-
http://cgj.sagepub.com/Cultural Geographies
http://cgj.sagepub.com/content/17/3/299The online version of
this article can be found at:
DOI: 10.1177/1474474010368604 2010 17: 299Cultural
Geographies
Louise Amoore and Alexandra HallBorder theatre: on the arts of
security and resistance
Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com
can be found at:Cultural GeographiesAdditional services and
information for
http://cgj.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:
http://cgj.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:
http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:
http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:
What is This?
- Jul 15, 2010Version of Record >>
at Ural Federal University on June 10,
2013cgj.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
cultural geographies17(3) 299319
The Author(s) 2010Reprints and permission: sagepub.
co.uk/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/1474474010368604
http://cgj.sagepub.com
Corresponding author:Louise Amoore, Department of Geography,
Durham University, Science Laboratories, South Road, Durham DH1
3LE, UK;Email: [email protected]
Border theatre: on the arts of security and resistance
Louise Amoore and Alexandra HallDepartment of Geography, Durham
University
AbstractThis essay addresses the conditions and limits of
artistic interventions in the contemporary landscape of border
security. It argues that the theatrical rituals of border security
scanning, screening, verifying identity have become domesticated
and all-but-invisible in our daily scopic regimes. At the same
time, the essay suggests that surprising, enchanting encounters
with the techniques and technologies of security can interrupt
border sequences and create invigorated possibilities for public
engagement. An ethics of unanticipated worlds is proposed as an
alternative to political action as always proximate to observable
and visible violence. In a world where rituals of border security
increasingly operate precisely by pre-deciding and pre-empting in
advance, art that works in the absence of certainty and
decidability offers a crucial window through which to evaluate and
respond.
Keywordsart, borders, dissent, public space, ritual,
security
Epic theatre interrupts the plot Epic theatre is accomplished by
means of the interruption of sequences. It arrests the action in
its course. It is less concerned with filling the public with
feelings, even seditious ones, than with alienating it in an
enduring manner from the conditions in which it lives.1
Introduction: life interruptedTen years ago, something
extraordinary happened at the San Ysidro crossing of the US Mexico
border. The San Diego-Tijuana crossing point is frenetically busy:
thousands of local people work on one side of the border and live
on the other, and make the crossing several times each day,
accompanied by tour-ists, business travellers and sightseers. Those
waiting in line in 1997 were confronted with an astound-ing sight a
10 metre high wooden horse with two heads that straddled the border
(see Figure 1). This Janus-faced Trojan horse was an installation
by artist Marcos Ramirez, who lives and works within sight of the
border in Tijuana. Ramirezs intervention a massive, unignorable
object, towed into place over the low concrete buildings of the
checkpoint drew the eye and confused the border landscape, an
engagement with the securitized border apparatus that, for Ramirez,
would simply not be possible in todays climate of post 9/11 border
anxiety. Ramirezs work often returns to the mundane objects and
apparatus of public space, which become transformed, altered or
repositioned in his interventions. His concern is to disrupt our
acceptance of the settled ordering of public space, such that you
dont know how to react, or they dont know how to react. Amid the
apparent certainties and securities of contem-porary life, an
interruption is made: Its that certainty, says Ramirez which I am
playing with.2
at Ural Federal University on June 10,
2013cgj.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
300 cultural geographies 17(3)
In the familiar scopic regimes of our daily lives, where the
credibility of visual acts and objects is established,3 much of
what enters our field of vision, and much of what we encounter,
feel, touch and hear, simply falls away. The border crossers,
Ramirez suggests in the literature accompanying his installation,
travel cocooned in their cars and in their thoughts. Toy an Horse
disrupted the everyday ways of seeing and defamiliarized the border
crossing, making it strange, incongruous and extraordinary. Ramirez
imagines an everyman border crosser, John Doe, who reflects on the
appearance of the horse: it sparked my deepest curiosity, who had
put it there and why?.4 As the security rituals of the border take
place the familiar, normalized checking, verifying and
authen-ticating so the appearance of the horse interrupted this
routine, casting it in relief, rendering it new and surprising,
provoking questions. Indeed, when the horse was removed a year
later, the border guards lamented its loss and the border crosser
was left with the residue imprint of its presence:
Today I woke to the usual routine, lining up in my customary
place in the border queue. Suddenly, the horse was no longer there.
Its absence felt strange. It had become a part of my personal
journey. So went my thoughts until my turn came at the border
point. I showed the official my work permit and he waved me on.
Only then did I realize that the horse remains in its place.5
Figure 1. Toy an Horse, 1997, Marcos Ramirez, InSite, San
Ysidro.
at Ural Federal University on June 10,
2013cgj.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
Amoore and Hall 301
As in Walter Benjamins observations of the epic theatre of
Berthold Brecht, the artists intervention is made via the
interruption or arresting of sequences, to allow for a circumstance
which has been too little noticed and to expose what is present.6
It is precisely these too little noticed repetitive sequences of
the border the multiple calculations and identifications that
constitute the sovereign practices of authorization that make the
very idea of security possible. It is not the single declara-tion
of exception per se that produces sovereign power, but the multiple
repetitive acts that write the very possibility of a securable
state.7 In Benjamins reading of theatre, an interruption of the
sequence works by arresting movement, suspending, even if only
momentarily, the happenings or sequences of events, so that
existing conditions are discovered or alienated.8 The sequences
that have become settled and domesticated in security practice are
rendered strange by the interruption, momentarily entering our
field of vision anew. Though we may tend to conceive of resistance
comfortably, as Benjamins filling the public with seditious
feelings, such that public engagement is a correlate of a public
sphere of civil society, might it be actually the discomforting
intervention that is of critical significance? A critique is not a
matter of saying that things are not right as they are, writes
Foucault, it is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of
assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged modes of thought
the practices we accept rest.9 To alienate people from the
conditions in which they live, then, is to unsettle the familiar
and to make facile gestures diffi-cult.10 The biopolitical
practices that have come to be associated with contemporary border
secu-rity, acting as they do on and through life itself, are
themselves incomplete, fraught, contingent and unknowable. To
interrupt their sequence, to deny the repetitions on which they are
dependent, is to assert that we are more than the sum of the
calculations that are made of us.
The questions, as we explore them here, become precisely how,
and with what conditions and limits, do artistic interventions
interrupt the sequences or rituals of border security? What are the
spaces of resistance, always already present within security
practices, that are prised open by artis-tic intervention? Does an
interruption have to have enduring effects, or to somehow transform
public space, in order to count as an ethical or political
intervention?
For the Mexican artist Marcos Ramirez, what counts is precisely
to be distracted such that we momentarily pay attention to that
which would otherwise slip away from view. It is not the case that
practices of attention and distraction stand in opposition, but
rather, as philosopher of art Jonathan Crary observes, attention
and distraction dwell together in modern ways of seeing, the two
ceaselessly flowing into one another.11 In essence, it is this mode
of attentive and yet also distracted public engagement that
interests us in this article. On one hand it is the rituals of
border security (standing in line, removing shoes, producing
documents, placing the finger on the biometric reader) that locate,
and call to attention, the trusted traveller, illegal immigrant and
risky passenger. Yet, if the rites of the border conjure habitual
sequences, delimiting what is seen, heard, paid atten-tion to, they
also have another potential: the capacity to invoke the
extraordinary, startling and otherworldly in a way that shatters
the mundane and disrupts the field of vision and experience.
