[August 2008]

Borders 2.0 – Future, Tense

Angela Mitropoulos*

Arrayed beyond and around the obvious walls of migration control, the architectures and technologies of
the border proliferate. These technologies seek to sort, expunge, confine and delay; to sift potential value
from non-value; to fix the border inside and round both states and selves; to foreclose the future to
versions of an infinitely stuttering present. Just as new instruments of financial debt and the offshore
internment facility were exported from their post-colonial laboratories situated beyond Europe and the
United States, so 'civil', metropolitan spaces have, in turn, been restructured by devices once reserved for
those declared to be 'uncivil'. The partitioning of 'third' and 'first' worlds, colony and empire, the zoning of
regular, waged work and that of precariousness and slavery – these are some of the divisions that have
been shaken by the unprecedented movements of people around the world since the late 20th century.
Flows shifted course, reversed, the (ex-)colonised moved toward the colonisers. And so, there is the
militarisation of policing, the amplification of the prison lock-down as urban crowd control, pre-emptive
surveillance and simulated warfare, a diffused fear and suspicion no longer confined to the 'margins'. To be
sure, these expanding technologies oftentimes multiply death and suffering in an attempt to re-impose the
ways in which misery was previously displaced to others, elsewhere – that is, marginalised. They aim to
reinstall the borders, to fine tune the ramparts of wealth and its extraction, sometimes by new means, often
as retrofits. Yet, as such, this expansion indicates the failure of the walls to hold firm against a future which
is contingent upon movements that cannot be identified before they occur.

[Superfluidity]

Superfluidity is surplus motion at the limit of recognition. It prompts the legal limbo of the detention
facility, shapes the condition of the stateless, of those who indefinitely dwell in airports and border camps
managed by the UN, squatter camps and those who are homeless, those evacuated under the emergency
edicts of the naturalised disaster, those who labour under the constant threat of deportation and its
growing collection of visa classifications and bonded-labour stipulations. Superfluidity is movement
contained and channeled at the same time, excess suspended and made captive for selection. It is the
horizon of surplus value and its derivation. And, between those described as 'floating populations' (such as
the vast numbers of 'internal migrants' in China) and those rendered superfluous through calculations of
their possible cash redemption and regeneration, there is the internment ship, anchored just off the
coastline of citizenship.

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[Extraterritory]

As with the return of the prison hulk, so with the recourse to shifting, just-in-time legal and economic
boundaries. Extraterritoriality is neither wholly legal nor quite illegal. It is the legally established non-
space in which anything becomes possible; constituted by law and selectively applicable of its clauses. It is
the architecture of moral ambiguity and an overpowering righteousness, a spatial camouflage; the typology
of the technically non-existent and the minutely surveilled. It is what programmes superfluidity, codes it
into landscape – fragments of territorialism de-territorialised so as to reinstate territorial limits and proper
passages. It is the offshore migrant processing facility trialled by the Australian Government in the Pacific
and exported to Libya via the EU, the shadow state and private armies, the practices of rendition and
subcontracting of torture, the export processing zone and maquiladora regions, the USA's Guantanamo Bay
positioned on the edge of Cuba, the excision of 'migration territories' which retrospectively cancels refugee
and migrant laws and conventions after borders have been crossed, the DMZ's (demilitarised zones) and
the growing number of 'airport liaison officers' from Europe, Australia and Canada situated around the
globe who conduct pre-emptive passport checks. Extraterritoriality is the border made transportable
because the significant variable to be contained and harnessed is the movements of bodies.

[Thresh/hold]

Where extraterritoriality took shape around migratory movements and discovered a magnifying capacity
in 9/11, the technologies of the protest zone have been directed toward movements as these have been
more conventionally defined. Their use signals a concurrent faltering and persistence of the very definition
of what a movement is. The series of anti-summit and no border protests that began at the close of the 20th
century precipitated a series of innovations in crowd control, the cordoning off of cities and regions,
making them minutely available to combined police-military operations of surveillance, management, and
ongoing research in civil policing/warfare exercises. Distinguishing 'good' from 'bad' protesters, legitimated
protest has increasingly meant dissent at an inconsequential distance and in disciplined corridors. These
threshold measures echo and deploy the mechanics of superfluidity and extraterritoriality, as well as
recalling the jail and passport check, cattle corral and traffic management, all designed to work from
vantages of detachment that can be plugged into the larger legal infrastructure as required. They sieve,
steward, and pre-emptively intern, for the length of declared protests. They arrest (social) movements by
becoming as moving and fleeting as they are. They are as internalised to the sense of proper political action
as they are brought to bear from the outside as police directive. They rise up around areas transformed into
gated communities for business executives and government representatives; supplement the offshoring of
migrant internment facilities with buffer zones that divide no border movements from migratory
movements. Threshold technologies are, above all, about reassembling the border of what will pass for
politics as such. What activates and distributes these particular sets of measures is the conventional
announcement of a protest action, its punctuated duration and specific location, that part of politics which
adheres to the politically customary rather than experimental.

