What then is truth? A mobile mass of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which are decorated poetically and rhetorically, increased and transferred, and which after lengthy usage are for a group of people considered fixed, canonic and binding: truths are illusions that have been forgotten they are thus.
NIETZSCHE1
In popular nationalist vernacular, one’s country is mutually exclusive with personal conduct and activity. One’s relationship to a country, culture, or creed is a highly linguistic affair, signaled in the repeated use of the word “meaning” in question of belonging. Alternatively there are actions and beliefs that are thought to be threatening to the nationalist stronghold which are blighted the prefix “un-.” At both poles, from the stalwart nationalist to the tentative subaltern, what it means to be of a race or country is a constant point of contention. Aside from the many material features cited for this reference, the events that lead to this meaning are more than usually traumatic and, even when recalling loss, triumphant. The components of what it means to one or another group are traditionally based on recognizable objects and of widely known past events, all of which are given a pictorially iconic character, usually starting with the flag. More elusive if not more structurally valid and the more subtle are the events, changes, upheavals, and manipulations that have coalesced into the stable and concrete concept of nation. The concept of rootedness from where there is only shifting sands makes the famous quote from Nietzsche strongly apposite. Nationhood is carved from many things, but it is conceived as immutable and commensurate with the truthfulness of one’s own being. Nietzsche continues: “We still do not know where this urge for truth comes from: for until now we have only heard the obligation from society that it exist: to be truthful means to lie according to the customary metaphors—in moral terms: the compulsion to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a common-bound style.”2 If we remove the reproach for now, what remains is the strength of common language and its transference into conviction and into psychopathology. This chapter traverses the tenuous and delicate subject of the relationship between individual, culture, and belonging with the emphasis on the ways in which it has been formed. The basis for this formation can be ironic, traumatic, or both. For some sense of clarity on a subject that emphasizes the convoluted and obscure, this chapter will be divided into two parts: the macrocosmic (nation, countries), and the microcosmic (individuals, subjects). In setting up a philosophical set of co-ordinates, the focus is not limited to the Orient, as general as the term may be, but takes a broader view of the assumptions and re-assumptions of national identity in order to form a picture of its pliability and the role of imagination, to show the oscillation between fictive construction and inner necessity.
The net image of all of this could be unnerving since to reveal the instability of one’s soil is to destabilize the security of home. But the intention is not to instill anxiety but to show how the superstructure of national coherence is built on a cloud, except that some clouds may be a little denser than others.
Another helpful synopsis of the twists of identity formation is offered by the philosopher Slavoj Zizek in a discussion of Russian nationhood:
There were three steps in the formation of Russian national identity: first, the substantial starting point (premodern Orthodox Russia); then, the violent modernization enforced by Peter the Great, which continued throughout the eighteenth century and created a new French-speaking elite; finally, after 1812, the rediscovery of “Russianness”, the return to forgotten authentic origins. It is crucial to bear in mind that this rediscovery of authentic roots was only possible through and for the educated eyes of the French-speaking elite: “authentic” Russia existed only for the “French gaze”. This is why it was a French composer (working at the imperial court) who wrote the first opera in Russian and thus started the tradition, and why Pushkin himself had to use French words to make clear to his readers (and to himself) the true meaning of his authentic Russian terms. Later, of course, the dialectical movement goes on: “Russianness” immediately splits into liberal populism and conservative Slavophilism, and the process culminates in the properly dialectical coincidence of modernity and primitivism: the fascination of the early twentieth-century modernists with ancient barbaric cultural forms.3
It is also instructive that Zizek concludes with the binary of the civilized modernist observing the primitive and barbaric. A barbarian is simply the earlier version of the Oriental, deriving from the Greek barbaroi, meaning “foreign.” (However the subsequent usages of the word add a frisson of violence and transgression, which is also essential to the Orient, as it enshrines something noble but also distinctly different and daring.) The exchanges between Russian and French are also vividly staged in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, when Pierre, during the siege of Moscow, in his dealings with people on the street becomes self-conscious of the fact that he speaks Russian with a French accent, thereby leaving himself vulnerable to the defensive violence against all things French. Yet it is Pierre who is the stalwart of Russian cultural integrity, in all its tenacity and fragility. But Pierre comes to this realization once aware of the changes in power relations, in which language inevitably plays a part.
