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HBO's Two Frontiers: Deadwood and TheWireMichael J. Shapiro aa Department of Political Science , University of Hawai'i , Honolulu ,HI , USAPublished online: 06 May 2014.

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Geopolitics, 00:1–21, 2014Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1465-0045 print / 1557-3028 onlineDOI: 10.1080/14650045.2013.847431

HBO’s Two Frontiers: Deadwood and The Wire

MICHAEL J. SHAPIRODepartment of Political Science, University of Hawai’i, Honolulu, HI, USA

The Wire (five seasons, 2002–2008) takes place in Baltimore, anurban venue that is distinguished by diverse modes of violenceand alienation – the colour line, tensions between governmen-tal bureaucracy and citizen, between policing executives andinvestigators, between corporate-oriented drug dealers and individ-ual (take-no-prisoners) dealers, and in general between aspiringchange-agents and entrenched power holders. And most signif-icantly for this analysis, The Wire explores what Robert Crooksidentifies as the new “urban frontier.” The older frontier (in “theWest”) is depicted in Deadwood (three seasons, 2004–2006). Thatfrontier, as Cronon, Miles, and Gitlin point out, was, at the outsetof the Euro American–Native American encounter, a space of nego-tiation, a space in which institutionalised regionalisation had notyet been installed.

INTRODUCTION: THE TWO FRONTIERS

The Wire (five seasons, 2002–2008) takes place in Baltimore, an urban venuethat is distinguished by diverse modes of violence and alienation – the colourline, tensions between governmental bureaucracy and citizen, between polic-ing executives and investigators, between corporate-oriented drug dealersand individual (take-no-prisoners) dealers, and in general between aspir-ing change-agents and entrenched power holders. And most significantly forthis analysis, The Wire explores what Robert Crooks identifies as the new“urban frontier.” The older frontier (in “the West”) is depicted in Deadwood(three seasons, 2004–2006). That frontier, as Cronon, Miles, and Gitlin pointout, was, at the outset of the Euro American–Native American encounter, aspace of negotiation, a space in which institutionalised regionalisation had

Address correspondence to Michael J. Shapiro, Department of Political Science, Universityof Hawai’i, 2424 Maile Way, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

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not yet been installed. As a result, how to live with each other was in contin-ual negotiation.1 In accord with that frontier moment, Deadwood’s openingepisode in season 1 begins with one of its main characters, Seth Bullock(Timothy Oliphant), setting out from the Montana Territory in 1876 towardDeadwood, where, he says, “There’s no law at all.” After he arrives and inter-acts with a wide variety of other characters, all with different occupations,ethical orientations, and degrees of self – versus other-regarding values, acomplex negotiation begins, ending with Deadwood being drawn into thesemblance of a coherent community, as it becomes part of the Dakota ter-ritory. Nevertheless, in an episode in season 3, at a moment well along inthe negotiations that had produced widespread participation in aspects of acollective civic life, Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert) expresses the situation inDeadwood this way: “Every day you have to figure out all over again howto fuckin’ live.” That instability in Deadwood’s land- and peoplescape is rep-resented in exemplary, identity-shaping daily encounters, which tend to bemore politically telling than do the normative and legal patterns that evolvefrom episode to episode (I reserve the details for later in this analysis).

Although the frontier in The Wire – primarily a racial frontier – is morefixed, with political and policing forces on the one side and the criminaland delinquent assemblages on the other, many of the relationships areunstable, both within and between the two assemblages. And of course,as Foucault has pointed out, policing agencies and the “delinquent milieu”(in this case drug gangs and users) are intimately connected, as the policeproduce and make use of informants to render “delinquency” useful.2 As isthe case with Deadwood, in The Wire, encounters and episodes of nego-tiation tend to trump the institutionalised tasks between and within eachassemblage on either side of the frontier. Moreover, the two HBO seriesemploy similar styles. Formally and substantively, they eschew a singleethico-political perspective and a central commanding set of protagonists.There are no heroes in either venue. The pattern of long takes or exposuresfor each individual type and group is broadly distributed, as the perspectives,dilemmas, coping strategies and habituses of each is continually explored.In terms of form, then, The Wire’s “segmented architecture,” like Deadwood’sis “polydiegetic.”3 It is constructed as an assemblage of multiple narratives,so that ultimately, in both cases, the viewer is witnessing a frontier that isa “multipolar axiological space”4 in which no point of view on the collec-tive negotiation that shapes the life worlds in Deadwood and Baltimore isunambiguously privileged.

However, rather than seeing the two frontiers as simply similar domainsof violence-shaping identity/difference, we can observe a historical transferfrom one to the other. As Robert Crooks has suggested, the violence thattook place on the US’s western frontier (an inter-nation frontier) during thenineteenth century, shifted to urban frontiers – in his terms, a “transforma-tion of the frontier from a moving western boundary into a relatively fixed

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HBO’s Two Frontiers: Deadwood and The Wire 3

partitioning of urban space . . . a racial frontier.”5 One might add, however,that insofar as a relatively fixed partitioning had taken place, the “frontier”had devolved into a borderland, a heavily policed demarcation (althoughcertainly a frontier, as a space of encounter, remained in proximity to theborder areas).6

The dramas in Deadwood take place in the late 1870s, shortly afterthe Euro-American national trauma, when General Custer and his cavalrytroop were defeated at The Battle of Little Big Horn. The frontier period inwhich Deadwood takes place was almost over, for as Crooks points out, “By1890 the western frontier as a geographical space had disappeared and the‘frontier’ as a signifier was now cut adrift, its attachment to past, present andfuture conceptual spaces a matter of debate.”7 Yet, as he goes on to note,“Other conceptual and spatial divides along ethnic and racial lines emergedalmost simultaneously with the western frontier . . . [and] The most obviouswas that between European and African Americans embodied in the codes,economy, and practices of slavery and subsequent segregation.”8

Nevertheless, we should not regard the morphing of the western intothe urban frontier, as the shift is articulated in popular culture genres, as com-plete; there remain liminal aesthetic figures that mediate between them – forexample, Raylan Givens (Timothy Oliphant), an urban Marshall in the FXchannel’s series, Justified, who wears a cowboy hat and whose quick drawwizardry with his pistol recalls the antics of fictionalised western heroes.In the first episode in season 3 (2012), Givens encounters the “bad guy,” astone killer named Fletcher (Ice Pick) Nix on an elevator, unaware at thispoint that he is the killer he is looking for. Seeing the cowboy hat, Nixasks if the “cowboy thing” is something passé, to which Givens responds,“You’d be surprised” (and he does surprise him at the end of the episode,using his quick reflexes to shoot Nix in the shoulder after foiling him ina grab for a gun, sitting between them on a table). Moreover, the ElmoreLeonard-inspired dialogue in Justified partakes of aspects of the discourses ofidentity/difference that have existed on both frontiers. (Significantly, Leonardbegan writing western stories and ultimately shifted to urban crime storiesand novels.) To some extent – both in fiction and in the life-world of lawenforcement types – the old “wild West” has been assimilated into contempo-rary urban America, making the transfer both incomplete and conceptuallyprovocative. Thus Chester Himes shapes his police detectives, Grave DiggerJones and Coffin Ed Johnson who appear in several of his Harlem crime sto-ries as cowboy gunmen –for example: “Detectives Grave Digger Jones andCoffin Ed Johnson reporting for duty, General,” Pigmeat muttered, “JesusChrist!” Chick fumed. “Now we’ve got those damned Wild West gunmenhere to mess up everything.”9

