Political action from spaces of bare life: Situating the figure of the refugee/asylum seeker in power analysis On the eleventh of November 2015, in the Greek village of Idomeni (on the Macedonian border) a group of six asylum seekers from Iran stitched shut their lips in protest after being effectively stranded in Greece following the decision of several Balkan states to no longer consider asylum requests from anyone but nationals of Syria, Afghanistan or Iraq (Grenoble, 2015). Such an exceptional act of protest is certainly not without precedent among asylum seekers/refugees. 1 Thus, several analysts of power, for whom the particular, marginal (in relation to dominant, nation state, sovereign power) figure of the refugee/asylum seeker is central, have taken these lip-sewing protests as case studies in exploring power, powerlessness and empowerment (for example: Owens 2009; Edkins and Pin-Fat, 2005; Gündogdu, 2015; Jeffers, 2011). Beginning with the theories of Hannah Arendt and of Giorgio Agamben which many of these studies take as their base, this essay will trace the key difference between Agambenian and Arendtian readings of lip-sewing to the embracing of or departure from bare life. An analysis of that which is lost in the production of bare life as the right to meaningful action, in Arendtian terms, and a closer examination of what surrounds the act of lip-sewing will lead us to follow Owens (2000) in rejecting an Agambenian interpretation of lip-sewing as reclaiming bare life in favour of an Arendtian understanding of the act of protest as aiming to transcend bare life and (re)enter the realm of action. Taking this interpretation as a point of departure, and with an awareness of the contemporary European crisis evidenced by the protest at Idomeni, the essay will conclude with a brief examination of how Anglo-American theories of power and empowerment, traditionally quiet on the issue of the refugee/asylum seeker, might inform efforts to find a place for the figure of the refugee/asylum seeker in modern politics. It is with Hannah Arendt that the modern stateless person (as one who is without the rights accorded by citizenship, whether de jure refugee or not) is first brought into academic analysis of power. Arendt places the stateless person at the centre of her argument that human rights (as common to all humans by simple virtue of being human, as opposed to the civil 1 In 2002, the mass lip-sewing protest by at least sixty asylum seekers at the Woomera Detention Centre in Australia brought particular attention to the phenomenon; other cases have since received attention in the UK, France, Greece and Nauru (where Australia maintains an offshore processing centre ) (Jeffers, 2011, pp. 99-100; Edkins and Pin-Fat, 2005, pp. 16-18).
rights which come with citizenship) are meaningless, evidenced by the fact that the unwelcome refugee, without civil rights and with nothing on which to claim rights but her abstract nakedness of being human found herself utterly rightless (1967, p. 299); [t]he paradox involved in the loss of human rights is that such loss coincides with the instant when a person becomes a human being in general (p. 302). This rightlessness will be explored in greater depth below, but for now it is worth noting that, following Parekh s (2014) reading of Arendt, this rightlessness entails both a legal/political loss and a a deprivation of certain fundamental human qualities (p. 646). For many 2, it is Giorgio Agamben who, building on Arendt s work, provides the next key theoretical ingredients in understanding the position of the refugee within power relations: sovereign power, the state of exception and bare life. In devising these concepts, Agamben draws on the Ancient Greek distinction between zoe (simple biological life common to all animals) and bios ( the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group that was lived in the polis (Agamben, 1997, p. 9)), on the Arendtian division between public and private (Arendt, 1998), on Foucauldian ideas of biopower (Foucault, 1976) and on Carl Schmitt s definition of the sovereign as he who decides on the exception to the application of the law (Schmitt, 2005, p. 5). For Agamben, western sovereign politics is based at its origin on the exclusion of zoe from the polis, which in fact means the inclusion of zoe as a constituent part the sovereign order by this very exclusion. This inclusive exclusion of zoe is the original production of the biopolitical body (1997, p. 11), the production of bare life at the limit of zoe and bios (p. 102). This point is elaborated by the opposing figures of the sovereign, who is subject to the law yet outside it since it is the sovereign who may decide when law is applied and when it is suspended (the state of exception), and of the homo sacer of Ancient Roman law who could be killed without it being considered murder, but not sacrificed in a religious ritual, thus included in divine and juridical law only by exclusion from them. Modern politics, which for Foucault was the entry of biological life into politics, is for Agamben instead the normalisation of the state of exception, when the law is held constantly at least partially suspended, and the making central to politics that bare life which was once constitutively included only through exclusion (Ibid., p. 12). 2 For example, Edkins, 2000; Jenkins, 2004; Edkins and Pin-Fat, 2005; Neyers, 2006, Zembylas, 2010; Betts and Loescher, 2011.
