Even then, and even by people with no interest in undermining the value of the virtual, the distinction between physical and virtual was confusing. Rheingold himself reinforces the boundary of body relations @@ -890,7 +890,7 @@ alt="Accept My Cookies, biscuits and bows for the performance." />
This thesis is an assemblageI live somewhere in the margins of scattered references, footnotes, citations, examinations embracing the inconvenience of talking back to myself, to @@ -983,24 +983,22 @@ transparency, universality, and underlying violence.
In the third and last chapter, I bridge the written text with the ongoing project that runs simultaneously as part of my graduation work in Experimental Publishing, where I mainly speak through my prototypes. -Talking documents are performative bureaucratic text inspections, vocal -and non-vocal, that intend to create temporal public interventions +Talking documents(5) are performative bureaucratic text inspections, +vocal and non-vocal, that intend to create temporal public interventions through performative readings. The intention is to underline how the vocalization of bureaucracies as a tool can potentially reveal their territorial exclusive function and provide space for the invisible vulnerability.
“on the other side is the river and I cannot cross it on the other -side is the sea I cannot bridge it” (Parra, cited by Anzaldua, 1987, -p.139)
-How a border is defined? How, as an entity, does it define? How is it performed? I used to think of borders in a material concrete way, coming from a country of the European South that constitutes a rigid, violent border that repulses and kills thousands of migrants and refugees. In the following chapter, I will attempt to explore the terrain of material borders in relation to bureaucracy as another multi-layered filter.
-![Front-facing camera at self-counter in LIDL]
What constitutes a border? Is it a wall, a line, a fence, a machine, a door, an armed body or a wound on the land? When somebody crosses a border are they consciously aware of the act of crossing? I am crossing @@ -1029,8 +1027,7 @@ bordering device that demonstrates in a way itself. Crossing and borders are inherently defined in relation to each other. “Where there is a border, there is also a border crossing, legal as well as illegal” (Khosravi, 2010).
-I started thinking about hospitality as a cultural behavior and as an inseparable term in the context of borders due to a recent personal bureaucratic experience. Hospitality can be instrumentalized to describe @@ -1054,13 +1051,21 @@ permission for a short-term postal address while declaring the addresses of my current hosts [4/02/2024]. I gathered the required documents, I processed a 9-page-text and another one with the personal data of my hosts and myself and answered questions about:
-why don’t I have a house, who are the people who host me, what is my -relationship with them, where do I sleep, where do I store my -belongings, how many people are hosting me and accordingly their -personal data, for how long, why I cannot register there, what days of -the week do I stay in the one house and what days do I stay in the other -house, whether and how am I searching for a permanent place and what is -the tangible proof of my search?
++why don’t I have a house,
+
+who are the people who host me,
+what is my relationship with them,
+where do I sleep,
+where do I store my belongings,
+how many people are hosting me and accordingly their personal +data,
+for how long,
+why I cannot register there,
+what days of the week do I stay in the one house and
+what days do I stay in the other house,
+whether and how am I searching for a permanent place and
+what is the tangible proof of my search?
All these questions provoked thinking around the concept of conditional hospitality as a behavior of the state towards strangers. I can see that on a smaller scale it is being applied to the hospitality I @@ -1073,10 +1078,12 @@ seems that forms of knowledge are inseparably related to forms of power. It will take 8 weeks for my request to be processed and for the government to approve or reject if I deserve my friends’ hospitality.
