Mediterranean Thinking: From Netizen to Medizen

American Geographical Society

Mediterranean Thinking: From Netizen to Medizen Author(s): Miriam Cooke Source: Geographical Review, Vol. 89, No. 2, Oceans Connect (Apr., 1999), pp. 290-300 Published by: American Geographical Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/216093 Accessed: 16/04/2009 23:35 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ags. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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MEDITERRANEAN THINKING: FROM NETIZEN TO MEDIZEN* MIRIAM COOKE The Mediterraneanhas traditionallybeen approachedfrom a geographicaland historicalperspectivethat has collapsedthe materialand politicaldifferencesbetweenwater and land. This conflation has been instrumentalin homogenizingthe diversityof this interregional arenaand turning it into a geopolitical area.Aquacentricthinkingbrings such approaches to the Mediterraneaninto question. Cybertheory,which despatializesinteraction and helps us think of wateras place,is appliedto the Mediterraneanto bring its multiplicity into dialogue and to explorethe possibilityof creatinga new epistemologyof place.Mediterraneanizingcybertheoryintroduces diachronicityinto theories of simultaneity.Keywords: diachronicity, fixity/fluidity,place. aquacentrism,cyberepistemology,

ABSTRACT.

Wlhat is the "Mediterranean" in "Mediterranean thinking"? It is the geopolitical reality of a stretch of water between the lands of three continents, the material culture of this "interregional arena"(Bose 1998), and an imaginary that links this region to itself and also to others through metaphor or comparison. The Mediterranean is physically unique. Large enough to constitute a transnational site that links widely separated peoples and cultures, it is also small enough to connect these same peoples and cultures. Unlike the Pacific and Indian Oceans, or the Black and Caspian Seas, the Mediterranean is both open and enclosed, with characteristics of both ocean and sea. In this basin and throughout recorded history, specific kinds of knowledge and art have been, and continue to be, produced and circulated through the medium of travelers, conquerors, pirates, refugees, merchants, scholars, and slaves from all the shores and islands. A site of political, economic, and cultural contestation, it has often occupied the center stage of world history. The networks and connections in the Mediterranean predate history and are alive and well today in the numerous conferences, both real and virtual, held by its hundreds of governmental and nongovernmental associations. Beyond its physical vitality and complexity, the Mediterranean serves as a metaphor to describe behaviors and cultures with which it bears comparison: It is the cradle of global religions; the battlefront of competing spiritualities; the special earth that has produced and circulated around its far-flung shores the grape, the olive, and the fragrance of thyme. When the adjective "Mediterranean"is used to describe an architecture, a temperament, or a food, we instinctively know, or think we know, what is meant. The processes that have shaped the Mediterranean as a specific kind of place with a particular imaginary can then be transposed by analogy elsewhere to * I would like to thank members of the Duke MediterraneanStudy Group for their feedbackon this article.In particular,I am gratefulto Roberto Dainotto and EricZakimfor their intelligent readingof earlierversions and their insightful suggestions. *' DR. COOKE is a professor of Arabic literature at Duke University,Durham, North Carolina 27708-0505. The Geographical Review 89 (2): 290-300, April 1999

Copyright ? 2000 by the American GeographicalSociety of New York

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serve as analyticaltools. For example, the discoveryof the Geniza documents in Cairo in the late nineteenth century revealedthat the animosity dividing Jewsand Muslims had been interruptedby long periods of harmonious coexistence.This model of peacefulsymbiosis,which may turn into a hotbed of xenophobia,can be appliedelsewherein orderto help us understandcomparable"interregionalarenas," to use the term coined by SugataBose (1998).This is the thinking that lies behind Yves Lacoste'sAmerican (Gulf of Mexico) and SoutheastAsian Mediterraneans (Belghazi 1999).

