Does the body matter? Determining the right to asylum and the corporeality of political communication

Abstract

Analyses of political agency often take the Habermasian notion of an ideal speech situation and its related discourse ethics as the ultimate model of politically relevant communication. Our examination of Finnish asylum officers’ perspectives on their work leads us to consider the asylum interview as an event of the political, an event of the body politic. Our interest lies in acts of communication that go beyond speech, which necessitates an engagement with the corporeal element of communication. Based on our data, we show how a focus on spoken communication alone fails to capture manifold ways in which the encounter between asylum officers and asylum applicant produces the political. We argue that taking corporeality seriously would enhance our understanding of what is at stake in this encounter and also beyond it.

Keywords

Asylum seekers communication corporeality political agency the body

Introduction

Theorizations about political agency in migrant struggles or within the field of new materialism are on the increase. Both approaches propose an understanding of politics that underscores the importance of the experiences and interactions of bodies, of the rational and affective, collective and individual, official or everyday elements in political agency (e.g. Ahmed, 2010; Coole, 2005; Grosz, 2010; Häkli and Kallio, 2014; Krause, 2011; McNevin, 2013; Moulin and Nyers, 2007; Nyers, 2008; Puumala, 2013; Puumala et al., 2011; Redclift, 2013; Squire and Darling, 2013). At specific points, these two literatures intersect, yet there are few attempts to think about the meaning of the corporeality of political agency in the context of migratory movements. Although it is not possible to fully bridge this gap in one article, we seek here to practice dialectical engagement with empiricism in the context of asylum interviews and theoretical debate on corporeality. First, we illustrate the need for an approach that takes account of the corporeal elements in communication and, second, introduce possible theoretical tools with which to interrogate its demands.

This article takes the first steps toward understanding the corporeal dynamics and ambivalence in a communication situation that rests upon a particular governmental logic so as to shed light on what corporeality, materiality and affectivity can do to the concept of political agency. We focus on how the theoretical framework that we put forward affects the understanding of what counts as a communication act and what constitutes a political act. More precisely, we will theorize neither communication nor politics as such. Rather, we point out the necessity to develop a material take on acts of communication by highlighting the need to consider how the body matters and how corporeality unfolds in highly institutionalized settings such as the asylum interview.

The asylum interview is conducted after a person lodges his or her application for international protection. On the one hand, these interviews rest on the assumption that politics is a condition that characterizes the interaction between the parties, as the applicant’s right to international protection and thus to asylum (denoting a political status that grants certain rights within a given community) are determined through the process. On the other, the setting is characterized by the assumption that language is the primary and objectively the most reliable avenue for communication, as it is usually considered as belonging to the field of rationality and logic (cf. Damasio, 2005 [1994]; Neocosmos, 2012). In this article, we claim that actually both of these assumptions are incorrect and that their concrete political implications are highly significant. Besides criticism, we present an alternative understanding about communication as an event of the body politic (Nancy, 2008) and illustrate how this takes shape in the ambivalent dynamics of asylum interviews with empirical examples drawn from asylum officers’ reflections on their work.

The notion of the body politic lays the normative ground for our present venture. In our conceptualization of the body politic, we rely on Jean-Luc Nancy’s thought. For him, the notion of the body politic implies a politics that begins and ends with the body (Nancy, 2008). This body is located in the ambivalent space between discourse and matter, being both inscribed with meanings and categorized through political practices, and exscribing itself out of those meanings. In Nancian philosophy, the body signals a realm that simultaneously calls to be written (upon), but always escapes and withdraws from this writing. Thus, in a sense we are engaging in a futile undertaking, yet we cannot do otherwise. Such is the dynamics of our existential responsibility toward one another that Nancy sketches (see e.g. Nancy, 2000, 2008). Hence, the philosophical ground on which the article is built turns the question of political agency into one of events of the political. An event represents the moment in which subjectivities come into presence with one another and in relation with one another. In other words, an event refers to existence taking place relationally, unfolding through the body.

For us, the political cannot be reduced to represent an extant condition that delineates the sphere where communication would automatically count as political. Rather, in Nancy’s thought the political represents an ontological condition that is shared by everybody. This sharedness – Nancy uses the French term partage to emphasize the simultaneous act of sharing and dividing – can no longer be seen solely as a question of politics but as the putting of an ideology into praxis. This notion represents the constant interplay between politics and the political as the essence of our existence. However, this is not to state that all acts would be political, but as Nancy describes it, his ontology of the political is ontology of the body and bodies. In Nancian thought, hence, the political takes shape and comes into presence through events. Not all acts are political but they bear the potential to become political. Whether an act – a gesture, a move or speech – becomes an event of the political depends on its reception; thus, Nancy (2000, 2008) puts forward an understanding of the political both as a deconstructive act and a phenomenological event (Watkin, 2009).

