Undocumented Citizenship

440 U (UN)DOCUMENTED CITIZENSHIP One of the unavoidable questions that are raised by contemporary refugee crises, deaths at the borders of Europe and permanent marginalization of undocumented refugees in the interior of fortress Europe concerns the relation between citizenship and the value of human life. There is an influential strand in critical theory which states that the refugee highlights the dominance of the figure of the citizen over that of the human. Writing in the aftermath of the Second World War, when millions of stateless refugees roamed Europe in search of juridical protection, Hannah Arendt identified a paradoxical effect of human rights discourse. Those for whom the notion of human rights was invented, and who need them most, can have the most difficulty in accessing them. As Arendt writes in The Origins of Totalitarianism: ‘if a human being loses his political status, he should, according to the implications of the inborn and inalienable rights of man, come under exactly the situation for which the declaration of such general rights provided. Actually the opposite is the case’ (Arendt 1973: 300). Arendt highlights that instead of one’s humanity forcing civil treatment, civil status determines who deserves humane treatment. Arendt concludes her analysis of human rights – this section of the book is titled ‘The decline of the nation-state and the end of the rights of man’ – with a pessimistic conclusion: ‘the danger is that (UN)DOCUMENTED CITIZENSHIP a global universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages’ (ibid.: 302). This analysis is radicalized by Giorgio Agamben in his famous Homo Sacer. For Agamben, the notion of human rights signals the infringement of political life over biological life: ‘declarations of rights represent the originary figure of the inscription of natural life in the juridicopolitical order of the nation-state’ (1998: 75). For Agamben, human rights serve as a hallmark of the power over bare life. Agamben’s analysis seems to end in a pessimistic prediction for the future: the figure of the refugee is an ‘ontological destiny’; Agamben’s famous conclusion, that we are all in the camps, aims to show how underneath juridico-political identifications we are all at the mercy of naked power over bare life. The triumph of juridico-political power over life is complete. These conceptualizations proved to be a prescient criticism of the global violence to be unleashed on refugees. Indeed, now that the borders of Europe can be seen as sites where necropolitics are becoming ever more apparent (Mbembe 2003), and while in the interior of European nation-states who unanimously subscribe to the declaration of human rights the treatment of undocumented refugees is frequently in direct violation of human rights (Spijkerboer 2013), pessimism is justified. Yet, as the twenty-first century progresses, 440 POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY (UN)DOCUMENTED CITIZENSHIP this grim diagnosis is increasingly untenable. There is an urgent need to not just critique but also to change inhumane situations around the borders of Europe. Emphasizing that any conceptualization of the human is inherently bound up with domination and biopower paradoxically runs the risk of enforcing rather than critiquing the powerlessness of those who are most victimized (Lemke 2005). In the face of the plight of refugees both at the borders and within nation-states, this stance is woefully insufficient. Increasingly, scholars argue that, contra pessimist diagnoses as outlined above, citizenship can be the site of micro-resistance (Papastergiadis 2006), and a rehumanization of those who are excluded (Zembylas 2010). In his Acts of Citizenship, Engin Isin has formulated an alternative conceptualization of civic agency which is illustrative of this trend in critical theory: ‘we define acts of citizenship as those acts that transform forms (orientations, strategies, technologies) and modes (citizens, strangers, outsiders, aliens) of being political by bringing into being new actors as activist citizens (claimants of rights and responsibilities) through creating new sites and scales of struggle’ (Isin and Nielsen 2008). Defining politics not as a play of actors with preconceived notions, but instead as processes that expand the political sphere, claimant of rights and responsibilities, citizenship is seen here not as a stable category, nor as an identification which is completely at the hands of empire, but rather as a dynamic practice. Citizenship in Isin’s sense is claimed by those actors who claim rights and responsibilities and those who create new sites and scales of struggles. Isin’s conceptualization opens up civic agency to those who are usually not seen as claimants of it. The activism of undocumented migrants themselves offers a good starting point. It POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY 441 shows how the non-citizen, Arendt’s ‘savages’ or Agamben’s ‘homo sacer’, those who are often associated with a position of ultimate marginalization, act from