LAK-KA-PID-LAK-KA-PERD : The Thesis

LAK-KA-PID-RAK-KA-PERD: THE THESIS
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What is Lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd?

In the third world, the displacement of postmodernism is not simply a matter of criticizing modernism as theory, philosophy, or ideas of cognition; rather, it is the emergence of an entirely different problematic, a displacement of a displacement that is in excess of what is still presented as the binarism of modernism-postmodernism.

(Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies , p.57)

In an attempt to understand and conceptualise the idea of lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd , firstly I would like to draw upon poststructuralist theories, which always suspect the logocentric nature in the history of Western philosophy. Such theorists as Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Spivak attempt to expose the 'privilege' term in binary opposition and how its identity depends upon the exclusion of the subordinate or the other. Derrida, in particular, suggests further that it is not only to recognise the metaphorical power of the binary opposition in text, but within the deconstruction process it also involves the breaking down of the binaries in an attempt to "pry it loose with the positive lever of the signifier, to reverse the resident hierarchy, only to displace it; to dismantle in order to reconstitute what is always already inscribed". It is also necessary to constantly seek out terms that disturb the logic of the text under examination in order to reveal the inadequate logical and rational structure of the text, not only through the understanding of the deconstruction process, but one also needs to draw across disciplines from geography to queer theory, from performativity to psychoanalytical theory, to the way in which it could be conceptualised and operationalised outside Western disciplines in order to understand the term lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd , as I shall illustrate further.

In ideological terms, lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd can be considered part of ancient Thai ideology regarding space. According to Nithi Awesriwong, space can be understood in two dimensions, horizontal and vertical. Vertically, the space is believed to separate into a hierarchy of different levels of respect, ranging from human to human, human to spirit, and all things in general, including our bodies, are to be categorised into these different levels. For instance, monks are considered to be on a higher level than a normal person, and that we should treat them and all things associated with them with respect. Horizontally, the spaces have been divided into two different areas according to the hierarchy of respectability as well sacredness. It can be separated by a physical boundary, such as a temple or royal palace, and by abstraction where there is no clear (such as to use a thread to separate the space) or in some cases invisible boundary. For example, the Thai belief that common people should not sit at the same level of space as monks; therefore, in the case of monks having to sit at the same level on the ground, Thai people tend to make a separation by using mats for the monks to put them in a higher position. The mat area for the monks can be considered a sacred space that separates them from the rest, which common people may not enter, or they have to dress or behave in a certain way. The sacred space can also be abstractly separated by a thread which monks or spiritualists use to divide the ceremonial space from the rest which others are not allowed to enter as they are not given the same level of respect. However, this boundary is easy to undo: if you only wrap up that mat, all of a sudden the divided spaces become one again.

Although Thai spaces are very much divided, whether with or without physical boundaries, into different spaces with their own rules, depending on their type of sacredness, and they are quite fragmented, they are fluid and unfixed. It is possible for a person to change or to move from one space to another, though it may be quite difficult to change vertically. One can change horizontally, but one needs to change oneself according to the rules of each space. According to Nithi Aewsriwong, there are four ways to change oneself, including appearance, behaviour, by going through rituals, and by superpower, which is often the case in Thai folklore and beliefs. It is why we may change our clothes or appearance according to space rather than time. This belief has led to the importance of appearance rather than the essence or identity of a person that underlies the way in which lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd is to be understood. It is this kind of abstraction in the understanding of space that allows multiple activities to take place simultaneously in one single space.

A similar kind of ideology can also be found elsewhere, as is suggested in the discussion of Rabelais' works by Mikhail Bakhtin regarding the carnival and grotesque bodies in the time of Rabelais and until the eighteenth century, where high and low culture can be simultaneously represented, possibly breaking down the distinction between the two. Strange and familiar elements were allowed to exist within the same space and time of the carnivalesque, where "the principle of the world [is] turned upside down, where everything becomes its opposite."

As a part of speech, lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd is now a specific kind of figurative slang that is often used in a sexualised context, a metaphor - an attempt to use one meaning system to explain another (to make an unfamiliar subject a familiar one). Though it is officially known as a kind of medical symptom relating to tooth and gum disorders, it is increasingly now used to refer to a homosexual or someone who occasionally displays behaviours of the opposite sex. It is perhaps derived from the term lak-ka-phet ( phet meaning sex/sexuality), which refers directly to persons who display themselves differently from what is expected from the sex they were born into, but in more ways than one lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd conveys a rather ambiguous meaning that could be used in broader terms, such as to convey the meaning of something that could not be decided one way or another. Through its literary linguistic meaning of sometimes close-sometimes open, the term suggests a kind of specific spatial arrangement as well as a specific kind of temporal arrangement, an element that time and time again will come to play a significant part in the understanding of lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd .

