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aesthetic values’, and ‘the thing itself’, or rather the territory in its concrete physical and anthropic reality.52 This ambivalence was determined at a certain point in the history of Western modernity, in the fifteenth century, when the Dutch word Landschap was used to designate a new kind of painting launched in the Flemish environment, the ‘landscape painting’. It is in this way that modern culture has gradually shaped its own idea of space, by structuring it through that particular kind of artistic representation based on the rational presuppositions of modern science and the geometrical linear perspective. Landscape involved the shaping of an external space represented in painting; a visual representation that could only be seen from afar, from the outside, when placed at the right distance by the perspective construction. The landscape is reduced then to an image used by a contemplative subject kept at a distance. In other words, the initial reference to a genre of painting ended up being shifted to designate its real referent, the territory. It is through a similar process that the vitality of the border landscape is concealed in the mapping of boundaries as dividing lines between nation-state sovereignties.53

However, the reference to the etymology of the landscape term and the ‘-scape’ suffix reveals how the landscape can not only be reduced to an image by allowing us to bring to mind another ‘original’ meaning of the landscape term previous to the ambivalence with which it is burdened in the modern period. It is a meaning originated in the relationship between the suffix ‘-scape’ and the term ‘shape’, for which landscape refers to the act of ‘shaping’ a composition of man-made spaces on the earth that work and evolve not based on natural laws but to serve a community, thus arising from the collective nature of the landscape. The landscape is ‘the land ‘scaped’, ‘shaped’ or created as place and polity by people through their practices of dwelling – their ‘doing’’, ‘undoing’, and ‘redoing’ of landscape.54

This etymological perspective supports the particular meaning that Rajaram and Grundy-Warr, in the wake of Appadurai, attribute to the borderscape concept: it can not only be interpreted as a ‘visible place’, that is to say according to its aesthetic image, but it originates in a complex web of conditions of possibility that are not immediately visible and inscribed in the relationship between space, lived experience and power. Thus, borderscapes are constructed spaces that, far from being fixed in space and time, are constantly evolving. As argued by Rajaram and Grundy-Warr, borderscapes show that every society is in a state of becoming, every political system is always contingent and the boundary between belonging and exclusion is floating and continually contested.55 This shows the double meaning of borderscapes. On the one hand, they retain a derivative dimension from human landscapes and, more specifically, from the relationship that they have with the exercise of power in space, being a political tool for ordering reality (hegemonic borderscapes). On the other hand, they are a context from which discourses and practices of ‘dissensus’ can originate, through which it

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is possible to think of alternatives to the static exclusivity of landscapes of dominant power (counter-hegemonic borderscapes).56

As its etymological evolution reveals, the notion of ‘scapes’ is part of a political project of ‘making’ that highlights the ways in which the borderscape affords particular sets of reproductive practices and shapes political subjectivities in a particular manner. As a consequence, the concept of the borderscape enables an understanding of the transition from a ‘politics of being’ to a ‘politics of becoming’, ‘that sees politics as process, community as disconnected from the rigid territorial spatialities of the nation-state . . .

[and as] forming new, irregular, and fluid spatialities and communities as it operates’.57 Not only is the borderscapes concept relevant to deepening our concern of the border as a space of complex interactions, but it also draws attention to another key argument within our reflection, that is to say the notion of becoming. Hence, borders critical potential should be searched for in their conception as paradoxical structures that are both markers of belonging and places of becoming.58

BORDERSCAPES, OR NEW EPISTEMOLOGICAL, ONTOLOGICAL, AND METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO BORDERS

This section explores the critical potential of the borderscapes concept for the elaboration of novel approaches to borders along the three main axes of reflection that can be distinguished as: epistemological, ontological and methodological.

Along the epistemological axis, the question is mainly concerned with finding alternative spatio-temporal topologies to the binary oppositions (inside/outside, centre/periphery, etc.) that modern Western thought has privileged, affirming a conception of the border as a line separating two mutually exclusive differences. Parker and Vaughan-Williams speak eloquently about ‘decentring the border’, pointing out the need for a renewed reflection aimed at problematising the border not as an entity taken for granted, but as an interesting place of investigation.59 This means getting the courage to show and cope with the paradoxes of the modern territorialist geopolitical imaginary by deconstructing essentialisms and forms of dualism,60 opening the door to a dynamic epistemological approach that is close to the relational philosophy as already proposed by Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu.61 Taking this one step further, there is concern that borders should be re-defined as analytical spaces where a new spatio-temporal in-between order can be found in the phenomena of spatial and temporal breaking that characterise complex contemporary sceneries.62

The borderscapes concept aptly fits in this reflection, carrying with it significant implications for this new epistemological approach. In fact, borderscapes foster a new ‘multi-sited’ organisation of border knowledge,

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able to overcome the binary oppositions through specific attention paid to the multiplicity of symbolic and material interactions at/in/across borders.

