Migrants Epistemologies: smooth/striated perception and collective knowledge production among transit migrants in Morocco

Migrants Epistemologies: smooth/striated perception and collective knowledge production among transit migrants in Morocco
Contribution to Summit strand “Knowledge and Migrancy”, Charles Heller, 18.05.07.

Introduction:

I would like to talk about « migrants epistemologies », from the perspective of my recent research and video Crossroads at the Edge of Worlds on transit migrants in Morocco, which was produced in the frame of the Maghreb Connection project .

Now what might “migrants epistemologies” be? One might think of epistemologies that migrate or of epistemologies that are specific to migrants. It is this second meaning that I would like to probe, asking how migration affects forms of knowing the world. After analysing transit migrants in Morocco’s social formation, I will argue that they develop a knowledge that both allows their circulation and is produced by their movement in space. This knowledge is defined by a “smooth/striated” perception and its collective production, and entails a collective belonging beyond the nation. I believe these espitemological transformations may influence our research in important ways today, if we wish to contribute to understanding globalization in general and specifically to augmenting possibilities of life and action within globalization.

Let me start with an introduction on the experience of migration and its epistemological implications.

Salman Rushdie’s eloquently describes the experience of migration:
«A migrant, traditionally, suffers a triple disruption: he looses his place, he enters into an alien language, he finds him self surrounded by beings whose social behaviour and codes are very unlike, and sometimes even offensive to his own. And this is what makes migrants such important figures: because roots, language and social norms have been three of the most important parts of the definition of what is to be a human being. The migrant denied all three, is obliged to find a new way of describing him self, new ways of being human.»

Despite his eloquence, Rushdie can not make us forget that the “new way” of describing his of her self and of being human that migrants forge, are often even more conservative then before they had left their countries. To take a historical example, Swiss emigrants of the 19th century continued to harbour their beloved cross, and feast the then recent national day in their American colonies. Today, Arjun Appadurai reminds us that “displacements and exile, migration and terror create powerful attachments to ideas of homeland that seem more deeply territorial than ever.” Migration then, does not in any simple and immediate way entail liberatory forms of being or of perceiving the world.

The experience of migration may also be lived as a burden. Enzo traverso, an Italian historian who’s book “la pensée dispersée” (or “scattered thought”) is based on a reading of the epistolary exchanges of the germano-jewich intelligentsia during and after the second world war gives us several examples. In a 1933 letter, Walter Benjamin writes: “Life among emigrants is unbearable, a solitary life in no longer bearable, and it is impossible to live among the French. All that is left is work, but nothing threatens it more then knowing it so distinctly as the only interior resource.”
But Traverso, inspiring himself from Georg Simmel also sees another side to this entstrangement. It may also entail an “epistemological privilege”: a heightened awareness, a capacity to see that to which others remain blind . “By the simultaneously interior and exterior gaze that he has on society, the foreigner is in a better place to have a critical, nonconformist perspective, which escapes conventions and received ideas.” It is to this epistemological privilege that he attributes exiled intellectuals capacity to perceive the specificity of Nazism and Totalitarianisms. Of course the experience of displacement is not in itself sufficient to explain great thought. And this experience of this liminal position may be considered constitutive of the work of the historian who must belong both to the past and the present, or of the anthropologist relation of participating exteriority to the societies he or she studies, independently of if they are migrants or not. None the less, the concrete experience of displacement may intensify this position, and migrants ability to work from and describe it.

The both exterior and interior position of migrants in society is a recurrent theme throughout the writings of numerous authors throughout the 20th century, who believed migration implied fundamental changes for being in and perceiving the world, and thus for the production of knowledge. I believe that migrants today enact new changes that I would like to address through my research on transit migrants in Morocco.

Transit migrants in Morocco:

Transit migrants in morocco were made “famous” after the massive crossings into the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla of September and October 2005. Then their multinational and self organized camps -which are paradigmatic of this enlarged perception and belonging- gained attention. These have since been destroyed. But their complex, deterritorialized, multinational, social formation which emerges from progressive collective circulation trough the Maghreb continues to exist, particularly in cities such as Rabat. I would like to show an excerpt from my video, which predates these events.

Crossroads video:
(bus station streets by night)
Mehdi Alioua:If they really want to have the connexion, to support them selves while waiting to continue, they must go to the cities. It’s in the cities that there are the most migrants and the smuggling networks.

Voice over: Descending the bus lines, a new infrastructure awaits them, one maid of and by people.

Mehdi Alioua:They do not know the basics, such as: how do I get there? Which neighbourhoods should I avoid? What are the basic names? And so they must rely on their “brothers”, members of migrants collectives. It is true this circulation, this accumulation of small favours, that the circulation is organized collectively and that a collective identity is shaped, that of the adventurers.

(going down into slums)
Mehdi Alioua:They live in the neighbourhoods where people clustered as a result of the rural exodus, hoping to find better living conditions. So they live among people who come from all over Morocco, who had to adapt to the city, and who have a feeling of clandestinity. In a sense they resemble Sub-Saharan migrants.

Voice over: The slums cosmopolitan population, and its unstable legal status -oscillating between constant threats of destruction and integration-, allows migrants to find a temporary refuge. Here their deterritorialized network converges in a more stable social assemblage.

