Tradition, Cultural Boundaries and the Constructions of Spaces
of Identity*
Identity formation
Central Europe is not a nation, and it is not
a state. It is neither a political unit nor a geographical designation;
yet Central Europe supposedly describes a geographical region, a
set of cultural phenomena, a tradition, in short, a community that
matters. This statement might seem very banal, yet the urgency of
the discussions, the desperate attempts to look for a definition
(defining it, that is, setting limits to the fluidity of a term,
stabilizing its meaning) are indicative of the importance of such
conceptualizations for coming to terms with what has been very often
described as a "crisis of identity" in contemporary academic
and popular discourse.
An obsession with defining this region can be
traced back to the rise of nationalism in the first half of the nineteenthcentury,
but it acquired a new sense of urgency in the 1980s, when old certainties
no longer seemed to obtain and social, political and economic changes
led to the breakdown of previously relatively stable representations
of community and group memberships. Issues of identity formation
have become the key to the interface between subject positions and
social and cultural situations. A cultural turn has brought identity
politics to the fore in geography and history, and added to the apparent
need to find traces and definitions of a "Central European culture."
This brings up questions of the basis of collective
and individual identity formation may:
at first sight seem surprising, for the consistent
logic of modern social and cultural thought has been to undermine
the notion of individual identity. Sociologists and Marxists have
insisted on its social determinations; Freud’s account of the unconscious
showed the inherently split, and so non‑identical, nature of the
self; Saussurean linguistics posited the self as the product rather
than the author of symbolic codes and systems; Foucault and others
point to the processes of subjectification operated by cultural apparatuses
and technologies. So why the return of identity as a theoretical
topic and a political project? The logics of universalism and, more
recently, modernization and globalization have sought to represent
localized identities as historical, regressive characteristics, and
have worked to undermine the old allegiances of place and community.
But the burgeoning of identity politics, and now nationalism, reveal
a clear resistance to such universalizing strategies. (Morley and
Robins viii)
Identity matters because it raises fundamental
questions about how individuals and groups fit, are co-opted into
or excluded from communities and the social world, and these meanings
appear to be in crisis.
The answer to this crisis is very often a vague notion of some
kind of "cultural community," a representational form
of belonging disengaged from political units that have fallen apart.
Identity itself is regarded as a cultural phenomenon, implying
that its construction is both symbolic and social. Identities are
given meaning through the language and symbolic systems through
which they are represented.
Doubtless this cultural turn in the search for
identity is a consequence of the demise of the nation as what Rupert
Emerson has called a "terminal community – the largest
community that, when the chips are down, effectively commands men's
[sic] loyalty" (Emerson 95) and its discourse of unifying traditions,
experiences and symbols. In its wake, geo-cultural notions gain new
acceptance and fill the void, but leave more space for uncertainties
and vagueness.
It is precisely this vagueness that draws attention
to the underlying issues that are at stake here: invented traditions
that form the basis for establishing not only cultural boundaries,
but also for mechanisms of dominance and resistance, inclusion and
exclusion. Identity as a representation is marked out by difference;
the key questions have become those of power, boundary-marking and
exclusion processes. If identity is crucially about difference, the
politics of identity necessarily raises questions of authenticity,
of roots, tradition and heritage.
Space, Location and Cultural boundaries
Why, one might wonder, is it so important to
relate a symbolic representation of identity to space and place?
The social experience of the 20th century, modernity:
is a mode of vital experience – experience
of space and time, of the self and others, of life's possibilities
and perils – that is shared by men and women all over the world
today. … To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment
that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of
ourselves and the world – and, at the same time, that threatens
to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we
are. Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries
of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion
and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind.
