According to the Fabian Speach I alluded to last time, in addition to freshen up, nurture and reinvigorate such hitherto dry debates on national belonging and national pride, celebrating an officially sanctioned festive Patriotic Day and using the Union Jack in every gardenmay also be of some assistance (Italics from the original speach). Hence the new urgencyof reclaiming the power of national symbols back from the most idiosyncratic internal enemy that Britain faces today, the enemy within: the far right BNP. As Gordon Brown said:

Let us remember that when people on the centre-left recoiled from national symbols, the BNP tried to steal the Union Jack. Instead of the BNP using it as a symbol of racial division, the flag should be a symbol of unity, part of a modern expression of patriotism. So we should respond to the BNP by saying the union flag is a flag for Britain, not for the BNP; all the United Kingdom should honour it, not ignore it; we should assert that the union flag is, by definition, a flag of tolerance and inclusion.

By monopolizing the British flag shamelessly the xenophobic and prejudiced far right distorts thus the good old British patriotic feelings and values of liberty, tolerance, inclusion and fair play. The un-stated reasons why, however, somebody should be so fond of catapulting the marginal BNP into becoming a rightist populist party with a serious presence in British politics are less paradoxical that they seem. Still relevant nowadays are Žižek’s remarks in “Why we all love to hate Haider”(The Universal Exception, 2006, pp. 236-7:

The first thing to do here is to recall the well-concealed but non the less unmistakable sight of relief in the predominant democratic political field when, a decade ago, the Rightist populist parties became a serious presence (Haider in Austria, Le Pen in France, Republicans in Germany, Bucharan in the USA). The message of this relief was: at last an enemy whom we can properly hate all together, whom we can sacrifice – excommunicate- in order to demonstrate our democratic consensus! This relief is to be read against the background of what is usually referred to as the emerging ‘post-political consensus’: the only political force with the serious weight which does still evoke the properly political antagonistic response of Us against Them is the new Populist Right.

The BNP, therefore, plays a key structural role in the legitimacy of Gordon Brown’s liberal-democratic discourse of tolerant multiculturalism as now hegemonised by a new sense of inclusive national belonging. The BNP constitutes, Žižek’s words are still relevant here, the very “negative common denominator of the entire…‘democratic’ bloc” (242), the unacceptable party of government which is the proof of our own democratic standards, credentials and attitudes; the extremely good for comfort enemy (them) who everybody (us) loves to hate.

Moreover: does not the BNP also become the enemy  that gives the very center-left liberal spectrum in general and Labour grassroots, in particular, the possibility of still playing proper ‘radical’, ‘anti-fascist’ politics while having to concede on traditionally unheard of calls for unsauvory national(ist) adhesions?

The first thing to do when discussing Gordon Brown’s own brand of excluding nationalism is not to be distracted with the would-be ‘anti-nationalist’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ babble to which the whole political spectrum (from civilised conservatives to centre and left “liberals” not to mention ‘radical’ intellectuals) have us accustomed; – which ironically include Gordon Brown’s own highly anti-nationalist and cosmopolitan civic-patriotic rhetoric. After all, as Zizek tells us often, ample evidence exists of how by way of constantly and adamantly refusing and mocking nationalism they only show the fascination that nationalism exerts upon them.

Gordon Brown’s emphasis on, and actual contents attached to his British national building project will help explaining this ambiguity. In this respect, the very repetition in that famous speech of a series of words quite loaded semantically such as the creation of a British national community clears the way for a conventional reading of its underlying meaning via some well-established scholarly texts on the topic of nationalism.

Is it not be the case then that the new British imagined community (Benedict Anderson, 1983) ultimately rests on the creation (Ernest Gellner, 1983, 1987) and invention of [a] tradition (Eric Hobsbawn (1983, 1990) that seeks to prevent The Breaking up of Britain (Tony Nairn, 1977) both from within (i.e.: Scottish, say, ‘local(ist), ‘tribal petty-nationalism’, un-mixed self-centered religious communities…) and from without (global terrorism, illegal asylum seekers, uncontrolled emigration…)? Is it not the case, likewise, that the very boundaries of ethnic nationalism and civic patriotism (Anthony Smith, 1981, Walter Connor, 1994) are ambiguously blurred, to say the least, rather than clearly defined in Gordon Brown’s project of British ethno-patriotic revival?

