Smash the Machinery of Time: Asylum Philosophy

Charlotte is a legal guardian.  She advocates for youth under the age of 18 seeking asylum in Belgium. I wanted to talk with her about this work.

Jeremy: I’ve known Charlotte Vyt since 2018 at a meeting of the Human Development and Capability Association in Buenos Aires.  In 2020-2021, we also co-organized the Planetary Justice Virtual Community with Ben Mylius and Sebastian Östlund. Charlotte is a philosopher who works in social epistemology, anthropological theory, Indigenous studies, and the Capability Approach. When we recently spoke, Charlotte was saying that her experiences as an asylum advocate and as a philosopher have a way of relating to the “politics of being put on hold.”  What did she mean, and what was she getting at?

Part I. The Politics of Nothingness

Charlotte:  I relate the “politics of being put on hold” to what I intuitively call the “politics of nothingness.” I’ve become more and more interested about that. By the “politics of nothingness,” I mean the seeming non-materiality of certain forms of suffering as well as the seeming absence of structures allowing for it. What in social epistemology is called the “the politics of ignorance” is part of the functioning of this nothingness.  The politics of ignorance allows the politics of nothingness to proceed silently.

Ignorance is associated with an absence of knowledge, a nothingness of knowledge. But it is a substantive epistemic practice in itself. Insofar as inequitable social relations influence what counts as valuable knowledge and who is considered as a credible knower, ignorance about certain forms of experience or sense-making are equally influenced by those inequitable social relations. This means that ignorance functions as an epistemic practice as such, as a way of having a reality.

In the context of asylum-seeking, the general ignorance about many aspects of the procedure reinforces politically constructed images of asylum seekers. Being put on hold is part of the suffering that isn’t acknowledged.  It comes across as nothing in the very society the asylum seekers want to join!  And yet it allows for many other forms of injustice to take root. It’s part of a structural “nothingness” that quietly stains and restricts life possibilities:

Imagine R., a fourteen year-old boy, alone, trapped between the life he had to escape from and the contingency of another life. He’s become Europe’s yoyo. For two whole years, he was deported back-and-forth between Greece and Turkey, enrolled in human trafficking practices, crossing the sea over-and-over again, even having his teeth broken by Europe’s guards.

Then, I became his legal guardian. His fingerprints were taken in Greece.  So our first step was to prove his age.  That way, the Dublin Regulation would not be applied to him and we could apply for asylum in Belgium. He had to undergo several bone scans at the hospital – of his collarbone, wrist and jaw. Luckily, the results were conclusive, he was estimated “with relative scientific certainty” to be sixteen years old.

A couple of weeks ago, he had his first interview at the “Office des Étrangers” (Foreign Office).  There, he broke down and repeatedly begged me to make sure “they” would not deport him again. 

We now have to wait in complete uncertainty for the convocation of his second interview at the “Commissariat Général aux Réfugiés et aux Apatrides” (General Commissioner for Refugees and Stateless Persons). The interview could happen at any moment, but there is no official deadline (well, technically there is, but it is never respected)! The official meeting may take over a year to come around. That means another year spent in legal and social limbo.

Moreover, there is a high probability R.’s claim for asylum will be refused.  But by the time we receive the response, another six to eight months will have elapsed. … By the time we will have appealed, another year will have gone by again. …

This type of idle waiting lasts for years and has no clear ending.  It constructs people as worthless in-betweens forced into immobility and anxiousness. Being put on hold is a politicized experience.  It serves a politics of nothingness by making suffering invisible.

Jeremy:  And Belgian citizens get to believe that fair process is occurring.  They can remain ignorant of what it’s like to be put on hold.  Is that it?

Part II. Slow, Violent “Stuckedness”

Charlotte:  The dynamics I’ve described are elusive and slippery. They tend to be presented to us Belgians as being unavoidable, bureaucratic side-effects, lesser evils. This bureaucratic rationalization clears them automatically. Still they embody a type of barely visible, slow violence.