Embracing this viewpoint, a novel epistemological gaze on borders is outlined, which could be defined as both kaleidoscopic and double. It is a gaze that, just like the lens of a kaleidoscope, is able to grasp the ‘variations’ of borders in space and time, transversally to different social, cultural, economic, legal, and historical settings criss-crossed by negotiations between a variety of different actors, and not only the State. Thus, through the lens of the borderscape, it is possible to highlight the relevant role of border variations and to grasp the ‘variability’ of borders that seems to correspond to a simultaneous process of doing, undoing and retracing of borders themselves in time and space.63 To understand the importance of border variations, it is worth referring to the guest editorial by Annemarie Mol and John Law in the theme issue on ‘Boundary Variations’ of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.64 According to Mol and Law, boundary variations are a useful conceptual tool for exploring ‘the complexity of boundaries in their materialities, their paradoxes, their leakages, their fractionalities, and their practical enactments’.65 Thus, border variations tell us that borders are blurring; they move around and fold. Borders themselves also travel and are not fixed, but are designed to be as mobile as the subjects and objects ‘on the move’ that they seek to control.66 This would help investigate the multiplication as well as the persistence of borders,67 by also contributing to the analysis of the diffusion and stratification of borders moving away from the limits of nation-states. It is also a double gaze able to grasp the configurations assumed by the border on a small and large scale, globally and locally, and taking into account not only the ‘big stories’ of the nation-state construction, but also the ‘small stories’ that come from experiencing the border in day- to-day life.68 By seeing double it is possible to be aware of geographical and territorial borders as well as ethnic, social and cultural boundaries, also considering their visible and hidden interactions. In this light, one could speak of an innovative epistemology of/from the borders, which the borderscapes concept helps to develop. Borderscapes also contribute to highlighting the potential of such an epistemological gaze by developing a new ‘pluritopical’ and ‘plurivocal’ interpretation of borders,69 capable of expressing the ‘multiperspectival view’ advocated by Chris Rumford as being central in critical border studies and defined as ‘seeing like a border’ as an alternative to ‘seeing like a state’.70

The ontological reflection axis proposes alternative reflections that could adequately respond to the epistemological challenge described above. The search for these alternative ontological reflections arises from a question regarding the ‘condition’ of the border, that is to say ‘What is the border?’, by showing the urgency to re-think borders beyond the mosaic of States through which the legal and political order of Western territorialist modernity has been expressed and represented.71 Rethinking the ontology of borders

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means, therefore, to deconstruct the epistemological interweaving between political practices of inclusion-exclusion and the images created to support and communicate them on the cultural level. It is an attempt to elaborate a novel ontological outlook capable of cancelling the absence of an ontology of borders for the contemporary situation of globalisation and transnational flows where borders appear, dis-appear, and re-appear with the same but different locations, forms and functions.72 This means to leave the realistic approach to the ontology of borders which entails that ontology stands a priori to human intervention, prior to cognition and recognition suggesting that there is some dimension of borders that pre-exists human understanding and action(s). Rather, the concept of borderscapes calls for a processual ontology that conceives reality as actively constructed, as what constitutes reality depends on human understanding and praxis. Thus, processual ontology of borders recognises that reality is evolving and constantly emerges and reemerges showing that being and becoming are not inseparable (part of our being is becoming).73

The borderscape concept, by revealing the ontology of the border as a complex process, highlights the limitations of the analytical tools and concepts elaborated within the framework of ‘methodological nationalism’,74 which assumes that the classic nation/state/territory trilogy is the ‘natural’ social and political form of the contemporary world, thereby denying the ontological multidimensionality of borders. On the contrary, this multidimensionality emerges in the interactions between the multiplication and stratification of borders and global processes, including migration and other transnational phenomena. On the one hand, borders do not simply block flows across them, on the other, transnational mobility not only weakens modern nation-state boundaries and sovereignty, but also determines a reconfiguration of them thanks to a novel ‘reinscription of space’.75 In light of this, we can argue that the critical reflection on borderscapes also offers a good chance to investigate migration governance and governmentality practices and policies in the age of globalisation.76

Another important implication of this new ontological reflection on borders is the possibility of revealing the hidden and silenced borders that are made invisible by the ‘big stories’ of nation-states.77 This leads to highlighting stories of conflict and often interrupted, irregular agencies and different actorial strategies aimed at using the border, depending on the circumstances, as an opportunity to be exploited, or an obstacle to overcome. Therefore, the borderscapes concept shows the border as a fluid field of political, economic, social, and cultural negotiations, claims and counter-claims; as a geo-political-cultural margin that is never marginal but rather the engine of social organisation and change.