As a matter of form as well as content, Deadwood and The Wire articu-late critical commentaries on what Crooks refers to as the “ideological work”associated with their respective frontiers. As I have noted elsewhere, as form

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television-as-critique works in part because it simultaneously shows new pro-grammes that address contemporary social and political situations and olderones on channels that reprise those situations in earlier periods. As a result, inaddition to substantive critique of entrenched regulative ideals about the ruleof law in both Deadwood and The Wire is “the way the forms of televisionprograming produce a [critical] historical consciousness [as] contemporaryviewers can tune in to reruns of programs [in these cases about the vio-lence and civic association in the West and about urban crime, policing,administration, and politics in urban venues] from earlier periods, allowingthem to compare past and present . . . .”10 Seen from the point of view ofa critical historical consciousness, both series thus militate against the “ideo-logical work” that turned the western frontier into a Euro-dominated regionand the urban frontier into a space of virtual racial apartheid. That ideolog-ical work, in the case of the westward moving frontier involved imaginingthe “Euro-American self” as involved in a struggle to turn a more-or-lessvacant and/or badly used wilderness, populated by backward peoples, intoa productive civilisation (turning “nature” into a “garden” as the process isrepresented in two of John Ford’s films – My Darling Clementine (1946) andThe Man who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)). As one commentator writes, inreaction to such pacifying tropes, “the West is too often represented as some‘perfect garden . . . safe behind some hedgerow’ of stories and establishediconographies.”11

Among those who most notably perpetuated pacifying imagery wasPresident Theodore Roosevelt, who moved to a ranch in the Dakotas in1884. Along with others, he reproduced the ideological work involved inEuro-America’s dispossession of indigenous nations (although his gloss onthe frontier period contained contradictions). Three textual productions, ahistorical epic by Roosevelt, a series of cowboy stories by Owen Wister, andthe paintings of Frederick Remington collaborated in constructing a deservedAnglo presence in the West. Their texts constituted much of what the US’sEuro-American population came to know about their continental acquisition.As I have noted elsewhere, in his epic, The Winning of the West, Roosevelt

alternatively depopulates and repopulates the West. He justifies theexpansion of white America in some places by claiming that they areoccupying ‘waste’ spaces visited only ‘a week or two every year’ and inothers by having savage and formidable foes’ fighting heroic settlers with‘fierce and dogged resistance,’ virtually every step of the way. Addinga biopolitical corollary to his romantic soldatesque and reproducingthe anti-Spanish sentiment that was integral to English imperialism,Roosevelt praises ‘the English race’ for maintaining its ethnic integrityby exterminating or driving off the Native Americans rather than, likethe Spanish in their colonial venues, ‘sitting down in their midst’ andbecoming a ‘mixed race’.12

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Roosevelt’s friend, the writer, Owen Wister, helped to popularise Roosevelt’sview of the superiority of the English “race” in much of his fiction. Forexample, in his story, “The Evolution of the Cowpuncher,” he features anEnglish nobleman who, after ending up in Texas, adapts rapidly because ofhis superior horsemanship and marksmanship.13 And the painter, FrederickRemington, a friend of both Roosevelt and Wister, supported their biopolit-ical conceits by depicting their invention of the cowboy as a legacy of theEnglish aristocracy. Among the paintings with which he lent visual supportto their narrative of the Anglo legacy is his Last Cavalier (1895), which showsa cowboy in the foreground against a background that consists of “a fadedpanorama of historical horsemen, of which the most prominent are gener-ations of English knights.”14 In addition, Remington did the illustrations formany of Wister’s stories in Colliers magazine, which represented the West asan evolving (and whitening) social order.

At a minimum, the “ideological work” legitimated the disenfranchisingof the resident Native American nations. And there were other aspects of thatconceptual labour – for example, another version suggested by Crooks, whowrites, “From the European-American perspective . . . the frontier wars werenot wars of conquest, for the assertion of authority by the U.S. governmentto make legal claim to land occupied by Native Americans was tantamountto redefining Native Americans themselves as foreign intruders.”15 However,some of the ideological work, which was to take place once the continentwas more-or-less subdued, constructed Native Americans as domestic depen-dents. John Borneman summarises the process of Euro-American ideologicalwork on that frontier effectively:

After a brief period in which Indians were viewed as sovereign nationsto be protected against crimes by whites, a century of hostilities and warfollowed . . . . From approximately 1796 to the middle of the nineteenthcentury, non-Indians characterized their commercial and political rela-tions with Indians in terms of a civilizing process opposed to “savage” or“tribal” states.16

In the case of the urban (racial) frontier, the ideological work evinced(in Crook’s terms) a “partitioning [that] refocused the frontier ideology, whichcontinued to map cultural and racial divisions, but in geographical terms[that] now denoted relatively fixed lines of defense for the purity and orderof European-American culture [so that they associated] black urban commu-nities . . . with the criminal side of the urban frontier.”17 In both cases, thetwo series counter the ideological work of the frontiers. As a result, their crit-ical interventions into that “work” constitute what Gilles Deleuze refers to as“counter-effectuations18 If we tune into the dominant progressive narrativesthat suggest a consensual development of civic orders and note the com-plicity of much of popular culture in those narratives, Deadwood and The

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Wire stand as counter-effectuations inasmuch as they display multiple sites ofself-aggrandisement, predatory and exploitive commerce, and violence. As aresult, the developing institutions and policies they represent can be seento emerge from the cynical use of raw power and the self-interested avoid-ance of just interventions. Like the form effect that M. M. Bakhtin ascribesto novels, the multiple narratives, voices and idioms in both series have acentrifugal effect; they pull away from any “verbal-ideological center.”19

THE TELEVISION AESTHETIC

Given their montage forms, in which parallel editing produces a simul-taneous treatment of different venues and points of view, both seriesarticulate socio-cultural pluralities without resorting to a single master narra-tive. Deadwood’s and The Wire’s camera work is thus more cinematic thantelevisual. Nevertheless, both series as forms belong to the television ratherthan the cinema aesthetic in that “the primary object of aesthetic interest . . .

