A MATERIALIST CRITIQUE OF CRITICAL BALKANOLOGIES
RADE ZINAIC
A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTORATE OF PHILOSOPHY
GRADUATE PROGRAMME IN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO
MAY 2015
© Rade Zinaic, 2015 ABSTRACT
The post-Cold War era from 1991 to the present is defined by two interrelated processes: (a) the political, social, and economic consequences of neoliberalization; and (b) a settled and universalizing cultural response to the materialities of this process. The institutional entrenchment of post-structuralist reading techniques provided a generation of critical balkanologists with the tools to successfully undo essentialist readings of the region; readings that define an era of denigrative balkanism where the causes of neoliberal war in the post-
Yugoslav milieu are seen as problems of cultural invariance. Drawing on a Marxist theoretical tradition that centres the work of Teresa Ebert, I discover that these techniques are limited by an epistemology that fetishizes the “commodity” of the sign and an ontology that assumes the existence of little more than single individuals in civil society. Thus emergent and oppositional solidarities are incapable of being granted their experience. Critical balkanologies nonetheless marginalize and balkanize the physics of neoliberalism at precisely the moment of their violent ubiquity through dystopic worlds of ethereal imaginariums, impossibly complex Others or sentimental cyber-utopias – all in the place of class consciousness.
Balkanism cannot be abolished via the scholastic unsettling of signs, but through intellectual accompaniment in protracted class struggles by (sub)proletarians against a capitalist mode of production that exploits and atomizes them, thus leaving them materially susceptible to nefarious conceptions of what it means to be human. This requires a total critique; abstracting from concrete texts, bodies and events to the historical mediations that might explain their becoming and limitations and identify alternative possibilities.
ii
DEDICATION
To Stojan, Milka and Milan.
iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you…
To my comrades for their rich friendship, manifold conversations, illuminating insights and unhinged humour: Manuel Marques Bonilla and Gary Romanuk, Ivan Stoljikovic, Elleni Centime Zeleke, Noa Ashkenazi, Mohan Mishra, Bojana Videkanic, Berislav Sabolic, Robert Tod Duncan, Craig Meadows, Neil Braganza and Karen Ruddy.
To my PhD committee members: supervisor Elizabeth Dauphinee for her remarkable professionalism and support; professors Nicholas Rogers and David McNally for coming on board and providing guidance and stability when things were at a standstill; my external examiner Natasa Kovacevic for her thought-provoking questions; and internal examiner Heather McRae and Dean’s rep Shannon Bell for their engagement with my project and insightful comments.
To SPT Programme Secretary Judith Hawley for her tireless labour, knowledge of all things FGS and patience with my often ubiquitous presence and semi-regular favour-asking.
To Professor Ralph Bogert for his keen insights and extensive knowledge of Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian culture.
To the eminently supportive, generous and ever expanding Brophy clan: Dianne, Owen, Ryan, Erin and six rough and tumble nephews – Finnian, Ronan, Eamon, Darby, Rhys and new edition Cael – for whom I am affectionately referred to as “Uncle Roddy”. Boys, we have more basements to wreck.
To my brother Milan for his deep sense of social justice, honesty and toughness. You lead by example – and a fine example it is. Samo napred.
To my parents, Stojan and Milka, for their unconditional love, unequivocal support and reminder to never forget my class and ethnic roots. Their immigrant struggle was infinitely more obstacle- laden than mine, and their perseverance, strong emphasis on the importance of an education and sobering realism kept me inspired and focused. I owe them everything.
And, finally, to my spouse Susan Dianne Brophy with whom I shared this journey and whose uncannily sharp intellect, love, comradeship and humour made the completion of this project possible. Language cannot capture the importance of your presence in my life.
iv TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT...... ii
DEDICATION...... iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...... iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS...... v
INTRODUCTION ...... 1
Balkanology ...... 3
Ethnicized Balkanology ...... 4
Critical Balkanology ...... 6
Materialist Balkanology...... 8
Proletarian Realism...... 10
Challenging the Hegemonic Sensus Imperium ...... 16
Methodological Praxis: Contrapuntal Analysis and Immanent Critique ...... 21
The Thesis and its Tributaries...... 25
A Personal Note ...... 29
CHAPTER 1: LIBERAL EXCEPTIONALISM IN A NEOLIBERAL ERA...... 31
Structural Adjustment and Accumulation by Disposession...... 33
Liberal Exceptionalism ...... 34
Textures of “Social Incoherence” ...... 39
CHAPTER 2: THE PITFALLS OF ETHNICIZED BALKANOLOGIES: MESTROVIC, ANZULOVIC, MACKINNON, ZIZEK ...... 57
‘the serbs’ and the Sensus Imperium ...... 58
Branimir Anzulovic: Genocidal Culture...... 73
Catharine MacKinnon and the Ethnicization of Rape...... 80
v The Ethnicized Idealism of Slavoj Zizek...... 100
CHAPTER 3: THE PRODUCTIVE CONTRADICTIONS OF MARIA TODOROVA ...... 114
Balkanism contra Orientalism...... 115
Culture and Individualism...... 125
The Materialist Import of “Historical Legacy”...... 131
Distorting Capitalism and Class...... 135
CHAPTER 4: SERBIA IN THE WAKE OF NEOLIBERALIZATION...... 148
Bourgeois Europeanization...... 151
Belgrade’s Others...... 153
Serbian Refugees ...... 153
Roma...... 156
Chinese...... 163
LGBT ...... 166
Revisiting Todorova...... 169
CHAPTER 5: TOMISLAV LONGINOVIC AND THE PERSISTENCE OF LIBERAL EXCEPTIONALISM...... 172
Historical Contexts: Between Post-structuralism and Liberalism...... 175
The Belgrade Circle and the New Europe ...... 181
Key Themes in Longinovic’s Vampire Nation ...... 184
The Vampire Metaphor...... 188
Historicizing “the serbs” & The Limits of Post-structuralism...... 194
Serbian Folklore and the Epic in Historical Context ...... 195
Moj Grad (“My City”): Expressions of Serbian Bourgeois Civility...... 200
Longinovic’s Virtual Answer to Vampiric Violence...... 205
vi Cyber Yugoslavia as Bourgeois Catharsis...... 212
CHAPTER 6: THE LUGUBRIOUS GAME: MARKO ZIVKOVIC AND THE “SERBIAN IMAGINARIUM”...... 216
Zivkovic: Flaneur ...... 217
Serbia\ as a Bourgeois Dreamworld...... 221
Mille from Cubura: “the serbs” Personified...... 229
A Balkanist Mode of Analysis...... 241
Common Sense ...... 244
Recurring “Mentalities” ...... 250
CHAPTER 7: THE POLITICAL LIMITS OF DAVID CAMPBELL’S AGONISTIC ONTOLOGY OF TALES...... 253
David Campbell ...... 254
Campbell’s Ontology...... 255
Campbell’s Politics ...... 266
Unpacking Campbell’s “Totalitarian” Obsession ...... 290
A New Balkanism...... 295
CHAPTER 8: THE SCOPE OF VIOLENCE: ELIZABETH DAUPHINEE AND THE NEOLIBERAL MOMENT...... 298
Balkanist Significations ...... 325
The Promise of Theory ...... 338
CHAPTER 9: TOWARDS A PROLETARIAN REALISM: THEORIZING CRITICAL BALKANOLOGIES FROM THE MARGINS ...... 340
Towards a Proletarian Realism ...... 343
Elementary Living Conditions...... 346
vii Subversive” Sacrifices ...... 351
Hip Hop as the New Music of Commitment...... 356
Civic Discourses, Material Realities, Working Class Proposals...... 362
A Complex Populism...... 367
Representing the Single Individuals of Civil Society ...... 369
Jugoremedija...... 374
Occupy Slovenia ...... 379
Bosnian Plenums...... 384
IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION: “BALKANIZATION FROM BELOW” AS A STANDPOINT OF SOCIAL HUMANITY ...... 389
BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 396
viii INTRODUCTION
From 1993 to 2013, Edward Said-inspired scholarship interrogating popular and academic representations of the Balkans had, one can safely surmise, created its own sub-discipline. 1
Prudent and judicious uses of post-structuralist and/or post-colonial theories have borne many necessary and illuminating contributions originating from a variety of disciplines such as history, international relations, comparative literature, and social thought. Historian Maria Todorova, in particular, galvanized a nascent if modest cluster of academics around the problematic of
“balkanism” with her breathtakingly erudite 1997 tome Imagining the Balkans . Published a scant two years after the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords – which cantonized Bosnia under the unelected auspices of the UN High Representative – and two years before the seventy-eight day
NATO bombing campaign of the (then) Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), Todorova argued that “balkanism” was more than just a “sub-species” of “Orientalism” but a wholly distinct discourse with its own unique genealogy. Her timely critical identification of this discourse served as a touchstone if not a fecund heuristic for an emerging generation of Balkan- concerned scholars. Many of these scholars were first generation middle class immigrants who cut their teeth in Euro-Atlantic academies and whose professional emergence is coeval with the transatlantic implementation and consolidation of neoliberalism.
In North America, Great Britain, and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
(SFRY), neoliberalism – a marked, violent, and variegated shift in political and economic power from workers to bureaucratic and/or business elites – ushered in an era of pronounced class antagonism and conservative (de)mobilization. The power-elites of the SFRY, United States, and
Great Britain undertook austerity measures at roughly the same time, with all of them pushing
1 See Dunja Njaradi, “The Balkan Studies: History, Post-Colonialism and Critical Regionalism,” Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 20, no. 2-3: 185-201; and K.E. Fleming, “Orientalism, Balkans, and Balkan Historiography,” The American Historical Review 105, no. 4 (2000): 1218-1233.
1 policies that undermined working class solidarities in large part through a steady historicization of jingoistic nationalism(s). The dire and regrettable consequences for Yugoslavia’s own tenuous post-war compromise are well-documented. As the vigorous working class politics of yesteryear were being, literally in some cases, beaten down, Marxism barely remained a theory in state college literature departments much less “the philosophy of our time” as Jean-Paul Sartre declaratively put it in 1960. 2 At this time, several types of post-structuralist theories, frameworks, and reading techniques, from Derridean deconstruction and Levinasian ethics, to
Foucauldian power/knowledge heuristics and Lacanian psychoanalysis, were popularized in
Anglo-Atlantic universities through the work of indigenous interlocutors such as Peggy Kamuf and Edward Said. The evident rapprochement with post-colonialism via Homi Bhabha, Dipesh
Chakrabarty, and Derrida translator Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak produced important questions and studies about local cultures and their relationship to dominant Western paradigms. However, debates surrounding “subalternity”, “the Other”, and “libidinal economies” did not begin to enter the scholastic discourses of balkanology until the late eighties and early nineties as part of an inter-disciplinary preoccupation with “culture”.
Indeed, “culture” emerged as the theoretical problematic par excellence since the economic triumph of established and emergent bourgeoisies in 1989 and their violent global material consolidation; this was evidenced in instances such as the 1990 to 1991 Gulf War, the aborted Communist coup d’etat in Russia, the brutal repression of the six year Palestinian intifada , and the dissolution of Yugoslavia as a viable, if imperfect, socialist federation. We might extend this triumph into the post 9/11 era with the costly occupations of Iraq and
Afghanistan, the ongoing occupation of Palestine, and the increased and lavishly-funded
2 Jean-Paul Sartre, “I. Marxism and Existentialism,” Marxists.org , https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/critic/sartre1.htm .
2 surveillance and policing of borders and immigrants – illegal and otherwise – in the Global
North. These examples of political, martial, and economic violence frame what Derek Gregory has aptly described as “the colonial present”, 3 and are either strangely absent, egregiously minimized, or incarnated as instrumentalized banalities in the pantheon of post-Cold War cultural studies. The popular struggles against the bourgeoisie, and crypto-bourgeoisie in the case of socialist states, and their consciously implemented and consequentially barbed “structural adjustments”, are often rendered as nationalist atavism, a cultural and/or behavioural “lack”, or class-specific and sentimental exhortations to some ethical utopia of multicultural recognition.
The “rush to culture”, Arif Dirlik observes, “is an escape not only from the structures of political economy but more importantly from the revolutionary radicalisms of the past, which are now denied not only contemporary relevance but even past significance.” 4
Balkanology
By balkanology I refer to the study of the Balkans – its peoples, politics, and history – in the broadest sense possible; and, more specifically, to a conjunctural preoccupation with the
Yugoslav successor states of the 1990s. Admittedly, balkanology is a term that is intentionally elastic in order to cover wide varieties of cultural production on the region: from journalistic and essayistic commentaries and impressions on transitional societies, emergent nationalisms, and
“post-modern war” to deeply researched and theoretically nuanced studies on said topics and the epistemological and ethical problems associated with studying them. The extensive radius of this term allows me to compare and contrast the editorializing of a Michael Ignatieff or Robert D.
Kaplan with the considered analyses of a Tomislav Longinovic or David Campbell. In short, it allows me to puncture the plastic translucence separating popular journalism and relatively
3 See Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Cambridge: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004). 4 Arif Dirlik, History after the Three Worlds: Post-Eurocentric Historiographies (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 39.
3 insulated academic inquiries so as to stretch open this arbitrary border in order to identify ideological commonalities. I identify two types of balkanology or balkanological discourses: (a) ethnicized balkanology; and (b) critical balkanology.
Ethnicized Balkanology
Ethnicized balkanology is another way of describing works discernibly plagued by balkanist prejudices. These analyses, commentaries, and polemics are structured by a hierarchy of moral worth, behavioural propriety, and rational capacity “positing an ideal, or primary white,
European/American, capitalist, Christian identity” 5 which originates in the nineteenth century and is constructed in opposition to intersectional discourses of “savagery , backwardness and obfuscation”.6 Modernity thus defined is either: (a) denied to all Balkan peoples as in the condescending journalism of Robert D. Kaplan and Michael Ignatieff; (b) projected onto perceived regional vanguards claiming the requisite characteristics – i.e. Croatian Catholicism,
Slovenian technological and economic superiority, Bosnian civic maturity, etc. – and evident in the deeply partisan works of Stjepan G. Mestrovic, Thomas Cushman, and Sabrina P. Ramet; or
(c) used as an ideal-type standard against which to wholesale demonize the Serbs and visible in the prosecutorial rhetoric of Catharine Mackinnon or the cultural anthropology of Branimir
Anzulovic. Ethnicized balkanology is imbued with a visceral journalistic immediacy, hastily coalescing around the events of 1991 to 1995 and 1999. At best, it provides competent if imperfect reportage on a quickly evolving and complex series of events; at worst, it reproduces the tropes, metaphors, and sanctimonious sensibilities of European colonialism with some of its practitioners expressing an undeniable racism. I am not saying that journalism per se is
5 Natasa Kovacevic, Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization (New York: Routledge, 2008), 13-14. 6 Andrew Hammond, The Debated Lands: British and American Representations of the Balkans (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), 5.
4 somehow, qualitatively and necessarily, inferior to professional scholarship. Stellar journalistic works such as Tim Judah’s The Serbs (1997), Misha Glenny’s The Fall of Yugoslavia (1992), and Chuck Sudetic’s Blood and Vengeance (1998) rival much professional work on the region and are still sourced today. Conversely, Stjepan G. Mestrovic’s “scholarly” Habits of the Balkan
Heart (1993) has been roundly dismissed by balkanologists and sociologists as logically inconsistent and propagandistic.
My point is that ethnicized balkanology – whether in the guise of editorials or monographs – set the terms for how Balkan history and Balkan peoples are perceived by a literate Euro-Atlantic public. What coalesces (not without contestation) from 1991 to 1999 is a public discourse that, by and large, reads the post-Cold War era through a decidedly culturalist lens. This public discourse encompasses the popular musings of the aforementioned Ignatieff,
Kaplan, MacKinnon, and Samuel Huntington, amongst other establishment intellectuals as well as publications such as The New Republic , The Atlantic , and Foreign Affairs . Whether reading the dissolution of Yugoslavia as “the narcissism of minor difference”, seeing rape as necessarily endemic to Serbian culture, apprehending the world order as a “clash” of self-contained
“civilizations”, or framing the Balkans as a pre-Enlightenment dystopia, these predominately journalistic accounts of the post-Cold War conjuncture are structured by a common sense that conceives of agents as determined by sharply bounded organic cultures or civilizations. 7 There is very little recognition of the fact that such cultures are historically porous if durable, and internally variegated along the lines of class, gender, geography, and history. On the surface, this
7 See Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1993); Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Turning Rape into Pornography,” in Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues , ed. Catharine A. MacKinnon (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 160-168; Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); and Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).
5 point is remedial, and very few intellectuals openly express such a stark essentialism. But it is a testament to the depth of this common sense that even the best-intentioned commentators produce knowledge that never transcends the more egregious types of sociological functionalism.
Critical Balkanology
On the other hand, what I term critical balkanology is mainly academic and critically and morally opposed to the trite formulations mentioned above. This is a discourse that “unites” balkanologists under the problematic of “representation”. The method of this critique is deconstructive and not without its virtues. Critical balkanology emerges in response to ethnicized balkanology with Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans (1997), Vesna Goldsworthy’s
Inventing Ruritania (1998), the earlier and trendsetting work of Milica Bakic-Hayden (1992) and
John B. Allcock (1991), David Norris’ solid In the Wake of the Balkan Myth (1999), the rewardingly difficult deconstructions of David Campbell (1998), and the tangential importance of Larry Wolff’s Inventing Eastern Europe (1994). This might be considered the inaugural phase of post-ethnicized balkanology that subsequently inspired a number of compelling ethnological, literary, anthropological, and philosophical studies. These 21 th century studies include Bozidar
Jezernik’s thorough Wild Europe (2006), Bogoljub Sijakovic’s sharp A Critique of Balkanistic
Discourse (2004), Natasa Kovacevic`s insightful Narrating Post/communism: Colonial
Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization (2008), the innovative and oddly underrated work of Andrew Hammond (2007), path-breaking ethnographies by Elizabeth Dauphinee (2007;
2013), and creative explorations of the Serbian imaginary by Tomislav Longinovic (2011) and
Marko Zivkovic (2011).
The most important contribution of critical balkanology is its recuperation of a materiality of difference; in other words, a sustained unveiling and recognition of silenced
6 Others. Examples include “Bosnians” who refuse the loyalty demanded of holistic nationalisms;
“Serbs” or tendencies within Serbian culture that run counter to Whig sacrificialism; ways of reading the Balkans that unwrap “totalitarian” origin narratives in the name of the positive and multiple, and so on. For critical balkanologists, what challenges the nascence of ontological and epistemological closure is the “concrete”, details , the unique and sensitively documented lives of specific historical agents; not morally tormented soldiers, but one tormented “Stojan Sokolovic” from Banja Luka; not raped women, but one raped Nusreta Sivac from Prijedor; not an abstract problem of exile, but the unique “immigrant blues” of one Goran Simic, etc. 8 These specific stories of loss, redemption, and despair are trampled underfoot and muffled by the bugle horn and jackboots of imagined communities.
Indeed, the violent abstractions of the nation are taken apart in favour of what Derrida calls “a non-ethical opening of ethics”; 9 aporetic spaces of contemplation where sensuous reality is unveiled and unoccupied as an object of meditation. As Marx implies in his “Theses on
Feuerbach”, there is a substantive difference between contemplation (the act of looking thoughtfully at something for a long time) and thinking (the process of evaluative judgment). 10
The latter draws conclusions and hints at closure. In the language of critical balkanology, such closure does violence to the object of thought.
Thus critical balkanologies recuperate alternative or oppositional voices, scope empirical materiality for such narratives, and foreground the ambiguous experiences of bodies as loci of resistance. Narrative or text is privileged as the primary social dynamic and the only means
8 See Elizabeth Dauphinee, The Ethics of Researching War: Looking for Bosnia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); “The Story of Nusreta Sivac”, United Nations Human Rights: Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights , June 23, 2009. http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/StoryOfNusretaSivac.aspx ; Goran Simic, Immigrant Blues (London: Brick Books, 2003). 9 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 140. 10 Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in The Marx-Engels Reader , ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 143.
7 through which the social is transformed. 11 This is a genre preoccupied with the “concrete” as
“‘the self-evidence’ of common sense – “the bodily sensual, the epistemologically empirical, the textually tropic, or the daily consumable.” 12 A struggle over textual representation and not class exploitation defines its cultural project and conception of history. Regardless, all of us working in critical balkanology are deeply indebted to such innovative theoretical practices and their incontrovertibly effective dismantling of what Hammond appropriately names “denigrative balkanism”. 13
Materialist Balkanology
Broadly Marxist in its contours – specifically insofar as I rely on a materialist framework to construct my position – my project draws on the work of Raymond Williams, Antonio Gramsci,
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, David Harvey as well as the indispensable work of Edward Said as resources in my re-materialization of critical balkanology. But the theorist whose interpretation of culture in many ways anchors the others is Teresa Ebert. Her underrated The Task of Cultural
Critique (2009) provides me with the impetus for this project and its basic thesis, namely, that balkanology in its critical form is informed by “a theory of materiality without materialism” 14 and is therefore, at best, a genealogical project in the Foucaultian/Nietzschean tradition that reads freedom not as “freedom from necessity but freedom from categories and concepts.” 15
Encompassing popular post-structuralist reading techniques that gained institutional traction in an era of working class retreat, such a critical project simply cannot know nor assume a reality outside of serialized entities within a fundamentally unequal society.
11 Teresa L. Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), x. 12 Ibid., 26. 13 See Hammond, The Debated Lands , 230-265. 14 Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique , 25. 15 Ibid., 51.
8 I argue, pace Ebert, not for a materiality of difference, but materialism . Materialism understands that the “actuality of the concrete … is in the complexity of social relations” and not an indulgent immersion in the autonomously particular. 16 The concrete is understood as produced by “the objective productive activities of humans that involve them in social relations under definite historical conditions that are independent of their will and are shaped by the struggles between contesting classes over the surplus produced by social labor.” 17 In other words, it is the contradictions of capitalism that produce both the sensuous signs of quotidian life and their objective materialities. What is insufficiently broached in critical balkanology are the organic conditions that give rise to the production of denigrative representations; the socio- economic displacement and interpellation of subjects thus rendered susceptible to such ethnicization from more privileged locations within the Euro-Atlantic order.
For example, the “social incoherence” in the Balkans catalyzed and exacerbated by IMF structural adjustment – i.e. civic protest, strikes, the repatriarchalization of social life, domestic violence, and, of course, war – is ideologically coded as a problem of “social character”. In other words, the struggles, lives, and concerns of working class, unemployed, and otherwise socially and economically marginalized peoples – from Roma and war refugees to displaced labourers, veterans, and victims of domestic violence and interpellated (or not) by conservative nationalisms – are read as problems of culture and character and not the multiple mediations of a specific historical moment. Whether muffled under grand ethnicized categories such as
“Serbs”, “Croats”, and “Bosnians”, or nominally acknowledged and instrumentalized in the service of professional interests, these lives are denied their historically-mediated experience.
Real living individuals located within demonstrable relations of production, their unique, pained,
16 Ibid., 26. 17 Ibid., 24.
9 hopeful, passive, and/or reflective responses to neoliberal war and its consequences, are either reduced to ahistorical “Socratics”, virtualized as avatars, uprooted as fragments of a national dreamscape, indicted in toto as rapists, or dehumanized as barbarians. In these approaches, consciousness is taken as a living individual or a communitarian facsimile thereof.
I argue that the social characterological assumptions of ethnicized balkanologies persist in the projects of critical scholars attempting to transcend them. The starting point is always something or someone atomized and unmediated; pre-constructed if you will. One gets the sense that the social world is interrogated from an inaugural position of unreality, thus pre-empting a serious consideration of present or emergent Balkan solidarities.
Proletarian Realism
Socio-cultural phenomena are elastic, flexible, and relatively porous; this is not denied by practitioners of post-structuralism; in fact, it is enthusiastically affirmed. Yet the methods deployed often assume a “totalitarian” presence in need of linguistic perestroika – whether or not such a presence actually exists. This presence is talked about as if it could be captured in its essentiality like a frog in formaldehyde – a tall order since, one would expect, a conclusion of essentiality should be drawn from thorough historical study of a given phenomenon. This is not the case.
In critical balkanology, what is substituted for history are the “ontopological assumptions” of post-structuralist theory. The theoretical co-ordinates of post-structuralism must nourish the anxiety of “metanarratives” and “foundations” precisely by positing the alleged violence of their presence – it justifies the enterprise. This is what Dirlik means by culturalism referring to the substitution of theories “for knowledge about other countries, knowledge of
10 languages, and … knowledge of other theories.” 18 The “ontopological assumptions” are both settled and universalizing. “The characteristic feature of contemporary literary radicalism”, writes Ahmad, “is that it rarely addresses the question of its own determination by the conditions of its production and the class location of its agents.” 19 Yet this radicalism nonetheless claims a sensitive “impartiality” of sorts, by scholastically upholding a plurality of modalities via textual aporia or archaeology. Contemplation as opposed to thinking affirms an objective idealism which presupposes a mind pitched outside of material entities so recognized; a mind that exists to expose and affirm sensuous difference without judgment.
Lenin, in a critique of social scientific positivism no doubt applicable to the post- structuralist aporia of impartiality, perceptively wrote that "there can be no ‘impartial’ social science in a society based on class struggle." 20 “To expect science to be impartial in a wage slave society”, he writes, “is as foolishly naïve as to expect impartiality from manufacturers on the question of whether worker's wages ought not to be increased by decreasing the profits of capital." 21 Here Lenin underscores the partisan and specialized role of modern scholars, their institutionalized incapacity to develop a general theory of knowledge, even while granting the not insignificant inroads made by them within their disciplinary limits. If the economists are the
“learned salesmen of the capitalist class”, philosophers are their corollary; the “learned salesmen” of the “theologians”. They are the resident ideologists, “organic intellectuals” with a monopoly on cultural production as a result of the education, abundance, leisure and social capital bequeathed to them in the division of labor, some of whom may even see themselves as disinterested apostles of reason or “traditional intellectuals” in the Gramscian sense. Marx
18 Dirlik, History after the Three Worlds , 8. 19 Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (New York: Verso, 1992), 6. 20 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, The Lenin Anthology , ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1975), 640. 21 Ibid.
11 identified this phenomenon as early as early as 1845, stating that “[t]he ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.” 22
Yet as Bertell Ollman points out in his Dance of the Dialectic (2003), “[b]ad faith and class interest politics, however, account for only a small part” of the practices obfuscating and denying contradictions. 23 Ollman argues that when a scholar colludes in the erasure of class conflict, it is due to an absence or failure of dialectical thinking. “For non-dialectical thinkers operating out of a commonsense view,” he writes “real contradictions can only be understood as differences, paradox, opposition, strain, tension, disequilibrium, dislocation, imbalance, or, if accompanied by open strife, conflict.” 24 Critical balkanologies are concerned with a representational realism that privileges the textural surfaces of language and the body; a sensuous empiricism preoccupied with the mechanics of immediacy. The aim of these works is to identify the manner in which violence – the erasure of representational and, therefore, communicative alternatives – inheres in representation and our role in unconsciously facilitating the illiberal cruelty of “presence”. There is implicit in this critical project a duty to unpack, destabilize and/or release self-contained discourses from their exclusivist perimeters, thus revealing the ineradicable flora and fauna of material life. The epistemological focus is not on why a given discourse, representation or signifier comes to be, its existence as a mediated product of historical forces, but how it is put together; hence the emphasis on the anarchic
22 Karl Marx, “The German Ideology,” in The Marx-Engels Reader , ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 172-173. 23 Bertell Ollman, The Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 18. 24 Ibid.
12 endgame of deconstruction and not the courting of “total” knowledge via scientific dialectics of inquiry.
These deconstructive reading techniques, for all their anti-essentialist worth, nonetheless harbour a limited political gaze. In an era where a totalizing ideology and practice of neoliberal capitalism has helped reframe and redefine subjectivities more amenable to the global expansion of capital, techniques informed by principles of heterogeneity and hostility to notions of the systematic affirm precisely the critical and political dispositions the system thrives on: those voluntaristic and liberal. The a priori “hostility” to “totality” or what might be perceived as the scientific method (“the testing of theory via evidence”) inhibits an understanding of capitalism as a “totalizing process”. 25 Ellen Wood argues that capitalism “shapes our lives in every conceivable aspect, and everywhere, not just in the relative opulence of the capitalist North.” 26
She further declares that “it subjects all social life to the abstract requirements of the market, through the commodification of life in all its aspects, determining the allocation of labour, leisure, resources, patterns of production, consumption and the disposition of time. This makes a mockery of all our aspirations to autonomy, freedom of choice, and democratic self- government.” 27 Far from dismissing these aspirations, Wood understands the extent to which they are bound and guided by conditions not of our own choosing.
The problem is that post-structuralist-informed balkanologies pre-construct, critique, uphold, and/or unveil precisely what capitalism needs affirmed: de-historicized difference. Per
Ellen Wood:
25 Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 262. To add to this, in a post-modern conjuncture, capitalists and capitalist activity are far more veiled and opaque compared to the naked brutality of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism – although recent developments in Greece and Spain portend otherwise. This partly explains the emphasis on surfaces and fragmentation in post-structuralist discourse. This turn emerged, in part, in the wake of failed leftist revolutions and a durable belief, as late as the early 1970s, in the end of capitalism. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 262-263.
13 The capitalist system, its totalizing unity, has effectively been conceptualized away by diffuse conceptions of civil society and by the submersion of class in catch-all categories like ‘identity’ which disaggregate the social world into particular and separate realities. The social relations of capitalism have been dissolved into an unstructured and fragmented plurality of identities and differences. Questions about historical causality or political efficacy can be evaded, and there is no need to ask how various identities are situated in the prevailing social structure because the very existence of the social structure has been conceptualized away altogether. 28
If the social structure “has been conceptualized away altogether” and knowledge of “totality” is deemed “violent”, then we are left with nothing but contemplation of externally-related objects or dumb generalities. The historically-mediated life-activity of Bosnians, Serbs, and people like
“Stojan Sokolovic” – as well as those writing about them – is obscured. 29 Recuperating this historically-mediated life-activity requires abstracting from the sensuous immediacy of everyday life to historical structures and back again in order to properly concretize “identities and differences” by reading them as an “ensemble of…social relations” 30 situated in a social division of labour. This dialectical approach is what Teresa Ebert calls “proletarian realism … a realism that de-reifies reality by grasping the essence of its specific stage of historical development.`` 31
The endgame is not to resolve or transcend presumed binaries through scholastic contemplation, i.e. theoretically complicating the “civic/ethnic” split or unwrapping the discursively mummified
“Bosnia” to reveal its arbitrary nature, but to “find their rational solution in human practice and in the contemplation of this practice.” 32 This means reconceiving “human activity itself as objective activity.” 33 In other words, the point is to discover which truths are being historicized in practice, by whom, under what conditions, and for what reason. This is an inductive enterprise
28 Ibid., 260. 29 “Stojan Sokolovic” is a fictionalized personage that Elizabeth Dauphinee utilizes to explore the politics of exile, trauma, and communication in her work on Bosnia. See Elizabeth Dauphinee, The Ethics of Researching War: Looking for Bosnia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); and Elizabeth Dauphinee, The Politics of Exile (New York: Routledge, 2013). 30 Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” 145. 31 Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique , 30. 32 Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” 145. 33 Ibid., 143.
14 that initiates a historical reconstruction from the position of real active subjects; subjects who produce their livelihood and attendant sociality and accordingly change their world and the manner in which they apprehend it. The dichotomies critical balkanologies problematize are never so cleanly separated in the thought and practice of those (sub)proletarians subjected to neoliberal processes.
I use the term (sub)proletarian to refer to wage labourers, pensioners, migrants, immigrants, veterans, and refugees, amongst others. “Proletarian” in its classically Marxist definition is retained as those compelled to sell their labour power to a capitalist class for some sort of remuneration. For example, in Serbia, this includes poorly paid workers in neoliberal
“free-zones” and their politicized brethren in privatized entities such as the pharmaceutical company Jugoremedija and the automotive firm Zastava. The bracketed prefix “sub” traditionally signifies the poorest fraction of the working class, but I stretch it to include everything from temporary and part-time labourers to those exogenous subjects of the economy
– from Roma to the 550,000 unemployed in Bosnia. 34 The term is intended to be provocative rather than precise; its presence alone places a wedge in the ethnicized liberalism of my interlocutors and provides me with a vantage point from which to identify the borders of their class insularity. Thinking like a (sub)proletarian elicits many questions when it comes to political prescriptions such as Longinovic’s dialogical and allegedly egalitarian Cyber Yugoslavia; questions about access, literacy, patriarchy, et al. Such informed perspectivism also serves to unsettle David Campbell’s updated “balkanization from above” and the “ironic” elitist exegeses of Marko Zivkovic. To be truly critical, critical balkanology must locate itself in a specific historical moment. This means concretizing oneself in the mediations of post-communist
34 Dado Zuvic and Maja Zuvela, “Bosnia Rocked by Anti-government Unrest,” Reuters , February 7, 2014, http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/07/us-bosnia-unrest-idUSBREA160UU20140207 .
15 modernity, its class contradictions, dominant ideological trends, and morally lucrative
“problematics” in order to shine light on epistemological blind spots and, perhaps, U-turn from ontological dead ends.
Challenging the Hegemonic Sensus Imperium
The sedimentation of discourses such as balkanism, their ongoing subversion and normalization, occurs in a form that is internally coherent if variable at the level of content. Discourses themselves must remain internally coherent in order to make sense; an internal coherence that is bought at the level of porous discursive boundaries. As a result, discourses tend to be episodic and disjointed, capable of holding together contradictory meanings. In some respects, they represent the fragmentary logic of common sense as the ontological truth of life; a totality devoid of concrete directionality or, to quote Raymond Williams, “social intention, the class character of a particular society.” 35 In this discursive approach, power/knowledge emerges from everywhere ; there is no unequivocal center of power/knowledge effects. Yet the emergence and continuous prevalence of balkanism as a discourse is mediated by transformations in the relations of production, in other words, the kinds of control some people have over the productive forces of a given historical moment. The question then becomes one of how power is derived from the ownership of the means of production. The agonistic pluralism of power/knowledge effects cannot assess how such effects come to be historically, i.e., under what laws of human biological
(re)production does the necessary abundance for the efficacy of various power/knowledge discourses emerge ? Centering the analysis along these lines allows us to apprehend not only shifts in, to quote Teresa Ebert, “conceptual strategies” of the “modernist subject”, but to ground the metamorphosis of “styles” in “the historical unfolding of wage labor and capital” and its
35 Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” New Left Review I, no. 82, (1973), 7.