We begin by exploring the place of ritual in security practice
and, specifically, the ambiguity of rituals performed at the
border: as both rites of passage and potentially also disruptive
and trans-formative tears in the fabric of daily life. We then
focus on two specific modes of artistic interven-tion that we
observe engaging with objects and technologies of vigilance and
control at the border, and whose work appears to contain the
potential to disrupt these rituals. The first, exemplified by the
Transborder Immigrant Tool, redeploys the security technologies of
tracking and tracing in ways that playfully reconfigure the
landscape and aesthetics of border crossings. The second,
exemplified by New York artist Meghan Trainors radio frequency
identification (RFID) projects, engages the audience via enchanting
and affective experiences that invoke the surprising and the
unanticipated. In their creation of something startling and
unexpected from what have become
at Ural Federal University on June 10,
2013cgj.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
302 cultural geographies 17(3)
mundane technological apparatuses, they create a momentary, and
potentially transforming, space of confusion. This, we argue,
cultivates a particular mode of public engagement, one that
disturbs the possibility of authoritative, settled judgements. We
conclude by reflecting on the implications of such artistic
interruption for the politics and ethics of border dissent.
Border security: ritual, theatre, performanceThe assemblage of
technologies and calculations that form the sequences of the
securitized border serves to authorize its actions to differentiate
the bodies that must wait, stop, pass or turn back. The borders
scopic regime construes as correct or normal its apparatus, checks
and inspections, rendering as necessary the multiple processes of
verification. To consider the rituals of the border, though, is to
focus on the intertwining of the sequential and the contingent, the
mundane and the extraordinary within its workings and effects.
Anthropological studies of ritual (religious and secular) have
shown it to have multiple political, symbolic and communicative
registers. As a set of stipu-lated, repetitive acts, ritual action
produces the conditions whereby agents both are and are not the
authors of their ritual actions.12 In this routinized sense, ritual
action is a close interplay of author-ity and deference, with the
possibility of improvisation and alternative utterances
foreclosed.13 Ritual is a distinct mode of routinized, sequential
action, through which certain modes of credibility and authenticity
are authorized by their very repetition.
Ritual is performed, but it is also performative in Judith
Butlers sense: the secular ritual of the post 9/11 border, with its
proliferating security practices, precisely authorizes via
repetitive, iterative acts that appear to offer scant possibility
of alternative.14 The border crosser must per-form to a number of
security demands removing shoes, emptying bags, submitting to a
scan, being searched, waiting in orderly queues, pressing fingers
on readers, repeating personal information in precise, clear and
unequivocal terms. Deviation from the settled sequences of border
rituals whether at the San Ysidro crossing, or at an international
airport is problem-atic, impossible if one wants to cross. If the
meaning of the border emerges from the drawing of sovereign lines15
that have become authorized transcripts, the ritual actions of the
border appear to constrict the possibility for digression.
Certainly the understanding of the border as an exception in
Agambens terms a space where the rule of law and the emergency
procedure merge into indistinction suggests also a place where the
unexpected, chaotic and unruly is compressed.16 At the border,
where bodies come under the watchful scrutiny of an assemblage of
guards, cameras and security experts that aim to modulate, police
and filter mobilities, there appears little possibility for the
emergence of the surprising or unanticipated. More than this, the
mode of attentiveness that is fostered at the border is a
regulated, vigilant and correct mode of seeing within which the
myriad everyday sequences of security fall away into the
inevitable, the necessary, and the prudent.17
Ritual, however, has another potential, which dwells within the
rationalized sequences of autho-rized security practice. Though
ritual undeniably contains elements of the regimented, the
habitual, the routine, it is always already potentially
transformative, enchanting and ludic. At the border, the rights of
passage that have been so much the focus of academic commentary
(through which certain kinds of mobility are authorized via
documentation, visa, passport and so on18) merge with a much less
well understood rites of passage, the ritual process that marks and
facilitates the possibility of change. Anthropologist Victor
Turners work on rites of passage foregrounds liminality, a stage in
certain ritual processes that contains a powerful possibility for
transformation. Rites of passage are processual, involving
separation (from normal order), transition (a marginal status) and
incorpo-ration or reaggregation (with an altered position or
status).19 The parallels between contemporary
at Ural Federal University on June 10,
2013cgj.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
Amoore and Hall 303
border practice and classic rites of passage are compelling: the
physical act of crossing a border involves a departure; a period of
ambiguity between sovereign territories; and entry, with a new
status. The refugee, for example, appears as the ultimate liminal
figure, neither one place or another and border cultures frequently
emerge as creative, chaotic and transgressive liminal spaces.20 The
liminal period is at once destructive and creative, a space and
time where people are betwixt and between and ambiguous.21 Rights
of passage intertwine with rites of passage, a radical
indetermi-nacy that the border produces even as it seeks resolution
through sovereign distinctions between categories of mobile
bodies.
For Turner, shards of the liminal (the extraordinary,
transformative and unsettling) are found in artistic, literary and,
perhaps especially, theatrical practice.22 It is here that the
multiple crossing points between theatre, ritual and the border
begin to emerge. The borders sequences are ritual-ized, and the
border can also be understood as theatrical, in that it shares
certain key qualities with theatre. On one level, the borders
theatricality is a matter of traditional display or show. The space
of the border is, for Nicholas De Genova, the exemplary theatre for
staging the spectacle of the illegal alien that the law produces.23
The border, then, is a political stage for the performance of
control, a showy set of symbolic gestures.24 It is through these
gestures that the sheen of secur-ability and controllability is
conjured. Importantly, though, the border is not simply like the
the-atre, with connotations of pretence, staging, illusion; rather,
it is productive in the same way that theatre is productive. The
border is theatrical because it produces a particular kind of
space: a space in which appearance of a certain kind becomes
possible; indeed, a space which is orga-nized in such a way as to
compel certain kinds of appearance.25 At the border, as in theatre,
presence becomes problematized: [t]he question of who is present:
actor, performer, character; material body or representational
figure carries exactly the same sort of ambivalence that is
reproduced in the experience of the border crosser.26
The border understood as ritual, and also as theatre, configures
a space where identification becomes fraught: at the border [y]ou
play yourself, and hope you are convincing.27 The border and the
border crosser mutually implicate one another, materializing in
their encounter. The borders performativity, again, lies in the way
it brings into being a series of recognizable categories state
authorities, illegal aliens, risky travellers, legal crossers
through its iterated sequences of identi-fication. It also lies in
the creation of a particular kind of space: one that relies on
ritualized sequences and calculations to produce the appearance of
securability, but which retains a liminal potential, and which is
theatrical, not in a playful illusory sense, nor in the sense of a
scripted, rehearsed pretence, but as a space configured as theatre
in which appearance, and identity, is always in question.28 This,
then, is the paradox in drawing out the theatre and ritual inherent
in the border, which reveals something of its inconsistencies.
