On Refugees and Abjection in Austurvöllur
Emotions like disgust, or in psychoanalytic terms, abjection, is a well-known reaction to people crossing borders. What we in so-called Western societies, believed to be built on universal human rights, need to come to terms with is that the abject — the stateless refugee who is here but not really (legally) here — is a product of our own system. The disgust we may feel at being faced with them being visible in the public, disturbing our sense of order, is not caused by them but by ourselves. We produced the humans who do not have human rights, writes Ole Sandberg in a reading of a refugee protest in Reykjavik.
Ole Martin Sandberg
In March 2019, a score of refugees who had been housed in Ásbrú, the former US military base outside of Keflavik, Iceland, decided to break their isolation and come into the city of Reykjavik. With help from activists in the No Borders network, they set up camp in the park, Austurvöllur, in front of the Icelandic parliament building. At first, they were met with violent repression by the police who used chemical weapons on the refugees and local activists, but a camp was established which had a permanent presence for about a week and regular protests in the weeks thereafter.
Becoming political subjects
This was of course meant as a political protest. The refugees had five clear demands: An end to deportations, individual reviews of asylum cases, the right to work, access to health care, and closing the Ásbrú camp. Some of these are demands of basic rights, like the rights the citizens already enjoy. But before you can receive legal recognition in the form of rights, you have to become a political being. In this respect, the most interesting demand is the one relating to the Ásbrú camp.
It is worth noticing the reasons given for this demand. It is not that the material conditions of the housing are bad. It is the social conditions. Being housed in an apartment complex on a former military base out in nowhere might be fine for students and researchers who have access to transportation and are part of a community. But for the refugees, who are not allowed visitors and can rarely afford even the public busses, it is more like a prison (complete with security guards who record their movement, arbitrary searches, etc.). In the leaflets with the demands, the complaint about Ásbrú is that it “makes sure they (the asylum seekers) stay isolated and invisible to the public.”
We can conclude that the mere act of the protest achieved one of the goals. By moving themselves out of the camp and into the city, the refugees broke the isolation and made themselves visible to the public. This was a direct action in that the method was part of the goal. The other demands depend on a third party, the political system, to listen and to act, but this one is directly political and transformative just by stepping into the public square and articulating it. By entering the park in front of the parliament the refugees were not just demanding to be seen, they made themselves visible in a way that could not be ignored.
The function of the refugee camp, which in Iceland like all over Europe is deliberately placed outside of society, is to isolate the people living there from social and political life. By entering the public space, the refugees broke their isolation and in effect became political beings that had to be recognized somehow.
Recognition is a necessary but difficult and painful process. On the one hand, many citizens of Reykjavik came out in support of the refugees, or at least came to visit in order to see them as human beings, as individuals with lives and needs, rather than the anonymous and easily-forgotten statistics that are housed away in our camps as a mere temporary and exceptional state that doesn’t affect our normal order. Shortly after the Austurvöllur camp was established the school students had the strike and demonstration for climate action in the same place, and afterwards many of them stayed to join the refugees in recognition of the mutual cause: the struggle for a world we can all live in, in safety and without fear. And when the state machinery decided to deport the family of a student in a Reykjavik school, it was clear that the refugees are also fighting to protect our friends and our neighbors; the entire school came out in solidarity.
But of course, not all have expressed their recognition in such affirmative ways. Besides the police repression and harassment of the refugees who have dared to take political action (they are being punished with arbitrary searches, followed by plain-clothes cops etc.) there has also been a few cases of physical assault and verbal abuse by random strangers who are upset by the political decision of the marginalized to become visible. Fortunately, Iceland does not have much of an active and organized fascist movement but the few cowardly members of the Nordic Nazi terrorist organization that do exist here have been putting up stickers and painting graffiti in the area around Austurvöllur.
It is not from these sources that the main threat and intimidation against the refugees were coming, though. Open hostility is one thing, and one it is much easier to deal with as it is premised upon a sort of recognition. The one who treats you as an enemy at least has to acknowledge you. While the internet as well as the physical space has been overflowing with support and solidarity, a stew of contempt has also been brewing on platforms like Facebook and the newspaper comment sections.
This contempt is almost never expressed honestly and directly. Unlike those racists who if nothing else are at least honest, the majority of Icelanders would never come out and say “I do not want other people here; I do not want us to give protection to refugees; I do not acknowledge their human rights.” Instead, the complaints are always directed at other things in a round-about way: “It is disrespectful to stand up and be visible; how dare they complain and imply we have done something wrong? They are rude; they are noisy; they are dirty; they are a disturbance.” Of course, these types of complaints can always be directed at any form of political action intended to bring injustice to the forefront of public consciousness and to change the order of things. Reactionaries have always expressed their contempt at troublemakers who fought for an expansion of rights in their time while at the same time enjoying the rights that were established by past troublemakers who did not listen to those who said that it is worse to be rude than it is to accept the status quo.
Horror and abjection in Austurvöllur
One of the complaints is of particular interest, though. One that got a lot of traction on social media and succeeded in feeding the flames of hate. A politician and former minister of Church and Justice wrote a blogpost leading with an innocent quote from a veterinarian talking about measures to prevent bacterial contamination in meat products imported from abroad. Then he switches topic to the refugees’ protest camp in Austurvöllur. [i] Thus, in a leap of association he manages to connect non-citizens with germs and diseases and the expulsion and detainment of foreigners with hygiene control and disease prevention. The implied message is clear: To preserve the health of the national body, foreign elements must be kept out and contained.