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[Recognition]

Biometric and surveillance technologies make everyone a suspect of no specific charge. They are the
principles of measure and classification applied to skin contours, eye, bone, gait, voice, affect,
comportment. They are the border guard's question of “Halt, who goes there?” – the interrogative which
seeks identification as the condition of crossing – multiplied and (post)industrialised. Recognition
technologies surmount Orwell's cherished distinction between public and private spaces, all the way down
into the body, internalising the citizen's yearning for that distinction's resurrection, as the re-privatisation
of dissent and difference. They are supposed to make one long to pass, to belong as a good citizen might.
Even so, as the high-tech offspring of phrenology and eugenics, bundled as security doctrine, the most
notable features of biometrics and surveillance are the scandals of (sometimes lethal) misrecognition, their
cost, and their remarkable failure. Certain identification is recurrently disoriented by movement. Someone
grimaces, another turns around, or moves just a little, runs too fast, speaks through the fog of a blocked
nose, fidgets nervously, walks on. Racial profiling, for all its aggressive materiality, remains a discretionary
and actuarial operation. Movements can only be captured as data or image after they occur. What makes
bodies unlike things is where the technologies of recognition falter.

[Pre-emption]

The world's largest police training ground is situated among the green and pleasantries of Gravesend, Kent.
Around 1,000 square miles of the Californian desert is given over to modelling the warzones of the Middle
East. Here, as with other police/military training environments, they tackle calamity in an amusement park
of unrest, insurgency and its abatement, architectures both detailed and artful, designed solely for the
purposes of being conquered and reconquered. As the accessories of the doctrine of preemption, these
spaces are accompanied by a growing number of university research laboratories which engineer
preliminary superstructures suspended in conjectural disaster, or simulate emergency landings and
training flight paths under fake duress, or teach of non-linear dynamics and Deleuzo-Guattarian war
machines. These arcade-labs of war prepare for conflict under the principle of continuous adaption, train
flexible military units moving not only to protect boundary lines but through terrains marked by the threat
of catastrophe. These are instructional handbooks of pre-emption made manifest as simulated cities, malls
and oilfields, aiming to transform soldiers from grunts to self-managed risk-assessors, to move the border
with them through chaotic environments. Seeking to relocate warfare within the paradoxical condition of
pre-empting the emergence of the unpredictable they, as with recognition technologies, are elaborately
armed and lethal signals of failure.

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[Futureclosure]

Debt seeks to preempt the future, to make of it an impregnable variation of the present, unperturbed by the
threat that the future might be otherwise. The securing of this world is accomplished not by military action
and walls alone but by instruments of indebtedness that seek to reshape space, time and selves, through
proliferating borders of a more intimate kind. The risk that the future might be different from the present
is, with debt, transformed into a question of the measurable. Difference becomes reduced to quantitative
difference, risk becomes calculable speculation – the present indifferent, or so it is wagered, to the
incomparable difference of the future. IMF loans and micro-credit, student loans and mortgages, credit
ratings both personal and national induce whole moral economies of success, failure and their
demarcations, geographies and self-assessments of value and superfluity. The ostensible normality of 'first'
world, Fordist regularity was built upon the possibility of seemingly endless debt renewal, leveraged by the
gendered, racialised boundaries of 'third' world and unpaid labours. Now, tweaked by sub-prime and
derivatives tested in Latin America, these geographies of impoverishment and the 'at risk', in both
metropolitan and postcolonial spaces, have become revisioned as the prospect of new frontiers, spaces that
might be re-conquered for capital's theoretically boundless expansion. It is debt which splices together an
increasingly correctional welfare system with humanitarian warfare to arrive at regeneration and
reconstruction projects, new rounds for the extraction of money and labour from the world's poor.
Through debt, everyone can aspire to be a property-owner, at the very least by looking upon one's self as
an asset. Debt unfolds as the imaginary utopia of a citizen-calculator, carrying the border against a
qualitatively different future with them across an eternalised present and through smoothed-out spaces.
Less utopically, the increasing personalisation of debt promotes the internalisation of command and self-
management, alongside the socialisation of risk and the dissemination of anxiety over exchange and
interest rates.

[Underneath]

Over the last twenty years, tunnels have been carved out under the two most prominent of the world's
borders. Since the launch of Operation Gatekeeper in the US, around seventy tunnels have been discovered,
one a mile long. Underneath Gaza there are hundreds of separate tunnels along the borders with Israel and
Egypt, new ones revealed on an almost weekly basis. Where there have been borders, people have found
ways to go around, over, through and under them. What is in excess of measure overflows, seeps down
through cracks, makes them wider, creates new ones. Here, experiment is key. In border crossing, what is
effective outflanks that which is established, and the most effective overall strategy is that which is
circumstantially tactical. Neither seeking to claim territory as with the counter-hegemonial nor hinged
around visibility and recognition as with citizenship and value, the very act of border crossing occurs as it
is able to. Borders 2.0 are to politically subsurface movements what web 2.0 is to the undercommons. The
transformations and proliferations of border technologies are attempts to become adequate to this

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experimentation, to pre-empt it by miming its inclination, to circumscribe and re-route. Seeking to
reimpose the present retrospectively and indefinitely, they are the architectural, technological tracings of
movements already underway and often long gone. One can stand in awe of their complexity or be
enraged by their enthusiastic attachment to suffering and fear. But simply because what gives rise to them
is not often recognisable – often taking place literally underground – does not mean they are where power,
or the future, is. The future, then, remains tense. Neither hope nor despair; but experiment.

*with thanks to Brett Neilson, Bryan Finoki, Melinda Cooper, Aren Aizura and Randy Martin.

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