++“Today as yesterday, her land and her time are stolen, only because -she is told that she has arrived too late. Much too late” (Khosravi, -2021)
-w a i t i n g
+she is told that she has arrived too late. Much too late”
+(Khosravi, 2021) +
Waiting can be considered as a dramaturgical means embedded in bureaucratic procedures that camouflage power relations through the manipulation of people’s time. When people are in the middle of a @@ -1140,38 +1147,15 @@ a v e r i g h t s ”
(Arendt, as cited by Khosravi, 2010, p.121) What about the crossers who managed to travel and reach the desirable “there”, the ones who transcended the borders and the control checks of the ministries of -defenseOne of the tactics for regulating -or preventing the so-called unproductive hospitality is border control -checks. According to the website of the Ministry of Defense of the -Netherlands, “the Royal Netherlands Marechaussee (RNLM) combats -cross-border crime and makes an important contribution to national -security. Checks are still performed at the external borders of the -Schengen area. In the Netherlands, this means guarding the European -external border at airports and seaports, and along the coast. By -participating in Frontex, the European border control agency, the RNLM -makes an important contribution to the control of Europe’s external -borders in other EU member states. There is one single EU external -border.” (Border Controls, 2017), the ones who enter but do -not own papers, the paperless? What does it mean to be documented and -what is inefficiently documented within a territory? They are threatened -if they get caught by authorities and also according to the official -narrative, they threaten. Since the physical mechanisms of bordering did -not succeed in repulsing them, the bureaucratic border appears as an -additional layer of filtration. The undocumented are non-citizens, they -might be crossers or burnersI would like -to refer to the practice of Harragas introduced by my friend Rabab as a -counter-act of dealing or breaking or burning the multilayered borders. -The burners or Harragas is a term alluding to the migrants’ practice of -burning their identity papers and personal documents in order to prevent -identification by authorities in Europe. Crucially this moving out is in -defiance of the bureaucratic rules and their elaborate visa systems. -Those who engage in harraga, ‘burn’ borders to enter European -territories. “They do not, however, burn the bridges to the people and -places they depart from. To these, they keep all kinds of links. For, as -they burn borders, they don’t move away from their place of origin. -Harraga is about expanding living space” (M’charek, 2020)., -both, or even none. “Undocumented migrants and unauthorized border -crossers are polluted and polluting because of their very +defense(7), the ones who enter but do not own papers, the paperless? +What does it mean to be documented and what is inefficiently documented +within a territory? They are threatened if they get caught by +authorities and also according to the official narrative, they threaten. +Since the physical mechanisms of bordering did not succeed in repulsing +them, the bureaucratic border appears as an additional layer of +filtration. The undocumented are non-citizens, they might be crossers or +burners(8), both, or even none. “Undocumented migrants and unauthorized +border crossers are polluted and polluting because of their very unclassifiability” (Borelli, Poy, Rué, 2023). The loss of citizenship, denaturalisation, makes somebody denaturalised, they are rendered unnatural. “Citizenship has become the nature of being human” (Koshravi, @@ -1203,9 +1187,8 @@ I will not stop talking about democracy. Democracy is the rule of law where everybody feels included. Democracy is a rule of law where everybody feels * We, undocumented people, we don’t feel a sense of belonging from the system.”
-Apart from the rigid visible borders, bureaucracy related to migrants, refugees and asylum seekers can also constitute an in-between less visible borderland. I used to perceive bureaucracy as an immaterial @@ -1248,10 +1231,8 @@ protection and who does not. They operate as systems that classify non-citizens and place them in a social hierarchy of disproportionate unequal obligations, lack of rights and access to institutional support.
-While I had this inherent concern about borders and bureaucratic structures in relation to migration, I decided to start zooming in and explore my own bureaucratic surroundings through my personal lens. As a @@ -1272,14 +1253,17 @@ institutions lies in the level of unawareness regarding surveillance via multiple bureaucratic rituals that (re)produce docile behaviors. How these mechanisms are masked and standing in the margins of the visible nonvisible sphere.
+“This is what makes it possible, for example, for graduate students -to be able to spend days in the stacks of university libraries poring -over Foucault-inspired theoretical tracts about the declining importance -of coercion as a factor in modern life without ever reflecting on that -fact that, had they insisted their right to enter the stacks without -showing a properly stamped and validated ID, armed men would have been -summoned to physically remove them, using whatever force might be -required.”, (Graeber, 2015)
+to be able to spend days in the > stacks of university libraries +poring over Foucault-inspired theoretical tracts about the declining +> importance of coercion as a factor in modern life without ever +reflecting on that fact that, had > > they insisted their right to +enter the stacks without showing a properly stamped and validated ID, +> armed men would have been summoned to physically remove them, using +whatever force might be required.”
