D.

Emily Hicks Border Writing: The Multidimensional

Text (1991)
Introduction
Border Writing as Deterritorialization

As the functional expression of the self-conscious attitude of a writer

juxtaposed between multiple cultures, border writing must be conceived as a mode
of operation rather than as a definition. What makes border writing a world
literature with a "universal" appeal is its emphasis upon the multiplicity of
languages within any single language; by choosing a strategy of translation rather
than representation, border writers ultimately undermine the distinction between
original and alien culture.1 Border writers give the reader the opportunity to
practice multidimensional
perception and nonsynchronous memory (Bloch, "Nonsynchronism and the
Obligation to Its Dialectics," 22-38).2 By multidimensional perception I mean
quite literally the ability to see not just from one side of a border, but from the
other side as well. In Roland Barthes's terms, this would mean a perception
informed by two different sets of referential codes. Such a writing practice arises
out of border culture, an essential characteristic of which is the specific
configuration of cultural practices that rob the discursive mechanisms of their
power to dissimulate an identity between cultural theory and its praxis; that is, the
functional unity between any specifiable aesthetic and its programmatic
implementation has been replaced by a relationship of nonidentity.
Border regions produce cultures that have certain common features. The
Mexico-U.S. border provides a set of general categories: the polio (the border
crosser), the mosco (the helicopter of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service), the migra (the U.S. immigration officer), the coyote (the person who
brings the polio across the border), the turista (the North American visitor to
Mexico), and the cholo or chola (the young bicultural inhabitant of the border
region). The coyotes and the cholosi'cholas are the most bicultural because their
lives depend on their ability to survive in the interstices of two cultures.
Latin American culture in particular is essentially heterogeneous, a culture
that articulates borders between widely disparate traditions. The contemporary
culture of Mexico, for example, emerges from what can be considered a
multilayered semiotic matrix: the Mixteco Indians, Spain, the Lacandonian
Indians, McDonald's, ballet folklorico, and punk rock. The heterogeneous cultures
of Latin America exist in the spaces that emerge between a desire for memories of
pre-Colombian cultures, a respect for the continuing traditions of indigenous
cultures, and a problematic relationship with Spanish and other European cultures
and the New World culture of the United States. As a result, much contemporary
Latin American literature is a literature of borders: cultural borders between
Paris/Buenos Aires and Mexico City/New York, gender borders between women
and men, and economic borders between dollar-based and other-currency-based
societies. Border writing, in a Latin American context, presents tnonshe cultures of
Europe and the United States in their interaction with Latin American culture
rather than as fundamental cultural models. In border writing, the subject is
decentered and the object is not present or immediate but displaced.3 Border
writers re-present that attitudes toward objects as they exist in more than one
cultural context. For example, the maquiladoras advertise the opportunity to
produce commodities in what Jean Baudrillard would call "hyperspace."
Corporations are encouraged to manufacture in factories built along the Mexican
side of the border. Mexican workers enter the plant from the Mexican side where
they live, whereas most of the management crosses the border from the United
States into Mexico to go to work. In this way, a "grotesque" element of border life,
the crossing of thousands of undocumented workers, can be diminished by
eliminating the need to "cross the border." Nonetheless, the question must be
raised as to what possible definition of the subject would be mirrored by the object
produced in such an environment.
One view of the decentered subject is suggested by Paul de Man in
"Phenomenology and Materiality in Kant."4 He argues that Immanuel Kant's
notion of the architectonic assumes, in rhetorical analytical terms, a consideration
of the limbs of the body apart from any use. This leads him to a provocative
conclusion: the dismemberment of the body corresponds to dismemberment of
language "as meaning-tropes are replaced by fragmentation" into words, syllables,
and letters (121-44). This dismemberment of language bears a similarity to Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari's notion of deterritorialization. That is, one could argue
that the nineteenth-century European notion of the subject is replaced in the work
of the border writer by fragmentation in cultural, linguistic, and political
deterritorialization.
Yet, in border writing, we can no longer speak of a clearly defined
"subjective" or "objective" meaning. Rather, there is a refusal of the metonymic
reduction in which a white, male, Western "subject" dominates an object. The core
of border writing is the border metaphor, which may be compared to Walter
Benjamin's "dialectical image," where there is a joining of the subjective and the
accidental to create objective meaning.5 Instead of the "accidental," however, there
