ZONEFACTS
While this analogy finds its origins in science fiction, its application to the Panamanian context becomes surprisingly generative. If one was to consider the Zones found throughout the isthmus on similar terms to those described by the Strugatskys, one could employ a reading of them whereby, just as in the novel or the film, an alien entity – whether the US state apparatus or the governmentality of international capital flows – lands on the territory, introduces a set of anomalous laws and logics and through its operation leaves certain traces – things – that can be found.
If in archeology the notion of artefacts designates things produced through human craft or skill (Lat. ’arte’ – ’by skill’; ’factum’ – made’), [17] the proposition here would be to speak of zonefacts – things brought into existence through the laws, logics, operations and anomalies of a Zone. These things cannot just be reduced to their materiality or their physical impact on the territory. Instead, much like the roadside picnic candy wrap studied by the curious forest animal or Strugatsky’s artefacts by the scientists, they can be instrumentalised to gain a deeper, more profound, systemic understanding of processes and forces that have brought them into existence as well as to become generative themselves.
Certainly no thing just exists in a vacuum, devoid of any relations; anything can be studied through a systemic, topological mapping to gain insight into its becomings. What makes the zonefacts of special interest however, is that through their conception in a system of laws and logics which are not otherwise found in the given context, what they ‘land’ and materialise in the territory is, what Zizek describes as ‘the Real of an absolute Otherness incompatible with the rules and laws of our universe.’[18] While otherness functions as a central tool for ontological differentiation and is ever-present in any form of existence, radical otherness in this case can be read as a transgression of the very ontological system itself, exceeding a certain critical limit beyond which it’s understanding as an ‘other’ to something else breaks down due to the incompatibility and incomparability of the two. This sudden exposure to something that one cannot comprehend or encompass with one’s common knowledge – objects with all agency, no history – then becomes strikingly productive on its own. One could make the point that this quality is also something that plays a central role in the notion of the sublime.
A connection can be drawn to Kant’s discussion of the sublime: ‘The feeling of the sublime, is at once a feeling of displeasure, arising from the inadequacy of imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude to attain to its estimation of reason, and a simultaneous awakened pleasure, arising from this very judgement of the inadequacy of sense of being in accord with ideas of reason, so far as the effort to attain to these is for us a law.’[19] Thus zonefacts produce a condition of ’absolute otherness’, hinting at a subliminal dimension, through which it becomes a generative entry point for a systemic investigation of larger processes at hand.