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ARTICLES

Texts and Other Symbolic Spaces

Jens BrockmeierOntario Institute for Studies in Education

University of Toronto

This article examines the cultural fabric of national identity in light of recent debates in the human sci-ences on the nature of texts and “textual realities.” In discussing various political and historical exam-ples, it argues that conceiving of national identity as a “textual reality” is to understand it (a) as a sym-bolic construction, (b) as a process of continuous cultural interpretation and reinterpretation, (c) assemiotic mediation, and (d) as a heterogeneous composition of different, often contradictory, layers ofmeaning. Although these issues have been discussed in different disciplines and theoretical contexts,they are viewed here as aspects of the same phenomenon, reflecting, each in its way, the conceptualscope of the textual approach. In further developing this argument, the article outlines a concept of textthat covers not only linguistic phenomena in the traditional sense but also meaningful structures in alarger, cultural sense: symbolic spaces that embrace several semiotic media. Based on the idea of textas a symbolic space, a concept of national identity is suggested that, although it implies viewing iden-tity as a discursive and narrative construction, is not limited to the mode of linguistic storytelling butalso includes narrative media such as architecture, landscape design, cultural traditions such as com-memorative rituals, and other symbolic and material practices.

The question of what makes up national identities is the subject of controversial debates in severalhuman sciences. To begin with, I describe—from a cultural and historical point of view—why thisis such a bewildering and challenging question. I then, second, offer some considerations on whatcan be seen as the advantages of the “textual approach” to the issue of national identity. Drawing onthese points, I, third, suggest that we should conceive of “texts” not only as linguistic entities in thetraditional sense but also as meaningful symbolic structures in a larger sense, that is, as symbolicspaces that embrace semiotic media other than just written words. In doing so, I develop the ideathat although national identities can be viewed as narrative constructions—as texts that tell astory—they are constructed not only in a linguistic mode but in various textual modes. That is tosay, they embrace a variety of discursive, iconic, and inactive sign systems—such as film, photog-raphy, architecture, urban and landscape design, social institutions and traditions such as com-

MIND, CULTURE, AND ACTIVITY, 8(3), 215–230Copyright © 2001, Regents of the University of California on behalf of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition

Requests for reprints should be sent to Jens Brockmeier, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of To-ronto, Department of Human Development and Applied Psychology, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 1V6,Canada. E-mail: jbrockmeier@oise.utoronto.ca

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memorative rituals and other material and symbolic forms of cultural memory. I conclude with in-terpreting a modern work of art: a mixed-media composition by the Afro-Cuban artist MariaMagdalena Campos-Pons, which not only represents a complex “hybrid of text” but also evokesthe symbolic spaces of one’s cultural and national identity in a most sophisticated way.

WHAT IS NATIONAL IDENTITY?

Why is it so difficult to systematically examine the fabric of national identity, both conceptuallyand empirically? Why is it so complicated to even get hold of this strange fabric at all? From anepistemological point of view, we can say that to understand this kind of human identity is to be-come conscious of some of the fundamental trajectories of our existence. These trajectories are laidout by the individual, social, and societal order of human meaning construction. Each of these or-ders has a particular historical dimension, a gestalt in time. Furthermore, each of these orders—theindividual, the social, and the societal—already represents a particular synthesis of human activi-ties, a synthesis of material, discursive, and other symbolic practices. The point I want to make withthis, admittedly, rather categorical and dry definition of national identity—a definition that will,however, be spelled out and illustrated in some detail in what follows—is that it captures one of themost dense forms of cultural identity. Investigating it is to deal with issues as diverse as militaryhistory and the history of painting, forms of class struggle and wedding ceremonies, institutions oflaw-making and school curricula, the funding of film departments and the rhetoric of academic pa-pers (including papers on national identity), the architecture of war memorials and many othertypes of collective and individual remembering.

National identity, viewed in this way, is not a distinct entity or sphere like “economy,” “law,”“history,” or “memory.” Rather, it is the thread that runs through all these spheres. And —what isparticularly important if we look at it as a case of identity construction— national identity is one ofthe strongest threads to bind the individual into the cultural whole of a social community. Lovehas often been said to be the most powerful of human passions. But it seems that at least at timesthe passions that emerge from one’s national identity come rather close to it. Miraculouslyenough, there is a sense of national belonging that turns Kang and Mary, György and Ana,Tadashi and Hanife, you and me into a Spaniard and a Basque, a North and a South Korean, a Ca-nadian and a Quebecer, a member of a ruling elite and a resistance fighter.

To more closely investigate this odd metamorphosis, we should be aware that constituting a na-tion is a different thing than constituting a national identity. The first one is a political and ulti-mately a legal act, an act of constitutional law; the latter one is a more complex, culturalconstruction, involving both a social and individual dynamic, as well as the interactions of thosedynamics in a historical process. A nation is always a collective order, whereas a national identitycan also be claimed by an individual. In fact, there is a people’s national identity only if, as theScottish Enlightenment philosopher Hume (1985) argued, a community of individuals have thecultural experience of a nation’s peculiar characteristics.

