"An alternative to the European constitutional process" Which is to say, insisting on a distinction between constituent and constitution, if you liketh a Spinozian argot. More here at the pajol site and here at noborder.org. I thought it might be timely to point to Franco Barchiesi's essay, "Citizenship as Movement" [available on pdf at TheCommoner site], which says in part: "A question that can be raised in response to this approach is: do processes of international and global migrations at present demand an expanding of the existing citizenship rights on the part of existing European institutions that are supposed to grant those rights, or are migration processes social dynamics and movements that radically question and subvert the understanding of 'citizenship' that institutions like the European Union are advancing? Does migrancy demand inclusion within an established juridical definition of citizenship or does it express subjectivities and needs that are fundamentally at odds with thevery foundation of that juridical definition? These questions in my view become urgent and relevant in a context marked by the emergence of a global security state characterised by repression of any form of dissent that is made akin to 'terror' and bypervasive militarisation of security. These shifts dramatically question the meaning of citizenship and at the same time they emphasise and deepen the crisis of a link between citizenship and state sovereignty that has constituted a central component in the historical trajectory of the European nation-state." [own emphasis] Which reminds me: This from the aut-op-sy interview with Michael Hardt: "Q: If the destiny of the multitude lies in global citizenship, then what do you see as the relationship between the project of the multitude and the emergence of a global humanitarian militarism? MH: I'm not sure I understand this question. Why should citizenship imply militarism? Citizenship, in any case, is a troubled concept and it's not immediately evident what it means. (I've admired, by the way, what Etienne Balibar has made of it.) In Empire we used the notion of global citizenship primarily in a negative way, that is, to indicate the destruction of boundaries and thus the freedom of movement for everyone. Citizenship can also have a positive face to include a whole series of positive rights. But that isn't how we were using it there in Empire." He might want to take another look -- at the extent to which this has been transformed into a positive 'project of the multitude' (or simply as the more comfortable way-station of a slightly-xenophobic (much like a slightly-pregnant) bunch of 'Empire' fans. And the extent to which the search for security has yet to fully distinguish itself from yearnings for a security-state. Remind me again, how was the protectionist state assembled in the US, Australia, Europe? Wasn't there some war, thousands dead, or somefin'? :( Time to read Holloway and Bonefeld again. Re prior discussions on precarity, reading the euromayday list discussions, there's this response to the paper from the Frassanito Network from Alex Foti: "I must say the document is frankly biased and mysteriously hostile to net/flex/temp workers as being central subjects of the labor process today and potentially of a new, radical, european politics. ... we have to embody a subject in order to be effective." And, reply, from Dimitris Papadopoulos: "Foti's response to the ideas sent earlier about connecting the 2nd Day of Action and the EuroMayDay sounds like a desperate attempt to subsume all various social and political actors under a single generic political subject (to come). Foti argues from the standpoint of (European) law, while migrational movements argue from the standpoint of the struggles and reveal the permeability and instability and corrupt, racist character of Europe." Biased? Mysterious? I wonder why Foti thinks that a deep distrust of the very idea and a politics founded on the Subject (and particularly one which rides an indistinction between the legal subject and the subject of politics) among those who've worked in the areas of migration and on racism is mysterious. Isn't it obvious why this recourse to a Subject is highly problematic, precisely because of the border policing which is required to make the reality concur with the idea of such? It may seem like an 'academic' debate in one sense, but the stakes are very real at the border, the literal, external border; but also the 'internal' and internalised one. Sometimes, I think this is incommunicability (would tension, conflict be better words?) is a misunderstanding between particular struggles, but then I remind myself that the euromayday pitch, like much of the Tutte Biance pitch, has been a process of translation (of exodus into inclusion, etc), of forging a continuity between 'constituent' and 'constitution' and using the figure of the migrant as a pretext for such. Negri argues for this constituent=to-constitution explicitly and has done so for quite some time (Marx Beyond Marx, eg), despite the fleeting Machiavellian recourse to the idiom of Foucault, Guattari, et al, which many assumed carried along with it a critique of the subject. As it turns out, Negri's critique stops short at a critique of the Fordist subject -- and running euphorically into the arms of Empire ... Of course, the relationship between a fetishism of the party-form and a critique of the Subject remains to be written, but Franco Berardi has, as always, been quite concise: "The origin of this philosophical and political movement can be identified in the works of Mario Tronti, Romano Alquati, Raniero Panzieri, Toni Negri, and its central focus can be seen in the emancipation from the Hegelian concept of subject. In the place of the historical subject inherited from the Hegelian legacy, we should speak of the process of subjectivation. Subjectivation takes the conceptual place of subject. This conceptual move is very close to the contemporary modification of the philosophical landscape that was promoted by French post-structuralism. Subjectivation in the place of subject. That means that we should not focus on the identity, but on the process of becoming. This also means that the concept of social class is not to be seen as an ontological concept, but rather as a vectorial concept." Maybe it's worth pointing out that the emphasis on the vectoral is from Sergio Bologna. PS: on a distantly related, if tangential note, I was -- for reasons which I can't for the life of me recall :) -- reminded of Ghassan Hage's book. I can't find the book to quote, so I'll cutnpaste what I wrote in a review of it for Overland in 2003: "As Hage notes in the Preface, there is nothing more hideously ironic than a world in which reality is so inverted that the denial of racism begin to sound like the only acceptable version of anti-racism; where, for instance, the [Australian] Prime Minister feels inclined to declare himself more offended at the accusation that he is racist than at the racism of the concentration camps over which he presides." By-the-by, I like Ghassan a lot -- the book was implicitly Keynsian (I called the review 'The Hopes of Political Economy') -- but at least his attachments to an implicit Keynsian never overtakes his revulsion toward xenophobia. But, I'll wait and see what's he has in the pipeline, which (interestingly) he's called 'Globalisation and the Political Economy of Hope'.