The situation of the refugee/asylum seeker - existing in a liminal state, bound by the law of the jurisdiction in which she finds herself but not afforded its protection in the same way as citizens of that jurisdiction - has led some authors to consider the refugee/asylum seeker a pure modern incarnation of Agemben s homo sacer (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr, 2004; Haverkamp, 2005, p. 142). However, since, for Agamben, in the modern biopolitical order where the state of exception is omnipresent, all citizens can be said, in a specific but extremely real sense, to appear virtually as homines sacri (1995, p. 66), the situation of the refugee/asylum seeker fits better into Agamben s theories as an extreme case of the state of exception which looms over us all, an especially naked version of that relation of sovereign power over bare life which is the core of modern politics, an exemplary camp dynamic (whether the refugees/asylum seekers are in a physical camp or not) in which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without any mediation (Agamben, 2000, p. 41). The bare life of the refugee/asylum seeker is maintained not only through political discourses and practices which turn her into a (dangerous, fearsome) alien other to be excluded, but also through liberal/humanitarian approaches which establish the refugee/asylum seeker as a depoliticised bare life to be taken care of, and therefore, despite themselves, maintain a secret solidarity with the very powers they ought to fight (Ibid., p. 76; see also Zembylas, 2010). Taking the refugee/asylum seeker as precisely this extreme instance of modern sovereign power s production of bare life and following Agamben s claim that bare life is today the one place for both the organization of State power and emancipation from it (1998., pp. 12-13), Edkins and Pin-Fat (2005) make the act of lip-sewing the centre of their elaboration of just how bare life can be the site of resistance to the sovereign power which produces it. They refer to this resistance as the assumption of bare life and see in it a real source of power to challenge the sovereign. Insofar as the dramatic corporeal protest of lipsewing forces a response from the sovereign (even if that response is to cast the act in terms of barbarism in an attempt to maintain the protesters otherness 3 ) it creates, maintain Edkins and Pin-Fat, a power relation, in Foucauldian terms 4, in a space where the sovereign has 3 As with the response of the Australian Immigration Minister to the lip-sewing of the Woomera detainees: Lip sewing is a practice unknown in our culture but we ve seen it before amongst detainees and it s something that offends the sensitivities of Australians. (Phillip Ruddock, quoted in BBC Online, 2002) 4 For Foucault, power only exists in action (Foucault, 1980, p. 89) and there are no relations of power without resistances (p. 142).
