Table of Contents

Panel 1 (Monday, 11:15-13:15) Sophie Rudolph The concept of national cinema in multilingual societies Articulation of national identity in bylaws of film subsidy institutions in Switzerland, Belgium and Canada Irina Souch Finding a Brother for Danila: Individual Identities and Collective Beliefs in Russian and Western Popular Film Prof. Dr. Slavica Srbinovska The Paradox of the Relation Individual-General and the Aspects of Violence in the Process of Cultural Articulations

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Panel 2 (Monday, 16:00-18:00) Morgan Currie Denationalization and New Networked Politics Andrea Kollnitz The French as the Other. Nation and Gender in Early 20th Century Fashion and Art Discourse Margaret Tali Which Kunst ist Super? Museum displays and ownership

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Panel 3 (Tuesday, 11:30-13:30) Walid el Houri and Dima Saber Hezbollah Music Videos: From the Sect to the Nation Melanie Schiller We are the natives of Trizonesia Articulations of Germanness in early post-war pop music Aylin Kuryel Bio-Images: Nationalist Tattoos in Turkey Ruthie Ginsburg Visual articulations of the violation of Palestinian rights in the reports of Israeli human rights organizations

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Panel 4 (Wednesday, 11:30-13:30) Primo Kraovec Nationalism, European integration and neoliberalism A contribution to a critique of the political economy of the post-socialist transition in former Yugoslavia Gal Kirn Looking awry at the national identity: memorial sites in (post-) Yugoslav context Dr. Rebecca Bramall Green Albion: Mapping the national-global in a new age of austerity

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Panel 5 (Wednesday,16:00-18:00) Seda Muftugil Religion/Moral Education in the late Ottoman era and in Modern Turkey Ernst van den Hemel Ethical non-indifference: present work on the Judeo-Christian roots of Dutch culture Marc James Mueller From Language Stream to Sea Culture On Re-Writing Water Imagery and Flowing Modes of Language as Post-National Articulation in German Intercultural Literature

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Appendix: Short bios of participants

Panel 1 (Monday, 11:15-13:15)

Sophie Rudolph Irina Souch Prof. Dr. Slavica Srbinovska

Sophie Rudolph (University of St. Gallen)

The concept of national cinema in multilingual societies

Articulation of national identity in bylaws of film subsidy institutions in Switzerland, Belgium and Canada

Introduction
The aim of this paper is to question the articulation of nation identity in the bylaws of film subsidy institutions in Switzerland, Belgium and Canada. I will explore the peculiarities of the concept of national cinema in the francophone regions of these three countries. National cinemas can be seen as a specific form of articulation. As a matter of fact, cinema and nation have no necessary relation to each other. Defining the 'national' in cinema is already a complex task. It gets even more complicated if one takes into account multilingual nations such as Switzerland, Belgium and Canada. How do 'national' and 'multilingual' go together? Is national cultural identity always a matter of language or 'mother tongue'? It is widely recognized that the homogenization of language is a prerequisite for the emergence of a national community, because regional dialects must be incorporated into a standardized form so that mass publications can reach large audiences (Anderson, Thiesse). Multilingual societies and their respective cinemas are thus naturally fragmented by linguistic differences which can create barriers between audiences within the nation. As Tom O'Regan argues any national cinema "collects a range of elements - people and things, screen identities, knowledges, strategies, films that are loosely related to each other; a raft of different institutions and relations, ranging from the complementary to the completely unrelated." (1996: 1) Like all national cinemas, Canadian (and Qubec) cinema as well as Belgian and Swiss cinema rely to a large part on public money, federal and provincial, for their existence. Therefore the systematic challenge is to understand that the functioning of cinema as an industry and as a cultural practice is to a large degree determined by the institutions of the state. How does the "institutional network called the state" (Vitali/Willemen 2006) shape what is national in cinema? I will approach the issue by way of taking a closer look at the bylaws of film subsidy institutions and asking how they articulate questions of national and cultural identity. I argue that the declared aim to foster a distinct national or cultural identity in
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French speaking feature films in Switzerland and Belgium is jeopardized by the proximity of the French film industry, whereas Qubec cinema comes closest to the structures of a distinct national cinema.

Methodological aspects
Defining the concept of national cinema posits a large set of problems. Christopher Faulkner writes: "to endeavour to construct the history of a nation or a national cinema as coherent, unified, homogeneous, is to lend support to its erasure of difference and to the maintenance of a centrist and neo-conservative cultural politics" (1994: 7). It is important, therefore, not to consider any national cinema as a seamless totality that describes the concerns of a specific culture. This points to the fact that films do not simply represent the homogeneous characteristics of a given national culture. Scott MacKenzie argues that national cinemas can merely be understood "as a public arena where the meanings of a culture are negotiated, not simply disseminated" (2004: 65) In this arrangement the concept of articulation as both theory and method can be helpful to map the context of national film production and to focus on the question of national identity in cinema. As Jennifer Daryl Slack points out "the context is not something out there, within which practices occur or which influence the development of practices. Rather, identities, practices, and effects generally, constitute the very context within which they are practices, identities or effects." (1996: 125) It is thus important to note that nationalism and national identity aren't monolithic entities which can be found 'out there'. In this perspective the articulation of national identity in the bylaws of film subsidy institutions shows clearly that identity is a discursive construction aiming at the build-up of an 'imagined community', to put it in Anderson's terms. Acting on the assumption that national film industries depend on state support it then becomes crucial to reflect upon cinema's role in constructing a national imaginary. Scott MacKenzie argues that the emergence of a (new) 'national cinema' necessarily takes place in a space created by forces both inside and outside any given nation-state. (2004: 174) The articulation of national and cultural identity in cinemas outside the US is usually based on a strong assertion of qualitative difference from the genre-based film productions of Hollywood. Therefore state subsidy of national film production aims mainly at enabling national

cinemas to try to counter the American domination of their domestic market. The declaration of difference is fostered by the concept of auteur cinema. In many national cinemas, especially in Europe, the name of the director as 'author' of his film functions as a 'brand name', a means of labeling and selling a film. The author then becomes a representative for the national cinema he derives from as can be observed in the competitions of international film festivals. In the process, international recognition redefines the role played by specific films within the 'imagined community' of the nationstate they originally 'belong' to. It is exactly the question of belonging that is at stake in the articulation of national identity in the bylaws of film subsidy institutions. How can one reasonably tell when and how a movie is Swiss, Belgian or Canadian, moreover French Swiss, French Belgian or French Canadian? In order to build up a distinct 'national cinema' these films also have to compete with French national cinema on an international level and struggle to hold their own grounds. In an era of international coproductions and of rising transnational (cultural) economies this turns out to be difficult especially for Swiss and Belgian French-speaking film productions. The articulation of national cultural belonging becomes all the more important, as we will see.

Switzerland
Switzerland does not have a large film industry, and, like in other small European countries, cinema is heavily dependent on state support. In the 1970s, mainly Frenchspeaking Swiss directors such as Alain Tanner and Jean-Luc Godard helped to put Swiss films on the cinematographic map. Godard, born to a Swiss family in Paris, spent his early years in Switzerland but later returned to France and was very much influenced by the French cinematic tradition. There is one national film-subsidy institution, the Cinema section of the Swiss Federal Office of Culture (Bundesamt fr Kultur [BAK]/Office fdral de la culture [OFC]) which offers several programs for the financing of film productions. These are equal for all parts of the country. Of course, there is the question of defining what makes a film Swiss - is a Hollywood film by a Swiss director as "Swiss" as a film set in Switzerland, using Swiss actors and focusing on life in Switzerland? Article 2 of the Federal Act on Film Production and Film Culture (Film Act, FiA) specifies the criteria as follows:
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A Swiss film is defined as a film that: a. has to a substantial extent been created by an author of Swiss nationality or who is domiciled in Switzerland; b. has been produced by a natural person who is domiciled in Switzerland or a company with registered office in Switzerland in which the equity and borrowed capital as well as the management is predominantly held and controlled respectively by persons with domicile in Switzerland; and c. which was produced, insofar as possible, using performers and technicians who are of Swiss nationality or domiciled in Switzerland and by technical cinematographic companies in Switzerland.

In determining whether the third of these conditions is met, the Swiss Federal Office of Culture used to apply by analogy Article 8 (2) of the Film Act, in the version in force since 1 July 2006. According to this provision, a film was recognized as Swiss if, in the absence of an international co-production agreement, the Swiss part amounted to at least 50%. Article 19 of FiA focuses on linguistic diversity: "Films subsidized by the Confederation must be made available in more than one national language." It is important to note that in Switzerland state support for fictional feature films has been introduced rather late, in 1969. The idea of the first Film Act in 1963 was to foster culturally and politically valuable films, which included documentaries and educational movies, but not fictional films. This was based on the assumption that the state should not mix with the arts, it should not denaturalize creativity. In the 1970s the perspective changes: the state now becomes the warrantor for art, it aims at fostering an artistic instead of a commercial cinema. As a consequence, the most successful Swiss movie The swissmakers (1978) was rejected by the selection committee because the screenplay was too 'popular'. Nowadays, the cultural policy of the Federal Office of Culture tries to redefine cinema through public taste which is new in Switzerland.

Belgium
Philip Mosley characterizes Belgian cinema as "split screen" beset with problems of cultural identity. Given the nation's fundamental biculturalism, and its consequent fragility as a unitary state, the construction of national identity has been and still is particularly problematic. The international critical acclaim of Belgian cinema is to a large
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degree determined by the success of individual directors, such as Chantal Akerman, Jaco van Dormael or the Dardenne brothers. According to the federal principle of the Belgian state there are two different film-subsidy programs - one for the Flemish and one for the French part of the country: Vlaams Audiovisueel Fonds (VAF) and Centre du Cinma et de l'Audiovisuel (CCAV). The CCAV is part of the CFWB (Communaut Franaise Wallonie Bruxelles), a political collectivity at the service of French-speaking Belgians. Belgian cinema is thus determined by linguistic division even on an institutional level. In order to be eligible for subsidy the production company has to prove evidence that the film is "belge, d'expression franaise". These two criteria are specified in two different articles in the "Arrt royal du 22 juin 1967 tendant promouvoir la culture cinmatographique d'expression franaise". Article 4 focuses on the conditions for a project to be considered as Belgian, while Article 22 specifies the criteria "d'expression franaise".

Article 4. Sont considrs comme films belges au sens de l'article 3, les films qui rpondent aux conditions suivantes : a) ils doivent tre produits par des personnes physiques ou morales de nationalit belge, dont l'activit technique et commerciale s'exerce titre principal en Belgique. Ces producteurs ne peuvent en outre tre sous la dpendance ou sous le contrle d'une entreprise trangre. Toutefois, les trangers, justifiant de la qualit de rsident en Belgique et y exerant la profession de producteur cinmatographique, peuvent galement sous rserve de rciprocit, bnficier des subventions ou primes. La rciprocit n'est pas exige en ce qui concerne les ressortissants des Etats membres de la Communaut conomique europenne. b) Ils doivent tre tourns en Belgique. Nanmoins, les extrieurs peuvent tre tourns l'tranger si le scnario ou des raisons de climat l'exigent. Tous les travaux de laboratoire et de studio doivent, sauf impossibilit technique, tre effectus en Belgique. c) Les ouvriers et les figurants contribuant la ralisation du film, doivent tre de nationalit belge ou possder un permis de travail en Belgique.

As we can see, article 4 states a similar definition of the nationality of a film as the Swiss Film Act. Moreover, it states that Belgian films have to be shot in Belgium, thus fostering national geographic boundaries, although exceptions can be made when the content of the

screenplay presupposes foreign sites or specific climate conditions which cannot be found in Belgium. Films which benefit from subsidies of the Centre du Cinma et de l'Audiovisuel are automatically labeled as "belge, d'expression franaise". Article 22 further develops a Key Creative Point System which allows the labeling of films that have not received state funding as "belges d'expression franaise". In order to be recognized as Belgian, films must have been coproduced according to effective international agreements or they need to accumulate at least 10 points distributed as follows:
French-speaking Belgian director French-speaking Belgian leading part French-speaking delegate producer who belongs to French-speaking Belgian literature French-speaking Belgian screenwriter French-speaking Belgian music composer French-speaking Belgian director of photography French-speaking Belgian sound engineer French-speaking Belgian Director of Set Design French-Speaking Belgian cutter 1 point 1 point 1 point 1 point 1 point 1 point 3 points 2 points 2 points

Screenplay based on an adaptation from a text by an author 1 point

This point system clearly strengthens the position of the director as the creative centre of a film production, thus fostering the concept of a national 'auteur cinema'. Moreover, the nationality of the film is determined by the nationality of the individuals who contributed to its production.

Canada
The case of Canada is especially interesting for the discussion of the concept of national cinema because of its status both as a colonizer and a post-colonial nation-state. In relation to cultural production, Canada is, according to Scott MacKenzie "already postnational and multicultural in nature and therefore offers us insight into what shape a multicultural, postnational cinema might take. Further, it is worthwhile to explore how
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Canada's postnational identity is both defined by and at odds with the national culture found in Qubec". (2004: 17) This points to the fact that Qubec's cultural production plays a dominant role in the shaping of Canadian multicultural identity as does Qubec cinema. Film subsidy in Canada is based on two Federal Tax Credit Programs offered by the Canadian Government and on the national institution Tlfilm Canada. As in Switzerland no distinction in the programs is drawn between the different linguistic regions of the country. The Film or Video Production Services Tax Credit (PSTC) is aimed at taxable Canadian or foreign-owned corporations; the Canadian Film or Video Production Tax Credit (CPTC) is available for Canadian-controlled taxable corporations. Through the Canadian Audio-Visual Certification Office (CAVCO), the Department of Canadian Heritage co-administers Canadas film and video tax credit programs with the Canada Revenue Agency. Tlfilm Canada is a Crown corporation reporting to Parliament through the Department of Canadian Heritage. Let's take a closer look at the following quote from the Departments of Canadian Heritage's website: The Government of Canada is committed to fostering a more cohesive and creative Canada, and to ensuring that a strong Canadian identity is reflected in and accessible to Canadians in a wide variety of cultural products. To that end, the Department of Canadian Heritage oversees federal audio-visual policy and program activities that seek to [] reflecting ourselves by reflecting Canada's rich linguistic, ethno-cultural, Aboriginal, and regional diversity as our shared citizenship and common values. http://www.pch.gc.ca/pgm/flm-vid/index-eng.cfm

It is obvious that the Canadian government articulates a narrative of cultural diversity and multiculturalism which constitutes the very identity of the nation. However, the government also established the Canadian Content Requirements, a Key Creative Points System similarly to the Belgian regulations. To meet the requirements in this area, a minimum number of key creative functions must be performed by Canadians. Points are allocated when a Canadian performs the function or, in some cases, when the activity is
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undertaken in Canada. For live-action productions and continuous- action animated productions, a minimum of six points must be attained pursuant to the following Table.
Director Screenwriter First Lead Performer (or first voice) Second Lead Performer (or second voice) Production Designer Director of Photography Music Composer Picture Editor 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1

Creative Function The labeling of a film as 'Canadian' is depending, as well as in Belgium, on the individual nationalities of the creative team members. However, there are no differentiations regarding the language of the team members. Canada's content requirements also slightly differ from the Belgian system by contributing the same number of points to director and screenwriter, a statement for the importance of the screenplay in the process of filmmaking.

Outlook
The examples in this paper reveal that the chosen focus on national legislation as articulation of national identity needs to be replenished by a close analysis of social practices that shape the raw material of available ideas, scripts, actors, productions before it is condensed into a movie which is meant to represent 'national identity'. The bylaws of the film subsidy institutions focus on the definition of a film's nationality, which turns out to be closely linked to the individual nationalities of the creative personnel of the production team. This points to the fact that it is the collectivity of individuals that form a 'national production team' and thus represent the nation and its identity. In this perspective, films can be seen not to 'reflect', but to 'stage' or 'perform' the historical conditions that constitute the 'national' and, in the process, to mediate the socio-economic dynamics that shape cinematic production. The bylaws do not define any criteria for the actual content of the screenplays, the nation-state thus doesn't regulate what might be a

'national story'. Therefore, the next step in the analysis of articulation of national identity in cinema as shaped by state-funded institutions would be to look at the decisional factors of selection committees regarding the quality and content of the films that are produced in a given national context. In most cases the decision to grant subsidy to a film project is based on the screenplay. Assuming this view, several questions may be raised. Do screenplays that present local stories have more chances to be granted by national film subsidy institutions? Does something like a regional identity exist in multilingual societies and can it be found in their 'national cinemas'? How will these 'regional' cinemas adapt themselves to the processes of globalization, namely the apparent 'deterritorialization' of film production and the development of new transnational systems of distribution with the accompanying fragmentation of mass markets and the targeting of particular audience segments? Do local stories by national authors become more and more part of an international 'art film community' as opposed to cultural mass markets? These questions cannot be pursued here any further but need to be addressed if national and regional cinemas shall be able to cope with the challenges of a globalized market while keeping up telling "Home stories" (Hediger et al. 2000).

Bibliography
Anderson, Benedict (1991): Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Spread of Nationalism. 2nd edn. London: Verso. Communaut franaise de Belgique: Arret royal du 22 juin 1967 tendant promouvoir la culture cinmatographique. (TEL QUE MODIFI LES 17 FEVRIER 1976, 24 MARS 1978, 4 AVRIL 1995, 25 MARS 1996, 21 DCEMBRE 1998, 5 MAI 1999, 18 DECEMBRE 2001 ET 5 SEPTEMBRE 2008). Online: http://www.audiovisuel.cfwb.be/fileadmin/sites/avm/upload/avm_super_editor/avm_edit or/reglementation/Cinema/Aides_publiques/CF_ar19670622_coord.pdf. Embassy of Canada / Ambassade de Canada: Canadian Tax Credit Programs. Federal, provincial and territorial tax incentives for film production and television. September 2009. Online: http://www.mediadeskvlaanderen.eu/files/film_tax_credits_Canada_20091.pdf. Faulkner, Christopher: Affective Identities: French national cinema and the 1930s. In: Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Jg. 3, H. 2, S. 324. Grossberg, Lawrence (1992): We gotta get out of this place. Popular conservatism and postmodern culture. New York, London: Routledge.
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Grossberg, Lawrence (1996): Identity and cultural studies - is that all there is? In: Hall, Stuart; Du Gay, Paul (Eds.): Questions of Cultural Identity. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications, S. 87107. Hall, Stuart; Du Gay, Paul (Hg.) (1996): Questions of Cultural Identity. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications. Hall, Stuart; Morley, David; Chen, Kuan-Hsing (Eds.) (1996): Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge. Hediger, Vinzenz et al (Eds.) (2001): Home Stories. Neue Studien zu Film und Kino in der Schweiz. Nouvelles approches du cinma et du film en Suisse. Marburg: Schren. MacKenzie, Scott (2004): Screening Qubec. Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press. Mosley, Philip (2001): Split Screen: Belgian cinema and cultural identity. Albany: State University of New York Press. O'Regan, Tom (1996): Australian national cinema. London, New York: Routledge. Slack, Jennifer Daryl (1996): The theory and method of articulation. In: Hall, Stuart; Morley, David; Chen, Kuan-Hsing (Hg.): Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, S. 112127. Swiss Federal Office of Culture (14 december 2001): Federal Act on Film Production and Film Culture. Film Act (FiA). Online verfgbar unter http://www.admin.ch/ch/e/rs/4/443.1.en.pdf. Thiesse, Anne-Marie (1999): La cration d'identits nationales. Europe XVIII-XX sicle. Paris: Seuil. Vitali, Valentina; Willemen, Paul (2006): Theorising national cinema. London: bfi Publishing.

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Finding a Brother for Danila: Individual Identities and Collective Beliefs in Russian and Western Popular Film
Irina Souch

Introduction The years after the fall of the Soviet Union have been marked by a continuous search for the Russian roots that were not subsumed or appropriated by the Soviet ideological machine. With the disappearance of the single dominant ideology the idea of Russianness acquired a paramount importance for the country, which was striving to develop an ethnically homogeneous nation-state. In the process of formation of the new nation-states ethnicity becomes a touching stone that allows individual identities to be collectivised and to acquire a strong sense of belonging. The decline of the Soviet Union prompted the re-evaluation of social denominators of the existing ethnic communities. Russianness in this context appeared to become a much debated phenomenon. A national survey carried out in 1996 demonstrated that almost half the Russian population was afraid of losing their national/cultural identity. 1 The elements that are believed to comprise Russianness have important political and cultural implications not only within the country proper but equally for its position vis--vis the former Soviet republics and ultimately the West. The question however remains whether it is feasible to identify the viable elements of the Russian identity that were not contaminated by the long lasted Soviet experiment. Moreover, the very existence of such essential elements requires interrogation. In this paper I consider individual identity formation as being closely related to the notions of community, belonging, and collective beliefs and identifications. This relation, although important at all stages of Russian history, appears to be vital and to provide a cementing substance for the building of identity in times of social and political instability, when, as Fredric Jameson asserts, the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public ... culture and society. 2 This papers thrust is to highlight the elements of Russianness and to discern the similarities and differences in the interpretation of identity concerns in Russian and
1
2

Levada2000:209210. Jameson1986:69,originalitalics.

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Western popular representations by means of comparing a Russian film Brother (dir. Alexey Balabanov 1997) with its American counterpart The Bourne Identity (dir. Doug Liman 2002), which is built upon a similar plot and reads identity as a social and political construction which nonetheless can be successfully contested by a self-aware and active individual.

Synopses Brat (Brother) features a young man, Danila (Sergei Bodrov Jr), who returns to his provincial hometown after military service and shortly after is sent by his mother to St Petersburg to visit his elder brother, Viktor (Viktor Sukhorukov). Viktor appears to be an accomplished hit man who enlists Danila to shoot a Chechen mafia boss whom he has been paid to kill by a mobster called Krugly. Danila carries out the assignment believing that he is killing a terrorist who presents a real danger to Viktor and other Russian people. What he does not realize is that Kruglys intention was to eliminate Viktor, who had started to behave irreverently towards his bosses. As a consequence, Danila is injured by Kruglys henchmen, who believe they are following Viktor. While his own brother lets him down, an unknown tram driver, Sveta (Svetlana Pismichenko), helps him. They subsequently have an affair but Sveta ultimately chooses to stay with her husband, despite the fact that he beats her. Although Viktor is supposed to function as a father substitute for Danila, at the end of the film it is Danila who acts more maturely, protecting and admonishing his elder brother before sending him back to the province to look after mom. Having cleaned the streets of St Petersburg from criminals, Danila departs for Moscow. The Bourne Identity features a young man (Matt Damon) whose wounded body is rescued at sea by a fishing boat crew who help him to recover. He appears to have no recollection of his name or background and thus begins to rebuild his memory using the clues available, such as his fluency in several languages and his extraordinary strategic abilities and fighting skills. Using the Swiss bank account the number of which was embedded in his hip, he soon finds out that his name is Jason Bourne and that, judging by the large sum of money, the gun and the collection of fake passports that are kept for him in a safety deposit box at the bank, he must have had a dangerous past and apparently still
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has powerful enemies who are trying to track him down and kill him. Bourne, with help of his new friend Marie (Franka Potente), embarks on a search for his identity, only to discover that his former occupation was as a professional killer and to find himself in the middle of a number of assassination plots masterminded by the CIA. After having sent Marie away to protect her from harm, Bourne succeeds in defeating his enemies. Sometime later, Bourne finds Marie settled in Greece, and the couple reunites as the film ends.

Twinning identities The comparison of the visual vocabulary and the selection of narrative tropes of both films yields a set of remarkable similarities. Apart from sharing their boyish appearance (they even sport the same kinds of shirts and sweaters) the protagonists both have an unknown or at least undisclosed past from which they have inherited physical and mental qualities together with an inexplicable urge to dispense justice according to their own judgments and unique moral codes in the situations they have been drawn into by others. Their anonymous quests inevitably bring them to the big, densely populated and busy cities, where young women appear to help them. Finally, the whiteness of the snow and the stuccoed fishermens houses in the closing scenes of the films stimulate the viewers belief in the purity of the young mens consciousnesses, in spite of the terrors they have lived through and holds a promise for a new beginning. This teaches us that the development of popular film in Russia has produced the same kind of narrative paradigms and iconic images as in the West and that the disappearance of boundaries for cultural exchange after the decline of the old Soviet regime has served as a catalyst for the process of streamlining of the cinematic practices and creation of a uniform repository of popular sounds, images and narratives which can be easily understood by the Western and Russian audience alike. However, while this conclusion can be applied to the set of the genre-specific elements, it does not hold when one starts to consider the tropes significance and the meaning produced by them in the films. Since this papers aim is to examine the process of identity formation in its relation to the social context, and collective beliefs and expectations, it seems to be productive to closely examine how the search for identity is narrativized in both cases.
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The point of departure for Danilas quest appears to be his altercation with the video clip director at the beginning of the film, and his subsequent moves provide illustration to his implicit yearning to belong. The young mans repeatedly failed attempts to relate to the ethical codes of the cultural elite force him to (re)turn to the more traditional reservoir of identificatory images, those of familial bonding and kinship. It is important to note however that throughout his endeavours the issue of connectedness to a certain kind of community with its collective aspirations and constrains remains central to his actions. Even when he declares that he will find his own way to carry out Viktors assignment he does this in the name and for the sake of even larger collectivity: the one of the Russian people. The ideological reality in the Althusserian sense tightly holds his psyche in its grip, not leaving any space for conscious doubt or even unconscious anxiety. The film clearly methaphorizes a greater collective dilemma set against the background of social and political upheaval. Discovering and asserting a distinct identity seems to provide a means to acquire certainty about who one is and where one belongs, about the claims of community and the limits of social obligation, in the epoch of rapid and bewildering change. In these conditions the notion of a people as a family with primordial bonds and a shared past supplies something of an anchor amidst the turbulent waters of a long-term operation of societal reconstruction. The Bourne Identity, on the contrary, bears no signs of a collective preoccupation with identity. Apart from the fishermens boat, the occupants of which do form a sort of community owing to their isolation from the land and the rest of the society, the (unmistakably Western) world is presented as consisting of atomized, self-contained individuals. The film exposes the tension between seeing individual identities as born into and therefore fixed and essential, and perceiving them as borne fluid constructions that are socially/ideologically imposed. 3 Jason Bournes search for identity from the start till the end appears to be a solitary endeavour (his alliance with Marie starting as a business transaction and only gradually and not without setbacks changing into a sentimental relationship) and is accompanied by the conscious desire to disentangle himself from whichever connections and commitments he discovers to have had in the past. Accordingly, confronting his former superior in one of the last scenes, he retorts to
3

HoffmannandPeeren2010(forthcoming).

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the latters remark I thought we were on the same side with Jason Bourne is dead. [] I am on my own side now. The ideology that the narrative overtly opposes to does not appear in the disguised form of a collectively internalized dominant fiction; 4 rather, it is clearly named and identified as manipulative and profoundly evil, which allows the protagonist to confront it in a conscious way. The figure of Bourne as a former professional assassin now deprived of his memory and incapable of explaining his numerous extraordinary abilities insistently reminds us of Foucaults notion of the body and mind relationship where the body appears as contained within disciplinary systems and controlled by the mind, which provides the location for discursive power. 5 For Foucault the body forms the material site of inscription of power relations as represented in specific discourses in identifiable institutional complexes, such as army, schools and prisons. The subjects thus come to experience themselves through the investments of that power. Through this operation different cultures develop generally acceptable bodily practices and, what is more, produce docile and useful bodies. Seen in this light, Bournes body in the beginning of the film presents a perfect example of such a docile, malleable instrument driven by external discourses firmly inculcated in the young mans mind. In the eyes of his CIA employer he is US government property and a functioning thirty million dollar weapon. The core of Bournes identity conflict is contained in his exasperated exclamations: I dont know what happened. I dont know who I am. I dont know who I am hiding from. These people know who I am... Ive got to figure this out! It is important to note that Foucaults ideas differ considerably from Althussers concept of interpellation by insisting on the materiality of the relation between the power structures and the individual. 6 However, as both narratives attest, the dependence of the material body on the discursive practices and the readiness of the mind for the acts of interpellation, can, in fact, coexist in the social reality and in some cases
4

ThetermdominantfictionbelongstoKajaSilvermanwhotheorizesitassomethingthatpassesfor realityinagivensociety.Thisphenomenoncansustainitselfonlythroughperpetualreiterationandas longasthesocietycontinuestoaffirmit.Silvermanstressesthat[t]hisaffirmationdoesnotinvolveonly orevenprimarilyconsciousbelief.Itinvolves,rather,theactivationofcertaindesiresand identifications(1996:178). 5 Foucault1977:25.

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ItdeservesmentioningthatinhislaterworkFoucaultbegantopaymoreattentiontotheinterior psychicprocessesandtowhathecalledthetechniquesoftheself,whichaccordingtohimwerecentral totheconstructionofthemodernWesternsubjectivity(1985).

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even account for unexpected acts of resistance. The military skills inscribed on Danilas body do not automatically make him accept a job with the police and to conform to that specific discourse in spite of the promise of a solid ground for collective identification. In the case of Bourne, even the fact that the original assassination target was an African exdictator named Wombosi does not alter the heros resolution to sabotage the CIAs plans and to bring its operative unit to fall. When Bourne, through successive flashbacks, remembers his last mission, he sees himself at Wombosis yacht holding a gun against the sleeping dictators head. Wombosi opens his eyes, and simultaneously Bourne becomes aware of the presence in the room of the dictators sleeping wife and children. Taken aback, Bourne retreats, to be subsequently shot in his back by Wombosi and thrown overboard. The scene reveals an interesting collision between different ideological paradigms. While the act of assassination is thought out by an identifiable state apparatus and is clearly aimed at the elimination of a political figure representing, according to the US officials, oppression and inequality, Bournes sudden attack of conscience is supposedly motivated by a strongly rooted conception of a nuclear family as a primal sacred structure and a building block of a stable society. Thus, unearthed from the deepest layers of the unconscious, the until then dormant dominant fiction unexpectedly accounts for the radical change in the heros behaviour, which eventually fuels his battle against the hegemonic system with its notions of universal justice and lawful commitments. Allowing Bourne to break through the ideological spinnings of the official power the narrative promotes yet another alternative ideological construction, that of individualism. This reading of identity as a predominantly personal matter can be seen as a manifestation of just another facet of the dominant fiction through which Western individuals live their relations to the existing political, social and economic order, their reality and their true identities. The individualistic determinant of Bournes endeavour stands in a stark contrast with Danilas actions, which, even at his most disengaged moments, always appear to bear elements of collective commitments and obligations, together with vague but strong feelings of comradeship. In a way, Bournes conduct undermines Derridas assertion of the phratrocentric character of the Western concept of democracy. 7 Free of any doubt, the hero defeats not only his symbolic fathers,
7

Derrida2005.

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but also a number of his brothers by arms who are sent to kill him, and by this denies the existence of any mutual allegiance and the necessity to establish any form of fraternal bond as a provision for a successful reconstruction of his identity. Finally, while Bourne makes desperate attempts to recover his memories, to try on different identities represented by an array of fake passports discovered in the bank vault, and in this way to find out who he really is, Danila knowingly obscures his past and his character remains impenetrable, even for the people he chooses to befriend. When he finds Sveta, severely beaten up and raped, in her kitchen with a bottle of vodka, singing, and she gives him the following explanation: Your people came along. They asked after you. Funny, but I really dont know who you are and where you live. They didnt believe me, Danila averts his look and remains silent, only to reply to her offer to sing together with a curt remark I am tone-deaf, at which moment the screen darkens. Contrary to Bournes preoccupation with the reconstitution of his identity, Danila, when temporarily impaired and unable to procure his type of justice on the streets of St Petersburg, prefers to interrogate his friend Hoffman about the meaning of human life, thus separating the higher existentialist plane of psychic activity from the earthly troubles of the material world. The technique of black-outs after each episode in the film allows every past action to be deliberately wiped out of the protagonists memory to enable him to repeat his attempt at identification, seemingly unaffected by the evolving events. In his analysis of this technique, a Russian film critic Yevgenii Margolit points out that each episode ends with a forceful direct action, after which, instead of offering an explanation that would allow the viewer to discern the existential features of reality, the director chooses deaf blackness, a wall, a sign of non-existence, of death. In every new episode the protagonist accomplishes a deed, a heroic action but remains inwardly unmoved, as if he were born anew in every following episode, thus dissolving himself in any action he completes previously. [T]he temporal duration of the frame ... is present... as a nonduration ... as a non-presence... The clip-like fleeting appearance of frames ... is masterfully used as a sign of the heros blindness, or, more broadly, of the blindness of this type of conscience. Is it not because the hero is incapable to consciously experience his own death ...that he remains invincible? 8 Remarkably, the fact that Danila is
8

Margolit1998:59.

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presented as a clean face without characterologic depth, a psychological tabula rasa and an innocent infant allows the director, and with him the viewers, to invest him with a newly imagined ethical substance necessary for the creation of a shared model of reality and the construction of a common identity. To conclude, the brief comparative analysis of the films imparts, in my view, something valuable about the ways individual identity is perceived and re-enacted in Western and Russian contemporary society. While the Western narrativization of identity inevitably leads to questions of individual agency, responsibility and conscious resistance to the oppressive state ideologies and restrictive normative systems, the Russian idea first of all focuses on the issues of communality and, more importantly, on the modes of adaptation to the incessantly changing environment, providing means for both opposition against and confirmation of the existing political and social order.

Works Cited Althusser, Louis (1971) Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Monthly Review Press. Derrida, Jacques (2005) The Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London and New York: Verso. Foucault, Michel (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Harmondsworth: Penguin. --- (1985) Introduction in The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of The History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, pp. 3-32. Hoffmann, Anette and Esther Peeren (2010) Introduction, Representation Matters: (Re)Articulating Collective Identities in a Postcolonial World. Amsterdam: Rodopi (forthcoming). Jameson, Fredric (1986) Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism in Social Text, Fall 1986. Levada, Juri (2000) Ot Mnenii k Ponimaniiu: Sotsiologicheskiie Ocherki 1993-2000. Moskva: Moskovskaia Shkola Politicheskikh Issledovanii. Margolit, Evgenii (1998) Plach po pioneru, ili Nemetskoe slovo Iablokitai in Iskusstvo kino 2. Silverman, Kaja (1996) The Threshold of the Visible World. New York and London: Routledge.

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SLAVICA SRBINOVSKA ( Sts. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje, Republic of Macedonia)
The Paradox of the Relation Individual-General and the Aspects of Violence in the Process of Cultural Articulations -(National Identities)-

I would like to begin my paper with the words of the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy: Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come. And some who have just returned from the border say there are no barbarians any longer. And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution. Waiting for the Barbarians

1. Complexity of the Concept of the Culture This study begins with the facts that lie in the pillars of every procedure of identification, which basically means an entire repertoire of images created throughout history by the course of cultures development. Through them the characteristics of groups and collectives, who differ according to age, gender, nation, class, could be focused and discovered. These images are projected upon a certain screen and thus become available in a certain epochs culture. Throughout them, a certain identity is set, and thus, the visual border is created, the visual border with which the picture of The Other begins. In an attempt to describe the concept of culture, the contemporary, post-modern epoch usually uses the picture of the museum with the goal to present what culture really is in a metaphorical manner. How does culture look like, when described as a museum? The museum represents the entire world in a certain period of time and synchronically unites exhibits from various epochs. According to Yuri Lotman, there are signs in different languages in use. There can also be instructions which help us how to use those languages. In the museum one may find texts composed by analytics, which describe the exhibition. The museum includes directions of movement and instructions of behaviour of the visitors. The presence of a curator and visitors is not excluded. The museum is a picture of not only the world, but also the culture and the multitude of languages used to present the phenomena of the cultural area where we exist, the semio-sphere. Lotman also claims
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that, in every living culture lies the mechanism of the languages, of the systems of signs, which tend to represent the phenomena. He speaks of a constant quantitative increase of the languages in the cultural area. This area, or semiotic area together with the term bio-sphere, taken from the natural sciences (introduced by V.I. Vernadski) is named the semio-sphere. It mirrors diversity and fills the semiotic space of the culture with a different nature. Nevertheless, they are translatable, but also sometimes, too distant and not possible to translate. Not only are they diverse, but they are also heterogenic and hetero-functional. In one single moment, in the semiotic space of the culture, all of the languages appear to be exactly as they are present in the museum, not unlike the exhibits from various epochs. The presence of the multitude of languages points out to the fact that no single rules of explanation or deciphering are to be used, but rules belonging to various systems. In the synchronic overview of the semio-sphere, numerous languages collide, along with the numerous stages of their development and texts which are created by using numerous languages. All of the above-mentioned facts point out to the concepts of semiotics, as a specific methodology can be of use. However, the concept of norm and/or rule, code which can be used to decode the ruled becomes a more problematic issue by the day. ( , 2000, 185) Hence, in contrast to these norms, we activate the interpretation as a tool used by the hermenutic, different methodological approach to the culture, which favours the individual, original approach to explaining the phenomena, leaving the rules behind. Art itself is no longer accepted as art, based on its own rules, but according to the password Art is everything that the readers, the viewers, the audience accept and understand as art. (Iser, 1989, 3-30) It is finally clear that the concepts are far from stabile, and are dynamic and shifting. The XX century is the period when the artistic activity is connected not only to the author, but also to the audience. The history of the novel is known, which is written in the native tongue, and for a long time, makes attempts to legitimize itself as art, in the ranks of the known languages of drama, poetry etc. Furthermore, nobody would have bothered to research the activities at the fair, the circus, the street colloquialisms, or the signs on the road, although these became a subject of analysis in the XX century. There is the example of the cinematography, which, in the beginning, was only a marginalized activity, turns into a high art, if not the centre of the culture that is our lives. From here, a fact exists, that the contemporary research cannot focus on the individual languages and phenomena, such as the literature, but only throughout their analyzing throughout comparison, and through their acceptance as sunk and fit in the semiotic space, where they are in a constant corelation with this space, which surrounds them. This, once again points out that the role of one
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language, one individual or one phenomenon is of no importance, but of the relations in the complete semiotic space. It is compelling, that the structure of the culture is not in any case symmetric. The translation is really, a basic and useful mechanism of consciousness, which one human being can use to discover its nature. However, the language also represents a boundary, to fully understand the nature of the being. (Starobinski, 1999, 24-25)