Certainly, Gordon Brown dismisses in an explicit way some of the very routinely “must-refute” teachings of German romantic Johann Gottfried von Herder’s ‘cultural nationalism’ mainly presented in Materials for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784). Simultaneously, Gordon Brown duly embraces some of the just as routinely “must adopt” slogans on ‘civic-political patriotism’ by French liberal Ernest Renan in more or less the exact terms of that celebrated lecture What is a Nation?  he delivered at the Sorbonne University, Paris, as far backa as 1882. However, while Gordon Brown explicitly rejects some of the ugly ‘objective’ factors, criteria or components such as an overly religious foundation or, most particularly, an ethnic(ist) approach to national building which are usually associated with the German tradition (i.e.: this British patriotism is, in my view, founded not on ethnicity nor race), he, nevertheless, complies to Herder’s romantic portrayal of the nation as a positive focus of identity and, at the same time, that is to say, the central piece of cultural nationalism-, as paramount.

Yet Gordon Brown’s reference to language is not only delivered as an explicit statement: to help integration – for which we should look at expanding mandatory English training. By the same token, this constraining reference to language also constitutes the ultimate bearer of an implicit assumption sustaining the whole ideological edifice of British national unity. In other words, Gordon Brown’s keenness to follow Ernest Renan’s own liberal plea for a person’s identity being rooted in universal humanity and individual ‘subjective’ will seems rather immaterial as the explicit call for mandatory language tuition brings the whole argument full circle to the very disavowed point of departure:

Language invites people to unite, -Renan says- but it does not force them to do so (…). The political importance attached to languages derives from their being regarded as a sign of race.

Is this not an instance, therefore, of how by seeking the best of both worlds one may end up producing the worst of all possible middle-of-the-road mixtures? There is no escaping from this fact: in Gordon Brown’s circular argument, the English language IS indeed the language of the Anglo-Saxon race that others are forced to learn.

Remember when on the wake of the London bombings Tony Blair said The rules of the game have changed? Despite the apparent dramatic depth of such lapidary a statement, the question was then and still is now as follows: have they though? Were they not already radically changed under the auspices of the post 9/11 US led war on terror? Or were they, really, even there and then? This is what, in the heat of the debate, Slavoj Žižek wrote in Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London, New York:Verso, 2002, pp 46-7):

So what about the phrase that reverberates everywhere: ‘Nothing will ever be the same after September 11’? Significantly, this phrase is never further elaborated – it is just an empty gesture of saying something ‘deep’ without really knowing what we want to say. So our first reaction to it should be: Really? What if, precisely, nothing epochal happened on September 11? What if – as the massive display of American patriotism seems to demonstrate- the shattering experience of September 11 ultimately served as a device which enabled the hegemonic American ideology to ‘go back to its basics’, to reassert its basic ideological co-ordinates against the antiglobalists and other critical temptations?

Talking of phrases that reverberate, to one’s mind come also earlier inputs into the cultural debate by always polemical but equally acute Conservative maverick Norman Tebbitt . After all, the very apparent insidiousness behind his legendary Cricket Testshould only remind us of a fundamentally depressing rather than racist exhortation. One, namely, that coerced British citizens of Afro-Caribbean descent into choosing between two equally mediocre sporting teams. On the other hand, however, as Jaqueline Rose stated in States of Fantasy(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996, p.149) Norman Tebbitt turned out to be quite right, for instance, in explaining Tony Blair’s first 1997 electoral victory:

Many traditional Labour voters realised that they shared our [Conservative] values – that man is not just a social but also a territorial animal: it must be part of our agenda to satisfy those basic instincts of tribalism and territoriality.

What is important to understand regarding New Labour’s increasing descent into ugly nationalism is that under the concealing discursive guise of seeking integrative and participative cultural policies through the supposedly healthy medium of ‘progressive’ British national identity, these new proposals also respond to a specific defensive framework whereby the process of globalisation seems to be perceived more as a cultural and political threat than the economic opportunity we are often told to believe in: a widely held feeling, let’s face it, that under the present circumstances of deep financial crisis no amount of gimmicks as to the leading role Gordon Brown is apparently taking to save global capitalism can conceal.