But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all
into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle
and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. (Berman 15)
The effect of the great dynamic forces of modernity – the
fragmentation of experience, the indeterminacy and mobility of identity,
basically the production of new forms of subjectivity" (Eley
18) – has been to “disengage some basic forms of trust relation
from the attributes of local contexts" (Giddens 108). Globalization,
the extraordinary transformation where old structures of national
states and communities have been broken up, has “created a sense
of information flows, fragmentation and pace replacing what is now
perceived to be a previous stability of homogeneity, community and
place" (Carter, Donald and Squires viii), a perception that
in itself gives rise to the notion of community. It is through the
logic of globalization that the dynamic of modernization, supposed
to be responsible for the rupture of, and thus heavy investment in,
territorially defined identities, is most powerfully articulated;
globalization has eroded territorial frontiers and boundaries and
provoked confrontations of culture and identity:
It is the dispersal attendant on migrancy
that disrupts and interrogates the overarching themes of modernity:
the nation and its literature, language and sense of identity; the
metropolis; the sense of center; the sense of psychic and cultural
homogeneity. (Chambers 24)
Places may thus no longer be the clear, unique
support for identity, and are certainly no longer tied to the political
borderlines of nations, yet they still resonate throughout the imaginations
of communities. Identities are shaped by embodied and embedded narratives,
located in particular places. In the terms of cultural geography,
it is not spaces which ground identification, but places. A space
becomes a place by being invested with meaning, a social signification
that produces identity, by being named, by "embodying the symbolic
and imaginary investments of a population" (Morley and Robins
xii). The point here is not to deny the force of such fictions but
to show how and why they are so powerful as a prelude to acting on
them.
It is precisely this fiction that seems to be
threatened by the developments of the 20th century. The
presumed certainties of cultural identity, firmly located in particular
places which housed stable cohesive communities of shared tradition
and perspective, though never a reality for some, are increasingly
disputed and displaced for all. Themes of cultural belonging, of
home and exile, have to be explored through the diverse prisms of
migration, diaspora, national identity and urban experience, and
the loss of Heimat seems to be a fundamental condition of
the late twentieth century, so the perceived need to stabilize this
belonging seems to have acquired a new urgency.
Tradition
Pierre Nora writes that there are sites of memory
(lieux de mémoire) because there are no longer real
environments of memory (milieux de mémoire) (see Morley
and Robins 87). This links place to its historical axis, spaces of
identity to questions of collective memory and tradition. Heimat/homeland
is a representation where place and memory, location and history
intersect and are inextricably intertwined, in order to stabilize
the meaning of community:
To cope with the fragmentation of the present,
[some] communities seek a return to a lost past – coordinated by
legends and landscapes; by stories of golden ages, enduring traditions,
heroic deeds and dramatic destinies located in promised homelands
with hallowed sites and scenery. (Woodward 17)
This is what constitutes Heimat/homeland: Heimat is
about community centered around shared traditions and memories; it
is a mythical bond rooted in a lost past. It is about conserving
the fundamentals of culture and identity; and as such, it is about
sustaining cultural boundaries and boundedness. Identity thus becomes
a question of memory, and memories of home in particular. Heimat,
in this sense, is a mirage, but a dangerous illusion, a result of
the search for a rooted, bounded, whole and authentic identity. Enterprise
and heritage culture represent protective strategies of response
centered around the conservation, rather than the reinterpretation,
of identities. "The driving imperative is to salvage centred,
bounded and coherent identities" placed identities for placeless
times, a struggle for wholeness and coherence through continuity. … Purified
identities are constructed through the purification of space, through
the maintenance of territorial boundaries and frontiers, as well
as stories we tell ourselves about the past in constructing our identities
in the present" (Morley and Robins 122), stories often rendered
as (national) literature or cinema, the memory banks of our times.
The past becomes sedimented into the present; conservation and tradition
deny the dynamic forces which come together as a conjunction of many
histories and many spaces. So what does this discussion imply for
Central Europe as a space of identity?
Central Europe as a space of identity
In this context the constructions of a concept
of a Central European culture can be seen as an instance of the articulation
and activation of cultural meaning and identity combining notions
of place with notions of collective memory (tradition). Place and
tradition are invented discourses for justifying boundaries that
affect people, but they are certainly less rigid imagined communities
than a nation. It is precisely here that the challenges and threats
of the notion must be situated. Attempts to establish the concept
of a Central European identity are necessarily accompanied by attempts
to recover and rewrite history; it is the political assertion of
identities that requires authentication through reclaiming one's
history.
