Borders in Motion
We live in an age of movement. More than at any other time in history, people and things move longer distances, more frequently, and faster than ever before. We live in an age of world historical global migration, increasingly rapid climatic changes, of high-speed digital images, of accelerating universes and accelerated particles. All that was solid melted into air long ago and is now in full circulation around the world like dandelion seeds adrift on turbulent winds. We find ourselves, at the turn of the twenty-first century, in a world where every major domain of activity, from nature and society to the arts and sciences, has become increasingly defined by patterns of motion that precede and exceed human agency.1
We can no longer continue on with the same old theoretical tools under these circumstances. We need a new theoretical humanities that no longer starts and ends with humans and human systems (language, society, culture, the unconscious, and so on). Today, more than ever before, it is apparent that humans and their systems are not the only agents on this planet. Humans and their social structures are shot through and exceeded by more primary and constitutive material-kinetic processes and patterns. Humans are thus caught up in much larger meta-stable patterns of motion with their own kind of logic, yet to be systematically studied across the disciplines. Matters both living and nonliving (geological, geographical, climatological, microbiological, technological, and so on) are not merely passive objects of human construction. Humans and nonhuman beings are two dimensions or regions of the same systems of collective interactional agency or patterns of motion.
Studying these patterns does not mean, however, that we should abandon the study of human agency and structures. Far from it. The challenge of what is now being called ‘posthumanism’ or ‘new materialism’, of which I see my work as a part, is to provide a new theoretical framework to help us think 184through the entangled continuity of human and nonhuman agencies that now confront us. The natural sciences, typically charged with the study of nonhuman structures, have largely treated these structures as independent objects of subjective knowledge, without attending to the active role their objects of study have played in the shaping of scientific knowledge itself.2 The sciences, just as much as the humanities, therefore require a new theoretical foundation that takes seriously the collective agency of humans and nonhuman systems as dimensions of something else—of what I call ‘kinetic systems’. The anthropocentric project has come to an end.3 We have crossed the threshold of a new Copernican revolution. Now is the time to put forward new ideas, such as a theory of kinetic systems.
The contribution of my chapter to this larger project is to show some of the political consequences of posthumanist kinetic systems with the aim of avoiding ‘inhumanism’.4 In the hopes of bringing the theoretical humanities closer to a more posthuman and movement-oriented perspective this chapter proceeds in three parts. Part one motivates and contextualises the shift in the theoretical humanities away from thinking about anthropocentric systems—starting with Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of assemblages. Part Two then provides a definition of and argument for a shift towards a movement-oriented perspective for thinking about politics in particular. Part three provides a concrete example of how this new perspective helps us to think about the contemporary border politics.
From Human to Posthuman Systems
My aim in focusing on patterns of circulation or systems of motion is to contribute to the theory of ‘systems’ or ‘structures’, which takes seriously the agency and mobility of nonhuman matters. In politics, for example, the focus of this chapter, I show that humans are only some of the agents involved in the patterns or regimes of circulation. All kinds of geographical, geological, biophysical, technological and architectural matters play an active and constitutive role in the expansion of bordered societies and the expulsion of the migrant bodies that sustain them. In the case of climate change, both historical and contemporary, this is obvious. Climate change is expected to nearly double global migration in the next twenty-five years. Human social movement both shapes and is shaped by changes in climate and geology. Together they comprise an interactional system. In architecture, too, geology plays an active role shaping humans in places with minerals, who in turn reshape the mineral sources through buildings, which in turn structure human and animal regimes of social motion in ways not entirely under their control.
185In short, instead of looking strictly at human agency or human structures we should look at the whole kinetic pattern or regime of motion within which human and nonhuman agencies both circulate together. The aim of this kind of kinetic new materialism is not to strip agency from humans but rather to locate it within larger structures of collective kinetic agency in which humans are part. Movement is something that all matters do. So instead of beginning our studies with language, consciousness, power or even life, starting with motion provides us with a shared and materialist basis for posthuman systems analysis.
Perhaps one of the most important precursors to the study of posthuman systems and agencies is the concept of agencement, developed by the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and translated into English as ‘assemblage’. The French word agencement comes from the verb agencer, ‘to arrange, to lay out, to piece together’. The noun agencement thus means ‘a construction, an arrangement, or a layout’, in contrast to the English word ‘assemblage’ meaning ‘the joining or union of two things’. This difference being noted, I will continue to use the English word assemblage but in reference to the original French meaning. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage makes three major contributions to any future posthuman system theories.
Heterogenesis. The first major contribution is that it provides an alternative to the theory of unities. The concept of organic unity is the linchpin of anthropocentrism and ‘closed systems’. Without the organic unity of the anthropos distinct from nature, anthropocentrism never gets off the ground. A unity is defined by the intrinsic relations that various parts have to one another in a whole. A unity is an organic whole whose parts all work together like the organs of the human body. Each organ performs a function in the service of reproducing its relations with the other parts and ultimately the harmony of the whole organism. A heart separated from a body does not survive as a ‘heart’, since the function of a heart is to circulate blood through a body. Similarly, the organism does not survive without a heart, since it is the nature of the organism to have a heart.