In order to understand the complex construction of this cultural experience, a further prelimi-nary note might be helpful. Not only does the concept of the nation differ from that of nationalidentity, but there also is the important distinction between national identity, political identity, andcultural identity. These terms do not denominate the same phenomena, although they are often notprecisely distinguished from each other. In fact, their meanings can overlap and even coin-

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cide—as, for example, in the case of the ancient polis, the Greek city republic, which was, accord-ing to Herodotus, defined by six common features: descent, language, religion, habits, territory,and political unity. From an historical and global point of view rather being an exception, suchmonolithic fusion of national and cultural identity is juxtaposed by numerous cases in which onlya few features, or even just one, become the “identifying mark.” In the 19th century, when Polanddid not exist as an independent and sovereign state on the political map of Europe, the Polish lan-guage was an important manifestation of a national sense, as was the music of Frédéric Chopin,which was understood by many Polish patriots as a quintessential expression not only of Polishculture but also of Poland as a political and national idea. Similarly, it was the German languageand—for the educated—literature, music, and the arts that gave a sense of cultural belonging tothe people of hundreds of politically independent states and principalities that, over some centu-ries, were spread over central and Western Europe. Whereas in centralized Britain and France reli-gion (i.e., the state’s religion) became a powerful element in the cultural fabric of nationalidentity, there are many countries where the national discourse embraces several diverse reli-gions, as in India. In North America, the tolerance of even larger religious and ethnic diversity hasbecome the hallmark of the United States Constitution and the Canadian Charter of Rights. On theother hand, there are ethnically quite homogenous nations such as China (with 92% Han-Chinese)and the Scandinavian countries; but one would not claim that this necessarily translates into an ex-cessive manifestation of nationalism in, say, Sweden or Denmark. All of which is to say that it ishard to specify one universally defining quality or essence of national identity. Instead of assum-ing that the highly diverse semantics of national identities are defined by reference to a prototypeor an ideal, it might be more appropriate to conceive of them as connected by what Wittgenstein(1958) called “family resemblance.”

We are facing here one of those phenomena that, as Foucault (1969/1972) suggested, cannot beunderstood in the light of a theory of knowledge or a knowing subject that places its own point ofview at the origin of all historicity, but rather requires a theory of discursive practices. Such a the-ory, in my reading of Foucault, is a theory of cultural practices or, in our case, a theory of the con-struction of a particular kind of cultural identity. In the wake of Foucault, Hall (1996) pointed outthat such an approach unavoidably entails an anti-essentialist critique of ethnic, racial, and na-tional conceptions of cultural identity, as well as a critique of the notion of a natural, original, andunified identity, which has been at the center of Cartesian Western metaphysics. In fact, both con-ceptions of identity have been discussed and radically “deconstructed” in an extensive literature incultural theory, post-colonial sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and feminist approaches.However, the same line of critical theorizing that aims to cancel traditional conceptions of (na-tional, cultural, and personal) identity (e.g., Hall & Du Gay, 1996), paradoxically, permits them togo on being used. Hall (1996) remarked that

… unlike those forms of critique which aim to supplant inadequate concepts with “truer” ones, orwhich aspire to the production of positive knowledge, the deconstructive approach puts key concepts“under erasure.” This indicates that they are no longer serviceable—“good to think with”—in theiroriginary and unreconstructed form. But because they have not been superseded dialectically, andthere are no other, entirely different concepts with which to replace them, there is nothing to do but tocontinue to think with them—albeit now in their detotalized or deconstructed forms, and no longer op-erating within the paradigms in which they were originally generated. (p. 1)

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Like many deconstructionist writers on personal and cultural identity, Hall drew on Derrida(1981), who described this approach as a sort of intellectual “double writing”: a traditional con-cept can no longer be included in its previous regime but is used “under erasure” to a new purpose,namely, to reconceptualize itself. Identity is such a concept, which operates “under erasure” in theinterval between the dissolution of its previous meanings and strategic functions, and the emer-gence of a new understanding of the issue at stake—“an idea that cannot be thought in the old way,but without which certain key questions cannot be thought at all,” as Hall (1996, p. 2) wrote. Hallwent on to propose thinking of identity in a new, process-oriented way, as the practice or activityof “identification,” rather than in essentialist terms as something that can be imposed on individ-ual “selves” and that is meant to stabilize or guarantee through a set of common beliefs, values,and a shared cultural memory an unchanging “oneness” of cultural belongingness underlying allother allegedly superficial differences. Identification, in this view, is a process never completedand not determined in the sense that it can be sustained or abandoned, “won” or “lost.” It is an on-going cultural construction that takes place simultaneously in several discursive orders, and itsoutcome is an always emergent, temporary gestalt.

THE TEXTUAL TURN

What, then, is the point of the category of text in understanding the cultural construction of nationalidentity? What are—viewed from the standpoint of a cultural psychology that aims at investigatingthe social, historical, and cultural nature of human existence—the advantages of approachingone’s national identity as a textual fabric? (Here and in what follows I use the concepts of national,cultural, and personal identity “under erasure” in Derrida’s sense.)

To sketch an answer, I briefly look at the history of the text model—or the text meta-phor—as it has been used in recent discussions in the human sciences. It is a short history, in-deed, beginning in the 1970s when the text model first found its way from philology, literarycriticism, philosophical hermeneutics, and deconstructivism to the social sciences. Geertz(1980/1983) described in his essay “Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought” howin those years social scientists began to take up the “text analogy.” Yet as Geertz pointed out,referring to a “text” as a model of understanding of social and psychological activities was notjust a new theoretical fashion but an intellectual culture shift. It was a genre blurring among ac-ademic and literary discourses, indicating the advent of a new post-positivist approach in thehuman sciences. More and more social (or behavioral or human or cultural) scientists seemedto have become free to shape their work in terms of its specific necessities rather than accord-ing to received borderlines and disciplinary constraints.

