Summary of Work Group 1 2009 MEETING
Borders
14-15 April, Nicosia, Cyprus
Convenor: Olga Demetriou
University of Nicosia
olga.demetriou@yahoo.co.uk
+357-22456555
Topic: Productive Borders: Perspectives on the Critique of Duality
Theorising “the border”
The border in Cyprus is pervasive. Its formation extends over the last six decades, from the British colonial curfew barbed-wire roadblocks to the computerized police checkpoints installed to control flow after the surprise opening of 2003. Its materiality inheres in the territory of the ‘Green Line’, covering 3% of the island’s territory and administered by the UN. Its designation has stumbled over the politics of recognition in Cyprus and the dispute over whether it is a ceasefire line or a state-defining border. This inland border, in fact, and not the coastal border rendering Cyprus an island, has chiefly defined what ‘Cyprus’ is: divided, contested, in conflict, in negotiation, awaiting an agreement. These understandings have also marked the space of political subjectivity in Cyprus rendering Cypriots subjects of and against states whose sovereignty is in question. The boastful rendering of the local municipality of Nicosia as ‘the last divided capital in Europe’ then, locates Cyprus as a particularly appropriate topos for thinking through the ‘border’.
The Nicosia workshop (University of Nicosia, 14-15 April 2009), was initially conceptualized around the question of division. It sought theoretically to further critiques of duality by forging a discussion across philosophical expositions of multiplicity (thinking of currently prominent Deleuzian perspectives) and unity (considering, in a similar way, literature inspired by Nancy). The call posited the proposition that taken alone, both of these perspectives seem limited by their own excess: endless multiplicity, as well as the singularity of identity and difference, seem to lead to a vanishing point that escapes description. Thus, on the one hand, the work group was asked to analyse ways in which singularity and multiplicity have been related to each other across theoretical strands and on the other to enquire into how these might be brought to bear in understanding how borders produce difference and/or its disappearance. Presenters were asked to address the question of how border have been used to signify duality across theoretical traditions; to consider how idioms of difference and sameness, separation and connection are linked; to discuss the ethical premises of theorizing unity and multiplicity; to relate the interpretation of unity and/or multiplicity to explanations of gender and/or class difference, and similarly, the uses of singularity and plurality to understandings of power and/or historical change. Some of these themes were taken up explicitly, some addressed obliquely. As a border-defining technique, the call framed both compliance and disobedience, and this only confirmed the conviction that unruliness is theoretically, and not only, enriching. At the end of two intense days, the concept of the ‘border’ appeared to define everything. The Nicosia border, visible across the road in the form of the UN headquarters, seemed even more expansive: when the border is understood as not a line but an area, where are its limits?
Setting the terms: Time and power
Providing a long-term overview of border literature, Lefteris Topaloglou’s presentation exemplifies the vastness of terms, theories, and political and ideological approaches tied to the analysis of borders. This serves as a reminder of the two terms that discussions about borders should take into account: time and power. Sarah Green’s presentation speaks to this question in laying out terminological suggestions on the theme of ‘borders’. The division between theories of unity and those of plurality may be based on the conceptualisation of borders in linear form, she suggests. What if borders are thought of in other ways? Time is one aspect of aspect of borders that theoretical conceptualisation often elides. If this is taken into account, ‘line’ is no longer the key attribute of ‘border’ – it becomes replaced by ‘trace’ and ‘tidemark’, the first concept invoking qualities of porousness, the second qualities associated with memory. Time is also taken up in Sanja Kajinic’s presentation on ‘travelling concepts’. Suggesting a view of ‘concepts’ as “shorthand theories”, the tracing of their use, as suggested by gender theorists, is a reminder that intellectual, cultural, and historical interchange is a key point for consideration in thinking about borders – a point that is in fact furthered by the conceptualisation of porousness. At the same time, ‘borders’ as a conceptual category is also constantly travelling and the need to take this into account is becoming greater with the proliferation of analyses around the theme of ‘borders’. One example of such a travelling concept is that of ‘conflict resolution’, explored by Yael Navaro-Yashin in the case of what she calls “the conflict resolution industry” in Cyprus. Her presentation traces the beginnings of ‘conflict resolution theory’, by now known in shorthand form (CRT), in military practices of WW2, and its travel across metropolitan academic institutions towards local contexts and in specific ‘practitioners’ in Cyprus. This tracing of the concept also brings to the foreground the question of power and instrumentalisation of concepts along Foucauldian terms, whereby concepts focussed on what could be called the ‘problem of the border’ translate into techniques of management and governance. The examination of such techniques from a critical perspective on neoliberalism is taken up in Rozita Dimova’s presentation. Here, the various levels of economic and political exchanges across the Greek- Macedonian border are seen as related to one another through the prism of the global neoliberalist project. Thus, apparent contradictions between strained relations on the political level and economic cooperation become part and parcel of a wider field within which the relationships between nation-states and their citizens are being reconfigured. Taken together, these presentations can be thought of as setting the bases for the conceptualisation of borders along the axes of time and power while bringing into view new insights on the relationship between particular contexts and global structures. Terminologies, the papers appear to remind us, are techniques that subjectivise and enable, without necessarily pitting these processes in opposition.
