The Design Politics of the Passport

Materiality, Immobility, and Dissent

Mahmoud Keshavarz

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781474289382
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Nationalism & Patriotism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Design Politics of the Passport presents an innovative study of the passport and its associated social, political and material practices as a means of uncovering the workings of 'design politics'. It traces the histories, technologies, power relations and contestations around this small but powerful artefact to establish a framework for understanding how design is always enmeshed in the political, and how politics can be understood in terms of material objects. Combining design studies with critical border studies, alongside ethnographic work among undocumented migrants, border transgressors and passport forgers, this book shows how a world made and designed as open and hospitable to some is strictly enclosed, confined and demarcated for many others - and how those affected by such injustices dissent from the immobilities imposed on them through the same capacity of design and artifice.

1

Introduction: Design, Politics, and the Mobility Regime

The freedom of movement […] is not the end purpose of politics, that is, something that can be achieved by political means. It is rather the substance and meaning of all things political.

Hannah Arendt

It was autumn 2012. A gloomy afternoon approached as the clouds loomed over the sky of Malmö, a city located in south of Sweden. I was sitting in the kitchen of my apartment listening to Nemat, a young, calm, slim boy from Afghanistan. I had known him for six months by this point. His family had fled the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s and had migrated to Iran. He was born and raised there and resided in Tehran legally until he was six years old. Then the authorities refused to prolong their permit. The family had to stay in Tehran undocumented, since going back to Afghanistan in 2002 was not an option. The country was just occupied by US forces. The consequences of being undocumented meant living in constant fear of deportation and thus being subject to exploitation at work, school, and in everyday encounters in Iranian society. When Nemat was 12 he had to begin working—in sectors including construction, tailoring, and household production workshops—to help the family bear the high costs of an undocumented life. When he was 15 the family decided to go back to Afghanistan as their situation in Iran was becoming worse. However, things did not work in their hometown of Ghazni as they had imagined. Afghanistan, a playground for different Western military forces since the 1970s, was too dangerous to live a life. After a few months, they decided to go back to Iran. They did not have a passport or a visa and, even if they had wanted to get one, it was an impossible task. The family had to travel separately as crossing altogether would have hindered their chances of crossing. Nemat crossed the border to Pakistan first with the help of smugglers and from there he hid in a Nissan pickup truck to cross the border to Iran, where he faced shooting from the Iranian border guards who, together with the international community, consider that specific border as a battlefield for the “war” on drug trafficking. Back in Tehran and reunited with his family within a few months, Nemat decided to leave Iran for Europe as he had no place, neither in Afghanistan nor Iran. The main problem, however was acquiring a proper passport, or a “right” passport as he put it. Without one, Nemat had no place in the world. He was not given a passport at birth and his possibilities to obtain one was incredibly limited—despite the fact that he worked twelve hours per day; that he and his family contributed to the Iranian economy through their devaluated labor, and that they refused to engage in any war in their home country. “Why did you not get an Afghan passport?” I asked him. “What would I do with that? There is no use in it!” Nemat decided to take the matter into his own hands and obtain a passport that could guarantee him a place in the world, a place to live, to make, to dream. That was when his long journey of border transgressing outside of Iran started.

During the last seven years, I have listened to the stories of many undocumented migrants and border transgressors who have had different experiences of how the lack of a passport, not having a good passport, carrying a forged passport, or waiting to be granted a proper passport have shaped their conditions and their options of mobility and residence. Mundane, instrumental, and sometimes not even at stake for the privileged population of the world, namely, white middle-class citizens of the Global North, a passport tends to be directly embedded in the lives of the majority of the world’s population: most prominently in the lived experiences of stateless refugees, undocumented migrants, and border transgressors, as well as working-class citizens of the Global South. To turn the passport into an object of thought stems from these non-privileged lived experiences.

