《逃》《離》鄉關的親密陌生人：論台灣當代移工與新移民女性之生命政治

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(1)國立台灣師範大學英語學系碩. 士. 論. 文. Master Thesis Department of English National Taiwan Normal University. 《逃》《離》鄉關的親密陌生人：論台灣當代移工與新移民女性之生命政治. Taiwan’s Intimate Strangers out of Place: A Biopolitical Reading of Migrant Workers and New Immigrant Women’s Life Stories in Escape and Separation. 指導教授：黃. 涵. 榆. Advisor: Dr. Han-yu Huang 研究生：莊. 媮. 荃. 中華民國 108 年 1 月 January 2019.

(2) 摘要本文以生命政治理論視角，探討在台東南亞移工與新移民女性之境況，藉由分析《逃／我們的寶島，他們的牢》與《離／我們的買賣，她們的一生》中逃逸移工與新移民女性之生命故事，揭示東南亞移民工因受制於台灣政經結構、勞動型態與社會關係中的權力壓迫，而處於例外狀態，並由此開展東南亞移民工如何以裸命之姿積極反抗，最後思索面對移民工他者之倫理意義。本論文主張東南亞移民工不應被視作外來威脅，而是深刻反映台灣社會內部的既有矛盾，其存在模糊並問題化種種因各方差異劃分區隔東南亞移民工之邊界，進而促使「我們」重省東南亞移民工之處境。本論文共分三章。第一章援引當代生命政治理論家阿岡本的「裸命」、「例外狀態」，與哈特與奈格理提出的「諸眾」、「情感勞動」等概念，闡述蘊含於政治、經濟與勞動下的權力機制，之所以將這兩條不同取逕的分析作為本文討論框架，旨於展現政經關係之密不可分。第二章以前述理論概念針對《逃》與《離》中的生命故事進行文本分析，逃逸移工與新移民女性之境遇一方面體現權力結構如何細緻地介入移民工實質生活，另一方面也顯示人際間情感連結具有抵抗壓迫、跳脫權力掌控之可能性。第三章發展對移民他者之倫理關懷，將精神分析學者紀傑克的「鄰人」及女性主義政治哲學家艾莉絲‧楊「正義」與「差異政治」的概念，與既有生命政治理論架構並讀，除延續並呼應權力之形上學意義，亦強調情感對倫理關懷的重要性。. 關鍵字：移民工、生命政治、裸命、例外狀態、諸眾、情感勞動. i.

(3) Abstract My thesis proposes a biopolitical reading of Southeast Asian migrant workers and new immigrant women’s life in Taiwan. Through addressing the issues of runaway workers and migrant spouses in Escape: Our Formosa, Their Prison and Separation: Our Trading, Their Life, it demonstrates that Southeast Asian migrants in Taiwan fall into state of exception under various forms of power mechanisms, further explores how Southeast Asian migrants can potentially resist oppression as contemporary figures of bare life, and ultimately envisions the ethical attitude toward the Migrant Other. The thesis argues that Southeast Asian migrants should not be construed as a threat. Rather, the migrants profoundly reflect Taiwan’s existing social paradoxes, and they blur and problematize the divides drawn by all sorts of differences to distinguish us from them, and it propels us to re-examine Southeast Asian migrants’ condition. This thesis is divided into three chapters. Chapter One brings together Giorgio Agamben’s, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s theories of biopolitics to illustrate the exercise of power mechanism in the realm of politics and economics, particularly with the notions of bare life, state of exception, multitude and affective labor. Under the framework of biopolitcs, Chapter Two proceeds to analyze how power in Escape and Separation meticulously intervenes in runaway workers and new immigrant women’s daily life, and how affective connections in social networks constitute the potential site of resistance. Chapter Three proposes the ethical attitude toward the Migrant Other by engaging Slavoj Žižek’s psychoanalytic perspective of the Neighbor and Iris Marion Young’s concepts of justice and politics of difference in the biopolitical framework, to complement the ontological understanding of power mechanism and to elucidate the importance of affect in making ethical decision.. Keywords: migrants, biopolitics, bare life, state of exception, multitude, affective labor ii.

(4) Acknowledgement My deepest gratitude goes to my advisor, Professor Han-yu Huang. Since I was an undergraduate, I have benefited significantly from his diverse courses. Each class is full of delightful intellectual excitement. He has fueled my academic interests in politics and psychoanalysis, and I develop my final report of his course “Contemporary Literary Theory and Cultural Studies” into this thesis. Huang’s patience and tolerance are as remarkable as his knowledge and insight, and it makes me a most blessed graduate student. Without him, I could not have embarked on this fascinating writing journey, nor could I accomplish it with the emotional and practical support. I would also like to express my heartfelt thanks to Professor Yu-chuan Shao and Professor Ching-kai Shen. Their valuable suggestions for my writing help me to form clearer thoughts. More than the committee members, they influence me profoundly. Professor Shao guided me through the wonderland of literature in the required freshman course “Approaches to Literary Works.” Afterwards, I had taken as many literature elective courses as possible. In my second year of teaching, I got acquainted with Professor Shen, the founder of Philosophy on Fridays. In fact, the very first evening talk I attended in this forum concerns Taiwan’s migrants. I ardently admire Professor Shen’s devotion to social and political activities. Besides my mentors, my friends and colleagues have turned this lonely process of writing into an affective event. I feel greatly indebted to their company and encouragement: Albert, Alice, Angie, Annabella, Bella, Claire, Clara, Donna Liu, Donna Wang, Elsa, Iris, Jillian, Joy, Kate, Kendra, Kuo-hsiu, Man-chiu, Mars, Marshall, May, Max, Megan, Miki, Ming-hong, Min-jing, Odile, Ping, Sophie, Sonya, Steven, Suzanne, Tirina, Weslee and Winnie. Lastly, my sincere appreciation goes to my loving parents, twin sister, Linda, and youngest sister, Joanne. No matter how anxious or frustrated I get when facing difficulty, they always have confidence in me. iii.

(5) Table of Contents Introduction. 1. Backgrounds and Motivations. 1. Literature Review. 3. Methodology. 10. Outline of Chapters. 16. Chapter One : Caught within the Grip: Conceptualizing Taiwan’s Migrants. 20. I. Bare Life: The Unbareble Lightness of Being. 22. II. Affective Labor: The New Landscape in Empire. 25. III. Southeast Asian Migrants down and out in Taiwan. 29. Chapter Two : Nameless Multitude: Marginal Life in Escape and Separation. 35. I. To Escape, or Not to Escape, That’s the Question. 37. II. Your Child Is Not Your Child. 47. III. Regarding the Pain of the Migrant Other. 53. Chapter Three : Love Thy Neighbor?: Towards an Ethical Reading of. 61. Migrants’ Life in Taiwan I. The Migrant Other as Sacred Neighbor. 65. II. Justice Unbound. 69. Conclusion. 74. Works Cited. 78. iv.

