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I.
The notion of "clandestine
publics", with which the following reflections
will be concerned, involves such an obvious contradiction
that there hardly seems to be any necessity for actually
describing this contradiction: Is not the public precisely
characterized by its distinctiveness from the clandestine,
the secret, from what is concealed? It indeed seems
that the public is, in the first place, determined through
a general visibility or audibility, which constitutes
the precondition for the possibility that it, the public,
can be witnessed, contested, or negotiated. Only thus
can it become the object of an exchange, or establish
the possibility of an open argument ideally accessible
to "all", whether, in the concrete case, it
is about a public trial at court, a parliamentary debate,
an article in the newspaper, or a discussion event.
The constitutive
demarcation of the public from the secret that becomes
evident in such a determination is moreover of historical
importance: The repulsion of a "public representation
of power" of a feudalistic or absolutistic type,
exercised through the exhibition of the insignia of
power,
through modern
publicity in the sense of a characteristic sphere of
bourgeois forms of societal organisation is linked with
the rejection of the secret as a "clearly acknowledged
and necessary dimension of political agency",
personified by the secretaries and privy concillors
of the princes and kings. The publicum
would thus not only be opposed to the privatum
- like in the self-interpretation of bourgeois society
-, but first and above all to the secretum
administered by the secretarii;
the public would be separated from the secret by a boundary
that establishes a relation of exteriority, indeed of
mutual exclusion between the two of them, which leaves
to the secret at the most certain temporary margins.
Consequently, historical narratives convey the idea
of a succession, suggesting an "age of secrecy"
having been replaced by a - bourgeois - "age of
publicity".
Such a construction
remains nevertheless unsatisfying, not only in view
of the very present practices of secret services run
by the states (along with the concomitant conspiracy
theories, which show a mixture, quite characteristic
for the modern era, of shudder and fascination in face
of the secret) or the existence of places like, for
instance, the U.S.-run camp in Guantanamo Bay that are
systematically withdrawn from public witnessing. It
remains unsatisfying, above all, because it fails to
take account of the intrinsic
bond that links together the "public" and
the "secret".
Such an intrinsic
bond can be grasped, as I have argued in another article,
in the way Kant has taken recourse to a principle
of publicity (i.e. the capability
of publicity and the need
of publicity of maxims of action relating to the right
of others) in order to found a system of public
law which is supposed to guarantee the harmony of
politics and morality (or of positive law and justice):
In fact, Kant's argument, trying to link back the regulation
of "public" affairs (i.e. affairs concerning
the polity as such) to a general "form of publicity",
reveals to be fragile precisely at the point where an
injustice committed by the actual sovereign (for instance,
in the form of a tyranny injuring, as Kant says, "the
rights of the people") is confronted with a "rebellion"
that is just as actual. For Kant, the latter is in the
wrong because, as opposed to the sovereign, its maxim
would "necessarily have to be kept secret"
in order to avoid the thwarting of its own intentions
(in Kants reflection: the overthrow). Thus, far from
guaranteeing the justice of public law, a fundamental
asymmetry of power is revealed in the very heart of
the "principle of publicity", structurally
contaminating, so to speak, this principle with a "secret"
that shifts the crucial question from the capability
of publicity of legal claims towards the capability
of representation of public law.
A second level on
which we encounter the inner entanglement of the public
and the secret can be demonstrated by having recourse
to the concept of "public spheres of production"
that has been coined by Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge
in their book Public
sphere and experience, published in 1972: In difference
to the classical concept of a reasoning public - ideally
orientated towards the general interest -, Negt/Kluge
consider public spheres of production as a "direct
expression of the sphere of production", as a way
of taking advantage of existing public sphere structures
through capitalist private and production interests,
which is nevertheless characterized by a certain incorporation
of the "interests of the workers in the production
process to the extent that they are absorbed by the
context of capital". What results from this
entanglement of production interests and various life
interests, is the specific "production of ideology"
of these public spheres of production, which primarily
aims at constructing a context of legitimation:
"Instead of the
mechanism of exclusion characteristic of the classical
public sphere, what characterizes the public sphere of
production, which is linked with the classical one, is
the oscillation between exclusion and intensified
incorporation: non-legitimable
actual circumstances fall into produced non-publicity;
power relations in the production process that cannot be
legitimated as such are recharged with legitimated
interests of the general collectivity and thus appear
within a context of legitimation. The place of the
distinction between public and private is taken over by
the contradiction between the pressure of production
interests and the need for legitimation."