At issue here is the kind of intervention that artistic practice
can make on the (theatrical, ritual-ized) space that the border
creates and the effects of the repetitive sequences which operate
therein, sequences which seek to know, calculate, and verify those
who pass. Rita Raley argues that artists are particularly
well-placed to think about the deployment and the manipulation of
signs that interweave with the border and its practices.29 More
than this, however, and central to our argument is that artists can
intervene on the border in ways that exceed the symbolic, or the
manipulation of signs. In producing theatre from the border, or
revealing the border as theatre, or reworking its rituals, artistic
interventions are able to reconfigure or transform the space that
is created through the border and its technologies of security. In
what follows, we explore two artistic interventions that engage
with the border, and the devices that are mobilized within
bordering practices. Our concern, then, is with artistic work that
works precisely to disrupt the calculation and authentica-tion that
is intrinsic to the borders sovereign distinctions.
at Ural Federal University on June 10,
2013cgj.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
304 cultural geographies 17(3)
Technology at play: Transborder Immigrant Tool
Along the US Mexican Border the chase across the desert between
the US Border Patrol and Mexican crosser has become a highly
ritualized emblem of the ways in which the border operates: those
without papers who want to make it to the other side must negotiate
a hostile landscape (see Figure 2) and the mobilization of
predatory and sophisticated technologies for locating and tracking
illegal bodies on the move. If they make it to the United States,
they join a vulnerable and tractable workforce in constant threat
of apprehension, detention and removal.30 If they die, their deaths
form a testimony to the obscene underside of the securitized spaces
of exception of the war on terror.31 New innovations, such as
Boeings virtual fence, have become enmeshed with an existing
securitized landscape in which the Border Patrol hunt and track
mobile bodies. Cartographic and global positioning technologies are
central to the Border Patrols efforts to main-tain borders that
work facilitating the flow of legal immigration and goods while
preventing the illegal trafficking of people and contraband.32
Transborder Immigrant Tool emerges in and through this
technological core of border gover-nance. It is the latest project
from artist activist (or artivist) Ricardo Dominguez, whose work
has continually sought to disturb the US-Mexico border,
particularly by technological means that he calls electronic civil
disobedience. In collaborative networks such as the Critical Arts
Ensemble, and Electronic Disturbance Theatre, and through infamous
actions such as Swarm the Minutemen
Figure 2. The vertiginous landscape separating Tijuana, Mexico,
and San Diego, California.
at Ural Federal University on June 10,
2013cgj.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
Amoore and Hall 305
(when the vigilante groups website was flooded by artivist
software), Dominguez and his colleagues act to temporarily reverse
or block flows of power.33 Transborder Immigrant Tool directly
engages GPS (Global Positioning System) technology and its use in
hunting suspect immigrant bodies. Dominguezs team has merged
cracked, GPS-enabled mobile phones with a Virtual Hiker algorithm
developed by Brett Stalbaum.34 This algorithm traces a virtual
trail through particular terrains, orienting users to landmarks and
paths. The aim is to produce a custom-ized geography, with people
receiving information on the move about safe trails, water caches
and checkpoints, to parse out the best routes and trails on that
day and hour for immigrants to cross this vertiginous landscape as
safely as possible.35
The project, according to its designers, has clear aesthetic,
political and artistic aims. The algo-rithm does not simply carve
out safe routes in terms of a map or a politics but seeks out what
Dominguez calls the most aesthetic crossing.36 For Micha Cardenas
(an artist researcher on Transborder Immigrant Tool), the project
is concerned with taking technology and repurposing it putting it
in a different context and using it in a different way taking that
GPS technology and making it available to people that really,
really need it.37 In effect, Transborder Immigrant Tool
half-con-ceals the act of assisting migrant crossings inside an art
project, while simultaneously making art from the aesthetics of
desert crossings. The artists use the device to cross the desert
themselves, making the border crossing a public performance that is
accessed and visualized in new ways, via the internet for example.
For Cardenas, the project works by interrupting the ritual of the
Mexico-California border crossing, repositioning the technologys
relationship to the landscape and provid-ing people with the way to
make their own maps.38 As geography, Transborder Immigrant Tool is
inseparable from its location: as it seeks to orient the desert
crossers, so it clearly orients itself in relation to the border
and its effects, seeking to create an alternative spatiality.39 The
space that it creates is an inverted world turned upside down,40
where everyone can cross the border, and where the desert landscape
becomes a safe, pleasurable hike. And it is through the performance
effects of the Tool in the hands of the undocumented, and the
artists, spiralled out through webcasts that this new alternately
visualized41 world is to materialize.
In the Transborder Immigrant Tool project we see a close
proximity between aesthetics and politics, or between art and the
political act. For many who would comment on the political
potential of artist intervention, this proximity is crucial if art
is to do more in civil society than engage in conscious-ness
raising around political themes, and is to meaningfully achieve
material political effects.42 It is around the notion of material
effects that differences emerge between Transborder Immigrant Tool
and Marcos Ramirezs Toy an Horse. The location of the Tool is
clearly legible, its relation to the act of activism clearly drawn,
its intervention in the ritualistic procedures of border governance
easily defined, the communities it defines enemy, friend, inside,
outside identifiable. Both Ramirez and Cardenas speak of wanting to
encourage public debate. While the effects of the Tool are able to
be calculated and measured, rather as the border itself calibrates
in bodies tracked and crossings suc-cessfully made the response to
Ramirezs Horse is literally immeasurable. Its effects are wrought
in the cracking of daily ritual, the dislocation of habit and
fragmentation of the borders scopic regime.
It is this profound uncertainty as to the effects of action that
we consider to be important in inter-rupting the rituals of
contemporary security. For us, it is not the case that art needs to
be proximate to observable and situated action easily identifiable
as political in order to be effective. Indeed, one might say that
the redeployment of security technologies in the hands of the
migrant do little to unsettle the sense of certainty about the
border and its technologies: instead it points to a particular
resolution where more people have access to geographical technology
and are able to cross the border. Ramirezs Horse does not adopt a
knowable political position, but works as a form of what Taussig
calls defacement.43 The act of defacement, Taussig argues, works on
objects the way that jokes work
at Ural Federal University on June 10,
2013cgj.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
306 cultural geographies 17(3)
on language, bringing out their inherent magic nowhere more so
than when those objects have become routinized and social.44
Defacement may offend, startle or shock, but it also provokes a
drama of revelation which uncovers a secret, making us see anew
what we thought we already recognized as familiar and mundane.45 As
Taussig has it, citing Benjamin, truth is not a matter of exposure
which destroys the secret, but a revelation which does justice to
it.46 What is revealed is the public secret the ways in which
knowing what not to know smoothes the workings of power.47 Where
interven-tions such as Transborder Immigrant Tool invert and
destroy the secret rituals of the tracking technologies, making the
border a space traversable by all, Ramirezs Horse works differently
in rela-tion to public space, provoking a continued curiosity to
that which is secret and mysterious.
The Horse, then, defaced the border, cutting into its
completeness, interrupting its sequential working and rendering it
visible to an excess. As the Horse towered over the border, its
players and rituals of controllability were suddenly part of a
different, more disconcerting, drama. There is also a sense in
which the Horse does indeed artfully reveal the public secret of
the border; not least that the line between US and Mexico, inside
and out, friend and enemy can never be clearly drawn. In Ramirezs
own words, Toy an Horse, it can work both directions, and its not
only one. And theres no one that is a villain, and the other one is
just a very weak, undefensive. That is to say, the revelation that
the Horse makes is not only exposing the unnoticed, routinized
workings of the securitized border, but also the double-edged,
incomplete nature of the borders distinctions, the limitations of a
politics that views it as a matter of victim and perpetrator, and
the assumption that art, to consider itself political, must have an
aim, an endgame. The Horse disconcerts the borders sheen of
securability, throwing its ordered sequences into disarray. To
confront Ramirezs Horse is not to encounter a clear, legible
judgement or settled explanation. Rather, works such as these offer
provocations that open space for a form of uncer-tainty that is
hopeful and meaningful. It is the precise way in which public space
becomes altered in Toy an Horse the defamiliarization and
distraction that it insists upon that lies at the heart of its
effects, but which ten years on and after 9/11, can never be
created at the place where it was originally located.
