Otherness and Identity through a Fractal Worldview of Interconnectedness

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University of Amsterdam

Otherness and Identity through a Fractal

Worldview of Interconnectedness

Aikaterini Alysandratou

MA Thesis Comparative Cultural Analysis

Student Number: 10849300

Supervisor: Mireille Rosello

Second Reader: Jules Sturm

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INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this essay is to suggest a fractal worldview, i.e. micro- meso- and macrocosmic levels of interconnectedness, how this perspective is essential regarding the way people perceive their relation to the Other, and thus in what way such viewpoint can be used for the deconstruction and reconstruction of one’s identity. In order to elaborate on my argument (which starts with the fractal perspective that unravels the problematic encounter with otherness, so that a redefining introspect will be generated), I will use the documentary

Samsara (2011) as my object. Samsara, Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson’s masterpiece, was

filmed over nearly five years in twenty-five countries on five continents. There is no narration, no plot, no actors or script, only sequential images of the planet as it is today, natural world and human activity included, a “non-narrative tale of human belief systems, congregations and wonders both man-made and natural” (O’Neil). Samsara is an immersion into the oneness of this world. The consecutive, divergent imagery highlights the simultaneous unity and individuality of everything that is part of the planet, animate and inanimate; “each snippet tells only part of a bigger story, barely giving you time to process who you are looking at and what they are doing, but this makes the whole thing a more active experience than most films. Questions are provoked then dismissed as we move on, but the themes build up in the mind’’ (O’Neil). The whole film is based on the power of flow, as its creators describe it (San Diego Reader), in order to show how everything is interconnected. By using “time lapse and slow motion sequences [they] convey the idea that humanity is always moving, and moving in patterns, so much larger than any individual at ground level could see” (Van Spall). When I saw this documentary, I was caught by the intense, pervasive

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look of different individual persons starring at the camera, by the synchronized moves of people praying, dancing, fighting or working and by how divergent images are interwoven giving a sense of oneness and interdependence. Thus, I observed that the film works in a two directional manner; it is very broad, because it raises the awareness for a plethora of issues, and very deep, because it addresses these issues on an insightful level. It is an expanded worldview that triggers the most inner instincts as well and because of that it functions as a fertile ground for new discourses ranging from identity problems to global concerns.

The reason why I chose a film as my object is because visual art reflects and consolidates theoretical ideas about alternative worldviews in a very direct way, due to the fact the vision itself is human’s dominant sense. The reason why I chose Samsara in particular, is because it works as an integrative power between many disciplines that solidify the notion of interconnectedness in the most obvious yet thorough way. The brilliance of this documentary is the sense of intimacy that resonates from every image, this “unordinary view of things that we already know” (Fricke, RCN TV), which renders its watching a didactic experience. By functioning as such, Samsara raised many questions for me regarding burning issues; inequality, intolerance, environmental crisis, overconsumption, animal cruelty. On the other hand, I was in awe of the wonderful human activities that are also included in the imagery; dance, architectural monuments, technological marvels, different types of spirituality. This contradiction made me feel that sometimes the documentary as an object was resisting me; how could I prove interconnectedness through division? How could I talk about the Other within when the Other is omnipresent outside and all around the Self? How could I suggest harmony in such a chaotic world? On the behalf of the creators of the film, they renounce any characterization of the status quo depicted in film as bad or good (In70mm) and so at first I was not able to support neither an optimistic nor pessimistic stance based on their words. As a result I decided to use this chaos (that at the same time resonated a

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very harmonic feeling as well) as an allegory to describe the chaotic connectivity I was looking for in the film and in the world in general, and highlight the presence of this connectivity through its absence. Before I start my inquiry I would like to note that there are two characteristics of Samsara that I find integral for it to be used as an object for cultural analysis; it is an intercultural dialogue and it deals with opacity in a very unique and profound way.

Samsara is an intercultural dialogue, a “dialogue [that] becomes an intervention,

because it places the unequal parties into a symmetrical exchange” (Pratt, Planetarity 26). For Marie Louis Pratt a contact zone is “a social space where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (Contact Zone 34). This is exactly what Samsara exhibits and what makes it a contact zone; the imagery of “Sodoma and Gomora” in Ghana, the world’s largest digital dump (pic1), the sulfur mine in Indonesia (pic2) or the luxurious apartments bordering favelas in Brazil (pic3), where children work in enormous piles of garbage (pic4), allows us to gain a holistic perspective upon the world as it is today. The domination of the western civilization and the escalation of inequalities that this domination entails, is omnipresent. Aside from these images of extreme poverty around the world, which obviously touch on economic and social issues, there are also some images that highlight the occidental sovereignty and the hybridization it encompasses in cultural frames. I am referring to the Japanese impersonators of Elvis Presley (pic5) or the contradictive shot of Muslim women in the metro wearing “abaya” that covers almost their entire body and stand next to a poster that depicts men in their underwear (pi6). The most iconic image that highlights the extension of the phenomenon of this ongoing transculturation, is the Himba tribesmen holding guns (pic7). This frame represents the multilevel intrusion of the West to even the most remote and still

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primitive places on earth like this tribe in Namibia. What is interesting in this documentary though, is that its creators do not keep a critical stance towards what is depicted, no matter how sensitive a presented issue might me. As Fricke stresses, “There’s a cross-cultural fertilization which some people don’t think is a good thing. It is what it is, though. Western culture is somewhat pervasive and something is lost with that, but it’s not something that anybody can stop or control or that’s right or wrong: it just is. The world is changing that way” (The NYC Movie Guru). Therefore, Samsara is about gaining an integrated view of the planet’s proceedings and the way they are interwoven in an arbitrary yet established manner.

