In a post on 8/15/11, I tried to gesture toward thinking borders through Agamben’s Stanzas, and in an even earlier post (4/18/11; a panel talk delivered at AAG 2011) I made the claim that borders do not exist.
The problem I am trying to work through is a phenomenon addressed in different ways by Wendy Brown (in Walled States, Waning Sovereignty) and Reece Jones (in the forthcoming Border Walls). Essentially, the phenomenon of bordering implies something that in practice is both impossible and impractical: the physical, actual exclusion of bodies from a territory. We already know from the work of Mat Coleman, Didier Bigo, Alison Mountz, and others that immigration and refugee policing no longer happens at the border. Instead, borders as exclusionary sites marking an interior and exterior have transformed into borders that exist on/within the body of the immigrant or refugee, and require specific technologies, techniques, and practices to actualize the border in a policing event. As Coleman, citing Heyman and others, notes, the majority of immigration policing happens on the interior (in non-border states) through traffic stops and other domestic spheres – rather than at the border or in the workplace. So what relevance is a border if the border is, in a sense, everywhere?
“Edges matter,” as Edward Casey notes in a recent article in Environment and Planning D, “Border versus Boundary at La Frontera.” But he asks an important question: “Edges are not parts of matter or space (if anything, they mark the moment when matter gives way to empty space); they have mainly to do with the differences between things. But what are they, positively put” (384)? He differentiates between a border and a boundary thusly:
- border – “a clearly and crisply delineated entity…established by conventional agreements, such as treaties or laws; thus…a product of human history and its vicissitudes.” (385)
- boundary – can have “cultural and historical parameters” but is often “natural in status”…”rarely demarcated with any precision, varying in contour and extent… porous in character… lacks exact positioning.” (385)
I think, at this moment, this is a good distinction that can be adopted somewhat unproblematically (or as much as anything can be unproblematic…). Where Casey’s work is especially interesting is how he locates borders as “an expression of state power” (386), and details a fundamental ambiguity between border and boundary. He posits a spectrum rather than a strict dichotomy:
boundary/borderland/BORDER/walls & fences/border-line
He clarifies:
“At the left end of this spectrum we have terms that approximate to edges that are porous and malleable…On the right end, closure and exactitude are prized…” (389)
Essentially, a border, then, is a construction, an impulse, a fetish, that has a materiality but is ultimately contingent. A will to border, rather than a phenomenological border.
Casey retains an emphasis on a distinction between border and boundary – the terms mean something, and the materiality of the phenomenon does differ. His analysis is best read as, perhaps, an argument for the understanding of bordering practices (including walls and fences) along with borderlands (as an ambiguous space with unique geographies and cultural phenomena – i.e. Anzaldua). However, what remains ambiguous in his essay, and is indeed taken up in the responses by Michael Dear, Mat Coleman, and Roxanne Doty in the same issue, is the fact that contemporary policing practices that do not adhere to borders (lines, fences, walls, checkpoints) are part of the borderlands. But what happens when the borderlands is everywhere?
Some questions, in no particular order:
How do we conceptualize borders as a materiality without substance? Can we?
How do we reconcile the utter failure of bordering in preventing mass migration/movement, the effectiveness of certain bordering practices at keeping some (and I stress some) people out of a defined space/territory, and the reality of interior policing practices being the primary site for population management?
What is the relation between the State and borders? What is the relation between the State and interior enforcement? If there is, as I suspect, a different set of relations for each practice, do we have to change our understanding of the State?
I especially appreciated the following quote, given my discussion of Agamben’s Stanzas and the fetishization of the border:
“All the personnel employed at or near the wall are expected to pursue certain goals in common… These goals include accuracy in the demarcation of the border and the policing and surveillance of the entire border region with regard to national security, illegal drug importation, and immigration control. All of these fiercely held goals converge in making the border itself ever more definite and known as something that is objectively and unquestionably there – and presented as such. In all this concerted activity, it is as if La Frontera [the US/Mexico border] has been fetishized as an object in itself – but, finally, more an ideal object, an asymptote or regulative ideal, a sheer limit, than a material entity. The wall bears the brunt of the materiality, but the border itself, insofar as it is distinguishable from the wall, is regarded as untouchable and invisible – as is true of any pure border. In the case of La Frontera, the border as an ideal object acts to protect and sanction…vested interests…as if to legitimate these interests by this very act of idealization. So as not to keep the border entirely in the ideal realm, such concrete entities as walls and border markers are created and continually invoked, anchoring what would otherwise be abstractly projected as ideal.” (387)