In our context, the
crucial point is of course Negt/Kluge's notion of a
"produced non-publicity" which marks precisely
the point where a context of legitimation between certain
actual conditions, corresponding to production interests,
and the "legitimated interests of the general collectivity"
can no longer be produced. Moreover, the whole argument
of Public sphere
and experience makes it clear that this produced
non-publicity is not simply something that is eclipsed
from or forms a lacuna within the public discourse,
but, above all, a - partly structural, partly directly
active - blocking of the specific societal articulation that could be produced
within a context of "non-legitimable actual circumstances":
the production of non-publicity appears as an immediate
effect of social marginalisation, which isolates and
fragments the subjects that are submitted to it and,
hence, permanently disorganizes the articulation of
their nevertheless shared experiences.
Thus, the readings
of Kant, on the one hand, and Negt/Kluge, on the other,
pose a common - or, in any case, analogous - problem:
namely the question of how an articulation of legal
claims and social experiences is conceivable and possible
even under the conditions of a certain collapse of the
capability of representation of public law or of the
structural-operative blocking of articulation within
an existing societal context of production and legitimation.
II.
Exactly at this point,
I would like to directly come back to our initial question
regarding "clandestine publics", this time,
however, in a concise and very concrete sense: namely
in view of those to whose existence the word "clandestine"
has been increasingly linked in recent years and who
entered the scene of the political struggles of our
time, beginning with the first occupations of churches
in France in the mid-nineties, under the name of "sans-papiers".
Indeed, the situation
in which sans-papiers find themselves in present Europe
(and elsewhere) precisely reflects the two elements
that I have touched upon above: that of a certain collapse
of the capability of social representation through public
law, which, in terms of its real
existence, coincides with the historically grown
and basically contingent legal systems of nation
states as well as, in the framework of "European
integration", with the mutual adjustment and renewed
forming up of these legal systems at a supranational level; and that of a "produced non-publicity",
to be explained not solely by the existing legal discrimination,
but also by the specific incorporation of sans-papiers
in the context of economic production. In our days,
the social figure of the sans-papiers specifically appears
where these two elements touch or superimpose each other
in the form of the two regimes that are probably crucial
of our time: the juridical-political regime of the nation
state and the economic regime of neo-liberalism. As
we will see, the effect brought about by this superimposition
is just as much characterized by a radical exclusion
(as far as the regime of the nation state is concerned)
as it implies a radical "inclusion" or a radical
incorporation (as far as neo-liberal forms of production
are concerned).
In order to understand
the figure of the sans-papiers, we should not forget
two things: On the one hand, even if it may be, in its
present form, relatively new, it is not, however, without
history. Its concrete genesis reaches back to the immediate
run-up to the "recruitment stop" enacted in
many European countries in the middle of the 1970ies,
hence to the end of worker's immigration pursued by
the state. A first "sans-papiers movement",
accompanied by first hunger strikes, can be observed
for the French context already in the years 1972/73,
in reaction to a prohibition, passed by the ministries
for interior affairs and labour, of the issuing of residence
permits for those immigrants who did well have an employment
but not yet a residence card.
Already in the early
eighties, after the recruitment stop in 1974 and a tightening
up of laws concerning the possibilities of entry and
the practice of deportations, in 1980 through the "loi
Bonnet" (named after the conservative minister
for interior affairs Christian Bonnet), the residence
of 130.000 sans-papiers was being legalized in the course
of a "regularization campaign" initiated by
the left-wing government that had meanwhile come into
power. At the same time, the regularization campaigns
in Italy, Spain, and Portugal in the mid-eighties and
early nineties, still several years before the emergence
of the current sans-papiers movement, indicate a certain
shift regarding the dynamics of migration, given that
all of those countries had figured among the classical
countries of origin in the times before the "recruitment
stop". Europe as a "zone of welfare"
has become larger (and, at the same time, slowly begins
to form up to a "fortress"), the demarcation
line between the "welcoming" countries and
the countries of origin runs henceforth between (Western)
Europe and the "Third World" as well as (since
1989, and in a more dynamic manner) between Western
Europe and Eastern/South-Eastern Europe.
Secondly, we have
to point to the fact that, in perfect correspondence
with the outlined development, many of the sans-papiers
who began, in the mid-nineties in France, to increasingly
get politically organized, to occupy churches, and to
engage in hunger strikes, did not at all find themselves
in a situation according to which they would never have
had a regular residence status; rather, due to the Pasqua
laws of 1993 and the "loi Debré" of 1997,
they had actually lost their status and thus been "illegalized"
in a literal sense. We can conclude from this fact that
the notion of "sans-papiers" should not be
exclusively understood as a strict description of a
certain legal status; it rather refers to a situation
of legal uncertainty,
a situation that is characterized by the fact that rights
are not guaranteed.