A case in point was the recourse to the humanities for explanatory analogies. Since the 1960s,in the human sciences, or at least in those that had begun to abandon a reductionist conception ofwhat they were about, the organizing models were coming more and more from the contrivancesof cultural performance than from those of natural processes and physical manipulation. Within afew years, new analogies from grammar, law, literature, theater, painting, and play became widelyused and accepted. The vocabulary and metaphors of “game,” “drama,” and “text,” were assimi-lated by various theoretical discourses that so far had been aiming to present themselves as scien-tific disciplines. The phenomenon of these travelling concepts that nested in new fields ofinvestigation was a sign not only of the dispersion of traditional genres (which first of all were de-

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signed to draw a sharp borderline between sciences and the humanities, the so-called “two cul-tures” of knowledge), but also of the beginning of an intellectual reorientation that then becameknown as interpretive turn and cultural turn (Hiley, Bohman, & Shusterman, 1991).

The adoption of the text model was viewed, however, from the very beginning with particularpuzzlement and suspicion. To be sure, most concerns were understandable. Compared with ex-planatory models like “game,” “drama,” “role system,” “communicative action,” or “self-orga-nizing system,” the idea that the concept of a text could be applied to societal action, to people’sbehavior toward other people, to political interests and psychological activities must have ap-peared for many most venturesome—a “particularly outlandish bit of ‘seeing-as,’” as Geertz(1980/1983, p. 30) put it. And he went on to point out some of the constituents of what can befound, continuing today, as a wide-spread skepticism: “Describing human conduct in the analogyof player and counterplayer, or actor and audience, seems, whatever the pitfalls, rather more natu-ral than describing it in that of writer and reader. Prima facie, the suggestion that the activities ofspies, lovers, witch doctors, kings, or mental patients are moves or performances is surely a gooddeal more plausible than the notion that they are sentences” (p. 30).

Yet the new interest was not just oriented towards the idea of a text in the narrow sense. I sup-pose that we also can recognize in the textual turn the emergence of a new interest in narra-tive—the narrative turn—as well as the skepticism it has encountered (Brockmeier & Harré,2001). This becomes evident if we look at the conceptual changes within traditional disciplineslike narratology, where contemporaneous scholars such as Bal (1997) suggested conceiving ofnarrative not as an exclusively linguistic product or activity but as one specific textual modewithin a broad cultural picture of human symbolic and semiotic activities.

NATIONAL IDENTITY AS TEXT

The textual approach has been criticized and repudiated by many human scientists—first of all, Isuspect, because of its poststructuralist and deconstructionist implications. Arguably, it has man-aged to draw attention to a number of essential aspects of political and cultural identity that wereneglected or even entirely ignored. I suggest distinguishing four aspects, four “textual qualities” ofnational identity construction that have been particularly highlighted in the wake of the new orien-tation. We will soon notice that all four aspects are intimately interrelated, but in order to single outthe different layers of a complicated story let me view them separately.

First, national identity is a societal organization of various discourses; that is, it is a process ofcombined meaning construction, which can be described both in political and cultural terms. Thisimplies on the one hand that national identity is not given (e.g., in or through entities such as the“nature,” “character,” “mentality,” or “subconsciousness” of “a people” or of individuals), butmade. More precisely, it is being made or constructed in a historical process. On the other hand,the actual making of a national identity is quite a peculiar historical construction. It was not themaking of France, for example, but of a particular cultural idea and political vision called Francethat was the primary subject of the history of French national identity construction, as Braudel(1989–90) and other historians of the Annales school showed. In his book Peasants into French-men: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914, Weber (1976) told the story of a genera-tions-long effort to transform isolated, uneducated, and poor peasants, deeply rooted in their localcultures, into citizens of a nation—that is, of one nation. Old France had been a cluster of many di-

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verse societies and cultures, speaking many languages; in 1860 a fifth of the citizens still could notspeak French at all. This was the social reality in which —or perhaps better, against which— theidea of France’s century long history as a nation was propagated.

Such a retrospective projection can be reconstructed in terms of a “genealogy of power” thatexamines the different discursive codes by which power presents itself, as was Foucault’s(1966/1970, 1980) influential suggestion. Or it can be studied as a process of cultural “invention,”as the historians Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) demonstrated. They argued that conceptions ofnational identity, like all historical traditions, are invented as a (political) function of the presentand then re-projected into the past. Especially, most of those Western conceptions of nationalidentity that pretend to be rooted in long, sometimes mythical historical traditions—conceptionsthat have determined most of Western debates, and wars, in the 20th century—were invented inthe last third of the 19th century (Hobsbawm, 1983). Of course, these inventions did not and donot have very much to do with real history or historical research. However, they demonstrate thatthe creative power of nationalism is that it creates nations, and not the other way around.

For Hall (1996), it is not only the present but, even more, the future that shapes the past.Though conceptions of national identity seem “to invoke an origin in a historical past with whichthey continue to correspond,” they primarily are about questions “of using the resources of his-tory, language, and culture in the process of becoming rather than being: not ‘who we are’ or‘where we came from’ so much as what we might become” (p. 4). Obviously, this interest in a par-ticular future is stronger than any interest in a proven historical narrative of the past. Therefore,the construction of a national identity that is supposed to meet a certain vision of the future typi-cally translates into a biased narrativization of the past. Yet, oddly enough, Hall stated, the “neces-sarily fictional nature of this process in no way undermines its discursive, material, or politicaleffectivity, even if the belongingness, the ‘suturing into the story’ through which identities ariseis, partly, in the imaginary (as well as the symbolic) and therefore, always partly constructed infantasy, or at least within a fantasmatic field” (p. 4).

