Notes on Self-colonising Cultures b published in the book Cultural Aspects of the Modernisation Process, Oslo, 1995. Re-printed in Bulgariaavangarda, Salon Verlag, Kraeftemessen II, 1998, re-printed in After the Wall. Art and Culture in post-communist Europe. Modern Museum, Stockholm 1999. by Alexander Kiossev In 1842 Konstantin Fotinov (1790 - 1858), the creator of the first Bulgarian magazine Lyuboslovie (Philology), published a remarkable appeal which treats ardently and with pain all that lack of civilisation of the Bulgarians: "Where are their daily newspapers and magazines, or the weekly and monthly ones? Where are their artistic magazines, their rhetoric, mathematics, logic, physics, philosophy, etc., etc., which man needs more than bread? Where is their history, written in detail and widely spread among people, such as the other nations have and which would help us to stand side by side with the others and make the others aware of the fact that we are as verbal as the rest of God's creatures?" The Bulgarian press during the National Revival abounded in similar appeals dealing with the lack of civilisation. They all represent patriotic complaints about various shortages - about the lack of cultural institutions, literary or scientific achievements, good manners or great Bulgarian poets. Yet, in spite of their variety and heterogeneity one can see that all these complaints expressed much more a morbid awareness of the absence of a whole civilisational model rather than of some concrete civilisational achievement. Fotinov's patriotic appeal would be quite absurd if he only complained of the lack of Bulgarian physics, for example. It is clear that his enumeration is synecdocal - it includes just a part of all the systematic deficiencies. The real question behind this enumeration is: Where is ... everything in Bulgaria? Where is the total, complete Bulgarian culture, built up according to the European model? Thus, in the genealogical knot of the Bulgarian national culture there exists the morbid consciousness of an absence - a total, structural, non-empirical absence. The Others i.e. the neighbours, Europe, the civilised World, etc. possess all that we lack; they are all that we are not. The identity of this culture is initially marked, and even constituted by, the pain, the shame - and to formulate it more generally - by the trauma of this global absence. The origin of this culture arises as a painful presence of absences and its history could be narrated, in short, as a centuries-old effort to make up for and eliminate the traumatic absences. I wonder whether it is not possible to call such cultures self-colonising? The reason for such a strange name is rather simple - in such cultures the social and symbolic "Order of Modernity" is not carried out by means of forceful colonisation in which the native culture is totally conquered and destroyed by European conquistadors, and the natives are exterminated or enslaved (as is the case with the American Indians or of some primitive cultures in Africa). But this order is scarcely the result of traditionally indicated economic and social reasons either. The economic explanation for the rise of modern nations has many deficiencies and to criticise all of them in detail would make us go astray. Suffice it to say here that there is no sufficient explanation for why the process that determined the expansion of economic rationality remains isolated within an irrationally articulated territory-culture and doesn't expand (or expands with other rates and specificity) beyond its boundaries. Being neutral, rational and universal, the economy of money and markets can not achieve boundaries of its own and in itself it is not able to become precisely a national economy. It needs to be doubled by a second one - the economy of symbols and models of identity, regulating the relationship of nations and groups to themselves as well as their relationship to the Others. And in the self-colonising cultures they, these symbols and models I have already mentioned, are symbols of absence. Though it sounds unusual, in such cultures even the national territory in question can present itself merely as a daydream, a geographic vision, as a longing caused by an absence, and not as a real institutional force. To put it more simply- the economic explanation can not answer why the new economic, media, industrial, etc. relations have acquired precisely this concrete national and territorial form - for this explanation always presupposes what it tries to explain the already existing national identity embodied in an articulated territory with clear boundaries. The hypothesis of this text is, therefore, the following: the birth of these nations is connected with a very specific symbolic economy. It seems that the self-colonising cultures import alien values and civilisational models by themselves and that they lovingly colonise their own authenticity through these foreign models. Yet which are, in fact, the cultures that we call, using a strange metaphor, "selfcolonising" cultures? From the point of view of the modern globalisation of the world, there are cultures which are not central enough, not timely and big enough in comparison to the "Great Nations". At the same time they are insufficiently alien, insufficiently distant and insufficiently backward, in contrast to the African tribes, for example. That's why, in their own troubled embryo, somewhere in the periphery of