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The Autonomy of Migration literature also forms an intervention in migration and border studies by challenging traditional ways of thinking and researching human mobility. Emerging from academic and political traditions associated with ‘Autonomist Marxism/Italian Operaismo’, the AoM, while closely related to CBS, begins political analysis not by investigating the diffusion and re-materialisation of borders but by

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attuning to the ‘autonomy’ of migration, understood as the primacy of (migratory) mobility over (border) control. As an attempt to abandon dominant conceptions of migration as mere passive reactions to economic or social pressures, as objectifiable processes responding to ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors, the AoM understands migration as a dynamic social force and an excessively subversive process. In the AoM literature, subjects of migration are not primarily depicted as vulnerable, passive or abject victims but as subjects whose mobilities constitute political mobilities that often escape the forces that seek to monitor, regulate, capture or deter them.

In 1992, Yann Moulier Boutang was amongst the first to suggest that, despite “myriads of experts and officials” in state administrations and international organisations, forces of emigration and immigration and their independence would surpass attempts to regulate them.71 Notwithstanding forms of repression seeking to counteract migratory movements, Moulier Boutang argues that, ultimately, it would be impossible to fully tame them. For him, shifting the gaze toward the autonomy of migration allows for a departure from conceptions of migrations as negative practices that respond merely to socio-political pressures, toward migration understood as a positive political practice.72

Sandro Mezzadra, further developing these lines of thought, suggests that the perspective of the AoM “means looking at migratory movements and conflicts in terms that prioritize the subjective practices, the desires, the expectations and the behaviours of migrants themselves.”73 For him, the approach illustrates “how the ‘politics of control’ itself is compelled to come to terms with a ‘politics of migration’ that structurally exceeds its (re)bordering practices.”74 Mezzadra proposes the idea of the ‘right to escape’ which seeks “to highlight the elements of subjectivity which permeate the migratory movements and which must be kept in mind if one wants to produce an

71 _{Yann Moulier Boutang, Grundrisse, Interview May 1992,}

http://www.grundrisse.net/grundrisse34/interview_mit_yann_moulierbouta.htm, Accessed 05/01/2014, my own translation.

72 _{Yann Moulier Boutang, ‘Europa, Autonomie der Migration, Biopolitik’, in Marianne Pieper, Thomas}

Atzert, Serhat Karakayalı and Vassilis Tsianos, eds., Empire und die Biopolitische Wende (Frankfurt: Campus, 2007), pp. 169-178.

73 _{Sandro Mezzadra, ‘The gaze of autonomy: capitalism, migration and social struggles’, in Vicki Squire,}

ed., The Contested Politics of Migration (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 121.

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image of these movements as social movements in the full sense.”75 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri capture the sentiment underlying the AoM when they state:

A specter haunts the world and it is the specter of migration. All the powers of the old world are allied in a merciless operation against it, but the movement is irresistible. […] The legal and documented movements are dwarfed by clandestine migrations: the borders of national sovereignty are sieves [...].76

The spectre of migration, the AoM suggests, does not adhere to traditional conceptions of the political to be political. For Angela Mitropoulos, ‘the Left’ tends to ignore the politicality of migration in order to “[reserve] for itself the semblance and definition of political struggle, movement, and representation”, thereby, however, recreating “the structure of the sovereign decision”.77 Important also for later conceptualisations of (migration) resistance, Mitropoulos suggests that the AoM forms “an insistence that politics does not need to be the property of the state and those who […] can claim to reserve for themselves the thought and action that is deemed to be properly political.”78 She further argues:

[The AoM] amounts to a challenge to the sovereign and representational disposition within what passes for the Left, to the very construction of what it means to be an activist, to do politics, and to recognise movements and struggles as such.79

Papadopolous, Stephenson, and Tsianos in particular advance the idea of migration as a spectre, as a creative and imperceptible social force that excessively escapes and subverts forms of control.80 In Escape Routes they argue:

[M]igration is autonomous, meaning that – against a long history of social control over mobility as well as a similarly oppressive research in the field of migration studies – migration has been and continues to be a constituent force in the formation of sovereignty. Engaging with the autonomy of migration is primarily a matter of acquiring a different sensibility [...].81

75 _{Sandro Mezzadra, ‘The Right to Escape’, Ephemera, 4:3 (2004), p. 270, emphasis in original.} 76 _{Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (London: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 213.}

77 _{Angela Mitropoulos, ‘Autonomy, Recognition, Movement’, in Stevphen Shukaitis, David Graeber and}

Erika Biddle, eds., Constituent Imagination (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2007), p. 131.

78 _{Ibid., p. 132.} 79 _Ibid.

