From the Editors: Making Sense of an Embarrassment of Riches: Discipline or Celebrate?

In the archetypal perception of time, the past is associated with a Golden Age of abundance that has somehow been depleted during the lifetime of an observer who has heard of a relatively recent Silver Age, but is already living in an Iron Age of scarce resources and severe governance. All the great things in life originate in the glorious past: territorial rights, political legitimacy, and national culture. The generous abundance of the imagined past readily accommodates even seemingly incompatible claims: thus, a national narrative of resistance to wicked imperial domination proudly celebrates the territories and peoples conquered by that “nation” in the past, before the evil empire put a yoke on it for a century or two. In empire and nation, the ideal state of affairs is envisioned in terms of sovereignty enjoyed by a homogeneous community of the chosen, which in the observable “Iron Age” is but wishful thinking: there is always the omnipresence of all sorts of “aliens,” patchwork-like cultural diversity, and more often than not, someone else’s political domination. The hegemonic public discourse of the post-Napoleonic period perceives diversity as the result of the glorious past being compromised on so many counts, and expects the future to restore the lost paradise of the community’s homogeneity and might.

The popular philosophy of history thus briefly outlined permeates political discussions and historical treatises to this day, if in somewhat more sophisticated and elaborated form. Increasingly masked by the rhetoric of political correctness, it still assumes diversity to be a liability and the result of a constellation of particular historical circumstances. Within Ab Imperio’s 2014 annual theme “Assemblage Points of the Imperial Situation: Places and Spaces of Diversity,” three thematic issues have reviewed several types of historical conditions producing the most systematic and complex forms of diversity. As it turns out, these forms of sustained diversity that are unreducible to the formula of “the norm and exclusions” (or “the majority and minorities”) and shorthanded as the “imperial situation”¹ can be produced by very different factors and in different epochs (even today). In this light, it seems natural to question the very logic of reasoning that perceives “pure forms” as the elementary “bricks” of more complex social formations and the norm as only temporarily (“historically”) undermined by diversity. It is quite possible that the imperial situation is the “natural” social arrangement, while any vision of a homogeneous community of the chosen (by gods, history, or genetics) is just a part of the myth of the Golden Age, forced on their audiences by entrepreneurs of culture. Therefore, the last issue of Ab Imperio in 2014 is dedicated to the mechanisms and strategies of ascribing meaning to the observable persistent human diversity – to “Spontaneous Bricolage, Masters of Assemblage, and Their Contested Blueprints.” Self-appointed “masters of bricolage” engage in producing new maps of human societies through social practices and high literary discourses, disciplinary knowledge, and policing of texts. The paradox of the imperial situation in modern societies is that these blueprints of modernity were, to paraphrase the famous line about Soviet nationalities, national in aspirations and cosmopolitan in origins. An assemblage point requires a simultaneous presence within the matrix of social relations and loyalties caught between empire and nation, and a certain discursive distance from this matrix, usually found in some universal (global, European, scientific, or modern) sphere. The universal and the local reinforced each other in multiple ways, and the problem of assemblage points became the problem of epistemology: can one be outside the imperial situation while attempting to map the relations between various loyalties and commitments within the imperial context? Much of the current issue is dedicated to the study of how the masters of bricolage who located the assemblage points for their contested blueprints outside of the imperial context were, in fact, reflecting the imperial situation on a new level. What this problem requires of scholars is the need to avoid binary oppositions and to make an intellectual effort to think of complexity and diversity in ways that are not reductive.

As if engaging...