In other words, conceiving of national identity as a discursive process of meaning constructionimplies the ideaofaprocessof symbolicconstruction. It is suchaprocess that turnsa riverand itsge-ography into the “French Rhine” and the “German Rhine,” each embodying the “natural expres-sion” of cultural symbol systems that are supposed to represent either the primordial landscape ofthe “French esprit” or of the “German soul.” Schama (1995) remarked that rivers often have servedas metaphors of “main arteries” of people and nations. Rivers thus could easily become subjects ofthe projections of all kinds of national visions and obsessions. Yet such symbolic constructions canalso nationalize the entire idea of “nature,” for example, in defining the identity (and identities) ofcountries such as England and Austria in terms of landscape and Landschaft, that is, as civilized andcultivated versions of nature as Heimat (i.e., home), which shape and are shaped by particular na-tional attributes, often with strong emotional colors (e.g., Breuss, Liebhart, & Pribersky, 1995;Daniels, 1993). Certain stereotyped elements of the Austrian landscape (the mountains, the villagewith the little Baroque church, the Danube) have become so closely identified with Austria’spost-1945 past identity (which was set against its previous German and fascist identity) that theyseem to have succeeded not only in marketing a new, tourist-friendly image of the Alpine republic,but also in providing “natural” evidence for the country’s peaceful and idyllic character. At the otherendof thespectrumwehave theAmericanvisionofwildernessasa fieldof freedom, frontier, and in-dividual challenge, as it is today perhaps paradigmatically embodied by “cultural monuments of na-ture” such as the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River (e.g., Pyne, 1998; Slotkin, 1985).

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The second aspect of national identity construction that has been brought into prominence bythe new textual approach is that it is a process of interpretation. That is to say, the political identityof people can be seen as a script or an inscription that not only is continuously written and rewrit-ten but, in order to convey its message, must also continuously be read and reread, interpreted andreinterpreted. The consequences of this hermeneutic vision can hardly be underestimated. ForGeertz (1983), it is here that the great virtue of extending the notion of text beyond things writtenon paper or carved into stone comes to the fore. To see cultural institutions, social customs, psy-chological activities, and political traditions as “readable” and thus interpretable is to alter ourwhole sense of what psychological, historical, and sociological understanding is. It is to shift it to-wards interpretive modes of thought that are “rather more familiar to the translator, the exegete, orthe iconographer than to the test giver, the factor analyst, or the pollster” (Geertz, 1983, p. 31). It isthis shift from causal-explanatory machineries to interpretive-hermeneutic forms of understand-ing in which the textual turn has played a pivotal role (Brockmeier, 1996).

In the case of national identities, it seems to be all the more indispensable to use the entire reper-toire of interpretive-hermeneutic forms of investigation because the identity at stake can itself beseenas theeffectofaprocessofmutual interpretations: acircular systemofsymbolicmirrors,whichhas been argued to be the regulative center of each culture. The metaphor of a cultural system of mir-rors is of particular importance in Benjamin’s (1999) study on the 19th-century Paris of Baudelaire.Describing Paris as an architecturally and discursively constructed symbolic space, Benjaminpointed out that this space was not only supposed to tell the grande narration of French nationalidentity but also to epitomize what he called the “cultural capital of the 19th century.” Ultimatelygrounded in theexpandingcapitalist economyanditscontradictionsasdescribedbyMarx, this sym-bolicspacewasconstitutedbyvariouscultural symbolsystems, rangingfromHaussmann’snewPa-risian boulevards and the corresponding urban design, including bourgeois institutions such as theopera and the new consumerist passages, to phenomena of style, fashion, painting, the philosophi-cal and political ideas of socialists and anarchist, and the poetry of Baudelaire.

Third, national identity is a process of semiotic mediation. The Vygotskyian idea of “semioticmediation” has to be only slightly changed to be used in this context. Semiotic mediation refers hereto a cultural process through which individuals symbolically and semiotically integrate themselvesinto a social order of meaning. The point of this symbolic and semiotic integration is that it consti-tutes a societal relation that is not primarily based on material power but on the deliberate and, to adegree, active participation of the individual. Like all forms of cultural identity, national identitydoesnotworkbecauseamasternarrative is imposedon themindsof individuals; rather, it is the indi-viduals who “suture themselves into the story.” What makes this fusion so psychologically intricateis that it creates a system of personal belonging. It is a system that owes both its political and psycho-logical coherence to its capacity to offer personal sense to its individual agents. “Personal sense” isanother notion suggested by Vygotsky and Leontiev to highlight the affective and motivational sideof individual agency (Brockmeier, 1988). Put differently, only because individuals make nationalidentity a part of their personal lives, only because they interweave their individual sense of a self inthe fabric of a collective community, only because the “grammar” of their personal texts of iden-tity—to put it, as Harré (1989) suggested, in Wittgensteinian terms—and the “grammar” of nationaltexts have become entangled, can the constructions of national identity become such a powerfulmanifestation of both collective and individual agency.

And fourth, national identity is a process of ramified reference in which a number of texts arelinked to each other. The result can be likened to a palimpsest: a text being written over previous

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texts, manuscripts, or other writing material, but in a way that the earlier layers of writing canshine through the more recent layers. In this way, different layers or fragments of texts can get intoconflict, questioning and contesting each other. Unavoidably inviting controversial interpretation,the reading of such a palimpsest is more like a process of multivocal, and often ambiguous, com-munication than an act of linear understanding. In modern and postmodern theory of text andcommunication, this process has been called “intertextuality” (or “dialogism,” to use theBakhtinian expression). From this point of view, every text intrinsically draws on, and refers to,other texts, creating an ever-shifting intertext in which no isolated and primordial meaning can beidentified. It is only within this fluid structure of mutual (and often circular) reference that mean-ings take form. In both the picture of the palimpsest and the intertext, national identity is the tem-porary effect of a particular textual mode of organizing meaning.

