Border as Method

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Head to quints.com/newbooks for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's QU-IN-CE.com/newbooks for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com/newbooks Hi. Theory. Welcome to High Theory. In this podcast we get high on the substance of theory. I'm Sharanik Gosu and I'm Kim Adams. We are two tired academics trying to save critique from itself. Today I am talking with Sharanik about border as method. What the hack is border as method. The name of the book that I'm going to talk about is border as method and the fact that method doesn't have an article in front of it, it expands the term a little more. Border as method is this book by Sandra Misadra and Brett Nielsen which came out in 2013. It's a really beautifully written book. When it comes to theory sometimes we tend to ignore style and I don't think that should be the case. But so what is it besides beautiful? I just read out the beginning of the preface because I think it's one of the most beautiful openings of books that I've read. The preface of the book begins like this. Fog and dirt. Violence and magic have surrounded the tracing and institution of border since late antiquity. Sources from around the world tell us wonderful and frightening stories about the tracing of demarcation lines between the sacred and the profane good and evil private and public inside an outside. From the liminal experiences of ritual societies to the delimitation of land as private property from the fractal side of remus by Romulus at the mythological foundation of Rome to the expansion of the imperial times these stories speak of the productive power of the border of the strategic world it lays in the fabrication of the world. It is a little Eurocentric yes but you know the very first line Fog and dirt violence and magic. Traumatizes the idea of border and it begins with this like my ass make character of the border. In my own words I think I'm gonna describe it as this number one border is a method of telling the story of the world and like if borders didn't exist the world would in some ways be undifferentiated. The border gives kind of form to the world and obviously one of the basic things that Miss Adra Nielsen are saying that they think of the world border much more capaciously than just a geopolitical border. What they want to do is to take the border and I quote not only as a research object but also as an epistemic angle so that's what they mean by border as method it provides productive insights on the tensions and conflicts that blur the line between inclusion and exclusion as well as in the profoundly changing core of social inclusion in the present. When we think border we think the wall and the wall has become the persistent paradigm of the concept of border which is kind of misleading because exclusion is not the only thing that a border does a border is by dint of the fact that it exists in that liminal space in relation to two realms or two spaces or two objects which have a certain kind of contentious relationship to each other but dint of that very fact it is something that produces new kinds of existence and new kinds of subjectivities and new kinds of struggles. Before you go on by wall you mean like the Trump build a wall wall or like the Berlin wall or like this book came out in 2013 so the build a wall political slogan hadn't existed. Berlin is definitely the icon that they're talking about. What they're saying is that it's intellectually lazy or like not very productive to imagine that or to think of the wall as the paradigm for border thinking because although borders do exclude the crossing of the border and other kinds of intellectual and physical activity that have to do with the border are as important as the mere fact of exclusion. Can you give some other examples of borders? This book is coming out of this very deep entrenchment in migrant studies and migrant activism so geopolitical borders are definitely instantiations of the idea of the border that give rise to insofar as this book is trying to care for certain constituencies is definitely looking at migrants and migrant labor. The one example that they begin with is the activism of Bijumati who is the organizer of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance and he wrote that book taxi caps and capitalism in New York City. That sounds like an exciting book. It mainly talks about series of strikes that they organized which resulted in the fair hike in 2004 and so in talking about Matthews activism and you know the world that he did he talks about this group of people New York taxi drivers as a group of people who are crisscrossed by several kinds of border linguistic borders, cultural borders. They say not only the linguistic borders that separate these workers but also the urban borders that are originally crossed as part of their working lives, the international borders they cross to reach New York City and the social borders that divide them from their clients and the owners from whom they leave the cabs. What about just the physical barrier that you put between the cab driver and the person? And yourself, yes, you know that is something that I guess like right now if you are taking a cab in New York City in 2020 it's all the more important and ominous. What Mizzad Ranielson are saying is that you know the physical borders of the physical action of crossing the border when they come to New York City in order to be a cab driver in New York City you have a certain experience at the border and that experience is definitely better documented than once they become part of this group of people, the New York taxi drivers, the conceptual cultural linguistic borders that cross their lives and that