Walls: A Performative Contradiction and Icons of Erosion

What interested me most in this week's readings was the delineation of the power structure outlined between the immigrant community and the "native" based upon the erection of walls. I kept coming back to Foucault's theories on the construction of power as relative to how a person is acknowledged as having or being denied power. The relation of such allocations of power is an interdependent one that requires one to be without power in order for the subject to be in possession of such power, much like Wendy Brown explains the interdependent relation between that of the construction of walls and the imperialist notions of "the content of the nations they barricade" (41). Brown describes the interdependence of these two as, "the kinds of subjects that Western nation-state walls would block out are paradoxically produced within the walls themselves" (41). The construction of such walls only fosters and "intensify the criminality and violence they purport to repel, and hence...generate the need for more fortifications and policing" (38). In this instance, Brown is depicting a sort of cyclical relation of the wall, notions of the subjects that walls are purported to repel, and the xenophobia that is fostered as a result which then feeds into the idea that these walls are a necessity and the cycle begins all over again. Because of the wall's role in increasing the criminality and violence of migrant individuals (through the use of border patrols at the border and the criminality that is subsequent to the immigrant's requirement of the protection of more "challenging areas," which Brown specifies as "urban areas," as a means of circumventing border patrol), the migrant community can only be further marginalized from society (38). Ahmed's article furthers the notion of an interdependent relation between the "native" and the migrant when she highlights the role of "hate that works to stick or to bind the imagined subjects and the white nations together" (43). Both Ahmed and Brown are focusing on the xenophobia that such walls produce as the reason that there are even social constructions of the existence of those "beyond the pale" (45).
Second was the notion of the necessity of land as the premise to all law and power. Brown cites the work of John Locke in understanding the central role that many believe private property serves in the acquisition of sovereignty, "bounded property... secures and reproduces the relationship of individual and state sovereignty. Obtaining legal status and protection for property ownership motivates entry into the social contract" (44). Brown then delineates the kind of "chicken or egg" relationship that sovereignty and the walling of space and how one may argue which one came first but that they are directly related to one another and happen in conjunction with the undertaking of one (45). This emphasis placed upon the ownership of land as inherent to power and autonomy is also seen in De Genova's text as she positions the role of and the possibility of deportation as the key factor in creating the immigrant's status of "illegal" (426-427). Wherein the "illegal immigrant" has the possibility of being forcibly removed from all property and land that they may have acquired within the nation-state, they assume no political, legal, or personal power. Therefore, there is an argument to be made in the drawing off of borders, but the socially heightened idea that a wall will offer this sovereignty is falsifiable and ultimately depicts a "performative contradiction" and creates an"icon of erosion" (Brown 24).