Postcolonial Transitions in Europe: Contexts, Practices and Politics by Sandra Ponzanesi & Gianmaria Colpani

Author:Sandra Ponzanesi & Gianmaria Colpani [Ponzanesi, Sandra & Colpani, Gianmaria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783484454
Google: D1ZPrgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 26491570
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
Published: 2015-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 10.2 Screenshot from Import Export (2007). Source: Ulrich Seidl Film Produktion GmbH

Her next job as a cleaner in a geriatric ward confronts Olga with the literal precariousness of life, in the form of human decay and mortality. The patients are housed in a large, cold, and sterile dorm room. They are bodily wrecked, confined to their beds. One hears only their idiosyncratic murmurings, prayers, repetitive phrases, and sounds. Olga seems to recognize their plight; she expresses sympathy and care toward them, thus exemplifying what, according to Lorey (2011), could be the next step following the recognition of a shared precarious existence—a connection with others through care. Olga becomes an ally to the marginalized patients, who are objects of dehumanizing and disciplined regulations, demonstrating how seemingly insignificant everyday practices of resistance—such as Olga’s response to a patient’s plea to bring him his favorite food—entail the potential to refuse the segmentation that comes with the formal regime of governmental precarization.

The character of Paul illustrates unemployment as one mode of precarity. His trajectory highlights that precarization denotes more than just the spreading of insecure employment, but constitutes instead a neoliberal instrument of governance. As Lorey (2010, 3) points out, neoliberal societies “are now governed internally through social insecurity, which means providing the minimum possible social security,” thus keeping individuals competitive. According to her, this form of precarization is not too serious a threat to the existing social order, hence does not produce uprisings; rather, it regulates social subjects through insecurity. This is precisely the case of Paul, who enjoys some basic support as he lives with his mother and his stepfather. At the same time, he becomes more and more unsettled as the film proceeds and his trajectory unfolds. The issue of security is literally addressed in Import Export in the scene that introduces Paul undergoing outdoor training for future security guards. Later in the film’s narrative, while Paul is indeed on patrol as a security guard, a gang of young men humiliate him. Ironically, Paul’s attempt to overcome his own precariousness by becoming a security guard, who ensures security for others, fails to stabilize his own security.

CONCLUSION: ECONOMIC CIRCUITS AND SUBJECTIVE OPENINGS IN MIGRATORY CULTURE

A common thread running through the film and articulated in its very title, Import Export, is a thematization of the economic circuits at play in migratory culture. As the film elucidates, borders between nation-states no longer pose any hindrance for exchanges of difference. With Import Export, Seidl explores the ways in which the border between East and West Europe is continuously reproduced as a division between different modes of precarity, and he also shows how this very division fuels the economic circuits at work.

The parallel stories of Olga and Paul express, on a micro level, the processes and dynamics that emerge when their lines of mobility become entangled in different economic circuits. When Paul accompanies his stepfather to Slovakia and Ukraine, he is confronted with two cycles of exploitation: one is the recycling and reutilization of discarded

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