Pushkin, Tolstoy’s great predecessor and rival for Greatest Russian Writer, was from the start embroiled in Orientalist narratives of some sort or another. For although he hailed from one of Russia’s most prominent nobility, his maternal grandfather was an African, Ibrahim Hannibal. As the legend would have it, he was an Abyssinian prince whom the Turks took hostage, and redelivered as a gift to Peter the Great in 1705, by a Russian envoy who had rescued him from the court of the Ottoman Sultan. Hannibal became Peter’s adopted son, received military training in France, and eventually became a general in the Russian army. He was later granted a massive estate, Mikhailovskoe, on the border of today’s Latvia by Peter’s daughter Empress Elizabeth. It was here that Pushkin wrote some of his greatest works. Pushkin was also a great admirer of the great literary Orientalist, Byron, especially evident in his fascination with the character Don Juan. His exotic ancestor was also a great source of literary capital as seen in the incomplete novella The Moor of Peter the Great, and in instances such as in Eugene Onegin when the protagonist yearns for “the sun of my Africa.”4
Yearning is a central part of the envisioning and conceptualization of nationhood: the yearning to return, the yearning of what was or what could be. They are powerful expressions of desire in which the addressee, the state, is everywhere and nowhere. The decenteredness and the yawning absence betoken its power. Nation, with a capital “N” is an empty signifier around which selective incidents and signs of the past and present come to rally. In the words of Zizek again in an earlier study on the psychology of political economy:
in a political discourse, the Master-Signifier (Our Nation) is this kind of empty signifier which stands for the impossible fullness of meaning, that is, its meaning is “imaginary” in the sense that its content is impossible to positivize—when you ask a member of the Nation to define in what the identity of this nation persists, his ultimate answer will always be, “I can’t say, you must feel it, it’s it, what our lives are really about.”5
The compulsions of Nation are typically at their strongest when there is the sense of something lost. This can range from the sense in the United States of the country having lost its grip on world power and economic dominance to the feeling in developing powers such as India, which, as we will later see, by degrees clings misty eyed to a shapelessly obscure, long-lost past.
Just as the victors write history, the priorities given to which histories are written belong preponderantly to those meting out funding, which are the dominant states. Thus, as Davies remarks, “siren voices sing that today’s important countries are also those whose past is most deserving of examination, that a more comprehensive spectrum of historical knowledge can be safely ignored.”6 It is also in the interests of these dominant histories that the presumption remains that the country in question is coherent, and observations of coherence are nonetheless serenely made from a standpoint of clarity and circumscription. Equally the studies of the great ancient civilizations—Greece, Egypt, Rome—work from standard assumptions, most often conveniently gleaned from art and architecture, however much their empire may have expanded and contracted. Indeed it is the visual manifestations of culture, from the Egyptian Pyramids to the Roman Coliseum, that tend to give a state and culture its metonymic balance, however much that they too were prey to alteration and decay.
Davies’ book, Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations is a set of connected historical essays on the appearance and disappearance of countries in the region of greater Europe, including Russia. His study can scarcely contain the diverse and ongoing shifts in borderlines and borderlands, however his book is a series of enlightening case studies that lays the groundwork for thinking of country, state, and nation in a less homogenizing fashion, as susceptible to time and change as any individual mortal soul. One of the salutary effects of this growing consciousness of the vicissitudes of culture has been a renewed interest in looking at this mutability. It is an area of study that was also borne out by post-millennial events, such as Russia’s lawful-unlawful reclamation of Crimea, and Britain’s “Brexit,” which in turn has stirred up renewed debate about Scottish independence. If this were to take place it would be hard to use the well-worn term “United Kingdom,” since Great Britain, divested of its most lavish colony, India, since 1947, would no longer be great at all.
