Policing Intensity

Abstract

How do everyday acts of policing hinge upon the contrastive evaluation of sensible intensities? This article examines how various attunements toward regimes of sensible intensities shape the policing of borders and bodies in a place where questions of the “sovereign” and identifications of the “illegal” are semiotically and politically up for grabs: the Indonesia-Malaysia borderlands. In two expository sketches, it examines the various ways in which the Indonesia-Malaysia border is policed as a virtual threshold between people and places considered to be “more-or-less the same.”