Building Walls and Dissolving Borders

The Challenges of Alterity, Community and Securitizing Space

Max O. Stephenson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317170792
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Paz y desarrollo global

Walls play multiple social, political, economic and cultural roles and are linked to the fundamental question of how human beings live together. Globalization and urbanization have created high population density, rapid migration, growing poverty, income inequality and frequent discontent and conflict among heterogeneous populations. The writers in this volume explore how walls are changing in this era, when social containers have become porous, proximity has been redefined, circulation has intensified and the state as a way of organizing political life is being questioned. The authors analyze how walls articulate with other social boundaries to address feelings of vulnerability and anxiety and how they embody governmental processes, public and social contestation, fears and notions of identity and alterity. This book's authors explore walls as the consequence of a changing web of social relationships. Whether walls are physical objects on the landscape or metaphors for difference among specific groups or communities, the writers consider them as heterotopias, powerful sites around which ways of living together are contested and transformed. They also investigate how architectural planning concerning walls may de facto become a means of waging war, as well as how demolishing walls may give way to new ways of imagining security.

PART I
Walling Spaces, Making Identity

Chapter 1
Bordering Violence? Natality and Alterity in Hannah Arendt’s Thought

Alexander D. Barder and François Debrix

Introduction

Many political thinkers have tried to remove violence from the idea of the political. Removing violence from politics is a conceptual exercise that has often required the mobilization of bounding, bordering, or walling techniques and concepts. Indeed, in order to keep a political domain free from violent actions (either from outside the polity or even from inside the political domain), delimitations and delineations—sometimes, with clear physical markers such as walls, fences, borders with officers and guard towers and so on—are typically called upon to separate the members of the polity (who are said to be worthy of both protection and freedom) from nonmember others or aliens whose very existence as political subjects is doubtful if not downright unacceptable (Walker 1992, Doty 1996, Campbell 1998b). Political demarcations such as walls, boundary lines, fenced-in or gated transit spaces or buffer zones thus generally function as both operators and enforcers of difference, otherness and alienation. They are instruments of identity (and difference), recognition (and rejection) and political belonging (and political antagonism), often in the name of national security, but also of freedom, particularly political freedom from violence.

Any serious reflection on the meaning, place and force of those boundary lines, walls, fences and other techniques of demarcation and alienation necessarily starts with an understanding of how bounding and bordering practices take shape in the first place in political theories and ideologies that, perversely, claim to have the freedom of (certain) political subjects and the realization of their “good life” in mind. These political theories and ideologies do establish and rely on a crucial paradox, though. Thought by some to be the paradox of liberal political sovereignty (Connolly 1993, Honig 2009, Brown 2010), this paradox is a product of the liberal claim that the demand for freedom, liberty, democracy or pluralism nonetheless may justify limits, controls, modes of containment and, indeed, borders. Few liberal democratic and allegedly pluralistic theories of political sovereignty—particularly when placed in national contexts—can do without borders. This paradox, we would argue, transcends the issue of national or state sovereignty and is at the heart of political theorizations of pluralistic participation in (somewhat idealized) settings that are said not to require sovereignty or the state. Indeed, modern political theories that seek to realize political openness, unlimited plurality and free participation and human creation in the public domain do not escape the paradox. In fact, those theories may be somewhat misleading to the extent that their beliefs about the political appear to be premised on the rejection of restrictive democratic community building and living and of the temptation to bound, wall in and segregate. Yet, as we will show in this chapter, the will to plurality at all costs (a genuine democratic impulse, to be sure) can only be transferred into political reality if limitations, demarcations and boundaries are already included in the political theorizations that call for an unlimited pluralism in the first place.

