2.1Visibility – Invisibility

The social imagination and its processes of signification create those who are excluded, pointing toward global asymmetries and the repressed traces of colonialism, and carrying a postcolonial framing. Media attention and strategies of visualization certainly do not escape this ordering, but instead bring forth an astonishing movement between visibility and invisibility. Despite massive media coverage, those who arrive on Lampedusa are invisible, as they are usually immediately transferred to a reception center situated at the periphery of the island’s small village (Centro di primo soccorso e accoglienza, Cpsa, a so-called ‘hot spot’ for identification and registration). The migrants are then not permitted to leave the center, nor is the public permitted to visit the camp.

In such a way, the status of these clandestini, and the semantic vicinity of the stranger to this secret and potential threat, is repeated and enforced. Clandestini, the Italian term for illegalized mobile people, points towards ‘that which is kept secret or is done secretly’ because it is prohibited. Etymologically, the word’s root, clan, signifies ‘hidden’ (di nascosto), from kal/cal as that which is hidden from the light of the day (dies); that which is ‘hidden from light or sheds the light of the day.’ The “secret,” as Jacques Derrida notes (Derrida 2002, 198), is the “separated,” which marks as well the double presence of the clandestini: present and absent, invisible and visible.

Images mobilize, and visibility is part of political strategy. Therefore, the clandestini, the invisibles, must become visible if they are to be marked as enemy, as a threat that legitimizes the practices of the border regime, its governance, and its eminent economic interests. The media’s gaze, the production of visibility, the staging of the invasion of ‘black masses,’ and the conjured ‘exodus of biblical dimensions’ serve the production of illegality and become part of the tragic border regime. In the same vein, visibility is a vital feature of humanitarian and critical discourse. Suffering has to be made visible in order to move the spectator and to raise indignation and eventually action. In order to understand the common features connecting humanitarian to critical discourse, we must take a short historical detour: “History tells us that it is by no means a matter of course for the spectacle of misery to move men to pity,” Hannah Arendt remarks (1963, 70). The poor person’s misery is due to the fact that while “he is not disapproved, censured, or reproached; he is only not seen […]. To be wholly overlooked, and to know it, [is] intolerable” (Arendt 1963, 69, emphasis mine). Revolutionary pathos and

the personal legitimacy of those who represented the people and were convinced that all legitimate power must derive from them, could reside only in […] the capacity to suffer with the “immense class of the poor,” accompanied by the will to raise compassion to the rank of the supreme political passion and of the highest political virtue. (Arendt 1963, 75, emphasis mine)

The visibility of the poor in the course of the French Revolution was related to a public compassion with the malheureux (Arendt 1963, 94). Visibility, thus, is bound on one hand to compassion, and to the (political) structures of “recognition,” the becoming visible in the public sphere, on the other (Honneth 2003).

Luc Boltanski’s Distant Suffering (1999) takes up Hannah Arendt’s analysis in examining at modes and practices of compassion that are not directed towards the immediate environment or the concrete and immediate sight of suffering, but rather to distant concerns and mediated suffering. Boltanski’s account concerns ethics and moral philosophy as well as the question of how indignation and political action in the face of human suffering are developed. In order to address these questions, he develops a triple topic: the “topic of denunciation,” the “topic of sentiment” and the “aesthetic topic” (Boltanski 1999). One may add to this the topic of knowledge, as social science may contribute to political mobilization (even if individual suffering is not at the center of its attention). These topics display tensions between the universal and the particular, between mass and singular suffering:

In fact, while it is easier to integrate general forms of presentation into the logic of political programs […], nonetheless it is necessary to go into particular cases, that is go into details, in order to arouse pity, involve the spectator and call on him to act without delay. (Boltanski 1999, 33)

Such a dispositif, however, has been modified, not least with the day-to-day use of digital media. Pity, commotion, and solidarity were once tied to religious prescription; moral-philosophic universalism; or ‘grands récits’ that distanced suffering through insight, critical judgement, and knowledge. Today, however, suffering is imprinted into the subjectivity of the spectator. Universality has been replaced by irony, and subjectivity and reason have been replaced by authenticity. Solid principles have been converted into consumerism, and rational judgment into subjective opinion. Solidarity has transformed into a feature of the lifestyle industry and the “ironic spectator” and “post-humanitarian imagination” identify with celebrities as Chouliaraki (2014, 24, 26) pointed out.

