Constructing Boundaries

Abstract

Politics involves the collective construction, questioning, and reconstruction of boundaries. They come in all sizes, shapes, thicknesses, and degrees of permeability. Property lines, for example, define physical space, clarify the materials with which we can mix our wills and energies, and thereby orient our labor. Legal boundaries separate acceptable behavior from what is beyond the pale, and thereby foster a sense of predictability, safety, and security as we interact with friends and strangers. Cultural edges make manageable the endless choosing among literally innumerable and often contradictory roles, principles, and visions of the good.Thus, from one point of view, boundaries are boons and blessings. We live among other humans to satisfy our physical needs, to release emotions, to gratify appetites, and to achieve social and spiritual goals. We wish not only to survive in a crude, corporeal sense, but to live well. To share existence with other humanswho have vastly different views, miseries, interests, and ambitions-collective boundaries are needed. Endlessly jostled by the choices, desires, and aspirations of those with whom we daily and occasionally interact, we crave the peace and order that boundaries provide.At the same time, boundaries are not innocently designed, nor are they harmless. As Friedrich Nietzsche reminds us in The Genealogy of Morals, legal, cultural, and moral boundaries not only make conviviality possible. They also are intended to hem in human beings and to contain their passions-in particular, to restrict the creativity and willfulness of persons with extraordinary ambitions and dreams. The often understated goal of any boundary is to make human beings less aggressive, disruptive, and cruel, by making them more circumspect, deferential, and sheep-like.It should be noted, furthermore, that property, legal, and cultural boundaries are not only designed to hold potential outlaws among us. They are created, in part, to help us define the unsociable, the sociopathic, and the barbaric. The flip side of the pacific benefits of boundaries is that we dread that which lives on the edges, and feel panic about impulses, beliefs, and peoples beyond the rim. Boundaries, although they are reassuring, also nurture specters and feed terrors about those whose practices deviate and cross.Boundaries therefore are problematic creations. They, on the one hand, are required to clear the wilderness and make settled life possible. Yet, on the other,