Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes: From Crisis to Critique [1st ed.] 9783030364144, 9783030364151

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN GLOBALIZATION, CULTURE & SOCIETY

Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes From Crisis to Critique Edited by Maria Boletsi · Janna Houwen · Liesbeth Minnaard

Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society Series Editors Jeroen de Kloet Centre for Globalisation Studies University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands Esther Peeren Literary and Cultural Analysis University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society traverses the boundaries between the humanities and the social sciences to critically explore the cultural and social dimensions of contemporary globalization processes. This entails looking at the way globalization unfolds through and within cultural and social practices, and identifying and understanding how it effects cultural and social change across the world. The series asks what, in its different guises and unequal diffusion, globalization is taken to be and do in and across specific locations, and what social, political and cultural forms and imaginations this makes possible or renders obsolete. A particular focus is the vital contribution made by different forms of the imagination (social, cultural, popular) to the conception, experience and critique of contemporary globalization. Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society is committed to addressing globalization across cultural contexts (western and non-western) through interdisciplinary, theoretically driven scholarship that is empirically grounded in detailed case studies and close analyses. Within the scope outlined above, we invite junior and senior scholars to submit proposals for monographs, edited volumes and the Palgrave Pivot format. Please contact the series editors for more information: [email protected]/[email protected] More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15109

Maria Boletsi  •  Janna Houwen Liesbeth Minnaard Editors

Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes From Crisis to Critique

Editors Maria Boletsi Department of Film and Literary Studies/Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society Leiden University Leiden, The Netherlands

Janna Houwen Department of Film and Literary Studies/Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society Leiden University Leiden, The Netherlands

Liesbeth Minnaard Department of Film and Literary Studies/Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society Leiden University Leiden, The Netherlands

Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society ISBN 978-3-030-36414-4    ISBN 978-3-030-36415-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36415-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 Chapter 1 is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see licence information in the chapter. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustrations: Alex Linch shutterstock.com Cover design: eStudioCalamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

The idea for this book arose during the seminar “Europe in Crisis: Crisis-­ Rhetoric, Alternative Subjectivities, and Languages of Protest” that we organized in Utrecht (the Netherlands) in the summer of 2017 as part of the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA). Although in this collection we decided to shift the focus from Europe to the Mediterranean for reasons we explain in the Introduction, we want to thank all participants in the panels of this seminar for contributing to the inception of this book project by sharing ideas with us through inspiring papers and lively discussions. We are grateful to the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) for providing the financial support that enabled us to conclude this project. During the final stages of completing this book, we could rely on the help of an excellent research assistant: Justin Scholtze, a student in the Leiden University Master’s program “Cultural Analysis: Literature and Theory.” We also wish to thank our colleagues at the department of Film and Literary Studies at Leiden University, as well as colleagues at the Modern Greek studies program and the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. In times when academic life is facing its own crises, especially in the Humanities, the supportive and stimulating environment of a team of like-minded colleagues is invaluable, as well as indispensable for moving from crisis to critique.

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Contents

 Introduction: From Crisis to Critique  1 Maria Boletsi, Janna Houwen, and Liesbeth Minnaard Crisis and Critique/Crisis As Critique   5 Crisis and the Mediterranean   9 The Contributions  13 Works Cited  21 Part I Critique and Crisis of Representation  25  Dwelling in Noncrisis (Im)possibility: Transmigrant Collective Action in Greece, 2016 27 Karen Emmerich Works Cited  41  the Refugee Machine: The Absence of Crisis and Its Critical In (Re-)Production 43 Janna Houwen Signs and Machines  46 Images of Subjection  48 Bodies to Bits: Machinic Enslavement  50 Crisis Against the Machine  53 Conclusion  57 Works Cited  60 vii

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 Precarity and Prosperity: Refugee Art Going Beyond the In Performance of Crisis 63 Ipek A. Çelik Rappas and Diego Benegas Loyo The Art of Suffering or the Refugee Horror Show  65 Nela Milic’s Wedding Bellas  70 Conclusion  75 Works Cited  77  Crisis, Common Sense, and Boredom: A Critique of Neoliberal Hegemony in Turkey 81 Begüm Özden Fırat Crisis and Kulturkampf  84 Many Senses of Boredom  87 Crisis: Boredom as Common Sense  89 Critique: Boredom as Good Sense  92 Conclusion: The Task of the Critic  96 Works Cited  97  Cultural Narratives of Crisis and Populism in Spain: Metaphor, Nation-branding, and Social Change101 Pablo Valdivia Introduction: Why a Cultural Constructivist Approach 101 Populism, the Global-Nation and Cenital: The Spanish Case 105 The White Paper on the Future of Europe and the Way Forward? 109 An Alternative? Problematizing Metaphors and Cultural Narratives  111 Works Cited 115 Part II Intersecting Crises 119  Palestine and the Migrant Question121 Olivia C. Harrison Crisis or Question? 121 Sans papiers 122 Displacements 128 Indigène, Refugee, Migrant 130 The North in the South 132 Are Palestinian Refugees Migrants? 136 Works Cited 141

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Lampedusa in Europe; Or Touching Tales of Vulnerability145 Liesbeth Minnaard The Fisherman and His Catch 147 The Debt Collector and Her Dream 153 Intersecting Narratives, Touching Tales 156 Conclusion 158 Works Cited 161  Alternative Hospitalities on the Margins of Europe163 Nataša Kovačević Necropolitics of the European Border 163 Commodified Migrant Bodies 166 Toward a New Politics of Friendship 170 From Social Death to Migrant Agency 173 Works Cited 179 Part III Alternative Languages and Visions of Futurity 181  Algeria Time and Water Logic: Image, Archive, Mediterranean Futurity183 Megan C. MacDonald Introduction: Two Boats in “Interesting Times”—Future Archives on Land and at Sea 183 Algeria Time and the Archive 185 Oceanic Turns and the Wake 188 Notes on Capturing the Wake 191 Ends and Beginnings in Algeria 200 Conclusion: Transnational Solidarity and Alternative Archives 202 Works Cited 206  Greek Weird Wave; Or, on How to Do a Cinema of Biopolitics209 Dimitris Papanikolaou A Girl in a Celebration… 209 … a Dog in the Big Blue Sea… 210 … and Their “Weird” Context 213 Biopolitical Realism… 218 … and a Cinema of Biopolitics 223 Works Cited 228

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 Moving Images, Moving Archives: Fracturing the Crisis in Interactive Greek Documentaries231 Geli Mademli Crystal-Clear Crisis? Realities of Interactivity 235 Crisis as a Vehicle: Moving the Medium 240 Conclusion: Refracting and Fracturing 244 Works Cited 246  Ice-as-Money and Dreams-as-Ice: Christos Ikonomou’s “The Blood of the Orange” and the Critique of Liquidity249 Jonas Taudal Bækgaard Virtual Values and Immaterial Ice 253 Affective Precarity, Frozen Dreams 259 Works Cited 264  Rethinking Stasis and Utopianism: Empty Placards and Imaginative Boredom in the Greek Crisis-Scape267 Maria Boletsi Empty Frames; Or How to Imagine Stasis Beyond Revolutionary Heroism and Passive Acquiescence 272 Imaginative Boredom; Or How to Rethink Utopianism Through the Middle Voice 278 From Crisis of Representation to a Politics of Possibility; Or, How to Rearrange Symptoms of Crisis in New Configurations 283 Works Cited 287 Name Index291 Subject Index299

Notes on Contributors

Jonas  Taudal  Bækgaard holds a Master’s in Comparative Literature from the University of Copenhagen. His current work seeks alternatives to the reliance of financial capitalism on monotemporal ways of living and working and focuses in particular on the capacity of literature and poetry to attend to environmental and climatic rhythms. Maria  Boletsi  is Endowed Professor of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Amsterdam (Marilena Laskaridis Chair) and Assistant Professor in Film and Literary Studies at Leiden University. She has published on various topics, including the conceptual history of barbarism, post-9/11 literature, crisis-rhetoric, and alternative subjectivities and narratives emerging from the Greek debt crisis. She is the author of Barbarism and Its Discontents (Stanford UP 2013) and co-author of The Lightness of Literature: Engagement in the Multicultural Society (Acco 2015; in Dutch) and Barbarian: Explorations of a Western Concept in Theory, Literature and the Arts, vol. 1 (Metzler 2018). She has co-edited the volumes Barbarism Revisited (Brill 2015) and Subjects Barbarian, Monstrous, and Wild (Brill 2018). Ipek A. Çelik Rappas  is Assistant Professor of Media and Visual Arts at Koç University, Istanbul. Her book In Permanent Crisis: Ethnicity in Contemporary European Media and Cinema was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2015. Her research topics include representation of minorities in European cinema, European popular genre cinemas and cultures, and film and TV production in Europe. She currently xi

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works on a manuscript on the ways in which screen production and representation generate value in minority and working class neighborhoods in Europe. She has published articles in Cinema Journal, Continuum, Television and New Media, and Studies in European Cinema. Karen Emmerich  is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. She is the author of Literary Translation and the Making of Originals, and has translated over a dozen books from modern Greek. She is currently at work on a monograph about citizenship and belonging in the Greek literary imagination. Begüm  Özden  Fırat is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology in Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul, Turkey. She works in the fields of visual culture, urban sociology, and social movements studies. She is the co-editor of Commitment and Complicity in Cultural Theory and Practice (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2009), Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas, Possibilities (Rodopi, 2011) and Aesthetics ̇ and Resistance in the Age of Global Uprisings (Iletiş im, 2015). Her book entitled Encounters with the Ottoman Miniature Contemporary Readings of an Imperial Art was published by I.B. Tauris in 2015. She is one of the directors of the short documentary Welcome Lenin (2016). Olivia  C.  Harrison is Associate Professor of French, Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies at the University of Southern California. Her first book, Transcolonial Maghreb: Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization (Stanford University Press, 2016), argues that the Palestinian question played a central role in shaping discourses of decolonization in postcolonial North Africa. She is currently working on a monograph titled Indigenous Critique: French Anti-Racism and the Question of Palestine, which charts the emergence of the Palestinian question in France, from the anti-racist movements of the late 1960s to contemporary art and activism. A third book project, tentatively titled The White Minority, analyzes the recuperation of anti-racism by the French alt right. Coeditor of Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics (Stanford University Press, 2016), Olivia C. Harrison has translated essays and poems by Abdelkebir Khatibi, Abraham Serfaty, and Abdellatif Laâbi. Janna  Houwen  is Assistant Professor of Film and Literary Studies at Leiden University. She is the author of Film and Video Intermediality: The Question of Medium Specificity in Contemporary Moving Images

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(Bloomsbury, 2017), the co-editor of Legibility in the Age of Signs and Machines (Brill, 2018), and has published on, among other things, cinematic and televisual representations of terrorism and violence, and lens-based artistic interventions in the so-called refugee crisis. Nataša  Kovačević is Professor of postcolonial literature at Eastern Michigan University and editor of JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. She is the author of Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization (Routledge, 2008). She has also published articles on postcolonial and postcommunist literature and film, Cold-War orientalism, narratives of migration, and avant-garde performance art. Her recent monograph Uncommon Alliances: Cultural Narratives of Migration in the New Europe (Edinburgh University Press, 2018) explores literary and cinematic narratives of migration which capture the emergent shift from national to postnational European space by addressing the European Union, rather than any of its member states, as a political problem. These narratives trace the EU’s neocolonial practices in relation to European history, borders, and guiding ideals of community, which exclude various “others” from their symbolic imaginary. They also imagine alternative modes of transnational belonging in Europe—uncommon alliances—which interrogate the traditional politics of community based on a common identity. Diego Benegas Loyo  (PhD New York University, Performance Studies) is a psychoanalyst and social researcher specializing on trauma and political subjectivity. Professor of Emergency Psychology and Science and Technology (San Martin National University), he is part of Argentina’s Network of Feminist Psychologists. His work with refugees includes projects by the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, in Buenos Aires, and the NYU Bellevue Hospital Program for Survivors of Torture, in New  York. He has coauthored Los cuerpos expuestos (Timbó Eds., 2016) and published articles in Acta Sociológica, Revista Brasileira de Sociologia da Emoção, Athenea Digital, and Performance Research. Megan C. MacDonald  is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo, and 2018–2019 EURIAS fellow, IMéRA, Institute of Advanced Studies, Université Aix-Marseille. Her research focuses on contemporary francophone and Mediterranean literary and visual cultures, and she has published in and edited journals such as Sites/Contemporary French and Francophone Studies,

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Francosphères, the International Journal of Francophone Studies, Feminist Media Studies, and Expressions Maghrébines. She is the co-editor with Claire Launchbury of the forthcoming collection Urban Bridges, Global Capitals: Trans-Mediterranean Francosphères (Liverpool). Her forthcoming book, Monsters Without Borders: Literary Precarity and the Postcolonial Navette, is the first part of a trilogy on connecting seas, and is preoccupied with understanding the relationship between books and bodies, and how they travel, via the figure of the “navette.” Geli Mademli  is a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, working on Greek film heritage and the concept of crisis as a modality of media archeology. She has taught at the University of Amsterdam and Amsterdam University College,  and she collaborates with the Thessaloniki International Film/ Documentary Festival and the Syros International Film Festival as a publications coordinator and film programmer respectively. She also works as a freelance journalist and translator and is a member of the editorial board of the open-access, peer-reviewed academic journal of Greek Film Studies FilmIcon. Liesbeth Minnaard  is Assistant Professor at the Film and Literary Studies Department of Leiden University. Her areas of expertise are critical migration studies, postcolonial studies, intersectionality, exoticism, and Europe “in crisis.” She is currently working on a monograph, tentatively titled Contemporary Protest Literature: Literary Responses to the European “Refugee Crisis.” She is the author of New Germans, New Dutch. Literary Interventions (Amsterdam University Press, 2008) and co-author of De lichtheid van literatuur. Engagement in de multiculturele samenleving (Acco, 2015). She has co-edited the volumes Challenging the Myth of Monolingualism (Brill, 2014), Literature, Language and Multiculturalism in Scandinavia and the Low Countries (Rodopi, 2013) and the special issue “Taking Positions on the ‘Refugee Crisis’: Critical Responses in Art and Literature” of FKW: Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur (2019). Dimitris  Papanikolaou  is Associate Professor of Modern Greek at the University of Oxford. He has written the monographs: Singing Poets: Literature and Popular Music in France and Greece (Legenda, 2007), “Those people made like me”: C.P.Cavafy and the Poetics of Sexuality (Patakis,

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2014, in Greek) and There is Something about the Family: Nation, Desire and Kinship in a Time of Crisis (Patakis, 2018, in Greek). He is currently completing Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics, for Edinburgh University Press. Pablo  Valdivia is Chair of European Culture and Literature at the University of Groningen, Executive Director of the Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies, and  Scientific Advisor of the Netherlands Royal Academy of Sciences (KNAW-NIAS). Before joining the University of Groningen in 2016, he worked at the University of Amsterdam, The Cambridge Foundation Villiers Park, and the University of Nottingham. His research deals primarily with the notions of “Literature and Crisis” from an interdisciplinary transnational perspective. He is an expert on “Cultural Narratives” and “Conceptual Metaphors,” and he carries multidisciplinary research with special emphasis in the fields of Social Sciences, Cultural Industries, and Cognitive Sciences. From 2014 to 2018, Valdivia was President of the  Steering Committee of the  H2020 European Commission Marie Curie RISE project “Cultural Narratives of Crisis and Renewal (CRIC).” In 2018, Prof. Dr. Pablo Valdivia was awarded “Lecturer of the Year” in the Faculty of Arts (University of Groningen).

List of Figures

In Precarity and Prosperity: Refugee Art Going Beyond the Performance of Crisis Fig. 1 Nela. The artist herself poses while another refugee woman takes the picture Fig. 2 Anne hugging a surveillance camera post

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Palestine and the Migrant Question Fig. 1 Maki and Shadi resting in a Bagnolet park. Screen capture from Brûle la mer (2014). Courtesy of Maki Berchache and Nathalie Nambot123 Fig. 2 Paris seen from la banlieue. Screen capture from Brûle la mer (2014). Courtesy of Maki Berchache and Nathalie Nambot 124 Fig. 3 The view from Maki’s window. Screen capture from Brûle la mer (2014). Courtesy of Maki Berchache and Nathalie Nambot 125 Fig. 4 Tunisian olives for a Palestinian friend. Screen capture from Brûle la mer (2014). Courtesy of Maki Berchache and Nathalie Nambot 127 Fig. 5 Poster of Mohamed arfad valiztek. Source: Fonds Kateb Yacine/ IMEC. Reprinted with permission 132 Fig. 6 Gaza. Screen capture from Ai Weiwei, Human Flow (2017) 137

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List of Figures

Algeria Time and Water Logic: Image, Archive, Mediterranean Futurity Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4

Paper boat, photo by Issrar Chamekh on Twitter Screenshot, “Territory” MiddleSea internet screenshot Untitled Image from Algeroïd, ©Abed Abidat

189 192 193 195

Rethinking Stasis and Utopianism: Empty Placards and Imaginative Boredom in the Greek Crisis-Scape Fig. 1 “Crisis… what else?” by V.M. Kakouris aka bleepsgr (Athens 2013). (Image reproduced by kind permission of the artist) 268 Fig. 2 Version of the wall writing “Variemai eufantasta” [I am bored imaginatively] in the Exarcheia neighborhood, Athens (2010). (Photograph reproduced by kind permission of the photographer) 280

Introduction: From Crisis to Critique Maria Boletsi, Janna Houwen, and Liesbeth Minnaard

In recent years, crisis has been an omnipresent term in global geopolitics and probably the most common qualifier for several sociopolitical, humanitarian, local and global challenges and developments, from the 2008 global financial crisis to the ongoing environmental crisis. In the Mediterranean, particularly, the term has accompanied and framed several acute situations the region had to face. The so-called refugee or migrant crisis that has been unraveling since 2015,1 the European debt crisis and its impact on Southern European countries (Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Cyprus), political crises in Turkey, the revolutions of the “Arab Spring” and their aftermath, the decades-old yet still acute Palestinian question, are all events and

M. Boletsi (*) Department of Film and Literary Studies, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] J. Houwen • L. Minnaard Department of Film and Literary Studies, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Boletsi et al. (eds.), Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36415-1_1

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situations brought under the rubric of this term. This widespread mobilization of crisis often works to legitimize repressive politics that involves military interventions, states of emergency, securitization of borders, anti-immigration policies, the curtailing of human or civic rights, biopolitical control, or austerity measures. Crisis rhetoric also fuels xenophobic and racist attitudes, disaster narratives or problematic modes of representation that engage in a show of human misery. The term’s banalization and oversaturation can also lead to passivity and compromised agency, especially in contexts where crisis comes to be seen as a society’s chronic state, an immobilizing condition that constitutes the “new normal.” This normalization of crisis, as many have argued, is becoming the rule rather than the exception. The concept crisis, Giorgio Agamben said in an interview in 2013, has become the “motto of modern politics” and “part of normality in any segment of social life” (2013, n.pag.). Certainly, the idea of crisis as a framework for understanding the present or even history is not new. Reinhart Koselleck, for example, in his well-known genealogy of the concept crisis in European modernity,2 argues that since the second half of the eighteenth century crisis becomes “a structural signature” of (Western) modernity and the main concept for conceptualizing history itself (2006, 372). Historically, the term crisis has assumed various and often conflicting meanings: in ancient Greek, the word (κρίσις / krisis) was used in the domains of politics, law, medicine, and theology, where it signified “choices between stark alternatives—right or wrong, salvation or damnation, life or death” (358).3 In the classical Greek context, the term was used both for an “objective crisis” (understood as a decisive point “that would tip the scales,” specifically in politics) and for “subjective critique”: a judgment in the sense of “criticism” but also in the juridical meaning of “trial,” “legal decision,” and “ultimately ‘court’” (359). In the medical context, crisis referred both to the “observable [medical] condition,” that is, the illness, and “the judgment (judicium) about the course of the illness,” that is, the diagnosis that would determine “whether the patient will live or die” (360). When the Bible was translated in Greek, the juridical meaning of crisis was transferred to the theological sphere: with God as the “judge of his people,” crisis as judgment became invested with a “promise of salvation” but also with “apocalyptic expectations” in the inevitable “Final Judgment” (Τελική Κρίσις / Telikḗ Krísis) (359). Crisis, then, assumes very diverse meanings: it can denote choice, decision, the power to distinguish or separate, judgment, critique, or diagnosis; and it can signal a turning point in history or

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a moment of truth for a society, but also a chronic condition without a clear prospect of resolution. The double meaning of crisis as an objective condition and a subjective judgment is particularly important for understanding the workings of recent mobilizations of crisis in the Mediterranean and beyond. The two meanings become regularly fused in public and political rhetoric: instead of a subjective judgment or speech act that shapes the reality it names, crisis is regularly used as a constative description of an objective state. As such, it often serves to validate repressive policies that are adopted without much debate. According to the New Keywords Collective, “a situation of ‘crisis,’ after all, appears to demand immediate responses that cannot afford the more prolonged temporalities of democratic debate and deliberative processes, or so we are told” (2016, 11). Popular crisis rhetoric today thus seems to work against the original meaning of crisis as choice or decision. “Today crisis,” according to Agamben, “has become an instrument of rule” that “legitimize[s] political and economic decisions that in fact dispossess citizens and deprive them of any possibility of decision” (2013, n.pag.). As Athena Athanasiou aptly puts it, “discourses of crisis become a way to governmentally produce and manage (rather than deter) the crisis. ‘Crisis’ becomes a perennial state of exception that turns into a rule and common sense and thus renders critical thinking and acting redundant, irrational, and ultimately unpatriotic” (Athanasiou in Butler and Athanasiou 2013, 149). Crisis rhetoric thus promotes “a politics without an alternative” (Badiou 2007, 4) or the so-called TINA doctrine (There Is No Alternative).4 Political choices are of course taken on a regular basis in order to deal with specific crises. But when crisis rhetoric serves a politics of no alternatives, uses of crisis tend to cast political decisions as self-evident “choices” between a right versus wrong, legitimate versus illegitimate, or necessary versus catastrophic alternative. Such uses of crisis shrink the space of choice and deter dissent and critique. As Stijn De Cauwer writes in his introduction to the volume Critical Theory at a Crossroads, “[r]educing the complexity of a situation to a questionable choice between two options is a much adopted tool for those who want to call something a crisis to impose dubious exceptional measures” (2018, xxiii–xxiv). The authors of the New Keywords Collective also address the anti-democratic undertones of proclamations of crisis in European politics, which serve “particular forms of governmental intervention, usually through the deployment of authoritarian measures” (2016, 11). This contemporary neoliberal

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governmentality of crisis, and the forms it has recently taken in different sites around the Mediterranean, forms the main framework in which this volume intervenes. Given the increased currency of crisis in recent years, literature on crisis has turned into a real industry, yet in popular and even in scholarly crisis-­ texts, crisis is still often taken as a given or a descriptive term for a reality or condition. As a result, most studies of contemporary crises undertake financial and political analyses, often aimed at identifying the causes and/ or offering solutions for crisis-management or for the overcoming of a crisis. However, when “[c]risis is posited as an a priori,” Janet Roitman argues in Anti-Crisis, “the grounds for knowledge of crisis are neither questioned nor made explicit” (2014, 11). In line with Roitman’s critique, this volume studies contemporary crisis-scapes by approaching crisis as a performative, meaning-making concept rather than an empirically observable phenomenon. Crisis, we argue, works as a framing that allows and authorizes certain narratives of the present and versions of futurity while precluding others. In this venture, we converse with, and build on, other recent scholarship on crisis from the fields of anthropology, cultural analysis, literary studies, visual studies, migration studies, philosophy, archeology, and sociology.5 The essays in this collection, by focusing on contexts around the Mediterranean, probe different aspects of the current neoliberal governmentality of crisis and show how multiple, co-existing or intersecting frameworks of crisis reconfigure attitudes to past archives; how they form experiences of the present and of current sociopolitical realities; and how they manage our ways of thinking the future. In addition, this book distinguishes itself from the bulk of critical scholarship on crisis due to the focus of many of its essays on the role of literature, cinema, art, and other forms of cultural and artistic production in questioning the logic of the governmentality of crisis, in drawing attention to it as a framework or in triggering crises of representation that enable reconfigurations of this framework or the imagination of alternative narratives and models of living. Western politics, media, and, to a large extent, academia, have endorsed the term crisis for many situations and challenges the Mediterranean has recently been facing, and seem to have found no good alternative to this term. But if crisis today is often “hijacked” by far-right, xenophobic, and anti-democratic agendas that shrink the space of political choice and the imagination of alternative futures, in this volume we ask if there are ways to salvage crisis as a concept that can do the work of its cognate— critique—and participate in the articulation of alternative languages,

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narratives, and modes of representation. Is the term crisis too tainted or saturated today or can it be part of the contrarian, critical, or transformative vocabularies of scholars, activists, and artists in attempts to challenge or sidestep pervasive frameworks of crisis in the Mediterranean? Can this concept be involved in attempts to trigger a crisis of meaning and representation or give rise to new “grammars” of protest and critique? Can crisis also bear the promise of the “otherwise,” that is, engender conceptual, artistic, political, and cultural spaces that narrativize the present differently and imagine a future of multiple alternatives? Can crisis be involved in alternative forms of representation that are better equipped to voice deviant subjectivities and liminal experiences? Or should scholars and artists try to develop what Janet Roitman has called “noncrisis narratives” (2014, 13) that disengage from the matrix of crisis and forge different models of relating to others and fostering communities? The essays in this volume offer different, sometimes opposed, conceptual solutions to this conundrum, in some cases proposing redefinitions of crisis and in others rejecting the concept of crisis altogether and examining alternative vocabularies for noncrisis narratives. The essays thus explore either alternative mobilizations of crisis that undercut the premises of current crisis rhetoric (e.g., exploring crisis as critique, dissent, call for change, reconfiguration of established paradigms, and revolution) or alternatives to crisis rhetoric itself. They trace and test other vocabularies, narrative structures, frames of interpretation, and expressive forms in art, cinema, literature, protest, and social movements across the Mediterranean that seek a reconfiguration of what Jacques Rancière in The Politics of Aesthetics and elsewhere calls the “distribution of the sensible” (2006). The volume puts particular emphasis on responses to the declared “refugee crisis,” which can in many ways be seen as paradigmatic for the way neoliberal governmentality today works to manage the movement of bodies and instrumentalizes crisis as a means of control and exclusion. But the essays also engage with several other crisis-scapes in the Mediterranean, through which they unravel the multivalence of crisis and its intricate relation to critique.

Crisis and Critique/Crisis As Critique In order to compare and (when necessary) reconfigure or deconstruct frameworks of crisis, we need to unpack the concept of crisis itself and its various conflicting meanings and operations in present contexts—a task

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some of the essays in this volume undertake. But we also wish to rethink crisis together with critique: a task that calls for a rethinking of critique itself in its relation to crisis. The link between the two concepts goes beyond their sharing of the same etymological root in the Greek verb κρίνω (krino ̄), which meant to “separate,” “choose,” “judge,” or “decide” (Koselleck 2006, 358; Crosthwaite 2011, 1). In the field of literary criticism, Paul de Man in his 1967 essay “Criticism and Crisis” even posed that criticism “necessarily occurs in the mode of crisis,” as literature demystifies received intellectual traditions and interpretive or disciplinary frameworks that critics bring to bear on it (de Man 1971, 18; Crosthwaite 2011, 1). But if crisis as a term has clearly gained currency in public and academic discourses, critique as a set of approaches, interpretive styles, and strategies of reading that make up a (multifaceted) academic tradition has come under intense scrutiny in the last two decades. Arguing that critique in that sense has run its course, some scholars have proclaimed that we live in “postcritical” times. Thinkers that subscribe to this postcritical paradigm stress the need to test “intellectual alternatives” to a tradition of critique that they often cast through unwarranted generalizations, by associating it, for example, with “a suspicious hermeneutics,” “chronic negativity,” pessimism, and a reliance on rationalism that underplays the role of affects, emotions, and moods in critical ventures (Anker and Felski 2017, 1, 11).6 Viewed as a “genre,” critique is of course internally heterogeneous, with its diverse instances sharing what Ludwig Wittgenstein called “family resemblances” rather than essential features (3–4).7 Critique is, however, marked by certain recurring elements. These include the emphasis on defamiliarization and a suspicion toward “common sense” and anything readers or viewers take for granted (Anker and Felski 2017, 3, 8; Culler 2011, 4); a self-reflexive attitude that never exempts the researcher and their position from further critique and scrutiny; and a liking for allegorical, symptomatic readings that sometimes approach literary or artistic forms as reflections of social structures and realities, and especially—in the tradition of critique of ideology—social, racial, or gender inequalities and hierarchies (Anker and Felski 2017, 6, 8). Most importantly perhaps, critique carries a diagnostic quality: a connotation it shares with the concept of crisis. Just as crisis in its medical meaning denoted “diagnosis,”8 critique also engages in symptomatology and aims to offer a diagnosis of the present or of realities, forces, and structures therein. This diagnostic aspect of critique, as well as its relation to the genealogy of crisis, deserves further scrutiny if we are to rethink the task of critique in contemporary frameworks of crisis.

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According to Elizabeth Anker and Rita Felski in Critique and Postcritique, one of the problematic aspects of the diagnostic impulse has to do with the prominent position of an authoritative expert-interpreter who scrutinizes “an object in order to decode certain defects or flaws that are not readily or automatically apparent to a nonspecialist perspective” (2017, 4). This version of the diagnostic impulse, Anker and Felski argue, easily translates into an attitude of “judicious and knowledgeable detachment” by a dispassionate interpreter that seeks to detect “the pathologies of the social body” (4, 5). It also underscores the hierarchical distinction between a (knowledgeable, authoritative) subject and an object, or an interpreter and a patient, whereby only the former can perform an adequate or reliable diagnosis (5).9 John Michael adds that critique may have been instrumental in emancipatory projects, especially since the 1970s, but often “this required [scholars] to adopt postures as supposedly knowing subjects, saddled with the necessary but essentially belligerent task of explaining the realities of the world to … less enlightened audiences”—a stance that often involved a Eurocentric orientation (2017, 253). When it comes to the critical study of frameworks of crisis today, such a version of diagnosis does not only feel outdated, but it also risks emulating precisely those binaries on which crisis rhetoric heavily rests: doctors versus patients or passive versus active subjects. During the Eurozone debt crisis, for example, the crisis-stricken Southern European countries (or so-called PIGS10) were regularly cast in the media and political speech as patients (or “spoiled children,” Graeber 2011, 229) that do not know any better and need their richer Northern European neighbors to act as doctors (or responsible parents), prescribing austerity measures as a medicine. And in the ongoing “migrant crisis,” migrants are either seen as the “disease” that Europe is called to extricate from its “body,” or cast as passive victims without agency that need to be helped and saved by Europeans (New Keywords Collective 2016, 20; Çelik 2015, 132). We should therefore be alert to critical practices that—wittingly or not—reproduce such metaphors and hierarchies. But if critique can no longer be conceptualized as “the masterful deciphering of codes or uncovering of preexisting meanings for an audience in need of enlightenment” (Michael 2017, 268), this does not mean that we should give up on the diagnostic rigor of critique altogether. The critical tradition has given rise to a rich and heterogeneous palette of transformative approaches that many critiques of critique, as the ones outlined above, do not do justice to. Intersecting crisis-scapes and the (global) forces that

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shape them demand symptom-reading and diagnosis. But when setting out to rethink both crisis and critique through the prism of Mediterranean crisis-scapes, we need to shed the authoritative frame of a doctor “reading” a patient (and the accompanying illusions of mastery) and to engage in critical practices of translation. Critique as translation can be understood in line with what Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood propose in their Preface to the volume Is Critique Secular?, in which they see translation as an attempt “to map incommensurable world views without seeking to reconcile them” and “to see how these very incommensurable domains constitute, inflect, and even suffuse one another without projecting a broader dialectical unity to which they ultimately tend” (2013, xvi). Engaging with several co-existing, overlapping, or incommensurable frameworks of crisis in the Mediterranean requires such practices of critique as translation that seek interconnections, global patterns of power, and historicization of current crises, but also acknowledge the “epistemic limits” of comparison and “sustain sites of untranslatability” when necessary (xvi). If in popular rhetoric crisis as diagnosis is usually a “judgement of deviation and failure” (Roitman 2014, 13), critiques of crisis often end up reproducing the same judgment. Aiming toward a more agonistic and less cyclical relation between crisis and critique, in this volume we consider different understandings of the diagnostic value of critique. For one such understanding, we may turn to Gilles Deleuze, who in The Logic of Sense (1969) saw an intimate link between the diagnostic and the esthetic, and viewed (great) authors as “astonishing diagnosticians or symptomatologists” (Deleuze 1990, 237). Deleuze wrote that “[t]here is always a great deal of art involved in the grouping of symptoms, in the organization of a table where a particular symptom is dissociated from another, juxtaposed to a third, and forms the new figure of a disorder or illness” (Deleuze 1990, 237). He saw artists and authors as able to “go further in symptomatology than doctors and clinicians,” precisely “because the work of art gives them new means, perhaps also because they are less concerned about causes” (Deleuze 1967, 13; also qtd in Smith 1997, xvii). Such a take on the diagnostic practice makes it not about identifying symptoms as independently existing facts but rather about rearranging, testing new combinations, and creating configurations that take us away from the illness and from diagnosis as judgment of failure. This approach to symptomatology stresses the creative, transformative, future-oriented, hopeful potential of critique and crisis, or, indeed, of crisis as critique.

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Frameworks of (chronic) crisis may often entail resignation and compromised agency for people, but they sometimes also trigger what Hendrik Vigh calls an “increased social reflexivity”: a “heightened awareness of the way we interpret the social environment, our perspectives and our horizons” (2008, 19). They force people to constantly test the efficacy of their interpretive strategies and devise alternative frameworks of interpretation—or diagnosis—that produce different narratives of the present. These alternative frameworks and narratives spring from crises of representation that signal, to speak with Janet Roitman, “a dissonance between historical events and representations of those events” (2014, 65). Sensing this dissonance and its affective charge can become an occasion, to use Deleuze’s words again, for “renew[ing] a symptomatological table” (Deleuze 1990, 237) and creating space for alternative models and narratives. Let us not forget that crisis can also mark a turning point and a transformative moment in history. Mobilizing our critical and creative diagnostic impulses is essential for recognizing and seizing those moments as occasions for social and historical change, even when the odds seem to be against that.

Crisis and the Mediterranean This volume asks how a rethinking of both crisis and critique could take shape through the prism of contemporary Mediterranean crisis-scapes. In recent years, the Mediterranean as a region has become the epicenter of various declared crises that often dovetail with each other. The imbrication of the financial crisis in Greece with the refugee situation in the country is one example of current “nesting crises” in the region.11 But the Mediterranean has also been the stage of chronic crises that persist up to the present, with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as probably the most striking one. Juxtaposing these “crises” either within the same essay or through the setup of the volume as a whole can help us illuminate and interrogate the global and local power structures and stakes involved in producing and managing these crises, their histories, and the current representational regimes that frame them. Moreover, it enables us to point out the surprising interconnections between new languages of critique, resistance, protest, and futurity emerging from the region. By focusing on the Mediterranean we produce situated critical studies while also asserting the paradigmatic value of many of these studies for broader, global processes and trends.

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Recent crisis scholarship has drawn much attention to Europe and its declared crises, including the Eurozone crisis, the refugee crisis, the threat of terrorism, Islamophobia, the rise of populism and the alt-right, and states of emergency (Cf. Castells et  al. 2017; Bitzenis et  al. 2015). Discussions of the above developments are often accompanied by reflections on Europe’s purported identity crisis or the crisis of so-called European values. In the common framing of, for instance, the refugee crisis as a European crisis, Europe often poses as a healthy body threatened by the human carriers of a disease/crisis that is external to Europe (New Keywords Collective 2016, 20). To be sure, many studies focusing on Europe and crisis engage in perspicacious critiques of the Eurocentric lens or (neo)colonial and neoliberal agendas involved, for example, in the framing of the “refugee crisis” as a European crisis—a framing that often asserts Europe’s innocence (Abbas 2015). One of the most notable endeavors in this direction is the collectively written “Europe / Crisis: New Keywords of ‘the Crisis’ in and of ‘Europe’” by the New Keywords Collective (ed. by Tazzioli and De Genova), which interrogates the nexus of “crisis” and “Europe” from postcolonial and decolonial perspectives. Their work, in the authors’ words, responds to “the dire necessity of radically unsettling any self-satisfied European discourse on ‘migration’ or ‘refugees’ as de facto human refuse of ‘crises’ constructed to be strictly ‘external’ to the presumed safety and stability of ‘Europe,’ erupting always ‘elsewhere’” (2016, 3). Building on such important studies and taking up their call to question and unsettle “Europe,” in this volume we challenge Europe’s positioning vis-a-vis, among others, the refugee question, but we also propose a shift of the center of gravity from Europe to the Mediterranean. In recent years the Mediterranean primarily features in the media as a hotbed of multiple crises. Nevertheless, as an imaginary and real geopolitical and cultural space, and as an object of study, the Mediterranean has historically yielded very divergent images. The two probably most popular images of the region are largely opposed to one another: the first, according to Christian Bromberger, is an often idealized Mediterranean “of exchanges, coexistences, harmonious polyphonies,” a place where the Occident meets the Orient, marked by confluences that are “incarnated in the port cities and cosmopolitan world-cities” that flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—cities like “Istanbul, Smyrna, Beirut, Alexandria, Algiers, Trieste and Marseilles” (2007, 292). The second is the Mediterranean as a “ring of fire”: a place of conflicts, hatred, and lines

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of separation, where walls are built and “bridges destroyed”; a place of “religious frontiers,” where one finds “the principal zones of friction and of conflict, where people are cleansed, herded together, exiled, and where interminable dramas are played out” (294–295).12 Scholars have played a key role in shaping these (and other) conflicting images of the Mediterranean. In Mediterranean Crossings (2008), for example, Iain Chambers “reads” the region as a fluid, hybrid, intercultural space that resists its common framing by European discourses, and eclipses nationalist and exclusionary frameworks and fixed identities. Other scholars question the applicability of concepts like hybridity, métissage, or creolization on Mediterranean societies, arguing, for example, that such concepts are a mismatch with the rigid borders imposed by the three main religions of the Mediterranean (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism) (Bromberger 2007, 296–298). Along similar lines, in The Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant casts the Mediterranean as an imperialist sea that illustrates what he called “continental” (exclusionary, ethnonationalist) thinking as opposed to the Carribean archipelago, which “provides a natural illustration of the thought of Relation” (1997, 34). The Mediterranean for Glissant is “an inner sea surrounded by lands, a sea that concentrates (in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin antiquity and later in the emergence of Islam, imposing the thought of the One),” whereas the Caribbean is “a sea that explodes the scattered lands into an arc,” “a sea that diffracts” (33). Although there is surely no true identity of the Mediterranean, the discursive constructions of the region, artificial as they may be, are constitutive of material realities: from attitudes to neighbors and understandings of self and other, to political realities, policies, wars, and publicity campaigns. Recent representations of the Mediterranean in the media mainly stress the region as a zone of conflicts and crises, be it the revolutions in the Arab world, ISIS and the civil war in Syria, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict or the financial crises in the European South. Such profiling reproduces the region’s conception as a hotbed of violence and sociopolitical unrest, contrasted with—and thus a possible threat to—(Northern) Europe. By centering on the Mediterranean, we do not claim a Mediterranean unity or homogeneity. Neither do we assert the “Mediterranean” as an innocent category that is in that sense distinct from “Europe.” It is important to recall that the Mediterranean as an object of study and discursive construct has been anything but free from European (imperialist) agendas. As Michael Herzfeld reminds us, historically, “the idea of a vast Mediterranean culture has frequently served the interests of disdainful

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cultural imperialism” (2005, 48). The notion of “Mediterranean unity” thus becomes problematic when we view it as “enmeshed in a global hierarchy of value in which ‘Mediterranean’ comes somewhere between ‘modern’ and ‘primitive’,” or as part of “publicity campaigns designed to exploit lingering exoticism among consumers” (50). As some of the essays in this volume show, the hierarchies and power relations that historically permeate the construct of the Mediterranean continue to shape current frameworks of crisis in the region, supported by representational regimes that are fortified by European media and public discourse. Taking the above into account, we argue that there is much to be gained from de-centering discussions around recent and ongoing declared crises from Europe to the Mediterranean. By refraining from clear-cut oppositions between “Europe” and “the rest” (North Africa, the Middle East etc.) or, more broadly, between the West and the global South, we set out to explore the intersections of various frameworks of crisis in the region. At the same time, we want to draw attention to this region not only as a “ring of fire” or as a series of transversal crisis-scapes, but also as a space that generates alternatives to dominant European models and representational regimes: a breeding ground for new cultures of protest to anti-democratic modes of governance and processes of securitization; for languages of decolonization and resistance to the neoliberal governmentality of crisis; for radical artistic imaginaries; and for alternative conceptions of community and subjectivity, many of which are shaped through, against, and beyond frameworks of (chronic) crisis. We thus join other recent studies (Solera 2017; Ianiciello 2018) that see the Mediterranean, to use the words of Gianluca Solera, as a “hub of civil resistance” against neoliberal capitalism, a base for “trans-regional grassroots movement” and citizens’ initiatives, and a possible “platform for a new social contract” that “rewrites the relations between institution and citizens” (2017, 94–95). Despite the bitter aftermath of many of the revolutions and uprisings of the “Arab Spring” that swept the Southern Mediterranean, these events have set forth modes of expression and resistance that still reverberate in present artistic and social practices in various and unexpected ways. On the other side of the Mediterranean, from the devastating financial crises in Southern European countries, new, strange, and bold artistic “grammars” are also emerging—such as the cinema of the so-called Greek Weird Wave. These new grammars and artistic idioms often yield radical reconfigurations of archives of the past, new articulations of the experience of the present, and alternative images of the future.

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The Contributions Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes: From Crisis to Critique includes thirteen contributions by scholars with a background in a wide range of disciplines across the humanities and (to a lesser extent) social sciences. Their case studies involve recent and contemporary literature, visual art, cinema, social and political movements, public rhetoric, media representations of “crises,” and personal and institutional documents from various geopolitical contexts in the Mediterranean, including Greece, Turkey, Italy, Croatia, Spain, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Palestine, Israel, and Syria. The authors engage with these case studies in their situated particularities, in their intersection with other frameworks of crisis, and in their paradigmatic value as examples of (or deviations from) broader structural processes, discourses, representational practices, and artistic trends in the Mediterranean and beyond. Central to many of the contributions are literary, artistic, cultural, and political practices that move beyond crisis as judgment of malfunctioning or failure by articulating alternative, more inclusive conceptions of hospitality, subjectivity, citizenship, and community or exploring new and different understandings of the present and the future, whether these alternatives involve a reconfiguration of the concept of crisis or a leaving behind of the concept altogether. The following issues and questions are taken up in different ways throughout the volume. First and central to all contributions is a questioning and unpacking of frameworks of crisis in and about the Mediterranean. Considering crisis as a discursive and experiential framing, the authors examine how various and conflicting meanings of crisis intersect, resonate, or clash with each other. Both independently and in productive juxtaposition to each other, the authors address questions such as the following: How do experiences of crisis converge or differ across the Mediterranean and what does their comparison disclose about the conditions that shape the present in each context, for instance in the current formations of “the new poverty” in crisis-ridden regions in Southern Europe? What can we gain by juxtaposing different crisis-frameworks or narratives in the Mediterranean, for example, the “migrant crisis” and the Palestinian question, or narratives of financial crisis from the European South and protests or revolts from the other side of the Mediterranean? Second, many contributions reflect on the contemporary performativity of crisis and trace mobilizations of crisis that project its intertwinement

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with different understandings of critique. They ask, for example, what it entails to read crisis as revolution, rupture, revision, or transformation of normative discourses and hegemonic paradigms; and what it means to conceive of crisis as a call for change or even as an occasion for rethinking more traditional understandings of social and political critique and devising new (post-)critical idioms. Third, Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes draws attention to spaces of futurity that are emerging from contemporary Mediterranean crisis-scapes. It explores how hegemonic grammars or conceptual metaphors can be transformed toward alternative social imaginaries, for example, in the case of institutional nation-branding and populist narratives in austerity-politics in Spain. Which artistic, literary, or other responses to discourses of crisis in the Mediterranean give rise to new vocabularies of resistance and critique, but also new imaginaries, versions of utopianism or creative reconfigurations of the “symptoms” of crises as parts of new languages? These three preoccupations—frameworks of crisis in and about the Mediterranean, the performativity of crisis in relation to critique, and spaces of futurity arising from Mediterranean crisis-scapes—are the main red threads that run through the three parts of this volume. PART I: Critique and Crisis of Representation contains five contributions that each in their own way revisit contemporary representations and instrumentalizations of crisis and explore the critical potential of thinking and conceptualizing crisis otherwise or disengaging from the term altogether. The contributions by Karen Emmerich, Janna Houwen, and Diego Benegas Loyo and Ipek Çelik Rappas focus on alternative configurations of, or responses to, the “refugee crisis” in forms of protest, a documentary film, and a photographed performance, respectively. The chapters by Begüm Özden Fırat and Pablo Valdivia study the operations of language in the shaping of frameworks of crisis and in undercutting those frameworks, by closely examining the complex meanings of an everyday expression (Firat) and of conceptual metaphors (Valdivia). In Chap. 2, “Dwelling in Noncrisis (Im)possibility: Transmigrant Collective Action in Greece, 2016,” Karen Emmerich studies tactics of (self-)representation in two instances of transmigrant protest staged in northern Greece in 2016, one involving the formation of the news outlet “Refugees.TV” in a settlement in Idomeni and the other the building of a replica of Homs’ clock tower in a camp in northern Greece. The two projects, Emmerich argues, both inhabit and supersede the spaces of

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forced immobility created by European tactics of bordering by acting out the very impossibility of certain kinds of action within that context of border securitization. Emmerich treats these two performances of obstruction as instances of “dwelling in (im)possibility”—a modality that also inhabits the contradictory meanings of stasis (as both mobility and immobility)— and as examples of the mobile commons at work, while also proposing the mobile commons as a site and model for intellectual efforts that straddle the scholarly and non-scholarly worlds. Chapter 3, “In the Refugee Machine: The Absence of Crisis and Its Critical (Re-)Production,” reflects on the European “refugee crisis” in terms of a well-oiled machine at work at the Mediterranean borders of Europe. Janna Houwen points out that here a military–industrial–surveillance complex is at work in a smooth manner, devoid of the impending instability, malady, and uncertainty the “refugee crisis” has come to connote. In order to gain an understanding of this contemporary construction that controls migration across the Mediterranean, and to examine the production as well as the fragmentation and repression of subjectivities in Mediterranean border areas, Houwen—drawing from Lazzarato’s machine theory and focusing on Loubeyre’s film Flow Mechanics—makes a case for “machine analysis” in this chapter. Only after uncovering the logic of the “refugee machine,” she argues, will it be possible to look for moments of resistance and protest against this lethal machinic system. Chapter 4, “In Precarity and Prosperity: Refugee Art Going Beyond the Performance of Crisis,” starts out with a critical exploration of refugee related art that drew a lot of media attention, such as works by Ai Weiwei, Banu Cennetoglu’s installation The List, and The Dead are Coming by art group Center for Political Beauty. While images of refugee deaths and suffering are abundant in artistic as well as mass media representations of the so-called refugee crisis, Diego Benegas Loyo and Ipek Çelik Rappas argue in this chapter that these spectacles never depict the voices and desires of refugees crossing the Mediterranean area, desires that go beyond their “deadly” wish to be in Europe. In order to explore alternative modes of representation, Benegas Loyo and Çelik Rappas turn to refugee art that is less visible in European mass media, particularly focusing on Nela Milic’s Wedding Bellas, a performance in which female refugees reflect quotidian expectations and desires that transcend the current discourse of crisis. In Chap. 5, “Crisis, Common Sense, and Boredom: A Critique of Neoliberal Hegemony in Turkey,” Begüm Özden Fırat traces the prestige and utility of the relatively new Turkish expression sıkıntı yok (meaning

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literally “no boredom” and figuratively “no problem” or “do not bother”), by pondering the relation between the figural and literal meanings of the expression. Firat reads sıkıntı yok as an instance of a historical articulation of common sense in response to the crisis of (political) culture in Turkey. She proposes to read culture as a ground on which the political economy of the everyday is constructed, and makes a case for a critical analysis of Sıkıntı yok’s “hidden” literal meaning, which lays bare the realities of neoliberalism in Turkey today under the populist hegemony of the governing party, the AKP. Intellectual critique, Firat argues, should pay attention to the “good sensical” nucleus in the expression so as to manufacture a counter-­hegemony that challenges neoliberal populist regimes. The complex relations between language, populist regimes, and crisis are also studied in Chap. 6, “Cultural Narratives of Crisis and Populism in Spain: Metaphors, Nation-branding, and Social Change,” in which Pablo Valdivia delves into the regime of metaphors that shapes populist attitudes in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis in Spain. He asks whether it is possible to develop a transposable theoretical model for analyzing the complex relations between language, socio-political mobilization, and culture. In what ways do conceptual metaphors generate alternative intellectual imaginaries for social renewal? How can social actors use conceptual metaphors to map the mutable nature of our societies and to promote social change? Through three case studies—a novel, a media production, and an institutional document—Valdivia examines how a hegemonic regime of metaphors can be disrupted, transformed, and renewed in the field of policy-making. The three contributions collected in PART II: Intersecting Crises explore how thinking different narratives of crisis together can help to call dominant discourses and political structures that insist on their separation into question, and to envisage new perspectives on various forms of interconnection between old and new Mediterranean crisis-scapes, as well as between the communities formed within them. Instead of focusing on singular instances or moments of crisis, Olivia Harrison, Liesbeth Minnaard, and Nataša Kovačević in their respective chapters foreground modes of relation and contact, and demonstrate through close analyses of films and literature that historical and current situations dubbed as “crises,” including the socio-political struggles and the questions they produce, intersect in intricate and meaningful ways. In Chap. 7, “Palestine and the Migrant Question,” Olivia Harrison asks what the ongoing migrant crisis can reveal about the decades-old

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Palestinian question, and what Palestine can in turn teach us about the human tragedy that continues to wash up on the shores of former imperial nations. Building on the work of Hannah Arendt and Edward Said, Harrison takes up three recent cinematic and literary texts to investigate the intersection of the Palestinian question and contemporary issues of migration: Mauritian writer Nathacha Appanah’s novel Tropique de la violence and the documentary films Brûle la mer, directed by Maki Berchache and Nathalie Nambot, and Human Flow by Ai Weiwei. Arguing against the ubiquitous alarmist discourses of crisis, her close readings of these works make clear that the mass transfer of populations that peaked in 2015 is less a turning point—one of the original meanings of crisis—than a new iteration of the decades-old image of migrants as unexpected and unwelcome guests. This chapter places current migrant questions in a long history of displacement that includes the Palestinian question. Liesbeth Minnaard also addresses the issue of migration, but in relation to contemporary neoliberalism. In Chap. 8, “Lampedusa in Europe; Or Touching Tales of Vulnerability,” Minnaard questions and opposes the currently dominant interpretation of the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa as a problematic and worrisome site at the European margins, and argues that Lampedusa should rather be seen as a heterotopian space at the heart of Europe that is symptomatic for the European Union’s faltering neoliberal politics. She elaborates on this idea by analyzing Anders Lustgarten’s theater text Lampedusa in which, Minnaard contends, the “refugee crisis” and the “social welfare crisis” appear as interrelated frameworks of crisis. She reads Lampedusa’s narratives of two individuals struggling with specific situations of “crisis” as “touching tales”—touching in the sense of equally emotionally charged (tales of insecurity, pain, loss, and fear) but also, importantly, touching in the sense of bordering on each other and interconnected in pivotal ways. Nataša Kovačević’s chapter picks up on the issue of touching tales with a discussion of the Francophone novel Welcome to Paradise (original Cannibales, 1999) by the Moroccan writer Mahi Binebine and the novel Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits by Moroccan-American writer Laila Lalami, that each imagines spontaneous communities arising among African migrants crossing the Mediterranean in juxtaposition to phantasmatic narratives of death and cannibalism that subvert the idealization of Europe. Kovačević demonstrates how the migrants’ ethics of mutual aid, compassion, and hospitality call into question dominant representations of political community in Europe. In Chap. 9, “Alternative Hospitalities on

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the Margins of Europe,” she develops a critique of the necropolitical regime of border policing immanent to the existence of the European Union as a political and cultural space. She thereby places the attempts to control “illegal” Mediterranean crossings firmly in the context of the EU’s neocolonial afterlife and transnational connections among former colonizers and the colonized. The five chapters in the final section of this book, Part III: Alternative Languages and Visions of Futurity, examine cultural objects, archives, grammars, vocabularies, and technologies that challenge dominant frameworks of crisis by testing a variety of alternatives—new types of narratives, imaginative structures, and languages of critique, utopianism, and futurity. In their respective chapters, Megan MacDonald, Dimitris Papanikolaou, Geli Mademli, Jonas Bækgaard, and Maria Boletsi ask how, among other things, practices in filmmaking, visual art, public archives, interactive media technologies, street art, and literary stories are able to resist or subvert systems of power, and, moreover, how their languages of protest or poetics of resistance open up possibilities of thinking crisis otherwise or thinking beyond crisis. This section explores the production of alternative subjectivities and visions of futurity that are emerging from frameworks of crisis in the Mediterranean and beyond. Part III opens with Chap. 10, “Algeria Time and Water Logic: Image, Archive, Mediterranean Futurity,” in which Megan MacDonald studies contemporary responses to Algeria’s interrelations with France. Works of art produced by visual artists moving between France and Algeria (Abidat, Sedira, Boudjelal, Mrabet, The Blaze), contemporary museum shows in France where Algeria is on the agenda (Mucem, La Piscine, IMA-­ Tourcoing), and language politics set to work in the Algerian protests in 2019, each deal with a complicated and painful past in their own specific way. Yet, MacDonald argues, these practices also offer alternative maritime and Mediterranean passages for the future, dislodge the logic of the migration boat, and allow us to rethink the place and nature of archives. Thinking the movement of boats, Mediterranean archives, and futurity through the logic of the wake, MacDonald envisages ways out of Mediterranean crisis-scapes. The section continues with Chap. 11, “Greek Weird Wave; Or, On How to Do A Cinema of Biopolitics,” in which Dimitris Papanikolaou marks out a “Cinema of Biopolitics”—a cinema sensitive to forms of resistance, unease, and subversion that reflects on how systems of power manage groups of people as well as the bodies of individuals. In order to speak

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about this undoubtedly broad trend in contemporary world cinema, this chapter turns to the example of the so-called Greek Weird Wave. Since 2008, the Greek films in question have been undermining a tradition of cinematic realism and seem to be proposing a new form of capitalist realism; a biopolitical realism. As Papanikolaou demonstrates, these films merge micro-stories of precarity, control, and resistance with subtle references to the macro-histories of exploitation, disinvestment, and revolt. Moreover, they turn their focus on the body, as both a disciplining and desiring machine, but also as a platform for a poetics of resistance. Geli Mademli asks how new, critical subjectivities can be evoked in times of crisis through the complex nexus of humans, technologies, narratives, material and non-material actors, and, particularly, the process of filming external reality. Her Chap. 12, “Moving Images, Moving Archives: Fracturing the Crisis in Interactive Greek Documentaries,” studies the crisis of representation that the abundance of representations of crisis in Greece has produced. Mademli examines the potential of media technologies in challenging established discourses regarding the Greek political, social, and financial crisis by analyzing the diverse media methodologies, archival practices, and interactive modes of two documentary projects: The Prism GR 2011 and The Caravan Project. Both projects, Mademli explains, aim to capture the onset and evolution of the economic recession in Greece and its impact on social life and everyday politics through micro-­ narratives of citizens living in the country’s periphery. Jonas Bækgaard discusses another potential challenge to established ways of representing crisis. In Chap. 13, “Ice-as-Money and Dreams-as-­ Ice: Christos Ikonomou’s ‘The Blood of the Orange’ and the Critique of Liquidity,” he considers a short story by Ikonomou as such a challenge to dominant ways of understanding the financial crisis. Bækgaard situates the story in the context of contemporary critiques of financial capitalism and EU economic politics. Instead of interpreting the Athenian ice cube factory in the story as a site in/of crisis, he rather reads the melting ice cubes in the protagonist’s hands as a reflection on the grounds of critique of the neoliberal language of finance. Looking specifically at the financial notion of liquidity, Bækgaard explores how the act of melting ice cubes challenges liberal conceptions of the free-floating market and the dominant language of finance in a way that opens up possibilities to think otherwise. In Chap. 14, “Rethinking Stasis and Utopianism: Empty Placards and Imaginative Boredom in the Greek Crisis-scape,” Maria Boletsi discusses different modalities for performing stasis and rethinking utopianism

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against the backdrop of the Greek financial crisis and, generally, of conditions shaped within the totalizing order Mark Fisher has called “capitalist realism.” Boletsi probes the ways two works deal with the (im)possibility of resistance from within the neoliberal “now”: the story “Placard and Broomstick” (Ikonomou) and an Athenian wall writing that translates as “I am bored imaginatively.” The empty placard that takes center stage in Ikonomou’s story and the imaginative boredom registered on the walls of Athens test modalities of stasis against alienation, dispossession, and the contracting of the future by disengaging from conceptions of subjectivity that rest on the binary choice of a passive or active subject. The story stages the desire for alternative languages by registering a crisis of representation. The wall writing taps into the modality of the “middle voice” to reconfigure one of the symptoms of neoliberalism—boredom—into a potential resource for modes of being that carry glimpses of utopianism. Although both works stage the limited possibilities for resistance within a totalizing order, they also, just like many of the cases discussed in this final section, enable alternative configurations of subjectivity, agency, and futurity.

Notes 1. Although migratory movement around the Mediterranean has historically been a common phenomenon, since 2015 such movements—particularly toward Europe—were dubbed a “crisis” and became world news following the forced migration of millions of people from Syria, but also Afghanistan, Iraq, and Sub-Saharan Africa, who have been fleeing their countries and trying to reach Europe by crossing the Mediterranean. 2. Koselleck’s account focuses primarily on German-speaking Europe, even though it includes various European contexts. 3. This applies to classical Greece, the Hellenistic era, and early Christian and Roman contexts. 4. For the mobilization of crisis as an instrument that contracts the space of political choice and promotes a politics of no alternatives, as outlined in this and the next paragraph, see also Boletsi (2018, 19–20). 5. Cf. Bryant (2016); Butler and Athanasiou (2013); De Cauwer (2018); Çelik (2015); Crosthwaite (2011); Dalakoglou and Agelopoulos (2018); Douzinas (2013); Fenske et  al. (2013); Hamilakis (2018); Hess et  al. (2016); Knight and Stewart (2016); Meissner (2017); Minnaard and Wienand (2019); New Keywords Collective (2016); Plantzos (2019); Roitman (2014); Tsilimpounidi (2018); Tziovas (2017); Valdivia et  al. (2019); Vigh (2008); and many others.

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6. For this debate, see the introduction and the essays included in Critique and Postcritique (2017), edited by Elizabeth Anker and Rita Felski. See also Bruno Latour’s influential article “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” (2004) that was partly responsible for triggering this debate. 7. Critique can refer to various and sometimes opposed approaches in literary and cultural studies. It includes traditions from critical theory as it emerged from the Frankfurt School to poststructuralist and deconstructive approaches, but also “both versions of New Critical close reading and New Historicist attacks on formalism’s putatively apolitical aestheticism” (Michael 2017, 252). 8. As we mentioned before, crisis in the medical context referred to the “judgment … about the course of the illness,” i.e., the diagnosis—a meaning that in the seventeenth century was transferred from the medical to the political realm, i.e., to the “body politic” (Koselleck 2006, 360, 362). 9. These connotations of diagnosis and this version of the interpreter/patient relation carry the marks of the psychoanalytic tradition, which mediated between the clinical and the literary contexts (Anker and Felski 2017, 4). 10. The acronym PIGS stands for Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain and is derogatorily used to refer to the economic situation in these countries during the Eurozone debt crisis. 11. The term is used by Anna Carastathis in her article “Nesting Crises” (2018) in which she discusses the discursive nexus of Greece’s socioeconomic crisis and the refugee situation in the country. 12. Bromberger also distinguishes a third model, popular mostly in anthropology, which sees the Mediterranean as a region comprising societies that present a “loose unity of family resemblances” and “underlying cultural complicities, beyond the fractures which separate them” (2007, 295–296).

Works Cited Abbas, Sadia. 2015. Neoliberal Moralism and the Future of Europe: A Postcolonial Perspective. Open Democracy, July 16. Accessed July 10, 2019. https://www. opendemocracy.net/5050/sadia-abbas/neoliberal-moralism-and-fictionof-europe-postcolonial-perspective. Agamben, Giorgio. 2013. The Endless Crisis As an Instrument of Power: In Conversation with Giorgio Agamben. Verso Blog, June 4. Accessed August 15, 2019. http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1318-the-endless-crisis-as-aninstrument-of-power-in-conversation-with-giorgio-agamben. Anker, Elizabeth, and Rita Felski, eds. 2017. Critique and Postcritique. Durham: Duke University Press. Asad, Talal, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood, eds. 2013. Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury and Free Speech. New  York: Fordham University Press.

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Badiou, Alain. 2007. The Century. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Bitzenis, Aristidis, Nikolaos Karagiannis, and John Marangos, eds. 2015. Europe in Crisis: Problems, Challenges, and Alternative Perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Boletsi, Maria. 2018. Towards a Visual Middle Voice: Crisis, Dispossession and Spectrality in Spain’s Hologram Protest. In Komparatistik: Jahrbuch der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, 2017, ed. Christian Moser and Linda Simonis, 19–35. Bielefeld: Aisthesis. Bromberger, Christian. 2007. Bridge, Wall, Mirror; Coexistence and Confrontations in the Mediterranean World. History and Anthropology 18 (3): 291–307. Bryant, Rebeca. 2016. On Critical Times: Return, Repetition, and the Uncanny Present. History and Anthropology 27 (1): 19–31. Butler, Judith, and Athena Athanasiou. 2013. Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Carastathis, Anna. 2018. Nesting Crises. Women’s Studies International Forum 68: 142–148. Castells, Manuel, Olivier Bouin, João Caraça, et  al., eds. 2017. Europe’s Crises. London: Polity Press. Çelik, Ipek A. 2015. Permanent Crisis. Ethnicity in Contemporary European Media and Cinema. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Chambers, Iain. 2008. Mediterranean Crossings. The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press. Crosthwaite, Paul, ed. 2011. Criticism, Crisis, and Contemporary Narrative: Textual Horizons in an Age of Global Risk. New York and London: Routledge. Culler, Jonathan. 2011. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dalakoglou, Dimitris, and Georgios Agelopoulos, eds. 2018. Critical Times in Greece: Anthropological Engagements with the Crisis. New York: Routledge. De Cauwer, Stijn, ed. 2018. Critical Theory at a Crossroads: Conversations on Resistance in Times of Crisis. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1967. Mystique et masochisme (Interview with Madeleine Chapsal). La quinzaine litteraire 25: 12–13. ———. 1990. The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V.  Boundas and trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press. Douzinas, Costas. 2013. Philosophy and Resistance in the Crisis. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Fenske, Uta, Walburga Hülk, and Gregor Schuhen, eds. 2013. Die Krise als Erzählung. Transdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf ein Narrativ der Moderne. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Glissant, Édouard. 1997. The Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

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Graeber, David. 2011. The Greek Debt Crisis in Almost Unimaginably Long-­ Term Historical Perspective. In Revolt and Crisis in Greece: Between a Present Yet to Pass and a Future Still to Come, ed. Antonis Vradis and Dimitris Dalakoglou, 229–243. London: AK Press/Occupied. Hamilakis, Yannis, ed. 2018. The New Nomadic Age: Archaeologies of Forced and Undocumented Migration. Sheffield and Bristol: Equinox Publishing. Herzfeld, Michael. 2005. Practical Mediterraneanism: Excuses for Everything, from Epistemology to Eating. In Rethinking the Mediterranean, ed. W.V. Harris, 45–63. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hess, Sabine, Bernd Kasparek, Stefanie Kron, et al. 2016. Der lange Sommer der Migration: Krise, Rekonstitution und ungewisse Zukunft des europäischen Grenzregimes. In Der lange Sommer der Migration: Grenzregime III, ed. Sabine Hess, Bernd Kasparek, Stefanie Kron, et al., 6–24. Hamburg: Assoziation A. Ianiciello, Celeste. 2018. Migrations, Arts and Postcoloniality in the Mediterranean. London and New York: Routledge. Knight, Daniel, and Charles Stewart. 2016. Ethnographies of Austerity: Temporality, Crisis and Affect in Southern Europe. History and Anthropology 27 (1): 1–18. Koselleck, Reinhart. 2006. Crisis. Translated by Michaela W. Richter. Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2): 357–400. Latour, Bruno. 2004. Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern. Critical Inquiry 30 (2): 225–248. de Man, Paul. 1971. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Meissner, Miriam. 2017. Narrating the Global Financial Crisis: Urban Imaginaries and the Politics of Myth. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Michael, John. 2017. Tragedy and Translation: A Future for Critique in a Secular Age. In Critique and Postcritique, ed. Elizabeth Anker and Rita Felski, 252–278. Durham: Duke University Press. Minnaard, Liesbeth, and Kea Wienand, eds. 2019, September. Positionings: Critical Responses to the ‘Refugee Crisis.’ Special issue of FKW // Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur 86. New Keywords Collective. 2016. Europe/Crisis: New Keywords of ‘the Crisis’ in and of ‘Europe.’ Coordinated and edited by Nicholas De Genova and Martina Tazzioli. Zone Books Online. Accessed August 22, 2019. http://nearfuturesonline.org/europecrisis-new-keywords-of-crisis-in-and-of-europe/. Plantzos, Dimitris. 2019. We Owe Ourselves to Debt: Classical Greece, Athens in Crisis, and the Body As Battlefield. Social Science Information 58 (3): 469–492. Rancière, Jacques. 2006. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London and New York: Continuum. Roitman, Janet. 2014. Anticrisis. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

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Smith, Daniel W. 1997. Introduction. ‘A Life of Pure Immanence’: Deleuze’s ‘Critique et Clinique’ Project. In Essays Critical and Clinical, ed. Gilles Deleuze and trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, xi–liii. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Solera, Gianluca. 2017. Citizen Activism and Mediterranean Identity: Beyond Eurocentrism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tsilimpounidi, Myrto. 2018. Sociology of Crisis: Visualising Urban Austerity. New York: Routledge. Tziovas, Dimitris, ed. 2017. Greece in Crisis: The Cultural Politics of Austerity. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Valdivia, Pablo, Lars Rensmann, Florian Lippert, Alberto Godioli, and Vera Alexander. 2019. Introduction: European Crises. Journal of European Studies 49 (3–4): 1–6. Vigh, Henrik. 2008. Crisis and Chronicity: Anthropological Perspectives on Continuous Conflict and Decline. Ethnos 73 (1): 5–24.

Open Access  This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

PART I

Critique and Crisis of Representation

Dwelling in Noncrisis (Im)possibility: Transmigrant Collective Action in Greece, 2016 Karen Emmerich

The present volume takes the oversaturation of the terrain of crisis discourse in popular and academic spheres as a starting point: the pieces it contains respond to a call to move beyond crisis as currently construed, to offer conceptual interventions, motivated historiographies of “crisis” and its cognates (including “critique”),1 or new vocabularies that might help us think differently about the political and social realities of the current moment. As Janet Roitman writes, the term “crisis” is frequently “mobilized in narrative constructions to mark out or to designate ‘moments of truth’ … when decisions are taken or events are decided, thus establishing a particular teleology” (2014, 3). Yet the term also “no longer clearly signifies a singular moment of decisive judgment … Today, crisis is posited as a protracted and potentially persistent state of ailment and demise” (16).