Below, scroll down some, is an excerpt of discussions around euromayday and the upcoming April 1st mobilisations for Freedom of Movement -- and precarity. Obviously, I've an interest in how the debates around precariousness unfold. On the one hand, euromayday has been heavily inflected by attempts to come up with a common orientation, and 'precarity' has for some time been working its way toward assuming the status of this common orientation. For its most enthusiastic proponents, the coupling of euromayday and precarity has been a way to lobby around the European constitution for the codification of rights. Alex Fotis (Chainworkers) and Greenpepper have been quite explicit about this lobbyist aspect and wanting to position ‘precarity’ as a "one multiple and federated fight". (Notice the 'one' that precedes 'multiple'?) For reasons which are not really clear to me, Greenpepper have continued to prioritise the publication of discussions on precarity which (whatever else is happening) don't confront the statist assumptions of either a recourse to 'rights' (as strategy) or (more disturbingly) the assumption that 'precariousness' should be seen as the search for security, the latter which apparently reigned during the Golden Age of Fordism. (I say prioritise, because they seem determined to not let critiques of such understandings trouble what they profess to be "Provocations". Yes, they want a discussion, responses, involvement, but only if it conforms with the underlying aim of finding a common, overarching programme; a way to re-figure the idea of the 'unity of the working class' so as to represent it within the terrain of the state, basically.) On the other hand, the noborder networks are critical of the euromayday propositions because having worked on the issue of migration (as something other than a convenient preamble to elevating a 'left wing alternative' to the European consititution), they are perfectly aware that orienting a movement around the assumption of the state as saviour is not only utopian (in the sense that it ignores and idealises what has actually been happening with the European-wide harmonisation of migration controls) but dangerous (in the sense that it willfully forgets the critique of the state as a racialised, biopolitical entity and tries to rejuventate what is, basically, social democratic -- if not liberal-democratic -- political approaches). So, on the other hand, there is a second call for a ">European Day of Action around freedom of movement. This is an excerpt from the callout: "When we talk about the European constitutional process we think first of all of its material dimension, that is of the way the integration process has taken place concretely in the last years. A European citizenship is in the making, and we must focus our analysis on the way the borders of this citizenship are constructed and managed, both in their external and in their internal dimension. Detention center for migrants have played and continue to play a key role in this process. Although they have taken different shapes in different countries, they are actually European institutions, within a unified framework which promoted even an externalization process of camps beyond the « external » borders of the EU - from the Balkan to Libya and Marocco." Thankfully, the paper from the Frassanito-Network isn’t evading a discussion of the traps of the motif of 'precarity', even though they want to continue using it. But nevetheless, importantly acknowledging that there is a tension between a 'precariousness from below' (of which migration has been a part of) and 'precarisation from above'. The responses from some others (also appended) are interesting to read too. But what is particularly interesting in all of this is that these debates parallel (exactly) the debates over 'globalisation' -- those who wanted to position 'globalisation' as a bad thing (and hence the need for regulation, etc) confronted by those who said, 'Hey, globalisation is, among other things, migration; the globalisation of labour. The forms you talk about (the WTO, the various summits, etc) are responses to this, attempts to manage what was always preceded by movements.' Then, as now, the debate wasn’t so much about those who were ‘pro-globalisation’ versus those who were against; but about social democrats versus autonomists, libertarian communists, anarchists, those who didn’t accept the distinction of 'benevolent state' / 'bad capital'. But what this easy return to statism as assumption tells me is that many of those who shifted to the various motifs of 'counter-globalisation', 'globalisation from below', etc really only did so because it became more fashionable, not because they understood what was at stake. So while it has become no longer quite so fashionable to talk about 'anti-globalisation', the events of Genoa, the end of the cycle of anti-summit protests, Sept 11 and the 'war against terrorism' have reinscribed the assumptions of social and liberal democracy. Coupled with Negri’s more persistent attachment to 'absolute democracy', 'basic income', 'global citizenship', those democrats now imagine themselves to be at the cutting edge of radicalism. It might be that they are indeed socdems and liberals, but I think that in many ways this is as a result of panic, a subterranean desire to return to the apparent security of the general measure. Anyway, I'm not really sure the pluralist-synthetic compulsions of this (which is part of the below): "to bring the different subjects into an intensified exchange, on a social as well on a political level; - to mediate contradictions and even concurrences within the respective realities; - and to pick out comprehensive questions as common themes" really addresses the issue of homegenisation in any meaningful way. It just gives a tighter rendition of political forms as commensurate with, well, the market, exchange, money as the general equivalent. And here I was thinking that 'precarity' was being sold as an anti-capitalist strategy... :) -- begin excerpt -- Precarious, Precarization, Precariat? Impacts, traps and challenges of a complex term and its relationship to migration I. Precarious literally means unsure, uncertain, difficult, delicate . As political term it refers to living and working conditions without any guarantees: for example the precarious residence permission of migrants and refugees, or the precarious everyday life as a single mother. Better known was the term Since the early 80s the term has been used more and more in relation to labor. Precarious work refers to all possible shapes of unsure, not guaranteed, flexible exploitation: from illegalized, seasonal and temporary employment to homework, flex- and temp-work to subcontractors, freelancers or so called self employed persons. II. Precarization at work means an increasing change of previously guaranteed permanent employment conditions into mainly worse paid, uncertain jobs. On a historical and global scale precarious work represents not an exception. In fact was the idea of a generalization of so called guaranteed working conditions a myth of a short period, the one of the so called welfare state. In the global South, in eastern Europe as well as for the main part of women and migrants in the north all together the big majority of global population precarious working conditions were and are the norm. Precarization describes moreover the crisis of established institutions, which have represented for that short period the framework of (false) certainties. It is an analytical term for a process, which hints to a new quality of societal labor. Labor and social life, production and reproduction cannot be separated anymore, and this leads to a more comprehensive definition of precarization: the uncertainty of all circumstances in the material and immaterial conditions of life of living labor under contemporary capitalism. For example: wage level and working conditions are connected with a distribution of tasks, which is determined by gender and ethnic roles; the residence status determines the access to the labor market or to medical care. The whole ensemble of social relationships seems to be on the move. III. Precariat an allusion to proletariat meanwhile is used as an offensive self-description in order to emphasize the subjective and utopian moments of precarization. Through the mass refusal of gender roles, of factory work and of the command of labor over life, precarization has really a double face: it is possible to speak indeed of a kind of flexibilisation from below. Precarization does not represent a simple invention of the command centers of capital: it is also a reaction to the insurgency and new mobility behaviors of living labor, and in so far it can be understood as the attempt to recapture