2. Aspects of the Relation Indivdual-General :the meaning of the border The language itself, used by the individual, points out to the phenomenon of asymmetry and limitation, both the individual and the subject could indentify themselves as beings. Martin Heidegger holds that, which is empirically present for perceptive and obvious. R. Decard shows the self-identification as a possibility, whilst for the most problematic and the most criticised is his thesis that the thinking subject is undoubtedly an existent one (Cogito ergo sum). The enlightenment gives the advantage to the powerful subject. Albeit this statement, Heidegger believes that, for the relationship with the world and for the so-called situation of the subject being thrown out there can be no exclusion of the relationship between the subject and the Other, the world which surrounds the subject. In the world, the subject faces its past, the pre-structures which define the way it thinks and sees. (Bourdieu, 1996, 99) The enlightening thought is criticised, due to the exclusion of the complicated behaviour of the world to the subject, because it is an ancestor of the relation which the subject has with the entire world and itself. In his study Eye and Mind, Merleay Ponty, states: The world is all around me, and not in front of me. I do not see that which envelops me, I live inside it. I am sunk in it (1993, 121-149). All of a sudden, we see that there are two things present: the subject and the world. There can be no unity, but two separate things, and a border in between them. If we took a look at the concept of the border, we would not be able to speak of the difference between the two areas split by it. On the one side, there is me, on the other one, there is the world. On the one side, there is the centre, created by the most clearly structured languages, on the other one, there is the margin. On the one side, there is grammar, codification of traditions and legal norms, on the other, non-regularity and anarchy. The self-description of the individuality, or of the culture means using of the pronoun I. It, in the sense of the semiotic individuality, has a materiality, space and time, to the point where it reaches. For that space we use the words our space, selfness, identity. It is defined by the characteristics: culture, harmonic organisation, order, articulations. The opposition of this space is the strange, the enemy, the foreign space, the chaotic and the barbaric. In J.M Coetzees novel Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), whose title refers to the poem Waiting for the Barbarians- Cavafy, the philosophy of torture and violence in the relation Me
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and the Barbarian is presented. The otherness is not just dangerous, chaotic and peripheral, but an object of torture, violence and crippling. The novel has a very simple story, used as an allegory for the relation between the centre and the margin, and is called Empire and Barbarians. In the moment when the Empire and/or the so-called civilization feels that the order is in jeopardy, it activates the concept of barbarism, and it matters not whether they are nomads, herders or fishermen, it constantly insists on interrogation, with the intention of boosting its identity. According to Stuart Hall, the concept of identity is in a co-relation with the politics of articulation and presentation, with the discursive practices. The novel is focused on the great idea of countering the Barbarians, which tend to bring chaos, and reversibly mirror the chaos of the Empire. Hall claims that, should the identities be affirmed inside the presentation, and not outside of it, then the positions of the Empire and the Barbarians in Coetzees novel are identical. What the Empire puts to use, as a series of cruel actions of human degradation, can hardly be connected to the high achievements of the Empire, no matter how much history, language and culture it can place in its area of existence, answering the questions: Who are we? Where do we come from? (Hall, 1997, 97). The identity can be formed with the social practice and of changed dialogue. The exchange and the dialogue are practices, which create a certain temporary connection between the individual and the group of individuals. We can approach ourselves through the long way created by the others in the past. Thus, we can create our present thoughts, views, feelings, words and language. Without the symbolic ordering of our own experience with the experience of others, we cannot communicate with the others. Forming an identity depends on the norms a lot, by which it can be recognized and interpreted as a phenomenon. Therefore, the use of violence in practice, as presented in Coetzees novel, speaks of the absence of communication, exchange of experiences, and recognition. Here, no positive references are present, which can be used to compare I and the Other as similar, and even equal. Thence, we meet the problem with interpretation and the enormous role of the understanding. The power to recognize the strange and the capability to enter the unknown seems to be one of lifes deepest known theoretical and practical problems. The norms of exchange and dialogue always depend on the partners in the dialogue, which may interact, but may also never reach out to each other. It may seem impossible to exit the dominant languages, the culturally created pictures and meanings, if we want to communicate. The process of communication itself is defined by agreement and norm, which would secure the communication, whether it is a language, translation or interpretation that is the topic of discussion. In the thoughts about oneself and about the others, we shape the identities, based on inherited resources, not free-willingly and the conditions which we would create by ourselves.
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Instead of using Lotmans concept semio-sphere, Kaya Silvermann uses the concept screen and calls it dominant fiction. It is something of an obligatory reality. The screen is a collage of pictures, where the visibility and the recognition of the acceptable actions are a condition and affirmation of the existence of an identity. Hence, it is emancipated. That, which does not enter the frames of the screen, is invisible, erasable, inexistent, or even barbaric and unallowable. The big screen of culturally standardized images is set between each individual and the stare directed towards it understood as a standardized and ideologically defined sphere from where, the recognition and identification of the phenomena could be learnt. The screen functions through two aspects: the first one is the one which relates to the wholeness of ready pictures usable for the realization and identification in a certain cultural context, and the second one on the subject who watches and who, through the screen, is capable to recognize the entities and identify them. (Silverman, 1984, 126). Manfred Frank counters the thesis which radically confirm the identity as a fulfilment, then the theories which define him as an emptiness to be filled, and the theories which operate with the opposition, regulated content of characteristics or absence thereof, characteristics which have to be enforced. He seems to be searching for the romantic model of a subject. Faced with the otherness, he finds self-consciousness to be a predecessor of the consciousness. The ethic moment and the responsibility play an enormous role, when the reflexion of the Other is being derived. He speaks of a so-called pre-reflexive, interpretative, hypothesis, as an individual foundation, as a consensual horizon, where each I is to begin, with the intention of communicating with the other in the process of dialogue, to reach exchange and confirmation of the identities, our own, and that of the Other. It comes to a inter-subjective centre of the culture, where the individual responsibility is emphasized. Together with the individualized subject, Frank accepts the responsibility of creating a social whole and communication. (Frank, 1997, 177). The Bulgarian author Adela Peeva in her documentary Whose Is That Song? tries to play with the need of the people who live on the Balkans to massively insist on putting themselves above everybody else in a rather ironical manner. Her plot is extremely engrossing, through connecting of the events which happen to her in Turkey, Bosnia, Albania, Serbia, Macedonia and Greece. These events are connected with the question which she asks the people of this region. Calling upon a same melody, she asks the people in these countries: Whose is that song? The melody is the same, and the text of the song varies and functionally differently useable, depending on the conditions. Sometimes it is a love song, sometimes a war march and sometimes it has a patriotic character. In every country all of the representatives, musicians, or normal people, which are interviewed give the answer that the song is from their country. What seems to be the problem here? There is neither
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communication whatsoever and reflexion for the Other, nor need to know him/her and attempt to understand him/her. The title of the documentary is a question, Whose is that song? The question means creating a relation, a need for communication and interpretation. The answers, according to the film, are always written in stone, closed and definite. They are aimed against the Other, as if the identity is established only by negating the existence of the Other. The film is an entirety of negations of the Other, and in a political and ideological sense, a reflection of an introvert world of the province. The example of the short story Black Bird, Yellow Beak and Syncope by Marija Stankova, is not different, when discussing the discourse, by using the rude, furious vocabulary of the female narrator. She is in a provincial state prison, but is not disappointed and thinks about ways of how to begin the new cycle of ascension, which would bring her to the space above the set limitation of the Balkan- which is Europe. The structure is derived as a diary written in a period of 6 days. Every day shows a faze of crossing the line of the new level, which does not satisfy, due to its being introvert, limited and provincial. According to Radomir Konstantinovich and his Philosophy of the Palanka, Palanka is a closed system. It is highly defined by its own introversion, its rules being written in stone, destruction of privacy (everything is public, but kept silent), and with the yearning of the same to be left, but it is always only a yearning, never a success. The female narrator in Black Bird, Yellow Beak and Syncope by Marija Stankova, is in an attempt to defeat the marginal position and migrate in the centre (to leave the Palanka). In this attempt, she forgets and leaves out all of the aspects of communication, related to love, friendship and understanding. Her goal is defined by the idea to go forth no matter the cost. In the text, the concept of envy is often manipulated, and is characteristic for the modest and limited provincial consciousness of the individual. The narrator and the main character in this text, in reality of the imaginary space of the text, reaches her so beloved goal, gets all of the highest degrees of education and meets the man, Englishman, with who she would leave for London. However, the relationship with the man who she used to get to the capital of the Republic of Bulgaria, leaves a mark in her. She is pregnant with his child. The new relationship with the Englishman, according to her meaning, should eliminate the entire heritage, which defines her identity as a person from the Balkan. In the end, she murders her child, and thus, ends up in prison, in Palanka. The prison is a metaphor of the consciousness, which is unable to surpass the primitive thoughts, and has remained provincial. The tragedy is obvious. This is where we reach the migration as a concept (Konstantinovic, 2004, 101). That which in this actual case is related to our topic is the image which is articulated and distributed on the relation: world-Europe-Balkans, and through which their difference is identified.
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A repertoire of separate pictures which Europe has standardized in relation to the Balkans is researched in Marija Todorovas study Imaginary Balkans, 1997. They are based on different narratives from different genres. The complexly constructed tradition is researched. This tradition reveals the narrated experiences, the submitted information, the political documentations and, generally said, the Europeans perception when they passed through the Balkans and left their distinct discursively articulated trail. In the spirit of the opposition, from which we start and in which Europe represents the civilized world, whereas the Balkans are said to be the epitomic example of a barbaric world, separated from Europe through its continuous separations, terrorism and wars by the name of other, M.Todorova says: The fact that the Balkan is described as other in their relation to Europe is not one necessary of proof. In relation to the Balkans it is emphasized that its population pays no heed to the standards which, as normative are prescribed by the civilized world () Just like every generalization this one, too is based on reductionism The Civilized World (this term is used, not ironically, but as a mark which it gives itself) for the first time, seriously disrupts itself in the time of the Balkan Wars (1912-1913). The news of the barbarism done on the distant peninsula in the European Mediterranean have been heard throughout the entire world In fact, the contrast between the abstract East and West is as old as written history itself. The Ancient Greeks used the term Orient when they spoke of the antagonism between the civilized men and the barbarians, even though for them the main dichotomy was the one between the cultivated South and the barbarian North (Thrace and Scythia). () From the time of Diocletian and later, Rome introduces the administrative division between East and West, and the Egyptian and Anadolian area. () The East has never been a desired part of this opposition: for Byzantium, the unopposed centre of the civilized world of Europe a few centuries after Romes downfall, the West was a symbol of barbarism Even after the siege of Constantinopol in 1453 and the Orthodox Twilight, but singly due to the economic power Western Europe was rapidly gaining, the East is considered as inferior, (Todorova, 1999, 29). In the spirit of this problematic, Vesna Goldsworthys study Inventing Ruritanija, 1998 is especially famous. She raises the question: How does the image imperialism function, and how does one imperialize imagination? The relation centre-margin is popular in the installation called Poetics of the Migration: Facing the Separation. In this work, the author Mieke Bal asks the question why some people from the margins decide do leave their lives behind and start over in another, elite sphere, where they can adapt their identity to the new sphere. The installation is composed of the shots where only the face of the person interviewed is shown. These women are mothers of people who have forever left in some western country. The first woman is Gordana Jelenikj from Serbia, the second one Masauda Taieb Medi from Tunis, and the Omoan Armagan from Turkey. The installation is called Nothing is Missing. The aim is to explain the contribution of the migration cultures to the Europe area, and
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above that, to understand the weight of the consequences and of the changes of the soul of the individuals who have taken that drastic measure, migration. Why do people from the margin and/or the periphery believe that they must leave behind their affectionate relations, their relatives, friends and habits, their entire foundation of that which makes the everyday life? It represents the faces of three mothers, in their emotional state, shown on their faces, while they speak of the children who have left them forever, the viewer is forced to face their sorrow, horror and fury. The example of this installation is included with the intention of giving an advantage of the viewer, who is capable, as an Other, to understand the emotional state of these women. The attempt to create an installation by focusing on the face, its gestures, no matter the language, which is often not understandable to the audience, the author of the installation forces the act of visual communication, and interpretation of the concept called Migration and Separation. The installation is composed of documentary elements, because these women are real, as real as is the act of separation between them and their children. It has an esthetical and political basis in its intentions to explain the consequences of migrations, the disintegrative processes, which leave deep wounds in the individuality of the people, which build an entirely new identity in a new environment. The political and ethical effects of this installation are exceptional, taking into consideration the fact that the performativity and the performance, in the theatrical sense of playing a role, such as this one, while we can still see the faces of the mothers, mean a mediated facing the distanced world of the periphery and connecting to it.

3. The need of the Articulation and Interpretation From the contemporary point of view, various types of research are related to the texts, which belong to culture. Actually, literature is no longer a subject of research in relation to the literatures, but in relation to the role played by the context, from which a literature is derived. Thus, what is researched is in close co-relation with the literature and culture, and the contemporary science focuses itself on the intercultural relations, instead on the inter-literature relations. Hence, a wide area of space is vacated, where an even stronger process of actualizing of the comparative analysis equally of the culture and literature is possible, which enables us to summarise the cultural studies and the studies of comparative literature. There is no certain position out of the literary work, which would provide us with understanding of all the meanings incorporated in the work itself. However, the effort to grasp the meanings in art or generally, the human need to find sense in everything is unstoppable. Therefore, the process of interpretation is constantly present: in literature, in culture and in life.

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The concept of interpretation or the methodology of hermeneuthic is in and unbreakable correlation with the concept of the point of view. In fact, we are always in the constant possession of an individual standpoint, from which we look for a reason for our existence in the culture. Still, culture possesses texts which differ from each other. A real problem is the fact that for the traditional doctrines of Beauty, Truth and Good there can be no rules. Ergo, living in the age of the modernity is defined by the end of the traditional values and the universal principles. The idea of emphasizing a secure position, from which an objective, real manner of announcing can be secured, a real thing or the truth seems impossible. Thus, we find ourselves in the role of an interpretator of the one on the quest of Truth. Consequently, we are surrounded by a large number of theoretical and critical approaches, which can be realized in the canons with the use of power. Our era is in the state of constant crisis and in the constant search of the theoretical assumptions, in an attempt to create evidence and arguments, and then, by their quick destruction, able to set itself on the quest of a new Truth. This is an era in which the status of the scientific Truth and its application are in constant crisis. Is there a correct interpretation for the contemporary literature, where the meanings are multiplied, and the literature is a plural whole with a multi-layer structure? We wonder: Is the interpretation in the comparative literature a theoretical or a practical issue? Paul Ricoeur makes a difference between the types of interpreting by using the terms critical and re-constructive interpretation. He tries to rise above the fact that all meanings are equal in worth, but never claims that there is no plurality in the meanings. Interpreting a literary piece of work, which is included in the borders of literature by the culture, because of the works complicity stands between the language of the author and the age, the intention of the author, the context, the reality and the reader. Thence, there is a multitude of areas where a literary piece of work is created, and fitly, a multitude of interpretative perspectives, which usually collide, but also may engage in dialogue.(Ricoeur, 1974, 27-29) Encouraging the hermeneuthic in the comparative research usually means engaging in a web antinomies, paradoxes and differences. This means that the norms of assessment are in a continuous dynamics, and the criteria of defining the Truth and Worth are shifting. If we take a look at the context that is our lives, we can assume a presence of ambivalence. On one side, the power to norm and the authority of the institutions: state, family and church are demolished, while on the other, alternative institutions are formed, which tend to de-construct, re-construct and construct new kinds of Worth. All of the development lines of the epoch of our lives point out to the fact that the interpretations are not exclusively set as Truth or Worth, except for the case when force or violence is used, in order to be accepted. Nevertheless, what is happening to us is a dogma that whatever
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happens now roots back to the past. The wholeness of the landscape is filled with many traditional or old things, which are popular time and time again, but in a new manner and represented by a different points of view. The contemporary culture and its landscape cannot be interpreted without the historical background in which it was created. What is culture generally? It comprises individuals and institutions, practices and discourses, texts and images, which have a symbolic structure. We attempt to interpret them, using a complex kind of methodology of the critical theory, the theory of systems, the hermeneuthic, the discourse analysis, the psychoanalysis, the anthropology, the structuralism and the poststructuralism, the semiotics and the analytical philosophy. In fact, the culture is a symbolic encompassing, a product of symbolic processes, a complex organisation of words, gestures, pictures and words. In an attempt to interpret culture, we analyse her boundaries of intelligibility, her possibilities and ethno-political influences. The realization of the interpretations as theories and the narratives is also a part of culture itself. As much as the piece of art consists of words, gestures, pictures and words, its interpretations consists of the same elements. Culture really is a polemical conception. It searches a stabile and a common base, but is exposed to constant changes of ideas, worth and good. It consists of a high, a low, and also a massive culture. It unites the aspects of everyday life, the normal and the banal, but also the original and the elite. The culture really looks like a conflict of a wholeness of worlds which above all sets itself as a concept in defence of the universal. Culture is organized through the forms of space and time. Outside of the organization it ceases to exist. In the spirit of the great debate on the topic of interpretation, and through it, of the Worth and the Truth, as well as the identity, we can see that this concept is really important, as a process of self-defining, and self-emancipating. Nevertheless, speaking of identity, it is very difficult to talk about its fulfilment of characteristics or its essence. Thus, it cannot bond with the subject in its entirety, central position, and capability of defining its actions. This can concern not only the identity of I, but also the identity of the Other, defined by the position of I. Sadly, according to Paul Gilroy, the identity is extremely distanced of any free choice, in the sense of building our own identity (Gilroy, 1993, 27). Therefore, we return again to the meaning of the relation I and the Other, understood as history, language, culture and individual, understood as a way of selfpresentation in various names. In the film Baraka by Ron Fricke, the wholeness of the culture, and of the world is presented in a perfect manner. The film is a picture of the space of the world presented in a specific
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way, as a mosaic of various cultures and languages. The picture of the museum which was discussed in the beginning could help us establish a synchronised entirety of peripheral and central parts of the world. Therein lie the most perfect achievements of cultures, like the American and the Japanese, but also the ritual acts of the African peoples, shown with their naked bodies, a specific kind of dance in the ritual and language understandable in the frames of their world. The film consists of consequential fragments related to multiple religions which dominate in this world, the way of their presentation speaks of their connection, although in every religion there is a different kind of code and a relationship with a different god. The wholeness of the culture that is this film also has a diachronic line, that leads from the very beginnings, connected to the white apes as a rare specie, the insides of a volcano, where the magma boils, the historical periods of conflict and destruction, such as the concentration camps throughout Europe. One may also find the human situation of disciplining the movements throughout the working process, as well as the monotone rhythm of the activities such as cigars manufacturing and poultry farming. A part of the tracking shots represent the peripheral worlds of the streets, where the beggars and homeless people live, and then the same ones are used to represent the perfect achievements of the godly temples of numerous religions or the pyramids. The wholeness is really full of languages, created meanings and forms of symbolic production, which speak of the enormous creative potential of man. Finally, the very title Baraka is a word, derived from the Sufi (Arabic) language and means blessing bestowed by a saint.

Literature: Bal, Mieke 2007. Video-Installation and a lecture by Mieke Bal: Saturday 20 SeptemberFacing Severance: When Nothing is Missing. Sunday 21 September, The Haldane Room, University College London, Gower Street London. Bordieu, Pierre. 1996. The Political Onthology of Martin Heidegger, trans. Peter Collier, Cambridge: Polity Press. Coetzee, J.M. 1980. Waithing for the Barbarians. New York: Penguin Books. Frank, Manfred. 1997. TheSubjectandtheText. EssaysonLiteraryTheoryandPhilosophy. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversityPress. Fricke, Ron. 1993. Baraka. USA:Magidson films. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness.Harvard: Harvard University Press.
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Hall, Stuart. 1997. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage. Iser, Wolfgang. 1989. Pbk.1993. Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Konstatinovi, Radomir. 2004. Filosofija palanke. Beograd: Otkrovenje. , . . 2000. , : -. Ricoeur, Paul. 1974. The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde, trans. Willis Domingo et al. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Silverman, Kaya. 1984. The Subject of Semiotics. Oxford University Press. , . 2000. . . :. Starobinski, Jean. 1999. Lil vivant. Corneille, Racine, La Bruyre,Rousseau, Stendhal, Paris :Gallimard. Peeva, Adela. 2003.eWhose is this Song?, Bulgaria: Adela media Film and TV Production Company. Ponty, M. Merleau. (1993). 'Eye and Mind' in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader. Trans by Michael Smith. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Todorova, Marija. 1999. Imaginarni Balkan. Beograd: Kultura XX vek.

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Panel 2 (Monday, 16:00-18:00)

Morgan Currie Andrea Kollnitz Margaret Tali

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Denationalization and New Networked Politics

By Morgan Currie

Sociologist Saskia Sassen identifies the emergence of a new political actor in the 21st century, one who never needs to step outside her local community to be strengthened by global, digital alliances. Actors engaged in a housing struggle, for instance, may know of multiple other localities around the world engaged in similar struggles and might reach out to these geographically dispersed actors over the Internet. For these actors, the idea of what is local then changes: locality is now also constituted by an awareness of global audiences and the potentially powerful alliances to be made with them. these 'domestic' settings are transformed into microenvironments articulated in global circuits...A community of practice can emerge that creates multiple lateral, horizontal communications, collaborations, solidarities, and supports. (Sassen, 2006 p. 375). Another key consequence of this lateralized, transborder view of the local is that actors have an altered relationship with, and possibly renewed understanding of, the national state. Sassen identifies a burgeoning denationalization caused by this re-articulation of the local. Denationalization is an important concept in Sassens work, a critical, useful heuristic for understanding the role of national states relation to a new type of networked, cross-border, lateralized but highly local actor. This paper will provide an analysis of two key concepts: first, the denationalized political actor, and second, the global digital assemblages that enable this actor to take part in new politics of scale. I will reveal how her description of digital assemblages is limited and even somewhat embedded in the traditional rhetoric she calls into question. A critique, or emendation, of this concept will show how her account is only a partial description precluding other possibilities and novel types of networked political activity that deserve richer explication and can point the way to alternate political strategies for the future. Denationalization According to Sassen, the global era isnt so much characterized by the diminishing role of the state but rather its adaptability to undergo certain mutations. Her term denationalization refers, then, to shifts inside the state due to new global forces. Denationalization is distinct from non-nationalizion
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or post-nationalization, which suggest new forms arising from changing world conditions outside of older national institutions altogether. (Sassen, 2006 p. 305). Denationalization refers to changes in scope, in emphasis, and to a shedding of certain roles alongside the accruing of new roles. It refers to ways that global forces are never wholly separate from the national state, but are often instantiated and enabled by the latter: global and national are never cleanly divided in Sassens formulation. Sassen identifies one critical instance of denationalization when state power in the United States shifted from Congress to the Executive office during the 1980s. She class this decade is a tipping point 9 when economic systems increasingly left national markets to operate globally, through complex supra-national dynamics of trade enabled by digital technologies (Sassen 2006 p. 183). At the same time, states stopped overseeing citizen entitlements to workers and certain disadvantaged populations, a reversal of states expansion of the formal public domain over the 19th and 20th centuries. The market then becomes the preferred mechanism for addressing an increasing amount of social issues, a situation that contributes to the partial unbundling or at least weakening of the national as the container of social process (Sassen 2006 p. 317). The resulting deregulation schemes produce rhetoric of a shrinking state system. However Sassen points out that while parts of the state system began contracting during this decade up until the present, others have accumulated new powers. As economies grew in complexity, economic oversight reshuffled within the United States from Congress to specialized agencies in the executive department. Congresss role to legislate welfare certainly diminished, but the executives at the same time increased to focus on regulating telecommunications and global markets and firms. (Sassen, 2006 p. 174). Concomitantly, the private sector increasingly administered social services, subjecting them to the market and removing them from public accountability. As a consequence, citizens experience a shift in expectations towards the national state, possibly leading to a weakening of citizen loyalty. 10 (Sassen, 2006 p. 317) Hence the global contributes to the strengthening of certain bodies inside the state, according to Sassen. Alternately, global formations are often given a degree of power by the state, even as they
Sassens theory runs counter to most sociologies that identifies post-WWII Bretton Woods as the tipping point into the global age (Sassen, 2006. p186). Deregulations in the eighties include airlines, reduction of environmental regulation; decimation of the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust regulatory staff; [and] repeals of regulations in the Federal Communications Commission (Sassen 2006 p. 176)
10

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in turn affect the denationalization of citizens. It is inside the national where so much of the work of disassembling the historically constructed nation-state gets done. (Sassen, 2006 p. 325) Digital Assemblages Denationalized citizens might seek empowerment and resources beyond the state level, taking advantage of supra-national solidarities and mass entertainment of global networks, including global ecological interdependence, economic globalization, global media, and commercial culture. (Sassen, 2006 p. 283). While global networks key capacities include decentralized access, interconnectivity, and simultaneity of transactions, Sassen challenges the idea that they operate entirely outside of state or territorial controls (Sassen, 2006 p. 387). She writes that governments often oversee protocols for hardware and software, set laws that allow the privatization of parts of the internet by corporate interests, and sometimes take measures to censor content. Similarly she dismantles discourses trumpeting digital networks compression of space and time - their supposed ability to break down geographic barriers. Digital technologies must be produced, and this requires vast concentrations of material and not so mobile facilities and infrastructures (Sassen, 2006 p. 382). She therefore identifies what she terms a complex imbrication between the digital and non-digital to emphasize their interdependent but discreet relationship, one determined by the social specificity of how they are used. (Sassen, 2006 p.326). Digital networks are therefore not wholly global constructions disconnected from the local, but are embedded in various social contexts. The internets transboundary reach doesnt relinquish the particular conditions of the people who utilize it, and local practices can retain their specific identities even as they scale. They are deeply local yet intensely connected digitally (Sassen, 2006 p. 369). Specifically she notes the rise of two major globally networked consortiums she calls digital assemblages: first, the human rights network, which I discuss further below, and second, the private, economic sector, in particular the derivatives trading markets which cluster in large cities such as London, New York, and Tokyo (Sassen, 2001). Digital assemblages enable formerly silent actors and institutions to emerge as legitimate actors in international/global arenas that used to be confined to the state. (Sassen, 2006 p. 306). They are globally dispersed and informal and they appear free from any local intervention. Yet they simultaneously remain embedded in the state; state institutions alone have the technical administrative capacity through courts and legislature to
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recognize them as having certain legal and rhetorical rights. (Sassen, 2006 p. 209) For instance, states increasingly grant citizens the right to make autonomous claims for human rights or privacy violations, subjecting states to legal scrutiny when it comes to treatment of individuals inside their territory. States also grant legal privileges to private foreign economic actors such as financial firms, constructing them as rights-bearing entities. (Sassen, 2006 p. 307-308) By endowing these actors with new legal capacities, digital assemblages fundamentally redefine the idea of the citizenship and further loosen the national hold on citizens rights. As such digital assemblages represent microinstances of denationalization; their subjectivities remains sub-national while being affected by global publics. (Sassen, 2006 p. 387) Critically, global assemblages give rise to a new kind of political actor. Sassen claims that whereas the local is historically defined as nested in hierarchical state systems and place-bound, with associated suggestions of closure, todays local fans out into these horizontal global networks connected by the internet, gaining a new political presence. She is non-cosmopolitan, but can still build powerful, transboundary networks with other local actors around the world who deal in similar struggles. These networks route around global institutions or the state, either by allowing direct local-global conversations that by-pass state hierarchies, or by multiplying localized struggles as part of worldwide networks. Networked communications have the effect of revalorizing locality and local actors; once-powerless individuals can now participate in global politics without having to leave their communities. This allows new political imaginaries: actors knowledge of a global network shapes their local political practice, as they envision strategies that resonate or scale across network channels. In this sense, by inviting other locales in solidarity, scaling itself may become a self-reflexive part of a communitys political strategy, making globality a resource for these users. (Sassen 2006 p. 343) The internet becomes a potentially more effective arena for local politics than the local political system itself. (Sassen, 2006 p. 374) Strangely, Sassen affiliates most of these denationalized actors with National Governmental Organizations (NGOs). For example, she describes how the Zapatista movement in Mexico aligned with a San Francisco-based NGO to spread awareness of the movement in the US. Other examples she uses are digital databases created by Oxfam, Amnesty International, and HURIDOCS; global campaigns launched by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines; and online community spaces created by the Association for Progressive Communications and Bellanet. She also mentions grassroots protests organized in 1998 against the WTO in Seattle, a consortium of organizations and autonomous individuals. (Sassen 2006 p. 370-372) Her description doesnt distinguish between
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those platforms and services offered by formally recognized entities such as NGOs, and more emergent, grassroots campaigns of non-formal, unaligned individuals. This distinction is important to make, because latter the emergent, global, grassroots campaigns suggest a new kind of entity specific to network architecture, in contrast to international NGOs that pre-date the Internet. 11 NGOs were characterized by transglobal scales and imbrication of global and local actors long before digital networks, as for example when employees work on housing issues with vulnerable populations share stories of similar struggles outside that vicinity. Sassen explores only changes in scope, as more actors join these global conversations and increase possibilities for solidarity but she does not discuss new forms altogether. Her examples demonstrate changes in velocities and spacio-temporal orders, but not transformations in structure. Instead she writes, the issue is rather one of orders and magnitude, scope and simultaneity (Sassen 2006 p. 370). I argue instead that these new technologies allow for entirely novel, webspecific types of actors and networks that emerge outside the structures of older institutions and that are specific to a globalized, networked era. It is certainly helpful that Sassen exposes the contingency and construction of seemingly stable entities such as the national state, citizenship, the global and the local. In actor-network theory, this is called opening black boxes: we pry them apart in order to destabilize the power dynamic that held them together and to raise possibilities for excavating the hidden trajectories that make them sem natural to us. Sassen asks, for instance, if by unearthing the degree that the global is embedded and filtered through the national, human rights activists may find critical channels to hold global, private economic actors accountable at the state level. (Sassen 2006 p. 308) Yet Sassen does not apply the same incisive analyses to her description of political networks a significant exclusion that precludes certain technological possibilities she sets out to expose. This paper next seeks a refinement of Sassens theories; in my view, NGOs are not exemplary examples of digital assemblages in the global age and must be distinguished from novel forms specific to electronic mediums. As net critic Geert Lovink writes, The more people work online, the more important it is to understand that the technical architecture of the tools we use is shaping our social experiences. (Lovink 2008 p. 214) I will now explore these new assemblages and their effect on national identity.

Sassen writes that the number of formally recognized NGOs grew from 330 in 1914 to 730 in 1939 and 6,000 in 1980 in US. (Sassen 2006 p. 161)

11

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New Networked Politics Just as Sassen identifies a complex, interrelated association between the state and global formations, so she writes that the digital cannot be entirely separate from the material. Her approach is in line with a body of sociological research that views technologies as complex productions of specific protocols and laws, economic incentives, design constraints, and social conditions. Langdon Winner, for instance, writes extensively of how technologies can be designed, consciously or not, to open up certain social options and close others. Yet even though technologies design can be directed, it is never fully determined before being put into particular practice such practices then gives rise to various new social conditions to operate them. Bruno Latour similarly argues that technological networks shape all human interaction: It is as if we might call technology the moment when social assemblages gain stability by aligning actors and observers. Society and technology are not two ontologically distinct entities but more like phases of the same essential action. (Latour 1991 p. 129) Technologies are not only produced, but they also produce us, and new technologies therefore will produce new assemblages of the social. One such formation could be what Geert Lovink terms organized networks. These do not refer to technology, but to the communication clusters that arise from the social and collaborative use of electronic tools. Lovink describes organized networks as an emerging social and cultural form that enacts a new logics of politics moving beyond representative democracy of the popular vote and towards consensus building (Lovink 2008 p. 242). Their power resides in their flexible creativity: when they work well they can inspire new expressions, new socialities, and new techniques. (Lovink 2008 p. 244) Yochai Benkler as well writes of this new type of organization based on sharing resources and outputs among widely distributed, loosely connected individuals who cooperate with each other without relying on either market signals or managerial commands. (Benkler 2006 p. 60) These are models of free cooperation (Spehr 2007) from which anyone can opt in or out; hierarchies and power structures still accumulate, but are always subject to negotiation and are never perceived as fixed - black boxes that never stay shut for long. Howard Rheingold emphasizes emergence as one key element distinguishing these networks from older institutional structures such as the NGO. The network instead rises from the space between technological design constraints and unpredictable social shapes and utilities that result from it.
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Networked technologies such as the internet can be flexibly designed, without structural qualities predicated strictly on expected outcomes. These agglomerations imply a radical political shift: they displace the role of leadership and management from an authority who explicitly shapes direction to a catalyst and periodic intervener who sets conditions and frameworks for interactions. (Rheingold 2005 p. 28) Such networks are not purely idealistic but are operative today: Wikipedia, eBay, Open Source Software, large scale conversations on weblogs and listserves (Latham, p. 259) and movements Rheingold calls swarms and smart mobs (Rheingold 2005). Digital assemblages work well if they are heterogeneous; they work towards consensus, but thrive on diversity and conflict along the way (Lovink 2006 p. 242). Indeed, Christoph Spehr finds networks that include diverse locales and languages and that require degrees of translation have more potential for radical social change: well-functioning coalitions - and only coalitions that are constantly questioned are wellfunctioning - are spaces where the work of translation between different languages, tendencies, traditions, experiences is done. Without such a work of translation, a new logic of the social can never be pushed through. That is why mixed and cross-section cooperations are especially important for processes of post-modern organizing. (Spehr 2007) Organized digital networks can devote themselves to localized politics using the same tactics as NGOs. For example, when conservative politicians in Bangalore, India, in 2009 beat a group of women in a bar for wearing western clothes, a local journalist founded an online chat forum and a Facebook page soon after; she urged women around India to send pink chaddis underwear in Hindi - to the politicians. More than 2000 chaddis arrived at the politicians houses; the story became highly linked in the blogosphere and received international television news coverage. The chat forums and Facebook page encourage continuing dialogue about womens rights in conservative areas of the country (Nisha 2009). Here, local actors operating independently of NGOs found addressed a local problem through the political solidarity of an ongoing digital network. There are countless such instances of informal political networked activism, ranging from open publishing of political magazines and journals, to blog networks, and election monitoring with cell phones, a technology that links more people than computers in the developing world, though one Sassen hardly mentions. 12

The Economist reported in September 2009 that there are now 3.6 billion cell phone owners in the world, with three quarters of these in developing countries. (The Economist 2009).

12

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Making the distinction between older forms of civil society and new network formations is crucial, because it raises the issue of the latters sustainability. While NGOs have methods for plugging into public and private funding, Lovink questions if it is possible for the extraordinary power of networks to be formalized and fiscally rewarded (Lovink 2006 p. 241). For Lovink, recognition and funding are the critical problems for organized networks. Again, this becomes partially an issue of the material processes that produce networks: how to pay for the costs of software development, of hardware production and distribution, of servers and of human administrative labor? And does the material cell phones or desktop computers, open source or proprietary software promote open-ended discussions that the emergent properties of digital networks make possible? Beyond funding, organized networks need visibility and the power to sustain long enough to negotiate political change. If the national state recognizes new denationalized subjectivities, such as that of the human rights plaintiff, or denationalized spaces, such as those inhabited by private economic firms, is there a way also for the state to formally recognize organized network? Sassens concepts open at least the possibility for such articulation within national state contexts, certainly in practice, if not, at some point in the future, in a formal apparatus of rights, regulations, and funding operations. Political change, therefore, pertains both to specific local or national human rights issues, and also to how politics are practiced as such. Networks should incorporate the capacities of digital technologies to invite direct, non-representational, free cooperation and emergence, using an institutional logicinternal to the socio-technical dimensions of the media of communication. This means there is no universal formula for how organized network might invent its conditions of existence. (Lovink 2008 p. 244) Organized networks, then, not only articulate a new type of denationalized actor with expanded imaginaries, but suggest structural openings, on both national and global scales, to enact new practices of politics altogether.

Bibliography Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Dale Leorke. Power, Mobility, and Diaspora in the Global City: an interview with Saskia Sassen. Platform Journal of Media and Communication. Vol. 1, 2009. January 31, 2010. http://www.culturecommunication.unimelb.edu.au/platform/resources/vol1/PlatformVol1_Sassen.pdf.
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The Economist. The Landscape of Telecoms 24 September 2009, 17 October 2009. http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14483896. Latour, Bruno. Technology is Society Made Durable. A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination. J. Law, ed. London: Routledge. 1991. 103-131. Lovink, Geert. Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture. New York: Routledge, 2008. Nisha, Susan. Why We Said Pants to Indias Bigots. The Observer. 15 February 2009, January 31, 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/15/india-gender. Rheingold, Howard, Technologies of Cooperation. Palo Alto: Institute for the Future, January 2005, January 31, 2010. http://www.rheingold.com/cooperation/Technology_of_cooperation.pdf. Sack, Warren. Discourse Architecture and Very Largescale Conversation. Digital Formations: IT and New Architectures in the Global Realm. Robert Latham and Saskia Sassen Ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 242-282.

Sassen, Saskia. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (2nd ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Sassen, Saskia. Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Spehr, Cristoph. Free Cooperation: or How to Become and Stay More Equal Than Others. The Art of Free Cooperation. Trebor Scholtz, Geert Lovink, ed. New York: Autonomedia, 2007.

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The French as the Other. Nation and Gender in Early 20th Century Fashion and Art Discourse.
By Andrea Kollnitz The aesthetic polarization between different regions and regional styles is as old as aesthetical production itself. Traditional art-history tells us stories of geographical regions and schools developing characteristic styles in mutual influence, a narrative building notions of North versus South, Northern versus Italian Renaissance, French classicism versus German romanticism etc. 1 The geographical or national interpretation of artistic styles reached its fatal climax within the Nazi era when Non-Arian art and its makers were condemned and annihilated as contaminating and degenerating the national spirit and health. 2 In spite of the lesson learned by this culture-political trauma we keep thinking in national and ethnic categories. In art history as well as in fashion and costume history national differences and antitheses still make a naturalized part in historical narratives which create ideals of "genuine" expressions and essential aesthetic identities. This article aims to reveal and discuss nationalist textual and visual rhetoric and its antithetical constructions in the fashion and art discourse from 1900 to the 1920s. 3 During this period of modernization and transnationalism national manifestation and differentiation were of urgent (cultural-)political concern. 4 Modernist art and fashion production were not only engaged in revolutionary aesthetic innovations but also deeply involved in the ongoing national project which often created ambivalent identities split between international openness and national obligations. 5 The national differentiation of fashion was early on linked to political power and cultural competitions between the empires and courts of Europe. 6 One of its strongest examples is the antithesis between French and English fashion roused by the absolutist Louis XIV powerful international promotion of French fashion. From the 17th century onward French influences in England provoked a consistent debate between not only different aesthetic but also moral opinions connecting the supposed ostentation and ornament of French (or generally outlandish) fashion with nationally deviating effeminating decadence and manifesting an image of genuine Britishness as more natural, practical and virile. 7 The condemnation of French sartorial exaggeration and excessive luxury reached its climax in the French revolution which can be considered a metaphorical event for the turn from French elitist power and rococo aesthetics to bourgeois rationalism and democratic thought even in clothing. What earlier had been opposed as a symbol of the French aristocracy, the ostentatious fashion of the ancien rgime, was now made a visual sign of feminine artificiality and weakness in contrast to the measured and practical fashion promoted by
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the British textile industry. 8 Until today British tailorship is considered the source of top quality male clothing while French couture is for women. 9 Practicality versus elegance, controlled and natural masculinity versus exaggerated and stylish femininity - those antitheses are of importance even in the Swedish and German discourse constructing "Frenchness" in the early 20th century. As fashion itself has been constantly attacked for its superficiality, artificiality and connection with feminine vanity, French style holds its position as a feminine aesthetic not only in fashion but also in art discourse. The supposed femininity of French style though is of ambivalent value: inferior in a politically and nationalistically charged rhetoric - superior and an unsurpassable model of artistic creativity in art and fashion history. 10 This ambivalence of evaluations is obvious not least in modernist cultural life-style magazines which often combine art criticism and fashion reports. 11

