Deterritorialising the Jungle: Understanding the Calais camp through its orderings

Introduction

It seems that Afghans and Pakistani were the first to arrive. They occupied the best piece of land they could find: close to the motorway, flat and free from the bush that covered the rest of the area. ¹ It was the end of March 2015 and there were around 1200 people squatting vacant areas and buildings in Calais. Local authorities had urged them to move to a plot of land on the outskirts of the town, on the grounds that they would not have been further tolerated in the centre. Since the closure of the Sangatte centre in 2002, the scattering of people along the French coast had led to the emergence of squats or precarious settlements called ‘jungles’ in the woods, and next to the ports or truck stops along the motorways. At the beginning of 2015, most of the people stuck in Calais took their stuff and moved to the identified area, called la lande by local authorities: partially a dump, partially a protected area along the motorway heading to the port. In a few months, a spontaneous encampment turned urban, without being planned or centrally managed, but rather emerging as the result of countless encounters and negotiations. From March 2015 to the end of October 2016, when it was totally evicted and dismantled, the Jungle was inhabited by thousands of people. Many were in transit, hoping to reach the UK through the Channel by hiding in a lorry. Many others were asylum seekers in France to whom the French asylum system did not provide hospitality. Some others had documents issued by another European state, their presence in France being thus legally acceptable. Some others were undocumented and with little chance to be eligible for asylum. Meanwhile, for all of them, staying in the Jungle represented a better option than sleeping rough on the streets of Paris or elsewhere. People who were stuck in Calais, either waiting to cross the Channel or for their asylum application to be processed in France, committed time and effort to build a transient refuge durable enough for desired change to happen in their lives. Over the months, through the relentless assembling of human and non-human bodies, as well as the attunement of rhythms and practices, something grew and coalesced to remain for as long it could. During this process, the Jungle started displaying a sort of organisation and some orderings were established. This article explores this event and offers a glimpse of the multiplicity of orderings that have been forged, as well as how the organising process was opposed and resisted where these encounters took place.

Following some scholars, the Jungle can be considered a biopolitical technology (Agamben, 1998, 2005; Diken and Laustsen, 2006; Edkins, 2000; Katz, 2015, 2017; Minca, 2015a, 2015b), in that it was born out of the French authorities’ decision to displace migrant people in Calais from the city centre to the outskirts, in order to assemble and better control them (Tazzioli, 2017). It was also a makeshift settlement, since the authorities did not built it but instead let migrants and aid organisations do so in an unplanned manner. However, it was much more than this: orderings and control emerged as the result of manifold entanglements ascribable to a plethora of bodies and movements. Exploring these entanglements, I want to argue, might help expand our understanding of the multiple force relations at play in such an environment. Such instances are outcomes of the camp-making process itself, which unfolds according to how various entities interact materially, affectively and spatially. Investigating these material and affective outcomes can bring to the fore the ways in which different bodies are involved in (re)producing (and taking advantage of) or challenging the biopolitical technology of the camp. To this extent, I will make use of the notion of territory as the spatial outcome of affective moves that put things together into a relation. This understanding of territory draws mainly from the geographical theorisations of Claude Raffestin (1981, 1986, 2012), the sociological approach of Andrea Brighenti (2010a, 2013) and the philosophical thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987, 1994). This body of work, albeit from different perspectives, construes territory as an analytical tool to study and describe sociospatial processes, and is employed in this paper in this sense.

