cultural geographies

17(3) 299–319
Border theatre: on the arts of © The Author(s) 2010
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
security and resistance co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1474474010368604
http://cgj.sagepub.com

Louise Amoore and Alexandra Hall

Department of Geography, Durham University

Abstract
This essay addresses the conditions and limits of artistic interventions in the contemporary landscape
of border security. It argues that the theatrical rituals of border security – scanning, screening,
verifying identity – have become domesticated and all-but-invisible in our daily scopic regimes. At
the same time, the essay suggests that surprising, enchanting encounters with the techniques and
technologies of security can interrupt border sequences and create invigorated possibilities for
public engagement.An ethics of unanticipated worlds is proposed as an alternative to political action
as always proximate to observable and visible violence. In a world where rituals of border security
increasingly operate precisely by pre-deciding and pre-empting in advance, art that works in the
absence of certainty and decidability offers a crucial window through which to evaluate and respond.

Keywords
art, borders, dissent, public space, ritual, security

Epic theatre interrupts the plot … Epic theatre is accomplished by means of the interruption of sequences.
It arrests the action in its course. It is less concerned with filling the public with feelings, even seditious
ones, than with alienating it in an enduring manner from the conditions in which it lives.1

Introduction: life interrupted

Ten years ago, something extraordinary happened at the San Ysidro crossing of the US Mexico border.
The San Diego-Tijuana crossing point is frenetically busy: thousands of local people work on one side
of the border and live on the other, and make the crossing several times each day, accompanied by tour-
ists, business travellers and sightseers. Those waiting in line in 1997 were confronted with an astound-
ing sight – a 10 metre high wooden horse with two heads that straddled the border (see Figure 1). This
Janus-faced Trojan horse was an installation by artist Marcos Ramirez, who lives and works within
sight of the border in Tijuana. Ramirez’s intervention – a massive, unignorable object, towed into place
over the low concrete buildings of the checkpoint – drew the eye and confused the border landscape, an
engagement with the securitized border apparatus that, for Ramirez, would simply not be possible in
today’s climate of post 9/11 border anxiety. Ramirez’s work often returns to the mundane objects and
apparatus of public space, which become transformed, altered or repositioned in his interventions. His
concern is to disrupt our acceptance of the settled ordering of public space, such that ‘you don’t know
how to react, or they don’t know how to react’. Amid the apparent certainties and securities of contem-
porary life, an interruption is made: ‘It’s that certainty’, says Ramirez ‘which I am playing with’.2

Corresponding author:
Louise Amoore, Department of Geography, Durham University, Science Laboratories, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, UK;
Email: louise.amoore@durham.ac.uk

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300 cultural geographies 17(3)

Figure 1. Toy an Horse, 1997, Marcos Ramirez, InSite, San Ysidro.

In the familiar scopic regimes of our daily lives, where the ‘credibility of visual acts and objects is
established’,3 much of what enters our field of vision, and much of what we encounter, feel, touch
and hear, simply falls away. The border crossers, Ramirez suggests in the literature accompanying
his installation, ‘travel cocooned in their cars and in their thoughts’. Toy an Horse disrupted the
everyday ways of seeing and defamiliarized the border crossing, making it strange, incongruous
and extraordinary. Ramirez imagines an ‘everyman’ border crosser, John Doe, who reflects on the
appearance of the horse: ‘it sparked my deepest curiosity, who had put it there and why?’.4 As the
security rituals of the border take place – the familiar, normalized checking, verifying and authen-
ticating – so the appearance of the horse interrupted this routine, casting it in relief, rendering it new
and surprising, provoking questions. Indeed, when the horse was removed a year later, the border
guards lamented its loss and the border crosser was left with the residue imprint of its presence:

Today I woke to the usual routine, lining up in my customary place in the border queue. Suddenly, the
horse was no longer there. Its absence felt strange. It had become a part of my personal journey. So went
my thoughts until my turn came at the border point. I showed the official my work permit and he waved
me on. Only then did I realize that the horse remains in its place.5

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Amoore and Hall 301

As in Walter Benjamin’s observations of the epic theatre of Berthold Brecht, the artist’s intervention
is made via the interruption or arresting of sequences, ‘to allow for a circumstance which has been
too little noticed’ and ‘to expose what is present’.6 It is precisely these too little noticed repetitive
sequences of the border – the multiple calculations and identifications that constitute the sovereign
practices of authorization – that make the very idea of security possible. It is not the single declara-
tion of exception per se that produces sovereign power, but the multiple ‘repetitive acts’ that write
the very possibility of a securable state.7 In Benjamin’s reading of theatre, an interruption of the
sequence works by arresting movement, suspending, even if only momentarily, the ‘happenings’ or
sequences of events, so that existing conditions are discovered or alienated.8 The sequences that
have become settled and domesticated in security practice are rendered strange by the interruption,
momentarily entering our field of vision anew. Though we may tend to conceive of resistance
comfortably, as Benjamin’s ‘filling the public with seditious feelings’, such that public engagement
is a correlate of a public sphere of civil society, might it be actually the discomforting intervention
that is of critical significance? ‘A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they
are’, writes Foucault, ‘it is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of
familiar, unchallenged modes of thought the practices we accept rest’.9 To alienate people from the
conditions in which they live, then, is to unsettle the familiar and to ‘make facile gestures diffi-
cult’.10 The biopolitical practices that have come to be associated with contemporary border secu-
rity, acting as they do on and through life itself, are themselves incomplete, fraught, contingent and
unknowable. To interrupt their sequence, to deny the repetitions on which they are dependent, is to
assert that we are more than the sum of the calculations that are made of us.
The questions, as we explore them here, become precisely how, and with what conditions and
limits, do artistic interventions interrupt the sequences or rituals of border security? What are the
spaces of resistance, always already present within security practices, that are prised open by artis-
tic intervention? Does an interruption have to have enduring effects, or to somehow transform
public space, in order to ‘count’ as an ethical or political intervention?
For the Mexican artist Marcos Ramirez, what ‘counts’ is precisely to be distracted such that we
momentarily pay attention to that which would otherwise slip away from view. It is not the case
that practices of attention and distraction stand in opposition, but rather, as philosopher of art Jonathan
Crary observes, ‘attention and distraction’ dwell together in modern ways of seeing, ‘the two
ceaselessly flowing into one another’.11 In essence, it is this mode of attentive and yet also distracted
public engagement that interests us in this article. On one hand it is the rituals of border security
(standing in line, removing shoes, producing documents, placing the finger on the biometric reader)
that locate, and call to attention, the ‘trusted traveller’, ‘illegal immigrant’ and ‘risky passenger’.
Yet, if the rites of the border conjure habitual sequences, delimiting what is seen, heard, paid atten-
tion to, they also have another potential: the capacity to invoke the extraordinary, startling and
otherworldly in a way that shatters the mundane and disrupts the field of vision and experience.
We begin by exploring the place of ritual in security practice and, specifically, the ambiguity of
rituals performed at the border: as both rites of passage and potentially also disruptive and trans-
formative tears in the fabric of daily life. We then focus on two specific modes of artistic interven-
tion that we observe engaging with objects and technologies of vigilance and control at the border,
and whose work appears to contain the potential to disrupt these rituals. The first, exemplified by
the Transborder Immigrant Tool, redeploys the security technologies of tracking and tracing in
ways that playfully reconfigure the landscape and aesthetics of border crossings. The second,
exemplified by New York artist Meghan Trainor’s radio frequency identification (RFID) projects,
engages the audience via enchanting and affective experiences that invoke the surprising and the
unanticipated. In their creation of something startling and unexpected from what have become

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302 cultural geographies 17(3)

mundane technological apparatuses, they create a momentary, and potentially transforming, space
of confusion. This, we argue, cultivates a particular mode of public engagement, one that disturbs
the possibility of authoritative, settled judgements. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of
such artistic interruption for the politics and ethics of border dissent.