The French as a model Saisonen 1916-18 The Swedish life-style magazine Saisonen (The Season. Magazine for art, news and fashions) offers reports on modern cultural events. Already its name connotes its French focus which becomes obvious even in the non-translated French expressions permeating the text. 12 Fashion figures in the fashion reports as well as on the magazines outer covers. Decorative colorful illustrations of fashionable ladies give the magazines first impression.(fig.1) They are followed by a second cover with traditionalist photographs of representatives from the Stockholm aristocracy and high society.(fig.2) Modern fashion signifying modernity and high society portraiture signifying tradition are contrasted and combined visually and ideologically, in the covers as well as in the contents. The fashion reports by Comtesse G. a pseudonym connoting Frenchness as well as aristocratic status link fashion news as well as fashion history to France and Paris. Thus an article on The first spring fashions opens with an homage to France the country of all beautiful fashions, unequalled in its feeling for style and rarely leaving the realm of good taste. 13 (fig.3) A very similar characterization of French style prevails in Swedish modernist art-criticism which promotes French art as masterly, devoted to beauty, tasteful and refined, not least in antithetical comparisons with German art. 14 While Comtesse G sees modern textiles in all their grace as very characteristically French, the art historian Axel L. Romdahl talks of the heaviness in German art which never can reach the relieving ease of French art. 15 What is considered a national French style thus transgresses the borders between the arts. French fashion as well as art shows traits of a national aesthetic character connected to visual markers which can be connected to femininity beauty, refinement, even elegance is a recurring
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feature of French fashion and painterly style. Another common place of fashion- and art reports are historical references to icons of French (art) history. Though dealing with the newest in fashion Comtesse G. is referring to the style of French king Louis XV and his mistress Madame Pompadour which even shows in the historical illustrations accompanying the modern fashion drawings. Likewise art criticism on modern French and even German art repeatedly promotes modern artists by associations or comparisons with French masters as Courbet etc. Not only is French style associated with feminine virtues but French fashion in itself considered as adequate for and naturally connected to women. Linguistically this becomes obvious when women are called legantes while men are called gentlemen. 16. All the reports on male fashion in Saisonen are talking of Gentlemen (using the original English term) and referring to English devices such as Oxford cloth and London tailors. But even though Englishness is mentioned, (feminine) French style is dominating the fashion discourse of Saisonen. 17 As in art criticism the description and interpretation of French fashion in terms of national character does not only concern Frenchness itself, but demarcates Swedish national identity in comparison to its French model or Other. Thus Comtesse G. links Swedish womens less cultivated ways of dressing to the colder climate in Sweden or complains that Swedish ladies stubbornly keep to the same color combinations[ inspired by Paris]. After having met fifteen in a line on Strandvgen you get an indigestion and keep seeing red hats during the rest of the day. 18 By thus analyzing the Swedish reception of Parisian influences the writer states her critique of Swedish mentality and taste which is considered less refined, versatile and courageous than French and bound to boring conformity while at the same time too easily influenced and without integrity. Even in modernist art criticism and art history writing Swedish art identity is constructed as less wild and audacious than its artistic counterparts and models. 19 Fashion as decadence Strix 1916, 1922 The satirical Swedish magazine Strix puts (French) fashion into a less positive role. Strix is mostly focused on class conflicts - a crucial question in the beginning formation of a social-democratic Swedish identity. Those class differences are visualized by contrasts in clothing and drawing styles: Concerning women we find poor and rudely drawn peasant figures in formless, "primitive" clothing, neatly but boringly dressed and traditionally depicted bourgeois women and school teachers, upper class ladies and housemaids, and finally a type of woman visually identified by a more modernist graphic style and her conspicuous fashionable appearance. Most striking is the contrast between an old ugly peasant woman in formless clothes visited by her fashionable daughter wearing a
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modernist gown, a drawing about the alienation between provincial and urbanized identities within the same family. (fig.6) 20 Apart from outrageous clothing patterns and extravagant hats, the exotic appeal of the fashionable girl or woman is expressed by a number of recurring signifiers: most obvious is the exaggerated black eye-make-up given to young waitresses and shop assistants as well as certain ladies. One drawing shows an extremely black-eyed shop assistant addressed by a stout elderly gentleman who wants to be shown some stockings. As an answer the girl lifts her skirts and shows her own legs - a gesture connected to sexual invitation already in 18th century fashion culture. (fig.7) 21 Those "black eyes" often combined with black hair give an impression of French physiognomy as well as Parisian pleasure life and "the Parisienne". From 1850 onward the figure of the Parisienne became an international icon as a woman of exquisite taste, fashionable appeal and beauty, showing and enjoying herself on the boulevards and in the night life of Paris, expressing a mixture of upper class exquisiteness, lower class practicality and moral liberty. 22 The model of the Parisienne as an admired icon and equally a warning of female liberty and metropolitan decadence can be detected repeatedly in Strix. As every modern city Stockholm had its places of fashionable show-off which can be seen in caricatures showing the promenade of the Strandvgen as a place of forbidden rendez-vous between modern fashionable girls and ugly elderly gentlemen. 23 The visual contrast provided by those combinations is building on extreme silhouettes with tiny waists and seductive poses in the fashionable light-footed girls and their physical opposite, the heavy-limbed elderly upper class gentleman trying his luck in vain. (fig.8) 24 A more aggressive critique of the fashionable woman and her demoralizing effect on national society are couples of girls in extravagant dress and with minimal shoes talking about cheating on their husbands or exchanging their boyfriends for superficial reasons. (fig.9,10) 25 In one drawing about a mother warning her elegant daughter who is about to travel to Stockholm the word "change" simultaneously connotes change of trains, change of partners and change of clothes. (fig.11) 26 The new woman's quick exchange of partners is metaphorically connected to the equally female habit of quickly and superficially changing a fashionable outfit. Superficial fashionability can be detected even in young men depicted as indecent upstarters robbing the elder generation of their money and pretending to be superior. Thus two conspicuously dressed and silhouetted young men are showing off not only their modern style but even their stupidity on Strandvgen.(fig.11,12) 27 The fickleness, superficial character and sexually seductive aspects of urban fashion get the role of morally undermining and unhealthy socially destructive forces. 28
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While the modern woman and fashion as a female device seem to endanger the status quo and conservative national virtues, they are simultaneously enhancing the beauty and validity of Stockholm as a growing cultural metropolis with continental habits. A positive evaluation of fashion as a cultural quality marker becomes evident in illustrations similar to fashion-plates showing beautifully dressed "Parisian" girls accompanying sentimental poems called Chansonette, Papillon Bleu etc.(fig. 13) 29 An ambivalence in the evaluation of French aesthetics as beautiful or superficial with negatively effeminate characteristics can be distinguished even in Swedish artcriticism which repeatedly opposes the virility and power of expressionist German art to the more beautiful and easily digested French modernists. The Swedish art world reveals itself as split between its longing for France and the pleasures of the South and its be-longing to a more "vigorous" Germanic family and fascination for the "powerful" German expressionism. 30 Germans and "Parisiennes" Jugend 1900 An ambivalence in the experience of modern and Frenchified fashionable women and men is depicted even in the German magazines Jugend and Simplicissimus, both published in Munich. German political and cultural relations to France have a more aggressive antithetical character than Sweden's generally quite positive gaze at France as a style-model. Although being a stylistic model in art as in fashion during long periods of German cultural history, France became more of an opponent in the course of the French-Prussian war and a main enemy after the First World War when German artists seriously got involved in the national project and started creating their own expressionist national identity opposed to what was considered French superficial beauty. 31 In 1900 though, French and Parisian culture were still admired, promising modernity and renewal which fit the ambitions of a journal with the title Youth, magazine for art and life. symbolist and realist images of national (South-)German culture, nature and Wagnerian mythological heroes intermingle with more impressionist drawings of metropolitan Parisian life and leave an amazingly manifold visual impact. Romantic drawings of "innocent" German youths dressed in simple timeless clothing as a dreaming young girl leaning against a tree or a shepherd boy lying in the grass between his sheep are often directly followed by so called Parisian images, a feuilleton of far more dynamical drawings presenting contemporary Paris and its pleasure life. (fig.14,15,16,17) 32 Those drawings with titles as Champs Elyses, Jardins de Paris or just Parisian images can be interpreted as a visual reportage of whats going on in Paris. 33 Paris is presented as an obvious icon of modernity and expressed by predominantly Parisiennes in fashionable dress and elegant make-up, often suggesting their belonging to the demimonde. 34 Jugend puts the modernity, fashions and dynamic life-style of Paris into an almost
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In Jugend

romanticizing contrast to the nature, traditions and people of provincial Bavaria and Munich. Both realms seem equally included in the modern and yet national spirit of life which Jugend seeks for its readers. Those contrasts get a more ambivalent role in caricatures: In The Wasp Waist two peasants in typical South-German folk costume with short leather trousers and feathered hats are gazing at a fashionable lady. Reacting to her tiny corseted waist one of them says: If she were mine, I would keep her in my hand. (fig. 18) 35 The question is who we are to laugh at: the provincial peasants keeping to their old-fashioned views on women as property and unfamiliar with modern values or the extravagance and unnatural dress of the modern woman, as responsible for deforming the laws of nature and tradition. Another drawing with an ambivalent message shows a slim fashionable lady gazing at a stout peasant woman in folk costume: When she comments on the peasants "breast and awful hips", her male partner insinuates that she is just envious. (fig.19) 36 In the images of those two women-types commented by the male German we meet not only with the contrast between fashion and traditional clothing but even with the contrast between two bodies of metaphorical significance for the nation a modern/cosmopolitan/unnatural body connoting affectation and artificiality and a traditional/national/natural body, less beautiful but stronger, more healthy and presumably more motherly. French fashion as national danger Simplicissimus 1921 The image of women and their (French) fashions gets a still more striking national importance in the sarcastic caricatures of Simplicissimus in the Twenties when Germany suffered from the economical misery caused by the strenuous claims of the Versailles contract which created an unsurpassable conflict between the defeated Germany and the victorious Entente with its main representative France. One highly dramatic and aggressive example is shown by a cover which says Off with French luxury!. 37 The image shows a blond muscular German man in simple workers clothes kicking a black-haired elegantly dressed woman who carries a pile of French luxury products. The sub-text says: "We have our own liquor to drown our worries." (fig.20) The antagonism between the sexes can be considered one of the earliest and consequently most powerful antitheses in the rhetoric and thinking of manhood and is constantly used in the political and cultural debate concerning German-French relationships from the 19th century onward to the 30s. E. g. German or Germanic virility and sincerity is opposed to French or Latin feminine weakness and disposition for superficial purely sensual concerns. 38 In the abovementioned drawing the feminine image of France as a national disturbance is still more confirmed by the connection to French fashion and luxury undermining German values and economic national strength. (French) fashion and its destructive potential become strikingly obvious in the cover to Simplicissimus special issue
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on fashion. 39 The gaudy cover colored in yellow and pink shows The Devil of Fashion, a naked creature, half woman, half devil, with long black floating hair, surrounded by small caricatures of exaggerated historical dress. (fig.21) Though not outspoken, the devil of fashion seems to be French, as black hair connotes the (dangerous) physical characteristics of the Latin femme fatale a blond woman would have been unthinkable in this context. When looking into this issue dedicated to fashion (which obviously was given great contemporary importance) we find more hints on the French: A caricature called Terrible! ridicules German women in desperation because of the stopped import of French fashion to Germany. (fig.22) At the opposite page called Money hyenas and showing two bony women in a fashion boutique we are told that Germany is an ideal country: The fashion is French, the textiles English and the prices are heavenly. Womens consumption of international fashion is hereby linked to superficial and hysterical behavior far from political responsibility and with tendencies which weaken the national forces. Though finally another aspect should be mentioned: In colored, modernistic illustrations visually differing from the caricatures above another type of woman is appearing: the emancipated woman in sporty, androgynous and audacious clothing. Her strong muscular body seems perfect for showing off fashionable sportswear, from bathing to skiing suits. It does not only indicate a change in physical ideals but also a change in gender relations. The invisible male part is put into a ridiculous and even physically inferior position. This can be illustrated by my final example a joke called "Below Zero": Posing like a ruler, a modern woman skier in striking color-combinations complains: I wish I could bring my husband up here, his belly would make the perfect ski jump. (fig. 23) 40 Is it the (obviously overweight) husband or even the woman who is object of criticism? The title suggests something more than outdoors temperature, it suggests the temperature of the emancipated woman who is considered "cold". Even a yet unmentioned joke in Swedish Strix complains of modern women being too "cold" to marry. Obviously the resistance against new women's fashions and liberate ways uses a similar rhetoric in Sweden and Germany and in spite of different political situations French style connotes "enchanting" and "destructive" in both national discourses. 41
Classical concepts constructing geographical polarizations in art history are e.g. Alois Riegls Kunstwollen in Die sptrmische Kunstindustrie nach den Funden in sterreich-Ungarn, Wien 1901 or Heinrich Wlfflins Principles of Art History. The Problem of the Development of Styles in Later Art, New York 1932 (orig. 1929) 2 For a historiographic review of art geographical concepts see Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art, Chicago 2004. 3 A thought-provoking example of a conscious investigation on national identity, politics and fashion is Eugenia Paulicelli, Fashion under Fascism. Beyond the Black Skirt, Oxford/New York 2004. 4 On the impact of cultural production on the nation and its imagined community see e.g. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, London 1991, Anthony D. Smith, National Identity, London 1994 and Michelle Facos & Sharon L. Hirsh ed., Art, Culture and National Identity in Finde-Sicle Europe, New York 2003.
1

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The ambivalent national and international identities of German expressionist artists are discussed in Kollnitz 2008, chapter 4. See also Christian Saehrendt, Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner. Bohme-Identitt und nationale Sendung, Frankfurt 2003. 6 For a historical survey of these interrelations and the continuous moralist debate on fashion see e.g. Christopher Breward, The Culture of Fashion, Manchester/ New York 1994. See even the work of Aileen Ribeiro, especially Dress in Eighteenth Century-Europe, 1715-1789, London 1984. 7 As Peter McNeil writes To the English speaking world, fashion was virtually synonymous with the French, whose ability to create ingenious trifles in every aspect of design simultaneously repelled and attracted the English. Peter McNeil, The Art and Science of Walking: Gender, Space and the Fashionable Body in the Long Eighteenth Century, p.177, Fashion Theory, vol. 9, issue 2, 2005. 8 Barbara Vinken claims this shift from fashion as a platform of class conflict to fashion as an arena of gender-conflict in her book Fashion Zeitgeist, Trends and Cycles in the Fashion System, Oxford/New York 2005, chapter 1 What fashion strictly divided. 9 Still fashion and the dominating fashion system have their origins in 1850s Paris which leads to the image of fashion as a French phenomenon in general. The role and up-rise of the French fashion system is discussed in Yuniya Kawamura, Fashion-ology, An Introduction to Fashion-studies, Oxford 2005 and Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion. A Cultural History, Oxford 1998 (1988) . 10 See my analysis of Swedish attitudes towards French art in comparison to German, Kollnitz 2008, especially chapter 3 on The German-French Antithesis. 11 Modernist art is strongly connected with fashion, concerning the fashion-design created by artists, the total art-works of e.g. Kandinsky and the Ballet Russe in Paris and its dependency on modernist costumes and the common aesthetical theories advancing abstraction and other visual modernist innovations (e.g. the art of Sonia Delaunay). See e.g. Radu Stern, Against Fashion. Clothing as Art 1850-1930, Cambridge MA, 1992. My analysis will mostly focus on examples from the fashion discourse in Swedish and German magazines from 1900 to 1922, but in a comparative dialogue with results from my earlier research on Swedish and German art criticism (Kollnitz 2008). I am conscious that my comparisons between the nations and different periods may appear somewhat incongruent and far from complete but I still want to claim some generally important features indicating the different national identities shaped in Swedish and German fashion and art discourse. 12 Saisonen. Magasin fr konst, nyheter och moder 1916-25. All translations from Swedish and German to English are my own. 13 Saisonen 1916 nr 1, pp 11f. 14 Kollnitz 2008, chapter 3. 15 Axel L. Romdahl, Konsten p Baltiska utstllningen II. Utlndsk konst, Gteborgs Handels- och Sjfartstidning, 25/5 1914 16 Saisonen 1916 nr 3, p.50. 17 The polarization between French and English can already be found in the antithetical relationship between 17th century British masculine puritans or Roundheads with their shaved heads and the morally suspect ostentatious cavaliers with their curly wigs and feminine attributes influenced by French fashion. See Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction. Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England. New Haven 2005, chapter 3 Sermonizing Dress. After the French revolution English textile industry got permanently identified with the production of highly qualified male fashion and became an indicator for a sober, practical and controlled style opposed to the exaggerated elegance of French fashion.
18 19

Saisonen 1918, p. 69. See my summary in Kollnitz 2008. 20 Strix 1/11 1922. The topic of alienation between country and city population is at the heart of Selma Lagerlfs iconic novel The Emperor of Portugallia from about the same period. Provinciality as an important condition for national health is part of the ideology in Julius Langbehn's book Rembrandt als Erzieher, Leipzig 1890, which was extremely popular in Germany as well as the Nordic countries. 21 Strix 19/4 1916. 22 On the Parisienne see Steele 1998, pp. 68-75. Particularly the figure of the "grisette", a Parisian working class girl romanticized in French literature and art from the late 19th century, fits into the image of black-eyed women and girls depicted in Swedish Strix. 23 On the "fashionable rendez-vous" and the "geography of fashion" see Steele 1998, pp. 133-140. 24 Strix 5/7 1916. 25 Strix 30/8 1916, Strix 19/12 1923. 26 Strix 10/5 1916. 27 Strix 22/2 1922.

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French fashion was considered an effeminating endangering force even earlier in Swedish history, when the Swedish court was accused of over-consuming outlandish French fashion and thereby weakening its virility. See Lena Rangsstrm, Lions of Fashion. Male Fashion of the 16th, 17th, 18th Centuries, Stockholm 2008. 29 Strix 21/3 1917. 30 See the German summary in Kollnitz 2008. 31 On antithetical constructions of German versus French national character in German art discourse see Andreas Holleczek and Andrea Meyer ed., Franzsische Kunst - Deutsche Perspektiven 1870-1945. Quellen und Kommentare zur Kunstkritik, Berlin 2004. 32 Jugend 1900, nr 35, p. 589f; Jugend 1900, nr 36, cover and p. 605. On Parisian high-life and the significance of fashion see Steele 1998, pp. 153-176. 33 Paris as a source of novelties is iconic even in art-discourse which often and rightly describes Paris as "the source of new art". See e.g. Swedish artist Georg Pauli' s book I Paris-nya konstens klla from 1915. 34 On the significance of the demi-monde for fashion and its revolutionary potential see Vinken 2005, p. 17. 35 Jugend 1900, nr 31. 36 Jugend 1900, nr 41. 37 Simplicissimus, 1921, nr 11 38 Not least the German art critical rhetoric developing during and after the First World War uses those antitheses to demarcate German art and expressionism as "stronger" than French, see e.g. Holleczek 2004, Magdalena Bushart, Der Geist der Gotik und die expressionistische Kunst, Mnchen 1990. 39 Simplicissimus 1921, nr 33. 40 Simplicissimus, 1921, nr 36 41 To be continued!

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Fig. 1 Cover Saisonen nr 4 1918 Fig 2. Second cover Saisonen nr 4 1918

Fig. 3 Saisonen nr 1 1916

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Fig. 6 Strix 1/11 1922

Fig. 7 Strix 19/4 1916

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Fig. 8 Strix 5/7 1916

Fig. 9 Strix 30/8 1916: Are you still with Fredrik? No, its over. He snored so terribly that my husband couldnt sleep.

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Fig. 10 Strix 19/12 1923: But Anna, why did you break your engagement? Well, an you believe it, the other day when I was about to leave town, Carl stood there and waved his handkerchief and blew his nose in it

Fig. 11 Strix 10/5 1916

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Fig. 11 (wrong order) Strix 22/2 1922 Fig. 12 Strix Baron Sabelstjerna: Listen, brother, how in heaven did they manage to push the anchor through that little hole?

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Fig. 13 Strix 21/3 1917

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Fig. 14, 15: Jugend 1900, nr. 36

Fig. 16, 17 Jugend 1900, nr. 35

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Fig. 18 Jugend 1900, nr. 31

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Fig. 19 Jugend 1900, nr. 41

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Fig. 20 Simplicissimus 8/6 1921

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Fig. 21 Simplicissimus 9/11 1921: God made man, but I made him take himself

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seriousl

Fig. 22 Simplicissimus 9/11 1921

Fig. 23 Simplicissimus 30/11 1921

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Which Kunst ist Super? Museum displays and ownership

Margaret Tali, guest researcher at ASCA, UvA Supervised by: prof Frans Grijzenhout Introduction This research paper deals with the production of national identities through displays of visual art, with a special respect given to ownership. The exhibition Die Kunst ist Super which I analyze was displayed in Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin in late 2009 and early 2010. Owing to my interest towards one part of the collection, a closer look will be taken on one of the private collections nowadays constituting the museum collection this of Friedrich Christian Flick. In my article, I remain particularly interested in the cooperation between collector and the museum, as narrated through the exhibition. The methodology that I use in my analysis is based on seeing the exhibition as a discourse (Greenberg 1995; Bal 1996 and 2001) and a circuit as proposed by the economical sociologist Viviana Zelizer (Zelizer 2000). It presents an attempt to engage the firstly, temporal and spatial context of the exhibition in its reading, and secondly, reconsider the economical context of meaning production through curatorial activities in museums. This leads me to argue in the end of my paper that ownership issues are growingly important for analyzing museum displays. Visual documentation, curatorial texts, media coverage, and artists biographies have been used as research material in analyzing the show. The temporal context in which the exhibition Die Kunst ist Super, is set, is this of the 20th Anniversary Celebrations of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, which filled the city at the time of its opening and continued throughout autumn 2009.

The Story of the Hamburger Bahnhof Collections After the re-unification of Germany in 1990, the collections of the National Gallery, which had previously been divided in two parts, were reunited. (Schuster 2004: 509) When the possibility of turning the former train-station Hamburger Bahnhof into a new museum became clear in the early of 1990s, private collectors were engaged to the enterprise from the start following the idea of the museum director Eugen Blume. Later he has called this choice an assistance without which the National Gallery suffering from poorly financed acquisition funds would not have been able to fulfill its mission (Blume 2004: 70). However, owing to the long and undisturbed traditions of private art market in the former Western Germany, compared to its eastern counterpart, the collection became based on the three private collectors who have a tight link to the Western German
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art centres following the art market developments. The museum, opened in 1996, has consequently become to consist of three private collections this of Egidio Marzona, focusing on Land art and Arte Povera; Erich Marxs standing out for its post-war American art and Joseph Beuys collection; and most recently, a king-size collection of 2000 works by the Swiss-German collector F.C. Flick. In 2004 the latter opened and became displayed in the new museum wing, Rieckhallen, which was renovated at the cost of Flick, turning Hamburger Bahnhof with its exhibition spaces of 13 000 m2, one of the largest art museums in Europe. Being given for the museum as a temporary loan of seven-years, the collection of Flick stands out for its particular story of continuities of the 20th century German history. Wide media criticism burst after the plans for housing Flick's collection were made public, which was unseen in the 130 years of history of the German National Gallery. This criticism was targeted mainly at two things: first of all, funding the collection with blood money since during the II World War Flick's grandfather had used Jewish slaves for labour in his steel industry; and secondly, F.C.Flick's refusal to pay anything into the reparations fund for the surviving victims of slave labor established by the German government a few years earlier. (Osmond 2005; Winder 2004) Important Jewish community members called for the cancellation of the plan considering it offensive. Flick opposed this criticism saying one cannot inherit guilt for acts being done by previous generations. This position quickly became supported in the public responses of the German political elite including Chancellor Gerhard Schrder and Minister of Culture (Osmond 2005: 2) and lead to pursuing these plans despite the opposition. Flicks interests in lending his collection to an institution of national authority were undoubtedly multifaceted. In 2001 he had failed to establish a private museum in Zurich due to wide public protests, targeting the same accusations that he was later to face in Berlin. Flick paid for the renovation of Rieckhallen, and provided his collection free of charge to be displayed in Hamburger Bahnhof, any income that would be earned goes to the National Gallery. (Schuster 2004: 511) Other circumstances of the contract between the two parties remain unknown. Flick had started collecting historical art in the 1980s, after settling in Switzerland wishing to turn a new page in his life. Under the guidance of the dealers Ivan Wirth and David Zwinger he changed his focus to contemporary art, gathering a world-class collection of over 2,500 works by 150 artists during the 1990s. In his website the collector writes, he is particularly interested in art which relates to the present, to life and its problems in today's world (www.friedrichchristianflickcollection.com). In an interview to Blume he admits his fascination in the speculative and risky character of contemporary art, and ambitions to play an active part in the contemporary art life (Blume, 2004: 14). He also acknowledges the rootedness of his practices of collecting in the discourses of family history considering his collection to be a statement - precisely as a result of its
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conceptual, political orientation - about his family history (www.friedrichchristianflickcollection.de). It is easy to track the similarity of his interests to these of any corporation, particularly image construction joined by visibility, and aim to play an active part in contemporary societys cultural life (Chin-Tao Wu 2002), whereas the corporation instead of being his enterprise, becomes his
family. Curatorial activities in Hamburger Bahnhof turn out to play an essential role during the

temporary period of Flicks loan, since apart from having the opportunity to turn every exhibition into a block-buster, the knowledge produced and information given out will continue to circulate in the narratives of history writing also after the loan period.

At home or not at home? The Curatorial techniques of Die Kunst ist Super The spacious hall which opens to the visitor straight after the ticket-sales is filled with three works Marcel Duchamp's small "Rue de Bicyclette" (1913/1964); and two large installations "Wagon" (2006) by Polish artist Robert Kusmirowsky and "It Will All Turn Out Right in the End"(2005-06) by the Slovakian artist Roman Ondak. Giving those works the entire space of the Stations waiting hall arises a tense dialogue negotiating presence and past, East and West, trauma and transition as well as displacement. The large scale model of Tate Moderns Turbine Hall by Ondak, and Kusmirowsky's almost perfectionist life-size reconstruction of a wagon made of wood and paper which surround Duchamps bycicle wheel enter into a melancholic dialogue with artistic reproduction (proposed by the curatorial text) and through the moments captured condense the whole 20th century. Kusmirowsys installation was initially set up in the Jewish Girls School as a part of the 4th Berlin Biennial (2006). Realized to commemorate the fate of the Jewish community during the Second World War, it looses some of its contextuality being now set into the station space. Although, the surrounding political realities of Germany in autumn 2009 remain openly untouched by the curators, this dialogue of works on display yet allow a political reading, being set into a wider context of the 20th century world. Other central themes of the exhibition are: vanity/ vanitas, homelessness and the expanding notion of art, all of them equally easy to be traced spatially. Vanitas is composed of art works from the Marx and centres around the placement of the iconic 20th century sex-symbol Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol and the replica of Nofretete (one the principal riches of Altes Museum) next to one another, revive the relationship of beauty and death, pleasure and victimization. Another dialogue is this of the three dimensional paintings of organic materials by Anselm Kiefer and the action paintings using graffiti by the American artists Cy Twombly. Whereas there is a large war-airplane standing in the midst of Kiefers work, Twomblys fascination of antique sculptures is honoured
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with setting large-scale replicas of Michelagelos sculptures in the middle of the space of his paintings. When leaving this part of the display, the visitor finds herself between a witty dialogue of two works using light-advertisement as their form - "Malice" by Bruce Nauman(1980) and the revolutionist question of the installation by Mario Merz "Che Fare" (1963), both of which eventually melt into self-conscious irony. Rieckhallen constitutes almost solely of works from Flicks collection. In the middle of the long museum wing there is a room, dealing with the topics of home and homelessness. The space consisting of works by well-known American and German artists resembles a bedroom, the most intimate part of home, which is stuffed with white furniture and mirrors (Franz West), small-scale paintings on the walls (John Wesley, Konrad Klapheck) and vases on stands (Gino Dominicis, Peter Fischli/ David Weiss). There is a bright green mouvie poster of Walt Disney's Neverland story of Peter Pan on one of the walls, while its ownership remains unmentioned. Going further one notices the green figure of a crucified frog by Kippenberger Zuerst die Fsse(1990) high up in the corner of the bedroom, which has gone to art history through several removals from display and protests by the Roman Catholic Church. On a small night-table there are two pairs of slippers one for women and another for men, as if waiting to be used, and yet questioning: is it yet a home or a hotel, and leaving a set of questions about belonging and being at home unanswered. Rieckhallen starts and ends with the 1970s the installation Un Jardin d'Hiver by Marcel Broodthaers, known for his institutional criticism, arises a self-critical look at the idea of classifying in museums work; whereas the large video installation of Robert Smithsons Spiral Jetty reminds the visitor about the spiral cycle, and temporality of the museum world. Together with Die Kunst ist Super two permanent art works opened in Rieckhallen, which were commissioned by Hamburger Bahnhof. First of them consists of 48 lamps with the sign Exit by the American artist Richard Artschwager. His work No Exit runs throughout the long corridor of Rieckhallen, turning the interieur of the into an expected context for the visitor. However, the controversial message of the work with an exit sign, where no exit exists, also starts to mingle with the circumstances of the temporary home of Flicks collection, from which the museum currently has no exit. The other permanent art piece is an installation filling the tunnel, which leads the visitor to Rieckhallen and later back to the museums main building. Robert Kusmirowsky has reconstructed there in a smaller scale the Berlin metro station Alexanderplatz and placed strong metal doors automatically opening and closing at its both ends. The installation Transition(2009) captures the spatial as well as conceptual motion leading the visitor from public domain to its privatized counterpart, from one set of values to another.
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The display in the West wing, pays an hommage to Joseph Beuys's, whose is set in the context of Fluxus movement and Viennease actionism. It concentrates around the idea of play and happening, which at the time broadened the concept of art. Large-scale installations by Beuys, The End of the 20th Century and The Monument to the Future (originally created for Venice Biennial 1976) are the epicenter of the display, surrounded by media performances, recordings of TV shows, which repoliticise the notion of play employed by Beuys, Fluxus in various forms of their creation. Accepting, healing, and overcoming the traumatic past of the post World War Germany that Beuyss works touch upon not only extends the meaning of art, but decisively situate these international flows in the context of Western Germany of the 70s. The works originate from collections of Marx and Flick, and Joseph Beuys Media Archive and their intermingling successfully produces a thorough overview of Beuyss artistic career expressed through different media.

Art, ownership and the ethics of curatorship At the opening of the Flick collection to public in Hamburger Bahnhof in 2004 the German critic Thomas Wagner noted the similarity between the artists represented by the two outstanding American galleries, Hauser&Wirth and David Zwirner, and those visibly present in the collection of Flick (Graw 2005) with several works. Turning private collections into founding parts of public museum collections, indeed, seems to create a tight bond between the museum displays and the art market, which needs to be articulated in further detail in relation to the knowledge production in museums. Occasionally, notable authority in the show was given to the preferences of the collectors. Artists such as Kiefer, Warhol, Rauchenberg and Twombly; West, Kippenberger and Roth, who were given further space in the display present the choices of Flick and Marx as collectors. It is also easy to trace the dominance of Western German, Swiss and American artists and artistic movements in the display. The circuits of exhibitions around which the meaning creation consequently becomes circulated owe to the networks of collectors, and their circulation in particular art scenes. Although, as parts of the display indicate the curators express a considerable consciousness of the production of meanings, which would comment upon the political issues in the post-reunified Germany, yet the few artists originating from Eastern European countries whose work figures in the show, are either borrowed to the collection from galleries, or bought to the museum in the last years. The need of integrating Eastern German art into the dominant narrative of art history has been neglected, and remains unarticulated. Furthermore, what remains neglected is the absence of women artists, for
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instance in Rieckhallen their work constitutes less than 10% of the whole display. Whereas the three collectors choices have become the dominant mechanisms of gate-keeping contemporary art which becomes displayed in the museum, the balance of art works shown needs to be taken further into account by museums to rightfully act as public institutions. The private collectors stories are given relatively much visibility, and in parts of the display, the ownership of works has defined the spatial organization of the display. Boris Groys has rightfully noted that as long as Flick's name figured in the context of art market it hardly raised any brow, however, as soon as it became to the museums world, ie public domain, controversies flared up (Khn Malvezzi 2004: 41). What makes the position of Flick further problematic, is hes authority to be literally shaping the history of the presence next to a major part of his collection being exhibited in Museum den Gegenwart in Berlin, hes continuing to collect in Switzerland. Flicks friendships with artists and gallerists, partnerships with the world of museums and political elite, as well as his elaborated views on the operating of contemporary art in society, have lead Isabelle Graw to call for finding a new name for the particular collector type represented by Flick (Graw 2005). This name has already been proposed in Britain for Charles Saatchi, by Rita Hutton in her book Supercollector(2005), yet the particular circumstances of Hamburger Bahnhof collection intimately involving the recent history continues to challenge the ethics of curatorial work through every exhibition. What distinguishes the collection of Flick from the other two private collections in Hamburger Bahnhof is particularly the means and scale of branding, which the heading of the show as well as an extensive publication activity seem to participate in. Analysing the exhibition Friedrich Christian Flick in Hamburger Bahnhof (2004) which filled the whole museum lead Reesa Greenberg to use the notion of redressing to articulate the mechanisms that the display of collection in the museum follows (Greenberg 2005). Conscious aim to forget all about the recent controversies is also visibly present in Die Kunst ist Super. The wall text introducing Flicks contribution highlights single artists and their masterpieces in Hamburger Bahnhof thanks to Flick, his motivation of the donation recalled as sharing his passion and putting art to the public sphere. Although, the background the story, which five years ago filled newspapers undoubtedly remains alive among the Berliners and groups local audiences populating the german media space, younger visitors as well as tourists are to find no traces of this story. With this in mind, the redressing seems to be taken even a step further by the self-celebratory heading of Die Kunst ist Super. Furthermore, here the positive branding of the museum appear as a shared interest of Flick and Hamburger Bahnhof.
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Conclusions In a world of national museums were patronage has become a complex phenomena and art is loaded not only with the meanings inscribed to it by curators, art historians, but also by collectors, the relation of exhibitions to particular ambitions and preferences of the private collectors needs to be articulated further in order to analyze the knowledge production in museums. Consequently, I have suggested that ownership of art works has to be taken into account when analysing museum shows, since the particular stories of their owners may turn out be essential for explaining not only the background of the body of works represented, but they also influence the curatorial techniques themselves.
The methods as well as communication used by Flick resemble considerably to these of corporate collecting. The

slogan-like heading of the exhibition Die Kunst ist Super participates in the shared interests of vesting the controversies related to the collection with a positive image, and disguising the ones that continue to surround the story of Flicks collection. Market mechanisms on the other hand hardly favour the diversity of contents as well as artists represented within the museum collection, in respect to their gender and origins. What becomes here of particular importance in a museum where a part of the collection is tied to certain spatial facilities within the museum space, is the ethics of curatorship and communication. In one of his texts the German art historian Hans Belting has related the dominant representation of American art in Germany to the desires of its visitors, who long for the great wide world rather than to look in the mirror of Germany (Belting 2005). This might well be true, but yet the art market context in which the Hamburger Bahnhof has found a position due to the partnership with a supercollector, similarly insists the continuous recreation of these desires.

Referenced material Bal, Mieke 1996. Double Exposures. The Subject of Cultural Analysis. London: Routledge, 1996. Bal Mieke 2008. Exhibition as Film. (Re-)Visualising National History. Museums and National Identities in Europe in the New Millenium. Ed. by Robin Ostow. Toronto, London, Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, pp 15-44. Belting, Hans 2005. Moderne und deutsche Identitt im Widerstreit : ein Rckblick in der deutschen Nationalgalerie. Szenarien der Moderne: Kunst und ihre offenen Grenzen. Ed. by Hans Belting; Peter Weibel. Hamburg: Philo & Philo Fine Arts, pp 40-64. Blume, Eugen 2004a. Museum fr Gegenwart. Friedrich Christian Flick Collection im Hamburger
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Bahnhof. Ed. by Eugen Blume, Joachim Jaeger, Gabriele Knapstein. SMB: DuMont, pp 513-517. Blume, Eugen 2004b. Ten Years Hamburger Bahnhof. Museum fur Gegenwart. Zehn Jahre Hamburger Bahnhof. Museum Fur Gegenwart 1996-2006, Berlin: Hamburger Bahnhof. Foster-Hahn, Francois 1996. Shrine of Art or Signature of a New Nation. The Formation of National Collections of Art and Archeaology. Ed. by Gwendolyn Wright, Washington, National Gallery of Art. Hanover, London: University Press of New England, 1996, pp 53-77. Greenberg, Reesa 2005. Redressing History: Partners and the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection. Originally published in Kritische Berichte Oct, 2005, Available at: http://www.yorku.ca/reerden/Publications/redressing_history.html (Last accessed 18.01.2009) Greenberg, Reesa 1995. Exhibition as a discoursive event. Originally published in Longing and belonging: from the faraway nearby. Santa Fe, pp 118-125. Available at: www.reesagreenberg.net (Last accessed 22.01.2009) Khn Malvezzi in Conversation with Boris Groys. - Friedrich Christian Flick Collection im Hamburger Bahnhof. Ed. by Axel Sova. Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 2004, pp 36-41. Osmond, Jonathan 2004. The Flick's: A Family That Cannot Stay Out Of the Headlines. H-German, pp 1-3. Accessed through H-Net Reviews in Humanities and Social Sciences, on www.hnet.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11264 Website, http://www.hamburgerbahnhof.de/exhibition.php?lang=en Steinbom, Deborah. Critics hit Flickr Show. Artnews, Vol 103, Summer 2004, No 7, p 82; Schuster, Peter-Klaus 2004. The Museum as the Site of Germans Dramatic Conflict with Art. Friedrich Christian Flick Collection im Hamburger Bahnhof. Ed. by Eugen Blume, Joachim Jaeger, Gabriele Knapstein. SMB: DuMont, pp 507-512. Winder, Jill 2004. Whats in a Name? The Friedrich Christian Flick Collection and the Story of one German Family. ICWA Letters, 30th October 2004. Accessible through Institute of Current World Affairs (ICWA) online-database www.icwa.com (Last accessed: 30.01.2010) Wu, Chin-Tao 2002. Privatising Culture. Corporate Art Invention since the 1980s. London, New York: Verso.

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Panel 3 (Tuesday, 11:30-13:30)

Walid el Houri and Dima Saber Melanie Schiller Aylin Kuryel Ruthie Ginsburg

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Title: Hezbollah Music Videos: From the Sect to the Nation

Authors: Walid el Houri and Dima Saber

On the morning of the 12th of July 2006 an Israeli patrol on the Lebanese borders is ambushed by Hezbollah fighters. Two Israeli soldiers are captured and a number of others are killed. The Israeli army quickly responds with air strikes against targets in Lebanon1 This is the start of a war that will last for 33 days and which constitutes the direct context of the production of the Nasr el Arab music video. The war ended and Hezbollah declared its "Divine Victory". Shortly after, a music video entitled Nasr el Arab (Victory of the Arabs), one among many others, is produced. With "Nasr el Arab", Hezbollah introduced a new semantic field into their media and political discourse that breaks with the pattern constituted by all pre-2006 videos: Hezbollah's victory becomes an Arab victory. Using Foucault's and Maingueneau's conceptions of verbal discourses and power in addition to Laclau's theory of political identification we look at the discursive transformations in Hezbollah's media strategies by comparing the Nasr el Arab video to music videos produced by the party in times of war. We argue that these music videos are indicators of the social, political and cultural contexts of their emergence and reflect the transformation in the party's self-representation and political identity from a Shiite organization, to a Lebanese national resistance movement, to the catalyst of the Arab nation's victory. I. The genealogy of Hezbollah music videos Music videos are one of Hezbollah's most common media productions. They accompanied the party's movement in all its turning points but most notably since the establishment of the party's television station Al Manar in 1991 (Wehrey). The genealogy of these music videos can be traced on the one hand in relation to the MTV revolution which transformed popular music videos from a promotional tool to sell records into a genre of its own presenting new techniques and modes of communication and expression (Abt; Goodwin)2, and on the other hand in relation to the old military practices of propaganda and mobilization in music and film.3 The Hezbollah music videos are texts produced in times of war and have a specific function in this context: to raise morale, to mobilize, and to promote a specific identity. The videos must be read as cultural acts, providing a wide range of re-used texts that speak to and are taken from the viewing
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culture's common memory and system of values (Rybacki and Rybacki). The cultural specificity in this sense determines the rhetorical strategies used in a given video to signify a specific meaning in a specific context (Schwichtenberg). Music videos are rhetorical texts whether in their form as popular music vehicles (often carrying social or cultural messages) or politically designed propaganda texts. In both cases the videos are designed to sell a product, an identity, or a narrative (Gow, Street). II. The emergence of a national narrative In form and structure, Hezbollah music videos consist of archival footage from the party's military operations4, news broadcasts from Israeli TV channels, as well as segments from speeches delivered by various party leaders. The other components of the videos are reenactments of Hezbollah militants in action, various displays of the party's arsenal, and footage from the party's rallies featuring acrobatic shows and disciplined rows of fighters in fast paced military marches. Previously limited to war mobilization in the form described above, the videos made after the liberation of Southern Lebanon in 2000 present two novelties in aesthetics and function: the celebration of victory and the national character of this victory. The first semantic field of victory is underlined in Hezbollah's anthem clip5 while the national aspect of this victory is clearly articulated in "Koulouna lil Watan"6. The Hezbollah Anthem The Hezbollah anthem is a fast paced song played with heavy instruments and loud drums, a characteristic common to war songs. The video is faithful to the mobilization videos described earlier with the same techniques and similar images: Martyrdom, military themes, the speeches of party leaders, and other recurrent elements. The use of footage from two of the partys military operations against the Israeli army (Picture H and C) is here to confirm the image of the "victorious self" (Picture H) over the "defeated "other". This victory, according to the party's narrative, is achieved through armed resistance. This is eventually confirmed with the planting of the Hezbollah flag (Picture I), a symbolic gesture found in the visual representations of war and victory both in the past and the present (Picture J). In Minding the Gap, Ernesto Laclau borrows a scene from Thomas Mann's Lotte in Weimar describing the change of attitude of the people of Weimar from sympathy with the French occupiers
73

to sympathy with the anti-Napoleonic coalition. This change of position, Laclau argues, is not opportunism, rather, it follows the principle by which identification - and the success of a national independence movement - must not be limited to "a spontaneous attractiveness or moral superiority", but has to demonstrate its power and ability to be, in Gramscian terms, hegemonic (Laclau 1994, 16). Hezbollah's music videos constantly demonstrate the power of the party. In the pre-2000 videos this was achieved by the celebration of successful military operations, after 2000 the celebration of the liberation is there to demonstrate this potential to be hegemonic. The break with the previous Hezbollah videos is formulated by the date written on the screen, May 25th 2000 (Picture B). The introduction of this date marks the transition from the symbolic victories exemplified in the planting of flags during military operations to the actual historical moment of liberation. It is not an "iconic image" of a victory, it is a physical one where the enemy withdraws after twenty years of occupation and where mothers celebrate the return of their sons (Picture F). This victory marks the end of a historical phase in the war narrative. Koulouna lil Watan The second shift that occurs after the year 2000 is one that concerns the party's self representation and their political identity. This shift is made clear by the introduction of the Lebanese flag as a central element in the post-2000 music videos. In "Koulouna lil watan", for instance, we see the Lebanese national army and Hezbollah fighters portrayed as complementary (Pictures 1 and 2). The video constantly features the Lebanese national flag alongside the party's flag (Picture 3), and the national character of the party's struggle is made clear in a scene of a soldier getting shot while carrying the Lebanese flag (Picture 4); the flag falls down but the next fighter picks it up7. This discursive shift reflects Hezbollah's move from a social formation to a national one. According to Balibar, it is when a community "recognizes itself in advance in the institution of the state" and "recognizes this state as 'its own' in opposition to other states and, in particular, inscribes its political struggles within the horizon of that state" that we can talk about a national formation (Balibar, 93). Hezbollah's post-2000 narrative is one that inscribes the party's struggle into the national narrative, and inscribes itself in the construction of the state by being the agent of the national liberation. By articulating this identification to the state as it is represented by the national flag or the national army, Hezbollah is re-formulating its struggle and re-articulating its identity within the limits of its national state.