manifold struggles and refusals in order to establish new conditions of exploitation of labor and valorization of capital. Precarization thus symbolizes a contested field: a field in which the attempt to start a new cycle of exploitation also meets desires and subjective behaviors which express the refusal of the old, so called fordist regime of labor and the search for another, better, we can even say flexible life. However, we think that precariat as a new term of struggle runs in an old trap if it aims at a quick unification and creation of a dominant social actor. Precariat gets even into a farce, if the radical left tries to legitimize itself as main force in its representation because of the increasing involvement of leftist activists in precarious labor and life conditions. But the main point is that taking into account the hierarchies which shape the composition of the contemporary living labor (from illegalized migrant janitors to temporary computerfreaks), the strong diversity of social movement and respective demands and desires, nobody should simplify precarization into a new identity. We are confronted here with the problem of imagining a process of political subjectivation in which different subject positions can cooperate in the production of a new common ground of struggle without sacrificing the peculiarity of demands which arise from the very composition of living labor. In these conditions, we think that precarization as complex and contested process - can offer a frame, - to bring the different subjects into an intensified exchange, on a social as well on a political level; - to mediate contradictions and even concurrences within the respective realities; - and to pick out comprehensive questions as common themes. We are thinking of process which bases on the autonomy of the various struggles, which fosters the communication between the struggles, which invents new forms of cooperation and which opens new fields. IV. Particularly because migrants experience all mentioned forms of depreciation and precarization of nowadays work, and particularly because mobility is their answer through and against the borders and identities, they show in their subjective conditions all the main characteristics which shape modern labor as a whole: in their subject position a common ground of the existence of social labor today finds a peculiar expression. To talk about migrants labor means to talk about a general tendency of labor to mobility, to diversity, to deep changes, which is already affecting although with different degrees of intensity all workers. Because of the possible extension of these conditions we speak of a political centrality of migrants work. The position of migrants represents the social anticipation of a political option to struggle against the general development of labor as it will be extended to the whole society and the whole life of all people. At the same time, we are aware that migrant labor as well as precarious labor doesnt represent an homogeneous subject: the process of subjectivation we were talking about is a process which must go through migrant labor itself, and which can be fostered by an increasing communication with other struggles and with the demands of other sections of contemporary living labor. attached responses: Some comments on the text about precarity and migration. I think that the texts should refer (at least briefly) also to the issue of social security and the tendency to conceive it in terms analogous to civil security. In my view, this leads to a social securization which - together with the precarization of work condition - completes the framework to understand precarity as a life condition. In other words, social security is more and more framed according to the model of civil liability and damages reclaiming (law of tort, in common law systems): social security implemented through (individual) rights claimed in courts (the clear example is the USA model where you ask for damages in every situation: from compensation in case of a lung cancer to compensation if you are born with disabilities. But in Europe we see similar tendencies). This model has several implication with regard to migration: - first of all, it is a tendency analogous to the privatization of border control. Also in this second case the model is a civil responsibility model. This is clear with legal institutions such as carrier liability for transporting illegal migrants, but also in the case of employers conceived as private agents of border management: institutions like the contratto di soggiorno/ contract of stay contain clauses for the refunding of repatriation expenses and other similar clauses. In other words, civil responsibility is a key instrument in the process of governmental management of borders which shed light on the connection between border securization and social securization . - Second. The migrant condition is paradigmatic for what Ive called social securization. A clear example is the recent EU directive on the deregulation of social services which introduces the country of origin principle. This means that an enterprise is subject to the law of the country where it is legally registered (instead of the country where it supplies the service). But this also means that a worker brings with him/her the social security system of the country where the enterprise is registered. Of course, this is not a new phenomenon (a frequent case regards workers of the maritime transportation sector), but the Bolkestein directive is not limited to the labour regulation: it extends the principle to the whole social services system. This is perfectly consistent with the model highlighted in the previous paragraph, and it leads to important consequences for migrant labour if we consider it together with the process of EU expansion. . - in political terms all this requires that we further specify the movements claims and analysis. Of course this is only my view, but I try to bring up some example. A) When we talk about flex-security (a concept which I find a bit unclear and, although we do not use it within the frassanito network, in Italy is very fashionable) we need to further specify the concept with regard to the work mobility. B) social cooperation is not a given achievement of the supposed community of precariat. The other side of precarization is an xtreme fragmentation and atomization of the social claims. Social cooperation is a form of political struggle and, at the some time, a battlefield to be conquered against tendencies which lead to a reverse direction. This is true also in the case of transnational networks of migrants solidarity (which are not naturally given but are conquered and constructed). In my view, it is important to underline it in order to reclaim the political meaning of transnational spaces of cooperation. C) As it is underlined by the ambivalence of the civil responsibility model with regard to claims implemented trough the instrument of (individual) rights, we do not have ready made models (in other words, ready made alternatives to corporative models of claiming). Alternatives need to be continually re-discovered and re-defined. next attached: dear friends, very briefly some comments on the precarity-paper. I strongly support the things about the "traps" included in the concept of "precariat", in the sense that it evokes a sociological perspective (like, defining who belongs to the "group" or "class" of precarious) I think we have to be very careful not to re-invent what the traditional left did with the term class/proletariat. This is why we probably should consider to not use this term rather than to be forced to make distinctions every time. Instead we should, I propose, to focus on the process of precarization and on what "class" meant in the alternative reading: to include into its definition centrally the struggles of precarisation, since it is the struggles of the subaltern that establish the new forms and levels of conflict. In my eyes it is also very important to think about what mentioned attached as the forms of "collectivness" or solidarity. Much of the precarity-discourse today is backwards-oriented (like defending the sunday as a holiday, certain concepts of the fordist family etc.) and it seems to me that this it is the result of a conceptual shortcoming. What would be the adequat line of flight regarding for example social security (is it basic income?), What are the limits of community-projects e.g.? on a global scale there seems to be a debate on land-ownership as a strategy for reducing the dependance on commodties/global market. How to combie the different aspects of precarity: how to reduce social unsecurity without again linking it to a social stabilization of living forms (e.g. the nuclear family).

