Auratic Geographies: Buffers, Backyards, Entanglements

ABSTRACT

The concept of aura deployed in this article – a notion contained in inchoate form in the popular usage of “backyard” – evokes the tension between the apparent stable boundaries of the state and its much more ambiguous incarnation. It allows for a view of the state that is both unconfined to its physical boundaries and that melts into its contiguous neighbours. Building upon the recent work of philosophers on more-than-human entanglements and symbiotic assemblages, the auratic can also help challenge the Darwinian model currently predominant in geopolitics. Indeed, adopting collaboration and symbiosis as organising metaphors rather than zero-sum survival predicated on competition and rivalry seems especially crucial in the current context of climate change and pandemics.

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Klaus Dodds for reading and commenting on a draft of this paper. Thanks also to Reece Jones, Corey Johnson, and the two anonymous readers whose feedback and suggestions greatly helped clarify and tighten the argument.

Notes

1. Aihwa Ong coined the terms “variegated sovereignty” and “graduated sovereignty” (see in particular Ong 2008), while the qualifiers “aleatory” and “paternal” are attributable to Dunn and Cons (2014) and Dodds and Kirby (2014) respectively.

2. A pertinent contemporary example of this may be the creation of buffers and special sanitary zones in response to the Covid19 pandemic. For example, several Chinese towns on the border with Russia, such as Suifenhe, became subject to lockdowns, even as the rest of China was opening up, when a number of citizens returning from Moscow and Vladivostok tested positive.

3. Think in particular about the use of ”buffering” in the context of computers and information technology.

4. As liminal spaces, echoing some of the aspects of the “terrain vague” (see de Sola-morales Rubio 1995), buffer zones are inherently associated with ideas of violation, pollution, contamination, aversion, and anxiety. Buffer zones therefore tend to elicit discomfort and often require buffering themselves, which leads to a further sublayering of space.

5. Noam Leshem and Alasdair Pinkerton, for instance, have convincingly argued that it is the “specific abandonment–enclosure dynamic that distils the specific quality of no-man’s land, and distinguishes it from related concepts and functions.” (Leshem and Pinkerton 2016, 41).

6. An epitaph attributed to communist revolutionary Sergey Lazo in fact famously reminds Russian citizens that “not everyone is granted the right to tread the last meters of Fatherland.” Indeed, as one Russian interlocutors recounted, it was only when he stood on the Chinese side that he got to see two bears on the Russian bank. “The wildlife there is rich because people are not allowed to go. In fact, only our border guards get to see it (Billé and Humphrey 2021).

7. Billé (2018). See also Billé and Humphrey (2021).

8. As historian Daniel Immerwahr writes, after the Mexican War of 1846–48 ended with U.S. forces occupying Mexico City, some in Congress proposed taking all of Mexico. Eventually, the United States chose to annexe the thinly populated northern part of Mexico only (including present-day California, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona). “This carefully drawn border gave the United States, as one newspaper put it, ‘all the territory of value that we can get without taking the people.’” (Immerwahr 2019, 77).

9. As determined by the 2010 Census, these cities are: New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, and San Jose.

10. For more details, see https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone

11. See, for instance, Vila (2005).

12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America%27s_Backyard

13. In a complementary reversal, Daniel Immerwahr notes that, unlike Britain and France who have some thirteen overseas bases between them, the United States has roughly eight hundred, in addition to agreements granting it access to even more other foreign sites. Thus, the “Greater United States, in other words, is in everyone’s backyard.” (Immerwahr 2019, 400).

14. See also Broers (2019).

15. As early as 2011, China Mobile announced for instance that residents of the Spratly Islands (which until recently were uninhabited) would be enjoying full cellphone coverage. Elsewhere, telephone signals have been known to mould more overtly patterns of human settlement. In occupied Palestine, the erection of a cellphone tower by the Israel Electric Corporation allowed a settler outpost to emerge and grow steadily, highlighting the capacity of technology to act as a prosthetic device for territorial sovereignty. The outpost of Migron is now one of the largest of the 103 outposts scattered throughout the West Bank (Weizman 2007, 2). As of 2011, it had a population of 260.

16. Two Turkish powerships have been providing 30% of Lebanon’s electricity since 2013 (Günel 2017).

17. A pertinent example of this is found at the complex of enclaves of Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau where the fractured and neatly marked space at street level conceals an infrastructural network of underground pipes and cables that does not follow boundary lines. At the same time, this subterranean infrastructure works in ways that endorse and sustain the neat Westphalian order above (Billé 2020b).

18. “Not in my backyard” (NIMBY) opposition movements have also often been linked to the construction of airports, whose flightpaths would negatively alter property prices as well as the quality of life of its residents.

19. These deals are usually restricted to properties that share at least 10 feet of lot line. Further, the restrictions are defined by the ratio of floor area to lot size. This ratio determines a building’s permissible bulk and varies by zone as well as by its position on a block or boulevard. “Corner and boulevard sites have fewer restrictions than side streets, particularly in matters of height.” (Finn 2013).

20. In 2016, a group of loft owners paid $11 million to purchase the air rights of a neighbouring plot in order to prevent construction altogether (Goodman, 2019).

21. In London, residents of a luxury apartment complex recently attempted, unsuccessfully, to stop visitors to Tate Modern art gallery from accessing a viewing platform looking into their homes. The justice’s decision was that overlooking another person’s home did not amount to a nuisance (Kirk 2020).

22. Cited in Graham (2016, 25).

23. See also Coole and Frost (2010).

24. See also Bregman (2020).

25. As Sheldrake writes (2020, 9), fungus itself, long lumped together with plants, is actually more closely related to animals. Indeed, “at a molecular level, fungi and humans are similar enough to benefit from many of the same biochemical innovations.”

26. Of all borders aligned on natural features, river borders are perhaps the most recalcitrant, creating misalignments as they alter their course. The border dispute between Croatia and Serbia arose during the twentieth century as natural meanderings and hydraulic engineering works contributed to altering the course of the Danube. Such changes frequently lead to overlapping territorial claims, but in the case of the Croatian-Serbian border it also opened up cartographic breaches, creating patches of land unclaimed by either side. One of these gaps was seized by activist Vít Jedlička who proclaimed the micronation of Liberland in April 2015.

27. Since Blagoveshchensk city trashcans are imported from China, they are identical to the ones used elsewhere in China and include signage, in Chinese, enjoining users to separate recyclable and nonrecyclable material.

28. The electromagnetic spectrum consists in a range of frequencies of electromagnetic radiation, categorised as radio waves, microwaves, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, X-rays, and gamma waves (Tawil-Souri 2017).

29. In a recent book, Eva Haifa Giraud spotlights the limitations inherent to the notion of entanglement. Noting how such narratives grasp something crucial about the world, she nonetheless insists on the importance of paying attention to the “frictions, foreclosures, and exclusions that play a constitutive role in the composition of lived reality.” (Giraud 2019, 2–3).