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You’d have to have a mind of winter. For tactic you might think solution. Either way the holding pen is real. It’s just that in its thoroughness it functions like a metaphor. Anyway people live there, sometimes for years. There, in abeyance, where the administration dreamed them. The person principally waiting at the AIC is the appellant. He or she is rarely white. The people waiting with the appellant will be their friends and supporters and when they have some their family. In most cases they will be accompanied by a legal representative, though increasingly this doesn’t apply. If they are there, that is – which is to say, if the appellant is in the building. Elsewhere in the AIC is the HOPO, the Home Office Presenting Officer so called, and, though it isn’t possible to see them yet, the Judge who is a civil servant also, and who sometimes hears presentations on his own, or her own, and sometimes in the company of a layperson. It is the Judge, sometimes in the company of a layperson, who constitutes the tribunal. What the tribunal judges is the language. What the tribunal judges with is the language. What the Judge determines when he reaches his determination is by whom the language can be used. What he circumscribes is the polis and what the tribunal constitutes is the primal scene, the setting where the language is formed by expulsion. I can’t say this fully enough. Witness the AIC. The AIC’s function is as a portal to a ‘hostile environment’. I offer it up in quotes because it is enshrined in law, because we have been rendered hostile, and where the hostility settles and finds its focus is as it handles the appellant. The tribunal is not a court of a record. Nobody here is writing everything down. It is the Home Office Presenting Officer who principally draws the line. That is his job, or her job, their function being to so diminish the appellant that the Judge and his companion can Through | 12
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comfortably expel them. Where exactly, nobody knows. This is not the building’s question. The building’s question is how best to sever any residual linguistic ties, any intimacies that might have formed, so that the tribunal might perform its task, leaving the language unaffected by the process of expulsion. People spirited away. Barely rendered present in the first place. In the event that an appellant receives relief they are paid in vouchers not cash. So that the currency is like the language, so that the function might be performed, so that as it is determined who leaves the language the language determining goes untouched. This is the tribunal’s job. It is the focal point of all the language, the setting where official hostility achieves full expression in all its multiple forms, where the Presenting Officer asks a series of questions that beggar belief in their disregard for the appellant’s actual circumstance, where mistranslation goes wilfully uncorrected, where fundamental documents are routinely withheld. Where the line is drawn. Where the hostile environment is made administratively manifest. Where the language forms by a series of procedures holding intimacy at bay. Where the procedures go unrecorded. Where all the intimacies are lost. Where that tone we live with that claims to represent us is perfected by compulsive use. Because it doth remove Those things which Elemented The language formed in the act of separation not acknowledging the absence of those it compels to leave, established by the breach, the act of shipping people out That ourselves know Witness the language Driven through The AIC. 13 | Who Leaves the Language

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You’d have to have a mind of winter. For tactic you might think solution. Either way the holding pen is real. It’s just that in its thoroughness it functions like a metaphor. Anyway people live there, sometimes for years. There, in abeyance, where the administration dreamed them. The person principally waiting at the AIC is the appellant. He or she is rarely white. The people waiting with the appellant will be their friends and supporters and when they have some their family. In most cases they will be accompanied by a legal representative, though increasingly this doesn’t apply. If they are there, that is – which is to say, if the appellant is in the building. Elsewhere in the AIC is the HOPO, the Home Office Presenting Officer so called, and, though it isn’t possible to see them yet, the Judge who is a civil servant also, and who sometimes hears presentations on his own, or her own, and sometimes in the company of a layperson. It is the Judge, sometimes in the company of a layperson, who constitutes the tribunal. What the tribunal judges is the language. What the tribunal judges with is the language. What the Judge determines when he reaches his determination is by whom the language can be used. What he circumscribes is the polis and what the tribunal constitutes is the primal scene, the setting where the language is formed by expulsion. I can’t say this fully enough. Witness the AIC. The AIC’s function is as a portal to a ‘hostile environment’. I offer it up in quotes because it is enshrined in law, because we have been rendered hostile, and where the hostility settles and finds its focus is as it handles the appellant. The tribunal is not a court of a record. Nobody here is writing everything down. It is the Home Office Presenting Officer who principally draws the line. That is his job, or her job, their function being to so diminish the appellant that the Judge and his companion can

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