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Animals, Machines, and PostnationalIdentity in Julio Medem's VacasNathan E. RichardsonPublished online: 22 Jan 2007.

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Animals, Machines, and PostnationalIdentity in Julio Medem's Vacas

Nathan E. Richardson

Perhaps, ironically, we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to

be Man, the embodiment of Western logos. (Donna Haraway)

In Suso de Toro's 1997 novel, Calzados Lola, a protagonist attempts to dispose of the

cadaver of his would-be assassin by dumping the body into a local Galician rõÂa. As he

begins to roll the corpse overboard, the ring of a cell phone still attached to the dead

man pierces the night air. After a moment of hesitation, the protagonist decides to

ignore the call, rolling the body and phone into the sea. As the body and its mechanical

appendage sink to the ocean ¯oor, the hero's girlfriend ®nds herself questioning her

lover's stories and alibis for the ®rst time. For hours before this event, she had known

that he had lied, stolen, and killed; still, his innocence for her remained unimpeach-

able. But as he ignores the call of the machine, the guise of innocence dissolves to

reveal, if only momentarily, a liar, a thief, and a cold-blooded assassin. Destroying a

body was one thing. Silencing the information ¯ow that had given that body meaning

is quite another.With this scene, a novel that had to this point af®rmed Galician identity becomes a

work calling into question the notion of identity itself. As Toro has illustrated in

novels such as Calzados Lola and Trece Campanadas (2002), identity politics todayÐ

whether local, national, or globalÐare cross-cut by a questioning of the most basic

notions of human subjectivity arising from the information and biotechnologies that

have become a part of everyday life in the modern, Western world. No longer the

province of esoteric theory, questions of unstable subjectivities come to rest with

common cell phone and stem cell users, e-mail and organ recipients, and, of course,

movie audiences. The masses in the cosmopolitan, globalizing West confront today

what many are calling the era of the posthuman, a phenomenon readily captured and

consumed in novels and ®lm both Hollywood and Spanish. Suso de Toro's work is all

the more interesting because of its move beyond the mere celebration of new

posthuman realitiesÐthe stuff of The Matrix (1999) or Abre los ojos (1998)Ðto an

exploration of the encounter between these new posthuman tensions and the often

Correspondence to: Nathan E. Richardson, Department of Romance Languages, Bowling Green State University,203 Shatzel Hall, Bowling Green, OH 43403, USA. Email: nrichar@bgnet.bgsu.edu

ISSN 1470±1847 print/ISSN 1469±9524 online/04/020191-14 ã 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd

DOI: 10.1080/1470184042000317143

Journal of Iberian and Latin American StudiesVol. 10, No. 2, December 2004, pp. 191±204

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seemingly premodern ethnic longings of local populations within the emerging globalcommunity. Toro asks what happens when citizens still employing vestiges ofpremodern ideologies in an attempt to gain a foothold in modernity ®nd themselvesconfronted midstream with the media, migration, and imagination of postmodernity?What happens when Celtic legend meets Motorola on the Castellana in Madrid?

Notwithstanding the interest of Toro's novels, I would like to turn in the followingpages to a more subtle registration of posthuman nationalism within the Spanish state,re¯ecting my suspicion that interactions between cyborg and local identities are oftennot so consciously lived or quite so novel. Indeed, I want to explore below howposthuman `cyborg citizenship' may in fact articulate more naturally with preexistingconditions than Toro's works illustrates. Finally, I want to look at this interaction inconditions where stakes are typically higher than in Galicia.

I ®nd such criteria met in Julio Medem's 1992 ®lm, Vacas. This ®lm about threegenerations of neighboring families in a rural Basque valley, although at timesbordering on the bizarre in both form and content, would never be read initially as a®lm about cyborg technologies or contemporary, posthuman possibilities. Setbetween the Carlist war of 1875 and the Spanish civil war of 1936, it relates theinteractions of two rival families inhabiting a rural valley somewhere in Guipuzcoa.The families embody many of the celebrated values of Basque identity: they are ruralclans centered around caserõÂos; their activities are overseen by strong matriarchs; theirpatriarchs are champion aizkolari (woodsmen); and they ®ght always on the politicallyproper side of the Basque cause (Carlists in 1875, Republican gudaris in 1936). Interms of cinematography, Medem's camera con®rms the appearance of the ®lm as acelebratory exploration of Basqueness, its lush images of a primeval countrysidereminiscent of rural ®lms by Manuel GutieÂrrez Arago n, Montxo ArmendaÂriz, andMario Camus. Despite this initial, and not misleading, description, Vacas is anunusual ®lm that challenges audiences looking for easy con®rmation of traditionalBasque values, particularly those associated with nationalist politics. At the heart ofthis confusion, though not its sole perpetrators, are the eponymous cows. Students ofthe ®lm have been quick to point out the connection between the cows and the ®lm'sBasque subjects, particularly its female characters, vacas being an anagram of vasca.