The post-humanitarian imagination and the adjoined “economy of attention” (Citton 2014) are characterized by several tensions: the tension between suffering and its branding; the tension between actor and victim(ization); the tension between consumer and the political (Chouliaraki 2014, 82–83); and the tension between pathos, distance, and prudence. The demand to render the invisible visible belongs to these tensions, and thus, the quest for visibility of the marginalized may reiterate stereotypes and even promote further marginalization (Schaffer 2008). In such a vein, Susan Sontag has argued that the (postcolonial) gaze on the suffering of others in art and contemporary photography adds a double message to the “unforgettable” and “ubiquitous images” of “large-eyed victims”: on one hand, they expose appalling misery; on the other hand, they ontologize suffering and withdraw historical circumstances from change (Sontag 2003, 56).

The visibility of suffering not only generates victims, it also allows one to imagine the Other as threat and enemy; thus, strategies of visibilization might solidify what they seek to combat. Additionally, we should not forget that imagination is connected to massive economic interest; and that images are created to legitimize and justify the current border regime, the migration industry, and current forms of governance that depict mobile people as victim or foe.

Current policies of expanding European borders to its former colonies via bilateral or multilateral accords – such as the recent Italian accords with Libya, and European efforts to cooperate with African dictators – are intended to close the central Mediterranean route, to keep mobile people ‘in their place,’ and at the same time to render them invisible. Images of death are no longer produced close to European shores; death is no longer visible for the European public: it occurs out of sight in the desert.

3.1Enemy

“The overcrowded boat is a common visual representation of threatening immigration to the West. In the European context, it is usually a flimsy-looking craft filled with black Africans,” Gilligan und Marley remark (2010). Such images confirm a racialized, biopolitical security-dispositif, they call for the repulsion of ‘invaders,’ the ‘catastrophic flood’ and the ‘parasites’ attacking the imagined body of the nation and its prosperity. Such images legitimize the permanent “state of exception” (Agamben 2003).

Indeed, the Italian Civil Defense Department (Protezione Civile), generally charged with coping with natural disasters, has been present on Lampedusa for decades, becoming an integral part of the tragic border regime and its economic interests. In an effort to allow this body to circumvent common rules for public tender and to promote clientelist networks, in July 2008 the government of Silvio Berlusconi declared a state of “emergency migrants.”

In February 2011 a “state of humanitarian emergency in the territory of North Africa” (sic) was again asserted “in order to allow efficient measures hindering the exceptional influx of aliens on national territory” (Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri 2011). Part of this “emergency” was a fiscal moratorium for local tourist operators who complained about the decline of their sector, which they attributed to the recent migratory fluctuations and extensive media coverage that damaged the island’s image as an ‘uncontaminated’ paradise. Indeed, the dominant media-gaze fostered the social imaginaire of assault. The production of such images was part of a political strategy by former Minister of the Interior, Roberto Maroni (Lega Nord), designed to press EU for financial aid. The arriving Tunisian harraga (migrants) were not immediately transported to mainland Sicily, but were forced to camp in the streets of the small Lampedusan village. For weeks, the island resembled an open-air television studio hosting journalists, photographers, artists, and anthropologists from all over the world who coproduced the media’s ‘humanitarian crisis.’ The moratorium imposed by Berlusconi (who visited the island during his own politically produced ‘state of emergency’ to promise inhabitants milk and honey) has been extended by successive governments until 2017. This now-famous ‘state of emergency’ has indeed become the island’s ‘new normal,’ fostering the economic interests of local and national actors.19

The notion of catastrophe – from the Greek kata ‘down’ (cata-) + strephein turn’; katastrephein,’to overturn, turn down’ denotes the ‘reversal of what is expected’ (especially a fatal turning point in a drama) – has been extended to ‘sudden disaster’ and is part of the (tragic) border regime, the political imagination, and the permanent state of exception.20 The permanent state of emergency and the normalization of the exception are promoted by highly symbolic visualizations of undocumented mobility. The imaginaire of mobile people as a sudden, abrupt catastrophe penetrating civil society generates a public-siege mentality against ‘invasion,’ which in turn has to be calmed by efficient, well-calculated measures of border management. Dominant mass-media images, policies of border management, and the state of exception are interrelated: images reiterate the exception, as the exception needs its images in order to command public and political legitimacy. At the same time, the imaginaire of catastrophy fosters (local) economic interests and the migration industry. However, not only the security industry refers to catastrophe. The scenario of catastrophe and tragedy is employed by humanitarian entrepreneurship and the need to promote and sell humanitarian aid and services on a competing market.21 Private SAR missions – as they have been carried out until recently – such as Moas, Jugend Rettet, Save the Children, SOS Mediterranée, Proactiva Open Arms, and Sea Eye – must promote their activities with drastic images of capsizing boats, drowning people, and dead black bodies.