Following on from the recent riots on Palm Island and Redfern, rioting at Macquarie Fields enters its fourth night (as of March 1st). Some additional links >> [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] In each case (Mac Fields, Redfern, Palm Island), the riots were triggered by people dying in custody or while being chased by cops. What's different about this occasion is that it wasn't mainly indigenous kids, but generally lumpenised ones. There is talk of "bulldozing" the area (most of which is public housing), just like after Redfern. And the NSW police are frothy and indignant that "there was talk among the locals of 'doing a Redfern'." But, that said, something else worth noting about this are the ways in which the media, cops, various do-gooders have resorted to racialisation. All the usual talk of "uncivilised behaviour", but a very particular recourse to motifs of biological degeneracy: inter-generational dysfunction, etc. Which is to say, that 'race' -- racialisation -- was never (and still isn't) about any inherent given, like skin colour, etc. The idea of 'race' might have come from the Aristocracy (who wanted to shore up their authority by calling themselves 'bluebloods' and talking about 'breeding'), but its modern incarnation is about making the conditions of life (or indeed the denial of life) appear to be the outcome of one's bodily characteristics or genetics or 'upbringing'. There are lots of examples of this kind of racialisation. The head of the Labor Party, Kim 'Bomber' Beazley is quoted as saying that he "supported police 100 per cent in their efforts to contain the riots and called for compulsory citizenship programs in schools." No justice, just us. Or rather: justice is about exchange -- lives get weighed on the money scale and are valued accordingly. And when lives are no longer valued in such a way, what then?. BR sent me this, given my recent preoccupations with the question of the 'value of life' and precariousness: "PS. This is a funny statement for a Nazi: "Those who posit a value always also posit, eo ipso, a non-value. The sense of this positing of non-value is the annihilation of non-value ... [As a result] the danger lies in the inescapability of a moral obligation. Those men ... feel compelled to destroy these other men, i.e., their victims, even morally. They must brand their opponents as criminal and inhuman, as an absolute non-value, otherwise, they themselves would become criminals and monsters. The logic of value and non-value unfolds all of its destructive consequence, and forces the creation of ever newer and deeper discriminations, criminalizations, and devaluations, up to the point of the annihilation of every life unworthy of existing." Yes, the quote is from Carl Schmitt, who indeed was a Nazi, but he was a Nazi because he was, above all, a liberal-democrat and was a realist about what it would take to decide the law and secure the order of said liberal-democracy. * The phrase "Bogan Intifada", coined I think by Peter Jovanovic, probably doesn't travel very well, so from the Slang Dictionary: Bogan = "person of questionable upbringing" Angry Bogan = "A discontented and disillusioned individual, angry at the world, with a penchant for wearing flannel." It actually means 'lumpen', and I'm surprised that the Slang Dictionary doesn't make that explicit, but talks about 'upbringing' instead. And "bulldoze", of course, should be more familiar to yanks: "bulldoze 1876, originally bulldose 'a severe beating or lashing,' lit. 'a dose fit for a bull,' a slang word referring to the beating of black voters (by either blacks or whites) in the 1876 U.S. presidential election. A bulldozer was a person who intimidates by violence until the meaning was extended to ground-clearing caterpillar tractor in 1930." Intifada needs no translation. [Appended from a posting elsewhere] While I think it's important to say that the exception has become the norm, norms are not the same as universalities. Some workers, those who identify with sovereignty and are enabled to do so (the citizen-commodity), are deemed to be capable of managing their own exploitation (sovereign in another fashion) and therefore capable of entering into the labour contract freely and autonomously (in the Kantian sense of that word). It is an effort to get them to identify outside this box, and to do so in such a way that they doesn't reproduce their training, habituation in and for sovereignty. (Campaigns around migration are full of missionaries, well-meaning colonists.) For everyone else, the formally free aspect of labour (all those warm cosy aspects of liberal-democracy, the social contract, the rule of law, etc) is suspended in a forceful, unmediated fashion, and this suspension is in turn *explained* (and legitimated) as an inherent attribute of those bodies (eg and esp., racialisation). It's therefore perfectly legitimate to bomb some people to democracy; forced labour is justified because those people 'lack' self-control (ie, the internalisation of sovereignty, in its particular Kantian sense, again); the indefinite, extrajudicial internment of 'suspected non-citizens' ... That doesn't mean citizen-commodities are not perpetually threatened with this suspension (this is what 'precarity' means). But the hypothetical interchangeability of abstract labour is only that. It's actual functioning is segmented and hierarchised, as in wage levels, differential labour markets, ie., the enclosures, etc. And, for liberal-democracies, it's racialisation (or attribution to body, biology, the apparently pre-social) that forms the necessary ingredient for legitimating the difference between the threat of violence and the use of it. And, I'll add something from the Patriotic Youth League (local nazis) about the recent riots that PJ sent over: "The constant glorification of african-american gang/street life and the whole hip-hop scene. (witness the rap-style graffiti desecration of the war memorial). The failure of multi-culturalism & left-wing teachers who have made a whole generation of white kids be ashamed of thier heritage,culture &values. Did anyone notice on the news the way the brother of one of the scumbag car thieves spoke-if you closed your eyes you would of thought this obviously Australian kid ,with an Anglo-celtic name was in fact Lebanese! I also noticed amongt several of the more brazen ring-leaders about 3 pacific islanders ,at least 1 asian and of course everyone's favourite troublemakers the middle-easterners ,although the media of course downplayed this ,mainly interviewing the anglo kids. The dress of this rabble was also note-worthy -the same predictable brands & american sporting garb seemed to adorn nearly all of them- all the usual 'homeboy' gear! I mean how many times do you watch the news and see young offenders ,either caught on CCTV or being arrested wearing the same hip-hop inspired clothing!"