In this book, I explore how the ability to move across territories is historically and contemporarily designed and commodified by following the emergence, development, and escalating uses of passports. By highlighting how the passport designs the conditions of being, moving, and residing in the world beyond the “actual” design of the passport, I aim to weave together stories of how mobilities, and more importantly immobilities, are organized through specific designed objects. Moreover, I intend to trace how mobilities are distributed unevenly and asymmetrically across various spaces by intentional as well as contingent actions and decisions.

This book argues that the passport is not neutral but a real and powerful device with its own specific history, design, and politics, mediating moments through which socially constructed power relations can be enacted and performed. Ethnicity, gender, and class come to interact, intersect, and produce inequalities through how passports work in various situations. Passports are material evidence of exercising discrimination. Passports circumvent abstract discussions of power in academia and bring to the fore stories of power relations at their sites of production, as well as in their spaces of circulation and consumption. This book explores the capacities and incapacities of the passport in granting an individual the possibility of crossing a border and thereby granting them the ability to claim the right to movement. This is to say that such an apparently simple and thin artifact is capable of helping to trace the politics of mobility in particular, as well as politics more generally. Passports thus can be thought of as instances in which the relations, contradictions, convergences, and intersections of design and politics collide. In international relations, a passport is frequently defined as a booklet issued by a national government that identifies its bearer as a citizen of that country, with permission to travel abroad and return under the home nation’s protection. When traced back historically, through its capacities, and in relation to how design and politics operate, passports reveal various aspects of design as an activity that participates in the manipulation of the world, regardless of its initial and actual intentions.

The Politics of Design and the Design of Politics

While this book is primarily about passports as objects or devices, it is also about the politics that generate the design and use of the passport, as well as the politics generated by the design of the passport. In this sense, it is an intervention in how the politics of design and the design of politics can be explored through objects. These two approaches to understanding the relations between design and politics may help further expand on the complexities and ambiguity involved in questions of design and politics that have been addressed previously by design scholars from different perspectives.¹

The politics of design can be thought of as relations that prescribe in advance what will and will not count as design, which order what is regulated and possible to regulate by those acts described as design practices. The politics of design is about ordering, devising, and distributing regulated and regulatable material practices. The politics of design defines who is to be called designer, and how one is qualified to talk about design; who understands the language of design and who is allowed to expand the language; who is making constructive criticism and who is foreign to it. What kind of designer can one become in such a world where the limits and meanings of the role are set out in advance? What happens when one has no place in the established regulation of the practice?² Much of this type of politics is produced historically and discursively, but it is also produced materially through diverse economic and intellectual practices derived from institutions in higher education; museums; the cultural, economic, and industrial sectors of government as well as commercial corporates, galleries, and design magazines (Forty 1995; Attfield 2000).

In the aftermath of Brexit, Deezen, a design blog, announced a passport design competition for “designs that present a positive vision of the post-Brexit UK to the world, and that represent all its citizens.” The banality of such a call in washing away the politics inherited through the Brexit vote, as well as ignoring the histories and complexities of passports, by treating them only as a symbol representing a nation-state, is not a surprise. Previously, a new design for the Norwegian passport had won several awards for its “Nordic touch.” Entitled “Norwegian Landscape” this entry won the contest run by the government due to the fact that “it both illustrates the Norwegian identity and makes sure the passport will be viewed as a document of high value” according to the judges (Howarth 2014). In these trivial, but very common, instances of “passport design,” questions concerning who has the authority to decide upon “the Norwegian identity” and perhaps how the designer(s), and consequently their design, enforce a particular Norwegian identity are not addressed. Moreover, the design of the passport is considered only in relation to its graphic reality, representational capacity, and its symbolic values—thus its designers will be only those graphic designers giving a visual language to its interface. Here a specific politics of design in relation to the passport is enacted, which argues that the only relation between the passport and its design is the way it looks visually, at surface level, omitting the relations and forces that a passport designs through its interactions with humans. Design thus is seen as a one-way process that can be inscribed into an object by those who see themselves as professional designers.