Beyond the tyranny of one lingua franca, this non-verbal film does not need translation because it speaks in every language. In this way, the film deals with opacity, that is to say the way people perceive their own ignorance. For Edouard Glissant (whose theories are going to be used extensively in this paper) opacity is the part of the identity of an individual or a community that will never be accessible, understood or translatable by the others, but on the other hand being as such, opacity is what can guarantee individuality (Prieto 115-116). In Glissant’s words, “the self’s opacity for the other is insurmountable, and, consequently, no matter how opaque the other is for oneself, it will always be a question of reducing this other to the transparency experienced by oneself. Either the other is assimilated, or else it is annihilated” (Poetics 49). So the opacity of the Self is embraced as the shield of uniqueness but the opacity of the Other is something that will never be understood, hence the need to be changed into something more familiar or to be destroyed. This refusal to see the difference and the impulsion to interpreter it within contexts the Self is acquaint with, is an issue brought to the foreground by Samsara. How does the viewer as part of the western civilization grasp images from around the world that deal with modern slavery, extreme poverty or war and confront him/her with the Other? How does this viewer feel when images of food, gun and sex industry confront him/her with the Self as part of the western

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civilization? In this way, Samsara deals with opacity and every way it is manifested; the opacity for the Other and the opacity of the Self. In Samsara, the former is traced in one of the most powerful images, which is (again) the Himba tribesmen holding guns, that signifies the intrusion of western civilization into indigenous populations hence the assimilation of the Other, whereas the latter is portrayed through the frame of the American family -father, son and daughter- proudly holding guns (pic8), which stands for the need to champion what is consider as one’s unique identity. Even though what Glissant describes involves people and cultures that are opaque with one another, there is still an interaction between them, as they exist as part of an extensive system of Relation (Desilets). When it comes to identity, Glissant considers the self/other dualism a pretty bad model, because it allows only two positions and in that way multiplicity is circled but not addressed seriously and thus other cultures always remain other to us (Desilets). What he suggests, though, is to embrace the problems of the Other because in this way it is possible to find oneself and this idea of identity not being only within the root but also in Relation (Glissant, Poetics 18). This is exactly how Samsara works; as a chaotic fractal system that confronts the viewer with the opacity that a twofold identity of being both the Self and the Other entails, and the way to deal with it to make it more transparent. Taking it step by step, I elaborate on the fractal worldview, the Other problematic and the identity renegotiation in three chapters.

The first chapter is a fractal reading of Samsara, which I regard in a micro-, meso-and macro level of interrelation. Fractal as a notion is coming from the field of mathematics and geometry and it is thus very challenging for me to apply in intercultural contexts. Nonetheless, it is a pattern whose accuracy in the depiction of interconnectedness and self-reflective expansion is extraordinary and this is exactly what I find very fascinating about it. The chapter starts with an explanation of the term fractal and its origin. Thereafter, I introduce Roy Wagner’s theory about the fractal person to prove that the subdivision of the

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whole into units in a holographic manner that he suggests, can renounce polarized dualisms, which are prevailing in western culture. On a micro-cosmic level, I focus on the person as the embodiment of heterogeneity, using Judith Butler’s account of oneself in relation to the Other. On a meso-level, I focus on groups of people and the way they are arbitrary formed by external, pre-determent forces that renders them imagined, based on Benedict Anderson and Arjun Appadurai’s theories about imagined communities and imagined worlds respectively. Instead, as Donna Haraway advocates, a cyborg world, away from dualisms, where hybridization is embraced, is what this essay presents as an ideal counterproposal to assemblage. Moving to the macro-cosmic level, I analyze a holistic perspective of the world’s oneness, explaining why by focusing on interrelation instead of hierarchy, the fractal world is a rhizome, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari describe it. It is also the Tout-monde that Glissant envisions, that is to say “the order that can be drawn out of chaos, a unifying perspective, a totalizing vision” (Traité du Tout-monde 22). Thus, Glissant’s chaos theory is also applied, in so far as the fractal world is a chaotic system, within which interdependence between phenomenally unrelated things creates order within chaos itself. Portraits of individuals, group activity and flow of imagery represent the three levels of interconnectedness in Samsara, which exemplifies in a very accurate way how fractals unfold multilaterally.

In the second chapter I elaborate on the notion of the Other, which is of high importance in the fractal word of interrelation. The whole chapter is structured based on Ulrich Beck’s distinction of otherness between External and Internal, and the subcategories of each. Starting from the External Other, I will show how the environmental concern that the film rises dictate a harmonic symbiosis like the one Michel Serres suggests, how the West needs the East and vice versa, as Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan advocates, in order to respect different cultures instead of disdain them, and how technological progress has brought the

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future closer than we think, as Haraway’s cyborgs are becoming the extension of humans themselves. Moving to the Internal Other, I will analyze how Hegel’s holism is applied in the documentary proving the interconnectedness of the subject with the object that are both indicators of the same unity, and finally, how imagining with precision, like Ghosh suggests, can project new ways of thinking, especially through a mediascape (in Appadurai terms again) like Samsara. All these arguments were built on the deconstruction of five fundamental binaries; nature and culture, civilized and primitive, past/present and future, subject and object, rationalism and imagination. The collapse of this bias reveals new possible ways to rethink the role of the Other in any of its manifestation, triggered by watching the documentary Samsara.

In the third chapter I focus on one of scenes that shocked me the most in Samsara. Olivier de Sagazan in Transfiguration becomes the mud/mad man, who incarnates both the Self and the Other in a process of continuous deconstructing and reconstructing of his own identity. This is the aim of re-evaluating the role of the Other in the fractal world; a rethinking upon one’s identity itself. After describing the performance and explaining its position in the film, I describe in the first part how the loop of disfigured faces that he molds using clay symbolize the constant redefinition of his identity through the construction of relational selves. I use Butler’s vulnerability to portray his emotional status in correlation to the Other, Jenny Slatman’s prosthesis to support changeability through re-modification, and Sami Schalk’s other-self to describe the middle position between the Self and the Other that the artist enters when he performs in front of his audience. In the next part, I advocate that the disruption of identity can be dismissed as madness and it is thus a strong opposition to the norm, using Tobin Siebers’ theory on disability as oppressed identity and Butler’s

unknowable “I” that is formed by norms and dependent to them. His abnormality is also

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different perception of what Slatman calls me-ness. In the last part of the third chapter, I refer to Timothy Bewes’ theory of shame and the discontinuity of the self it involves as a possible trigger of the mud/mad man’s reaction. For the most part I explain the way Transfiguration starts from within but includes everything in the way de Sagazan uses his body to address the Other in his own redefining process. To support theoretically the importance of the Other in questioning one’s own identity through a bodily experience, I use Jean-Paul Sartre The

Body-For-Others.

My aim in this paper is to illustrate how a fractal reading of the documentary

Samsara can highlight the importance of otherness when it comes to redefining one’s own

identity. More specifically, how does a fractal worldview work in intercultural contexts, and how can it be represented through visual art? How can otherness be a notion to rethink upon by questioning fundamental binaries in the way people approach the Other, and what does that entail for one’s perception of identity? Is changing from within a possible way to achieve true change and why is such endeavor so intimidating? These are questions whose answers are the inquiry of this paper.