Despite periodical and well-publicised xenophobic outbursts, ideal(ist) discursive fantasies fueled by the promise of a frictionless and harmoniously integrated (multicultural) society have underpinned, at least until recently, a gracious desire on the part of the dominant indigenous ethnic majority population in Britain to positively engage with the different other; – leaving aside, that is to say, the almost invariably tokenistic nature of such engagement: Yes to experiencing the authentic Tikka Massala in Brick Lane, East London; No to barbarian blood spilling rituals as goats’ throats are slit in the back streets of Birmingham, let alone forced marriages…

As things stand, however, it could also be argued that this dual approach of the civilised and cultivated metropolitan towards the subordinate ethnic culture of the other is increasingly irrelevant nowadays. Needless to say, customary cultural procedures and practices will still dictate that praising – and consuming- the enigmatic, the exotic and the mysterious in the primitive other will always be kind of right on, to put it in cool, colloquial American idiom. But (and this is far from a mere rhetoric opening to a disjunctive clause) as you may recall the rules of the game changed a few years ago on the waking of the London bombings. In a context, therefore, in which the hitherto distant global war on terrorism finally hit home with the vengeance of the bombers speaking a ‘perfect’ south Yorkshire dialect, new answers had to be found to confront the new intercultural conundrums that must be faced. New answers that certainly leave aside the superfluous question of knowing whether it was ever possible though to speak a ‘dialect’ in a perfect way, and which require instead a far more urgent modification in the traditional three-course menu that authentic locals in Britain speaking a perfectly understandable and accent-less received pronunciation language offer now on a take it o leave it basis: for starters, a standard bureaucratic rebuke on health and safety grounds; as a main course, a warm appeal to embrace the superior moral standing of our way of life (human rights, gender equality, democracy and freedom…); and finally, yet most importantly, a newly devised dessert where the sweet discourse of civil liberties is heavily supplemented with, if not replaced altogether with the increasingly sour emergency discourse and ideology of national security.

As the emergency discourse and ideology of national security hovers around all aspects of our public and private lives, a crucial condition no critic should forget when engaging in cultural debates, Britishness is now the only possible meaningful cultural container and British national identity the only political horizon remaining which forever defines what the highest form of self-identification one can find. In this respect Left-wing cult popular singer Billy Bragg’s , attempt to “reconcile patriotism with the radical tradition” in his The Progressive Patriot (2006) gave us a clear indication, for instance, of the new major neo-nationalist repositioning that is taking place in Britain. A progressive neo-nationalist repositioning from which it is allegedly possible not only to overcome traditional, Conservative Middle England politics, but also to challenge the re-emergence of the xenophobic BNP together with the threat of religous aka. Muslim fundamentalism.

In addition, British Minority Ethnics  such as Trebor Phillips and Tariq Morood, to all intents and purposes of self-definition and self-portrayal, both progressive liberals and / or centre-left thinkers, are always quite adamant in pointing us towards such a forced choice: to choose, that is to say, between British national identity or nothing else; or do we instead, as Morood does not fail to ask in his Remaking Multiculturalism After 7/7, although with a certain amount of ironic disdain…

…just take the view that if inspiring and meaning-conferring identities can be found elsewhere – in some internationalist movement- that’s just fine and if that’s at the expense of your country and its citizens, well they don’t really matter all that much in the ultimate scheme of significance? (6)

As so it should be, however, the straightforward answer to this intelligent question is a very admittedly un-pragmatic and indeed silly: yes, I do take the view that inspiring and meaning-conferring identities can only be found in some unconditionally un-attainable internationalist universalism. Moreover, it is the very impossibility of a truly universalistic politics that transcends national, sexual, religious… identities and determinations which should function, nevertheless, as a central structuring point of reference. After all when from the Commission for Racial Equality Trebor Phillips said that “[I]n recent years we’ve focused far too much on the ‘multi’ and not enough on the common culture”, what is however the main kernel of such a common culture: that (1) we, foreigners and ‘minority ethnics’ aspire to conform to the dominant British way of life, now ever so idiosyncratically defined by pragmatic and utilitarian concerns as to their fate having been left in the hands of greedy irresponsible bankers, or that (2) we are bound together on our own subordinate marginality, which I am sure also extends to a total lack of worry regarding our nonexistent saving accounts?