This brings into view the dialectic of inclusion and exclusion, a dialectic that plays a centralrole in the making of national identities. To define an identity is to define an inclusive code that is,at the same time, an exclusive code. For Derrida (1997/1999), this code regulates the relationshipbetween the self and the other. Although a sense of belonging may promise a secure place in a ba-sically insecure world, establishing or defending some ties—according to a code of inclu-sion—entails, or presupposes, the exclusion of others. It is almost as though the very intensity ofsuch ties, and the rights and obligations they comprise, enhances the sharpness and theexclusionary power of the boundaries that are thereby constituted.

Patently, the making of political identity always has a reverse side: the dismantling of iden-tity—of previous identities or identities of other people and political, ethnic, religious, linguistic,and other cultural communities whose texts of identity are being “written over” or “rewritten.”Viewed as a cultural–historical phenomenon, remembering is not only the social organization of ahighly selective sequence of the past, but it also is forgetting. Cultural memory embraces bothpractices of remembrance and commemoration, and of forgetting and repression, to borrow theFreudian term. And what’s more, often these practices are the same (Brockmeier, in press). Theidea of a nation-state as a “melting pot” of people is an example of a political conception of na-tional identity based on the assumption that people simply renounce and forget their sense of na-tional and cultural belonging and adopt a new model identity through the formal act ofimmigration. However, as we know today, things rarely work that way. Cultural identity, like cul-tural memory, can be both amazingly resistant and resilient; often it is both at the same time, evenunder a seemingly unified surface. Not surprisingly, therefore, the idea of nationalizing people bysimply immersing them into a “melting pot” has become a blurred layer of the theoretical palimp-sest that the notion of national identity represents itself.

This brings to the fore a further aspect of the dialectic of inclusion and exclusion. Political and,particularly, national identity does exist but in a network of relations to other identities. It is, in astrong sense, a relational notion. Historically, we face a broad spectrum of plural national identi-ties in which a sense of belonging is reflected: identities that are configured in forms of juxtaposi-tion, overlap, mixture, and merger, as well as in forms of struggle, exclusion, negation, andannihilation. Many of these forms can coexist and be combined in a number ways—again, not un-like the various layers of an intertextual palimpsest. Although the desire for belonging seems to beone of the oldest, not to say archaic and most deeply rooted forms of bonding, there have alwaysbeen diverse, even contradictory forms and layers of belonging: forms of localizing oneself inseveral contexts of meaning and in various texts of identity. One and the same Belgian can be aFlame and a Huguenot, a native speaker of French and Portuguese, a Jew and a Catholic, a holder

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of a Swiss passport and an employee of an American company who pays his taxes in Luxembourg,and, while married to a Brazilian, is having a love affair with a woman from Canada with whom heshares a passion for German symphonic music.

It is not hard to imagine how many tensions and conflicts can emerge from such multiple forms ofbelonging. And indeed, they do. All of us are members of more than one first-person plurality,grounded in race, family, friendship, gender, education, work, interests, place, memory, and national-ity. Cole (1998) referred to the principle of multivoicedness, fundamental to the structural diversity in-herent in every form of human interaction. Human interaction is multivoiced because it containswithin it many different selves and relations to other selves, arranged in multiple, overlapping, and of-ten contradictory ways. Cole’s example is the system of formal education in California, with localschool-age populations of astonishing diversity—between schools as well as within schools. In thelight of the various political and cultural powers and waves of multi-ethnic immigration that histori-cally have shaped California, and continue to do so with increasing dramatic consequences, Coleshowed that it is not surprising that issues of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity have becomeloaded with political energy and fueled by conflicts over resources and their distribution.

Yet we also can look at it the other way around. The sense of ethnic, religious, linguistic, andnational belonging to a community, imagined or real, is never something just given like the colorof your eyes or the generation into which you were born. Mostly, it rather derives from social andeconomic constraints, from interests and conflicts in which people are involved, in which they arebrought up, and in which they bring up their children. It seems to me that most scholars today tendto share this assumption. Let me refer to Brubaker, one of the specialists in this field. In his studieson the making of so-called national minorities in Eastern and Central Europe, Brubaker (1996)held that the “nationalizing of the political space” is not a point of departure, but the outcome of apolitical, economical, and cultural process of continuous definition and redefinition of a symbolicspace. This process of nationalization and re-nationalization is a trend spanning more than a cen-tury in Eastern and Central Europe, which has culminated in the 1990s with the disappearance ofthe region’s last avowedly multinational states. This has afflicted, in one way or another, the na-tional, ethnic, religious, and linguistic identities of tens of millions of people—Russians, Hungari-ans, Germans, Romanians, Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Albanians, Turks, Armenians, Uzbeks,Tajiks, and others.

Brubaker proposed that we should think of a national minority not as a fixed entity or unitarygroup but rather in terms of a field of differentiated and competing stances and positions. Thesepositions or, perhaps better, positionings are adopted by different parties, movements, institu-tions, individual political entrepreneurs, and other protagonists. Each of them competes with par-ticular “texts of national identity” in order to “represent” a minority to its own putative members,to a “majority,” to the state, and to the outside world. Furthermore, specific national minoritystances and readings vary widely, not only between but also within particular minority communi-ties. In short, in the Eastern and Central European arena of struggle, the meaning of the concept ofnational identity is all but given by the facts of ethnic demography and geography. It is a functionof the dynamic interaction of political positionings in various fields of power, rather than a staticethnodemographic condition. It is a concept that refers to a family of related, yet mutually compet-ing stances that try to legitimate themselves by competing readings of the texts of (national, eth-nic, religious, linguistic, and historical) identity at stake.

