Magazine

Chaos Welt c Heinricht Holtgreve

Chaos-World

by Dorothee Röseberg

Contrasting developments of both opening up and closing down inform our current experiences. In the face of conspicuous climate change, we are all becoming more aware of ourselves as inhabitants of the Earth, travelling to distant countries and being digitally networked. At the same time, we frequently understand our own neighbours less, who may speak foreign languages and whose habits may be unfamiliar to us. Increasingly we are unable to find work in the region we were originally from. Mobility and the ability to adapt to new places have become present-day commandments. The national is both losing and gaining in influence, borders fall and are being rebuilt, territories are opened and closed. How should we orientate ourselves in such a chaos-world? What do we identify ourselves with and how? What alternatives are available to us, if we identify ourselves with where we are from and where we live, when both are changing? Deterritorialization and reterritorialization go hand in hand.

Are we obliged to reject local identities? Are we obliged to learn to think differently? Notions of globalization can only provide insufficient answers to these questions.

Such notions rely on an overly one-sided view of the world as a market, and relations between people as producers and consumers – or in short, economic relations. The American political scientist and consultant Samuel Huntington became famous for his handy thesis of a Clash of Civilizations. In his book of the same name, whose title continues and the Remaking of World Order (1996), he diagnoses an inevitable clash of (religious and/or national) cultures as being a battle of winners and losers. In this simplistic view of cultures, the West is in danger of decline and Islam is considered the biggest threat. Cultures, in such an essentialist view, are not perceived as something that changes through contact. The other, the alien represents a threat to territorially determined identity. The fear of foreigners generally not only distinguishes the thinking of right-wing extremist political groupings, but is one of the many by-products of migratory movements. The transformation of indigenous identities through the alien and a loss of identity is a diagnosis that becomes the focus of feelings of unease in a world which has become disordered. Yet, a voice of a completely different kind has remained, almost unheard of among Europeans, one which originates in the Caribbean. The cultural-theoretical debates being conducted there are only discussed amongst a few experts.[1] One of its most prominent authors is Édouard Glissant. His work continues, beyond his death in 2010, to be an inspiration for further thought throughout the world. Glissant (*1928, Sainte-Marie, Martinique) was a descendant of African slaves, who had been brutally abducted from their homeland, penned in the holds of ships during long voyages, and forced to work for colonial masters on the island of Martinique’s plantations. Glissant’s thinking was shaped by his ancestors’ experiences of abrupt, violent uprooting and the loss of cultural knowledge and practices. Such losses, their vestigial memory and life on an archipelago are deeply embedded in Glissant’s thinking and means of expression. Consequently for Glissant, notions of identity are initially strongly bound to territory. He regards the island world of Martinique as a model for processes occurring today all around the world, the particular being closely connected to the universal. Glissant’s thinking is shaped by postmodern theorists, especially French philosophers.[2] But the terms that Glissant conveys to us should not be too hastily attributed to precedents, as he has modified and adapted them to his own perceptions, notions and modes of expression.[3] Glissant uses these terms for the most part metaphorically, because for him poetry, philosophy and poetics are commensurate forms of expression whose boundaries he largely obviates, his figures of thought evading systematic discussion. His typology of cultures that encounter each other in a world of accelerated globalization becomes a point of departure for issues of identity and territory. These cultures, however, behave differently in such encounters due to their differing qualities. Atavistic[4] cultures are long-established cultures that construct their identities through the narrating of founding myths, determining their existence in genesis and descent, and territorially legitimizing themselves in order to justify their claims to ownership. Such myths are disseminated and appropriated in schools, through monuments, in history books, through the canon of ‘our classics’ and through popular poetry. Atavistic cultures determine their identity through exclusion and the ostracising of others. If necessary, the other is stylized as an enemy in order to justify indigenous identity and in the interests of power. The other is usually not just alien, but is also devalued to the advantage of the indigenous. The sacralisation of heroes is as inextricable in this as the sacralisation of territory. The last two centuries, in hindsight, provide evidence of such a construction of identity in the national cultures of Europe. The wars associated with territorial claims were conducted in the name of civilization and/or culture. The blood of the victims of these wars transformed the ground on which they fought into sacred soil.[5] This form of constructing identity is by no means a thing of the past, as was evident in the wake of Yugoslavia’s disintegration. In addition to Pegida, AfD and discussions around Leitkultur (dominant culture), laws were still effective in Germany, until only a few years ago, that provided a legal framework for the German population’s historically evolved understanding that ethnic status was defined solely by jus sanguinis (law of descent) in granting German citizenship. Even after the reform of these laws, enduring vectors have been effective in maintaining atavistic culture in Germany. Who belongs to us and who not, and to what extent does the other jeopardize indigenous identity? These are questions peculiar to atavistic cultures. Their answers, in an era of migration and globalization, lead to symptoms of crisis. It is exactly these questions and the consequent approaches to experiences of difference that are not inherent to complex cultures, as Glissant calls composite cultures, since they do not define themselves by origin and exclusion. Glissant repeatedly reports how Martinique, as an example of such a composite culture, constitutes itself solely through cultural contact and processes of diverse cultural compositing. Identity is generated through relation to the other. Such cultures are unable to identify with either a root or origin, as these have been destroyed in the torrents of the colonial era’s violent history. Vestiges of memory remain, which subsequent generations employ in a productive manner in creating something new. The image that Glissant conjures of these two different types of culture was one he adopted from the postmodern thinkers Deleuze and Guattari. Atavistic cultures, with their myths of origin and principles of exclusion, are symbolized by the image of the tree, which is hierarchically structured from the root, via tree trunk, to crown. Unlike the two French thinkers, Glissant relates this figure of thought to the phenomenon of identity. Complex cultures, in contrast, correspond to the image of the rhizome, that is a wide, horizontally branching network whose roots on encountering each other form a network. Hierarchies remain absent here, whilst identity can only be disentangled with difficulty. Given such ideas, it can be surmised why Glissant recognises the positives of a clash of cultures in a chaos-world, being himself a representative of a complex culture, the fear of a transformation of original identity is alien to him. “Globality[6] is the unprecedented adventure that in our time we are all able to experience, in a world that for the first time really perceives itself in a direct and immediate, ground-breaking manner as diverse, as one and inextricable.”[7] From this diagnosis Glissant develops a theory of relations. It is not territories that determine identity, but the relations that people enter into with each other. In this sense, what can be recognized in Glissant’s thinking are those vestiges of deterritorialization which confirm our own personal experiences. Glissant, as the voice of those excluded from Western European discourse, has always addressed the colonized and their descendants’ views of Europe. He diagnoses the fragilities of a 19th and 20th century, nation-oriented Europe. Even though, according to Glissant, nations remain politically and administratively alive, he sees the realities of European life as transpiring more through, and in, regions that are open to interrelations. This is what Glissant means when he speaks of Europe becoming an archipelago. But does such an island-structure mean that automatically complex constructions of identity occur there, or do such ‘islands’ in Europe tend to also identify themselves territorially? Glissant has cited the Basque Country as a negative example, where aspirations for autonomy combine with constructions of identity addressing descent, purity of race and language that eventually forcibly exclude others. Glissant’s message and challenge is therefore that everyone should change the way they perceive, live in and react to, the world. Thinking in the vestigial, which is inductive and intuitive, should, according to Glissant, replace systematic thinking. There are however conditions if the positives of cultural contact are to prevail. Chaos is only appealing, “if you consider all its components as equally imperative.”[8] It is at this point at the latest that the political implications of such a cultural theory come to fruition. In a 1998 interview, Glissant explicitly calls for the development of a new thinking in Europe,[9] since he does not trust economic forces to dismantle the globalized world’s deadly hierarchies. Rather he relies on the power of thought, a central question now and in the future being whether, and how, cultural contacts can be structured as lived relations between people, in which new relational identities can emerge. Glissant insists that migration, relocation and cultural contact does not mean a loss of identity, but rather can generate other forms of identity. The Caribbean can be regarded as a model for an identity that does not primarily understand itself territorially, but always constitutes itself “when it enters into composite relations with its surroundings.”[10] Chaos, that composite in which the world-as-a-whole today constitutes itself,[11] is not simply disorder but, according to Glissant, inevitably implies unpredictability. “Chaos exists in the world because unpredictability exists in the world.”[12] For European traditions of thought, which are largely based on rationalism, understanding and control, the challenges it formulates may seem alien and not without contradiction. Glissant’s cultural analysis of the state of the world is however far too close to our present experiences to be simply banished, without consideration, to distant regions. German history can also be narrated and understood both historically and currently through cultural contacts. In any case, identities only generate themselves in the plural.

