As demonstrated in the last section, Deleuze and Guattari‘s concept of nomadism gives rise to important critiques that provide a fertile ground for the formulation of a new nomadism, in which subjectivity is bridged with materiality and life experiences. In this section, I move from an understanding of nomadism as an embedded and embodied figuration of thought to discussion of a nomadic aesthetic. We begin by positioning the nomadic subject following RosiBraidotti‘s lead. Braidotti situates nomadic thinking, or nomadic conscious-ness, as an image of thought that escapes the binary opposition between soft and hard sciences but transits between them, tracing multiple assemblages and interconnections across different fields of knowledge. She uses Deleuze and Guattari‘s figuration of a rhizome, a root that grows underground, horizontally, in multiple directions, with non-linear, yet interconnected ramifications. Just like the nomad, there is no end and no beginning to the rhizome‘s path, and
their evolutions are continuous works-in-progress marked by multiple passages and transi-tions. Braidotti points out:
The nomad enacts transitions without a teleological purpose; Deleuze also gives as an example of this nomadic mode the (...) rhizome. The rhizome is a root that grows underground, sideways; Deleuze plays it against the linear roots of trees. By extension, it is ―as if‖ the rhizomatic mode expressed a non-phallogocentric way of thinking: secret, lateral, spreading, as opposed to the visible, vertical ramifications of Western trees of knowledge. By extension, the rhizome stands for a nomadic political ontology that (...) provides mova-ble foundations for a post-human view of subjectivity. Nomadic conscious-ness is a form of political resistance to hegemonic and exclusionary views of subjectivity (Braidotti 2011, p. 23).
I am interested in how Braidotti accounts for the nomadic unfoldings of deviant paths from specific normativities and long-established patterns of behaviour and ex-clusion that seem to be predominant in Western civilisation; that is to say, the canons of a patriarchal, ethnocentric, Eurocentric, heteronormative and capitalist society, which produces a long semantic corridor of exclusion based on gender, race, nationality, sexuality and class, among other categories of second or third-class citizenship. The nomad shifts between and away from these categories, tracing alternative roots for that which constitutes the Other. I want to verify how Braidotti‘s concept of nomadism helps us reframe Western representations of alterity.
Regardless of how tempting it is to represent people in specific cate-gories or images, these catecate-gories are established vertically, from a position of power which has the power to determine one‘s place in society, the little box where he or she belongs.
These boxes are grouped hierarchically, exclusion being the filter through which one is given
a specific position or identity. Deviating or taking an alternative route from these established boxes does not place the subject in a submissive, or even defensive position. Instead it can potentially empower the subject through encouraging their own agencies, their power to make their own articulations, and self-definitions. By refusing the imposition of hierarchical catego-ries, one can move with more independence against or away from the mainstream. It involves taking an active role, embracing his or her process of becoming in the direction of his or her desires at the moment. Subjectivity is conceived as a process. One which denies any perma-nent self-definitions, but a constant work in progress. Braidotti claims:
The nomadic tense is the imperfect: it is active, continuous; the nomadic tra-jectory is controlled speed. The nomadic style is about transitions and pas-sages without predetermined destinations or lost homelands. The nomad‘s relationship to the earth is one of transitory attachment and cyclical frequen-tation; the antithesis of the farmer, the nomad gathers, reaps, and exchanges but does not exploit (Braidotti 1994, p. 25).
In Braidotti, nomadism shifts away from a nationalist sentiment of be-longing. She makes a statement that the nomad transiting near the city gates is not ―seeking readmission‖ (Braidotti 2011, p.32). The nomad just passes by, or stops for a pause, before he or she gets on with their journey. Please allow me to pose a Latin American example of no-madism in regards to borders and territorial demarkations: Andean ethnic groups like the Quechuas and Aymaras in Bolivia challenge the idea of belonging to a specific land in terms of borders and territorial demarkations. Pachamama, the term for the Quechuas and Aymaras in Bolivia, means ―Mother Land‖ (Kaijser 2014, p. 17), or the spirit of the land. Yet the
―land‖, in the Quechuan and Aymaran languages, has little or nothing to do with nationality.
