From Americana to the Borderlands Consciousness

On the Evolution of Violence from the Frontier to the Geo-Political Border between the
United States and Mexico, as examined through Cormac McCarthys Blood Meridian

By: Enrico Doan

Prof. Gillian Harkins
English 496
Spring Quarter 2014

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Every day, the U.S.-Mexico border in the Southwestern United States is immersed in
turmoil and unrest. It seems that there is a constant stream of new topics in the news headlines
about immigration reform, political lobbying, and economic sanctions along the border. The
border and its intrinsic instability, perhaps due in part to the sheer complexity of the issues at
hand, present a rather concrete and tangible problem with rippling ramifications for both nations
involved. This massive space between the two nations constantly generates an innumerable
amount of discourses on the milieu of aspects, of which I have only noted a fraction, of this
problem. Perhaps more importantly, the space of the geo-political border is highly contested, and
at the heart of this conflict is an incredibly intense violence a violence that takes on many
forms and employs different mechanisms of power.
Born and raised in southern Los Angeles, my daily grappling with the incessant haze of
disarray has, unfortunately, given me a first-hand experience with the sheer intensity of this
violence that pervades every crevice and oozes out of every crack in the land. It is this encounter
with perpetual violence that drives me to the goal of this project, which is to take the first steps in
constructing a genealogy of the violence of the geo-political border between the United States
and Mexico. More specifically, in this inquiry, I hope to address how the violence which is
centralized along the space of the border propagates outwards in every direction, affecting the
lives of citizens of both nations.
Of course, an endeavor of this magnitude would be impossible to undertake without some
way to narrow my focus and methodology. Thus, I will approach this considerable undertaking
through a rather unique framework. I will, instead of dedicating my analysis to the geopolitical
border itself, read the space of the frontier. I argue that the frontier, far from being a historical
relic confined to our past, is a residual element present in the very existence of the geo-political
border; this is especially true in the case of the U.S.-Mexico border. To refine my argument

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further, I will read the space of the frontier through a close-reading of the novel Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy. This choice is not random; Blood Meridian has gained notoriety for its
graphic content, its caustic characters, and certain passages which defy the reader to form any
kind of concrete reading. Perhaps most importantly, Blood Meridian is also particularly fitting
because many critics (both academic and popular) have dismissed the violence in the novel as
having no specific symbolic function.
It is to this common sentiment that I disagree with. I argue that violence is actually
integral to the workings of the frontier as it exists in McCarthys text. Additionally, by reading
McCarthys novel, I am able to refine my definition of violence. Rather than being an allencompassing word that can account for any power-wielding system or methodology, violence,
as I am using it, takes on different mechanisms and characteristics in different situations. In my
attempt to start a genealogy on the geo-political border, my close-reading of Blood Meridian has
allowed me to define two major kinds of violence which I will focus the majority of my time on
in this thesis. The first of these is something I term racial violence and in my definition, I
mobilize the Foucauldian formulation of biopower. In this section, I track the character of the
kid and many of the scenes of physical violence that are described in McCarthys novel to argue
on the specific mechanisms of this racial violence. The other major form of violence which I
dwell on is termed representational violence, by which I am referring to the Benjaminian
notion of violence which is done in the act of selective history making. In this section, I analyze
the character of the Judge and ask how his power is the paradigm upon which nations model
their own representational violence.
By reading a fictional text such as Blood Meridian, my hope is that I can raise the
question of how it is that our jobs as literary critics is to tackle violence as the media through
which we can critically examine our responsibilities. Moreover, I ask what our potential is to

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take literature and apply resistance to the world around us. Through this framework, we can
identify how it is that the frontier is actually present in our current moment, by being a residual
element of the geo-political border. Additionally, I ask how it is that the space of the geopolitical
border in the Southwestern U.S. actually intensifies and morphs the original mechanisms of
violence, race, and power of the frontier. Thus, my hope is that this study will help to explicate
how we as critics can actually take literary and cultural studies and actually produce some
tangible effects through our immersion in the madness of the Southwestern United States and the
U.S.-Mexico border.
Theoretical Framework: Defining the Frontier, and Racial and Representational Violence
Before beginning my analysis, however, I would first like to construct a theoretical
framework which gives me the vocabulary required in order to make any complex arguments. I
first define the frontier as a tumultuous, violent space. To do this, I turn to Michael Redclifts
book, Frontiers: Histories of Civil Society and Nature as a reference. In his book, Redclift writes
on the relationship between rival societies as they vie with one another for supremacy in the
contested zone of the frontier. He does this by examining five separate cases in which civil
societies emerged from the frontier space and eventually manage to carve out their own holdings,
boundaries, and property. Redclift argues that the frontier is a constantly refashioned space,
ideologically and culturally as much as geographically, in which competing definitionsof
progress meet and collide (206). Thus, the frontier cannot be reduced to a space where only two
parties exist (the colonizer and the colonized). Instead, the frontier consists of a dense web of
ideologies and power, as they compete for the domination of the contested space. Indeed, the
frontier is a space where there is shifting competition for the right to define populations, power,
and politics. As such, one can never concretely crystallize any moment of the frontier every
point of a frontiers time is distinct and unique. The frontier is not merely a homogenous