This approach has not been employed so far with respect to the Jungle of Calais. Scholars have regarded to the 2015–2016 encampment in Calais from perspectives that, despite different starting points, refer back to the same dichotomic logic of the institutionalised versus the auto-organised camp, the site of oppression and violence versus the site of humanity and sociability. The first contribution, in particular, views the Jungle as both vibrant and homely, both lively and welcoming, despite the mud, the lack of infrastructure and its despairing precariousness (Katz, 2017; Katz and Gueguen-Tien, 2018; Mould, 2017). It focuses on the built infrastructure and its mode of assembling as a social and communitarian product and, as such, its role for the development of sociability and the mobilisation of positive relational resources in the camp. Another strand of research looks at the Jungle as a space of abandonment and biopolitical order (Davies et al., 2017), but with no particular spatial emphasis. A third group (Agier, 2016; Hanappe, 2018; Koegler, 2017) pays attention to the urban character of the Jungle and its emergence as a ‘potential city’, an ‘ephemeral city’ of ‘international urbanites’ (Hanappe, 2018), which becomes, in this view, the object of the violent reaction of the state which cannot tolerate a place of sociability it cannot manage (Agier, 2016). If all these works contribute to the understanding of the Jungle of Calais by providing multiple perspectives and rich accounts of what the encampment was, they end up reproducing binary conceptualisations that conceal the complex and ambiguous relationships among the multiple sovereignties involved in the makings of the camp. Building on conceptualisations of the camp that put an emphasis on the multiple bodies that contribute to its production (Maestri, 2017; Martin, 2015; Oesch, 2017; Ramadan, 2013; Sanyal, 2017), the territorial approach I want to propose here can contribute to the ongoing debate on the nature of the camp in three ways. First, it helps unpack various sovereignties at play in a camp. While some forces are certainly more powerful than others, it is their mutual relation which produces the camp-making process. More importantly, by applying the notion of territory in a relational perspective, it is possible not only to bring to the fore the manifold orderings that stratify the camp, but also to unveil the micro-forces that break, at least temporarily, those stratifying segments. Second, it works to make visible the spatial and material results of these power relations, orderings and (dis)orderings, by conceiving every negotiation as involving an expressive border-making process. Finally, this approach shows how the geographies of the camp are a complex web of relations that stretch well beyond the camp(s) to the point at which the political can emerge out of any movement associated with such geography.

This paper is based on fieldwork which took place in three different moments, a digital ethnography, and the collection of data from legal documents, policy papers and aid organisations’ internal reports. At the very beginning of my longest fieldwork, in February–March 2016, the Prefecture of Nord-Pas-de-Calais issued an injunction that announced the forthcoming demolition of the southern part of the makeshift camp. The injunction gave 10 days of delay before the beginning of the operations of dismantlement; in the meantime the humanitarian organisations that assisted migrants in the Jungle could appeal in the administrative Court of Lille against the partial eviction. These events substantially changed my fieldwork. It soon became evident that it would have been hard meet and talk to people as I had planned, because while volunteers and humanitarian professionals were either very busy or very reticent, the massive presence of the media made of me just one more intrusive questioner in the eyes of the residents of the Jungle. In this context, I conducted 15 in-depth interviews with members of aid organisations, legal advisors, local journalists and the police and made great use of informal chats with residents and volunteers, as well as participant observation every day on-site and during formal and informal meetings.