The unity of an organic system is given in advance of the emergence of the parts and subordinates the parts to an organising principle or spirit. Unities can develop themselves, but they never change the whole of what they are. Thus unities do not allow for the possible emancipation or recombination of their parts without destroying themselves in the process. On the other hand, when component parts subsist independently from their internal relations within a unity they cease to be unities and become mechanisms: defined 186only by their external relations. As Hegel writes, ‘This is what constitutes the character of mechanism, namely, that whatever relation obtains between the things combined, this relation is extraneous to them that does not concern their nature at all, and even if it is accompanied by a semblance of unity it remains nothing more than composition, mixture, aggregation, and the like’.5
In contrast to organically unified systems, assemblages are more like machines, defined solely by their external relations of composition, mixture and aggregation. In other words, an assemblage is a multiplicity, neither a part nor a whole. If the elements of an assemblage are defined only by their external relations, then it is possible that they can be added, subtracted and recombined with one another ad infinitum without ever creating or destroying an organic unity. This is what Deleuze and Guattari paradoxically call a ‘fragmentary whole’.6 The elements of the assemblage are ‘not pieces of a jigsaw puzzle’, they say, but like a ‘dry-stone wall, and everything holds together only along diverging lines’.7 Each new mixture produces a new kind of assemblage, always free to recombine again and change its nature. Thus, as Deleuze says, ‘in a multiplicity, what counts are not the terms or the elements, but what is “between” them, the in-between, a set of relations that are inseparable from each other’.8 The assemblage constructs or lays out a set of relations between self-subsisting fragments—what Deleuze calls ‘singularities’. ‘The system’, Deleuze says, ‘must not only be in perpetual heterogeneity, it must also be a heterogenesis’.9 Humans and human systems, for Deleuze, are not discrete unities cut off from the influence and agencies of the material world.
Event. The assemblage’s second major contribution to posthuman systems is that it provides an alternative to the logic of essences. The essence of a thing is what uniquely and necessarily defines it; in other words, what it is about a thing that makes it what it is such that it is not something else, that endures despite all its unessential aspects. This is the second great bastion of anthropocentrism insofar as it provides the basis of a hierarchy between fixed classes or species of beings. The problem with this sort of question is that the answer requires us to already assume the finished product of what we are inquiring into. Assuming the thing to be the complete product or closed system, we simply identify the enduring features of its history and retroactively posit them as those unchanging and eternal features that by necessity must have pre-existed the thing.
In contrast to this, Deleuze and Guattari do not ask ‘What is . . .?’ But rather how? Where? When? From what viewpoint? And so on. These are not questions of essence, but questions of events. An assemblage does not have an essence because it has no eternally necessary defining features, only contingent and singular features. In other words, if we want to know what something is, we cannot presume that what we see is the final product or that this 187product is somehow independent from the network of social and historical processes to which it is connected. Systems are relational.
For example, we cannot extract the being of a book from the vast historical conditions of the invention of an alphabetic language, distribution of paper, the printing press, literacy, and all the social contingencies that made possible the specific book of our inquiry with all of its singular features (colour, lighting, time of day and so on) and all the conditions under which someone is inquiring into the book. A vast network of processes continues to shape the book, and thus there is no final product. We do not know what the book might possibly become or what relations it may enter into, so we do not yet know its universal or essential features. We know only its collection of contingent features at a certain point in its incomplete process. As Deleuze says, ‘If one insists, the word “essence” might be preserved, but only on condition of saying that the essence is precisely accident, the event’.10
Collective Agency. The assemblage’s third major contribution to posthuman systems is that it provides an alternative to anthropocentric theories of agency in which only the human acts. The idea that only humans have genuinely free action is very old, but lies at the heart of humanism. Human agency is linked not only to the unity of the human subject but also the essence of the human being, distinct from others, to have free, conscious action in the world. Agency is tied to freedom, and freedom is tied to consciousness, which is something possessed only by humans. Anthropocentrism has used this theory as a weapon to subordinate the actions of all beings without consciousness. Humans act freely, but animals, plants and minerals act by necessity. Nonhumans move, but this movement is not a genuinely free or agential movement. A contemporary version of this still persists in various structuralisms and poststructuralisms grounded in collective human agency.