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While in the pre-2000 videos there was a clear focus on a strictly Shiite identity with black flags, party flags, and the religious thematic of the lyrics and the images, after May 2000 we see an articulation of a Lebanese national identity placing the party as a Lebanese rather than a Shiite one. Mobilization remains a function of the videos produced after 2000, however, it can be argued that these videos become largely a demonstration of the party's legitimacy and credibility as a national resistance movement. This legitimization is achieved by the demonstrated causality linking the achieved liberation to the party's military efforts. III. "The Victory of the Arabs": from Lebanon to the Arab nation If the Hezbollah music videos are texts produced in times of war to mobilize the public visually and have it adhere to a certain representation of this war, Nasr el Arab8 seems to celebrate its end. War is represented in the past and the present is for celebration only. The video was produced after the 2006 war with Israel which Hezbollah called the "Divine Victory". it starts with light and a smile (Picture N1). A young child opens his window to the sunlight and we hear the voice of the Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah saying: "as I always promised you victory, I promise you victory again"; we are all invited to a festival of victory. In this festival white is the dominant color, no more black, grief or sorrow. Even martyrs are remembered differently: In the beginning of the video, the camera gets closer to a frame hanging on a wall, we can distinguish the picture of a Hezbollah fighter. Rays of light quickly strike us and the picture becomes blurry (Picture N2). This almost mythical rhetoric of martyrdom can be compared to the essence of ascension in Christianity, where those who die here on earth rise to heaven surrounded with rays of light. Coffins hitherto black are now yellow with red, white and pink roses spread on top (Picture N3). The coffin is in a forest where all is white. One can't tell if it is snow or magic (Picture N4). Martyrs die differently in Nasr al Arab and their death is also celebrated differently. Political identification and national identity A main theme in the video is love. while the chorus sings "we were born with love and we were raised with love" we see two fighters, both armed, embrace each other on a hill (Picture N5). This is the image with which the Hezbollah wants to replace their old one. Nasr el Arab is made as a
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celebration of love, diversity, and peace. Apart from the very few pictures of armed fighters in camouflage, Hezbollah's militants are sitting in a meeting, wearing the national army's costume, in front of each of them a digital screen (Picture N6); "resistance" is no longer represented as a wild and heavily armed militia fighting in the woods, it is represented as an organized institution which acts as the guarantor and protector of the peace and victory we celebrate in the music video. Following Laclau's Hobbesian interpretation of identification9, 'organization' is here the substitute to the chaos of the 'state of nature'. it is the possibility of a social organization that constitutes the legitimacy of any social order and not its actual content (Laclau 1994, 3). In this regard, Hezbollah's self representation as the agent of peace allows it to "incarnate the very possibility of a social organization" whose alternative is the state of war - or 'nothingness' (Laclau 1994, 14). The incarnation of order is again reminiscent of the hegemonic dimension of Hezbollah's discourse after the war. Military violence is excluded from this music video, and the Israeli other is also absent from the picture. Celebration leaves no space for the "other". Following the same rationale, children are one of the main protagonists in this video (Picture N7). Children are playing music in battle fields (Picture N8); heavy weaponry, missiles and rockets are replaced by a piano and two violins (Picture N9). The children are here to represent the future generation. As part of the same process of political identification, children are here to demonstrate the "ability to guarantee the continuity of the community", a continuity which is another name of the constitutive lack of identity in Laclau's identification process and a condition for its possibility (Laclau 1994, 16). Women are also present in the video and they are not veiled (Picture N10). This constitutes a break with the militaristic and masculine aesthetics of the older music videos, and a break with the religious identity that the veil represents. The chorus previously limited to male voices now features men, women and children singing the song of victory together. The Lebanese flag inhabits the screen. Small, medium size and huge Lebanese flags accompany the children in their journey of celebration (Picture N11). Faithful to its post-2000 discourse, the Hezbollah is reaffirming the Lebanese national meaning of the 2006 war.

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Addressing the Arabs Apart from affirming the Lebanese national identity of the party, Nasr el Arab - the victory of the Arabs - addresses an Arab audience that transcends the national borders. The war of 2006 - a war that was extensively covered on the Arab satellite channels among which Hezbollah's Al Manar - is a victory for all the Arabs. From the choice of its title, to the very last word of its lyrics, Nasr el Arab is re-articulating an Arab discourse addressed to a wide Arab public of satellite television spectators. The song's chorus itself is made of Arab celebrities; famous men and women featured in the video carrying the picture of the party's General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah and singing the victory (Picture N12). Egyptian, Qatari and Moroccan flags, among others, are hoisted with the Lebanese flag althrough the spectacle of victory while the Hezbollah flag constantly appears alongside them (Picture N7). The Arab public is the guest of honor in this clip. Whether they are shown in their own living rooms watching their television screen (Picture N13) or in traditional scenes riding on horses or serving tea in the desert (Pictures N14 and N15), the Arab populations are part of the narrative and are there to celebrate their own victory. Conclusion A clear thematic transition is to be highlighted in Hezbollah's music videos from war propaganda and mobilization to celebration and glory. The transitions in these videos consist of changing rhetorical strategies pertaining to the changing context of their production and therefore a shift in the intentions, contents, and meanings of the music videos as strategies of resistance or of hegemony. During the process of liberation of Southern Lebanon (until 2000) Hezbollah can be seen as a movement seeking the reversal of the forces of hegemony in this specific context. The achievement of this liberation marks the point at which the party transforms from a force of resistance, or transgression (Cresswell 23) to one of hegemony (Smith 167-8). It is the moment of transition of power from the Israeli occupation forces to the social, military, and political force of Hezbollah and subsequently the Lebanese state.

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The paradoxical position of the party as resistance in regards to the Israeli other, and as the dominant system of governance when it comes to its own social constituency is made more complex after the liberation. In the music videos the transition is established by the introduction of new visual elements that portray the party's narrative as part of a state narrative. It is a transition from the representation of a guerrilla in the absence of a State to a political party within a sovereign State, and finally to one that is articulating an image of the nation in peacetime after the 2006 war. In other words the transition occurs from the celebration of a party's accomplishments (the military operations featured in the early music videos), to the celebration of a national accomplishment10 (the liberation of the occupied Southern Lebanon) to one that transcends the national borders and involves the Arab world as a whole in 2006. In "Nasr el Arab" Hezbollah is clearly articulating a national identity based on an image of the nation in peacetime - the aesthetics of the music video are a representation of the party's understanding or imagining of Lebanon as an Arab country integrating various religious symbols of Islam and Christianity in a national myth that speaks clearly to the image of the multi-confessional Lebanon. The Nasr el Arab Music video presents a narrative where questions of diversity, of cultural and political identities and of the political and regional meanings of war and resistance are visually told. It is a visual event that establishes the first transition towards the re-creation of an Arab discourse and the emergence of a new Arab leader - Hassan Nasrallah - who would have taken the Hezbollah from a Shiite organization celebrating its small military operations, to a Lebanese national resistance movement celebrating the end of 20 years of occupation, to finally an Arab movement celebrating the Victory of all Arabs against their constitutive other - Israel.

Notes
For a detailed account of locations bombed during the July 2006 war see <http://electronicintifada.net/bytopic/uploads/lebanon-map-12-28.pdf>
2 1

As a format, Music Videos represent a cultural product that went through various transformations in role, form,

78

and function. The earliest forms that could be characterized as the ancestors of music videos consisted in projections of transparent colored images onto a screen to accompany a musical piece. These practices of the late 1890s were designed to entertain as part of Vaudeville acts and to sell sheet music. Similarly the more recent history of the music videos consists of promotional clips intended to sell a group's album or concert tickets. However, with the emergence of MTV, this advertisement based practice became a genre of its own that still however - sell a product, an identity (or a look), and deliver a message (political, social or otherwise) (Abt).
3

These videos are inscribed in a genealogy of war texts that includes both visual and/or musical aspects: from the old tradition of war songs on the front and away from it (Rikard), to the visual representation of war in wartime cartoons, flyers, and posters, and the practices of early cinema at war (for ex. the Spanish-American war films), and all the long history of war propaganda and war related productions (Rikard). See for instance the American Army Posters of WWII, and the Spanish American War films in Library of Congress. <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/sawhtml/sawhome.html>

On this media genre see Exum and Wehrey in addition to El Houri and Saber. This is footage filmed by a Hezbollah special unit accompanying the fighters in military operations against the Israeli Army in Southern Lebanon.
5 < 6

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYHu9i4fm5I&feature=related>

Koulouna lil Watan meaning we are all for the nation is also the first verse of the Lebanese national anthem. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY6z-sIIxtQ> A similar scene is found in one of the Spanish American war films during the Philippines war. The film dated June 5 1899, is entitled "Advance of Kansas Volunteers at Caloocan" and can be found here: <http://memory.loc.gov/cgibin/query/r?ammem/papr:@filreq(+@FIELD(NUMBER+@band(sawmp+0973))+@field(COLLID+spanam))>
8< 9 7

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z5n0eLPwbs>

"The key term for understanding [the] process of construction [of social identities]" according to Laclau "is the psychoanalytical category of identification , with its explicit assertion of a lack at the root of any identity: one needs to identify with something because there is an originary and insurmountable lack of identity." (Laclau 1994, 3) This transition is confirmed by the accompanying political discourse expressed by the party in public speeches and political statements. The liberation is said to be a national achievement, one that is compared in the party's narrative to the independence of the country. In other words the liberation pertains to a process of state formation by which the entry of the party into the realm of political hegemony is achieved. See Nasrallah speech on the 26 May 2000 in Bint Jbeil (Noe, 232-243).
10

References Abt, Dean. "Music Video: Impact of the Visual Dimension." Popular Music and Communication. Ed. James Lull. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1987 Ajemian, Pete. "Resistance Beyond Time and Space: Hizbullah's Media Campaigns." Arab Media and Society 5 (Spring 2008): <http://www.arabmediasociety.org/?article=671>. Alagha, Joseph E. The Israeli-Hizbullah 34-Day War: Causes and Consequences. Arab Studies Quarterly 30:2 (2008): 1-22

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Alagha, Joseph E. The Shifts in Hizbullahs Ideology: Religious ideology, Political ideology, and Political Program. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2005 Amossy, Ruth (dir.). Images de Soi dans le Discours, La Construction de lthos, Paris : Delachaux et niestl, 1999 Balibar, Etienne and Emmanuel Wallerstein. Race Nation Class: Ambiguous Identities. London: Verso, 2002 Boyd, Douglas A. "Development of Egypt's Radio: 'Voice of the Arabs' Under Nasser." Journalism Quarterly Vol. 52, No. 4 (Winter, 1975): 645-53 Cresswell, Tim. In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression. University of Minnesota Press, 1996 Dawisha, Adeed. Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2003 Dayan, Daniel. La Terreur Spectacle: Terrorisme et Tlvision. Paris : De Boek Universit, 2006 EL Houri, Walid and Saber, Dima. "Filming Resistance: A Hezbollah Strategy." Radical History Review 106 (2010): 70-85 Exum, Andrew. "The Spectacle of War: Insurgent Video Propaganda and Western Response." Arab Media and Society 5 (Spring 2008): <http://www.arabmediasociety.org/?article=672>. Foucault, Michel. The Archeaology of Knowledge. London: Routledge, 2006 Foucault, Michel. LOrdre du Discours. Paris : Gallimard, 1971 Foucault, Michel. Les Corps Utopiques, les Htrotopies. Paris: Lignes, 2009 Goodwin, Andrew. Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 1992 Gow, Joe. "Music Video as Communication: Popular Formulas and Emerging Genres." Journal of Popular Culture 26 (1992): 41-70 Palmer, Harik Judith. Le Hezbollah, le Nouveau Visage du Terrorisme. Paris : ViaMedias, 2006 Kepel, Gilles. Jihad. Paris: Gallimard, 2003 Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso, 2001 Laclau, Ernesto. The Making of Political Identities. London: Verso, 1994 Maingueneau, Dominique. Analyser les Textes de Communication. Paris : Nathan Universit, 2002 Maingueneau, Dominique. LAnalyse du Discours, Paris: Hachette, 1991
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Mardam-Bey, F. et Sanbar, E. (d.), Etre Arabe. Paris: Actes Sud, 2005 Noe, Nicholas. Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. London: Verso, 2007 Nora, Pierre. Les lieux de Mmoire ; tomes 1-2. Paris: Gallimard, 1984 Ricoeur, Paul. La Mmoire, lHistoire, lOubli. Paris: Seuil, 2000 Rikard, Dorlea. Patriotism, Propaganda, Parody, and Protest: The Music of Three American Wars. War, Literature and the Arts: 129-144. Rybacki, Karyn Charles and Donald Jay Rybacki. Cultural approaches to the rhetorical analysis of selected music videos. Transcultural Music Review 4 (1999): <http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/trans4/rybacki.htm>. Schwichtenberg, Cathy. "Music Video: The Popular Pleasures of Visual Music." Popular Music and Communication 2nd. ed. Ed. James Lull. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992 Samaan, Jean-Loup. Les Mtamorphoses du Hezbollah. Karthala, 2007 Smith, Anna Marie. Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary. London: Routledge, 1998 Street, John. Fight the Power: The Politics of Music and the Music of Politics. Government and Opposition. Vol. 38, No. 1 (Winter 2003): 113-130 Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. London: Verso, 1989 Wehrey, Frederic. "A Clash of Wills: Hizballah's Psychological Campaing Against Israel in South Lebanon." Small Wars and Insurgencies Vol. 13, No. 3. (Autumn 2002): 65

Appendix I Hezbollah Anthem Screen shots

Picture A
81

Picture B

Picture C

Picture D

Picture E

82

Picture F

Picture G

Picture H

Picture I

83

Picture J Joe Rosenthal, Raising the flag on Iwo Jima (February, 1945)

Appendix II Koulouna lil Watan Screen shots

Picture 1

Picture 2

Picture 3
84

Picture 4

Appendix III Nasr el Arab Screen Shots

Picture N1

Picture N2

Picture N3

85

Picture N4

Picture N5

Picture N6

Picture N7 Picture N8

86

Picture N9

Picture N10 Picture N11

Picture N12

Picture N13

87

Picture N14

Picture N15

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We are the natives of Trizonesia Articulations of Germanness in early post-war pop music
By Melanie Schiller

Verse one Mein lieber Freund, mein lieber Freund, die alten Zeiten sind vorbei, ob man da lacht, ob man da weint, die Welt geht weiter, eins, zwei, drei. Ein kleines Huflein Diplomaten macht heut die groe Politik, sie schaffen Zonen, ndern Staaten. Und was ist hier mit uns im Augenblick? Chorus one Wir sind die Eingeborenen von Trizonesien, Hei-di-tschimmela-tschimmela-tschimmelatschimmela-bumm! Wir haben Mgdelein mit feurig wildem Wesien, Hei-di-tschimmela-tschimmela-tschimmelatschimmela-bumm! Wir sind zwar keine Menschenfresser, doch wir kssen umso besser. Wir sind die Eingeborenen von Trizonesien, Hei-di-tschimmela-tschimmela-tschimmelatschimmela-bumm! Verse two Doch fremder Mann, damit du's weit, ein Trizonesier hat Humor, er hat Kultur, er hat auch Geist, darin macht keiner ihm was vor. Selbst Goethe stammt aus Trizonesien, Beethovens Wiege ist bekannt. Nein, sowas gibt's nicht in Chinesien, darum sind wir auch stolz auf unser Land. Chorus two

My dear friend, my dear friend The old times are over, whether we laugh or cry The world carries on with a one, two, three a small pile of diplomats makes big politics today They create Zones and change states And what about us here right now? We are the natives of Trizonesia Hei-di-tschimmela-tschimmela-tschimmelatschimmela-bumm! Our women are fiery and wild Hei-di-tschimmela-tschimmela-tschimmelatschimmela-bumm! We are no cannibals, But we kiss so much the better We are the natives of Trizonesia Hei-di-tschimmela-tschimmela-tschimmelatschimmela-bumm! But stranger, just so you know, A Trizonesian has a sense of humor he has culture and intellect No one beats him in that Even Goethe is from Trizonesia Beethovens cradle is well known No, that does not exist in Chinesia, Thats why we are proud of our country.

Introduction There is an abundant amount of books published on German post WWII history. Most of them are interested in either political developments and facts, or in terms of culture, they often focus on the influence of American popular culture on Germany during the occupation. Particularly German
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post-war national identity is often described as a process (and fear) of Americanization, whereas post-war cultural life is generally described as apolitical and dominated by escapism (into utopias or superficiality) 1 . Particularly German popular music of the mid 1940s to early 50s is mostly simplistically characterized as escapist and a typical expression of the populations longing for security and feelings of shelter. Especially Nachkriegsschlager as one of the most successful and popular genres of music in the post-war years, is presented as escapism into utopias of Heimat and innocence 2 . In this paper I want to scrutinize this notion of the apolitical Schlager and investigate popular music and its role in articulating national identity in German early post-war history. In order to get a clear view on how popmusic can function as articulating, anchoring and contesting national identity, I will focus on one particular Schlager song : Wir sind die Eingeborenen von Trizonesien, which temporarily even functioned as a surrogate national anthem. In consideration of the very limited scope of this paper, I will strategically focus on the lyrics of the song, while realizing that I blatantly wrong other relevant aspects including a more thorough analysis of the historical context, the actual music, its performative aspect, its particular function as a carnival song and the broader implications of the songs temporary function as a surrogate national anthem. I hope to discuss some of these certainly interesting factors in the workshop session. We are the natives of Trizonesia After WWII Germany was divided into four sectors; the eastern being assigned to the Soviet Union, and the three western zones under the administration of the French, British and American Allies. In 1947 the British and the American Sectors merge into the so-called bi-zone and decide on a collaborative administration, until in 1948 the French followed and the bi-zone became the trizone. Trizonesien is a somewhat mocking naming of the tri-zone and was the very first term to represent a sense of West German solidarity. A real nation-state does officially not exist at this point (the Federal Republic is not to be founded until 23.5.1949). In Cologne, being located in the British zone, the carnival parade has been a tradition for centuries, but during the years 1939-1949 it was banned. The most successful song of the first celebrations
Unfortunately I dont have the space to go into details here, so I will just offer some references: historian Christoph Klemann for instance describes the early post-war years as being dominated by hunger, homelessness and grief. According to him the early fifties are defined by people seeking for peace and security and despite all the rapid changes, they are hardly interested in politics. (Cf. Christoph Klemann. Die doppelte Staatsgrndung Deutsche Geschichte 1945-1955. Gttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991. p. 37ff.) 2 As Eckhart Hfig explains post-war Heimatschlager: after the war, the main aim is to forget about the horrors of the war or respectively repress them. The Heimatlieder are supposed to provide a Gefhl von Wrme and express the pursuit of a carefree life in an undestroyed nature, the dream of a Heimatidyll; In der damaligen Zeit war die Sehnsucht nach unbeschdigter, idyllenhafter Welt gro (Eckhart Hfig. Heimat in der Popmusik. Identitt oder Kulisse in der deutschsprachigen Popmusikszene vor der Jahrtausendwende. Gelnhausen: Triga Verlag, 2000. p. 116f.)
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after the war in 1949 was the Schlager Wir sind die Eingeborenen von Trizonesien by Karl Berbuer. The song is presented on November 11th 1948 (the official start of the carnival-season) on the radio, and immediately becomes a big success. It is also performed and sung in the streets of Cologne during the parade in February of 1949, while people (partly disguised in costumes) dance and cheer 3 . The Trizonesien-Song 4 is frequently used as one example of the so-called humorous way of dealing with contemporary politics, as either ironic or nave expressions of peoples experience during the post-war years 5 . But how does the song articulate visions on (West) German national identity? To get a grip on this question I will use Althussers theory of interpellation to argue that the song constructs its listener ideologically, and I will use Gerald Princes concept of the narratee to analyze how the addressee of the song is constituted (and what kind of citizen is implied). Subsequently I will take a closer look at what exactly is being said, and especially what is not said by reading the song symptomatically. I will do a close reading of the songs lyrics, and see what it tells us about contemporary perceptions of national agency and belonging in West-Germany. I will finally show how popular music can function as a counter narrative to the dominant discourse about Germanness. Verse one According to Louis Althusser, all ideology has the function of constituting concrete individuals as subjects 6 , and the individual subject is produced by acts of hailing or interpellation 7 . In the Trizonesien-Song, the friend is addressed as you, the story that is told, is directed at you, someone who is dear and therefore close to the narrator of the song. A certain kind of intimacy, of a presupposed agreement is implied, assumed, and therefore created in the act
For a short audiovisual impression of the parade see: 60x Deutschland. Die Jecken sind wieder da. Karnevalsumzug in Kln. <http://www.60xdeutschland.de/erster-grosser-karnevalsumzug-nach-dem-krieg/> (Last seen on: 22.6.2009) 4 The song is called both, Wir sind die Eingeborenen von Trizonesien and Trizonesien-Song. Interestingly it is called the Trizonesien-Song. Firstly, this points to a certain englification (its called song, not Lied), and secondly the title has a strong resemblance with the former (and later) official German national anthem, which is actually called Deutschlandlied. 5 OrtheSchlagerisdescribedasanindicationforanewlygaineddistancefromtherecentwarpast(Jeweiterdie Kriegsereignissezurcklagen,jemehrmansichderneuenLageangepathatte,destoeherbegannman,dieeigeneSituation etwaszubelcheln,jasogarherzhaftdarberzulachen)(WernerMezger.Schlager.VersucheinerGesamtdarstellungunter besondererBercksichtigungdesMusikmarktesderBundesrepublikDeutschland.Tbingen:TbingerVereinigungfr VolkskundeE.V.,1975.p.151) 6 Louis Althusser. Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. In: John Storey (ed.). Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader. 3rd ed. London: Pearson Education, 2006. p. 343. 7 His famous example is the police officer calling Hey! You there! and once one responds to this, one has become a subject of the police officers discourse. But ideology is per definition not neutral, it not only creates subjects, it creates subjects which are in turn subjected to its specific patterns of thought and modes of behavior. In the case of advertisements for instance, this means the created subject is subjected to its meanings and patterns of consumption, since the consumer is interpellated to make meaning and ultimately to purchase and consume. In the case of Wir sind die Eingeborenen von Trizonesien, the interpellation is less geared towards a consumption of goods, but rather towards creating the subjects as a citizen of the nation called Trizonesia, and therefore to buy into the offered ideology as conveyed by the song. The opening line of the song (my dear friend, my dear friend) is a perfect example of creating an addressee in the act of him (the friend is male!) recognizing himself as being the addressee.
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of interpellation. The listener is invited to become the imaginary you (dear friend) of the song. The creation of the addressee as fellow-citizen of Trizonesia is continued by the final line of the first verse, in which the dear friend is included in the we, who, in the following line (which is the beginning of the chorus) is defined as the native of Trizonesia. The act of ideological construction of the addressee, the implied listener, has another dimension to it. It is not only established who we are, it simultaneously establishes a sense of time and also a first sense of what we are not: the old times are over, although it seems to be unclear whether that is a positive thing or not (depending on what the implied old times are. Are they pre-war, when the Trizonesian was still a very proud citizen of Germany with aspirations of ruling the world, or is it the war-time, when all the proud imaginations started to be contested and finally ended in total defeat). One thing is sure after all: The world keeps moving and everything will progress in one way or the other. By pointing to the small pile of diplomats who make politics and create states (like the trizone of which the Trizonesian is a citizen), the narrator and the created addressee delineate themselves from those with power, the diplomats. It also points to the fact that Trosinesia is, after all, an artificial construction 8 , by the diplomats. As a result, it apparently leaves the citizens (us) with no power at all, as a mere subjects of the will of the Allied forces. Finally, the last line of the first verse raises the question: whats happening to us?, an ultimate expression of powerlessness. In order to get a better idea of what specific kind of addressee the song constitutes (therefore, what its assumptions about a Trizonesian are, what the we effectively implies), I will use Gerald Princes concept of the narratee as described in his Introduction to the Study of the Narratee 9 : [he] becomes the spokesman for the moral of the work 10 . As I want to dismantle how German national identity 11 is articulated in the song, I am interested in what kind of narratee, what kind of

There is no actual nation-state of Trizonesia Gerald Prince.Introduction to the Study of the Narratee. In: Jane P. Tompkins (Ed.). Reader-Response Criticism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. p. 7-25. Prices initial question is why literary theory is so concerned with discriminating various kinds of narrators (omnipresent, implied author, etc.), but never asks questions about the different kinds of person to whom the narrator addresses the discourse (Raman Selden. A Readers Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986. p. 109.). This person is labeled a narratee by Prince. The narratee must not be confused with the reader, or, as I will apply it, the actual listener. The narratee may be specified by the narrator in terms of its sex (dear Madam), class (gentleman), situation (the reader in his armchair), race, or age etc. Evidently the actual reader may differ from the narratee (As Selden points out in his description of Princes concept of the narratee, one may not confuse the narratee with the virtual reader (the kind of reader the author imagines when developing the narrative), and the ideal reader (the perfectly insightful reader who understands the writers every move). Ibid, p. 109). According to Prince, the text carries many signals, direct and indirect, which help us gain knowledge of the narratee. The narrator may for instance challenge, attack, supported etc. the assumptions of the narratee, whose character will thereby be strongly implied. Prince shows that a narrators discourse frequently reveals evidence about the narratees identity, even in narratives where there is no explicit address to the narratee (James Phelan. Self-Help for narratee and narrative audience: How I-- and you -- read how. In: Style, Vol. 28, No. 3, 1994. p. 352.) 10 Prince, 1980. p. 23. 11 I use quotation marks here, because there exists no official German nation-state at the moment of the songs release, and it would actually be more appropriate to call it the Trizonesian national identity at that point.
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German citizen, it constructs. What is the moral (ideology) of the Trizonesien-Song when we read it symptomatically and take a closer look at what is absent, what kind of knowledge is implied, and therefore what narratee is constructed? 12 The very first words of the song already establish a very clear notion of the narratee: My dear friend, my dear friend, the song begins like a personal letter to a dear friend. My, the pronoun indicates a) a first person narrator and the singers voice points to him being male. b) the pronoun my also articulates a certain notion of possession. Therefore, the listener is interpellated as someone close and owned, and the the narratee is constructed as male and a single person. Dear indicates closeness, community, a shared history, as does the word friend. I have already mentioned that the dear friend is male (he is a Freund, not a Freundin). So far I have established that one male narrator addresses one dear male friend. The old times are over and the narratee is assumed to understand what is meant by the old times (whereas the points to specific old times, not a general past). A shared history is created by implying common knowledge and experience. The narratee is supposed to share the same feeling of either ambiguity whether the old times being over is a good or bad thing, or he is supposed to be able to decode the implied answer to the question that is not posed directly 13 . The world carries on with a one, two, three 14 -not only a shared history, also a shared future is assumed. A small pile of diplomats makes big politics, they create Zones and change states 15 . A third party, an other is introduced, a small pile of diplomats. The community of narrator and narratee is detached from the diplomats, who are not included in the dear relationship between narrator and narratee. The narratee is supposed to know, who the diplomats are (the Allied forces). Narrator and narrate are presented as powerless and in opposition to the diplomats, who have the agency to create zones and change states. The us is finally articulated, as being you (the dear friend), the narratee, and me, the narrator. The now established community of us is presented as powerless, and insecure. The first lines of the Trizonesien-Song have already established a common past and shared future, and at this point, the specific here and now are interrogated by the song: what about us here, right now?. Not only the lyrics articulate the question of here in time 16 , it is also translated into a musical space of interrogation. After here, a lyrical pause is inserted: and what about us here
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A symptomatic reading, according to Althusser, is a critical practice of deconstructing the problematic (Louis Althusser. For Marx. London: Allen Lane, 1969. p. 67). A problematic, according to him, consists of assumptions, motivations, underlying ideas, etc. from which a text is made. If we are to fully understand the meaning of a text, he argues, we need to be aware of the underlying assumptions which inform it. In this case, the what is not said (the absent) about the narratee of the song, is the key for an understanding of the ideological construction of the Trizonesian citizen. 13 Ob man da lacht, ob man da weint, whether we laugh or cry 14 Die Welt geht weiter, eins, zwei, drei 15 ein kleines Huflein Diplomaten macht heut die groe Politik, sie schaffen Zonen, ndern Staaten 16 im Augenblick

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_____ (). The music creates an empty space of here, which has yet to be filled (like a cloze text). But the music (the marching rhythm of the bass) continues, time doesnt stop, the lost metric time has to be made up in what follows after the space: () ___ right now?. I want to add that us in this case can be understood in a double sense: It can still be the community of narrator and narratee as opposed to the diplomats, but, since the song is structured like a letter, the narrator might also ask the narratee about their relationship. This would not only point to delineation from the others (the Allies), but also a possible re-consideration of our status quo, the internal relationship within the community that is created, a re-definition of West-German national identity? Chorus one The chorus seems to answer the question posed in the final line of verse 1, what about us, here, right now?; we are the natives of Trizonesia 17 . The question that is not asked, who are the others then? is already answered in verse 1: The diplomats, the allied forces. Or, if the narrator asks the narratee what about us?, the answer We are the natives of tTrizonesia, seems to be another reinforcement of their close relationship. In both cases, either as delineation from the others as a self-definition, or by reinforcing internal commonalities, the line We are the natives of Trizonesia is a rigid statement, a declaration. What else is being said in the chorus? It is of course no coincidence that the subjects of the song claim to be natives of Trizonesia. The question that is not asked, (again, who are the others?) has to be answered with: the colonizers! This is interesting. Without a doubt, the colonizers are the diplomats with power, and the natives are the powerless and invaded and defeated Trizonesians. The colonial metaphor is held up: the Trizonesian women are fiery and wild 18 . The narrator and narratee have the sexualized women of their tribe, the Trizonesians. It is important to pay attention to the power-relations that are established here. The diplomats have the power to create artificial states (including Trizonesia!) and the Trizonesians (powerless) claim to be the original natives of this artificial state. The wild Wesien (nature) of the Trizonesian women points to a natural authenticity of the natives, who were invaded, colonized 19 . Again, what history, what kind of shared memory is implied? Obviously a natural state is implied, before the rape, before colonization and before being subjected to outside powers, (West) Germany (Trizonesia) was in a natural state of self-government, of power, of innocence. Looking back at the old time passed, the

Natives = indigenes, aborigines. Note: In German Mgdelein is the diminutive of Magd, which means both woman and maidservant! 19 At this point it might be interesting to bear in mind the rape-metaphor in the context of canonicalization and its powerrelation associations.
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shared history is one of German autonomy, of self-authority. The natural, uncivilized, wild nature of the womens Wesien claims a pure and natural character. We are no cannibals, but we kiss so much the better the chorus continues. In the last paragraph I argued that the wild nature of the Trizonesian women has to be interpreted as a metaphor for the natives natural innocence, but also powerlessness after the canonicalization by the Allies. Now the men (narrator, narratee, we) are presented as sexual objects themselves, as being good kissers, but no cannibals, the Trozonesian as supposedly innocent and not responsible. Not responsible for the past times, but, also a natural, innocent and irresponsible creature without power, without autonomy. The cannibalism, which is disclaimed, may be understood as an implicit reference to the Holocaust, another indication for what kind of shared history is implied but yet denied. Furthermore, the answer to the question not being asked (who are we not?), switches from the diplomats, to what is NOT included in Trizonesia, namely the Sovjet Sector. The artificial state of Trizonesia is clearly delineated from the Eastern Sector, which more and more develops to be the other of West-Germany. When keeping this in mind, the claim to be the natives of Trizonsia, gets another, additional, dimension. As I have mentioned earlier in this paper, the term Trizonesia is one of the very first to indicate a feeling of West-German solidarity. Regarding the relationship between East and West-Germany, in May 1947 (the Bi-zone has been established a few months earlier) Ernst Lemmer, chairman of the Christian conservative party CDU, says the following: there can be no bigger disaster than a falling apart of Germany 20 . Only a few months later it becomes clear that a division is more likely than ever. In the summer of 1948 the French sector follows the British and the Americans and the Tri-zone is created. In June of the same year the monetary reform in West-Germany leads to serious conflicts with the Soviets and the Berlin airlift is arranged. Still the dominant opinion of politicians and population alike rejects an official division of Germany. Considering this historical background, it becomes obvious that Karl Berbuer only defends the inhabitants of the western zone 21 . Although a division is not yet reality, the Trizonesien-Song seems to foreclose it. The exclusion of the Sovjet sector introduces another element regarding a sense of geography. The specific focus on the west of Germany (the trizone) establishes a particular kind of here that we share, the West-Germans.

Es kann zur Zeit kein greres Unglck geben als ein Auseinanderfallen Deutschlands. Heimliche Hauptstadt. Nichts dagegen zu sagen. In: Der Spiegel, 58/1947, 24.5.1947, p. 2. 21 dass Karl Berbuer nur die Einwohner der westlichen Trizone verteidigt. Andr Port le Roi. Schlager lgen nicht, deutscher Schlager und Politik in ihrer Zeit. Essen: Klartext Verlag, 1998. p. 46.

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Verse two The addressee of the song in verse two is no longer the dear friend of verse one; it is now a stranger (fremder Mann) and verse two functions as an introduction. The Trizonesian (narrator) explains the foreigner (the narratee, the colonizer, the Allied) what a Trizonesian is all about: stranger, just so you know. Interestingly the foreign man is addressed informally with du as opposed to the more appropriate form of address for a stranger, Sie. The inappropriate informal addressing of the colonizer shows a lack of respect, a dismissal of the invaders. And what is a Trizonesian? He, the archetypical Trizonesian, has humor, intellect, he cannot be fooled easily. Big thinkers, poets and musicians like Goethe and Beethoven were born in Trizonesia, which cannot be said about China, the lyrics allege. Interestingly (but not very surprisingly), the newly invented (diplomats make states) and discovered species of the Trizonesian shares a lot of the traditional German virtues and characteristics, Geist und Bildung, his description is actually based on the German tradition of superiority (i.e. in terms of music, Beethoven supposedly as one of the unchallenged masters of German music), which of course nicely corresponds with the Nazi-ideology of the German bermensch. Trizonesia is now even more specified in geographical terms: Johan Wolfgang von Goethe was born in Frankfurt am Main, Ludwig van Beethovens cradle and creative roots can be located in Bonn. Not coincidentally these two cities where in the run for becoming West-Germanys capitals 22 until on November 3rd, 1949 Bonn is elected as provisional capital until Germanys reunification. As for the China reference: Fred Ritzel goes as far as associating Chinesia in its symbolic reference to an obscure foreignness with Judaism 23 , but I think Chinesien is much more a reference to the east, to the excluded Soviet Union, West-Germanys new post-war other. The final line of the second verse is the most remarkable and explicit of all: That is why we are proud of our country. At this point it has been explained who we are, and the our country again reinforces notions of (natural) possession. The pride is generated by the past and shared cultural qualities like Bildung and Geist. The recent history seems to be forgotten, at least is explicitly left unmentioned. Since this is also the final line of the songs lyrics (only followed by repetition of the chorus), it is automatically highlighted and the song ends with an unambiguous nationalistic message. The second verse is followed by the last chorus, a full version with lyrics, an instrumental part and completed by another repetition of the final four lines of the chorus. In the light of my analysis of
22 (West-)Berlin, located in the centre of the Soviet sector, was (controversially) considered ineligible as being West Germanys capital. 23 FredRitzel.Wasistausunsgeworden?EinHufchenSandamMeer:emotionsofpostwar Germanyasextractedfromexamplesofpopularmusic.In:PopularMusic.Vol.17,No.3.1998.pp.293309.

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the second verse, the final chorus meaning has shifted (in comparison with chorus one). When the first chorus functioned mainly as creating unity between the narrator and the narratee, the second chorus is an introduction to the new narratee (the colonizer), and the final chorus (remember, it follows the line that is why we are proud of our country) is a re-claiming of authority. It claims to be the first, original and rightful owners of the country, We are the natives of Trizonesia!, therefore, you cannot be. The status of the native in this case indeed signifies a we were here, first! It is our land!. The claim of rightful ownership is reinforced by the music. The timbals and cymbals make this claim sound like a recalcitrant child who refuses to accept his defeat in an argument with the parents. Conclusion By doing a close reading of the popular Nachkriegsschlager Wir sind die Eingeborenen von Trizonesien and interpreting its process of meaning-making in its specific historical and cultural context, I have found a few paradoxes in its articulation of Germanness. Firstly the song simultaneously claims that the Trizonesian is a new species, yet the tribe is proud of its tradition. The nationalistic message of the song is in line with Nazi ideology, but considering the change of context, its meaning becomes subversive to the dominant narrative of the allies being the liberaters of Germany from Nazi dictatorship. The Allies are represented as colonizers and their power is regarded as illegitimate. The song re-claims West German identity. Which brings me to the second paradox. We are the natives of Trizonesia on the one hand disregards the Trizone as a legitimate nation, and a real nation-state does not exist at the moment of the songs release. Yet on the other hand, it participates in the formation of this West German nation and shared identity by constructing its fellow Trizonesian citizen (and its others) ideologically. Thereby it (re)naturalizes the artificial nation of Trizonesia (West Germany). The Trizonesien-Song can be described as simultaneously resistant (towards the allied forces) and reinforcing a West German solidarity. Finally, my analysis clearly shows that 1945 is often carelessly assigned to be zero-hour, a moment of rupture and a new beginning in German history. But, personnel and ideological contingency were actually prevalent. The post-war years are often generally characterized by a sense of apolitical-ness and individual aspiration for privacy and security. The Trizonesien-Song however shows a very different identification, one that longs for community and agency rather than escapism. Popsongs can be multifaceted articulations of national identity and identification and offer illusive insights into the dynamics of nation formations, contestations, and processes of belonging. I hope that I have shown that popmusic should not be considered harmless, apolitical or simple entertainment too carelessly.

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References Althusser, Louis. Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. In: John Storey (Ed.). Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader. 3rd ed. London: Pearson Education, 2006. --------For Marx. London: Allen Lane, 1969. Eckhart Hfig. Heimat in der Popmusik. Identitt oder Kulisse in der deutschsprachigen Heimliche Hauptstadt. Nichts dagegen zu sagen. In: Der Spiegel, 58/1947, 24.5.1947, p. 2. Klemann, Christoph. Die doppelte Staatsgrndung Deutsche Geschichte 1945-1955. Gttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991. Popmusikszene vor der Jahrtausendwende. Gelnhausen: Triga Verlag, 2000. Mezger, Werner. Schlager. Versuch einer Gesamtdarstellung unter besonderer Bercksichtigung des Musikmarktes der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Tbingen: Tbinger Vereinigung fr Volkskunde E.V., 1975. Phelan, James. Self-Help for narratee and narrative audience: How I-- and you -- read how. In: Style, Vol. 28, No. 3, 1994. p. 350-366. Port le Roi, Andr. Schlager lgen nicht, deutscher Schlager und Politik in ihrer Zeit. Essen: Klartext Verlag, 1998. Prince, Gerald. Introduction to the Study of the Narratee. In: Jane P. Tompkins (Ed.). ReaderResponse Criticism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. p. 7-25. Ritzel, Fred. Was ist aus uns geworden? Ein Hufchen Sand am Meer: emotions of post-war Germany as extracted from examples of popular music. In: Popular Music. Vol. 17, No. 3. 1998. pp. 293-309. Selden, Raman. A Readers Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986. Discography Wir sind die Eingeborenen von Trizonesien [Trizonesien-Song]. Karl Berbuer/Berbuer. Polydor, 1948. Other media 60x Deutschland. Die Jecken sind wieder da. Karnevalsumzug in Kln. <http://www.60xdeutschland.de/erster-grosser-karnevalsumzug-nach-dem-krieg/> (Last seen on: 22.6.200

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ASCA International Conference 2010 Aylin Kuryel

Bio-Images: Nationalist Tattoos in Turkey

Images are considerably influential in the construction of a community, creating a sense of unity, and demarcating national identities. They play an indispensible role in performing and reinforcing nationalist practices. The visual community formed through images has a strong impact in determining the coordinates of social relations within a national community. Within a visual community, images establish various types of intimate relationships with people and acquire different functions. This article will focus on the role of imagery in relation to nationalism and community formation by focusing on one particular type of image and its cultural and political implications. Etienne Balibar, the co-writer of Race, Nation, Class (1988), makes a crucial remark about nationalism in this book; following Benedict Anderson, he states that every social community that is reproduced by the functioning of institutions is imaginary, which comes down to accepting that only imaginary communities are real. Thus, imaginary communities have real effects and the realization of the nation-state community happens at the level of people. Nations do not naturally possess a given past or ethnic basis; the fundamental problem is therefore to produce people. More exactly, it is to make the people produce itself continually as national community (1991:93). What is important is that he does not conceptualize the production of people as a result of a one way force from above, but suggests to look at how people produce themselves as a community. Balibar continues by stating that a social formation can only reproduce itself as a nation to the extent that a network of apparatuses and daily practices are employed to institute the individual as homo nationalis, from cradle to grave, alongside with homo economicus, politicus, and religiousus (1991:93). He then states that the question of the nation form is actually about knowing under what historical conditions it is possible to institute such a thing by virtue of [] symbolic forms invested in elementary material practices (1991:93). I argue that creating a visual community is one of the vital

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methods of investing elementary material practices with symbolic forms, on the level of everyday life. Therefore, analyzing how a visual community is formed by looking at specific examples sheds light on the way that individuals institute themselves as homo nationalis and construct themselves as a national community with particular inclusion and exclusion rules. Turkey provides a fruitful context to explore the dynamics of the relationship between imagery and nationalism due to its specific historical, political, and cultural dynamics, as well as the existence of a national community obtaining its sense of unity largely from images. The period after 1990 in Turkey witnessed both the rise of nationalism and the crisis that nationalist practices are faced with. The image politics around nationalism in Turkey is rather underexplored although it has become a more urgent issue considering several cultural and political changes that Turkey has gone through after the 90s. During this period, the rise of nationalism went hand in hand with the challenges to the homogeneity of the Turkish identity and the increased visibility of Islam. The concern of EU membership that started in the same period, the increased polarization of Islamic and secular groups after the re-election of the ruling Islamic party, the ongoing trial partially investigating certain practices of the networks of deep-state and the illegal extensions of the state for the first time, a general questioning of the role of the army in politics, the recent discussions on past events related to minorities, and the developments in the Kurdish issue are among many factors marking this transitional period. This striking phase can be well read through images. All these factors shook the stable ground that the ruling Republican elite and its dominant discourses stand on. Images that I am looking at can be situated in this historical and political context that requires a re-clinging to nationalist values and beliefs. They work to create a strong nationalist visual community on the one hand. However, on the other hand, they can also be seen as the result of a crisis with which Turkey is confronted, as tangible signs of a lingering of a hegemonic structure at risk. Some images work to facilitate creating a visual community and to reinforce the norms in the face of a crisis and on the level of everyday life. I focus on images that become part of ones body or appearance and start influencing the way of being. I call

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these bio-images. The Greek word bio- means life, course, or way of living 24 . The use of bio in the concept bio-image is both to imply that the image becomes a physical, almost biological part of ones self and that a certain way of living is attached to and made possible by the image. The term bio-image does not offer a stable position to any image, but defines the specific relationship between a certain image and the self in a particular socio-political arrangement. Bio-images are both products of a certain identity, which is formed within particular socio-political coordinates, and constituents of that identity. Therefore, it is not possible to think of them as the result of an established and fixed being, marking an already completed identity, because every image that becomes part of ones self, in turn, continues to determine that person, either temporarily or permanently. One of the interesting phenomena that emerged in the late 90s in Turkey and gained momentum in the late 2000s provides a fruitful example for the discussion of bioimages: nationalist tattoos. The tattoo examples shed light on how the bio-image works by politicizing the skin and allowing for the coalescence of the person and the image. An external image, the visual material of the tattoo together with the ink, is inscribed on the skin and becomes an mostly indissoluble part of the body. The tattoos can be a seen as a symptom of a more common phenomenon, rather than being an extreme and marginal example, of the fact that nationalist values are already considered a should-be part of peoples being. The pervasive idea of sacrificing ones self and becoming one with the nation can be found in the act of being tattooed as I will explain below. Nationalist ideologies are not homogenous and coherent entities imposed on the whole of the society at once and embraced by everyone. People interpret, strengthen, distort, reproduce, and act them out in various ways; and imagery is a crucial tool in these processes. Looking at nationalist tattoos enables one to see how nationalist practices are customized by people, and it opens up a space for the discussion of strategies and tactics, in the sense that Michel de Certeau uses the terms, by showing the blurry area between and the possible interactions of subject and object, personal and political, top and bottom, and power and agency.

