“Deconstruct That Wall!”: The Virtuality of a Wall and the Foreigner

• In Event: Migration and the Wall

Abstract

If Candidate Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign could be distilled into a single chant by both his supporters and detractors, it would likely be “Build That Wall.” This paper analyzes the political implications of the prospect of a southern wall to make three central claims. First, it is the threat of the wall, rather than its actual construction, that mobilizes polarized political capital. The potentiality of a wall reaches from the future into the present to elicit and modify political behaviors—the reality of the ‘wall’ thus pre-exists its (potential) construction. If the wall’s functionality is found in its virtuality rather than its actuality, then the need for and effectiveness of an actual wall is irrelevant. Second, the proposition of a wall attempts to solidify an artificial conception of an in-group and out-group without over-specifying the content of those categories. The implication of a southern wall mobilizes affective energy based on existential fears of being caught outside that threshold of an ‘us’ that is threatened by a ‘them.’ Third, the notion of the wall hinges on a complicated concept of foreignness that smears all bright lines. Following Bonnie Honig’s work on the foreign founder, Trump plays the role of both the foreign founder/savior and domestic, homegrown hero: his status as a political ‘outsider’ and his Manhattan wealth distinguish him from his purported base, while his reiteration of who qualifies as ‘American’ and who does not places him at the center of his self-made non-category. Meanwhile, this category is mobilized against another non-specific conception of a different type of ‘foreigner’ who poses an urgent threat to the first category. His dual status allows him to construct and then traverse these distinctions as he protects Americans for the foreigner.

Author

• Charles A. Phillips, Gettysburg College