(Un)making mess
Résumé
Critical border and migration studies have shown that border practices are often messy, ambiguous, improvised and uncertain. With datafication and the increased use of algorithmic technologies at borders, messiness and the effects of uncertainty and disconcertment for migrants have become both more extensive and more intensive. If mess is an inescapable aspect of datafied bordering practices, how can we critically engage with its effects while avoiding the ‘managerialism’ of clarity, systematicity, and standardisation (Law and Singleton, 2000)? In this paper, we draw on fieldwork in border zones in France, Italy, Germany and Spain to show, on the one hand, how messiness undergirds border practices and, on the other, how it becomes an object of critique. Yet, as Science and Technology Studies have shown, the relation between order and mess is co-constitutive rather than oppositional. We argue that mess also fuels bordering practices. This has significant implications for how we formulate critiques of data borders today. A critique of data borders needs to insert a third term in the relation between mess and order to account for the effects on subjectivity.