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description to describe a time before the existence of a border which has been strictly defined.
Rather, it is a complex space that exists wherever two or more disjointed notions of progress
compete.
The next of these framework texts is Foucaults writing and his multi-faceted
development of the notion of biopower. When Foucault first writes on biopower in the last
section of History of Sexuality, he argues that the locus of biopower is found in the realm of
sexuality and reproduction. Importantly, biopower is distinct from an older, sovereign power,
which exercised the power to let live and make die. Biopower also exercises the power to make
live and let die (Foucault, 138). This subtle change emphasizes a switch to a form of power
which treats humans as members of specific populations; these populations in turn are selfregulatory and constantly seek to foster the lives of its members. Foucault argues that sexuality
is a vital component of the vocabulary of biopower because reproduction is the central
mechanism through which populations can manage their members and their numbers. Because
every individual has some personal stake in sexuality and reproduction, biopolitics justifies its
regulation of birth and mortality rates. Attached to this regulatory mechanism is the necessary
intervention into the environment which the population finds itself in. To ensure the lives of its
members and its future members, a biopolitical state must be constantly vigilant, keeping
potential threats to its members at bay. However, I will not focus on Foucaults formulation of
biopolitics with respect to reproduction, but rather as a deployment of his terms in light of racial
and physical violence.
This language of the protection and optimization of a population and physical violence is
further mobilized in Foucaults series of lectures, Society Must Be Defended. More specifically, I
am interested in how Foucault more complexly develops his definition of racism. This is because
Foucault argues that racism is the mechanism through which the biopolitical state can make its

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members live and to regulate when they are allowed to die. Racism, for Foucault, is also at the
core of any tension or violence between two populations. In fact, Foucault writes that racism is
primarily a way of introducing a breakbetween what must live and what must die and that
the first function [is] to fragment, to create caesuras within the biological continuum addressed
by biopower (254-255). That is, racism stratifies people and causes them associate with other
members of their population. Racism produces an us and them. From this point, Foucault
develops the second function of racism, which seems to be the most concrete aspect. Foucault
writes that racism creates a new biological type relationship: the more inferior species die
outthe more I as species rather than individual can live, the stronger I will be, the more
vigorous I will be. I will be able to proliferate (255). Just as racism produces a population for
individuals to identify with (indeed, to become one smoothly running part among many others),
it simultaneously produces the other populations as threatening enemies to the wellbeing of
our own race. Thus racism justifies violence violence which, as long as it make[s] life in
general healthier for ones own population is desired and even expected. In his formulation,
then, Foucault argues that the most violent states are, necessarily, the most racist (and vice
versa). In this manner, the death function of the biopolitical rises to the forefront, because it
becomes necessary to relieve other inferior races of their lives for the sake of our own
population.
History of Sexuality and Society Must Be Defended have produced the language within
which I mobilize the term racial violence. As I mentioned before, however, racial violence is
only one of the kinds of violence which I examine in this thesis. The other kind is something I
call representational violence, and to elaborate on this, I turn to Benjamins Theses on the
Philosophy of History. Benjamins writing is focused on a new method of historical analysis,
one that is not obsessed with the notion of progress, linear history, and a correct narrative. For

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Benjamin, the notion of human history as one, singular, unbroken historical narrative is a
fundamentally incorrect formulation. Benjamin further explains that the past can be seized only
as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again
(255). Thus Benjamins philosophy of history is centered on the moments of danger and the
images of the past that flit by. He warns the historian against the solidification of interpretation
and that like any physical phenomena, the act of observation changes that which is being
observed. He argues that, by subscribing to the truth of the typical, conformist view, historians
actively do violence onto all the narratives that exist. Thus, I call this kind of violence
representational violence because it arises from the dominance of a singular narrative over an
innumerable number of other stories and timelines.
The relationship between Benjamins idea of violence being done onto the numberless
historical narratives can be connected to Foucaults body of work by another essay (interestingly
enough, also written by Foucault). Foucaults essay, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History examines
the physical, biological body as a unique space in and of itself. For Foucault, the body is a blank
canvas upon which history is inscribed. He says that the body is the inscribed surface of
eventsGenealogy is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to
expose a body totally imprinted by history (148). This argument has two major ramifications in
the scope of my paper. The first is that if we accept that the body is totally imprinted by history,
then it follows that the body is inexplicably intertwined with the weak Messianic power and the
time of the now. We can actually treat physical, biological bodies as canvases upon which we can
read both racial violence and representational violence. That is, both kinds of violence exert their
influence and leave their marks on the physical body, and are not merely abstract notions mired
in theoretical debates. The second implication of Foucaults writing is that racial violence and
representational violence are tightly interwoven. I mean this not only in the fact that both kinds

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of violence have their locus of power in the body, but also that, as I will argue later, racial and
representational violence form a circular loop, with either type interacting with and informing the
other. Thus, these five framework texts have produced a methodological entry point into my
analysis of the violent space of the frontier. I have briefly defined the highly contested space of
the frontier, and explicated a variety of terms which I will use in my close reading of Blood
Meridian in the following sections.
A mongrel race: Racial Violence and its Intensification along the Border
In this next section, I will read Cormac McCarthys Blood Meridian as a text which
describes the two kinds of violence that I have elaborated on, as they function in the complex
space of the frontier. Blood Meridian is primarily the story of the kid, an adolescent who runs
away from home and travels around in the Southwestern United States. The kid has a rather
vicious disposition for violence, and eventually finds his way to join the Glanton Gang. The gang
is devoted (and endorsed by United States authorities) to the scalping of Apaches and the
monetary bounties for each scalp that they take. Along the way, the kid meets many questionable,
brutal individuals. The foremost of these is the Judge, an ageless, hairless, powerful individual
who haunts the kid through the novel. Eventually, the kid ages into the man (this transition is
compressed into the span of a few pages) and meets the Judge once more at a bar in Texas.
There, he finds the Judge to have not aged a day, and the scene that follows implies that
something terrible happens to the man while the Judge claims that he will never die. I will return
to the figure of the Judge once more when I discuss representational violence in a later section,
but in this section, I would like to address the racial violence depicted in almost every scene of
the novel, by tracking the narrative of the kid and his actions with the rest of the Glanton Gang.
The kid starts the novel by running away from his home in Tennessee and making his
way to New Orleans. There, the kid seems to regularly come down at night like some fairybook
beast to fight with the sailors (McCarthy, 4). McCarthy writes further on the same page: all

