“Design for the Alien Within is my designer alter ego, invented to frame fictional architectural and furniture design projects. It is situated at an intersection of art and design, where there is a fruitful conversation. It responds to current US reality but is not a direct action tool like some interventionist art or tactical architecture. 26,000 immigrants are held in US detention each day, thousands more are pouring over borders to do needed jobs; a vast government force, larger than the US armed forces put together, is busy locking up and repatriating even more, and hundreds of thousands of immigrants and citizens demonstrated last year against yet more punitive legislation. Design for the Alien Within celebrates allegiance between citizen and immigrant against anti-immigrant laws, along with our desire to buy furniture that reshapes our homes as expressions of our beliefs.” (Jenny Polak,The Culture of Rights)

Both Votemos.us and Design for the Alien Within imagine treating the illegal alien as if he/she matters; Votemos.us considers their political substance through hypothetical voting rights, and Design for the Alien Within considers their safety. It is not my intent to provide an in-depth analysis of either Votemus.us or Design for the Alien Within, but to trace the specific phenomenon of the unaccounted body as it is articulated in each project². These artistic interventions, which have the unaccounted body as their subject/theme, present a space that has yet to reach their subject—whether as audience or as a catalyst for a better life making their situation better—and the hypothetical situations they evoke. Giving voting rights to undocumented people could not occur when their civic being has not yet been accounted for, and designing furniture for the hiding of bodies cannot be functional if people do not feel a real need to hide undocumented immigrants.

Based on an Aristotelian idea that art is not a semblance opposed to reality, but rather the image of reality that is penetrated by the idea, I see Votemos.us andDesign for the Alien Within as artworks in which their artistic frameworks show how art is an image of reality. The idea of the subject of the rights of the illegal alien becomes more apparent than in the actual world. Within this framework, I want to present Votemos.us and Design for the Alien Within as two examples of art about the ‘unaccounted body.’ I call the body of the undocumented immigrant in the U.S. the ‘unaccounted body’ in order to highlight the situation in which the undocumented body finds itself: half way between existence and representation. Although certainly the body of the undocumented person exists, it does not exist in the society’s account of its bodies. In this paper, I will present an analysis and comparison of these two artistic interventions that have as their subject matter the rights of the illegal alien.

The rights of the illegal alien echo the notion of the rights of man as conceived by Jacques Ranciere in his article Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man? The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen was issued on August 26, 1789. In the wake of a new right, the right to “humanitarian interference” (1991)³ —which was promptly translated into to the right to invasion, the suspicion arose that the “man” of the Rights of Man was a mere abstraction because the only real rights were the rights of citizens, the rights attached to a national community as such (Ranciere 298). According to Ranciere, the “Rights of Man are the rights of those who have not the rights that they have and have the rights that they have not” (302). In this essay Ranciere is responding to Hannah Arendt’s essay, The Perplexities of the Rights of Man.⁴ While Arendt considers that the Rights of Man are indeed a lack of rights, Ranciere re-reads Arendt’s assertion against the events in the French Revolution, and problematizes the notion of political subject as a potential generator of subjects for rights: “It appears thus that man is not the void term opposed to the actual rights of the citizen” (Ranciere 304). I consider the illegal alien in the U.S. is an example of a subject without rights who is, nevertheless, not void of rights.

In the case of illegal aliens in the U.S., the subject of the rights exists in a space of liminality. I see the illegal alien’s body as a liminal site for the Rights of Man, and I see this intangibility is apparent in the artistic interventions that take the rights of the illegal alien as its subject matter. Still, in reading politics as a space for contesting notions about who is the subject of rights, I perceive in the artworks a potential re-configuration of discursive space (as a space for possible claims for equality) that might depart from the theoretical intangibility of the rights of illegal aliens as men without citizenship. The question: who the subject of the rights of illegal aliens is? lurks beneath the artistic interventions presented here.

While in Votemos.us the question is: Who would be the president of the United States if undocumented immigrants could vote?, Design for the Alien Withinasks: “Under what circumstances do people take action to assist friends, family, colleagues to evade repressive governments?” The knowability of the situation of the illegal alien constructs two different subject positions, and those lead to the chosen way of representation. That is, one initiative takes the reality of the illegal alien to be the lack of political representation, while the other takes the reality of the illegal alien to be the raids and fears of deportation. In Votemos.us the subject position constructed is one that performs the giving of authorship at a political level through the voting poll, and the performance of accountability at the interviews displayed in the site. In Votemos.us the subject is given agency. In Design for the Alien Within the constructed subject position performs the mapping of unaccountability, the space of the hidden body without the body. It is conceptually practical, if the visualization of a body causes the body to be expulsed, then we hide it. The subject is given survival or mere ‘being there.’

The most recent estimate by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) calculates the number of illegal immigrants to be 12 million. However, because this calculation uses the residual method that deducts the number of immigrants holding authorization to come to the US from the foreign born residents, the number of illegal immigrant is probably higher. The amount of 12 millions does not include, among others, people who overstayed their visa, people who didn’t answer accurately the census in 2000, or people whom the census could not reach. Not even in the number of the mass of undocumented immigrants accounts for the illegal aliens.

