Flüchtlingsströme against / and / or Wohlfahrtsfestung An Ecology of the So-called Refugee Crisis Tanja Nusser University of Cincinnati Abstract: The chapter investigates the connection between archives, ecology and the so-called refugee crisis� While it seems to be surprising that the so-called refugee crisis is articulated within the environmental and ecological concepts, this discursive framing speaks to broader issues at hand� The questions are what can be said and how can it be articulated, which articulations become statements that seem to be able to describe or define a situation� In this sense, the description of the so-called refugee crisis within concepts of ecology or / and environment have to be understood, as the chapter argues, within the Foucauldian notion of archive. Concepts like landscape or flows do not only shape our understanding of the so-called refugee crisis and the massive movements of people all over the world but also shape massively the discourse about the sociopolitical realities and as such function as part of an archive of what can be said and which realities exist� Keywords: refugee crisis, Human Flow, Ai WeiWei, archive, Zentrum für politische Schönheit, environmental metaphors, ecology Europe’s new border walls in this way make manifest an obdurate physicalist fact about ‘flows’ on land: they cannot be stopped, only routed. The seas, of course, are another matter: there, migrant flows can be dissolved, dissipated, even disappeared, as evidenced by the tens of thousands of migrants allowed to drown in the Mediterranean since the Arab Spring. (Brown 8) What is the connection between archives, ecology and the so-called refugee crisis? At first glance, this constellation seems to direct the gaze in different directions� However, as the following essay will argue, the debates about the so-called 198 Tanja Nusser refugee crisis in Europe are partly framed within the concepts of ecology and environment, as the motto of this essay already indicates. The massive ‘influx’ of people that is portrayed time and again as a flood or flow seems to not only threaten and change the understanding of the German nation as a (more or less) stable environment for its citizens but also seems to destabilize the definition of German citizens itself (as organisms living in and as part of the environment). Taking a closer look at different materials, I conceptualize the situation since 2015 from a relational standpoint that perceives the different materials like media, technologies, human and nonhuman actors (and so forth) as shaping and being shaped by the same environment; this means essentially that I try to show on the following pages how medial, sociopolitical and ecological environments are intertwined in creating our understanding and perception of the so-called refugee crisis� 1 While it seems to be surprising that the so-called refugee crisis is articulated within the environmental and ecological concepts, this discursive framing speaks to broader issues at hand. The questions are what can be said and how can it be articulated, which articulations become statements that seem to be able to describe or define a situation. In this sense, the description of the so-called refugee crisis within concepts of ecology or / and environment have to be understood within the Foucauldian notion of archive. The archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events. […] Far from being that which unifies everything that has been said in the great confused murmur of a discourse, far from being only that which ensures that we exist in the midst of preserved discourse, it is that which differentiates discourses in their multiple existence and specifies them in their own duration. (Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge 129) Nevertheless, before I further elaborate the topic of this essay, let me step back and take a closer look at the archival discourse to show why Michel Foucault’s relatively short description of the archive in The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language is important for the following pages. The past 20 years have seen an explosion of archival studies. Already in 1995, Jacques Derrida speaks of an Archive Fever (in French published 1994). Although he is not concerned with the multiplication and dissemination of the concept, the English title points towards a range of meanings the concept takes on (fever, in my reading, becomes a metaphor for a discourse that flames up or flares and becomes visible as neuralgic point). We speak, as Marlene Manoff highlights, of a “‘social archive,’ the ‘raw archive,’ the ‘imperial archive,’ the ‘postcolonial archive,’ ‘the popular archive,’ ‘the ethnographic archive,’ ‘the geographical archive,’ ‘the liberal archive,’ ‘archival reason,’ ‘archival consciousness,’ ‘archive cancer,’ and ‘the poetics of the archive” (11). Flüchtlingsströme against / and / or Wohlfahrtsfestung 199 We also talk about a film as archive, 2 