(6) Introduction Backgrounds and Motivations Since the 1990s Taiwan has welcomed migrant workers1 to boost its domestic economy mainly from four Southeast Asian countries: the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand. A majority of these newcomers hold labor-intensive jobs. Meanwhile, Taiwan has also attracted the new immigrant women from these countries to settle down. Born and raised during this time, I am no stranger to the presence of migrant workers and new immigrant women, but I feel estranged from the sense of co-existence that we live under the same sky. With more migrants introduced and their offspring inhabiting Taiwan in recent years, my estrangement has been transformed into moral discomfort with divergent views on them. On the one hand, they carry the social stigma of crowding out local workers’ job opportunities or utilizing cross-border marriage to benefit their families of origin. On the other hand, the incidents of exploiting and abusing migrants, especially female domestic workers, occur incessantly. Nevertheless, rarely is the situation alike seen or reported in the cases of white-collar foreign workers in Taiwan. In an era of globalization and democratic currents celebrating freedom, the hardships of Taiwan’s migrants paradoxically reveal that violence could be unrestrictedly administered to them in their everyday lives. My concern for the oppressed migrant groups in Taiwan primarily resides in the institutional forces of various immigration policies, and the psychological dimensions of incongruity experienced by both locals and migrants. In effect, I suppose that the two angles deserve equal attention. Either reducing migration issue to a political. “Migrant workers” stand for Southeast Asian laborers including domestic workers instead of white collar-workers, and “new immigrant women” refer to female migrants, be they single, married, remarried or divorced. The term “new immigrant women” is a rectification of “foreign brides.” 1 1.

(7) conundrum or turning blind to the racial discrimination would inevitably hinder the proper understanding of the migrant Other. In saying so, I do not propose what proper understanding should be; rather, I focus on the plausible formulation of our misunderstanding and its consequential harm in bridging the ethical, benign relation with the migrants. Based on the notions from crossing borders to facing the migrants, I seek to answer the following questions. What do these evoke in us? How do the migrants posit themselves? What impacts does migration have on the sending and receiving ends? How does migration (re)shape one’s perception of work and life? How can we respond to migration as a global phenomenon with its symptomatic, corporeal figures living on here and now in Taiwan? Why is migration customarily treated as a problem or a crisis in our time? With the questions above in mind, I choose Escape: Our Formosa, Their Prison (2012) and Separation: Our Trading, Their Life (2013)2 as my target literary texts. The birth of Escape and Separation is attributed to the special columns in TaiwaneseVietnamese newspaper 4-Way Voice established in 2006. Escape consists of the undocumented Vietnamese workers’ letters mostly from the first-person point of view. Separation, the sequel of Escape, includes the writing of news journalists of 4-Way Voice. Originally written in the migrants’ mother languages and later edited and translated into Chinese, Escape and Separation vividly present the living conditions of migrant workers in contemporary Taiwan. As the book titles starkly reveal, the division between “our” and “their,” hominess and imprisonment, marriage as a deal and as a commitment, signals the overall predicaments of migrants in Taiwan, and fundamentally evokes the ethics of the Self facing the Other. The collections inspire me for further research from two aspects. First, in terms of. Currently Escape and Separation have no English versions. All the quotes from these two books are based on my translation. 2 2.

(8) literariness, Escape and Separation do not claim the authority of any single author, and some articles are even written anonymously. With remarkable idiosyncrasy, each article not only stands alone for itself but also coincides or interacts with others. Second, regarding the social, historical and geographical context, Escape and Separation capture the underside of Taiwan’s economic and social prosperity that the migrants sustain. To address the issue of migrant workers and new immigrant women in Taiwan, this thesis problematizes the divide between we Taiwanese and migrant workers and new immigrant women as the different gender, racial and ethnic Other.. Literature Review On a broad scale, current researches of migration are usually centered on international relation and foreign policies with regard to globalization. Theorization of the political and economic issues of migration receives much academic interest. The gender-based approach primarily to migrant women also brings forth comparably passionate discussion. On a regional scale, the local studies on migration are blooming around the world, especially the receiving countries of the migrant workers. By situating migrants within different cultural and historical contexts, the local studies serve as a highly reflexive approach to reassess the migration issues. Altogether the studies demonstrate a dialectical relationship between global and local levels, theory and practice, power and people. As the host country, Taiwan also participates in this lively dialogue. Over the past decade, there appears a growing body of academic research as well as discursive presentation concerning Taiwan’s migration issues. Though without current studies solely on either Escape or Separation, to appropriately address the condition of migrant workers and new immigrant women in the target texts, I review four crucial 3.

(9) publications below. Like Escape and Separation, Don’t Call me a Foreign Bride (2005, hereafter DCFB), edited by Hsiao-Chuan Hsia, includes a series of the migrant women’s writings. For the first time ever DCFB allows the voices of new immigrant women from Southeast Asia and Mainland China to be heard in Taiwan. Keenly attentive to the need of the new immigrant women in the wake of growing migration, Hsia founded “New immigrant women Chinese Literacy Program” in 1995 to equip the newcomers with language ability for better adaption. The program received positive response and support, which further encouraged Hsia and her companions to establish TransAsia Sisters Association, Taiwan (TASAT) in 2003. More than the realization of new immigrant women’ learning accomplishment in the literacy program, the migrant women’s writings in DCFB marked the repressed and unheard voices excluded from the mainstream media at that time. It is hard to ignore that this first wave of new immigrant women articulated their trials and tribulations in DCFB as protagonists of Separation did. Unsettling feelings toward stigmatization and migration policies have been sustaining the compelling emotional landscape of the new immigrant women. For example, Dong-Mei Hsiao, a Mainland China spouse, was deeply hurt by her Taiwanese colleague’s complaint: “The lady boss was too mingy! I have so much work to do but get paid like you ‘Wailao!’ ” (my trans.; 55). Vietnamese wife Gin-Hue Lin feared that her son “would be ostracized by his classmates like other new-inhabitants’ children and confronted by the society” (my trans.; 74). Ya-Jing Chiu from Thailand protested against the high threshold for obtaining Taiwan identification card. She questioned, “Does it ever occur to you [Taiwan’s government] that the malicious Taiwanese families would be most reluctant to see we are granted the ID card, because we wouldn’t be controlled as long as we have one?” (my trans.; 93). These remarks do not merely touch upon the 4.

(10) cultural and political conflicts but also manifest the new immigrant women’s vulnerability in a society where their identity may hinder them from making themselves at home. To rethink migration in relation to individual experiences and sentiments, I regard the role of affect considerably decisive and indispensable in fostering action for change. Noticeably, unlike Chinese serving as the translation text in Escape and Separation, Chinese in DCFB makes the original text. Little doubt is that language figures prominently in the face-to-face interaction with the migrant Other, while language often degenerates into a constraint for the newcomers. Would the effort of the literacy program fall prey to what Paulo Freire defines as “one of the myths of the oppressor ideology: the absolutizing of ignorance” (133-34)? In other words, would learning Chinese reversely become a form of subjugation? In DCFB, Chinese, a seemingly prerequisite for the migrant women to express their voices in Taiwan, is in effect instrumentally deployed to build mutual trust among the members of the literacy program and lay the foundation for empowerment (116-17). All in all, to comprehend Chinese as a bearer of migrant’s voice in Escape and Separation, DCFB acts as a valuable reference. In 2008, the publication of Transborder and Diaspora: Immigrants and Migrant Workers under Globalization (hereafter Transborder) in two volumes witnesses Taiwan’s academic endeavors in migration studies. As a seminar paper collection, Transborder records the dynamic of migration by looking into four aspects. The first volume of Transborder tackles the two main forces contributing to the flow of labor migration, economics and politics. Scholars including Antonio Tujuan Junior, Te-Pei Huang, Hsin-Hsing Chen and Pei-Chia Lan discern that the economic freedom of capitalism acts as a double-edge sword. The market of labor migration is free, but free of the migrant workers’ equivalent status to negotiate with their employers. The 5.

