The Figure of the Migrant

Thomas Nail

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780804796682
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia politica

This book offers a much-needed new political theory of an old phenomenon. The last decade alone has marked the highest number of migrations in recorded history. Constrained by environmental, economic, and political instability, scores of people are on the move. But other sorts of changes—from global tourism to undocumented labor—have led to the fact that to some extent, we are all becoming migrants. The migrant has become the political figure of our time.

Rather than viewing migration as the exception to the rule of political fixity and citizenship, Thomas Nail reinterprets the history of political power from the perspective of the movement that defines the migrant in the first place. Applying his "kinopolitics" to several major historical conditions (territorial, political, juridical, and economic) and figures of migration (the nomad, the barbarian, the vagabond, and the proletariat), he provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary migration.

PART I

POLITICAL THEORY OF THE MIGRANT

CHAPTER 1

The Figure of the Migrant

The Migrant

Creating a concept of the migrant allows us to understand the common social conditions and subject positions of a host of related mobile figures: for example, the floating population, the homeless, the stateless, the lumpenproletariat, the nomad, the immigrant, the emigrant, the refugee, the vagrant, the undocumented, and the barbarian. To be clear, these are all distinct mobile figures in political history and are not always and in every circumstance identical to the figure of the migrant. However, under certain social conditions, they become migratory figures. This book is a history of the common social conditions and agencies that emerge when these mobile figures become migrants. In other words, “the figure of the migrant” is a political concept that identifies the common points where these figures are socially expelled or dispossessed as a result, or as the cause, of their mobility.

In this sense, the migrant is the political figure of movement. But movement has too often been defined as derivative or lacking. In a spatio-temporal sense,¹ movement is defined as beginning from a point of departure (A) and passing, via translation, to a place of arrival (B). Movement, according to this definition, is change of place. Movement is the line AB, which is traversed and, like space, can be infinitely divided. This definition imagines that movement occupies each of the infinite points between A and B in succession and coincides with the immobility of each point in turn. Each point in the series is like a possible point of arrival.

The problem with this logic, according to the Greek philosopher Zeno, is that we would have to traverse an infinite distance of intervals in order to arrive anywhere. Thus, movement would be impossible. The same result occurs, according to Zeno, when we understand movement as a series of temporal now-points or instants. If every unit of time is infinitely divisible, it will take an infinity of time to move from one point to any other. The problem is that movement cannot be divided without destroying it. By thinking that we can divide movement into fixed, immobile stages based on departures and arrivals, we spatialize and immobilize it.² Movement, according to such a definition, is just the difference between divisible points of space-time, but there is no real continuity.

The same problem appears in the case of the political figure of movement: the migrant. The migrant is often defined as the one who moves from country A to country B—from one fixed social point to another. The fixity of the social points is presupposed as primary, and the migrant is the one who temporarily or permanently lacks this fixity or social membership. This definition has political consequences. In the spatio-temporal definition, movement is presupposed as the line AB, but since this line can be infinitely divided into units of immobile space-time, movement is ultimately unrepresented in the system: the migrant is the political figure who is unrepresented but still exists socially as unrepresented in the system.

However, with respect to movement, displacement is not a lack but a positive capacity or trajectory (even if the empirical outcome is not desirable, i.e., involuntary exile). To view migration and movement as lack is also to conceal the conditions of expulsion required by social expansion. It is to treat migration as an “unfortunate phenomenon” rather than the structural necessity of the historical conditions of social reproduction. In other words, to understand migration and movement as lack is to accept the banality of social dispossession. For example, every day our cities must be maintained, remade, built up, torn down, and cleaned. Our office buildings and homes are cleaned and maintained while we are away by an underground and largely invisible reproductive labor force disproportionately composed of migrants. What appears to be the relatively static place we call “society” is constantly being modified through the cleaning and maintenance of labor. Without this labor, our cities, homes, and streets would be unusable. Yet these sorts of reproductive labor are often paid less and are less valorized than their “productive” counterparts are. The appearance of social stasis in this case is an illusion of the capitalist division between productive and reproductive labor. But the illusion of stasis is not unique to capitalism. Every society has its own social illusions of stasis. Accordingly, the challenge of defining the political figure of the migrant is to positively reconceptualize what has previously been understood as an unrepresentable lack in political philosophies based on stasis. “[T]he world is about to change its foundation. We are nothing, let us be all.”³

