The “imaginary” aspects of real location
Topographic situatedness, inasmuch as the Imago-Real, is endowed with the capacity of being constitutive for the subjectivity/identity constructions. Thus, to be located in the Balkans is the territorial, both as real as well as imaginary, produced – and producing itself – as signification; or/and locus produced – and producing as -signification.
To be inherently linked with the territory of the Balkans, or constituted by this material link (as being born and raised in the Balkans and/or being a citizen of one of its countries), is, or rather involves, the real (also as the Real) as subjectivizing factor. And it comes to pass through the Gaze. And more specifically through the gaze of the European Other (although there are other Others, such as, for instance, the Oriental Other or the American Other, the latter in many culturally constitutive aspects not differing significantly from the European).
The European gaze is to be taken as centrally constitutive for the Balkan subjectivity considering the fact of its (or, of the Balkan countries) current, predominant aspirations for European integration. However, the European aspirations, or rather, the identification with Europe, of the Balkans are something which significantly precedes the current political moment. For centuries, namely, the entire education of the Balkan nations has been basically that of the Western civilization, supplemented by our modest East European contributions. For this, and for some other important reasons, one can declare the European Other to be the foundational Other of the Balkan Subject. The Great Narratives, the Ideologies, or the ideological Imaginaries, within which the Balkans have lived for at least 150 years (in some of its countries, such as Croatia, hundreds of years longer) have been those of the West. One could say that the European Other holds the position of THE Other for the Balkan subjectivity.
Always already trapped within the formative powers of this gaze, the location on the soil of the Balkans becomes the source of production of a set/complex of significations forming what can be called a borderline European subjectivity. Subjectivity that is in a continuous crisis with respect to its pretended/intended European character, in a continuous frustration by its never fully attained European identity, or/and reconciled with its situation at the borders of (the phantasmatic) Europe. Its topographical position is on the borders of Europe, at its expiring ends; topographically, the Balkans is the borders, or is at the borders of Europe, and this is a conditioning moment for the emergence of an entire imaginary. Or, to put it differently and (hopefully) more plainly, the real – or, the imago-real – location itself produces the ways of construction of the Balkan subjectivity.
Furthermore, the relevance of this topographical situatedness – for the creation of the imaginary of the subjectivity construct in question, and the power mechanisms it is subjected to – is not merely metaphorical. By way of acting as the Lacanian Real in its aspect of tuché – that is as trauma interrupting the signifying chain, the bearer of the pleasure principle3F – it is an active aspect of the formation of the Subject. It performs as a sign, as imaginary or symbolic (or fiction4F), it performs as a presence within the signifying chain and not as absence.
The real situatedness at the geographical borders of Europe becomes the imago-real investment within the political imaginaries (or some would argue: symbolic)5F of both the Balkan as well as the European subjectivity, scilicet for their construction of the Balkan identity as a borderline European identity and subjectivity. It is the imago-real, holding the position and the Name of the Real, which is continuously being translated and articulated into the political imaginary – and their justifications – of the West of Europe (or rather EU). It is that which has been accorded the role of representing (Vorstellungsrepraesentataenz) the support of the real, the reality, and/or “the material truth” of the political imaginaries.
Namely, it acts as (is) the material support, performs as (if) the final word of the Real, or of Reality, of the EU’s phantasmatic Europe. Western Europe’s claim to the exclusive right to the name of Europe, and its exclusive prescription for the identity it (this name) should perform, finds its solid argument in the topographical reality. “After all, spatially, the Balkans is far from the Center of Europe”, (which is, of course, not in the topographical Central Europe). Consequently, it is also the imago-real investment in EU’s official politics towards the Balkans, such as its insultingly strict and rigid visa-requirement policies. And in a reverse way, within the subjecivizing gaze of Europe, while constructing itself, the Balkan subjectivity takes recourse to the same topographical fact as the truth of the Real, as the reality (material) support for the same imaginary (“explaining” its own marginality).
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3. “N’est il remarquable que, &aegrave; l’origine de l’expérience analytique, le réel se soit présenté sous la forme de ce qu’il y a en lui d’inassimilable – sous la forme du trauma, déterminant toute sa suite, et lui imposant une origine en apparence accidentelle? Nous nous trouvons l&aegrave; au coeur de ce qui peut nous permettre de comprendre le caractère radical de la notion conflictuelle introduite par l’opposition du principe de plaisir au principe de réalité – ce pourquoi on ne saurait concevoir le principe de réalité comme ayant, par son ascendant, le dernier mot.” (Lacan, 1973: 65)
4. Both in Butler as well in Laruelle appears the notion/term of “fiction” as the opposite to the real, within the binary structure, (Butler, 1993: 6 et passim; Laruelle, 1989: 231 et passim).
5. I rather choose the term of the imaginary, following Butler’s discussion in Bodies That Matter, where she conjectures “what operates under the sign of the symbolic may be nothing other than precisely that set of imaginary effects which have become naturalized and reified as the law of signification.” (Butler, 1993: 79)