From this apparently innocent and mostly unexamined observation, I want to re-watch Medem's ®lm, as it were, seeing the metaphorical and metonymical vacas asmerely a starting point for a broader posthumanization of celebrated premodernidentities. While cows are hardly cell phones and not a single microchip is to be foundwithin the frames of Medem's ®lm, the cows of Vacas draw connections betweennatural, primitive, mythic pasts and the technologies that have produced them, andthat, moreover, in the present posthuman/postnational moment seemingly threatenthem with obliteration. Cows are, in short, the pre-`human' origins of a contemporaryBasque posthuman identity, what I will call, borrowing from Donna Haraway (2000),the Basque cyborg. Through the cows, I ®nd the ®gure of the cyborg at the heart ofMedem's ®lm. As in Haraway, I read the cyborg as challenging without discountingthe myths and histories that have comprised the Basque experience, and ®nally, asoffering the Basque spectator a prismÐif a rather distorting oneÐthrough which

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agency, if not identity, to negotiate the Scylla and Charybdis of ethnic nationalism andglobal anonymity might be found.

Posthumanism and Cyborg Citizenry

First, a word on posthumanism. Recently entering into the popular conscious if notvernacular, posthumanism refers to a new mode of or outlook on (depending on whois talking) human existence, describing the point where ¯esh-and-blood meetsinformation science and biotechnology to produce a new kind of being, a `metaman,post-human, superhuman, robot, or cyborg' (Winner 2002, p. 27). This new ontologyis promoted by Internet groups urging science to use biotechnology to `play God', andto discard human ¯esh in search of `boundless expression, self-transcendence,dynamic optimism, intelligent technology, and spontaneous order' (More 1994, p. 1).Meanwhile, conservative opposition, in popular presses, warns of `threats to mind,body, and world', prophesying a bleak future devoid of humankind's moral and socialgraces (Borgman 2002, p. 9; Fukuyama 2002, p. 99). Academics, rather than prophesy,af®rm that posthumanism is already with us: Chris Hables Gray argues that `almost allof us are cyborged in some way' (Hables Gray 2001, p. 1); Donna Haraway adds, `weare all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism ¼ we arecyborgs' (Haraway 2000, p. 70).

In light of such often politically charged and opposed views, N. Katherine Hayles'shistorical perspective on both the technological and cultural reality of posthumanismis worth consideration. Hayles describes the technological heart of posthumanism asbased on increasingly re¯exive interactions between human and machine wherebyinformation moves from the creator and observer of an intelligent system into thesystem itself, and then back again, thereby drawing the observer into what wasassumed to be an objecti®ed, limited order. In the era of the posthuman, theobjectifying observer has become subject to and subject of the once passive machine.According to many information scientists, everything with which the creator/observerexchanges information in this fashion becomes an extension of beingÐwhat Haylescalls a dematerialized prosthetic. The logical conclusion to this breakdown ofmodernist frontiers arrives as the body itself comes to be understood as `the originalprosthesis' (Hayles 1999, p. 3). Consequently, in the new posthuman era, modernistdistinctions between presence and absence as central to ontological issues dissolve,replaced by questions of pattern and randomness. Access to information patternsrather than possession of material space becomes the chief guarantor of existence. Ifsuch theories prove to be fact, then classic boundaries between biology and virtualitydissolve. Where the ¯esh ends and the machine begins is increasingly a question thatcannot be answered and, moreover, that may no longer need be asked. This is the newposthuman beyond.

Or so it may seem to its true believers. Hayles, by grounding her study in history,shows the posthumanist claims to be hardly as radical as they purport. Is not thereduction of essence to informatics, she asks, yet another attempt of rationalconsciousness to overcome the corruption of the ¯esh, to transcend the classic

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modernist mind±body dualism? If such is the case, then the posthuman project may beas much humanÐif not humanistÐas it is post. Hayles calls for a more consideredtheory of posthumanism, insisting on a recognition of the body as essential to anytheorization of subjectivityÐan inescapable shaper of human consciousness (1999,p. 284). She argues that pattern and presence are not mutually exclusive. Throughsuch coexistence may arise `a dynamic partnership between humans and intelligentmachines' that `replaces the liberal humanist subject's manifest destiny to dominateand control nature' (1999, pp. 49, 288).

