Extract from: Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century – Review

by Stephan Scheel

The authors quote different examples of strategies of dis-identification. Here I will mention only two: Some migrants assume several identities over time and thereby enter into a permanent process of indefinite change by continuously reinventing their existences. This strategy challenges the prevailing understanding of migration as a unidirectional and intentional process: ‘Even if migration starts as a form of dislocation [...] it is not relocation but the active transformation of social space’ (p. 211). Another example of dis-identification is resembled by the ‘brûleurs’ who burn their documents before reaching European soil in order to avoid deportation. By refusing to be identifiable the migrants voluntarily abandon the regime of human rights: Instead of claiming asylum they enter a life outside of visibility in the informal networks of clandestine labour in the European metropolises. These two examples of dis-identification together with several others discussed in the book subvert the very basis on which control operates: the logic of representation that renders individuals governable by making their bodies identifiable. Imperceptible politics rely on the political practice of becoming ‘through which social actors escape normalising representations and reconstitute themselves in the course of participating and changing the conditions of their material corporeal existence’ (p. 81).

Entire article at:
http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2010/04/21/escape-routes-control-and-subversion-in-the-21st-century/

- About the idea of 'imperceptible politics' they propose:
It is in the everyday practices and imperceptible moments which make up people’s ‘escape’ from a given social order that we can find the beginnings of social transformation.
...
’Sovereignty manifests in response to escape…Control is a cultural-political device which comes afterwards to tame and eventually to appropriate people’s escape. Social struggle comes first’(p. 43).