Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

Strangerhood without Boundaries: An Essay in the Sociology of Knowledge Author(s): Tibor Dessewffy Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 17, No. 4, Creativity and Exile: European/American Perspectives II (Winter, 1996), pp. 599-615 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1773215 . Accessed: 11/08/2013 09:47
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without Boundaries: Strangerhood An Essayin the Sociology of Knowledge

TiborDessewffy
Budapest Sociology,(ELTE)

Abstract This essay separatesthe two dimensions of strangerhood.First, using historical materials, the spatial wanderers are examined, and the reactions of the host community and the cognitive processes of the stranger are elaborated. The second part of the essay deals with psychological aspects of the problem under the circumstances of late/postmodernity. Identity politics and role explosion are discussed as significantelements of the present situation. It is argued that this second meaning of strangerhood has become the general condition of our time. The relation between creativityand exile is illustratedby differentexamples, ranging from the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa to the Austrian sociologist Alfred Schutz.

Strangerhood moves all of us, making us spit in anger or swallow in desire, but in any case urging us to act. This effect is not as obvious as it may seem. Why do the people of Balassagyarmat, a small town in Hungary, get excited if Muslims buy the run-down hostel next door? Why are the black players of visiting basketball teams welcomed in similar Hungarian towns? Let us first try to understand what makes the stranger so exciting for us moderns. The first possible explanation would be the essential sameness of the stranger and the modern man, who rediscovers-or wishes to rediscover-himself in this metaphor. The result of a thousand years' reflection on the we all stranger is the recognition that in the "homelessness"of Geworfenheit become strangers. Instead of annihilating strangerhood we have turned
PoeticsToday17:4 (Winter 1996) Copyright ? 1996 by the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics.

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it into general experience, making domesticated homelessness our home. The curiosity we feel toward the exoticism of the alien has turned into an astonishment over our own personalities split into irreconcilable roles. Even if these two sentiments merge deep in our souls, it is important to separate them theoretically, to distinguish the outer, wandering, physical, social stranger from the inner, introverted, psychological, anxious, alienated self. The distinction between these two types of strangerhood helps to clarify the border between them. Besides, the particular characteristics of one type also illuminate the hidden features of the other. and Strangerhood Community Emigration, exile, migration, refugees, persecution, immigrants, personae non gratae: pictures on the covers of magazines, the modern representations of the ancient archetype of the stranger. The stranger, as Georg Simmel (1964) points out in his brilliant essay written at the turn of the century, is the other who arrived today and stays tomorrow.'His presence is not dimmed by distance, we bump into him, we cannot help seeing him and cannot ignore his existence. He is neither the exotic native of faraway lands nor a bizarre nomad; for a Central European city dweller, an Eskimo or an Indian is not a stranger but a mythical figure. Likewise with the tourist, the traveler, and the wanderer, who give us a reassuringfeeling of peace: because we are not forced to live with them, we are only temporarily disturbed by their presence. The stranger, by contrast, "stays on for tomorrow.5" Simmel's definition of the stranger is basically geared to spatial movement, but I wish to extend it to other dimensions as well. Besides the forms of spatial foreignness, my examples cover a whole range of types of strangerhood in social, sexual, and cultural behavior patterns that carry the stigma of otherness. The stranger in any form embodies otherness, making the confrontation with ourselves inevitable and upsetting our previously unproblematic existence. The wanderer, though temporarily among us, may move on at any time, stepping out from our collectively built everyday life and thereby questioning it. This otherness, by definii. The history of the unidentified creature offers a storehouse of encounters with the stranger where the definition suggested above tends to lose its significance. Consider, for example, virulent anti-Semitism against a virtually nonexistent Jewry, no longer to be encountered in the flesh. It is true, however, that in this case we are dealing not with the problem of disstrangerhood, but with one sociopathological type of encounter with it, based on the torted interpretation of a former historical situation. In that interpretation, the other stayed here and would not go. It is sad enough that the notion of the collective unconscious, so dear to psychologists, can be verified precisely by this pathological form of objectless hatred.

