Of Networks, Submerged Histories and the New (Central) Europe
The interdisciplinary conference NetCultureScience/NetzKulturWissen-schaft, which took place in Budapest on December 10-13, 2003, might strike Anglophone academics interested in what used to be known as literary theory as something of an anachronism. Hasn’t Terry Eagleton just reassured us that we are now in a globalized brave new era “after” theory (Eagleton; see also Payne and Schad), and, more to the point, after the actor-network theory (ANT) which evolved from the work of Bruno Latour and Michel Callon in the early 1990s? That may well have been the thrust of the “After Networks” special 2000 issue of Society and Space (Hetherington and Law); however, in the context of Central Europe during the transition to the newly enlarged Europe, networks have proven a useful concept to reflect on metamorphizing groupings which affect the production of academic knowledge. While one might justifiably venture the suspicion that the “network” component in this combination of Net/Culture/Science represents another mobilization of that amorphous signifier “culture” to colonize yet another discipline, the “natural sciences,” and one might wonder what is it about the particular terrain of Central Europe that would allow the cultural turn to overextend itself to the point of bursting out the confines of the humanities and social sciences, it was by no means a case in Budapest of eliding nature with science and thereby simply conjuring an old polarity in new bottles, but rather of a spirited effort, given the realities of this brave new academic era, to not sink but rather sync.
Because of our participation in the Budapest conference and our collaborative relations with its organizers “Kakanien revisited,” a web-based networking project for interdisciplinary research in the field of Central and Eastern European studies (www.kakanien.ac.at), we initiated in the last issue of spacesofidentity a special section on networks in which to continue the explorations begun in Budapest. In this editorial, we would like to reflect on that experience in light of the two “network” contributions in the current Bazaar issue and the attention they draw (and challenges they pose) to the situated creation of knowledge in, between and across disciplines and academies, and across very different times and spaces.
Both pieces – Juliet Kershaw and Karen Virag’s “Meeting Through Time and Space: The Kirschner Letters, 1925-1973” and Maria Tamboukou’s “Nomadic Trails in the Unfolding of the Self” – began life as conference papers. Only one was targeted towards Budapest, but readers uninvolved with those proceedings might well have difficulty determining which one, given Kakanien’s stated interdisciplinary intent:
Net-Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe from the fields of Media Studies, Cultural and Political Sciences, Arts, Natural Sciences and Literary Studies as well as Philosophy and Sociology are the prime focus.
Both are reports on collaborative projects, both interlace autobiography with images, and both self-consciously avail themselves of experimental means to explore, in Tamboukou’s words, “what it means to be at home, what it means to be estranged, what it means to move in between space/time boundaries.” Moreover, both hone in on a key transitional point in the life stories of their subjects. Those stories, of four young black women in contemporary London in the process of making decisions about their post compulsory education and of a Hungarian young man in England at the outbreak of World War II who decided to join the Pioneer Corps, might otherwise seem to have little to do with each other. Yet, to us at any rate, because of the situatedness of their authors (all fluid, transnational female subjectivities) vis-à-vis the changing face of Europe and the increasing (global) corporatization of universities, these pieces, especially taken together, helpfully dissect the ideology of locationality: the seeming irrevocability of being identified with the place of one’s birth while at the same time being dislocated by the forces and flows which have come to be associated with globalization.
We have often been disturbed, here at spacesofidentity, at continued misunderstandings resulting from our name, which was chosen not as a form of commendation but rather to target a pernicious problematic of particular relevance to Central Europe, customarily understood in the first instance as a geographical and geopolitical entity. The purpose of our journal has been to offer an alternative space to problematize and debate issues arising from this traditional and still regrettably hegemonic standpoint. This is where “theory” enters the picture. How to not merely identify, not merely to remap but to reimagine “Central” Europe, and its historical centrality in establishing academic discourses? As these two articles demonstrate, history and theory may well have come, or at least be coming, to our rescue.
Kirschner: The Enigma of Central European histories
The story Kershaw and Virag relate about Endre Kirschner and the afterlife of his correspondence struck us because of the way its historical undercurrents corresponds with those of the popular “Enigma” story about the British lads in Bletchley Park, who worked to decipher the codes the Nazis used to guide their submarines around the North Atlantic during the Second World War. A state secret for decades, it has since become stock material in Anglo-American popular military history programs, such as those on the History Channel, and also of recent period films such as U-571 (2000, dir. Jonathan Mostow) and Enigma (2001, dir. Michael Apted).
