Sometimes it is immediately apparent — a signpost or a change in the unit of measurement. Other times it is not. Not until the momentary sound of other-worldly voices flash across the airwaves disrupting the already fading car radio signal — then, maybe thirty or forty miles beyond, you know, you were there but now you are here, and here, although sharing the same millennia-old geological strata is not there.

Across farmers’ fields, back garden fences, country lanes and motorways the 499,000m invisible borderline weaves its way, manifesting only in the presence of its absence, marked by what it is not — a physical wall of bricks and mortar; checkpoints; passport control; customs searches. Post-Brexit: what of the technological solutions being proposed by the hard-borderites? Will they be sufficient to police these strange unmapped border crossings of Ireland’s hinterlands?  Seventy-seven in total currently being documented by author Garrett Carr. The strange ancient and modern border technologies of galvanized steel farmers gates, dirt tracks, streams, hedgerows, narrow lanes and gently undulating cattle pastures. 

The question of a post-Brexit technological solution is deceptive. For what is already there is no less a form of technology. A shifting and changing biological, psychological, sociological and physical, soon-to-be one-hundred-year-old technological border solution of sorts. By technology I mean, at its simplest, something that when applied in a certain way changes that towards which it is applied. Just like a hammer is used to hit a nail, thus changing the nail’s relationship to itself, its surroundings and that which it is being nailed into, so do borders, walls, interfaces, and boundaries, material, immaterial or otherwise change the contexts in which they exist. This has always been so. Fuelled by myths of strangers gods and monsters; nation-states, city walls, and village boundaries have always and continue to play a powerful role in the formation of an us and a them. 

What lies beyond the wall? Strange mythical monsters roaming the foggy moorlands of the medieval world; ancient Hebraic leviathans of the deep sea; flesh-eating barbarians; fire-breathing dragons; Mexicans; two-headed serpents; savage natives; Irish Catholics; witches, wizards, and job-stealing-benefit-frauding-polish-immigrants. Here be ghosts. That which we call ‘other’ is often little more than the manifestation of our own insecurities about who we are and where we come from. As the Irish philosopher Richard Kearney writes “monsters arise when reason sleeps.”

The technology of borders is a technology that creates subjects.  Like a translucent fairground mirror they simultaneously reflect the image of the viewer — ‘here I am; there’s no place like home’ —  while revealing a distorted view of that which lies beyond — ‘there they are; there’s no place like there!’ Here’s the point: walls, be they physical, geographical or otherwise, writes Wendy Brown, “cannot block out without shutting in … cannot define an external ‘they’ without producing a reactionary ‘we’.” Walls and borders are a “visual means of restoring a psychic insulation” — we are we, and we are not like them — a security blanket of belonging.

Walls and borders, writes Brown, provide this security by responding “to the need for containment in too global a world [and] too unhorizoned a universe. They produce a spatially demarcated ‘us,’” they also produce a collective sense of political coherence “when these can no longer be fashioned from conceits of national political or economic autonomy, demographic homogeneity, or shared history, culture and values.” Ironically then, borders and walls often function not as a sign of national security but national insecurity.

But here’s the thing.  As you gaze through the translucent fairground mirror you might, just about, catch a glimpse of the distorted image of an other looking back at you. You are not just the viewer but are being viewed. You are always someone else’s other. Maybe someone else’s monster. This meeting of gazes can be transformative, for as Julia Kristeva puts it, “how can we tolerate strangers if we do not know that we are strangers ourselves?” Or Kearney again: “For if each of us can accept that we are the strangers, then there are no strangers — only others like ourselves.”