The Sea

There are stories about the ocean as well as poems, songs, lyrics. The ocean as life enabling, as mysterious, as powerful. Full of resources. “All of this is now at risk, however, of dying, as the oceans are turned into the poisoned receptacle of the world’s waste.” (註1) In the 1970s, the fishermen’s movement started in Southern India to defend access to the ocean’s resources and to affirm the ocean as a source of life; to defend a sustainable approach to its use and to ensure the inexhaustibility of fish, and to protect and defend the communities that depend on fishing for their livelihood. Compared to other sectors, the exploitation and use of the sea was and is much more emphasized than its preservation. Around two-thirds of the world is covered by ocean. The earth stretches out deeper into the ocean than high into the sky. The oceans are uncanny, opaque, nebulous. They swallow boats, planes, and tons of trash. Some items are spit out again and scientists will follow ocean streams to determine the place of origin and entry. The oceans are some- times described as one global, interconnected, continuous body of water that interchange relatively freely. But there are other descriptions as well that specify the ocean in different oceans. Oceans are often used as borders, or serve as borders, or borders are inscribed onto them. As oceans have a fluid materiality, they are said to need a map that inscribes order into their fluidity and projects borders onto them. Borders can’t be physically built on oceans. Sometimes vessels and warships perform borders on the ocean. Around six million European passengers traveled on cruise ships in 2014.(註2) In 2015 around one million people made it across the European, Asian, and African borders without going through passport control. Most used the Aegean Sea for their crossing. At the time of writing, NATO war vessels are positioned between the Greek islands and the Turkish coast.(註3)

Cruising

The etymology of cruising is connected to cross and crossing; it seems to originate from the Dutch word meaning “to cross” in the seventeenth century, when the Netherlands was at the height of its shipbuilding and colonial trade powers. The Age of Sail refers to a period between the sixteenth to the mid- nineteenth century, when sea power was the dominant force behind aggressive expansions from Europe. The sea was not just a trading zone, but also a battlefield. It was in this period when European settlers expanded to all parts of the world in one of the biggest migrations in recorded history. At that time, the term cruising was used to identify a specific type of movement—independent scouting, raiding, or commerce protection(註4)—and not a vessel. It was not until the nineteenth century when vessels, then called cruisers, were built for this specific purpose. The first leisure cruising took place in 1822 and the business of pleasure voyages came to form cruise ships.(註5) Transportation was not the primary purpose and the trips were called “cruise to nowhere” and “nowhere voyages.” Once more, this is where the movement and purpose defined the meaning of cruises in contrast to ocean liners that provided trans- port-oriented “line voyages.” Outside of the tourism industry, cruisers and cruising are terms used for many forms of traveling by boat or other vessel on water. In the 1950s, the term cruising became popular for describing the pastime of slowly driving around “cruise strips” in a small town with a car. It de- scribes a type of driving that is mostly aimless and concentrates more on the social interactions within the car or with other car drivers. It was part of a kind of event culture of “cruise nights,” and it later continued as a nostalgic retro event that still occurs today.

Cruising is often associated with an enclosed object in motion. According to Michel Foucault, the ship is the heterotopia par excellence. It is

a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infin- ity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development […] but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination.(註6)

It is an immense weapon of colonizing the world, a violent dream machine that is imagining an open space that can be traveled on. The colonial apparatus covered its violent desires with the innocence of curiosity.(註7) In the same or different narrations we also find boats, ships, and vessels that were and are directed by pirates and outlaws.

Around the beginning of the twentieth century, cruising became a code word among gay men looking for sex. Cruising areas identify public places known within a gay community as places to find sex partners. The places include public toilets or parks; they are public as well as hidden.(註8) The HIV/ AIDS crisis probably served as a major rupture changing the practices of public sex acts and areas immensely. An age of safer sex followed, translat- ing these queer practices and spaces past antisex and homophobic polic- ing. Still, there is a nostalgic sentiment around gay communities that refers to this moment of free sexual pleasure. José Esteban Muñoz identifies this nostalgia in artworks that address unsafe sex in the moment when gay men were living during the AIDS pandemic. This backward move can also be understood as a form of queer cruising, a cruising within and through the times; a cruising through these utopian pictures that lets “us critique the present, to see beyond its ‘what is’ to worlds of political possibility, of ‘what might be.’”(註9)

Cruising Commoning

We want to look at cruising as a practice of decentralized collective creation. We see it as a practice that allows occupying and commoning specific spaces in the city. It is a mode of acting together without assimilating the subjective desires within the common act. We want to learn from cruising and use it as a tool to understand and critique commoning and its processes of identification and group formation within urban spaces.(註10)