Civilisation, they arise in the space of a generative doubt: We are European, although perhaps not to a real extent. This is a precondition for a quite peculiar identity and a quite peculiar modernisation. They arise through the constitutive trauma that: We are not Others (seeing in the Others the representatives of the Universal), and this trauma is also connected with the awareness that they have appeared too late and that their life is a reservoir of lacks of civilisation. A rough structural analogy between cultures of entirely different types is possible here. We know from ethnology that the symbolic economy of every human society arises, in a sense, in a similar way - around the trauma of a certain great Absence. The CreatorGod (Icelandic Poluga, Australian Bungjil, African Olorun) created the world and after that left it; the Biblical Jehovah created man and after that expelled him from himself and Paradise. The Sacred One which Rudolf Otto, the great theoretician and historian of religions, calls Das ganz Andere, is always separated in another absent modality of the Cosmos, entirely different from the profane life which, in each part, exists merely in so far as it feels its painful lack, and is homesick for its ultimate reality. Self-colonising cultures carry out a great replacement - they put an alien model of civilisation in the structural place where the figure of Das ganz Andere, the absent Transcendence, the Universal, used to be. They adopt its symbols as universal generative schemata at the point of their genesis. In its own self-consciousness, selflegitimisation and propaganda, this Alien (equal to the expanding, rational and entzaubert modern world) is known to represent itself as an embodiment of the main stream in history and of the Universal fate of mankind. In contrast to this narcissistic ideology of the West, the self-colonising nations suffer a tragic paradox - for them the Alien is the Universal but the opposite is also true - The Universal remains forever alien. It is a fatal coincidence between The Great Other and the Alien which dooms the self-colonising nations to the feeling that the universal values are never their values but values of Das ganz Andere - the civilised world. In contrast to pre-modern society the otherness of the aliens and the foreigners stops being associated with the Demonic and becomes normative. That is to say - by adopting these alien universal models, the self-colonising cultures traumatise themselves - for they also adopt their own inferiority, their own painful lack of essential Substance and Universality. Thus, in the economy of their secular values the archetypal structural place of the absent God turned out to be replaced by the deified West. The image of the West itself becomes split - it is, on one hand, the empirical West, the "great Nations and Powers" (which could also be hostile, as the ceaseless wars, and diplomatic and economic conflicts have constantly proved), but at the same time it has lost its empirical features and has coincided with the Essential and the Universal, while receiving a hidden transcendent aura in spite of the secular ideology of Modernity. And yet, how can we explain the fact that these peculiar cultures lack not only any resistance against colonisation through Western symbolic patterns, any resistance to the symbol-invasion of the Alien (resistance so inevitable in every violent colonisation even the fatalistic North American Indians resisted the Spanish conquistadors to a certain extent), but they adopt the alien models with love, ardour and desire? How can we also explain the fact that they display a certain unaccountable naïveté: they not only welcome the expanding universalistic ideology of the foreigners which makes them marginal and undeveloped, but they fall in love with it as well? How can we explain the fact that these cultures "suffer" because the Alien-Universal is not present in its "civilisational totality", with all its "physics", "mathematics", "rhetoric", "logic", "daily newspapers", "artistic magazines", etc.? How is this unexplainable childish mistake possible - to confuse the West with God? The reason for this naïveté is in fact rather simple: these cultures simply did not exist before this confusion - they arose through it. The suffering from this absence and the desire to acquire the alien cultural models are constitutive as regards their "own" identity. This suffering and these burning desires are the stimulating forces for the building of the real dominant institutions of Modernity in these regions - the educational and public ones. Schools, different types of educational institutions and later the universities, produced and spread the Western symbols and models - a much more wanted commodity in the European periphery than English cloth, French wines or German machines. For all these reasons such cultures could be, quite inaccurately and metaphorically, called self-colonising cultures. And perhaps it is high time to abandon this metaphor which has already exhausted its heuristic potential. We are already in a position to see that the main presupposition of this metaphor is a logical contradiction: that it is by and for themselves (through social agents born and raised in their own bosom and not by foreign invaders or missionaries) that such cultures "conquer" themselves and impose foreign values on themselves. The metaphor "self-colonisation" presupposes that in some hypothetical