Download Lose your Identity: The Art of Interdisciplinarity

briefje ik heb je lief ik heb je niet bedacht
[little letter I love you I did not make you up]
Lose your Identity: The Art of Interdisciplinarity
Jonneke Bekkenkamp
The graffito that adorns ASCA publications was originally written on a wall in the Biltstraat
in Utrecht, near the place where Mieke Bal lived during the time she taught at the University
of Utrecht. Whenever I passed it, it caught my attention. As did the Loesje posters a little
later. Somehow, they always managed to cheer me up. It is as if a random stranger starts
talking to me and we have a kind of connection. The Loesje posters express a complex, and at
the same time positive, funny and critical, “we”: “Democracy. Now we.” (1985).
In line with Mieke’s clever intertwining of everyday culture and academic thinking, I
will discuss four prototypical forms of expressing we in this essay: in everyday, cultural,
religious, and prophetic ways. And I will demonstrate, or at least hope to, that Loesje is a
refined mixture of these four. The Loesje texts seem simple, and they are. But are they
really?1
Everyday We
The first way of saying “we” is a “natural,” daily we. It is the we of “the dreamed-of society”
that Willem Schinkel speaks of in his work of the same name. Among academics, it is mostly
the sociologists who concern themselves with this form of saying “we.” But according to
Schinkel, a sociologist himself, they seem to forget that society is not a moral fact but a
productive “con-fiction” – fiction of a con, a together (Denken 480). Words like “society” and
“integration” do not offer a neutral view of an existing society, but create the reality they
pretend to refer to.
In De gedroomde samenleving [the dreamed-of society], Schinkel discusses the
confiction of the discourse of integration: the references to “outsiders” who need to adjust
This text is a shortened version of the following article: “Loesje en de kunst van het citeren.” Als ik w1j word.
Nieuwe vormen van verbondenheid. Ed. Jonneke Bekkenkamp and Joris Verheijen. Almere: Parthenon, 2010.
29-40.
1
themselves to some sort of organic unity, a social organ, the “society.” This society is a wish,
a dream. One has only to repeat often enough that we are modern, tolerant, secular, or
whatever else seems desirable, and it becomes the apparent truth. Whoever does not comply
with these social norms is “outside” society and must integrate, or bugger off, which would
imply that this person was not outside to begin with, but inside, an “intruder.” If society were
a fact and not fiction, it would be everything involving social life, and therefore a useless
term. According to Schinkel, referring to society demarcates lines which one pretends already
existed before their demarcation.
It is hard to shirk “society.” What one can do is derail the vulgarity of speaking about a
society. Schinkel does this by constantly putting the word “society” between inverted
commas. Loesje does it by plastering the walls with texts such as: “Multicultural. Oh, you
mean like the world?” or “Those who still can’t deal with asylum seekers don’t belong here.”
It was November 1983 when the first Loesje poster was put up. By now there won’t be
many Dutch people who are not aware of her. What started at someone’s kitchen table has
grown into a creative hub with many international branches.
“It seems simple. And it is.”
Loesje physically exists as an organization and is approachable, with an office in Arnhem,
regular group meetings throughout the country, and an international office in Berlin since
1994. Writing the texts is a group process: “Because it’s a group process, we often don’t even
remember who has written what exactly. Therefore, every text is from Loesje.”
But who is Loesje? Loesje is not fixed by the identification laws, which she
characterizes as governmental OCD: “Identification. To be honest, I don’t think you even
want to know who I am” (2001). Loesje is a creative fiction, an alternative confiction of
“society.” “Society” is a political term, and politicians are dreamers. Unfortunately, they are
regressive dreamers, says Schinkel. Their dreams are static dreams. Because they do not
believe in progress anymore, they become introverted, fixated on the diseases that threaten the
social body. They are social hypochondriacs. This does not seem to affect Loesje. Although
she might stick to one writing style, her dreams are beyond the dreamed-of society: “More
blue in the skies. More dreams on the streets” (1998).
