The Figure of the Migrant - Softcover

Nail, Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804796580 ISBN 13: 9780804796583

Verlag: Combined Academic Publ., 2015

Inhaltsangabe

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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Thomas Nail is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver.

Thomas Nail is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The Figure of the Migrant

By Thomas Nail

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-9658-3

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
PART I. POLITICAL THEORY OF THE MIGRANT, 
1. The Figure of the Migrant, 
PART II. EXPANSION BY EXPULSION, 
2. Kinopolitics, 
3. Centripetal Force, 
4. Centrifugal Force, 
5. Tensional Force, 
6. Elastic Force I, 
7. Elastic Force II, 
PART III. FIGURES OF THE MIGRANT, 
8. Pedetic Force, 
9. The Nomad, 
10. The Barbarian, 
11. The Vagabond, 
12. The Proletariat, 
PART IV. CONTEMPORARY MIGRATION: MEXICO–UNITED STATES, 
13. Centripetal Force and Land Grabbing, 
14. Centrifugal Force and Federal Enforcement, 
15. Tensional Force and Illegal People, 
16. Elastic Force and Neoliberalism, 
17. Pedetic Force and Migrant Power, 
Conclusion, 
Notes, 
Index, 

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, 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. 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."

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. 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." "Reality is mobility itself. ... If movement is not everything, it is nothing." When an extensive movement occurs from A to B, the whole AB undergoes a qualitative transformation or change.

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. 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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Combined Academic Publ.
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804796580
• ISBN 13: 9780804796583
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 312
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande