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Abstract
Foucault’s shift from an analytical focus on discipline to governmentality saw the theme of visibility move into the background of his attention. In this article we ask how the debates about governmentality and visibility can be brought into a mutually productive relationship. Building on recent arguments for greater rigour in conceptualising visibility, we proceed to examine what visibility means and does in the context of migration control in Europe. Focusing on the EU’s recently deployed programme of border surveillance, EUROSUR, we elaborate how multiple forms of visibility are at play. We conclude that the politics of visibility is an important theme for future studies in the governance of migration.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
About the Authors
Martina Tazzioli is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Aix-Marseille. She received a PhD in Politics from Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of Spaces of Governmentality: Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprisings (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), co-author of Tunisia as a Revolutionized Space of Migration (Palgrave-Pivot, 2016) and co-editor of Foucault and the History of Our Present (Palgrave, 2015). She is also on the editorial board of the journal Materialifoucaultiani (www.materialifoucaultiani.org).
William Walters is Professor of Political Sociology in the Departments of Political Science and Sociology & Anthropology at Carleton University, Ottawa. He has published widely in such areas as migration and citizenship studies, security and borders, and Foucault studies. He co-edits the book series Mobility & Politics (Palgrave Macmillan). His research interests are secrecy, publicity and infrastructure.
Notes
* We would like to thank the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.
1. Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, 2010); Carl Death, “Counter-Conducts: A Foucauldian Analytics of Protest”, Social Movement Studies, Vol. 9, No. 3 (2010), pp. 235–251; Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Louis Amoore, “Lines of Sight: On the Visualization of Unknown Futures”, Citizenship Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1 (2009), pp. 17–30.
2. Andrea Brighenti, “Visibility: A Category for the Social Sciences”, Current Sociology, Vol. 55, No. 3 (2007), pp. 323–342; see also John B. Thompson, “The New Visibility”, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 22, No. 6 (2005), pp. 31–51.
3. However, we note that the issue of the struggles around visibility—how subjects refuse to be monitored and controlled by power—does appear in Foucault's texts and interviews many times, although it is never quite developed. See, for instance, M. Foucault, “The Eye of Power”, in Colin Gordon (ed.) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 2000), pp.146–165.
4. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).
5. Thompson, op. cit., pp. 40–41.
6. This discomfort in pointing to struggles over visibility is in part also due to the absence in Foucault's texts of a thorough critical engagement with the question of representation, in its twofold dimension (political and visual representation). But one must also consider that a crucial point in Discipline and Punish is that disciplinary power does not act only at the level of the bodies and of their external “surface”: indeed, the production of a subjected and productive body is the result of the production and the discipline of the “soul”; see Foucault, Discipline and Punish, op. cit.
7. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 98.
8. Ibid., p. 141.
9. Ibid., p. 38.
10. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Dean, op. cit. This emergence of a mode of power that no longer privileges (yet does not dispense with) the surveillant gaze exercised over bodies can be expressed in various ways. For instance, if the eighteenth century dreamt of governing the entire territory like a great city, this was an age when architecture was a privileged way of thinking and organising space and power. By contrast, with the discovery of “society” and “population”, the nineteenth century developed other ways of seeing, knowing and constituting its objects and territories of power, most notably through the rise of the modern social and human sciences which make visible hitherto invisible patterns and processes in the life of the population. See Michel Foucault, “Space, Knowledge, and Power”, in J. Faubion (ed.), Michel Foucault. Power (New York: New Press, 2002), pp. 350–354; Andrew Barry, “Lines of Communication and Spaces of Rule”, in A. Barry, T. Osborne and N. Rose (eds.), Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism, and Rationalities of Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 126–127.
11. Rey Chow, Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), p. 154.
12. M. Foucault, “The Eye of Power”, op. cit., p.149; emphasis in original.
13. Eyal Weizman, “Violence at the Threshold of Detectability”, E-Flux (2015), available: <http://www.e-flux.com/journal/violence-at-the-threshold-of-detectability/> (accessed 24 August 2015).
14. Interview with an Italian Navy officer in charge of coordinating the monitoring room in the Navy headquarters in Rome, 18 July 2015.
15. Brighenti, op. cit., p. 337.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ben Hayes and Mathias Vermeulen, “Borderline. The EU's New Border Surveillance Initiatives. Assessing the Costs and Fundamental Rights Implications of EUROSUR and the ‘Smart Borders’ Proposals” (Berlin: Heinrich Böll Stiftung, 2012), available: <https://www.boell.de/sites/default/files/DRV_120523_BORDERLINE_-_Border_Surveillance.pdf> (accessed November 2015).
19. Regulation (EU) No. 1052/2013 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 October 2013, Official Journal of the European Union (2013): L 295/11-26, p. 14.
20. Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
21. Brighenti, op. cit., p. 329.
22. Pat O’Malley, Lorna Weir and Clifford Shearing, “Governmentality, Criticism, Politics”, Economy and Society, Vol. 26, No. 4 (1997), pp. 501–517.
23. Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
24. Nikolas Rose and Carl Novas, “Biological Citizenship”, in A. Ong and S. Collier (eds.), Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 439–463.
25. Huub Dijstelbloem, “Mediating the Mediterranean: Surveillance and Countersurveillance at the Southern Borders of Europe”, in Y. Jansen, R. Celikates and J. de Bloois (eds.), The Irregularization of Migration in Contemporary Europe: Detention, Deportation, Drowning (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), pp. 103–118; see also Engin Isin and Greg M. Neilsen (eds.) , Acts of Citizenship (London: Zed Books, 2008).
