8.05.2017
7. PERMEABLE BORDERS & POLITICAL MICROORGANISMS
Who drew
the first border? Better question: why? Perhaps clan borders were drawn on
‘biological’ terms; family ties, whose blood runs in whose veins, the claimant
and protection of people-as-property (vessels for labour, breeding.) This seems
deeply silly to me, although I know that many organisations persist in seeing
borders as drawn on grounds of race. All biology persists in showing borders
and membranes as totally imperfect and necessarily penetrable; our body is as
much reliant on the non-human bacteria and microorganisms that dwell within us
as on the food, air and water we must also drag into ourselves. Perhaps it was
thus the imaginary narratives we create to territorialize space that has spawned
the myth of the border as perfect seal. One has just to look across a map to
see the wealth of permeated membranes supposedly dividing nations. Between
Uganda and Rwanda, the border disappears into forest where many pass from one
nation to another; the Kaliningrad Oblast sits between Poland and Lithuania,
detached from Greater Russia like a replicating bacteria; various blobs and
fissures scuffle up the Spanish- French border, requiring exhaustive and boring
bureaucratic debate to clarify who’s a what and why. Borders are even more
laudable if you try and explain them to animals. Why should a wolf care about the
Finnish-Russian border when there is forest, snow and prey either side? Why
would a critically-endangered mountain gorilla care that it is specifically ‘Ugandan’?
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