is not the individual piece, but the format.”20 The various episodes in bothseries, however different from each other thematically, derive their coher-ence from the formulas that generate them, among which is the continuingparticipation of the same characters and the progression of their relationshipswith each other.21 And unlike the typical cinematic aesthetic, much of whatis offered week-to-week is a background of uneventfulness – the mundanemoments of interaction in life worlds – from which the special events thatdrive each episode stand out.22

However, given the polydiegetic nature of both series, the episodes ineach tend to decentre the viewer’s narrative reception. And crucially, mod-ern technology has created a viewer that is now a participant in the montageeffect. Because of the contemporary availability of episodes and recordingequipment, the viewing situation itself frees viewers from the narrative pro-gression of both series. As Victor Burgin has pointed out video viewingequipment (the VCR and personal computer) along with purchasable copiesof films and videos has changed the viewing experience: “The . . . arrival ofdigital editing on ‘entry level’ personal computers exponentially expandedthe range of possibilities for dismantling and reconfiguring the once invi-olable objects offered by narrative cinema.”23 The same can be said oftelevision programmes which, because they are obtainable in a video format,can be lent a variety of different temporalities that reshape their significanceas series and, at the same time, insert them in different historical moments.They become a “mediator of temporality, a constant resource in the presentthat continually shapes our sense of being-in-the-world.”24 In what follows,I analyse Deadwood and The Wire by taking advantage of the contemporaryaesthetic of viewing, which, following Burgin’s analysis, is a technology-assisted, critical reception. And methodologically, I engage in a “philopoesis”;

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I “interfere” with the televisual texts (assemblages of affects and percepts)with philosophically derived concepts, adapting a methodological protocolthat Cesare Casarino has applied to literature. “Philopoesis,” Casarino writes,“. . . names a certain discontinuous and refractive interference between phi-losophy and literature.”25 That “interference” is one between an “‘art offorming, inventing, and fabricating concepts’” (philosophy) and an art consti-tuted as “the production of a ‘bloc of sensations . . . a compound of perceptsand affects’” (literature).26

DEADWOOD

The lead-in to each episode of Deadwood provides an overview of all theelements of its setting – the diverse dimensions of the inhabitants’ livelihoodsand contests for supremacy, involving the human and non-human elementsof its system of exchange (its economies). What are depicted are blood,mud, alcohol, gold dust, horses, cards, prostitutes, and guns. The openingof the first episode in season 1 addresses the economic motives of settle-ment and entrepreneurial management. Beginning, as I noted, in 1876 withthe move of Seth Bullock from the Montana Territory to Deadwood, welearn about a character that is leaving his law enforcement role to becomea proprietor of a hardware store. Having been a Marshall in the Montanaterritory, he plans to ignore the illegal town’s lawlessness and open thestore with his friend, Sol Star (Ethan Hawkes). As they negotiate with AlSwearengen (Ian McShane), the ruthless owner of a bar and bordello, “TheGem,” for a space he owns to erect their store, the primary character jux-taposition between Bullock and Swearengen is initiated. They both haveviolent tempers. However in Bullock’s case, we see a man with Victorianvalues and accordingly a temper that articulates itself as righteous indig-nation. In contrast, Swearengen, a pragmatic and predatory entrepreneur,becomes enraged on occasions in which his business and/or his acquisitiveinstincts are threatened or opposed. Hence, in the initial encounter betweenthe two – the negotiation for the space for the hardware store – Swearengenwants guarantees that no commodity that the Bullock-Star enterprise sellswill compete with his commodities: alcohol and (as he puts it), “pussy.”Bullock becomes so angry about Swearengen’s intransigence about the con-ditions of the sale that the more emotionally cool Star has to take over thenegotiation.

Once Bullock and Star’s hardware business is underway, a tellingencounter occurs between Star and Swearengen. Star begins what he regardsas a romantic relationship with one of Swearengen’s prostitutes, Trixie (PaulaMalcomson). When Swearengen finds out, he demands payment, listingthe fees (more, he says if they had anal intercourse). Outraged, Star ini-tially refuses to pay but capitulates once Swearengen makes it clear that

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if Star doesn’t pay, Trixie will have to. That encounter reveals one of theplurality of systems of exchange that constitute Deadwood’s economy: inthis event, its contentious libidinal economy. Two of Deadwood’s incip-ient public spheres, Swearengen’s bar-bordello and Cy Tolliver’s (PowersBoothe) gambling hall–bordello are sites of fee-for-service sex. Nevertheless,in both cases, the owners, Swearengen and Tolliver have powerful feelingsfor their head prostitutes, Trixie and Joanie Stubbs (Kim Dickens) respec-tively. However, inasmuch as both men have little trust in their vulnerableaffective selves, they treat their affectionate impulses as threats and tendto lash out at the women in moments when they are feeling most bound tothem. For example in season 1, right after he has sex with Trixie, Swearengenaggressively says, “Now get out of here.” It becomes evident that he is notmerely abjecting Trixie; he’s abjecting the vulnerable part of himself. Part ofthat evidence emerges in his remark to Bullock (season 2 episode 8), “Areyou a cunt-driven near maniac or a stalwart driven by principle.” Bullock isindeed very much the latter. And despite many provocations, Swearengenresists a violent solution to Bullock’s many difficult obstructions (protect-ing others that he might have killed, siding with enemies or competitors,and ultimately imposing inconvenient aspects of law enforcement when hebecomes the Deadwood Marshall). It turns out that Swearengen needs sucha “stalwart” to help him shape “the camp” in ways that allow his enterpriseto maintain its near-monopoly and to keep him out of trouble (he’s a fugitivefrom the law because of a murder he committed in his pre-Deadwood life).He also cultivates Wu, the head of the town’s Chinese community, and eventhough his pedagogy offered to Wu suggests radical independence (“Wu,” hesays at one point, “are you’re here for justice or to make your way”), he sig-nals his dependence on Wu’s many services (getting rid of the corpses whichWu feeds to his pigs and having Wu muster force to balance that held byhis adversaries) and offers Wu quid pro quos rather than simply dominatinghim (as he does his employees).

