Identity formation as a result of transnational political contestation: a performance as a result of a rehearsal

Some time back, I read in an ethnography (In & Out of Morocco, McMurray, 2001, page 128) that „subjects involved in border running can both succeed at what they are doing while simultaneously confirming the legitimacy of the state’s monopoly, .. the dominated often become complicitous in legitimising state power.“   Our focus in this blog is, of course, elsewhere than upon smugglers, which are the subjects being inferred primarily by the preceding position, however I begin there to ready your mind with what mine has been readied with.  Now, return to the Asylum seekers, and consider how the notion of I and you is performed via the behaviour that is bordering.  Permit me, one more anecdote, my Uncle lives in a little neighbourhood between the city of Ratzeburg and the Hamlet of Einhaus, half of which is a suburb of Einhaus and half of which is of Ratzeburg and in this harmless arena a comical game of charades is evident, not only in the way my Uncle describes his lived environment, but also in the signage which signifies which streets of the suburb are Ratzeburg streets and which are Einhaus streets.  This is a ridiculous example and there are no real consequences of this suburban microcosm, but the borders which do in fact have great consequences are the same behaviour which the people in my uncle’s neighbourhood so comically rehears.  Didier Fassin turns our attention to life-size performance, the arrest of human mobility across the lines some polity (state, not culture) has drawn on their map; the creation of illegal zones and the spectres that they reject.   Fassin frames their discussion of what I would call a masquerade, pure political trickery, in the explication of „Governmentality“, for the line drawers are not involved in the market or the culture, but the state.  The state, the locus of governmentality, is the emperor’s costume, something made up by and for those who can’t contend with humanity, so it doesn’t fit the scope of humanity, only an imagined section of it.  So the action of performing ownership and stateship in governmentality (just as intuitive as it sounds) serves mainly to hobble the helpless and lift up the loudest.  This governmental performance is frictive, it builds an artifice ostensibly to mimic boundaries, but in fact creating boundaries as a consequence of living a perpetual masquerade, borders which draw vitality out of the heart and toward the thickening of the crust, kicking out and permitting in, delaying and accelerating, seeking only to dominate, to control, and, ultimately, to be affirmed, to be legitimised, to be actuated.

main reference:  Fassin, Didier. Policing borders, producing boundaries. The Governmentality of Immigration in Dark Times.  Annual Review of Anthropology. 2011