Border security: ritual, theatre, performance

The assemblage of technologies and calculations that form the sequences of the securitized border
serves to authorize its actions – to differentiate the bodies that must wait, stop, pass or turn back.
The border’s scopic regime construes as ‘correct’ or ‘normal’ its apparatus, checks and inspections,
rendering as necessary the multiple processes of verification. To consider the rituals of the border,
though, is to focus on the intertwining of the sequential and the contingent, the mundane and the
extraordinary within its workings and effects. Anthropological studies of ritual (religious and secular)
have shown it to have multiple political, symbolic and communicative registers. As a set of stipu-
lated, repetitive acts, ritual action produces the conditions whereby ‘agents both are and are not the
authors of their ritual actions’.12 In this routinized sense, ritual action is a close interplay of author-
ity and deference, with the possibility of improvisation and ‘alternative utterances’ foreclosed.13
Ritual is a distinct mode of routinized, sequential action, through which certain modes of credibility
and authenticity are authorized by their very repetition.
Ritual is performed, but it is also performative in Judith Butler’s sense: the secular ritual of
the post 9/11 border, with its proliferating security practices, precisely authorizes via repetitive,
iterative acts that appear to offer scant possibility of alternative.14 The border crosser must per-
form to a number of security demands – removing shoes, emptying bags, submitting to a scan,
being searched, waiting in orderly queues, pressing fingers on readers, repeating personal
information in precise, clear and unequivocal terms. Deviation from the settled sequences of
border rituals – whether at the San Ysidro crossing, or at an international airport – is problem-
atic, impossible if one wants to cross. If the meaning of the border emerges from the ‘drawing
of sovereign lines’15 that have become authorized transcripts, the ritual actions of the border
appear to constrict the possibility for digression. Certainly the understanding of the border as
an exception in Agamben’s terms – a space where the rule of law and the emergency procedure
merge into indistinction – suggests also a place where the unexpected, chaotic and unruly is
compressed.16 At the border, where bodies come under the watchful scrutiny of an assemblage
of guards, cameras and security experts that aim to modulate, police and filter mobilities, there
appears little possibility for the emergence of the surprising or unanticipated. More than this,
the mode of attentiveness that is fostered at the border is a regulated, vigilant and ‘correct’
mode of seeing’ within which the myriad everyday sequences of security fall away into the
inevitable, the necessary, and the prudent.17
Ritual, however, has another potential, which dwells within the rationalized sequences of autho-
rized security practice. Though ritual undeniably contains elements of the regimented, the habitual,
the routine, it is always already potentially transformative, enchanting and ludic. At the border, the
rights of passage that have been so much the focus of academic commentary (through which certain
kinds of mobility are authorized via documentation, visa, passport and so on18) merge with a much
less well understood rites of passage, the ritual process that marks and facilitates the possibility of
change. Anthropologist Victor Turner’s work on rites of passage foregrounds liminality, a stage in
certain ritual processes that contains a powerful possibility for transformation. Rites of passage are
processual, involving separation (from ‘normal’ order), transition (a marginal status) and incorpo-
ration or reaggregation (with an altered position or status).19 The parallels between contemporary

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Amoore and Hall 303

border practice and classic rites of passage are compelling: the physical act of crossing a border
involves a departure; a period of ambiguity between sovereign territories; and entry, with a new
status. The refugee, for example, appears as the ultimate liminal figure, neither one place or another
and ‘border cultures’ frequently emerge as creative, chaotic and transgressive liminal spaces.20 The
liminal period is at once destructive and creative, a space and time where people are ‘betwixt and
between’ and ambiguous.21 Rights of passage intertwine with rites of passage, a radical indetermi-
nacy that the border produces even as it seeks resolution through sovereign distinctions between
categories of mobile bodies.
For Turner, shards of the liminal (the extraordinary, transformative and unsettling) are found in
artistic, literary and, perhaps especially, theatrical practice.22 It is here that the multiple crossing
points between theatre, ritual and the border begin to emerge. The border’s sequences are ritual-
ized, and the border can also be understood as theatrical, in that it shares certain key qualities with
‘theatre’. On one level, the border’s theatricality is a matter of traditional display or show. The
space of the border is, for Nicholas De Genova, ‘the exemplary theatre for staging the spectacle of
“the illegal alien” that the law produces’.23 The border, then, is a political stage for the performance
of control, a showy set of symbolic gestures.24 It is through these gestures that the sheen of secur-
ability and controllability is conjured. Importantly, though, the border is not simply ‘like the the-
atre’, with connotations of pretence, staging, illusion; rather, it is productive in the same way that
theatre is productive. The border is theatrical because it produces a particular kind of space: ‘a
space in which “appearance” of a certain kind becomes possible; indeed, a space which is orga-
nized in such a way as to compel certain kinds of appearance’.25 At the border, as in theatre, presence
becomes problematized: ‘[t]he question of who is present: actor, performer, character; material body
or representational figure – carries exactly the same sort of ambivalence that is reproduced in the
experience of the border crosser’.26
The border understood as ritual, and also as theatre, configures a space where identification
becomes fraught: at the border ‘[y]ou “play” yourself, and hope you are convincing’.27 The border
and the border crosser mutually implicate one another, materializing in their encounter. The border’s
performativity, again, lies in the way it brings into being a series of recognizable categories – state
authorities, illegal aliens, risky travellers, legal crossers – through its iterated sequences of identi-
fication. It also lies in the creation of a particular kind of space: one that relies on ritualized
sequences and calculations to produce the appearance of securability, but which retains a liminal
potential, and which is theatrical, not in a playful illusory sense, nor in the sense of a scripted,
rehearsed pretence, but as a space configured as theatre in which appearance, and identity, is always
in question.28 This, then, is the paradox in drawing out the theatre and ritual inherent in the border,
which reveals something of its inconsistencies.
At issue here is the kind of intervention that artistic practice can make on the (theatrical, ritual-
ized) space that the border creates and the effects of the repetitive sequences which operate therein,
sequences which seek to know, calculate, and verify those who pass. Rita Raley argues that artists
are particularly well-placed to ‘think about the deployment and the manipulation of signs’ that
interweave with the border and its practices.29 More than this, however, and central to our argument
is that artists can intervene on the border in ways that exceed ‘the symbolic’, or the manipulation
of signs. In producing theatre from the border, or revealing the border as theatre, or reworking its
rituals, artistic interventions are able to reconfigure or transform the space that is created through
the border and its technologies of security. In what follows, we explore two artistic interventions
that engage with the border, and the devices that are mobilized within bordering practices. Our
concern, then, is with artistic work that works precisely to disrupt the calculation and authentica-
tion that is intrinsic to the border’s sovereign distinctions.

