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Welcome to the first blogpost of the Laboratoriesof Democracy multidisciplinary research team. Taking our name from USSupreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’s well-known experimental metaphordescribing the US states as “laboratories of democracy,” our research investigateshow democracy is practiced, experimented with, and experienced today. In ourfirst blogpost, Zachary Reyna (political theory) explores the often-paradoxicaltension between democratic practices and wall-building.----------I spent a week earlier this month on the Greekisland of Zakynthos—just a hop and a skip from Odysseus’ beloved Ithaca nestledin the Ionian Sea. Approaching Zakynthos by ferry, the island looks like aslumbering lithic dragon curled up on a sea-blue blanket. Clouds like smokegather in a lethargic skirt around its peaks and the rocky seashore juts intothe uncannily turquoise water like the ridge of the serpent’s arched back (or amassive serrated knife). From a distance, the gnarled olive and scruffy cypresspeppering the landscape look like lichen clinging to the scales of thelong-sleeping beast. I spent the week grading, writing, and preparingfor the Communal Studies Association annual conference (Winterthur, Delaware),but I also had the chance to rent a motorbike and cross the island. I wascaptivated by the numerous stone-walls that crisscross the island, and was repeatedlyreturned—almost as if by the walls themselves—to two tensions that animate myinterest in the Laboratories of Democracy team research: 1) the tensionbetween walls/boundaries/limits as simultaneously restrictive andgenerative, and, relatedly, 2) the tension between isolation and activism. Butfirst, back to the walls.The walls are almost entirely grayish-white,composed of the rough—even at times sharp—carbonate stones (limestone andothers) that are ubiquitous on the island. Most of the walls are no more thanfour feet high and vary in width from one to three feet. Many of the walls lookto be in an extreme state of disrepair. Olive trees seem to have a penchant forwinding their roots right into the walls and unless you have a watchful eye itis very easy to mistake the lion’s share of walls for a natural, ornon-intentional, feature. There are two main types of walls. The first serve asretainer walls and are built right into the side of the hill allowing for aterraced effect, presumably for farming reasons. The second appear to formcorrals or mark the boundary between pastures. This latter type of wall isfree-standing. When puttering by on a motorbike, it is not hard to imagine thatthe walls are the old, worn chains used to bound the dragon and tame it. Walls and boundaries—and in particular, Greekwalls—have long held the imagination of political thinkers.[1] Wallsboth limit and restrict on the one hand, impeding or even halting the movementof bodies, defining an inside and an outside, or what Carl Schmitt has calledthe friend-enemy distinction; and, protect, facilitate, and generate on theother hand, creating a space in which certain activities can come into being. Agood example is the walls of a house. These walls do not only restrict the flowof inclement weather and unwelcomed bodies both human and nonhuman, but theyalso foster and even create modes of domestic living that would be impossibleon the open plain. The Western social imaginary is replete with images ofwalls, boundaries, and limits. In the Abrahamic traditions, the first divineact of creation is one of boundary-drawing: setting a limit to the darkness ofnight and giving a boundary to the sea. And on Hannah Arendt’s rereading ofWestern political thought, the wall is the sine qua non of politics, thenomos or walls of the ancient Greek city-state. For Arendt, without thewalls and laws protecting, defining, and structuring the city-state, the spaceof appearance in which politics can emerge and take place would not only beephemeral but impossible, bereft of the very stage on which it could appear. Yet today, and in part because of thesetheoretical-theological origins, few things sound as reactionary—even nationalistic—aswall-building, limits, restrictions, and “law and order.” One might think hereof US President Trump’s building of a border wall between the US and Mexicoalong with his rhetoric of “law and order,” or the EU’s recent austerity measures,but one can also think of the response to environmental activist calls to limitCO2 emissions or population growth. In all these cases, the limit or boundary—evenif intended for progressive purposes—is cast as reactionary and authoritarian:the desire to return to an often-mythologized past of stability and harmony. And yet, what do we lose when we abandon therhetoric of the limit, of the boundary, of law and order to the reactionaryforces of society? The Greek walls of Zakynthos—and its leisurelyMediterranean climate—were a good injunction to follow this thought. One couldliterally amble along the walls, over brush and thicket, following the line ofthought… Around me on Zakynthos surged a mass of northern European vacationersall pumping money into the local economy while capitalizing on the warmweather, plentiful beach scene, and relatively cheap accommodations. Unlike inAthens, most of the locals I observed on the island seemed to live in relative,even if spartan, comfort. Furthermore, the island’s infrastructure, including