They contribute to making people feel out of sync with reality and the rest of society. For the boys I have guardianship over, it is extremely hard to keep up with school, especially during the moments when we have to meet their lawyer more often or when they are waiting for a reply from the foreign office. When they miss too many days of school, they are kicked out of the school system, and that has a lot of detrimental consequences for them and their future lives. At the same time, it seems absurd for them to focus on something like school when so much uncertainty is going on.

Yet the stuckedness that is created during the process of asylum shapes and affects their life possibilities. At the moment I am talking to you, all Afghan files in Belgium are not being decided. So everyone has to wait without any clear perspective; everyone is stuck and out of sync with the rest of society. Discomfort, unease, worry, shame and fear are emotional aspects of my boys’ daily lives in quite specific ways. These things are an emotional dimension to their precarity that is often overlooked.

Today’s flow of Ukrainian asylum seekers highlights the fact that the limbo certain asylum seekers face is in fact a political choice and not a bureaucratic side-effect of European policies. The Belgian state chose to grant a form of asylum to all Ukrainian applicants, including granting them a basic subsidy. This means that they do not have to go through interviews and even do not have to live in asylum centers. In other words, their lives – and not those of non-European others – are worth not being put on hold.

There’s this quote from Foucault that has always profoundly touched me. He says “people’s suffering must never be allowed to remain the silent residue of politics.” Being put on hold is exactly that. It’s suffering that remains a silent residue of politics, and it should not be allowed to remain so.

Part III. Time as a Political Technology / Smash the Machinery of Time

Jeremy:  What do you do as a guardian?

Charlotte:  Currently, I am legal guardian to three boys who are seeking international protection in Belgium. I accompany them in their daily lives and support them in their legal process. This means that in the eyes of the state I act as their parent. Central to my role is to accompany them in their asylum procedures: to find a good lawyer for them, make sure their rights are respected and to be present at their interviews with state officials who will decide upon their status as refugees or not.

Regardless of their individual life stories and traumas, the recurring anxiety that marks the realities of these boys’ experiences revolves around time:  the experience of having to constantly wait, of being in a continual in-betweenness—in between the life that was and the life that may or may not become.

Jeremy:  Then you also shoulder them in all this, … labor emotionally?

Charlotte:  There’s this sense of a persistent “stuckedness,” an unavoidable waste of time spent somewhere in between.  Waiting, in this context, is not a banal and prosaic practice.

When I refer to a “politics of being put on hold”, that’s what I partially mean to acknowledge: it’s the political element to this form of structural and existential waiting. How and why does this unlivable stuckedness of existence get upheld? Why should lives be put on hold?

An overwhelming number of people die at Europe’s borders – mostly at sea but also at land. Crossing Europe’s borders implies a risk of corporeal violence and death, but it also involves various unstructured, affective and endless forms of violence.

In 2015, Europe implemented its “hotspot system.” This system is supposed to transfer the migrants who are in “clear need” of international protection to other European states. The main consequence of this system is that many asylum seekers are stranded at the borders, stuck, waiting, either to cross the border or for their appeal against the denial of international protection to be processed and responded to.

Spatial borders are not sufficient for Europe’s border strategy? No!  A temporal border system has to be implemented as well! Temporal borders reinforce the difficulty of crossing spatial borders by implementing an extra, temporal, layer to them. They function by means of the establishment of an accelerated or decelerated temporality of control through deadlines and time limits.  In other words, the temporal border accompanies the spatial border by reinforcing it with a series of rules and deadlines that reinforce its “borderness.”

Concretely, this means that migrant movements are slowed down and their autonomous temporalities disrupted. There’s what Tazzioli calls a “technology of control” here. Temporality is accelerated by reinforcing channels of deportation or illegalization whilst simultaneously being decelerated by reinforcing bureaucratic deadlines. Both manipulations of temporality are put into place in order to reinforce the border system and to regain control over “unruly” migration movements.

Time is then a technology of governmentality in this precise sense: it governs migrants’ mobility.  Waiting is ubiquitous in any bureaucratic setting; yet in the context of migration it becomes a tool, and the relations between waiting and (im)mobility serve bordering systems.