16 concomitant contradictions. 36 Seeing balkanism as alloyed to the mode in which human livelihood is organized necessitates a concerted effort to understand, organize, and fight against the mode of exploitation in which people are racially interpellated; a mode of exploitation whose structures are often regularly obscured in the textual strategies of critical balkanologists. If the economic conditions that produce and exacerbate balkanism remain in place, deconstruction is, at best, a limited endeavour. The “salvation” of the Balkans, if I may tweak the concluding sentence from Aime Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism , “is not a matter of a revolution in methods. It is a matter of the Revolution”. 37
Post-Cold War claims to moral, political, and cultural superiority accompany an imperial sensibility or sensus imperium as I heuristically refer to it. The sensus imperium speaks to a historical conformism – which I sketch in detail below – defined by hegemonic discourses of liberal exceptionalism as they have emerged in the wake of the Cold War, the nascence of neo- liberalism, and the spread of American economic and military might following 9/11. “Historical conformism” is a Gramscian notion that iterates the saturative quality of cultural hegemony within human material relations. 38 As Gramsci is keen to emphasize, “we are all conformists of some conformism or other, always man-in-the-mass”, and thus equipped with a mode of thought that is cluttered with the inherited historical weight of “disjointed”, fragmented, and “episodic” cognitive forms. 39 This is what he terms “common sense” and whose content must be historicized in order for us to even begin to take an “inventory” of its infinite traces in our
36 Teresa L. Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Class in Culture (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), 143. 37 Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York : Monthly Review Press, 2000), 78. 38 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks , ed. Quintin Hoare (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 324. “Historical conformism” is, all things considered, an acknowledgement of the diverse materiality of cultural practices and productions and their debt to a grid of pre-conceptual hypotheses upon which various expressions are made, unmade, mediated, recycled, and nuanced. These expressions are produced in ways that, more often than not, add to the moral heft of these hypotheses even via projects that are consciously styled as progressive and/or radical; that is, those consciously challenging said hypotheses. 39 Ibid., 323-324.
17 speech, practices, ideas, and projects. 40 In this respect, common sense functions along the lines of what Williams has dubbed a “structure of feeling”; an affective means of producing and consuming cultural products that are stealthily guided by the base assumptions of a “central, effective, and dominant system of meanings and values, which are not merely abstract but which are organized and lived”. 41 Pace Gramsci, Williams adds:
That is why hegemony is not to be understood at the level of mere opinion or mere manipulation. It is a whole body of practices and expectations; our assignments of energy, our ordinary understanding of the nature of man and of his world. It is a set of meanings and values which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming. 42
Here we have a productive understanding of hegemony as (a) desire (“assignments of energy”);
(b) ontology (an “understanding of the nature of man and his world”); and (c) common sense
(“ordinary understanding” and “practices” that “appear as reciprocally confirming”). The metaphor of the body as a normative assemblage of variegated labour and a sentient mediator and conductor of meanings and values identifies hegemony as “a process of incorporation.” 43
Herein lays its material efficacy, at both the level of social production and social reproduction.
This is because hegemony is primarily volitional in its incarnations, as both Gramsci and
Williams recognize. 44
40 Ibid., 324. It is my contention that such an articulation of common sense is by definition infraconscious or embodied within us at such a profound level of relational practicality that it serves as a moral basis rarely foregrounded and interrogated. 41 Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” 9. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 Gramsci alludes to this in a number of passages. When discussing the popular image of “philosophy”, he understands that its role, as commonly understood, is “that of overcoming bestial and elemental passions through a conception of necessity which gives a conscious direction to one’s activity.” This is the “healthy nucleus” in “common sense” that ensures the biological import of desire is always already ‘assigned’ in specific ways. This can also be read as one component part of what he describes as “contradictory consciousness”, namely, a “theoretical consciousness” that is “superficially explicit or verbal” and “inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed.” This is precisely the historically conformist consciousness that orders our “instinctive and violent impulses” at a primary tier of socialization. See Gramsci, 327-328, 333. Williams’ famous phrase that hegemony is not something “occupying merely the top of our minds” is pertinent here as well. Fanon, in his own way, makes a similar argument. See Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the
18 What interests me is how the content of this “practical consciousness”, in a specific historical moment, assumes a rhythmic confidence that operates to affirm and uphold a particular discourse and its ontological architecture. The stark chasm between certain forms of mental and manual labour that define the more labyrinthine social divisions of labour and their corresponding political ecologies provide a starting point for exploring the salience of race- thinking and the fetish-mongering masquerading as erudition that often informs this thinking.
“[A]n effective and dominant culture” must be consistently bought into for it to exist as such; there must be aspects of it that are deemed and practiced as “correct”, in a moral and philosophical sense. 45 Williams describes this as a “selective tradition” that closes off alternative and emergent ways of thinking about our specific state of affairs. 46
Critical balkanologies are limited by precisely such a “selective tradition”, one that harbours a particular ontology, desideratum and common sense with the first part of this troika structuring the contours in which the latter two define their objects of interest. Of course, fragments of common sense secrete their own ontological assumptions and a clear break between these categories is untenable if not impossible. After all, energies assigned to objects of interest are coded through the raced, gendered and classed categories of common sense. Such categories, in turn, share tacit organizing principles as to what constitutes being. The “selective tradition” in which critical balkanologies emerge and define themselves uphold: (a) an ontology of single
Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 39-59. Yet this deep socialization of volition is not merely intellectualist, but simultaneously corporeal as well. Human species-life, so argues Marx, is geared primarily towards the fulfillment of needs and interests that are non-ideological. But writing in the midst of continental revolution, the nascence of national consciousness amongst heretofore oppressed peoples, the pending rebirth of colonial expansion, and the violent consolidation of capitalism made him aware of the role political ecologies play in the legitimation and sustenance of productive forces. Indeed, these political ecologies, with whatever euphemism one prefers to describe them (i.e. “civil society”, “ideological state apparatuses”, “fields”, etc.) are part and parcel of the historical inheritance of said productive forces. Human livelihood is alloyed to means of communication, language broadly conceived, and what this medium works to make visible and divisible “up to its furthest forms.” See Karl Marx, “The German Ideology,” in The Marx-Engels Reader , ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 154. 45 Williams, “Base and Superstructure,” 9. 46 Ibid.
19 individuals in civil society; (b) the privileging of the “Balkans” and its constituent parts –
“serbs”, “Bosnia”, etc. – as a critical problematic for reasons that vary depending on which privileged subject(s) are doing the privileging; 47 and (c) a discursive mode of consuming the
Balkans parasitic on Cold War Manichaeism and a deeply Eurocentric nineteenth century colonial sensibility or sensus imperium . For the sake of clarity, I schematize the precepts of this
Eurocentric sensus imperium as follows:
-the Euro-Atlantic, anchored by its Anglo-American wing, for all its faults and misguided interventions, is still the barometer of moral progress and the legitimate heir to Enlightenment values. With cultural production situated in metropolitan areas such as New York, London, and Paris, this is a decidedly urban and cosmopolitan sensibility. -the silences and sounds of this sensus imperium are fundamentally liberal in its valorization of representative democracy, capitalism, pluralism, moral individualism, and human rights. -the silences and sounds of this sensus imperium are fundamentally social democratic in its valorization of representative democracy, capitalism, pluralism, moral individualism, and human rights. -the Euro-Atlantic, anchored by its Anglo-American wing, is essentially altruistic and compassionate which, when not practiced, is always to be assumed. -the Euro-Atlantic is humanitarian, sensitive to issues of race, gender, and class. -the Euro-Atlantic, anchored by its Anglo-American wing, practices a confident and responsible foreign policy and fully assumes responsibility for security in the international arena. -the Euro-Atlantic is categorically civic nationalist. Of course, these precepts are not simply the domain of external actors, i.e. foreign diplomats, journalists, generals, and scholars, but are also embodied in specific Balkan agents if not classes and class fractions – the example of “Other Serbia” being emblematic in this regard. 48 The
47 For example, strategic concerns merge with human rights discourses, economic imperatives with the Culture Wars, Cold War paranoia with haughty cosmopolitanism. Much evidence points to a strategic desire on the part of Anglo-European economic and cultural elites to extinguish the last continental remnants of a planned economy. There is also the proximal currency of the Balkans; a nominally “European” region at the crossroads of several European economic routes. 48 Marek Mikus, “‘European Serbia’ and its ‘Civil’ Discontents: Beyond Liberal Narratives of Modernisation,” Centre for Southeast European Studies, Working Paper, no. 7 (2013), 1-60.
20 juxtaposition of these criteria with those used to explain “the serbs” is an important step in undoing the battery of racializations plotting “the serbs” and, by association, Croatians,
Bosnians, et al, on what Arthur Melegh has described as an “East/West slope”; a descending order of moral, social, and political worth grounded, at its Easternmost point, in discourses of
“savagery”, “backwardness”, and “disorder”. 49
Methodological Praxis: Contrapuntal Analysis and Immanent Critique
There is little doubt that each example of critical balkanology “has its own practical genius” as does the Balkans as a region “with its own overlapping experiences and interdependent histories of conflict.” 50 In my immanent critique of these texts I try not to “generalize so much as to efface the identity of a particular text, author or movement.” 51 I make a careful effort to grant an author his/her experience and clearly iterate the notable aspects of their work. At the same time, I challenge what appears to be certain for a given work or author by gesturing to literature that clearly contradicts their position. As Said lucidly puts it, “[i]n reading a text, one must open it out both to what went into it and to what its author excluded. Each cultural work is a vision of a moment, and we must juxtapose that vision with the various revisions it later provoked.” 52 This contrapuntal methodology allows me to “draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented.” 53 In this sense, for example, I can confidently conclude that Tomislav Longinovic’s Vampire Nation , despite its scholastically transgressive post-colonial approach, nonetheless reinscribes an imperial discourse reconstituted as Serbian bourgeois civility. This reinscribed imperial discourse implicitly displaces balkanist
49 See Attila Melegh, On the East-West Slope: Globalization, Nationalism, Racism and Discourses on Central and Eastern Europe (Budapest: Central European Press, 2006), 9; and Hammond, The Debated Lands , 120. 50 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 67. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 66.
21 tropes onto an abstract (sub)proletarian culture, exhibits an urban middle class condescension towards folk practices, and privileges middle class male intellectual acumen as a voluntaristic ethos of critique. The working classes are seen as a relic of a Titoist past and naturally susceptible to nationalist manipulations.
I thus identify and critique the ahistorical aspects of these texts from the perspective of the concrete conditions in which people live. By concrete conditions I refer to the extended and uneven consolidation and consequences of neoliberal ideology and practice in the Euro-Atlantic and the Balkans; a process whose origins stretch back to the 1970s. As such, I draw inspiration from the Marx of The German Ideology in that I unpack the scholastic representations of “real, active [agents] … and on the basis of their real life-process … demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process.” 54 I interrogate these texts from their own creative standpoint while criticizing said standpoint from the perspective of the political- economic conjuncture in which they exist. Immanent critique describes a historical dialectic
“which is driven by the contradictions between ideology and reality.” 55 I argue that the greater the ideological claims of these scholars, the more insignificant the social context that informs them; a social context often muted or excised in the texts themselves. 56 Such claims I expose as complicit – and sometimes profoundly so – with the structures of domination they purport to challenge and/or subvert. It is here where I am in agreement with Slovenian sociologist Rastko
Mocnik when he describes balkanism as an ideology framed by “European” ocularity. When speaking and writing about the region in this respect – regardless of whether one is situated inside or outside of it –, one is simultaneously “seeing” and constructing it from an implied
54 Marx, “The German Ideology”, 154. 55 Max Horkheimer as quoted in Robert J. Antonio, “Immanent Critique as the Core of Critical Theory: Its Origins and Developments in Hegel, Marx and Contemporary Thought,” The British Journal of Sociology 32, no. 3 (1981), 338. 56 Ibid.
22 moral high ground “structured along a teleological axis” which understands normalcy as
“Western” and “modernization as the course of History”. 57 As such, the discourse is endowed with “a mobilizing power”. 58
As an “ideology of domination” triangulating the region and its peoples as savage, backward, and obtuse, balkanism “ideologically mediates and reproduces the economic, social, and political dependence of a certain semi-peripheral European region upon the Western
European center” while also entrenching “the socio-economic domination of the ruling elites within the countries of the region.” 59 This ideologically reproduced dependence is possible because political and economic dependence actually exists . Hammond points out that while “it is true to say that western discourse does not create the problems of the Balkans, it certainly covers over those very real strategies that the West has been pursuing in the region, strategies which continue adversely to effect the region.” 60 He perceptively concludes that:
Successfully combining the neo-imperialist practices of economic hegemony with the traditionally colonialist strategies of military intervention, political interference and administrational supervision, the West has achieved tremendous leverage in the region. Amongst the numerous, often ongoing, instances of direct domination one could cite the controlling and overseeing of the break-up of Yugoslavia, the legitimising of the Berisha and Illiescu regimes in Albania and Romania respectively, the attaining of direct rule across much of Kosova and post-Dayton Bosnia, the sizeable control of Balkan economies, and the pursuit of a wide-ranging cultural imperialism under the guise of humanitarian aid. 61
On a purely scholastic plane, balkanism presupposes an ontological distancing of the region from
“Europe” proper; a “subaltern culture” ripe for western stewardship or a “civilizational other” whose complications are of little concern to the West. 62 Mocnik, however, rightly claims that
57 Rastko Mocnik, “The Balkans as an Element in Ideological Mechanisms,” in Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation , eds. Dusan I. Bjelic and Obrad Savic (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002), 96. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., 79-80. 60 Hammond, The Debated Lands , 252. 61 Ibid., 247. 62 Ibid., 310.
23 balkanism “is not what separates” Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, et al “from ‘Europe’; rather, it is their means of integration into the international system.” 63 Denigrative balkanism justifies the political-economic terms on which the Yugoslav successor states re-enter the international division of labour. In the post-Cold War conjuncture I highlight, balkanism is triggered and organized as hegemonic and “denigrative”; scoping and sculpting episodic traces of elite common sense into a coherent, if subtle, ontology upon which a desire for normalcy – as civil society, free markets, and ideological individualism – is confidently broached if not dutifully pursued.
These ideological claims, despite their complicity with structures of domination, are formally emancipatory; they deploy discourses of pluralism, democracy, non-violence, and even anti-capitalism in some instances. Yet the interests these claims are alloyed to – the professional interests of middle class academia – generate them as ideology that either downplays or ignores the importance of popular struggles against socio-economic necessity. What exists in its place is a scholastic means of obfuscating socio-economic necessity footed in the privileging of “culture” as an object of inquiry. Even the imperative need to critique the transforming racisms of balkanism start from an ontological sphere defined by serialized cultural entities. This forces the hand of even the more theoretically progressive balkanologists into making an argument for a representational realism of some sort that is “anti-totalitarian” and ontologically inclusive. But what these reading techniques nonetheless privilege “is a world of self-difference made of representations, which are ultimately self-representations, because signs are seen as always pointing to themselves and not to a reality ‘outside’.” 64 The propositions of this “world of self- difference” are akin to the Nietzschean “will to power”.
63 Mocnik, “The Balkans as an Element in Ideological Mechanisms”, 86. 64 Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique , ix.
24 What is missing in much critical balkanology is a lucid and centered recognition that balkanist relations of force are not merely self-referential and pitched outside of the process of neoliberalization or the production of knowledge in academia, but are immanent to them; they are the immediate effects of economic and educational inequalities and their durable internal structure. This simultaneity is precisely what accounts for their hegemonic strength. One could argue that from 1991 to 1999 – and, really, in any post-1999 instance where the “global media complex” chooses to mine content from this part of the world (i.e. Srebrenica anniversaries, political assassinations, EU-courting elections, anti-austerity protests, etc.) – a discourse of savagery, chaos, obfuscation, and backwardness is reinscribed. Some aspects of this discourse might be overemphasized while others are softened, but all have a potentially productive role to play wherever they are exercised. And this is precisely the point: balkanist relations are not merely superstructural in the manner a vulgar Marxism or, I argue, pace Ebert, a culturalist approach to analysis might have us believe. There is the problem of “social incoherence” facilitated by neoliberal restructuring that place Balkan peoples in demonstrable positions of subordination and social pathology. Ethnicized balkanism emerges alongside such restructuring.
The Thesis and its Tributaries
I thus presuppose two intertwined historical processes that are indisputable in their manifold materialities: (a) the social and economic consequences of neoliberalization; and, as mentioned above, (b) a settled and universalizing cultural response to the complexities of these real material processes. 65 The result of their confluence, as embodied in the texts I explore, is a pronounced silence about the global and quotidian transformations in wage labour and capital. These silences are upheld, nay, required by a conformist liberal exceptionalism. But what is strange is the manner in which these silences are upholstered by said liberal exceptionalism; they are
65 Raymond Williams, “Problems of Materialism,” in New Left Review I, no. 109 (1978), 9.
25 racialized . The material consequences of neoliberalization are refracted, i.e. understood as knowledge , through the taut and dense fabric of balkanism; a fabric hiding within its patterns and sinews the binary of class conflict. “If, then,” write Marx and Engels in The German Ideology ,
“the theoretical representatives of the proletariat wish their literary activity to have any practical effect, they must first and foremost insist that all phrases are dropped which tend to dim the realisation of the sharpness of this opposition.” 66 This is the spirit in which I undertake this project.
This spirit is materialized over nine chapters. I prove that balkanism simply cannot be purged at the level of deconstruction via an immanent critique of what I believe to be the most theoretically inventive and provocative texts in critical balkanology. My inaugural chapter,
“Liberal Exceptionalism in a Neoliberal Era”, traces the emergence of an Anglo-Atlantic discourse of liberal exceptionalism and cultural invariance in a conjuncture defined by social incoherence. I map the social and political turbulence produced by neoliberal structural adjustment leading up to, and especially after, Yugoslav president Ante Markovic’s acceptance of sweeping IMF reforms in 1990. I do this in order to set up my subsequent chapter on the limitations of ethnicized balkanologies by showing how their evaluative criteria is parasitic on a specific sensus imperium that requires the invariance of “social character” or some such culturalist lens to read materialities that are, in large part, the result of a violent process of
“accumulation by dispossession”. These parallel developments work to obscure class as a category of analysis; it was as if neoliberal state dissolution and war could only be understood culturally as the product of national pathologies.
66 Karl Marx, “The Philosophy of True Socialism,” Marxists.org , https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch04b.htm .
26 Chapter 2, “The Pitfalls of Ethnicized Balkanologies: Mestrovic, Anzulovic, MacKinnon, and Zizek”, explores how these scholars code “the serbs”, the dominant national pathology of the era, as a self-contained, genocidal totality, homogenous and libidinally nationalist. This balkanist reading represents “the serbs” as a grotesque alterity against which all other balkanisms are produced and evaluated. Effacing the complexity of Serbian society and the diversity of the
Serbian people, these readings undercut any potential for pan-Balkan solidarity and reflect a general tendency to interpret the dissolution of Yugoslavia in culturalist terms. Critical balkanologies, if not directly confronting these scholars, are nonetheless positioned against such fetishizations of “social character” yet ironically, and in more subtle ways, reproduce some of their basic assumptions. Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans (1997) is a watershed contribution in this regard.
Chapter 3, “The Productive Contradictions of Maria Todorova”, specifically analyzes the work of this pioneering scholar in critical balkanology. I interrogate her work with an eye to her methodological idealism, political orientation, and elision or obfuscation of class concerns. I point out how Todorova’s productive contradictions open up a space for a reading of balkanism grounded in political economy while at the same time privileging a discourse of (white)
Europeanness that plays out in the Balkans in deeply problematic ways.
Chapter 4, “Serbia in the Wake of Neoliberalization”, substantiates the problematic nature of this Europeanness by looking at the classed nature of balkanism in post-Milosevic
Serbia with an eye to the interplay of neoliberalization and the plight of Roma, refugees, LGBT peoples, and Chinese. This serves as a prologue for the critiques of the Serbian imaginary by
Tomislav Longinovic and Marko Zivkovic undertaken in Chapters 5 and 6.
27 The projections of the “global media complex” and their Serbian counterparts are interrogated in Chapter 5, “Tomislav Longinovic and the Persistence of Liberal Exceptionalism”, and Chapter 6, “The Lugubrious Game: Marko Zivkovic and the “Serbian Imaginarium”. In these chapters, I analyze the provocative and thematically-linked work of these scholars, focusing primarily on their definitive texts: Longinovic’s Vampire Nation: Violence as Cultural
Imaginary (2011) and Zivkovic’s Serbian Dreambook: National Imaginary in the Time of
Milosevic (2011). Both books deploy similar conceptions of the “imaginary” in their deconstruction of the tropes, metaphors, and allegories that allegedly fed Serbian nationalism during the Milosevic era. Longinovic’s sly displacement of a sacrificial atavism onto
(sub)proletarian Others underscores the classed nature of his prescription for Yugoslav renewal while Zivkovic’s ironic reading of the Serbian “dreamscape” fixes it as a chaotic and obscurantist staple of the national character.
Chapter 7, “The Political Limits of David Campbell’s Agonistic Ontology of Tales” and
Chapter 8, “The Scope of Violence: Elizabeth Dauphinee and the Neoliberal Moment”, explores the way in which the signifier “Bosnia” is complicated in the scholarship of these critical balkanologists. Campbell’s argument in National Deconstruction (1998) is a good example of what Teresa Ebert identifies as “getting class out of culture.” 67 He avoids the discourse of class and consciously chooses to thematize only the identitarian aspects of the Bosnian war, a silence that is symptomatic of global changes in socio-economic structures and cultural production. On the other hand, Dauphinee, conscious of these global changes, grapples valiantly with the privileged violence practiced by professional ethnography, her relentless questioning going
67 Ebert and Zavarzadeh, Class in Culture , 3-46.
28 further than any of her contemporaries in framing materialities that require more sensitive and focused exploration.
Finally, in my concluding chapter, “Towards a Proletarian Realism: Theorizing Critical
Balkanologies from the Margins”, I argue that, at the very least, abolishing balkanism requires a popular social movement transforming the social relations that place these peoples in a pronounced position of political and economic dependence. Moreover, a movement of this sort must also redefine what it means to be an intellectual. This might include a shift away from isolated and competitive professional trajectories towards a rapprochement of sorts with the immediate community in which knowledge is produced and/or “accompaniment” with the people and communities intellectuals claim to speak for. This is a radical proposal to be sure, but there are, as Grubacic highlights, notable historical precedents for it. It is in this final chapter where I recuperate and acknowledge these precedents and their contemporary reincarnations. I do not pretend to have a concrete theoretical or political solution to the problem I critique, but I do gesture towards historical solidarities from which a movement of the kind I find necessary might find moral and critical nourishment.
A Personal Note
As the first generation son of Serbian working class immigrants and grandson of Yugoslavian
Partisans, my political awakening in 1990s Toronto is closely tied to the dissolution of a state I had only visited twice until that time. Stories of ethnic cleansing, rape, and military sieges reached me from my extended family overseas, the multicultural media in Canada, and, of course, conventional North American news sources. I began to understand myself beyond the stuffy walls of parochial suburbia as part of a tribe that was defined as “savage”, “backward”, and “sadistic” while cutting my teeth on temporary manual work in order to pay my university
29 tuition. My parents, employed in two different plating factories owned by the same CEO, managed to weather the austerity measures passed by Ontario Premier Mike Harris, leader of the
Progressive Conservatives, and despite media representations of their class and broader union mobilizations as “obsolete”, “self-interested”, and “socialist” (in the pejorative sense of course).
The same totalizing neoliberal capitalism inside and against which I developed my political instincts was a major causal factor in the dismemberment of my parents’ homeland. At the time, my mind jumbled together these ethnicized, classed, and still opaque discourses; at the very least, their use would trigger in me an inarticulate rage. This incoherent rage found a critical vocabulary during my undergraduate years and could be said to be the “unconscious” of this entire scholarly enterprise.
30
CHAPTER 1: LIBERAL EXCEPTIONALISM IN A NEOLIBERAL ERA
We know what works: Freedom works. We know what's right: Freedom is right. We know how to secure a more just and prosperous life for man on Earth: through free markets, free speech, free elections, and the exercise of free will unhampered by the state.
-George Bush, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1989
Hajde, hajde sad pogodi, Kakav duh to mene vodi, Sta to mojoj dusi godi, Kakav zvuk je sad u modi? 1
-Disciplina Kicme, “Buka u modi” (1991)
“If you believe that the working class really rules in this country, all you will have in the end is a naked dick.”
-Johnny Stulic, Azra (1991)
The dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) has been written about extensively since the first shots were fired at Borovo Selo in 1991. Journalistic accounts of varying quality flooded the North American reading market in the half-decade from 1990-1995, narrating a thick consistency of ethnic irascibility, communist underdevelopment, and fratricidal violence that was always already “there” even if not consummated for nearly forty years. Many of these accounts were predicated on egregious Eurocentric binaries inherited from a colonial past as couplets such as civilization/barbarism, modernity/tradition, urban/rural, and liberal/authoritarian conveniently insinuated themselves into various tropics of interpretation, thus garnering an unquestioned popular import. Kenneth C. Danforth’s timely National
Geographic piece, “Yugoslavia: A House Divided” (1990), is a perfect example of investigative journalism dependent upon a series of balkanist tropes tropes in order to make the “foreign”
1 “Come on, come on, take a guess/At what kind of spirit is leading me/What pleases my soul/What kind of noise is now in vogue?” - Discipline of the Spine, “Noise in Vogue” (1991).
31
palatable to “Western” senses and sensibilities. 2 The Berlin Wall was already thoroughly subject to the rudiments and tools of popular deconstruction when Danforth’s photo-essay hit the stands in the summer of 1990. Four months away from the start of the Gulf War and the official remaking of the New World Order through the ominously charted continuum of “free markets, free speech, and free elections”, “Yugoslavia: A House Divided” described an a-temporal region of rustic poverty, crimson sunsets, and the protracted death-rattle of an economic and political system that had allegedly sighed its last breath. With circulation in the millions, a wide audience was ensured for a mode of representation that would prefigure the glut of eyewitness accounts chronicling the over-determined fragmentation of a founding member-state of the United Nations and the Non-Aligned Movement. Yugoslavia was rendered as something at once anomalous in the coiled ferocity of its domestic life and a discernible symptom of what the nascent post- communist world was really like. The clinical realism of mainstream publications such as
Michael Ignatieff’s Blood and Belonging (1993) and Robert D. Kaplan’s much maligned Balkan
Ghosts (1993) popularized a discourse of abrading and exploding ethnic nationalisms; a
Boschian Fourth of July ironically commemorating the post-Berlin Wall rise of American triumphalism. The proverbial “thousand points of light” seemed comparatively obscure and somber to say the least. 3
2 See Kenneth C. Danforth, “Yugoslavia: A House Divided”, National Geographic 178, no. 2 (1990), 92-123. 3 The “thousand points of light” reference is from George H.W. Bush’s 1989 inaugural address; it is a rhetorical device signifying a unified, civic, patriotic and voluntaristic America where everyone, from individuals to community organizations, take part in its sustenance as a benevolent force: “I have spoken of a thousand points of light, of all the community organizations that are spread like stars throughout the Nation, doing good. We will work hand in hand, encouraging, sometimes leading, sometimes being led, rewarding. We will work on this in the White House, in the Cabinet agencies. I will go to the people and the programs that are the brighter points of light, and I will ask every member of my government to become involved. The old ideas are new again because they are not old, they are timeless: duty, sacrifice, commitment, and a patriotism that finds its expression in taking part and pitching in.” See George H.W. Bush, “Inaugural Address of George H.W. Bush”, The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy , January 20, 1989, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/bush.asp .
32
It is during this half-decade from 1990-1995 that ethnicized balkanology gained popular and academic traction within the contours of a specific historical conformism. In the Euro-
Atlantic and, in particular, its Anglo-American orbit, the immediate post-Cold War conjuncture was defined by a power-elite sensibility that was discernibly imperial. This imperial sensibility or sensus imperium congealed around a renewed liberal exceptionalism and the spread of
Western military and financial hegemony in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s unexpected implosion. Those Eurasian and European states that had at least nominally upheld the rights of workers, despite their Stalinist tendencies, had collapsed into fledgling transitional societies, unfairly burying an anti-capitalist imagination with them. Yugoslavia’s own belated and bloody transition completed the continental shift towards capitalist reorganization, financial dependence and labour exploitation.
Structural Adjustment and Accumulation by Disposession
In 1989, with the Consumer Price Index soaring at 2,700 per cent, Yugoslavian President Ante
Markovic met with US President George H.W. Bush in order to secure a “financial aid package” with strings including “sweeping economic reforms…a new devalued currency, the freeze of wages, the curtailment of government expenditure and the abrogation of socially-owned enterprises under self-management.” 4 Enacted in January 1990, this IMF-sponsored package induced a number of big enterprises into bankruptcy and resulted in the import-saturation of the domestic economy. Domestic labourers and producers were ultimately dispossessed. This deal, sold as it was on a rhetorical spirit nourishing itself on the post-Berlin Wall hearth, helped inaugurate and foreground the authority of the Financial Operations Act, which “was to play a crucial role in engineering the collapse of Yugoslavia’s industrial sector” and eventually ensure
4 Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order (Shanty Bay: Global Outlook, 2003), 245.
33
that each republic would be “strangled in separate debt-rescheduling and structural adjustment agreements.” 5 This was a perfect example of what David Harvey has popularized as
“accumulation by dispossession”; a fragmented disciplinary process of displacing and reconfiguring potential surplus labour for the exploitive purposes of renewed capital accumulation. “Dispossession”, explains Harvey, “is fragmented and particular – a privatization here, an environmental degradation there, a financial crisis of indebtedness somewhere else.” 6
This makes it especially difficult to oppose at the level of popular organizational politics, and especially so in a multicultural federal state making a concomitant transition to an electoral system. Such policy-driven “social incoherence” set the conditions for Yugoslavia’s demise.
Yet the sources of this “social incoherence” – a methodically neoliberalized international division of labour – is obscured by a Eurocentric sensus imperium touting liberal capitalism as the limit of political imagination. This sensus imperium problematizes the region in identitarian terms, forsaking or minimizing the neoliberal turn in global capitalism. Bounded ethnic and religious identities are presented as the cause of regional strife, a potentially global contagion to be quarantined. The problem to be addressed is not the product of a historical process whereby labour is disempowered and mystified, but a peculiar collective psychology whose apparent suddenness threatens rhetorical “values”. This is a theological problem of good versus evil, but in deftly coded terms.
Liberal Exceptionalism
Ethnicized balkanology is not produced in a void, and my representative sample of such knowledge production must be read against a general tendency in power-elite discourse towards
“culturalism”; a settled and universalizing response to complex material processes. Indeed, the
5 Ibid., 248, 252-253. 6 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 178.
34
immediate post-Cold War conjuncture saw the emergence of a conformist liberal exceptionalism among many Anglo-Atlantic intellectuals. Historian Orlando Figes’ reinterpretation of the
Russian Revolution, 1997’s A People’s Tragedy , and Adrian Hastings’ Wiles Lectures bound and titled as The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism (1996) typify this imperial sensibility. Figes’ contribution, noted by many at the time for its refusal to engage then recently opened archival sources and its propagation of a simplistic “continuity thesis”, argues away Russian popular resistance in toto in favour of Menshevik and Kadet centrism.
Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm’s own ambivalence towards the Russian Revolution, superbly explored by Kevin J. Murphy in a 2007 issue of Historical Materialism , raises doubts about the orientation of the Marxist academic Left. 7 Indeed, Hobsbawm chooses to praise a Figes whose end-of-book conflation of international socialism and ethnic nationalism, quite an ideological juxtaposition to say the least, implies that the most practical response to social ills is liberal moderation, i.e. market liberalization, parliamentary democracy, and “civic” models of nationalism. 8 Similarly, in choosing to interrogate the roots of modern nationalism, Hastings, a medievalist with a self-professed predilection for “hard history”, challenges the “modernist” orthodoxies of Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner, and Benedict Anderson by arguing that “religion has been integral to the wider history of nationalism, perhaps even determinative” and locates for concepts of the “nation” an otherwise denounced primordial origin in British religious texts. 9 He gleans from this a British imperial model of nation-state organization, predicting that Britain, long denied its place as a model to the world, will “in another fifty years’ time” offer the best
7 Kevin J. Murphy, “Can We Write the History of the Russian Revolution? A Belated Response to Eric Hobsbawm,” Historical Materialism 15, no. 2 (2007), 3-19. See also Hobsbawm’s review of Figes’ book: Eric Hobsbawm, “Out of the Great Dark Whale,” London Review of Books 18, no. 21 (1996), 3-5. 8 Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution (London: Penguin, 1998), 824. 9 Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2.
35
“prototype for the political structuring of modernity.” 10 Since “territorial nationalism” is preferable to the “ethnic linguistic form”, the ideal institutional ecology for such a prescription is a nineteenth century imperial formation of the allegedly extra-nationalist British variant. 11
Hastings, a close associate of historian Noel Malcolm and Croatian socialist-turned- nationalist Branka Magas, both of whom hold high posts in The Bosnian Institute, a pro- humanitarian intervention think thank that includes a Professor of Strategic Studies at the United
States Marine Corps, is one of a plethora of scholars working with the assumptions of a sensus imperium . Malcolm has published two popular “short histories” of Bosnia and Kosovo respectively, well-received by power-elite publications such as the Economist and the Wall Street
Journal , but subject to noteworthy criticisms by several journalists and scholars. 12 Magas, for years a highly esteemed commentator on the ex-Yugoslavia and editorial board member of the
Marxist journal New Left Review (NLR), broke with its internationalist vision along with her partner and one-time Gramsci translator Quintin Hoare in favour of cosmopolitan militarism.