The border regime also fosters an expanding branch of competing IGOs and NGOs (such as International Catholic Migration Committee, the International Organization for Migration, Save the Children, and Doctors Without Borders), public-private enterprises, knowledge-generating research institutes, and various other infrastructures that manage mobilities and make up a dense transnational fabric of actors, practices, policies, and powerful images of human mobility. Images of flow, invasion, crisis, and emergency are an integral part of such entrepreneurship as the media gaze produces and disseminates dominant views of undocumented mobility. This dense fabric of organizations, the security and military industry, and the European border agency (Frontex) make up the highly dynamic postcolonial border regime that connects policing, surveillance, the state of exception, and the imagination of threat that must be kept under control. Sarcastically, the militarization of borders is justified with the humanitarian fight against ‘human trafficking.’

The oft-repeated image of invasion inverts the postcolonial situation: it relies on forgetting, withholding, and the repression of European colonialism, and installing instead historical revisionism. These images invoke the invasion of black masses, which take what has been taken from them; they show the phantasms of colonialism and the ghastly return of the colonized on the shores of the colonizer: the threat of a revenant.

Georg Simmel has already noted that the wanderer provokes “latent or open antagonism (Gegnerschaft),” and becomes an “irreconcilable enemy” and a “parasite of the sedentary elements of society” (Simmel 1992, 760). The provocation, the affront, is the other who menaces pollution, an intruded heterogeneity that contaminates and infects the sane body of the people, the interior of the nation, and its welfare. The intruder, the parasite, is to be detected at the borders; he is to be neutralized, and eliminated symbolically or physically by ‘letting him die’ (Foucault 2001, 291), thereby employing modern biopolitics: which is not to govern a territory but the ‘own’ population. As Francesca Falk notes: “[T]erritorial borders are superimposed on the boundaries of the body; migration appears at the same time as an assault upon the integrity of one’s own body and that of Europe,” and a “discursive and iconic connection between infection and immigration” is established (Falk 2010, 90, 89).

Dominant media representations evoke catastrophe and contamination. They also repeat juridical classifications and distinguish between different categories of mobile people. At one pole exists the miserable refugee who escapes from war and annihilation; at the other pole there is the economic migrant who flees economic circumstances on the grounds of autonomous decision and will. It seems that the demonstration of individual decision and autonomy cannot be pardoned, it is exactly that demonstration that distinguishes the figure of the victim – who is not responsible for his decisions – from the enemy, the figure of threatening autonomy, decision, and will. The migrant is not only a parasite of the nation’s body and welfare but an autonomous agent. Paradoxically, autonomy and will both characterize the modern subject. A helpless, needy and dependent person can be pardoned for that which in reverse marks the Other as a threat: namely autonomy, choice, and decision.

3.2Victim

“The victim is […] the hero of our times,” Daniele Gigliolo boldly states (2016, 9). The refugee as victim is depicted as the innocent object of appalling circumstances, a victim of warfare and violence who seeks only a safer life, and who is ready to take risks, even deadly risks, in order to do so. In this, the terrifying, threatening stranger is transformed into a ward and a supplicant, a passive, needy object of temporary care who in turn must be grateful for the offering of shelter and asylum. Using the “topic of emotion, sentiment and aesthetic” (Boltanski 1993, 10), the social imagination recognizes the victim in the figure of the miserable, and turns the needy into an icon (Falk 2010, 86).

Usually, the dominant image of suffering and the wide-open eyes of victims capture the post-humanitarian spectator, as Susan Sontag confirms in her remarks on the dominant “shots” and the “full frontal views” of suffering people in distant countries described in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003, 56). The spectator can hardly evade the direct gaze of suffering that calls for pity, and for donations. In fact, all NGOs employ these images to that end.

