Holger Pötzsch
This chapter presents a terminological trajectory of border-related concepts. It also highlights the methodological implications of a move from the descriptions of allegedly static border technologies to an assessment of the mundane practices through which these technologies are activated, re/appropriated, or subverted. The slash both connecting and separating iBorder and its verb iBordering in the title of the chapter is indicative of this methodological and theoretical double-move, described in more detail below.
Starting with a critical interrogation of interconnections between states and borders, the essay moves on to introduce conceptual advances that aim at grasping the increasing dislocation of borders that spread from the fringes of nation states to ubiquity in everyday life. Connected to this often technologically driven development is a shift in attention from static border locations and institutions to contingent practices of bordering at the level of day-to-day performances. Subsequently, I introduce the twin concept of iBorder/iBordering to account for the impacts of new technologies of dataveillance, biometrics, algorithmic analytics and human–machine coordination on these processes, before, finally, I argue that iBorder/ing constitutes a fundamental cultural technique that not so much processes given subjectivities and practices, but rather co-constitutes them.
Contemporary border studies perceive borders as dynamic, multidimensional entities that constantly change and shift, and that function across a variety of registers (Rumford 2012; Brambilla 2014; Pötzsch 2015). Borders both divide and enable contact and exchange, they are resources providing orientation in contradictory terrains and designate zones of exception that allow for extraordinary measures to be taken against non-normative subjects. In recognition of this ambivalence, border research broadens its outlook, moving beyond a confinement to state borders and sovereignty. As Rumford has claimed with reference to what he terms ‘multiper-spectival border studies’ (2012: 888), ‘the state does not exhaust the meaning of the border’ (2012: 894).
Attention to micro-processes of bordering at the heart of the sovereign exception, however, does not render states insignificant for border research. As O’Dowd (2010) has noted, even in times of globalization and increasing cross-border flows and connections state borders deserve continued attention. Arguing against an overexpansion of the border concept, he claims that ‘[c]ontemporary border studies . .. risk seeing nation states and state borders simply as fixed ideological constructs or ideas, rather than as territorial projections of infrastructural power’ (2010: 1044). According to him, the concrete, economic and coercive power of states still has significant impacts on the lives and wellbeing of subjects and merits critical scholarly attention.
Acknowledging O’Dowd’s position, I argue for the necessity of adopting multidisciplinary perspectives not so much with the objective of reducing the significance of states as actors in processes of bordering, but so as to enable a clearer understanding of exactly how states (and other actors) today project power – including forms of power extending to the level of mundane, day-to-day practices. As such, rather than dismissing the state, border research should direct critical attention to the multiple and dynamic scales and dimensions that predispose and frame varying forms of governance and sovereignty. Such an extended research trajectory will enable a productive exchange between traditional, political science-based approaches to international relations and border studies on the one hand, and disciplines that enable a bottom-up phenomenological outlook on border processes, practices, and institutions on the other.
Every border is, by necessity, enacted from below at the level of day-to-day practices and can only be realized through everyday performances carried out by situated subjectivities (Hall 2012; Rumford 2012; Bigo 2014; Côté-Boucher, Infantino and Salter 2014). The term bordering is often used to describe this mundane level of constrained agency, the ‘lived meaning, expression, contestation and reproduction of . .. boundaries and hierarchies in . . . everyday routines’ (Hall 2012: 2) that underlie even the most pervasive and apparently efficient border regime. In their works, both Hall (2012) and Bigo (2014) employ qualitative methods inspired by anthropological approaches to highlight micro-processes of bordering at specific localities and in this way bring vernacular bottom-up perspectives to traditional state-based and systems-oriented border research.
This chapter highlights the interrelation between technologies of tracking, tracing and profiling, and mundane practices of in/exclusion at the contemporary dislocated and increasingly ubiquitous border. In doing so, I follow Côté-Boucher et al.’s (2014) call for a practice-based agenda in border research and weight a description of particular socio-technical potentials for management and control against the various practices and performances through which such potentials are actualized, negotiated or subverted. The term iBorder/iBordering will enable a conceptualizing of some of the implications of such an interdisciplinary methodological trajectory.