I'm in the middle of writing an essay on autonomy, movement and recognition (the abstract, itself written I think a month ago, below). Suggestions for readings, tangents, whatever would be good. Obviously, Agamben's comments on 'movement' are provocative and interesting. Although I don't see how a concept of 'lack' is required to mitigate against closure, I think his reading of the Schmittian tripartation of state / movement / people is useful here, movement as the failure of demos (people) to connect with -cracy (rule). Also interesting is (but in quite another way) is Vahamaki's essay on commonplaces. Vahamaki's comments on commonplaces as the production of platitudinous community is pretty swell. Anyway, all that is working its way in to an essay which actually begins with a critique of concepts of movement as the connective between people (or multitudes) and state, as a fleeting, transitional phenomena, rendered as 'lacking' intellect. Obviously, at stake here are the constructions of migratory movements as not movements in any socio-political sense, and therefore requiring the intervention of, well, intellects. A pretty standard, but in this case highly racialised, version of Leninisim/Taylorism, which I think has its updated, 'post-fordist' versions in, well, I'll leave the rest of the discussion for the essay itself... Abstract: "Autonomy, Recognition and Movement" I begin with a discussion of the impact of the most recent waves of undocumented migration on traditional socio-political understandings of what a movement is. I argue that those waves of migration, and the struggles against border controls that have ensued, pose a concrete challenge to the particular role granted to intellectuals in such understandings. I then discuss some of the specific stakes of such understandings as they arose in the struggles around migration and 'globalisation', principally but not exclusively in Australia over the last six years. In December 2004, the last of those who escaped from the migrant internment camp at Woomera (Australia) in 2002 was captured by Immigration officials. Ali had been working clandestinely in Melbourne, among the growing number of undocumented workers. Between these two moments of escape and capture lay a whole series of debates about recognition and visibility within and around the struggles to close the camps, including the noborder networks and migrant/refugee solidarity groups. The essay explores those debates as they connected to, on the one hand, the process of refugee determination and migration management and, on the other hand, the particular role of academic and cognitive workers in navigating the particular dilemmas of visibility and clandestinity in relation to the autonomous movements of undocumented migration. [ps. hydrachrist, I look fwd to the rest of the your essay, translations.]

Habeas corpus e pluribus unum Abstract This paper examines the legal-political subject that is called forth by habeas corpus and the biopolitical terrain that it assumes as both precondition and task. Habeas corpus (meaning: 'you shall have the body') has been routinely associated with the defence of individual rights against the right and force of the state. In austere legal terms, a writ of habeas corpus obliges the presentation of the body of the detained before the court, so that the court might ascertain the legality of that detention. It is commonly regarded as an index of the distinction between democracy and tyranny. Habeas corpus has featured prominently in court cases relating to the internment of undocumented migrants by the Australian Government and those incarcerated by the US Government in Guantanamo Bay. As habeas corpus has unravelled in the course of those proceedings, as attempts to give it effect have become more compelling, it--along with similar codifications of rights that are customarily associated with it--has assumed an exemplary political status beyond the courts. That is, beyond the anticipated proposals from self-declared liberals for a more ample application of habeas corpus, a palpable sense of catastrophe--which is to say: the so-called 'War on Terrorism,' the seemingly endless war in Iraq, and the ever-widening scope of Australia's concentration camps--has, perhaps not surprisingly, prompted others to resort to similar prescriptions. For instance: Judith Butler has called for an extension of the Geneva Convention to recognise 'non-state' actors; Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have called for a new Magna Carta; and recent Mayday events in Europe emphasised the need for a more adequate code of rights for precarious, immaterial and undocumented labour. However, the initial and important question to be asked here is precisely how those writs of habeas corpus have thus far been rendered inoperable. For instance, how did the Australian Government evade the legally successful writ of habeas corpus when its commandos took those aboard the Tampa hostage? In each case, the jurisdiction of the courts has been "found wanting". Given that inoperability, the question becomes: precisely what do calls for the expansion of rights such as habeas corpus facilitate? Exploring the subsequent and related questions that arise from this is the main focus of this paper. Questions such as: What subjects are being composed (or decomposed) here? What diagrams of action, work, resistance, sovereignty and jurisdiction are being assembled and disassembled? What is the relationship between the increasing preponderance of precarious, immaterial and undocumented forms of labour and calls for habeas corpus to have a more expansive and satisfactory reach? What are the protean but nevertheless tangible historical coincidences of the habeas corpus of jurisdiction, the habeas mentis of General Intellect, the habeas mutatis of 'flexible production systems', the habeas data of cyberspace? What kind of body--indeed, what kind of life--is being summoned before the court, and what might this court look like? In the course of this paper, the works and concepts of various Italian writers--such as Agamben, Negri, Bologna, Lazzarato, Berardi--will be used to bring to the fore what is at stake in those writings and in discussions around them, considering them for, but also beyond, their theoretical appeal. I’d like to begin by posing a couple of questions. What is jurisdiction and how is it changing? And: What are the forms of subjectivity that are elicited in the process? These two questions underscore what is at stake in considerations of habeas corpus and its current troubles. So, what is the current predicament of habeas corpus, that ‘Great Writ of Liberty’ as it has been called since Blackstone? To put it as briefly as possible: while this ‘Great Writ of Liberty’ has featured prominently in almost every legal proceeding relating to the internment camps and so-called Border Protection, it has yet to deliver anything that might look remotely like, well, liberty. Which is not, for a moment, to identify the circumstances of a legal writ with the situation of those who are interned. It is, I think, a condition of radical practice and theory to not invite a confusion of the two, the identification of bodies with and through the law’s apprehension of them, or rather: of us. That way lie too many disasters. To put it more acutely: this paper is, in one sense, an argument against the law’s apprehension of us, including what ‘us’ or ‘we’ might mean. Because in confronting what may well seem to be a state of permanent war, a normalisation of a state of emergency, the rapid erosion of protections against the arbitrary powers of the state in the so-called War on Terror—there is simply no way to calculate