The insistence that posthuman existence can only be meaningful as it recognizes the¯eshiness of human being recalls Donna Haraway's description of the cyborg in heroft-cited `Cyborg manifesto'. CyborgsÐ`fabricated hybrids of machine and organ-ism'Ðdo not eliminate humanity but offer it a new ontology and a new politics(Haraway 2000, p. 70). Cyborg being undoes the supposedly natural dualities ofhumanist thought: culture/nature, mind/body, civilized/primitive, male/female, etc.(2000, p. 82). As a hybrid being, the cyborg no longer looks to essential natures, toutopian pasts, to manifest destinies, or to natural communities (2000, p. 71). There isno natural origin. There can be no disembodied transcendence. Hence, instead ofdividing in its search for such humanist illusions, the cyborg blurs boundaries and,thus, uni®es: machine to human, but also human to animal, and animal to earth. Thecyborg, rather than leading to posthuman ¯ights from the ¯esh, brings spirit to earthand yet not to earth as some ®nal Edenic home. For Haraway, the cyborg's ability tocollapse dualities, as the posthuman for Hayles, promises a way out of the violence ofhumanism, providing new tools with which to radically rethink identity outside theparadigms that wouldÐreturning to the focus of this articleÐalways ®nally pitauthentic BasquenessÐfor exampleÐagainst maketo, or a `true' Basque historyagainst `of®cial' Spanish histories.

Black on White/White on Black

In light of the posthuman cyborg's purported ability to blur boundaries I want tobegin analysis of Vacas by examining precisely its striking and seemingly irresolvabledualisms. First and foremost, Vacas pits Basque myth against Basque history. Insupport of a mythic reading of Basque culture, Medem's ®lm has been viewed as asimple epic tale of Basque rural life, telling the story of two families, the Irigibelsand Mendiluces, neighbors and rivals inhabiting what Nuria Vidal has described as`un mundo ancestral primitivo' (Vidal 1992, p. 8). Medem shoots this primitiveworld in lush, earthy tones, drawing attention to the ®lm's setting in what SaraTorres identi®es as `posiblemente el valle maÂs hermoso y virgen de toda Euskadi'(Torres 1991, p. 95). The ®lm abounds, moreover, with mythic imagery, the forestseparating the two family caserõÂos reading as a kind of Garden of Eden where a BasqueAdam and Eve meet in the shadows of a mythic tree to form the ®rst Basque man.Medem mixes poetic close-ups of native ¯ora and fauna with his glossy panoramicshots, and ®nally, emplaces all in a tale displaying a number of cyclical properties akinto myth.

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At the same time, Medem situates the epic of internal family strife between largerpolitical struggles with an external Other, the ®lm beginning with the Carlist war of1875 and concluding in the Spanish civil war of 1936. Both settings actually mix mythand history, as the Carlist crisis situates the story at what according to many is thepoint of origin of Basque nationalist identity: the 1875 Carlist war that involved theSpanish siege of Bilbao and led to the loss of Basque fueros in 1876, the events fromwhich sprang Sabino de Arana Goiri's nationalist movement (Heiberg 1989, pp. 45,49; Juaristi 2000, pp. 168±170). Moreover, while the speci®c 1875 date inserts history,the Carlist con¯ict has its own mythic meanings, described by the in¯uentialnineteenth-century French Basque writer, Joseph-AgustõÂn Chaho, as `a war of nationalreaf®rmation and, thus, part of a long tradition' (Heiberg 1989, p. 48). Suchconstructive tension between myth and history continues throughout the ®lm, asspeci®c dating of scenes (1875, 1905, 1915, 1936) and clear evidences of political,economic, and social changes tint each episode in the color of history, while therepetition of events and even of actors in different guises foregrounds archetypes thatdraw a timeless intrahistory from beneath historical change.

The myth/history divide is only the ®rst of many dualisms around which the ®lmwill build: nature vs. culture, woman vs. man, heart vs. mind, barbarism vs.civilization, Basque vs. Spaniard. As with the myth/history binary, Medem is moreinterested in creating dialogue than resolving con¯icts. Here, some detail of the ®lm isnecessary to work towards my reading of posthumanist Basque identity. Even asMedem invites historicization through reference to war, he uses con¯ict to narrate amythic struggle between the two neighbor families of the mountain valley, the Irigibelsand the Mendiluces. The scenes following the episode of the Carlist war feature thesons of the Carlist heroes, who now ®nd themselves as rivals in aizkolari competitions,as well as competing for the affections of the same girl, their respective sister andneighbor. Medem's narration of this rivalry invokes Basque politics of the same era.Appearing to spring from events in the Carlist trenches, the rivalry grows and reshapesthe valley ideologically through celebrated Basque festivals, in particular the aizkolaricompetitions.1 By the arrival of the 1936 civil war, former allies now slaughter oneanother. Basque nationalism, sprung from the trenches of Carlist defeat, nurtured inthe rural-focused cultural festivals of the 1910s and 1920s, and af®rmed in the loss toSpanish fascism in the civil war, is soundly historicized for Basque spectators in theseepisodes.