In contrast, Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the assemblage offers us a truly posthuman theory of collective agency. There are geological, biological and technological assemblages just as there are political, literary and musical ones. They all mix together freely, collectively transforming one another. Metal, for example, has a geological and material agency all its own that humans follow into the earth and that transforms them collectively: metallurgy. Deleuze and Guattari thus describe ‘the immanent power of corporeality in all matter’ as ‘a material vitalism’. ‘Because metal is the pure productivity of matter, those who follow metal are producers of objects par excellence’. Metallurgists, they say, have relations with ‘the others, those of the soil, land, and sky’.11 Metal liberates itself from the mines using humans and in turn is transformed by metal’s particular agencies to take on many hardened forms: weapons, armour, horse-mounted weapon assemblages and so on. Humans and their social structures are the way they are in part because of their particular location near metal mines, relations with metallurgists, and 188whether the metal ore is wealthy or poor, powerful or weak. The human-metal assemblage is a collective one in which humans act through metal and metal acts through humans.
These are the three major contributions of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage to posthuman systems theories. They are the beginnings from which posthumanism emerged from poststructuralist theories grounded in strictly human systems of language, power, economy, the unconscious and so on. There is, however, much work yet to be done and new moves still to make beyond Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of assemblages.12 For example, more recent contributions to posthumanism have developed and expanded this systems approach to important areas in feminist, decolonial, disability, critical race, and queer theories, as well as critical science studies, previously underdeveloped in Deleuze and Guattari’s work.13
My own unique contribution to this growing tradition is to focus on systems or patterns of motion and mobility. In particular, I would like to argue in this chapter that such a movement-oriented approach allows us to see something extremely counter-intuitive about political borders: that they are in motion and circulation.
Within the thriving posthuman systems tradition, one way of thinking about systems is by looking at their motion—what I call ‘kinetic systems’ or ‘kinetic structures’: A kinetic system is different than the ‘structures’ found in both structuralism and poststructuralism. A kinetic system is, first of all, not a reductively anthropocentric structure that explains all the others (power, language, economics, the unconscious and so on), nor is it a single total structure with no ‘outside’ to it, or even some combination of such structures like various Freudo-Marxist (post)structuralist positions. Kinetic structures are not anthropocentric because what is in motion are matters both human and nonhuman, with their own kinetic agency. Since all matter is in motion the study of kinetic systems or structures allows us to look at both at once. Kinetic structures are not reductive, or total either, because what is primary is not the kinetic structure itself but the flows of matter that compose, decompose and recompose the emergent patterns.
Kinetic systems theory is thus both inspired by but distinct from new materialist vitalism and from Deleuzean nomadism.14 Kinetic systems are distinct from ‘vitalist new materialisms’ in which the motion and activity of matter is explained by recourse to something else: ontologically ‘vital powers’ or ‘forces’ of the Spinozist or Deleuzian variety.15 Kinetic systems are also distinct from the Deleuzean theory of nomadism, defined by the 189‘immobility’ of speed and the ‘motionless voyage’ of the nomad.16 Kinetic systems theory is not a theory of powers, forces or immobile speeds, but empirically and historically emergent patterns of motion.
The study of kinetic systems is thus not an ontology of becoming. It is a practical and historical study situated in the present. Like the owl of Minerva, theoretical practice flies at dusk after the day is done, and looks back on its immanent conditions. However, once it has seen the practical and historical conditions of its own appearance, it then descriptively transforms them, not from nowhere, but precisely from the very point from which it is at: the present. Theoretical description is thus always backwards-looking, like Walter Benjamin’s kinetic reading of Paul Klee’s Angel of History. The angel of history theoretically faces the past but is continually and blindly propelled forward into the future. As Marx writes of his method in the ‘Postface’ to the second edition of Capital:
Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development and to track down their inner connection. Only after this work has been done can the real movement be appropriately presented. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is now reflected back in the ideas, then it may appear as if we have before us an a priori construction.17
Kinetic systems are therefore historical; that is, immanently extracted from the past, from the perspective of the present. This practical approach is different from the more ‘conceptual’ approaches found in certain ahistorical versions of structuralism and poststructuralism.18
Movement is a common feature of all posthuman systems. In contrast to essences, forms and structures, which are defined by stasis, immutability, fixity and anthropocentrism, kinetic systems are defined by their flux, mobility and circulation. Kinetic systems are not just ‘open’ or ‘closed’ at their limits but the whole system is in continual meta-stable motion. Every aspect of the system is a continuously reproduced flow in a mixture of centripetal, centrifugal, tensional, elastic and pedetic motions. A kinetic system, like Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage, is heterogeneous, nonessentialist, nonteleological, and is defined by collective agency.