80 _{Papadopoulos, Stephenson and Tsianos, Escape Routes, 2008, p. 2, p. 203.} 81 _{Ibid., p. 202.}

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For them, this sensibility allows to focus on the many forms of subversion that always occur when people move, and they do move, regardless of forces of control. These subversions need not be named or, rather, cannot be adequately named as, for Papadopolous et al, they constitute ‘escape’ which is “primarily imperceptible” and differs from ‘escape from’ as it is “only after control tries to recapture escape routes can we speak of ‘escape from’.”82 _{Imperceptible escape routes, then, are those paths that are} found or to some extent ‘made’ by those on the move and in transit, creatively, strategically and excessively. Elsewhere, Papadopolous and Tsianos suggest that the AoM thesis “is about training our senses to see movement before capital (but not independent from it) and mobility before control (but not as disconnected from it).”83 Responding to the charge that the AoM would often tend to romanticise migration, they state:

There is no space for romanticisation of nomadism and migration in the autonomy of migration approach. Migration grapples with the harsh, often deadly, realities of control. However, the point is migration is not just responding to them. Rather it creates new realities that allow migrants to exercise their own mobility against or beyond existing control.84

Papadopolous and Tsianos re-emphasise that migration is “not simply [...] a response to political and economic necessities, but [...] a constituent force in the formation of polity and social life” with “the capacity to develop its own logics, its own motivation, its own trajectories that control comes later to respond to, not the other way round.”85

Relatedly, Manuela Bojadžijev and Serhat Karakayalı argue that the idea of migration as

a ‘water-tap’ that could be turned on or off depending on countries’ economic needs for labour forces is flawed, as migration could neither be reduced to economic rationales

82 _{Ibid., p. xiii, emphasis in original.}

83 _{Dimitris Papadopoulos and Vassilis Tsianos, ‘After citizenship: autonomy of migration, organisational}

ontology and mobile commons’, Citizenship Studies, 17:2 (2013), p. 184.

84 _Ibid. 85 _Ibid.

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nor exhaustively directed.86 For them, instead of a ‘one-way-road’, migration conceived as autonomous allows to understand migration as emerging in social conflicts that inhabit new forms of cooperation, communication, life. They state:

The concept of the autonomy of migration connects to the persistence of migrant movements and the drive towards mobility on the basis of social networks. In the process of migration, migrants divest themselves of existing forms of sociality.87

For them, migration and its control need to be seen as processes intimately tied to the history of capitalism:

The first proletarians in Europe were mobile workers. They were people who had fled the feudal mode of production to work in the cities, and were chased across Europe as vagabonds, crooks, and the poor.88

In order to tame the ‘mob’, they argue, the proletariat’s societal integration became reinforced and “all characteristics that had been ascribed to them were transferred to the borders of the nation-state.”89 Complicating migration (control), for Bojadžijev and

Karakayalı means also overcoming the metaphor of ‘fortress Europe’ which would

simplify the processes and practices that give rise to “a complex system of limitation, differentiation, hierarchisation, and the differential inclusion of migrant groups.”90 For them, despite the complexification of a system of mobility control, the AoM approach allows “exploring migratory lines of flight as social movement in the intermediate zones, where migration slips out of the hands of regulative, codifying, and stratifying policies.”91

86 _{Manuela Bojadžijev and Serhat Karakayalı, ‘Autonomie der Migration: 10 Thesen zu einer Methode,’ in}

Forschungsgruppe Transit Migration, eds., Turbulente Ränder: Neue Perspektiven auf Migration an den Grenzen Europas (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007), pp. 209-215.

87 _{Manuela Bojadžijev and Serhat Karakayalı, 2010, ‘Recuperating the Sideshows of Capitalism: The}

Autonomy of Migration Today’, e-flux, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/recuperating-the-sideshows-of- capitalism-the-autonomy-of-migration-today /, Accessed 08/01/2014.

88 _Ibid. 89 _Ibid.

90 _{Bojadžijev and Karakayalı, ‘Autonomie der Migration’, 2007, p. 210. For a detailed elaboration of the}

concept of ‘differential inclusion’ see Mezzadra and Neilson, Border as Method, 2013.