(11) capital circulates but it rarely accumulates in migrant workers’ pockets. Regulatory institutions facilitating migration range from governments, enterprises to manpower agencies, while they could easily exploit the migrants in the name of free market. Besides the economic dimension, migration policies also draw critical attention in the field of sociology. The larger the scale of migration grows, the more the administrative forces are involved. Via examining the migration policies, researchers such as Yen-fen Cheng, Antonia Chao, Yuan-hao Liao, Yu-chien Kung and so on pinpoint that the divide between we and they, the domestic Self and the foreign Other, stems from the discriminated, exclusive nature of policy design. They also look into various degrees of classification and the security concerns behind the migration control at home and abroad. Under the complex economic and political background, the second volume of Transborder focuses on the migrants’ subjectivity. It probes into migrants’ accommodation and the rising social movements in receiving countries. Hok Bun Ku, Mei-lin Pan, Chih-hung Wang, Lucie Cheng and other researchers analyze migrants’ living modes or strategies with specific cases in Hong Kong, India and Taiwan. The studies demonstrate migrants’ pressure from meeting financial needs to developing the sense of identification. Migrants’ corresponding adjustment such as running restaurants that offer specialties of the home countries is not merely for livelihood but also of cultural significance. In particular, pertinent to my study is Lucie Cheng’s investigation of 4-Way Voice’s role in media. Positioning itself as a platform for Vietnamese workers and wives in Taiwan, 4-Way Voice provides heterogeneous information without the attempt to educate or be politically neutral. Though it is hard to justify whether 4-Way Voice makes a sturdy or representative channel for the migrants, it distinguishes itself from the mainstream media. 6.

(12) Lastly, the second volume ends with the discussion on social movements. The section accentuates the relation between migrants and locals. Fieldwork and case study serve as the main approaches for critics including Ramon Bultron, Hsiao-chuan Hsia, Chin-ju Lin, Young-ie Wuo and so on. It is from this “bottom-up” angle, the first-hand interactions with the migrants, and the actual implementation of empowerment, that we come to realize the difficulty yet the necessity of letting out a voice. Bultron introduces successful instances of Filipino migrant workers worldwide developing international organizations for mutual assistance, Hsia reckons building consensus among the migrant groups to be crucial for TASAT to sprout and thrive in Taiwan, and Wuo critically assesses the closure of HOME (the House for Migrants’ Empowerment) under social and political pressure. I consider the instances justifiably demonstrate that the making of social movements involves multilateral efforts and that the effect could extend beyond the institutional realm. For the buds of improving migrants’ living conditions to bloom, the spatial and mental perspectives of migration are worth further exploration. Overall, the seminar collections delineate a contour of migrants’ life in Taiwan and around Asia. On the one hand, political and economic forces trigger and regulate the flow of migrants; on the other hand, migrant’s adaption and living conditions attest to the need of ethical concern. The two-fold influences urge me to investigate the shared apparatus rendering migrants as survivors instead of citizens proper. In the same year 2008, two widely acclaimed works on migration in Taiwan were published. One is Yu-ling Ku’s work of literary reportage Our Stories: Migration and Labour in Taiwan (English edition 2011, hereafter Our Stories) and the other is Pei-chia Lan’s Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan (English edition 2006, hereafter Global Cinderellas). With the narration beginning in the era that witnessed the inflow of migrant workers, Our 7.

(13) Stories situates the stories from migrant workers’, local workers’ and local employers’ viewpoints. The line between the self and the Other turns obscure via the juxtaposition of different stances. In fact, “Our” in the title proposes the dissolved boundaries among diversified national, ethnic, and social status categories. The multiple perspectives that Ku displays map out a broad overview of the complexity of migration when considering culture, gender, regulation, manpower agency and so on. As Ku reveals, the power and benefits relations are intrinsically operated through the public and private realms of migrants’ life. Inclusive of a detailed record of migratory process, Our Stories prompts a biopolitical reading of migrant workers’ life in Taiwan. Though Our Stories is not classified as an academic work, Ku infuses her writing with the humanitarian concern and critique. Ku’s passionate work indicates the importance of contextualizing migrant workers in Escape and Separation, and her analysis in Our Stories makes great value to my proposal of an ethical attitude toward the migrant Other. The other crucial work I consult for my research is Pei-chia Lan’s dissertation Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan. Lan’s key contribution to the research of migration lies in her engagement of “boundary work,” which critically examines socio-categorical and socio-spatial boundaries (200). As Lan pinpoints, the low social status of migrant workers is constructed and reinforced when placed alongside with white-collar foreign workers and the other different nationalities. Furthermore, Lan acutely observes that the once correlated notions embedded in “family” and “home” turn out to be separable, in the sense that home has been ripped of the family value and become a working place. Along with plentiful moving stories of migrant workers via in-depth interviews, Lan addresses migration in Taiwan under the trend of globalization and takes gender as the main trope to examine the paradoxical situations of Taiwan’s female employers and the 8.

(14) female migrant domestics. On the one hand, we see an increasing number of Taiwan females who pursue their career are seeking to outsource the household responsibility; on the other hand, we have the tough overseas domestic workers fulfilling the motherhood mandate to sustain the life of their original families in Southeast Asia. Beyond a simple analogy between female migrant domestic workers and the docile maid Cinderella, Lan unravels the entangled and shifting identities of mother/maid/breadwinner that domestic workers and female employers share. On the whole, Lan’s approach, which is linking macro and micro scale, helps me to regard migration not merely as a global phenomenon taking place between labor-sending and labor-receiving nations, but involved in the daily life interactions. The publications briefly reviewed above provide detailed examination of the social, economic and political predicaments of Taiwan’s migrant workers and new immigrant women. From various approaches, these writings appeal to historical backgrounds, gender, cultural differences and hierarchical division of labor force to account for migrants’ unfavorable situations. Amidst the sources of oppression, inadequate policies and social discrimination against migrants have incurred most critics’ reprimands. However, the subtleness underlying the operation of political and economic system, and the unconscious aspect of social discrimination, have received less investigation. By highlighting the necessity of rethinking the two dimensions, I do not suggest that as long as we endeavor to improve the regulations and eliminate social discrimination, migrants would gain proper treatment. Instead, I propose that as long as we treat politics and social discrimination as external to us, we may risk adopting an ostensibly impartial stance without acknowledging that we might purport the operation of related rules and help fostering the hostility against the migrants. In this regard, to make a supplementary effort to address Taiwan’s migration issues, I develop a discourse that places migrant workers and new immigrant women’s 9.

(15) lives at the heart of politics. By defining migrants as the political, cultural and working-class exception, I employ theories of biopolitics to pinpoint the complexity of migrants’ identities, particularly undocumented workers and new immigrant women in Escape and Separation. Meanwhile, I further elaborate on the psychological aspects of social discrimination to present the inevitable yet necessary encounter of ourselves simultaneously in the face of the migrant Other. As the establishment of law entails violence of drawing boundaries, the mental mechanism that generates resentment, anxiety, xenophobia and so on, also involves latent violence in the ambivalent attitudes toward strangers, especially familiar strangers.. Methodology This thesis proposes a biopolitical reading of migrants’ life in Taiwan. I argue that migrant labor becomes an exception to sustain our everyday life. To examine the excluded, marginal and ambivalent status of undocumented workers and migrant spouses in Escape and Separation, I seek to critically engage theories of biopolitics proposed by the influential contemporary thinkers Giorgio Agamben, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, particularly with the notions of bare life and affective labor. I place these two lines of biopolitics on the same plane primarily for two reasons. The first is to explore the political, economic and affective dimensions of Taiwan’s migration issues, and the second is to grasp the shared bond of inclusive exclusion submerged in these aspects intimately connected to migrants’ well-being. Key to understanding the intersection of Agamben, and Hardt and Negri’s notions of biopolitics is the blurred divide between bare life and affective labor. I argue that migrants’ presence problematizes the border not only among nations, races and classes, but also among life, affect and work. It invites a genuine and profound 10.