We could talk about the obvious historical parallels with the rhetoric in this post, but I’d rather approach it from a different angle. The intention and function of the blogpost is of course to induce emotions into the readers, in particular emotions like fear and disgust, in order to channel these into a political orientation. The political function of affective states like disgust is fascinating and well-documented (see, for example, research by scientists like Read Montague, David Pizarro and many others[ii]). Disgust is a deep-seated emotion that triggers our desires for protection and purification and animosity against that which is different and thus threatens the stability and purity; it is therefore no surprise that it is known to amplify more authoritarian and conservative views.
In the book Powers of Horror the French-Bulgarian literary critic and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva has written extensively on affective states like repugnance, disgust and, in particular, abjection[iii]. Abjection literally means the act of throwing something out, rejecting or expelling it, and as such it seems immediately relevant for the topic of refugees who were at first pushed out of their own states, then arrived in Europe where they are expelled from society and risk being pushed out again by forced deportation. In modern English though, “abject” is used to refer to the state of humiliation and hopelessness which is certainly also relevant for this topic. But in psychoanalysis it has a somewhat different use.
In Kristeva’s writing, abjection refers to our reaction to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other. One of her examples is the loathing of certain types of food that can cause the body to convulse and gag in order to abject the foreign element such as when an infant expels the milk it both needs and desires. She writes:
Along with sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. “I” want none of that element, sign of their desire; “I” do not want to listen, “I” do not assimilate it, “I” expel it. But since the food is not an “other” for “me,” who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself.
The reason she puts the word “I” in scare quotes is that this reaction is prior to the formation of the self as an independent subject. There is no autonomous self who performs the act of abjection of an independent object; on the contrary, the revulsion and discomfort is caused by the lack of separation between subject and object and the desire to establish a border between them. The infantile disgust which the former politician is expressing is one relevant to those who have not yet established a sense of self that they are comfortable with and therefore feel compelled to define themselves against others. By abjecting the other they seek to establish themselves.
When horrified Icelanders are sharing pictures of refugees camping in Austurvöllur they are of course not truly reacting to an imagined lack of hygiene. Kristeva writes that it is “not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.” It is the fact that the refugees are here and yet not here, they are in Iceland but not accepted in Icelandic law, they are trapped in an in-between and draw attention to the holes in the Icelandic and European system. Both the holes that allow some to come in because they have human rights, and the loopholes in the system that deny them full rights. They are neither outside nor inside and we do not know how to cope with that.
This is truly sickening not just for the refugees but also for the citizens, and the isolation of the camps are a means for the state to prevent the citizens from having to face the reality caused by the state itself, to prevent them from growing up. The infantile mind can learn to paraphrase meaningless sentences like “we believe in human rights” while at the same time believing that only citizens have rights as long as those humans who fall through that system are kept in a permanent state of exception. But when they present themselves in front of you as real humans who are denied rights by the state that claims to protect human rights you have to somehow cope with that naïve contradiction. That can cause pain because it means you have to give up a part of yourself: your self-identification with a political system believed to be perfect. You have to abject yourself in order to gain yourself.
It is not those who do not fit the system who have a health issue but those who want to maintain that system by any cost. The object of abjection is not relevant to the deject — the one who abjects. The deject is one who has not found themselves. They are not concerned with who they are, Kristeva writes, but obsessed with where they are: “the deject never stops demarcating his universe whose fluid confines — for they are constituted of a non-object, the abject — constantly question his solidity and impel him to start afresh.” As long as their search of identity is based on the exclusion of others, they will never find peace, there is always a border to police and another “other” to abject.
The deject is a neurotic desperately and constantly seeking to establish borders, but really sickened by the borders themselves. The border shows that there is always something on the other side, an object that can neither be fully assimilated nor fully excluded. There is always something threatening their subject-formation. So they go on building borders. Borders between them and us, between subject and object, between citizens and humans. The borders of Fortress Europe that started in the Mediterranean but have now expanded far into Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe.
And when the borders have encroached upon all our neighbors we let them permeate our own societies: We make ID laws and allow police to stop people on the street to prove their right to exist, we give up the right to privacy and allow the police to search our homes to find refugees. We make our whole society into a border-regime, which is a state of exception: The border is the in-between where you have to prove your right to enter one system from another but what happens to your rights when that regime is everywhere? Kristeva writes that “the most sickening of wastes is a border that has encroached upon everything.”
What we need to come to terms with is that the abject — the stateless refugee who is here but not really (legally) here — is a product of our own system. The disgust we may feel at being faced with them being visible in the public, disturbing our sense of order, is not caused by them but by ourselves. We produced the humans who do not have human rights. They are not outsiders coming in threatening our “order” but results of that “order”; they are the insides becoming visible. There is no clear line between subject and object here, but there is no need to be threatened by that. We can continue to be disgusted by the byproducts of our own faulty system, or we can grow up and take responsibility for it.
This text is an abridged version of an article published in Byltingur, May 2019.
Ole Martin Sandberg is a PhD student in philosophy, University of Iceland.
References
[i] Björn Bjarnason, “Frysting eyðir ekki smithættu,” Björn Bjarnason — bjorn.is, accessed April 24, 2019, https://www.bjorn.is/dagbok/frysting-eydir-ekki-smithaettu.
[ii] Woo-Young Ahn et al., “Nonpolitical Images Evoke Neural Predictors of Political Ideology,” Current Biology 24, no. 22 (November 17, 2014): 2693–99, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.09.050; David Pizarro, Yoel Inbar, and Chelsea Helion, “On Disgust and Moral Judgment,” Emotion Review 3, no. 3 (July 2011): 267–68, https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073911402394.
[iii] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Columbia University Press, 1982).
