Qadosh

It's us or them. That simple. Me or you; peace or war, light or darkness; order of the soul or the raging wilderness without; the pure against impure; the chosen pitted against the damned. Just don't ask: who is black , who is blue-or who's with me, who's with you.

We live in liquid times, when nearly everyone is an "extra"...superfluous humanity. The contradiction of capitalism: production requires a non-capitalist sector to provide cheap inputs, raw materials. But it is the nature of capitalism to expand, to flow across borders. Capitalism, like modernity, destroys "the limit," devours 'otherness'. There is a constant need to reconstruct 'the other', to find exotic spaces, untapped markets.

We live in a waste society. The waste accumulates, piles and piles of it. Like a swamp that has has become stagnant through an excess of energy equilibrium requires that something has to give..there has to be an outlet, a draining, creative destruction (Bataille). The surplus must be consumed or destroyed.

Surplus humanity.

The libertarians are always put on the back foot when asked if their idea of freedom of capital movement and information applies to labour as well ! With globalisation there is no more wilderness, no more places to colonise. We live in one space. Where does the surplus go now?

Humanity on the move.

It is estimated that 4 million Iraqis have been displaced since the war on Iraq ( two million internally). The refugee is an outlaw, an outcast, subsisting on the periphery of the city-like the lepers and madmen of old (Foucault) or the dead (Peter Brown, Cult of the Saints). We must avoid the sight of them. Stateless, and doubly so: since there isn't even a state to which they could potentially belong and no state will accept them. Welcome to the desert of the real, to no-man's land. A lawless space, limbo, purgatory. A frontier land where one cannot look back or forwards. There is only a waiting -but we've forgotten for what.

Camp life.

Detention centres, checkpoints, Reservations, camps, gulags, workhouses, walls and fences (Berlin, Baghdad, China, the occupied territories, American-Mexican); gated communities, fenced-in existence. Ilfo, Hagadera, Dabab...

Being a refugee means to lose the media on which social existence rests, that is a set of ordinary things and persons that carry meaning-land, house, village, city, parents, possessions, jobs, and other daily landmarks. The creatures in drift and waiting have nothing but their 'naked life,' whose continuation depends on humanitarian assistance.

People without qualities, living in ground zero.they have been deposited in this nondescript space ( a desert) and are all at sea, nothing to cling on to. One day is as good as the other. A frozen transience chills the heart. Nothing happens here. Groundhog day. These people are not even a people. Who knows their stories and what do they leave behind? They are, as Derrida says, undecidables-neither nomadic nor sedentary. They are the unthinkables, the undead, the untouchables, the unimaginable community. Are they communities at all or mere aggregates, surviving by the grace-if that's the right word-of others, in utter dependence on the outside. They have become puppets, pulled one way or the other by the strings of power.

The refugee is the great unknown, the harbinger of ill tidings (Brecht). He is a mirror image of the stateless elites who have lost all contact with the earth, any love for place, any ties to the world of men. The permanently transient are a sign of our times, our liquid times.
---based on Z. Bauman's Liquid Times