School of Slavonic and East European Studies

4th Annual Socrates Kokkalis Graduate Student Workshop 8 - 9 February 2002 KOKKALIS PROGRAM on Southeastern and East-Central Europe PAPER TITLE: Balkan Language ‘Games’ and Poststructural Agency in Ethnic Identification Anthony London University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies Introduction There is a general consensus in Balkan literature that ethnicity has become the dominant mode of identification – a belief historically determined, retroactively rooted and prominently re-invoked in light of the internecine conflict the past decade. This is reflected in the process of international post-conflict intervention in the Balkans, which is failing towards a comprehensive understanding of the source of ethnic identity-claims in the region of the former Yugoslavia. The seemingly innate discrimination and therefore inexplicable source of ethnically based identity need be understood to engender comprehensive justice systems. Consequently, the core theme of this paper is to chart how ethnicity has become the focal point, indeed, how it epitomises identity politics, and to interrogate this foundation as the sole legitimate representation of ethnic identity-claims. It pursuit of this aim, this paper will examine how ethnic identification has come to embody identity and political community in the former Yugoslav context, implicitly by deconstructing positivist understandings, extrapolated within a poststructuralist milieu. If one is to overcome ethnic chauvinism, its fundamental and core components must first be understood. This paper examines the performative processes that represent identity at a given moment, and in so doing, seeks to interpret human behaviour to acknowledge the paradoxes evident in modern ethnic identity. The central argument of this paper consists of interrogating a poststructuralist explanation by way of linguistic ‘games’ to supplement the formative nature of ethnic membership. It is premised upon the notion that ethno-communal associations become ethno-chauvinist through the manipulation of power representations latent in linguistic structure – how the process performed and continues to perform. Pursuant to this endeavour, a number of questions arise when consideration of language is applied to ethnic identification. First, is language simply a means of communication, or does it function in a more profound manner? Second, if language is fused with meaning and value, in what manner is this established? Third, how does this meaning play a role in shaping social objects – does it function as a source of identity or should identity be implicitly understood as the performative use of language? In this last undertaking, a selected and specific example in the Croatian context, by no means comprehensive of the spectrum available, will be provided to illustrate the language ‘games’ that facilitate its manipulation in an ethnic identity context. All these issues feature prominently in how social identity is determined. It will interrogate how language is politicised in three senses: first, how it functions as an onto-epistemic source in identity formulation; second, how its 1 Anthony London BalkanBalkan LanguageLanguage ‘Games’‘Games’ andand PosPoststructuraltstructural AgencyAgency inin EthnicEthnic IdentificationIdentification 4th Annual Socrates Kokkalis Graduate Student Workshop manipulation performs on the subject in an ethnically chauvinistic context to shape and homogenise ethnic identity; third, to elaborate more fully the symbolic linguistic exchanges, in conjunction with a final examination of the power of performative legitimisation, in invoking objective and homogenised identities. ‘Situating the Self’ James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin talk of ‘identity politics,’ as the social valuation of members in categories within rules of membership, indicated by sets of characteristics or behaviours thought to be inclusive of members of said categories relative to others, and the method by which this socialisation occurs and is contested.1 For this paper, it is the overtly social and contested elements that touch the ontological contingency of ‘identity politics,’ as situated in one basic premise: as language is political, identity is political. At the risk of being overly pedantic, it is worth summarising how positivist international narratives versus ‘postmodern’ are incomplete in determining the alluring quality of ethnocommunalism. The former easy to grasp, stemming from the ethos of western cultural and legal traditions, from the naturalised “pre-texts of apprehension.”2 Whereas a ‘postmodern’ interpretation would suggest, “the meaning and value imposed on the world is structured not by one’s immediate consciousness but by the various reality-making scripts one inherits or acquires from one’s surrounding cultural linguistic condition.”3 To explicate how this performs in ethnic identity formation, the postmodern rendition encapsulates the inherent contradictions of identity formation. In the postmodern subject is found “no fixed, essential, or permanent identity. Subjectivity is formed and transformed in a continuous process that takes place in relation to the ways we are represented or addressed and alongside the production or reproduction of the social.”4 This fundamental poststructuralist reading of identity is noteworthy for its unintrinsic, unstable and fluid nature. As is constitutive of the social world, like it, identities ‘oscillate’ within a “medium of identity,”5 in an indeterminate social reality and in fluctuating status; yet bound to a structured social world, implying some type of determinate ‘core.’ Identity is thus operative and identifiable, if not entirely arbitrary, in a substantive or normative founding 2 Anthony London BalkanBalkan LanguageLanguage ‘Games’‘Games’ andand PosPoststructuraltstructural AgencyAgency inin EthnicEthnic IdentificationIdentification 4th Annual Socrates Kokkalis Graduate Student Workshop fashion. Peggy Kamuf’s “Violence, Identity, Self-Determination, and the Question of Justice: on Spectres of Marx” identifies Jacques Derrida’s conception of identity and further captures this postmodern subject: In practically everything Derrida has written over the last thirty years, this figure of circular appropriation of the self to itself without difference shown to submit to the implacable work of deconstruction, by which is meant a transforming historical inscription that allows us to indicate with the term of identity only a relatively stabilized and never thoroughly stable state of being. 6 Far from a simply a negation, apartness, or otherness of social identity, poststructuralist subjectivity facilitates both what is and what is not in identity formation – not in a reductive sense, but in an inclusive, constructive manner, contrary to the positivist assertion that identity is something which dictates by negation what one is not per se. Poststructuralism, it is argued here, positions identity within the relatively extensive grounds of an ethos, such that identity reflects what is in prominence at a given moment of manifestation, bound by a particular community. Curiously, because poststructural identity is unfixed, is this a multiplicity of identities or one which varies? The reply is moot. What is, and all that need be clear, is that one’s identity is not exclusively determined by juxtaposition, but by recognition of difference as constitutive of self. In this sense, ‘change’ or ‘alteration’ in identity is a perversion of this counter-subject, and, by extension, the self. It can appear as undue admiration or idolatry on the one hand, or disproportionate loathing and degradation on the other, punctuated by corresponding degree of intensity as instances dictate. Indeed, it is this interpretation which accommodates the paradoxes of modernity – how individuals may incorporate an array of cultures, languages, and positions within society. In this light, identity relies on situational and contextual referents and highly politicised modes of understanding. It is malleable as a situation necessitates, easing individuals into adopting appropriate behaviour patterns in accordance with subjective social constructs. Within this orbit of characteristics, given (the right) determinative circumstances, one can display any number of ‘selves’ at a moment of manifestation. Within each ‘expression’ of identity, at a given moment, a plethora of forces are 3 Anthony London BalkanBalkan LanguageLanguage ‘Games’‘Games’ andand PosPoststructuraltstructural AgencyAgency inin EthnicEthnic IdentificationIdentification 4th Annual Socrates Kokkalis Graduate Student Workshop simultaneously acting upon the individual identity, bearing in mind the reflexivity of each individual to the situation, each other, and above all else, to situating the self. The implication of this characterisation is explicatory of the multiplicity of identifications and behaviours found in modern cultures. Such an account of identity is not designed to obfuscate or deceive, or through this rendition imply there to be a measure of unencumbered choice, for in poststructuralist analysis, the force of social subjectivity and power relations ultimately inscribes roles. Symbolic Language ‘Games,’ Beyond Deconstruction If poststructuralists are determined to defend deconstruction, a partial but incomplete constructivist turn is requisite in the multifarious aspects of social identity. Foremost among these concepts is the language ‘games’ which permeate poststructuralist thought. If poststructuralism is

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