For precisely this reason, it is justified to speak
of a legal and political precarisation - a precarisation which expands into all social rights
that are linked with a guaranteed
legal residence status.
Nevertheless, we
are dealing with a legal exclusion of a structural character,
which does not seem to be corrigible within the framework
of the nation state regime and its constitutive linking
of guaranteed rights and nationality. The problem becomes
clear if we consider, for instance, the aporia inevitably
linked with the logic of "extraordinary regularizations":
as the "Déclaration de l'Ambassade Universelle"
(the founding document of the Universal Embassy in Brussels,
which is inhabited by sans-papiers)
puts it, these regularizations represent, in the best
case, a "temporary cleansing of the prominent clandestineness"
- in reality, in view of the defined criteria and the
large number of refused applications or applications
that have not even been sent in, not even this.
But in what does
this "prominent clandestineness", which constitutes
an inignorable social fact of our time, consist (we
can assume that the number of migrants living as sans-papiers
especially in the states of Western Europe runs into
millions; that it equals, thus, the populations of a
number of smaller EU-member states)? What kind of societal
production forms the basis of the social fact of "prominent
clandestineness"?
First of all, these
questions direct our attention to the motivational conditions
as well as to the various predicaments that underlie
current migration processes. Of course, these conditions
cannot be reduced to a single denominator, but rather
refer to a complex bundle of political, social, ecological
circumstances and, especially, to a series of straight
economic backgrounds: in this context, Saskia Sassen
has for instance pointed to the manifold disastrous
effects that austerity policies imposed by the IMF have
on local forms of economic production in the countries
of origin, as well as to the ousting of local producers
through multinationals that "extend their markets"
or new forms of exploitation in the places of production
delocalised into "countries with low wages".
In this light, migration
appears to an important extent as an effect of a global
production of poverty that is linked with the mechanisms
of international labour division and financial politics,
permanently exposing the new sub-proletarian strata
of this world to the "immense collection of commodities"
of the rich countries and strata and, at the same time,
supplying the production of this collection of commodities
with their labour force. In most cases, however, it
is nevertheless less the members of the poorest strata
that leave their regions of origin (a large part of
the migration movements remains confined to a regional
level), but those who, due to their education, experiences
or language competences, expect to have a good chance
for a successful emigration.
In Europe herself,
on the other hand, whole branches of economy are hardly
able to survive anymore without the labour of sans-papiers
(as well as of other migrant groups with a subordinate
legal status): A striking example of this is the sector
of agricultural production, which has fallen into an
enormous price pressure due to the dominance of trade
and the concentration of supermarket chains and which,
in view of seasonal fluctuations in production, is moreover
characterized by a particular need for "flexible"
manpower.
As for the field of industrial production, the French
sociologist Emmanuel Terray has coined the apt term
of "delocalisations on the spot" in order
to point to the profitable logic of employing sans-papiers
in different branches of production like the textile
industry, offering entrepreneurs all of the advantages
of "authentic" delocalisations (lower wages,
longer working periods, absence of social contributions,
low degree of unionized worker's organisation, etc.)
without entailing the usual disadvantages (transport
costs, costs for executives sent abroad, communication
impediments, etc.).
Finally, we have to add to this a large number of services
(catering trade, communication work, cleaning work,
care work, sex work) that are carried out by sans-papiers
under most precarious conditions.
In all these sectors,
we find the legal precarisation of sans-papiers immediately
linked with a more general process of economic and social
precarisation. Classical forms of worker's action in
view of inacceptable conditions - or simply of claiming
a minimum of rights and securities - are, even in cases
of withheld payments of wages, usually only possible
at the risk of being deported (whereas the entrepreneurs,
due to intermediary subcontracting structures, most
frequently remain unprosecuted): to the very extent
that the figure of the sans-papiers is subject to a
fundamental legal and political exclusion, it is at
the same time incorporable into the socio-economic context
of production as a, so to speak, ideal embodiment of
"flexible" manpower.
III.
This brings us to
our final question: Under these circumstances, how can
the possibility of an articulation be conceived that
would be capable of challenging and transforming the
existing structures of the "public" - both
at the level of public law and at the level of prevailing
discourses of legitimation? What is at stake in this
question touches quite obviously on more than on the
possibilities of "dissidence" or on the formulation
of political claims (albeit that these may of course
represent an important part of such an articulation).