K. Emmerich (*) Department of Comparative Literature, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Boletsi et al. (eds.), Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36415-1_2

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“Crisis” has thus become a term that only “allegedly allow[s] one to think the ‘otherwise’” (9); in fact, it is often coopted not to enable change but rather to support a further reconsolidation of the status quo, as the putative state of emergency created by this or that threat is invoked to support the rapid expansion of state or institutional powers in non-democratic directions.2 Academic volumes such as this one are responding, then, to a perceived “crisis” in “crisis” itself, one marked among other things by the use of the term to support policies that deepen and lengthen this “state of ailment and demise.” Yet calls for urgent scholarly action to reconceptualize or reimagine “crisis” ironically continue to engage the trajectory it used to have: crisis as an exceptional moment that engenders critique, which in turn engenders radical change. How, then, are we to think beyond or outside of crisis, if even the urge to do so is often shaped by crisis-thinking? Roitman’s central project is to investigate the constitution of “crisis” as a subject of knowledge—but she also offers glimpses of another path, that of “noncrisis narration.” What kind of possibilities are generated, she asks, “by suspending crisis as the foundation of narration and critique?” (2014, 71). Rather than trying to resuscitate an earlier incarnation of “crisis” as a productive (if not always positive) formation, as the opportunity for transformation via the practice of critique, Roitman invites experiments in thinking that disrupt the teleology of “crisis”—and therefore also disrupt the notion that critique is necessary to engender an otherwise that will follow. If crisis is no longer a decisive moment, an occasion for judgment and action, if it has become a persistent historical and affective state (as operative also in Lauren Berlant’s formulation of “crisis ordinariness”; 2011, 10), the time-boundedness of the forms of narration and critique that might arise out of it can also be suspended. Which is to say that the otherwise, the beyond, the genres that reflect modes of existence concerned less with teleology than tenacity, might already be with us, in forms we simply need to learn to see. I want to draw our attention to a few minor moments in the expansive crisis-scape of the contemporary Mediterranean that help train our eyes and activity in that direction. I briefly explore two collective actions undertaken by transmigrants in northern Greece in 2016, which I see as emblematic of what I will call (after Emily Dickinson) a dwelling in (im)possibility that responds to Roitman’s invitation for a proliferation of (or attention to) forms of noncrisis narration. While these actions have the putative

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“refugee crisis” or the “crisis at Europe’s borders” as their backdrop, I follow scholars who view human mobility as an autonomous, often collective undertaking that precedes control, and tactics of bordering as reaction formations that strategically deploy rhetorics of crisis in order to reconfigure the role of the state vis-à-vis people on the move.3 I draw on Dimitris Papadopoulos and Vassilis Tsianos’ exploration of the “mobile commons”—a non-hierarchical, non-institutionalized set of behaviors by which people on the move share “knowledge and infrastructures of connectivity, affective cooperation, mutual support and care” (2013, 2)—to present examples of “migrant protest” that challenge the conventional understanding of protest as itself a reaction formation. These collaborative, creative projects both inhabit and supersede spaces of forced immobility created by European tactics of bordering; they are manifestations of the mobile commons turning outward to self-represent in times of stymied forward movement. Both of these projects fill the space of an enforced lack of activity with an acting out of the very impossibility of acting, one that mines impossibility itself according to what Arjun Appadurai might call an “ethics of possibility,” engaging ways of “thinking, feeling, and acting that increase the horizons of hope, that expand the field of the imagination, that produce greater equity in […] the capacity to aspire, and that widen the field of informed, creative, and critical citizenship” (2013, 295). My use of the term (im)possibility therefore contests the idea that there is “nothing happening” in these moments. Rather, the performance of nothing happening lays bare a “chink in the wall”4 of “crisis,” highlighting uneven patterns of access to the means by which traditional forms of narration and critique are promoted, shared, and circulated, while also reminding us of the powerful possibilities of alternate forms of narration and critique. As such, these instances of collective, largely anonymous or anonymized action may also help us reconsider our own intellectual and scholarly practices, particularly as manifested in the institutional humanities, themselves currently mired in another kind of crisis discourse. I initially experienced these actions in a context distant from academic research, and turn to them now with great ambivalence. While I do not want to instrumentalize them, or to become complicit in academic structures of knowledge extraction, I can conceive of no way of writing or talking about them that will not inevitably instrumentalize and extract; silence, meanwhile, solves one ethical problem but raises myriad others. My discomfort therefore signals a further “crisis” that accompanies this crisis in crisis discourse: the question of how to negotiate our relationship to the

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often collective, not easily attributable knowledge produced by others elsewhere, as well as the troubled gap between discourse and action in our lives as “engaged” or “activist” academics—or even as “engaged” or “activist” individuals who happen to be academics. Dwelling in shared spaces of noncrisis (im)possibility, where urgency meets daily routine, where non-teleological forms of narrative are engaged, may help us counter the instrumentalist modalities of a highly hierarchical, extraction-­ oriented, quantification-obsessed academic environment. It may help us learn not only to speak and write but to act differently, to incorporate our own intellectual practice into modes of collective thought and action already unfolding in the extra-academic realm.5 In spring 2016, I spent time near the Greek-Macedonian border, at a few of the informal refugee camps that had grown with astonishing rapidity over the previous winter as one European nation after another started closing its borders, putting an end to the “humanitarian corridor” that had been in effect since Germany temporarily suspended the Dublin Protocol by pledging to accept refugees whose first port of entry into the European Union lay elsewhere. The successive border closures, including partial closures that allowed only individuals of certain nationalities to pass, turned the fields outside the tiny village of Idomeni into a de facto temporary settlement, as upwards of 15,000 people saw their forward progress halted, yet steadfastly refused threats and entreaties to go elsewhere. Like the smaller encampments at Hara Hotel or the Eko gas station along the highway in nearby Polycastro, the fields outside of Idomeni— privately owned land in a military zone—thus became occupied space.6 The individuals camped there had already rejected countless legal restrictions regarding their movement, across and between borders; their collective intransigence in traveling to Idomeni and in refusing to leave, not to mention engaging openly in commerce and community building under the indifferent eyes of the Greek police, could be described as an act of “mass transnational civil disobedience” (New Keywords Collective 2016, 14). If the occupation of this space was already an implicitly political act, it set the stage for a series of explicitly political protests: blockades, sit-ins, hunger strikes, a deadly attempt to cross the river en masse, another to storm the fence, only to be rebuffed by tear gas and water grenades lobbed into Greek territory by the Macedonian police.7 Among these many acts of protest, another political action of a less traditionally legible sort stood out to me for the jocularity of its form: a group of men, all residing in the

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camp, wandered around with a fake video camera fashioned from a piece of log and a plastic bottle, and a microphone made from a disposable cup. They called themselves Refugees.TV, and conducted interviews with refugees, aid workers, volunteers, and even other reporters with functional microphones and cameras, who worked for a range of mainstream and independent media outlets. For several weeks in the winter and spring, Idomeni had in fact been a magnet for journalists; the bend in the road approaching the camp was lined with camera trucks, with the noise and glare of their generators and floodlights standing in stark contrast each night to the hushed darkness of the nearby clusters of tents. As the border closure persisted and Idomeni solidified into a longer-term settlement, many reporters began to move on to other emergent situations. In a video interview with Spanish Internet radio station Hala Bedi in late April, a man named Mustafa, who was for a time the group’s de facto English-­ speaking spokesman, described the origins of Refugees.TV: “The cameraman, he woke up in the morning, then he found there is no journalist, no photographer, no media in here. So then he got the idea that we going to do a fake one, and we going to turn around and do some interviews with people.”8 In another version of this story shared with Sean Cole on the radio show This American Life, Basil, the cameraman, speaking through an interpreter, described the group’s first live “broadcast”: seeing a group of kids setting fire to a tent, precisely the sort of spectacle the media might try to capture, they rushed over with their fake camera—and, catching sight of both the kids and the crew, some nearby reporters indeed came over to film them “filming.” The real reporters thus unwittingly became parodies of the media obsession with spectacle, while the kids became yet another instance of refugee hooliganry.9 Here, then, was a first instance of staged (im)possibility and its troubled reception: the non-functional camera, the hackneyed news item, the parody that seemed not to land but rather to reinforce the very stereotypes being parodied. Much could be made of the interplay—and power play— between the two cameras, the two microphones, the two sets of reporters with their differing linguistic competencies and means of accessing audiences beyond those immediately present. And of course there is a deep irony in the fact that this particular form of protest-play, the performance of a lack of control over media interest, garnered the attention of international journalists—including Cole, who “became obsessed” with Refugees. TV before visiting Greece for a segment that aired on National Public Radio in summer 2016. By the time of his visit, Idomeni and the nearby

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settlements had been forcibly dismantled by the Greek authorities, and the Refugees.TV crew was living at a military camp in Oraiokastro, on the outskirts of Thessaloniki. Basil’s wooden camera had, meanwhile, been supplemented by the donation of a small handheld camera that allowed the team to film and broadcast on its Facebook page, which at the time of this writing has over 16,000 followers. In his commentary on This American Life, Cole suggests that before the arrival of that donated camera, the crew was just “goofing around”; he implicitly posits the first moment of serious play as the one when they start recording. For me, on the contrary, it is the continued presence of the fake camera—which often appears in the frame, along with the fake microphone—that makes serious stuff of their play, highlighting as it does both the crew’s circumscribed access to mainstream media and the generic complexity of the performance they are enacting. In some sense, these acts of staged (im)possibility depend on other media for broader visibility, yet in continually gesturing to that dependence, the performance also stresses the resilient autonomy of the self-representation enabled by the small-scale, do-it-yourself operation of an unbroadcasted—or, later, social-media broadcasted— news outlet. Refugees.TV was, in other words, as dynamic as the context of its creation, functioning not only as a parodic commentary on media spectacle, but as a daily practice of resistance with both symbolic and practical effects. While the team’s mixing (in Mustafa’s words) of “comedy and reality” was usually lighthearted, the performance also pointed to bitter truths— including refugees’ lack of consistent access to means of self-­representation on a global stage, as well as what Elizabeth Cullen Dunn has described as the chaotic “adhocracy” of humanitarian aid.10 Moreover, Refugees.TV did not just report on life in the camp; the crew also staged darkly humorous prank interventions that likewise straddled the line between comedy and tragedy, parody and truth. In another interview with indy media outlet Athens Live in early May, Mustafa again speaks into the styrofoam cup, facing both the log camera and an unseen, actual camera, as a likewise unseen reporter questions him in English: Reporter: And what did you do yesterday? Mustafa: We built a United Nations office. A fake one, like, for three hours. We bring a table, then some blankets, like, to build the office, then we bring a board, a very big board, and we write, “United Nation: no help and no informations.” And we did

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like an Asylum Program for refugees who want to register. We were going to choose a country for them. The countries that we were going to choose is like Syria, Iraq, and Palestine, the war countries. Because they die here every day. But I explain to them that in Syria or Iraq or Palestine you will die very fast and in one day only. So it wouldn’t be a waste of time for you. … And a lot of people register in our office!11 For refugees wanting to move further into Europe, the ineffectiveness of the UNHCR (United Nations High Council for Refugees) vis-à-vis a range of specific demands (including some the UNCHR is not actually tasked with addressing) is all too real, as is the affective (and also strictly literal) truth of dying a little bit every day while waiting in Idomeni. The proposal of an asylum program that would take refugees directly back to the countries from which many of them have fled also gestures to the possibility of deportation and to the “coerced mobility” (New Keywords Collective 2016, 18) of relocation to military camps elsewhere in Greece, a process which had already begun; it likewise reflects the EU relocation scheme that would eventually send families and individuals to locations elsewhere in Europe over which they had almost no control. The performance is more than parody on a structural level, too: as a participatory event, the registry program at the fake UN office becomes an actual meeting point, a fleeting hub in the mobile commons where people come together not only for bitter laughs, but to form practical and affective connections that support them on their unfolding journeys. In their widely cited discussion of the mobile commons as comprising “ordinary experiences of mobility” (2013, 179) that build “an infrastructure of connectivity which is crucial to distributing these knowledges and for facilitating the circular logistics of support to stay mobile” (191), Papadopoulos and Tsianos explore the everyday, embodied politics of people on the move. Transmigrant politics, they write, “develop their own codes, their own practices, their own logics which are almost imperceptible from the perspective of existing political action, in part because we are not trained to perceive them as ‘proper’ politics and, secondly, because they create an excess that cannot be addressed in the existing system of political representation” (188). For people actively on the move, who exist outside of frameworks of national belonging, political action is everywhere and diffuse, reflecting a “politics of care” that is oriented both toward acts of “immediate justice” (including clandestine attempts to cross the

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border) and toward the creation of networks that allow transmigrants to nurture one another in the present while supporting forward movement and dispersal. The operation of the mobile commons in a place like Idomeni is thus unavoidably political, or politicized, even in the common sense, given its ultimate goal of furthering illegalized migration, and in the meantime of sustaining the likewise illegalized existence of such settlements. The mobile commons that shapes Idomeni and of which Idomeni forms a part—as a space of mundane civil disobedience—becomes almost synonymous with the intransigent performance of (im)possibility. And the fake UN office in some sense encapsulates this dynamic: the staging of a parodic space of “no help and no information” in fact creates a real space in which both help and information of a different sort can be provided, by and for a transmigrant population. Insofar as it contributes to the expansion of the mobile commons, in person and remotely through its broadcasts on social media platforms, Refugees.TV dwells in (im)possibility only to open up very real possibilities for thinking and doing otherwise. After the closure of Idomeni, Eko, and Hara—as the personal connections forged in these physical spaces were tested by the residents’ dispersal to dozens of military camps across northern Greece, and eventually to cities all over the EU—Refugees.TV maintained what might be described as an increasingly sincere presence, as a particularly visible part of the mobile commons allowing people on the move to stay informed. There were, of course, still moments of jocularity in the Refugees.TV broadcasts. In order to ease the police and military’s suspicions so as to continue filming in the military camps, they staged hammy events such as the “Refugees Got Talent” competition, which could be seen as a continuation of the serious play they had started in Idomeni (after all, in an interview from the border in late April, Mustafa had noted that they showed “all the problems [in Idomeni], we show everything in here, even the talents”12). But the majority of the broadcasts from the post-Idomeni period were informative in nature, reaching out to other refugees with Arabic-language posts while also catering to international followers, including members of the humanitarian and volunteer communities, with reporting in English. They covered the inhuman conditions in the infamous Softex camp on the outskirts of Thessaloniki; showed a baby born in the Oraiokastro camp; interviewed refugees who ran in the Thessaloniki marathon in October, 2016; filmed demonstrations in camps and in the city center; covered the final day at Oraiokastro in February, 2017; and ventured out into the streets of Thessaloniki to interview passersby about their knowledge of the

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war in Syria, with results verging on the tragically parodic in the depth of ignorance displayed. In this sense, Refugees.TV became an unironic but still self-aware source of alternative news, complete with an image stamp in Arabic and English in the upper-left corner of their videos. Yet the log camera and styrofoam microphone continued to feature in their reporting, as this increasingly bitter projection of (im)possibility suggested itself more and more forcefully as a starting point for the action Refugees.TV already helped to support and sustain. In summer 2016, while Refugees.TV was covering conditions in the military camps in the Thessaloniki region, I was in a different camp in northern Greece outside of Ioannina, volunteering with a small NGO formed on Lesvos in 2015 that subsequently expanded its operations to the mainland, following the movement patterns of the “refugee crisis” itself. Most of the camp’s residents had arrived before the closure of the informal settlements on the Macedonian border. One volunteer who had been there since the camp opened in March told me the earliest residents had voluntarily boarded buses in Idomeni, thinking they were headed to Athens, where they would be provided housing in apartments; instead, the buses took them to a disused military facility on the outskirts of the village of Katsikas, where UNHCR (United Nations High Council for Refugees) tents had been erected in a field of gravel and mud. The refugees’ initial reaction to this betrayal, I was told, was one of protest: they remained on the buses for two days, refusing to disembark—a very different form of dwelling in (im)possibility, a temporary postponement of the inevitable capitulation to this duplicitous relocation into a state-controlled space. This first moment of protest was followed by other forms of political action. Footage of camp conditions was uploaded to social media sites; protests were staged, with concrete demands for adequate food and shelter; while demonstrations in the village and in nearby Ioannina, including a days-long occupation of the village square, sought to increase the visibility of the camp and its residents. There were also daily civic actions, undertaken in collaboration with volunteer groups, that aimed to improve the camp, including the organization of a community-­led school with classes for children and adults, the building of a makeshift gym, regular community meetings, and lectures and art shows given by resident scholars and artists. And in the most visible part of the camp, in full view of the trailer at the entrance from which police and military personnel casually monitored comings and goings, stood a roughly 12-foot replica of the clock tower in Homs that was the site of a brutal massacre of dozens of unarmed

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protesters by Assad’s forces in April 2011. What has become known as the Clock Square Massacre is widely considered to be a turning point in the Syrian uprising and civil war; after that moment, what Asef Bayat has described as “non-movements” that “were sustained and nurtured silently through the everyday and seemingly non-political experiences and actions of people” gave rise to organized political resistance.13 The replica in Katsikas was built of plywood and painted white and black to resemble the symbol of resistance, perseverance, and witness on which it was modeled. A sign at its base read, in English, “19.03.2016, 23:15 Life stopped when we entered Katsikas camp”; the clock hands perpetually showed the hour of night when the first arrivals stepped down off the buses and entered the camp. Amid the busy daily activity of caring for selves and others in the extremely adverse conditions of the Katsikas camp, of building a community while hoping that the structures supporting it would soon be left behind, the clock stood as a symbolic gesture to the foreclosure of forward movement, temporal or geographic. It stood, too, as a gesture to a specific genealogy of protest, to the violent failure of protest, and to still more protest in the face of failure. In Katsikas as in Idomeni, the staging of failed action also opened up a space for other kinds of action, performing impossibility (“life stopped”) while also subverting it by means of the performance itself, as individuals came together to design, build, and erect the tower, with the limited resources available in the camp. This performance was, moreover, both inward- and outward-facing: while the simulacrum of the clock was most readily recognizable to the camp’s Syrian residents, the English-language sign was obviously intended for others to read. And, just like the fake UN office, the base of the clock tower provided a meeting place that negated even the division between inside(r) and out(sider), offering itself to anyone who chose to come and sit. As Natasha King writes in No Borders, the mobile commons is not an exclusive domain but is rather “accessible to anyone by virtue of their participation” (2016, 35), including non-migrants seeking to support people on the move; Papadopoulos and Tsianos likewise note the centrality of alliances with local governments, NGOs, and so on (2013, 191). The “anarchical humanitarianism”14 that developed throughout Greece in 2015–2016 (and in fact long before) is another such extension of the mobile commons. These practices of solidarity on the ground also offer potential models for other, less direct forms of engagement in the service of human mobility, including the academic advocacy projects of the scholars I have been citing. Yet if the outward-facing address of the

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Katsikas clock tower, or of Refugees.TV, invites a response of solidarity and support, it is not entirely obvious how the academic or scholarly sphere can best take up that invitation. How to speak of the struggles of mobility without falling into a form of intellectual resource extraction, by which the collective actions of others are used to further certain forms of knowledge production, and also indirectly to further one’s career as a researcher, without benefiting those others in any tangible way?15 I have already noted my own hesitation to invoke a mode of “having been there” in my discussions of Refugees.TV and the clock in Katsikas. And I am cognizant of critiques such as that of Carastathis and Tsilimpounidi—who, writing from within an emergent situation of critical need and anarchical humanitarianism, are critical of the way rhetorics of crisis have been invoked not only to validate regimes of border security but to further a “veritable cottage industry” (2018, 15) of academic engagements with both the “refugee crisis” and the “sovereign debt crisis” in Greece. In a text that responds directly to the formality, procedure, and exclusivity of academic convention, Carastathis and Tsilimpounidi suggest that “develop[ing] productive academic responses to the era of austerity, crisis, racism, and precarity … demands an undoing of boundaries that discipline us, disaffiliating from institutions that colonise our common sense, shifting our allegiances, and configuring relations of solidarity on different terms than those dictated by the nation-state system and its hegemonic institutions, among which is the university” (2018, 5).16 If expressions of solidarity often come across as solidarity with—solidarity, that is, from above, from a position of relative comfort—Carastathis and Tsilimpounidi insist on solidarity among, which may necessitate a deliberate distancing from institutional structures that discipline and extract, and therefore a form of self-precarizaation that admittedly few may be able or willing to risk. By the same token, this dwelling on impossibility—speaking (like Refugees.TV) about the ethical complications of speaking, yet (unlike Refugees.TV) from a position of privileged rather than circumscribed access to means of message-dissemination—is also disconcerting: scholarly gestures to the troubled nature of our role vis-à-vis our “material” perform an urgency to which their continual repetition gives the lie. What if, instead, we were to cultivate active commitments to dwelling in uncomfortable spaces of (im)possibility, becoming more practically and politically engaged with the objects of our investigation, and brainstorming real ways of bringing institutional power to bear of questions of justice and mobility?

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Papadopoulos and Tsianos express a desire for their scholarship to contribute “to creating conditions of thick everyday performative and practical justice so that everyday mobility, clandestine or open, becomes possible” (2013, 192); the New Keywords Collective similarly insists that scholars of migration seize every possible “opportunity for re-thinking and re-inventing border struggles toward the ends of reinforcing and enhancing the elementary human freedom of movement” (2016, 21). These activist researchers aspire to function, we might say, as a further extension of the mobile commons, offering a form of specialized labor that at least indirectly impacts possibilities for human mobility. In this light, certain forms of migration research can be seen less as extractive than as participating in collaborative processes of knowledge production that, while common in activist circles, are in fact discouraged by current modes of academic valuation, since their intellectual products are not easy to attribute to any one individual. In No Borders, which arises out of a long-term engagement as both scholar and activist in the no borders movement in Calais and Athens, King takes care to describe the thinking her book represents as arising not only from standard forms of research, but also from her own lived experience as well as that of countless individuals in her activist communities. This is, of course, always the case with scholarly research: academic conventions of citation leave out far more than they include. Which is to say, if the university’s hierarchical, non-­ democratic structures currently invite an instrumentalisation of thought, feeling, and human relationships that seems at odds with the information sharing and politics of care that characterize the mobile commons, perhaps the forms of collective, collaborative action I have described above might serve as models for a revision of the terms by which academic labor is recognized, assessed, and evaluated. The mobile commons—a theoretically ever-expanding “realm of use” that “exists only through the interrelationship and collaboration of people” (King 2016, 38)—could, I suggest, become a potential site as well as model for work that straddles the scholarly and the non-scholarly worlds. As a social space that we too can help build, it offers models of non-­ hierarchical, unattributable thought and action that might open a chink in the wall of academic practice, ushering in other forms of narration and engagement, other genres of work. In the specific context of crisis-­thinking and crisis-writing, the mobile commons—as exemplified, perhaps surprisingly, by the instances of creative transmigrant collective action described above—is emblematic of an alternate discourse that seems to me to offer

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forms of noncrisis narration, through which we might tell stories of the present, of the everyday, that seek to critique and foment change without invoking rhetorics of crisis. If we as scholars are invested in breaking what Roitman calls the “epistemological impasse” of crisis discourse, it may simply not be enough to stage a crisis in the discourse such that other ways of imagining and responding might emerge. Rather, our discursive moves, too, must be accompanied by a move beyond discourse, into what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call the “beyond” of the university as currently configured, where Papadopoulos and Tsianos’ “everyday performative and practical justice” is sought, contested, enacted. In turn, that move into the beyond might offer ways of seeking justice that find their way back from the beyond, rewriting discourse by rewriting action.

Notes 1. See Roitman pages 22–23 and 35–36 on the relationship between “crisis” and “critique.” 2. As the New Keywords Collective writes, “Labeling a complex situation (such as that of the contemporary dynamics of mass migration and refugee movements) as a “crisis” and therefore as “exceptional” tends to conceal the violence and permanent exception that are the norm under global capitalism and our global geo-politics, and may serve to perpetuate the conditions that have led to the purported “emergency” in the first place. … Indeed, the proclamation of “crisis” consequently serves the ends of particular forms of governmental intervention, usually through the deployment of authoritarian measures: a situation of “crisis,” after all, appears to demand immediate responses that cannot afford the more prolonged temporalities of democratic debate and deliberative processes, or so we are told” (2016, 11). See also De Genova 2017 on the strategic state and EU deployment of “crisis” to manage human mobility in the Mediterranean, and Douzinas 2013 on the ways “cynical capitalism” and cynical neoliberal governance have used the evocation of crisis to extend the reach of their own power; his elaboration (after Peter Sloterdjik) of a “kynical” response of playful protest resonates with the first of my examples of transmigrant protest below. 3. See Mitropoulos 2007, Livi-Bacci 2012, Ataç et  al. 2016, De Genova 2017, and Skleparis 2017 for indicative work. 4. I borrow this phrase from Papadopoulos and Tsianos, who borrow it in turn from Peter Linebaugh, in their effort “to cultivate an imaginary and a practical sensibility to what lies after citizenship” (2013, 179) via their exploration of the mobile commons.

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5. There are striking parallels between Papadopoulos and Tsianos’ work on the mobile commons and Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s discussion of the “prophetic organization of the undercommons” (28) in the university’s “beyond,” where critique is supplanted by study. Among other similarities, the language of physical movement—“exile,” “refuge,” “refugee,” “asylum,” “border,” “beyond”—permeates Harney and Moten’s discussion of the undercommons and the university. Care should be taken not to romanticize either the undercommons or the mobile commons, and I try to walk that fine line when I return more explicitly to these concepts at the end of the paper. 6. To my knowledge, no one has yet written of spaces like Idomeni in the context of the Occupy movement; in the Greek context specifically, the settlement in Idomeni could be placed alongside occupations of public space in the period of austerity, including the occupation of Syntagma Square in Athens in 2012. Idomeni had, of course, been a crossing spot for much longer; see Anastasiadou et al. 2018 for a summary account of this history. See also Thornhill 2018 for a sketch of her time as a volunteer at Hara Hotel, working out of the Park Hotel in Polycastro, which served as a base of operations for many small NGOs and independent volunteers active in the region in winter and spring of 2015–2016. 7. Of this last occurrence, on April 10, 2016, Marianna Karakoulaki, one of Greece’s leading journalists of the “refugee crisis,” writes that “The lengths that states go to in order to protect their borders in peaceful times became even more evident to me that day” (2018, 82). Karakoulaki’s account of her involvement as a reporter is unusual in that she abandons the problematic premise of journalistic objectivity for an explicit defense of a “no borders” perspective; it might be a model for a form of engaged scholarship that likewise refuses the premise of political neutrality. 8. Transcribed from “Refugees.tv interviewed in Idomeni by Hala Bedi Irratia.” 9. “Smile, You’re on Handmade Camera” first aired on This American Life on August 5, 2016. 10. See Dunn 2012, 2 and throughout. 11. Transcribed from “Refugees.TV at Idomeni.” 12. Transcribed from “Refugees.tv interviewed in Idomeni by Hala Bedi Irratia”. 13. Quoted in Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013, 188. 14. I borrow this phrase from Anastasiadou et al. 2018, 8. 15. See Papataxiarchis 2016a and b on the “symbolic hierarchies” of “being there” on the “front line” of the “refugee crisis”; see also Andersson 2014 (particularly Chap. 1) on the problematic relationship between ethno-

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graphic research, academic advancement, and complicity in structures of knowledge extraction. 16. There are echoes, here, of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s intellectual “undercommons,” which sees the university as “always a state/State ­strategy” (2013, 32), and rejects the idea that it is possible “to embark on critical projects within its terrain, projects that would turn its competencies to more radical ends” (34). The undercommons, they write, is both wary and weary of critique, tries to escape from its “degradation as university-­ consciousness” by “retreating … into the external world” (38).

Works Cited Anastasiadou, Marianthi, Athanasios Marvakis, Panagiota Mezidou, and Marc Speer. 2018. From Transit Hub to Dead End: A Chronicle of Idomeni. München: Bordermonitoring.eu e.V. Andersson, Ruben. 2014. Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 2013. The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. London and New York: Verso. Ataç, Ilker, Kim Rygiel, and Maurice Stierl. 2016. Introduction: The Contentious Politics of Refugee and Migrant Protest and Solidarity Movements: Remaking Citizenship from the Margins. Citizenship Studies 20 (5): 527–544. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press. Carastathis, Anna, and Myrto Tsilimpounidi. 2018. Experts, Refugees, and Radicals: Borders and Orders in the Hotspot of Crisis. Theory in Action 11 (4): 1–21. De Genova, Nicholas. 2017. Introduction: The Borders of ‘Europe’ and the European Question. In The Borders of ‘Europe’: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering, ed. Nicholas De Genova, 1–35. Durham: Duke University Press. Douzinas, Costas. 2013. Philosophy and Resistance in the Crisis: Greece and the Future of Europe. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Dunn, Elizabeth Cullen. 2012. The Chaos of Humanitarian Aid: Adhocracy in the Republic of Georgia. Humanity: An international Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 3 (1): 1–23. Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Wivenhoe; New York; Port Watson: Minor Compositions. Karakoulaki, Marianna. 2018. Europe’s Barbwire Fences: Reflections on Reporting the Refugee Crisis in Greece. In Critical Perspectives on Migration in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Marianna Kakakoulaki, Laura Southgate, and Jakob Steiner, 74–90. Bristol: E-International Relations.

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King, Natasha. 2016. No Borders: The Politics of Immigration Control and Resistance. London: Zed Books. Livi-Bacci, Massimo. 2012. A Short History of Migration, translated by Carl Ipsen. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Mitropoulos, Angela. 2007. Autonomy, Recognition, Movement. In Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization, eds. Stevphen Shukaitis and David Graeber with Erika Biddle, 127–136. Oakland: AK Press. New Keywords Collective. 2016. Europe/Crisis: New Keywords of ‘the Crisis’ in and of ‘Europe,’ coordinated and edited by Nicholas De Genova and Martina Tazzioli. Zone Books Online. Papadopoulos, Dimitris, and Vassilis S. Tsianos. 2013. After Citizenship: Autonomy of Migration, Organisational Ontology and Mobile Commons. Citizenship Studies 17 (2): 178–196. Papataxiarchis, Evthymios. 2016a. Being ‘There’ at the Front Line of the Refugee Crisis, Part 1. Anthropology Today 32 (2): 5–9. ———. 2016b. Being ‘There’ at the Front Line of the Refugee Crisis, Part 2. Anthropology Today 32 (3): 3–7. Refugees.TV at Idomeni. 2016. YouTube, May 9. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=zR67miUh3KY. Accessed 25 August 2019. Refugees.tv interviewed in Idomeni by Hala Bedi Irratia. 2016. YouTube, April 26. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX_lOR_rfnw&t=28s. Accessed 25 August 2019. Roitman, Janet. 2014. Anti-Crisis. Durham: Duke University Press. Skleparis, Dimitris. 2017. The Politics of Migrant Resistance amid the Greek Economic Crisis. International Political Sociology 11: 113–129. Smile, You’re on Handmade Camera. 2016. This American Life, August 5. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/593/dont-have-to-live-like-a-refugee/actfive-1. Accessed 25 August 2019. Thornhill, Teresa. 2018. Hara Hotel: A Tale of Syrian Refugees in Greece. Brooklyn, NY: Verso.

In the Refugee Machine: The Absence of Crisis and Its Critical (Re-)Production Janna Houwen

Who or what is designated as being in crisis by the notion of the “refugee crisis”? Ubiquitously employed today in European journalistic discourses as well as political rhetoric, the phrase does not refer to the catastrophes experienced by migrants crossing the Mediterranean area in order to reach “Fortress Europe.” Rather, in contemporary European contexts, the collocation refers to the European refugee crisis; Europe’s crisis, indicating that the Fortress itself is in trouble. It is brought into a difficult and dangerous state by refugees1 whose physical presence and transgressive mobility delivers crisis to Europe, whenever and wherever it is violated or penetrated by foreign bodies appearing in the Mediterranean Sea or on land (New Keywords Collective 2016, 20). While the refugees on Europe’s Mediterranean borders might not be denoted as “being in crisis” by the notion of the refugee crisis, crisis can be said to be inscribed in them by

J. Houwen (*) Department of Film and Literary Studies, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Boletsi et al. (eds.), Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36415-1_3

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the term in question. For, as the authors of the New Keywords Collective point out, the term “refugee crisis” tends to relocate “crisis” in the body and person of the figurative migrant/refugee, “as if s/he is the carrier of a disease called ‘crisis,’ and thus carries the contagion of ‘crisis’ wherever s/ he may go” (20). Enforced by visual and textual tropes that present groups of refugees as “swarms,” “invasions” or even “infestations,” today’s conventional meaning of the phrase “refugee crisis” clearly goes back to medical roots of the term “crisis” itself. However, whereas in the medical meaning of the word in ancient Greek crisis referred to a transitional phase in which an illness will evolve for better or for worse (leading either to the recovery or death of a patient),2 the present understanding of Europe’s “refugee crisis” seems to liken crisis to an enduring chronic illness, suggesting that an inescapable, yet natural process is weakening Europe without an end in sight. This “thoroughly corrupt conceptualization,” Joseph Vogl says, “ignores that migration is an essentially constructed phenomenon—not just in every individual instance, but also in general” (2018, 64).3 What is more, the connotations of (chronic) illness and malady that are signaled by the term “refugee crisis” do not only ignore the constructedness of migration, they also produce a construction that highly affects migration through the Mediterranean area to Europe. For, as a rhetorical tool, the metaphor of chronic illness impels the creation of a substantial lenitive remedy, which has now taken the form of a well-wrought system of European border patrol. As the authors of New Keywords Collective put it, “this ‘crisis’ … is really a moment of governmental impasse that is being mobilized and strategically deployed for the configuration of tactics and techniques of border policing” (2016, 21). As the notion of crisis-as-disease buttresses attempts at ensuring state power over transnational human mobility, it can be said to sustain a well-oiled machine at the Mediterranean borders of Europe, where a military-industrial-­surveillance complex is at work in a smooth manner, devoid of the impending instability, malady, and uncertainty the “refugee crisis” has come to connote. In order to gain an understanding of this well-oiled machine and to address the specificity of this contemporary construction that controls migration across the Mediterranean, I make a case for “machine analysis” in this chapter. Based on Maurizio Lazzarato’s understanding of machinic systems, the concept of the machine denotes an apparatus that does not depend on techne per se. Machinic systems can be technological, but also political, economic, social, or all of these at once.4 Drawing from theories

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by Karl Marx, Gilles Deleuze and, most of all, Félix Guattari, Lazzarato defines the machine as a series of intertwined devices; an assemblage of multiplicities that work together as parts in a machine. Public institutions, factories, and the media, can for instance all be understood as (non-­ metaphorical) machines because they assemble people, procedures, semiotics, techniques, rules, and so on. Together, discursive and non-discursive, semiotic and material components make up a whole that surpasses them (Lazzarato 2014, 82). The political and analytical importance of Lazzarato’s machine theory lies in his emphasis on the ways in which contemporary machines have the power to create and dismantle subjectivities. Machine analysis therefore enables an examination of the production as well as the fragmentation and repression of subjectivities in Mediterranean border areas. What is more, machine analysis can introduce meanings of the word “crisis” that are hitherto repressed in understandings of the term “refugee crisis,” namely the meanings of “choice” “decision,” and “judgment” that spring from the classical political, judicial, and theological roots of the word. As I will demonstrate, “crisis” as a concept can potentially denote forms of freedom and resistance when it is tied to its classical meanings in the context of the European “refugee crisis.”5 Lazzarato’s understanding of the machine points to the opposite of freedom: a machinic system holds everyone and everything in its enslaving clutches. However, in order to find potential moments of resistance within the system, and instances of protest to its clutches, the enslaving system of control that is supposed to manage the so-called refugee crisis must first of all be analyzed and understood as a “refugee machine” that is not in crisis (in the sense of illness or instability) at all. Only after uncovering the logic of the machine, I argue, will it be possible to look for potential instances of crisis (in the sense of choice) in or against the refugee machine. After a discussion of Lazzarato’s philosophy of machinic assemblages, I will study the military-industrial-­ surveillance complex at Europe’s Mediterranean borders as a “refugee machine” by turning to a documentary film that unravels this machine through cinematic and videomatic means: Flow Mechanics (2016) by Nathalie Loubeyre.6,7

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Signs and Machines According to Lazzarato, one of the main shortcomings of contemporary political theory is that it can only envisage resistance and emancipation in a logocentric way; as something that is created with language by subjects who are themselves a product of language.8 Unlike scholars following the “linguistic turn” in analytical philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Lazzarato does not understand subjectivity as a merely discursive construct that is the result of signifying operations. Following Guattari, he believes that subjectivity has a non-discursive, asignifying, unnamable core that is existential, pathic, and affective prior to being (or becoming) linguistic or cognitive. In a pre-personal and pre-linguistic phase, human beings can already experience an emergent self through affects, intensities, and ways of feeling, even though there is not yet a division between subject and object. According to Lazzarato, this pre-personal, pre-individual core remains active and mutable in later stages of subject formation. A consequence of this understanding of subjectivity is the notion that the production, mutation, or adaptation of (political) subjectivity are not necessarily discursive processes. For Lazzarato, this realization is of essential importance. Without discarding the role of language in subjectivation processes entirely, he urges political theorists to pay more attention to the non-discursive aspects of subjectivity: our present circumstances cannot be understood or critiqued without it. Lazzarato claims that, under the conditions of global capitalism and in our increasingly technology- and media-­ saturated time, we have entered a machine-centric world in which the production of subjectivity takes place at the intersection of two modalities.9 On the one hand, people are controlled and assigned to specific subject positions by way of discourse; a process Lazzarato labels social subjection. “We are subjected to machines,” he writes, “when we, constituted as its users, are defined purely by the actions that the use of the machine demands” (2006a). Even though we may feel alienated from these allocated roles, we cannot escape from being turned into individual subjects via categories such as identity, sex, profession, and nationality. On the other hand, people are taken over “from the inside” as affects and sensations of what Lazarrato calls subjectivities’ “pre-personal core” are captured by machines (Lazzarato 2014, 38). Lazzarato labels this process of taking over from the inside enslavement. We are enslaved to a machine when we are turned into “a cog in the wheels, one of the constituent parts enabling the machine to function” (38). As opposed to the

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process of social subjection, the mechanisms of machinic enslavement are not aimed at subject constitution but rather dismantle and fragment the individual. Pre-subjective elements of human beings such as affects, emotions, perceptions, sensations, rhythms, and non-verbal bodily movements, function as parts of the machine, but without a singular subject as referent. Machinic enslavement does not bother with subject/object, words/things, nature/culture dualisms, and disregards distinctions between human and non-human operators (Lazzarato 2014, 26). On the level of machinic enslavement, fragmented human beings are not persons, but recurrent and interchangeable parts of a process.10 As an example of a machine that both subjects and enslaves its users, Lazzarato mentions the television. A television is a technological, but also an ideological and social machine that subjects its users by producing specific subject positions through enunciation (such as viewer/listener or represented/speaking subject). At the same time, the enunciated subjects of the television are enslaved by the machine, because they become part of it by receiving and producing input and output, thus facilitating the transmission of information. The television machine works, for instance, on behalf of users operating the remote control; their choices are collected as data that influence programming. The affects, emotions, perceptions, and physical actions of viewers as well as of guests or hosts on screen are sent out and fed back into the machine in a loop that makes the machine run. On this level of machinic enslavement, viewers are sets of multiple elements that become part of the television network. Their affects, emotions, desires, or simply their hands pressing the remote control do not need a single subject as referent in order to function as cogs in the machine (Houwen 2019, 74–76). Whereas subjection takes place in “the register of ‘representation’ and ‘signification’ or ‘production of meaning,’ both of which are organized by signifying semiotics (language) with the purpose of producing the ‘subject,’ the ‘individual,’ the ‘I’” (2006b, n.pag.), the process of machinic enslavement depends on a register organized by a-signifying semiotics that tune in directly to the body by means of a-signifying signs. Even though a-signifying signs remain more or less dependent on signifying semiotics, “at the level of their intrinsic functions they circumvent language and dominant social significations” (Lazzarato 2014, 40).11 As “power signs” they make things happen, they produce changes by engaging material flows (of goods or bodies, for instance). They have a direct, unmediated impact on the real without being routed through signification and

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representation. For instance, the bar code on a parking ticket opens the garage’s lever, computer languages command technological machines in a factory to carry out certain tasks, and a magnetically loaded strip allows you to travel by train in some countries (Houwen 2019, 76). While these a-signifying “power signs” can bring an additional symbolic or signifying effect into play, a-signifying signs are in the first place operational rather than representational. They produce direct material consequences, while bypassing signification (Lazzarato 2014, 85).

Images of Subjection In Flow Mechanics, the conjoined regimes of subjection and enslavement are mapped out by way of images. Loubeyre’s film functions predominantly as what Bill Nichols (2001) would call a documentary in the “observational mode.” An unobtrusive camera records the activities of people in several South European countries as well as in the Mediterranean Sea adjacent to them. Starting in Croatia, Loubeyre’s film first depicts the daily activities of a small team of Croatian border policemen. While sitting in strategically placed watchtowers or in cars patrolling inland roads and deserted buildings, they look out for signs of refugees attempting to cross Croatia in order to reach Northern Europe. Their objects of surveillance appear on video monitors during refugees’ nightly attempts at crossing natural and constructed borders (e.g., rivers, fences, and gates).12 In subsequent scenes, Flow Mechanics moves from Croatia to Greece and Italy, all the while tracing border areas in indistinguishable places across Europe’s Mediterranean South. The “foreign bodies” behind the miles and miles of fences and gates depicted in Flow Mechanics are not only regulated by border police officials, but also by military soldiers and Frontex officers,13 who are in turn aided by concerned citizens (on the look-out for strangers entering their villages), watchdogs and a wide array of surveillance technologies, all of which form part of a machinic assemblage. Other identities have a place in this machine as well. A doctor, for instance, treats ill refugees in a detention center; a priest buries their corpses. These two men are linked to economic components of the refugee machine (e.g., who pays for the medicines or coffins?), as well as to social ones (e.g., locals not accepting dead strangers in their cemeteries). Within this machinic assemblage of interrelated social, political, geographical, architectural, and technological components that becomes

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visible in the movie, a process of social subjection can be recognized. All represented persons have clear cut roles; they are defined by the actions expected of them within the machinic assemblage. What is more, the identity of the involved individuals is shown to be largely discursive; identities are formed by the words with which the people in the movie talk about themselves and others, illustrating Lazzarato’s claim that mechanisms of subjection depend on signifying semiotics (language). In Flow Mechanics, policemen, for instance, talk about themselves as “protectors” and about refugees as “strangers.” A helping doctor, on the other hand, speaks about refugees as patients in dire need of care. Such utterances by European law enforcers and aid workers produce binary schemes in which the identity of refugees is very much defined along the axes of active threat (to be averted) and/or passive victim (to be helped). Yet, without denying their suffering or criminalization, refugees in Flow Mechanics do not speak about themselves as mere objects of care or control. For example, by discussing ways to make money, difficulties in border crossing, or successful attempts of others moving North, small communities of (mostly male) refugees appear as actors in larger economic and social migratory networks. However, even though the refugees in Flow Mechanics are shown to defy surveillance systems (for instance, by hiding under lorries or climbing a ferry’s anchor) and form social networks that resist passive victimhood, their networked agency cannot be understood as a “counter-machine” that functions in opposition to, or distinct from, the EU military-industrial-­ surveillance complex. With Lazzarato’s definition of the machine as an assemblage of heterogeneous components in mind, the refugees’ actions and organizations cannot be seen as distinct from the push and pull with EU authorities, aid workers, and journalists (including their technological, medical, and discursive tools). All are “plugged into” the same refugee machine. In Flow Mechanics, the autonomy of migration14 is denied by way of cinematic devices: the movie makes a spatial and temporal interrelation between refugee “strangers” and European “protectors” apparent by way of cuts. Cross-cuts between border officials and refugees draw a parallel between the two groups, especially when the cross-cuts are match-cuts. For example, a shot of a male refugee walking toward the camera through the snow with a bag in his right hand is cross-cut with a matching image of a Frontex officer scouring a similar white landscape, holding the leash of a watchdog in his right hand. Because of the similarity between the mise-en-scène of the two men within subsequent shots, it is unclear if the

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officer is following the refugee, or the other way around. Even though they are visually distinguishable, the two men seem to be walking the same route at the same pace, yet in a temporally unreconstructable order. This way, the film makes clear that the two men are involved in interrelated actions that form each other’s cause and effect. The men are different and oppositional, yet closely related, parts in the same machine in which refugees respond to border surveillance and border technologies are tethered to refugees’ strategies, in an ongoing process that subjects all people involved.15

Bodies to Bits: Machinic Enslavement In addition to the process of social subjection, Flow Mechanics demonstrates how the refugee machine enslaves its “users.” Within the regime of enslavement, opposing or different people, such as refugees and Frontex officers, become equivalent cogs in a wheel, so to speak. The filmic depiction of the loss of binary oppositions such as hunter–hunted, citizen– stranger, lawful–illegal and human–non-human illustrates Lazzarato’s claim that machinic enslavement does not bother with dualisms, and disregards distinctions between human and non-human operators. In Flow Mechanics, the obliteration of dualisms can be seen in the functioning of video surveillance technologies. Thermal video cameras that trace down refugees in the dark are unable to distinguish between animals and human beings: groups of people crossing the land and flocks of birds crossing the sky are both measured by the camera as objects with higher temperatures than the surroundings. As such, both humans and animals appear on the video monitor as similar abstract white figures, captured within the square corners of the camera’s viewfinder. Furthermore, not only animals and humans are shown as similar pieces of data, also video cameras and policemen appear as equivalent actors in surveillance practices. Shots of policemen scanning the land from their watchtower are matched by shots from high-angled video cameras doing the same. The abstract representations such as the ones produced by thermal cameras can be seen in light of Lazzarato’s definition of a-signifying signs: they are not so much (or not in the first place) signs that produce meaning, but rather signs that intervene in reality in a direct manner. White figures of a certain size on the video screen function first and foremost place as a command. Like a bar code opening a lever or computer language directing a factory’s production process, the video measurements

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tell police officers (enslaved as cogs in the wheel) to go to the border area the camera is filming and halt moving bodies there. The fact that the white marks possibly produce a number of additional meanings (e.g., humans, refugees, threats, and ghostlike figures) does not obliterate the fact that their functioning as command, as a “go,” in the refugee machine does not depend on signification. In Flow Mechanics, the video cameras that form a recurrent theme in the film are shown to be aided by a wide array of other instruments, such as CO2 detectors, radars, sensors, scanners, and computer programs—all of which produce abstract a-signifying signs. “In this tele-techno-mediated surveillance context,” Joseph Pugliese writes, “refugees, asylum seekers and irregular migrants are seen as mere radar blimps, infrared blobs and anonymous numbers” (2013, 577). The presence of refugees is measured, and when they are captured, they are processed as pieces of data by computers. Refugees’ bodies are scanned and photographed, their data subsequently put in graphic forms and stored in computers connected to EURODAC’s central database. Pugliese has aptly termed this database an anatomizing archive “of biometric-templates-as-‘body-bits’” (587). I deploy the term ‘bits’ in both its in-silico, digitised sense and its metaphorical meaning of segmenting and anatomising the body of the biometrically scanned subject. This statist archiving of biometric ‘body bits’ fundamentally functions to dislocate the subject from their body, and through processes of networked classification and dissemination, precludes them from … agentic governance over their own biodata. (587)

The graphs, templates and diagrams that form and organize these bodybits function as a-signifying “power signs,” because even though the dissection of bodies is only metaphorical, the effect of the data-packets is quite real. Like a barcode opening a lever, data packets in EURODAC’s database preclude and allow bodies to cross borders.16 Flow Mechanics furthermore emphasizes the fragmentation of the individual and the lack of a stable, present, coherent “I” on the refugee machine’s enslaving level by combining shots of data units (scans, CO2 graphs, etc.) with images of lost pieces of clothing left behind by refugees on the run, as well as with auditory fragments about the amputation of frozen limbs and the collection of body parts on Mediterranean soil. Hence, together with their subjectivities, the bodies of refugees are shown to fall apart. In fact, in Flow Mechanics the latter can be read as a result of

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the former. Visual and auditory representations of body collection follow on images of data collection. As such, Flow Mechanics demonstrates how this machinic system of surveilling, marking, and controlling, based on a processual, a-signifying logic, leads to bodily disintegration, and death.17 This lethal outcome can be attributed to the absence of crisis in the machine. That is to say, the absence of crisis as a critical moment of judgment. As Pugliese points out, the regime of border surveillance is strategically selective in who or what it deems worthy: “the surveilling agents of the state choose who will live and who will be, in Foucauldian terms, ‘let to die’” (2013, 582). However, importantly, this choice is almost mechanical and thus not necessarily a matter of judgment. At least, if we follow Hannah Arendt’s study of the phenomenon of judgment (1992). In her reading of Immanuel Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment, Arendt argues that judgment is never simply a mechanical application of a rule. By judging—which involves judging the judgments of who we put on trial—we create a common world: we relate to others who are “like us” (72). As Yasco Horsman demonstrates in his discussion of Arendt’s study, Arendt holds judgment as fundamentally human because we judge someone else’s judgments and decisions by placing ourselves in their situation, by projecting ourselves into that person (Horsman 2018, 143). Flow Mechanics reveals how, through the process of machinic enslavement, border officials in the refugee machine cannot judge for themselves. Only one Croatian border policeman in the first scene shows some capacity to relate to the “others” he is chasing by saying “these people are just running from the war.” Through references to the Yugoslavian war and Croatia’s entry to the EU in 2013, Loubeyre’s movie points out why this police officer is not condemning the decisions of the outsiders who want to come in: he was once in the same position. However, the police officer in question does not execute this personal judgment; as he explains: “we just do our jobs.” As Flow Mechanics proceeds, border agents are shown to do their jobs without any of the insights expressed by the Croatian policeman. Subjection to the machine (“we just do our jobs”) goes hand in hand with enslavement to the machine, leading to a regime in which persons, human beings, and individuals no longer exist. As Flow Mechanics maps out the military-industrial-surveillance complex piece by piece, the choices made by border agents become harsher throughout the film, ending with life-or-death decisions near the end of the movie. In brief but harrowing stories, survivors of so-called left-to-die-boats tell how they were “dehumanized” by coast guards sending boats in need away in the

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wrong direction, how police helicopters left sinking boats alone, or how military patrollers on rescue boats pushed parents with children back into the ocean, or threw people on deck by their hair like animals.18 Through its carefully ordered structure, Flow Mechanics represents the inhumane treatment of refugees as a continuation of dominant surveillance technologies and their related a-signifying semiotics that turn people into non-human blobs, objects in a viewfinder, lines and numbers to be crushed by algorithms, or into hands operating surveillance tools, bodies following commands, minds enslaved to orders. Border agents cannot place themselves in the position of the persons they catch in order to judge their decision to take flight across the Mediterranean, because the a-­signifying signs that dominate the military-industrial-surveillance complex of which border officials are a part do not represent refugees as persons, but as objects of a command. Moreover, enslaved by the machine, the border officers lack personhood themselves. Intertwined with the a-signifying, processual and numerical logic of surveillance technologies, they steer and control border management in a robotic, inhuman fashion—like cogs in a wheel, Lazzarato would say. Therefore, their choices between life and death are not judgments made by a person on another person, nor choices made by a person; they are machinic executions.

Crisis Against the Machine Flow Mechanics paints a bleak picture when it comes to resistance to what I have termed the refugee machine. In itself, this picture can be understood as a form of critique. Notably, some of the refugees in the movie engage together in critical analyses of the system they are part of as well. In group conversations, for instance, they discuss how their reasons for taking flight are caused in part by economic, military, and political interventions of Northern countries that now refuse to let them in. It is important that these reflections, which require some form of critical distance from a seemingly all-encompassing machinic system, take place in two clandestine communities formed by refugees at the Mediterranean edges of Europe in unrecognizable cities. In deserted buildings, groups of men have made a place together, where they live “f the grid,” out of sight, in fairly self-sustaining ways. In-between leaving their home countries and new attempts at border crossing, these men stay put in small social networks where everyone has a role.

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As invisible subjects in liminal places, the refugees in question still do not acquire the political agency they also lacked when they functioned as actors (or objects, or cogs) within the refugee machine. Nevertheless, the fact that they are—for a while—retracting from the ongoing push and pull between border crossers and border patrollers in the refugee machine, can be understood as a small act of resistance. The refugees’ inaction vis-a-vis the machine is not to be mistaken for a form of paralysis that chimes with the contemporary connotation of crisis as an ongoing, permanent situation, for the activities of placemaking the refugee communities in Flow Mechanics are engaged in suggest that they are willfully staying put, albeit temporarily. Rather than being decapacitated and frozen by crisis as an endless situation without any resolution in sight, these refugees are making crisis in the concept’s senses of decision and choice. A choice against the “refugee machine,” that is, yet one that is not made from a position of complete independence from that machine. Comparable to Saskia Sassen’s conceptualization of alternative digital social networks as counter-geographies that are deeply imbricated with some of the major dynamics constitutive of globalization yet are not part of the formal apparatus or objectives of this apparatus (Sassen 2002, 380), these communities of refugees exist in relation to the machinic system of border control, in its recesses so to speak, yet they defer their participation in it. The process of the machine, referred to as a mechanical flow in the film’s title, is temporarily rejected. However, Flow Mechanics does not only show inconspicuous forms of rejection by pointing the camera at small alternative communities; it also performs a rejection of the refugee machine. This rejection cannot be understood separately from the problematic position of the movie vis-à-vis its object of representation; in many ways, Loubeyre’s camera “plugs into” the machine it attempts to depict. In order to bring the workings of the refugee machine into sight, Loubeyre’s camera first of all follows the surveilling gazes within the machinic system. Shots taken by her digital video camera are sutured to the searching look of border agents in shot-reverse shot patterns, thereby suggesting visual access to the agents’ surveilling points of view. Second, the surveilling gazes of video cameras are brought into view by Loubeyre’s video camera, which records surveillance cameras and monitors in the same distant way the filmed surveillance video technologies record moving “foreign bodies” on the run. Finally, grainy black and white video surveillance images are filmed up close in Flow Mechanics. As screen-filling images, they can no longer be recognized as embedded or represented pictures; they become part of the primary structure of the

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movie. In sum, the representational tool adopted by Loubeyre is part of the machinic system it represents. How, then, is her movie still able to function separately from, let alone critically against, the refugee machine? This question puts forth a more general issue with respect to machine analysis. As Frederik Tygstrup puts it well: “Following Lazzarato, we could say that contemporary cultural analysis is not about reading what the objects we study are saying about something extraneous to them, but about reading how they retain a particular function in such contexts” (2018, 267). The latter mode of reading is very much called for when it comes to Flow Mechanics as well. Without ever shedding its position as cog in the refugee machine, Flow Mechanics manages to function as a counter-cog; a cog that acts up. In many scenes, the camera suddenly cuts away from the machinic assemblage it is mapping. Shots of surveilling cameras, fences and barriers, arrests, measuring technologies, graphs, watchdogs, and refugee boats are repeatedly interrupted by images of, for instance, the sky, rocky soil, plants waving in the wind, or abstract dark images in which nothing can be seen at all. Sometimes these images appear with a hard cut, at other times the camera slowly swerves away from the machinic elements it depicts. By doing so, the movie interrupts the act of mapping it is carrying out. This mapping is not only imbricated with the refugee machine because of a shared visual technology (video), but also because Loubeyre’s structured mapping—though indispensable in displaying complex machinic systems—has a diagrammatic character that follows and re-produces the a-signifying, processual character of the refugee machine. In addition, the cutaways from machinic elements suggest a form of judgment. Not a judgment of the depicted people, as the camera also swerves away from barbed wired areas and cranes deporting coffins. Rather, occasionally the camera accusingly turns away from the refugee machine, as if it can no longer bear to look at it, and chooses to disengage itself from the system. Although this doesn’t involve one person placing him or herself in the position of another person, the cutaways definitely humanize the camera. Instead of functioning like an icecold technological eye, video images come to express the (non-character-bound) focalization of someone who judges the machinic regulation of refugees in the Mediterranean, thereby bringing crisis to bear on the machine in several meanings of this concept: as a judgment of the machine, as a choice against it,19 and as the production of an instability within the machine; a turning point.

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The latter is brought about by the above-discussed resignification of video images. As cog in the refugee machine, video technology functions as a surveilling device for tracking down foreign bodies in a mechanical way. This function is problematized by Flow Mechanics when incorporated video images in the movie are used against the machinic grain, namely as images that express an affective or affected human point of view. The movie does not only establish this form of critical adjustment of the application of video technology by having the camera turn away, it also manages to change the function of surveillance video through conventional cinematic editing techniques. In a scene that shows grainy surveillance footage of a boat filled with refugees who appear only as small colored pixels, a male survivor of a “left-to-die-boat” tells about his crossing of the Mediterranean Sea. Close-up images of the man are alternated with images of the floating boat. At first, the images seem to match the story of the man who recounts how his boat was approached by coastguards. The video footage, so it seems, shows the perspective of these coastguards, looking through viewfinders at the man’s boat. This assumption, however, is undermined when a mismatch arises between the story and the images. The coastguards abandoned the boat, the man explains, yet grainy surveillance images of the boat still accompany close-ups of the internal narrator. This mismatch invites reading the relation between the man and the surveillance footage according to the conventional narrative film principle of suture: when a character is looking at or describing something (such as memories), subsequent shots fill in his or her point of view. In Flow Mechanics, grainy surveillance images are repurposed as personal memories. This is confirmed all the more when the man tells about the appearance of a helicopter in the sky, which was a moment of hope and relief: “Now we are saved.” His words are accompanied by shots of an aircraft, in exactly the same grainy quality as the images of the boat, yet from a low angle that corresponds with the position of the man when he was on the boat. Thus, the video images in this relatively short scene appear to, briefly, express the focalization of this refugee and illustrate his affective and emotional point of view. In light of Lazzarato’s machine theory, the latter repurposing of video surveillance technology for the expression of affective and emotional perceptions can be read as a form of resistance to, if not a bringing into crisis of, the refugee machine. As explained, Lazzarato argues that machinic enslavement involves a process of being taken over “from the inside” by a-signifying modes that capture (use and determine) our affects,

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emotions, and perceptions. Surveillance technologies are an example par excellence in this regard: “The cycle of fear, anxiety and panic penetrating the atmosphere and tonality in which our ‘surveillance societies’ are steeped are triggered by [a-signifying] sign machines; these machines appeal … to the nervous system, the affects, the emotions” (Lazzarato 2006b, n.pag.). The affects and emotions caused by the machine are also used by it as cogs in the wheel, Lazzarato explains. Fear and panic are, in part, what makes surveillance systems effective. In Flow Mechanics, the enslaving effect of video surveillance technologies is countered. The movie manages to turn video from a technology that causes negative feelings, affects and perceptions, and that converts subjects into pixels and data packets without being routed through signification, into a technology that can be used to express instead of capture the meaningful memories and feelings (fear, despair, but also hope) of a person.20 Importantly, the video images that express those negative as well as positive memories and feelings do not show sensational spectacles of suffering, they retain the distant “cold look” of video surveillance footage, and are, moreover, only tied briefly to a narrating refugee. Because of this, Flow Mechanics manages to use video against the grain, while simultaneously intercepting identification with the refugee-as-victim, thus resisting the arousal of crude empathy that characterizes some strands of representation of the “refugee crisis.”21

Conclusion Loubeyre’s interventions in the application of video technology demonstrate that resistance to a machinic system cannot merely be discursive. As the refugee machine comprises discursive and non-discursive elements, the functioning of this lethal machine can best be countered when both signifying signs and a-signifying components are taken into account. Flow Mechanics responds to the refugee machine on a discursive and a non-­ discursive level. The movie intervenes into the functioning of a technology that holds a dominant position in the machine by way of using the same technology otherwise. This involves material, bodily actions (turning the camera away, turning it off) as well as narrative strategies (applying narrative editing conventions). Hence, Flow Mechanics produces languages as well as performances of protest that open up tentative possibilities of choice and freedom in relation to a controlling and complex machinic system. It does so, however, by being compliant, too. Not only are machine

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analysis and machine critique of the refugee machine likely to be concomitant with what they aim to “dissect,” Flow Mechanics demonstrates that protest against the machine is most effective from such a position of concomitance. By becoming a cog in the wheel, and then changing the functioning of the cog, a critical moment of crisis is produced in the refugee machine.

Notes 1. I use the term “refugee” throughout this chapter to refer to people who have left their home countries in order to escape from poverty and/or violence. I consider refugees as migrants who have made an “involuntary choice”: their decision to take flight and move abroad was forced by extremely disadvantageous, oftentimes life-threatening circumstances. 2. For an excellent overview of the history of the concept of crisis, see Koselleck (2006). 3. Although Vogl does not go into the nature of this constructedness in detail, I would say that migration is not merely a social or politically fabricated construct, nor is it solely discursively produced or economically structured; it is rather—quite in line with Lazzarato’s machine theory—a heterogeneous construct, produced by as well as comprising many different elements. 4. In his seminal book Signs and Machines (2014), Lazzarato mostly focusses on capitalism as a machinic system. 5. For further discussions of the etymological roots of the word “crisis,” see also Boletsi (2017) and Vogl (2018). 6. Flow Mechanics is Loubeyre’s third film about migration. In 2009, her documentary No Comment was released, followed by Against the Tide in 2012. On all three projects, Loubeyre worked together with cinematographer Joël Labat, whose camerawork is of great importance to Flow Mechanics’ effect. 7. My discussion of Lazzarato’s machine theory as well as my analysis of Flow Mechanics in this chapter draw from a previous publication; “Video Against the Machine,” Houwen (2019), in which I compare Loubeyre’s documentary to Morgan Knibbe’s film Those Who Feel the Fire Burning (2015) in order to demonstrate how the medium of video is set to work against the “refugee machine” in both movies, yet in different ways. In this chapter, I have built on these analyses in order to explore the manner in which specific videomatic and cinematic techniques employed in Flow Mechanics can be tied to the concept of crisis, most specifically the multiple meanings that spring from concept’s historical roots.

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8. Lazzarato’s broad use of the term “logocentrist” as a reproach to theorists who study language and meaning (in relation to subjectivity, politics, ­ideology, etc.) is not congruent with the understanding of logocentrism as the belief in a center or foundation of meaning and thought that exists independently of language. When following the latter understanding, certain theoretical strands within or following the linguistic turn (such as the constructivist approach) can readily be called anti-logocentric. 9. See also Hesselberth et al. (2018) for a discussion of Lazzarato’s ideas in relation to contemporary issues of legibility. 10. Lazzarato turns to Deleuze’s notion of the dividual in order to further define this fragmentation: “subjection produces and subjects individuals, whereas in enslavement individuals become “dividuals,” and masses become samples, data … . The dividual “functions” in enslavement in the same way as the ‘non-human’ component parts of technical machines” (Lazzarato 2014, 26). 11. The circumvention of social significations is important, as it distinguishes Lazzarato’s notion of a-signifying signs (or, in other words, “power signs”) from performatives as defined by J. L. Austin. The effect of a performative utterance, that is, the performativity of language, depends on a social context. The performative speech act is a social act. In the words of Lazzarato, the performative entails a “social obligation” (2014, 170). A-signifying semiotics functions independently of social roles or meanings. 12. My use of the term “refugee” as a word referring to people who have fled from poverty and/or violence in their home countries is not in accordance with the much narrower European judicial meaning of the word, which indicates a legal status that many of the people in Flow Mechanics do not have. I use “refugee” in a broad sense instead of turning to categories such as “illegalized migrants,” “economic asylum-seekers,” or “undocumented immigrants,” so as not to reproduce the exclusion that is currently produced by the narrow definition of the term under EU Law. Therefore, the process of distinguishing between legal/illegal is an element of the “refugee machine” that I aim to “plug out” from in my own writing. 13. Frontex is the EU agency charged with monitoring the EU’s border. It is seen as an agency augmented by EUROSUR, the European Border Surveillance System was proposed by the European Council in 2012. For a detailed discussion of Frontex and EUROSUR, see Pugliese (2013). 14. A concept discussed by, for instance, Papadopoulos and Tsianos (2008), and Casas-Cortes et al. (2015). In the words of Casas-Cortes et al., autonomy of migration refers to “the multiple and diverse ways in which migration responds to, operates independently from, and in turn shapes … apparatuses [of control] and their corresponding institutions and practices” (2015, 895). I would rather argue that migration and apparatuses of

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control shape each other and are therefore not operating independently at all. As intertwined mechanisms, they are part of the same machinic system. 15. As an ongoing processual system, the refugee machine functions in concord with the more general idea of the present European crisis as an enduring state to which there is no alternative (the so-called TINA doctrine). However, whereas the TINA doctrine is a rhetorical trope sustaining political agendas, the refugee machine is a complex system that can be understood as a result of the crisis rhetoric that justifies the (political) implementation of a controlling machine. 16. This is not to say that some of these “power signs” cannot produce any additional meanings. Illustrating Lazzarato’s claim that a-signifying signs can bring an additional symbolic or signifying effect into play, the datafication of refugees is frequently used as a rhetorical tool in mass media. As De Genova points out, the Mediterranean Sea in particular has long been a space for the staging of continuous border spectacles which are fortified by a “numbers game” (2016, 22). The sense of an “invasion” by “dangerous” refugees that is produced through proliferating images and texts that depict masses of packed migrant vessels arriving on European shores is enforced by charts, diagrams, and graphs that present this increasing “threat” in a numerical way. 17. A conclusion that is very much line with Pugliese’s fierce critique of the lethality of the EU’s integrated systems of surveillance. 18. I borrow the term “left-to-die-boat” from Pugliese (2013). 19. This choice to perform acts (movements) of rejection does not entail an easy escape or decision to simply “opt out” of the machine, though. 20. In Videophilosophy (2019), Lazzarato ties the power to create and express affects, bodily pulsations and “crystallizations of time” to the ontology of video, which can thereby proliferate beyond apparatuses of control. I would rather say that video’s ability to counter its own application in systems of control has a long history, in which conventions make up the Janus-faced medium as much as the ontology of its technology. See Houwen (2017). 21. For a discussion of these strands of representation, as well as artistic lens-­ based alternatives to the crude empathy they invite to, see Houwen (2016).

Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. 1992. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Boletsi, Maria. 2017. The Unbearable Lightness of Crisis: (Anti-)Utopia and Middle Voice in Sotiris Dimitriou’s Close to the Belly. In Greece in Crisis: The

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Cultural Politics of Austerity, ed. Dimitris Tziovas, 259–261. New  York: I.B. Tauris. Casas-Cortes, Maribel, Sebastian Cobarrubias, and John Pickles. 2015. Riding Routes and Itinerant Borders: Autonomy of Migration and Border Externalization. Antipode 47 (4): 894–914. Hesselberth, Pepita, Janna Houwen, Ruby de Vos, and Esther Peeren, eds. 2018. Legibility in the Age of Signs and Machines. Leiden: Brill. Horsman, Yasco. 2018. OK, computer? Understanding Cybernetic Personhood. In Legibility in the Age of Signs and Machines, ed. Pepita Hesselberth, Janna Houwen, Ruby de Vos, and Esther Peeren, 133–146. Leiden: Brill. Houwen, Janna. 2016. An Empty Table and an Empty Boat: Empathic Encounters with Refugee Experiences in Intermedial Installation Art. American, British and Canadian Studies Journal 27 (1): 44–73. ———. 2017. Film and Video Intermediality: The Question of Medium Specificity in Contemporary Moving Images. New York: Bloomsbury. ———. 2019. Video Against the Machine: Lens-Based Interventions in The Refugee Crisis. FKW Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und Visuelle Kultur 66: 72–86. Koselleck, Reinhart. 2006. Crisis. Translated by Michaela W. Richter. Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2): 357–400. Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2006a. The Machine. In In Transversal Texts: Machines and Subjectivation, ed. Aileen Derieg et  al. Vienna: EIPCP.  Accessed March 28, 2019. http://eipcp.net/transversal/1106/lazzarato/en.html. ———. 2006b. ‘Semiotic Pluralism’ and the New Government of Signs: Homage to Félix Guattari. In Transversal Texts: Machines and Subjectivation, Trans. Mary O’Neill and ed. Aileen Derieg et al. Vienna: EIPCP. http://eipcp.net/ transversal/0107/lazzarato/en.html. Accessed May 7, 2019. ———. 2014. Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. South Pasadina: Semiotext(e). ———. 2019. Videophilosophy. New York: Columbia University Press. New Keywords Collective. 2016. Europe/Crisis: New Keywords of ‘the Crisis’ in and of ‘Europe’. Coordinated and edited by Nicholas De Genova and Martina Tazzioli. Zone Books Online. http://nearfuturesonline.org/europecrisisnew-keywords-of-crisis-in-and-of-europe/. Accessed August 22, 2019. Nichols, Bill. 2001. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Papadopoulos, Dimitris, and Vassilis Tsianos. 2008. The Autonomy of Migration: The Animals of Undocumented Mobility. Translate. Beyond Culture: The Politics of Translation. Vienna: EIPCP.  Accessed March 27, 2019. http:// translate.eipcp.net/strands/02/papadopoulostsianos-strands01en. Pugliese, Joseph. 2013. Technologies of Extraterritorialisation, Statist Visuality and Irregular Migrants and Refugees. Griffith Law Review 22 (3): 571–597.

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Sassen, Saskia. 2002. Towards a Sociology of Information Technology. Current Sociology 50 (3): 365–388. Tygstrup, Frederik. 2018. Representational Assemblages: Forms, Concerns, Affects. In Legibility in the Age of Signs and Machines, ed. Pepita Hesselberth, Janna Houwen, Ruby de Vos, and Esther Peeren, 263–274. Leiden: Brill. Vogl, Joseph. 2018. The History of the Notion of Crisis. Interview Conducted and Translated by Sven Fabré and Arne Vanraes. In Critical Theory at a Crossroads: Conversations on Resistance in Times of Crisis, ed. Stijn De Cauwer, 61–74. New York: Columbia University Press.

In Precarity and Prosperity: Refugee Art Going Beyond the Performance of Crisis Ipek A. Çelik Rappas and Diego Benegas Loyo

Center for Political Beauty, a humanitarian performance art collective based in Germany, describes itself as “an assault team that establishes moral beauty, political poetry and human greatness while aiming to preserve humanitarianism” (Center for Political Beauty n.d., n.pag.). In June 2015, in reaction to the anonymity of refugees who died that year while crossing the Mediterranean, they staged an intervention titled “The Dead are Coming.” The aim of the intervention was to search for mass graves of refugees who drowned on the shores of Greece and Italy, identify the corpses, reach their families, and plan for their reburial in Germany.

I. A. Çelik Rappas (*) Department of Media and Visual Arts, Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] D. Benegas Loyo Escuela de Ciencia y Tecnología, Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Buenos Aires, Argentina

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Boletsi et al. (eds.), Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36415-1_4

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Another performance by the Center for Political Beauty in 2016, entitled “Eating Refugees,” was staged as a reaction to strict European Union border policies that led to illegal trafficking and deaths of refugees on perilous journeys. The art collective set an arena that contained four tigers in the center of Berlin and threatened to place four voluntary refugees inside the cages unless a flight that was bringing refugees without Schengen visa was allowed entry in Germany. The flight was canceled and a refugee who volunteered to be eaten, Syrian artist May Skaf, gave a speech in front of the arena (“‘Tigers eat refugees’” 2016, n.pag.). With regard to both interventions, the artist-activists claim that their aim was to draw attention and provoke reaction to the corporeal perils that refugees go through and the invisibility of refugee struggles and suffering. Contrary to the claim by the performers/activists of the Center for Political Beauty, refugee deaths and suffering have been far from invisible. In fact, images of corpses, dying bodies, or groups of refugees waiting endlessly at European borders have become “an integral part of the political regulation of migration,” serving a wide range of functions from fostering stereotypes to mobilizing activism (Köhn 2016, 4). For instance, in September 2015, a New York Times headline declares that the scale of the refugee crisis is increasing rapidly (Aisch et al. 2015, n.pag.). The article is accompanied by an image of a large group of refugees waiting at the Hungarian border to board a bus. In the panoramic image, most of the refugees’ faces are not seen as the camera shoots from a distance behind and above them, from a perspective that emphasizes both their multitude and precarity. The image implies that large groups of faceless (and mostly veiled) refugees entering through European borders are a possible threat and it points to the need to regulate this mass migration crisis. According to anthropologist Nicholas De Genova, such refugee-related media events and accompanying images are “border spectacles” that are central in displaying what is strategically defined as the “crisis” of migration, a discourse of urgency utilized to configure more efficient tactics of control and law enforcement (2017, 3). There is without doubt a “refugee crisis,” not only in Europe but globally. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees report published in 2017, the number of forcibly displaced people has increased over 50% in ten years, the Syrian conflict being the major cause of this increase. In 2017, the total number of refugees was estimated to be 25.1 million (UNHCR 2017, n.pag.) while the total number of forcibly displaced people was as high as 68.5 million.1 And yet, associating

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refugees with crisis and catastrophe is a well-rehearsed discourse that has been circulating in the mass media of the Global North for decades. Especially as of the 2000s, refugees and migrants appear in European mainstream news in relation to emergency situations defined by rupture and crisis: as “victims of human trafficking, suspects of terrorism, ‘bogus’ asylum seekers who pose an imminent threat to social welfare systems, hyper-fertile minorities within a declining ‘European’ population” (Çelik 2015, 3). These social, economic, and political states of crises often call for urgent measures or remedies. The temporality shaped by this understanding of crisis as emergency calls for humanitarianism, that is, immediate action that provides “temporary care” for situations of emergency (Ticktin 2015, 82). As Craig Calhoun (2010) underlines, refugees have become the primary figures to bring Europe both crisis and opportunity for political activism. This chapter explores a number of artworks that respond to the so-­ called refugee crisis in Europe. It starts by examining refugee-related art activism that has drawn significant media attention—particularly Ai Weiwei’s work in which he performs Aylan Kurdi—as emblematic of what we call “performances of crisis.” Performances of crisis such as Center for Political Beauty’s actions and Ai Weiwei’s refugee performance build an affective landscape in which refugees are represented as objects of scandalized spectacles that remain outside the quotidian lives of Europeans. We argue that what is missing from such performances of crisis is the desire of refugees—that is, any desire that goes beyond narratives of suffering—and also any interpellation of the host society, other than the call to become concerned citizens. We proceed by discussing refugee art that is uncommon and less visible, particularly focusing on Nela Milic’s Wedding Bellas (2007–2010), a digital photography and oral history project exploring refugee women’s “wish to belong to the European borderscape” (Milic 2016, 75) by reflecting on their quotidian expectations, struggles, and desires.

The Art of Suffering or the Refugee Horror Show Circulated globally in 2015, an image showed three-year-old Syrian child Aylan Kurdi’s lifeless body washed ashore on a Turkish beach. Kurdi’s image reached 20 million people around the world in 12 hours through social media (Ratnam 2016, n.pag.). The image was striking yet controversial as it showed the cruelty of migration by using the corpse of a child.

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Yet, as Monica Tan writes in The Guardian, Aylan Kurdi’s photograph became “the defining symbol of the plight of Syria’s refugees” (2016, n.pag.). Even Daily Mail, a tabloid that frequently invokes anti-migration discourse, published an article titled “Don’t shut your eyes to this picture because WE did this. Now we have to make it right” (Morgan 2015, n.pag.). Kurdi’s image did not only serve as proof of the extent of the consequences of the Syrian war but it also raised discussions on Europe’s faltering migration policy and the need for immediate humanitarian action by European governments to prevent further loss of innocent lives. Indeed, after the spread of Kurdi’s photo, Germany, France, and the UK decided to increase the number of refugees that they were willing to accept. Anthropologist Miriam Ticktin explains that the image “gave the ‘migrant crisis’ a new face: innocence. It shamed Europe into action” (2016, 258). On January 2016, a few months after the publication of Kurdi’s image, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, a political refugee himself, posed as Aylan Kurdi for India Today Magazine, in which the artist’s image was described as “a tribute to the tragic and everlasting image of three-year-old Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi … highlighting the plight of refugees” (India Today (Web Desk) 2016, n.pag.). The photo was taken on the island of Lesbos (Greece), a key point of entry into the EU for many refugees, which Ai Weiwei visited, reportedly in order to “document the migrant crisis” (Neuendorf 2015, n.pag.). During his visit, Ai Weiwei volunteered at a refugee camp, shared pictures of the living conditions in the camp on his Instagram account, declared his desire to set up a studio on the island, and called for the construction of a monument dedicated to migrants and refugees (Neuendorf 2016, n.pag.). In Tan’s article in The Guardian (2016) Ai’s posing as Kurdi was accompanied by other images of the artist’s visit to the island. One of these images that showed Ai giving a chocolate cookie to a refugee girl was reminiscent of images of humanitarian aid in which children are “perfect victims” who become “the face of humanitarianism” (Ticktin 2016, 257). In an interview with the UN Refugee Agency, Ai explains: “Aylan Kurdi is not just one person. In the past year, in 2015, every day two persons, two young persons just like him drowned. It’s very important to put myself in that condition … Refugee is not someone who isn’t fortunate. If someone is unfortunate we are all unfortunate” (UNHCR 2016, n.pag.). This assumption of the position of a victim refugee by the artist refugee was at the center of the reactions against Ai’s image taken in Lesbos. As

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Niru Ratnam states, “[Ai] is not in the same position as Kurdi for the simple reason that, after the photo-shoot, he got up, dusted himself down and returned to whatever leading international artists do, as opposed to Kurdi, whose dead body was carefully picked up by a police officer” (2016, n.pag.). Other critics underline that the work ultimately decontextualizes the original image (Mortensen 2017) and that this renders the artist rather than the victim central: “Weiwei turns the spotlight toward himself rather than prioritizing and creating space for the suffering to speak for themselves” (Amirkhani 2016, n.pag.). This decontextualization is done in the name of empathy with the victim and over-identification based on the wrong assumption that “once we realize we are all the same … we can open our hearts and borders to the strangers who are just like us” (Houwen 2016, 50). As Janna Houwen states, refugee-related art that seeks empathy fails both “to acknowledge the distinct nature of suffering of refugees and … the incommensurability of the political status of European citizens on the one hand, and nationless refugees in camps on the other” (2016, 50). Through empathy and over-identification, Ai’s performance about refugees tries to account for the story of someone else, claiming to be the witness of a horror happening in front of our eyes. One would be tempted to concede that it is impossible to represent such horrors. Hamid Dabashi (2016) points to the “crisis of representation” around Ai’s image, that is, the very impossibility of artistically representing the harsh reality of Kurdi’s situation. Dabashi critiques the performance but also reinforces the idea of the unrepresentable quality of certain horrors: “Nothing will ever haunt the frightened humanity like the original snapshot of Aylan Kurdi—nothing. There are certain irreducible realities that make a mockery of any artistic attempt at representing them more frightfully than they already are” (2016, n.pag.). Jacques Rancière (2009) explores the common expectation that certain painful instances are unrepresentable, even when their witnesses give accounts of these events. Rancière analyzes an infamous scene in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah when the director forces a Holocaust survivor to recount his story until he breaks down and falls into silence. When the witness remains speechless and fails to articulate his experience in words, he is deemed to be more believable, as extreme pain is considered un-­ representable in words and in images. Rancière points out: “The problem is not whether the reality of these genocides can be put into images and fiction … It is knowing what kind of human beings the image shows us

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and what kind of human beings it is addressed to” (2009, 102). The French philosopher underlines the fact that the audience expects a silent witness/victim whose image of pain is supposed to be translated into meaning by someone else, be it an artist or a journalist. Ai’s posing as Aylan Kurdi shows an artist’s attempt to translate the horrors of refugee experience into meaning, and according to Dabashi, fails in this endeavor. Here, what needs to be fleshed out is not only Ai’s failure or success, but also, as Ranciére points out, the artist’s choice of image to be imitated or translated. Dabashi’s critique highlights the failure of Ai’s art as much as the power of, and expectations from, the original image in “haunting” its spectator and conveying “irreducible realities” (Dabashi 2016, n.pag.). The trauma of the refugee experience is assumed to be most faithfully reflected in the silent image of the corpse of an innocent victim. In its attempt to convey “irreducible realities” (Dabashi 2016) refugee art becomes speechless (or terse), somber, and sad. Ai takes up a refugee corpse as his subject of mimicry. He is not the only artist to take as his subject the tragic deaths of refugees in their attempts to cross the borders of Europe. Istanbul-based artist Banu Cennetoglu’s ongoing installation The List traces information related to (currently) over 34,000 refugees and migrants who lost their lives on the borders of, or in, Europe since 1993. The compilation of this list started in the early 1990s by United for Intercultural Action, a European NGO network, against racism. The List started to be publicly disseminated by Cennetoglu as of the early 2000s, long before the mid-2010s when refugee questions moved into the spotlight in Europe. It is an ongoing work occasionally published and distributed by newspapers such as Tagesspiegel (on 9 November 2017) and The Guardian (on World Refugee Day, 20 June 2018) and exhibited in numerous European capitals including Stedelijk Museum Bureau and SKOR in Amsterdam in 2007; outdoor advertising boards in Istanbul in 2012; Chisenhale Gallery in London; and the Liverpool Biennial in 2018. Along with an identification of victims, The List includes gruesome details such as their causes of death: “beaten by border guards in the port of Igoumenitsa (GR) attempting to reach Italy, dead in hospital in Greece” or “suicide, failed asylum seeker hanged himself in park in South Shields (GB)” (from image in Nestor 2018, n.pag.). Cennetoglu explains the logic behind the artwork as follows: “Not knowing and not recording leads to a certain kind of indifference and normalization … It just becomes a very vague, crowded ‘refugee crisis,’ as they say. It becomes a thing and not about people” (in Donadio 2017, n.pag.).

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It is debatable whether having refugee names on a long list undermines “indifference.” Yet, Cennetoglu’s approach differs sharply from Ai’s as she makes no attempt to identify with refugees or pick a particularly scandalous image as representative of the so-called refugee crisis. Yet, like Ai’s performance, her installations deal with refugees who cannot convey their own stories because they have died. The artist attempts to give expression to these stories by providing the aforementioned information on their name and cause of death. The problematic voicelessness of refugees (and the artist’s position as the translator/conveyor of their stories) is combined with the enforced narrative genre of tragedy that is central to the performance of crisis. Tragedy as narrative genre is also taken up by the performance of the Center for Political Beauty in which corpses are dug out to be re-buried. As in a funeral, the affect is heavy, and European spectators are expected to adopt the appropriate gestures, attitudes, and behaviors of good and concerned humanitarian citizens who pay attention to the lives that were lost. Performances of crisis are no laughing matter, they are sad. As most human rights related art, they refer to a serious issue and engage the public in a serious discussion: it is made clear that there is no pleasure in showing or viewing them. They even strive to make the spectators cry, as did Cuban artist Tania Bruguera’s work exhibited at Tate Modern (2018). Bruguera’s refugee-related art was accompanied by a “crying room” in which a chemical compound was released to make the visitors cry.2 As Bruguera explains, “Life is not comfortable. I want people to get out of their comfort zone” (MacIntosh 2018, n.pag.). The viewers were chemically forced to cry in this spectacle as the artist assumed that they may be unable to truly feel the appropriate sadness from their comfortable position. This forced crying instructs the spectator by imposing on them the proper reaction (crying and sadness) when confronted with the refugee experience. It also marks a discontinuity between the spectators’ “comfort zone” (their quotidian lives) and refugee lives. Refugee-related performances of crisis, in their focus on pain and death, avoid the economy of pleasures that refugee bodies may provide in the quotidian lives of the spectators. Refugees who were the subjects of Ai Weiwei’s, Banu Cennetoglu’s, Bruguera’s, and Center for Political Beauty’s artworks and performances are detached from European daily comforts. They were not the working bodies that make European houses cleaner, childrearing and elderly care more comfortable, or food easier to acquire. Even though we expand the definition of pleasure beyond sexual

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pleasure, refugees as sex workers can be included in the discussion. The aforementioned artworks overlook the fact that some lives are rendered more pleasant or comfortable because of the labor (including but not limited to cleaning, caretaking, and agricultural work) extracted from refugee bodies whose lives may become, for that very reason, less pleasurable. Not only are the presence and labor of refugees that facilitate lives in the Global North hardly addressed in refugee-related artworks, but also refugees as seekers or subjects of various kinds of pleasures are also rarely the subject of artistic performances of crisis. It seems as though a laughing refugee, or a pleasure-taking refugee, is not a good refugee—unless she is a child receiving a cookie from an artist.

Nela Milic’s Wedding Bellas A woman in bridal gown peacefully smiles as she leans her head on a traditional red British mailbox, “passionately attached to the ‘object’ of [her] marriage” (Milic 2015, 163) (Fig. 1).3 She seems happy that becoming

Fig. 1  Nela. The artist herself poses while another refugee woman takes the picture

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“Mrs. British Mailbox” will make her a “Queen’s subject.” Milic’s Wedding Bellas, born out of the artist’s interactions with refugee women at the Migrants Resource Center (MRC, East London), includes such uncommon representations of refugee women, including the artist herself. Wedding Bellas are photo-shoots of refugee women in wedding gowns posing for the camera while hugging signposts, streetlights, trees, mailboxes, security camera posts, or fountains. Milic recounts that the project started in 2007 with a conversation about love and how much women are willing to give in order to find someone “rooted, stable and not going away” (2015, 165). What can be more rooted than a tree, or more stable than a signpost? From this casual joke, the project evolved into a calendar of pictures, a photography workshop to train future photographers for New Londoners—a newspaper developed to counter bad portrayals of migrants in the media—and several exhibitions. Furthermore, the performances multiplied through the reactions of the passers-by, who were congratulating the brides during the photo-shoots, and audience reactions during exhibits (Milic 2015, 173), which triggered other performances of citizenship and gender. There is a series of layered reversions in this collaborative oral history and photography project, the creation and final product of which includes both the artist (herself a refugee from Serbia) and other refugee and migrant women (from Iran, the Czech Republic, Argentina, Zimbabwe, Poland, Ecuador, Turkey, and several other countries). Many of the photographed women have moved numerous times around the world and within London. The photos stage their desire to be settled, rooted as European citizens, but through mock-wedding pictures of them marrying not UK citizens but other UK “subjects,” namely, objects. Contrasting the innocence of the white dress to the frequent accusation of fake marriages (Milic 2015, 173), these images address the precarious situation of women refugees, who desire to remain in Europe and stay attached to the utopian prospect of (European) prosperity, without appealing to spectacles of crisis and death. Milic expresses her wish to undermine performances of crisis or the genre of tragedy that is attached to refugee women as follows: I wanted to capture them in photographs, but their dramatic life stories needed to be told differently than in the documentary reportage of mainstream media where they are usually portrayed as victims—battered, distraught or crying. (2016, 76)

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In a book chapter and an article she published, Nela Milic (2015, 2016) recounts the making of Wedding Bellas and provides more detailed information about the refugee and migrant women that the project represents. The information about the women includes relatable quotidian details such as “Larisa moved for the third time this year in search of a place she could be happy in” or “Alenka is going through a personal crisis, as she left her boyfriend who then left her when she changed her mind” (Milic 2015, 164), as well as problems that may be related to their precarious refugee and migrant status. Yet, these narratives form a list quite different from Cennetoglu’s The List. Problems that may be attributed to their refugee or migrant status are always coupled with their survival strategies and coping mechanisms: Aneta has four jobs. She wakes up at four in the morning and makes abstract paintings. When you are working so much, the world is an abstract feature that you can only feel through repetition that sustains it. … Jobeda has always felt a sense of longing for belonging as an outsider not fitting into any community and mentally struggling most of her life. She has reached a stage and an age she no longer cares about what people think of her. (Milic 2015, 165)

Refugees and migrants, some of whom are in a permanently mobile state, become Londoners through their attachments to landmarks. The objects in Wedding Bellas—the objects the women marry—are not random: they are UK and at times London landmarks and as such, they map out a belonging to the country and to the city. In their indexicality, each of them points to an experience of the lived space: they are signs that help the resident navigate the city. For instance, as her white dress “flies” with the wind and occupies half of the picture, Jobeda hugs a hydrant plate post showing a yellow “H” sign (Milic 2016, 76). This is a familiar sign but its meaning is so obscure for many residents that there is a BBC video explaining their function (i.e., showing firefighters the location of a water supply) (“Ever wondered?” 2017, n.pag.). Dita poses in front of a cycling post, a sign of the “new” London where the sharing bicycle scheme started in 2010, an index of a city concerned with its environment and the health of its residents. Dita also happens to be an artist creating environment-­ friendly art with fruit and vegetable leftovers (Milic 2015, 164). In this sense, the wedding photo also tells the story of the connection between the city and its refugee or migrant resident by being sensitive to its ecology.

