Stefan Arteni. The East-Central European Cultural Model. Part I
Data: Thursday, February 05 @ 18:27:06 CET
Topic: Lecturi critice


East-Central Europe is not a static abstraction. The complex pattern of interaction rises out of the peculiar aspect of ‘limes’ ethos as the site of continuity of the archaic and of a paradoxical fatalistic optimism, and can provide a picture of comprehensive correspondences in space and time - the multiscale and many-valued chronotope.

Stefan Arteni

The East-Central European Cultural Model.
1 . Cultural Polyglotism


Motto.
Through time's howling clamor,
A voice of the nothing;
Through chattering aeon,
A wailing of humans.
(Lucian Blaga)

A ‘limes’ runs through the middle of Europe, the old Roman ‘limes’ on the Danube. Charlemagne created a new borderline down the centre of Europe, the ‘Limes Sorabicus’, that clearly marked also a cultural border. In the early 1950s, the historian Oskar Halecki sketched a model of Europe, identifying three macro-regions: Western Europe, Central Europe and Eastern Europe. In Halecki’s view, Central Europe consists of two parts – West-Central Europe (Germany and Austria) and East-Central Europe (the territories between Germany and Russia). Historically, East-Central Europe includes the group of countries which fell under Soviet domination.

East-Central Europe is not a static abstraction. The complex pattern of interaction rises out of the peculiar aspect of ‘limes’ ethos as the site of continuity of the archaic and of a paradoxical fatalistic optimism, and can provide a picture of comprehensive correspondences in space and time - the multiscale and many-valued chronotope. To paraphrase Milan Kundera, it is a culture or a fate. If it may be said that there is a longing for an escape from the terror of a linear meaningless history – for example, after modernity’s attempt at ‘memory erasure’, Boris Groys proposes ‘erasure of erasure’ to describe the contemporary ‘global’ situation - it may also be said that the East-Central European cultural space, the ‘liminal locus’ where semiospheres come into contact, intersect and overlap, necessarily denotes the potential of possibilities that culture is able to realize by attempting to make sense of the past in the present.

Maria Todorova suggests that memory, identity, and historical legacy are the pertinent categories of analysis. Piotr Piotrowsky speaks of “the other Europe”, while Arpad Szakolczai holds that the area may be viewed as borderlands of Western civilization, as located “between the both mythical and very real entities ‘West’ and ‘East’ “. However, “the concept of Borderline is twofold”, remarks Alexander W. Belobratow. “On the one hand it has a separating function and on the other hand a binding one”. Unfortunately, notes Szakolczai, the area has been stuck too long in transitoriness, “in a precarious liminal condition”.

There may be an alternative, non-canonized history of twentieth century culture, a history of periphery input and dispersed diasporas, a history of the omnipresence of present pasts playfully renegotiated by every new work that is itself informed by what precedes it. One may also underscore the ambivalence of the center and periphery concepts and of the hierarchic differentiation center/periphery. Czeslaw Milosz once remarked: “And the intellectual Paris of the 1950s and the 1960s turned with expectation towards the East…It tells the story of how a center, by losing faith in itself, changes through resignation into a periphery”.

When one considers culture, it is the intersubjective schemas pertaining to the 'consensual domain' that are relevant. Roy D'Andrade employs the term 'cultural models'. According to D'Andrade, "a cultural model is a cognitive schema that is intersubjectively shared by a social group". A reinterpretation of Michael Kimmel's notion of dynamic switches between culture-embedded ontologies through image-schemata transformations and encompassing cases of partial compatibility, may be horizontally extended to include non-linguistic phenomena. In the case of East-Central Europe, a world constantly wracked by changes that raise again and again the identities dilemma and the threat of oblivion, the cultural ‘Dasein’ of the individual consists of a positive heterarchy that couples various languages and cultures toward a cooperative survival unity, without giving up the autonomy of parts. Evidently, there are several different cultural logics at work at the same time, involving interaction and conflicting interaction, and, occasionally, the phenomenon of mimetism, understood both in the Girardian sense of ‘mimetic desire’, and in the sense the term is used in biology, as a way to ‘trick’ the environment.

It must be borne in mind that, as Caryl Emerson points out, “Central and East Europeans (for all their contributions to the avant-garde) have routinely stood up to Western models.” (To approach the question of modernism’s relationship to tradition, it may be briefly noted here that, paradoxically enough, to transgress is to reaffirm a limit). Emerson argues that “exile, displacement, multi-languagedness, heteroglossia, outsideness to oneself and thus a taste for irony…” constitute the defining coordinates of a unique heritage, a polycentered identity connected to “finding themselves always between several cultures and unable to lose themselves in any one of them…” or, so to speak, "planted in each reality, informed by all, circumscribed by none".

What is interesting about multilingualism is the unique state of compound multi-competence postulated by Istvan Kecskes and Tunde Papp, that is a common underlying proficiency and two or more constantly available interacting systems, none of which is the same as the language system of a monolingual. Brian MacWhinney points out that in case of childhood multilingualism, it appears that multiple languages are acquired as separate entities. Ulrike Jessner argues that the increased metalinguistic skills trigger a heightened awareness of the arbitrary aspects of language, of cognitve styles and of syntactic factors. All in all, the dynamic of systems creates new structures and emergent properties within the playfulness and variation of culture-specific metaphoric fields.

Language is a repository of culture. The fact is that, in the age of Empires, cultures located at a crossroads and subjected to repeated colonization and assimilation attempts may feel the need of an encounter with the cultures which exercise widespread influence. Karen Wong remarks that an individual needs “to become fluent in the language of knowledge” and to acquire “the language of the currently predominant culture”. The polyglot inhabits someone else's culture, including ‘the’culture or cultures. What this helps instigate, and continues to finesse, is a cultural polyglotism. From the beginning, a translocal multi-identiy web and a recursiveness of identity recreation, a being between and astride cultures and moving across languages and cultural contextures set side by side, imply a second-order perspective, an experiential metacultural sensibility. An inner metalanguage, multiple inheritances and multiple codings, are at work. Second-order culture delineations are continuously reconstructed. The new entities produced by the peripatetic impulse open up a situational space which revels in the freedom of a horizonal in-between transcending untranslatable knots. Doris Runey points out that polyglots are "not 'in the world' but rather 'in worlds', dwelling in the liminal space of simultaneous belongingness and non-belongingness.


Stefan Arteni






Acest articol este trimis de Asymetria. Revista de cultura, critica si imaginatie
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