However, a kinetic system is not the same as an assemblage of heterogeneous or even heterogenetic elements. A kinetic system is instead composed of continuities: flows, folds, and fields of kinetic patterns or regimes of circulation through which flows of matter are continuously reproduced 190and transformed. Assemblages, Deleuze and Guattari say, are ‘fragmentary wholes’ where ‘everything holds together only along diverging lines’19 and are composed of ‘singularities’. Kinetic systems, however, are not defined by their fragments or wholes but by their continuities and folds. They hold together not by divergence but by knotting and knotworks. Their collections are not defined by singularities but by confluences, conjunctions and circulations.20
The goal of what follows next is to provide an elaboration of kinetic systems theory and its consequences in the domain of border politics, or what I have called elsewhere ‘kinopolitics’. Instead of adopting the typical anthropocentric categories of political analysis (citizens, rights, states, laws and so on), I believe that there are numerous important implications for shifting our perspective on politics from anthropocentric systems and cultural structures to one of material kinetic systems. For example, if we define political systems not by their anthropocentric and ideological content (authoritarianism, liberalism, Marxism and so on) but more fundamentally by their patterns of motion, then political theory can provide a much closer analysis of the material and kinetic systems within which humans and nonhumans share collective agency and responsibility.21
Kinopolitics is the theory and analysis of social motion: the politics of movement. Instead of analysing societies as primarily static, spatial or temporal, kinopolitics or social kinetics understands them primarily as ‘regimes of motion’. Societies are always in motion: directing people and objects, reproducing their social conditions (periodicity), and striving to expand their territorial, political, juridical and economic power through diverse forms of expulsion. In this sense, it is possible to identify something like a political theory of movement.
However, a political theory of social motion based on movement, not derived from stasis, time, or space, will also require the definition of some conceptual terms important for this analysis. The core concepts in the definition of social motion are ‘flow’, ‘fold’, and ‘field of circulation’, from which an entire logic of social motion can be defined. After we lay out these concepts in Part Two, we can look more closely in Part Three at the concrete consequences this theory has for our understanding of how social borders work.
Flow. The conceptual basis of kinopolitical systems is the analysis of social flows. The key characteristic of flows is that they are defined according to their continuous movement. In this sense, the philosophical concept of flow parallels the historical development of the fluid sciences, aerodynamics and 191hydrodynamics.22 In fluid dynamics, a flow is not the movement of fixed solids analysed as discrete particles, as it is in solid mechanics; the presupposition of the fluid sciences is continuum.23
However, measuring ‘a’ flow is difficult because a flow, like a river, is indivisible and continually moving. Thus there is never only one flow or any total of flows, but a continuous process. A flow is by definition a nonunity and nontotality whose study can never be completed because it keeps moving along to infinity like a curved line. However, regional stabilities composed of a certain confluence or flowing-together of two or more moving streams do exist.24 One flow does not totalise or control the other, but the two remain mixed like different regions in the same fluid. Confluent flows are diverse but also continuous and thus overlap in a kind of open collection of knots or tangles. In this sense, flows are not only physical, metabolic or statistical but also social. Kinopolitics is precisely the analysis of social flows.
A flow is not a probability; it is a process. A political philosophy of flows is an analysis of their bifurcations, redirections, vectors, or tendencies—not their unities or totalities. The science of probability assumes that a flow is a percentage of 100 (i.e., a totality): x / 100. A percentage presumes a knowledge of the whole such that the per- is a part of the known cent-, or whole. But a flow is not a part in a whole (even a fragmented whole) it is a percentage of infinity: x / ∞. For this reason flows include chance, uncertainty and events. Every point or node in a network already presupposes a more primary process that made it. A point, node or singularity is simply something passed through and traversed by flows. This also explains why social flows, and borders in particular, are so poorly understood in terms of inclusion and exclusion. Nothing is done once and for all: a flow is only on its way to something else. One is never completely included or excluded but always inclusively excluded or exclusively included: hybrid.25 Movement, as a continuous flow, is always both/and: it is an inclusive disjunction.
Finally, flows are just as difficult to study as they are to control. They are not controlled by blocking or stopping them, but rather by redirecting or slowing them down. Every systemic aim for totality is confronted with the continuity and nontotality of flows that leak from its periphery. The control of flows is a question of flexible adaptation and the modulation of limits. Accordingly, the politics of movement is first and foremost defined by the analysis of continuous movement, changes in speed and the redirection of flows.
Fold. The second basic conceptual term of kinopolitics is the fold. If all of social reality comprises continuous flows, folds explains the phenomenon of relative or perceived stasis. However, this relative stasis is always secondary to the primacy of the social flows that compose it. A fold is not something other than a flow; it is the redirection of a flow back onto itself in a loop or 192junction. In this way, the fold is distinct from a confluence. A confluence is an open whole of overlapping flows, but a fold occurs when a single flow loops back over itself. A fold remains a process but a vortical process that continues to repeat in approximately the same looping pattern—creating a kind of mobile stability or homeorhesis.26 A fold is the joining together of a flow with itself. The point at which the flow returns to itself is an arbitrary one, but also one that constitutes a point of self-reference or haptic circularity that yokes the flow to itself (see figure 10.1).