What makes our argument stand out among recent theorizations of political agency in the context of migration is that we highlight the role of the body, not the body of an asylum seeker (cf. McNevin, 2013; Redclift, 2013). Thus, we focus on the dynamic relationship that unfolds and evolves between bodies during the asylum interview. We begin by presenting our data collected among asylum officials that opens one venue to access their views on the role of different modes of communication in their interaction with asylum applicants. The officials occupy a crucial position as the interviews they conduct with asylum applicants constitute the main resource for determining the outcome of the applicant’s asylum claim. We then proceed by introducing the Habermasian concept of communicative acts and discourse ethics, as they illustrate the ethos of the knowledge base of asylum interviews. By building a dialogue between feminist advances in discourse ethics and the concrete challenges in asylum officers’ work, we seek to indicate the problems of remaining within the discursive realm. Finally, we discuss both the necessity and the possibility of engaging with corporeality and moving beyond speech to challenge the knowledge practices that are present in the asylum interview.

The theory and practice of asylum interviews as communicative acts

We illustrate our argument with data gathered through a qualitative web survey that was conducted with asylum administration officials from the Finnish Immigration Service in June–August 2011.¹ The link to the survey was sent out by email to all officers who at the time conducted asylum interviews in Finland (N = 52) and 52 percent of the officers filled and returned the questionnaire. The survey charted the interviewing officials’ perspectives on the interpersonal dynamics at work in the asylum interview, including their practices for eliciting knowledge as well as the criteria utilized in the evaluation of asylum accounts. It comprised 24 open questions. The data illustrate clearly the empirical and practical need to consider the role that corporeality plays in political communication. Drawing on the survey, we claim that the asylum interview exemplifies a case where the problems of the politics of asylum have turned into problems in the administration of asylum.

The function of the asylum interview is to determine whether the applicant has faced persecution in his or her country and whether he or she has a well-founded fear of it that prohibits return. During the interview, the applicant is expected to give credible evidence of this fear by describing her or his personal history. The interviewing officer then produces a written account of the applicant’s responses to the officer’s questions and of his or her free narration. This written record is examined and contrasted with other relevant and trustworthy information such as United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) guidelines, human rights reports and reports about the applicant’s country of origin. The credibility of the applicant’s story can also be tested with a language test, with which it is possible to determine whether the applicant’s accent matches the accent of the region from which he or she claims to come. It is also possible to perform other tests on the body, such as measuring the size of the applicant’s wrist to determine his or her age, as minors are rarely returned. This process through which it is eventually determined whether the applicant is entitled to receive a positive decision on asylum – or even a residence permit on any other ground – makes it clear that the applicant’s body plays a role as a source or information and as a piece of evidence (cf. Perera, 2006). That is, the applicant’s body is evaluated and subjected to medical tests and the information thus gathered is contrasted against his or her account in the actual asylum interview.

As stated, the empirical material informs our quest to develop an alternative theoretical understanding of body politics in the context of asylum interviews. Similar studies of the link between the institutional logic of the assessment of asylum applications and body politics do exist (see, for example, Abuya and Mukundi, 2006; Bögner et al., 2010; Bohmer and Shuman, 2007; Eades, 2009; Kelly, 1993; Shuman and Bohmer, 2004; Thomas, 2006; Wettergren and Wikström, 2014; Wikström, 2014). However, most of those studies either focus on the experiences of asylum seekers or rely on analyzing verdicts or adjudication procedures omitting the interpersonal and corporeal dimensions that nonetheless lie at the core of the evaluation process (but see Coutin, 2001; Granhag et al., 2005). Our aim is to underscore with the empirical material that the process of determining the right to asylum involves interactional and bodily elements that support the notion of politics happening between people, or the political becoming manifested in events. As a whole, the empirical material is used to develop an understanding of the ambiguity and openness – the eventness – of the evaluation criteria that are related to national body politics (cf. Nancy, 2000).

Before moving on to discuss the role of the body and the senses in asylum interviews, we will contextualize our argument and present the asylum interview as a communicative situation. To do that, we will commence with Habermasian discourse ethics and then explore feminist attempts to remedy some of its shortcomings. As our focus here is on the encounters between asylum officials and asylum seekers, we seek to take discourse ethics back to the agent-level discourses – defended in Habermas’ earlier work – from the anonymous institutional flow of communication (see Munro, 2007: 463–464). Throughout the discussion, we will illustrate what is omitted in both of the approaches and why an alternative frame of analysis and interpretation is necessary.