These rhythms of governmentality and bureaucratic decisions rapidly change over time and are generally unclear.  This creates an overall context of “nonknowledge”, an epistemology of ignorance. The temporal rhythms constantly fluctuate because the dates and deadlines migrants have to comply with in order to be eligible for protection and thus cross the border are always changing.

Besides, not only are the rules regularly changing, there is an ever-growing gap between the “ideal” procedures and the reality of the ways in which they are implemented. The maintenance of strategic ignorance – “unknowns” that are used to enclose possibilities – is not simply a bureaucratic side-effect. It’s a political tactic as such. This means that the unclarity, inconsistency and continuous change with regard to the criteria for selecting and partitioning migrants who have the right to ask for asylum contributes to the containment of migration movements.

The hermeneutical gaps between “official” government statistics and information and the “unofficial” ones represents a meaningful silence, a loud unknown. In other words, the rapidity of changes in temporal deadlines and the ways in which these changes create a general context of non-knowledge are inherently part of a politics of being put on hold.

Part IV. Thinking-Things-Through into Meaningful Action

Jeremy:  How did you come to do this kind of work given your background in philosophy? 

Charlotte:  Initially, I chose to study philosophy because I have always loved the mental exercise of really thinking things through. When I finished high school, my interests in philosophy were mainly what I’d call “self-centered:” I loved metaphysics, ontology, etc. and wanted to understand the meaning of life in its greatest sense.

At the same time, I was very aware of the selfishness of my choice and was in conflict with finding my purpose in life. I wondered how to contribute to society.

This is mainly why I shifted my interests towards social and political philosophy and the study of theories of social justice.

Once I became more familiarized with philosophers and their ways of making sense of everything, I started to become more and more disappointed with their general lack of actual concern with people’s lives – their very real suffering and various experiences of oppression. By “actual concern,” I mean a form of engagement that concretely affects people’s lives. Instead, human existence often times seemed to be overshadowed by the interpretation of it!

Because of this, I have continuously wondered whether my ambition to contribute to diminishing injustice in the world can be accomplished in such a self-centered setting.

I did two master degrees and during the last one, I started to volunteer in a refugee center. I ended up working there as a social worker for more than a year, after which I started my PhD in political philosophy.

During that time as a social worker, I never doubted my purpose. Work seemed meaningful to me. Yet I felt very frustrated often times. In Dutch, there is an expression which says “dweilen met de kraan open” (“mopping with the tap open”). No matter how much you mop, the water will never be gone! The effort to deal with something becomes useless because there is a continuous flow of problems coming your way. That’s how I felt doing the work I did.

As a social worker in a Red Cross facility, I had to follow governmental guidelines. Expressing political opinions was forbidden. I even had to sign a code of “neutrality” and “impartiality.” This meant I could help people only by respecting what was put in place by the Red Cross and the Belgian government. I wasn’t permitted to critique or influence those guidelines.

By starting a PhD, I thought I might have the opportunity to end up working somewhere where I could be more influential in actually changing the structures that anger me.

A couple of years ago, I passed the tests to become a legal guardian to minor asylum seekers and I have accompanied youngsters ever since.

…

Here, this is a picture I took in the train of my hand holding that of one of my boys. It was after an interview, and he was crying in panic over something that had happened. At the moment I took the picture, he fell asleep. I was overwhelmed with a feeling of respect and sadness for what life had brought him so far. I decided to take the picture with that feeling in mind.

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This is an installment of Into Philosophy.

ge·ni·al | ˈjēnyəl | adjective friendly and cheerful: waved to them in genial greeting. • literary (especially of air or climate) pleasantly mild and warm. DERIVATIVES genially | ˈjēnyəlē | adverb ORIGIN mid 16th century: from Latin genialis ‘nuptial, productive.’ The Latin sense was adopted into English; hence the senses ‘mild and conducive to growth’ (mid 17th century), later ‘cheerful, kindly’ (mid 18th century).