Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor

Border Region

Global border regimes

Language(s)

Anglais

Type

Note on a scientific book publication

Main Category

Governance – Power – Cooperation

Theories – Concepts – Terms

Introduction

This book analyzes the contradictions and paradoxes of globalization, which, in promising a world without borders, has instead contributed to a proliferation of borders, which, in turn, has profound implications for migratory movements, capitalist transformations, and political life.

Summary

Border as Method claims that contemporary globalization has not led to the diminution of borders but to their proliferation, linking this proliferation of borders with the intensification of competition within global labor markets. Focusing on border struggles across various geographical scales, and combining theory with a number of case studies drawn from various parts of the world, the authors approach the border not only as a research object but also as an epistemic framework, which enables new perspectives on the practices of border-making and the maintenance of borders as essential tools for the production of labor power as a commodity.

Content

Sandro Mezzadra, a professor of Political Theory at the University of Bologna and Brett Neilson, a professor at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, endorse a mode of inquiry in their book that does not limit itself to one border or one geo-political context. In fact, as the title of the book suggests, Mezzadra and Neilson study the border as a method, which means that to them the border is much more than a line that can be drawn and re-drawn on a geo-political map. As they see it, borders are a social method of division as well as of multiplication: not only do they divide geographical and social space but they also multiply social differences. Stressing the ontological presence and the force and violence of borders as well as their epistemological effects, Mezzadra and Neilson foreground the concept of the “multiplication of labor,” which emphasizes the constitutive heterogeneity of living labor as well as the articulation of labor regimes and different forms of exploitation. As they show in great detail, the multiplication of labor works through intensification, “the tendency for work to colonize the time of life” (21), diversification, which, as Marx already had it, refers to the ways in which capital is constantly expanding and creating new kinds of production, and heterogeneity, which concerns the legal and social regimes of the organization of labor. Depicting how the frontiers of capital, living labor and borders are deeply intertwined, the work owes much to the Italian autonomist or operaist tradition.

The book consists of nine chapters, which deal with the changing functions and locations of borders, the tradition of fabrica mundi (fabrication of worlds), which, following the Renaissance philosophers Pico della Mirandola and Giordano Bruno, interprets borders in terms of their geographical impacts, the development of modern cartography and area studies, the international division of labor, temporal aspects of bordering, governmentality and sovereignty, the management of migratory movements, and various forms of political subjectivities, such as the figure of the citizen-worker (p. 251). The last chapter uses the “labor of translation” (p. 270) to map new understandings of the common (versus a singular commons). Translation, as the authors insist on, is “paramount in the organization of border struggles” (p. 281) and is essential for a politics of the common, which must both “extend beyond any rhetorical invocation of a world without borders” and “renounce any attempt to turn the border into a justice-giving institution” (p. 281).

CONTENTS

The proliferation of borders
Fabrica mundi
Frontiers of capital
Figures of labor
In the space of temporal borders
The sovereign machine of governmentality
Zones, corridors, and postdevelopmental geographies
Producing subjects
Translating the common

Conclusions

This book maps out new conceptual terrain in the field of Border Studies. While the scholarly aim of the book is to reveal the global significance of bordering practices and to show in what ways they contribute to the creation of new political spaces and subjectivities which are important for surviving the exploitative and destructive social relations of capitalism, the book can also be seen as a call for action in times in which border struggles dominate the political landscape. Focusing on the many tensions and conflicts that emerge around the proliferation of borders, the authors offer a series of new concepts and conceptual tools with which to approach borders. As a method, the border, for them, both separates and constitutes space, it obstructs global flows but also channels movement, and it plays a key role both in “producing the times and spaces of global capitalism” and in shaping “the struggles that rise up within and against these times and spaces” (p. 4). The notion of multiplicity, in turn, is taken as the material reality that structures the sites on which social relations and the struggles against capital are played out. In order to grasp the political stakes and potentials of this multiplicity, a series of key concepts, such as the heterogeneity of global space, the multiplication of labor, temporal borders, differential inclusion, and border struggles, are developed.

Mezzadra and Neilson are very much concerned with the concept of living labor, discussed in the book in terms of the various subjectivities of migrant or precarious labor. For them, migration, labor, and border struggles constitute “forms of social conflict that challenge capitalist ways of being” (p. 59), which open up new spaces of struggle and identity. Contrary to a dominant tendency to view borders in terms of their exclusionary functions, this book reverses the gaze and analyzes borders, walls, refugee camps, etc. as part of shifting regimes of “differential inclusion” (Chapter 5). In doing so, it shows that borders (international borders, internal borders such as race and gender, and temporal borders) do not simply demarcate inclusion (for instance of citizens) or exclusion (non-citizen), but also differentially include, that is include some people in a hierarchized or differential manner, for instance, non-citizens as subordinated labor within the legal category of “illegal.”

Key Messages

One of the central claims of Border as Method is that globalization has led not to the diminution of borders but to their proliferation. In analyzing the proliferation and the “heterogenization” of borders, which produces differentiated subjectivities and legal statuses, Mezzadra and Neilson draw the attention to borders as material relationships rather than objective “facts.” Analyzing the interrelated material and ideological work done by bordering practices, the book helps deconstruct the understanding of borders as dividing lines between interior and exterior, instead focusing on the multiple connections that exist between people across borders.

Lead

Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson

Author of the entry

Astrid M.

FELLNER

Links

https://www.dukeupress.edu/Border-as-Method-or-the-Multiplication-of-Labor/

Keywords