As Albert Schutz explained, cultural description is a process analogous to the experience of any foreigner learning the culture of a host society. Schutz noted that in the weeks and months following the immigrant’s arrival in the new society, what she previously took for granted as knowledge about that society turns out to be unreliable if not obviously false. In addition, areas of ignorance previously of not importance come to take great significance, overcoming them being necessary for the pursuit of important goals, perhaps even for the foreigner’s very survival in the new environment. In the process of ‘integration’ and learning how to participate in social relations in the new society, the foreigner gradually acquires an ‘inside’ knowledge of it, which supplants her previous ‘external’ knowledge. Schutz argued that by virtue of being forced to understand the culture of the host society in this way, the foreigner acquires a sense of objectivity not available to native citizens. This form of what Schutz also called gentle perspectivism allows the foreigner observing that the inside members of a culture are quite unable to see it as anything but a reflection of ‘‘how the world is’, something that as Sutchz explains in various articles (1960, 70) as well as in his seminal Phenomenology of the Social World (1972) revolves around the idea of “the natural attitude”: a disposition and / or frame of mind and opinion, in other words, whereby the fundamentally context-specific and culture-bound set of believes shaping the visions, in our case, of the indigenous ethnic majority population in Britain are mostly unconsciously taken for granted in a very common-sense, mundane way.

Dealing with the topic and issue of inter-cultural relations (particularly in Britain) responds to the same process of knowledge building. Since culture is also ordinary and everyone participates in it (Raymond Williams, Keywords, 1976, Culture, 1981) so most people feel to have something to say and to hold an opinion about it, from the lay member in the street on to the informed citizen, journalist and / or politician not to mention the expert scholar from many a field in the humanities. However, in the process of a foreign academic learning, trying to understand and explaining the complex forces acting upon the relations between community, culture and identity within the confines of a given dominant but declining State formation, one is perhaps the main single belief and attitude across the board, which adequately distilled through common sense, appears as much taken for granted in current debates be they on multiculturalism / inter-culturalism and the (postmodern) politics of identity and difference, or the discussions on the interactions between citizenship and the nation, among others: it is the general assumption that, when addressing the conspicuous issue of the foreign body the common frame of reference in regards to the prominent topics of “cultural integration” and / or “social inclusion” ought to be the values, customs, laws, language and culture of the “guest society”.

This, in turn, offers the foreign other a highly liberal and individual(ist) choice: … and if you don’t like it, you leave!

The global economic system, which has increasingly developed over the past decades, has expanded the international migrant experience to unknown limits. Simultaneously, permanent political unrest and conflict in many corners of the world have multiplied the cases of exile displacement. In such a context, the political apprehensions of host nation-states deriving from the economical and social burden that migration and exile apparently originate have come to darken the travelling experiences of both migrants and exiles. We only have to think of the emotions and arrangements of departure, the consequences of journeying, of changing places and losing the way, the efforts to find a new “home”, the expectations of return etc. All these experiences of movement and precarious resettlement are meaningless for the bureaucratic discourses of the State, always-already established within the fixed limits of its own boundaries thought of as immutable and unchangeable.

Facing the constraining visions and structures of the state, the formation of new diaspora and exile cultures across the world brings about the possibility to study new discourses, practices and attitudes towards the modern travelling experience. As a consequence, the traveling discourses of departure, loss, resettlement and return are attainable through a myriad of knowledges, stories, traditions, musics, books, personal diaries and other cultural expressions which denote, simultaneously, the material and spatial conditions underpinning the narratives of travel.

The members of the new diaspora and exile cultures which are now being established across the world feel thus a real urge to talk, sing and write in the metaphoric / melancholic language of travelling and return; and if they do so, it is precisely because, at the end of it all, we know that all hope to return back “home” is lost. Unlike the privileged nineteenth century traveler, or the ethnographer, for that matter, and unlike both cosmopolitans and tourists nowadays, our return to the past is impossible; but this impossibility of return does not imply that links and identifications are not kept with the place of origin and its traditions. What it means is that return is impossible even in the case of actually going back home to the place of origin, which will have by then known transformations beyond recognition.

