Call for Objects: The Embodiment of Borders

Call for Objects: the Embodiment of Borders
In conversation with Sandro Mezzadra

The concept of ‘borders’ is one that is fundamental to our lived experience. From private property, to the question of refugees and migrants, as well as the clear separation between the social and the environmental, borders are continuously invoked by conservatives (for the sake of nationhood) and progressives (in the public/private split) to show a clear line of separation between an inside and an outside. Borders are part of our everyday lives even as many become blurred.

Today, we must consider how we embody borders and how they come to define the landscape of our political, social and cultural world’s.

Italian social theorist, Sandro Mezzadra, reflects on such questions within the European context in his many writings. In a recent interview – partly reproduced below – he reflects on the issue of borders and argues that their blurring “should lead us to think of a situation which is marked by a different relationship between war (even in a philosophical sense) and politics”.

This is a Call for Objects – which asks you to read the reproduced text below and reflect on both how we embody borders and how they come to shape our world – and then produce on Object to respond to Sandro’s writings.

This Object may be a piece of writing (academic, non-academic, fictional, poetry), art (photos, drawings, paintings, design), music, spoken word or any other form of expression.

You are then invited to attend a session and hear Sandro in conversation with UWS academic Brett Nielson. Following this short discussion, you will then have the opportunity present your Object. Accepted works will then be reproduced in a special edition e-zine.

For details, email James Arvanitakis at j.arvanitakis@uws.edu.au or 0438-454-127.

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Extract of Sandro’s writing from “Borders, Citizenship, War, Class: a discussion With Étienne Balibar and Sandro Mezzadra”, from New Formations.

In discussing multiculturalism, borders and a crisis of tolerance, Sandro notes (p.7):

In this sense, the discussion of multiculturalism in Europe has always been… a discussion about the identity and the borders of Europe. What does it mean, in this situation, to make the point that the crisis of multiculturalism… is at the same time a crisis of tolerance? It means to underscore that this crisis cannot be reduced to the relation between a homogeneous Europe and its cultural and geographical ‘others’. The re-emergence of the long history of the European colonial project, which was in a way the hidden face of the concept of tolerance, tends to disrupt the ‘civility’ of social relations within Europe, that is, it can destroy what has always been presented as the fundamental achievement of ‘tolerance’.

Of course I do not want to deny the fact that many theorists of multiculturalism were, and still are, engaged in an attempt to overcome the contradictions and pitfalls of modern universalism. But when I say that we are confronted today with a crisis of tolerance, I am suggesting that the colonial border between Europe and its outside, which was presupposed by the concept of tolerance… The ‘whiteness’ of the European citizen… has not been put into question by multiculturalism: it has only been rhetorically ‘weakened’, in order to make its coexistence with ‘non-white’ citizens possible, while this coexistence has been always imagined and constructed… as a hierarchical coexistence.

Of course what is currently discussed as a crisis of ‘multiculturalism’ in Europe – that is, we must be very clear on this point, as a crisis in the coexistence of ‘white’ and ‘non white’ citizens within the European polity – opens up the space in which the danger of the radicalisation of the hierarchical character of that coexistence emerges. But in order to counteract this danger we must displace the very framing of the crisis: to talk about the current situation as a situation which is marked by a latent crisis of tolerance… means to stress the fact that the problems we are confronted with are not to be understood as problems of relations between a compact ‘we’ and the ‘others’. They are rather problems which address the very definition of a European ‘we’: to recognise this means in my opinion to accept the challenge which is posed by the concept of a postcolonial condition when applied to Europe.

In discussing the blurring of borders between war and non-war – and hence the ubiquity of war, militarisation of politics and society – Sandro notes (p.12-13)

The discussion we are developing on the transformation of borders has to do with the logic of war entering into political spaces which had been in a way protected from it by borders. Borders were in modern history a mechanism for neutralising war, that was their first function. Or rather, they were, in the sense suggested by Carl Schmitt, a mechanism which made possible at the same time the ‘expulsion’ of war from the political space of the state, and the ‘regulation’ of war between states… In 1907, Lord Curzon stated that ‘frontiers are indeed the razor’s edge on which hang suspended the modern issues of war and peace’.

So what we are saying today about the transformation of borders should lead us to think of a situation which is marked by a different relationship between war (even in a philosophical sense) and politics. To put it briefly once again: war is playing an increasing role in shaping social relations within unified political spaces, while the ‘traditional’ war itself tends to develop independently of the regulations that have been set up by modern international laws…

…My point is… the border between war and peace, which was one of the main distinctions upon which some of the most important political concepts of modern times were based, has become blurred, and this is really a radical challenge. I think this is a point that we should deepen in our discussion on the transformations which are reshaping the very institution of the border.

…When I say that the border between war and peace has been blurred, I am referring to a situation in which the border between interior and exterior is itself being blurred. Once again: this does not mean that this border does not exist anymore – quite the opposite is the case – and the everyday experience of migrants in Europe shows this in an often dramatic way. But that border is not anymore an absolute border, be it in a geopolitical or in a conceptual sense. To talk about the ubiquity of war is another way of talking about the ubiquity of the border…

… (Anthropologist) Pablo Vila in his work on the US-Mexican border, it opens up the possibility of border crossing as the substance of citizenship, but also border reinforcing. you have shown in essays that have been very important for my own work how the border is the ‘non-democratic’ element of democracy. The ubiquity of the border is the ubiquity of this ‘non- democratic’ element, which can take the shape of war-like technologies of governance within the European space itself.

The blurring of borders for the migrants as they are simultaneously inside and outside (p.18):

… the border between the ‘social’ and the ‘institutional’ which appears to have been blurred. If we take a look at the whole debate that has taken place around the concept of ‘governance’ in the last decade, it seems to me that it is focused on just this process. But I think we could and should radicalise the problem: if the border between the interior and the exterior is being blurred, this means that it does not make sense anymore, from a conceptual point of view, to think of politics and democracy in the terms suggested by the category of ‘integration’. From this point of view, I think that the condition of migrants in Europe is particularly meaningful for us. To borrow the concepts used by the postcolonial feminist Nirmal Puwar in a recent book, migrants are at the same time insiders and outsiders. … We are talking about ‘subject positions’ which can be defined at the same time as insider and outsider, on the one hand because of specific policies which are making rights themselves precarious, on the other hand because certain kinds of ‘belonging’ which were among the presuppositions of what you call the ‘national social state’ have been – and continue to be – criticised and deconstructed by several social movements which put into crisis the ‘national social state’ long before the start of ‘neoliberal’ policies. These movements shape, on the level of social behaviours and desires, the actual composition of ‘living labour’, and this is the reason why I tend to be very critical of the theoretical and political positions which frame the criticism of ‘neoliberalism’ in terms suggesting a return to the welfare state as the only possible ‘critical’ solution.

p.21… Well, on the one hand, the recent literature on migration (I’m thinking, for instance, of the so-called ‘new economics of migration’ but also of the works which employ the concept of ‘transnationalism’), has pointed out that a set of ‘social institutions’ – family and ‘ethnic’ networks for instance – play a key role at every stage of the migratory process. But, on the other hand, we cannot be uncritical towards these ‘institutions’: they can function as means of resistance, and the whole history of the struggles of migration show that, but they can also function effectively as sites of reproduction of old and new mechanisms of domination and exploitation. The relation between a new reflection on the issue of institutions and the autonomy of migration can be developed only within a broader conceptual and political framework, focused on the construction of a new political space which tries to develop in a positive way the challenge posed by the process of the blurring of borders…