is a broader view of the object that presents it within a historical—although not
necessarily linear—past. This is the border "object" to which the Chicana poet
Gina
Valdes refers in "Where You From?": "my mouth still / tastes of naranjas I con
chile I soy del sur I y del norte." The subject in this poem is dominated by the
nostalgic memory for an object. Trinidadian writer Marlene Nourbese Philip also
writes about the border object; by mimicking a grammar lesson in her poem
"Universal Grammar" (She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks), she
exposes the complicity between language and violence: "The tall, blond, blue-
eyed, white-skinned man is shooting an elephant / a native / a wild animal / a
Black / a woman / a child."
What the postmodern subject is or is not, and how the debates relate to the
culture being produced outside of Europe, is touched upon by Gilane Tawadros in
her essay "Beyond the Boundary: The Work of Three Black Women Artists in
Britain." She writes that "the diasporan experience constitutes a critical distance
which Jameson claims has been abolished in the space of postmodern society."6
Furthermore, in Philip's view, there is also a "re-membering" in the work of some
Caribbean writers that is distinct from both deterritorialization and
reterritorialization. 7
Deleuze and Guattari have discussed the nonunified subject in relation to the
writings of Kafka. They posit that the "statement" never refers back to a "subject"
and that even the most individual "enunciation" is a particular case of "collective
enunciation" (Kafka, 84). In their discussion of The Trial, they argue that
"ultimately, it is less a question of K as a general function taken up by an
individual
than of K as a functioning of a polyvalent assemblage of which the solitary
individual
is only a part, the coming collectivity being another part, another piece of the
machine—without our knowing yet what this assemblage will be: fascist?
revolutionary? socialist? capitalist?" (85).
I propose considering Franz Kafka, a Czech Jew who lived in Prague and
wrote in German, as an example of a writer of border literature. Deleuze and
Guattari call him a writer of "minor" literature. Border writing emphasizes the
differences in reference codes between two or more cultures. It depicts, therefore, a
kind of realism that approaches the experience of border crossers, those who live in
a bilingual, bicultural, biconceptual reality. I am speaking of cultural, not physical,
borders: the sensibility that informs border literature can exist among guest
workers anywhere, including European countries in which the country of origin
does not share a physical border with the host country.
Who, then, might be the audience for border writing? Philip writes, in
"Who's Listening: Artists, Audiences and Languages," that we each complete a
novel, play, poem, or painting differently depending on factors as diverse as age,
gender, class, and culture. She goes on to question the validity of the response of a
reader who is a stranger to the traditions that inform a work. Like Kafka, who as a
writer experienced the deterritorialization of language, the reader of border writing
may experience a deterritorialization of signification; to read a border text is to
cross over into another set of referential codes. The reader of border writing will
not always be able to perceive the "logic" of the text at first. Nor will she be able to
hear the multiplicity of discourses within a single language—the four keys in a
sequence of four chords, or the multiple sets of referential codes. For this reason,
Argentine writer Julio Cortazar had to invent the lector complice; similarly, much
of border art and culture is considered with the active participation of the audience.
A greater demand is made on the reader of border texts. In Derridean terms, the
Ear of the Other must be heard; some readers of border texts may become border
crossers.
The border crosser is both "self and "other." The border crosser "subject"
emerges from double strings of signifiers of two sets of referential codes, from
both sides of the border. The border crosser is linked, in terms of identity, activity,
legal status, and human rights, to the border machine, with its border patrol agents,
secondary inspection, helicopters, shifts in policy, and maquiladoras. According to
Deleuze and Guattari, a machine may be defined as (1) a system of interruptions
and breaks; (2) possessing its own set of codes; and (3) connected to other
machines (Anti-Oedipus, 36-41). The border machine, which produces the border
subject, is subject to "flows" that depend on the labor needs of California growers;
its codes are continually changing, as they are connected to and determined by the
political and juridical machines of Washington and Mexico City.
All of the above has been obscured by the term "magic realism," which has
been used to refer to border writing. The term comes from art history, where it has
described Arnold Bocklin and Giorgio de Chirico, both of whom have been
associated with surrealism. David Young and Keith Hollaman note in Magic
Realist
Fiction that the first use of the term in relation to Latin American literature may
have been in 1954 by Angel Flores. Gregory Rabassa rejected it in 1973 because it
"gave too much credence to realism as a norm" (Young and Hollaman, 1). Many