On the one hand, therefore, diaspora and exile cultures bear the traces of their own particular cultures, traditions, histories, languages and systems of belief. On the other hand, we have to come to terms with, and make sense of the new host culture and society they take residence in without simply assimilating to them. In this sense, we are necessarily the product of different and interrelated cultures and histories; and necessarily inhabit different “homes” at the same time. Or, what is the same, no special home at all.

In the words of Edward Said, other than allowing unconventional, often eccentric life styles and careers, the condition of exile experience also carried with it certain pleasures, rewards, and even privileges; hence the idea that positive things can be derived from exile and marginality. However, the questions Julia Kristeva raises still remain that whereas the ambivalent possibilities and sources of intellectual pleasure seem undeniable, this precarious sense of happiness is always temporary and short-lived:

…Y a-t-il des étrangers heureux? … Peut-on étre étranger and heureux? L’étranger suscite une idée neuve de bonheur. Entre fugue et origine: Une limite fragile, une homéostase provisoire.

Said also felt compelled to underline that the actual condition of “exile is one of the saddest fates” (p. 35). At the end of it all, the pleasures, advantages and privileges of the marginal (intellectual) exile do not alleviate every last anxiety or feeling of bitter solitude. Kristeva words this state of affairs as follows:

Libre d’attaches avec les siens, l’étranger se sent “complètement libre”. L’absolu de cette liberté s’appelle pourtant solitude … Son paradoxe: l’étranger veut être seul mais avec des complices … L’étranger est un rêveur qui fait l’amour avec l’absence, un déprimé exquis. Heureux? … Le plaisir de la souffrance est un lot necessaire dans ce tourbillon insensé.

Kristeva also captures the point that exiles feel a real urge to talk, sing and write in the metaphoric language of travelling and return, although if they do so, it is precisely because, at the end of it all, they know that all hope to return back “home” is lost:

On connaît l’étranger qui survit tourné vers le pays perdu de ses larmes. Amoureux mélancolique d’un space perdu, il ne se console pas, en fait, d’avoir abandoné un temps. Le paradis perdu est un mirage du passé qu’il ne saura jamais retrouver.

Exiles are necessarily the product of different and interrelated cultures and histories; and necessarily inhabit different “homes” at the same time. Or, what is the same, no special home is inhabited after all. The exile …

… est perdu dans le kaléidoscope de ses multiples identités et des ses souvenirs intenables, pour ne laisser de ses exils accumulés qu’une trace en mots (57).

To summarise, even if l’espace de l’étranger est un train en marche, un avion en vol, la transition même qui exclut l’arrêt. Des repêres, point(18), nevertheless, dès que les étrangers ont une action ou une passion, ils s’enracinent. Provisoirement, certes, mais intensément (I9), and therefore: le but (professionel, intellectuel, affective) que certain se donnent est déjà une trahison de l’étrangeté, car en se choisissant un programme, l’étranger se propose une trêve ou un domicile (15).

Well aware of these tensions, Said’s warning against the temptation of relaxation was stark:

There is no real escape, even for the exile who tries to remain suspended, since that state of inbetweenness can itself become a rigid ideological position, a sort of dwelling whose falseness is covered over in time, and to which one can too easily become accustomed (p. 43).

And to further emphasise this attitude of permanent awareness he mentioned Theodor Adorno’s intellectual consciousness as a main model of exile experience represented in terms of restless tension. As Adorno, the leading exponent of “Melancholy science” in the Frankfurt Institute, stated “for a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live”. However, this newly found ‘home’ does not allow the possibility of escaping the demands of intellectual rigour:

The demand that one hardens oneself against self-pity implies the technical necessity to counter any slackening of intellectual tension with the utmost alertness. […] In the end, the writer is not allowed to live in his writing (Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, pp. 38-39).

We have already seen how Edward Said placed the experience of the migrant exile as existing “in a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting nor fully disencumbered of the old”. This he said in “Exiles and marginals” (Representations of the Intellectual. The 1993 Reith Lectures, London, Sidney, Auckland, Bergvley: Vintage, 1994, pp 35-47). For Said, the exile is…

… beset with half-involvements and half-detachments, nostalgic and sentimental on one level, and adept mimic or a secret outcast on another. Being skilled at survival becomes the main imperative, with the danger of getting too comfortable and secure constituting a threat that is constantly to be guarded against.