and an archive of films, photography as archive and photographic archives, gestures as archives, archival records, electronic archiving, digital archives, “counter-archives” (Amad) and so on. I have to agree with Jacques Derrida: “nothing is less clear today than the word ‘archive’” (57). The multiplication of archives and archival structures and Derrida’s dictum in mind, his definition of archive becomes informative: for him, the function of an archive is “unification, […] identification, […] classification” but the function is also one “of consignation” (10). Consignation aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration. In an archive, there should not be any absolute dissociation, any heterogeneity or secret which could separate (secernere), or partition, in an absolute manner. (Derrida 10) Derrida sees the principle of the archive as “gathering together” (10). This definition harkens back to older definitions of the word archive. Originally, the word archive describes in the first place a collection of files, documents, material records as well as the place where this collection is being kept and preserved; 3 to be more precise: it is a ‘storage place’ for public documents, records, and testimonies (Kluge 51). The documents or materials being stored claim to be originals, foundational; they are the source, origin, reign and government (Archiv). Staying within this context or logic, an archive becomes also the space that places history as facts or creates an understanding of history based on documents as generating facts and a reality or version of reality. This means an archive is at the same time a collection as well as storage place, a generator of reality as well as a form of organizing knowledge and a spatial concept. Nevertheless, the idea that archives and the collected documents they house (be it texts, photos, films, artifacts and so on, and might the archive be a film, photos or other media) are capable of objectively documenting history, reality or the real (all concepts are problematic) is disputable; the factuality or truth claim (Steyerl; Gouigah 1) that is being attributed to archives has been questioned time and again. Archives have to be understood as subjective configurations of existing materials that are housed in a ‘container’ (it might be a digital storage space, a building, a shelf, a box and so on), which seems to adequately provide the space and room for this subjective configuration. An archive housing documents is also to a certain extent a forceful, even structurally violent organization of fragments that shapes understanding and a new reality (Dever 121). As such, the documents become part of a narration or construction that already questions both the status of the document and of reality. In the end (that is actually not the end) it can only be stated that “archives are eminently political, not only because of their nature and purpose but because of their dependence on a method of knowledge perpet- 200 Tanja Nusser uation at the heart of Western epistemology, namely writing or more generally material inscription” (Gouigah 128). The archival collection of material is also fundamentally connected to colonial attitudes and conquests: cataloging, naming, and giving the collected material a place within an order of things, hierarchical, exclusionary, and based on material objects taken out of time and context and only fragmentary, as well as organized from a Western-centric standpoint. Foucault now turns away from the concept of archive as either “the sum of all the texts that a culture has kept upon its person as documents attesting to its own past” (The Archaeology of Knowledge 128) or as “the institutions, which, in a given society, make it possible to record and preserve” (129). The archive, in his writings, becomes a concept that moves between being a method, way of thinking and space, and it becomes a system that defines what is enunciable (129). For Foucault the archive “is the general system of the formation and transformation of statements” (130) within a certain time. As Heath Massey points out: Foucault’s “archive is not a collection of written works so much as a set of rules or norms determining what can be said or written. […] In this way, the archive limits discourse” (Massey 82). This turn away from the archive as being and housing documents, a collection and storage place that seems to be capable of documenting history, towards a concept of the archive as an enunciation, or to be more precise an enunciability of statements that produce and restrict what we can know and say, and, to borrow a formulation from David Webb, as a “specific set of conditions for a given discourse” (117) is significant. It allows us to conceptualize the use of environmental and ecological metaphors describing the so-called refugee crisis as part of an archive in the Foucauldian sense that produces and restricts the field of that which can be formulated. Concepts like landscape