Then undocumented immigrant experiences a tension between making him/herself disappear or visible. On the one hand, the person doesn’t exist in statistics, records, credit databases and/or rental history. On the other, the person is forced to avoid crossing the line from invisible to visible because ‘being accounted’ may result in ‘being removed’ i.e. deportation. Any transaction demanding corroboration of identity is an act that crosses the line from invisibility to visibility. Only through visibility might the subject be the subject of rights, but the act of being visible as subject rather than object threatens the subject.

I. VOTEMOS.US

Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga’s artistic intervention, Votemos.us, assembles these questions of visibility and accountability into a cart that moves in real and virtual space. The Votemos.us initiative is both a website and a cart. The website “México Decide!” provides information in Spanish on the electoral campaign, interviews with undocumented U.S. residents, and statistics on votes registered through the website and the cart.⁵ México was selected given that Mexicans constitute the majority of undocumented migrants, and 42% of all immigration in the 90’s. However, the author later regretted this decision of including only Mexicans and claimed that had he been able to do things differently, he would have used a multinational flag (Zuñiga, Nov. 22, 2008). The cart is a sort of ambulatory voting booth. It is painted with red and white stripes with yellow patches at the bottom or base of it. Red letters read ‘GROCE’—probably ‘grocery’ cut short. The Votemos.us cart carries two life size puppets on board: Obama and McCain puppets. The two flags—the American flag and the Mexican—emerge from behind the puppets. The puppets have a circular device on top: a microphone and a light, blue for Obama, red for McCain. The light turns on when any passerby engages with the performance and grabs the microphone belonging to a particular candidate. The person who chooses to participate can grab the microphone of the favored candidate, or the opposite, and parody the other’s views or intonation. On October 12 and 18, 2008, the Votemos.us cart, emblazoned with a Mexican and an American flag, hit the streets in a quest for collecting the vote of those who were not allowed to vote. The cart visited McCarren Park on October 12, a Sunday, when many Latino families were in the park. The cart traveled around for six hours, from noon to 6 pm. On October 18, the cart was in West Village (Eyebeam) at a block party called “Park Day” from 1 to 5 pm. The microphones and lights were used at the performance on October 18 at Eyebeam—West Village, but on October 12 certain technical difficulties prevented their use. This technical barrier shifted the focus to the puppets and the music (Caetano Veloso, Manu Dibango, Moussa Doumbia, and Too Short), played as the cart traversed the streets. Zuñiga makes use of various technologies in this movement that is transversal rather than oppositional—he collects opinions in different environments but does not speak against existent laws about voting rights. Votemos.us makes explicit the claim, existent in certain groups of society that all U.S. residents including the undocumented should be able to vote.⁶

The puppets have been carefully thought through, and have oriented the development of the rest of the piece. The masks of the puppets are handcrafted wooden masks, which the author considers characteristic of Latin America. Traditional plays in Nicaragua, the country Zuñiga’s parents are from and where he spent all his summers growing up, make use of these wooden masks as part of costumes. While putting together the cart, Zuñiga had in mind a very old play, El Güegüence, in which native people from Nicaragua make a parody of the Spaniards El Güegüence is one of the oldest folkloric dramas of Nicaragua. No one knows who authored El Güegüence, but it was written during the colonial period to mock the Spanish colonial authorities” (Whisnant 1995). This play, Zuñiga asserts, illustrates a typical Nicaraguan way of resistance with humor. “Grignon and Passer have observed that the techniques selected are symptomatic of how the relation of popular culture to society is visualized” (Grignon and Passer quoted in Garcia Canclini 1989: 200). The masks encompass Zuñiga’s visualization of his own heritage—in the folkloric sense of the word.

Since the time of colonization and Spanish conquerors can only be understood and referenced as history (or what became history) allows, the popular wooden masks are not so much about content and meaning. Rather, the wooden masks allow us to visualize the structure of relations. It is possible to see the traditional craftsmanship, which has lasted five centuries, as evoking a set of relations that are being re-enacted by the Votemos.us initiative. The theme of voting rights maintains the opposition ‘native’ and ‘immigrant’, nevertheless the functions to which both elements relate has been upended. The immigrant is subjected to the law, as opposed to the Spanish conquerors five centuries ago. I see the use of this popular craftsmanship (wooden masks) in terms of the set of relations between culture of the people and society. The use of an ancient craft marks an awareness of the oppositions and subsequently acts as a mediator in a new set of functions with the same set of oppositions. The use of puppets with typical wooden masks obeys a tradition of popular art that gives recognition to other actors and cultural forms that share the condition of subaltern. In a world in which representation and votes are mainly sought on TV and online, the physical presence of the puppets achieves not only a sort of objecthood no longer predominant, but is also reminiscent of traditional, popular forms such as puppet theater, oral narrative events and street celebrations.

II. DESIGN FOR THE ALIEN WITHIN

Jenny Polak’s artistic intervention, Design for the Alien Within, employs design to contest the state’s visualization of the unaccounted bodies. Design for the Alien Within is composed of three different pieces, all created in 2006: an interactive website similar to online games in which one walks through an apartment installation and discovers hidden spaces, a series of framed drawings of domestic settings where people can be hidden, and a media center which consists of furniture pieces made of Plexiglas and presents the spectator the opportunity of putting his/her own body inside them, and pretend to be hiding. In addition, between the years of 2006 and 2009, Design for the Alien Within has been always exhibited with other pieces concerned as well with the politics of immigration. Those encompass: a set of 14 acrylic paintings on blue paper mounted on foamcore that commemorates 14 raided spaces; ICE escape signs that show how to evacuate in case of an immigration raid; and a website that tracks the raids.

