pranešimai

presented papers

The Scene: Obscene/Abscene or, The Oriental Garden of Desire

_{santrauka (lietuviškai ir angliškai)>> /abstracts (in English and Lithuanian)>>}

'The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the place that claws and gnaws at us…'

Michel Foucault, Text/Context of Other Space. Diacritics 16.1 (1986), p.23

On the Loss of Loss

In this fragment, I am addressing certain problems of cultural imperialism dealing with it in the aspect of corporeality, desire, and love. I will mostly concentrate on the sentimental aspects of transformation of Europe into United Europe – a process that is equally painful in the East as in the West, a future event under whose sign both East and West envisage their futures.

Love and politics, however, intersect not only in the Baltic discourses, but also in today’s media discussions concerning the events of the 11th of September and the NATO bomb strikes in Afghanistan. Recently, I have been reading quite a lot of articles in which Western analysts are dealing with Afghan national character and Moslem traditions. Many of them observe, with surprise, that Moslems do not only condemn the US-generated effort of justice, but also seem to refuse to embrace those prospects of social emancipation that Western democracies promise them in exchange for their fundamentalist loyalties. Western analysts are genuinely surprised to learn that Afghan children seem to love Osama more than they love democracy, and that Moslem women would be willing to choose their veils (as well as lives, drab as they are but still undisturbed by war) in preference to the prospect of social emancipation brought about through NATO bomb attacks. The conclusion that Western analysts have to make assessing the lack of understanding offered by those to be emancipated, is “they do not love us”. The statement of the absence of love comes home as a painful revelation. This is not what a dialogue with the Other should result in. This “lack of love” – an erotic aspect in the discourse of justice and puishment – is, to my mind, something more significant than a mere figure of speech. How does it apply in the Western discourse United Europe?

It was a recognizable tune of erotic longing towards the Other that I could clearly discern in the public campaign in favor of the enlargement of Europe. The campaign was undertaken by the Swedish government last summer. As we remember, it was organized on the eve of the European summit in Gothenburg  which, as we also remember, culminated in violent street clashes between the police and anti-globalization activists. The public message calling “Enlarge Europe” sound the same note of unrequited love and sentimental longing that also rings in the media reports on Afghanistan. But seen retroactively, the bureaucratically produced sentimental utopia of a new East-West dialogue on a give-and-take basis contrasts painfully with the later media images of an outburst of hatred that came in the aftermath. Gothenburg’s streets ravaged by masked stone-throwers and the sinister over-presence of the over-equipped, over-efficient police effectively cleaning up the troublemakers. The post-factum media discussion sounds bitter like reproach in unrequited love: the activists are being accused by tabloids for exterminating the very give-and-take spirit nurtured by the bureaucrats: the dialogue cruelly disrupted, the give-and-take undermined, love itself betrayed…

The public campaign  for the enlargement of Europe was certainly directed against the well-known Scandinavian “national egoism”. This sums up as follows: the average taxpayer is not happy about having to cover the expenses of enlarged Europe’s ample bureaucracy, let alone the bottomless economic and social needs of EU’s new members, the spills of the USSR empire. The fear of the USSR would be the only factor that could convince the taxpayer in the necessity of paying for the enlargement. In the absence of the USSR factor, however, one is forced to be looking for new arguments.

			Unexpectedly enough, the argument is found in a Lack: the Vikings in the pictures that were hanging all over Sweden during this summer were represented as basically peaceful, modest people, not imperialist at all, nor aggressively militarist: they were, in fact, those very average tax payers, but strangely disconcerted, not quite happy, dissatisfied, visibly unwashed, unkempt, un-taken-care-of. In each case presented on the billboards (there were five characters, all in all, figuring in various combinations   in   various   places),  there  was
			something essential that was missing, something that stirred desire and longing. In one picture, an emaciated Viking woman was described as allergic to fir and, therefore, longing for cotton from Cyprus. Another character, another woman, a “rhythmic” one, was longing for Estonian choirs. Still another Viking, a sweet but rheumatic old man, was longing for hot spring baths in Hungary;  a self taught Viking polyglot was longing to learn the language of the Poles, and someone else, equally sweet, expressed his desire for honey produced by the Czechs.

In Deficit: “Continentality”

This longing that I was reading in these specimens of bureaucratic propaganda is something I also recognize in the self-searching discourse of the Swedish intelligentsia. I could describe this attitude as a search for “continentality”, whatever that might be: continental lifestyles in fashion magazines, continental attitudes in mass entertainment, continental flair in food and sex life, and, importantly, continental philosophy at universities. The search for continentality goes hand-in-hand with the critical re-appropriation of the Swedish modernity (folkhemmet) and includes the re-consideration of the experience of military neutrality.