The fold then acts like a filter or sieve that allows some flows to pass through or around the circle and other flows to be caught in the repeating fold of the circle. The movement of the captured flow can then be connected to the movement of another captured flow and made into all manner of mobile technologies: a vehicle for travel, a tool for moving the ground or a weapon of war. But the yoking of the flows also augments them, not necessarily by moving them faster or slower but by putting them under the control of something else: a driver. The driver is not necessarily a person but the given point at which the flow intersects with itself. Although the flow is continually changing and moving around the loop, the driver appears to remain in the same place. In this sense, the driver absorbs the mobility of the yoked flow while remaining relatively immobile itself: a mobile immobility, a relative immobility that moves by the movements of others.
The concept of the fold stands in contrast to the concept of node, developed in spatial location theory and the geography of movement. For example, Lowe and Moryadas define movement as the routes between prior discrete nodes. Movement is purposive, and ‘each bit of movement has a specific 193origin and destination. … Our schema is predicated on the existence of nodes prior to the development of networks and movement. … Without nodes, why is there movement, and where is it consigned?’27 Kinopolitics offers an alternative to this sort of static and spatialised theory, which has been thoroughly critiqued elsewhere.28 In fact, one could easily invert Lowe and Moryadas’s question and ask, ‘Without movement, how did nodes or stable points emerge in the first place?’ Placing the fixed nodes first means that movement is always already yoked to an origin and destination, so there is no fold. Bergson argues that we will never understand movement beginning with immobility. My argument is that movement cannot be understood as a route between presupposed origins and destinations, and that junctions are not fixed nodes given in advance of movement.29 Folds, as the joining of flows, are secondary to the continuous movement of those flows.
Field. The third basic term of kinopolitics is the field of circulation, which connects a series of folds into a larger curved path. This curved path continually folds back onto itself, wrapping up all the folds together. Circulation is the regulation of flows into an ordered knotwork of folds, but flows are indivisible, so circulation does not divide them but rather bifurcates and folds them back onto themselves in a series of complex knots. Since flows are continuously variable and the junctions are vortical, circulation is dynamic. It acts less like a single ring than like an origami object that brings together multiple folds, changing the neighbourhoods each time it folds. Even to remain the same, circulation has to keep changing at a relatively stable rate. Since flows have no absolute origin or destination, neither does circulation; it always begins in the middle of things (Figure 10.2).
Circulation, just like flows, is not well understood by using the concepts of exclusion and inclusion. The conceptual basis of circulation is that something goes out and then comes back in, again and again. It is a continuum. In this sense, circulation is both inside and outside at once. It is a multifolded structure creating a complex system of relative insides and outsides without absolute inclusions and exclusions, but the insides and outsides are all folds 194of the same continuous process or flow. Each time circulation creates a fold or pleat, both a new inclusion and new exclusion are created.
However, circulation itself is not reducible to just these two categories. The aim of circulation is not only to redirect flows through a network of multiple folds but also to expand them. Just as flows are yoked into folds, so are folds conjoined together through circulation. The folds remain distinct, but flows tie them together. Through circulation, some folds act together (by connecting flows) and become larger; others separate and become weaker. Circulation turns some folds away and merges other folds together in an expanding network. As a circulatory system increases the power and range of its folds, it increases its capacity to act in more and more ways. It becomes more powerful. Circulation is more complex than movement in general or even harnessed movement (fold); it is the controlled reproduction and redirection of movement.
With the basic terms of kinopolitics in hand—flows, folds, and fields of circulations—we are now in a position to see two examples of how this changes the typical political theory of borders based on stasis and blockage.
A kinopolitical and posthuman systems theory of the border allows us to overturn two commonly held but false beliefs about how borders work. First, we tend to think of borders as static structures under the control of human agents. On the contrary, what I would like to show next is that borders are in constant motion and have a material nonhuman political agency of their own. Second, we tend to think that the primary function of borders is to keep people out or let them in. Again, this only appears to be true from the perspective of human agency and human structures. In fact, on the contrary, the main function of the border is not to stop movement but to circulate it.30
Thesis One: The Border Is in Motion
Borders are always and everywhere in motion. It is precisely the mobility of borders themselves as nonhuman agents that continuously modulates and multiplies social flows.