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Similarly, De Genova detects in the freedom of movement a “defiant reminder that the creative powers of human life, and the sheer vitality of its productive potential, must always exceed every political regime.”92 Conceiving migration as possessing a “moment of independence vis-à-vis political measures seeking to control them” as Rutvica Andrijasevic et al note, speaks also to Ranabir Samaddar’s conception of autonomy as ‘governmentality’s other’.93 Samaddar notes that autonomy functions as a “symbol for the emerging patterns of new spaces in politics, spaces that speak of rights, and justice”.94 He proposes an understanding of autonomy as “practices that give birth to the political subject whose existence is in contradistinction to the existence of the governmental realities of this world.”95 In accordance with many AoM scholars, Samaddar ties autonomy to the idea of excess, for example when he notes that “autonomy always points to the supplement that remains after (the task of) government has been achieved.”96

Underlying these accounts of the AoM, only briefly pointed out, is the idea of migration as something excessive, always at work, actively transforming the social, making worlds, not as a collective subject or political party implementing political programmes or demanding political change, but as a multitude of people on the move changing politics. When migration is regarded as an autonomous force that “[changes] history by undermining the sovereign pillars of contemporary societies”, one can assume the AoM’s scepticism toward (the framework of) citizenship.97 Instead of calling for the expansion of citizenship and its capacity to include, as many advocates of Citizenship Studies do, Papadopolous et al suggest that the force of migration would “create new situations which cannot be conceived within the existing framework of citizenship”.98

92 _{De Genova, ‘The Deportation Regime’, 2010, p. 59.}

93 _{Rutvica Andrijasevic, Manuela Bojadžijev, Sabine Hess, Serhat Karakayalı, Efthimia Panagiotidis and}

Vassilis Tsianos, ‘Turbulente Ränder Konturen eines neuen Migrationsregimes im Südosten Europas’, PROKLA - Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialwissenschaften, 35:140 (2005), pp. 345-362, my own translation; Ranabir Samaddar, ‘The Politics of Autonomy: An Introduction’, in Ranabir Samaddar, ed., The Politics of Autonomy: Indian Experiences (London: Sage Publications, 2005), p. 10.

94 _{Samaddar, ‘The Politics of Autonomy’, 2005, p. 10.} 95 _Ibid.

96 _{Ibid., pp. 9-10.}

97 _{Papadopoulos and Tsianos, ‘After Citizenship’, 2013, p. 187.} 98 _{Papadopoulos, Stephenson and Tsianos, Escape Routes, 2008, p. 14.}

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Contrary to the conception of citizenship as a potentially progressive and emancipatory space, Papadopolous and Tsianos argue that it would “[operate] as a wall when it represents the ultimate horizon of political practice and social analysis.”99 Citizenship, for them, cannot be thought beyond sovereignty as “[t]he limits of citizenship are the limits of sovereignty”.100 However citizenship was defined, re-conceptualised, and re- interpreted, it would, Papadopolous and Tsianos hold, still function as a “form of governance that regulates the relation between rights and representation [...]; [t]his double-R axiom is the foundation of modern polity.”101 They note that the question of who can be understood as the subject of rights is intimately linked to representation, and while this relation is always shifting, it is citizenship that constitutes the ‘cut’:

Imagine a scale where we have on the one pole full rights and on the other complete illegalisation and invisibility. It is somewhere between these two extreme poles that a cut is placed. This cut is citizenship. [...] Citizenship [...] regulates the balance between rights and representation and renders certain populations as legitimate bearers of rights while other populations are marked as inexistent.102

Since citizenship, functioning as a political technology needs to place the ‘cut’ somewhere, they argue, all-inclusive citizenship would be a contradiction in terms, or, at least, could only materialise in a borderless world without nation-states.

The AoM literature, internally diverse as noted and therefore not straightforwardly generalisable, could be outlined only in broad strokes. The AoM has found widespread support as a political intervention that seeks to shift conceptions of migration as passive, highly dependent and controlled movements, to (moments of) independence and uncontrollability that are ascribed as inherent facets of human mobility. Migrants, then, are not simply subjected to pull and push factors, victimised or objectified, but regarded as protagonists who decide to move without (necessarily having) reducible motifs.

At the same time, the AoM has attracted critique, in particular with regards to its ascription of ontological primacy to mobility and the interpretation of ‘control’ as re-

99 _{Papadopoulos and Tsianos, ‘After Citizenship’, 2013, p. 179.} 100 _{Ibid., p. 183.}

101 _{Ibid., p. 181.} 102 _{Ibid., p. 182.}

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acting forces, leading to a growing concern of romanticising tendencies within the approach. Mezzadra, for example, argues that “we were not really successful in creating a satisfactory theoretical framework that allows to present ‘the Autonomy of Migration’ as an approach that does not lead to a romantisation of migration.”103 He criticises the tendency to counteract a negative depiction of migrants as exploited subjects with an image of migrants as the “cultural avant-garde of the present” and suggests that what he terms the “ambivalence of migratory practices” should become central in the AoM approach.104