or flows do not only shape our understanding of the so-called refugee crisis and the massive movements of people all over the world but also shape massively the discourse about the sociopolitical realities and as such function as part of an archive of what can be said and which realities exist� Wendy Brown’s formulation exemplifies exactly this point; while she argues that the border politics that forcefully inand exclude through building walls have to be understood as performative spectacles she also falls back on an established language of landscapes, flows and barriers when she writes about the movement of people: [T]he new nation-state walls are part of an ad hoc global landscape of flows and barriers both inside nation-states and in the surrounding postnational constellations, flows and barriers that divide richer from poorer parts of the globe. This landscape signifies the ungovernability by law and politics of many powers unleashed by globalization and late modern colonialization, and a resort to policing and blockading in the face of this ungovernability. (Brown 36) Flüchtlingsströme against / and / or Wohlfahrtsfestung 201 Interestingly, this use of environmental metaphors intersects, as Heath Massey puts it, with an understanding of the archive as “a geographical or topographical exploration, a mapping” (83) that tries to ‘discover’ the rules and regulations that make it possible that “one particular statement appear[s] rather than another” (Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge 27); it is not so much an archeological digging to uncover some kind of truth under the surface or subconsciousness of the text� 4 It is quite simply a process of a continuous transformation of knowledge or truth claims (Ebeling 221) and at the same time a diagnostic tool that “deprives us of our continuities” and “establishes that we are difference” (Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge 131). This means while on the one hand the archive is understood as transformative and as an exploration, on the other hand the use of environmental and ecological metaphors works against this exploration in restricting the field of the expressible. Before delving deeper into the use of environmental and ecological metaphors in the discursive framing of the so-called refugee crisis I want to take a step back to situate briefly my understanding of ecology and environment for this essay. I take Ernst Haeckel’s foundational formulation—“Unter Oecologie verstehen wir die gesammte Wissenschaft von den Beziehungen des Organismus zur umgebenden Aussenwelt, wohin wir im weiteren Sinne alle ‘Existenz-Bedingungen’ rechnen können. Diese sind theils organischer, theils anorganischer Natur” (286)—as a starting point for the exploration of the use of ecological and environmental metaphors and concepts within the different articulations, “statement[s]-event[s]” (Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge 129) centering on the so-called refugee crisis� In Fall 2017, Amazon released Ai Weiwei’s film Human Flow, which premiered in October 2017 for its Prime members (and was one of the films competing at the Venice film festival). Ai Weiwei filmed the documentary in 23 countries with the help of 200 crew members. The film was shot with different technologies; for example, cameras, iPhones, and drones. As one motivation for making the film the production notes state that Ai Weiwei “has said the crisis before us is not only the staggering number of refugees with nowhere to go right now but the temptation to turn away in a time that asks something of each of us� So he set out on a journey of his own” (“Human Flow. Final Press Notes” 3). The film “does not propose a solution” to current conditions; instead, “the intention is that it operates as a spark that, along with other sparks, might help light the flame of rethinking priorities and re-examining our capacity for compassion and creative problem solving” (6). However, I am not so much interested in the film itself or Ai Weiwei’s motivation to make the film or that it is an Amazon Studio Production. What caught my attention is the title: Human Flow� Taking 202 Tanja Nusser its cue from the film’s title, the essay circles around the word “flow” used in connection to humans, more precisely to refugees and migrants, as it has been increasingly used to discuss the massive movement of people in the world� Human Flow signals the movement of people as an unstoppable force� However, it also marks this unstoppable force as nature-like. Like water people will flow, starting as small creeks, coming together from different places, to unite into bigger rivers, into streams (this is the image that comes to mind). Not only does the title posit the movement of people or, to be more precise, refugees and migrants, within concepts of nature, but it also marks this movement as fluid, as uncontrollable. Fluids, as John Urry argues, for example, “demonstrate no clear point of