From one camp to multiple territories

A wide strand of literature on migration inspired by Agamben’s thought focuses on the exceptionality of the camp in relation to the state and the law, and on the figure of the refugee considered as surviving in a state of bare life (Bigo, 2007; Diken, 2004, Diken and Laustsen, 2006; Minca, 2015a). This line of thinking views the camp as a spatial biopolitical technology through which the sovereign power operates, by means of the state of exception, for the management of care and control over individual and collective life. However, these representations of the refugee camp have recently undergone broad criticism by scholars who defend the idea of migrants’ agency against their depiction as bare life, and propose a different perspective on migration and camps. This approach values migrants’ agency instead of their total subjugation to the sovereign power and contests the spatial boundedness that the paradigm of exceptionality assigns to the camp (Andrjasevic, 2010; Garelli and Tazzioli, 2017; Isin and Rygiel, 2007; Millner, 2011; Redclift, 2013; Rygiel, 2011; Walters, 2008). Migrants’ struggles for freedom of movement are thus seen as political acts, which defy the power of the state and the juridical order through the mass phenomenon of migration itself and also through the numerous protests they engage along their journeys (Papadopoulos et al., 2008). Such a perspective on migrant people as agents is accompanied by a shift in the understanding of the camp from the site where bare life is confined to the site where politics can emerge (Oesch, 2017). In this sense, ‘by re-centring the analysis of camps away from exceptionality’ (Sigona, 2015: 5), the camp is conceptualised less as a place of immobilisation and powerlessness, and rather in its social, political and material intertwinings as a multifaceted space, where inhabitants certainly suffer exclusion and lack of rights, but also negotiate, resist and struggle. Camps are thus ‘contemporary spaces of politics’ that play a central role in the everyday life of people whose legal status is insecure (Sigona, 2015) and may be seen as ‘a resource upon which claims can be made for rights for irregular migrants on the move’ (Rygiel, 2011: 5). Both lines of thought provide invaluable insights into the political entanglements that a camp involves, conceived either as the result of juridical mechanisms of exception aimed to control or as a site of claims-making. Nonetheless, taken separately they risk advancing a dichotomic view according to which a camp would be either a site of oppression or emancipation, where oppression tends to be seen mainly coming from the sovereign power of the state. While the sovereign is often the most powerful force in the game, there are more forces involved in the exercise of containing and fixing bodies and they need to be taken into account. Some scholars have made a move forward in this direction by conceiving the camp as the result of multiple sovereignties (Maestri, 2017; Ramadan, 2013), or a process whose outcomes rely not only on the sovereign but also on manifold undetermined circumstances (Martin, 2015). For Ramadan (2013), for example, the camp is ‘an active arena of agency’ which is governed and controlled by a whole range of institutions that all together participate in the making of the camp’s orderings. This is also what the recent collective work edited by Irit Katz, Diana Martin and Claudio Minca (2018) purports by positing the camp as ‘a site of political repression, separation, containment, abandonment, and custody, but also a site of agency, resistance, solidarity, care, identity, and perpetual movement of bodies, materialities, complex and entwined management practices, political imperatives and human networks’ (2–3). By drawing on this scholarship, my endeavour here is to put forward an understanding of the camp as a site of both control and resistance, whereby control and resistance are understood as forces that relentlessly confront each other spatially. This means to study how control and resistance are actualised when bodies negotiate for space, and in doing so produce what we call a camp. The notion of territory, I want to argue, can be employed here as productive concept-tool to bring to light how forces of stratification shape and affect a makeshift camp, where manifold bodies play a role and exercise control at a time (Ramadan, 2013), and the line that demarcates the outside from the inside is blurred (Martin, 2015).

In geography, the notion of territory has been used either to refer specifically to the spatial delimitation of state sovereignty – notably in geopolitics – or as a trope for the appropriation of space, from perspectives that emphasise issues of identity and power; or even as a buzzword for a bounded area (Antonsich, 2009, 2011; Delaney, 2005; Giraut, 2008). Robert Sack (1986), one of the most influential geographical thinkers on territoriality, understands it as ‘a spatial strategy to affect, influence, or control resources and people, by controlling an area’ (1–2), or in other words a spatial behaviour that has to do with rational motivation about how to use a space, organise social activities spatially and assign meanings to places. While this perspective is of great importance when it comes to the analysis and critique of institutional practices of spatial control and segmentarisation, it is less so when our aim is to understand sociospatial processes from a perspective which is centred in mundane power relations, which can be more affective than strategic. Inspired by the French philosophical tradition, some French geographers have expanded the idea of territory beyond state determinacy and conceived of it as the space where connection and sense are created. In this line of thought, Claude Raffestin (1981) in particular advocates for a relational approach to territoriality in which ‘space becomes territory as soon as it is involved into a social relation of communication’ (153, my translation). By drawing widely from Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault, Raffestin views territory as the result of interaction between individuals in order to modify their environment and social relations while also transforming themselves. Territory is, in his account, a dynamic relation of the individual with otherness, to wit, with space and other bodies. In other words, territory is precisely the spatial outcome of social production and as such can be structured, destructured and restructured (Raffestin, 1986). To paraphrase, this is what Andrea Brighenti (2010a) advocates when he calls for the concept of territory to be explored ‘not simply as a specific historical and political construct, but more radically, as a general analytical tool to describe the social sphere and, ultimately, as a social process in itself’ (55). This perspective has been inspired by a Deleuze-Guattarian reading of social processes as movements of de–re-territorialisation.

The conceptual tools which I draw from these strands of research and thinking inform my reasoning throughout this paper and help me answer two questions. First, what kind of understanding of sociospatial processes can be put forward by a processual and relational notion of territory? And second, can this approach to territory help to unpack movements that would otherwise stay concealed under dichotomic interpretations of oppression and emancipation? I support my theoretical constructions through some examples extracted from my encounter with the Jungle of Calais, thus demonstrating how territories emerge, are dismantled and reconstituted through the endless movement of bodies, countless negotiations and the production of codes, rhythms and patterns.