NLR co-editor Tariq Ali revealed that the political differences amongst editorial board members over where responsibility lies for the dissolution of Yugoslavia were irreconcilable, as they threatened the very nature of how the journal defined Marxist internationalism. “We had people who do not like being described as Croatian nationalists,” Ali explains, “but that was certainly the impression they gave us. They were certainly part of the demonization of Serbia. They refused to see it as a civil war and saw it essentially as a war waged by Serbia. Many of us saw this as a civil war brought about by the European Union and by German intervention to break up
10 Ibid., 6-7. 11 Ibid., 7. 12 See especially Tim Judah, “Will there be a War in Kosovo,” The New York Review of Books , May 14, 1998, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1998/may/14/will-there-be-a-war-in-kosovo/
36
the country – two totally different ways of seeing the thing.” 13 For Ali, Magas and Hoare moved
“further and further away from anything to do with the universalist projects of the left.” 14
Magas and Hoare are symptomatic of a wider trend in balkanology that is reflective of the dominant ideological sensibility extant in Anglo-Atlantic academia after the ostensible end of the Cold War in 1989 and the beginning of an aggressive and protracted war on terrorism after
9/11. The originary coordinates of this this ideological sensibility can be traced to the now rebuked claims of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992) where liberal capitalism, for all its faults, is acknowledged as the best outcome of human history and where representative democracy, in true Hegelian fashion, embodies the pinnacle of social progress. Such premature pronouncements were qualified with the publication of numerous works dedicated to highlighting ethnic nationalism or some such form of reactive nativism, primitivism, or tribalism as the inescapable antipode to liberal modernity. Michael Ignatieff’s ubiquitously received series of essays Blood and Belonging (1993) set the tone for an Anglo-
Atlantic intelligentsia attempting to make sense of the rise of nationalism as an “irrational” force obstructing the spread of liberal democracy. Ignatieff’s prioritization of “civic nationalism” over its “ethnic” counterpart gave intellectual credibility to the framework many humanitarian interventionists would apply in their justification of military aggressions from Bosnia and
Kosovo to Afghanistan and Iraq. 15 This was now a “bi-polar” world characterized by a “clash of civilizations” which required a not immodest degree of pragmatic ruthlessness on the part of
Anglo-Atlantic governments in order contain these geo-political conflagrations be they in Iraq,
Somalia, or Bosnia. Samuel Huntington’s much maligned Clash of Civilizations (1993; 1996)
13 Global Balkans, “Interviewing Tariq Ali: Neo-Liberalism and Protectorate States in the post-Yugoslav Balkans,” ZNet , February 19, 2008, http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16560 . 14 Ibid. 15 See Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (London: Penguin, 1993), 249.
37
and Benjamin Barber’s Jihad versus McWorld (1996) added to the establishment chorus of “us versus them” that had a slyly recoded nineteenth century sonority about it. Robert D. Kaplan’s
Hobbesian tome The Coming Anarchy (2001), the guiding masculinity of Warrior Politics: Why
Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (2002), and his neo-colonialist travelogue Balkan Ghosts
(1993) contributed to this flurry of tomes a stoic realism that was positively sanguine in its mercenary prescriptions. 16
The general line in these texts was that of sobering disillusionment, a sense that, with the
Soviet threat in remission, the “open society” described by Karl Popper in The Open Society and its Enemies (1945) could be put into practice. Not that this world of triumphant liberalism was necessarily new, as Russell Jacoby recounts in his enjoyable 1999 polemic The End of Utopia:
Culture and Politics in an Age of Apathy , it was not dissimilar from the Cold War liberalism of the 1950s. Indeed, the alleged advantages of establishment-guarded “pluralism”, “free markets”,
“representative democracy”, and “moral individualism” were to be found as often in the Time editorials of that decade as in the more highbrow circles of Encounter and The New Leader .17 In fact, as Frances Stoner Saunders has impeccably argued in her path-breaking Who Paid the
Piper: the CIA and the Cultural Cold War (1999), the ideological efficacy of this liberalism, at
16 Robert D. Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts: a Journey through History (New York: Vintage, 1993) is often cited, rightly, as a prime example of yellow journalism masquerading as sociological description. A personal favorite of both Bill and Hillary Clinton during their tenure in the White House, this slight tome framed their view of the Balkan wars and helped influence American policy on the region. Henry R. Cooper Jr., in the autumn 1993 issue of Slavic Review , concluded that “ Balkan Ghosts is deceptive, for it portrays itself as a lively account of the contemporary Balkans, based on history and firsthand experience. In fact it is a distasteful mix of tired clichés, undigested or incorrect historical fact, and personal bias. Let the reader beware.” See Henry R. Cooper, “Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History,” Slavic Review 52, no. 3 (1993), 592-593. This is the same Robert D. Kaplan who, in The Coming Anarchy , advocated the premeditated assassination of world leaders refusing to bend to American interests. See Robert D. Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (New York: Vintage, 2001), 178-179. 17 Jacoby does an excellent job of illustrating how the present discourse is actually old hat. See The End of Utopia: Culture and Politics in an Age of Apathy (New York: Basic Books, 1999) ,1-28.
38
least in its highbrow guise, was in large part secured covertly through CIA front organizations. 18
Nevertheless, in the absence of the Soviet Union, the main question was against whom to define this Anglo-American inheritance. Nationalism, Islam, and the Balkans, specifically the Serbs, served to fill this vacuum in an era where center-left governments were appropriating social democratic discourses in order to more firmly entrench neoliberal policies.
This epistemological emphasis on nations, cultures, religions and civilizations and their ontological status as bounded, predatory, populist, holistic and/or totalitarian – oddly anthropomorphized to say the least – settled into popular interpretive frameworks at the moment the individualist physics of neoliberalism was unsettling space in Yugoslavia and paving the way for war. The voices of those displaced by “accumulation by dispossession” are rendered invisible through the tropics of this sensus imperium . Below I foreground these textures of “social incoherence” in order to illustrate how distanced my subsequent representative sample of ethnicized balkanology is from neoliberal materialities in the Yugoslav successor states of the nineties.
Textures of “Social Incoherence”
Using the definition provided by David Harvey, it is easy to see that such policies as those pursued by Ante Markovic were not directed towards the development of industrial and agricultural labour. Instead, these policies were tactically judicious, even piecemeal in their execution, leading to the atomization of social space. The wholesale siphoning off of public assets that were politically, and painfully, procured over decades and, in the case of Yugoslavia, through a bloody and fratricidal revolutionary war, is a hallmark of neoliberalization. What this siphoning off of public assets provides, at first glance, is relatively risk free opportunities for the
18 See Francis Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 1999).
39
expansive thrust of capital accumulation as practiced by various elites. The raw material in capital, labour, and technology is already extant in some shape or form and, instead of being maintained as popularly regulated “common property rights”, is transferred to emergent or established private realms as a “redistributive” policy – and this often against the needs of those whose productive livelihood depends upon a just social wage. In this sense, privatization is guided by state redistribution, but through a distributive circuit that funnels wealth and assets to
“class privileged domains.” 19 Harvey is correct to conclude that “[t]he main substantive achievement of neoliberalization…has been to redistribute, rather than to generate, wealth and income.” 20
In the case of Yugoslavia, Markovic’s reforms “shifted the balance of economic policy in favour of certain firms, sectors, and areas.” 21 Such a shift, given the economic and cultural geographies of the federation – a federation that was “based on control over economic assets and their distribution” 22 – could not hope to avoid the politicization of economic realities. With the international terms of trade moving markedly away from petroleum based industries, export manufacturers, not domestic producers, reaped the benefits of new economic reforms in the form of subsidies, tax incentives and foreign exchange. 23 This was due to the fact that, as Woodward bluntly states, “the primary earning capacities in foreign trade varied significantly among the republics”. 24 “Slovenia and large areas of Croatia had a distinct advantage,” she states, “and
Serbia somewhat less; demand declined for producers in agriculture, mining and metallurgy, and defense, which tended to concentrate in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Serbia proper
19 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism , 161. 20 Ibid., 159. 21 Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1995), 58. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid.
40
and its two provinces, Kosovo and Vojvodina.” 25 The pressures of the structural adjustments were felt disproportionately as “[t]his second group of producers also needed to restructure old industries, making them far more vulnerable to immediate unemployment than the northwest.” 26
Economic historian John R. Lampe states that “real income” had declined substantially in the five years from 1983 to 1988, down at least a quarter, and unemployment had risen 5.8 per cent to 16.6 per cent from 1981 to 1986. 27 Sixty per cent of those without employment were under 25 years old with a quarter of these jobless denizens holding at least a secondary education with 50 per cent of them female. 28 “The growing number of jobless citizens” writes Lampe, “formed a political barrier to the downsizing of inefficiently large enterprises that would be needed to reverse the decline in labor productivity since 1982.” 29 It is interesting to note that what Lampe interprets as a “political barrier” to, it is implied, “inevitable” change, former Croatian socialist
Branka Magas understands as the beginning of a confident assertion of class struggle. 30
Conversely, Woodward sees this “political barrier” as the integration of socio-economically displaced people into the “realm of antipolitics”, 31 while V.P. Gagnon reads it as part of a civic push including “economic demands for basic reform.”32 It is important not to overstate, in some theologically revelatory manner, the extent of worker discontent during these stages of neoliberalization. To assume some sort of rising homogeneity of interests as the response to poverty and state-deployed political violence that was, in many concrete instances, ethnicized is to forsake the nature of the materialities structured by, and structuring, the relations of
25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 John R. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History: Twice there was a Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 333. 28 Ibid., 333-334. 29 Ibid., 334. 30 Branka Magas, The Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracking the Break-up 1980-92 (London: Verso, 1992), 212. 31 Woodward, 56. 32 V.P. Gagnon, The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 100-120.
41
production. “Anti-politics” is a bit of a disingenuously terse manner of describing the very real apathy that is not uncommon amongst those displaced by neoliberal policies, if only because politics can be interiorized in a way that does not necessarily require the qualifier “anti”; the work of James C. Scott is instructive in this regard. 33 Yet, as Lampe points out, “[p]ublic opinion polling in 1987 found that 79 per cent of the respondents doubting that there was any avenue open to escape the accumulated economic problems.” 34 Citing official sources, Michel
Chossudovsky provides some startling evidence informing this fatalism:
In 1989 … 248 firms were steered into bankruptcy or were liquidated, and 89,400 workers had been laid off. During the first nine months of 1990, directly following the adoption of the IMF programme, another 889 enterprises with a combined workforce of 525,000 workers were subjected to bankruptcy procedures. In other words, in less than two years “the trigger mechanism” (under the Financial Operations Act) had led to the lay-off of more than 600,000 workers (out of a total industrial workforce of the order of 2.7 million). The largest concentration of bankrupt firms and lay-offs were in Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia and Kosovo. 35 These statistics are supplemented by the astute observations and reportage of Magas, who charts a marked rise in labour disruptions and strikes since the early implementation of IMF shock therapy policies. Apathy and fatalism were no doubt prevalent, but there was also resistance occurring alongside such sentiments. In 1987 alone there were 900 strikes, often involving whole enterprises, implicating 150,000 workers with proposals aimed at everything from wage raises to the expulsion of managers. 36 Woodward argues that such resistance was symptomatic of the
“self-management structure in large public sector firms” and precluded large-scale mobilization at the level of civil society. 37 According to her, there were 1,570 “work stoppages” implicating
365,000 workers in 1987, a telling addition to the 80 per cent increase in stoppages and strikes in
33 See James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 34 Lampe, Yugoslavia as History , 333. 35 Chossudovsky, 249. 36 Magas, 114. 37 Woodward, 56.
42
the span of a year from 1982 to 1983. 38 Attempting to encapsulate the essential rationality of these labor movements, Magas points out that “[w]orkers’ strikes should not be seen as only defensive: they are a necessary stage in the class’s positive self-definition.” 39 In this sense, at least at the level of trade unionism and working class politics, there was discernible cross-ethnic solidarity that, as Gagnon has done a wonderful job of substantiating, drew upon popular sentiments, at least among Croats and Serbs, which were clearly anti-nationalist or lukewarm to nationalist prescriptions. 40 Magas, in her more sober analyses, correctly recognizes the nature of this mobilization while, rightly, expressing reservations over its potential to spill over into the autonomous province of Kosovo. It is in Kosovo where a strike at the Trepca mining complex by predominately Albanian labourers had understandably ethnic contours given the ultimately successful attempts at revoking the province’s constitutionally guaranteed autonomy by
Slobodan Milosevic, then President of the Serbian League of Communists. 41 Magas nonetheless sees the strike as a template of coexistence, “giving the lie to the daily propaganda in the
Belgrade press about the supposedly unbridgeable ethnic tensions in the province.” 42 In April of
1987, a strike occurred at the Labin mine in northwest Croatia and lasted 33 days, 43 while a civil
38 Ibid. 39 Magas, 117. 40 Gagnon, 31-51. 41 See Miranda Vickers, Between Serb and Albanian: A History of Kosovo (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 227-240. 42 Magas, 107. The Belgrade press, especially the Albanian-baiting of the Serbian daily Politika around the Fadil Hoxha statement, reached paroxysms of nationalist hysteria in the years leading up to this strike. Hoxha, at the time a high-ranking Kosovar Albanian politician and a member of the rotating post-Tito leadership cadre in Yugoslavia reportedly said, in jest, that the alleged rapes of Kosovar Serbian women by Kosovar Albanian men might be prevented if more non-Albanian women would freely prostitute themselves in Kosovo’s drinking establishments. To be sure, this was a horribly misogynistic and tasteless thing to say, from a prominent official no less, but the response to it in the Serbian press, as Dubravka Zarkov analyzes, was “contextualized within the Albanian separatist campaign.” Zarkov writes that in the pages of Politika “a clear and direct line connects the verbal insult of Fadil Hoxha to the physical attacks against…Serbs and Montenegrin women living in Kosovo.” The rapes were thus ethnicized, as “the Albanian separatist-rapist” became “the symbol of all Albanians: monsters without morality.” See Dubravka Zarkov, The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Break-up of Yugoslavia (Durham: Durham University Press, 2007), 39, 41. 43 Woodward, 86.
43
resistance movement emerged in the Macedonian village of Vevcani against republican bureaucrats attempting to raid an irrigation system installed by the villagers themselves. 44
Croatian dockworkers also staged an unsuccessful strike in the port city of Rijeka and, in April of 1991, a staggering 700,000 workers in Serbia – mostly textile, leather, and metal labourers – struck for over two days. 45 Magas highlights this as Serbia’s “tremendous democratic potential” and cites the fact that Serbian trade unions threatened a general strike in order to rebuff an attempt by Milosevic’s legislature to curtail the right to strike. In a dispatch for NLR, she chronicles that
[i]n Serbia, as elsewhere in Yugoslavia, the working class is in fact engaged in increasingly coordinated strike action. The number of strikes is rising, the number of participants is growing, and the actions last longer and are better organized. Although they above all seek economic justice, political demands too are increasingly being articulated. ‘We are entering a period of organized class struggle. The working class is beginning to build up its own cadre, which does not belong to the bureaucracy, speaks the workers’ language and learns quickly from the experience of other workers.’ 46
This “tremendous democratic potential” is reflected in the watershed emergence of independent trade union Nezavisnost (“Independence”) in 1991. Formed as a direct challenge to the
Milosevic-loyal Confederation of Trade Unions of Serbia (SSS), Nezavisnost “adopted a deliberate strategy of autonomy from the state and independence from political parties. Its social roots were identified with opposition to both war and nationalism.” 47 Moreover, “it has maintained within its membership minorities within Serbia such as the Hungarians in Vojvodina, as well as Croats and Albanians.” 48
44 Magas, 107. 45 Ibid., 107, 308, 289. 46 Ibid., 212. 47 Martin Upchurch and Darko Marinkovic, “Wild Capitalism, Privatisation, and Employment Relations in Serbia,” in Employee Relations 33, no. 4 (2011), 104. 48 Ibid.
44
This variegated organized resistance to the consequences of neoliberal restructuring was nourished on real sources of malaise and discontent. Woodward, in a dense and brilliant exposition of the state of the Yugoslav economy, iterates the scale of the social suffering sculpting the quotidian lives of the populace. In the wake of the Financial Operations Act, firms exhibiting losses were compelled to lay off workers instead of placating them with lower wages.
Private sector mini-firms hoped to procure some of these reserve labourers, but could not secure the requisite credit in an economy defined by severe price inflation. “An underclass of unemployed, unskilled workers emerged,” writes Woodward, “concentrated in urban areas.” 49
She goes on to state that
Wage and income restrictions, price increases, and unemployment among young people and women sent average household incomes plummeting to levels of twenty years before. Savings were rapidly depleted for 80 percent of all households, who found it increasingly difficult to live on their incomes. Official unemployment was at 14 percent by 1984, varying from full unemployment in Slovenia to 50 percent in Kosovo, 27 percent in Macedonia, and 23 percent in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in large parts of Serbia, including the capital, Belgrade. 50
These are stark statistics to be sure, and the human toll in poverty, depression, domestic and other forms of violence – an inventory of social suffering if you will – has yet to be written in the vein of Pierre Bourdieu’s monumental The Weight of the World (1998). 51 But the available evidence does much to flesh out the social physics of neoliberalism. The climacteric unemployment statistics cited by Woodward, a good seven years before the outbreak of civil war in Croatia, foreshadows the durability of high unemployment levels throughout the 1990s. In his thorough From Shock to Therapy: the Political Economy of Postsocialist Transformation (2000),
Grzegorz W. Kolodko provides an eight year chronicle (1990-1998) of unemployment as a
49 Woodward, 51. 50 Ibid. 51 Pierre Bourdieu, The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
45
percentage of the labor force for all the newly independent republics. Serbia and Montenegro, under sanctions for the bulk of this period, oscillates between 21.4 and 26.1 per cent unemployment while formerly stable Slovenia registers an obvious increase from 4.7 per cent in
1990 to a high of 14.6 per cent in 1993. 52 Croatia hit a high of 18.2 per cent in 1996 from 9.3 in
1990. 53 Political scientist Lenard J. Cohen states that, at least for Serbia and Montenegro, “the severe pattern of deterioration” was a consequence of international sanctions, the breaking down of historical economic linkages between republics, and civilian and martial support for Serbs in other republics. 54 From 1989-1992, Serbia’s GDP dropped 45 per cent, concomitant with a similar drop in exports, and contributing to record levels of hyperinflation. 55 “Compounding this situation,” explains Cohen, “was the proliferation of private businessmen, war profiteers, and sanctions-busting smugglers, who manipulated the rapidly growing black market and often acquired a certain celebrity status and political influence in Serbia’s vortex of competing nationalist and ultranationalist political groups.”56 The depravity of necessity later captured in films such as Goran Paskaljevic’s Cabaret Balkan (1998) and Srdjan Dragojevic’s The Wounds
(1998) is scholastically transcribed by Woodward, Kolodko, and Cohen, with first person accounts of the Trepca mining strike in 1989 available in Magas’ often compelling collection.
Studies such as those of Adjelka Milic have zeroed in on the social and familial consequences of neoliberalization, underscoring the “retraditionalization and repatriarchalization” of “private
52 Grzegorz W. Kolodko, From Shock to Therapy: the Political Economy of Postsocialist Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 412, 402. 53 Ibid., 372. 54 Lenard J. Cohen, Broken Bonds: the Disintegration of Yugoslavia (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), 277. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid.
46
family life” while the work of Marija Obradovic has effectively detailed the socio-historical effects of neoliberalization in Serbia. 57
An already gendered division of labour in Serbia was exacerbated in the post-Cold War era, with Serbian women spending, according to a 2000 study on domestic labour, “about 5.2 hours per day on housework, and men less than an hour.” 58 “Thus it comes as no surprise”, writes Milic, “that in Serbia 81.0% of women say they feel overloaded with work.” 59 Add to this scenario the country’s elderly population and the increasingly gendered nature of homecare in an era of economic austerity and it is easy to see why “[i]n such a material situation … especially if they cannot find steady employment easily enough, women-mothers prefer to stay at home and devote themselves to caring for members in need of their assistance.” 60 The autonomy of many women is thus circumscribed as is that “of their female offspring, who early on ‘tread in their mother’s footsteps’.” 61 Marginalization and/or privatization of “state social institutions”, 62 and the public assistance traditionally provided by them, compels labouring women to adopt evermore acute practices of sacrificial discipline.
The conditions for such “repatriarchalization” worsened in the 1990s as a result of a privatization process creating little in the way of capital. 63 “Between 1991 and 1993,” writes
Obradovic, “a total of 1,566 enterprises (44.2% of the total) were privatized”. She goes on to state that, “[t]he transformation encompassed 2,388 enterprises or 70.2% of the total number of
57 See Andjelka Milic, “The Family and Work in the Post-socialist Transition of Serbia: 1991-2006,” International Review of Sociology 17, no. 2 (2007), 359-380; and Marija Obradovic, “The Socio-Historical Consequences of Privatization in Serbia,” South-East Review for Labor and Social Affairs 1 (2007), 39-60. 58 Milic, 373. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 375. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid., 377. 63 “Compared with the situation before 1990s, when surveys found absence of discontent among women with this unequal division of housework, now we find mild discontent in 85% of women.” See Milic, 373-374.
47
enterprises” with “over 50% of social capital…privatized in Serbia and Montenegro by 1994”. 64
The elite-centered “redistributive” nature of this process as identified by Harvey is neatly encapsulated by Obradovic in the case of Serbia:
The communist nomenclature in Serbia, as in other republics of the former Yugoslavia, considered civil war and hyperinflation, to the creation of which it amply contributed, to be a very favorable social framework for the private appropriation of social capital. In this aim, it went so far as to abolish the self-management system, because self- management was the primary obstacle to the establishment of a labor market and/or for lowering the price of labor. On the other hand, the value of social capital was under- estimated so as to enable the members of the nomenclature, the new owners, to acquire property at minimum cost. The inflow of resources into state funds was symbolic. Privatization did not encourage the mobilization of capital while the sale of social assets absorbed available financial resources so that funds for new investment, i.e. for the development of production and modernization, were reduced. An accelerated sale of social property rapidly increased supply, resulting in a falling price of social capital, thus allowing the nomenclature to get rich swiftly and easily. Enormous social resources (material and human) were spent on changing ownership relationships and ensuring the economic domination of the nomenclature. 65 In light of such obscene and unproductive consolidations of elite power, it is easy to sympathize with Woodward’s claim that, for the vast majority of Yugoslavs, “reaction to austerity was restricted to the personal level and to a growing realm of anti-politics.” 66 There is much truth to this and, in fact, helps to explain the dynamics of the nationalist response to the aforementioned strike mobilizations. The loss of purchasing power was supplemented with the emergence of more nakedly interpersonal means of procuring goods and services such as “barter, gifts, friendships, political networks, and connections, and the reciprocal obligations of kinship and ritual kinship.” 67 An economic habitus of the sort envisioned and anticipated by both neo-liberal theory and the dull compulsion of its practice failed to materialize. “Instead of encouraging market behavior as intended,” explains Woodward “the reforms – by forcing people to resort to
64 Obradovic, 44. 65 Ibid., 44-45. 66 Woodward, 58. 67 Ibid.
48
the older norms of reciprocity and mutuality – reinforced the localization of economic redistribution and the social divisions within the labor force prevalent in preceding decades.” 68 In the midst of the destruction of inherited forms of social solidarity, regional and municipal disparities emerged, and those implicated in these inequalities would find means to “hustle” a livelihood of sorts. More conspicuous forms of ethnic and racial violence, coupled with an anti- feminist backlash not unlike the one coalescing in the United States at the time, took root in this socio-economic anomie. 69 “The destruction of forms of social solidarity” Harvey states, “…of the very idea of society itself, leaves a gaping hole in the social order.” 70 What often emerge to occupy this void are serialized practices of criminality, anti-sociality, and violence, some of which are not regarded as such by many of its desperate practitioners. The work of Michael Pugh has thoroughly and sensitively explained the importance of “shadow economies” in mitigating the effects of neoliberalization in post-Dayton Bosnia, and justifies this network as one of
“coping or survival”. “[T]he reliance of sectors of the population on mafia welfare and petty economic crime” he writes, “is, at least in part, a function of impoverishment and the withdrawal of public safety nets”. 71 Martin Upchurch and Darko Marinkovic point out that “GDP per capita in Serbia fell from $2,696 in 1990 to US$1,965 in 1999 while the ‘grey economy’ as a proportion of GDP increased to as much as 53.4 per cent in 1994.” 72 Such an ostensibly
Hobbesian reality compels representatives of the state to control, manage, reconfigure and/or judiciously embrace such problematic manifestations.
68 Ibid. 69 See Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006). 70 Harvey, 80. 71 Michael Pugh, “Transformation in the Political Economy of Bosnia since Dayton”, International Peacekeeping 12, no. 3 (2005), 457. 72 Martin Upchurch, “State, Labour and Market in Post-revolution Serbia,” Capital and Class , no. 89 (2006), 4.
49
“The inevitable response” writes Harvey “is to reconstruct social solidarities, albeit along different lines – hence the revival of interest in religion and morality, in new forms of associationism (around questions of rights and citizenship, for example) and even the revival of older political forms (fascism, nationalism, localism, and the like).” 73 Bogdan Denitch (1996) and Eric D. Gordy (1999) provide compelling accounts of the emergence of various forms of popular culture and dress, discourses and rhetoric that attest to the salience of nationalist prejudice, masculinist posturing, and religious mystagogy and/or fundamentalism induced by neoliberalized conditions. 74 “In those poorer communities”, writes Woodward, “where job cuts were most severe and federal government subsidies and employment were more critical to the local economy, the employment requirement of proportionality among national groups made ethnicity more salient rather than less.” 75 This was especially the case in a province such as
Kosovo, with its majority ethnic Albanian population, and the Serbian-dominated enclave in
Croatia, the Krajina.
The evidence procured and narrated above is only a modest sampling of the social suffering engendered by the neoliberalization of Yugoslavia. My purpose is simply to sketch the extent to which the multiple responses to a decade of structural adjustment and the precipitous agreement finalized by Ante Markovic and George H.W. Bush were clearly practices of class resistance to the counter-productive “redistributive” efforts of neoliberalized federal politicians and bureaucrats and their contrarian, and sometimes openly hostile, colleagues in the republics.
The protracted implementation of neoliberal reforms over the decade leading up to, including, and surmounting the 1991 secession of Croatia and Slovenia from the SFRY set the conditions
73 Harvey, 81. 74 See Bogdan Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 73-75; and Eric Gordy, The Culture of Power in Serbia: Nationalism and the Destruction of Alternatives (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1999), 103-164. 75 Woodward, 58.
50
for a complex, contradictory, and shifting alliance of political forces. These political forces responded to the physics wrought by these socio-economic transformations in a myriad of ways.
Jasna Dragovic-Soso in her brilliant Saviors of the Nation: Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism (2002) chronicles how in Serbia a heterogeneous coalition of intellectuals created proposals to recentralize the federation along lines that were deemed by some to be “Serbo-centric.” 76 Conversely, Slovenian intellectuals proposed a sweeping decentralization of the federal apparatus informed, to some extent, by a conspicuous and alienating Eurocentrism. 77 The impoverished and criminalized status of the Albanian majority in the autonomous province of Kosovo served as an unfortunate cause celebre in the political posturing between Slovene and Serbian intellectuals over the status of the federation. 78
Moreover, the “demobilization” strategies practiced by Slobodan Milosevic, Franjo Tudjman, and Alija Izetbegovic leading up to war, ethnic cleansing, and rape are demonstrable examples of a “shift from government (state power on its own) to governance (a broader configuration of state and key elements in civil society).” 79
For the SFRY, this shift to governance coalesced with the emergence of an extensive civil society, “democratization” as sociologists are fond of describing this process, as the first multiparty elections were held in 1990. Woodward and Gagnon disagree as to the nature and intent of these elections. The former expresses a highly pessimistic interpretation, comparing the
76 Jasna Dragovic-Soso, Saviours of the Nation: Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 162-205. 77 The deeply Eurocentric notion of “’Central Europe’ became the symbol of Slovenia’s national revival, with the Yugoslav ‘Balkans’ replacing ‘Asiatic’ Russia as the alien ‘Other’.” Indeed, for many Slovenian intellectuals, “Slovenism…offered…an escape from the Balkans, towards the promise of Mitteleuropa and perhaps in the distant and ever-elusive future of Western Europe or Europe itself.” Milan Kundera’s controversial article “The Tragedy of Central Europe” (1985) had a profound impact on a number of Slovenian writers, its ethos incarnated in the political slogan “Europe zdaj!” (Europe now!) Self-aggrandizing analogies to Austria and Italy, a pronounced antipathy towards the influx of proletarians from the Southern Yugoslav republics and, most extremely manifest in the writings of Taras Kermauner, a difficulty in identifying with “pro-Asian and pro-African Yugoslavia” were aspects of this simultaneously balkanist and Eurocentric discourse. See Dragovic-Soso, 165-166, 198. 78 Ibid., 115-161. 79 Harvey, 77.
51
elections in Slovenia and Croatia to the “elite project” of the eighteenth century “whereby local gentry reached out for the people’s support in their struggle against the crown.” 80 The elections themselves, she concludes, were “a vehicle for local republican politicians.” 81 Whereas Gagnon claims that “[t]he violence in the former Yugoslavia was a strategic policy chosen by elites who were confronted with political pluralism and popular mobilization”, 82 Woodward clearly denies this groundswell as autonomously plebeian in any way. “The demand for elections did not originate from popular pressure,” she writes, “but with politicians seeking more political power over their territories and opposition intellectuals seeking more influence over the course of events.” 83 One wonders, then, as to what constituted “the course of events” since elsewhere she documents the drastic increase in strike mobilizations in the wake of neoliberal economic reforms. It may have very well have been the case that popular pressure was not focused on elections. In fact, Gagnon’s entire argument, despite the key difference with Woodward, underscores the role of elites in constructing homogenous and electorally legitimated spaces in order to “silence and marginalize those who disagree with those in power; it demobilizes people who may in other circumstances have mobilized against the regime and effectively prevents their political participation.” 84 Disagreements are expressed in a variety of ways, including strikes, and “in other circumstances” implies the potential for emergent opposition. In this sense, the differences between Gagnon and Woodward are negligible.
Gagnon convincingly argues that the strategies of republican elites, whom he cleverly dubs “ethnic entrepreneurs”, 85 constructed and/or induced an unnatural relationship predicated
80 Woodward, 117. 81 Ibid. 82 Gagnon, 7. 83 Woodward, 117. 84 Gagnon, 28-29. 85 Ibid., 3.
52
upon “fear”; a relationship that must be continuously “imposed” and “enforced”. 86 This socially destructive investment is often undertaken by those elites who have a significant amount of power and influence to lose. Woodward concurs:
The multiparty elections in Yugoslavia in 1990, rather than being a regular instrument of popular choice and expression of political freedom or the transition to a democratic system, became the critical turning point in the process of political disintegration over a decade of economic crisis and constitutional conflict. 87
She goes on to state, as does Gagnon, that despite the severe propaganda campaign initiated by the elites of Croatia and Serbia in 1991, “the voters did not make a clear choice for nationalism and independence.” “They did push the nationalist momentum further”, she writes, “not because of the voting rights themselves, but because of the use politicians made of them.” 88 Upchurch concurs insofar as a “class based workers opposition to the Milosevic regime, the product of economic crisis and an emergent civic ecology capable sounding specific needs, was disaffected at key junctures by national chauvinism.” 89 Prior to the emergence of liberal democracy, strikes were readily accepted as appropriate means of articulating popular concerns. Nonetheless,
“ethnic entrepreneurs” such as Milosevic and his ruling Socialist Party were able to divert these progressive energies through the deployment of nationalist rhetoric and the privileging of ethnic grievances. In 1990, at the zenith of labour unrest, Milosevic, in an emotive and jingoistic speech, commanded the disaffected to “go back to work” leading one trade unionist to lament
“we came to the rally as workers and left as Serbs.” 90 There is still a debate amongst participants, historians, and sociologists as to whether the “triumph of nationalism” was a consequence of the overall vulnerability of Serbian labour due to its peculiar history of worker management or a
86 Ibid., 29. 87 Woodward, 118. 88 Ibid. 89 Martin Upchurch and Darko Marinkovic, Workers and Revolution in Serbia: From Tito to Milosevic and Beyond (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 98. 90 Ibid., 99.
53
bonafide trigger for ethnonationalist politics precisely because of its cumulative vigour .91
Regardless, it is quite clear that the elite appeal to nationalism demobilized labour and demonstrably ethnicized the union movement. Trade union leaders who refused to abide by ethnic proprieties were under constant threat. 92
Neither Woodward nor Gagnon, however, are putting forth a liberal interpretation of early phases of “democratization” as one in which the people are rendered as “masses”, “raw material”, or wholly media-saturated dupes of cynical or crafty elites. Not only were there concrete materialities of resistance, but empirically verifiable anti-nationalist sentiments in the decade leading up to multiparty elections as well. Gagnon proves beyond a reasonable doubt that
“there is very little evidence from the ethnically diverse communities of these republics that would indicate…the massive violence undertaken in the name of Serbs and Croats would wrack the region and tear apart the most ethnically homogenous communities.” 93 His thorough interrogation of survey data from the 1980s and 1990s illustrate very generous stratums of
“positive coexistence”. 94 Yugoslavism as an identity was growing in popularity, especially in
Bosnia, and Serbs in both Croatia and Bosnia “were among the strongest proponents of peaceful coexistence.” 95
The relationship between popular mobilization of a non-electoral kind and the real (or perceived) threats to the ensconced privileges of republican elites is inseparable from the
91 Ibid., 98. See also Mihail Arandarenko, “Waiting for the Workers: Explaining Labour Quiescence in Serbia,” Workers after Workers’ States: Labor and Politics in Postcommunist Eastern Europe , eds. Simon Crowley and David Ost (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 159-179; and Miroslav Stanojevic, Workers’ Power in Transition Economies: the Cases of Serbia and Slovenia,” European Journal of Industrial Relations 9, no. 3 (2003), 283-301. 92 Upchurch and Marinkovic, Workers and Revolution in Serbia , 99. 93 Gagnon, 34. 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid. For example, in a November 1989 poll of Bosnians, “80 percent of the wider population surveyed considered interethnic relations in the places in the places where they lived to be positive, and 66 percent saw interethnic relations in Bosnia-Herzegovina as the most stable in Yugoslavia. When asked whether ethnicity should be taken into account when choosing marriage partners, 80 percent of Serbs, 77 percent of Muslims, 93.4 percent of Yugoslavs, and 66 percent of Croats replied negatively.” See Gagnon, 40.
54
neoliberal reforms pursued by the federal government and the republics themselves.
