This chapter argues that thinking about architecture as a process and pattern of movement can help us better understand what is going on at the US–Mexico border. Instead of thinking about borders as architectural “flow spaces” that people move through, I propose we think about how nonhuman and human movements create and transform these spaces together. In particular, this chapter identifies and describes four patterns of motion at the US–Mexico border: the funnel, the cage, the current and the pool. Toward the end of the chapter, I compare the function of these patterns of the US–Mexico border to what Karl Marx calls “primitive accumulation.” They are patterns or cycles that directly displace people in order to capture and mobilize them in various ways. Elsewhere, I have called this process expansion by expulsion. I also emphasize how the US response to the coronavirus has intensified all these patterns and how the results of this intensification have been devastating for migrants and asylum seekers. A large part of border architecture now operates in a zone of national and international legal suspension.

O presente artigo argumenta que atualmente não existe uma única definição do novo materialismo, mas sim, ao menos, três trajetórias distintas e parcialmente incompatíveis. Todas as três trajetórias compartilham pelo menos um compromisso teórico comum: problematizar as orientações antropocêntricas e construtivistas da maior parte das teorias do século XX de modo a encorajar uma posição mais próxima das ciências pelas humanidades. Esse artigo surge a partir do nosso desejo de oferecer uma resposta às críticas, mas não para defender o novo materialismo como um todo. Em vez disso, esperamos ajudar a redirecionar cada flecha da crítica em direção ao seu alvo adequado para, com isso, defender a abordagem que nomeamos do novo materialismo “performativo” ou “pedético”.

Zusammenfassung: Dieser Beitrag schlägt einen neuen, bewegungsorientierten grenztheoretischen Ansatz vor. Gegen politikphilosophische Konzeptionen, die Grenzen als statisch und unpassierbar fassen, wird unter Verweis auf historische und empirische Studien gezeigt, dass und inwiefern Grenzen dehnbar, fluktuierend und beweglich sind. Auf dieser Grundlage wird im folgenden Abschnitt argumentiert, dass sich dynamische Prozesse der Grenzziehung am angemessensten in Sinne von Zirkulation begreifen lassen: Anstatt Mobilität zu verhindern und stabile Formen von Ein- bzw. Ausschluss zu etablieren, stellen Grenzen Regime sozialer Zirkulation dar, welche Menschen, deren Arbeitskraft und Steuern im Interesse der Schaffung gesellschaftlicher Ordnung und wirtschaftlichen Mehrwerts regulieren. Unter Rückgriff auf Marx’ Konzept der ursprünglichen Akkumulation präsentiere ich anschließend eine Neubeschreibung von Grenzen als beweglichen Instrumenten ökonomischer und sozialer Aneignung – ich bringe dies auf den Begriff „Ausdehnung durch Ausschließung“. Im abschließenden Abschnitt untersuche ich, welche Gestalt „Ausdehnung durch (territoriale, politische, rechtliche und wirtschaftliche) Ausschließung“ unter den Bedingungen von Klimawandel annimmt und inwiefern dabei Bevölkerungsgruppen produziert werden, die in höchstem Maße verletzlich und ausbeutbar sind.

The term ‘COVID capitalism’ designates the ways capitalism and the novel coronavirus alter and amplify one another. In this paper, I look at four major features that characterize this relationship so far. (1) Capitalist extraction and urbanization increase exposure to new viruses. (2) Capitalism increases the spread of infectious disease. (3) COVID amplifies inequalities that benefit capitalists. (4) COVID has led to profits, bailouts, and deregulation for capitalists.The increasing frequency of COVID and other pandemics not only amplifies existing capitalist structures but feeds back into those structures and becomes an advantage to capitalism. I argue here that COVID is not a threat to capitalism but rather a mutagen altering and magnifying it.