Habermasian discourse ethics: an institutional starting point

As stated above, the asylum interview emphasizes the role of language and speech in providing insight into the applicant’s situation and whether there is a well-founded fear of persecution arising from the applicant’s expressed experience. Thus, the situation arises from language which is deemed capable of providing access to and transmitting people’s ‘authentic’ experience. Perhaps the most familiar approach to this is Jürgen Habermas’ (1979, 1985) theory of discourse ethics. As the asylum interview is burdened with highly unequal power relations, the interview becomes conceivable in terms of strategic communication from the perspectives of both parties. The quest for authenticity must then be renounced, and the asylum interview is best understood as a speech situation where both communicating parties have a high level of interest in manipulating the situation. We are not suggesting that the asylum interview should – or even could – aim to fulfill the demands that Habermas set for an ideal speech situation, but we do claim that the logic upon which the interaction in the asylum interviews proceeds is based on the primacy of language. Furthermore, we argue that uncritical acceptance of that primacy is highly problematic on many counts. First, we sketch an overview of the Habermasian discourse ethics and its notion of ideal communication as well as the criteria according to which this ideal might be judged. Then, we turn to the views of the Finnish asylum officers and consider the empirical evidence in the light of the Habermasian position.

In Habermas’ theory of communicative action, the conversing parties are assumed to pursue the goal of reaching understanding in a cooperative way. Interaction is thus central in the creation of understanding, which can be estimated according to three validity claims. The first validity claim concerns the truth-value of the statement, meaning that the existential presuppositions of the propositional content mentioned must be satisfied. Second, the speech act must be valid with respect to the existing normative context or that the normative context is itself legitimate. Third, the manifest intention of the speaker must be meant as it is expressed. In the concept of communicative action, these validity claims are ascribed to the perspectives of the speakers and hearers themselves. The communicating parties seek consensus and measure the speech act against the notions of truth, rightness and sincerity. Habermasian discourse ethics explicitly excludes bodily expressions and nonverbalized actions and thus remains within the confines of the spoken word (Habermas, 1979: 1, 1996: 118). However, within this ethics it is recognized that in real life communication the validity criteria delineated above rarely hold true, as most speech situations contain some forms of incomprehension and misunderstanding, intentional and involuntary untruthfulness, discord and also pre-existing or achieved consensus (Habermas, 1996: 120).

In addition to truth, rightness and sincerity, in Habermasian thought, speech acts are evaluated in terms of the relationship between the act and the objective world, the social world and the subjective world. The notion of the objective world refers to the totality of entities about which true statements are possible. The social world, in turn, marks the totality of legitimately regulated interpersonal relations, while the subjective world denotes the totality of the experiences of the speaker to which one has privileged access. Let us now contextualize the theory by illustrating which characteristics of the Habermasian understanding of the nature and scope of communication can be detected from the actual practice of asylum interviews in Finland.

The way in which the asylum officer introduces the scope of the asylum interview to the applicant was found to be an aspect of crucial importance to the Finnish Immigration Service (personal communication, 19 May 2011). The interaction at the beginning of the interview was considered decisive in directing the communication in such a way that the information gathered during the interview would be adequate to determine whether the applicant suffered from well-founded fear of persecution. The practices with which the scope of the interview was set varied in the survey responses. It was common that the interviewing officers showed a preference for free flowing narration as opposed to structured questioning as an interview technique. The officers placed heavy emphasis on giving the applicant time and space to tell about his or her experience and personal history. Only at the end of the interview did the interviewers ask more specific questions. In other words, the officers had been trained to ‘embrace’ the applicant’s story and with this technique mediate the unequal power relations thus lifting pressure from the applicant. Yet, at the same time, they made the applicant responsible for voicing the right things. Many respondents emphasized the applicant’s active and important role and downplayed the element of power that constrains the interaction in the interview situation:

I highlight the significance of the applicant’s activity in terms of their narration. I also repeat many times that s/he can tell if s/he doesn’t know something or if s/he fails to understand either the question or the interpreter. I stress that now the person can tell at his/her own pace everything about the situation in the home country. (Emphasis added)

This vignette illustrates that the interviewing asylum officers adopt techniques that seek to empower the asylum applicant as the source of knowledge and as an active party in the interview process. Furthermore, the vignette suggests that the applicant does not have to know everything and that he or she can determine what counts as relevant in their personal story. There is, thus, a perceivable conceptual connection with the idea behind Habermasian discourse ethics, where the conversing parties cooperate to reach understanding. However, the guideline of ‘embracing the story’ does not fully describe how the interaction as strategic communication becomes the center of focus and power differentials start to play a role in the situation. The following two comments made by the asylum officers shed more light on the limitations placed on the applicant in terms of their ability to communicate and determine what becomes voiced during the interview and how:

I underline the impartiality of the interpreter, clarify quite specifically the course of the hearing and that there is no need to talk about the general situation of a country, but one’s personal experiences and that they can take their time to narrate, since we can continue another day, if time falls short. (Emphasis added)

I try to control those who open up extensively by saying that this is enough and advising them to concentrate on this or that. Sometimes I interrupt people who come from particular regions and whose narrative is very detailed, and tell that this is not relevant from the perspective of the hearing and I have even forbidden people to talk about things that clearly miss the focal point of the hearing. […] Overall it is important to create the kind of atmosphere in which the applicant understands right away that the officer is in charge of the situation. (Emphasis added)

The two comments illuminate the constant challenge and negotiation that takes place between the interviewing asylum officer and the asylum applicant. While the first quote presented highlights the importance of the asylum applicant adopting an active role, here in this second quote we begin to see that the agentive space and the narrative position that the applicant can take in practice is rather limited. When attention is paid to the complex dynamics of interaction that is at play in the asylum interview, we can better appreciate the significance of Habermas’ schematic distinction between strategic and communicative action (Habermas, 1979: 209–210, 1996: 130). Yet, it can be said that when communication is observed empirically the schema Habermas offers is far from being clear-cut. One reason for this ambiguity is that the purpose of the asylum interview is not to reach understanding but to collect information for decision-making.

The asylum interview resembles institutionally bound communicative action (see Habermas, 1979: 38–40) in that the asylum officer is there to help the asylum seeker to formulate a truthful yet concise story where the elements which will lead to the granting or with-holding of asylum can be discerned clearly. However, the communicative action remains open until the moment when the final evaluation of the applicant’s story is made. This evaluation is performed by the asylum officer against the documentary evidence that was described at the beginning of this section. At this point, it is not possible for the asylum applicant to affect the decision-making. From the interviewing officer’s viewpoint, the process starts to resemble strategic action as imageries concerning certain countries of origin, consideration of potential ‘stock stories’ that could easily be described as (systematically) distorted communication (e.g. Habermas, 1996: 166), and other intervening issues come into play. What makes this interesting is that the process of evaluation and the determination of the claim’s credibility tend to rely on principles similar to those which characterize Habermasian discourse ethics and against the three worlds Habermas has determined relevant in the evaluation of speech acts.

There are, then, multiple points of connection between the principles of Habermasian discourse ethics and the practice of asylum interviews. However, when considering the dynamics of communication, the analytical framework that Habermasian thought provides falls inevitably short. The following two vignettes provide examples of the kinds of difficulties that cannot be addressed through the theory of communicative action, yet the situations they refer to are politically extremely significant as communicative acts in the context of asylum interviews:

Gesture and body language may reveal if a question makes the applicant uncomfortable. Depending on the situation, one can try to clarify what is going on, or if the question was related to a traumatic experience, maybe a change of perspective is in order. Emotional states can strengthen the credibility of the applicant’s account or then not. Often people cry at the interview; often genuinely, sometimes less so. If the applicant seems aggressive, the interviewer must be especially careful. If one notices from the body language that the situation is getting tense, it is worth taking a break and perhaps altering one’s approach.

If the applicant does not want to talk or reply, or if for example despite continuous advice interrupts the interpreter […], or if I’ve advised that s/he should tell about personal experiences, not about the overall situation in the country, but the applicant continues to refer to others instead of him/herself, my frustration shows. Then the questions become more poignant, so the applicants have to reply to what I asked. (Emphasis added)

The first quote illustrates that the applicant’s cultural background, level of education, gender and personality are not irrelevant to the interaction during the asylum interview. The applicant’s body is used as evidence and as a point of reflection for the interpretations that the officer makes of the account. What is even more significant is the way in which the second vignette points toward an understanding that the emotional reactions of the interviewing officer take a corporeal and gestural shape. Thus, they become perceivable to the applicant and begin to play a role in how the asylum interview unfolds. This action under consideration contrasts significantly with Habermasian understanding of discourse ethics, according to which the process of reaching understanding takes place against the background of a culturally embedded pre-understanding. In the Habermasian framework, the background knowledge remains unproblematic as a whole and gains a role as only one part of the stock of knowledge that participants make use of and thematize (Habermas, 1985: 99–100).