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CHAPTER 1: A FRACTAL WORLDVIEW

Fractal is defined as “a mathematically conceived curve such that any small part of it, enlarged, has the same statistical character as the original.” (OED). Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot was the first to introduce the term “fractal” in 1975, and later published Fractals: Form, Chance and Dimension (1977), in which he illustrated his new vision of geometry

and scale symmetric or self-similar objects. Ever since, this concept of a never-ending pattern has been used in many different fields, proving its multiple applicability. A fractal is a structure where the minute unit and the grand whole are one and the same, developing in a micro-/macrocosmic scale of interrelation. Thus, following such a fractal logic, the way individuals experience their own selfhood and the cultural frames they function in, is analogously a fractal interrelated system in the chaotic manifestation of existence. The fractal reading of the documentary Samsara in this paper is an allegory of this interconnectedness used in order to trigger a rethinking upon pre-established dogmata.

Dualism, a product of western civilization, dictates the division of phenomenally opposite binaries rather than understanding alterity as a self-reflected symptom of completeness, as this paper suggests. For instance, the microcosm and macrocosm – instead of an antithetical pair - are a scale-retaining system examined as an interrelated whole in

pic9.Sourse:

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order to be understood in the best way possible. Likewise, a single person is related to the cultural/social framework he or she thrives in and at the same time cultural phenomena are not dissociated from their origin, i.e. the unit. Roy Wagner in Fractal person (1991) gives some very interesting examples of Melanesian cultural practices to illustrate the totality hidden underneath every decrease or magnification of its own that is at the same time a neglected viewpoint exactly due to the prevalence of the occidental model of dualism. According to Wagner, “[t]he opposition of individual and society, a product of western jurisprudence and political ideology, is not merely coincidental to the hegemony of “social” thinking, but identical with it” (159).

An imprinted cultural attitude is equivalent to one’s identity and self-perception and thus hard to be impartially put under the microscope, especially in western culture, whose belief system – including social, political, technological and economic structures - is considered as a norm by its carriers and thus as a point of critical reference for every other civilization on the planet. On the other hand, distancing oneself from this one-sided perspective, can allow alternatives, like the one considering a fractal structure of the world on any level, where “[a] fractal person is never a unit standing in relation to an aggregate, or an aggregate standing in relation to a unit, but always an entity with relationship integrally implied” (Wagner 163). But in what ways does this oversight work? What is that we, in the West, misunderstand and are there any effects deriving from our erroneous view? Wagner answers these questions eloquently:

When the arbitrary sectioning cut from the whole cloth of universal congruence are taken literally as data, they become the social categories that we identify as names, individuals, groups, wealth - objects and information – bearing sentences or statements. Taken at face value this way they lose any sense of fractality and merge with the western hegemonic of social orders constructed of substantive elements,

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cultural systems made of representational categories. This does not mean that the fractal possibilities of scale retention are not there […] [b]ut it does carry a strong guarantee that the indigenous awareness and use of these possibilities will be discounted, overlooked or misread as rustic attempts at social construction. (166) What needs to be clear about fractals is that the totality they entail is not a summation of disparate parts into one heterogeneous unit, but a macro-scale assemblage reflecting itself starting from a micro-scoping level. In consonance with Wagner, “[f]ractality [...] relates to, converts to and reproduces the whole, something as different from a sum as it is from individual part. […] When a whole is subdivided in this way it is split into holographs of

itself; though neither the splitting nor its opposite amount to an ‘ordering’ function” (Wagner

166-167, my italics). Such perspective attempts to describe chaos which, at the same time, is not chaotic, an idea that I will further analyze in the third part of this chapter, based on Glissant’s theory about the chaos-monde. For the time being, it is important to note that interconnectedness is the key to grasp the chaotic structure of the world and by extension the fractal form of it as well, as it allows a more holistic understanding of intricate relations. As Wagner stresses, “[t]he holographic totalisation of the conceptual world […] amounts to a recognition of personal fractality through the realization of its relational implications.” (171). He considers ideal for one to simultaneously embody both the person and the aggregate “solidifying a totality into happening” (172), a stance that I argue is prerequisite for human consciousness to take the next evolutionary step.

Similar to the “fractal person” concepts, that undermine the notion of dualism and the binaries it creates, are proposed by Marilyn Strathern and McKim Marriott, whose ideas I am briefly presenting to support my argument regarding fractals. The former, in her book The

Gender of the Gift (1988) advocates that plural and singular are each other’s homologues, as they are basically the same. As she explains “the bringing together of many persons is just

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like the bringing together of one. The unity of a number of persons conceptualized as a group or set is achieved through eliminating what differentiates them, and this is exactly what happens when a person is also individualized” (14). The latter, in his book Hindu

Transactions: Diversity without Dualism (1976) analyzes the concept of “dividual”

personhood by also making a clear distinction/comparison of the western and eastern perception of individualism. According to Marriott, while the social and psychological theory of the West thinks persons as “individual”, indivisible, bounded units, in South Asia are seen as “dividual”, divisible; “To exist, dividual persons absorb heterogeneous material influences. They must also give out from themselves particles of their own coded substances – essences, residues, or other active influences – that may then reproduce in others something of the nature of the persons in whom they have originated” (111).

Consequently, seeing the world through a fractal lens reflects a scale-retaining system of self-reflected patterns, starting from a microcosmic level, i.e. individuals, to a macrocosmic level represented by a holistic worldview. I would like to add an intermediate position in order to support my argument, a level between the unit and the whole, that is to say a mesocosmic level, in which I will analyze the way groups of people work as a middle ground that mirrors both the person and totality.

1.1: Microcosm

The first step to understand the fractal structure of the world in intercultural terms would be to examine individuals that represent a defined culture, which unfolds through externalized relationships, but is simultaneously internalized, for it is experienced within. A person is the topos where heterogeneous elements of cultural phenomena meet and collide, a process that intensifies more and more as the globalization of the world progresses questioning well established ideas of identity, hierarchy and otherness. The whole belief

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system, which functions as the stepping stone of the idiosyncratic expression of the Self, is ironically a plethoric puzzle of different stimuli that one is exposed to from the beginning of one’s life. Who can claim an ontogenetic origin of culture, when spatial and chronological components determine to a great extent one’s mannerism? Common characteristics sporadically spread around the globe lighten the interrelation between phenomenally isolated parties and prove that transculturation is an ongoing process, which interweaves different cultures together in a very complicated, multilateral way.