26. Dijstelbloem, op. cit., pp. 113–114.
27. Susan Coutin, “Illegality, Borderlands, and the Space of Nonexistence”, in R. Perry and B. Maurer (eds.), Globalization under Construction: Governmentality, Law, and Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 171–202.
28. Edouard Glissant, ‘For Opacity’, in his Poetics of Relation (trans. Betsy Wing), Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 189–194; T.J. Demos, “The Right to Opacity: On the Otolith Group's Nervus Rerum”, October, No. 129 (Summer 2009), pp. 113–128.
29. Brighenti, op. cit., p. 332 (his italics).
30. Thomas Keenan, “Publicity and Indifference (Sarajevo on Television)”, PMLA, Vol. 117, No. 1 (2002), p. 107.
31. Martina Tazzioli, Spaces of Governmentality: Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprisings (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).
32. Brighenti, op. cit., p. 325.
33. Godfried Engbersen, “The Unanticipated Consequences of Panopticon Europe: Residence Strategies of Illegal Immigrants”, in V. Guiraudon and C. Joppke (eds.), Controlling a New Migration World (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 222–246; John Pugliese, “Statist Visuality, Irregular Migrants, Refugees and Technologies of Extraterritorialisation”, Griffith Law Review, Vol. 22, No. 3 (2013), p. 316.
34. Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani, “Liquid Traces: The Left-to-Die Boat Case”, in E. Weizman (ed.), Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (New York: Steinberg Press, 2014), pp. 657–683.
35. European Commission, “Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council Establishing the European Border Surveillance System (EUROSUR)”, COM(2011) 873 final (Brussels, 12 December 2011).
36. EUROSUR has access to different EU maps and monitoring systems (the EU satellite system, Marus, Frontex risk analyses) and national ones (the monitoring systems of the Navy and the Coast Guard of the different EU countries).
37. Hayes and Vermeulen, op. cit.; Julien Jeandesboz, “Beyond the Tartar Steppe: EUROSUR and the Ethics of European Border Control Practices”, in J.P. Burgess and S. Gutwirth (eds.), A Threat against Europe? Security, Migration and Integration (Brussels: VUB Press, 2011), pp. 111–132.
38. European Commission, COM(2011) 873 final, op. cit.
42. Interviews with EUROSUR's officers at the Italian Home Office in Rome, July 2014 and January 2015. Due to the restricted access to EUROSUR, in order to interview EUROSUR's officers and to see the map, we sent an official request to the Italian Home Office explaining our ongoing research about migration and monitoring systems. It is interesting that although it took a formal and quite lengthy procedure before getting the permission, this was still relatively easy in comparison to the huge difficulty we encountered in meeting humanitarian actors, such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
43. Claudia Aradau and Rens van Munster, “The Time/Space of Preparedness: Anticipating the ‘Next Terrorist Attack’”, Space and Culture, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2012), pp. 98–109.
44. Amoore, op. cit.
45. Interview with a Frontex officer at the regional headquarters in Catania (Italy), 3 December 2015.
46. Tazzioli viewed the real-time visualisations of the Navy during a visit to the headquarters of the Italian Navy in Rome in July and November 2014. She also saw the one used by the Coast Guard during a visit to the headquarters of the Italian Coast Guard in Rome, July 2015.
47. Interview at the Italian Navy Headquarters in Rome, November 2015.
48. Heller and Pezzani, op. cit., p. 676; Tazzioli, op. cit.
49. Nicholas De Genova, “Extremities and Regularities: Regulatory Regimes and the Spectacle of Immigration Enforcement”, in Jansen, Celikates and De Bloois, op. cit., pp. 3–14.
50. Since the start of the Triton operation in December 2014, the Italian Coast Guard, which together with the Italian Navy is the main actor involved in rescue operations, has started to post videos of rescue operations: <http://press.guardiacostiera.gov.it/video/soccorsi/>. The Navy also publicly circulates images of the rescues on Youtube: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RA7cCz1me3s>.
52. Angeliki Dimitriadi, “Managing the Maritime Borders of Europe: Protection through Deterrence and Prevention?”, Criminal Justice, Borders and Citizenship Research Paper (2014), available: <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2602730> (accessed 24 August 2015); Charles Heller and Chris Jones, “Eurosur: Saving Lives or Reinforcing Deadly Borders?”, Statewatch Journal, Vol. 23, No. 3/4 (2014), pp. 2–14, available: <http://database.statewatch.org/article.asp?aid=33156> (accessed 24 August 2015).
53. “Turaya” is the name of the model of satellite phone used by migrants to be detectable on the high sea.
54. Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
55. Federica Sossi, “Struggles in Migration: The Phantoms of Truths”, in G. Garelli, F. Sossi and M. Tazzioli (eds.), Spaces in Migration: Postcards of a Revolution (London: Pavement Books, 2013), pp. 98–115. See also <http://www.storiemigranti.org/spip.php?article1047>.
56. Interview with Frontex officers at the port of Augusta, Sicily, 3 July 2015.
57. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, op. cit.
58. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility (London: Penguin Books, 2008).
59. Maribel Casas-Cortes, Sebastian Cobarrubias and John Pickles, “Stretching Borders beyond Sovereign Territories? Mapping EU and Spain's Border Externalization Policies”, Geopolitica(s), Vol. 2, No. 1 (2010), pp. 71–90.
60. William Walters, “Migration, Vehicles, and Politics: Three Theses on Viapolitics”, European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 18, No. 4 (2015), pp. 469–488.