departure, just de-territorialized movement or mobility (rhizomatic rather than arboreal)”; “move in particular directions at certain speeds but with no necessary end-state or purpose”; they might be “channeled along particular territorial scapes or routeways which can wall them in”; they “move according to certain temporalities, over each minute, day, week, year, and so on” and do not always keep within the walls — they may move outside or escape” (Urry 38). In her new foreword to the second edition of Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Wendy Brown argues in a similar direction when she points out that “great floods of migrating humanity, like any other kind of flood, inevitably breach or flow around walls and dams” (8): “they cannot be stopped, only routed” (15). Fluids, fluidity and flow have become important metaphors used in theoretical concepts to describe social movements and even more so the understanding of global interactions or “global fluids,” as John Urry puts it. He describes “global fluids” as “the remarkably uneven and fragmented flows of people, information, objects, money, images and risks across regions in strikingly faster and unpredictable shapes” (38). Fluidity, water, and metaphors that are connected to this metaphoric field need to be understood in their multiple meanings (Roe). To point out only a few of the images and areas that are discursively connected to concepts of fluidity: water can trickle slowly, unseen; will undermine and erode surfaces, territories; it floods huge areas, transports human goods, connects and divides people and is essential for survival� While the oceans have become the sites of human tragedy in the last years, fluidity is at the same time a concept that questions stability, and this means also the borders and boundaries of nations (Brown 36). However, fluidity also seems to signal unstoppable change and new forms to conceptualize global or cosmopolitan structures; it is also being used to describe the reality of millions and millions of people who leave their countries because of ‘catastrophic living conditions’ or of being reduced to bare life. These migrants or refugees are after all not perceived as global or cosmopolitical citizens; their flow seems to question partly the concepts of fluidity as they have been theorized in the last years, and if we follow the rhetoric that Flüchtlingsströme against / and / or Wohlfahrtsfestung 203 has been used again and again: Europe needs to fortify itself against this flood. Interestingly enough no clear-cut line can be observed of who uses the concept of fluidity in which manner. Academic discourses tend to position fluidity for both argumentative fields, whereas politicians as well as media outlets who are potentially more on the middle-right, populist scale and who fear foreignization or make politics by inciting this fear use it in the first meaning. More middle-left, nonpopulist newspapers or journals tend to use it again in both manners� Let me turn back to Ai Weiwei’s film Human Flow or, to be more precise, to its title again, to further elaborate the topic of the naturalizing discourse. Perceiving the movement of humans as flows indicates, as already mentioned, a multidirectional conceptual framework. The advertising materials to the film at the same time complicate and simplify the understanding of human refugees and migrants as an unstoppable natural force, highlighting that “65 million people have been forcefully displaced globally.” This statement or information (the reader has to decide how to understand the sentence) is contrasted on one poster with the statement that “70 countries built border fences and walls by 2017.” The center of the poster is framed by two additional statements� On the top of the page one sentence reads, in white letters superimposed on water with a man standing in a raft, “The refugee crisis by the numbers.” At the bottom of the page, a second sentence states: “It’s not a refugee crisis. It’s a human crisis — Ai Weiwei.” Ai Weiwei advertising material for the film Human Flow 204 Tanja Nusser Connecting these different pieces of information on only one of several posters with the title of the film (Human Flow), a complex but also ambiguous discursive field emerges that moves back and forth between global and national, flows and restriction, refugees and humans, numbers and lives, culture and nature without further developing how these different ‘positions’ are defined and how they are interconnected� Within this ping-pong game of catchwords, a subject is seemingly constructed that makes sense to those who are (even only basically) informed about the so-called refugee crisis. Mirroring the way newspaper headlines portray the ‘crisis,’ the material simplifies the situation. It does this even more so in the way the poster is designed. The information is monocausal and monological but circularly organized, borrowing its design from infographical depictions: arrows with