The many histories and cultures bear witness to their sheer perishability. When scrutinized, these histories show that any culture is constituted by a diversity of conditions, embedded in the material and eidetic moment. That is, they are fashioned from the political, geographic, and technological circumstances, and much more. But how they are is impossible to gauge since all these factors build to an idea that is immaterial but helps to organize these data that makes the individual comprehensible to the group, and vice versa. Davies begins with Tolosa, which made up the majority of the southwest region of what is now France, the state of the Visigoths from 418–507 and ends with the Soviet Union (1924–1991). The rise and fall of states, he argues, makes for consternation amongst historians because the causes vary and are often “random.” As he observes
the definition of a nation should include its past and future, its memories and illusions. To paraphrase an old critic of Renan, a nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past, a hatred of their present neighbors, and dangerous illusions about their future. (For example, today’s Slovenes are united by myths about a Slovene kingdom in the eighth century, their hatred of [at this moment] the Croats, and the illusion that they are on the way to becoming the next Switzerland.) Each historical form is a totality which encompasses not only its retroactively posited past, but also its own future, a future which is by definition never realized: it is the immanent future of the present, so that, when the present form disintegrates, it undermines also its past and future.7
Nationhood is porous but at the same time what in political economy and sociology is called a universal. It is held up as an ideological fait accompli in which biology and destiny are intertwined. For even if this is a fantasy, to think otherwise is to encounter destabilization and ruin. Nationhood is a mythic solipsism from which any one of us can only escape by degrees; to be an exile is to be an exile from somewhere. To be stateless is to feel a pathological lack that is tantamount to orphanage or paternal rejection: the state, like the parent, is present through its absence.
In the age of kings and princes, the changes in borders are in some cases far easier to qualify, since they were due to deaths, marriages, and the expansion or contraction of dynasties. There are other cases where states have risen and fallen to some unaccountable measure: the precise reasons for the fall of the USSR are still open to debate.8 Davies concludes that “Successful statehood, in fact, is a rare blessing.” It is attributable to having neighbors that do not pose a great or ongoing threat, and to “a sense of purpose to aid growth and to reach maturity.”9 In other words, participation in the collective idea of what it means to belong to that nation, and how one manifests within it. It is this intangible vision, albeit linked to innumerable material constituents, that ensures a state’s longevity. “In the chronicles of the body politic, as in the human condition in general, this has been the way of the world since time immemorial.”10
The condition of belief and conviction in the collective requisite for the endurance of the collective is always, however, a mixed blessing, as it has the taint of nationalism, or rather “Nationalism” in which ideology is imbued with a quasi-religious fervor. As Benedict Anderson observes in his important study, Imagined Communities, “nationalism” itself does not follow a single or comprehensive definition. Anderson leans on the word “imagined”: “because even the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”11 Kinship cannot be verified except according to conviction. It is delimited according to borders and who does not belong, it frequently refers to upheavals such as wars and revolutions, and it presumes a shared set of values and belief in narratives critical to the state’s formation.
Reflecting on previous studies of nation-building and nationalism, Anderson concludes that they were all noticeably too Eurocentric. His “problem,” as he states, “was how to sail between the Scylla of the nineteenth-century European-derived romantic fantasies about umpteen thousand years of Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, etc. nationhood, and the Charybdis of Partha Chatterjee’s splendidly indignant later indictment of all anticolonial nationalisms outside Europe as ‘derivative discourses.’”12 Anderson refers to Partha Chatterjee’s Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, which demonstrates the presence of different kinds of nationalisms alive in the spirit of anticolonialism. Writing from the perspective of India, Chatterjee emphasizes the role of spiritual imagining in safeguarding a reservoir of belonging on which communities could draw, separate from the impositions of colonial dominance.13
Writing about the formation of modern Turkey, Zeynep Kezer states: “The concept of modern nationality comprises an amalgam of spatial imagination and spatial practices that are internalized through explicit and implicit lifelong experiences acquired both by immersion in formal settings—such as schools.”14 Hence the role of education as formation, the word more commonly used in French that emphasizes the ways minds and morals are influenced and brought into shape.
