Thomas Nail

The Figure of the Migrant

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

At a time when more people than ever are being constrained to move for political, economic, and environmental reasons, this book provides a new political theory of migration, one based on the social primacy of movement.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 312
• Erscheinungstermin: 23. September 2015
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 154mm x 22mm
• Gewicht: 486g
• ISBN-13: 9780804796583
• ISBN-10: 0804796580
• Artikelnr.: 42792607

Autorenporträt

Thomas Nail is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction
chapter abstract
The Introduction lays out the objectives of the book as a whole. Given the
contemporary importance of migration, this book develops a political theory
of the migrant. In particular, the aim is to overcome two problems: the
migrant has been predominantly understood from the perspective of stasis
and the state. If we want to develop a political theory of the migrant
itself and not of the migrant as a failed citizen, we need to reinterpret
the migrant first and foremost according to its own defining feature: its
movement. This allows us to conceptualize the emergence of the historical
conditions that give rise to the different types of social expulsion that
define the migrant and to diagnose the capacity of the migrant to create an
alternative to its social expulsion.
1The Figure of the Migrant
chapter abstract
This chapter defines "the figure of the migrant" as a political concept
that identifies the common points where mobile figures are socially
expelled or dispossessed as a result, or as the cause, of their mobility.
The movement of the migrant is thus not simply from A to B but the
constitutive condition for the qualitative transformation of society as a
whole. This chapter defines the migrant as a figure, which is not a fixed
identity or specific person but a mobile social position. One becomes a
figure when one occupies this position and may do so to different degrees,
at different times, and in different circumstances. The figure of the
migrant, for example, is like a social persona that bears many masks (the
nomad, barbarian, vagabond, proletariat) depending on the relative social
conditions of expulsion.
2Kinopolitics
chapter abstract
The history of the migrant is the history of social motion. This chapter
defines and lays out the logical structure of social motion or
"kinopolitics," the politics of movement. Instead of analyzing societies as
primarily static, spatial, or temporal types of entities, kinopolitics or
social kinetics understands them primarily as "regimes of motion."
Societies are always in motion: directing people and objects, reproducing
their social conditions (periodicity), and striving to expand their
territorial, political, juridical, and economic power through diverse forms
of expulsion. This chapter introduces three key concepts to understanding
social motion: flow, junction, and circulation. In this way, it is possible
to identify something like a political theory of movement. In particular,
this chapter argues that the migrant is defined by two intertwined social
motions: expansion and expulsion.
3Centripetal Force
chapter abstract
This chapter analyzes the first type of social expansion by expulsion:
centripetal force. The first historically dominant type of expansion by
expulsion can be described as a centripetal social force because its
dominant motion is inward-toward the creation of the first stable social
centers on the earth's center-less surface. Since centripetal social force
is primarily concerned with accumulation, territorial expulsion remains an
indirect phenomenon. Nomads were not first expelled because they were
foreigners or social inferiors. Rather, the type of expulsion proper to
territorial kinopower creates a centripetal remainder: leftovers-that which
is not territorially accumulated. The figure of the nomad is simply
expelled because there are not enough territorial flows left over for them,
and they are in the way.
4Centrifugal Force
chapter abstract
This chapter analyzes the second type of social expansion by expulsion:
centrifugal force. This force emerges historically alongside the ancient
empires of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Political or centrifugal
kinopower expands the curved movements of territorial control into a
completely enclosed circle, brings all its stock into a shared resonance
around a central axis, and radiates outward. It adds to the system of
curved, centripetal expansion a system of concentric, centrifugal expansion
and produces a new figure of the migrant: the barbarian. Territorial
kinopower expands by creating a stock and expels only certain plants,
animals, and people (nomads) as an indirect consequence: as an
unaccumulated, aterritorial remainder.
5Tensional Force
chapter abstract
This chapter analyzes the third type of social expansion by expulsion:
tensional force. This force emerges historically alongside the feudal
societies of medieval Europe. This type of kinopower is "juridical" in the
kinetic sense in which law binds the movement of social beings to one
another and to a certain social condition or territory. Tensional migratory
expulsion occurs when these juridical linkages are severed and release a
social flow: vagabondage. However, just as easily as this network of