In the documentary Samsara, the individual and its uniqueness are in the foreground. A Balinese dancer (pic10), a Himba tribeswoman (pic11), a Chinese worker in food industry (pic12), a Japanese geisha (pic13), a disfigured United States army veteran (pic14); powerful portraits of people from around the world compose the mosaic of a diverse yet interlinked mankind. According to Ron Fricke, “The whole idea of the portraits was that they were set up on the King Tut death-mask in the beginning (pic15); his stare coming at you from eternity, you could say. We tried to make that a connection to all the other subjects we did portraits of - they're connected to that stare, that soul in all of us. It's like really good still photography; you get an essence of who is inside that skin’’ (San Diego Reader). All these people represent different cultural, ethnic, political, economic, social statuses, spaces and locations, but at the same time they are part of a larger interrelation that cannot be overlooked as it is vital in the process of the self-determination. A closer look to the portrait of the tribesman holding a gun unfolds the links between the Western and the indigenous, the superior and the marginalized, the “humanitas” and the “anthropos”2_{. This hybridity in the very core of the individual, that} symbolizes the microcosm in a subatomic representation of culture, accentuates the fractal structure of the whole world starting from a ground level.

2 Walter Mignolo uses these two terms to make a distinction between the western-centered theo- and ego- colonialism and the marginalized geo- body decolonialism. (81)

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The very interrelation between the individual cultural units, is what defines them. I myself was able to relate with some of the portraits, while simultaneously recognizing the Other in the faces of those who are different to me, and this is a process equally important for one’s self-determination. I know who I am and who I am not and this distinction is feasible only because there is someone different from whom this cognition derives. In this sense, one can never truly and fully know oneself unless there is a dissimilar point of reference to be (un)related with and that proves the importance of the Other when it comes to Giving an

Account of Oneself (2005). In this book, Judith Butler clearly states;

The opacity of the subject may be a consequence of its being conceived as a relational being, one whose early or primary relations are not always available to conscious knowledge. Moments of unknowingness about oneself tend to emerge in the context of relations to others, suggesting that these relations call upon primary forms of relationality that are not always available to explicit and reflective thematization. If we are formed in the context of relations that become partially irrecoverable to us, then that opacity seems built into our formation and follows from our status as beings who are formed in relations of dependency. (20)

What is problematic here is the fact that this interconnectedness, even though it is so omnipresent, has become opaque, something that consequently renders the units opaque to themselves as well. Even though people claim to live in a universalized world, it is in our days clearer than ever that any kind of intolerance gains ground. Butler traces the root of this issue to the operation of universality, which doesn’t succeed in responding to cultural particularity and thus in being able to adapt to the social and cultural conditions it applies to (Giving an Account of Oneself 6). Therefore, individuals function as clashing universalities instead of acknowledging the plurality they embody. Even so, as globalization progresses and transmutes, it forces the recognition of the influence that the Other within the Self has. As a

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result, it is easy to regard the individual as the embodiment of the society and culture he/she is part of, for the “I” both conditions and it is conditioned by social norms, which bear a “purely personal or idiosyncratic meaning” (Giving an Account of Oneself 7).

1.2: Mesocosm

One of the primordial human tendencies/needs is to form groups, in which people function both as subjects and objects, as they form them and they are being formed by them. Affiliation and solidarity are the driving forces of coalition, which, nonetheless, automatically entails division, intolerance and “othering” in related contexts. A group, regardless of its magnitude in both size and importance, is the reflection of the Self and the way it is “self-perceived” but at the same time it is a determinant element in the constant renegotiation of selfness. This dynamic between the unit and the collective is the de-focalizing point as we progressively move from the microcosm to the macrocosm of the fractal world, a space in-between those two viewpoints; a mesocosm. A group of people - as one person himself/herself – is an autonomous, self-determined unit that is consolidated through cultural, ethnic, political, economic, institutional and/or social practices but at the same time is in a ceaseless connection with more extensive phenomena occurring in global scale.

It is this very middle position that renders groups very interesting to focus on separately and Samsara paves the way for such gaze due to the fact that it depicts quite vividly conjoined human activities. Uniformity is all-pervading in the documentary; military parades (pic16), shaolin fighters (picpic17), prisoners who perform a dancing routine under the surveillance of the guards (pic18), and millions of people praying simultaneously (pic19) are powerful images that evince division in the name of some hierarchical order. The synchronized moves of those images render homogeneity a symbol of a fragmented glocality3

3 Ulrich Beck’s belief that globalization is about localization as well in what he envisions as “rooted cosmopolitanism” (19)

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in a world where uniqueness is misinterpret as superiority and any attempt of fruitful unification fails due to epistemic friction. Samsara is a product of our culture being at that turning point when the shortcomings of it are the outcome and the driving force alike of radical change in human consciousness and perception of the world. Samsara is a “contrived baroque disturbance” (Glissant, Poetics 79) because it suggests a divergence from today’s intolerant stance towards heterogeneity through imagery that illustrates how everything is interconnected in a very fluid, unforced manner.

Thus, the documentary both illustrates what can be characterized as problematic in terms of separation and confliction between groups of people, and triggers thinking upon what humans have done wrong and how this ailing situation could be healed – if that is still possible. It portraits all kinds of discrimination and exploitation caused by western-rooted dualisms - “self-other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/ partial, God/man” - which, according to Donna Haraway, “have all been systematic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of color, nature, workers, animals – in short, domination of all constituted as others, whose tasks is to mirror the self” (Cyborg 177) . Imagery of the largest sex complex in the world in Thailand (pic20), poor colored people on the streets of Ghana (pic21), Indonesian mine workers (pic2) and Chinese workers of food industry in enormous factories where millions of animals are slaughtered (pic22), bring the viewer closer to the harsh reality, where “[i]dentities seem contradictory, partial and strategic” (Haraway, Cyborg 155).

What people perceive as “us” is arbitrary and pre-determined by externally imposed criteria. The whole idea of collectivity/exclusion is based on the formation of phenomenally homogeneous groups, which are to a great extent imagined. For instance, Benedict Anderson defines nation as “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited

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and sovereign” (6). Nations are imagined because the members will never know all of their other fellow-members, but even so there is this sense of communion between them; they are limited because they have boundaries that divide them from other nations; they are sovereign because of the freedom emerging from the tailspin of the divinely-ordained hierarchical dynastic era before the Enlightenment and the Revolution; and they are communities because they are conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship (6-7). I personally prefer the extended adaptation of Anderson’s imagined communities to imagined worlds by Appadurai on the grounds that it is broader; “the multiple worlds which are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe” (Disjuncture and

Difference 296). This description of nations is very illuminating and applicable to any other

type of polarization that leads to group formation. Patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism are what Haraway points out as the origins of gender, race and class consciousness (Cyborg 155). So this acute consciousness of exclusion, as she describes it, is the product of a very specific cultural framework, namely the western civilization, which happened to become established as the norm, and it is now more obvious than ever that this unilateralism and its aftermath is a horribly invalid illusion.