Bullock is a principled stalwart in all aspects of his life. For example,exemplifying his place in the Deadwood’s diverse libidinal economy, hebreaks off his passionate affair with the widow, Alma Garrett (Molly Parker),when his deceased brother’s wife and son arrive, choosing to honour a fam-ily obligation and take his brother’s place as Martha’s (Anna Gunn) husbandand his son, William’s (Josh Eriksson) father rather than follow his passions.Alma Garret’s location in the libidinal economy provides another variation.Rather than principled, her marriages are economically driven. Her marriage,to her first husband, Brom Garret (Timothy Omundson), whom Swearengenhas murdered, hoping to take over his gold-rich land claim, is based onan economic obligation. We learn in season 1 episode 4 that she marriedhim to bail her father (a scammer who later shows up in Deadwood seek-ing to steal Alma’s new-found wealth) out of a financial obligation. Andher second marriage, to Whitney Ellsworth (Jim Beaver), is undertaken to

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acquire a protector and manager of her land claim and a paternal presencefor the child she has taken into her care (the daughter of Norwegian immi-grants who were murdered). Those relationships distinguish Alma from theother key women in the series, Swearengen’s head prostitute, Trixie, andTolliver’s, Joannie Stubbs, both of whom are initially powerless commoditiesrather than persons whose connections with men are undertaken to enhancetheir economic position. They are not in control of their own bodies untillate in the series when they break away – Trixie to a consensual conjugalrelationship with Sol Starr and Joannie to the management of her own busi-ness, after leaving Tolliver’s establishment and developing an alliance with aprotector, Charlie Utter (Dayton Callie).

Indeed, inasmuch as the Deadwood series is polydiegetic, the women’sstory is one that occurs as a parallel narrative, emphasised throughDeadwood’s cinematic structure – frequent montage effects as women areshown taking care of women in a variety of venues – in the saloons,when they are imperilled or badly treated, outside of those enterpriseswhen they seek to establish economic and/or romantic independence, andso on. Other narratives, also shown in parallel through cinematic mon-tage treat cross-gender alliances – Joannie Stubbs and Eddie Sawyer (RickyJay), who works as the craps table manager in Tolliver’s casino-bordello,Joannie Stubbs and Charlie Utter, her protector after she leaves Tolliver’s tostart her own bordello, Alma Garret and Bullock, who, before they becomeromantically involved, helps her to hold onto her claim. The other most sig-nificant alliances are between powerful men and subordinates, Swearengen,who uses thugs to manage his saloon and either kill or bully competi-tors and smarmy intelligence gatherers, especially E. B. Farnum (WilliamSanderson), who runs the local hotel, Tolliver who has thugs with guns tokeep order in his establishment and also has smarmy informants (e.g., thedrug-dependent Leon), and finally, in the last season, Mr. Hearst, a wealthymining entrepreneur who uses a succession of armed killers to manage hisclaim and to eliminate or intimidate competitors.

From the outset, up to the point where Deadwood is about to becomepart of the Dakota territory and thereby subject to economic and politi-cal regulation, the political economy of the town is more or less a blackor pirate economy, where greed and violence dominate. Nevertheless,Deadwood’s aesthetic, articulated in the form of Shakespearean soliloquys(with which many of the characters reflect on their situations, often lamentingtheir actions or frailties) provides a moral economy. Those Shakespeareanmoments, supplemented by characters who inhibit, through word or deed,some of the planned excesses of the economic predators – Wild Bill Hickock(Keith Carradine), Calamity Jane, Doc Cochran (Bad Dourif), Bullock, CharlieUtter, and Alma Garret, among others – constitute the moral economy thatinhibits some of the more predatory self-aggrandising and violent impulses.Moral or symbolic economies run parallel with the more rationalistic aspects

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of economic exchange and effectively limit the range of exchanges regardedas legitimate, while at the same time either permitting or preventing certaintypes of characters from participating in exchanges. Historically it has usuallybeen the case that expanding capitalism has tended to break down barriersto exchange. As Jonathan Crary succinctly puts it, “Capitalism unleashes aprocess [that] uproots and makes mobile what is grounded, clears away thatwhich impedes circulation, and makes exchangeable what is singular.”27 Thatinsight is articulated metaphorically in a scene in which the predatory min-ing entrepreneur George Hearst (Gerald McRany), breaks down a wall of hishotel room to provide easy walking access to his balcony.

Nevertheless, although the last few episodes of Deadwood are domi-nated by a virtual blood feud between Hearst and Deadwood’s dominantcharacters, who have preceded his arrival, the overall narrative articulatesthe development of vestiges of a civic order and consequently a diminutionof the former aspects of lawless violence. By episode 9 in the last season (3),the newspaper publisher, A. W. Merrick (Jeffrey Jones) refers to the need tocreate a coalition of reliable, public-spirited people. And at a micro-politicallevel, the abjecting, disparaging signifiers for ethnic Others – celestials forChinese, savages for Native Americans, square heads for Scandinavians, nig-gers, for African Americans, and a variety of anti-Semitic epithets and stereo-types applied to the Jew, Sol Star – have diminished as different types whowere formerly disqualified from shaping the town’s practices begin to havetheir presences more welcomed and their voices heeded. Al Swearengen,who had settled his conflicts with his knife and through the murderousagency of his hired thugs, increasingly has occasion to tap into his reserveof canned peaches, which he brings out for the episodes of civic negotiationthat he hosts in The Gem. And perhaps most notably, Swearengen and oth-ers, for example, Alma Garret and Bullock, increasingly invoke the conceptof “the camp” to refer to Deadwood as a civic entity that ought to be cul-tivated as an object of collective concern. Seemingly minor scenes speak tothe ways in which formerly disqualified bodies are being drawn into the civicconversation. The breakfast room in E. B’s hotel, which in earlier episodeswas a preserve for male notables, has begun to host a mixed clientele,which includes prostitutes. Similarly, the downstairs bar section of The Gembecomes one of the public spheres, where conversations begin to reflectcommunal sensibilities. Although there remain centrifugal forces – mostnotably the violence and political manipulations of the Hearst entourageand to some extent Tolliver’s resistance to civic concerns – there is a grow-ing civic culture, spurred by the development of various communication andcontrol agencies that begin to align Deadwood with structures of order thathave increasingly impinged from the outside of the town: election commis-sions, the telegraph, and the local newspaper, which increasingly carriesitems from outside Deadwood’s boundaries. By the end of the series, these

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media play a role in obviating the town’s former lawlessness and regulatingand coordinating its interrelated economies, libidinal, political and moral.

However, while much of the political trend in Deadwood involves theimpact of a public sphere with its attendant forms of governance on itseconomies, especially land use, mining rights, and the freedom to initiatenew enterprises, there is a very notable biopolitical aspect of the series.“How to fuckin’ live,” as Calamity Jane puts it late in the series has beensignificantly inflected by the actions of powerful men who determine whocan be allowed to live and who will have to die. Michel Foucault’s gloss onthe difference between modern biopower and the territorial state’s sovereignpower is apropos here. Referring to the power over life and death, he assertsthat whereas the thanatopolitics of the old sovereign power’s relationships tolife is captured in the formula, “to take life or let live,” the formula applied tobiopower is “to ‘make’ live and to ‘let’ die.”28 Both forms of power are there-fore articulated as the management of life/death. When sovereign powerwas preeminent, making die or letting live was a policy aimed at reactivatingsovereign power. Once territorial states enacted not only sovereign powerbut also biopower – because within the modern “governmentality,” their aimwas to make use of bodies rather than simply extracting allegiance from them– biopower was enlisted such that, for example, the state became involvedin public health because it wanted to extract energy or working capacityrather than mere allegiance from its bodies. It made little sense within sucha governmentality to let die those from whom value could be extracted.

