PAVILION

frontier to frontier, from periphery to
periphery, from squat to squat, the line of
transmigration is always tangled with
detours. Deligny has proposed a particular
way of mapping the daily courses of
the autistic children. His cartography
traces customary lines and supple lines,
where the child makes a curl, finds something,
slaps his hands, hums a tune,
retraces his steps, and then makes
meandering lines, lignes d’erre
‘... a chevêtre [an ‘entangled curl’ ] is
similar to a detour as long as the need
for, the cause of this detour escapes
our knowledge. The term “chevêtre”
indicates that there is something
there that attracts a profusion of
lignes d'erre ’. 8
If a map of European mobility were to be
made, it would be criss-crossed with
meandering lines which make detours
and deviations from one country to the
next, looking for that ‘something that
attracts’. This map would include lines of
migration: entangled customary lines,
supple lines and curls indicating other
kinds of social behaviour, other economic
and political opportunities than the
‘straight’. The ‘lines of flight’ would be an
important feature of such a map. Deleuze
defines the ‘line of flight’ not only as a
simple line, but as a force that maintains
a tangle of lines:
(...) There is a third type of line,
stranger still, as thought something
were carrying us away, through our
segments but also across our thresholds,
towards an unknown destination,
neither pre-existent nor foreseeable.
9
‘I came here by flight ’- says a migrant,
referring to the illegal way he crossed
over the frontiers of several countries in
his way to France. ‘And I will return by the
“sending off”‘, which in French immigration
legislation means a plane ticket with
financial assistance of about 1000 FF
(150€) for reinstatement in the home
country. A new kind of logic recalculates
this ‘sending off’, this ‘going back home’,
as the real purpose of initial departure.
Nothing happens other than a detour, a
curl, a delay, and a subsidy. This ‘curling’
logic transforms impedimenta into pathways,
obstacles into objectives, conflicts
into alliances, policies of rejection into
politics of welcoming. It transforms a ‘bad
end’ into a ‘happy end’. The faux
migrants’ main objective is to make profit
from a ‘line of flight’. They have invented
a new market product that is the migration
itself, the double crossing of a frontier,
the transversion, a movement by
detour, the pure displacement of a person
from a country to another and back
again.
Analogies and diagrams of life
The politics which negotiate entangled
‘lines’ must stick to a diagram. For the
destiny of an individual or a group, the
diagram is the profitable ‘passage
through catastrophe’. Deleuze talks
about ‘diagram’ in the context of Francis
Bacon's painting and notices that ‘the
diagram is a chaos, a catastrophe, but
also a germ of order or rhythm’. For faux
migrants, ‘losing everything’, ‘leaving it all
behind’ is not a tragedy but a trick.
Playing as if all is lost is therefore putting
oneself in a state of diagram, in a ‘state of
factual possibility’, as Deleuze says. It
transforms the ‘impossible’ into a ‘state of
possibility’. ‘How did you get here?’ The
migrant replies mockingly: ‘I've walked
across the garden’. In this logic, the garden
of the family house extends topologically
as far as Paris, just as ‘the mouth’
in some of Bacon’s portraits goes from
one edge of the face to the other.
According to Deleuze,
‘The diagram is therefore the operative
totality of insignificant and nonrepresentative,
lines and zones, traits
and spots’. 10
A community is not made up exclusively
of ‘individual lines’ but integrates equally
‘insignificant and non representative’
zones, lines and spots of places and
things with which individuals co-habit and
operate diagrammatically in the practice
of migration. Deleuze has observed that
the language of the diagram is analogical:
‘It is the notion of modulation (and not
that of sameness) that is generally apt to
make us understand the nature of the
analogical language or the diagram.
‘Modulation’, which functions in the analogical
synthesizers as an addition of
‘intensive subtractions’.
The notions of ‘subtraction’ and ‘intensity’
can be associated with migration.
Migration functions as a modulator for the
social field. The migrants respect codes
and conventions as long as they can be
modulated. They make their own ‘intensive
subtractions’ and transport them
somewhere else. They practise a ‘relational’
way of doing within a ‘conventional’
thought structure. But for the migrant,
the analogy is not simply a way of doing
but also a policy which is enacted from
thing to thing, person to person, situation
to situation. A policy based on analogy is
more precise, clearer, more adequate to
the practice of migration than a policy
ruled by codes and norms. Know hows,
tricks and lucky finds are linked by proximity.
Analogical thought works by correspondence
not by comparison. As imaginative
insight, it recognises something
familiar in the alien and unfamiliar. The
migrant reading of the alien cityscape
keeps the familiar at hand. The
Romanians migrants that squat abandoned
houses near La Defense (the main
business district in Paris), call Grande
Arche, ‘the great granary’. The biggest
square in the district is called ‘the vague
field’ -the place where they cross paths
with tourists and functionaries in high
finances during the week and play football
on Sundays. This particular way of
naming places shows how the hostile
environment of a financial metropolis can
be compressed reduced to the size of a
village.
The home environment is kept in everyday
language in the same way that personal
belongings are kept in plastic bags
in the squat. Living out of plastic bags is
a way of living in the metropolis while
resisting it. The configuration of the
native village, the order of streets and
houses are topologically compressed
within the squat. Neighborhoods and
familial relations regulate the occupation
of rooms. Boundaries transported from
home with their existing customs modulate
the intimate conditions within the
promiscuity of the squat. The intimate,
the private and the collective are kept
separate and allowed to cross each other
through discrete boundaries. As a
[92]
[93]