Neutrality produced a collective peacefulness of mind, but also seems to have turned its other face on the Swedish society: now that politicians encourage Europeization, Sweden feels painfully alienated from anything that is Europeanism: from European history that is all made of wars and side-taking in military alliances to European personal experiences and personal life stories that are also all made of wars, revolutions, Holocausts, and all possible social calamities. Either in terms of History, or in terms of Memory, Sweden has been getting a growing awareness of incompatibility: its neutrality gives Sweden protection from the horrors of history, but at the same time provides them with a somewhat “inadequate” Europeanness, a missed turn towards “continentality”. It is a tragic incompatibility of Sweden’s personal and collective narratives with the meta-narrative called “Europe”.

A lack of history, as I already said, amounts, strangely enough, to a lack of trauma. Due to its proclaimed neutrality, Sweden feels as if it failed to partake of Europe’s traumatization and, precisely for that reason, is excluded from the collective post-traumatic stress and from the collective talking cure, the public discussion. While the rest of Europe is discussing its continental pains, the Swedes seem to have no pains to discuss – therefore, no understanding, no solidarity to be gained in this on-going conversation.

Identity as a Local Apocalypse

Traumatization by non-History, I as I see it, prevents the Western intelligentsia from the understanding of the fact that their alienation does not so much result from their “inadequate continentality”. What is much more important, this alienation is a by-product of history’s narrative machine. Both symbolic constructions of “Europeanism” and “continentality” (vague as they are) are both derivative from the narrative syntax of History. I mean primarily the apocalyptic mode of appropriating history: we know it mainly as a chronology of catastrophes. We count time by periods immediately preceding or immediately following one catastrophe or another; this is also how we count generations: in each generation, there should be a catastrophe to form its cultural physiognomy – 1914, 1939, 1968 and so on.

Thus, belonging to a history comes to be synonymous with belonging to one or another Apocalypse; similarly, belonging to a generation means partaking of one of another “local holocaust”. The Bible – History’s narrative mother – starts with the story about the catastrophe of the Fall and ends in the story about the catastrophe of the Last Judgment. Just like the Biblical story, any local history – a national, a corporate, or a personal one – is expected to start with a cataclysm and end up in a cataclysmic resolution.

It is no news that “Europe” is not a geographical concept, but a narrative one. The concept of “Europe” as we know it first articulated itself through the vision of Europe’s own Fall (Oswald Spengler). Europeanism thus amounts to a mega-narrative of Europe’s own historical demise. Being European means having a chance of envisioning Past and Future through the knowledge of one’s own irrevocable extermination.

This apocalyptic narrative gives rise to institutions that are organized by the apocalyptic principle. Our heterotopias – museums, archives, to say nothing of churchyards – are all conflations of organized and classified historical catastrophes. The memorial and research center Yad-Vashem in Jerusalem – one of the the biggest Jewish archives – produces Jewish identities from the fact of demise in the Holocaust: in order to be included in the world’s biggest register of Jews one needs to have had a family killed in extermination. The mode of apocalyptic narrative is forced on History and Memory by History’s and Memory’s own institutions, producing catastrophic stories in official history as well as in the construction of private life stories. Such an identity is, by the logical necessity of the narrative, a Loss; the loss of such Loss – i.e., no loss at all --  inevitably excludes  one from European history and European memory.

The trauma inflicted by the loss of loss, however, is not the stigma of Sweden as a nation; rather, as psychoanalysts are telling us, it is the stigma of the whole of the post-post-war generation whose experiences have been protected, politically and socially, from over-exposure to mass destructions. The post-post-war generation has no Holocaust to identify with, and this fact only results in new problems of identification. Holocaust therapists, for example, report the appearance of a new form of identity crisis developed by the second generation of Jewish holocaust survivors. As distinct from their parents, they do not have any immediate experience of historical trauma that gave identity to the generation of their fathers and mothers. The lack of such a trauma, paradoxically enough, is a trauma in itself: having no Apocalypse in their past to identify with, they go through a severe crisis in the construction of personal identities.

