PAVILION

profiting from the remains of outdated
laws and administrative procedures, they
make economic use of the urban environment
by reusing leftover, unoccupied
spaces. Despite their ignorance of language
and rules of the place they travel
to, the peasants are successful in establishing
their own markers, both individual
and collective. They develop human networks
that involve border passing intermediators,
visa providers, employees,
lawyers and policemen. They take
advantage of both the interstice of cities
and of rules and lows. They pitch this
human network against the institutional
network and tackle administrative
automatism with radical subjectivity. The
migrants’ methods are comparable to
what Freud calls ‘the technique of Witz’
(the technique of jokes) and the disruptions
caused by 'the return of the
repressed': verbal economy and condensation,
double meaning and misinterpretations,
displacements and alliterations,
multiple uses of the same material,
etc... 15
The Oas peasants misuse lows and
rules, cross and displace habits and
expectations. In Paris they are living in
squat but in their village they live in huge
villas. Similarly, the Witz brings together
different things and thoughts, condenses
them, combines or marries them in a misalliance
that makes the listener laugh,
and can even surprises the jokes-teller.
The Faux migrants tactics don’t exactly
make the administrative authorities
laugh; instead they leave them openmouthed
at their own bureaucratic inefficiency.
The Witz - the comic and the humorous -
are, according to Freud, means of libidinal
saving. If ‘dream's work’ is an individual
product, the Witz is a social production.
It can exist only by means of a community,
by an ‘economic necessity of a
third’, by hawking, by transmigration. The
technique of Witz consists of juxtaposing
diverse elements in order to suddenly
produce a flash shedding of a different
light on the proper and customary language
and to strike the hearer. De
Certeau speaks about the art of ‘pulling
tricks’ and ‘taking an order by surprise’.
‘Cross-cuts, fragments, cracks and lucky
hits in the framework of a system’ these
are the migrants' equivalents to Witz, but
instead of language and linguistic constructs,
they are attacking laws and policies.
In ‘The Pleasure of the Text’, Barthes
speaks about ‘a subtle subversion’:
‘By subtle subversion I mean, on the
contrary, what is not directly concerned
with destruction, evades the
paradigm, and seeks some other
term: a third term, which is not, however,
a synthesizing term but an
eccentric, extraordinary term. An
example? Perhaps Bataille, who
eludes the idealist term by an unexpected
materialism in which we find
voice, devotion, play, impossible
eroticism, etc.; thus Bataille does not
counter modesty with sexual freedom
but... with laughter’. 16
To the ‘serious idealism’ and ‘modesty’ of
Western democracy, the faux migrants
oppose what Barthes calls ‘an unexpected
materialism’: the ‘base materialism’ of
a good Bataillan burst of laughter which
shakes the good manners of the established
system of welcoming and
exchange.
The ‘unexpected materialism’ as well as
‘the laughter’ does not belong to the
dialectical materialism of the Marxist-
Leninist ideology that the peasants have
experienced in Romania, but rather to the
Batallian ‘base-materialism’ that was
already operating during the communist
period, inside and within this ideology.
The same ‘base-materialism’ proves to
be good enough to undermine the ‘idealistic
materialism’ of the Western capitalism.
Networking with Thresholds
Within their practices, the faux migrants
identify thresholds between logics, politics,
lows and economies. For the Oas
peasants the threshold is their working
place. By selling newspapers in front of
the city’s most profitable market places,
they are developing a whole new economy
of threshold. According to recent
sociological studies, ‘ within one year, the
Romanian peasants established, the
most successful network for selling the
newspaper “L' Itinerant” ’.
By making an inventory of thresholds and
places of passage in the city while considering
their profit value, the peasants
have completely re-mapped the urban
space and located a network of invisible
economic values, which correspond to
their own market system. This threshold
infrastructure derives from specific kinds
of movement in the city. The thresholds of
supermarkets are places where capitalist
flows take place and are, as such, strategic
places to catch these flows and to
drain and divert them.
The migrant’s temporary occupation of
thresholds is based on the detournement
of both private and public space. Within
their spatial and economic investment in
the thresholds, they intensify and complicate
the uses of space in the city. As with
drifting, random encounters take place at
the thresholds where successful trading
depends on emotional relationships.
Rather than the newspaper, the faux
migrants are selling their own condition.
This threshold activity is in itself a critique
of the conventional urban culture, which
operates in the zone of subjectivity. It is a
spatial and economic experience powered
by the body. At the threshold,
instead of bartering their merchandise,
the migrants expose themselves. As marginals,
the faux migrants combine neoliberal
practices and post-communist ideologies
through tactics, analogies, diagrams
and jokes. They map without
moralising the thresholds of the
European Union and its lines of flight.
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