Before we enter the territory of the Jungle, let me briefly introduce some thoughts about how territories are affective, namely how, in a Spinozan sense, they are the results of the striving (conatus) of bodies towards the enhancement of their power of acting (Spinoza, 2009 [1677]). The affects that flow ‘through the bodies of humans and other beings’ (Thrift, 2008: 236), thanks to the interactions between bodies (and space), are what characterises any territorial process. The territorial move is affective in that, first, it involves an exchange with a milieu (other bodies and space), the consequences of which transform all of the bodies and space involved by enhancing or reducing their capacity for acting, to wit, their power. Second, this move has to do with how the territorialising body sensuously differentiates itself from the milieu, and how it acquires qualities that make its territory emerge, what Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 315), term ‘matters of expressions’, which are the mode of functioning of territory, its communicating feature.

There are at least three elements that describe the notion of territory which is explored in this conceptualisation. First, every body territorialises its milieu, namely by building a territory through selection, inclusion and exclusion; in other words, by drawing boundaries. This operation is affective in nature, not strategic, as Sack would have it. By territorialising, bodies build a space in which to feel good, a refuge, ‘with a view to reaching the greatest autonomy’, as Raffestin (1986: 92) puts it. The territory emerges when a body and a milieu communicate and the first constitutes itself by differentiation from the chaos of the milieu, by selectively letting in what it needs to protect itself and letting out what might harm it. A necessary closure corresponds to a paradoxical openness, which is necessary for the territorial body to relate with other bodies, to evolve and keep living.

The second character of territory is in/visibility. Sensory qualities are the marked features of the territory that reveal the territorialising process in its making: it is by expressively territorialising the milieu, to wit, by selecting from the milieu the components that need to be transformed in communicative features, that the territorial body territorialises. And it is in the process of becoming expressive of selected qualities that distances are established, frames are raised and boundaries are put up: ‘critical distance is a relation based on matters of expression. It is a question of keeping at a distance the forces of chaos knocking at the door’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 320). And this process, which conjugates expressive matter and distances, is in/visible, because its degree of in/visibility depends on the type of relations bodies establish. I will explore this empirically in the Jungle using the camp of container of the French state as example. In this vein, in/visibility is not a property of the territory; it is rather a relational quality that relies upon an exchange of affects among bodies (and space), and is more about senses in a wider interpretation than just vision (Brighenti, 2010b). The manifestation of the territory to other bodies’ perception and affect is anything but obvious. Depending on their mutual relations – which are always also relations of power – bodies are affected (and can affect) differently and their possibilities for negotiating with other bodies’ territories vary largely. So do their chances of being inscribed, or not, in the field of the visible.

We now come to the third character of territory, which understands it as mobile in both space and time. If the socius is crossed by movements of territorialisation, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Raffestin, 1981, 2012), its openness makes it vulnerable to change. Thus, deterritorialisation might entail a change that positively affects the territorial body by providing it with extra powers, new resources or stronger connections. Conversely, it might open ‘the flesh to the cosmo-universe without the protective space of a house or personal territory’ (Lorraine, 2005: 161), hence jeopardising the cohesion of the individual and making its territory collapse. Deterritorialisation is always followed by a reterritorialisation, meaning that if the body leaves the territory then it necessarily builds a new one elsewhere, but under different conditions, establishing unprecedented relations, and with undetermined, yet always negotiable, results. Each movement carries with it the ethical consequences of the encounters that it actualises, which, from a Spinozan perspective, are positive if the involved bodies can preserve, or even enhance, their power to affect and to be affected.