24

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=bio&searchmode=none.

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Picture 1 The word tattoo was coined by Captain Cook during his trip to South Pacific in 1769, deriving from the Tahitian word ta-tu, meaning to mark as well as referring to the sound of the Tahitian tattoo instrument (Sanders, 14). The history of the tattoos of icons, symbols, names, and scenes related to the nation is a long one; they have been inscribed on the body across different contexts and times, the most common contemporary Western examples ranging from country flags, to Nazi-related symbols or White Pride tattoos. A glance at the tattoos that are related to political issues or figures in Turkey shows that there is a range of different themes from the face and signature of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk the founder of the Turkish Republic, Ottoman Sultanates, to Ali the prophet, a wolf (as the symbol of nationalism and the emblem of nationalist party), the colors of soccer teams, and the Turkish flag in various forms. The tattoo that we see above (Picture 1) is a representative example of the rather new trend of nationalist tattoos in Turkey. It is the portrait of Ataturk looking at us from a mans chest, whose incarnadine background shows that the tattoo was just finished. Ataturk is looking directly into the eyes of the viewer. The information coming from the

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tattoo websites and interviews with tattooists 25 reveals that although the first nationalist tattoos appeared in the 90s, the craze for Ataturk and flag tattoos started in the late 2000s, after the ruling Islamic party was elected. Having a tattoo of either Ataturks portrait or his signature has become a significant trend during the Republican Meetings (first wave in 2007, the second wave in 2009) against the Islamization of the society. First in 2007, then again on the 10th of November 2009, a tattooist in Istanbul announced (through Facebook) that he would be doing Ataturk tattoos for free all day to commemorate the day of Ataturks death. 26 According to another tattoo shop in Izmir, which also started a free Ataturk signature tattoo campaign to protest against the threat of Islam to the Republic, 3,994 Ataturk signature tattoos were made between December 2007 and September 2009. 27 In the same period, there are many other tattooists who make free tattoos of Ataturks portrait or signature, as they announce on their websites, together with their declarations about the perilous times the country is facing with and their principles of nationalist tattoo-making, such as using Ataturks real signature rather than the fake one that also circulates around, or never making these tattoos on certain parts of the body such as below the waist. One of the sources that the nationalist tattoos gain their power from becomes clear considering the political stance that both the tattooists and tattooed people hold in opposition to the rise of Islam. According to the Sunni Islam tradition, the Prophet forbade tattooing (as well as his own depiction) because it involved changing the creation of Allah. 28 This is an interesting clash between the religious prophet on the one hand, who cannot be depicted according to Islam and the equally sacred image of secularism on the other hand, who should be depicted as much as possible, even on the bodies. Some of the web-testimonies by people who have or are fond of the tattoos of nationalist images show that people are aware of the fact that tattoos are not allowed in Islam and that
I have exchanged several emails with some tattooists in which I asked their ideas about the meaning of making nationalist tattoos and the general political tendencies of people who want to have these tattoos. I refer to some of their answers in the text. 26 http://www.posta.com.tr/turkiye/HaberDetay/Moda_Ataturk_dovmesi.htm?ArticleID=7380 27 http://www.koprualti.com.tr/ic/ata.htm 28 In al-Saheehayn it is narrated that Abd-Allaah ibn Masood (may Allaah be pleased with him) said: May Allaah curse the women who do tattoos and those for whom tattoos are done, those who pluck their eyebrows and those who file their teeth for the purpose of beautification and alter the creation of Allaah. (al-Bukhaari, al-Libaas, 5587; Muslim, al-Libaas, 5538). (http://www.muslimconverts.com/cosmetics/tattoos.htm/)
25

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turning the image of Ataturk or the flag into a part of their body is the strongest statement against the rise of Islam in Turkey. Therefore, tattoos, through which a political and cultural message is transferred, gain another layer of significance as a medium because of their form, alongside their content. This reaction can be best understood considering the ongoing war of interest between the existing Republican ruling elite and the newly emerging Islamic bourgeoisie. Therefore, carrying a collective symbol, a portrait which everybody recognizes and constantly sees in every field of life in Turkey, comes with its political and historical baggage. It tells more than a personal story. This mark can still be seen as a memoir like all the tattoos and it is still personal and selective like all the memoirs; but compared to the personal marks, it gives a more explicit account of the situatedness of the storyteller. Having Ataturks face imprinted on the skin allows the tattooed body to act as a political messenger. This is one of the characteristics of bio-images: bringing about a personal transformation in the case of tattoos, mostly permanently which underlines the persons position in society and turns the body of the carrier of the image into a social and political ground. It causes a specific emplacement of the self in the social milieu: it invests the self within a socio-political field. In other words, the fetishized image of the nation attributes the body a mission: carrying and constantly articulating it. It is a metonymic process; a part of the body, namely the tattoo, becomes powerful enough to define the whole body and therefore, the body itself becomes the fetishized image of the nation. Picture 1 is a common visual representation of bodies decorated with nationalist tattoos. We mostly do not see the tattooed persons face in these pictures. This also indicates that the face (the previous identity of the person) does not matter as much as before. Apart from protecting the privacy of people, it is a sign that the person starts being described by his/her bodily imprint. The inscribed body becomes the protagonist: the translator of the official discourse, speaking instead of the person who does not require a face anymore. Nation related bio-images on the human canvas brings to mind Foucaults theorization of the body as a site of political and cultural manipulation, in which the body
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becomes the surface of inscription of events (1984:76). Thinking of tattoos as inscriptions of power relations as a way of control and surveillance on the body brings to mind the tattoos made by slave owners in ancient Greece and Rome, Nazi concentration camp markings, and tattoos made as punishment (Schildkrout, 323). These are examples in which the Foucauldian model is performed in a direct and literal way. Indeed, most of the literature in tattoos that Schildkrout summarizes in an efficient way in her article Inscribing the Body (2004), is inclined to see tattoos as either inscriptions of power relations onto bodies like stigmas, or using the body as a site of resistance through which the individual inscribes his or her own subversive print onto the culture. Should one see the Ataturk tattoo as an inscription of a powerful national icon imposed upon people by power relations? Is it far-fetched to remember the most eerie example of this process: the torture machine in Kafkas In the Penal Colony which carves the sentence of the condemned prisoner on his skin in the course of twelve hours until he dies? Or, should it be seen as a rebellious act through which one expresses his or her opinion and reaction overtly? One can say that nationalist tattoos are closer to the second category since they are not made forcefully and that they are ones own choice. However, there is a more blurry area between these two conceptualizations of tattoos and the bio-image in general, as either being strategically and forcefully imposed, or tactically created and used to oppose. Carrying images like the flag, the face of a leader, or a bloody war scene which have always been the visual imprints of a particular (and exclusionary) national identity, is neither a merely bodily print of bio-power practices, nor a subversive act to resist these relations. It is an example of people using available visual tools in the society in order to constitute themselves as a national community. Therefore, it is maybe in between tactic and strategy, in the sense that Michel de Certeau uses the terms in his book The Practice of Everyday Life (1989). It is not coming from above and aiming for unification like strategy, but it is also not in opposition to what is coming from above, like tactic. It is more like a tactic becoming a strategy at the end. It is a tactic in the sense that it happens on the level of everyday life and creates an activity that is not exactly mapped by strategies. The tattoos are not aimed at unification; on the contrary, they are performed by people in order to distinguish themselves from the others. But it works like a strategy in the sense that it fulfills the
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function of nationalist strategies of creating a homogenous national community based on unified symbols. They are tactics that people come up with in their everyday lives by interpreting what is going on around them, that in turn, nourish institutional nationalist strategies.

Picture 2

Picture 3 Above, we see the tattoos of the Turkish flag appearing from under the torn skin

of a shoulder (Picture 2) and Ataturks signature on the inner side of an arm as if the stone or the skin that surrounds it is cracking (Picture 3). In both of these tattoos, the power of the image is strengthened by the visual effects environing them, which provide crucial insights on another characteristic of bio-images. The usage of these effects in the form of ripped and cracked skin shows a figurative character of the nationalist discourse, almost in a literal form. The bio-image as an inseparable part of the being is emphasized twice here: it is part of the body but it was already a part of the body. In the first case, the
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skin is ripped and the flag appears underneath, as if it was already there waiting for the skin to be peeled in order to be seen. In the second case, the signature is cracking the skin as if coming from inside or trying to dig itself in. They both hyperbolically emphasize that these images and what they signify are already part of the body, therefore part of the being. The essentialist claims of nationalism, positioning national identity as an innate feature of the national subject who has to repeat I give my existence as a gift to Turkish existence! every morning as a child while reading the pledge out loud, become crystallized in these images. The idea articulated in the nationalist discourses, of becoming one with the nation and sacrificing ones life to realize this coalescence, finds its reflection in nationalist tattoos. They also reveal the uncanny relationship between bio-images and the idea of death. A tattoo is a good example showing this relationship in the sense that the person, by having the tattoo, realizes a (symbolic) part of the act of dying, which is bleeding/being hurt/suffering and being born again as another person with a new identitymark. It is again a metonymic realization of the discursive premises of national subject formation; a ritual performed between self and society through the bio-image. Looking at these bio-images enable one to get one step closer to answering what W.J.T. Mitchell asks about images: They are all things that want things, that demand, desire, even require things food, money, blood, respect. It goes without saying that they have lives of their own as animated, vital objects. What do they want from us? (2005:194) Bio-images shed light on one aspect of these demanding images. They are the carriers of particular discursive patterns and they want to be articulated. People endow these images with life; they provide a moving body and a breathing canvas for images. In turn, these images give life to people as political subjects and the conveyers of sociopolitical messages. This mutually beneficial relationship between images and people as it becomes clear in the case of bio-images, makes a historical crisis moment more violent (and bearable for some), yet also clearly visible.

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References: Balibar, Etienne. The Nation Form: History and Ideology, in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, eds. E. Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, London: Verso, 1991, 86-106. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1989. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin, 1991. Mitchell, W.J.T. What do Pictures Want? : The lives and Loves of Images. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. Schildkrout, Enid. Inscribing the Body. Annual Reviews in Anthropology. 33, 2004. 319-344.

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Visual articulations of the violation of Palestinian rights in the reports of Israeli human rights organizations.
Ruthie Ginsburg ruthieginsburg@gmail.com The right to have rights, a well-known and frequently-cited notion coined by Hannah Arendt, is a notion that underlines the conflict that exists between rights and the nationstate. After World War II, refugees were denied citizenship and consequently their rights as human beings were impaired. Arendt identified the difficulty in realizing such rights out of the context of the nation-state. Although her study stressed that the nation-state was a political structure intended to realize the rights of individuals, she also claimed that this structure was one of the main threats to such rights (Arendt, 1958). Through careful analysis of the practices of human rights organization, this paper intends to present this discordance from another perspective i.e. visual schemes that represent the articulation of the global human rights regime in a national context. For more than two decades, Israeli citizens belonging to human rights organizations have documented violations of Palestinian rights. As part of my research into this visual documentation, I noticed that the Israeli soldiers were almost always pictured in the same way; their backs, shoulders, as well as other parts of their body, are used to frame the events, the city and the Palestinians.

Left. Machsom Watch, Huwwara checkpoint, April 2006, Photo: Masha Mukmel. Right. BTselem, Annual report, 1990, Photo: Miki Kratzman.

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Left. Machsom Watch, Huwwara Checkpoint, 2005, Photo: Dorit Herskovits. Right. Machsom Watch, Bet Iba Checkpoint, 2004, Photo: Horit Herman Peled.

By contrast, only a few images of this nature appear in similar publications by international organizations, such as Human Rights Watch or Amnesty. 1 The pictures of Israeli soldiers found in Palestinian human rights organizations reports, if any, are entirely different. 2 Despite using the same photojournalist agency Reuters Palestine Monitor, a Palestinian information center for human rights in the Occupied Territories, and B'Tselem, an Israeli organization, select different pictures for their publications. Whereas the Israeli photos capture the soldiers from behind, the Palestinian photos capture the soldier head on, as if his rifle is aimed at the photographer or the viewer. 3

www.palestinemonitor.org, Reuters, Photo: Unknown

Although the soldiers presented in the reports of Israeli human rights organizations are often placed by the edge of the pictures, their persistent presence clearly demonstrates that they are not of marginal importance. Not only do they sometimes appear prominently in the photographs but the soldiers are often placed in sharper focus so that more detail can be captured. Their bodies draw the gaze of the viewer towards the image, forming both an aesthetic and contextual relationship between the margins of the image and its core.
http://www.amnesty.org.il/ , http://www.hrw.org/middle-eastn-africa/israel-and-occupied-territories (data obtained in June 2008). 2 http://www.palestinemonitor.org/spip/ (data obtained in June 2008). 3 http://www.btselem.org. & Palestine Monitor.
1

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Left. BTselem's report: Opening fire by army forces in the Occupied Territories, July 2001, Photo: Miki Kratzman. Right. BTselem's Internet site: "An Israeli soldier points his assault rifle during an army operations in Nablus", August 2003, Photo: Gil Cohen Magen, Reuters.

In the present paper I seek to demonstrate how this visual scheme represents an articulation of the global human rights regime in a national context. Focusing particularly on the visuals of BTselem and Machsom Watch, two radically different Israeli human rights organizations working in the Occupied Territories, I show both the instrumental and sentimental causes that determine the presence of this visual scheme in the reports. Such an examination is intended to provide an invaluable tool for sketching a particular social formation, i.e. articulation of human rights in a national context. A close examination of the reports and visuals reveals the tension and contradictions that emerge with human rights language as it come into being, as well as the instability of what was previously regarded as fixed boundaries and categories within the discourse. Examination of these photographs as a form of knowledge on the one hand and as a way of highlighting both ethical and political responsibility on the other hand, has been inspired by work of scholars such as Ariella Azoulay, David Campbell, Thomas Keenan, and Sharon Sliwinski (Azoulay, 2008, Campbell, 2007, Keenan, 2004, Sliwinski, 2006). Following their research attitude and in order to dismantle the uniform understanding of the photographs in the reports as nothing more than objective evidence, I intend to present an analysis that deploys the ontological notion of photographic reference (Barthes, 1993) p 4-5, and constructs the photographic event (Azoulay, 2008).

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On the shoulders of soldiers

B'Tselem's report: "Hebron, Area H-2: Settlements Cause Mass Departure of Palestinians", August 2003, Photo: Nati Shohat, Reuters.

The photographs of the soldiers' shoulders, in the visual dimension, point to the one held responsible, or the person in charge. A B'Tselem report from Hebron H-2, for example, describes a complex situation in which the violence of the Jewish settlers towards Palestinians in Hebron is exerted under the auspices, approval, and protection of the Israeli army and police forces. By focusing mainly upon how the law is not enforced on Jewish settlers who live in Hebron and how the rights of Palestinians are violated under the alleged safety measures, the soldiers and the policemen, i.e. those who are in charge, are brought to the fore. In this sense the photograph reflects the content and the vision of the report. This approach is clearly evident from other B'Tselem reports. 4 A video captured in the summer of 2006, for instance, shows a Jewish woman from the Tel Rumeida settlement at Hebron city harassing her Palestinian neighbors. As a result of the video members of the Israeli parliament subsequently demanded that charges were brought against the woman for the offence. Having circulated the video in the first place, BTselem responded to parliamentary response by insisting that criticism was directed away from the Jewish settler and towards those held it responsible i.e. the Israeli army and police. 5

See for example other B'Tselem's reports: "Ghost Town: Israel's Separation Policy and Forced Eviction of Palestinians from the Center of Hebron", May 2007, "Standing Idly By: Non-enforcement of the Law on Settlers: Hebron", 26-28 July 2002, "Free Rein: Vigilante Settlers and Israel's Non-Enforcement of the Law, Information Sheet", October 2001. 5 http://www.btselem.org

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The emphasis placed by local organizations upon the duties imposed upon the Israeli government and those in charge also emphasizes a wider and more comprehensive ethical obligation. The following extract, taken from a MW report from Bethlehem by way of example, reveals the extent of the emphasis placed upon duty as border police monitor Israeli checkpoints along the West Bank:

"There is a shift change of the border police while we are there. A considerate border policeman who tries to help in humanitarian cases is replaced with two other ones one is smoking a cigarette and one is eating a Popsicle. They call out to the Palestinians: We will show you whos in charge and Move it! Move it! They are unbelievably rude to the Palestinians who were not allowed in for one reason or the other. In short, they act like masters." 6 Focusing on duty, rather than on rights, requires the shifting of the gaze from the offended to the ones who carry out the offence. Focusing attention towards the one who holds an obligation is not only a physical act. Diverse interactions and relations between the human rights Israeli activists and the one held responsible go along with shifting of the gaze. Such levels of interaction can are also be detected in other reports from the various organizations. Of particular interest to the present paper are examples from the reports of B'Tselem and MW.

Lethal Curfew Photographs taken over the shoulders of soldiers became a prevailing feature of B'Tselem report covers between 2001 and 2003.

Bethlehem, Friday morning, 14-09-2007 (http://www.machsomwatch.org/).

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B'Tselems' reports covers "Excessive Force", December 2001 (left), "Trigger Happy", March 2002 (in the middle) , and on "Hebron, Area H-2",August 2003 (right).

B'Tselem report "Lethal Curfew: The Use of Live Ammunition to Enforce Curfew", October 2002, photo: Magnus Johansson, Reuters

As part of an examination of the "Lethal Curfew" I asked the B'Tselems researcher who had written the report why he had chosen this particular picture for the cover, he pointed out that the picture clearly demonstrated that a curfew was in place and if people left their homes during the curfew they would face a pointed gun. 7 Although his reply invoked the ontological notion of the photographic reference (Barthes, 1993) p 4-5, his point of view, close to that of the soldier but not identical to it, discloses yet another aspect. It was apparent to me from an interview that I had held with the head of the human rights organization research department, Yechezkel Lein, that this aspect was related to the convention of the organizations documentation:

"There are strong testimonies and weak ones; it depends on the function they are to play. If we want to reconstruct an event, such as a shooting or some other form of violence, then a strong testimony is one that comes from an eyewitness. When there is a shooting, however, people usually hide and they dont actually see. A strong testimony is when there are
7

The interview was held in November 21, 2006.

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conditions to see like light etc. A soldiers testimony is stronger than a Palestinians. He can see and he can refer to a chain of events that the Palestinian is unable to witness. The Palestinians only see part of the event and the soldiers usually have a better viewpoint. When addressing Israelis or the international community, testimonies are perceived as more convincing when they come from the person who acts."8 Although he did not refer to the photograph selection of the "Lethal Curfew" report cover in the interview, the connection remains clear. Even though the report focuses on how breaking the curfew can be lethal for the Palestinians, a photograph that emphasizes the view point of the soldier was preferred. On the basis of the Lein interview, it would appear to be the case that conventions governing the written style of reports indicate a preference for the testimony of soldiers over those of the actual subjects. This is not only the case in relation to the reconstruction of the details of the event but the assumed impact that the report will have upon Israelis and a wider international audience.

The Struggle for Watching Conditions Whereas B'Tselem monitors different types of harm across the whole of the West Bank and Gaza, MW primarily concentrates on the Palestinian right to movement by monitoring Israeli checkpoints. Whereas B'Tselem moves everywhere, MW reports depend on the physical presence of activists at the checkpoints. They watch every morning, when Palestinians go out for work, school, or medical care and every afternoon, when the Palestinians return, the activists are there reporting what they see, taking photographs and attempting to help them pass the barriers.

Machsom Watch, A-Ram Checkpoint, 2004, Photo: Neta Efroni

8

The interview was held in July 31, 2007.

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These photographs from A-Ram checkpoint were taken by a MW member. By imagining where the photographer stood, and noting the location of the activist depicted, we can understand just how close they are to the soldiers shoulder - peeking when the Palestinians ask to go through. Dorit Hershkovitz, a MW activist, maintains that the relationship between the soldiers and the Palestinians is based on the pivotal distinction between seeing and not seeing. In an interview she described the situation at the checkpoint as follows: "The soldiers dont really see them [the Palestinians]. They don't talk to them. They don't straight their eyes towards them. I don't know Arabic, but there is a way to speak to people even if you don't know their language. The soldiers don't speak to anyoneyou can imagine that there are soldiers that act nicely to the Palestinians; they try to conduct their role in some respect, but they do not manage to pass the barrier that the Palestinians are human beings." 9 The gaze exchange between the Palestinians, the Israeli soldiers, and the human rights activists at the checkpoint is connected to the respective roles of the members of each group. Being supervisors of the Israeli rule the soldiers have the privilege to be alienated from the Palestinians. By monitoring through binary categories of the passage permission, their gaze is alienated from the Palestinians a-priori, distancing and limiting their perspective. The Palestinians at the checkpoints usually lower their gaze in order to avoid confrontation with the soldiers. Although MW activists look away from the Palestinians in order to avoid causing embarrassment, especially if men are present, some of them focus their gaze directly at the soldiers in order to express their resentment and create discomfort. When the emotional aspects behind this eye contact are explored, it becomes clear that the situation is even more complex. Shula Bar, by way of illustration, described the nature of her interaction with the soldiers as she attempted to communicate the characteristics of her role as a MW checkpoint activist: "We are like their non-aiming eye. The soldiers look with one eye on the target and ignore the other eye that sees the human being. If the soldiers

The interview was held in July 4 2007.

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saw the humans their arms would shiver. We are therefore the non-aiming eye." 10 What may be inferred from this the non-aiming eye image is the complexity of the speakers attitude towards the soldier. Rather than simply condemning the soldiers behavior, she acknowledges his disability and offers her help. All MW activists may not agree with Bar's embracement of the soldiers but evidence of the ambivalent nature of the relationship between soldiers and activists at the checkpoints can be detected in MW reports. A careful reading of these reports helps us to understanding what lies at the heart of Bar's description: "When we, as Israeli peace activists, look at the soldiers, we see them as agents of the occupation. When we look at the soldiers as our sons, part of our flesh and blood, the next generation we fear the mental experience they have to go through and the ethical values they trample on during the military service in the Occupied Territories." 11 The split between sentimental feelings and sticking to rational instrumental monitoring regulation creates both tension and conflict. The range of such relationships not only concerns the soldiers but manifests itself in the organizations contradictory conduct, which goes between collaboration and protest, from intervention to separation. The reason for such tension and conflict is that the Israeli activists operate by using their privilege as Israeli citizens to act for the benefit of the deprived Palestinians, and at the same time, although they are perceived by many Israelis as traitors, who help Palestinians, the supposed enemy, they are motivated by their belonging to the Israeli community in which they live. The ambivalence is not one sided. In winter 2007, MW activists found a white line on the road at the Huwwara Checkpoint, the main entrance to Nablus.

10 11

The interview was held in August 13 2007. In "Opposed View" MW report, 2004 (Hebrew).

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Machsom Watch, The "White Line", 2007, Photo: Yudit Levine

It was nicknamed by the checkpoint soldiers as the "watchers line". Machsom Watch members were ordered to stand behind the line and watch from there. The purpose of the white line was to keep away the activists, but at the same time sketching it was also a means of demonstrating approval of their presence. To put it another way, the army sought to prevent observation of what it is doing yet simultaneously wanted the approval of human rights organizations such as MW. A MW attorney, who represented the organization during negotiations with the Israeli army concerning monitoring conditions at the checkpoints, has drawn attention to the evident ambiguity. Her explanation addresses the particular rule governing the Occupied Territories and the mode by which they are put into practice in the checkpoints: "There are places which are declared as having a special law status. A court of justice, for example, has the authority that the law provides and counties have a jurisdiction zone. The checkpoint is not a defined territory and has no exceptional status from the territory next to it. It can be declared as a closed military zone so that citizens will not be allowed to enter it. The checkpoints, however, cannot be defined as such since citizens pass through them all the time. As a result, MW activists do not need approval from anyone to be there, as they do not need approval to enter or be at other part of the Occupied Territories. The issue at stake is that the checkpoints have a function so the military are authorized to act accordingly in line with this function i.e. they are authorized to carry out specific actions. Like policemen, the soldiers at the checkpoint can claim that MW activists are disturbing them from their duties thus enabling them to ask the activists to move out." 12 The ambiguity of the nature of the checkpoints, i.e. neither a military zone nor a civilian zone, affects the activists' ability to monitor the behavior of the Israeli soldiers. The

12

The interview was held in October 16, 2007.

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activists, as indicated by the report, are asked by the soldiers to move away yet despite the warning the activists are not forced to leave. 13 I conclude with a photograph from a booklet that was distributed by B'Tselem to soldiers at the checkpoints during 2004. This photograph demonstrates clearly how the visual form of the soldier's shoulder constitutes part of a discursive, Foucault-style, practice. The form does not impose an external formation upon the practitioner's thoughts but rather provides a medium through which certain statements to be made (Foucault, 1989). The representation of the soldiers shoulder in the booklet shows another link between the focus placed on the soldiers as representatives of the State and the practice of the local human rights organization. B'Tselem is not the first Israeli organization to address soldiers serving in the occupied territories through the distribution of booklets. 14 By mimicking the style of military orders in booklets, Israeli organizations were able to address soldiers directly thus providing them with an alternative meaning and context.

BTselems booklet, 2004, Photo: Achikam Seri

The text by the picture says: "take care of yourself!" "serving in the Occupied Territories these days presents you with complex challenges complete your mission without causing unnecessary harm to civilians". The bottom of the page also reads: "this booklet aims to help you protect our values."
In May 2007 one of MW activist was arrested by an Israeli police officer at Hawarra checkpoint after she was detected crossing the "whit line" by a soldier at the checkpoint. The activist was detained for a night in prison but the judge released her the day after. According to the hearing she did not violated any law. 14 Apparently Yesh Gvul (There is a limit!), an Israeli peace group, was the first to distributed booklets to Israeli soldiers at the Occupied Territories. I found similar booklets of other two Israeli organizations: Breaking the Silence, and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (http://www.yeshgvul.org/, and http://www.shovrimshtika.org/, http://www.acri.org.il/ ).
13

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Through use of these phrases, the organization emphasizes the connection between the duties of soldiers and their own preoccupation, i.e., guarding human rights. Hence, the schematic visualization encapsulates the multiple obligations that the members of local human rights organization bear and wish to transfer. The image of soldiers shoulder from this perspective, as displayed by the booklet, represents the ethical obligation connecting the responsibility bore by both the soldiers and the human rights activists as Israeli citizens of the occupier rule. The generation of solidarity through the creation of intimacy between the sufferer and the observer, whilst detaching them from their context at the same time, is a practice that human rights organizations usually employ. Such a practice was criticized for depoliticizing the cause of their suffering. Photographs of soldiers shoulders, however, firmly place suffering in a political context. As I have demonstrated in this paper, these organizations watch soldiers, as well as others in charge, for instrumental and/or sentimental reasons. They integrate inspection of the faces of those who suffer with introspection. Even though my analysis highlights troubling ways in which certain aspects of the human rights emancipatory aims are subverted to local civil operations, these photographs represent an attempt to brings "distant suffering" closer and the attempt to show that the sovereign State is accountable for this suffering.

References ALTHUSSER, L. (1984) Essays on Ideology, New York, Verso. AMIR, H. K. A. M. (2007) (En)Gendering Checkpoints: Checkpoint Watch and the Repercussions of Intervention. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 32. AZOULAY, A. (2008) The Civil Contract of Photography, New York, Zone Books. BARTHES, R. (1993) Camera lucida : reflections on photography, London Vintage. BOLTANSKI, L. (1999) Distant suffering : morality, media and politics, Cambridge Cambridge University Press CAMPBELL, D. (2007) Geopolitics and visuality: Sighting the Darfur conflict. Political Geography, 26, 357-382. CRARY, J. (1995) Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, New York, MIT Press. DE-WAAL, A. (2003) Human rights organizations and the political imagination: how the West and Africa have diverged. Journal of Human Rights, 2, 475-494.

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FEHER, M. (2007) The Governed in Politics. IN FEHER, M., KRIKORIAN, G. & MCKEE, Y. (Eds.) Nongovernmental Politics. New York, Zone Books. FOUCAULT, M. (1989) The archaeology of knowledge London Routledge. GINSBURG, R. (2009) Framing, Misframing, and Reframing: The Fiddler at Beit-Iba Checkpoint. IN MARTEU, E. (Ed.) Civil Organizations and Protest Movements in Israel: Mobilization around the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Palgrave MacMillan. GORDON, N. (2006) Human Rights as Contingent Foundation: The Case of Physicians for Human Rights. Journal of Human Rights, 5, 163-184. HASS, A. (25 September, 2007 ) Disrupting the separation policy Haaretz. IGNATIEFF, M. (2001) Hunam Rights as Politics and Idolatry, Princeton, Princeton University Press. KADMON, S. (21 November, 2003) Many Mothers. Yedioth Ahronoth. KAPLAN, E. A. & SPIRNKER, M. (Eds.) (1993) The Althusserian Legacy, New York, Verso. KEENAN, T. (2004) Mobilizing Shame. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 103, 435- 449. KESHET, Y. K. (2006) Checkpoint watch, Testimonies from Occupied Palestine, New York, Zed Books. MCLAGAN, M. (2006) Technologies of Witnessing: The Visual Culture of Human Rights. American Anthropolgist, 108, 191-220. MERCER, C. (2002) NGOs, civil society and democratization: a critical review of the literture. Progress in Development Studies, 2, 5-22. NAAMAN, D. (2006) The Sileneced Outcry: A Feminist Perspective from the Israeli Checkpoints in Palestine. NWSA, 18. SLIWINSKI, S. (2006) The Childhood of Human Rights: The Kodak on the Congo. Journal of Visual Culture, 5, 333-363. SONTAG, S. (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ZIZEK, S. (Ed.) (1994 ) Mapping ideology, London Verso.

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Primo Kraovec

Nationalism, European integration and neoliberalism 1

A contribution to a critique of the political economy of the post-socialist transition in former Yugoslavia

1. The structure of national(istic) ideologies in post-Yugoslav transition Resurge of identitarian politics based on ethnicity in countries, emerging from the break up of SFRY (Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) is, at least in mainstream media and research, usually presented as, however problematic and violent, the continuation of each nation's historical coming to itself and as the natural end of each nation's historical trajectory, which must end with an independent state, consisting of one nation only. According to such narratives, unlike their Western sibling nations, who got their indepedent states much earlier, post-Yugoslav nations had to suffer an unnatural historical turn in the form of socialist federal state, described by certain conservative historians as another (as in after the Austro-Hungarian empire) dark prison for the nations, whose springtime (as in springtime of the nations, a poetic name for national uprisings, presenting attempts to break free from the Austro-Hungarian yoke in 1848) was delayed for further 50 years by bloody communist dictatorship. In this view and as written by mainstream historiography in the region, nation is the sole subject of history and national history means a predetermined trajectory, a certain linear progress towards nation's self-fulfillment this self-fulfillment being an ethnically homogenous nation-state with capitalist mode of production and parliamentary democracy as political system. National history as the only history worthy of being written of South Slavic nations is then interpreted as a series of rude interruptions of this continous and linear progress. South Slavic nations had, since their very arrival on the Balkan peninsula (I am focusing on the review of the mainstream historiography and

The paper is based on inspirational discussions with and relentless supply of relevant literature from a dear comrade Stipe urkovi.

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leaving aside the most bizzare theories on Slovenians' origin in ancient Venetians 2 and Croatians' in Iran as supposedly original Aryans) suffered opression and foreign rule: from Byzantines, various Germanic and Gothic tribes, Ottomans, Venetians, AustroHungarians, Napoleon's French etc. to, finally, domestic opression and supression of the natural course of their development by the hands of the domestic communist tyrants in the second half of the 20th century. Most post-Yugoslav history textbooks thus involve a quatripartite schema of national history, beginning with a mythical era of freedom and independence in the ancient tribal Slavic society. In Slovenia, this period is exemplified by the Karantan state from the 8th century A.D., rougly corresponding in territory to nowaday's Slovenia, whose political system was supposedly tribal democracy with elected chieftains and egalitarian social structure. 3 It is a classical case of projection of contemporary ideologies of one nation, one territory, democracy and sovereignty, into mythical past, where everything was supposedly already idyllic and perfect. 4 This mythical era ended when Karantania was subsumed under the Frankish empire and so the historical calvary of the Slovenian nation began, representing the second part of the historical journey towards self-fulfillment through suffering and opression under Franks, Germans, Austrians, Turks, Italians and, finally and that is the third stage of the journey, Yugoslav communists. Opression under domestic communist elites and a centralised rule, based in the capital of SFRY, Belgrade, is in this perspective seen as the last stage of succesive foreign dominations, as opression of South Slavic nations by one of their own, the Serbs, culminating in Slovenia's declaration of independence in 1991 and Serbian territorial

The most recent development in this field, supposedly supported by a DNA research analysis, is that Slovenians originate from Scandinavia and came to the Balkans a good century earlier than the Slavs but were later slavicized by them because they were too few in numbers to retain their original ethnic identity. This theory is an attempt to ground a distinction between Slovenians and the Slavs in genetical/biological terms and, as such, to further support the claim that Slovenians are entitled to join developed Europe, while South Slavs are not. Still, the DNA analysis in question makes one wonder what could scientific criteria for distinguishing Slav from non-Slav genetic material be. 3 According to some sources, Karantan state presented an inspiration for none other than Thomas Jefferson when establishing the American version of democracy. 4 Karantan symbol, a black panther, is also a symbol of today's Slovenian neonazist skinheads. It is very important to emphasize that Karantan story represents a wagnerian/nietzschean romatic fairy tale of a virilic heroic pure bred tribe, ie. a fantasy not of engelsian prehistoric communism, but of exalted brotherhood of warriors, endowed with contemporary machistic and chauvinistic stereotypes.

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agression in the Yugoslav wars in 1991-1995. The story ends with the nation's newly found freedom and independence after centuries of suffering under foreign domination. This narrative has an obvious dramatic structure it begins with a portrayal of ancient Eden and picks up pace with the fall from grace and thousand and some year long search for paradise lost, reaching its dramatic peak with the bloodiest and cruelest opression of all, the communist rule, before coming to a happy end with an indepedent state which corresponds to its ideological message. The message is, obviously enough, that each nation, sooner or later, arrives at its historical destination, ie. an independent democratic and capitalist one-nation-state, and that such historical trajectory is a kind of natural neccessity, which nevertheless does not diminish the importance of those who had fought and suffered for the nation. National independence thus signifies the end of history. At least this is the case for Slovenia and Croatia, while in Bosnia the ideal of the ethnically homogenous state, despite Miloevi's best efforts, has not been attained, although the country is still divided and politically organised, under the EU and UN patronage, along the ethnic lines. In Serbia, the situation is also specific Serbian mainstream historiography and a big part of its official politics sees Republic of Srpska (part of Bosnia with predominantly Serbian population), parts of Croatia, Montenegro and especially Kosovo as a lost national territory and Serbia as nation divided between several states, still suffering historical wrongs and still not reaching the end of its historical journey. But, nevertheless, all of those narratives still belong to the same ideological horizon and are structured in the same ways as Slovenian and Croatian national(istic) myths nation is still the sole subject of history, which is itself seen as a linear and teleological progress towards nation's self-fulfillment, the only difference being that in Serbia's case it has not been quite attained yet. It is obvious that such manner of narrating history has a directly apologetic character it presents current social, economic and political situation as a peak of history, as the most developed and, at the same time, neccessary and natural socio-political order. In concrete terms this means apologetics of the establishment of the Schengen border on the Eastern border of Slovenia, legal persecution of the immigrants without papers, their imprisonment in the collection centres for the foreigners, selective measures when receiving refugees from the Bosnian war and similar neo-fascist state policies in the name
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of the finally attained Slovenian national confidence and sovereignty, the infamous erasure of 18.000+ people from the permanent residence registry in the name of protection of the body of the nation against those who would wish to harm and pollute it and who were against Slovenia's independence, and psalms of praise for the free market and parliamentary democracy in the name of rejoining our economically developed and politically advanced European brethren. Not only does the narrative of national history provide a quasi historical and quasi-scientific basis for pro-capitalist and pro-democratic discourses - which interpret structural disfunctions (such as political corruption and mass unemployment) of both as neccessary features in transition from dictatorial regime and as remains of its backwardness and brutality, not as neccessary sub-products of the normal and routine functioning of an already full established capitalism and parliamentary democracy 5 -, its fervor for democracy and Europe also has a dirty obverse side the blatant racism of such discourses. To be in favor of democracy and Europe, one has to, within the Yugoslav sociopolitical context, also be against Balkans and its backwardness. Love for Europe neccessarily contains hatred for other South Slavic nations, who don't understand democracy, adhere to primitive religions (orthodox Christianity and Islam), are violent, bloodthirsty, prone to wars and authoritarian rule, territorially agressive, economically backward and culturally primitive. 6 Reunion with Europe means abandoning Balkans and, in this regard, the 90s presented an absurd race of once Yugoslav nations to present themselves as the only ones worthy of the ascension into heavenly kingdom of Europe at the expense of other South Slavs: Slovenians were fiercely digging up their close cultural connections with the Germanic world (temporarily forgetting about their centuries long opressive rule, which obstructed the historical self-fulfillment of the Slovenians), Croatians presented themselves as the last defenders of Catholicism, Serbs as the last defenders of Christianity as such against Islam etc. During the 90s, the discourse of the official politics in the post-Yugoslav space (with the exemption of explicitly anti-Western and anti-EU politics of Miloevi's regime, which resented the West for not recognizing
5 6

See also Primo Kraovec's Revisionism and Yugonostalgia (currently in print, to be published soon). In some cases, this racism is also projected inwards in a form of resignated self pity of the post-Yugoslav left, desoriented after abandoning communist and socialist ideas for a case of study of such ideology in Croatia, see Stipe urkovi's A new notion of democracy?, a lecture at Historical Materialism conference at Birkbeck College, London, 27.11. 2009.