The debate about Central Europe that re-emerged
in the 1980s was nostalgic in tone:
The retrospective focus was… the polyglot
urban culture of pre-1914, mainly, but not entirely, of the Habsburg
monarchy [sic]. Diversity was the catchword of this re-embraced central
European world; skepticism and irony were proclaimed the unifying
values of the central European intelligentsia, as of European culture
as a whole. Indeed European values were better preserved by marginalized
central Europeans, it was argued, than in the complacent, consumerist
west. (Okey 127)
The climax of this was definitely the Viennese
metropole of the fin de siècle, the ideal of diverse
artists bonded to each other and to the essential character of their
time and locale as a myth, the myth of "a modern avant-garde
not homeless, but integrated into a real community, Klimt and Wagner
and Loos thus become tablemates of Freud and Mahler and Wittgenstein
at an imaginary coffeehouse for a shining moment in the city that
was the cradle of modernity…" (Varnedoe 20, see also more
recently: Horak).
The flexibility gained by separating place and
tradition from nation even allows for the imperial theme in Austrian
history to be integrated into this memory, substituting the (obviously
broken) continuity of legal-institutional commonalties with "culture":
cafés, Baroque style and the look of railway stations providing
enough symbolic material to postulate, like Erhard Busek (former
Austrian Minister for Education and Culture) and Emil Brix, a "new
political culture," implying clearly a symbolic challenge to
America by looking to the past monarchy as "a sphere where attitudes
to history, right and human dignity were different from elsewhere" (Busek
and Brix, quoted in Okey 128). This reverberates with the nostalgic
meanings of a defensive identity of European belonging, a concept
that is meant to overcome nationalisms by turning diversity, hybridity
and migration into a tradition that denies other hybridities, a Heimat in
the center of Europe where a supposedly common history and location
safeguards against, and provides means for overcoming, future uncertainties.
Clearly the danger of the concept used in such
a way is to become steeped in the longing for wholeness, unity and
integrity. A discussion of Central Europe thus cannot, and must not,
involve the construction of an imaginary homogeneity of identity,
culture, place and tradition (this seems to be stating the obvious);
it has to analyze the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion whereby
one definition of Central Europe is centralized and others are marginalized,
the "internal cultural colonialism" (Morley and Robins
91). This suggests adopting an epistemology of cultural difference
that investigates the (culturally) constructed nature of these common
symbols and histories and traces the multiple vectors of domination
and resistance involved in their emergence.
A view that thinks of identity not as an already
accomplished fact but as a production, which is never complete, always
in process, and always within, not outside representation, in other
words, a view that sees Central Europe as an object of constant negotiation,
might provide a better basis for answering questions such as: Whose
history is being negotiated? Which experiences constitute the past
as part of an imagined community or (as Stuart Hall has put it) a
community of subjects that speaks as we? How are differences manifested
and represented? How is difference marked in relation to identity?
What is the significant "other" of the identity being constructed?
Which other markers of difference does it obscure (class, gender,
popular culture)? And what effect does the classificatory system
have on material and social conditions?
This calls for a conceptualization of Central
Europe seen as a field of contestation and negotiation that produces
plural identities. Discussions of the geographical and historical
nature of Central Europe have so far tended to reveal a desire for
clarity, a need to be sure about where Europe ends, a symbolic geography
that separates the insiders from the outsiders, informed by history
and politics, but implying identity. More nuanced perspectives could
begin to reveal the important issues often elided by the lazy invocation
of identity politics. They underlie the point that the quest for
identity cannot be separated from the experience of division. A discussion
of Central Europe that dispenses with notions of coherence and integrity
based on place and tradition could expose the conflicting articulations
on which such notions are and have been based.
Central Europe, and its cultures, must be seen
as a "conjunction of many histories and many spaces" (Massey
191). This is precisely the potential of its meaning, the utopian
quality of the concept in its non-essentialist understanding. A Central
European culture as a space of negotiation means that we would be
dealing with a space within which both meaning and anxiety can be
held and therefore worked upon, which implies coming to terms with
the nature of our identity desires, and their situatedness in history.
Possibly there are forms of collective association and community
that might constitute precisely such containing spaces, but only
if their contingent character, genesis, and potential is taken into
account.
References
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Notes
* An earlier version of this
paper was presented at the conference Central European Culture
Today, organized by the Canadian Centre for Austrian and Central
European Studies, in September 1998.