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races, all breeds. Men whose speech sounds like the grunting of apes. Men from lands so far and
queer that standing over them where they lie bleeding in the mud he [the kid] feels mankind
itself vindicated. In this passage, it seems that McCarthys stylistic choice is very deliberate.
This passage is actually startlingly crude, because the sentences that precede it are strikingly
lyrical, even though they merely describe the physical appearance of the kid. The novels short,
brusque sentences actually reinforce the line which describes the sailors and fighters as grunting
[like] apes by mimicking the kind of rudimentary speech a reader might expect apes or other
primates to possess. The characterization of the sailors as a kind of primitive breed seems to
justify the violence that leaves them bleeding in the mud. We see this because the kid survives
the fight, and feels mankind itself vindicated. This vindication sets up the kid as the figurehead
of humanity, surviving and prevailing in its struggle against the other men. Most importantly, to
really clarify the relationship between the violence in this passage and Foucaults biopower, we
can also read the line men from lands so far and queer as feeding into the violence. McCarthy
purposefully sets up this schism between the kid and the sailors, and when read through the lens
of the biopower, this break becomes the division between humanity and animals. The other men
literally become the other.a When this division occurs, it justifies the violence against the
sailors indeed, the elimination of the other has led to the kids continued survival. This fact
thus feeds back and vindicates the violence which occurred in the first place. Using Foucaults
vocabulary, the racial logic that we see constructed here the logic which creates strata and
distinct populations within a specific society is here legitimating the use of violence for the
health of ones own race. The language of this passage is violent in that it reduces people to the
level of animals, while elevating others to a kind of lyrical, poetic humanity. Thus, in the opening

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pages of Blood Meridian, McCarthy has already set up a kind of racial logic which is deeply
intertwined with the violence that he writes on in the rest of the novel.
As we follow the kid further, he sets off from St. Louis heading west, approaching the
present U.S.-Mexico border. At some unspecified location, presumably modern-day Texas, the
kid is recruited to join the United States army and to go soldiering into Mexico. When asked
what compensation he would receive, the recruiting officer answers: Hell fire son, you wont
need no wages. You get to keep everything you can raise. We goin to Mexico. Spoils of war. Aint
a man in the company wont come out a big landowner (McCarthy, 32). This argument briefly
sways the kid, and he consents to meeting the captain of the army for an interview and to learn
more about the expedition. When the captain meets the kid, he warns him that:
What we are dealing with is a race of degenerates. A mongrel race, little better than
niggers. And maybe no betterWe are dealing with a people manifestly incapable of
governing themselves. And do you know what happens with people who cannot govern
themselves? Thats right. Others come in to govern for them. (McCarthy, 36).
In this, and the preceding passage, we once again see a very prominent racial logic. This time,
however, the language is much more explicit and the races in question are not as the previous
passage with animals and mankind. What is at work here is a logic that builds on the basic
biopolitical reasoning. This is a kind of murdering that Foucault argues is still relevantly violent
because of a specific kind of social death. The captain discusses colonization and conquering
with a whimsical tone, and is actually more concerned about how much land they can capture
than the lives that they will trample over. Thus, we see that, while physical killing is still at the
core of the biopower found on Blood Meridians frontier, the methods through which the
biopolitical exercises its power is hardly limited to bodily harm. The ideal of enslavement and
exploitation that is at the heart of this fantasy dreams up the capture and re-tooling of a certain
kind of capital. It transforms human lives and their labor into commodities. Every man in the

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company will come out a big landowner. In so doing, this logic begins to fall into the
category of racial, social violence that Foucault describes in the last lecture of Society Must Be
Defended.
Perhaps most interestingly, this passage demonstrates that the power of biopolitical
becomes appropriated by the apparatus of the nation-state. No longer is biopower some formless
mechanism that floats around, exerting its influences in the individual lives of inhabitants of the
frontier. Rather, the expanding nation-state of the United States accepts (or rather, embraces) the
methods of biopower in order to justify its expansion. As it does so, its citizens become
progressively desensitized to the very violence in which they are participating. This, in turn,
reflects another central tenet of Foucaults formulation of biopower: its ability to self-perpetuate
and seamlessly integrate its way into every facet of peoples lives. Thus, as the nation attempts to
expand and colonize, it convinces its citizens that they are superior human beings and that it is
their duty and destiny to govern for them. They find themselves avidly participating (whether
consciously or not) in the violence, in the conceptualization of different peoples as other, and
spreading that conviction to other brother-citizens.
Of course, it is but a fantasy that these soldiers could simply traipse into foreign land and
claim it as their own. The kid joins the captains expedition, but before they encounter any
Mexicans, they are ambushed by hundreds of Apache warriors. In the gruesome pages which
describe the battle, McCarthy makes liberal use of a rambling, incessant style, where sentences
sometimes run into page-long lengths. The entirety of the scene is one massive, roiling passage,
punctuated only by the line Oh my god (55), spoken when a sergeant realizes they are under
attack. The disconcerting effect of these numerous run-on sentences is that the reader, in her
efforts to make it through the text, almost drowns in the gore and the entrails of the battle. The
tone and imagery of the text lend themselves to imagine oneself as being present in that moment.

