Out of Line

Essays on the Politics of Boundaries and the Limits of Modern Politics

R.B.J. Walker

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138783126
• eBook ISBN: 9781317435686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A collection of essays on the politics of boundaries, this book addresses a broad range of cases, some geographical, some legal, and some involving less tangible practices of inclusion and exclusion. The book begins by exploring the boundary between modern Western forms of international relations and their constitutive outsides. Beyond this, the author engages with relations between subjectivity and security, security and nature, social movements and a world politics, as well as the politics of spatiotemporal dislocation. Two chapters address the work of Thomas Hobbes and Max Weber as exemplary accounts of the relationship between boundaries and the constitution of modern forms of politics. Each chapter speaks not only to the politics of specific boundary practices, but also to the limits within which modern politics has been shaped in relation to claims about spatiality, temporality, sovereignty and subjectivity. In this way, the book draws attention to a pervasive account of a scalar order of higher and lower that has shaped more familiar distinctions between internality and externality.

Offering an analysis of the relation between concepts of internationalism, imperialism and exceptionalism, as well as the implications of spatiotemporal dislocation for claims about democracy, the book links contemporary claims about the transformation of boundaries to various ways in which political life is said to be in crisis and in need of novel forms of critique. Brought up to date by a new and extensive introductory essay and an assessment of the status of political judgement after 9/11, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of politics, international relations, political theory and political sociology.

1 Despite all Critique

DOI: 10.4324/9781315693224-1

Distinctions/connections

This book collects a sequence of essays sharing a concern with the politics of boundaries and, conversely, the bounding of modern forms of politics. The essays were written many years apart and engage with a broad range of substantive problems. Nevertheless, they all explore situations and contexts in which boundaries can be understood both as characteristic expressions of particular forms of politics and as constitutive practices that produce and reproduce those particular forms of politics.

Consequently, they insist that boundaries require some kind of dialectical appreciation, some sense of the need to pay attention to both sides of any boundary, as well as to the relationship between specific forms of bounding and the practices that constitute those forms rather than a presumption that boundaries simply record a distinction, and choice, between one side or the other, or between cause and effect. At the same time, these essays also suggest that boundaries elude any singular logic, topology or conventional account of what it means to understand political phenomena dialectically. Indeed, they affirm widespread suspicions that political boundaries are profoundly puzzling, perhaps increasingly so: in ways that disturb many familiar assumptions about where politics is supposed to occur and consequently what political life is supposed to involve, who is supposed to engage in it and under what conditions.

Thus where conventional wisdom, and too much scholarly analysis, remain hostage to accounts of boundaries as mere lines distinguishing already existing entities, these essays, like much recent literature on diverse phenomena, assume that boundaries produce, reproduce and sometimes transform phenomena that they also distinguish. A lot of politics comes out of a line: from within practices that can be made to seem as thin, empty and abstract as the edge of a triangle or days divided in some open ocean. Indeed, even the edges of triangles have had many profound consequences; and for all that we may live in an era of speed, accelerations and flows, the passing of time is still regulated by not so straight lines drawn through the deep Pacific.

Similarly, most or even all political phenomena are open to interpretation as both cause and effect, though it is usually much easier to examine them as either cause or effect; just as it is usually easier to presume a simple boundary distinguishing cause and effect. Given that boundaries are especially susceptible to naturalization and abstraction, as simply in place, and as doing very little, these essays try to engage with boundaries as both cause and effect, sometimes simultaneously and sometimes as distinguished by their spatiotemporal relation. They examine patterns and practices through which here and there, now and then, as well as claims to identity and subjectivity both here and there and now and then, have been distinguished and naturalized as the necessary ground of political possibilities and impossibilities.

Some essays are concerned with relations between boundaries enacted in spatial terms and those expressed in temporal terms. Some respond to spatiotemporal practices of partition, of various kinds. Some respond to interpretations of influential thinkers, some to the interpretive fallout from particular events. All are concerned to get some purchase on how we have come to engage in political life on the basis of specific accounts of inclusion and exclusion: accounts of where, when and who we are, and therefore are not. They also try to articulate some understanding of what it means to imagine some other kind of politics by trying to cross the boundaries that affirm that we are indeed where, when and who we imagine ourselves to be.