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tion, is maintained until the moment of integration into the group. As long as the newcomer is regarded as a stranger,he cannot be a natural and fully incorporated part of the community or a member of a historical nation or state. Metaphorically speaking, he is not entitled to own the motherland, and indeed he is often literally cut off from this opportunity. The mere possibility of the stranger's stepping out can severely upset the individual who is bound to the soil. The stranger is a strange mixture of nearness and distance, for although he lives close to us, we are always haunted by the nightmare of infinity embodied in his personality. He is a menacing hurricane that can turn our everyday life, peacefully babbling in its gently sloping bed, into an overflowing cataract. To find an outlet for this psychological tension, the rejecting community can resort to a whole range of traditional and horrifying measures that lead to the stranger's isolation and annihilation. When, after the declared End of History, you look at the colored map of wars raging on the earth, the smaller fires that stand for ethnic disturbances (the bigger ones mark wars) will remind you of the firelit nights of your childhood scout camps: there are tiny fires all around, the dream of the pyromaniac scoutmaster seeming to have come true. The conservative sages of the Western world consider these to be the ephemeral, localized, and repressed flames that repel the danger of the all-devastating Great Conflagration. Although the negative definition of the stranger is not universal, it nevertheless seems to be used more often than should be acceptable, for in this case there are no morally acceptable proportions. Even though peaceful encounters with the stranger outnumber the flames dotting the map, we cannot be proud of the position the stranger occupies in the civilization of the turn of the millennium. Apart from the field of gastronomy, where the foreign flavors of Thai, Chinese, French, or Ethiopian cuisines are irresistibly tempting, the general tendency is still to reject otherness. Whether we take up arms and set out for insane expeditions of "ethnic cleansing,"or merely curse the primitive inhabitants of neighboring countries over our beer, the logic of rejection is at work. Even if the Korean stores are not permanently on fire in Los Angeles, racial tension persists; and the absence of street fights in Hungary does not mean that public opinion regarding Gypsies is devoid of prejudice. As the Hungarian writer Peter Esterhazy remarked:"A slightly anti-Semitic person" is a nonsensical expression. Simmel, a Jew living in Berlin, the restless, scintillating metropolis of the beginning of the century, was himself an expert on strangerhood, though his main concern was with the host community and its possible reactions. Despite his admired intellect, Simmel was refused a professorship in Berlin, experiencing firsthand the disadvantages ofrootlessness and the vicissi-

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tudes of the outcast, but also calling attention to another, surprisingfeature that arises from the "lack of a past." In times when battles between rival clans are pushed to extremes, the stranger, so despised and stigmatized up to this point, is the one to get hold of positions of trust, since he does not have his hands tied by the past and is not enmeshed in local history. Lewis A. Coser (1974)cites several historical examples of the trust put in such a stranger. Although it is not geographical foreignness he deals with, his examples are still relevant: the careers of the numerous lovers of Louis XIV and of his two successors to the throne prove that those who came from far below could bathe longer in glamor and could count on a more abundant allowance. As social strangers, they belonged only to the king, so that the king, caught in webs of courtly intrigue, could place absolute trust in them. The best-known example is no doubt that of the Jews in the German courts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Excluded from political action (since they were not allowed to carry weapons) and restrained in economic life (since they were not entitled to own land), the Jews could give aid to the monarch that he could not accept from anyone else. After being deprived of one-half of the notion of "man" as defined by the age, the Jew became an almost human homunculus and, even more important, could live under the monarch's protection. In certain historical situations and social systems, the functional importance of strangers grows and they become the pillars of a given society. For example, in the dynamic, conquering period of the Ottoman empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the sultans enlarged not only the territory of the empire but also their own internal sphere of power, they defeated their potential internal rivals by relying almost solely on renegade Christians. The military elite, the Janissaries, kidnapped or bought as children, belonged only to the sultan and, through lack of families or other forms of integration, remained ever strangers and fighters. The administrative managers of the empire were recruited from the most talented children who, after being educated in the schools of the palace, became the leaders of the court and provinces and the main supporters of the sultan in defeating the oligarchies. Of the forty-eight military leaders central to Ottoman history between 1453 and 1623, only five had Turkish origins. Annihilation and elevation to a distinguished position are the two poles of possible relation to the stranger.To illuminate the diversity of possibilities between these poles and to see to what extent these solutions characterize a given society, let us refer to a peculiar case of sexual strangerhood. If there is one cultural phenomenon that surely cannot be limited to the Western world, it is the division of all human beings into two biological