attempted to install, and come close to achieving, a relation of pure violence in which the refugee/asylum seeker has no freedom to resist (Edkins and Pin-Fat, 2005, pp. 9-11). Though this argument of Edkins and Pin-Fat, following Agamben, is compelling, not least because the concept of bare life encompasses a great deal of the situation of the refugee/asylum seeker, it is inadequate to the task of establishing an effective means of empowering refugees/asylum seekers, who have been reduced to bare life, to challenge sovereign power. This is because, as Owens writes, the act of lip-sewing, or any assumption of pure bare life, cannot in itself constitute a new political beginning (2009, p. 578). Instead, what is needed is an appropriate distinction between nature and political artifice (Ibid., p. 569): that is, against Agamben, Edkins and Pin-Fat, a redrawing of the zoe/bios separation. Owens bases her claim on Arendt s idea of political action as constituted between humans engaging in meaningful communication. For Arendt, political action corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and when it comes to political action, the bare, common nature of human beings as human beings is irrelevant (Arendt, 1998, pp. 7-8). Thus, the lip-sewing of refugees/asylum seekers only becomes politically powerful when it transcends bare life, when the act is recognised as the action of a specific political being not of a human in general, when in meaningful speech it enters the realm of political action (Owens, 2009, p. 578). This is because, for Arendt, having herself experienced the rightlessness that came from being a refugee, from being a human being in general, rights could never be understood to come from some inborn equality of humans: We are not born equal; we become equal as members of a [political] group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights (Arendt, 1967, p. 301). It is useful here to examine in greater detail Arendt s idea of the rightlessness of (de jure or de facto) stateless persons, in which analysis Parekh s (2014) reading of Arendt is illuminating. Parekh distinguishes two dimensions to this rightlessness: on the one hand, being (in fact or effectively) without citizen s rights and thus outside legal protection 5 ; on the other hand what Parekh refers to as the ontological deprivation of statelessness, or the loss of core human qualities (p. 651). The reduction of the refugee/asylum seeker to bare life as 5 Formally, this rightlessness has been relieved somewhat since Arendt wrote on it in the mid-twentieth century, though in practice the legal protection provided to stateless persons is still often not upheld (Ibid., p. 650).
analysed above is central to this ontological loss. As bare life, the stateless person loses her individual identity, loses any officially recognized identity (Arendt, 1967, p. 287). She is also forced outside the common world, participation in which, in Parekh s reading, is necessary for our humanity (Parekh, 2014, p. 653); she is abandoned, in the Agambenian sense of inclusive exclusion (Ibid.). This abandonment is physical, since the camps and detention centres which house most of the world s stateless persons are separated from the physical spaces of citizens; it is economic, since in the camps these stateless persons are excluded from economic activity and reliant on charity; it is social, since there is no opportunity for social integration among citizens; and it is political, since they are denied the political rights of citizens. In this way, they become uprooted, without a recognised place in the world, and superfluous, of no importance to the world and unable to affect it meaningfully (Ibid., pp. 653-4). For Ardent, as a result of this loss of recognised individual identity and of access to the common world, the stateless person, in the most fundamental aspect of her rightlessness, is severely limited in her ability for action, since action for Arendt is intersubjective and relies not only on the ability to express an opinion or perform a gesture, but to be judged by one s actions and opinion (Arendt, 1967, p. 296). So fundamental is the intersubjective recognition of action and speech as meaningful that Arendt calls this the right to have rights (Ibid.). Arendt and Agamben are in agreement that the central deprivation of the refugee/asylum seeker is rooted in her reduction to bare life, abandoned by (but not freed from) the sovereign, and that, in breaking the nexus between human being and citizen (Agamben, 2000, p. x) she presents the clue to a new politics and model of international relations (Owens, 2000, p. 578). However, while Agamben calls for the new politics to be based on the being that is only its own bare existence (1998, p. 105), Arendt, in Owens reading, maintains that no political order can - or should - centre itself on the notion of a pure human (2000, p. 579). For Arendt, the way out of bare life is in reinstating that which has been taken away: this ability for meaningful action. Taking the cases of lip-sewing among refugees/asylum seekers, it seems indeed that these actions can only be understood as attempts on the part of the protesters to act in Arendtian terms, to move from a state of bare life to a space where their actions can be seen as relevant. In many instances of lip-sewing by refugees/asylum seekers, this attempt is evident: the Woomera detainees published three letters to explain their protest, to render their actions meaningful in the eyes of others (Gündogdu, 2015, p. 161). Further, any politics emerging out of these actions... is based on a