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Technology at play: Transborder Immigrant Tool

Along the US Mexican Border the chase across the desert between the US Border Patrol and
Mexican crosser has become a highly ritualized emblem of the ways in which the border operates:
those without papers who want to make it to the other side must negotiate a hostile landscape
(see Figure 2) and the mobilization of predatory and sophisticated technologies for locating and
tracking ‘illegal’ bodies on the move. If they make it to the United States, they join a vulnerable
and tractable workforce in constant threat of apprehension, detention and removal.30 If they die,
their deaths form a testimony to the ‘obscene underside’ of the securitized spaces of exception of
the ‘war on terror’.31 New innovations, such as Boeing’s ‘virtual fence’, have become enmeshed
with an existing securitized landscape in which the Border Patrol hunt and track mobile bodies.
Cartographic and global positioning technologies are central to the Border Patrol’s efforts to ‘main-
tain borders that work – facilitating the flow of legal immigration and goods while preventing the
illegal trafficking of people and contraband’.32
Transborder Immigrant Tool emerges in and through this technological core of border gover-
nance. It is the latest project from artist activist (or ‘artivist’) Ricardo Dominguez, whose work has
continually sought to ‘disturb’ the US-Mexico border, particularly by technological means that he
calls ‘electronic civil disobedience’. In collaborative networks such as the Critical Arts Ensemble,
and Electronic Disturbance Theatre, and through infamous actions such as ‘Swarm the Minutemen’

Figure 2. The vertiginous landscape separating Tijuana, Mexico, and San Diego, California.

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Amoore and Hall 305

(when the vigilante group’s website was ‘flooded’ by artivist software), Dominguez and his
colleagues act to ‘temporarily reverse’ or ‘block’ flows of power.33 Transborder Immigrant Tool
directly engages GPS (Global Positioning System) technology and its use in hunting ‘suspect’
immigrant bodies. Dominguez’s team has merged cracked, GPS-enabled mobile phones with a
Virtual Hiker algorithm developed by Brett Stalbaum.34 This algorithm traces a ‘virtual trail’
through particular terrains, orienting users to landmarks and paths. The aim is to produce a custom-
ized geography, with people receiving information on the move about safe trails, water caches and
checkpoints, to ‘parse out the best routes and trails on that day and hour for immigrants to cross this
vertiginous landscape as safely as possible’.35
The project, according to its designers, has clear aesthetic, political and artistic aims. The algo-
rithm does not simply carve out safe routes ‘in terms of a map or a politics’ but seeks out what
Dominguez calls ‘the most aesthetic crossing’.36 For Micha Cardenas (an artist researcher on Transborder
Immigrant Tool), the project is concerned with ‘taking technology and repurposing it … putting it
in a different context and using it in a different way… taking that GPS technology and making it
available to people that really, really need it’.37 In effect, Transborder Immigrant Tool half-con-
ceals the act of assisting migrant crossings inside an ‘art project’, while simultaneously making art
from the aesthetics of desert crossings. The artists use the device to cross the desert themselves,
making the border crossing a public performance that is accessed and visualized in new ways, via
the internet for example. For Cardenas, the project works by interrupting the ritual of the Mexico-
California border crossing, repositioning the technology’s relationship to the landscape and provid-
ing ‘people with the way to make their own maps’.38 As geography, Transborder Immigrant Tool
is inseparable from its location: as it seeks to orient the desert crossers, so it clearly orients itself in
relation to the border and its effects, seeking to create an ‘alternative spatiality’.39 The space that it
creates is an inverted ‘world turned upside down’,40 where everyone can cross the border, and where
the desert landscape becomes a safe, pleasurable hike. And it is through the performance effects of
the Tool – in the hands of the undocumented, and the artists, spiralled out through webcasts – that
this new ‘alternately visualized’41 world is to materialize.
In the Transborder Immigrant Tool project we see a close proximity between aesthetics and politics,
or between art and the political act. For many who would comment on the political potential of artist
intervention, this proximity is crucial if art is to do more ‘in civil society’ than ‘engage in conscious-
ness raising around political themes’, and is to meaningfully achieve ‘material political effects’.42 It is
around the notion of ‘material effects’ that differences emerge between Transborder Immigrant Tool
and Marcos Ramirez’s Toy an Horse. The location of the Tool is clearly legible, its relation to the ‘act’
of activism clearly drawn, its intervention in the ritualistic procedures of border governance easily
defined, the communities it defines – enemy, friend, inside, outside – identifiable. Both Ramirez and
Cardenas speak of wanting to encourage public debate. While the effects of the Tool are able to be
calculated and measured, rather as the border itself calibrates – in bodies tracked and crossings suc-
cessfully made – the response to Ramirez’s Horse is literally immeasurable. Its effects are wrought in
the cracking of daily ritual, the dislocation of habit and fragmentation of the border’s scopic regime.
It is this profound uncertainty as to the effects of action that we consider to be important in inter-
rupting the rituals of contemporary security. For us, it is not the case that art needs to be proximate to
observable and situated action easily identifiable as ‘political’ in order to be effective. Indeed, one
might say that the redeployment of security technologies ‘in the hands of the migrant’ do little to
unsettle the sense of certainty about the border and its technologies: instead it points to a particular
resolution where more people have access to geographical technology and are able to cross the border.
Ramirez’s Horse does not adopt a knowable political position, but works as a form of what Taussig
calls ‘defacement’.43 The act of defacement, Taussig argues, ‘works on objects the way that jokes work

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306 cultural geographies 17(3)

on language, bringing out their inherent magic nowhere more so than when those objects have become
routinized and social’.44 Defacement may offend, startle or shock, but it also provokes a ‘drama of
revelation’ which uncovers a secret, making us see anew what we thought we already recognized as
familiar and mundane.45 As Taussig has it, citing Benjamin, ‘truth is not a matter of exposure which
destroys the secret, but a revelation which does justice to it’.46 What is revealed is the public secret –
the ways in which ‘knowing what not to know’ smoothes the workings of power.47 Where interven-
tions such as Transborder Immigrant Tool invert and destroy the secret rituals of the tracking
technologies, making the border a space traversable by all, Ramirez’s Horse works differently in rela-
tion to public space, provoking a continued curiosity to that which is secret and mysterious.
The Horse, then, defaced the border, cutting into its completeness, interrupting its sequential
working and rendering it visible to an excess. As the Horse towered over the border, its ‘players’ and
rituals of controllability were suddenly part of a different, more disconcerting, drama. There is also a
sense in which the Horse does indeed ‘artfully reveal’ the ‘public secret’ of the border; not least that the
line between US and Mexico, inside and out, friend and enemy can never be clearly drawn. In Ramirez’s
own words, ‘Toy an Horse, it can work both directions, and it’s not only one. And there’s no one that is
a villain, and the other one is just a very weak, undefensive’. That is to say, the ‘revelation’ that the
Horse makes is not only exposing the unnoticed, routinized workings of the securitized border, but also
the double-edged, incomplete nature of the border’s distinctions, the limitations of a politics that views
it as a matter of victim and perpetrator, and the assumption that art, to consider itself political, must have
an aim, an ‘endgame’. The Horse disconcerts the border’s sheen of securability, throwing its ordered
sequences into disarray. To confront Ramirez’s Horse is not to encounter a clear, legible judgement or
settled explanation. Rather, works such as these offer provocations that open space for a form of uncer-
tainty that is hopeful and meaningful. It is the precise way in which public space becomes altered in Toy
an Horse – the defamiliarization and distraction that it insists upon – that lies at the heart of its ‘effects’,
but which ten years on and after 9/11, can never be created at the place where it was originally located.

