Pavel Doboš

The paper analyses popular geographical imageries of the European migrant crisis. It focuses on visualities that shaped discussions about the event among Czech Facebook users with anti-immigration attitudes. The paper elaborates on the co-production of migrants' visibility and visualities that depict them in certain ways. Visuality influences visibility and shapes what it means for people (who are represented by images) to be visible in certain ways when seen by another people (who observe and consume the images). Here, we analyse how cartographic visualizations and the practice of montage of images produce meanings and affects that make migrants either visible only as abusers of the Czech social welfare system (linking migrants in a racist way to the Roma minority) or visible only as dehumanized raging Muslim invaders that resemble more machine-like beings. These interpretations are explained with references to historical specificities of the Czech context. A user-made, film-like sci-fi video of the crisis is also analysed carefully to demonstrate its imaginary of a collapsing Western Europe, where raging invaders dominate. Presenting migrants' visuality as invaders links these racist and Islamophobic attitudes to migrants' visibility as enemies and targets to be killed, not pitiable human beings to be helped.

The paper focuses on Facebook's shaping of communication regarding the European migrant crisis in the Czech Republic. Topological spaces in communication with entanglements of inclusion and exclusion were produced by practicing the communication, with the mutual influence of two kinds of the collective unconscious, the technological and the Orientalist unconscious. The paper is based on a participant observation of Czech-language Facebook groups and pages where discussions about the European migrant crisis proliferated. Due to the technological unconscious, algorithm-induced "filter-bubbles" helped to separate discussions of different opinions about migration so people with anti-immigration attitudes could be building European free-thinking people identities who distrust mainstream media, and people with pro-migration attitudes were excluded and considered trustful "sheeple". Due to the Orientalist unconscious, European free-thinking people identities were strengthened by the sharing of ideas about uncivilized, irrational, and barbaric imaginative spaces of migrants' origin, which were entirely Other to Europe.

The paper analyses communication about the European migrant crisis in East-Central Europe, particularly in the Czech Republic, as it was happening on the Facebook platform. In discussions amongst Czechs, the collective Orientalist unconscious shapes what imaginative geographies are communicated, and how. The paper argues for a coupling of the critique of Orientalist imaginative geographies and Deleuzean critique of the pointillistic chronological time. Both, imaginative geographies and the chronological time, acknowledge difference only as the difference from the Same. In the analysed communication, imaginative geographies draw on several notions of temporality that depend on the chronological time. These are the single timeline of progress, tunnels of time, movement towards apocalypse, and repetition of the past. They transform African and Middle-Eastern imaginative geographies and understandings of people migrating from these spaces. They also compose an imaginative geography of Western Europe which collapses under the surge of migrants. It provokes an irreconcilableness between the anti-immigration and pro-migration attitudes of discussants as it leads to emplacing the other attitudinal side in the past time. Therefore, the paper calls for an ethics of the event and the need to acknowledge the heterogeneity of diverse temporalities and accidentality of a present event.

The point of departure of the article is distant suffering studies. The article tries to supplement them by theses from post-colonial and critical spatial theories that were elaborated in post-colonial geography. Through post-colonial imaginative geographies, the spatial context shapesWestern television performances of wartime suffering. This is demonstrated by empirical examples of mediation of wars in Mali, Palestine and Syria, from the news of Czech Television. In the Malian case, the space is homogenized as a violent African space, where suffering is moral. In the Palestinian case, the space is divided into rational Israeli and barbaric Palestinian space, where Palestinians’ suffering is neglected, if Israel stays evidently rational. In the Syrian case, the suffering is accented, however, only if Syrians seem to want to de-Orientalize themselves. These cases demonstrate that there is always a need to be spatially sensitive in respect to mediated distant suffering from post-colonial regions.

