Page - 114 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 2/2016

114 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Arthur Depner, Simon Goebel | Rede Macht Asylpolitik Extended Abstract of: Arthur Depner und Simon Goebel, ‘Rede Macht Asylpolitik. Bundestagsreden zum Thema Flucht und Asyl aus metaphorologisch-kulturwissen schaft licher Perspektive’, Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2, 2016, 95-115. <http://unipub.uni-graz.at/mcsj> Authors’ affiliation Arthur Depner M.A., Simon Goebel M.A., Tür an Tür - Integrationsprojekte gGmbH, Wer- tachstraße 29, 86153 Augsburg, Germany arthur.depner @ tuerantuer.de, simon.goebel @ tuerantuer.de of their use in the speeches as well as their discursive coherence with the subject of the so-called “refugee crisis”. The claim for combating the causes of flight appeals to be very reasonable and agreeable. Moreover it expresses the determination and strength of the speaker. This superficial dimension of the metaphor however blocks out the many questions it leaves unanswered or even disguised, such as: Where exactly does this “combat” take place? Does it focus on the actual conflict areas or is it about keeping refugee camps in other coun- tries well enough equipped to stop people from leaving them and expanding their flight-route to “our” region? Our analysis shows that there can be various motivations behind the claim for combatting the causes of flight and that there is no common understanding of that expression, even though it is used in almost every speech we examined. This reveals a basic function of all these metaphors: they seemingly indicate an unequivocal subject while at the same time obscuring the concrete background, actions and/or consequences associated with them. The outcome can be very irritating as the example of the metaphor securing the external borders shows: one important subtext of this metaphor is a discourse about safety. Paradoxically the perspective switches very subtly from talking about help-seeking refugees and bringing them to safety to talking about violators of “our laws” and threats to “our society”. This subtle but nonetheless significant change turns victims into perpetrators and declares safety as an exclusive right of certain people who themselves then are endangered of becoming victims of any claims for safety from “outside” this exclusive group of people. We conclude that basically the metaphor securing the external borders is strongly connected to a revenant discourse about safety which accompanies almost any migration-debate. Our findings show that the systematic and profound analysis of the apparently trivial assump- tion that political rhetoric effects public opinion and vice versa, produces significant results in the field of an ethnology of contemporary “Western” national states and their interdependence, including their self-understanding as well as the complex dynamics of discourse and power within themselves and on a global scale. We conclude that the approach presented in our paper can get hold of dynamic socio-cultural negotiation processes in motion. With Blumenberg we argue that it is important to point to the metaphorical dimension of expressions used in political discourses, since these expressions can lose their metaphorical characteristics within the course of a discourse (i.e. by repetition) and could be taken for granted, leaving no scope for different expressions/met- aphors triggering different frames and thus enabling different actions.