In the case of Deadwood, we see neither a central sovereign power,characteristic of the state form, nor a centralised biopower. The taking oflife emanates from more than one place – Swearengen’s enterprise, that ofhis Chinese ally Wu and associates, and ultimately Hearst’s as well. Amongthose who at one point are made to die are Chinese prostitutes, run by arival Chinese gang from San Francisco, who treat the women as expend-able slaves. However, it turns out that this way of running an enterprise,even in lawless Deadwood, violates many segments of the town’s moraleconomy. Swearengen’s and Wu’s crowds collaborate to kill the rival gang,while Charlie Utter and others collaborate to sneak the surviving Chinesesex slaves out of town. And as is the case throughout the series, with respectto moments of moral economy, the plurality of positions is shown with acinematic montage that drops the viewer into the town’s different venueswith their alternative modes of permission versus inhibition with respectto exploitation and servitude – for example, cuts between an increasinglymorally inhibited Al Swearengen, being gruff but occasionally kind and gen-erous toward his prostitutes and bar managers and a consistently vicious CyTolliver, for whom cruelty, exploitation, and murder are the only modes.

Crucially, before law enforcement officials and the rest of the justicedispositif – a prosecution and judgment structure can be firmly institution-alised (although a somewhat chaotic trial takes place as Wild Bill Hickock’s

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killer is tried and ultimately acquitted) – Hearst and his hired thugs engagein a biopolitical standoff with Swearengen and his newly created civicallyoriented allies in “the camp.” The prelude to that encounter is narrated in along Shakespearean soliloquy by the head of the visiting theatre group, JackLangrishe (Brian Cox), who warns, “This camp is in mortal danger The ManHearst is a murderous engine.”

That encounter is a result of Trixie’s failed attempt to kill Hearst (sheonly wounds him with a shot to the shoulder) in retaliation for Hearst’smurder-for-hire plot in which his head henchman kills Alma Garret’s hus-band, Whitney Ellsworth, in order to force her to sell him her land claim.That encounter, in the very last episode of season 3, exemplifies the com-plex biopolitical situation in Deadwood. Toward the very end of the episode,Swearengen decides that the life to be sacrificed, in order to placate themurderous Hearst, who demands the death of “the cunt” who shot him, isa lookalike prostitute, Jen (a wholly innocent life), because he and someothers place a high value on Trixie. He goes with his “feelings,” as his thugassistant, Dan, explains to Swearengen’s other main minion, Johnny, whois angrily lamenting the loss of Jen, with whom he was in love. Althoughthere had once been a very wide dispersion of biopolitical positions on whoshould live and who should die, the newly developed consensus on pro-tecting “the camp” has obviously created a willing coalition of characterswho were formerly at odds. As Hearst prepares to come and observe thedead body, it is clear from the passive presence of Bullock, Star, Utter, andMerrick that the thanatopolitics of Deadwood has moved in the directionof its newly developing civic consensus; an ideological investment in thecollective entity, “the camp,” has increasingly trumped individual, predatoryforms of economy and violence.

THE WIRE

Like Deadwood, The Wire is both polydiegetic and polycentric; it followsdiverse narratives as it focuses in on the temporal trajectories of a widevariety of Baltimore’s life worlds, and unlike most police procedurals, it hasno dominant centre. Although it does a deep ethnography of some of thelives of the police department homicide and narcotics enforcement divisions,it gives equal space to many other sectors of the city – street life in the AfricanAmerican western section of the city, competing drug gangs, newspapers,the dock, political and administrative offices, local schools and communityassociations, and so on. And as a form, The Wire, like Deadwood, has acinematic montage style, cutting continually from one to another of the city’ssubcultures and agencies.

In addition, like Deadwood, reception of The Wire requires an appre-ciation of artistic genres. While Deadwood is articulated as a western

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film–Shakespearean drama hybrid, The Wire combines elements of film noir,television police procedurals, Greek tragedy, and the novel. With respect tothe latter two genres, the series producer-creator, David Simon has notedthat The Wire is structured by literary forms; he conceives it as “essentiallystructured like ‘a novel’ [and as] . . . most closely akin to Greek tragedy.”29

Certainly the fates of the characters in The Wire result from seemingly impla-cable structural conflicts that render them tragic. But the tragedy aesthetichas less effect on each episode than the genre of the novel. Two approachesto novels are worth elaborating to appreciate how The Wire-as-form works.First, heeding M. M. Bakhtin’s treatment of the novel, undeniably The Wireis a container of diverse sociolects, speech styles that, in Bakhtin’s terms, arespecific socio-linguistic (verbal ideological) styles such that there is consider-able centrifugal movement away from a verbal-ideological centre.30 Second,heeding Franco Morretti’s treatment of literary geography, we can discernan affinity between the way the camera constructs Baltimore and the wayCharles Dickens rendered London in his novels. In contrast with anothernineteenth-century novelist, Jane Austin, who mapped only London’s WestEnd (because her “silver fork” novels were focused on a narrow marriagemarket within a particular class), “Dickens’ stroke of genius . . . [for examplein “Eugene and Moritmer’s long coach ride from the West End to Limehouse”in Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865)] was to unify the two halves of London.”31

For example, the novel treats a character, the eponymous “mutual friend,”who “is caught between the fraudulent arrogance of the West End and thephysical violence of the Docks, where the mutual friend is almost killed.”32

Similarly, in season 2 of The Wire, the drama precisely connects much ofBaltimore with the docks. James (Jimmy) McNulty (Dominic West), a roguedetective who having been resistant to the primary interest of the policebureaucracy (avoiding responsibility), has followed a public service ethos inhis investigations. As a result, he has been punished, relegated to harbourpolicing in small boat. After he finds a corpse in the water and it is tracedto a container where thirteen unidentified young women have been founddead, he undertakes a dual task. One is vengeance oriented; he strives tomake his former commander responsible for dealing with the murders. Theother is ethical; he works to discover the floating corpse’s identity so thatthe family can be apprised of what has befallen her. At the same time thethirteen dead bodies become political liabilities. The homicide captain cyn-ically refers to the dead as “pussies in a can” (they were asphyxiated bya Turk in charge of guarding them because it was feared that they wouldreport the rapes they had had to endure from the traffickers who broughtthem to the US) and resists allocating resources to solve the murders. Thehuman traffic from Eastern Europe in the opening episodes of season 2 ofThe Wire is comparable to the Chinese women trafficked into Deadwoodby the San Francisco Chinese gang. Both groups of women are expendablebodies that reflect the darker side of the biopolitical aspects in both series.