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McCarthy, through his writing, helps the reader imagine the chaos of battle and to hear the din of
the battle field as some were pale through the masks of dust and some had fouled themselves or
tottered brokenly onto the spears of the savagesand everywhere the dying groaned and
gibbered and horses lay screaming (57). In using this style, McCarthy makes gut-wrenchingly
visceral the true despair and misery of the battlefield; this desolation is, of course, never
mentioned in recruitment programs. Through the ambush, McCarthy demonstrates that the idyllic
imagery of conquest that the nation imagines is anything but feasible. Rather, the expansion of
the nation, the pushing of the frontier further south and west is a campaign fraught with
casualties, trauma, and suffering. As readers, these passages jar us out of our nationalistic reverie
if we have fallen prey to it and thus been caught in the vision of colonial expansion.
A secondary ramification of this passage is to show, perhaps more explicitly, that the
space of the frontier is not merely a space in which the colonizer slowly encroaches upon and
claims the land and livelihood of the colonized. Rather, even if there are really only two cultures
and societies involved (which is rare, if ever the case), the space of the frontier is a highly
contested area. Going back to Redclift, the frontier reflects growing reflexivity in societies
developed out of the conflicts they produced in remote and empty lands (Canada, Ecuador,
Mexico) (207). As I mentioned in my framework, the frontier is not merely a space of
competition between colonizer and colonized. Instead, the frontier is the prized space which
is competed for by a number of different ideologies and systems, and Redclift argues that power
can be exerted in many directions by many different systems.
Going back to Blood Meridian, by exposing us to the reality of the sheer complexity of
the tensions and conflicts found on the frontier, McCarthy shows us that the biopower, which we
saw so freely used by the nation-state, is also very prevalent in every other competitive society
which is vying for the space of the frontier. Just as, previously, we saw both mankind itself

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vindicated and the promise of the spoils of war, here, we see a very similar racial logic with
the Apaches. McCarthy writes that the Apaches, seizing them up by the hair and passing their
blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigsfell
upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries (56). While not immediately explicit, just
as the logic of biopower legitimates the campaign of expansion, the Apaches, too, seem to justify
their violence through the logic of biopower. While the ambush could be read as a pre-emptive
strike taken to protect their people from colonization, the scene could also be read in the sense
that the Apaches become the us and the army becomes the them. By killing most of the
expedition, the Apaches ensure their prolonged survival. In addition, the Apaches act of scalping
and sodomizing the soldiers seems to declare their status as the superior race. The debasement
of the soldiers and their ability to take home trophies for proof of their victory are but rewards
for the successful defense of their race. Thus, McCarthy uses a very similar language and logic to
show us that the racial violence of biopolitical systems is a universal one, and is not merely a
characteristic of the American expansion.
One of the unsettling sentiments that arises from this passage, and the numerous other
gruesome passages that follow, is the sense of the frailty of life itself. McCarthy casually
dedicates a single sentence to the death of several key characters in the book, writing: they
enteredand slew Gunn and Wilson and Henderson Smith each in turn as they reared up
drunkenly and they moved on (286). Passages such as these, where McCarthy tells the reader of
characters death and immediately followed by the phrase they moved on, are particularly
unsettling. This is because his writing feels like it is literally discarding those that he is talking
about. Despite the investment put into writing about these characters and their lives, McCarthy
kills them off, and rewards the reader for that trauma with not a hint of sympathy. As he writes
they moved on, McCarthy forces us to literally move on as well, not sparing us any kind of

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respite in order to dwell on those characters deaths. Rather, he pushes the reader to keep reading,
only to encounter another death in the next paragraph. This time, the next characters death is
expected.
Of course, the very fact that we, as readers, become almost desensitized to the violence of
the novel speaks to something. While McCarthys writing may still be brutal and grisly, we have
come to expect the constancy of death in his world. In one particularly gruesome seen, the
Glanton Gang (the group that the kid joins to hunt for scalps) has raided a small Mexican town.
Glanton, the leader of the gang, executes an old woman. McCarthy writes, the woman looked
up. Neither courage nor heartsink in those old eyeshe put the pistol to her head and firedshe
pitched over and lay slain in her blood without remedy (102-103). In a later scene, the Glanton
Gang similarly kills a middle-aged man, but this time because of a dispute that they have at his
restaurant. McCarthy writes that the mans brains went out the back of his skull and plopped in
the floor behind him. He sank without a sound and lay crumpled up with his face in the floor and
one eye open and the blood welling up (246). Both of these passages contain within them a
sense of silence or lack of drama. Despite the fact that these deaths are executions, the tone with
which McCarthy writes is relaxed. This is in almost direct contrast to the previous scene with the
Apache ambush and is more akin to the style McCarthy employs while describing the kid before
the vindication of mankind scene (see above). Moreover, there is no passion; the tone McCarthy
uses gives a sense of complacency or futility there is no fight left in the dead and dying. They
are simply killed. This sentiment, I argue, highlights the last important aspect of biopower as it
exists in Blood Meridians frontier: that of the make live and let die function. People are
seemingly kept in a state of living, when the natural direction for the body to take would be to
die. Thus, killing allows the body to enter into the realm of death. It becomes a natural act of