At the same time, Medem's cinematography keeps the historical development closeto the mythic earth: work in the virgin forests is gritty, sexual intercourse in this edenicsetting sinks into the moss and mulch, animal-like. As the families evolve in closeproximity to nature, so too their futuresÐand, in turn, their pastsÐintertwine. Themixing of the blood and seed of the two families grows exponentially from episode toepisode. Midway through the ®lm the second-generation Mendiluz aizkolari engagesin sexual relations with his rival's sister, resulting in a son that will bridge the gapbetween the competing families. However, the ®rst scene of the ®lmÐthe activity inthe Carlist trenches in which Irigibel gives his life and literally his blood to save hisneighborÐmakes the Mendiluz family a symbolic extension of the Irigibels.

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Moreover, tensions in the trenches just prior to the Irigibel sacri®ce suggest possibleliteral connections between the families' progeny. Consequently, the son that joins thefamilies may be merely the ®rst acknowledged union. This same Mendiluz/Irigibelproduct will, in time, fall in love with his Mendiluz half-sister. A second straightgeneration of incest, which begins as the ®lm concludes, con®rms the spectator'searliest suspicions about Mendiluz/Irigibel connections and in doing so converts theseinteractions into mythic, timeless events. At the spatial, temporal, and symbolic heartof this dynamicÐespecially in the one explicit scene of Mendiluz/Irigibel couplingÐstands a large, dead tree stump, `El agujero encendido', a bottomless opening to theheart of the earth, bathed in blood, ¯ies, and earth, a mythic tree-of-life/tree-of-knowledge-of-good-and-evil at the heart of the families' Adam/Eve, Cain/Abelinteractions. In its poetics, Medem's ®lm is an af®rmation of Arano Goiri's mythifyingdeclaration of Basqueness as `the moral union of individuals born from the sametrunk, who maintain among themselves relations elaborated by blood through time'(Heiberg 1989, p. 51).

On top of the tensions between myth and history Medem adds the eponymousvacas, or cows, into the mix. In an early review of the ®lm, Paul Julian Smith calls thecows `mute witnesses to human absurdity' (Smith 1997, p. 12). For example, in the®lm's ®rst episode, when Manuel Irigibel deserts the Carlist cause bathed in Mendiluzblood, a cow stands as his lone accuser. Medem's camera frames the `mute witness',moreover, as a kind of god, discovering with an all-seeing eye the erstwhile soldier'scowardice. Fifty years later, when Manuel's son, Ignacio, enjoys a midnightrendezvous with the daughter of his late rival and ironic savior, a cow again lookson. At the ®lm's conclusion yet another cow stands by as an illegitimate Irigibel/Mendiluz descendant escapes with his half-sister from the slaughter of civil war. Allthree scenes foreground a strange and estranging vision of the Basque identityexplored in the ®lm, forcing the spectator to view related myths and histories fromunaccustomed angles.

Many ®lm viewers have rightly seen the cows, however, as much more than merewitnesses: rather, in fact, as a strange metaphor for the Basque people themselves.Indeed, from the ®lm's opening scene to its ®nal resolution, cows not only observe butparticipate in the Irigibel/Mendiluz saga. Such participation, however, does begin withtheir role as witnesses. If the cows are `mute' in this role, as Smith describes, they arecertainly not blind. On the contrary, Medem actually employs the cows within hisstory as literal focalizers. Several scenes feature camera work that presents spectatorswith what they understand as a cow's-eye view of human activity; the camera movesspectators literally into and then out from the cow's eye. At times the journey results ina reverse shot that gazes back at the human eye that brought the spectator in; moreoften, however, the shot breaks expectations for reversal to carry spectators throughthe ocular nerve and into cow consciousness as it were, out onto an-other side,implicitly an alternative world of bovine imagination that renders all identities`Other'. In fact, an early sequence suggests a never-resolved possibility that the entire®lm beyond its initial Carlist war episode is the product of cows' vision. Through suchcamera work, Medem repeatedly tears at any simple suture between ®lm text and

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spectator: bovine vision replaces the patriarchal gaze described by apparatus theorists,and, moreover, thanks to its occupation of multiple narrative levels, calls attention toitself as such. Hence, in the language of apparatus theory, camera work problematizesthe production of the illusory subjectivity based on the manufacture of an ego-idealbuilt upon identi®cation between camera, protagonist, and spectator. Thus, a ®lm thatwould be about Basque identity is problematized by a meta-cinematic exploration ofthe very notion of identity.

Still, as I will continue to repeat, problematizationÐor, rather, historicizationÐdoes not completely dissolve the suturingÐor mythologizingÐcapacity of the ®lm.Suture works particularly at an ideological and an aesthetic level, constructingspectators anxious to resolve the enigma of the Irigibel/Mendiluz rivalry andits relation to Basque myth/history, and to understand the bovine imagination behindthe camera. Medem's suggestive music, lush cinematography, and presentation ofcows as stand-ins for human protagonists allow an alternative kind of suturing toproceed.