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the crucial role of Serbia in defending European civilisation from islamic barbarism) was dominated by the racist vel 7 - Europe or Balkans. 8 Thus the conclussion of epic ullysseian journey of post-Yugoslav nations also includes racist distancing from all other post-Yugoslav nation (with corresponding violent effects: Yugoslav wars, ethnic cleansing, abyssmal treatment of Bosnian refugees in Slovenia, border harrasment, ruthless exploitation of cheap work force from Bosnia and Serbia in Slovenia and Croatia etc.). The end of history is not reached by, for and in itself, but in relation to distance achieved toward the Balkanian Other cultural, economical and political progress of each post Yugoslav country is measured by the distance separating it from uncivilized, poor, miserable and undemocratic Balkans, and, by the same token, by the closeness to democratic, advanced, developed and democratic Europe. It is no coincidence, then, that Slovenia's entry into EU and NATO in 2004 united otherwise mutually hostile conservatives and liberals in common celebration of this final confirmation of the end of history for Slovenia, at least, while the Balkanians still have to struggle in the mud of its barbaric and backward history. Cruelty towards Balkanian other thus became a measure of one's progress towards European civilisation.

2. Post-Yugoslav nationalisms in European economic and political context As shown thus far, domestic ideological condition for (re)joining the developed Europe in the post-Yugoslav case was ethnically exclusive version of nationalism, modeled after its 19th century precursor, characteristic for the period of the springtime of nations. A connection was thus being established between the final national liberation in the form of independent new nation-states in 1991 and its supposed historical first attempt in 1848 South Slavic national uprisings within the Austro-Hungarian empire. Ideological function of this connection is twofold to connect the history of postYugoslav nations to that of Central Europe, ie. to point at the last historical instance when they were truly a part of the common European historical processes (before the
On vel alternative, where choosing one element among the two means losing both and choosing the other means keeping just the one chosen, whereas you start in possesion of both a classic example is a robber's Your money or your life! - see Jacques Lacan's Four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. 8 For a detailed analysis of the Europe Balkans vel see Rastko Monik's 3 theories (pp. 142-161, 181183).
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communist regime violently disconnected the same nations from the European history and locked them into half of a century of darkness by preventing them from following their natural historical course) and, at the same time, to downplay and obscure socialist politics regarding and methods of resolving the national question. Although mainstream historiography claims that there was nothing, apart from darkness and suffering, for nations in socialism, national question was one of the primary political preoccupations of the Yugoslav communists. In 1943, national question was one of the primary topics of the AVNOJ (Anti-fascist Council of the Nations of Yugoslavia) congress, during which the socialist Yugoslavia was established. However, there is a crucial difference between the transitional neo-masarykian nationalism and communist/partisan idea of nationalism. Nationalism was an integral part of the anti-fascist resistance on the Yugoslav territory during the 2nd world war, and a lot of appeals were being made to people to join the partisans in order to preserve their national language and culture and similar. These appeals were a part of progressive politics of national liberation since the people of Yugoslavia were being attacked on the basis of their ethnicity (long term Nazi plans even included a wholesome extermination or at least enslavement of Slavs), they were forced to respond and resist on an ethnic ground. Since the occupators lead an active policy of denationalisation (ruse of history - and the lack of historical memory on the part of the post-socialist elites - wanted that post-socialist process of privatisation of once public property - industry, banks, health, education etc. - bore the same name), Yugoslav partisans at first fought for preservation of national languages and cultures. In historical circumstances of fascist occupation even speaking or writing in Slovenian was already an act of political resistance, since Slovenian literature and the use of Slovenian language was strictly forbiden and could lead to inprisonment or even death sentence. Later on, especially during and after the AVNOJ congress, national politics of the partisans became more precisely articulated each Yugoslav nation was guaranteed its basic rights, such as rights to national language and culture, but these rights were also tied to a certain emacipatory vision of social and political development (that of socialism). 9 AVNOJ declaration also inclued an uncompromising condemnation of collaborators as traitors of

For a precise study of the politics of AVNOJ and its relation to the national question see Ozren Pupovac's Project Yugoslavia: The dialectics of the revolution in Prelom 8, pp. 9-23.

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the nation and had thus shown that national politics, as practised by Yugoslav partisans and communists, did not mean a historical fullfillment of a single nation and, therefore, was not nationally exclusive (as opposed to the post-socialist nationalisms) and that nation was not understood as a homogenous whole, but as politically and socially divided and as just one among many other relevant political categories (such as class and working people). Anti-fascist struggle and subsequent development of socialism understood national politics as inclusive and based on the notion of solidarity, as exemplified by the slogan brotherhood and unity of all the nations and nationalities and Yugoslavia. Consequently, Yugoslavia was established not on the basis of common blood, belonging to common soil, ie. not in terms of identitarian politis, but as federation of nations united by their resistance to fascism (and all other forms of identitarian politics) and their common vision of a new, socialist society. In stark opposition to this, nowaday's post-socialist nationalisms represent a return to identitarian politics, ie. they are based on identity and culture, not on common political goals and unity in revolutionary struggle. This supersession-by-regression of socialist revolutionary national politics was at first, in the early 90s, wellcomed by and applauded to in the Western Europe Slovenia's independence was praised all around and prominent French new philosopher Alain Finkielkraut stayed forever true to Tuman despite his authoritarian rule and ethnic cleansing of Croatian Serbs during the war. But after the final act of Yugoslav wars NATO's bombing of Serbia in 1999 European enthusiasm, which was principally an ethusiasm for the fall of really existing socialism, began to fade. Euphoric post-Yugoslav nationalistic political elites began to receive a cold shoulder from Europe and concerned remarks from liberal EU officials and NGOs about the state of nationalism in the former Yugoslavia began to multiply. When their high hopes of national self-fullfillment hit the wall of EU's realpolitik, the process of European integration of post-Yugoslavia disclosed militant nationalists as the dupes of transition. What was already obvious to anyone not infected by nationalist deliriums, raging across the region in the 90s, when Dutch UN company left Srebrenica's Bosnian residents to be massacred by the army of Repulic of Srpska in 1995, namely that Europe is totally indifferent to the national dimension of post-Yugoslav development, even if it means genocide, started to dawn to even the most zealous nationalists when prosaic basic
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economic aims of Europe (opening up of Yugoslav borders to free trade and foreign investment) were met. While violent and militant nationalism was crucial for the destruction of the multinational socialist Yugoslav federation, post-Yugoslav nationalisms started to prove troublesome, since they could again destabilise the region and therefore pose a threat to bussiness interests vested in the region, or lead to a protectionist economic policies to counterweight mass unemployment and decline of social rights, both resulting from restoration of capitalism. With the combined effort of pressure from the EU, grassroots activism of regional NGOs and domestic liberal intellectual and political elites, the most extreme and influential fractions of post-Yugoslav nationalists were, after the deaths of Tuman and Miloevi, succesfully tamed and marginalised. In the 00s, European integration was not anymore seen as the final achievement of the nationalist dreams, but as a triumph of moderate and democratic pro-European liberal fractions of the postYugoslav political elite against the violent, blood thirsty and archaic nationalists. Nationalists were - despite them being most overt and fervorous anti-communists in the 90s and the ones whose political ideology and practice contradicted those of socialism the most, - grouped together with the communists as belonging the last stage of the dark Balkanian past (in accordance with a liberal stereotype whose wide acceptance among the political analysts and newspaper commentators can only by matched by its horrenderous historical untruthfullness - of Miloevi as the last communist), ending with the tragic Yugoslav wars, but paving way to democracy and European integration. Heroes of the national independence thus became the scapegoats of its realisation. 10 Post-Yugoslav extreme nationalists became victims of their own blindness. Their nationalistic fervor prevented them from seeing that EU's primary interest in the dissolution of Yugoslavia (and other socialist federations) was not a support for their imprisoned nations' self-fullfillment, but a prosaic economic calculation. After all, the EU was founded on two basic pillars: neo-classical economics meaning free-tradism (abolishment of all barriers, such as protective customs and tariffs, to free international
For a case study of the ideological division of labor between nationalists and liberals in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina see Neboja Jovanovi's Anti-fascism between two deaths: The Bosnian intellectual elite and its civic liberal revisionism, in Lev Centrih, Primo Kraovec and Tanja Velagi (eds.) Uneventment of history, pp. 151-163.
10

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trade), privatisation of all public institutions, services and utilities, monetarism (reduced public spending, limited money supply, high interest rates) and anti-workerism (reduction of wages and the level of employment, flexibilisation of the labor force market, abolishment of workers' rights and benefits) and the idea of loose supranational federation, devised by one of the founding fathers of ordo-liberalism (a precursor of neoclassical economics) Friedrich von Hayek, and more adequate to neo-classical economic policies than ordinary nation states. 11 Yugoslavia fell apart just as these two processes finally, after decades of inter-EU class and inter-state struggles, negotiations, compromises and delays, came together. Post-Yugoslav states came into being when EU was already more or less fully-established single market, single currency, monetarist, free-tradist and post-nationalist supranational institution (the introduction of euro and the signing of the Maastricht treaty, two cornerstone events for the formation of the EU as we know it today, happenned in 1992). So both post-Yugoslav nationalist ideology and its material and institutional correlate, an anachronistic 19th century style nation-state, contradicted ideological and political tendencies of the then EU but they were, however, neccessary preconditions for the destruction of the socialist federation and proved of use in the process of integration of the post-Yugoslav states into (above all) common European market. While extreme nationalism was, after it completed its dirty work during the Yugoslav wars, relatively quickly but not without tensions and bitter tears from disillusioned nationalists, often turning hostile to the idea of united, united Europe discarded, marginalised and replaced by the post-nationalistic ideologies of neo-functionalist interest group pluralism and technocratic management, 12 the new small nation-states remained usefull and preserved their importance. Their main economic function and importance in the new historical circumstances was the role they had in the rather harsh and agressive dissolution of previously existing economic ties and connections between socialist states of the Eastern Europe. 13 A federation, even with capitalist mode of production restored, would still hamper Western economic interests somewhat, since it would mean a relativelly big domestic
11 12

See Bernard H. Moss (ed.) Monetary union in crisis. See same book, chapter 4: Theories of integration: American political doctrines. (pp. 74-92) 13 See Peter Gowan's Neoliberal theory and practice for Eastern Europe.

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market and production focused on domestic demand, while the Western business elites desired Eastern cheaper work force for themselves (to reduce their production costs) and the destruction of Eastern industry, which was previously, because of the iron curtain and limited trade connections between Eastern and Western Europe, East oriented, but could, in the new circumstances, present a potential competitive threat to Western industry. The emergence of several small nation-states, on the other hand, came quite handy and was therefore never challenged, even if it meant tolerating genocide on Europe's doorstep. Liberal political and economic elites of these new states, although they discarded the more troublesome inward identitarian component, retained the racist outward component of nationalism, placed themselves in a position of local compradors, turned their backs to economic cooperation with other post-Yugoslav states and heartily embraced any economic directive the European brethren threw their way. Few years was all it took for once incredibly strong Yugoslav industry to be all but abolished through the process of wild privatisation, which not only changed the ownership structure of the factories, but forced most of them to close down shortly after as well. 14 Industrial competitive threat was quickly and efficiently put down, much to the pleasure of Western business elites. After the utter destruction of their predominantly industry based national economies (with an exception of Slovenia, which underwent a so called gradual privatisation and managed to retain a certain degree of social welfare and economic sovereignty), post-Yugoslav economies were left to the mercy of the WTO, World bank, IMF and EU's economic policies. Their role in the context of the European economy ever since has been to present a kind of sub-contractors in accordance with the neoliberal trend (sometimes called Toyotism) to cut down production into the smallest possible units, which serve as providers of component parts of the final products and are in mutual competition with each other. Instead of previous mutual economic cooperation and
14AccordingtoaSerbiantradeunionactivist(quotedfromthefootageinelimirilnik'sfilmThe

new school of capitalism) no factory in Serbia survived more than two years under private ownership. The example of Cezch car producing company koda, described in Gowan's article, is telling as well. See also an article in Novi list (in Croatian) about the fate of the machine factory Prvomajska, once a leading manufacturer of component parts for heavy machinery, which went bankrupt soon after being sold to German private company: http://novine.novilist.hr/default.asp?WCI=Rubrike&WCU=285C2863285928592863285A28582858 2861286328A2288F28632863285C285D285F2858285D285C28632863286328592863T

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development of their productive capacities, post-Yugoslav states are now entagled in fierce competition with one another, offering their partly finished products in the form of public infrastructure (which is a perfect investment opportunity, since it has been already built and developed with public funds and therefore costs include only maintenance and, for Western standards, negligible wages, while the profits are, since each member of the population uses it on a daily basis, enormous) and cheap work force to the Western big business. Relationships between post-Yugoslav states went from typically socialist internationalist solidarity and economic cooperation to typically capitalist competition, leaving all of them miserable and impoverished. 15 Local pro-European liberal comprador elites, responsible for this process, are proving themselves to be equally duped as the previous nationalists ones instead of imagined and desired European economic development, welfare and growth, the process of the European integration brought nothing but pain and misery. On the other hand, rebellious youth and workers, occupying universities and factories all over ex-Yugoslavia in resistance to neoliberal transition, have already realised that humanity won't be happy until the last nationalist is hung by the guts of the last pro-European liberal.

15

Slovenia, as the most developed post-Yugoslav state and the only one that is already a member of the EU, bases its entire construction industry on the ruthless exploitation of undepaid immigrant workers from Bosnia, who work without papers and therefore any social rights and security, with state authorities looking away not to hamper Slovenia's economic miracle, of which enormous profits made in the construction business at the expense of immigrant workers present an important part. It is only in the abyssmal conditions of the working class, which today resemble those described by Engels in his study of the English working class, and not in the romantic visions of national self-fullfillment, that post-Yugoslav states succeeded in their le grand retour to the 19th century.

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Looking awry at the national identity: memorial sites in (post-)Yugoslav context

By Gal Kirn

Introduction The current work on memory politics in post-Yugoslavian context usually operates within the ideological frame of Yugo-nostalgia (good old times) or a depiction of Yugoslavia as totalitarian gloom. If the first version fits into a liberal narrative of commodification of certain Yugo-products and past symbols, the second is a typical dissident outcry, which marks Yugoslavia as a prison-house of nations doomed to dissolution from the very beginning. Yugo-nostalgic version has depolitising effects (mourning about the lost past), while totalitarian argument participates in the orientalistic view on the Balkans that was present all throughout the 1990s. The orientalistic argument is transhistorical and reproduces the image of the Balkans as the barrel of gunpowder ready to explode at any moment, where eternal ethnical animosities, religious divisions and civilisational backwardness do not allow for a constitution of truly democratic governance. Consequences of this reasoning were very political: it legitimized the politics of ethnic cleansing and supported the implementation of ethnic model: one nation in one state. Both positions reduce historical complexity of Yugoslavian social formation and psychologize social processes. In the light of this specific theoretico-ideological conjuncture we shall analyze two memorial sites, which will demonstrate that things are more complex and historically specific. The reading of two memorial sites will enable us dissecting two different logics of community constitution in the post-Yugoslav and Yugoslav context 1 . Firstly, we will visit one typical new memorial site in Slovenia, which embodies the official discourse of national reconciliation, being an important ideological support/vehicle in the formation
1

I performed a more extensive study of memorial sites in new nation states for the book Reading images in the post-Yugoslav context (forthcoming, Brill Publications: Leiden), while for this occasion I wanted to stress differences in the logic of community constitution, not touching on aesthetical dimensions of memorial sites.

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of new Slovenian state. This reading will be contrasted by the analysis of the non-specific partisan memorial. It was participating in the modernist current of new memorial sites, which performed a radical discontinuity within the sphere of art (against typical partisan memorials directed by official cannons) and produced political effects, re-articulating the Yugoslav event of the WWII. 2

Slovenian reconciliation is oblivion of the antifascist struggle and social revolution In the 1990s Slovenia the rightwing ideologies launched subtle techniques of historical reinterpretation. The debate on recent history has led to the hunt for the criminals of the former totalitarian regime and revision of the WWII history. The end goal of this debate is the rehabilitation of the Slovenian fascists-collaborators. Many of local fascists at the end of WWII fled the country, while the remaining ones were imprisoned or killed. With the Slovenian independence some grave sites were discovered and historical and political accounts started including the collaborationist in the discourse of victimhood and reconciliation, which would end up in healing Slovenian nation. At this point we would like to make clear that we do not a priori oppose an erection of memorial site of postwar killings, but the way how they were used and supported in the construction of new memory of the past. Loosing any historical reference they performed an extremely dangerous ideological operation as we will show in a moment. Let us look at a typical Home Guard memorial erected in 1998, in Koevski Rog, a site of post-war executions. The figure 1 shows the inscription on the memorial site: Odpusti (Forgive). The reference to morality and the Catholic Church is transparent and emphasized with a cross in front of the monument. Most of the Home Guard memorials are shrouded in silence, and this one is no exception. Placed in the silence of a forest, as a home for the fallen, lacking pomposity, they avoid any historical reference. The memorial statue expresses the moral element of depoliticised suffering; it appeals to piety and forgiveness as if the civil war had transhistorical and eternal character. This monument participates in a humble glorification of the victims of war and post-war
2

We read event in Badious sense of term, see his Logics of the Worlds (2009), Verso: London.

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executions. As with the majority of Home Guard memorials this one insists upon representing the victim rather than a particular collaborator, but more generally a crucified Slovenian nation that had to experience a civil war during the Second World War. It does not present us with historical arguments from that time, but displaces the memory in the time after war: the traces of fascist occupation and collaboration are reoriented to the post-war executions. Instead of the new political subjectivity of the Peoples Liberation Struggle and emancipatory effects of partisan struggle, we witness only the post-war executions of a bad and evil totalitarian regime.

Figure 1

Other less moralistic inscriptions can be found on the Home Guard monuments, the most popular being: Mother, Homeland, God or Victims of revolutionary violence. The first slogan embodies precisely the essence of political ideology that functioned in the first pre-war Yugoslavia, which was based on Serbian and Yugoslav unitarism, conservativism and the Church. The second slogan introduces morality on the fascists side and is already framed in the totalitarian discourse. All of these conservative inscriptions do not present the Home Guard members as active protagonists, but as victims, who found themselves collaborating. These memorials share the basic assumption that choosing sides was more a matter of chance or fate than of political conviction and thought. Or that despite collaborationist oath to Hitler, they could retain
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an innocent soul. 3 This, however, poses at least two problems: one is the positive interpretation of the Home Guards as passive and innocent victims, and the other, the absence of any historical context of the Second World War in their memorials. Slovenian monuments from the Second World War are structured like mainstream political discourse. The latter remains divided between advocates of the Partisan movement and advocates of the Home Guard. The Partisan side defends certain aspects of the Peoples Liberation Struggle, while the Home Guard side persecutes the post-war totalitarian terror, which they locate in the communist leadership. Although the two camps are opposed, they share a common goal in the debate reconciliation. Reconciliation of the Slovenian nation happens through the rituals of mourning for the victims of both sides. It is in the national interest to appease political passions and to write a more objective truth, rather than to maintain the division between us and them, if all Slovenes naturally belong to One Nation. However, reconciliation does not have the same meaning for both sides. While both agree that the post-war killings executions and collaboration with the enemy were problematic, reconciliation nonetheless equates with a neutralization of how novel and crucial the Partisan movement was in Yugoslavia. At worst, reconciliation is no less than the rehabilitation of fascism and the Home Guard. This means that the Home Guard and the Partisan movement are equalized and the afterwar totalitarian regime condemned. Thus reconciliation can be possible when we become ashamed of our communist past and come to forgive fascism. The political maxim of the Home Guard supporters could be termed in the following way: Let us reconcile with the fascist past. The Home Guard committed some crimes during the war, but so did the communist regime after the war. For supporters of the Partisan standpoint, on the other hand, reconciliation means acknowledging the post-war killings executions and praising a certain aspect of the politics of the Peoples Liberation Struggle. It is a defence of the Peoples Liberation Struggle as the core of Slovenian nationhood, as if the struggle had only been about national independence. In this way the reconciliation discourse of both sets of supporters produces a twofold effect: a reduction in the importance of the Peoples

See Miklav Komelj's Kako misliti partizansko umetnost (How to think partisan art?), 2009, Zaloba cf/*: Ljubljana.

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Liberation Struggle in the history the Slovenian nation-state and a condemnation of everything that came after the Second World War up until the end of the 1980s. The reconciliation discourse 4 thus completely relativizes the debate about the Yugoslav socialist project and attempts to demonize or erase all revolutionary traces of the Peoples Liberation Struggle. It is true that the post-war killings were part of the revolutionary terror, but there was no totalitarian regime at that time. Firstly, any serious historical study can assert that Yugoslavia was a socialist state (democratic centralism of the League of Yugoslav Communists, which had a last word in political decisions), which on some levels (economy, culture) practiced a relative freedom (self-management, workers participation, local communities). Secondly, revolution cannot be simply equated with totalitarianism, as Hannah Arendt argues on various places 5 . Yugoslav revolution was the destruction of the old Yugoslav order and happened in the conditions of war (WWII), thus, it is hardly imaginable to avoid any violence. That does not mean that we should leave out a fierce condemnation of excesses and repression of the Communist Partys policies after the war. There were different ways to prevent violence and excesses, but it the logic of revenge and also political purges prevailed. However, the defenders of the collaborationists (Home Guard) are not interested in political theory and historical discussions about the emergence of Yugoslavia and problems of Peoples Liberation Struggle (PLS), but in revising Slovenian history and putting forward moral claims with practical consequences: when all criminals will be condemned, reconciliation will be possible. In the light of this moral re-articulation, the Partisan side has been pushed into the corner. It has passively accepted the guilt and accepted the terrain of the moralizing discourse. Instead of

Miklav Komelj pointed out that national reconciliation was a key dimension in Ciril abots fascist national programme of breaking up Yugoslavia. National reconciliation has a reactionary background, stemming from a biologistic biological conception of a nation; it was reactivated during the 1980s. A very interesting thesis on the contextualization of national reconciliation was put forward by Lev Centrih: In the broadest sense, it has been understood as a call for the mutual recognition and respect of all sides engaged in the conflict, on the grounds that they all belong to the same motherland, to the same Nation, even though they may perceive their devotion differently and are marked by errors and crimes. Nation and motherland have been perceived as pre-given qualities of every individual, that is, as essentially separate from ones affiliations to political, production, or ideological practices. (2008: 70-71) 5 Even Hannah Arendt argues that Tito's Yugoslavia should not be analyzed as totalitarian regime. See her book Origins of Totalitarianism.

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presenting a broader defence of the transformational effects of the antifascist struggle, the Partisan side has backed down into defending merely the national aspect of the PLS. The home Guard and Partisan argumentation reclaim the WWII to launch Slovenian Nation and erase any emancipatory dimensions of the Yugoslav revolution. Reconciliation did not only result in excluding Yugoslav event from the history, but also in forgiving and rehabilitating local fascism. Slovenian independence entailed a specific logic of identification: de-identifying with anything that contained anything Yugoslav and reidentyfiny with the presupposed Slovenian Nation.

Modernist memorial sites: how to re-affirm Yugoslav event? Is it today still possible to rethink the Yugoslav politics of memory? Could the field that is sutured by morality on the one (the figure of suffering) and the state politics of bearing witness (canonized memorial sites 6 ) on the other hand produce emancipatory effects? We have to say that even on the field of memorialisation, Yugoslavian cultural production had very specific effects. We shall look closer the fascinating memorial enterprise of Vojin Baki 7 . We will not be interested in his artwork because of its pure artistic form, or even less in order to detach his art from revolutionary politics as some contemporary commentators do (see ii, 2001). On the contrary, we will show how precisely politics intervened in the artwork, although not in a directly statist or socialist realist way. Bakis interventions reconfigured the established relationship between politics and aesthetics in the realm of memorials 8 .

We must not forget that official memorial sites served as important vehicle for mytologisation of Liberation struggle, the latter becoming an ossified signifier and mot dordre of the official ideology. 7 There are some other important artists, who produced similar modernist memorials such as Bogdan Bogdanovi and Miodrag ivkovi from the 1960s on. See an interactive map: http://fzz.cc/issue02PART.html. As Robert Burghardt comments on the webpage: those monuments have an abstract, often monumental, but always unusual and peculiar formal vocabulary in common. 8 We are indebted and inspired by Miklav Komeljs analysis of partisan art during WWII (2009).

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Figure 2

Vojin Baki was one of the most important Yugoslavian sculptors, working from the 1950s to the 1990s. He conceptualized and constructed a series of antifascist monuments, which were part of Yugoslavian modernism. Today most of Bakis monuments are in a poor state, sad sites of slow decay. Furthermore, explosives destroyed a number of them: in Gudovac, Karlovac, Bjelovar, izme, etc. One of his masterworks, which is to a certain extent preserved was set up in 1981 and is located in Petrova Gora. The Petrova Gora monument commemorates Partisan struggle and the battle of 1942, where two hundred Serbian villagers were killed by Ustashi forces that were located on the top of the mountain. At first glance the structure is not recognizable as a typical antifascist monument. The precise meaning of the sculpture is not clear. We also see no representation of suffering victims or antifascist victors, there is no idealized figure of partisans. This sculptural form is antifigurative and abstract. It completely negates the humanist moment of suffering or victorious partisans, but at the same time strategically touches the question of re-presentation and imagination of the partisan struggle.

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What we see is a massive construction of steel and concrete, which is 37 meters high. From the massive platform rise oval structures with round shapes, which are constructed in four storeys that outgrow asymmetrically from one another. The sculptural work, or rather building, reminds us more of a space station or a space shuttle, which apart from a firm platform does not have any specific hierarchy that would imply a topdown pyramidal structure. The sculpture looks as if it has emerged from a different world. We could easily relate Bakis monument to Tatlins monument to the Third International. It repeats its fundamental gesture: it forces the spectator to recognize a certain striving for the future, whereas at the same time it reasserts the utopian character of the antifascist community that formed and realized the event of Yugoslavia. Robert Burghardt nicely draws attention to this uncommon dimension of Yugoslav modernist monuments: They open the scene for numerous associations; they could be ambassadors from far-away stars, or from a different, unrealised present. The openness which originates in the abstract language of the monuments is a visual manifestation of the emancipation from the Stalinist dominance of socialist realism in the eastern bloc, in which the future is represented only in a happy-overreaching form of the present. The monuments invoke a utopian moment, stick to aniconism, and translate the promise of the future into a universal gesture 9 . Bakis monumental work opens a crucial parallel: couldnt we relate this boldness, this aesthetic novelty also as something that was internal to the politics of partisan struggle? Because this struggle indeed produced something radically new in the situation, the pre-War situation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, dominated by the Serbian Crown and semi-peripheral capitalist mode of production. From the point of view of the old Yugoslavia (and we can add also from the contemporary post-Yugoslav context) the antifascist struggle was something unimaginable, a ruptural event that created a new political community, which was based on internationalist, non-ethnic criteria. Yugoslavian liberation struggle was a national liberation from the Nazi and fascist occupation and socialist revolution, which broke up with capitalist social relations. From the very beginning liberation struggle included the transformative dimension, the not-

http://fzz.cc/issue02PART.html. 27.5.

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yet-realized, not yet there, the handling with Real 10 . The principal political axiom was the axiom of equality, equality for all, egalitarian community that fought against fascism and exploitation. Bakis monument evokes precisely this risky nature and novelty of revolutionary antifascist struggle 11 . However, it is not only analogy between the novelty of art and politics that we would like to advocate. Much more we would like to show how both fields get reconstituted in the process acquiring new meanings. Our basic inspiration for this move is indebted to the lucid interpretation of the relationship between art and politics from Jacques Rancire (2004). One of his key theses claims that art becomes art only when it is identified with something that is not art. Art becomes Art through non-Art. The case of memorial site was the privileged investment of state politics, where the genre of memorial war art was interwoven in a meta-narrative of victory or suffering which bounded art to ethics. The case of majority war memorials testifies to the existence of this presupposed form, ascribed genre, which instituted specific artistic cannon (socialist state art 12 ). But as far as Baki work is concerned, his monuments do not refer to a canonical glorified image of the partisan or a suffering victim of fascist violence. The case of Petrova Gora refers to a utopian political community that was operative during the Second World War. The antifascist partisan struggle was engaged in establishing the new social structure, a new network of social relations that was historically a negation of fascism (compare Monik, 2005). Moreover, this political community did not have only utopian dimension, but comprised of the real communist movement. The latter is a movement that abolishes the existing state of things, as Marx argued in German Ideology. International antifascist solidarity, socialist revolution (expropriation of bourgeoisie and redistribution of wealth), cultural revolution (education of the masses) all formed a part of the event of new Yugoslavia. Through the impossible (trans)figuration of partisan and
We will return to this later. For a more detailed account on Yugoslavia as socialist revolution and event see Pupovac (2008). 11 See also a thesis put forward by Branimir Stojanovi (2003) on the status of Yugoslav revolutionary war, which articulated a different answer to both Nazi total war and to the collaborationism of old forces. 12 Komelj shows how after the Second World War cultural circles started slowly imposing the bourgeois criteria of art and advocated a bourgeois autonomy of art. This tendency was confronted by a hardline Communist partys socialist realism that subjugated art to politics. These were both ideological positions, which tended to erase the legacy of partisan art rupture (2009).
10

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communist community Baki succeeded in reframing the sensorial experience signified by Yugoslav modernism. It produced a double effect: firstly, his sculpture broke with the already established cannon of memorial production in Yugoslavia. What was seen as the normal distribution of the sensible was subverted by a discomforting presentation of antifascist struggle, by a spatial construction that triggered many responses. Against the socialist statist art approach that represented the figure of the partisan, Baki produced an abstract form, an antihumanist sculptural intervention. This aesthetical novelty of memorial carries resemblances with other works of ivkovi and Bogdanovi, who together formed an art movement of memorial sites. Only through their artistic practices could art autonomy or art itself be created. Their artworks asserted the side of not yet existing and by performing this, they had to articulate artworks relationship to the world in a new fashion. The critique of official ethical cannon was one indicator, but also importantly was the political-symbolic layer, which addressed spectators in a new way. It forces us to think about what monument stands for, or how it is connected to the antifascist struggle. The abstract nature of the monument has something in common with the abstract nature of partisan politics, politics that rests on the principle of equality and politics that stood on the side of not yet existing, something that was fighting for new world. Next important political dimension that was grasped by memorial site was articulation of the agency of partisan struggle. It was neither a figure of the partisan nor the Communist Party of Yugoslavia which was embodied in Bakis memorial. The figure of partisan struggle can only be understood as masses of anonymous partisans that fought against the occupation and collaborators. This collective anonymity is a feature of new modernist aesthetics. Against the moralization and humanization of memorial sites, we witness a revolutionary politics of aesthetics. A lesson to be learned from this memorial, which is supported by Rancires theoretical position, is the following: the alternative between socialist state art and socialist autonomy is false. Artistic rupture always brings something new into the world; new sensorial experience, and by doing so it is detached from the recognised distribution of the sensible or existing artistic cannons (state art). However, art cannot be seen as the only field or form of life that would conserve the

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emancipatory promise that would be simply detached from the dirty reality. Artistic autonomy is not the protector of the failure of emancipatory politics, which sooner or later can get consolidated in the state power, as Adorno seems to suggest (Rancire, 2006). Bakis work thus created a certain interval, a gap between official state ideology and mainstream artistic expression, a gap between socialist realism and art autonomy, which made visible what was not visible before. Only through the impossible presentation of the partisan masses and sculptural novelty does his work succeed in reanimating or sustaining fidelity to the Yugoslav event. Revisiting the past, he opened up the vision for the future: his insistence on the emancipatory past event is there only to force us to act in the present. It arrived in this position only through a certain artistic labour, that is, without being directly political (in terms of who the represented object/subject is) and without ascribing a presupposed artistic dimension (the existing cannon of ethics and socialist realism), but only through this brilliant detour was Baki able to produce the thinking partisan monument. The logic of identification of pre-war Yugoslavia was undermined by the partisan event: de-identifying with the presupposed national substance (Serb, Croat or Slovene), new Yugoslavia became a community recognising all nations and nationalities, where national liberation included also fighting against exploitation. This produced a new syntagm of working people, which mean rearticulation of nation to the question of class. If both topics were not resolved, there would be no new Yugoslavia. De-identification entailed re-identification with Yugoslavness, being neither a Nation nor language, an unfinished political project. This logic internal to the Yugoslav event can be traced in the modernist memorial sites of socialist Yugoslavia (in 1960s and 1970s). Instead of conclusion Our short case studies demonstrated radically different community formation in the post-Yugoslav and Yugoslav context. The case of Slovenian identitarian community and erection of new memorial sites is bound to national reconciliation that results in the rehabilitation of fascism, which we could name counter-revolution. Contrastingly, the case of Bakis modernist monuments opens up a new configuration of art and politics in

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the Yugoslav context, affirming the specificity of Yugoslav event. The latter is bound to the idea national liberation, international solidarity and socialist revolution. The lesson of it Yugoslav thinking monument lays in the claim that monument is not an ethical herald of the future, but already claims the future, which wants to re-affirm a past partisan gesture of novelty. Its reference to the past is to continue in this contingent, emancipatory moment of the struggle, which always already propels us into the future.

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Green Albion: Mapping the national-global in a new age of austerity

By Dr. Rebecca Bramall Climate change is regularly presented as a global problem, for which transnational solutions are required. Yet in recent years, and particularly since the onset of the global recession, a wide range of social actors in the UK have been turning to British nationalism in the search for resources through which to communicate and perpetuate sustainable initiatives. There is a continuing debate about the extent to which Britishness and the national past can be articulated to radical democratic ends (Laclau, 1977; Hall, 1996: 42; Pitcher, 2009), one that needs to be elaborated in order to take account of this apparent greening of some forms of nationalism. The question of whether this yoking of nationalism to sustainability is likely to engage broad constituencies in progressive social change is clearly a critical one. However in this paper I simply want to focus on the question of why the nation and nationalism have emerged as potent elements in sustainability discourses in the contemporary moment. What role do these elements perform in the current conjuncture? In order to attempt to answer this question Im going to be discussing two related cultural phenomena: an advertising campaign (and branding exercise) by the energy company lectricit de France (EDF, trading as EDF Energy in the UK), and a newly-opened Terence Conran 1 restaurant. Both can be seen as exemplary of a wider discursive formation I have termed the new austerity, and which is the object of my current research project. This term names a set of discourses in which an analogy is drawn between todays recession-stricken, climate change-threatened Britain, and the austerity years of 1939-55. 2 Nationalism is a critical element of the new austerity, so my first

Terence Conran is a British designer, restaurateur and retailer. He founded the Habitat chain of home furnishing shops in the 1960s and a portfolio of restaurants in the 1990s. See http://www.conran.com/about-us/history-of-conran/biography 2 Another example of this discourse the Imperial War Museums upcoming exhibition The Ministry of Food, which aims to show visitors that growing your own food, eating seasonal fruit and vegetables, reducing imports, recycling and healthy nutrition were just as topical in 1940 as they are today (IWM, 2010). See: http://food.iwm.org.uk/

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step will be to characterize the two case studies in more detail, and to locate them in this overarching discursive formation.

Austerity nationalism In spring 2009 a series of billboard adverts placed by the energy company EDF began to inform consumers of an impending event of national importance. Each advertisement depicted an everyday object rendered in a green Union Jack pattern against a white background a dress on a dressmakers dummy, a boot, a sofa, a mug accompanied by the slogan Do something green for the team on Green Britain Day. 10.07.09. 3 Later iterations of the advert were to expand on what this something, and its relationship to the object depicted, might be: Football cards, stickers, snogs. Swapping is one of lifes pleasures. Whats old hat to you is new hat to your friends. But why not show them the rest of your wardrobe? On Green Britain Day, for example. Swap parties could help keep thousands of tonnes out of landfill. And hundreds of quid in your pocket. So organise your own party and decide whose clothes you want to get into. After the first Green Britain Day the campaign continued under the banner Team Green Britain, and its focus switched to signing up individuals to ongoing team activities, modelled on those promoted in the initial advertising campaign. Join Team Energy, for instance, and the focus is on activities that will cut energy use in the home: how about inviting your friends and family around once a week to watch your favourite TV show?.

The team in question here is the British national team: a significant element of the campaign is its link with the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, whose logo appears alongside that of EDF on all Green Britain publicity materials. Thus the deadline for fighting climate change is explicitly dictated, in this campaign, by the forthcoming games in East London, providing the slogan help Britain reduce its carbon footprint by 2012. For an example of the billboards, see: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8586443@N03/3673201602/

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Green Britain Days green flag insignia doesnt simply articulate nationalism to environmentalism: other energy companies have already attempted to make such a connection (Mcalister, 2009). What is novel to the EDF campaign is its hand-made, patchwork aesthetic, 4 derived from flags commissioned from a small company who sell textile crafts online. In a post to Flickr, the creator of the commission describes the 100+ hours of fabric selection, cutting, sewing, trimming, and binding involved in creating each patchwork of many fabrics, including some reused/repurposed.5 This make do and mend element is what helps the Green Britain project resonate with audiences who have become familiar with new austerity discourses. Launched in January 2009, Albion is a caff, bakery and shop which occupies the ground floor of a converted Victorian warehouse in Shoreditch, East London. It is the second project I want to discuss. Here is the websites description of its offer: Typical British caff food, nothing challenging or complicated, just straightforward hearty ingredients and recipes. The menu includes breakfast served throughout the day, fish and chips, pies, sandwiches, puddings and fruit crumbles. Open all day for coffees, teas, English ales, juices, biscuits and cakes. The late-night menu includes Welsh rabbit, kedgeree and hot chocolate with shortbread. 6 Reflecting on the subject of British patriotism in the 1980s, Raphael Samuel observed that the most striking of all absences, in the components of national sentiment, is the notion that British is best. There is no such thing, he went on to note, as a national diet, as there was in the days when Boiled beef and carrots provided a rousing music hall chorus, and solid breakfasts and suet puddings could be taken (Samuel, 1989: xxii, xxxi). Albion conjures such a diet from an indefinable nostalgic past (Jameson, 1985: 117), and re-presents it as something we might actually want to eat. It reasserts the notion that British is best, and it does so without irony or apology. The valorization of
4 5

See for example: http://www.flickr.com/photos/scarycrow/3664839958/ See: http://www.flickr.com/photos/firehorsetextiles/3698091811/in/photostream/ 6 http://www.albioncaff.co.uk/

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Britishness is strongly tied, here, to a notion of sustainability verging on a kind of protectionism. The message is intended to be a reassuring but inward-looking one: if all else fails, we can live on Marmite. Its the sense Albion conveys of the nation under siege beleaguered, in need of defence that pinpoints its relationship to the new austerity.

Origin supply security It has been suggested that the force of a hegemonic discourse lies not in its actual content, but in its form, or in other words, in the consistency it introduces to an otherwise chaotic political terrain (Smith, 1994: 38). I want now to consider this process of formal hegemony secured by the discursive formation of the new austerity by thinking about the contemporary anxieties, concerns, and desires that can be read into the spaces, images and texts of Albion and Team Green Britain, and to consider how these anxieties are both stimulated in and palliated through these projects. 7 Through this analysis I intend to characterize the role that the nation is performing in these case studies, and in the discourse of the new austerity more generally. Its not hard to identify the kinds of concerns that these projects seem to organize and soothe so successfully. As the text I reproduced above suggests, the Team Green Britain campaign explicitly addresses an already-anxious subject who has concerns about her excessive consumption, rising fuel bills, and carbon footprint. The campaign website elaborates further, addressing these worries even more bluntly: Team Swap is about swapping your old stuff for someone elses old stuff. Both of you end up with something you want, you both save

It is important to emphasize that these projects do not simply reflect consumers anxieties back at them. But neither can they simply be seen as disciplining technologies which work to produce (in a Foucauldian sense) anxious subjects who will be responsive to the imperatives organizing these projects who will make return visits to Albion, and who will switch their energy supply to EDF (Bramall, 2010). I prefer to read these two projects as examples of the way in which lived experience (in this case, the disordered experience of living in Britain in a time of environmental and financial crisis) can be discursively organized and made meaningful to broad constituencies of people. To the extent that the discourse of the new austerity (and the particular instances of this discourse described here) is fit for this purpose, it is likely to be perpetuated, extended, and developed by an ever-increasing range of social actors and projects.