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mercy, because it removes the impediments necessary for the body to die, and discontinues the
forced act of living.
Thus far, I have detailed a few major points on the violence of Blood Meridians frontier,
examining the multiplicity of how racial logic justifies violence. How, then, does the physical
violence that I have talked about so far actually relate to the violence that occurs along the geopolitical border? In Phillip Snyders essay Disappearance in Cormac McCarthys Blood
Meridian, Snyder makes an argument about our remembrance of the past especially that found
in Blood Meridian, and how we maintain a kind of romantic nostalgia for the violence of the
past. Snyders argument is that the violence of the text functions as a kind of disappearance,
causing objects and biological bodies to be erased from the sociopolitical context. While
Snyders argument is more related to my upcoming section, I am not engaging with his general
critique so much as I am addressing his treatment of the epilogue of McCarthys epilogue. In the
epilogue of Blood Meridian, a person wanders aimlessly down an expanse of prairie, boring
holes into the ground. The driller starts a fire in each of the holes that he bores, while at the same
time, a group of vagabonds, similar to the driller wander across the row that he has drilled.
Snyders reading of this epilogue is that the driller is the representation of the institution of
barbed wire fences. In the process, he suggests that this is the thematic illustration of the
disappearance of the frontier, and the subsequent establishment of the geopolitical border. Snyder
writes that the epilogue underscores the disappearance of the violent, largely borderless world
of the novel[and] anticipates the fenced-in Southwest borderland world (133). Snyders
reading suggests that the two spaces, the space of the frontier and the space of the geo-political
border, are two separate entities. For Snyder, they are mutually exclusive in their times, and
when the frontier is removed, it is only because of the establishment of the border. However, I
am arguing that the frontier is actually very much still present in our current moment. Rather

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than the frontier being replaced by the border, the mechanisms of the frontier are in fact very
residualb in the space of the border.
Despite the fact that the frontier is residual in the space of the frontier, however, the
border is a very conceptually different space. The border is supposedly established after the
campaign of colonization has concluded, and the major players along the geo-political border are
nation-states. Smaller societies like the Apaches and Mexicans may still be present, but I argue
that their participation in the major violence of the border falls away. To make my argument
about the border as a violent space, I turn to Mbembes Necropolitics to provide reasoning for
this argument. Mbembes essay takes issue with Foucaults formulation of sovereignty, violence,
and biopower, and explores the extreme reaches of biopolitical situations in recent history.
Mbembe writes that Foucaults thesis Nazism and Stalinism did no more than amplify a series
of mechanisms that already existed in Western European social and political formationsis, in
the end irrelevant (23). For Foucault, racism is the rationality for the death function it justifies
the actions of a biopolitical state. For Mbembe, though, the goal of the necropolitical state
(which is the extension and current status of the biopolitical state) is to produce the death
function as a regular aspect of life. It is no longer about racism as a justification, but rather about
the reorganization of hierarchical and physical space to produce the racial. This shift, Mbembe
argues, forms the basis of the insufficiency of biopower to describe the mechanisms of modern
power and politics, and the new necropolitics which he develops explains this production of
the racial and the existence of populations which are termed living dead. While I will not take
up any substantial discussion about whether or not Mbembe succeeds in his replacement of the
biopolitical with the necropolitical, I will pull the production of the racial, and the existence of
the living dead as fundamental aspects of the violence of the frontier.

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Using Mbembe, I argue that the transition from the frontier to the space of the geopolitical border mirrors that of the evolution from biopower to necropower. While the frontier is
essentially emergentc, the border has been established. Were the border a sentient being, it would
desire to stay in place, to continue to exist, and to preserve the integrity of its function. I argue
that the only way that the geo-political border is able to do so is to intensify and perpetuate the
violence of the frontier. Looking at the United States especially, the border is only able to stay
stable because of the transition from the biopolitical to the necropolitical.
To illustrate how the necropower works in the space of the geopolitical border, I turn to
Gilberto Rosass essay The Fragile Ends of War: Forging the United States-Mexico Border and
Borderlands Consciousness. Rosas focuses in particular on the struggles of those who must be
either officially or extra-officially policed, surveilled, or disciplined by forms of power that
stabilize both statesproduc[ing] what I term a borderlands consciousness (82-83). While
Rosas does briefly summarize Foucault, Agamben, and Mbembe, he synthesizes all three
frameworks and analyzes the space through this fragile borderlands consciousness. Rosas
writes that these spectacular displays of state power at precisely the sites where migrants could
blend in with the local U.S.-Mexican population channeled migrants into the unforgiving deserts
of the Southwest (87). This fact, combined with the propagation of the immigrants dream is
precisely the production of racial logic sought by the necropolitical, as described by Mbembe.
The space of the geo-political border, rather than using racial logic to justify violence, creates a
circular logic between the two. If the necropolitical could be said to have a genesis point, it
would begin with the creation of racial logic, which is only made possible by the precise
encouragement and channeling of violence along the border, as Rosas describes in the passage
above. By producing conditions for violence and conflict, the border produces its unique racial
logic as it is established. The border is thus able to self-perpetuate and remain a fixture because

Doan 17
this racial logic produces violence, just as the opposite holds true. Of course, as in the frontier,
violence is not uni-directional forced onto Mexico by the United States (even though, at times, it
may seem that way). Rosas writes of forms of violence exercised by Mexicans on the other side
of the bordersuch violence at the periphery of two nation-states underscores the fragility (94).
Thus, the geo-political border becomes increasingly complex as both nation-states become
participant in the violence and racism that is traded back and forth, strengthening the identity of
the border.
The geo-political border further intensifies the violence of the frontier by creating the
living dead. Rosas writes that officials at the border seek simple responses, in which the
racialization of foreignness equates to a life of poverty. Such routinized state practices
underscore the stabilizing of the state through racialized policing and similar forms of
subjugation at the border (91). Immigrants from Mexico who reside along the border are much
more often than not reduced to lives of labor and poverty, and this trend racializes their
foreignness. As this occurs, the immigrants become stuck in a kind of living death, where
every day of their lives is spent in social marginalization and in conditions in which they live
only in the banality of evilthat is, they had to be racialized (Rosas, 84). This is an
intensification of the murdering (whether physical or social) that I described in Blood Meridians
frontier. Rather than simply dying, the victims are almost artificially maintained in that perpetual
state of death. The cruelty of the violence of the border lies in its ability to indefinitely prolong
the act of killing; the border forcefully makes live those victims who have been already cast
aside to let die. Thus, the mercy that we saw in Blood Meridian, where killing relieves the
other of the burden of their lives, has been transformed into a more effective form of violence
against that other. All of this is done for the sake of self-perpetuation of the geo-political
border space.