All of these pieces were exhibited at Queens Central Library (April – June 07) in New York and at the Newark Museum (May – July 06) in New Jersey among others. On February 19, 2009, at the panel “The Culture of Rights”, all of these elements were exhibited in the left wing of the Douglass Library in Rutgers. From theDesign for the Alien Within: The Media Center 2006, there was a cupboard at the exhibition at Rutgers’s Library. The brochure at the panel at Rutgers describes the Media Center initiative—the one the cupboard was part of—as:

Fake furniture based on IKEA ideas of total accommodation, with hiding place for people without papers. Historically people have needed places to hide from persecution, and others have the need to hide them. Here and now, many Americans are unaware but many others know this exists. Under what circumstances do people take action to assist friends, family, and colleagues to evade repressive governments?

The furniture presented at Rutgers has transparent Plexiglas. One could say that it is not really a place to hide the undocumented but a space to see what type of body we don’t see. There is a tag at the back or entrance of the cupboard that reads: “Remove your shoes and enter carefully.” The act of imagining one’s own body to be hidden arguably causes the person to enter another space of the body ⁷—the space of a body that is not accounted for and needs to remain invisible. We need to see the space in which the body is not seen. The interior of the cupboard is painted like a camouflage, leaves and flowers, full brush lines in blue (one can see the brush’s bristle marks). This interior plays with the idea of half camouflage and half artistic pattern, which the author calls schemata (Polak 2009). This piece of furniture designed with Plexiglas “is nearly a piece of furniture, but is not” (February 19, 2009). Thus, as the unaccounted body, it is like an object in between two statuses: one of artistic object and one of furniture.

Polak conceived this artwork in the beginning of 2006. At that moment, the ICE (Immigration Customs Enforcement) heightened its raiding programs dramatically, looking to increase rates of detention and deportation as part of the so-called the “Return to Sender” program. One of the ways to increase the rates of detention was to set a quota that the ICE federal agents had to meet. Politics about immigration are appealing to Jenny Polak. She considers that growing up and hearing his Dutch father telling stories about how people hid victims and helped them to survive during the Holocaust influenced her interest in the politics about immigration (February 19, 2009). Shortly after her first exhibition at the Newark Museum in New Jersey (June-July 2006), another raid hit nearby in Baltimore, Maryland, and it appeared in the news because of allegations of racial profiling. On January 30, 2007 federal agents targeted Latinos outside a 7-Eleven in Southeast Baltimore. The video, taken by store cameras, captured U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents rounding up 24 men suspected of being undocumented immigrants. In the video, agents can be seen ignoring black store patrons while focusing on Latino men.⁸ Since then, most have been deported or left the country voluntarily.

At about the same time, Jenny Polak heard of a woman, Barbara Kremer, who successfully hid more than 25 people from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the huge raid at the Swift Meatpacking Factory in Worthington, MN in December 2006. Barbara Kremer inspired the “Sanctuary Systems: emergency Sleeping Solutions for People Without Immigration Papers” installation at the Soap Factory, MN, and encouraged Polak to expand the project of theDesign for the Alien Within. Polak added to the exhibition of Design for the Alien Within a looped audio of Kremer narrating her own experience. In 2007, Polak created the “Track the ICE raids” website. This website tracks the raids since 2003 using Google map. The raids’ markers on the map cast shadows that look like fingerprints. The markers fade as they age, and their angles denote the type of place raided.⁹ Jenny predicts that as the raids keep being recorded, the map will eventually be obliterated. The obliteration of the map by the shadows of the raids shows that raids ‘do’ something to the map. Echoing and upending anti-illegal alien feelings, the raids and not the persons threaten to obliterate—or demolish—the map, or the nation. There is a translation of feelings (such as threat) into the opposite thought. While the anti-illegal alien posture is one that considers the undocumented a threat to the map and boundaries of the nation, the subjacent idea in the “Track the ICE raids” website is that the raids obliterate the nation, and is a threat to the undocumented person. The feeling is re-enacted differently. The website is more open to a diverse array of audiences who might interpret the map about raids from various perspectives.

III. THE SUBJECT IS BESIDE

As paradigms of the unaccounted body, these artistic interventions show how the subject of the rights of the illegal alien has yet to be reached. Accounting for the actuality of the subject would turn the form of representation inside the art piece to be functional for the illegal alien or the illegal alien’s concrete needs. In short, accounting for the actuality of the subject would turn the art piece into activist art, which is not necessarily the goal of an (the?) artist. The proposals presented by these artistic interventions stand beside their subjects, they do not reach the space in which the subject matter would be attainable. This is neither positive nor negative; rather, it shows a relationship between the idea of the subject and the subject. The relation between the person as subject and the person as illegal alien, and the relation between the illegal alien as artistic subject and the piece of art are similar to each other. The artists’ subject matter exists in a space besides its being; a position which coincides with the body of the undocumented immigrant existing besides his own being as ‘present’ in a system. If American life were a restaurant, the existence of the illegal alien would be located in the kitchen area. I am here drawing a correlation with the paradigmatic example in which “the phenomenon has a space beside and this is the essential part” (Agamben, What is a paradigm). That means that the unaccounted reality and subject in these artistic interventions are equal to the concrete situation of the subject of the Rights of the Illegal Alien. The illegal alien stands in a space that prevents his/her presence from being accounted as part of a social system. The illegal alien hides by not participating in the bureaucratic rituals of citizenship; a position that allows for hiding amongst the public.

