Border as Method: Or, the Multiplication of Labor by Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson (review)

In this important book, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson re-examine some of today’s most debated and commented upon processes and practices (migration, globalization, neoliberalism) as well as some of the most naturalized of state categories (citizenship, illegals). In linking what they call the proliferation of borders with the expansion and intensification of competition within a labour market that encompasses the entire world, they provide new insights to the ways in which practices of border-making and maintenance are essential to the production of labour power as a commodity and hence to capitalism. Most refreshingly, their aim is to not only reveal the significance of bordering practices to the creation of current ruling relations but also to argue for the creation of new political spaces – and subjectivities – necessary for the possibility of living a life without the sorts of exploitative and destructive social relations organized by capitalism.

In doing so, Mezzadra and Neilson map out new conceptual terrain. A dizzying array of new concepts are deployed – “border as method,” “multiplication of labour,” “sovereign machine of governmentality,” “assemblages of power” – as well as a reworking of older concepts such as “differential inclusion,” “translation” or “the common” (versus a singular commons).

The book is named after their main conceptual contribution: “border as method.” Studying the border as a method draws attention to the fact that borders are much more than lines drawn (and constantly re-drawn) on a geo-political map to separate a plethora of state territories. Borders, they argue, are also a social method of division as well as of multiplication. They divide geographical as well as social space and they multiply socially organized “differences.” Borders, thus, do significant epistemic and ontological work (and violence) by constructing both the space of “society” and who can be known as its members and who come to be known as its “problems.”

Mezzadra and Neilson discuss how borders don’t simply demarcate inclusion (of citizens) or exclusion (of non-citizens) but also differentially include (some) non-citizens as intensely subordinated labour power through the enactment of differential legal categories (such as “illegal”). They further analyze how racism, sexism, and the construction of class create borders between people, all in the service of commodifying and providing human labour power for the owners of capital. In discussing the proliferation (and the “heterogenization”) of borders (by which they mean the production of differentiated subjectivities and legal statuses), Mezzadra and Neilson wish to point to the deeply interrelated material and ideological work done by bordering practices. “Border as method” thus helps to deconstruct the false line of “interior” and “exterior” that borders organize while radically remembering the connections that exist between people across such borders. This is refreshing for it helps to reconceptualize the space of “society” as something other than the currently hegemonic geo-political order. In short, “border as method” is developed to show that the border is a material relationship, not a mere objective “fact” to be studied.

In the process, unfortunately, geo-political borders demarcating nation-state territories and social spaces are given less import than they ought to. In the attempt to discuss borders as social difference, the significance of nation-state borders is given short shrift. This, ironically, leads to a dizzying proliferation of “borders” in this book. Alongside international borders, there are temporal borders, urban borders, social borders, borders separating colonizer from colonized, borders separating present from past, borders separating memory from reality, borders separating identity from image, cognitive borders, and linguistic borders. Is it useful to conceptualize social processes of differentiation as “borders,” especially in a world where political borders between states (and the differentiated legal and social statuses people are given by them) are increasingly consequential to every aspect of people’s lives and to their sense of self? I think not.

Nation-state borders matter. It is undoubtedly correct that the historical construction and ever-intensifying enforcement of state borders are very much productive (as well...