Borderscapes allow a multi-sited approach to borders that is not only spatial but also temporal by encouraging a ‘genealogical’ perspective on borders based on a new ontological standpoint on them capable of taking into

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account both their spatiality and temporality as well as the mutual implications between these two dimensions.78 Borders are also temporary; they are not fixed and the borderscapes concept enables us to understand that the time-space of borders is inherently unstable and infused with movement and change. Furthermore, the focus on borderscapes avoids the ahistorical bias, which besets much of the discourse on borders and globalisation. Whilst we are now observing new forms of de-bordering and re-bordering, these processes are not per se new: deand re-bordering processes that occurred during periods of transition in the past have comparative value for understanding new hybrid scenarios originated from changes in the contemporary world.

The last axis of reflection is that concerning the methodology. Since the processual turn in border studies of the 1990s, there has been an urgency for a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary methodological approach that may account for ethnographic attention to the border accompanied by archival and desk research on historical sources, documents, texts and other forms of cartographic, photographic, artistic and, more recently, digital representation of borders.79

However, I would argue that the reference to two more aspects at the centre of the borderscapes concept could help us push the reflection on the methodological axis forward. These two aspects are, respectively, that of experiences and that of representations. With regard to experiences, great emphasis is placed on the need to ‘humanise’ borders, by giving attention to experiences, and thus recovering the phenomenological dimension of border studies. In particular, the borderscapes concept allows to describe how the experience of borders often clashes with the assumptions of geopolitical theory, and to investigate how the rhetoric and policies of borders impact, conflict and are in a dynamic relationship with everyday life; how these rhetoric and policies are experienced, lived and interpreted by those who inhabit borders by paying particular attention to issues of citizenship, identity and transnational migration.

At the same time, there is a need to search for new ways to give voice to these experiences and make them visible, embracing the very concept of visibility as elaborated by Hannah Arendt, that is to say a kind of visibility understood as a first way to access the public sphere.80 It is precisely at this point in our reflection that the critical potential of the borderscapes concept is shown in full, by referring to the ambivalence that characterises its etymological evolution, for which the term borderscape expresses the representation of borders as well as individual and collective practices of construction (bordering), deconstruction (de-bordering) and reconstruction (re-bordering) of borders. This etymological duplicity of borders is the keystone to critically, and finally, connect border experiences with border representations by rethinking borders through the relationship between politics and aesthetics, in which borderscapes arise. This means grasping the

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opportunity to overcome Euclidean geometry, which has greatly contributed to the representation of borders as divisive lines on modern maps, moving towards a new ‘multidimensional choreography’ of borders,81 which allows us to recognise and accept the complexity of border processes as constructed, lived and experienced by human beings. Borderscapes, inhabited by continuous processes of claim and counter-claim, also affect and call into question every predetermined social and political order, showing the urgency to rethink the modern categorisations of political belonging by revealing their fluid and contextual character.82 Hence, the borderscapes perspective provides a powerful link between processes of social and political transformation, conceptual change and local experience.

Although there are good reasons for the call to take phenomenological experience and visibility as starting points for a renewed methodology in border studies, the actual ways to develop such a methodological outlook in terms of practical methodological agenda-setting should deserve deeper attention. How could this methodological approach actually be carried out? How to go about finding out?

To answer the question, I borrow a few terms from Jeremy W. Crampton and conceive this alternative methodological approach as ‘performative’, ‘participatory’, ‘political’.83

A performative approach would help us to grasp the ability of the borderscape to bring together experiences and representations. Following Anke Strüver, ‘the construction of borders ‘takes place’ through representations, through performative acts, through acts of narration, visualization, and imagination including their interpretations – and can be conceived as borderscaping’.84 In so doing, the borderscape allows to move beyond the often-criticised gap between practices and representations, by bringing the concept of performativity into the foreground. Taking it one step further, it is worth referring to Strüver’s reflection on the interrelations between representations and practices through Judith Butler’s notion of performativity in the context of the Dutch/German borderscape. For Butler, performativity is ‘the reiterative and citational practice through which discourse produces the effects that it names’.85 According to Strüver, ‘Performativity is thus constitutive of representations and their meanings as well as of embodied identities and practices’.86 Embracing this viewpoint, the anthropological method – ethnography – could represent an important vantage point for actually developing the performative methodological approach.87

