Barbed Wire

Reviel Netz

Mark out, on the two-dimensional surface of the earth, lines across which no movement is allowed and you have one of the key themes of history. Draw a closed line preventing movement from outside to inside the line, and you define landed property. Draw the same line preventing movement from inside the line to outside, and you define compulsory confinement. Draw an open line preventing movement in either direction and you define a border. Topological structures of this kind range from absolute barriers that make movement across them physically impossible, through more subtle ones whose function is to make movement inconvenient and therefore undesirable, to wholly symbolic definitions of limits, respected only because that’s how a society or an international consensus works. Even a symbolic definition of space, however, depends on the possibility of force being used in defence of spatial bounds, if only as a last resort. The role of force in the history of the prevention of movement – force in its most literal sense, of physical pressure applied to bodies – means that such a history must be one of violence and the infliction of pain.

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