Page - 213 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 1/2015

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 1 2o15 Estela Schindel | Sea border crossing to Europe 213 Between nature and culture: Bare life talks back The political creation of bare life, however, is not unilateral nor does it remain undisputed. The downgrading of bios (a full citizenship condition) to zoe (bare life) can be seen therefore as the result of a concrete bio-political assemblage; but the refugees redouble the bet by putting themselves in danger, when they “blow off” the boat and call attention to the vulnerability of their condition. Agamben’s distinction between a qualified life and a pure biological existence should not be taken as a binary opposition but rather as extreme and fixed categories; as two poles in a range of stratified and contested statuses, like the boat crossings exposed here. Neither should the figures associated to bare life be considered as lacking agency. Migrants who destroy their own boats in order to turn their crossing into a “distress at sea” operation and be rescued into European soil are using as a token of exchange their own survival, once the legal channels for applying for legal entry to the EU have been closed. Pushed into “bare life,” they play this very condition in their own favor. Like a prisoner on hunger strike, they are investing in the only value they have left: their biological existence. They radicalize their vulnerability, putting at stake their own biological lives or physical integrity. The creation of space of “bare life” might then be not only a biopolitical strategy of the powerful but also reused and re-signified in terms of resistance and challenge. More important than discussing the validity or use of such strategies is to understand the consequences and underlying assumptions of the EU border regime’s pushing unwanted migrants to a sphere of exposure and nakedness, as if they were not citizens of rights. This operation reproduces the “bio-political schism” emerging in the form of a system of stratified rights (Buckel and Wissel 2010, 45), and the “ever-expanding matrix of deterrence and risk” that is constantly being built and rebuilt along the Global North/Global South divide (Weber and Pickering 2011, 7). furthermore, the migrants’ destruction of their own means of transpor- tation and survival can be seen as the pivotal point on the construction and negotiation not only of a border in the geopolitical sense but also of a symbolic boundary, where the illegalized travellers are constructed from the European viewpoint in continuity and contiguity to nature, as opposed to the West, which perceives itself as a highly developed, technologically advanced civilization. Bruno Latour’s (1993, 2002) considerations about the asymmetry of Western epistemologi- cal assumptions are useful in supporting this claim. for Latour, the technological instruments are part of an entanglement of social, discursive, scientific, symbolic and affective aspects that the western worldview tends to single out. The alleged neutrality of both nature and the push back technologies that displace illegalized migrants towards its realm explain why deaths that are politically caused, socially conditioned and historically rooted are presented and perceived in public opinion as if they were events without an agent. There is, however, another aspect of the conceptualization of Bruno Latour which is key for making sense of the biopolitical schism that is taking place, not only politically but also on the level of the imaginaries and repre- sentations, along the European borders. The ‘Moderns’, according to Latour’s critique, define themselves as if the West were not a culture among others but rather one radically separated from the rest. The separation Natural/Social-cultural is viewed as an exclusive feature of the Western moderns, while all other “anthropological” cultures are conceived of and studied in the entanglements of technologies, beliefs, discourses. The Western sciences, instead, separate