Emerging out of the privatization of common goods, such as knowledge, land and water, language, and all kinds of collective products, the commons became a tool for thinking against privatization and in collectivity, commonly. Feminist discourse on commons expanded to all areas of social life, and to “the need for practices that create new communitarian models.”(註11) Silvia Federici connects the concept of the commons with a set of useful questions: “Are all these commons equivalent from the viewpoint of their political potential? Are they all compatible? And how can we ensure that they do not project a unity that remains to be constructed?”(註12) Following these questions, I would like to propose thinking of the commons or commoning together with cruising as a queer movement:(註13) cruising commoning aimlessly and following the course of social relations and encounters rather than defining and categorizing those relations. Queer cruising itself is already based on the idea of commonly produced spaces and times, and as a practice that negotiate rules instead of resting on preexisting sets of laws. Lauren Berlant describes queer life in general as “exhausting because you kind of have to make it up all the time. There are so few conventions to rest in or cruise in.”(註14) Accordingly, cruising requires constant effort to be not just a movement between fixed location but a movement in itself. In proposing cruising as a term, I don’t want to highlight cruising areas as ideal places, as these places can hold violence for gay cruis- ers. But they still allow for the earlier mentioned moments of what might be, which Muñoz describes in his book Cruising Utopia, moments of imagining and living a different life. In the context of commoning, these moments are often described as trying to capture ways of being together beyond capitalist and nationalist order systems. Although this longing is often directed toward the future, ways of being might be found in the present and past as well; they are lost or found in fugitivity.(註15) Muñoz says that queerness is not yet here, but that there is a potentiality, there are traces in the here and now. In this sense, commoning also comprises desires, fantasies, and belonging in opposition to the idea of identity as a stable condition.(註16)

I would like to develop queer cruising as a methodology that evolved out of queer histories and settings, out of their negotiations and involvements, desires, needs, wants, and fantasies. In these production of histories, relations, and being-together were made that concentrated more on the making of and the becoming than in concluding in a final version. But as there is no innocent term, it will never become one. Cruising needs to be continuously cruised to find its different meanings, uses, and ambivalences. What cruising learned as a queer practice is to wander the hidden places of transparent negotiations, where desires open common and conflictual spaces.

Following Gibson-Graham in their reference to the concept of being-in- common—“where subjects can understand one another but not necessarily have to be like each other”(註17)—Karin Schönpflug and Christine M. Klapeer point out that “‘queer commons’ means not only rejecting the individualized and abstract ownership of oneself (including gender identities), commodities and land, it also accepts that there is a general interrelatedness and connected-ness, a one-ness or a world’s ‘commons.’”(註18) This queer commons points to a conflictual space, where everything is effected and is effecting. Gibson- Graham are producing languages of economic diversity that “denaturalize capitalist dominance“ and are “opening the way to queering economic space.”(註19) To “queer the economy” means in their practice to “bring into visibility the great variety of noncapitalist practices that languish on the margins of economic representation.”(註20) In Antke Engel’s argumentation we could also understand commoning as fantasies of “togetherness and being-in-common defined by competition, conflict, and violence—fantasies of negotiating the precarious thresholds between power, abuse of power, and violence, and the complex overdetermination of structural and symbolic inequalities, and of transformative agency.”(註21) In this understanding of commoning, multiple layers of rule and power relations cross each other, and commoning is not just a space where differences do not mark conflicts, but a space where the negotiation of inequalities and agencies mark the utopian.

On Crossing

Lesvos is an island in the Aegean Sea. It is part of Greece, and one of the is- lands besides Samos and Chios that is nearest to the Turkish coast. A width of 5.5 kilometers marks the closest point. In 2015 Lesvos especially experienced a never before number of EU border crossings that continues in 2016. At the same time, the number of people drowning in the Aegean Sea while crossing this border has peaked. For sure, this border has become one of the most well-known in Europe in 2015, though it has been used for undocumented crossings for many years now. While the Aegean is still deadly for many, border crossing by sea allows for higher numbers than on land, as the borders are much less controllable by patrols. The violent push backs, the practice of forcing people to return to their origin of departure by border control and Frontex, decreased in the Aegean after the Greek government changed in early 2015,22 but has increased again since the beginning of 2016 and has been recently fully legalized. Since the beginning of April 2016, ferries deployed by the EU transport and push-back people from Greece to beyond the external EU border.