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However there is a major difference in the way bodies are valued or dis-qualified between the two series. While bodies are evaluated in terms of theresources they bring to both economies and warring factions in Deadwood,bodies constitute a liability from the point of view of major centres of power(except the media) in The Wire – for politicians, the police bureaucracy andthe drug gangs. I treat the details on that aspect of The Wire below afternoting its polydiegetic form and spheres of exchange.

In season 2, the murder investigation of the dead girls in the containeris only one narrative strand that links the docks to other parts of the city.A police Major Stan Valcheck (Al Brown) harasses the dock’s head of theInternational Brotherhood of Stevedores with an investigation because ofa rivalry over their sponsoring a stained glass window where his depart-ment had wanted to place one. Smuggling on the dock has trajectories thatimplicate people in various parts of the city, a Greek gang, the mayor’soffice, various parts of the police bureaucracy and the downtown media.The dock episodes also highlight the complex interactions between localand global space. In terms of the city itself, in the episodes throughoutthe five seasons of the series (season 2 cuts from the docks across townto West Baltimore to treat the drama of in and out of prison members ofAvon and D’Angelo Barksdale’s drug gang), The Wire unites East and WestBaltimore, just as Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend united West and East London.As is the case with Our Mutual Friend, it is the movement trajectories ofdiverse characters that ties the different parts of the city together – cruisingpolicy detectives, campaigning politicians, police informants, and ambitiousentrepreneurs, operating in both the legitimated and illicit parts of the econ-omy. In terms of a wider national and global space (existing off screen inboth series), just as the growing, gold-based prosperity of Deadwood attractsentrepreneurs at some distance (for example Hearst’s mining company andthe Chinese sex traffickers from San Francisco), the infusion of drug moneyinto an otherwise increasingly impoverished city, attracts contraband com-modity and sex traffickers from all over the globe. And given the greaterglobal reach of commodity transfers in the time of The Wire, compared tothe smaller space and slower pace of trading in Deadwood’s nineteenth cen-tury, the trafficking response to enhanced possibilities for clienteles is morerapid. Crucially, the sex trafficking that takes place in both series articu-lates a transversality between geo- and biopolitics. The biopolitical policiesin evidence in the value of deceased bodies played out on screen in bothDeadwood and The Wire (which I treat below) occur within an extensive,geopolitical space of forces that exist mostly off-screen.33

To summarise, The Wire’s beginning season 1 introduces two spaces andtwo parallel narratives. There is on the one hand, “the pit,” an open spacebetween low-rise buildings where Avon Barksdale’s drug gang (a crime dis-positif comprised mostly of his young clockers) congregates and implementsthe illicit narcotics sales. On the other is a police station housing “the detail,”

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a policing dispositif tasked with arresting those involved in drug enterprises.Thereafter, the seasons highlight other spaces and different social segments,moving to the docks in season 2, to the creation of a drug tolerant zone inseason 3, to a contest between rival drug gangs to control corner sales inseason 4, and to detective McNulty’s subterfuge (aided and abetted by anambitious reporter at The Baltimore Sun) in season 5, in which he plantsevidence of a serial killer in order to force the city to put more money intopolicing drug crimes and related murders. Although each season exploresalternative spaces and issues in the city, one way of rendering its treatmentof space fits all the seasons. Carlo Galli captures that model in his discus-sion of how Machiavelli depicted the Renaissance world (in his shift of focusfrom a religious model of space to the space of the city): “His space is . . .

determined by vectors of conflict, by the always changing theater of ‘virtu-ous’ operation, and this conflictuality is, for Machiavelli, spaces paradoxicalqualification, one based on neither boundary lines, nor moral differentiation,but simply on the search for glory.”34

The dramas that occur within the conflictual spaces of The Wire’sBaltimore display the tensions between moral economy and political econ-omy, between democratic and corrupt politics, and between professionalversus corrupt and self-aggrandising policing. In terms of the moral-politicaleconomy binary, on one side of the frontier there is the failed attempt byRussell ‘Stringer’ Bell (Idris Elba) to orchestrate a rational, violence-inhibitingconcord among the rival drug gangs (in contrast with the uninhibited violentapproach of Marlo Stanfield (James Hector)), and on the other side there isMayor Thomas ‘Tommy’ Carcetti’s (Aiden Gillen) attempt to run an economi-cally just Baltimore in contrast with the corrupt, favour-distributing approachthat existed under the former mayor, Clarence Royce (Glynn Turman).

The space of this essay doesn’t permit a thorough treatment of the manycritical aspects of Baltimore’s encounters that The Wire enacts (ultimately,Baltimore is the series’ main protagonist). Here I will restrict my focus tothe geography of The Wire’s treatment of the policing-political economydynamic and the dramatic contrast between its biopolitics and Deadwood’s.The Wire’s montage lead-ins to each episode, as the credits begin to run,reflect the dramatic cleavage between Baltimore’s macropolitical process inthe central and western section of the city and the micropolitics of survivalin East Baltimore. Apart from the many images of the generations existing inthe African American segment of the population in East Baltimore, what wesee is a contrast of political levels. There are iconic representations of themacropolitics of the city – election ballots and shots of the capital dome onthe one hand, and shots of street corners, of hands exchanging drug pack-ets for money on the other, all of which articulate the difference betweenthe two kinds of politics: a struggle for the political offices in Central andWest Baltimore’s iconic political buildings. And there is a struggle for eithersurvival or dominance that constitutes the micropolitics of East Baltimore,

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where the camera maps the spaces of the struggle to control the street cor-ners where the drug trade makes contact with its clientele (part of the lead-into all the episodes explores the spaces of exchange involved in drug sales).Once the episodes begin, much of the focus is on the agency mediatingthe two economies, the policing structure, which is also radically divided.There is the administrative hierarchy, which operates under orders from cor-rupt state senators and the mayor’s office, initially under the corrupt mayor,Clarence Royce, until he loses an election to the reform-minded TommyCarcetti. There are the professionally committed detectives, McNulty, William‘Bunk’ Moreland (Wendell Pierce), Shakima ‘Kinma’ Greggs (Sonja Sohn) andthe surveillance manager Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters), among others. Andthere are some of those caught in between, trying to manage both sides –especially the “Deputy Commissioner for Operations, Cedric Daniels (LanceReddick).

