GRGR(3): Borders

[keith woodward]

Doug said:
>It's hardly worth mentioning, but wouldn't "peripherally concerned with
>borders" be more accurate, since borders are located at the periphery of an
>enclosed space and not at the center? Guess it depends on what "centrally"
>means, as we saw in another recent GRGR discussion.

Quite right, and much funnier that way round.  What I meant was that maps
are concerned with where a certain "named" space is said to begin/end.  How
far it extends, you get the point.  Oddly, Roger's set of borders, the
grid, breaks down any sense of centrality by neutralizing the landscape:
everything's open game. [below]

>Then there's the notion, most recently capitalized upon by fast food giant
>Taco Bell, of "the border" as a region all it's own, a fuzzily defined
>area, a Zone made possible by boundary lines. And we come full circle to
>the line-drawing and map-making of M&D, which would seem to share this
>central concern with GR.

I've seen this notion of border-as-place in Derrida's *Aporias* (all
groan), where death is seen as a border in which we all live (no big
surprise).  It nonetheless makes for interesting speculation re Slothrop &
his connection to the map, but that would take far more time and space than
I have this afternoon, see?  I think we can find much of the early seeds of
M&D in this GR, particluarly re the topic of borders.

Keith W