Mediating Mobility

Visual Anthropology in the Age of Migration

Steffen Köhn

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780231850940
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Images have become an integral part of the political regulation of migration: they help produce categories of legality versus illegality, foster stereotypes, and mobilize political convictions. Yet how are we to understand the relationship between these images and the political in the discourse surrounding migration? How can we, as anthropologists, migration scholars, or documentary filmmakers visually represent people who are excluded from political representation? And how can such visual representations gain political momentum?

This volume not only considers the images that circulate with reference to migrants or draw attention to those that accompany, show, or conceal them. The book explores the phenomena of migration with the help of images. It offers an in-depth analysis of the documentary approaches of Ursula Biemann, Renzo Martens, Bouchra Khalili, Silvain George, Raphael Cuomo and Maria Iorio, Alex Rivera, and Rania Stepha, which evoke the particularities of migrant lifeworlds and examine urgent questions regarding the interrelations between politics and poetics, mobility and mediation, and the ethics of probability and possibility. The author also discusses his own cinematic practice in the making of Tell Me When… (2011), A Tale of Two Islands (2012), and Intimate Distance (2015), a trilogy of films that explore the potential to communicate the bodily, spatial, and temporal dimensions of the experience of migration.

CHAPTER ONE

Migrant In/visibility

This chapter discusses the visual discourse surrounding migration and the politics of in/visibility inscribed in it. In the last two decades, we have witnessed an increasing acceleration of both the migration of people and the circulation of images. The power and meaning of images and visual representations has since become an urgent question of academic concern. For this reason, I want to take a closer look at the images of migrants and their representation in the public sphere. The huge attention migrants have received in mass mediated discourse has recently become a focus of research within cultural and media studies, as well as for scholars of an emerging interdisciplinary field of visual culture (see Mitchell 1994, 2004; Wenk and Krebs 2007; Bischoff et al. 2010; Falk 2011). These approaches have offered a critical iconology of the visual stereotypes and clichés in which migration is frequently portrayed. They reveal the assumptions these representations entail and explore the practices of social exclusion inscribed in them. To fully understand the entanglement of visual representations with political processes, however, I argue that one has to not only analyse the discursive content of these depictions but also those very acts of visualisation that render migrants visible. Visibility and invisibility have to be understood first of all as political modes of existence. In this chapter, I therefore build upon Hannah Arendt’s political theory that allows us to apprehend representation in both visual and political terms and that dissects the relationship between visibility and power. I show that the existence of migrants in the public sphere is constituted by a dialectics of in/visibility, of both concealment and exposure. The prominent visibility migrants receive in the media as stereotypes effectively renders them invisible as individuals. There further exists a disturbing connection between media representations and the state’s politics of surveillance and control of migrants. Their visualisation is thus potentially dangerous for many migrants as it conflicts with their need to remain invisible. In what follows, I will unfold the ethical, epistemological and theoretical challenges at stake in the visualisation of migrants. Further, I will explore this realm of visibility by engaging with artists’ critical interventions in these processes. In short, I want to draw attention not only to what is present, but also to what remains absent in the visual discourse on migration.

THE QUESTION OF IMAGES

As already noted, the recurring images (and imaginations) of migration in mass media discourse have recently been investigated by a number of scholars. Christine Bischoff, Francesca Falk and Sylvia Kafehsy, for example, seek to map out an iconography of ‘illegal’ migration, analysing ‘the actual visual images, figures, symbols, narratives, metaphors – the material forms – in which symbolic meaning is circulated’ (2010: 7). These approaches all explicitly refer to W. J. T. Mitchell’s (1994) postulation of a ‘pictorial turn’ in the humanities and social sciences that emphasises the constitutive role images play in the creation of social meaning. Departing from Richard Rorty’s linguistic turn (proclaimed in the 1970s), Mitchell and his followers recognise the increasing importance and influence of the visual on the way we perceive, imagine and think of the world. They state that the image has taken over from language as the main structuring agent of social realities. Thus, the ‘need for a global critique of visual culture seems inescapable’ (1994: 16). Mitchell further sees the question of images as intricately bound to questions of power and hegemony. Highlighting political controversies around images, he describes the visual as a terrain of political struggle and makes ideology itself the subject of his iconological analysis (1986: 164). Many scholars have taken up this suggestion and explore how images constitute, reinforce and influence political processes and how political theory itself relies on the evocation of powerful imagery (for example, see Falk 2011: 15). Mitchell’s call for the transdisciplinary study of visual culture has also had an impact on visual anthropology. In their introduction to Rethinking Visual Anthropology, Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy argue that the subdiscipline should not only be concerned with the practice and theory of employing visual media for research but also with the anthropological study of (Western and non-Western) visual systems and images as social objects (1997: 21).