Cultural We
Dreaming about a better society can help improve the way we live together. But at the very
moment that this fiction causes friction it is important to search for a better fiction. That is the
second expression, that of the imagination. Among academics, it is mostly literary scholars
who occupy themselves with the forms of “we” being put forward here. One example is
Alberto Manguel in City of Words. While Loesje brings the imagination to the streets,
Manguel searches for plurality in literature. Manguel’s image of a society is that of a city of
words. The danger threatening this city is not a Babel of different tongues but the
impoverished vocabulary of a society saturated by the language of advertising.
ICH
BIN
ZWEI
BERLINER
Manguel compares the reading of novels with the methods of European political leaders to
ensure the survival of a society’s identity, such as, for instance, in January 2007, when Tony
Blair’s government decreed that schools should adduce the notion of “Britishness.” In
practice, according to Manguel, this was no more than a vague kind of couleur locale which
one would expect from a travel agency. Where Loesje poses the question of why a passport
does not have pages available for addresses, Manguel seems to want to put a literary memory
card in it. In effect, the language of stories enables one to build a pluralistic identity, which
leaves you with multiple options. The more stories are heard, the more complex the identities
of individuals, the more open a society. In short, Manguel tries to say:
To the limiting imagination of bureaucracies, to the restricted use of language in
politics, stories can oppose an open, unlimited mirror-universe of words to help us
perceive an image of ourselves together. (27)
The language of politics freezes identities into static definitions: people who seem to share a
certain tongue, a certain religion, a certain piece of land. It pins us all to a colored map
crossed by imaginary longitudes and latitudes that we take to be the real world. The
constructed view of the other – which stems from the attempt to define oneself better, which
in turn stems from fear of disintegration again – leads to conflicts. In this way, the blurred
concept of the identity of a society can be the cause of conflict. Then, Manguel suggests, we
should – instead of forcing all of our different personal natures and differentiating languages
into one common but restricted language – try to intertwine all these, and so render the curse
of Babel into a gift of many tongues.
This is a beautiful thought with regard to old papers. But it is unbelievable that
Manguel, anno 2007, does not question the canon, the subject in which I received my Ph.D.
under the supervision of Mieke Bal. If stories do create community, they will need to be
shared. Manguel seems to assume that everyone knows the books he quotes from. Without
exception these are books written by men. And without exception they are books put on the
World Literature list by the cultural elite.
Loesje does not really relate to the elite, not even to its cultural version. She does relate
to culture, though. She does so with a love for the riches of the mind, though. In 2005, she
went to the streets like a Robin Hood, to steal ideas and plans from the “rich of mind,” and
offer these to the “poor of mind,” the rulers without inspiration. She does so with expanding
borders, though: “I think we are the real globalists, although they call us the anti-globalists”
(1998). And she does so with plurality: “African saying. All thoughts are brothers” (1993).
Religious/Real We
“Go and talk to strangers.” In 2007, Loesje distributed this phrase, along with several creative
opening lines, to train travelers as a little push to start a conversation. The call to speak to
strangers is the core of Jewish belief, according to Jonathan Sacks.2 It is definitely the position
adopted by the Jewish German scholar Martin Buber in his classic book I and Thou (1923):
“All actual life is encounter” (62). According to Buber, there is no “I” as such. There is only
the I of “the basic word I-You” and the I of “the basic word I-It.” The moment you say “I,”
implicitly you either say I-It or I-You. In the first case you express yourself as an individual;
in the second case you express yourself as a person. Individuals, egos, only appear by setting
themselves apart from other egos; persons only appear by entering into a relation with other
persons (112). Although the It-humanity is a fiction, without It, a human being cannot live.
But whoever lives only with that is not human (65, 85). Note that the It in the basic word I-It
might be a She or a He. The difference is not the addressee, but the way he/she/it is addressed.
The basic word I-You can be spoken only with one’s whole being, yet the You cannot be
found by seeking: “The You encounters me by grace” (62). On the personal as well as on the
level of the communal life, a real We is not Me + He + She + … but “the sum of You and
You and You, which can never anything else but You” (96).
True community, according to Buber, will rise or fall in line with non-functional,
living, reciprocal relationships with other people and with religion as standing in a living,
reciprocal relation to a single living center. God, for Buber, is a name for that single living
center which he also calls the eternal You, or the Present, or Reality. Nowadays, in everyday
language, reality is not the first thing one thinks of when speaking of religion. The meaning of
religion is closer to (slightly out of this world) fantasy. Or, in the words of Loesje, “Believing
is starting an alien relationship with yourself” (1987).