Doan 18
Nothing exists without my consent: Representational Violence and the National Model
As I mentioned earlier, racial violence is only one major kind of violence that I read in
Blood Meridian. In this section, I address the second type of violence which I described in my
framework section as representational violence. In Blood Meridian, I argue that the character of
the Judge is the paradigm of representational violence in narratives of the frontier. Just as racial
violence works explicitly on the physical body, representational violence does the same. Indeed,
even the mechanism through which representational violence is intensified along the border is
similar to the intensification of racial violence. In fact, as I shall argue, the nation-state as a
whole adopts the representational violence of the Judge in order to continue to propagate the
geo-political border and that this action constructs a circular interaction between racial and
representational violence.
The Judge, first and foremost, is a man of great knowledge. He chronicles, sketches, and
records every single interesting commodity that he comes across, despite the peril and exhaustion
that seem to be propagating all around him. McCarthy writes about the Judges ability and desire
to see complexities, saying that whether in my book or not, every man is tabernacle in every
other and he in exchange and so on in an endless complexity of being and witness to the
uttermost edge of the world (McCarthy, 147). In this passage, the Judge demonstrates the
enormous and incomprehensible ability to analyze cosmologies something that is beyond the
riddling skills of those common companies in the hunt for scalps. The Judges preoccupation
with the witnessing of the uttermost edge leads to an all-consuming hunt for knowledge
knowledge that drives the world and understands the mechanisms to change it, or rewrite it. The
Judge gains infamy for this ability to connect concepts, parables, and lessons to tangentially
related problems that arise. It is through this cognitive space that we see how vastly in-tune he is
with the cosmologies of universes. Because he understands everything, and does not shy away

Doan 19
from the danger of being a visionary, we, as compatriots on this scalping journey, make him into
our personal prophet.
The Judge discards his biology by discarding his mortality, which is unholy in and of
itself. He is blessed and cursed with immortality, having a ritualized space in the vector of time
that allows him to bear the burden of living and escape from the frightening concept of nonexistence. Many decades after the Glanton gangs journeys throughout the evening redness, the
Judge retains his appearance, having not aged a single day, in comparison to the metamorphosis
of the kid into the man. This immortality cannot come without a job however. There must be
some role that the Judge plays, beyond the gatherer of information, which allows him to continue
to exist in the plane of reality. Without it, the Judge fades from existence, and is forgotten so
largely that he is made mystic. This realization forces us to examine his role as a prophet he
can only claim that he is the eternal dancer and fiddler if and only if he performs a mystic role.
This realization leads us to examine the Judge, not as a fighter, but in his history-making.
The Judges fixation on the pressing of objects into his book, his secrets of knowledge, and the
kernels of imagination ultimately leads to a single goal constructing some sort of historical
narrative. McCarthy writes of the Judge and his habits, the judge sketched in profile and in
perspective, citing the dimensions in his neat script, making marginal noteswhen he had done
he took up the foot guardand then crushed it into a ball of foil and pitched it into the fire
(McCarthy, 146). The Judge then, is the epitome of violent historians. He examines antiquities of
the past, records them in his tome of knowledge, and then proceeds to erase the physical
manifestation of conceptualized culture. This is the most violent act against history, but it is the
most direct way to the creation of his idyllic new world in this act, the Judge is in fact rewriting
history for the purpose of the present and future. He selectively chooses memoirs to remember,
to record events that only he deems worthy for his book, and then constructs a continual

Doan 20
narrative that is, returning to Benjamin, at once a document of barbarism as it is a document of
civilization.
Indeed then, this is his role. The Judge serves as a historian, and reveals to us his history
of Americana he is much satisfied with the world, as if his counsel had been sought at its
creation (McCarthy, 146). And the world does seek his counsel he is the one who constructs
frontiers, who transgresses them, and who writes the definition of the Americana. In this role, he
is an immortal prophet, an exceptionally selective historian, and the ultimate keeper of time and
knowledge. Indeed, anything that exists without his knowledge exists without his consent.
How does the Judge, as the epitome of representational violence, allow us to examine the
space of the geo-political border and its own representational violence? The answer, I argue, is
that the Judge is essentially a model for how the nation-state, as a whole, constructs its own
historical narrative and propagates it throughout its domains. The character of the Judge is a
paradigm upon which the nation-state expands on. Where the Judge was limited to what he could
find, record in his book, and then destroy, the nation-state is only limited in so far as the extent to
which it can construct its own idyllic history.
The creation of this kind of history is one that, when applied specifically to the United
States, creates American Exceptionalism. While exceptionalism has many definitions, the one
that I will mobilize in this paper comes from Donald Pease, who writes about the notion of a
particular strain of superiority in his contribution to the book Keywords for American Cultural
Studies. He writes that:
The U.S. statefound it necessary to justify exceptions to exceptionalist norms. In
recastingdeviations within the historical record, scholars have aligned themselves with
state policy makers by removing these troubling events from the orderly temporal
succession organizing the nations official history. (110)
In his writing, Pease examines what it is about the United States that distinguishes its history
from those of other nations. America is unique in that it chooses deliberately what to forget and