the extent of this injustice, and nor should there be—in this terrible context, it becomes all too easy to assume that justice can be served by the law and that our task is therefore to serve the cause of the law, its more adequate or sufficient elaboration. Franco Berardi has spoken eloquently on another occasion of “panic war”, of the ways in which this panic produces the aspiration for the return to the general rule, that the greatest danger in this panic is the militarisation of the intellect. This return to the general rule and the militarisation of the intellect can take many forms. E pluribus unum, which translates as ‘from the many into the one’ is not simply the motto of Hobbesian sovereignty, although it is that as well. But more on that later. To return to habeas corpus: As Agamben argues, habeas corpus is not at all the guarantor of freedom it is assumed to be in liberal-democratic politics. Rather it is, the presentation of the body before the court—the staging of the law’s authority to decide in relation to that body, in relation to life—that is put to work in the procedural writ of habeas corpus. What habeas corpus ratifies in its procedures is jurisdiction. Whether it results in the release of people from internment—which has yet to be the case—or not, it is jurisdiction that is at issue, and the recognition of bodies therein. Jurisdiction refers not simply to the scope or reach of the law’s authority, as is well-known, but also to the declaration that constitutes this authority. It’s no coincidence I think that in discussing the processes of interpellation, the processes by which people are rendered into and recognised as subjects, Althusser opted for a scene in which a cop yells, ‘Hey, you there!” In other words: juris-diction is also the language—the diction—of law and of right, of juris. To put it another way: it is the language through which power is translated into law. The monopolisation of violence by the state—its constitution—becomes established as norm, habit. Consider the events around the Tampa. While the Australian court upheld the writ of habeas corpus, the Australian Government and military rendered that decision obsolete. That is, less than 48 hours prior to the Court’s judgement, those aboard the Tampa had been moved to a military vessel, removed from Australian territorial waters and thereby beyond the jurisdictional reach of the courts. Therefore, for much of this period—let’s say between 1989 and 2003—habeas corpus has been rendered inoperable by a discrepancy between the law and the military. During that time, US Courts have routinely ruled against writs of habeas corpus, in their terms, “for want of jurisdiction.” The same has been the case in Australia, given particular effect by the so-called “Pacific Solution,” the excision of parts of the continent from the migration zone, and so on. That is, an inconsistency between violence and norm. That inconsistency has come about not because of some inherent tendency on the part of states toward extra-legal violence—although that tendency exists and is inherent. Rather, it has come about because prior structures of nation-states (and the international system erected during the Cold War) have been rendered insufficient to the task of controlling the movements of people by the extent and scope of those movements since the late 1970s. In any case, that discrepancy is now in the process of being surmounted, and it does not bode at all well. Before going into that, it might be useful at this point to indicate just how important inconsistency has been in the exercise of habeas corpus as a protection, as well as in the very possibility of asylum, refugee policy and so forth. To be very clear on this point, this is not the same kind of discrepancy just noted, that between violence and law. But it is a discrepancy nevertheless which takes the form of a conflict over and between jurisdictions. Habeas corpus gets its reputation for being a “writ of liberty” from those historical occasions when it functioned as an expression of conflicts between Kings and barons, or between different levels of jurisdiction. Asylum too emerges in the context of a conflict between Church and State; leaving aside the fact that the very possibility of flight is premised on there being different jurisdictions. Without these conflicts, neither habeas corpus nor refugee provisions function as the possibility for flight, let alone the chance at freedom. Without such conflicts over jurisdiction, these policies become, as has been the case since the end of the Cold War and with the ‘War on Terror,’ a device in the organisation of labour markets. The particular form of the Tempororay Protection Visa is but one example of this device. But, as mentioned, those inconsistencies are already in the process of being overcome. The most recent instance of this is, of course, the ruling by the High Court that it is perfectly legal to keep people in indefinite detention. The law has indeed caught up with violence, and far from resulting in any increase in protections against that violence, it has instead normalised it. Contrary to William Pitt, tyranny does not begin where law ends. Rather, tyranny becomes normalised where it becomes codified as law. Given this, calls by Judith Butler for the inclusion of “non-state actors” in the Geneva Convention, or those by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt for global citizenship are not simply dubious, but actually and politically redundant. Extensions to the scope of recognition or citizenship are nothing other than arguments for the extension of jurisdiction, if not simply for the diffusion of a juridical subjectivity whose precise corollary is that of abstract labour. First, it is all too easy to render the processes of internment, border policing and war according to a motif of inclusion-exclusion. But this is really not what happens. As Sandro Mezzadra has argued with regard to Fortress Europe: “policies on migration, despite their rhetoric, do not aim to hermetically seal … borders. Their objective, and their effect, is the establishment of a system of dams and eventually the production of an active process of inclusion of migrant labour by means of its criminalisation.” Secondly, the reach of particular states has already extended well beyond the putative territorial borders of those states. For instance, the Australian Government has “airport liaison officers” around the world, as well as Just-In-Time paramilitary squads, bureaucratic and legal personnel running other states in the Pacific and South Asia. Not to mention the extent and scope of similar arrangements by US and European Governments, or the rise of a militaristic humanitarianism which has already resulted in the conjunction of a global juridical rights discourse with violence on a global scale. And thirdly, all of the above and more besides, indicate something broader on the horizon. As noted before, E pluribus unum—from the many to the one—is not simply the motto of a Hobbesian sovereignty, although it will likely be most familiar as that. In this motto resides the whole limit-point of political philosophy—Plato, Rousseau, Hobbes, Spinoza, Hegel. The problematic, as it is construed here, is in one sense quite simple: how to unify multiplicity? More often than not, the particular answers given to this question are deemed worthy of criticism only to the extent that they deploy a project of unification based on homogenisation or transcendence. Most of us here are well-acquainted with a critique of those, and rightly so. But e pluribus unum does not simply circulate as political philosophy. In its more common manifestation it circulates as the slogan on US