+(Graeber, 2015) +
The genuine essence of education is not bureaucratic at all, neither does it have to fit and ground its foundations under a bureaucratic roof. “The pedagogical process runs counter to the hierarchical, @@ -1291,9 +1275,12 @@ other.“Students and staff are treated as human capital” (Cunningham, 2017). This determination can dehumanize people involved, like when “faculty-as-labor” and “students-as-consumers” are marginalized and treated as just variables.
++“there is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a -document of barbarism” -Walter Benjamin- (Pater, 2021)
-t h e d o c u m e n t
+document of barbarism”,
+Walter Benjamin +
From fences and armed police to nation-state mechanism of less-material bordering to bureaucracy to the elements of bureaucracy to the document itself as the minimum unit of an apparatus. Understanding @@ -1306,8 +1293,8 @@ bureaucratic apparatus is something more than a metaphor it is also a symbol. It is hard to see that there are many more layers beneath the purpose it propagates. A metaphor that is so perfectly materialized as well as naturalized that you cannot even see it.
-The bureaucratic apparatus can be considered as something more than an infrastructure that organizes institutions, markets, states, etc. It can constitute itself an institution, a textual institution. As the @@ -1322,8 +1309,7 @@ element of bureaucracy. Language can become a shroud to conceal the violence and reinforce hierarchical structures and simultaneously can be transformed into the rigid rational cell itself. They shape their own narratives, they reflect the institutional narratives.
-One of the great powers of bureaucracies is their ability to render themselves transparent. It seems that bureaucracy does not have to say anything more beyond itself, is self-referential and self-contained. It @@ -1357,8 +1343,8 @@ define them under specific perspectives. Why do they ask for this information instead of others? “Why place of birth and not, say, place where you went to grade school? What’s so important about the signature?” (Graeber, 2015)
-There is a great materiality in bureaucracies. Bureaucratic procedures are often compared to a labyrinth which appears as a similarly complex structure constituted by simple geometrical shapes @@ -1374,10 +1360,12 @@ administrative objects that the design aspect of these artifacts appears to be invisible? The material decisions applied as well as the material constraints attributed to the document can transform or produce different textual meanings and consequently understandings.
+“This does not mean that constraints limit meaning, but on the contrary, constitute it; meaning cannot appear where freedom is absolute or nonexistent: the stem of meaning is that of a supervised freedom”, (Roland Barthes, 1983)
+
When I encountered the green logo of the municipality of Rotterdam I did not cultivate any feelings of enthusiasm or even boredom. A big calligraphic “R” with the flawless green ribbons that penetrate it on @@ -1395,14 +1383,17 @@ biscuit. She used the same color blue scheme and she placed the biscuit form inside the same standardized dimension folder 229x162 mm with the same transparent layer that reveals my name and surname. According to literary critic and theorist Katherine Hayles:
+“to alter the physical form of the artifacts is to change the act of reading and understanding but mostly you transform the metaphoric and symbolic network that structures the relation of world to world. To change the material artifacts is to transform the context and circumstances for interacting with the words, which inevitably change -the meaning of the word itself. This transformation of meaning is +the meaning of the word itself. This transformation of > meaning is especially possible when the words interact with the inscription -technologies that produce them” (Hayles, 2002).
+technologies that produce them”,
+(Hayles, 2002) +
In the latter case, the inscription technology used is the sugar blue paste and the handwriting of Chae. The text in the white-blue government document forces a different reading from the white-blue biscuit @@ -1426,8 +1417,8 @@ alt="The birthday biscuit that Chae made, re-creating the Dutch government form" -
This chapter is mainly a constellation of some prototypes I created while writing and coping with personal bureaucratic challenges. I provided some further space for my anxiety by unpacking and exploring @@ -1493,7 +1484,7 @@ experiments - closely related to language as well as the performative “nature” of these texts themselves. I was intrigued by how transforming the material conditions of a piece of text could influence the potential understandings and perceptions of its meaning.