a marginalized position. It is a good starting point for a discussion of the value of undocumented citizenship. Whereas citizenship and documentation, in the sense of passports, residence permits or official recognition of the right kind of refugee, seem to be inherently connected, when we see citizenship as a dynamic practice, it becomes possible to see citizenship enacted by those without documentation. All over Europe activism of undocumented migrants is taking place. To take a number of Western European examples: between 2008 and 2010 France witnessed a series of strikes of undocumented workers. Almost 7,000 workers occupied companies and temp agencies (Kahmann 2015). This form of activism is not only an act that tries to reject marginalization, it is also an affirmation of the constructive civic presence of sans-papiers (literally: ‘those without documentation’) in French society. The strike showed to what extent the French economy counts on undocumented workers. The name that was claimed by the activists was not ‘sans papiers’, but rather ‘ouvriers sans papiers’ (‘workers without papers’). There is no figure of the humanitarian victim here, nor is there only the grasp of power, rather what was shown by the strike of undocumented French citizens is that undocumented migrants are marginalized yet active and constitutive parts of society and hence can engage in acts of citizenship. Similarly, the Netherlands has known a protest movement that uses the slogan ‘We Are Here’. The slogan is simple yet effective: undocumented migrants have been making a life for themselves, often under extremely taxing circumstances, in the midst of Dutch civilization. The movement URBANIBALISM 442 does not ask for recognition of victimhood, it is not a plea for a humanitarian embrace nor is it purely negative; instead it is a courageous affirmation of presence. This slogan, if affirmed by Dutch civilization, cannot but lead to a fundamental reconsideration of the most foundational questions of belonging. As these acts of undocumented citizenship show, it is not merely a matter of inclusion or exclusion. Undocumented citizens are already part and parcel of political communities. Indeed these acts show destructive marginalization and precarity, and indeed these movements make a claim for inclusion and normalization of their status in juridico-political orders, but they also showcase different forms of civic engagement. The challenge is to listen to and follow the example of these acts of undocumented citizenship. The voices of undocumented citizens confront ossified notions of humanity and civil treatment of humans with creativity, courage and the demand to reinvent the current horizons of civic engagement. See also Camp; Expulsions; Lampedusa; Stateless State; Violence; SS = Security/ Surveillance. Ernst van den Hemel larger metabolism of digestion and nourishment. As the Manifesto cites: ‘The matter of the world is endlessly cooked and devoured – the stomach is the big / outside us’ (Stanza 9). Against a pacifying and essentialist idea of ecology, Urbanibalism rejoices in the messy metabolism of nature in all its parasitic, ‘cannibalistic’ and endosymbiotic relations. Its posthumanism resides in its antithesis to the idea of a natural equilibrium and separation of the natureculture continuum: ‘We should never abandon the city in favour of a virgin territory’, reads the very first line of the Manifesto (Stanza 1). While Urbanibalism perceives the city as a gigantic stomach, it does this along its economical, political and colonial fault lines. An important reference of Urbanibalism is the anti-colonial ‘Manifesto Antropófago’ by the poet Oswald de Andrade, which is a founding text of the Brazilian avant-garde movement tropicalismo and historical challenger of Eurocentric humanism. In the western world Urbanibalism addresses new forms of biopolitical control as represented by ‘green capitalism’ and policies of sustainable development. ‘As there is no longer an outside, within the ideology of degrowth we have established the borders of our own siege’ reads the last stanza of the Manifesto. Methodology URBANIBALISM A provocative portmanteau of the terms ‘urban’ and ‘cannibalism’, Urbanibalism is an artistic practice and political agenda initiated in Amsterdam in 2006 and encapsulated in the terse metric of the ‘Manifesto of Urban Cannibalism’ (Maas and Pasquinelli 2013). Urbanibalism envisions the city, the environment and even the cosmos from the point of view of the stomach, that is from the perspective of a In postulating the stomach as the organ of perception and experience of the surrounding world (Umwelt), Urbanibalism turns upside down the dominant aesthetic and political canon that is based on the centrality of vision and, nowadays, computation. Urbanibalism deems the surrounding world, the Umwelt, as an ‘extroverted’ stomach. This is posited by Urbanibalism as a necessary thought experiment but also as a fertile provocation for emergent posthuman epistemologies. Such a neomaterialist POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY