Borders of Agency

    The question of "self" and "other" may be read to interrogate how the border between these two categories is drawn.  If in a developmental mode, we might begin with Freud's account of differentiation between infant and mother.  In a socio-cultural mode, we might explore processes by which outgroups are produced across borders of identity and identification.  Any such approach, however, begins with an implicit expectation that there are entities that might be sorted into self and other, me and you, us and them, mine and thine.  Yet, we might also differentiate between those that might be self or other, and those which are neither.  The infant that smiles and coos in recognizing its mother as other reserves such affect for her and like entities, and not for bottle, crib, chair or bib.  The individual who identifies according to borders of nation, ethnicity, religion, region, profession or class, relates differently to the outgroup "other" than to the assortment of material and immaterial objects by which such borders are marked and enacted.  

    The border between self and other, then, is predicated upon a border between selves and things.  Yet, where a story can be told for how the border between self and other is worked out through mechanisms of sociality, the working of the border between selves and things is not so readily discernible. Attempts to historicize this border fail to fully account for other expressions of the same mode of distinction, as made among animals human and nonhuman.  There is a salience to this category comprised of self and other, of selves, that conditions the affective economy of cultural and social discrimination.  This salience points to a perceptual border, by which territories of sociality and physicality are ordered.

    It is through crossings of this border, between a kingdom of selves and a kingdom of things, that a world of hybridization emerges.  Immigrants from the region of things are excorporated by selves, as bodies and identities are extended outward in new modes of sociality and physicality.  Imports from the domain of selves are subsumed as components of things, inhabiting and informing structures and architectures as new artifacts and situations.  In encountering such assemblages of trans-border migration, the perceptual is challenged.  The salience conferred by the border is rendered in an uncanny register, as we encounter entities in the act of crossing.

    It there is a history to the border, it is an evolutionary history.  This border differs from species to species, both in where it is drawn and in how easily it is crossed.  In human animals the border guards seem especially lax, such that assemblages of selves and things pass easily from one realm to the other.  Increasingly, such assemblages seem content to straddle the border.  Things act as if selves.  Selves perform as if things.  Hybrid entities lay claim to citizenship in both countries.  Less a third estate, than a state of flux, these nomads are encountered as wave forms, arriving at no particular point either side of the border.