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sexes. Although this division defines a fundamental and rarely questioned segment of our identity, it takes no account of such extreme cases as hermaphrodites. This particular case of strangerhood, though rare, is more than just a curiosity; it is a real cultural challenge responded to variously by different cultures. Precisely because it involves categories of identity and worldview that are of the greatest significance, it provides us with important information on the social responses to strangerhood and otherness. As Clifford Geertz (1983) points out in his essay on the cultural aspects of common sense, we find a fascinating contrast in the views of hermaphroditism taken by different societies. Based on the research of Robert Edgerton, Geertz's essay deals with three different cultures: the American, the Navaho, and the Pokot. In the case of the Americans-and European thought is no differentthe first commonsense reaction is horrified paralysis. How is the sex to be indicated on a birth certificate? Is military service relevant? Can such a person marry? How can "it" choose the right public bathroom? Such questions arise, and in our rational Western culture this is the point where the mind boggles and dread numbs all responses. But our reaction often involves undisguised forms of pressure as well, mostly through parental influence. The "illegitimate" individual who does not fit into our schemes of comprehension is pressured to choose, to adopt either a male or a female role, to become at last a normal "he" or "she" like the rest of us. In late modernity, where social control is achieved by the tabulation of bodies, the organizing rules of the table and the demands of conceptual clarity are much more important than the flesh that completes the Order; the unwanted, unfitting parts have to be removed-literally. The Navaho's attitude toward hermaphroditism-or in Geertz's terminology, intersexuality-is quite different. For the Navaho, too, of course, intersexuality is strange and abnormal, but rather than evoking horror and distrust, it inspires respect and even reverence. In Navaho society, intersexuality is the divine symbol of fertility,well-being, and wealth. Thus, the hermaphrodite is divinely blessed, chosen to be both a man and a woman in one person. The Navaho often choose their leaders from among the hermaphrodites to ensure the reproduction and wealth of the society. "If there were no more left, the horses, sheep, and Navaho would all go. They are leaders, just like President Roosevelt" (ibid.: 82). The third group, the Pokot tribe of Kenya, takes a middle position. Their attitude toward intersexuality is neutral: they are not horrified by hermaphrodites, but do not regard them highly either. The Pokot think that even God could make a mistake when creating the world, and re-

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gard intersexuals as useless, like a botched pot. As one discards a broken pot, so intersexed children are sometimes killed, not with hatred but in an offhanded way. In this culture, the place of the intersexual is defined by "its" functional uselessness, being unable to give birth to a child; nor can "it" enjoy what the Pokot say is the most pleasant thing in the worldsex. They are often allowed to live, but are simply regarded as not Pokot. Interestingly enough, the Pokot hermaphrodites are relatively well-to-do since they have neither the obligation to support a family nor the ordinary drains of kinship on their wealth. What concerns us in the cross-cultural study of intersexuality is not to illustrate afresh the irrationality of Western rationality. More significantly, through such an approach to the alien we can develop an important argument against the ideas of vulgar materialism, which overestimate social and economic factors. The example above urges us to devote particular attention to cultural-conceptual elements as organizers of social behavior. "[Common sense] is what the mind has filled with presuppositions-that sex is a disorganizing force, that sex is a regenerative gift, that sex is a practical pleasure," Geertz concludes. "God may have made the intersexuals, but man has made the rest" (ibid.: 84). It would be economic reductionism to explain the various forms of racism and nationalism simply as the result of poverty, of a competition for limited resources, without considering the worldview, the "order of things," involving space and time and the system of cultural presuppositions in its complexity. In the rational culture of Western Europe, this system of presuppositions does not promote the tolerant acceptance of the stranger.The modern nation-state has spectacularly failed in this sphere; it is enough to remember the French or the German Volkish model, the former laying stress upon equal rights at the expense of otherness, and the latter upon blood, giving priority to the German people and ignoring state borders. The East European intelligentsia, stunned by the horrors of the post-Yugoslavian crisis, is inclined to self-chastisement, with good reason. It is important to see that this is a nationalist war, and as such it arises from the essence of modernity. While I disagree with those who claim that the Habermas-Lyotard debate was settled in Sarajevo, surely this war does not speak in praise of modernity. We can see that the system of presuppositions that unite to form a whole culture largely determines the relation to the alien. Let us now reconstruct this encounter the other way around, from the stranger's point of view. At first sight, the stranger simply does not exist. If we enter an unknown group or another country, theyare the strangers, while we are ourselves as