The cyborg world that Haraway suggests is what Samsara brews as well, that is to say “[t]he relationships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination” (Cyborg 151). As she stresses;

[…] a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. (Cyborg 154)

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So, only when the privileged position of any group is lost, will people be able to grasp plurality and recognize it within their own frames. Since people are and they know, according to Haraway, that they are cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras (Cyborg 177), there is nothing left but to embrace this multi-identity that emerges anew. Samsara is a piece of art that contributes to this whole new perspective with its imagery imprinting how humanity has done the worst but it is capable for the best.

1.3: Macrocosm

One could see the world as an impartial observer by gaining a more holistic perspective on the oneness that resonates throughout the planet despite of the spatiotemporal occurrence of disintegration. The whole world again, just like individuals in a micro-level and groups in a meso-level, is a unified cluster of divergent parts, whose interconnection seems to be unshaken, for even when the flow brakes, it is always healed. A fractal world is in a sense a rhizomorphous world where “all individuals are interchangeable, defined only by their state at a given moment–such that the local operations are coordinated and the final, global result synchronized without a central agency” (Deleuze and Guattari 17). Deleuze and

Guattari developed the rhizome theory, a concept that originates from botany, in which rhizome is defined as “an elongated, usually horizontal, subterranean stem which sends out roots and leafy shoots at intervals along its length.” (OED). “Their rhizome is [a] non-hierarchical, heterogeneous, multiplicitous, and acentered” (Gartler) way of perception, interpretation and representation. It is not hierarchy that matters but the interrelation between parties, no matter if they are equal or not. The portraits of people around the world in

Samsara certainly reflect a non-hierarchical, heterogeneous multiplicity. Regardless of their

culture, ethnicity, religion, economic or social status, they are all harmonized with the flow of the film, which seems to equilibrate them, and in this way this sense of oneness and

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interconnectedness resonates beautifully. Even when this flow brakes, “when you see animals in cages (pic23) and people in prison (pic24) and walls that divide religions (pic25) and dolls that replicate humans (pic26)” or the Transfiguration performance which is about “the shadow side” (and I will analyze extensively in the third chapter) , there is always a catharsis that restores and reconnects this lost unity. This is exactly how the rhizome works as well; in correlation to Mark Gartler, “[a]lthough a rhizome can be broken or injured in one location, it will merely form a new line, a new connection that will emerge elsewhere”. As a result, it can be presumed that all of the four characteristics – the principle of connection, heterogeneity,

multiplicity and asignifying rupture (Deleuze and Guattari 7-9) - which the two theorists

attribute to the rhizome, are brilliantly illustrated in Samsara, which has a rhizomatic structure itself but at the same time mirrors the rhizomatic structure of the world.

This macroscopic view of the multipart world can also be related to Glissant’s envision of the Tout-monde; “Tout-monde is the order that can be drawn out of this chaos, a unifying perspective, a totalizing vision” (Traité du monde 22). For Glissant Tout-monde is an insight into the world, a profound perspective upon a situation that people are “simultaneously aware of and awash in” (Prieto 115). In order to grasp the interrelation that links everything and everybody on this planet, analogy is used to highlight “the larger webs of relation [of these] analogous phenomena [occurring] elsewhere in the world” (Prieto 116). This is to a great extent the way in which images are presented in Samsara; the viewer grasps these “larger webs of relation” by watching the mandala symbols dominant in every religion –Tibetan monastery (pic27), catholic church (pic28), mosque (pic29) - possession of weapons by a typical American family (pic8) and at the same time by tribes in Namibia (pic7), parental affection from a white man covered with tattoos (pic30), a tribeswoman in Africa (pic31), a father in Paradisopolis favela in Sao Paolo (pic32) to an African woman in slums (pic33). These repetitive, analogical patterns occurring in various places around the world do

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trigger a renegotiation with belief systems about the Self, the Other and their relatedness. As Eric Prieto explains, “[o]nce acquired, this analogical habit can have profound effects on the way individuals view their local environment, fundamentally altering their sense of self and place” (116). When everything one’s being consists of – habits, emotions, weaknesses, capabilities, beliefs - suddenly ceases to appear as unique as hitherto believed, this can be the first step towards embracing otherness hence altering self-perspective for the espousal of a more intolerant stance.

It’s not easy to imprint the complicity of the occurrence of these events that exemplify the chaotic structure of this world. But “this work of putting distant places together turns the chaos of the world of immediate experience into something cognizable, something that makes sense” (Prieto 117). If Glissants’s Tout-monde is a holistic vision of order that emerges from chaos, then by functioning in this way towards this direction, Samsara works as a medium from the ongoing chaos-monde to the actualization of the Tout-monde envision with the ambition being “to reconcile the local and the global, to gain this totalizing perspective but without losing track of the particulars […] to see individuals as even as we consider them within this larger global context” (Prieto 117).

According to Prieto, “The challenge of Tout-monde […] is to represent individual events in ways that highlight their participation in this large, global scheme, to find a language of representation able to capture simultaneously the relatedness and the uniqueness of every individual” (119). Samsara’s fractal illustration of the microcosm, mesocosm and macrocosm of human behavior and its aftermath can be used as the kaleidoscope for the contemplation of Tout-monde. In this way, “chaos is not chaotic” (Glissant, Poetics 94), which means that “it is not ungoverned by any standard or meaning” (Desilets) and that can be reflected to Samsara’s writer Mark Magidson’s statement about the themes presented in the documentary; “it’s not something that you would judge as good or bad [it’s more about

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focusing on that it] is happening in a very large, complex scale” (TheLip TV). Conforming to Glissant, “The aesthetics of the chaos-monde embraces all the elements and forms of expression of this totally within us; it is totality’s act and its fluidity, totality’s reflection and agent in motion” (Poetics 94, my italics). For Glissant there is a difference between totality and universality, because totality implies openness, while universality signifies homogenization (Desilets). The brilliance of Samsara is that it succeeds in depicting aspects of homogenization while at the same time resonating this openness that totality is about through the power of flow. In other words, even though the tendency that people have to blend and assimilate is more than obvious in the film, the latter manages to incorporate this behavior to diverse continuity that resonates the oneness in spite of the sporadically occurring division.