Enchanting objects: engaging the audience

The politics of contemporary security technologies has tended to coalesce around ideas about sur-
veillance, monitoring and control. Though such ideas certainly capture something of the rights of
passage performed at late modern borders, they have closed down the possibilities of the rites of
passage that are always already co-present. It is in the work of artists who use technologies in sur-
prising ways that we locate the possibility of an alternative politics of border security. In a sense,
the very refusal to take a position on the place of a technology in our contemporary society, and
instead to work on the potential for different and more affirmative ways of engaging that technol-
ogy, opens up many of the political difficulties avoided by the appeals to surveillance or threats to
privacy. Consider, for example, the work of New York artist Meghan Trainor, an interdisciplinary
multi-media artist who works with RFID (radio frequency identification) tags. Most commonly
encountered in consumer goods, passports and immigration documents, and in urban transporta-
tion smart cards, RFID has become a ubiquitous, almost unnoticed way of encoding and reading
data, and tracking objects and bodies. In her 2005 work With Hidden Numbers Trainor (and her
collaborator Michelle Anderson) places RFID tags inside tactile hand crafted objects that invite a
playful interaction in which the work is never complete (Figure 3).48 When scanned, the objects
trigger sounds and audio playbacks that place the work in the hands of visitors to the exhibition,
continually creating new possibilities and variations. The objects, then, foster what Trainor calls a
‘nostalgia for the new’, which she states is a ‘powerful way to engage the audience’.49 Enclosed
within the tactile, smooth and vaguely familiar objects, participants encounter RFID technologies
in a way that provokes an incongruous affective response.

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Amoore and Hall 307

Figure 3. With Hidden Numbers, 2005, Meghan Trainor.

To touch one of Trainor and Anderson’s objects is to feel a sudden sense of doubt about their location
in our past, present and future. To us, they look and feel old, like an object we once played with in
our grandmother’s house. And yet, in their orientation to Trainor’s digitized sounds, they suggest
something of an uncertain future world yet to come. Our sense of the place these technologies have
in the world, of where they are located in our lives, is momentarily interrupted. Once encountered
in this way, the residue of the disruption – rather as in Ramirez’s Horse – echoes through other
everyday encounters with the rituals of RFID: the movement of the hand on the scanner, the sound
of the verifying ‘bleep’, the tactile feel of the card in the hand. That which had previously slipped
away from view is newly visualized, experienced, and attended to.
In Trainor’s project 16 Horsepower, RFID tags are similarly integrated with tactile objects and
aural responses. Audiences hold micro-chipped graphite objects which leave traces on walls, and
which also trigger sounds when scanned by reader software (Figure 4). As they play with the objects,
the movements and actions of participants echo some of the prosaic daily movements of passengers
in the subway or at the border crossing, and yet also invoke strangely the movement of dancers or the
hands of a DJ on the decks. The immediate experience of the RFID technology, and the object that
encloses it, is never predictable, and is unique to every participant. Expanded as Transmission during
her residency in a disused bank in New York’s Lower Manhatten Cultural Council’s (LMCC)
Swingspace programme, Trainor’s projects are precisely interested in the unanticipated, unforeseen
and unrecognized sensory engagements with architectures and technological devices. Indeed, the
LMCC’s programme to sponsor artists to work in the city’s unused offices of the financial district,

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308 cultural geographies 17(3)

Figure 4. Audiences interact with Trainor’s RFID-embedded objects.

begun in the World Trade Center’s North Tower 1997–2001, invites new and unanticipated world
views into spaces that appear settled, rational and calculable. Trainor’s work, seen in this context,
invites the audience to enter spaces that they thought they already knew, or they thought they could
never know, and to touch and experience objects they may think they have seen somewhere before,
encountering them anew: her work displacing the participant forwards and backwards in time.50
Experimenting with the unseen and unarticulated elements of RFID technologies – the visceral,
affective encounters that combine fear, fascination, wonder and suspicion – Trainor’s installations
give ‘people a chance to experience it [the device] outside of something that’s commodified or some-
thing that’s governmental’.51 It is this space of experience ‘outside’ and yet within the rituals of com-
mercial or governmental life that may contain important political potential. The affective and
emotional experience of the object interrupts these sovereign domains, revealing the rights of passage
on which they are so very dependent.
Significantly, Trainor and her collaborators overtly refuse a singular positionality in relation to
the technologies they use: ‘they are neither good nor bad’ and their futures are unknown and unpre-
dictable.52 This suspension of clear positionality is not a sidestep of politics, but is a matter of

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Amoore and Hall 309

refusing to draw out a calculable, knowable response to the technologies, or the intervention itself.
Indeed, it is the refusal to display a singular horizon of the future that opens the possibility of
beginning to imagine what the future might look like. The artists play on the relations between our
bodies, technologies and experiences, seemingly embodying a philosophy depicted by Rosi
Braidotti as a ‘vitalistic ethics’ in which, rather than withdraw from a world of which we are some-
how ashamed, we ‘transcend negativity itself, transforming it into something positive’.53 What is
required, at least as Braidotti sees it, is a vitality that expresses itself in a creative approach to sub-
ject and self. We find a similar sense of possibility in Jane Bennett’s ‘crossings’ that ‘invoke the
exciting sense of travelling to new lands’, creating a ‘space for novelty’ in the relations between
humans, bodies and technologies.54 Read through Braidotti and Bennett’s insights, Trainor’s work
crosses the ascribed boundaries of subject and technological object, making possible new forms of
connection and engagement. One might reasonably ask at this point, how does one creatively
engage the crossing from authenticated self to the RFID in one’s newly issued UK passport? The
question might be how we come to think anew about the apparently singular and intact identity that
the authentication of that document assumes, and which the border stipulates we ‘play’. While the
RFID at the border seeks to verify and check, closing down on uncertainty and the unknown,
Trainor’s work consistently draws out the liminoid ‘mood of maybe, might-be, hypothesis, fantasy,
conjecture, desire’.55
This ‘mood of maybe’ has risk attached: when Trainor was stopped in Charles de Gaulle airport
on her way to a seminar in Barcelona,56 her incongruous ceramic objects drew suspicion from
security officials. They demanded to know what her art did; if her objects were embedded with
RFID, would they work with their security scanners at the airport? Trainor finally managed to
catch an onward flight by producing her invitation from CCCB to present her work – the verifica-
tion the border security apparatus recognizes. Yet Trainor’s efforts to explain her work – that RFID
could be used in art, that it would work differently in the context she creates, that RFID might have
‘another life’ outside the airport security apparatus – reveals much about the ‘problem’ of incon-
gruity and the unexpected at the border and in public spaces? Trainor’s encounter at Charles de
Gaulle was the border as theatre and ritual; where appearance and identity hung in doubt, and where
the possibilities of art found themselves proximate to the border’s machineries of exclusion.
Resolution was finally reached with the officials’ realization that Trainor (and the seminar at which
she was participating) was ‘talking about us’. What lingers from the interaction with Trainor’s RFID,
however, even as expulsion hangs in the balance, is the sense that things could always be otherwise.
The liminal and liminoid elements of ritual, then, are transformative, not only in the sense of
altering our status in the face of authority (as in traditional rites of passage), but also in the sense
of imparting new ways of knowing, of disrupting settled ways of seeing and replacing them with
something new: these disruptions may never be mapped, or quantified, or fully known. Rather than
seek to resolve the paradoxes and contradictions of border security technologies, then, the artworks
function ‘as catalyst’ to new modes of public space.57 They remind us that within apparently disci-
plined and securitized regimes of attention and forgetting there are also interstitial spaces of dis-
traction, enchantment or reverie that may work against settled and familiar prejudicial and
individualized practices. ‘To be enchanted’, writes Jane Bennett, ‘is to be struck and shaken by the
extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and the everyday’.58 For Bennett, ‘joy can propel ethics’,
at least in the sense that the magic of the future and the promise of life not yet lived is kept open.59
Where calculative and securitized orientations to the future annul the possibility of the unantici-
pated and surprising, to momentarily forget oneself and be enchanted by life is to accept the
unknowability of the future, even where it may contain dangers and fears.

