Tarkovskys Terrain Vague: Nomadic Subjectivity and Interspecies Dialog inSolaris and Stalker

The notion of the terrain vague as an interstitial space where the possibilities of the virtual have freedom to manifest has been explored by those curious about the power of alterity to affect change, from architect Ignacio de Sol-Morales to cyber-punk guru William Gibson. The terrain vague is a no-persons land, or more poetically, a wasteland, the very decay of which holds promise for affective encounter that could change paradigms for thinking and therefore being and relating. In the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, the wasted or unevolved landscape becomes not only an abject space of virtuality, but a character with its own nomadic identity, shifting and changing as it interacts situationally with other, human nomadic subjects. A question then arises around how one might see this interaction, one that is both bizarre and unfamiliar, as generative, rather than merely terrifying or in need of rectification: is it possible to understand subjectivity in terms of uncertainty without harboring resentment or needing to retreat into a normative, solution-oriented fixity? The term nomadic subjectivity, articulated by Rosi Braidotti in her 1994 book of the same title, describes a theoretical figuration for contemporary subjectivity that involves the Deleuzian notion of nomadism, or a succession of translations, of displacements, of adaptations to changing conditions (Braidotti, 1994:1). Conceptualizing praxis as well as an idea of the nomad, Braidotti evokes an aesthetic style engaged with the solitude of empty spaces where the traffic jam of meanings waiting for admission at the city gates (15) is evaded and thereby radicalized. She is primarily focused on literature and cinema specifically categorized as feminist, but I would like to offer Tarkovskys abundant and saturated aesthetic approaches to the wasted, liminal space of the nomadic as a vision that allows for shifts in identity, cognitions, and epistemes. By navigating the unknown with the logics of madness, faulty memory, and post-war trauma, Tarkovsky explores a radical shift in understanding that necessitates refiguring knowledge of society, the self, and their shared relations in terms of interspecies interactions that occur most readily among nomads drifting through or bumping around in the wasteland. While Braidottis discussion of nomadic subjectivity is limited to what she considers the central question in feminist theory: how to reassemble a vision of female subjectivity after the certainties of gender dualism have collapsed (99), this paper explores the ways in which nomadic subjectivity is not necessarily limited by species-being, let alone gender/sexed identity. Further, it will connect the idea of nomadic subjectivity with the potentiality of interstitial space offers when it is dealt with on its own terms and not forced into normative productivity but where it is considered in terms of what Heidegger calls the open space of destining (25). This paper attempts a nomadic movement through the territory of the wasteland via the aesthetic unfolding that occurs in Tarkovskys cinematic vision, where interspecies nomads gaze in wonder from a space of liminality; because the concepts of nomadism and wasteland relate in terms of the generative potential of alienation and loss, marginalization and madness, the movement will be fluid and perhaps nauseating. This dense exchange of ideas, images, and characters with hopefully iterate how Tarkovskys nomadic movement through the horrifying, the destroyed, and the wondrous by dismantling the known, insisting on the indefinite, and evoking and exchange with nonhuman life can unfold how freakishly, alarmingly familiar is the monstrous. Nomads in the Wasteland

Tarkofskys nomadic subjects in Solaris and Stalkerare situated in a future wasteland, either a decaying space station hovering over a planet conscious enough to wonder about itself in relation to its visitors, or a shattered industrial landscape that is able to reconfigure itself from moment to moment activated as its human guests move through it. These wasted spaces bear the marks of alien encounter and evoke the alien in the human, blurring the boundaries between the self and the monstrous and generating a space that engages the conditions of transformation, a creative activity that is relational and has no focused end. Because they begin to confound unified identifiers concerning species, personality, and motivation, these spaces create a kind of intensity that catalyzes a process of change and movement from the universal, familiar, and classifiable to the shocking, multiple, and destabilized. This is a space of pure potentiality where what can be is not limited to what is already available and understood. In this space, both the human subjects and the landscape subjects begin to experience a porosity of identity, an incorporation into the subjectivity of the other where fragmentation, uncertainty, and relativity in emphatic proximity (Braidotti 5) are the terms of the encounter. This particular kind of encounter can render closed and stagnate systems of understanding, informed by oppositional ideology, into generative experiences of becoming and relationality that move without cease and take us toward an understanding of ourselves as post-human. In both