Colony.Englishtrans.docx

COLONY I should like to thank Amnanda Cellini for translating this piece from the Norwegian. Iver B. Neumann In Knut Stene-Johansen, Christian Refsum and Johan Schimanski (eds.) Living Together Stuttgart: [transcript], 2018. Barthes’ review of the colony is based on an existential theme: man’s life as a recluse in the desert. Barthes’ earliest example is the Jewish Qumran sect, documented in the Dead Sea Scrolls circa 140 B.C., but his central example focuses on the Sinai in 300 A.D. where a growing stream of loners (‘drop-outs’, ‘anchorites’) tried to find a way to meet their god in peace. Instead they often found wild animals and people with more sense for profit than idiorrhythm. A few pulled up on pillars. Most searched in groups for protection. The groups found unstable souls (‘drop-ins’) along the way. The colony is a special community that arises in relation to a larger community of which members have left or been cast out of. Barthes holds forth on this way of life, called ‘idiorrhythmic clusters’, clusters where everyone lives in parallel, according to their own rhythm, as their favorite fantasy. He insists on individuality. There is every reason to try to insist, for the story he tells about hermits, is also the story of the monastic order beginnings. By taking a look at codification that was made at this time, especially the Rule of St. Benedict, one sees immediately that the individual was read out in favor of a more common rhythm: ‘They live not only as it suits them even after their own lusts, but subordinates the other judgements and commandments, live a communal life in monasteries and choose an abbot to govern themselves’ (Benedict 1986: 63). Historically carrying the sequences Barthes discusses the history of his own fantasy shipwreck. Barthes’ answer to this is to seek more anarchic colonies extended by tired: Athos in Greece, Egypt, Constantinople. He concludes resigned, by discussing a monk who had enough of asceticism and, we are to believe, draws consequences by returning to mainstream society. Politics form the primary question that presses on, and it is not about the relationship to the other, so Barthes suggests, but the relationship between the one and many: Is a life of community where everyone can follow their own rhythm possible? Were there specific reasons why idiorrhythm disappeared in the 300s, or was it the story of a notified murder? If we turn to archeology, we find two major changes in assumptions in the formation of such communities. First is big game hunting; second is rural society (or, to be more precise, access to food that is so stable that it makes sedentary life possible; in these parts fishing and oyster hunting sufficed before agriculture came). Big game hunting is at least 300,000 years old. It brought with it what we might call a Paleolithic political revolution, that wildlife could only be captured if adult men hunted together. Thus, ability and the willingness to cooperate became important. Alpha males went from being a social crank to being a leader. The social structure was flatter, but not very flat; what little we know about society that is organized this way, suggests that other members, men and women, used enormous amounts of time keeping the best hunters at bay. In the famous study of the King of southern Africa from the 1970s documented by Shostak (1981), we see that as much as half of conversation could be to remind the best hunters how dependent they were of group support and how important it was to share. Here, there was little room for individual rhythms. After centuries and millenniums experimenting with the increasing production of everything from hazelnuts to oysters came the Neolithic political revolution, which gave groups relatively fixed supplies of food in the form of agricultural commodities. Agricultural products can be stored. Extra can be exchanged for other goods. Some get richer, other become poorer. Whereas the Paleolithic political revolution flattens hierarchies, the Neolithic revolution spearheads them again. The room for one’s own rhythm shrinks further. The members of the Qumran sect and their followers, i.e. precisely the people Barthes discusses, tried to escape the tyranny of rural society, but with little luck. In the millennium before our own era, there were, in addition to the logic Barthes mentions, at least three other logics that gave rise to colonies. Plato mentions one: When men who have nothing, and are in want of food, show a disposition to follow their leaders in an attach of the property of the rich – these, who are the natural plague of the state, are sent away by the legislator in a friendly spirit as far as he is able; and this dismissal of them is euphemistically termed a colony (Plato 1937: 503). Agricultural society gave relatively fast access to food, but not permanent access. When the hungry attacks hierarchy, they are sent off to found colonies. Here we have the basis for the next two thousand years with bandits, pirates and highway robbers in semi-nomadic colonies, from Robin Hood to Captain Black Bill (see Hobsbawm 2000). This life may stand in a certain sense, but it hardly provides much space for Little Jon’s own rhythm of life; Robin