In this article I argue that the Mediterraneancan be thought of at any one of these levels or all of them simultaneouslyand that this possibilitytodayallowsfor a new way to think of place. I write "today"because I believe that the information revolution of the past twenty years and the spreadof the Internethave createda paradigmshift that providesnew vocabularyand new optics for ancientprocesses. Althoughthe conditions forwhat I call"Mediterraneanthinking"predatecybertheory,it is arguablethat the Internethasplayeda rolein the emergenceof a new epistemology, which allows us to think of the Mediterraneanbeyond its geographically and historicallydeterminedlimits. HOMOGENIZING DIVERSITY

The Mediterraneanis a radicallymulticulturalandmultilingual,interregionalarena whose populations have historicallyspannedthe gamut of religious,ethnic, social, and politicaldifferences.A perimeterof richlydiverseshoresconnectsthe sedentary urban associations of the northern rim with the wandering,desert tribes of the east.This celebrated south, and the Catholicwest with the Judaic-Orthodox-Islamic the Mediterranean has most often been represented multiplicity notwithstanding, monolithically.Hegelcalledit triumphantlythe "axisof worldhistory.....Wecannot conceive of the historicalprocesswithout the centraland unifying element of the sea" (1975,171,172).In the twentieth century, romantics like the Lebanese Amin Maa-

louf, the ItalianFrancoCassano,or the Briton LawrenceDurrellhave looked for a Mediterraneanconsciousness,a specialrelationto time, an exoticizedsenseof place. Others, whose purposes are less romantic and more pragmatic, have invoked Mediterranean-nessas a rhetoricalstrategy:some in orderto rule it;othersto reject such rule and to demand equality. How can an arenaas multiculturalas the Mediterraneanbe reducedto a metaphysicalunit?One way is to begin with what seemsto be fixedand unchanging.This is what the FrenchhistorianFernandBraudeldid in his monumentalhistory of the Mediterranean world in the sixteenth century (1972). Although some may consider

Braudelto be a pioneer in basin-centeredthinking,it seemsto me thathis workdoes not constitute a radicalbreakwith the conventionsof continentalor land-basedapproaches.The premiseof his projectis unambiguous:"Ihavesought out, within the frameworkof a geographicalstudy,those local, permanent,unchangingand much repeatedfeatureswhich arethe 'constants'of Mediterraneanhistory.... All Western writers who have at some time in their lives encounteredthe Mediterraneanhave

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been struck with its historical or rather timeless character. Like Audisio and Durrell, I believe that antiquity lives on round today's Mediterranean shores" (Braudel 1972, 2: 1239). Picking out the fixed constants, rather than the fluid connections, Braudel constructs a bioregion that he calls the "true Mediterranean" and a spatial system, the "Greater Mediterranean," whose influence can be measured by the extent of its mercantile and civilizational flows. Within this physical space, Braudel argues that three great Mediterranean civilizations held sway: the Greek, the Roman, and the Islamic. Several lesser civilizations, including the Iberian, the Baroque, and the Jewish, were less long-lived and less widely influential. Yet arguing against his own thesis of the geographically determined nature of Mediterranean history-and the multiplicity of its civilizationsBraudel proposes that Mediterranean civilization, in the singular, was created not by water but by men [sic], for "history is not made by geographical features, but by the men who control or discover them" (1972, i: 225). Here, in his privileging of the role of the human psyche, is the opening to diversity that he closes a thousand pages later. These controlling men are themselves controlled. In Braudel's overall thesis, the individual cannot choose because he is "imprisoned within a destiny in which he has little hand, fixed in a landscape in which the infinite perspectives of the long term stretch into the distance both behind him and before.... The long run always wins in the end" (1972, 2: 1244). To base his analysis on human history, Braudel would have run the risk of dealing with the uncertainty, the fluidity, of individual freedom. His answer was to focus on the longue duree, a landscape of time, into which he locked the individual. Although Braudel's writing thus oscillates between the teleology of temporal fixity and the randomness of spatial fluidity, teleology wins out in the end. Indeed, for Braudel's "total history" to be possible, it must be played out against a backdrop of essential sameness that, for him, goes back to Homer. The Mediterranean for Braudel is one because its geography produced civilizations that linked its shores. It can also be construed as one because it can be monolithically contrasted with other geographical entities, such as the Sahara (a sealike landmass that is interchangeable with Islam), Europe (a landmass), and the Atlantic (a sea mass). Like the sea, the Sahara is not marked by boundaries. The prevalence of nomadism and trade caravans is emblematic, for Braudel, of the erasure of barriers. The desert is the place of Islam, the third great civilization against which the other two, the Roman and the Greek, are measured. Islam is the desert.... It is the emptiness,the asceticrigor,the inherentmysticism, the devotion to the implacablesun, unifyingprincipleon which myths arefounded, and the thousand consequencesof this human vacuum. In the same way,Mediterraneancivilizationgrewup underthe determininginfluenceof the emptinessof the sea:one zone peopled by ships and boats, the other by caravansand nomad tribes. Islam, like the sea and like the desert, implies movement ... a long road cutting through the strong and rigid mass of the AncientWorld.Rome,when she achieved the unity of the Mediterranean,did no more.Islamis also the historicalchancethat

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from the seventhcenturyon madeit the unifyingforceof the AncientWorld. (Braudel1972,1:187;my emphasis).