films, Tarkovsky lingers on a landscape saturated with color, moving in the wind, or flowing in abstraction and has it make repeated attempts to contact, caress, and speak to the human characters. In Solaris the planet takes physical form by materializing the space station occupants dreams, desires, and fears. So we see strange crea tures and long-dead wives or mothers appearing again and again, despite repeated attempts to get rid of them. They are actual manifestations of the flowing, roiling planet over which the station floats. For the Stalker, the Zone has a given physical form, namely a sector that has been transformed outside the laws of physics and which manifests as a landscape that shifts, runs, and floats in the forms of long grasses, gripping vines, dogs, and spores. The human encounters with these uncertain manifestations is frightening, disorienting and even insane; still in the Tarkovskinian universe [and in the nomadic zone] we must understand that the mad maintain an advantage over the sane (Halligan 54). What seems irrational, ugly, loathsome, or frightening is actually filled with potential if only a different approach to the conditions of being can emerge. This unhinged logic, a rationale that is not normal, belonging to the wasted landscape and our interaction with it, is able to move our understanding away from a notion of productivity that is governed by market-related concerns and into one that moves in many directions at once, can accommodate various forms of being, and understands itself only in relation to movement and change. Decrepit and partially dismantled, the space station in Solaris is reminiscent of the rounded and rotating interstellar transportation ship of Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey, released four years earlier and of which Tarkovsky was highly critical. The Solaris station is also high tech and round-walled and white and minimal, but wires are torn from casings, drawers are dangling from slots, and many large HAL-like components are covered with plastic sheeting, a trope that begins to haunt Kelvin as his memories become embodied and unclearly differentiated from what he believes to be reality. This first wasteland, it becomes clear, is a result of the disruption engaging with Solaris has provided for the men on the station. Manifesting itself in their nightmares, the planets interest in them ha s mainly resulted in an insupportable unhinging of their understanding of themselves. They are driven to what they consider madness and it kills them. This is not through malice on the part of the planet though. It seems only to seek a way to connect with the other life forms it sees, entering by the route they offer: their neural pathways and the trails of their memories.

In Stalker, the wasteland hovers as a space of potential like no other: destruction is likely but redemption is possible and the actualization of the unknown and terrifying virtual may change things in a way that is at the very least, interesting. Entering The Zone is dangerous but without it there is no possibility for finding what is desired most: namely that which one fears most but also a kind of unearthing of the nature of dreams, the complexities of desire, and the faultiness of memory. In these achingly beautiful wastelands, only wonder and freefloating belief in the unknown can navigate the disintegration of all that once seemed rational. This allows, again, for an engagement with the horrifics of the absurd and the psychotic in the direction of opening up a variety of previously unknown ontological orientations. The vague in Tarkovsky is not ambiguous, however, in order to force God or god-thoughts onto the fractured space of the wasteland. It is not purposely obtuse or something through which one may fast forward. It is not mean or parsimonious or merely mad. It is in fact purposeful and intentional. It allows for the possibility of moving beyond the boundaries that bind the subject to oppressive regimes of the mind, the socius, and the material, allowing for the real possibility of a range of shift in awareness and with it a different type of engagement with what has for so long been considered the other. Interspecies Engagement of Nomadic Subjects In her book Metamorphosis, Rosi Braidotti seeks new styles or figurations for the non unitary or nomadic subject (2002: 172). In this search, she discusses at length the notion of the monstrous, a figuration that grapples with representations of the otherness within: the monster [that] dwells in your embodied self and may burst out any minute into unexpected and definitely unwanted mutations (201). She desires that we extend our understanding of this figuration from the merely frightful and acquire a flair for complicating the issues (210) as developing porous boundaries between what is considered normal and what is named as monstrous can provide new ethical models for navigating the constant flux of the nomadic wasteland. The key problematic of this proposal is in coming to grips with the fact that subjectivity must become something that is practically nothing; it must be a construct that never settles into fixed categories whereby it can be articulated and grasped. It must be at once stable and transient, capable and insubstantial, enveloping and permeable. So the nomadic monstrous subject, if one is to define it at all, cannot be limited