DE GRUYTER

Burcu Dogramaci, Birgit Mersmann (Eds.)

 THOMAS NAIL

THE MIGRANT IMAGE

We live in an age of mobility. More people are on the move today than ever before in history. More
images, too, are on the move than ever previously possible. The migrant has become the political
figure of our time just as the mobile image has become the aesthetic figure of our time. The mi-
grant and the image are part of the same historical primacy of motion and mobility that defines
life in the early twenty-first century. This chapter argues that the fundamental structure of both
the migrant and the image must therefore be re-theorized from the perspective of motion.
Th is is an important new conceptual move because, on the one hand, t he migrant has been
understood predominantly as a secondary political figure derived from the static basis of states.
The migrant is typically defined as the one who moves between pre-established states. Opposed
to this, this chapter argues that the migrant is in fact a constitutive figure of social life itself. On
the other hand, the aesthetic image has been understood predominantly as something static,
either as a representation of an object or as an imagination by the subject.
Both of these static conceptions, I argue, should be replaced with a kinetic theory of the
'migrant image: However, by the term 'migrant image' I do not necessarily mean the visual or art
images of migrants, art by migrants, or the migration of art images across borders, although
these are all important aspects of a migrant turn in art history. I mean something much more
general about the material structure of the image and the migrant themselves. The image does
not become mobile just because it represents migrants, and the mobility of migrants is not de-
rived merely from our images of them. Rather, the argument I would like to make in this chapter
is that the social primacy of the migrant and the aesthetic primacy of the mobile image are two
dimensions of the same historical zeitgeist at the turn of the twenty-first century in which
everything appears to be characterized by the primacy of motion.
Therefore, instead oftrying to derive the mobility of one from the other, I would like to show the
common conceptual redefinition occurring in both oft hem with respect to the primacy of mobility
in the twenty-first century. In order to do this, I begin first with the social primacy of the figure of the
migrant and then move on to consider the kinesthetics of t he mobile image. The aim is to demon-
strate the sense in which the migrant has become a dominant social image for us today, as well the
sense in which the image has become aesthetically migratory and mobile at the same time.

Th e figure of th e migrant
We live in the age of the migrant. At the turn of the twenty-first century, there were more re-
gional and international migrants than ever before in recorded history (International Organiza-

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 THE MIGRANT IMAGE

tion for Migration 2015). 1 Today, there are more than 1 billion migrants (United Nations Popula-
t ion Fund 2015, 21 )2 Each decade, the percentage of migrants as a share of the total population
continues to rise. In the next 25 years, the rate of migration is predicted to be higher than over
the last twenty-five years (Cole 2000; United Nations Database 2008; US National Intelligence
Council2012, 24) 3 More than ever, it has become a necessity for people to migrate due to envi-
ronmental, economic, and political instability. Climate change, in particular, may even double
international migration over the next 40 years 4 Even more, the percentage of total migrants who
are non-status or undocumented is further increasing, wh ich poses a serious challenge to de-
mocracy and political representation (International Council on Human Rights Policy 201 O) s
6
In other ways, we are all becoming migrants (Bauman 1998, 87; Papastergiadis 2000, 2).
People today relocate greater distances more frequently than ever before in human history.
Whi le many people may not cross a reg ional or international border in their movement, they
tend to change jobs more often, commute longer and farther to work (World Bank's World De-
velopment Indicators 2005), change their residence repeatedly, and tour internationally more
than ever before (World Tourism Organization 2013) 7 Some of these phenomena are directly
related to recent events, such as the impoverishment of middle classes in certain rich countries
after the financial crisis of 2008, wh ich include subsequent austerity cuts to socia l-welfare pro-
grams, rising unemployment, the subprime mortgage crisis, which led to the expulsion of mil-
lions of people from their homes around the world (9 million in the United States alone since
2008), the eviction of millions of small farmers in poor countries owing to the 540 mi llion acres
acquired by foreign investors and governments since 2006, and increasingly destructive m ining
practices around the world, including hydrau lic fracturing and tar sands extracti on. This general

In total number (1 billion: 1 in 7) and as percentage of total population (about 14 %) according to the
International Organization for Migration. http://gmdac.iom.int/global-migration-trends-factsheet. Accessed
15 December 2017.
2 As of 2015, there were 244 million international migrants and 740 million internal migrants according to
the UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund), 2015, State of World Population 207 5. www.unfpa.org/migra-
tion. Accessed 26 October 2017.
3 On the theoretical implications of this phenomenon for liberalism, see Phillip Cole, 2000.
4 Future forecasts va ry from 25 million to 1 billion environmental migrants by 2050, moving either within
their countries or across borders, on a permanent or temporary basis, with 200 million being the most widely
cited estimate. This figure equals the current estimate of international migrants worldwide; International
Organization for Migration, http://publications.iom.int/system/files/p df/mecc_outlook.pdf Accessed 15 De-
cember 2017.
5 The International Council on Human Rights Policy estimates that the approximate numbers of global ir-
regular migrants have grown to 30-40 million persons; http://www.ichrp.org. Accessed 15 December 2017.
6 With the rise of home foreclosure and unemployment, people today are beginning to have much more
in common w ith migrants than with certain notions of citizenship (grounded in certain social, legal, and
political rights). "All people may now be wanderers;' (Bauman 1989). "Migration must be understood in a
broad sense;' (Papastergiadis 2000).
7 International tourist arrivals exceeded 1 billion annual tourists globally for the first time in history in 2012.
World Tourism Organization, "World Tourism Barometer;' Vol. 11, 2013; http://cf.cdn.unwto.org/sites/all!files/
pdf/unwto_barom 13_02_apr_excerpt_O.pdf. Accessed 15 December 2017.