The post-humanitarian imagination is apolitical and ahistorical. Replacing one image of disaster with another, images are distributed around the globe with unprecedented speed, suggesting a fictitious copresence. In its need to attract funding, emotion, and authenticity, post-humanitarian discourse does not name responsibilities; it does not ask for causes or consequences; it does not have a referent other than the conveying of authenticity: in short, it is self-referential. Violence, ferocity, war, destruction, mobility, blind and merciless nature, pitiless fatality, and catastrophe are indiscriminately and uncritically comingled in an effort to attract attention and an immediate subjective response.

Another salient attraction of images of victims is that their closeness to physical pain creates a semblance of authenticity resulting from the unreflecting crudeness of the representation. […] The representation of pain in images of victims does not tell a personal story, it rather generates attention by means of its event character. It suggests evidences that are not meant to inform, but to create the impression that similar events have taken place since times immemorial. By means of their irrational perspective and the persistent repetition of their motifs, they achieve a narcotic effect. From this perspective, they could be compared to spiritual imagery and its language of ritual. Mostly, representations of suffering – as a kind of visual humanism – are deployed as a means to propagate proper ethical values. In scenarios generated by PR agencies, they become mere clichés of an aesthetics of pity geared to sell issues. The overstimulation of this emotional approach to ethics numbs the viewer until he becomes used to shocks. (Sontag 2003, 56)

By exposing human plight, such a discourse resembles mythical-religious narratives, erasing and overwriting time, history, and post-colonial entanglements.

Within the accelerated economy of attention, the commodification of pietà, misericordia, solidarity, and the selling of humanitarian issues via personal story-telling intends to render deplorable fate even more catchy for the consumer’s subjectivity. Images of humanitarian rescue and protection against blind fate and sudden catastrophe are the only possible offer on the highly competitive market.

Identification with the victim in its visibility allows for subjectivity and ultimately, as Renata Salecl states, for the deviation of anxiety:

There seems to be an attempt in today’s society to find a cure for anxiety by constantly exposing the disturbing objects that might incite it (even in contemporary arts, for example, we try to figure out what is anxiety-provoking in death by exposing cadavers). (Salecl 2004, 15)

This post-humanitarian discourse can be labeled as tragic because the actor must bear responsibility for his acts despite being entangled in fatal circumstances. From their own comfortable and secure shores, spectators bear witness to shipwreck, death, and destruction; in so doing, they become part of the commenting media chorus and the border regime that in one tragic breath assembles threats, victims, and heroes.

3.3Hero

The symbolism of critical discourse demanding indignation and protest is by no means autonomous; instead, it is well integrated into the current ‘economy of attention.’ It has to produce spectacular and tragic images in order to incite emotion, subjectivity, identification, and solidarity. Compassion is no longer tied to universal religious and moral claims (pietá, misericordia) or to the promise of salvation; and solidarity is no longer connected to critical analysis and its grand récit of revolution, but to individual feeling and the mediatized authenticity of the Other’s suffering. Thus the “ironic spectator” and the call for solidarity in the “era of post-humanism” (Chouliaraki 2014, 24, 26) are to be kindled by dramatic, ‘tragic’ scenarios such as shipwreck, disaster, and death, and not by the discreet and ‘invisible’ day-to-day existence of sans-papiers in search of a normal life.

The image of the refugee mobilizes. Compassion, in the sense that Hannah Arendt describes it, is elevated “to the rank of the supreme political passion” and “the highest political virtue” (Arendt 1963, 75) without being embedded in a universalistic framework. Next to the figure of the refugee as victim is produced the figure of the refugee as hero, a hero who is acknowledged and legitimized by his dangerous, heroic voyage. In this symbolic order, the hand of the drowning victim desperately gasping for help becomes the sheet anchor of the (red) fist and battle. Compassion is converted to solidarity with refugees and, even more so, with the ‘just fight of refugees.’

Alongside the topics of emotion and aesthetic, the social imagination of the refugee as hero reworks the topic of denunciation and indignation (Boltanski 1993, 10). This symbolic transformation elevates those who are excluded from ‘legal’ mobility (but who mobilize nonetheless) into modern heroes of an autonomous fight for opportunity and for the realization of autonomous will. In short, the excluded become heroes of modern subjectivity.