In their respective ways, Anderson, Chatterjee, and Kezer all emphasize the creative energy devoted to the nationalistic act, and the ability to share consensual myths lends these myths their credibility. It is through the mechanisms of sharing, through communication and community, that nationalism (not “Nationalism”) might be redeemed, and only in recognition of the porosity, fragility, and protean nature of the concept.15 Sharing belief in fictions for the sake of maintaining a stronger communal perspective is evident, for example, in the way Chinese cinema and cinema about China have had a richly symbiotic relationship, both building on the constructs and liberties that they take. This will be explored in a later chapter.
Symbiosis and exchange, while ostensibly benign notions, are nonetheless ones that are highly vexed. For the presumption in a plural, postcolonial, postmodern society is that there are multiple language systems, different mores and, correspondingly, never a unified way of understanding or representing the world—despite the continuum of capitalist (Euroamerican) strains of dominance in fiscal and cultural economies, and beyond. If cultural sensitivities are to be observed, then it seems only legitimate to suggest that an insider has a greater entitlement to be observer and to broker representations than someone who is not. Someone who has access to the language and cultural systems is better suited to explain them and to offer them for study and consumption. From a postcolonial standpoint, there are cultural sensitivities to consider, especially given a history of having had stories effaced and rewritten by the colonial power. All of this appears simple and fair at first, but it comes with an ever-mounting list of caveats and exceptions. One is that to place too rigid ideological controls over representation generates a solipsism that begins to mimic the kind of imperialist power that it sets out to counter. Another is that an outsider’s perspective may have a refreshing view. Another still is that miscegenation, hyphenated identities, and so on, mean that people often inhabit more than one world at the same time. To make the “third world” the custodian of its own history is a “hazardous” one, warns Gyan Prakash, as “it seems to reek of essentialism,” especially what constitutes “theirs” and “ours.”16
Such tribulations and subtleties of culture and representation are dissected and evaluated by Trinh Minh-ha, to some extent in all her work as a filmmaker and theorist, but also specifically in a paper from 1986, “Outside In Inside Out.”17 Here she asserts that “to see things from the native’s point of view speaks for a definite ideology of truth and authenticity.”18 It is a mistake to pretend that the break from the colonialist to postcolonial mind is a smooth one, given the ongoing prejudices that repeat themselves. The Outsider who seeks knowledge is conventionally one who inhabits the power–knowledge axis that is strengthened from learning from the Insider. Thus “what the Outsider expects from the Insider is, in fact, a projection of an all-knowing subject that this Outsider usually attributes to himself and to his own kind.”19 The Outsider (the postimperialist, the Euroamerican, the non-exotic privileged, articulate subject) is indeed expected to look elsewhere, and the extent of his (Trinh presumably maintains a metonymic irony to gender where “he” equals the dominant party) curiosity goes unnoticed. However “that a Third World member makes a film on other Third World peoples never fails to remain questionable to many.” Moreover the attempts to blur the line between Inside and Outside are also met with resistance for numerous reasons, including the fact that to remain exotic is to remain marketable, a subject of fascination and scrutiny.
