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Signs of Life: Visibility and Woomera2002, Angela Mitropoulos.

Recently, "illegal immigration" was listed in a Defence Department White Paper as a "non-military threat to our national life". Around the same time, the Department of Immigration announced a campaign of "saturation surveillance" extending from the northern coastline to well outside Australian territorial waters, and the systematic use of biometrics in the implementation of 'border protection'. And so, if you happen to cross a line drawn on maps but not on the seas, and if you do so without the necessary papers, everything you do is watched and recorded in detail, in one way or another. From the very first blip and flash on the radar screens of military patrols signalling the presence of your boat, reports are sent to the highest levels of Government and your every move is photographed and videotaped. Where it is possible for messages to be sent from the vessel you are on—such as the Norwegian freighter the MV Tampa—the Defence Signals Directorate monitors those communications.

In the internment camps, there are floodlights—like those in football stadiums—to ensure that night cannot hide anything you do from the cameras and guards. Here you are, again, photographed and videotaped constantly, with cameras situated throughout. You are also subjected to biometric testing: you will be fingerprinted, your voice is recorded to check accent and dialect, swabs and body samples can be taken to examine your DNA. Every protest you make, any resistance to your internment is filmed and studied to single out 'troublemakers'. If you are registered as a 'troublemaker', you are likely to be put into an isolation unit, which also functions as a 'round-the-clock observation unit. You may also be denied a visa and deported under the conformist provisions of the "character test": "the applicant will not pass the character test if [they] … incite discord in the Australian community [or] … become involved in activities that are disruptive."

In one way or another, all the techniques which can record the movements of your body, all the instruments which can be used to document and inspect the sounds and gestures that someone alive can make, are deployed in a bid to halt that movement and fix an identity sufficient to process you through the classifying machinery of migration policy—asylum seeker, refugee, migrant, unlawful non-citizen, illegal, persona non… Biometrics and surveillance systems are the modern technological accessories of the (also modern) 'refugee determination process', a means in a larger methodology which compels you to prove—over and again and to everyone you speak with—that you have endured a sufficient and very particular kind of suffering, and that you are therefore worthy of release from arbitrary imprisonment.

The criteria of the Refugee Convention—drafted in the post-World War II and Cold War period—favour Eastern European athletes and blithely encourage nationalist identification; but they rule out most of the reasons for movement and flight today, such as wars, famine, environmental disasters, desertion, the flight from nationalism. Which is to say, they rule out speaking of the proximate connections between migration and the rotting and restoration of particular global capitalist arrangements, such as the geopolitical strategisings over oilfields in the Middle East and their nomadic and increasingly insurgent workforce or the relationship between the IMF's Structural Adjustment Programmes and wars, famine and slaughter. You cannot remain silent; but are bound to speak. Still, do not speak of economics. Speak only of persecution, a limited set of persecutions. You can—in fact, you must, because this is a condition of your release from internment—be reduced to an object which can be watched and pitied, examined by molecular biologists, the military, lawyers, chemists, Ministerial advisers, psychologists, migration officials and tribunals and the entire array of audio-visual and biometric technologies at their disposal. But you cannot be a 'troublemaker', a subject capable of action and decision. You must learn patience and passivity, roll yourself into an inert object which others act upon, watch, test and make decisions about.

This is what being recognised, acknowledged and classified as a refugee entails: being enclosed by a narrative which, at best, can prick consciences and, at worst, serves to render those who fail to be granted a visa (or who are rendered ineligible to make an application with the slur of child-chucking) as pushy and manipulative of that same conscience when they protest that enclosure. This narrative is not so much bipartisan as it is dominant. It can be expressed as either support for internment—as Ruddock did when he suggested that "the more you say you are prepared to compromise because of behavioural issues, the more people will misbehave" [1] —or it can be articulated as a way of distancing oneself from, and implicitly chastising, what are seen as immoderate or unmanageable forms protests.

In either case, rebellion is stripped of any political-economic reference, complex meanings and agency. Instead, such revolts—when they are not simply presented as an enigma—are depicted as the acting-out of the traumatised or the dissolute, ultimately warranting chemical restraint and counselling and explained through psychological motifs as inherent to the individual or as extraneous to the system of internment, that is: as originating from some foreign cultural inclination or place.