IV. POTENTIALITY IN LIMINAL SPACE: BETWEEN THE REAL AND THE FICTIONAL

This virtual relation that the un-accounted body holds to residency correlates to the space of the virtual realm of online existence. “Metaphors can be built because of the similarity of two forms of bodily space in the two cases” (Gil Metamorphoses 130.1). The Internet is as undocumented and subject-less as the un-accounted body. For this reason, it might prove harder to patrol:

Laws in cyberspace are hard to enforce, very hard to enforce because you don’t have a body that you can enforce them on necessarily. (…) Laws traditionally have been passed by governments that had clear jurisdictions and had things that they could do to the people and institutions in those jurisdictions had penalties that they could assess, sanctions that they could impose, those kind of things. It’s very difficult to do that if you don’t know where the event that you’re trying to regulate is taking place. You don’t know who’s doing it. You don’t know whether it lies in your jurisdiction or not, you don’t know whether it affects your jurisdiction or not. (Barlow 2000: n. p.)

Jenny Polak, approaching the topic with a degree in Architecture from Cambridge utters similar views, when asked about ‘lost space’:

I am interested, in my references the field of interior design and architecture, in the difficulties surrounding wasted or ‘lost’ space. I see possibilities for such space, as being outside the normative, perhaps exempt from laws, perhaps safe from persecution, perhaps a metaphor for art, in that it does not have to answer to any rules, and can critique the status quo from its place of exemption, disguised as ‘mere’ fiction. (Polak 2009)

The website provides a shield of protection to the body of the undocumented.The online experience cheats the audience into forgetting that they have actually forsaken their bodies while viewing the Votemos.us cart traveling the streets or the Design for the Alien Within‘s installation online. Both websites and both interventions continue performing on the cyber stage. When I finished watching the Votemos.us‘s film of the cart traversing the streets, I felt as if I had been following the puppets in the cart the whole day. Taking advantage of this virtual reality, Jenny Polak goes ahead and makes the online experience interactive similar to online games. Votemos.us and Design for the Alien Within intertwine tradition and innovation in cyberspace. Cyberspace is no longer ‘unmapped,’ ‘verbally terse’ and ‘up for grabs,’ as J.P Barlow described it twenty years ago (Barlow 1989), but for the subject of the undocumented it remains a place in which law and rights are hard to enforce given the lack of real bodies in which to enforce.

Similarly to Polak’s website, Zuñiga’s website is also equipped with statistics and data. Ricardo Zuñiga addresses audiences and spectators through different mediums: live and online, through a website that provides information, videos, and transcripts of interviews. The movement goes beyond physical conceptions into different times in virtual space. Here I literally mean ‘movement,’ as he was pushing the Votemos.us cart through the streets on October 12 and October 18. But I also think of movement in terms of audience and point of view. Since each day new spectators view videos of the October 12 and 18 performances on the website, the movement also traverses the virtual realm. He inhabits both the time of the suburbs in which Latino populations’ thrive and the time of cyberspace where rules and customs differ greatly. The audience of Votemos.us at Chelsea, West Village, New York, was of different backgrounds and had a good amount of information about elections and figures. In one video of the performance at Chelsea, an American white male is explaining to his two kids, “certain people living in this country can’t vote.” The audience at this event resembles Jenny Polak’s audience at her exhibition and talk at Rutgers. In both interventions the illegal alien acquires representative value, which can potentially result in agency. As long as it is understood that this representative value can lead to but does not equal to agency and the giving of authorship to the unaccounted body, the artistic intervention is opening space; broadening the scope for a different point of perspective. Once a space for action is created it needs to be used. To use the space created by a different way of seeing is to cause a personal view perceived as truth to become belief in the audience. Since beliefs are more likely to modify behaviors, the artistic piece can influence episodic memory (experience) in a manner that the event is related to semantic memory (sense). In short, many things make sense, but fewer ‘move’ us. Agency can be reached through any action that acts in accordance to personal beliefs. Giving authorship to the unaccounted body could lead the illegal alien to realize he/she lacks a saying, and therefore should aim for it. Still, art tends to create more space than it can, and is willing, to use.

The space in the cupboard exhibited at Rutgers is empty, and yet, it is filled with the subjectivity of the un-accounted body. The words that accompany the installation are the only things that transform the physical object into a piece of furniture that hides illegal aliens. At Rutgers, the voice of Barbara Kremer, who hid immigrants, can be heard explaining the situation, her beliefs, and her action. On one hand, there is the space inside the piece, which is full with the absence. On the other hand, there is the piece housing a safety space from raids inside the space of an institution that depends from the state such as Rutgers, Queens Library and Newark Museum. The Newark Museum has a Victorian house as part of it. Had it been exhibited in the building’s Victorian wing, the institution of the museum would have been occupied differently by this space that defies raids, if occupied at all. Although it is part of the museum, the Victorian house annex, performs a quotidian feeling instead of an institutional vibe. The fact of being placed into an institutional frame carries this potentiality of occupation that would have been wasted if the art were to be placed were it conceptually belongs: inside a house. Felicitously, when Jenny Polak presented the Media Center piece at the Newark museum she exhibited it inside the main museum building. As Thiongo notes in the Enactments of Power: the Politics of Performance Space:

