Wallerstein on Walls
The architecture of exclusion: Immanuel Wallerstein, whose online posts predate blogging, recently posted Comment 185 in which he concludes:
…one might think that persons committed to social equalities ought to be in favor of sharing with everyone. But in practice, many advocates of social equalities, especially those in rich countries, wish to limit the social equalities to those already inside a particular country, and not open it to the entire world. The slogan seems to be protect our rights, property, and jobs, not the rights, property, and jobs of the entire world.
As for effectiveness, walls are effective in the short run to keep many (not all) people out, and to keep many (not all) people in. But in the middle run, walls are politically abrasive and magnify injustice, and therefore tend to force further negotiations. The one sure thing we can say about walls is that they are certainly neither friendly nor charitable nor a sign of freedom.
July 16th, 2006 at 6:18 am
In Commentary 185, Wallerstein, whatever his stature may be in the social sciences, limits his discussion to physical, material properties of walls, and focuses on their debilitating qualities with hardly a mention of the ways walls do good things.
While his intent was probably not to write everything there is to know about walls, the way this piece is set out leaves me with the impression that he is trying to make universal claims without having a comprehensive look at the features of his subject. In other words, I am surprised at his reduction of walls to their worst features, and the absence of discussion about the social properties of walls. So part of my response here is to ask others to explain why he’s done this. The other part of my response is to provide contraindicative examples, to make my point a bit more clearly.
For instance, in the physical realm, walls do good things, like hold up the roof, or the floor above, and the floors above that. Walls make tall buildings possible. Tall buildings have a reduced ground-level footprint. That’s mostly a good thing. Granted that Wallerstein has focused on barrier walls, but does he make that clear at some point near the outset? In omitting to make that distinction he leaves the impression of carelessness.
But that’s not all: he also neglects to mention the social functions of walls in organising space. While the material qualities of walls are used primarily to organise social activities, partly to allow the making of distinctions, they are also partly about giving people some indication of what behaviour is appropriate in a given space: walls are boundary markers. All boundaries have some material form, whether it is the physical act of walking the bounds around a medieval village, a wire marking the eruv in north London, or the ink and paper on a planner’s zoning map. Wallerstein doesn’t address these issues of materiality, but regards boundaries as essentially immaterial things. In so doing he misses an important thing: that even the properties of lines on the ground have material effects. This omission is what puzzles me most. How can a social scientist overlook the material effects of imagined boundaries? How can he ignore the social and psychological barriers that resist passage to a greater extent than any stone and wire barricade?
Walls do indeed do the things Wallerstein says they do. But they also do a lot more, so my overall impression of his piece is that it makes his conclusion seem like an irrelevance.
Here’s his concluding point: “the one sure thing we can say about walls is that they are certainly neither friendly nor charitable nor a sign of freedom”.
What Wallerstein has to do to reach this conclusion is ignore the freindly, charitable, and freedom-signifying aspects of walls. These are not incidental qualities, but quite possibly the primary functions of such barriers.
Perhaps he forgets that good neighbours make good fences, if not necessarily vice versa.
July 18th, 2006 at 11:57 pm
I don’t know what to make of many of your asides, but I appreciate the point that walls are more than material - and its worth sorting through the probable, abstract and virtual qualities of “wall” as a social technology. But your concluding comment is really arresting: I’ve never built a wall as a “friendly, charitable and freedom-signifying” activity. What colour and material would I use?
July 19th, 2006 at 4:00 pm
1. ) ‘I don’t know what to make of many of your asides…’
A wall, perhaps? A compound, some sort of immaterial edifice? Or maybe a bridge? A pier?
2.) ‘I’ve never built a wall as a “friendly, charitable and freedom-signifying” activity. What colour and material would I use?’
That would be up for negotiation with your neighbours, and would depend partly on the kind of relations you intend to have with them. As I recall, Robert Frost chose granite fieldstones.