Who Drew That Line?

A Boundary Has No Substance

It was during summer supplementary classes in middle school. The school split the students by grades and reassigned the classrooms — the superior class and the inferior class. I was in the inferior class. I still remember how I felt the day I first heard that name. Furious and ashamed at once, I simply did not go to those supplementary classes.

Looking back now, that line was drawn by a few sheets of examination paper. It would have been a matter of a few points; it might have been how I felt on a given day; and before all that, it was the decision of some meeting where somebody resolved to create such classes. The people who drew the line probably meant nothing grand by it. Yet that line came inside me and lived there a long time. I did not become a boy assigned to the inferior class; I became an inferior-class boy.

In Chapter Four we saw the living membrane. The membrane that makes a cell a cell is actually there. You can touch it; puncture it and the cell dies. But there is another kind of boundary in the world — the line between the superior class and the inferior class. That line is nowhere. It is not painted on the schoolyard; it is nowhere on the body. And yet a child who crosses it becomes a different person.

Some boundaries are real; some are merely agreed upon. And the agreed-upon ones hurt more.

The person who pushed this distinction furthest lived in India some two thousand years ago. Nagarjuna — rendered in Chinese characters as Yongsu — wrote a book called the Mulamadhyamakakarika. As far as I understand him, his core claim is this: nothing whatsoever stands on its own. Everything becomes what it is only within relation to something else. Long is established only because short exists; inside is established only because outside exists. Therefore nothing possesses an intrinsic nature of its own.

Applied to boundaries, it comes out like this. A boundary is not an object but a relation. There is an inferior class because there is a superior class; there are non-members because there are members. The line does not exist somewhere as an actual thing and thereby divide me; the line exists because people agreed to divide that way.

This sounds deflating, but in fact it is the opposite. To have no substance means it can be changed. A mountain cannot be moved, but an agreement can be made again. If the line that confined me was not a law of nature but somebody’s decision, then another decision is possible.

Only, it is dangerous to say this too quickly. “It has no substance, so pay it no mind” is something only a person who has never been shut inside such a line can say. It took me twenty years to cross that line. Knowing in the head that two words like “inferior class” are not real is an entirely different thing from those two words losing their power inside me. Something with no substance can rule a person for twenty years. That is the frightening part of this story.

That is exactly what happened to those two words, “inferior class.” At first they were outside me. They were a decision made in a staff room, a list posted on a board. Then they came inside and settled, and at some point they were no longer an agreement outside but a part of me. Earlier I wrote that I did not become a boy assigned to the inferior class but a boy who was inferior class. That “became” is the most important word in this chapter. The moment an agreement turns into a self is right there.

So the boundary of the self is not some awkward third thing wedged between the real boundary and the agreed-upon one. It is an agreed-upon boundary that came inside and became real. Here lies the reason something with no substance can rule a person for twenty years. By then it is no longer an agreement but a membrane. And a membrane is not peeled away by argument.

Here I must call back the cell membrane of Chapter Four. We are apt to think the cell membrane is real because it is an object we can touch, and that the boundary of the self, being untouchable, is something lesser. Yet as Maturana and Varela said, the cell membrane was never an object either. It is a process remaking itself at every moment, and we merely call it by the name of an object, a membrane. This is no different from what Nagarjuna said: a boundary is not an object but a relation. If so, the cell membrane and the boundary of the self are not made of different materials. They differ only in the speed at which they are remade. The cell membrane is remade so ceaselessly that it looks like an object that never changes; the boundary of the self is remade so slowly that it looks like a rock that cannot be changed.

Both are in fact flowing. The invisible boundary is not less real — only slower.

So what we must do is tell boundaries apart. The first is the given boundary. The cell membrane is such a boundary; so is the intestinal wall. When it collapses, the result is fusion or death. The second is the agreed-upon boundary: the line that decides who is inside and who is outside, who is a member and who is not. This one can be redrawn. And there is a third. It is the grown boundary. The line between me and you, and the outline of my own self, belong here. It was neither given like the cell membrane nor hung outside like a list. It came from outside and grew within.

So each of the three asks to be handled differently. The given boundary is to be kept, the agreed-upon boundary to be redrawn, and the grown boundary — which can be neither kept nor redrawn — must be cultivated. Confuse them and errors follow. Either we tear down a membrane that ought to be kept and call it freedom, or we stand before a line that could be redrawn and call it our fate, or we round on a boundary that needs cultivating and demand to know why it is still like that.

As a boy I committed the middle error. I took a line someone had drawn to be a law of nature. And instead of erasing the line, I hated myself beneath it.

Redrawing a line usually happens quietly. One day you go somewhere no one knows you and are treated differently for the first time; or someone calls you by a different name. And then you realize: ah, that line does not follow me. That line existed only inside that school.

For me it happened in high school. I joined the weightlifting team and became its captain, and my self-esteem, which had been on the floor, rose a little. And I learned that I could major in physical education — that without becoming an athlete I could study what I loved for the rest of my life. From then on my grades rose. The order matters. It is not that my grades rose and confidence followed; it is that I was called by a different name in a different room, and then my grades rose.

So the way to draw someone out of a line drawn around them is not to tell them to try harder. It is to take them into another room and call them by another name. Lines are not erased by persuasion; they change only by another agreement.

And do the lines disappear when we become adults? They do not. Graduate from school and there are learned societies; get past a society and there is another roster. I intend to tell in Chapter Seven the story of the day my name was refused on one society’s membership list. That email, received past the age of fifty, brought back the summer of my fourteenth year exactly as it was. Lines do not disappear. But a person who knows where the line came from collapses a little less in front of it.

Notes for this chapter

Nagarjuna, Mulamadhyamakakarika — on dependent origination and the absence of intrinsic nature · The recollection of the superior/inferior classes draws on the author’s Facebook record (2015) · Maturana & Varela (autopoiesis) — see Chapter Four