Braudelcallsthe Saharaan emptinessand a humanvacuum,despitethe factthat he mentions in the samebreaththatit is peopledwith asceticsandsun worshipers,caravans, and nomadic tribes.Performativeuniformitysignalsa unifyingprinciplethat allowshim to posit the homogeneity of its people and their religion.He emphasizes the apparentlycontradictoryrole of Islamand its civilizationin unifyingwhat was diverse,but also in moving, cutting,even breakingthroughwhat he callsthe strong and rigidmassof the AncientWorld.He does not, however,pursuethe dynamisminherent in his metaphor of Islam as a road cutting through fixity. Next, the Mediterraneanis contrastedwith Europeto producequiteanother,but equally monolithic, story.Vibrant,pluralEurope,stretchingfrom the BlackSea to Gibraltar,pulses with life and activityalong its isthmuses,which transmittedMediterraneaninfluenceto "severalEuropes,facesof the continent whose communications with each other along the transversalrouteswere often poor and little used" (Braudel 1972, 1: 223). Europe is so diverse that it can be construed as one.

The third contrastingblock is the Atlantic,which, like Europe,is "several":the SpanishAtlantic,which stretchesfromSevilleto the WestIndies;the PortugueseAtlantic;the Englishand FrenchAtlanticscreatedby the Gulf Stream;and "most ancient of all, the Atlantic of the mediaeval and even classicalnavigatorsfrom the Pillarsof Herculesto the Cassiterides,... the simple north-south route rivallingthe land routesof the Europeanisthmuses.Fromthis one followedall the otherAtlantic oceans of the 15thcentury and i6th century.It was the nurseryof Atlanticexploration"(Braudel1972, 1: 224-225). Havingmultipliedthe Atlanticinto its variousgeopolitical components, Braudel turns around and homogenizes the diversity, claimingthat traditionalhistoryregardsthe Atlanticasone, one thatis pittedagainst the Mediterranean,what Braudelterms its "natural"enemy. Yet Braudel'sMediterraneanis both single and double: Essentiallyone, it is nonethelesssplit betweenits northernand southernshores.This is a common paradigm that stretches far back into history. Other observers,from the fourteenthcentury Tunisian historiographerand protosociologist Ibn Khaldun to the latetwentieth-century signatories of the 1995 Barcelona Declaration, have also describedthe Mediterraneanas needingto be one harmoniouswhole, though being in fact split into two contesting halves.It matterslittle whetherthe approachbe from the north or from the south. The organizersof a 1998IslamicStudiesconferenceentitled "Seekingthe Individualin the MediterraneanMuslimWorld"statedthat their overall intellectual frameworkwas the process of individuation and that their almost Braudelianpurpose was to see whether this process "in the Mediterranean Muslimmilieu [thatis, the south] is comparableto the Europeanexperience[thatis, the north]" Also in 1998, UNESCO'S Mediterranean Programme convened what was

called the "MediterraneanMultaqa."The use of the Arabicword multaqa,meaning encounter,was a tip of the hat to the south in an eventthat seemsto havebeen dominated by the north and its desire to control the south (Osseiran 1999, 42, 47). Like Ibn

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Khaldun,the organizersof these two conferenceswere approachingthe Mediterranean frombeneath,from the subalternsouth,yet theirprojectmerelyreplicatedthe views and methodologies of the dominant north. In such a scheme,the Mediterranean becomes a mirrorwith no identity of its own. The challengeis to reconceivethe Mediterraneanin such a wayas to account for the factthat all of its shoresareequallypartof the sea.Whathappenswhen all of the shores are simultaneouslyconsideredand the many faces of the mirror meet? At some point, they encounternegativespace,which becomes the determiningsource of civilizationalinfluencesand residuesthat aremarkedas Mediterraneanand not as Europeanor North Africanor WestAsian.It is this thirdspaceof negativereflection, wherecivilizationstouch, dialogue,interferewith eachother,move on, or stop, that interestsme. KNOWING THE MED THROUGH THE NET