One way to do this is to distinguish between two kinds of movement that define the migrant. The first kind, made up of units of space-time, is extensive and quantitative: movement as change of place, or translation. The second kind of movement is intensive and qualitative: a change in the whole, a transformation. In the example of the line AB, Henri Bergson argues that it is “already motion that has drawn the line” to which A and B have been added afterward as its end points.⁴ A and B presuppose the movement of the line, on which they are points. The division into A and B is always a division of something: an attempt to impose arbitrary divisions into a continuous movement. Movement is already primary, but we imagine it is not in order to explain it later as derived. According to Bergson, “[I]t is movement which is anterior to immobility.”⁵ “Reality is mobility itself. . . . If movement is not everything, it is nothing.”⁶ When an extensive movement occurs from A to B, the whole AB undergoes a qualitative transformation or change.⁷

This second definition also has important political consequences for the political theory of migration. The movement of the migrant is not simply from A to B but is the constitutive condition for the qualitative transformation of society as a whole. The migrant not only undergoes an extensive movement but also affects an intensive or qualitative social movement of the whole of society itself.⁸ In this sense, the figure of the migrant is a socially constitutive power. It is the subjective figure that allows society to move and change. However, since the migrant’s movement has often been viewed as derivative or lacking sufficient stability (from the extensive perspective), societies have most frequently responded to these qualitative changes of the migrant in two ways. First, they may institute forms of social deprivation that aim at arresting any change that does not accord with the fixed values of those in power: the state, law, profit, and so on. In this case, the migrant does not simply change place but also changes status (becomes apolitical, criminal, unemployable, etc.). Second, when societies desire change or expansion, they may harness the mobility of the migrant in the form of slavery, militarism, incarceration, and waged labor in order to help them expand.⁹

Without a doubt, the migrant moves both extensively and intensively. In the former case, movement and the migrant appear as derivative and lack. In the latter, the movement of the migrant appears as the constitutive force of qualitative social motion, as the condition for the change and growth of society as a whole. What appear to be fixed points are instead points where movement has only slowed down or appears to have stopped relative to other movements. From the perspective of the migrant, these points are simply relays or portions of a continuous trajectory that have been arbitrarily or strategically selected as discrete from the continuum of social motion. According to Bergson, the “stasis” points A and B are simply the “dead and artificial reorganization of movement by the mind.”¹⁰ The political theory of the migrant is an analytics of the regimes of social motion that have strategically reorganized movement into the circulation between artificially static social points. But the theory of the migrant is also a theory of movement and migration as the constitutive force of social motion, a theory of the extensive and intensive social movement of the migrant. The two are always present together like the latitude and longitude of a social cartography of motion. But insofar as intensive movement remains primary, the migrant remains the constitutive dimension of social motion upon which society divides, organizes, and circulates.

Following this definition, we can see how the migrant forms a common social position between different migratory figures. For example, the emigrant is only an emigrant from the perspective of a socially fixed point from which it departs. However, from the perspective of the socially fixed point to which the emigrant arrives, it is not an emigrant at all but an immigrant. The distinction between the emigrant and immigrant is a socially relative one, based on certain fixed social points. But the figure called an “emigrant” from one point and called an “immigrant” from another is the same figure: the migrant. It is the same figure seen from two sides of the same Möbius strip.