Medem encourages this suturing of a distanced spectatorship mainly by drawing awealth of parallels between the cows in the ®lm and the two rival families, making itimpossible to see the cows (and `their' focalization of Medem's camera) as separatefrom the humans who are themselves indivisibly sutured together in spite of theirprophesied rivalry. For example, in the ®rst scene following the escape of ManuelIrigibel from the Carlist war, Manuel, now a venerable white-haired patriarch, paintswhat appears to be a portrait of his three granddaughters with the family milk cow.Six-year old Cristina, who will become with the grandfather and her soon-to-be-conceived half-brother one of the ®lm's three protagonists, remarks to her sisters thattheir grandfather is painting only the cow. When her sisters question her claim, thegrandfather reassures them: `Todo el mundo sabe que una vaca no se sujeta sola, ymucho menos en un cuadro'. The spectator, enjoying a privileged camera angle thatincludes grandfather, portrait, and models, sees, however, only the likeness of a cow onthe canvas. Cristina then shoos the cow away, encouraging her sisters to check theprogress of the painting. As the grandfather continues to paint, a shot/reverse-shotsequence shows Cristina still posing, standing as though possessed of a secretknowledge that while her grandfather paints only the cow (as she had insisted), at thesame time he paints her. Cristina and cow fuse in the minds of the spectator as theyalready have with Medem's mind/camera. Later in the ®lm, a whole series of paintingsdepicting Cristina and her half-brother as cows recon®rm this fusion.

Summarizing to this point, more than mere symbols of human interaction, thecows become literally connected continuations, a kind of primitive prosthesis, of theBasque and Spanish family body ®rst constructed through the ®lm's allegorical clues.Through the cow(camera)-to-human link Medem problematizes the intra-valleyrivalry between the two families. On the one hand, by drawing symbolic connectionsbetween humans and cows, he foregrounds the biological nature of Basque identityexplored in the ®lm. On the other hand, by using the same cows as focalizers of hiscamera, Medem subverts the very notion of a human nature `out there in the primevalforest' ready to be discovered, defeated, or defended.

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The Basque Cyborg

At this moment of fusion between cow and Basque, between animal and human, vaca

and vasca, a moment that seemingly couples the human to a pre-human nature of

animals and earth, theories of the posthuman may seem far away. Surprisingly, at this

point such theory, especially Haraway's thought on the cyborg, may be most helpful.

Haraway's manifesto is different from so much of posthumanist rhetoric in that,

rather than escaping into the rare®ed ether of cyberspace, it tugs posthumanists, like

spectators of a Medem forest scene, back into the blood and soil of biology. Haraway

explains that the notion of a cyborgÐhalf animal±half machineÐhistorically has

arisen in cultures at moments when boundaries between humans and animals have

been breached, when nothing, `language, tool use, social behavior, mental events ¼

convincingly settles the separation of human and animal' (Haraway 2000, p. 72).

Hence, it is not a sign or agent of transcendence but of the collapse of biology and

technology, of matter and spirit.This is, in fact, precisely what happens in Vacas. Indeed, the posthuman cyborg that

will generate meaning from the multiple tensions of Medem's strange ®lm springs

literally from the human/cow fusion. At the very point in the ®lm where cow/human

coupling becomes indisputably evident, cows begin to cede their role to a variety of

technologies. The changing of the guard, moreover, occurs on the multiple narrative

levels whereon the cows and humans fused. That is, technology, like the cow, becomes

both another protagonist and focalizer. As protagonist, technology does exactly as the

cows, mixing with the various combinations of Irigibels and Mendiluces to become

literal prostheses of the Basque body. In its second role, technology replaces the cow as

the camera/focalizer of the ®lm. If cows initially spark interest in the technology of

Medem's camera, now technology itself descends to a narrative level to become the

new `cow' of the movie. The technology of the camera, once manipulated by the cow,

now enters the narrative itself, springing forth almost literallyÐas I will show belowÐ

from the cow itself to function as more than just a meta®ctional device; it functions

now as a `posthuman' prosthetic of the Basque body developed in the ®lm.The changing of the guard commences when Ignacio IrigibelÐthe second

generationÐbegins bringing home his aizkolari winnings. Ignacio initially uses his

winnings to replace the family's native cow with a superior black-and-white, foreign-

bred version, a move that inserts a question of foreign-ness into this study of

Basqueness, highlighting another duality at the heart of Basque identity (Juaristi 2000,

p. 49). Ignacio returns from a later competition bringing a foreign automobile and a

tripod camera. The black-trim-on-white design of the automobile parallels the black

and white cow of the previous triumphal return as well as the very composition of the

valley inhabited by black-clad Mendiluces and white-clad Irigibels. The family

patriarch, Manuel, obsessed since his Carlist war days with staring into the eyes of

cows, literally sees into being the connection between cow and the new technology, as

he now rejects the cow's eye to stare instead into the eye of the tripod camera. Here,

Medem reproduces the defamiliarizing sequence of shots whereby the view of the

spectator itself travels into the camera view®nder to open out from the other end,

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converting the camera into the ®lm's new focalizer. Medem's camera now stands foritself, returning the spectator to an awareness of the self-conscious play of the ®lmwith its own devices. But again, by ®ltering this self-consciousness through the vaca/vasco plot line, Medem makes it part of the suturing play of the ®lm. In other words, inreplacing the cow/camera-eye view with a camera/camera-eye view, he collapsesnarrative levels; the camera is now both representation and representer, and, yet again,another extension of the on-screen human subject with whose vision spectatorsstruggle to suture theirs.

