This book offers a much-needed new political theory of an old phenomenon. The last decade alone has marked the highest number of migrations in recorded history. Constrained by environmental, economic, and political instability, scores of people are on the move. But other sorts of changes-from global tourism to undocumented labor-have led to the fact that to some extent, we are all becoming migrants. The migrant has become the political figure of our time.

Rather than viewing migration as the exception to the rule of political fixity and citizenship, Thomas Nail reinterprets the history of political power from the perspective of the movement that defines the migrant in the first place. Applying his "kinopolitics" to several major historical conditions (territorial, political, juridical, and economic) and figures of migration (the nomad, the barbarian, the vagabond, and the proletariat), he provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary migration.

Auteur

Thomas Nail

Contenu

Contents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThe Introduction lays out the objectives of the book as a whole. Given the contemporary importance of migration, this book develops a political theory of the migrant. In particular, the aim is to overcome two problems: the migrant has been predominantly understood from the perspective of stasis and the state. If we want to develop a political theory of the migrant itself and not of the migrant as a failed citizen, we need to reinterpret the migrant first and foremost according to its own defining feature: its movement. This allows us to conceptualize the emergence of the historical conditions that give rise to the different types of social expulsion that define the migrant and to diagnose the capacity of the migrant to create an alternative to its social expulsion. 1The Figure of the Migrant chapter abstract This chapter defines "the figure of the migrant" as a political concept that identifies the common points where mobile figures are socially expelled or dispossessed as a result, or as the cause, of their mobility. The movement of the migrant is thus not simply from A to B but the constitutive condition for the qualitative transformation of society as a whole. This chapter defines the migrant as a figure, which is not a fixed identity or specific person but a mobile social position. One becomes a figure when one occupies this position and may do so to different degrees, at different times, and in different circumstances. The figure of the migrant, for example, is like a social persona that bears many masks (the nomad, barbarian, vagabond, proletariat) depending on the relative social conditions of expulsion. 2Kinopolitics chapter abstract The history of the migrant is the history of social motion. This chapter defines and lays out the logical structure of social motion or "kinopolitics," the politics of movement. Instead of analyzing societies as primarily static, spatial, or temporal types of entities, kinopolitics or social kinetics understands them primarily as "regimes of motion." Societies are always in motion: directing people and objects, reproducing their social conditions (periodicity), and striving to expand their territorial, political, juridical, and economic power through diverse forms of expulsion. This chapter introduces three key concepts to understanding social motion: flow, junction, and circulation. In this way, it is possible to identify something like a political theory of movement. In particular, this chapter argues that the migrant is defined by two intertwined social motions: expansion and expulsion. 3Centripetal Force chapter abstract This chapter analyzes the first type of social expansion by expulsion: centripetal force. The first historically dominant type of expansion by expulsion can be described as a centripetal social force because its dominant motion is inward-toward the creation of the first stable social centers on the earth's center-less surface. Since centripetal social force is primarily concerned with accumulation, territorial expulsion remains an indirect phenomenon. Nomads were not first expelled because they were foreigners or social inferiors. Rather, the type of expulsion proper to territorial kinopower creates a centripetal remainder: leftovers-that which is not territorially accumulated. The figure of the nomad is simply expelled because there are not enough territorial flows left over for them, and they are in the way. 4Centrifugal Force chapter abstract This chapter analyzes the second type of social expansion by expulsion: centrifugal force. This force emerges historically alongside the ancient empires of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Political or centrifugal kinopower expands the curved movements of territorial control into a completely enclosed circle, brings all its stock into a shared resonance around a central axis, and radiates outward. It adds to the system of curved, centripetal expansion a system of concentric, centrifugal expansion and produces a new figure of the migrant: the barbarian. Territorial kinopower expands by creating a stock and expels only certain plants, animals, and people (nomads) as an indirect consequence: as an unaccumulated, aterritorial remainder. 5Tensional Force chapter abstract This chapter analyzes the third type of social expansion by expulsion: tensional force. This force emerges historically alongside the feudal societies of medieval Europe. This type of kinopower is "juridical" in the kinetic sense in which law binds the movement of social beings to one another and to a certain social condition or territory. Tensional migratory expulsion occurs when these juridical linkages are severed and release a social flow: vagabondage. However, just as easily as this network of juridical linkages can be dissolved, so the links can be reassembled into new circuits. Internally, juridical kinopower expels peasants and debtors from their legal right to the land and expands legal power by criminalizing them as vagabonds. Externally, juridical kinopower expels foreign peoples through war, colonialism, and kidnapping and expands its legal power by colonial legislation: the encomienda. 6Elastic Force I chapter abstract This chapter analyzes the fourth type of social expansion by expulsion: elastic force. This type of kinopower comes to dominance during the sociohistorical period between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries and can be kinopolitically defined by the emergence of a newly dominant force of social motion: elasticity. This elastic force is a specifically "economic" type of kinopower in the sense that economics strives for the free arrangement and movement of things to and fro with a minimum of territorial, political, or juridical restrictions and with a maximum of equilibrium. The migrant proletariat is the spectrum of the proletariat that is economically expelled as a mobile social surplus. This chapter and the next analyze the specific social technologies of expulsion and mobilization that give rise to a variety of such migrant proletarian subjects and expand economic kinopower, including enclosures, capitalism, and eighteenth-century workhouses. 7Elastic Force II chapter abstract This chapter continues to analyzes the fourth type of social expansion by expulsion: elastic force. Not only is a migrant proletariat created through an intensive expulsion-enclosures, capitalist valorization, and workhouses-in order to increase competition and production, but it is also produced through an extensive expulsion via penal transportation, emigration, and denationalization. The chapter describes the forms of external expansion by expulsion in their intensive forms (the Atlantic slave trade) and their extensive forms (British colonialism in Ireland and North America). 8Pedetic Force chapter abstract The migrant has many different figures. The nomad, the barbarian, the vagabond, and the prole…