text (upper half from left to right — following the Western tradition of reading, lower half from right to left and thus building a circle between both halves of the poster) point towards photos that seem to illustrate the message. However, while the photos seem to illustrate the sentences, they, in turn, can only be interpreted as showing a refugee camp and border patrols at one of the 70 countries because the sentences state information and produce meaning: the borders are being closed trying to stem the Human Flow� Interestingly, the different interpretational directions the title and poster of the film take us, in dispersing meaning while at the same time constructing a circular, monocausal logic, reflect the discursive field that has emerged in Germany since late 2015. In ‘reaction’ to the ‘flood of refugees’ but also anticipating the changes of German society, different levels of official and non-official rhetoric could be observed. While on the one hand the official rhetoric in 2015 constructed the image of an environment that could integrate and needed the refugees to evolve as a nation that defined itself not any longer as white, hegemonic, and so on, an Othering happened on the other hand and a rhetoric of crisis emerged, which argued that the stability of the German nation was threatened. It is striking how often newspaper articles use the word “Flüchtlingsstrom” or the plural “Flüchtlingsströme” in their titles: “IWF warnt vor Mega-Flüchtlingsstrom durch den Klimawandel” (Ettel and Tschäpitz, Die Welt); “Flüchtlingsströme in der Geschichte: Menschen waren schon immer auf der Flucht” (Harhermsen, Berliner Zeitung); “Flüchtlingsströme in Europa. Von wegen arme Afrikaner” (Busse, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung); “Flüchtlingsströme - Die Karte der Wahrheit” (Slominski, Journalistenwatch); “An der Drehtür der Flüchtlingsströme” (Schmid, Neue Züricher Zeitung)—to quote only a few of the headlines. While all the headlines allegedly only ‘label’ a situation — the massive movements of people — they already situate the following article (and none of the quoted articles uses the word “Flüchtlingsstrom” again in the text) within two different discourses. Firstly: Photos illustrating the newspaper articles connect Flüchtlingsströme against / and / or Wohlfahrtsfestung 205 the Flüchtlingsstrom to the crossing of the oceans by desperate people, trying to reach Europe in small boats or rafts with the help of smugglers. Water becomes visible as a metaphor that connects and translates into each other different and unrelated discursive fields and makes it possible to connect to a third metaphor which became very prominent in the 1990s and is increasingly being used again since 2016, characterizing the fear that Germany will decline or Germans will drown if more migrants and refugees come into the country: “Das Boot ist voll�” The second discourse is the more obvious one: similar to Ai Weiwei’s film title Human Flow, the newspaper headlines do naturalize the movement and portray it as an unstoppable force (even if this is not the explicit message) that cannot be controlled. Exactly here, the naturalizing discourse of flow and fluidity that erodes or has the capability to erode (not only sociopolitical) landscapes connects to another discourse and logic that positions “the old trinity of state-nation-territory” (Agamben 21) as a body and at the same time as a building and system (see for example the concept of “Wohlfahrtsfestung” (Slominski)) that needs to be protected and whose outer borders need to be fortified. 5 This understanding of the German nation as body, building and system positions the massive migratory movement of people as a threat to Germany. It might be helpful to consider the concept of a homeostatic balance to understand the implicit logic that informs positions that argue that Germany is threatened by these migratory movements. The concept of homeostasis was developed by Walter Cannon in 1929, and describes first and foremost a self-regulating system. The concept was very quickly picked up in biology and cybernetics and made it possible to describe systems within biological paradigms and biological entities within system-theoretical concepts� Homeostasis became a concept that refers to an inner milieu and its flexible stability. 