Neoliberalization ushered in multiple sites of resistance to elite power. The response to this was elite management of some kind in order to secure, consolidate, and/or expand elite power. Of course, the consequences of this as war, rape, and ethnic cleansing are amply documented elsewhere and need not be retraced here. 96 What I assert is that a subtle or explicit reading of
“the serbs” as tradition, savagery, backwardness, and/or ethnonationalist excess often served as a standard against which many ethnicized balkanologies defined their respective projects. This is, of course, not to absolve the Milosevic regime and its Bosnian proxies of their crimes; much credible scholarship and human rights reports attest to their brutality, the height of which was the
1995 execution of at least 6,186 men and boys in Srebrenica. 97 What needs to be highlighted, however, is how the social physics of neoliberalism and class struggle were not only obscured and remade in identitarian terms by nationalist forces on the ground, but also distorted and reconstituted as uniquely agonistic ethnic atomies by scholars and commentators in the Global
North. It was as if neoliberal state dissolution and war could only be understood culturally as national pathologies or at least the consequence of a national pathology; centering the historical conditions for state failure and civil war is seen as subterfuge or an abdication of moral responsibility. On the contrary, the psychologizing of culture collapses socio-economic complexity into anthropomorphized atomies in need of “civilization” thus uniquely justifying
96 The sources for this are numerous and growing, but three stellar accounts are Steven L. Burg and Paul Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Ethnic Conflict and International Intervention (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1999); Laura Silber and Alan Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (New York: Penguin Books, 1997); and Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia: the Third Balkan War (New York: Penguin Books, 1996). 97 See for example Daniel L. Bethlehem and Marc Weller, The “Yugoslav” Crisis in International Law: General Issues, Part 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Heike Krieger, The Kosovo Conflict and International Law: An Analytical Documentation 1974-1999 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); “DNA Results of the International Commission on Missing Persons Reveal the Identity of 6,186 Srebrenica Victims,” International Commission on Missing Persons , July 9, 2009, http://www.ic-mp.org/press-releases/dna- results-of-the-international-commission-on-missing-persons-reveal-the-identity-of-6186-srebrenica-victims-dnk- izvjestaji-medunarodne-komisije-za-nestale-osobe-icmp-otkrili-identitete-6186-sreb/.
55
Western military and economic interventions – interventions that hastened state failure to begin with. Cross-ethnic class struggle, its potential and presence as a social force capable of transforming the conditions in which balkanism manifests, is epistemologically repressed. This is why the canonization of “the serbs” in early 1990s academia as “European alterity”, 98 substantialist and self-contained, is problematic; it operates as a red herring that distracts one from the contradictions of neoliberalism and its class struggles. “The serbs”, as Longinovic helpfully summarizes, serve as a reminder of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and irrational ethnic nationalism, and provide a potent magnet legitimizing a historically conformist liberal exceptionalism. All other balkanisms in the early nineties are defined in relation to this one.
98 Tomislav Longinovic, Vampires like US: Writing Down “the serbs” (Belgrade: Belgrade Circle, 2005), 14-15.
56
CHAPTER 2: THE PITFALLS OF ETHNICIZED BALKANOLOGIES: MESTROVIC, ANZULOVIC, MACKINNON, ZIZEK
In this chapter, I critique a representative sample of ethnicized balkanologies from a ubiquitous
1990s library of essentialist literature. Rather than do a general schematic survey of a large swath of texts that “think about Yugoslavia”, 1 I foreground a cluster of works and commentaries that span several disciplines and, by virtue of their timely publication, professional clout and/or popular influence, had a discernible and efficient effect on how a broader literate public views the Balkans and, especially, the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Indeed, I am less interested in an intellectual history of this ethnicized literature than with illustrating the political importance of a different way of reading these culturalist texts. As such, I underscore the more problematic examples of ethnicized commentary and scholarship on the break-up of Yugoslavia in order to highlight how critical balkanologies have not fully extricated themselves from the pitfalls of deeply balkanist discourses.
My selection of, respectively, a sociologist, anthropologist, feminist legal scholar, and
Marxist philosopher reflects how these intellectuals, despite different political persuasions and disciplinary training, embody the sensus imperium in their essentializations of “the serbs” – with
“the serbs” serving as a floating signifier/standard against which all other post-Cold War balkanisms are produced and measured. The prejudices and simplifications exhibited by these scholars are not exceptions to the rule, but its most summative embodiments. The obsession with
“social character” exhibited by Stjepan Mestrovic and Branimir Anzulovic psychologizes and de-historicizes a politically, economically, and socially variegated people while Catharine
MacKinnon’s feminist reading of the Bosnian conflict is in its own way a performance of
1 See Sabrina P. Ramet, Thinking about Yugoslavia: Scholarly Debates about the Yugoslav Breakup and the Wars in Bosnia and Kosovo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
57
“imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” 2 Slavoj Zizek’s multiple commentaries on the dissolution, although conscious of the manner in which the Balkans are racialized, nonetheless reads the belligerents as self-contained entities and the Serbs in particular as libidinally nationalist. Such rarefied culturalism operates as if the “social incoherence” produced by structural adjustment had no bearing on subsequent events.
‘the serbs’ and the Sensus Imperium
The most important texts on the “ethnic” problem of “the serbs” were published between 1993 and 2003 and speak to a preoccupation with Serbian culture past and present. In surveying some scholarly analyses of “the serbs” during this decade, I fully appropriate Longinovic’s helpful lowercase qualification – despite its obfuscatory consequences in his work – given that it signifies a non-identitarian metonym that magnetizes the most essentialized aspects of scholastic and popular balkanism. It usefully represents, in the authors I subsequently interrogate, a settled and universalizing cultural response to the overdetermined complexities of IMF structural adjustment and neoliberal war. The 1990s canonization of “the serbs” as everything that must be transcended, fought, and/or destroyed, or at least taken heed of in the way one takes heed of the grotesque - with fear and fascination - is summed up nicely by Longinovic as an example of
“European alterity”:
Within the context of the former Yugoslavia and its tragic end, the global media complex has constructed the spectre of “the serbs” as a doubly orientalized other of the U.S.-led West, a nation that thwarted the aspirations for independence of other Yugoslav ethnic groups. Western strategic phantasms have handled “the serbs” as if they were miniature Russians, an alien nation who culturally and politically never departed from the indigestible Orient-in-Europe. Serving as a metaphor for the bloody past Europe proper is trying to forget, this Orthodox Christian population was transformed into a mirror reflecting past traumas of the old continent. The exclusion from the global community was indeed the separation from the West, whose media presented other Yugoslav nations as part of civilized Europe, while “the serbs” were relegated to the East, both communist
2 See bell hooks, Feminism Theory: From Margin to Center (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 118-119.
58
and “Oriental”, where they continued to play the role of civilization’s other throughout the nineteen nineties. 3
“the serbs”, as Longinovic defines the term, serve as a reminder of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and irrational ethnic nationalism, and provide a potent magnet for attracting the assumptions behind what I chart and evaluate as a sensus imperium or imperial sensibility. Of course, attracting these assumptions requires a clear delineation of what “the serbs” represent to the authors whose texts I take to be representative of this trend in balkanology. These assumptions are summarized as follows:
“the serbs” are representative of rural, (sub)proletarian or “peasant” origins. This somehow automatically pitches them outside of the Enlightenment and illustrates their preoccupation with “Dinaric” values such as cast (honour), cojstvo (manliness), and junastvo (heroism).
“the serbs” are predisposed to “communism” in the silences and sounds of this sensus imperium and all this entails: authoritarianism, bureaucracy, and nepotism.
“the serbs” are predisposed to “fascism” in the silences and sounds of this sensus imperium and all this entails: authoritarianism, bureaucracy, and nepotism.
“the serbs” partake of genocidal behaviour, which, when not practiced, is always trigger- ready.
“the serbs” are misogynists.
“the serbs” are a “victim-nation”; sufferers of a psychological pathology that always already displace responsibility for actions onto a convenient Other.
“the serbs” are categorically ethnic nationalists.
Taken separately, or as a whole, these are essentializations of highly sophisticated and heterogeneous peoples that paint racist caricatures of them. 4 Defined in such a stark manner, “the
3 Tomislav Longinovic, Vampires like US: Writing Down “the serbs” (Belgrade: Belgrade Circle, 2005), 14-15. 4 Longinovic provides a useful, if somewhat problematic, typology of the Serbian “ethnic assemblage”. “In fact, culturally,” he writes, “‘the serbs’ form a rather diverse ethnic assemblage: (1) “The serbs” of Vojvodina and southern Hungary who imagine the core of the new nation in the nineteenth century, steeped in the Central European cultural milieu as eternal renegades due to their Byzantine sense of belonging; (2) “The serbs” of southern Serbia, Macedonia, hybridized with the “Oriental” culture brought by the Ottomans, yet forming the ancient core of the nation tied territorially to Kosovo and the memory of imperial Serbia of Dusan the Mighty; (3) “The serbs” living
59
serbs” become the repulsive antipode to Western bourgeois political sensibilities. Also implicated in this typology are certain intellectual traditions, in particular Romanticism and, not unrelated, populism. A condemnation of “the serbs” is often coded as a condemnation of “the mass” and its various manifestations as psychology or political threat. The Slovenian Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Zizek is notorious for doing just this. In an article published shortly after the toppling of Milosevic by a Western-intelligence funded “popular” movement dubbed Otpor! – whose intellectual muse was the Habermas-educated philosopher Zoran Djindjic – Zizek argued that all Serbian domestic resistance was de facto “nationalist”. 5 His commentary on the new configuration of political forces in Serbia implied that there were no progressive alternatives, despite the fact that they were present on the ground, and refused to understand the socio- economic and post-conflict basis of this alleged nationalism (always expressed in the singular I might add). There was little if any indication that those peoples signified under “the serbs” may have legitimate grievances, or that the nationalism(s) might be explained relationally as constitutive of the structural and socio-economic dissolution of a state susceptible to the
along the Adriatic coast of Montenegro and Dalmatia, alongside Catholics within the larger Mediterranean cultural sphere of tolerance; (4) The Dinaric culture of “the serbs” living along the Military Frontier of Croatia and Bosnia- Herzegovina, fostering masculinity of the outlaw and border guard, squeezed between the Holy Roman Empire and the “unholy” Ottoman Porte they were escaping from.”. These in and of themselves are nesting essentializations, overlooking the cross-pollination between the various Serbian groupings. The cultural borders are as porous as the ethnic ones, but as a more nuanced counterpoise to the mono-nationalistic conventional discourse about Serbs, this is a necessary starting typology. See Longinovic, Vampires like US , 13-14. 5 Zizek has a well-documented history of Serbo-phobic comments and insinuations that belies his often extraordinarily prescient and persuasive critiques of liberal capitalist hegemonies in popular culture and beyond. His is an internationalist vision, but his pointed criticisms of balkanism in The Plague of Fantasies (1997) and his refusal to see the Serbs in anything but nationalistic terms in articles such as “The Morning After” and the strangely disingenuous NLR contribution “Against the Double Blackmail” (1999) regularly vitiates his otherwise noble pretensions to anti-racism. The latter article appeared in two versions. One was published on the European Graduate School website, prefaced as a copy of the NLR piece, and contained the following pro-war sentence: “So, precisely as a Leftist, my answer to the dilemma "Bomb or not?" is: not yet ENOUGH bombs, and they are TOO LATE.” The original NLR version conveniently omits this bomb-hungry position, presumably for a more “progressive” audience. See Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 60-64; Slavoj Zizek, “The Morning After,” Eurozine , March 3, 2001, http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2001-03-27-zizek-en.html; Slavoj Zizek, “Against the Double Blackmail,” New Left Review I, no. 234 (1999), 76-82; “Against The Double Blackmail Slavoj Zizek. New Left Review 234, March-April 1999,” http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/against-the-double- blackmail/ .
60
imperatives of international capital and the geo-political interests of powerful states which led to a civil war. This explanation in no way absolves Serbian political leaders from their role in the violent fragmentation of Yugoslavia, but situates this fragmentation in a framework that might explain the obstinate durability of nationalist positions.
Balkanologists such as Tomislav Longinovic and Elizabeth Dauphinee have interrogated pejorative representations of “the serbs” circulating throughout what the former refers to as the
“global media complex”. 6 Their modes of critique, although different in emphasis and disciplinary standards, nonetheless share similar theoretical aims. This is also true of more general critiques of balkanist discourses by Maria Todorova, Vesna Goldsworthy, Milica Bakic-
Hayden, Andrew Hammond, Bozidar Jezernik, and Marko Zivkovic. In all instances, however, the object of critique, deconstruction, and/or “unveiling” is always presented as a culturally deterministic reduction of a people’s “social character” – a term, originally put forth and explicated by the German social psychologist Erich Fromm and one carrying an inordinate about of pejorative baggage in subsequent uses. Fromm defines “social character” as
the whole of the traits which in their particular configuration form the personality structure of this or that individual. The social character comprises only a selection of traits, the essential nucleus of the character structure of most members of a group which has developed as the result of the basic experiences and mode of life common to that group . Although there will be always “deviants” with a totally different character structure, the character structure of most members of the group are variations of this nucleus, brought about by the accidental factors of birth and life experience as they differ from one individual to another. 7
At best, the concept, properly qualified, might provide a compass of sorts for an exploration of everyday life. Yet talk of essential nuclei and “variations” of such types are rife with idealist simplifications, and the subsequent appropriation of this concept within balkanology has been
6 Tomislav Z. Longinovic, Vampire Nation: Violence as Cultural Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 7. 7 See Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1941), 275-276.
61
quite problematic; its usage and/or sly reappearance in the works of Stjepan Mestrovic and
Branimir Anzulovic contemptible. This is precisely the point.
What Todorova, Dauphinee, and Longinovic, et al are up against are precisely ways of writing about the region and its peoples that ossify into sociological functionalism – both inside and outside of academia. Modern ethnic war is simplistically attributed to the martial vitality of
“Dinaric” peoples, an unequivocally male chauvinist communist culture, some ahistorical myth of martyrdom which never seems to resignify despite the different socio-historical contexts in which it finds itself, “Christoslavism”, 8 the “narcissism of minor differences” – thereby making
Balkan peoples a distinctly petty lot – the alleged clock-stop of Titoist rule and the “inevitable” return of the repressed upon the resumption of time, etc. Sadly, this list can be extended, and is easily one of the great failures of popular intellectual acumen – as good an argument as any against evaluating conflicting claims via an appeal to the intelligentsia. Yet authors such as
Michael Ignatieff, Robert D. Kaplan, Catherine MacKinnon, Michael Sells, Sabrina P. Ramet,
Slavenka Drakulic, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, amongst others, set the terms of observation.
Cross-pollination was evident between the contributions of specialists and those of dilettantes; the differences were often negligible. Although the entire Balkans were deemed unruly, savage, congenitally tragic, a rattling chain of failed republics, a concentrated balkanism was squeezed out for the “serbs” – with the pulp. Sensationalized and poor quality writing dominated and, in terms of argumentation, undergraduate fallacies of all sorts were committed. A case in point is the early and contentiously received output by Texas A&M sociologist Stjepan Mestrovic.
Mestrovic, the Harvard educated grandson of famous Croatian sculptor Ivan Mestrovic, published six books on the Balkans in a short span of three years from 1993 to 1996 with
8 See Michael Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 45-52. Robert M. Hayden provides a short but illuminating criticism of Sells. See Robert M. Hayden, “The Tactical Uses of Passion on Bosnia,” Current Anthropology 38, no. 5 (1997), 924-926.
62
provocative banners such as Habits of the Balkan Heart (1993), The Barbarian Temperament
(1993), and The Balkanization of the West (1994); titles that would not be out of place amongst the tomes of nineteenth century race science. One might be tempted to dismiss contributions that received, according to Balkan historian John B. Allcock, “a generally unsympathetic reception among social scientists” 9 and were a more extreme version of “the myth of ancient hatreds” 10 narrative that footed the Yugoslav conflict in “chronic mental states or cultural predispositions.” 11 Yet perhaps due to the still fresh naivety surrounding the conflict in the early
1990s, Mestrovic’s works nonetheless “attracted wide attention” 12 and were especially popular
“among intellectuals within the region.” 13 In fact, they were affirmed and popularized by political scientist Sabrina P. Ramet and sociologist Thomas Cushman, the latter of which co- wrote an introduction with Mestrovic for their 1996 edited collection This Time We Knew:
Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia that includes dubious pieces by Philip J. Cohen and
Jean Baudrillard. 14 In the almost two decades after the publication of this collection, Mestrovic and Cushman have become part of a shared ideological approach to the study of the region, best summarized in Ramet’s Thinking about Yugoslavia: Scholarly Debates About the Yugoslav
Breakup and the Wars in Bosnia and Kosovo (2005); a survey that provoked an intense debate in two different publications between Ramet and scholars Aleksa Djilas and Robert M. Hayden,
9 John B. Allcock, “Rural-Urban Differences and the Break-up of Yugoslavia,” Balkanologie VI, no. 1-2 (2002), 105-106. 10 John B. Allcock, “The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia,” in Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies: A Scholar’s Initiative , eds. Charles Ingrao and Thomas A. Emmert (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2013), 355. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 384. 13 Allcock, “Rural-Urban Differences and the Break-up of Yugoslavia”, 106. 14 See Thomas Cushman and Stjepan G. Mestrovic, eds., This Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia (New York: New York University Press, 1996).
63
with Hayden calling her out for numerous logical fallacies and an irresponsible militancy. 15 This shared approach is grounded, Hayden convincingly states, in a moralizing discourse and pits alleged Serb sympathizers against (Western) proponents of Universal Reason. Here is Ramet on the alleged differences between the two camps:
On the one side are those who have taken a moral universalist perspective, holding that there are universal norms in international politics . . . founded in Universal Reason and expressed in international covenants such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. . . . On the other side are authors who reject the universalist framework, with its emphasis on universal norms and universal human rights and who, in their accounts, embrace one or another version of moral relativism. 16
She positions herself amongst the Universalists and condemns the others as “collaborators”. Now the implications of this are obvious; it lends itself to civilization-mongering, an ignorance of the darker aspects of said universalism, reduces a rich body of diverse and critically-acclaimed scholarship to an imputed political failure, and justifies an important perspective by way of a genetic fallacy. The point is that the entire project is grounded in a theological perspective that privileges a discourse of good versus evil. It is precisely this Manichean approach to the study and interpretation of the region, an approach that echoes the tautly bounded intolerance of the most egregious ethnic nationalisms, which an entire generation of critical scholars from
Todorova and Bakic-Hayden to Dauphinee and Longinovic interrogate, historicize and/or deconstruct. Now this is not to say that Ramet and company are the immediate interlocutors of said critical scholars, but it is to say that, at its inception, critical balkanology was up against
15 See Aleksa Djilas, “The Academic West and the Balkan Test,” The Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans 9, no. 3 (2007), 323-332; John R. Lampe and Sabrina P. Ramet, “Responses to Aleksa Djilas, “The Academic West and the Balkan Test’,” The Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans 9, no. 3 (2007), 113-120; Robert M. Hayden, “Moralizing about Scholarship about Yugoslavia,” East European Politics and Societies 21, no. 1, (2007), 182-193. The same issue also contains Ramet’s reply and Hayden’s reply to Ramet in what is an entertaining debate and a microcosm of the main academic divide in balkanology. See Sabrina P. Ramet “A Review of One Chapter: An Example of Irresponsible Self-Indulgence,” East European Politics and Societies 21, no. 1 (2007), 194-203; and Robert M. Hayden, “Reply to Ramet,” East European Politics and Societies 21, no. 1 (2007), 204. 16 Sabrina P. Ramet, Thinking about Yugoslavia: Scholarly Debates about the Yugoslav Breakup and the Wars in Bosnia and Kosovo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1.
64
widespread discourses of “chronic mental states or cultural predispositions” read through the tainted spectacles of “chaos, savagery, backwardness, and obfuscation.” 17 It is important to highlight these deeply partisan texts in order iterate the progressive contributions of critical balkanology while, contra Todorova, steering away from claims that such balkanism was the exclusive import of journalistic publications.
Revisiting the roundly discredited studies of Croatian anthropologist Dinko Tomasic,
Mestrovic proceeds to define Serbian culture as “Dinaric”, hints at its “predatory aspects”, and deigns to uphold an interpretive position that is, by his own admission, neither “analytic” nor
“empirical”. 18 He even goes so far as to state that “the notion of social character is deemed as non-sociological and politically incorrect by many contemporary sociologists”, blaming this not on the high probability that it is severely pre-judgmental, unscientific, and susceptible to race- thinking, but on “postmodernists”. 19 Mestrovic concedes that “we will never convince readers who are hostile to this concept to read us with an open mind” thereby eliciting discomfort with an approach that serves as “a substitute for biological instinct among humans.” 20 Moreover, he audaciously foregrounds the heuristic import of stereotypes over any kind of sociological reflexivity, duly recognizing that social character is “problematic”, “nonsociological”, and
“politically incorrect” for contemporary scholars yet granting the analytical import of lay usages of reductionist terms that signify cultural difference. 21 What, then, is the point of this recuperative enterprise?
17 Andrew Hammond, The Debated Lands: British and American Representations of the Balkans (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), 5. 18 Stjepan Mestrovic, Habits of the Balkan Heart (College Station: Texas A&M University, 1993), xi, viii, xi. 19 Ibid., x. 20 Ibid., 21 Ibid., xi.
65
“[I]f a hidden agenda must be attributed to us in relying on this concept,” writes
Mestrovic, “it is an agenda geared towards democracy and liberalism” that is “more useful to policymakers than to academicians.” 22 His tome is interventionist, summoning the activist sociology of C. Wright Mills, but exhibiting the slavish expediency of Noam Chomsky’s New
Mandarins. Since he is in “broad agreement” with “world opinion” as it pertains to the “barbaric aspects” of the Serbian social character, his work allegedly carries a moral import that renders it immune to criticism. 23 For Mestrovic, the West is a moral failure as it pertains to the Yugoslav wars of secession because it was too “provincial to assume that all cultures in the world hold the same values that it holds dear, such as rational self-interest, keeping one’s word, or honoring a contract.” 24 Alas, the inverse of this are people who are irrational and unscrupulous liars – “the serbs”. He equates Serbian culture with the potential for “a new strain of totalitarianism” arguing that Western liberal democracies must challenge Serbian barbarism because “[a]n entire cultural worldview is at stake.” 25 For Mestrovic, “Dinaric culture” is “mostly responsible” for the conflict in the Balkans. 26 Here is an unabashed articulation of the Balkans as anchored in “savagery” and
“backwardness” that also marks, to borrow a pertinent quotation from Natasa Kovacevic, “a passage towards the obsession not so much with race as behaviour, presentation and image, in order to appear civilized or worthy of Western accolade.” 27
Anthropologist Marko Zivkovic, in his succinct and informative “Violent Highlanders and Peaceful Lowlanders: The Uses and Abuses of Ethno-Geography in the Balkans from
22 Ibid., xi, xii 23 Ibid., ix, xii. 24 Ibid., viii. 25 Ibid., xii, xi. 26 Ibid., xiv. 27 Natasa Kovacevic, “Orientalizing Post/Communism: Europe's ‘Wild East’ in Literature and Film,” Reconstruction 8, no. 4 (2008), http://reconstruction.eserver.org/Issues/084/kovacevic.shtml .
66
Versailles to Dayton” (1997), 28 traces the uses of the “ethno-geography” deployed by Mestrovic in the latter’s Habits of the Balkan Heart . Zivkovic provides a genealogy of these functionalist forms of theory and practice that includes the oeuvre of Mestrovic’s muse Dinko Tomasic, as well as those of the Serbian anthropologists Jovan Cvijic and Vladimir Dvornikovic. What is at issue here is the hegemonic persistence of particular typologies within the anthropological literature on the Balkans. Zivkovic is keen to point out that the trope of the “highlander” or
“Dinaric mountaineer” is often used “as a rhetorical weapon in inter-ethnic conflicts” in as much as it has served as a means of Balkan self-designation and self-understanding. 29 Tomasic’s
Personality and Culture in Eastern European Politics (1948) argues that the “savagery”,
“obscurantism” and “backwardness” that allegedly peppers the Balkan historical landscape is to be located in the eternal conflict between “Dinaric” and “zadruga” cultures. 30 He claims that
Dinaric kinship units are responsible for the rearing of peoples who are irrational, bi-polar, aggressive, and power-hungry. A climate of “rivalry and antagonism”, writes Tomasic, produces
“[d]eep feelings of insecurity” and “a strong need for self-assertion” that easily slips into
“boastfulness and illusions of grandeur.” 31 Moreover, quoting Cvijic, he concludes that these people “can hate with a consuming passion and a violence that reaches a white heat” and helped foster a “herdsmen-brigand-warrior-police ideal” that “furnished a program for the conquerors of urban centers and of the surrounding peasantry.” 32
Note the marked urban-rural divide in the content of the above passage; the presentation of the threat is figuratively Roman, with the barbarians at the gate. Insinuations of whom and
28 Marko Zivkovic, “Violent Highlanders and Peaceful Lowlanders: The Uses and Abuses of Ethno-Geography in the Balkans from Versailles to Dayton,” Replika (1997), http://www.c3.hu/scripta/scripta0/replika/honlap/english/02/08zivk.htm . 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. Also see Dinko Tomasic, Personality and Culture in Eastern European Politics (New York: G.W. Stewart, 1948). 31 Zivkovic, “Violent Highlanders and Peaceful Lowlanders”. 32 Ibid.
67
what is considered “civil” is easy to identify. More to the point, the class sub-text of this typology is not to be discounted. The insecure braggadocio of these hateful people, raised as they are in agonistic spaces, has more than a whiff of the North American pejorative “white trash”.
The fact of the matter is that, as the sincere and heartfelt memoirs of “Dinarics” such as Milovan
Djilas (1957) and Mihailo Lalic (1962) illustrate quite descriptively, these are parts of the
Balkans that were historically condemned to severe structural poverty, which, in many ways, was exacerbated with their forced entry into the world capitalist system. 33 The historical relations informing these conditions and the contradictions therein must be foregrounded over simplistic renderings of inherent “characteristics”.
Yet this is not the business of Tomasic, who chooses to pitch the “Dinarics” against his ideal type, the communally-inclined “zadruga” peasants. This “peaceful, stable, and tolerant” peasantry is located between the Sava and Drava rivers and is defined by “[e]xposure to happy family life and a mild, but reasonable family discipline” and are “non-violent”. 34 Tomasic ethnicizes this typology, viewing the Croatians as particularly representative of these traits while reading the interloping Krajina Serbs as an ethnic junta imposed upon the indigenous population.
Yet Zivkovic intelligently explains that, if one were inclined to use these ethnic reifications as heuristic concepts, both types are to be found amongst Serbs and Croats. For him, the issue is their rhetorical deployment as affirmations of civility and/or enlightenment, strength and/or political creativity, or some such self-designation. Zivkovic points out the irony in Dvornikovic using what is a pejorative in the hands of Tomasic as evidence of a distinctly Serbian
33 See Milovan Djilas, Land Without Justice (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957); and Mihailo Lalic, The Wailing Mountain (Harcourt Brace and World, 1965). 34 Zivkovic, “Violent Highlanders and Peaceful Lowlanders”.
68
predisposition for nation-building, which apparently requires the reckless strength associated with the “Dinaric” type. 35
Zivkovic’s piece provides useful shorthand to map some of the more notable essentializations in Mestrovic’s text. Now there is far too much in Mestrovic to unpack, but some of his more explicitly racist statements are important to illuminate as an example of how certain assumptions behind the sensus imperium subsist in varying degrees in the contributions of both ethnicized and critical balkanology – the latter of which I later interrogate. Mestrovic is only the most extreme example of this deep structure of feeling. According to him, the authoritarian traditions that preceded Communism have consistently fermented underneath the quotidian existence of Yugoslav civilian life. He utilizes a classic Cold War balkanist trope that pre- distinguishes the Yugoslav socialist project as authoritarian, looking askance at imperfect but noteworthy projects such as worker self-management and a federal constitution reworked in
1974 to become one of the most democratic in the world; the latter ensuring the protection of the national rights of minorities in a far more comprehensive manner than any North American legislation. “If we break Communism and Bolshevism down in to its constituent parts”, he writes, “namely, radical egalitarianism, totalitarianism, dictatorship, lack of freedom, and primitivism, then we notice that most of these features can be found in the political and social structures that preceded Communism.” 36 This is “[e]specially” true “in the Balkans” where “the tradition of absolutist government, intolerance, imperialism, and general backwardness preceded
Communism.” 37 There is a generous body of scholarly literature that concludes that the Balkan
Peninsula, in different degrees to be sure, remained pre-capitalist in its forms of social intercourse for an extended time after the rise of capitalism in what can be termed “Western
35 Ibid., 36 Mestrovic, Habits of the Balkan Heart , 138. 37 Ibid.
69
Europe”. 38 But to what extent this automatically constitutes “intolerance, imperialism, and general backwardness” is debatable.
There is a substantially documented tradition of inter-ethnic cooperation in the Balkans; a profound cross-pollination of national ideas; a rich history of poly-cultural and poly-ethnic syncretism, especially amongst the peasantry and clusters of organic intellectuals.
Correspondences between prominent Croatian ethnographer Ljudevit Gaj and his Serbian counterpart Vuk Karadzic are a case in point. 39 The role of Viennese educated precani in importing sentiments from North of the Danube is another example. Most importantly, the debates over different conceptions of Balkan unity, revolving around the distinctly Croatian idea of Yugoslavism, highlight the varieties of inter-ethnic solidarity, of which the Montenegrin poet
Njegos was a notable exponent. 40 The often ignored tradition of spontaneous peasant rebellion grounded in the freedom-secreting narratives of folkloric culture underscores that the mass practices of the common folk contained an essential rationality Mestrovic is loath to recognize. 41
For him, an acknowledgment of these historical realities is anathema, as he prefers the comfort provided by Tomasic-inspired ethnic reifications of political and social phenomena. So
Communism, which is Serb-identified, is grounded in a “power-hungry Slavic type of social
38 See for example the wonderful little collection of essays edited by Daniel Chirot entitled The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989) which includes thought- provoking contributions by Fikret Adanir, John R. Lampe, Robert Brenner, and Gale Stokes. See also Lampe’s seminal Balkan Economic History, 1550-1950, From Imperial Borderlands to Developing Nations (Indiana University Press, 1982); Ivan T. Berend, History Derailed: Central and Eastern Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003); and the controversial revisionist study by Michael Palairet entitled The Balkan Economies c. 1800-1914: Evolution without Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 39 See Elinor Murray Despalatovic, Ljudevit Gaj and the Illyrian Movement (Boulder: East European Quarterly, 1975); and Duncan Wilson, The Life and Times of Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic, 1787-1864: Literacy, Literature and National Independence in Serbia (London: Clarendon Press, 1970). 40 For a solid cultural history of the different conceptions of Balkan unity see Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); and the magisterial work by Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). 41 Some examples include the Serbian Revolution of 1804, the brutally suppressed Romanian peasant rebellion of 1907, and the Ilinden Uprising of 1903.
70
character” historically located in “power-hungry, aggressive Rodopian-Dinaric or Ural herdsman” evident in Southeastern Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. 42 This barbaric social character is defined in opposition to “the peaceable, rural-plains farmer; and the urban-industrial cosmopolitan type” which are “more conducive to Western outlooks.” 43 As such, the war in
Croatia was seen as a war on “Western culture in general” and “Western civil religions”. 44 For
Mestrovic, Croatia and Slovenia, under Vatican stewardship, stood a chance of becoming
“democratic” and “Western”. 45 This is because their “social character” is in line with the criteria put forth by Tomasic, i.e. “recognizably Western”; 46 a strange tautology to say the least, and one that does not jibe with detailed studies of Croatian history. Ethnic cleansing and genocide, which, as Michael Mann has provocatively argued, modern European state-building is built upon, does not exclude Croatia from a history of murder and exclusion that is continent-wide. 47
“Serbia and Montenegro”, surmises Mestrovic, “tend in the direction of an Eastern orbit of cultural values. They typically have had close ties with Russia and are neo-Communist, following free elections in which democracy was rejected. Orthodox or Muslim in their religious orientation, they seek a pyramidal power structure and are militaristic.” 48 This authoritarian tendency is registered as habit and given a racist pseudo-psychoanalytical prescription: “After all, individuals who seek to change neurotic or otherwise destructive character traits often have to endure years of psychotherapy and must work hard to change their habits. Why should it be any easier for entire peoples who have suffered under the collective neuroses of Communism?” 49
42 Mestrovic, 51. 43 Ibid., 44 Ibid., 140. 45 Ibid., 4, 40, 60. 46 Ibid., 30. 47 See Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 279-318; Ivo Goldstein, Croatia: A History (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 1999), 135-144; 48 Mestrovic, 30. 49 Ibid., xii.
71
The Serbs, in true neo-colonialist fashion, are “sick” and must be cured of their necessarily congenital illness. One might try to dismiss Mestrovic’s racism as an anomaly in a more sober academic climate. Yet the gist of his often exaggerated claims and descriptions have been echoed by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Bogdan Denitch, and Slavenka Drakulic in a myriad of ways that reinforce, recode, and relegitimize a discourse of “obscurantism”, “savagery”, and
“backwardness”. 50
Mestrovic’s writing exemplifies balkanism as self-designation and racist projection.
Countless examples iterate his perverse yearning for Western stewardship; his shame at having
Croatian artists such as his grandfather indebted to a “barbaric” culture; his relentless coupling of
Western Christianity with “democracy”; and his unsubstantiated claims that Croatia and
Slovenia, even though a mixture of “barbaric” and “aristocratic” types, are nonetheless predisposed to realize “Western cultural values”. 51 These values he tellingly defines as “anti-
Communist patterns, a Catholic and therefore universalist base, a tendency toward pluralism, a recognition of values pertaining to human rights, European political values, and a willingness to adopt a free-market economy.” 52 Apart from an effective encapsulation of what Western military and economic power expects of its clients, his synopsis of Western cultural values echoes the evaluative criteria of the sensus imperium in his ethnicized denunciation of “the serbs”. The
50 See for example Bogdan Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) that reads the Balkans as defined by “ethnos” and somehow bereft of qualitative practices of “modernity” and “universalism”; and Slavenka Drakulic, “We are all Albanians” in The Nation , May 20, 1999, http://www.thenation.com/article/we-are-all-albanians . Drakulic’s piece reproduces the myth of a homogenous Serbian political field, looks askance at the geo-politics informing the invasion of Kosovo, and resorts to a rhetoric of neurodevelopmental disorder to describe the pathologies of the Serbs, thus fully distancing these people as self- pitying Others (“It is hard to understand that our acquaintances, our lovers, drinking buddies, philosophers, our once dear friends, are different people. It is even harder to understand that they themselves let that change happen.”) In another piece, she laments “the autism of the Serbian people”, their collective incapacity for empathy (“[t]here's no trace of such consciousness”) and the vagaries of “the state of the Serbian mind”. See Slavenka Drakulic, “Who are the Real Targets?” Bosnia Report , April-July, 1999, http://www.bosnia.org.uk/bosrep/report_format.cfm?articleid=2749&reportid=126 . 51 Mestrovic, Habits of the Balkan Heart , 36. 52 Ibid.