The paper builds upon distant suffering studies and the ‘analytics
of mediation’. It observes how television performances of suffering expose spectators to dispositions to feel, think and act towards
each instance of suffering. It analyses the news coverage of civilians’ suffering in the Syrian Civil War that was presented by Czech public television broadcaster. The interpretation of imaginative geographies expands the analysis because of the need for more spatially sensitive approaches to distant suffering. Imaginative geographies coproduce diverse spacetimes and distant suffering studies often overlook how
media performances are shaped according to spacetimes where suffering occurs. Two spacetimes are contrasted here; the Syrian Civil War before and after the Islamic State gained prominence in it. In both cases, the aim is to interpret in what ways the distance is translated into difference through imaginative geographies and how it shapes television performances of suffering. The analysis shows that Orientalist imaginative geographies appear in both cases. However, while in the first case imaginative geographies empower pity and dispositions to act towards suffering, in the second case they do not. It is because of the difference between Bashar al-Assad as a local Oriental persecutor and the Islamic State as the global threat.

This article provides an outline of imaginative geographies of Sub-Saharan Africa that can be found in Czech society. It is based on a qualitative analysis of interviews with Czech men and women regarding the respondents’ ideas about Africa and its inhabitants. Edward Said’s imaginative geographies are used as the key analytical concept – these are ideological images and visions of distant places emphasizing mainly their otherness. The aim is to analyze the ideas of Sub-Saharan Africa and to critically interpret discourses of otherness of the region and its inhabitants. For this purpose, not only postcolonial critique of imaginative geographies is used, but also Marxist critique of neoliberalism because this theoretical approach is an added value of the analysis. The analysis itself reveals that for the otherness of Sub-Saharan Africa some discourses are crucial: those of savagery, poverty, passivity of people and unwillingness to work and especially conservation of Africa in the past times, which has a special impact on perception of humanitarianism and economic neo-colonialism.

Protiromské demonstrace v Duchcově, Českých Budějovicích, Ostravě a dalších městech znovu poukázaly na problematiku soužití české většinové společnosti a romské menšiny. Problematiku, která možná není zcela důsledně řešena, ale také problematiku, která vynáší do centra diskuzí otázku, jak silně je, nebo není u české většinové společnosti zakořeněn rasismus. Otázka nabrala na důrazu zejména díky faktu, že protiromské demonstrace v roce 2013 nebyly jen iniciativou skupin pokládaných za pravicově extremistické, ale i skupin, u nichž tento extremismus není obvykle předpokládán. Situaci následně ještě více zkomplikoval jev, který začal některé protiromské demonstrace doprovázet, tedy proti demonstracím namířené protiakce vyjadřující podporu soužití majority s minoritou.

The dissertation deals with the topic of the communication about the issue of so-called European migrant crisis in the virtual space of social network. The dissertation locates its paradigmatic basis in poststructuralist geography – especially in the form that is advanced by British geographer Marcus Doel who is inspired by philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. According to them, our world is instable, unsettled and becoming multiplicity that continually takes place in the immanence of life where various practices unceasingly happen. However, the becoming of this plane of immanence/consistency is stabilized and segmented by transcendent forces that create a transcendent plane of organisation and often draw on people’s collective unconscious. The aim of this thesis is to map the working of three forms of collective unconscious that shape communicative practices concerning migrants and the migrant crisis in five different groups and pages of social network Facebook. These three are technological, orientalist and optical unconscious. The technological unconscious operates primarily through indiscernible activity of software and algorithm which are typical for the present age of media digitalization and datafication. This activity limits communicative practices into a continual reproduction of media content that is shared and appraised the most. Hence, it often closes possibilities of alternative communicative practices about the topic of the migrant crisis. The orientalist unconscious manifests primarily in the form of stereotypical essentialization of people into opposites of “us” and “them”. Simultaneously, migrants as members of African and Islamic civilizations are supposed to be firmly structured by their savagery and Islamic religion and that is why they are expected to lead a war invasion into Europe. In the Western Europe, this invasion seems to be successful, so countries of the Visegrád Group happen to be last islands that defend true European values. In the case of the optical unconscious, firstly, we can notice how visual map imagination supports the discourses of the invasion because this visual imagination enables us to imagine the world from above as the surface on a map. Secondly, we can notice the importance of the montage technique in the modern optical unconscious because this technique is able to put together differently affectively charged frames and, hence, to produce affects of fear of migrants, for instance. Thirdly, the visibility is inseparably linked to the truthfulness and the authentication of the real so diverse visual materials have the ability to produce truth-effects about violent and bloodthirsty migrants.