Of Modernity’s Boundaries, Border-Runners and Toll-keepers

Boundaries have always been a part of how people have understood and made sense of their environment. The most fundamental kind of boundary comes in the form of natural geography, which imposed physical boundaries which were either impossible, or difficult, to cross before the advent of modern transportation. By contrast, the imposition of social order represents another kind of boundary. In the attempt to establish order, social organizations have always demarcated their spheres of power, influence and activity, thus implementing and setting up cultural boundaries. And on a psychological and spiritual level, boundaries between imagination and reality, between life and death and between the seen and unseen, have never ceased to intrigue and obsess humankind. Liminality, and hence the recognition of boundaries is what anthropologists call a common human experience; its meaning varies according to cultural contexts. In this sense, boundaries can be a means towards the end of political sovereignty and a way of stabilizing individual identity. Boundaries can be understood as protective shields against unwelcome intrusions and intruders and as simple brute facts about the world that help to bind a specific community. From another perspective, boundaries can also be criticized and deplored as limits to human activities, or they can be perceived as obstacles which stimulate the capacity and the motivation to surmount them. Western modernity has put great emphasis on boundary crossing, which it regarded as a promise of advancement. One of the clearest expressions of this approach was formulated long ago by Frederick J. Turner in his 1893 essay on the significance of the frontier in American history. As a meeting point between savagery and civilization, Turner regarded the frontier as the “line of most rapid and effective Americanization,” a purifying process by which the European colonists were first stripped of their culture by the wilderness, but eventually became the greatest defenders of republicanism and democracy at home and in the world. But before striding frontiers on the track to the West would become the symbol of American territorial expansion and its transgressive ideology, distant places offered themselves as a screen on which to project possible solutions to present dissatisfactions at home. The imaginary Asia as a land of plenty in early modern times, for example, incited many individuals to seek fortune in the service of East India Companies. Utopian literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries favored far away islands as settings for the ideal society and emphasized the dangerous maritime passage that had to be undertaken to reach them. On the frontispiece of Francis Bacon’s 1627 scientific program for a new science, Nova Atlantis, the idea that stimulation for progress must be sought beyond the horizon was allegorically expressed by the image of a ship returning with full-blown sails through the pillars of Heracles, bringing back knowledge and discoveries from distant lands. Gulliver’sTravels by Jonathan Swift (1726) is a classic example of political satire in which the crossing of boundaries and the resulting estrangement serves to criticize a specific social order back home in the writer’s native land. The transgression of temporal borders is equally important in the culture of modernity. Overcoming traditions and reassuring that a break with the past has been made qualifies the modernist outlook just as much as its future-bound perspective. The first futuristic utopia L'an deux mille quatre cent quarante. Rêve s'il en fût jamais, published by Luis-Sébastien Mercier in 1771, helped to establish a view of time which would prove essential for the future-bound ideology of social change propagated by revolutionary French society in the following decades. Similarly revolutionaries of the nineteenth century, Karl …