At the same time that contests for political office proceed among thosewho would seek to alleviate the city’s crushing inequality and violence andthose who would want simply to maintain their power and privileges byavoiding the bad press that attends an increasing murder rate, a contest isunderway (across the seasons) between the more corporate and cooperation-oriented group run by Proposition Joe (Robert Chew) and the more ruthless(let-no-competitor be left alive) Marlo Stanfield for control of the drug trade.The struggle to control bodies and space in order to run the illicit drugtrade unfolds in temporally parallel, interdependent segments, as The Wiredramatises the breadth and diversity of the city’s economic geography. Forexample the struggle among rival gangs is articulated with struggles withinelementary, middle, and high school student groups, in which some desireto assist and get recruited into the drug gangs while others resist the gangs’demands and blandishments (e.g., Michael Lee’s [Tristan Wilds] refusal toaccept Marlo Stanfield’s school clothes money he distributes in the hood togarner influence).

Ultimately, the conflicts that exist within the city and state agencies are,through The Wire’s cinema-inspired parallel montage, shown to mirror eachother. Thus for example, there is a dissonant gang member, Omar Little(Michael Kenneth Williams), who resists the gang’s protocols very much theway Jimmy McNulty resists those of the police department. And while LesterFreamon (Clarke Peters) strives, against the police hierarchy’s resistance to“follow the money” in order to bust the drug gangs, the cerebral businessmanager of the drug gang, ‘Stringer’ Bell tries to manage the money in a waythat will elude detection. And most crucially for the way The Wire constitutesa counter-effectuation of television’s usual police procedurals (as well as tothe usual politics of law enforcement) characters in the official milieu of WestBaltimore, in the gang and neighbourhood milieu of East Baltimore, andthose who connect the two – e.g., Reginald ‘Bubbles’ Cousins (Andre Toyo),a trash-diver junk man and police informant – are given complex lives, as

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the camera explores their home lives as well as their daily interactions androles in crime, detection, politics, administration, or mere survival strategies.In terms of what The Wire, considered by itself, has to offer, it would behard to improve on this summary by John Kraniauskas:

One of the most important contributions The Wire makes to crime fictionis the detail with which it dramatizes, on the one hand, the proceduresand limits of detection and, on the other, crime as a complex practicewhich it conceives formally and compositionally, through the narrativeloops and cycles of accumulation (which constitute in turn the TV series’polydiegetic, segmented architecture), not as crime against capitalism,but as crime that is thoroughly capitalized (a neoliberal utopia, in fact).35

Kraniauskas’s analysis brings nineteenth-century philosophy of economy tobear on The Wire. His approach is a philopoesis or cross-genre “interfer-ence” in which Karl Marx’s and Adam Smith’s concepts encounter the affectsand percepts in The Wire’s episodes. Although I wholly endorse what thatapproach makes of The Wire, I turn finally to a different set of philosophicalconcepts to read The Wire with and against Deadwood, the concepts associ-ated with biopolitics as they have been articulated in a trajectory of analysesfrom Michel Foucault to Giorgio Agamben.

While much of what likens The Wire to Deadwood is the contentionover space and resources, as characters who operate within the constraintsof moral economy try to constrain those who operate with little inhibition inpredatory and violent modes of acquisition, I want to end by focusing on theway they diverge biopolitically – specifically the way bodies are treated aseither valuable (and thus to be utilised) or as inconveniences to be disposedof and hidden. As I noted in my analysis of Deadwood, Foucault’s formulasfor treating the difference between sovereign and bio-power involved theformulas, “to take life or let live,” the formula applied to biopower is “to‘make’ live and to ‘let’ die,” where competitors were made to die if theywere mere impediments or allowed to live if value could be extracted fromthem. Inasmuch as that biopolitical practice was decentralised because dif-ferent entrepreneurs controlled a killing power that no centralised authoritycould effectively oppose, biopolitical initiatives are also decentralised. In TheWire’s Baltimore, biopower functions differently. Politicians, the police, andthe drug gangs are primarily focused on the negative economic and politicalcapital associated with dead bodies. As noted, in season 2, the police hier-archy wants to avoid dealing with the corpses of the trafficked Hungarianwomen found in a container at the docks. The Barksdale gang hides thecorpses of their victims in an abandoned building, and when they are discov-ered, both the mayor’s office and the police administration strive to hide thediscovery because it bears negatively on their performances. Their politicalcapital depends in part on making live those who usually die in homicides

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and thus on constraining the forces that make die. Ultimately, then, bothHBO series reveal a biopolitics that challenges the more progressive narra-tives applied to both the American West and to the modern city. With respectto the latter, it became clear as the series creator, David Simon, discovered,that the thanatopolitics of Baltimore had not made it into the media (e.g., TheBaltimore Sun). In the case of Deadwood, the media its creator, David Milchand his directors and writers had to counter was both traditional Americanhistory books and a history of popular media – the western film genre espe-cially. At a minimum, both series militate against the “ideological work” towhich Crooks refers in his treatment of both frontiers.

CONCLUSION: BORDERS AND FRONTIERS

To conclude I want, with reference to the insights in David Newman andAnssi Paasi’s above-cited distinction between borders and frontiers, to returnto two concepts that apply to both HBO series – their narrative structures,which are “polydiegetic,” and the nature of their boundaries in proximity totheir frontiers, which I construed (after Adriana Alves de Paula Martins) asa “multipolar axiological space”36 Heeding Newman and Paasi’s suggestionabout analysing the “socio-spatial identities” that constitute the border inproximity to frontiers, I want to emphasise again that the “ideological work”on frontiers to which Crooks (supra) refers is multipolar in both HBO series(i.e., there is a multiplicity of borders in each). And I want to emphasisethat the concept of axiology references precisely what I have treated as themoral economy inhibitions that create restraints on exchanges and on bothviolence and policing controls in both Deadwood and The Wire.

However, given the genre (realised through the sequence of imageson the small screen) within which the two series function, I want to turnto Newman’s later analysis of the border concept in which he suggests a“bottom up” focus on “border stories.”37 While Newman’s bottom up focusis enacted with an ethnographic orientation, deployed on a literary genre,to adapt his suggestion to the television aesthetic, we have to recognise thatmuch of the diversity of border perspectives in the two series emerges fromtheir “polydiegetic” structures and is conveyed through images rather thanstories. While certainly the different voices of the characters articulate aspectsof their varying border perspectives (the centrifugal “ideological work inevidence in both series), the way the images are created and mobilised isa crucial aspect of the two series’ meaning making. Neither the town ofDeadwood nor the city of Baltimore is given a centralising imagery. Thecinematic style that perhaps most closely approximates how the perspectivalseparations are conveyed is that of Robert Bresson. As Gilles Deleuze pointsout, Bresson’s films have a “distinct type of space . . . . There are rarelyentire spaces . . . spaces are disconnected . . . Bressonian space presents

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itself as a series of little bits [where the] connections between them arenot predetermined.”38 That cinematic style privileges the kinds of contingentencounters in diverse, disconnected spaces we observe in both series. Theresult is a politics of aesthetics that derives from the way both series areshot. They provide a critical take on frontiers which challenge the simplisticunderstandings conveyed in both academic and popular literatures, where(for example) the western frontier is alternatively “made to stand for differentthings . . . from a Jeffersonian natural democracy to a Darwinian strugglefor survival and power . . . or “the transition to a civilized order under therule of law”39 and the urban frontier is seen as a product of a permanentdivide between two unitary “racial” formations. With their polydiegetic andmultipolar foci on the boundaries within the assemblages in proximity totheir respective frontiers, Deadwood and The Wire tell very different frontierstories. They evoke a critical politics of aesthetics hitherto absent in televisionprogramming.

