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Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method: Or, the Multiplication of Labor (Durham: Duke University Press 2013)
IN THIS IMPORTANT book, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson re-examine some of today's most debated and com- mented 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 prolifera- tion of borders with the expansion and intensification of competition within a labour market that encompasses the en- tire 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 com- modity and hence to capitalism. Most re- freshingly, 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 diz- zying array of new concepts are deployed - "border as method," "multiplication of labour," "sovereign machine of govern- mentality," "assemblages of power" - as well as a reworking of older concepts such as "differential inclusion," "transla- tion" or "the common" (versus a singular commons).
The book is named after their main conceptual contribution: "border as method." Studying the border as a meth- od draws attention to the fact that bor- ders are much more than lines drawn (and constantly re-drawn) on a geo-po- litical 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 onto- logical work (and violence) by construct- ing 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...