Rituals of Not Touching - Borders
“There can be no friendship between twins: they are too close, so the only way for each of them to maintain his identity is to liquidate the other. A friend has to be outside of my grasp.”
-Slavoj Zizek, Abercrombie and Fitch Back to School Catalog 2003
There is a ritual in the back seats, “I’m not touching you”, a child's prototype of metaphysics, a finger hovers as a surveying instrument establishing sovereignty through proximity. It performs the same structural function as “I love you”. Both utterances enstate a boundary and orbit it, circling it close enough to feel but never to touch, each resisting the dread of fusion and the collapse of autonomy, always terrified of being indistinguishable from oneself.
The identity escapes from the interior as a defended perimeter; if I occupy this position, no one else can. If you are fixed over there, your pain will always carry itself in your place, never in mine. All the internal contradictions, too unstable to hold within, will be projected outward and projected upon your otherness and reclassified as a difference between one and two.
Think of the siblings in the back of the car, held in a bondage of adjacency, there is no escape, under constant surveillance in the rear view mirror, a little brother extends a finger towards the other’s face in a taunt, “I’m not touching you” a sigil of his shield. They behave as magnets held too close, generating a repulsion so forceful that they could never become one, each insult becoming proof of separateness, each name called becomes a symbol of their distinction, “we are two people and will never be one, and to show this we will create an exhibition of loathing, because this distinctly shows that we are not the same person.”
“I love you” is rarely said with the same hostility, yet it follows the same declaration of a border. The asserevation of passion is an acknowledgement of a gulf yet it preserves the attachment across it, it depends on its own division to function. The lovers tell each other “there is a line between us, yet despite this difference, which could not be more profound, I care for you.” Without distinct territories, the care has no direction, it wanders aimlessly in the self looking for a target on which it can attach. Even in a corporeal union the lovers imagine a protecting casing around the self, a reminder that their enclosure is temporary and that the individual is still within. Even when they have sex they imagine a border, the man may say “My penis is inside you, it may be completely enveloped, but it is in no way and never will be a part of you.” Though if he happens to say this out loud the sex will probably not last much longer.
The couple’s desires are partitioned into permitted and prohibited routes and crossings, they create a code of what sex is and what it is not and assume code to be fact, “of course our secret hand shake is the way which hands should be shook.” This makes sex into something unnatural to them, but something that must be taught. To continue quoting the 2003 Abercrombie & Fitch back to school catalog, “There is nothing spontaneous about sex: one has to learn it, one has to be introduced to it.” These rules do not contain sexuality, instead they dramatize it, they create a spectacle of what rules can and cannot be broken and the only unbreakable rule is to never do what comes naturally.
Deviance comes with the accusation that the other not only desires differently, but that they enjoy improperly or with excess libido. A moral language produces a border around sexuality that protects a narrative of enjoyment, reproduction, and legible kinship. These rules take the excesses of love and sex and turn them into bodily figures and positions which speak as signs to the other. The woman with her back arched and legs open, the man hunched over with his tongue swinging wildly, they say “this is what you can have, but you can not have all of me.”
These cases of identity present themselves as tangible substance pleading recognition, but instead operate as staging, a theater of sovereignty. Without an imagined encroachment, the cohesion loses its intensity, unity is then indexed as a threat. We can look back at certain precolonial communities in the Pacific Northwest. Two tribes of fishermen on the coast of what is now Washington State, both with similar environments, rituals, and language, yet there was a mutual distrust, if not hatred, between the groups. One group kept prisoners of battles as slaves, the other did not. This was their main difference and they needed this difference, without it they feared losing their understanding of identity, of who they were as a tribe. “If we shared the same customs, same land, same practices, what would differentiate us from them?” The community recognizes itself only once it has declared what it is not.
The purity of identity is not a static property, but a maintained ideal, it constantly renews itself with what it is not to be, the foreign is assigned an excess of appetite, pleasure, cunning, or fertility. Anxiety attaches itself to the idea that enjoyment is misallocated. Policy then creates the language of quotas and protections, promises of correcting a distribution that was never measurable. The state, the policy, the individual calls for its protection. What is defended is less territory than consistency of its narrative, the wall becomes a prosthetic for a story that cannot stabilize itself, each reinforcement acknowledges a libidinal doubt.
The excluded other, the sibling, the lover, the immigrant, the neighbor, is necessary to portray what the interior cannot symbolize about itself. Disorder, mixture, and desire are exported from the body, given a passport and barred from entry. The outside becomes a place where the disowned property can be viewed and dissected, “those things are not in here.” Seeing the other move through categories only exposes that the line had been a performance, the border had been spoken into existence and been treated as having been the origin, the recognition preceded the existence.
Where the identity declares itself indivisible and incorruptible, division has already been encountered and attacked. The border is a scar of that denial, a mark of what is and has been excluded.