What distinguishes these latter two films is the ironic twist and resulting historical punch Enigma’s Central European undercurrent provides. Whereas U-571 sticks to the tried-and-true submarine adventure plot, Enigma involves a dredging-up of the past in much the same way Kirschner’s personal history does. While most (male) reviewers seem to assume that the enigma of the title is Saffron Burrows’ blonde bombshell, whose memory haunts the protagonist-code-breaker as he scrambles to rescue an imperiled Allied convoy, one could perhaps more persuasively interpret the film’s enigma as being the Katyn forest massacre. The message the Kate Winslett character is finally able to decipher on account of her knowledge about the theater of operations where the message was sent from contains the names of the Polish officer corps that German troops dug up in 1943 in Katyn, about sixteen kilometers north-west from Smolensk (http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/ katyn/map.html), a massacre which was successfully hushed up by the Allies so as not to harm the war-effort and not acknowledged by the Soviets until 1990. In the film, however, the Katyn casualties being unearthed are pointedly juxtaposed to other, nameless victims of war lost in a watery grave: those on the Allied vessels who have undertaken the very dangerous Atlantic crossing to bring supplies to a besieged England and who are sunk by Nazi submarines because the Bletchley Park gang is unable to break the Enigma code in time. That Enigma’s screenplay was written by the politically sensitive, Czech-born Tom Stoppard (birth name – Tomas Straussler) lends further credence to such an interpretation and a link to Kirschner, who, with a dramatic flair Stoppard would surely appreciate, “was given one hour to choose a new English-sounding name and warned to never again refer to himself by his birth-name. He had to construct a new family history and burn any possessions that could reveal the truth.”
Such masking of identity also occurs with the film’s genre. Purporting to be a love story, Enigma is more fundamentally a detective story, but one of a specific kind. While “[f]rom Dickens and Balzac and Baudelaire to Benjamin and film noir and beyond, the detective story stages the city as enigma: a dangerous but fascinating network of often subterranean relationships in need of decipherment” (Donald 69-70, italics added), here it is not the city but history, more precisely the Central European theater of World War II, that is being thus staged. And if it is, in Donald’s account, “[t]he detective [who] embodies knowledge of the city’s secret lore and languages, and the daring to move at will through its society salons, its ghettos and its underworld” (70), here it falls to the historically minded writer to navigate subterranean (or more generally – submerged) spaces and bring to the surface secret lore and languages, particularly in the form of switched or suppressed identities and fates. The image-enhanced epistolary form that Kershaw and Virag chose in this regard neatly echoes the fictional blend of the visual and literary embodied in Stoppard’s screenplay. As with Stoppard, drawing on a dislocated familial past allows Kershaw and Virag to probe the mirage of their current place-bound identifications. It induces in them a sobriety about how fragile these identifications are and demonstrates both their lure and how history can work to crack enigmas by revealing them to be not myths, blonde bombshells, but rather the aftermath of shell-shocking unearthings.
Nomadology: the history of Central European enigmas
Turning now to Maria Tamboukou’s sensitive re- (as opposed to de)-coding of the life-stories of young black women in East London, we find a different yet not unrelated way to spring the trap of identificatory interpellation: one which takes as its focus “becoming” as opposed to “being.” Offering the young women the perspective of a mobile subject position, one which hinges on the possibility and productivity inherent in narratives of transition, Tamboukou is concerned with not the fragility but the ambivalence of not only identifications but also the concepts used to frame and determine them, such as “youth, femininity, blackness, localism and/or good/bad educational provision.” Like Kershaw and Virag, she calls the already existing discursive categories regarding her subjects into question by reflecting in her work on the process of her writing about them, on how that writing necessarily entails discursive limits and on how to most judiciously work against them through the choice of one’s methodology. She thus opts for a feminist-inflected nomadology based on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, as “Deleuze and Guattari’s theoretical work does not construct or impose a closed theoretical and/or methodological framework. Indeed their philosophies have fought against any totalitarianism in thought and not only.”
