Biopolitics Multiple: Migration, Extraction, Subtraction

Abstract

This article proposes ‘biopolitics multiple’ as an approach to the heterogeneity of biopolitical technologies deployed to govern migration today. Building on work that has started to develop analytical vocabularies to diagnose biopolitical technologies that work neither by fostering life nor by making people die in a necropolitical sense, it conceptualises ‘extraction’ and ‘subtraction’ as two such technologies that take ‘hold’ of migrants’ lives today. Extraction, explored in the article through a focus on borderzones in Greece, captures the imbrication of biopolitics and value through the ‘outside’ creation of the economic conditions of data circulation. Subtraction, which is analysed in this article through a focus on Calais, captures the practices of (partial) non-governing by taking material and legal terrain away from migrants and reconfiguring convoluted geographies of (forced) hyper-mobility. This move allows us to understand the governmentality of migration beyond binary oppositions such as ‘making live/letting die’, biopolitics/necropolitics and inclusion/exclusion. Biopolítica múltiple: migración, extracción, sustracción

Carceral economies of migration control

“…The World Food Program and UN promote debit as revolutionizing humanitarian aid, both in allowing asylum-seekers and refugees to choose their purchases and in quickly and efficiently dispersing money to them (Kenyon, 2016;UNHCR, 2018). At the same time, the cards produce the same kinds of transaction data used to analyse deviant patterns of movement (Aradau and Tazzioli, 2020;De Goede and Amoore, 2008). Debit card programmes are managed by different organizations and agencies from country to country, however -sometimes in partnership with banks, sometimes operating as a distinct flow of money.…”

“…In Greece, asylum-seekers agree to certain conditions to receive debit cards, tying assistance to particular kinds of behaviour and biopolitical control (Aradau and Tazzioli, 2020;Tazzioli, 2019). In the UK, debit cards operate in a similar way, but for rejected asylumseekers, the cards cannot be used to withdraw cash.…”

Kidnapping migrants as a tactic of border enforcement

“…The necropolitical proclivity to render these migrant and refugee lives expendable has a deeply biopolitical ramification, just as the biopolitical recourse to regulating these lives in a manner that is oriented to the maximum extraction of their vital force and productive power is likewise inextricable from the compulsion to render them disposable (De Genova, 2015, 2018b). Thus, we need to apprehend economies of violence that are simultaneously necropolitical and biopolitical (Aradau and Tazzioli, 2020; Brambilla and Jones, 2019; De Genova, 2015). Both of these manifestations of a power over life and death, overwhelmingly perpetrated against racially subordinate populations, are inextricable from the centuries-old sociopolitical order predicated upon a global post/colonial regime of white supremacy.…”

Rethinking the biopolitical: Borders, refugees, mobilities…

“…At a close glance it is noteworthy that Foucault himself has never fully developed the nexus between biopolitics and circulation, nor did he elaborate a biopolitics of mobility. In fact, it should be stressed that Foucault speaks of governing circulation, and not of mobility (Aradau and Tazzioli, 2020) 3 ; and that, in arguing that modern governmentality consists in "making a division between good and bad circulation" (Foucault, 2007: 18), he does not actually engage with the 'bad circulation', that is, with the ways in which criminalized and unruly subjectivities on the move are governed. Or better, while Foucault highlights that the government of cities in the eighteenth century was driven by the need to deal with "the influx of the floating population of beggars, vagrants, delinquents, criminals.…”