National and political identity as symbolic construction, as continuous interpretation, assemiotic mediation, and as palimpsest or intertext are four ways to conceive of the same complex.

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Although they have been discussed in different disciplinary fields and from different theoreticalperspectives, my argument is that they highlight different aspects of the same phenomenon, re-flecting, each in its way, the conceptual scope of “textual thought.”

WHAT IS TEXT?

Having outlined this reading of national identity as a textual reality, I should at least mention that Ifind myself in the midst of a theoretical minefield. Most explosions in this field are being triggeredby the question of what actually is a text. What are the empirical objects we deal with when study-ing texts of national identity? I believe we can distinguish two main options, two different familiesof theories on how to understand a text. One, most common among linguists, philologists, psychol-ogists, and anthropologists, is to conceive of texts as linguistic entities, that is, as forms or formatsof written and spoken (but transcribable) language. Whereas in everyday usage the term text onlyrefers to written material, in linguistic, literary, and anthropological research often all linguistic ut-terances are called texts. (I should add that, in discourse and text linguistics, utterances are textsonly in as far as they satisfy certain conditions such as coherence, intention, and cohesion.)

Against the backdrop of such linguistically oriented understanding of text, narrative texts canclaim particular attention for the study of national identity. Narrative texts are highly appropriate“cultural tools” to shape, represent, and transmit complex views and evaluations of the past, asWertsch (1997) argued. Accordingly, the focus in this area of research is on historical text docu-ments, such as history books, political speeches, manifestos, newspaper articles, play and filmscripts, and subversive stories and other underground writings such as samizdat papers, letters,and diaries. But narrative texts are not only forms of historical representation. For Skultans(1997), the forms and patterns of such narrative text genres can offer to the individual quest for na-tional identity a “membership of a symbolic textual community” (p. 761). The concept of a “tex-tual community” was suggested by Stock (1983), who examined how interpretation communitiesorganized around certain texts gave rise to groups of religious and philosophical heretics fre-quently appearing prior to the Reformation. These communities developed a strong sense ofgroup identity based on the common reading and understanding of a canon of texts.

A textual community always is an interpretive community, that is, as Fleisher Feldman (2002)explained, a cultural group who shares knowledge and a specific set of discursive practices amongmembers. It is a group who knows the same stories in the same ways and hopes to tell, or more pre-cisely, to indicate to each other what things mean to them. Under certain political and cultural con-ditions, textual communities can provide a perspective for the quest for meaning in disrupted andchaotic lives, as Skultans (1997) demonstrated in studying Latvian life stories against the back-ground of the turbulent history of this Baltic nation over the last 60 years.

The second understanding of text is to be found among semioticians; theorists of art, architec-ture, and music; and theorists of text and narrative. Here—to put it into a nutshell of semioticterms—any sign system, any meaningful symbolism is viewed as a text. This includes not onlypaintings, sculptures, photos, advertisements, and musical compositions but also their perfor-mances and other presentations like dance and social rituals, as well as the symbolic spacesevoked by material and ideal artifacts such as castles, town halls, public squares, churches andtemples, monuments, parks, and gardens.

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In a strict sense, we can conceive of all these texts as symbolic spaces: spaces of meanings thatin combining several semiotic modes organize one discourse. In creating an “integrated whole,”to borrow White’s (1987) terms, a discourse out of persons, actions, and events takes form—theform of a story. Even if this story is not, or not exclusively, told in words, it outlines a narrativeprogram. Narrative program is a semiotic term originally suggested by Greimas and Courtés(1982). But although the two French structuralist semioticians of text used this term in a moretechnical and restricted sense (to name a transformation within a “narrative syntax”), I think thisexpression also makes sense—perhaps even better sense—in the context of my line of argument.By narrative program I mean a discourse whose meanings are organized along one (or more) storylines, creating a narrative “emplotment,” a synthesis of heterogeneous elements. The “narrativesyntax” (as the structuralist would put it) of this discourse is not restricted to language in the nar-row sense but comprises various textual modes or media.

We might associate the two ideas just outlined with a narrow (linguistic) and a broad (semioticand cultural) notion of meaning. Systematically speaking, the semiotic and cultural notion em-braces the linguistic one. Now, which of the two notions is more appropriate to our understandingof national identity? The processes of meaning construction involved here are so complex, and thescope of the human forms of life interwoven with them so broad, that only conceptions that recog-nize and exploit that diversity are of any real value in understanding these phenomena. That is tosay, I believe that both approaches offer important analytical tools for the cultural and psychologi-cal study of the “making of national identities.” They suggest indispensable conceptual instru-ments for the tool kit of every inquiry into what makes up the cultural identity (including thenational identity) of individuals and people. My argument, thus, is not to conceive of linguisticand semiotic concepts of text as mutually exclusive but as complementary. Let me explain.