Similarly, what defines the nomad, the barbarian, the vagabond, and the proletariat as migrant subjects is the sense in which each of these figures is displaced and made mobile in its own way and with respect to its own relative points of expulsion. With respect to the territory, the nomad is the one who is expelled from the land; with respect to the political order, the barbarian is the one who is expelled from politics; with respect to the juridical order, the vagabond is the one who is expelled by the law; and with respect to the economic order, it is the proletariat who is expelled from the economic means of production.¹¹ Each of these migratory figures is defined according to the dominant type of social order from which it is expelled. These are merely relative definitions of the same figure from the perspective of different sites of social expulsion. The migrant is the underlying and common figure of social movement and expulsion.

Accordingly, there is no theory of the migrant “as such.” There is no general ontology of the migrant.¹² There are only figures of the migrant that emerge and coexist throughout history relative to specific sites of expulsion and mobility. In this sense, the theory of the migrant offered in this book is a specifically political and historical one. It is political insofar as it is primarily concerned with the social conditions or regimes of motion within which different types of migratory figures emerge and coexist. It is historical insofar as these conditions are not universal or global but regional. Thus, it is neither strictly ontological nor strictly empirical.

So there is not only one migrant, but many. Just as there are different types of societies, so there are different types of migrants, different degrees of mobility, and different forces of expulsion. But in the end, every society produces its migrants. The political theory of the migrant examines each situation according to its types, degrees, and forces.

The movement of the migrant is not always “good,” and social regimes of expulsion are not always and in every way “bad.” This book does not put forward a theory of what we ought to do. Instead, it lays bare the theoretical, historical, and political conditions for the movement of the migrant that remain obscured today by certain voluntaristic and neoclassical economic accounts. Before we can take political action on contemporary migration policy, we need a better description of the phenomenon and its conditions than we currently have. If there is any kind of normative imperative in this study, it is a conditional one: if you want to struggle against the regimes of social expulsion, here are some tactics and points of intervention that may prove helpful in that struggle.¹³

The Figure

A figure is not a fixed identity or specific person but a mobile social position. One becomes a figure when one occupies this position. One may occupy this position to different degrees, at different times, and in different circumstances. But there is nothing essential about a person that makes the person this figure. The figure of the migrant, for example, is like a social persona that bears many masks (the nomad, barbarian, etc.) depending on the relative social conditions of expulsion.

In this sense, the figure of the migrant is broader than specific groups of migrants defined by crossing national borders. But it is also more regional and historical than a general ontology of migrant subjectivity. A figure is not an unchanging essence lying beyond the concrete, but neither is it merely a specific individual or a group of individuals. A figure is a social vector or tendency. Insofar as specific individuals take up a trajectory, they are figured by it. But it is also possible for individuals to leave this vector and take up a different social position, since it does not define their essence. In other words, the figure of the migrant has a “vague essence” in the etymological sense of the word: a vagabond or migratory essence that lies between the ideal and the empirical.

For example, in geometry, a circle is an exact ideal essence. This is in contrast to inexact empirical objects that are round (such as bowls, planets, or balls). However, figuration is like “roundness”: it is more than an empirical object but less than an ideal exact essence. Roundness can refer equally to bowls and to ideal circles: both are round.¹⁴ Thus, as a figure, the migrant refers both to empirical migrants in the world and a more abstract social relation. It is irreducible to either.

In this sense, migration refers both to the millions of actual migrants identified by the United Nations and to the sense in which many more people than these are also migrants to some degree and in some circumstances. As a social position or figure, the migrant is a subjective formation that anyone may become. No one’s movement is guaranteed to be safe from some degree of social expulsion. In a political sense, the theory of the migrant, viewed from the primacy of movement, may even present a more inclusive model of international relations than citizenship currently does.¹⁵ The migrant is not only empirical but also prefigures a new model of political membership and subjectivity still in its early stages. Thus, there are empirical migrants, but their meaning and potential extend beyond their empirical features under the current conditions of social expulsion. What would it mean to rethink political theory based on the figure of the migrant rather than on citizenship? This book prese...