Feminist discourse ethics: understanding the exclusivity of speech

With regard to the sphere of the nation-state, there is a political dilemma that emerges from the gap that we addressed at the end of the previous section. That dilemma concerns the exclusion of asylum seekers who are affected by the consequences of the norms of membership, but who have no say in the articulation of the criteria of exclusion (Benhabib, 2004: 15, 112; also Munro, 2007: 458). The claim is related to the ultimate scope of the asylum interview from the point of view of the state, namely that the political scope of the interview is to define those people who can be allowed access to the national space. There is a prominent literature of feminist discourse ethics that has sought to remedy the gap in Habermasian discourse ethics, yet this literature remains to a large extent silent on the problem which we have identified. However, there is an interconnection between the feminist advances and our approach. We therefore deem it necessary to briefly address the question of feminist discourse ethics.

Feminist and postcolonial scholars, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) perhaps most persistently, have for long explored the kinds of hierarchies that are at play in both representation and interaction. They have argued in favor of ‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway, 1988) and moves toward ‘decolonizing theory’ (Mohanty, 2003), and thus underlined the role that power plays in communication. Furthermore, feminist theorists have pointed out that there exists a whole set of layered difficulties in using Habermasian discourse ethics as a normative basis on which dialogue should be built (e.g. Hutchings, 2005: 155). In the light of this literature, Habermasian discourse ethics is revealed as one-sided and exclusive with its claims of a foundational ground and teleological end characterizing an ideal speech situation.

We will start with the work of Seyla Benhabib, who is among the most prominent feminist scholars who have engaged extensively with Habermasian thought. Benhabib (2004: 35) has also explicitly pointed out how sovereign states manipulate the principle of nonrefoulement, central to the international human rights instruments, specifically the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, by defining life and freedom narrowly in order to fit their purposes. Her critique remains at the macro-level but presents clearly the politics at play in the field of international protection regimes. Of this, asylum is one example. Benhabib (1992) introduced the concept of the ‘concrete other’ to go alongside Habermas’ idea of the ‘generalized other’ so as to better understand dialogic encounters. Although her focus is on the dialogic nature of the encounter between both ‘others’, her approach still remains within the linguistic and verbal realms. Furthermore, the changes that Benhabib suggests can be criticized for a tendency to assimilate difference into sameness (see Hutchings, 2005; McNay, 2003; Young, 1997). Indeed, as Kimberly Hutchings (2005: 162) argues, in sympathizing with Habermas’ discourse ethics one also accepts an account of collective moral learning that considers modernist liberal societies as the source of moral authority. This stance, again, represents one liberal universalism, which already knows its moral superiority before any dialogue has taken place. Yet, according to the principle of discourse ethics, all those affected by a norm should be involved in its discursive validation in an inclusive dialogue (e.g. Benhabib, 1992: 36–38; cf. Hutchings, 2005: 159).

In the light of the above, it can be claimed that feminist and Habermasian versions of discourse ethics as well as the politico-institutional setting of the asylum interview rely on individualistic ontology. They arise from the notion of people being autonomous agents ‘free’ to participate in open dialogue (see Robinson, 2011: 847). Dialogue becomes open once the barriers limiting interaction have been removed. It is implicitly assumed that the interacting parties understand and are able to practice effective communication and know how to listen to one another (Robinson, 2011: 847). However, this is not the case with asylum interviews.

Even when the interviewing officer seeks to include the applicant in the interaction at the beginning of the hearing by introducing its scope and highlighting the applicant’s significant role in interaction, the communication between the parties remains restricted in several ways. For instance, the division of responsibilities between the parties and the ultimate scope of the interview are exclusive by nature, no matter how the interview situation is framed. The applicant’s perspective may very well remain incredible and incomprehensible to the interviewing officer, which suggests that the idea of the reversibility of perspective does not materialize in practice (cf. McNay, 2008; Young, 1997: 41). Yet, the relation between the participants is not static but dynamic, although unequal (see also Hutchings, 2005: 163). Perhaps the apparent and stark inequality of power is one reason why the literature on asylum interviews perhaps too hastily assumes communication to be related to the discursive realm and therefore it omits the role of nonverbal communication and the gestural politics of the body (e.g. Bohmer and Shuman, 2007; Shuman and Bohmer, 2004; cf. Kynsilehto and Puumala, 2013).