(16) reflection on the connection between human life and labor work. I construe migrant workers and new immigrant women beyond the vulnerable victims of migration policies, social discrimination and other forms of violence: They demonstrate to us what cannot be deprived of a man, or in Agamben’s term, “the pure source of every identity” (114). According to Audrone Žukauskaitė and S.E. Wilmer’s classification, Agamben’s and Hardt and Negri’s theories of biopolitics are two of the predominant lineages of Michel Foucault’s critique on biopolitics. Agamben develops his theories in the domain of political theology, and Hardt and Negri offer their insights from the stand point of political economy. Agamben unveils the paradoxical nature of sovereign power that has sustained the legitimacy of politics, while Hardt and Negri look closely how capitalism rearranges the power relations within the current politics. Regardless of the seemingly divergent routes of interrogating power over and of life, the thinkers rethink human condition in its relation to modernity, characterized by Foucault as the origins of biopolitics, and nowadays it is democracy and capitalism at issue. Indeed, migrant workers’ vulnerability to institutional violence in our times embody the crux of democracy and capitalism. The subtitles of Escape and Separation pose more than a simple analogy between home and prison, trade and life. What converts the analogy into the bloody reality consists in the link between body and power. In this respect, Agamben’s notions of bare life, state of exception and the camp appear palpable. In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben takes up the fundamental problem that Michel Foucault obliquely touches upon yet fails to solve: the nature of power. While Foucault structures the exercise of power on the two poles, namely, the politicization of the population and the subjectivation of the individual, Agamben inquires further how the two poles can be separated. For Agamben, it is unreasonable to “hold 11.

(17) subjective technologies and political techniques apart” (6), for there is the zone of indistinction between the individual life and governmental power. For Agamben, the paradigm of Western politics is not mutated or becomes what Foucault designates as the “threshold of modernity” (History of Sexuality 143); rather, it thrives on a paradox that “the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power” (Homo Sacer 6). In this regard, Agamben pinpoints that sovereign power and biopolitics have always been bounded. The contiguity is so concealed yet pivotal that Homo Sacer hinges upon the “hidden point of intersection between the juridicoinstitutional and the biopolitical models of power” (6), or more specifically, “the inner solidarity between democracy and totalitarianism” (10). Agamben’s notions of bare life, state of exception and the camp radically problematize the establishment of boundary in the name of norm yet in the form of exception. They inspire me to comprehend the condition of Taiwan’s migrant workers in relation to layers of boundary, through the mechanism of power manifested in different fashion. Are migrants not treated as exceptions in our labor market as we set up different rules for them? Are migrants not exactly the beings whose political status are at stake and whose life and working activities are also strictly controlled? Are migrants not bearing the distrust and hostility evoked by their larger population considered a threat to our nation security? In particular, for undocumented workers, their rights to work and freedom are simultaneously deprived once they got unemployed. Namely, they are not granted the right “not” to work. For domestic workers and new immigrant women, home conceptually becomes the camp where the employers can suspend the effectiveness of working contracts and impose their own principles. Consequently, migrants get trapped inside and outside the law. As Agamben suggests, “it is precisely this topological zone of indistinction, which had to remain hidden from the eyes of justice, that we must try to fix under our gaze” (37). 12.

(18) To further unearth the site of zone of indistinction that may obstinately hinder justice, I take the concept of labor for analysis. Besides the administrative force, the economic pressure on migrants is typically at the center of discussion. As revealed in Escape and Separation, migrant workers’ hardship stems from the high agency fee, low-paid jobs and sometimes the remittance, along with the concomitant emotional turmoil, the sense of rootlessness and hostile social discrimination. To rethink the value of migrant workers’ contribution to Taiwan, I would like to draw on the concept of affective labor, proposed by another line of biopolitics theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. In their two compelling yet controversial works, Empire and its sequel Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, Hardt and Negri suggest that imperial sovereignty is exercised through microconflicts in the era of globalized capitalism and that the multitude possesses both the productive and destructive forces since they exist within and against Empire. As a “new global form of sovereignty,” Empire stays organic and fluid in substance and serves as a “decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers” (Empire Preface xii). Therefore, Empire by no means indicates the disappearance or faltering of power; instead, it denotes a broader network of the dispersed sites of power with the coupling trends of democracy and capitalism. Through their reading of Delezue and Guttari’s critiques on Foucault, Hardt and Negri argue that biopolitics takes the form of control (as opposed to that of discipline) and permeates through the current sociopolitical landscape with an unprecedented degree. Following Foucault, Hardt and Negri highlight “biopolitical production” as the feature of Empire and meanwhile the prime impetus against this sovereign power. By biopolitical production, Hardt and Negri suggest “the dynamic and creative relationship between material production and 13.

(19) social production” (Empire 29), which they consider Foucault fails to capture and Delezue and Guttari explain vaguely (28). Based on the Marxist tradition, Hardt and Negri accentuate the notion of “immaterial labor” to signal the shift from the industrial capitalism to the informatization of production. In addition, because of the immanent relation between labor and life, they elevate the status of immaterial labor to the extent of a new hegemony which potentially sustains and destroys Empire. Hardt and Negri formulate the concept of immaterial labor with respect to biopolitics much clearer in Multitude: “What is immaterial is its product…. It might be better to understand the new hegemonic form as ‘biopolitical labor,’ that is, labor that creates not only material goods but also relationships and ultimately social life itself” (109). More specifically, as a form of immaterial labor, affective labor “produces or manipulates affects such as a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion” (108) and belongs to “biopolitical production in that it directly produces social relationships and forms of life” (110). By providing examples such as health service workers or caring labor, Hardt and Negri note that affective labor has frequent association with “women’s work” (Multitude 110; Empire 274). As they observe, affective labor “is still most often performed by women in subordinate positions,” while it is “given less authority, and paid less” (Multitude 111). Hardt and Negri admit that the hegemony of immaterial labor “does not make all work pleasant or rewarding, nor does it lessen the hierarchy and command in the workplace or the polarization of the labor market.” However, they view that exploitation can become a powerful site of resistance, since the hegemony of immaterial labor immediately and directly connects what people share in common (Multitude 111-14, Empire 209). Noticeably, for Hardt and Negri, immaterial labor also includes the material production and the material tasks, and immaterial production is nothing additional but 14.