Enchanting objects: engaging the audienceThe politics of
contemporary security technologies has tended to coalesce around
ideas about sur-veillance, monitoring and control. Though such
ideas certainly capture something of the rights of passage
performed at late modern borders, they have closed down the
possibilities of the rites of passage that are always already
co-present. It is in the work of artists who use technologies in
sur-prising ways that we locate the possibility of an alternative
politics of border security. In a sense, the very refusal to take a
position on the place of a technology in our contemporary society,
and instead to work on the potential for different and more
affirmative ways of engaging that technol-ogy, opens up many of the
political difficulties avoided by the appeals to surveillance or
threats to privacy. Consider, for example, the work of New York
artist Meghan Trainor, an interdisciplinary multi-media artist who
works with RFID (radio frequency identification) tags. Most
commonly encountered in consumer goods, passports and immigration
documents, and in urban transporta-tion smart cards, RFID has
become a ubiquitous, almost unnoticed way of encoding and reading
data, and tracking objects and bodies. In her 2005 work With Hidden
Numbers Trainor (and her collaborator Michelle Anderson) places
RFID tags inside tactile hand crafted objects that invite a playful
interaction in which the work is never complete (Figure 3).48 When
scanned, the objects trigger sounds and audio playbacks that place
the work in the hands of visitors to the exhibition, continually
creating new possibilities and variations. The objects, then,
foster what Trainor calls a nostalgia for the new, which she states
is a powerful way to engage the audience.49 Enclosed within the
tactile, smooth and vaguely familiar objects, participants
encounter RFID technologies in a way that provokes an incongruous
affective response.
at Ural Federal University on June 10,
2013cgj.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
Amoore and Hall 307
To touch one of Trainor and Andersons objects is to feel a
sudden sense of doubt about their location in our past, present and
future. To us, they look and feel old, like an object we once
played with in our grandmothers house. And yet, in their
orientation to Trainors digitized sounds, they suggest something of
an uncertain future world yet to come. Our sense of the place these
technologies have in the world, of where they are located in our
lives, is momentarily interrupted. Once encountered in this way,
the residue of the disruption rather as in Ramirezs Horse echoes
through other everyday encounters with the rituals of RFID: the
movement of the hand on the scanner, the sound of the verifying
bleep, the tactile feel of the card in the hand. That which had
previously slipped away from view is newly visualized, experienced,
and attended to.
In Trainors project 16 Horsepower, RFID tags are similarly
integrated with tactile objects and aural responses. Audiences hold
micro-chipped graphite objects which leave traces on walls, and
which also trigger sounds when scanned by reader software (Figure
4). As they play with the objects, the movements and actions of
participants echo some of the prosaic daily movements of passengers
in the subway or at the border crossing, and yet also invoke
strangely the movement of dancers or the hands of a DJ on the
decks. The immediate experience of the RFID technology, and the
object that encloses it, is never predictable, and is unique to
every participant. Expanded as Transmission during her residency in
a disused bank in New Yorks Lower Manhatten Cultural Councils
(LMCC) Swingspace programme, Trainors projects are precisely
interested in the unanticipated, unforeseen and unrecognized
sensory engagements with architectures and technological devices.
Indeed, the LMCCs programme to sponsor artists to work in the citys
unused offices of the financial district,
Figure 3. With Hidden Numbers, 2005, Meghan Trainor.
at Ural Federal University on June 10,
2013cgj.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
308 cultural geographies 17(3)
begun in the World Trade Centers North Tower 19972001, invites
new and unanticipated world views into spaces that appear settled,
rational and calculable. Trainors work, seen in this context,
invites the audience to enter spaces that they thought they already
knew, or they thought they could never know, and to touch and
experience objects they may think they have seen somewhere before,
encountering them anew: her work displacing the participant
forwards and backwards in time.50 Experimenting with the unseen and
unarticulated elements of RFID technologies the visceral, affective
encounters that combine fear, fascination, wonder and suspicion
Trainors installations give people a chance to experience it [the
device] outside of something thats commodified or some-thing thats
governmental.51 It is this space of experience outside and yet
within the rituals of com-mercial or governmental life that may
contain important political potential. The affective and emotional
experience of the object interrupts these sovereign domains,
revealing the rights of passage on which they are so very
dependent.
Significantly, Trainor and her collaborators overtly refuse a
singular positionality in relation to the technologies they use:
they are neither good nor bad and their futures are unknown and
unpre-dictable.52 This suspension of clear positionality is not a
sidestep of politics, but is a matter of
Figure 4. Audiences interact with Trainors RFID-embedded
objects.
at Ural Federal University on June 10,
2013cgj.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
Amoore and Hall 309
refusing to draw out a calculable, knowable response to the
technologies, or the intervention itself. Indeed, it is the refusal
to display a singular horizon of the future that opens the
possibility of beginning to imagine what the future might look
like. The artists play on the relations between our bodies,
technologies and experiences, seemingly embodying a philosophy
depicted by Rosi Braidotti as a vitalistic ethics in which, rather
than withdraw from a world of which we are some-how ashamed, we
transcend negativity itself, transforming it into something
positive.53 What is required, at least as Braidotti sees it, is a
vitality that expresses itself in a creative approach to sub-ject
and self. We find a similar sense of possibility in Jane Bennetts
crossings that invoke the exciting sense of travelling to new
lands, creating a space for novelty in the relations between
humans, bodies and technologies.54 Read through Braidotti and
Bennetts insights, Trainors work crosses the ascribed boundaries of
subject and technological object, making possible new forms of
connection and engagement. One might reasonably ask at this point,
how does one creatively engage the crossing from authenticated self
to the RFID in ones newly issued UK passport? The question might be
how we come to think anew about the apparently singular and intact
identity that the authentication of that document assumes, and
which the border stipulates we play. While the RFID at the border
seeks to verify and check, closing down on uncertainty and the
unknown, Trainors work consistently draws out the liminoid mood of
maybe, might-be, hypothesis, fantasy, conjecture, desire.55
This mood of maybe has risk attached: when Trainor was stopped
in Charles de Gaulle airport on her way to a seminar in
Barcelona,56 her incongruous ceramic objects drew suspicion from
security officials. They demanded to know what her art did; if her
objects were embedded with RFID, would they work with their
security scanners at the airport? Trainor finally managed to catch
an onward flight by producing her invitation from CCCB to present
her work the verifica-tion the border security apparatus
recognizes. Yet Trainors efforts to explain her work that RFID
could be used in art, that it would work differently in the context
she creates, that RFID might have another life outside the airport
security apparatus reveals much about the problem of incon-gruity
and the unexpected at the border and in public spaces? Trainors
encounter at Charles de Gaulle was the border as theatre and
ritual; where appearance and identity hung in doubt, and where the
possibilities of art found themselves proximate to the borders
machineries of exclusion. Resolution was finally reached with the
officials realization that Trainor (and the seminar at which she
was participating) was talking about us. What lingers from the
interaction with Trainors RFID, however, even as expulsion hangs in
the balance, is the sense that things could always be
otherwise.
The liminal and liminoid elements of ritual, then, are
transformative, not only in the sense of altering our status in the
face of authority (as in traditional rites of passage), but also in
the sense of imparting new ways of knowing, of disrupting settled
ways of seeing and replacing them with something new: these
disruptions may never be mapped, or quantified, or fully known.