The interconnectedness in Samsara can also be related to the use of chaos theory by Glissant and his “hypothesis is that the world today has become quite simply a zone of rapid, unceasing and often violent cultural encounters. In such a context of uncertainty and unpredictability, old symmetries are irrelevant and any attempt at systematic explanation is doomed to failure […]even the tiniest fluctuations in the most remote part of the world are interconnected with disproportionately larger, more important events elsewhere” (Dash 176). Prieto calls it “a theory of interdependence” which means seeing the world as an “interlocking system” (118) and chaos theory is to a great extent related to fractals, as the latter are chaotic systems. An extraordinary progression of imagery that interweaves sporadic events in a chain reaction manner is the following; it begins with the meat industry in a poultry farm in Denmark (pic34) and a pork production facility in China (pic35), the brute reality of how the food people eat is made. Next is the reason behind this massive production of food, which is of course consumerism portrayed by supermarket shopping (pic36) and fast-food devouring in the United States of America (pic37). Thus, the issue of obesity comes to

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the front ground with a shot in a plastic surgeon’s clinic, where the doctor is marking the protruding stomach of a patient (pic38). The marker reappears immediately after used by doll maker (pic39), an image which is followed by the inside of a sex doll factory in Tokyo (pic40), framing in this way beauty and body stereotypes in western society that promote aesthetic surgeries on such a large scale, as well as how far the obsession with “fake” beauty can go. As a result, from phenomenally random and isolated with each other actions, an interrelated system of human activity that is widespread and has social, economic and ethical extensions emerges.

As stated by Prieto, “Chaos theory emphasizes a more properly global awareness, an intuition of the extent to which distant places and events impinge on my understanding of the immediate environment” (115). Samsara imprints in one’s consciousness the codependence between what is perceived as reality with miscellaneous factors that determine it, which one is usually not aware of. The inability to realize the vastness and multiplicity of this phenomenon does not appear to be a problem, as Prieto noted; “The principle of interrelatedness remind[s] us that we do not have to be able to enumerate every individual in the world or to hold in mind every detail of every situation at every minute to have a feel, however obscure, for the totality. At some intuitive level we feel the effects of all this diversity on us, whether we are consciously aware of it or not” (118-119). In such way, the depiction of the concatenation of events happening in distant places around the word, renders

Samsara the locus where Glissant’s interpretation of fractal chaos theory is implemented in

practice.

Through this totalizing vision, the macroscosm shrinks into smaller aggregates and units, upon which it mirrors in a chaotically harmonic manner. Any deviation or separatism are natural parts of the rhizomatic manifestation of the world’s interconnectedness, which is

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self-restored and thus omnipresent despite its circumstantial opacity. Everything is connected to everything else; everything is interrelated to the Other.

CHAPTER 2: THE EXTERNAL AND THE INTERNAL

OTHER

The fractal morphology of the world suggested in the first chapter, leads to the forceful emergence of one key factor; the role of the Other in the self-determination process as well as the formation of one’s worldview in general. Because when the Self is reflected in patterns, a whole system of inclusive oppositions4_{is created and fueled by the interrelation}

and interaction with the Other. In our diverse yet intolerable world, otherness is a burning issue that requires prudent handling as it arises on many levels, from inner conflict to interethnic antagonism. Because of this complex and multilateral occurrence, bridging the gap between the Self and the Other is a courageous endeavor that requires constant questioning and rethinking upon one’s identity in order to disclose the micro- and macroscopic interconnection between units and their oneness. In this chapter, I would like to take a closer look to the different types of otherness and the way they are presented in

Samsara. As theoretical tool to conceptualize otherness and demarcate its forms of

manifestations, I will use Ulrich Beck’s distinction of otherness between external and internal;

Externally it means:

(a) including the otherness of nature;

4 According to Ulrich Beck’s methodological cosmopolitanism, the latter “rejects the either-or principle and assembles the this-as-well-as-that principle – like ‘cosmopolitan patriots’[…]. What the ‘cosmo-logic’ signifies is its thinking and living in terms of inclusive oppositions […] and rejecting the logic of exclusive oppositions, which characterizes methodological nationalism and first modernity sociology”. (19)

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(b) including the otherness of other civilizations and modernities; and (c) including the otherness of future;

internally it means:

(d) including the otherness of the object; and

(e) overcoming the (state) mastery of (scientific, linear) rationalization. (18)

Dualism, the legacy of the Enlightenment that still dominates the western mindset, has created an unfortunate division between the Self and the Other that resonates in every aspect of modern life and is deeply rooted, thus challenging to dissolve. Following Beck’s distinction I will deconstruct five basic dualisms in order to reveal the nevertheless omnipresent Other by demonstrating how Samsara breaks the wall between nature and

culture, civilized and primitive, past/present and future, subject and object, rationalism and imagination. Hence lending weight to the role of the Other can cultivate the renegotiation of

one’s identity.

2.1: The External Other

Nature, other civilizations and modernities as well as the future are not objects that

can be fully understood, but rather inherently hyper-objects5_{exactly because of their}

“ungraspability”. By regarding them as External Others, that is to say what people invariably consider as something they are not, something that their Selves are differentiated from and thus they can be used and abused, I intend to upgrade them into subjects so they could be symmetrically taken into account as one’s own existence, part of one’s own selfness. Because division is both the cause and the prerequisite of binaries and only their dialysis can restore oneness through inclusion.

5 I am using Timothy Morton’s term (not necessarily in strict ecological context) in order to highlight that the notions I am referring to are too large and indefinite to be grasped due to their spatiotemporal vagueness.

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2.1.1: The otherness of nature. In Samsara the imagery of nature is very dynamic.

From deserts to waterfalls, from volcanos to canyons, the film offers the chance to see many planet’s locations that are thrillingly powerful (pic41-44). The most vibrant images are those of nature and human activity merging together, some of which depict the predominance of nature that makes any effort of man to overrule it seem impotent, while other suggest a smooth coexistence of man and nature. Kolmanskop in Namibia, a formely thriving place with diamond mines, is now a ghost town full of sand in the abandoned houses (pic45). The aftermath of the hurricane Katrina are shocking as the director guides us through ruins that used to be houses, supermarkets, libraries, schools and churches (pic46-50). I find quite ironic the shot of some books, one of which is called “The village that Allah forgot” and the one with many trophies in a room completely wrecked (pic51-52). They seem to portend that the war humans have declared against nature has prescribed winner and loser. On the other hand, the Bagan temples in Myanmar (pic53) give a sense of harmony as the city’s own existence links antiquity to modern times in a continuum of spiritual connection to the land. The Bandiagara Escarpment in Mali is a 500 meter sandstone cliff where thousands of Dogon people live in accordance with the natural environment as cliff and village appear to be one (pic54). Same goes for Petra in Jordan, the carved in stone ancient city (pic55), whose own name means “rock” in Greek, and exemplifies both the feasibility and the elegance of humanity as part of nature instead of its conqueror.