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Another index of contemporary London is the surveillance camera, considering that the city reportedly has the highest number of security cameras in the world (Gilbert 2017, n.pag.). Anne, a “larger than life teacher” who works with children with disabilities (Milic 2015, 165), holds the post dearly and smiles at the surveillance camera on top of it (Fig. 2) telling us a multilayered joke: if you were to marry an “authentic” Londoner, a true inhabitant of the city who occupies a central place in this society and has power overall, then you would marry a security camera post. The implications of marrying a surveillance camera post are manifold. The object refers to the surveillance of refugees and migrants as well

Fig. 2  Anne hugging a surveillance camera post

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as to European society giving up on its privacy rights and freedom in order to gain a promised security: refugees or not, we are all subject to surveillance. Nela Milic’s artwork on the surface seems to be about “them,” when in fact it is about all of us. Rather than hiding from it, Anne smiles at the surveillance camera. Similar to the performances of suffering we described before, in Wedding Bellas, the refugee and migrant body is at the center of the viewer’s eye. However, in this case, it stands there in its color, happiness, and radiance—its “glamour” (Milic 2016, 76). The genre of the wedding picture is used as imagery that is already coded; perhaps the most rehearsed visual performance of happiness. This is a gendered conception of happiness, one specifically attributed to women. Hence, we encounter a performance of gender that connects refugees and migrants to a wider cultural realm of femininity and traditional expectations. To further this connection between women, the refugees and migrants who pose wanted to wear wedding dresses, and due to budgetary limits of the project, these dresses had to be borrowed from other women (Milic 2015, 167). For those who contributed to the project, collaboration with other women was part of the stimulus, as Milic explains. When Milic asked them whether they should continue to photo-shoot despite difficulties faced, “[t]hey answered that participating in the project allowed them to feel special like models, to finally wear ‘THE’ dress, to reflect on the constant victimization of refugee and asylum seeking women, to do something for our community, to collaborate as women” (2015, 164). To the male spectator’s eyes, these photographs send an especially interesting message: that these women are simply uninterested. The photographs play with the idea of marriage as a path to UK citizenship and also hint at the catalogues of mail-order brides. These images also point out the women’s wish to be recognized as subjects with the right to desire—and at times not to desire male UK-citizens. Men are nowhere to be seen. They are thus deprived of the opportunity to perform their presumed gracious act of sharing UK-citizenship with migrant women. The pictures put the women center stage, not by making them the object of exchange, but rather by making them agents in the center of the frame. Nela Milic recounts that during the exhibition of the photographs one man told her to “Go back to Serbia” when she joked that the women in the photographs “marry objects because they do not like British men” (2016, 79). This performance of masculinity coupled with racism makes the agenda of Bellas even more pertinent: it poses the question whether

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women—all women, including non-refugee/non-migrant women—are allowed to say “no” to men and marriage. In their enacted refusal to marry (British) men, they point to larger questions relating to gender relations. The refugee/migrant women in the images (including the artist herself) do not submit to marriage. Yet, they use the genre of marriage photography to associate themselves with commonly assumed images of happiness since they also do not want to submit to telling tragic stories about themselves. And they do not submit; they have other plans.

Conclusion In his work on the sacred foundations of modern sovereignty and state power, anthropologist Michael Taussig (1997) proposes that for the operation of terror to work, it has to establish a space outside, an assumption that terrible things happen far away. Performances of crisis are horrifying and the terror they stage is similarly assumed to emerge away from the quotidian lives of Europeans. The tigers may eat refugees, lists give gruesome details about the ways refugees die on the way to Europe, and images of dead children multiply in mimicry performances. Refugee bodies are “haunting,” abject, absent, or present only as corpses; they are rarely portrayed as existing inside Europe. The horrifying affects of these performances help build that spatial and conceptual separation. The non-refugee stays detached from suffering even if she/he is forced to cry about it (as in Bruguera’s work), as this suffering is detached from the “comforts” of his/her daily life. In order to make sense of the semiotics of art that contains horrifying body images and stories of refugees, it is useful to turn to the works of anthropologist Rita Segato (2016) and philosopher Sayak Valencia (2010) who have both analyzed the spectacles of violence against women and children at the US–Mexico border. Segato explains that today we face an “expressive violence” that is not instrumental but is rather measured by the spectacle it produces. As opposed to many other wars in history, in which violence was directed to the strongest members of the opponent, in the case of contemporary mafias, drug cartels, or terrorist states, we witness violence toward the weakest, with women and children as the preferred subjects. In this way, the agent of this violence exercises his power on the body of the victims as a message and violent spectacles perform a “pedagogy of cruelty” (2016, 21): this is a didactic endeavor directed to forge subjects that will learn, by horror, to fear the powerful. Segato claims

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that this structure of violence is inherent and necessary to contemporary capitalism, as it works to discipline the bodies of those subjected but also the spectators of these horror shows. Valencia (2010) analyzes the use of spectacles of violence and the media use of images of dead bodies in what she calls “gore capitalism.” She asserts that contemporary capitalism requires a specific kind of subject who is willing to consume images of dead, injured, or dismembered bodies in videogames, films, or TV shows. This consumption of violent images produces a sort of desensitization that naturalizes violence and makes it part of the landscape. Both Segato and Valencia show how the images of dead bodies and suffering people are central to the workings of contemporary capitalism in that they keep its audiences both desensitized to the suffering of others and also fearful that they could be the next unfortunate victims of its violence. In this sense, these spectacles of terror remind us of campaigns of state terrorism. For instance, during Argentina’s last dictatorship (1976–1983), clandestine detention centers of torture and disappearance were part of a campaign of terror aimed at disciplining the public and erasing all political opposition. These performances produce a public horrified but also numb to the cruelties, since identifying with the victim could lead to sharing their fate (Benegas Loyo 2011, 2014). In the case of the declared refugee crisis, current performances of crisis as spectacles of refugee suffering are different from those in dictatorial Argentina: they are explicit and throw cruelty abundantly in our faces. Yet, they accomplish a similar work of horror happenings, and arguably with the same political results: a public horrified yet unable to intervene becomes numb to this cruel show. In light of this, the use of suffering bodies and horrific stories by refugee art is not only “ineffective” in relation to the refugee crisis but can even be considered as part of a systemic problem—despite the good intentions of the artists. Such works reproduce a form of terror where violence—this time the anonymous and abstract violence of global situations like unemployment, war, underdevelopment, or global warming—is inscribed on the bodies of the weakest—women and children from the impoverished classes in the Global South—and desensitizes the spectators. In her writings about Wedding Bellas, Milic reflects on how the mechanisms of art funding applications force artists to rely on replicating figures of tragedy or simply placing refugees in neat, unambiguous categories identifiable to European audiences. By contrast, Wedding Bellas portrays refugees in a way that is not categorizable. In their modeling for the photo-shoots in wedding gowns, holding city landmarks dearly, these

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women call categorizations such as “refugee women” and “happily-everafter” into question. Wedding Bellas make their spectators smile and invite them into a shared joke, as they raise questions about what it means to be a citizen of the most surveilled city in the world, what it means to be a woman in a European country, and what it means to be someone other than a concerned citizen/spectator.

Notes 1. According to UNHCR, forcibly displaced communities include refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced and stateless persons. These categories may coincide, as one can be a refugee who seeks asylum or a stateless refugee. For definition of each forced displacement category, see UNHCR 2018. 2. Many thanks to Ozlem Koksal for bringing this exhibit to our attention. 3. We would like to thank Nela Milic for granting permission to use her images.

Works Cited Aisch, Gregor, Sarah Al Mukhtal, Jaosh Keller, and Wilson Andrews. 2015. The Scale of the Migrant Crisis, From 160 to Millions. New York Times, September 22. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/09/10/world/europe/ scale-of-migrant-crisis-in-europe.html?_r=0. Accessed October 10, 2018. Amirkhani, Jordan. 2016. Between Citizenry and Privilege: Ai Weiwei and Bouchra Khalili. Artpractical 8 (1), November 10. http://www.artpractical.com/feature/between-citizenry-and-privilege/. Accessed January 12, 2019. Artist Ai Weiwei Poses as Aylan Kurdi for India Today Magazine. 2016. India Today (Web Desk), February 1. https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/artistai-weiwei-poses-as-aylan-kurdi-for-india-today-magazine-306593-201602-01. Accessed December 15, 2018. Benegas Loyo, Diego. 2011. ‘If There’s No Justice…’ Trauma and Identity in Post Dictatorship Argentina. Performance Research 16 (1): 20–30. ———. 2014. Apuntes de la postdictadura para una psicología política del trauma. Revista Argentina de Psicología 53: 18–35. Calhoun, Craig. 2010. The Idea of Emergency: Humanitarian Action and Global (Dis)order. In Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions, ed. Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi, 29–58. New York: Zone Books. Çelik, Ipek A. 2015. In Permanent Crisis: Ethnicity in Contemporary European Media and Cinema. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Center for Political Beauty. n.d. Center for Political Beauty.  https://politicalbeauty.com/. Accessed December 12, 2018.

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Dabashi, Hamid. 2016. A Portrait of the Artist as a Dead Boy. Aljazeera, February 4. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2016/02/portrait-artist-dead-boy-ai-weiwei-aylan-kurdi-refugees-160204095701479. html. Accessed January 12, 2019. De Genova, Nicholas. 2017. Introduction. The Borders of ‘Europe’ and the European Question. In The Borders of ‘Europe’: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering, ed. Nicholas De Genova, 1–35. Durham: Duke University Press. Donadio, Rachel. 2017. Listing the Dead. The Atlantic, November 18. https:// www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/11/the-list-refugeeseurope/546275/. Accessed January 15, 2019. Ever wondered what that yellow H sign means? 2017. BBC, 23 September. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-englandleicestershire-41372040/everwondered-what-that-yellow-h-sign-means. Accessed February 19, 2019. Gilbert, Kimutai. 2017. Most Spied On Cities in the World. World Atlas, April 25. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/most-spied-on-cities-in-the-world. html. Accessed February 10, 2019. Houwen, Janna. 2016. An Empty Table and an Empty Boat: Empathic Encounters with Refugee Experiences in Intermedial Installation Art. American, British & Canadian Studies 27 (1): 44–73. Köhn, Steffen. 2016. Mediating Mobility: Visual Anthropology in the Age of Migration. New York: Wallflower Press. MacIntosh, Steven. 2018. Tania Bruguera Explains Tate Modern’s New Turbine Hall Installation. BBC News, October 2. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-45708599. Accessed January 29, 2019. Milic, Nela. 2015. An Artistic Journey through the Experiences of Refugee and Migrant Women in London. In Identity and Migration in Europe: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Maria Caterina La Barbera, 163–173. New York: Springer. ———. 2016. Wedding Bellas—Migrancy as a Dispute to Photographic Traditions. Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture 7 (1): 75–80. Morgan, Piers. 2015. Don’t Shut Your Eyes to this Picture Because We Did This. Now We Have to Make It Right. Daily Mail, September 3. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3221090/PIERS-MORGAN-Don-t-shut-eyespicture-did-make-right.html. Accessed November 19, 2018. Mortensen, Mette. 2017. Constructing, Confirming, and Contesting Icons: The Alan Kurdi Imagery Appropriated by #humanitywashedashore, Ai Weiwei, and Charlie Hebdo. Media, Culture and Society 39 (8): 1142–1161. Nestor, Hatty. 2018. Banu Cennetoğlu: The List. Studio International, September 12. https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/banu-cennetoglu-interviewhowbeit-exhibition-chisenhale-gallery-london-liverpool-biennial-the-list. Accessed January 14, 2019.

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Neuendorf, Henri. 2015. Ai Weiwei Visits Lesbos Refugee Camp to Document the Migrant Crisis. Art World, December 29. https://news.artnet.com/artworld/ai-weiwei-volunteer-refugee-camp-399707. Accessed April 23, 2019. ———. 2016. Ai Weiwei Sets Up Lesbos Studio and Calls for Monument Dedicated to Refugees. Art World, January 4. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/ai-weiwei-lesbos-studio-monument-refugees-401285. Accessed April 23, 2019. Rancière, Jacques. 2009. The Intolerable Image. In The Emancipated Spectator, 83–106. London: Verso. Ratnam, Niru. 2016. Ai Weiwei’s Aylan Kurdi image is Crude, Thoughtless and Egotistical. The Spectator, February 1. https://blogs.spectator.co. uk/2016/02/ai-weiweis-aylan-kurdi-image-is-crude-thoughtless-and-egotistical/. Accessed October 15, 2018. Segato, Rita. 2016. La guerra contra las mujeres. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños. Tan, Monica. 2016. Ai Weiwei Poses as Drowned Syrian Infant Refugee in ‘Haunting’ Photo. The Guardian, February 1. https://www.theguardian. com/artanddesign/2016/feb/01/ai-weiwei-poses-as-drowned-syrian-infantrefugee-in-haunting-photo. Accessed October 15, 2018. Taussig, Michael T. 1997. The Magic of the State. New York: Routledge. Ticktin, Miriam. 2015. Humanitarianism’s History of the Singular. Grey Room 61: 81–86. ———. 2016. Thinking Beyond Humanitarian Borders. Social Research: An International Quarterly 83 (2): 255–271. ‘Tigers Eat Refugees’ Performance Ends without Bloodshed. 2016. Deutsche Welle, 29 June. https://www.dw.com/en/tigers-eat-refugees-performanceends-without-bloodshed/a-19362283. Accessed December 12, 2018. UNHCR. 2016. Video interview with Ai Weiwei. https://www.facebook.com/ UNHCR/videos/10155380042238438/. Accessed January 12, 2019. ———. 2017. Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2017. https://www.unhcr. org/statistics/unhcrstats/5b27be547/unhcr-global-trends-2017.html. Accessed January 12, 2019. ———. 2018. Forced Displacement above 68m in 2017, New Global Deal on Refugees Critical. https://www.unhcr.org/news/press/2018/6/5b27c2434/ forced-displacement-above-68m-2017-new-global-deal-refugees-critical.html. Accessed April 23, 2019. Valencia, Sayak. 2010. Capitalismo Gore. Barcelona: Paidós.

Crisis, Common Sense, and Boredom: A Critique of Neoliberal Hegemony in Turkey Begüm Özden Fırat

In the introduction to The Age of Revolution: 1879–1848, Eric Hobsbawm famously states that “words are witnesses which often speak louder than documents” (1996, 1). He then asks the reader to consider a few “English words which were invented, or gained their modern meaning” in the nineteenth century, during the period he calls the “dual revolution”—including “‘industry,’ ‘industrialist,’ ‘factory,’ ‘middle class,’ ‘working class,’ ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’” (1). [Economic] “crisis” is among them. And to the same list we can also add Kulturkampf. In the last decade, crisis and Kulturkampf have become two essential notions used to define the neoliberal transformation Turkey has been experiencing since the 1980s, while class-related notions have lost their sociopolitical expressive power. Crisis is a recurring concept that has commonly been used to define the conditions experienced by Turkish society following

B. Ö. Fırat (*) Department of Sociology, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Boletsi et al. (eds.), Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36415-1_5

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the 1980 coup d’état, which cleared the way for the neoliberalization not only of the economy but also of society and culture. Kulturkampf, or “culture war,” has recently been used in descriptions of Turkey’s political culture, specifically in the last decade, in reference to the country’s historical modernization process.1 Taner Akçam, an influential historian, recently declared that Kulturkampf was an appropriate notion to define contemporary Turkey. According to Akçam, two large blocs, which can be described respectively as “Western-oriented, progressive, enlightened and modernizing” and “Islamist and conservative,” have been waging an identity war since the nineteenth century over which “culture world” Turkey should belong to. Culture, experienced as a difference in “lifestyles,” is one of the crucial fault lines of contemporary politics, Akçam states (2018, n.pag.).2 Crisis and Kulturkampf have gained widespread usage in defining the historical conjuncture of the rule of the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party, henceforth AKP), founded in 2001 by ̇ the reformist wing of the Islamist Refah Party (Welfare Party). As Ismet Akça, Ahmet Bekmen, and Barış Alp Özden argue, the AKP era “represents the reconsolidation of the neoliberal hegemony after the devastating effects of the 2001 crisis in particular, and the 30-year painful constitution of the neoliberal hegemony in general” (204, 1). While the AKP’s hegemonic project succeeded in ending the political crisis among the elites by constructing a power bloc, its cultural discourse relied on a presumed Kulturkampf, that is, a culture war between the two historical socio-­ cultural camps: that of the modernist, secular, westernized elites on the one hand, and on the other hand the religious, national and “homemade” (yerli) population representing “the real people.” Under AKP rule, Kulturkampf has become a strategy used to overcome the economic and political crises and to govern the masses by waging a war through cultural means. Simultaneously, the process of sustaining the Kulturkampf has led to prolonged social crisis as it further polarizes society. In other words, Kulturkampf is a populist and hegemonic cultural tool that has consolidated AKP voters, and yet, as I will show, it has also created the potential of counter-hegemonic mobilization. Defined as an “uncritical and largely unconscious way(s) of perceiving and understanding the world that has become ‘common’ in any given epoch” (Gramsci 1971, 322), hegemony relies on the articulation of a new language, as well as the incorporation of what Antonio Gramsci calls common sense, by the ruling classes. The hegemonic project of the AKP has taken the question of common sense and language seriously. In the last

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decade, a specific language has been developed, which relies on the reshuffling and reuse of already existing political notions alongside the construction of new phrases and expressions. The expression sıkıntı yok (literally “no boredom” and figuratively more or less “no problem” or “don’t bother”) has been argued to encapsulate the new conception of the world constructed by the language of “New Turkey” (see, e.g., Bora 2018; Cantek 2017). This expression, one of the rampant everyday idioms “invented” within the past decade, first gained widespread usage in everyday language and popular culture, and then found its way into political discourse to the degree that, according to Bora, it has become a sort of milli düstur (“national motto”) (2018, 36). In this chapter, I focus on this “national motto” and read it both as an articulation of hegemonized common sense and as a critical “good sense” that carries the potential of building a counter hegemony. As I will show, sıkıntı yok has been interpreted by left intellectuals and culture critics as the source and symptom of a new neoliberal common sense in tandem with that of the Kulturkampf. In this reading, sıkıntı yok is understood as Gramscian common sense: “the conception of the world which is uncritically absorbed by the various social and cultural environments in which the moral individuality of the average man is developed” (2000, 343). Here sıkıntı yok is read as an expression of the “popular wisdom” of the masses, which is to say the beliefs and opinions held by the mass of the population. I then explore the ways in which this commonsensical expression was subsequently hegemonized by politicians and public authorities during the early stages of the 2018 financial crisis. Here, both the left-leaning intellectuals’ analysis of the expression and its incorporation by the powers that be demonstrate the ways in which the hegemonic articulation of language operates. Finally, I move from crisis to criticism and propose instead an analysis of the expression’s literal meaning (“no boredom”) as an instance of the “good sense,” or what Gramsci calls “the healthy nucleus” (2000, 329) present in the concept of common sense. I argue that this “hidden” literal meaning of the expression lays bare the historical truth of our neoliberal times, namely, that there is no time or place in which to get bored. Such a reading requires that culture not be apprehended as a war zone but as the ground on which the political economy of the every day, that is, struggles around the relations of production, as well as social reproduction, is constructed. Intellectual critique, I argue, should pay attention to this “good sensical” nucleus in the expression so as to manufacture a counter-­ hegemony capable of contesting the rise of neoliberal populist regimes.

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Crisis and Kulturkampf In 2001, Turkey was hit by the biggest economic crisis in the country’s history. This crisis led to an “organic crisis” á la Gramsci, in which not only the existing political parties but also the political system as a whole was questioned by the electorate (cf. Akça 2014).3 As a major consequence of this organic crisis, the AKP, which seemed to be the anti-systemic party, gained the majority of votes in the general elections held in 2002 and became the first party to secure a parliamentary majority since 1987. Akça argues that the AKP manufactured “an expanded hegemony on the basis of neoliberal, conservative and authoritarian populism” and revitalized the neoliberal hegemony by “articulating religious conservatism and neoliberalism, and could win succeeding elections with increasing electoral and popular support” (2014, 45). Indeed, the AKP subsequently managed to win the 2007 and 2011 elections, “survived” the country’s biggest uprising, namely Gezi, in 2013, and a failed coup attempt in 2016, and is still the governing party. In the referendum held in 2017, the parliamentary system was replaced by a presidential system. In 2018, in an early general election, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was elected as the first President of Turkey. As Akça, Bekmen, and Özden state, hegemonic projects are “considered as national-popular programs of action geared towards securing the unity of the power bloc (e.g., of the dominant classes and class fractions),” while “producing and acquiring the consent and support of the subaltern classes through economic redistribution mechanisms and ideological-­ political practices” (2014, 4). In order to gain the consent of the subaltern classes, the AKP inserted measures “to soften the blow of the austerity and privatization programs” involving “redistributive welfare measures” as well as policies aiming at the entry of “working-class households into financial markets” (Akçay 2018, 10). These policies caused the fragmentation and atomization of the subaltern classes and turned them into charity-­ takers and debtors, while simultaneously meeting their immediate material aspirations and partially manufacturing their consent. The cultural dimension of AKP’s hegemonic project relied on the formation of a cultural leadership that defined the Party and its leader Erdoğan as the natural voice of the subaltern sections of society. In the Party’s terms, these subaltern sections had not only been neglected but also offended by what the AKP termed the “Republican Regime’s” imposition of a modernist, secularized, and westernized lifestyle and politics on the masses. The discourse of “the exposure to the West’s cultural

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colonization” (Ahıska 2009, 1049) and of the elites’ compliance and complicity with such colonization has been instrumentalized effectively by the AKP as a means of legitimizing itself as the leader of the “real people.” Raymond Williams defines hegemony as a set of meanings and values experienced as practices. It “constitutes a sense of reality for most people in the society” (2005, 38). Williams states that in order to understand the efficiency and dominance of a culture in a given society, one should understand “the process of incorporation” (38). He emphasizes a process of “selective tradition” in which “from a whole possible area of past and present, certain meanings and practices are chosen for emphasis, certain other meanings and practices are neglected and excluded” (39). Williams further argues that “some of these meanings and practices are reinterpreted, diluted, or put into forms which support or at least do not contradict other elements within the effective dominant culture” (39). The AKP’s hegemonic cultural discourse relied on a selective re-reading of nationalist myths through a religious (Sunni-Muslim) and moralist prism. The cultural discourse of the people (or millet) labeled those who reject this religious-­nationalist identity as “enemies of the nation and the people,” including the “non-religious Kurds, Alevis, liberals, leftists, seculars and all dissidents” (Yabanci 2016, 599). The so-called New Ottomanism (see Tokdoğan 2018), which worked to revive the Ottoman past—a past which, the AKP argued, had been suppressed by the “Republican Regime”—provided the AKP with the popular contours of its hegemonic discourse. This Ottoman revival was reflected in the organization of urban spaces, invention of new national commemorations, and popular culture such as television series (Sirman and Akınerdem 2019; Özçetin 2019). More importantly, the AKP managed to construct a sense of reality that mobilized the non-material aspirations of the subaltern sections of society: by marking them as “victims” of the Republican “Old Turkey,” socially, culturally, and economically displaced and dispossessed, they popularized a sense of resentment (see Yılmaz 2018). “The New Turkey,” an expression that Erdoğan began using after 2010 (Bora 2018, 11), induced a revanchist “bio-politics distinguished by its articulation of neoliberalism and religious conservatism, including the increasing control of social life by means of a myriad of policies imposed in authoritarian ways” (Akça et  al. 2014, 248). Such revanchist policies materialized the Kulturkampf on bodies and across the urban landscape and made it visible at the everyday level. In this sense, the AKP constructed a “neoliberal conservative common sense” that softens socio-economic

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grievances (fragmentation, isolation, alienation) by transposing them to the realm of everyday culture. Hall and O’Shea argue that the “structural consequences of neoliberalism” have been paralleled by “an upsurge in feelings of insecurity, anxiety, stress and depression” (2013, 13). The AKP’s response to that upsurge was the inducement of a revanchist feeling of resentment, an emotional state from which the masses can be rescued only by the cultural and political leadership of the Party and its leader, Erdoğan. The politics of Kulturkampf have proved to be successful in changing the conception of class relations. As David Harvey contends, “[t]he so-­ called ‘culture wars’ … cannot be sloughed off as some unwelcome distraction … from class politics” (2005, 205). We have learned from the studies of the Birmingham School that “culture is ordinary” and that ordinary culture is where class relations are reproduced (see Hall 1994, Williams 2005). Now neoliberal populist regimes teach us that politics is culturalized to the extent that it veils class contradictions by turning ways of life into the zone where a clash between the “nation” and the “enemies of the nation within” takes place. In this context, the notion of Kulturkampf becomes an apt way of describing the cultural politics of the AKP. Kulturkampf, which is argued to be the constructive fault line of the so-called Ottoman and Turkish modernization processes, actually mystifies that of the Klassenkampf (class war) and by doing so veils the crisis of neoliberalism (Bora 2018, 258). Gramsci argued that whoever considers the philosophical enterprise a “cultural struggle to transform the mentality of the people … must technically give first place” to the question of language, since in language “there is contained a determinate conception of the world” (qtd. in Nun and Cartier 1986, 210). Kulturkampf largely relies on the creation of a new language, that of so-called New Turkey, which draws on a montage of old and new figures of speech, each used in a particularistic, reductionist, and essentialist manner so that socio-political issues become more simple, one-­ sided, and hence distorted (Bora 2018). This new language of Turkey consists of expressions among which are those supposedly “invented” by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the current president of Turkey and head of the AKP. These include “doesn’t exist in our culture” (bizim kültürümüzde yok), “homemade and national” (yerli ve milli), “who are you!” (sen kimsin!), and “our sensitivities” (hassasiyetlerimiz) and simultaneously rely on, and further enforce, the polarization of society, while feeding the mechanics of the Kulturkampf by constituting a new common sense.4

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Many Senses of Boredom The opening lines of “Sıkıntı Yok,” an essay by influential culture critic Funda Cantek, read: “[t]here are jargon fashions just like dressing fashions of every era. Suitable for the spirit of the time. In the future, if one asked what the two most consumed words in the second half of the 2000s were, wouldn’t you say ‘sıkıntı yok!’ without hesitation?” (2017, n.pag.; my translation). I, definitely, would. Hobsbawm (1996), like Williams (1960, 1976), argues that when new collective experiences arise from emerging material conditions of life, new words are coined to meet these transformations. Alternatively, existing words can gain new meanings. These words settle into people’s daily language and gain different meanings as they travel across different places and social positions over time. In 2010, around the time that the notion of “The New Turkey” was being invented, a rather new, but not so unfamiliar, expression, sıkıntı yok, found its way into everyday language. The Turkish Dictionary of the Turkish Language Institution describes the word sıkıntı as (i) spiritual tiredness, suffering, annoyance arising from causes such as unemployment, monotony, weariness, and so on; (ii) effective and constant fatigue or anxiety, caused by disorder or confusion; (iii) lack of subsistence caused by a certain lack or poverty; (iv) the state of not being available; (v) figurative: trouble, issue, syndrome, problem (Sıkıntı 2011, n.pag.; my translation). In the last decade, the figurative use of the word sıkıntı has surpassed its literal uses. For example, “there’s a sıkıntı in the text” usually means the text is not good enough, “there’s a sıkıntı in the traffic” means there is most probably a traffic jam, and “there’s a sıkıntı in the budget” means there is probably a budget deficit. Sıkıntı yok has become a buzzword that could mean “no problem,” “excuse me,” or “everything is under control,” sometimes all at the same time. The first entry of sıkıntı yok in Ekşi Sözlük, a collaborative online hypertext dictionary, states that the expression is widely used in the army during mandatory military service. The entry reads: “from privates to captains everybody uses this term and it is highly contagious, one should watch out” (sıkıntı yok  2010, n.pag.; my translation). Around 2011, a former celebrated football player used the word sıkıntı on a TV football show, this time as sıkıntı var (“there’s a problem”). After that, sıkıntı yok and sıkıntı var made their way into the football community and

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terminology in phrases such as “there’s a sıkıntı on Fenerbahçe’s wings” (Bora 2018, 35; my translation). Subsequently, sıkıntı yok became the motto of a character in the popular TV series Kurtlar Vadisi (The Valley of the Wolves), recounting the story of a counter-guerilla organization. From the army to the football community and then to popular culture, sıkıntı yok finally found its way into yet another macho arena: politics. After being excessively used by Erdoğan, then the Prime Minister of Turkey, politicians of all ranks and profiles started using the expression whenever they needed to make a public declaration about a politically dire situation. Eventually, the expression found its way back into everyday language. Today, it is commonly used by everyone regardless of class, ethnicity, age, gender, political, or sexual orientation. There are popular songs bearing the title sıkıntı yok, including pop songs, a traditional folk song, and hip-­ hop songs. There are t-shirts, mugs, and other paraphernalia bearing it as a slogan sold in shops and on websites. Recently, the popular quasi-­ counter-­culture TV-series Çukur (The Hollow) re-popularized the expression, this time by turning it upside down as sıkıntı yoksa sıkıntı var (“there’s a problem if there’s no problem”). This phrase soon made its way onto the streets and became one of the most popular graffiti slogans across Turkey. On May 11, 2018, almost a month before the general elections, President Erdoğan delivered a speech at the Congress of the AKP Youth Section. After the long speech, he suddenly stopped and addressed the crowd—“My dear youngsters, I know you’re bored.” They cheerfully responded “Nooo!” in reply. “Really, are you not bored?” he persisted. Within a couple of minutes, the hashtag #sıkıldık (#wearebored), created by AKP opponents, became a trending topic on Twitter. The opponents of the governing party took it as an opportunity to make their voices heard on social media platforms, explaining why they were bored with the AKP and Erdoğan himself in a myriad of ways, in humorous and witty style. The opposition party Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (The Republican People’s Party) immediately made an election propaganda song entitled “Artık Sıkıldık” (“We are Bored”) (“Artık” 2018). Culture critics and left intellectuals alike declared sıkıntı yok a recent reflection of the worldviews of AKP supporters and an expression of neoliberal common sense. In the following, I focus on some of these articles so as to understand the ways in which they perceive the ongoing “organic crisis.”

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Crisis: Boredom as Common Sense According to Tanıl Bora, sıkıntı yok “essentially … mystifies the essence of matters in question, blurs their meaning, thereby ‘leveling up’ their degree of importance and dignity among matters” (2018, 34). Finding its way into public and political language from that of the everyday, sıkıntı yok, for Bora and others, is actually an articulation of a neoliberal common sense, expressing “the desire to escape from tiring one’s mind and looking into the well of one’s conscience” (34). In the texts collected under the rubric of “Philosophy, Common Sense, Language and Folklore,” Gramsci turns to what he calls the “spontaneous philosophy” that is, in his words, “proper to everybody” (2000, 325). This philosophy, he argues, is contained in “language itself which is a totality of determined notions and concepts and not just of words grammatically devoid of content” as well as “‘common sense’ and ‘good sense’” (2000, 325). According to Gramsci, common sense is not “a single unique conception, identical in time and space” but is “even in the brain of one individual, fragmentary, incoherent and inconsequential, in conformity with the social and cultural position of those masses whose philosophy it is” (2000, 343). Yet it is collectively uttered and understood. Gramsci writes: “What matters is not the opinion of Tom, Dick, and Harry but the ensemble of opinions that have become collective and a powerful factor in society” (qtd in Crehan 2016, x). Common sense is, then, an expression of a messy yet collective wisdom and is important for Gramsci as it is “the cement hegemonic politics needs in order to form alliances between different social groups, and turn interests or claims represented by one group (or by a small number of groups) into a focal point around which other groups gather to create a ‘historical block’ and fight against whoever is perceived as a common enemy” (Snir 2016, 271). In line with the Gramscian understanding of common sense as “the cement hegemonic politics needs,” left-leaning cultural critics, such as Bora and Cantek, analyze sıkıntı yok as a linguistic formulation embedded in the socio-cultural conditions of the Kulturkampf. Hence, the expression reflects “the diffuse, uncoordinated features of a generic form of thought common to a particular period and a particular popular environment” (Gramsci 1971, 332–33). Similarly, Tolga Tüzün, to whom Bora refers extensively in his piece, proposes that sıkıntı yok points to a sociocultural predisposition that involves refraining from facing a problem and thus analyzing a situation,

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thereby withdrawing from being an active social agent and renouncing the responsibility that comes with it (2017, n.pag.; my translation). He argues that a problem requires a solution since “it involves taking a number of steps towards the solution, taking action and giving oneself agency. Analyzing and naming a problem also indicates the existence of a subject that will offer a solution. This subject would act on the problem and solve the problem” (2017). Sıkıntı, however, is not the same as defining a situation as problematic. When a situation is defined as sıkıntı, the person uttering the expression actually suggests that “[t]here is a problem, but I am too tired to deal with it, I am ineffective, there is nothing I could possibly do.” This confirms, Tüzün argues, the ineffective and irresponsible position attributed to the neoliberal political subject (n.pag.). Reinhart Koselleck argues that “without common concepts there is no society, and above all, no political field of action” (2004, 76). If this is so, sıkıntı yok refers to a political field of action based on collective inertia. In that sense, sıkıntı yok functions as a confession and confirmation that one is paralyzed: too paralyzed to act and too paralyzed to think relationally and critically. While Bora and Tüzün analyze sıkıntı yok as a culturally and socially pervasive phenomenon used by both supporters and opponents of the AKP, Funda Cantek’s analysis tends to relate the emergence and utterance of sıkıntı yok implicitly to AKP supporters and, in particular, to a certain performance of masculinity. A telling passage from her essay reads: Sıkıntı yok is … the product of a masculine and conservative language. Moreover, it is national and homemade. It has a heavy macho tone. This is why it doesn’t really fit a young woman’s mouth. Because it also has a sexist tone. “I know everything,” “everything is taken care of,” meaning … [it] conforms to the spirit of our times, implying an unfounded self-confidence. (2017, n.pag., my translation)

By using the words “national and homemade,” Cantek is apparently referencing Erdoğan, the inventor of the formulation, and his designation of “the real people” against the secularist elites. For Cantek, sıkıntı yok is the invention of that hoi polloi and a reflection of the worldviews of AKP supporters, especially the views of men whose “unfounded self-­confidence” is thoroughly articulated. In this piece, Cantek constantly refers to a “broken grammar” of the masses through the utterance of such expressions. No doubt, Cantek’s analysis here falls back onto the notion of the Kulturkampf, reproducing the cultural divide between the ignorant

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masses as the inventor of colloquial language and the language of the elites. Subsequently, Cantek refers to the relationship between everyday language and political discourse by touching upon the capitalization of sıkıntı yok by politicians: [sıkıntı yok] is a replica of the broken grammatical self-esteem of the state officials who declared “there is no sıkıntı at the point of employment” as the unemployment rate sky rockets. As they fall into a funny situation in order to become stylish, it is the pedestal that keeps this monument of self-­ confidence alive. (2017, n.pag., my translation)

Indeed, when Turkey was hit by an economic crisis in 2018, sıkıntı yok suddenly became a popular expression used equally by governmental and state authorities and MPs. This time, the pervasive use of the expression pointed to a paralysis of the state in the face of the approaching financial crisis. The economic dimension of this crisis was different from that of the 2001 crisis, which brought the AKP into power in the first place. Bülent Küçük and Ceren Özselçuk argue that the 2018 crisis is much more pervasive and far-reaching, as “financialization and indebtedness (private, both corporate and household, and public), which are closely tied to construction, the unsustainable motor of capitalist growth in the last decade, have socialized and taken hostage a much larger group of people in a shared economy of both specular and real interdependency” (2019, 12). In this dire situation, sıkıntı yok came in handy for politicians, particularly in the early stages of the crisis. The first signs of the crisis were the failure of state institutions to provide social services. President Erdoğan stated “there is no sıkıntı either in school books, nor in medication, nor in health nor other services” (“Cumhurbaşkanı Erdoğan” 2018, n. pag.; my translation). In relation to the rise in the price of bread, the Turkish Grain Board issued a statement declaring that “It is not right to introduce an increase in the wheat-based price of bread as of today. There is no sıkıntı of wheat in our country” (“TMO’dan Ekmek Zammı” 2018, n.pag.; my translation). When inflation figures rose to 17.9 percent in September 2018, the President this time declared: “We have no sıkıntı, inşallah we will overcome” (“Erdoğan’dan Enflasyon Yorumu” 2018, n.pag.; my translation). When the financial sector and banking system started to face the first signs of the economic meltdown in 2018, Garanti Bank General Manager Ali Fuat Erbil stated, unsurprisingly, that “there is no sıkıntı with banking and

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the current budget deficit will also decrease,” adding “Now that we have seen the worst of the current budget deficit, it means we are halfway through it” (“Garanti Bankası Genel Müdürü” 2018, n.pag.; my translation). Finally, when the country was struck by an outbreak of anthrax during the Islamic Feast of Sacrifice holiday due to infections found in the animals imported from Brazil, Gölcük District Governor Mustafa Altıntaş “had a striking statement regarding the incident”: “The district governor has finally spoken: There is no sıkıntı. Allegations of anthrax concerning one of Turkey’s largest animal farms ‘Vadi Besicilik’ have turned out to be unfounded” (“Kaymakam Nihayet Konuştu” 2018, n.pag.; my translation). Quoting similar news headlines, Bora proposes reading such utterances of sıkıntı yok in relation to the processes of neoliberalization and the fall of several public and state institutions. Its use by ministers, governors, and the president alike points not to a “problem” but to an ambiguous situation—sıkıntı—which is not directly definable. Bora, for example, argues that “such inflationist use of the expression” gives an assumed assurance that “the situation is ‘isolated’ or ‘under control’ and that ‘necessary measures are taken’” whereas in reality the state is ineffective and the situation is out of control (2018, 34; my translation). Sıkıntı yok as an expression of common sense has been hegemonized by those in power and used in a way that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses socio-economic relations at the heart of the crisis. Hence, it is a strategy of governing the masses by mystifying and oversimplifying the political issues in question. Toward the end of his opinion piece, Bora refers to the potential of what he thinks real boredom, that is boredom in its literal sense, might have (2018). Similarly, Tüzün compares the recent figurative use of the notion of sıkıntı with Baudelaire’s notions of spleen and l’ennui as modernist reactions to the experience of modernity (2017). In the following, accepting the authors’ invitations, I focus on the “hidden” potential of the literal meaning of sıkıntı.

Critique: Boredom as Good Sense The notion of common sense helps Gramsci argue that “everyone is a philosopher, though in his own way and unconsciously” while its companion, “the good sense” which is hidden within common sense, provides him with a “second level of analysis,” that of “awareness and criticism” (2000, 325). If the incorporation of common sense and language by the

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ruling classes is how the consent of the masses is built, by the same token a socialist strategy would rely on the articulation of the “hidden” good sense. And that, according to Gramsci, is the task of the intellectual and the Party. In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci asks: “[i]s it possible that a ‘formally’ new conception can present itself in a guise other than the crude, unsophisticated version of the populace?” (2000, 343). This is, no doubt, a rhetorical question. But as Kate Crehan explains, for Gramsci, even though subaltern common sense seems crude and unsophisticated, it is “the ultimate source of new political narratives capable of effectively challenging those of the capitalist hegemony” (2016, 63). Here, Gramsci diverts the reader’s attention toward the critical potential present in common sense. Gramsci calls this “the healthy nucleus” that exists in common sense, “the good sense” which deserves to be made “more unitary and coherent” (2000, 328). The task of critical endeavor is to unearth such a potential present in “common and popular philosophy” which otherwise appears as “only a fragmentary collection of ideas and opinions” (2000, 329). He gives the example of a popular image of philosophy by looking at those expressions which were in common usage in his time. He writes: One of the most usual is ‘being philosophical about it,’ which, if you consider it is not to be entirely rejected as a phrase. It is true that it contains an implicit invitation to resignation and patience, but it seems to me that the most important point is rather the invitation to people to reflect and to realize fully that whatever happens is basically rational and must be confronted as such, and that one should apply one’s power of rational concentration and not let oneself be carried away by instinctive and violent impulses. These popular turns of phrase could be compared with similar expressions used by writers of a popular stamp—examples being drawn from a large dictionary— which contain the terms ‘philosophy’ or ‘philosophically.’ One can see from these examples that the terms have a quite precise meaning: that of overcoming bestial and elemental passions through a conception of necessity which gives a conscious direction to one’s activity. (2000, 329)

Common sense, hence, stems from the everyday sense of practical issues and involves a practical philosophy that might yet be misguided and misrepresented. Therefore, Gramsci insists that the intellectual endeavor should orient itself toward an understanding of the “felt” in the common sense, which is “present in nascent or inchoate form” in people’s consciousness “but which is contradicted and immobilized by other conceptions” (2000, 323). However, as Itay Snir argues, “[t]he common sense of

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the masses is never a simple reiteration of the views of the ruling classes and ‘traditional’ intellectuals, for it necessarily includes elements expressing the people’s genuine experiences and interests. These are ‘real,’ and facilitate critical understanding of the dominant ideology” (2016, 271). What if sıkıntı yok harbors a healthy nucleus, in other words, a Gramscian good sense? What if the popularity of the expression sıkıntı yok in its literal sense (“no boredom”) reveals a historical truth about neoliberal populist regimes: that they leave no room and time for boredom at all? What if everyday life under neoliberal governmentality has become so regulated by biopolitical control, that there is no place left for routine—the kind of monotonous and repetitive action that is deeply associated with boredom—seen as the modern malaise? Modern debates on the notion of boredom define it as a collective mood rooted in the specific conditions of capitalist modernity and its spatio-­temporal organization. In this classical reading, a disenchanted and rational, homogenized, and repetitive modern life leads to the modern subject experiencing boredom. Hence, boredom is understood as a historically specific mass-affective condition. This analysis generates contradictory lines of understanding: one of them finds boredom counter-revolutionary and the other deems it a creative condition with emancipatory potential (see Gardiner and Haladyn 2017). Sıkıntı yok (no boredom) points to the fact that the historically specific conditions that made boredom a pervasive mass-affective state have transformed. Under neoliberal capitalist processes of production and regimes of accumulation—based on dispossession and financialization—the experience of work and leisure has thoroughly changed. The shattering of the workplace and worktime, a characteristic of “flexible” work, precarious employment, the widening of informal work, as well as the commodification of social reproduction and the privatization of public services, have indeed affected the way we live and apprehend our world and our place in it. Ahmet Bekmen argues that neoliberal hegemony became possible due to the dissolution of the material conditions that could give rise to class consciousness (2015, n.pag.; my translation). The shattering of living spaces and workplaces—which provide the material conditions within which the working class is organized, from neighborhood solidarity associations to workers’ unions—causes working-class experience, culture, and political forms of organization to wane. Bekmen argues that this process is

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the direct impact of policies such as “‘breaking’ workers’ unions (scattering economic organizations), urban transformation projects (dismantling the unity of life and space, isolating the working class from urban public space), contracting labor (dividing the unity of the work place), and precarization (obscuring ties among the working class itself and between it and society at large)” (2015, n.pag.). According to Bekmen, the shattering of the material conditions that enable class consciousness to arise will eventually lead to a shattering of the class culture and experience. Following Gramsci, however, we may reach a different diagnosis. Gramsci argues that “[t]he active man-in-the-mass [sic.] has a practical activity, but has no theoretical consciousness of his practical activity” (2000, 333). “One might almost say,” he continues, “that he has two theoretical consciousnesses (or one contradictory consciousness): one which is implicit in his activity and which in reality unites him with all his fellow-workers in the practical transformation of the real world; and one, superficially explicit or verbal, which he has inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed” (2000, 333). Following Gramsci’s reasoning, I argue that sıkıntı yok captures this contradictory consciousness through its two “senses.” Against the backdrop of the shattering of the material conditions that enable class consciousness to arise, sıkıntı yok, in its figurative sense, reflects a compliance with neoliberal hegemony by expressing the loss of a collective experience that would articulate a common class culture. Yet, when read literally, the expression actually points to the transformation of the socio-historical conditions of the subaltern classes’ everyday life and refers to their collective experience: no boredom. Williams states that “[a] lived hegemony is always a process” and as such “[i]t has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified. It is also continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures not at all its own” (2005, 112). The literal meaning of sıkıntı yok, arising from the collective experience of the subaltern classes, is where neoliberal cultural hegemony can be countered. Therefore, a counter-hegemonic struggle should assume the contradictory nature of the common sense, since for Gramsci it is how “the state of moral and intellectual passivity” can be broken. This involves demystifying the conditions that make the cultural discourse of neoliberal populism, that is, Kulturkampf, possible and moving to a second level of analysis that would lay bare the historical material conditions that leave “no room for boredom.”

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Conclusion: The Task of the Critic Bora writes that hegemony subordinates its adversaries to its own agenda and, even worse, turns them into a reflection of themselves by primarily capturing that of the language (2018, 16–17; my translation). Bora insists that we should save our minds, our ideas, our dreams, and our language from the marking of the powers that be, by “[c]onstructing our own words … Constructing our own network … Writing our own story” (2018, 18). The “we” in Bora’s argument broadly refers to the critical and oppositional intellectual forces of society. Gramsci would call them “specialists” or “intellectuals.” For him, the specialist or the intellectual should focus on everyday practical issues. Yet, to criticize common sense does not imply a doctrinaire assault on the “spontaneous sentiments of the masses” for “it is not a matter of introducing science ex novo into the individual life of everybody, but renewing and making critical an already existing activity” (qtd. in Nun and Cartier 1986, 205). He insists that “the philosophy of praxis will in turn found, in conjunction with material changes, a new common sense, bringing about an ‘intellectual and moral reformation,’ a wholesale transformation of people’s conceptions of the world and norms of conduct” (Gramsci 2000, 232). For Gramsci, common sense “feels” but “does not always know or understand,” while “the intellectual element ‘knows’ but does not always understand and in particular does not always feel” (2000, 349). One could regard popular expressions such as sıkıntı yok and their uses in popular culture as simple evidence of the fact that ordinary people live in a permanent state of “false consciousness” as cultural dopes (Hall 1994, 446–47). According to this view, such popular elements are seen as crude sensations involving no critical reflection whatsoever. As Snir states, Gramsci argues that “the philosophy of praxis” will not be able “to overturn the socioeconomic order if it yields the struggle over common sense, for collective political action will never recruit the masses unless its causes appear obvious, namely commonsensical” (2016, 271). Therefore, counter-hegemonic projects engage with the good sense in the common sense—that is, the practical knowledge of the subaltern classes— so as to initiate a critique of the socio-economic order. This requires an understanding of culture not as a historically sedimented abstract set of meanings and values but as an actual site of struggle between dominant and subaltern classes over meaning. In other words, culture should be seen not as a site of a Kulturkampf, but a zone of critique in which the struggle over the meaning of social practices takes place. Critique starts

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from a reworking of the popular range of everyday practices, values, beliefs, and behaviors, which constitute the common sense of the prevailing neoliberal hegemony, and links those popular elements to the practical issues of the every day in order to lay bare its structural inequalities. A counter-hegemonic process starts from the good sense to show that there is indeed no boredom and to start asking why, not in order to make room for boredom but to demonstrate that the lived every day is a zone of struggle. This is why culture matters. Otherwise, as Stuart Hall aptly put it, one should not “give a damn about it” (1994, 453).

Notes 1. Kulturkampf initially defined the German chancellor Otto van Bismarck’s authoritarian politics of getting rid of the Catholic Church’s cultural and social authority in the final decade of the nineteenth century. See Bora 2018, 258. 2. Such line of thinking of course mystifies the historical formation of class relations and its operation at the socio-political level. Also, the lived experience of the clash between the camps is much more complicated than Akçam would suggest. This clash is undoubtedly taking place in modern cities and is not necessarily lived and experienced as a homogenous polarization between the two camps, and modernizing elites would adopt a discursive pluralism. See Ural 2019. 3. David Forgacs explains the notion of organic crisis as follows: “An ‘organic crisis’ is a crisis of the whole system, in which contradictions in the economic structure have repercussions through the superstructures. One of its signs is when the traditional forms of political representation (parties or party leaders) are no longer recognized as adequate by the economic class or class fraction which they had previously served to represent. It is therefore a crisis of hegemony, since it occurs when a formerly hegemonic class is challenged from below and is no longer able to hold together a cohesive bloc of social alliances” (2000, 420). 4. For a selective list of these new expressions and words, see Bora 2018.

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Tokdoğan, Nagehan. 2018. Yeni Osmanlıcılık: Hınç, Nostalji, Narsisizm [New ̇ ̇ Ottomanism: Resentment, Nostalgia, Narcissism]. Istanbul: Iletiş im Yayınları. TMO’dan Ekmek Zammı Açıklaması: Buğday Sıkıntısı Yok. 2018. Anadolu Ajansı, July 5. https://www.aa.com.tr/tr/ekonomi/tmodan-ekmek-zammiaciklamasi-bugday-sikintisi-yok/1195819. Accessed September 1, 2019. Tüzün, Tolga. 2017. Sıkıntı Var! Sıkıntı Yok! Manifold, May 3. https://manifold. press/sikinti-var-sikinti-yok. Accessed September 5, 2019. ̇ Ural, Tülin. 2019. Şehre Intizam Vermek: 1930’larda Türkiye’de Basılmış Adab-ı Muaşeret Kitaplarında Kent [Ordering the Urban Space: The City in the Books ̇ of Manners Published in Turkey in the 1930s]. Kebikeç: Insan Bilimleri için Kaynak Araştırmaları Dergisi 48 (December): 306–320. Williams, Raymond. 1960. Culture and Society 1780–1950. New  York: Anchor Books. ———. 1976. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2005. Culture and Materialism. London: New York: Verso. Yabanci, Bilge. 2016. Populism as the Problem Child of Democracy: The AKP’s Enduring Appeal and the Use of Meso-Level Actors. Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 16 (4): 591–617. Yılmaz, Zafer. 2018. Yeni Türkiye’nin Ruhu: Hınç, Tahakküm, Muhtaçlaştırma ̇ [Turkey’s New Esprit: Resentment, Domination, Destitutionization]. Istanbul: ̇ Iletiş im Yayınları.

Cultural Narratives of Crisis and Populism in Spain: Metaphor, Nation-branding, and Social Change Pablo Valdivia

Introduction: Why a Cultural Constructivist Approach In this article, I will deal with post-2008 Spain as a study object to show the role of metaphor in reshaping cultural narratives in time of crisis. My goal is to explain how metaphors can orientate social realities. In order to

I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Alberto Godioli and Dr. Camilla Sutherland for their valuable insights to this article and to my team at the Chair of European Culture and Literature (University of Groningen). I developed, published, and presented the concepts “Regime of Metaphor” and “Cultural Narrative” for the first time in May 2016 during a research stay at the Universidad de la Frontera, Temuco (Chile), in the context of the H2020 European P. Valdivia (*) University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Boletsi et al. (eds.), Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36415-1_6

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do that, I will adopt a cultural constructivist approach. In this first section, I present my theoretical framework and I make a case for the need of such an approach. In the following sections, I will move onto the analysis of post-2008 Spain. In his controversial book The Blank Slate (2016), Steven Pinker studies some of the challenges presented by modes of thinking that overlook psychological evolutionary developments in human nature. According to Pinker, a radical cultural constructivist approach has blinded some scholarly studies to the extent of leaving important biological aspects out of their analysis on how the social sphere is configured. Indeed, extreme and uncritical academic approaches to any phenomenon have proven to be, to say the least, biased by projecting onto the object of study the critical a priori of the scientist. Unfortunately, this academic praxis is not only common in the Social Sciences and the Humanities, as Pinker seems to suggest but, at large, in all scientific disciplines and knowledge fields. While one can partially agree with Pinker’s broad definition of culture as “a pool of technological and social innovations that people accumulate to help them to live their lives, not a collection of arbitrary roles and symbols that happen to befall them” (Pinker 2016, 65), it might be naive to disdain the power of roles and symbols as elements that orientate behavior and thus provide anchoring to complex representational mechanisms and informational processing. Historically, one of the most powerful mechanisms ever created to both process information and orientate behavior

Commission Excellent Science Marie Curie RISE Project Cultural Narratives of Crisis and Renewal (CRIC) Ref. 645666. Since then, I have presented my findings on “Regime of Metaphor” and “Cultural Narratives” at the University of Valencia (Spain) in June 2016; at Oxford University (UK) in September 2016; at the University of Granada (Spain) in February 2017; at the CRIC Lab University of Groningen in May 2017; at the Universidad de Antioquia (Colombia) in June 2017; at the Universidad Nacional San Marcos (Peru) in January 2018; at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain) in June 2018. This research is funded by three research projects: H2020 European Commission Excellent Science Marie Curie RISE Project Cultural Narratives of Crisis and Renewal (CRIC) Ref. 645666; Spanish Ministry of Science Research Project: “Metaphora: Metaphor as a component of Cultural Rhetoric. Rhetorical, literary, social, ecocritical and cultural aspects and foundations of the metaphorical devices” Reference FFI2014-53391-P; and Chilean Ministry of Science Research Project: “Converging Horizons: Production, Mediation, Reception and Effects of Representations of Marginality” Reference SOC180045.

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were the nineteenth-century national philologies whose ultimate goal was the psycho-emotional legitimization of nation-state imaginaries and their social mobilization by means of fictionalizing cultural phenomena, in other words, configuring a meaningful narrative from/for its enunciative community (Anderson 2006; Hobsbawn and Ranger 1983). Since then, and especially thanks to the fields of narratology and neuroscience, new studies have demonstrated that the way in which we experience narratives is key to understanding very important cognitive processes ranging from the configuration of different typologies of memory to social and political behavior. These studies help to explain how the experience of symbols (literary, cultural, visual, among others) inform worldviews in relation to particular ways of organizing representation, expression, individual and collective imaginaries (identities, political systems, affects, cultural mediations, etc.). As Marco Caracciolo has accurately explained: representation and expression are different layers or aspects of the same process of engaging with texts. Language is inherently representational because it asks interpreters to think about—or direct their consciousness to—mental objects like events and existents. But it is also experiential because it can express experiences by constantly referring back to the past experiences of the interpreters, and by inviting them to respond in certain ways. Note that representation does not come in degrees: something is representational or not (and language always is). (2014, 38)

In this vein, following Caracciolo’s ideas, it is possible to argue that culture does not operate as an accumulative pool (Pinker) but as a process of engaging with a text which articulates roles, symbols, and scenarios. Such a process is inextricably connected to two mechanisms described by Caracciolo: (a) “consciousness-attribution, the simple recognition that a particular event referred to by the story is experiential”; and (b) “consciousness-­enactment,” which “is more sophisticated, since it consists in empathizing with or mentally simulating the experience that we attribute to a fictional character” (Caracciolo 2014, 41). In this regard, Caracciolo borrows the term enactivism from the academic field of Psychology where it “emphasizes the expressive and dynamically enacted nature of cultural meaning” (Baerveldt and Verheggen 2012). Additionally, Antonio Damasio has recently stated in The Strange Order of Things (2018) that “the verbal track is co-responsible for the narrative streak of the human mind, and for most of us it may well be its main organizer. In non-verbal, quasi-filmic ways but also with

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words, we tell stories non-stop, to ourselves, very privately, and to others. We even ascend to new meanings, higher than those of the separate components of the story, by virtue of such narration” (146). Consequently, narratives are one of the core constituent mechanisms of human agency, interaction, mobilization, and social participation. Contrary to what Pinker defended in The Blank Slate, it seems important to not undervalue the power of narratives and culture in favor of mere biologicist appraisals. Stories matter and narrative devices are key to the social, political, and cultural configurations of our actual societies. In the digital era, more than ever, textual communicative practices are pervasive to our everyday lives as Manuel Castells has extensively demonstrated in Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (2012), Aftermath: The Cultures of the Economic Crisis (2012), Communication Power (2013) and Europe’s Crisis (2018). This theoretical crossroads between sociology and cultural studies is especially fruitful when it is brought into dialogue with the work of David Pujante who, from the field of constructivist rhetorics, has argued that: the four basic tropes, or four possibilities of prefiguration (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony) are four types of awareness of the experience obtained from living. A linguistic process is what makes the contents of our experience (our cognition) conscious. Broadening this approach— which is an approach rooted in rhetoric—when engaging in any rhetorical analysis of public discourse, what we have to seek is the relationship between elocutive structures and the inventio-dispositio, that is, the discovery of the ideas of the discourse and its interpretative design of the part of the world that causes it. This interpretation takes place through forms of language and gesture, and does so on several levels: primarily the narrative and the tropological. We certainly produce a plot (a narratio in rhetorical discourse, a subject in literary narrative discourse) which explains events as we see them—this is the composition of our consciousness. (2017, 55)

In light of the ideas produced by Caracciolo, Damasio, Castells, and Pujante, among others, it seems justified to tentatively conclude that a cultural constructivist approach which takes into consideration the enactivist configuration of narrative experiences (narrative level) and the articulation of the rhetorical devices which enable the pre-figurative poetic act of processing information (tropological level) provides us with a new powerful research instrument for the study of cultural narratives. Such an instrument should be at the base of a transposable quali-quantitative model of scientific

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cultural analysis falsifiable and empirically testable. The next section is a preliminary contribution to reading social phenomena, in particular responses to the 2008 financial crisis in Spain, within this new framework.

Populism, the Global-Nation and Cenital: The Spanish Case In the previous section, I have explained why it is relevant to adopt a cultural constructivist approach and I have justified the criteria that sustain my theoretical framework. In this section, I will analyze my case studies by applying the critical instruments presented above. According to Cas Mudde, populism is a thin-centered ideology (2017), that is, a political corpus of ideas that requires a host for its survival, having no core itself. This is why, in the same vein, Mudde maintains that populism always needs another major ideology to survive. Although this approach might be interesting for political scientists, Mudde’s medical image (host-virus) provided centrality to the ideological component of populism. However, from my point of view, populism is a cultural narrative more than a thin-centered ideology; a narrative that requires a psycho-­ emotional attachment for its successful deployment. In Spain, until very recently, there was only a populist left-wing oriented choice epitomized by the political party Podemos, heir to the civil society movement known as 15-M. In my article “Narrando la crisis financiera de 2008 y sus repercusiones” (2016), I established a definition of the so-called crisis literary genre and its typologies in connection to the political configurations of Spanish society since 2008. The term “literatura de la crisis” (literature of the crisis) first appeared on 16 March 2013. It was coined by El Pais journalist Javier Rodriguez Marcos and, as I analyzed in the abovementioned article, it gained immediate momentum as the general label used by media and academia to refer to all the literary production that engaged with or connected to the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermaths. Instead of rejecting or accepting the term, I problematized it by suggesting a typology of the so-called literature of the crisis under the following operation nuclei: (A) Crisis literature in the rural space (Caballos de Labor by Antonio Castellote, 2012); (B) Crisis thriller literature (Baria City Blues by Carmelo Anaya, 2009); (C) Crisis comedy literature (El enredo de la bolsa y la vida by Eduardo Mendoza, 2012); (D) Crisis dystopian literature (Cenital by Emilio Bueso, 2012); (E) Aftermath crisis literature (Cicatriz by Sara Mesa, 2015) which were subdivided into (1)

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Resistance literature (La habitación oscura by Isaac Rosa, 2013); (2) Social alternative imaginaries literature (Diario de campo by Rosario Izquierdo Chaparro, 2013); (3) Financial and real state literature (En la orilla by Rafael Chirbes, 2013); (4) Precariat literature (La trabajadora by Elvira Navarro, 2014); (5) Emergency literature (Democracia by Pablo Gutiérrez, 2012) (Valdivia 2016, 26). My goal in “Narrando la crisis financiera de 2008 y sus repercusiones” was to provide a clear approach that could expose the divergences and similarities among those literary works that directly problematized the 2008 crisis and its aftermaths, those that presented the financial crisis as a context with just a superficial repetition of certain archetypes, and those that offered a complete alternative imaginary representation to the conceptual tensions and actual challenges of such an unstable historical period. On the one hand, the Spanish institutional discourse attempted to attenuate or hide the reality of the 2008 crisis and its repercussions by politically emphasizing the so-called Marca España (Spanish Brand), as Rius-Ulldemolins and Martín Zamorano stated in their article “Spain’s nation branding project Marca España and its cultural policy” (2015). On the other hand, the creative industry produced new literary practices which also used novel channels for dissemination. These works managed not only to voice alternative narratives to the hegemonic one based on the metaphor of Spain as a container of containers (“global nation”) according to Rius and Zamorano in their article, but they also reflected on renewed ways of imagining the social fabric. This is the case with Cenital (Emilio Bueso, 2012), a novel that was first published as a series of blog entries, later as an e-book, and finally edited as a paperback due to the high demand of readers. In a nutshell, Cenital offers a vision of the 2008 crisis different from the above-­ mentioned literature of the crisis. Unlike in most of the novels of the crisis such as Caballos de Labor, El enredo de la bolsa y la vida, Cicatriz or En la orilla, among others, Cenital presents a collective subject articulated via a character called Destral who connects diverse times, spaces, and lives. The main plot of the novel is not very sophisticated as it resembles any average apocalyptic novel: the fossil resources are extinguished, the distribution of food becomes impossible, and Spain, along with the whole of our Western civilization, collapses. Destral succeeds in bringing together a group of people who anticipate the end of neoliberal contemporary societies. Eventually, they manage to create an eco-primitivist society which resists

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the attack of uncritical consumers now turned into a sort of cannibalistic and sadistic tribe. The analysis of the metaphorical systematicity of the novel provides illuminating results. In Cenital’s possible future, the precarious subjectivities resultant from the 2008 crisis are made visible. The precariat moves from the periphery of the society to a central place as the leader of an ecovillage in this dystopian account. The ecovillage is the result of a process of social renewal that emerged as a reaction to the 2008 financial crisis and at the same time represents a new proposal for the articulation of the collective imagination and public space. At the ecovillage, the inhabitants hold no name but respond to the unique set of skills they can offer to the community. In this regard, the text presents a very fruitful paradox: while the novel as a whole is a dystopia, the ecovillage becomes a utopia within the narrative framework of the text. In this novel, metaphor is relevant on two levels: (1) the micro-textual level (occurrences of a given metaphor in a given sentence), and (2) the macro-textual level, that is, the two polarized metaphors of the Cannibals and the Village. Thus, a regime of metaphor (Valdivia 2019) identifies the ecovillage with sustainability and not progress: the village is a body, the village is family, the village is life or, as stated in one passage from the novel (level 1: the micro-textual), “the alternative is the subsistence … you seed potatoes in Winter, you defend them from the plagues in Spring, you water them in Summer and you pick them in Autumn” (Bueso 2012). Cenital’s characters choose the alleged simplicity of rural life over the despair of the consumerist and market-based system. The regime of metaphor BODY-FAMILY-LIFE-SUSTAINABILITY suggested by this novel turns the precarious exploited worker into a citizen of a civilized community. By contrast, the uncritical 2008 consumers and the winners of the free markets turn in this dystopia into individualistic cannibals looking to expropriate the resources of the eco-primitivists. Therefore, in the novel, two cultural narratives based on opposing regimes of metaphor (level 2: the macro-textual) enter into conflict: Alternative Ecovillage Cultural Narrative Hegemonic Post-Neoliberal Cultural Narrative Sharing is good Equity is rational Solidarity is progress Sustainability is the way forward

Expropriating is good Equity is mad Stealing is progress Cannibalism is the way forward

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Thus, far from conceptualizing the 2008 crisis as a contingent point in History, far from understanding the crisis as an ordinary event within a predictable cycle, Cenital imagines a rural and dystopian setting of extraordinary polarization. Economic cannibalism and the rise of inequality (Milanovic 2016) after the 2008 crisis are translated in Cenital into characters, places, and actions. Cenital, through its post-apocalyptic scenario, presents a North versus South conflict relatable to the European context. Cannibalism, in the novel, is easily recognizable as a metaphor for the austerity policies. These policies led to the impoverishment and reduction of the Spanish middle class since 2008, which has received the name of austericide due to the sharp increase in suicides connected to the trauma produced by the repercussions of the crisis.1 In addition, two powerful macro metaphor scenarios collide in Cenital: the global village and the global nation. The latter was at the center of institutional discourse: Cultural diplomacy must reinforce Marca España abroad, which must include all the elements that define the new Spanish reality. Today, the democracy that is Spain is deeply plural with regard to values such as gender equality, renewable energies, creativity, and innovation and cooperation for development, and the nation seeks to promote the growing external projection of its companies and an active presence in every international organism. Spain’s cultural diplomacy must follow this projection and transmit those values of modernity. [Extract from the official policy document published by the Spanish Government]. (Rius-Ulldemolins and Martin Zamorano 2015, 8)

According to this text, the country could be summarized by the primary metaphor Spain is modern. In this regard, Spain becomes a mini-narrative informed by the pervasiveness of a regime: Spain is equal, Spain is green, Spain is creative, Spain is innovative, Spain is cooperation, Spain is progress. However, the dystopia of Cenital is inspired by a totally different narrative where Spain is unemployment, Spain is precarity, Spain is unequal, Spain is toxic, Spain is stagnation (Bueso 2012). The nation-­ branding process seems to project a misperception of modernity here as it identifies the term modern with global economics. Therefore, Cenital is not only a piece of fiction, but it also provides an alternative imaginary to the institutional cultural narrative that was promoted by official political bodies from 2008 until 2013 over the toughest years of the European austerity measures which denied the very existence of the financial crisis and its tragic social consequences in Spain.

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Populism has risen in Spain from the abovementioned conflict between regimes of metaphor. The increase of Spanish and regional nationalist support is directly connected to the dissonance produced by the nation-­ branding of Spain as a global nation and the opposition to this branding. This leads to another key question: How is it possible to conceive a critique of the neo-liberal present outside of the polarizing/dichotomic/ antagonistic forms that are typical of the populist narrative? In Cenital, it is possible to trace an alternative to the mindset and attitude of the neo-­ liberal system, but it is difficult to not come across polarized metaphor which feed into the typical “us vs. them” form of populist cultural narratives. This political attitude has been broadly shared by voters who identify the traditional political parties with the European Union and with neoliberal global politics and economic practices. As a reaction, the nation-state epitomizes a populist ecovillage-like narrative where the cannibals are the political elites and the people the neglected survivors. The politics of fear, as Wodak calls it, is giving way to a new cultural narrative: the politics of resentment. Under this new paradigm, the European Commission has tried to propose a narrative compromise which will be the object of my analysis in the following section.

The White Paper on the Future of Europe and the Way Forward? The White Paper on the Future of Europe and the Way Forward was presented to the European Commission on 1 March 2017. Its aim was to open a debate and foster critical reflection on the goals of the European Union for 2025. The second half of its title, “the way forward,” is very telling of the metaphorical frame on which the conceptual grounding of the document relies. Terms such as drivers (“this White Paper maps out the drivers of change in the next decade”); carrying-on (“as in carryingon, the single market is strengthened”); accelerating and continue to ­ (“these trends will only accelerate and continue to change the way democracy works”); among other examples, are predominantly present in the document. This is especially evident in one of the five possible scenarios contemplated in it and titled as “those who want more do more,” where “carrying on” (as a train or leading group) is one of the most privileged notions. In short, the document conceptually operates under metaphor of motion as is well noted from its title. The privileged primary metaphor of

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“Europe is Motion” engenders some semantic expectations that enable particular, and no other, (un)conventional metaphor which further articulate a specific mini-narrative or scenario (progress). However, the document has no single metaphor that alludes to the importance of a more social Europe or that somehow establishes a narrative experience (following Caracciolo’s ideas) out of the economic metaphor. By contrast, as argued by Tanja Petrovic in “Images of Europe and the Process of the Western Balkan Countries’ Accession to the European Union” (2014), the post-war metaphorical configuration orbited around a regime of metaphor such as “European Union is a Building”; “European Union is a Family”; “State Members as Friends”; “European Union as Equilibrium”; “European Union as an Alliance.” These metaphor implied relationships of trust, solidarity, compromise, and non-economic but moral conceptual frameworks as friendship. A comparison between the regime of metaphor underlying the White Paper and the foundational metaphor of the European Union provides a clear insight into how the European Union is conceptually feeding populist narratives. A very good example is the metaphor fortress Europe which goes conceptually against the principles of the European Union but perfectly captures the logic of the populist cultural narrative: Europe as a village that has to protect itself from the barbarians that aim to bring Europeans’ pacific co-existence to an end, just as the cannibals of Cenital were the demonized Other (“us vs. them” populist form abovementioned). In 2014, European politicians agreed on the need for a new narrative for Europe (2014), and this was meant to be one of the projects for a more inclusive union. However, my analysis of the metaphoric systematicity in the mentioned case studies offers substantial qualitative and quantitative evidence which leads us to conclude that the newest anti-European, anti-diversity, protectionist, nativist, and xenophobic populist narratives that have emerged in Spain, France, Italy, and Greece, as well as in other European countries, share the common denominator of a narrative experience based on fear and resentment. The collapsing regime of metaphor epitomized by Europe as a family is being quickly replaced by Europe as a competition. Perhaps, the European Commission should deeply meditate on the socio-emotional implications of promoting texts such as the White Paper, which inform a cultural narrative of exclusion rather than inclusion and seems to fuel rather than exhaust populist attitudes.

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An Alternative? Problematizing Metaphors and Cultural Narratives As I elaborated in my article “Narrating Crises and Populism in Southern Europe: Regime of Metaphor” (2019), a metaphor is not only a linguistic device. It is also a cognitive operation that configures and shapes the pre-­ figurative poetic act which articulates our worldviews. Examples of this claim have been analyzed in the context of the post-2008 crisis. This has made clear that we need to problematize the following question: Why are metaphors so important? Scientific and academic scholarship (Burgers 2016, Gibbs 2017, Kövecses 2010, Musolff 2009, 2012, 2016, 2017, Winter and Matlock 2017, Zaiotti 2008) supports the idea that metaphors hold the potential for re-signifying a given informational process by means of connecting apparently distant objects (mental images, embodied movement, multimodal representations, among others). In the specific context of this chapter that focuses on the post-2008 Spain crisis, the study of metaphor becomes relevant as it allows us to identify underlying sets of practices, attitudes, beliefs, aesthetics, and ethical values which configure the citizens’ ideological and moral enactment in the public sphere. Despite the fact that Conceptual Metaphor Theory was originally considered a neo-positivistic approach, its latest developments are useful for analyzing social configurations. Following this line of argument, my working hypothesis is that by studying the metaphorical systematicity produced within certain interpretative communities, it is possible to ground the conceptual system that informs cultural and political practices such as populist movements while also tracing novel metaphors that can activate renewal and produce structural changes in our societies (Valdivia 2016, 2017, 2019). In recent European history, perhaps one of the most important turning points as a result of which a hegemonic metaphorical system—what I have elsewhere called regime of metaphor (Valdivia 2019)—suffered a structural change was the 2008 financial crisis. The economic recession produced structural changes in almost every single stratum of the social fabric in Europe including the re-signification of its symbolic capital (Crosthwaite 2012). This crisis triggered the downfall of the 2008 pre-given set of cultural, political, and institutional values. In its aftermath, a new horizon of political and social instability gave room to different cultural imaginaries all across Europe. In the years when the European Commission imposed austerity measures, one psycho-emotional key-element gained particular

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momentum among these new imaginaries: fear. In this vein, Ruth Wodak has explained that the post-crisis opened up to a new context defined by a politics of fear: “Currently, we observe a normalization of nationalistic, xenophobic, racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric, which primarily works with fear: fear of change, of globalization, of loss of welfare, of climate change, of changing gender roles; in principle, almost anything can be constructed as a threat to Us, an imagined homogeneous people inside a well-­protected territory” (2015). The processes that Wodak refers to, I argue, emerge as the fictional engendering of different sets and configurations of the citizen’s ideological and moral grid operating in a given cultural narrative (Valdivia 2017, 2019). What is a cultural narrative? Due to the absence of a comprehensive definition of the term cultural narrative, I propose to conceptualize the phrase as the moral and aesthetic coded symbolic matrix-in-the-making which orientates behavior and signifies the imaginary relationship between an individual (and/or [virtual] community) and her (his/their) material conditions of existence in a given historical-spatial context (Valdivia 2019). In short, a cultural narrative is a sort of dark matter that establishes the cognitive and performative grounds of social interactions, attachments, expectations, rationalities, and modes of becoming. Cultural narratives operate as cognitive and performative thresholds as they create meaning and orientate behavior in multidirectional relational ways (Valdivia 2019). Regardless to mention that a threshold, by definition, is the “level or point at which we start to experience something, or at which something starts to happen or change” (Cambridge Dictionary 2019). If we take into consideration that in most of our cultural narratives, namely also communicative events, 16.4% (written news), 7.7% (interpersonal conversations), and 18.5% (academic texts) of words are metaphoric (Burgers 2016), we can grasp the pervasiveness of metaphorical systems. In Burgers’ words: metaphors provide frames of thinking about societal topics, by highlighting particular aspects of the target [domain] while obscuring others. Because frames of thinking about the old situation shift in the context of change, focusing on the metaphors through which these frames of thinking are expressed in language is an efficient way to model change in communication. (Burgers 2016)

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Consequently, it is important to ask: How do metaphors intervene in the creation of alternative cultural and political imaginaries and thus social change? According to Fez-Barringten (following Lakoff and Johnson 1980a, b, Lakoff 1990), “[o]ur metaphor system is central to our understanding of experience and to the way we act on that understanding” (2012, 85). In my view, such understanding of experience is deeply connected to the fictional narrativization of space, time, and self-referential expression as explained in the first section of this chapter. In short, as it was illustrated in detail through the analysis of our case studies, we are the fictions we engage with and which are hierarchically operated under multi-­ directional and multi-layered forces. Recently, Alberto Godioli and Ana Pedrazzini (2019) in “Falling Stars and Sinking Ships: Framing and Metaphor in Cartoons about Brexit” have expanded this idea by emphasizing the importance of Andreas Musolff’s notion of scenario2: The framing power of metaphor has been widely investigated by scholars in recent years (Semino et al., 2018; Boeynaems et al., 2017; Ritchie, 2013; Musolff 2006), also with specific regard to the framing of economic, political, and social crises in contemporary Europe (Valdivia 2017); a crucial notion in this respect is that of scenario, denoting a figurative ‘mini-­narrative’ generated by a given metaphor and expressing an ‘evaluative stance’ on the perceived reality (Musolff 2017, 3). (Godioli and Pedrazzini 2019)

The scenario enables mini-narratives which operate at the level of cultural narratives. Examples of mini-narratives were provided by Musolff in “Metaphor Scenarios in Public Discourse” (2006) where it was explained how “mini-narratives or scenarios dominate the discourse manifestations of source domains” (22). Musolff used a corpus of four newspaper articles (from The Guardian, The Economist, Die Zeit) which were dealing with the complex political relationship between Britain, France, and Germany at the time. Musolff argued that the conceptual constellations offered in the articles were all related to a common source domain: LOVE-­ MARRIAGE-­FAMILY. In order to analyze the subdomain of conceptual structures present in the articles, he suggested to use the notion of “mini-­ narratives or scenarios” which are structured “by a SOURCE-PATH-­ GOAL schema in the time domain” (Musolff 2006, 27). According to Musolff:

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Turner and Fauconnier (2003) also speak of “scenarios” with regard to conceptual blendings, as in the saying “If Clinton were the Titanic, the iceberg would sink.” Here, the target, topic of President Clinton’s political survival during the public investigation of his sexual scandals and the historical tragedy of the Titanic are blended into the “complex counterfactual scenario in which the Titanic sinks the iceberg” (Turner & Fauconnier 2003, 470–471). The scenario in this case is a complex dynamic schema that is “run” in the mental space created by the blending. (Musolff 2006, 27)

In my own earlier research which is building up knowledge from Musolff’s ideas, I have stated that hegemonic metaphorical systematicity (regime of metaphor) can be traced by (1) studying a set of primary metaphor; (2) analyzing (un)conventional metaphor; (3) delving into the metaphor scenarios; (4) examining the regime of metaphor; (5) assessing the cultural narrative(s); and (6) evaluating how they operate in institutional discourse. This mode of analysis is especially fruitful when dealing with the rise of populist attitudes (Valdivia 2018). As I have argued in previous work, populism responds to the articulation of an imagined artifice: First, the mythical and legendary past is identified with another that was not replete with major social injustices and was chronologically prior to the existence of the European Union. Second, the imaginary nation-state community is postulated as equivalent to the Welfare State. Third, one or more external agents are discovered to be responsible for the loss of the Welfare State. Fourth, the populist, supremacist and nationalist political and cultural actors promise that as soon as they are in power the national sovereignty will be restored, thus putting an end to all the problems of a conflict presented starkly as between the elite and the people. These two terms, elite and people, are turned into theological principles when the agent pronouncing them defines them at the same time. (Valdivia 2018)

In this regard, there is a clearly identifiable socio-emotional turn in political discourse, an Eros (in a Lacanian sense) of the confrontation that rewards non-encompassing attitudes and a hegemony of the economic metaphor. Metaphor of solidarity (European Union is a family; European Union is home; European Union is progress) have been displaced by metaphor of protectionism, competition, and failure (European Union is a fortress, European Union is a market, European Union is sinking) as demonstrated by the quali-quantitative analysis of Valdivia (2019) and Godioli and Pedrazzini (2019). In this context, Southern Europe, and more

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specifically Spain which can be regarded as a laboratory for the Union, becomes a very revealing case study on how social discontent has been channeled in different directions. I opened this chapter by alerting to the risks of an essentialist biologicist approach to social phenomena. A similar warning should be issued to policymakers and their conceptual constructions. As demonstrated in these pages, a cultural constructivist approach can contribute to seeing beyond the utilitarian appropriation of figures. Any political all-encompassing project without a pivotal cultural narrative based on a regime of metaphor that can emotionally meet the expectations of the public seems doomed to fail. Finally, it is worth asking ourselves again: How can conceptual metaphors be used by social actors to map the mutable nature of our societies and to promote social change? The answer lies with the Humanities which is the oldest discipline dealing with metaphor. Tracing the response to complex societal problems through cultural representations and practices might help us to understand changes and challenges and thus improve the quality of our democratic mechanisms.

