Page - 207 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 1/2015

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 1 2o15 Estela Schindel | Sea border crossing to Europe 207 and asylum regimes limit their possibility of crossing as citizens through regular border crossing points, these travellers are left with the option of embarking into the open and, in the best case, being found and saved as mere human beings. Differently from the full citizenship of rights, as granted by the national state, they are travelling as temporary state-less persons. While trying to cross outside the regular border control points, refugees and migrants do not count on the guarantees and privileges of a citizen but, as Giorgio Agamben poses it, they are reduced to bare life. It is not as citizens of rights, but in their ‘mere’ biological, undifferentiated existence that they are object of humanitarian protection. The universal human rights they are supposed to be granted (although even those are often violated) does not equal citizenship. Instead, by being pushed into a realm of mere survival, their life is reduced to biological existence without civil inscription. In Agamben’s (1998) understanding of bare life, they were taken beyond the threshold of animalization, left alone with their biological subsistence, deprived of the rights inherent to the qualified life of the citizen. Several authors have exposed how in diverse EU countries the unwanted asylum seekers and immigrants are being constructed either as enemies or as a sort of threaten; an operation that relies on the amalgamation of criminality and migration and is amplified through its spectacular treatment in the media (See i.g. Dal Lago 1999, Palidda 2011 and the contributions of ceyhan and Tsoukala in Bigo & Guild, 2005). Read through foucault’s (2003) definition of state racism, they are being constructed not as object of an ethnic racism but of a biological racism; a potential danger the social body. Pushing unwanted border crossers into this biologi- cized sphere is consistent with those discursive constructions. More recently, the treatment of detained migrants and refugees has been furthermore interpreted as a sovereign operation of “animalization” of “irregular” migrants in the frame of what is constituted as a “zoopolitical border”: a specific spatial technology of power aimed at rendering otherwise ‘iregular’ populati- ons knowable and governable and, especially, at immobilizing them (Vaughan-Williams 2015). Mark Salter (2013) calls the current mobility assemblage, paraphrasing foucault, a power oriented instead to “making move and letting stop.” This principle can be easily applied to the creation of an uncertain mobility regime, consisting of deterring immigrants and forcing them to navigate adrift for longer periods, or to look for alternate routes, increasing the duration and danger of their journeys. foucault (1979) explained how, under the disciplinary societies, power used to fix the individual to spaces of enclosure. In the contemporary societies of control, accor- ding to Deleuze (1992), power tends instead to “forms of free-floating control.” The enclosures and panopticons analyzed by foucault are thus giving place to an undulatory, modulating con- trol that operates as a continuous network. The new mobility regimes brought along include a series of practices of movement adrift, indefinite detention, and enormous amounts of waiting, where illegalized migrants no longer own their own time (Salter 2009). Boats subjected to the controversial “push back” operations must spend much more time on the high seas than a direct crossing would require; they are forced to keep navigating, unable to reach the coast. When Paul Virilio, who coined the term “dromologie” –or the study and science of velo- city– wrote that “speed is power” (1980) he was pointing out the emergence of a new political configuration: one where power lies not only and not necessarily in the right and possibility to move – or not to move – but in the capacity to decide and regulate the velocity, rhythm and flow of (im)mobility, meaning governing (im)mobilities. At the European Borders the (im)