55
THOMAS NAIL

increase in human mobility and expu lsion that affects us all is now widely recognized as a defin~
ing feature of our epoch (Sassen 2014, 1-2; Blunt 2007) 8
However, not all migrants are alike in their movement (Bauman 1998). For some, movement
offers opportunity, recreation, and profit with only a temporary expulsion from or deprivation of
their territorial, political, juridical, or economic status. For others, movement is dangerous, con~
strained, and their socia l expulsions are much more severe and permanent. Today, most people
fal l somewhere on this migratory spectrum between the two poles of'inconvenience' and 'inca~
pacitation: But at some point, everyone on this spectrum shares the experience that their move~
ment results in a certain degree of expu lsion from their territorial, political, juridical, or economic
status. Even if the end result of migration is a relative increase in money, power, or enjoyment,
the process of migration itself almost always involves a 'sacrifice'or'cost'of some kind and duration:
the removal of territorial ownership or access, the loss of the political right to vote or to receive
social welfare, the loss of legal status to work or drive, or the financial loss associated with trans~
portation or change in residence.
The gains of migration are always a risk, while the process itself is always some kind of loss.
This is precisely the sense in which Zygmunt Bauman writes that "tourism and vagrancy are two
faces of the same coin" of global migration (Bauman 1998, 96). Both the "tourist" (the traveling ac~
ademic, business professional, or vacationer) and the "vagabond" (migrant worker or refugee), as
Bauman calls them, are"bound to move" by the same social conditions, but result in different kinds
and degrees of expulsion from the social order (Bauman 1998, 85). Business people are compelled
to travel aroun d the world in the"global chase of profit;"'consumers must never be allowed to rest"
in the chase of new commodities and desires, and the global poor must move from job to job
wherever capital calls (Bauman 1998, 78, 83). For the "tourist;' this social "compulsion, [this] 'must;
[this] internalized pressure, [this] impossibility of living one's life in any other way;· accord ing to
Bauman, "reveals itself to them in the disguise of a free exercise of wiii"(Bauman 1998, 84).
The "vagabond" sees it more clearly. The social "compu lsion" to move produces certain ex~
pulsions for all migrants. Some migrants may'decide'to move, but they may not decide the social
conditions of their movement or the degree to which they may be expelled from certain social
orders as a consequence. Migration in this sense is neither entirely free nor forced; the two are
part of the same regime of social motion. 'Expulsion' simply means the degree to which a migrant
is deprived or dispossessed of a ce rtain status in this regime.
The "tourist" and "vagabond" are always crossing over into each another. "None of the insur~
ance policies of the tourists' life~style protects against slipping into vagabondage[ ... ] most jobs
are temporary, shares may go down as well as up, skills, t he assets one is proud of and cherishes
now become obsolete in no time" (Bauman 1998, 97). Migration is the spectrum between these
two poles, and the figure of the migrant is the one who moves on this spectrum. In this way,
migratory figures often change their status as mobile social positions and not fixed identities.
One is not born a migrant but becomes one. However, there are two central problems to over~
come in order to develop a movement~oriented theory of the migrant.

8 I use the word 'expulsion' here in the same sense in which Saskia Sassen uses it to indicate a general
dispossession or deprivation of social status. Many scholars have noted a similar trend. For an excellent review
of the "mobilities" literature on migration, see Alison Blunt.