Notes 1. According to the Spanish National Institute of Statistics, 3914 people died in 2014 as direct result of the austerity measures implemented by the European Union and the government of the People’s Party. 2. As conceptualized by Andreas Musolff in Political Metaphor Analysis (2017).

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Baerveldt, Chris, and Theo Verheggen. 2012. Enactivism. In The Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology, Jaan Valsiner, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https:// www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019539v6430.001. 0001/oxfordhb-9780195396430-e-9. Accessed 17 September 2019. Burgers, Christian. 2016. Conceptualizing Change in Communication Through Metaphor. Journal of Communication 66: 250–265. Caracciolo, Marco. 2014. The Experientality of Narrative. Berlin: De Gruyter. Castells, Manuel. 2012. Networks of Outrage and Hope-social Movements in the Internet Age. London: Wiley. ———. 2013. Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2018. Europe Crises. London: Polity Press.

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Castells, Manuel, Joao Caraça, and Gustavo Cardoso. 2012. Aftermath: The Cultures of the Economic Crisis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crosthwaite, Paul. 2012. Is a Financial Crisis a Trauma? Cultural Critique 82: 34–67. Damasio, Antonio. 2018. The Strange Order of Things. New York: Pantheon Books. Fez-Barringten, Barie. 2012. Architecture: The Making of Metaphors. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars. Gibbs, Raymond W. 2017. Metaphor Wars: Conceptual Metaphors in Human Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Godioli, Alberto, and Ana Pedrazzini. 2019. Falling Stars and Sinking Ships Framing and Metaphor in Cartoons about Brexit. Journal of European Studies 49 (3–4): 1–22. Hobsbawn, Eric, and Terence Ranger. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kövecses, Zoltan. 2010. Metaphor and Culture. Acta Universitatis Sapientae Philologica 2 (2): 197–220. Lakoff, George. 1990. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980a. Conceptual Metaphor in Everyday Language. The Journal of Philosophy 77 (8): 453–486. ———. 1980b. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Martín Zamorano, Mariano and Joaquim-Ulldemolins. 2015. Spain’s Nation Branding Project Marca España and Its Cultural Policy: The Economic and Political Instrumentalization of a Homogeneous and Simplified Cultural Image. Journal of Applied Statistics 21(1): 1-31. Milanovic, Branko. 2016. Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Mudde, Cas. 2017. The Populist Radical Right: A Reader. London: Routledge. Musolff, Andreas. 2006. Metaphor Scenarios in Public Discourse. Metaphor and Symbol 21: 23–28. ———. 2008. The Embodiment of Europe: How do Metaphors Evolve? In Body, Language, and Mind, 301–326. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. ———. 2012. Immigrant and Parasites: The History of a Bio-Social Metaphor. In Migrations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 249–258. Berlin: Springer. ———. 2016. Political Metaphor Analysis: Discourse and Scenarios. London: Bloomsbury Press. ———. 2017. Metaphor and Cultural Cognition. In Advances in Cultural Linguistics, 325–344. Singapore: Springer. Musolff, Andreas, and Jörg Zinken. 2009. Metaphor and Discourse. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Petrovic, Tatjana. 2014. Images of Europe and the Process of the Western Balkan Countries’ Accession to the European Union. In Constructing and Communicating Europe, ed. Olga Gyarfasova and Karin Liebhart, 121–147. London: Lit Verlag.

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Pinker, Steven. 2016. The Blank Slate. New York: Viking. Pujante, David. 2017. The Discursive Construction of Reality in the Context of Rhetoric. In Developing New Identities in Social Conflicts. Constructivist Perspectives, ed. Esperanza Lopez-Morales and Alan Floyd, 42–65. London: John Benjamins. Valdivia, Pablo. 2016. Narrando la crisis financiera de 2008 y sus repercusiones. 452° F Journal of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature 15: 18–36. ———. 2017. Literature, Crisis, and Spanish Rural Space in the Context of the 2008 Financial Recession. Romance Quarterly 64 (4): 163–171. ———. 2018. Ten Years on From the Crisis: Writing the Future of Europe. BBVA Openmind. https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/humanities/politics/ten-yearson-from-the-crisis-writing-the-future-of-europe-i/. Accessed 17 September 2019. ———. 2019. Narrating Crises and Populism in Southern Europe: Regimes of Metaphor. Journal of European Studies. White Paper on the Future of Europe. 2017. European Commission, March 1. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/white-paper-future-europe_en. Accessed 18 October 2017. Winter, Bodo, and Teenie Matlock. 2017. Primary Metaphors Are Both Cultural and Embodied. In Metaphor: Embodied Cognition and Discourse, 99–117. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wodak, Ruth. 2015. The Politics of Fear. London: SAGE Press. Zaiotti, Ruth. 2008. Bridging Commonsense: Pragmatic Metaphors and the ‘Schengen Laboratory’. In Metaphors of Globalization, ed. Vincent Pouliot, 66–80. London: Palgrave.

PART II

Intersecting Crises

Palestine and the Migrant Question Olivia C. Harrison

Crisis or Question? Nearly two decades ago, Mireille Rosello reminded us that “the vision of the immigrant as guest is a metaphor that has forgotten it is a metaphor” (2001, 3). The trope of the migrant as unexpected guest remains ubiquitous in Western discourses about migrants today, from nativist discourses on the right to liberal attempts to reframe the contemporary “migrant crisis” in humanitarian terms (Hobsbawm 1990, 174; Bauman 2016).1 What I call instead the migrant question foregrounds and critiques the production of a dehistoricized discourse of crisis about the “invasion” of Europe by colonial subjects-turned-foreigners. The migrant question has been central to grassroots anti-racist activism and cultural production in France for the past fifty years, starting with the 1972 Franco-Algerian play Mohamed arfad valiztek (Mohamed pack your bags). As I will show, the convergence of the Palestinian question and anti-racism in postcolonial France is not accidental or, for that matter, circumscribed to France.

O. C. Harrison (*) University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Boletsi et al. (eds.), Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36415-1_7

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Already a key concern in the early 1970s when anti-racist activists began invoking “Palestine as a rallying cry,” the migrant question has taken on even more urgency for decolonial activists in recent years across heterogeneous (post)colonial contexts (Said 1992, 125). Building on key insights delivered by Hannah Arendt and Edward Said decades ago, this chapter takes up three recent migrant texts to investigate the intersection of the Palestinian and migrant questions: Brûle la mer / Ihrag al-bahr (Burn the sea), a 2014 film by Maki Berchache and Nathalie Nambot that stages a comparison between a Tunisian harrag (“burner” or undocumented migrant) and an occupied Palestinian in Paris; Tropique de la violence (Tropic of violence), a 2016 novel by the Mauritian writer Nathacha Appanah that invokes Palestine to elucidate the abject misery of the inhabitants of “Gaza,” the notorious slum of France’s Indian Ocean island, Mayotte; and Ai Weiwei’s 2017 documentary film Human Flow, which places the Palestinian question at the heart of the migrant question. In different ways, these texts deploy Palestine in a comparative framework to show that the mass transfer of populations we are witnessing today is less a turning point—one of the etymological meanings of crisis—than a new iteration of “history as recursion . . . processes of partial reinscriptions, modified displacements, and amplified recuperations” (Stoler 2016, 26–27). Migrants are not foreigners, strangers, or unexpected guests in these texts, but the human “debris” of empire, simultaneously forced into movement and immobilized in transit zones at the borders of the (former) metropole (Stoler 2013).2

Sans papiers I begin my reading of Palestine and the migrant question with Maki Berchache and Nathalie Nambot’s 2014 documentary film Brûle la mer, which stages an encounter between a Tunisian harrag and a Palestinian who occupy different coordinates of the migrant experience: the Tunisian wants to stay in a country, France, that is barred to him; the Palestinian came to Paris legally but finds himself unable to return home. As the characters put it in the scene I analyze below, their stories are not identical (mish nafs al-hikaya, mish kif-kif ) and yet they nonetheless offer a complex audiovisual articulation of the shared experience of (post)colonial migration. One of the most original documentaries about the migrant question in Europe, Brûle la mer sets up an unexpected comparison between the situation of harraga (plural of harrag) and Palestinians, raising a set of

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provocative and, I will argue, urgent questions: what are the conditions that might enable us to think the Palestinian and migrant questions together? To what extent can the Palestinian question help elucidate current mass displacements? What, in turn, does the migrant question tell us about the Palestinian question? The visual introduction to Palestine in Brûle la mer is a thirty-second long take, placed eighteen minutes into the opening sequence, which narrates the protagonist’s journey to France (Fig.  1). Two young men are resting on a grassy knoll surrounded by pine trees, white clouds drifting through a blue sky in a tableau that might be described as pastoral were it not for the incessant drone of highway traffic and the high-rise towers jutting out in the background, which unmistakably place this scene in la banlieue, the working-class urban sprawl located on the other side of the ring road that circles Paris. Though they are at ease, they seem preoccupied, casting their gaze far into the distance at what we will later understand, thanks to a reverse shot in one of the final scenes of the film, is Paris intramuros (Fig.  2). On one side of the screen, reclining in the grass, is the film’s co-director and protagonist, Maki Berchache, whose itinerary from a fishing village in the south of Tunisia to a Bagnolet high-rise is retold in

Fig. 1  Maki and Shadi resting in a Bagnolet park. Screen capture from Brûle la mer (2014). Courtesy of Maki Berchache and Nathalie Nambot

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Fig. 2  Paris seen from la banlieue. Screen capture from Brûle la mer (2014). Courtesy of Maki Berchache and Nathalie Nambot

the film through grainy super-8 and 16mm color shots of the Tunisian seashore and the French banlieue. Sitting next to him is a character we have not yet encountered, his arms resting on his knees: Shadi Al Fawaghra, a Palestinian from the West Bank who has come to Paris to speak about “the Palestinian situation (wad‘a filastin)” and finds himself stranded in the French capital, unable to return home.3 The camera observes the two young men silently for several long seconds before cutting to a claustrophobic shot of Maki’s window in one of the high-rise towers, a framing shot that will structure the film as it shuttles back and forth between Paris and Tunisia (Fig. 3). Shadi remains unnamed in this opening scene: he is an anonymous migrant in the Parisian banlieue. Ten minutes before the end of the documentary, the camera returns to the pair to reveal the circumstances of their encounter, and the importance of this Tunisian-Palestinian friendship in a documentary about migrants to France. Maki begins to speak softly in Tunisian Arabic (darija). “I really like this place,” he says. “You feel like you’re somewhere else.” His friend agrees, in Palestinian Arabic (‘amiya): from this vantage point, the city is “like an image, like a dream.” In the diglossic conversation that follows, Maki and Shadi rehearse the events

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Fig. 3  The view from Maki’s window. Screen capture from Brûle la mer (2014). Courtesy of Maki Berchache and Nathalie Nambot

that brought them together, comrades in misfortune. They “arrived in France at the same time . . . not from the same country (balad), but from the same land (ard).” They share a language, Arabic (albeit different dialects) and cultural tradition. But beyond this almost clichéd articulation of pan-Arab cultural affinity lies a stark assessment of their shared political situation. As Shadi explains, neither he nor Maki was allowed to leave his country of birth. “Visa sa‘ban” is his concise explanation: visas are hard to come by, but also passports, laissez-passers, all the documents that the sans-papiers, the undocumented, are lacking. Their trajectories are exemplary of the paradoxical condition of refugees, who cannot move freely, and yet find themselves forced into perpetual movement, unable to return home or make a new one in the place they have arrived. “To travel (safar) is a dream,” muses Shadi. “Yes,” agrees Maki, “to travel is a dream.” The shot closes with the pair still gazing at the faraway image of a city inaccessible to those who seek refuge there. What Shadi says next, however, introduces an important distinction between the two migrants. At this point in the film, we know that Maki has acquired legal residency. He lives in an apartment in Bagnolet, one of the rapidly gentrifying banlieue communities surrounding Paris, speaks

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French fluently, and is now a filmmaker, as well as the protagonist in his own story. Unlike Maki, one of the 25,000 Tunisians who fled the country during the revolution and hope never to return, Shadi came to Paris legally and now finds himself unable to return to a home under military occupation.4 He is the stateless subject of a colonial occupation that bars him access to his native land. “I wanted to travel (safar),” insists Shadi, “not leave my country (baladi).” In spite or perhaps because of his strong sense of identification with Tunisians when the revolution began—“we were all with the revolution . . . we felt that we were the same people (nafs al-­ sha‘b)”—Shadi does not share Maki’s telos. “It’s not the same story (mish nafs al-hikaya),” he explains, in Palestinian ‘amiya. “No, it’s not the same thing (mish kif kif ),” Maki agrees, in Tunisian darija. The aural difference in the friends’ Arabic tongue gives an acoustic materiality to the divergence in their trajectories of exile. And yet, the audiovisual language of this scene blurs the distinction that is made here in narrative, linguistic, and affective terms, resulting in a transcolonial articulation of indigeneity rooted not in the same colonial experience but in the same metaphoric land (ard), expanded to include Tunisia, Palestine, and la banlieue. As Shadi recounts the uprooting of olive trees in his village, Wad Rahal, the camera pans around in a 360-degree hand-held panoramic shot of Bagnolet and the semi-industrial outskirts of Paris, gradually zooming in as if to extend the aerial view from Maki’s apartment in the opening sequence of the film. Maki’s narrative of migration finds an echo in Shadi’s trajectory of exile, resulting in the audiovisual layering of an occupied Palestinian village onto the drab greyness, factory chimneys, and high-rise towers of la banlieue. The image, the dream that Shadi invoked at the start of this scene loops back to his imagined Palestine, projecting home onto the site of exile, and Palestine onto the postcolonial metropole. “My body is here,” he confesses, “but I left my heart in the country (fil-balad).” As if fulfilling Shadi’s wish for return (‘awda), the following sequence, set in Tunisia, films Maki and his parents walking through an olive grove, whipping the branches with thin rods to make the fruit fall. The camera zooms in on the ripe fruit in his father’s open palm, a visual offering, through montage, for the Palestinian friend Maki has left behind in Paris (Fig. 4). But this scene is also, in a sense, a wish fulfillment for Maki, who is able to travel back home now that he has obtained French residency. Instead of being deported, he has won the privilege of mobility. The manifest pleasure Maki takes in being reunited with his family and his land

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Fig. 4  Tunisian olives for a Palestinian friend. Screen capture from Brûle la mer (2014). Courtesy of Maki Berchache and Nathalie Nambot

complicates the story he has been telling in the film: that life in Tunisia was a slow death, that he had no choice but to leave. Poised between the home he has left and the dream of mobility he shares with his Palestinian friend, Maki seems to occupy an ambivalent position at the close of the film, torn between a desire for travel and a yearning for home. And yet, without effacing the very real difference between Maki and Shadi, Brûle la mer allows their itineraries to intersect in meaningful ways. The final sequence of the film foils our desire to understand the migrant question in simple terms, forcing us to widen our geographical and historical frame of analysis to include the Palestinian question in the story of migration. In the audiovisual chiasmus of the closing sequence, an imagined Palestine takes root in Tunisia while la banlieue echoes with the sounds of Israeli bulldozers. The complex audiovisual grammar of Brûle la mer is the starting point in my investigation of the migrant crisis from a Palestinian point of view. Despite the stark differences registered by Maki and Shadi in this scene— the Tunisian desires to stay in a country that does not want him; the Palestinian wants to go home, but cannot—Brûle la mer sets up a startling parallel between Palestinian refugees and contemporary migrants, and

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invites us to explore the resonances of the Palestinian question in a world that continues to be shaped by forced exile and violent expropriation. What does the ongoing migrant crisis reveal about the decades-old Palestinian question, and what can Palestine teach us about the human tragedy that continues to wash up on the shores of former imperial nations?

Displacements To fully grasp the ways in which the migrant question articulates itself with the Palestinian question, we need to begin much earlier than 2010, the date of the Tunisian revolution, which is usually taken as the starting point of current mass displacements. One of the effects of the inclusion of a Palestinian character in Brûle la mer, I argue, is to place the current migrant question within a modern history of mass displacements that includes both the transfer of colonial and then postcolonial subjects to the metropole, and what Ilan Pappe has called, in no uncertain terms, “the ethnic cleansing by Israel of the Palestinians that started in 1948 but continues, in a variety of means, today” (2006, 8).5 Though distinct, the histories of displacement to Europe and from Palestine intersect at key points, and together mark the discursive reemergence of what, at the height of the European Jewish refugee crisis, Hannah Arendt called “a new kind of human being”: the stateless refugee (Arendt 2007 [1943], 265).6 As I will suggest, Arendt’s key insights into the paradigmatic condition of the refugee, exemplified, in the 1940s, in the figure of the European Jew, have direct bearing on my interpretation of Palestine and the migrant question. Edward Said was the first to highlight what we might call the Jewish genealogy of the Palestinian and migrant questions. Following Arendt’s expanded articulation of “the problem of the minorities or the stateless” in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Said suggests that although European Jews are exemplary of the modern state’s production of statelessness, they are not exceptional. On the contrary, the paradigmatic nature of the Jewish question is what allows Arendt to recognize the Palestinian question as one of statelessness: “the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people” (Arendt 1968 [1951], 290; qtd. in Said 1992, xxxix). Said’s later writings in turn make Palestinianness exemplary of the migrant question, beginning with his photo-essay After the Last Sky: “our truest reality is expressed in the way we cross from one place to another. We are migrants and perhaps

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hybrids in, but not of, any situation in which we find ourselves” (1986, 164). In the final chapter of Culture and Imperialism, Said extends his analysis of the Palestinian question to a global imperial map: It is one of the unhappiest characteristics of the age to have produced more refugees, migrants, displaced persons, and exiles than ever before in history, most of them as an accompaniment to and, ironically enough, as afterthoughts of great post-colonial and imperial conflicts . . . Insofar as these people exist between the old and the new, between the old empire and the new state, their condition articulates the tensions, irresolutions, and contradictions in the overlapping territories shown on the cultural map of imperialism. (1993, 332)

The widened frame Said offers here is not simply meant to accommodate a moving map of mass displacements. If the Palestinian question is, for Said, a classically colonial question, it is part of a messy postcolonial map that has produced “hybrids in, but not of” new sites of exile—the intersecting trajectories of a Tunisian migrant and an occupied Palestinian in Brûle la mer, for example. What this long view reveals are the discontinuous, overlapping, and recursive histories of imperialism that produced— and continue to produce—today’s mass displacements. To be clear, the history of the Palestinian question does not match up exactly with the history of the migrant question. The scale (Israel-Palestine versus Europe and its former colonies) is incomparable, as is the direction of movement: from the colony in the first case, to the metropole in the second. And yet even a cursory look at these twinned chronologies of displacement underscores the belabored temporality of what the Western media have dubbed the migrant crisis—as if the mass movements of people from South to North in the twenty-teens were unprecedented. The staggering number of migrants and the velocity of displacement, to be sure, are new: over one million migrants entered Europe in 2015; more than 68 million persons were forcibly displaced across the globe in 2018. But numbers, here, are a distraction.7 When placed in the context of the centennial displacement of colonial and postcolonial subjects, the current migrant crisis suddenly acquires a history, one that parallels the production of the Palestinian refugee crisis, even if it does not match it exactly. Products of different but overlapping histories, the Palestinian and migrant questions have only grown in urgency in the ensuing decades.

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Against alarmist discourses that make of the current mass displacements a turning point and existential litmus test for the future of Europe and the West—discourses that are not, in fact, new—this chapter takes a long view, placing the current migrant question in a decades-long history of displacement that makes visible the production of a naturalized discourse of crisis. I use the expression migrant question instead of migrant crisis in order to delink current forms of coerced displacement from the dehistoricized discourses that have produced the very notion of crisis. The expression migrant question also deliberately echoes what Said analyzed some forty years ago under the name the question of Palestine: “something to be thought through, tried out, engaged with—in short . . . a subject to be dealt with politically” (1992, xli). Addressing the migrant question politically, in turn, requires that we place current mass displacements in a decades-long history that includes the Palestinian question in its purview.

Indigène, Refugee, Migrant The comparison between Palestinian refugees and migrants to Europe is not new. In the context of postcolonial France, it has been foundational to anti-racist discourse, from the Comités Palestine founded by migrant workers and students in the wake of May ’68 to contemporary decolonial movements such as les Indigènes de la république (Natives of the republic). Cultural production, from literary texts to films to rap and street art, likewise bears the mark of what elsewhere I have called transcolonial identification: identification with a (post)colonial subject position that is not one’s own (Harrison 2016). Without collapsing the specificity of individual trajectories of displacement, these texts reveal fundamental parallels between migration to Europe and the Palestinian question. In the two sections that follow, I discuss the ways Palestine has been deployed in representations of migration from the early 1970s to the present, focusing on two very different texts: a 1972 popular Algerian dialect play, and a Mauritian French-language novel published in 2016. Different in almost all respects, these texts both expose the historical redactions enabled by the discourse of crisis, and place migration in a centuries-long, transnational imperial history. One of the first texts to draw a parallel between Palestinians and migrants is Mohamed arfad valiztek, an Algerian darija play produced by Kateb Yacine and his popular theater troupe, Masrah al-bahr / Le Théâtre de la Mer (The Theater of the Sea).8 The troupe toured Mohamed arfad

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valiztek in migrant foyers (housing communities for North African migrant workers) in France in 1972, the year the French nativist party Front National (FN) began its decades-long ascendency. The massive recruitment of colonial, and then postcolonial, labor to reconstruct Europe after World War II was grinding to a halt as restrictive immigration policies were introduced, partly in response to anti-Arab violence fueled by the FN’s colonial-era racist rhetoric. Immigration was now a “problem” divorced from its colonial genealogy. It is not surprising in this context that migrant workers who saw the poster for the play thought it was a far-­ right campaign ad urging the “Mohameds” of France to “pack their bags” and return home (Kateb 1999, 27) (Fig.  5). In fact, the play offers a fiercely satirical critique of the decades-long production of the emerging “migrant crisis.” Significantly, it stages this critique by setting up a parallel between Algerian migrants and Palestinian refugees. Mohamed arfad valiztek begins with a scene split between colonial-era Palestine and Algeria, in which two peasants named Mohamed till the land under the watchful eyes of a Zionist and a French settler. The Algerian and the Palestinian merge in the following scenes, which are set in Algeria and France. Sent to the metropole by a postcolonial state that has cozied up to its former colonial master, Mohamed becomes the target of the institutional and quotidian forms of racism born in the colonial encounter, no longer a postcolonial subject, but an immigrant without history. If the Zionist settler, the Palestinian Mohamed, and the future Israeli state fall out of the picture after the opening scene, the parallel between Palestine and Algeria is instrumental, I argue, in exposing the production of (post) colonial displacement as a discourse of crisis. “La France aux Français” (France for the French), the National Front’s nativist slogan, belies the fact that until 1962, Algerians were French. Similarly, “Mohamed pack your bags” might serve as the slogan of Israeli nationalists, for whom “birth right” does not apply to those born in the settled land. Colonial Algeria, postcolonial France, and Israel are heterogeneous yet interrelated sites of a convoluted politics of citizenship meant to remove the protections of the state from a class of persons designated as indigènes (natives), migrants or refugees. The opening parallel between Algeria and Palestine anchors the play’s critique of what was emerging, in 1970s France and Israel-Palestine, as a discourse of crisis surrounding the migrant and Palestinian questions.

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Fig. 5  Poster of Mohamed arfad valiztek. Source: Fonds Kateb Yacine/ IMEC. Reprinted with permission

The North in the South I have argued that attending to the longue durée history of colonial and postcolonial displacements forces us to place recent migratory movements in what Said calls “the overlapping territories shown on the cultural map of imperialism,” including Palestine (1993, 332). Paradoxically, the invocation of Palestine in my third textual example, Nathacha Appanah’s Tropique de la violence, decenters the exceptional status of the Mediterranean on the moving map of (post)colonial displacements. If Brûle la mer forces us to rethink the dehistoricizing exceptionalism that portrays migrants as

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not only unwanted but unexpected guests, Tropique de la violence introduces a critique of the geographic exceptionalism that sites migration to Europe on the maritime and land borders of the continent—as if the European Union and the idea of Europe itself were not already deterritorialized, erecting walls across its global extensions (Casas-Cortas et  al. 2014, 73–77; Garelli and Tazzioli 2017, 89–91). As Françoise Vergès has argued, geographic exceptionalism is likewise a feature of Francophone postcolonial studies, which have until recently been almost exclusively focused on France’s Caribbean, African and, to a lesser extent, continental Asian colonies, at the expense of France’s overseas territories in the Indian and Pacific Oceans (2005). The trope of Mediterranean crisis is also ubiquitous in the emerging field of migrant studies, as several critics have noted (Casas-Cortas et al. 2014, 60). Against the Mediterranean exceptionalism of both migrant and postcolonial studies, I propose that we expand the “cultural map of imperialism” beyond Palestine and the Maghreb to the farthest recesses of Europe’s overseas territories. Tropique de la violence drags the coordinates of the migrant crisis south of the equator to Mayotte, France’s miniscule island outpost in the Comoros archipelago. One of France’s former slave-holding Indian Ocean colonies, Mayotte is, with La Réunion, France’s sole remaining overseas territory in the region. Since 1975, the date of Comorian independence, tens of thousands of migrants from the three other islands in the archipelago and, increasingly, from the African continent have attempted to cross into this tiny French island, a tropical avatar of Ceuta and Melilla, the Spanish enclaves nestled between Morocco and the Mediterranean. The introduction of stringent visa requirements in 1994 led to an uptick in clandestine crossings. Today, a third of the population is “foreign-born” (for the most part, from France’s former Comorian colonies) and approximately fifty percent of migrants are undocumented. As occasionally happens with France’s remote outposts, Mayotte made national headlines in 2016 when Mahorais militias set out to “décaser” (literally, remove from their homes, dislodge) migrants, adding to the already impressive official number of deportations by the border police: 15,000 to 20,000 per year, for a total population of 210,000 (Slama 2016, 3). In order to draw our attention to this neglected frontier of migration to Europe, it would have sufficed to set the novel in Mayotte. But Appanah introduces another coordinate of displacement in her novel: the Gaza Strip, the tiny rectangle of land to which three generations of refugees are confined, sealed off from Occupied Palestine through land and sea

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borders controlled by the Israeli and Egyptian states. The triangulated map that obtains in the novel stretches our understanding of the migrant question further to include both the Palestinian question and “la question noire,” yet another “question” produced in the colonial crucible (Cottias 2007). For many of the migrants denied access to France today are descendants of the slaves and indentured servants of France’s lucrative Indian Ocean colonies: Madagascar, Réunion, the Comoros, and other “poussières d’empire”—specks of imperial dust, as France’s tiny island-colonies are poetically dubbed. The Indian Ocean migrants of today bear the history of the greatest forced mass displacement in modern history, a practice not restricted to the Western reaches of Europe’s imperial dominion.9 “Mais c’est la France ici quand même!” (but this is France!) exclaims one of the well-meaning white residents of Mayotte. Freshly minted as an NGO volunteer posted to this far-flung département français to open a cultural center for disenfranchised youth, Stéphane is touring Kaweni, the decrepit shantytown that sprawls north of the capital, Mamoudzou. “They told me it was like the projects: young men hanging around, making deals, mired in boredom, zero future prospects, no work, drugs aplenty.” But Kaweni looks nothing like la banlieue. In its place Stéphane discovers a wretched shantytown made of “cases” (huts), mud, and trash. The only familiar sight is a group of disaffected young men, standing before a concrete wall bearing the tag “GAZA.” Gaza is the unofficial name of this slum, and the only one the inhabitants of Mayotte use to refer to it. Stéphane takes a picture of the graffiti and sends it to his NGO friends posted in far-flung locations across the Third World, including, for the most intrepid volunteers, the Gaza Strip itself. “La bonne blague,” he adds: LOL (Appanah 2016, 112–113). Stéphane’s sardonic invocation of humanitarian work in Gaza is the only reference to the Palestinian question in the novel. But the name Gaza, reiterated every few pages as the climax of the novel, the murder of Bruce “the chief of Gaza,” is recounted in tightly wound prose, functions as a constant reminder of the colonial genealogy of the migrant crisis depicted in the novel—a colonial genealogy that implicates human rights discourse itself.10 Somewhat problematically, it is the second sympathetic French (white) character in the novel, the policeman to whom Moïse (Mo), Bruce’s murderer, surrenders, who articulates “Gaza as metaphor” in the most succinct terms:11

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I don’t know who gave Kaweni, the underprivileged quarters bordering Mamoudzou, this name, but they got it right. Gaza is a shantytown, it’s a ghetto, a dump, a black hole, a favela, it’s a gigantic open-air clandestine camp, it’s a huge steaming pile of garbage visible from miles away. Gaza is a violent no man’s land ruled by gangs of doped up kids. Gaza is Cape Town, it’s Calcutta, it’s Rio. Gaza is Mayotte, Gaza is France. (Appanah 2016, 51)

Gaza is more than just a metaphor for poverty in this passage. The tragic tale of an adopted undocumented Comorian who gives up the privileged life of a black citizen of France to fulfil his predestined fate as an outlaw, Tropique de la violence places France’s former slave-holding island colony within a global imperial map dotted with shantytowns, ghettos, and migrant camps. Ironically, the undocumented child-turned-citizen of France winds up killing “the only real Mahorais” of Gaza, the citizen-­ turned-­outlaw Bruce, a black-on-black crime that surreptitiously reveals the colonial genealogy of Kaweni, whose destitute inhabitants, citizens and stateless both, are the products of colonization and slavery. “I’m not ashamed to say that I am the descendent of slaves,” intones Mo’s victim from beyond the grave, counterposing his black pride to Mo’s tragically hybrid identity (Appanah 2016, 67–68). In a final twist of fate, the naturalized Mo shares his jail cell with an undocumented migrant deemed “too unstable” for the PAF (police aux frontières, border police), until he splits his head open against the walls that confine him (49). Mo, an undocumented foundling turned French citizen who winds up in jail because he crossed over into Gaza, shares his cell with a man whose destiny—deportation—could have been his own. If the Gaza Strip is an open-air prison, the network of camps, jail cells, and detention centers located on France’s island-colony turn Kaweni (“Gaza”) into a metaphor for France: “Gaza c’est la France.” It is not coincidental that this metaphor rewrites the colonial mantra chanted by pro-French Algeria settlers during the Algerian war of independence, “l’Algérie c’est la France” (Algeria is France). Although the gendarme utters this phrase to critique the French state’s neglect of its marginalized borderlands, it surreptitiously evokes another disavowed colonial contact zone, and the North African migrants who cross the Mediterranean to reach the former metropole. The tropic of violence is the southern frontier of a postcolonial nation-state that has forgotten the colonial history that produced the “migrant crisis” in the first place.

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Are Palestinian Refugees Migrants? The Palestinian refugee crisis unleashed in 1948 has not abated. Each new military operation to secure Israel’s ever-expanding borders creates a new generation of refugees. Occupied Palestinians like Shadi are subjected to forced displacement, and even Israeli citizenship does not guarantee freedom of movement for Palestinian Israelis. In recent years, the Palestinian question has also merged with the ongoing migrant question in unexpected ways. The lists produced in an attempt to count the number of undocumented migrants who have entered Europe since 2011 always include Palestinians, the vast majority from Syria, where 120,000 Palestinian refugees have been displaced, mostly to neighboring countries but also to Europe.12 Ironically, Palestinians have gained new visibility as a result of the Arab uprisings and their violent aftermath, joining the ranks of those who aspire to the status of refugees. In the process, they have lost the political identity that made them exemplary of the refugee question for Arendt, and of the colonial question for Said: from stateless subjects barred from their native land, they have become sans-papiers striving for European citizenship. In closing, I take this recent transformation—from Palestinian refugee to undocumented migrant—as an invitation to rethink the Palestinian question from a migrant point of view. This is, I argue, the effect of Ai Weiwei’s documentary film Human Flow, which tracks the recent convergence of the escalating Palestinian question and the mass displacements of the twenty-teens, even as it inscribes the latter in a decades-long history that begins with the Palestinian question. In a disconcerting montage of drone’s-eye aerial views, hand-held, moving camera close-ups, and documentary-­style interviews, Human Flow orchestrates an ex-centric narrative of migration and enforced immobility that includes migrants fleeing destitution, fugitives from war, ethnic cleansing, and climate disasters, and colonized subjects: Syrians, Iraqis, Afghanis, Rohingya, Eritreans, Ethiopians, South Sudanese, Mexicans, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, and occupied Palestinians in Gaza. Without confining itself to the Mediterranean, Human Flow gives Palestinians a central place in the story of migration, reversing the terms in which Palestine is framed in discourses about the “migrant crisis.” Ai Weiwei has been criticized for borrowing a military vantage point— the point of view of the drone—to represent migrants, reinforcing, in the view of his critics, the mechanistic, panoptic, and surveillance-based image

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of migrants as threats to Europe and the West (Didi-Huberman 2018).13 For his part, Ai Weiwei has argued that the drone’s eye view has the paradoxical effect of humanizing the migrant: everyone looks the same from that far away.14 Approaching Human Flow from a Palestinian point of view, however, complicates both the particularistic and humanistic views offered by Ai Weiwei and his critics. Instead of drowning out historical specificity and migrant singularity, Ai Weiwei’s airborne camera travels across heterogeneous yet overlapping trajectories of displacement—from Bangladesh to the Mexico-US borderland via Sudan—before zooming in to film particular cases which, taken together, form the fabric of a planetary history of displacement. Palestine plays a central role in this story not because it is exceptional, but because it is exemplary of the migrant question.15 The tension between the two starkly different visual poles that organize the film—aerial takes versus the kind of intimate portrait I discuss below—elucidates the double function of Palestine as a particular story that is nevertheless exemplary of the migrant question.16 I focus on a scene near the end of Human Flow, which films ten young women seated in two staggered rows on the concrete ruins that litter the Gaza seashore, as if they are posing for a photograph (Fig.  6). As in Tropique de la violence, Gaza is the name of the migrant question, except

Fig. 6  Gaza. Screen capture from Ai Weiwei, Human Flow (2017)

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that here the camp is no longer a metonym for the migrants forced to live there. Gaza itself is a camp.17 As one of the young women interviewed in the film explains, “we’re in a prison.” Echoing Shadi’s wry observation in Brûle la mer (visa sa‘ban), she explains that her “dream is to travel (safar).” But travel, another young woman explains, is “very difficult . . . impossible” (sa‘b jiddan . . . mustahil). It is a luxury for citizens with papers, not refugees, undocumented migrants, and stateless Palestinians displaced by war, hunger, and other disasters. The inability to travel (safar) is what makes Palestine emblematic of the paradox of the migrant/refugee, who is simultaneously forced into movement and immobility. Paradoxically, Ai Weiwei chose not to film this scene in what the viewer might expect a camp to look like. In Gaza, camps take the form of palimpsestic concrete structures that have been built up since 1967 with each new wave of Palestinian refugees, and destroyed with alarming regularity since Israeli withdrawal in 2005.18 Instead, Ai Weiwei films the Gaza scene on the seaside border of the strip, by the placid waters of a warring sea. But even here, concrete ruins and twisted metal encroach upon the tiny possibility of a horizon that opens up an impossible dream behind the young women in the frame, as seen in Fig. 6. Like Maki’s trip to his family’s Tunisian olive grove, this scene is, on one level, an attempt to make the Palestinians’ wish come true—return for Shadi, travel for the Gazawiyat—even as it bears witness to the futility of the gesture. It also revises our presentist understanding of both the Palestinian and migrant questions. Against the mediatic erasure of the Palestinians, drowned in the staggering numbers of the displaced and disappeared, Human Flow insists on the foundational place of the Palestinian question in the story of contemporary mass displacement. Let me reiterate, in closing, that like the Palestinian question, the migrant question demands our attention not as a crisis but, precisely, as a question: “something to be thought through, tried out, engaged with . . . politically” (Said 1992, xli). In turn, the migrant literature of the past forty years reveals that the Palestinian question has been central in articulating migration as a (post)colonial question, one that must be historicized and placed on a global scale. Brûle la mer elucidates the migrant question through the decades-old Palestinian question, exploring through dialogue, sound, and image the differences and resonances between Maki’s and Shadi’s itineraries of exile. In different ways, Mohamed arfad valiztek and Tropique de la violence widen our view historically and geographically to reveal the colonial genealogy of the notion of crisis that has dominated

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discourses about migrants since the 1970s. Human Flow takes a different approach, zooming out to place the Palestinian question itself in a global history of forced immobility and coerced displacement. Against the ubiquitous discourse of crisis, these texts offer a critique of the colonial and postcolonial production of mass displacement in the twentieth and twenty-­ first centuries, replacing the trope of invasion with the trope of return: “Après tout, les réfugiés ne font que revenir” (after all, the refugees are simply returning), in Georges Didi-Huberman’s poetic formulation (2017, 31; original italics). Absent the possibility of ‘awda (return), the refugees will haunt the place that set in motion their displacement.

Notes 1. Valeria Luiselli makes much the same point in her essay on the refugee crisis at the US-Mexico border, the causes of which, she explains, “are deeply embedded in our shared hemispheric history and are therefore not some distant problem in a foreign country that no one can locate on a map” (2017, 85). For a biting critique of the “forgetting” of the colonial history that produced the migrant crisis, see Mbembe 2016, 85–86. 2. On the immobility of the “refugee, migrant, subaltern or stateless,” enforced, for instance, by the “mobile” wall in Israel-Palestine, see David Fieni 2016, 351. Kelly Oliver makes a related point about coerced movement by reflecting on migrants’ “supposed ‘choice’ (individual sovereignty) to leave and live or stay and die” (2017, 57). 3. Shadi explains that he cannot travel back to the West Bank because the Israeli Defense Force is looking for him, presumably to arrest him for his role in organizing peaceful protests in his village, Wad Rahal. Quotations from films are based on the English subtitles, although I have made some modifications. All translations of printed texts are my own unless otherwise indicated. 4. 25,000 is Maki’s estimate. According to Maurizio Albahari, 23,500 Tunisians arrived in Lampedusa in the months of January and February 2011 alone (2015, 163). 5. Speaking of the “ruination” of Palestine, Ariella Azoulay describes the refugee as “that which is left” after the “failure” of ethnic cleansing: “in most cases efforts at complete ethnic cleansing end in failure, manifested in a political language that invents such categories as displaced, dispossessed, and refugees” (2013, 203). 6. I am citing Arendt’s 1943 essay “We Refugees”: “contemporary history has created a new kind of human being—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends” (Arendt 2007 [1943], 265).

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7. These statistics are based on data provided by the United Nations Human Rights Commission: “Figures at a Glance” (2018); “Mediterranean Situation” (2019). On the role of the “spectacle of numbers” in the production of a Western discourse of crisis, see Maurice Stierl, Charles Heller, and Nicholas De Genova 2016. 8. My readings of Mohamed arfard valiztek are based on the published French version of the play (Kateb 1999) and on the manuscripts, typescripts, and audio recordings held at l’Institut des Mémoires de l’Edition Contemporaine (IMEC). For a full version of the argument I summarize here, see Harrison 2016, 41–59. 9. See also Patrick Chamoiseau’s poetic treatise Frères migrants, which places the history of slavery—and the Palestinian question—within the purview of the migrant question (2017, 23, 27). 10. The critique of humanitarianism is a feature of both Palestine and migrant studies. On the “military-humanitarian continuum” in the context of contemporary mass displacements, see Albahari 2015, 20 and Oliver 2017, 14. For a critique of “the humanitarian present” that connects the migrant and Palestinian questions, see Weizman 2017, 3–4. 11. I borrow the expression “Gaza as metaphor” from a recent volume that works against the global resonances of Gaza as a metaphor for, among other things, the global refugee crisis, to dwell on the particularities of life on the Gaza Strip (Tawil-Souri and Matar 2016). Though I am mindful of the dangers of metaphor, my approach is closer to that of John Collins, whose book Global Palestine explores “the globalization of Palestine and the Palestinization of the globe” (2011, 2), and Eyal Weizman, for whom “Gaza—where the system of humanitarian government is now most brutally exercised—is the proper noun for the horror of our humanitarian present” (2017, 6). To my knowledge, Mahmoud Darwish was the first to speak of “Palestine as metaphor” (1997). 12. I have not been able to find a source that separately lists the number of Palestinians (refugees or occupied Palestinians) who have come to Europe since 2011. UNWRA, which keeps track of Palestinian refugees in the Middle East, has estimates for Palestinian refugees displaced within and outside of Syria (“Syria Crisis,” 2019). On Palestinian refugees leaving Lebanon for Europe, see “Palestinians Desperate to Flee Lebanon Refugee Camp” (2015). 13. Marxiano Melotti also takes Ai Weiwei to task for his provocative installations based on the migrant crisis, and his “use of the refugee tragedy in an art creation [as] a form of commodification” (2018, 6). Didi-Huberman’s and Melotti’s critiques are partly based on the artist’s presence in the film, and his performance in several of the installations. For a countervailing argument on the ways in which Human Flow stages “the production of crisis” by including Ai Weiwei and his crew in the frame, see Zimanyi 2019.

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14. See the interview with Ai Weiwei by John Weiner (2017). 15. In interviews and on social media, Ai Weiwei has suggested that the inclusion of Palestine in a film about the contemporary migrant crisis is meant to underscore the decades-long history of forced displacement—that the ongoing “crisis” is not, in fact, new (“Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei Visits Gaza and the West Bank,” 2016). 16. On the exemplary versus exceptional status of Palestine, see Stoler 2016, 54. 17. The structure of the camp provides yet another point to track the intersection of the Jewish, Palestinian, and migrant questions. Giorgio Agamben notes, with respect to the Spanish camps in Cuba and the English camps in South Africa, that “in both cases one is dealing with the extension to an entire civilian population of a state of exception linked to a colonial war,” before discussing the examples of migrant camps in Italy, airport holding zones in France, the French banlieue, and the American ghetto (2000, 38, 42). On the colonial genealogy of migrant camps, see Le Cour Grandmaison 2007 and Mbembe 2016, 98–107. 18. On destruction as a feature of the “inner grammar” of Israeli sovereignty in the Occupied Territories and Gaza, see Azoulay 2009, 159; 2013. For Eyal Weizman, the camp itself is a marker of destruction: “the camp is not a home, it is a temporary arrangement, and its destruction is but the last iteration in an ongoing process of destruction” (2017, 144–145).

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. What Is a Camp? In Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, Trans.), 37–45. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Albahari, Maurizio. 2015. Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migration at the World’s Deadliest Border. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Appanah, Nathacha. 2016. Tropique de la violence. Paris: Gallimard. Arendt, Hannah. 2007 [1943]. We Refugees. In The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman, 264–274. New York: Schocken Books. ———. 1968 [1951]. The Origins of Totalitarianism. London: Harcourt. Azoulay, Ariella. 2009. The (In)Human Spatial Condition: A Visual Essay (Tal Haran, Trans.). In The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, ed. Adi Ophir, Michal Givoni, and Sari Hanafi, 153–177. New York: Zone Books. ———. 2013. When a Demolished House Becomes a Public Square. In Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, ed. Ann Laura Stoler, 194–224. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2016. Strangers at Our Door. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

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Brûle la mer. 2014. Directed by Maki Berchache and Nathalie Nambot. Paris: Les Films du Bilboquet. Casas-Cortes, Maribel, et  al. 2014. New Keywords: Migrations and Borders. Cultural Studies 29 (1): 55–87. Chamoiseau, Patrick. 2017. Frères migrants. Paris: Seuil. Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei Visits Gaza and the West Bank. 2016. Deutsche Welle, May 14. https://www.dw.com/en/chinese-artist-ai-weiwei-visits-gaza-andthe-west-bank/a-19258063. Accessed September 9, 2019. Collins, John. 2011. Global Palestine. New York: Columbia University Press. Cottias, Myriam. 2007. La question noire: histoire d’une construction coloniale. Paris: Bayard. Darwish, Mahmoud. 1997. La Palestine comme métaphore: entretiens (Elias Sanbar and Simone Bitton, Trans.). Arles: Actes Sud. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2018. Hauteurs de vue. Esprit 446: 65–78. Didi-Huberman, Georges, and Niki Giannari. 2017. Passer, quoiqu’il en coûte. Paris: Minuit. Fieni, David. 2016. Tagging the Spectral Mobility of the Stateless Body: Deleuze, Stasis, and Graffiti. Journal for Cultural Research 20 (4): 350–365. Figures at a Glance. 2018. UNHRC. June 19. https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/ figures-at-a-glance.html. Accessed September 9, 2019. Garelli, Glenda, and Martina Tazzioli. 2017. Tunisia as a Revolutionized Space of Migration. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Grandmaison, Le Cour. 2007. Les origines coloniales: extension et banalisation d’une mesure d’exception. In Le retour des camps? Sangatte, Lampedusa, Guantanamo…, ed. Le Cour Grandmaison, Gilles Lhuilier, and Jérôme Valluy, 31–41. Paris: Autrement. Harrison, Olivia C. 2016. Transcolonial Maghreb: Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1990. Nations and Nationalism Since 1870: Programmes, Myth, Reality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Human Flow. 2017. Directed by Ai Weiwei. Participant Media, AC Films, Amazon Studios. Kateb, Yacine. 1999 [1972]. Mohamed prends ta valise. In Boucherie de l’espérance: oeuvres théâtrales, ed. Zebeida Chergui, 205–370. Paris: Seuil. Luiselli, Valeria. 2017. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2016. Politiques de l’inimitié. Paris: La Découverte. Mediterranean Situation. 2019. UNHRC, February 4. https://data2. unhcr.org/en/situations/mediterranean#_ga=2.11273149.808110494. 1549565328-35554069.1547834671. Accessed September 9, 2019. Melotti, Marxiano. 2018. The Mediterranean Refugee Crisis: Heritage, Tourism, and Migration. New England Journal of Public Policy 30 (2): 1–26.

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Oliver, Kelly. 2017. Carceral Humanitarianism: Logics of Refugee Detention. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Palestinians Desperate to Flee Lebanon Refugee Camp. 2015. Al Jazeera, April 5. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/03/palestinians-desperate-flee-lebanon-refugee-camp-150330080534973.html. Accessed September 9, 2019. Pappe, Ilan. 2006. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. London: Oneworld Publications. Rosello, Mireille. 2001. Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Said, Edward W. 1986. After the Last Sky. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1992 [1979]. The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf. Slama, Serge. 2016. Chasse aux migrants à Mayotte: le symptôme d’un archipel colonial en voie de désintégration. La Revue des Droits de l’Homme 10: 1–5. Stierl, Maurice, Charles Heller, and Nicholas De Genova. 2016. Numbers, or the Spectacle of Statistics in the Production of ‘Crisis.’ In Europe/Crisis: New Keywords of ‘the Crisis’ in and of ‘Europe,’ ed. Nicholas De Genova and Martina Tazzioli. Zone Books Online. http://nearfuturesonline.org/europecrisisnew-keywords-of-crisis-in-and-of-europe/. Accessed September 9, 2019. Stoler, Ann Laura, ed. 2013. Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2016. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Syria Crisis. 2019. United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinians in the Near East. https://www.unrwa.org/syria-crisis. Accessed 9 September 2019. Tawil-Souri, Helga, and Dina Matar, eds. 2016. Gaza as Metaphor. London: Hurst & Co. Vergès, Françoise. 2005. L’Outre-Mer, une survivance de l’utopie coloniale républicaine? In La fracture coloniale: la société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial, ed. Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire, 69–76. Paris: La Découverte. Weiner, John. 2017. Ai Weiwei on the Refugee Crisis: ‘People Have Been Forced into a State of Movement.’ The Nation, October 13. https://www.thenation. com/article/ai-weiwei-on-the-refugee-crisis-people-have-been-forced-intoa-state-of-movement/. Weizman, Eyal. 2017 [2011]. The Least of All Possible Evils: A Short History of Humanitarian Violence. London: Verso. Zimanyi, Eszter. 2019. The Production of Crisis: Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow. Docalogue. https://docalogue.com/july-human-flow/. Accessed September 9, 2019.

Lampedusa in Europe; Or Touching Tales of Vulnerability Liesbeth Minnaard

The name Lampedusa resonates meaning in multiple ways. Located at the outskirts of Europe and, especially since 2015, place of refuge for a large number of migrants, the Mediterranean island has in recent years not only become a symbol for the so-called European refugee crisis, but also for the dramatic failure of the European Union’s border and migration policy as well as for its crisis management. In this chapter I question and oppose the current interpretation of Lampedusa as a worrisome site located in the European I would like to thank Rolf Parr for his hospitality and inspiring enthusiasm during my research stay at the Literature and Media Studies Department of University Duisburg-Essen in May 2019 and Babs Boter (Free University Amsterdam) for her constructive and insightful response to a previous version of this text that I presented at the expert meeting Unhinging the National Framework at Utrecht University in March 2019. L. Minnaard (*) Department of Film and Literary Studies, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Boletsi et al. (eds.), Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36415-1_8

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margins. Instead, I argue, Lampedusa should be seen as a heterotopian space at the heart of Europe and read as symptomatic for the European Union’s in many respects faltering neoliberal politics.1 I will elaborate on this idea by presenting an analysis of the script of the theatre play Lampedusa (2015) by the acclaimed British playwright Anders Lustgarten.2 This text, as I will show, simultaneously confirms and subverts the dominant refugee crisis narrative in which Europe struggles to come to terms with the exponentially increased influx of migrants, and it does so in unexpected and thought-provoking ways.3 In the following, I will demonstrate how it brings assumedly ­distinct European crises—the refugee crisis, the financial crisis, the social welfare crisis—together within one interpretative framework, thus prompting readers to think about these crises as what Leslie Adelson (2005) has termed “touching tales”—touching in the sense of emotionally charged tales of insecurity, pain, loss, and fear, but also, importantly, touching in the sense of bordering on each other and interconnected in complex as well as pivotal ways. As a literary text, Lustgarten’s Lampedusa fits in quite neatly with what can be considered a Europe-wide literary trend: the publication of literary works that refer to, imagine, address, and also in more or less activist ways intervene in the dramatic developments at Southern European borders.4 A new transnational genre of “refugee crisis literature”: literature of urgency as Carla Calargé (2015) has called it, illiterature in the term of Hakim Abderrezak (2016), a contemporary form of protest literature or, with an emphasis on the often-intended effect of stirring readers’ empathy, literature of concern. These works, including Lampedusa, are mostly written by white European, well-meaning authors who predominantly and in demonstrative opposition to anti-migration populism, take a leftist political standpoint in “refugee crisis” discourse. Very often these politically motivated works support an activist agenda: by more in-depth depictions of refugee protagonists they aim to add nuance and complexity to the rather one-dimensional, objectifying, and often sensationalist representations of refugees in the media, and to “give a voice and restore a lost humanity to the corpses that regularly wash ashore on touristic beaches” (Calargé 2015, 3).5 However, despite these good intentions, it seems that only few of these works manage to properly get away from the single refugee crisis story in which refugees, detached from social ties and broader networks, are solely victims and never political subjects, as Ipek Çelik in her monograph In Permanent Crisis argues with regard to European film (2015, 133). In the same vein, Agnes Woolley speaks of a strongly normative “narrative

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economy that sets the terms for the enunciation of refugee experience” (2016, 4). Following Gillian Whitlock, she points out that the dominant mode of the so-called humanitarian storytelling consists of a mix of human rights discourses and testimonial narrative (Woolley 2016, 8). The resulting plot possibilities, so it seems, remain limited: refugee protagonists get a chance to tell their stories of flight and violence, to testify of the horrors that they—in contrast to many others—have survived, but their representation generally fails to escape what Çelik calls “the overarching trope of victimhood” (2015, 127). And while “belief in the credibility of the narrative becomes the organizing principle” (Woolley 2016, 8), the reader is not only encouraged to empathize with refugees, but also put in the position of “a ‘cosmopolitan,’ knowing” judge who is to decide on the authenticity and credibility of the narrative of flight and distant hardship (8–9).6 Lustgarten’s Lampedusa qualifies in several ways for the generic category outlined above. The play that presents two voices—one male, one female; one Italian, one British—telling us about their experiences “[h]ere, in Europe, 2015” (13), is set in a narrative frame of crisis and appeals— directly and indirectly—to the reader’s concern and commitment. In terms of form the two monologues appear as intersecting narratives of which the first, the story of the Italian fisherman Stefano, a native inhabitant of the island of Lampedusa, seems to tick all the boxes of a conventional “refugee crisis narrative.” However, as I will demonstrate in the following close reading of both monologues and of their particular narrative arrangement, it is through this specific intertwinement that Lampedusa resists the more common narrativization of crisis as singular and, instead, draws our attention—both on the level of form and of content—to notions of contact and relation. By doing so, it foregrounds the contested Mediterranean island not as a European outpost that can easily be kept at arm’s length, but as closely interlinked to other European spaces that are leaning under the neoliberal strait-jacket.

The Fisherman and His Catch In this section I will examine the story that opens the play, and focus especially on the position of its protagonist, Stefano. The stage directions introduce Stefano as follows: “Spotlight on Stefano, alone, reflective. A cigarette burns in his hand. He stares out into the great wide expanse of the Mediterranean Sea” (3; italics in original). Stefano, the Italian fisherman, addresses the reader in the form of a (self-)reflective monologue. In the

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first parts of this monologue, he nostalgically associates himself with the island’s long maritime tradition: “My father was a fisherman. And his father before him. And before and before” (7). He aligns himself with a heroic history of Mediterranean crossings by a long list of predecessors: Caesar, Hannibal, the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Ottomans, and Byzantines. When at sea, he feels as though he follows in their footsteps and becomes part of what, at the beginning of the play, is imagined as the almost-mythical origin of the world: “This is where the world began. … We all come from the sea and back to the sea we will go. The Mediterranean gave birth to the world” (3).7 Stefano imagines himself, pondering, as part of this powerful, vibrant, and life-giving organism. In the play’s opening moment, in which he is surrounded by this “giant lung, breathing life into the world” (3) he primarily feels alive. Free. Worriless. Soon enough, however, this ecstatic moment evaporates and the reassuring feeling of oneness with a motherly and benign Mediterranean dissolves. Reality takes over and the recall of the positive experience of livelihood that the play opens with is replaced by a chilling depiction of death. In continuation of the anthropomorphous image of the Mediterranean as lung, Stefano’s detection of “little black spots, floating on its surface” (3) turns the initial image of vitality and vigor into one of illness and disease. These are signs of contagion, spots foreboding death. Simultaneously, for the present-day reader the textual image is uncannily familiar in another register: images of Mediterranean crossings gone astray that since 2015 have saturated the media, frequently showing dead, mostly black migrant bodies floating on the water. And indeed, when Stefano’s boat draws closer, the text zooms in on such a tragedy. The subsequent nauseating exposition of the materiality of the numerous corpses that Stefano over the previous period has recovered from the Mediterranean Sea works to draw the reader into the scene and simultaneously has a repulsing effect. Moreover, in this scene the Mediterranean transforms from the powerful, life-giving organism that was evoked at the start of Stefano’s reflections into a similarly powerful producer and representative of death.8 “The Med is dead” (7), as Stefano sighs some instances later: it contains corpses rather than fish and, as a consequence, also disrupts the professional family lineage that is key to Stefano’s identity. For Stefano, as for his ancestors, the Mediterranean determines who he is. The fact that presently, as he suspires, “my job is to fish out a very different harvest” (7) severely affects his self-understanding. On the one hand, it is the substance

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of the harvest, human and lifeless, that disturbs him and causes his nightmares: human beings that are swallowed up by the Mediterranean turned monster.9 On the other hand, it is his own uprooted position that worries him: his loss of identity, of grounding in tradition, of self-respect. Dissatisfaction and existential insecurity result from this new situation; holding on and endurance are the preferred solution. It is through his very personal and in its details often shocking monologue, that Stefano draws the reader into the geopolitical area as well as the ethical, humanitarian problematic that the name Lampedusa has come to represent. The play Lampedusa does not rely on the preferred narrative form of much “refugee crisis literature”—giving a voice to (one of) the migrants—but it puts the testimonial of an involuntary European host at the center of the narrative: the fisherman who reluctantly, as a direct consequence of fundamentally changed circumstances, has turned into a professional rescuer—in lucky instances, that is. More often his job resembles that of a grave digger: he is to clean the Mediterranean of the posthumous remnants of the European Union’s current migration politics. In comparison to works that feature migrant or refugee protagonists and encourage readers to empathize with their tribulations, Lampedusa invites European readers to a form of what Kaja Silverman has called “idiopathic identification”:10 for the average European reader it is easier to share in Stefano’s feelings of alienation and concern than to identify with a story of flight and illegality. Even if most readers of this British theatre-­ text probably reside in parts of Europe that are further removed from its aquatic border to the Global South than Stefano, they will recognize the dilemma that he is confronted with. The tension in Stefano’s narrative between his “guilty” humanitarian conscience on the one hand, and his worries about (the impact of this crisis for) his own existence on the other hand, is a tension that is central to refugee crisis rhetoric Europe-wide. A decisive point of difference between the reader and Stefano, however, besides their ontological status, is that the latter is actually doing the dirty work. As Stefano himself is well aware, he is doing “[t]he job no-one else will take” (Lustgarten 2015, 7). Lampedusa’s Stefano is a simple fisherman, wrestling to survive in an incommensurably less dangerous, yet on a personal level just as disruptive context of crisis as that of the migrants and migrant bodies he is “catching.” In this sense, Stefano can be seen as representative of a working class, located especially in the European south, that has great difficulties to make ends meet in today’s globalized economy. In a context in which

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EU-austerity politics has tended to cast the Southern European working class, if not its professional population as a whole, as either lazy profiteers or as superfluous and dispensable to the (global) economic machine,11 Lampedusa offers its readers insight in the precarious, split situation in which one of these Europeans finds himself. In his monologue Stefano shares his particular worries, his fears, his nightmares, his feelings of vulnerability. But he also shares, in his capacity as what Tim Cresswell has called an “everyday theorist” (2007, 79), his analysis of the Lampedusa situation of crisis. He calls the refugee center on the island embarrassing: “[l]ooks like Guantanamo” and “makes us look cruel and closed” (Lustgarten 2015, 8). “[B]ut” he asks, in a rhetorical question to the reader: “where else can we put ’em?” (8), and extrapolating from there, “where is everybody else? Why are we, a little dusty island you’ve never heard of, left to deal with all this alone?” (9). It is rhetorical questions like these, combined with Stefano’s negative assessments of the state of Italy in particular—“In Italy there’s no hope” (9)—and of Europe more in general—“[D]o the migrants not understand Europe is fucked?” (9)—that point the reader to a problematics of crisis that reaches way further than just Stefano’s personal situation on the island of Lampedusa. Lampedusa is not only in Europe, Lampedusa is Europe. What appears as central in Stefano’s assessment of this broader situation of crisis is the complete absence of support that he experiences: not only by the European Union and the (in Stefano’s opinion corrupt) Italian state, but, importantly so, also the support provided by solidarity, by community, by intersubjective relations. In the world that he sketches in his monologue it is every man for himself and even more negative than that: “Here, in Europe, 2015. You have to watch yer back from every angle” (13). In the specific moment in the text in which Stefano makes this claim, it actually concerns the risk that newcomers, such as the ones he tries to save from drowning, will make him superfluous, his labour redundant. That they will take his job, do it better and for only half the wage that he would need to make a living. At the same time, his addition “here, in Europe,” as well as the fact that the refugee who triggers this thought, the Malian Modibo, becomes a very close friend despite Stefano’s initial rejection—the only one, so he feels, who understands him and his psychological struggles (22)—work to expand the scope of the claim: the stated necessity to always be on guard and the more general sense of unsafety that the claim puts forward are indicative of the contemporary status quo of living, or rather surviving in neoliberal times. The juxtaposition between

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Stefano’s “everyday analysis” and an even stronger skepticism about “Europe” and the home it provides in Lampedusa’s second parallel monologue, further reinforces this impression of thorough existential insecurity. It is the rather stereotypically depicted character of Modibo—optimistic, always smiling, never complaining—who plays an important role in Stefano’s subsequent transformation from a bitter skeptic who has lost the lust for life into a life-embracing character, grateful for the lesson of hope, melodramatic as this may sound, that his relation with Modibo has taught him. Modibo is the character in Lampedusa that, quite in tune with “refugee crisis literature” conventions, gives a human face to the threatening migrant mob that is supposedly invading Europe. Simultaneously, this character functions as a catalyst in Stefano’s reconciliation with his precarious situation. From the start of his monologue the expression of mistrust and rejection that Stefano feels towards the migrants is interwoven with moments of self-reflection. Thinking back to one of his professional encounters with migrants at sea, he recalls: You try to keep them at arm’s length. If you let them get close, you never know what they might ask for. On the boat the survivors start talking to me, pleading their case, like I can do anything for them. It’s not part of my job to listen to their stories. There’s too many of them. And it makes you think. About the randomness of I get to walk these streets and he doesn’t. You start thinking about things like that, the ground becomes ocean under your feet. (13)

As the above passage wonderfully demonstrates, Stefano’s thoughts oscillate wildly from feelings of helplessness to a rejection of responsibility and, again, from a sense of powerlessness—in a situation out of control—to a reflection on the arbitrary facts of life more in general. His intention to keep a distance and to not listen to these survivors rapidly slides into a reflection on his own privileged as well as random position, a relativizing reflection that testifies of exactly the listening that is “not part of [his] job” (13). His mind moves from “There’s too many of them” and the fear of large numbers to the very slippery question of “why not me?”—a question better kept at bay in order not to drown in an ocean of existential doubt. Interestingly, the “[t]here’s too many of them” also resonates meaning in quite a different, if not opposed sense in a later moment in the script.

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There Stefano reflects on the traditional, masculinist stance fishermen are supposed to take when confronted with casualties at sea: We’re fishermen and fishermen die. You’re not supposed to make a big deal of death, you mourn and you get back to life while you’ve still got it. But there’s never been a time when three hundred and fifty have died at once. In sight of shore. With no-one to mourn for them. (22)

Again, on the one hand, Stefano is struggling not to be affected, to perceive of these casualties as the “collateral damage” of a migration politics that is framed as inevitable self-defense; on the other hand, he has great difficulties to come to terms with the underlying suggestion that these lives do not matter. Current EU-legislation stipulates these non-­European, non-white, and dispossessed individuals’ attempts to enter Europe as illegal.12 Stefano struggles with what seems to be the disturbing consequence of this judicial decision: that the lives of the thus criminalized, of the corpses that he catches—human remnants of illegalized crossings—actually, judicially seen, do not deserve to be mourned. Lampedusa’s first narrative thus sketches the transformation of a “common” European citizen, worried about his existence and about the threat posed by the arrival of large numbers of “fortune hunters,” to an individual who comes to care and feel hope through his encounter with one of these illegalized migrants. As already mentioned, this narrative does not escape the pitfalls that haunt the refugee crisis genre. A certain romanticization of the fisherman turned rescuer, the spectacular quality of the recovering of the dead, the centrality of the white men’s conscience and, last but not least, the exoticization of the African Modibo as a catalysing figure in Stefano’s transformation and as a carrier of hope: these elements together lend the story an at times clichéd if not downright problematic character. Moreover, Stefano’s change of attitude towards refugees within the narrative seems rather predictable, and the climax (Stefano in an act of reckless heroism rescues Modibo’s wife from drowning) as well as the ending (“They’ve given us joy. And hope . . . And I thank them for that” [33]) appear over the top in their strong melodramatic make-up. However, as I will argue in the following section, the assessment of Lampedusa’s critical impact changes when one considers the larger picture that the juxtaposition of the two parallel stories provides. By focusing on the specific

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combination of Stefano’s quite conventional and melodramatic refugee crisis-story with the monologue of its second protagonist, Lampedusa’s original and thought-triggering contribution to refugee crisis discourse becomes clear. As I will demonstrate, the critical force of Lampedusa’s intervention hinges exactly on this strategy of juxtaposition—on the way in which it encourages us, readers, to think about the relation between two European stories of crisis that at first sight appear utterly apart.

The Debt Collector and Her Dream Central to the second narrative that Lampedusa presents us with, is the character of Denise, a working class female of mixed British-Asian descent located in the north of England. In terms of form, her story is closely intertwined with that of Stefano: fifteen times during the play the stage lights go down on Stefano in order to go up on Denise and vice versa. Denise’s first introduction in the stage directions, immediately after Stefano’s dramatic reflections on the fundamentally changed conditions of his profession, provides an apt characterization of her suspicious posture: “Lights up on Denise, mixed white and East Asian, cautious, observant. She watches us” (Lustgarten 2015, 5). Denise, as soon becomes clear, is full of mistrust and always on guard. Her reservation towards others includes the readers: in a world where people primarily look after themselves, no one is to be trusted, an attitude grown from Denise’s everyday experiences in contemporary England. Denise in many ways qualifies as the ideal neoliberal citizen that ­demonstrates resilience, flexibility, endurance, and a hyper-rational mindset, especially in times of crisis.13 She excels in everyday strategies of ­survival in a context determined by economic austerity and a redressal of the social welfare system. Her most important strategy, so she makes it seem, is assuring she cannot be hurt, bracing herself, in any case not showing (or admitting) her vulnerability. The social behavior that she demonstrates in relation to the characters around her and that she advocates towards the reader who she regularly draws into her argument by means of direct address—“let me tell you that” (11)—is to be harsh, not to care and, in the first place, to look after yourself. All this is a manifestation of her shock-proof neoliberal resilience that enables her to withstand socio-­ economic hardship and to secure her financial and emotional independence.

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In her monologue, Denise sketches a bleak image of contemporary England, northern England (East Yorkshire) in particular: I can’t stand this country now. The hatred. The hatred and the bitterness and the rage. The misplaced, thick, ignorant rage. (11)

She describes British society as a hostile place and as a social desert where especially people in the margins try to survive their new poverty—a result of severe cutbacks in social welfare provisions—by keeping up appearances and scapegoating others. She herself surely uses this same strategy. As a debt collector, working for the loan company ATOS—another job no-one else will take—her task is to cash from people who neither have money nor income. Moreover, and not unrelated to their economic position, they are without prospect, social network, and often in poor health. Despite the fact that Denise clearly deals with people in precarious positions that are, except for the employment, not so different from her own, she despises their dependence on the social welfare system as well as the vulnerability that ensues from their situation. From her monologue it becomes clear that she herself has always been an outcast, an outcast among the “lowly.” Especially her mixed race functioned as a marker of difference and, supposedly, inferiority, and continues to do so on a daily basis: all feelings of frustration and helplessness that her ATOS-clients experience seem to find a way out in the form of verbal, often racist violence, targeted at Denise. She, in a reversal of this daily offence, holds on to, or rather insists on, the difference between her and her dispossessed clients: “Learn some discipline. If you ant got the money, do without. / I have. I do.” (7). In Lampedusa, Denise’s assumption of an assumedly protective neoliberal mindset is put to a test when her aged mother, whom she describes as a traumatizing, loveless factor in her life, becomes fully dependent on social welfare. She qualifies as “a proper case,” Denise assures in her monologue, “not like most of these I deal with” (15). It is in Denise’s account of her mother’s destitute situation that the dehumanizing workings of the production-and-profit-centered neoliberal system become clear. Simultaneously, her mother’s miserable situation constitutes Denise’s drive to search for ways out of this lonely, poverty-ridden margin. And while her chances, arguably, are low, Denise not only dreams of escape but

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also invests her spare time and money in studies and in the promise of upward mobility that education represents for her: [I]f the results [of the exams] are good enough, I can go anywhere. Australia. America. China even. Doing well, ent they? That’d be fucking ironic. Anywhere but here. Slam the door on this bitter washed up country, turn me back, be free. I don’t know what free is, where I’ll find it, but that is where I am going and nobody will stop me. (12)

Her dream of escape, including escape from the racism she has been confronted with all her life, is very much framed in individualistic terms: rather than forming a fantasy about changing her present circumstances, she longs for gaining individual freedom elsewhere. In her here and now, so hegemonic neoliberal discourse has taught her, there is no alternative. Hence Denise imagines an alternative future elsewhere. Whether this dream can be categorized as a form of “cruel optimism,” as described by Lauren Berlant (2011), or as an indicator of the skills and courage to think otherwise and, as such, to resist her situation, is debatable. Does it testify of what Sarah Bracke describes as “the kind of agency an ethos of resilience forecloses: . . . the developing of skills of imagining otherwise” (Bracke 2016, 63) or of “a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility” (Berlant 2006, 21), to a fantasy of “the good life” that is in the current circumstances fraying, dissolving, even cruel?14 In Lampedusa’s monologue it is, again, intersubjectivity that steers the narrative in a different direction, away from slamming the door and turning away. Like Stefano in the first narrative, Denise meets someone—again a stranger, an ATOS-client: the Spanish single mother Carolina—who is sincerely and unconditionally kind to her: “no agenda, just nice” (17). The impact of the repeated instances of intersubjectivity and gestures of care is enormous. Whereas Denise first, unbelievingly, feels taken off guard, her suspicion abates when she realizes that these are actually acts of kindness outside of the capitalist economy of profit and exchange. And although a certain amount of exoticism and melodrama arguably also undermines the critical effect of this second narrative, the message of hope—“hippy shit but fuck it” (32)—with which Denise concludes her monologue is critically moving, especially in combination with her newborn recognition that “attachment is crucial to survival” (Butler 2004, 45).

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Intersecting Narratives, Touching Tales In this last section I will now bring the two analyses together and point out how the juxtaposition of the two narratives even deepens each monologue’s critique of the neoliberal ethos of individualism and resilience that reigns all over Europe and, moreover, poses a critical counterpoise to dominant crisis rhetoric with its emphasis on singular and separate crises. In terms of plot, the two narratives never touch and despite the formal suggestion of a dialogue—the alternating voices appear as if they are speaking to each other—Stefano and Denise live in completely separate worlds. There is no attempt in the text to bring the two characters together, except for one moment at the very end of the text, in the stage directions; a meaningful moment to which I will come back later. However, despite the fact that there is no explicit order that suggests a comparison of Stefano’s and Denise’s stories, as a reader you are encouraged to think them together, purely on the basis of their joint appearance in the play, on the basis of their parallelization. And this is as interesting as it is important. In Lampedusa the story of the refugee crisis as told by the Italian fisherman Stefano and the story of the social welfare crisis as told by the British debt collector Denise appear as “touching tales.” Leslie Adelson coined this phrase in her monograph The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature (2005) in which she insightfully pleads for a new critical grammar for studying migration in its intersection with other events in history. Adelson proposes the concept of touching tales to explore how, in German literature, the history of labor migration and that of the Holocaust—two histories that are traditionally considered distinct from each other— “touch”; how they resonate affect and meaning in relation to each other. She defines touching tales as “literary narratives that commingle cultural developments and historical references generally not thought to belong together in any proper sense” (Adelson 2005, 20). Defined as such, the term resonates with several other theories and concepts that aim to think historical narratives together that have conventionally been kept apart, such as Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of contact-narratives (1992), Andreas Huyssen’s study of forms of triangulation (1995), and Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectionality (2009). The specific surplus value of the idea of touching tales lies in the double meaning of the term “touching” that not only denotes the close proximity of the two tales brought together in one narrative, sharing the pages of one book, but also hints at the affective, touching dimension of their touching.

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What does it mean now, when I contend that the refugee crisis and the social welfare crisis appear as touching tales in Lustgarten’s Lampedusa? In what ways do they touch, and to what effect? In my opinion these are questions that the literary text assigns to the reader who is to make sense of the—in plot-terms unmotivated—juxtaposition of two stories of contemporary precarity, as well as, as I would now like to argue, resistance. In its representation of Stefano’s and Denise’s daily tribulations, Lustgarten’s Lampedusa points at a general, widespread pattern of precarity that is, at least partly, the result of the European Union’s neoliberal, technocratic politics and the faltering social infrastructure that this politics has entailed. When Stefano sighs “do the migrants not understand Europe is fucked?” (Lustgarten 2015, 9) and, more (melo)dramatically, “I resent them for their hope” (9), he evokes an image of a harsh and inhospitable Europe. This Europe is not only an inhospitable place for illegalized migrants and refugees, but also for its legal inhabitants; an image that matches quite well with Denise’s perception of a socially bleak UK. It is in this sense that Lampedusa very much imagines “the present moment . . . as a moment in extended crisis,” as described by Lauren Berlant, in which “conventions of reciprocity that ground how to live and imagine life are becoming undone” (2011, 7) and “in which people find themselves developing skills for adjusting to newly proliferating pressures to scramble for modes of living on” (8). In Vulnerability in Resistance Judith Butler argues that the neoliberalism that produces this precarious present, the “crisis ordinary” in Berlant’s terms, tends to establish the individuals that it leaves dispossessed and disenfranchised—such as Stefano, Denise, as well as the migrants—as “vulnerable populations” (Butler et al. 2016, 25). But rather than a call for care and action, this attribution of vulnerability as an identity-­marker fixes the subjects constituted by the term “in a political position of powerlessness and lack of agency” (25). Lampedusa challenges this fixation as much as it challenges the neoliberal promotion of an ethos of resilience. By presenting two narratives of precarity in which intersubjectivity and acts of kindness open up a more expectant, forward-looking attitude towards life as well as a heartening sense of community, it questions the neoliberal ideal of individual endurance and of an endless bouncing back. I consider the revealing of this Europe-wide precarity, an outcome of various interlocking crises that in themselves can be understood as the result of deficient neoliberal policies, as Lampedusa’s first achievement. Undoing the above-mentioned reified definition of vulnerability as a

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position of powerlessness and passivity is a second. As EU-subjects in vulnerable positions, trying to survive in the socio-economic margins of the European Union, Stefano and Denise seem to have no other choice than to adapt to, and even perform, the neoliberal policies from which they themselves do not gain or profit in any way. Through the performance of their particular jobs, jobs that no-one wants, they—involuntarily—turn into the everyday representatives and even executers of the neoliberal system. As minor Europeans they give a face to laws and policies made elsewhere, while simultaneously facing and dealing with their dehumanizing consequences. However, and this is important, in Lampedusa the protagonists’ vulnerability neither automatically effaces their agency, nor their capacity to resist. In both stories, the key to resistance is intersubjectivity. It is through small and unexpected acts of kindness—personal and, as such, in stark contrast to the anonymizing technocratic system—that both Stefano and Denise come to realize that they are not only exposed, but can also relate and be of value to others, a realization that has an empowering effect on their resilient, but isolated subjectivities.15 From the perspective of EU-politics, their resistance—small instances of caring in the margins of the margin—may seem futile and have little to no effect on the larger status quo, but the impact on the characters’ self-perception is immense and life-changing. The discovery and subsequent acknowledgement of their relation(ality) to others not only has a self-affirmative effect, but also motivates them to think of themselves as part of a community of hope.