By engaging with Habermasian and feminist discourse ethics, we have argued that the exclusiveness of speech in the context of asylum interviews arises from a set of background norms and assumptions. There is an underlying ontological background that precedes the interaction and that is based on the notion of sovereign subject and his or her autonomous and free agency (cf. Frost, 2010; Grosz, 2010). The ontological backdrop is further connected with the international governance of asylum and the political organization of the world into a system of sovereign states (cf. Puumala, 2013; Robinson, 2011: 859). Indeed, the discussions on both ‘having a voice’ or ‘speaking’, ‘listening’ and ‘being heard’ in politics often implicitly assume that we know how to do this, and that we are also inclined to listen to the voices of others (cf. Epstein, 2011; Maggio, 2007; Spivak, 1988; see also Spivak, 1998). Our empirical evidence from asylum interviews does not support the idea that language provides a primary or most reliable avenue to people’s experience. Thus, it becomes crucial that attention is paid to the corporeal element of political communication.

A focus on the bodily and the evented nature of political expression relies on the understanding that communication is always a creative process. The message is ultimately formed between the speaker and the listener, through the act or event and in its reception. Next, we will present an alternative conceptual framework for discussing the moved body and the way in which its movement and acts create movement in other bodies. We further aim to illustrate through empirical examples the political potential that the body bears and also the necessity of starting to think about the corporeality of (political) communication.

Acting out the political: the body matters

In a single article, it is not possible to provide a comprehensive account of corporeal acts, gestures and outbursts as politically relevant forms of communication. However, we will present both the potential and necessity of such a move. The key argument of the article, therefore, is that the idea of intersubjectivity should be disconnected from the verbal realm and instead attention be paid to the events through which people’s being-with-others becomes manifested (cf. Nancy, 2000). The move suggests that attention be paid also to the body and the political that emanates through and from that body. Indeed, for Nancy, our bodies and embodiedness represent the core of our being. It is from this understanding that the demand to think the body – not about the body – arises. Before moving on to discuss the conceptual implications of the tweak that the article performs, we ground the necessity of performing that tweak with our empirical material.

The two perspectives that come physically together in the asylum interview, in the construction of an ‘asylum narrative’ (Shuman and Bohmer, 2004), are not always compatible and can in fact have a rather ambiguous relation to one another (cf. Foucault, 1980: 82). This raises severe limitations to the Habermasian idea of the reversibility of perspective through communicative action. Thus, knowledge – in the form of decision about the applicant’s right to asylum – is not objective but instead, produced in the event of the asylum hearing and largely based on the officer’s intuition and personal evaluation of the credibility of the account and the applicant’s behavior. As one respondent pointed out, the process of decision-making is only ‘seemingly neutral’. Communication, in the context of asylum interviews, is inherently corporeal and intertwined with subjective interpretation:

It is difficult to interpret body language, so it does not affect greatly the course of the interview. Emotional states might make it necessary to take an extra break. …

Naturally the applicant’s fear or aggression affects the atmosphere of the interview. … If the applicant’s body language shows disrespect or contempt, I’ll use body language that shows that I’m in an authoritative position. Usually that is enough to settle the situation.

I’m unhappy and discontented if the applicant avoids answering my questions. If the applicant clearly has no fear of persecution, the interview seems to be waste of time. If cooperation is smooth, I’m friendlier and make more eye contact. If I am unhappy with the applicant’s unwillingness to cooperate I might for instance not smile and avoid eye contact with them.

The excerpts above illustrate some of the diversity in reading applicants’ corporeal presence. For the first respondent, the difficulty in interpreting body language – that is not the insignificance of the corporeal as such – orders it to be left without notice, focusing solely on verbal interaction. The second respondent describes how he or she attempts to bring the applicant back to the level of communication that is sought by interpreting and resorting to the use of body language, whereas the third acknowledges how the applicant’s behavior affects the dynamics of the interview as a whole and is reflected back through the officer’s body language and gestures. These three examples were by no means the only ones in which it was acknowledged that the body and the interpretations of the communicating parties of one another’s bodies play a role in the interview. In fact, almost all interviewing officers reported having trouble and struggling with how precisely to interpret the applicant’s behavior and what to make of corporeal interaction in the interview.

The asylum officers’ responses highlight that the process of knowledge formation takes place during the asylum interview between the two parties, and that the process is also based on the officer’s personal estimation of the applicant’s behavior, gestures and appearance. Furthermore, the responses underline the fact that communication between the participants is not transparent. Thus, it is necessary to address both spoken and embodied or imaginatively gestured messages as an inevitable precondition for speaking to and being heard by the other (see also Spivak, 1998: 824). Communication and interaction are deeply relational practices in the course of asylum interviews and as such they cannot be determined either beforehand or by focusing solely on the spoken word. However, there seems to be an immense gap between the interviewing officer’s acknowledgement of the effects and meanings of corporeal communication in the interview itself, and their refusal to acknowledge that anything else than the spoken word could count as a source of knowledge:

I never use the kind of knowledge that has not been transmitted through speech. (Authors’ emphasis)