Hannah Arendt is one of those theorists who have ardently called for political pluralism and free unobstructed access to the public realm. And yet, in Arendt’s work, the specter of a paralyzing violence, one that could render the exercise of political power meaningless, is never far from the surface of political life. Thus, in a pluralistic theoretical and political context, Arendt may offer one of the most acute examples of the paradox of democratic politics described above. Namely, in order for the political domain as the source and embodiment of pluralism to remain free from violence (a violence that Arendt sees as the main impediment to plural politics), boundaries and other delimiting ways of thinking the possibility of political power must remain in the picture. More than remain, in fact, such demarcations must be reimagined, rethought and made to work in a non-sovereign pluralistic democratic context.

Arendt’s political theory has not always been interpreted along these lines. In fact, insisting on the rebounding and redelineating dimensions of her pluralistic theories may be found to be a profane reading of Arendt’s work. Still, we believe that it is a valid and, as we will show below, theoretically substantiated claim that must be entertained if Arendt’s theorizations are not to become victim of assumed political interpretations and analytical dogmas. Moreover, it is crucial to involve Arendt, one of the most prominent late-modern thinkers of democratic plural possibilities, in any critical analysis that aims to show that the making and enforcing of political boundaries, fences, walls and demarcation lines (conceptual as well as physical) are not limited to theories of sovereignty (thus, in this way, we depart from Wendy Brown’s recent arguments) (Brown 2010).

We argue in this chapter that the central Arendtian concept of natality, considered by many Arendtian thinkers to be a safeguard against the return of violence in the political and a protection against the ever present threat of totalitarian force, is particularly illustrative of the tension (or paradox, once again) present in Arendt’s thought between the possibility of plurality on the one hand, and the bounding of the political community on the other. This tension reveals that bordering practices may always be present (perhaps primordial) in theorizations of political pluralism that, on the surface, seem to wish to achieve precisely the opposite, that is to say, a way of thinking political life away from divisions, demarcations and differences. Put differently, Arendt’s ambiguous notion of natality shows that, if bordering concepts and practices are always part and parcel of the political edifice (even a political edifice not premised upon state sovereignty, as we mentioned above), alterity or otherness may never be thought in any way other than in the form of alienation. Thus, through a revisiting of Arendt’s thought on natality (irreverent to some Arendtian scholars as it may be), we may also be able to identify an important connection in pluralistic political theories between bounding and bordering ways of thinking and a subterranean reconstruction of alterity/otherness as division, distance and, indeed, alienation.

Let us be clear, though. We are not suggesting that Arendt’s political project is without merit. Nor are we arguing that Arendt’s political theory is always suspect or hides the marks of a political violence, a violence that Arendt famously sought to distance herself from. Arendt’s writings are too rich, too important, too complex and often too inconsistent for such grand critical claims to be made. There are, no doubt, many interesting and problematic paradoxes in Arendt’s thought. While these paradoxes can lead to crucial insights (for example, about the possible pervasiveness of bounding/demarcating ways of thinking plurality and alterity, the very paradox we are pointing to in this essay), they matter primarily because they are invitations for further thinking. Arendt’s paradoxes invite us to introduce interrogations and perhaps moments of doubt at the very point where affirmations (about political openness, the availability of free choice, otherness and so on) are likely to be advanced. Thus, if nothing else, the discovery of the paradox of natality in Arendt’s work encourages one to be more alert about the construction of borders and demarcations and about the return of otherness as alienation in democratic and pluralistic theory in general. The paradox of natality in Arendt makes us realize that we can never assume that a political theorization will be immune from the advocacy of border constructs.