56
 THE MIGRANT IMAGE

Two problems
The first problem is that the migrant has been predominantly understood from the perspective
of stasis. The result is that the migrant has been perceived as a secondary or derivative figure with
respect to place-bound membership. Place-bound membership in a society is posited first. Then
the migrant is defined as the movement back and forth between social points. The em igrant is
the name given to the migrant as the former member or citizen, and the immigrant as the
would-be member or citizen. In both cases, a static place and membership is conceived first, and
the migrant is the one who lacks both. This is the case because more than any other political
figure (citizen, foreigner, sovereign, etc.), the migrant is the one who is least defined by its being
and place, but rather by its becoming and displacement: by its movement.
Therefore, if we want to devel op a political th eory that begins with the migrant, we need to
reinterpret the migrant first and foremost according to its own defining feature: its movement.
Thus, we should develop a theoretical framework that begins with movement instead of stasis,
following in the tradition of those thinkers who have granted theoretical primacy to movement
and flow: Lucretius, Marx, Henri Bergson, and others 9 However, beginning from the theoretical
primacy of movement does not mean that one should uncritically celebrate it. Movement is not
always good, nor is movement always the same or uniform. Movement is always distributed in
different social formations or circulations (Merriman 2012, 1-20)WThus, the migrant turn is nei-
ther a valorization of movement nor an ontology of movement in general. Rather, it is a historical
ontology of the subject of our time: th e migrant. It seeks to understand the historical conditions
under which something like the migrant has come to exist for us today.
In this way, we need not only a theory of the migrant, but also a theory of the social motions
by which migration takes place. Society is always in motion. From border security and city traffic
controls to personal technologies and work schedules, human movement is socially directed.
Societies are not static places with fixed characteristics and persons (Urry 2000). Societies are
dynamic processes engaged in continuously directing and circulating social life. In a move-
ment-oriented framework there is no socia l stasis, only regimes of social circulation . Thus, if we
want to understand the figure of the migrant, whose defining social feature is its movement, we
must also understand society itself according to movement (Hannam et al. 2006, 1-22; Cresswell
11
2012; Kaufmann 2002; Urry 2007; Cressweii/Uteng 2008; Baerenholdt 2004; Thrift 1996).
The second problem that needs to be overcome is that the migrant has been predomi-
nantly understood from the perspective of states. And since history is all too often written by the
state, the result is that the migrant has often been understood as a figure without its own history
and social force. "In world history;' as Hegel says, "we are co ncerned only with those people s that
have formed states [because] all the value that human beings possess, all of t heir spiritual reality,
they have through the State alone" (Hegel1998, 41 - 42). This is not to say that migrants are always
stateless, but that the history of migrant social organizations has tended to be subsumed or

9 For a full literature review of the history and thinkers of the ontology of motion, see Thomas Nail, Being
and Motion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
10 For a review of the criticisms against the philosophy of movement, see Merriman 2012.
11 In this sense, this chapter can also be placed in the context of what is now being called the "new mo-
bilities paradigm" or "mobility turn" in the social sciences.

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THOMAS NAIL

eradicated by state histories. Often, it is the most dispossessed migrants who have created some
of the most interesting non-state social organizations.
In response to this problem, we need a counter-history of several important migrant socia l
organizations that have been marginalized by states. The migrant is not only the figure whose
movement results in a certain degree of social expulsion; the migrant also has its own type of
movement that is quite different from the types that define its expulsion. Accordingly, migrants
have created very different forms of social organization, as can clearly be seen in the 'minor his-
to ry' of the raids, revolts, rebellions, and resistances of some of the most socially marginalized
migrants. This is a challenging history to write because many of these social organizations were
not written down, or if they were, they were systematically destroyed by those in power. It is not
a natural fact that the history of migrants has become ahistorical, as Hegel argues; it is the vio-
lence of states that has rendered the migrant ahistorical.

The consequences
There are three important consequences of developing a political theory ofthe migrant in this way.
First, it will allow us to conceptualize the emergence of the historical conditions that gave rise to the
types of social expulsion that define the migrant. These forms of social expulsion li nked to migrant
motion did not emerge out of nowhere in the twenty-first century; they emerged historica lly. At
different points in history, migratory movement resulted in different types and degrees of social
expulsion (territorial, political, juridical, and economic) due in part to the presupposed ontological
primacy of stasis. Once a new form of social organization becomes historically dominant (i.e. vil-
lages, states, feudal lands, markets, etc.), we begin to see an explosion in new techniques for expel-
ling migrants from their territorial, political, lega l, or economic status. Once these techniques
emerge historically, they are differentially repeated again later on. Today, we find the contempora ry
migrant at the intersection of all four forms of social expulsion, albeit to varying degrees.
The aim of such a proJect should also be historica l: to provide an analysis of the major tech-
niques for expelling migrants during their period of historical dominance and to provide a con-
ceptual, movement-based, definition of the migratory figures associated with these expulsions
(Castles 1992). 12
The second consequence of the theory of the migrant is that it will allow us to analyze
contemporary migration. This is possible because the history of migration is not a linear or pro-
gressive history of distinct'ages.' Rather, it is a history of co-existing and overlapping social forces
of expulsion. The same techniques of territorial, political, JUridical, and economic expulsion of the
migrants that have emerged and repeated themselves in history are still at work today. For ex-
ample, territorial expulsion (the dispossession of land) 13 does not only occur once against the
nomadic peoples in the Neolithic period. Once this techn ique of expulsion emerges in the Neo-

12 Stephen Castles has also argued that the figure of the migrant needs to be defined in relation to its
other overlapping historical figures, such as indentured laborer, refugee and exile.
13 Here I am using the word "territory" simply to mean "delimited land" (following the OED) and not in a
strictly historical way since, as Stuart Elden (2013) argues, the usage of the word 'territory' varies significantly
th roughout history and cannot be used in a univocal way.

