ABSTRACT
What is a border? Is it a jurisdiction, or an institution? Is it a line or a zone? As with everything in politics, what we see is greatly determined by what we look at – an insight drawn here from John Berger’s famous intervention into art history Ways of Seeing. This chapter uses the problem of how we “see” the border, as a prompt to flip the question, asking instead: How does the border “see” us? By examining the state’s gaze of its subjects, we can transition away from thinking about the border as a material or legal entity, and towards considering it as an active, embodied site of data accumulation – i.e., as a seer. The body of the chapter looks at what we might gain with this “ways of seeing” approach, offering three models of how the border acts like a seer – what I call the “Westphalia”, “Orwell” and “Pixelation” theses – drawing on fieldwork conducted at the US–Mexico and US–Canada borders. The chapter closes by considering this evolution at the border – from less- to more-sophisticated ways of seeing – as examples of state rationalization, with its incumbent harms to individual subjectivity and citizenship.