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we have always been. A large number of interactions are necessary for us to give up after a while our own former knowledge and self: not to regard themas strangers but to see ourselves and our own world as unusual in the new environment. Yet, no matter how we define or name the new situation, it will differ fundamentally from our former everyday lives in one respect: the lack of custom. We can no longer rely on the routines that help us through the labyrinth of everyday communication; the automatisms that smoothly control our behavior are no longer operative. The newcomer, from the moment he realizes that he has fallen into a foreign environment, becomes tense and alert: he must begin to learn, and this learning is accompanied by a serious personal crisis. I mentioned earlier how irritating the otherness of the stranger can be for the host community, since it questions the community's conceptual apparatus. On his part, the stranger-unless he is a conqueror, which is another story-cannot expel the hosts but instead must go through a purgatory of uncertainties. For when, during the process of learning, he realizes the constructed nature of the system of rules in the given culture, the clarity and uniqueness of his own former culture collapse as well. The sociologists' favorite example in the case of kinship relations bears mentioning: the stranger who learns that in a given community the incest prohibition is extended even to the third cousin may come to doubt the eternal truth of his own incest prohibition. Similarly, seeing that others eat heartily the flesh of hare and camel, pig and swarming things, the Jew is liable to doubt the teachings of Mosaic law (in Leviticus), which pronounce these impure and repellent. After becoming acquainted with a culture built on rational efficiency and profit making, we can still follow other patterns with the traditional family as a basis, but we may no longer believe that they represent the "orderof things," the only possible way. The stranger's reactions to this dissonance of consciousness can vary between the extremes of intransigent opposition and overcompensating assimilation. Yet in most cases, the process of learning continues, though in a sense it is bound to fail. As Alfred Schutz says in "The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology": To be sure,fromthe stranger's pointof view,too, the cultureof the approached grouphas its peculiarhistory,and this historyis even accessibleto him. But it has never become an integralpart of his biography, as did the historyof his home group. Only the ways in which his fathersand grandfathers lived become for everyoneelementsof his own way of life. Gravesand reminiscences can neitherbe transferred nor conquered. The stranger ... maybe willingand able to sharethe presentand futurewith the approached groupin vivid and

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immediate underall circumstances, he remainsexcluded however, experience; fromsuchexperiences of its past.Seenfromthe pointof viewof the approached 96-97) group,he is a man withouthistory. (1976: The learning of the unlearnable means much more than the inaccessibility of the past: it is the general existential experience of the stranger.The fabric of culture keeps fraying instead of wrapping protectively around us; the possibility of making mistakes exists in even the most perfect action. Remember the foreigner who speaks a language with absolute precision and subtlety, and yet betrays himself by his own perfect pronunciation, for it is the clumsiness and negligence in the use of the native tongue that are impossible for a foreigner to learn. He is caught in an unavoidable trap. If his behavior deviates from cultural norms, he will be stigmatized as a stranger; if, however, he wants to acquire them, he will lose naturalness and ease through the act of learning. Creativityand Strangerhood It would be very difficult to speak in general terms about the reaction of the personality to the experience of being a stranger. From the viewpoint of social productivity, the experience of strangerhood can lead to either exceptional creativity or apathetic passivity. Most actual cases of strangerhood range between these extremes. Let us take one example from the field of the social sciences, involving a member of an extraordinarily successful generation that arrived in the
United States in the late 1920S and 1930s. Alfred Schutz (1899-1959) repre-

sents the type of personality that responds to foreignness with an explosion of creativity.This choice may be surprising, for Schiitz is known to have published only one book during his lifetime and, what is more, not even in the United States but in Austria before his emigration. However, considering the fact that, except for his last few years, Schutz worked as a banker and a part-time teacher, spending an hour each day playing the piano Works and writing essays in his spare time, the three-volume Collected published in the late 196os and the massive collection of manuscripts edited by Thomas Luckman are evidence of an exceptional productivity. His creativity is not merely or primarily quantitative, but original and deep. The unique place Schutz's writings occupy in sociology is perhaps due to the fact that their author remained a stranger-not only in America but within the discipline as well. Schutz, born in Vienna, became Husserl's student and the prospective inheritor of his university chair. Under the threat of the Anschluss, how-