(in apartment)
Nigerian migrants: I left my country to Niger, from Niger spent some years in the desert, suffering, battering, travelling by jeep, drinking water, we had nothing to eat, before I left with my brothers.
We met after Agadez, on the jeep to Libya. We met people from Cameroon, Ghana, Mali, Senegal -plenty people-, we became brothers. Eating the same food, drinking the same water, we became brothers.
All these people you met, do you keep contact with them? Yes. By telephone? By telephone.
With those that live in Rabat or also other places? I still call those in Oujda.
You have friends in Laayoune? Yes, and in Casablanca.
We are now one family. We left our homes. We can eat here, eat together, play together, because we are just like a family now.

As we see here transit migrants often spend several years circulating in West Africa and the Maghreb before arriving in morocco. They may not have initially formulated the project of crossing into Europe, but for instance work for a few months in Libya, move on to Algeria where they may find work as well. They are very good at exploiting geographical differences of economic development or of jurisdictions. For instance Malians do not need visas to enter Algeria, Senegalese to enter Morocco, so other migrants may buy or rent their passports. But as we have seen with the example of Rabat, they also infiltrate local geographical differences such as the slums. During their journey they progressively form a collective network. Today the epistolary network that linked the scattered Jewish intelligentsia has been replaced by cellular phones and the Internet. As Mehdi Alioua underlines it is though this shared information network, and their collective circulation through space, that is bred the common identity of the “aventuriers.” Now I want to look in more detail at three characteristics of this complex social formation in relation to knowledge production: their smooth/striated perception, their collective knowledge production, and their common belonging.

Smooth/striated perception:
Appadurai writes that today more people then ever before seem to imagine routinely the possibility migrating. Imagination here is not just a counterpoint to the certainties of daily life, but the formulation of new social projects. But what is the nature of the space imagined? To answer this question I must attempt to imagine the imagined, from the practices of migrants described above. Transit migrants seem to perceive space as smooth, open to their potential migration. But simultaneously they remain deeply conscious of the forms of mobility control that continue to structure space, and are always alert to instrumentalize geographical differences such as income, or jurisdictions, to their own ends. Transit migrants eyes then, perceive a paradoxical world without borders, but in which boundaries remain salient as potential threats or tools to be exploited. Theirs is a smooth/striated perception.

Collective production of knowledge:
Indissociable of the perception that informs the knowledge produced by transit migrants, is the collective process of its formation. Today the epistolary network that linked the scattered Jewish intelligentsia has been replaced by cellular phones and the Internet. Now this collective production is not “open source”, or defined by the free access and distribution of a collective “pool” of knowledge. Mehdi Alioua explains that information becomes a resource in a mixed capitalist and gift economy. “Sometimes it is paid for, a passport, a meeting with a smuggler. But most of the times one has to gather information through ones brothers. Generally information is not really paid for, but one knows that the day one receives a more important payment, one will have to remember ones brothers: one buys them a bit of food…”

Enlarged belonging:
We have seen that transit migrants, through their collective circulation and the sharing of knowledge, produce a common belonging, beyond the nation. But is it simply possible to say that the belonging of migrants is cosmopolitan, in the sense of a belonging to the world? Although it clearly explodes the borders of nations, their belonging is also much more limited, and specific then “the world”. Theirs is not some kind of angelic common humanity, but a very practical belonging and organisation in function of a community of fate. Their social formation remains to a certain extent amorphous, flesh-like, forming a common living substance that resists the fixed positions and functions of formal political bodies. But it has also been the basis for more formal organizing into collectives. The collectives politically organize beyond the community of fate formed by migrants as alliances are formed with NGOs from Morocco and other countries who take part in their struggle. Migrants and NGOs have understood that when migration control has gone transnational, it is necessary for those who oppose it to do the same.

Conclusion:

What can we conclude from these contemporary transformations in perception, shared knowledge production and belonging?

We should interrogate closely the expanded belonging enacted by transit migrants. It may help us to not make wishful thinking calls for cosmopolitanism, and see how transnational solidarities and forms of action actually come into existence. Clearly the inescapable fact that our community of fate is global, is not yet perceived by all. Today, ours is a forced common belonging, lived primarily negatively : we live a forced commonality of labour, of ecology, or in face of terrorism. But facing these common problematics we are still unable of formulating a positive project to reapropriate out forced commonality.

This is maybe exactly where the epistemological mutations and the collective process of knowledge production enacted by transit migrants are important. If we wish to understand contemporary transformations we must also adopt their paradoxical smooth/striated perception of space, for it structures the actions of number of actors that lie at the core of globalisation. Is such a perception not used by the mobile networked factories, which circulate the globe in their fine-grained exploitation geographical and juridical differences? It seems then that globalization is both a material phenomenon and a perception, both mutually constitutive of each other. It imposes to those that want to act within it as well those who wish to understand it a kind of epistemological mutation. It demands of our vision to no longer be obstructed by national boundaries, to perceive an open space yet scan its complex structuring. Making ours this perception is on the one hand a precondition to contribute to developing tactics for practices of liberation within globalization. On the other hand, by underlining the transnational nature of number of phenomenons today, we may emphasise the fact of our forced community beyond national borders. The emergence of a common belonging from transit migrants collective process of knowledge production and sharing within a mixed capitalist and gift economy should also retain our attention.

In short, inspiring ourselves form the epistemological mutations and the collective process of knowledge production enacted by transit migrants we may contribute to the struggle in the definition of globalization -between oppression and liberation – through tactic indicators, but also participate in the emergence of new political subjects that will actually lead this struggle. I believe then, that migrants are not simply people one should pity, or defend, but that we may actually learn from them in order to think and act in globalization.