Conclusion In its representation of two EU citizens struggling to survive in the European societal margins, Lampedusa does not deny these subjects’ vulnerability. On the contrary it empathically shows them in their precarious situations: struggling to tread water. But, in doing so, Lampedusa does not settle for the association of vulnerability with a lack of political agency. It is by locating change and hope in small but impactful moments of intersubjectivity, melodramatic as they may appear, that Lampedusa criticizes and breaks away from the idealization of an ethos of resilience within a strategically individualized neoliberal ideology. This happens within the stories that Stefano and Denise tell us about their lives, but it also takes place outside of these narratives on the level of narration. Right after Stefano’s concluding words “I defy you” (Lustgarten 2015, 33), I defy you to feel hope as well, addressed directly to the reader,

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the final stage directions prescribe the first and only moment of contact between Stefano and Denise: “Stefano and Denise look warily at one another” (33). While the use of the term “warily” clearly indicates the hesitant and cautious character of this exchange of glances that concludes and undoes the parallelization of Stefano’s and Denise’s existences, this intersubjective moment very much takes place under the sign of the prior appeal to feel hope and of the impactful moments of contact between Stefano and Modibo, and between Denise and Carolina. And while Stefano and Denise, all the time together on stage, for the first time look at each other, see each other, the reader becomes part of this concluding as well as opening scene of intersubjective intimacy.

Notes 1. I am well aware of the multiple and contested meanings of the term neoliberalism, as a.o. described by Damien Cahill et al. in The Sage Handbook of Neoliberalism (2018). In this chapter I consider neoliberalism as the hegemonic political doctrine in contemporary Europe that entails a mode of liberal governance that prioritizes free market and economic growth and that emphasizes consumer citizenship, personal responsibility, and individual empowerment. See Van Weyenberg (2016) for a critical discussion of the center/periphery binary in the EU’s attempted construction of a “shared” narrative of Europe. 2. This chapter chooses to read the script of Lampedusa as a literary text and focuses on its politics of literary representation and on the way in which the dramatic text addresses its readers. The play was first performed in the Soho Theatre in London in 2014 and has been successful ever since with performances all over Europe, including Germany, Malta, and Greece. Each of these performances provides a different, often strongly site-specific interpretation of the dramatic text. 3. As many scholars have pointed out, refugee crisis rhetoric represents migrants and refugees either as powerless victims, in need of help, or criminalizes them as public welfare abusers and even terrorists (Bauman 2016, Wienand and Minnaard 2019, Žižek 2016). Scholars also emphasize the strong politicization of the terminology used for people trying to cross the Mediterranean “illegally” (Carasthatis et  al. 2018, De Genova and Tazzioli 2016). 4. A similar trend can be distinguished in the field of film. See, for instance, Bennett 2018 and Rangan 2017. 5. In Contemporary Asylum Narratives: Representing Refugees in the Twenty-­ First Century, Agnes Woolley warns that “representations cloud as much as

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they clarify” and states that the “tension between occlusion and revelation is most ethically and politically pressing in relation to disenfranchised groups who have only limited access to the means of self-representation” (2014, 3). 6. For a thorough reflection on empathic identification in respect to artistic representations of refugee experiences see Houwen 2016. 7. This idea resonates in interesting ways with Iain Chambers’ notion of the Mediterranean as a postcolonial sea (2004). 8. Although the Mediterranean appears as the monstrous producer of death here, the association of refugees themselves with contagion and illness— “carrier[s] of a disease called ‘crisis’” (De Genova et al. 2016, 20)—is activated here as well. As De Genova et al. write: “Some of these embodiments of ‘crisis’ are literally converted into figures of death as the corpses of migrants and refugees become spectacularly visible through the proliferation of images of dead bodies floating in the sea or washing upon the shores of ‘Europe’” (20). 9. In a later, major dramatic moment in Stefano’s monologue, this image of the Mediterranean as monstrous returns: “Leviathan looms. A monstrous wave as tall as a tower block, so tall it has little waterfalls tumbling from its crest. … A roar, and it slams us under its paw and the whole boat goes under” (26/27). The two fishermen in this scene, Stefano and his compagnon, survive, but on the surface of this cannibalistic Mediterranean they detect “[t]he black silhouettes of corpses” (28), the monster’s prey. 10. Kaja Silverman (1996) makes a distinction between idiopathic and heteropathic identification. The first form relies on a certain (projected) likeness between the other and the self, whereas the latter involves a more risky, but as Ernst van Alphen argues also more “affectively powerful” (2008, 28), temporary and partially becoming like the other. 11. Cf. Boletsi 2018. 12. Cf. De Genova 2018. 13. Mark Neocleous states that “[r]esilience comes to form the basis of subjectively dealing with the uncertainty and instability of contemporary capitalism as well as the insecurity of the national security state … Neoliberal citizenship is nothing if not a training in resilience as the new technology of the self: a training to withstand whatever crisis capital undergoes and whatever political measures the state carries out to save it” (2013, 5). See also Bracke 2016. The factors of race and gender are also determinant of Denise’s position and point at the intricate intersection of neoliberalism with postfeminism, as described by Jess Butler (2013). 14. Both Stefano’s and Denise’s monologues, about “navigating what’s overwhelming” in a situation of “impasse induced by crisis” (Berlant 2011, 10), fit Berlant’s interpretive framework of “cruel optimism” exceptionally

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well: their stories “are about the cruelty of optimism for people without control over the material conditions of their lives and whose relation of fantasy is all that protects them from being destroyed by other people and the nation.” (2006, 33). 15. These narrative developments very much resonate with Judith Butler’s idea that “imagining community affirms relationality not only as a descriptive or historical fact of our formation, but also as an ongoing normative dimension of our social and political lives, one in which we are compelled to take stock of our interdependence” (2004, 27).

Works Cited Abderrezak, Hakim. 2016. Ex-Centric Migrations. In Europe and the Maghreb in Mediterranean Cinema, Literature, and Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Adelson, Leslie A. 2005. The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. van Alphen, Ernst. 2008. Affective Operations of Art and Literature. RES 53 (54): 21–30. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2016. Strangers at Our Door. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bennett, Bruce. 2018. Becoming Refugees: Exodus and Contemporary Mediations of the Refugee Crisis. Transnational Cinemas 9 (1): 13–30. Berlant, Lauren. 2006. Cruel Optimism. Differences: Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 17 (3): 20–36. ———. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham; London: Duke University Press. Boletsi, Maria. 2018. The Futurity of Things Past: Thinking Greece beyond Crisis. Inaugural Speech as Marilena Laskaridis Chair of Modern Greek Studies, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 21 September 2018. University of Amsterdam. Bracke, Sarah. 2016. Bouncing Back. Vulnerability and Resistance in Times of Resilience. In Vulnerability in Resistance, ed. Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, 52–75. Durham; London: Duke University Press. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London; New York: Verso. Butler, Jess. 2013. For White Girls Only? Postfeminism and the Politics of Inclusion. Feminist Formations 25 (1): 35–58. Butler, Judith, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, eds. 2016. Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham: Duke University Press. Cahill, Damien, Melinda Cooper, Martijn Konings, and David Primrose, eds. 2018. The SAGE Handbook of Neoliberalism. London: Sage. Calargé, Carla. 2015. Clandestine or Conquistadores? Beyond Sensational Headlines, or a Literature of Urgency. Research in African Literatures 46 (2): 1–14.

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Carastathis, Anna, Natalie Kouri-Towe, Gada Mahrouse, and Leila Whitley. 2018. Introduction. Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees 34 (1): 3–15. Çelik, Ipek A. 2015. In Permanent Crisis. Ethnicity in Contemporary European Media and Cinema. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Chambers, Iain. 2004. The Mediterranean. A Postcolonial Sea. Third Text 18 (5): 423–433. Cresswell, Tim. 2007. Place. A Short Introduction. Malden; Oxford: Blackwell. De Genova, Nicolas. 2018. The ‘Migrant Crisis’ as Racial Crisis: Do Black Lives Matter in Europe? Ethnic and Racial Studies 41 (10): 1765–1782. De Genova, Nicholas and Martine Tazzioli, eds. 2016. Europe/Crisis: New Keywords of ‘the Crisis’ in and of ‘Europe.’ Zone Books Online. http://nearfuturesonline.org/europecrisis-new-keywords-of-crisis-in-and-ofeurope/. Accessed August 22, 2019. Houwen, Janna. 2016. An Empty Table and an Empty Boat: Empathic Encounters with Refugee Experiences in Intermedial Installation Art. American, British and Canadian Studies 27 (1): 44–73. Huyssen, Andreas. 1995. Twilight Memories. Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York; London: Routledge. Lustgarten, Anders. 2015. Lampedusa. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. Neocleous, Mark. 2013. Resisting Resilience. Radical Philosophy 178 (March/ April): 2–7. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation. London; New York: Routledge. Rangan, Pooja. 2017. Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary. Durham; London: Duke University Press. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Silverman, Kaja. 1996. The Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge. Van Weyenberg, Astrid. 2016. ‘Repairing Europe’: A Critical Reading of Storytelling in European Cultural Projects. In Peripheral Visions in the Globalizing Present. Space, Mobility, Aesthetics, ed. Esther Peeren, Hanneke Stuit, and Astrid Van Weyenberg, 164–181. Amsterdam; Leiden: Brill Rodopi. Wienand, Kea, and Liesbeth Minnaard. 2019. Introduction: Taking Positions on the ‘Refugee Crisis’: Critical Responses in Art and Literature. FKW // Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur 66 (September): 17–26. Woolley, Agnes. 2014. Contemporary Asylum Narratives: Representing Refugees in the Twenty-First Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2016. Narrating the ‘Asylum Story’: Between Literary and Legal Storytelling. Interventions. International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 19 (3): 1–19. Žižek, Slavoj. 2016. Against the Double Blackmail. Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours. London: Penguin.

Alternative Hospitalities on the Margins of Europe Nataša Kovačević

Necropolitics of the European Border Moisés Salama Benarroch’s 2004 documentary Melillenses explores the political paradoxes of life in Melilla, which, along with Ceuta, has been one of Spanish exclaves in Africa for the last five centuries. By virtue of being in Africa, Melilla explicitly participates in promoting the ideal of Spanish convivencia, coexistence of multiple cultures and ethnicities: it boasts a thriving mix of Spaniards, Berbers, Arabs, and Jews. However, Melilla is also a well-protected European fortress on African soil. While its border fence and surveillance system fend off increasing numbers of migrants attempting to enter the EU, its walls are temporarily porous to An earlier version of this essay appeared in my book Uncommon Alliances: Cultural Narratives of Migration in the New Europe (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). N. Kovačević (*) Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Boletsi et al. (eds.), Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36415-1_9

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neighboring Moroccans who pay daily visits to purchase its (cheaper) goods and sell them across the border. The film highlights the following paradox: Melilla’s diverse inhabitants speak of the necessity of hospitality to one another’s cultural traditions, while the city closes its borders to non-European outsiders. And yet, while Melilla is politically controlled by Spaniards, it is economically dependent on Morocco. Literary and cinematic narratives are increasingly set in such exceptional spaces as Melilla, geographically and symbolically located in borderline Europe. In this essay, I focus on the recurrent preoccupation in two works of contemporary literature with the impossibility of a “good life” in borderland states of exception, which suggests that an invisible war on migrancy—often presented as a temporary crisis—has become immanent to the EU construction of sovereignty. These texts—Mahi Binebine’s novel Welcome to Paradise (1999; Cannibales in the French original) and Laila Lalami’s novel Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005) (henceforth referred to as Hope)—treat the Gibraltar border as a threshold into “Fortress Europe” rather than any specific EU country. In fact, this border is the most unequal among the United Nations, effectively separating “First” and “Third” Worlds and representing a symbolic “safeguard against the mixing of Africa and Europe” (Dotson-Renta 2012, 4). The texts also imagine new migrant communities taking shape in the process of crossing, with their solidarity based on a shared economic predicament rather than common ethnic or racial identity. Both novels feature communities that spontaneously arise among African migrants crossing the Mediterranean at the Gibraltar, as they recount stories of exploitation and death that subvert the idealization of Europe. The migrants’ hospitality to one another, along with the mutual aid and compassion they offer, announce the possibility of migrant agency that arises through acting in common despite not sharing a common background. This complicates the hegemonic discourses of the migrant crisis which draw on spectacles of misery and powerlessness. Binebine and Lalami critique what, following Achille Mbembe, I define as the EU necropolitics of the border—the violent protection of Europe from “illegal” migrants, including refugees and asylum seekers. In his essay “Necropolitics,” Mbembe explores contemporary sovereign prerogatives of the “right to kill.” Sovereign power, exercised by the army as much as by “repressed topographies of cruelty,” is variously “deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-­ worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations

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are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead” (2003, 39–40). According to Mbembe, “the important feature of the age of global mobility is that military operations and the exercise of the right to kill are no longer the sole monopoly of states, and the “regular army” is no longer the unique modality of carrying out these functions. The claim to ultimate or final authority in a particular political space is not easily made” (31). Taking the example of Palestine, Mbembe argues that late-modern colonial occupation is distinctive in that it combines “vertical sovereignty” (aerial surveillance and control) with horizontal “splintering occupation,” which not only controls colonized populations but also secludes them, replicating the same logic behind late-modern “suburban enclaves or gated communities” (28). Combined with the abovementioned splintering of sovereign authority, this dynamic leads to the proliferation of sites of violence. While I do not suggest that the situation at the EU borders is the same as in Palestine, I wish to extend these concepts to discuss a similar employment of the colonial tactics of surveillance, segregation, and the right to decide who can live or die. Both vertical and horizontal sovereignty are exercised, for instance, in controlling movement in the Mediterranean and policing the Schengen borders, while in borderline EU spaces which migrants manage to reach, processing centers often carry out the prison functions of seclusion from the local population, long-term detention, and abuse of human rights. Within the EU, a symbolic politics of verticality is also exercised through a top-down politics of identity that involves both national and EU definitions of ideal citizens. The segregation of migrants in processing centers at the border is infinitely multiplied in urban seclusion and neglect of migrant communities of lower socioeconomic status. Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee extends Mbembe’s concept to include capitalism as a crucial factor, which leads to dispossession and the creation of death-worlds through “necrocapitalism”: “If the symbol of past sovereignty was the sword, I want to examine the effects of the sword of commerce and its power to create life worlds and death worlds in the contemporary political economy” (2008, 1542). Economically dispossessed urban enclaves contribute to such death-worlds, but their extreme manifestation is at the EU borders where undocumented migrants are viewed as useless, dispensable, and unemployable bodies from the perspective of neoliberal capitalism. Consequently, they can be left to die with impunity.1

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Commodified Migrant Bodies Situated in a borderline death-world, Welcome to Paradise takes place in anticipation of the passage of clandestine migrants from former colonies to the former colonial empires—crossing the Gibraltar from Morocco to Spain—and downplays the importance of national origins and boundaries on either side of the strait. The migrants, both anxious and hopeful, are united in their shared goal despite diverse backgrounds: they are from Algeria, Morocco, Mali, and a number of other African countries. The intended passage will take them through Spain, France, and possibly other European countries, united by a single border. Binebine maps contemporary neocolonial relations, considering the EU in light of the former colonial legacies of its most prominent member states.2 Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits also centers on crossing the short but deadly Gibraltar strait. The opening chapter builds around the common aspirations and apprehensions of prospective migrants as they cross illegally on a boat, but the narrative immediately moves into the “Before” and “After” sections to flesh out individual character backgrounds. The migrants are from Morocco, Guinea, and other African countries; while many of them hope to remain in Spain, some see the trip as a ticket to the larger European home. Unlike Binebine, however, Lalami is invested in depicting a cross-section of Moroccan society, in which the migrants are only one sample of the unemployed, poor or otherwise trapped people whose only hope from the novel’s title lies in the precarious future in Europe. The chapters that recount what happens to them before and after the crossing contextualize these characters in contrast to the more privileged sections of Moroccan society who live luxurious lifestyles and can look forward to education-based emigration to North America. Hope triangulates the relationship between North Africa, the European Union, and North America, highlighting how neocolonial structures of power intersect with the neoliberal movement of labor.3 Welcome to Paradise employs images of paralysis and listlessness to highlight common predicaments among the migrants as well as their fetishizing of Europe as “paradise,” the excruciatingly elusive world on the other side of the strait. At the beginning of the novel, the Moroccan narrator, Aziz, wonders if any of the gathered migrants could be in a “deeper, blacker” hell than the one of poverty, in which they all languish (Binebine 2003, 3). This question is addressed by individual background stories, which comprise many of the chapters in this novel of endless

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waiting to make the crossing to Europe. The narrative flow mimics the lethargy and idleness that the migrants wish to escape, placing them either in the past or a suspended present, rather than the future. Their shared poverty is linked to the repeated trope of circulating, like a commodity, in the economy of monetary exchange that governs human relationships in the novel. The lack of agency that results from their commodification strips them of human dignity by rendering their intimate, personal histories secondary as soon as we are introduced to them. Binebine builds the narrative around such stark human experiences, suggesting that the protagonists live in what Pal Ahluwalia terms “social death.” Building on Mbembe’s discussion of necropolitics, Ahluwalia argues that in the contemporary death-worlds created in the name of reason and civilization, there is no capacity for agency “in living a life of unfreedom of being socially dead” (2004, 638). Sovereignty in such situations resides with what the subject perceives to be an “illegitimate power—the master, the colonizer” who can arbitrate on “who can live and who can die” (638). While Lalami suggests that both local and global “illegitimate power” resides with specific, privileged social classes, in Binebine such power is diffused and drives every relation of social hierarchy on either side of the Gibraltar. Here the EU figures as a physically absent, yet pervasively involved neocolonial power. As Chantal Mouffe observes, free trade policies promoting EU protectionism and neoliberal hegemony force “an increasing number of people to immigrate” to Europe, but they are perceived as a threat by Europeans who do not realize their own policies are “at the origin of the problem” (2013, 62). On the Moroccan side of the strait, Welcome to Paradise depicts Marrakesh as a place where poor children and young people are forced into begging or prostitution by employers who exploit them. While generosity comes from those who have already left for Europe and return only temporarily, it is often portrayed as self-congratulatory and the object of others’ envy. Nuara, one of the Berber migrants who attempts the crossing with her baby hoping to join her husband Suleiman in France, recalls how he would return with bags “crammed with presents” to show off in front of his village, bringing “an infinite variety of objects no one knew how to use but that looked precious” (Binebine 2003, 37). Meanwhile, Nuara has to pay for Suleiman’s incoming calls in her village because the shopkeeper who had a phone was a “real blood-sucker.” Similarly, the Malian Pafadnam receives the money necessary for the crossing from his cousin in France,

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but is warned not to act too happy because “there must be a snake in the grass” to guard against: if he shows off, he’ll “get it stolen” (63). In virtually all interactions with Europeans, African migrants figure as cheap commodities, ready to perform services in exchange for minimum maintenance. Morad, one of the traffickers’ aides who mesmerizes migrants with stories of life in the European “paradise,” fondly remembers his badly paid restaurant job and paltry dwelling, “the space of six square meters” with “cracked ceiling” and “bare bulb by that small half-blocked­up basement window” (18). He recounts a nightmare in which his restaurant manager gradually cannibalizes him while Morad acquiesces and keeps smiling as he receives another benefit, including a residence permit, with each body part surrendered to the manager. This gruesome story points to the paradox of self-sacrifice in a necropolitical economy that progressively destroys one’s wellbeing while holding the promise of a better life. The vampiric imagery of capitalism as cannibalism suggests that the waning European welfare state is no longer dedicated to “the maximum of life but the minimum for living and sometimes not even this” (Gržinić 2008, n.pag.). In Hope, prospective migrants also experience social deaths as their lives stagnate, their careers and personal relationships eternally suspended in the present. Everyone anticipates a liberating future across the strait, but with full awareness that it may never arrive. That this belief in a better future in Europe is a collective rather than individual fantasy is repeatedly emphasized in the novel. Seemingly every family has a member who supports them financially from Europe, and the community enthusiastically recounts the stories of successful Mediterranean crossings, but keeps at bay anxieties about the more numerous, unsuccessful ones (Lalami 2005, 111). It is clear, however, that the migrants are not welcome in Spain: in an attempt to deter migrants from crossing the Gibraltar, Spanish coast guards stack “sunken fishing boats” on their side, “plainly visible from the Moroccan side. They thought it would scare people. It didn’t” (111). Such potentially suicidal attempts at crossing are not a desperate escape from a life in death, but rather the only proactive decisions the characters can make. I propose reading them not as self-destructive denials of agency but precisely as a final, in multiple senses of this word, chance to reclaim one’s life. Ahluwalia observes that, paradoxically, even the decision to take one’s life is the only act of genuine agency in the situation of social death: “Actual death as opposed to social death is the very instance where agency itself can be exercised” (2004, 638). In Hope, Morocco is awash in

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corruption, wasted possibilities, and nepotism: the chapters in the “Before” section establish the characters’ shared social paralysis which also affects their most intimate relationships. Murad, the narrator of the opening chapter, is a university educated English teacher who cannot find gainful employment and harasses tourists into hiring him as a guide; Aziz is an unemployed repairman who feels emasculated in his marriage; Halima is a working-class mother and wife fleeing an abusive marriage and an environment that blames her for the abuse. As in Welcome to Paradise, intimate relationships are mediated by money or lack thereof: either they are unable to sell their labor to support their families or, like Halima, they need money to bribe the authorities into granting them release from abusive relationships. Perhaps the most intriguing character in this novel is the young university student with a religiously fueled, anti-establishment anger, Faten. Taking pride in her poverty, Faten aligns herself with a radical underground mosque in Rabat which condemns Morocco’s authoritarianism, hypocrisy, and obsession with emulating Western lifestyles. She pursues social mobility through higher education, but when caught cheating on an exam with the help of her friend Noura, Noura’s father, employed in the Ministry of Education, pulls connections to have Faten expelled. The irony that Lalami highlights is that everyone cheats, and it is only Faten’s poverty that strips her of any pretension to a charmed life enabled by connections. When Noura’s father asks Faten if, like Noura, she would refuse the offer of free education at New York University, she replies, “No one is offering me anything … No one gives anything for free. That is the trouble of some of our youths” (Lalami 2005, 46). Faten is acutely aware of the system of exchange and indebtedness that marks the everyday lives of the socially vulnerable. Noura, on the other hand, has the privilege to either turn down or accept the gift of “free” education in the United States. Faten’s expulsion irreversibly strips her of the possibility of social advance and pushes her toward a European “paradise,” where she becomes a prostitute. Both Hope and Welcome to Paradise abound in exploitative sexual relations, including prostitution, which highlight the commodification of non-European bodies. In Binebine, a cannibalistic commodity exchange underwrites sexual relations, where masculinity is repeatedly compromised in encounters with Europeans in positions of authority. For instance, Yarce is suspected of being a prostitute for the rich white people he massages in the exotic salons of Marrakesh. The European customers exude

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the “bland, sickly odor of cadavers” (Binebine 2003, 85), contributing to the image of such exchanges as lifeless and sterile, even when it comes to presumably passionate sexual contact. In Hope, Faten’s downward slide from a devout woman to a prostitute contrasts with the lost potential for upward mobility in Morocco. There, she could speak and act freely until she was expelled from university and a careless remark about the king made her a police target. In Spain the only way out of her predicament is her client Martin who offers to get her immigration papers. Faten’s fate thus mirrors Halima’s as they are both trapped in unwanted relationships; ironically, however, Faten’s sexual abuse begins only after she moves to the European “paradise.” She is alternately treated as an Orientalized commodity and an unacceptable other, from the moment she is raped by a Spanish border guard beyond the purview of law to the realization that she will never be accepted by Martin’s Franco-supporting father. Significantly, she rejects Martin in the end, frustrated by his stereotypical thinking and confidence in “[knowing] her and her people” (Lalami 2005, 149).

Toward a New Politics of Friendship Welcome to Paradise offers an alternative to this pervasive sense of violence and commodified exchange by juxtaposing it with instances of selfless help, nurturance, and generosity in interactions among the migrants. Aziz feels compelled to take care of his cousin Reda, “his blood,” without expecting anything in return. He observes a similarly generous impulse in the Algerian Kacem Judi: he offers Aziz oranges after seeing that he is starving, although at the point of crossing into Europe the oranges are “worth their weight in gold” (Binebine 2003, 25). Kacem, who has lost his family in a massacre at Blida, also gives money to a little boy selling cigarettes in Marrakesh, without helping himself to any goods, presumably because the boy reminds him of his own son (69). Finally, like many others who have received money from cousins, Aziz gets the money for the crossing from Sister Benedicte from his French school, who figures as his surrogate mother, leaving him her life savings so he can pay for university studies. Family and other kinship structures, real or surrogate, complicate the dominant economy of debt and repayment in the novel. Kinship terms such as “mother,” “sister,” and “little brother” foster an intimate sense of community with people who are either distant family relations or are

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excluded from the possibility of blood kinship through differences of race, class or gender. Binebine explores questions of responsibility and community through a Derridean politics of friendship that complicates the traditional designation of public enemies and friends. Jacques Derrida proposes the possibility of friendship “without a familial bond, without proximity” (2005, 35) in order to challenge the influential conceptualizations of friendship as affiliations based on a shared genealogy, culture, politics or interests. He asks, “What truth is there for a friendship without proximity, without presence, therefore without resemblance, without attraction, perhaps even without significant or reasonable preference?” (35). In Welcome to Paradise, this “truth” arrives through negative association, either affiliation by economic dispossession, loss of family or alienation from the family to which one has been born. Reflecting on Kacem’s loss of family in a massacre by Algerian fundamentalists, Aziz suggests that to live without a family is akin to being a ghost: “To be a husband, a father, an uncle, a friend, and then an hour later—the time it takes for a stroll in the moonlight—to be nothing … Too weak to bury your family, or take your own life” (Binebine 2003, 70). Loss marks his own family: Reda joins the French school Aziz attends because Reda’s mother committed suicide. Such horrid family tragedies are repeated with symbolic regularity and all are linked to poverty. The creation of a substitute family is not necessarily romanticized in the text, however. Examples of solidarity and alternative kinship structures are underscored even before the migrants arrive on the Moroccan coast—for instance, the unlikely bond that develops between Yussef’s two wives and Nuara’s treatment of Tamu, the family’s poor black servant, like a sister. Nonetheless, they are set against a generally unsympathetic community that reinforces established hierarchies. Initially, the familiar attitude of suspicion and disapproval characterizes the migrants’ relationships. They are upset that Nuara’s baby keeps crying and afraid he will give them away. However, they gradually become more protective of the mother and the baby, assuming responsibility for them collectively: We bent over to look at the baby, who had woken up. He had beautiful eyes, a turned-up nose and a full-lipped mouth which smiled at the circle of strange faces. We were suddenly captivated by this wriggling creature who had given us such a fright. Kacem Judi seemed so happy cradling the little mite that when Nuara returned she didn’t dare take him again. (118)

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This vulnerability of the other and instinctive call to responsibility one cannot give up is dramatized in greatest detail in Aziz’s relationship with his “little brother.” Aziz initially describes Reda as a sickly, dependent nuisance, an obstacle on their trip to Europe: it would be “typical of him to go and let himself die in the most cowardly, squalid way possible” (173). But when he almost dies while launching the migrants’ boat, Aziz stays behind the entire night and talks him back into regaining consciousness: “I’ll be your eyes and you’ll be mine. We’ll look after each other, we’ll never split up, will we, little brother? But you’ve got to get up now. Do it for me” (175). Asserting their interdependence in this way, Aziz relinquishes his greatest obsession, his dream of escaping to Europe, in order to take care of an injured other. In Hope, the opening chapter “The Trip” is the only shared locus of otherwise disparate life narratives of the prospective migrants. Rather than providing an external observation point, Lalami gives Murad the privileged first-person perspective in this chapter, which helps her highlight a sense of genuine curiosity and empathy in his attention to his fellow travelers. Murad ponders the ironies of the second North African “invasion” of Spain, where “instead of a fleet, here we are on an inflatable boat—not just Moors, but a motley mix of people from the ex-colonies, without guns or armor” (Lalami 2005, 3). Murad’s apprehensiveness is slowly disarmed by the vulnerability he observes in other passengers, although he initially thinks of himself as superior because of his university education in English and Spanish: “he doesn’t want to break his back for the spagnol” like everyone else (3). Murad is intrigued by Faten, frequently referencing her actions and emotions, as well as awed by Halima’s “aura of quiet determination” (6). The passengers in the boat help one another, offering the last bits of food and water, and encouraging smiles, to those in need. The narrative builds this sense of kinship not so much through conversation and exchange of ideas as by focusing on affect and body language. In the tight space of the boat, Faten retracts her leg so it does not brush against Murad’s, her gesture suggesting reluctance and indecision; Aziz is “tall and lanky and sits hunched over” to make room for others (4); the Guinean woman is nervous as “she cradles her body and rocks gently back and forth” (6). Despite the forced, even uncomfortable, sense of physical intimacy, the passengers communicate with one another through familiar physical reactions that unite them beyond cultural and linguistic barriers. It is the confrontation with the embodied presence of the other with an

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alien smell, feel, and language that demands one’s response and help, making the boundaries of one’s identity porous and vulnerable. For instance, when the Guinean woman vomits on Faten and the stench is inescapable, Murad defends Faten after the trafficker Rahal yells at her to “shut up.” In fact, Murad often defends other female passengers from Rahal’s unscrupulous treatment of them as commodities to be delivered, while Rahal merely invokes his patriarchal authority to intimidate unaccompanied Muslim women. Murad’s assumption of responsibility for others is especially dramatized when Rahal makes the passengers swim the last bit of the trip. Murad is torn between helping Faten, who grips onto him, fighting for her life, and training her to swim so as to help them both survive (12). After making the difficult decision to free himself or else drown, “[a] sob forms in his throat … He’s already drifting away from her, but he keeps calling out, telling her to calm down … He closes his eyes, but the image of Faten is waiting for him behind the lids” (11–12). This self-defensive decision means that Murad remains haunted by Faten’s pleas for help. When he is arrested and taken to a detention center, he vomits at the sight of body bags, recalling an earlier scene in the boat, as he imagines his own and other passengers’ bodies in the bags (17). At this stage, his body has become interchangeable with others, only one variation of the collective migrant body, in the face of which former distinctions of education and plans to get a good job in Spain seem meaningless. Certainly, the border here works as a great equalizer, reducing the specificity of one’s predicament to the label of indistinguishable illegal migrant. However, Murad’s affect—nausea, caused by the migrants’ shared anxiety—and tendency to empathetically align himself with people on the boat rather than a future community in Spain suddenly ties him back to the African continent which he has decided to abandon.

From Social Death to Migrant Agency In both novels, this unavoidable responsibility for the others with whom one has (unexpectedly) come into contact is also described as a function of one’s fate. It is not only imagined as a passive, fatalistic reconciliation with a difficult situation, but also as an act of agency, arising from the need to deal with the here and now which cannot be wished away. In Welcome to Paradise, Aziz, though feeling like a “stranger among his kin,” believes he must make the best of his “lot,” a word which is often used to signify the inescapable circumstances of one’s existential condition (Binebine 2003,

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166). The ethics of the here and now which creates unlikely affiliations among the migrants is only one manifestation of the unpredictability of social relations and refusal of hegemonic cause and effect narratives. It is expressed through a frequent use of words such as lot, fate, and luck, as well as references to looking to the stars for guidance or ascribing turbulent emotions to djinn possession. These references also articulate a religious worldview, although the very belief in God’s providence is subverted at the end, when most of the migrants drown at sea. But invoking the mystical ways of the universe also implies that, in Welcome to Paradise, the social circumstances into which one is born are like fate in that they largely exceed individual control and agency. Binebine similarly suggests that Europe is either one’s birthplace by sheer luck or an elusive neverland beyond the reach of migrants, challenging meritocratic assumptions about opportunities to earn a European work visa by being a hardworking immigrant.4 For migrants, Europe signifies disaster or success, dream fulfilment or perpetual nightmare, and this mythical image that rests on the opposite extremes trumps its portrayals in the text as a geographic reality. Like Europe, the characters themselves come across as “unreal”: on both sides of the strait, they already are, or must become, ghostly, invisible. As they wait for their trip on a lifeless beach away from the bustling city, they are depicted as shadows and ghosts, their boat resembling a “sea coffin.”5 Aziz observes that a life of hardship tamed Pafadnam’s “wild, virile beauty” into a small, “humble and fearful” creature that already slipped “into the skin of a refugee” (66). This humility prepares them for their European future, where they will have to practice disappearing into the crowd, avoiding eye contact and being “another shadow, a stray dog, a lowly earthworm, or even a cockroach” (66). In Hope, it is also the sheer luck of birth that differentiates between migrants who have a choice to study in North America and those who are forced to undertake an illegal crossing of the Gibraltar. A sense of fatalism pervades this novel, exemplified by social paralysis, constant mourning of missed opportunities, and obsession with an unattainable future. The decision to cross the Gibraltar is portrayed as a dangerous gamble: tempting fate, as it were. The characters see the crossing as an event that disturbs the established order of things, as if their very act of asserting independence from the circumstances of birth is an unthinkable betrayal. Hope suggests that they merely substitute one type of prison for another: their destinies, even at this moment, are not their own. They are in the hands of “the captain, the coast guards, God” (Lalami 2005, 2). Faten interprets

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the breakdown of their boat as confirmation that this “unnatural” trip is cursed; while other passengers do not share her religious interpretation and pragmatically focus on the engine problem, “her hysteria is contagious” (8). Some characters in Hope make it across European borders, but as in Welcome to Paradise, most do not. For survivors of the trip, whether they stay in Europe or are deported back to Morocco, daily subsistence is all they can hope for. Living with low or non-existent income in Morocco suggests a social death in the face of which even a suicidal, “blasphemous” crossing of the Mediterranean becomes an act of agency, a potential line of flight, as in Welcome to Paradise. Repeated crossings, while economically disastrous, imply a refusal of life in death and of bare survival, which comes across as even more unbearable. Tracing Morocco’s migrant flows to both Europe and North America, Lalami’s novel also muses on the advantages of education as a path to upward mobility. For upper-class Moroccans, attending private French lycées, a leftover from colonial times, makes them competitive candidates for North American universities, which enable a neocolonial brain drain. If they were to remain in Morocco, their economic status would be far from certain, not least because of unemployment and endemic corruption. For instance, Murad prides himself on his bachelor’s degree in English and his love of British literature, but his family can neither afford to send him abroad nor has connections to find him professional employment at home. He can only use his degree as a freelance tourist guide for Americans who visit Morocco on a pilgrimage to cultural sites related to Paul Bowles and William S. Burroughs. Such tourists come across as benevolent but oblivious to the social dynamics they enter. For instance, Murad witnesses a haggling over a “vintage” Moroccan Quranic schoolboy’s tablet which the tourists treat as a quaint commodity they can turn into a decorative item on the other side of the world, disengaging it from its historical and cultural context. Murad slowly awakens to this problematic dynamic: he imagines the schoolboy’s life, his history and community, which leads him to reflect on the lost potential of Moroccan children’s education. He reads the inscription the boy made, “a verse from Sura 96 … ‘Read, in the name of thy Lord, who created’” (Lalami 2005, 179). While the inscription reflects the hope and promise of education, Murad cannot know if the boy “finished Quranic school and went on to public school or whether he’d been sent into apprenticeship” (179). He links this incident to his own generation’s obliviousness to their cultural heritage, deciding that it was

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wrong of him to be so focused on Spain: “when he thought of the future, he saw himself in front of his children, as mute as if his tongue had been cut off, unable to recount for them the stories he’d heard as a child” (186). The novel ends on a hopeful note: in the final section, “Storytelling,” Murad reclaims the past, remembering the stories and songs that had been forgotten and regaling American tourists with a Moroccan fairy tale rather than his usual, tourist-adapted spiel on Paul Bowles. As the Americans haggle over a Moroccan rug, Murad tells the story of love between a poor muezzin’s daughter and a rug maker who overcomes various obstacles presented by those in power. As in many fairy tales, in this one too injustice is redressed and the poor triumph, mirroring Murad’s own development as an empowered subject who has staked out an independent, albeit unprofitable, path. This event inspires a change of heart: Murad develops a new sense of self, abandoning his lifestyle of begging Western tourists for work. While this denouement by no means suggests a radical or even comprehensive political change, the novel’s refusal to fetishize Europe as the only possible future for desperate Moroccans is significant. It is through this and other small, however isolated, gestures of acceptance, of becoming “hospitable” to one’s own history which has become foreign, and to foreign people who share one’s own predicament, that Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits suggests possible modes of connecting. In Binebine’s Welcome to Paradise, the migrants’ quest to reach Europe, if not self-destructive, is more Sisyphean than Odyssean, as their repeated failed attempts far outnumber successful arrivals. Those who eventually arrive in the European “paradise” encounter the “cannibals” who will ingest them economically and culturally. Simultaneously, however, the novel imagines hopeful transnational connections among aspiring migrants, highlights points of mutual aid and compassion, and complicates the identity politics that isolates rather than connects both at home and abroad. Despite the grim ending, we could perhaps see them as communities prefiguring political subjects who can, in the future, act in common despite not having a common racial or cultural background, demanding rights within the EU rather than any individual member state. Contemporary migrant protests against the limitation of movement or withdrawal of asylum rights across Europe increasingly give shape to such a community. On the other hand, this impetus for empathy and social leveling results from an extreme, deadly situation, and we might ask where it might lead, beyond momentary connection, after the migrants disperse into their

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individual predicaments. This problem is highlighted through Lalami’s narrative structure, which contrasts the mapping of alternative solidarity and community during the Mediterranean crossing with the solipsistic individual narratives that come before and after it. In contrast to Welcome to Paradise, however, Hope’s main focus is not so much the tragedy of social death through emigration. Rather, its main concern is the future of Morocco as a postcolonial state that drives away its educated cadres. This brain drain is aided by Moroccans’ self-denigration and active obliteration of the country’s educational and cultural heritage in favor of Western standards of intellectual advancement. As the ending of the novel suggests, then, agency can be asserted not only by rejecting life in Morocco altogether, but also by remaining in the country and acquiring a new sense of identity through anticolonial resistance. Literature that stages the potential of the aforementioned alternative communities, non-identitarian affiliations, and hospitable passages across the borders of Europe can simultaneously act as an incentive for resolving the “crisis” that it takes up. As it calls attention to the contemporary discourses of crisis haunting the EU superstate, it also gathers communities that can become politically invested in the aesthetic paradigms that it infiltrates into dominant “distributions of the sensible” (Rancière 2004, 12). Literary aesthetics is indivisible from politics because politics, as Jacques Rancière suggests, is dynamically informed by new aesthetic forms explored in art: “the logic of descriptive and narrative arrangements in fiction becomes fundamentally indistinct from the arrangements used in the description and interpretation of the phenomena of the social and historical world” (37). Novels like Welcome to Paradise and Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, therefore, intervene in political discourses by calling into question existing representations of community and helping to expand its cognitive possibilities.

Notes 1. One, by no means unique, example is the case of the migrant boat that set off from Tripoli to the Italian island of Lampedusa in March 2011, carrying seventy-two migrants. Finding themselves stranded in the sea with dwindling fuel and food, they issued a number of distress calls, to both c­ ommercial and military vessels, the latter belonging primarily to Italian and Spanish NATO troops. While several helicopters dropped food and water and promised a swift rescue, nobody ended up evacuating the migrants over the next

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two weeks: they were left to die. Their boat never reached Lampedusa, and instead drifted back to the Libyan coast. Eventually, only nine migrants survived. For more information, see the 2014 film Liquid Traces: The Left-To-­ Die Boat Case, which assembled the trajectory of the boat recorded by surveillance technologies. 2. Binebine portrays the contemporary African immigration to the EU’s most prosperous countries as an afterlife of colonialism in that the geographic trajectories of migration predictably follow the former colonial ties. In the novel, such ties are solidified by colonial cultural and educational institutions in the former colonies, continuing economic and political inequalities, and the repetitive trope of European tourists visiting the former colonies, oblivious to their historical privilege of travel or residence in such spaces. For a detailed discussion of the European Union’s neocolonial indebtedness to its member states’ colonial pasts, see “Introduction” to my book Uncommon Alliances. 3. The neoliberal structural adjustment programs introduced in Africa by the IMF and the World Bank since the 1970s, which promoted “free market” economies, openness to foreign investment, privatization, and fiscal austerity in exchange for financial loans, have contributed to a rise in inequality and unemployment for a significant segment of the population, driving illegal immigration to Europe (see Pérez 2015 for an overview of these policies and relevant scholarship). In terms of legal immigration, the EU (like North America) favors professional elites and educated middle classes, rather than the unskilled, uneducated labor it imported in the period of vast re-­ industrialization after World War II. 4. The rise of clandestine migration results from Spain’s 1991 decision “to end Moroccans’ privileged status to enter Spain without a visa and the implementation in 1998 of the … SIVE, Integrated System of External Vigilance,” a hi-tech surveillance system along the Spanish coast (Abderrezak 2009, 461). On the other hand, to accommodate the surge in migration, Spain has signed agreements with Senegal, Gambia, Mali, and Mauritania to offer limited-term work visas to workers from these countries (Montouri 2011, 2). 5. They are additionally “unreal” in the eyes of international law because they become the harraga in the act of crossing, those who join the ranks of the stateless by burning one’s identity papers—people without a past or a future, perfect necropolitical subjects. Jonathan Smolin notes that Arabic “hrig, which means ‘burning’” implies not only destroying identity papers to avoid repatriation, but also “a metaphorical burning of the past” (2011, 75).

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Works Cited Abderrezak, Hakim. 2009. Burning the Sea: Clandestine Migration across the Strait of Gibraltar in Francophone Moroccan ‘Illiterature’. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 13 (4): 461–469. Ahluwalia, Pal. 2004. Empire or Imperialism: Implications for a ‘New’ Politics of Resistance. Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 10 (5): 629–645. Banerjee, Subhabrata Bobby. 2008. Necrocapitalism. Organization Studies 29 (12): 1541–1563. Binebine, Mahi. 2003 [1999]. Welcome to Paradise. Translated by Lulu Norman. London: Granta. Derrida, Jacques. 2005 [1994]. The Politics of Friendship. Translated by George Collins. New York: Verso. Dotson-Renta, Lara. 2012. Immigration, Popular Culture, and the Re-routing of European Muslim Identity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gržinić, Marina. 2008. Euro-Slovenian Necrocapitalism. Transversal: Multilingual Webjournal. Accessed September 9, 2019. http://eipcp.net/transversal/0208/grzinic/en. Heller, Charles, and Lorenzo Pezzani, dirs. 2014. Liquid Traces: The Left-To-Die Boat Case. Accessed September 9, 2019. https://vimeo.com/89790770. Kovačević, Nataša. 2018. Uncommon Alliances: Cultural Narratives of Migration in the New Europe. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lalami, Laila. 2005. Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. Necropolitics. Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40. Montouri, Chad. 2011. Gendering Migration from Africa to Spain: Literary Representations of Masculinities and Femininities. Ph.D.  Dissertation. University of Missouri. Mouffe, Chantal. 2013. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. New York: Verso. Pérez, Jorge. 2015. Reframing Accountability in Spanish Immigration Cinema: Mediterranean Modernity and the Shortcomings of ‘NGO-Films’. Journal of Mediterranean Studies 24 (2): 215–229. Rancière, Jacques. 2004 [2000]. The Politics of Aesthetics. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. New York: Continuum. Salama Benarroch, Moisés, dir. 2004. Melillenses. Spain: Atico7. Smolin, Jonathan. 2011. Burning the Past: Moroccan Cinema of Illegal Immigration. South Central Review 28 (1): 74–89.

PART III

Alternative Languages and Visions of Futurity

Algeria Time and Water Logic: Image, Archive, Mediterranean Futurity Megan C. MacDonald

Introduction: Two Boats in “Interesting Times”— Future Archives on Land and at Sea On display at the 2019 Venice Biennale is Barca Nostra (Our Boat), a ninety-foot fishing boat turned art object which sank in the Mediterranean between Libya and Lampedusa in 2015. This crisis boat concerns Mediterranean remains as art, or archive. It is estimated that between 700 and 1100 people died in the shipwreck, leaving twenty-eight survivors (Higgins 2019, n.pag.). The boat’s appearance in Venice is only the latest in its multiple afterlives. Artist Christoph Büchel got the idea for its display in Venice after visiting a community in Palermo, and it is suggested that the boat will become a traveling “garden of memory” (Higgins 2019). What kind of vegetation grows in the rusted remains of this ship, one which served as coffin and cage? The title of the 2019 Venice Biennale is

M. C. MacDonald (*) Department of English and Comparative Literature, American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt © The Author(s) 2020 M. Boletsi et al. (eds.), Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36415-1_10

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May You Live in Interesting Times. Considering the wreckage on display and the dead elsewhere, we might alternatively render the “You” and “Live” of the Biennale as “You [sic]” and “Live [sic].” This crisis boat as art object is crisis on display, or in its wake. In her book In the Wake, Christina Sharpe examines the etymology of the word opportunity, to query the wake: “(Opportunity: from the Latin Ob-, meaning ‘toward,’ and portu(m), meaning ‘port’: What is opportunity in the wake, and how is opportunity always framed?)” (Sharpe 2016, 3). I am citing Sharpe’s reading of opportunity, the wake, and ports in order to examine boats in, of, and on the Mediterranean, in order to then connect these physical structures with their representations in visual culture, their place in the archive, and for posterity. The second boat is of a more recent crisis. On 10 May 2019, seventy people died trying to reach Europe in a boat coming from Libya. Sixteen people were rescued from the boat which sank forty miles off the coast of Sfax. Matteo Salvini, the far-right Italian minister, tweeted: “The ship has been blocked and seized. This will be their last trip. Bye Bye!” (qtd. in Tondo 2019, n.pag.). What does a “last trip” look like in light of a volume on Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes?1 Are there images and practices which factor in boats and transit that are alternatives to crisis? In other words, can images of boats be tied to futurity—can they go elsewhere? What comes in their wake? In my contribution to this volume I will discuss the stakes of Mediterranean archives constructed otherwise, and possible ways out of crisis, in order to think Mediterranean futurity. I will offer several examples of “going back” via artists in and between France and Algeria, a kind of road map writ water, a reverse migration on and with the sea, in and next to its wakes, boat logic otherwise. Artists include Marseille-based photographer Abed Abidat, Paris-based French-Algerian photographer Bruno Boudjelal, and London based French-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira. These artists make North to South Mediterranean journeys (France to Algeria) in their work. Most have family connections to both France and southern Mediterranean shores, with the exception of the French music duo The Blaze. In addition to the work itself, I will offer a brief interrogation of the spaces where their work appears. These spaces include conventional museum and exposition spaces such as Mucem in Marseille; Northern French spaces including the Institut du Monde Arabe in Tourcoing and La Piscine in Roubaix; and La cité de l’immigration in Paris.2 The fact that we are seeing a specific focus on Algerian art and artists, and that there is

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space for the quotidian and mundane, is somewhat new in a French context. Next to official exposition spaces, I also consider the outsides of these museums, and the archives of and from the street around these spaces. Finally, I will turn to recent protests in Algeria to show how the image of the Mediterranean boat and its implied migration crisis have been represented in the protests and how this has changed. Language and archives have also been altered with the current Crisis/Opportunity in Algeria. The Algerian protests have produced placards, images, installation pieces and jokes which not only work alongside more formal artistic practices, but also contribute to future archives in and of France and Algeria, as well as Mediterranean futurity itself. This revolutionary moment offers a look at the future from the street, rather than from the sea. The main tenets of the argument that emerges from my discussion of these artistic examples are the following: 1. I consider Mediterranean “crisis” in this context as referring to two related issues: precarious and deadly migration across the Mediterranean, and the ongoing postcolonial crisis of the relationship France/Algeria. 2. The very existence of these artworks, and their display in French museum space suggests a possible beginning to a way out of the second crisis. They also visually respond to and document imagery from the first crisis. 3. The ongoing protest movement in Algeria that began in February 2019 (hirak)  offers a possible future or way out of both crises—a rejection of migration to Europe via boat across the Mediterranean, and the emergence of new language to consider France/Algeria in different ways.

Algeria Time and the Archive From these ghosts and shells of shipwrecks, I turn to Algeria. I was struck since my arrival in Marseille in September 2018, specifically, but also in Paris and France more generally, by how much Algeria was on the agenda, and in which ways. This chapter’s timeline begins in September 2018, and ends in May 2019, with a radical break in February 2019 with the emergence of protests in Algeria (which I will discuss in more detail below).

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This is an undoubtedly futile attempt at, following Spivak’s formulation, “writing it at speed” (Spivak 1995, 65). Events in Algeria and France’s re-focus on the country changed dramatically in late February due to ongoing protests in the country, which have thus far resulted in Algerian President Bouteflika resigning from office after threating a fifth mandate. At stake in this opening in Algeria are contemporary and past resentments, archives, and what comes next. I call this opening up Algeria Time, a question of timing and tuning: good or bad timing, early or late (belatedness/ avant-garde), being in time, out of time, in or out of tune. Algeria Time is a chronotopic postcolonial space, constantly in movement between recognition and resentment (reconnaissance/ressentiment). This movement of texts, bodies, archives, and images takes into account Paul Gilroy’s conceptualization of the chronotope in The Black Atlantic where he combines the ship and the crossroads to create passages in and between diasporic spaces (Gilroy 1993). This, however, works differently in Mediterranean space, in that the roundtrips (allers/retours) are repetition with a difference in space and time.3 Examining Algeria from a French context is part of a larger research project in Marseille, titled “The Way Back.” The term “the way back” refers to: re-considering Algeria via the Mediterranean; a re/turn to Algeria (artists and writers going back); and a “way out” of current political and archival discourses and silences, via French cultural institutions focusing on Algeria. It is an attempt to look beyond the Mediterranean crisis of France/Algeria. It plays with the French colonial phrase “France is Algeria,” and returns to the claim in a postcolonial and decolonizing rubric, one which considers France/Algeria as still connected, via Mireille Rosello’s “fractal” (Rosello 2003), and Etienne Balibar’s provocative question “Algeria, France: One Country or Two?” (Balibar 1997). In this view, Marseille and Algiers become mirrors of one another, as do the countries of France and Algeria themselves. How is Algeria presented in France, and where? I make these connections via la navette or shuttle, a form of transport and a weaving mechanism (“shuttle” in English) which connects Mediterranean spaces. Urban space, Mediterranean space, exhibition sites (museums) and cultural productions intersect, and form multiple polyphonic and polygraphic archives which come together to form France-Algeria and Algeria Time.4 Are there alternatives to Mediterranean crisis-scapes—other than crypts, necropolitical spaces, or the Mediterranean as a cemetery? I turn to the archive in order to address some of these concerns. Here the archive

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refers not only to traditional or typical spaces such as museums and galleries, and archival holdings in museums, libraries, and national archives, but also digital archives, the recording of protests in urban space, twitter threads, and archives in, of, and on the street. The question of the archive is also a question of Algeria-France. How do archives move? Who is allowed in the archives?  This is a timely issue, especially in France, as French President Macron has promised to “open up” opaque archives concerning the French occupation of Algeria. France and Algeria are also in discussions to return skeletons and skulls of nineteenth century Algerian freedom fighters back to Algeria (which are currently held in French archives). My focus on contemporary visual cultures allows for alternative spaces to be opened up, that speak to a Mediterranean future (one still imbued with crisis), and an opening up of archives (colonial, postcolonial, and otherwise) on multiple Mediterranean shores. A partial list of events concerning Algeria in France since September 2018 connecting archives and recognition includes the following: French President Emmanuel Macron promising to open parts of French archives on the Algerian War of Independence; France Culture asking if the way the Algerian War of Independence is taught in French schools should be changed; Macron promising les harkis (Algerian soldiers who fought for France during the Algerian War) recognition by the French state via the Légion d’honneur et du Mérite, and possible financial compensation; Macron recognizing that the French military used torture in colonial Algeria; Macron meeting with the widow of Maurice Audin, a French Communist math teacher in colonial Algeria tortured and killed by the French military during the Algerian War of Independence. Audin will make an appearance in the discussion of recent protests in Algeria, making connections between resentment and recognition in the hexagon, i.e., mainland France, and postcolonial lieux de mémoire in Algeria. And in the realm of memory, archive, and urban space, Algerian novelist, playwright, and Berber language rights activist Kateb Yacine was honored on 6 October 2018 with a garden bearing his name in the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris, followed by an homage at the Mairie as part of the theme “Journées de la Méditerranée.”5 Kateb’s inscription in Parisian urban space creates a postcolonial French-Algerian lieu de mémoire in the hexagon, and attests to the presence of Algeria Time in the former metropole. While each event on its own may appear anodyne, taken together they form a sea change.

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Oceanic Turns and the Wake What is the wake? Sillage in French, the wake is the trail behind a boat in motion. It is also a funerary practice. It points to what is left behind. As a timekeeper, it denotes a precedent. As an ephemeral marker, it signifies a journey. It connects the mourning of the funeral, and boats in transit. Archives and shipwrecks. “Wake work,” to use Christina Sharpe’s term, “troubles mourning” itself, as well as commemorations or memorials in the forms of museums, asking: “how does one memorialize chattel slavery and its afterlives, which are unfolding still? How do we memorialize an event that is still ongoing?” (Sharpe 2016, 19–20). Even though these lines suggest her focus lies with the slave ship, she sees this as a continual wake: migrants, refugees, Black Americans, the Mediterranean, the prison, the camp, the school (Sharpe 2016, 21). My use of wake is similar to Sharpe’s, in that it interrogates “questions of temporality, the longue durée, the residence and hold time of the wake” (Sharpe 2016, 22). However, my longue durée is Mediterranean in its focus as a way to frame a way back or way out of the crisis called France-Algeria, while still fully implicated in the refugee crisis. It is crucial to keep in mind that the ship’s wake indicates movement—when the ship is no longer in motion, or sinks, the wake disappears. What happens when things get stuck, or the boat is stopped? I am working at the intersection of the wake, and the turn—movement and its absence, to interrogate post-crisis time and space. Territory (land) and the sea. My focus is the capturing of the trace of the ship itself, and what is at stake in this visualization as represented in photography and video work. In other words: what kind of futurity is on offer in visually capturing the wake, freezing it for posterity? Mediterranean migrants— harraga—can be seen as a form of stuckness. From the Arabic for “to burn” harraga refer to young men (and some women) who “burn” across the Mediterranean in an attempt to migrate and land in Europe, the burning referring to both the transit as well as the possibility of burning one’s identity card before the journey. Caught between crisis mode (driven by the singular desire to leave), or in opportunity mode (the potential of arrival), in the Mediterranean south, the mental imaginary surrounding harraga often includes boats with questionable sea readiness, waterproof phones, young men mugging for the camera, and the eventual YouTube video.6 These are one-way boats, heading south to north and nowhere else. Boats that split the Mediterranean, boats that mimic the regularity of defunct ferry boats that now go south, and no longer north like previous

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migration patterns. Hakim Abderrezak writes an eloquent genealogy of boats and ferries in Maghreb cinema, connecting changing Mediterranean migration patterns to visual cues: as migration to Europe is made more difficult, the ferry seen in Maghreb cinema is replaced by the cargo ship (Abderrezak 2016, 18). This shifting emphasis from ferry to cargo ship, from movement to rust “reveals that regular migration is not going anywhere anymore. It is certainly not going to France” (Abderrezak 2016, 168). In other words: “France is over” (172). Next to the change in cinematic boats—ferry to cargo—we can read other examples of boats, such as those taken by harraga—representing migration—as changes in scale: from the cinema to the classroom, from hulking shells of metal to single pieces of folded paper. Scholar Issrar Chamekh shared an example of one such boat on Twitter (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1  Paper boat, photo by Issrar Chamekh on Twitter

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When Chamekh was teaching in Tunisia, she wrote of a “relic” she “confiscated” from one of her students. After she left Tunisia to pursue graduate work in the US, she took the paper boat with her, reflecting: “I feel light years away from my students back home. The girls often talked about marriage, the boys were obsessed with crossing the Mediterranean.” Of the paper boat in the picture, she writes: “Saddens me deeply, but keeps me grounded” (Chamekh 2018). When considered alongside Abderrezak’s discussion of ferry and cargo boats in Moroccan and Algerian cinema, Chamekh’s ostensibly Tunisian boat adds to a wider North African and Mediterranean frame, bookending Algerian territory. Metonymy for future precarious crossings, and one example of classroom paper put to use. Like Barca Nostra, the paper boat is a crisis boat. Though both boats share the same form, one is paper, the other metal; one huge, the other can fit in the palm of a hand. Chamekh’s classroom boat is a model of desire—the locus of crisis. Like Barca Nosra, the paper boat may float for a while before getting waterlogged. It is a memorial to her students, but also from her students. Symbolizing sea desires for other lands, it keeps her “grounded.” The boat, in Chamekh’s possession abroad in the United States, has travelled further than the students’ cross-Mediterranean desires: it flew in a plane without ever touching the water. This boat is a folding and enfolding of desires—both compact and light. As a timekeeper it may point to the future. It is inscribed with “ROMA” in red pen one side and a Tunisian flag rendered in pencil. On the other side we read about the cost of the trip: 7000 dirhams, which Chamekh says is a fortune for these fifteen-year-old students, who were obsessed with obtaining the money, burning (migrating, harraga) for France.7 Barca Nostra is but one iteration of this paper boat. Here the wake is a dream connected to a paper talisman. The classroom does not offer a way out of the migration crisis. (And though my focus is mainly on Algeria in this chapter, Tunisia and Morocco are two bookends of the harraga practice.) From fragile boats launched into the Mediterranean to their classroom paper doubles, we will arrive at a re-metaphorization of Algeria in two ways: first, visual representations of the wake by contemporary artists and musicians, and second, representations of Algeria as a sinking ship, specifically the Titanic.

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Notes on Capturing the Wake Guillaume and Jonathan Alric are two French cousins who form the electronic music group The Blaze. The video for their song “Territory” opens with the wake/sillage of a boat which lands in Algeria (The Blaze 2017).8 The wake cuts the screen in half vertically, and the sea occupies most of the screen, leaving a thin slice of horizon and the suggestion of a cargo ship near the top of the frame. This Mediterranean crossing results in a homecoming. Emotion is on display, there are close-ups of hands, faces, bodies, and movement. Young Algerian men are dancing, trading gestures while smoking hookah, running on the beach, coming together, coming apart. The home-comer [sic] boxes in time to the music, throws his body around, trains for a combat the viewer never sees. These are alternative masculinities in motion for a global audience, and this video of performative Algerian arrivals does specific work in French spaces. Many comments on the YouTube video are expressions of emotion or nostalgia for Algeria, by those both inside and outside of the country. The boat comes from France and lands in Algeria. This suggests the privilege of papers and visas as well as a claim to belonging to two places. Post-crisis futurity in this video valorizes southern Mediterranean shores. Jon Caramanica (2018, n.pag.) interviewed the duo in The New York Times in English, and slight variations from the French leave a residue on the words exchanged in productive ways. Jonathan Alric describes their project as a desire to “do something more original” while Guillaume chimes in: “And speak about people we don’t used to see [sic].” This “we don’t used to see” is a questioning of the representation of young Arab men in French media spaces. The video “Territory” opens on the Mediterranean Sea (Fig. 2), privileging the wake before arriving on land, then cuts directly to the main character leaning on the boat’s railing and staring at Algiers from the water, before another cut locates him in a domestic space, crying. As viewers we are behind him on the boat, and in front of him in the house. What does the title refer to? Algeria as home, as passage, as return? France/ Algeria: One country or two? Algeria Time in “Territory” is a new way of looking at Algeria from France, with a global reach (based on its international popularity). Bringing quotidian scenes of life in Algeria to a space beyond France/Algeria is both new and notable. Figure  2 captures the opening of “Territory,” and puts the viewer in the wake. The viewer has a boat’s eye view, while orchestral electronic music builds in the background.

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Fig. 2  Screenshot, “Territory”

This wake is the passage to Algeria from France, not just physically, but in terms of memory and emotion. The wake cleaves Mediterranean space, depends on a boat in movement, and keeps its own time. It frames the notion of territory or land as including Mediterranean sea space. Algeria Time here is a desire for landing, for territory. The first words of the song are “We’ve waited for this day,” and the time on the ship from Marseille to Algiers is almost 24 hours—the unit of a day. Sedira’s MiddleSea (2008) is another passage between Marseille and Algiers on a ferry, and here the boat can be considered the main character. In the sixteen-minute film, we see a man killing time (Algeria Time) on the deck, seemingly alone on a vast ferry. He paces, moves in and out of the passenger area, and stares at the sea. Sedira’s work between London, France, and Algeria often points to the gaps between memory, language, generations, and places. Sedira, too, captures the wake on camera, and like in “Territory,” viewers are behind a man onscreen as he leans on the railing and stares at his arrival (Fig. 3). As Algeria comes into view, the film temporarily changes from color to black and white, before returning to color upon arrival. Figure 3 bears an uncanny resemblance to the beginning of “Territory,” but there is no meeting up with other people, no family in sight. Viewers may project desires onto this arrival—the boat is parallel to the shore as it pulls into Algiers harbor with the single man

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Fig. 3  MiddleSea internet screenshot

staring at the shore—and the wake in Fig. 3 is not in view. Why this loss of color between being at sea and being on land? MiddleSea is slow-moving, and yet a twenty-four hour trip is condensed into sixteen minutes. The shift from saturated blues, blacks, and whites of the film’s color section are rendered stark upon arrival: the end of the wake (the end of the trip) briefly loses color. Arrival brings it back. Viewers move between man, boat deck, and wake (Sedira 2008). Sedira’s piece was shown at Mucem in Marseille in 2014, on loan from the Cité de l’immigration museum in Paris. The Mucem exposition focused on the Mediterranean throughout history, and Sedira’s piece came at the end of the section “Construction, deconstruction, reconstruction.” It was displayed next to Antoni Muntadas’ piece “Allers/Retours, citoyenneté et déplacements” (2013) where Muntadas repurposes shipping containers by adding video screens to them, then uses the screens to display seas and ports in multiple Mediterranean cities. In all of these works, the wake is on screen, overlaid with subtitles in multiple Mediterranean languages and scripts. What is more, rather than young people staring at Europe across the Mediterranean from its southern shores, Sedira and The Blaze offer defiant if privileged returns: do both men have the right to “go back” to France afterwards? Are these one-way trips? Neither “Territory” nor MiddleSea forecloses the question. As a post-crisis consideration of

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Mediterranean passages and France/Algeria, MiddleSea plays with construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction: the wake in movement is all three continuously. The photographers Abed Abidat and Bruno Boudjelal inhabit space and territory in different ways. They arrive on land in Algiers from France, and spend time there, without forgetting the sea. Abidat is from Marseille, where his parents settled after arriving from Algeria in the 1950s. Boudjelal has a French mother and an Algerian father. Both photographers speak of visiting the country where they have family ties. Boudjelal traveled to Algeria for the first time during the Algerian Civil War in the 1990s, known as the black decade. He felt that his life in France had become “stuck,” so he went to Algeria to learn about his Algerian family, something his father never talked about (Photographier ses racines 2019). For his part, Abidat speaks of “returns” (retours) to Algeria, in an interview I conducted with him, but is quick to note that France is his country. Abidat’s recent collection of photographs taken in Algiers was published as a book titled Algeroïd (Abidat and Toumi 2018), combining the words Alger and Polaroid, as he used a Polaroid land camera to shoot. He wants his images to normalize Algeria: they show daily life in the streets, the Casbah, cats, shop owners. His image taken from the sea also speaks to wakes, with Algiers as destination. In this image, taken from a small boat, the photographer captures Algiers from the water, and viewers see multiple wakes from other boats in the frame, along with a cargo ship, a fishing boat, and an Algerian flag. This was a short day journey taken while visiting Algiers, and the photographer will return to land (Algiers) before flying home (Marseille). Post-crisis in Abidat’s work is valorizing scenes of daily life in Algiers: normalizing southern shores as well as considering Algeria as a site of tourism—a chosen destination, rather than one imposed (Fig. 4). Both Abidat and Boudjelal speak of the difficulty of photographing public spaces in Algeria, as well as people. This stems not only from authorities controlling images (police questioning photographers, for example), but also from people themselves who are reticent about being photographed. On his first visit, Boudjelal brought a plastic camera from a McDonald’s Happy Meal. This allowed him to take photographs during a dangerous period: when seen by authorities, it was considered a toy, a joke, rather than a threat. His photos taken with plastic cameras are atmospheric, fuzzy, like a dream. Boudjelal notes that photographing in Algeria now is completely different from the 1990s. Since everyone has a

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Fig. 4  Untitled Image from Algeroïd, ©Abed Abidat

smartphone, cameras are ubiquitous. He recounts how people pretend to take selfies in order to be discrete and photograph something in front of them (Photographier ses racines 2019). Boudjelal’s photography book Vanishing into Reality/Algérie, Clos Comme on Ferme Un Livre? (2015) is accompanied by essays written by Boudjelal and others. Boudjelal’s work on harraga focuses on the mobile phone and images and short films made by those trying to cross the Mediterranean. The phones are “not only an important navigational tool but also a means of photographing and filming the crossing. They’re a way of recording the adventure that can be sent to those who’ve stayed at home” (Boudjelal 2015, n.pag.). His artistic intervention into the topic of Mediterranean Crisis is via migration. He took photos of short films made by those making the crossing—films meant for friends and families—and made photos of the screenshots, archiving the digital and the personal, making these

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images travel from phone video to screen to photograph, a meta-digital archive. For him it is a testament to the journey as well as a rejection of classical aesthetic considerations: “Often unfocused, pixelated, under- or over-exposed or badly framed” (n.pag.). Boudjelal’s Harragas work covers five pages in the book, and each page contains approximately eighty small photos taken from the videos: light, dark, blue, sun, boat, close-ups of faces, at sea. Thumbnails, seashells. In a few of these photos, we see nothing but the wake created by the small motor boats. It is a harraga archive. Boudjelal’s work moves from one crisis (the Algerian Civil War) to another (harraga and migration). More recently, his work as a curator speaks to post-crisis in two ways: France/Algeria seen otherwise, and in making Algerian photographic works travel. Boudjelal is also interested in showing another side to Algeria, not only in France but in Algeria itself. In an attempt to bring together two Mediterranean shores, and to make those shores travel, in 2017 he curated the show Ikbal/Arrivées, featuring young Algerian photographers and exhibited in Algiers, Paris, and Marseille (Regards 2017). His choice of young photographers was a conscious one, and moves away from the canonic public imaginary archive of Algerian images, a timeline that begins with nineteenth century colonial photographs and postcards, jumps ahead to images depicting the War of Independence in the 1950s and 1960s, and ends with the atrocities of the 1990s. Historically, Algeria in the French imaginary is a series of crises and nightmares. The book ends with departures—all white and all blue. In “Departure Landscapes/Les paysages du départ” Boudjelal confronts the viewer with washed out white photographs, with light grey shapes suggesting the littoral, items found on shore, the place that marks land from water, shadow squares of windows in a building rendered in white. We see a series of irregularly placed boats on shore, overturned, recognizable in their repetition, surprising in their stasis, frozen in time. As opposed to Abidat’s saturated images, Boudjelal’s photographs force viewers to lean in, to spend time, to figure out what they are looking at. Boudjelal wanted to capture the shore from Annaba and Oran, two cities from which harraga migrants leave. He wondered what their last images of shore would be, and recreated them in washed out rectangles: With my back to Africa and looking towards the European shores of Spain and Italy, I photographed white landscapes, recording in a single image the dazzling effect of the light, the disappearing landscape and the structure of

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memories. This series of photographs is an evocation of the final image remaining in the mind of someone leaving their native land. (Boudjelal 2015, n.pag.)

The book ends in blue, and in color with the final series “Vanishing into Reality/Détours-Retour.” Here he plays on the notion of round trips, allers-retours, replacing it with multiple detours and a single return. Full pages of blue put the viewer in marine space—it is as if we are very close­up in Zineb Sedira’s film. If we are in the wake, we can only see the blue. Boudjelal’s first visit to Algeria in 1993 from Marseille was by boat. His last journey would be the same, but this time from Algiers back to Marseille: As I grew further from the coast [en m’éloignant des terres], I was first bewildered by the brutal, white light coming from the surface of the sea. Then there remained nothing but this whiteness, the blue and emptiness. It transported me to the departure landscapes. As I boarded the boat, I was convinced my photographic work in Algeria was over. I was sure I’d failed in my attempts to analyse my connection to the country. But I found an explanation in the course of this journey. Algeria was mine, but not totally. Then in the last ten minutes, as we came into Marseille, it became warmer, more golden, and the landscape started to take shape…. The appearance of this landscape was also a revelation to me of a sensation of returning home…. Was this the end of another journey, where I’d found an identity made up of both here and there, a place I could settle?/Had all my journeys to Algeria over twenty years been many detours, the better to be able to return here? (Boudjelal 2015, n.pag.)

Is this last “here” France, Marseille? Boudjelal’s journeys and questions interrogate and unpack the longue durée of Algeria in the France imaginary, and thus the crisis of France/Algeria. His very journeys were inspired by the silences in and between the two countries. Boudjelal discussed some of the work in this book in the context of current events in Algeria, during a talk and interview titled “Photographier ses Racines” (“Photographing one’s Roots”) in April 2019 with Roubaix-based French-Algerian photographer Naime Merabet at the museum La Piscine in Roubaix, in connection with the Institut du Monde Arabe-Tourcoing (IMA-Tourcoing). Both venues in northern France are landlocked, but connected to water: La Piscine is a former Art Deco swimming pool turned

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museum in 2001, and IMA-Tourcoing is housed in a former swimming school (école de natation), which was one of the first of its kind in France when it opened in 1904, and turned into a museum in 2016. Far away from the Mediterranean, and yet imbued with the logic of water and space, these two museums transport Isabel Hofmeyr’s “dockside mode of reading” (Hofmeyr 2019, 11) and translate it, as I will argue in the following, into a poolside and portside way of seeing. Boudjelal’s work is featured in the IMA-Tourcoing show Photographier L’Algérie (February–July 2019). The show contains 100 photographs dating from the early twentieth century to 2002, and the museum’s website offers an important reminder: photography was born at the same time as the French colonial conquest in Algeria, thus photography has always accompanied Algeria. Visitors to the show were offered a poster from one of the artists in the show, the opportunity to buy the exhibition poster, as well as a small piece of paper when leaving. The small paper details how IMA-Tourcoing is collecting stories from Algerian families living in northern France, on the occasion of the museum’s “Algeria season” (which happened to coincide with protests in Algeria). This call for contributions the size of a post-it note, most likely with an eye towards archives, comes from the ground: the demand for stories from local families who arrived in northern France via the Mediterranean. The call includes the image of a ferry at sea. Here North African memories and experiences are valorized in French space, documented, displayed, made permanent.9 But it also depends on family archives and local stories—demanding goodwill and donations. They become a new addition to national French stories, rather than a silenced one. While the IMA-Tourcoing only hosts temporary exhibits, La Piscine in nearby Roubaix has a permanent collection which it supplements with temporary shows. Algerian-born, Roubaix-based photographer Naime Merabet’s show Fenêtre sur l’Algérie (Merabet 2019) showcases his work made in Algeria. Merabat (like Abidat), is interested in quotidian life in Algeria, and notes that Roubaix/Alger became “deux rives” (“two shores” or “two banks”) for him (Photographier ses Racines 2019). For his part, Boudjelal says that after displaying his Algeria work for many years, he has been contacted by quite a few people—old and young—who want to make Algerian “returns,” visit the country themselves, and take photos. The very possibility of Algerian returns is another instance of post-crisis possibilities in the Mediterranean.

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At La Piscine, Merabet’s work is exhibited next to the pool, and across from a small show of Orientalist drawings, installed in the former shower stalls of the pool, refurbished into gallery walls (Belles feuilles 2019). At the same time, there are two other Algeria-inspired shows at La Piscine, mirror images of nineteenth-century Algeria, one on the nineteenth-­ century French Orientalist painter Gustave Guillaumet (1840–1887) (L’Algérie de Gustave Guillaumet 2019), and the other on the nineteenth-­ century Algerian resistance leader Emir Abdelkader (1808–1883) (Abdelkader: L’Émir de la Résistance 2019). La Piscine does an interesting job of combining its permanent collection with loaned works. The Orientalist alongside the postcolonial is an ambivalent space, but offers a version of historical continuity: if we read this history against the grain, different histories can emerge. A quick glance at the permanent homes of many of the items in the Guillaumet and Abdelkader exhibitions reveals a hexagonal map of France: Versailles, L’Hospitalité d’Abraham in Lyon, the Musée d’Orsay, Carcassonne, Mucem, Lille, Meaux, and private collections. L’Hospitalité d’Abraham, owner of multiple items in the Abdelkader exhibition, is also an association responsible for the nomination of the “Place Émir Abd el-Kader” in Lyon, inaugurated in 2008. Algeria is still considered a hot or taboo topic by many in France. (When I mentioned this “taboo” element to French students studying documentary film, they made a film about it in Marseille, called “La terre passe” (2019).) These current exhibitions, and the holdings they derive from, suggest a taboo or a silence in plain sight. In other words, not only is Algeria currently all over France, but it has been for a very long time: French and Algerian archival and artistic holdings cover contemporary French hexagonal space. The Abdelkader exhibition is timely, if not uncanny, coinciding with the protests in Algeria, which began in February 2019. The exhibition includes paintings of the Emir, photographs, and many cartes de visite— pocket-sized Emirs. The wall text notes that the “profusion” of images of Abdelkader has circulated and continues to circulate around the Mediterranean. In 1866 the Musée de Roubaix won a portrait of Abdelkader’s wife in a lottery organized by an Arts Society in Lille. This portrait (for which Abdelkader’s wife Aicha is thought to never have sat) is the permanent collection’s hinge for the show, and offers a creative postcolonial rethinking of its permanent collection. A seemingly banal faux-­ portrait anchors a postcolonial revisiting of Abdelkader’s nineteenth century visual legacy, and the ways in which his portraits (via cartes de visite) traveled around the Mediterranean, and beyond. The museum’s

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bookshop included many books about Algeria as well as Algerian francophone novels for sale. Posters of the Orientalist show were available, but no poster was made for the Abdelkader exhibition. One of the famous portraits of Abdelkader was created while he was in captivity in France. Unlike his earlier paper movements, the contemporary reproduction of his image does not travel beyond the museum in the gift shop’s contemporary visual offerings. The unintended message may be that even though Abdelkader’s image traveled freely across the Mediterranean during the nineteenth century when he was a direct threat to French rule in Algeria, celebrating his image today in a large format may (still) be too chaud.

Ends and Beginnings in Algeria From nineteenth-century permanent collections to twenty-first-century digital archives, we arrive at protests in Algeria. On 18 February 2019, Abdelhak Smara tweeted: “Hello from the Bottom of the Ocean…” (Smara 2019) in response to a tweet from the satirical Algerian newspaper El Manchar. El Manchar was responding to the news on 6 February that the physically incapacitated Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika had announced his candidacy for President and would be running for a fifth presidential term. El Manchar posted two photos in response to the fifth mandate from the film Titanic: the first was a photo of the Titanic sinking, and the second was the Titanic band playing while the ship went down (El Manchar 2019). The band’s faces from the film still were replaced with those in power in Algeria as the band members (the President, his brother, and the Prime Minister were all pictured). Many protests followed, and on 2 April, 2019, President Bouteflika resigned. Algerians of all ages have been regularly protesting every Friday since February 2019, and students have an additional protest on Tuesday. The protests began and have remained peaceful, characterized by an outpouring of humor, creativity, memes, jokes, colorful placards, costumes, and anger from a population fed up with the status quo.10 Historian Sarah Ad put out a call on Twitter to collect images and examples of all of the protest art, an archive for the future (Ad 2019). This has implications for future archives. One man dressed up as the nineteenth century Emir Abdelkader (the subject of the museum exposition discussed above), and it was as if the famous statue of the Emir in central Algiers had come to life—off of the pedestal and into the street. If the government was portrayed as the Titanic band playing while the ship went down, what came

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in its wake? Following the protests, the nature of archives has changed, as has the role of the migration boat, and possibly a rejection of Mediterranean crossings toward Europe. This is post-crisis-space. The movement is commonly referred to as hirak [“movement” in Arabic] and sometimes “La révolution du sourire” [the smile revolution]. A whole new language of protest has emerged, as evidenced by “A Hirak Glossary” (to give but one example in English) published on Jadaliyya, which documents language used in the protests (Davis et al. 2019). At the beginning of the protests, many would gather at Place Maurice Audin in Algiers, named after the French teacher tortured and killed by the French military during the Algerian War of Independence, considered a hero in Algeria. Young people decided to write their hopes for the future on post-it notes, and put them up around the square, resulting in an ephemeral archive pasted onto a postcolonial lieu de mémoire. What I am calling archiving—via twitter links, screenshots, digital images, and even post-it notes on walls expands traditional methods, insists on urban space as an archive, and here includes spontaneous and significant participation. This focus on the fragment and the ephemeral speaks to what Saidiya Hartman calls the “scraps of the archive” (2018, n.pag.). Eventually the police came and removed the messages, revealing the fragility of urban paper archives. However, digital images remain, an ephemeral and powerful revolutionary moment in movement.11 The 8 March protests brought images of boats and claims for an alternative future in Algeria, one where territory replaces taking one’s chances at sea. Filmmaker Farah Souames shared a photo on twitter of one of the protest banners made by Fine Arts students which she translated from Arabic: “We will not flee to Europe on deathtrap boats; We will not burn our mother’s hearts with grief; We will not be eaten by the fishes; We will rebuild our Algeria” (Souames 2019). The language of burning is used, referencing harraga, and defiantly rejecting Mediterranean crossings in favor of staying in Algeria and building something else. Another banner in Arabic (translated by historian Arthur Asseraf into French) critiques those in power, noting that their children are in Europe while ordinary peoples’ children are under the sea (Asseraf 2019). Journalist Hamdi Baala (2019) posted a photo on twitter of a group in Oran who protested with a harraga boat which they deemed the “last” migration boat—reserved for those in power. This boat is on display like a mirror image of the Venice Biennale’s Barca Nostra, but with a different audience, and very different passengers in mind: their boat, rather than our boat. The language of sacrifice and

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opportunity of harraga has been transferred as punishment and exile for ruling elites. It has been a privilege in this piece to include images from artists and musicians. Navigating copyright is less clear with Twitter screenshots, and though I insist on the archival possibilities of the screenshot, I am not able to include a screenshot of Hamdi Baaala’s tweet of the last boat. Readers may follow the Twitter url breadcrumbs as long as they are digitally viable. Wall graffiti in French from the March protests reads: “For the first time I don’t want to leave my Algeria.” Journalist Adlène Meddi reported on a message to Europe written in Arabic, and translated by twitter users into English and French: “A message to those obsessed with the Algerian ‘migration wave’ in France: on this placard by protesting students we read ‘we studied to serve the country, not emigrate elsewhere’” (Meddi 2019). Twitter user @jovendelaperla created the placard in three languages: these messages are for inside Algeria as well as for the world. Protesters are taking control of the visual narratives and European imaginary of southern Mediterranean shores—offering a way out on their own terms. One young Algerian became famous after being interviewed in the street by a newscaster in Modern Standard Arabic. He responded to the newscaster in darija (Algerian Arabic), at which point the newscaster asked him to answer “in Arabic.” He responded: “I don’t speak Arabic [modern standard], this [the language I am speaking] is in our darija.”12 This illustrates the insistence on a homegrown protest in local languages that people speak on the street. Other changes in attitude could be seen in Twitter polls asking if those of French-Algerian backgrounds living in France would be willing to move to Algeria even temporarily if it became democratic. These digital archives—the screenshotted tweet, the image of the discarded placard, or the saved image, the short interview clip—are only a few examples of the many ways the protests have changed the country.