Said did not only disagree here with the assumption that being exiled is to be separated and isolated from the place of origin; rather than analysing big migratory / exilic movements, his focus in dealing with the experience of displacement is also directed towards the search of individual intellectual responsibility. As he preferred to remain “outside the mainstream, unaccommodated, unco-opted and resistant”, he placed himself outside and against the dominant intellectual attitudes and discourses which seek to perpetuate the state of affairs, the state of things as they are. In such a context, the notion of exile refers not only to an actual condition but also to a metaphorical condition. For Said, even if one was not an actual exile, it was still possible to think, imagine and research as one. In spite of barriers, it was still possible to stand as a marginal figure outside the comfort of privilege and power, to move away from the conventional and comfortable, away from the centralising authorities towards the margins:

To be as marginal and as undomesticated as someone who is in real exile is for the intellectual to be unusually responsive to the traveler rather than to the potentate, to the provisional and risky rather than to the habitual, to innovation and experiment rather than the authoritatively given status quo. The exilic intellectual does not respond to the logic of the conventional but to the audacity of daring, and to representing change, to moving on, not standing still (p.46).

For Said, the vocation of the exile intellectual should be to develop the ability to see how things have reached a certain point, how they have come to be that way instead of describing then as they are, as they are prescribed by the guardians and redressers of things. All situations should be perceived as contingent occurrences that have taken place in society, as the outcome of historical choices made by humans. For the exilic intellectual there are no inevitable or natural situations. Situations are not permanent, predetermined, irreversible, unchangeable. In this metaphorical sense, exile for the intellectual is restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others since…

…you cannot go back to some earlier and perhaps more stable condition of being at home; and, alas, you can never fully arrive, be at one with your new home or situation (p.39).

But if exilic displacement means that one is going to always be marginal, this fate does not necessarily need to constitute a source of permanent deprivation and regret. On the contrary, exilic displacement can be lived through as a sort of freedom, as a process of discovery in which things are done according to one’s own pattern, according to the various interests that dictate one’s particular goals. And for Said, this constituted a unique pleasure:

The pleasure of being surprised, of never taking anything for granted, of learning to make do in circumstances of shaky instability that would confound or terrify most people (44).

Therefore, other than allowing unconventional, often eccentric life styles and careers, the condition of exile experience also carries with it certain pleasures, rewards, and even privileges in the words of Said. Positive things can stem from exile and marginality.

Summer is over. While prisoners remain in prison, tourists and cosmopolitans return home. Tourists arrive tanned as red as lobsters from popular Mediterranean resorts. Although they prefer the word artifact, cosmopolitans come with authentic cultural gadgets, preferably from Africa, but also further afield, masks, statuettes, rugs, ceramic pots… For a while they have immersed and integrated into, even embraced an alien, exotic culture. Mind you: without becoming too committed to it; the doors at home are always open to return whenever necessary.

Unlike real cosmopolitans, who take active part in an alien culture by will, migrants and exiles do not participate in the foreign culture they inhabit by need. To face up to life, migrants and exiles need holding on to the symbols and the cultural heritage rooted in their own particular places of origin. The impracticability of integration and/or assimilation by the host culture annoys the indigenous ethnic majority. What can be done though? Certainly not denying that Edward Said was right when he said this in “The 1993 Reith Lectures”:

Once you leave your home, wherever you end up you cannot simply take up life and become just another citizen of the new place. Or if you do, there is a good deal of awkwardness involved in the effort, which scarcely seems worth it. (Vintage, 1994: 45).

Awkward as it may be, taking up life in a new place involves learning other skills and other lessons. Existing as Said also said “in a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting nor fully disencumbered of the old” (36), migrants and exiles are not only compelled to inhabit several identities. To do so there is something practically unavoidable, namely that other languages must be learnt, the process of negotiation and translation between mother and foreign languages becoming then a constant source of (dis)enchantment.

Insisting on such particular aspect of the linguistic problematic, Julia Kristeva did not fail to remind us this in “Etrangers à nous-mêmes”. For Kristeva, the foreigner…

…est perdu dans le kaléidoscope de ses multiples identités et des ses souvenirs intenables, pour ne laisser de ses exils accumulés qu’une trace en mots.