It should already be clear that I use the term boundary in a broad range of senses: as practices of spatiotemporal differentiation; as geographical or territorial borders; as delimitations of socio-cultural norms and claims to citizenship through stipulations of legal and illegal status; as historically, culturally and socially specific procedures through which the modern world has learnt to draw the line, both subjectively and objectively, not least in designating what counts as objectivity and subjectivity; as post-Kantian accounts of the conditional – delimited, and thus critical – character of knowledge as the necessary but ultimately ungrounded ground of political freedom, equality, security and authority; and as practices of discrimination that work simultaneously as claims about spatiotemporal crisis and the possibilities of critique and political engagement.

In political analysis, at least, boundaries have come to be known most extensively in geographical and legal terms, as borders and limits. This seems to me to be a very restricted range of possibilities. Consequently, these essays examine boundaries as sites of often intense political practice on many dimensions: as practices of connection quite as much as practices of distinction, and as practices of conceptualization and principle quite as much as practices of tangible materiality.

Above all, these essays are concerned to engage with and disrupt influential attempts to analyse contemporary political problems on the basis of dualistic assumptions affirming very sharp differences between here and there, now and then, us and them, and even cause and effect. They do so in order to affirm much richer patterns of connection, complementarity, mutual production, recognition, transgression, classification, negotiation, antagonism, aporia, exception and violence – patterns that work in temporal as well as in spatial articulations. Many of these patterns are already well known. As Thomas Hobbes once remarked in relation to law, ‘hedges are set, not to stop travellers, but to keep them in the way’.¹ As many histories will attest, frontiers have had a regular habit of turning into crossroads.² Like skin, the sea shore and the far horizon, boundaries are often very busy places, perhaps marginal in some senses but certainly not in others. Yet while many familiar patterns in many different contexts might help us to resist the idea that boundaries simply divide spaces and times into two, it is also wise to expect the unexpected. This is especially the case given the recent popularity of literatures claiming that boundaries are either fixed in place for the foreseeable future or are simply disappearing into thin air: claims that simply mimic the conceptualization of boundaries in radically dualistic terms as markers of presence or absence.

The idea that boundaries connect as well as distinguish is especially well established; good fences make good neighbours, as it is said. The exception confirms the rule. The self comes to know itself, and to be recognized as a self, by recognizing other selves. It is nevertheless an idea that is dramatically at odds with many influential narratives about boundaries in many settings, and not least in the categorial structures shaping scholarly claims to knowledge about politics as well as in doctrinal claims about individualism and nationalism. There are many kinds of boundaries. They do many different things. Nevertheless, this diversity is regularly reduced to a more standardized procedure, to a more or less geometrical or topological template, especially where claims about commonality, standardization and similarity are distinguished from claims about diversity and plurality.

This is partly why these essays tend to focus more on concepts and principles than on empirical material; that is, on the highly consequential principles and concepts at work within what can seem to be rather mundane phenomena. Boundaries work not least as practices distinguishing concepts, but are themselves complex and contestable concepts, often with profoundly practical implications for the ways we construct political orders of both commonality and diversity. If boundaries distinguishing claims about commonality and diversity are reduced to a singular template, it becomes very difficult to imagine politics as a practice of both commonality and diversity in any other way. Many contemporary thinkers have urged us to think about politics in more universalistic terms. Others urge us to think about less constrained – more heterogeneous – forms of diversity and pluralism. I tend to be sympathetic in principle in both cases. Yet neither project seems likely to get very far, certainly in political terms, without attending to the relations – and thus boundaries – through which we have learnt to reconcile competing claims to both unity and diversity.

In any case, most of what is said here is certainly open to elaboration and reinterpretation through more historically, sociologically and empirically oriented procedures; it is also open to even more abstract (mathematical and ontological) accounts of concepts and principles than I tend to make explicit.³ I am fairly conscious of having written about boundaries from a position that is itself grounded within a boundary, not only between the sociologically, genealogically or geographically concrete and the ontologically abstract but also between the great constitutive oppositions – finite/infinite, immanent/transcendent, being/becoming, one/many, subject/object – that have shaped modern accounts of what it means to think about boundaries. This is why I am ultimately more interested in politics than in either sociology or ontology while recognizing that what we have come to know as politics has been constituted both by social forces and by historically contingent though very slowly shifting ontological principles.

