Border Incidence

In his informative Frontières de France, true to a Gallic tradition that draws universal facts from local fields of inquiry, Daniel Nordman offers four or five reflections about the nature of a border. Once drawn, a border distinguishes extension—understood in the Cartesian tradition of an infinite res extensa—from space. Extension, an "indifferent spatiality," is not marked by "a town, a city, a forest, but by disembodied points without dimension, each similar to the others, that can be infinitely reproduced, and for which each is the center of infinite directions" (512).¹ Its "smooth texture of points" becomes "spatialized" when forms endowed with dimensions are located and situated with respect to each other. And space is made manifest when extremities—borders—are set in relation with axes or centers, and where limits describe the surface area they contain. He goes on to distinguish a given space, that can be an indifferent container traveled about, traversed, and occupied by flows, networks, various economic or social configurations, which is to be distinguished from a territory. The latter becomes the object of an appropriation. When power is exerted on a space so as to define its perimeters, a territory is born. Nordman adds that territorial borders emerge from the management and conflict of social solidarities. The "complex linkages and contradictions among places give way to [laissent la place à] physically homogenous, juxtaposed wholes," such that a "proximity of elements becomes the pertinent trait of the territory" (523). The sense of its border comes forward "from the oldest and most inveterate social solidarities" that inhabit its environs (524).

Nordman's distinction between space and territory shares much with the definition of "smooth" (lisse) and "striated" (strié) spaces that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari study at the end of 1000 Plateaux (592 625). For the two philosophers, for whom the distinction is virtual and heuristic, "a multiplicity whose nature changes in dividing itself" characterizes a smooth space (604). Because nature is always changing (such as in a desert), distances calibrated within or about it are endlessly modified and changed. They are measured through what the philosophers call a géométrie mineure (605), the definition of which tells as much about the qualities of smoothness that typify a desert, a steppe, a sea, or an icepack as the manner of apprehending it. Major or "majoritarian" science is based on geometry, arithmetic, and algebra, while it "can be said, in contrast, that non-metric multiplicities of smooth space refer only to a purely operative and qualitative minor [or minoritarian] geometry, in which calculation is by needs very limited, and in which local operations are not even capable of a general translatability, nor of a homogenous system of localization" (605).

These words smack of war and conflict. Deleuze and Guattari's descriptions of a striated space, like Nordman's of a territory, are based on the idea that borders are sites where strife and exchange are coextensive. A territory or a striated space is the site where, following a classical sense of tactics, a minor or "minoritarian" group deploys local operations to inhabit a space that the controlling order keeps under strategic control. Although contained or confined in officially striated spaces, minor groups engage various means to operate—and even, much to the frustration of the strategist—within or about them. They work against or without respect for an ordered space all the while they are within it. For their livelihood, they are obliged to move along borders that can be both legal and geographical. For Deleuze and Guattari (and no doubt, also for Nordman), nomads and migrants are tacticians and the police, the operatives of strategy.

When they are discerned as sites of continuous conflict and thus, in equally philosophical and graphic registers, borders bear uncommon resemblance to what early modern engineers had noted of them. On maps, the limits of a kingdom were shown where its ostensive edges met the framing borders. The latter were drawn to represent the nation as a containing surface. The most unchanging were those where sea and land meet, while rivers, the "highways" of topographical surveys, were strongly marked lines...