Notes on the Tampa Crisis

Shane McGrath

Polizzotti translates the title of chapter two, part three of Virilio's Speed and Politics as 'The Boarding of Metabolic Vehicles' and explains, in a footnote, that the original is an 'untranslatable pun between arraisonnement, "the boarding of ships for inspection," and raisonnement, "reasoning"'. It seems like this is exactly the confusion the government is having now - who knew John Howard spoke French? As I write, 30 Australian SAS troops are on board the Tampa with 460 Afghanis and a handful of crew members, steadfastly refusing to allow it to dock on Christmas Island. The events of the last few days open new possibilities for understanding and resisting the contemptible actions of the State.

from crisis to war

The current border crisis is quantitative, not qualitative; numerical rather than normative. It's no use arguing about morals, since mathematical thresholds define the changes in its administration. The most important of these thresholds, although we can't know its exact statistics, was breached by the early 90s, with the advent of mandatory detention, if not before. It was the point at which the undocumented global movements of people in flight came to constitute an alien power that could only be engaged militarily. Since then it's been a mistake to talk about any Australian 'refugee policy'; policy has given way to strategy. Without hyperbole, a new kind of war. This is why detention mirrors the internment of those seen as potential agents of foreign powers in WWII.

It's enough to remember Ruddock on the ten thousand Iraqis about to assault our borders; quantity is immediately linked to militarisation. It's the quantity, not its constituents, that assault the nation. The government is at war against a population - and see how quickly I'm forced into an utterly inadequate vocabulary of nation-States - of 21 million; not a population of individuals, but population as such.

the tampa

Of course, all of this has been dramatised most effectively by and around The Tampa. The residents of Christmas Island are reportedly preparing tents in the belief that it's inevitable the ship will dock there, but the government insists these tents are for more military personnel, if/when the government sends them. (Paul Bongiorno, Channel 10 News, 11:30 am, 30/8/2001) Howard seeks legislation legitimising the use of military force to repel vessels suspected of carrying people likely to make onshore asylum applications. This is a real escalation in Australia's undeclared war against undocumented migration, but in no way is it the commencement of hostilities.

state of emergency

The State has for some time been in a state of perpetual emergency, a state of war, against the new minor economies - economies of drugs, weapons, information, people (ideologically hypostatised as 'people-smuggling', the inverted projection of the profiteering of ACM and other private prison contractors), and an endless et cetera. These economies should not be misunderstood as merely transnational. Trasnational economies - in the sense implied by corporate globalisation - tendentially impose a recomposition of the nation-State, but in the interests and under the direction of capital. The minor economies are better thought as anational or antinational, irreducibly caustic to any and all State sovereignty, but also to the current organisation of global capital. The State's responses to these economies - from drug wars to the campaign against 'people smuggling' - also share a number of characteristics; racist trade wars represented as matters of law and order, but with no real chance of achieving their rhetorical aim of ending the criminal trade.

Trajectories that are at once desiring and geographical, and that undermine the State's capacity to administer the limits of the human, are some of the common characteristics of the new minor economies. I call these economies 'minor' to recall Deleuze and Guattari's 'minor literatures'; written in, but undoing and stuttering, major languages, one of their key defining properties is an absent people, a people who must be and are created in the specific stutterings of language. The people of these economies have not yet arrived. Yet an imminent/immanent logic inextricably connects the waning of State sovereignty with the shift of those who engage the minor economies from illicit/illegal consumers, to constituents in exodus.

the boarding of metabolic vehicles

I digress. 'The Boarding of Metabolic Vehicles' concerns what Virilio calls 'total war'. 'Born of the sea,' Virilio writes, 'total war, according to Admiral Friedrich Ruge, aims "at destroying the honor, the identity, the very soul of the enemy."' Familiar? Currently, the government is attempting to pass legislation allowing guards in the detention centres to strip-search detainees as young as ten. Putatively, this is to prevent escapes. In fact, as Mitropoulos and Doherty-Rozensweig argue, the government has made the suffering of refugees within Australia an active objective of its policy. The government's drive to repel in advance further arrivals mandates an iconography of ethnic suffering, the image of Australia's inhumanity becoming our newest ideological export. '"Mr Ruddock's silly video," in which images of crocodiles and other threatening species are used to frighten would be refugees' , inverts the tourist ad to propagate a national negativity, to counter and deflect global trajectories.

Border strategy is above all juridico-geographical, about the State's administration of space. This is why State sovereignty and refugee trajectories are properly irreconcilable, as untranslatable as the pun of Virilio's title; indeed, it's the same event of untranslatability in both cases. As Polizzotti notes, 'Virilio will play on this [untranslatable pun] throughout the chapter'. This play concerns the State's occupation of 'mindless' minority bodies; 'but still today,' Virilio argues, 'the most widespread conviction with respect to the bodies of those wanderers deprived of their identity, those living dead, is that they must be occupied, inhabited, possessed by wills other than their own'. From the State's perspective, the mindless bodies of refugees have been colonised by an extra- and anti-national will, the will constituted in the mass times speed of undocumented trajectories (will, of course, being nothing but force euphemised as reason, in this case in the form of the supposed calculations of people-smugglers and queue jumpers). The system of temporary protection Visas is at once part of the policy of suffering designed to deter asylum applications, and a kind of re-education specifically designed to break the refugee to the national will. It translates, it is the violence that undermines the irreconcilable by forcing the alien party onto the terrain of the State. It aborts the specific instance of the untranslatable, but not the crisis of untranslatability with which the State faces movements characterised their non-relation to the legal apparatuses of nationalism.

total war

Total war is characterised by the simultaneity of the occupation of terrain, vessels and bodies - or, to put it more clearly, vessels and bodies become territories in strategic confrontations. And while it's clear that in the refugee war, there is (on one side) no geographical territory in the traditional sense to struggle over, the State will proceed by aggressing against the new 'territory' of movement itself. Vessels, bodies and dynamism are the key elements of enemy advancement the State seeks to capture, destroy and territorialise.

This is not, however, a case of the State seeking to capture or put a stop to movement, even if certain battles have taken that form. The phase in which the State could internalise and appropriate the nomad trajectories of people in flight is coming dramatically to an end, as we see in the attempts to establish the first off-shore detention centre on Nauru, and jettison Australian territories like Christmas Island so as to draw in the national borders. The State aspires to the condition of the fortifications of the Middle Ages, 'means of avoiding carnage and of breaking up the enemy simply by constructing… "a totality of mechanisms able to receive a defined form of energy (in this case, that of the mobile mass of assailants), to transform it and finally to return it in a more appropriate form."' Not to impose stasis, but to regulate movements and control circulation, to render the antinational merely transnational