critics, however, including Jean Franco, continue to use "magic realism," often as a
means of identification. Has it outgrown its usefulness? For in the absence of any
definitive critical analysis of the historical and political context of Latin American
literature, the term "magic realism" can only serve to depoliticize the text. Fredric
Jameson draws attention to this problem in The Political Unconscious: "Thus, in
the first great period of bourgeois hegemony, the reinvention of romance finds its
strategy in the substitution of new positivities (theology, psychology, the dramatic
metaphor) for the older magical content . . . from Kafka to Cortazar" (134).
Restated, border writers rely on more than one set of referential codes. The
"dramatic metaphor," whether the "dialectical image" of Kafka, the "magic realist"
image of Cortazar, or the "i-mage" of Philip8 nevertheless maintains certain
elements of "the older magical content."
Because of its dependence on the literary categories of dominant cultures,
the term "magic realism" necessarily obscures important issues such as narrative
nonlinearity, the decentered dimensional perspective. Rather than elaborating the
term "magic realism," I want to analyze the border metaphor. I also want to
consider
the appropriateness of applying European postmodernist terminology to border
writing by juxtaposing certain border texts with the category of
"deterritorialization" of Deleuze and Guattari. Finally, I will propose a model of
analyzing the border text, a multidimensional model drawn from holography.
Although border studies, along with cultural studies, is currently a rapidly
expanding field, only J. Nelly Martinez has discussed Latin American literature in
terms of a multidimensional or holographic model, and most Anglo critics of Latin
American literature still refer to Garcia Marquez and others as magic realists.
Nevertheless, unlike the term "magic realism," which maintains the binary
opposition of magic/real, the term "border writing" connotes a perspective that is
no longer dominated by nonborder regions. It hints at the subversive nature of this
writing, a writing that disrupts the one-way flow of information in which the
United States produces most of the mass-media programming in the world and
thereby controls the images of itself as well as those of other countries. North
American critics of Latin American literature must realize that to continue to stress
the "magical" or even certain postmodernist aspects of Latin American literature is
to deny the larger, broader understanding of reality that informs these texts. Long
before French poststructuralist criticism had been imported to U.S. literature
departments, artists and writers in Latin America were already "appropriating"
images and "decentering" the subject. We need only consider a few examples such
as the Mexican artist Posada in the nineteenth century, the Brazilian concrete poets
in the 1960s, the writers of the "boom," and the artists of the neo-grdfica
movement in Mexico. To recuperate now a long tradition of experimentation with
the uncritical use of European poststructuralism is unnecessary. Gilane Tawadros
makes a similar argument with regard to the work of black artists.
Independent historical developments have led to "postmodernism" in border
writing. Harry Polkinhorn has stated that "Chicano writing at least in part
shortcircuited the power lines of transmission of the European avant-garde and
broader modernist tendencies, which had much more of an impact on Latin
American practitioners (viz. Ultraismo to Huidobro, Estridentismo, Noigandre's
Concrete Poetry of the de Campos and Pagnatari, Poem/Process, and later
developments such as Espinosa's Post-Art group). By contrast with this richness of
cultural embeddedness, Chicano literature was born ex nihilo, as it were, with
connections less to a long tradition of oppositional art but more to one of oppressed
social experience" (42).
The multiplicity of voices in the work of many Latin American writers has
given the grotesque a place from which to speak. The grotesque, suppressed in the
nineteenth-century European novel, is often confused by U.S. readers of Latin
American literature with the "magical." What Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and His
World calls "the grotesque" has not been homogenized out of the metaphors
deployed in border writing; indeed, the referential code of "the grotesque" is very
important. In the border region, the notion of the grotesque is linked to relations of
power. In the U.S.-Mexico border city of Tijuana, the U.S. tourist is fascinated and
repulsed by "grotesque" culture: velvet paintings, ceramic sculptures of the Last
Supper, and children selling chewing gum. The tijuanenses watch, amused and
horrified, as surfers walk into the churches barefoot and drunk Marines stumble
into shop displays on the street. The inclusion of the grotesque is already an
anticentering strategy. Border writers are conscious of the gap or difference
between the reader and the audience, and between the characters and the temporal
setting (Derrida, Writing and Difference, 196-231). Border narratives are
decentered: there is no identity between the reader and the individual character, but
rather, an invitation to listen to a Voice of the Person that arises from an overlay of
codes out of which characters and events emerge (Barthes, S/Z). There is a