French! Beautiful, is it not? In another section which I now freely translate (48-49) she also said that once deprived of attachments to the maternal tongue, to the foreigner the language(s) newly learnt remain artificial altogether, like algebra or solfeggio. Like in a hallucination, the verbal constructions of foreigners roll on empty space, dislocated from their body and passions, taken hostage by the mother tongue. According to Kristeva, foreigners do not really know what they say in the new language. Their subconscious do not inhabit their thoughts and feelings. As a consequence, the language of the foreigner becomes of an absolute formalism, of an exaggerated sophistication. The foreigner’s voice rests thus on the single strength of his/her naked rhetoric. Or else, it turns into silence. Placed between different languages the foreigner’s element becomes silence. But not a silence imposed upon them from the outside. This silence refers back to an inner state of being. It is a silence that empties the mind and leaves the brain laden with despondency.

To sum up, Kristeva’s perspective involves a vision whereby beyond the mother tongue, the late learning of languages becomes, inevitably, a “source of estrangement”, a source of disaffection, split and withdrawal leading to the “silence of the polyglot”.

When dealing with questions of traveling we are forced to rethink the very concept of “culture”. This opens the way for contesting certain naturalising and organic preconceptions conventionally linked to culture understood as ‘cultivation’ i.e., as a coherent and rooted organism that grows and lives according to the permanently ordered laws of nature. Traveling experiences convey the idea that notions of mobility, fluidity and process are more suitable than notions of stability, solidity and fixity to express the dynamic character of human cultural practice.

Anthropologist James Clifford is well known for studying this topic. According to Clifford (Traveling cultures,1992: pp. 99, 97), the notion of traveling is handled in two different ways within the field of anthropology. Firstly, the ethnographer moves in the literal sense to the extent that s/he must leave home in order to carry out research work:

Ethnographers, typically, are travelers who like to stay and dig in (for a time), who like to make a second home/workplace.

Secondly, at the epistemological level, the ethnographer finds the need to describe knowledge as contingent and partial:

Every focus excludes; there is no politically innocent methodology for intercultural interpretation.

When rethinking culture as travel the optimistic and positive elements of the traveling experience come to the fore, more often than not. For instance, travel is usually portrayed as a form of pleasurable evasion. In addition, the hedonistic experience of travel as exploration and escape brings about a variety of unexpected encounters enabling renewal, transformation and change. The idea of travelling in this sense relates to the expansion of the realms of freedom and possibility. Travel is the pursuit of pleasure. The possibilities of travel are kaleidoscopic, that is, changeable, fluctuating, mutable, complex, varied, colourful etc.

However, many images conventionally related to such overly rejoicing notions of travel as pleasure and unrestrained fluidity often fall into mere mystification. Trendy “nomads”, cosmopolitans and ethnographers aside, an overwhelming form of the travelling experience nowadays is that of the anonymous migrants and exiles. Perhaps more paradoxical than all, moreover, prisoners also have access to traveling. In “The heuristic power of art” (Becker, C. (ed), The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society” and Social Representation, New York, London:Routledge, 35-54). Puerto Rican artist and pro-independence militant Elizam Escobar wrote this during his stay in several State penitentiaries in the USA

Any individual or group of individuals who dares to challenge this order of things will be submitted to extremely hostile treatment and systematic harassment, or transferred to another institution for “security reasons” or “program needs” (…). You may end up travelling around the country from prison to prison with no definite destination (p 45)

In these extremely exciting times of global wars against terror and the like, the kaleidoscopic possibilities of travel for fundamentalist prisoner monsters knows no national boundaries. As a consequence, the pursuit of the traveling experience expands into changeable, fluctuating, mutable, complex, varied and colourful experiences. It expands not only into and through a variety and unexpected geopolitical destinations, from Afghanistan to Guantanamo via a whole array of fantasmatic European airports. It also allows encounters with a whole variety of secret agents more or less civilized depending on whether they outsource or not well-known torture techniques ranging from water-boarding to electrotherapy.

Clifford (p.96) was absolutely right when saying that the airport is both a “launching point for strange and wonderful voyages (…) a place of collection, juxtaposition and passionate encounter” and “somewhere you pass through, where the encounters are fleeting, arbitrary (…).