Full migrancy now (sick leave x Seventh Gallery, 2019)
Full migrancy now: a migrant manifesto[1] of mimicry
Jacques Rancière: ‘What does it mean to be un?’
While walking through the suburbs I saw on the nature strip a scattered arrangement of posts upon which were hung ripped pieces of an Australian flag. They were planted in the ground among flowers and grass and I tried to decipher their meaning. Were they on the one hand an attempt to disseminate and strengthen national identity, or on the other hand a self-aware gesture signifying the fragmentation and dissolution of national identity, a small subversive act in a quiet suburban guerrilla war against colonial identity?[2]
I didn’t have much of a chance to see this show this week, stuck as I was in a philosophy conference. Nor did I know much beforehand about IMMI. My etymological investigation on Google revealed that IMMI must have something to do with immigration, so that’s what I’m talking about.
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What is immigration, who is the migrant, what is migrancy? Who is IMMI?
These terms are defined by their negotiation of different forms of circulation. One form of circulation represented by money is defined by expropriation and accumulation, for instance. The form of circulation represented by the legal migrant is defined by their negotiation of multiple borders, not once and for all, but all the time.
What I am calling Full Migrancy, after Sophie Lewis’s manifesto for full surrogacy, is a form of circulation without a centre, it is a wayward experiment (Saidiya Hartman) in living without a fixed identity or culture, a kind of political solidarity with the borderless who are currently stuck at the borders.
Paul Carter lovingly calls the migrant an ‘uninvited guest’. He writes that ‘To cross the border means announcing oneself, becoming one’s own signifier, that is, mimicking the expectations of the border guard. At the same time, the mimetic skills that protect the vagrancy of the one passing through cast a veil over [their] identity.’ (Meeting Place, 80)
The migrant’s identity is indeterminate, defined by its mobility. It is perpetually and productively mis-identified, and it inhabits these qualities by its mobility. Migrants are floating people, on cobbled-together rafts, they come, to paraphrase Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, ‘under false pretences, with bad documents, out of love.’[3]
In some ways, ways we can either affirm or deny, we are all migrants. This is what I mean by Full Migrancy. Crossing borders, we are to be found over-stepping ourselves; that is how we become who we will be, by crossing the border with the past. But we remain fundamentally empty in the middle, as Mari Ruti writes, ‘lacking, out of joint, distorted… and basically screwed up.’ (She finds comfort in sharing this condition: ‘I mean, if everyone is fucked up, it’s okay for me to be fucked up too, right?’) (MR + AA, 27) There’s no centre that we can cling onto in the midst of things. To exist in a way that doesn’t deny we exist with and for others, we have to keep migrating.
Habermas: Benjamin ‘fundamental (non-Marxist) convictions that meaning is not produced by labour, as value is, but can at most be transformed in dependence upon the process of production.’ 111 – cites Mimetic faculty, Reflections 333ff – we have ‘’gift of producing similarities… and therefore also the gift of recognising them, have changed with historical development. The direction of this change seems definable as the increasing decay of the mimetic faculty.’’ 112 – ‘In the mimetic capacity, Benjamin sees not only the source of the wealth of meaning that human needs, released in the socio-cultural form of life, pour out in language over a world that is thereby humanised.’ 112 – need to ‘liquidate dependence without sealing off the powers of mimesis’, divine ‘because they break myth while preserving and setting free its richness’ 112
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We can hardly forget that, as Paul Carter writes, migrancy takes place in the shadow of empire (Raft, 69). Acknowledging ourselves as migrants is a way to prevent us from becoming settlers and colonists.
Yet, if we pause over this sad figure of the colonist, we find them pathetically desperate to hide their own lack of identity. But they do so by violence and appropriation. Critical anthropology teaches us that all static societies maintain themselves by violence, just as all wealth is abstracted, accumulated and hoarded at the expense of others.
