No-man's land

[Guilherme Kujawski]

The self-portraits of peoples, especially when they are mature, serve
as a mirror in which people can form their individual identities. For
those who are not nationalist extremists, individualities are
constructed through contact, love, bodily and sexual alterity, in
short, through social relations. The two paths, nationalism and
individualism, are trod in the eternal search for personal
affirmation.

The death of Arafat once more demarked Palestine, the perfect
example of how a swath of land can have influence on the formation of
individualities. The territorial logic, at least for the two parties
cited in the Royal Commission's partition proposal, is the logic of
blood. There is no other way. If you do not belong to one people, you
must belong to the ranks of the living-dead, the Nosferatu. In such
cases individualities must be diluted in more or less general life
experiences, kind of like a national business coaching. Personal
demonstrations and attitudes such as "I'm da man" are summarily
prohibited in the mindset of a country like Palestine, whose leader
was an Egyptian, by the way. To parody MacLuhan, nations, not tires,
are the true extensions of the human being.

Geographic territory requires maps. Lots of them. Besides being
instruments for locating things and places, maps also form the
identity of the "self". Different cultures have different strategies
for forming individualities, but the great majority of them avail of
maps. They have a great power of external attraction, transforming
inert bodies into traveling horsemen, engine cutout into a point of
escape. See how a strong sensation of individuality wells up in people
who manage to find their whereabouts in those shopping center maps.
"YOU ARE HERE". It so happens, though, that this discovery only means
something as a representation. The truth is the person is still lost,
he just doesn't know it. It's like on that bumper sticker that reads:
"Don't follow me, I'm lost too".

The newspapers tell us that the colours of Brazil are invading Europe.
This gives the xenophobes a lifeline. But how does one explain to the
patriots that Brazil is a Kakania too, to use the jocular term
employed by the Austrian writer Robert Musil to describe his homeland
at the beginning of the last century, which he saw as a tangle of
geographic lines encompassing slaves, Hungarians and Habsburgs?  In
this context it is difficult to extrapolate from personal to national
identity, to something worthy of being voluntarily defended to the
death. Differences apart, Brazil is a true Kakania, as, ontologically
speaking, its inhabitants are at once nothing, everything and
something. Whatever. In philosophically difficult situations like this
people usually go look for themselves somewhere else.

Musil himself wrote that the anthropocentric vision has withdrawn from
the centre of the universe to the centre of the I. The body is the new
territory and can be seen as a country - or even as a planet. That
whole idea that men are from Mars and women are from Venus has already
become cliché. Things have evolved further - today they say that men
and women are those planets, not from them. When you think about it,
the idea does have a certain Hellenistic logic if we consider the
Apollonian world. Everyone knows that while Ulysses vied with
Achilles, Penelope hoodwinked the suitors. The story gave rise to
various girl jokes, like the one that ends with "...Achilles heels".
Indeed, the most observant amongst us will notice that there is
something extraterrestrial about the female body, almost always
moulded in the form of an ampulla, apple or pear. Space babes in
assorted flavours.

As such, women and Epicureans in general, all corporeal beings by
nature, gain force and credibility. The borders of the new "countries"
now extend as far as the human skin. The problem is the Venusians have
joined up with the Martians, thus endangering their precious bodily
individuality: one step away from becoming the other, and vice-versa.
Total mayhem. When two individualities start to share feelings they
come to have four arms and two heads, the kind of monster that recalls
the story of the Spanish arriving in America on horseback only to be
mistaken for centaurs by the natives. But the same confusion that
assailed the world's Kakanians also applies to the Corporeals. This is
especially true when registration forms begin to feature a third and
vague gender category under the simple title "others" (see the
registration form for the File - Electronic Language International
Festival seminar, www.file.org.br).

If countries and bodies are no longer safe harbours, where are we to
go to find individuality? Well, all that's left is the spirit. So
individuality is forged from the hum and darkness of the night.
Unbelievable as it seems, even this undefined subject is not safe from
appropriation by religion-peddlers, or perhaps from being 'abducted'
by alien angels, as some fundamentalist North-American conspirators
would wish. So it is not even possible to take refuge in the intimate,
in the invisible territory of never-never land. Sad times are these of
the landless "self". Individuality now finds itself adrift, without a
country, body or spirit to call its home.