Territorialisation and aid groups

On 12 February 2016, the French Prefecture announced that half of the Jungle would be dismantled. A few days later the command was turned into law. When the decree was issued and before the eviction started, aid organisations operating in the camp appealed against the state decision. They questioned the method through which the state was conducting the population survey in the southern part of Jungle and challenged the total numbers declared, for being miscalculated and underestimated. State officials were blamed for carrying out the fieldwork early in the morning, when most of the people were absent from their shelters, usually on their way back from nocturnal attempts to cross the Channel. They were also blamed for counting only individuals found in the shelter at the moment of the inspection, without inquiring about the actual number of occupants. To contradict the official figures, the aid groups organised their own census. Their method was based on a double check at different moments of the day and a two-page questionnaire distributed with the help of translators inquiring about origin, age, family status, period of stay in the Jungle and other information. The census was not just a tool used in the courtroom. It materialised itself in the Jungle by way of tags on shelters. Every shack and every tent was turned into a piece of census, a declaration of war against authorities, the becoming-expressive of a political territory. Every shelter was assigned an alphanumeric code composed by a number, indicating the sub-sector, and a letter indicating the occupied sector (North or South), followed by the number of the registered shelter. The tags territorialised every hut of the Jungle: they became marks that erased the monotonousness of the encampment, points of reference in the disorienting landscape, orderings. After the partial eviction, when every single hut and caravan had been moved to the north, all references were lost in the south, which remained vacant, only to be reterritorialised onto a new landscape of contradictory signs that made visible the instability of this territory in the northern area, where southern and northern tags had been mixed up (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Census tags in the Northern area of the Jungle, following the eviction of the Southern area.

Before the trial, the Jungle was composed of many different territories, which included its inhabitants, volunteers, journalists, researchers, workmen of the waste collection service, firemen, etc., that confronted the territory of the state mainly at the fixed borders and at the access points. With the trial, the census and through the tags, the Jungle emerged as the territory defended by the aid organisations. It was not the first time that aid groups were challenging the French state, but it was the first time they were transcoding their territory in the Jungle to face the state. They were making the Jungle their territory by re-functionalising the materiality of the camp through some refrained tags. Territory, Guattari (1995) says, is ‘never given as object but always as intense repetition’ (28). The threatened eviction pushed aid organisations to emerge from the inertia of the daily routines to repositioning themselves more politically, by closing their territory against the state, but at the same time opening themselves to upheaval. The offset of their closing was that they re-functionalised their territory and, by turning the inhabitants of the Jungle into numbers, they became open to the same biopolitical framing of the state. This opening was unveiling, thus making visible, another territory, a biopolitical territory that the state and the aid organisations shared: the territory of sustenance. From the perspectives of both the state and the aid groups, their livelihood machines were two distant and incompatible galaxies. On the one side, the French state neglected the work of volunteers, obstructing it at its discretion at the border of the encampment. On the other side, volunteers vehemently criticised the system of food provision put in place by the state. ² If we regard the provision of food as a machinic arrangement, the two machines cooperated, being part of the same gear that managed, distributed and fed the residents of the Jungle. Both machines had built territories that functioned through highly expressive and visible apparatuses for the administration of bodies: queues, reservation tickets, disposable tableware, predetermined schedules. The residents of the Jungle used the machines according to their needs, which could change over time. And this is the point: the whole food machine worked by assuming the inhabitants of the Jungle as a population, that is, biopolitically. Over the months, the aid organisations had modified their functioning in order to meet the needs of the residents and provide them with a more individualised service, but this tailoring was accompanied by an inescapable increase of apparatuses to manage their daily operations. For example, they adopted a system of relais, namely people from various ethnic groups who were assigned the role to collect raw food from volunteers and then distribute it to their community. This role was a controversial one and during my fieldwork a relais was accused by his fellows of stealing, being unfair and taking advantage of his relationship with volunteers. ³

These practices can be considered biopolitical in two senses. On the one hand, by putting bodies’ life at their core, they established a power relation, a precise territory with boundaries, functions and sensory qualities, and ‘acted as factors of segregation and social hierarchisation, exerting their influence on the respective forces of both these movements, guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of hegemony’, as Foucault (1978: 141) puts it. On the other, the feeding practice, in its full materiality, cannot be dismissed as a neutral or apolitical process on the grounds that it does not involve discursive factors. ⁴ In this respect, reworking Karen Barad’s (2007) theorisation of materiality, I want to put an emphasis on matter as an agent with a capacity of doing its own, not correlative to but intertwined with discourses. If we understand feeding practices and their apparatuses of production as material phenomena, and discourses as a product of the enactment of those same practices, we cannot but view matter as inseparable from discourse and material–discursive practices as agents of territorialisation. As such, matter, in its mattering, creates boundaries and exclusions, it territorialises.