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Border rites: art, ethics and politics

In June 2001 outside the Palace of Westminster, peace activist Brian Haw began a five year protest
against the economic sanctions in Iraq and, later, the Iraq war. In many ways, the material presence
of his placards, images and objects had itself become a ritual that was almost unnoticed, no longer
drawing the attention of passers-by on their way to work. Yet, on 23 May 2006, following the pass-
ing into law of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act prohibiting unauthorized demonstra-
tions within 1km of Parliament Square, Haw’s vast collection was removed by 80 police officers.
Having followed Haw’s protest for some time, documenting it in digital photographs, artist Mark
Wallinger began to recreate the collection piece by piece for the Duveen Galleries of Tate Britain.
As the resulting Turner prize winning State Britain exhibition catalogue presented the work:

Mark Wallinger has recreated peace campaigner Brian Haw’s Parliament Square protest for a dramatic
new installation at Tate Britain ... Faithful in every detail, each section of Brian Haw’s peace camp from
the makeshift tarpaulin shelter and tea-making area to the profusion of hand painted placards has been
painstakingly sourced and replicated for the display. On 23 May 2006, following the passing by Parliament
of the ‘Serious Organised Crime and Police Act’ prohibiting unauthorised demonstrations within a one
kilometre radius of Parliament Square, the majority of Haw’s protest was removed. Taken literally, the
edge of this exclusion zone bisects Tate Britain. Wallinger has marked a line on the floor of the galleries,
positioning State Britain half inside and half outside the border. In bringing a reconstruction of Haw’s
protest before curtailment back into the public domain, Wallinger raises challenging questions about issues
of freedom of expression and the erosion of civil liberties in Britain today.60

As an instance of the apparent replication of public protest inside the hallowed halls of the famous
gallery, Wallinger’s intervention raises some important questions in relation to art as politics. As
the spatiality of the act is moved to the space of the gallery, is it the case, as the Tate promises, that
protest is ‘brought back into the public domain’? In one sense, Haw’s protest until 2006 had a clear
positionality, not only in its proximity to a recognizable site of politics and its occupation of public
space, but also representing as it did an overt refusal of war and suffering. Wallinger’s artistic
intervention is political in a quite different sense, and in a way that strikes at the heart of the diffi-
cult relationship between art and politics. Like Ramirez’s Horse and Trainor and Anderson’s inter-
active performance installations, Wallinger does not seek to tell people what they should think
about the border, the war in Iraq, or contemporary civil liberties. Instead, he interrupts their visual
expectation of the Tate Britain, arresting their progress through the gallery, making strange their
visit and ‘defacing’ the cool neo-classical columns of the Duveen.
In an interview, Wallinger suggests that the installation of the reproduced Haw placards, far
from exposing the state via the gallery, actually reveals the mysteries and secrets of the politics of
the gallery itself. The Tate, he reminds us, was ‘once a penitentiary’ and ‘Tate money had links to
the former slave trade’.61 His work, then, is not merely a commentary on the state of civil liberties
in contemporary Britain, but more precisely a gesture that allows certain things that had disap-
peared in repetition ‘as people walk to the Turners’ to reappear in a new light.62 In this way it was
theatrical in the sense of spectacle, but also in Nield’s sense of making presence problematic.
Wallinger’s installation was uncomfortable in the space it occupied – ‘vulnerable as the objects of
a harvest festival in a church’63 – and, as a result, it made visual, and brought into focus, things that
would not otherwise be seen. Indeed, in order to clarify the legality of his work within the 1km
exclusion zone, the Tate’s lawyers had to work hard to define what we might call an exception to
the exception, an exemption for art within the exceptional measure of prohibited protest in public

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Amoore and Hall 311

places. In the final analysis, the State Britain could dwell within the Tate so long as the museum
‘although a public building, does not constitute public space’. It is precisely the difficulty, the
obduracy of the work within the context of the space that is the essence of its political character.
Put simply, artist interventions are not political because they resolve a political issue, pointing to
its causes and calling for a solution, but exactly because they point to irresolvability and difficulty.
In the sections that follow, we address two of what we see as the key problematics of thinking
through the political potential of artist interventions to open new modes of public space through the
interruption of sequences.

What counts? Politics as difficulty

A key question when thinking about the political possibilities of the art-centred interruption, the
arresting of sequences, is how one considers a particular intervention to be political, or to have
political effects, without engaging in an exercise of ‘what counts’ that simply authorizes certain
forms of politics. Is it the case, for example, that Ramirez’s Horse, Haw’s placards and Dominguez’s
devices count as political when they are ‘in situ’ at the border or in sight of Westminster, and yet
not when they enter the gallery or museum? Was the encounter with Trainor’s art at Charles de
Gaulle airport more politically significant than those at the Lower Manhatten disused bank?
Certainly one could not say that all artistic intervention, even of the forms we have discussed, are
inherently political or are somehow imbued with political possibility. We are compelled, though,
by interventions that reflect on their shifting spatial and political affects. To take an object inside
the apparently buffered space of the gallery, as Michelle Anderson suggests, does change the nature
of the intervention, moving it into an ‘economy of information’ with which visitors may be familiar.64
As the border space spirals into the architecture of urban life, however, this economy of informa-
tion is itself part of the unseen backdrop of security intervention. Where does the city journey and
the border crossing begin and end? As Anderson proposes:

Where’s the line between the … disorientating space of the subway, when, when you shut down and then
when you open up again? Is it, at the turnstile? Is it when you put your card in? Does it start as soon as you
put one foot on the step?65

As the homeland security state appoints the citizen’s vigilant visuality66 to the work of recognizing
the anomalous or suspicious in the routines of everyday life, our journeys across the public spaces
of subway, city street or plaza become trajectories across multiple, merged borders: through the
gallery (where we are reminded of our duties by the police poster in the vestibule, ‘if you suspect
it report it’); waiting in line at the border (the most normal thing in the world); walking, unknow-
ingly, across the exclusion zone as we hurry to work. Our trajectories are marked, as Crary reminds
us, by attention and distraction, by concentration and forgetfulness. As the artists attest, we all
‘learn patterns’,67 each and every day: for all our journeys and encounters in public space. Because
the very idea of securability rests precisely on these forgotten, unnoticed patterns,68 it is of critical
political significance that we find ways of retrieving what is forgotten, or overlooked. In asking
where, how, or why people ‘shut down’ and forget in public space, it is especially important not to
reproduce an economy of intervention that says, the desert counts, Westminster counts, San Ysidro
counts, but the museum, the office block, the gallery, they do not.
To clarify our case that art need not be proximate to some form of observable or situated political
action, what we are interested in is a specific mode of critique that interrupts the repetitions and
arrests the sequences that make contemporary security practice possible. This is not, then, a matter