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money and you cut out the energy it takes to produce something new. At the same time, theres less pressure on those landfill sites. Other team activities are designed to meet anxieties about poor health and lack of exercise (cycling is a great way to get in shape), about a loss of community (host a lunch to meet your neighbours), and about paying a premium for ready-made goods produced in far-flung places (stitch up, knit your own clothes!). These are the concerns that Team Green Britain addresses squarely, but it is also possible to read more diffuse and inchoate uncertainties into their project design. In particular, the campaign responds to questions about the relative merits, in environmental terms, of different forms of energy, as well to fears about energy security and its relationship to economic well-being. Some of the same anxieties and concerns can be read into Albions spaces and texts. The caffs shared tables speak to the loss-of-community narrative, while its website actually conjures a local community (for which it aims to provide an everyday resource) out of the gentrified and transient zone of East London around it. 8 Like Team Green Britain, Albion offers green and recession-busting solutions: an environmentally friendly approach has been adopted where ever [sic] possible, while tap water comes as standard (in an enamelled, 40s-style jug, labelled COLD WATER). 9 The anxieties about overconsumption and not making and doing that Team Green Britain answers with the call to take up knitting needles are soothed here by the arrival of a teapot nestling under a knitted cosy, and by the reuse of vintage, high-industrial-era cutlery (Made in Sheffield), displayed in Lyles Golden Syrup tins. In neither instance does it matter that the repaired/homemade objects of these discourses have not really, or not yet, been created by the subjects being interpellated: Albion and the Team Green Britain campaign offer comforting spaces where those subjects can play at being good (anti-)consumer-citizens, just as a child with a tea set plays at being mother.

This latter ambition also depends, of course, on the cultural valorization of local, independent shops, the subject of a Friends of the Earth campaign in 2006. 9 Albion has also been billed as a budget choice, but as one irritated customer noted on a review website, there's nothing budget about 10 for fish and chips (Time Out, 2009).

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It is not surprising that Albion is however primarily organized by a distinct set of concerns about food, and in particular food production and processing: Albion is to an internationalized food market as Team Green Britain is to an internationalized energy market. This venture is only one of several restaurants that have responded to debates about food miles by foregrounding the British elements of their menu, or by setting limits on the distance from which they will source their supplies. 10 In a similar vein, Albions offer of dishes such as devilled kidneys and crackling attends to the problem of food waste by taking up Fergus Hendersons philosophy of nose to tail eating. The caffs open kitchen is consciously defetishizing of the production process, tapping into anxieties about food processing and fake foods. The shop sells heritage, not GM, tomatoes. But perhaps most interesting, and most determinative of Albions appeal, is its staging of a culinary scenario both disturbingly austere and affectively satisfying. Albions website explains that the shop specialises in great British food and drink products, but while it stocks the kinds of small, artisan products this description implies (including seasonal fruit and vegetables from the kitchen garden at Barton Court, Terence Conran's country home) its visual impact is achieved via displays of decidedly mass-produced foodstuffs, including Marmite, Branston Pickle, Jacobs Cream Crackers, Colmans Mustard, and Lea and Perrins Worcestershire Sauce. The shops shelves resemble nothing so much as a reserve store cupboard of rationed essentials, or a wartime larder packed with homemade pickles and preserves. The unease, here, is around food supply: the shop addresses anxieties about food running out or becoming contaminated, and about constraints on consumer choice. Albion stages a scenario of want and deficiency, but at the same time reassures us that we will be satisfied, as indeed we are, as we progress through the shop and into the caff, for our breakfast, lunch or tea. 11 The experience is analogous to visiting the Imperial War Museums 1940s house, where you can experience the frisson of austerity before purchasing a bar of ration fudge in the gift shop.
10

One notable example is the London restaurant Konstam, which claims to source over 80% of its ingredients from within the area covered by the London Underground. 11 We are satisfied, but we experience a restriction of the palate. Martin Purvis has argued that the dietary changes urban consumers experienced in late nineteenth-century Europe heightened the impact of their increasing distance, both function and spatial, from traditional forms of agricultural and locally focused systems of self-provisioning (Purvis, 2003: 69). It might be argued that a similar process is taking place here, but in reverse.

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Mapping the national-global The degree of public interest in the recent takeover of Cadbury by Kraft became a subject of discussion in itself. Given that the acquisition story is a familiar one, why, one critic asked, did it grab the public imagination? Granted, jobs might go but jobs always go. Granted, the new management might not be sympathetic to the workforce it usually isnt. Granted, theyre foreign these days, thats the norm. British companies are taken over by foreign firms all the time. As Tony Blair once pointed out to the French president, the electricity in 10 Downing Street is supplied by a French company. So why the fuss? (Lanchester, 2010: 10). The same question could be directed at Albions displays of Marmite, Branston Pickle, and Colmans Mustard, except that a time when they could be identified as products created by British food manufacturers is long gone. These imperial-age foodstuffs, invented and first manufactured in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, are now trademarks owned by multi-national food manufacturers and agri-processers such as Unilever, Heinz, United Biscuits, and Premier Foods. Similarly, as Blairs comment underlines, Britain has, over the last ten years or so, stopped being self-sufficient in energy and has become a net importer. Why, then, does EDF want to pose as a British energy company, supplying British-produced electricity? Why are formerly British foodstuffs the cornerstone of the Albions shop display? Why, and why now? One very obvious answer to this question would be to diagnose a straightforward case of nostalgia for a time when Britain was a great industrial and manufacturing nation. In order to consider the limitations of this argument properly, its worth briefly recalling the context and substance of the debates about nostalgia culture which preoccupied cultural theorists and historians on the left in the eighties and early nineties. In Britain, these debates focused on the predominance of heritagized representations of British history in popular culture of the time, and most of the scholarship was strongly attentive to the
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political and economic context of its emergence (Wright, 1985; Bromley, 1988; Samuel, 1989; 1994; Corner and Harvey, 1991; Higson, 1993). In the US, Frederic Jameson responded to related cultural phenomena in his analysis and critique of the postmodern nostalgia film (1985). Summarizing these debates necessarily ignores their complexities and nuances, but it is not overly reductive to say that it is the ideologically obfuscatory function of nostalgia texts and discourses that is of most concern to these scholars. For Roger Bromley (1988), the use made of the national past by Conservative governments compensates for two processes: the Thatcherite policy of orienting the British economy towards the global and the multinational, and, relatedly, the pace of change in British society that this policy demanded. Samuel, reiterating the point, contends that: A government ruthlessly intent of modernising (and Americanising) British society, nevertheless calls for a return to traditional ways. The EEC subsidises regionalist projects. The multinational companies trade as local firms. The more cosmopolitanism capitalism becomes, the more it seems to wear a homespun look; the more nomadic its operations, the more it advertises its local affiliations. (Samuel, 1989: lvii) To transpose this compensation thesis to the contemporary conjuncture, it might be argued that the current austerity nationalism works to supplement a de facto absence of agency on the part of the nation-state vis--vis the present economic and environmental crises. 12 Or to pursue this analysis in relation to a more specific and concrete instantiation of Albions nationalism, we could flesh out the analysis we might make of a brand such as Marmite: that Unilevers multiple brands obscure common ownership; that this veiling effect is, in fact, what a multinational buys when it acquires a familiar brand. It follows

It is notable that the social actors (national and multi-national companies, charities, museums and media institutions) who have sought to promote the paternalistic, super-egoic models of state authority associated with ration-book Britain operate at one remove, at least, from the centre of government.

12

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that what is obscured by a display of such products is the reality of the globalized food system. It is important to recall the strong conception, in these debates, of the role historical cultural texts ought ideally to perform. In Jamesons work this role is of course specifically conceived in terms of their capacity to illuminate the present mode of production through contact with past forms of social existence (Jameson, 1979: 70). Nostalgia-culture fails in this task; it fails to reinvent a picture of the past in its lived totality (Jameson, 1985: 116). The idea of rendering tangible the means of production remains important in contemporary environmental and anti-capitalist discourse. But from a post-structuralist perspective, the idea that it is possible to illuminate capitals markets and systems fully or totally is, of course, problematic. Such a perspective thus produces the insight that each of the projects Ive been describing enfolds a particular kind of story about existing social relations (Littler, 2009: 43), a story in this case about globalized food and energy supply systems. I want to suggest, contra Jameson et al., that the nationalist retrospects at stake in the scenarios Ive described precisely do render intelligible shifting patterns of social relations, or in this case, what might be termed the historicity of markets. By intelligible, I clearly dont mean that these retrospects render internationalized food and energy production capable of being understood from a position outside of discursivity or of ideology that is, that they deliver the truth of such systems. I mean that new austerity discourses have proven to have certain critical properties. The case studies Ive discussed are instances of a discursive formation that articulates and introduces a consistency to some of the present conjunctures most significant, and elsewhere incongruent, social concerns. Austerity nationalism resonates, moreover, with broad constituencies of British consumers, making it one of the dominant forms through which the conjunction of recession and environmental catastrophe in the contemporary moment are thought, imaged and lived. Via their figuration of a historical-geographical known Britain at war the images, texts and spaces worked up by Team Green Britain and Albion contribute to their customers sense of their dependence on global
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social relations and resources. Rather than suggesting that the function of Albions display of once-British foodstuffs is essentially obfuscatory that it veils, through its heritage branding, the reality of the globalized food system, I want to argue that Albion is only meaningful as a discursive space because its clients are aware that the mode of production it celebrates is no longer. Cadbury, we all know, is (more or less) the last to go, and thats the reason for the fuss. The national-global mappings that Albion and Team Green Britain consolidate are fundamentally and self-consciously historical ones, and that is one of reasons why they create an opportunity to grasp our own. We may not want to rule as entirely adequate the mappings of the national-global that Albion and Team Green Britain offer (Hall, 1996: 39). We may have real concerns about the tendencies of these mappings. But rather than reading the turn to austerity nationalism as a retreat from global political-economic realities, it is important, I suggest, to interpret this discursive formation as productive and indicative of an emergent consciousness of, and concern about, the shift towards globalized food and energy markets. The question of how individuals develop a sense of their connection to, and dependence upon, globally distributed social relations and material resources remains a critical issue. At the very least, Albion and Team Green Britain exemplify some of the resources through which this process is being perpetuated today.

Bibliography Bramall, R. (2010) Dig for victory! Anti-consumerism, austerity, and new historical subjectivities, Subjectivity 3(4) (in press). Bromley, R. (1988) Lost Narratives: Popular Fictions, Politics and Recent History. London and New York: Routledge. Corner, J. and Harvey, S. (1991) Introduction: Great Britain Limited, in Corner and Harvey (eds) Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of National Culture. London: Routledge. Hall, S. (1996) The problem of ideology: Marxism without guarantees, in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (ed.) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Abingdon: Oxford.
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Higson, A. (1993) Re-presenting the national past: nostalgia and pastiche in the heritage film, in L. Friedman (ed.) British Cinema and Thatcherism. London: UCL Press. Imperial War Museum (2010) 'Press release: The Ministry of Food', Imperial War Museum. Available at: http://www.iwm.org.uk/server/show/ConWebDoc.6574. Accessed 25 January 2010. Jameson, F. (1979) Marxism and historicism, New Literary History 11(1): 41-73. Jameson, F. (1985) Postmodernism and Consumer Society, in H. Foster (ed.) Postmodern Culture. London: Pluto Press. Laclau, E. (1977) Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory. London: New Left Books. Lanchester, J. (2010) Short cuts, London Review of Books 32(1): 20. Littler, J. (2009) Radical Consumption. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Macalister, T. (2009) Energy firms fuming over EDFs Green Britain Day, Guardian, 10 July. Pitcher, B. (2009) The Politics of Multiculturalism: Race and Racism in Contemporary Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Purvis, M. (2003) Societies of consumers and consumer societies: Co-operation, consumption and politics in Britain and Continental Europe c. 1850-1920, in D. B. Clarke, M. A. Doel, and K. M. L. Housiaux (eds) The Consumption Reader. London: Routledge. Samuel, R. (1989) Introduction: exciting to be English, in R. Samuel (ed.) Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity: Volume One: History and Politics. London: Routledge. Samuel, R. (1994) Theatres of Memory. London and New York: Verso. Smith, A. M. (1994) New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Time Out (2009) Review: Albion at the Boundary Project, Time Out. Available at: http://www.timeout.com/london/restaurants/reviews/13406.html. Accessed 10 January 2010. Wright, P. (1985) On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain. London: Verso.

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Panel 6 (Wednesday,16:00-18:00)
Seda Muftugil Ernst van den Hemel Marc James Mueller

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Religion/Moral Education in the late Ottoman era and in Modern Turkey

By Seda Muftugil A particular illusion still reigns in Turkey today, which asserts that there is an abrupt break with the religious Ottoman Empire and secular Republic of Turkey. Within this illusion, there is also another, which asserts that the late Ottoman society was deeply divided by a clash of worldviews; between a traditional world led by ulema 1 and that of a westernist world associated with Enlightenment and Progress. According to proponents of this view, irreconcilable differences between these world views resulted in a schizoid late Ottoman society. 2 I put forward that these illusions are direct results of projecting post-Kemalist dichotomies back onto late Ottoman society. Although today it is criticized by many, these projections are still tenacious and keep on distorting the past. When the ungainly body of late Ottoman history is truncated to fit to the modernization theory, what one always encounters is the sharply defined entities of religious and secular. I stand by the idea that instead of a historical trajectory that juxtaposes wild swings between secular and religious periods in the late Ottoman and Republican eras, it is more accurate to envision recombinations of largely the same elements reflecting changes in emphasis over time. 3 I think that the history of the rather complicated religion/moral education in the late Ottoman Empire is a suitable one to show the blurred, redefined and nuanced edges of the concepts of religious and secular. In the context of religion/moral education, I have chosen to examine three religion/moral textbooks that belong to different eras. Starting from Hamidian era, as particular constructions of knowledge, textbooks have displayed successfully whose knowledge is of most worth and what is counted as 'legitimate and truthful in a country. 4
Ulema refers to the educated class of Muslim legal scholars engaged in the field of several Islamic studies. Benjamin C. Fortna, Imperial Classroom Islam, the State and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire, Oxford Univ. Press: New York, 2002, p. 14 3 Benjamin C. Fortna, Imperial Classroom Islam, the State and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire, Oxford Univ. Press: New York, 2002, p. 247
2 1

Kenan Cayir, Preparing Turkey for the European Union: Nationalism, National Identity and 'Otherness' in Turkey's New Textbooks, Journal of Intercultural Studies, Vol.30, No.1, February 2009, pp.39-55, p.41, Apple, M. W. Official Knowledge. London: Routledge, 1993

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I believe that religion textbooks, commissioned by the state, are of critical importance to trace the intricate relation between concepts such as secularism, religion and state in the Turkish context. The first textbook I examine belongs to the Hamidian period (1876-1908) in the late Ottoman era, the second to early republic period (1923-1933) and the third to the last years of single party regime (1940s). Each textbook, when historically analyzed in its own context, can be seen as a latent attack on the so called schizoid history or the post Kemalist dichotomies of the Turko-Ottoman history. The content of the textbooks of these very different time periods will hopefully show first that there are persistent elements of Islam in allegedly secular endeavors and, in the same vein, how in very secular seeming endeavors there are Islamic traits. On this issue I remain cautious to the point Talal Asad makes about the pitfall of essentializing the concepts of secular and religious. 5 I also do not claim that if one strips appearances one would see that some apparently secular institutions were really religious or vice versa. 6 On the contrary, I also believe that there is nothing essentially religious or secular. Secondly, the textbooks that I will analyze will show that despite the different publishing dates of the textbooks, where the contested secularism principle has been interpreted rather differently, there is a consistent confessional understanding of - or approach to Islam that crosscuts these time periods. Lastly, I want to argue that the subordination and instrumentalization of religion by the state is a form of secularization which had its origins in the Hamidian period and continued after the founding of the republic and that there was no clear cut break in this respect between these three periods. Thus, a nuanced rereading of these texts will surely confuse a mind who still abets with the meta-narratives of Westernization, secularization, and modernization.

Religion Textbooks of the Hamidian era (1876-1908) In the Hamidian period, Ottoman education policies were very much influenced by a feeling that the Empire was under various attacks due to its vulnerable position.
5

Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford University Press: California,2003, p.25 6 Ibid

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Fortna argues that in the field of education these threats came in the form of an array of educational competitors present within the empire's borders: foreign missionaries, neighboring states, and indigenous minority groups. 7 Surrounded by this kind of a psychology during the Hamidian period, foreign institutions were increasingly considered to be agencies in which native children, Muslim as well as non-Muslim, were subjected to political indoctrination which weakened loyalty toward the state and the Sultan. 8 In order to prevent this, the state redoubled its efforts to fund and build schools wherever possible, in keeping with the vision on the 1869 Education Regulation. Education policies were changed in a way that it was still informed by a very enlightenment notion of progress that relied heavily on Western European models but cut them with a strong dose of Ottoman and Islamic elements that were deemed capable of meliorating the deleterious side effects of Western influence. 9 Thus, the Ottoman educational policy was based both on Ottoman and Islamic tradition and on the modernity of Western models. Prior to the Tanzimat period, that began in 1839, there were no school textbooks in the modern sense. It is only from the Tanzimat onwards that textbooks began to appear which are specially designed for civil educational institutions. 10 During the Hamidian period, religion/moral education was only a course among many courses. Thus a superficial gaze at the education system of this time might conclude with the argument that the education had become secular, following the idea that in the preceding education system, education itself was religious. However, a close look to the content of education reveals further complexities. During the Hamidian period all levels of schools, as well as most of the curricula, were covered by regular textbooks. Somel argues that in fact it was the tendency of the Hamidian regime to establish efficient control of course content at all levels of

Benjamin C. Fortna, Imperial Classroom Islam, the State and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire, Oxford Univ. Press: New York, 2002, p. 47 8 Selcuk Aksin Somel, The Modernization of Public Education in the Ottoman Empire 1839-1908 Islamisation, Autocracy and Discipline, Brill: Leiden, Boston, Koln, 2001, p.15 9 Benjamin C. Fortna, Imperial Classroom Islam, the State and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire, Oxford Univ. Press: New York, 2002, p. 3 10 Selcuk Aksin Somel, The Modernization of Public Education in the Ottoman Empire 1839-1908 Islamisation, Autocracy and Discipline, Brill: Leiden, Boston, Koln, 2001, p.187

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educational institutions within the Ottoman borders that accelerated the promotion of textbooks. 11 In line with this, during this period considerable attention had been given to the commissioning, controlling, inspection, and the occasional banning, of a variety of texts that appeared in the schools of the late Ottoman Empire. 12 The textbook that I would like to examine in this era is titled Rehber-i Ahlak, (The Guide to Morals), written by Ali Irfan and published in the year 1899-1900. 13 As we learn from Fortna, Rehber-i Ahlak mixed elements inspired by Western Europe with those exhibiting a clearly Islamic and Ottoman lineage. While the text's formal aspects call to mind the Western editorial tradition, the content drew from Islamic and Ottoman traditions. Firstly, ninety percent of the text appears in the form of questions posed by a student and answers supplied by a teacher. This didactic method recalls an important mode of theological disputation prevalent in Ottoman and Islamic history. The student poses the questions which are fully and correctly answered by the teacher. Secondly, the texts in the textbook are based upon Islamic terms, sources, and concepts explaining the moral duties incumbent upon the young subjects of the Ottoman Empire. The Islamic identity of the text appears through both its form and content. The most obvious examples of this are the mentions of the Prophet Mohammad, specifically Islamic duties and injunctions, and the citation of Hadith-narrations originating from the words and deeds of the Muhammad. For instance in the text, as a response to the student's question In what way are we to be religious?, the teacher responds in Islamic terms, explicating the Five Pillars of Islam. In fact, the strong extolment of the Sultan is a reprise of the tone established in the introduction. In the introduction (Mukaddeme) of the textbook, there is an appraisal to God and also to the Sultan, and his role in causing education to be spread throughout the empire though the establishment of schools, printing houses, and libraries each of which is a proof which announces the truth. The educational agenda of Abdulhamid cements the connection between the Divine and the

Selcuk Aksin Somel, The Modernization of Public Education in the Ottoman Empire 1839-1908 Islamisation, Autocracy and Discipline, Brill: Leiden, Boston,Koln, 2001, p.189 12 Benjamin C. Fortna, Imperial Classroom Islam, the State and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire, Oxford Univ. Press: New York, 2002, p. 220 13 Ali Irfan Egriboz, Rehber-i Ahlak (Istanbul:A.Asaduriyan, 1317 [1899-1900] Rare Book Library of Istanbul University (catalogue number: 80572)

11

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Imperial. The dissemination of knowledge in this context implies the spreading of religion. The content of this textbook fits well into the ilmihal centered approach, which is used to describe the traditional teaching of Islam. An ilmihal is a book written in response to the practical needs of ordinary Muslims; it usually aims to provide knowledge in terms of three dimensions of Islam: faith (iman), worship (ibadet), and ethics (ahlak). The language used in ilmihals is usually simple and straightforward because they are generally written for a wide range of Muslims. 14 When the history of religious education during Ottoman era is examined, one can see the presence of this ilmihal centered approach. The ilmihal discouraged the development and production of new comments and criticism in religious matters. As has been argued by Atay, the pedagogy of late Ottoman madrasas was mainly based on teaching one opinion about any religious issue from one selected book, while discarding further opinions and genuine discussions. 15 Different ideas about a particular issue were only introduced so that they could be refuted in order to support the approved opinion. 16 This approach stresses, through its selection of content; faith, worship and ethics. Thus, it ignores the social and political dimensions of Islam. Secondly, it follows a confessional approach for teaching religion. Thirdly, it assumes a common faith (Islam) as a point of departure, and is authoritative in its claims. 17 Lastly, in the ilmihal, the teaching of one particular legal school is used to present Islam. Thus it argues that there is almost a consensus among Muslim scholars that the four Sunni schools of law are the only true and legitimate ways to follow. We can see that in the moral courses of this era too this approach has been strictly followed.

Religion Textbooks of the New Republic

14

Recep Kaymakcan, Religious Education Culture in Modern Turkey, M. de Souza et al. (eds), International Handbook of the Religious, Moral and Spiritual Dimensions in Education, 2009, 449-460, p. 451 15 Atay, H. (1995). Kurana Gore Arastirmalar (Vol.5) Ankara
16

Recep Kaymakcan, Religious Education Culture in Modern Turkey, M. de Souza et al. (eds), International Handbook of the Religious, Moral and Spiritual Dimensions in Education, 2009, 449-460, p. 456 17 Recep Kaymakcan, Religious Education Culture in Modern Turkey, M. de Souza et al. (eds), International Handbook of the Religious, Moral and Spiritual Dimensions in Education, 2009, 449-460, p.454

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The textbooks I would like to examine in this section belong to early Republican era; textbooks that were used extensively between 1927 and 1931 for primary schools, for third, fourth and fifth grades. During the High Kemalist period, (1920-1930) where the modernizing reforms were moving at a great pace and religion was tried to be removed from all kinds of societal realms, the existence of religion courses sounds like a contradictory phenomenon to the Kemalist logic. I hope that my analysis of these textbooks will illustrate that it takes only a careful glance to the content of the textbooks to realize that the courses are perfect tools to promote the dominant values of the time. In 1924, a primary school curricula religion course titled Kuran-i Kerim and Religion Courses had been taught in classes (except for the first grade), for two hours a week. Analyzing the religion courses of the 1924 curricula, Dogan concludes that with the religion courses of the time, it was aimed to abolish erroneous opinions that were rooted in religious field and to modernize, with the help of these courses. 18 In 1926, the religion courses started from the third grade onwards and the course was decreased to one hour per week. The aim of the course resembled the previous one where it was declared that the superstitious beliefs as having religious character should be destroyed and outmost attention to be given not to inject Islamic fanaticism. The aims of the 1924 and 1926 programs were too strictly adhered to by textbook writers, reminding us the application of the Hamidian era. Although Islam was marginalized in the dominant discourses of the time, the approach towards religion in the realm of education was more subtle. As it will be more explicit with the examples I will provide, in the textbooks of religious course, the Turkish state came up with its own version of Islam and tried to reconcile the concept of nationalism with religion because apparently religion was deemed as a useful factor in the formation of national character. The author of the textbooks is Muallim Abdulbaki, the author of various other textbooks in the same era. During this period, compulsory education lasted for five years, religion education was voluntary and was given one hour per week. The first release of the books which were titled Religious Instruction for the children of the Republic 19 came out in Ottoman language in 1927-1928. Later, however, in the period between
18 19

Ibid Muallim Abdulbaki, Cumhuriyet Cocugunun Din Dersleri, Ataturk Donemi Ders Kitabi, Kaynak Yay: Istanbul, 2005

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1929-1931, they were translated to modern Turkish. The textbook was prepared in line with the principles of the 1926 Curriculum for Primary Schools. The above mentioned aims of the course indicate that the desired outcomes of religion courses are more societal aims rather than individual aims. This is very much the outcome of the political/social climate of the time. In those times, many believed that the whole reason behind Turkey's lagging after other nations had been caused by religious beliefs of the society. Therefore, these beliefs needed to be altered in the early republican era through formal education. Muallim Abdulbaki's textbooks, like their contemporaries, were used as ideological tools to legitimize the official discourse of the Republic, which was still in formation. In other words, they reflected the essence of the religious imagination of this discourse. In them, categories such as state, nation, national hero were turned into religious subjects, and/or Islamicized. In many places in the textbooks, Ataturk was sacralized and portrayed as a miraculous and almost a god-like figure by means of various metaphors. Since being a good Muslim was equated with being a Turkish nationalist/etatist, the major theme seems to be Turkish nationalism, instead of religion. 20 It is astonishing to see the language used to describe the caliphs that came to power after Mohammad. In a passage titled Prophet's Last Pilgrimage and His Death in the textbook for the third grade, it is argued that after the death of the Prophet, all Muslims gathered and chose themselves a Prime Minister which started Repbulican Age. According to the textbook the names of the first prime ministers are Ebu-Bekir, Omer, Osman and Ali. 21 This passage is rather ridiculous because it uses the terminology of the Republic, such as the word Prime Minister, or indirectly democracy through referral of the chosen Prime Ministers. This shows that not only national figures are sacralized and turned into religious subjects, but also its opposite is made, religious subjects are turned into national ones and thus they are rendered devoid of their religious content.

20 21

Mustafa Capar, Turkiye'de Egitim ve Oteki Turkler, Maki Yay, Ankara, 2006, p. 442 Muallim Abdulbaki, Cumhuriyet Cocugunun Din Dersleri Sinif 3, Sirketi Murettiye Matbaasi: Istanbul, 1930-1931, p.35

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Again, in the textbook for third grade, in the section of Love of God, the writer elaborates on the kinds of behavior that pleases the god and concludes the section by saying that the greatest worship to God is to love him, to be a good person and to be beneficial for our country. It goes on to explain how we should help our government and nation perpetuating the Republic which has saved the nation from ignorance, fanaticism and which brought light of civilization. The paragraph ends with the words Long live Turkishness and the Republic! 22 As seen a strong etatism reigns the passage and the religion is superseded by it by far. I believe that to be able to say by praying and fasting, we don't do good for anybody in a religion textbook is something that can only be articulated in that specific time period, and not a sentence that a religion textbook writer could dare to write that explicitly afterwards. I believe it is useful to continue to give examples about this strong nationalist/etatist mentality that governed religion education. In Abdulbaki's textbook, there is a section titled What do we do during Feasts? which talks about Turkish feasts. It is surprising to see that although the textbook is a religion textbook, priority is given to National Feasts and Holidays, such as the 29th of October Republic Day or the 23rd of April National Sovereignty and Children's Day. It is only after these days that religious holidays such as Eid ul-Fitr (Sugar Feast) or the Eid ul-Adha (The Feast of the Sacrifice) are mentioned. It must be noted that nowhere in the textbook the word Ramadan which ends with the Sugar Feast is mentioned. As for the Eid ul-Adha (Feast of the Sacrifice), the textbook decrees that we should in fact refrain from sacrificing animals and it would be better give money to the institutions such as Hilal-iAhmer (Ottoman Version of Red
Cross), Himaye-i Etfal ( Society for the protection of Children), Darulaceze (Alms house) and Tayyare Cemiyeti (Turkish Aeronautical Association). The book goes even further to argue

that in fact Allah, God would be more content with this kind of an act. I think that these examples reflect very much the climate of the late 1920s where religious elements in the society wanted to be eliminated by the state, whereas the cultural elements of Islam were allowed and accentuated in the societal realm. By arguing that people should give their
22

Ibid, p.41

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donations to state institutions and by making comments about what people should actually do in this very individual arena, we see that there is a will by the state to control people's relation with religion. Religion textbooks of late Single Party Regime The textbook I would like to examine in this era belongs to 1949 academic year. It is actually the first textbook that was used in classrooms after a sixteen year absence of the course from all kinds of school curricula. I believe that the historical and political process that amounted to the re-introduction of religion courses is a fruitful arena that reveals continuities between the previous applications of the course as well as the diversions from them. I will briefly look at this history and then elaborate on the text itself. It was first in the beginning of 1940s a will on the side of the government to introduce some kind of a religion/moral course came to the fore. In the last couple of years of 1940s, however, a more positive attitude was adopted towards the incorporation of religion courses into the education system with the growing discontent of some intellectuals and MPs. After the 1940s, as part of its liberalization efforts, the RPP-the party of Ataturk- had loosened its policies with regards to religion education in schools due to its realization of the discontent of the conservative rural population with the existing situation. The regime's attitude towards religion had become extremely repressive in the 1920s and 1930s. Starting in the 1920s, nominal Islam had become a marker of Turkishness, whereas Islam as a faith was cast outside the public sphere. It is through this perspective that one has to judge the ambivalent relation that state had established with religion. The fact that all religious elements were eliminated from the school system in 1930s was the result of this latter conception of Islam. Secularism during the mid 1930s became controversial because militant secularists became dominant in the party and criticized practising Muslims as clericalists and counter-revolutionaries. Some even talked of the need for a reformation in Islam in order to bring it in line with modern times. It was only after the introduction of multi-party politics, in 1946, that both parties started to court the Muslim vote. During this period, it became obvious that there was a demand from the people that they had to learn their religion properly. Some MPs in the RPP declared that if they did not implement some kind of religion instruction in
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schools, they would not be able to win the next elections. Some people also thought that religion courses were needed to prevent society from becoming communist. In the parliamentary debates of those times, one can see fierce debates within the RPP on the issue of these religious courses and their compatibility with the secularism principle. That is why different ideas came to the minds of MPs as to how religious information could be provided to children without breaching secularism. Thus, as seen, the moral courses which was thought of at the beginning of 1940s, transformed into religious courses. The motive behind the re-introduction of the course was connected to the political climate of the time where there was a perceived threat of Communism and also due to recently formed DP, a party which spoke to the religious sentiments of common people and not just the 'elite' of Turkey, establishing a better chemistry with them. Finally, in February 1948 it was decided that a religion courses to be introduced in the schools on voluntary basis. However, because textbooks for the course were not ready, the implementation of this decree was postponed by one year. According to the decree, religion courses were going to be taught on a voluntary basis to the fourth and fifth grades in primary schools. We learn from the memoirs of Banguoglu, Minister of Education (1948-1950), in whose presidency the courses started, that the first textbooks prepared by the Ministry of Education were very much disliked by Ministry of Religious Affairs and by some others thinking that the textbooks contained traits of communism (devrimcilik) and dervishism. It also had poems from Pir Sultan Abdal, the spiritual leader of Alevis of Anatolia. The dissatisfaction with the books belated the introduction of the course. While Banguoglu was the Minister of Education, he talked with the Minister of Religious Affairs and commissioned him to write a book. This time it was decreed that the textbooks should not touch on denominational differences, which translates in the Turkish context as absence of information on Alevism in the textbooks, and should not contain revolutionary traits. Thus the textbooks were prepared in this line and they finally came out fully prepared for the 1949 academic years. While the topics for fourth grade covered more general information about Islam and its morality concept, the content of the fifth grade dealt more with the specific teachings of Islam, and entailed the memorization of prayers to be able to practice namaz. The textbook I examined for

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this section belonged to the Ministry of Education's own publishing house, prepared for fourth grade. 23 The textbook for fourth grade, starts with a page long poem-like piece which is titled I am Muslim. It says:
Thanks to God I am Muslim; I have been born a Muslim and will live like a Muslim. My mother, father, my grandfather and my ancestors are Muslims... Every person who is a Muslim is born clean; bad people go towards badness afterwards. My God, you created me as a Muslim, make me live as a Muslim... 24 (p.3.)

This kind of a beginning in fact hints to us the new quality of the textbook, rather different from the ones used in late 1920s. There are specific qualities of the textbook that resemble the textbooks of previous eras, as well as traits that are totally in opposition to them. First of all, as we have seen, in the previous books Ataturk was sacralized to a great extent and his name came up more than Mohammed's name. In this textbook, there was not a single line that contained the name of Ataturk. While the accent in the previous religion textbooks was more nationalism and etatism, the new textbooks focused on the teaching of the main tenets of Islam and Islamic morality understanding. The content of this textbook was geared towards teaching the students the life of Mohammed to make them take him as a role model whose understanding of morality was the highest among people according to the writers of the text. Other than the detailed life of Mohammed, the book contains sections such as I Love My Parents, I Love My Country and My Nation and I love My Teachers. In these sections, values such as respect to parents or to love one's teachers are portrayed as religious duties that we should fulfill, so they are legitimized on religious grounds, which is again the exact opposite of what was done in the textbooks of 1920s. These sections remind us of the Rehber-i Ahlak, where there was a section in the textbook on the people whom students should show respect to and obey, such as parents, teachers, officers etc. So we see that there is repetition of the same obeisance culture in the multi-party religion textbooks. In the same vein, the textbooks of the multi-party regime followed the traditional way of teaching Islam. Just like the
23 24

Ilkokul Kitaplari, Din Dersleri , Birinci Kitap, Isranbul Milli Egitim Basimevi, 1951

Ibid, p.3

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textbooks of the Hamidian era, Sunnism too was the dominant discourse in them, ignoring totally the beliefs of Alevis, who now were exposed to this course. Conclusion In this paper, by looking at religion textbooks that are products of three different eras; namely Hamidian era, early Republican era and late single party regime, I have tried to show that in the Turkish context too 'secular cannot be viewed as a successor to religion' in Talal Asads terms. 25 Via the examples of the religion/moral courses and specifically the textbooks, I showed how secular seeming endeavors contained Islamic traits and how in secular endeavors one came across persistent elements of Islam. Hamidian era witnessed profound changes in its education system. Whereas what was understood from education was religious education, with the Westernization movement that had started with the Tanzimat era, in the Hamidian era religion/moral education became only a course among many courses. However, this secular seeming endeavor has many layers and is intertwined with complex political processes of the time which shows us that in fact the religion courses was one of many ways to withstand the challenges that were perceived to come from Western world itself. In the same vein, during the Republican period, the existence of a religious course in a still multi-ethnic country might seem very contradictory to the militant secularist ideals of the time. However, the content of the course shows us that a highly nationalist version of Islam was promoted in the textbooks, in congruent with the dominant political climate of the time. Secondly, I have argued that there are similarities between the religion textbooks of different eras which can again be carelessly classified as the secular Republican era and the religious Hamidian era. However, the content of the textbooks of the Hamidian era, and the content of the textbooks of the late single party era, proves that there are many similarities between the two textbooks such as their ilmihal-confessional 26
25

Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford University Press: California,2003, p.25 26 In confessional religious education, a single religious tradition is taught as the religious education curriculum, and is taught from the insider perspective. The teachers are expected to be believers in the religion themselves, and the object of the instruction is to enable pupils to come to believe in the religion or

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approach to Islam. Thus the comparison of these two textbooks lead us to show that the readily accepted categories of religious and secular are not always apt to analyze the modernization efforts that late Ottoman Empire and then Turkish Republic found themselves in. Lastly, in all different periods, what is striking to see is that there is a strong will of the state to shape the morality/religious understanding of the citizens to achieve the ideal-citizen that emerges out of these specific time periods. The perceived threat that came from missionary schools during the Hamidian era, sharia movements in the newly established republic or from Communism in late 1940s, urged the state to take action and it was through religious education that the state raged a war against these very different threats. As every societal realm related someway with religion, close surveillance mechanisms too were implemented in the context of religious education. This phenomenon, namely the will of the state to control religion, in fact marks its stamp on Turkish secularism. This is why various scholars in Turkey choose to call the Turkish Republic as a state of 'controlled secularity'27 or name Turkey as 'semi-secular' 28 state, arguing that Turkish approach to secularity advocates the management and control of private religion. I hope that this paper, whose focus has been on religion textbooks of the formal education system, has shown that neither the meaning of the terms secular nor religious is something self-evident and that these concepts have rather blurred and nuanced edges.

to strengthen their commitment to it. The pupils are expected to learn that the religion is true, and to learn to live in accordance with that religion.
27

Pinar Tank, Political Islam in Turkey: A State of Controlled Secularity, Turish Studies, Vol.6, No.1,3-19, March 2005. 28 Binnaz Toprak, Islam and Political Development in Turkey, Leiden: E.J.Brill, 1981

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Ethical non-indifference: present work on the Judeo-Christian roots of Dutch culture

By Ernst van den Hemel Es bilden sich Gruppen

(Karl Kraus: Die Letzten Tagen der Menschheit) As the theme of articulations implies not so much a speaker or an author as much as a vehicle through which articulation takes place, I will begin this paper on a personal note: I am a young academic who focusses in his research on questions around the literary structure of textuality in the work of John Calvin, the 16th century theologian, who, through the complicated processes of historical, religious and political influences, lent his name to the adjective used so often to describe the culture in which I am currently writing my dissertation. At the same time the historical religious roots of Dutch culture, painted in broad strokes, are at the moment subject of a muddy debate. Frequently the phrase Judeo-Christian culture is uttered in political debates to denote a common denominator with which to distinguish true Dutch culture from foreign intruders, most notably, of course, Islam. Having been trained at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, I see one of its main tenets as a serious and personal challenge: if history is preposterously written in the present, then the question posed in the invitation to this conference, how do we analyze, understand, and participate in the world?, becomes a serious matter. I have experienced the debate around the so called Judeo-Christian roots of Dutch society as a political framing of my own academic work. 1 In short, the simple but pressing question arises: what, in the specific context of contemporary Dutch society, and from the viewpoint of a PhD-student who devotes four years to Calvin and calvinism, does it mean to be a scholar of an influential element in Dutch culture in times of political confusion about the very same subject? Am I, an inhabitant of a situation in which blocks of identity are forming, and its exclusionary effects more and more coming to the forefront, capable of escaping the dangers of either relegating my
1 Frustration about the uninformed nature of the debate led me to write an accessible version of my dissertation: Calvinisme en Politiek: Tussen Verzet en Berusting (2009).

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work on the literary structure of Calvins texts to the ivory tower of academia, or of cooperating with the cementing of the Judeo-Christian identity by studying it? Or is there another way in which the literary structure of historical texts can be thought to be of political relevance? In order to answer these questions we first have to see in what way the expression Judeo-Christian functions. After that we can see how a theoretical approach to a historical text can aid in providing not merely valuable background to the discussion, but also how it can critically interact in the present.

Judeo-Christian?
First of all, what is evoked, brought into the present, with the term Judeo-Christian 2 ? Obviously, it first of all means not-islam; the very term already denotes a split between the native Jews and Christians, and muslims 3 . Furthermore it seems to mean predominantly Christian,-but-we-want-toavoid-any-semblance-of-anti-semitism therefore-we-also-include-Judaism. For instance, it would have been hardly as self-explanatory to claim Dutch culture as Judeo-Christian in the 19th century. The Dutch past in the Second World War seems to be present here in the background. It is all the more interesting that for instance in the political remarks by Geert Wilders, Judeo-Christian roots of Dutch culture can be seemlessly combined with such secular accomplishments as equal rights for women and homosexuals, and freedom of speech; forms of typical Dutch tolerance that are threatened by the tsunami of Muslims, who endanger Jews, women as well as homosexuals with their islamo-fascism. But, I want to bypass the obvious constructions of nationalist identity that come along with the phrase Judeo-Christian and I want to focus on its treacherous self-explanatory nature. One of the reasons that allows this term to be used so freely is, I believe, because it appeals to a common knowledge, a knowledge that all Dutch citizens are supposed to know. At the very minimum of this shared unconscious thought lies the idea that it something not only worth defending, but also capable of grounding this defense of and in itself. With the invocation of the Judeo-Christian roots of Dutch culture, the question arises what past is constructed by this invocation? Do these hinted-at roots of
2 I refer here exclusively to the surprisingly empty signifier as it circulates in debates in contemporary Dutch political debates. The nietzschean overtones of the notion, where Christianity is seen as a continuation of Jewish ressentiment is obviously absent. As is the second phase of the modern expression, pre-war United States, where the term was used to counter antisemitism. The third phase of the modern use of the expression, signifying simultaneously a cultural unification of the West and a gap with islamic cultures came into fashion after 9-11. See Friedrich Nietzsche The Anti-Christ, ressentiment morality () this is the Judaeo-Christian morality through and through (21). And: Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1941: Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I dont care what it is. With us of course it is the Judeo-Christian concept but it must be a religion that all men are created equal. Quoted in Silk 1984. 3 For an English example of this rhetorical dichotomy, see the lecture Geert Wilders gave at the Hudson Institute, on september 25th 2008. http://www.pvv.nl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1310

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Dutch culture lend themselves to draw dividing lines between us and the others? Of what defense is this invoked self-explanatory identity capable? And, what role can scholars of religion play in this debate? By tracing the capacity to affirm identity in Calvins writings, we can see not only how drawing a line between the ethically just and the unjust is seriously complicated in Calvins, and calvinist, theology, futhermore an analysis of the language in which this complication is couched can shed light on the intertwinement of political and literary tensions within a historical text.