Vukov and Sheller have noted a transformation of borders ‘away from static demarcators of hard territorial boundaries toward much more sophisticated, flexible, and mobile devices of tracking, filtration, and exclusion’ (2013: 225) that enlist everyday life and practices in technologically enhanced processes of in/exclusion. Bringing critical approaches to technology into dialogue with border research, I have coined the twin concept of iBorder/iBordering to enable an understanding of the possible impacts of such a fusion of new technologies and border-related processes (Pötzsch 2015).
iBorder/iBordering allows for a critical interrogation of state-driven1 bordering practices in complex socio-technical environments. The first segment – iBorder – enables a mapping of technological potentials for dispersed governance, i.e. new means of surveying, accessing, and analysing global communication flows as well as new techniques of identifying, tracking and tracing individual subjects and abstracted patterns of life. The second element – iBordering – draws attention to the (often messy) realization and/or subversion of these potentials at the level of everyday practices.
The socio-technical apparatus of iBorder consists of new technologies of biometric identification, digital tracking, and algorithmic mapping that afford both an individualizing and a massifying trajectory. Biometric techniques such as facial recognition, iris scans, fingerprint and sentiments analysis, as well as gait or keystroke pattern recognition are combined with remotely accessible RFID-equipped passports and interoperable databases to enable an increasingly comprehensive identification and tracking of individuals. At the same time, new surveillance programmes directed at mobile and Internet-based communications make possible a largely automated assembling and assessment of population-level content, movement, and connection data that enables an identification of potentially threatening, abstracted patterns of life. For instance, as Edward Snowden has revealed, by acquiring access to key servers, fibre-optic cables and Internet exchange points, and by gathering phone records as well as geolocation and connection data, state agencies such as the NSA (US) or GCHQ (UK) have managed to survey a significant part of global communications over an extended period of time.2
The amount of data gathered by these agencies is too vast to be processed by humans. Algorithms are therefore used to find correlations and identify significant deviations from implied norms. The machine-generated actionable information resulting from these processes then selectively informs human decision-making cycles with probabilistic assessments leading to what Amoore (2013: 5) has termed a politics of possibility – a ‘governing of emergent, uncertain, possible futures’. For instance, as signature strikes in drone warfare illustrate, this pre-emptive form of politics densely intertwines human cognition and agency with complex and dynamic sociotechnical systems – an interaction that often entails deadly consequences.
As a result of these developments, today ‘borders as bounded topographical locations or zones recede and reemerge as iBorder – an ephemeral, technologically afforded aura that attaches itself to the individual’ (Pötzsch 2015: 111) and follows the individual wherever he or she might move. Biological and behavioural markers stored in increasingly interoperable databases, RFID-equipped passports and ID cards, as well as the almost constant accessibility of movement and connection data through wearable technical interfaces ubiquitously exposes subjects to the gaze of a de-territorialized border apparatus. This sticky everywhere-border is inherently uncrossable, denies non-normative subjectivities refuge from this condition, and can lead to detention or ultimately death. The present description of the technological potentials for management, control and coercion, however, can only provide a partial account of the complex processes of contemporary technologically facilitated bordering.
A transition from iBorder to iBordering entails a shift in focus from overarching technological frames to ‘technological work’ (Walters 2011: 58) – the myriad minute daily endeavours through which the potentials for management and control inherent in these frames are activated, negotiated or subverted. This move also implies a change in methodology toward a phenomenological inquiry into the micro-physics of power – the everyday practices and life-worlds of the subjectivities constitutively intertwined with contemporary technologically facilitated processes of bordering.
In accordance with this trajectory, Brambilla has recently advocated a ‘need to humanise borders’ by recovering their ‘phenomenological dimension’ (2014: 27). She suggests a combination of methods drawn from ethnography, anthropology, cultural analysis and visual cultural studies to account for the ‘ontological multidimensionality of borders’ (2014: 26) stretching from daily routines to geopolitics, and including state-driven procedures of management and control as well as counter-hegemonic articulations and performances.