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312 cultural geographies 17(3)

of location. The point of the interruption is not to rally to an issue or to call for a specific response,
but rather to deface the apparently smooth and seamless surface of certainty and securability and
make it suddenly appear, uncertain, fraught and difficult. Understood in this way, politics and
political critique is a matter of exposing or revealing that difficulty and intractability. In an inter-
view in Le Monde in 1980, Michel Foucault denounced criticism that simply passes judgement and
‘hands down sentences’, calling instead for ‘a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination’.69
For Foucault, critique is not that which seeks out resolution, reconciliation or the smoothing out of
difficulty, but rather that which discomforts and unsettles one’s sense of certainty:

Critique doesn’t have to be the premise of a deduction which concludes: this then is what needs to be done.
It doesn’t have to lay down the law for the law. It isn’t a stage in a programming. It is a challenge directed
to what is.70

Understood as a tendency to leave the observer unsettled, to work against the grain of the mood of
the times, Foucault’s writings and teachings embody what Edward Saïd called, in his own last
book, ‘late style’. In Ibsen’s later plays, as in Benjamin Britten’s opera, Saïd finds ‘works that seem
to break away from the amazingly persistent underlying compact’.71 In such work there is no
redemption, but only ‘intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction’.72 The possibility of
completion, of a final judgement, is disturbed by work that denies the possibility of closure, leaving
‘the audience more perplexed and unsettled than before’.73
It is this absence of a final judgement, this unsettling of the audience that we consider to be sig-
nificant in artist interventions in contemporary border security. The San Ysidro border crosser who
is left with the image of the Horse long after Ramirez’s work is removed; the Lower Manhattan city
worker whose encounter with Trainor’s tactile soundscape haunts her subsequent use of technology;
the visitor to the Tate Britain’s Turner collections whose walk down the Duveen hall is interrupted
by Wallinger: they are left not with a final judgement. On the contrary, their encounter has removed
from them the certain and definite grounds for judgement. For philosopher Thomas Keenan, such a
removal of grounds is essential to the cultivation of a public space for political life. ‘Politics is dif-
ficult. It is difficulty itself’, writes Keenan, such that the only responsibility worthy of the name
‘comes with the withdrawal of the rules or the knowledge on which we might rely to make our deci-
sions for us’.74 A public space for politics that might be cultivated by art, then, cannot be said either
‘to count’ or not ‘to count’ as political, because it actually requires the removal of programmed ways
of counting, authorizing or calculating – the French border guards’ demand to know ‘how does it
work’? Put simply, if the border’s theatricality requires that we ‘cite’ ourselves correctly within ritu-
alized sequential procedures, then there is political potential in the arrest of those repeated citations.
To respond responsibly, politically, is to respond in the absence of a framework for judging what
counts. ‘If decision making is relegated to a knowledge that it is content to follow’, writes Derrida,
‘then it is no more a responsible decision, it is the technical deployment of an apparatus’.75 In order
to respond with responsibility, then, one must not defer into a calculative apparatus, but precisely
illuminate that apparatus and what it has done. In the artist works we have discussed here, because
they point to a profound uncertainty as to technological, commercial and governmental effects, we
would locate just such an illumination and withdrawal of enumerative or calculative apparatus.

An ethics of unanticipated worlds

An important question in relation to theatrical and artistic modes of interruption and intervention
is: how, in precise terms, one might locate the ethical character of this kind of action? Certainly,
where art projects do seek, in Benjamin’s terms, to ‘fill the public with feelings’ or to carve out a

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Amoore and Hall 313

defined public space for action or for protest, there is less difficulty in locating an ethical grounds.
In the instance of the Transborder Immigrant Tool project, for example, one might say that a clear
and unequivocal position is taken on the matter of the human rights of the migrant. The figure of
the border crosser in this mode, though, appears only as a relatively stripped down being who,
along with all others, is the bearer of rights. As critical legal scholar Costas Douzinas has put it, the
‘man of the rights of man’ appears ‘without differentiation or distinction in his nakedness and sim-
plicity, united with all others in an empty nature deprived of substantive characteristics’.76 Thus, the
appearance and disappearance of the person at the border or in border spaces, absolutely crucial to the
border as theatre, is not thrown into question by such artistic modes. If human rights are conceived,
instead, as particular and contingent struggles for recognition,77 the claim of the border crosser to cite
themselves differently, to play themselves differently, becomes at least a possibility. Far from locating
the ethics of artistic intervention in clear ethical stances, then, we are interested instead in instances
where the ethical response is not pre-programmed in advance. In a world where rituals of border secu-
rity increasingly operate precisely by pre-deciding, pre-empting, and pre-targeting, critical responses
may interrupt more effectively if they themselves confront the absence of certainty and decidability.
It is not our intention to suggest that all modes of artistic or theatrical interruption in securitized
spaces such as borders have some form of inherent ethical potential. Rather, in arresting sequences
and repetition we locate a capacity to bring back into visibility those elements of security practice
that had slipped below the visual register. In short, they remind us of what we do not pay attention
to, what we are distracted from, as we stand in line at the airport, subway station or land border
crossing, creating what Tom Mitchell says ‘looks like a picture of something we could never see’.78
In some specific cases, then, installation artworks do form a kind of theatre, a form of ‘experimen-
tal activity’ that ‘involves the creation of unanticipated spaces and environments in which our
visual and intellectual habits are challenged and disrupted’,79 and where the subjunctive, undecided
mood hovers. The creation of unanticipated spaces, as we see in the works of both Marcos Ramirez
and Meghan Trainor, is where the more fully fleshed out human being envisaged by Douzinas in
his sense of human rights might come into focus. As Ramirez explains, the ordinarily pre-pro-
grammed and calculable decisions and responses of the border guards were suspended in the face
of his horse. Enchanted by its presence in the border landscape, and lamenting its loss when it was
removed, the border guards’ habits and rituals are disrupted, perhaps momentarily, perhaps endur-
ingly, but in ways that may not be mapped.
What could it mean to advance an ethics of the unanticipated? In the unprogrammed responses to
Ramirez’s Horse and Trainor’s magical objects there emerges a sense of possibility. To enter this
space of otherwise is to create the possibility for decisions made in the absence of what we thought
we knew about the world, to leave behind easy, comforting, familiar and well-rehearsed judgements.
The border of the ‘war on terror’ works precisely by seeking a securable resolution to the risky and
unaccountable. Yet, Jane Bennett argues that ‘the novel and as yet unprocessed encounter’80 can also
charm and enchant tearing us from anticipated relations with others, and cultivating instead an ethic
of generosity.81 To put this ethic in more tangible terms, it implies an acknowledgement of the fragil-
ity and contestability of the positions we all bring to forms of public engagement. Our relations with
others; our sense of self and identity; our hopes for the future: all, as William Connolly suggests, are
‘fragile fundamentals’. ‘The key’, he argues, ‘is to acknowledge the contestability of the perspec-
tives you bring into public engagements’ and recognize on the ‘visceral register of subjectivity’ a
‘generous ethos of public engagement’.82 In short, the artistic interventions we have discussed here
act not so much to open a particular public space for defined bearers of rights, as to cultivate a mode
of public engagement among persons whose ideas about rights are held in check.
The ‘border arrested’, which is at the heart of the artistic interventions we have described, some-
what exceeds the ethic of generosity that may emerge in moments of wonder and enchantment. In

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314 cultural geographies 17(3)

stalling the sequences of border security, revealing the modes of disengagement vital for their
operation and the very possibility of ‘an otherwise’, the artworks we have discussed insist on
weaving the unknowable into public space, where there is an increasing intolerance of the unfore-
seen, unexpected and unaccountable. The interruption, as Benjamin realized, is the true potential
of art’s political provocation: to make us notice and look again so that nothing is quite as it seems
and the sheen of the securable border begins to cloud.