72
West is still the barometer of moral progress, the legitimate heir to Enlightenment values, and fundamentally liberal in its valorization of representative democracy, capitalism, pluralism, and human rights. Yet, for Mestrovic, Western foreign policy has been irresponsible, refusing to deploy it’s comparatively (at least compared to primitive Balkan standards) “soft” machinations of violence in the peninsula in order to thwart the anti-civilizational Serbian threat. 53
Branimir Anzulovic: Genocidal Culture
Branimir Anzulovic is a cultural anthropologist engaged in similar ethnic profiling. His 1999 book Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide is a deeply problematic essay on the alleged violence of the Serbian “social character”. While indebted to the work of Tomasic, Anzulovic attempts to distance himself from cheap psychoanalytic generalizations, stating that “[o]ne cannot explain a nation’s violent expansionist adventure merely in terms of the psychological make-up of its members.” 54 Yet no sooner than in the following paragraph he writes “[t]here is a psychological mechanism that makes it possible for large numbers of basically normal citizens to engage in collective crimes or to accept them without protest.” 55 Here we have a reworking of the call for a collective psychotherapy proposed by Mestrovic spliced with the “collective guilt” theses pioneered by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and so in vogue in the late nineties. 56 Now, in the
53 Ibid., 140-142. 54 Branimir Anzulovic, Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 3. 55 Ibid., 3. 56 Over fifteen years since the bombing of Yugoslavia, one is still struck by the chutzpah of this theological reading of complex diplomatic, social, and psychological phenomena. Goldhagen explicitly states that the Serbian people “have rendered themselves both legally and morally incompetent to conduct their own affairs and a presumptive ongoing danger to others.” Serbia, a country of hateful delusionals, must be subject to an “indefinite quarantine” until a “new democratic educational system and public sphere” is imposed that “could teach Enlightenment values such as toleration and the moral equality of all human beings.” The Serbs are a people who “clearly [consist] of individuals with damaged faculties of moral judgement and has sunk into a moral abyss from which it is unlikely, anytime soon, to emerge unaided.” See Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, “A New Serbia” in The New Republic 220, no. 20 (1999), 16-18. Not to be outdone is Stacy Sullivan, who labels “many ordinary Serbs” as “Milosevic’s willing executioners” and that Western hostility is clearly directed against the “Serbian people”. In that case,” she writes, “the "center of gravity" in Yugoslavia is something far more difficult to destroy than an army or a regime. It is the very mentality of a nation.” See Stacy Sullivan, “Milosevic’s Willing Executioners,” The New Republic 220, no. 19 (1999), 26-35. A superb critique of collective guilt theses as they apply to the Serbs is provided by Janine Natalya
73
absence of an analytical method that allows us to probe the social conditions of such alleged behaviour, psychoanalysis lends itself to a politics of stigma. Franz Fanon was quite aware of this as his pointed criticisms of the scholarship of Joseph R. Mannoni prove, choosing instead to argue for the foregrounding of a heuristic of sociogenesis; the commitment to incorporating the findings of psychoanalysis as part of a broader inquiry into (a) the socio-economic conditions of their production and (b) the international character of the socio-economic conditions themselves. 57 A transcendence of neuroses requires not only personalized therapy to help control symptoms, but a protracted struggle, in all its variegated positioning, against the historically material relationships which encourage the manifestation of these symptoms to begin with.
Anzulovic has no such consciousness, keen as he is to blame the “eruption of a collective murderous frenzy” on “the utopian promise of a perfect society”. 58 Echoing the reactive criticisms of Cold War liberalism in his criticism of “the serbs” – i.e. that the Communist “idea”, in and of itself, was responsible for Stalinism – Anzulovic reveals his position as idealist in the most reductive and tautological sense, namely, genocide does not emerge from abnormal people, but the abnormality of ideas that are “produced and propagated” by normal people who are unaware of the consequences of what is in fact their culturally-conditioned abnormality. “Thus,
Clark. See Clark, “Collective Guilt, Collective Responsibility and the Serbs,” East European Politics and Societies 22, no. 3 (2008), 668-692. For an exploration of the dubious political uses of Nazi/Serb analogies see John Rosenthal, “Kosovo and the ‘Jewish Question’,” Monthly Review 51, no. 9 (2000), http://monthlyreview.org/2000/02/01/kosovo-and-the-jewish-question/ . 57 Fanon on sociogenesis: “Reacting against the constitutionalist tendency of the late nineteenth century, Freud insisted that the individual factor be taken into account through psychoanalysis. He substituted for a phylogenetic theory the ontogenetic perspective. It will be seen that the black man’s alienation is not an individual question. Besides phylogeny and ontogeny stands sociogeny. In one sense, … let us say this is a question of a sociodiagnostic. What is the prognosis? But society, unlike biochemical processes, cannot escape human influences. Man is what brings society into being. The prognosis is in the hands of those who are willing to get rid of the worm-eaten roots of the structure. The black man must wage his war on both levels: Since historically they influence each other, any unilateral liberation is incomplete, and the greatest mistake would be to believe in their automatic interdependence …. Reality, for once, requires a total understanding. On the objective level as on the subjective level, a solution has to be applied.” See Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 11. 58 Anzulovic, 3.
74
the primary driving force leading to genocide” he writes “is not the pathology of the individuals organizing and committing the genocide, but the pathology of the ideas guiding them. These ideas are often produced and propagated by relatively normal people who may be unaware of the consequences of their escape from reality into myths.” 59
Firstly, the casual use of the term “genocide” in pathologizing a culture is a rhetorical coup, a “tactical use of passion” whereby, in the absence of any contextualized and concrete evidence to the contrary, one is immediately reproached as a “genocide-denier” if they so much as deign to challenge this problematic assumption. 60 Robert M. Hayden describes the political uses of genocide as tantamount to constructing, in Kenneth Burke’s words, a “God term … one that denotes the ultimate in motivation and thus trumps any other argument.” 61 Publications such as those by Mestrovic, Anzulovic, and MacKinnon are not grounded in rigorous Platonic argumentation, but a visceral and moral sentimentalism required of a Manichean world view.
Their contributions are “prosecutors’ briefs, charging the ultimate crime of genocide and brooking no defense” as they seek “to eliminate the mind and the critical facilities.” 62 These polemics are structured to trigger feeling and not to encourage thought. This makes reasoned debate impossible, and forces the interlocutor to either assent to an unsubstantiated position or occupy the frayed ends of marginalia.
Secondly, and intimately connected with the first point, is the media-propagated understanding of the dissolution of Yugoslavia as solely a unilateral act of Serbian aggression without Serbian victims; a pre-meditated genocidal program of Serbo-Communist Lebensraum planned out in the notorious 1986 Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences.
59 Ibid., 4. 60 Robert M. Hayden, “The Tactical Uses of Passion on Bosnia”, Current Anthropology 38, no. 5 (1997), 924-926. 61 Ibid., 924. 62 Ibid.
75
Indeed, this is the core victim/victimizer assumption behind many of the travelogues, eye- witness accounts, and journalistic exposes of the early to mid-nineties that has done so much to obscure and suppress a more thoughtful interpretation of the failure of a post-communist state.
As mentioned, it is impossible and disingenuous to undertake a thorough analysis of the past decade and a half of ethnicized balkanology without periodizing its emergence in the wake of the Cold War and neoliberal triumphalism. But more specifically, a critique of the works discussed in this thesis loses much of its efficacy if said works are not contextualized against the background, prejudices, and conventional assumptions behind the 1991-1995 dissolution of
Yugoslavia. This is because the bulk of scholarship on the Balkans has been informed by a particular ideological conformism that is anchored to an ethnicized Serbian alterity. MacKinnon,
Mestrovic, Anzulovic, and Zizek are not exceptions to the rule in this respect, but representative instances of it. Within their work we have simplistic equations between “ethnic nationalism” and
“the Serbs”; a conflation of Serbian culture with “communism”; and a positioning of the Serbs as irrevocably “Eastern”. Juxtaposed in opposition to these unnecessarily attenuated dichotomies is an elite discourse of multiculturalism, “civic nationalism”, and human rights alloyed to the unquestioned import of Western liberal democracy. This “Western” cluster of traditions serves as a moral barometer “in need of defense” and an acknowledged template for “progress” and
“modernity”. Huntington, Kaplan, Ignatieff, and Barber, in various ways, believe themselves to uphold this tradition. The oversaturation of this discourse in post-Cold War elite culture and public discourse serves to preclude, contort, and/or marginalize those positions that explicitly challenge its deep structure of feeling. It is revealing that “the serbs” are constructed in a way that situates them on the other side of the barbed wire separating the “rational” Anglo-Atlantic world from the rest.
76
It is with this in mind that Anzulovic’s criticisms of Serbian culture must be evaluated.
When he deigns to explore the psychosis of an “innocent, suffering Serbia” surrounded by perceived “foreign evildoers who conspire against its very existence” 63 he partakes in the conventional and reactionary discourse of Serbian “victimhood” that precludes the Serbs from articulating their grievances, testimonies, stories, and sufferings. As Johnstone lucidly argues in her excellent Fool’s Crusade (2002), this tactic ensures that everything the Serbs experience is a mere figment of their imagination. The Serbs are thus magnetized to attract any and all attacks on their livelihood, culture, and institutions. They are apostles of persecution-mania, “seasoned haters raised on self-pity” 64 who secrete “autistic” tendencies and are always in “denial”.
Nothing they express is given weight unless it wholesale remits its negative traits as defined by others and embraces the ideological conformism that demonized them to begin with. In other words, those women, children, and non-combatants filed under the sign “the serbs” are compelled to reinterpret murder and rape at the hands of others as nourishment for an always already pathological psychology and not something grounded in historically specific experiences and complex junctures that include the 1995 ethnic cleansing of thousands from the Serbian
Krajina, the estimated 2,500 deaths during Operation Allied Force, the tortures of Camp Lora, and the documented fact that, during the 1992-1995 Bosnian War, Bosnian Serb casualties – in the tens of thousands – were the second highest after those of Bosnian Muslims. 65
Anzulovic strategically selects several features of “Serbian historical experience” that he alleges “nourished these myths and contributed to the recent violent attempt to create a Second
63 Anzulovic, 4. 64 Rod Nordland, “Vengeance of a Victim Race” in Newsweek 133, no. 15 (1999), 42-43. As if this racist generalization was not enough, Nordland goes on to state that even Serbian “democrats are questionable characters.” 65 For a superb meticulous breakdown of deaths in the 1992-1995 Bosnian War see Ewa Tabeau and Jakub Bijak, “War-Related Deaths in the 1992-1995 Armed Conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Critique of Previous Estimates and Recent Results,” European Journal of Population / Revue Européenne de Démographie 21, no. 2/3 (2005), 187-215.
77
Serbian Empire”. 66 Three of these features are presented in a way that homogenizes Serbian history and society in a reductively integral fashion, showing no nuance or recognition of historical heterogeneity. The Serbs are the products of a religious secularization of “church, state, and nation”, congealed and ossified under centuries of Turkish rule, and defined primarily by a culture rooted in “the endemic violence of the Balkan highlands” filtered through “the
Romanticist glorification of blood and soil”. 67 Ironically, the exposure of formally educated
Viennese Serbs to Romantic thought and Enlightenment values such as the importance of public education and constitutional guarantees is spun by Anzulovic as nothing more than a phase through which “traditional tribalism” transforms into “modern Serbian nationalist ideology”. 68
So even when this “underdeveloped Eastern Orthodox nation” is granted as being informed by
“Western Christian cultures” it is still slothfully unresponsive to the “cultural and political spheres” of the appropriate “civilization”. 69 Revealingly, Anzulovic justifies his scant references to Croatia in his tome as a way of highlighting “the differences between Eastern and Western
Christian cultures.” 70 Croatia is assumed, from the start, to be an unproblematic standard of appeal for evaluative judgments on Serbian history, society, and culture; its well-documented history of racial discrimination, genocide, and Western-sanctioned ethnic cleansing notwithstanding. In an interesting sleight-of-hand, Anzulovic blames “the Western intelligentsia” and “Western media” for accepting “the relatively new myth of a demonic Croatia”. 71 Alas, in his contorted logic, “innocent, suffering Serbia” becomes “innocent, suffering Croatia”, at the
66 Anzulovic, 4. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid., 7. 69 Ibid., 6-7. 70 Ibid., 6. 71 Ibid., 7.
78
whim of foreign media and intellectuals who do not understand her. A yearning for victimhood is dutifully registered.
Anzulovic’s appeal to Serbian historical experience overlooks two important developments. Firstly, there is no sense that Serbia’s development as a nation was fundamentally intertwined with that of Croatia, his marked emphasis on civilizational fault lines vitiating any gesture towards co-operative and poly-cultural practices of nation-building. Secondly, how certain social formations are made historically durable is never read through the literature of political economy, leaving the Serbs and Montenegrins schematically suspended as national anomalies. As Ivan T. Berend, Michael Palairet, and John R. Lampe have effectively argued, the violence and poverty of highland cultures rests at the intersection of economic exploitation, failed resistance to imperial encroachment and migratory practices common to these intertwined phenomena. Patriarchal or “caesaro-papist” social relations, if the terms have any meaning whatsoever, require a historical materialist rendering underscoring how the interplay of militarism and competing modes of production and reproduction displaced and maintained certain peoples within relations of structural poverty and isolated resistance. Cultural anthropology practiced through the lens of moral dualism cannot accommodate such material nuances. Their documentation is not Anzulovic’s intent. What matters is that “the serbs” serve to superiorize the “Western” moral and political culture he identifies Croatia as being a part of.
Thus “the serbs” are a confluence for a reactive ethnic nationalism immersed in a self-pitying world view and grounded, in turn, in a peasant culture notorious for violent tendencies.
Anzulovic conveniently reduces Serbian history to a mono-ethnic slave morality, leaving its internal debates, competing social forces, and multiple political traditions outside of his
79
narrative. The streamlining of such complexity characterizes the early nineties output of feminist legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon.
Catharine MacKinnon and the Ethnicization of Rape
Catherine Mackinnon is an interesting case. The amount of time I devote to her reflects her impact on the media in the 1990s and the influence that had on constructing ethnicized balkanologies. Her forays into balkanology emerged while she was secured as legal counsel for
Croatian and Bosnian women allegedly raped by Serbian soldiers. An established legal scholar and feminist theorist, Mackinnon’s writing on the dissolution of Yugoslavia was hotly contested in feminist circles even as its problematic essentializations gained traction in the mainstream media. 72 In light of my exegeses of Mestrovic and Anzulovic – and prior to my analysis of critical balkanology – I want to explore the nature of Mackinnon’s characterization of “the serbs” for three reasons.
Firstly, her characterization deploys the same concentrated balkanism found in
Mestrovic, et al and is an ideal prototype in that regard. Secondly, her analysis of the gendered aspects of war is undermined by a subjective-idealist approach that forsakes recognition of
“relations of ruling” and the manner in which such relations might point to the socio-economic conditions supporting and exacerbating gendered violence. Finally, Mackinnon’s Balkan writings exhibit the problems associated with many western expressions of transnational feminism, in particular, the representational violence performed by white middle class feminists on foreign women.
72 See especially Erica Munk, “What’s Wrong with This Picture,” Women’s Review of Books XI, no. 6 (1994), 5-6; Vesna Kesic, “A Response to Catherine MacKinnon’s Article ‘Turning Rape into Pornography: Postmodern Genocide,” Hastings Women’s Law Journal 5 (1994), 267-280; Vesna Kesic, “The High Price of Free Speech,” Women’s Review of Books X, no. 10-11 (1993), 16-17; Vesna Kesic, “Witch Hunt, Croatian Style,” Women’s Review of Books X, no. 10-11 (1993), 16;
80
“Principle begins in reality” she matter-of-factly states, yet ironically proceeds to deploy tropes of interpretation that are veritably idealist, and this on top of committing factual errors by embracing the unsubstantiated claims of her informers. 73 She is correct in stating that “[l]aw does not grow by syllogistic compulsion”, preferring instead to understand its development through an agonistic logic of domination and resistance, yet she also, strangely, comprehends the dynamics of gendered violence in Bosnia in precisely such reductively syllogistic terms. 74 Balkan culture is pornographic. Pornography is rape. Therefore, Balkan culture is a rapist’s culture. For her, the cipher of such reasoning is “the serbs”, even though “Yugoslavia” as a whole is the culture of pornography par excellence .
Overall, her writings on Bosnia are rhetorically passionate and morally uncompromising, but also crude in thought and wanting in concrete and verifiable evidence; they are prosecutorial, a rhetorical avalanche of emotively graphic descriptions of sexual violence that often border on yellow journalism, which some feminists have even described as a violation of the rights of the victims so righteously spoken for. 75 “Text does not beget text; life does” 76 MacKinnon declares; however, the material “life” she sees herself as representing, nay, embodying , is distilled through discursive practices that Hammond and Todorova identify as “balkanist”; it is, to put it bluntly, a rendering of the region, its peoples, and culture (the singular form of this noun a particular favourite of hers) as categorically and primarily libidinal. This congenital lawlessness
73 Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Postmodernism and Human Rights,” in Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 51. 74 Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Crimes of War, Crimes of Peace,” in Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 141. 75 Kesic explains the problematic aspects of MacKinnon’s notoriously graphic style: “Pornography is not only content, but a specific form of aesthetic presentation. Exaggerated, distorted images, centered on augmented details, have the primary function of arousing (male) sexual excitement, as Susan Sontag describes it. I wonder whether Serbian rapists, or any other war or everyday rapists, aren’t the ones who would really enjoy MacKinnon’s graphic style and ‘aesthetics.’ It is important to expose the truth of the war atrocities committed against women, but not the way MacKinnon does it; by exploiting the suffering of women and victimizing them further, similar practice the Croatian and Serbian sexist, nationalistic media does.” See Kesic, “A Response to Catharine MacKinnon’s Article,” 279. 76 MacKinnon, “Postmodernism and Human Rights,” 51.
81
incorporates appetitive sexuality with brutal violence, thereby fixing the Balkans, and “the serbs” specifically, in a primordial state of pure reactivity. I offer up some of her more popular interventions from the early 1990s in order to highlight the nature of her characterization of “the serbs”.
In her notorious 1993 Ms magazine article “Turning Rape into Pornography: Postmodern
Genocide”, MacKinnon takes issue with those who “mischaracterize” the war in Bosnia as a
“civil war” and who thus attempt to strike a moral equivalency amongst belligerents in a conflict that she squarely describes as “genocidal”. 77 “Serbian aggression against non-Serbs” she writes
“is as incontestable and overwhelmingly one-sided as male aggression against women in everyday life.” 78 The crux of MacKinnon’s argument is that “the serbs” produce pornography out of their rapes, “clearly intended for mass consumption as war propaganda.” 79 She cites controversial “Banja Luka” tapes; rapes allegedly videotaped by Serb perpetrators and, rumour has it, rebranded and utilized as “disinformation”.80 This was, according to MacKinnon, easy to do since amongst Balkan peoples “there are no racial markers for ethnic distinctions” 81 thus allowing “the serbs” to hone what she calls “a standard Serbian technique”. 82
This “Serbian technique” is made possible by the “cheap, mobile, and available” surplus of “visual technology” whose sadistic deployment makes “the Nazis’ effort look comparatively primitive.” 83 In a lecture given at Oxford University on 4 February 1993 titled “Crimes of War,
Crimes of Peace”, MacKinnon states that “much Serbian ideology and practice takes a page from
77 MacKinnon, “Turning Rape into Pornography,” in Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 161. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., 162. 80 Ibid., 162-163. 81 Ibid., 162. 82 Ibid., 162-163. 83 Ibid., 167.
82
the Nazi book”. 84 A year later, as part of a Yale Law School panel under the name “From
Auschwitz to Omarska, Nuremberg to the Hague”, she highlights what she calls “the analytical and factual parallels” between the Nazi Holocaust and Serbian ethnic cleansing:
Both are genocide on ethnic grounds with a religious dimension, conducted through aggression and invasion, using war as a tool of the genocide. Both are long and planned, with deep roots in perpetrator culture, cynically carried out to win and directed from the top with official state involvement. Both are an obsession with “blood,” a Volk ish definition of the nation, and a long-nursed sense of grievance and prosecution from the past promoting a sense of mission in the present. Both have historical excuses. Both love symbolism and have a flair for and commitment to the use of propaganda. Both lie – a lot. Bigotry and terror mark a common fascism. As a post-Communist left-wing insurgency comes to a post-democratic right-wing one, fascism emerges as neither left nor right but a politics in itself. 85
It is important to emphasize that no one is disputing that massacres and ethnic cleansing actually occurred; murder and ethnic cleansing committed, rapes perpetrated and, lest one stand accused of Serbian apologetics, that Serbian leaders, military forces, and paramilitary groups played a large role in committing these crimes and pushing Yugoslavia towards dissolution – from the imposition of martial law in Kosovo in 1989 to the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. Numerically,
Bosnian Muslims, at the receiving end of both Serbian and Croatian extremism, were the greatest victims of Yugoslavia’s demise. Yet the role of the United States, a then recently unified
Germany, Slovenian politicians, the Vatican, and the documented crimes of Franjo Tudjman’s
Croatia, Bosnian Muslim paramilitary leader Nasir Oric, and the Croatian general behind
Operation Storm, Ante Gotovina, are integral parts of a “responsibility” narrative that befits a complex civil war. 86 I am not interested in excusing the role of Serbian leaders in this conflict.
84 MacKinnon, “Crimes of War, Crimes of Peace,” 146. 85 Catharine A. Mackinnon, ““From Auschwitz to Omarska, Nuremberg to the Hague,” in Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 174. 86 See David N. Gibbs, First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009); Diana Johnstone, Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions (London: Pluto, 2002); and Susan Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1995).
83
My point of contention with MacKinnon’s interpretation rests on one point: that genocide, exercised in this instance as rape, is a natural consequence of Serbian culture .
MacKinnon’s statements about “the serbs” normalize into a notion of “social character” that is heavily balkanist and precludes a historicized understanding of the conflict while silencing those voices, indigenous voices, commenting on it. The ethical imperative informing her moral dualist understanding of the Bosnian war operates as a superiorizing standard of appeal. “The serbs” are the signifier against which this moral standard of appeal justifies itself in speech and prose. This justificatory process requires a static and homogenous rendering of its object for its moral claims to have any rhetorical efficacy. “The serbs” are an internally coherent totality engaged in covering up 87 the reality of the Bosnian war; they are “fascist”, 88 pejoratively
“Communist”, 89 fond of “symmetry traps” 90 that morally equalize war culpability, “rape and kill” 91 as a matter of “respect”, 92 and are never themselves victimized.
In her 1994 contribution to the Harvard Women’s Law Journal MacKinnon reads “the serbs” as apostles of virulent and exclusivist nationalism; men who are nourished on pornography and engage in strategic rapes. For MacKinnon, concludes the late feminist scholar
Jill Benderly, “rape is a distinctly Serbian weapon for which all Serbs – even feminists who oppose the war – are culpable.” 93 Indeed, MacKinnon echoes the severely problematic notion of
87 Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Rape, Genocide, and Women’s Human Rights,” in Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 185-186. 88 MacKinnon, “From Auschwitz to Omarska,” 174; and MacKinnon, “Turning Rape into Pornography,” 163. 89 Ibid., 186. 90 Mackinnon, ““From Auschwitz to Omarska, Nuremberg to The Hague,” 174. 91 Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Rape as Nationbuilding,” in Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 170. 92 Ibid. 93 Jill Benderly, “Rape, Feminism, and Nationalism in the War in Yugoslav Successor States,” in Feminist Nationalism , ed. Lois A. West (New York: Routledge, 1997), 67.
84
“collective guilt” popularized at the time by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (1996). 94 These works circulated within a welter where the popular import of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) and the scholarly pull of Deborah Lipstadt’s 1993 attack on Holocaust denial helped sculpt both popular and elite common sense into a form, one can infer, more sensitive and aware of the political and social consequences of genocide as a human practice however limited its historical application, as Ward Churchill (1997) is keen to point out. 95 The facility, and one might say irresponsibility, with which MacKinnon deploys the Nazi paradigm in her reading of the Bosnian war immediately precludes a more complex understanding of the conflict. 96 MacKinnon’s argument, unfortunately, merely operates at the level of an analogical transfer. She tows the line that “the serbs” were engaged in premeditated unilateral “campaigns to exterminate non-Serbs”, genocide and a proto-Nazi project to realize a “Greater Serbia”. 97 She recuperated what can be identified as standard balkanist tropes and applied them selectively to one specific ethnic group, bolstering her accusations not with facts, but with egregious Nazi analogies. For MacKinnon,
“the serbs” did “as the Nazis did under the Third Reich” and are no better than “German
Aryans” 98 ; they are the undisputed aggressors in a war whose interpretation she righteously, and without a shred of proof, claims is “beyond question”. 99 The provocative comparisons continue as she claims that this roving totality “the serbs” “seek destruction of non-Serbs on the basis of
94 See Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). 95 See Schindler’s List (Universal City, CA: Universal, 2004); Deborah E. Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: Free Press, 1993); and Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the America’s, 1492, to the Present (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997). 96 This is not to say that “complex” is and should be synonymous with a moral equivalency that, bereft of an empirical inquiry into what actually happened, automatically views the war as the consequence of the neatly divvied up belligerence of “all sides”. On the other hand, such a cautionary approach should not presume analogies to be sufficient forms of evidence, however helpful they might be in tentatively framing what is going on. 97 MacKinnon, “Rape, Genocide, and Women’s Human Rights,” 184. 98 Ibid. 99 Ibid., 183.
85
ethnicity and religion (Muslims as Muslim, Croatians as Catholic)” even though “the Serbian fascists’ operation, is less streamlined, systematic, and precise than the Nazis was.” 100
MacKinnon specifically locates this penchant for genocidal aggression and its concomitant misogyny in specifically Serbian and, more broadly, Yugoslavian culture as a whole. Granted, she makes the not indisputable point that “everyday life” is the exemplary locale for “the fact of male aggression against women.” 101 In light of the accomplishments of feminist movement in academia and the public sphere, one would be hard pressed not to agree with such a statement. Research has shown that common sense is imbued with sexism, misogyny, and patriarchy; such oppression taking on concrete forms in various socio-economic and cultural contexts. It must be emphasized, however, that she is a radical feminist who identifies women as
“violable”; it is absolutely this quality that differentiates them from men and defines the nature of her critique of Serbian misogyny. This assumption allows her to suggest that male aggression, much like German “anti-Semitism” prior to the rise of Hitler, is an integral part of Serbian behaviour. Gender essentialism thus folds into cultural essentialism, allowing her to equate a nation of ten million people dispersed over several Southeastern European countries as secreting a congenital disposition for aggression. Labeled as “male”, this penchant for hostility nonetheless implicates Serbian women as well. The role of Serbian women is merely that of an appendage to a hyper-masculinized ethnic concept, with this concept serving as a barometer for feminist credibility and trustworthiness.
MacKinnon’s rhetoric is parasitic on precisely the race and nationalist thinking that a number of scholars have recently pointed out as poisoning the political dynamics of pre-war
100 MacKinnon, “From Auschwitz to Omarska,” 174-175. 101 MacKinnon, “Crimes of War, Crimes of Peace,” 144.
86
Yugoslavia. 102 Her tropes homogenize political and social space, thereby constructing two internally coherent moral orders. As V.P. Gagnon rightly states in his compelling monograph
The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s :
[e]very social space is heterogeneous. Even in societies that are considered to be ethnically or religiously homogeneous, diversity is a fact of life: age, gender, socio- economic status, profession, region, political views or orientation, as well as the meanings attached to those differences. Such diversity is itself an expression and reflection of the lived experiences of the population. 103
MacKinnon refuses to grant this diversity its experience. Whether this is symptomatic of the dynamics of her profession or the result of simple naivety is beside the point; the conclusions she draws from her homogenization of Balkan social space demobilizes its qualified heterogeneity and, most importantly, “the meanings attached to those differences.” Her rhetorical style silences a plethora of “lived experiences” in a manner at once glib and dismissive.
Vesna Kesic, one of the many Balkan feminists MacKinnon wholeheartedly ignores, thoroughly critiques the latter’s theoretical approach to mass rape while supporting her civil lawsuit against Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. 104 Kesic, a Croatian feminist from
Zagreb trained in psychology and sociology and a co-founder of the Zagreb Center for War
Victims, originally had her response to MacKinnon published as a severely edited letter in Ms , the original home of MacKinnon’s controversial piece. 105 Kesic brooks no quarter in stating that
102 See Dubravka Zarkov, The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Break-up of Yugoslavia (Durham: Durham University Press, 2007); V.P. Gagnon, The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and David Campbell, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 103 Gagnon, 13. 104 Kesic, “A Response to Catherine MacKinnon’s Article,” 267. 105 According to Erica Munk, Ms printed “three of the least damaging paragraphs” surrounded by “almost- contentless gushy testimonials”. Subsequent attempts by the magazine to address MacKinnon’s article were superficial and exclusive, ultimately extending her already dubious position on pornography into the realm of Balkan politics, spearheaded, of course, by a popular mainstream feminist magazine with an early ‘90s circulation averaging 550,000 readers a month. Kesic’s critique found an honest home in Off Our Backs and The Hastings Women’s Law Journal and, to this day, stands as a devastating rebuttal of MacKinnon’s Bosnian intervention, supportively cited by a number of feminists along the way. See Erica Munk, “What’s Wrong with This Picture,” 6.
87
“MacKinnon’s argument is severely undermined by her conceptual mistakes and reliance on suspect sources in her analysis” and “not only ignores and supplants the work already undertaken by feminists around the world but also disregards essential facts.” 106 MacKinnon’s rhetorical ethnic-baiting is so buttressed by “factual inaccuracies” that Kesic feels her “work has become a part of the war propaganda which stirs ethnic hatred and promotes revenge”. 107 One of the several qualms Kesic has with MacKinnon’s argument are “the factual assertions regarding the prevalence and impact of pornography in pre-war Yugoslavia.” 108 It is precisely this assertion that anchors MacKinnon’s balkanist rendering of “the serbs”. 109
Kesic takes up the thesis of pornography “as a tool of genocide”, 110 the alleged videotaping and circulation of rapes by Serbian soldiers, and states that she was not aware of any of these reports “until after MacKinnon’s article appeared.” 111 Without denying that such actions may have indeed happened, Kesic summons the need for “some quantity of proof and evidence” in what was to her becoming “television vaudeville with a quid pro quo plot which has been constructed by MacKinnon and her informers for the sake of supporting her anti-pornographic theories.”112 The aporia of proof Kesic zeroes in on is MacKinnon’s claim that these rapists were
See also Jelena Batinic, “Feminism, Nationalism, and War: The ‘Yugoslav Case’ in Feminist Texts,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 3, no. 1 (2001), 1-23; Jill Benderly, “Rape, Feminism, and Nationalism in the War in Yugoslav Successor States”, 59-72; Aniko Imre, “Lesbian Nationalism”, Signs 33, no. 2 (2000), 255-282; and Dubravka Zarkov, The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Break-up of Yugoslavia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 106 Kesic, “A Response to Catherine MacKinnon’s Article,” 268, 267. 107 Ibid., 268. 108 Ibid. 109 Erica Munk explains: “Pornography didn’t saturate Communist Yugoslavia. Hard-core porn was much rarer than in Western Europe, and the Playboy -style imagery omnipresent in large Yugoslav cities and tourist towns was rarely displayed in underdeveloped villages like those most Bosnian Serbs came from. Even if, like MacKinnon, you consider every picture of an objectified half-naked woman pornography, her notion that girlie mags alone can compel men to genocidal rape falls apart precisely on the issue of the Serbs’ particular responsibility for genocidal rape. If sexist imagery is the cause, why don’t the Croats and Bosnians commit genocidal rape? Yugoslavia was one country. Belgrade’s publications were no more objectionable than Croatia’s, and were available there.” See Munk, 5. 110 Ibid. 111 Ibid., 269. 112 Ibid.
88
indeed Serbian, based on the “unmistakable Serbian intonation and word choice of the soldiers, one of whom was yelling ‘harder’.” 113 Kesic, aware that the standardized language of the country is Serbo-Croatian, despite the manifold dialects that are still spoken throughout the Balkans and the linguistic affectations imposed by conservative governments, rightly states that it is extraordinarily difficult to differentiate in which language someone is shouting “harder” (“jace”).
That being said, even if MacKinnon could identify the Serbian soldier, her reductionist scholarship still pre-empts an understanding of the socio-economic conditions behind both epistemological and political violence. The point, of course, is not to exonerate “the serbs” from this violence, but to iterate that this violence is not unusual and, more importantly, not reducible to essentialist notions of “social character” or “culture”.
An understanding of MacKinnon’s claims is impossible outside of the context and nature of her sources. She dedicates her 2006 collection of essays Are Women Human? to Asja
Armanda and acknowledges her collaboration with feminist Natasa Nenadic. Both women are members of the Zagreb-based lesbian feminist organization Kareta. MacKinnon was in the service of this and other Croatian nationalist women’s groups who utilized public relations agencies such as Ruder Finn and Waterman and Associates to propagate an understanding of
“the serbs” as fascist ideologues. By not leaving even a mild gesture towards possibilities for transnational feminist solidarity, as evident in the reductive projection of collective guilt onto the
Serbian nation in toto and not those individually responsible for the rapes themselves, these groups in effect reproduced the nationalist thinking they were so keen on condemning. As a result, “the Serbs,” writes Serbian feminist Vesna Nikolic-Ristanovic, “especially Serbian women, were completely neglected as often victims themselves.” 114
113 Ibid. 114 Vesna Nikolic-Ristanovic, “Serbia Between Civil War and Democracy,” Peace Review 10, no. 2 (1997), 250.
89
According to a number of Balkan and East Central European feminists, Kareta represents what Hungarian scholar Aniko Imre succinctly terms a form of ultra-right “lesbian nationalism” that is in direct opposition to more conspicuously “anti-war” feminist positions.
“Feminist narratives of rape became instrumentalized in nationalistic constructions of Serbian or
Croatian ethnic identities, preventing coalitions among feminist groups who otherwise shared an anti-war stand.” 115 “These groups” she continues “condemned the war but insisted on measuring and comparing on a national basis the victimhood assigned to women through rape, torture, and humiliation.” 116 Feminist concerns were co-opted by nationalist discourse in extremely paternalistic ways, with women instrumentalized as “our wives”, “our mothers”, “our daughters” in the pantheon of Croatian and Serbian nationalist rhetoric; the “nation” itself positioned as the only acceptable saviour of rape victims, real or perceived. Diana Johnstone further problematizes this nationalist co-optation of female voices and concerns, observing that “[w]omen are raped every day in peacetime in the most ‘advanced’ societies. There is no reason to doubt that in wartime, especially during civil war, rape is even more common. But aside from the matter of believing or doubting the word of the women themselves, in wartime there is the additional problem of whether or not to believe allegations made in the context of war propaganda.” 117
Indeed, as a number of scholars have pointed out, it was the stigma-baiting invective of Croatian war-propaganda that became the basis for Western feminist scholarship on the region, upholding a Manichean schema of Serbian predatory misogyny versus innocent Croatian and Muslim victimhood.
