Cultural Disjuncture in the European Union: a Narrative Approach to Integration
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Kuennen UW-L Journal of Undergraduate Research X (2007) Cultural Disjuncture in the European Union: a Narrative Approach to Integration Joel Kuennen Faculty Sponsors: Bryan Kopp, Department of English Curt Reithel, Department of Political Science ABSTRACT The way in which cultures interact has fundamentally changed in the post-colonial, globalized world which has submerged us. Theories have, since the 1980’s, suggested that the cultural landscape has become one of rhizomic interaction (Deleuze and Guattari 1987); lacking in cultural material epicenters which predicate hegemonic power struggles. No longer is the story of culture one of domination and submission, rather it has become a history of diasporic populations. The term diaspora originally was used by the ancient Greeks to characterize those who would colonize conquered lands in order to assimilate them into the empire. However, today, diasporic populations refer to those who are driven or induced from their homelands. The story of culture today, specifically in the EU, is one of Diaspora in both the traditional sense and the newly emerged one. It is the interaction of various cultural platforms at various stages of influence and development that is now the goal of study, not the mere identification of the systematic root of cultural hegemony. In December/January of 2006/07, I traveled to Brussels, Paris, Avignon, Strasbourg and Budapest over a period of 3 weeks in order to study the style of cultural integration the EU is currently undergoing. First I went to the Capital of the EU to see what the bureaucracy’s representation of integration consisted of. Then, I traveled through France to get a sense of what a Western European and co-founder of the EU was experiencing. Finally, I traveled to Budapest to get a sense of what a country undergoing integration into the EU was like. What I found, however, could not be captured by the traditional methods of ethnographic research I had been prepared to employ. A simple cultural analysis, rhetorical analysis, and the like could not capture the intense sense of cultural disjuncture that I witnessed. As a result, the following is an attempt at analyzing the cultural disjuncture present in the EU while at the same time, allowing for the personal narratives of the EU citizens themselves to tell the story of the new cultural development. INTRODUCTION Fear and Desire Cultural disjuncture1 is arguably the major shaping force behind the rhizomic flux of societies today, or what Appadurai called imagined worlds. The world we live in today is characterized by a new role for the imagination in social life. To grasp this new role, we need to bring together the old idea of images, especially mechanically produced images (in the Frankfurt School sense), the idea of the imagined community (in Anderson’s sense), and the French idea of the imaginary (imaginaire) as a constructed landscape of collective aspirations, which is no more and no less real than the collective representations of Emile Durkheim, now mediated through the complex prism of modern media.i My project is an exploration into the imagined world of the emerging EU ideology and it’s affectivity in the creation of an imagined EU cultural sphere. Originally it was to be merely an exploration of the rhetorical and ideological disjuncture which occurs through a supra-national integration (specifically the way in which the European Union integrates new countries into its ideological identity) but as I was traveling through six different countries for three weeks in search of material for this project, it became apparent to me that not only is ideological integration and therefore disjuncture occurring all around me but it was occurring to me as well. This is when I was struck by the fundamental necessity for a reevaluation of my approach to this study. I realized how narrow of a 1 Cultural disjuncture is the reaction by the subject to the disparity between the culturally referential world and the imagined world of possibility. 1 Kuennen UW-L Journal of Undergraduate Research X (2007) consideration a traditional political analysis of the ideological situation would be, where in effect, the observer is just that, merely an observer, removed from society at large, a stance that is at odds with the very nature of my research. In order to avoid this, I decided that the best way to approach any kind of cultural analysis was to posit myself within it and to try to tell the story of those within the developing, imagined worlds; a sort of anthropological narrative of becoming, if you will. Therefore, this project has since become what, in a way, it was always meant to become (seeing as it is an inter-disciplinary research project; English and Political Science), a look at cultural disjuncture and integration from the people that live it. The theoretical framework from which I will analyze the stories I present will be heavily dependent on Appadurai’s concept of ideoscapes mediated through emerging EU mediascapesii. The idea of scapes as working descriptions of the channels of integration allows us to evaluate trends from within while avoiding the sort of analytical distance that removes the politician, the critic, and the anthropologist from the actuality of the situation. These terms with the common suffix –scape also indicate that these are not objectively given relations that look the same from every angle of vision but rather, that they are deeply perspectival constructs [my emphasis], inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors: nation-sates, multinationals, diasporic communities, as well as subnational groupings and movements (whether religious, political, or economic), and even intimate face-to-face groups, such as villages, neighborhoods, and families.iii The EU provides for distinctly new scenarios of becoming and possibility to develop by reducing the restrictions on international travel, by making training for licensed professions equitable throughout the continent, and by creating an economic system that does not rely on a domestic economy but on constant intra-national trade of services and goods. These three symptoms of EU integration (by no means a complete list) are examples of how the EU’s attempt to develop a physical closeness with its citizens allows for those citizens to delve into a world of imagined identities and possibilities. For example, a tale told on Romanian TV of an West European success story now has a much different connotation in that it has undergone a shift from a purely imagined possibility to one which gains significance and weight due to the shear closeness of its possibility in becoming. It is the unique interaction between the physical world, or referential world and the world of imagined possibility in the EU which must be understood so that EU integration can be streamlined and done in such a way that avoids the more violent reactions to cultural disjuncture that result from the two main emotions driving cultural disjuncture; fear and desire.iv Underneath the movement of ideas and people, the emotions of fear and desire drive rhizomic cultures into imagined worlds of possibilities. Desire as an image of possibility is derived from the interaction between the subject and the imagined world of possibility. For example, for a portion of this grant, I stayed with a friend of mine in Hungary. He was raised in an upper-middle class home and his basic exposure to America (though Hungary is one of the most Americanized Eastern European countries) came via his obsession with Frank Sinatra songs. Months later, he received a scholarship to study a semester in Kentucky. Within the first month he called me up and complained of how America was NOT a Sinatra song. He was shocked, dismayed, destroyed, in a way, his image of the America he always wished existed crumbled before his eyes. My friend desired the America of Sinatra (the imagined possibility), not the actual referential world of middle-class Kentucky which he was now in. However, desire is not limited to this sort of reaction. Desire is also the confluence of imagined worlds of possibility that the diasporic populations create as a matter of establishing a community. Desire itself can never really be obtainable, it is necessarily unobtainable and as such is always a force in becoming; however, pieces of the image can be mediated into the referential world of experience Fear can take many forms in the realm of cultural disjuncture and is often predicated upon the distance between the imagined world and the referential one. Fear is most often reactionary in its stance in that it generally takes the form of fundamentalist style reactions to cultural flux in an attempt at preserving the subject’s own cultural world of imagined possibilities. This can be present in any form of ideology, from governmental to religious, to familial. First, however, it will be appropriate to give you, the reader, some of my background in order to better understand both my perspective and the personal networks through which I traversed in order to complete this research project. Generally, I’m an American (of German, French, and English decent, a paradoxically important aspect of the American identity is predicated upon an imagined cultural heritage) from the Midwest (Wisconsin) and although I’ve never tried to tie myself to this or any other national identity, it cannot be helped and so, as much as I hate saying it, much of my perspective has been shaped by these two culturally-geographic identifications. However, I have also been given the opportunity to travel the world since a young age and by the age of 22 I had already made it to 22 countries (in Asia, Europe, North America, South America, and Australia) and these diverse travels have 2 Kuennen UW-L Journal of Undergraduate Research X (2007) shaped my mind, in many cases, much more than being at home.