Regimes of visibility and the state

In January 2016, the French state opened a container camp to host people from the Jungle, after dismantling a portion of the existent makeshift camp: white containers surrounded by fences, expressiveness and distance. ⁵ The state made a portion of the makeshift camp its territory by bestowing expressiveness, in a white ordered way, on a piece of land that was previously occupied by makeshift shelters. When the container camp opened, it established a regime of dialogue with its milieu. Some (journalists, researchers, volunteers) had to negotiate their access by asking for formal permission from the French NGO in charge of the container camp’s management. Its prospective residents had to negotiate their access by releasing their palm prints. Some people were excluded. ⁶ The main discourses about the two places, mostly shared on-site from volunteers and the media, and also proposed by some scholars (Hanappe, 2018; Mould, 2017; Ticktin, 2016), labelled the Jungle as an urban object – as lively and messy as a city is – and the container camp as a prison: closed, controlled and inhospitable. ⁷ These narratives were held as if the two places were counterposed in terms of control. This was explained on the grounds that in the Jungle people had freedom of movement, a variety of food on offer (including the possibility of cooking one’s own meals), intimacy in small tents or shacks, and spaces for socialising – things you may find in a city – while the container camp lacked of all these features and felt like a confinement camp. I want to argue that, despite the sharp polarity between the two sites, they both ended up being porous for many residents when boundaries were negotiated and challenged, as I show below.

How do visibility and territories relate to each other? According to Brighenti (2010b), a territory only comes into being in its field of visibility, which is both intensive and extensive. Its visibility implies a relation between territory and space: the territory materialises its spatiality by becoming visible. Think of the tags: shelters, after this expressive movement, were no longer only the built environment of the encampment; they had turned into the spatial emergence of a practice run by volunteers. When a territory is claimed, it enters into a precise regime of visibility that is correlative to the act of territory-making and whose effects (e.g. recognition or control) depend on the relationship between the territorialising body and its milieu. Before the opening of the camp, the white containers and the device for controlling the access of residents made another territory emerge that joined with the already circulating ‘city versus prison’ narrative and construed an extremely powerful regime of visibility. This territory had been engineered to differentiate its space from the Jungle: the white colour, the turnstiles, the biometric device and the fence made sure that the body ‘feels the work of transformation’ in the passage from the CAP to the Jungle (Latour, 1997: 177). Through the visible, distances are created and boundaries emerge, as Brighenti (2010b) maintains. Does the refrain of a white, fenced and technologically controlled space not establish a highly visible distance from the Jungle (Figure 2)? In this territorial movement there are at least two regimes of visibility at work. On the one side, the hypervisibility of the division through a whiteness that is a not-so-subtle racialised stance; on the other side, the visibilisation of the biopolitical regime of control and surveillance through a biometric device, which controlled the access to the camp by associating the morphological scan of the hand with a numerical code. The appearance of the camp of containers brought planning into the makeshift camp, and with it order and biopolitical control. The first, in the visible form of distinction and segregation through both its material and aesthetic qualities; the second in the unverifiable dimension of the biometric technology (Foucault, 1995). The visibility of the segregational move and the ambiguity of the biopolitical territory combined to repulse bodies: on the first days following its opening, the new camp received very few requests of accommodation. Some people were intimidated by the level of surveillance and control, and especially afraid of having their fingerprints registered by the suspicious biometric device installed at the entrance of the camp to recognise the palm print of the registered guest. Many people had reached Calais after crossing several borders in Europe and had already had their fingerprints taken in one country and registered in the Eurodac database, or not taken at all. Within this regime, which is governed by the Dublin Regulation III, the European country in which the fingerprints were first taken is held responsible for the asylum application. Since many people in the Jungle were trying to get to the UK and did not want to claim for asylum in France or run the risk to be transferred back to the country where they had left their fingerprints, they were worried that a biometric device could somehow capture their fingerprints and make them available to the police. Katz (2018) is right when she claims that the containers offered inhabitants a merely functional relationship with the shelter; nonetheless, this functional machine which was rejected at the beginning was soon reterritorialised by the people of the Jungle as an annex of the Jungle itself. A little later, the containers began to fill up slowly and after the eviction a waiting list was set up. ⁸ New functions were assigned to the fence and the transformational practices which opened it up, carrying out a deterritorialisation of the boundaries between the CAP and the Jungle, and thus of the two territories themselves. The fence that separated the CAP from the Jungle, the same fence that manifested so visibly the emergence of the territory of the state, was converted into a passage and a dryer (Figure 3). It was no longer the exclusive territory of the state but had already been refunctionalised as a whiter, planned and ordered neighbourhood of the Jungle. This is not to say that the camp of container was open. Yet some residents were able to negotiate their territory with it, challenging its regimes of visibility with different ones, and dismantling the original territory by smoothing their process of crossing it.

