What we might call "Schengen" is a phantom, it's not so much about what's really in the databases, but first of all about what we think MIGHT be in. That's then also a point in the shift from the disciplinary society to what Deleuze called the society of control: you would no longer move step by step from one separated milieu to another one, but you would never finish anything : you never finish your education - continous education; work more and more gets mixed with leisure time, you have to be available 24-7, a flexible subject for flexible production. Within such a model the control is put in the subject itself: You integrate the control mechanisms. You THINK you're in some Schengen-database and so you won't even try to protest at some summit. So the repression doesn't only work with the real data, but more and more it's about your interpretations: it is inscribed into the subject. In many of the interviews people were talking about the impact of the transformation of space on a very bodily level, how much they could actually feel it.
In the end the power structure goes through the body itself.
When we watch a video about the shots in Göteborg, with the bleeding
Hannes Westerberg, we see only the most obvious image of how the repression
goes through a human body and disintegrates it, fragments it. What we
could draw as abstract diagrams of power and struggle violently materializes
there. The contradictions of the structure and the struggles against it
are denied on the surface and put into the subject: so that you think
the problem is within yourself and not a structural problem of capitalist
society.
So we can see "Schengen" as a gigantic phantom that is placed
right into our bodies. And this is a very violent and frightening operation.