Rethinking duality
This reminder paves the way for a second set of papers that address the question of duality directly. Reading Derrida and Deleuze in the prism of each other, Tuija Pulkkinen’s paper turns to the conceptualisation of borders as productive. The borders discussed there are borders of philosophical paradigms, across which new intellectual insights can arise. This is exemplified by two sets of border: geographic (such as in the border around understandings of Finnish identity) and disciplinary (such as in the border around understandings of sexuality). The paper argues that in reading the two thinkers together attention should be paid to Deleuze’s notion of ‘profoundness’ absent in Derrida, for whom ‘excess’ is instead central – this has implications for the temporal dimension of their accounts. Thus, the problem they together pose for the thinking of borders can be phrased in terms of borders as productive and as products, producing identity and difference ontologically and anti-ontologically. From a different perspective, the production related to borders can be framed in terms of ambiguation. This is the focus of Antke Engel’s paper, which calls for a conceptual strategy of un-disambiguation. Addressing conceptual tracing differently, the paper outlines the implications for the various calls to re-think borders as creative of ambiguity. Dualities remain, within such rethinking, the paper suggests, and these dualities hark back to socio-political orders that cannot be brushed aside. Yet to accept them as conceptual tools is intellectually unproductive and it is to this conundrum that the suggested strategy of ‘undisambiguation’ is being offered as an answer.
Ethnographically, the duality of national identities arising in geographical borders is reframed in Deniz Duru’s paper where nationalist accounts of Ottoman Imperialism as simply oppressive are refuted by historical evidence – which also questions idealisations of the Ottoman era. On a similar theme, Jane Cowan’s paper addresses the context of international structures as productive of minorities – both in the conceptual sense and in the sense of coalescence around specific identity claims. But while the notion of productive borders brings the complex ‘minoritisation’ process into relief, it also throws open the question of ethics. Our own involvement, as researchers, critics, or perhaps advocates of rights discourses and our position within an international political system that makes of us ‘experts’ in the very spaces where such processes of minoritisation take place is equally produced by the dualities we critique. The ethics of such involvement therefore need rigorous scrutiny beyond that already taking place. Katja Kahlina’s paper addresses another aspect of the ethnography of critiquing duality. Speaking from material on the construction of gayness in Croatia, she argues that theories that pose identities as fixed or as endlessly multiple are equally unhelpful. Instead, she argues for conceptualisations of identities as processes, where the question in the case of gender is about ‘doing sexuality’. This perception of sexuality is non-exclusive.
A still different critique of duality was presented by Nikolai Vukov, whose paper focussed on the making of community among migrants between Turkey and Bulgaria. The paper presents a detailed study of community-making rituals and other cultural practices, which nevertheless how the prevalence of conceptualisations of the border that constantly re-confirm it. In considering such community-making in her presentation from data on the Norwegian-Russian border, Marit Aure focuses her attention to the consideration of scaling between local, global, transnational and contexts in-between. It is within these frames and their interactions that communities are made, unmade and remade.
Symbolism and ocularity
It is interesting that an important thread running through papers that explored physical borders on the ground appeared to be the production of symbolism expanding outward from the border and the reproduction of differences in that symbolism. Ocularity also appears indispensable in the representation of this symbolism. At one extreme participants had the opportunity to experience the workings of such symbolism on the Cypriot Green Line through a walking presentation meant to re-implant on the ground insights from Yiannis Papadakis’ analysis of the Nicosia border (included in the paper posted on the EastBordNet website). In a similar vein, Giovanni D’Alessio invited participants to witness analytical insights from his paper on symbolic aspects of integration and division in Mostar (also posted on the website) through a documentary focussing on just one of the examples of landscape construction analysed, the creation and deformation of a statue of Bruce Lee, considered a common hero, for a central public park. In opposition to this ‘grounded experience’, Agnieška Juzefovi? poses, in her posted paper, a different methodological question: how to conceptualise understanding across cultures that have been analysed in terms of complete difference, in the particular case under analysis, those of Europe and China. It is interesting though to note that ocularity and symbolism is also important there, in the form of materials through which interaction is exemplified: the mis-represented ‘oriental’ china artifacts, or the difference of landscape representations.
Conclusions
This vast array of themes and propositions was brought to bear on participants’ own re-constructions of the concept of ‘border’ during the following day’s open discussion session. At the basis of this exchange was an agreement that despite the burgeoning literature on borders and their conceptualisation, a number of question seem to remain elusive, traces perhaps of what resists verbalisation in the drawing, crossing, and persistence of those ‘division lines’. The discussion that ensued focussed on themes not often associated with border studies, such as differences of ethics and morality, as well as others that are, for example the relevance of different forms of institutions in the formation of borders and differences. One of the re-emerging themes in this discussion was the simultaneous complication and self-evidence of ‘border’ and this is a theme to which many of the subsequent papers and wiki entries have turned.
Olga Demetriou
Nicosia, August 2009