Most studies that engage analytically with the visual representation of migrants in mass media discourse have criticised the heavy use of distortions and clichés. Terence Wright (2002), for example, reveals how many press photographs depicting migrants refer to Christian iconography in order to construct the image of the helpless and victimised refugee. Francesca Falk (2010) explores the motif of the (overcrowded) boat as a visual and verbal metaphor in the discourse about refugees and asylum. She shows how it is frequently associated with invasion in political anti-migration campaigns. Both Rutvica Andrijasevic (2007) and Sylvia Kafehsy (2010) analyse media campaigns that the International Organization for Migration (IOM) has sponsored in alleged emigration states in order to discourage would-be migrants. These campaigns associate migration with the dangers of criminal activities such as human trafficking and the sex trade. Together, these studies provide an iconology of the visual conventions in which migration is repeatedly stereotyped. They reveal how migrants are either criminalised or depicted as passive victims without agency. Thus, they aim at uncovering the preconceptions, the ideological ‘unconscious’, of mass media representations.

All of these studies, however, operate on the level of the icon, the single image, and hence they usually deploy methods of picture analysis derived from art history, Mitchell’s disciplinary point of departure for the interpretation of images. Antonia Schmid (2011) has therefore proposed a methodology for ‘visual discourse analysis’ that seeks to make Mitchell’s ideas productive for the study of moving images. Schmid’s method seeks to decode ‘visual statements’ in films in order to reveal their ‘latent meanings’ and implications. Like Mitchell, she draws on a very broad understanding of what an image is. Her concept of ‘topos’ encompasses pictures, icons, verbal and ‘immaterial’ images, and even ‘accumulated images’ such as film characters (2011: 306). These ‘mental images’ might thus ‘be composed of several parts including auditive and pictorial elements’ (2011: 312). This, however, reveals one of the serious shortcomings of the visual culture approach: while it claims to offer a comprehensive theory for everything visual, it relies on a concept of the image as a metaphysical construct withdrawn from all material reality. Its notion of the image falls back behind a considerable body of scholarship that has explored the materiality and communicative specificity of different media and the perceptual processes in which they involve the observer. Despite claiming the contrary, Schmid’s method of deciphering the meaning of images is thus ultimately based on a linguistic paradigm, on the easy translatability of images into text. It locates the meaning of a film solely in its signification, in its abstract transmission of decodable signs. While Schmid claims to recognise that the meaning of images is produced in the process of their perception, the only conclusion she draws from this is that one would also have to analyse their specific context in order to pinpoint their meaning. By context, however, she only means the discursive context, not the actual physical situation of their reception. This communicative context can then only be ‘read’ in yet another act of discourse analysis.

In what follows, I propose to depart from such a generalised notion of the image and take a close look at how visual technologies are embedded in the state’s politics of surveillance and how this specific mode of visualisation becomes reproduced in the mass media. An analytical approach to images that is solely interested in their signification and not in their materiality also falls short of providing any real understanding of the power relations that are entailed in visual representations. Schmid’s visual discourse analysis ultimately avoids the question whether media images influence or reflect society’s views. A mere discussion of the iconicity of migration thus cannot reveal the complex ways in which power is constituted by visibility. Thus, I will draw upon Hannah Arendt’s political theory to describe the production of visibility as a political process mediated by specific visual technologies and linked to the exertion of power, regulation and control.

