I
n Brazil, the milieus present themselves as images of conventional locations. They are immediately recognizable to the spectator, and yet their dysfunctionality is more than evident: they are a kind of simulacra of places, which fail to fulfill their conventional employment.Therefore, there remains a chasm between the seeming purpose of each place and the sense of failure and even catastrophe that results from attempts at living and working in each milieu according to its “ordinary”
meaning. As I wish to claim, the locations of Brazil are never available as such, but a difference between two meanings – the real-life and the everyday on the one hand, and the cinematic and imagined on the other – takes place continuously.
For Jacques Derrida, the différance is at the same time a temporal and a structural notion. It includes simultaneously a presence which is always postponed and the place of origin, of khôra, in which the differences in each presence are outlined. The “origin” – the form of things – cannot be full presence. Rather, it exists as a trace, that is, as pure difference which itself does not have any definite place (Derrida 1982, 11–14). The presence of things is therefore characterised by its never being real: as Georges Didi-Huberman says (1992, 157), presence is always put into work, spaced, temporalised and made into traces. The sites in Brazil are like empty forms of places, with no evident relation to their everyday uses. If “form” has designated in earlier theories more or less the object itself, no matter if it really had an immediately recognizable form or not, such an object was still able to give form to other objects by the negative process of inclusion and imprint. In semiotic terms, form has been in relation to something that it is not: it has given a key for recognizing and interpreting other objects – an aspect of familiarity and a definition. According to Didi-Huberman, this semiotic notion of form is based on relations between things. Yet already in the Greek vocabulary associated with “form”, its scope soon became more complex. In Derrida’s theories, this development has come to its extreme, form being no longer an opposite of “content” or “matter” (ibid., 156–157).
The places featured in Brazil remind us of well-known types of locations.
As such, they all have a function which brings forward the plot of the film.
Yet, as they are presented, these environments are more or less meaningless and non-functional with respect to how they are conceived in the everyday life. As places, they are highly stylized and the spectator’s imagination takes part in completing their role and signification in the course of the film. This is what changes their nature from realistic to artistic.
On such a basis, the locations of Brazil are like empty signs; they are places without place, but still with a space and time of their own. In his essay “Art and Space”, Martin Heidegger emphasizes the ontological interlacement of space and time. He calls this Einräumung, “making-room”, while Derrida has the notions of différance and khôra (Heidegger 1973, 3–8;
Derrida 1982, 3–27; Derrida 1993a). As I propose, both the Heideggerian
“making-room” and the Derridean khôra imply a differing movement, which makes them convergent from this perspective.
Derrida, as well as Heidegger, reject the notion of space as a homo-geneous, geometrically determinable expanse: différance and Einräumung must be termed temporalisation at once as they are considered spatiality.
Heidegger gives an account of making-room and the yielding of places in art, space and their intertwining. In “Art and Space”, sculpture, as the embodiment of places, is his primary example of art (Heidegger 1973, 7).
Derrida, in turn, refers to différance as a non-place, a place of different relations, or constant differing and deferring movement. In both Derrida and Heidegger, these notions involving the interplay between time and space are connected with art.
Derrida’s concept of khôra does not mean a place (lieu) in a general sense, but it refers to an abysmal chiasm of time and space. Plato’s Timaeus serves as a point of origin for Derrida’s thinking of khôra. It is neither sensible nor intelligible, but belongs to a “third kind”, triton genos. Yet khôra, which is neither being nor nonbeing, is itself a placeless place, an abysmal gap between all oppositions (Derrida 1993a, 46–47).7 Such place remains without identity.
7 The khôra appears as “invisible” and is without a “sensuous” form. Thus, the khôra is an interval and a space between things, their material substratum. Plato, Timaeus, 48e4, 52a; cf.
Derrida 1993a, 15ff.