demonstration of people s desire to grant each other rights and to deny the effort of the sovereign state to destroy their right to have rights (Owens, 2000, p. 578). What does all this tell us about how power theory can effectively aid the promotion of the cause of refugees/asylum seekers? First, as noted above, even humanitarian outlooks on the situation of the refugee/asylum seeker too often end up being complicit in the reduction to bare life of those they purport to help, by seeing them only as biological bodies to care for (in a similar way to how state biopolitics takes on the biological life of citizens as its central concern, though without the comforting fictions of citizenship (Owens, 2000, p. 571)). There is a serious risk in the disempowerment that this brings in denying the political agency and significance of the refugee/asylum seeker. Equally, we must be wary of Edkins and Pin- Fat s celebration of the assumption of the bare life of those refugees and asylum seekers who have stitched their mouths closed which, without recognising the need to transcend that bare life in order to become political, equally risks condemning the refugee/asylum seeker as aneu logou and blocking off the possibility of empowering her resistance. Second, if what is sought by the refugee/asylum seeker who sews her lips is Arendtian action, action recognised as politically meaningful, it is likely that the Anglo-American schools of power and empowerment theory - where analysis of the position of the refugee/asylum seeker has received rather scarce attention, dominated as this analysis is by Arendtian and Agambenian approaches - might provide some useful insights into how the status of the refugee/asylum seeker may be promoted. While an in depth analysis is outside the scope of this essay, a brief examination of some of these insights, drawing on Lukes, Gavanta and Cornwall, will form the content of this final section. First though, we must make the case that, despite their largely independent development, the Anglo-American school is here compatible with the continental schools of power which have thus far informed this essay, despite, notably, Hayward s (1998) call, following Foucault and against Lukes, for the de-facing of power. The constructive dialogue between Hayward and Lukes (2008) is helpful in this regard. Here the two authors, while clear in their disagreement over the place of structural forces in power analyses, identify how engagement between the schools might combine, exactly as is attempted here, the continental structural analysis of modern political (and, in particular, biopolitical) power and the Anglo-American concern with elaborat[ing] avenues for challenging and changing power relations (p. 5). Throughout the dialogue, they are in agreement that power analysis should concern itself with studying how the situations of
[t]he dominated, the oppressed, the relatively powerless (such as the marginal figure of the refugee/asylum seeker) might be changed (p. 17). Lukes Power: A Radical View (1974) outlined three faces of power: formal decision making power (drawn from Dahl, 1961), non-decision making power which involves the biases within the arena of decision making power, for example, in terms of setting the agenda (drawn from Bachrach and Baratz, 1962) and ideological power which involves the internalisation of biases so that preferences and perceived possibilities are reshaped. John Gavanta, applying Lukes theory in his 1980 study of mining towns in Appalachia presented a convincing case study of Lukes three faces in action. With the British Institute of Development Studies, Gavanta further developed the three faces into a set of applicable analytical frameworks for use by actors working in development and empowerment fields (2006). In application, his framework suggests using the faces (which he calls forms) of power to identify the kind of power that needs to be challenged and the kind of power that can be mobilised in support of a cause. Approaching the situation of the refugee/asylum seeker under this framework might lead one to distinguish, for example: on the one hand, the ideological power which, in humanitarian approaches to the marginalised refugee/asylum seeker, perpetuates an image of her as a general, purely biological figure in need of care (implying, for activists, strategies to introduce the figure of the refugee/asylum seeker as an individual, political being into public discourse); and, on the other hand, the lack of channels for refugees/asylum seekers to express their message, which serves to keep their cause off the agenda (implying the creation of just such channels where refugees/asylum seekers might represent themselves). In this last case Andrea Cornwall s (2002) notion of spaces of power as decision making arenas or opportunities for action is relevant, in particular her identification that those who find themselves powerless in established spaces of power can effectively create or claim a new power space within which they can exercise agency, control the agenda and set the rules. Indeed, it is this notion of a claimed space which perhaps best describes what is attempted when a refugee/asylum seeker protests by sewing shut her mouth. Denied the ability for meaningful action in every other space, indeed, abandoned outside the realm of political agency, this desperate act of protest becomes a way to claim a space in which she is recognised, in which she is judged as an agent. If a place is to be found in our politics for the
figure of the refugee/asylum seeker - whether that means the demolition of the nation-stateterritory trinity, as suggest Arendt and Agamben, or not - it will certainly require that dominant politics take seriously these claimed spaces and the messages that come from them.
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