(20) increasingly transformative when the economic mode comes to feature “flexible, mobile, and precarious labor relations” (Multitude 112). I would further advance Hardt and Negri’s notion of immaterial labor by questioning the distinction of material labor and immaterial labor. I propose that immaterial labor constitutes the foundation of whatever form of labor and that affective labor should be better understood as the prototype of labor instead of a feature of immaterial labor. While Hardt and Negri classify the two according to the materiality of product, we cannot help but wonder: Are not all the human beings involved in the social relationship at the instant they are entitled to work? Do laborers not in a broad sense work for the livings? Even when material laborers produce tangible products, do they not simultaneously show their commitment to their work? As material laborers continue devoting their efforts, be it physical or psychological, in order to maintain the employment status, is it not also reproduction of life? I suggest the affective component not only lies in immaterial labor but also in all forms of labor per se. In brief, it is impossible to separate affect from any labor. As Agamben perceives that the “ambiguity of the sacred” constitutes the matrix of Western politics and thus problematizes humans’ political status, Hardt and Negri recognize that the ambiguity of the immaterial labor has obscured the conventional divide among realms of politics, culture and economics. In a brief note, Hardt and Negri criticize Agamben for being simply “anthropological” and even “indifferent” when focusing on the materialist dimension of zoē (Empire 421). Nonetheless, I suggest that Hardt and Negri’s and Agamben’s biopolitical perspectives complement each other when considering human being as the political, economic and affective subject. The indistinction between material labor and immaterial labor, which Hardt and Negri do not specifically address in their work, resonates with Agamben’s problemtization of the divide between bios and zoē. What Agamben does not evaluate 15.

(21) for the figure of homo sacer, such as how one’s labor condition could be associated with political force, receives Hardt and Negri’s rigorous demonstration. Though the thinkers refer to disparate sorts of abstractness in humans (affect and political status) and develop different discourses on biopolitics, they respectively hold considerable radicalness in searching for what is beyond the grasp of institutional forces on humans. In this regard, the tow-fold understanding of migrants, namely bare life and affective labor, entails more than a simple differentiation of migrants’ social status. It puts forth a fundamental inquiry into the good life.. Outline of Chapters My thesis consists of three chapters. Chapter One addresses the dual identity―bare life and affective labor―of migrants through the lens of biopolitics. It provides a theoretical framework by engaging Giorgio Agamben’s and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s critiques. Centering my discussion on the implicated oppression of these two modes of life, I argue that the migrant Other face violence stemming from the ubiquitous borderlines. In this thesis, the term “migrant” does not specifically distinguish itself from “immigrant,” since it is also possible for female migrant workers to permanently settle down in Taiwan. Moreover, as Escape and Separation reveal, the undocumented workers and the divorced foreign women do not fall into two distinct categories. Some are the both, striving hard to survive. It would be justifiable to take the blurred border as the departure point for the discussion on migrant’s identity. In this context, biopolitics, the theory of interrogating the divide between human life and the realm of politics, functions as a pertinent approach. To elucidate the lurking violence arising from migrants’ shifting, suspending and ambiguous status, I link the concept of bare life to that of affective labor. The former 16.

(22) is the legitimately deprived, excluded and marginalized life as such that Agamben situates at the center of Western politics. The latter is a new hegemonic form with the biopolitical essence according to Hardt and Negri. I construe migrant workers as the contemporary avatar of bare life because they are grasped within the state of exception to sustain our routine daily life. In addition, I define migrant workers, domestic and non-domestic workers as affective laborers whose non-physical efforts and devotion does not usually gain due importance. In particular, undocumented workers can best exemplify the impossibility of the escape from the intervention of sovereign power, and domestic workers’ perilous exposure to physical and mental abuse unveils the underside of family. With the theoretical framework sketched in Chapter One, Chapter Two proceeds to analyze in Escape and Separation how migrant workers struggle against power mechanism and how the non-migrant Other interpret and reflect on the pain in the migrants’ life stories. It is no exaggeration to exclaim “we are all virtually homines sacri” (Homo Sacer 115) or that we are all affective laborers, in a broad sense that our lives all get involved in the political and economic spheres. The subjects of Escape, a group of “illegal,” “runaway” migrant workers, constantly challenge the divide between being legal and illegal. Nevertheless, it is more of a choice between legal slave and illegal fugitive. Without the option of resignation, migrant workers are de facto deprived of the right not to work. Manpower agencies and employers can easily threaten migrant workers with dismissal. I argue that to escape or not to escape does not even count for a legitimate question in itself. This forced choice to become undocumented would put migrant workers in dire straits since it verifies the state of exception in the name of labor force regulation. Also dealing with the question of choice, Separation excavates new immigrant women’ migratory journey and accommodation into Taiwan’s family―and the parting with it. The cross-border 17.

(23) marriage has been stigmatized as the unscrupulous deal, and new immigrant women are often accused of treating marriage as a lucrative trade to meet the financial needs of their original family abroad. However, it is often neglected that the new immigrant women are extremely vulnerable to domestic violence and that the majority of them treat cross-border marriage as a decision out of lifelong concern rather than greed. Moreover, the abstractness of new immigrant women’ invisible affective efforts often turns out to be the relentless reduction to a disposable attribute of labor force. Escape and Separation include volunteers and reporters’ articles as well. The multiple voices in the collections express collective concerns for the migrants and provide critical perspectives of injustice on them. For one thing, we capture the migrants’ unyielding attitude and determined effort to affirm their identity; for another, we move beyond the mindset of pitying the victims and imagine the plausibility of resistance. Based on the text analysis, I further suggest that the recognition of mutual differences between we and the Other is in fact to help unravel the fact that more commonalities are shared among us. Does migrant workers’ choice of escape not bespeak the pursuit of freedom and dignity in employment as we do? Are new immigrant women’s expectations of well-being not as indispensable as that of Taiwanese women? Hasn’t the hierarchical division within family, class and nation long been the source of violence to life, despite the fact that migrants’ conditions have underscored it more than ever before? Stimulated and echoing the biopolitical perspectives, the third chapter proposes an ethical reading of migrant’s life by rethinking border in the era of multiculturalism. Drawing on Slavoj Žižek’s psychoanalytic perspective of the Neighbor and Iris Marion Young’s politics of difference, I aim to bridge the gap between knowing to show respect and ubiquitous social discrimination, and mediate between Agamben’s and Hardt and Negri’s postulation of the marginalized and excluded groups’ 18.

(24) resistance. I seek to capture the rupture arising from the systematic or institutional violence, or the immediate and nearly instinctual repulsion toward the different cultural, ethnic, gender and religious Other. The gap, in Žižek’s sense, refers to the irreducible Otherness of the Other. Žižek radically proposes that it is only through the deprivation of the Otherness of the Other that one can possibly “love your neighbor.” The question is how we can approach the possibility of loving our neighbors on the condition of its impossibility. As is the case with social status, we may ask: can we live without neighbors? Can we live in a world without hierarchy? The Otherness of the Neighbor and its chances of producing social hierarchies and oppression echo Young’s politics of difference. Young advocates that differences within and among social groups should not be defined as exclusion or opposition (170). By complicating the concepts of difference, we come to perceive that oppression does not necessarily stem from the competition among social ranks but from the minute, face-to-face interactions with others. By and large, I suggest that migrant workers and new immigrant women should not be treated as the thieves of enjoyment, nor should they be perceived as the exception of the contemporary political landscape and global labor market. Migrant workers and new immigrant women prompt us to rethink the function of law and the value of labor work, revisit the concept of marriage and family, and most of all, call for the active ethical decisions that would enrich rather than divide us.. 19.