itsroads, was all quite well-kept (even if I would have preferred a few moreguardrails around the narrow mountain turns). And yet the stone-walls werealmost all in seeming disrepair—sometimes appearing merely like thevictim of time’s slow march under the ceaseless circuit of the Ionian sun, andother times appearing deliberately mined for their material. Standing there in silent majesty, thedeteriorating walls seemed to harken to a time past, to a time before thetourism industry and globalized capital, to a time when walls and limits didnot merely restrict, but facilitated, to a time when “nature, red in tooth andclaw,” needed to be tamed and bounded to be put to human use. And yet, whilethe stone-walls seemed to attest to human control of the natural environment,they also dissolve into that environment. Made of the same stuff as the islanditself, the walls were at times almost imperceptible and I am sure I zippedpast many without the slightest awareness. The stone-walls of Zakynthos makeme ask: in our contemporary era of globalized capitalism with its rhetoric oflimitlessness, what role do walls/boundaries/limits continue to play? And ifwall-building has been nearly wholly coopted by reactionary forces in ourcontemporary world can (and should) it be reclaimed for leftist, egalitarianpolitics?Over sixty years ago, in the aftermath of her ownencounter with the forces of nationalism and authoritarianism, the politicaltheorist Hannah Arendt began The Human Condition with a meditation onlimits and boundaries. Writing just a year after the successful launch ofSputnik, Arendt offers a brief but insightful reflection on the cultural andpolitical meaning of humankind’s first forays beyond the limits of the Earth.Arendt claims that the success of Sputnik in escaping the boundaries of PlanetEarth marked an unrivaled event in human history that exceeded even thesplitting of the atom and its nuclear geopolitical implications. Yet, as Arendtastutely notes, it was not triumph or joy that attended this event, but“relief.” Arendt writes, “The immediate reaction, expressed on the spur of themoment, was relief about the first ‘step toward escape from men’s imprisonmentto the earth.’ And this strange statement, far from being the accidental slipof some American reporter, unwittingly echoed the extraordinary line which,more than twenty years ago, had been carved on the funeral obelisk for one ofRussia’s greatest scientists: ‘Mankind will not remain bound to the earthforever.’”&#160; Fast-forward some six decades and ourpreoccupation with escaping limits and boundaries has only seemed toaccelerate: we look for limitless energy in the wind, sun, and water, dream oflimitless posthuman futures in technological advances, pine for unlimiteddemocratic inclusion, accumulate cordless charging stations and limitless dataplans for our wireless mobile devices, and of course, motor our economies on arhetoric of limitless growth. Especially on the left, the limit, boundary, and,I want to add here, intentionality, do not fare well (more below).Indeed, as a political concept, the limit or boundary, just like the planned orintentional economy, is routinely opposed to the hallmarks of contemporary lefttheorizing: potentiality (Hardt &#38; Negri 2005; Agamben 1999), pluralism(Connolly 2005), and multiplicity (Deleuze &#38; Guattari 1987). Nothing soundsas backwards and simple-minded today as the invocation of the limit, theboundary, the intentional prohibition. Indeed, it seems only Bible-thumpingfundamentalists, crazed doomsday environmentalists, and jingoistic rhetoricinvoke limits. From the center right to radical left comes a nearly unanimousdenunciation of limits. “Drill, baby, drill!”—the 2008 US Republican NationalConvention slogan invoking a limitless lust for and equally limitless demand ofoil—merges uncomfortably well with Judith Butler’s more recent injunction tothe radical left to “demand the impossible.” Nothing seems moreanti-egalitarian and less utopian than the limit and the disciplining ofdesire.The deteriorating stone-walls of Zakynthos seem toreflect our contemporary disdain for walls and limits. And yet almostparadoxically—as Wendy Brown has perceptively observed in her book WalledStates, Waning Sovereignty—we witness alongside this disdain for walls andglobalized capital push, a contemporary resurgence of nation-statewall-building that has only taken on more brash forms since Brown published herbook in 2010. I want to conclude this first blogpost with a series of questionsthat I hope to flesh out within the larger research framework of the Laboratoriesof Democracy project. First, the stone-walls that crisscross Zakynthoswhile melding into the landscape raise for me the question of intentionality.The stone-walls are undoubtedly intentional constructs and yet at the sametime, in part because of their deteriorating state, in part because of my own ignoranceof historical agricultural practices on the island, and in part because of thevery material from which are they are made, the walls seem almost natural. As Imentioned above, often for the untrained eye, the walls are almost impossibleto discern, appearing like a natural feature of the landscape rather than anintentional human-made construct. The walls thus simultaneously stand as atoken of intentionality even as they materially and historically problematizethe intentional—unintentional (artificial—natural) dichotomy. In an article Ipublished last year on Aquinas and his understanding of law as ligament andnature as a boundary-drawing activity rather than a universal normativefoundation, I used Aquinas to probe the boundary between the so-called“artificial” and “natural” (see, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07393148.2017.1416728)In their own way, the walls of Zakynthos perform a similar probing. As Louis Althusser has argued in his work onMontesquieu and Rousseau, modern Western political theory begins with the radicalintentional creation of an artificial community through the mechanism of thesocial contract in contradistinction to the natural filiations of feudalism.However, since at least Marx’s time, the left in particular has been criticalof intentionality and planned utopian communities, or what David Leopold hascalled Marx and Engels’ “utopophobia” (2016). Intentionality is criticized herefor a number of reasons: that it is elitist, authoritarian, and non-democratic;that it excludes rather than includes; that it fragments political power ratherthan builds coalitions; that it is escapist, creating gated utopias rather thanpursuing a more radical democratic politics; that it is a historically-situatedbourgeois value that is both closed-off to others and mired in a particularworldview. Rather than shying away from these criticisms, I want to approachthem head-on. &#160;To do so, I have begunempirical research on intentional utopian communities. The Foundation forIntentional Community defines an intentional community (IC) as: “a group ofpeople who have chosen to live together with a common purpose, workingcooperatively to create a lifestyle that reflects their shared core values. Thepeople may live together on a piece of rural land, a suburban home, or in anurban neighborhood, and they may share a single residence or live in a clusterof dwellings” (Kozeny). I recently began this empirical research through aseries of in-depth, semi-structured, informal interviews at the annual CommunalStudies Association conference of IC practitioners and scholars. I hope tocontinue this fieldwork in the spring and summer of 2020 with Anna Varfolomeevawith an onsite study. My working hypothesis is that what is political about ICsis their intentionality and that it is precisely the practice ofintentionality—of having and giving intentions, of working within boundaries,of setting and holding to limits; namely, law’s boundary-setting function—thatmust be renewed in critical politics and reclaimed from nationalistic politics(Nersessian 2015). Second, the stone-walls of Zakynthos highlight forme the question of walls’ dual function—as both restricting and generating. Thelegal theorist Peter Fitzpatrick has described law as the dynamic betweenrestriction or determination and facilitation or responsiveness. Bothboundary-setting and boundary-breaching, law for Fitzpatrick is animated by thetension between bounding and bonding, between limiting and connecting (2001).In political discourse today—and we don’t just have Trump to thank forthis—walls have an overwhelmingly reactionary and excluding force. Walls arebuilt to exclude migrant hordes, to protect that which is on the inside, tolimit and bring stability. Yet what is the radical potential of wall- building?And more to the point, is there any? Do limits only become generative in theirerasure or is there a positive radicality of limits? If politics is aboutmaking distinctions and boundary-drawing is a radically democratic andegalitarian politics automatically foreclosed? These are question I have begunto raise with Anne Mulhall drawing on Gorgio Agamben’s discussion ofpotentiality and impotentiality. This last set of questions is related to a thirdand final question that the walls of Zakynthos raise for me even as it returnsto the first. Namely, just as walls create a separation, I am interested inexploring the political benefits and pitfalls of separatist autonomy practiced inisolation. If leftist “utopophia” is right in suspecting the fragmenting andescapist tendencies of intentional communities, I am interested in asking whatthe benefits might be. To this end and working alongside Peter Jones’s work onthe political influence of monastic medieval communities, I am beginning toinquire into the political potential of concepts and practices such as refugeand sanctuary. How does one practice and perform separateness? What are thewider political benefits of practicing separateness? With the stone-walls of Zakynthos receding into the background (and alas the Mediterranean clime too), I turn now to a new quarter of teaching and research in wintry Siberia. Still though, the walls stubbornly endure, a testament of the generativity of rubble and a goad to further think through a politics of intentionality at the close of the second decade of the twenty-first century. Stay tuned for more posts, updates, and podcasts from the Laboratories of Democracy research team!Zachary Reyna, z.reyna@utmn.ru[1]See Hannah Arendt’s reflections on nomos and lex in ThePromise of Politics, as well as Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth;Peter Fitzpatrick’s account of law as a “shoring up” and “breaching” process (Modernism2001); Deleuze and Guattari’s meditation on nomos, nomads, and straited space (AThousand Plateaus); and Derrida’s concept of limitrophy (The Animal thatTherefore I Am).