TRANS Nr. 17: 5.3. - Boris Škvorc: (Not) Sharing Culture(s): Narrating ‘us’ and the ‘others’ within (and around) ‘our’ Culture

(Not) Sharing Culture(s):
Narrating ‘us’ and the ‘others’ within (and around) ‘our’ Culture

Since the introduction of the concept of imagined communities in the sense of artificial entities representing a ‘deep, horizontal comradeship’ (B. Anderson, 1991), the concept of shared culture within limited and finite boundaries is regarded to have been a dominant cultural force in the nineteenth as well as the first half of the twentieth century. This situation of cultural separation and the forceful imposition of one’s own upon another or other culture(s) was dominant practice until the deconstruction of the concept of identity took place, which is now understood as re/constructed or even ‘negotiated’ rather than naturally ‘given’. In the development of this concept a new awareness of the hybrid character of culture(s) in various cultural studies projects is of utmost importance. Despite the insight that ‘even in modernism every culture was to a certain degree also a hybrid concept’ (owning to various influences coming from without as well as from the popular culture), the real awareness of hybridization emerged not earlier than with the postcolonial theory (Bhabha, 1994) which analysed the penetration of ‘others’ into the body of the stable, nationally negotiated cultural concept(s). With that awareness also comes a sense of agencies that deconstruct the negotiated stability from both, inside – in a form of ‘divisive’ agencies that always negate stability of negotiated (constructed) concept; but also from outside as some sort of corrective agencies who have their negating narrative as a contrast towards which a particular cultural concept should be renegotiated.

In the view of above, it can be stated that the hybrid character of Croatian culture as well as canonisation of national literature in relation to ‘others’ is, as a cultural concept, negotiated, during the period of 150 years starting from the construction of (Romantic) stereotypes up to the various re/construction of this narrative during the twentieth century. This narrative of continuity was renegotiated several times with changes in political landscape and ideologically determined change within the realm concerned with positions of cultural power. Much less is achieved with the view point of the power brokers that the field of negotiation becomes inclusive rather than exclusive, since this view was always concerned with repositioning within the field of power reaching cultural or political authorities, rather than with the consensus with wider community and its ‘minority agencies’. This can be considered as a major reason why there are even now days still some taboo themes for Croatian literature that can (or should) be discussed ‘only to a certain degree’.(1) In my opinion this positioning is very much influenced by the situation in which the colonial dependency status during the nineteen and twentieth century history is narrated and by the way in which the nation is constructed ‘against the other agencies’. It is interesting to note that at the same time the reach of these ‘foreign’ agencies within the body of national corpus, is not considered as an important constructing element of nationhood in a recent processes of deconstructing some inhabited stereotypes and reconstructing the modern cultural (shared) identity. This type of positioning goes for scholars, same way as it goes for other powerbrokers whose connection with policy making and manipulation is closer. This also is not a specific Croatian or Balkan situation but is an important element of nation construction within the corpuses of small nations.

The absence of awareness of subaltern position within the theory and literary historiography circles of scholars belonging to these ‘small’ traditions, as well as the sublimation of naturalized and appropriated influences from surrounding great traditions, has developed a type of hybrid cultural environment with strong outside (semi-colonial) frame imposed on their cultural development, which has to be taken into account in a process of re-constructing the narratives of “small nation’s” national culture and national imaginary.

In that respect it is worth mentioning an interesting paradox. First of all, I found that the question of belonging to some imaginary culturally well profiled circle (Central European, or European) was very important issue for Croatian intellectuals and writers from the nineteen and early twentieth centuries. At the same time the resistance towards ‘foreign influence’ on political and ideological level is represented simultaneously in a form of emphasizing the elements of national vernacular and stressing the need for well profiled national narrative, and that is the fact even when this vernacular is narrated in forms that were borrowed from these canonical traditions. In both cases there exists an interpretative barrier that is not easy to cross either from outside, nor even from within the circle, if the awareness of this post-colonial or semi-colonial cultural influence is not taken into account or even decoded in philological naturalizations of texts of the past.(2) The positioning in between here is a major point of constituting a difference, both in relation to ‘others’ from outside, as well as for producing the vernacular within this ‘horizontal comradeship’.

This paper is primarily concerned with this ‘places in between’ from where the core of otherness in relation to the narrative of majority culture is constructed. They can be negotiated in relation to imaginary space within which the narrative of temporarily, that is tradition forming, as Lyotard would put it, ‘is (primarily) concern with time, not a content’ (1985:34; and Bhabha, 1994:72). At this very context, continues Lyotard, ‘West wants from this (narrated) autonomy, intention and novelty’ to forget the time as a consolidating factor of sphere where difference can be negotiated and to ‘preserve and accumulate past in a form of content’. It can then be transferred from time to time and appropriated in various discursive practices in a process of textual naturalisation. However, Lyotard does not emphasise enough the fact that this content is not any content, that here we are talking about what can best be described as a ‘collective consciousnesses’. In other words, so called Western tradition wants from the narrative of continuity to ‘turn time into a history and to think that it progresses because it accumulates’. This argument can continue further: the accumulation could blur the dividing line between past and present and produce a new state of consciousness that appears in a form of the ‘invention of the better past’. Probably the best examples of this process can be decoded in a field of literary production. Since the mid-nineteen century, two elements of exclusion were embedded within the process of canon formation as foundational in understanding the situation where culture is not shared equally within the field of power negotiation between various ideological, political, gender and economic players. They are both present as destabilizing factors within the community but also in interaction with other communities.

