The Fall of Literary Theory. Liana Vrajitoru Andreasen
of nations, religions, or other kinds of communities in one territory due to migration, immigration, or other forms of cultural interaction. This conception of losing a territory to somebody else only matters, in terms of identity, if it is remembered—either through story, or through recorded history.
Given the plasticity of the world, territory has lost its physical importance not only in our age of mass communication and mass transportation, but also from the very beginning of this remembering. From Rousseau’s “liberty” to Heidegger’s “dwelling” in the home of truth (within language),1 the notion of territory has reached complex levels of abstraction. It may be that what still connects territory in its initial understanding (as land) to abstract territoriality is the tendency of communities once occupying the same territory to remain somewhat connected to each other and somewhat attached to their initial perception of themselves as identical to each other. Anything they carried with them in the initial loss, or fall from territory, or anything that remains theirs after being invaded, or after accepting others among them, will become a stake in preserving identity.
One might think of practices that become cultural, such as a common way to make pottery, or the weapons certain peoples use in killing their enemies; if these are recorded in any way, they are part of the identity of that community and become their cultural baggage. As history advances, these tokens of identity become even more abstract, and turn into ideas and ideologies. The gods embraced by the members of a community, the common fears, their way to perceive food, evil, love, hate, family, and any other concepts, also become tokens of identity. In linguistic terms, signifiers “represent” identity: for instance, the identity of citizens of the United States is represented through the flag, in its number of stars. Yet “real” America is not somewhere in the flag, since an actual identity behind the signifier is not an actual “presence,” as Derrida would say.
The struggle to purify the identity of a community is always doomed to failure: nobody will eliminate all foreigners from a country, or all pagans from a nation, or retrieve a land that waits for them empty. Faced with such circumstances, communities in this day and age have to decide what it is that can still be brought back from what is supposed to have been lost. According to this logic, if not the land, at least freedom could be brought back, the freedom associated with not having somebody else dictate the social order of that community (as in the case of diverse America still finding unity in the concept of freedom: the freedom to shop, the freedom to be fashionable, the freedom to react to threats, or any other freedom). If not complete unity against foreign elements, these communities will seek at least unity around a God, a social organization, or the history that unifies them.
In so many examples of conflicts between communities whose territories have been disputed throughout the centuries (such as Israel vs. Palestine, Pakistan vs. India, Hungary vs. Romania), these communities’ religions, degree of civilization, or other abstract territories are used as reasons to continue to identify with the disputed physical territory. When they have to settle for a smaller piece of land, they demand more “rights” to an abstract territory (their language to be recognized as official, their religion to be practiced freely). The violence of defending a territory can be justified by anything that is included in the process of identity production.
Even self-identity is a territory to defend, because the individual who creates meaning through “authentic” signifiers will still defend those signifiers as if they were his/her property, such as the “original” work of an artist. Meaninglessness or floating signifiers are also potential property or territory for those who circulate them in a decentralized market. As long as something “sells,” even an idea, it is a territory and it can be defended because it can be part of the process of identification. Even though postmodern identity appears as the attempt to divorce identity from territory, given that territory is already language, identity cannot become any less a stake in language, so that the same set of problems is maintained.
The starting assumption for the three modes of identity is that there is no subject outside of the system of language that defines territoriality, since it is the remainder of the initially lost reality. There is no circumstance in which subject, language, and meaning can be taken apart or define themselves in any way divorced from each other. The instability of one triggers the questioning of the others in such a way that, if there is no social space in which the subject searches for meaning, whether by identification or rejection, there is also no subject and no meaning because there is no framework in which to engage in identity definition. If there is no subjecthood, any given social system has nothing to sustain the power dynamics that establishes its meaning, or its territory: ever since G. W. Hegel, the master has been understood as a master only if there is a slave too (or a subject), while there is no subject without a master (even an abstract one) to be subjected to.
If meaning itself (as master) is destabilized, the system it supports and its subjects also lose the stability they draw from meaning. There is no territory if there is nobody who has lost it. Usually, the members of a community reinforce the concept of territory, in order for it to sustain their meaning, or their desired identity. For instance, an oppressed social group like that of African Americans has to forge a meaning, a communal territory, which, abstractly, is “race,” but can also acquire a “territory” that can be defended. This issue is complicated by the fact that black Americans have to define themselves within a territory that has already been defined by those who bereaved them of their initial territory, so that territory has to remain a stake in resisting the forces that strip them of identity. In the contemporary world, we can look at the example of “the hood” as the territory in which, for instance, rap communities forge an identity, a territory defended against contamination by inauthentic rappers.
For the social structure to function and to allow the individual to function inside of it, any destabilized factor is turned into a stake. The need for the social structure to be (re)affirmed is predicated upon a challenge, an unknown, anything destabilizing. The territory is continuously redefined. It is not possible to determine an ultimate starting point where any constitutive factors can be identified as origin, in the sense of prior to any other (whether larger factors like society, the individual, or meaning, or related ones such as the sign, the family, or any other social unit, power relations, and so forth). In the terms advanced by Lacan, anything pertaining to the imaginary or to the symbolic cannot be given priority since, when individuality joins the social space, all the elements are already there, in the mirror stage (the initial stage of self-perception). He also goes on to claim that, as far as the subject is concerned, there is no other stage besides the mirror stage, while the real is always lost because of alienation into the social self. The subject speaks by abolishing itself as real, by already having lost the territory.
This real will never be retrieved since language and the social systems that function within language can only retrieve it by defining it. The real, as the outside/prior to language, escapes definition since there is no such thing as not-language, once language is the means to retrieving non-meaning. All the signs, or signifiers, which the territory has become, even the “land” sign, are not the “real” territory that has been lost by the community. All objects defining territory have become language and, for us, they signify, rather than simply exist. That is why territory is never not an abstraction, and always a “real” to be retrieved. Unfortunately, then, the real also contains its subjects, who will always try to define this real and derive their identity from it. This is why, from the perspective of language, everything is always a fall and a loss.
Now, as I have mentioned, Lacan and other poststructuralists have been stamped with the stigma of irrelevance to the “real world” due to the abstractness of their theories, and it is true that language cannot be discussed without abstraction. But let’s consider that Lacan’s understanding of the connections between the real, signifiers, and desire is relevant due to the enormous, very real consequences of the fact that territory has become abstract, which means it can be infinitely defended. This renewable and flexible abstract territory points to the perspective of the fall that I am suggesting: anything can be lost, which means anything can be fought for in an attempt to retrieve it or save it from impurities.
The three modes of understanding the loss of territory, or the fall, are by no means separate historically. Identities, or territories,