I can also give a similar example from my personal history. My identity is strongly influenced by my family history – a history, however, that I have no access to. My grandfather and grandmother were staunch Soviet Bolsheviks, prominent enough during the early Stalin’s times. As many other “prominences”, theirs was drastically reduced when the Grand Terror began. I have always been very sensitive to this “destroyed prominence”, always conscious of the fact that I owe to it that privileged position that my family was enjoying in the USSR – but by the same token, also owing it the repression that the USSR generally implied to all of its members, no matter how prominent. My knowledge about their activities comes mostly from family legends, which, as any family legends, are just tales of glorification mixed with attempts of justification. However, my efforts to find bare facts instead of family myths proved useless. The problem was, again, the lack of problem: different from other prominent figures of the same generation, my grandparents, in spite of their “reduced prominence”,  were never imprisoned nor shot under Stalin (and the question that I was fearing to get an answer to was, of course, “How come?”) What stood in the way of my ultimate documented knowledge, was that very apocalyptic principle of archivization that I spoke of earlier. From discussions with GULAG historians, I found out that nowadays, at the time of regained accesses to official archives in the ex-USSR, it is this very fact of under-repression – the incomplete extermination of my grandparents – that prevents me from learning the facts.

If my grandfather had been shot or at least imprisoned in his time, I would be entitled nowadays, as a family member, to familiarize myself with his official file. Moreover, if he had been shot, I would be entitled, as a member of his family, to the title of the granddaughter of the victim: this would have saved me lots of unpleasant thoughts about my own and my family’s second-hand implication in, and responsibility for, the terror. However, since he so luckily survived, there is practically no hope of ever finding his file in the archives, and there are no organizations that would have the right to (or interest in) unearthing his case.

Thus, I don’t even have the possibility of finding out the most basic piece of knowledge about my grandfather: was he, after all, a victim or (a disquieting thought) an executioner? Are we a family of victims, or that of ruthless, parasitic perpetrators? Are we “good ones” or “bad ones”? I am lost in this maze of non-knowledge, deprived of the right to inscribe my own narrative of identification into a larger context of historical catastrophe. In the same way as second-generation Holocaust survivors lack a personal catastrophe that would inscribe them into a narrative of Jewishness. In the same way as post-post-war generation Swedes lack a personal catastrophe that would inscribe them into a narrative of “continentality” and “Europeanism”.

Identity: the Sweet but Faithless Lover

It is this alienation from ours own identities that makes us proclaim the endless “ends of history” at every turn of politics. These imagined “ends” are not the outcome of historical events. They are produced by the way we appropriate the narrative of local apocalypses. Our experience of the Self is negative: the alienation from our own past; an unrequited love, an unfulfilled desire for a symbolic home. We are rejected by history as we are rejected by our lovers: the desire to be desired by the desired gets no desire in response.

The post-historical condition of “I” as Deleuse and Guattari playfully suggest, a mere figure of speech. A generation of motherless/fatherless “I’s”, unloved by their own histories, displaced from history’s playing grounds, from its “gardens of desire”.

Identity is a symbolic home where one is supposed to be loved, nurtured, and cherished. When we ask other people “Where do you come from”, we actually mean, “Who are you loved by?” or “Where are you always welcome”? In this strategy of identification by being loved, we often forget that home is also a place of death and sorrow: a place where my mother and father died, a place where I grieve their loss.

Identity without grief is home without loss: a fake home, an empty identity, a meaningless “I” – an “I”as a figure of speech. My generation is traumatized by having a home without trauma; in its search for identity, my generation is primarily looking for a loss to grieve. The actual “home” – Sweden, for example – turns out to be a place without grievance, a place without an apocalypse. What I think is very visible behind the commercial tourist interest in Eastern Europe is the need to find a place to grieve in (and about).

When no grief is possible at home, there is positively something wrong with “home”. Young Sweden exports its grief overseas: thus, the overseas, Eastern Europe, the garden of history becomes a promise of a real home instead of a simulated home at home: Eastern Europe where the presence of multiple historical apocalypses does not care to conceal itself under any facades. A lived reality of historical catastrophe that does not care for facades, nor can it afford the erection and the maintenance of facades.

This is why I refer to Eastern Europe as a garden of desire: it preserves in itself the traces of each and every European catastrophe  and thus forms a living body of European apocalyptic history, a living archive of various forms of extermination out of which Europe is building its historical narratives. In his conceptualization of heterotopia – a place of arrested flow of time, a conflation of history – Foucault imagines it as a museum, an archive, a graveyard, or a garden. Of these four images, I prefer the last one: the oriental garden is a place of intense and joyous living, in contrast to the graveyard’s eternal peace. An oriental garden is a place of unreflected, spontaneous experiencing – a more suitable metaphor for Eastern Europe than an archive or a museum that are places for veneration  and reflection. Eastern Europe is first and foremost a place of lived corporealities: with its notorious weakness of social institutions, it is extremely strong in terms of (in)corporations.

Maybe this is what gives the Western institutionalized individual a highly desirable feeling of intensely lived corporeal life, a feeling of the ultimate survival of corporeality in spite of institutionalization – the joy of incorporated togetherness instead of the institutionalized individuation and estrangement in the bureaucratic utopia.