However, in this thesis I want to consider lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd in a more spatial mode, both as spatial metaphor, a way of talking about power that is made possible by radical geography (Massey 1993, Keith and Pile 1993, Smith and Katz 1993, Brown 2000) and a text of Eve K. Sedgewick's Epistemology of the Closet , as well as in a mode of geographical materiality that could be taking various forms and different scales such as the body, a home, a city, or a country where spatial and cultural orders are embedded and reproduced as Pierre Bourdieu may use the term 'habitus' to describe. These spaces then can be seen as the embodiment of knowledge that must be recognised in terms of Foucault's (1980) power/knowledge regime and very much the same way the term lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd itself already embodies. It suggests and exercises a similar spatial structure and arrangement as the term 'closet' has. They both imply the attempt to conceal and the attempt to display at different times, or in other words, things are not fully concealed and are not fully visible. It signifies the similar kind of oppressive structure for homosexuals that has been suggested by the term 'closet' in queer study as pioneered by Sedgewick. Although it might not be quite the same to the term lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd when 'lak' is put in front of 'pid' (close) and 'perd' (open), they signify the act of sometimes close and sometimes open. Therefore the attempt to 'conceal' and 'display' are not straight forward.

Instead of concentrating on the oppositional space of the inside and outside of the closet, lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd attempts to find the in-between space where things can be simultaneously represented, similar to Henry Urbach's 'ante-closet', which is the space before the closet that one uses to dress and undress oneself and position oneself in-between spaces, that is neither in the room nor in the closet, which he links to what Delueze terms pli in his attempt to explain a space that emerges both within and against social relations, to constitute a space of self-representation at once connected and free from social norms.

The ante-closet is not a permanent or fixed space as it would appear and disappear dependent on one's needs or desires to change oneself. It is a space where one's concerns of self-representation in the social world intervene with one's fantasy.

(Henry Urbach's "Closets, Clothes, disClosure", p. 349)

It is a space that no longer belongs to any conventional thinking or, in other words, any binary opposition that governs the society. It is a space that is both metaphoric and material. In general, lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd can be compared to the kind of spaces that have been described and materialised by Michel Foucault's 'Other Space' or 'heterotopia' (1986), Edward Soja's 'Third Space' (1996), and Henry Lefebvre's 'Counter Space' (1991). It is a space that could be considered both real and imagined, which can set out and initiate a new kind of mapping, where all the traditional relationships between spaces have been rearranged beyond our geographical imagination. For me, it is also a space that could be found in everyday life, where its very meaning could be resisted and changed from within and grants people an opportunity to think of their own conditions in relation to the set of norms that have been inscribed onto the spaces that have long governed their very being. Spaces such as cinema, park, shopping mall, sport stadium, theme park, home to a very personal space of the body, are no longer easy to grasp as they are always slippery and incomplete.

Beyond the above suggestion of its close relation to the 'closet', lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd also links directly to the notion of 'performativity' that has been influentially theorised by Judith Butler. For Butler, there is no longer the fixed and given role of gender that produced oneself or identity, but gender identity as the 'disciplinary production of the figures of fantasy', which has been produced through a series of acts, gestures and desire that presents onto the body's surface. At the same time, these performative acts also sexualize space. The space that used to be naturalised now "can thus be dressed in any way: any sexual identity can assume space and space can assume any sexual identity". The space then can become unfixed and operate as a kind of lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd when constructed by the very acts of performativity. When the sexuality conceptualised as performative, lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd can also be seen as a strategy that helps one to arrange oneself in the complex society.

However, it is 'performativity' according to the context, or kalatesa , knowing how one should appear and behave in the particular intersection of places, time and relationship that best explain lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd as a strategy, because of the Thai people's sensitivity to context that allows the surfaces to be changeable and makes possible the flowing of multiple gender/sexual identities. The gender/sexual surfaces can be perceived as temporal and non-fixed, which can be transformed in order for one to have an appropriate and smooth contact with others. The surface that can be seen as 'an embodied social practice that is not based on a notion of expressing an interior', individualised self which is in contrast to Western 'faciality' which, drawing from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , detaches faces from bodies in order to construct a symbolic, essentialised self-identity.

According to Deleuze and Gauttari, 'faciality' can be seen as a regime of signs relying on the production of two semiotic systems, public representation (the white wall) and private self-consciousness (the black hole), which itself functions as a dynamic point of contact where the two systems are communicated both with each other and with world at large. However, for the Thai 'face', instead of the dynamic communication between the two, the private 'self' is kept hidden inside the black hole and allowed only the public representation or the 'face' to communicate with the multiplicity of forces that operate within the society. The Thai 'face' or Thai performativity acts is then disconnected from what the West knows as 'self' and instead it is transformable and transitory depending on time, locations and relationships with persons, or kalatesa . The Thai 'face', then, can be multiplied and signified by the battle of both public/private and self/other. The Thai 'face' in this case is, in Derridean thinking, not the part and yet not the whole in the unitary structure.