dollar, the de facto global currency. Which is to raise, in quite explicit terms, the fact that capitalist forms of subjectivity—and subjection—do not require recourse to either a transcendental plane or homogeneity to function. Money unites, in its fashion, through the general rule of abstraction, measure, calculability. Capitalism operates through, as Deleuze and Guattari argued, the axiomatic, the “differential relation between abstract and quantitative flows.” Capital produces an indifference to and abstraction of concrete labours, the qualitative differences between the creation of this or that. This synthetic-pluralism is perpetually flexible. Codes can be added and exploited in an infinite categorical and innovative expansion. This is the very meaning of a flexible production system. This is the micro-physics of the multitude, of immaterial labour—in their subjection. It is time to take some distance from Negri’s fantasies about the multitude which present it as a better, more adequate vanguard, replete with its own destiny in global citizenship as if this amounts to freedom. There is nothing destinal about freedom, as Jean-Luc Nancy has pointed out. It is always about physics, the movements of bodies. The citizen-commodity is cynical and opportunistic, but that ability to circulate cynically and opportunistically is safeguarded by reworking the distinction between public and private space. Antagonism is deemed impolite, ruled out by procedures which privatise difference, rendering its intractable moments as being ‘beyond the pale’. Flexible productions systems allow for competition, but not antagonism. Antagonism draws attention to the rules of relation, exchange and communication through which the market operates. Competition abides by those rules. As Augusto Illuminati wrote some time ago: “the individuation of the citizen-individual brought about by the rights State, the rule of law, … administratively distributed legality so as to reintegrate the underprivileged classes within the fiction of a guaranteed community in exchange for renouncing the virtual subversiveness of difference.” The absolutisation of democracy which Negri and Hardt propose—and which Sylvere Lotringer has called (in the introduction to Virno’s Grammar of the Multitude) their “strategic embrace of Empire”—expresses nothing more than the universalisation of abstract labour in its globally juridical form. In this global factory, antagonism cannot be nurtured by a habitatution to or aspiration for the general rule, recognition or inclusion. Divested of its critique of capital, money and the wage form, celebrations of the common risk being nothing more than consolatory forms of belonging, a temporary respite, if not simply another idealised and idyllic version of the marketplace which apparently functions with neither violence nor exclusivity. Human capital plus the internalisation of the law as habit. Panics are of no help here. Panics promote the etatisation of subjectivity, in one form or another. As Augusto Illuminati also wrote, “after the excesses of the emergency, one goes back to work, better than before.” Autonomy, if it is taken to mean a project rather than somewhere—like a brand name—one has already arrived at, means the rigorous subtraction of time, energy and affect from wage work, antagonism to the forms of subjectivity that the capital-labour relationship gives rise to. Without this, the ‘War on Terror’ will continue to be mirrored by panics that find temporary refuge in the juridical, in the desire for a justice which is always calculable and therefore inherently unjust—and the terrorism of money will continue. Angela Mitropoulos Paper given (with thanks to Aren Aizura) at Italian Effect: Radical Thought, Biopolitics, Cultural Subversion (Sydney) September 2004 Note: this is a companion piece to "Habeas Corpus" here. 1. Italian Effect Conference 2. Franco Berardi on Panic War 3. Sandro Mezzadra on citizenship in motion 4. Jean-Luc Nancy 5. Augusto Illuminati on Unreprepresentable Citizenship 6. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt on a new Magna Carta 7. Brett Neilson on Giorgio Agamben’s latest book, State of Exception 8. Sylvere Lotringer / Paolo Virno 9. Judith Butler, The Nation (2002)

I'm always surprised that people don't seem to get what's at stake in the arguments about inclusion/visibiity. It's not about Negri versus Foucault, although that is one way of marking out the debate, at least for those who like their politics marked by personnae and academic patronage. It's about, among other things, what 'autonomy' might mean, how it might be distinguished from the autonomy of bourgeois subjectivity (the capacity for responsible self-exploitation) and whether it might therefore be useful to continue talking about 'autonomy' and to what effect. I'm in the process of writing up a review of Allaine Cerwonka's Native to the Nation: Disciplining Landscapes and Bodies in Australia, which deserves to be read more widely I think. There's lots to talk about. But the more interesting part of the book is the discussion about Aboriginal subjectivity and governmentality, a discussion which relates to current debates about welfare, etc -- and a more general debate about whether at issue here is the operation of exclusion and invisiblity. Liberals (and those like Tute Bianche who pretend they're not liberals) have tended to talk about exclusion/invisibility as if misfortune springs from this, and therefore that the solution would be to include and make visible. Cerwonka, otoh, insists that what happens here is the production of particular kinds of visibility and inclusion. The political/theoretical lineage here is, of course, Foucault. A quote:"governmental policies for economic self-reliance in Aboriginal communities ironically require the production of an Aboriginal subjectivity in the mold of the bourgeois ideal [...] Colishaw argues: 'Recognising "the community" entailed the production of communities as suitable recipients of state funding. Certain kinds of subjects had to be produced who would take part in the procedures that the state demanded. The bourgeois ideal of autonomous, self-willed subjects took a particular form in this field of governing Aboriginality.' [...] self-determination programs are still grounded in a cosmology that priveliges history as progress, an epistemology that posits knowledge as technique, and an 'ontology premised on being apparent and visible'. [... What Colishaw] stops short of saying is that such forms of epistemology and ontology are the srtuctures that modern power takes [and] the means by which the modern state governs." Cerwonka disagrees with Colishaw that government officials "ignore Aboriginal forms of meaning and communication." Rather, "Aboriginal groups are forced to make their knowledge 'apparent and visible' if they are to receive government resources. [...] this mandate to make meanings and knowledge visible to the government is an important process by which settler Australians have responded to the challenges that Aboriginal land rights pose to the territorialization of the Australian settler state." As postscript: The same questions about the injunction to visibility and inclusion/exclusion are at work in the areas of 'refugee determination' and border policing. That's a debate I've written about elsewhere and for some time. But I'm always surprised that some people imagine that what's at stake in those debates is some factional dispute or abstract theoretical question. But I'm thinking that those who continue to imagine that the stakes in such an argument are either factional or theoretical has more to do with the fact that this is what is at stake for them.

