Borders seem obvious.
Countries have borders.
Properties have borders.
Cities have borders.
Maps are filled with them.
People cross them.
Protect them.
Fight over them.
The existence of borders appears unquestionable.
Yet a peculiar question emerges:
Where exactly is the border?
The question initially appears trivial.
One points to a line on a map.
A fence.
A wall.
A river.
A checkpoint.
But difficulties appear almost immediately.
Because the wall itself is not the border.
The river itself is not the border.
The line on the map is not the border.
Destroy the fence and the border may remain.
Move the checkpoint and the border may remain.
Erase the line and people may still act as though it exists.
The object begins slipping away once more.
The object trap
Object-thinking attempts its familiar solution.
Perhaps the border simply is:
- the wall
- the fence
- the line
- the geographical feature
- the legal definition
Yet each possibility quickly becomes unstable.
Physical structures can disappear.
Legal systems can change.
Maps can be redrawn.
Landscapes themselves shift.
And yet people still speak of:
the same border.
Again the supposedly stable object becomes elusive.
The monster appears
Now the border begins behaving strangely.
It divides space without occupying much space itself.
It shapes movement.
Constrains activity.
Organises identities.
Generates conflict.
Changes possibilities.
Yet it possesses no obvious body.
Worse still, people often behave as though borders are simultaneously natural and constructed.
A mountain range may appear to justify one.
A river may appear to justify another.
But the mountain itself does not know it is a border.
The river itself carries no passport.
The monster appears drawn upon the world without being reducible to anything in the world.
The relational turn
Suppose once again that the problem begins elsewhere.
Suppose the difficulty comes from assuming that realities must exist as self-contained objects.
Then the puzzle reorganises.
The border no longer appears as a hidden thing stretched across landscapes.
Instead it becomes visible as an ongoing organisation of relations.
Practices.
Institutions.
Legal systems.
Expectations.
Collective activities.
Symbolic distinctions.
Patterns of participation.
None alone constitutes the border.
Yet through their continuing organisation, relatively stable distinctions emerge.
The border exists.
But it exists differently.
Not beneath relations.
Within relations.
The revelation
And now the final hidden expectation begins becoming visible.
Object-thinking quietly assumed:
distinctions must divide things because the world itself already contains divisions.
But perhaps distinctions do not simply reveal a pre-divided reality.
Perhaps distinctions participate in organising realities.
The border was not the strange entity.
The strange assumption was:
the world arrives already cut into pieces.
And suddenly the monsters begin changing shape.
Nations.
Money.
Corporations.
Institutions.
Algorithms.
Consciousness.
Borders.
None now appear especially unusual.
Instead something else begins looking peculiar.
The assumption that reality fundamentally consists of isolated objects quietly starts resembling the strangest monster of all.
And perhaps that monster was hiding in the cave from the beginning.
No comments:
Post a Comment