In this state of affairs, presence, such as the presence of our idea of an office building or a city, is characterised by its never being real:
presence is always put into work, spaced, temporalised and made into traces (Didi-Huberman 1992, 157). For this reason, khôra is also beyond logos: only belonging to a place would grant it the truth of logos (Derrida 1993a, 57). Derrida is thus giving a figure to an aesthetics in which the form of a thing, as soon as it exists, is already reproduced, with no other origin than the endless chain of images. The origin or the model is an abyss; each production is reproduction and original repetition. The work’s fate is to exist à part: separately from everything else (Roelens 2000, 99).8
In the essay “Art and Space”, Heidegger seeks a thinking of space that differs from the traditional conceptions of physical and technical space. In addition to only one kind of “objective cosmic space”, he inquires whether there could be other kinds of space as well, and not only “subjectively conditioned prefigurations and modifications” of the scientifically determined space. He contends that art is often held to be such a space, but instead of this, he is still seeking something else, not derivable from the physical, calculable expanse.9
For Heidegger, one has not yet determined in what way space reigns throughout the work of art. What space as space would be, and in what way space is, are his questions. Heidegger’s key to investigating these is the notion of Räumen: clearing-away or clearing-space, with the intensions “to clear out”
and “to free from wilderness”, to bring forth the “free” or “the openness for man’s dwelling”. Räumen implies thus the release of places and bringing forth of a locality, as time spatialises space, or provides space (Heidegger 1973, 5).
In spatialisation, time and space belong together to make “space space by filling it up”, a notion that Heidegger already developed in Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) (1999, 134, 183f). Making-room prepares for things
8 To the figure of the separateness and non-reciprocal existence of the work of art, it is possible to see a point of comparison in Derrida’s notion of spectrality, which refers to the presence of absence – namely, the fact that a thing may be present to our thought and memory, although it is absent from us in any concrete sense. The idea of spectrality is part of Derrida’s theory of film and photography. See Derrida 1994; Derrida and Stiegler 2002.
9 This idea links “Art and Space” to the over 30 years earlier Origin of the Work of Art.
the possibility to belong to their relevant “whither” and, out of this, to each other – in this twofold making-room happens the yielding of place. Thus, for Heidegger, “Place always opens a region in which it gathers the things in their belonging together” (Heidegger 1973, 6).
Derrida’s khôra means pure space of differing, a place in which any relations between things and meanings are born. Therefore, the khôra opens up placeless place. To put into question the notion of pure, measurable space, both Derrida and Heidegger have introduced the thought of infinite divisibility and production of places. While Heidegger’s Einräumung refers to releasing places, I argue, however, that Derrida’s khôra is not a spatial notion as such, nor does it belong to the inside or the outside of any signification.
Rather, the khôra appears to be their very condition, an invisible limit between things that makes space: it is the withdrawal [retrait] or the eclipse of appearing, the differential inappearance (Derrida 1993b, 53). The limit between the realistic presentation of places and their surreal cinematic renderings is what I understand to be at stake in Brazil.
In both deconstructive theory of architecture and the film Brazil there appears a notion of places as structures that are not concerned with values and purposes only, but which, even in their dysfunctionality, exist to fulfil a certain objective in the framework of either art or living. As Derrida states, “You can’t (or you shouldn’t) simply dismiss those values of dwelling, functionality, beauty and so on. You have to construct, so to speak, a new space and a new form, to shape a new way of building in which those motifs or values are reinscribed, having meanwhile lost their external hegemony”
(Derrida 1989, 72). As I suggest, spatialisation and difference are the ways in which places are born in Brazil. They are lacking a stable essence;
rather, the action, however out of place, gives them an identity in the film, although this identity is only local and ephemeral and dependent on each context. The unrealistic, even surreal, attributes given to each environment are thus different from our everyday ideas of a workplace or a department store, and dependent on the very context that they are surrounded by in each scene. Yet, despite their fictive nature and unrealistic features, they are recognizable enough to arouse an ominous feeling of familiarity in the viewer: if our world is not yet quite like this, will it be so one day?