Abstract
This is an essay about how alienhood is made. Alienhood is a material, affective, and political condition of that is manufactured by the State’s technologies of visibility. Immigration control in the US relies on enhanced technologies of perception to surveil the intensive movement differences (alien affects) of migrants to control their extensive movements—their flow. Alien affects are the micro-flows of intensity that when cast upon the surface of the State, glimmer with difference, augmenting the ways alien migrant bodies move into and across the surfaces of US statehood. This makes the process of alienation a political process that involves governance of migrating bodies through a multitude of technologies aimed at surveilling and controlling both citizen communities and non-citizen communities. This essay explores the relationship between extensive movement and intensive movement and what this relationship means in the context of affect studies. It also describes how State power is expressed through layers of articulable and visible expression that is distributed across landscapes of US statehood to control the flows of the bodies. Lastly, the essay invites those invested in affect studies to find more links between the fields of rhetoric and affect studies, to study the technological production of alienhood in our societies of control, and to consider what adopting a movement politics can offer that ascribing to an identity politics may not.
Highlights
This is an essay about how alienhood is made
I say this for two reasons: first, the United States (US) has invested tens of billions of dollars in the latest surveillance technologies over the last three decades, to create a network of sensing devices to track the movements of migrants across that border (Office of the Inspector General, 2005; US Customs and Border Protection, 2015a)
I explore the relationship between extensive movement and intensive movement, and what this relationship means in the context of affect studies
Summary
This is an essay about how alienhood is made. Alienhood is a material, affective, and political condition of that is manufactured by the State’s technologies of visibility. The State’s technologies of visibility, like drone surveillance, biometric databases, and the ‘virtual border’, make the intensive and extensive movements of migrants moving into and through our landscapes of citizenship more sensible, making migrants more vulnerable.
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