Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies

Repetition of difference – the search for unstable identity
adoption through the Oriental Other, could we actually choose the ways to escape, the
ways to re-exoticize, re-orientalize ourselves for the gaze of the Other (of the West),
choose to reconstitute ourselves as Otherness, as Difference in the heart of Sameness
Boris Groys (2006: 30-36) said that dominant discourse of cultural identity follows
a person on his/her journey from a pre-modern, closed, isolated community towards
an open, global, interconnected society. This man should adapt to the homogenizing
and uniforming powers of modernity or contemporaneity and by that be released from
his pre-modern cultural tradition. However, cultural studies nowadays consider premodern
traditions as the point of resistance to the totalitarizing, unifying operation of
global culture disguised as multiculturalism. The fact that East European art exploits
the same language and methods as the art of the West, that they have become so close,
so similar to each other is not a positive and encouraging development of the situation,
as Boris Groys concludes. Art should always be searching for the Difference, searching
for the lines of escape. And when we highlight the transfer from the national cultural
matrix towards global cultural values which support “individualization of cultural
identification” we have to keep in mind that Western art and the art market have only
created and recognized the individual artist as an artist and free entrepreneur in a free
market, while East European art production has been traditionally organized through
artistic groups, and art practice in the East is still considered as a potential collective
project. When we from East European countries are talking about our art production we
wish to talk about the existence of the art scene as a particular art community. Therefore,
East European artists and their work are often isolated in the West, placed in a context
they do not belong to and in which they could not properly function: they are either
ignored and degraded or exoticized and colonized.
Identity as a stable, coherent, controllable and predictably growing construct is a
modernist phantasm which has crashed and decomposed in the post-modern era. To
modernists, in a fast changing world where tradition counted less and less, something
to compensate, to recuperate these losses had to be found: a national myth, a political
ideology, a social plan, an economic model, a cultural innovation or some grand
transnational or global or globalizing project (such as an EU project, such as global
capitalism or pan-capitalism, global culture or multiculture, globalization in general).
Modernists believed that it would reconnect us, re-anchor us and provide us with some
way of dealing with the future, give us identity perspective. Peter Sloterdijk (Funcke,
2005) claims that there are three waves of globalization, of overcoming distances: the
first wave was the metaphysical globalization of the Greek cosmology; the second
was the nautical globalization of the 15th century. While this second wave, according
to Sloterdijk, created cosmopolitanism, the third wave we live in is creating global
provincialism. As things are going on now with big projects or “grand narratives”
(Lyotard) say, with the (in) stability of global capitalism or pan-capitalism, with the (in)
stability of EU projects and with (not) having secured the possibility for the constitution
165