According to Anna Kaijser, there is no specific location attributed to Pachamama since she is the very ―condition of locality‖ (Kaijser 2014, p. 17; Rockerfeller 2010, p. 80). In Kaijser‘s
words: ―she represents a holistic notion of the world, encompassing all living beings, includ-ing humans‖ (Kaijser 2014, p. 17). In fact, Pachamama is a transnational mythical figure: she is worshiped in the Andes, between Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. Unlike other spiritual icons of the Andes, Pachamama is refused any ―visual representation‖ (Kaijser 2014, p.17, Harris, 2000, pp. 201-219, Poupeau 2011, pp.256-258). Kaijser points out that she is invoked as a collective myth of ―pre-colonial origin‖, alternative or oppositional to Western values (Kaijser 2014, p.18). This allows us to establish links between Pachamama and the figure of the nomad as a perspective that drifts away from Western ideas of border, territorial demarkations. Kaisjer observes that ―she stands for interconnectedness‖ between the Andean peoples, ―along with the strive for decolonisation and liberation from imperialist patterns‖
(Kaijser 2014, p.18). For Olivia Harris, Pachamama ―stand[s] at the intersection of indigen-ous knowledge and the variindigen-ous cultural needs of different outsiders‖ (Harris 2000, p. 201).
She is, in fact, a ―cosmopolitan character‖, as observed by Kaijser, who stands for ―a univer-salised indigenous worldview‖ (Kaijser 2014, p.18) and who translates the knowledge pro-duced in indigenous settings to the outside world. In this respect, Pachamama provides us with a clear example about the relation of the nomad with the land, in the extent to which she is the entity that unites the Andean peoples, traversing frontier regions insofar as she engend-ers the alchemy between multiple sites of knowledge, which the nomad also does as an inter-sectional image of thought – in Deleuze and Guattari‘s nomad, and also in Braidotti‘s. From a postcolonial perspective, Pachamama is a whole indivisible spectrum. As is the case with the nomadic journey, Pachamama is recreated from pueblo to pueblo. She is the road through which the nomad moves about, sharing pre-Incan and Incan heritage and ancestry. As a divine figure, she requires no logical explanation.
Just like in the Andean mythic figure, there is not a perfectly logi-cal explanation for a nomadic path: moving in a certain direction might have been circumstan-tial, but by no means was it predetermined. What is the relation between the nomadic way of
thinking and Western centrality of logic or logos? The nomad is not exempt from rational thinking, but this is not the only force that impels him or her. Reason fails to explain the devi-ations that can be affected by logical predetermined aspects, such as seasons, but also pas-sions, changes in interest or even in mood. In the nomadic path, the exception becomes the rule, deviations become the route.
Jacques Derrida thinks of Logocentrism as what he calls ―a metaphys-ics of presence‖ (Derrida 1997, p. 49) (what I understand as a spiritual dimension of logos, or logic), which is impelled by the organising principle that transcends meaning, beyond signs and names associated with that which he calls the ―transcendental signifier‖ (Derrida 1997, p.
252). It is how the Western canon structures thought, using logic as a godlike organising prin-ciple that transcends all signifiers. The nomadic disregard for Logocentrism as the source of explanation of all things rests upon the limitations of reason, that is to say, the impossibility to adequate all subjects to a ―scientific norm‖ (Braidotti 1994, p. 32). It embraces the excesses, the subjects that are difficult to categorize, variables that cannot easily fit into a cause-effect equation. Nomadic thinking is one which travels through categories, but does not allow itself to be entirely shaped by them. It traces its lines of escape from established norms and catego-ries, it slips through fissures, cracks in the walls of reason. Braidotti is precisely interested in the fissures or cracks through which nomadic thinking escapes Logocentrism,the radical rup-ture with linear, cause-and-effect thought processes and the refusal of names and catego-ries.Nomadic thinking can allow us to draw a decentred, rhizomatic cartography, open to new possibilities of articulating alliances in between commonplaces. It is a means of decentering thought, casting away canonical subject positions that are considered pillars of Western thought, such as white, European, male, heterosexual, etc. I am using Braidotti‘s nomadic cartography insofar as it allows me to move between the centre and the peripheries without excluding or recreating pre-existing hierarchies in between them. In Braidotti‘s words:
Nomadic thinking is the project that consists in expressing and naming differ-ent figurations for (...) decdiffer-entred subjectivity. Politically, the nomadic style expresses my doubts about the capacity of high theory to reflect upon the very questions that I see as central: phallogocentrism, ethnocentrism, the positivity of difference. Philosophy – as a discipline of thought – is highly phallogocen-tric and antinomadic; it maintains a privileged bond to domination, power and violence and consequently requires mechanisms of exclusion and domination as part of its standard practices. Philosophy creates itself through what it ex-cludes as much as through what it asserts. High theory, especially Philosophy, posits its values through the exclusion of many: men, white, non-educated, etc. The structural necessity of these pejorative figurations of other-ness makes me question the theoretical capacity – let alone the moral and polit-ical willingness – of theoretpolit-ical discourse to act in a nonhegemonic, non-exclusionary manner (Braidotti 1994, p. 33).
