Imagining the West in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union

Chapter 1. Introduction: The Oblique Coordinate Systems of Modern Identity

1 cHaPter 1 IntroductIon tHe obliQue coordinate SySteMS oF Modern identity György Péteri Few today would deNy the importance of the study of images, perceptions , and mentalities on which the modern social order rests. A possible approach to these entities leads through an understanding of the processes of mental mapping. In 1905, Endre Ady wrote, Ferry-land, ferry-land, ferry-land . . . even in its most daring dreams it is only roaming back and fro between two shores. From East to West or, rather, the other way around. [. . .] Sporadically, there have already been souls who have engaged with the West. [. . .] Some 10,000 people have run ahead. They have become European in nerves, blood, thought, pain, and thirst. An overdeveloped type of human has established itself here: they are ahead of Hungarian society by at least 100 years. These holy forerunners did not even dream of not being followed by hundreds of thousands. [. . .] You are great, my people; you are great. You have been continually struggling with Europe for 1,000 years. In the meantime, you have been recruiting troops. Although you were bleeding. But you have never allowed Reason to triumph over the heads of your children—you live in the middle of Europe as a living protest against piercing the virginal membrane of barbaric existence. [. . .] The Tartars are moving on turbulently under the Carpathians.1 peteri text3.indd 1 8/16/10 10:46 AM 2 györgy péteri Nearly a century later, Péter Esterházy was asked, in a 1992 interview, “Whatkindofcountrywouldyouliketolivein?”Hereplied,“Isharethehelplessness that constitutes Europe today. This empty head, this shoulder-shrugging, this shy gaze toward the ground—this is Europe. Therefore, my answer can only be a practical one, and rather suspicious too. I prefer to cite my friend who says he would like to live in a country like Toscana inhabited by Englishmen speaking Hungarian.”2 Symbolic geographies reveal how human agents, in particular historical and cultural contexts, define themselves by locating themselves spatially as well as temporally, drawing the boundaries of social spaces where they are within, and relating themselves and their spaces to others and to what lies, in their discursively constructed spatial/temporal order, without, behind, and ahead. What makes these socially and historically situated processes really important is their intimate relationship to the formation of identities and, indeed , to identity politics (including the regular attempts in all kinds of modern political regimes to manage identities through the projection of images about themselves and the others). The definition with any exactitude of any location in a physical space is a rather complicated matter, as is clearly demonstrated in the history of geographical coordinate systems. Moreover, any point’s exact location on, in, or above Earth can be defined only on the basis of a set of conventions contested , negotiated, and decided on by humans. There has been nothing of an “objective necessity” forcing modern geographers of the 1880s to choose the line passing to the rear of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, U.K., as the prime meridian (the 0° longitude), defining everything that lies east of it as the Eastern Hemisphere and everything that lies to its west as the Western Hemisphere. If even our ways of “bringing order” into the natural world are so contingent, so highly dependent, on social interaction (negotiations producing and reproducing conventions—more or less generally shared understandings —as to various reference points, reference lines, and/or procedures of mapping), it comes as little surprise that the regimes (criteria, standards, and procedures) defining the very “coordinates” of our symbolic geographies exhibit a overwhelming level of variability and exposure to human agency and never-ceasing contestation. Mental mapping in the modern and late modern era can and should certainly be understood and studied as consisting in at least four distinct, although partly overlapping operations.3 The first of these is the construction of regionlike units by associating alleged constituent parts of an area (like “the West” or “Eastern Europe”), whereby resemblances producing apparently peteri text3.indd 2 8/16/10 10:46 AM introduction 3 “shared patterns” are emphasized at the cost of differences/deviations marring these patterns. Moreover, a position is assigned to these parts (and the coherent whole they are imagined to constitute) in the prevalent “developmental hierarchies” of the time, localizing the region thus construed on an axis between “barbarism ” at one extreme and “civilization” at the...