Abstract
In this chapter, Janna Houwen proposes to reflect on the European ‘refugee crisis’ in relation to a well-oiled machine at the Mediterranean borders of Europe, where a military-industrial-surveillance complex is at work in a smooth manner, devoid of the impending instability, malady, and uncertainty the ‘refugee crisis’ has come to connote. In order to gain an understanding of this well-oiled machine, to address the specificity of this contemporary construction that controls migration across the Mediterranean, and to examine the production as well as the fragmentation and repression of subjectivities in Mediterranean border areas, Houwen makes a case for ‘machine analysis’ in this chapter. Following Maurizio Lazzarato’s understanding of machinic systems, the concept of the machine points to the opposite of freedom: machinic systems hold everyone and everything in their enslaving clutches. However, only after uncovering the logic of the ‘refugee machine,’ Houwen argues, will it be possible to look for moments of resistance and protest against the machine, and for potential instances of crisis (in the sense of choice) in this lethal machinic system. Houwen studies the military-industrial-surveillance complex at Europe’s Mediterranean borders as a ‘refugee machine’ by turning to a documentary film that unravels this machine through cinematic and videomatic means: Flow Mechanics (2016) by Nathalie Loubeyre.
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- 1.
I use the term “refugee” throughout this chapter to refer to people who have left their home countries in order to escape from poverty and/or violence. I consider refugees as migrants who have made an “involuntary choice”: their decision to take flight and move abroad was forced by extremely disadvantageous, oftentimes life-threatening circumstances.
- 2.
For an excellent overview of the history of the concept of crisis, see Koselleck (2006).
- 3.
Although Vogl does not go into the nature of this constructedness in detail, I would say that migration is not merely a social or politically fabricated construct, nor is it solely discursively produced or economically structured; it is rather—quite in line with Lazzarato’s machine theory—a heterogeneous construct, produced by as well as comprising many different elements.
- 4.
In his seminal book Signs and Machines (2014), Lazzarato mostly focusses on capitalism as a machinic system.
- 5.
- 6.
Flow Mechanics is Loubeyre’s third film about migration. In 2009, her documentary No Comment was released, followed by Against the Tide in 2012. On all three projects, Loubeyre worked together with cinematographer Joël Labat, whose camerawork is of great importance to Flow Mechanics’ effect.
- 7.
My discussion of Lazzarato’s machine theory as well as my analysis of Flow Mechanics in this chapter draw from a previous publication; “Video Against the Machine,” Houwen (2019), in which I compare Loubeyre’s documentary to Morgan Knibbe’s film Those Who Feel the Fire Burning (2015) in order to demonstrate how the medium of video is set to work against the “refugee machine” in both movies, yet in different ways. In this chapter, I have built on these analyses in order to explore the manner in which specific videomatic and cinematic techniques employed in Flow Mechanics can be tied to the concept of crisis, most specifically the multiple meanings that spring from concept’s historical roots.
- 8.
Lazzarato’s broad use of the term “logocentrist” as a reproach to theorists who study language and meaning (in relation to subjectivity, politics, ideology, etc.) is not congruent with the understanding of logocentrism as the belief in a center or foundation of meaning and thought that exists independently of language. When following the latter understanding, certain theoretical strands within or following the linguistic turn (such as the constructivist approach) can readily be called anti-logocentric.
- 9.
See also Hesselberth et al. (2018) for a discussion of Lazzarato’s ideas in relation to contemporary issues of legibility.
- 10.
Lazzarato turns to Deleuze’s notion of the dividual in order to further define this fragmentation: “subjection produces and subjects individuals, whereas in enslavement individuals become “dividuals,” and masses become samples, data … . The dividual “functions” in enslavement in the same way as the ‘non-human’ component parts of technical machines” (Lazzarato 2014, 26).
- 11.
The circumvention of social significations is important, as it distinguishes Lazzarato’s notion of a-signifying signs (or, in other words, “power signs”) from performatives as defined by J. L. Austin. The effect of a performative utterance, that is, the performativity of language, depends on a social context. The performative speech act is a social act. In the words of Lazzarato, the performative entails a “social obligation” (2014, 170). A-signifying semiotics functions independently of social roles or meanings.
- 12.
My use of the term “refugee” as a word referring to people who have fled from poverty and/or violence in their home countries is not in accordance with the much narrower European judicial meaning of the word, which indicates a legal status that many of the people in Flow Mechanics do not have. I use “refugee” in a broad sense instead of turning to categories such as “illegalized migrants,” “economic asylum-seekers,” or “undocumented immigrants,” so as not to reproduce the exclusion that is currently produced by the narrow definition of the term under EU Law. Therefore, the process of distinguishing between legal/illegal is an element of the “refugee machine” that I aim to “plug out” from in my own writing.
- 13.
Frontex is the EU agency charged with monitoring the EU’s border. It is seen as an agency augmented by EUROSUR, the European Border Surveillance System was proposed by the European Council in 2012. For a detailed discussion of Frontex and EUROSUR, see Pugliese (2013).
- 14.
A concept discussed by, for instance, Papadopoulos and Tsianos (2008), and Casas-Cortes et al. (2015). In the words of Casas-Cortes et al., autonomy of migration refers to “the multiple and diverse ways in which migration responds to, operates independently from, and in turn shapes … apparatuses [of control] and their corresponding institutions and practices” (2015, 895). I would rather argue that migration and apparatuses of control shape each other and are therefore not operating independently at all. As intertwined mechanisms, they are part of the same machinic system.
- 15.
As an ongoing processual system, the refugee machine functions in concord with the more general idea of the present European crisis as an enduring state to which there is no alternative (the so-called TINA doctrine). However, whereas the TINA doctrine is a rhetorical trope sustaining political agendas, the refugee machine is a complex system that can be understood as a result of the crisis rhetoric that justifies the (political) implementation of a controlling machine.
- 16.
This is not to say that some of these “power signs” cannot produce any additional meanings. Illustrating Lazzarato’s claim that a-signifying signs can bring an additional symbolic or signifying effect into play, the datafication of refugees is frequently used as a rhetorical tool in mass media. As De Genova points out, the Mediterranean Sea in particular has long been a space for the staging of continuous border spectacles which are fortified by a “numbers game” (2016, 22). The sense of an “invasion” by “dangerous” refugees that is produced through proliferating images and texts that depict masses of packed migrant vessels arriving on European shores is enforced by charts, diagrams, and graphs that present this increasing “threat” in a numerical way.
- 17.
A conclusion that is very much line with Pugliese’s fierce critique of the lethality of the EU’s integrated systems of surveillance.
- 18.
I borrow the term “left-to-die-boat” from Pugliese (2013).
- 19.
This choice to perform acts (movements) of rejection does not entail an easy escape or decision to simply “opt out” of the machine, though.
- 20.
In Videophilosophy (2019), Lazzarato ties the power to create and express affects, bodily pulsations and “crystallizations of time” to the ontology of video, which can thereby proliferate beyond apparatuses of control. I would rather say that video’s ability to counter its own application in systems of control has a long history, in which conventions make up the Janus-faced medium as much as the ontology of its technology. See Houwen (2017).
- 21.
For a discussion of these strands of representation, as well as artistic lens-based alternatives to the crude empathy they invite to, see Houwen (2016).
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Houwen, J. (2020). In the Refugee Machine: The Absence of Crisis and Its Critical (Re-)Production. In: Boletsi, M., Houwen, J., Minnaard, L. (eds) Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes. Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36415-1_3
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