(Emotional outbursts and body language) affect in the background, cannot be written down in the decision as such. (Authors’ emphasis)

As a part of the general estimation of the applicant’s credibility these matter. E.g. usually men, when crying, cover their faces and look at the table, but if the applicant cries with their head held high, and also in other respects the narrative is weak, then this adds to suspicion. Also tears and crying in so called right spots are not credible. Often in true stories tears are shed in the context of subsidiary questions, when the pain is to some degree released. (Authors’ emphasis)

How do you estimate somebody’s body language during the interview? I will not do that. Crying, yelling and those kind of emotions can add to the credibility of the story. Unwillingness to answer a question also, although there can be a variety of reasons for that (the applicant does not know, does not want to make up more lies; the applicant is afraid to tell, because they are ashamed etc.). (Authors’ emphasis)

Even though the first respondent denies the role of body language completely in the evaluation of the asylum application, the three following vignettes begin to illustrate that the matter is much more ambiguous. The responses make evident the fact that the applicant’s body is used as a means of acquiring information during the asylum interview and, when combined with the previous responses from the officers, it is clear that also the officers’ bodily reactions and gestures serve as a point of reflection. In accordance with the asylum officers’ answers, the body constitutes a central hermeneutical element in the course of the asylum interview. Nevertheless, the institutional logic on which the whole process has been established does not recognize this. Instead, it demands that in the name of objectivity and transparency the meaning of the body in knowledge production and as an arena of political expression is omitted. On the one hand, this signals a return to the realm of discourse ethics, and on the other, it only reifies the exclusive communication relationship in which one party has the upper hand morally and the other is required to translate their views into language that fits the prevalent discursive paradigm.

Moreover, the officers’ differing methods of detecting the applicant’s behavior illustrate well that in the context of asylum hearings, it is crucial to pay attention to power and hierarchy that are inevitably present in this form of communication (cf. Robinson, 2011: 846). The officer’s estimation of the applicant’s gestures and emotional expressions is a part of the interaction between the parties, which makes it meaningful to explore the political being expressed through the body and gestures as acts and events of the political that might not fall into the sphere of rational, reflective agency and intention (see also Neocosmos, 2012: 541–542). It cannot be denied that to some extent gestures and body language are not only ambivalent, culturally relative and gender dependent, but also impossible to know in advance as they always take place and are acted out in relation to others (cf. McNay, 2008: 279). Hence, their meaning is dependent on how others receive the act and respond to it. Such are the dynamics that constitutes the events of the political in the context of asylum interviews. Despite the difficulty of using both body language and the senses as sources of knowledge and conceptualizing them as relevant aspects of political communication, it becomes obvious from the officers’ answers that they do give direction to the nature of interaction in asylum interviews.

Thus, the necessity for thinking about the corporeality of political communication and of moving beyond speech seems evident when one looks at the empirical evidence. Yet, the asylum interviews build upon a logic that arises from an idea of totality (in this context the nation and the state) within which political life takes place and political communication occurs (also Neocosmos, 2012: 541). A central problem thus emerges: how does the body communicate itself as a (political) body? How are we to think and make sense of the body, if the body is ultimately formed only when it comes together with other bodies? If, then, we take Nancy (2008: 17–21, 113) to be correct with his claim that the body cannot be known or written, as it always withdraws from all attempts at so doing, are we not therefore facing an impossible task? Despite the impossibility of ever being able to know and signify the body completely, Nancian thought regards that it is our ethical, or perhaps more accurately, existential responsibility to try to think about the body, or the bodies multiple (see also Berard, 2006: 253; Connolly, 2010: 187–190). Emotions and bodily reactions emerge through practice, which includes the power dynamics between the parties, but which nevertheless deviates from stable power relations. Body politic, in this context, refers to which one of the possible responses becomes enacted and how that enactment shapes the interaction between the parties.

The vignettes we have considered in this article illustrate that notions such as ‘well-founded fear’ (central in determining one’s right to asylum) or ‘power’ are not unambiguous facts, but negotiable designators during the asylum interview (see also Berard, 2006: 237; Connolly, 2010: 182–183; Kynsilehto and Puumala, 2013). To say that it is necessary to move beyond speech in asylum interviews is not to say that language should be omitted or it should be distrusted completely. It is to say that far more attention should be paid to the multiple and ambiguous ways in which political existence and corporeal communication affect the ways in which individuals can be identified as asylum seekers and affect our understanding of the officer’s body as a significant arena of communication, as well. Otherwise, there is a risk that we assume an underlying agreement about which experiences are relevant and which terms, gestures and emotions are appropriate to express people’s histories and relations in the context of asylum seeking (cf. Berard, 2006: 245).

