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The first draft of an abstract/intro on the frontier.
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Oftentimes, the frontier is horizon approached as possibility. And yet, while it is so often conceived as a space of expansion without limit, it is also – in its paradigmatic, European sense – the rolling out of those limits as the proliferation of borders. Significantly, however, unlike the border against which it is so often defined, and as this delineation arises in tandem with the contrast of old Europe and a new America, the frontier is that space into which people carry those borders with them as they might their own personal baggage.

In the final pages of the first volume of Capital, Marx located the significant differences between European and American class struggles as the ‘constant transformation of the wage-labourers into independent producers’, in view of a relative absence of a surplus labourers in the colonies. He cites Wakefield, complaining of a ‘parcelling-out of the means of production among innumerable owners’ that, he adds, ‘annihilates, along with the centralisation of capital, all the foundations of a combined labour.’ In 1893, F.J Turner would present the frontier as the very thesis of American exceptionalism in terms not entirely dissimilar, as ‘productive of individualism’, and therefore of a democracy and egalitarianism grounded in the diffusion and perpetual expansion of property in land.

Yet the very concept of the frontier is also a way of depicting, as Turner put it, ‘the meeting point between savagery and civilization’. And, from the perspective of the other side of that frontier, the encounter was not of a tale of individuated self-mastery and freedom, but an experience of dispossession, carried out through a violence, and marked by establishment of ‘reserves’, missions and penal colonies.

Thus, while Virno’s account of the distinction between border and frontier, by way of the writings of Marx, accentuates the sense of exodus as individuation, construes it as the abundance of the promise of self-mastery in frontier space, it also underscores the proximity between the sense of autonomy as flight and that of self-possession, as holding out the possibility of a redistribution of sovereignty in and through democracy.

This is the problematic which shadows current thinking and functions is its horizon, from the deliberations of Hardt and Negri on absolute democracy, to the debates over ‘web2.0′, the question of whether frontiers remain tethered to a specifically Euro-American provenance is also a question of the extent to which declarations of a frontier are but an inducement or prelude to colonisation, the advance, in highly individuated and intimate form, of would-be property owners – and citizens – through ’savage’ spaces. Indeed, the question is also of the extent to which this repeats the sense of Machiavelli’s Prince seeking to violently seize Fortuna by the hair, joining with Lockean notions of rights, labour and enclosure to produce not the annihilation of class but to systematise its internalised, meritocratic fortification in the denial (and defense) of the racialising, carceral borders that are its precondition.

But if the opposition between Europe and America delivers versions of the frontier that are but an occasion for the expansion of borders, the establishment of the colonies through systems of reserves and as penal colonies, and not least the constant attempts to escape from them, offers a quite different perspective on exodus.