Some boundaries permit very little connection. Some walls are almost impermeable. Clear decisions to decide an exception or suspend a law are sometimes taken. Sometimes escape is impossible. Sometimes one is forced out. Sometimes both entrapment and exclusion induce dreams of greener pastures in some other place or some other time. For the most part, however, boundaries both drive apart and bring together, even include in the very act of exclusion and exclude through practices of inclusion. Analytical categories that presume that boundaries only divide must reproduce systematically distorted accounts of how modern political life is organized and how it is sustained.

Unfortunately, systematic distortion has become normalized to the point that presumptions of a sharp dualism, a permanent state of rupture and exception, have been treated much too often as the basic political reality from which analysis, and hopes for some sort of alternative politics, must begin. This is especially the case with relations between individuals and states, between states and states, between states and a structural relationship among states, and between that structured relationship and whatever lies beyond.

As a consequence, many traditions of political analysis and practice have been encouraged to naturalize not only radical forms of individualism and nationalism but also claims that the only acceptable forms of human being are those defined within and by the borders and legal jurisdictions of an international order of modern states. This is an order that affirms a specific understanding of what it means to speak about ‘man’, about humanity as such, and thus poses questions of far greater reach than is usually presumed within contemporary academic literatures about ‘international relations’. Those literatures sometimes work very diligently to get some kind of scholarly grip on some of the most pressing political problems of our time, but they also work with at least equal diligence to avoid questions about why and how these have become the most pressing questions of our time, and to avoid questioning the boundaries within which the political character of those problems has come to be (incompletely) contained.

Many of these essays do speak to tendencies within the specific literatures of international relations theory. However, their primary concern is with a longer history through which modern conceptions of humanity have been split precisely between claims about universality and claims about diversity and plurality, thereby generating the characteristic forms of bounding that are taken more or less for granted in theories of international relations; taken for granted, that is, except when the adequacy of an internationally organized political order is subject to radical criticism or to dramatic crisis and transformation in that order. In either case, theories of international relations then tend to switch from highly pragmatic and policy-oriented orientations to more speculative modes invoking macro-histories and ambitious philosophical principles. This is one of the reasons why portraits of international relations theory in terms of a monolithic ‘mainstream’ are fairly misleading guides to a multidisciplinary field that may conform to stereotype in many privileged institutions but is often difficult to identify elsewhere.

This is also why I have tended to examine those theories as highly suggestive expressions, even symptoms, of what it means to engage in politics given characteristically modern refusals of both theocratic and imperial forms of authority and hierarchical subordination. It also explains why the boundaries I have in mind involve those distinguishing individual subjects from states and states from an international system of states in principle before I engage with the boundaries of specific subjects, states or the international system.

Naturalizations of political boundaries are perhaps most pervasive in assumptions about the possibility of comparison across political orders: across the specific sites of citizenship that are supposed to add up to an all-encompassing and internationalized humanity. While it may be the case that all knowledge is comparative in some way, it is certainly not the case that the categories of comparison are simply given. Comparison may well be a necessary condition of any claim to knowledge but is always contingent upon the politics of its original ground and logical procedure. We have known this at least since Aristotle shifted, over the course of a few chapters, from a naturalistic account of the city to a classification of political regimes that were distinctly human creations.⁴ This was a subtle but important shift, one that made his categories of classification disturbingly unstable in the face of empirical observations and social forces. Contemporary categories of comparison seem susceptible to similar or perhaps even more consequential destabilizations, and not least in relation to the presumption of categories affirming possibilities for statist citizenships within that internationalized humanity.⁵

Naturalizations also shape the meaning of many of the core concepts of political, social and cultural analysis, including concepts of the political, the social and the cultural that tend to impose peaceful unities upon seething practices.⁶ Divide and know has long been a mantra of atomistic and analytical epistemologies, but it is not always helpful when trying to understand political practices of division, or of founding, or of limitation, or the forms of political authority that both constitute and are constituted by such practices.