In this subtle cyborg-ing of the Basque subject, signi®cantly, biology is still not lost.Like the cow-camera vision, the camera-camera vision sustains the ®lm's focus onnature, manifest in frequent sounds of bellowing, shots of falling excrement and ¯y-infested eyes, and scenes of the birthing of a calf and the death of a cow. Through theeye of the tripod camera, the biological component of a lush Basque wilderness comesmore sharply into focus, with extreme close-ups of a variety of ¯ora and fauna. Aseasily as Basque identity ¯oats from Mendiluz to Irigibel, and then to cows, to cars,and to cameras, strong ties to biology remain to ground its ¯ight.

In the latter part of the ®lm, as nature and technology unite, Medem embodies thebiology/technology, or human/cow/camera link, in the person of Peru, Cristina'sMendiluz/Irigibel half-brother. The culmination of generations of rivalry, incest, andblood mixing, Peru is in name a Mendiluz, though his sympathies and associationsdraw him to the Irigibels. As possibly a third-generation product of rivalries and bloodmixing, Peru epitomizes the simultaneous stretching and collapsing of humanistdualisms that information and biotechnology introduce to the posthuman subject.Above all, Peru is symbolically, and following the ®lm's own special logic-by-montage,almost literally, a cow/child, a vaca/vasco; the ultimate product of incest/rivalry, he isthe ultimate form of human/animal. Mise-en-sceÁne and montage link Peru'sconception and birth, respectively, to that of the black-and-white cow's calf so thatPeru and the calf become paradigmatic stand-ins for the other in the ®lm's syntax.Peru is a cow/child.

Thanks again to montage and mise-en-sceÁne, Peru, the cow/child, soon becomes acow/child/camera (where animal and human divisions have collapsed, the cyborgenters in). Inheriting his grandfather's obsession with the camera, Peru regularlyremoves the tripod and dons the machine atop his head as if an extensionÐorprosthetic, to use Hayles's preferred termÐof his body. In one of the ®lm's mostmemorable mise-en-sceÁnes the multiple mixtures of identity (Mendiluz/Irigibel;human/cow; human/camera) join in a single shot featuring the elder Manuel Irigibel,the original Mendiluz/Irigibel: ®rst victim of the cow's gaze as well as director of thatgaze; his Irigibel granddaughter Cristina: the original vaca/vasca; the Mendiluz/Irigibelboy/camera, Peru, wearing the camera over his head so that in the scene he is nothingbut a cyborg; and the all-seeing cow itself. With faces ®lling the screen they present anironic counterpoint to an earlier of®cial family portrait of the Irigibel family posedbefore their caserõÂo. In opposition to the portrait of of®cial patriarchal power (in theshot the champion aizkolari holds his axe threateningly over his wife) lording over awell-organized family unit, the constantly moving combination of cow, humans, and

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machine emphasizes the heterogeneity, earthiness, and, ®nally, irreducible strangenessof human and Basque being. As if to underline this difference, the grandfather insiststhrough the scene, `Eso es importante. Eso es importantõÂsimo. Nunca os olvideÂis deeso.'

Patterns of Basqueness

If Medem's multiple mixing of cows and humans had precipitated an earlierexploration of the biology of Basqueness, the introduction of the camera extends thatquestioning into the realm of information, the second of the two technologiesinspiring posthuman thinking. The camera records information, which is thentransformed, or `embodied', through further technological processes into photo-graphs. When Peru and his half-sister/neighbor, Cristina, are separated geographicallytoward the end of the ®lm, information-based photographic bodies replace ¯esh-and-blood presences to reaf®rm existence. Peru, the ultimate Basque cyborg, has physicallydisappeared. But while he is physically absent, his information patterns returnregularly to sustain meaning in the old country. Photos function to extend being,serving as what Nicholas Mirzoeff has called a `prosthetic memory' (Mirzoeff 1999, p.82). Moreover, in Peru, a budding international photographer for an importantAmerican paper, identity not only consists of information patterns, but of informationthat ¯ows from an already impure source and now almost entirely disconnected inmaterial form from a Basque homeland. The cyborg child is the essence of impurity,but also the essence of the ®lm's version of Basqueness in all its purity. On the onehand, Peru is the epitome of `noise' and `pollution', a rejoicing `in the illegitimatefusions of animal and machine' (Haraway 2000, p. 81). On the other hand, Peru, thecyborg man/camera is the ®lm's `best machine ¼ made of sunshine ¼ all light andclean'; from his North American location he is `nothing but signals, electromagneticwaves, a section of a spectrum ¼ eminently portable, mobile ¼ ether, quintessence'(Haraway 2000, p. 73). Both quotes from Haraway describe the cyborg, which, in all itsnovel cleanness, continually confuses age-old boundaries.