The Mediterraneanis as much a networkof reflections,connections,and intersubjectivitiesas it is a geopoliticalsite.In a word,it is a processaswell as a place,suggesting an epistemology that may be called "Mediterraneanthinking."Water,both as mirrorand as liquid substance,playsa defining role in Mediterraneanthinking.A formof aquacentricinquiry,Mediterraneanthinkingdistinguishesbetweenthe materialityof earth and sea,juxtaposingthe fixedand the fluid,as well as the nearand the farin time and space.In the process,it challengesthe assumptionsandcategories associatedwith traditionalareastudies.Whereasland-basedscholarshipcan content itselfwith considerationof territoryonly,aquacentrismmust includeboth seas and shores if it is to have meaning. The Mediterraneanis the water,the lands around the water,and materialculture.It is also a metaphorand a wayof thinkingof these realitiestogether.To rethink the Mediterranean,we must thinkthroughits wateras a specifickind of placethat is both solid and liquid,thatprovidesroots andtakesthem away.This is a model of the Mediterraneanthat giveswaterequal playwith the land. Beginningwith water,we can imaginean originalstateof dynamismand movement.Sucha womblikestateof flux,which is then fixedby a rim, reversesthe ontologicalorderof things,wherethe fixedprecedesthe dynamicandwhereland andwaterarecastnot as contiguitiesbut as opposites. Mostwriterswho haveponderedthe meaningof the seahaveproposeddichotomous paradigmswhere fixity and fluidityare mutuallyexclusive.For Cassano,the sea "detachesman from his naturalfixityand projectshim into history.This sea becomes an ocean, a place without shores, an absence of land" (1998, 27). Here water

representsfreedom from limits and dependencies,the impossibilityof remaining fixed in any one place.ForW. H. Auden,the sea "isthat state of barbaricvagueness and disorderout of which civilizationhas emergedand into which ... it is alwaysliableto relapse.It is so little of a friendlysymbol that the firstthing which the author of the Book of Revelationnotices in his vision of the new heavenand earthat the end of time is that 'thereis no more sea"'(quotedin Connery1996,291). In the beginning

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werewaterand chaos, and in the end will be only thatwhich is fixed.ForHegel,seawateris the chaotic Otherby which the fixedorderof groundedexistenceis known: It "givesus an impressionof limitlessnessand infinity,and when man feels himself part of this infinity,he is emboldenedto step beyond his narrowexistence.... Land ... binds man to the soil;consequentlya whole seriesof ties attacheshim to the locality he lives in. But the sea lifts him out of these narrow confines" (1975, 160). Hegel

then opens up the possibility of thinking beyond absolutebinariesby writing that "morehighly developed statescombine the distinct attributesof both: the stability of the inland regions and the rovingcharacterof coastallife with all its contingencies"(p. 162). He suggeststhat progressdepends on the abilityto think of land and water together,not as opposites. How can we take Hegel'sinsight and use it to think of land and watertogether without one precedingthe other?How canwe think of waterasplace?Cybertheorizing about placeprovidesone answer.An engagementwith networkingas awayof reconceptualizingplace opens up a differentway to think about the Mediterranean and to Mediterraneanizethought. The Mediterranean,after all, has alwaysfunctioned as a huge network of nodes and connections. Thinking of the Mediterraneanmetaphoricallythrough the Internet is not as far-fetchedas it may at first appear.New geographersof the Internetare deploying such oceanic vocabularyas "navigators," "surfing,""swimmingthrough oceans of data,"and "spaceof flows"(sociologistManuelCastells'sterm) to apprehendthe abstractnessof the Net. CelesteOlalquiagadescribedthe self in cyberspaceas "aship that can sailfluidlythroughdifferenttimes andplaces,alwaysmoving and changing, adapting to each port of call but anchoring nowhere" (Olalquiaga 1992,32, quoted in

