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Please be advised that this information was generated on 2021-09-29 and may be subject to change. OUTLOOK ON EUROPE ‘SPATIAL PLAY’ AT THE ENDS OF EUROPE: OYAPOCK BRIDGE, AMAZONIA
OLIVIER THOMAS KRAMSCH Nijmegen Centre for Border Research (NCBR), Radboud Universiteit, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected]
Received: March 2014; accepted March 2015
ABSTRACT Drawing on the work of philosopher-semiotician Louis Marin, this contribution to Outlook on Europe reveals the ‘spatial play’ of contending outlooks hovering fitfully over the construction of a bridge at the ‘ends of Europe’, in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, on that very spot where French Guiana and Brazil, the European Union and Mercosul, physically touch one another over a muddy tributary, the Rio Oyapock. The inter-play of visions colliding around the Oyapock bridge, it is argued, illuminates the paradoxes and contradictions of European territorial governance in the globalised time-space of its postcolonial frontiers. In spite of the high geopolitical rhetoric seeking to unite both continents, the peculiar blindness of Europe’s metropolitan gaze vis-a-vis indigenous difference sets the stage for perverse effects of exclusion and disempowerment in and around the site of the bridge itself, extending far into its regional hinterlands. Framed against the backdrop of a long, ‘utopian’ modernity of European imperial expansion and territorial conquest, the ghostly spatial dynamics surrounding the Oyapock River bridge project serve to illuminate wider challenges to the projection of EU influence ‘in the world’. A close examination of similar dynamics elsewhere may help bring into focus the lineaments of a more fully confident and mature postcolonial European border studies.
Key words: spatial play, utopia, French Guiana, Brazil, Oyapock River, European postcolonial border studies
‘THE ENDS OF EUROPE’ the heart of the Amazon rainforest, on that very spot where France and Brazil, the Euro- Do these ‘ends’ denote a temporal, as well as pean Union and Mercosul, physically touch a spatial, limit? Assuming that they do, one is one another across a muddy river, the Rio inevitably led to conjecture on the historical Oyapock. As I argue, the inter-play of visions and geographical conditions of possibility for colliding around the Oyapock bridge illumi- understanding Europe as a limit-object in the nates the paradoxes and contradictions of world. This, I argue, turns us in the direction European territorial governance in the time- of properly utopian narrative, one which seeks spaces of its postcolonial frontier peripheries. to reconcile two contradictory yet overlapping Specifically, it is the peculiar blindness of the modes of ‘seeing’ the frontier spaces of Euro- European metropolitan gaze vis-a-vis indige- pean modernity. In what follows, I trace the nous difference on its overseas frontiers that ‘spatial play’ of this narrative in relation to sets the stage for perverse effects of exclusion the construction of a ‘European’ bridge in and disempowerment in and around the site
Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie – 2016, DOI:10.1111/tesg.12179, Vol. 107, No. 2, pp. 209–213. VC 2016 Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG 210 OLIVIER THOMAS KRAMSCH of the bridge itself, which serves as a privi- [1516]). More’s text, in attempting to recon- leged microcosm for assessing wider chal- cile contradictory political and economic forces lenges to the projection of EU influence ‘in racking the Tudor England of its time, would the world’ (Bialasiewicz 2011; Moisio et al. itself inaugurate a tension between European 2012). It is in this precise sense that the frontier and horizon, totality and infinity, limit Oyapock bridge – ostensibly a spatial medium and transcendence, closure and liberty, pro- and symbolic presupposition for utopian tran- ducing deep and lasting reverberations in our scendence between Europe and one of its lived present. vital external frontiers on the South American For Marin, the very contemporaneity of the continent – demonstrates both the capacity utopianfrontieranditshorizonsisputback for outward radiance as well as the agonised on the agenda since 1989 with the opening limits of European governmental power at a up of the East as a ‘great void’, concomitant time when the EU’s external borders are with Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ and ‘end of being contested with an intensity like at no ideology’ theses. The collapse of the Commu- other time since the end of the Cold War. nist Utopia, according to Marin, ‘allows the The term ‘spatial play’ is derived from the return of Utopia itself in the shape of its first geographically-infused work of philosopher- apparition at the beginning of the sixteenth semiotician Louis Marin (1973, 1993). The centuryinEuropewiththegreatexplorations phrase appeared to him one day as he