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'Civilized modern societies are defined by processes
of decoding and deterritorialization. But what
they deterritorialize with one hand, they
reterritorialize with the other. These
neoterritorialities are often artificial, residual,
archaic; but they are archaisms having a perfectly
current function, our modern way of "imbricating,"
of sectioning off, of reintroducing code fragments,
resuscitating old codes, inventing pseudo codes or
jargons. Neoarchaisms, as Edgar Morin puts it. These
modern archaisms are extremely complex and varied.
Some are mainly folkloric, but they nevertheless
represent social and potentially political forces'
(1984: 257 original italics). |
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The ability to discover tradition within modernity
is crucial. Or more precisely to claim modernity,
and thus authority, one must be able to
reterritorialise tradition, to relocate 'primitive
art in civilised places' (Price, 1989) in the name
of a transcendent supracultural aesthetic, where
"even words aren't necessary". Understanding becomes
subordinated to narrated experience. 'Believing is
being exhausted. Or at least it takes refuge in the
areas of the media and leisure activities. '(Certau,
1984: 180). And if as Bourdieu (1984) pointed out
taste is the means by which individuals and social
groups differentiate themselves, he nevertheless
does not fully tackle two key questions: (i) why in
certain societies tradition is revitalised by being
reterritorialised as exotic, and (ii) why there has
been a movement towards sufaces and narration.
If għana is now perceived as exotic, this
exoticism exists as always about to be discovered,
as 'marginal'. In a similar way Savvopoulos attempts
to salvage rebetika by reexoticising it as
Turkogyftiko. Experience is emphasised; it is an
experience that desires to be recounted, and even
shared, though not necessarily directly. Not a
secret experience, this experience realises itself
in its recounting rather than its concealment. As
Certau has observed 'our society has become a
recited society, in three senses: it is defined by
stories (recits, the fables constituted by our
advertising and informational media), by
citations of stories, and by the interminable
recitation of stories' (Certau,1984: 186).
Authority is claimed by the navigation of the self
and the taking of social bearings through these
narratives. Power is thus related not so much to the
role of rituals as expressing the mutual
articulation of groups, but rather to the narration
of experiences of exoticising discoveries of the
traditional which in itself legitimises modernity
and hence confers authority. The recounting is an
expression of new pleasures, and 'at the centre of
this pleasure is the aficionado-as-explorer, the
self who wades through diversity' (Washabaugh ibid:
67) in the search for what Grossberg calls
'affective excess' (1988:45).
It is clear that we are in the presence of a new
phenomenon: representation as narration/as recits
becomes the primary locus of production. As Deleuze
and Guattari point out 'representation no longer
relates to a distinct object, but to productive
activity itself' (1984; 263) The 'revitalization' of
rituals, the rediscovery/invention of tradition, is
not so much a reinvestment of the symbolic, a
discovery of play as Victor Turner seems to suggest,
but a redefinition of the relationship between the
symbolic and representation: "Symbolic" thus no
longer designates the relation of representation to
an objectivity as an element; it designates the
ultimate elements of subjective representation, pure
signifiers, pure nonrepresented representatives
whence all the subjects, the objects, and their
relationships all derive" (Deleuze and Guattari,
1984: 306)
It remains to tackle one major question. Is
something distinctive happening in small scale
societies like Malta and Greece whereby to be modern
is to discover tradition, to exoticise it? Wendy
James has suggested that a distinctive feature of
globalization is that we have moved from the
certainty of certainty where 'forms of knowledge and
claims to truth (were) articulated through a
mutually constituting structure of social relations'
(1995: 6), to the certainty of uncertainty. Malta
and Greece are societies on the margins of Europe
with two diverging pulls: the certainties of their
past (often manufactured by the State and its
elites, and in association with the West), and the
uncertainties of their modern vulnerability. Both
societies play with these tensions. The Greeks made
their centrality a marginality; the Maltese their
marginality a centrality. 'The peculiarity of
Greece's case', R. Just reminds us, 'is not that she
lost the cultural hegemony that once was hers but
that everyone appears to have appropriated it'
(1995: 289). The problem was therefore 'how are you
to play the role of being exclusively universal'
(ibid: 290). By contrast the problem besetting the
Maltese was similar but inverted: how are you to
play the role of being exclusively marginal? The
Maltese made their marginality a centrality. From
its earliest historians to its role under the
Knights of St John, to its foreign policy since
independence in 1964, Maltese society has constantly
been preoccupied with its place on the map, with its
being a rocky outcrop of Europe. Inspite of changes
in government there has been a remarkable continuity
in foreign policy across time: the island's
importance is presented as a 'bridge', a 'link',
'bringing peace to the Mediterranean', and 'the two
shores together', etc. Indeed this is a society that
appears to make a positive virtue of its marginality
as a means to claim centrality, including in its
application to join the EU (Redmond, 1994).
As the certainties of the cultural-genealogical
model of the past upon which the model of the
Urstaat was based recede for Greece, 'increasingly
the problem for Greece will become not to prove that
Greek civilization was in fact 'Greek', but to
maintain that Greek civilization was in fact
'Civilization'' (Just, ibid: 301). By contrast as
the vacuousness of the concept of Malta as a
'bridge' between two fixed opposed entities
(West/East) becomes increasingly exposed as
irrelevant in a system that re-(or de-)territorialises
everything from culture to companies, the problem
for Malta will be not to prove that the island is a
bridge, but rather that in fact there is anything to
bridge at all, particularly in a world where
difference is celebrated. It is hardly surprising
that the certainties of historical uncertainty are
giving way to the seductive veracity of nostalgia.
Societies, particularly those that cannot anymore
capture or control their interpretations of their
past (meaning interpretations by dominant groups),
increasingly attempt to recover it through
nostalgia. Nostalgia can be seen as a new way of
imagining communities, harnessed in and by the
post nation-state, an attempt at
a connivance of a recovery of a lost
childhood, a return to the m(other)land.
Nostalgia, often the erosion of memory into (and as)
history, helps create frameworks of interpretation
(and narration) for sites of memory (Nora 1989)
(such as kulturiarika in Greece, or medieval
cities in Malta (Sant Cassia, forthcoming). In its
most epiphaniac form nostalgia is precipitated into
the Heritage Industry, linked as it is to tourism (Lowenthal,
1985).(17) In
such contexts traditional rituals are displaced to
what MacCannell (1992: 298) has called 'staged
authenticity' which is 'a kind of repressive
de-sublimation of tradition' (ibid: 298). Yet as
MacCannell points out 'while the gesture behind
staged authenticity seems to be a valorization of
tradition, its deepest effect is the opposite. Every
instance of staged authenticity delivers the message
that tradition does not constrain us, rather we
control it'.(18)
In Greece nostalgia increasingly expresses itself
not through the old certainties of links to
classicism, but rather through the (continual)
exoticization of that which represents the threat of
otherness within. In Malta by contrast it is
inevitably through the familiarization of the
marginal (such as għana), and its celebration as
marginal as a means to claim centrality. It is these
dialectics that help explain the revitalization of
traditions on the margins of Europe. |