THE POLITICS OF VISIBILITY

In her political philosophy, Arendt offers us an understanding of visibility in political terms. For her, visibility is the basic condition for political participation and the prerequisite for the emergence of a public sphere. Visibility, for Arendt, first of all constitutes our ‘common world’ (1958: 52), the world we intersubjectively share with our fellow human beings. She describes the sphere of politics as a ‘space of appearance’. Reality, ‘humanly and politically speaking, is the same thing as appearance. To men, the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others, by its appearing to all…and whatever lacks this appearance comes and passes away like a dream, intimately and exclusively our own, but without reality’ (1958: 199). Arendt insists on the situatedness and worldliness of human existence, rejecting any Platonian dualism of being and appearance, materiality and ideas. She approaches political phenomena not in idealised or abstract metaphysical terms but first of all ‘through the way they appear to those living through them…that is, through the way they experience and interpret them’ (Borren 2010: 15). Arendt’s writings thus examine the individual and shared experiential dimension of politics. The public sphere, the Arendtian space of appearance, is the space where ‘individual experiences are selectively refashioned in ways that make them real and recognizable in the eyes of others’ (Jackson 2006: 12). For Arendt, any given physical space can potentially be transformed into a political one, ranging from the coffeehouses that Jürgen Habermas (1962) has described as the breeding ground for public debate in eighteenth-century Europe, to street corners and public places, or even the living room. Individuals access this public sphere as citizens through speech and action; that is, civic participation. However, if people stop acting and speaking together, the space of appearance can vanish as fast as it emerged. As mentioned, visibility is the basic requirement for participation in such an intersubjectively shared space, as any (political) action and speech necessarily depends on recognition. These acts gain relevance in that they are visible to everyone. Arendt, however, distinguishes sharply between this public world of visibility and the private sphere. As citizen, one not only has the right to appear (that is to raise one’s voice politically) on the stage of the public realm, one also has the right of non-appearance in the private sphere. In private life, one is (and should be) invisible and hence protected from the public eye (see Arendt 1958: 71). Hence, as Marieke Borren notes, public visibility and private invisibility for Arendt form a complementary right that is bound to citizenship (2010: 175). Arendt’s position, however, is by no means a simple liberalism that argues for a resistance of the private against the state. For her, private and social conditions rather have a political relevance as they make possible our visibility in public life. Without private and social identities, we are not ‘at home in the world’ (1994: 308); we cannot appear in and discuss a common world.

One of Arendt’s most recognised descriptions of political experience is concerned with those who cannot enter this common world of visibility. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), she acknowledges the condition of non-citizens, the stateless refugees. Arendt describes the production of this group of people as an outcome of European disintegration after World War I. The stateless refugees lack a political status and a legal personhood. This effectively excludes them from the space of appearance. Simultaneously, it also deprives them of all their basic rights because ‘the conception of human rights, based on the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships – except that they were still human’ (1973: 299). Without legal personalities, the refugees are unable to act or speak politically. Their existence in the public sphere is thus contrary to that of regular citizens. They suffer from public invisibility because they don’t have access to political representation. At the same time, however, they are forced into natural visibility, because as mere ‘natural men’ they are left without protection against state intrusion into their lives (see Borren 2008: 224f). In his essay ‘We refugees’ that explicitly refers to Arendt’s article from 1943 of the same title, Giorgio Agamben draws a disturbing parallel between the treatment of stateless refugees by Western nation-states in the first half of the twentieth century and their present-day policy towards ‘illegal’ migrants. These non-citizens of today might have a nationality of origin, yet ‘inasmuch as they prefer not to make use of their state’s protection they are, like refugees, “stateless de facto”’ (1995: 117). No autonomous space exists for them in the current political order, for the status of the refugee is ‘always considered a temporary condition that should lead either to naturalization or to repatriation’ (1995: 116).