Conclusion: Transnational Solidarity and Alternative Archives On 24 March, 2019, the progressive Marseille newspaper La Marseillaise published an online petition in solidarity with Algerians, “L’Appel des deux rives.” A week later, the newspaper sponsored a debate on the future of Algeria and current events in Marseille  (La Marseillaise 2019). The journalist chairing the debate opened by reminding the audience that La

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Marseillaise has held an anticolonial stance since colonial times, and that Marseille was a center for anticolonial movements. The insistence upon thinking multiple shores (deux rives) is another possible route out, and recognition of Mediterranean crisis-scapes. The invited journalist Samir Ghezlaoui writes for the Algerian newspaper El Watan, and began by explaining that not only does France have a financial and geopolitical stake in what’s going on in Algeria, but many people in France also have “une certaine idée de l’Algérie.” With this quote, he echoes Charles de Gaulle at an angle, with de Gaulle’s notion of “une certaine idée de la France.” This is not de Gaulle’s only appearance in current events in Algeria. Bouteflika’s resignation was seen by many as his “Je vous ai compris” moment on Algerian twitter (referring to de Gaulle’s famous phrase in his 1958 speech in Algiers) and this phrase has been used mockingly towards the Army General in power post-Bouteflika, Ahmed Gaïd Salah.13 The ongoing 2019 revolutionary moment in Algeria can also be read as a reckoning with unfinished business that dates from the time of de Gaulle. Ghezlaoui cites the Algerian protests’ peaceful nature as uninteresting to France and French media outlets. Put another way, now that Algeria is visible on a global stage (it is usually invisible), the most interesting discussions are most likely not coming from the French media.14 Weekly solidarity marches with Algeria take place in France on Sundays, and are lively in Marseille (which has a sizable Algerian and French-­ Algerian population), replete with local banners and slogans. In contrast to Marseille, the march I witnessed in Lille at the end of April 2019 was much smaller, and included Algerian sans papiers holding banners. One banner, taking a slogan from the Algerian War of Independence read: “Un seul héros le peuple.” This remix of slogans from Algerian Independence offers new life to old slogans, and possibilities for a future which does not erase the past. The slogan “Un seul heros le peuple” could also be seen under glass not far from the street protests, at the Algerian photography exhibition at the IMA-Tourcoing. This expo included Marc Riboud’s iconic photo from July 1962  in Algiers where UN SEUL HEROS LE PEUPLE is written on the city walls. Insisting on the march and in its wake, these solidarity marchers leave a trace on the city, expanding the boundaries of Mediterranean solidarities, and insisting on youth for change. Following Edwige Tamalet Talbayev’s words, however, this may be an expansion of Mediterranean borders, but not their erasure: “The notion of a borderless Mediterranean is certainly tempting, yet for a vast

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majority of North Africans the sea represents fracture and confinement” (Talbayev 2017, 152). Some protest slogans from Algeria in 2019 suggest there is another way out, not via boat. Future archives will involve holding multiple spaces together at the same time: the journalistic and historical photograph in the archive under glass, the artists moving between France and Algeria documenting daily life and theorizing memory and transit, and the sans papiers on the street in the former metropole, reclaiming revolutionary slogans fifty-seven years later. One of the first books on the current popular protest movement in Algeria, La révolution du sourire (Benali 2019) was published in May 2019 by the publishing house Editions Frantz Fanon, an appropriate choice for archives looking to the future and not forgetting the past. Moving from Sedira’s 2008 video artwork MiddleSea (pre-dating the so-called Arab Spring) to the visual cultures surrounding the 2019 Algerian hirak movement/Smile Revolution reflects a decade of wake work whose way out of multiple crises concludes in a refusal to get on the boat and head north. In this way, the 2019 revolution in Algeria is the avant-garde of Mediterranean post-crisis-scapes. Algeria Time is fleeting: it is at once trying to catch a revolutionary moment and preserve it by any means possible, as fragile as a captured wake.

Notes 1. Considering the term “crisis,” I also have in mind elhariry and Talbayev’s use of “critical” in discussions of the Mediterranean in Critically Mediterranean (elhariry and Talbayev 2018). 2. Mucem regularly stages exhibitions and events on Algeria, including Made in Algeria, généalogie d’un territoire (2016). In March 2019, of note was Alger 2035, part of the “Algérie-France, la Voix des objets” series, which included discussions on urban space in Algiers (which ended with a reconsideration of France-Algeria and call to “garder les traces” for future archives in light of the protests) and performances, such as Nabil Djedouani’s “Come with me to the Casbah” (2019), another example of a “way back” from France to Algeria. Djedouani also runs an online digital archive on Algerian cinema. Zahia Rahmani, involved in the Made in Algeria show, also exhibited her 2017 work “Sismographie des luttes. Vers une histoire globale des revues critiques et culturelles” in Marseille in 2018. This installation is an alternative archive of 900 images and covers of anti-colonialist journals and revues from around the world.

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3. See MacDonald (2017) for more on Mediterranean archives, “Algeria Time,” and Mediterranean chronotopes. The notion of repetition could be read next to Benitez-Rojo’s arguments about the Caribbean in The Repeating Island (1996).  In the case of Mediterranean boat images, archives, and water transit, here the repetition of the boat is one with difference that lends itself to alternative Mediterranean futurity. Thanks to Liesbeth Minnaard for pointing out this comparison. 4. For more on the navette, see MacDonald (2013). 5. Other recent events not limited to Algeria, but speaking to archives and decolonization include: Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s video “Apeshit,” shot at the Louvre (2018); the publication of the controversial volume Sexe, race & colonies (Blanchard et al. 2018); the exhibit Le modèle noir: De Géricault à Matisse at the Musée d’Orsay (2019). 6. Elisabeth Leuvrey’s (2013) film “La Traversée” on people crossing between Marseille and Algiers every summer uses the image of the wake on the DVD cover. 7. Thanks to Chamekh for her translation assistance and generosity. 8. “Territory” was the surprise winner at the Cannes Lions International Festival in 2017. We could even read it as a contemporary take films from the 1980s where “going back” is still possible via ferry, such as Sarah Maldoror’s “Le passager du Tassili” (1986). 9. This trend can also be seen in the 2019–2020 exposition in Toulouse, “Ô Blédi! Ô Toulouse!” [“Oh my home country! Oh Toulouse!”] which documents the historical North African presence in France’s fourth largest city. 10. For more on humor and the Algerian protests, see: Nadia Ghanem (2019). 11. See Khaled Drareni tweets for images (Drareni 2019a, b).  Drareni has been arrested multiple times since the beginning of the hirak movement. Most recently he was imprisoned on March 29, 2020 for his journalistic coverage of the hirak movement. As of May 24, 2020 he remains in prison in Algeria. In addition, the satirical newspaper and website El Manchar also shut down in May 2020 after government pressure. 12. For a highly nuanced discussion of the socio-linguistic stakes of the exchange, see: Lameen Souag (2019). 13. This de Gaulle quote was also central to the play “Les Oubliés (Alger-­ Paris)” staged at the Comédie Française in 2019. Thanks to Abdelkader Belloundja for honing in on and drawing my attention to “une certaine idée de la France.” Gaïd Salah died of a heart attack in December 2019. 14. My focus on the historical relationship France/Algeria is not to ignore other players in the SWANA region that influence events in Algeria, such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia, but there is no space for it in this chapter.

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Works Cited Abdelkader, L’émir de la résistance. 2019. Roubaix La Piscine, July 30. https:// www.roubaix-lapiscine.com/expositions/abd-el-kader-lemir-de-la-resistance/. Abderrezak, Hakim. 2016. Ex-Centric Migrations: Europe and the Maghreb in Mediterranean Cinema, Literature, and Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Abidat, Abed, and Samir Toumi. 2018. Algeroïd. Marseille: Images Plurielles. Ad, Sarah. 2019. Twitter post, March 12, 12:21 a.m. https://twitter.com/ sarouche06/status/1105217234639732736. Alger 2035: “Algérie-France, La Voix Des Objets”. 2019. Mucem. Accessed March 12, 2019. http://www.mucem.org/programme/exposition-et-temps-fort/ algerie-france-la-voix-des-objets. Asseraf, Arthur. 2019. Twitter post, March 12, 12:32 a.m. https://twitter.com/ ArthurAsseraf/status/1105219879563603975. Baala, Hamdi. 2019. Twitter post. March 22, 9:28 p.m. https://twitter.com/ HamdiBaala/status/1109159915157893120. Balibar, Étienne. 1997. Algérie, France: une ou deux nations? Editions Hazan. http://www.cairn.info/article.php?ID_ARTICLE=LIGNES0_030_0005. Accessed August 30, 2019. Belles feuilles et petits papiers. 2019. Roubaix La Piscine, July 30. https://www. roubaixlapiscine.com/expositions/belles-feuilles-et-petits-papiers-2/. Benali, Arezki. 2019. ‘La Révolution du sourire’: Le premier livre sur Mouvement populaire en Algérie. Algerie Eco, April 28. https://www.algerie-eco. com/2019/04/28/larevolution-du-sourire-le-premier-livre-sur-mouvementpopulaire-en-algerie/. Benitez-Rojo, Antonio. 1996. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Durham: Duke University Press. Blanchard, Pascal, Nicolas Bancel, et  al. 2018. Sexe, Race & Colonies. Paris: La Découverte. Boudjelal, Bruno. 2015. Bruno Boudjelal: Vanishing into Reality/Algérie, Clos Comme on Ferme Un Livre? Marseille: Autograph. Caramanica, Jon. 2018. How the Blaze’s Emotional Dance Music Brings Listeners to Tears. The New  York Times, August 17. https://www.nytimes. com/2018/08/16/arts/music/the-blaze-dancehall.html. Chamekh, Issrar. 2018. Twitter post, June 3. https://mobile.twitter.com/tn_ zlabya/status/1002999074251988992. Davis, Muriam Haleh, Hiyem Cheurfa, and Thomas Serres. 2019. A Hirak Glossary: Terms from Algeria and Morocco. Jadaliyya, June 12. https://www. jadaliyya.com/Details/38734. Djedouani, Nabil. 2019. Come with Me to the Casbah. Marseille: Mucem. Drareni, Khaled. 2019a. Twitter post, March 12, 5:06 p.m. https://twitter.com/ khaleddrareni/status/1105470132560760832.

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———. 2019b. Twitter post. May 10, 3:40 p.m. https://twitter.com/khaleddrareni/status/1126829251544715270. El Manchar. 2019. Twitter post. February 18. 7:50 p.m. https://twitter.com/ el_manchar/status/1097538794339909634. elhariry, yasser, and Edwige Tamalet Talbayev. 2018. Critically Mediterranean: Temporalities, Aesthetics, and Deployments of a Sea in Crisis. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ghanem, Nadia. 2019. The Frame, The Sausage, The Oil: Humor and Politics in Algeria’s Protests. ArabLit, March 10. https://arablit.org/2019/03/10/ the-frame-the-sausage-the-oil-humor-and-politics-in-algerias-protests/. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hartman, Saidiya. 2018. On Working with Archives: An Interview with Writer Saidiya Hartman. Interview by Thora Siemsen. The Creative Independent, April 18. https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/saidiya-hartman-onworking-with-archives/. Higgins, Charlotte. 2019. Boat in Which Hundreds of Migrants Died Displayed at Venice Biennale. The Guardian, May 7. https://www.theguardian.com/ artanddesign/2019/may/07/boat-in-which-hundreds-of-migrants-dieddisplayed-at-venice-biennale. Hofmeyr, Isabel. 2019. Provisional Notes on Hydrocolonialism. English Language Notes 57 (1): 11–20. L’Algérie de Gustave Guillaumet (1840–1887). 2019. Roubaix La Piscine, July 30. https://www.roubaix-lapiscine.com/expositions/lalgerie-de-gustaveguillaumet-1840-1887/. l’Appel Des Deux Rives. 2019 La Marseillaise. http://www.lamarseillaise.fr/analyses-de-la-redaction/decryptage/75430-signez-l-appel-des-deux-rives-pour-lapaix-le-progres-la-liberte-et-la-democratie-en-algerie. Accessed May 21, 2019. La Marseillaise. Twitter post. March 29, 8:46 p.m. https://twitter.com/lamarsweb/status/1111686119014449152. La Traversée. 2013. Dir. Elisabeth Leuvrey. Les Oubliés (Alger-Paris). 2019. Comédie-Française. https://www.comedie-francaise.fr/fr/evenements/les-oublies18-19#. Accessed March 8, 2019. MacDonald, Megan C. 2013. The Trans-Mediterranean Navette: Assia Djebar and the Dictionnaire Des Mots Français d’origine Arabe. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 17 (1): 58–68. ———. 2017. N’Zid? Zid!: Mediterranean Archives and Postcolonial Translation in the Time of Amnesia. In Translating the Postcolonial in Multilingual Contexts, ed. Judith Misrahi-Barak and Srilata Ravi, 161–183. Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée (PULM). Meddi, Adlène. 2019. Twitter post. March 5, 10:10 p.m. https://twitter.com/ adlenmeddi/status/1103009930636902400.

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Naime Merabet. Fenêtre sur l’Algérie. 2019. Roubaix La Piscine, July 30. https:// www.roubaix-lapiscine.com/expositions/naime-merabet-fenetre-sur-lalgerie/. Ô Blédi! Ô Toulouse! 2019–2020. La médiathèque José Cabanis. https:// www.toulouse.fr/web/cultures/-/exposition-o-bledi-o-toulouse#/?_ k=3qspce. Accessed January 5, 2020. Photographier l’Algérie. 2019. Institut du monde arabe Tourcoing. https:// ima-tourcoing.fr/institut-monde-arabe/exposition-photographier-lalgerie/. Accessed May 5, 2019. Photographier ses racines. 2019. Roubaix La Piscine, April 27. https://www.roubaix-lapiscine.com/agenda/photographier-ses-racines/. Accessed May 5, 2019. Rahmani, Zahia. 2018. Sismographies. Marseille expos. https://www.marseilleexpos.com/blog/2018/06/03/sismographies/. Accessed August 12, 2019. Regards algériens. 2017. ARTE. https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/078302000-A/regards-algeriens/. Accessed May 14, 2019. Rosello, Mireille. 2003. Farança-Algéries Ou Djazaïr-Frances? Fractales et Mésententes Fructueuses. MLN 118 (4): 787–806. Sedira, Zineb. “MiddleSea”. 2008. https://www.zinebsedira.com/middlesea2008/. Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press Books. Smara, Abdelhak. 2019. Twitter post. February 18, 8:48 p.m. https://twitter. com/dlhak/status/1097553566070439936. Souag, Lameen. 2019. ‫سواق ا ألمني‬. Jabal Al-Lughat: ‘I Don’t Speak Arabic, This Is in Our Darja’. Jabal Al-Lughat, March 12. http://lughat.blogspot. com/2019/03/i-dont-speak-arabic-this-is-in-our-darja.html. Souames, Farah. 2019. Twitter post. March 9, 4:30 p.m. https://twitter.com/ souamesfarah/status/1104373820587167749. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1995. Ghostwriting. Diacritics 25 (2): 65–84. Talbayev, Edwige Tamalet. 2017. The Transcontinental Maghreb: Francophone Literature Across the Mediterranean. New York: Fordham University Press. The Blaze. 2017. Territory  - Official Video. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=54fea7wuV6s. Accessed August 17, 2018. Tondo, Lorenzo. 2019. Up to 70 Dead after Boat Capsizes Trying to Reach Europe from Libya. The Guardian, May 10. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2019/may/10/dozens-feared-drowned-migrant-boat-sinks-offtunisia.

Greek Weird Wave; Or, on How to Do a Cinema of Biopolitics Dimitris Papanikolaou

A Girl in a Celebration… First you see the door opening, the door frame just fitting inside the camera frame. We enter the middle-class sitting room of an Athenian family. Confetti, dancing, a celebration of a birthday and of intergenerational kin cohabitation—like you often find in Greece; a daughter confiding to her mother that she is pregnant; a father and/or grandfather dancing with his young grandchildren and/or children (exactly in this “and/or,” as the viewer will soon realize, lies not only the interpretative anxiety the film provokes, but the violence structuring the life-arrangements of this family group). A close-up of the 11-year-old girl whose birthday they are celebrating. She balances on the window to the soundtrack of Leonard Cohen’s “Dance me to the end of love.” She falls. The camera then follows her out of the window. We realize that the flat in the previous scenes had been on the fifth floor or so. As the camera pans to a vertical crane

D. Papanikolaou (*) University of Oxford, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Boletsi et al. (eds.), Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36415-1_11

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shot, the dead body of the young girl lying on the ground seems like it is being inspected, surveyed—the square-tile pattern more and more now looking like a graph measuring her body and the blood slowly flowing from it. In the first three minutes of Alexander Avranas’ Miss Violence (2013; script co-written with Kostas Peroulis), we have moved from allegory, to realism, to symbol, and then back. And in the two hours that follow in this gripping, harrowing, and extremely difficult to watch film, we will be constantly moving between several levels: a story of abuse, exploitation, child sex trafficking, and incest during the Greek crisis (a paterfamilias inflicts all of the above on the members of his family, among other things, in order to “make ends meet during a difficult period”); an allegory of Greek society seen in the microcosm of this family flat and behind its closed doors (the doors open in the first shot of the film and close in its last one); a larger symbolic narrative about the vicious circles of power and control and the inability to break them (in the last scenes the father is killed, yet control is reimposed, this time by the mother of the family); and a selfconscious realist micro-exploration of how bodies are trained through discipline, sexuality, welfare, affect, and kinship. The screening of violence is such that affective reactions are provoked, forced, and manipulated all at the same time. It makes this film a good example of what has been described by European film critics as “New Extremism” (Horeck and Kendall 2011). As in the films of Gaspar Noé or Catherine Breillat, violence in Miss Violence is not simply a part in a system of signification; it produces affect before it has (or can be read for) meaning. Like in many other films of New Extremism, violence here does not simply push you to consider it in its context; it drags you into it.1 Watching the film, I keep shivering; I also keep repeating to myself this is not my family experience, this has never been an experience I have ever been close to, this violence cannot touch me. And then I keep wondering—why on earth did I feel the need to say that? What is it that makes this particular subject matter affect me like that? What is it that makes me want to shelter myself from the porosity of its violence?

… a Dog in the Big Blue Sea… In Babis Makridis’ Oiktos (2018; based on a script by Efthimis Filippou), it strikes the viewer how much all characters appear in frames; not, that is, framed just by the rectangular film image, but also by architectonic and

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scenic elements in the mise-en-scène. They stand in front of new, shiny buildings; they sit next to spotlessly clean windows with views of the Athenian coast; they sit behind expensive furniture; they walk past modernist and postmodernist architectural landmarks of contemporary Athens, framed by their vertical and horizontal lines. A father and a son visit their wife and mother while she is in a prolonged coma in the hospital, only to be even more elaborately framed: by hospital doors, stands, beds, and medical equipment. A dog abandoned in the middle of the sea by its owner is then seen, from a crane shot, as a spot in the center of a blue horizon. Of course there is no point and character in the diegesis that could make us think of this as an internally focalized subjective shot. But neither is this constant framing and “measuring” of living beings in space coincidental in this film. From a moment on it becomes so excessive that it becomes integral to it. Someone is doing the framing on our behalf; somebody is expecting such framing; and many people (viewers and characters alike) probably feel they are bound to interpret this framing as something more than the idiosyncrasy of the mise-en-scène. The fact that in order to make a visual metaphor you can make use of a frame is something apparently not unknown to the characters of the film intradiegetically either— it forms a significant part of the overall joke: they pose, they deliver their lines, they move in space, as if constantly aware of the way they are being framed and of the visual metaphor in which they could be participating. First and foremost in this process is the obsessive and distanced central character, who will remain unnamed for the duration of the film. He is a lawyer whose wife has been in a coma in hospital for a long time. He has been quite rejoicing at the pity he and his son have been receiving to such an extent, that he decides to continue with this story even after his wife makes an unexpected recovery. With the balance he had achieved within the economies of pity now being challenged, the lawyer suddenly faces a growing sense of unhomeliness, trying to hold on to his previous situation as much as he can. Pity and compassion have suited him well—and some of the most hilarious scenes occur as he keeps trying to maintain his pitiable figure in front of hundreds of hanging suits in a dry cleaner’s. Given that this constant word-and-concept play is encouraged so much by the mise-en-scène, it is not far-fetched for the viewer to contemplate the film’s title in terms of another possible wordplay: the Greek title for the film translated into English as Pity is Oiktos, just one letter away from Oikos, the word for “house” that has given us notions and words such as “ecology” and “economy,” among others.

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This overissuing and concomitant devaluation of visual metaphor continues throughout, and seems to be shared wholeheartedly by the characters within the narrative. For example, when we see the lawyer in his office, he is sitting centered in front of the painting of a ship sailing calmly in the ocean until, toward the end, he gets a new painting delivered. It depicts a shipwreck during a storm. Of course, this marks the moment the lawyer starts to lose his calm and composure. Indeed, only a couple of scenes later, he will turn this film about the ennui of (not) being pitied enough, to horror, killing all his immediate kin (savaged bodies and bloodied furniture shot, again, framed within a frame, bring this film to its end). Awkwardly, Oiktos is punctuated from the very beginning by frequent intertitles, which offer forensic or biologistic descriptions: of bodies and their reactions in specific affective states (fear, loss, agony of death); of the specific details of a mental disposition; of the details of a crime scene. Again, the characters seem to be in on the game too: when the wife wakes up from her coma, she describes her ordeal in meticulous detail to friends as part of a dinner entertainment. Throughout the film, her husband has also been rehearsing moments from his court depositions, where he describes in forensic detail a crime scene and the psychological profile of the perpetrator. With these framings, the intertitles, the ironic visual metaphors, and the odd turns of this story, the film becomes an excessive production of allegories, visual and conceptual, to such an extent that, from a certain moment on, they seem to form a hyperbolical, excessive allegorization whose main point is, more than anything else, to show just such excess. In the very last scene, the protagonist’s dog (the one that had been abandoned to die in the middle of the sea) is seen finally reaching shore, in the center of the shot, framed equally by the sea and the beach—the dog we thought had drowned has, in the end, survived and returned. It is as if all this effort of overblown signification has ended with an empty joke; or, that it has culminated with a scene of impossible persistence, a scene of cruel optimism (cf. Berlant 2011). I have just placed emphasis on the word “or,” precisely because the decision about how to watch and make sense of such a scene (and of the whole film) very much relates to what is at stake with the type of cinema that Oiktos seems to be making a meta-­ commentary on. To point to the “emptiness” of this last scene means that you want to watch the film as a statement on/of its realism, that you are ready to consider it an ironic comment on the very emptiness of the capitalist everyday otherwise depicted in the film. Yet something much more

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complex emerges if you decide to track further the systems of representation, the political arguments, and the analytical concepts that, for instance, this last scene could conjure up. Other aspects emerge if you decide to persist with reading the last scene as a recollection of cruel optimism and why it still matters today, to think back and ponder the scenes in hospitals and the visual allegories of the empty, yet “good life” this film seems full of (and how much of its opposite, the “unlivable life,” seems to have been clinically purged from the picture); to see the film, but also its central concept of “pity,” as a statement on the economies of affect today (including pity and compassion in Greece and around contemporary Greece). What is more, to do all this while also taking into account how one is guided toward such a (largely participatory) reading by a cultural economy in which the film participates. Who can read this Greek, strange, “weird” film today without entering those long signifying chains?

… and Their “Weird” Context After Miss Violence was first presented in the Venice Film Festival in 2013, where it won the Silver Lion for Best Director and the Volpi Cup for best actor, the film’s director Alexandros Avranas was quick to reassure audiences that this had not been a film specifically made about the Greek crisis, nor even about Greece. For that matter, he kept insisting on the fact that he had taken inspiration from a real story that took place in Germany, and which he had read about in a newspaper. Expectedly, he had trouble persuading a gathering of international critics eager to hear the opposite and ready to elaborate on the Greek crisis-connection behind this film. By that time, a film like Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth (2009) had already become the film of the Greek Crisis (again, sometimes against the objections of its director about such a contextualization). In that earlier film’s central scene, just like in Miss Violence, we also had a family in a very awkward celebration, and the girl at the center of that celebration trying, in a desperate act, to react to and break the family’s vicious circle. Suddenly, there was something about these families that kept haunting contemporary Greek films; alongside the realism of domestic violence and abuse that dominated the storylines, there was something violent, explosive, expansive, making that allegorical reading too good an opportunity to let go. Hence, one of the ideas that for years afterward became central in the reception of post-2009 Greek cinema: the family in tatters, in violence, in explosion, in disarray, was seen as a form of national allegory for the nation

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in Crisis (Giannouri 2014, 157–158). No matter how much Avranas protested (and, one feels, his protest might have been a way to create even more discussion about these issues), Miss Violence was firmly cataloged as a product of the Greek Crisis. “Cruelty [in this film] could be blamed on the economic crisis. You would have to believe that the Greek economy has ended up leading to either derision through the absurd (in line with Yorgos Lanthimos’ cinema) or, in a more worrying way, to monsters like this pater familias [of Miss Violence], the real master of the house who imposes discipline by enslaving his children” (La Porta 2013, n.pag.).2 The narrative about a “Greek cinema of the Crisis” is one that almost all Greek art film directors who presented work internationally after 2009 have, like Avranas, tried to resist at times, while at others accepting it in order to promote their films. Yorgos Lanthimos, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Syllas Tzoumerkas, Panos Koutras, Yiannis Economides, have often argued against the narrow contextualization of their films within the economic and sociopolitical Crisis that hit Greece in that period. They have also been less than enthusiastic about the idea that their films are too closely connected to one another, or that they belong to a distinct film movement. Yet it was exactly that frame that seems to have guaranteed their films’ global circulation and distribution in many countries, as well as the very positive reception in international film festivals, the interest of global media, and often, in terms of financing, even their existence. Let us not forget that, as Lydia Papadimitriou has so aptly put it in her discussion of international co-production networks that have been increasingly financing Greek films, “[New Greek cinema’s] international trajectory and recognition [after 2009] is not just a desired extra, but a fundamental condition of possibility … [T]hese films, in other words, are crucially dependent on international circulation in order to exist” (2017, 148). Indeed, it was mainly due to an article written in the English newspaper The Guardian on the eve of another of these films’ British premiere— Tsangari’s Attenberg—that new Greek cinema after 2009 acquired the name it has become identified with in most promotional channels of World Cinema ever since. Written by critic Steve Rose, it decisively proposed new Greek directors as being part of a group, and their films as intricately related and forming a new cinematic “wave.” “Is it just a coincidence that the world’s most messed-up country is making the world’s most messed-­up cinema?”, Rose asked in that piece, which had the overall title “Attenberg, Dogtooth and the Weird Wave of Greek Cinema” (2011, n.pag.). The most

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successful cultural product of the Greece of the Crisis was thus born; and its name: “the Greek Weird Wave.” There have been objections to this labeling, some of them well founded (Chalkou 2012; Kourelou et  al. 2014; Mademli 2016; Nikolaidou and Poupou 2017). Indeed, some of the more recent Greek films seem to have joked about this specific internationalization of Greek cinema after 2009, that is, the tendency to see new Greek cinema as the weird outlier of World Cinema. Oiktos is a film that makes this point obsessively: it seems to be poking fun at attitudes of Greece (and Greeks) as a country and a population in need of compassion, and at the same time, to be making a point about the kind of Greek cinema (and the cultural politics) it does not cease to belong to. Oiktos, metaphorically through its storyline and performatively through its form, is suggesting that Greek art cinema, in search of an (international) audience, has relied for too long on visual allegories, framed and often visually fragmented bodies, awkward storylines, and a constant feeling of unease and malaise. As with that film’s main character and the pitiable fiction he has invented for himself, the implication is that Greek cinema has also reached a saturation point exactly because it has become a national oddity for international consumption, and has not yet decided where to go from there. That said, it is impossible to bypass certain thematic and formal traits that many Greek art films of this period have shared and developed. Take, for example, a group of films that could consist of Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth (2009) and Alps (2011), Athena Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg (2010) and Chevalier (2015), Babis Makridis’ L (2012) and Pity (2018), Avranas’ Miss Violence (2013), Syllas Tzoumerkas’ Country of Origin (2010), Blast (2014) and The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea (2019), Panos Koutras’ Strella (2009) and Xenia (2014), Ektoras Lygizos’ Boy Eating the Bird’s Food (2012), Yannis Economides’ The Knifer (2010) and Stratos (2014), Argyris Papadimitropoulos’ Suntan (2016), Yorgos Zois’ Interruption (2015) and Third Kind (2018), Konstantina Kotzamani’s Washingtonia (2015) and Sofia Exarchou’s Park (2016). There are, undoubtedly, huge differences between these works, including important formal and stylistic ones. But the similarities are also notable. Most of them turn their attention to the individual and to the private space and/ or on family and kinship dynamics, in a persistent tendency to develop visual and situational allegories. In practice, this means that relationships portrayed in these films end up being less about affective investment and more about relationality, with love portrayed as an integral part of larger

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systems of power. Screening sex also tends to be less about desire and more about sexuality as a surface network that operates on bodies and makes them connect with each other, holding each other in check, producing the space for each other. Screening violence becomes a way to explore the dynamics of violence, its use and signification, as well as its ability to be affectively disturbing, exuberant, and extreme (as in, say, Avranas’ Miss Violence or Tzoumerkas’ Sargasso Sea and in the films of Yannis Economides) (cf. Kaloudi 2014). In many of these examples, and notably in the films of Lanthimos and Tsangari, the larger context remains stubbornly absent, something that has often made Greek critics suspicious (Spatharakis 2011; cf. Brody 2016). However, instead of a very pronounced exposition of sociopolitical context, more often than not what we get is a layered engagement with the politics of life: from details about the life of a group of people and the care of self and other in clean and clinical environments (as, for instance, in Alps, Third Kind or Washingtonia), to the intertwinement of the body, sexuality, control, and kinship (Dogtooth, Knifer, Attenberg). And from images of “wellbeing” and its diverse economies (as in Alps, Oiktos, Chevalier, Suntan) to their opposite—chaos, complete havoc (as in the films by Tzoumerkas and in Suntan) or the condition of bare life (Boy; Third Kind; Park).3 Let us not forget that from 2009 onward the Greek public sphere became dominated by narratives of a state of emergency, the fight for national survival, the rhetoric of framing, bordering, training, retraining, and disciplining. Greeks became accustomed to thinking of their country as “the big patient” of Europe and of the austerity measures as “a necessary and powerful medicine.” They faced stereotyping as an everyday reality in their country’s international relations (but also in their own everyday experience). They also became used to discussing monetary figures and projections relating the individual (and the individual’s survival) to a population (and its economy), as well as to stories of individual and collective hardship, the idea of people failing to make ends meet and even to figures of exhaustion and death, alongside political decisions and negotiations. With a migration and refugee crisis that also reached its peak after 2014, Greece was seen as one of the major European sites of/for holding people, for seeing people moving en masse, dying en masse, as a place for the organization, detention, and deportation of people, for the construction of camps for people. Population became a shadow constantly recalled, discursively and physically mapped on people’s bodies, related to life, livability, precarity, and more generally the politics of life and death. To

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follow a well-known formulation by Michel Foucault (1978), the anatomopolitics of the human body became intricately linked, in a spectacular and very public fashion, to the biopolitics of (a) population.4 It is in this context that Greek art films were made and fought for international distribution, received, critically debated, watched, and rewatched in Greece and abroad after 2009. It is in this context that viewers reacted to the films’ engagement with the domains of the public and the private; their investment in the theme of the “Greek family”; their portrayal of violence (and their insistence on the systematicity and economy of violence); their screening of the body, of scenes of education and induced docility or of eruption and disarray; their screening of landscape, including the landscape of development, underdevelopment, and uneven modernization; their reception and use, by communities of viewers, as a platform to create new cultural genealogies and tell new histories of Greek cinema. Most importantly, it is in this context that audiences had to decode most of these films’ insistence on weaving realism with allegory in ways that demanded the continuous engagement and investment of the viewer. Pace the unease with which their directors tried to avoid being pigeonholed, one cannot underestimate the impact of the larger political, socioeconomic, and cultural context in which the films of the Greek Weird Wave appeared. If this period, and the narrative of Crisis that gave it its most recognizable shape,5 is experienced as an intense biopolitical present in Greece, the films of the Weird Wave have provided enough material to be considered its representative cultural product. They were being felt as relevant—even when their “new extremism” seemed far-fetched or their allegories concocted. It is no coincidence that the main poster photograph from Lanthimos’ Dogtooth, a shot depicting the children of the family in a domestic celebration, has for years illustrated many an article about not only the cultural, but also the economic, social, and political state of Greece. The choice seemed evident: Dogtooth is an allegorical film about managing a family in extreme ways, and turning the family house into a laboratory for the production of docile and well-trained bodies. It is the theme of governance that became the common denominator between the film and what Raymond Williams calls “the structure of feeling” (Williams 1961) of the period it appeared. And the more you keep thinking of the two together, the film and the period’s most pervasive structure of feeling, the more you realize that they both do not refer simply to governance. Rather, it is that more complex, intensified, and internalized mode of power, which asserts itself as the only logic of conduct, precisely

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that structuration of power that Foucault has called governmentality, that is at (or, rather, is the) issue in both the film and its larger context. At this nexus of governmentality, you also start reconsidering an aspect of Dogtooth (and of the Weird Wave more generally) that its allegorical impulse may have initially overshadowed: its peculiar, and acutely topical, realism.

Biopolitical Realism… Addressing the question of realism in the films of the recent Weird Wave of Greek cinema is bound to challenge our understanding of what cinematic realism should be (and is currently) doing, and how it needs to be positioned within a cultural economy of Crisis. Following a rather traditional understanding of both realism and social relevance, Greek journalists have at times complained that recent Greek art cinema does not show enough “love” to its audience. “We would like a film based preferably on classical narration, with carefully crafted aesthetics, as genuine dialogue as possible, where we could recognize our deeper sorrows and/or comic impulses, in a frame that would seem realistic and be done with fashionable trends and half-baked politics” (Politakis 2019, n.pag., my translation). Interestingly, even in such a polemic criticism of recent Greek cinema as non-crowd-pleasing, what still emerges is the idea that its films have been trying to achieve a different way of engaging with audiences (as well as trends and their politics). Could it be that this is not so much an anti-­ realist stance (as the last quotation implied) but evidence of a search for a different (and more powerful for that matter) type of realism? As one could easily counterargue, for all their “weird” turns and defamiliarizing formal gestures, most of these films do start from a very engaged depiction of “the world we live in”: more often than not they insist on underlining their relation to a specific and recognizable reality. The celebration scene in Miss Violence, the flat, its surroundings, as well as the environment the main character inhabits in Oiktos or the house of Dogtooth are not only “real,” they are also indexical, in the sense of being deictic (Doane 2007), pointing, that is, to recognizable upper-middle-class contemporary urban living in Greece and to a specific moment in the history of the country. The films also participate in real and topical cultural and social debates. Dogtooth’s allegory, for instance, especially as it circulates within debates that use it as a transparent reference to “the moment we live in,” becomes part of that moment’s realist tapestry, its favorite illustration. Last but not

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least, the films’ investment in provoking a strong affective reaction in their viewers (which I have also tried to describe in my own reconstruction of some scenes earlier in my text), aims to create exactly what one critic has so evocatively called a “realism of the senses” (DeLuca 2014). Recent critical assessments of Greek cinema have engaged with these issues, even though not always in the same terms. Vrasidas Karalis, for instance, in his Realism in Greek Cinema, attempts to integrate an analysis of the Weird Wave within a larger genealogy of cinematic (and Greek) realism. The Weird Wave, he argues, is a “cinema of transgression” precisely because it aims to transcend the very codes of reference of a national canon of cinematic realism, often by overdoing them. Crucially, [t]he “Weird Wave” or the Cinema of Transgression is not the product of the economic meltdown: on the contrary, it refracted the panicked reaction to the absurd conspicuous consumption, the reckless consumerism and the systemic abuse of power that were taking place before and after 2004…. During the crisis, … young cinematographers used the economic collapse as an opportunity to explore the deep social implosion that has engulfed all levels of culture—especially at the level of symbols, representations and cultural iconographies. (Karalis 2014, 241)

These films, Karalis maintains, “don’t pretend to be outside [the] reality” of a late capitalist corporate culture and meaningless spectacle; they, instead, thematize it. “They depict a cultural paradigm in implosion and in conflict with itself” (238). This is a perceptive, if at times problematic,6 analysis, shared by many. According to its main premise, the capitalist expansion in Greece prompted by the preparations for the 2004 Olympic Games, which had included a big construction bubble and a stock exchange frenzy, was already problematized in art well before the films of the Weird Wave. This was often done in ironic modes that bear the formal mark of exactly that period and its capitalist overexpansion—by, for instance, imitating the esthetic codes of advertising or focusing on the signs of capitalist growth in the urban environment and often directly undermining them to produce an anti-­ esthetics of capitalism. It is no coincidence, according to this view, that some of the main representatives of the Weird Wave (including directors Makridis, Lanthimos, Avranas, and scriptwriter Filippou) worked for long spells in advertising in the early 2000s, and that often in their films they self-consciously imitate hyper-capitalist imagery and propaganda, in the

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films’ form, through the use of specific urban and domestic settings and via parts of their storylines. What is being underlined here is that Greece, especially since the early 2000s, became a fertile ground for what Mark Fisher has so influentially described as capitalist realism. According to Fisher’s well-known argument, neoliberal capitalism is so powerful and expansive today that it becomes “evident,” the ubiquitous and ubiquitously (and painfully) obvious way of the world. Rather than a reality, capitalism has constructed its logi(sti)cs as the ultimate reality, an endpoint and a totality, “a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education” (Fisher 2009, 45; cf. Shonkwiler and La Berge 2014). This is always the function of realism, you could say: a modality, a specific historicopolitical consensus about what constitutes the real and its representation in any given time. Yet what Fisher argued and maintained in the very interesting conversations that followed his initial intervention throughout the 2000s is that today’s late capitalism co-opts realism to such an extent, that even its denunciation in “non-realist” art is always already co-opted as well. We are all in it, inescapably, and quite realistically so, Fisher reiterated, while also pointing at the subtle modalities existing within that overexpansive realism for vantage points of critique. I do not want to make a huge overarching argument here (however much my feeling remains that such an argument could be made). Yet following Greek cinema, especially after 2009, I have seen exactly how capitalist realism (and our relation to it) has been changing. Capitalist realism’s mutation is of course more general, and rests on a well-known and documented background: the continuing rise of the neoliberal “subject-as-­ enterprise,” and this subject’s self-conscious representation in art has been going hand-in-hand in the twenty-first century with a growing understanding of the representationality of economic movements, financial products, and financial crises. The understanding that the world economy is based more and more on speculation and its forms of representation— that is, that it is, itself, a form of capitalist realism—has now not only become commonplace, it has also become the basis for most of the effective critiques of late capitalism from within, with the recent Greek Crisis becoming a key site for the articulation of such critique. While global, late capitalism has not ceased to produce spectacular localities: such a spectacular locality has been the Greece of the Crisis. And in such spectacular localities what I have already described as an “intense biopolitical present”

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provides a new context and framework for the ever-present capitalist realism. Take, as a telling example, the photographic representation of the Greece of the Crisis, and of the refugee crisis that peaked after the summer of 2014. In the long texts, seminars, and conferences that were dedicated to this wave of photographic realism (often celebrated around the world in the esthetics of Greek photographers such as Antonis Bechrakis), it was exactly the idea of capitalist realism that was called on to explicate the poetics and the cultural impact of the photographs. At the same time, capitalist realism was also exactly the mode that was being critiqued as inadequate for fully grasping these photographs and the reality in/for which they were serving as witness. The power of these photographs rested less on their willingness to document and more on their self-­ conscious showing of the inability to extricate themselves from the technological and economic apparatus that was already surveying, mapping, redistributing, and reconceptualizing the “population flow” (see Petsini 2018; Giannakopoulos 2016). While the photographs vied to achieve a symbolism, an esthetics, and a narrative that could give them an emancipatory potential, they were also, at the same time, focusing on their mediality, their intertextuality, on their own power of surveillance and survey, and on the underlying structures that the scenes they were capturing could help lay bare. Most importantly, they were also presenting subjects who were intensely aware of these chains of signification and circulation of power and image. Often in Bechrakis’ photographs of refugees, the subjects seem (and eventually many confirmed they were) intensely aware of the setting, the potential symbolic meaning, even the potential global circulation, of the photographs that were made on/of them. Similarly iconic became another photograph, this time by Lefteris Partsalis, first published in October 2015: three Greek old ladies in Mytilini could be seen holding a baby, while the baby’s refugee mother is on the edge of the picture talking to someone outside the frame—crucially, all participants were eventually not against discussing this photograph with the (international) media which made it viral. The intersections of the biopolitical, audiovisual, medial, citizenship, and economic regimes that this photograph and its circulation alerts to were from the outset so plural, they ended up making capitalist realism look, as a concept and a project, exhausted; if anything, it was this exhaustion that became the photograph’s most spectacular subject matter. In a scene three weeks later, on November 4, 2015, the same picture, magnified to cover a whole wall,

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served as the background for the joint announcements of then Greek prime minister of Greece Alexis Tsipras and the President of the European parliament, Martin Schultz. The occasion was the organized transportation of refugees from Greece to Europe as part of a larger relocation program, one of the many population-management plans that the EU tried to put in place during the refugee crisis. The photograph was used as a comment on, among others, the hospitality of Greeks to refugees (and its thick genealogies); as a reminder of the plight of uprooted refugees, but also of Greeks, under austerity; last, but not least, as a sign of the Greek government’s change of tactics in its economic negotiations with its European partners and lenders after the showdown of the summer of 2015 (Gedgaudaite 2018, 178–182).1 In such spectacular localities of biopolitics, therefore, what becomes obvious is that the production of capitalist realism is so unavoidably intertwined with the policies of life (and less-life), that it seems to be taking a new, very tangible inflection. Capitalist realism, in the very same way it still “conditions” the production of culture, work, education, and financial (re)production, is now also furnishing us with the major lens through which to view how the bodies of the individual and the population are documented, categorized, and disciplined in thick webs of interdependence; how contemporary neoliberal governmentality means a constant taxonomy of which lives matter (and how much they matter) and which groups of people are left to die (and the technologies in which this is asserted); how for the first time so intensely the concepts of human and social “rights” and “achievements” are fully marketized and constantly under review and negotiation; how the very concept of crisis rests on the success of the fear that specific disciplinary and biopolitical techniques of “the good life” will be withdrawn, and on the disciplined iteration that there is no other alternative (the so-called TINA doctrine). Optical technologies and the various economies of vision and visibility (from screening techniques and drone cameras, to instagram narratives of the good life and the ubiquity of “amateur” video), participate in this process, of course, in a world of “Biopolitical Screens,” to recall Pasi Valiaho’s term (2014). Individuals are today constantly aware that they are more and more “screened” in their everyday, while at the same time becoming all the more what Laura Mulvey (2006, 171 and passim) has termed “possessive spectators”: holders of the material and technical means to influence viewing, able to review, to edit, to reframe and re-use images, from the amateur video to the cinematic image. Constantly screened and screening, being a

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possessive spectator today does not describe a position of power and full agency (as Mulvey had thought of it), but indicates participation (more often than not, self-conscious participation) in the larger network of politics, representation, and signification that I have just laid out. What I have described happening with those photographs and videos from the Greek Crisis, is exactly the cultural and social context the Greek Weird Wave has been responding to: the feeling that capitalist realism does not suffice as a conceptual framework to describe what is happening. In those spectacularly biopolitical sites and with such examples, one therefore realizes the need to talk about a new phase, what I would propose to call not just capitalist, but biopolitical, realism. Biopolitical realism is exactly that type of capitalist realism that ponders, remains, and rests on the biopolitical structures producing the contemporary moment, as they produce it. As with the celebrated photographs by Bechrakis, or that iconic picture of the ladies and the baby in Mytilene, so too with films like Miss Violence, Oiktos, Dogtooth, and so many others: biopolitical realism provides the frame in which they could resonate as both allegorical and real(ist), their form both distancing and defamiliarizing, while also being affectively disturbing, analytically topical, and painfully close. Biopolitical realism is exactly the frame in which a film like Dogtooth became totemic, the way for a national cinema to acquire international circulation and recognition, its scenes cut by viewers and circulated in order to illustrate, sometimes contra the film’s abstracting poetics, specific politics and their immense consequences, and to discuss specific social formations, from the impact of austerity to the state of the Greek family or the Greek political system.

… and a Cinema of Biopolitics Biopolitical realism is not a common term. However, I am by no means the first to have used it. Artist and theorist Hito Steyerl (2003, n.pag.) has used the concept to completely different ends in an essay about contemporary documentary practices. For Steyerl, biopolitical realism aligns with a certain type of documentary film popular in the early 2000s that tried to ethnographically depict a “reality,” often prioritizing resistance, anticapitalism, the survival of subcultures (and “other cultures”), or forms of contemporary life untouched by late capitalism. Those films, Steyerl maintained, were too often oblivious of their own documentality—the governmentality that they belonged to, the fact that, even when denouncing them, they

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themselves participated and strengthened a certain form of power, type of marginalization, and financial and environmental exploitation. They were complicit in an organization of biopower; they were not simply realist but biopolitically realist. Their subjects could not break out of the biopolitical frame they found themselves in, and neither could the documentaries that purported to be giving them voice and public representation. Steyerl explained that to counter this, artists needed new forms of exposition and exhibition of material, new styles of participatory art and ways to engage the audience, making spectators more self-conscious about tactics of representation and the normalizing power of the films’ claims to realism and reality, especially since it was exactly the organization of that reality that the films were purportedly critiquing. Steyerl thought that such cultural practices could antagonize and dismantle biopolitical realism. Eventually, I would argue, what happened was quite the opposite. Instead of breaking away from biopolitical realism, they ended up participating in it differently, pushing it to a very different direction. In recent years, these more self-conscious, more participatory exhibition and production techniques—these strategies of making use of material in a self-conscious way and of exposing its biopolitical use while also trying to find ways to disrupt it, these efforts to make biopolitical noise while being within a biopolitical frame—have certainly entered the cinematic text as well as the ways in which communities of viewers, as possessive and biopolitical spectators, interact with it. As I have argued elsewhere, contemporary documentary is now becoming a prime site to explore this change (Papanikolaou 2019). In contemporary documentary, pace Steyerl, we witness complex narratives where ethnographic realism combines with archival questioning, the more self-conscious production of visual metaphors and the exposition of alternative archives. We witness a focus on embodied affect and on how it frames perception, how it questions forms of power that have fashioned it. Contemporary documentary practice also tends to question the politics of representation and cultural production, as well as the political themes that its original ethnographic depiction may have put in motion. Biopolitical realism has become a tool in documentary (see, for instance, the documentary practice of Agnès Varda, Vincent Dieutre, Patricio Guzman, not to mention more recent representatives), especially because it relates to the larger culture of biopolitics and responds to an intense biopolitical present, about which audiences are also intensely aware. Audiences are becoming more and more self-conscious of their participation in a culture of biopolitics, manifest as ubiquitous and matterof-factly, ingrained in the thick structures of the everyday (see Rawes et al. 2016).

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It is with this in mind that I view the Greek Weird Wave as a Cinema of Biopolitics, trying to follow the signifying chains that its biopolitical realism establishes. On the one hand, I trace these films’ reflection on how systems of power manage groups of people (from a family to a population) and the bodies of individuals, as well as their attention to forms of resistance, to noise, unease, and subversion. On the other hand, I try to supplement this analysis with a revisiting of my own and others’ interaction with these films, in the variable contemporary frames within which this interaction can and does happen. A formal and content analysis that takes into account affective investments and reactions can thus interrelate with an analysis of concepts and their metonymical relation to specific events, political pronouncements, social movements, production and promotion tactics, as well as accounts of the communities of viewers that have received these films and the use they have made of them. Recent discussions about cinema and biopolitics have tended to see film either as a tool of biopolitical governance and surveillance (Valiaho 2014; Neroni 2015), or as a way to resist biopolitical frames (Gronstad and Gustafsson 2014), as a way to respond creatively to a culture of biopolitics (Rawes et al. 2016; Campbell 2017), or as a way to critically assess it (Frauley 2010; Rushing 2016). But a participatory review of the Greek Weird Wave has pointed, at least to me, to the need for a more inclusive discussion of all of these aspects together. This means, among other things, an effort to see a Cinema of Biopolitics and its contemporary production, circulation, and viewing practices as important sites for the self-conscious engagement with technologies of representation, technologies of embodiment, and technologies of participation. By the phrase “technologies of representation” I understand the new technologies of the image and their development in a new media environment, but also the way these technologies function as governmentalities, since new media and the culture of the image participate in the new forms of surveillance, constant measuring and financialization, countability, and accountability. Technologies of representation are key for power to be productive and internalized in the new neoliberal regimes of normality and futurity, but they also offer new grammars for their destabilization. Often a cinema of biopolitics reworks archives of heterogeneous material (found footage, Internet pages, surveillance cameras, the graffiti on the walls of the city) to create what I have elsewhere termed “archive trouble” (Papanikolaou 2011, 2017); it undermines or thematizes surveillance mechanics, and rejoices in constructing and deconstructing visual allegories.

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With “technologies of embodiment,” I understand the ways in which the limits of the human body and its potentials are being redrawn today, but also how the body becomes a field for the articulation and the disarticulation of biopower. Their interest in technologies of embodiment brings together, in a Cinema of Biopolitics, such disparate works as a film on bare life during the beginning of the Greek Crisis (Lygizos’ Boy Eating the Bird’s Food) with films on contemporary transsexual politics and sexual citizenship (Koutras’ Strella and Xenia) or a film on how embodied dislocation and affect becomes a strategy to construct heterotopic spaces (Tsangari’s Attenberg),7 with films that focus on how the body erupts as it is being trained into the social, the symbolic, the patriarchal, and the national (Dogtooth, Alps, Miss Violence, Sargassos Sea). With “technologies of participation,” I note the way the body is being screened in space (from the house to the urban or other landscape), but also how groups of people appear (or, pointedly, fail to appear) on screen. Crucially, in such technologies of participation, I want to include the tendency that a film might have to draw the spectator in, to provoke an affective response, to create an assemblage film/viewer, and/or the possibility of communities being formed around and for films. I do not see these technologies as mutually exclusive—on the contrary, I think of technologies of representation, technologies of embodiment, and technologies of participation, as the very technologies framing together our present culture of biopolitics. These technologies are not, to be sure, new (neither is their theorization), but what is novel is their importance, their thick intertwinement, their dominance, and their ubiquity. What is also clear is that they are becoming sites of implementation of power/knowledge and of contestation. The point as you set out to write about a Cinema of Biopolitics and its biopolitical realisms, is that you every so often feel like those children in the middle of a celebration in Miss Violence, say, or in Dogtooth. You feel an affinity with them not as a result of the similarity of experience relayed by biopolitical realist works, but as a result of your own continuous participation in systems of representation, of power, of experience, and of accounting for that experience in which these works also participate and on which they reflect. You start writing, therefore, and then you feel like that dog in Oiktos, swimming in the middle of the sea, the camera angle suddenly changing and shooting from above, the analytical viewpoint (your analytical viewpoint) thus becoming part of the overall setting and visual metaphor. You might not know where to go on from there, but you know what it takes to start barking from within.

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Notes 1. I am paraphrasing here a line of thought that has been prevalent in recent affect theoretical approaches to film, some more phenomenological (as Sobchack 2000; Shaviro 1993) which argue that the body responds before it makes conscious reflective thought of what is being watched on screen, and others more specifically influenced by Deleuze, which theorize on an assemblage of image-sound-space-time-viewer, as does beautifully, for instance, Pepita Hesselberth (2012). Recent discussion on New Extremism makes use of both such approaches (and other affect theory arguments), in order to return to what for many seems an obvious statement: New extremism exploits cinema’s ability to make you feel before thinking (Horeck and Kendall 2011). 2. See also, among many others, Varikos (2013) and Aftab (2013), as well as the discussion in Aleksic (2016) and Psaras (2015). 3. A similar, very measured account of the thematic threads of the Greek New Wave, is proposed by Anna Poupou and Afroditi Nikolaidou (2017), who take into account both the Greek and international reception of these films. 4. A very well-known indication of that interweaving was the rise in the power and social presence of the neo-fascist group Golden Dawn, who supported outright racist politics, glorified the bodies of “Greeks” and targeted the bodies of “others,” especially the bodies of racially marked refugees and migrants. However, Golden Dawn’s discourse (and its significant sudden rise in popularity) fits in with a larger biopolitical discourse, often also articulated by mainstream politicians and official policies (see, among many others, Kotouza 2019). 5. The economic and sociopolitical crisis that started in Greece after 2008 has had many different turns, has seen diverse developments, and in many ways is still with us at the moment these lines are written, even if it has been officially declared over. We cannot, therefore, easily talk about a monolithic, concrete period. Having said that, there is a public discourse of a prolonged state of emergency, a political debate about it, a certain understanding of it as a historical period, and an iconography, that have resulted in producing a narrative of the Greek Crisis as more concrete and shaped. It is to this shaping narrative of our lives that I, along with many others, refer to as the Greek Crisis, with a capital C. 6. The insights of this analysis notwithstanding, Karalis seems to be adopting without nuance the narrative that the Greek governments (which he takes as single, unified actors) kept offering money that was non-existent, and thus created a state in implosion. 7.  Note Attenberg’s impact on the more recent Park (dir. Sophia Exarchou, 2016), and the internationally successful shorts Copa Loca (dir.  Christos Massalas, 2017), Hector Malot: The Last Day of the Year (dir. Jacquelin Lentzou, 2018), and The Distance Between the Sky and Us (dir. Vassilis Kekatos, 2019).

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Works Cited Aftab, Kaleem. 2013. Miss Violence Examines the Malaise in Greek Society. The National, December 10. Accessed September 10, 2019. https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/miss-violence-examines-the-malaise-in-greeksociety-1.286211. Aleksic, Tatjana. 2016. Sex, Violence, Dogs and the Impossibility of Escape: Why Contemporrary Greek Film is So Focused on Family. Journal of Greek Media and Culture 2 (2): 155–171. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press. Brody, Richard. 2016. The Petty Laments of Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster. The New Yorker, May 23. Accessed September 1, 2019. https://www.newyorker. com/culture/richard-brody/the-petty-laments-of-yorgos-lanthimossthe-lobster. Campbell, Timothy. 2017. The Techne of Life: Cinema and the Generous Forms of Life. New York: Fordham University Press. Chalkou, Maria. 2012. A New Cinema of Emancipation: Tendencies of Independence in Greek Cinema of 2000s. Interactions: Studies in Communications and Culture 3 (2): 243–261. DeLuca, Tiago. 2014. Realism of the Senses. London: I.B. Tauris. Doane, Mary Ann. 2007. Indexicality: Trace and Sign: Introduction. differences 18 (1): 1–6. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon. Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? New Alresford: Zero Books. Frauley, Jon. 2010. Criminology, Deviance and the Silver Screen. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Gedgaudaite, Kristina. 2018. Smyrna in Your Pocket: Memory of Asia Minor in Contemporary Greek Culture. Doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford, Oxford. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:864a8d4f-0e50-4241-8552-5 0bef1077f95. Giannakopoulos, Georgios. 2016. Depicting the Pain of Others: Photographic Representations of Refugees in the Aegean Shores. Journal of Greek Media and Culture 2 (1): 103–113. Giannouri, Evgenia. 2014. Matchbox, Knifer and the ‘Oikographic’ Hypothesis. Filmicon 2: 156–175. Gronstad, Asbjorn, and Henrik Gustafsson, eds. 2014. Cinema and Agamben. New York: Bloomsbury. Hesselberth, Pepita. 2012. Cinematic Chronotopes: Affective Encounters in Space-­ Time. Doctoral dissertation, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam. Horeck, C. Tanya, and Tina Kendall. 2011. The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Kaloudi, Kostoula. 2014. La Violence du quotidian dans le cinema Grec contemporain: L’Exemple du cineaste Giannis Oikonomidis. In La Violence du quotidian: Formes et figures contemporaines de la violence au théâtre et au cinema, ed. Florence Thérond, 83–92. Laverin: L’Entretemps. Karalis, Vrasidas. 2014. Realism in Greek Cinema: From the Postwar Period to the Present. London: I.B. Tauris. Kotouza, Dimitra. 2019. Surplus Citizens: Struggle and Nationalim in the Greek Crisis. London: Pluto Press. Kourelou, Olga, Mariana Liz, and Belen Vidal. 2014. Crisis and Creativity: The New Cinemas of Portugal, Greece and Spain. New Cinemas 12 (1–2): 133–151. La Porta, Domenico. 2013. Miss Violence: A Family Code of Silence. Cineurope, September 1. Accessed September 10, 2019. https://cineuropa.org/en/ newsdetail/243436/. Mademli, Geli. 2016. From the Crisis of Cinema to the Cinema of Crisis: A ‘Weird’ Label for Contemporary Greek Cinema. Frames Cinema Journal 9. http://framescinemajournal.com/article/from-the-crisis-of-cinema-to-the-cinemaof-crisis-a-weird-label-for-contemporary-greek-cinema/. Mulvey, Laura. 2006. Death 24× a Second. London: Reaktion. Neroni, Hilary. 2015. Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film. New York: Columbia University Press. Nikolaidou, Afroditi, and Anna Poupou. 2017. Post-weird Notes on the New Wave of Greek Cinema. In Non-catalog, ed. Orestis Andreadakis, 26–107. Thessaloniki: 58th Thessaloniki International Film Festival. Papadimitriou, Lydia. 2017. The Economy and Ecology of Greek Cinema since the Crisis: Production, Circulation, Reception. In Greece in Crisis: The Cultural Political of Austerity, ed. Dimitris Tziovas, 135–157. London: I.B. Tauris. Papanikolaou, Dimitris. 2011. Archive Trouble: Cultural Responses to the Greek Crisis. In Beyond the Greek Crisis: Histories, Rhetorics, Politics, ed. Penelope Papailias. Hot Spots on Cultural Anthropology website, October 10. Accessed September 10, 2019. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/archive-trouble. ———. 2017. Archive Trouble, 2017. In Culturescapes: Archaeology of the Future, ed. Kateryna Botanova, Christos Chryssopoulos, and Jurriaan Cooiman, 38–52. Basel: Cristoph Merian Verlag. ———. 2019. How Metonymical Are You? Notes on Biopolitical Realism. In Non Catalog, ed. Orestis Andreadakis and Geli Mademli, 104–125. Thessaloniki: 21st Documentary Film Festival. Petsini, Penelope, ed. 2018. Capitalist Realism: Future Perfect/Past Continuous. Thessaloniki: University of Macedonia/Thessaloniki Museum of Photography. Politakis, Dimitris. 2019. Theloume ki emeis ligi agapi apo to elliniko cinema [We also want a little love from Greek cinema]. Lifo 616, February 28. Accessed September 10, 2019. https://www.lifo.gr/print/shortcut/227999/ theloyme-ki-emeis-ligi-agapi-apo-to-elliniko-sinema.

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Psaras, Marios. 2015. Miss Violence: Film Review. Filmicon 3: 87–95. Rawes, Peg, Timothy Mathews, and Stephen Loo, eds. 2016. Poetic Biopolitics: Practices of Relation in Architecture and the Arts. London: I.B. Tauris. Rose, Steve. 2011. Dogtooth, Attenberg and the Weird Wave of Greek Cinema. The Guardian, August 27. Accessed September 12, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/aug/27/attenberg-dogtooth-greece-cinema. Rushing, Robert. 2016. Descended from Hercules: Biopolitics and the Muscled Body on Screen. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Shaviro, Steven. 1993. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Shonkwiler, Alison, and Leigh Claire La Berge, eds. 2014. Reading Capitalist Realism. University of Iowa Press. Sobchack, Vivian. 2000. What My Fingers Knew: The Synesthetic Subject or Visions in the Flesh. Senses of Cinema 5 (April). Accessed September 10, 2019. http://sensesofcinema.com/2000/conference-special-effects-special-affects/ fingers/#31 Spatharakis, Kostas. 2011. I oikogeneiaki alligoria kai i anazitisi tou politikou [Family allegory and the search for the political]. Leuga 1: 26–29. Steyerl, Hito. 2003: Politics of Truth: Documentarism in the Art Field. springerin 3. Accessed September 10, 2019. https://www.springerin.at/en/2003/3/ politik-der-wahrheit/. Valiaho, Pasi. 2014. Biopolitical Screens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Varikos, Joanna. 2013. Miss Violence Director Talks Filmmaking Amongst Greek Crisis. The Greek Hollywood Reporter, October 14. Accessed September 10, 2019. https://hollywood.greekreporter.com/2013/10/14/interview-missviolence-director-talks-filmmaking-amongst-greek-crisis/. Williams, Raymond. 1961. The Long Revolution. London: Chatto and Windus.

Moving Images, Moving Archives: Fracturing the Crisis in Interactive Greek Documentaries Geli Mademli

In different timelines presenting the evolution of the Greek debt crisis, the year 2011 holds a special place: it was a nodal year in the acceleration of recession and the establishment of austerity measures, structural reforms, and social frustration. In the same year, two similar, yet distinct documentary projects were initiated by small teams of Greek researchers and filmmakers who applied alternative methodologies and hybrid modes in “representing reality.” This chapter aims to explore how these two ventures challenge established organizational modes of representation (meticulously analyzed by Nichols 1991). While acknowledging strategies of documentation that stem from but also expand beyond these political, social, and financial events—spanning from the formation of a coalition government between opposing parties to the EU summit deal on the debt haircut, and the daily protests on the Syntagma Square in Athens by the Greek “Indignant Citizens”—the two projects highlight the potential of media technologies in subverting dominant crisis discourses.

G. Mademli (*) Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands © The Author(s) 2020 M. Boletsi et al. (eds.), Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36415-1_12

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The first case that will be analyzed, titled The Prism GR 2011, conceived by Nina-Maria Paschalidou and Nikos Katsaounis, is a documentary project that aimed at the collective documentation of Greece at the peak of the crisis of the European South. The project was launched as an online platform, a feature narrative documentary, and an installation, presenting the gist of the research and encounters with local populations in different areas of the country. The second case, titled The Caravan Project, conceived by Stratis Vogiatzis and Thekla Malamou, presented itself as a living story archive created through a traveling practice. As such, it constituted an attempt of what Michael Herzfeld would name “impromptu ethnography in the Greek Maelstrom” (Herzfeld 2011, n.pag.), driven by a sense of urgency. This small group of filmmakers equipped a production van and traversed Greece in order to collect citizens’ stories that tend to slip through the cracks of dominant media discourse. They presented the filmed documents either ad hoc in workshop formats engaging local populations, in installations in large yurtas in varying locales in the country, or through conventional festival circuits as autonomous films focusing on different individuals narrating their life stories. The aforementioned two projects comprise separate endeavors that share many common features in their output and methods: they both use the camera to engage their filmed subjects in practices of storytelling around their individual experience of crisis in their everyday environments; they develop web interfaces as key platforms for the dissemination of these projects, while working in parallel with different media dispositifs (in media installations or short and feature-length films);1 they associate digital technologies with the fragmentary nature of their content; and, most importantly, they perceive and present themselves as archival gestures, constituting acts of “collective documentation” (The Prism GR 2011) or the gradual build-up of “a living story archive” or “a digital story bank” for the future (The Caravan Project). This chapter will reflect on the interrelationship between these visual story archives and the reality of crisis they address, by examining their technologies of mediation and these technologies’ potential to challenge established discourses on the representation of crisis. By focusing on the agency of these media constellations, I aspire to showcase the projects’ critical approach to institutional archivization and their contribution to a radical understanding of subjectivity in documenting fluid, transitional, and transitory realities. In this venture, I purposefully avoid entering the discussion of the iconography these documentary projects produce, nor

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will I assess the cinematographic treatment of the subject matter in the content of these archives. These areas of interest exceed the scope of this chapter and have already triggered important research in the fields of film and media theory, and visual anthropology alike.2 More importantly, this text’s main premise resonates with John Law and Ruth Benschop’s crucial argument that every act of representation performs a “politics of ontology” (Law and Benschop 1997, 158). As Law and Benschop write: Pictures, and particularly those related to crises, generate an unequal distribution of power through a composite, often invisible system of exclusions— by separating the subject from the object, by choosing what to leave off-frame, un-narrated or un-depicted, by delineating surfaces of significance over an indefinite space, re-presentations reenact (cultural) assumptions and work as functional substitutes, standing for larger areas of perception. (1997, 160–161)

Interestingly, the two documentary projects, I argue, resist this system by critically re-imagining another widely contested practice, namely the archive as a colonial invention par excellence (Stoler 2002). By showcasing the complex relationship between humans, technological devices, stories and pictures, material and immaterial worlds (what Andrew Pickering (1995) defines as the “mangle of practice”), and by openly acknowledging that archives, be they virtual or physical, are necessarily territorial entities, expanding in space and defining areas of access and control, both The Prism GR 2011 and The Caravan Project consider the archive as a point of merging contrasting ontologies. Through non-dualist performances, the documentary projects counteract the predominant divisive discourses on (and the uni-vocal perception of) the reality of crisis in Greece. Several Greek media scholars have already scrutinized the proliferation of Greek (fiction and documentary) films that deal with the crisis as a main theme, background, or even plot device, and their vocal political character in the years of recession (from 2009 to this day).3 This abundance of representations of crisis in Greek cinema was also interpreted as a practice of “branding” a label (Nikolaidou 2014; Papadimitriou 2014; Mademli 2016) or, in extension, of local productions self-proclaiming a nominal category. Thus, they withstand the standardized rules of creative industries in the age of globalization, which are all-too-often dependent on classificatory systems for their safest promotion in a vast landscape of production. Whereas fiction filmmakers gained international recognition

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through their grouping by critics under the rubric of the “Greek Weird Wave” (an umbrella term accumulating standardized esthetic tropes4), documentary filmmakers capitalized on the inexpensiveness and availability of digital means for recording, editing, and diffusing moving images. Hence, if the æsthetics of the Greek New Wave were associated with highly controlled, laboratory-like film sets and rigid “performative æsthetics” (Nikolaidou 2014), documentary images were by contrast highly uncontrollable, not only in their production, but also in their interpretation. As Lydia Papadimitriou acutely observes, “a lot of images and footage, especially of the protests and clashes … have been framed variously depending on the political orientation of the different outfits” (Papadimitriou 2016, 469–470). In addition, the products of the extensive reporting of cases of political and social emergency were recurrently feeding mainstream or alternative news sources. Different media channels reiterated the same images, regardless of their original context, presenting similar visual compositions (such as shots of dressed-up protesters mocking the German authorities or long shots of the Acropolis covered in fumes, to name only a few examples) as leitmotifs alluding to narratives of regeneration and disaster. Large conglomerates, but also smaller constellations circulated images of similar æsthetics as spectacle, thus sidelining their original meaning. Technical assemblages5 have not only profoundly challenged the indexicality of moving images documenting the crisis (i.e., their ability to be associated with certain meanings on different occasions), but they have also infused them with an increased archival potentiality. On the one hand, they render each audiovisual snippet capable of accumulating, containing, and preserving conflicting crisis discourses within the borders of their frame; on the other hand, they increase their probability of inclusion into mass collections of sorts which promise an exhaustive, comprehensive system of memories of a crisis. Yet, in the case of The Prism GR 2011 and The Caravan Project, the archival gestures that define the projects from their nascence elicit a critical response. My interpretation of the two projects draws on Dimitris Papanikolaou’s proposal of the concept of “archive trouble” as the ultimate modality that defines the public sphere and the cultural milieu in crisis-stricken (or crisis-driven) Greece by establishing the experience of “history in the present” (Papanikolaou 2017, 46), thereby also revealing the inconsistencies of any attempt to record (and therefore historicize) fragments of the inescapable reality of crisis. I aim at framing The Prism GR 2011 and The Caravan Project as technological

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assemblages of critique on the basis of the “trouble” they generate in the categorical taxonomies of crisis iconography. Consequently, if “Archive Trouble works with a very complex structure of metaphor/metonymy/ allegory that invites the audience to decide their position towards those modes” (Papanikolaou 2017, 49), my analysis of the two documentary projects will be grounded on their capacity to perform their titular metaphors (the “Prism” and the “Caravan,” respectively). In this contribution, they will function as starting points for the elaboration of emancipating media methodologies that elicit a unique kind of interactivity with the audience.6

Crystal-Clear Crisis? Realities of Interactivity The importance of the use of figurative language in the partial construction of social reality in the Greek crisis is meticulously highlighted in a critical discourse analysis by Bickes et  al. (2014). Drawing on the well-­ known “Conceptual Metaphor Theory” by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), the study focuses on the figures of speech that were employed in German and international printed media covering the Eurozone crisis, thus revealing a typology of metaphorical structures. Whether it involves variations of disease, contagion, (natural) disaster, and other prompts of catastrophe, or more “constructive” metaphors like “mechanisms,” “teacher/learner,” “game,” or “family” relations (the latter emphasizing synthesis over destruction), influential media discourse has established a discourse of difference (Bickes et al. 2014, 120). The common practice of demonization of a cultural “Other” was well rooted in word choices that stimulate primordial emotions and point to systems of power where roles are concrete and power dynamics are non-negotiable. In particular, in the case of generating discourses of difference between the European North and South, Bickes, Otten, and Weymann attempt to highlight how the use of rigid, almost monolithic lexical systems fails to address the complexity of a critical period in European history. In the case of The Prism GR 2011, the creators seem to identify the power of metaphorical structures in dominant discourses on the Greek crisis, and therefore use a metaphor in the project’s title as an act of subversion. The title of the project notably underlines the reflective and distorting qualities of the prism as an optical device, while connoting an individual viewpoint that maintains its singularity while intersecting with other observational trajectories on Greek reality. The Prism GR 2011

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comprises twenty-seven short films that were shot over the course of a year in different areas of Greece, both in the urban centers and the rural periphery of the country. The directors of the films were fourteen photojournalists who had never included filmmaking in their professional work and participated in the project on the basis of the provision of professional training in handling D-SLR. Thus, by using education as a motivational tool in their project, Katsaounis and Paschalidou’s methodology conveys an unconventional message—one that considers dislocation, un-rooting, and transformation as the only valid path for the filmmakers’ gaze to perceive the reality of crisis. In order to build or navigate an archive of crisis, the filmmakers seem to suggest, the individual needs to shift her or his tools, while recognizing that this shift is a process of learning, and not of withholding knowledge. The concept of individuation in the work of Georges Simondon can be employed as an oppositional force to classification schemes used by many filmmakers “to selectively forget things about the past in the process of producing knowledge” (Bowker and Leigh Star 2000, 257). In his theory of individuation, Simondon uses the crystalline structure of the prism as a conceptual tool for the development of individuation. Using the example of crystallization as a natural process where one non-predetermined element enters a state of constant, ever incomplete conflation with other entities, Simondon proposes that the relation between humans and their societies of reference is subject to an analogous process of constant movement and negotiation (Sauvagnargues 2012, 61–62). Respectively, the platform The Prism GR 2011 features narratives of individuals that are neither random, nor representative of a social group, class, or milieu, but people that live in what John Law describes as a fractiverse, “partially participat[ing] in multiple realities … and not in a single container universe” (Law 2015, 134). In the narratives this platform features, subjects of Greek crisis do not inhabit a world with multiple, overlapping voices, a “multiverse repopulated by beings each of which goes its own way according to its own type of trajectory” (Latour 2013, 290), or a world that favors categorization and difference through a comparison of different conceptions of the same reality; rather, they perform fractal (non-linear, non-teleological, self-transforming) realities where the crystal structure mediates, enacts, and converges different sets of relations between singular subjectivities that would have remained intact, and therefore inaccessible. In other words, documentaries with a non-prismatic structure may be able to collapse cultural assumptions and hegemonic discourses, or

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even to expose mechanisms of subalternity; yet, the possible multi-­ perspectival take of such works would still be focused on a single reality— that of Greek crisis. Conversely, what Paschalidou and Katsaounis’s endeavor arguably suggests is that the reality of crisis should not be perceived as a realm that can be scrutinized, quantified, archived, and shared, but rather as a realm whose singular ontology can never be disputed. In the filmmakers’ view, critique begins when crisis is understood as a non-­ monist conception, found in a constant process of crystallization—a process of inclusion, fusion, and expansion, whose end-product maintains a non-fixed, mutative structure. The Prism GR 2011 cannot be easily accommodated in the definition of a trans- or a cross-media project. In his foundational text on transmedia storytelling, Henry Jenkins notes that the term “represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated … experience” (2007).7 The Prism GR 2011 platform does not prioritize certain narrative elements over others, as the “integrity” of the project lies in supplementarity—photos, interviews, and time lapses are presented in counterpoint under the “Archive” menu, featuring different fragments of the same subject matter and presenting them in the form of unedited footage. Utterly resisting the “one story, many channels” doctrine that is associated with cross-media communication, the project does not incorporate “unified messages across multiple media” (Davidson et al. 2010, 12), as it resists the notion of unification. The different media through which the project unfolds are indeed utilized so that “each medium can maximize the refraction of the stories … in self-contained entries” (Jenkins 2008, 95–96). Nevertheless, it can be argued that the “offline” configurations of the prism neither function as separate expressions that comprise cohesive “experiences” nor add extra layers to the narrativization of crisis. The unfolding of the project as an installation view was only presented on three occasions, the first being in an art-oriented event: the Thessaloniki Biennale in 2011, whose theme was defined through the phrase “A Rock and a Hard Place.” The piece was on display in the historical building of Bey Hamam, an Ottoman bath house complex built in 1444 that ceased to function as a hammam place in 1968 and was recently re-appropriated as a cultural space. The main interface of The Prism GR 2011, screened through a beamer, featured a fragmented menu of film excerpts and prompted the visitor to select a clip from the given selection (similarly to

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the online platform and its user). This interface was found in a vivid dialog with the physical environment, as the crystal texture of the screen was expanded on the cracked surface of the walls of the hot chamber of the male’s public baths. The other two installations were set during the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA) in the Netherlands in November 2011 and the Festival International de Programmes Audiovisuels in Biarritz, France, in January 2012. In the latter festival, The Prism GR 2011 was presented in regular computer screens reproducing the average online user experience that non-festival goers would have, regardless of the physical environment they are situated. However, the project’s presentation took place in the specially configured spaces of the festivals where different viewing formats (and, in extension, new dispositifs) are tested.8 Interestingly, the project could have been presented in the same festivals in a more conventional strand, as The Prism GR 2011 was also launched as a feature documentary under the title Krisis. As Afroditi Nikolaidou poignantly observes in relation to the project’s launch in different media formats and in particular as a feature film, “the linear narrative form that is a distinctive feature of the film and TV product still dominates the market, and often doesn’t simply co-exist with non-­ linear narratives, but often becomes the interactive documentary’s frontispiece” (Nikolaidou 2019, 157). Constituting a more recognizable (and thus “marketable”) format in the most popular milieu for film-related narrative works—that is, the film festival circuit—The Prism’s distribution as a self-contained documentary fulfills two purposes. First, it functions as social currency for its dissemination in a circle of media professionals. Here online interaction with archived audiovisual material does not necessarily constitute an integral characteristic of their everyday working practice, since the cinematic apparatus maintains a strong tradition even when migrating on Video-on-Demand (VOD) platforms. Second, and more importantly, by merging fragments created by different makers in a unified narrative, this format gives the creators the opportunity to present their filmmaking process as a collective endeavor. This calls for non-rational discourse (Habermas 1984) and underlines the experiential qualities of the exploration in a new dispositif. Framing the linear narrative version of the project with an alternative title and with a new way of working with the archived material adds new layers of interpretation in the realities of crisis. By selecting a title stemming from the Greek verb κρίνω and spelling out crisis with a k, Paschalidou and Katsaounis ground their work with geographical and cultural

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specifications. This way, it becomes evident early on that the crisis archived in this project refers to Greece and is, in that sense, at the same time local and particular, but also paradigmatic of processes that exceed the case of this country. Moreover, and more importantly, the title Krisis points at the etymology of the word to reflect on the genealogy of the concept of crisis and its distribution of meaning among different domains of public life. From decision-making and assessment to divorce and quarrel, from judgment and trial to separation and sorting out, “the concept [of crisis] imposed choices between stark alternatives—right or wrong, salvation or damnation, life or death” (Koselleck 2006, 358). Reinhart Koselleck analyses crisis as a metaphor in itself, as a scheme that is able to permeate colloquial language and expand to different fields of civil experience, ranging from politics to psychology, theology, and law, among others; exactly “[b]ecause of its metaphorical flexibility, the concept gains its importance” (2006, 358). Whereas Susan Sontag, in her discussion on the use of disease as a metaphor for societal degeneration, notes that the use of modern metaphors aims at sustaining a “profound disequilibrium between individual and society, with society conceived as the individual’s adversary” (1978, 73) and frequently leads to anti-political stances (1978, 76), Koselleck makes use of the negative associations of crisis as a metaphor to reveal its profoundly political use. In his view, the metaphorical use of crisis “in principle defines the ordering of civic community” (2006, 359). Thus, the use of crisis as a conceptual tool grounded in a binary logic of exclusion (as a reality cannot be “right” and “wrong,” etc. at the same time) and procedures of labeling and separation insinuates something more significant: the prevalence of binary reasoning over in-between, fused, or inclusive modes of thinking. Yet, emulating these meanings of the concept of crisis, the practice of filmmaking is also defined by processes of selection, evaluation, and disposal. This concerns both the framing of a specific view of reality (be it staged or not) and the editing of the filmed material, where usually the largest part of the filmed footage has to be left out. The temporal and narrative restrictions of the format of the feature documentary highlight the inevitability of this premise, proving that krisis is an inherent characteristic of documenting the “real.” So whereas in the online, interactive version of The Prism GR 2011 project the title uses the prism-metaphor to trigger associations that capture the creators’ non-­ monist, inclusive view of the non-singular universe of crisis, in the linear narrative version the title applies the word crisis in its original, literal meanings of separation, judgment (and exclusion) as a descriptive attribute that

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pertains to their filmmaking practice. In other words, if the mode of interactivity inspires individuation in a fractiverse, the linear narrative mode nurtures (creative) individualism in a world that is already systematized through set values. The proposition that interactivity is a recently coined term that only applies to online media projects and propagates a more active model of user participation has been widely debated. As the perception of any cultural object necessitates the interaction between the subjectivities of its creator and its addressed receiver, the online specificity of interactivity is often regarded as an intellectual construction. As for the value of individual free choice in practices of interactivity, it can be argued that the degree of success of interactive design can be measured according to the users’ faith in the unpredictability of their options. As Kinder successfully notes, “interactivity tends to be used as a normative term—either fetishized as the ultimate pleasure or demonized as a deceptive fiction” (Kinder 2003, 351). Oscillating between opposite poles, responses to interactivity have become a pharmakon for online media—an ambivalent duplicity that crystallizes the reality of a non-palpable, ever-expanding, and constantly moving cyberspace (a dispositif where the distance between the user in the front end and the server in the back end becomes difficult to perceive). The core interactive gesture of the feedback loop in an online platform (the remedy) guarantees the proliferation of an uncontrollable digital system (the poison). Serving as a reflective (and reflexive) mechanism for the normative notion of crisis, encapsulating dichotomy and division, interactivity in the case of The Prism GR 2011 urges the user not only to reconsider, but actively perform the thresholds between the individual self and the “real” world, and the levels of their mediation. Critical interactivity is therefore encouraged through the revelation of the thick layering of mediality between subjects and objects, in the crystal capsule of a confined online archive.