decides. This draws a line from Greece’s colonialization of the Mediterranean from 750 B.C. to the British colonialization of Australia from the late 1700s and onward to Africa. The Greeks of Thera (modern Santorini) had set forth a related logic, namely due to overcrowding. Herodotus tells how the island in 630 B.C. had too many mouths to feed, and decided by lot who had to leave for a minimum of five years. To establish itself as a colony, however, proved difficult and after a while the unwilling colonists returned. They were met with a shower of stones from the shore and once again had to sail away looking for a place to establish a colony. They found space on the coast of Africa. The Greeks were not the first with colonies in the Mediterranean. When they settled in this way, it was also in response to the Carthage colonization of the Mediterranean (Cunliffe 2008: 284). It had begun almost two centuries before, in 814 B.C., when the Phoenicians in Tyre (in today’s Lebanon) founded Carthage (today’s Tunis). The logic here is about trade routes and military strategy: A tug of war between Carthaginians and Greeks, then the Romans, whether maritime, or, to use a military expression, by sea, domination of trade in the Mediterranean was first settled with the three Punic wars and the Roman salting of Carthage earth in modern times. We are talking about a type of colonization that is not operated by the other’s desire to live according to their own rhythm, but about structural offshoots. The three logics – diversion of discontent, overproduction, sovereignty over new areas – have been the driving force in settler colonies thrust across the globe and can also be found at the heart of the two major European waves of colonization (1492-1600; 1815-1918). Note that there is talk of settler colonies here. The Greeks did not use a variation of the world colony about this, but rather apoikia, which means it is out of the house; from api, outside and oekos, house. For Greek colonists, it was important to recognize one’s hometown, but there was little contact with and no direct control from one’s hometown to colony. Barthes mentions 19th-century utopia. This utopia had two assumptions: that industrialization drives people into cities and also created a longing for the monotony and innocence of life back in the home village. Most satisfied themselves with nationalism as a counterweight, but there were others who turned to idiorrhythm and founded colonies on the American prairie or the Patagonian pampas. They left because of the dream of a pre-industrial society, but also because structural colonialization had opened geographic space. It did not go well for these utopian settler colonies. Where structural colonialism opened room for settlers, be it those who would like to find their own rhythm or others, lived inevitably other people who got their life rhythms beaten to pieces by the newcomers. From the late 1700s on, with the emergence of romantic nationalism, people’s self-determination was a new ideal and colonies became an insult. The colony is seen here not as a possible microcosm, but, quite in line with what happened with the hermits of the Sinai in the 300s, as a community that is in a subordinate relation of power to an imperial center, and people cannot be national citizens who determine communal rhythm. Here we talk about a new sense of the colony, which goes back to the Latin word for farmer, colonus, which in turn comes from the proto-Indo-European kwel*, to go around. Colonies in this sense are therefore not colonies formed by people who themselves are sent or strike out on their own; rather colonies are established by takeover and in a situation where those who do establish it, do it while they are resistant contact with mothership. So there are colonies and colonies. The main idea nowadays in Norwegian, English and other Indo-European languages is, however, the one we got with the transition to modernity from 1750-1850, the Reinhart Koselleck calls ‘saddle time’, and what we can see, for example, in political slogans from the counterculture spread, ‘Welcome to Arizona, Nuclear Colony of the United States’ (Masco 2005). It is in this sense, as a political entity of the imperial center, we find the term in the debate about Norway’s situation around 1814, where Swedish, Danish and Norwegian debate any wrongdoing either Copenhagen or Stockholm to make Norway a ‘Colonie’. Let us just as well pick an example from Carl Johan: «Les Norvègiens qui ont éprouvé toutes les angoisses du besoin et de la misère, vont incessamment être prévenus que leur union avec la Suède aura pour premiere base les mêmes avantages qui viennent d'être rendus aux habitans de la Presqu'île Cimbrique; ainsi la Norvège libre et heureuse ne sera plus gouvernée comme Colonie, et jouira de tous ses droits politiques.» (Se http://www.nb.no/bibliografi/1814/show?id=30a973b459fc1fa9a295847a88a7a731, retrieved 22 April 2015.) Or, to give the Danish translation (as there was no written language that may be called Norwegian at this time): «Nordmændene, som have udstaaet alle Mangelens og Elendighedens Trængsler, skulle upholdelig vorde underrettede om: at deres Forening med Sverrige skal til förste Grundvold have de