to the descriptors as Braidotti employs later in her text: a woman of color, a disenfranchised language learner, an urban homosexual. It must rather be a space that is eventually occupied by anyone hoping to find escape from homogeneity, oppression, and the spectacular banality of a normative subject whose painful venue is that of contemporaneous global capitalism. Tarkovsky ventures an interesting foray into understanding this becoming the nomadic monster where he insists on an agency for non-human characters that is both irresistible and terrifying to his human characters. In Stalker, the Zone acts with a mad agency normally not attributed to an environment; it engages the human characters, by reconfiguring the terrain comprising its material body and by caressing and infiltrating those it desires, a situation that has possibly affected Stalkers DNA as exhibited in the strangeness of his daughter Monkey. The Zone eventually exceeds the boundaries between itself as landscape and experiences other manifestations which can leave the previously clearly marked borders of its territory (e.g., the dog or the spores that play with Monkey in the closing sequence of the film.) It is not necessarily unfriendly as an interlocutor although it is dangerous, as Stalker repeatedly informs his seekers. They believe they must tread carefully because the Zone is monstrous, but we find they have much more to fear in their

own psychic instability. The self-identified subjects named Professor and Writer, in relation to the unpredictability of the landscape character with which they find themselves engaging, are constantly undermined in their efforts to gain ideological footing as previous definitions and intentions do not carry the same, known meanings. This results in frustration for the characters because they seek fulfillment of desire, but unfortunately their desire is too limited by ideologies that inform the sepia-toned apocalyptic village of their daily lives. They have no idea how to meet the monster on his own turf and thereby recognize the monster in themselves. Following this notion, if we consider Stalkers physical interludes with the Zone, we might see the grizzled, the wasted, and the abandoned as wondrous: we might see how the monster can merge with the man and generate a new life. The first time this happens, Stalker leave the others upon entering the Zone and goes to a private place where he can immerse himself in the body of the other, rolling in tall grass and allowing insects to rove his skin. This kind of intimacy is unexpected in normative representations of landscape, but a slow consideration of this evokes the most immersive experiences of physical touch, mostly remembered directly and not as mere spectacular representations. This is intimacy with something non-normative and non-human. In the dream sequence, for a sustained moment the Zone and Stalker share the combined and refigured view of not only objects but also their signifying potential, their semiotic nomadism. The objects, presented as if part of a scroll, appear under the glass of still water. The scroll of objects and their poetic potential are read from bottom to top. They are displaced from use by the fact of their being cast away; still they are part of the Zones consciousness filtered through or commingled with the dream-vision of Stalker, an understanding that is ultimately modified by the influence of the interaction of one with the other. The commingling is not oppressive, the vision of a dead society injected into Stalkers dreams by the Zone of which Benjamin Halligan speaks (59 -60); rather it is a moment of potential where signification has been shifted and the ambiguous re-rendering of the face of man, Zone, and memory occurs in a manner that is filled with uncultivated wonder. Donna Haraway discusses monstrous companions in her book, When Species Meet: they are messmates at tablepolitical companions[someone with whom one] consort[s], keep[s] company, with sexual and generative connotations always ready to erupt (17). She is speaking not only about her dog, the subject with whom she deals extensively in the book, but about viral, bacterial, and reptilian encounters. She is raising questions about a material semiotic around terms like animal/human, nature/culture, organic/technical, and wild/domestic and how they flatten into mundane differences the kinds that have consequences and demand respect and responserather than rising to sublime and final ends (Haraway 15). Her inquiry involves an involution of interspecies dependency that is, again, situated and thereby relational. In cybernetics, situated relates to the ability of a device to engage in a dynamically changing environment, to sense situations and then change or manipulate them through their actions.[1]Considering the interspecies engagement in terms of situatedness makes for a symbiotic paradigm whereby there are no boundaries of otherness; [w]e have forbidden conversation; we have oral intercourse; we are bound in telling story on story with nothing but the facts (16), whatever those may be. The landscape in Tarkofsky is not a mere frame for human interaction; it has its own desiring machine and it is trying through relationality to connect with the other complex subjects in its field of attention, namely humans. It manifests in human, animal, vegetal,