-Title: “Quality Assurance Questionnaire Censoring” When: October 2023 Where: XPUB studio wall Who: myself
@@ -1591,13 +1582,16 @@ phone. The recording was transcribed by voskVosk is an offline open-source speech recognition toolkit. and myself and a small booklet of our passport readings was created. +“So the object here is like not by random it comes from the history of nation-states and how nation-states and nationalities created like a form of identity. So nation-state is actually a recent invention that came into existence over the last two hundred fifty years in the form as we know it nowadays, in the form of democratic capitalism, before like monarchies and so on and each citizen of such a nation-state got also -kind of a particular identity”, Joseph says about his ID card.
+kind of a particular identity”,
+Joseph says about his ID card. +
We read the embedded signs, symbols, categories, texts, magical numbers in our passports that construct our profiles. Seeing someone’s passport, ID cards, visas, travel documents might mean that you are able @@ -1653,10 +1647,10 @@ elements of these processes.
-I expanded the “play” by incorporating additional “scenes” sourced again from the documents accompanying the ongoing “conversation with the government”. Two weeks after submitting my application for a short-term @@ -1695,11 +1689,8 @@ people to share, vocalize, talk through, read out loud, amplify, (un)name, unplace, dismantle the injurious words of these artifacts.
-As I sit in the waiting area at the gate B7 in the airport preparing to come back to the Netherlands, I am writing the last lines of this text. I am thinking of all these borders and gates that my body was able @@ -1710,48 +1701,58 @@ multifaceted borders and get crossed and entrenched by them, but on the contrary we start interrogating and shouting at the contexts and the frameworks that construct them and render them invisible, natural and powerful.
-Agamben, G. (2000) Means without end: Notes on politics. Minneapolis,
-MN: University of Minnesota Press. Anzaldua, G. (1987) Borderlands - la
-Frontera: The new mestiza. 2nd ed. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books.
+MN: University of Minnesota Press.
+Anzaldua, G. (1987) Borderlands - la Frontera: The new mestiza. 2nd
+ed. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books.
Austin, J. L. (1975) “lECTURE VII”, in How to do things with words.
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-Translated by M. Ward and R. Howard. Hill & Wang. Border controls
-(2017) Defensie.nl. Available at:
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-and Rué, A. (2023). “Governing Asylum without ‘Being There’: Ghost
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-https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci12030169] Butler, J. (1997) Excitable
-speech: A politics of the performative. London, England: Routledge.
+Oxford University Press, pp.83-93.
+Barthes, R. (1983) Fashion system. Translated by M. Ward and R. Howard.
+Hill & Wang.
+Border controls (2017) Defensie.nl. Available at:
+https://english.defensie.nl/topics/border-controls
+Borelli, C., Poy, A., and Rué, A. (2023). “Governing Asylum without
+‘Being There’: Ghost Bureaucracy, Outsourcing, and the Unreachability of
+the State.” Social Sciences, 12(3), 169. [DOI:
+https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci12030169]
+Butler, J. (1997) Excitable speech: A politics of the performative.
+London, England: Routledge.
Cretton, V., Geoffrion, K. (2021). “Bureaucratic Routes to Migration:
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+Cunningham, J. (2017), “Rhetorical Tension in Bureaucratic University”,
+University of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
+Graeber, D. (2015) The utopia of rules: On technology, stupidity, and
+the secret joys of bureaucracy. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House
+Publishing
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+Introduction days (2021) Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences.
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https://www.rotterdamuas.com/study-information/practical-information/international-introduction-days/Tuberculosis-test/
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+and Borders. Malmö University, Faculty of Culture and Society.
+Khosravi, S. (2010) “illegal” traveller: An auto-ethnography of borders.
+2010th ed. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.
+Khosravi, S. (ed.) (2021) Waiting - A Project in Conversation.
+transcript Verlag.
+M’charek, A. (2020) “Harraga: Burning borders, navigating colonialism,”
+The sociological review, 68(2), pp. 418–434. doi:
+10.1177/0038026120905491.
+Malichudis, S. (2020) How the Aegean islands became a warehouse of
+souls, Solomon. Available at:
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