samme Fordele, som nu ere tilbagegivne Indvaanerne af den Cimbriske Halvöe. Saaledes skal Norge frit og lykkeligt ikke mere regjeres som Colonie, men skal nyde alle sine politiske Rettigheder.» (Carl 1815: 28-29; se også Hemstad 2014: 88). This notion that Norway should have been a ’Colonie’ under Denmark of course crosses the Swedish king. It was also a central notion in Norwegian nationalism, from Nikolai Wergeland to the now retired 1968-ers. It is a strange reading. Denmark was an empire, quite rightly, and it had colonies. Norway delivered officers to these colonies on a regular basis, and it received good money on colonial slave trading and other shipping. But Norway was by no means a colony. Norway was near Copenhagen, and thus as Morten Skumsrud Andersen (2015) has recently shown, is best understood as an imperial semi-core. The largest colonies were Trankebar on the Indian Ocean, the crown colony Danish West India (which was first sold to the United States in 1919) and the typical settler colony of Greenland, whose apostle was Hans Egede, a Norwegian. Numerous Danes and Norwegians lived there in a colonial life that so thoroughly left local life rhythms in ruins. The European colonialization was a worldwide project, as Barthes wrote in the book we are celebrating, yet had just ended for the case of France. Barthes lived in a postcolonial world but it seems, except for an occasional reference to the tricolor in Mythologies, not to have been significant interest, despite the fact that he had lived through a bloody civil war which was about just that, and despite the fact that immigration from former colonies was to make the city he lived in a metropolis. These immigrants lived a postcolonial life, where they tried to find a rhythm that could speak both to the tradition they had traveled from and to the society they had become part of (Mbembe 2006). That Barthes did not have an eye for this, if not from the street observation as in any case of Franz Fanon books on how such a life turned out is, to me, incomprehensible, not least because immigrants in Paris created their own clusters where they tried to find a rhythm which to some degree could remain their own right in the world city. If he thought about it at all, he might not write about it because he had a suspicion that these marginalized idiorrhythms would have to perish, and so would become a coda to the marginalized, utopian idiorrhythmic colonies he wrote of. Whether they become institutionalized slums, like some bidonville around Paris, or as it went with the Russian and Indonesian farmers who tried to copy their villages inside Moscow in the 1920s and Jakarta in the 1960s: they assimilated. Immigrants assimilate to the rhythms of their new city and their new country. Very few of us make a conscious attempt at finding our own rhythms, for such attempts demand an interest in deep play and utopias, and that quickly proves too much for most. And yet, it is important to keep up with utopias, for they give us reason to go on. In principle there is no reason to give up hope that the two major obstacles that have stood in the way of the idiorrhythmic project from the beginning, animus dominandi and a complex society needs a certain degree of hierarchy, should not be modified. The utopia of finding one’s own rhythm within a community may, however, come in the way of a social understanding of what kind of rhythms people actually live. If one wants utopia, one should be absolutely clear about what one is up against: the weight of the world in its entirety. Bibliography Andersen, Morten Skumsrud. ‘Semi-cores in imperial relations: The cases of Scotland and Norway’ Review of International Studies 42(1):1-26, 2015. “Hva var Norge i det danske imperiet? -- Skottland og Norge som semi-sentra”, Internasjonal politikk, årg. 66 (3), s 367-387. Benedikt. Om lydigheten i Klosterliv i Vesten: Augustins regel - Benedikts regel, oversettelse Erik Gunnes, Oslo, Aschehoug, Thorleif Dahls kulturbibliotek, 1986. Carl Rex. Proclamationer fra Hans Kongelige Høihed Kronprindsen af Sverrig, og Bulletiner udstædte i den forenede Nord-Tydske Armees Hoved-Qvarteer fra Begyndelsen af denne Armees Operationer indtil 16de September 1813 / oversat efter den paa Fransk i Lüttich udkomne 2den Udgave, Christiania: Grøndahl, 1815, tilgjengelig som http://www.nb.no/bibliografi/1814/show?id=30a973b459fc1fa9a295847a88a7a731. Cunliffe, Barry. Europe Between the Oceans: 9000 BC-AD 1000, annen utg., Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008. Hemstad, Ruth (red.) ‘Like a herd of cattle’. Parliamentary and Public Debates Regarding the Cession of Norway, 1813-1814, Oslo, Dreyer, 2014. Hobsbawm, Eric. Bandits, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, (1969) 2000. Masco, Joseph (2005). “The Billboard Campaign: The Los Alamos Study Group and the Nuclear Public Sphere”, Public Culture,. 17 (3), s 487-496. Mbembe, Achille. (2006) “On the Postcolony: a brief response to critics”, African Identities, 4 (2), s 143-178. Plato. Laws 5.735, The dialogues of Plato, bind to, transl. B. Jowett, New York, Random House, 1937. Shostak, Marjorie. Nisa, the life and words of a !Kung woman, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1981. 6