Doan 21
what to glorify. The U.S. state attempts to make a perfect history, and has several mechanisms
to do this. The first is to remove these troubling events entirely from the orderly temporal
succession. Pease identifies this removal of incriminating evidence as the main method through
which America organizes its record. However, he touches on another method through which
America streamlines its historical record, mainly the justification of exceptions to
exceptionalist norms and the recasting[of] deviations within the historical record. In doing
so, the American narrative perfects the moment of the now, and pushes itself towards a desired
future.
Thus, this American Exceptionalism has truly magnified the scope and intensity of the
Judges motivations. The nation-state has seized the mechanisms through which the Judge
received his historical powers, and distributed it to its history-makers and its scholars. By doing
so, it indoctrinates its citizens into the seamless narrative that it desires. This narrative has a
strict genesis point, and a uni-directional movement through time that has led up to this point.
Conveniently, those bothersome patches of the past can be spliced out of the narrative, defeats
glossed over, and the fact of continuing racial discrimination can be marginalized under the
banner of progress.
This exceptionalist logic is also precisely the reason that we are able to apply the
representational violence found in Blood Meridians frontier to the intensification along the geopolitical border. Returning to Rosas, he quotes an officer who describes how he learned to pick
out illegal immigrants as they cross the border: Its hard to explaintheyre just not American
looking. Things like dirty clothes, beat-up dress shoes, shaggy hair, mean theyre a ewey (entry
without inspection) (95). While this passage is similar to when Rosas writes about the
expectation of Mexican immigrants to live in poverty and have simple speech, it highlights an
even greater violence in the Border Patrol. As the officers become indoctrinated in and avid

Doan 22
participants of their occupations, they learn intimately the details of the narrative created for
them by the history of the nation-state. In their training, they learn about the history of the
border, as the U.S. deems it to be. The officers learn of the regions past frontier, of the American
lives sacrificed to carve out an imaginary line one the map that distinguishes the United States
and Mexicod. This narrative reinforces the sanctity of the geo-political border as it currently
exists, and, as Rosas argues, these immersive discourses reveal the blurring of boundaries
between immigrants and racialized citizenry (97). Thus, not only does the geo-political border
intensify the physical, racial violence of the frontier, but it also amplifies the representational
violence that Benjamin describes by immersing the entirety of the nation-states population in its
exceptionalist logic.
It is at this point that we can see the circular interaction between racial and
representational violence which I mentioned above. I argue that this circular feedback loop arises
because of the characteristics of the geo-political border which I have described briefly; namely,
the circularity of the interactions and logic behind both major kinds of violence lends itself to the
self-perpetuation and purported stability of the border. In the intensification of the representative
violence and, as I argue above, the resulting immersion of the natione propagates the logic of the
racial violence that I have described. In turn, racial violence and the logic of bio/necropower
seem to justify representational violence, with all of its propensities to marginalize, erase, and
forget moments in time which break from the constructed, idyllic narrative. Moreover, with the
larger nation-state in mind (and more specifically, with American Exceptionalism), racial
violence repaints certain parts of a nations histories in a perfectly packaged manner.
A validation of sequence and causality: Possible Resistance to Violence along the Border
Why does this all matter? What are the personal ramifications of reading the frontier and
its violence as still present, and indeed, even more intense in the current moments of our time?
This kind of analysis may, at times, seem obsolete and ineffectual due to the very nature of it

Doan 23
being centered on a literary and theoretical close reading. However, I argue that the answer to the
question of how do we resist in a concrete manner to the physical world around us is, once
again, found in writing of Benjamin, and the theory that has sprung up around it. Benjamin
writes that there is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our
coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed
with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be
settled cheaply (256). Thus, Benjamin is calling us to action in remembrance of the wholeness
of the past. He urges us to cast off the tradition of history which seeks to marginalize and
diminish, leaving but a shell of the past which is at once a reflection of the lost and a reminder of
the power of the rulers. The fact that the claim which the past stakes in our lives cannot be settled
cheaply means that we must fight for the past constantly; we must be engaged in a perpetual
revolution. It is this struggle that distinguishes the Messianic from the normal. The Messiah
sacrifices much for these lost and forgotten histories, but for the Messianic, these sacrifices are
worth it to settle this debt to the past. Benjamin urges us to embrace our weak Messianic power,
to engage in a perpetual revolution, and to blast open the continuum of history. Thus, perhaps the
question that we should be asking when seeking ways to resist the hegemony of our current
moment starts with how are we, as critics and as human beings, implicated in the text we have
just read?
Let us then ask that same question with my reading of Blood Meridian and its connection
to our contemporary moment along the U.S.-Mexico border. Blood Meridian is, obviously, not a
classical text. The novel eludes understanding with every sentence, decades are compressed into
the span of a few pages, and the vision of an ideological closure is just that an illusion. Despite
the difficulty of reading such a text, however, the rewards for critically analyzing it are great.
This is precisely because, as Benjamin urges us to do, we are able to examine the past through a