displacement of time and space.
The "magical" or "grotesque" content, in that it disrupts the rational, raises
the
question of linear narrative. How is the reader able to understand a nonlinear
narrative? Laura Mulvey, Teresa de Lauretis, and Fredric Jameson among others
have written on this issue. In "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Mulvey
argues that "sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen,
forcing
a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all
occurring in a linear time with a beginning and an end" (14). The structure of the
relationship between the sadist and masochist resembles that of the relationship
between narrative structure and the reader. Jameson imagines an alternative to
bourgeois, linear narrative in his discussion of Bakhtin's notion of the dialogic: "as
rupture of the one-dimensional text of the bourgeois narrative, as a carnivalesque
dispersal of the hegemonic order of a dominant culture" (Political Unconscious,
285). Border writers often engage in a metacommentary about "story." Cortazar
and Argentine writer Luisa Valenzuela in particular address their roles as narrators.
They also demand that their readers address their roles as readers.
What methodological tools or theoretical model might we use in
approaching
border writing? Recent demonstrations in which Anglo-Americans drive to the
border and shine their headlights in the direction of Mexico constitute one of many
examples of border behavior that defies unidimensional logic. When pressed,
demonstrators have claimed that by pointing their headlights at Mexico, they will
send a message to people in the United States about the seriousness of "the
[immigration] problem." This border trope, of turning away from the addressee in
the moment of sending the message, suggests that we require a model that will
allow us to look in two directions simultaneously. The model of holography
presents itself because it creates an image from more than one perspective. If we
imagine the "real" to be a matrix of interactions between "subjects" and "objects"
that can be partially translated, but which, in the final analysis, resists
symbolization, then border writing might be conceived as a framing of certain
crucial interactions: nature and technology, humans and nature, popular culture and
mass culture, meaning and nonmeaning. The border metaphor summarizes these
relationships by selecting two or more perspectives from which to "digitally
sample" a portion of the matrix. In the same way that one part of a hologram can
produce an entire image, the border metaphor is able to reproduce the whole
culture to which it refers. Border metaphors are holographic in that they re-create
the whole social order, but this is merely to say the "whole" in its fragmentation, as
would Deleuze and Guattari (Anti-Oedipus, 42). In "The Absence of Writing,"
Philip discusses the "decontextualized" or deterritorialized "i-mage"-making power
of the African in the New World (15).
To clarify the relationship between the border trope and holography, let us
consider how a holographic image is formed. Holography provides a provocative
multidimensional model for visualizing the production of deterritorialized
meaning/
nonmeaning. A holographic image is created when light from a laser beam is split
into two beams and reflected off an object. The interaction between the two
resulting patterns of light is called an "interference pattern," which can be recorded
on a holographic plate. The holographic plate can be reilluminated by a laser
positioned at the same angle as one of the two beams, the object beam. This will
produce a holographic image of the original object. A border person records the
interference patterns produced by two (rather than one) referential codes, and
therefore experiences a double vision thanks to perceiving reality through two
different interference patterns. A border writer juxtaposes the two patterns as
border metaphors in the border text. The border metaphor reconstructs the
relationship to the object rather than the object itself: as a metaphor, it does not
merely represent an object but rather produces an interaction between the
connotative matrices of an object in more than one culture. The holographic "real"
is less solid, and as a result it cannot be dominated as easily as the monocultural or
nonholographic real.
What is the relationship between the border machine and holography? What
would a holographic system of interruptions and breaks be? What codes would the
border machine as a holographic image possess? How would the holographic
border machine be linked to other holographic border machines? Perhaps William
Gibson gives us a clue in Neuromancer: the border machine and holography would
meet in the matrix in border cyberspace. The border "cyber" would be piloting the
machine with a double bicultural program in which the data base contained two
sets of referential codes, one from each side of the border. Theodor Adorno at the
new frontiers within First and Third world cultures. Negative border praxis.
Many border tropes, metaphors, and images juxtapose traditional culture and
technology; this juxtaposition forms the basis of a phrase used by more than one
Chicano artist: "From Aztec to high tech." Border writing is rooted in a critique of
technology. It is a "committed" art form in Adorno's sense of the term. Benjamin's