Adams 1997,166). "Port"is used here as both a metaphorand a technicalterm. In cyberlanguage,a port designatesa placewhereinformationgoes in and out of a computer. Port gives us "portal,"which [http://matisse.net/files/glossary.html] definesas "amarketingtermto describeaWebsitethat is or is intendedto be the first placepeople see when using the Web.... A Portalsite may also offeremail and other serviceto entice people to use that site as theirmain 'point of entry'(hence 'portal') to the Web."In its October1999issue, Wiredmagazinepublisheda remarkablestudy by StewartTaggartshowing the analogousnessand interdependencebetween shipping and information networks and demonstratingthe connection between real and virtualports.Taggartbeginsby tracingthe theoreticallyunpromisinghistoryof containerizationsince 1950.He then goes on to analyzeits surprisingrole in transforming shipping into the most efficientand least expensivemeans of distributing goods today.The airplanemayhavesupersededthe oceanliner for people,but it has not done the same for commodities.Watertransportremainsthe key means of distributingmerchandiseand accumulatingcapital.In tandemwith the development of information networks, shipping networks have allowed for an exponential growth in global trade.Ships are becoming massive,so much so that they may become too largeto be accommodatedin land ports andwill haveto dock offshoreon floating islands.Wiredto each other and to their customers,these islandswill serve

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as instantlymobilizablewarehouses.Taggartwritesthatthe outcome is a synchronic exchangeof dataand merchandisethat is at once realandvirtual.He recognizesthe "ironyof comparingthe processesof containershippingwith those of telecommunications.... How can the mammoth bricksstackedon Koch'sfreightship be reduced, through analogy, to nothing but a series of electrical impulses coursing through a thread of glass?" (Taggart 1999, 255). Yet his essay demonstrates that they

are indeed mutually reducible. This interchangeabilityof bricksandbytesprovidesa concretewayto conceptualizethe virtualandthe realtogetherandthus to understandthe "spaceof flows"as a realgeography.When MichelFoucaultdescribedour epoch as one of "simultaneity ... of juxtaposition,the epoch of the nearand the far,of the side-by-side,of the dispersed"(Foucault1986, 22), he was anticipatingthe waysin which cybergeographers like PaulAdamsand JonathanTaylorwould describethe effectsof the Internet(Adams 1997;Taylor 1997). For them, simultaneity and juxtaposition of the near and the

far,what PaulVirilio calls"telepresence"(Virilio1996),areneitherabstractnotions nor impossibilitiesbut, rather,key propertiesof the Internet.They see the network of nodes and links as "functionallyequivalentto a space;a fieldof opportunitiesfor movement and interaction" (Adams 1997, 157). These material social scientists are

now demanding that their discipline reconceptualize "place as not necessarily defined only by one'sphysicalpresencebut by involvementwith a rangeof new media technologies" (Taylor 1997,190). The Net has transformed our ways of knowing

the world and ourselves,forcinga deterritorializedconsciousnessof place.Despatializationof interaction,Adamssuggests,erodesthe "traditionalsymmetryof place and identity,with its strong ties between social structureand a mappablespace of places" (1997, 160).

If cyberspaceallowsfor transnational,synchronicconnections,it also suggestsa way of reconceptualizingthe Mediterraneanas both physicaland virtualplace.Cyberepistemologyepitomizes connectednessand complexityby allowingfor a form of thinking and knowing that conjoins the virtual and the realwithout collapsing them into each other.As ManuelCastellswrites,it is a "methodfor understanding diversity,ratherthan a unified meta-theory.... The informationtechnology paradigm does not evolve towardsits closureas a system,but towardsits openness as a multi-edged network. It is powerful and imposing in its materiality,but adaptive and open-ended in its historicaldevelopment.Comprehensiveness,complexity,and networkingareits decisivequalities"(Castells1996,65).Insightsfrom cybertheorizing can be appliedto the Mediterraneanas anotherkind of networkto constructa specific epistemology that does not take off from land. Viewedas a spaceand systemof radicalnetworking,the Mediterranean,like the Internet, destabilizesthe "meaning of place in traditional core-periphery paradigms" (Brunn and Cottle 1997,255).For example, the islands that are geographically

centered in the Mediterraneanare rarelycenters of power; rather,they are crossroads, sometimes sleepy but sometimes also dangerousplaces of mixing, where power is most visibly contestedandwheredifficultchoices must be made.These is-