A participatory approach would entail researching not on different actors involved in the borderscape but with them, opening up new possible pathways towards novel forms of political participation, understood as existence (becoming) rather than essence (fixed realistic/territorialist ontology). In the contemporary era of globalisation and transnational flows, participatory methods call for a more careful analysis of the working of border regimes and for the inclusion in the picture of what is happening every day at

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whatever external frontier of the agency of migrants. Abandoning the often socially constructed idea that the migrants are ‘needy’ human being without any agency, participatory methods give a chance to develop strategies for empowerment and advocacy. A participatory approach to borders can empower migrants entailing the inclusion of new political agencies and subjectivities into the changing realm of the social. These emergent subjectivities can be regarded as expressions of resistance to the misrepresentation of the ‘absent agents’ determined by hegemonic understandings of global border and migration regimes.88

Last but not least, to understand how this renewed methodological approach can be actually carried out, I make the argument that we should devote attention to its political dimension. Concerning this, I find it helpful to refer to what Mezzadra and Neilson argue in their recent book Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labour: ‘For us the question of border as method is something more than methodological. It is above all a question of politics, about the kinds of social worlds and subjectivities produced at the border and the ways that thought and knowledge can intervene in these processes of production’.89 That is, the assumption that ‘method is as much about acting on the world as it is about knowing it’.90 Hence, adopting the borderscapes ‘as method’ involves a shift from a fixed knowledge to a knowledge capable of throwing light on a space of negotiating actors, experiences, and representations articulated at the intersection of competing and even conflicting tensions revealing the border also as ‘a site of struggle’.91 By highlighting the role of borders as sites of struggle where the right to become can be expressed, the borderscapes method opens a new space of political possibilities, a space within which new kinds of political subjectivities become possible.92

NOT AN ENDING, BUT A BEGINNING

I do not want to provide conclusions here, but I would like to reaffirm that the borderscapes concept has a significant potential for future advances of border studies in the era of globalisation and transnational flows, thereby allowing us to push forward the critical reflection on borders connecting it to the phenomena of contemporary political and social life.

The kaleidoscopic and double gazes thanks to the borderscapes concept pass through the three axes of epistemological, ontological and methodological reflection at the centre of analysis hoped for in a new agenda for critical border studies. These particular gazes are useful for opening the way to novel political ‘experiments’ capable of overcoming the modern territorialist (geo)political imaginary and moving towards a new politics of becoming based on a pluritopical and plurivocal interpretation of borders. This interpretation forms part of a ‘democracy to-come’ in the sense given by Jacques

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Derrida,93 that is to say a democracy that originates from a promise that can be understood by ‘acting’ on the critical potential of the borderscapes concept.

Thus, borderscapes make us think and act. It is necessary then to think of them and ‘act’ on them in order to operationalise their critical potential through different analytical dimensions, such as politics and policies, practices, representations, perceptions, and interpretations. Said differently, the notion of borderscape gives us the chance to relate the somewhat abstract level of conceptual change in border studies to actual borderscaping as practices through which fluctuating borders are imagined, materially established, experienced, lived as well as reinforced and blocked but also crossed, traversed and inhabited.

Not only is this a way to contribute to a renewed critical shift in border knowledge but it is also a mode to grasp new forms of belonging and becoming that are worth being investigated in a time of globalisation and transnational flows.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to Elena dell’Agnese for organizing the wonderful Borderscapes conference series at which the first ideas for this paper were discussed. I am grateful to Martin Lemberg-Pedersen for stimulating conversations on the critical potential of borderscapes to inquire into the Euro/African border nexus. Holger Pötzsch is thanked for a lively chat on the issues of in/visibility and (audio-visual) borderscapes. I am grateful to Olivier Kramsch for inspiring conversations on postcolonial borderscapes and critical border studies. I would also like to gratefully thank the three anonymous reviewers for critically challenging and inspiring me with their thought-provoking comments.

My research for this text has been conducted within the framework of EUBORDERSCAPES funded by European Commission FP7-SSH-2011-1 (290775).

NOTES

1.K. Ohmae, The Borderless World. Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (New York: HarperCollins 1990).

2.D. Newman and A. Paasi, ‘Fences and Neighbours in the Post-Modern World: Boundary Narratives in Political Geography’, Progress in Human Geography 22/2 (1998) pp. 186–207.

3.J. Scott, ‘Euroregions, Governance and Transborder Co-Operation within the EU’, European Research in Regional Science 10 (2000) pp. 104–115.

4.H. van Houtum, ‘The Geopolitics of Borders and Boundaries’, Geopolitics 10 (2005) pp. 672–679.

5.H. van Houtum, O. Kramsch, and W. Zierhofer (eds.), B/Ordering Space (Aldershot: Ashgate

2005).