115 Aniko Imre, “Lesbian Nationalism,” 260. 116 Ibid. 117 Johnstone, Fool’s Crusade, 78.
90
Contrary to their alleged complicity in these crimes, Serbian feminists, notably the
Belgrade Women in Black, resolutely condemned those rapes perpetrated by their own nation, as well as those of other nations, declaring that:
We refuse to be part of the debate: who is the real victim, or who has the greatest right to call themselves victims. We refuse the politics of instrumentalization of victims. A victim is a victim, and to her the number of other victims does not decrease her own suffering and pain. We happen to live in Belgrade and happen to work with women who happen to have Serbian names, and happen to be prisoners of war and victims of rape (we meet also Muslim and Croat women as well). Some of them have been months and months in camps where they have suffered all kinds of mental, physical and sexual violence. Facing these courageous, exhausted and traumatized women, we cannot in anyway see them as less victims than any women of different nationality. They tell us of all kinds atrocities, systematic rapes, death threats and other horrors. It is obvious that in war rapists are mostly of other nationality, but for many women it is not the nationality but the body of men which have destroyed their joy of life. We must say that we are sad that some of our sisters from Croatia … do not want to communicate with us anymore. Even though we support their work for women, which in the long run should bring more freedom for everyone – they still see us as a part of the Enemy Body. 118
Now this statement is far from the rape apologetics often attributed to “the serbs” in the mainstream media. Moreover, it supplements International Red Cross data from the autumn of
1992 which identifies a total of 2,692 civilians held in 25 detention centers in Bosnia with 1,203 detainees held by the Bosnian Serbs in eight camps, 1,061 by Bosnian Muslims in twelve camps, and 428 by Bosnian Croats in five camps. 119 These numbers refute the spin that the Bosnian war was a unilateral act of Serbian “genocidal” aggression. Strangely enough, this rhetoric was the import of Franjo Tudjman’s nationalist Croatia, a rhetoric leveled two months after the IRC data by the Croatian weekly Globus at seven notable Croatian feminists who, in their effort to write critically about the war, were proclaimed national traitors who hid “the truth about sexual violence as the instrument of Serbian racist and imperialistic policies” and were labeled
118 Batinic, 8. 119 Johnstone, Fools’ Crusade , 71.
91
“witches”. 120 These women had their private and professional lives pried open and were publicly blacklisted.
Indeed, the sensationalist reporting and open use of state-controlled media by the conservative leaderships in Croatia and Serbia, however, made it extraordinarily difficult to hold true to transnational notions of sisterhood. “Raped women” were a guaranteed headliner under
Franjo Tudjman’s reign for politically prudent reasons and, as a result, MacKinnon’s piece received a generous amount of press in Croatia. As Kesic chronicles, a government run tabloid named Vecerniji list ran MacKinnon’s claims about the Banja Luka tapes including a reported but never confirmed gutting of a pregnant women. 121 In the context of war propaganda nothing is sacred, and the frenzied and fear-induced gullibility that is so much a part of its machinations ensures a hungry audience for even the most exaggerated claims. 122 This is not to say that rape was not in many instances a premeditated tool of Serbian ethnic cleansing; it is because of
Bosnia that it was recognized, rightly, as a war crime and genocidal practice. The key point is that academic and feminist support for essentialized ethnic identities undermined any form of solidarity that could have been built by feminists. MacKinnon discouraged such solidarity by referring to those critical of her as Serb sympathizers; “collaborators…trying to hide what it is all about.” 123 Kesic, Slavenka Drakulic, Dubravka Ugresic, and other anti-nationalist feminists who have gone on to acclaimed literary and journalistic careers refused to engage in victim-counting and the ethnic privileging of Croats and Muslims as “the only authentic casualties of the war”, 124
120 Batinic, 9. 121 Kesic, “A Response to Catharine MacKinnon’s Article,” 269-270. 122 MacKinnon’s argument rests upon the assumption that the war rapes were systematically filmed. There is no such evidence for such systematicity. The UN Commission’s Final Report (1994) refers to only one known incident of a filmed rape, as does the extensive Bassiouni Report (1996) and the only source given in either case is, as Zarkov points out, MacKinnon’s own problematic article on the issue. Her message nonetheless made the international wire, so to speak, and also became a weapon in the hands of the conservative Croatian government. See Zarkov, 150. 123 Kesic, “A Response to Catharine MacKinnon’s Article,” 275. 124 Ibid., 276.
92
leaving them vulnerable to public indictments, evictions, threats, and “sexualized verbal attacks”. 125 MacKinnon served as a notable recruit in this propaganda campaign.
From the UN Human Rights Conference (1993) to the New York Bar Association (1993), from the high circulation Ms (1993) to the studio lights of Charlie Rose (1993), MacKinnon espoused falsities from the causal import of pornographic determinism to the accusation that “the serbs” impregnated 30,000 Croatian and Muslim women. Her tropics of interpretation rest upon a three-tier rendering of the Bosnian war. First, Balkan peoples, generally, are rendered as
“savage”, “backward”, and excessively “libidinal”; they are sculpted by original sin, enjoy lascivious sex, and exist in a public culture that “primes” its own unisexual misogyny and concomitant barbarism. Educated women are nothing more than mouthpieces for a sexist culture that is simply a priori and, as such, never explained; it is assumed as a matter of course.
Secondly, this coiled and libidinous savagery and backwardness, the common everyday rape culture that all belligerents share, is that of “Communist rule”, a rule equated with “Serbian hegemony”, thus making the misogynist burden a peculiarly Serbian one. 126 The Balkans are primitive, but “the serbs” are the unequivocal receptacles of this primitivism. Serbian modernity is gauged by the “technological and psychological sophistication” of its rape tactics and nothing more. 127 Thirdly, “the serbs” are a magnetic totality; there exist no oppositional classes, parties, genders, and generations. If they do exist, they all represent the same thing. Herein lays
MacKinnon’s functionalist and essentialist reading of an entire people. Those perceived as attracted to this totality, i.e. those who choose not to view it as a wholesale personification , are labeled “sympathizers”, “deniers”, “witches”, porno-feminists, and “Yugo-nostalgics”, irrespective of whether they actually own a broomstick or a Bijelo Dugme album. Implicated in
125 Ibid., 275. 126 MacKinnon, “Rape, Genocide, and Women’s Human Rights,” 186. 127 MacKinnon, “Turning Rape into Pornography,” 161-162.
93
this bewitching totality are, apart from the aforementioned Croatian feminists, Serbian women as well.
Whether exposed to prescient and well-substantiated criticisms by her interlocutors, or severely contradicted by the human rights reportage she so selectively uses, MacKinnon utilized her privileged position as easily the most eminent feminist in the US at the time to ignore, deflect, and/or stigmatize views contrary to her own. Erica Munk surmises that MacKinnon
“seems to believe that an individual’s goodness, or badness, can inhere in their race and place” and uses her “political energies” to fight pornography “at the expense of other social and economic battles”. 128 Kesic concurs:
MacKinnon’s subjective, biased approach neglects all the complex and historical causes and processes of this war, culminating in the oversimplification that the source of sexual violence in this war is found in pornography. This is dangerous and banal reductionism which can damage, if not discredit and wholly disqualify feminist analyses of armed conflict. 129
Critics exist who dispute this position, and who legitimately feel that what Kesic, Munk, and others prescribe is akin to a “trap of morality”; that the more actions are overdetermined, i.e. subject to the conditioning of multiple structural causes, “the less culpable they seem.” 130 This is not what I am arguing. The strategies that MacKinnon and her supporters deploy are those of an experiential and decidedly visceral kind, and the discourse of justice that informs these strategies is grounded in a refusal to comprehend the conflict beyond its “barbaric” immediacy. Hayden states that this is the key moral puzzle at the centre of “the rhetorics of genocide ”. 131 The approach taken by MacKinnon is largely grounded in recoil and reaction, triangulated by an uncompromising moral outrage. There is nothing wrong or necessarily obfuscating about such
128 Munk, 6. 129 Kesic, “A Response to Catharine MacKinnon’s Article,” 276. 130 Robert M. Hayden, “Schindler’s Fate: Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and Population Transfers,” Slavic Review 55, no. 4 (1996), 730. 131 Ibid.
94
moral outrage, it is, after all, a wholly understandable and sentient response to the brutality of rape and ethnic cleansing. But, for MacKinnon, such a response begins and ends with moral outrage; the answer to the questions and contradictions wrought by the conflict are terminated, i.e. “answered”, by the outrage itself. There is no strategy of understanding that takes the axe to the root and explores (a) the local and global historical conditions for such violence; (b) its relationship to the brutal history of European and North American state formation; (c) as part of the multiple and stark social consequences of a decade of neo-liberalization; and (d) the complex and highly competitive history of Great Power manoeuvring within the region. Rape and ethnic cleansing are, as Hayden astutely points out, justified by such a rhetorical structure. Moral outrage requires something to be outraged about, and its raison d’etre is first and foremost about the need to take the right side, so perceived. The desire to understand the process in its totality is secondary. Genocide in common parlance is a synonym for pure and unfathomable evil that any person of conscience must surely condemn. In this regard, the subjectivist desire for justice is paramount whereas the need to understand and explain the conditions facilitating the rise of genocidal practices, in other words, the practice of social science, is concomitantly rendered mute.
The consequences of what I call the subjectivist-idealist approach deployed by
MacKinnon is a wilful erasure of what Dorothy Smith has astutely termed “relations of ruling”;
“a complex of organized practices, including government, law, business, and financial management, professorial organization, and educational institutions as well as discourses in texts that interpenetrate the multiple sites of power.” 132 By positing “the everyday world as problematic”, Smith provides a heuristic whereby binaries such as oppressor/oppressed,
132 Dorothy E. Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987), 3.
95
male/female, and colonizer/colonized can be complexified. What this heuristic essentially recuperates is two-fold: (a) a viable and decidedly materialist notion of overdetermination; and, not unrelated, (b) a marked emphasis on lived experiences as the inductive ground through which potential solidarities might be galvanized. The overdetermination of lived experiences profoundly implicates those producers of “discourses in texts” with “the multiple sites of power.” 133
MacKinnon is a traditional intellectual, in the Gramscian sense, really an academic celebrity of sorts, labouring in the welter of post-Cold War American exceptionalism and the triumph of neoliberalism. The nation-state on whose ground she writes, speaks, and pontificates is founded upon a protracted process of violence that, as Michael Mann states, is ongoing and foundational to its structure and heft:
Ethnic cleansing, murderous, deporting, amounting at its worst to genocide, was central to the liberal modernity of the New World – committed first by the settler colonies then by the ‘first new nations’. The process continued in North America and Australia until there were virtually no more native peoples to exterminate. It was not a product of democracy per se. but a product of democracy amid colonial exploitation. 134
Mann has done a notable job of highlighting these originary and ongoing processes of violence, extermination, and displacement, of which MacKinnon is not totally unaware. In this vein, understanding “relations of ruling” requires a recognition and auto-critique of ones complicity in the inherited “relations of ruling” of a given settler state. This requires an analytical framework that foregrounds the historical intersections between capitalism, colonialism, and racism, and not simply in an anachronistic “that was then” manner. To iterate how these processes continue to exist allows for a broad spatio-temporal geography upon which to identify and work through the often privileged and abstracted complicities of global exploitation. MacKinnon cannot account
133 Ibid. 134 Michael Mann, “The Dark Side of Democracy: The Modern Tradition of Ethnic and Political Cleansing” in New Left Review I, 235 (1999), 27.
96
for the multiple instances of what David Harvey, via Marx, understands as “accumulation by dispossession” and how such a late-capitalist phenomenon consolidates and entrenches the power of specific classes while nourishing the conditions for various kinds of political and social pathologies. The global economic disciplinary schemes of neoliberalism, proposed, enacted, and legislated under various governments from New York to Belgrade, and the social suffering engendered by the attendant processes of neoliberalization, reserve no space in her theoretical framework.
The play of conjunctural forces in the Balkans from 1987-1992 is not thematized in a manner that might explain the multiple social, political, and economic mobilizations that led to war. Gagnon and Zarkov substantively underscore the role of government-controlled media in
Serbia and Croatia and the relative immediacy with which various racialized and gendered discourses were deployed by the likes of newspaper outlets such as Politika and Globus in the crucible of popular agitation against both Milosevic and, later, Tudjman. 135 Woodward, Cohen, and Chossudovsky chronicle and analyze the multifarious forms of popular agitation in response to structural adjustment and the intra-ethnic co-operation visible in many such mobilizations and sociologists such as Andjelka Milic have zeroed in on the consequences of structural adjustment on family and work in Serbia. 136 Such studies are indispensable for coming to terms with the nature and scale of violence in the former Yugoslavia. The production of intra-ethnic subjectivities, i.e. conceptions of the “Other” as civilized/uncivilized, Western/Eastern,
European/Balkan, and/or urban/rural along what amounts to a decidedly Eurocentric continuum,
135 See V.P. Gagnon, The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 66-72; and Dubravka Zarkov, The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity and Gender in the Break-Up of Yugoslavia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 136 See Lenard J. Cohen, Broken Bonds: the Disintegration of Yugoslavia (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993); Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order (Shanty Bay: Global Outlook, 2003); Andjelka Milic, “The Family and Work in the Post-socialist Transition of Serbia: 1991-2006”, International Review of Sociology 17, no. 2 (2007), 359-380; and Susan Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1995).
97
is inseparable from the “material activity” and “material intercourse” of “real living individuals” under “definite conditions”. 137 In fact, “othering” seems to be “directly interwoven” with precisely such intercourse and activity at both the level of official institutional power and quotidian life. 138 What is (re)produced is never simply “the material conditions that we live under but also the very conception of what it is to be human.” 139 The racialization of “Albanian- separatists” by certain fractions of Serbia’s power-elite presumes an implicit understanding of what constitutively separates “the serbs” from the Albanians in a genealogy of mutual “othering” that includes a branch defined by war, occupation, and conflicting nationalisms. Likewise, the protracted racialization of “the serbs” in Anglo-European media presumes a hierarchy of civilizational worth that cannot be understood outside of its tactical performances in the immediate post-communist conjuncture and the Eurocentric inheritance to which it is indebted.
To conclude, MacKinnon assumes that there exists one trans-historical humanist subject or “consciousness taken as the living individual”, coded as either male or female. 140 This essentially Eurocentric subject, in its female-gendered incarnation, de-materializes the real material lives of those constructed through its pre-digested victim-mongering gaze. Chandra
Talpade Mohanty, in her collection Feminism without Borders (2003), criticizes the shortcomings of “women as a category of analysis” in its Western humanist guise:
Thus, the discursively consensual homogeneity of women as a group is mistaken for the historically specific material reality of groups of women. This results in an assumption of women as an always already constituted group, one that has been labeled powerless,
137 Karl Marx, “The German Ideology,” The Marx-Engels Reader , ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978), 154. 138 Ibid. 139 Carol Boyce-Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 140 Marx, “The German Ideology”, 155.
98
exploited, sexually harassed, and so on, by feminist scientific, economic, legal, and sociological discourses. 141 She goes on to analogize “that this is quite similar to sexist discourse labelling women as weak, emotional, having math anxiety, etc.” 142 Assuming Marx’s starting point of “real living individuals themselves” and the “consciousness” that “is considered solely as their consciousness”, she critiques this Western feminist approach as not concentrating “on uncovering the material and ideological specificities that constitute a particular group of women as ‘powerless’ in a particular context” but focusing, erroneously, “on finding a variety of cases of powerless groups of women to prove the general point that women as a group are powerless.” 143
MacKinnon embodies the Western feminist approach, especially in her writings on the Balkans.
She defines “women as archetypal victims” and “freezes them in ‘objects-who defend- themselves,’ men into ‘subjects-who-perpetrate-violence,’ and (every) society into powerless
(read: women) and powerful (read: men) groups of people.” 144 For her, there are always those who need to be saved. Such pre-constructed and reified categories actually preclude a comprehensive understanding of male violence, because they do not require violence be explained, simply moralized. The cases pile up on top of one another in their graphic minutiae, inciting more explosive rhetorics of moral outrage. If every society is defined not through the contested durability of “relations of ruling”, but through the moral dualism of good and evil, than the legislator of such representations can practice nothing but exhortative damnation, approbation, and disgust; the reactivity of common sense as taste and sentiment. As Gramsci persuasively explains in his Prison Notebooks , no performance of common sense is innocent since it is part and parcel of a specific, socially saturated, and yet often contested historical
141 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 23. 142 Ibid. 143 Ibid. 144 Ibid., 24.
99
conformism. Cultural production, it goes without saying, is not externally-related to such conformism.
The Anglo-Atlantic inheritance I identified above is nuanced through the work of
Mohanty and Norma Alarcon. The former argues that “universal sisterhood”, as discursively constructed over the years by a plethora of liberal and radical feminists, operates as an insidious racialized discourse when transposed onto non-bourgeois and non-Western peoples and geographies. Mohanty’s notion of “Third World difference” is in effect a synopsis of these discourses; a signifier whereby the oppression of the non-Western female is culturalized .145 As
Alarcon states, the nature of the gaze that often fixes Third World women in their oppressive ahistoricity is implicitly rendered as “an autonomous, self-making, self-determining subject who first proceeds according to the logic of identification with regard to the subject of consciousness, a notion usually viewed as the purview of man, but now claimed for women.” 146 To oversimplify, what we have here is the philosophical reappropriation of white male privilege or, what in many respects amounts to the same thing, “consciousness taken as the living individual” from the purview of what Said has succinctly termed “a positional superiority, which puts the
Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand.” 147 The Balkans serves as a qualified “Orient” in this regard.
The Ethnicized Idealism of Slavoj Zizek
This sly pushing aside of the motional heterogeneity of Serbian history and political culture is also evident in the commentaries of the more sophisticated and subtle thinkers. Slavoj Zizek is a perfect case in point. A bonafide Socrates of the late-capitalist jet set Left, Zizek’s work is incredibly ecumenical and, at times, wonderfully insightful. When not critically acclaimed for
145 Ibid., 40. 146 Ibid., 80. 147 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1979), 7.
100
philosophical expositions such as The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) or The Ticklish Subject
(1999) he is lionized in biographical films or added to the extras of blockbuster DVD’s. A self- avowed internationalist and Lenin revisionist, Zizek’s commentaries on the Balkans, however, oscillate between the disingenuous and the outright balkanist. His inability to see “the serbs” in politics and culture as nothing more than a tribal artefact of the age of nationalism is regularly displayed in a cluster of writings and interviews from 1997 to 2003.
For Zizek, the root cause of the Balkan wars rests with one personage: Slobodan
Milosevic. He identifies the start of the breakdown in 1987, when Milosevic revoked the qualified autonomy of the Serbian provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina, never once identifying, as Susan Woodward and Jasna Dragovic-Soso do, the role of Slovenian secessionism in informing this manoeuvre. 148 His explanatory framework is sorcerous, investing as he does a magical quality to Milosevic’s power through “Great Man” postulates that completely efface the not necessarily benign agency of those surrounding this bureaucrat. Zizek recognizes that
Milosevic, in however distorted a form, attempted to “remedy the underprivileged situation of
Serbia within the Yugoslav federation”, 149 but conveniently refuses take stock of the concrete economic and political nature of this inequality; a structural inequality that pre-dates Milosevic’s nascence. 150 Instead, we are to assume that Milosevic had enumerated specific targets, beginning with the Albanians of Kosovo, and accordingly vented his wrath à la Clint Eastwood in
Unforgiven in a systematic takedown, ultimately returning to Kosovo “in a closed loop of
Destiny” after blitzing through Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia. 151 “[T]he arrow returned” writes
148 See Woodward, Balkan Tragedy , 47-81, 82-113; and Jasna Dragovic-Soso, Saviours of the Nation: Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 162- 205. 149 Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Stories (London: Verso, 2002), 123. 150 Woodward, Balkan Tragedy , 47-81. 151 Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real , 120.
101
Zizek “to the one who dispatched it by freeing the spectre of ethnic passions.” 152 This is an approach to political analysis that Andrew Baruch Wachtel cleverly describes as “fiendish- political” because it sub-writes an understanding of “the serbs” as easily duped by authoritarian personalities and their insidious schemes. 153 Zizek goes one further by ethnicizing this approach; not only are “the serbs” duped by Milosevic’s witchcraft, but they wholesale anticipate it, i.e. they desire it.
“The serbs” are, for Zizek, a synonym for “the passionate energy of the crowd.” 154 The conflation of a nation of ten million people with a vague libidinal kinesis allows him to contradict his own argument in the service of a racist balkanism:
When the Western powers repeat all the time that they are not fighting the Serb people, but only their corrupted leaders, they rely on the (typically liberal) wrong premise that Serbs are victims of their evil leadership personified in Milosevic, manipulated by him. The painful fact is that the Serb aggressive nationalism enjoys the support of the large majority of the population - no, Serbs are not passive victims of nationalist manipulation; they are not Americans in disguise, just waiting to be delivered from the nationalist spell. 155
“The serbs” are thus nationalist by definition. Their relationship with “aggressive” nationalism is more than just a “spell”; it is far more fundamentally ideological. These are a people, unlike any other, who are saturated by a murderous chauvinism, passively awaiting the trigger that would ignite it. Natasa Kovacevic, in her Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial Discourse and
Europe’s Borderline Civilization (2008), takes Zizek to task for his “theoretical” reifications of
Balkan ethnicities within the context of late twentieth century “humanitarian” discourses. 156 She states that Zizek “casts the Yugoslav wars as a question of ethnic entities – always-already
152 Ibid. 153 Wachtel, 14. 154 Slavoj Zizek, “The Morning After,” Eurozine , March 3, 2001, http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2001-03-27- zizek-en.html . 155 Slavoj Zizek, “Against the Double Blackmail,” New Left Review I, 234 (1999), 80. 156 Natasa Kovacevic, Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization (New York: Routledge, 2008), 156-187.
102
invested with presence, self-same, monolithic – and of their respective responsibilities in the war.” 157 Moreover, “he follows a Western humanitarian logic in separating evil nationalists from noble multiculturalists and establishing hierarchies between entire ‘entities’ thus qualified.” 158
His understanding of the rise and fall of Milosevic is a case in point.
Zizek argues that Milosevic rose to power “by deftly manipulating the Serb public discontent” 159 yet “the serbs” themselves are not to be seen as “passive victims of nationalist manipulation.” 160 But the moral force of this pronouncement requires a rendering of “the serbs” as uniquely susceptible to these capricious libidinal energies and, more to the point, incapable of freeing themselves from it of their own accord. This of course also assumes that the grievances, concerns, exaggerations, and desires coded within the dominant variant of Serbian nationalism do not have an essential rationality; that perhaps the memory of Jasenovac for Krajina Serbs, the poverty and dearth of opportunities in the Military Frontier, the ethnic cleansing of this habitat by US-backed Croatian forces in 1995 are somehow not part of the complexes of cause and effect that gave hellish detail to this post-communist civil war.
For Zizek, none of this matters. “The serbs” were brought into a nationalist stupor in
1989 as if by magic, and also, as if by magic, brought out of it in 2000. He finds the removal of
Milosevic in October of 2000 as compelling precisely because it was “unexpected” and
“magical”. 161 “The magic dimension of this moment” he writes, “rests in the fact that it is always and by definition unexpected, as if it emerged ex nihilo.” 162 In a rhetorical turn reminiscent of the more puerile kinds of colonial sociology, he argues that “the serbs” dumped the “[p]ower”
157 Ibid., 165. 158 Ibid. 159 Zizek, “The Morning After,” http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2001-03-27-zizek-en.html . 160 Zizek, “Against the Double Blackmail”, 80. 161 Zizek, “The Morning After,” http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2001-03-27-zizek-en.html . 162 Ibid.
103
controlling them when they simply “ceased to believe in it.” 163 This attenuated dialectic of
“people” and “[p]ower” does not seem to be a problem for Zizek, who deploys the discourse of
“sleep” to explain this political transformation. “Sudden”, “discover”, “awaken”, “awareness” are verbs, adverbs, and adjectives that telegraph “the serbs” as people existing just short of consciousness for at least a decade; wilfully refusing to disassociate themselves from their master. 164 He goes on to propose that “[o]ne should thus fully acknowledge the magic of these unique moments of universal solidarity, in which all differences are magically leveled, and the entire people is united in the hatred and rejection of Him, the Leader fallen from grace.” 165
Yet this rejection has no bearing on a collective shift in attitude. After all, “the serbs”
“are not Americans in disguise”; their nationalism is un-nuanced and incapable of being redeemed. 166 One might speculate that Zizek, given his nostalgia for aspects of “multicultural”
Yugoslavia, is at the very least consistent in his reifications, i.e. that all Balkans nationalisms in and of themselves are sinful phenomena. Such is not the case. The Bosnians under Alija
Izetbegovic are read as harbouring an honest “intent” towards multiculturalism; a superficial speculation that wholesale overlooks the ideological content of Izetbegovic’s notorious “Islamic
Declaration” and the tactics of Realpolitik deployed by the Bosnian administration from 1992-
1995. 167 The culpability of the Croatian regime under the authoritarian presidency of Franjo
163 Ibid. 164 Ibid. 165 Ibid. 166 Ibid., 80. 167 David N. Gibbs cites the memoirs of Bosnian Muslim liberal Adil Zulfikarpasic to prove that Izetbegovic was not the multiculturalist mainstream media made him out to be. Here is Zulfikarpasic on attending a 1990 rally for Izetbegovic’s Party of Democratic Action (SDA): “I had been at Tito’s rallies in Belgrade but I had never seen one like this. When people breathed it was like the roar of a tank, it was unbelievable. There were slogans, green flags, shouts, signs saying “We’ll kill Vuk!” [Vuk Draskovic, a Serb leader] and ‘Long Live Saddam Hussein!’ Saddam Hussein? There were pictures of Saddam Hussein, people wearing Arab dress, hundreds of green [Islamic] flags….Izetbegovic’s and the SDA’s main [press] organ published a text calling for the creation of a Muslim state and the strict implementation of Sharia , which is absolutely impossible in a multinational, multi-cultural, and multi- faith environment such as Bosnia.” Zulfikarpasic called the SDA’s spirit “fascist”. Gibbs adds: “If Izetbegovic was a believer in democracy and multiculturalism – as some accounts suggest – then he certainly had an odd way of
104
Tudjman is excused by Zizek in weak terms because its head, in some shape, acknowledges a callow Yugo-nostalgia. “[E]ven such a degenerate and, sad regime as the Tudjman regime in
Croatia” writes Zizek “still acknowledges Tito and the old Yugoslav legacy as a legitimate tradition. Even if he is – and he definitely is – a proto-fascist figure, Tudjman still includes Tito within the great Croat legacy, or however he puts it.” 168 Kovacevic perceptively observes that here we have, at the very least, an open recognition of the complexity within Bosnian and
Croatian nationalisms. 169 Yet the subtle sophistication imputed to these nationalisms is denied to its Serbian counterpart in a manner that makes a mockery of Zizek’s pretensions to anti-racism.
“The serbs” cannot not be nationalist; their expunging of Milosevic is only a prelude to a more egregious and versatile nationalism parasitic on a regressive Russophilia. The prejudices of
MacKinnon, Anzulovic, and Mestrovic come home to roost in quite covert ways.
Zizek argues that the “morning after” Milosevic’s downfall heralds a post-catatonic opportunity for political organization that, given the nature of their nationalism, “the serbs” are de facto incapable of. 170 It is interesting to note that he slyly codes his rendering of Serbia’s political manoeuvres in language that smacks of an irresponsible and uninhibited night on the town; “the sobering headache after the drunkenness” of political solidarity preceded, of course, by a twilight of the idols (Milosevic and Karadzic) colored by “the poetic-military complex.” 171
This coupling of drunkenness and song has been evoked by Aleksander Hemon and Slavenka
expressing it.” David N. Gibbs, First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009), 114-119, 155-160; and Johnstone, 55-64. 168 Slavoj Zizek, “Human Rights and its Discontents,” Bard College, November 15, 1999, http://www.lacan.com/zizek-human.htm . 169 Kovacevic, Narrating Post/Communism , 171. 170 Zizek, “The Morning After,” http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2001-03-27-zizek-en.htmi . 171 Ibid.
105
Drakulic in the media histrionics around the arrests of Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. 172 It is a classic neo-colonialist trope; the poetic savages of yesteryear that lurk below the pointed eye of Freud’s watchman. The fetishization of “poet-warriors” as amorality incarnate, “lawlessness let off the chain” in the words of Dostoevsky, supplements the allegedly extra-historical nationalism of “the serbs”. In this sense, Milosevic’s “excess” nationalism was a mere simulacrum in the political anthropology of “the serbs”. The real kernel of Serbian intolerance is rooted in the bedrock of Serbian common life. Alas, the ethnicization of a people has reached its logical conclusion. “[N]ow”, writes Zizek, “we will get honest and true nationalists.” 173
The chauvinistic substratum of this culture and its natural affinity with others of its ilk is the real threat. Interestingly, the “others” in question consists solely of Russia. “Russification” emerges as an epithet denoting parasitical and anti-democratic nouveaux riches who sell themselves as democrats to the West for financial welfare; Fanon’s “national bourgeoisie”, if I may proffer the analogy. 174 Yet Zizek does not read this as the consequences of years of neoliberal restructuring, war, and sanctions, but as a simple problem of national eccentricity. He worries that Yugoslavia will reintegrate itself with the West as a gangster nation “without paying any price.” 175 In a long paragraph in “The Morning After” (2001), Zizek touches all the criteria outlined earlier as to what defines “the serbs”:
This brings us back to the present situation in Serbia: how radical will the sobering process be? Will the new public self-consciousness stop again at putting the blame on the others (NATO, the Communist legacy, up to Milosevic himself), reasserting the self- perception of Serbs as eternal victims, or will it achieve a true catharsis, discerning the roots of the present catastrophe in its own past acts? Will Serbia continue to play the game of "who betrayed the national interests", or will it be able to confront the ethical
172 See Aleksander Hemon, “Genocide’s Epic Hero,” The New York Times , July 27, 2008; and Slavenka Drakulic, “Who Created Ratko Mladic?” Eurozine , June 2, 2011, http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2011-06-02-drakulic- en.html . 173 Zizek, “The Morning After”: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2001-03-27-zizek-en.html . 174 See Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 148-205. 175 Zizek, “The Morning After”: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2001-03-27-zizek-en.html .
106
betrayal that pertains to excessive nationalism itself? In short, will Serbia really awaken to what it has done in the last decade, or will it just awaken into a new dream? And, to avoid a crucial misunderstanding, this fundamental choice has nothing to do with the reintegration of Serbia into the Western community: it's emphatically not true that only a Serbia cleansing itself of its nationalist guilt will be really admitted into the West. The West has grown tired of the Yugoslav crisis, willing to settle with anyone, as long as it is not Milosevic. Once the West will be able to save face by claiming that democracy has won, the reintegration of Serbia will be fast and smooth, and money will start to flow – if anything, the "Russified" Serbia, with "honest nationalists" in a pact with corrupted business, would be the ideal partner for the West. 176
Once again Zizek is preoccupied with a discourse of sobriety and intoxication as it pertains to the chronic relationship the always already reified “serbs” have to nationalism as such (“sobering process”). Also evident is his explicit reference to Serbian victimhood (“putting the blame on others”; “eternal victims”) and the proposition that “excessive nationalism” is not only the ontological essence of “the serbs”, but that it is also an “ethical betrayal”. A betrayal of what one might ask? A betrayal of the very same multiculturalism Zizek is usually so keen on chastising for its insidious racism. As an entity, Serbia does not even have the substance to “reintegrate” into a Western form; it is perennially deformed and impalpable, even if it manages to “[cleanse] itself of its nationalist guilt”. So one can ultimately sober up, but never shed the stigma of its peers.
Kovacevic correctly points out that Zizek takes advantage of his position as an
“outsider”/”insider” on the Balkan conflict. 177 He considers the wars from the “outside” in his guise as a much published representative of Western commentary on the region; a posture that is perhaps informed by a Sloveno-centric pose that self-identifies as Western. Conversely, he is keen to play up his participation in late twentieth century Slovenian politics as a member of the inaugural “free” Slovenian Parliament, within which he advocated for the introduction of
176 Ibid. 177 Kovacevic, Narrating Post/Communism , 166.
107
neoliberal policies. 178 In this, Western intervention for Zizek is a moot point, something that was
“already inscribed in the break-up of Yugoslavia” and, as such, nourishes itself on Western humanitarian discourses. North American popular and academic audiences thus receive him as an authority on the region due to his political activities, activities now over twenty years old, and are often lax in challenging his interpretations. His stance on military humanism “recapitulates the mainstream concepts of a multicultural, human rights discourse that it seeks to transcend” 179 and “gives even more leverage to Western supporters of the NATO actions against Bosnian
Serbs and Serbia proper.” 180
He openly operates within the framework I outlined earlier, framing “the serbs” as (a) a victim-nation”; sufferers of a psychological pathology that always already displace responsibility for actions onto a convenient other; and (b) categorically ethnic nationalist. In his rendering of
Serbian nationalism as the essential kernel of “the serbs”, murder is registered as a corollary of the culture that allegedly justifies it, and not explained conjuncturally as the product of variegated historical variables. Moreover, the problem that hinders Serbia’s progress is its indebtedness to a totalitarian communism, a debt that Croatia has inexplicably brushed off:
However, this very parallel with Croatia renders the difference all the more visible: the fact that, following his death, Tudjman's memory was erased and endures now only in the scandals from the time of his rule that continue to reverberate, is, paradoxically, a good sign. It demonstrates that Tudjman's authoritarianism was superficial, that the Croat state was able to survive his disappearance without too much of a shock. In the case of Serbia, the situation is much more complex: what the rule of Milosevic stood for was the survival of the old Communist nomenklatura which continued to dominate the entire scope of
178 “Once in power, the Slovene Liberal Democratic Party was the party of capital, and Zizek’s response in subsequent interviews when asked about the policies of the Liberals in government was that the party saved the country from chaos. He even went so far as to suggest that if a little neoliberal privatization of the economy worked, then why not try it. Zizek took the side of the state against the social movements, and he is quite clear he would do so again today: ‘I should say that in the breakup of Yugoslavia just as in most other conflicts between the state and civil society, I was regularly on the side of the state. Civil society meant democratic opposition; it also meant, however, violent nationalism.’” See Sean Homer, “To Begin at the Beginning Again: Zizek in Yugoslavia,” Slavic Review 72, no. 4 (2013), 709-710. 179 Kovacevic, Narrating Post/Communism , 167. 180 Ibid., 166.