Rather than seek to resolve the paradoxes and contradictions of
border security technologies, then, the artworks function as
catalyst to new modes of public space.57 They remind us that within
apparently disci-plined and securitized regimes of attention and
forgetting there are also interstitial spaces of dis-traction,
enchantment or reverie that may work against settled and familiar
prejudicial and individualized practices. To be enchanted, writes
Jane Bennett, is to be struck and shaken by the extraordinary that
lives amid the familiar and the everyday.58 For Bennett, joy can
propel ethics, at least in the sense that the magic of the future
and the promise of life not yet lived is kept open.59 Where
calculative and securitized orientations to the future annul the
possibility of the unantici-pated and surprising, to momentarily
forget oneself and be enchanted by life is to accept the
unknowability of the future, even where it may contain dangers and
fears.
at Ural Federal University on June 10,
2013cgj.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
310 cultural geographies 17(3)
Border rites: art, ethics and politics
In June 2001 outside the Palace of Westminster, peace activist
Brian Haw began a five year protest against the economic sanctions
in Iraq and, later, the Iraq war. In many ways, the material
presence of his placards, images and objects had itself become a
ritual that was almost unnoticed, no longer drawing the attention
of passers-by on their way to work. Yet, on 23 May 2006, following
the pass-ing into law of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act
prohibiting unauthorized demonstra-tions within 1km of Parliament
Square, Haws vast collection was removed by 80 police officers.
Having followed Haws protest for some time, documenting it in
digital photographs, artist Mark Wallinger began to recreate the
collection piece by piece for the Duveen Galleries of Tate Britain.
As the resulting Turner prize winning State Britain exhibition
catalogue presented the work:
Mark Wallinger has recreated peace campaigner Brian Haws
Parliament Square protest for a dramatic new installation at Tate
Britain ... Faithful in every detail, each section of Brian Haws
peace camp from the makeshift tarpaulin shelter and tea-making area
to the profusion of hand painted placards has been painstakingly
sourced and replicated for the display. On 23 May 2006, following
the passing by Parliament of the Serious Organised Crime and Police
Act prohibiting unauthorised demonstrations within a one kilometre
radius of Parliament Square, the majority of Haws protest was
removed. Taken literally, the edge of this exclusion zone bisects
Tate Britain. Wallinger has marked a line on the floor of the
galleries, positioning State Britain half inside and half outside
the border. In bringing a reconstruction of Haws protest before
curtailment back into the public domain, Wallinger raises
challenging questions about issues of freedom of expression and the
erosion of civil liberties in Britain today.60
As an instance of the apparent replication of public protest
inside the hallowed halls of the famous gallery, Wallingers
intervention raises some important questions in relation to art as
politics. As the spatiality of the act is moved to the space of the
gallery, is it the case, as the Tate promises, that protest is
brought back into the public domain? In one sense, Haws protest
until 2006 had a clear positionality, not only in its proximity to
a recognizable site of politics and its occupation of public space,
but also representing as it did an overt refusal of war and
suffering. Wallingers artistic intervention is political in a quite
different sense, and in a way that strikes at the heart of the
diffi-cult relationship between art and politics. Like Ramirezs
Horse and Trainor and Andersons inter-active performance
installations, Wallinger does not seek to tell people what they
should think about the border, the war in Iraq, or contemporary
civil liberties. Instead, he interrupts their visual expectation of
the Tate Britain, arresting their progress through the gallery,
making strange their visit and defacing the cool neo-classical
columns of the Duveen.
In an interview, Wallinger suggests that the installation of the
reproduced Haw placards, far from exposing the state via the
gallery, actually reveals the mysteries and secrets of the politics
of the gallery itself. The Tate, he reminds us, was once a
penitentiary and Tate money had links to the former slave trade.61
His work, then, is not merely a commentary on the state of civil
liberties in contemporary Britain, but more precisely a gesture
that allows certain things that had disap-peared in repetition as
people walk to the Turners to reappear in a new light.62 In this
way it was theatrical in the sense of spectacle, but also in Nields
sense of making presence problematic. Wallingers installation was
uncomfortable in the space it occupied vulnerable as the objects of
a harvest festival in a church63 and, as a result, it made visual,
and brought into focus, things that would not otherwise be seen.
Indeed, in order to clarify the legality of his work within the 1km
exclusion zone, the Tates lawyers had to work hard to define what
we might call an exception to the exception, an exemption for art
within the exceptional measure of prohibited protest in public
at Ural Federal University on June 10,
2013cgj.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
Amoore and Hall 311
places. In the final analysis, the State Britain could dwell
within the Tate so long as the museum although a public building,
does not constitute public space. It is precisely the difficulty,
the obduracy of the work within the context of the space that is
the essence of its political character. Put simply, artist
interventions are not political because they resolve a political
issue, pointing to its causes and calling for a solution, but
exactly because they point to irresolvability and difficulty. In
the sections that follow, we address two of what we see as the key
problematics of thinking through the political potential of artist
interventions to open new modes of public space through the
interruption of sequences.
What counts? Politics as difficultyA key question when thinking
about the political possibilities of the art-centred interruption,
the arresting of sequences, is how one considers a particular
intervention to be political, or to have political effects, without
engaging in an exercise of what counts that simply authorizes
certain forms of politics. Is it the case, for example, that
Ramirezs Horse, Haws placards and Dominguezs devices count as
political when they are in situ at the border or in sight of
Westminster, and yet not when they enter the gallery or museum? Was
the encounter with Trainors art at Charles de Gaulle airport more
politically significant than those at the Lower Manhatten disused
bank? Certainly one could not say that all artistic intervention,
even of the forms we have discussed, are inherently political or
are somehow imbued with political possibility. We are compelled,
though, by interventions that reflect on their shifting spatial and
political affects. To take an object inside the apparently buffered
space of the gallery, as Michelle Anderson suggests, does change
the nature of the intervention, moving it into an economy of
information with which visitors may be familiar.64 As the border
space spirals into the architecture of urban life, however, this
economy of informa-tion is itself part of the unseen backdrop of
security intervention. Where does the city journey and the border
crossing begin and end? As Anderson proposes:
Wheres the line between the disorientating space of the subway,
when, when you shut down and then when you open up again? Is it, at
the turnstile? Is it when you put your card in? Does it start as
soon as you put one foot on the step?65
As the homeland security state appoints the citizens vigilant
visuality66 to the work of recognizing the anomalous or suspicious
in the routines of everyday life, our journeys across the public
spaces of subway, city street or plaza become trajectories across
multiple, merged borders: through the gallery (where we are
reminded of our duties by the police poster in the vestibule, if
you suspect it report it); waiting in line at the border (the most
normal thing in the world); walking, unknow-ingly, across the
exclusion zone as we hurry to work. Our trajectories are marked, as
Crary reminds us, by attention and distraction, by concentration
and forgetfulness. As the artists attest, we all learn patterns,67
each and every day: for all our journeys and encounters in public
space. Because the very idea of securability rests precisely on
these forgotten, unnoticed patterns,68 it is of critical political
significance that we find ways of retrieving what is forgotten, or
overlooked. In asking where, how, or why people shut down and
forget in public space, it is especially important not to reproduce
an economy of intervention that says, the desert counts,
Westminster counts, San Ysidro counts, but the museum, the office
block, the gallery, they do not.