I list several examples pointing to the limits of, and resistances to, the apparatus of iBorder at the level of day-to-day practices and experiences (Pötzsch 2015). The counter-practices range from the random exchange of sim-cards by Afghan insurgents to trick targeting protocols of US drones, via the unintended incentives created by the EU’s Dublin accord to misrepresent migration flows to avoid national responsibilities, to the tricky business of establishing standards that bridge analogue and digital biometric registration practices. Based on these examples, I argue for the imminent necessity to separate ‘ambitions of comprehensive surveillance, management, and control’ articulated by a global security apparatus ‘from the often messy realities of their incremental day-to-day implementation’ (Pötzsch 2015: 112).
iBorder/iBordering shows how technology changes and partially enhances the capacity of states to exert power over its subjects and how these capacities are increasingly detached from distinct territorial locations towards an inherently boundless global space. However, as the examples described above attest, state governance is executed, limited and framed by the everyday practices of situated subjectivities. A proper understanding of contemporary borders and processes of bordering, thus, also requires qualitative methods that provide access to the life-worlds and mundane experiences of individual border subjects.
Besides the fissures and limits of its technological apparatus, there is another issue at stake in connection to the concept of iBorder/iBordering: the question of possible performative qualities of the involved technologies and practices. Does the socio-technical apparatus of iBorder process and manage or does it actively constitute contingent subjectivities and practices? Can iBorder be separated at all from the performance of iBordering, or does the pair form a mutually constitutive whole – iBorder/ing?
Introducing the term cultural technique from the context of recent German media theory, Winthrop-Young (2013) argues for the mutually constitutive nature of human subjectivities, technical objects and the procedures interconnecting the two. He argues that the practice of writing, the form of pencil and paper, as well as the subjectivity of a writer can only heuristically be divided. In reality, the entities involved constantly shape and mould one another in a perpetuated dynamic process of feedback and adaptation. Similarly, I argue that the socio-technical apparatus of iBorder, its procedures and protocols, as well as the subjectivities of those operating within its frame can be seen as mutually constitutive. iBorder/ing in its composite form, thus, becomes conceivable as a fundamental cultural technique of in/exclusion that not so much identifies and processes already established practices and subjectivities, but becomes co-constitutive of them in and through technologically predisposed and procedurally framed everyday border work. In turn, an apparently clear-cut distinction between border technologies and institutions on the one hand and border subjects and practices on the other is problematized and replaced by a processual understanding of the border as a constantly emerging assemblage combining all the above phenomena.
In iBorder/ing, automatically assembled and assessed hypothetical ‘life signatures’ (Amoore 2013: 81) spread through inter-operative databases and frame the everyday practices of police and border guards who encounter the marked emergent subjectivities. This way, virtual profiles pointing to mere possibilities of future actions and intentions entail actual consequences for certain non-normative subjects. The critical question then becomes whether, or not, such negative consequences at least in part lead to the actualization of the very intentions these technologies claim to identify and avert. Seen from this vantage point, iBorder/ing might be conceived as producing the very threats and aberrations it allegedly identifies and prevents.
iBorder/ing as a cultural technique connects the concrete subjectivities of situated individuals to biometrically and algorithmically determined data doubles populating databases and spread sheets. Practices and technologies of iBorder/ing, as such, selectively activate and operationalize various contingent identity-potentials inherent in these doubles that then feed back into the lives of these individuals entailing concrete physical and embodied effects. In this perspective, categories such as trusted traveller or terrorist threat emerge not as a priori givens justifying particular state conduct, but as the contingent results of technologically facilitated projections of state power pointing to possible futures. The concept of iBorder/ing enables border research to engage with these complexities of contemporary border regimes and practices by productively combining methods and insights from traditional top-down approaches with the phenomenological and critical frameworks providing alternative accounts from below.
1 ‘State-driven’ includes activities delegated to transnational or private actors, which then implement measures on behalf of states.
2 For an overview of the documents leaked by Snowden see the online archive established by the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression at https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/cgi-bin/library.cgi and the documents available via The Intercept at https://theintercept.com/documents/.
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