But how can a certain act being used to transform a whole space? Can it be used as strategy or a process for a minoritarian subject to unsettle the hegemonic ideology? How can the understanding of lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd and the operation of the 'face' be used to construct and understand the space and geography beyond the hegemonic Western knowledge? These are questions that I shall explore further into different locations and scales of space in the thesis.

Furthermore, lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd is not only a means or a tool for exploring in this thesis, but points to the way in which the thesis itself is organised, as the term also signifies a process in which each fragmented and contradictory space can be experienced in a non-linear way. The juxtaposing of two different elements of, metaphorically, opening and closing, resulting in something in-between, something unknown, has forced us to understand them from a different perspective in relation to the production of knowledge. It allows for a more subconscious experience, as it tends to concentrate on the slippages in meaning (Lacan, 1977). It resembles the 'montage' method pioneered by Sergei Eisenstein. It is an idea that "arises from the collision of independent shots-shots even opposite to one another" where the splicing and stitching of each shot always creates conflicts, such as when the elements of closeness and openness are placed side by side. It is a method based on the principle of conflicts (conflicts between shots, within a shot, etc.). Each one plus continues to subtract, add, erase, reconstruct, and deconstruct the previous one, without end. The result can never be premeditated and more often than not negates the previous meaning. Neither can it be singular, as each conflict offers a multiplicity of choices, resulting in a never-ending process where each organically grows out of the other. Rather than being juxtaposed, they pile up one on top of the other as we see the continuously moving images creating the montage. While the old meaning or old image may be deconstructed as the new one emerges, the old one still remains and produces a rather different and unimagined meaning. It is in this moment of blurring that lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd may take a different direction from the 'montage'. Instead of a clear message deriving from the juxtapositions of the montage, the result of lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd is rather ambiguous and can never be predicted.

It is also not structured out of 'building-blocks' or the 'unrolling' of an idea, as Eisenstein suggests, but is rather unstructured and unruly, like building bricks on the moon or in zero-gravity conditions which can go into different directions. It may resemble the 'rhizome' structure described by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus , that also connects directly to surveying and mapping of a kind where "the map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification." All in all, lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd is a spatial metaphor, a material geography, a kind of mapping (of desire, of location, of relationship, etc.), a strategy, a process that one has to continue to explore to unsettle and open up new possibilities, a new term for the postmodern landscape in Thailand and elsewhere. It is not one way or another but perhaps all in one.

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs (Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1973); Writing and Difference (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), Dissemination (London, Athlone Press, 1972).

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987).

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Translator's Preface', in Derrida, Of Grammatology , p.1xxv.

Nithi Aewsriwong, Pah-kao-ma, Pah-sin, Underwear and Etc.: Culture, Transformation and Others (Bangkok: Matichon, 1995), p. 139.

ibid., p. 139.

ibid., p. 146.

Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (trans. Helene Iswolsky), Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984, p. 13.

See Kevin Hetherington, The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering (London: Routledge, 1997, p. 33) for further discussion on the carnivalesque and the market place in constituting a kind of heterotopic space.

By using the term 'habitus', we understand these spaces in terms of a set of structured rules and beliefs that have been naturalised through a form of 'habit' and of 'habitat'. See Pierre Bourdieu, 'Structures, Habitus, Practices' in The Logic of Practice (trans. Richard Nice), Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990, p. 210.

Michael P. Brown's Closet Space: Geographies of metaphor from the body to the globe discusses exclusively the notion of the 'closet' and its relation to power/knowledge, in which he links the power with homophobia or heteronormativity. However, it is important to note that it is not so long ago that "Thai culture" has really used the closet in the same way as the West. "Thai culture" had used the kind of case or box to keep clothes and other valuable belongings in, which was easy to carry and move around, just before the Western influence in the period of King Rama V (1868-1910). The different history and context of the closet may result in a different connotation of the term for Thai people and perhaps elsewhere. The term itself has never been used directly in metaphor, but in Thai other terms in relation s to a homosexual, such as E-ape ("the one who hides"), could suggest the same kind of spatial arrangement as the term 'closet' suggests. (Various Thai terms will be analysed elsewhere in the thesis.)

Henry Urbach's "Closets, Clothes, disClosure" in Gender, Space, Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction (eds. Jane Rendall, Barbara Penner and Iain Borden, London: Routledge, 2000, p. 349.

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity , Routledge: London, 1990, pp. 135-136.

David Bell and Gill Valentine, Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities , Routledge: London, 1995, p. 18.

Brian P. McGrath, "Bangkok Simultopia", in Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change and the Modern Metropolis (eds. Amy Bingaman, Lise Sanders and Rebecca Zorach), London: Routledge, 2002, p. 208.

Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (ed. and trans. Jay Leyda), Florida: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1949, p. 49.

ibid., p. 38-39.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , London: Continum, 1987, pp. 3-29.