58
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lithic period, it is taken up again and mobilized in various ways throughout history up to the
present.
The first territorial expulsions created historical nomadic peoples, but they also defined a
conceptual type of migrant subjectivity characterized by territorial expulsion that also defines
other territorially displaced peoples. This is the sense in which migrants may be 'nomadic' with-
out being the same as historical nomads. As an example, in the ancient world, migrants were
expelled from their territories by war and kidnapping; in the medieval world, they were expelled
by enclosure and the removal of customary laws that bound them to the land; and in the mod-
ern world, they were expelled by the capitalist accumulation of private property. In each case,
these events, like a festival, paradoxically repeat an "unrepeatable:"'They do not add a second and
a third time to the first but carry the first time to the 'nth' power" (Deleuze 2001, 1).
Contemporary migration is part of this legacy. 14 Migrant farm workers expelled by industrial
agriculture, indigenous peoples expelled from their native lands by war and forced into the
mountains, forests, or waste lands, and island peoples expelled from their territory by the rising
tides of climate change are all often popularly described as"nomads"(Cresswell 201 O).ln a certain
sense, this is true. All these migrants share those similar social conditions of territorial expulsion
that first produced historical nomads.
The analysis of contemporary migration I am arguing for here is not one of total causal ex-
planation of push-pull factors, psychological volunteerism, neoclassical or structural economism,
and so on. Rather, it offers a descriptive kinetic analysis. The aim is not to explain the causes of all
migration, but to offer better descriptions of the conditions, forces, and trajectories of its histor-
ical emergence and co-existence in the present from the perspective of motion.
The third consequence of a theory of the migrant is that it will allow us to diagnose theca-
pacity of the migrant to create an alternative to the socia l expulsion of the migrant. The figure of
the migrant is not merely an effect of different regimes of social expulsion. The migrant also has
its own forms of social motion in the form of riots, revolts, rebellions, and resistance. Just as the
analysis of the historical techniques for the expu lsion of the migrant can be used to understand
contempora ry migration, so too, can the historical techniques of migrant social organizations be
used to diagnose the capac ity of contemporary migrants to pose an alternative to the present
social logic of expulsion that continues to dominate our world.
Today, the figure of the migrant exposes an important truth: that social expansion has al-
ways been predicated on the social expulsion of migrants. The twenty-first century will be the
century of the migrant not only because of the record number of migrants today, but because
this is the century in which all the previous forms of social expulsion and migratory resistance
have re-emerged and become more active than ever before. These two events also reveal, how-
ever, a certain historical and conceptual continuity of migratory struggles for an alternative to
social expulsion.
The same historical conditions at the beginning of the twenty-first century that give rise to
the primacy of the migrant also give rise to a primacy of the mobile image.

14 As Tim Cresswell writes, "We cannot understand new mobilities, without understanding old mobilities"
(Cresswell 2010, 25).

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The mobile image

We also live in the age of the image. Just before the turn of the twenty-first century a host of
digital media technologies (computers, the Internet, video games, mobile devices, and many
others) unleashed the largest flow of digitally reproduced words, images, and sounds the world
has ever witnessed. No other aesthetic medium can possibly compete with what digital media
has done to human sensation in the last twenty years. All that was solid has melted into the
electromagnetic field. The digital image has mobilized sensory and aesthetic experience in more
ways than ever before in history.
While the effect of television and radio on sensation was significant. they still restricted
sensation to relatively centralized, homogenized, and unidirectional programming. The new in-
teractive and bidirectional nature of digital media today has expanded the mobility and muta-
bility of the image in a way that analog media never could. With the popularization of the Inter-
net and mobile devices at the turn of the twenty-first century - cell phones, smartphones,
tablets, and laptops - digitalized images have become not only dominant but increasingly port-
able (Internet World Stats). 15 As of 2014, there were more active mobile devices than there are
people on the planet. The mobile phone is probably the single fastest-growing human sensory
technology ever developed, growing from zero to 7.2 billion in a mere three decades.
The mobi lity of the digital image has incited a revolution in publishing, journalism, enter-
tainment. education, commerce and politics. It has both overthrown and wholly integrated
analog media, giving rise to whole new digitalized industries in the process. Industrial factories
and workers are increasingly replaced by internet servers and automated checkout software. It
is plainly obvious to everyone that we have now entered a new aesthetic regime; we are now in
the age of the digital image.
Today, it is possible for anyone to communicate by voice or text with anyone else; to listen
to almost every sound ever recorded; to view almost any image ever made; and to read almost
any text ever written from a single device and from almost any location on Earth. All of this is now
available on the move and is itself in movement in the form of electrical flows. The image will
never be the same.
The contemporary mobility of the image and its sensation, made possible by the advent and
now dominance of digital media, is not just a quantitative increase in reproduced images. Digital
media and digital images have transformed the very conditions of sensation itself. Anything can
now be digitized, mobilized, and browsed non-linearly through a single portable device. The
whole of art history can now be made responsive and interactive with the viewer through the use
of digital software and a continuous flow of electrica l current. None of the senses have remained
unchanged by digital media; even taste and smell can now be synthesized using computer soft-
ware (Turin 2007). Something is always lost in transit as the continuous is converted into the
digitally discrete, but the affect moves on regardless, sweeping us all along with it.

15 Today 77 percent of developed countries and 40 percent of the entire world use the Internet. It has
become the single-largest mechanism for the production, mobilization, and consumption of sensory media.
Internet World Stats, 15 December 2017, http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm. Accessed 15 De-
cember 2017.