Crisis as a Vehicle: Moving the Medium In one of her numerous interviews in popular media, Paschalidou noted that during the making of The Prism GR 2011 she would be backpacking throughout Greece. If in the case of The Prism a nomadic practice was an inherent part of the documentary process, in the case of The Caravan Project this allusion to the world of constant movement became integral in

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the making of a documentary project according to the principles of nomadic thought. If in the case of The Prism GR 2011 the use of a metaphor evokes a radical media agency and critical interactivity, The Caravan Project understands the word metaphor literally (as derived from μεταφορά which means “transfer”) and implements an idea of an archive transferring artifacts (i.e., moving images) as it moves itself in space and on the map. In this case, the “caravan” stands as a metaphor for a practice of nomadic thought, of what Deleuze and Guattari present as the only resistance to the rule of the State, which is “not necessarily a physical entity comprised of borders but an institution of hierarchies and dualistic oppositions,” but “a set of ideas, histories and truths which are common to a group of people and passed down over generations (Deleuze and Guattari qtd. in Bestrom 2009, 209). In this obvious process of archivization that defines the State, nomadic subjectivity can only emerge through a process of “dynamic interaction” (Braidotti 1994, 111). Despite the allusions to Nomadology, the initiators of The Caravan Project are inclined to use a different Deleuzian metaphor for their work: that of the rhizome. Contrary to The Prism GR 2011, The Caravan Project did not begin as a complete, self-contained crystal entity. From its very conception, it was presented as an evolving work-in-progress that would expand “in a rhizomatic way” (Daskalaki et al. 2015, 129), growing in size over time, recording stories of people the caravan would meet during its journey through Greece. In so doing, the creators would test different (analog and digital) interfaces for visual storytelling and instigate different communal activities ad hoc, aiming at “educating” local groups on the preservation of oral histories, “familiarizing pupils with the concept of narrative and with the value of human stories,” as explained on the website of The Caravan Project.9 In their mission statement, they highlight their role as “educators” providing tools and organizing training sessions for groups of adults that can undertake the task of documenting everyday cultures of the past and present for the future. At first, their stated approach raises significant questions about the entitlement of the filmmaker as an uninvited, external gaze that assertively enters a community, as well as about the ethics of participatory observation—points that often constitute the main pylons of the critique to anthropological research methods. Furthermore, the tone of a process of “enlightenment” through granting standardized knowledge devices (the camera recorder and, primarily, the promise of an archive) as a gift to those who do not have access to it exemplifies what Marcel Mauss calls a system of “fosterage—with education

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being given outside the family of birth” (1966, 113)—that creates an obligation to reciprocate. Yet, through a close examination of the process of reciprocity within the context of interactivity—a moving archive of moving images—the potentiality of a critical, nomadic subjectivity is fully revealed. The Caravan Project is grounded in yet another act of metaphor, but this time specific to film history: positioning a motor vehicle in a central place in creative visual methodology alludes to early cinematic practices. Already from the first days of cinema, the train as an (auto)mobile medium was comfortably correlated with the newly introduced medium, and not only because of the Lumiere brothers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1895), commonly coined as the first film to be presented in a public screening in 1896. Martin Loiperdinger (2004) has proven the insufficiency of sources to justify this screening as a historical event, proclaiming this as part of the medium’s mythological discourse. Yet this “founding myth” works in two directions: first, it draws a comparison between the steam engine and cinema as two technologies inextricably linked to modernity; second, as myths are primarily interpreted as metaphors, the founding myth of cinema features a reflexive representation of a vehicle of transportation, which reminds us that, in the sense of transfer, metaphor is synonymous to mobility. The most influential cases of these motor vehicles in cinema history are no other than the agit-trains: they appeared in the years following the Soviet Revolution and their initial scope was supplying the Red Army and delivering the Communist Party’s messages to people in the periphery of the Soviet Union through the expansive railway network. The capacity of the new medium to “accomplish both [distilling the artist’s emotions into the masses] and [disseminating ideas among minds that would otherwise remain stranger to them] with particular force” (Taylor and Christie qtd. in Heftberger 2015, n.pag.) culminated in the expeditions of Dziga Vertov in the 1920s and Aleksandr Medvedkin in the 1930s, who enabled these vessels to become multi-leveled agitators and film factories on reels. Vertov, in particular, was the first to conceive mobile cinemas as vans, as the flexibility of these vehicles would allow the crew of agitators to reach the heart of Russian cities. His special cinema trucks, later developed for traveling in the west of the country, included a projector that was also a camera. This made the agitation apparatus simpler, more effective, and flexible in archiving reality by saving physical space and working on the elimination of the distance between shooting, processing, and projecting. Vertov opted for “[s]creenings while en route, inside the car; film

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steamers, cinema barges, collapsible cinemas set up on shore, and mobile ones,” because “the installation possibilities are greater than for the railway cinema” (Vertov qtd. in Heftberger 2015, n.pag.). Respectively, Medevkin also understood film production as a question of addressing the locale and capturing the reality of encounters with communities. The principal difference between the film-train and other film factories is that in the second case the production of a film is organically and intrinsically linked to its screening in the place of production (Widdis qtd. in Heftberger 2015, n.pag.). Constituting an indirect reference to Vertov’s vans and following Medevkin’s principle on the interrelatedness between the production space and the screening place (both mangled in a realm that Malamou and Vogiatzis themselves define as “story-spaces”; Daskalaki et al. 2015, 129), the archival structure that The Caravan Project uses as its foundation is one that reveals the genealogies of the cinematic medium––exactly because it performs earlier versions of cinematic dispositifs. Consequently, this archiving vehicle proves that archives may contain inscriptions of different narratives around their own genealogy or perform their genealogy by including different archival constellations, co-existing modules of the past and present—in the same way that every crisis contains other crises. Film factories of the past were themselves compartmentalized into modules that encapsulated and prepared different sets of film-related activities, from information centers for the general public to printing rooms and projection centers—with the exception of the development of film, which had to be outsourced to Russian cities. As these vehicles were nearly self-contained capsules, collecting the early experience of “cinemas of attraction” (Gunning 1986), contemporary media scholars raise an important point by comparing this network with the World  Wide Web. Adelheid Heftberger, in particular, astutely observes that the experiments with agit-trains and mobile cinemas, especially in the work of Vertov, were propagating the importance of attributes that are also key concepts in describing the Internet world. Even when their meaning is disputed when it comes to practices of the everyday, online archives still generate questions regarding “mobility, interactivity, and accessibility” (Heftberger 2015, n.pag.). In its turn, and while transferring the practice of film factories to the Greek territory in a time of crisis, The Caravan Project aspires to present this vehicle as “a transformative space” that is distinguished by three properties: “mobility, multiplicity, and permeability” (Daskalaki et al. 2015, 129). By substituting interactivity with the “multiplicity of social interactions” (Daskalaki et al. 2015, 137; emphasis

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added), the makers of the project confute the view that interactivity necessarily refers to a dual intermediary relationship—between subject and object, user and archive, text and context, human and machine—and propose a diffused system of complementary agencies. Additionally, by thinking of this archival space as a permeable space, the initiators of The Caravan Project question the “ideology of empowerment as access” (Kerssens 2017, 13), which is widely spread by the consolidation of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in software studies since the early 1980s. The emergence of convenient interfaces that enabled a vast number of users to navigate around online datasets obfuscated the back-end processes that controlled the flow of information. Contrarily, The Caravan Project envisions an archival platform, the mediality of which is always in the making: as it comprises an incomplete environment of becoming, it suggests that in online environments, no query is complete. The impression that the user is left unguided and independent from search patterns is a pretense. In that sense, the critical subjectivity encouraged by the The Caravan Project can diminish the guise of autonomous individualism in computer-mediated search (Kerssens 2017, 13). By defining the archive as a porous, penetrable medium, The Caravan Project makers understand it as an entity that is subject to natural processes of non-predetermined factors—similarly to the creators of The Prism  GR 2011 and their embracement of their crystal model.

Conclusion: Refracting and Fracturing The similarities of the two models do not offset their important and numerous differences. Whereas The Prism GR 2011 uses education as the driving force for their filming subjects, the Caravan posits this goal for their filmed subjects. Whereas The Prism GR 2011 featured a narrative documentary film as a complementary format to highlight the specificity of media agencies, The Caravan Project began from a narrative documentary film (namely The Blind Fisherman, 2011) that was circulated in festival networks and became the point of departure for the rhizomatic expansion of the stories archive. On a more practical note, while The Prism GR 2011 was self-funded and only received in-kind sponsorship, The Caravan Project was generously supported by Stavros Niarchos Foundation, one of the leading cultural organizations in Greece in the years of recession (a fact that could raise several questions regarding the extent of the critique to the institutionalization of the archive). Lastly,

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whereas the online platform of The Prism GR 2011 is self-contained and finite, The Caravan Project makes use of massive online video-sharing platforms, namely YouTube and Vimeo, to inform and diffuse information on the range of their activities, thus depriving interactivity of its critical framing. Yet, what the two projects have in common is the complexity with which they employ technical assemblages in the process of archiving the reality of crisis in Greece. At the same time, both projects have the capacity to “trouble” salient documentary practices and narratives of Otherness, which are deeply rooted in structures of classification and representational ontologies. By addressing the agency of the media involved in the archival ventures, the two projects manage to evoke new, ever-moving subjectivities in critical times, refracting and fracturing individual realities in an expansive fractiverse.

Notes 1. My use of the term dispositif in this chapter acknowledges its long history and strong presence in different fields from visual arts to critical theory, but it draws primarily on the writings of Jean Louis Baudry and its definition as a dialog between the technological devices necessary to produce and screen a film (what he names “appareil de base”; Baudry 1978, 31) and the topological and ideological positioning of the spectator. 2. For reference, see the edited volume Crisis-Scapes: Athens and Beyond (2011), especially Part III: “Between Invisibility and Precarity.” See also Kalantzis (2015), Korbiel and Sarikakis (2018), Wills (2017), Kountouri and Nikolaidou (2019). 3. For a comprehensive review of the research on this topic, see Nikolaidou and Poupou (2017). See also Papadimitriou (2016), Wills (2017), Lykidis (2015). 4. For a description of these esthetic tropes (such as static camera shots, deadpan performances, cold color palettes in cinematography, absurdist dialogues, and more), see Nikolaidou (2014) and Nikolaidou and Poupou (2017). For an analysis of the discourse, æsthetics, and practices connected to the Greek Weird Wave, see Dimitris Papanikolaou’s chapter “Greek Weird Wave; Or, On How to Do A Cinema of Biopolitics” in this volume. 5. Similarly to the notion of the dispositif, the term assemblage is used widely and diversely across disciplines. Its use in this chapter originates from Manuel DeLanda’s understanding of Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory as a mode of arranging entities of different nature so that they can function together for a given period of time, thus describing social move-

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ments between human and non-human agents. The emphasis on “technical assemblages” as an analytical took points at the use of the term in Material Semiotics, where the word technical emphasizes the materiality of the relations of exteriority between humans and non-humans. For a comprehensive overview of interpretations of assemblage theory and the definition of “technical assemblages” in Material Semiotics, see Müller (2015). 6. The critical use of metaphor and metonymy as analytical tools for dissecting the reality of crisis, and particularly in relation to documentary filmmaking, is further developed in the text “How Metonymical Are You: Notes on Biopolitical Realism” (Papanikolaou 2019), which was interestingly written for a special edition of the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, a major cultural event in Eastern Mediterranean. 7. In his definition, fiction can be used interchangeably with narrative. 8. It is no coincidence that the IDFA segment in focus is called DocLab, and that its recent orientation has expanded to virtual reality media. 9. www.caravanproject.org/en

Works Cited Baudry, Jean-Louis. 1978. L’Effet cinéma. Paris: Albatros. Bestrom, Erin. 2009. Moving Beyond Borders: The Creation of Nomadic Space Through Travel. Intersections 10 (1): 199–217. Bickes, Hans, Tina Otten, and Laura Chelsea Weymann. 2014. The Greek Financial Crisis: Discourses of Difference or Solidarity? Journal of Social Science Education 13 (3): 113–122. Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. 2000. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 1994. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Brekke, Jaya, Dimitris Dalakoglou, Christos Filippidis, and Antonis Vradis, eds. 2011. Crisis-Scapes: Athens and Beyond. Athens: Synthesi. Daskalaki, Maria, Alexandra Saliba, Stratis Vogiatzis, and Thekla Malamou. 2015. Story-spaces and Transformation: The Caravan Project. In Untold Stories in Organizations, ed. Michal Izak, Linda Hitchin, and David Anderson, 129–142. London: Routledge. Davidson, Drew, et al., eds. 2010. Cross-Media Communications: An Introduction to the Art of Creating Integrated Media Experiences. Pittsburgh: ETC Press. Gunning, Tom. 1986. The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Cinema, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde. Wide Angle 8 (3): 63–70. Habermas, Jürgen. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action. Boston: Beacon. Heftberger, Adelheid. 2015. Propaganda in Motion. Dziga Vertov, Aleksandr Medvedkin, Soviet Agitation on Agit-trains, Agit-steamers, and the Film Train

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in the 1920s and 1930s. Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe, 1. Accessed April 20, 2019. https://doi. org/10.17892/app.2015.0001.2. Herzfeld, Michael. 2011. Crisis Attack: Impromptu Ethnography in the Greek Maelstrom. Anthropology Today 27 (5): 22–26. Jenkins, Henry. 2007. Transmedia Storytelling 101. Accessed April 20, 2019. http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html. ———. 2008. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Kalantzis, Konstantinos. 2015. ‘Fak Germani’: Materialities of Nationhood and Transgression in the Greek Crisis. Comparative Studies in Society and History 57 (4): 1037–1069. Kerssens, Niels. 2017. When Search Engines Stopped Being Human: Menu Interfaces and the Rise of the Ideological Nature of Algorithmic Search. Internet Histories 1 (3): 219–237. Kinder, Marsha. 2003. Designing a Database Cinema. In Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film, ed. Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel, 346–353. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Korbiel, Izabela, and Katharine Sarikakis. 2018. Media and Citizens in Greece and Beyond: Resistance and Domination through the Eurocrisis. Journal of Greek Media & Culture 4 (1): 3–8. Koselleck, Reinhart. 2006. Crisis. Translated by Michaela W. Richter. Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2): 357–400. Kountouri, Fani, and Afroditi Nikolaidou. 2019. Bridging Dominant and Critical Frames of the Greek Debt Crisis: Mainstream Media, Independent Journalism and the Rise of a Political Cleavage. Journal of Contemporary European Studies 27 (1): 96–108. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Latour, Bruno. 2013. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. Translated by Cathy Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Law, John. 2015. What’s Wrong with a One-world World? Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory 16 (1): 126–139. Law, John, and Ruth Benschop. 1997. Resisting Pictures: Representation, Distribution and Ontological Politics. In Ideas of Difference: Social Spaces and the Labour of Division, Sociological Review Monograph, ed. Kevin Hetherington and Rolland Munro, 158–182. Oxford: Blackwell. Loiperdinger, Martin. 2004. Lumière’s Arrival of the Train: Cinema’s Founding Myth. The Moving Image 4 (1): 89–118. Lykidis, Alex. 2015. Crisis of Sovereignty in Recent Greek Cinema. Journal of Greek Media & Culture 1 (1): 9–27.

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Mademli, Geli. 2016. From the Crisis of Cinema to the Cinema of Crisis: A ‘Weird’ Label for Contemporary Greek Cinema. Frames, 9. Accessed April 20, 2019. https://framescinemajournal.com/article/from-the-crisis-of-cinema-tothe-cinema-of-crisis-a-weird-label-for-contemporary-greek-cinema. Mauss, Marcel. 1966. The Gift. Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by Ian Cunnison. London: Cohen & West Ltd. Müller, Martin. 2015. Assemblages and Actor-Networks: Rethinking Socio-­ material Power, Politics and Space. Geography Compass 9 (1): 27–41. Nichols, Bill. 1991. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Nikolaidou, Afroditi. 2014. The Performative Aesthetics of the ‘Greek New Wave.’ FilmIcon: Journal of Greek Film Studies 2: 20–44. ———. 2019. Σύγκλιση ντοκιμαντέρ και δημοσιογραφίας στο διαδίκτυο: Mορφές μιας αναδυόμενης τάσης στην Ελλάδα / Documentary and Journalism Convergence on the Web: Forms of an Emerging Tendency in Greece. In Τεχνοπολιτισμός και πολιτιστικές βιομηχανίες / Technocultures and Cultural Industries, ed. Irini Papadaki and Sissy Theodosiou, 197–216. Athens: Nisos. Nikolaidou, Afroditi, and Anna Poupou. 2017. Post-Weird Notes on the New Wave of Greek Cinema. In Non-Catalog: 58th Thessaloniki International Film Festival, 88–105. Thessaloniki: Thessaloniki Film Festival Publications. Papadimitriou, Lydia. 2014. Locating Contemporary Greek Film Cultures: Past, Present, Future and the Crisis. FILMICON: Journal of Greek Film Studies 2: 1–19. ———. 2016. Politics and Independence: Documentary in Greece during the Crisis? In The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Politics, ed. Yannis Tzioumakis and Claire Molloy, 469–480. New York: Routledge. Papanikolaou, Dimitris. 2017. Archive Trouble. In Culturescapes Greece: Archaeology of the Future, ed. Kateryna Botanova, Christos Chrissopoulos, and Jurriaan Cooiman, 38–51. Zurich: Christof Merian Verlag. ———. 2019. How Metonymical are You: Notes on Biopolitical Realism. In Non Catalog: 21st Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, 104–126. Thessaloniki: Thessaloniki Film Festival Publications. Pickering, Andrew. 1995. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sauvagnargues, Anne. 2012. Crystals and Membranes: Individuation and Temporality. In Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology, ed. Arne De Boever, Alex Murray, Jon Roffe, and Ashley Woodward, 57–70. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sontag, Susan. 1978. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Stoler, Ann. 2002. Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance. Archival Science 2: 87–109. Wills, David. 2017. The Greek Crisis at the Movies: Jason Bourne (2016). Journal of Greek Media & Culture 3 (1): 117–124.

Ice-as-Money and Dreams-as-Ice: Christos Ikonomou’s “The Blood of the Orange” and the Critique of Liquidity Jonas Taudal Bækgaard

In the following quotes, the first-person narrator and the character Michalis from Christos Ikonomou’s short story “The Blood of the Orange,” published in the collection Something Will Happen, You’ll See (2010), link together the ice cubes they produce with a number of seemingly disparate phenomena: To make something you know will be gone the very next moment. What an inhuman thing. (Ikonomou 2016, 105) Dreams. Dreams. For people like us dreams are like ice cubes—sooner or later they melt. (107) What it’s like to work and save and dream and have those dreams melt like ice, as if there were special hands that existed in this world just for that—to

J. T. Bækgaard (*) University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark © The Author(s) 2020 M. Boletsi et al. (eds.), Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36415-1_13

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hold the dreams of poor people and squeeze them until they melted like ice. But I didn’t say anything. (115) Then there was a sound. The Scot suddenly came unblocked and the ice fell jangling into the bin like coins out of a slot machine. (115)

Ice cubes are here associated with the inhuman working conditions in the factory, dreaming about a better future, and the money system. It is furthermore clear that for these two characters working under economically precarious conditions, all these phenomena—ice, dreams, money, and precarity—are figures of negative actualization: working at the factory is conceived as being inhuman; the ice cubes are melting away in the hand of Michalis; the dreams of the poor are melting in the well-known figure of the invisible hands of the market economy; and money is traced back to the arbitrary “logic” of gambling. The figurations of ice-as-money and dreams-as-ice that these passages foreground seem to draw on the materiality of ice, and especially the transient quality of ice cubes that appear to be produced only to disappear—a quality that here comes to signify the precariousness of the characters’ working conditions. There is thus something about the temporal condition of ice—bound to melt—that aligns it with how dreams themselves seem to balance on the edge between the illusory and the hopeful, at once signifying the condition of aspiring to the future and that which might not be fulfilled. Like most of the stories collected in Something Will Happen, You’ll See, “The Blood of the Orange” takes place on the working-class outskirts of Athens. In this short story, we are introduced to a few characters in an ice cube factory in Kaminia, a working-class neighborhood in Piraeus, a port city a few kilometers outside Athens: the narrator, his co-worker Michalis, their gambling-addicted boss, and the Palestinian caretaker of the factory Ziyad. Their monotonous work at the factory consists mostly of maintaining the machines, the biggest of which they call “the Scot,” and carrying 10  kg bags with ice cubes to the trucks. After introducing Michalis as someone who lost his parents at a young age and whose attempt at getting an education in Romania failed because he had no money, the unnamed narrator portrays Michalis as a dreamer and as an avid reader of poetry, especially that of the poet Miguel Hernández whom he has taught himself to read in the original Spanish. Michalis’ biggest dream is to take up his education as a pediatrician again and then move to Spain. The narrative, however, only spans a few rather uneventful days at the factory in January,

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with Michalis reciting poems such as Hernández’ “Lullaby of the Onion” (1939) while there seems to be no change on the horizon. The climax of the story comes when Michalis reads an article about a death-sentenced man named Michael in a magazine and has a strong reaction to it, as he is shocked by the magazine’s apathetic interpretation of the event. In the last scene, the ice-cube machine they call “the Scot” gets unblocked and ice cubes start overflowing the bin and falling on the floor, but the workers leave it untouched and stay in their chairs observing the overflowing ice cubes melt. The reviews of the English translation of the collection tend to focus on the Greek context, the debt crisis, and the hardships of the working classes in Athens.1 In this chapter, I follow the connections made between ice, money, and dreaming, and propose to extend the context of this analysis beyond the framework of the Greek debt crisis in order to read the various figurations of ice in light of contemporary critiques of finance capitalism in the context of the European Union and beyond.2 I focus on the gestures that make up the story’s final act—that is, the workers letting the ice cubes melt—and Michalis’ repeated gestures of melting ice cubes in his hand, and propose to think of these acts not only as the workers’ undermining of the products of their (in many ways) meaningless labor, but also as a reflection on the possibilities of critique of their social conditions. The economic metaphor of liquidity, particularly referring to the “interchangeability of assets and money” (OED) and connoting a sense of effortless fluidity or flow, helps us illuminate some of the ironies Ikonomou’s story captures. If liquidity thus names the process by which material as well as non-material assets are transformed into the flow of cash, the frozen seems to offer a counterview. In her analysis of the financial crisis of the years 2007–2008  in her book Anti-Crisis (2013), Janet Roitman stresses the centrality of the notion of liquidity for economic analysis, arguing that “[i]f one distills the contemporary canon of crisis analysis down to the central debates, we find that what is at issue in this recent canon of crisis narratives is the problem of liquidity in either the banking system or in the capitalist world system, depending on one’s theoretical approach” (2013, 43). Being non-liquid—whether this refers to unsellable houses, unpayable debts, or other forms of insolvencies—is therefore understood as a state of crisis that according to Roitman shapes the ways contemporary journalists and economists think about financial crisis. It is important to stress that diagnosing the economy as being in crisis due to being illiquid eludes the way in which contemporary finance has

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internalized notions attached to the crisis narratives that Roitman probes— instability, contingency, insecurity, and so on—and turned those into vehicles of capital accumulation. Karen Ho addresses this process in her book Liquidated (2009), in which she discusses changes in Wall Street corporate culture, and particularly the growing tendency toward corporate downsizing in the 1990s and afterward. Ho shows how liquidation, the termination of debts, has paradoxically become a figure for accumulation, in the sense that getting rid of “assets,” such as workers, in the cases she studies led to massive increases in stock prices. Termination and downsizing are new institutionalized methods of capital increase rather than signs of dysfunction or crisis management, as dominant narratives might have it. Ho thus terms contemporary financial culture the “ideology of instant liquidity” (2009, 125) and makes a strong case as to how crisis and accumulation in the contemporary economy are linked: “instability and crisis fundamentally characterize this particular culture of liquidity, and signal not the decline but the influence of Wall Street values and practices. During the latest period of finance capital dominance of American business, Wall Street … has continually transformed itself through mergers, acquisitions, bankruptcies, and failures” (6). By turning crisis, here understood as volatility, instability, and contingency, into the new ethos of everything that goes by the name Wall Street—much like Roitman’s assertion of how crisis has come to designate an enduring state rather than a decisive moment (2013, 2)—the financial system thus works on the premise of termination. The figures of negative actualization that are put forward through the narrator’s use of the melting ice cubes to capture both the material conditions of the workers’ labor and the affective conditions of their dreams therefore make legible how this system has turned the evaporation of people’s dreams into profit, and the cruelty that lies herein. Ikonomou’s short story collection was published just when the debt crisis in Greece broke out. Although “The Blood of the Orange” does not thematize the conditions usually associated with a financial crisis—the focus, after all, is on the working conditions in a factory, not foreclosures, homelessness, or vacancy—the ice factory is a peculiar, if not ironic, figure in this landscape. Combining the distinct figures of dreams, finance, and precarity as frozen, the ice factory seems to constitute a ground, though icy and thus slippery, from which one can speak about contemporary economic as well as affective conditions that do not necessarily follow the idiom of liquidity and finance.

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Virtual Values and Immaterial Ice I wish one could press snowflakes in a book like flowers. (Schuyler 1988, 6)

Lifted out of its original context, these lines by the American poet James Schuyler from the poem “February 13, 1975” (1988) aptly express the temporal challenge ice poses. The speaker of the poem here expresses the desire to maintain and preserve ice crystals by pressing them like flowers, that is, to dry and remove the degrading capacity of water to decompose the otherwise seasonally exposed and transient flower petals. The irony, of course, is that snowflakes are nothing but water and the only trace the crystals would leave is a few water drops soon to evaporate. Michalis, the poetry-loving co-worker of the narrator in the ice cube factory, who is quietly protesting his job at the factory by melting ice cubes in his hands, is similarly preoccupied with the impossibility, or difficulty, of leaving traces. After seeing in a magazine article a photograph with the last words that a young man sentenced to death by the Gestapo wrote on the wall of his cell, he reacts strongly to the accompanying caption: “A message with no recipient, written in the heat of the moment and therefore subjective, today it offers a cool, unprejudiced witness regarding the postmodern subject of History” (2016, 113; emphasis in original). Left speechless and struggling to express his feelings, he takes a few pieces of ice in his hand and starts voicing his frustration with the magazine’s interpretation: “I don’t understand it, he said. What does it mean, a slogan written in the heat of the moment? He was nineteen years old. They were going to kill him at any minute” (113), and adds: “It’s the silence that really scares me. It’s inhuman. How much silence can a person carry inside?” (114). The narrator then notes how the ice in Michalis’ hands had melted and the conversation ends in silence, as if nothing more can be added, with the narrator asking himself “how it feels to work and save and dream and have those dreams melt like ice” (115). Michalis’ remark about the inhumanity of silence can be read alongside one of the opening quotes of this chapter, where Michalis criticizes the work they are pursuing at the factory: “To make something you know will be gone the very next moment. What an inhuman thing” (2016, 105). Read together, these two quotes—the one regarding the inhumanity of silence and the other regarding inhuman working conditions where

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nothing seems to add up—sketch a complex relation between the capacity to accumulate and the ability to speak. The ice cubes melting in Michalis’ hands while he struggles to articulate his reaction to the magazine caption are the materialization of this relation, and the cruel irony here is that they are in fact meant to disappear in the circulation of goods without leaving any traces for Michalis. The concept of liquidity here captures both the process by which the ice cubes enter from one state into another and their convertibility on the market to cash. For Michalis and the other workers, the fact that the ice cubes will be gone is therefore a figure that captures, on the one hand, the lack of means to leave a trace in the sense of preserving something and of creating something that will last, and, on the other hand, the fact that they will not profit from the circulation of the ice on the market. Oxford English Dictionary offers, among others, the following two  definitions of accumulation: “1. An accumulated mass; a heap, amount, or quantity formed by successive additions” and “3. The action of accumulating wealth or possessions; the growth of a sum of money or capital, esp. by the continuous addition of interest” (2005, n.pag.). Unable to make their work add up or even just to preserve what they produce, and lacking the means to accumulate the profit of their work, Michalis and the other workers are barred from both abovementioned senses of the concept. When Michalis struggles with the capability to speak and terms this difficulty inhuman, he aligns the lack of the material means to accumulate with the incapacity to protest one’s working conditions. The story therefore seems to point to a relationship between the power to speak and to be heard and the capacity to accumulate in a very concrete sense. The ubi sunt motif that the two lines of Schuyler’s poem capture, that is, the desire to preserve that which is bound to disappear, thereby gets a new dimension. The transience of ice is here not so much a reflection of human transience or mortality as it is a way to name the condition under which these workers are living. Blocked from the surplus value that their work generates—and which for a large part ends up evaporating like water in the casino visits of the gambling-addicted owner of the factory—Michalis and his co-workers have neither the means by which they can preserve the value of their own work, nor ways to account for or witness this process. Michalis’ disavowal of the factory work as inhuman is therefore not just a protest against producing barely material, in the sense of lasting, goods but just as much a reaction to the processes that fend him off from valuating them in the first place. The difference between these two might be difficult to pinpoint, but Roitman’s approach to crisis narratives as

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evolving around the problem of valuation helps to articulate this. Summarizing the dominant critical accounts of the financial crisis, she writes: “the narratives resulting from these approaches all attempt to document a differential between the ‘real economy,’ on the one hand, and a ‘fictive’ or ‘overvalued’ state of affairs, which is seemingly immaterial, on the other” (2013, 43). To read ice cubes as figurations of fictional value— fictional because transient—would reproduce this binary logic of value as real versus fictive, without addressing how these processes of valuation create and redistribute wealth in the first place. Instead of following such narratives, Roitman’s approach shifts attention from crisis as a diagnosis of the present that suggests a “judgment of failure”—for example in the way the dominant narratives around the financial crisis metaphorize price developments through images like bubbles—to exploring the kinds of thinking crisis rhetoric itself sparks. Roitman thus shifts focus from crisis as a problem of valuation— between speculatively skyrocketing house-prices and “the real economy” understood as labor and wages, for example—to epistemological questions regarding how crisis is constituted as an object of knowledge. In doing so, she draws on Reinhart Koselleck’s work on the concept of crisis as a concept that marks the modern conception of “history.” In his entry on “Crisis,” one of the key concepts from his seminal eight-volume work on conceptual history, he writes: a Crisis either reveals a situation that may be unique but could also—as in the process of an illness—continue to recur. Or, analogous to the Last Judgment, a crisis is interpreted as involving a decision which, while unique, is above all final. Thereafter, everything will be different. Between these two extremes there may be a cornucopia of variants which, although logically exclusive, can influence the characterization of crisis both as entailing a possible structural recurrence and as absolutely unique. In this way, the concept of crisis can generalize the modern experience to such an extent that “crisis” becomes a permanent concept of “history.” … The concept of crisis has become the fundamental mode of interpreting historical time. (2006, 371)

Koselleck here captures a paradox that characterizes the concept of crisis, which at the same time designates a crucial, irreversible transition to another state, as well as a condition that contains the possibility for recurrence. Extending the possibility of recurrence to the sense of a chronic

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state that haunts many of the contemporary accounts of crisis, Roitman summarizes this paradox in one of the opening questions of her book: “How did crisis, once a signifier for a critical, decisive moment, come to be construed as a protracted historical and experiential condition?” (2013, 2). Putting further pressure on the idea that crisis defines our conception of history, Roitman summarizes Koselleck’s thesis regarding the experience of history as “a consciousness that posits history as a temporality upon which one can act” (7, emphasis in original). The paradox here is that evoking crisis as an epochal diagnosis of the present often produces the opposite sense of the inability to act or a narrowing of the possibility of decision. The sense of crisis as implying the possibility of change and action is crucial to the use of the concept in political rhetoric, but seems contrary to Michalis’ struggle with the phrase “the heat of the moment” from the magazine’s description of the final words of the death-sentenced man. The political space for change that crisis opens up in these agential conceptions of crisis thus hardly reflects the very limited room of agency that characterizes Michalis’ existence, whose experience resonates more with that of the death-sentenced young man. The epistemological blind spots of the crisis narratives that Roitman points out are amplified and revealed by the short story’s refusal to simply suggest that there is room for agency. As Roitman suggests, the kind of agency that the diagnosis of crisis in the economy purportedly allows, as both liberal followers of the so-called invisible hands of the market and proponents of financial regulation seem to believe, is often merely found in calibrating and correcting values, and not in protesting the system producing them in the first place. The idea of “a critical transition phase,” as Koselleck characterizes the epochal conception of crisis as a historical event, resonates in a perhaps unexpected way with the thermodynamic concepts of critical point and liquefaction point (OED) that describe the transformation points of substances, including water. The critical point of a substance is the temperature after which a substance cannot be liquefied anymore: here, the idea of the irreversibility of crisis as a way of understanding transition, contingency, and change thus seeps into the way in which science conceptualizes substances like water. The liquefaction point, on the other hand, registers the transition from solidity to liquidity that this short story takes as its figurative starting point. As Koselleck shows, the uses of the word crisis range from the Biblical concept of the Final Judgment and the term’s ancient and medieval use in medicine, to its modern uses in philosophies of history, in conceptualizations of economic crises, in the concept of

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critique as a cognate of crisis, as well in the scientific vocabulary on thermodynamic changes. The transference of the meaning of the word crisis between these different semantic fields invites a close reading of the acute attention the short story pays to these transition phases. Read against the backdrop of these meanings and uses of crisis, the process of liquefying the ice cubes in the story is not simply a doing away with the products of labor, as a form of protest, but constitutes a specific way of thinking about the possibilities of critique. Key in this attempt to seek ways of critiquing labor conditions is the necessity to think beyond the difference between the “real” and “fictional,” which, as already noted, in the case of the financial crisis takes the form of the often repeated discrepancy between “the real economy” and speculative and “fictive” value. This distinction can furthermore be read in relation to the metaphor of the “ground” that I have tentatively offered as a way to designate the ice factory as a place, or locus, from which to criticize the idiom of liquidity. Particularly, it is noteworthy that the adjective “grounded” is primarily used in the figurative sense to designate immaterial things like knowledge or ideas (OED), but the concept is also used in relation to the economic concept of value. As Roitman points out in her analysis of the role of the housing market in crisis narratives, “grounded” in the economic sense refers to assets or goods whose value corresponds to an underlying “real” base as opposed to, for instance, “the freewheeling market or groundless derivatives” (2013, 81). In what follows, I will explore how this idea of being (un)grounded resonates with the affective conditions of the factory. Before doing so, however, I will unpack Roitman’s analysis of the role of the housing market in crisis narratives, in order to propose yet another intersection between the economic and the experiential: to say that the financial value created was “virtual,” or completely divorced from “real value”—houses—is to disregard how houses were practically irrelevant to processes of valuation and the creation of particular forms of wealth, which implies that it is meaningless to try to trace that wealth back to home values, as some kind of “fundamental” value that could be located or determined outside of this system of financial valuation and production. In other words, discerning true value in the materiality of the universe (houses, labor), as an a priori, is distinct from discerning the ways in which forms of value are produced by material systems and technologies, as the burgeoning literature in economic sociology and the social studies of finance show us. (2013, 53–54)

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Evoking the concept of crisis is therefore one way for Roitman to posit a difference between, on the one hand, literally and figuratively “grounded” value, as in houses or in labor markets like the factory, and on the other hand, presumed fictional value such as financial speculation, of which the infamous trade with collateral debt obligations, the so-called CDOs, has become the best-known example. According to Roitman, positing such a difference between the virtual and the real veils the fact that the massive creation of wealth that the debt market contributed to was never materially grounded, but rather produced by technical and economic systems independently of the housing market and the labor force. We need, in other words, to look for other ways of understanding how value is created and distributed, if we are to understand the basis of the massive redistribution of wealth that took place during the crisis: Indignation over the fact that taxpayers financed the massive translation of private debt into public debt, via a massive devaluation or expropriation of wealth, lost its political force by replicating the crisis judgment and embarking without hesitation or modesty on the relentless search for deviance from the sure ground of true value and the straight path of uncorrupted history. (2013, 56)

Following Roitman’s argument, the consequence of dominant crisis narratives is not just that they involve blind spots that lack critical potential, but that this further translates into protest losing its political force. The imperative for Roitman is therefore to find new ways of narrativizing the workings of the economy, ways that do not “discount the co-constitution of discursive and material formations” (58). In Ikonomou’s story, merely positing a difference between “real” and “fictional” value will not account for the complexity by which the material, the discursive, and the affective intersect in the case of the workers of the ice factory, where the capacity to accumulate, as I have discussed, never reads as simply an economic question. The narrator seems to grasp this co-constitution of the material and the immaterial when he compares the sound of ice cubes to the sound of coins: “Then there was a sound. The Scot suddenly came unblocked and the ice fell jangling into the bin like coins out of a slot machine” (2016, 115). Comparing money to ice is another peculiar yet fitting figure for how money functions here; never quite real in the sense of a lasting solid substance, yet still tangible enough to grasp, if only for a moment.

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Affective Precarity, Frozen Dreams The final question I want to touch upon concerns the obverse of this configuration of the ice cubes as coins, namely how in the short story they also stand for the dreams of Michalis and his co-workers. The way in which melting stands for loss, as in the Schuyler poem, or for the difficulty of holding on to the passing of time, assumes a strong critical edge here. Loss in this story does not only refer to the passing of time (in the sense that the workers often “waste” time by not working) but to violent processes of expropriation from the means of accumulation of liquid assets. Roitman’s account of how the private debt, primarily held by the banks, was financed by the public after the housing “bubble” burst shows how this creation of value—what she calls the expropriation of wealth—functions to a large extent like primitive accumulation, but with a reverse logic: the commonization of private debt, instead of the privatization of the commons. In Marx’s work, the thesis that “original wealth” historically came about violently, not peacefully and gradually, plays a central role in his account of the birth of the proletariat. In Capital (chaps. 26–33), Marx gives an account of how the processes of capital accumulation in England in the late feudal period depended on privatization and exploitation of public land and commons that formerly served as means of subsistence for the commoners and the peasants. In Marx’s narrative, the result of this is the ongoing expulsion of a class of proletarians from these lands, who own no other means of subsistence than selling their labor power to the very people who set them “free.” In her analysis of the contemporary situation, Roitman extends these modes of extraction to the way in which the debt crisis, too, is a violent example of redistribution of wealth. But where Marx’s analysis concerns property relations to agriculture and other means of production, Roitman focuses on the mechanisms by which taxpayers are held accountable for the debts of financial banks and big companies and thus sets forth an analysis of modern forms of precariousness. Lauren Berlant’s analysis of late capitalism in Cruel Optimism offers a vocabulary for tracing the ways in which dreams, or dreaming, and precarization seem to go hand in hand in the short story. Berlant points to the legal definition of being precarious as “the situation wherein your tenancy on your land is in someone else’s hands” (2011, 192). With roots in the Latin “preces” (prayer), the etymological origin of precarious as “given a favour, depending on the favour of another” (OED) materializes here in the juridical sense that describes tenancy as a state of dependency. To be

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precarious, then, is the condition of being non-grounded in the literal sense of not holding private ownership, which consequently seeps into the notion of “being given a favor,” which Berlant employs not only to describe an economic relation but also an “affective atmosphere” shaping “the experience of insecurity throughout the class structure and across the globe” (192–193). At work here is the degree to which concepts such as insecurity, instability, and the potential of loss permeate contemporary living conditions. One can easily trace the extension of this individual conception of precarity to a social one in the discourse surrounding, for example, the creditor-­debtor relationship that shapes Greece’s relation to the European Union, and which to a large extent has determined the working conditions of the poor in Greece—something the work of Johanna Hanink (2017), among many others, makes explicit. Ikonomou’s story makes the ensuing paradox clear: Michalis is on the one hand “free” in the sense that he has no clear, grounded connection to accumulative capacities, but he is not free enough to pursue his dream and move to Spain. The liquefaction of the European labor force that is enshrined in “Article 45” of The Lisbon Treaty as the freedom of movement is frozen in the case of Michalis’ incapacity to move where he wants to. This clash between the promise of free movement and his experience of being unable to change his own conditions echoes Berlant’s analysis of the historical present as an “impasse,” which she defines as “the space where the urgencies of livelihood are worked out all over again, without assurances of futurity, but nevertheless proceeding via durable norms of adaptation” (200). In the case of Michalis, however, the space assigned for adaptation is so minimal that it seems to be exhausted by the minimal act of holding the ice cube in his hands. Another perhaps more familiar meaning of precarity is the use of the word to describe “a state of persistent uncertainty or insecurity with regard to employment, income, and living standards” (OED). It is worth stressing the word persistent, as it stands in contrast to the definitions of crisis as a momentary as well as epochal concept (following Koselleck’s and Roitman’s delineation). To be precarious is here defined as a continuous state that can only be brought under the rubric of crisis insofar as one leaves out such central meanings of the word as judgment, change, choice, and so on and understands crisis as an enduring state without real possibility of change. Precarity is a predictable state of contingency, suggesting the conviction that the (precarious) subject is “in someone else’s hands.” In that sense, Michalis’ act of taking and holding the ice cubes in his hand

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is a figurative way of reclaiming his autonomy. If nothing else, this constitutes a silent protest mirrored in the frustrated face of the factory manager. When the narrator then compares the liquefied ice cubes to dreams, dreaming and saving are juxtaposed, showing how the figurative intersections of finance, precarity, and the act of dreaming are intertwined in a very concrete sense: “What it’s like to work and save and dream and have those dreams melt like ice, as if there were special hands that existed in this world just for that—to hold the dreams of poor people and squeeze them until they melted like ice” (2016, 115). The story thus refuses to read the state of being precarious as confined to the economic or juridical sense of the word. On the contrary, by making the ice cubes stand for both money and dreams, the melting ice cubes become the narrator’s figure for the affective experience of Michalis’ evaporating dreams—and with him, more structurally, the dreams of the “poor people” as well. The juxtaposition of his version of the American dream, that is, the work-save-and-dream narrative, and the brutally realistic rewriting of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” shows that what is at stake here is not only the depletion of the means of subsistence but also of the very means of dreaming that the immobility of these Athenian workers seems to foreclose. One can ask what the use of saving and accumulating ice cubes would be in the heat of Athens, besides offering a contemporary metaphor for the Sisyphus-like work of surviving contemporary capitalism. The figure of the dreams of the poor melting in an unspecified hand furthermore denaturalizes the idea of a functioning market. This can be understood in light of Joseph Vogl’s work in The Specter of Capital, where he follows some of the ways in which the history of economic thinking functions by reinstating some of the specters that haunt earlier European philosophies. One of the ghosts that Vogl is interested in is the “invisible hand” figure that haunts both the narrator’s expectations regarding the dreaming of the poor and liberal economists’ accounts of the idea of equilibrium in the market. He explains how the idea of the market works as follows: The concept of the market took shape before the market began to function. Although political economy is at pain to insist that it transcribes real-world relations, this reality is still seen as unfulfilled, as an all too incoherent and incomplete process. Its realism is prospective; it is always anticipating a virtual reality which it projects into objects and relations. That is the distinguishing feature of the dual structure of modern economic science or, if we

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can put it this way, its performative force: the concept of the market is at once a model and a “truth program” (Foucault). It is thus fully invested in the challenge of making the laws of the market themselves come true. (2015, 43)

Vogl reverses the traditional epistemological temporality in which thinking assumes an explanatory or critical function about—and thus necessarily after—the phenomena in question and outlines how conceptual thinking about “the market” functions the other way around. The concept of the market thus precedes the reality it is assumed to describe, meaning that (liberal) economic theory does not describe how “the market” works, but rather struggles to make reality fit its conceptual framework. When the story’s narrator bitterly casts the dreams of the poor as subject to an invisible hand, he thus rewrites a classic figure that according to liberal economic thinking is supposed to create equilibrium. “The market,” as envisioned in the story, is far from a common ground where actors meet on equal terms or, to borrow another metaphor from the European Union, a “single market” in the sense of being “without any internal borders or other regulatory obstacles to the free movement of goods and services” (see European Commission n.d., n.pag.). It is clear how the ideology of liquidity is bound up with Vogl’s notion of the market as one that has to perform itself and continually reinvent its own “territory” as one that operates across borders. What is less clear—and what the story thus poignantly reveals—is the irony involved in this so-called free movement: as shown by the narrator’s figuration of the “market” as a force that liquidizes the dreams of the poor, the market’s free movement translates into the cruel living conditions Berlant describes as being materially as well as affectively dependent on someone else’s favor. The impossibility of accumulating due to being deprived of the means to do so thereby also leads to the impossibility of dreaming. The difficulty of articulating critique and Michalis’ struggle with bearing witness means that on the level of the narrative it is difficult, perhaps even impossible, to “think otherwise.” This struggle resonates with Mark Fisher’s rewriting of Margaret Thatcher’s slogan “There Is No Alternative” in the question forming the subtitle of his well-known book Capitalist Realism: “Is There No Alternative?”—a question that Fisher answers negatively (2009, 8). In the book, Fisher proposes the concept “capitalist realism” as a term for an aesthetic that no longer poses challenges to capitalist society. Building on the work of Fredric Jameson, he juxtaposes this kind of realism with

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modernism’s “revolutionary potential” (8) and declares that this kind of thinking otherwise is a “frozen aesthetic style” (8), which now has given way to an all-encompassing sense that capitalism “occupies the horizons of the thinkable” (8). In the face of this purported impossibility of thinking the “otherwise,” however, and by way of an ending, it may be worth rethinking the problem of temporality that characterizes both Fisher’s denial of an alternative future (at least on a conceptual level) and the ice cubes. If the future for Fischer is “frozen” in the sense of a general sense of the “exhaustion of the future” (4) characterized by an aesthetic that poses no real alternatives, what happens if we read the ice cubes, which signify frozen dreams, as not-yet melted—that is to say: not yet sold, allocated, profited from, and exploited? If “frozen” for Fischer designates the incapacity to think otherwise, the story seems to counter this impasse by offering a double temporality. On the one hand, the ice cubes reinstate the possibility of dreaming, albeit momentarily. On the other hand, the time of melting is a form of silent protest in which Michalis and the narrator give rise to a critique of the conditions under which they have to let go of both the products of their labor and their desire to live otherwise. To have one’s dreams frozen might concurrently designate an attachment to dreams such as Michalis’ desire to move to Spain, but, also, a break in the continued flow of capital. The liquefaction point of the ice cubes describes, in technical terms, the temporal moment of the letting go of one’s dreams, but a letting go that “wastefully” refuses to capitalize on such liquidity. As quoted earlier, Berlant metaphorizes the slip between economic and affective precarity as “permeation” (2011, 192), that is, as an atmospheric sense of diffusing that is neither liquid nor solid. In Ikonomou’s short story, the frozen again represents a figurative impasse, but also one that resists continued precarization. If liquidity designates a problematic condition that consists in freedom from any grounds and readiness to further extraction in the name of profit, where else can we turn to, then, in the search for a critical vocabulary? There might be something to gain by taking seriously the figurative space the ice cubes open for thinking critique by neither falling back on a secure, if violent, ground of “real value,” nor following the imperative of financial liquidity. Acknowledgment  Thanks to Maria Boletsi and Liesbeth Minnaard for encouraging the writing of this chapter and for their inspirational teaching of most of the material cited in it.

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Notes 1. See, for instance, Anne Germanacos’ Los Angeles Book Review article “Greek Tragedy, Cellular and Bodied,” where she argues that “Something Will Happen presents a vision that deftly combines economic and existential crisis, showing how the two are never far apart” and that the “loss of the individuals behind any news story is a crime. Ikonomou undoes the crime by bodying forth the tragedy” (2016). In Germanacos’ reading, the power of Ikonomou’s stories appears to be their capacity to go beyond the media’s distanced representation and instead represent individual, existential suffering. See also Ratik Asokan’s Bookforum review of Ikonomou’s collection, where Asokan blames the Greek state and ascribes the sufferings of one of the collection’s characters to the “doomed reliance on an incompetent, crisis-­ridden state” (2016). In both cases, their employment of crisis discourse seems to limit their analyses to a focus on either personal, existential “tragedy” or dysfunctional state politics. 2. See also Maria Boletsi’s chapter in this volume, which focuses on another short story from Ikonomou’s collection.

Works Cited Asokan, Ratik. 2016. Something Will Happen, You’ll See by Christos Ikonomou. Bookforum, March 21. Accessed September 19, 2019. https://www.bookforum.com/culture/-15832. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press. European Commission. n.d. The European Single Market. ec.europa.eu. Accessed September 19, 2019. https://ec.europa.eu/growth/single-market_en. Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism. Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books. Germanacos, Anne. 2016. Greek Tragedy, Cellular, and Bodied. Los Angeles Book Review, March 13. Accessed July 10, 2019. https://lareviewofbooks.org/ article/greek-tragedy-cellular-bodied/. Hanink, Johanna. 2017. The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in the Era of Austerity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ho, Karen. 2009. Liquidated. An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham: Duke University Press. Ikonomou, Christos. 2016. Something Will Happen, You’ll See. Translated by Karen Emmerich. New York: Archipelago Books. Koselleck, Reinhart. 2006. Crisis. Translated by Michaela W. Richter. The Journal of History of Ideas 67 (2): 357–400.

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The Lisbon Treaty. 2007. Article 45. lisbon-treaty.org. Accessed September 19, 2019. http://www.lisbon-treaty.org/wcm/the-lisbon-treaty/treaty-on-thefunctioning-of-the-european-union-and-comments/part-3-union-policiesand-internal-actions/title-iv-free-movement-of-persons-services-and-capital/ chapter-1-workers/187-article-45.html. Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Books. Oxford English Dictionary. 2005. ‘Critical,’ ‘Grounded,’ ‘Liquidity,’ ‘Liquefaction,’ ‘Precarity,’ ‘Precariousness.’ oed.com. Accessed September 19, 2019. Roitman, Janet. 2013. Anti-crisis. Durham: Duke University Press. Schuyler, James. 1988. Selected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Vogl, Joseph. 2015. The Specter of Capital. Translated by Joachim Redner and Robert Savage. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Rethinking Stasis and Utopianism: Empty Placards and Imaginative Boredom in the Greek Crisis-Scape Maria Boletsi

The following phrase appeared on an Athenian wall as part of a street artwork created in 2013 by the Greek public artist known as bleepsgr (Fig. 1): “Crisis… what else?” The graffiti showed a woman carrying a small placard with the message “Against cultural hegemony” with one hand, and with her other hand pushing away a male artist wearing a T-shirt with the writing “artistes systemiques” on it.1 The graffiti was conceived as a critical response to a street art festival with the title “Crisis? What Crisis?”, organized by the School of Fine Arts in Athens.2 The work issued a critique of the institutionalization and commodification of street art (and art in general) and M. Boletsi (*) Department of Film and Literary Studies, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Boletsi et al. (eds.), Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36415-1_14

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Fig. 1  “Crisis… what else?” by V.M. Kakouris aka bleepsgr (Athens 2013). (Image reproduced by kind permission of the artist)

the instrumentalization of artists by the capitalist system. The artist’s statement that accompanies an image of the graffiti on his website criticized the exclusion of independent Greek artivists from cultural initiatives that projected Greece’s artistic production in the midst of its socioeconomic crisis. The same statement also called for forms of agonistic artistic resistance that could take on the task of “producing new subjectivities” and “new worlds” (Kakouris n.d. n.pag.). The graffiti and its critical message were indicative of the heated discussions that have been taking place in Greece in recent years on the role of art in the context of the country’s economic crisis that broke out in 2009. Central to these discussions has been the question of whether art—street art in this case—can offer alternative languages of resistance to the all-­ encompassing framework of crisis, as it took shape in Greece since 2009. The phrase accompanying this graffiti—“Crisis… what else?”—underscored the omnipresence of crisis by projecting it as lack of choice: a normalized framework that seems to leave no room for alternatives. Crisis in Greece indeed turned into a master-narrative, which provided legitimation for harsh austerity measures, exacerbating conditions of precarity for a large part of the population and radically changing people’s experience of

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their present and images of the future.3 Since 2015, the discursive framework of crisis has been further shaped by the entanglement of the sovereign debt crisis and the social and humanitarian crises it engendered, with what has been dubbed the “migrant” or “refugee crisis.” This entanglement made Greece the epicenter of multiple declared crises or what Anna Carastathis called “nesting crises” (2018, 142). It should be noted here that since the official end of the international bailout program for Greece in August 2018, dominant political rhetoric in Greece has been shifting: from a narrative of crisis that “demands” sacrifices and resilience from the population, political leaders have moved toward a rhetoric that taps into the vocabulary of recovery, rebuilding, and a new beginning after the traumatic crisis-years.4 While the persisting conditions of precarity and poverty of a large part of the population are at odds with this new political narrative, it remains to be seen whether this shift in rhetoric will consolidate a new hegemonic framework of post-crisis, and how art and literature will respond to this framework. The framework of crisis in Greece largely affected the terms of production and reception of art and literature created in the crisis-years. Art forms like street art, poetry, theater, and cinema experienced a remarkable efflorescence and started receiving international attention,5 but this attention was usually, in one way or another, framed by reference to the “crisis,” even though many filmmakers and artists resisted this framing for their work.6 The reduction of artistic forms of expression in Greece to by-products of the “crisis” risks affirming crisis as a hegemonic narrative and interpretive framework for those works, while steering their reception in restrictive ways (Boletsi 2017, 256). Nevertheless, exploring how literary, artistic, and other cultural objects engaged with the framework of the crisis does not necessarily entail treating these objects as products of this framework. Many forms of artistic and sociocultural expression devised agonistic forms of engagement with dominant crisis-discourses or experimented with expressive modalities that registered what some have called a “crisis of meaning” in Greek society (Psaras 2016, 2, 4). This “crisis of meaning” was accelerated by the major rearrangements in the Greek social fabric brought about by the financial crisis of 2009, but it can already be traced before that, in the events of December 2008: the massive protests and demonstrations that took place in Greece following the killing of a sixteen-year-old boy, Alexis Grigoropoulos, by a policeman. The December 2008 events registered a widespread discontent among the population, and the younger generations particularly,

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which commentators and politicians had a hard time framing within existing discourses and political categories.7 In art and literature, the crisis of meaning involved a reconfiguration of people’s relation to history and to past (ethnonationalist) narratives that defined Greek identity, but also radical engagements with futurity. Dimitris Papanikolaou coined the term “archive trouble” (2011) for this “iconoclastic return to the past” during the crisis, showing how writers, poets, artists, and filmmakers were turning to past archives and reinventing or reconfiguring “the past and its remnants” while trying to give expression to a precarious present of crisis (2017, 41, 46, 47). While I focus on the Greek context, the framework of crisis I probe in this chapter is not limited to Greece, despite the undeniable particularities of the Greek crisis-scape. The experience of crisis as a chronic framework of living rather than a singular turning point extends far beyond the constellation known as “the Greek crisis.” The phrase “Crisis… what else?” captured such a broader understanding of crisis in neoliberal capitalism as an enduring state that contracts the space of political choice and the imagination of alternative futures. Crisis-rhetoric amplifies what Franco “Bifo” Berardi has called the “slow cancellation of the future” since the universalization of neoliberal capitalism (2011, 18)—a process that started already in the late 1970s and 1980s but took a more totalizing form after 1989 and the fall of Eastern-bloc communism. This neoliberal capitalist totality established what Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism”: an anti-utopian outlook on the global present marked by “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (Fisher 2009, 2). Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri famously used the term “Empire” in their homonymous book (2000) to name the deterritorialized, decentered, supranational form of power that took shape in this new global order to which there is no outside. “Crisis” is instrumental in this world order. As David Higgins writes, following Hardt and Negri, “Empire has capitalized on an environment of perpetual crisis in order to fold its exterior inward and to territorialize the entire globe within its domain” (2015, 53). Cultivating a sense of perpetual crisis becomes a mechanism for maximizing profitability for some, as well as authorizing exceptional measures, (semi-permanent) states of emergency, limitations in civic or human rights, and biopolitical control. In the era of finance capitalism, Brian Massumi writes, the problem of the inevitable “periodic economic collapse” in the “capitalist cycle” “has been

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solved—by eternalizing crisis without sacrificing profits. The future-past of the catastrophe has become the dizzying ever-presence of crisis” (1993, 19; emphasis added). Thus, if one of the meanings of the word “crisis” in ancient Greek (κρίσις / krísis) was “decision” or “choice” between alternatives (Koselleck 2006, 358), recent mobilizations of crisis run contrary to this meaning: they narrow the space of real choices, critical reflection, and alternatives in politics. Crisis as an instrument, Stijn De Cauwer writes, “plays into the hands of those who want to claim that ‘we have no other choice’” (2018, xxiii). It thus turns into a pillar of the “TINA doctrine” (“There Is No Alternative”),8 which establishes neoliberalism as “the only rational and viable mode of governance” (Athanasiou in Butler and Athanasiou 2013, 149). Based on this doctrine, discourses of crisis render “critical thinking and acting redundant, irrational, and ultimately unpatriotic” (149). As a supporting mechanism for a doctrine of “no alternatives,” crisis rhetoric reduces complex constellations to pseudo-choices between a right and a wrong, or a legitimate and an illegitimate alternative.9 This binary logic also largely determines the way subjects are construed in this rhetoric as either active or passive, guilty or innocent, masters or victims. In my previous work, I showed how this logic determines constructions of Greek subjects in moralizing narratives of the Greek debt crisis: either as guilty and responsible for their country’s plight due to “bad conduct” or as passive, powerless victims either of a domestic flawed political system or of global forces outside their control (Boletsi 2016, 8–11). Thus, if “crisis… what else?” is a rhetorical question that draws attention to a framework of crisis without an outside, how can this question become a real one? Can this “else”—alternative or even utopian political, social, and cultural spaces, times, narratives, subjectivities—be thought through but also, hopefully, beyond the “new normal” of crisis? This chapter traces the ways in which two works engaged with this question in the Greek crisis-scape: the short story “Πλακάτ με σκουπόξυλο” / “Placard and Broomstick” by Christos Ikonomou (2010) and the wall writing “βαριέμαι ευφάνταστα” [variemai eufantasta], translated as “I am bored imaginatively” or “I am bored fancifully,” which featured on Athenian walls in the years of the crisis. Both works evoke but do not directly address or thematize the “crisis” in Greece. They respond to conditions of precarity and alienation that are simultaneously embedded in a local context and exemplary of broader, global processes. Casting contemporary experiences of dispossession and

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alienation as a pervasive narrative frame, Ikonomou’s story registers the impossibility of stepping out of this frame but also the unyielding desire for alternative narratives. The wall writing reconfigures one of the symptoms of capitalist realism—boredom—into a language that, I argue, reimagines utopianism from within the neoliberal “now” by tapping into the modality of the middle voice. Even though these works perform different kinds of stasis, they both disengage from conceptions of subjectivity that rest on the binary choice of a passive or an active subject—either an acquiescent victim without agency or a revolutionary hero who challenges power from its outside. The former option invalidates the possibility of resistance while the latter is an untenable position for resisting a late-capitalist totality without exteriority. They both also respond to the impossibility of standing outside the totalizing framework they resist. They thus enact forms of stasis as an “internal contestation of power” (Lambropoulos 2018, n.pag.) that challenges neoliberal imperatives of acquiescence, normalization, and “moving forward.” Both works—the one perhaps more convincingly than the other—enact, to borrow Arjun Appadurai’s term, “a politics of possibility.” As a challenge to the neoliberal “politics of probability” that seeks to calculate, contain, and control the future, a politics of possibility remains open to languages and modes of being that cannot be fully articulated in the present and harbor the hope of different futures (Appadurai 2013, 1, 3).

Empty Frames; Or How to Imagine Stasis Beyond Revolutionary Heroism and Passive Acquiescence The story “Placard and Broomstick” was included in the short story collection by Christos Ikonomou Κάτι θα γίνει, θα δεις / Something will Happen, You’ll See, published in 2010.10 The collection became a best seller and—owing also to the timing of its publication in 2010—it became, according to the synopsis of the book’s English translation, “the literary emblem of the Greek crisis.”11 The book’s haunting stories feature poor, working-class, vulnerable, laid-off, unemployed, or indebted characters, watching their dreams of a better life dissolve under the material and symbolic violence of sociopolitical and systemic conditions that stifle possibilities for resistance or escape. Many stories stage small acts of protest or resistance to these conditions, ranging from (unrealized) fantasies of escape to extreme violent acts against the self, as in the story “Penguins Outside the Accounting Office,” in which the narrator’s father swallows five metal tacks upon seeing his wrongfully arrested son in handcuffs at the

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courthouse. Even though these acts of protest carry a bitter taste of futility, the book’s title underscores the stubborn hope for an event—the “something” that, against all odds, will introduce a dissonance in the ordinariness of a crisis without prospect of resolution and will open up the future.12 Even though most stories in the collection were actually written before the financial crisis erupted, they were largely received within the framework of the crisis, that is, as responses to social conditions and inequalities the crisis exacerbated. Even when critics took into account that many of these stories were created before the watershed year of 2009, they still framed them as “harbingers” of the crisis (Hadjivasileiou 2012; Bekos qtd. in Kapsaskis 2013; Raptopoulos 2010): stories that may have not explicitly addressed the crisis but foreshadowed it by showing a society at a critical point (Hadjivasileiou 2012, 91). Regardless of this framing, the writing of these stories before the outbreak of the crisis certainly complicates clear-­ cut distinctions between a “pre-crisis” and “crisis” Greece and problematizes prelapsarian understandings of the pre-crisis years. The substandard living conditions of the working classes, the inequalities, disposability, and lack of future prospects sketched in the stories, can be related both to domestic sociopolitical structures and to systemic conditions in neoliberal capitalism that preceded 2009. In “Placard and Broomstick,” the protagonist, Yannis Englezos, tries to come to terms with the death of his best friend Petros Frangos.13 Petros, a steelworker, was electrocuted at the construction site he was working, in an accident that happened because the contractor had pressured him to work late into the evening on a Thursday, just as Yannis and Petros were preparing to leave for Yannis’ village in the mountains of Epirus to spend Easter together (Ikonomou 2016, 91). Petros dies two days later in the hospital from severe burns. His death also puts an end to the escape-plan the two friends had been fantasizing about: leaving the city for the countryside. “Things here are getting rough, everyone’s losing it, these days people scare me … I’m telling you, the future is in the mountains,” Petros kept telling Yannis before the accident (92). To them, the mountains posed as an escape from an unfulfilling urban life of social alienation, apathy, and hardship. Unable to process his friend’s painful and senseless death, Yannis is struggling to find words to capture his and his friend’s experience. All words, however, feel foreign, borrowed, and ill-suited. During Petros’ last days at the hospital, Yannis’ dramatic plea to the doctors to save him—a

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plea Yannis believes is not taken seriously because he does not have the money for serious treatment—feels like words that “have come straight out of some series on TV” (97). The language of soap operas and popular entertainment makes his desperation sound like a melodramatic cliché, alienating him from his own emotions. To fathom Petros’ pain, he then turns to the language of arithmetic, trying to break down and quantify his friend’s pain in numbers: “He divided 24,000 by Petros’s age to see how many volts there had been for each year of his friend’s life. He multiplied Petros’s age by 365 and divided that into 24,000 to figure out the volts per day. Then he calculated the hours and the minutes and the seconds” (93). His need to protest leads him to attach a piece of cardboard onto a broomstick, making a makeshift placard. Thinking of what to write on that placard, however, words fail him again: He wanted to write something that would express unspeakable rage and hatred and love and despair all at once. Or maybe it should be some plain, dry slogan, the kind of thing a political party might say about workplace fatalities, about people who die on the job. Or maybe something like the things they write on the gravestones of people who die in vain, or too young. Something about god and the soul and angels and the afterlife. (94)

The vocabularies he considers—political rhetoric, gravestone inscriptions, religious sermons—sound like clichés to him that fail to articulate his and Petros’ experience. Leaving the placard empty, he walks to the building site where his friend died and holds the placard high. He spends the whole day there, hoping, to no avail, that his wordless protest will attract some reaction by passersby or that someone will become interested in his story. While waiting for something to happen, he ponders ways to emplot his protest and endow his empty frame with meaning. In this attempt, two hegemonic narratives are “tested” as potential analogical vehicles for his act of protest: history and religion. Following the logic of analogy, Yannis seeks to counter his dispossession and social invisibility by tapping into the (masculine) heroic ethos of ancient, Byzantine, and modern leaders and heroes of Greek History. If people came to him, he thinks, “He wouldn’t tell them his real name. He would make up some other name, more suited to the circumstance, a nice heroic name. My name is Achilles. Achilles Palaiologos. Or Alexander. Or Thrasyvoulos. Alexander the Great Thrasyvoulos Nikiforidis” (99). The irony of the analogy is unmistakable: this hyperbolic list of heroes is ill-fitted for the anti-heroic figure of Yannis,

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whose wordless protest stands no chance of becoming part of the historical record. The religious narrative that underlies the whole narration is the Christian narrative of (self-)sacrifice and salvation. The story is interspersed with references to Easter. The analogies the story implicitly constructs are between, on the one hand, the passion and sacrifice of Christ, and, on the other hand, Petros’ painful death but also Yannis’ placard as a modern version of the cross. The story starts on the Monday after Easter, as Yannis is preparing for his protest (the accident and Petros’ death are narrated through retroversions, mostly mediated by Yannis’ recollections). The accident happens on Maundy Thursday and Petros dies on Holy Saturday. In his last painful hours in the hospital bed, Yannis saw Petros’s arm or foot suddenly flail, two or three or four times in a row, and Yiannis’s eyes would fill with tears and to steel his nerves he would repeat words to himself from some old prayers that he had mostly forgotten. But that flailing wasn’t the work of god. It was just the current shaking Petros’s body—that’s how much current was still in his body. (89–90)

If the shaking of Petros’ body gives the momentary impression of a resurrection—a projection of Yannis’ hope for his friend’s recovery—this turns out to be not “the work of god” but the cruel, continuous effect of the cause of his death, yielding a pain without end and a sacrifice without redemption. Petros’ sacrifice (a sacrifice that was not his choice) and Yannis’ makeshift “cross” not only fail to lead to a form of salvation but they also seem to have zero impact on the rest of the world. The religious analogy therefore falters before it is even erected. In fact, since the Christian narrative of sacrifice does not support any prospect of salvation in the story, it is more convincing as an allegorical vehicle for the passivity of acquiescent subjects that the neoliberal governmentality of crisis breeds. As Athanasiou writes, “Under the truth regime of ‘crisis,’ not only do people have to engage in a daily struggle against economic hardship and humiliation, but they are also called upon to bear all this without any sign of outrage or dissent” (in Butler and Athanasiou 2013, 149). As a result, the evocation of Christian and heroic national narratives ends up underscoring the incommensurability between those narratives and the characters’ experience. These attempted transhistorical analogies prove unable to offer consolation, understanding, or a well-articulated critique of the present. As no past narratives provide the framing Yannis is

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looking for to piece together his experience and find his place in the present, the muteness of his placard is highlighted even more. “This,” Yannis thought, “is the most pathetic, most ineffectual protest since the birth of the workers’ movement” (Ikonomou 2016, 102). Ironically, the only metaphorical vehicle in the story that proves convincing is one that captures his inability to transfer (the original meaning of “metaphor” from the verb metapherein) his experience to language: “All the things he had inside, everything he was feeling, were like these fish he’d seen once on TV, strange fish that live deep down in a lake in Asia somewhere and when you take them out of the water and the sun hits them they rot right away and dissolve and disappear” (100–101). His protest ends as he lights a cigarette at night and watches the smoke “slowly rise under the yellow street light and then disperse in the darkness like the smoke from some pitiful ancient offering that no one even noticed, neither gods nor people who believed in gods” (103). As a final attempt to relate his “now” to other spaces and times, this “offering” fails to establish a connection with the Greek gods in search of meaning or justice: it dissipates without a trace, just as the protest of the empty placard found no audience or sympathizers. Yannis’ placard signals a crisis of language and representation, which, notwithstanding the story’s anti-heroic ending, projects the need for alternative languages for the experiences of subjects exposed to social disposability. If there is a “felicity” then to be found in this (speech-less) speech act of the empty banner, it lies in its stubborn refusal to be appropriated by established frameworks—be it popular entertainment, arithmetic, Christianity, or Greek History. Such frameworks, as Yannis knows, would make his and Petros’ experience “dissolve and disappear” like those strange fish as they reach the sea’s surface. Is the empty placard mute? If not, what space for dissent does it forge in an alienated present of normalized crisis in which workers are exploited (Petros’ precarious working conditions led to his death) and in which there is no hope for justice or a different future (their utopian escape to the mountains remains unrealized)? Yannis’ protest can be seen as a form of stasis that unsettles the neoliberal, nationalist, and religious discourses eager to capture his experience and subjectivity through established formulas. As a speech(less) act, his protest proclaims an epistemic crisis in available discourses that cannot speak for the dispossessed. In that sense, the placard’s emptiness signals the insufficiency of those discourses rather than his own.

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Stasis in ancient Greek accommodated several meanings: “stand” (from the verb ίστημι / hístēmi that meant “to stand”), “position,” “standpoint,” and gradually dissension, “conflict” between groups with opposed standpoints, civil war, revolt, popular insurrection (Hansen 2005, 126–127). Stemming from the root *sta, the polysemy of stasis can be schematized in two opposed clusters of meaning, “one signifying immobility, the other signifying mobility” (Vardoulakis 2018, 95).14 In his article “Greek Democracy in Crisis or Stasis,” Vassilis Lambropoulos distinguished two ways of approaching the decade of the 2010s in Greece: the one was the dominant model of “a biopolitical crisis whose victims need the government’s pastoral care” and the other was the model of stasis, “an alternative model of institution” in which “actors contest self-rule agonistically” (2018, n.pag.). In the model of crisis (which Lambropoulos ascribes to the hegemonic Left), the collective’s behavior is disciplined by “the normalization of resistance,” that is, “the availability of the morality of resistance to the entire population that acquiesces so long as it can claim to do it heroically” (n.pag.). By contrast, what Lambropoulos understands as the model of stasis, which he associates with the autonomist Left—the Left of “the excluded and marginal forces that do not fit the crisis narrative”— privileges “internal contestation of power,” “the politics of autonomism” and “the power of solidarity” (n.pag.).15 Disavowing two hegemonic narratives that often pose as sources of consolation, identity, power, and even remedy to crisis (Greek Orthodox Christianity, Greek nationalist heroism), Yannis’ stasis can be seen as such an autonomist gesture that combines (seemingly) passive standing (waiting in the same position throughout the day) with a standpoint without content. The paradoxical combination of immobility (sitting or standing still) and mobility (contesting, taking a stand) in his gesture exemplifies “the bewildering multivalence of the term” stasis that, as mentioned above, signifies both movement and its opposite (Vardoulakis 2018, 95): “standing still but also taking a stance and taking the stand: at once motionlessness and insurrection” (Athanasiou 2017, 183). But if his standpoint has no content, what does this standpoint contest, exactly? The hegemonic narratives he tests (and rejects) in the story rest on binary understandings of subjectivity along the lines of active versus passive: victims or heroes; passive endurance of pain or full mastery of one’s fate; the masculine heroic ethos of Achilles and the imperialist drive of Alexander the Great (Ikonomou 2016, 99) or the passive Christian ethos of self-sacrifice. His stasis disengages from old recipes for countering the

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injustices of a present “in crisis”: he is neither the heroic individual, nor part of a collective revolutionary act, nor a messiah who sacrifices himself for the good of humanity. Words fail him because he refuses to side with either side of a passive/active binary. Viewed in this way, his placard is neither just the desperate act of an impotent subject nor a revolutionary call for a clean start. His stasis thereby becomes what Athanasiou describes as “an embodied practice of inhabiting the polis through contestation and dissent,” that, by rejecting (heroic) accounts of the sovereign subject, manages to “stand critically beside the conceits of self-sovereign subjectivity” (2017, 42). His gesture asserts the need to re-frame and rearticulate experience and subjectivity in the “now” of a normalized crisis and to imagine alternatives that are not there yet. If stasis requires a shared standpoint and a “politics of solidarity,” however, Yannis’ protest, which remains unanswered, seems to lack the reciprocation that could turn it into a collective form of dissent. Yet, even if he stands alone in the story, outside the story his placard does find transnational lines of connection with other “solitary” forms of stasis that operated beyond frameworks of revolutionary heroism or passive acquiescence. One may recall the so-called standing man protest by Erdem Gündüz, who stood still in Taksim Square facing the Atatürk cultural center in a silent, seemingly passive protest against police brutality during the Gezi Park protests in 2013. Or the action of Aslan Sagutdinov, a man in Kazakhstan, who on May 21, 2019, was arrested for holding a blank banner in a central public square in the city of Oral. Although his banner had no message—or perhaps because of that—it confused the authorities and led to his arrest.16 Yannis’ empty placard also resonates with the empty billboard frames in Yorgos Zois’ short-film Out of Frame (2012), the starting point for which was the recent banning of advertisements in large exterior billboards in Greece, which left hundreds of empty billboard frames around the country in a state of decay.17 In these—and other—solitary acts of protest or estranging visual grammars, Yannis’ act finds the interlocutors and the lines of connection he lacks in the intradiegetic world.