problematic angel of history in Illuminations is helplessly propelled toward the
storm of plutonium; the industrialized world is on the edge of a storm worse than
the storm that destroyed Macondo. Deterritorialized children grow up near
chemical-waste dumps in Los Angeles. Where some in the industrialized world
would see "a chain of events," Benjamin's angel sees one single catastrophe, which
now threatens to be nuclear holocaust. Where some see linearity, the angel sees a
piling up of images. According to Kant, "The whole is articulated and not just piled
on top of each other" (de Man, Hermeneutics, 128). Physicist David Bohm
describes the whole in terms of the implicate order (Martinez). Why can't the angel
see that the whole is articulated? The angel of history would like to warn us, to
make whole what has been smashed, to translate the disaster, but its wings are
caught up in the storm. The "storm" is like that text that links the puppeteer to the
puppet. The image of "making whole that which has been smashed"—that is, of
adopting a multi-dimensional perspective—recalls Benjamin's view of the task of
the translator: "to piece together the fragments of a broken vessel" (Illuminations,
78). How are the translator and the angel of history alike?
For Deleuze and Guattari the task of the translator is "to make use of the
polylingualism of one's own language, to make a minor or intensive use of it, to
oppose the oppressed quality of this language to its oppressive quality, to find
points
of nonculture or underdevelopment, linguistic Third World zones by which a
language can escape, an animal enters into things, an assemblage \agencement}
comes into play" (Kafka, 26-27). Philip reminds us of the oppressive quality of her
"own" language, English, a language in which she is forced to operate. What, then,
is the task of the writer or artist? For Philip, it is to use language in such a way
"that the historical realities are not erased or obliterated" ("The Absence of
Writing," She Tries Her Tongue, 19). Another example of the exploration of border
culture within the Third World can be found in the work of the young Cuban visual
artists of the 1980s, including Jose Bedia and Magdalena Campos.9
According to Deleuze and Guattari, the three characteristics of "minor
literature" are (1) the deterritorialization of language; (2) the connection of the
individual to political immediacy—that is, everything is political; and (3) the
collective assemblage of enunciation—that is, everything takes on a collective
value (Kafka, 17). In addition, they consider Kafka to be what I call a border
writer: "Not only is he at the turning point between two bureaucracies, the old and
the new, but he is between the technical machine and the juridical statement. He
has experienced their reunion in a single assemblage" (82). As a border writer, he
is a Czech Jew, a minority, but writes in a major language, German. In a similar
way, border writing is deterritorialized, political, and collective.
In order to expand the definition of "minor literature" to include border
writing, Deleuze and Guattari's categories can be rewritten to consider: (1) the
displacement or "deterritorialization" of time and space through nonsynchronous
memory and "reterritorialization" (and not only through nostalgia in a pejorative
sense); (2) deterritorialization or nonsynchrony in relation to everyday life; (3) the
decentered subject/active reader/assemblage/agent/border crosser/becoming-
animal; and (4) the political. When one leaves one's country or place of origin
(deterritorialization), everyday life changes. The objects that continually reminded
one of the past are gone. Now, the place of origin is a mental representation in
memory. The process of reterritorialization begins. "Border" literacy, or the ability
to read border literature, is a kind of border crossing as well as a democratic
thought process; it avoids a single perspective, such as a middle-class, Western
cultural bias. It takes a critical view of authority and supports the imaginative.
Border writing offers a new form of knowledge: information about and
understanding of the present to the past in terms of the possibilities of the future. It
refuses the metonymic reduction of reality to the instrumental logic of Western
thought. As Valenzuela puts it, the word is sick: in order to heal it, the writer must
free it from the teleological and bring it across the border into the architectonic
(see Hicks, "La palabra enferma"). This historic journey will reterritorialize it. The
global body needs to be healed. Border writing holds out this possibility, through
its combination of perception and memory, of subverting the rationality of
collective suicide, of calming the storm of progress blowing from Paradise— the
ability to withstand the pull of the future destruction to which one's face is turned.
 In "La palabra enferma," I argued that border writing is the trace of the
coyore/ shaman, basing this on Valenzuela's view of the role of the writer as a
shaman who writes in order to cure the reader. We can also see from Deleuze and
Guattari's notion of the machine that the writer is a smuggler or coyote. If the
border is a machine, then one of its elements is the bicultural smuggler, and to read
is to cross over to another side where capital has not yet reduced the object to a
commodity—to a place where a psychic healing can occur.
Notes