Settler colonial identity is a fraud that we are forced to participate in. Colonists are paranoid narcissists. They are driven by the mortal fear that someone will discover their fundamental lack, the emptiness of all their promises, and the foundation of all that they own in acts of ongoing theft.
The settler tries to appease their emptiness by demanding that the migrant mimic colonial identity, and establish what Homi Bhabha calls ‘the metonymy of presence.’ (Location, 128) Confronted with the border guard, the migrant must therefore practice mimicry of thenothingness that is the settler identity. As Susan Howe writes, ‘Ambulant vagrant bastardy comes looming through assurance and sanctification.’ (The Birth-Mark, p.45) Settler colonial identity is a fraud to the same extent that full migrancy is true.
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Colonial mimicry is a command that aims to assimilate. It uses the trap of a mirror to fix an image of itself in the other, whose life it steals. But as Moten and Harney describe the undercommons, ‘to enter this space is to inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts… on the stroll of life, the life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back, where the commons give refuge, where the refuge gives commons.’ (103)
The migrant here strolls, but any of the migrant’s movements are like camouflage in that they arethe act of concealing their vagrant (Rimbaudian) circulation. Thus the migrant’s mimicry is a camouflage that might be as permeable as air and at the same time as substantive as weather, as Fran Dyson reminds us. (in Meeting Place, 42)
Migrancy is practised at ventriloquism. It speaks with the voice of the thing that has no voice. When it is successful, this feat can appears as a kind of magic, a conjuring act that makes meaning out of nothing. But there is a risk; always the risk of assimilation and the potential for the act to become assimilable, to stop itself from circulating, become static; in other words, to fit in too easily.[4]
Migrancy, instead, is what no one can own. Its ceaseless circulation makes it a commons inhabitable by anyone at all, and where it is successful, it can produce a people where there was not one.
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Migration then is the alternative to static identities and cultures that are founded on violence; it is impatient and restless for the future it is always creating. It is a great show, a highwire performance always ill-timed but always absolutely necessary.
Migrancy comes out of nothing but is not itself nothing. It is like a vase or a bag, whose very purpose is to contain space, but whose casing is made of a vortex rather than of clay. It is like an empty spot on the wall that organises the whole room. As Paul Carter writes, ‘good architecture instantiates loss’ (Meeting Place, 26).
Migrants are like the Argonaut, a vessel in flux but always a refuge. Those who inhabit it are both sailors and sailed vessels. Following Maggie Nelson, we can compare migrancy to pregnancy, schooling us in a ‘communistic sensibility’ where ‘I literally do not have a firm sense of where my body ends and the world begins.’ (in Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now, 126-27)
But like Bini Adamczak, we have to qualify that pregnancy is full not of another but of CIRCLUSION, that is ‘the antonym of penetration’ (Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now, 81), a process that returns the agency to all kinds of orifices and fissures, so that the act of welcoming and making space is no longer forced on us but one we undertake joyfully.
In seeking to meet the migrant we must not find the common ground, but give it. In the magical performance of mimicry, giving ground becomes an act of accommodation and hostpitality to the stranger. It becomes a way to make a commons literally out of the privacy of our selves. It involves identifying not with others or even with ourselves but precisely with the lack of ourselves, our constant mobility. IMMI gives us the chance to imagine Full Migrancy Now. (Now if only they’d tell us who they are.)
[1] Or a utopia…
[2] (Was it a parochial gesture, like planting flowers to combat climate change, or a small act of resistance testifying to a deeper root system in the field of flower power?)
[3] (Writing as migrancy: Writing, speaking, making and performing all involve the circulation of imagination in unpredictable ways.)
[4] (Paul Carter writes, ‘the efficacy of such transformative mechanisms depended on the willingness of the stranger to contemplate himself in the mirror of the other, and to understand this invitation as an initiation into the conventions of reciprocity.’ (Meeting Place, 54))
Image credit: Kaspar Schmidt Mumm, IMMI, Photo By Emmaline Zanelli
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