Excerpts from Developmental Time, Cultural Space:
Studies in Psychogeography
The Symbolic Meaning of Territory
Territory is symbolic. In ethnonationalist sentiment, ideology and political action, land, or geography are central in symbolism. What, though, do they symbolize? The answer seems to be: boundaries. Such elements as language, land, historic sites, music are conscripted to delineate more secure boundaries, to differentiate distinctly between us and them, inside and outside, good and evil. The boundaries must be closed, and anything that might threaten the perfection and greatness within must be excluded, e.g., through linguistic, cultural, demographic purging of that which might contaminate the purity.
One fights for the symbol as if it were the thing symbolized. The identity of every human group is bound up with how it imagines, symbolizes, constructs, and maintains its boundaries. For cultural content does not exist apart from, and without constant reference to, the shape, size, extent, and security of its boundaries.
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The Image of the Enemy
The "image of the enemy" is one of every group's most treasured possessions. Not the comforting teddy bear to be kept close, but the uncomfortable inner monsters that must be expelled and kept outside oneself. The universal notion of group boundaries—that separate in psychogeographic space the identity of every "us" from every "them"—rests on a misperception that is at once paradoxical, and dangerous. For, alas, those groups from which we most passionately distinguish ourselves are those with which we are most inseparably bound.
The enemy, whom we are certain is a despicable "other," is in fact endowed and littered with parts cast out from the self. The "enemy" is an inner representation become flesh. The "boundary" is thus a sacred illusion and delusion, defended to the death to keep the "good" inside and "bad" outside. Each partner in this deadly dance needs the other to complete itself. We cultivate our enemies. We tend our externalized demons as diligently as we do our revered deities.
Fantasy of Society as Body
Much of intergroup, including international, conflict is heir to the leap from the mind to society based on the fantasy of society-as-body (organism). Members of cultures experience and speak of their society as a virtual personified "body" (the body politic) from which they feel inseparable. |