Finally, it important to recognise the oblique references in the narrativesin both series. Deadwood’s counter-effectuation is constituted as a challengeto the traditional “American ethnogenesis,”40 the whitening and civilising ofthe western part of the continent by a homogeneous Euro-American culturalformation. In contrast, to appreciate referential aspect of The Wire we haveto recognise its allegorical moments. For example in season 3, when the“Towers” housing project is demolished, there is “an intense surge of smoke[that] blankets the blue sky, billowing out onto the street where a greentraffic light seems to signify its unexpected arrival . . . . As home viewerswe are voyeurs of this functional event, yet instantly are transported backin time to 11 September 2001 when Americans – and the world – witnessedthe collapsing World Trade Center Towers in new York City replayed overand over on television.”41 Nevertheless, in keeping with the multipolar axio-logical focus of the narrative, that allegorical event is experienced differentlyby three of The Wire’s characters, who express different reactions as theywitness the demolition. Preston “Bodie” Boradus, Malik “poot” Carr, andHerbert De’Rodd “Puddin” Hern, “banter about their personal and collectivehistories lived on this spot, a long-held Barksdale drug trafficking territory.”42

Ultimately, both series effectively displace unitary narratives of western set-tlement and urban development/decline with a critical focus on the clash ofperspectives and the cross class and cross vocational encounters that enliventhe politics of their respective frontiers.

NOTES

1. See William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, ‘Becoming West’, in William Cronon, GeorgeMiles, and Jay Gitlin (eds.), Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past (New York: W.W.Norton 1992) pp. 3–27.

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2. See ‘The Delinquent Milieu’ chapter in Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth ofthe Prison, trans. by A Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon 1977).

3. The terms belongs to John Kraniauskas; see his analysis of The Wire, ‘Elasticity of Demand:Reflections on the Wire’, Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April 2009) p. 32.

4. The quotation is from Adriana Alves de Paula Martins, ‘Haunting Imperial Representations intoDialogue: Os cus de Judas by António Lobo Antunes and Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee’, inVictor K. Mendes (ed.), Facts and Fictions of António Lobo Antunes (Dartmouth, MA: Tagus 2011) p. 63.

5. Robert Crooks, ‘From the Far Side of the Urban Frontier: The Detective Fiction of usChesterHimes and Walter Mosley’, College Literature 22/3 (Oct. 1995) p. 68.

6. See David Newman and Anssi Paasi on the distinctions between borders, boundaries, and fron-tiers in their ‘Fences and Neighbors in the Postmodern World: Boundary Narratives in Political Geography’,Progress in Human Geography 22/2 (1998) p. 186–207.

7. Crooks (note 5) p. 68.8. Ibid., pp. 68–69.9. Chester Himes, The Crazy Kill (New York: Vintage 1989) p. 28.

10. The quotation is from Michael J. Shapiro, For Moral Ambiguity: National Culture and the Politicsof the Family (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2001) pp. 14–15.

11. Neil Campbell, The Rhizomatic West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 2008) p. 5.12. Michael J. Shapiro, Methods and Nations: Cultural Governance and the Indigenous Subject

(New York: Routledge 2004) p. 187.13. Ibid., p. 188.14. Ibid., p. 189.15. Crooks (note 5) p. 70.16. John Borneman, ‘American Anthropology as Foreign Policy’, American Anthropologist 97/4

(Dec. 1995) p. 666.17. Crooks (note 5) p. 71.18. See Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. by M. Lester (New York: Columbia University Press

1990).19. See M. M. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse and the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. by Michael

Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press 1981) pp. 259–422.20. The quotation is from Stanley Cavell, ‘The Fact of Television’, Deadalus 111/4 (Fall 1982) p. 79.21. See ibid., p. 82.22. See ibid., p. 89.23. Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film (London: Reaktion Books 2004) p. 8.24. The quotation is from Andrew Hoskins, ‘Mediating Time: The Temporal Mix of Television’,Time

& Society 10/2–3 (Sep. 2001) p. 214.25. Cesare Casarino, ‘Philopoesis: A Theoretico-Methodological Manifesto’, Boundary 2

(2002) p. 86.26. Ibid., p. 67. (The internal quotations are from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is

Philosophy?, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press2004.)

27. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1991) p. 10.28. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, trans. by David Macey (New York: Picador

2003) p. 241.29. The quotations are from J. M. Tyree, ‘The Wire: The Compete Fourth Season’, Film Quarterly

61/3 (Spring 2008) p. 36.30. See Bakhtin (note 19).31. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel: 1800-1900 (London: Verso 1998) pp. 115–116.32. Ibid., p. 117.33. For an analysis of the two kinds of cinematic space, see Noël Burch, ‘Nana: Or the Two Kinds of

Space’, in Theory of Film Practice, trans. by Helen R. Lane (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1981).Burch writes, “To understand cinematic space, it may prove useful to consider it as in fact consisting oftwo different kinds of space: that included within the frame and that outside the frame. For our purposes,screen space can be defined very simply as including everything perceived on the screen by the eye”p. 18.

34. Carlo Galli, Political Spaces and Global War, trans. by Elizabeth Fay (Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press 2010) p. 22.

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35. Kraniauskas (note 3) p. 32.36. Alves de Paula Martins (note 4) p. 63.37. See David Newman, ‘The Lines that Continue to Separate Us: Borders in our Borderless World’,

Progress in Human Geography 30/2 (2006) pp. 143–161.38. See the interview with Gilles Deleuze, ‘What is a Creative Act’, on YouTube, available at

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DskjRer95s>.39. The quoted summary is from Gilberto Perez, ‘The House of Miscegenation’, London Review of

Books 32/22 (2010) p. 23.40. The concept of “ethnogenesis” belongs to William Boelhower, Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic

Semiosis and American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press 1986).41. The quotation is from Elizabeth Bonjean, ‘After the Towers Fell: Bodie, Broadus and the Space

of Memory’, in Tiffany Potter and C. W. Marshall (eds.), The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television(New York: Continuum 2009) p. 163.

42. Ibid., p. 162.

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