(25) Chapter One Caught within the Grip: Conceptualizing Taiwan’s Migrants Woven into the backdrop of Taiwan’s daily lives, over 67 thousand Southeast Asian migrants have been enriching, constituting and reshaping the country’s scenery. Since the1990s Taiwan has introduced migrant workers and new immigrant women in succession to boost its domestic economy and population mainly from the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand. With more migrant workers and their offspring inhabiting Taiwan in recent years, migrants’ cultural diversity becomes increasingly familiar to Taiwanese. Moreover, public awareness of and grassroots’ responses to migrant groups have risen. For instance, organized by Chinese Association for Foreign Spouses & Labors’ Voice, Taiwan Literature Award for Migrants has invited and esteemed migrant’s voices through their writing in mother language since 2014. The Southeast Asia-themed bookstores, Southeast Asian Migrant Inspired in Taoyuan and Brilliant Time in New Taipei City, opened in 2015 to fervently promote positive perspectives and profound understanding of the migrants. Official organizations also join in the effort in building a migrant-friendly society. For example, in 2016, celebration activities of Indonesia’s Independence Day and the Eid al-Fitr Festival were held respectively by National Taiwan Museum and Taipei City Government. In the same year, to bolster the ties with the Southeast Asian countries, Taiwanese government started to propose the New Southbound Policy. Apart from establishing multilateral economics with the neighboring countries, the policy also takes settlement of the first and second generation of new immigrants in Taiwan into consideration. However, migrants’ social status in Taiwan deserves more critical attention. Contrary to the international travelers and white-collar foreign workers, most migrants do not have access to relaxed daytime or a decent salary in Taiwan. Some become 20.

(26) immigrants through transnational marriage, and some perform the “three d-jobs” (dirty, dangerous, and difficult) to meet the nation’s needs of construction and domestic work. Migration entails the cost hard to measure. Globalization enables migrants to enter the cross-border labor markets, but nevertheless involves them in a profit-oriented competition dominated by the capitalists. From qualifications for working overseas, adaptation to the receiving country, to responsibility for the original families, migrant workers and new immigrant women follow sets of rules imposed on them economically, politically, culturally and affectively. In Taiwan, it is still common to refer to migrant workers as wailao (a derogatory term for foreign laborers in Chinese) or insinuate that new immigrant women are “imported brides” bought by Taiwanese males. It takes physical and emotional effort to make a living here, but such endeavor would not promise them dignity; worse still, the impingement on migrants’ human rights and the cases of harassment and abuse have occurred incessantly. Is it all too familiar Swiss novelist and playwright Max Frisch’s stark reminder “we wanted workers but we got humans instead”? Not if we radically rethink what makes us humans. The presence of Taiwan’s migrants opens up the avenues for problematizing the boundary between we and the migrants. Since political and economic forces strenuously influence migrants’ life, I adopt biopolitics, the theory on interrogating the divide between human life and the realm of politics, as the theoretical framework to account for the ambivalence of migrant’s state of life in Taiwan. This chapter engages primarily Giorgio Agamben’s musing on bare life and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s concept of affective labor to further explore the tense, intimate and ambivalent relationship between we and the migrant Other. I integrate the two different angels to reach closer to a politically and economically affected form of life and to grasp the shared power mechanism in politics and economics. Agamben 21.

(27) unveils the paradoxical nature of sovereign power that has sustained the legitimacy of politics, and Hardt and Negri look closely how capitalism rearranges the power relations within the current politics. I suggest that the theoretical perspectives deepen our understanding of the migrant Other in Taiwan, unravel the unbearable darkness of being, and cast light on the threshold to overcome.. I. Bare Life: The Unbareble Lightness of Being Before I elaborate on Agamben’s critiques of biopolitics, I would like to briefly introduce Michel Foucault’s incipient notion of biopolitics: the relation between human life and governmental power under modern political economy. Foucault elusively sketches the concept of biopolitcs in The History of Sexuality, first discusses it in Society Must Be Defended, and further develops it in The Birth of Biopolitics. As Foucault keenly observes, the sovereign power over its subject has shifted to the “bio-power,” which is enacted by “an anatomo-politics of the human body” (Society Must Be Defended 139) and positioned both “as a biological problem and as a power’s problem” (The Birth of Biopolitics 245). The shift does not suggest a radical break from the nature of sovereignty but signal a qualitative change in power. As Foucault states, “I wouldn’t say exactly sovereignty’s old right- to take life or let live- was replaced, but it came to be complemented by a new right…the right to make live and to let die” (Society Must Be Defended 241). With the population becoming the target of disciplinary governmentality, Foucault calls attention to the political force on people at the micro-level, namely through the meticulous operation of the state apparatus. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben challenges Foucault’s critique by arguing that biopower is never a new right but rather as ancient as sovereignty. In Agamben’s 22.

(28) view, Foucault fails to discern how sovereign power has been constituting itself by interminably making the distinction between two statuses of human life: zoē and bios, biological life and political existence. Agamben probes into the nature of power by problematizing the long-standing divide between bios and zoē, formulated since Aristotle but made no explicit distinction in Foucault’s work. As Agamben suggests, “the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power” (Homo Sacer 6), or more specifically, “the production of bare life is the original activity of sovereignty” (83). Agamben traces the avatar of bare life back in the ancient Roman figure homo sacer, “a human victim who may be killed but not sacrificed” (83). As a perpetrator who is not worthy of sacrifice to the gods and can be killed without any warrant, homo sacer suffers from dual exemption from divine law and human law. The threshold of determining homo sacer’s life and death thus passes into ambivalence. “Neither political bios nor natural zoē,” as Agamben elaborates, naked life inhabits “the zone of indistinction in which zoē and bios constitute each other in including and excluding each other” (90). Zoē, already in and of human life, ambivalently becomes the production, the excess, the marked. Bare life exemplifies a form of life which converges from bios and zoē. It is neither bios nor zoē, but zoē without bios, the flesh being stripped of politically qualified status. Yet how does this zone of indistinction take shape? How can bare life be politicized? Echoing Carl Schmitts’ claim that the sovereign does not need law to create law and advancing Schmitts’ musing on the exception and general rules (16), Agmaben further elaborates the logic of sovereignty with respect to the structure of exception: “The exception does not subtract itself from the rule; rather, the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the exception and, maintaining itself in relation to the exception” (18). In other words, via maintenance instead of total exclusion the exception could uphold the rule, altogether decided, produced and exercised by 23.

(29) sovereignty. It is from this point that Agamben unravels how relation of exception functions as “included solely through its exclusion” (18) and prompts him to reconsider “the validity of the juridical order possible” (19). As Agamben further correlates sovereignty and violence, “the sovereignty is the point of indistinction between violence and law, the threshold on which violence passes over into law and law passes over into violence” (32). Thus, it is violence employed by sovereignty in the form of law that creates, mobiles the zone of indistinction and serves as the means of casting out the bare life. After we have investigated Agamben’s reconceptualization of sovereignty, human life, law, and the state of exception, we arrive at the essential logic of inclusive exclusion. As we shall see, instead of offering any concrete, objective definition to those terms, what comes into being in Agamben’s discourse is marked by dissolution: a string of ostensible antitheses─ bios and zoē, inside and outside of law, exception and regular case, exclusion and inclusion─ emerges as “a zone of irreducible indistinction” (9). At the ontological level, the blurred divide between sovereignty and law engenders the state of exception, and sovereign power’s radical intervention of zoē and bios produces bare life, namely zoē without bios. As Agamben precisely points out, sovereign violence is in effect “founded not on a pact but on the exclusive inclusion of bare life in the state” (107). Bare life thus makes the example for the state of exception, based on which Agamben contends that the sovereign power is always intertwined with biopower. The notion of “inclusive exclusion” deepens Agamben’s observation that sovereignty enjoys the absolute freedom of being inside and outside the law. Simply put, sovereignty remains self-justifying. Agamben’s demonstration of the short-circuit between sovereignty and biopolitics, totalitarianism and democracy has its ancient paradigm in the Roman figure of the “homo sacer” (sacred man) and the most striking modern instantiation in 24.

