Approaching the Limit: Panel 2, Extremities
Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture
Boundary, border, threshold, edge—to approach the limit is to look beyond the familiar landmarks of cultural studies. From geographical borders to epistemological categories, limits and edges initiate the dialectical moment of thought, overturning or transcending the axioms and foundations from which it has sprung. Setting limits to the working day (minimums, then maximums) or to wages (maximums, then minimums, as Marx describes in Capital‘s chapters on primitive accumulation’s legislative efforts) are only the tip of the iceberg. So where do we experience the limits—or limitlessness—of our worlds?
In two linked panels, the Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture explores the limits and limitations of our world—sensory, spatial, temporal, social, cultural, political. In their geographical and methodological variety, our papers collectively map out the terrain of this keyword, and seek to determine the bounds, so to speak, of studying, theorizing and making culture at the limit.
The second of our two panels, , questions the socio-spatial manifestations of the limit and its political and property avatars: the border the boundary, and the zone. Across these contributions, to think at the extremity is to reevaluate the whole, querying how limits animate entire systems of thought and distinction.
Nathaniel LaCelle-Peterson examines the function of infrastructure in the thought of Louis Althusser, where it appears as substitute for “base” as the opposing category of “superstructure” in his structuralist articulation of the mode of production. Alan J. Alaniz analyzes the built and unbuilt architectural projects of the midcentury Mexico-United States borderlands to illuminate the spatial consequences of geopolitics at the international divide. Madeleine Han examines the role of contemporary art in the transformation of Korea’s Demilitarized Zone (DMZ)—a geographical and imagined ‘limit’ marked by dreams of deferred reunification—into a visitation site. Javier Porras Madero explores how combined and uneven development along the Mexico-Guatemala borderlands produced newly alienated subjects who became the central social components of twentieth-century nationalisms.
The Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture is an interdisciplinary cultural studies research group that has been practicing at Yale University since 2003 Over the years, we have presented our collective work at Crossroads in Cultural Studies the Irish Association for American Studies, the Cultural Studies Association, Historical Materialism, the Marxist Education Project, and the World Social Forum. Past projects have appeared as “Going into Debt,” online in Social Text’s Periscope, and as “Space and Times of Occupation” in Transforming Anthropology; a collective interview regarding “Matters of Life and Death” was published in Revue Française d’Études Américaines. Nathaniel LaCelle-Peterson is a doctoral researcher in Film & Media Studies and Comparative Literature at Yale University. Alan J. Alaniz is a doctoral researcher in the Yale School of Architecture. Madeleine Han is a doctoral researcher in the Yale American Studies program. Javier Porras Madero is a doctoral researcher in the history department at Yale University.