When tolerance is posed as a question, compassion presented as a demand, or when one is granted the authority to welcome—in short, when one is granted the power to make decisions over the life of another—the object of this decision will always be treated as an object, however benevolently on occasion. 'Refugees are welcome'—only those with (aspirations to) such power speak in such a language. So many debates before the Festival of Freedoms [2] which hovered around these issues, so many debates after. Does the fence-line (and the border) provide a means to distinguish between, on the one hand, protesters, activists, politics and, on the other hand, refugees, victims, psychology? What does it mean when both some organisations which claim to speak 'for refugees' [3] and the Minister for Immigration mobilises the same constructs: "The protesters have incited inappropriate behaviour." [4] Yet, no matter how much such terminology dominated the airwaves, with Woomera2002 being organised through autonomous networks and thereby having ruled out the means by which such debates could be resolved, they were deliberately held in tension and without the assumed finality of collective decree, thus leaving a space open for the arrival of the immediate, unexpected and untrammelled. [5]

Conditions of visibility

Just as I and many others made our way back from Woomera over the Easter break, the Department of Immigration (DIMA) announced a shortlist of architectural firms who would vie for the contract to design new internment camps, one of which would be located in Brisbane. DIMA's media release indicated a shift in the architectural design, if not fact, of internment. It encouraged the firms toward innovation, providing "an opportunity for architectural organisations participating in the design process to showcase their talents and potentially earn international recognition in an environment where the illegal movement of people around the world is a growing international problem." [6]

When it comes to innovations in the architectural design of places of confinement, there is none more famous than Jeremy Bentham (1748-1842), reformist lawyer, founder of utilitarianism and designer of the Panopticon. The Panopticon is a constant, all-seeing surveillance mechanism. In Bentham's particular and original version, this was a tower located in the centre of the prison, with the cells arranged in a radial fashion around it and in such a way that they could be viewed by an 'inspector' who, in turn, remained invisible to them. Prisoners would know they were under constant surveillance, yet could never be sure whether they were at any given time, thereby introducing psychological uncertainty (or 'reasonable paranoia') as an means of control and voyeurism as the conduit of power.

Since Bentham, the Panopticon—or rather, the forms of control that it inaugurated—have become routine. And, just as the camera has increasingly replaced the central tower, Australia's new internment camps are already implementing electronic solutions to the problem of maintaining and enforcing control. [7] Electronic fences rather than the unseemly barbed wire and spiked bars that encircle Woomera, Maribyrnong and Villawood will surround the new camp at Baxter near Port Augusta. Electrified fences cannot be pushed over and dismantled as easily; and yet, above all, this particular innovation is directed at the escalating sense that Woomera and places like it are concentration camps—not the fact that they are [8], but the visual sense that they are. In other words, the aim of such innovations in confinement is not only to produce more effective forms of internment, but to render obsolete images which delegitimise the grounds of policy (of faces behind barbed wire) and the circulation of images of intractable resistance (of the scaling and dismantling of those same fences). [9]

When, post-Tampa, the Government instructed Defence media liaison staff to only distribute those photographs and videos to the media which did not 'personalise' undocumented migrants, this specifically meant editing out those images which showed people's faces and, in particular, their eyes. When we look into the face of a stranger, we recognise something that is not so strange after all. Unlike Bentham's Panoptic inspector, hidden from the eyes of those whom it interns and seeks to control, we recognise that the stranger can return our gaze, is capable of looking at us and bringing into question our responses and responsibilities in that relationship. What we recognise, in this instance, is not that we can see another before us, but that we can see one another. What this encounter calls out from us and how this affects us—this is the shaky ground upon which communities, politics, love and our sense of self are created and altered. In a philosophical register, this meeting between strangers is the prototype of all ethical questions, dilemmas and risks.

And so, an impromptu rendezvous between strangers and through fences turned into the great escape, and immediately it was a question of hiding rather than showing, stopping camera crews from filming, swapping clothes, blending into the anonymity of the crowds, remaining silent and in the darkness as police ringed the perimeter, established a roadblock to do identity checks on those travelling in cars down the single road, and rumours were sent flying for the entire night that the police would raid the campsite. Inside the internment camp, many were still fighting, eventually subdued by batons, tear gas and chemical restraints. It took well into the next morning before the authorities could establish how many and the identities of those who had escaped. There were, of course, those few who saw it as a chance for more visibility, photo ops with escapees who had little say in the matter, loud chanting that worked like a magnet for the police, and the distribution of information as the currency of political authority—not because it was effective, or rather because it was effective in achieving something else that was deemed more important. Nevertheless, that this happened as little as it did, that for the most part freedom was regarded as more important than spectacle, and that the circulation of images of resistance were considered to be more powerful than any fiction of command, indicates the lines of flight which connected for a moment at woomera2002. [10]