Braidotti questions the criteria through which the process of producing knowledge is indexed, compartmentalised, and adjusted to a frame that is compatible with the scientific norm or with a frame of representation. Does the academy enable the indexicalisa-tion and compartimentalisaindexicalisa-tion of knowledge? To what extent does the academy make way for the criticism of Logocentrism and the formulations of alternative cartographies of thought? On one hand, the academy seeks to reassure and reinforce its status quo (as with cinema), dominated by those who get to call the shots, those in a position of power and au-thority to make decisions. On the other hand, the academy makes room for its own criticism, taking certain liberties in terms of allowing some level of critical thinking and questioning, but it is not an isolated entity in relation to the Establishment, the very structure of power which sustains it. In knowing that, Braidotti‘s idea that it is established not so much in ―what it asserts‖, but in what it ―excludes‖, is quite pertinent (Braidotti 1994, p. 33). The academy
(like the cinema industry), participates in the exclusion of subjects that are marginalised by society, based on the same criteria: race, colour, nationality, gender, sexuality, etc. These cri-teria go beyond granting or denying access to the academy. They are applied in discourse analysis to designate what is valid, and what is not; what is relevant and what is not. Sustained by the status quo, the academy tends to preserve and legitimise the exclusion-based pillars which sustain its own privileges. The discourses that allow a deeper questioning of these cat-egories of exclusion find their place in the academy through fissures of the educational sys-tem, spaces that open in between fields, in between disciplines and lines of research. It is through struggle that some of these fields have conquered some level of academic legitimacy.
How does the nomadic subjectivity move about socially built categories? What does it mean to move in between categories of exclusion? Braidotti uses the figure of the nomad to shift fixed categories attributed to women, with designated functions in the social division of labour, as well as designated roles and voices; voices which are levelled according to other devices of exclusion, for instance those which place women of color at the bottom of a social hierarchical pyramid. The ability to transit though these categories is a way to displace them and blur boundaries bringing about a different idea of identity, defined not so much in terms of what it excludes, but in what it can potentially become – in terms of path-ways, connections, bonds, associations. To put it in Braidotti‘s words: ―The nomadic subject functions as a relay team: s/he connects, circulates, moves on; s/he does not form identifica-tions but keeps on coming back at regular intervals. The nomad is a transgressive identity whose transitory nature is precisely the reason why s/he can make connections at all‖ (Brai-dotti 1994, p. 35). Interval is used by Brai(Brai-dotti to highlight fragments of time and space in the midst of these itineraries, that is, the nomadic‘s transitory nature.
What precisely expresses these nomadic transitions across identi-ties? In the constant act of becoming, one no longer is. The verb to be can only be employed
in the past, since one is constantly on the move. ―Nomadic cartographies need to be redrafted constantly; as such they are structurally opposed to fixity and therefore to rapacious appropri-ation‖ (Braidotti 1994, pp. 35-36). The idea of an on-going change of directions, and the re-fusal of permanent homologation, challenges discourses inside and out of the academy; blur-ring borders between spaces of political activism and intellectual analysis of marginalised subjects, more specifically, for women as the subjects and social actors engaged in the decon-struction of Logocentrism. It is, therefore, the refusal of a permanent form of reterritorialisa-tion that enables the process of deterritorialisareterritorialisa-tion. It does not mean that reterritorialisareterritorialisa-tion does not happen in Braidotti‘s nomadic cartography, but that it happens in an intermittent process of creating and discharging meaning, building punctual alliances across the map. In Braidotti‘s words:
Figurations of female subjectivity (...) can be taken as different maps by which critical readers can identify points of exit from phallocentric schemes of thought. They attempt to work through established forms of representa-tion, consuming from within. I have referred to this technique as metabolic consumption of the old in order to engender the new. (...) In this sense I [de-fend] (...) the practice of ―as if‖, of mimesis as a political intellectual strate-gy based on the subversive potential of repetitions. Metabolic consumption attacks from within the stock of cumulated images and concepts of women as they have been codified by the culture we are in. Women need to repos-sess the multi-layered structure of their subjectivity as their site of historical sedimentation of meanings and representations that must be worked through (Braidotti 1994, p. 39).
This discussion is important insofar as transitory forms of representation are connected to female subjectivity and agency. As we will later see in Trinh‘s cinema, this can
potentially dismantle stereotypical icons of representation of alterity on the big screen. My main goal is to identify how we can translate nomadism as a figuration that deterritorialises and reterriteritorialises the idea of identities of non-Western women in terms of film. We must first look closely at the postcolonial critique of the Western discourse of women, native, other so that we can think of a postcolonial and feminist reflection of how they are represented ci-nematically.