Hence, by the time the story arrives at the Spanish civil war of 1936Ðmovingforward historically but also effecting a mythic return to a violent, victimist encounterwith the Other that Juaristi claims has always de®ned Basque identity (2000, p. 35)Ðthat very identity has been at once pulled apart at the seams and collapsed to the pointof implosion, and this on both the levels of an ultimately conjoined content andtechnique. The discourse of Basque identity that Medem has produced, mixing natureand culture, mind and body, human and animal and technology, and suturing this upwith the visionÐand momentary subjectivityÐof the spectator, might be described interms that Paula Rabinowitz has used to discuss the possibilities for a posthumanfeminism: it is a discourse that circulates apart from human (i.e. Western, patriarchal)knowledge, a Basque story that develops from an evasion of truth and a saturation infantasy, exaggeration, and lies (Rabinowitz 2000, p. 43). The battle scene, in whichBasque gudaris ®ght Basque Carlist requeteÂs and their Italian support, moves quicklyinto the primeval forest with views of ancient tree trunks, sounds of the mythic jabalõÂ,

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and shots of the original yellow milk cow from the Carlist campaign of 1875. In thismythic skirmish (however historical in appearance), most of the local Basque ®ghtersare killed, Cristina loses consciousness, and Peru is rounded up to be placed before a®ring squad. At the last moment Peru's Carlist uncle Juan, the Mendiluz rival of Peru'sIrigibel father, recognizes his nephew and rescues him from certain death. However,when the guns go off, Peru, thinking he has been shot, falls to the earth alongside hisless fortunate fellow villagers, leading the spectator to believe momentarily that theprotagonist has indeed died. Finding himself still alive, Peru arises and walks away as ifin a trance, a kind of ghost of his former self. The human/cow/camera has now become®guratively immaterial. He has been saved, and in a sense given a new life not becauseof his presence on one side or the other of battle lines or because of his possession of aforeign passport but because of genetic patterns that run in his blood and his access toa Carlist uncle who shares and understands his code. And yet, he believes for amoment that he has lost his camera in the ®ghting; symbolically, he is not pureinformation technologyÐthe guise he acquired when living abroadÐeither. Medempaints Peru here as both physically and symbolically absent; yet, arising from the forest¯oor he is as biologically and spiritually present as ever.

In the ®nal scene of the ®lm, Peru mounts a horse, rescues his half-sister andapparent future lover (also arising from her own deep sleep on the forest ¯oor), andrides off in search of the French border. While on the one hand Peru and Cristina are®nally escapingÐmoving out to a place where `no hay guerra' and doing so on a horse(an animal which moments earlier had come head-to-head with the milk cow in a shotsymbolic of clashing Basque and Spanish cultures)Ðthey carry with them theircrisscrossed blood lines, which in the sexually charged interaction between the two,promise to mix again, as well as the camera that has never physically left Peru's sidefrom his earliest childhood. And while they have rejected the cow for a horse, theanimal±human±technology link still holds. Finally, while there is not a war in France,in a movie that has moved episodically through time, it is implicitly a matter of mereminutes before Cristina and Peru become entangled in yet another de®ning con¯ictÐa war with clear ideological connections to the very con¯ict from which they ¯ee.

But, how will the con¯ict be this time? Between whom? Who will Cristina and Perube by then? What will have become of their Basqueness, living in France or the UnitedStates or wherever their horse, automobile, or other, newer information orbiotechnologies may carry them? The last words the spectator hears as Cristina andPeru ride off into the forest is Cristina af®rming arrival, `estamos llegando'. WithoutMedem's ever-problematizing approach to ®lm, we might say here that the teleologyof Basque nationalist identity has ful®lled itself: Basque nationalism, with the triumphof Francisco Franco and the subsequent repression, was fully formed as a historicalreality (Heiberg 1989, p. 103; Hooper 1995, p. 398; Juaristi 2000, pp. 294±362). ThatCristina's words accompany a shot carrying the spectator ever deeper into the hollowtrunk of the mythic treeÐthe `agujero encendido'Ðat the center of the Basque forestsuggests, however, the arrival on the part of the spectator at a view of Basque identityin its fully romanticized, mythic sense. As we work our way out of the explicit con¯ictof Basque civil war, the tension between myth and history surfaces one ®nal time.

