On the border with D&G

Question 1

How do Woodward and Jones to rethink the border?

Answer 1

Outside the border’s material preoccupations

Question 2

How do Woodard and Jones follow on from Smith and Katz (1993: 68)?

Answer 2

In respect to spatial concepts that “a new spatialised politics is to be coherent and effective, it will be necessary to comprehend the interconnectedness of material and ideational space”

Question 3

How can D&G be ushered in to enact the call made by Smith and Katz to dismiss the border?

Answer 3

• Dismiss the idea of the border as a metaphor
  
  • Aka the conveyor belt par excellenceof representation)
• Highlight the productive materialism of D&G’s “becoming”
• Theorise the becoming-border through the concept of (de)territorialisation

Question 4

WHy are borders never truly static or fixed?

Answer 4

• They should be conceived as fluid and manifold in nature
• Ontological multiplicity of borders (Sohn, 2016)

Question 5

What is Balibar’s issue with D&G over issues of the state, instiutions and borders and how do Woodward and Jones dismiss these?

Answer 5

• Questions their insistence on doing away with the state and on espousing smooth space that are too abstract
• Woodward and Jones (2005) show this to be a false act with the example of La Resistencia

Question 6

What is the continued importance in undoing physical barriers?

Answer 6

• Continued importance to make connections, open up spaces and undo fixed mental and physical barriers
• Travel in space, between identities, not so much to undo them but rather question the subject, identity and the state
• Only then can we make dashed and dotted lines of borderlines

Question 7

What is the problem of conceiving the border in a metaphoric sense?

Answer 7

• ​Absolutist versions of spatial thinking that may de-materialise and therefore de-politicise social space
• Act as if borders did their work solely within the nether-land of abstract neutrality (Woodward and Jones, 2005)

Question 8

What is the key to overcoming the division between metaphor and materiality in D&G’s work?

Answer 8

• Explicitly rejection of the term metaphor
• Metaphor for them as an idealist relation that uses ‘series and structure’ to produce degrees of resemblance and difference between a set of terms (ATP)

Question 9

Why is the border metaphor problematic?

Answer 9

Problematic because it presupposes on a unified transcendental identity on either of its sides

(Woodward and Jones, 2005)

Question 10

What is more productive then using the metaphor border?

Answer 10

• Therefore, more productive to begin with the fragmented pieces as they are already assembled; ‘in the middle’ as Doel (1999) often says
  
  • For D&G the pieces produce a whole that is immanent to the multiplicities that constitute an assemblage
  • Indicates not Identity or essence but rather a temporary stabilisation

Question 11

How do Woodward and Jones (2005) apply D&G’s philosophy of concepts as material and productive?

Answer 11

Woodward and Jones (2005) apply their efforts to unhinge calcified language regimes that are aimed at remapping the terrain of thought so as to welcome in a host of new becomings

Question 12

How should the concept and process of bordering should be understood?

Answer 12

As an event of becoming

Question 13

What does bordering describe?

Answer 13

• Bordering describes vast array of affective and transformative material processes
  
  • Rhizomatic connections that form open territories that are not constricted by the enclosing frame of rigid borderlines (Conley, 2005)
  • Follows D&G critical view of spatial models defined by vertical orderings that have dominated the West -> Space as a pre-existing and a simple décor for human action

Question 14

How does bordering produce an escape from insititutionalisation?

Answer 14

• Does this by producing affects that operate outside of the influence of surviving organised assemblages
• Lines of escape are productive bodies that are capable of new affects

Question 15

What does deterritorialisation and the heterogenesis it produces do?

Answer 15

• It produces are processes that bring forth socio-spatial complexity that was disguised by the function and categorical divisions of institutionalisation
• Deterritorialisation facilities new forms of bordering

Question 16

How does de/reterritorialisation play out within the expansion of capital under globalisation?

Answer 16

• Capital is content to limit the transformations of the process of bordering
• Capitalism is continually reterritorialising with one hand what it is deterritorialising with the other (AO: 259)
• The political potential of any deterritorialised smooth space is therefore always at risk of a capitalist overcoding of social relations

Question 17

How is smooth space created by the global expansion of capital across national borders?

Answer 17

• Epitomised by global expansion of US constitutional project to rearticulate open space and reinvent diverse relations in networks across an unbounded terrain
• Resulting smooth space, while potentially a site of resistance against State striation, is overtaken by capital as a site for connecting several networks of control at once

Question 18

What is La Resistencia?

Answer 18

• An organisation dedicated to fighting the criminalisation of immigrations by US Border Patrol and by police and vigilantes who enforce over the US-Mexican Border
• Ground their opposition in the guarantee that “all persons have a right to work”
• Engaged in a strategy to unmap the borders in the world

Question 19

How are members of La Resistencia recognisable?

Answer 19

• By blue triangles they wear on their tops that read “we are all illegals”
• Blue triangle appropriated form its use in Nazi Germany, where it identified “stateless people” àsolidarity with “illegal aliens”

Question 20

How does La Resistencia’s slogan disrupt state territorialisations of subjectivity?

Answer 20

• Illegal serves as an ontological legitimation for violence
• Slogan smooths the border by delegitimating exclusivity nationalisms
• This border-disordering is simultaneously ordering, encompassing all bodies living within it and offering a new transcendent body, a new “We’, that no longer identities with the State

Question 21

What do smooth spaces generated by assemblages like La Resistencia resist?

Answer 21

Resist both:

• Striating force of the State and the smooth reterritorializations of capital
• Borderlines themselves through advocation of the bordering activity of becoming

Question 22

How does the dichotomy between spatial transformationa and national attempt to solidify and prioritise the border?

Answer 22

• Necessary component to striation of space
• Ordering of thought that take the border to be prior to materiality of space and its becomings
• Speaks to development of discourses of immigration “invasion”

Question 23

How does La Resistencia’s slogan reverse the ordering of thought across spatial transformation and national identity?

Answer 23

• La Resistencia’s cry for “We Are All Illegals” reverses this ordering, deterritorialising the “native” and setting the border off on a new line of flight
• Deterritorialise to destabilise identity (Sohn, 2016)

Question 24

How do assemblages such as La Resistencia take their line of flight?

Answer 24

• Take their lines of flight from what they are bordering against striations, organisations and institutions
• La Resistencia as an expression of nomadism; machinic undoing
  
  • Eludes capture and traces its own lines of flight
  • Becoming-revolutionary here for D&G as they trace new maps and invent new lines of flight