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ever, he emigrated first to Paris, then the following year to the United States, where he taught at the New School for Social Research until the end of his life. His intellectual career illustrates the pathbreaking bravery of the stranger. It was Schutz who mixed Husserl's phenomenology with Weber's cognitive sociology, or simply turned the phenomenology of science of ideas into sociology, the study of the transcendent, floating ego into the analysis of the individual social consciousness, thus discovering and developing a new field: the phenomenologist sociology of knowledge. This approach, radically different from the classical European one, was also rather shocking to the emerging canonical American sociology. On his arrival in America, Schutz wrote a study of mainstream American sociology, titled "Parsons' Theory of Social Action." Following an intellectually fascinating, but in its tone very dry correspondence with Parsons, he decided against publication, because of the antagonism revealed in the controversy. Given Parsons's authority in contemporary American social science, this affair did not help to integrate him into his new home. Most importantly, neither was the structuralist, functionalist trend in American sociology favorable to the new interpretative sociology of Schutz. In a certain sense, Schutz cannot be regarded as a lonely hero since this peculiar intermingling of originality, intellectual achievement, tolerance, and nonparticipation characterizes other thinkers of his generation as well. The postwar history of the American social sciences could hardly have been written without the contributions of Hannah Arendt, Eric Vogelin, Leo Strauss, and Franz Neumann in political theory, Karl Wittfogel, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Pitrim Sorokin (a refugee from Lenin's Russia) in sociology, or Wilhelm Reich, Bruno Bettelheim, and Eric Fromm in psychology. Members of the same generation, they all produced significant oeuvres and, because of their originality, became "odd man (or woman) out" in their own professions. To present the other extreme, that of apathetic passivity, let us consider a case studied by Erik Erikson, a classic figure- and reformer- of historical psychology, and himself a German emigre of the generation mentioned above. Observing the adaptation strategies of the Sioux Indians, Erikson divided the inhabitants of the reservations into two groups, the offended resisters and the opportunistic resisters(in Riesman 1950: 151).Sioux of the first group were seen by whites as incorrigible and problematic, while the diligent "opportunists"tried to impress the whites by "overachievement." Erikson primarily studied the children of the reservation for whom, along with the obligation of attending a "white school," assimilation into white

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culture was a must. Cultural adaptation clashed with Sioux tradition and knowledge. As David Riesman has pointed out, this conflict "drains out the emotional energies of the child, thus he seems to be lazy. Therefore both the resisters and the seeming opportunists show indifference towards white culture and white politics" (1950: 95). What seems to be the Indian's laziness and idleness is in fact a painful and self-destructive mitigation of the trauma of strangerhood. We have to make it clear that this approach, stressing the aspect of intellectual achievement, does not deal with cultural values as such, but with the chances of assimilation and cooperation with the dominant culture. Who could say that Native American textiles and carvings inspired by the horrors of ostracism and genocide are inferior to Thomas Mann's "Mario From the standpoint of Western culthe Magician," or Picasso's Guernica? tural values, however, it is fair to say that not all forms of strangerhood lead to creative work. The intellect's longing for categorical assertion would be more easily met if this statement were reversed: all creative work is a form of strangerhood. So we must return to the theme that we put aside in the beginning, that of the genuine anxiety and internalized experience of estrangement. The universal experience of strangerhood in late modernity can be reconstructed in the metaphors that attempt to describe the isolation, solitude, and alienation of the individual toward the end of the millennium. The common characteristic of these metaphors is the reinterpretation of strangerhood by way of reversal.Viewing the strangeras a characterwithin ordinary existence and thus as a metaphor for society as a whole, we step out of the conceptual framework in which the stranger is seen as a newcomer or a minority confronting the majority. Zygmunt Bauman (1993)describes the internally controlled character of classic modernity by using the image of the pilgrim, who knows where he comes from but, having a sacred cause in view, is even more certain about his destination. The meaning of his life is not simply found in the enjoyment of moving, sightseeing, and discovering foreign lands. Although he might not refuse these worldly pleasures, the real meaning of his journey is to reach the Holy Place. In the late modernity of the present day, a new metaphor of the wanderer is needed to grasp the character of society: that of the tourist. The tourist has nothing sacred in view, only places listed in a guidebook. The web of these places forms an imaginary world dazzling him with the illusion of experience. For the tourist, the world is a source of sensual pleasures, mouthwatering flavors, spectacular events, and cameraready monuments: pure enjoyment without the slightest intention of par-