HYBRIDS OF TEXT AND SPACES OF MEMORY

The main reason why I argue that both notions of text are essential for such an inquiry is that, in thereality of human meaning construction, both types of text are inextricably combined and intermin-gled with each other. All texts (including linguistic texts in the narrow sense) are hybrids—perhapscomparable to mixed-media compositions in art. Beyond the categorical matrix of linguistic andphilosophical abstraction, there is no such thing as an exclusively linguistic text, a text that consistsonly of a set of words or utterances, spoken or written, isolated from the multi-modal symbolicworlds of human activity and consciousness, removed from interaction, imagination, and emotion.Language games are not only games with language but also material and symbolic practices shotthrough with the use of words. When we look at how texts are embedded in forms of life, we alwaysfind them intertwined with other systems of signs and action, that is, in hybrid entanglement.

To describe in more detail how such “hybrids of text” organize symbolic spaces and howwithin these spaces narrative programs are realized, I want to view an example. This example willalso allow me to explain more precisely the concepts of symbolic space and narrative program. Ialready mentioned mixed-media compositions in modern art. An excellent illustration here is in-deed such a work of art: a mixed-media installation by a contemporaneous artist, MariaMagdalena Campos-Pons. Her installation Spoken Softly with Mama (The Museum of ModernArt, New York, Spring 1998) not only represents a hybrid of text but also offers a compelling in-terpretation of the issue of cultural and national identity.

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The title Spoken Softly with Mama refers to the idea of a whispered conversation between ayoung girl and her mother. To be sure, entering the dark installation space, we feel as if we werewalking into a scene of intimate exchange. What we experience is a very personal, private world.To create this world, Campos-Pons used a wide range of different media. Any material, any modeof representation, any text, is potentially part of her artistic palette. She combines stories, songs,old photographs, household objects, embroidery, dress patterns, and other materials, associatingthem with her mother, sisters, and aunts from afar. We may think of a large family portrait re-vealed through the household objects used by generations of women. In fact, as Sally Berger, a cu-rator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, explained, Campos-Pons’s installation is homage tothe female figures in the artist’s Afro-Cuban family, descendants of survivors of the Spanish colo-nial slave trade between Nigeria and Cuba. Exchanging the ordinary materials of the ironingboards, irons, and sheets that they labored over, for fine wood, glass, and translucent fabric, the in-stallation seems to signify both the transcendence and the continuity of these women’s endeavors.Spoken Softly with Mama integrates their personal and collective memories about life in Cuba andits African and European roots into fragmented video narratives. At the same time, the work indi-cates that the focus of all these different texts of memory is the artist’s own remembering, her verypersonal “remembrance of things past.” So her life history comes into play, a story of the culturaltransitions and adaptations that have been integral to her life.

In order to demonstrate how the mnemonic pictures of her ancestors blend with her own auto-biographical memories and, that is, with her multiple cultural identity, Campos-Pons projectsthree video narratives onto sculptures created out of the memory materials from her family’s past.Like a stream of consciousness or, perhaps better, a stream of remembrance that flows into thepresent, these video narratives recreate adolescent games and fantasies and, incorporating familyphotographs, allude to mythological figures who symbolically illustrate the artist’s own passageinto womanhood.

On a further level of meaning, the different elements of the installation cohere into the arrange-ment of an altar—an altar, it seems, erected in visual and poetic praise of the women’s fortitude thatnourished family, friend, and culture, following the end of slavery. With the architecture of the altar,the artist evokes still another cultural trajectory of identity. The various streams of personal memo-ries and of memories of family members, dead and alive, and of earlier layers from the Afro-Cubanpast are infused by a religious culture. Berger, the curator, remarks in her museum presentation ofCampos-Pons that the content and form of Spoken Softly with Mama reflects the practices ofSantería, a syncretism of the Yoruba religious tradition (brought to Cuba from Nigeria) and Catholi-cism. Campos-Pons was compelled by the altars she was exposed to at an early age, long before shehad ever seen a painting, and of which she now presents with ease a number of elements in thethree-dimensional space of her installation. Conducting her performances, she was inspired by theinitiation rituals of Santería to create powerful narratives that are told simultaneously in the momentof a still frame and over time in the moving image. Because of the symbolically rich and resilientYoruba religious traditions that inform Campos-Pon’s œuvre, the materials of the installation aredensely layered with religious meanings that capture the imagination of the visitor and, at the sametime,escapehisattempts to fullyunderstand them.Everyobject,material, color, light, sound, shape,and motion is charged with personal, historical, and religious resonance.

Lotman (1988, 1990) noted that, in an overall cultural system, texts fulfill at least two basicfunctions. They convey meanings adequately, and they generate new meanings. To examine thecomplex forms of cultural evolution, one has to understand first of all the second function, that is,

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the nature of texts as generators of new meanings. For Lotman, this is the issue of how differenttexts interact among each other and, in this way, become active cultural factors within what hecalled a “working semiotic system.” Such a system also requires one or more interlocutors to beactivated, a fact that reveals, as Lotman (1988) emphasized, the profoundly dialogical nature ofthe textual weave of each cultural system which involves both semiotic artifacts and the mind: “Tofunction, consciousness requires a consciousness, a text requires a text, and a culture requires an-other culture” (p. 40).