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More than ever before, the fact that the image is up in the air and on the move requires a
serious rethinking of the nature of art and affect from the perspective of the present, from the
age of the mobile image. Something fundamental about ou r world changed around the turn of
the twenty-first century: not just an empirical change introduced by new technologies, but a
new and fundamentally kinetic set of relations in aesthetics have begun to appear.
The exceptions to the rules of the previous historical paradigms have now themselves be-
come the rules in a whole new game. Mobile digital devices are no longer luxury items for the
privileged few but have transform ed every aspect of daily life around the world, including the
very structure of human experience, thought, and sensation. If everything looks like a crisis to-
day - the migration crisis, the digital media crisis, the measurement crisis in the quantum
sciences- it is because we are still looking at our present through the eyes of the past. As long
as these kinds of critical events continue to appear as seconda ry or derivative, as long as motion
and mobility appear to be deviations from stasis, we have no hope of understanding some of the
greatest events of our time.

Migrant aesthetics
The mobile image and the centrality of the migrant mark a new period in aesthetics. The digital
image is not only mobile by virtue of its form but by the mobility of its content and author. Some
of the most shared and viewed images of the past few years have been digital images of mi-
grants, refugees, and the conditions of their travels, and even their death. The image of Alan
16
Kurdi, the dead Syrian 3-year-old is now one of the most influential images of all time. The
popular media has been saturated with migrant images and has thus been confronted in a new
and dramatic way with the visible lives and deaths of migrants.
Furthermore, the widespread access to cell phones with digital cameras has also made it
possible for migrants and refugees themselves to generate more images of their own movement
and experience than ever before. The itinerant, grainy, handheld, and "poor" images of migrant
cell phone cameras have become their own film genera: the "wretched of the screen" (Steyerl
2013). In these videos migrants are not silent victims but creators of new aesthetic forms, "an
imperfect cinema" (Espinosa 1979) as demonstrated in Elke Sasse's 2016 film #MyEscape.
Cell phones have also become literal lifelines for migrants to obtain travel information in
isolated areas, to share videos, sounds and images with friends, family, and authorities. The digital
visua l and sonic images produced by migrants have become the material basis of the aesthetic
threads that hold together numerous committees across borders, not just refugees. Although it
is most obvious in the case of refugees, these are the same aesthetic lifel ines that make possible
sustained social and informational communities around the world. The migrancy of the digital
image is w hat allows for community in a world of global migration, continuous mobility, and
displacement. What wou ld global migration look like without without the migrancy of the image
and the images of the migrant7

16 Farida Vis and Olga Goriunova, editors, 2015, The Iconic Image on Social Media: A Rapid Research Response
to the Death of Aylan Kurdi https:!/research.gold.ac.uk!14624/1/KURDI%20REPORT.pdf. Accessed 17 Decem-
ber 2017.

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THOMA S NAIL

The migrant image thus marks the limits of the previous centu ry and the outline of a new
one defined by the mobility and migration of the image. This requires a new approach both to
the politics of migration and the aesthetics of the image. However, the advent of the present is
never limited to the present alone. Now that our present has emerged, it has become possible
in a way it was not before to inquire into the conditions of its emergence and discover some-
thing new about the nature and history of art. in other words, the present reveals something new
about the nature of sensation and what it must at least be like so as to be capable of being de-
fined by the primacy of motion and mobility as it is. At no point in history has the image ever
been anywhere near as mobile as it is today in the digital image.
So, what does this say about the nature of the image such that it is capable of this mobil ity?
lfthe image is defined by the primacy of mobility today yet existing theories of it are not, then we
need a new conceptual framework. We need to produce such a new conceptual framework based
on the primacy of motion to better understand contemporary sensation and aesthetics, as well
as the historical events from which it emerges. in short, the rise of the mobile digital image draws
our attention not so much to its radical novelty, but to a previously hidden dimension of all pre-
vious images throughout art history that can only now be seen (Hansen 2004; Hansen 2006;
Manning 2012; Massumi 2007; Naukkarinen 2005; O'Sullivan 2001; Gregg/Seigworth 201 0).
The research program proposed by this chapter is therefore neither a theory of the migrant
image that applies strictly to the novelty of the digital image nor an ahistorical theory of the
image that applies forever and all time to all images and media. I am not proposing a naive real-
ism in which the discovery of the contemporary primacy of motion gives us pure access to un-
changing essence of the image. Instead, I am proposing a realism of the minimal affective condi-
tions of the emergence of the present itself. That is, a critical or minimal realism in the sense in
which the image is interpreted only with respect to that aspect of the image that must at least
be the case for our present 'to have been possible; i.e., actual.
Therefore, the method proposed here is neither realist or constructivist in their traditional
senses, but rather minimally or critically realist. The question is not what the conditions oft he human
mind must be for the image to be what it is, but rather what the image itself must at least be like
such that the present has come to be defined by the primacy of a mobile or migratory aesthetics.
Without a doubt, contemporary reality is shaped by multiple human structures, but these
structures are in turn conditioned by other real, non-anthropic, affective, and aesthetic struc-
tures. This chapter proposes that we locate the real conditions necessary for the emergence of
the contemporary mobility of the image and of global migration. The type of global migration
we are witnessing today would not be possible without the unique material and aesthetic struc-
ture of the digital image. Once these twin conditions are elaborated, however, it is always possi-
ble for a new present to emerge and in turn reveal yet another previously unseen dimension of
the past, and so on in an additive, yet historically realist fashion. However, there are two central
problems to overcome in order to develop such a migrant theory of the image.