This chapter shows that objects emerge and persist through flows of matter. Flow is defined as an indeterminate process of energy and momentum that is not reducible to any directly observable object. However, through their pedesis and turbulence, flows also fold and unfold into metastable patterns we call “objects.” As such, flows always coexist with objects just as the river inseparable from its whirls and eddies. “Flow” is the first concept of my kinetic theory. Every product presupposes a process. All objects come from somewhere and dissolve in something else. They persist only momentarily in various forms because some activity is continually running through them. This is the flow of matter.

Chapter 1 argues that matter flows. This is the first and central thesis from which the entire conceptual framework of kinesthetics follows. In order to understand what the minimal structure of the image is, such that it is capable of being in motion, we begin with its most basic aspect: the flow of matter. The flow of matter is defined by its movement and continuity; by its extensive and intensive features, by its pedesis, bifurcations, and confluences. The flow is the material condition for the emergence of images, which are defined by the folding of matters. In the concept of flow we have the necessary, but not yet sufficient, conditions for the emergence and mobility of the image.

This chapter and the next argue that several ancient sciences created cardinal objects using centrifugal motions. Specifically, this chapter shows how cardinal objects developed out of four ancient scientific practices: the use of numerals, accounting, measurement, and logic. It focuses on the invention of numerals and the use of ancient accounting practices. It also shows how each of these four practices moves through four similar stages of increasing abstraction. Along with the way that each of these scientific practices moves through these shared stages and motions in its own way. There was not a linear sequence in which one method derived its cardinal objects from another. The practices emerge, then disappear, then reappear somewhere else differently. The emergence of increasingly abstract cardinal objects seemed to work more by resonance than by progressive causality and direct influence. It’s more like when a person strikes a key on a piano in a piano shop, and all the pianos begin to resonate than like knocking over a series of dominos. Another important note is that the rising dominance of cardinal objects in the ancient world did not mean that ordinal objects and their patterns disappeared. Instead, they became absorbed and transformed.

Modern objects followed a predominantly elastic pattern of motion. This chapter and the next show how this shared pattern of movement emerged historically among several modern sciences: the statistical sciences, digital logic, and transcendental mathematics. These sciences were not always in direct or indirect conversation with one another. Nonetheless, there was a fascinating historical resonance where a shared pattern of motion and understanding took hold. This chapter begins the story of this resonance by looking at several sciences that all adopted the framework of statistical mechanics.

Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird die Critical Limology vorgestellt – eine neue, an Prozessen und Bewegungen orientierte Methodologie zur Erforschung von Grenzen. Dieser Ansatz erlaubt es, umfassende Muster wiederkehrender (zirkulärer) Bewegungen ( patterns of circulation ) über längere historische Perioden und größere geografische Räume hinweg zu untersuchen, als es derzeit üblich ist. Er ermöglicht auch, die Dynamik von Grenzen selbst zu verstehen, die unter dem Einfluss dieser wiederkehrenden Bewegungen Veränderungen unterworfen sind. Der Beitrag zielt insbesondere darauf ab, aufzuzeigen, inwiefern dieser methodologische Ansatz Probleme der Grenzforschung lösen kann.

Throughout the history of science and technology, objects have been understood in many ways but rarely have they been understood to play an active role in the production of knowledge. This has led to largely anthropocentric theories and histories of science, which treat nature as passive objects viewed by independent observers. Thomas Nail approaches the theory of objects historically in order to tell a completely new story in which objects themselves are the true agents of scientific knowledge. They are processes, not things. It is the first history of science and technology, from prehistory to the present, to illuminate the agency, knowledge and mobility of objects.

Lucretius was a materialist who understood thinking to be a thoroughly material and performative activity inseparable from nature. Matter, for Lucretius, was neither reductionistic, mechanistic or vitalist but fundamentally indeterminate, swerving and irreducible to any substance. As such, thinking does not create representations of nature because it is nothing other than nature itself. This chapter thus argues that Lucretius was perhaps the first process-materialist philosopher and held a profoundly original kinetic theory of knowledge and thinking. And it further contends that this unique perspective on thinking and materialism was directly related to his methodological practice as a philosophical poet.