Imaginative Boredom; Or How to Rethink Utopianism Through the Middle Voice By disavowing established vocabularies that cast the subject as either active or passive, Yannis’ wordless protest points perhaps toward the modality of the middle voice, even though this is never registered on the placard’s

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empty space as an alternative expressive form. The middle voice was a third grammatical voice in ancient Greek, distinguished from the active and passive voices by the fact that the subject in middle voice verbs was inside the process designated by the verb, involved and affected by it, and neither just agent nor patient, but a bit of both (Benveniste 1971, 148; Pecora 1991, 210).18 The middle voice vanished as a grammatical category from Modern Greek (as well as from most modern languages) and its functions were absorbed by the binary distinction between the active and passive voices. However, linguistic constructions that convey the meaning of the middle voice through passive or active verbs are still operational in Modern Greek. Beyond linguistics, thinkers have also conceptualized and theorized the notion of the middle voice as a mode of discourse that undoes binaries between active and passive, perpetrator and victim, subject and object (Barthes 1970; Derrida 1982; White 2010; LaCapra 2001). As a discursive modality, the middle voice captures a space of indeterminacy that shuns rigid oppositions and suspends crisis, understood here as binary choice.19 It is also a space in which the subject is always implicated in discourse and cannot speak or act from an external position. If the middle voice is evoked but never articulated in Ikonomou’s story, it is explicitly taken up in the second case I engage with: a wall writing that fills Yannis’ empty canvas, as it were, with a precariously hopeful response to neoliberal discourses of crisis. The wall writing comprises two words: “βαριέμαι ευφάνταστα” [variemai eufantasta]. The verb “βαριέμαι” [variemai] means “I am bored” while the adverb “ευφάνταστα” [eufantasta] has a double meaning: it can refer to someone with creative imagination or someone who makes up imaginary stories and lies. It would thus be translated as “I am bored imaginatively” or “I am bored fancifully.” The writing appeared during the years of the financial crisis in Athens. I was able to trace two renditions of it in Athens, but it is very likely that there have been more. Although I could not determine when it first appeared, a terminus post quem is 2010, since a blogger posted an image of it in an entry from 2010 (Fig. 2).20 “Being bored” could allude here to the idleness and emptiness of a middle- or upper-class consumerist lifestyle. But it also evokes the enforced inactivity of unemployment that skyrocketed in Greece in the crisis years. The latter reading—the “boredom” related to unemployment—is more in tune with the Athenian neighborhood of Exarcheia, where the writing appeared. Exarcheia is home to unemployed youth and carries an air of insurrection and resistance to power, often materializing in clashes with the police, but is also a

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Fig. 2  Version of the wall writing “Variemai eufantasta” [I am bored imaginatively] in the Exarcheia neighborhood, Athens (2010). (Photograph reproduced by kind permission of the photographer)

neighborhood from which many self-organized communities and solidarity initiatives have emerged, offering, for example, refuge to migrants and disenfranchised people. A blogger, for example, posted a photo of the wall writing in his “Diary of an unemployed” and used the phrase to title his entry on November 11, 2010, in which he describes his discovery of the writing during an idle walk as an unemployed “flaneur” in Exarcheia.21 The peculiar figure of an unemployed flaneur already hints at the ambiguous subject that variemai eufantasta captures. The phrase links the passivity of unemployment with creative imagination: the latter promises future action and the possibility of resisting conditions of enforced dispossession22 (unemployment, precarity, disposability) through an exodus from the neoliberal demands of productivity that breed acquiescence and leave no time to think or contest the conditions of one’s life. Significantly, the phrase plays with, and inverts, a common phrase in Greek: βαριέμαι αφάνταστα [variemai afantasta], which translates into

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“I am unimaginably bored,” that is, I am bored to death. The wall writing reconfigures the extreme boredom registered in this phrase by replacing the prefix a- (indicating lack) with the prefix εύ- [eu-], indicating something positive. This change of prefixes reinstates the “imagination” (fantasia) that is only present in afantasta by negation. The late capitalist ennui of an “unimaginable boredom” thereby becomes an imaginative use of that boredom to potentially change the conditions that induced it. In the wall writing, dispossessed subjects are invested with the power to daydream, imagine, and potentially challenge the conditions of their abjection through their only valuable possession: time. The notion of imaginative boredom suggests a partial disengagement from the demands of productivity and from what Lauren Berlant calls the “cruel optimism” of attachments to “upward mobility,” “job security,” and other “conventional good-life fantasies” that prove untenable within the new normality of crisis in neoliberal capitalism (Berlant 2011, 2). If, following Berlant, in the “precarious public sphere” of crisis-stricken Greece such attachments have become “more fantasmatic with less and less relation to how people live” (11), the word eufantasta hijacks the “fantasmatic” from the affective structure of cruel optimism, reclaiming it for a quotidian utopian space that is shaped not outside but within the chronotope of capitalist realism and in agonistic opposition to it. Reconfiguring boredom from a space of inaction to one of imagination, it exchanges the cruel attachment to “good-life fantasies” for a stasis that instills glimpses of utopianism into the new normal of crisis. Variemai eufantasta joins what Harry Cleaver calls “the struggle against work” that resists “the endless subordination to work in order to gain space, time and energy to elaborate alternatives” (2015, 84). Like Yannis’ empty-placard protest in Ikonomou’s story, this wall writing also has domestic, transnational, and transhistorical interlocutors. It winks, for instance, at Guy Debord’s famous wall-writing “Ne travaillez jamais” (“Never work”), which he painted on a wall on the Rue de Seine in Paris in 1952. It also converses with another wall writing that appeared in Greece during the crisis: “Δεν φοβάμαι τίποτα, δεν ελπίζω τίποτα, είμαι άνεργος” [I fear nothing, I hope nothing, I am unemployed]. This writing paraphrases a famous line by literary author Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957): “I fear nothing. I hope nothing. I am free.”23 In the latter wall writing, the implicit casting of unemployment as a form of freedom (through the evocation of Kazantzakis’ line) certainly carries a bitterly ironic tone. But it also registers a potential side effect of contemporary

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forms of enforced dispossession, that is, one’s disengagement from the “cruel optimism” of attachments to “good life” and consumerist fantasies. The word “fantasia” (imagination) embedded in “eufantasta” also links the wall writing with the May ’68 slogan “all power to the imagination.” Variemai eufantasta tries perhaps to update that slogan and carry over its utopian energy into the world of capitalist realism. The utopianism of this wall writing, however, is of a different kind from the May ’68 slogan: to understand its mode of operation we can look at how its message and affective force are inflected through the modality of the middle voice. The verb constitutes a middle voice construction, since in variemai [I am bored] the subject is affected by, and involved in, the process the verb designates. One could also read the phrase as a whole as cast in the discursive mode of the middle voice: the cohabitation of passivity and inaction with creativity and imagination yields a subject that is concurrently passive and active, disempowered and empowered, neither just agent nor patient, but both. It is also a subject internal to the late capitalist conditions that induce boredom (whether this boredom is related to precarity and unemployment or to a consumerist life-style), and thus implicated in the system it tries to resist. This already moves us away from a revolutionary utopianism that demands rebellious subjects seeking to overturn a corrupt system by opposing it from the outside. If there is no outside to the new world order of “Empire,” resistance and utopianism in a post-­revolutionary world can take shape through different modalities.24 Variemai eufantasta refuses to abandon utopianism, but rethinks it in a capitalist realist context through the expressive modality of the middle voice. Its precarious utopianism erupts within a quotidian space of normalized crisis and antagonizes its conditions (boredom) from within. The wall writing refashions the “unimaginable boredom” of capitalist realism that promises no different future into a utopian space that dovetails with what José Esteban Muñoz calls “queer utopianism”: an “anticipatory illumination” that helps us sense “the not-yet-conscious” as “a utopian feeling” in certain properties of “representational practices” (2009, 3). This utopianism, channeled here through the middle voice, is neither passive nor active, neither acquiescent nor revolutionary, neither negative nor uncritically positive, but belongs, to speak with Shoshana Felman, “precisely to scandal: to the scandal of their nonopposition” (2003, 104, also qtd in Muñoz 2009, 13). The message’s optimism is certainly not unhindered: it is further undercut by the second meaning of eufantasta as “fanciful.” Imaginative

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boredom may thus prove to be fanciful and fictional: a fake promise for an impossible exodus from the neoliberal governmentality of crisis. The message’s promise may thus be cruel after all, articulating the fictitious musings of dispossessed people that pose no real challenge to power. Variemai eufantasta issues a message that contains its self-contestation, without, however, invalidating the utopian energy that motivates it. The double meaning of eufantasta activates an ambiguously utopian space that finds itself in an agonistic relation to the neoliberal conditions that threaten to undercut its optimism. The writing thus rethinks utopianism through and against the “new normal” of crisis. It projects boredom both as a symptom of capitalist realism and as a potential resource for imagining the otherwise.

From Crisis of Representation to a Politics of Possibility; Or, How to Rearrange Symptoms of Crisis in New Configurations The empty placard of Ikonomou’s story and the imaginative boredom registered on the walls of Athens test modes of resistance to the alienation, dispossession, and contracting of the future in the “new normal” of crisis: conditions that have taken shape in capitalist realism and predated the financial crisis in Greece, but were severely aggravated in the crisis-years. In Ikonomou’s story, the protagonist is unable to find the words for his protest in nationalist narratives of heroism and in Christian narratives of self-sacrifice. His empty canvas challenges hegemonic narratives about the past as means of narrativizing the present or resources of wisdom and resilience in times of crisis. Although the story does not envision a new language of protest that would fill the blank canvas, the protagonist’s stasis draws attention to the inadequacies of existing frameworks and longs for a different vocabulary for articulating the experience of dispossessed, alienated people and for imagining the not-yet-there. The wall-writing variemai eufantasta mobilizes the properties of the middle voice to rethink the possibility of utopianism and of imaginative spaces within the totalizing conditions of late capitalism. It does not pose as a new language of resistance untainted by, and external to, hegemonic narratives—the language that Yannis in Ikonomou’s story longs for but cannot find. Rather, variemai eufantasta linguistically and conceptually reconfigures one of the “symptoms” that afflict subjects within the neoliberal governmentality of crisis: the “unimaginable boredom” linked to

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unemployment, consumerism, or an indebted life without the prospect of a different future. If boredom is a symptom of the chronic “disease” of normalized crisis,25 the wall writing tries to counter the disease by placing this symptom in a new configuration through which it could yield different, more hopeful effects. A symptom like boredom that entails depletion of energy, passivity, acquiescence, compromised agency, may thereby turn into a resource for imagining different modes of being in the present and for inserting moments of utopianism in the ordinariness of crisis. If Ikonomou’s story registers a crisis of representation and the inadequacy of existing narratives, variemai eufantasta revisits a symptom of neoliberal capitalism and “crisis” through the modality of the middle voice: a modality that, it is important to note, does not always or by definition serve as an instrument of stasis and critique of hegemonic frameworks, but can assume this function in cases such as this.26 The space of imaginative boredom that the wall writing fosters may be ambiguously utopian or even fanciful. But by hijacking quotidian spaces from the governmentality of crisis, it can activate a “politics of possibility” (Appadurai 2013, 1, 3), momentarily enabling the imagination of those alternative configurations of subjectivity and agency that Ikonomou’s empty placard only dreams of.

Notes 1. An image of the graffiti can be accessed on the artist’s website at http:// bleeps.gr/main/outdoor/crisis-what-else-9/ 2. The graffiti and the accompanying statement protested against the initiative of the Athens School of Fine Arts to organize this street art festival, from which, according to the statement by bleepsgr, local Greek artivists were excluded. 3. The phrase “Crisis… what else?” and the graffiti by bleepsgr are also briefly discussed in Boletsi (2018, 4). 4. Illustrative of this shift of narrative is the speech of then Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on the occasion of Greece’s exit from the bailout program in August 2018, symbolically shot with the harbor of Ithaca in the background, in which he evoked the homecoming of Odysseus after a long, troubled journey in order to project a redemptive narrative of successful arrival after years of hardship (“We have reached our destination”) and the commencement of a new chapter in Greek History (“Today is the beginning of a new era”) (qtd. in “Alexis Tsipras’ State Address from Ithaca” 2018, n.pag.). Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Prime Minister of Greece since

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July 2019, also announced in his victory speech that Greece will “proudly raise its head again” under his leadership (qtd. in “Kyriakos Mitsotakis” 2019, n.pag.; my translation). 5. For example, several new anthologies of recent Greek poetry in translation written around or during the crisis have been published for international audiences. The most prominent are by Chiotis (2015), van Dyck (2016), and Siotis (2015). 6. A good example of this tendency is the international reception of the films of the so-called Greek Weird Wave, which critics tended to see as products of Greece’s socioeconomic turmoil. Steve Rose, in an article that introduced the term “Greek Weird Wave,” asked: “Is it just coincidence that the world’s most messed-up country is making the world’s most messed-up cinema?” (2011, n.pag.). See also Papanikolaou’s essay on the “Weird Wave” as a cinema of biopolitics in this volume. 7. See Douzinas (2013), Kallianos (2011), Kornetis (2010), Panourgia (2010), Schwarz et al. (2010), for indicative analyses of those events. 8. A popular slogan first used in the early 1990s by Margaret Thatcher and other politicians to indicate the lack of alternative to neoliberalism. 9. For this argument, see also Boletsi (2017, 260–261) and De Cauwer (2018, xxiii). 10. See also the essay by Jonas Bækgaard in this volume that focuses on another story from the same collection. The collection was translated in English in 2016 by Karen Emmerich. 11. From the book’s synopsis on the website of Archipelago books, at https:// archipelagobooks.org/book/something-will-happen-youll-see/. 12. For a brief discussion of the book and its title, see also Boletsi (2018, 22). 13. The last names of the two protagonists mean—somewhat ironically— “English man” and “French man,” respectively. 14. The direction of the first cluster of meanings can be illustrated, for example, through words like “state,” “static,” or “status quo,” while the second cluster that connotes movement is manifest through words “that confound the stability and unity of the state,” such as the understanding of stasis as civil war or the Greek term for “revolution,” epanastasis, that also derives from *sta (Vardoulakis 2018, 97). Although these clusters seem contradictory, their interrelation has been explored by philosophers (Vardoulakis 2018; Schmitt 2008; Loraux 2006). See Vardoulakis’ account of stasis and its relation to democracy that develops through an illuminating discussion of Schmitt’s and Loraux’s ideas on the matter (2018, 99–109). 15. Lambropoulos traces the model of stasis in Modern Greek poetry and its modes of expression and circulation. 16. According to a statement by the activist, he wanted to show that he would still be arrested even if his protest had no message, hinting at the curtailing

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of freedom of expression in his country (Daniyarov and Morgan 2019, n.pag.). The protest was seen by some “in the light of the recent anti-­ governmental protests” in the country (Biedarieva 2019, n.pag.). 17. See the synopsis on the film’s website (https://www.outofframefilm.com). The film’s synopsis “frames” the empty billboards by asserting that “the empty frames are now the message. And we are out of frame.” Unlike Yannis in Ikonomou’s story, the film’s director did try to fill the void of these frames and signify them in a “director’s note” on the film’s website: “The empty frames above our heads, picture not only the current social and financial collapse, but … our bare inner world. They directly reflect our blank state of mind, our sentimental void and solitary existence. The empty frames are the contemporary monuments.” I am grateful to Georgios-­ Evgenios Douliakas for drawing my attention to Aslan Sagutdinov’s protest and Zois’ film. 18. This exposition of the middle voice draws from a more detailed outline in Boletsi (2016, 11–12). 19. For Jacques Derrida, for instance, the middle voice corresponds with his notion of différance, as the in-between repressed by conceptual dichotomies (Derrida 1982, 9; LaCapra 2001, 20). 20. The blog entry, entitled “Ημερολόγιο ενός ανέργου—Ημέρα 116η: ‘Βαριέμαι ευφάνταστα’” [Diary of an unemployed—Day 116: ‘I am bored imaginatively’] can be accessed at https://thestranger.wordpress. com/2010/11/11/log116/ 21. See note 19. 22. See Butler and Athanasiou for a delineation of “dispossession” as both an ontological condition that stresses the relational constitution of the self (i.e., a condition of not “owning” oneself) but also as the “enforced deprivation of rights, land, livelihood, desire or modes of belonging” (2013, 3, 5). 23. In Greek, the line, which is engraved on Kazantzakis’ gravestone, reads: “Δεν ελπίζω τίποτα. Δεν φοβούμαι τίποτα. Είμαι λέφτερος.” 24. According to Hardt and Negri, in the model of a “disciplinary society” individuals could oppose “the disciplinary invasion of power” from an external position. In Empire, however, biopolitical power subsumes “the bodies of the population” and the “entirety of social relations,” precluding resistance from the outside (2000, 24). 25. In ancient Greek, the word crisis also had the meaning of disease (Koselleck 2006, 360). 26. For the political and ethical risks in uses of the middle voice, see Boletsi (2016, 22–23).

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Works Cited Alexis Tsipras’ State Address from Ithaca: ‘Today is the Beginning of a New Era.’ 2018. Greek News Agenda, August 22. Accessed August 27, 2019. http:// www.greeknewsagenda.gr/index.php/topics/politics-polity/6805-alexis-tsipras-state-address-from-ithaca-today-is-the-beginning-of-a-new-era-2. Appadurai, Arjun. 2013. The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. London and New York: Verso. Athanasiou, Athena. 2017. Agonistic Mourning: Political Dissidence and the Women in Black. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1970. To Write: An Intransitive Verb? In The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. R. Macksey and E.  Donato, 134–145. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Benveniste, Émile. 1971. Active and Middle Voice in the Verb. In Problems in General Linguistics, 145–151. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press. Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo.’ 2011. After the Future. Translated by Arianna Bove et al. Edinburgh, Oakland, and Baltimore: AK Press. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Biedarieva, Svitlana. 2019. Man Arrested in Kazakhstan for Wielding a Blank Poster in a Public Square.  Hyperallergic, May 21. Accessed July 12, 2019. https://hyperallergic.com/500658/man-ar rested-in-kazakhstan/ ?fbclid=IwAR3wiZiICGwUofeER8XipE7SKm4zbZJJt1Zc8WMMUqBwa H36eADs0IJmZB4. Boletsi, Maria. 2016. From the Subject of the Crisis to the Subject in Crisis: Middle Voice on Greek Walls. Journal of Greek Media & Culture 2 (1): 3–28. ———. 2017. The Unbearable Lightness of Crisis: (Anti-)utopia and Middle Voice in Sotiris Dimitriou’s Close to the Belly. In Greece in Crisis: The Cultural Politics of Austerity, ed. Dimitris Tziovas, 256–281. London and New  York: I.B. Tauris. ———. 2018. The Futurity of Things Past: Thinking Greece beyond Crisis. Inaugural Speech as Marilena Laskaridis Chair of Modern Greek Studies, University of Amsterdam, September 2. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. http://cf. bc.uva.nl/download/oraties/oraties_2018/Boletsi_Maria.pdf. Butler, Judith, and Athena Athanasiou. 2013. Dispossession: The Political in the Performative. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Carastathis, Anna. 2018. Nesting Crises. Women’s Studies International Forum 68: 142–148. Chiotis, Theodoros. 2015. Futures: Poetry of the Greek Crisis. London: Penned in the Margins.

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Cleaver, Harry. 2015. Rupturing the Dialectic: The Struggle against Work, Money, and Financialization. Edinburgh: AK Press. Daniyarov, Elbek, and Martin Morgan. 2019. Kazakh Detained over Empty Placard Vigil. BBC News, May 7. Accessed July 12, 2019. https://www.bbc. com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-48187353. De Cauwer, Stijn, ed. 2018. Critical Theory at a Crossroads: Conversations on Resistance in Times of Crisis. New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1982. Différance. In Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass, 1–27. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Douzinas, Costas. 2013. Philosophy and Resistance in the Crisis. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press. van Dyck, Karen, ed. 2016. Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry. London: Penguin Books. Felman, Shoshana. 2003. The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J.L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester and Washington: John Hunt Publishing. Hadjivasileiou, Vangelis. 2012. I elliniki pezografia brosta stin krisi (tora kai allote) [Greek Prose Faced with the Crisis (Now and Then)]. Diavazo 526 (February): 88–91. Hansen, Mogens Herman. 2005. Stasis as an Essential Aspect of the Polis. In An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis, ed. Mogens Herman Hansen and Thomas Heine Nielsen, 126–127. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Higgins, David M. 2015. American Science Fiction after 9/11. In The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction, ed. Gerry Canavan and Eric Carl Link, 44–57. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ikonomou, Christos. 2010. Kati tha ginei, tha deis [Something will Happen, You’ll See]. Athens: Polis. ———. 2016. Something will Happen, You’ll See. Translated by Karen Emmerich. Brooklyn: Archipelago Books. Kakouris, Vlassios Markos. n.d.. Crisis… What Else? Academia.edu. Accessed August 25, 2019. https://www.academia.edu/4211450/CRISIS..what_ else_en Kallianos, Yannis. 2011. December as an Event in Greek Radical Politics. In Revolt and Crisis in Greece: Between a Present Yet to Pass and a Future Still to Come, ed. Antonis Vradis and Dimitris Dalakoglou, 151–166. Edinburgh: AK Press. Kapsaskis, Vassilis. 2013. Mono ego to vrika aristourgima? [Was I the Only One Who Found it a Masterpiece?]. Lifo, 358, October 17. Accessed September 2, 2019. https://www.lifo.gr/guide/cultureblogs/bookblog/35757.

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Kornetis, Kostis. 2010. No More Heroes? Rejection and Reverberation of the Past in the 2008 Events in Greece. Journal of Modern Greek Studies 28 (2): 173–197. Koselleck, Reinhart. 2006. Crisis. Translated by Michaela Richter. Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2): 357–400. Kyriakos Mitsotakis: Echo epignosi tis ethnikis eythinis—I chora sikonei perifani to kefali [Kyriakos Mitsokatis: I Am Aware of the National Responsibility—The Country Raises Its Head Proudly]. 2019. iefimerida. gr, July 7. Accessed August 25, 2019. https://www.iefimerida.gr/ekloges/ diloseis-kyriakos-mitsotakis-gia-niki-tis-nd. LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Lambropoulos, Vassilis. 2018. Greek Democracy in Crisis or Stasis. The Press Project, August 16. Accessed August 18, 2019. https://thepressproject.gr/ greek-democracy-in-stasis/. Loraux, Nicole. 2006. The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens. Translated by Corinne Pache and Jeff Fort. New York: Zone. Massumi, Brian. 1993. Everywhere You Want to Be: Introduction to Fear. In The Politics of Everyday Fear, ed. Brian Massumi, 3–37. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York and London: New York University Press. Out of Frame / Titloi Telous. 2012. Directed by Yorgos Zois. Greece. Panourgia, Neni. 2010. Stones (Papers, Humans). Journal of Modern Greek Studies 28 (2): 199–224. Papanikolaou, Dimitris. 2011. Archive Trouble. Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology website, 26 October. Accessed April 15, 2020. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/archive-trouble. ———. 2017. Archive Trouble, 2017. In Culturescapes Greece: Archeology of the Future, ed. K.  Botanova, C.  Chrissopoulos, and J.  Cooiman, 38–51. Basel: Christoph Merian Verlag. Pecora, Vincent. 1991. Ethics, Politics, and the Middle Voice. Yale French Studies 79: 203–230. Psaras, Marios. 2016. The Queer Greek Weird Wave: Ethics, Politics and the Crisis of Meaning. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Raptopoulos, Vangelis. 2010. I mystiki voi ton plisiazonton gegonoton [The Hidden Sound of Things Approaching]. Kyriakatiki Eleytherotypia (supplement Technes kai Zoi 460), September 12. Accessed September 2, 2019. http://www.enet.gr/?i=issue.el.home&date=12/09/2010&id=201191. Rose, Steve. 2011. Attenberg, Dogtooth, and the Weird Wave of Greek Cinema. The Guardian, August 27. Accessed August 28, 2019. https://www. theguardian.com/film/2011/aug/27/attenberg-dogtooth-greece-cinema.

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Schmitt, Carl. 2008. Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political Theology. Translated by Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward. Cambridge, MA: Polity. Schwarz, A.G., Tasos Sagris, and the Void Network. 2010. We are an Image of the Future: The Greek Revolts of 2008. Oakland: AK Press. Siotis, Dinos. 2015. Crisis: Greek Poets on the Crisis. Smokestack Books. Vardoulakis, Dimitris. 2018. Stasis before the State: Nine Theses on Agonistic Democracy. New York: Fordham University Press. White, Hayden. 2010. Writing in the Middle Voice. In The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory 1957–2007, 255–262. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Name Index1

A Abbas, Sadia, 10 Abdelkader, Emir, 199, 200 Abderrezak, Hakim, 146, 178n4, 189, 190 Abidat, Abed, 18, 184, 194–196, 198 Ad, Sarah, 200 Adelson, Leslie A., 146, 156 Aftab, Kaleem, 227n2 Agamben, Giorgio, 2, 3, 141n17 Agelopoulos, Georgios, 20n5 Ahıska, Meltem, 85 Ahluwalia, Pal, 167, 168 Aisch, Gregor, 64 ̇ Akça, Ismet, 82, 84, 85 Akçam, Taner, 82, 97n2 Akçay, Ümit, 84 Akınerdem, Feyza, 85 Albahari, Maurizio, 139n4, 140n10 Aleksic, Tatjana, 227n2 Alp Özden, Barış, 82

1

Alphen, Ernst van, 160n10 Alric, Guillaume, 191 Alric, Jonathan, 191 Altıntaş, Mustafa, 92 Amirkhani, Jordan, 67 Anastasiadou, Marianthi, 40n6, 40n14 Anderson, Benedict, 103 Andersson, Ruben, 40n15 Anker, Elizabeth, 6, 7, 21n6, 21n9 Appadurai, Arjun, 29, 272, 284 Appanah, Nathacha, 17, 122, 132–135 Arendt, Hannah, 17, 52, 122, 128, 136, 139n6 Asad, Talal, 8 Asokan, Ratik, 264n1 Assad, Bashar al, 36 Asseraf, Arthur, 201 Ataç, Ilker, 39n3 Athanasiou, Athena, 3, 271, 275, 277, 278, 286n22

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Boletsi et al. (eds.), Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36415-1

291

292 

NAME INDEX

Avranas, Alexandros, 210, 213–216, 219 Azoulay, Ariella, 139n5, 141n18 B Baala, Hamdi, 201 Badiou, Alain, 3 Bækgaard, Jonas, 18, 19, 285n10 Baerveldt, Chris, 103 Balibar, Étienne, 186 Banerjee, Subhabrata Bobby, 165 Barthes, Roland, 279 Baudry, Jean-Louis, 245n1 Bauman, Zygmunt, 121, 159n3 Bayat, Asef, 36 Bechrakis, Antonis, 221, 223 Bekmen, Ahmet, 82, 84, 94, 95 Benarroch, Moisés Salama, 163 Benegas Loyo, Diego, 14, 15, 76 Benitez-Rojo, Antonio, 205n3 Bennett, Bruce, 159n4 Benschop, Ruth, 233 Benveniste, Émile, 279 Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo,’ 270 Berchache, Maki, 17, 122–125, 127 Berlant, Lauren, 28, 155, 157, 160n14, 212, 259, 260, 262, 263, 281 Bestrom, Erin, 241 Bickes, Hans, 235 Biedarieva, Svitlana, 286n16 Binebine, Mahi, 17, 164, 166, 167, 169–171, 173, 174, 176, 178n2 Bismarck, Otto van, 97n1 Bitzenis, Aristidis, 10 Boletsi, Maria, 18–20, 264n2, 269, 271, 284n3, 286n18 Bora, Tanıl, 83, 85, 86, 88–90, 92, 96, 97n1 Boudjelal, Bruno, 18, 184, 194–198 Bouteflika, Abdelaziz, 186, 200, 203 Bowker, Geoffrey C., 236

Bracke, Sarah, 155, 160n13 Braidotti, Rosi, 241 Brody, Richard, 216 Bromberger, Christian, 10, 11, 21n12 Brown, Wendy, 8 Bruguera, Tania, 69, 75 Bryant, Rebecca, 20n5 Büchel, Christoph, 183 Bueso, Emilio, 105–108 Burgers, Christian, 111, 112 Butler, Jess, 160n13 Butler, Judith, 3, 8, 155, 157, 161n15, 271, 275, 286n22 C Cahill, Damien, 159n1 Calargé, Carla, 146 Calhoun, Craig, 65 Campbell, Timothy, 225 Caracciolo, Marco, 103, 104, 110 Caramanica, Jon, 191 Carastathis, Anna, 21n11, 37, 269 Cartier, William, 86, 96 Casas-Cortes, Maribel, 59n14, 133 Castells, Manuel, 10, 104 Catherine Breillat, 210 Çelik, Ipek A., 7, 14, 15, 65, 146, 147 Cennetoğlu, Banu, 15, 68, 69, 72 Chalkou, Maria, 215 Chambers, Iain, 11, 160n7 Chamekh, Issrar, 189, 190, 205n7 Chamoiseau, Patrick, 140n9 Chergui, Zebeida, 131 Chiotis, Theodoros, 285n5 Christie, Ian, 242 Cleaver, Harry, 281 Cohen, Leonard, 209 Cole, Sean, 31, 32 Collins, John, 140n11 Cottias, Myriam, 134 Crehan, Kate, 89, 93

  NAME INDEX 

Cresswell, Tim, 150 Crosthwaite, Paul, 6, 111 Culler, Jonathan, 6 D Dabashi, Hamid, 67, 68 Dalakoglou, Dimitris, 20n5 Damasio, Antonio, 103, 104 Daniyarov, Elbek, 286n16 Darwish, Mahmoud, 140n11 Daskalaki, Maria, 241, 243 Davidson, Drew, 237 De Cauwer, Stijn, 3, 271 de Gaulle, Charles, 203, 205n13 De Genova, Nicholas, 10, 39n2, 60n16, 64, 140n7, 159n3, 160n8 de Man, Paul, 6 Deleuze, Gilles, 8, 9, 45, 59n10, 227n1, 241, 245n5 DeLuca, Tiago, 219 Derrida, Jacques, 171, 279, 286n19 Dickinson, Emily, 28 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 137, 139, 140n13 Dieutre, Vincent, 224 Djedouani, Nabil, 204n2 Doane, Mary Ann, 218 Donadio, Rachel, 68 Dotson-Renta, Lara, 164 Douzinas, Costas, 39n2 Drareni, Khaled, 205n11 Dunn, Elizabeth Cullen, 32 Dyck, Karen van, 285n5 E elhariry, yasser, 204n1 Emmerich, Karen, 14, 15, 285n10 Erbil, Ali Fuat, 91 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip, 84–86, 88, 90, 91 Exarchou, Sofia, 215

293

F Felman, Shoshana, 282 Felski, Rita, 6, 7, 21n6, 21n9 Fenske, Uta, 20n5 Fez-Barringten, Barie, 113 Fieni, David, 139n2 Filippou, Efthimis, 210, 219 Fırat, Begüm Özden, 14–16 Fisher, Mark, 20, 220, 262, 263, 270 Forgacs, David, 97n3 Foucault, Michel, 218, 262 Frauley, Jon, 225 G Gardiner, Michael E., 94 Garelli, Glenda, 133 Gedgaudaite, Kristina, 222 Germanacos, Anne, 264n1 Ghanem, Nadia, 205n10 Giannakopoulos, Georgios, 221 Giannouri, Evgenia, 214 Gibbs, Raymond.W., 111 Gilbert, Kimutai, 73 Gilroy, Paul, 186 Glissant, Édouard, 11 Godioli, Alberto, 113, 114 Graeber, David, 7 Gramsci, Antonio, 82–84, 86, 89, 92, 93, 95, 96 Gronstad, Asbjorn, 225 Gržinić, Marina, 168 Guattari, Félix, 45, 46, 241, 245n5 Guillaumet, Gustave, 199 Gunning, Tom, 243 Gustafsson, Henrik, 225 Guzman, Patricio, 224 H Habermas, Jürgen, 238 Hadjivasileiou, Vangelis, 273 Haladyn, Julian Jason, 94

294 

NAME INDEX

Hall, Stuart, 86, 96, 97 Hamilakis, Yannis, 20n5 Hanink, Johanna, 260 Hansen, Mogens Herman, 277 Hardt, Michael, 270, 286n24 Harney, Stefano, 39, 40n5, 41n16 Harrison, Olivia, 16, 17, 130 Hartman, Saidiya, 201 Harvey, David, 86 Heftberger, Adelheid, 242, 243 Heller, Charles, 140n7 Herzfeld, Michael, 11, 232 Hess, Sabine, 20n5 Hesselberth, Pepita, 59n9, 227n1 Higgins, Charlotte, 183 Higgins, David M., 270 Ho, Karen, 252 Hobsbawm, Eric, 81, 87, 121 Hofmeyr, Isabel, 198 Horeck, C. Tanya, 210, 227n1 Horsman, Yasco, 52 Houwen, Janna, 14, 15, 47, 48, 58n7, 67 Huyssen, Andreas, 156

Kaloudi, Kostoula, 216 Kapsaskis, Vassilis, 273 Karalis, Vrasidas, 219, 227n6 Kateb Yacine, 130, 140n8, 187 Katsaounis, Nikos, 232, 236–238 Kendall, Tina, 210, 227n1 Kerssens, Niels, 244 Kinder, Marsha, 240 King, Natasha, 36, 38 Knight, Daniel, 20n5 Köhn, Steffen, 64 Korbiel, Izabela, 245n2 Kornetis, Kostis, 285n7 Koselleck, Reinhart, 2, 6, 20n2, 21n8, 58n2, 90, 239, 255, 256, 260, 271, 286n25 Kotouza, Dimitra, 227n4 Kountouri, Fani, 245n2 Kourelou, Olga, 215 Koutras, Panos, 214, 215, 226 Kovačević, Nataša, 16, 17 Kövecses, Zoltan, 111 Küçük, Bülent, 91 Kurdi, Aylan, 65–68

I Ianiciello, Celeste, 12 Ikonomou, Christos, 19, 20, 249–263, 271–273, 276, 277, 279, 281, 283, 284, 286n17 Irratia, Hala Bedi, 40n8, 40n12

L La Berge, Leigh Claire, 220 LaCapra, Dominick, 279, 286n19 Lakoff, George, 113, 235 Lalami, Laila, 17, 164, 166–170, 172, 174–177 Lambropoulos, Vassilis, 272, 277, 285n15 Lanthimos, Yorgos, 213–217, 219 Latour, Bruno, 21n6, 236 Law, John, 233, 236 Leuvrey, Elisabeth, 205n6 Loiperdinger, Martin, 242 Loraux, Nicole, 285n14 Loubeyre, Nathalie, 15, 45, 48, 52, 54, 55, 57, 58n6, 58n7 Luiselli, Valeria, 139n1

J Jenkins, Henry, 237 Johnson, Mark, 113, 235 K Kakouris, Vlassios Markos, 268 Kalantzis, Konstantinos, 245n2 Kallianos, Yannis, 285n7

  NAME INDEX 

Lustgarten, Anders, 17, 146, 147, 149, 150, 153, 157, 158 Lygizos, Ektoras, 215, 226 Lykidis, Alex, 245n3 M MacDonald, Megan C., 18, 205n3, 205n4 MacIntosh, Steven, 69 Macron, Emmanuel, 187 Mademli, Geli, 18, 19, 215, 233 Mahmood, Saba, 8 Makridis, Babis, 210, 215, 219 Malamou, Thekla, 232, 243 Marx, Karl, 45, 259 Massumi, Brian, 270 Matar, Dina, 140n11 Matlock, Teenie, 111 Mauss, Marcel, 241 Mbembe, Achille, 139n1, 141n17, 164, 165, 167 Meddi, Adlène, 202 Medvedkin, Aleksandr, 242 Meissner, Miriam, 20n5 Melotti, Marxiano, 140n13 Merabet, Naime, 198, 199 Michael, John, 7 Milanovic, Branko, 108 Milic, Nela, 15, 65, 70–76 Minnaard, Liesbeth, 16, 17, 20n5, 159n3, 205n3 Mitropoulos, Angela, 39n3 Mitsotakis, Kyriakos, 284n4, 285n4 Montouri, Chad, 178n4 Morgan, Martin, 286n16 Morgan, Piers, 66 Mortensen, Mette, 67 Moten, Fred, 39, 40n5, 41n16 Mouffe, Chantal, 167 Mrabet, Naime, 197 Mudde, Cas, 105 Müller, Martin, 246n5

295

Mulvey, Laura, 222, 223 Muñoz, José Esteban, 282 Muntadas, Antoni, 193 Musolff, Andreas, 111, 113, 114, 115n2 N Nambot, Nathalie, 17, 122–125, 127 Negri, Antonio, 270, 286n24 Neocleous, Mark, 160n13 Neroni, Hilary, 225 Nestor, Hatty, 68 Neuendorf, Henri, 66 Nichols, Bill, 48, 231 Nikolaidou, Afroditi, 215, 227n3, 233, 234, 238, 245n2, 245n3, 245n4 Nina-Maria Paschalidou, 232 Noé, Gaspar, 210 Nun, José, 86, 96 O Oliver, Kelly, 139n2, 140n10 O’Shea, Alan, 86 Otten, Tina, 235 Özçetin, Burak, 85 Özselçuk, Ceren, 91 P Panourgia, Neni, 285n7 Papadimitriou, Lydia, 214, 233, 234, 245n3 Papadimitropoulos, Argyris, 215 Papadopoulos, Dimitris, 29, 33, 36, 38, 39, 39n4, 40n5, 40n13, 59n14 Papataxiarchis, Evthymios, 40n15 Pappe, Ilan, 128 Partsalis, Lefteris, 221 Pecora, Vincent, 279

296 

NAME INDEX

Pedrazzini, Ana, 113, 114 Pérez, Jorge, 178n3 Peroulis, Kostas, 210 Petrovic, Tatjana, 110 Petsini, Penelope, 221 Pickering, Andrew, 233 Pinker, Steven, 102–104 Plantzos, Dimitris, 20n5 Politakis, Dimitris, 218 Poupou, Anna, 215, 227n3, 245n3, 245n4 Pratt, Mary Louise, 156 Psaras, Marios, 227n2, 269 Pugliese, Joseph, 51, 52, 59n13, 60n17, 60n18 Pujante, David, 104 R Rahmani, Zahia, 204n2 Rancière, Jacques, 5, 67, 68, 177 Rangan, Pooja, 159n4 Ranger, Terence, 103 Raptopoulos, Vangelis, 273 Ratnam, Niru, 65, 67 Rawes, Peg, 224, 225 Roitman, Janet, 4, 5, 8, 9, 20n5, 27, 28, 251, 252, 254–260 Rose, Steve, 214, 285n6 Rosello, Mireille, 121, 186 Rothberg, Michael, 156 Rushing, Robert, 225 S Said, Edward W., 17, 122, 128–130, 132, 136, 138 Salama Benarroch, Moisés, 163 Salvini, Matteo, 184 Sarikakis, Katharine, 245n2 Sassen, Saskia, 54 Sauvagnargues, Anne, 236 Schmitt, Carl, 285n14

Schuyler, James, 253, 254, 259 Schwarz, A.G., 285n7 Sedira, Zineb, 18, 184, 192, 193, 197, 204 Segato, Rita, 75, 76 Sharpe, Christina, 184, 188 Shaviro, Steven, 227n1 Shonkwiler, Alison, 220 Silverman, Kaja, 149, 160n10 Simondon, Georges, 236 Siotis, Dinos, 285n5 Sirman, Nükhet, 85 Skaf, May, 64 Slama, Serge, 133 Smara, Abdelhak, 200 Smith, Daniel W., 8 Smolin, Jonathan, 178n5 Snir, Itay, 89, 93, 96 Sobchack, Vivian, 227n1 Solera, Gianluca, 12 Sontag, Susan, 239 Souag, Lameen, 205n12 Souames, Farah, 201 Spatharakis, Kostas, 216 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 186 Star, Susan Leigh, 236 Stewart, Charles, 20n5 Steyerl, Hito, 223, 224 Stierl, Maurice, 140n7 Stoler, Ann Laura, 122, 233 Stratis Vogiatzis, 232 T Tan, Monica, 66 Taussig, Michael T., 75 Tawil-Souri, Helga, 140n11 Taylor, Richard, 242 Tazzioli, Martina, 10, 133, 159n3 Thornhill, Teresa, 40n6 Ticktin, Miriam, 65, 66 Tokdoğan, Nagehan, 85 Tondo, Lorenzo, 184

  NAME INDEX 

Tsangari, Athina Rachel, 214–216, 226 Tsianos, Vassilis S., 29, 33, 36, 38, 39, 39n4, 40n5, 40n13 Tsilimpounidi, Myrto, 20n5, 37 Tsipras, Alexis, 222, 284n4 Tüzün, Tolga, 89, 90, 92 Tygstrup, Frederik, 55 Tziovas, Dimitris, 20n5 Tzoumerkas, Syllas, 214–216 V Valdivia, Pablo, 14, 16, 20n5, 106, 107, 111–114 Valencia, Sayak, 75, 76 Valiaho, Pasi, 222, 225 Van Weyenberg, Astrid, 159n1 Varda, Agnès, 224 Vardoulakis, Dimitris, 277, 285n14 Varikos, Joanna, 227n2 Vergès, Françoise, 133 Verheggen, Theo, 103 Vertov, Dziga, 242, 243 Vigh, Henrik, 9, 20n5 Vogiatzis, Stratis, 232, 243 Vogl, Joseph, 44, 58n3, 58n5, 261, 262

297

W Weiner, John, 141n14 Weiwei, Ai, 15, 17, 65–67, 69, 122, 136–138, 140n13, 141n14, 141n15 Weizman, Eyal, 140n10, 140n11, 141n18 Weymann, Laura Chelsea, 235 White, Hayden, 279 Widdis, Emma, 243 Wienand, Kea, 20n5, 159n3 Williams, Raymond, 85–87, 95, 217 Wills, David, 245n2, 245n3 Winter, Bodo, 111 Wodak, Ruth, 109, 112 Woolley, Agnes, 146, 147, 159n5 Y Yabanci, Bilge, 85 Yacine, Kateb, 130, 187 Yılmaz, Zafer, 85 Z Zaiotti, Ruth, 111 Žižek, Slavoj, 159n3 Zois, Yorgos, 215, 278, 286n17

Subject Index1

A Activism, 64, 65, 121 Activist research, 38 Aesthetics, 111, 112, 177, 196, 218, 262, 263 Affect, 6, 44, 47, 57, 60n20, 69, 75, 103, 148, 156, 169, 172, 173, 213, 224, 227n1 as affective, 9, 28, 29, 33, 46, 56, 65, 126, 156, 210, 212, 215, 219, 225, 226, 252, 257–263, 281, 282 as disaffected, 134 as mass-affective, 94 Africa/African, 17, 133, 152, 163, 164, 166, 168, 173, 178n2, 178n3, 196 North-, 12, 131, 135, 166, 172, 190, 198, 204, 205n9

1

Agency, 2, 7, 9, 20, 49, 59n13, 90, 104, 155, 157, 158, 164, 167, 168, 173–177, 223, 232, 241, 244, 245, 256, 272, 284 political, 54, 158 Aid humanitarian, 32, 66 worker(s), 31, 49 Algeria/Algerian Algerian protests, 18, 185, 203, 205n10 Algeroïd (Abidat 2018), 194, 195 Alienation, 20, 86, 149, 171, 271–273, 283 Allegory, 210, 212, 213, 215, 217, 218, 225, 235 “Allers/Retours, citoyenneté et déplacements” (Muntadas 2013), 193

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Boletsi et al. (eds.), Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36415-1

299

300 

SUBJECT INDEX

Arab, 128, 136, 163, 191 as Arabic, 35, 125, 126, 178n5, 188, 201, 202 Archive, 4, 12, 18, 51, 183–205, 224, 225, 231–246, 270 as archival, 19, 186, 187, 199, 202, 224, 232, 234, 243–245 as archived, 237–239 as archiving, 51, 195, 201, 242, 243, 245 Art as artistic, 4–6, 12–15, 60n21, 67, 70, 160n6, 185, 195, 199, 268, 269 cinema, 5, 13, 215, 218 contemporary, 190 film, 214, 215, 217 -ist(s), 5, 8, 18, 35, 64, 66–72, 75, 76, 140n13, 184, 186, 190, 198, 202, 204, 223, 224, 242, 267–270, 284n1 performance, 63 protest, 200 work, 65, 68–70, 74, 185, 204, 267 A-signifying signs, 47, 48, 50, 51, 53, 57, 59n11, 60n16 Assemblage, 45, 48, 49, 55, 226, 227n1, 234, 235, 245, 245–246n5 Asylum, 33, 40n5, 51, 65, 74, 77n1, 164, 176 Austerity, 2, 7, 37, 40n6, 84, 108, 111, 115n1, 153, 178n3, 216, 222, 223, 231, 268 as austericide, 108

Biopolitics, 18, 209–226, 285n6 as biopolitical, 2, 19, 94, 217–226, 227n4, 270, 277, 286n24 Biopower, 224, 226 Black Atlantic, The, 186 The Blaze (band), 18, 184, 191, 193 Body/bodies, 5, 7, 10, 18, 19, 43, 44, 47, 50–53, 56, 64, 65, 67, 69, 70, 74–76, 85, 107, 108, 126, 148, 149, 160n8, 165, 166, 172, 173, 186, 191, 210, 212, 215–217, 222, 225, 226, 227n1, 227n4, 275, 286n24 Border(s) aquatic, 149 as bordering, 15, 17, 29, 135, 146, 216 as borderland(s), 135, 137, 164 as borderscape, 65 crossing, 49, 53 Europe’s/European/of Europe/of the European Union/ EU, 15, 29, 44, 64, 68, 133, 146, 150, 163–165, 175, 177 Mediterranean, 15, 43–45, 203 police/policing, 18, 44, 48, 133, 135 spectacles, 60n16, 64 surveillance, 50, 52 technologies, 50 Boredom, 20, 81–97, 134, 267–284 as bored, 83, 88, 271, 279–282 Brûle la mer/Ihrag al-bahr (Berchache and Nambot 2014), 17, 122–125, 127–129, 132, 138

B Banlieue, la, 123, 124, 126, 127, 134 Barca Nostra (Büchel 2019), 183, 190, 201 Biometric, 51

C Camera/camera’s drone, 136, 222 fake, 31, 32 handheld, 32

  SUBJECT INDEX 

security, 71, 73 surveillance, 54, 73, 74, 225 thermal, 50 trucks, 31, 242 video, 31, 50, 51, 54 Camp(s), 14, 31–36, 66, 67, 82, 97n2, 135, 138, 139n6, 141n17, 141n18, 188, 216 military, 32–35 refugee, 30, 66 Cannibalism, 17, 108, 168 as cannibal(s), 17, 107, 109, 110, 176 Capitalism, 58n4, 81, 168, 263 anti-, 223 as capitalist, 19, 20, 91, 93, 94, 155, 212, 219–223, 251, 262, 268, 270, 272, 281–283 contemporary, 19, 76, 160n13, 223, 251, 261 finance, 251, 252, 270 financial, 19 global, 39n2, 46 gore, 76 hyper-, 219 late, 31, 219, 220, 223, 259, 270, 272, 281–283 necro-, 165 neoliberal, 12, 94, 165, 220, 270, 273, 281, 284 Capitalist realism, 19, 20, 220–223, 262, 270, 272, 281–283 The Caravan Project (Vogiatzis and Malamou 2011-today), 19, 232–234, 240–244 Cenital (Bueso 2012), 105–110 Center for Political Beauty, 15, 63–65, 69 Ceuta, 133, 163 Chronic, 2, 3, 6, 9, 12, 44, 255, 270, 284 Chronotope, 186, 205n3, 281 as chronotopic, 186

301

Cinema, 4, 5, 12, 13, 18, 19, 190, 204n2, 209–227, 233, 242, 243, 269, 285n6 of attractions, 243 as cinematic, 17, 19, 45, 49, 56, 58n7, 164, 189, 214, 218, 219, 222, 224, 242, 243 Citizen, 3, 12, 19, 48, 50, 65, 67, 69, 71, 74, 77, 107, 111, 112, 135, 138, 152, 158, 165, 231, 232 as citizenship, 13, 29, 39n4, 71, 74, 131, 136, 159n1, 160n13, 221 Civilization, 106, 167 Colonial, 134, 136, 139n1, 141n17, 165, 196, 198, 233 anti-, 177, 203, 204n2 de-, 10, 122, 130 neo-, 10, 18, 166, 167, 175, 178n2 post-, 10, 121, 126, 128–133, 135, 139, 160n7, 177, 185–187, 199, 201 trans-, 126, 130 Colonization, 85, 135 Commemoration, 85, 188 Commons, 1, 3, 10, 11, 15, 16, 20n1, 34, 37, 38, 52, 67, 82, 88–93, 95–97, 102, 110, 113, 147, 152, 164, 166, 176, 217, 223, 232, 235, 241, 245, 259, 262, 280 mobile, 15, 29, 33, 34, 36, 38, 39n4, 40n5 Common sense, 3, 6, 15, 16, 34, 37, 81–97 Community/communities, 5, 12, 13, 16, 17, 30, 34–36, 38, 49, 53, 54, 72, 74, 77n1, 87, 88, 103, 107, 111, 112, 114, 125, 131, 150, 157, 158, 161n15, 164, 165, 168, 170, 171, 173, 175–177, 183, 217, 224–226, 239, 241, 243, 280

302 

SUBJECT INDEX

Compassion, 17, 164, 176, 211, 213, 215 Constructivist approach, 59n8, 101–105, 115 Consumerism, 219, 284 Contemporary art, 190 Convivencia, 163 Crisis as crises, 1, 3, 4, 8–14, 16, 65, 82, 113, 146, 156, 157, 185, 196, 204, 220, 233, 243, 256, 269 as crisis-scape, 4, 5, 7–9, 12–14, 16, 18, 19, 28, 184, 186, 203, 267–284 discourse, 3, 12–17, 19, 27, 29, 39, 64, 82, 121, 130, 131, 134, 139, 140n7, 146, 153, 164, 177, 231, 232, 234, 235, 264n1, 269, 271, 276, 279 economic, 81, 82, 84, 91, 104, 214, 264n1, 268 financial, 1, 9, 13, 16, 19, 20, 83, 91, 105–108, 111, 146, 251, 252, 255, 257, 269, 273, 279, 283 migrant, 1, 7, 13, 16, 66, 121, 127–131, 133–136, 139n1, 140n13, 141n15, 164 refugee, 5, 10, 14, 15, 17, 29, 35, 37, 40n7, 40n15, 43–45, 57, 64, 65, 68, 69, 76, 128, 129, 136, 139n1, 140n11, 145–147, 149, 151–153, 156, 157, 159n3, 188, 216, 221, 222, 269 teleology of, 28 Critique, 1–21, 27–29, 37, 39, 40n5, 41n16, 46, 53, 58, 60n17, 67, 68, 81–97, 109, 121, 131, 133, 135, 139, 139n1, 140n10, 140n13, 156, 164, 201,

204n2, 220, 221, 235, 237, 241, 244, 249–264, 267, 275, 284 post-, 7, 21n6 Croatia/Croatian, 13, 48, 52 Cultural narrative, 16, 101–115 D Darija, 124, 126, 130, 202 Death, 2, 15, 17, 44, 52, 53, 64, 68, 71, 127, 148, 152, 160, 160n8, 164–168, 173–177, 216, 239, 251, 253, 256, 273, 275, 276, 281 as died, 63, 69, 115n1, 152, 183, 184, 205n13, 274 as dying, 33, 64, 216 world, 164–167 Debt, 1, 7, 21n10, 37, 153–156, 170, 231, 251, 252, 258, 259, 269, 271 as indebted, 272, 284 Decolonial, 10, 122, 130 Decolonization, 12, 205n5 Democratic, 3, 39n2, 115, 202 anti-democratic, 3, 4, 12 Digital, 54, 65, 104, 195, 201, 232, 234, 240, 241 as digital archive, 187, 200, 202, 204n2 Discipline as disciplinary, 6, 222, 286n24 as disciplined, 222, 277 as disciplining, 19, 76, 216 Discontent, 115, 269 Discourse alarmist, 17, 130 crisis/of crisis, 15, 27, 29, 39, 121, 130, 131, 139, 140n7, 146, 153, 231, 234, 264n1, 269 dominant, 16, 235

  SUBJECT INDEX 

hegemonic, 14, 82, 85, 155, 164, 236 media, 12, 19, 65, 231, 232, 235 neoliberal, 155, 279 political, 83, 91, 114, 177 public, 12, 104, 113, 227n5 Displacement, 17, 77n1, 122, 123, 128–134, 136–139, 140n10, 141n15 Dispositif, 232, 238, 240, 243, 245n1, 245n5 Dispossession, 20, 94, 165, 171, 271, 274, 280, 282, 283, 286n22 Documentary film, 14, 17, 45, 122, 136, 223, 233, 244 platforms, 232 practice(s), 223, 224, 245 project(s), 19, 231–233, 235, 241 Documentation, 231, 232 as documentality, 223 Dogtooth (Lanthimos 2009), 213–218, 223, 226 Dream, 19, 96, 124–127, 138, 153–155, 172, 174, 190, 194, 249–263, 272, 284 Dystopia, 107, 108 as dystopian, 105, 107, 108 E “Eating Refugees” (Center for Political Beauty 2016), 64 Elite, 82, 85, 90, 91, 97n2, 109, 202 Emergency, 2, 10, 28, 39n2, 65, 106, 216, 227n5, 234, 270 state of, 2, 10, 28, 216, 227n5, 270 Empathy, 57, 60n21, 67, 146, 172, 176 Empowering, 158

303

Enslavement, 46–48, 50–53, 56, 59n10 Ethics, 17, 29, 174, 241 Ethnography, 232 as ethnographic, 41n15, 223, 224 EU as European Union, 19, 33, 34, 39n2, 49, 52, 59n12, 59n13, 66, 158, 163–167, 176, 177, 178n3, 222, 231 Eurocentrism as Eurocentric, 7, 10 Europe, 7, 10–13, 15, 17, 20n1, 20n2, 33, 44, 53, 64–66, 68, 71, 75, 109–111, 113, 121, 122, 128–131, 133, 136, 137, 140n12, 145–161, 163–178, 184, 185, 188, 189, 193, 201, 202, 216, 222 Fortress, 43, 110, 164 Northern, 11 Southern, 13, 111, 114 European border(s), 15, 18, 30, 44, 49, 64, 145, 163–165 citizen(s)/citizenship, 67, 71, 136, 152 Commission, 109–111 country/countries, 1, 7, 12, 48, 77, 110, 166 crisis/crises, 10, 60n15, 146 discourse, 10, 11 North, 235 South, 11, 13, 149, 232 Union, 17, 18, 30, 64, 109, 110, 114, 115n1, 133, 145, 146, 149, 150, 157, 158, 166, 178n2, 251, 260, 262 Exception as exceptionalism, 133 state of, 3, 141n17, 164

304 

SUBJECT INDEX

F Family, 114, 126, 138, 148, 168, 170, 171, 175, 184, 192, 194, 198, 209, 210, 213, 215, 217, 223, 225, 235, 242 Far-right, 4, 131, 184 Fear, 17, 57, 75, 109, 110, 112, 146, 150, 151, 212, 222, 281 Fenêtre sur l’Algérie (Merabet 2019), 198 Financial crisis, 1, 9, 13, 16, 19, 20, 83, 91, 105–108, 111, 146, 251, 252, 255, 257, 269, 273, 279, 283 as debt crisis, 252 Flow Mechanics (Loubeyre 2016), 15, 45, 48–57, 58n6, 58n7, 59n12 Futurity, 4, 9, 14, 18, 20, 183–204, 225, 260, 270 G Gaza, 122, 134–138, 140n11, 141n18 Gender, 6, 71, 74, 75, 88, 108, 112, 160n13, 171 Genealogy/genealogies, 2, 6, 128, 171, 189, 219, 222 of the cinematic medium, 243 colonial, 131, 134, 135, 138, 141n17 of the concept of crisis, 239 cultural, 217 of protest, 36 Global North, 65, 70 South, 12, 76, 149 Globalization, 54, 112, 140n11, 233 as globalized, 149 Good sense, 83, 89, 92–97 Government, 36, 66, 115n1, 140n11, 200, 222, 227n6, 231, 277 as governmentality, 225 Graffiti, 88, 134, 202, 225, 267, 268, 284n2, 284n3

Greek crisis, 44, 210, 213, 214, 220, 223, 226, 227n5, 235–237 as crisis-stricken Greece, 281 as Greek crisis-scape, 19, 267–284 Greek Weird Wave, 12, 18, 19, 209–226, 245n4, 285n6 H Harkis, les, 187 Harrag, 122 as harraga(s), 122, 178n5, 188–190, 195, 196, 201, 202 Hegemony, 15, 81–97, 167 as hegemonic, 14, 16, 37, 82–85, 89, 97n3, 106, 111, 114, 155, 159n1, 164, 174, 236, 269, 274, 277, 283, 284 as hegemonized, 83, 92 counter-, 83 Heterotopian, 17, 146 History/histories colonial, 128, 129, 131, 132, 135, 139n1 of displacement, 17, 122, 128–130, 132, 134, 136, 137, 139, 141n15 European, 111, 235 film/cinema, 137, 141n15, 242 Greek, 274, 276, 284n4 of Mediterranean crossings, 148 Hope, 29, 56, 57, 104, 126, 150–152, 155, 157–159, 164, 166, 168–170, 172, 174, 175, 177, 201, 272, 273, 275, 276, 281 Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (Lalami 2005), 17, 164, 166, 176, 177 Hospitality as hospitable, 176, 177 as hospitalities, 13, 17, 163–177, 222 as inhospitable, 157

  SUBJECT INDEX 

Human Flow (Weiwei 2017), 17, 122, 136–139, 140n13 Humanitarian, 1, 30, 32, 34, 63, 66, 69, 121, 134, 140n10, 140n11, 147, 149, 269 as humanitarianism, 37, 63, 65, 66, 140n10 I Ice cubes, 19, 249–255, 257–261, 263 Identification, 57, 68, 126, 130, 160n6 idiopathic, 149, 160n10 over-, 67 Identity crisis, 10, 270, 277 ethnic, 164 hybrid, 11, 135 loss of, 149 -marker, 157 politics (of), 165, 176 racial, 164 Idomeni, 14, 30, 31, 33–36, 40n6, 40n8, 40n12 Ikbal/Arrivées (Boudjelal 2017), 196 Immigration, 178n2 anti-, 2 papers, 170 policies, 2, 131, 178n3 Imperial, 17, 128–130, 134, 135 Indigène, 130–131 Instagram, 66, 222 Institut du Monde Arabe, 184, 197 Interactivity, 235–245 as interaction, 71, 104, 112, 168, 170, 225, 238, 240, 243 as interactive, 18, 19, 231–245 Intersection, 12, 13, 17, 46, 122, 141n17, 156, 160n13, 188, 221, 257, 261 Intersubjectivity, 155, 157, 158 as intersubjective, 150, 159

305

Irony, 31, 104, 169, 172, 251, 253, 254, 262, 274 as ironic, 155, 212, 219, 252, 281 Islam, 11 as Islamic, 92 -ist, 82 -ophobia, 10 Italy/Italian, 1, 13, 21n10, 48, 63, 68, 110, 141n17, 147, 150, 156, 177n1, 184, 196 Itinerary, 123, 127, 138 J Joke(s), 71, 73, 77, 185, 194, 200, 211, 212 Judgment, 2, 3, 8, 13, 21n8, 27, 28, 45, 52, 53, 55, 239, 255, 256, 258, 260 Justice, 7, 33, 37–39, 276 K Kinship, 170–172, 210, 215, 216 Krisis (Paschalidou and Katsaounis 2012), 2, 238, 239, 271 Kulturkampf, 81–86, 89, 90, 95, 96, 97n1 as culture war, 82, 86 L Labor, 38, 70, 95, 131, 156, 166, 169, 178n3, 251, 252, 255, 257–260, 263 La cité de l’immigration (museum), 184 Lampedusa, 17, 139n4, 145–159, 177–178n1 Lampedusa (Lustgarten 2015), 17, 146, 147, 149–158, 159n2

306 

SUBJECT INDEX

Language(s) alternative, 18, 20, 268, 276 body, 47, 172 computer, 48, 50 contrarian, 4–5 everyday, 14, 83, 87–89, 91 of finance, 19 Mediterranean, 13, 14, 185, 193, 201 new, 9, 14, 82, 86, 185, 201, 283 of protest, 9, 12, 18, 57, 201, 202, 283 of resistance, 9, 12–14, 18, 46, 268, 283 transformative, 5 Libya/Libyan, 178n1, 183, 184 Lieux de mémoire, 187 Liminal, 5, 54 Liquid/liquidity, 19, 249–264 The List (Cennetoglu 1993-today), 15, 68, 72 Literature, 4–6, 13, 16, 105, 106, 138, 146, 156, 164, 175, 177, 257, 269, 270 as literary, 4, 6, 13, 14, 17, 18, 21n7, 21n9, 103–106, 130, 146, 156, 157, 159n2, 164, 177, 269, 272, 281 M Macedonia/Macedonian, 30, 35 Machine, 19, 43–60, 150, 244, 250, 251, 258 analysis, 15, 44, 45, 55, 57 as machinic, 15, 44, 45, 47–57, 58n4, 60n14 theory, 15, 45, 56, 58n7 Maghreb, 133, 189 Margin(s), 17, 146, 154, 163–178 European/of the European Union/ of Europe, 17, 18, 145, 146, 158

as marginal, 277 as marginalization, 224 as marginalized, 135 Market, 19, 84, 107, 109, 114, 159n1, 178n3, 238, 250, 254, 256–258, 261, 262 Mayotte, 122, 133–135 Media, 4, 7, 10–13, 16, 18, 19, 45, 46, 64, 76, 105, 129, 146, 148, 191, 214, 231–235, 237, 238, 241, 243–245 mainstream, 31, 32, 65, 71, 234 mass, 15, 60n16, 65 as medial, 221 as mediality, 221, 240 new, 225 outlet(s), 31, 32, 203 social, 32, 34, 35, 65, 88, 141n15 technologies, 18, 19, 231 Mediterranean futurity, 9, 13, 14, 18, 183–204, 205n3 Sea, 11, 43, 48, 56, 60n16, 147, 148, 160n7, 183–185, 188, 191, 192 The, 11, 14, 133, 188, 195, 198 Melilla, 133, 163, 164 Melillenses (Benarroch 2004), 163 Memorial, 188, 190 as memorialize, 188 Memory/memories, 56, 57, 103, 187, 192, 197, 198, 204, 234 Metaphor(s), 7, 14, 16, 44, 101–115, 121, 135, 140n11, 211, 212, 224, 226, 241, 242, 246n6, 251, 257, 261, 262 as metaphora, 102 as metaphoric, 110, 112, 126 as metaphorical, 51, 107, 109–112, 114, 178n5, 235, 239, 276 regimes of metaphors, 107, 109 Metonymy, 104, 190, 235, 246n6 as metonymical, 225, 246n6

  SUBJECT INDEX 

MiddleSea (Sedira 2008), 192–194, 204 Middle voice, 20, 272, 278–284, 286n18, 286n19 Migrant, 1, 7, 16, 17, 43, 44, 51, 58n1, 60n16, 65, 66, 68, 71–75, 121–141, 145, 146, 148–152, 157, 159n3, 160n8, 163–176, 177–178n1, 188, 196, 227n4, 269, 280 protest, 13, 29, 176 undocumented, 122, 133, 135, 136, 138, 165 Migration, 10, 15, 17, 38, 44, 58n3, 58n6, 64–66, 122, 126, 127, 130, 131, 133, 136, 138, 156, 178n2, 189, 195, 196, 202, 216 anti-, 66, 146 autonomy of, 49, 59n14 boat, 18, 184, 185, 188, 201 clandestine, 178n4 crisis, 64, 185, 190 forced, 20n1 illegal/illegalized, 34 mass, 39n2, 64 policy/policies, 66, 145 politics, 149, 152 reverse, 184 studies, 4 Military-industrial-surveillance complex, 15, 44, 45, 49, 52, 53 Mimicry, 68, 75 Miss Violence (Avranas 2013), 210, 213–216, 218, 223, 226 Mobile commons, 15, 29, 33, 34, 36, 38, 39n4, 40n5 Mobile phone, 195 Mobility, 15, 29, 33, 36–38, 39n2, 43, 44, 126, 127, 155, 165, 169, 170, 175, 242, 243, 277 Modernity, 2, 92, 94, 108, 242

307

as modern, 2, 12, 75, 81, 94, 97n2, 108, 128, 134, 202, 239, 255, 256, 259, 261, 274, 275, 279 as modernist, 82, 84, 92, 211 as modernization, 82, 86, 217 as modernizing, 82, 97n2 Mohamed arfad valiztek (Kateb 1999 [1972]), 121, 130–132, 138 Morocco/Moroccan, 13, 17, 133, 164, 166–171, 175–177, 178n4, 190 Mucem (museum), 18, 184, 193, 199, 204n2 Museum, 18, 68, 184–188, 193, 197–200 Music, 184, 191 N Narrative(s) Christian, 275, 283 cinematic, 164 contact-, 156 crisis/of crisis, 16, 101–115, 147, 217, 269 cultural, 101–115 documentary, 232, 244, 245 of Europe, 110, 146, 202 hegemonic, 174, 269, 274, 277, 283 historical, 156 intersecting, 147, 156–158 linear, 238–240 literary, 104, 156, 164 mini-, 108, 110, 113 as narrativization, 113, 147, 237 as narrativize, 5 national, 275 new, 110 noncrisis, 5, 28, 39 normative, 146, 161n15 political, 93, 269 populist, 14, 109, 110 testimonial, 147, 149

308 

SUBJECT INDEX

Nation, 30, 86, 108, 161n14 -branding, 14, 16, 101–115 as national, 33, 82, 85, 90, 103, 114, 133, 160n13, 165, 166, 187, 198, 213, 215, 216, 219, 223, 226, 275 as nationalist, 11, 85, 109, 114, 131, 276, 277, 283 as nationalistic, 112 Necropolitics, 163–165, 167 as necropolitical, 18, 168, 178n5, 186 Neocolonial, 18, 166, 167, 175, 178n2 Neoliberal, 3–5, 10, 12, 16, 17, 19, 20, 39n2, 81–97, 106, 109, 146, 147, 150, 153–158, 165–167, 178n3, 220, 222, 225, 270, 272, 273, 275, 276, 279–281, 283, 284 as neoliberalism, 16, 17, 20, 84–86, 157, 159n1, 160n13, 275, 285n8 as neoliberalization, 82, 92 New Extremism, 210, 217, 227n1 New Keywords Collective, 3, 7, 10, 30, 33, 38, 39n2, 43, 44 Noise, 31, 224, 225 Nomad/nomadic, 240–242 Noncrisis, 5, 27–39 Normal new, 2, 271, 281, 283 normality, 2, 225, 281 as normalize, 194 normalized, 268, 276, 278, 282, 284 as normalizing, 194, 224 O Oiktos (Makridis 2018), 210–212, 215, 216, 218, 223, 226

P Palestine/Palestinian, 1, 13, 17, 33, 121–139, 165, 250 Paradise, 166, 168–170, 176 People, the, 49, 59n12, 85, 86, 94, 109, 114 Performance(s) art, 63–77 of citizenship, 71 of crisis, 15, 63–77 of gender, 71, 74 of happiness, 74 of protest, 57 of suffering, 74 Periphery/peripheries, 19, 107, 236, 242 Photography, 65, 71, 75, 188, 195, 198, 203 as photograph, 66, 71, 74, 137, 194–199, 204, 217, 221–223, 253, 280 Poetics, 18, 19, 104, 111, 139, 221, 223 of resistance, 18, 19 Political bio-, 2, 19, 85, 94, 217–226, 227n4, 270, 277, 286n24 necro-, 18, 168, 178n5, 187 Politics anatomo-, 217 austerity, 2, 14, 108 bio-, 209–226 of care, 33, 38 cultural, 86, 215 European/EU, 3, 158 of fear, 109, 112 of friendship, 170–173 of identity/identity, 165, 176 language, 18 of life, 216 migration, 149, 152 necro-, 163–165, 167

  SUBJECT INDEX 

neoliberal, 17, 146 of possibility, 272, 283–284 repressive, 2 transmigrant, 33 Western, 4 Populism, 10, 16, 84, 95, 101–115, 146 as populist, 14, 16, 82, 83, 86, 94, 105, 109–111, 114 Postcolonialism, 10, 121, 126, 128–133, 135, 139, 160n7, 177, 185–187, 199, 201 as postcolonial, 10, 121, 126, 128–133, 135, 139, 160n7, 177, 185–187, 199, 201 Postcritical, 6, 14 Poverty, 58n1, 59n12, 87, 135, 154, 166, 167, 169, 171, 269 Precarity, 15, 19, 37, 63–77, 108, 157, 216, 250, 252, 259–263, 268, 269, 271, 280, 282 as precarious, 71, 72, 94, 107, 150, 151, 154, 157, 158, 166, 185, 190, 250, 259–261, 270, 276, 282 The Prism GR 2011 (Paschalidou and Katsaounis 2011), 19, 232–241, 244, 245 Prosperity, 15, 63–77 Protest, 5, 9, 12–15, 18, 29, 30, 35, 36, 39n2, 45, 58, 139n3, 146, 176, 185–187, 198–204, 204n2, 205n10, 214, 231, 234, 254, 257, 258, 261, 263, 269, 272–276, 278, 281, 283, 285–286n16 language of, 9, 18, 201, 283 R Race, 160n13, 171 as racial, 6, 164, 176 as racism, 37, 74, 131, 155 as racist, 2, 112, 131, 154, 227n4

309

Realism biopolitical, 19, 218–226 capitalist, 19, 20, 220–223, 262, 270, 272, 281–283 Refugee(s), 1, 5, 9, 21n11, 31–34, 39n2, 40n5, 43–60, 63–77, 125–139, 147, 150, 151, 159n3, 160n6, 160n8, 164, 174, 216, 221, 227n4 art, 15, 63–77 camp(s), 30, 66 crisis, 5, 10, 14, 15, 17, 29, 35, 37, 40n7, 43–45, 57, 64, 65, 68, 69, 76, 128, 129, 136, 139n1, 140n11, 145, 146, 149, 152, 153, 156, 157, 159n3, 188, 216, 221, 222, 269 Refugees.TV, 14, 31, 32, 34, 35, 37 Religion, 11 as religious, 82, 84, 85, 174, 175, 274–276 as religiously, 169 Representation, 2, 4, 5, 14, 15, 19, 20, 33, 47, 54, 57, 60n21, 97n3, 106, 147, 157, 159n2, 191, 213, 220, 221, 223–226, 231–233, 242, 264n1, 276, 283–284 as representational, 9, 12, 13, 48, 55, 102, 103, 245 as representative, 69, 148, 149, 158, 217, 219, 224, 236 Resentment, 85, 86, 109, 110, 186, 187 Resilience, 153, 155–158, 160n13, 269, 283 as resilient, 32, 158 Resistance, 9, 12, 14, 15, 18–20, 32, 36, 45, 46, 53, 54, 56, 57, 106, 157, 158, 177, 199, 223, 225, 241, 268, 272, 277, 279, 282, 283, 286n24 Responsibility, 90, 151, 159n1, 171–173

310 

SUBJECT INDEX

Revolt, 13, 19, 277 Revolution(s), 1, 5, 11, 12, 14, 126, 128, 201, 204, 285n14 as revolutionary, 185, 201, 203, 204, 272–278, 282 Rhetoric, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 13, 29, 37, 39, 43, 60n15, 104, 112, 131, 149, 156, 159n3, 216, 255, 256, 269, 271, 274 Rhizome, 241 as rhizomatic, 244 Right(s) asylum, 176 birth, 131 human, 69, 134, 147, 165, 270 privacy, 74 social, 222 S Sans papiers, 122–128, 136, 203, 204 Securitization, 2, 12, 15 Sıkıntı yok, 15, 16, 83, 87–92, 94–96 Solidarity/solidarities, 36, 37, 94, 110, 114, 150, 164, 171, 177, 202–204, 277, 278, 280 Something Will Happen, You’ll See (Ikonomou, 2010), 249, 250, 264n1, 272 Spain/Spanish, 1, 13, 14, 16, 101–115, 133, 141n17, 155, 163, 166, 168, 170, 172, 173, 176, 177n1, 178n4, 196, 250, 260, 263 Spectator(s), 68, 69, 74, 76, 77, 222–224, 226, 245n1 Stasis, 15, 19, 20, 196, 267–284, 285n14, 285n15 Street art, 18, 130, 267–269, 284n2 Subjection, 46–50, 52, 59n10 Subjectivity/subjectivities alternative, 13, 18, 20, 278, 284

critical, 19, 244 deviant, 5 inter-, 155, 157, 158 nomadic, 241, 242 political, 46 precarious, 107 singular, 236 Subject(s) acquiescent, 272, 275 active, 7, 20, 271, 272, 278, 279, 282 collective, 106 colonized, 136 dispossessed, 281 invisible, 54 modern, 94 passive, 7, 20, 271, 272, 278, 279, 282 political, 90, 146, 176 postcolonial, 128–131 stateless, 126, 136 Subversion, 18, 225, 235 Suffering(s), 15, 49, 57, 64–70, 74–76, 87, 264n1 as suffered, 111 Surveillance, 48–54, 56, 57, 60n17, 73, 74, 163, 165, 178n1, 178n4, 221, 225 as surveilled, 77 as surveilling, 52, 54–56 technologies (see Technology) Syria/Syrian, 11, 13, 20n1, 33, 35, 36, 64, 66, 136, 140n12 T Technology/technologies border, 50 digital, 232 of embodiment, 225, 226 media, 18, 19, 231 optical, 222, 235

  SUBJECT INDEX 

of participation, 225, 226 of representation, 225, 226, 232 surveillance, 48, 50, 53, 54, 56, 57, 178n1 as technological, 47–49, 55, 102, 221, 233, 234, 245n1 video, 54, 56, 57 Television/TV, 14, 31, 32, 34, 35, 37, 47, 76, 85, 87, 88, 238, 274, 276 Temporality, 3, 39n2, 65, 129, 188, 256, 262, 263 Territory, 30, 112, 129, 132, 133, 141n18, 188, 190–194, 201, 205n8, 243, 262 “Territory” (Alric and Alric 2017), 191 Terrorism, 10, 65, 76 TINA doctrine, 3, 60n15, 155, 222, 262, 271 Touching tales, 17, 145–159 Transformation, 13, 14, 28, 81, 87, 95, 96, 136, 151, 152, 236, 256 as transformative, 5, 7–9, 243 Translation, 8, 87, 88, 90–92, 94, 96, 139n3, 218, 251, 258, 272, 285n5 as untranslatability, 8 Transnational, 18, 30, 44, 130, 146, 176, 202–204, 278, 281 Tropique de la violence (Appanah 2016), 17, 122, 132, 133, 135, 137, 138 Tunesia/Tunesian, 13, 122–124, 126–129, 138, 190 Turkey/Turkish, 1, 13, 15, 16, 65, 71, 81–97 Twitter, 88, 187, 189, 200–203 U Unemployment, 76, 87, 91, 108, 175, 178n3, 279–282, 284

311

United Nations (UN), 32–34, 36, 66, 164, 203 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 33, 35, 64, 66, 77n1 Urban, 85, 95, 123, 165, 186, 187, 201, 204n2, 218–220, 226, 236, 273 Utopia, 107, 283 as anti-utopian, 270 as utopian, 71, 271, 276, 281–284 as utopianism, 14, 18–20, 267–286 V Vanishing into Reality / Algérie, Clos Comme on Ferme Un Livre? (Boudjelal 2015), 195 Venice Biennale, 183, 201 Victim, 7, 49, 57, 65–68, 71, 75, 76, 85, 135, 146, 159n3, 271, 272, 277, 279 as victimhood, 49, 147 Video, 35, 72, 193, 196, 204, 222, 223 camera, 31, 50, 51, 54 games, 76 on demand (VOD), 238 philosophy, 60n20 surveillance, 48, 50, 54, 56, 57 technology/technologies, 50, 54–57 thermal, 50 as videomatic, 45, 58n7 YouTube, 188, 191, 245 Vimeo, 245 Violence, 11, 39n2, 58n1, 59n12, 122, 131, 135, 147, 154, 165, 170, 209, 210, 216, 217 as violated, 43 as violent, 36, 75, 76, 93, 128, 135, 136, 164, 213, 259, 263, 272 as violently, 259

312 

SUBJECT INDEX

Vulnerability, 17, 145–159, 172 as vulnerable, 157, 158, 169, 173, 272

Welcome to Paradise/Cannibales (Binebine 1999), 17, 164, 166, 167, 169–171, 173–177

W Wake, the, 18, 72, 130, 184, 188–200, 203, 204, 205n6, 212 War, 11, 33, 35, 36, 52, 66, 76, 82, 83, 86, 135, 136, 138, 141n17, 164, 187, 194, 196, 201, 203, 277, 285n14

X Xenophobia as xenophobic, 2, 4, 110, 112 Y YouTube, 188, 191, 245