Two problem s
The kinetic theory of the image encounters two problems related directly to the problems en-
countered by the figure of the migrant. Both have been treated as static and ahistorical. The fate
of the image and the fate of the migrant are thus related to the problem of stasis.

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First problem: stasis

The first problem to be overcome is that the image has been traditionally subordinated to some-
thing static. This subordination has taken two complementary formulations: an objective one
and a subjective one.
Objective stasis. On the one hand, the image has been subordinated to a static object or
unchanging esse nce. The image, in other wo rds, has been t reated as a copy or representat ion of
an original, just as the migrant has been treated as a failed citizen. The d ifference between the
object and the image of the object becomes the degree of movement or change in the image
itself w ith res pect to its unchanging origi nal. This is the classical model/copy re lation famously
dramatized by Plato in t he Ttmaeus. The origina l or model object remains static and unmoved
while subsequent images aim to work like mobile snapshots to accurately rep resent the original
object in all its immobile perfection and essential form.
As Plato writes, "Now the nature of the ideal being was everlasting, but to bestow this attrib-
ute in its fullness upon a creature was impossible. Wherefore he reso lved to have a moving image
of eternity, and w hen he set in order the heaven, he made th is image ete rnal but moving accord-
ing to number, while eternity itself rests in unity" (Plato, Ttmaeus, 37c-e). There can be no higher
exhalation of eternity and denigration of the image than this. For Plato, the image is nothing but
illusion, appearance, and likeness organized according to discrete numerical quantities. The object
is thus fixed in its essence and the image is fixed by its discrete number. These discrete numerica l
images fail to represent the object precisely because of the mobility of the image. Moti on and
mobility thus become the conceptual names for the failure of the image to represent the object.
Similarly, images of migrant suffering become exceptions to the "normal functioning" of nation
states.
Al l definiti ons of art as representation are defi ned by some version or degree of t his static
model/copy/resemblance relation. Not on ly is the object immobilized in the model to be cop ied
but the image of the model itself remains nothing more t han a failed numerical attempt to re-
produce this same static condition. Between the two stands a gulf of movement and turbulence
that ensures their incommensurability. In this way the only real or true sensation occurs in the
object itself- all images of the object are mere appearances or modified snapshots of t he orig-
inal. It is therefore no coincidence that art history and museum culture tend to privi lege the most
static of the arts, i.e. the visual and plastic arts. The obsession with art preservation, authorial
authenticity, and connoisseurship too are historically linked to this classical idea of stasis and
mimesis. It is also no coincidence that images of m igrants and refugees tend to be treated as
victim-images, as if t he process of t heir productio n was not still ongoing.
Subjective stasis. On the other hand, t he image has also been subordinated to the relatively
static mental states of the subject. In this theory, perceptual images are only given conceptual
and aesthetic cohe rence and reality in the faculties of the perceiver. Versions of this theory are
closer to the more modern aesthetics developed by Kant in his Critique ofJudgment (1790). 1n this
theory what remains static, fixed, and universal is not the object being represented but the con-
cept of beauty itself found in the mental structure of the subject. Fluctuating images occur in the
body of perceiver but it is only in the concept of beauty that they are given fixed and universal
form. lt is thus human mental and perceptual structures and not sensual images themselves that
lie at the firm foundations of truth and beauty.