To clarify our case that art need not be proximate to some form
of observable or situated political action, what we are interested
in is a specific mode of critique that interrupts the repetitions
and arrests the sequences that make contemporary security practice
possible. This is not, then, a matter
at Ural Federal University on June 10,
2013cgj.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
312 cultural geographies 17(3)
of location. The point of the interruption is not to rally to an
issue or to call for a specific response, but rather to deface the
apparently smooth and seamless surface of certainty and
securability and make it suddenly appear, uncertain, fraught and
difficult. Understood in this way, politics and political critique
is a matter of exposing or revealing that difficulty and
intractability. In an inter-view in Le Monde in 1980, Michel
Foucault denounced criticism that simply passes judgement and hands
down sentences, calling instead for a criticism of scintillating
leaps of the imagination.69 For Foucault, critique is not that
which seeks out resolution, reconciliation or the smoothing out of
difficulty, but rather that which discomforts and unsettles ones
sense of certainty:
Critique doesnt have to be the premise of a deduction which
concludes: this then is what needs to be done. It doesnt have to
lay down the law for the law. It isnt a stage in a programming. It
is a challenge directed to what is.70
Understood as a tendency to leave the observer unsettled, to
work against the grain of the mood of the times, Foucaults writings
and teachings embody what Edward Sad called, in his own last book,
late style. In Ibsens later plays, as in Benjamin Brittens opera,
Sad finds works that seem to break away from the amazingly
persistent underlying compact.71 In such work there is no
redemption, but only intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved
contradiction.72 The possibility of completion, of a final
judgement, is disturbed by work that denies the possibility of
closure, leaving the audience more perplexed and unsettled than
before.73
It is this absence of a final judgement, this unsettling of the
audience that we consider to be sig-nificant in artist
interventions in contemporary border security. The San Ysidro
border crosser who is left with the image of the Horse long after
Ramirezs work is removed; the Lower Manhattan city worker whose
encounter with Trainors tactile soundscape haunts her subsequent
use of technology; the visitor to the Tate Britains Turner
collections whose walk down the Duveen hall is interrupted by
Wallinger: they are left not with a final judgement. On the
contrary, their encounter has removed from them the certain and
definite grounds for judgement. For philosopher Thomas Keenan, such
a removal of grounds is essential to the cultivation of a public
space for political life. Politics is dif-ficult. It is difficulty
itself, writes Keenan, such that the only responsibility worthy of
the name comes with the withdrawal of the rules or the knowledge on
which we might rely to make our deci-sions for us.74 A public space
for politics that might be cultivated by art, then, cannot be said
either to count or not to count as political, because it actually
requires the removal of programmed ways of counting, authorizing or
calculating the French border guards demand to know how does it
work? Put simply, if the borders theatricality requires that we
cite ourselves correctly within ritu-alized sequential procedures,
then there is political potential in the arrest of those repeated
citations. To respond responsibly, politically, is to respond in
the absence of a framework for judging what counts. If decision
making is relegated to a knowledge that it is content to follow,
writes Derrida, then it is no more a responsible decision, it is
the technical deployment of an apparatus.75 In order to respond
with responsibility, then, one must not defer into a calculative
apparatus, but precisely illuminate that apparatus and what it has
done. In the artist works we have discussed here, because they
point to a profound uncertainty as to technological, commercial and
governmental effects, we would locate just such an illumination and
withdrawal of enumerative or calculative apparatus.
An ethics of unanticipated worldsAn important question in
relation to theatrical and artistic modes of interruption and
intervention is: how, in precise terms, one might locate the
ethical character of this kind of action? Certainly, where art
projects do seek, in Benjamins terms, to fill the public with
feelings or to carve out a
at Ural Federal University on June 10,
2013cgj.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
Amoore and Hall 313
defined public space for action or for protest, there is less
difficulty in locating an ethical grounds. In the instance of the
Transborder Immigrant Tool project, for example, one might say that
a clear and unequivocal position is taken on the matter of the
human rights of the migrant. The figure of the border crosser in
this mode, though, appears only as a relatively stripped down being
who, along with all others, is the bearer of rights. As critical
legal scholar Costas Douzinas has put it, the man of the rights of
man appears without differentiation or distinction in his nakedness
and sim-plicity, united with all others in an empty nature deprived
of substantive characteristics.76 Thus, the appearance and
disappearance of the person at the border or in border spaces,
absolutely crucial to the border as theatre, is not thrown into
question by such artistic modes. If human rights are conceived,
instead, as particular and contingent struggles for recognition,77
the claim of the border crosser to cite themselves differently, to
play themselves differently, becomes at least a possibility. Far
from locating the ethics of artistic intervention in clear ethical
stances, then, we are interested instead in instances where the
ethical response is not pre-programmed in advance. In a world where
rituals of border secu-rity increasingly operate precisely by
pre-deciding, pre-empting, and pre-targeting, critical responses
may interrupt more effectively if they themselves confront the
absence of certainty and decidability.
It is not our intention to suggest that all modes of artistic or
theatrical interruption in securitized spaces such as borders have
some form of inherent ethical potential. Rather, in arresting
sequences and repetition we locate a capacity to bring back into
visibility those elements of security practice that had slipped
below the visual register. In short, they remind us of what we do
not pay attention to, what we are distracted from, as we stand in
line at the airport, subway station or land border crossing,
creating what Tom Mitchell says looks like a picture of something
we could never see.78 In some specific cases, then, installation
artworks do form a kind of theatre, a form of experimen-tal
activity that involves the creation of unanticipated spaces and
environments in which our visual and intellectual habits are
challenged and disrupted,79 and where the subjunctive, undecided
mood hovers. The creation of unanticipated spaces, as we see in the
works of both Marcos Ramirez and Meghan Trainor, is where the more
fully fleshed out human being envisaged by Douzinas in his sense of
human rights might come into focus. As Ramirez explains, the
ordinarily pre-pro-grammed and calculable decisions and responses
of the border guards were suspended in the face of his horse.
Enchanted by its presence in the border landscape, and lamenting
its loss when it was removed, the border guards habits and rituals
are disrupted, perhaps momentarily, perhaps endur-ingly, but in
ways that may not be mapped.
What could it mean to advance an ethics of the unanticipated? In
the unprogrammed responses to Ramirezs Horse and Trainors magical
objects there emerges a sense of possibility. To enter this space
of otherwise is to create the possibility for decisions made in the
absence of what we thought we knew about the world, to leave behind
easy, comforting, familiar and well-rehearsed judgements. The
border of the war on terror works precisely by seeking a securable
resolution to the risky and unaccountable. Yet, Jane Bennett argues
that the novel and as yet unprocessed encounter80 can also charm
and enchant tearing us from anticipated relations with others, and
cultivating instead an ethic of generosity.81 To put this ethic in
more tangible terms, it implies an acknowledgement of the
fragil-ity and contestability of the positions we all bring to
forms of public engagement. Our relations with others; our sense of
self and identity; our hopes for the future: all, as William
Connolly suggests, are fragile fundamentals. The key, he argues, is
to acknowledge the contestability of the perspec-tives you bring
into public engagements and recognize on the visceral register of
subjectivity a generous ethos of public engagement.82 In short, the
artistic interventions we have discussed here act not so much to
open a particular public space for defined bearers of rights, as to
cultivate a mode of public engagement among persons whose ideas
about rights are held in check.
The border arrested, which is at the heart of the artistic
interventions we have described, some-what exceeds the ethic of
generosity that may emerge in moments of wonder and enchantment.
In
at Ural Federal University on June 10,
2013cgj.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
314 cultural geographies 17(3)
stalling the sequences of border security, revealing the modes
of disengagement vital for their operation and the very possibility
of an otherwise, the artworks we have discussed insist on weaving
the unknowable into public space, where there is an increasing
intolerance of the unfore-seen, unexpected and unaccountable. The
interruption, as Benjamin realized, is the true potential of arts
political provocation: to make us notice and look again so that
nothing is quite as it seems and the sheen of the securable border
begins to cloud.