First of all, when we are talking about the experiences of sharing in cultural endeavours in twenty first century, it is important to constantly remind ourselves about this ‘places in between’ consisting of various types of subaltern communities and discursive practices attached to them. The discursive field of this deprivation is originated from deprived classes who did not have an access to education in nineteen century and others who were physically excluded from a process of nation building (inventing) and mechanisms of producing and manipulating the national stereotypes. As far as content sharing issues and processes attached to it are concerned, the continuation of that relationship of power grouping within ‘the field of play’ in wider community can be clearly seen even now days in a form of exclusions in relation to various minority groups. These exclusions are today best visible in the cases of national minorities, gay communities, non-mainstream intellectuals and women interest groups, who are still deprived in many respects. However, there are other types of exclusions which are very finely tuned and are a part of what de Certeau calls ‘the power play within the field of poetics of everyday living’.

The second factor is closely connected with the idea of the space at the Balkan Peninsula. Considered to be a space with postcolonial state of affairs, it is not necessarily the space of postcolonial mindset. The problem lies in the fact that there was never any reconciliation process that has taken place in a form of dialogue, either in arts (literature) or in political realm of power play. Some cultural issues were never clarified, and reconciliation did not take place between Austrians and Croatians, Croatians and Hungarians, Bosnians and Turks, Croatians and Serbs. The content against which Bhabha reads these in-between spaces (and narratives) of time de-formation in this particular case is accumulated instead of being relieved in a dialogical form of inclusion in which the polyphonic minority voices could, in fact, decide on how the temporality could be canonized in the form of negotiated historicized narratives that can then be agreed upon with consensus. Even if discussion among intellectual elite was taking place and some main stream works of literature were written in order to tackle the above issues(3), this process has never been placed in a context where the widest possible terms of appropriation would be addressed, the ones that concern not only power players within a given community but a most inclusive possible range of agencies that are, in current state of affairs, not positioned to negotiate their particular point of view. This is the case at the level where cultural policies are already negotiated, but is also present at the level of reading the national, or even better, potentially multicultural formation of national and regional stereotypes, as well as their ironic negations, all in order to produce not a ‘better past’ but liveable and inhabitable future.(4)

In a situation where both, the ‘presentation of the past in a form of accumulated content’ and the repressing of colonial past and national status within the realm of this accumulated speculative field of endeavour, is taking place and ruling the field of canon formation and tradition negotiation, any deconstructive practice that puts emphasis on and is trying to look at the problem from subaltern point of view seams to be endangered in its very core. This is the case because to look at the problems of sharing culture with others from minority perspective is always going to be heard as a ‘whisper among the screamers’, especially if it is viewed within a wider social context. The ones that are positioned as power players are always the owners of a narrative that construct the ‘nation’ and frame the possible construction of ‘global influences’. Simultaneously, the others are manipulated and deprived of the voice from this very ‘nation building perspective’ and are set outside the framework of negotiating the sphere of global influence. To naturalize the past with the purpose of ‘painting the bigger picture’ in a process of its presentation as postmodern nation building, represents a perfect appropriation positioning of governing agencies from where they can simultaneously speak in a name of minority voice, while not giving them a room or medium to express itself without the mediator. This is the space where the inhabitation of provided infrastructure enables some of these agencies to manipulate the very minorities for which they are standing up. The process of mediation is taking place by using the two types of tools that historical narrative have ‘accumulated’ for the elite in a form of provided content that is extremely pliable for interpretation or/and mediation. The first type is the nationalistic one, and is inhabited from two different diachronically charged sources: the first one reaching to 1870’s and time of canon and nation formation (Hobsbawm, 1999 and Anderson, 1994) that is a period of nation liberation and constructing the narrative of continuity, while the second one is, in a particular South Slavic and Croatian case, connected with narratives of 1990’s and its neo-a-historicism that evokes a very situation described before, only now with much stronger black and white stereotyping and exclusions that are appearing to be more obvious. The second type of tools used is in its core connected with globalisation process and is imported during that very same period of neo-exclusion. Its power on local scene is charged by the fact that its narrative is artificially intermingled with the first ones in orders to leave minorities even more outside the major field of power play. Its stereotype is closely connected with the positioning between ‘local and global identification’.