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ticipation or the burden of responsibility.It is freedom, in Simmel's famous words, the freedom of the "physically near, spiritually distant" alien from the obligation of turning physical proximity into spiritual identification. "Freedomfrom moral duty is paid for in advance; the package tour kit contains the preventive medicine against pangs of conscience next to the pills preventing air sickness.... Nowhere as much and as radically as in the tourist mode is the uniqueness of the actor disavowed, erased, blotted out" (Bauman 1993: 242). The tourist drowns the natives in numbers, making them all alike. The pleasures of the fantasy world, staked out by the business professionals of tourism and the dream factories of the media, can in no way be disturbed; in an ideal state one's entire life would be a delirious holiday. It would be an overstatement to say that in sociological terms the entire world has turned into Nescafe-travelers, but as the ever rising star of the tourism industry and the publicity of commercialized desires show, the tourist has become a legitimate metaphor for our age. In this touristic world there is not much possibility for creative work. Of course,judging this statement true or false depends upon what we mean by creative work. It is enough to consider the world of science, that undoubtedly limited sphere of the intellect, to find striking counterarguments. To horrify his readers, the mathematician and social historian Fokasz Nikosz (1993) loves to point out that in the last three hundred years, the number of scientificjournals has doubled every fifteen years with monotonous regularity. This process, leading up to the present, obviously contradicts the statement above-provided, of course, we agree with the quantitative view that identifies intellectual achievement with the length of the list of publications. As I have pointed out in connection with Schutz's lifework, it would be more correct to counterbalance quantity with the depth and originality of thought, although this proposal is more a dream than a possibility. But here, with fearsome power over the text in my hands, by creative work I mean only a contribution to the imaginary construction of the intellect and "adding a piece to the puzzle of the world." I do not think that this definition requiresfurther elaboration: first, because it might be impossible and second, because it is not of decisive importance. Our concern is not with the nature of intellectual value but with the creation of those values, in other words, not with the evaluation of results but with the process itself. It is not important whether someone values Mozart's music more or less than Salieri's; in the case of genuine creation, the creative process is identical. This sameness leads us back to strangerhood in the touristic world, for the morality of a creative person is fundamentally different from that of a tourist. Creative work, in the sense in which I use the word, can only be accomplished after taking responsibility for other people, for the world. The

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much-emphasized solitude of creation stands opposed to tourism, even if the created work is the tourist's apotheosis. Since the creator wishes to speak about and to other people, she must first step on the walkway of responsibility to which the tourist consciously gives a wide berth. However, the strangerhood of the creative person cannot be grasped only in relation to the tourist. The process of creation is nothing less than casting off the roles and conventions that help us get along in our everyday lives. The creator is a lonely ropedancer, never seeing the end of the rope but feeling it, knowing the direction and the right steps. Anyone who dares to tackle the ropedance of creation becomes a stranger, even to himself. It is not iterativity or reproducibilitybut the urge to step out of roles and give up identities that makes Fernando Pessoa, the Lusitanian miracle, the archetype of creation at the close of the millennium. As the Hungarian poet Gyorgy Somly6 writes: "In Portuguese pessoameans person, man, someone, anyone.... It is the most general and most abstract word for human being, in which individual, genus, and species are integrated. The original meaning of the Latin persona- mask- also vibrates deep down in it. If a nomen, which is really an omen, were ever to exist, then the name of the most peculiar poet of the century surely is one" (1969: 173;my translation). Pessoa was born in 1888 in Lisbon but spent his youth in South Africa; he spoke perfect English, and wrote his first poems in it. Since he did not want to give up literary independence, he worked as a clerk, just like Kafka. After returning home he wrote poems in Portuguese until, on March 8, 1914, something happened that is called a "Cartesian moment" in modern poetry. Wanting to play a joke on a friend, he tried to write a poem in another persona. His attempt was nearly unsuccessful until, one day, "he stepped to a tall table .. ., put a piece of paper in front of him, and started to write standing, as he usually did whenever he had the time. And he wrote in some kind of a trance more than thirty poems in a row, in the name of another poet who appeared fully armed within him" (ibid.: 176).The author of the poems, the resigned philosopher Alberto Careiro, was soon followed by the epicurean Ricardo Reis, fond of antique forms, and Alvaro Campos, the poet of free verse recalling Whitman's style and devotion to civilization. These are not poems written under pseudonyms. As Pessoa said, he only gave form to the heteronyms that had long existed in himself. "The personality broke into four parts and behold, these did not become four quarters but four different, entire personalities with their own biographies, aesthetics, worldviews, styles, syntaxes, and moreover with their own methods of writing" (ibid.: 177).The poet of modernist free verse, Alvaro Campos, exchanged the tall table for the devil's piano, the typewriter. Not only the ecstatic moments of creation, but also the continuous cohabitation with the otherness emerging from the depths of per-