Such representations do not refer to the humanitarian discourse and its alleged neutrality. However, paradoxically, this discourse is apolitical even as it seeks to open a political space. It is apolitical because the figure of the hero is situated between the innocent victim of capitalism and neoliberal governance on one hand, and, on the other, the figure of threat, the enemy who menaces the existing order. Whereas at one time the attention of activists was directed to the movements of liberation in the ‘Third World,’ and to the hope that revolutionary élan of the periphery might pressure the capitalist center, the hero of liberation has been replaced by the fighting refugee. He is to take up the fight against power and capitalism, and yet he is assigned to an asymmetric position that allows the activist to celebrate the (missed) triumph of the revolution, ensuring for himself the position of protector or guardian angel of a just and humanitarian cause.

The “Declaration of Solidarity” of the committee “Lampedusa is Everywhere” states: “The inhumane events of Lampedusa during October of 2013 are only one example of how the ‘fortress Europe’ claims countless human lives every day. We are shocked, angry and mournful that the defence (sic) of western wealth is indiscriminately violating human rights.”22 Even if critical discourse establishes analytical connections to European policies and the border regime, it falls in with the pathos of humanitarian discourses of catastrophe and victimhood, declining a scale of possible distress by the (alleged) authenticity of suffering in one’s own shock, anger, and mourning. By depicting victims whose autonomous actions end in tragic fatality, and even have to end in tragic fatality for its legitimizing power to be established, the tension of the tragic-humanitarian discourse is repeated. Taking up the topic of denunciation, such a discourse laments the defense of affluence on one hand. On the other hand, the compassionately suffering activists participate in western prosperity, even if they seek to exorcize such participation through the displayed authenticity of emotion.

Additionally, if power works through “dispersed, heteromorphic and local procedures” which are “adopted, enforced and transformed by strategies, resistance, inertia” and therefore do not lead to “massive domination” or a binary structure of domination and subordination (Foucault 1994, 425, my translation), the fighting hero is positioned within a binary structure. For some strands of activism, the fighting hero/non-citizen is to act on behalf of those whose revolutionary practices did not succeed. Therefore, such representations must equip mobile people with revolutionary courage. In such a vein, Antonello Mangano describes the revolt of illegalized day-laborers in the Calabrian town of Rosarno in 2010 as follows: “[P]art of the Senegalese community cordoned off the villa of a capomafia […] no one ever dared to do such a thing. This is why Africans will save us” (Mangano 2010, 135). Against the superior might of circumstances, the foreigner/victim/sacrificed is transformed into a redeemer, a Salvatore of the enslaved and oppressed: he is the one who acts for others and speaks on behalf of those without voices of their own. The hero redeems from voicelessness and acquits from responsibility; the image of the hero who ceaselessly fights injustice, power, and the state not only allows the spectator to celebrate victory, but allows even the hero to celebrate himself as an incessant and victorious fighter for the just cause. However, the foreigner as imagined hero, as figure of salvation, and as icon of struggle is advised to arrange that which political circumstances deny. The cult of heroes blocks claims to a life according to wishes and dreams. Mobile people cannot be inscribed into an imagined, imaginary collective subject.

The stranger, as Georg Simmel has remarked, is one who is “not tied down in his action by habit, piety, and precedent,” but is “bound by no commitments which could prejudice his perception, understanding, and evaluation of the given,” allowing thus for ‘objectivity’ and freedom (Simmel 1992, 766–767, my translation). As Bonnie Honig demonstrates, the figure of the stranger as hero and/or liberator reflects that of the “foreign founder” who inaugurates a political community, a figure well known in political thought. Rousseau’s contract theory, for example, assures “a foreign founder’s foreignness […] the distance and impartiality needed to animate and guarantee a general Will that can neither animate nor guarantee itself” (Honig 2001, 21). The figure of the stranger, the foreigner as founder and lawmaker, or as immigrant, reveals the problematic nature of democracy and its aforementioned paradox. Additionally, as a homogeneous people or nation is nothing but a fiction, the foreigner always already constitutes a (political) community.

Mobility challenges democracy; it incessantly points towards the paradox of democracy and to its inclusive-exclusive structure. In fact, current national-populist “excitable speech” (Butler 1997) and its emphasis on borders and national sovereignty – the sovereignty of an imagined homogeneous, identitarian demos to decide who belongs and who is excluded from the community – exhibits the paradox. The call for open borders or humanitarian impetuses also cannot escape this tension. Mobility challenges efforts to contain the excluded. The signifying processes of the social imagination that produce the racialized figures of mobile people as a threat, as victims, or as heroes reiterate and elaborate these tensions as well. Mobile people are none of these.