Doan 24
text which does not conform to the idyllic nature of the exceptionalist narrative. Rather, a text
such as Blood Meridian allows us to read the past through a different lens. It is in doing so that
we mount some form of resistance to the conflict and tension of the current geo-political border.
Reading texts like Blood Meridian and actively seeking out narratives and stories that do not
match with the timeline of the American history allows us to engage in a critical remembrance of
the past. Only by refusing to limit our field of vision to a singular narrative can we, as literary
critics, hope to remember the past in all of its wholeness.
This is not to say that we attempt to remember the past as it truly was. Nor am I
arguing that only those narratives that do not conform to the American Exceptionalism are true
or complete. Such thinking is also dangerous, because in doing so, we simply have
transformed the narrative that was previously alternative into the dominant narrativef. We fall
prey to the conforming nature of representational violence by thinking like that, and so, utmost
care should be taken to ensure that our readings are at once effectively resistant and appropriately
scaled.
I also argue that our resistance should not merely be limited to additional readings of nonconforming narratives. I, first, turn to Judith Butlers Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect, in
which Butler argues that the body is not, however, a mere surface upon which social meanings
are inscribed, but that which suffers, enjoys, and responds to the exteriority of the world (3334). In essence, for Butler, lives are vulnerable and precarious, and our responsibility to others is
not merely to see their histories written on their bodies, but to respond to that evident
vulnerability and the social conditions of life (35) which generate such precariousness. This
then, becomes an additional question we have to ask ourselves: how does our literary training
equip and prepare us to recognize human lives as holding some intrinsic value over that of a
blank canvas upon which history is written and violence is done?

Doan 25
The last aspect of the resistance I am proposing is found in Hardt and Negris Multitude:
War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. In Multitude, Hardt and Negri argue that the
multitude, although it remains multiple and internally different, is able to act in common and thus
rule itself. Rather than a political body with one that commands and others that obey, the
multitude is living flesh that rules itself (100). Additionally, each cycle does, in fact, destroy
traditional social and political bodies and create in their stead something new and aberrant, a
monster (214). For Hardt and Negri, these cycles are the cycles in which the multitude arises
out of a common desire for difference; the multitude, in rising up and causing terrifying
disruptions in the dominant system, can easily appear monstrous (192). In keeping with
Benjamins notion of perpetual revolution, the multitude must constantly shift and evolve to
continue seeking difference and change in the land of conformity. Thus we, as literary critics,
must seek to become part of that monstrous entity which is Benjamins perpetual revolution
because it is only in embracing the aberrance required that we can effect real change into the
world around us.
This, then, is the synthesis of our efforts. We have seen physical, racial violence and
representational violence at work in Blood Meridians frontier. I have attempted to explain how
the geo-political border ensures its continued existence through the intensification of said racial
violence through the creation of the living dead along the national lines. In addition, I
discussed the propagation of a particular brand of representational violence I called American
Exceptionalism, and its violence by propagating a united, conformist narrative. In doing so, I
have hopefully highlighted the need for a continual resistance to the violence that rages on along
the U.S.-Mexico border. In my effort to start a genealogy of this space, I have read the transition
from Americana to the borderlands consciousness of the border as it exists now. Along the
way, briefly touched on how to resist the powers which generates such incessant violence.

Doan 26
To truly make this perpetual revolution in our thinking tangible and present in our
contemporary moment, we, as literary critics, need to appropriate the theory discussed and make
it ours. In doing so, we are able to express our resistance in a way that is not merely declarative
but efficacious and provocative. Indeed, we must have a desire for the multitude in order to
radically transform the world (Hardt and Negri, 101). This quest would require us to look to
the past, not as it really was, but rather as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can
be recognized and is never seen again (Benjamin, 257). In doing so, we could acquire our own
weak Messianic power, and affect the world through our fulfilling of our debt to the past. By
reading the violence of the frontier as very real and truly present in our current moment along the
geo-political border, we could engage in the perpetual revolution against racist hierarchies of
power which seek to socially violate, injure, and murder those it deems as unworthy. We could
learn to accept every life as precious. I mean this not merely as a generalized platitude that gets
us nowhere, but rather, to realize that our responsibility is to accept that our lives are
inexplicably bound to others and that it is our duty to question the social conditions of life
(Butler, 35). It means that we look beyond the physical body as a space upon which both kinds of
violence are done and see it as a gateway into resistance. We could learn to let go of the empty,
homogenous time that so often dictates the rituals and habits of our lives. By learning to be
wholly invested in the now, we could make our Messianic duties possible and livable. To take the
questions that we have asked, and apply them specifically to our cultural moment, we place
ourselves in a powerful position to affect the world. Indeed, this forces us to enter a new world
in which we can only understand ourselves as monstersthe new world of monsters is where
humanity has to grasp its future (Hardt and Negri, 194;196). With great power comes great
responsibility and, indeed, despite the aberrancy of our bold criticism, we can begin to settle our

Doan 27
debt to the past by asking these questions about the violence and madness of the border as it
exists in our current moment.

Doan 28
Endnotes:
a. By the other, I am also gesturing to Jeffrey Cohens Monster Theses, in which he
makes an argument about the figure of the monster as being something simultaneously
repulsive and desirable. The monster marks the shadowy space between us and them,
and anything that is other to us is strange and antagonistic.
b. By residual, I am referring to Raymond Williams Marxism and Literature and to two
specific chapters: Dominant, Residual, Emergent and Structures of Feeling. Thus, the
frontier is a conceptual space that, while not archaic nor obsolete, is simultaneously no
longer the hegemony nor departed. It informs much of the structure of the border.
c. In this case, I am not intentionally using emergent with respect to Williams terms. While
there may be some similarities, I am simply referring to the fact that the frontier
constantly shifts, both in terms of geography and in terms of participant societies.
d. One can imagine that the argument of a national narrative and indoctrination extends all
the way into childhood, with elementary school education of the U.S.-Mexico border.
This discussion is particular interesting in light of the fact that schools dictate the history
of the United States through a succession of conquests and colonization heading west and
south.
e. I am also reminded of Althussers concept of ideology that is inescapable and pervasive.
f. I am, once again, referring to Williams at this point. More specifically, I make reference
to his argument that, for something to be truly emergent, the dominant must attempt to
either conform it to its hegemony or to eliminate its power in its domain.

Doan 29

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Doan 30
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