The performance space is also constituted by the totality of its external relations to these other centers and fields. Where are they all located relative to each other? Who accesses these centers and how frequently? (13)

The space of the artwork can’t escape being defined by the institution housing it. Nevertheless, it can utilize this spatial determination. It is a double force pulling in and out.Design for the Alien Within transduces¹⁰ the space of performance to the interior of another body (home, library, museum, university) linked to the body of the state.Design for the Alien Within places a source of contagion for alien-ness inside an institution. The space [an empty space against raids] inside the cupboard exemplifies what I am expressing here with the space the piece houses, and what is housing the piece. Designed with Plexiglas, this cupboard is a piece that plays between existence as function and existence as representation—or representation like functionality. Both being a cupboard and a hiding place are functional, except for the fact that the piece is not used as a cupboard or as a hiding place. Therefore, the functionality is representational. If the main arena of struggle is according to Thiong’o, “the performance’s space: its definition, and regulation” (12), then the struggle pertains to the liminality. The object renders certain liminality, occupies a liminal space of regulations and defines itself as in function of residents living in a liminal space of performance, definition, and regulation. While the cupboard’s intended function presents itself as hypothetical (hiding people), its virtual function appears to be objective (furniture). I do not use the word fictional because I consider art inhabits a space that is neither fiction nor quotidian, however, Jenny Polak refers to the ‘fictional’, as we will see. Both the hypothetical function of the object and the audience’s recognition of what the object is are framed in artistic terms. The actual function manifests in a political mode (introducing topic inside institutions that rarely deal with it). Polak makes use of design to create political and experiments with the technical drawings’ power to make people believe:

This project [Design for the Alien Within] uses the authoritative language of technical drawing to describe what most people will think are fictions: the twist is that the circumstances being alluded to by this line of furniture with hiding places built in, that is, the desperate needs of people in the present time and place to flee and hide, and the desire of others to facilitate this despite having to go against the law, are real, not fictional. (Polak March 15, 2009)¹¹

The word ‘virtual’ embodies this tension between the real and the fictional. Virtual does not mean real, as we know, but it doesn’t mean fictional either. According to Nicolas Mirzoef, the essence of politics as dissensus regards that which can’t be seen but needs to be visualized. Both artists favor this act of visualization. Polak has the act of visualization clearly in mind, “I’m interested in making art that is close to being something real – like a cupboard or an emergency evacuation sign – so that viewers will wonder about what is real/fictional in life.” In a panel at the two-day symposium “Visuality + Performance + Social Critique,” hosted by New York University’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center¹², Nicolas Mirzoef referred to visuality as a battlefield. If visuality pertains to the mapping of what is accounted for, then the virtual encompasses that which cannot be seen but needs to be visualized. The light to see enables the act of subjectivization.

V. IS THERE A NEED FOR ART TO UNDERSTAND THE ACTUALITY OF ITS SUBJECT-THEMES?

It is crucial to recognize what sorts of exposure to politics these unaccounted bodies have and what would change if they were to have a saying in politics while still unaccounted as part of civic society. Forms of representation permeate artistic utterances. It is a question of what governs statements (Foucault 112), what happens when propositions and forms of knowledge cannot possible be known (in epistemological terms: if they are not true they cannot be known), but nevertheless make sense? Are representations only known in propositional terms? Commenting on the concept of the event, Foucault asserts, “a dichotomy was established between structures (the thinkable) and the event considered as the site of the irrational, the unthinkable, that which doesn’t and cannot enter into the mechanism and play of analysis” (113). Can we experience a representation without assigning to it ‘a’ truth-value? At the time of the 2008 U.S. elections, Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga with his intervention Votemos.usintroduces the undocumented immigrant as a subject to be represented in the world of politics. Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga takes advantage of his ability to move through time. On October 12, he noticed that most of the Latino people addressed didn’t know who McCain was, that is, they didn’t recognize the McCain puppet (Zuñiga 2009). This coincides with the observations I gathered at the Spanish Adult Literacy classes at the organization “Make the Road.” The students in the Spanish Literacy class watched the last debate between Obama and McCain as homework. While discussing the debate, one of the students referred to McCain as the ‘American’ one. Students had a hard time pronouncing Obama’s name, but in this particular class they couldn’t remember McCain’s name at all. That is why the student referred to McCain as ‘the American one.’ This use of the word “American” brought to mind Bordieu’s and Canclini’s notions on cultural capital. According to Bordieu, cultural capital produces representations ‘that belong to all society, and that everyone interiorize’ (Quoted in Garcia Canclini 199). Canclini considers that this vision fixes popular classes in the place assigned to them (198). This anecdote about ‘Americanism’ depicts both Bordieu’s perspective and Canclini’s concerns. The appropriation of cultural capital allows this fixation of the American presidential representation as being inevitably white. Other sort of American representations such as jazz musicians or sports stars can be black and American, that is to say African-American, but presidency has a certain way of representation as this student reveals when she refers to McCain as the ‘American’. Americanness and alienness are two sides of the same coin. There are certain recognizable schemes of what it is to be American despite the fact that American people do not always fit this mode of representation. Likewise, even though many representations of illegal aliens misrepresent the ways actual people live, these modes of representation still tell us something about the subject. Even further, what happens when the subject of the Rights of the Illegal Alien is not present in the artistic intervention accounting for him/her? Is there a need for art to include the actuality¹³of the subject of its subject matter?

