Patrols, records and pictures: Demonstrations of Europe in the midst of migration’s crisis

Abstract

Migration is not readily seen. A vast infrastructure supports its visualization, making migration visible and actionable. Recent scholarship on the visuality of migration has clearly shown how visualizing migration is an integral part of governing it. Concepts and research approaches from Science and Technology Studies (STS) are particularly appropriate when studying these connections between knowing and doing. In this paper, the performativity of visual methods and their data practices are analysed with respect to the monitoring infrastructure of European border management. Three such methods-patrolling, recording and publicizing-are reconstructed through analysis of their histories and their present. Patrolling involves the tactical domination of terrains. Recording involves the production of documentary objectivity. Publicizing involves the pictorial capture of fleeting realities. These methods are irreducibly political. Their political significance is explored through the concept of demonstrative effects that helps to show how methods of visualising migration at once involve specific demonstrations of the European association that is operative in them. These demonstrations make visible what Europe can and cannot do. The so-called 'migration crisis' of Europe turns out to be more than political discourse but entangled with the very methods that render migration apparent and governable.

State work and the testing concours of citizenship

“…Rather, ambiguity is what allows the state to manifest itself in the first place. As Rogier van Reekum says, if the state were to really eradicate doubt, “it would progressively rid itself of investigative capacities … Government would truly become administration” (van Reekum, , p. 3). Or in other words, the enactment of borders, in these cases, at the same time demonstrates the specific kind of association that makes claims to statehood—that demonstration is the effect of state work, but that is a work which can get to be credibly called “state” only after the effect.…”

“…Rogier van Reekum has productively differentiated between the performative effects that pertain to the visualization and calibration of “migration” and what he calls the demonstrative effects that always accompany such performativity but exceed it by drawing attention to the specificity of the association that produces it (van Reekum, ). By enacting the public life of “migration,” “the state” demonstrates the contingency and limitations of its own entanglement in the world of territories, materials, signs, and moving bodies.…”

“…As van Reekum says:

migration is, through its varied and contradictory visualizations, also a test in which the capacities and tendencies of an association—“Europe”, for instance—are demonstrated. (van Reekum , p. 4)

…”

Photojournalism as political encounter: western news photography in the 2015 migration ‘crisis’

“…Even though the photojournalism of military duty can also highlight instances of effective action, where migrants escaping through securitized fences reveal the occasional permeability of territorial sovereignty (Van Reekum, 2018), this class of photographs ultimately works as a space of symbolic bordering insofar as the proliferating imagery of ghettoized zones comes to naturalize the border violence of national defence. The photojournalism of military duty operates, in this respect, as a key securitizing procedure within European journalism in that it illustrates, what Agamben (1998) after Schmitt, calls the border as a ‘state of exception’ – a space of national sovereignty where the state reserves the rule of law as a protective force for its own citizens, while it exercises the law only as a punitive force for those it wishes to keep out.…”

Atmospheric Border Politics: The Morphology of Migration and Solidarity Practices in Europe

“…This implies, as Adey ( 2013) has stressed with regard to the security concerns of megacities, that "Sloterdijk's thesis should be taken a little more critically in these contexts. We should err on the side of caution in taking the processes he describes as "an accomplished fact" (Thrift 2009) and rather see them as trajectories of possibility" (Adey 2013, 304). Sloterdijk can also be read as anticipating the critical aspects of bubbling because, as Ryan (2015) explains with regard to the maritime protection zones (MPZ) which are being created in the territorial waters of a number of European states.…”