Politicness of any territorial identity suffers from trivial binaries (me/you, good/bad, East/West, left/right, this/that...). The third solution (in many versions and nuances of; fusioned, ordinary, dislocated, unified, unspecified...), inhabited by those dissatisfied with both opposing radical choices, or alternatively; rejected by them, hardly regarded as serious. It is seen as bad; faceless, beyond ethics, geographically and spatially lost, not serious; and described with many terms of their cowardice, a weakness, a lack of an attitude, and an interest in the debate. Being third is worse then even being an enemy, as conformism or non-conformism is demanded for the importance of issuing divisions. Otherwise, the whole disputation is seems; plastic and hyperficial.
But, there was always that less acknowledged way of; neutrality, chosen or imposed, that indeed have side-appearance as anxiousness, indifference, or apathetic resistance. There were always, and still are those people that live in that twilight of political binarism, that moves right and left, East and West, socialism and capitalism, feeling no gravity of any of them, or those that simply live in between.
The story repeats symptomatically, showing again no sense, as it is its nature. Narratives of indecision are boring and repeatable, echoed and replicated. Their territorial forms are always abstract; moving in circles, trivial absence from a place, a moving that is not a departure, an elimination of return, treating all quays as only places to take a breath. Similar are their timed descriptions, as; spending time in between waiting and thinking back. It is apathetic geography with the undecided time.
Indifference of those double-minded seems to be a channel through which everything needs to pass, to be purified up, to be refreshed, and to get the meaning. That nomadism is meaningless in all directions; as at the same time there are those that quest for the travel "to" somewhere, and those that know only where they travel "from". And again, there are those that have given up asking the question. They are anxious, sceptical to both defining the departure and arrival point. For them they are the same, as things simply repeat. So, arrival paradoxically happens before the departure, and all of them in lost times of maybe, sometimes, once, as in dream, a long, long time ago...
Third is a ground decided in-between two, but at the same time it is a soft border, and is inhabited with those that don't know who they are. It is a zone of un-named, or named vague; as zone (as "Krajina"), interzone, twilight zone...
For those reasons, the territory inhabited is non-patriatised, and all depictions of it are foggy, distorted and doubled, unfocused as uncorrected. So, they are by any sides simply omitted as irrelevant. In that dis-objectified world only another illusion of impossible bothness is desirable, of fullness of meaning, while any of single solution claustrophobic. As both sides do include them in the descriptions of self; those are doubled beings, existing at the same time in both different maps that cover the same edge as referential. But as the map is not a territory, they live in a territory inbetween two maps, a territory of extra-dimension needed to draw a map on the flat surface, seeing both of them fused.
Because of that, politicalness of that middle way [of neutrality, of vagueness, of unbelonging] is futile. It is a road of the unsatisfied or even a road of unsatisfaction, crowded with those tired of cronical confronting to the limited choice, always in-between two single-sided constructs, that have to be both used as parameters of the same real space they refer to. Tired of being a reference, they become a line of referring, a border of sense.
Being imprisoned from the outside of both, means living on the border. Though, a border is a small territory, a framing line of a temporary sense. Therefore, that zone has no reasons, ideologies, interpretations and uses. The line of division is inhabited by alternative histories, and alternative geographies of repeating. It moves, but with all movings it has no sense, as meaning of the border is precisely to keep the sense outside or inside of self.
We can think the border visually, as a line on which no one is supposed to live, two-dimensional world. That line is double exposed, from both sides described. What it is then, is a doubled territory, that can be as well seen as belonging here and there. In the time sense of visual media double exposure, that can be compared, an error in which "a bit before" intersects "a bit after", but without any present, or any presence. It is a consequent event of the transformation that is not accepted as distinct.
There are as well two eyes that show the same story. Parallaxes, a fall of a picture between two eyes, is corrected or objectified (made desirable) in three dimensional, perspective (or purposive), and real. In biological and parallely the cultural maturing, correction of the binocular vision is a main interrogation of the authority that resolves the meaning, or identity, that gives the meaning to the one. The unfocused world is irrelevant, and its existence doesn't matter. It can be omitted, so are the histories of the undecided or double-minded. It is irrelevant, and that irrelevancy is repeatable while all divisions aside change. That is, and for those reasons it is excluded from it, because finally civilisation is a fight against the apathy of undeciding, of drawing precisely; borders.
That is, again, the world that has no other horizon, than the one of expectations in-between. History of the undecided, and at the same time refused, rejected, and uninvited is a history of lodging for a meaning in a lost and unreachable land, that tries to find the ideal identity while it is tired of both it already possesses. It is rich of interpretation and poor in meaning.
The same is a story of the Promised land, the richest narrative without a sense. As how can something be sensical that is lost and desired at the same time? On the border that is a territory, there is always a wish to become a space. The promised land can only be described in terms of inside outside, through the history of diving out. Utopia is produced by melancholy.
It means, "home, that is lost". Birgel's concept of Heimat [Ger. Home] gives the closest definition of "utopia omnius" (Morley and Robins, 1995), losing the security, or ghostly reminder of a disintegrated past, that cannot be re-established. Only in the Bible, it was lost twice. It is a home that is abandoned, but refused, desired but rejected. And it always had it's space; it was always that strange territory in-between lost past and unreached future, but with lack of dimension of present. It was always only a thin line that has no other territory, outside of both bridging and dividing, as all borders are.
It is a place of identity, a place of lost meaning. As such, it is as well a dream of drawing another border, and the only horizon (of expectations) basically a border. But all places are discovered. Finally, this is a first century of a "closed map", that had to find the way of resolving a tragic of the discovered world, since the last Terra Incognita disappeared in 1899, and there is no place for those that have nowhere to go, that stand "on the line".
That place is inhabited by people that can be both "in residence", although are prosaically in exile, refugees, or gastarbeit [ger. temporal hard labour abroad]... It is an imperfect world of errored fusions; of here and there; being nowhere; being home abroad, real and virtual; included or excluded. It is a place of being alive dead, dead alive, being both without a will to change it... to atrophy and diminish the self out, to dream. Because, finally, the border is an ideal territory, that has no gravity of meaning, it is enough paradoxical to be free, until the real meaning arrives.
But third can also be related to the other nicely drawn territorial identities, despite major ones [as; state, nation, religion, culture]. They can inhabit descriptions of any real or illusional space, even movements in it, any inclusion and exclusion, territorial identity, or even it's valorisation. It can, therefore, refer even to the one of own body, as the only state, as a nation, even as own religion and cultural point. What stays is only indifference in lost both-ness, inbetween maps that are not the territory but appear as. And that travel is only travel on the border, on all those territorial borders; from state to the own body lines, as temporary home.