In The Natural Contract (1992), Serres expresses his concern about nature being forgotten by those who share power nowadays (3). All people want is to master and possess, as domination and appropriation is the philosophy hidden beneath industrial enterprise and science that nonetheless claim to be impartial (5). This stance, he advocates, will ultimately force people to choose between their ongoing parasitic activity in the expense of the planet and every living being on it that will lead to death, and altering to reciprocity with man giving

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to nature as much as it does that will lead to harmonic symbiosis (7-11). In order to bring order and balance between humans and the planet, in comparison to a social contract that marshals the relations between humans, he suggests a natural contract, by which he means:

[…]first the precisely metaphysical recognition by each collectivity that it lives and works in the same global world as all the others; not only each political collective associated by a social contract, but also every kind of collective: military, commercial, religious, and industrial associated by a contract of law, but also the expert collective associated by the scientific contract. I call this natural contract metaphysical because it goes beyond the usual limits of diverse local specializations and, in particular, physics. It is as global as the social contract and makes it, in some way, become history. (17)

An equilibrium between law and science could result in a jointly revised act on the behalf of man, who will view nature as subject instead of object, for it can never be fully grasped. As Barry Commoner’s first low of ecology points, “everything is connected to everything else” (33) and unless this interconnection is acknowledged, humans will never understand that their culture is inextricably related to nature and they will always have the “conventional sense that the problem is out there, distinct from one’s self [instead of accepting] that one’s very self is substantially interconnected with the world” (Alaimo 561). Therefore, as Serres stresses, “…we must learn and teach the love of the world, or of our Earth, that from now on we can contemplate as a whole” (20) and I believe this is the first step towards deconstructing the nature/culture binary. Samsara’s contribution to this dissolution is twofold; on the one hand images of environmental destruction stress that people treat nature like an object they think they can exploit but such stance ironically always turns against them; on the other hand images of harmonic co-existence prove that what Serres

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envisions is indeed feasible because it already exists as a practice and it is only in need of extension.

2.1.2: The otherness of other civilizations and modernities. One of the most

obvious contradictions in the documentary is between the images of western lifestyle and those of indigenous tribes. Highways, skyscrapers, robots, offices, golf fields, indoors ski centers, artificial islands, luxurious hotels, food and gun industries (pic56-65) outline human activity in the western and westernized world, characterized by technological development, bureaucracy and consumerism. In contrast, the imagery of Mursi village in Ethiopia, Dogon village in Mali and Himba village in Namibia (pic66-68), portray people who belong to completely different cultures and thus they seem to represent the notions of strangeness, alterity, primitivism and otherness in general. These shots shown together, one coming after another, indicate the connection between phenomenally contrasting civilizations. The most

powerful imagery that supports such holistic viewpoint is, as mentioned before, parental affection (pic 30-33) or gun possession (pic7-8) on the behalf of people of different cultural load, which loses its weight when it comes to human primitive instincts. In this way, the film manages to promote the idea of interconnectedness and its primordial source.

Even though the dominance of the western civilization is more than obvious, it’s the bad side of it that is prevalent in the documentary, exactly to mirror the imbalance between West and non-west. It seems that the colorful, vibrant images of East are necessary to attune the depressing depiction of the West. The Balinese Tari Legong dancers in Indonesia, the 1000 Hands Goddess dance in China or the Thiksey monastery of Leh in India (pic69-71) work as a counterbalance for skyscrapers, factories, offices and gyms. The former, colorful and artistic, resonate peacefulness and euphoria, whilst the latter, dreary and overcrowded, generate a sense of anxiety and vanity. According to Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, it’s more than obvious that the East and the West are in search of completion and thus they try to annex

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technological advancement and spiritual enhancement respectively (329). He states that “no one culture or civilization is complete in itself, the only way to deal with incompleteness is to radically “dialogize” possibilities of knowledge and cognition, that is, in-mix self-centered perceptions with other-oriented perceptions to actualize a different world, script a different historiography.”(328). With its creators being westerners, Samsara seeks this new enlightenment from the East, as they describe their film as a “guided meditation” (Fricke, TheLipTV). The dialogue between different cultures and modernities that are masterfully interwoven through the power of flow, renders them symmetric and confute the civilized/primitive binary in a very simple yet profound manner.

2.1.3: The otherness of the future. Not only does Samsara link places and cultures

around the globe, but also it interrelates different periods of time,as images from places that represent different periods of time flow and merge. Mount Nemrut National Park in Turkey (pic72), Bagan in Myanmar (pic53), Petra in Jordan (pic55), Wailing Wall in Israel (pic25), Great Pyramids of Giza in Egypt (pic73), Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris (pic74) are some of the insuperable monuments that unify past and present as they are still impressive and great reminders of centuries that have passed. The modern world is also illustrated by contradictory imageries of modern architecture as well as modern slavery, state-of-the-art machinery used in food industry and animal cruelty at the same time, luxurious apartments that border with favelas.

Some of the most stunning images, though, are those which prove that the future is actually here and many of the things hitherto considered as science fiction are already happening as technological progression is staggering in our times. The Palm Islands in Dubai (pic62) are made of artificial land in the shape of palm trees, a great achievement in modern architecture, in the era that man can himself create land, questioning even the God/human binary. Man has even created robots in his own image. In Osaka University in Japan a

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humanoid robot (pic75) is used by its creator, Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, to teach classes from miles away. The resemblance between the robot and the real man is so impressive that mechanical sounds had to be added during this specific shot, so that people can understand that what they see is actually a robot. Also, when the creators of the documentary visited the sex doll factory in Tokyo (pic40), they were impressed by the silicon technology that made doll feel like real skin. With both human mind and human body being so realistically represented by inanimate objects and “machines [being] prosthetic components, friendly selves”, as Haraway puts it, “[w]hy should our bodies end at the skin […]?” (Cyborg 178).

Consequently, by displaying these futuristic imagery, Samara familiarizes the viewer with the unknown and thus usually intimidating future that already unfolds rapidly, and it also develops an almost unforced thoroughfare of the human kind through centuries, making huge leaps of progression look like parts of a natural evolution in time. In this way, humans as carriers of their past/present appear by all means interconnected to the future they are on the threshold of and whose otherness is included in the present moment of this binary deconstruction.

2.2: The Internal Other

The Other within is exposed when not regarded as an object. Imagination can be used as a tool to experiment with alternative versions of the Self. This process itself renegotiates one’s identity along with the outcomes it may entail. The Internal Other is even harder to be grasped in comparison with the External Other because there is no rational access to it. As we move from the outside to the inside, it becomes clearer that Self and Other spring from the same unity.