6 Michel Foucault then used the concept to draw an analogy between the population of a state and the individual biological body, arguing that homeostasis aims at “the security of the whole from internal dangers” (“17. March 1976” 249). To secure the system, state or body regulatory mechanisms are needed — and all three have been conceptualized within this model of homeostasis and became — following the Macy Conferences (1943-54) and until the 1990s — insofar interchangeable as cybernetics and genetics used the same vocabulary and theories (Hayles; Bergermann). If we stay within this logic or theoretical frame and follow this certainly problematic transfer of the concept of homeostasis from an individual system/ body unto a population, then the question has to be asked how it can be protected in each of its cells (speak humans), and how all these activities are being coordinated? To that end Foucault introduced the concept of racism, through which the whole body/ the population is being fragmented, and “a biological-type caesura within a population that appears to be a biological domain” (“17. March 1976” 255) 206 Tanja Nusser is being positioned� Operating with concepts of norm and normality, a very troubling logic based on social Darwinian concepts is being established that makes it possible to single out the ‘abnormal’ and discard and or eliminate her/ him/ thems: “‘The more inferior species die out, the more abnormal individuals are eliminated, the fewer degenerates there will be in the species as a whole, and the more I — as species rather than individual— can live, the stronger I will be, the more vigorous I will be. I will be able to proliferate’” (Foucault, “17. March 1976” 255). Even if Foucault’s considerations are outdated today, the contemporary fear of Überfremdung (and it is telling that in English no equivalent word exists; one of the English formulations used is: “the fear of being flooded with foreigners”—which is telling in itself too) functions exactly within this logic of degeneration because it can attach itself to the discourse of decline or demise as it exists in Germany throughout the twentieth century (Etzemüller). Biopolitically speaking, the foreigner as the Other threatens the inner stability, not at least because —that is one of the fears voiced — Germans will not reproduce enough and will eventually die out. Now, the interesting thing is that Germany does not have to fortify its borders. In the ‘middle of Europe,’ it is protected by all the borders that other countries have erected in the last years� Zentrum für politische Schönheit The photo above is part of an online documentation about a political campaign/ art happening (depending how one wants to interpret it) organized by the Zentrum für politische Schönheit. The Zentrum für politische Schönheit decribes itself as Flüchtlingsströme against / and / or Wohlfahrtsfestung 207 an assault team that establishes moral beauty, political poetry and human greatness while aiming to preserve humanitarianism. […] It believes that Germany should not only learn from its History but also take action. The Center for Political Beauty engages in the most innovative forms of political performance artan expanded approach to theatre: art must hurt provoke and rise in revolt� In one basic alliance of terms: aggressive humanism. (https: / / politicalbeauty.com/ ) In 2014 the Zentrum für politische Schönheit moved fourteen white crosses, commemorating the people who died at the German/ German Wall between 1961 and 1989, “to their brothers and sisters across the European Union’s external borders, more precisely, to the future victims of the wall” (https: / / politicalbeauty.com/ wall.html). Zentrum für politische Schönheit People followed the call for action: travelling with busses to the Bulgarian border, they tried to destroy the barbed wire fence. 25 years after the so-called unification, the Zentrum für politische Schönheit brings two different situations into contact to question our as well as Germany’s stance towards Europe’s fortification. While most official reactions unsurprisingly condemned the political campaign/ art happening, I want to highlight two positions that grasped the dimensions of it. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung pointed out that the “campaign’s success consists in revealing the absurd effort with which German authorities and the Bulgarian police protect the European border — even from a few harmless art tourists. […] At the end of the day, the Center for Political Beauty revealed some unpleasant certainties: ignorance for the true problems” 208 Tanja Nusser ( https: / / politicalbeauty.com/ wall.html ). And the Erich Maria Remarque Society stated: This campaign plays off courage and imagination against inhumanity and a bureaucratic lack of imagination. It connects the memories of the Berlin wall to today’s reality of refugees in despair throwing themselves against barricades and barbed wire fences. […] ‘Being human did not count then, a valid passport was everything.’ This description of a refugee’s fate is more up to date than ever on a European continent isolating itself from refugees and willingly accepting the death of people in need� ( https: / / politicalbeauty.com/ wall.html ) While here the connection to the Berlin Wall is being made, the phrases “Festung Europa” (Leubecher, Die Welt; Deutsche Wirtschaftsnachrichten; Spiegelhauer, Deutschlandfunk; Spiegel Online), “Festung Deutschland” (Bielicki, Süddeutsche Zeitung) or “Deutschland, eine Festung? ” (Handelsblatt) actually refer back to another very important time in German history. “Festung Europa” was being used in World War II for the areas in Europe that had been occupied by Nazi Germany. While not everyone might be aware that the formulation has a history, the discourse that is being evoked is troublesome because it hints at the biopolitical dimensions of forceful, violent, murderous, nationalist exclusion� The materials presented position the refugees or migrants in a space that is defined on the one hand by metaphors of fluidity, of instability, of an undefined geographical location and as such an undefined environment, and on the other by fortification, closed borders, nations, an environment that excludes them from being part of it. Being discursively positioned, for the lack of a better word, in a definitional inbetweenness, “the refugee,” as Agamben argues, “should be considered for what it is, namely, nothing less than a limit-concept that at once brings a radical crisis to the principles of the nation-state and clears the way for a renewal of categories that can no longer be delayed” (21). Or, as Asian Dub Foundation in their song Fortress Europe state at one point: “This generation has no nation.” While so far refugees or migrants have been conceptualized within a discourse of fluidity, we now become aware that the global situation in itself becomes fluid and the environment of the nation becomes unstable in its historical trajectory if we consider it from a relational standpoint. The medial, sociopolitical and ecological environments pull the so-called refugee crisis into different directions and make it into a human crisis that is not located within nation states, even if they try to reestablish themselves again and again (and in such follow exactly a performative model of reinscription unto the surface of the body to produce some ‘inner truth’—this would be the Butlerian model) as such in global times (Brown). Flüchtlingsströme against / and / or Wohlfahrtsfestung 209 However, as part of a media-ecological system or of the mediascape as Arjun Appadurai describes it—“both viewers and images are in simultaneous circulation. Neither images nor viewers fit into circuits or audiences that are easily bound within local, national, or regional space” (Modernity at Large 4)—media themselves are globally migrating, moving, dispersing and ever shifting or changing (depending on the other scapes that influence each other) while at the same time working on momentarily producing a temporally-spatially organized or localized meaning. It is and can only be momentarily stable because “(a) ethnoscapes; (b) mediascapes; (c) techno-scapes; (d) finanscapes; and (e) ideoscapes” 7 as “deeply perspectival constructs” (Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference” 296) produce a fluidity that negates the possibility of stable definitions and principals on which some kind of cosmopolitical or global ethics or politics could be based� Ai Weiwei’s film poster then essentially becomes the image for the inability to form stable definitions, stable borders, stable nations or stable human communities. Or to phrase it differently: it shows the instability of environments and of archives in the Foucauldian sense. Ai Weiwei film poster 210 Tanja Nusser An extreme high-angle shot by a drone camera shows dispersed people standing or moving in a nondescript desert-like space overlaid by the title Human Flow� However, the title does not show the flow, the masses; it shows (even if they are not recognizable) individual humans. Nevertheless, in combining a concept of fluidity and an image of sand/ desert the sent message is twofold: 1) these spaces are more or less uninhabitable, and 2) they defy geographical/ cultural as well as historically established borders. Going back to Ernst Haeckel’s foundational definition that ecology is concerned with the relationship of the organism to its surrounding external world or, phrased differently, its conditions of existence (286), the material presented makes it impossible to define or even describe the relationship of the migrants or refugees to their environment or their conditions of existence� At the same time, the relationship is marked by a lack or absence of a structure or system that is quintessential for defining the environment (understood here also as the framework that in return defines the organism within it). The fences thematized earlier in the essay are the delineations of exactly this absence and mark the refugees as liminal figures in the Agambian sense who are always already a discursive, medial, and sociopolitical part of the fortress, even if Europe works hard on expelling them or restricting them discursively through using the mentioned metaphors, concepts, and images� Turning back to the beginning of this essay, the environmental and ecological metaphors that I explored are part of an archive that positions “the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events” (Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge 129). Employing these metaphors (even those of fluidity) fence in the liminal figure and constrain him/ her/ them in a non-place that is nevertheless a place defined by ‘our’ archive that speaks for and defines refugees as refugees, and positions them as other� Notes 1 For the relational understanding of an ecological thinking see Hörl; Latour. 