[Zone Books; 2010]
by Michael Schapira
You show me a 50-foot fence and I’ll show you
a 51-foot ladder at the border.
-Janet Napolitano
One of the important lessons that a reader will take away from Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, of which there are many, is that if you want to write an interesting piece of social and political analysis, pick a topic riddled with contradictions that happens to reside in plain sight. Wendy Brown, a professor of Political Science and Critical Theory at UC Berkeley, chooses to focus on the increasingly familiar phenomenon of erecting physical barriers – both at the edges of sovereign territories and within – in an age of globalization that in its most utopian moments promises to make such barriers obsolete. Noting the variety of people, goods, and information that these walls are meant to keep out, Brown isolates three key paradoxes that walling projects share:
1) An announcement of the arrival of a world without borders (the dreams of cosmopolitans, neoliberals, and humanitarians) occurs simultaneously with popular support for wall construction at national boundaries.
2) The triumphalist rhetoric proclaiming liberal democracy as the only legitimate political form is accompanied by increasingly sophisticated technologies of exclusions and stratification, which become concretized in walling projects.
3) An age of networked, virtual, and biological power is met by the “stark physicalism” of walls, which along with the integrity of the nation state is the very thing which such power renders ineffective.
Brown is able to unite these three paradoxes in the more general insight that walling projects tend to “function theatrically, projecting power and efficaciousness that they do not and cannot actually exercise and that they performatively contradict.” It is difficult to resist the temptation to extend this insight to the Tea Party rhetoric that Republicans rode into their recent takeover of the House. In fact, one of the more fascinating critical flourishes of Walled States is an analysis of the types of speech that walling projects generate, including a poem by a Minuteman (a quasi vigilante group “patrolling” the US-Mexico border) entitled “An Open Border.” Of the poem, which concludes with the lines “If you keep us safe in the war on terror/An open border is a fatal error,” Brown writes:
“It is easy to deride or dismiss as reactionary ignorance of [the author’s] metonymic chains of terrorism, smuggling, drugs, rape and robbery, and illegal immigrants on the one side, and solidity, strength, height, Christian prayer, service, safety, and children righteously sacrificed in wars of freedom, on the other. Such metonymies, however, both reveal the anxieties generated by declining state sovereignty and discursively resurrect myths of viable state sovereignty.”
Ultimately it is this generosity towards the subjects of Brown’s analysis that make this book a valuable contribution to the difficult project of understanding the globalized, networked society which we inhabit. It is easy enough to deride instances of political gladhanding like that of candidate John McCain saying, “I think the fence is least effective. But I’ll build the goddammned fence if they want it.” However, this leaves the difficult work of actually investigating both the causes of the desire for wall building and to what extent this desire is being mobilized for a host of political and ideological projects (one of Brown’s stronger theses is that walls indicate that “key characteristics of sovereignty are migrating from the nation-state to the unrelieved domination of capital and God-sanctioned political violence”). Given today’s political climate and the paucity of insight and reporting coming from mainstream media outlets, works like Walled States, Waning Sovereignty should be commended for actually doing this difficult investigative work.
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