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THOMAS NAIL

Again, for Kant, it is the movement of the image in the mobile and affected body that marks
the inferiority and subordination of the image. The nature of the object in itself remains unknown
because the body and its perceptual images are moved and mobile. The senses are thus led to mis-
represent reality to the mind. The senses of the body cannot be trusted in knowledge or in
beauty. Our experience of beauty, therefore, is not the beauty of nature or even of the beauty of
the images, but rather the beauty of our own idea, experience, or faculty of representing these
images to ourselves. Nature is only the prompt for us to discover the beauty of our own aesthetic
and phenomenological facultiesP This is the inverse of the classical idea of the model/copy re-
lation. Instead of defining the image by its subordination to the static essence of the object; it is
defined by its subordination to the static aesthetic structures of judgment in the mind of the
experiencing or intentional subject.
This subjective form is most dramatic in Kant and post-Kantian aesthetics, but a similar
model is also at work in other anthropic constructivisms as we ll, including social, anth ropol og ical,
linguistic, economic, and other non-psychological versions. All these different constructivisms
share the reduction of the image not to the Kantian ego, but to other anthropic structures. In
contrast to Kant, some of these anthropic constructivisms can even be transformed to some
extent by moving images. However, even in those cases the movement of the image still remains
tied to the relatively static anthropic structures that produce and consume those images. Since
numerous full-length works have recently been devoted to making this argument, including my
own, and since this is not the primary focus of this chapter, I must simply refer the interested
reader to those works at this point. 18
Both the objective and subjective/constructivist theories of the image thus subordinate it
to something relati vely static. Furthermore, they both treat the movement of images as some-
thing discrete, either in number (Plato) or in the body (Kant). In both cases movement is what
makes the image inferior but also what secures the difference between the object and subject
in the first place. For Plato, the object remains different from the inferior images of it precisely
because the object does not move. For Kant, the same is true of the transcendental subject. For
constructivi sts, images remain extensions, projections, or reflections of more primary human
structures. In both cases the object and subject are separated by a kinetic gulf of fluctuating
images. The political connection here is that it is the figure of the migrant that relies most deeply
on th is subordinated aspect of the image's mobility. The use of images is not just a luxury of fixed
citizens but a defining feature of survival for migrants. Their own mobility is thus tied to the
mobility, and often hybrid and shaky mobility, of the image in a way that it is not for others.
There are two kinetic paradoxes here. The first is that the movement of the image is both
necessary to ensure the division between subject and object but also necessary to ensure the
region of transport that connects them as distinct. The model transports its image to the senses.

17 We can see a later expression of a similar idea in Aby Warburg's interesting, but also socially and anth ro-
pocentrically limited, idea of the "pathos of images" and in Bredekamp's theory of the Image-act, in which
images have agency, but only for human reaction, will, desire, and perception. "The'l'becomes stronger when
it relativizes itself against the activity of the image" (Bredekamp 2013, 328)
18 See Tom Sparrow, The End of Phenomenology; Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway; lan Hodder,
Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things; Manuel Delanda, Assemblage
Theory; Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, editors, New Materia/isms; and Thomas Nail, Being and Motion.

64
 THE MIGRANT IMAGE

The subject then receives these images on the surface of its sensitive mobile body. Without this
zone of transport between the object and subject, nothing transpires - sensation fails. And yet,
precisely because of this mobility representation is undermined. The mobility of the image, just
like the mobility of the mig rant, is thus both the condition of possibility for the object and subject
and the condition of their impossible convergence in perfect aesthetic and political representa-
tion. Hence the related second paradox that t he image is treated as necessarily mobile in its
transport but fixed and limited by number and body. The image, in the subjective and objective
accounts, must move but only as a frozen mobility, a snapshot, or particle of sensation. The mo-
bility of the image is thus described as secondary to the fixed object or subject when it is in fact
the mobile substratum within which regions of relative immobi lity emerge. The citizen and the
snapshot are thus crystallizations of the mobile migrant image.
Therefore, if we want to develop a theory of the migrant image that does not fall into these
paradoxes we need to begin from its most primary and defining feature, its mobility, and not try
and deduce this mobility from something static or statist This requires, however, a whole new
theory based on the motion of the image. The division between the object and subject of sen-
sation is not a primary ontological determination but rather the effect of a more primary kinetic
process of kinetic images themselves.
This is the novelty of the kinetic approach : It reinterprets t he structure and history of sensa-
tion from the perspective of the primacy of the m igrant and mobile image.

Second problem: history

The second problem the kinetic theory of the migrant image aims to overcome is the suppos-
edly ahistorical nature of the image, j ust like the ahistorical treatment of the migrant There are
three formulations of this ahistorical thesis: an objective, a subjective, and an ontological one.
Objective. On the one hand, if the image is subordinated to a static model object then it can
have no history, or its history is a mere illusion. History presupposes the real movement and
transformation of matter, but if objective essences do not move, then they can have no history,
and thei r images can have no real history either. The state treats the migrant in the same manner.
Subjective. Second, if the image is subordinated to the static conceptual or constructivist
structure of human subjects then a similar problem occurs. If subjective structures are universal,
as Kant and much of post-Kantian phenomenology argues, 19 then they do not change (or
change only within a fixed domain) over time, and if subjective structures themselves (not just
their contents) do not change over time then they have no real history. Perceptual images may
change within this structure, but the aesthetic conditions of making sense of these images and
ordering them have always been the same - and thus the image too, as subordinate to the

19 Merleau-Ponty's late essay "Eye and Mind" (1961 ), for example, makes great strides toward overcoming
the anthropocentrism and constructivism of earlier phenomenology, including his own. In Eye and Mind,
Merleau-Ponty aims to give back historicity to the image itself as a continuous fold, fabric, or pleat in being:
"the world is made of the same stuff as the body" because it is "visible and mobile: a thing among things"
(163). While the emphasis of the text remains largely on the human body, it also aims to break down the
division between image and body.