Kneel down and you will …

For some time—so long perhaps that few sense that such things are contingent—many Leftists have seen themselves as charged with the task of bringing things to light, of undoing ignorance with knowledge and of speaking of that which remains unspoken. Yet, we can easily discern from recent events that knowledge of the facts has not meant an erosion in support for the policy of internment, or indeed a challenge to the belief that "they are throwing their children at us" [11] or capable of doing so. There has never been a lack of visibility, knowledge or speech on this issue. On the contrary, the experience of internment is that of identification rather than anonymity, constant surveillance, the obligation to speak and reveal all, bright lights that blot out the darkness, and (not least) instruments which enhance the vision of power, right down into the very molecules of life itself. Rarely has a week passed in the last three years where the struggles in the internment camps have not been apparent on the nightly news, even if in those images they were rarely depicted as struggles. But, still, the theory of inadequate vision, knowledge and speech persists, as both explanation and solution. Either the solution posed to every problem is that of more visibility and speech, better more accurate knowledge; or it is deployed as an explanation for the continuing existence of the camps: surely, if people could only see, if they could only know that terrible things were occurring, then things would be different.

In that sense, this approach has not been about what might work to shift support for the internment camps or to compose an opposition to their existence. If that were the case, it would have become apparent quite soon that, in the same period of time, the more often such arguments were expressed the greater the political rewards of being tough on boat arrivals. To put it another way, the more many critics of government policy, unreflectively or deliberately, positioned themselves as the philosophical heirs of Bentham, the more they worked to strengthen support for government policy. Having proffered a particular theory of the relationship between knowledge and action, where knowledge is cast as decisive and eminent, of the need for more vision and more light, those critics spoke less the language of a desire for things to be otherwise than they betrayed a belief in the virtues of social management, albeit a more progressive kind. Difficult as it is to recall that Bentham was, in his time, far from being a conservative, it is important to note that the Panopticon was Bentham's solution, as a progressive, to the growing problem of prisoner revolts, sincerely offered as a more humane way to control prisoners than by brute force.

But what was never at issue for Bentham, just as it is not put into question by many critics of government policy, is the division between knowledge and action, between the one who watches and the one who is watched, and the very act assigning oneself in the role of bringing salvation and light to the unfortunate peasants of the Carpathian mountains. While there are those who relish the role of inspector and supervisor, most people's daily experience is of being inspected, supervised and managed, sometimes as intrusively as those in the camps are. For if Bentham represents the genesis of surveillance as a means of controlling prisoners, Frederick Taylor (1856-1915) represents the introduction of detailed surveillance as an instrument of management in the workplace. [12] Taylor was the founder of scientific management, the study of the movements of workers' bodies in relation to the time it took for each, detailed action, with the aim of making such movements (production) more efficient. The development of a field of knowledge about such movements was crucial to the growth of supervision and management in the 20th Century, in particular the management of assembly line production. Through the 20th Century, the use of surveillance as a technique of control expanded out from the prison to the workplace and, more recently, to the streets. Even leaving aside that those who locate themselves on the side of knowledge and call for more visibility echo a widespread means of social control (of workers, of undocumented migrants, of young people on the streets), there is no evidence that knowledge of something terrible might lead to social change. For instance, no one has really asked the question, troubling as it is, whether the increasing use of images of suffering people in the camps might be—for some or for many—more enjoyable than scandalous, more confirming of racism than of change. [13]

In addition to asking questions about the kinds of images being circulated and what work they do, the question of the relationship between belief and action remains. The pervasive use of surveillance indicates that what people think is less threatening to social order than what people do. Actions—especially daily routine actions—are what shapes beliefs and reality. For instance, it does not matter whether someone believes in capitalism or thinks it ought to be abolished, they can still reproduce it in their actions, in the trivial customs of waged work, shopping, and so forth. Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), concerned with the erosion of religious orthodoxy by modern liturgical practices and the like, argued that "we must kneel, pray with the lips, etc." in order to believe. For Pascal, the ritualisation of the act was the basis for belief and preceded it as its condition: "Proofs only convince the mind. Custom is the source of our strongest and most believed proofs." [14] That is: it is through habit that belief materialises.