The design of politics on the other hand can be thought of as the materialities produced by different human and non-human actors that generate different conditions for certain politics to emerge. In other words, how materials produce possibilities, not necessary by the virtue of being made, but by being transformed intentionally by humans from one thing to another—wood becoming table—as well as how they produce impossibilities for certain bodies to move, inhabit, and act in particular moments and places.

In the eyes of the public, perhaps one of the most recent indicative examples of the way the design of politics operates are the spikes or other material obstacles deterring the possibility of sleeping for homeless persons in certain areas of various cities. While these are explicit cases of using material means to regulate an order of things—or in the words of designers or city authorities prevent “vandalism”—they do not tell us much about the complex forces and relations involved in issues of design and politics beyond that of aggressive, hostile, and obvious instrumental uses of design. By highlighting this particular example as the exclusively violent one, we tend to see design as a neutral and passive instrument that can be the carrier of “good” or “bad” ideologies and intentions. However in this book, by examining the passport and its specific design, I argue the opposite: that because design always entails an imagination of certain persons, ideologies, arguments, positions, and privileges being realized in the materiality of the world, design inevitably produces specific politics of life and living. These spikes have existed for a long time in other forms in train stations, on city clocks, and in other urban spaces to limit areas for birds to land. By reducing questions of design of politics to exceptional cases of violence against humans instrumentalized through design, we run the risk of forgetting the less explicit, less obvious aggression that resides in any operating design actions. To recognize them and to act upon them, a political understanding of design and a material understanding of politics are urgently needed, which would (i) situate design as a political activity, and (ii) include matters of reworking the material conditions and possibilities of the world in our conception of “the political.”

For this reason, I use the term “design politics” throughout this book to refer to the complex set of mutual relations that are the politics of design and the design of politics. In other words, this book throughout is an exploration of the concept of design politics, of what design politics, not only as a concept but also a series of practices, entails through examining the passport, its histories, its designing, and its transformations and reappropriations.

Thus, the design politics of the passport is about the politics produced by the material existence of passports historically and temporarily as much as the politics that drives their graphic reality. In this sense, the term “design” in this book is used in a complex and broad sense, but this does not necessarily make this a vague usage. To discuss the design of politics and the politics of design in a situated and concrete fashion, in relation to how the passport operates locally and globally, I use three meanings of the term “design.” While slightly different in what they do and generate, these usages nonetheless overlap and exist in every designed situation: (i) the designed thing (the passport); (ii) the activity of designing (the different practices, situations, and contexts involved in designing passports, technologically, bureaucratically, and materially); and (iii) the actions flowing from the designed thing and the activity of designing: what I call in Chapter 4 “passporting,” that is how passports design certain conditions of mobility and normalize certain bodies as being legal and others as semi-legal or illegal. This understanding of design comes from an ontological perspective. Such a perspective argues that human beings design their relations to the world and the future, as well as the possibilities to act in the present and future through designed objects, environments, services, and systems (Willis 2006). In summary, through making a world possible by artifacts and artifactual relations, human beings remake the world constantly, and consequently into an artificial horizon (Dilnot 2014). However, such a designed world is not passive and constantly kicks back; it “acts back on us and designs us” (Willis 2006: 70).

Following this, design in this book is understood as and in relation to the material practices generated by state and non-state actors in their promotion and production of a certain politics of movement. This is regardless of whether or not those material practices involved in politics of movement are seen or considered as design by design institutions and discourses. These political situations in return are considered as design or acts of designing that open up but also limit certain modes of being, moving and acting in the world. In this sense, by developing the concept of design politics this book expands the notion of the politics of design and the design of politics through the artifact of the passport, its generative practices, and the environments to which it gives shape. Overall, by thinking of passports in such an expanded manner and through interrogating the relations made possible by the artifice and the artifactual relations, this book goes beyond the idea of design as representation. Passports highlight the agency of design as an activity that consists not merely of designing artifacts and relations, but also of designing new environments in which new regimes of meaning-making and translations are produced. As much as these environments are socially constructed, they are materially sustained and reproduced; as much as they are real and pragmatic, they are fictional and illusionary. It is in this context that passports should be taken more seriously and deserve an analysis of their own. Rather than as a product or a servant of border politics, a designed service provider, we should think of passports as a set of relations within design politics that configure not only our perceptions of the world but also the possibilities for intervening into those perceptions.