Lotman is a Bakhtinian semiotician of culture. He has particularly dealt with the manifoldforms of dialogical interactions that emerge when a text is integrated into another text—a “textwithin a text”—constituting a heterogeneous and multivoiced (or, as we also could say, a hy-brid) text system. A simple example is the rhetorical framing of one text by another: the frameof a painting, the binding or blurb of a book, a singer clearing his throat before an aria, the suitof the speaker, or the words, “And now, listen to an independent observer,” in an oral dis-course. In all these cases, the frame of the text is not inserted into the “proper” text. The framemight play the role of a warning system signalling the beginning or end of the “real” text, ormaking an external comment on the text. The big golden frame says: “This is the artwork, andnot, for instance, the fire extinguisher that hangs on the wall beside the painting.” When theframe becomes inserted into the text, the center of the audience’s attention usually shifts fromthe message to its specific semiotic coding. If the fire extinguisher would be framed as well, themessage might be to raise the question of what (or who) defines what an artwork is and whatdoes not. Things become even more complicated when a text and its frame are intertwined onseveral layers, so that each is, in various respects, both the framing and the framed text, subjectand object of a comment or evaluation. For Lotman, culture is such a semiotic system of textualinteraction. And it is because of this interaction that the system, as a matter of principle, isopen: “Powerful, external, textual incursions into a culture, seen as one grand text, not onlylead to the adaptation of external messages and the entry of those messages into the memory ofa culture but also serve as stimuli for the self-development of that memory, the results of whichare unpredictable” (Lotman, 1988, p. 40).

It seems as if such an unpredictable self-development that results from the interplay of variouscultural texts is one of the underlying themes of Campos-Pons’s installation. As we see, her col-lage of different texts that mutually comment on each other can also be understood as an homageto the women of her past, an exploration of the heterogeneous sources of her and her family’s cul-tural memory and identity. But this psychological portrait of Afro-Cuban life worlds, mingled as itis with fragments from the artist’s autobiographical memory to create one of those “ceremonies ofmemory” that are so salient in contemporary Hispanic art (Mesa Bains, 1988), is only half thestory. The other half of this artwork’s narrative program is homage to the symbolic spaces of cul-tural memory.

In the wake of Halbwachs’s (1925/1980) groundbreaking studies on collective memory, sev-eral authors have pointed out that the idea of an individual memory separated from social memoryis a meaningless abstraction. Over the last years, many investigations have extended this view, of-fering new insights in the social processes of remembering and forgetfulness, and on their impacton collective and individual ideas of history and national identity. Let me mention just one exam-ple. In examining memories and histories of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, Íñiguez, Valen-cia, and Vázquez (1997) stated that different collectives and categories even within one nationalcontext have distinct pasts and different social memories that shape and are shaped by people’s

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specific experiences of intersubjectivity. “Every memory,” they wrote, “as personal as it maybe—even of events that are private and strictly personal and have not been shared with any-one—exists through its relation with what has been shared with others: language, idiom, events,and everything that shapes the society of which individuals are a part” (p. 250).

It is the whole of the material and symbolic practices underlying these “relations” that make upwhat I have described as the symbolic spaces of cultural memory. I think it is crucial to bear inmind the spatial dimension (in terms of practices and of materials) of our symbolic worlds. As it ismisleading to conceive of individual memory as separated from social memory, so it is to con-ceive of memory—and even of the discursive construction of memory—as an entirely mental orcognitive process. We can learn more from works of art such as Campos-Pons’s Spoken Softlywith Mama than from many psychological textbooks about the construction of these symbolicspaces: spaces of memory in which personal objects and events, pictures and smells, atmospheresand materials blend with fears and hopes, strong and ambivalent emotions, as well as with ab-stract, generalized knowledge and theoretical reflection.

It is here, I suspect, where our sense of both individual and collective identity emerges. Thissense, though it has deep cultural roots, is amazingly malleable and resilient. It can be shaped in avariety of canonized narrative prototypes and other forms of societal discourse. One of them iscalled national identity.

Viewed in this way, Campos-Pons’s work is also a meditation about how a sense of belongingtakes form. It recreates, by artistic means, the symbolic web of memory that binds minds into cul-ture. In doing so, it allows us to witness as participant observers the genesis of a hybrid of text. ButCampos-Pons’s composition not only demonstrates how different genres of text, linguistic or not,can blend into one discourse, one narrative program. It also offers a view at the intricate interplaybetween individual, cultural, and national texts of identity. And it is capable of doing so, as itseems to me, because it is itself a text of identity, a text that can (and is supposed to) be read fromall three points of view.

Although it is one text, written by, and about, one artist, it demonstrates why individual identityconstruction does not necessarily mean to unify multiple cultural and multiple national identitiesinto one coherent identity text. And what’s more, we realize why it is even impossible to individu-ally homogenize cultural heterogeneity. However we look at this installation, which—as I havepointed out—allows for quite a variety of possible viewpoints, it demonstrates that such “unifica-tion” is a hopeless undertaking; this is all the more true in the postmodern social reality of theWest where “cultural hybridity,” as cultural theorists such as Young (1995) and Schulte (1997)have claimed, has always been the normal state of things.

In sum, I have suggested in this article that both culture and cultural identities may generally beregarded as texts. However, drawing on arguments by Geertz, Derrida, Bakhtin, and Lotman, Ihave argued that it is important to keep in mind that we are dealing here with complexly con-structed texts, which break down into diverse textual realities, often contradictory among eachother. These realities, thus, might be more appropriately understood as symbolic spaces. Speakingof the complex textual intertwinings of texts, Lotman reminded us of the etymology of the word“text,” which goes back to weaving. I like the idea of text as something that is woven. Perhaps wecan even go one further step and conceive of culture less as a text than as something that weavesdifferent texts together—without, however, ever reaching one coherent fabric.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Earlier versions of this article were presented on the panel “Texts of National Identity” at theFourth Congress of the International Society for Cultural Research and Activity Theory, Univer-sity of Aarhus, Denmark, in June 1998, and at the conference “Narrative, Discourse, and Identity”at the University of Brasilia, Brazil, in December 1999. I would like to thank James Wertsch andtwo anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

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