juridical linkages can be dissolved, so the links can be reassembled into
new circuits. Internally, juridical kinopower expels peasants and debtors
from their legal right to the land and expands legal power by criminalizing
them as vagabonds. Externally, juridical kinopower expels foreign peoples
through war, colonialism, and kidnapping and expands its legal power by
colonial legislation: the encomienda.
6Elastic Force I
chapter abstract
This chapter analyzes the fourth type of social expansion by expulsion:
elastic force. This type of kinopower comes to dominance during the
sociohistorical period between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries and
can be kinopolitically defined by the emergence of a newly dominant force
of social motion: elasticity. This elastic force is a specifically
"economic" type of kinopower in the sense that economics strives for the
free arrangement and movement of things to and fro with a minimum of
territorial, political, or juridical restrictions and with a maximum of
equilibrium. The migrant proletariat is the spectrum of the proletariat
that is economically expelled as a mobile social surplus. This chapter and
the next analyze the specific social technologies of expulsion and
mobilization that give rise to a variety of such migrant proletarian
subjects and expand economic kinopower, including enclosures, capitalism,
and eighteenth-century workhouses.
7Elastic Force II
chapter abstract
This chapter continues to analyzes the fourth type of social expansion by
expulsion: elastic force. Not only is a migrant proletariat created through
an intensive expulsion-enclosures, capitalist valorization, and
workhouses-in order to increase competition and production, but it is also
produced through an extensive expulsion via penal transportation,
emigration, and denationalization. The chapter describes the forms of
external expansion by expulsion in their intensive forms (the Atlantic
slave trade) and their extensive forms (British colonialism in Ireland and
North America).
8Pedetic Force
chapter abstract
The migrant has many different figures. The nomad, the barbarian, the
vagabond, and the proletariat are only four major ones. Not only does each
figure of the migrant emerge under different historical and social
conditions of expansion and expulsion, but each figure also invents a form
of kinetic power of its own that poses an alternative to social expulsion.
Although each of the figures of the migrant deploys this force in its
unique way, each is also the social expression of a more general "pedetic"
social force. This chapter briefly outlines the concept of pedetic social
force that is deployed by the four figures of the migrant analyzed in the
following chapters of Part 3.
9The Nomad
chapter abstract
This chapter analyzes the first figure of pedetic social force: the nomad.
The nomad is not simply the result of a primary territorial, centripetal
expulsion. Early hunter-gathers were not simply left out from territorial
society; they also actively left it and invented an entirely different form
of social motion. Hunter-gathers moved to the mountains and cultivated the
newly discovered art of animal raising. In cultivating this art so
exclusively, they had to invent a form of social motion most conducive to
it. Nomadism oscillates continually by following the earth's flows wherever
they may go, without centripetal capture or accumulation. Nomadism also
deploys a transportation of social kinetic disturbances: waves. The nomads'
kinetic wave is a mass or common phenomenon that links them by force
without producing a division in their motion. Finally, nomadism creates a
social pressure against territorial barriers.
10The Barbarian
chapter abstract
This chapter analyzes the second figure of pedetic social force: the
barbarian. The barbarian, like the nomad, is not merely the result of a
kinetic expulsion. Barbarians also invent their own form of social motion
that functions in a pedetic way. Just as "barbarian" in the ancient world
was often etymologically or literally the word for the "slave by nature,"
it is not surprising that the ancient art of pedesis appears most
predominantly in the oscillations, waves, and social pressures of refugees
and slave revolts.
11The Vagabond
chapter abstract
This chapter analyzes the third figure of pedetic social force: the
vagabond. The vagabond is not only the criminalized migrant expelled by the
tensional force of law as the tramp, the debtor, the beggar, the pauper,
the vagrant, the heretic, the witch, the Jew, the minstrel, the foreigner,
the homeless. The vagabond, from the Latin vagus, meaning "to wander," from
the Latin proprius, meaning "one's own way," is also the migrant whose free
wandering has its own techniques of pedetic force found in the kinetic
counterpower of rebellion: the direct battle with the forces of expulsion.
12The Proletariat
chapter abstract
This chapter analyzes the fourth figure of pedetic social force: the
proletariat. The proletariat is not only a migratory surplus expelled by
the elastic force of the economy; the proletariat also breaks free from the
driving forces of oscillation (profit, equilibrium, competition, etc.). In
other words, the proletariat responds to elastic force with a pedetic force
of its own. This pedetic force is defined by the free oscillation of social