Naturalizations have been expressed with especially telling effect in the translation of profound antagonisms between individuals, states and an international order of states into discrete ‘levels’ on a hierarchical scale: in the separation of each of these three expressions of modern subjectivity into distinct orders subject to the subordination of small to large and plurality to unity. This is the ubiquitous ‘levels of analysis’ schematic that has mapped the default ontology not only of most theories of international relations but of the social sciences more generally for a very long time. In this case, conflicts between competing claims to sovereign authority (between popular sovereignty and state sovereignty, between state sovereignty and the sovereign necessities imposed by systematic relations among states) have been subjected to methodological demands for analyses within just one (even if pluralistic) form of sovereign authority.⁷

This has been a particularly effective strategy for restabilizing dangerously fragile categories, like sovereignty and subjectivity, as well as for avoiding ontological, epistemological and axiological disputes through demands for methodological orthodoxy. With such boundaries firmly in place, one would scarcely think that claims to sovereign authority are distributed along that scale, from low to high – from many people to many peoples to people as such – generating highly consequential and still unresolved struggles over the location of supreme political authority in the process; or even see anything odd about the reorientation of a political order predicated on claims to liberty among more or less equal subjects into a vertical order of hierarchical subordination. One would scarcely attribute significance to most of the substantive processes of modern political life either, especially those that have been distributed among a broad field of other categories, of economy, society and culture, of class, race and gender, of law, ethics and legitimacy, or of ecologies, geologies and climatologies, to take just some of the most obvious. It is, after all, much easier to reduce conceptual multiplicities to generalizing formulas; about ‘power’, for example, or ‘values’, or an eternal relation between the two – a bordering inviting a decision to choose one way or the other. Such has indeed been a familiar strategy of depoliticization at work within scholarly disciplines claiming authoritative knowledge about contemporary politics.

Naturalizations of boundaries have been remarkably influential in defining where politics must be, what it must be, what kinds of human agency should be encouraged to participate, and what kind of knowledge claims should be taken seriously. They work in temporal terms, affirming specific accounts of origin and history; in spatial terms, affirming specific accounts of territoriality and jurisdiction; and in terms of cosmological and theological concepts of higher and lower, bigger and smaller, proximity to the infinite or transcendental heavens and the immanent finitudes of earthly ground. Moreover, it is certainly unwise to underestimate the degree to which cartographies of higher and lower still shape our understandings of now and then, and here and there, and thus to be citizen, or human, or somehow both at once, especially given that most of us are now more or less aware that we live on a spherical planet rather than a flat plane. Still, these definitions are spatiotemporally contingent, and they rest upon claims about boundaries that are very difficult – perhaps impossible – to sustain either theoretically or empirically, whatever their undoubted political popularity, methodological convenience or conceptual elegance.

Of course, some forms of common sense have long insisted that there is something odd – impractical as a matter of everyday existence, even inhuman as a matter of philosophical anthropology – about the force of such sharply dualist versions of common sense. But it is also clear that a preference for sharp separations, for logics of either/or, friend and enemy, and even saved and damned, have a lot to do with the very high value that has come to be placed on modern principles of self-identity, self-determination and the autonomy of independent subjects, not all of them liberal. To speak of boundaries as sites of connection as well as distinction is to risk undermining such principles, with clear implications for the way competing claims about what it means to be a citizen or a human being have shaped modern political ideals and practices for a very long time; and clear implications also for our understanding of distinctions between those who try to shape themselves through principles of self-determination and those who experience human possibilities in some other ways.

This risk has long been felt whenever claims are made about the primacy of our social being, or about the agonistic even if not necessari...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Global Horizons
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Despite all Critique
• 2 World Politics and Western Reason: Universalism, Pluralism, Hegemony (1980)
• 3 The Doubled Outsides of the Modern International (2005)
• 4 The Subject of Security (1995)
• 5 On the Protection of Nature and the Nature of Protection (2005)
• 6 Social Movements/World Politics (1994)
• 7 Europe is not Where it is Supposed to be (2000)
• 8 They Seek it Here, they Seek it there: Locating the Political in Clayoquot Sound (2003)
• 9 Violence, Modernity, Silence: From Max Weber to International Relations Theory (1993)
• 10 Hobbes, Origins, Limits (2011)
• 11 War, Terror, Judgement (2002)
• 12 International, Imperial, Exceptional (2005)
• 13 Which Democracy for Which Demos? (2013)
• 14 The Political Theory of Boundaries and the Boundaries of Political Theory: Interview with Raia Prokhovnik (2012)
• Index