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But cyborgs, as Haraway points out, do not arrive at a ®nal destination, just as theydo not spring from EdenÐor any primeval Basque mountain valley (Haraway 2000,pp. 71, 83). Cyborg identity, like the Basque wilderness in the ®lm's opening shot, orthe Basque valley, in the ®lm's earliest scene, is already scarred. Cyborg arrival, then, isnot transcendence, nor is it a return to any paradise melancholically lost but, rather, toits very opposite. Cyborg politics is not the perfect communication of monolithicBasque nationalist discourseÐwhether mythic or historicalÐbut the very struggleagainst perfect communication realized in Medem's defamiliarizing and stillÐdespitemy inevitably reductive readingÐvery untidy ®lm (Haraway 2000, p. 81). Cyborgpolitics is not a recognition of the human escape from the worldÐor the Basqueescape from Spain, or the escape of Basque myth from Basque history (or vice versa)Ðbut of the Basque self as fully implicated in a world of inextricably intertwined mythand history (Haraway 2000, p. 81). In sum, while Medem's ®lm on the one handproblematizes Basque identity, pointing to the holes already so easily poked innationalist myths, it is, on the other hand, a celebration of a Basque past, but acelebration outside the logic of dominant, Western humanist (or Spanish) discourse.As Paula Rabinowitz has pointed out with the case of feminism, the presence of thecyborg invites the exploration of a posthumanist history. Can the posthuman, thatsupposed creature of the present, have a history, asks Rabinowitz? She reminds us thatsuch is the very question that Western patriarchy so often ®res at women thoughtypically couched so as to posit women as pre-historicalÐor, we might say, biologicaland mythical (Rabinowitz 2000, p. 42). Does the posthuman have links to theprehuman, or to the pre-humanist? Can it get us around the impasses of humanism?Such questions are pertinent to a reading of Vacas as well. In essence, the very questionof history was asked by the Franco regime in the immediate aftermath of the closingevents depicted in Medem's ®lm: does the Basque, the Catalan, or the Galician have ahistory? Can they speak? If not, wherein is their humanism? With Medem's study ofBasque identity, perhaps, indeed `estamos llegando', arriving at a sense of being that asanimal±human±machine `does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonisticdualisms without end' (Haraway 2000, p. 83), or, speci®c to contemporary Basquepolitics, a different kind of Basque state in which `everything is shared, negotiated,contradicted, and sometimes opposed' (Castells 1999, p. 30), a less pristine Basqueland more adaptive and heterogeneous (de Vento s 1999, p. 40).

Gurutz JaÂuregui Bereciartu has argued that Basque nationalism as articulatedthroughout the twentieth century showed no room for heterogeneity, `narrowlyde®ning Basqueness' with an `exclusionary concept of nationalism' that `displaced,and still does today, the essential marrowÐthe Basque people themselves' (JaÂureguiBereciartu 1999, p. 46). Heiberg has called it `non-ecumenical' and `purist', anideology in which alternative options are both politically and morally unacceptable(Heiberg 1989, p. 57). According to Haraway, `Cyborg imagery can suggest a way outof the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools toourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful in®delheteroglossia' (Haraway 2000, p. 84). To conclude, Vacas does not boast any miraclesolution to the complex questions surrounding Basque nationalism or any other

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nationalist movement today. Rather, Medem's ®lm, with its strange and estrangingcombinations of images, techniques, and storylines hits uponÐperhaps even stumblesuponÐthe very complexities of the issue. It illustrates why present political discourseson either side of the independence and identity issue fail. It suggests through its storyand technique a different way of seeing Basque identity, an alternative approach toseeing the Basque past, understanding the Basque present, and planning for a Basquefuture. It does so by problematizing the humanism that infuses both pro-Basque andpro-Spanish discourses. By infusing the Basque Eden with pre- and posthumanpatterns, Medem collapses dualisms and offers an alternative discourse. In his ®lm, toturn in conclusion to the quote that led off this article, in the cyborg Basque `we canlearn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man' (Haraway2000, p. 81). Medem offers instead an alternative Basque, not the manly vasco oftraditional Western humanism and its nationalist offshoots, but a wildly mixedCristina/Peru/cow/camera, not a manly, dualing vasco, but a vasca, or, in a morescrambled formÐalways plural, never patriarchalÐvacas.

Notes

[1] Heiberg argues that during the 1920s, Basque nationalism was most powerfully manifest andpromoted through athletic competitions, dance and music festivals, and other cultural arts(1989, p. 76). She explains, further, that political nationalism preceded cultural nationalism inthe promotion of such events, and that such events were regularly promoted in a way so as toprovoke opposition between Basques and Anti-Basques, despite of®cial declarations of theBasque community as `one great family tied by blood, culture, shared interests and destiny'(1989, pp. 76±77).

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Filmography

Abre los ojos (Alejandro AmenaÂbar, 1998).The Matrix (Andy Wochowski, Larry Wochowski, 1999).Vacas (Julio Medem, 1992).

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