Similar to what several Arendtian scholars have done, we could return to the places in Arendt’s texts that are dedicated to violence and politics to establish Arendt as a crucial thinker of political pluralism, boundless commonality or non-otherness driven democratic living. In our view, too many scholars have uncritically written on these dimensions of Arendt’s thought (Benhabib 2003, 2010, Cotter 2005, Williams and Lang 2005, Barber 2010). Such an uncritical approach does not take us very far. Instead of this blind acceptance of Arendt’s so-called project, we problematize Arendt’s own attempts at answering past, present and future instances of bounding, delimiting and estranging violence in the modern world. Once again, to do so, we bring to the fore the key Arendtian concept of natality. Following the insights of theorists like Julia Kristeva (1982) and, more recently, Peg Birmingham (2006), we suggest that Arendt’s natality as the beginning (birthing, creating) event that propels her vision of a free, open and participatory political domain can also be read as a certain ontological or even ontopolitical opportunity (Connolly 1995, Campbell 1998a) to transmute the greatness of the free political deed into a form of violence and alienation. For Arendt, natality—the moment in which each human being comes into the world (and this coming into the world can be multiple and repeated for each human life since, for Arendt, there are actual births and political births, or rebirthings)—represents a new beginning, a departure from the old or the settled, a creative instance (Arendt 1998: 9). Following Greek etymology, Arendt associates this creative instance with arche, or the capacity for origination and rule (both simultaneously) (Markell 2010). As Arendt states, “the Greek word for beginning is arche, and arche means both beginning and principle” (1982: 212). Arche and natality, in Arendt’s reading, are thus not just any purposeless moments of creation. Rather, they represent creation or novelty with an organizing principle, particularly as they apply to human affairs. Natality embodies arche since it marks and identifies the presence of an ontological/ontopolitical event characterized by the human ability to introduce into the world ever novel dimensions and directions on behalf of an open, always to be reinvented collective domain. But whereas Arendt emphasizes the positive, creative and freeing aspect of natality and further insists on the perpetual performative reenactment of this new beginning (1998: 247), Kristeva’s own analysis of Arendt’s thought (through Kristeva’s discussion of the concept of abjection, in particular) (1982, 2001) asks whether natality cannot instead serve as an ontological/ontopolitcal moment of horrific violence. Kristeva’s challenge to Arendt’s natality is striking and somewhat uncompromising. Natality as a moment of horrific violence, one that would be deeply embedded in the psychological, symbolic, but also cultural “givenness” of each human being vis-à-vis the world (and vis-à-vis others), is a possibility that seems anathema to Arendt’s perspective. Still, we wish to investigate further Kristeva’s reading of natality through abjection in order to show that Arendt’s natality is no guarantee that boundaries or walls will not be erected between violence and the domain of the political. In fact, despite, or even because, of natality, conceptual borders remain in Arendt’s thought, and they may establish a pervasive mode of “democratic violence” at the very heart of the plural and democratic polis. Moreover, such a recurring or persistent violence may reinforce a form of alterity as alienation, even if such alienation is not always too visible precisely because natality is assumed to be a foundational principle of pluralism (and an answer to totalitarianism).

Our argument about Arendt’s natality and its linkage to alterity will further reveal that the need to draw political, ethical, legal or, indeed, geographical boundaries or walls to try to maintain a genuine space of political plural activity and public participation is a pernicious move that ends up replicating on the inside of the polis vicious forms of violent alterity. This claim rejoins one of our previous analytical conclusions with regards to another Arendtian concept, that of agony that, we argued, could become a justification for the deployment of heroic but boundless violence (Debrix and Barder 2011: 33–38).