peered and travels’ (Marin 1993, p. 406). The open- at the city of Chicago from the observation ing of this ‘strange apeiron’intheearlymod- deck of the Sears Roebuck tower. Descending ern period signals at the same time the to ground level, Marin marvelled at two sets of emergence of new terms such as ‘Lisiere,the postcards: one, he reports, ‘recalls the prospect indefinite, horizon’, their semantic network [visitors] have discovered from the top floor of constituting today the ‘chance of Utopia just the building ... the plain stretching away as far as in the past’ (Marin 1993, p. 411). Marin sit- as the eye can see, the others ... the [other] uates the proper subject of Utopia in the place views of the tower from the ground at a dis- of a ‘gap’ produced by the tension between tance’ (Marin 1993, p. 397). For Marin, the the two aforementioned visions, a space where ‘spectator’s eye’, looking down from a domi- ‘the beholding process and the fact or feeling nant position, occupies an altitude so that ‘his to be seen’ would change itself into the place [sic]gaze“collects”aspacethathe“really” of the ‘neutral’ (Marin 1993, p. 404). The totalizes, the plain up to its extreme frontier’ specificity of ‘the neutral’ (le neutre), according (Marin 1993, p. 398). Rather than perceive to the French semiologist, would lie in ‘being these perspectives as antagonistic opposites, neither one nor the other, neither this edge nor Marin suggests we apprehend the two ‘visions the other’ (Marin 1993, p. 410). of the world’ revealed by the postcards as ‘all To understand the epistemological condi- together at the same time and moment of tions of possibility for the ‘return of Utopia’ thinking’; the ‘opposition as such’ would reveal today, Marin argues we must grasp them not for him a visually decisive emblem of the ‘fron- as an iconic or visual representation but as tiers of Utopia’, understood as (1) the frontiers process (‘fiction-practice’; Marin 1973, citing that limit utopia if such frontiers ‘really’ exist, Bloch). Utopia-as-representation always takes and (2) the frontiers that any utopia traces if the form of a map: according to its colour- any utopian is capable of tracing such fron- coded rules of representation, it fixes a loca- tiers. We may pardon Marin’s playfully confus- tion to all journeys, itineraries and voyages: ing syntax. What matters is that from the top ‘[A]ll are potentially present because they are of the Sears tower he read the re-emergence of all there, but implicitly it negates them all’ utopian frontiers in world history as a ‘symp- (Marin 1993, p. 413). In the place of map-as- tom’ defining the end of the 20th century, representation Marin proposes ‘the figure of a whose spatio-temporal horizon would be only projected journey, even it is an imaginary one, the latest iteration of a ‘spatial play’ whose a dreamed one’, one that produces a narrative roots could be located ‘at the very dawn of our that ‘awakens’ space to new loci and practices: modernity’, in Thomas More’s Utopia (2012 the utopian moment and space of the travel
VC 2016 Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG ‘SPATIAL PLAY’ AT THE ENDS OF EUROPE 211 that is also, paradoxically, a limit, a frontier Surinam and French Guiana (Boudoux d’Hau- (Marin 1993, p. 415) To give substance to this tefeuille 2010). moving-map, Marin introduces the figure of According to its creators, Jacques Chirac Raphael, the traveller-narrator of More’s Uto- and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and eager pia,whotravelsfromPortugaltoBrazilwith successors Nicolas Sarkozy and Lula, the Oya- Amerigo Vespucci. For Raphael the Brazilian pock bridge is also intended to serve a more shore represents ‘a minimal space at the limit strategic, geopolitical role, suturing France between what is known and what is unknown’ and Brazil, the European Union and Merco- (Marin 1993, p. 415). Thomas More describes sul, in a partnership whose geo-economic this New World frontier eschatologically, where dimensions far outweigh any merely regional, ‘human abandonment, the desire of traveling, or South American scale. Looking through and the encounter with death merge together’ Marin’s ‘inverted telescope’, we may see that (Marin 1993, p. 415). Raphael, glad to be left through the Oyapock island-bridge construc- on the extreme edge of the world, is less inter- tion, France (and by extension the European ested in continuing his travels than finding a Union) attempts to project itself as a geopol- tomb where he can finally rest. His Brazil is itical actor into that frontier space where the the space of the ‘neutral’, a ‘horizon, this edge colonial metropolitan gaze traditionally of the world [which] joins, onto another edge, imposed itself Sears Roebuck-like on its terri- that of the other world ... that belongs neither toires d’outre mer. Here, once again, Europe to the one nor the other, a gap between the crosses into that visual limit-horizon made interior space