[This is Part I of a longer piece on welfare, labour and the body of politics. Yes, it's a drafting process] The Australian government is currently setting about changing the criteria for which people, in particular indigenous people and those with disabilities, can receive welfare payments. Australia’s welfare system has always operated as a direct adjunct to work and is a principal technology for the organisation of the national labour market. Welfare is paid at a level far below any estimates of a livable income because it is, quite literally, disbursed as an unemployment income. It is not meant to supplant the injunction to work, but supplements that injuction in a very particular fashion. ‘Welfare payments’ do not amount to welfare in any abstract sense and are certainly not outlayed by the state as an unconditional right. Rather, they are an index of the relative force of very specific understandings of what ‘the welfare of the commonwealth’ might mean. If recent elections and policy are anything to go by, there is an alternation between the blunt corrective of fiscal ‘rectitude’ and the unprecedented disbursement of constituency-building measures, mostly in ‘marginal’ electorates. Indigenous peoples, immigrants, people with disabilities, young people and creative types are out; families are in. To be clear, this is not some battle between discrete ‘classes of persons’ over proportions of the social income, as if it were possible to squeeze actual people into one category or another. Rather, the shift to ‘families’ has much to do with the pressure of a decade-long shift from national to ‘household’ debt coupled with the twinned strategies of re-defining the national in familial and enterpreneurial terms—which is to say, along Darwinian and biological (racialised) lines. For the enterpreneurial unit of ‘the family’, the task of managing psychological—if not material—risk has been given over to the fast-growing industries of pharmacology, ‘self-help’ and evangelism. What each of these industries has in common—aside from their competing but similarly rigid foundationalisms in biochemistry and a Higher Power respectively—is an emphasis on salvation and revelation as processes of individual behaviour modification. That said, proposed changes to welfare include intensive monitoring and control of “behaviour” deemed to be “passive”, that is: unproductive—and certainly not properly familial—in the strict terms of what it means to reproduce the conditions of a national labour market. Changes include the introduction of ‘smart cards’ to monitor what people buy and the extension of work-for-the-dole and ‘mutual obligation contracts’ to entire communities. Other measures include the cutting of payments or denial of repairs on public housing if parents do not ensure their children attend school ‘clean and neatly dressed’. Moreover, in a process designed to shift “native title” landholdings into commercial circulation (and quite likely, to mount an eventual land grab), lands recently returned to indigenous communities and held under communal title will become real estate and used as collateral for loans. Among other things, the changes to welfare are designed to force people off welfare (and into ‘self-employment’ and low-paid work) by introducing punitive measures against certain “behaviours” and making life on welfare unbearable. They are widely seen as a test case for the welfare system as a whole. Indeed, the specific criticism from human rights organisations of the proposed changes suggests this is more rather than less than likely. For the most part, human rights organisations have criticised proposed changes to welfare arrangements for indigenous people as a contravention of anti-discrimination laws rather than amounting to the extension of forced labour, thereby implicitly making a case for the generalisation of those changes (and forced labour). Nevertheless, these changes are continuous with Australia’s history of forced labour (especially of indigenous people) and of welfare arrangements since the 1970s. In the 1970s, the Fraser Liberal Government introduced the Community Development Employment Program (CDEP) which made welfare payments conditional upon work, well before the Keating Labor Government’s extension of work-for-the-dole scheme to all long-term unemployed over 25 in the early 1990s, and the Howard Liberal Government’s more recent ‘mutual obligation’ contracts, which similarly made forced labour a condition of welfare. Nevertheless, the extent of recent proposals indicates a more aggressive attempt to end, as the Government terms it, “passive welfare once and for all”. In this aim, they are supported by some indigenous people whose resort to the jargon of “uplift” and “prohibition” reasserts the “civilising” and paternalistic doctrines of the missionary organisations vested with the task of “Aboriginal Protection” since the beginning of the last century. With that resort has come a prominence granted on the basis of deflecting the charge of racism. Noel Pearson—whose assertions that welfare payments are “a major contributor to the drug problems of Aborigines” can at best be described as a teetotaler’s fantasy of causation—has become a significant figure in the legitimation of government policy. That legitimation functions, as it always has, by insisting that punitive measures and control are enacted ‘in the best interests’ of those who cannot ‘control themselves’ sufficiently to be entrusted with the task of exploiting themselves. But while Pearson and others holding photo opportunities with the Prime Minister have been presented as representatives of and for indigenous people, conflicts between indigenous people remain more than apparent, but largely (as is often the case) unrepresentable as such in a context where mediation is principally the performance of simulation, inclusion/exclusion and the legitimation of state violence. Part II: Redfern, Palm Island and deaths in custody ...