This is at first glance a highly counter-intuitive thesis. What I am saying is that the problem is not so much that the border is too fixed and impassible, but precisely the opposite. It is because the border is so malleable and fluctuating—continuously moving between the two sides it separates—that it ends up changing the topology of the two sides and thus the figures defined by them. Borders are not static. They are open kinetic systems. They are always 195made and remade according to a host of shifting material variables. In this sense, the border should not be analysed according to motion simply because people and objects move across it, or because it is ‘permeable’. The border is not simply a static membrane or space through which flows of people move. In contrast to the vast anthropocentric literature on the movement of people and things across borders, there is, unfortunately, relatively little analysis of the motion of the border itself. Even many so-called theorists of flows, fluidity and mobility such as Manuel Castells and Zigmunt Bauman continue to describe the border in primarily extensive and spatial terms: as ‘borderscapes … shaped by global flows of people’, or as ‘the material form of support for flows’,31 whose mobility or fluidity is purely ‘metaphorical’.32
The movement of the border is not a metaphor; the border is literally and actually in motion in several ways.33 First, the border moves itself. This is especially apparent in the case of geomorphology: the movement of river borders, the shifting sands and tides along coastlines, and so on. The border also moves itself in not-obvious ways, such as the constant state of erosion, decay, and decomposition to which every physical object on earth is subject. This includes the crumbling of mortar that holds walls together, rains and floods that rot wooden fences, fires that burn down buildings and towers, rust that eats holes through fences and gates, erosion that removes dirt from underneath a building, and so on. Every physical border is subject to the movement of constant self-decomposition, which has consequences for migrants who, for example, use these weak spots for crossing. Or authorities may take advantage of this nonhuman political agency and leave these spots weak in order to force migrants into fatal situations such as the Devil’s Highway on the US-Mexico border, boat passage across the Mediterranean or dangerously cold mountain passages in the Alps. Human and nonhuman political agencies are thus two sides of the same pattern of motion that ‘funnels’ migrants to their death. From a naively anthropocentric perspective, these migrant-border deaths look like unfortunate accidents of the nature of those borders. In fact, however, the material agency of the sea, mountains and desert are part of the agency of the border itself in a certain pattern of funnelled motion.
Second, the border is also moved by others. This is especially apparent in the case of territorial conflicts in which two or more social parties negotiate or struggle over land divisions; political and military conflicts over control of people, land and resources; juridical partitions of legal domains or police municipalities; and economic reforms that directly change trade barriers, tariffs, labour restrictions and production zones. Borders with large zonelike areas may persist as sites of continual negotiation, slived differences, and movement, like the settlements on the West Bank. The status of the migrant as enemy combatant, or settler, fluctuates alongside the fluctuations of the border.
196But the border is also moved in not so obvious ways, such as the continual process of management required to maintain the border. Without regular intervention and reproduction (or even legal or economic deployments), borders decay, are forgotten, are taken over by others, weaken and so on. Borders are neither static nor given, but kinetically and materially reproduced. Humans intra-act with borders and their environments, each reproducing the conditions for the other. As Nick Vaughan-Williams writes, ‘None of these borders is in any sense given but (re)produced through modes of affirmation and contestation and is, above all, lived. In other words borders are not natural, neutral nor static but historically contingent, politically charged, dynamic phenomena that first and foremost involve people and their everyday lives’.34 However this same fact also makes possible the arbitrary use of police power, the profiling of migrants, micro-economies of bribery and so on. Even in US sanctuary cities anyone can still report suspected migrants to federal immigration enforcement. In this sense anyone can become a border, even migrants themselves.
The common idea many people have of borders as static walls is therefore neither conceptually nor practically accurate. If anything, borders are more like motors, folds or bifurcation points. Just like any other motor, border technologies must be maintained, reproduced, refuelled, defended, started up, paid for, repaired and so on. In short, a vast nonhuman knotwork of agencies is involved in reproducing and transforming border systems. This is not a new phenomenon that applies only or largely to contemporary life;35 borders have always been mobile and multiple. Humans and nonhumans have always managed borders in some form or another throughout history.
Therefore, the distinction between natural and artificial human borders posed by early border theorists36 cannot be maintained. This is the case not because borders today are radically different than they used to be, but because throughout history ‘natural’ borders were always delimited, disputed, and maintained by ‘artificial’ human societies. A river only functions as a border if there is some social impact of it being such (i.e., a tax, a bridge, a socially disputed or accepted division). Additionally, so-called artificial borders always function by cutting or dividing some ‘natural’ flow of the earth or people (who are themselves ‘natural’ beings). A dramatic example of this is the US government’s attempt to change the naturally ‘insecure’ topology of the border outside San Diego by moving two million cubic yards of earth (enough dirt to fill the Empire State Building) from a nearby mountaintop, only to have it erode within months, destroying the new roads and the whole ecology. Borders are in constant motion and intra-action with humans, each one continually supporting and undermining the other at the same time.
197Thesis Two: The Border Is a Process of Circulation
The second counter-intuitive idea rendered visible by our kinopolitical framework is that borders function not to keep in or keep out but rather to circulate social motion. Borders, like migrants, are not well understood only in terms of inclusion and exclusion, but rather by circulation. In part this follows from the first thesis about the mobility of the border. Since the border is always in motion, it is a continually changing process. Borders are never done ‘including’, someone or something. This is the case not only because empirically borders are at the outskirts of society and within it and regularly change their selection process of inclusion, as we said before, but also because exclusion is not synonymous with stasis. The exclusion is always mobilised or circulated.