We would rather have to take into account a counter-speech,
a "counter-public", which is not exclusively,
and perhaps not even prioritarily, characterized by
an opposition to hegemonic structures and public discourses,
but at least just as much by the production of a social
context of experience and articulation in zones where
the blocking of such a context - the marginalization
and fragmentation of the horizons of experience to which
it opens up - appears as an immediate effect of power.
I will confine myself
here to dealing with the question of a counter-public
or, rather, counter-publicity thus conceived by referring
to an idea which seems to guide an important part of
the practice of the Universal Embassy in Brussels that
has already been mentioned:
the idea of a testimony or witnessing, in which the
construction of a political articulation of sans-papiers
is undertaken by way of attentively taking account of
subjective experiences (concerning working conditions,
relation forms, experiences with the state apparatus
or in deportation camps, etc.). In this practice, the
collective political recourse to the subjective can
in itself be seen as bearing a certain potential of
resistance, as it profoundly questions the predominant
splitting off of the merely "private" and
"individual" from abstract ideas of the "political".
But how, on closer
inspection, can the claim of a testimony be understood?
- A theoretical approach to the status of the testimony
can be found in the last part of Giorgio Agamben's book
Remnants of Auschwitz.
Agamben tries here, explicitly in the sense of a certain
resumption of the question of a (lived) subjectivity,
to consider the testimony as a model of an articulation
that is always precarious. He finds an important starting
point in Foucault's concept of the archive which, inserted
in between the abstract linguistic construction system
of all the sentences that are in principle possible
(langue) and
the totality of what is concretely and actually said
(parole),
represents a "system of relations between the said
and the unsaid" and thus subjects the formation
and transformation of statements (énoncés)
or discursive events to certain rules. Agamben's point
consists now in repeating Foucault's operation and,
at the same time, shifting it by laying open a field
which extends in between the language (langue)
"as the potentiality of speech" and its contingent
taking place, or the linguistic event (that is, the
level of the archive). In exactly this field the testimony
is situated, namely, "in opposition to the archive,
which designates the system of relations between the
unsaid and the said," as a "system of relations
[…] between the sayable and the unsayable in every language
- that is, between a potentiality of speech and its
existence, between a possibility and an impossibility
of speech."
Agamben's explanations
- just as the context in which he places them (the testimonies
of survivors of Auschwitz) - suggest that the mentioned
"impossibility of speech," referring, after
all, to a prevented Being-able-to-actually-take-place
of a fundamental possibility of language, has its grounds
in processes of a "desubjectification, of the destruction
and destitution of the subject", exposing the subject to
a world determined by necessities and impossibilities.
Therefore, the subject does not any longer appear in
Agamben, like in the classical theories of the subject,
as the place of self-consciousness or self-positing,
but "as that which remains between a subjectification
and a desubjectification, a speech and a mutism."
For exactly this reason, however, it can - even though
this place remains always precarious - become the place
of a testimony, bear testimony even of the specific
desubjectification which it is subject to.
Hence, a practice
of witnessing, as it is undertaken at the Universal
Embassy and elsewhere, is situated at the precarious
and yet kept dynamic boundary between the sayable and
the unsayable, the public and the non-public, between
communicatability and the fragmentation, isolation or
blocking of speech - and, finally, between an articulated
"experience in the production of experience"
(Negt/Kluge) and an objectifying, desubjectifying societal
production of "clandestinity". Counter-publicity
is constituted in this practice, let me repeat this
crucial point, not simply because it counters the dominant
"viewpoints" with a different kind of "viewpoints".
It is constituted, above all, because such a practice
counters the mechanisms of exclusion, through which
classical forms of publicity are constructed, with an
activity that undermines the exclusion by letting occur,
at the very boundary which separates the public from
the "secret" - the non-representable and non-legitimable
-, an articulation which challenges the prevailing framework
of representation and legitimation. An articulation,
at the same time, which translates the social fact of
the situation of sans-papiers in present Europe into
a communicable social evidence and thus links the processes
of political organisation with a specific knowledge
and discourse production, taking account of the concrete
social experience of sans-papiers.
Thus, the notion
of "clandestine publics" may well appear as
a theoretical paradox: The crucial point about it is
that it refers to a practice that takes place precisely
within this paradox. As for a theory of publicity, we
should at least draw the consequence from this to consider
publicity not solely by taking into account its formal
characteristics and its (conflictual) variety of appearances,
but this kind of practice, that is, by taking into account
the constitutive and practical relation to a non-public,
starting from which it can be renewed.
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