and mineral form and interacts in ways physically possible for these forms. I have already mention the way that the planet manifests in the form of Hari and how the Zone becomes more directly playful as dandelion spores floating around Monkey. I would like to spend a moment with the dog in Stalker, as a point of discussion for what is partly at stake in a deeply historical embodiment of species commingling. First appearing as a howl as Stalker enters the Zone, a greeting to the pack, a call of connection, the dog is a way for the Zone to vocalize itself to the humans. Uncertain if they actually hear this long and lonesome cry, Writer and Professor look around in wonder: Are we being hailed? Should we be frightened? This is the typical response of humans to alien contact as represented in most films. But Stalker runs to greet the caller, rolling lovingly in the grass as it caresses his body and holds his head like a lover. Later, the dog approaches as Stalker falls to sleep, curling up beside him on the narrow strip of ground, that is at once a surface and a part of its own body. Lying together in this manner, the Zone is able to have an kind of encompassing contact with the physical form of Stalker, both from the ground and from the side where the dog is lying, making possible the joint dreaming discussed earlier. Further on in the sequence, the dog accompanies Stalker out of the Zone, a traversing of boundaried spaces and in fact further emphasizing that the Zone is not mere spatiality, but a situated embodiment that in fact can move and willfully adjust to the context and relationship in which it finds itself. The drenched color of the scene that follows with Stalker and his family, Monkey presented raja-like on her fathers shoulders, appears to follow the dog. The full infiltration of the Zone into the space of the other is further demonstrated by the return of the intense color as Monkey sits reading in the kitchen, her yellow scarf and golden freckles, pale skin and small hands clearly articulated as no other image has been. Finally the spores flow around the room in an invisible eddy as Monkey asserts her own kind of gentle monster agency to move the water glasses across the table. Moving away from normalizing structures of language, vision, and understanding that describe contemporary subjectivity toward a subtle, fluid, and monstrous constant redefinition of relational interaction is key for engaging embodied, situated, dynamic epistemes. Tarkovskys intense aesthetic cinematic practice, which unfolds a story that is built around madness as much as plot propels the wasted landscape and the monstrous character toward a porous nomadism. The films activate the spectator in the way they create discomfort in the sublime, and push us through carefully constructed intersections that evade fixed definition in favor of finding what is not known, what might not be tenable unless we relinquish control and allows known structures to be disrupted, to render ourselves implicit in the monstrous. In this way, Tarkovskys films work toward a radical redefinition of embodiment, space, and knowing that allows for an open and dynamic consideration of the nomadic subject. Bibliography Braidotti, Rosi. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge, UK: Published by Polity in Association with Blackwell, 2002. Print. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Print. Deleuze, Gilles, and Flix Guattari. "Year Zero: Faciality." A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987. 167-91. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. Print. Gibson, William. Virtual Light. New York: Bantam, 1993. Print. Guattari, Flix. Les trois cologies. Ed. Paris: Galile, 1989. Print. Halligan, Benjamin. "On Tarkovsky's Aesthetic Strategies." Through the Mirror: Reflections on the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky. Ed. Gunnlaugur A. Jnsson and Thorkell ttarsson. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2006. 40-64. Print. Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2008. Print. Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Harper Perennial: 1977. Hendriks-Jansen, Horst. Catching Ourselves in the Act: Situated Activity, Interactive Emergence, Evolution, and Human Thought. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1996. Print. Lvesque, Luc. The terrain vague as material some obversations. http://www.amarrages.com/textes_terrain.html. 2002. Web. 28 May 2010. McSweeney, Terence. "Sculpting the Time Image: An Exploration of Tarkovsky's Film Theory From a Deleuzian Perspective." Through the Mirror: Reflections on the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky. Ed. Gunnlaugur A. Jnsson and Thorkell ttarsson. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2006. 79-99. Print. Shaw, Kurt. "Compromising Spaces."Http://www.pittsburghlive.com/. Pittsburgh TribuneReview, 24 Mar. 2004. Web. 27 May 2010. Sol-Morales, Ignacio. "Terrain Vague." Anyplace. Ed. Cynthia C. Davidson. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1995. 118-123. Print. Filmography Solaris. Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky. 1972. DVD. Stalker. Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky. 1979. DVD.

[1] See Hendriks-Jansen, Horst. Catching Ourselves in the Act: Situated Activity, Interactive Emergence, Evolution, and Human Thought.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Print.