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sonality, define the essence of Pessoa's existence, as opposed to the tourist society which molds the stranger into a nameless, impersonal mass. "This does not mean that 'nothing human can be alien' to a human being, but that the human being is identical to anything human. The notion of 'not alien' can soften the forming of judgments, can encourage forgiveness and the universal whilethe notion out of responsibility; emphasizes of 'identity' wriggling man"(ibid.: 178;my emphasis). of eachandevery responsibility Heroically guarding the integrity of personality by entirely giving it up through this "explosion of the self," Fernando Pessoa becomes a cult figure for the next thousand years, in which the primary question of the increasingly important politics of identity is: How can the unity of identity be maintained in the flood of roles that has become our destiny? Moralityand Strangerhood Looking back from our not very promising situation on all the horrors of the century, the greatest achievement of humanity may appear to be the mere fact of survival, which earlier remained unnoticed, natural. The most archaic technique for enduring the horrors is supposedly the division into Us and Them, in which We, the good and innocent, not only regard helplessly the incomprehensible, horrible deeds committed by the evil Them, but also free ourselves from any responsibility for the psychological burdens of crime and the ghosts of punishment. This mechanism can work in two directions. On the one hand, we tend to attach a positive ontological status to the notion of our own group, often definable only in contrast to the stranger. Among the building blocks that make up the national identities of the small Central European countries, charming examples can be found of this phenomenon. Lacking social welfare and effectiveness, national identity can be based on such elements as the "plainness"of the Great Hungarian Plain or the "patriotic spirit" of homemade spirits, the idea of being a world power in sports or of having blood ties with nonexistent empires. The stranger can only come into this picture as a retarded, primitive boor. On the other hand, if "our" group has committed undeniable crimes, we try to project them onto another group; in addition to the victim Them, we create the evil Them, so that we can stay clean. A sad example is the lack of shame and responsibility among Hungarians for the 1944 deportation of Hungarian Jews and Gypsies. Gyorgy Csepeli's research describes it as one of the weak points of Hungarian national identity: Hungariangendarmesroundedup, beforethe Hungarianpeople'seyes, hundredsof thousands of theirfellowcitizensintoghettos,andthencrammed them

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into wagonscarrying them towardcertaindeath.The questionhas been asked in severalpolls who is to blamefor this unpardonable crime,in the opinionof Hungarianpeople today.The majorityconsistentlyinsistson disclaimingresayingthat Nazi Germanyand the Germanarmyoccupyingthe sponsibility, were to blame.They rejectthe opinionthat the Hungarianchurches country and Hungarianpublic opinion could have done much more to preventthis enormousnationalshamefromhappening. AdmiralHorthy,the Regentof the who had his the country, kept positionduring Occupation, simplyblamedFate in his memoirs. (Forthcoming; my translation) There are numerous anthropological data-consider, for example, the structuralist research of Mary Douglas (1966)-that are evidently applicable to our century's culture of global modernity. Sociology, the science par excellence of modernity, used the metaphor of glorious development as a set of blinders. "The history of class struggle," "the process of rationalization," "the process of civilization," "the conversion from Gemeinand "the development of organic solidarity"were all schaftto Gesellschaft", infamous emblems manufactured by sociology, dependent on victorious modernity, and proudly worn by those in the field. (From this point of view, the pessimism of individual classic authors-especially Weber-and their personal attitudes toward modernization were irrelevant. What was important was what modernity adopted from their works to serve its own myth.) Modernization's perception is morally that of a rise out of barbarism, and it sees the process of civilization as a step-by-step movement from bad to good. In this schema, reincarnations of evil appear as the intrusions of barbarity,as wounds left untreated by the process of modernization, which can be salved by the imposition of a more modern, more civilized system. Perhaps this explains the hysterical attempts to deny the modernizing features of the Stalinist regime. The first event of earthshaking importance that interfered with this sociological and historical-philosophical vision of modernity was the Holocaust and its modern organizational, technological, administrative, and industrial nature (Bauman 1988). The period following World War II, with its environmental pollution, and above all the irrationalityof the arms race and the nuclear arsenal left behind by the Cold War, have led to a strengthening of the environmental movement and a rethinking of values that Inglehart (1977) has called the "silent revolution." Perhaps a better for this revolution has led to a repression of term would be counterrevolution, modernity's revolutionary mutations and values, a refusal of the rationalization of growth and conquest. But even if, with the exception of a few irredentist conservatives and lost utopians, very few people still see modernity as a radiant angel, we are far from being free of its moral effects. The