(30) the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. For Agamben, life in concentration camps typifies bare life caught in the state of exception. With Jewish body abandoned, exterminated, distinguished from German body rightfully in Nazi regime’s juridical order, the camp serves as “the most absolute biopolitical space ever to have been realized, in which power confronts nothing but pure life”; in fact, Agamben goes as far as to suggest “the camp is the very paradigm… at which politics becomes biopolitics and homo sacer is virtually confused with the citizen” (171). It is essential to note that a concentration camp is an ahistorical site where sovereign power exposes its violence through setting up exception and thus verifies its legitimacy autonomously. It is the sovereign’s capacity for establishing the exception, instead of suspending the normal rule, that makes the rule of ruling. From the ancient figure of homo sacer, the concentration camp to the citizen nowadays, Agamben delineates the ceaseless actualization of bare life in the realm of politics.. II. Affective Labor: The New Landscape in Empire If Agamben seeks to unearth “the hidden matrix of modern politics,” Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri strive to delve into “the hidden abode of production.” In Empire (2000) and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004), Hardt and Negri propose “Empire” as a new political-economic model where the divide between production and reproduction becomes indistinct, and “Multitude” as an aggregation of people with irreducible differences. Empire and Multitude represent contemporary crisis and solution with the advancement of neoliberalism. While how radically Hardt and Negri’s critique revamps our understanding of economic and political globalization remains debatable, it is noteworthy to examine their appropriation of biopolitics and postulation of affective labor in this context. Michel Foucault is preeminently influential in analyzing power relations, not 25.

(31) from a “descending” angle but an “ascending” one. In Foucault’s account, power is “exercised rather than possessed,” it penetrates “into the depths of society,” and that power relations “are not localized in the relations between the state and its citizens or on the frontier between classes…, reproduce at the level of individuals, bodies, gestures, and behavior, the general form of the law or government” (Discipline and Punishment 26). In effect, the relationship between power and the individual portrayed by Foucault is not as “static” as Hardt and Negri claim (Empire 24). It is at the micro level that Foucault exposes power’s thriving reproducibility and characterizes a disciplinary society with it. The question of how power is exercised to discipline the social, political, economic bodies is therefore closely examined. For Foucault, the prison is exemplary of a society of discipline. As “an exhaustive disciplinary apparatus,” prison “must assume responsibility for all aspects of the individual,” and “its mode of action is the constraint of a total education” (235-36). Reflecting on Foucault’s musing on micro-powers, Gilles Deleuze treats the same question with different focus. In “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Deleuze argues that a society no longer aims to impose command and discipline on people but to regulate and control. He identifies the notion Foucault slightly touches upon ―the power to control―as the main feature of society. In a disciplinary society, people’s relation to various “environments of enclosure,” such as school and factory, can be clearly regulated by time, space and monetary. However, in the societies of control, the modern “closed system” yields to the “spirit” behind it. In other words, a more elusive and pervasive force control people, “as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination” (4). As Deleuze defines, control is “short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit” (5). Deleuze’s insight into a paradigmatic shift from the disciplinary society to the 26.

(32) society of control inspires Hardt and Negri to discern a “qualitative passage” from imperialism to Empire, from industrialization to informational economy. Hardt and Negri envisage Empire as “a new form of sovereignty” (Empire xi), in which “civil society is absorbed in the state, but the consequence of this is an explosion of the elements that were previously coordinated and mediated in civil society” (25). Placing biopower at its core of analysis, Hardt and Negri observe though power has become “decentered and deterritorializing” (Empire xii), it is not declined but “exercised through machines that directly organize the brains…and bodies” (23). Moreover, Empire “include[s] not only the dominant state powers but also supranational administrations, business interests, and numerous other nongovernmental organizations” (Multitude 59). In Empire, the mechanism of power functions autonomously. It controls, regulates, generates and validates power itself. Empire’s operation of power from the bottom up shares the similar fashion with the changing mode of production. As Hardt and Negri observe, the production of products moves toward that of services, “characterized in general by the central role played by knowledge, information, affect, and communication” (Empire 285). They define the labor involved in this production as immaterial labor. Therefore, immaterial labor does not mean that workers become immaterial but rather the products are intangible, “such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication” (290). The focus on immaterial labor does not suggest a quantitative increase of immaterial laborers but signal a hegemonic tendency in qualitative terms during the process of all forms of work, in which “labor and society have to informationalize, become intelligent, become communicative, become affective” (Multitude 109). Hardt and Negri point out two primary forms of immaterial labor. The first form produces symbols, images, knowledge and other “primarily intellectual or linguistic” products. The second form is affective labor, which “produces or manipulates affects such as a 27.

(33) feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion” (109). Highly associated with affective labor are workers in health services, caring work and entertainment industry. Hardt and Negri provide a simple definition: “A worker with a good attitude and social skills is another way of saying a worker adept at affective labor” (108). What is the connection between affective labor and the multitude? Hardt and Negri indicate the potentiality of resistance. Affective laborers produce “social networks, forms of community, biopower” (Empire 293) and “are themselves, in many respects, immediately social and common” (Multitude 114). The multitude encompasses “all forms of labor …[that] produce in common, and share too a common potential to resist the domination of capital.” Replacing exclusion with multitude as the “open and expansive concept” that can characterize working class, Hardt and Negri highlight that the biopolitical production offers “equal opportunity of resistance” (107). It explains why they refuse to consider the poor “merely victims” of capitalism but “powerful agents” (129). In particular, Hardt and Negri underline migrants as a special category of “the poor” of the multitude. The theorists value migrants’ positive pursuit of wealth, joy, and freedom, and they believe migrants not only devitalize the geographical boundaries but also the social hierarchies. The globe becomes “one common place” for migrants to thrive, “serving as living testimony to the irreversible fact of globalization” (133-34). The biopolitical condition of the multitude, which Hardt and Negri define as “the many singular instances of labor processes, productive conditions, local situations, and lived experiences” (114), is becoming common instead of the same. It is in this “becoming common” that Hardt and Negri perceive the rise of subjectivity. As they claim, “[t]hese singularities, act in common and thus form a new race, that is, a politically coordinated subjectivity that the multitude produces” (358). Social relationships that immaterial labor produces 28.

(34) endow the multitude with the constituent power to stand within and against Empire. Hardt and Negri’s supposition of immaterial labor leaves us a real-life question to answer: to what extent can the vulnerable people such as migrants, refugees, homeless and asylum seekers become powerful enough to fight against the reality?. III. Southeast Asian Migrants down and out in Taiwan Employing the notions of bare life and affective labor to comprehend Taiwan’s migrants, I propose the link between bare life and affective labor primarily resides in the similar logic of inclusive exclusion. For Agamben, bare life is not zoē but zoē without bios. As I further interpret Hardt and Negri’s notion of affective labor in Introduction, affective labor can be labor deprived of affect. Ontologically, it is impossible to separate one’s natural life from political life, or the affective dimension from one’s work. However, the intervention of law and the effects of consumerism are always already sifting and screening in reality. In Agamben’s and Hardt and Negri’s writing, power mechanism and global market allow inclusive exclusion to be exercised in a democratic manner. Democracy herein is not simply posited as a political reality but put in question regarding the lurking underside of it. For instance, law and free trade can protect but also infringe on people’s right. The decision makers are no longer the instantly recognizable monarchs or the individual capitalists, but the governments or collective capitalists. In this respect, I propose that bare life and affective labor call our attention to the legitimacy of boundary drawing within living, and working subjects in our era. One can find Taiwan’s migrants as the contemporary avatar of bare life and affective labor. The binding force of politics and capitalism unravels that bare life and affective labor could be institutionally produced, or utilized, and become vulnerable to violence. As a young democratic country witnessing rapid economic growth, Taiwan 29.