Conclusions: border publics

London’s famous black cabs daily weave in and out of the exceptional space of Parliament Square,
from which the traces of Haw’s protest have long been removed. A number of black cabs now carry
an advertisement for Raytheon, the commercial weapons manufacturer whose expertise in military
technologies has enabled it to win the multi-million pound contract to provide information technology
‘solutions’ for the UK’s border controls (see Figure 5). Raytheon, a ‘Trusted Partner’, confronts no
limit to its appearance and rapid disappearance on the city’s landscape. This is a city, though, where
unauthorized political protest becomes subject to the drawing of limits, where surprise, uncertainty
and the incongruous must be sanctioned in advance. The rights of passage are writ large on this
landscape: mobilities and appearances are authorized and certified, while the transformative and
magical possibilities embedded within rites of passage fall away. The capacity to visually gaze anew,
to be awoken from a distracted inattention, to engage in a way that shatters certainty: this capacity
confronts the limits that Raytheon’s advertisements do not. So distanced is the Raytheon cab
from the visceral violences of the theatre of war, and from the blistering desert crossings of the
US-Mexican border and the expulsions that result from a security checkpoint search, that it has
found a comfortable place on the register of public space, appearing fleetingly and familiarly in our
daily scopic regimes. In response to claims that art’s critical potential is related to its proximity (to
the border, its visible apparatus, to a site of exclusion at territory’s edge), a reply might well note
that it is precisely the prosaic and comfortable presence of border violences in our daily lives that
must be arrested in their smooth running sequences.
Contemporary political life has tended to comfortably locate public responses to, and actions
against, the techniques and technologies of border security by securing a position in turn. For the
most part this form of political action has implied knowing beyond doubt what is to be opposed,
and mapping with certainty the way a responsible society would respond. And yet, as we have sug-
gested, if security acts through sequences, calculations and repetitions that constantly threaten to
fall beyond visual, indeed political, reach, is its apparatus ever as intelligible as these various forms
of public refusal – an appeal to a surveillance society, to the march of dystopian technology – sug-
gest? The case that an ethical and meaningfully public response must render intelligible the arcane
practices of border security to make action possible is shaken by the work we have described. We
suggest, in contrast, that a public engagement that precisely refuses schema of enumeration that
allow us to be identified, counted and calculated, might be at the core of what ‘counts’ as political.
As Judith Butler captures the problem:

It may be that the question of ethics emerges precisely at the limits of our schemes of intelligibility, the
site where we ask ourselves what it might mean to continue in a dialogue where no common ground can
be assumed, where one is, as it were, at the limits of what one knows.83

One possible site where we might interrupt the dialogue of common ground and proceed at the lim-
its of what we know of the world, we have argued, could be the site of artistic intervention. As the

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Amoore and Hall 315

Figure 5. Advertising for Raytheon Systems.

sequences of a world rendered ‘securable’ are arrested by the disconcerting intransigence of peculiar
and unexpected objects, the possibilities of public engagement are also made new. Though familiar
sites of public action are undeniably eroded by the security architectures of post 9/11 worlds –
juridical limits on public protest or assembly; the restriction of public space for art installation and
performance works; risk management flagging of particular behaviours ‘in public’, and so on – it is
not the case that the space for public engagement and a political life is annulled. It is clear that the
reconfiguring of public space in the name of security is itself a form of border theatre, but its rituals
become the object of artistic interventions which exceed questions of ‘how does it work?’ and circle,
instead, a more nebulous set of questions about the world we inhabit. Just as Marcos Ramirez is
confronted with political difficulties of finding sites for his work within the security city, so those
who seek new modes of public engagement that might arrest, surprise and enchant face challenges.
If the border is understood as theatrical and ritualized in the distinct ways we have described, then
within its spaces always lies the possibility of an altered landscape, a transformed angle of vision, a
new mode of attention, and a revised reflection on how we live and how we wish to live.

Acknowledgements
This article draws on research that was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council under the
Non-Governmental Public Action Programme, award RES155250087 Contested Borders: Non-Governmental

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316 cultural geographies 17(3)

Public Action and the Technologies of the War on Terror. The article was first presented at ‘Targeted Publics’,
an event hosted by the Centre for Contemporary Culture Barcelona October 2008. The authors acknowledge
the comments and discussions of the participants, two anonymous reviewers for the journal, as well as generous
contributions from Sophie Nield, Nicholas de Genova, Deborah Natsios, Debbie Lisle and Stephen Graham.
The contribution of discussions with Ricardo Dominguez, Micha Cardenas, Marcos Ramirez and Meghan
Trainor has been beyond measure.

Notes
1 Walter Benjamin (ed.), Illuminations, with an introduction by Hannah Arendt; trans. by Harry Zohn
(New York: Schocken Books, 1986), p. 237.
2 Interview with Marcos Ramirez, Tijuana, Mexico, November 2007.
3 Allen Feldman, ‘Violence and Vision: The Prosthetics, Aesthetics of Terror in Northern Ireland’, Public
Culture, 10(1), 1997, pp. 29–30.
4 Unpublished literature accompanying installation Toy an Horse, 1997.
5 Unpublished literature accompanying installation Toy an Horse, 1997.
6 Benjamin, Illuminations, pp. 150, 237.
7 David Campbell, Writing Security: United States’ Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 10.
8 Benjamin, Illuminations.
9 Michel Foucault, ‘Practicing Criticism’, in L. Kritzman (ed.) Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture
Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984 (New York: Routledge, 1988[1981]) , p. 154.
10 Foucault, ‘Practicing Criticism’, p. 154.
11 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 51.
12 J. Laidlaw and C. Humphrey, ‘Action’, in Jens Kreinath, Jan Snoek and Michael Stausberg (eds.) Theo-
rizing Rituals: Vol. I: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts (Leiden: Brill), p. 275. See also E. Leach,
‘Ritualisation in Man in Relation to Conceptual and Social Development’, in Stephen Hugh-Jones and
James Laidlaw (eds.) The Essential Edmund Leach: Anthropology and Society, Volume I (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 158–65, and Maurice Bloch, ‘Symbols, Song, Dance and Features
of Articulation: Is Religion an Extreme Form of Religious Authority?’, Archives Europeenes de Sociologie,
15, 1997, pp. 55–81.
13 Bloch, ‘Symbols’; M. Bloch, ‘Authority’, in Jens Kreinath, Jan Snoek and Michael Stausberg (eds.)
Theorizing Rituals.
14 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990);
Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1992).
15 J. Edkins and V. Pin-Fat, ‘Introduction: Life, Power, Resistance’, in J. Edkins and V. Pin-Fat (eds.) Sovereign
Lives (London: Routledge, 2004).
16 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005).
17 L. Amoore, ‘Vigilant Visuality: The Watchful Politics of the War on Terror’, Security Dialogue, 38(2),
pp. 139–56; Feldman, Violence, p. 30.
18 Mark Salter, Rights of Passage: The Passport in International Relations (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner,
2003); M. Salter ‘Governmentalities of an Airport: Heterotopia and Confession’, International Political
Sociology, 1, 2007, pp. 49–66.
19 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1977); Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing
Arts Journal Publications, 1982).