2 “The cinema’s central role as entertainment does not preclude its intimate relation with new epistemologies, its inextricability from the reorganization of knowledge taking place in modernity. For photographic media offered new standards of accuracy, memory, knowability. The cinema, unlike fairs, vaudeville, and magic theater, requires a permanent inscription, an archival record� While all of these forms celebrate the ephemeral, it is cinema which directly confronts the problematic question of the representability of the ephemeral, of the achievability of presence.” (Doane 24) 3 “Archiv n. ‘Sammlung von Schriftstücken, Urkunden, Akten, Aufbewahrungsort einer solchen Sammlung’, entlehnt (15. Jh.) aus gleichbed. Flüchtlingsströme against / and / or Wohlfahrtsfestung 211 spätlat. archīvum, einer Nebenform von lat. archīum, anfangs noch häufig in lat. Form. Zusammensetzungen wie Landesarchiv und Stadtarchiv sind im 17. Jh., Reichsarchiv im 18. Jh. bezeugt. Lat. archīum führt auf griech. arché͞ion (ἀρχεῖον) ‘Regierungsgebäude, Behörde, Amt’, das von griech. archḗ (ἀρχή) ‘Anfang, Ursache, Ursprung, Herrschaft, Regierung’, einem Verbalnomen zu griech. árchein (ἄρχειν) ‘der erste sein, vorangehen, anfangen, herrschen’, abgeleitet ist (s. ↗ Archaismus, ↗ Architekt, ↗ Hierarchie sowie die Vorsilbe ↗ Erz-). Archivar m. ‘Betreuer eines Archivs’; nach Archivarius (1. Hälfte 17. Jh.), gebildet aus Archiv mit der lat. Endung -ārius, setzt sich Archivar von der Mitte des 18. Jhs. an mehr und mehr durch. archivalisch Adj. ‘die Archivalien betreffend, urkundlich’ (2. Hälfte 18. Jh.). Archivalien Plur. ‘in einem Archiv aufbewahrte Schriftstücke’ (Anfang 19. Jh.), gebildet mit der Pluralendung -alien (aus lat. -ālia) nach Mustern wie ↗ Naturalien (s. d.). archivieren Vb. ‘Schriftstücke in ein Archiv aufnehmen’ (Mitte 19. Jh.).” (Archiv) 4 We must, in Foucault’s terms “grasp the statement in the exact specificity of its occurrence; determine its conditions of existence, fix at least its limits, establish correlations with other statements that may be connected with it, and show what other forms of statement are excluded� We do not seek below what is manifest the half silent murmur of another discourse” (The Archaeology of Knowledge 28). 5 I agree with Wendy Brown’s statement that the concept of fortification was in the early 2000s mainly used by the Left as “derogatory term for restrictive EU immigration policy towards non-Europeans” to become in the middle of the 2010s “the affirmative rallying cry of a growing European right” (7). 6 This self-regulation can also be connected to the second and third thermodynamic theorems, as Norbert Wiener’s and Stanislaw Lem’s considerations illustrate (representative for a bigger discourse). Norbert Wiener argued in the 1950s that processing of information in biological or mechanical systems can be understood as a process of organization that works against the tendency of entropy in isolated systems as it is formulated in the second thermodynamic theorem� As such it interprets the information transported in a message as “essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability.” (21) To be able to conceptualize processes of information as organization that works against entropy, Wiener needs to assume that living beings and machines can be explained within the same parameters. In his opinion the attempt to control entropy presumes feedback mechanisms� Only these mechanisms enable “to control the mechanical tendency toward disorganization; in other words, to produce a temporary and local reversal of the normal direction of entropy” (25). Feed- 212 Tanja Nusser back means in this context the capability of machines (as well as humans) to react in an “actual performance rather than its expected performance” (24) to situations. However, the concept of organization can also mean, as Stanisław Lem argued, that contrary to the third thermodynamic theorem biological evolution always strives to reach a higher order/ organization (Lem 47—74). 7 “The suffix scape allows us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes, shapes that characterize international capital as deeply as they do international clothing style” (Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference” 297). “These landscapes thus are the building blocks of what, extending Benedict Anderson, I would like to call ‘imagined worlds,’ that is, the multiple worlds which are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe” (296—97). Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Means without End: Notes on Politics. 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