1. This notion of multiplicity of codes within a single language is taken from Mikhail Bakhtin
and informs Jacques Derrida's critique of Roman Jakobson's categories of translation. Marlene
Nourbese Philip discusses the relationship between standard English and Caribbean English in
terms that suggest how codes may act upon each other in a single language. In Introduction: "The
Absence of Writing or How I Almost Became a Spy," from She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence
Softly Breaks, she writes: "The place African-Caribbean writers occupy is one that is unique and
one that forces the writer to operate in a language that was used to brutalize and diminish
Africans so that they would come to a profound belief in their own lack of humanity. No
language can accomplish this—and to a large degree English did—without itself being
profoundly affected, without itself being tainted. The challenge, therefore, facing the African-
Caribbean writer . . . is to use the language in such a way that the historical realities are not
erased or obliterated, so that English is revealed as the tainted tongue it truly is" (19).

2. Bloch's formulation of nonsynchrony and the noncontemporaneous is resonant of the

"multiplicity of voices," Jacques Derrida's phrase in The Ear of the Other. Slovenian video artist
and critic Marina Grzinic expands upon Deleuze and Guattari's notion of deterritorialization to
include historical displacement (Tertulia, Border Culture Residency, Banff Centre for the Arts, 2
July 1990).

3. Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things, has shown in his analysis of Velasquez's Las
Meninas
that painting was already freed in seventeenth century from the task of representing objects.

4. See the discussion of dismemberment in Paul de Man, "Phenomenology and Materiality in

Kant" and "Aesthetic Formulation: Kleist's Vber das Marionettentheater."

5. See the discussion of Baudelaire in Benjamin's Illuminations.

6. Gilane Tawadros, "Beyond the Boundary: The Work of Three Black Women Artists in
Britain,"
138. See also: "However, I am less concerned at this point with Jameson's own position than
with the implications of this notion of the 'fragmented subject' for postmodern practice as well as
for black cultural practice" (136).

7. In "Introduction: The Absence of Writing or How I Almost Became a Spy" (She Tries Her
Tongue), Philip does not use the term "border writing" but refers instead to texts written in
"demotic" English by black writers.

8. Philip discusses the i-mage in "Introduction: The Absence of Writing," She Tries Her Tongue.
She explains that the unconventional spelling not only signifies "the increasingly conventional
deconstruction of certain words, but draws on the Rastafarian practice of privileging the T in
many words" (12). She goes on to relate the concept to meaning and nonmeaning.

9. Conversation with Magdalena Campos, Border Culture Residency, Banff Centre for the Arts,
27 June 1990. See also Osvaldo Sanchez, "Children of Utopia."