Beyond a Representative Device

Passports mediate experiences of moving, residing, and, consequently, acting in the world. Due to this they can be “remediated” through other forms of representations, especially in cultural and artistic works. These works, through acknowledging the brutality of the passport as a system of control, deception, and regulation, try to open this banal booklet and redirect it as an object of thinking, imagination, and memory with the hope of reworking the hegemonic narrative prescribed to them.

Amita Kumar’s (2000) beautifully written book Passport Photos tackles various issues of identity, home, racism, and belonging through precisely those bureaucratic features that exist in passports: photos, signatures, names, sex, places of birth, and so on. Kumar’s powerful account works very well to reappropriate those bureaucratic features, turning them upside down and opening them up toward other stories: in his case often stories of the wretched, the forgotten, the underclass, and the pariah.

Some cultural practices that surround passports as a mediating metaphor for identity as well as a concrete object of identification can gain another layer of meaning after they are set in circulation. Ahmad Hammoud and Malak Ghazaly’s project Passport for the Stateless is a case in point. As part of a larger project Stateless of the World, Hammoud and Ghazaly have designed a passport for the stateless person, whose lack in being recognized by any state results in lacking a passport. As part of the exhibition Cairo Now at Dubai Design Week, Hammoud and Ghazaly sent their project to be shown at the exhibition, but when the passport arrived, it was signed off and every page was ripped off (Figure 1). State security considered this fictional passport of some value, which prompted them to try to invalidate it by signing off and ripping it apart.

Similarly, but in a different fashion, Khaled Jarrar’s State of Palestine stamp project unsettles the relations between borders, authority, and passports. Part of a larger project Live and Work in Palestine, Jarrar designed a visa stamp for Palestine, visited a bus station in the West Bank, and asked tourists for their passports to be stamped by the visa he designed (Figure 2). We often get our passports stamped when entering a legally existing territory. Jarrar, however, does the opposite. By stamping a visa from a non-existing territory—of course non-existing in the imaginary of the international community—into the existing legal passports, he redraws a map of Palestine and performs its borders. This happens at the moment of performance of asking for the passport and stamping it, as well as through the traces of stamp left on those circulating passports. He reminds us that passports or visas are not simply products or signifiers of the borders but rather the very components that constitute border politics. They are the very material and performative practices that produce borders. While these examples, among other ones, demonstrate, expand, and unsettle what a passport is, how it operates, and how it can be rethought differently, this book avoids engagement with artistic works concerning passports. This is because these works tend to metaphorize or universalize passports, tendencies that I aim to resist throughout this book. This is not because these approaches are redundant or unhelpful, but due to the fact that this book engages with very materialized, concrete, and non-representational situations and encounters that produce and are produced by the passport.

It might be true that passports are just another material technique of border control. However, their unique emergence, transformation, and existence can illuminate the complexity of how mobility and immobility can be produced and communicated through material practices. More specifically, due to their particular materiality and technical configurations, passports are different from barbed wire, for example. While one of the most important and determining actors in development and promotion of mobility across territories as a modern phenomenon, their specific capacities in facilitating, regulating, and producing identification at any moment and place make them unique compared to other techniques of control.

Another factor that makes passports special compared to other material techniques of border control is their actual mobility due to their configuration. Compared to the majority of border techniques, which are technically fixed and bound to the geographical location of the border, passports are conceived to be mobile, to be carried. A passport that does not accompany a mobile body fails its purpose from the perspective of the issuing authority. This makes ...