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Figure 2.

The Jungle and the CAP.

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Figure 3.

Challenging the border between the containers and the makeshift camp.

Stuff as a vector of deterritorialisation

It was all about stuff, in the Jungle. To put it bluntly, stuff was what allowed action in the Jungle, as Latour (2005) might have it. It assembled with other bodies, consolidating some territories and weakening others. It was ever present, overvisible. It was a body with which it was necessary to negotiate: food, clothes and shoes, wood, tarpaulin, gas tanks, sleeping bags, toothbrushes, cups, notebooks, cigarettes, generators, extinguishers, caravans, blankets, tents, chairs, tables, bottles – the list could continue. How did stuff affect other bodies? To rephrase Jane Bennett (2010), by encountering other bodies stuff enhanced or weakened their power, or even its own power, to affect. Stuff in the Jungle was an element that, caught into various territorial movements, had the force of pulling them in a certain direction, modifying them, generating orderings, and thus contributing to the formation of the Jungle in that and not another way.

Let us move across these territories. First, stuff as merchandise travels, and it travels by lorry. It is part of a complex assemblage of drivers, technological devices, international regulations, companies, labour, workers, inspectors, raw materials, and so on. The port in Calais has most traffic with the UK, especially for freight: the merchandise travels on roads, it stops at parking lots and sometimes must wait in lines when it approaches the port. When the merchandise travels, its territory ‘on the move’ is nevertheless exposed through coloured tarpaulin or metal boxes. Yet it suddenly changes its function when it becomes the mode of transport of people who need to cross the Channel without being caught by the police. It is not the lorry that transports migrant people, for the lorry would never travel empty. It is the stuff that allows people to cross the Channel. Stuff was the force of deterritorialisation that turned cargos into an encampment of people stuck at the borders.

Second, stuff was the materialisation of compassion. Compassion implies, as Weizman (2011) holds, a ‘view of humanity based on the figure of the victim’ (38), and a restless tension between dominance and assistance which soon becomes the explanation and reason behind action (Fassin, 2012). Compassion becomes itself action auto-poietically: it aims to boost and raise the same affect in others, to make compassion grow, to spread as epidemic. Compassion affectively called together human bodies around stuff and translated it into action. Tons of stuff were gathered, packed and then sent to points of collections in London from across the UK. Thousands of goods, sold or produced in the UK, were flooding into France, going to occupy first the shelves of a warehouse, then to feed, clothe and sustain the everyday life of thousands of people in the Jungle. This huge inflow was at the same time the materialisation of both compassion and action for many who desired to help. On the one hand, stuff itself was turned into action by compassion: collecting, sorting and calling other people into action. On the other, stuff called for more action: the more stuff that arrived in Calais, the more action was needed to sort it, work it and distribute it. As we have seen for the food machine, these material territories of stuff came with orderings and rhythms which were necessary to organise stuff and to provide humanitarian aid as the double-edged desire for governing and helping required. This way, stuff became the territory of compassion, only to be deterritorialised onto new territories, sometimes in conflict with each other: the Jungle as a home-territory, and the Jungle as a dump-territory.