The suggested tweak places emphasis on events and acts of political agency and communication. It comes close to discussions that focus on phenomenologies of political agency and acts (also Coole, 2005; Häkli and Kallio, 2014; McNay, 2008; cf. Watkin, 2009). Moreover, it dissolves the notion of a strong, sovereign subject and calls for an understanding of the sharedness of our being, or, in Nancian terms, thinking of existence as being-with-others. Communication, in this frame, is neither objective nor subjective, but relational. It takes place within relations between two or more people, and in this sense, there is no shared understanding beforehand on which to rely. The scope of the asylum interview changes from whether the applicant has faced persecution and suffers from well-founded fear, to how persecution and well-founded fear are or should be acted out during the interview. The question focuses on sense-making both during and after the asylum interview, instead of neutral and objective description of the real world nature of the applicant’s background and experiences.

In conclusion

The asylum interview represents a complex setting of political communication. The overall setting of the interview leans heavily on language as an unbiased and most reliable medium leading to knowledge. An examination of the asylum officers’ perspectives on the interactional dynamics, however, illustrates that in the course of the interview the body, whether the officer’s or the applicant’s, functions in many ways as a complementary, indeed an alternative arena of political expression. With regard to the applicant, the body and its gestural politics can even surpass speech, if the two are seen by the interviewing officer to be in contradiction with one another. Yet, in deciding upon the applicant’s right to asylum the body is cast aside and verbal communication between the parties is given priority, at least in terms of the argument. Our dialectical engagement both with discursive ethics and the asylum officers’ views on the interviewing and evaluation processes suggests that the asylum interview is a setting where it is paramount to move beyond speech and think about the corporeality of political communication.

The experiences of asylum officers, in particular their uncertainties and personal reflection on the practices of interviewing, clearly show that the kind of national body politics is not a solid entity that is put to practice in determining one’s right to asylum. Rather, the evaluation of credibility and plausibility is always dependent on negotiation that takes place during the asylum interview – and that negotiation is not exclusively based on reason, logic and narrativity, but it is also corporeal, bodily and emotional (cf. Damasio, 2000, 2005). In terms of theory-development, the construction and representation of an asylum narrative concerns the questions of body politics and also sovereignty. This is so because our empirical material sheds light into the taking place – happening – of an identity that is (re)constituted among others, rather than being a quality of a sovereign subject with a certain political status in reference to the state. Instead, the continuous flow of reflection that asylum officers have to carry out illustrates that we are something or someone only as we appear to others and as others receive that act or event of appearance. Our empirical findings underscore that the body demands to be thought of as an essential dimension of interaction. We need to scrutinize further how thinking about the body as capable of politics – political agency – changes as a result of taking our corporeality into account when thinking about reason and consciousness.²

A careful and detailed analysis of the dynamics of asylum interviews would be useful in gaining a fuller understanding of the ways in which vulnerability, inequality, dominance and resistance unfold in interaction, between people. Furthermore, it would enable an exploration of the conceptual and philosophical challenges that the body and senses bring to bear to extant notions of the political and acts that constitute or express political existence. A focus on the corporeal also restores agency to the asylum applicants, whose role is often reduced to dependency, helplessness and haplessness when they cannot adequately access the realm of speech and verbal representation. At the same time, this focus warns against using the asylum applicant’s body as a piece of evidence in its own right in the decision-making process. Instead, the interactional dynamics that unfold between bodies need to be explored in all their complexity. The conceptual tweak lies in understanding that the political is an element in the act of communication itself, whether that act was verbal or corporeal, not an extant condition within which communication would be automatically deemed political.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this article have been presented at the conference of European Consortium for Politics and Gender, March 2013, and at the Research Collegium at the University of Tampere. We would like to thank the participants in both occasions for valuable feedback on our work. We are especially grateful to Risto Heiskala and Janne Seppänen for their insightful remarks.

Funding

This research has been funded by the Academy of Finland (SA 266009).

Notes

Biographical notes

Eeva Puumala is a Postdoctoral Researcher of the Academy of Finland and a member of the research group on Corporeality, Movement, and Politics (COMPORE), at the University of Tampere. Her research interests include Nancian philosophy and the body in politics, human mobility, and political agency in terms of acts and events. Her work has appeared in Body & Society, International Political Sociology, Review of International Studies, and International Studies Perspectives.

Anitta Kynsilehto works as Senior Researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden, and is a member of the research group COMPORE. Her research focuses on human mobility, with an ongoing project focusing on corporeal forms of resistance and relational knowledge formation. She has published in Environment and Planning A, Body & Society, and International Studies Perspectives.

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