Calvinism
Let us start at the foundational work of calvinism, John Calvins Institutes of Christian Religion. At the opening of Calvins Institutes, John Calvin informs Franois I, the king of France, that his followers are theologically unable to launch an insurrection against the ruler. In the defense of his doctrine Calvin assures the king that he and his followers are by no means after political power: We, forsooth, meditate the subversion of kingdoms, we, whose voice was never heard in faction, and whose life, while passed under you, is known to have been always quiet and simple; even now, when exiled from our home, we nevertheless cease not to pray for all prosperity to your person and your kingdom. () But if any, under pretext of the gospel, excite tumults (.)if any use the liberty of the grace of God as a cloak for licentiousness (), there are laws and legal punishments by which they may be punished up to the measure of their deserts. (Prefatory letter to the king of France) We see here not only an attempt to defend a religious doctrine from persecution, but the prefatory address to Franois I also contains the whole calvinist docility in a nutshell. The theology of John Calvin famously proclaimed the utter sinfulness of man, to such an extent that even the knowledge of the divine serves as an accusation to any belief in the human capacity for truth. Furthermore, through the doctrine of predestination, true religion demands obedience to the God-given nature of all wordly functioning. In this mode of functioning in the world, Weber famously saw the impulse for the development of modern capitalism: the notion of the calling the role in which each individual is born, combined political modesty with faithful productivity, thus enabling a system of economic functioning that laid the foundations for the modern economic system. Furthermore, the iniquity of man prevents the believer from imposing his own dogmatic principles on a society. Abraham Kuyper, founder of the
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Anti-Revolutionary Party, the first Dutch political party, saw in this aspect of calvinist theology the origin and safeguard for the separation of church and state 4 . It is all the more surprising then, that more than 1300 pages later, Calvin ends his magnum opus with a rebellious warning to all those that are vested with political power, the following citations are from the very last paragraph of the book: But in that obedience which we hold to be due to the commands of rulers, we must always make the exception, nay, must be particularly careful that it is not incompatible with obedience to Him to whose will the wishes of all kings should be subject () And that our courage may not fail, Paul stimulates us by the additional consideration that we were redeemed by Christ at the great price which our redemption cost him, in order that we might not yield a slavish obedience to the depraved wishes of men, far less do homage to their impiety. (IV,xx, 32) In certain situations the believer is expected to rise up in rebellion. The extremities of the Institutes thus frame the compendium of religious knowledge in an uneasy tension between obedience and resistance to human impiety. This uneasy feeling is deepened by the fact that in Calvins theology the human being is unable to formulate clear criteria with which to distinguish impiety from piety. Mans heart is a perpetual forge of idols, and nothing appears within us or around us that is not tainted with very great impurity (I,i,2). The knowledge of God itself even serves to discourage mankind to place faith in his own contraptions. But without any criteria to determine when a situation demands political action the believer is caught between the two options: one needs to beware of yielding a slavish obedience to men, but at the same time it is the same humanity that should decide when to act. The Catch-22-like circularity that frames the Institutes, turns out in fact to be a series of concentric circles. Even the knowledge of God is stripped of its descriptive safety: But though experience testifies that a seed of religion is divinely sown in all, scarcely one in a hundred is found who cherishes it in his heart, and not one in whom it grows to maturity, so far is it from yielding fruit in its season. ()It follows, that every man who indulges in security, after extinguishing all fear of divine judgment, virtually denies that there is a God. (I,iv,2) In this highly crafted rhetorical passage, Calvin employs the figure of the katabasis, the descend into the deep, not only to describe but also to show performatively how the religious ethical demand should be caught up in failing: divinely sown in all , yet scarceley one in a hundred who cherishes it in his
4 see Abraham Kuyper: Calvinism; the source and the safeguard of our constitutional freedoms. A Dutch thought (1874)

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heart and not one in whom it grows to maturity. In this paragraph, the reader descends from faith in his own capacity, to all-encompassing insecurity. Similar figures are often found in Beckett as well: But I am silent, it sometimes happens, no, never, not one second (Beckett, 1995: 131). The drama for the reader consists of having to through the process of human failing, and losing any descriptive foothold that could stop the process of undermining signification. The same necessarily goes for the text itself; its meaning itself is undermined by its own distrust in the capacity of descriptive language to accommodate a truth that escapes human iniquity. In safeguarding human iniquity, Calvin has cut the access to any exception out of the equation. What are the parameters of political agency involved in this theology? The Institutes necessarily fail to give a final answer and the tension between acquiescence and resistance has been part of political calvinist situations ever since 5 . What we do know however, is that the mistrust in descriptive language doesnt lend itself easily for grounding an ethical judgment on the superiority of one identity over the other.

Religious Texts as Literature

Over the last decade or so the study of literature gave a new twist to the descriptive uncertainty in 16th century theological writings. In the appeal to literal-mindedness, under the battlecry sola scriptura the Reformers of the 16h century wished to return to a direct understanding of what Scripture meant. They had at their disposal a whole array of humanist methodologies that enabled the publication and study of more and more translations of, and commentaries on, Scripture. At the same time, the resulting destruction of Church hierarchy and the cutting away of the role of the clergy, made the grounding of such a truth in descriptive dogmatic parameters uneasy to say the least. In his Grammar and Grace: the Literary Culture of the Reformation, Brian Cummings summarized the predicament succinctly: it seems to be because Luther expressed absolute faith in language, when Luther himself made such faith in language impossible () a literal interpretation, like any other, pays words back with words (29). The predicament is even better formulated by Thomas More, who wrote in reply to the religious confusion over what a return to Scripture could mean; And who will be the judge of that word? Luther or the Catholic Church? Cummings draws the conclusion from this Babel-like confusion in the 16th
5

For instance, at the start of the occupation of the Netherlands during World War II, a fiery debate ensued among the reformed about whether the German occupant was now the God-appointed power, and thus demanded obedience, or whether this was a just cause to rise up in rebellion. See van den Hemel 2009, ch. 4, p. 93-117.

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century: the Reformation is as much about literary truth as it is about literal truth (5). The 16th century religious texts should be seen as literature, according to Cummings, precisely because in their writings the Reformers had to incorporate an awareness of the limits and unstability of descriptive language. Consequence of this emphasis on the literariness of religious texts is that the scholar should not just focus on the descriptive content and the context in which the texts were written, but the scholar also has to probe into the textual movements, internal structures and rhytms of the text.

Literary non-indifference
Following Cummings statement that the 16th century is in fact an age in which literary truth as much as literal truth was at stake, and keeping in mind the textual dimension of failing that we see in Calvins theology quoted above, what possible link could there be to the larger, overarching insecurity with regards to acquiescence / resistance? And, in light of the current political situation that we have sketched earlier, what value can the tracing of literary movements in historical texts for contemporary debates? Jacques Rancires The Politics of Aesthetics, (2006) might be of particular use here. In his essay Is History a Form of Fiction? Rancire warns against the temptation to claim that historical texts can be relegated to the realm of fiction. Such an analysis would imply a dichotomy between truth and fiction that does not do justice to the material power of words. Instead, he argues, it has become possible to think of literature as a regime in which the logic of descriptive and narrative arrangements used in the fiction becomes fundamentally indistinct from the arrangements used in the description and interpretation of the social and historical world (37). This standpoint enables him to think together both politics and art as forms of knowledge that construct fictions, that is to say material rearrangements of signs and images, relationships between what is seen and what is said, between what is done and what can be done (39). Both politics and art can be defined as that which gives a name to the disruption of self-explanatory arrangements. Man, in the words of Rancire, is a political animal precisely because he is a literary animal who lets himself be diverted from his natural purpose by the power of words (39). Literature then can not only form new meaning, identities, bodies, but it can also disrupt the distribution of the sensible, it also creates lines of fracture and disincorporation of imaginary collective bodies. Literature is not so much a fictive experiment, but through its disruptive force unmasks the equally fictive bodies and communities as they exist in social and historical reality.
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It seems to me that from these reflections on the kinship between politics and art as aesthetic forces in the present, a claim can also be made for the literary element in historical religious texts: the literary aspect of a religious text, can create a site of struggle in the present. Mieke Bal, in her paper on the Literary Canon and Religious identity, has exactly this point in her sights when she says: I find it important to save () religious canonical texts literariness from ethical indifference (Bal, 2006: 430). Instead of the ethical indifference traditionally applied to aesthetic appraisals of literary texts, and inversely, the indifference towards the disruptive literary effects in religious canonization, Bal argues for ethical non-indifference. This ethical non-indifference, in which the literary aspects of a text are seen as potentially disruptive factors for political, or institutionalized, canonized, interpretations of a text, comes down to an attitude that fuses the literariness with history, influencing the meaning of canonical history with a politically engaged reading of the texts aesthetic potential in the present.

Judeo-Christian?
In the case of Calvins theology, and by extension, its rewritings in calvinist theology, we can see a recurring blind-spot in both Calvins textuality that can become the site for a politically engaged reading. To return to our case-study above, the unsure footing that the katabasis produced in the very heart of Calvins theology, the knowledge of God, becomes linked to an ongoing ethical demand to keep failing. The lack of faith in descriptive language resists closing down the contents of this failing. Instead, the literariness, the performativity of Calvins theology puts this failing squarely in the present of the reader. When seen through this prism, the history of calvinist appropriations of Calvins theology becomes not merely a struggle between modalities of institutionalization, but we see, time and time again, that the content of this failing unrolls itself actively in the present, and this is not without risk. From the justification of resistance to the Spanish King in the Dutch national anthem (where the tension between obedience to the King and obedience to God are brought into the present) , to the resistance that was based on Calvins theology in the Second World War, from the Reformed legitimation of the South-African Apartheidsregime, to current politically charged circulations of the Judeo-Christian roots of Dutch culture, it becomes possible to read moments of calvinist political agency not from a perspective of identity (historical or literary), but from the question of how a present is appropriated, what readings it allows, what stratifications it enforces, and what disincorporations can be named. In short, whats at stake is the ethical implications of its literary structure, and, even shorter: a critical poetics of fundamentalism.
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To return to the personal predicament with which I started this paper, the nature of the knot of religion, history, politics and literature in which I am active can now be thought to consist of the following: through tracing the literary in religious texts, analysis can bring to the fore how texts do not offer closure, but instead move and stratify. That this is not a-political, that the scholar who brings this play of textuality to the fore is not necessarily doomed to the historical study of aesthetics is supported by the models of Rancire as well as Bal. Their emphasis on the literary aspect as a politically relevant undermining of canonization of textuality is well illustrated by the testcase we have discussed above: tracing the literary movements in Calvins theology inherently resist its use in invocations such as the intolerance for islam on the basis of the Judeo-Christian roots of Dutch culture. Studying the literariness of religious texts does not imply indifference, nor does it imply being part of an institutionalized identity block. One does not have to be part of institutionalized religion to influence the way images circulate in society. Instead, it shows textuality as a struggle in the present, and the scholar, that is to say, me, as someone who can enter and try to influence the circulation of invocations by emphasizing the failing that is so often kept out of sight in the everyday exchange of history. The important question of strategy has not been discussed yet; the changing status of academic work in the present and the forms and degree in which academic work can or should enter public discussions are part of the discussion as well, but they will have to be discussed in a different paper.

Bibliography
Bal, Mieke. A Mieke Bal reader. University of Chicago Press, 2006. Beckett, Samuel, S. E. Gontarski (ed). The complete Short Prose, 1929-1989. Grove Press, 1995. Calvin, John, Henry Beveridge (trans). Institutes of the Christian Religion. Hendrickson Publishers, 2008. Cummings, Brian. The Literary Culture of the Reformation. Oxford University Press, 2007. Van den Hemel, Ernst. Calvinisme en Politiek: Tussen Verzet en Berusting. Boom Uitgevers, 2009. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Aaron Ridley, Judith Norman (ed). The Anti-Christ, Ecce homo, Twilight of the idols, and other writings. Cambridge University Press, 2005.
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Rancire, Jacques, en Gabriel Rockhill (trans). The politics of aesthetics. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006. Silk, Mark. Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America. American Quarterly 36, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 65-85.

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From Language Stream to Sea Culture

On Re-Writing Water Imagery and Flowing Modes of Language as Post-National Articulation in German Intercultural Literature

by Marc James Mueller The history of intercultural literature in the Germanic context is also a history of its names, from the first terms given by its own protagonists (Literature of Involvement by Franco Biondi, Rafik Schami, 1981) to the labels forcibly attached by literary criticism and dominant literary scene (among those Literature from Outside; Minor or Multicultural Literature). The German-Spanish poet Jos F. A. Oliver extended this list in 2008 yet another time by the concept of "Meerkulturelle Literatur (Meer = ocean, sea; a homophone to mehr = more). After all, is there something, or even more/ Meer which serves as a connectional, yet not always present element in migrational writing? In this presentation I argue that water imagery and 'flowing' modes of language are used by German speaking minority authors as a dynamic linguistic fashion criticising dominant identity constructs based on a prevalent static concept of language, linguistically forging the desired mobility of identity for ethnic/ cultural minorities. Thus 'streaming language' becomes a literary method articulating liquid (Zygmunt Bauman), post-modern/ post-national concepts of identity itself.

Hybridity of Water and the Sea The history of water as a metaphor and allegory runs through the entire oral as well as written cultural history of mankind. As an essential element, as the 'lifeblood' it stands for existence itself; as 'flowing' motif it symbolizes the passage of time as of life. The image of the 'fountain of youth' has always been a metaphor for renewed life or eternal youth respectively. Also the sea, in its totality never imaginable, man always tried to better grasp with projections: As a place of longing, a romantic place, anyone can draw on sea imaginations. It has always been a place of possibilities, of journeys to terra incognita and terra nova. However, the sea is also a locus teribilis, a place of negative desire. Especially in our present-day media-shaped culture images of the sea are 'reloaded' with negative attributes: The rising sea, the destructive tsunami, the place of a failed crossing into a better world on a crowded refugee boat. Water is a hybrid element, it determines the (further) development of mankind through the struggle with too much and too little of it; the sea is a hybrid place between borderless globality and dynamic topos of fear.

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Tawada's Water-Borders The German-Japanese author Yoko Tawada (born 1960 in Japan), who lives permanently since 1982 in Germany and published her first work in German language in 1986, consistently employs water imagery and concepts of the flowing in her texts. In Tawada's volume "Where Europe begins" (1991), the narrator on her first trip by ship and train to Europe trying to approach the new continent as unprepossessed as possible, encounters also the hybridity of water. She recounts a story of her grandmother saying that travelling first and foremost means to drink "foreign water"; different place, different water. (66) And such 'foreign' water could be "dangerous" too: In the grandmother's story it causes sudden ageing, as well as disappearance. The narrator answers this traditional tale with her own childhood memory: "I, as a little girl could not believe that there was foreign water, because I always thought the globe was a sphere of water, on which many large and small islands swim, water had to be the same everywhere. In my sleep I sometimes heard the rush of water flowing under the main island of Japan. The border surrounding the island also consisted of water, which as waves steadily hit the shore. How can one know where the place of the foreign water begins if the border itself is made of water? (67f) In the grandmother's story, which stands as a fairy tale for an imagination being part of collective memory (cf. GUTJAHR 34), water is a familiar commodity that is to be mistrusted if it is not ones own. The attribution of age and disappearance are negatives of the attributes youth and life commonly allocated to water. In this tale, water loses its beneficial effects being outside of ones familiar sphere water has to be controlled. In contrast, there is the uncontrollable nature of the sea and its familiar and/ or foreign parts in the narrator's childhood memory. Here, foreign water is unmasked as almost unnatural boundary. The concept of foreignness turns out not to be a given, comprehensible dichotomy, but a dynamic and constantly fluctuating notion. On the same token, the image of the border in conjunction with waterhere between the different islands (countries, nations)is deconstructed and thus, foreignness is generally relativized. During her trip to Europe, the narrator repeatedly alludes to this notion of a fluid, changeable concept of foreignness. The regularly emerging water imagery in Tawada's writing indicates a move away from solid positions" and "the turn to dynamic space" (KRAUSS 61), in terms of boundaries between nations/ cultures, and therefore of cultural and linguistically forged identities.

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Exclusion from Post-Modern Fluidity A signature of post-modernity is precisely such dissolving of boundaries. Space generally is from the perspective of post-modern discoursecontinuously disappearing, accompanied with a new spatialization of world this leads to the notion that space has transformed itself into a permanent side by side organized as a capacious net. As Foucault states, we live in an epoch of space with simultaneity as its most outstanding attribute. (cf. SCHROER 171) The new structure also induces a partial loss of times leading function: the narrative coherences consisting of past, present and future only can create and carry less and less sense (cf. HAN 54) changing to different conflicting time tendencies. They become point-time or event-time, and thus they are as well shifted abreast. (cf. HAN ibid) Fragmentation and plurality of a post-modern, liquid society entail beside new complexities and lacking means for orientation also an expansion of individual possibilities for play, choice, and change. Such a point-universe (Villem Flusser) of references, positions and possibilities facilitates a high mobility of identitybut generally only for members of the dominant parts of society. Cultural/ ethnic minorities are often denied such mobility, being reduced to certain attributes by majority and dominant discourses. In consequence, members of minorities are excluded from a symmetrical dialogue with the majority and denied the confirmation of an identity that unifies presumed contradictions (e.g. being German and Turkish). A hybrid borderline space, the Third Space (Homi K. Bhabha), in which members of minorities can negotiate border-crossing and polyphonic self-concepts, remains unacknowledged by the dominant culture/ the majority. The societal space allotted to migrants is limited. Even though the second and third generation grew up in a post-modern, pluralistic society, in an atmosphere of confinement and of ignorance of certain aspects of identity by the majority, the agency of free choice, in and with a borderless world, is difficult for them to perform most of the time. In the German context, the role of another liquid is additionally aggravating this unequal situation: The German citizenship law does not allow for a double nationality for adults and in the past has aggravated the situation with its principle of lex sanguis naturalization of the second and third generations. In addition, dominant public debatesmainly carried on by conservativesdemand a clear commitment to German culture from migrants, accepting and adapting it as their Leitkultur (leading culture). Consequently, an equal side-by-side of German culture and culture of the country of origin is very difficult to establish and to enact for migrants in Germany. They find themselves oftentimes in a position where they have to decide which side they want to belong totoo many directions pull on their identity. However, according to Habermas, the parameters of self 181

identification must be acknowledged inter-subjectively: Identity can only be built on attributes accepted by the environment as such. (cf. JANICH 29) And the German sociologist Lothar Krappmann states that an individual builds identity in interaction with others, thus in dialog. The basis for the unequal dialogue between a dominant majority and migrants in Germany also lays in the presence and exertion of fixed linguistic attributions signifying e.g. German vs. non-German as pre-modern, immovable boundaries. However, especially the meaning of words gives reason to mistrust language.

Static Words of Earth and Water Yoko Tawada comments in her Tbinger Poetics-Lecture (1998) on the creation of the world in Ovid's Metamorphoses from a perspective of essential language scepticism: God had created the world by setting borders into the chaos. His work was necessarily a linguistic act. Because substantially one can not separate earth from water; water will always contain some soil and vice versa. Only through concepts one can separate them from each other and say: Here is water and there is earth. The word 'earth' says nothing about what the earth really is; however this word makes clear that earth is neither water, nor air, nor sky, etc. In the eyes of realists, the stories of transformation in the Metamorphoses ought to be fictitious and phantasmagorical in the sense of unrealistic. However, the book of "Metamorphoses" only points out that definitions are fictitious. (23) Tawada's semiotic worldview emphasizes the arbitrariness of the correlation 'language-object' turning against the idea that words bear or reproduce meaningsince words produce meaning only by definition. The identification of such fictitious definitions is also the basis for the author's understanding of foreignness: The fixed attributions 'self 'vs. 'other'coinciding throughout the majority of Tawada's texts with categories such as ,Japanese' vs. 'German' or 'European'are ultimately fictitious and basically linguistically constructed. Apart from that, language takes on an additional role due to the fact that ethnic/ cultural dichotomies are not only linguistically produced and manifested, but are also linguistically justified: A main marker of ethno-cultural non-membership has always been a different mother tongue.

Speech as Flowing Mode of Language Yoko Tawada's poetics is after all to oppose word's petrified and arbitrary definitions and meanings by a dynamic use of language. Besides the already mentioned water imagery, she also employs a more abstract aesthetics of the flowing. Language as well is for her an unlimited 'flood of
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letters' that neither can mono-dimensionally map reality, nor can it be translated into reality. Admittedly, one can not actually liquefy words; however, we can let language flow by simply speaking it. A voice articulating static language into flowing tones would always be polyphonic; yet, in everyday life, according to Tawada, the different voices would not be heard, "because we firmly believe that one voice must only be one voice." (TAWADA 1998 II, 111; my emphasis) The dominant concept of a 'monodicality' of linguistic expression can be parallelized to Tawada's criticism of the unambiquitity of word meanings. In her volume berseezungen (Overseatongues, 2002) she projects the topic of polyphony on different languages and develops in her story "Ear Witness" a phonetic understanding of multilingualism based on the perception of sound and voice of language(s). The story tells the reader about an afternoon at the Institute for Languages and Literatures at the MIT in Boston, where Tawada spent a term as visiting professor and writer-in-residence. The experience of the multilingual nature of the place merges with a "spatial experience" (IVANOVIC 8) for the protagonist: "Each room secretly overheard the sounds of the outside world. The hallway was like a line of numbered ears. My ear had number 320. (131) The location of speaking and hearing is connected to the parcelling of the various office spaces in the institute. The individual rooms are not strictly separated, doors are open, walls are sound-permeable, people constantly move back and forth between the offices. The narrator even shares her room with two other colleagues. These "ears" with their temporary occupants will thus become a model "of the practice of multilingualism" (IVANOVIC 8), which is marked by constant mutual transfers between languages and their connectivity. The narrator synchronically 'captures' snippets of conversations coming from other rooms or from the hallway, permeating her ear and her space. Consequently, interference of different overlapping voices occur. Hence, the protagonist outlines a flowing 'web' of sound from her encounter with the different languages. Voices, the dynamic sound of languages in the airas well as differing waters in the oceancan not be bordered, nor can be defined where one voice/ language ends or where one other begins. Sound can not be framed or molded and will always be situational. Moreover, the narrator in Tawada's story also has own conversations with individual members of the institute. During a dialogue in English language with her colleagues Seto another dynamic sound- and voice-over takes place: French sound fragments jumped out of the room, they sounded clear, spontaneous and delightful. They made their way through the net of Seto's voice, and reached me without me being able to understand. Suddenly, I could no longer understand Seto's English. English and French words mixed up, whirled around in the air, and broke away from the flow of sound gestures, which seemed to generate
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meaning. A cloud of foreign sounds emerged and grew into my ears, the language's excess material overflowed and slipped across aurality. (105) The aural fusion of both languages mutually alienates both and leads to a resolution of meaning of individual words and sentences. Such linguistic excess material are tones and sounds that reach the ear, but are no longer understood, they do not make sense and can not produce intended meaning anymore. Here, Tawada confronts the reader with a different, often ignored side of language. In its articulated, performative form, it can flow, merge, be volatile or disappear. By presenting a phonetic and hence physical quality of language, she foregrounds its dynamic side apart from fixed, rigid meanings. In doing so, Tawada not only deconstructs the definitional character of languagewhich always claims to make or to have sensebut she also undercuts fundamentally the concept of foreignness again: The various foreign languages are finally indistinguishable in their sound, and can no longer be separated. Thus Tawada lends language as a medium a quasi-oceanic attribute: How can one know where one language ends and the other begins if the border itself is made out of language?

Language Stream of Poetry The German-Spanish poet Jos F.A. Oliver also elaborates on the importance of 'flowing' language in his works, and describes the reason why he writes as follows: I write because I-estuary I always was, language-river I am, and lope-wards sound I will be, overflowed by the Self, in between all the other Selves, for any clear emotion, which devises me. (OLIVER 2000, 112) The river and flowing, poetic language are already associated with each other in some of Goethe's poems, such as "Muhamads Gesang; later, in Hlderlins so called river poems (Fluss Gedichte) they reached a climax in German classical literature. However, Oliver's poem does not aim to idealize nature and its beauty, but rather presents an almost ,natural relation of the Lyrical I/ the author to writing. In the centre of the poem the Lyrical I is equated with a river and language simultaneously. If language is a river, the author understands his identity as a (river-)estuary" releasing language into the world (the sea). Also soundas the 'natural', physical quality of languageis seen by Oliver as an integral part of his Self. The river metaphor is continued at this point; the sound moves "lope-wards", and thus runs with the flow direction of language, which can be understood again as concrete, direct articulation of words. This implies both, the impossibility to speak and/or to be against language, as
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well as it reiterates the position of the author, who produces sound and who is produced by it. And Oliver and his identity is formed by many sounds, by various languages. He was born in 1961 in the Black Forest, as son of Andalusian immigrants. This circumstance has caused him to live and work even in four languages, as he says: German, Spanish, Andalusian, and Alemannic, the dialect of Germanys south-west. However, this poetic potential which lies in such an exotic and erotic respect of different linguistic influences is ruined for the author at first by the fact of a bilious green passport with the entry ciudadano espaol. He is not a German citizenalthough he was born and grew up in Germanyand this restriction sobers his relationship towards his languages: But, no poetry! Only sober prose. Consequently, all in all, two languages remained to me, or, however, two times two language tatters and a poet who had started to search for his language not to fall silent.(OLIVER 1989, 8) After all, he is a poet before many language tatters trying to find a languagehis own language. Finding a language that is polyvalent and polyphonic and will embrace Olivers multi-sided Self is a dynamic process. In his river poem, he continuous with a water metaphor in the next line and parallelizes once again identity with river/ language. Here, the poet sees himself in a passive role: He is "overflowed by the Self, and can only imagine as well as experience his identity along a language flow, which is beyond his control. Part of this autonomy of the Self/ language is the existence of "other Selves". Against the background of Oliver's attempt to find his own words, I understand "other Selves" as a reference to the above mentioned linguistic tatters resulting from Olivers socialisation in four different cultures. If language and identity are on par with each other, as the author expresses in this poem, it is such a fragmented language that will lead to Olivers differing fractions in his identity. Against such a Self-plurality he sets an identity formation through "any clear emotion" inventing the author in the process of writing. From my point of view this refers to both the nature of poetry commonly giving an inward perspective of the Lyrical I, as it also indicates a re-connection of the process of identity formation to the writing process. In these lines the author appears as active carrier of language as well as being passive in the sense that identity with and through linguistic means finally is with no alternative. However, an inter-cultural, multilingual identity such as Olivers will never be fully reflected by one language, by any language. This is one reason why Oliver, as well as Tawada, turns to an articulated, streaming form of languageto sound.

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Sound as Dynamic Expression Olivers river poem is one of a series of poetic texts entitled: 13 Saiten, die meine Verse stimmen (13 chords tuning my verses). In German Saiten (chords, strings) is a homophone to Seiten (pages). This word play already alludes to the importance of sound, of speech respectively in his poetics. The difference between language and speech was also of crucial relevance for Paul Celan, who Oliver names as one of his most influential teachers of poetry, repeatedly alluding to Celan's work in his writing. Celan wanted to reach beyond the logic of signs and arbitrary language, demanding a poetic language of speaking which is present in its innermost nature (CELAN 197). In his wellknown Meridian-speech (1960), Celan propagated a radical relation of the individual to the poem, to the individuals speech respectively. Through this, poem and author/ speaker have the ability to animate language by an individual breath (LEUTNER 208). The sound of spoken language itself echoes; by its pure physical and material existence, it turns language into a dynamic, flowing medium. Of course poetry is always an attempt to rhythmicize language, to make it sing; and Oliver's poetry is dedicated to this in a very special way. However, sound appears also as an agent in many of Olivers poems. Sound as an agent means that besides the sound of words, sound itself appears directly or indirectly in a poem in order to criticize naming practices or the linguistic construction of meaning and signification. Furthermore, sound is in Oliver's poetry by itself a bearer of a post-national, 'fluid' identity. As an example, I would like to cite an excerpt from his poem moon change, gender act: and moon and mooness and moon lunares like coinage in the trousers pocket (affirmation of the easy closeness) jingles (OLIVER 1997, 52) The moon takes here the function of representing an identity which is marked by German and Spanish culture, German and Spanish language. It stands for both linguistic and cultural worlds combined: der Mond (the moon) which is of male gender in German, and its feminized form die Mondin (the mooness)a reference to the Spanish la luna. Also, with every step the lyrical I takes both worlds echo without the possibility of distinguishing the differing derivation of their sound. The quick and direct change between the lunar gendersand between the linguistic relationsimplies the intense closeness and familiarity of the Lyrical I to both. Indeed, the gender parts do not overlap into a hybrid; moon and mooness always remain themselveslinked, but independent of each other. Therefore, they exist as
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both sides of a coin. Oliver equates the two moon-sides, his two or even four-sided identity, with coinage in the trousers pocket. However, above all it is the familiar, everyday sound of the coins which lets the lyrical I feel close to himselfaffirmation of the easy closenessand therefore becomes primarily a self-assurance. In consideration of the fundamental deficiency of language to reflect reality and particularly the linguistic tatters of Olivers identity in four languages, sound is a possibility for him to tell himself about himself without linguistic reduction/ construction or languagebased decisions for or against the German or Spanish part of his identityalthough both components of his identity are represented in the words moon and mooness but already in a conceptualized form. From my view, a unity of both different influences is impossible; therefore, they pause in a steady exchange. The coinage, however, the different coins and their sides melt into just one constant and ongoing jingle, without the lyrical I being able to make out the source/ side of the soundit becomes simply his sound. The border between both cultural as well as linguistic worlds is obsolete. Once again sound provides for a flowing mode of language which allows to dynamize linguistic meaning and definition.

Mehr Kultur! Jos F.A. Oliver can not express his complex post-national, multilingual identity in given rigid linguistic patterns. This is symbolized in a very impressive fashion yet by another water metaphor at the end of his trilingual volume "Duende" (1998). The poem is written in German, as well as in Alemannic and Andalusian dialect, in each case with identical content: So it was to him Song of the Furrows Duende from the old Meerin gentle and easily said into YOU Magic November Cypress () (OLIVER 1998, 105; my emphases) I have deliberately not translated "Meerin, since with this neologism the author wants to emphasize the untranslatable polyphony of his Self into common language. Just like "Mondin (mooness ,la luna) Meerin is alternated by the Spanish analogy of the word namely la mar (as it is kept in the Andalusian version of the poem). In this form, Meerin is neither Spanish nor German, but dissolves the boundaries between the two languages creating a third entity, something of its own. "Duende" in Spanish means both a goblin, and the spirit of poetic inspiration and creation. If one reads the word
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Du ende in German it translates into "you end" (ETTE 143). However, in this poem it is exactly such a "you" that is created again by the sea (Meerin) through a gently and simply said word: YOU. Hence, these two lines form a quasi-endless, flowing cycle, from the end (or starting point) of a (post-national) youor Otheruntil his/ her acknowledgment and acceptance through dynamic and individualized speech. It is this recognition and understanding of the individual that is for Oliver a never completed processas it is for his very own identity formation. There always will remain substantial parts of a post-national, multilingual Self beyond ready-made words and meanings ultimately leading to excluding stereotypes and prejudices. Thus, intercultural writing such as Olivers poetry or Tawadas stories and essays claim a performative use of language, articulating and fostering fluid individual self concepts. In accordance with Oliver, his term "Meerkultur" then stands not only for more culture(s) and diversity but as well for the dynamic potential of language(s)if actually spoken in equal dialogue.

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Short bios
Currie, Morgan, is a Masters student in New Media at the University of Amsterdam. Her topics of interest include digital archives, open publishing, sustainability of the commons and autonomous networks. Currently she is a trainee with the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam. Contact: morganecurrie@gmail.com Dr. Bramall, Rebecca, completed her PhD in cultural studies at the University of East London in 2007, and she is now a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Brighton. Rebeccas research examines concepts of remembering and forgetting in twentieth-century cultural and social theory. She is interested in Marxist, post-Marxist, poststructuralist, and discourse theory, twentieth-century history and historiography, and more recently in discourses of anti-consumerism, environmentalism and nationalism. Contact: R.Bramall@brighton.ac.uk el Houri Walid, University of Amsterdam. Walid el Houri studied film making in Beirut, he holds an MA in Journalism from the Lebanese University, and an MA in Film Studies from the University of Amsterdam where he is currently a PhD student. His research deals with Hezbollah's media strategies and notions of resistance and hegemony. He was the managing editor of menassat.com a website that covers the Arab Media, and a part time media instructor at the University of Balamand in Lebanon. Contact: houri.walid@gmail.com Ginsburg, Ruth, was a PhD student at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, under the supervision of Dr. Ariella Azoulay and Prof. Ronen Shamir. Her dissertation focuses on the discourses of local Israeli Human Rights organizations through critical reading of their visual documentation. Her research interests include photography, civil discourse, and conflicts. In addition to several publications in Hebrew, she published an article on the photo of the Fiddler at Beit-Ibba Checkpoint in the peer-reviewed book Civil Organizations and the Protest Movements in Israel. Contact: ruthieginsburg@gmail.com Hemel, Ernst van den, (1981) is completing his dissertation at the Institute for Culture and History at the University of Amsterdam, and teaches at the department of Literary Studies. In his dissertation he combines contemporary literary theory and philosophy in an interdisciplinary interpretation of the work of John Calvin and sixteenth-century rhetoric and theology. He is the author of Calvinisme en Politiek: Tussen Verzet en Berusting (Uitgeverij Boom, 2009), and the editor of the forthcoming Future of the Religious Past conference proceedings (with Asja Szafraniec, Fordham University Press, in preparation). Contact: vandenhemel@gmail.com Kirn, Gal, was born in Ljubljana. He finished BA in political science with honors in 2005 on the concept of sovereignty. He is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences, where he combines his research on contemporary French philosophy with the history of the emergence of revolutionary Yugoslavia and its tragic break-up. From 2008 onwards he has been a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht and from 2010 a correspondent editor of the international journal Historical Materialism. In his home town Ljubljana he participates in the Workers-Punks University, which set up a platform of events: lectures, film seminars and reading groups. He passionately comments on politics in Slovenian weeklies and has

been involved in the student struggles against the privatisation of universities and other activist projects. He currently lives in Amsterdam. Contact: galkirn@gmail.com Kollnitz, Andrea, was born in Austria in 1970. After humanistic studies at Vienna University and the Academy of Applied Arts, Austria, including German, English, Scandinavian languages, literature and graphic design, she studied art history at the University of Stockholm and achieved my PhD in art history in 2008 with the dissertation Konstens nationella identitet. Om tysk och sterrikisk modernism i svensk konstkritik 1908-1934.( The National Identity of Art. On German and Austrian Modernism in Swedish Art criticism 1908-1934). She is currently teaching as an assistant professor at the Centre of Fashion Studies, Department of Art History, at Stockholm university, Sweden. Her ongoing research projects concern nationalist art and fashion discourse, the modernist artists role, modernist women artists and interactivities between art and fashion amongst others. Contact: andrea@fashion.su.se Kraovec, Primo, (1979) is a researcher at the institute for educational studies, Ljubljana and a PhD student of Sociology of everyday life at Faculty of social sciences, University of Ljubljana. His current research project has to do with critical analysis of discourses of European integration, while the topic of his PhD is politics of marxist epistemology in conjunction with a critique of political economy of postsocialist transition. His main theoretical and research interests are: intellectual and political history of neoliberalism, critique of the knowledge society and neoliberal reforms of education, history of socialist Yugoslavia and its world war two resistance, refutations of conservative historical revisionism, proving the relevance and urgency of a return to a marxist critique of political economy and Chinese economic miracle. Contact: primoz.krasovec@gmail.com Kuryel, Aylin, is a PhD candidate in Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the University of Amsterdam. Her dissertation, provisionally entitled "Visual Community in Transition: Image Politics of Nationalism in Turkey after 1990", explores the relationship between nationalism and imagery, and the different roles that both dominant and resistant images play in the context of nationalism. She is also involved in several art projects and film-making. Contact: aylinkuryel@gmail.com Mueller, Ph.D, Marc James - 2001 MA German Philology, German Literature; Freiburg University, Germany - 2001-2003 Max Kade Teaching Fellow; Colgate University Hamilton, NY - 2003-2004 Max Kade Research Fellow; University of Illinois at Chicago, IL (UIC) - 2005-2006 Research Stipendiary; Humboldt University Berlin - 2006-2008 Senior Lecturer for German as Foreign Language; Sprachenatelier Berlin - 2008 Ph.D. German Studies, UIC since 2009 Assistant Professor for German Studies, Montana State UniversityBozeman, MT Contact: mueller@montana.edu Muftugil , Seda, finished her BA in Social and Political Science in Sabanci University, Istanbul. After graduating, she pursued a masters degree (MSc in Human Rights) in London School of Economics in 2006. Since then she is a phd student at ASCA, working on compulsory religion education in Turkey

and its relation with religion minorities in the context of Turkish secularism. Her main research interests include nationalism, human rights, gender studies and oral history. Contact: A.S.Muftugil@uva.nl Rudolph, Sophie, Research associate at the University of St. Gallen's Institute for Media and Communication Management (MCM). Study of the interdisciplinary program "Diplom-Romanistik" at the University of Mannheim (French and Italian studies and organizational theory, 1997-2003), Film studies at Universit Paris III, Sorbonne Nouvelle (2000-2001). PhD-Thesis on the films of Alain Resnais (defended at the University of Mannheim in February 2010 ). Research interests include film theory, European cinema and the concept of national cinema. This working paper is part of a currently developed Post-Doc-project at the University of St. Gallen. Contact: sophie.rudolph@unisg.ch Saber, Dima, University of Paris 2. Dima Saber studied Languages and Translation in Lebanon, holds an MA in Journalism from the Lebanese University, and an MA in Media languages and communication from the University of Panthon-Assas Paris 2, where she is currently a PhD student in Information and Communication, Semiotic Studies. Her research is focused on the media representation of figures of the Arab nationalism from G. Nasser to H. Nasrallah. She is the co-founder of Hibr.me, a Lebanese youth-run monthly newspaper and currently teaches in the University of Paris 2. Contact: dimasaber@gmail.com Schiller, Melanie, finished her BA in Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam with honors and and holds an MA in Mediastudies. She worked for an Independent record company in Hamburg, Germany (Tapete Records), and for the online music television station yoomee.tv. She is now a Lecturer at the Department of Media Studies of the University of Amsterdam. Melanie is currently pursuing a PhD in popular music analysis for the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA) which has the working title "German national identity in popular music from 1945-now". Her main research interests include popular culture and popular music in particular, nationalism and Germany, but also gender and queer studies. Contact: m.m.schiller@uva.nl Souch, Irina, has a background in Germanic Philology, Pedagogics and Literary Studies. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. Her work addresses the issues of formation, assertion and representation of post-Soviet Russian identities in the popular television series and films. Through her research she explicitly aims to establish a reciprocal dialogue between relevant theories, disciplines and objects across national, cultural and linguistic boundaries, in particular those between Russia and the West. Contact: i.s.souch@uva.nl Srbrinovska, Slavica, Professor of Theory and Methodology of Literature at the Department of Comparative Literature, Faculty of Philology Blaze Koneski, University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, Skopje. Translation of the studies from the field of Theory of Literature and Comparative Literature (M.Bal, G.Prince, J..Bessiere, R.Lachmann, M.Riffaterre etc).Main studies: Strolling Spectator in the Novel, Skopje, 2000, Through the Perspective of the Other, Skopje, 2002, The Novel: Status, Interpretations, Perspectives, Skopje, 2004, Subject, Literature, Culture, Skopje, 2006, Visual Strategies, Skopje, 2008. Collaboration in the projects of the field of theory of fiction (including the field of adaptation of the Novel to the Film, Drama and Theatre) and Cultural studies at the University of Amsterdam (TEMPUS project), European Institute of Gender study in Florence (Summer School

devoted to the problems of Boundaries and Borders) and Universite de la Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III / High Educational Support Project). Also an active participant in many seminars and conferences that are focused on the problems of Comparative studies, Theory and History of Literature and Cultural studies. Contact: slavicasrbinovska@yahoo.com Tali, Margaret, is researcher and PhD candidate in a combined programme of cultural studies and sociology by Tallinn University, Estonia. Since April 2009 she is a visiting fellow by ASCA in University of Amsterdam, pursuing her PhD research. She has published articles on topics such as contemporary art heritage, nationalism, ideologies of art funding, contemporary dance in several magazines and journals. Her recent articles have been published in article collections Kulturmanagement konkret. An Anatomy of Arts Management (Institute fr Kultur Konzepte, Hamburg, 2009) and Contemporary Art and Nationalism. Critical Reader (MM, Centre for Humanistic Studies, Kosovo 2007). In 2009 she has also acted as a guest-editor for a special magazine issue called The Economics of Estonian Art for the magazine Kunst.ee. Estonian Quarterly of Art and Visual Culture. Contact: margarettali@yahoo.com