Martina Benz and Helen Schwenken, while supporting the initial shift away from traditional perspectives in ‘migration studies’ that would objectify migrants, caution that the AoM subsumes heterogeneous migration practices and experiences to the idea of ‘autonomy’ and thereby re-establishes simplistic ‘state versus migrants’ conceptions.105 Arguing from a feminist perspective, Benz and Schwenken criticise a lack of nuance in AoM approaches to understand gender differences and unequal subject positions within migratory networks which are, at times, hierarchically organised and composed of multiple internal dependencies. For them, the assumption of the autonomy of migration and its ‘stubbornness’ as an emancipatory force romanticises and falsely unifies various migration experiences by recreating untenable dualisms as well as sidelining questions of sexism and racism.106

In a related critique, when reviewing Papadopolous et al’s work, Nandita Sharma problematises the assumed commonality amongst ‘escaping migrants’ which would illustrate a lack of subtlety when engaging with the subjectivities of those on the move.107 She points out that there “is the lack of importance paid to people’s

103 _{Sandro Mezzadra, ‘Autonomie der Migration – Kritik und Ausblick’, 2010, Grundrisse,}

http://www.grundrisse.net/grundrisse34/Autonomie_der_Migration.htm, Accessed 06/07/2014, my own translation.

104 _Ibid.

105 _{Martina Benz and Helen Schwenken, ‘Jenseits von Autonomie und Kontrolle: Migration als}

eigensinnige Praxis’, PROKLA - Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialwissenschaften, 35:140 (2005), pp. 363-378.

106 _Ibid.

107 _{Nandita Sharma, ‘Escape artists: Migrants and the politics of naming’, Subjectivity, 29:1(2009), pp. 467-}

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subjectivities” which would turn ‘imperceptible subjects’ into figures, not people.108 In this way, Sharma argues, similar to Benz and Schwenken, “migrants’ classed, racialized, gendered, sexualized, territorialized bodies, as well as people’s historical, geographical and metaphorical dislocations and relocations are emptied, both of people and meaning.”109 In her critique that certainly concerns many underlying aspects of the AoM, Sharma objects to the symbolic violence done to people on the move by turning them into romanticised symbols of escape and nomadism. She importantly notes:

[A]s with all forms of symbolic violence, it also ignores how the lives of many migrants are distorted, disfigured and often just plain destroyed, in the process of controlling them and containing their movements.110

The problem of seeing migration as a symbol without attuning to its complexities and ambiguities has been discussed in detail by Sara Ahmed who suggests that “[using] migration as metaphor, is to migrate from migration, such that it becomes an impossible metaphor that no longer refers to the dislocation from place, but dislocation as such.”111 For her, the many experiences that migration entails become either flattened out due to such ‘fetishism of figures’ or, at worst, generalised as a supposedly common experience in a (post-)modern ‘world of flow’ in which ‘we’ all now ‘are migrants’: “strangerness is not simply ontologised, but it is universalised as that which ‘we’ have in common, in the presumed universality of homelessness.”112

Anne McNevin also convincingly criticises the AoM and in particular Papadopolous et al for according ontological primacy to mobility while, at the same time, reading sovereign power reductively and narrowly.113 McNevin states:

The insistence on strategies that resist incorporation remains (ironically) reactive to the terms of sovereign power and fails to mobilise a genuinely alternative political

108 _{Ibid., p. 472.} 109 _{Ibid., p. 474.} 110 _Ibid.

111 _{Sara Ahmed, ‘Home and Away’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2:3 (1999), p. 333.}

112 _{Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters – Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 6.} 113 _{Anne McNevin, ‘Ambivalence and Citizenship: Theorising the Political Claims of Irregular Migrants’,}

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topography. The rejection of rights-based claims also comes with considerable political risks.114

For her, Papadopolous et al’s scepticism toward rights-based claims would miss the political potential of these claims. Mobilising the notion of ‘ambivalence’ that resonates in many respects with the Non-Citizen struggle followed in Chapter Three, McNevin ethnographically explores migrants’ rights-claims as inhabiting transformative political potential at the inside-outside junctures of sovereign order.115

Relatedly, Stephan Scheel seeks to contribute to the AoM literature by offering a (re- )reading of the notion of autonomy and by taking into account the embodied and relational nature of mobility that suggests diverse experiences of migration as well as existing inequalities in accessing resources “to realise [...] migration projects”.116 _For Scheel, by emphasising the primacy of migrant mobility, the AoM fails to realise the impact of the progressive technologisation of border controls, such as biometric technologies, on experiences of migration. For him, similar to Amoore’s argument, biometric border control practices have crucially changed “the encounters and power relations between migrants and border control authorities” as the latter do not any longer need to rely on the former’s “narratives as a source of truth”, significantly