In a similar line of argument, Borren states that the pathological political status of the refugee Arendt describes also applies to ‘illegal’ migrants in a number of ways (2008: 225ff). Their public invisibility is fostered by an ever more restrictive asylum policy that in Europe in the last decade has resulted in a drastic fall in the numbers of accepted asylum claims. This means, de facto, a denial of legal personhood for an increasing number of people.⁷ Undocumented migrants who have been apprehended on the streets and rejected asylum seekers who have exhausted all legal procedures are prone to detention and, finally, to forced expulsion. Those non-convicted migrants in Europe’s expulsion centres, police cells or in border custody are frequently incarcerated for an indefinite period of time. Thus, they exist outside the law in a status of non-jurisdiction that excludes them from the most basic human rights, a status in which committing a crime would actually improve their legal position: ‘As non-natives, they are “only human” due to the convergence of nationality and citizenship; as noncitizens, the human rights regime is unable to change their situation, due to the convergence of civil rights and human rights’ (Borren 2008: 231). A regime of concealment not only deprives them of the legal personality needed to enter the political space of appearance, it also withdraws them from the view of society at large. Europe’s detention centres, operating in a legal grey zone, are usually inaccessible for journalists and political activists and hence remain largely invisible to the ordinary citizen. Ariella Azoulay has shown in graphic detail how the state’s regime of concealment thus keeps the abandoned of the global era from making their claims heard in the public media. She describes how the Palestinian non-citizens in the Israeli-Occupied Territories are kept just ‘on the verge of catastrophe’ by the regime, thus creating ‘a paradoxical situation in which the injury to the population of noncitizens is simultaneously visible and invisible’ (2008: 65). Due to the humanitarisation of the occupation through the permanent presence of humanitarian organisations and their assimilation into the apparatus of Israeli rule, the catastrophe is always postponed, making it invisible, even though it is manifest to everybody. It is invisible even though numerous visual and textual expressions might depict it, because the postponed catastrophe does not produce an énoncé, an urgent claim for emergency that creates the kind of global attention a war or a natural catastrophe does. The everyday horror on the verge of catastrophe, in which the non-citizens must live, instead becomes a routine event that rarely makes it into the news and does not inspire affection or dispute by the regular citizens.

The illegalisation of migration in Europe or the US equally creates living conditions on the verge of catastrophe for the non-citizens of these states. It creates zones of forced invisibility not only within the institutions of the state. It implements spaces of nonexistence throughout society through the very contradiction between the physical and social presence of these migrants and their official negation as ‘illegals’ (see Coutin 2000: 27ff). Their ‘enforced clandestinity’ (Coutin 2000: 33) turns everyday activities such as working or driving a car into illicit acts, resulting in restricted physical and social mobility. As Nicholas De Genova notes, this denial of legal personhood produces ‘real effects ranging from hunger to unemployment (or more typically, severe exploitation) to violence to death’ (2002: 427). Making themselves visible, attempting public visibility, for example, in demonstrations and other forms of social protest, for ‘illegal’ migrants thus eminently becomes an insubordinate and very dangerous act as they risk being photographed, arrested, and even deported (see De Genova 2009: 450).

Paradoxically, at the same time a regime of exposure enhances the migrants’ natural visibility as it exposes them to measures of control, identification and surveillance by the state. Since the earliest days of the nation-state the visibility of migrants posed a haunting problem to government agencies that soon started to utilise technologies of visualisation in order to politically regulate migration. The development of new visual technologies has since gone hand in hand with the need for the visual identification of migrants and the surveillance of migratory movements. In 1892, the Geary Act demanded an obligatory registration of all Chinese immigrants in the US. This law was the first to consider ‘illegal’ migration a crime, to be punished with ‘hard labor’ for up to one year (see Falk 2011: 122). It required all members of the growing Chinese community to carry a ‘certificate of residence’ that included a photograph. As the Chinese were publicly considered individually indistinguishable (see Gordon 2006: 57) this should secure their proper identification. Many Chinese protested against this discriminatory act that applied only to their particular community. It furthermore posed a practical problem, for in the rural areas where ma...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Anthropology, Migration and the Moving Image
• 1. Migrant In/visibility
• 2. Migrant Experience
• 3. Migratory Spaces
• 4. Migratory Times
• Conclusion: Possibilities
• Notes
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index