border

Not what is above, what sits on top or what is below but instead what is in between.

The constitution of one place to another. Boundary lines. Markers of separation.

Borders are psycho-spatial conditions that people carry within them. Not just lines on a map or perimeters of places but traces of a living context. They expand or shrink, selectively and strategically.
Control disguised as care.

It is what separates
Delineating difference
Necessitates an Other

Our understanding of borders is a constantly shifting re-negotiation that responds to the socio-political conditions of the contemporary moment. The recent pandemic, with its lack of respect for borders, has emphasized the fictitious construction of these lines, troubling questions of territory, economy and mobility. The side you sit on can be the difference in access to security, rights and resources.

Borders carve narrative into place, constructing perceptions of alterity, hatred and rejection. They also play into bodies, not just bodies of land or sea but bodies of the humans and other animals that have to navigate them.

Psychologically, boundaries are how we have traditionally constructed notions of subjectivity, as much defined by what you are not as what you are. What might it mean to become unbounded.

We must smuggle.

‘I have for some years been pre-occupied with geographies and territorialities, with boundaries and circulations always keeping in mind Jacques Derrida’s belief that boundaries, whether they are narrow or expanded, do nothing more than establish the limits of the possible. Thus and perhaps most importantly for my purposes I have been trying to envisage what an ‘unbounded’, an unbounded space, an unbounded practice, an unbounded knowledge, might be.’

Irit Rogoff, Smuggling: 4

How might we learn to smuggle other modes of embodiment and co-existence with the more-than-human? As Barad states, recent thinking ‘eschews both humanist and structuralist accounts of the subject that position the human as either pure cause or pure effect, and the body as the natural and fixed dividing line between interiority and exteriority. Posthumanism doesn’t presume the separateness of any-‘thing,’ let alone the alleged spatial, ontological, and epistemological distinction that sets humans apart.’* We need to lean into the erosion of these borders, questioning assumptions of human exceptionalism.