Grobund for nationalisme. En manual til beskæringen af danskhedsgevæksten

Abstract

In this article, I demonstrate that usages of “growth” generally indicate two, divergent understandings of the term. While the one, which has roots in the philosophy of natural history, attempts to consolidate a notion of growth meant to mobilise collective, national, and historical values, the other identifies the notion of growth with its industrial, capitalist, and transnational associations, whereby the term becomes analogous with global expansion and unlimited freedom of movement. It is important to acknowledge that rhetorical usages of “growth” are not exclusive to the discourse of neoliberal capitalism, particularly as my primary purpose is to marshal an analysis of political, art-historical, and cultural-historical discourses in order to expose the assumptions that underpin the national conception of growth and the persistence of such constructions. I find, in other words, that there is often something veiled in references to growth in Denmark: an implicative subtext that subtly attaches itself to biology, the soil, and the landscape, and results in forceful national allegories and symbols. Similarly, it is interesting to observe how the expansive emergence of industrialisation critically challenged and subsumed the Romantic conception of growth, such that the term eventually had little reference beyond business and economics. In contrast, this article considers the symbolic value of the forest and the physiology of trees for the construction of a collective, Danish, national identity; through this lens, the article focuses on the organic/biological aspect of growth and sheds new light on its implementation in art and cultural life in Denmark.