What is difficult when speaking of religion, belief, and spirituality is that they may
mean so many, even contradictory, things. When I speak of Buber’s approach to saying we as
“religious,” all I am trying to say is that it is mostly theologians and philosophers who
concern themselves with this approach. Less confusing terms are “real,” “discontinuous,”
“intensive,” and “contingent.” The best term in Dutch is ontmoetings-we, in both meanings
that ontmoeten has in Dutch: 1) to meet, 2) learning to give up the feeling of “having to,” of
obligation. The usual habits and expectations block real relations, which are direct,
unmediated, and generally exclusive. The best term in English is perhaps “real we.”
2
“Beschaving geeft ruimte aan verschil.” LUX. IKON television, 12 January 2010.
“Meeting Place: Here Nothing is Obligatory”
.
The Outsider
“We” happens. Or not. The “real we” either exists, or it does not. One may be open to it, but
one cannot control it. The more things get out of control, the more chances there are of a new
we emerging. Power cuts and snowstorms are great we-initiators. But at a certain point, that
train will start moving again, or so we hope. Outsiders wish it did not. With disgust, they look
at everyone getting back to their boring daily routine. By “outsiders” I mean the highflyers
that Colin Wilson describes in The Outsider, his first book from 1956. To give an idea of the
complexity of the book: Wilson composes the figure of the outsider from the lives and works
of people (men) like Camus and Hemingway, Herman Hesse and James Joyce, Tolstoy and
Dostoevsky, William Blake and Thomas Mann, Nietszche and Vincent van Gogh, Vaslav
Nijinsky and T.E. Lawrence.
The image that outsiders have of civilization is of a prison they have to break free
from, or an illusionary world from which they have to awake. Saying we is utterly
problematic for them. In this way, their confiction is an anti-confiction. Beware of massmentality, convention, the seemingly common. Embryonic prophets, Wilson calls those who
prefer the intensity of living over psychical certainties. The goal is to focus on More Reality.
More Being. “Just do it, free your mind, let’s make things better, live life to the max” (Loesje
1996).
Loesje, seemingly so common, has something of an outsider in her. “Jezus wat leven
we toch in een kantoortuin jongens” [Jezus, guys, we're all living in an office garden] (Loesje
1992); “Als u ze allemaal op een rijtje hebt. Pas op voor het dominoeffect” [Watch out for the
domino effect if you have everything lined up]; and most of all: “leven is meervoud van lef”
(Untranslatable pun, literally rendered as: “Life is the plural of courage”).
Since 2006, Loesje has been publishing a magazine called Masta, an international
journal for creative activism. The fourth issue, Identify this, is about identity in its double
meaning of “unique individuality” and “identical to others.” It contains articles about how to
hack fingerprints, how to cleverly combine identities, and how to virtualize them on social
networks like MySpace. How to steal and lose identities. Lose your identity: a board game.
What is typical of Loesje in this issue, and exemplary of every community, is its shifting back
and forth between imagination and relative thinking, between the building of an identity and
letting it go.
The cultural we and the common we are both constructs of identity. Regardless of
whether these identities are unique or pluralist or whether these groups are vast [stuck] or
open. Saying we calls for contradiction. More life, more reality. Loesje has it all. Her
strongest character trait is her pleasant derailing of the everyday we. Manguel speaks of a city
of words. Loesje brings the words to the streets, enabling them to be shared automatically.
Like her texts, which are simple but not simplistic. What is so clever about the Loesje texts is
that they, in all their plainness, cheerfully break through platitudes and we/they
contradictions: “Let’s all stop integrating and start living together.”
Works Cited
Buber, Martin. I and Thou. 1923. A New Translation with a Prologue and Notes by Walter
Kaufmann. Edinburgh: , 1970.
Manguel, Alberto. The City of Words. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2007.
Schinkel, Willem. Denken in een tijd van sociale hypochondrie. Aanzet tot een theorie voorbij
de maatschappij. 2nd, revised edition. Kampen: Klement, 2008.
--. De gedroomde samenleving. Kampen: Klement, 2008.
Wilson, Colin. The Outsider. 1956. New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1982.