Conclusions: border publicsLondons famous black cabs daily weave
in and out of the exceptional space of Parliament Square, from
which the traces of Haws protest have long been removed. A number
of black cabs now carry an advertisement for Raytheon, the
commercial weapons manufacturer whose expertise in military
technologies has enabled it to win the multi-million pound contract
to provide information technology solutions for the UKs border
controls (see Figure 5). Raytheon, a Trusted Partner, confronts no
limit to its appearance and rapid disappearance on the citys
landscape. This is a city, though, where unauthorized political
protest becomes subject to the drawing of limits, where surprise,
uncertainty and the incongruous must be sanctioned in advance. The
rights of passage are writ large on this landscape: mobilities and
appearances are authorized and certified, while the transformative
and magical possibilities embedded within rites of passage fall
away. The capacity to visually gaze anew, to be awoken from a
distracted inattention, to engage in a way that shatters certainty:
this capacity confronts the limits that Raytheons advertisements do
not. So distanced is the Raytheon cab from the visceral violences
of the theatre of war, and from the blistering desert crossings of
the US-Mexican border and the expulsions that result from a
security checkpoint search, that it has found a comfortable place
on the register of public space, appearing fleetingly and
familiarly in our daily scopic regimes. In response to claims that
arts critical potential is related to its proximity (to the border,
its visible apparatus, to a site of exclusion at territorys edge),
a reply might well note that it is precisely the prosaic and
comfortable presence of border violences in our daily lives that
must be arrested in their smooth running sequences.
Contemporary political life has tended to comfortably locate
public responses to, and actions against, the techniques and
technologies of border security by securing a position in turn. For
the most part this form of political action has implied knowing
beyond doubt what is to be opposed, and mapping with certainty the
way a responsible society would respond. And yet, as we have
sug-gested, if security acts through sequences, calculations and
repetitions that constantly threaten to fall beyond visual, indeed
political, reach, is its apparatus ever as intelligible as these
various forms of public refusal an appeal to a surveillance
society, to the march of dystopian technology sug-gest? The case
that an ethical and meaningfully public response must render
intelligible the arcane practices of border security to make action
possible is shaken by the work we have described. We suggest, in
contrast, that a public engagement that precisely refuses schema of
enumeration that allow us to be identified, counted and calculated,
might be at the core of what counts as political. As Judith Butler
captures the problem:
It may be that the question of ethics emerges precisely at the
limits of our schemes of intelligibility, the site where we ask
ourselves what it might mean to continue in a dialogue where no
common ground can be assumed, where one is, as it were, at the
limits of what one knows.83
One possible site where we might interrupt the dialogue of
common ground and proceed at the lim-its of what we know of the
world, we have argued, could be the site of artistic intervention.
As the
at Ural Federal University on June 10,
2013cgj.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
Amoore and Hall 315
sequences of a world rendered securable are arrested by the
disconcerting intransigence of peculiar and unexpected objects, the
possibilities of public engagement are also made new. Though
familiar sites of public action are undeniably eroded by the
security architectures of post 9/11 worlds juridical limits on
public protest or assembly; the restriction of public space for art
installation and performance works; risk management flagging of
particular behaviours in public, and so on it is not the case that
the space for public engagement and a political life is annulled.
It is clear that the reconfiguring of public space in the name of
security is itself a form of border theatre, but its rituals become
the object of artistic interventions which exceed questions of how
does it work? and circle, instead, a more nebulous set of questions
about the world we inhabit. Just as Marcos Ramirez is confronted
with political difficulties of finding sites for his work within
the security city, so those who seek new modes of public engagement
that might arrest, surprise and enchant face challenges. If the
border is understood as theatrical and ritualized in the distinct
ways we have described, then within its spaces always lies the
possibility of an altered landscape, a transformed angle of vision,
a new mode of attention, and a revised reflection on how we live
and how we wish to live.
Acknowledgements
This article draws on research that was funded by the UK
Economic and Social Research Council under the Non-Governmental
Public Action Programme, award RES155250087 Contested Borders:
Non-Governmental
Figure 5. Advertising for Raytheon Systems.
at Ural Federal University on June 10,
2013cgj.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
316 cultural geographies 17(3)
Public Action and the Technologies of the War on Terror. The
article was first presented at Targeted Publics, an event hosted by
the Centre for Contemporary Culture Barcelona October 2008. The
authors acknowledge the comments and discussions of the
participants, two anonymous reviewers for the journal, as well as
generous contributions from Sophie Nield, Nicholas de Genova,
Deborah Natsios, Debbie Lisle and Stephen Graham. The contribution
of discussions with Ricardo Dominguez, Micha Cardenas, Marcos
Ramirez and Meghan Trainor has been beyond measure.
Notes
1 Walter Benjamin (ed.), Illuminations, with an introduction by
Hannah Arendt; trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books,
1986), p. 237.
2 Interview with Marcos Ramirez, Tijuana, Mexico, November 2007.
3 Allen Feldman, Violence and Vision: The Prosthetics, Aesthetics
of Terror in Northern Ireland, Public
Culture, 10(1), 1997, pp. 2930. 4 Unpublished literature
accompanying installation Toy an Horse, 1997. 5 Unpublished
literature accompanying installation Toy an Horse, 1997. 6
Benjamin, Illuminations, pp. 150, 237. 7 David Campbell, Writing
Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity
(Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 10. 8 Benjamin,
Illuminations. 9 Michel Foucault, Practicing Criticism, in L.
Kritzman (ed.) Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture
Interviews and Other Writings 19771984 (New York: Routledge,
1988[1981]) , p. 154.10 Foucault, Practicing Criticism, p. 154.11
Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle,
and Modern Culture (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 51.12 J. Laidlaw and C. Humphrey,
Action, in Jens Kreinath, Jan Snoek and Michael Stausberg (eds.)
Theo-
rizing Rituals: Vol. I: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts
(Leiden: Brill), p. 275. See also E. Leach, Ritualisation in Man in
Relation to Conceptual and Social Development, in Stephen
Hugh-Jones and James Laidlaw (eds.) The Essential Edmund Leach:
Anthropology and Society, Volume I (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2001), pp. 15865, and Maurice Bloch, Symbols, Song, Dance
and Features of Articulation: Is Religion an Extreme Form of
Religious Authority?, Archives Europeenes de Sociologie, 15, 1997,
pp. 5581.
13 Bloch, Symbols; M. Bloch, Authority, in Jens Kreinath, Jan
Snoek and Michael Stausberg (eds.) Theorizing Rituals.
14 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Judith Butler, Bodies that
Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge,
1992).
15 J. Edkins and V. Pin-Fat, Introduction: Life, Power,
Resistance, in J. Edkins and V. Pin-Fat (eds.) Sovereign Lives
(London: Routledge, 2004).
16 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago, University of
Chicago Press, 2005).17 L. Amoore, Vigilant Visuality: The Watchful
Politics of the War on Terror, Security Dialogue, 38(2),
pp. 13956; Feldman, Violence, p. 30.18 Mark Salter, Rights of
Passage: The Passport in International Relations (Boulder, CO:
Lynne Rienner,
2003); M. Salter Governmentalities of an Airport: Heterotopia
and Confession, International Political Sociology, 1, 2007, pp.
4966.