For us today, there are numerous customs, and few more routine than the election of the Federal Parliament. In the sense described above, xenophobia and populism were not used in the last Federal Election for political advantage. Rather, the act of a national election always sets nationalism in motion, materialises it, irrespective of any given version. It is not easy to recall an election when xenophobia was quite so explicit as that of the last election. Nevertheless, it is also true that a Federal Election in which no one claimed that they best represented 'the national interest' is unthinkable. When the original Federal Government sat in 1901, one of the first pieces of legislation it passed was the 'White Australia Policy'. When Bentham applied his utilitarian precepts to the issue of Poor Law Reform, working out what was good or bad in terms of what would increase the general happiness of the greatest number of people, he simply elevated the calculus of the election into a philosophical principle. Bentham's definition of 'the people' extended only to voters, which in Bentham's time only included landowners. In other words, the only people's happiness that is of concern are voters, in today's terms: citizens.

Amongst those gathered for Woomera2002, everyone engaged in acts of disobedience. When Australian Protective Services made their first serious attempt to move people from the campsite, the first chant that went up was 'No jurisdiction'; the second, after they had failed to make any arrests: 'You've lost control'. Everyone trespassed by simply camping where they did, hundreds helped others to escape and countless have harboured escapees. In the Adelaide Magistrates' Court, as the judge 'released' escapees on bail to be sent back to internment, and with a handwritten note stuck onto the back wall which read "justice = freedom", he twisted around on the bench so that he could not see the note and as little of those who had packed into the courtroom as possible. After some time, he began informing those before him that he had no control over the Department of Immigration: he was releasing them on bail, DIMA were sending them back to the camps. (Recall that internment is extrajudicial.) In South Africa, just before the apartheid laws fell, judges would dismiss the charges against those that had committed acts of disobedience or would fine them the equivalent of a dollar. For bad laws to continue to exist, it matters, above all, that everyone accepts the tautological command to obey the law because it is the law. It does not really matter if anyone disagrees with the internment of undocumented migrants; for as long as most continue to act as if they should, they will be.

Overland 2002.

Notes

1. Cited in the Age, 8 January 2002.
2. Woomera2002 - autonomadic caravan & festival of freedoms: http://woomera2002.com
3. Just before Woomera2002, South Australian Justice for Refugees (a coalition of Church groups and lawyers) released a statement saying that it did not support the protests. Unofficially, the reasons given to journalists for this were that this action might 'incite' detainees to protest. Just two days prior to this release, detainees had protested inside Woomera after failing to be given assurances that they would not be separated from their children. SAJR is among those groups campaigning for the removal of children and it does not campaign for the closure of the camps.
4. Department of Immigration media release, March 30 2002.
5. Similarly, the attempts by the Woomera Area Administrator to move the campsite to a disused football oval, 5kms away and surrounded by a high fence, were frustrated by the absence of anyone capable of negotiating on everyone's behalf. Police instructions to move on under the threat of arrest were delayed by the police having to return with 50 photocopies of the statement and read it to every single person there.
6. DIMA media release, April 3 2002.
7. Similarly, proposals have been floated to use electronic bracelets as a substitute for internment, or rather to accomplish internment and control with methods which are cheaper and which decompose resistance to border policing through the atomisation of undocumented migrants and the dislocation of protests. This follows the trajectory of 'labour market reforms': casualisation, the decomposition of the large-scale assembly line and 'mass factory' production methods.
8. Concentration camps are not defined by their architecture or fencing, but by their legal form. That is, concentration camps are spaces in which those who are interned have no rights vis-à-vis the state that interns them and such internment is outside the usual terms of confinement: the laying of charges, trial, the presumption of innocence, etc. In Australia, the Government interns 'suspected unlawful non-citizens'. In Germany in the 1930, the Government stripped German Jews of their citizenship as a prelude to their internment.
9. See http://melbourne.indymedia.org/
10. Or rather, connected again, having initially come together through autonomous networks of s11 (the protests against the World Economic Forum in Melbourne in 2002).
11. This phrase comes not from recent accusations made prior to the Federal Election, but from a science fiction novel, Dune. They are spoken by the Baron Harkonnen in an attempt to persuade the Emperor of the difficulties of fighting a colonial war against an insurgent indigenous population who do not conduct themselves with decency.
12. F. W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, New York, Harper Bros., 1911. 13. Although, the use of digitally-lip-sewn models by Australian Style suggests a lurking fascination more pornographic than rebellious.
14. B. Pascal, Pensees, nos. 250 and 252 - first published: 1670. Available at http://www.orst.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/pascal/pensees-contents.html