According to Dimitris Papadopoulos and Vassilis Tsianos, migration control is not just applied to geopolitics on the ground but it is also about speed and regulation. Border control “is not there to block migration; it tries to institutionalize it by controlling its speed and magnitude. Sovereignty is not about sovereign borders. Secure borders do not exist and cannot exist; sovereignty is the futile attempt to regulate the porosity of borders: this can be conceived of as porocracy.”(註23) The European borders were opened last summer by refugees and migrants.(註24) When Germany and Austria declared their borders open on September 4, 2016, this can be seen as an act of sovereignty to control a situation where governing was already in immense crisis. Still what happened was that around one million people entered Germany in 2015, and most were distributed to a prechosen destination. When migration control is about migratory movements and labor market control,(註25) we can see that Germany possesses an immense pool of highly qualified, easily accessible labor, both financially and geographically. How refugees and migrants will be filtered, who can stay and who cannot is connected to education, working abilities and professions, and so on. In addition, what becomes productive labor is the fact “that bodies can become mobile in the most averse circumstances.”(註26) Since migration is not simply a response to political and social necessity,(註27) but as a social movement it is also an important force under current political and social circumstances, Papadoupolous and Tsianos draw the figure of the “mobile commons.” These mobile commons exist as a shared and commonly produced space that gathers all the knowledge, tricks of survival, caring for each other and sociability. And these mobile commons are crucial to “survive the order of making these lives happen and for surviving the sovereignty and capitalist exploitation.”(註28) This common space that is after all not free of hierarchies as the authors point out, is continuously under threat. But these forms of being in relation that are not easily captured, not fixed, and too opaque to control, enable us to imagine another living together, to produce a being-in-common or commoning. If we understand migration not as an individual situation, but as collective and commoning practices that involve multiple actors and political situatednesses,(註29) we are able to think, recognize, and imagine multiple powerful forms of cruisings that are able to challenge those dominant forces. Still, “we cannot say what new structures will replace the ones we live with yet, because once we have torn shit down, we will inevitably see more and see differently and feel a new sense of wanting and being and becoming. What we want after ‘the break’ will be different from what we think we want before the break, and both are necessarily different from the desire that issues from being in the break.”(註30)

Cruising and Crossing

A queer methodology evolves out of queer theory that concentrates on the fluidity of relations and practices. A queer methodology has to react to the fact that there is no fixed position in the research and that data can’t be normalized. (註31) Queerness doesn’t have a linear form, it is not straight—neither its multiple histories nor the positions of things and subjectivities.(註32) Queer theory doesn’t mean to just focus on deviant positions, but to queer the normative and to dismantle the stability of the heteronormative order. Cruising points to the instability and fluidity of things and communities. It has the potentiality to conceive of the political in an alternative way; that is, in its organizational instability. “Let’s look at this ‘methodology’ then, this way of being in the world that has not yet fully manifested itself but that we know we want, that we yearn for. It’s just not going to say: Here I am. It is a constant act of creation, recreation, reflection, imagination, living in community, however we constitute that, possession, radical self-possession, radical collective self-possession.”(註33)

This concept of commoning is not built on identities but on ways of living together as continuously happening. Practices and examples are mediated from the past, happening in the present, and are imagined for the future. A politicized cruising is asking for an affective involvement with utopia. Following Muñoz, we have to cruise affective maps of the social, where we are able to feel hope and utopia. This affective perspective of a renewed and newly animated sense of the social produces a queer critique that concentrates at the varied potentialities possible.(註34) Resonating with Papadoupolous and Tsianos’s concept of the mobile commons, M. Jacqui Alexander claims that knowledge is evolving from the crossing, from crossing.(註35) Cruising and crossing are not just connected, but should be in complicity. This knowledge that evolves from all that is happening now and in future happenings has to be reflected in the way we think and live. Crossings are never undertaken all at once, and never once and for all.(註36) The crossings stand against the segregation of knowledge, “they disturb and reassemble the inherited divides of Sacred and secular, the embodied and disembodied,” and “summon subordinated knowledges that are produced in the context of the practices of marginalization in order that we might destabilize existing practices of knowing and thus cross the fictive boundaries of exclusion and marginalization.”(註37)

We are constantly building communities; we practice building them and will continue to do so. The struggle for wholeness, for finding ways of belonging to each other, is not about sameness. Colonialism was a project of separation, fragmentation, and dismemberment. Today these borders are not torn down—they are in addition to new ones that are being built. To intervene in the dominant order that structures our lives, we have to allow for ways that challenge systems of oppression that enable different knowledge, experiences, and agendas to enter our perceptions and our multiple world-makings. We have to cross because “no one comes to consciousness alone, in isolation, only for herself, or passively.”(註38)

Cruising Crossings, Crossing Cruisings

If I lost you on the way, I would be curious where and when we will meet again. If I lost the track, this might be what cruising is about: losing and finding. Writing and reading is a lot about cruising. And about crossing. I tried to meet you in the cruising and crossing around commoning, in thinking, writing, and doing with, against, and in opposition to you, the I, and the we. This is always conflictual. Commoning is the practice that evolves from being-in-common. Commoning hereby is a practice. It is not something that is just happening, but something that has to be done, that has to be constructed. Commoning doesn’t evolve out of passivity. Nevertheless, passivity could be commoning.

Commoning goes to all areas of life. It has a general understanding of connectedness. This connectedness is not about sameness but about relation. Cruising and crossing are relational methodologies, evolved as minoritarian practices that concentrate on the relationality of being. We meet now, here, and there, in the past, present, or future; time and space cross each other. This could be our first conflictual space of commoning.