According to Arendt, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which makes all men free and equal, is implemented only in the sphere of citizenship. Ranciere, seeking to problematize this claim, cites the case of revolutionary woman Olympe de Gouges during the French Revolution as an example. Olympe de Gouges famously stated that if women were entitled to go to the scaffold, they should be entitled to go to the assembly as well. In a situation similar to which Olympe de Gauges found herself— only allowed to go to the guillotine but not to the assembly— illegal aliens enlist today in the military seeking citizenship:

“Recruiters trying to fill slots have historically pressed vulnerable people into service,” says Dan Kesselbrenner, director of the National Immigration Project, a program of the National Lawyers Guild. “But for some people it’s the only way they are ever going to get citizenship” (Davis n.p.).

During the wars of the 20th century (World War I, World War II, the Korean and Vietnam hostilities), citizenship was granted solely on the basis of three years of honorable service. Nowadays, despite promises of green cards and citizenship, the military itself has no authority to grant citizenship, and even if it is granted by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, it is only granted to the combatant and not to the entire family as promised by recruiters. According to Margaret Stock, a nationally known immigration attorney and professor of military law at West Point, the Pentagon has always had the authority to recruit foreigners during wartime, but the executive order issued by George W. Bush in 2002 made it harder to justify the enlistment of foreigns (Quoted in Davis n.p.)¹⁴. Additionally, the path leading to citizenship that enlistment might offer has been increasingly convoluted after the comprehensive reform bill failed:

The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill (S 1639), which failed to pass the Senate in June, [2007] proposed to give legal permanent residency to any “alien who has served in the uniformed services for at least 2 years and, if discharged, has received an honorable discharge.” In other words, illegal immigrants have been in the military all along, and the government was getting ready to admit it. Now, with the bill’s defeat, they will be forced to remain hidden (Davis n.p.).

Combatants are entitled to citizenship after service during a period of conflict. Political activity would subsequently demand that the act of being immediately entitled to go to war should be followed by an immediate entitlement to citizenship. Moreover, because regular residents don’t actually need to be enlisted in the army to access citizenship, the issue of belonging is a different right for different men. Men are not born free and equal.

VI. CONTROL SOCIETIES

“In control societies business takes over from factories, and a business is a soul, a gas” (Deleuze 318).

I suspect that the emergence of this new conception of political representation (the idea which demands rights but not subjecthood) is related to the value that virtual power accrued, and the features this new sort of power dynamics entails. In 1990 Deleuze wrote, “Control societies are taking over from disciplinary societies” (318), referring to this emerging way of exercising power in which the subject is not secluded but monitored. Today, in 2009, we can say that control society has taken over. Control is exercised in circulation rather than in confinement. The illegal alien experiences a continuous fear of being expulsed (from the country or from his/her job). Most of the time he/she succeeds in escaping deportation, but what their status cannot circumvent is the inability to circulate among geographical and information-borders, that is, any space where there is a circulation of information. The unaccounted body finds challenging and dangerous to circulate in places such as airports, courts, traffic checkpoints or clinics requiring a social security number. Consequently, “we are no longer dealing with a duality of mass and individual. Individuals become “dividuals,” and masses become samples, data, markets, or banks.” The undocumented worker represents tacitly these two components. They only exist in a sort of synechdochical way: their arms, their backs, (Taylor, personal conversation)¹⁵ and in the databases, recording what they produce. An undocumented resident is a citizen who never ‘completes’ anything, a citizen who is in perpetual circulation from job to job, always in a liminal space of transition without space for representation. In a society where the power is held by the polls, which only represent certain people, Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga fights on the battleground of mass media, contesting opinion polls rather than the ‘people.’ Regarding his body of work, he declares in his artistic statement, “my work seeks to invert common tools of social control to create dialogue, exchange, critical perspectives, generate questions, and ideally inspire subjective action” (Zuñiga, personal conversation). This viewpoint has a double effect; on the one hand it assures a discursive space inside the virtual environment, which is the place of ‘actual’ media power. On the other hand, it brings out of focus the subjectivities of people whose bodies are to be kept out of the map.

Performance Studies Professor Diana Taylor recalled she once passed by a sign that a church posted addressing undocumented immigrants that said: “Give us your soul; we don’t want your body” (Taylor 2008). Precisely because the business has taken over, the undocumented worker rendered invisible in the factory becomes magically present in the Domestic Gross Product. The State wants the ‘soul’ (present in the GDP) as well. In regards to the soul Deleuze asserts, “The sales department becomes a business center or ‘soul.’ We are told business have souls, which is surely the most terrifying news in the world” (320). The undocumented alien only has soul as long as it contributes to the increase of the Gross Domestic Product. Hence, the unaccounted body is only accounted in the virtual reality of economical data ¹⁶ At the time of 2008 U.S. elections, the undecided voters were to be captured solely by means of the insertion of the economy in the campaign’s focus Presently, the economy functions as a code of access. “Control is based on floating exchange rates, modulations depending on code setting sample percentages for various currencies” (Deleuze 319). The fact that the unaccounted body can still be under government’s scrutiny is what had possibly allowed for the emergence of the discourse Votemos.us echoes; that is the urgency of giving political representation for the undocumented residents.