In practice, borders, both internal and external, have never succeeded in keeping everyone in or out. Given the constant failure of borders in this regard, the binary and abstract categories of inclusion and exclusion have almost no explanatory power. The failure of borders to fully include or exclude is not just an effect of the contemporary waning sovereignty of postnational states;37 borders have always leaked. The so-called greatest examples of historical wall power—Hadrian’s Wall and the Great Wall of China—were not meant to keep people out. Rather, their most successful and intended function was the social circulation of labour, taxes and nonhuman provisions.38 Humans thus circulated as the bearers of nonhuman agents. Or nonhuman agents (food, building materials, weapons, etc.) circulated as bearers of human agents. The two function as sides of the same form of motion.
This continues today with the US-Mexico border wall.39 The success rate of illegally crossing is around 90 percent, according to several studies. Most of the traffic across the border is related to economic regulation. Thus one of the main effects of borders is not keeping out but circulating bodies, both human and nonhuman, in a particular pattern: by criminalising them, killing them, extracting a tax from them, and so on. Contrary to most critiques of the US-Mexico border, this is poorly understood as a ‘failure’ of the wall—rather it simply succeeds in other ways that may not be directly ‘keeping people out’. Here again, anthropocentric politics misses the whole pattern of motion because it looks only at humans and passive objects. If we look at the agency of nonhuman matters we see a much more complex picture in which animals, insects, water, weather, wind, dirt, trash and rivers are constantly crossing the border, circulating back again, often transforming the border each time.40 Such material agencies circulate and thus cooperate with and against various humans, sometimes making the border more or less dangerous, more or less stable, more or less effective, and so on.
198But border circulation is not just the ongoing process of dividing; its technologies of division also have a direct effect on what is divided. What is divided by the border is also recirculated, defended, maintained, and even expanded, but also expelled and pushed away. The whole system, not just part of it, is continually reproduced by continuous flows and bifurcations. Division is not simple blockage—it is a redirection. What is circulated does not stop after the division—it often comes back again and again. Thus ‘it is the process of bordering’, as border theorist David Newman writes, ‘rather than the border line per se, that has universal significance in the ordering of society’.41 The border is the social technique of reproducing the limit points, after which that which returns may return again and under certain conditions (worker, criminal, commuter, etc).
The border does not logically ‘decide’, as Agamben says. Rather, it practically redistributes. Undocumented migrants, for example, are, for the most part, not blocked out but rather redistributed as functionally ‘criminalised’ persons into underground economies. Or an economic surplus is extracted from their incarcerated bodies as they pass through the private detention-industrial complex. They are released just on the other side so they may go through the process again, creating a whole regime of social circulation.
However, since the border is not a logical, binary or sovereign cut, its processes often break down, function partially, multiply or relocate the division altogether. Instead of dividing into two according to the static logic of sovereign binarism, the border bifurcates by circulation and multiplication. The border adds to the first bifurcation another one, and another, and so on, moving further along. Instead of ‘the sovereign who decides on the exception’, as Carl Schmitt writes,42 we should say instead that it is ‘the border that circulates by division’.
The age of the human, as the sole origin and end of the theoretical humanities and sciences, is over. The twenty-first century marks a Copernican turn toward the emergence of new posthuman systems. Motion is at least one major defining characteristic of these systems with relevance for every kind of material agency.43 Political theory, in particular, cannot go on as if humans and human social structures were not entangled in much larger regimes of motion and material agencies: climate change, mass migration, landscape and environmental transformations, and the agencies of the matters and critters that populate and suffuse all political events.44
In this short chapter, I have tried to briefly introduce some key methodological concepts and practical consequences I have developed for thinking 199about border politics in terms of entangled material kinetic agencies, beyond merely human agents or human systems. Future work is needed not only to develop other posthuman system theories but also to apply those currently available to new domains. I look forward to seeing and participating in this invention of a ‘new humanities’.
Notes
1. This is an ambitious claim and requires more than the few paragraphs I have offered to prove. In fact, each area (politics, science, and art) requires its own book-length argument showing the historical and contemporary importance of motion. I have tried to do this in Nail 2015; 2016; forthcoming 2018c; forthcoming 2018d.
2. For a full critique see Barad 2007.
3. See Braidotti 2013.
4. This is a much larger project. See Nail forthcoming 2018d.
5. Hegel 1999, 71.
6. Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 16.
7. Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 23.
8. Deleuze and Parnet 1987, viii.
9. Deleuze 1994, 365.
10. Deleuze 1994, 91.
11. Deleuze and Guattari 2007, 411–12.
12. For example, much important work has been done by Rosi Braidotti (2012) and Patricia MacCormack (2012).
13. See Braidotti 2012; Buchanan and Colebrook 2005; Bignall and Patton 2012; Roets and Braidotti 2012; Saldanha and Adams 2013; Nigianni and Storr 2012; Haraway 1991; and De Landa 2013.
