A gestural history of the border. How liberalism reaches its limits at the border The plague doctors' masks on the frontispiece of the "Leviathan", John Locke's empty land, the photographs by Carleton Watkins, a military policeman's...
moreA gestural history of the border. How liberalism reaches its limits at the border
The plague doctors' masks on the frontispiece of the "Leviathan", John Locke's empty land, the photographs by Carleton Watkins, a military policeman's protective mask, the colonial history of the deportation camps, the plague policies and the Sans-Papiers - these are the seemingly disparate pieces that Francesca Falk assembles into a mosaic to create a gestural history of the border. The mosaic lets territorial borders emerge from programmes of visualization and transparency, reveals their historicity and shows them as fault-lines of our society that produce violence.
Borders have for some years now dominated social and political debates and inspired numerous works of art as well as considerable scholarly research. Such studies tend to have a strong spatial, temporal, and factual focus. Francesca Falk has chosen to approach the subject from a different angle. Since the abstract cannot be considered without taking recourse to the graphic she sets out to investigate a number of specific constellations as well as significant interdependencies.
The two cornerstones of the author's study are the notions of borderline evidence and border contingency. She shows how visual and verbal premises that generate or have generated borderline evidence shape our thinking, thereby enabling us to identify border contingency in past and present. It is precisely because every border is in a sense contingent that there is a need for the social order to establish borderline evidence. If these effects of evidence fail, the borders are perceived as arbitrary, unnatural, constructed, not given, as contingent and not evident. Evidence and contingency are however by no means mutually exclusive pairs of opposites. On the contrary, they operate interactively. Every production of evidence can be questioned as to its inherent contingency. For this reason the study focusses on areas where despite apparently generated borderline evidence contingency is discernable. The power of borders does not however solely rely on evidence - in the sense of producing clarity - but also on the strategy of invisibilisation, of aniconism, and removal from view, which the author subsumes under the term border transparency. Because the most impermeable borders are those that are not perceivable as such.
The study's starting point is John Locke, the "father" of liberalism, and his social contract in the "Second Treatise". According to this theory individuals are called upon to enter voluntarily into a social contract. Falk's interest in this founding document of liberalism is directed to something often overlooked: namely, that those excluded from the socal contract are also affected by it. Not only are they subjected to constraints by their exclusion, but they are also unable to respond actively. Political borders are thus not the outcome of the free will of both sides. John Locke has to postulate an "empty land" in America to legitimize his concept of state formation.
This emptiness was visualized by the photographer Carleton Watkins. In the 19th century he photographed the West of the USA and became famous with his pictures of what was later to be the Yosemite Park. The fact that the same photographer's pictures were also used in court to settle land disputes creates a constellation of paradoxes similar to the one inherent in John Locke's theory.
For Thomas Hobbes in contrast, America with its native Indians was not empty country but the representation of the state of nature. Thus on the first frontispiece of Hobbes' "De Cive" the state of nature ("Libertas") and government ("Imperium") are set against each other as a dichotomically opposing pair. In her study, the author puts the frontispiece of the "Leviathan", the emblem of the Body Politic, into a radically new context, namely that of sanitation, sovereignty, selection and incipient biopolitics. The masks of the plague doctors, which have been largely ignored by research so far, occupy a pivotal position in Falk's interpretation. They point to the violence induced by the drawing of borders which was necessary to establish the sovereign totality and segregation of the body politic. Mechanisms of controlling and channelling the movement of citizens first emerged in the course of plague politics. Medical deployment was important for the establishment and legitimization of borders. The result was that plague measures produced new statal structures and new forms of border and migration control.
The plague doctor's mask makes a reappearance in the protective mask of the military policeman photographed "receiving" boat refugees. The mask points to the fear of contamination. In such images territorial borders and corporal boundaries overlap: Migration here appears as an assault against one's physical integrity. Boat refugees coming ashore on Europe's borders are regularly visible in the media, whereas deportees remain largely invisible. Their camps are usually located on urban peripheries and media images of them are rarely circulated. A look at history shows that deportation camps were first used in a colonial context, which allows us to raise critical questions about the current illegalization of immigration from a fresh, post-colonial perspective.
Using historical case studies as a point of departure, Francesca Falk addresses pressing issues such as whether there should be a (human) right to migration. But today the admission of migrants is considered to be the domain of the discretionary authority of sovereign states: Seen from this perspective, "illegal migration" is regarded as an attack against state sovereignty. While an exercise of power in the sense of sovereignty, according to Foucault, seeks to exert strict control over people's movements, governmentality tries to produce conditions that make circulation and freedom of movement economically rewarding for specific groups of people, because there is a demand for flexible workers who "on their own accord" are willing to move to wherever there is work for them.
The prototype of the flexible worker is the Sans-Papiers. Their existence results from the fact that they have managed to cross a programmatically closed border, proclaimed as such in the tradition of sovereignty, which in reality does not function hermetically. At the same time the state makes an example with the draconic custody pending deportation, which, like Hobbes' "Leviathan", is designed to have a deterrent effect, in particular also on the "regularized" immigrants who can themselves be affected by coercive measures and forfeit their residence permit.
In the tradition of Thomas Hobbes, political philosophy serves the production of the state's evidence. The basic question is how the state can be legitimized towards its citizens. In this tradition of thought the state is only required to justify itself to its own citizens. But precisely this is criticized in current political theory, a school of thought which this study, on the border between historical science, image analysis and political theory, adheres to. Falks argumentation with and against Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke departs from the traditional history of political ideas and moves towards the iconism of political theory. Images provoke our thinking, limit it, organize our argumentation systems. This again affects how we see borders and consequently perceive migration.
Francesca Falk has opted for a gestural historiography which is based on a strategy of reductionist writing, on the principles of condensation and interruption. Her study reveals how liberalism reaches its limits at the border.