movements, the wave of protests, communes, and the pressure of the strike
in its various forms: the barricade, the labor strike, the hunger strike,
the boycott, and others.
13Centripetal Force and Land Grabbing
chapter abstract
The aim of the final part of this book is to deploy a hybrid theory of
kinopolitical analysis to the increasingly complex phenomenon of
contemporary migration. The history of the migrant this book has traced so
far is not simply a history of the past; it is also a history of the
present in which all of the historical conditions and figures of the
migrant return and mix. This chapter describes the reemergence of
centripetal social force seen in contemporary Mexico-US migration. While
unquestionably mixed with several other types of social motion, centripetal
force in its most basic form remains a crucial condition for the expulsion
of the Mexican people and the expansion of US and private power. Today, we
call this "land grabbing." This chapter describes two major periods of
centripetal accumulation in Mexico: the Porfiriato and neoliberalism.
14Centrifugal Force and Federal Enforcement
chapter abstract
This chapter analyzes the use of centrifugal social force in Mexico-US
migration. There are several ways centrifugal power operates through
federal power in Mexico and the United States to expand its reach and expel
migrants. The centrifugal force of the Mexican state expands its
centralized force by the direct expulsion of indigenous farmers from public
lands and the reappropriation of their labor by other means. It also uses
direct police and military violence to expel migrants. When peasants will
not migrate or sell their land "voluntarily" to these state-sponsored
mega-projects, a centrally directed police and military force is sent out
from the city to directly expel people from the territory. Finally, Mexico
and the United States treat migrants as naturally inferior and
depoliticized barbarians.
15Tensional Force and Illegal People
chapter abstract
This chapter analyzes the use of tensional social force in Mexico-US
migration. Contemporary tensional force is created by the rise of multiple
legal powers: international, supranational, humanitarian, and corporate law
that now poses entirely new limitations on the executive power of sovereign
governments. Today's tensional forces that bind social motions, although no
longer feudal, still take the form of a vast network of legal contracts
binding at every level of society, that is, between individuals, local law,
states, nations, and other non-state international organizations. This is
accomplished in several ways: the reform of the countryside in Mexico, the
North American Free Trade Agreement, Free Trade Zones and maquiladoras, the
criminalization of labor in the United States, and the detention and
expulsion of migrants in the United States.
16Elastic Force and Neoliberalism
chapter abstract
This chapter analyzes the use of elastic social force in Mexico-US
migration. Elastic force expands and expels not by creating and breaking
juridical tensions between social motions but by creating and
redistributing a surplus of motion elsewhere. As long as a society is
capable of producing and mobilizing its surplus and deficits, it will be
able to pursue equilibrium and hopefully expand. Thus, elasticity expands
and expels, not from the outside to the center (centripetally), nor from
the center to the outside (centrifugally), nor by rigid links between
centers (tension), but rather by the redistribution of a surplus wherever
it is needed. This accomplished in several ways: the redistribution of
surplus in Mexico, privatization, guest-worker programs, and undocumented
migrant workers.
17Pedetic Force and Migrant Power
chapter abstract
This chapter analyzes four types of contemporary migrant counterpower in
the case of Mexico-US migration. Just as contemporary migration is produced
by the forces of social expansion and expulsion, so it is also defined by
the pedetic counterforces of oscillation, waves, and pressure. Social
pedesis is the irregular movement of a collective body: a social
turbulence. It is the force of motion of the social figure who moves
outside the dominant forms of social motion: the migrant. This is expressed
in four contemporary figures of Mexico-US migration: the nomadic seasonal
worker, the barbarian invader, the vagabond rebel, and the proletarian
occupier.
Conclusion
chapter abstract
The Conclusion recapitulates the main problems and consequences of the
movement-oriented theory of the migrant presented throughout the book.
Additionally, it highlights three major areas where further work is
necessary. First, future work is necessary to analyze the kinopolitical
technologies presented in this book (and others) according to their full
historical and kinetic mixture or hybridization-which this book has
presented only in their relative isolation. Second, many other major and
interesting areas of contemporary migration remain to be analyzed with this
framework, such as the landless peasant movement in Brazil, the recent home
foreclosure process happening around the world, the recent land grabs and
expulsions in Cambodia, and the sans-papiers (without papers) struggle in
France. Third, future work is needed to examine additional figures of the
migrant, such as tourists, commuters, diplomats, and business travelers,
with respect to their degrees of expulsion and movement.