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MARKHA G. VALENTA

frontiers: social and class upheaval at home as well as renewed international competi-

tion compelled an obsession with social enclosures of all sorts: the boundaries that

separated nation from nation, urban from rural, and the zones within cities, the

conceptual frontiers that divided church from state, public from private, household

from work, alleged male from reputed female roles [and the civilized from the bar-

barian]—social and political order was conceivable only through spatial partition.^7

Equally crucial to this project of late-nineteenth-century territoriality—to the gradual
or eruptive, intentional or forced shift from confederal organization to centralized nation-
states depending on bounded space for their power, security, and identity—is the mecha-
nism of saturation, the ‘‘filling’’ of the national space with the authority, the institutions,
the ideology, and the economics of the nation. The territory is to be continually mapped,
interconnected, exploited, mobilized, shaped, and reshaped at an ever-increasing level. All
points are to be made accessible to the movement of military and police power, raw
resources, goods, and people through vast railroad projects; the intensified gathering and
dispersal of information is to be administered by new strings of government agencies and
post offices, linked by an ever-expanding grid of telegraphic and electrical cables (note
that in France government bureaucracy sextupled in the nineteenth century); and the
transfer of ideology is to be seen to through schools, national media, holidays, and so
forth: ‘‘no point inside the frontiers could be left devoid of the state’s control.’’^8 Which is
not to say that there is not resistance, that resistance does not have its own place within
the realm in the name of progress, democracy, liberalism, or even conservatism. Only that
resistance must accept the principle of centrality, its totality, the concentration of wealth,
agency, knowledge, formation, and culture at the center.^9 Resistance might question the
current centrality’s constitution and intentions or, taking on the form of radical rebellion,
it might strive for centrality itself in a zero-sum bid for power. But the principle and
authority of centrality remain untouched. Aspiring to remain total, centrality thus ‘‘lays
claim, implicitly or explicitly, to a superior political rationality (a state or ‘‘urban’’ ratio-
nality),’’ as the French historian Henri Lefebvre has argued.^10
This, then, is the doubled logic of modern territoriality: the simultaneous necessity
to saturate and to separate, to centralize and to expand, to fortify against the alien and
make coherent the own—nation, home, self—through the control of space at all levels,
material, ideological, and ontological. Danger and abjection lie in the realm not so much
of the known other (which, after all, has a crucial function as the self ’s mirror image
across the border) but most especially in the territorially impure and the unaligned, the
open and the vulnerable, the unbounded, the incoherent, the uncentered. These threaten
not only the sovereign and secure subject—national or individual—but the very possibil-
ity of territoriality. But because the logic of territorialism is a contradictory one—at once
uniting and dividing, homogenizing and differentiating—territorialism both produces
and contains its own disruption. In this sense, as with capitalism, the preeminent mode

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