19 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and
Anti-Structure (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977); Victor
Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New
York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982).
at Ural Federal University on June 10,
2013cgj.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
Amoore and Hall 317
20 Homi Bhaba, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge,
1994); Lisa Malkki, Purity and Exile (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1994); A. Mountz, R. Wright, A. Miyares and A. Bailey, Lives
in Limbo: Tem-porary Protected Status and Immigrant Identities,
Global Networks, 2(4), 2002, pp. 33556.
21 Turner, Ritual Process.22 Turner, Ritual to Theatre.23
Nicolas De Genova, Migrant Illegality and Deportability in Everyday
Life, Annual Review of Anthro-
pology, 31, 2002, pp. 41947.24 Peter Andreas, Border Games:
Policing the US-Mexico Divide (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press,
2000), pp. 9, 11.25 S. Nield, On the Border as Theatrical Space:
Appearance, Dis-location and the Production of the Refugee, in
Joe Kelleher and Nicholas Ridout (eds.) Contemporary Theatres in
Europe (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 64.26 Nield, On the Border as
Theatrical Space, p. 64.27 Nield, On the Border as Theatrical
Space, p. 65.28 Nield, On the Border as Theatrical Space, p. 65.29
R. Raley, Border Hacks, in Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede
(eds.) Risk and the War on Terror
(London: Routledge, 2008).30 Justin Akers Chacn and Mike Davis,
No-one is Illegal (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006); De
Genova, Migrant Illegality; J. McC. Heyman, State Effects on
Labour Exploitation: The INS and Undocumented Immigrants at the
Mexico-United States Border, Critique of Anthropology, 18(2),
2002,pp. 15780.
31 See Slavoj iek, Whats Wrong with Fundamentalism. Part I, .32
Border Patrol Overview, 2008, US Customs and Border Protection
website, .33 Raley, Border Hacks.34 See .35 See Transborder
Immigrant Tool, .36 Interview with MobileActive.org, .37 Interview
with Micha Cardenas, San Diego, California, 16 November 2007.38
Interview with Micha Cardenas, San Diego, California, 16 November
2007.39 S. Pile, Introduction: Opposition, Political Identities,
and Spaces of Resistance, in Steve Pile and
M. Keith (eds.) Geographies of Resistance (London: Routledge,
1997), p. 3.40 S. Nield, There is Another World: Space, Theatre and
Global Anti-Capitalism, Contemporary Theatre
Review, 16(1), 2006, p. 61.41 Nield, There is Another World,
p.59.42 A. Gach and T. Paglen, Tactics without Tears, Journal of
Aesthetics and Protest, 1(2), 2003, .43 Michael Taussig,
Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labour of the Negative
(Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1999), p. 4.44 Taussig, Defacement, p.5.45
Taussig, Defacement, p.51.46 Taussig, Defacement, p.2.47 Taussig,
Defacement, p.7.48 See .49 Interview with Meghan Trainor.50
Presentation by Meghan Trainor at the Centre de Culturia
Contempornia de Barcelona, 3 October 2008.51 Presentation by Meghan
Trainor at the Centre de Culturia Contempornia de Barcelona, 3
October 2008.52 Presentation by Meghan Trainor at the Centre de
Culturia Contempornia de Barcelona, 3 October 2008.
at Ural Federal University on June 10,
2013cgj.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
318 cultural geographies 17(3)
53 Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2006), p. 201.54 Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of
Modern Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), p. 31.55
V. Turner, Dewey, Dilthey, and Drama: An Essay in the Anthropology
of Experience, in Victor Turner
and Edward Bruner (eds.) The Anthropology of Experience (Urbana,
IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986), p. 42.
56 Targeted Publics: The Arts and Technologies of the Security
City, at the Centre de Cultura Contempor-nia de Barcelona, 3
October 2008.
57 Nicolas De Oliveira (ed.), Installation Art in the New
Millennium: The Empire of the Senses (London: Thames and Hudson,
2003).
58 Bennett, Enchantment, p. 4.59 Bennett, Enchantment, p. 156.60
Tate Britain, State Britain, 2006, .61 Mark Wallinger, An Interview
with Mark Wallinger, with Yve-Alain Bois, Guy Brett, Margaret
Iversen
and Julian Stallybrass, October 123, p. 193.62 Wallinger, An
Interview with Mark Wallinger, p. 192.63 Wallinger, An Interview
with Mark Wallinger, p. 194.64 Interview with Michelle Anderson,
New York, October 2007.65 Interview with Michelle Anderson, New
York, October 2007.66 Amoore, Vigilant Visuality; E. Isin, The
Neurotic Citizen, Citizenship Studies, 8(3), 2004, pp. 21735.67
Interview Michelle Anderson, New York, October 2007.68 These are
the patterns retrieved by data mining, for example, see L. Amoore,
Lines of Sight: On the Visu-
alization of Unknown Futures, Citizenship Studies, 13(1), 2009,
pp. 1730; L. Amoore and M. de Goede, Transactions after 9/11: The
Banal Face of the Preemptive Strike, Transactions of the Institute
of British Geographers, 33(2), 2008, pp. 17385.
69 Michel Foucault, The Masked Philosopher, in P. Rabinow (ed.)
Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault
19541984 (New York: The New Press, 1997), p. 323.
70 M. Foucault, Questions of Method, in Graham Burchell, Colin
Gordon and Peter Miller (eds.) The Foucault Effect: Studies in
Governmentality (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), p.
81.
71 Edward Sad, On Late Style: Music and Literature against the
Grain (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 5.72 Sad, On Late Style,
p.160.73 Sad, On Late Style, p.7.74 Thomas Keenan, Fables of
Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics
(Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).75 Jacques Derrida,
The Gift of Death (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996),
p. 24.76 C. Douzinas, Identity, Recognition, Rights or What Hegel
can Teach us about Human Rights, Journal of
Law and Society, 29(3), 2002, p. 398.77 Douzinas, Identity,
Recognition, Rights, p. 398.78 W.J.T. Mitchell, There Are No Visual
Media, Journal of Visual Culture, 4(2), 2004, p. 260.79 Jonathan
Crary, Foreword, in Nicolas De Oliveira, Nicola Oxley and Michael
Perry (eds.) Installation
Art in the New Millennium: The Empire of the Senses (London:
Thames and Hudson, 2003).80 Bennett, Enchantment, pp. 56.81
Bennett, Enchantment, p.10.82 William Connolly, Why I Am Not a
Secularist (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
1999).83 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (Assen,
Netherlands: Royal van Gorcum, 2003), p. 18.
at Ural Federal University on June 10,
2013cgj.sagepub.comDownloaded from
-
Amoore and Hall 319
Biographical notes
Louise Amoore is Reader in Political Geography at the Department
of Geography, Durham University. She has published on global
geopolitics and the security practices of the border; the politics
and practices of risk management; and political and social theories
of resistance and dissent. Her recent book (co-edited with Marieke
de Goede) Risk and the War on Terror (2008, Routledge) explores the
multiple modes of risk calcula-tion deployed in the name of
security and counter-terror in contemporary life. She can be
contacted at: Department of Geography, Durham University, Science
Laboratories, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, UK; email:
[email protected]
Alexandra Hall is Research Associate at the Department of
Geography, Durham University. Her research interests include
border, security and the politics of mobility. She is currently
preparing a monograph entitled The Everyday Life of Immigration
Detention (Pluto Press), an ethnographic investigation of the
micropolitics of mobility and detention. She can be contacted at:
Department of Geography, Durham University, Science Laboratories,
South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, UK; email: [email protected]
at Ural Federal University on June 10,
2013cgj.sagepub.comDownloaded from