historical times, when there were no traumas and suffering, there already existed a social agent with its own stable identity - a presupposition which contradicts the empirically proven fact that before the symbolical "self-conquering" such "Self", such an identical social agent, did not exist at all. Furthermore, the metaphor presupposes that later this social agent became in some way crazy - it discovered an inferiority complex in itself, abandoned its own values and began to "conquer" and "colonise" itself by lovingly using alien values. In that manner it, this agent, corrupted its own authenticity by dooming itself to impossible desires for nonexisting realities - poetry, mathematics, theatre, logic, etc. But the error and the trauma are actually constitutive - they, in fact, have not conquered but engendered these cultures. Without the alien European model of the educated and the emancipated Nation, which such a national ideologist as Fotinov so selflessly imported and propagated, without the model of the educational system in general and the literal translation of Western institutions - school, university, press, public domain, administration, jurisdiction, infrastructure, etc., the local rural patriarchal communities in the Balkans would never have reached "national self-consciousness". The very "national self-consciousness" is, in its structural totality, an adopted Western model. The idea that certain "We" fell suddenly in love and began to apply the values, the symbolic and institutional order of certain "Them" (thus self-colonising itself) is, of course, wrong. In fact, on the level of close examination of the empirical historical data, the genealogy of modern nations on the Periphery begins not with its own "We" but from a derogatory, mocking "You" - from the trauma of real intellectuals who, in their practical relations to the "more civilised", have been humiliated many times over (they have been shouted at, "Hey, you, Bulgarian!" more often and with more rage then the rest). It can be easily proven that this has happened to every one of the Bulgarian intellectuals from the period of the so called "Revival", who experienced similar humiliations in their cultural contacts with some more developed foreign nation - this applies for Paisiy (1722 - 1773), and for Peter Beron (1800 - 1871), and for Fotinov, all the way to that great symbolic machine for production of national identity, the poet called Ivan Vazov (1850 – 1921). In this de profundis of humiliation that they are born inferior and second rate, such intellectuals experienced in a kind of a negative ecstatic vision all their lacks and shortages as shame and pain: "Where is our rhetoric, mathematics, logic, physics, philosophy, etc., etc. that man needs more then bread? Where is our own "us"? Such traumatic cultures inevitably engender some misleading sublimative rationalisations in order to suppress the memory of their own birth-trauma. These rationalisations are not accidental but substantial - because they belong to the structuraland-generative necessity of this cultural type. The first of them consists in the fact that in such cultures the Birth of the Nation manifests itself always as a Re-Birth, as a Revival of the Nation. The new modern type of culture and collective constructs by necessity a historical Narrative of its own - it invents for itself a far going historical Past that allows it to identify itself with phenomena which are absolutely different in structure - medieval Empires and ancient philosophers, rural magic and rituals, kings, dynasties and saints, patriarchal sexual ethics, sometimes even mythological ancestors or the transcendental origins of the nation. All this is meant to self-convince such a culture that its own historical time has not started at the traumatic point but has been continuous from some honourable Past towards the glorious Future of the Nation. In this perspective, the humiliating birthtrauma of such cultures seems to be merely a transitory unpleasant incident, which will be overcome and entirely forgotten during the stream of History - the provisional and accidental Absence of civilisation will be replaced through its happy Presence. The second rationalisation consists in the fact that such societies engender necessarily two symmetrical, competing, conflicting and equally mistaken doctrines. The first-one is called Westernisation or Europeanisation - it presents the historical temporality in an oversimplified manner - as an "athletic" competition, as a running event where the "civilisational" drop-back can be compensated for by "enlightened" sprinting. This doctrine has the pseudo-universalism of one "progressivist" doctrine that measures the value of life by the quantity of "civilisational achievements". The second one is called Nativism - it looks for and often finds (i.e. invents) the lost "authentic substance" of the Nation, before it has been corrupted by aliens, and then idealises it in a bucolic manner. This doctrine, of course, struggles against any new corrupting influences and gives birth to the most vehement nationalistic ideologies and dangerous sacralisations of the "native". The third sublimative rationalisation of the birth trauma, probably the most important and determinative of the other ones, is enfolding on a deeper semantic level. It is an attempt to reverse the hierarchies of the Symbolic Order adopted from Europe (= the West, the civilised world, true humanity) - it