14. I am in agreement with Rosi Braidotti (2012, 256) when she writes that ‘From Aristotle to Freud woman has been described as immobile, that is to say passive, or quite inactive’. I see much to praise in Deleuze’s theory of nomadism, but for the same reason Braidotti cites, I must part company with Deleuze on the existence of the immobility or ‘immobile journey’ that Deleuze and Guattari explicitly attribute to the nomad.
15. See Bennett 2010; Connolly 2013; Coole and Frost 2013.
16. ‘It is thus necessary to make a distinction between speed and movement: a movement may be very fast, but that does not give it speed; a speed may be very slow, or even immobile, yet it is still speed.’ Hence the nomad’s ‘motionless voyage.’ Deleuze and Guattari 2007, 381, 159, 197, 199.
17. Marx Capital, 102.
18. For a full discussion of the three differences between ‘kinetic systems’ and Deleuze’s assemblages (history, becoming, and vitalism) see Nail 2018d, chapter 3; and Thomas Nail 2018a.
19. Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 16, 23.
200 20. For a complete account of this theory see Nail 2018d, book one.
21. Theories of collective agency have so far been largely captured by liberal political theory and grounded in the colonial statism. This has restricted collective agency to citizens (against migrants) Western colonial states (against the colonised), and humans (against the devalorisation of nature, women, animals, and the colonies). On the further critique of this restricted notion of agency see Bignall 2012.
22. Fluid dynamics also has its conceptual origin in the work of Lucretius, as Michel Serres (2000) argues. See also Nail 2018a.
23. In fluid dynamics the density, pressure and velocity of fluids are assumed to be well defined at infinitesimally small points, which vary continuously.
24. Serres 2000, 141.
25. Papastergiadis (2000), Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), Homi Bhabha (1994), and others argue that we should understand the migrant in terms of hybridity.
26. Michel Serres develops a similar theory of vortices: ‘The vortex conjoins the atoms, in the same way as the spiral links the points; the turning movement brings together atoms and points alike’ (Serres 2000, 16). Deleuze and Guattari then further develop this under the name of ‘minor science’ (2007, 361–62).
27. Lowe and Moryadas 1975, 54.
28. Lowe and Moryadas have been thoroughly critiqued in Cresswell 2012, 27–29.
29. Peter Haggett (1966, 31) puts movement first, but only arbitrarily: ‘It is just as logical to begin with the study of settlements as with the study of routes. We choose to make that cut with movement’.
30. For much more detailed treatment, defense, and history of these thesis and others see Nail 2015; 2016.
31. Castells 1996, 376.
32. For examples of the metaphorical usage of concepts of mobility and fluidity see: Urry, 2000, 2 ‘to deploy “fluidity” as the leading metaphor for the present stage of the modern era.’; Bauman, 2013, 2.
33. By saying the border is not a metaphor I mean that the mobility of the border is not ‘like’ something else that actually moves—implying that the border has no actual movement, but only a metaphorical, ideal, or representational one. This does not mean that there is no such thing as metaphor—only that linguistic metaphor presupposes matter that moves. This is directly attested to in the original Greek meaning of the word metaphor as ‘transport’. Metaphor is a kinetic process by which the features of one material thing are literally or affectively transported to another. The danger is that the original kinetic definition has been lost in favor of an idealist and representational model that simply compares essences by analogy. If a soldier is the human brick stacked into the military wall, it is not because the soldier is like a brick or the brick is like the soldier, but that both actually move according to the same border regime. They share the same affective capacity without being modeled on one another. For more on this idea of affect vs. metaphor see ‘Becoming Intense, Becoming Animal’ in Deleuze and Guattari 1987.
34. Vaughan-Williams 2009, 1.
35. Borders have always been mobile. Their management has always been crucial. This is not a new phenomenon—as some have argued. ‘If the major focus of past 201research into borders was concerned with the way in which they were demarcated and delimited, it is the management of the border regime which is of greater importance today.’ Newman 2003, 16. See also: Johnson et al. 2011, 61–69.
36. For a summary of historical positions affirming a difference between natural and artificial borders see Prescott 1987, 51. See also: Ancel 1936, 51 on ‘frontiére naturelle’.
37. Brown 2010.
38. See Nail 2015, chapter 3.
39. This argument is fully defended in Part III of Nail 2015.
40. Squire 2015.
41. Newman 2003, 15.
42. See Agamben 1998.
43. This is not strictly unique to the twenty-first century. Only now because of its predominance do we realise that the processes have been at work the whole time.
44. For several interesting examples of such interspecies politics see Haraway 2016, chapter 1.
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