108
state apparatuses and economy, from the Army and police to education, public media and big business. Which is why the cleansing of this Augean stable will be much more demanding, threatening to tear apart the social fabric. 181
Why was the Croatian state able to survive Tudjman’s disappearance? Are there legitimate structural reasons for this? How is a state whose media was more tightly controlled than its
Serbian counterpart and whose more progressive feminists were blacklisted without much in the way of support an example of “superficial” “authoritarianism”? What about prison camps such as the notorious Camp Lora where inmates were tortured, forced to perform sexual acts on one another, humiliated, and physically deprived of basic necessities? What of the celebration
Second World War fascist symbology and its pop cultural incarnations in hate-baiting acts such as Thompson? 182 None of this seems to be either (a) inquired into or (b) if so, acknowledged in any serious and/or scholarly manner. Attention is to be focused on “the serbs” and their durable culture of “old Communist nomenklatura” which, ironically, requires a truly “demanding”
“cleansing” for the culture to be considered normal. 183 Here we have a perfect example of stock stereotype: “the serbs” are predisposed to “communism” in the silences and sounds of this sensus imperium and all this entails: authoritarianism, bureaucracy, and nepotism. Zizek is aware of the corrosive impact of balkanism on the peoples of the former Yugoslavia, just wholly unaware of it in himself. This is markedly evident in his musings on contemporary “Serbian” culture, namely, the films of Emir Kusturica.
In the Plague of Fantasies (1997) and selected interviews, he rightly takes Kusturica’s magnum opus and Palme d’Or winning Underground (1995) to task for its balkanist
181 Zizek, “The Morning After”: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2001-03-27-zizek-en.html . 182 Chris Hedges, “Fascists Reborn as Croatia’s Founding Fathers,” The New York Times , April 12, 1997, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/04/12/world/fascists-reborn-as-croatia-s-founding-fathers.html . 183 Zizek, “The Morning After”: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2001-03-27-zizek-en.html .
109
representations. 184 The film follows the lives of two friends, the intellectual Marko and the career gangster Blacky, from the turbulence of World War II to the surplus repression of communism in practice, and, finally, to the ultimate fissuring of Tito’s Yugoslavia. Without belabouring the point too much, Zizek describes this film as “tragic” in that it presents the Balkans as “a crazy part of the world where people have sex, fornicate, drink and fight all the time.” 185 Furthermore, he concludes that “[Kusturica] is staging a certain myth which is what the West likes to see here in Balkans: this mythical other which has been the mythical other for a long period.” This is a very perceptive, if debatable, interpretation of the film. But Zizek stretches this interpretation onto “the serbs” themselves, describing the cinematic cycle of fucking, fighting, and folklore as the “Serbian libidinal economy” which he concludes is the same as the “libidinal economy of the ethnic slaughter in Bosnia”. 186
What he refers to as “libidinal economy” is an understanding, certainly not without credence, that desire in its various incarnations is not innocent; it is deeply political. A politicized desire is molded through a given political conjuncture and its concomitant history, and also serves to inform and justify this specific political conjuncture. Yet Zizek does not identify and probe the historical conditions of production of such inflections of desire. His psychological heuristic is grounded in a typology that stays true to his repertoire of ethnic hierarchies. “The serbs”, filtered through Underground , are the sole repository of this sexual industry. Zizek attempts to displace blame for the Balkan wars onto Kusturica’s frame of reference and its limitations, accusing him of essentializing the Slovenes and Croats as Nazi sympathizers while celebrating an androcentric fantasy of thwarted heroism, uninhibited love,
184 See Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 60-64. 185 Slavoj Zizek, “Euronews Talks Films and Balkans with Slavoj Zizek,” Euronews , December 9, 2008, http://www.euronews.com/2008/09/12/euronews-talks-films-and-balkans-with-slavoj-zizek/ . 186 Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 64.
110
and expansive generosity. 187 Conversely, one might conclude that the “realm of freedom” embodied in this film is an exercise in humanization; an attempt at recuperating the many ironies of life that are part and parcel of Balkan history. “I would like to make you understand that
Underground is a film deeply and sincerely humanistic,” explains Kusturica “and whose roots belong to my history, to my family, to my dead father fighting against the Nazis, to the Balkans.
I made a personal visceral, sentimental opus on a volcanic, explosive region that is also full of vital energy.” 188 He views his film as “an ironic pamphlet against all the propagandas, wherever they come from.” 189 Indeed, as Sean Homer argues in his “Retrieving Emir Kusturica’s
Underground as a Critique of Ethnic Nationalism” (2009), the film is incredibly self-referential,
“a very self-conscious cultural artifact”, 190 within which the “postmodern relativization of truth and representation is consistently emphasized.” 191 Homer explains how Kusturica’s presentation of Marko as a cynical and manipulative “fraud” – keeping his friends and comrades managed and propagandized in a cave as he buttresses his “Titoist” authority and lies to win over the love of the coveted Natalija – undercuts Zizek’s implication that the main characters are somehow filmic doppelgängers of war criminal Radovan Karadzic and naturally amenable to a straight
Serb nationalist reading. 192 Lost in Zizek’s reading of this film, which he describes as a “pseudo-
Batailleian trance of excessive expenditure” 193 – thus squaring his take with MacKinnon’s problematic sexualization of “the serbs” – is an understanding of Kusturica’s aesthetic roots as part of a parodic and subversive 1980s “punk subculture” known as the Sarajevo New Primitivs
187 Ibid., 61. 188 Emir Kusturica, “Underground - like a thunderstorm” in Le Point #1205, 21 October 1995: http://www.kustu.com/w2/en:itv_95-10-21_le_point . 189 Ibid. 190 Sean Homer, “Retrieving Emir Kusturica’s Underground as a Critique of Ethnic Nationalism,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media , no. 51 (2009), 3, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc51.2009/Kusterica/ . 191 Ibid. 192 Ibid. 193 Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies , 64.
111
(SNP). “The New Primitivs”, writes Homer, “were militantly provincial and anti-intellectual.
Rather than rejecting Balkan stereotypes, such as the Balkan ‘Wildman,’ they embraced these stereotypes and exaggerated them. They adopted an ironic stance regarding official culture and drew upon folk culture as well as the tradition of Yugoslav naïve painting in order to subvert it from within.” 194
This does not mean, however, that Underground does not contain unsavoury representations and characters – the sexism is palpable and notably unaddressed by Zizek. But this is also a film that adheres to the tenets of magical realism, a staple of Kusturica’s aesthetics.
As such, there is a sense in which the film’s excesses are intentional and genre-specific, in many ways analogous to Gabriel Garcia Marques’ One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). Zizek, however, reads it as a receptacle for Serbian culture in toto . By conflating the film with Serbian culture as a whole and projecting it as the ideological soil for the growth of death and destruction, he reproduces the balkanism he often views himself the victim of. There is a sense in which some proponents of Lacanian psychoanalytical theory, in their application of its concepts to political and social phenomena, must be made aware of the extent to which their discourse often assumes more than it explains. If your preoccupation is with totems of “patriarchy”,
“libidinal economies”, “madness”, and dualisms of “sanity” and “insanity” then it very much matters upon whom this arsenal is deployed and its relationship (or not) to a dominant hegemon that can be empirically verified as such. Zizek’s is not a rigorous sociological analysis, but a tactical use of balkanism; it reaffirms the dominant and effective discourse that frames the Serbs as the sole perpetrators of this post-Cold War drama, and goes one step further by psychologizing an entire nation.
194 Ibid., 1.
112
The ethnicized balkanologies of Mestrovic, Anzulovic, MacKinnon and Zizek are parasitic on precisely the taut nation-thinking that defined policy and practice for the belligerents of the Yugoslav drama. These selected contributions conflate the contradictions and internal relations of the multiple spaces in which Balkan peoples live with what Rogers Brubaker terms a
“realist substantialist” understanding of nations. 195 This view assumes nations as a priori entities that harbor a telos towards “autonomy and independence.” 196 Nations are thus seen as an aggregate of goal-oriented individuals capable of unified action. Some have called this “a sociologically naïve view” with its tinges of “primordialism” because it tends to take “ categories of practice as categories of analysis .” 197 In other words, “[i]t takes a conception inherent in the practice of nationalism and in the workings of the modern state and state system – namely the realist, reifying conception of nations as real communities – and it makes this conception central to the theory of nationalism.” 198
Zizek reads the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the terms in which the respective power- elites in the conflict interpellate their subjects. Complex post-Yugoslav social phenomena are thus balkanized into balkanisms . The identification and heuristic import of the latter term was brought to prominence by Maria Todorova in 1997 as a means of challenging such monolithic representations of the Balkan Peninsula more generally. Providing an intellectual history and theoretical tools with which to deconstruct denigrative representations such as these, Todorova’s contribution set the terms for subsequent critical balkanologies and also anticipates their epistemological and ontological limitations.
195 Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 14. 196 Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed , 14. 197 Ibid., 15. 198 Ibid.
113
CHAPTER 3: THE PRODUCTIVE CONTRADICTIONS OF MARIA TODOROVA
I cannot emphasize enough the importance of Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans (1997).
As both a work of historiography and intellectual history it simply does not have a rival in critical balkanology. However, a number of those who have taken their cue from this study have used it as little more than a tool kit or springboard. 199 I find that this does a disservice to what is ostensibly also a profound work of social theory and thus should be read closely and on its own merits as with the great works of this genre. Although Todorova’s politics are – let me take a liberty here – elitist and reformist, her text is riddled with productive contradictions. As a scion of communist nomenklatura – her father was former Bulgarian President, academic, and diplomat Nikolai Todorov – she had a respectable position teaching Ottoman history in the 1980s before immigrating to the United States and taking up tenured duties at the University of Florida and, subsequently, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 200 A member of what Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas once famously referred to as “the new class” in his classic of the same name, Todorova comes from a highly educated, mobile, and relatively leisured petty bourgeois class fraction. 201 Evidently well-versed in Marxist historiography, her work has always exhibited a tension between materialist aspirations and idealist descriptions; a tension that inadvertently opens up a space for a political economy of balkanism, but nonetheless privileges a culturalist reading of “power”. I defend this claim by (a) identifying the limitations of her rather individualistic cultural ontology; (b) highlighting the materialist import of her concept of
199 Some works in this regard include Bozidar Jezernik, Wild Europe: The Balkans in the Gaze of Western Travellers (London: Saqi, 2004); David Norris, In the Wake of the Balkan Myth: Questions of Identity and Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999); Bogoljub Sijakovic, A Critique of Balkanist Discourse: Contribution to the Phenomenology of Balkan ‘Otherness’ (Toronto: Serbian Literary Company, 2004); and Dusan I. Bjelic and Obrad Savic, Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002). 200 Maria Todorova, Bones of Contention: the Living Archive of Vasil Levski and the Making of Bulgaria’s National Hero (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009), 4-5. 201 See Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1957).
114
“historical legacy”; and (c) underscoring how her reading of capitalism and class is obfuscated by a “deconstructive ethos”. But before I explore these productive contradictions, it is necessary to provide an exposition of her concept of balkanism and its relative uniqueness vis-à-vis Said’s influential notion of orientalism – especially given that the former is defended as a more
“materialist” discourse.
Balkanism contra Orientalism
Perhaps a variation of balkanism may have been identified by some promising scholar, if not
Todorova herself, in the post-Cold War conjuncture without the existence and historicization of
Said’s Orientalism . Such a counterfactual is, however, a hard sell. Early producers of Balkan and
East European cultural critique such as Milica Bakic-Hayden and Robert Hayden, John B.
Allcock, Larry Wolff, Vesna Goldsworthy, and Todorova herself have all taken Said’s
Orientalism as a touchstone, keenly stressing at the very first appropriation Said’s emphasis on
“ideas, cultures, and histories” as the product of “configurations of power.” 202 “To believe that the Orient was created”, he writes “– or, as I call it, ‘Orientalized’ – and to believe that such things happen simply as a necessity of the imagination, is to be disingenuous.” 203 Critical balkanology understands that the relationship between Europe and the Balkans, not unlike that between the “Occident and the Orient”, “is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of complex hegemony.” 204 Granted, “configurations of power” between Europe and the
Balkans must be read cautiously, especially through post-colonial and anti-colonial frameworks, given the relative ease with which such rhetoric can conflate the Balkans socio-economic
202 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 5. 203 Ibid. 204 Ibid.
115
dependency on Europe with Europe’s sanguine, systemic and brutally violent colonial and imperial history in the New World, India, and Africa. 205
Yet for historian and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois, it is true that “the legalistic distinction between colonized and subordinate was ephemeral.” 206 Under the heading “The
Unfree Peoples” in Chapter III of his post-World War II polemic Color and Democracy:
Colonies for Peace (1945), Du Bois states that “[I]n addition to the some seven hundred and fifty millions of disenfranchised colonial peoples there are more than a half-billion persons in nations and groups who are quasi-colonials and in no sense form free and independent states.” 207 These
“quasi-colonials” include the Balkans where “60,000,000 persons in the ‘free states’ of Hungary,
Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania, and Greece. They form in the mass an ignorant, poor, and sick people, over whom already Europe is planning ‘spheres of influence’.” 208 Several economic historians, such as Fikret Adanir, Robert Brenner, Ivan T. Berend and John R. Lampe, have traced the history of “economic backwardness” in Eastern Europe and the Balkans in light of developments in the West, where a position of subordination relative to the West might reasonably be claimed. 209 However, Todorova cautiously invokes a “semicolonial” label for the
205 This is a tightrope that Vesna Goldsworthy walks in her notable Inventing Ruritania: the Imperialism of the Imagination . The odd delinking of her otherwise insightful concept of “imaginative colonization” from its political and economic base allows Goldsworthy to thoroughly analyze a specific type of knowledge production within the short history of British modernity. Her concerns are clearly mediatic or, as Marxists would describe it, super- structural , as she “seeks to explore the way in which one of the world’s most powerful nations exploited the resources of the Balkans to supply its literary and entertainment industries.” She recognizes that these cultural industries and their commodities secure a place of relative autonomy within capitalism and that the allegedly “innocent” “process of literary colonization” is similar to what she terms “real colonization”. This is a rather confusing distinction, confusing insofar as “real colonization” is imputed with a certain gravity and materiality, something indubitably more physically if not also psychologically violent than its purely mediatic double, while the latter is still somehow “as ruthless” and exploitative “as any imperialist endeavour”. See Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: the Imperialism of the Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 2-3. 206 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans , 16. 207 Ibid; and W.E.B. Du Bois, Color and Democracy: Colonies for Peace (New York: Harcourt, Bruce and Company, 1945), 58 208 Ibid., 67. 209 Berend states: “The Balkans, as well as the entire Ottoman empire … had to cope with devastating competition from the advanced Western countries. The Anglo-Ottoman treaty of 1838 fixed duties, eliminated monopolies, and led to an impressive increase in imports of cheap foreign goods, especially until the 1860s. The industrial revolution
116
region, rightfully wary of conflating “historically-defined, time-specific, and finite categories like colonialism and imperialism with broadly conceived and not historically circumscribed notions like power and subordination.” 210 For her, the Balkans are clearly a part of Europe, even if self-perceptions within it are tainted by “a chronic allochronism in which the non-Western world lives in another time, always ‘behind’ the west.” 211 This, of course, is not to say that
Eurocentrism is not a discernible materiality, as Todorova perceptively recognizes. As a product of modernity, Eurocentrism “constitutes one dimension of the culture and ideology of the modern capitalist world”; this is perhaps another way of saying that those who own the means of economic production also own the means of ideological production. 212 Such a formulation might explain the import of “semicolonial” as a category through which the Balkans are “made” by outsiders and understood by its educated inhabitants – and this despite the presence of, to echo
Du Bois, nominally “free states”. 213
If, as Said states, orientalism is “a discourse originating in an era of colonialism” and balkanism, as per Todorova, a conjunctural product of the Balkan Wars and World War I, then
in the core countries thus at least temporarily destroyed the traditional guild and cottage industries in the Ottoman periphery. Deindustrialization had a long-lasting effect and could not be overcome before the last third of the century.” See Ivan T. Berend, History Derailed: Central and Eastern Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 175; and Daniel Chirot, The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe: Economic and Politics from the Middle Ages to the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 210 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans , 16. 211 Todorova, “The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality, and the Study of Eastern European Nationalism,” Slavic Review 64, no. 1 (2005), 145. 212 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans , 17. 213 But as Balkan economic historians have persuasively argued, the Balkans have been – and still are – subordinate to Europe and Britain. An underscoring of this economic subordination is where appropriations of “colonialism” as a literary metaphor – as in the work of Vesna Goldsworthy – can be read as an important ideological symptom of a nonetheless politically and economically exploitative relationship. As it stands, Goldsworthy’s concept of “imaginative colonization” is an almost purely self-referential and super-structural affair. In short, she forsakes “precise details of Balkan history” in order to thematize simulacra , justifying this approach by underscoring Britain’s negligible “colonial” involvement in the region. This is a noteworthy endeavor as she is primarily concerned with mapping the nature of British colonial desire , but nonetheless underplays, as Andrew Hammond argues, Britain’s “persistent interference through diplomacy, militarism, and venture capitalism” which “has had a profound and lasting impact” on the peninsula. See Andrew Hammond, The Debated Lands: British and American Representations of the Balkans (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), 3.
117
the genesis of balkanism is inseparable from ripened class conflict. 214 Moreover, much of this class conflict was geared against empire. Balkanism, as Todorova demonstrates, is an indubitably classed discourse in the sense that its optics are often uncannily proletarian. Her identification of its origins also places it squarely in a historical matrix that includes the institutionalization of psychoanalysis and the emergence of surrealism, with the former having a deeply problematic and ethnicized relationship to the region as scholars such as Dusan Bjelic have pointed out. 215
According to Todorova, a major difference between balkanism and orientalism is the nature of what they problematize. Perhaps due to her training as a historian, Todorova attempts to take a deeper materialist angle vis-à-vis Said, claiming that unlike the “intangible nature of the
Orient”, 216 the Balkans “have a concrete historical existence”; 217 they represent a named material landscape and a durable and observable if differentiated history. 218 In that sense, the Balkans indeed “correspond to [a] stable reality that exists as a natural fact”. 219 Indeed, the elasticity of
Said’s concept is such that ostensibly different colonial, geographic, and cultural histories, those of India and Algeria come to mind, end up occupying the same ontological space – even if we grant their ethereality. The Balkans exhibit less incommensurability in this regard, with, for example, Slovenia, Bulgaria, the old European Porte and Serbia being far more spatio-temporally intimate despite obvious differences. Geopolitically, the Balkans have always been an autonomous preoccupation for Great Powers, “a strategic sphere distinct from the Near or
Middle East” that primarily bears the mark of Byzantine and, more profoundly, Ottoman
214 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans , 9. 215 See Dusan I. Bjelic, Normalizing the Balkans: Geopolitics of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2011), 19-74. 216 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans , 13. 217 Ibid., 12. 218 Ibid., 11-12. 219 Ibid., 11.
118
historical legacies. 220 Even after the Ottoman Empire’s dissolution, notable legacies in demographics and popular culture remained. “In practically all spheres in which the Ottoman legacy can be traced (political, cultural, social, and economic),” writes Todorova, “a drastic break occurred at the time of secession and was largely completed by the end of World War I. In the demographic sphere and the sphere of popular culture, the Ottoman legacy has had a more persistent and continuous life.” 221 The Balkan states also “Europeanized” at roughly the same time. No doubt used as a euphemism for capitalist penetration, Todorova understands this process as “the spread of rationalism and secularization, the intensification of commercial activities and industrialization, the formation of a bourgeoisie and other new social groups in the economic and social sphere, and above all, the triumph of the bureaucratic nation-state.” 222
Finally, this process facilitated “the construction of an idiosyncratic Balkan self-identity or rather of several Balkan self-identities … invariably erected against an ‘oriental’ other.” 223 In short, the
Balkans, unlike the Orient, are anchored to a specific time and place, its peoples and territories sharing generally similar historical trajectories and legacies.
Furthermore, the Orient is consistently rendered as “an escape from civilization” bloated with “wealth” and “excess” “an exotic and imaginary realm, the abode of legends, fairy tales, and marvels; it epitomized longing and offered option, as opposed to the prosaic and profane world of the West.” 224 Feminized and sexualized, the Orient is the consummate embodiment of
“lust”. 225 Conversely, “the balkanist discourse is singularly male” with “the appeal of medieval knighthood, of arms and plots.” 226 Poverty is foregrounded, in dress and possessions, as “the
220 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans , 20. 221 Ibid., 12-13. 222 Ibid., 13. 223 Ibid., 20. 224 Ibid., 13. 225 Ibid., 14. 226 Ibid., 15, 13.
119
standard Balkan male” is represented as “uncivilized, primitive, crude, cruel, and, without exception, disheveled” while the standard Balkan female was a “plucky” labouring autodidact who might serve “a three-course meal” and, “lacking enough silverware, [wash] it after each course.” 227 Sexless yet diligent and scheming, self-taught yet uncouth and “disheveled”, such descriptions might have accompanied photographs of the Victorian working classes.
Not unrelated to the classed nature of balkanist discourse, is the “transitory status” of the region that marks balkanism as “a discourse about an imputed ambiguity.” 228 “The in- betweenness of the Balkans,” states Todorova, “their transitory character, could have made them simply an incomplete other; instead they are constructed not as other but as incomplete self.” 229
In this regard, the Balkans are not “incompatible entities” like West and Orient, but the
“lowermost” point in an open hierarchy of liminality, “‘the shadow, the structurally despised alter-ego’.” 230 Or, to recoup the popular Balkan literary metaphor of the bridge, “a bridge between stages of growth” invoking labels such as “semi-developed, semicolonial, semicivilized, semioriental.” 231 If I may “class” these descriptions, the Balkans are read as neither the passive lumpenproletariat nor the pacified middle class, but irrepressible and unpredictable proletarians; not quite yet “proper” and “couth”, but neither wholly “uncivilized”. Todorova muses that
“[b]ecause of their indefinable character, persons or phenomena in transitional states, like in marginal ones, are considered dangerous, both being in danger themselves and emanating danger to others.” 232 This ostensible fear of anarchy, repressed and/or unharnessed potential is in many
227 Ibid., 14, 15. 228 Ibid., 16, 17. 229 Ibid., 18. 230 Ibid., 16, 18. 231 Ibid., 16. 232 Ibid., 18.
120
ways a classic middle class prejudice, telegraphing as it does a real fear of losing one’s privilege and property. Moreover, it is certainly not a fear solely endemic to the World War I era.
Three years before the beginning of the Crimean War (1853-56), a war fought over the question of religious authority in the Holy Land between the Russian Empire and an alliance consisting of the Porte, Great Britain, the Kingdom of Sardinia, and France, and two years after the contagious and class-fractioned revolutions of 1848, an eager and already well-travelled
Edmund Spencer made a not uncommon trek through the Balkans, or what was at the time referred to as “European Turkey”. Having already traversed Circassia and Krim Tartary in 1836, and following in the Balkan footsteps of the French traveler Ami Boue and the Egyptologist John
G. Wilkinson, Spencer began his quest “on the verge of civilization”, eager to divest himself of all those luxuries, proprieties and cerebral stimulations that identify him as a denizen of
‘civilized’ Europe. Standing “for the last time” on a “Northern shore” our guide through
European Turkey crossed the pulsating river at his feet that cleanly separated “active, noisy, toiling, and ever-progressive Europe” from the “clam silence and mystery of the unchanged and unchanging Land of the Crescent.” 233 The Apollonian hustle and diligence of a growing continent was traded for the Dionysian timelessness and mystique of an ahistorical civilization.
“Stagnation, death-like stagnation,” wrote Spencer “has ever characterized the rule of the race of the Othman.” 234 This statement bespeaks a sentiment that has been a part of British sensibility ever since the Eastern Question became a subject of economic and geo-political importance. The problem of how to prop up a sickly imperial order in order to secure the Dardanelles and a passage to India remained at the forefront of British diplomacy from 1838 to 1878. Russian pretensions to influence in the Balkans via diplomatic hankering and the discourse of Pan-
233 Edmund Spencer, Travels in European Turkey in 1850, Vol. I (London: Colburn and Company, 1851), 9-10, 2. 234 Ibid., 2.
121
Slavism was a cause for concern, and the public contempt for Ottoman political incompetence carried over into moral and racial judgments. This “half-civilized” empire was defended by a pathetic ragtag outfit of soldiers, “diminutive in size, their yellow, swarthy features unprepossessing, and their equipments dirty and slovenly.” 235 These were soldiers historically recruited from, and often used to contain, unruly Christian peoples, peoples who were felt by much of the British literati to be denied their predestined place as civilized Europeans as reflected in Georgina Muir Mackenzie and Paulina Irby’s comment on Serbia’s allegedly dire cultural predicament. “Serbia”, conclude Mackenzie and Irby, “was shut out from the thought as well as from the commerce of Europe. Art could not take root on her war-ploughed soil.” 236
These stunted Europeans were to be quarantined and disciplined by a “civilized” “hand” lest this
“seething mass” overstep its boundaries and destroy civilization itself:
What a vital question is then the future destiny of these people for the other countries of Europe; here we have, so to speak, the molten ore of which nations are cast in fusion at our very door. Let the statesmen of civilized Europe look to it, and may some skilful hand be found in the hour of emergency to make a way for the seething mass to flow in its predestined mould of a great and powerful community, else may they repent, when too late, if they allow it to burst its barrier, and volcano-like spread ruin and desolation around. 237
Writing coevally with Spencer was one W. Cooke Taylor who, in 1842, published his prescient
Notes of a Tour in the Manufacturing Districts of Lancashire . This text perfectly captures the
“feverish anxieties” of its author as it also foregrounds the glacial heft of class exploitation while illustrating, with pursed lucidity, how this exploitation sculpts human nature. It is fruitful to quote a passage in full:
As a stranger passes through the masses of human beings which have accumulated around the mills and print works…he cannot contemplate these ‘crowded hives’ without
235 Ibid., 12. 236 Georgina Muir Mackenzie and Paulina Irby, Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey in Europe (London: Bell and Daldy, 1867), 180. 237 Spencer, 3.
122
feelings of anxiety and apprehension almost amounting to dismay. The population, like the system to which it belongs, is NEW; but it is hourly increasing in breadth and strength. It is an aggregate of masses, our conceptions of which clothe themselves in terms that express something portentous and fearful…as of the slow rising and gradual swelling of an ocean which must, at some future and no distant time, bear all the elements of society aloft upon its bosom, and float them Heaven knows whither. There are mighty energies slumbering in these masses…The manufacturing population is not new in its formation alone: it is new in its habits of thought and action, which have been formed by the circumstances of its condition, with little instruction, and less guidance, from external sources… 238
Our narrator is of the same social class as Spencer, and designates himself an Other in this obscure and chaotic realm of satanic millers. There is a tangible atmosphere of claustrophobia; of aggregates, swarms, masses, and multitudes. These are bees (“hives”), worker drones, but with an acknowledged capacity to rise and swell with a stinging unpredictability commensurate with their “breadth and strength”. It is no exaggeration to conclude that the guarded walls of Taylor’s common sense have been cracked. Privacy and property and the pace of life are on the cusp of drastic change. The newness of this “population” is its radical alterity, nay, subalternity , because these are not a collective of unique social beings, but dark cumuli; drifting, merging, and heaving their way through empty space. Taylor suggests violence in his absences, the need for external authority, heteronomous norms and “guidance”, because the uncanny freedom of these masses, in thought and action, is too much to bear. The fear, in short, is Lovecraftian; a fear of savagery and chaos, a fear of disorder. The author cannot connect with this “population” in sentient and sensuous terms since it is presented only in abstractions, and there is a disturbing sense that if the
“portentous and fearful” were eliminated, humanity itself would be vindicated.
Here, a good sixty years prior to the World War I era, yet not outside the class contradictions of a consolidating capitalism, we witness an affinity between balkanism and classism. Although Todorova claims that the discourse crystallizes at the beginning of what Eric
238 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin, 1991), 208-209.
123
Hobsbawm has called the “short twentieth century”, Andrew Hammond (2007) successfully argues that it in fact predates this conjuncture. Conversely, Said’s Orient is generally a sphere of affinity between privileged classes and class fractions where many Western travellers exhibit “a very distinct class attitude of solidarity with the Muslim Ottoman rulers.” 239 For balkanism, as per Spencer, the potential actions of the “poor and unpolished…Christian upstarts” who make up the bulk of the Ottoman soldiery are “described in a discourse almost identical to the one used to depict the Western lower classes, a virtual parallel between the East End of London and the East
End of Europe.” 240
Unlike the uniformly non-white Orient, the Balkans, despite apparent “racial ambiguity” and “important internal hierarchies” are still positioned as “white, “Christian”, and “Indo-
European” and “treats differences between one type” as opposed to “between (imputed) types.” 241 As I later explain, this is quite a sleight of hand on Todorova’s part, clearly implicating her in the “culture and ideology” of Eurocentrism and the “chronic allochronism” it generates as self-designation. Moreover, as a template, it shares an uneasy compatibility with neoliberal middle class discourses of “whiteness” and their manifold exclusions in, for example, post-
Milosevic Serbia. Balkanist and orientalist discourses also differ at the level of institutionalization and genre, with the former not having “equally affected intellectual traditions or institutions” and present mainly in “journalistic and quasi-journalistic literary forms
(travelogues, political essayism, and especially this unfortunate hybrid – academic journalism), which accounts for its popularity.” 242 Generally true, this point nonetheless overlooks why the
239 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans , 18. 240 Ibid. 241 Ibid, 19-20. 242 Ibid., 19.
124
Balkans encourage a regression into the simplistically journalistic by otherwise accredited academics.
Culture and Individualism
In a telling irony that reveals much about the politics of her project, she begins her study with a nod to the Marx of the Communist Manifesto (1848), declaring that “a specter is haunting
Western culture – the specter of the Balkans. All powers have entered into a Holy Alliance to exorcise this specter: politicians and journalists, conservative academics and radical intellectuals, moralists of all kind, gender, and fashion.” 243 The equivalency here between the denigrated
Balkans and the dawn of organized class war in nineteenth century Europe hints at balkanism being, in part, a classed discourse while at the same time severing class as an object of analysis.
One need not be reminded that, for Marx, the battle against such spectres explicitly takes place in the political sphere involving as it does religious and political authorities, extremists and the coercive arm of the state whereas, for Todorova, the battle occurs in the cultural sphere between a broad range of organic middle class intellectuals. The distinction is noteworthy since Todorova regularly gestures to the classed import of balkanism in her genealogy of the discourse. This is not surprising given that she identifies the origins of the discourse around World War I; a global conjuncture rife with conspicuous and profoundly antagonistic class conflict. 244 Yet she writes about balkanism in an epoch where class conflict is still persistent, if arguably not as amplified and threatening to the status quo, without paying lip service to this conflict. 245
243 Ibid., 3. 244 It would be enough to mention the Russian Revolution, but some sources that speak to this class conflict include Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008) and Louis Adamic’s Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America, 1830-1930 (Oakland: AK Press, 2008). 245 Examples of class conflict coeval with Todorova’s work include the 1994 Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas and the 1999 anti-globalization protests in Seattle.
125
To be fair, there is a difference between what an author overlooks and what she consciously chooses not to thematize. Todorova clearly has a keen sense of the psychological alienation that affects many post-1989 East European intellectuals and how this cultural and professional marginalization serves as an entering wedge for anti-foundational theories such as post-colonialism. 246 She argues that although a “self-understanding as colonial subjects was absent in the Balkans”, modern “East European intellectuals … see themselves in a subordinate position vis-a-vis the centers of knowledge production and dissemination in the West.” 247 The sharp and somewhat disingenuous division between “the Balkans” and “East European intellectuals” requires an addendum in light of some of the critical balkanology published since
Todorova’s watershed contribution. Many Balkan scholars, such as Tomislav Longinovic, Vesna
Goldsworthy and Natasa Kovacevic, have appropriated the tools and talk of post-colonialism to great effect and, one can confidently claim, “increasingly see themselves in a subordinate position vis-à-vis the centers of knowledge production and dissemination in the West” where they “speak explicitly of intellectual neo-imperialism, neocolonialism, or self-colonization.” 248
But what we are dealing with here, despite the deployment of post-colonial rhetoric, is how a specific Balkan-born “intellectual clientele” think of themselves. In other words, “how the ones among the educated elites of the Balkan nations who are charged with or at least conscious of their ethnic, national, religious, local, and a variety of other multiple identities define (i.e. reject, accept, are ambiguous about, or indifferent to) their link to a putative Balkan identity.” 249 These educated elites, amongst them Todorova herself, labour to prove that “they do not belong to the
246 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans , 201. 247 Ibid. 248 Ibid. 249 Ibid., 38.
126
repellent image that has been constructed” of the region. 250 Indeed, Todorova sees her study as an intellectualist project, approvingly citing renowned sociologist of stigma Erving Goffman in that “representations are not representative, for representation can hardly come from those who give no attention to their stigma, or who are relatively unlettered.” 251 The subaltern, evidently, cannot speak.
For her, transforming the “weighty materiality” of balkanism should be the concern of politicians and intellectuals or, preferably, the intellectual-politician. In a 2003 address given to the Balkan Political Club in Istanbul entitled “What Is or Is There a Balkan Culture, and Do or
Should the Balkans have a Regional Identity?”, Todorova lays out her ideas on culture and social change. 252 Aware of the extent to which the educational system in Bulgaria has been decimated, she calls “for more investment in the basic human capital of the region” and especially “the educational infrastructure”. 253 This is framed as a decidedly top-down process that relies on some vague hope that politicians in a neoliberal political ecology might somehow find the gumption to pump money into education when the recent history of this ideology dictates precisely the opposite. An intra-state mission civilisatrice of sorts is proposed. “[P]oliticians in particular” she writes “should be doing everything in their power to help and raise the culture (in the most conventional sense of the word) and an identity of self-respect of the individuals who inhabit the large space of what is conditionally designated as the Balkans.” 254 This is because “[p]oliticians have a crucial and responsible role to play not simply in the effort to improve the culture of the political class and society at large (i.e. the political culture), but in contributing to elevate the
250 Ibid., 57. 251 Ibid., 38. 252 See Maria Todorova, “What Is or Is There a Balkan Culture, and Do or Should the Balkans have a Regional Identity?” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 4, no. 1 (2004), 175-185. 253 Ibid., 184. 254 Ibid., 185.
