The Politics of Stasis
I was born in Romania and, in the past 20 years, I lived in 7 different countries. When I say lived, I mean anywhere between 1 and 4 years. the hardest question, and the most frequent, I am asked is: “Where are you from?” Recently I made up a standard answer: “I was born in Romania… and there are 6 countries in between then and now.” Roughly less than half of those who ask hear and process the second part of the sentence. I always wonder what happens when you move? Because, in fact, we are all moving. Here is a first possible theoretic answer to that question.
Many thinkers concerned themselves with the paradox of movement and identity, that is: movement is becoming, therefore can one keep one’s identity if one moves? The question is power laden, because identity generates/ creates legitimized affiliation to a political-administrative unit always comes with rights and obligations, advantages and disadvantages, and also with the assertion of the supremacy of one particular identity over the others. Before the nation-state, the choice was apparently simpler. In the XVth century, Gennadius, the patriarch of Constantinople, wrote the following:
“Although I am Hellenic by language, I would never call myself a Hellenic, because I do not share their belief. I would like to call myself according to my faith;therefore, if somebody asks me what I am, I would answer: a “Christian”. Although my father lived in Thessaloniki, I do not consider myself a Thessalian, but a Byzantine, because I belong to Byzantium.”
For Gennadius, a man of the church, religious affiliation prevailed; however, when one balances the language against the territory, the latter wins. Moreover, it is the lived space, and not the pater space, that gives shape to identity. Amin Maalouf solves this paradox in a fairly romanticized form at the beginning of his novel Leo Africanus:
“I, Hasan the son of Muhammad the weigh-master, I, Jean-Leon de Medici, circumcised at the hand of a barber and baptized at the hand of a pope, I am now called the African, but I am not from Africa, nor from Europe, nor from Arabia. I am also called the Granadan, the Fassi, the Zayyati, but I come from no country, from no city, no tribe. I am the son of the road, my country is the caravan, my life the most unexpected of voyages.”
This fragment points out to both the importance of movement, and the fluidity of identity in the process of moving. Reading these fragments makes one believe that our societies were more accepting of blurred borders before the advent of the nation-state. We are all on the move, however today’s politics favour static identities over moving ones — settled bodies over migrating ones. This happens perhaps for the simple fact that the unmoving bodies are easier to administer.
Maybe a more fundamental concept, that of human being, is questioned once we consciously engage in the practice of moving, migrating, crossing over… and will be (hopefully) gradually replaced by that of the “human being in becoming”. This shift would be a chance to transform the space of the politics of stasis that constitutes the current norm in the administration of beings, into a place for fluidity, movement and change, in which politics would serve the becoming — or at the least it would point to its possibility. It would mean in fact the emplacement of politics, its movement from today’s space of techno-politics concerned with administering the numbers of the bodies present, towards tomorrow’s political place that follows the quality and the transformations of each of the mobile subjectivities.
Thinking in movement, and movement thinking may point to solutions for our multiple global crises. The questions may turn on their head. We may stop questioning the mobile of migrant persons, or assigning them different value based on the answers (i.e. are they refugees? are they economic migrants? and what are they searching for here? are they just moving because they are privileged?). We may question instead how did immobility became the norm? and why is it a privilege, and a legitimizing means to claim territory? (i.e. I have been here for more than you…).
In doing so, not only that we would allow space for the vast possibilities of encounter while moving, but we would re-evaluate the predominant negative connotations we give to words that indicate persons on the move. As a starter, it worth trying at least to think who do we accept, and who do we not accept to move, and why, in what context, and under what circumstances.