65
THOMAS NAIL

structure, remains ahistorical. A notable exception to this post-Kantian ahistoricism is the tradi -
20
tion of Marxist aesthetics, including the Frankfurt School
Ontological. The third formulation of this problem is ontological. In order fo r the object to
be copied by an image, the object must appear in sensuous reality and thus must be, in some
sense, affected by the conditions of its appearance. Similarly, in order for the subject to schema-
tize and conceptualize its perceptions, it must in some sense be affected or receptive to the
sensory images of its body. The affective nature of the image is therefore continuous with the
whole process of becoming in which the object and subject both transform and are trans-
formed through their appearance as images. In this way, the ontology of the affective image
liberates the image from its twin subordination.
It does so, however, only at the risk of reintroducing its own form of ahistoricity.lf the affec-
tive image comes to be understood as ontologically 'autonomous' with respect to the objects
and subjects it produces or distributes then its constant change becomes something relatively
changeless: pure becoming (Massumi 2007). If all images are reduced to their lowest common
denominator, affect, becoming and ontological change, then the particularity of historical and
regional images risks being submerged entirely into a pure ontological flux. Pure change be-
comes pure stasis. The ontology of becoming is ahistorical. The ontological rejection of history
in favor of becoming has been put forward by a number of recent process ontologists (Massumi
2007; Manning 2012; Bennett 201 0; Connolly 2011; Whitehead 2014, 73).
The process ontology of the affective image treats the image as if it were possible to de-
scribe its structure for ever and all time and from no position in particular. The ontological im-
age, in this way, risks becoming something like its own kind of'autonomous' substance or pure
'force'- adding nothing to the historical description of the image but a generic ontological
language applied to new phenomena (see Nail, forthcoming).
In response to the problem of ahistoricity, this chapter proposes not only a theory of the
image and aesthetics grounded in the migrant present, but also offers a history of this present
and the material conditions of its emergence. In short, it does not offer an ontology oft he image.
It is precisely because the image is mobile that it has a history, and therefore that sensation must
be t heorized historically, and not ontolog ically. Furthermore, because the image has a history it
also has a whole typology of distributions that organize the world of subjective and objective
structures. All these structures have to be accounted for, starting from the historical mobility of
the migrant image. It is precisely because of the dual historical migrancy of the image and aes-
thetics of the migrant that this type of inquiry is now possible and crucial. Just as it is impossible
to understand our contemporary world without understanding the primacy of the migrant, so
it is impossible to understand it without the migrancy of the image itself and its global network
of affective lifelines, which socially and aesthetically support a world-in-migration.

The migrant image

The migrant image is not a copy. It is not even a copy of a copy without an original (Baudrillard
201 0). There is no mimesis whatsoever. If we are looking for a new and more fruitful definition of

20 While they remain anthropocentric humanists they also allow for radical historical changes in existing
social and aesthetic structures. See Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964- 1965: Theodor W Adorno.

66
 THE MIGRANT IMAGE

the migrant image, we need look no further than within the same Latin root of the word itself.
The word 'image', from the Latin word imago, means "reflection, duplication, or echo" (Glare
201 0). These definitions imply precisely the opposite of what we typically think of as a copy. A
copy must be something other than its model or, by definition, it cannot be a copy of a model.
Reflection, however, from the Latin word flex, means to bend or curve. A reflection is a
re-curving or re-bending that folds something back over itself. Duplication, from the Latin word
pli, meaning 'fold', and the example of an echo, given in the Oxford Latin Dictionary, make this
meaning quite appa rent. The image is not a distinct or separate copy but the process by which
matter curves, bends, folds, and bounces back and forth. The image is therefore the mobile
process by which matter twists, folds, and reflects itself into various structures of sensation. The
migrant too is defined by its flows, folds, and circulations- always in transit and caught between
worlds.
There are not first static objects, subjects, and states and then second a movement or trans-
fer of images or migrants between them. Rather, there is first matter in motion and then a fo ldi ng,
composition, and duplication that generates larger sensuous matters such as objects and sub-
jects that then further reflect and duplicate the flows of matter between them . A folded image
is not a copy because a fold is not something separate from the matter that is folded . The fold is
a completely continuous kinetic and topological structure. There is not one part of the fold which
wou ld be an original and another that wou ld be a copy. This is the sense in which Henri Bergson
writes that the image is "more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that
which the realist calls a thing- an existence placed halfway between the 'thing' and the 'rep-
resentation"' (Bergson 2005, 9). It is more than a rep resentation because it is not a copy of some-
thing else, and it is less than a thing because it is already the material of which things are com-
posed and as such is irreducible to our empirical sensations of them. Images, in our view, are an
aggregate of"matters:' 21

Conclusion
The migratory turn in aesthetics and art history is not just a turn toward the prevalence of images
of migrants, t he emergence and importance of m igrant art works, but also the mobi le and migra-
tory nature of the image itself. There is thus a becoming migrant of the image and a becoming
image of the migrant at the same time. Because of the current historical conJuncture, it is impos-
sible to extract them from each other.Therefore, the two must be thought together as the migrant
image. This chapter, however, has only laid out the problem conceptually and suggested some
possible methods and trajectories for a much larger research project that would look more closely
at the images of migrants, by migrants, and the mobility of images themselves as migrant. 22

21 An inversion of Bergson's claim that "Matter, in our view, is an aggregate of images:' (Bergson 2005,
9-10)
22 See Thomas Nail, Theory of the Image (manuscript) for a full development of this research program.

67
THOMAS NAIL

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