And so we arrive at the third territory. The becoming-waste of stuff was the deterritorialisation (and reterritorialisation) of compassion into a new territory of filth, which, in turn, was being reterritorialised into the former, through the very image of squalor that the latter generated. The circular movement was prompted by stuff, which was its vector, or mediator as Raffestin would put it, capable of making the territory of compassion pass into that of home and sustenance and then into one of waste and dirt. On the one hand, waste was the expressive way through which a territory of filth could emerge and nourish the desire for helping, by sending more stuff which would end as waste again on the ground of the encampment: ‘waste, itself an excess, proliferates, creating even more waste in an uncontrollable spiralling process’ (Morrison, 2015: 69). On the other hand, waste fostered aid groups’ practices of distributing and cleaning, thus consolidating their territory. Distributions of stuff had to be tailored (to avoid waste), and the potential individual donor was asked to send this or that particular thing. Teams of volunteers were managed to clean the encampment weekly and collect the garbage that accumulated and had not already been collected by private companies paid by the French government. ⁹ This practice was a territorial move that involved the circulation of powerful affects around waste. Stuff was also the territory of Afghan shop keepers and the Sudanese black market: trading goods was the deterritorialisation of donations, which were transformed into money. Through this line of flight, stuff was reterritorialised into better living conditions in the Jungle, or into smugglers’ hands in the pursuit of a new life, or whatever else could increase people’s power for acting.

Conclusion

For a migrant staying or travelling without authorisation, the living present is one of indeterminacy and suspension (De Genova, 2017). With regard to the Jungle, people were not detained within its borders, but they were also not out of the asylum regime: they were as detainable and deportable inside the Jungle as they were outside. The French state had set the borders of the encampment by building the inside against the outside, as though they were two separate territories. It ascribed to the inside the humanitarian face of the state, where people could find a refuge until further notice, and territorialised the firm face of the state onto the outside. The inhabitants of the Jungle, although living a dangerous and harsh everyday life in the camp, were not subjected to police controls or capture as long as they stayed within its borders, but were exposed to high risks of detention and potentially deportation if caught outside. The state’s strategy of fixing its territory outside the Jungle and letting its inside becoming others’ territory (aid groups, migrant people, also mafias and smugglers) framed the Jungle as a camp. Seen through this lens, the Jungle had no escape from sovereign power; nevertheless, by approaching the particular occurrence of the Jungle as the emergence and overlapping of multiple territories, it is possible to disclose movements of departure from other orderings that were organising and constituting it. By examining the unfolding of the Jungle from various perspectives, we have observed that countless orderings emerged as a result of how bodies encountered, composed, negotiated and built territories. We have traced the becoming-expressive of the territory of aid groups in response to a threatening state whose territory had been built as the outside of the encampment. This movement towards the inside was a bold attempt to reverse the state’s strategy to take control of the Jungle step by step. It did not succeed, and the territory of aid groups was reterritorialised into the smaller borders of what was left eviction by eviction. We have explored how the state had functionalised its territory by making it visible and using the regime of visibility for purposes of control. Yet control was not absolute, and many little flights broke through the container camp, transforming it into a white annex to the Jungle. Finally, we have examined the territorialising movements of stuff and its crucial positioning in the assembling of the Jungle. Stuff made the Jungle materially exist and become by segmenting and ordering its everyday makings, but at the same time, it enabled uncountable deterritorialisations, included the provision of material possibilities for crossing the Channel. The territorial movements that have been explored here do not exhaust the understanding of the Jungle and remain a partial account of its richness and its countless entanglements. By providing insights into some of its multiple territories, this paper has aimed to offer both a different narrative of what the Jungle was and a glimpse of how a camp could be investigated on the basis of its orderings and its movements of resistance, while making a particular effort to avoid dichotomic approaches.

A camp is both a political technology aimed to draw a fictitious line that divides an inside from an outside and a locus where daily practices might produce political acts and claims. It is also much more, if we look deeper into the materiality of its everyday makings. The camp is crossed by forces that push bodies towards encounters and make them assemble to organise their milieu and stabilise, while maintaining a possibility for transformation. Along these relentless processes, orderings emerge which are materially inscribed in everyday life where they can be resisted and changed. Understanding these processes and their more or less temporary outcomes offers a critical reading of camps that calls into question the role of any body in its assembling, the orderings it produces, the opposing movements it engages and the connections it establishes with other bodies. Once the resulting (unstable) territory has been outlined, the political matter which is formed can be explored without being merely taken at face value.