precipitate together informing the cultural identity of the New York taxi workers as a whole. You know the latter is not less important or less functional than you know the first kind of borders. So it sounds like border as a method is a way of thinking intersectionality. Border as method is definitely a way of thinking intersectionality to like some of the question of what the heck is border as method they are mainly inspired by Etienne Bollybars concept of the polysemi of the border and the border or something that that is the sort of meaning rich. They say border as method introduces a range of concepts that seek to grasp mutations of labor, space, time, law, power and citizenship that accompany the proliferation of borders in today's world. Among these are the multiplication of labor differential inclusion temporal borders, the sovereign machine of governmentality and border struggles. So it's like thinking intersectionality of not just about people but about places and time. Yeah thinking intersectionally about how you know subjectivities produced by these or by enmeshment within these several kinds and orders of bordering. The full title of the book is border as method or the multiplication of labor and they define the multiplication of labor as a conceptual tool for investigating the composition of living labor in a situation characterized by a high degree of heterogeneity. It bot it traverse the intensification of labor processes and the tendency of work to colonize the time of life. It also attempts to grasp the subjective implications of the diversification and heterogeneization of work forces that are the other side of the growing relevance of social cooperation in contemporary capitalism. The concept of multiplication of labor is therefore meant to a company as well as supplement the more familiar concept of the division of labor be a technical social or international. Is that whole thing the title? The multiplication of labor as opposed to the division of labor. At one point they say we should when we say the world order we should really say the world disorder because you know in order to pay that due to the lives that are disrupted by the neoliberal system. So I guess like the same multiplication as opposed to division is a way to look at this you know several mutations and like effloresances that happen due to this really complex heterogeneity of labor constituencies who are affected intersectionally by so many different kinds of borders. It's like a way of splitting up the the hegemonic basically and understanding the ways in which power is multiple and divided or not divided but multiplied upon the lives of individuals. How do I use border as a method? They say the diadic figure of the citizen worker has long monopolized the political imagination especially within the left. The analysis that we have pursued in this book can be read as a contribution to the description of the explosion of the relation. I'm stuck on diadic man. I actually really like the word diadic I use it all the time. The diadic figure of the citizen worker this this figure that has these two well-delineated but well-delineated and also kind of symbiotic aspects that of the citizen and that of the worker. So a diadic. But the next sentence is kind of like alliterative so okay. So they said and the analysis we have pursued in this book can be read as a contribution to the description of the explosion of the relationship between labor and citizenship epitomized by this diadic figure. A triple crisis of the democratic welfare state, the socialist state and the developmental state opens the political history of globalization. So essentially with the recent history of globalization past us and the the kind of neoliberal capitalism that we live under or in right now, the diadic figure of the citizen worker should be further qualified and one of the ways to do it is to sort of put that figure through the multivalent lens of border as method. So the use of border as method there is to rework your labor politics and to get rid of ideas that don't work to sort of be always on your feet to constantly think of competing sort of allegiances or competing identity formations that your politics needs to be cognizant of. So it's like instead of workers of the world unite, it is imagining re-imagining that category of the worker which is already sort of in our society established as a diad between worker citizen. It's saying in fact it's made of all of these little components or that it's driven with all of these borders and that in order to understand how it really works for people in their material conditions of existence. Yeah exactly actually they have a section titled workers of the world. It begins like this, the proletarians have the nothing to lose but they're changed, they have a wall to win working man of all countries unite. These are among the most famous words written by Marx and Engels and then they say yet the key concepts we elaborate in this book, border as method and the multiplication of labor suggests the need to interrogate the metaphors of unity and change that animate this memorable, yes you totally that animate this memorable statement. At the root of our investigation is the perennial question of the many and the one. The notion of unity for instance implies overcoming divisions and diverse parties acting in concert. Similarly the notion of the chain though it carries a sense of ligature or bondage that should be discounted or diminished suggests a linkage or articulation of multiple units into a linear single linear system. Yeah the great medieval chain of being man. Yes exactly central to our approach and argument is the contention that the proliferation of borders in the contemporary world means the political organization