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lands can be either centersor peripheries.The meaning attachedto their location will depend on the subjectposition of the speaker,which in turn determineswhere the perimeterof the Mediterraneanis drawn.It maybe the shoreline,but then there is the problem of identifyingwhere that line is, because territorialsovereigntyhas been extendedto 200 miles offshoreby internationallaw.Alternatively,the perimeter of the Mediterraneanmay be the fartherreachesof Braudel'sisthmuses,which markthe outerlimits of interactionandinfluence.However,once thatperimeterhas been reached,it touches the perimeterof another centerto createa liminal space, which maybe coevalwith or oppositionalto the otherfrontier,or it maybecome another center.The uncertaintysurroundingsuch placeschargesthem with what Cassano calls "theoreticaldensity,"because it is there that "the space for realthinking opens up"(1998,55).Margins,then, become centersof thinkinguntil, perhaps,they become centers of power.At that point we are once again facedwith the question: Where are the margins of these new centersto be drawn? A concreteexamplein the Mediterraneanof thevolatilityof center-marginparadigms is Greece.Whereasthe classicsmaybe regardedas the firstof the areastudies, today it is so marginalizedas to fit nowherebut on the outer rim of the humanities (Ruprecht1997).If, as Cassanowrites,peripheriesare places of theoreticaldensity, then we may do well to think of the Mediterraneanfrom a placelike modern Greece, which historicalprocesseshavemoved fromthe centerto the edge of Mediterranean powerand influence.The territoryof Greecemaybe fixedon the physicalmap,but it has moved dramaticallyon the politicalmap.Today'sGreekcitizenhas a doubleconsciousness of being marginaltoday but centralyesterday,and is seen as such. Again, on the Net as on the Med, one can be in one local place and also in the wider space of flows, an interregionalarenathat gives the place an identitybeyond itself.The differenceis that in the Mediterranean,placeis diachronicallyconceived. Mediterraneanthinking,like cyberepistemology,compressestime and space,but it holds on to the diachronicityof space. The Mediterraneanimaginarybrings togetherself,Other,and interactiveprocess,or localplace,transnationalism,and transcendence, so that today's Berber irredentism coexists easily with premodern Phoenician restlessness.Thus Carthagecan be experiencedat multiple levels:as a physicalplace (a contemporaryarchaeologicalsite,made up of the layeringof civilizations, which is daily mobbed by tourists); as the trace of a former network of powerthat,like the Net today,linkedthe shoresof the Mediterraneanin a "systemof interactingnodes"(Adams1997,164);and,aboveall,asthe disembodied,ontological metaphorof compressedtime space,whereninth-centuryB.C.E. Lebanonis as close as contemporarydowntown Tunis.This consciousnessof the shore, not as boundary between land and sea but as simultaneityof fixity and fluidity,of present and past, as the site of "telepresence,"echoes the shamanlikeexperience of transcendence familiar to Netizens (Starrs 1997).

The revolutionin informationtechnologyhas replacedthe "Enlightenmentnotion of the human subject-unified, consistent,and noncontradictory"-with that of "Netizens,who may occupy numerous,even contradictorysocial positions and

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inhabit multiple, overlapping communities simultaneously"(Warf and Grimes 1997,270). Like Netizens, so Medizens. In her 1995 Vasteest laprison, the Algerian his-

torian and novelist Assia Djebarroams acrossthe Mediterranean-the sea and the centuries-with pirates, archaeologists,paleographers,and military leaders. Her goal is to piece togetherthe puzzleof a mysteriousscriptthat turnsout to be the lost language of a Berberprincess,and also Djebar'smother tongue. Rome, Carthage, Paris,Thugga,and the Libyandeserteachcontributefragmentsof a languagethatallow her to collage a multiple sense of self that is so much more than the French mimic she had been during the war of independence. To be a Medizen is to understandoneself as a citizen of three continents that, from the sixteenthcentury,havereachedout to a fourthcontinent acrossthe Atlantic. Medizensare offeredthe dazzlingarrayof culturalpossibilitiesthat three continents provide, not only aroundthe peripherybut in most cases down through the earthto the earliesttracesof human civilization.Medizensareat home in the shards of Phoenician,Carthaginian,Greek,Roman,Berber,Arab,European,and now U.S. imperialistprojects.Situatedat the crossroadsof the ancientand modern worldsas well as of multiple placesin the present,they can sometimes choose between them even as they retainawarenessof a historyof powerrelations.Theirchoosing is both facilitatedand constrainedby their location as aquacentricbeings in a domain of fluidity and movement. AGAINST BINARIES AND CLOSURES