It is no longer a matter of being ‘in’ a system or ‘outside’ a system, but of having access or not to the benefits the system provides. Thus, it makes sense that a discourse accounting for the vote of the ones excluded appears at a time when ‘belonging’ has been overruled by ‘accessing’. Needless to say, ‘accessing’ means in no sense ‘belonging;’ access nowadays demands no inclusion. Therefore, voting rights ‘could’ demand no green cards and presence ‘could’ demand no subject. In the Resistance of the Object, Moten addresses the alienation I perceive in the un-accounted body. For Moten:

The representative value and its necessary relation to the possibility of […] language, is only given in the abstraction from sounded speech […]. Similarly, the truth about the value of the commodity is tied precisely to the impossibility of its speaking, for if the commodity could speak it would have intrinsic value, […] and it would […] therefore contradict the thesis on value (13).

One could ask: what is the value the illegal alien sees himself possessing? I should be allowing the commodity to speak.¹⁷ Since I am no longer that object, I cannot say. I am not interested in analyzing the value; rather the relation itself is what matters. The relation that the subject holds to value can shed more light upon the possibility for the object to talk. Having in mind the tension that the undocumented resident experiences between making him/herself invisible or visible, Zuñiga approaches his audience in public parks and plazas during moments of celebration or leisure, which favor a more open predisposition for engagement (Zuñiga 2008). Contrary to what one would expect, members of the audience (even if undocumented) had no problem with being filmed once Zuñiga explained the project and its objectives. However, sometimes reticence has been encountered towards the microphone. In a society, where social interaction— although not necessarily communication—is mediated by images, being seen is less problematic than being heard. It is as if the object has internalized at times its nature as being speechless. The tension between disappearing and standing out is not erased.

If it is true that a “thing that disappears in discourse disappears in real life,” as Diana Taylor states (2008), then one could ask what appears in real life when ‘things’ appear in discourse. The discourse I am referring here is the focus on the alien resident as the subject of the demands for safety and political representation. To the vast twelve million or more undocumented residents inhabiting the U.S. (Hoefer), the benefits of political representation can only come after the benefits of civic ‘existence.’ ‘Existence’ requires a Social Security Number; otherwise the person is invisible to the considerations of rental, financial, and legal institutions and to the benefits that legal work and presence can provide. Not owning a legitimate social security number buries the person under the line of the visible. Accordingly, when¹⁸ giving voting rights to ‘every’ alien resident, including undocumented residents appears in discourse—including people who have not yet been accounted and therefore can not be represented, at least in the old political terms of mapping physically present objects—then the idea of nation, political representation, and alterity turns on a whole new screen of political existence as representation. Similarly, hypothetical solutions in design demand actual needs in reality. The expressed claims hold a virtual relation to political representation because it demands rights for a virtual resident. That is, a resident that is being [a resident] in essence or effect though not formally recognized or admitted. In a Deleuzian reading of this virtual reality of the unaccounted body, the virtual resident inhabits a space of potential that is real although not actual. Zizek refers to Deleuze’s virtuality as a “potential field of virtualities out of which reality is actualized” (4). The possible actualization of voting rights for a resident who does not exist in civic life —or of a safe place for a civically engaged subject—exists only as an abstraction. This space of potential opens when things appear in discourse.

It would be wrong to assume that such initiatives, which focus on allowing undocumented immigrants to cast a symbolic vote or to remain ‘here’, are enough to inscribe them in society. To be ‘accounted’ demands other factors. Nevertheless, the fact that the un-accounted in society is being included in political discourse does to some extent grant a kind of theatrical appearance, which hypothetically could transcend the political by having an impact on the civic, both in potentiality and in action. Employing Ranciere’s terms, Votemos.us and Design for the Alien Within are profoundly political since they enact a “reconfiguration of the partition of the sensible,” which is that which the subject perceives as concerning him or her (Ranciere 2). The act of accounting for the choice of a subject who usually has no choice in the other realms of his/her quotidian life might reconfigure the sensible.

Seeing the performance event as a body of knowledge allows the performance to be seen as co-participant with the real rather than as portrait of the real. Additionally, and precisely because the virtual forms part of the real, the Votemos.us cart and Design for the Alien Within need to be understood as acting jointly both in physical and electronic space. “This unsettling of ‘matter’ can be understood as initiating new possibilities, new ways for ‘bodies to matter'” (Butler 30). Returning to my question: What appears in ‘real’ life when things appear in discourse? It could be said that that which appears is visible wiggle room for ‘the thing’ to be performed. Following Elizabeth Grosz’s perspective, what counts is not whether something is real or not, but the effect it has (Grosz 101-115). Still, society at present needs to understand the geography of representation through visibility, which is crucial to a sense of the real and of the potentials for ‘realization.’ Re-configuring the sensible demands a joint effort of electronic and non-electronic spaces. Likewise, re-configuring representation demands a joint effort between episteme as performance and episteme in performance.

