Infrastructure Aesthetics and the Crisis of Migrancy

Abstract

Two years ago, off the coast of the small Italian island of Lampedusa, 368 people drowned. Their boat, which was headed north from Libya, ran aground offshore, capsized, and sank. Among the drowned were migrants from Somalia, Ghana, Eritrea, and elsewhere, fleeing violence and poverty. One was a woman who, officials concluded, had given birth at the moment when the vessel turned onto its side, her infant child still attached by an umbilical cord when she was found. The child's short life was ended--her body, with hundreds of others, caught beneath the upturned hull--before it had even begun. This ghastly image appears in a recent essay by Frances Stonor Saunders, published in the London Review of Books, which discusses borders and their centrality to worldly experience.' The implication--"the longest journey is also the shortest journey"--holds out the notion of a staggering alternative: Death is the easiest, fastest flight from the turmoil of a life between checkpoints, borders, and camps, a life without papers or visas. Death is the only escape from the worldly entanglements of displacement, isolation, and exposure, for these increasingly characterize what it means to be a living person: as our infrastructures are integrated and globalized, they are evolved, also, to catalog our fingerprints, scan our irises, and map our DNA. They are both, in this way, objects of an intimidating statecraft and passages from turmoil. They are necessary and intractable, sources of hope and fearsome specters of power and violence. These concerns find an exemplary grounding in the current crisis. Nearly two million migrants, moving into Mediterranean port cities and large metropolises as a result of the five-year Syrian Civil War and an array of other conflicts in Africa and the Middle East, have given form to longstanding fears over the vulnerability of global systems. The effects may take the form of a specific alarm or a generalized atmosphere of paranoia and dread. This became evident well before the "Brexit" vote, during the mediated panic over the closing of the Chunnel, and thus the vulnerability not only of England's own borders but the logics--free trade, free movement--of the new Europe. A more dominant strain of paranoid aesthetics appears in the use of aerial drone photography to document the "surge" and "swell" and "tide" of refugees in places like Cyprus and Lesbos, and to circulate images of the victims as they are washed ashore, unloaded from pallets and shipping containers. Even in popular mediations that seek to iconize migrancy, such themes are central. Artists who seem political, or for whom politics is a kind of general attitude or style--Banksy, M.I.A.--employ in their treatments of the crisis the simple reduction of migrant bodies to surplus objects, taking them as part of a new landscape of precariousness and abjection. The people are conflated with infrastructure in a great equivalency of matter. The scale of the individual is obscured, the prism of experience denied. INFRASTRUCTURE AESTHETICS The question is not just the movement of bodies or security of borders, but their representation and documentation. For many people living in the metropolitan North, this is a matter of leisurely encounter. Watching television and reading the news from a distance naturalizes an array of suppositions about aliens, outsiders, threats, risks, and thus also about one's self. Whether these are panicked, quickly drawn assessments or stylistic representations of abjection, they affirm (per the Saidian formulation (2)) the attitudes and prejudices of American and European audiences against the specter of difference--especially if it comes in the form of stateless persons and, more especially still, stateless Muslims. In the examples I survey, Western media has consecrated its own innovations (which are almost always also technologies of war and conquest) and reduced a population of living people to a manipulable object-world. …