Thinkingof the Mediterraneanfirstthroughits watermakesit possibleto imaginea way of linking the real and virtualplaces to the ways in which they havebeen presented and represented.Mediterraneanthinking undermines conventional wisdom about centersand their margins,as well as about the indivisibilityof identity, language,culture,and place,complicatingthe mappingof individualand national identitiesonto specific,stableterrains.As I havedefinedit in this article,Mediterranean thinkingtakesofffrom cyberepistemologyeven as it goesbeyondit by compelling theoretical attention to the diachronicityof the simultaneous, and also by distinguishingbetween real and virtualplaceswhile holding them in tension with each other. Mediterraneanthinking is always multiple and open, always engaged in exchange, negotiation, and dialogue between what Mohammed Arkoun calls "influences" and "residues" (Arkoun 1994,124-125). Rather than seeing Copernicus

as havingplagiarizedArabscientistswhen he cameup with his theoryof the mutual derivabilityof the circularand the linear,this perspectivewould see him as a scientist in the Arabic-Islamictraditionwho happened to speak Polish and to write in Latin(Saliba1999).Whatis keyis not the ethnic andlinguisticbut the chronological identification,which allowsus to listenacrosstime to the ongoing dialoguebetween the margins and their multiple centers. Evenmore crucialis wateras episteme,not merelyas propertyor metaphor.Although Mediterraneanthinkingposits an interregionalarenathatis in constantflux,

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with individuals moving, meeting, and changinghabits of heart and mind, it also moves beyond liquid to cognitiveinsight.It offersan analyticalframethat balances diachronicapproachesto movement:Crossings,conjunctures,confrontations,exchanges,transnationaleconomic and culturalprocesses,and transformationsmix with essentialized,timelessnotions of pureorigins,roots,andbordersthat for some areporous but for othershavevery realeffects.It is nonhierarchical,so that peoples of the margins, whereverthey may be contingentlysituated,can speak with each other and with the center of the moment, but alwayswith the understandingthat they remainvulnerableto the interestsand desiresof agentsof globalpowerwho can control the flows. It allowsfor creativeforms of resistancebecauseof its simultaneous awarenessof freedomand constraint.The negationof absolutethinking,it is in constant developmentas it reactsto material,metaphorical,and figurativepractices with which it must retaincontact to survive.Mediterraneanthinking is at work in verlan,the languageof the North Africansborn in Franceand living in the cities,or ghettos, that connect and separatethe Frenchand the Maghrebians.Verlanis constantlyreinventingitself so that it cannot be understoodor appropriatedby others, even at the riskof furthermarginalization.Likeculturesin the contactzones,verlan is in constantflux.Once the structureseemsto be takingroot,it becomessusceptible to control, so it changeseven as it remainsbound to its roots (Malki1999). The fluidity of the Mediterraneanas an epistemologicalprojectcan be understood only in terms of the fixityof its actualand analyticalframe.Ratherthan focus on or compare specific subregionsor time periods, Mediterraneanthinking connects them. This processentailsinsistenceon the juxtapositionbut also on the crisscrossing of binaries such as land and water, fixity and fluidity, indigenous and foreign,settledand nomadic,ancientand modern,colonizerand colonized,nationalism and globalization.Suspiciousof closures,Mediterraneanthinking mobilizes these concreteand abstractoppositions to rethinkthem in an open-ended and dialogical manner. The Mediterraneanis an abstractnetworkbut also a very realbody of water,the lands that surround it, and the history that holds them together and gives them meaning. With its narrativeof millennia of crossings,communications,and communities, the Mediterraneanprovidesthe conditions for going beyondthe transnational imaginary in order to rethink the connected world through its optic. Mediterraneanthinking may,of course,be a form of inquiryand knowing applicable only to those territoriesthat define its geographicalreferent.On the other hand, it may help to develop an epistemology that can inform readingsof other crossoceanic arenasof cultureand knowledge.In this case,Mediterraneanthinkingmay provide a way to de-essentializethe Mediterraneanand discourseson it. Med thinkingpresentsboth an opportunityand a danger.The riskis thatthe retrospectiveuse of modern methodologies,paradigms,and vocabularywill erasethe historicity of a diachroniclook-alike. The challengeis to see whether a paradigm that emerges out of a particularplace and a specificmoment in history can be applied to differentplacesand periods. In this articleI havetried to considerthe chal-

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