On the other hand, and, Trinh adds, the Outside is more than willing to use its own auspices to encourage and sanction the Insider’s view of itself: “‘We would like to see Asians as told by Asians’; or We want ‘to teach people with a culture different from ours to make motion pictures depicting their culture and themselves as they see fit’.”20 It is a stance, she argues, that amounts to another deliberate but mildly insidious form of control. It fills a gap that whites are, as the narrative goes, unable to fill, and it is an undertaking that aimed at making the Other more complete, less Other. Yet it is an operation that “is ultimately dependent on white authority to attain any form of ‘real’ completion.”21 It is a charity mission in the form of the transaction of knowledge. Its danger, as Trinh argues, is that the “colonial Savior” is still presiding, but concealed under revisionist clothing.22 But then, how might the Insider, the non-white Euroamerican, assert herself independent of such rulings and formal parameters of power allocation? Note again Spivak’s repeated invocation of the double bind: similarly, Trinh, with a sense of personal reflexivity, suggests that the Insider step away from the Inside. “She necessarily looks in from the outside while also looking out from the inside.” She avails herself of multivalent perspectives. Elsewhere Trinh comments on the limitations of a term such as “multiculturalism,” which straddles difference but also ensures that difference is still present, while obscuring the fact that differences already pertain within any one culture. Moreover, any one individual can be thought of “multicultural,” as a product of the confluence of many cultures, just of differing combinations. “Intercultural, intersubjective, interdisciplinary.… To cut across boundaries and borderlines is to live aloud the malaise of categories and labels; it is to resist simplistic attempts at classifying, to resist the comfort of belonging to classification, and of producing classifiable works.”23 For this multi-zoned self-positing, Trinh uses the term, “Inappropriate Other” for whom “the criterion of authenticity no longer proves pertinent.”24 This does not mean that origins and cultural affiliation are deleted or annulled, rather it is an effort not to “naturalize the ‘I’” by constant deferral to the shadow of origins and cultural inheritance.25 It is a subjectivity that looks continually to its renewed constitution and contradictions of self. It ensures that “culture” is never in stagnation but an entity whose renewal comes from interaction between Inside and Outside. It is a performative stance that foregrounds the staging of culture, whether that be through ownership (Inside) or influence (Outside). “To me,” Trinh confesses, “the most inspiring works of art are those that cut across the boundaries of specific art form and specific cultures, even in their most specific aspects.”26 In doing so such works insist on their non-compliance, their difference. Trinh emphasizes that this kind of “difference is not otherness.” The constant reminder of difference is to unsettle “every definition of otherness arrived at.”27
The word “staging” goes a long way in helping to grasp the elusive, nebulous notion of “culture,” eloquently defined by Spivak in the Introduction. It is worth repeating: “Let us think of culture as a package of largely unacknowledged assumptions, loosely held by a loosely outlined group of people, mapping negotiations between the sacred and the profane, and the relationship between the sexes.” To this she adds,
On the level of these loosely held assumptions and presuppositions become belief systems, organized suppositions. Rituals coalesce to match, support, and advance beliefs and suppositions. But these presuppositions also give us the wherewithal to change our world, to innovate and create. Most people believe, even (or perhaps particularly) when they are being cultural relativists, that creation and innovation are their own cultural secret, whereas others are only determined by their cultures. This habit is unavoidable. But if we aspire to be citizens of the world, we must fight this habit.28
Another problem arises, she argues, with the differences in the way that cultures perceive one another, especially when a more powerful group views a less powerful one as static as opposed to dynamic. It is a convenient binary in which the dynamic, evolving, and progressive group may exhibit its progressiveness through the thorough examination of the static group, which is all the more easily able to be examined objectively because of its very stasis. Yet another concern are the limitations enshrined in an overly deft and glib formulation of culture, and the claims regarding “cultural memory.” For “‘Cultural memory,’” Spivak claims, “is a crude concept of narrative re-memorization that attempts to privatize the historical record.”29 Cultural memory is an immediate presumption of ownership by a nebulous collective subjectivity. It disposes of facts and myths, and is also a negative symptom to outside pressures. It is, however, endemic to any collective, any society, and thus its mores and laws.
The examination of cultures is the natural and logical coefficient of the early historical stages of globalization since the fifteenth century. Consumption of foreign goods occurred on every level, including treasures, curios, and hence culture itself. It is in the sixteenth century that the first museums were created: the Wunderkammern and Kunstkabinette, storehouses of acquisitions and gifts reflecting the wonders of the natural world and of human creation. Once amassed, they required taxonomy. Thus the observation of culture was reciprocally twofold, namely on the level of the sense gleaned through relics, artifacts, and specimens which then provided the criteria for the assessment of the “real” and existing cultures themselves—and vice versa. Understandably, anthropology is married to museology, as both were conceived according the same impulse to draw knowledge through ordering systems, almost all of which were based on visual data.