I will concentrate on the issues that deal with nation formation and the consequences that this process has for contemporary situation in relation to minority voices in a region. It is connected with (not) sharing one’s own culture with others at the level of official political platforms and realm of everyday practices. It also is connected with sharing the cultural endeavours in regional sub-cultures as well as sharing the aesthetic values on the level of production and cultural policy making circles positioned ‘in between’. These ‘places in between’ where the difference to the policy of exclusion/inclusion is formulated, are present simultaneously on both levels of discussion: in a context of correcting the narrative of nation building in a situation where some agencies are (or use to be) completely excluded, but also at the level of defining the real consequences of not defining the post-colonial state of mind appropriately, except in, to the certain degree, literature and arts narrated as a resistance to the traditional patterns of nation construction. This is the position from where it was possible to think in terms of de/constructing and re/constructing the tradition constructed in nineteen century as stable and ‘given’, rather than dynamic, change driven and hybrid in its core. This shift we owe to the dynamics of these ‘in between places’ that always question stable and ‘great’ concepts of meta-stories.

In a postmodern environment of second part of twentieth century at the level of narrative deconstruction this situation will be complicated even further with inclusion of Diaspora and Globalisation deconstruction agencies within the discursive realm of national narrative. Their positioning ‘in between’ is not only deconstructing local national agencies but also other stable formations where the physical penetration of otherness is now taking place. In contemporary transnational space, the penetration of ‘others’ into the ‘genuine’ space of a national corpus is not noted as an anomaly on the level of cultural interaction, but the fact that the process is happening in a space where ‘others’ build their identity while space wise being placed within the corpus of another dominant culture may lead us to consider it as an anomaly.

This entails that, on the one hand, a horizontal deconstruction of the ‘united space’ is becoming a permanent feature of any cultural interaction, which produces a number of ‘others’ within the image of ‘our culture’. On the other hand, however, the vertical penetration of constructed ‘external’ narratives is stereotyped differently in different spaces, depending on the opposition between ‘homeland’ and ‘diasporic’ positioning, as well as on the type of history(es) reconstructed.

With inclusion of diasporic agencies, considered either as spatially absent as ‘our’ corpus living elsewhere or as spatially present, that is as a part of ‘their’ corpus living within the imagined realm of ‘our’ space, the narrative of continuity is becoming even more exclusive, rather than inclusive, even when at the surface it appears as if the opposite is the case. Imagined and self imposed realms of voluntary isolation in a community that follow the narrative of resisting hybridisation, produce the fictionalization of media outlets and new and previously unknown forms of narratives. In that respect sharing / or not sharing the culture becomes even more important issue: the postcolonial situation in compounded content that has been neglecting the time of narrated, which is provided with a tool of justifying isolation, becomes a difficult agency to deconstruct. However, the proper type of negation from both positions, of subaltern agency and cultural policy renegotiation, can shade a new and different light on this complex issue. Rethinking of, for example, canon of nineteen and twentieth century Croatian literature, inclusion of other texts and other forms as potentially formative to a particular cultural circle, giving minorities constitutive voice, these are some of the possible starting points for the positioning from which sharing culture(s) can be negotiated in a nation, region but also in transnational space that in wider sense belongs to the realm of ‘imagined’ civilisation circle.

And maybe, at the end, a word or two instead of conclusion: when a minority voice is given to a small culture to renegotiate its positioning towards the great cultures, canons and traditions in widest sense of the world, this also most probably is a position from which this very same small culture can renegotiate power system within its own corpus and provide all the agencies with the possibility to voice their own concerns and positions. If the world becomes a better place in the sense that small nations will really be able to speak with their own voice, then I believe that the opposite will certainly become the case.

1 This is not specific to Croatian or any Balkan or Central European literature or culture. Same goes even for US or United Kingdom, even though to, at the first glance, lesser degree.

2 The form of Petrarca’s sonnet in Renaissance Dubrovnik was very often the very form in which the Venetian, and wider pressure from other parts of Italian peninsula was denounced and criticized. Critics and literary historians would decode the influence, but at the level of interdependency.

3 Krleža’s or Andrić’s novels, for example – first from a position of addressing post-colonial state of mind on both sides, and second one to address the various level of deprivation and social consequences of both post-colonial state of affairs and social issues actualized on basis of this ‘content of narration’.

4 Multicultural is here understood in a wider context of reference, as described in Kelly (2003) and Watson (2000) where it is stated that various minority groups and their voices enable vertical rather than horizontal diversification, while ‘official’ Canadian multicultural policy is insisting on horizontal naming of ‘difference’ as belonging ‘among equal’ and is highly ideologically charged and politically pragmatic.

For quotation purposes:
Boris Škvorc: (Not) Sharing Culture(s): Narrating ‘us’ and the ‘others’ within (and around) ‘our’ Culture - In: TRANS. Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften. No. 17/2008. WWW: http://www.inst.at/trans/17Nr/5-3/5-3_skvorc17.htm

	Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften	17. Nr.	April 2010

Sektion 5.3.	Sharing in / out Culture(s) Sektionsleiter \| Section Chair: Vladimir Biti (Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb) Dokumentation \| Documentation \| Documentation