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simple reversal of belief systems is no help: the claim that evil is embodied by modernism and "progress"is just as wrong as belief in the "goodness" of modernism. Under the circumstances of our fin de millennium, those who sail through the straits into the next millennium will not be those who continually search for evil in all its guises outside, among "others,"among "them." It is historical philosophy, not history itself, that has come to an end. We can no longer look to the simple working of logic for the creating force of events. And certainly we can no longer-for the sake of history or to change the spirit of the world--simply attempt to adjust human values. All this, naturally, does not mean that "good" and "evil" will cease to exist; it simply means that we cannot use the Us and Them schema any longer, and must instead begin to think in terms of the dichotomy between what is possible and what exists. This duality is less comforting than its predecessor, for it bears little promise of psychic relief. It does not allow us to step out of history by simply saying that the grand inquisitors, SS campguards, or communist commandos were fanatically insane or rotten with cynicism. On the contrary, this duality forces us to accept that those capable of monstrous evil are not Them and do not belong to a separate species, but are people like Us. To put it more precisely, they are what we might have become under different circumstances. The sickening, raving evil we see around us in time and space lies dormant within each of us. Although the chances for the expansion of this worldview are rather low, there is one factor that supports it: the identity politics closely linked to the problem of strangerhood. The way of living characteristic of late modernity imposes more and more roles upon us. We have to learn various roles we never wanted to: we drive cars and, clumsy penmen that we are, we use computers. These are not mere activities but compulsory roles: the computer user must buy software, the car owner must talk to the mechanic. We have to live up to different role expectations at political meetings, in our families, at work, or playing football in a park. Because of the increase of cultural consumption and the globalization of its structure, we have become members of various symbolic communities. This plurality of roles makes metamorphosis an everyday personal experience. Even if spared the change into a monstrous insect, we wake up to find ourselves in new roles. This role explosion, in a sense undoubtedly frightening, is also promising in two respects. First, it is hard to imagine a man playing all his roles with the same skill--being a wonderful father, a brilliant artist, an excellent athlete, and a witty politician, yet at the same time knowing how to fix a leaky faucet. For this reason we all have to learn the role of the loser as well. This recognition can lead to frustration and hatred, but also to empathy for the weak. Second, realizing the mosaic-like

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complexity of our own identities, the potential stranger in ourselves, may enable us to pass over the dimension of difference that constitutes strangerhood; recognizing the potential stranger in ourselves, we will then be able to attach importance to similarities, the aspects of our identities through which we can cooperate (Suleiman 1994). One might ask whether it is necessary for a Serbian who meets a Croatian schoolmate to define himself by his national identity, his first reaction being the impulse to kill. What makes him choose this role from among the bulging bag of identity components, rather than the part of the father playing with his daughters, the tipsy jazz fan, the Volkswagen owner hunting for needed parts, the enthusiast recording on videotape the episodes of Miami Viceeach Wednesday, or the Madonna fan? All of these roles can be his as well as the other's. Are we predestined to kill or is there a possibility for us to break away from modernity's violence-breeding division between Us and Them? For us, guests in the carnival of roles of late modernity, the latter possibility might not be completely illusory.We cannot be certain whether the chances of a positive attitude toward the stranger are greater today than in the last fin de siecle, but the consequences surely are. This time we cannot afford to miss the opportunity.
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Bauman, Zygmunt 39: 496-97. 1988 "Sociology after the Holocaust" BritishJournalof Sociology

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Somly6, Gyorgy 1979 "Fernando Pessoa: The Four-Faced Poet," afterword to That AncientAngst [Hungarian] (Europa: Budapest). Suleiman, Susan R. 1994 "The Politics of Postmodernism after the Wall; or, What Do We Do When the Ethnic with Contemporary Art and Literature, Cleansing Starts," in RiskingWho OneIs: Encounters 225-42 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

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