Anthropology as a discipline was reborn as “Cultural Studies” as result of social and epistemic upheavals of the 1960s. The luxury that anthropology had always cherished and languished in was that it was comfortable with its own apparatus—what Foucault would call a dispositif—and powers of deduction for labeling the outside, the other. It was a system that was labeled imperialist and “phallocentric,” and its supposedly neutral order was in fact an illusion or a fragile edifice held together by myopia and misprision. As Spivak puts it, while “colonizers founded Anthropology in order to know their subjects” the new order of “Cultural Studies was founded by the colonized in order to question and correct their masters.”30 The main difference is that anthropology assumes that the culture under scrutiny is static and determined, while cultural studies maintains that cultures—both studier and studied—are “dynamic and evolving.”31 But alteration in perspective does not liberate the operation of study from what Spivak repeatedly refers to as the “double bind,” which, among other examples, is where the process of revision is demonstrably best undertaken under the aegis of the culture that is being revised: hence Said and Spivak thriving in the United States.
Echoing this view, in an earlier essay on diaspora and Caribbean cinema, Stuart Hall extends two definitions of cultural identity. The first is the most obvious, understood, and the most staid. Namely the identification with, and of, a common past. It is a past that is unified by literature, art, and film, which are accepted as representative of an overarching shared experience.32 The other is more nuanced, that takes into account not only what is shared but what is also different. It is a view that looks at the evolution of identity—“what we have become.” As he asserts: “Cultural identity, in this second sense, is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as ‘being’. It belongs to the future as well as the past. It is not something that really exists, transcending place, time, history and culture.” As opposed to being obsessed with “recovering” the past, this second view holds to a future to be created, and for new but still related identities to be deployed into an unnamed elsewhere.33 Such identity has an historical state but is in practicality stateless. We must acknowledge, he argues, for a particular “diaspora aesthetic” that is a distinctive “aesthetics of ‘crossovers’ and ‘cut-and-mix’, to borrow Dick Hebdidge’s telling phrase.” Hence the representation he exhorts is one “able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable us to discover places from which we speak.”34
The notion of dynamic and evolving cultures takes on a far darker face when confronted with the extraordinary number of displaced peoples as a result of war and natural disasters—but where even “natural” is a euphemism for something with a human cause earlier down the line. In her meditation on war and cataclysm in recent memory, Trinh paints a picture of dispossession on a scale that defies the imagination:
Who’s fleeing and where to? Through defiance and loss, from wasteland to wasteland, into the transborders zone of the denizens whose earthwalk is characterized by an indefinite state of being-in-expulsion: exiled, expatriated, segregated, deported, displaced, discarded, repudiated, estranged, disappeared, unsettled and unsettling. Countless shadows of terrified bodies in flight, moving alone en masse, searching in vain for the lost ones, faring in a no-man’s-land as a no-nation people.… Neither citizen not simply a living being, the one who leaves, the phantom-turned-refugee, hurtles along with loads of other empty bodies, driven by the sheer movements of waves of humanity in distress.35
It is a stirringly desperate picture that only comes to the privileged public in fits and starts because it is uncongenial to entertainment news. The stateless individual, deprived of rights and denuded of identity has become a normative problem throughout the world. It is a category that must also include the United States as a result of consistently regular natural disasters, in which thousands have had their livelihoods torn from them and their lives placed in a semi-permanent state of abeyance.
The paradox of globalization is that the price of everything-at-hand comes at the expense of millions for whom next to nothing is at hand through social and financial inequity, through disaster, or a combination of all of these. It is a condition that has received rising attention and which perhaps has its philosophical roots in recent memory in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life,36 and whose more recent voices include Zizek and Trinh. Refugeeism and rootlessness is now no longer an exception, but a widening problem whose solutions seem obvious but are sedulously deferred. This contemporary condition is thus the deplorable dimension of the “trans” state of ineluctable limbotic suffering, and it is one that will be returned to at regular intervals throughout this book. This is not to say that the diversity and multiplicity available in the idea of transorientalism are not to be cherished, it is only to infer that there are different faces to the prism. Global culture is climax of capitalism itself whose survival depends on being able to absorb and feed off the constituent contradictions.