of labor must be carried out in an irreducibly multiple sense. No longer is it a matter of overcoming divisions to international solidarity or appeals to the human condition only by analyzing the only by analyzing I got too excited. The heterogeneous constitution of global space and complex ways it criss-crosses the production and reproduction of labor power is commodity is it possible to begin the work of translating between subjects and struggles. How will border as method save the world? Part of it is implied in what I just said because I mean it's not a it's not a call to arms I guess. Is it really saying that we that like internationalism? So I think one of the things that it is objecting to is a kind of internationalism that was in vote at the beginning of globalization whenever that was. So one of the books that they talk about is Kenny Shiyomai's The Borderless World which came out 1990. It's a it's a book in business management which talked about globalized world where geopolitical borders are kind of feeble and this book begins from a position that well nation state is still sort of the dominant ways in which we can imagine the world. Let's not let's not ignore that fact. The like one thing that seems really solid from Marc Senengels to me is the idea that the way the proletariat can gain power the way that labor can gain power is through forming unions right through forming large large unified units of people with the similar with similar claims and so The book is definitely an endorsement of solidarity movements and an endorsement of unionizing and unions. Okay but then if you take that to its like ultimate end as they do in the communist manifesto the argument is that all workers should unify there should be full like international union of all working people right like it would be stronger if if you just keep adding to it and okay so like fair enough now that i'm saying it like that it sounds kind of stupid. You know the intervention of this book into that idea would be like from a position of fragmatism. Like what it in my own words so everything is border the main sort of lie off the border is that it is peripheral it's not it's central right so you know when we imagine the border we always think of different kinds of periphery and yet it is the central working concept in our political lives it has the putative nature of the margin but it is at the actual center think of like what has happened or like to the american political conversation and i was reading this article about what it means to live one of the one of the borders so new mexico or texas you know one of the the areas lining the border and how central the wall has been or how central especially in the you know the election cycle that we just experienced how central different borders has been and if you think of i don't know if you did but i definitely stayed up at night to look at the different states turning red and blue and i remember having a nightmare of these two binary colors and like this sort of something in my mind was flashing red blue red blue red blue and that is just a me problem but i know but it's it's the political borders being realized on a map for us like that's how we're how we're envisioning our political process so they say border struggles in very real ways have expanded and sit no longer other margins but at the center of our political lives while they challenge any closed notion of political subjectivity in the struggle for the common they also confront us with the continued production of other limits that run across societies labor markets and jurisdictions so one of the things that they had said right before is the way in which the instance of a border cutting through some kind of originary common is the point where the idea of private property takes you know is born and they use the definition of William Blackstone in commentaries on the law of England from 1765 the Solan despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises with the external things of the world in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe and so you know this idea of political angst and political subjectivity and political struggle the inception of that at this particular instance of an originary common which might or might not be a real common being cut through by a border and so from 1765 cut to now borders have proliferated and that particular source of understanding the formation of the laboring subject or the citizen worker subject has become even more complicated and so I guess border as method will save the world on that note of fragmatism and to sort of reshape labor activism by using the border as a productive conceptual idiom and not and not just something that is only about inclusion and exclusion because that in all honesty is myopic. Border as method will save the world by shifting our understanding to see how the border is at the center of our discourse rather than the margins and border as method will save the world by helping us understand that everything is bordered we don't exist in a situation where we encounter the border only if we travel a little bit conceptually or physically but instead we are interpolated with borders all the time and it will thereby help us change our labor organizing practices. Yes exactly. Of the things that we have covered this is one that like actually sets out to save the world. Cool that sounds great to me man. Thank you for listening to High Theory. If you like our podcast please review and subscribe on Spotify iTunes Patreon or wherever you get your podcast fix. Choronic Bosu manages our social media presence. Owen Quinn composes our theme music and Kim Adams and Choronic Bosu edit our audio. You can also find us at hightheory.net. We hope you have a highly theoretical day.