(35) had boasted of its freedom and wealth. From the mid-1980s, Taiwan’s “economic miracle” had been sustained by labor-intensive manufactured goods. In response to the subsequent rising cost of local labor and the urgent need for construction laborers, Taiwan officially approves the introduction of migrant workers in 1989 and domestic workers in 19923. Due to the slightly higher minimum wage among the other Southeast Asian countries, Taiwan attracts considerable migrant workers from Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Philippines, nevertheless under the principle that “no employment of Foreign Worker may jeopardize nationals’ opportunity in employment…. or social stability” (“Employment Service Acts 1992,” Art. 42). Posited as a potential economic and social threat to Taiwan, migrant workers are entitled to a less protective and more restrictive legal system. In effect, Taiwan is notorious for its flawed migration policies to prevent exploitation of their migrant laborers. In particular, Taiwan’s vampiric manpower agencies that exploit the loopholes in the law maltreat migrant workers as rampantly as they are lambasted (See Lan and Ku). On top of the appalling working condition and low wages, the most unreasonable regulation on migrant workers is the limited freedom of voluntary unemployment. Since Taiwan’s migrant workers cannot change employers freely, that is, they have the right to work but not to quit, they risk becoming “illegal” workers, or “undocumented,” “runaway” workers before they land a new job. Already inclusively exclusive of Taiwan’s labor regulations, runway workers face the more precarious situation. The other vast vulnerable groups in agency’s hands, new immigrant women, also fight for being “legal” wives and “legal” citizens in Taiwan. More often than not, Southeast Asian immigrants’ cross-border marriages to Taiwan are stigmatized as sham marriages. Many assume that the migrant wives either come for their Taiwanese. 3. Migrant spouses are allowed to apply for permanent residence since 1994. 30.

(36) spouses’ wealth or for Taiwan’s identification card. In fact, now that migrant spouses would have to renounce their original nationality if they are to be naturalized Taiwanese citizens, they are prone to becoming stateless. Once migrant spouses involved in sham marriage or runaway workers are reported, they might face immediate repatriation. Readily imaginable is that employers, manpower agents or family members can manipulate the reporting. Taiwan’s (illegal) migrant workers or new immigrant women make the living figures of bare life in the sense that they exist externally to Taiwanese’s politically qualified life yet immanently to our politicaljuridical structure. The violence on migrant workers is not lurking beneath the written laws alone; it can also be demonstrated by the social network that connects us and the migrant. Along with bare life, the second motif affective labor is equivalently crucial to conceptualizing Taiwan’s migrants. Although Hardt and Negri realize “when affective production becomes part of waged labor it can be experienced as extremely alienating” (Multitude 111), they nonetheless underestimate the decisive role of capital in configuring the form of production by claiming “the central forms of productive cooperation are no longer created by the capitalist as part of the project to organize labor but rather emerge from the productive energies of labor itself” (113). While Hardt and Negri affirm the (re)producing power of affective labor, I emphasize the underside of it: the invisible output of affective labor is liable to exploitation not only because the affect itself is abstract and thus hard to measure by prize but also because it is rarely treated as the cost. Being migrant laborers may make it all the more miserable. From fishing vessels, factories, restaurants, long-term care centers, neighborhoods and our houses, we see migrant workers and new immigrant women undertake the paid or unpaid work to nourish Taiwan’s economy and support our proper life. Nevertheless, domestic abuse, sexual assault or harassment, death-by31.

(37) overwork have been plaguing them incessantly. Foreigners In Taiwan, a blog organized by American expats, unreservedly dubbed Taiwan’s migrant workers “modern-day slavery.”4 It is symptomatic of Taiwan’s deep-rooted discrimination against working class and Southeast Asian labor-sending countries, and it partly results from Taiwan’s negligence of the cost of a newcomer to work or settle down in a foreign island. The cost of labor and marriage migration entails not merely different types of payment such as plane ticket fees, recruitment fees, manpower agency fees and other expenses, but more importantly, the affective factors driving migrants to leave their homeland for a better life. Is the most common and understandable motivation for migration not powered by one’s love, hope and determination to procure one’s family the basic right to happiness? At this point, I would like to clarify I do not apply the concept of bare life to male migrant workers and that of affective labor to new immigrant women due to the masculine hue (or “sex blindness”) of bare life and the feminine quality of affective labor. Indeed, Agamben’s theory invokes critiques on the blatant absence of women bodies or in his biopolitical framework, and researches have highlighted migrant women’s more disadvantaged status particularly in domestic and care service.5 Furthermore, the gendered division of labor has also generated and reinforced the perception that men perform the laborious tasks while women labor mentally. As is the case with Taiwan’s migrant workers, construction workers are mostly male and domestic or care workers female. However, I suggest that addressing Taiwan’s migration issues primarily from a biopolitical approach is de facto gender conscious, if we recognize that biopolitics. See the blog. “Modern Day Slavery in Taiwan – Migrant Workers.” 23 November. 2017. <https://www.foreignersintaiwan.com/blog-370963385326684/modern-day-slavery-in-taiwan-migrantworkers> 5 See Repo, Jemima. The Biopolitics of Gender. New York: Oxford UP, 2016. Print. 32 4.

(38) foregrounds the reproduction (instead of deprivation) of human life as the kernel of modern governmentality. As proposed, through the regulatory means of managing the population, biopolitics “mak[es] life no longer a private affair, but a matter of policy” (2). If this private affair is realizable because of women, then women “is already assumed as a key political referent” (Cerwonka and Loutfi). Namely, without women, the birth of population will not even be possible. Ruth Miller’s insight into the citizenship formation further accentuates woman’s integral role to bring the birth of human life into the sphere of politics. As Miller indicates, “It is the womb that has become the predominant biopolitical space, it is women’s bodily borders that have been displaced onto national ones, [and] it is thus the citizen with the womb who has become the political neutral” (qtd. in Cerwonka and Loutfi). By and large, women’s capacity of sexual reproduction encapsulates the governmental function of preserving its subjects’ life. Bare life, the life that is killable and not even worth sacrificing, ambivalently confronts us with the extent to which life can be regulated, suspended and discarded. With respect to the feminist perspectives on female domestic workers’ and migrant wives, I follow Taiwanese scholar Pei-Chia Lan’s insight that the feminization of domestic work demonstrates the continual formulation of womanhood/motherhood in the patriarchal pattern. Viewing female not as a traditional gender role but as a structural continuity, Lan underscores the “similar patriarchal constraints” and the connection between gender and “other social inequalities” (Global Cinderellas 12-4) in her analysis of Taiwanese female employers and the migrant domestic workers. According to Lan, while the migrant domestic workers in Taiwan bring home the bacon, thus “transcending the gender boundary” (158), they meanwhile “have to pay substantial emotional and monetary costs” (159). To engage 33.