This striking formulation draws attention to a key point linking the two contributions. The driving force behind Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy would seem to be very much akin to that motivating Endre Kirschner’s decision to join the Pioneer Corps and the code-crackers’ activity at Bletchley Park, which on the basis of the Life After Theory discussions is precisely what one would expect. With “the dramatic discovery in 1987 of de Man’s wartime journalism... [a]lmost overnight (or now it so seems) theory discovered itself to be, in a sense, a post-war event, or trauma – an attempt to deal with dark European memories” (Payne and Schad 175). In other words, theory’s symbolizing kernel (or Ding, to speak in a psychoanalytic register) is the trauma associated with the European experience of WWII, and as Martin Matuštík recently made clear in a heartfelt reflection on the role of American Christianity in continuing the tragic chaos in Iraq, and as Paul Gilroy has long maintained (see, for example, Gilroy), there is indeed much to be said for such a “due sense of tragedy” like the one Europe gained during the short but all too traumatic 20th century:
a key difference between Europe and the United States [is] – not that Europe is somehow “better,” but that it lost belief in its own innocence in Auschwitz, in the Gulags, in Rwanda. Europe knows on its own skin that it is possible to sing Schiller’s / Beethoven’s Ode to Joy on the way to the gas chamber. Europe knows that when it intones its European Union anthem in hope that it will “become” the Europe it is in that ode, it will not save itself from the possibility of committing new evil. It lacks, therefore, the dangerously naive conscience that would suspend the Geneva Conventions for captured prisoners and then protest its presumption of innocence before its people and the world community. (http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-3-77-1938.jsp)
One will note that “becoming” is critical to Matuštík’s case for what he terms a “cosmopolitan conscience” and, also, that it quickly capsizes under the weighty framework of a very static, territorial transatlantic alignment of Great Powers. As the conclusion of Susan Sontag’s speech accepting the peace prize at the 2003 Frankfurt Book Fair is exemplary in demonstrating, this tired dualism offers precious few lines of escape, in fact, mainly only a Sartrian one:
Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom.
Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom. (http://www.justresponse.net/Sontag.html)
Not, however, for the young black women in Tamboukou’s study, as her nomadological analysis makes clear. The requirement of this particular literary passport, which does indeed allow the bearer “to enter a larger life” of distinction and the freedoms it makes possible, is precisely the problem with which the four young women are confronted, and therefore imposing concepts like freedom and erudition on them is only to further solidify their sans papiers status. Rather, it is more adequate to their experience, as Tamboukou shows, to approach them as nomads, for, as the epigram from Rosi Braidotti indicates:
The nomad is only passing through; s/he makes those necessarily situated connections that can help her/him to survive, but s/he never takes on fully the limits of one national, fixed identity. The nomad has no passport – or has too many of them. (Braidotti 33)
European historical memory here calls forth another of the nomad’s many guises: the displaced person, a figure who personifies the underbelly of Sontag’s freedom and underscores that nomadology is not about a celebratory losing of one’s self in the funhouse of theory but rather the grim discomfort of those (even – or especially? – academics who practice theory) who continue to be displaced as Europe and its histories continue their relentless realignment.
meanwhile, back in Budapest...
It was apparent at the NetCultureScience/ NetzKulturWissenschaft conference that it was no longer a case of a ghost stalking Europe, but rather of émigré ghosts of Europe making a theoretical return. The discussion generated by Herbert Hrachovec’s final plenary paper on “Trees, Nets, Mazes,” for example, made clear how thinking history together with theory leads to the debunking of stereotypes of both. Should networks be conceived of as grids for mapping, charting, and finding one’s way out of labyrinths, as Hrachovec as well as many other, more structuralist conference participants claimed, or rather, as others insisted, encountered as Kafkaesque burrows? What came out of the general round-up sessions, a truly marvelous organizational strategy for conferences with multiple sessions, was that each of the possible approaches to networks is all the poorer if only taken into consideration in isolation and not with the others. Only then must subject positions be confronted and made available for debate. Networks thus proved an indispensable concept for ferreting out preconceptions, something as evident in our two contributions as it was in Budapest.
In the context of the newly enlarged Europe, then, life can never be “after” theory in the temporal sense because of theory’s state of historical saturation, but only in the sense of modeling of the kind rhizomic nomadology encourages and lends itself to. Conceiving of networks as rhizomic is one way of overcoming the limitations of the network metaphor identified by the British geographers who publish in Society and Space:
Certainly, then, it is clear that the metaphor of the network is too limited in its assumptions about connections, regions, and centres of calculation – nodes that come to sum up the relations of the network. A network as a spatial imaginary works well when it is the relations between the different actors that are being sought, but to recognise Otherness as inside rather than leave it out requires other ways of thinking about space. We need a spatial imaginary more topologically complex and less certain in order to do justice to the uncertainty that Otherness brings with it. (Hetherington and Law) http://www.envplan.com/html/d1802fst.html
In the 25-member EU, one cannot but encounter Otherness, an enigma which often seems as though it were enlargement’s structuring principle. What spacesofidentity would like to see, then, are rhizomic histories of the new Europe that, as our network contributions do, unearth and contextualize enigmas while still respecting their alterity and, in Tamboukou’s words, offer “effective models of making sense of... lives, drives, decisions and/or choices.”
References
Braidotti, R. Nomadic Subjects. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Donald, James. Imagining the Modern City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Eagleton, Terry. After Theory. New York: Basic Books, 2003.
Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000.
Hetherington, Kevin, and John Law, eds. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Special Issue: After Networks. Vol. 1, 2000.
Payne, Michael, and John Schad. Life after Theory. London New York: Continuum, 2003.