ABSTRACT
Political modernity can be represented as a relentless struggle on maps. Indeed, against any naturalistic claim, the relation between a map and ‘its’ territory – that is the very political notion of space – is far from being a simply descriptive matter. ‘The map is not the territory’ is a kind of mantra that from Korzybski up to Gregory Bateson has been continuously repeated. It means, above all, that instead of simply reflecting or being defined by a territory, a map effectively produces it, defining the way we make experience of the space. In other words, once we have fixed a map, we have at the same time decided how to organize the space, how to circumscribe it, to think about and to govern it. Yet, if political modernity has signified, above all, the ultimate subsumption of the territory under the rationality of several (and often conflicting) maps, such an over-determining relation seems now to have come to an end. Indeed, current geography(ies) appears to exceed and transcend any possible map, any kind of cartographic rationality.1 For this reason a renewed geographical imagination has to be developed, in order to give an account of the whole array of processes that, at different levels, are definitely overpassing any singular and discrete (or national) scale. Saskia Sassen deals with this kind of predicament when she suggests conceiving the new geography of globalization in terms of an intricate/imbricated and multi-scalar dimension, encompassing territories, authorities and networks, where working out the distinction between an inside and outside becomes increasingly arduous, and where the global interpenetrates the national generating new solid concretions of borders.2 As a matter of fact, borders are the places where global tensions and geographical pretensions end up precipitating and becoming particularly visible. In other terms, the overall reshaping of current geography starts from the borders, from the very notion of border. But what are we talking about when we talk about borders?