[1] Gesine Müller, Natascha Ückmann (eds.): Kreolisierung revisited. Debatten um ein weltweites Kulturkonzept. transcript, Bielefeld 2013. Ralph Ludwig, Dorothee Röseberg (eds.): Tout-Monde: Interkulturalität, Hybridisierung, Kreolisierung. Peter Lang Verlag F. a. M. 2010.
Andrea Schwieger Hiepko. Rhythm ’n’ Creole. Kulturverlag Kadmos Berlin 2009

[2] Glissant studied in France, taught in New York and travelled the world.

[3] Schwieger Hiepko, pp.79-81 3.

[4] atavus (lat.) forefather.

[5] French President Emmanuel Macron only recently, on 11. November 2018, called the battlefields of the First World War terre sainte.

[6] Glissant does not choose the term “globalisation” for the “all world” but “globality” to undermine the primacy of the economy.

[7] Glissant, 2005, interview for the magazine Les périphériques vous parlent. Qtd. after Beate Till. In: Édouard Glissant. Kultur und Identität. Wunderhorn Heidelberg, p. 78 5 [Engl. transl. Tim Beeby]

[8] Ibid.

[9] In German the interview can be found in Lettre International 42 (October 1998) pp. 88-91 (abridged), in French in: Schwieger Hiepko, pp. 219-230. 6

[10] Schwieger Hiepko, p. 81 [Engl. transl. Tim Beeby]

[11] Glissant. Kultur und Identität, p. 56

[12] Ibid., p. 57 [Engl. transl. Tim Beeby]

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