attempts to reverse the relationship between the unmarked and the marked members of the binary oppositions which constitute this Order and which articulate the non-symmetrical relationship between the "Ours" and "The Alien". It is well known that in each non-traumatic collective the "Ours", in its ideal essence, manifests itself for the members of the collective ecstatically and always in terms of Presence, Good, Beauty, Truth, Purity, Harmony whereas the Alien is connected with Absence, Chaos, Impurity, Lie, Ugliness, Formlessness. At the point of their origin (where they interiorise and transform as their own norm the gaze of the other), the traumatic collectives experience this binarism from its dark side - they experience their Self-ness as impure, non-true, absent, etc. - it is a simple lack of essence, a virtuallity which still lacks a civilisational form and can be experienced only in the mode of shame. In the further development of such cultures, however, as its sublimative and rationalising national ideology expands itself in its full scope, there occurs the already mentioned attempt to reverse the oppositions - the marked members are represented as unmarked. Thus, the impure becomes pure, the lack of essence is transformed into a faith in an essential organic kernel of the "nativeness". But the same mechanism of sublimation works with non-national collectives as well. Thus, "the last will be the first" turns out to be the Biblical cure-all for all "repressed and humiliated"; thus, suffering raises the spirit of the humiliated and the offended; thus, the famous slogan of the Afro-American movement "black is beautiful" could lose its presumed originality by being contextualised in some general typology of traumatic collectives and their ideologies. The birth of Bulgarian culture abounds with such examples as well. Here shame must become pride, the "don't have" - "have", the absence - presence, etc. This paradoxical operation of the subliminal reversal functions already in the legendary entry exclamation of Paisiy, the monk from Mount Athos, which opens his Slaveano – Bulgarskaya Istoria (Slaveno-Bulgarian History), the almost mythical text written in 1762 and considered to be the very first text of the Bulgarian Revival: "Oh thou unreasonable, oh you silly fool! Why are you ashamed to call yourself a Bulgarian? Is it not true that Bulgarians have had a kingdom and a state of their own? Among all the Slavic peoples it was precisely the Bulgarians who were the most glorious nation - they were the first to crown their kings, they were the first to have an Orthodox patriarch, they were the first to be baptised and they have conquered the greatest territories." (Paisiy 42). For a long time we have been used to thinking that the rhetorical strategy of this phrase, as well as of the entire "Slaveno-Bulgarian History" is quite clear - it attempts to carry out the already mentioned reversal of the binary oppositions and to transform the negative into positive, ignorance into glorious history, lack of achievements into the presence of honourable figures and great events in the historical memory - shame and the formlessness - into pride and identity. What is rarely mentioned is the fact that under the layer of its conscious rhetoric this text expresses something quite different as well it reproduces the trauma it is trying to overcome and sublimate. I don't only mean that the relation with the others - "wise Greeks, mighty Romans, Slavic people", is constitutive and quite obvious in a certain sense. I mean that the appeal to pride which is all Bulgarian is doubled-up with a curse. The dream to be part of a glorious collective is doubled-up with an ethical and emotional gesture of distancing oneself, even repulsion from the very same collective which is simultaneously "brothers - ignorant Bulgarians" and a crowd of "unreasonable and silly fools". By calling his compatriots silly fools Paisiy not only transgresses but also repeats the humiliation and the offence that he himself had been subjected to on Mount Athos. The internal alienation from the "native" is not only in the unavoidable awareness for the "wise" and the "mighty" who have turned out to be Other by necessity - it is much deeper. Traumatic cultures can not accept any absence with calm - it awakens pathetic arguments or straightforward unfounded paradoxical reversals which aim to show that the absence is somehow a presence. But the reverse is also valid - each presence is under the threat of actually turning-out to be an absence, each sublimation is unstable and risks being a hidden reenactment of the trauma, together with everything else. Aren't we then forced to describe the historical rhythm of such traumatic, selfcolonising cultures as a constant repetition and return? Maybe the constitutive traumas can not be overcome and they will occur over and over again in the form of various historical symptoms - as a Wiederkehr des Verdrängten - a recurrence of the suppressed? Or maybe this is just a reminder that the history of Modernity could not be written as a composite history consisting of the histories of many separate nations (that means as histories of the Native and the Alien), but should be written (described, analysed, criticised, etc.) globally, as a history of the entire process of asymmetrical modernisation, transgressing the boundaries of the established historiographical narratives about states, cultures and ideologies?