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Amoore and Hall 317

20 Homi Bhaba, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); Lisa Malkki, Purity and Exile (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1994); A. Mountz, R. Wright, A. Miyares and A. Bailey, ‘Lives in Limbo: Tem-
porary Protected Status and Immigrant Identities’, Global Networks, 2(4), 2002, pp. 335–56.
21 Turner, Ritual Process.
22 Turner, Ritual to Theatre.
23 Nicolas De Genova, ‘Migrant “Illegality” and Deportability in Everyday Life’, Annual Review of Anthro-
pology, 31, 2002, pp. 419–47.
24 Peter Andreas, Border Games: Policing the US-Mexico Divide (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2000), pp. 9, 11.
25 S. Nield, ‘On the Border as Theatrical Space: Appearance, Dis-location and the Production of the Refugee’, in
Joe Kelleher and Nicholas Ridout (eds.) Contemporary Theatres in Europe (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 64.
26 Nield, ‘On the Border as Theatrical Space’, p. 64.
27 Nield, ‘On the Border as Theatrical Space’, p. 65.
28 Nield, ‘On the Border as Theatrical Space’, p. 65.
29 R. Raley, ‘Border Hacks’, in Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede (eds.) Risk and the War on Terror
(London: Routledge, 2008).
30 Justin Akers Chacón and Mike Davis, No-one is Illegal (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006); De
Genova, ‘Migrant “Illegality”’; J. McC. Heyman, ‘State Effects on Labour Exploitation: The INS and
Undocumented Immigrants at the Mexico-United States Border’, Critique of Anthropology, 18(2), 2002,
pp. 157–80.
31 See Slavoj Žižek, ‘What’s Wrong with Fundamentalism. Part I’, <http://www.lacan.com/zizpassion.htm>.
32 ‘Border Patrol Overview’, 2008, US Customs and Border Protection website, <http://www.cbp.gov/xp/
cgov/border_security/border_patrol/border_patrol_ohs/overview.xml>.
33 Raley, ‘Border Hacks’.
34 See <http://visarts.ucsd.edu/node/view/491/46>.
35 See ‘Transborder Immigrant Tool’, <http://post.thing.net/node/1642>.
36 Interview with MobileActive.org, <http://mobileactive.org/artivists-and-mobile-pho>.
37 Interview with Micha Cardenas, San Diego, California, 16 November 2007.
38 Interview with Micha Cardenas, San Diego, California, 16 November 2007.
39 S. Pile, ‘Introduction: Opposition, Political Identities, and Spaces of Resistance’, in Steve Pile and
M. Keith (eds.) Geographies of Resistance (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 3.
40 S. Nield, ‘There is Another World: Space, Theatre and Global Anti-Capitalism’, Contemporary Theatre
Review, 16(1), 2006, p. 61.
41 Nield, ‘There is Another World’, p.59.
42 A. Gach and T. Paglen, ‘Tactics without Tears’, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, 1(2), 2003, <http://
www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/>.
43 Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labour of the Negative (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1999), p. 4.
44 Taussig, Defacement, p.5.
45 Taussig, Defacement, p.51.
46 Taussig, Defacement, p.2.
47 Taussig, Defacement, p.7.
48 See <http://meghantrainor.com/>.
49 Interview with Meghan Trainor.
50 Presentation by Meghan Trainor at the Centre de Culturia Contemporània de Barcelona, 3 October 2008.
51 Presentation by Meghan Trainor at the Centre de Culturia Contemporània de Barcelona, 3 October 2008.
52 Presentation by Meghan Trainor at the Centre de Culturia Contemporània de Barcelona, 3 October 2008.

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318 cultural geographies 17(3)

53 Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), p. 201.
54 Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), p. 31.
55 V. Turner, ‘Dewey, Dilthey, and Drama: An Essay in the Anthropology of Experience’, in Victor Turner
and Edward Bruner (eds.) The Anthropology of Experience (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press,
1986), p. 42.
56 ‘Targeted Publics: The Arts and Technologies of the Security City’, at the Centre de Cultura Contemporà-
nia de Barcelona, 3 October 2008.
57 Nicolas De Oliveira (ed.), Installation Art in the New Millennium: The Empire of the Senses (London:
Thames and Hudson, 2003).
58 Bennett, Enchantment, p. 4.
59 Bennett, Enchantment, p. 156.
60 Tate Britain, ‘State Britain’, 2006, <http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/wallinger/>.
61 Mark Wallinger, ‘An Interview with Mark Wallinger’, with Yve-Alain Bois, Guy Brett, Margaret Iversen
and Julian Stallybrass, October 123, p. 193.
62 Wallinger, ‘An Interview with Mark Wallinger’, p. 192.
63 Wallinger, ‘An Interview with Mark Wallinger’, p. 194.
64 Interview with Michelle Anderson, New York, October 2007.
65 Interview with Michelle Anderson, New York, October 2007.
66 Amoore, ‘Vigilant Visuality’; E. Isin, ‘The Neurotic Citizen’, Citizenship Studies, 8(3), 2004, pp. 217–35.
67 Interview Michelle Anderson, New York, October 2007.
68 These are the patterns retrieved by data mining, for example, see L. Amoore, ‘Lines of Sight: On the Visu-
alization of Unknown Futures’, Citizenship Studies, 13(1), 2009, pp. 17–30; L. Amoore and M. de Goede,
‘Transactions after 9/11: The Banal Face of the Preemptive Strike’, Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers, 33(2), 2008, pp. 173–85.
69 Michel Foucault, ‘The Masked Philosopher’, in P. Rabinow (ed.) Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: Essential
Works of Foucault 1954–1984 (New York: The New Press, 1997), p. 323.
70 M. Foucault, ‘Questions of Method’, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds.) The
Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), p. 81.
71 Edward Saïd, On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 5.
72 Saïd, On Late Style, p.160.
73 Saïd, On Late Style, p.7.
74 Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).
75 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 24.
76 C. Douzinas, ‘Identity, Recognition, Rights or What Hegel can Teach us about Human Rights’, Journal of
Law and Society, 29(3), 2002, p. 398.
77 Douzinas, ‘Identity, Recognition, Rights’, p. 398.
78 W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘There Are No Visual Media’, Journal of Visual Culture, 4(2), 2004, p. 260.
79 Jonathan Crary, ‘Foreword’, in Nicolas De Oliveira, Nicola Oxley and Michael Perry (eds.) Installation
Art in the New Millennium: The Empire of the Senses (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003).
80 Bennett, Enchantment, pp. 5–6.
81 Bennett, Enchantment, p.10.
82 William Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
83 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (Assen, Netherlands: Royal van Gorcum, 2003), p. 18.

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Amoore and Hall 319

Biographical notes

Louise Amoore is Reader in Political Geography at the Department of Geography, Durham University. She
has published on global geopolitics and the security practices of the border; the politics and practices of risk
management; and political and social theories of resistance and dissent. Her recent book (co-edited with
Marieke de Goede) Risk and the War on Terror (2008, Routledge) explores the multiple modes of risk calcula-
tion deployed in the name of security and counter-terror in contemporary life. She can be contacted at:
Department of Geography, Durham University, Science Laboratories, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, UK;
email: louise.amoore@durham.ac.uk

Alexandra Hall is Research Associate at the Department of Geography, Durham University. Her research
interests include border, security and the politics of mobility. She is currently preparing a monograph entitled
The Everyday Life of Immigration Detention (Pluto Press), an ethnographic investigation of the micropolitics
of mobility and detention. She can be contacted at: Department of Geography, Durham University, Science
Laboratories, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, UK; email: a.e.j.hall@durham.ac.uk

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