2005-10-16
become a citizen of the nomad territories
[be]
En cherchant dans mes vieux dossiers je retrouve le projet d’un collectif du Québec : les territoires nomades, 1994
Je cite : “A manoeuvre from Quebec across Europe was planned, with events taking place in a series of, predominately art, centres in a variety of different cities. A passport bearing the colours and emblem of the Nomad Territories was issued in each place. These events, composed as they were of exhibitions, installations and performances, both generated and attracted a great deal of political, social, artistic and media interest.”
En effet, ce projet m’avait intrigué. Si vous en savez plus sur ce projet, avez des photos ou possédez un passeport, n’hésitez pas à me le faire savoir.
2005-10-17 6:56 am
I keep meaning to point you at the minimal compact, my “open-source constitution for post-national entities”: http://www.v-2.org/displayArticle.php?article_num=339
enjoy…
2005-10-17 7:26 pm
You might want to look at: Anderson, Benedict R. O’G. (Benedict Richard O’Gorman), 1936-: Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (London; New York: Verso, 1991)
(I had made a review of the book for research purpose some time ago):
Anderson Benedict looks at the phenomenon of nationalism from a different point of view than the one of traditional “Eurocentrics” who for a majority imagine being the source of all important phenomenon (preface ,xiii). Two centuries of recent history have shaped the concept of nation-ness. The analysis draws from Eastern Asian examples as the author is passionate about Asian politics. He indeed holds a PhD from the Modern Indonesian Program at Cornell, program of which he is the director, today.
According to Anderson Benedict, Nation is an “imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (Introduction, p.6). A nation is imagined because created, as none of the people that belong to it know all the others. It is limited, as the extent of the nation, when it stops—when the others starts—is defined. It is sovereign because it detached itself from antecedent global communities like the Empire and religious global expansions. A Nation is also a community fostering “a deep, horizontal comradeship” (introduction, p7) while creating people willing to die for it.
Technical innovations like the printing press for example—printing capitalism—along with the socio-economical changes—language—and the increasingly fast communication systems—industrial capitalism, have contributed to the end of old models of imagined communities. As Benedict Andersons write page 36, “No surprise then that the search was on, so to speak, for a new way of linking fraternity, power and time meaningfully together.” The pioneers of Nation-hood were the Creole functionary, educated through a system other than the one he lived in, in fact caught in between two others as he is a “Person of pure European descent but born in the Americas (and by extension, anywhere outside Europe).” In Europe, “Power and print-language mapped different realms” (p.77) whereas the new models occurred in other settings, in the Americas, where the empires did not include different languages. Nationalism becomes official when the leading group (the functionaries…) “resistant to foreign rules (p.111),” be it within Europe (United Kingdom), other empires (Japan) or within the colonies (Indians—to be anglicized), promotes a system (rules, policies, official language…) which will create nationalism. As Benedict Anderson later writes page 133, “It is always a mistake to treat languages in the way that certain nationalist ideologues treat them—as emblems of nation-ness, like flags costumes, folk-dances, and the rest. Much the most important thing about language is its capacity for generating imagined communities, building in effect particular solidarities.” But it is “Print-language that invent nationalism (p. 134),” as it is print-language (instead than language) that is mainly spread, and becomes powerful because of the larger magnitude of its reaching.
Nation-ness inspires at the same time love and hatred, patriotism and racism. Language expresses nation-ness while participating to the imagining of a nation (power, fight for equality, longing…). It is however, at the age of mechanical reproduction, the technological tools (“institutions”) like the Census, the Map and the Museum that participate to the creation of imagined communities, by changing (p. 164) “the nature of the human beings it [the colonial state] ruled, the geography of its domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry.” The census enabled the categorization (often racism), generalization (amalgam), and quantification of the population. The European-style maps which also categorizes, replaced the old cosmological and diagrammatic ways of imagining space (p. 171, the example of Siam). The museum has inherited from the late colonial interest and development of archeology. Objects where suddenly de-contextualized, “Successively disinterred, unjungled, measured, photographed, re-constructed, fenced-off, analyzed, and displayed.” Furthermore, the consciousness of a nation lies in the notion of identity which is much imaginary as it relies on memory (also conveyed through language) and is highly selective (choice to forget).
In conclusion nation is, for Anderson Benedict, an imagined community that inherited from historical precedents and contexts while highly hinging on technological advances. The technological advances impact on the way knowledge (true/false/imagined/in power) is conveyed, thus permit imagining the extent of the community.
2008-01-20 1:16 pm
[…] There was an experiment in Quebec for issuing passports to citizens of nomad territories… Unfortunately, the link does not work anymore :( […]