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This article studies the military-industrial-surveillance complex at Europe's borders as a machine that functions alongside and in response to the so-called refugee crisis, but that in itself is not in crisis at all. Following philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato's definition of machinic systems, I conceptualize the machine as anapparatus that does not depend on techne perse, but as aseries of intertwined discursive/semiotic as well as non-discursive/material elements. When viewed through the lens of machine theory, the reduction of refugees to calculable formula and neatly arranged data packets cannot be seen as an isolated, purely discursive matter. It is part of a large machinic assemblage in which economic, judicial, social and technological components work together, producing material, immobilizing, de-subjectifying, as well as oftentimes lethal consequences for the human beings involved. Only after carefully studying the workings of this refugee machine, I argue, will it become possible to uncover possible modes of resistance against this controlling and objectifying system. In order to analyse the military-industrial-surveillance complex at Europe's borders as a machinic system, I turn to two art-house documentary films which do exactly that. Nathalie Loubeyre's Flow Mechanics (2016) and Morgan Knibbe's Those Who Feel the Fire Burning(2014) will be read as forms of machine analysis that are very much in line with Lazzarato's machine theory, as they map intertwining parts of a large refugee-controlling system at work in Southern European countries.

Intro -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- Notes on Contributors -- List of Figures -- Introduction: From Crisis to Critique -- Crisis and Critique/Crisis As Critique -- Crisis and the Mediterranean -- The Contributions -- Works Cited -- Part I: Critique and Crisis of Representation -- Dwelling in Noncrisis (Im)possibility: Transmigrant Collective Action in Greece, 2016 -- Works Cited -- In the Refugee Machine: The Absence of Crisis and Its Critical (Re-)Production -- Signs and Machines -- Images of Subjection -- Bodies to Bits: Machinic Enslavement -- Crisis Against the Machine -- Conclusion -- Works Cited -- In Precarity and Prosperity: Refugee Art Going Beyond the Performance of Crisis -- The Art of Suffering or the Refugee Horror Show -- Nela Milic's Wedding Bellas -- Conclusion -- Works Cited -- Crisis, Common Sense, and Boredom: A Critique of Neoliberal Hegemony in Turkey -- Crisis and Kulturkampf -- Many Senses of Boredom -- Crisis: Boredom as Common Sense -- Critique: Boredom as Good Sense -- Conclusion: The Task of the Critic -- Works Cited -- Cultural Narratives of Crisis and Populism in Spain: Metaphor, Nation-branding, and Social Change -- Introduction: Why a Cultural Constructivist Approach -- Populism, the Global-Nation and Cenital: The Spanish Case -- The White Paper on the Future of Europe and the Way Forward? -- An Alternative? Problematizing Metaphors and Cultural Narratives -- Works Cited -- Part II: Intersecting Crises -- Palestine and the Migrant Question -- Crisis or Question? -- Sans papiers -- Displacements -- Indigène, Refugee, Migrant -- The North in the South -- Are Palestinian Refugees Migrants? -- Works Cited -- Lampedusa in Europe -- Or Touching Tales of Vulnerability -- The Fisherman and His Catch -- The Debt Collector and Her Dream -- Intersecting Narratives, Touching Tales -- Conclusion -- Works Cited.

1. Introduction -- 2. Dwelling in Noncrisis (Im)possibility: Transmigrant Collective Action in Greece, 2016 -- 3. In the Refugee Machine: The Absence of Crisis and its Critical (Re-)Production -- 4. In Precarity and Prosperity: Refugee Art Going Beyond the Performance of Crisis -- 5. Crisis, Common Sense, and Boredom: A Critique of Neoliberal Hegemony in Turkey -- 6. Cultural Narratives of Crisis and Populism in Spain: Metaphors, Nation-branding, and Social Change -- 7. Palestine and the Migrant Question -- 8. Lampedusa in Europe; or Touching Tales of Vulnerability -- 9. Alternative Hospitalities on the Margins of Europe -- 10. Algeria Time and Water Logic: Image, Archive, Mediterranean Futurity -- 11. Greek Weird Wave; Or, On How to Do A Cinema of Biopolitics -- 12. Moving Images, Moving Archives: Fracturing the Crisis in Interactive Greek Documentaries -- 13. Ice-As-Money and Dreams-As-Ice: Christos Ikonomou's "The Blood of the Orange" and the Critique of Liquidity -- 14. Rethinking Stasis and Utopianism: Empty Placards and Imaginative Boredom in the Greek Crisis-scape.

Introduction: Legibility in the Age of Signs and Machines /Pepita Hesselberth , Janna Houwen , Esther Peeren and Ruby de Vos -- Desire -- Legible Affects: The Melodramatic Imagination in Painting /Ernst van Alphen -- Overreading: Intentions, Mistakes and Lies /Colin Davis -- Freud's Conquest of the Dreamscape: Legibility and Power in Freud's "Specimen Dream" /Seth Rogoff -- Illegible Desire: James Purdy's Resistance to Sexual Identity /Looi van Kessel -- Justice -- The Legibility of Legislation in Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" /Siebe Bluijs -- Lex Fugit: On Acts of Legibility /Isabel Capeloa Gil -- Encountering the Law: Machinic and Theatrical Space in Criminal Prosecution /Tessa de Zeeuw -- Machine -- OK, Computer? Understanding Cybernetic Personhood /Yasco Horsman -- Machine Language and the Illegibility of the Zwischen /David Gauthier -- Connectivity, Legibility and the Mass Image /Sean Cubitt -- Too Much to Read? Negotiating (Il)legibility between Close and Distant Reading /Inge van de Ven -- Heritage -- Between Nostalgia and Utopia: A Conversation on the Legibility of Film Archives /Peter Verstraten and Giovanna Fossati -- Intersecting Frames of Legibility in Conversion de Piritu (1690): A Remodeling of Paratexts in the Digital Setting /Roxana Sarion -- "That the Section 'Weapons' Had to Be Plentiful Is Evident for Aceh": The Readability of Colonial Conquest in Dutch Ethnographic Exhibitions /Anke Bosma -- Ledgers and Legibility: A Conversation on the Significance of Noise within Digital Colonial Archives /Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld and Pepita Hesselberth -- Coda -- Representational Assemblages: Forms, Concerns, Affects /Frederik Tygstrup.