Arendt’s Polemic Against Violence

In On Violence (1970), Arendt makes explicit earlier distinctions between violence and the political that she had sketched out in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1994a) and The Human Condition (1998). In this latter essay, Arendt seeks to draw clear lines of demarcation between the concepts of power, violence, strength, force and authority in order to avoid an analytical confusion that she believes has been far too predominant in modern political thought. Power, for Arendt, must be considered as “the human ability not just to act but to act in concert” (1970: 44). She adds: “Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together” (1970: 44). Differently, strength refers to a “singular” individual property that can be witnessed in relation to others, as in physical strength (1970: 44). Force, Arendt argues, is the “indirect energy released by physical or social movements” (1970: 45). Authority is vested in the individual for the purpose of eliciting obedience without resort to persuasion or command (1970: 45). Often, authority is contingent upon respect. Violence is in contrast not just to power, but also to all the previously introduced notions. Violence, Arendt intimates, is a type of fabrication or poiesis. And, unlike the previous concepts, it is mostly instrumental in nature. But the key feature of Arendt’s understanding of violence is its opposition to power (1970: 47). Such an opposition to the concept of power is crucial to the unfolding of politics. Politics, in this Arendtian perspective, is premised on a fundamental demarcation of power from violence (a demarcation meant to shield power, too) (Owens 2005). Put differently, from the beginning of her analysis of power and its relation to violence, Arendt has recourse to divisions, distinctions and categorizations. For Arendt, the political is not just a response to violence. It is rather a domain of possibility that is never to be confused with violence. The political, then, is as much a cradle for the human capacity for new creations as it is a boundary making and marking practice. The political is a domain of possibility (ever new possibilities) for the human agent precisely because it emerges as a primordial demarcation or separation from violence. Arendt’s political defines a conceptually bounded realm (if not a national territory)—the public domain—at the very moment when it embodies human plurality. Put in yet another way, the political is an essential mark of difference for Arendt. And it is at once difference as the recognition and celebration of plurality and difference as opposition and alienation. Political power for Arendt thus separates an inside from an outside that, in this case, is understood to be violence. Arendt writes:

Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course its end is the disappearance of power. This implies that it is not correct to say that the opposite of violence is nonviolence: to speak of nonviolent power is actually redundant. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it (1970: 56).

Arendt goes on to claim that violence can win battles, often by limiting the ability of any group to act in concert. But violence can never establish rule and order (arche) through the emergence of a genuine authority. And thus, should violence not be clearly distinguished from power, it would inevitably lead to a deterioration of political power, a power that must remain rooted in plurality, public voice, and open consent. Moreover, because violence is based on instruments or tools, not on a common purpose (Arendt 1970: 46), it always desperately needs to justify itself to achieve particular ends. By contrast, power, Arendt argues, needs no such justification since it is a genuine commonality of meaning, action and intention. Again, if violence were not to be separated from power, the very place that is that of the political could become infiltrated by totalitarianism, a term that at times encapsulates all of violence’s horrors for Arendt.

This argument about the danger of violence’s infiltration was introduced by Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism. In this work, Arendt noted how a “boomerang effect” (1994a: 155) (a form of returning contagion) can take place as a result of the Western imperial march of colonial expansion. Such an expansion by means of capitalism, overseas domination and often raw totalitarian violence, Arendt asserted, was actually hostile to the way the nation-state conceived of itself as the embodiment of a bounded, homogeneous and sovereign polity. But the inability of Western sovereign states and colonial empires to negotiate the distinction between their empire building “abroad” and their “democratic” governance “at home” resulted in the infiltration of violent practices from the outside (the colonies) into the inside (the metropoles). This return of an outcast violence into the realm of (Western) democratic politics, despite the West’s constructed conceptual borders and ideological walls allegedly meant to buffer it from the violent (read non-West) outside, brought the issue of legitimacy (and its crisis) to the forefront of late 20th-century Western political projects and practices (Barder 2009). When the conceptual buffers are no longer strong enough and the “boomerang effect” manifests itself, the legitimacy that a liberal-democratic political order requires through a renewed appeal to the consent of the governed may begin to be questioned. As the crisis of legitimacy calls into question communal consent and public action, liberal-democratic institutions tend to have recourse to unrestrained forms of violence too, thus mimicking the violent practices deployed in the “periphery.” This turn to violence and the crisis of legitimacy it reinforces close off even further the public sphere as a place of debate and political engagement, in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Building Walls, Unmaking Borders: the Securitization of Space and the Making of Community Imagination
• PART I: WALLING SPACES, MAKING IDENTITY
• PART II: ENCLOSING A POROUS WORLD, SECURITIZING THE MOVEMENT OF PEOPLE
• PART III: WALLS AND THE HYBRIDIZATION OF MEMORY
• PART IV: CONCLUSIONS
• Conclusions
• Index