2.2.1: The otherness of the object. The subject/object binary, namely the relation

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centuries now; from ancient Greek and Indian to 21st_{century philosophers. As David Swartz} noticed, “When stated at a general level, the subjective/objective dichotomy is recognized by most social scientists as one of the enduring metatheoretical dilemmas in the social sciences...”(55). In this section, I will use the Hegelian approach to otherness due to the fact that it applies in Samsara in a surprisingly accurate way. The main reason why I chose to take this big step back in history regarding the theory that I am using in this paper, is because Hegel believed that “the unity is divided within itself” (107) and thus the Self and the Other are both manifestations of that same unity. In such gaze, no matter how chaotically the world seems to function, there is always this oneness that resonates and restores order. This is exactly how the fractal world that I suggest unfolds, which renders a Hegelian approach (even if it is a bit anachronistic) a theoretical bridge between fractals and otherness. More specifically, for Hegel, the Self and the Other are multiple manifestations of unity, and thus alterity is not the equivalent of an absolute, inaccessible and incomprehensible Other, but rather a different reflection of this unity within the general, broad spectrum of existence. In the Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford U Press 1977) he characteristically states: “[…]being-in-itself and being-for-an-other are one and the same[…]self-consciousness is the reflection out of the being of the world of sense and perception, and is essentially the return from otherness[…]the in-itself, or the universal result of the relation of the Understanding to the inwardness of things, is the distinguishing of what is not to be distinguished, or the unity of what is distinguished.” (104-106). By highlighting the invalidity of a self–contradictory distinction between the Self and the Other, and the bias of such division that impedes any compromise between the subject’s and the object’s viewpoint, Hegel renegotiates what is perceived as objectively true (Paidais 4), because what this binary has resulted in is a constant “attempt on the part of each to impose his own subjective point of view on the other and to

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claim for his own subjective point of view the status of being the “true”, the objective, impersonal point of view.” (Pinkard 59)

In the film, the way the subject/object binary is both framed and resolved is impressive. On the one hand, the viewer witnesses the objectification of the Other as a result of the Eurocentric universalism that is generated by the supremacy of the occidental subject. Nature is treated as an object that can be exploited, animals are used as objects to fulfill the imprudent consumerist needs of westerners, and even people of different cultures are regarded as objects that are monitored and compared to the dominant culture. The creators of the documentary are not an exception, with Magidson stating “how fortunate we are here” and “how difficult life is for most people” (trknowles), clearly taking the role of the detached observer of the Other. On the other hand, what they have succeeded in, by the flow of the imagery, is surprisingly the exact opposite; they illustrate the interconnectedness of subject and object despite their division that stems from the occidental mindset, because they offer and almost impartial worldview from above. The shots in the film are the visual implementation of the Hegelian theory of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, that is to say West/self-ness, non-West/other-ness, and unity/one-ness respectively. If “Hegel's holism is relational in the sense that his self-differentiating holism must include both identity and difference” (Paidais 5), then Samsara captures that holism in an exceptional way. It challenges the viewer to realize the significance of the other in the self-determination process, to grasp that “[s]elf-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness” (Hegel 110), and embrace the fact that I am what you are not, but we are one. The latter is an ancient truth that needs to be rediscovered and it is beautifully summarized in one of the oldest Hindu scriptures; “The Absolute Truth is both subject and object, and there is no qualitative difference there... In the relative world the knower is different from the known, but in the Absolute Truth both the knower and the known are one and the same

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thing.” (Bhaktivedanta VedaBase). In this sense Samsara functions as a didactic narrative of otherness that equalize subject and object by highlighting their interconnectedness.

2.2.2: Overcoming the mastery of rationalization. This last type of otherness –

dealing with scientific, linear rationalism - that Beck suggests, is what I translate as the deconstruction of an imagination/rationalism binary and how those two practices, if conjoined, can actually create alternative worldviews. Imagination is the counterbalance of the rationalism that western philosophy, economy, politics and epistemology is based on, a way to overcome the Eurocentric, imperial, colonial, linear way of thinking, which, according to Walter Mignolo, goes back to the 16th_{century when the pontifical sovereignty was} dividing the new found land between the European conquerors (78). Appadurai recognized imagination as a valid social practice. More specifically, in Modernity at Large (1996) he states:

The image, the imagined, the imaginary - these are all terms that direct us to something critical and new in global cultural processes: the imagination as a social practice. No longer mere fantasy […], no longer simple escape […], no longer elite pastime […], and no longer mere contemplation […], the imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labor and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility. [...] The imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order. (31)

This wide spectrum of possibilities that such perspective creates, is based on “global flows [that] occur in and through the growing disjunctures between ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes”, that is to say the move and circulation of people,

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machinery, money, images and ideas (Disjuncture and Difference 301). The very word

scapes indicates fluidity, instability and transformability, but “the real and intricate challenge

is how to imagine one’s reality not in egocentric isolation, but relationally with other imaginings” as Radhakrishnan stresses, and “it is important that people invent their own realities rather than dwell passively and reactively in realities invented by others” (330). He supports Ghosh’s phrase imagine with precision, which incorporates “the freedom to be different, heterogeneous, non-formative, and subjective” and simultaneously “the rigor […] which denotes a certain representational fidelity as well as accountability” (330).

Samsara as a piece of art, is a globally imagined world through the eyes of its

creators. The imagery chosen to be displayed reflects their perception of the world as it is today with all its progressions, patterns and relations. It’s a mediascape that provides information about ethnosapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes throughout the world, as it depicts movement of people, technological and finance diffusion as well as ideas such as sovereignty, freedom or rights. This film is Fricke and Magidson’s imagining with precision by illustrating heterogeneity in the way they perceive it as film makers. It may look as if I have been praising Samsara so far, but this is a point where I am really skeptical about, that is to say the responsibility they are willing to take regarding their viewpoint reflected in their documentary. According to Magidson, “It’s not a value judgment […] It’s not about what’s right or wrong, it’s about how it is now. It’s a snapshot of the current of how things are done.” (In70mm). Regardless of the responsibility they are willing to take about the issues that their documentary addresses, the latter is still an amalgamation of rationalism and imagination; on the one hand it exposes the viewer to realistic and sometimes raw imagery of the world as it is today; on the other hand, it is the product of this world as it is imagined by its creators whilst at the same time it triggers alternative imaginations of the world due to the constant negotiation with otherness. And as this last binary of logic and imagination is being

Otherness and Identity through a Fractal Worldview of Interconnectedness

University of Amsterdam