Seite - 214 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Band 1/2015

214 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 1 2o15 Estela Schindel | Sea border crossing to Europe nature, the social and the scientific-technological developments, but at the same produce and let proliferate the hybrids that combine all of them. The program of revising the Eurocen- tric assumptions underlying the dualism between nature and culture has been more recently undertaken by Philipp Descola (2013), whose arguments aim at dismantling the assumptions by which nature is created as “a domain of objects that were subject to autonomous laws” that “formed a background against which the arbitrariness of human activities could exert its many- faceted fascination” (2013, xv). The technologies of border control and surveillance that force refugees to confront directly the elements in a zone of bare life are complemented – and informed – by discourses that con- struct migration as close to and in a continuum with the realm of nature, in opposition and separation to Europe as a highly technologized world. They thus reproduce the moderns’ trend to allocate the non-western “other” in a continuum with nature, while putting themselves in the area of legitimate scientific knowledge and value free technology, a separation typical for modernity that Latour (1993) calls “the great divide.” Some authors suggest that a bio-political schism between the global South and the global North is currently being produced by the bor- der regime (Buckel and Wissel 2010, Weber and Pickering 2011) in the form of the exposure of certain populations to the danger of death or increasing their risk of death. This schism relies on – and reproduces – a continuous cleavage between the realm of technology and civilization on one hand, and immediate exposure to the constraints of the elements on the other, and manifests itself every time refugees must face direct exposure to the elements while crossing the sea at night, with no other mediations than prayers in the dark. Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press) Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. Means without End. Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) Amnesty International. 2013. Frontier Europe. Human Rights Abuses on Greece’s Border with Turkey (London: AI) <http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/EUR25/008/2013/en/ d93b63ac-6c5d-4d0d-bd9f-ce2774c84ce7/eur250082013en.pdf > [accessed 2015-01-28] Balibar, Étienne. 2009. ‘Europe as Borderland’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 27 (2): 190-215. Bauer, Wolfgang. 2014. Über das Meer. Mit Syrern auf der Flucht nach Europa. Eine Reportage (Berlin: Suhrkamp) Bigo, Didier, and Elspeth Guild. 2005. Controlling Frontiers. Free Movement into and within Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate) Buckel, Sonja, and Jens Wissel. 2010. ‘State Project Europe: The Transformation of the European Border Regime and the Production of Bare Life’, International Political Sociol- ogy 4, 33-49 Dal Lago, Alessandro. 1999. Non persone. Lesclusione dei migranti in una società globale (Milano: feltrinelli). Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. ‘Postcript on the Societies of control’, October 59 (Winter), 3-7.