Notes

¹ If you are a resident, you can apply for citizenship after living in the country for five years. For this cohort the hypothetical vote would not be such a creative concept, unless the person is desperate to vote in a particular year. The illegal resident aliens, on the other hand, are the population in which the hypothetical vote achieves greater weight. Not only I have applied this sort of logic, two articles in El País, Spain took this perspective: “The ‘without papers’ mexicans elect the US president” (October 30, 2008), “Votemos.us continues developing a project that Ricardo Mirando Zuñiga began in May to offer to the undocumented imigrants the posibility of expressin their political preferences” (May 15, 2008). See Bosco.

² In What is a Paradigm?, Giorgio Agamben asserts, “What the example, the paradigm and the phenomenon have in common is not substance or a kind of common material element. What they have in common according to Goldschmidt is just a relationship; it is itself a relationship that we have to grasp—which kind of relationship and between what.” Video. See Agamben 2002.

³ UN Security Council adopted Resolution No 688 of 5 April 1991, which then was used by the United Kingdom and the U.S. to justify the bombing of Iraq. (See “Dossier”)

⁴ Arendt equated the “abstractedness” of “Men’s Rights” with the concrete situation of those populations of refugees that had flown all over Europe after the First World War. These populations have been deprived of their rights by the very fact that they were only “men,” that they had no national community to ensure those rights. Arendt found there the “body” fitting the abstractedness of the rights and she stated the paradox as follows: the Rights of Man are the rights of those who are only human beings, who have no more property left than the property of being human. Put another way, they are the rights of those who have no rights, the mere derision of right. (Ranciere 298).

⁵ In the description (see first page) it is noticeable the remark that only ‘some’ of these non-citizens are undocumented. Even if the number of 12 million people were accurate, that would mean that one person out of three non-citizens is undocumented.

⁶ Aside from artistic interventions, economists in various accounts entertain the notion of empowering undocumented residents through political representation. Ramji-Nogales, Jaya, in For Whom Would the Undocumented Vote? posted at the blog Concurring Opinions alludes to Rawls’ Theory of Justice, particularly the notion that society should be structured so as to balance social and economic inequalities such that they provide the greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society. (Ramji-Nogales 2008) Jennifer Gordon in Let Them Vote, published in the Boston Review, states, “I believe that states and local governments already treat non-citizens—both legal permanent residents and undocumented people—sufficiently like community members to qualify them as voters, under this conception of voting rights” (Gordon 1998). The emergence of the undocumented immigrant in discourse covers the juridical, the artistic, and the economic.

⁷ In The Paradoxical Body, Gil argues that the dancer actively produces the space of the body, which he defines as the creation of affective investment; an opening to the virtual that destabilizes the actual body and thus makes it “ready to allow gestures to become actualized in it” (22). The paradoxical body creates space but also “secrets interiority.” When this occurs, the dancer “senses his [/her] dancing,” and thus “sees his dancing in a dream—thus opposing his body image to one seen in reality” (24), creating a kind of resonant space. I see the audience entering this space as a dancer entering another level of energy.

⁸ The video has been recently released and is available at http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/world/bal-md.immigrants30jan30,0,7974898.story

⁹ http://www.jennypolak.com/Track_the_ICE_Raids.html

¹⁰I am using this word following José Gil’s use of it: To lead across, to convert, as energy or a message, into another form.

¹¹Likewise, Zuñiga asserts that his concept initially conceived as artistically edging the absurd, was taken quite literally by Mexican voters where the initiative had a web site with information and workshops (Zuñiga, Nov. 22, 2008).

¹²A two-day symposium, “Visuality + Performance + Social Critique,” hosted by New York University’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center on September 25 and 26, explored evocative sites of intersection between performance and visual arts by considering artists who worked in both forms.

¹³ By actuality I mean the reality that is not virtual. Virtuality is real, although not actual. Virtuality plays an important role setting the potentialities of the illegal alien. Any illegal alien is potentially a legal US citizen that is also part of its reality and expectations.

¹⁴ An Executive Order signed by George W. Bush on July 3, 2002, provided for the “expedited naturalization for aliens and noncitizen nationals serving in an active-duty status in the Armed Forces of the United States during the period of the war against terrorists of global reach.” Under this order, any noncitizen in the military can apply for expedited citizenship on his first day of active duty. Not only is this order still in effect, but it has been codified in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2006, that authorizes the enlistment of (1) nationals of the United States; (2) aliens who have been lawfully admitted for permanent residence (green card); (3) residents of several former U.S. territories; and (4) any other person “if the Secretary of Defense determines that such enlistment is vital to the national interest.” (See Davis)

¹⁵ Diana Taylor made me notice this ‘fragmentation’ as she put it.

¹⁶ Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga goes as far as to say that given the close and multifarious relation between the U.S. and Mexico, it would make sense if Mexicans could influence elections -in the way that the U.S. indeed do have an impact in Mexican elections- since they are being affected by its political outcome.

¹⁷ You can hear a very clear account given by a 22-year-old in the audio slideshow “Without Papers, Looking for a Future” that accompanies the article “A Family divided by two Words, Legal and Illegal” New York Times, New York, April 25, 2009.

¹⁸ Zuñiga asserts that his concept initially conceived as artistically edging the absurd, and in Mexico, where the initiative had a website with information and workshops, voters took it quite literally (Zuñiga 2008).

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