that is enclosed by the routes of historically manifest as one of France’s more travels (the terrae cognitae) and the unknown notorious penal archipelagos, including that ‘neutral’ spot where the European Union outer space’ (Marin 1993, p. 416). launches itself into that ‘endless frontier’ that At this afflicted end of More’s modernity, we is outer space via the European space station might well ponder, as did Marin nearly two dec- based in the French Guianese town of ades ago at the height of America’s military and Kourou. We may thus grasp this ‘utopian geo- economic supremacy, what space the imagina- politics’ as an attempt by France to reconcile tion can (or should) create in thinking through the spatio-temporal contradictions inherent the contradictions embodied in the contempo- in once having been a colonial power and rary European horizon, or limit. In a plural, postcolonial motor of European integration, post 9/11 world lacking the singular monstrum now financially downgraded, sitting astride a of the ‘Sears Roebuck tower’, we might ask: continent rudderless and adrift, with rising how have the co-ordinates of Europe’s ‘utopian ex-colonial powers emergent everywhere the frontiers’ changed once its limits seem once eye can see (Benjamin & Godard 1999; and for all to have been exhausted, hedged in French 2014). In this attempted synthesis of by rival geopolitical powers? It may be safe to opposites, we perceive Europe attempting to speculate that if the ‘neutral’ border-crossing maintain, against all odds, some measurable figure of Raphael were alive today, he may be capacity to ‘cognitively map’ the world sitting as a frontier guardian on the Brazilian around itself, drawing upon the energies of side of the recently completed bridge over the its former colonial peripheries to re-assert its river Oyapock, a natural riverine frontier position as a key interlocutor in world affairs. between French Guiana – a French overseas ter- A richly innovative decade examining what in ritory (or D epartement-r egion d’Outre Mer) often geography we may now label as the ‘postcolonial referred to as an ‘island’ on the South Ameri- European border condition’ has revealed that can continent – and Brazil. According to its the ‘process of totalization at work through the engineers, the bridge is meant to connect the beholder’s gaze is ...displaying its practical weak- Brazilian state of Amap atotheFrenchGuia- ness, its cognitive uncertainty, its ontological trou- nese capital Cayenne, forming one link in a ble from its beginning to its end’ (Marin 1993, vaster regional transportation system – ‘la Trans- p. 398; but see also Pickles 1995; Sidaway 2001; guyanaise’ – which should connect Caracas (Ven- Kramsch 2002, 2011; Kuus 2004; Bialasiewicz ezuela) to Macap a (Brazil) by way of Guyana, 2011). ‘Ontological troubles’, indeed, brought
VC 2016 Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG 212 OLIVIER THOMAS KRAMSCH about by the bridge-builder’s blindness to the political historicity, to change and to unex- demands of traditional riverine transport in both pected surprise, as was imagined by Thomas Amap a and French Guiana, for which the bridge Moreatpreciselythatmomentwhenanacci- infrastructure poses a danger for local employ- dental ‘cough’ prevented the main narrator ment dependent on water-borne carriers (Knech- from hearing where, exactly, the island of Uto- tel 2013); an inability to adequately take into pia was to be found (More 2012 [1516], p. 17). consideration the territorial needs of local Palikur indigenous communities, who, con- Acknowledgements fronted by the bridge, associated border controls and heightened military presence, are cut off To Luiza B.’s complicitous smile in New York over from their centuries-old right to transboundary that one word: ‘horizon’. And to Carlos Z., for his hunting areas as well as manioc-producing palm paciencia amaz onica. tree cultivation (Grenand et al. 2006; Z arate Bot ıa 2008); and the difficulties of integrating local REFERENCES democratic input into the bridge’s future control and maintenance, leaving it to am enageurs du terri- BENJAMIN, D. & H. GODARD (1999), Les Outre-mers toire flown in from Paris and Bras ılia (Boudoux Franc¸ais: Des Espaces en Mutation. Paris: Ophrys. d’Hautefeuille 2010; Kramsch 2012). BIALASIEWICZ, L. (2011), Europe in the World: EU The comments of a Brazilian restaurant Geopolitics and the Transformation of European proprietor whose business is located on the Space. Aldershot: Ashgate. French side of the river in St. Georges BOUDOUX D’HAUTEFEUILLE,M.(2010),LaFrontie`re Oyapock epitomises an entire cross-border et ses Echelles: Les Enjeux d’un Pont Trans- community’s dumbfoundedness at the sight frontalier entre la Guyane Franc¸aise et le Bresil. of a still-empty bridge, whose inaugural date Cyberg eo: European Journal of Geography, Espace, remains a mystery: Soci et e, Territoire 514. Available at
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