Second Act
As we were walking on it, Laura once asked me why is the track behind the university’s old gym blue, and not red like other tracks? My reply: of course, in this place, the track is blue, because it is an anti-communist track. This premise engages one possible history of border-as-dilemma: how anti-communism is an unevenly yet mutually constructed and awkwardly shared political unconscious in the murky era/region oxymoronically termed Pax Americana, which plays a big part in shaping perceptions of both cultures and individuals. Laura’s question led me to see myself against my conscious political choices as walking on more than one such anti-communist track at once, both literally in the class-revealing locations of my morning fast walks and in my overall life path. Walking back into my apartment, in an older building on a gentrifying block, how do I perceive myself? If I have any self-awareness, I have to perceive myself and know I am perceived by others as a Western, “American” (read US), white, female, white-collar foreign worker and apartment-owner from the US, as a living symbol of encroaching neoliberal gentrification, even if this would never be named as such by my friendly neighbors. Laura’s questions for me are thus utter dilemmas. First, I cannot perceive myself as Mexican, Chinese, or Taiwanese because, given the history of colonial capitalism that shapes experience and perception in the places I have lived, such a claim would be an appropriation and ultimately denial of how I am perceived by others and what possibilities that perception affords me. Second, not to recognize how I am shaped by long experience in Taiwan and in the US near the Mexican border is possibly an even more pernicious form of denial, and risks upholding the also colonially derived monolithic notion of culture that Medina critiques. What I’ve learned so far is that while national borders are tools of neoliberal exploitation and should not be reified as given designators of culture, because the multifaceted border is a technology of the partitioned world I inhabit, it has a historical reality that I must face in order to perceive Laura at all: much relating necessarily happens on many borders at once, and there is nothing monolithic about this or the historical realities that have put it in place. The non-monolithic nature of cultural frames can still be a tool of the reified border. In such a layered context of dilemma I can only try to refuse both self-ethnicizing appropriation and the reification of cultural difference as mutually constructed border affirming projects of the ongoing Cold War. Perhaps recognizing this condition and its limits affords what possibilities there are for care.
Second Special Scene
Laura, I would like you to go to a gentrified area in Taiwan and walk around, asking random people questions, and then do the same thing in a less gentrified area. In these places, how do you perceive yourself? How do you perceive others and how others perceive you? How do you perceive Amie?
As a third-world brown-skin female teaching analytic philosophy in Taiwan, I had no choice but to learn to perceive myself as Mexican, American, Taiwanese, Chinese, and so much more. To survive and have a sensorial glimpse of the social world, I had to perceive others as Mexicans, Americans, Taiwaneses, Chineses, and so much more. I still remember when I came to Taiwan and with all my senses experiencing Amie speaking Mandarin, a dynamically complex language(s) and worldview(s). To build my friendship with you, I have learned to perceive you as Mexican, American, Taiwanese, Chinese and so much more.
Note: This work integrates theatre and gloss into a single piece, which was subsequently broken apart again for the purposes of publication. The two pieces, re-established “theatre” and “gloss,” thus document a performative dialogue in which each author invited the other to act in specific ways; and, the dissolution and reconstitution of generic borders. Laura Pérez León’s text is in plaintext; Amie Elizabeth Parry’s text is in italics.
The Diccionario de la Lengua Española defines ‘dilema’ as: “Situación en la que es necesario elegir entre dos opciones igualmente buenas o malas.” In philosophy, the term is defined as: “Argumento formado por dos proposiciones contrarias disyuntivamente, de tal manera que, negada o concedida cualquiera de las dos, queda demostrada una determinada conclusión.” Synonyms of ‘dilema’ include: disyuntiva, alternativa, problema, duda, encrucijada, opción.[1] Antonyms encompass solution, certainty, straightforwardness, effortlessness, no bother, no trouble.
First Act
For this exercise, we initially use the term ‘border’ as ‘dilemma’ aiming to reflect on self-perception and perception of other peoples as cultural and linguistic phenomena.
A border understood as a dilemma is a situation of crisis in which we must choose between monolithic, uniform, developed, rigid notions of culture.
However, culture is a non-monolithic entity:
“[…] I have also developed arguments against a monolithic conception of culture and its shared hermeneutical resources that called into question blanket statements about the impossibility of expressing, understanding, or interpreting an experience, a problem, an identity, etc. […] For a pluralistic conception of social groups and cultures, it is problematic to say that it is impossible for an experience to be understood within a particular culture. Instead of focusing on complete success or failure, […] understanding oneself and others is a matter of trying as hard as one can, of paying attention to the emerging expressive and interpretative possibilities, no matter how inchoate or embryonic.”[2]
Laura’s proposal is not to locate herself in the position of solving a dilemma that a border entails aiming for certainty, straightforwardness and effortlessness, but to pay attention to cultural diversity, heterogeneity, matters of degree to express, understand, interpret ourselves and others.
Cultural perception allows the extremely imaginatively theatrical task of shaking disjuncts. I perceive myself from my culture. My culture is Mexican, American, Taiwanese, Chinese and so much more. I perceive myself from my language and language is shaped by my culture. I perceive other peoples from my culture. I perceive other peoples from my language and language is shaped by my culture. You speak Spanish, English, Taiwanese, Chinese and so much more.
First Special Scene
Amie dear, I would like you to go to the blue track of the university, and respond to the questions: How do you perceive yourself? How do you perceive other people? How do you perceive Laura?
[1] https://dle.rae.es/dilema?m=form
[2] José Medina “Varieties of Hermeneutical Injustice” in The Routledge Handbook Of Epistemic Injustice (New York and London: Routledge, 2017), 43.