127
culture of every single member of each Balkan society, because, in the end, culture is not a collective entity, but a notably individual process.” 255 No one doubts the imprint ones socialized yet concretely unique personality has on “cultural goods”; there is certainly a place for the creative ego as Said acknowledges in Orientalism (1979). 256 But Todorova’s insistence that
“culture and identity” are basically “an individual endeavor” and “the peculiar property of certain individuals” 257 nullifies the porous fluidity of her definition of culture as physically and territorially unbounded, “fluid and flexible … part of a complex grid where class, gender, race, age, sexuality, etc. come in.” 258 This is a very loose definition of culture “as a way of life” that rides alongside her colloquial understanding of the term as “high-brow” and pedagogical. 259 But if culture is defined as a way of life, this way of life presupposes an overlapping and contradictory network of practices and, given the modern history of European nation-state formation, cultures that are conditionally porous yet also deeply bounded territorially and physically. An institutional ecology that, for example, propagates a pejorative understanding of
Albanian history at the public school level is nonetheless contributing to an “identity of interests” amongst not insignificant fractions of the populace, however incongruous the individual reception. 260 It is often within these institutional ecologies where specific interpellations of race, gender, and sexuality occur. Privileging culture as the private property of the liberal ego
255 Ibid., 176. 256 Ibid., 185. See also Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 14-15, 23-24. 257 Todorova, “What Is or Is There a Balkan Culture”, 185. 258 Ibid., 177. 259 Ibid. 260 See the excellent pieces by Charles Jelavich on the circumvolutions of “Serbianism” in Serbian textbooks prior to the outbreak of the First World War: Charles Jelavich, “Serbian Textbooks: Towards Greater Serbia or Yugoslavia?” Slavic Review 42, no. 4 (1983), 601-619; Charles Jelavich, “The Issue of Serbian Textbooks in the Origins of World War I,”, Slavic Review 48, no. 2 (1989), 214-233. For a look at how Albanians were historically perceived within Serbian institutional ecologies see Djordje Stefanovic, “Seeing the Albanians through Serbian Eyes: The Inventors of the Tradition of Intolerance and their Critics, 1804-1939,” European History Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2005), 465-492. Dubravka Zarkov offers a terrific take on the role state media played in mobilizing ethnic and especially gendered sentiments before and during the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia. See Dubravka Zarkov, The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity and Gender in the Break-Up of Yugoslavia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 85-187.
128
undermines the role of precisely the politicians Todorova entrusts with popular enlightenment.
Ironically, her proposal requires that culture be a “collective” project and inculcated as such. A
“high-brow” curriculum that emphasizes the virtues of civic duty and mutual recognition (“an identity of self-respect of the individuals”) is a form of identity politics which she no doubt understands “is as much a form of social control and political mobilization as any other kind of politics.” 261 The terribly uneven manner in which the ideology of civil society is being instituted in the Balkans, and the exclusions that seem an automatic part of its logic, is a testament to this.
Moreover, and perhaps this is the obvious point, a rendering of “culture and identity” as “a notably individual process” precludes the cultivation of inter-state and intra-state Balkan solidarities from below .
Todorova rightly argues that “[t]here has never been … a common Balkan identity” only
“varieties of individual and group memories in the Balkans,” 262 but there has also never been a common identity amongst women, working classes, and people of colour, at least not one categorically so and unearned as part of a critical solidarity against injustice and oppression. The absence of a common Balkan “culture and identity” coupled with the fact that “[i]t is hard for a minimalist to depict the Balkans” given its “powerful ontology … of constant and profound change” 263 does not mean that progressive experiments are to be aborted. Todorova articulates a cautious suspicion of attempts to build federative regional solidarities, stating that “the attempts to hypostatize a Balkan identity have historically been noble but utopian political exercises, like the movement towards a Balkan federation, doomed from the outset both by internal opposition, but, more significantly, by outside forces.” 264 If movements are automatic failures due to the fact
261 Todorova, “What Is and Is or is There a Balkan Culture”, 183. 262 Ibid., 182. 263 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans , 184. 264 Ibid., 183.
129
of “internal opposition” and “outside forces”, then our species might claim very little in the realm of achievement. She implies that a history of struggle from below is apparently not worth looking into, thus sharing an eerie similarity with Friedrich Engels’ infamous dismissal of
Balkan Slavs as naïve, impotent, and non-historical peoples. 265 The anti-colonial and federalist writings of the Serbian Social Democratic leader Dimitrije Tucovic and the Bulgarian revolutionary socialist Christian Rakovsky, for example, have much to say about popular organizing, working class empowerment, anti-imperialism, and anti-capitalism. 266 Alas, for
Todorova, change is a scholastic and politically modest endeavour. The production of any sort of anti-balkanism in the tradition of anti-oppression merely requires that “East Europeanists … have a good grasp of West European fields” in order to “challenge the sanctioned ignorance of
West Europeanists about developments in the eastern half of the continent.” 267 This kind of struggle is no doubt meritable, pitched as it is against “expert and informational power” – the bonafide target of critical balkanology. 268 This is a limited professional target to be sure, hitched as it is to a lukewarm proposal that exhibits wilful ignorance of courageous popular and solidaristic resistance against seemingly immovable political forces. Her individualist pedagogical and ontological coordinates prevent her from acknowledging these documented
265 Tristram Hunt’s stellar biography of Engels explains the latter’s prejudice in some depth: “For Engels, the subjugation of ‘non-historic’ peoples was especially appropriate in the case of the Slavs, who had committed the ultimate counterrevolutionary crime of allying themselves with both imperial Habsburgs and tsarist Russia against Kossuth’s Magyars. In words that many dictators would echo in the twentieth century, Engels advocated a policy of ethnic cleansing in the service of progress and history. ‘I am enough of an authoritarian to regard the existence of such aborigines in the heart of Europe as an anachronism,’ he wrote of the Slavs in a letter to the German socialist theoretician Eduard Bernstein. ‘They and their right of cattle stealing would have to be mercilessly sacrificed to the interest of the European proletariat.’ It was an ugly, brutal ideology and there is something deeply chilling about the ease with which Engels made the transition from his sybaritic wine-tasting tour to calling for ‘bloody revenge on the Slav barbarian in a span of just a few weeks. ‘The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples,’ he blithely wrote in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung . ‘And that, too, is a step forward.’” See Tristram Hunt, Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 166-167. 266 See Andreja Zivkovic and Dragan Plavsic (eds.), The Balkan Socialist Tradition: Balkan Socialism and the Balkan Federation, 1871-1915 , Revolutionary History 8, no. 3 (London: Porcupine Press, 2003). 267 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans , 202. 268 Ibid., 188.
130
struggles – such as the 1996-1997 anti-Milosevic protests in Serbia. 269 “Faced with stark political realities,” she laments “and working within the confines and with the modest means of academe, one can only hope to subvert the informative power of expert authority.” 270
The Materialist Import of “Historical Legacy”
Given these political and ontological assumptions, what, then, is the nature of Todorova’s materialism? The answer to this question allows us to highlight the weaknesses of her position and sublate its strengths. Her project attempts to outflank power-knowledge discourses at a richer level of materiality and she views her chosen discipline as best suited for this war of position.
For her, history, as opposed to anthropology or archaeology, has a more nuanced practical understanding of “culture”, free from any sort of mechanical determinism. Thus “culture” is applied “to signifying or symbolic systems, although material and symbolic production is intertwined.” 271 The primacy is placed on the signifier, as befits someone who anchors her genealogy of the term “Balkan” in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and Jacques Derrida. 272
Such anchoring allows her to trace the elasticity of the term from its rather innocuous if still morally hefty place name to the more politicized and denigrative signifier of the World War I era. Within the deconstructive perspective:
it is predictable that the signifier “Balkan” would be detached from its original and from subsequent signified(s) with which it enters into a relationship. In fact, this is a simultaneous process: at the same time that “Balkan” was being accepted and widely used as geographic signifier, it was already becoming saturated with a social and cultural meaning that expanded its signified far beyond its immediate and concrete meaning. At the same time that it encompassed and came to signify a complex historical phenomenon, some of the political aspects of this new signified were extrapolated and became, in turn, independently signified. 273
269 See Orli Fridman’s study on the protest tactics of the Belgrade feminist anti-war group Women in Black: Orli Fridman, “’It was like fighting a war with our own people’: anti-war activism in Serbia during the 1990s,” Nationalities Papers 39, no. 4 (2011), 507-522. 270 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans , 188. 271 Todorova, “What is or is there a Balkan Culture?”, 177. 272 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans , 21 273 Ibid.
131
But Todorova is not wedded in any way to this tradition, and adamant “that an excessive emphasis on abstract knowledge-power patterns stands in the way of the effort to recognize and recover the more determinate, more concrete, and ultimately more messy activities of history.” 274
There is an uncompromising realism to her approach that harbours a healthy antipathy towards, for example, the psychologizing of events such as the dissolution of Yugoslavia, which she sees as “explicable in terms of rationally set aims, rather than irrational (or subconscious) urges.” 275
Moreover, for her, historical geography matters . To the accusation that many East Europeans are suspicious of “de-centering” Europe, Todorova grounds her rebuttal in historical geography. “I submit to a very materialist bias,” she replies, that “simply reflects the physical fact that Europe
(in a very elastic and mostly geographic understanding) is the natural geographic and historical background against which developments in one of its subregions in particular time periods can be most adequately projected.” 276 What is implied is that the reality of Europe vis-à-vis the
Balkans with regards to capital accumulation, the transmission of ideas, migrations, etc. cannot be excised deconstructively even though representations of it can. “Time-bound and place-bound specificity matters,” she states “not only in order to avoid cognitive fallacies, but on ethical grounds as well.” 277
In an important 2005 Slavic Review piece entitled “The Trap of Backwardness:
Modernity, Temporality, and the Study of Eastern European Nationalism”, her Braudelian approach to the study of nationalism, only hinted at in Imagining the Balkans , comes to the fore.
In this article she argues contra Benedict Anderson that a more productive manner of studying the commonality of national forms “is to start from the idea of the basic similarity of human
274 Ibid., 200. 275 Ibid., 138. 276 Ibid., 201. 277 Ibid., 196.
132
societies, even when they are not in immediate contact.” 278 The similarity with the Marx of The
German Ideology is not lost here, and seems to substantiate her “materialist bias”. Marx states that “the production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness [these are grounded in language ] is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of
[individuals], the language of real life.” 279 Thus, the first premise or fact of all human history is
“the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.” 280 In that fundamental sense, there is a “basic similarity of human societies”. Such an approach allows for a “synchronous rearrangement of group solidarities in human society, as a global social process that is itself a by-product of urbanization, bureaucratization, [and] the revolution in communications.” 281 Group solidarities, in their multifarious forms, are an outgrowth of modernity broadly conceived, and their synchronicity is best captured “in terms of a long duree framework … of a historical period in which separate developments can be treated as relatively synchronous.” 282 What such an approach does is undercut: (a) teleological notions of development; (b) “pirating” as a way of describing cultural transmission; and (c) the durability of “botanical metaphors” (i.e. “ideas” are “transplanted on alien soil”). 283 On the issue of historical population transfers and forms of ethnic and social cleansing, this approach resists the desire to see the Balkans and Europe as separate spheres; the former a terribly unstable mosaic while the latter an ordered and peaceable demographic. Instead, a wide lens allows one to see the dark side of “[n]ation building and consolidation” as a continental phenomenon or, in other words, a “historical legacy”:
278 Todorova, “The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality, and the Study of East European Nationalism” in Slavic Review , Vol. 64, No. 1, Spring 2005, 149. 279 Karl Marx, “The Germany Ideology,” in The Marx-Engels Reader , ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978), 154. 280 Marx, “The German Ideology”, 149-150. 281 Todorova, “The Trap of Backwardness”, 149-150. 282 Ibid., 150. 283 Ibid., 150, 154.
133
Thinking in terms of historical legacies – characterized by simultaneous, overlapping, and gradually waning effects – allows us to emphasize the complexity and plasticity of the historical process. In the case of the Balkans and Eastern Europe, it allows us to rescue the region from a debilitating diachronic and spatial ghettoization, and insert it into multifarious cognitive frameworks over space and time. 284
This approach resists the easy teleology of modernization theory, sharing as it does an affinity with “Marx’s own conception of the historical time of the capitalist mode of production” as a
“complex and differential temporality, in which episodes or eras [are] discontinuous from each other, and heterogeneous within themselves.” 285 For Todorova, the Balkans, unlike Said’s Orient, are clearly “a scholarly category of analysis – a concrete geographic region” and, as a result, relatively non-elastic. 286 Balkanism is also a phenomenon studied not by a literary critic, but by a historian, with the attendant methodological differences. 287 Thus, the concept of “historical legacy” is defined as “realist and empirical” as opposed to “modernist” and allows for a
“historicity” of balkanism and its “historical grounding … in the Ottoman period.” 288 This period, of course, is fenced in as a part of a European legacy. The innovative aspect of her approach lies in its capacity to “de-provincialize” Western Europe and “provincialize” Europe
“for the rest of the world, insofar as the European paradigm will have broadened to include not only a cleansed, abstract, and idealized version of power, but also one of dependency, subordination, and messy struggles.” 289 The concept of historical legacy uncovers Europe as webbed with multiple relationships of power inside its expanded historical borders. This is a contested, agonistic space and, although she does not mention class struggle, a space within
284 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans , 202. 285 Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” New Left Review I, no. 144 (1984), 101. 286 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans , 194. 287 Ibid. 288 Ibid., 192-193. 289 Ibid., 202.
134
which to view Europe as a material entity of “messy struggles”, “dependency”, and
“subordination”; where one can think the “semi-colonial” and exploited. 290
But how exactly does Todorova think the “semi-colonial” and exploited? If one can do little more than scholastically subvert “expert and informational power”, on what tier of representation is she operating? Her methodology does much to liberate the Balkans from “a chronic allochronism” and, if I may focus the appellation, Western Eurocentrism – leaving aside, of course, the question of a white Christian Balkan alter-ego and its allegedly rightful place as part of the still European inheritance. Yet, as befits a cultural historian, she is still preoccupied with “perceptions”; in particular, “the outside perception of the Balkans that has been internalized in the region itself.” 291 Her tools are deployed on the “concrete … dense materiality of culture as exemplified in language” or, more accurately, “the textually tropic” and her gestures to capitalism and class are instructive in this regard. 292
Distorting Capitalism and Class
It has been established that “the Balkans have a powerful ontology”; “an ontology of constant and profound change.” 293 The “image” of the region “is more than a stereotype. It appears as a higher reality, the reflection of the phenomenal world, its essence and true nature, the
‘noumenon’ to the ‘phenomenon,’ to use the Kantian distinction.” 294 The nature and relations of existence in this geographically concrete region is that of flux and instability, in utero or manifest, or, to borrow an earlier description, “social incoherence”. This “image” is metynomic, for “the Balkans”, “balkanism”, or “balkanization” are often substituted for other words or phrases with which they have been made to be associated. A cursory survey of book titles has
290 Ibid. 291 Ibid., 39. 292 Teresa L. Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2009), 24, 26. 293 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans , 184. 294 Ibid.
135
some variation of the root word “Balkan” alloyed to “burden”, “tyranny”, “tragedy”, “war”,
“entanglements”, “genocide”, “ethnic cleansing”, and the like. Metonymy emphasizes the concrete, “the textually tropic”, in this regard; the world of phenomena. But Todorova argues that such metonyms are reflected as “a higher reality”, essential and true. Apparently mirrored into durability, the “image” of the region is still no less an appearance (“[i]t appears”). The
“higher reality” is no doubt an abstraction, but an abstraction that does not subsume the sensible into a greater totality; it simply flips it onto its (allegedly) eternal side. “Europe had added to its repertoire of Schimpfworter , or disparagements,” explains Todorova, “a new one that, although recently coined, turned out to be more persistent over time than others with centuries-old tradition. ‘Balkanization’ not only had come to denote the parcelization of large and viable political units but also had become a synonym for a reversion to the tribal, the backward, the primitive, the barbarian.” 295 This post-World War I descriptive term is now a free floating signifier; “decontextualized and … related to a variety of problems.” 296
Indeed, the taxonomical term “Balkan” magnetizes “a number of externalized political, ideological, and cultural frustrations stemming from tensions and contradictions inherent to the regions and societies outside the Balkans.” 297 As per Spencer’s ominous intuition, what is iterated about the region “is that its inhabitants do not care to conform to the standards of behavior devised as normative by and for the civilized world.” 298 Keeping in mind again that, both inside and outside the region, middle class intellectuals constitute “the civilized world”, one can extend to the present day Todorova’s perceptive identification of the nineteenth-century
“bias of … urban bourgeois rational culture against what was perceived as the superstitious,
295 Ibid., 3. 296 Ibid. 297 Ibid., 188. 298 Ibid., 3.
136
irrational, and backward rural tradition of the Balkans.” 299 This is now, as it was then, a thinly veiled form of class prejudice, preoccupied as it was/is with “propriety” and “accompanied by intolerance.” 300 The dissolution of Yugoslavia and the concomitant and militarized attempts at humanitarianism and charity “presented a useful method of ideological self-preservation” amongst elites in the Euro-Atlantic, whether in the guise of civilizational superiority a la Michael
Ignatieff or, as Andrew Wachtel would have it, a primer on what the American “culture wars” could become. 301 This self-preservation was a convenient form of subterfuge, as the Anglo-
Atlantic, in particular the US, was not immune from its own species of class warfare, conducted primarily from above via welfare reform, privatization, and the deregulation of domestic economies. If “Vietnam Syndrome” had been kicked, remorse about its popular psychological toll weighed heavily on subsequent military decision-making. Domestic bombings by home- grown and international agents in 1993 and 1995 punctured any remaining post-Cold War optimism. Susan Faludi identified a backlash against feminism at the level of popular culture and a sincere if voguish stance on the poor took root in the performative contradictions of the Clinton era. 302 The burgeoning anti-globalization movement, from the Zapatista uprising against NAFTA in 1994 to the Seattle protests of 1999, ensured that “social incoherence” was not only on the other side of the Anglo-Atlantic picket fence.
The Balkans became the conveniently nameable nomen nudum or name without standing.
“Social incoherence” could thus be labeled with this, ironically, not quite empty signifier, and its nominal variations allowed the malaise of the post-1989 Euro-Atlantic to coalesce into a rather
299 Ibid., 111. 300 Ibid. 301 Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 18, 227-248. 302 See Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006).
137
Manichean “good sense”. What Todorova writes about the nineteenth-century English had renewed import in the late twentieth-century Euro-Atlantic, especially the United States:
Not only charity presented a useful method for ideological self-preservation among the English. The East offered easy possibilities of translating in simple terms the complex issues that the English colonial metropolis was facing at the time: the uneasiness about Ireland was translated into uneasiness about Macedonia; the vogue about the poor was transformed into a vogue for suppressed nationalities; the feminist movement focused on life in the harems; the remorse about India or the Boer war was translated at the turn of the century into guilt about Turkish atrocities. 303
Ideological self-preservation . There was a discernible need for a new self-congratulatory narrative amongst Euro-Atlantic elites after 1989, consummated militarily with a new role for
NATO in 1999. Andrew Hammond, echoing Todorova, sees the Balkans as a “non-colonial” sphere but rightly states that its “‘difference’ can be just as vital for manufacturing Western identities.” 304 “So powerful is the binary logic”, he writes, “that … the balkanist paradigm is conditioned less by attributes within the region itself than by competing features of the western collective identity.” 305 “Balkan” served to binarize and thus render “lucid” the disjointed and episodic cognitive categories of common sense. One might read the region, pace Frederic
Jameson, as a “conspiratorial totality” given that “the cognitive or allegorical investment in this representation will be for the most part an unconscious one, for it is only at that deeper level of our collective fantasy that we think about the social system all the time, a deeper level that also allows us to slip our political thoughts past a liberal and anti-political censorship.” 306 The uneasiness about the “culture wars” was translated into uneasiness about a wider Balkan conflagration; the vogue about the poor was transformed into a vogue for Croatia and Slovenia; the feminist movement focused on Serbian rapists; the remorse about Vietnam was translated
303 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans , 100. 304 Hammond, The Debated Lands , 11. 305 Ibid. 306 Frederic Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 9.
138
into guilt over Bosnia. Countless journalists, pseudo-intellectuals, academics, commentators saw in this conflict, and its Bosnian stage in particular, a small-scale replay of the Second World War or “the emotional equivalent of the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War.” 307 Socially conscious and well-intentioned libidinal energies were transcribed onto the image “Balkan” and the pejorative “balkanization” producing ethnically-specific balkanisms – from the romantic to the racist. 308
On the whole, such popular accounts, in their skeletal form and apart from their specific content, adhered to theological imperatives of “good versus evil”, among other such binaries that
Hammond feels was the sole import of post-1989 travel literature. Political thoughts were streamlined, binarized, and projected abroad in this era of “denigration” as a means through which to narrate Euro-Atlantic superiority. “Through evoking in foreign cultures the spirit of radical otherness, of chaos, backwardness, and poverty,” writes Hammond, “… texts produce justification for the economic and political mores – democracy, capitalism, liberalism – which underlie western society, entrenching the form of power in currency in that society and valorizing its political dominance in the international arena.” 309 “Backwardness”, for example, is to be merely condemned and not understood as a “specific stage of historical development … by examining the relations of the subject to the totality of social relations that situate the subject in the social division of labour.” 310 Thus Michael Ignatieff can refer to “the poverty, backwardness,
307 Chris Hedges, “Muslims from Afar Joining 'Holy War' in Bosnia,” The New York Times , December 5, 1992, http://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/05/world/muslims-from-afar-joining-holy-war-in-bosnia.html . 308 Bosnia and Bosnians were read by many, such as journalist David Rieff and writer Susan Sontag, in romantic terms while Catherine Mackinnon, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, and Slavoj Zizek viewed the Serbs as savages or “willing executioners.” 309 Hammond, The Debated Lands , 12. 310 Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique , 30.
139
stubborn second-ratedness of ordinary Balkan existence” qua Balkan existence. 311 Class and ethnic snobbery meets cultural invariance.
But does Todorova provide any tools that might help us break free of this historical conformism or is she just as haplessly mired in it? She is critically absorbed with the signifier
“Balkan”, and signifiers generally speaking, as genealogical curiosities. Yet unpacking them as popular “good sense” espoused by the likes of Sontag, Ignatieff, and Kaplan, et al leaves little more than a “non-ethical opening of ethics”; an aporia without prescriptions. 312 Where her analysis shows the potential to go beyond “expert and informational power” and into the broader realm of political economy is between the lines. Capitalist penetration for her is not only a post-
Ottoman development in the region, but also a post-Cold War process destined to snuff “a historical legacy of ethnic multiplicity and coexistence” in favour of ethnic homogeneity. 313 This is a process that she dubs not “neoliberalism”, “structural adjustment”, or some such euphemism, but “Europeanization” thereby regionalizing and obscuring this specific stage of historical development. 314 One can confidently infer that, not unlike the nineteenth century, such
“Europeanization” “brought more intensive and more regular contacts with the Balkan populations through commerce and increased political, military, religious, and educational activities”; a region “to be seamed with through lines of rail, and by the opening up of vast resources to exercise new influence upon European commerce.” 315 This process, then as now, initiated developments in consciousness as well. The nascent middle classes viewed “the peasantry as a social group still to be reckoned with but essentially belonging to a past economic
311 Hammond, The Debated Lands , 235. 312 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 140. 313 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans , 200, 199. 314 Ibid., 199. 315 Ibid., 94, 111.
140
and social order” whether this order was the Pax Ottomana or state communism. 316 More to the point, despite the central place of the peasantry and working classes under state communism (at least nominally), nowhere did the post-1989 ruling elites champion (sub)proletarian interests – something that characterized the nineteenth century as well. Yet another analogous process was/is the existence of specific kinds of statism, the contemporary incarnation being the
“neoliberal state”. 317 Both nineteenth century and post-communist forms of statism exerted a hegemonic force over society, were not simply Balkan phenomena, and thus “should be interpreted in the larger framework of European history.” 318 Finally, citing Alexandru Dutu,
Todorova, with marked prescience, concludes that Balkan “regional identity is based less on common traits and a common heritage and more on the common issues that we all have to face.
These issues were produced by the process of modernization which put a special imprint on all the people living in this area.” 319
Let us take Todorova’s observations and use them solely as a description of the post- communist conjuncture. “Europeanization” and/or “the process of modernization” open up vast resources for exploitation under the guise of new ethnically homogenous and economically subordinate states; states defined by the society-vitiating thrust of neoliberalism – a Euro-
Atlantic phenomenon that at the very least must be understood in a larger framework. 320 “Social incoherence” as war, unemployment, re-patriarchalization, racism, privatization, deregulation, the persistence of shadow economies, middle class emigration, and educational reform is what now unites the Balkans; “common issues that … all have to face” and that have tattooed the quotidian lives of its inhabitants. Given the productive elasticity of her concepts and their affinity
316 Ibid., 111. 317 See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 7, 64-86. 318 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans , 172-173. 319 Ibid. 320 Ibid., 62.
141
with political economy, what does her historicized and deconstructive reading of the great
Bulgarian folk hero Ban Gayo have to do with the processes illuminated by such conceptual deployment? If these are the organic physics of social incoherence, world-historical conditions not of ones choosing, whose ecologies socialize even intellectuals such as Todorova into occupying “destined” positions in the social division of labour, why does their truth have to be teased out symptomatically via literary representations? Why Ban Gayo and not the striking
Trepca miners of Kosovo? Why focus on the representations of British, French, and American travelers and journalists and not the increasing violence against women in the peninsula? Do such problematics necessarily have to be mutually exclusive?
Todorova merely gestures towards the themes and dynamics of capitalist modernity in her nonetheless insightful meditation on Ban Gayo. A classic Balkan folk hero, Gayo is a not uncommon plebeian trope that has polarized Bulgarian literary criticism; is he an ethnic type or
“a distinctive sociohistorical type without an indispensable ethnic/national specificity, belonging to a definite transitional period in the development of backward societies and having a concrete class profile”? 321 Ironically, this is the type of question that might be leveled at critical balkanology as a whole. What are we analyzing? Ethno-cultural typologies or the “concrete” grounded in “the many determinations that make [it] and that are situated, through material relays, in production practices”? 322 Ban Gayo is an organic part of a specific mode of production,
“conceived in the literary imagination of Aleko Konstantinov in America, at the time of his visit to the Chicago World’s fair in 1893.” 323 He is, as Todorova insightfully states, “a character organically related to the rapacious and selfish mechanisms of a society whose central
321 Ibid., 39. 322 Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique , 66. 323 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans , 41.
142
motivation was predatory accumulation.” 324 This is not simply a Balkan-wide phenomenon, but a tendency amply evident in any emergent capitalist formation. The “bourgeois upstart” or aspirational petty bourgeois is a staple of European modernist literature, deliciously lampooned as the species homo cylindriacus (a genus of hominids wearing top hats!) by Croatian Marxist writer Miroslav Krleza in his underrated classic The Return of Phillip Latinowicz .325 This sociohistorical type has “strong roots in reality” and is historically “resilient” in large part because “the technological gap between the regions of Europe became meaningful only in the framework of new structural relations with the creation of what Wallerstein has designated as a world-economy. More importantly, this is a continuing reality.” 326 Certain themes recur throughout modernity, in different forms to be sure, but resilient nonetheless. This is because we are interpellated and disciplined by processes intrinsic to the capitalist mode of production
(“world-economy”); the hegemony of its vanguard class as exploiter and cultural model and the
“continuing reality” of its crises and desire for untrammeled profit. The post-communist conjuncture is littered with “bourgeois upstarts” who are, in fact, defining the terms of popular debate and policy in favour of neoliberal restructuring. What many intellectuals actually despise in the Balkans is the West’s “self-image … of only a few generations ago.” 327 “Ban Gayo with his Belgian mantle” writes Todorova “has been aptly called the ‘knight of the primitive accumulation of capital.’” 328 Or, in other words, the petty bourgeoisie are the bonafide knights of neoliberal “social incoherence”.
Despite this awareness of the logic capitalism and the relevance of class, an awareness that has to be teased out of a largely deconstructive enterprise, they are never taken to their
324 Ibid. 325 See Miroslav Krleza, The Return of Philip Latinowicz (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995). 326 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans , 42. 327 Ibid., 41. 328 Ibid.
143
logical conclusion, namely: where does one place Todorova in the post-communist conjuncture?
She is aware that “patterns of perception” are indubitably “informed by attitudes of class” both
“aristocratic” and “bourgeois” despite “the fashionable dismissal of ‘modes-of-production narrative,’ ‘historicism,’ and class analysis.” 329 If this is the case, and by her logic it very well is, her contradictory relationship to this conjuncture can, in part, be explained by her professional training and class attitude. There is a noticeable tension between two Todorova’s; (a) the one with an implicit predilection for political economy and a self-professed “materialist bias” and (b) the other who takes her cue from discourse theory and deconstruction. The former is aware of how exploitation, primitive accumulation, and class, are inseparable from a thorough understanding of cultural representations. The latter views culture as an individualist enterprise, elitist in its contours, and geared towards challenging “expert informational power” within a world of “formal asymmetries”. 330 What matters are “outside perceptions”, “patterns of perception”, “abstract demons”, the “ nomen nudum ”, and the “opening of categories”; a project for the “academic field”. 331
This “deconstructive ethos” is the dominant tendency in her work and puts her in the midst of a late-capitalist professional and cultural inheritance traced to great effect by both Aijaz
Ahmad and David Harvey. 332 Imagining the Balkans appears in an era of working class demobilization in the Balkans and the dominance of post-structuralist theory in academia. What I argue is that there is a connection between the reading techniques deployed, their theoretical assumptions, and the inability to situate ones scholastic production within “the objective productive activities of humans that involve them in social relations under definite historical
329 Ibid., 108-109. 330 Ibid., 201. 331 Ibid., 37, 39, 201, 202. 332 See Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (New York: Verso, 1992), 1-42; and David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).
144
conditions that are independent of their will and are shaped by the struggles between contesting classes over the surplus produced by social labor.”333 In the scholastic field, “power” is the effect of weighty and arbitrary “discursive formations” that harden over time and transcribe an essential materiality onto the object of focus. This, Teresa Ebert argues, is a “[m]ateriality … in the speculative tradition of Feuerbach” and not “materialism” per se . This “materiality” produces
“a form of spiritualism … what Derrida calls a ‘materiality without materialism’ and ‘without matter’. It is the contemplative corporeality of difference – which is the effect of the textual sensuality of language, the body, and their affective resistance to conceptuality and determinate meanings.” 334 The potentially transgressive agent is the body and her solitary resistance to being spoken and written about in specific ways. What this abstracted biological individual is imbued with is a will to question and challenge said discursive formation(s). This is a categorical assumption that is also true of the material world in general: “the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation , but not as sensuous human activity, practice , not subjectively.” 335 One contemplates the discursive object; contemplates ways to release it from its shell. This object is always rendered “concrete”, but not “concrete” “in the complexity of social relations.” 336 Concrete materiality in this sense is a Nietzschean concept, and Nietzsche Todorova admiringly quotes in full:
The reputation, name, and appearance, the usual measure and weight of a thing, what it counts for – originally almost always wrong and arbitrary, … - all this grows from generation to generation, merely because people believe in it, until it gradually grows to be part of the thing and turns into its very body. What at first was appearance becomes in the end, almost invariably, the essence and is effective as such. 337
333 Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique , 24. 334 Ibid., 25. 335 Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” The Marx-Engels Reader , ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978), 143. 336 Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique , 26. 337 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans , 19.
145
What the aforementioned techniques of reading are preoccupied with are “reputation, name, and appearance”; the erroneous arbitrariness of their somatic incarnations. The heft of such phenomenal (and nominal) criteria is produced, to echo famed Nietzschean Foucault, by “expert informational power”. The ethereal “will to power” – embodied primarily by those who own the means of ideological production but relayed by any and all through the force of rhetoric – is absent what Raymond Williams refers to as a “social intention”. For critical balkanology, concrete materiality is all there is – it is everywhere; a veritable “totality”. Yet,
if totality is simply concrete, if it is simply the recognition of a large variety of miscellaneous and contemporaneous practices, then it is essentially empty of any content that could be called Marxist. Intention, the notion of intention, restores the key question, or rather the key emphasis. For while it is true that any society is a complex whole of such practices, it is also true that any society has a specific organization, a specific structure, and that the principles of this organization and structure can be seen as directly related to certain social intentions, intentions by which we define the society, intentions which in all our experience have been the rule of a particular class. 338
There is a qualitative difference between the rather imprecise and technocratic phrase
“expert and informational power” and the more historically and sociologically precise
“bourgeoisie” of which the former is, to quote Pierre Bourdieu, a “class fraction”. 339 Experts, journalists, academics, diplomats and other such “organic intellectuals”, when descriptively divorced from the socio-economic basis that undergirds their power and privilege, herald a
“writerly” world of arguments, counter-arguments, professional propriety, and an assumption that all equally partake in a public sphere of rational voices. Politically, the most one can hope
338 Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory” in New Left Review , I/82, November- December 1973, 7. 339 By class fraction Bourdieu refers to “a set of individuals who occupy an identical position and are engaged in the same collective trajectory, the one which defines a rising or declining class.” Furthermore, “a class or class fraction is defined not only by its position in the relations of production, as identified through indices such as occupation, income or even educational level, but also by a certain sex-ratio, a certain distribution in geographical space (which is never socially neutral) and by a whole set of subsidiary characteristics which may function, in the form of tacit requirements, as real principles of selection or exclusion without ever being formally stated (this is the case with ethnic origin and sex). See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 112, 102.
146
for is to persuade others of the error of their ways. This is precisely how Todorova frames her enterprise despite her gestures to something less neutered. It is also why the social conditions of her preoccupation with the “textually tropic” – social conditions part and parcel of a capitalist economy with distinctive spatial and temporal forms of social incoherence – are never confronted. Alas, “[p]ower …” writes Ebert,
is the effect not of discourse formations but of private property – accumulated surplus labour. Owning the means of producing wealth causes power to become powerful . This is exactly what genealogy mystifies. It does so with two interrelated reading strategies: by dismantling the relation of cause and effect and by destratifying all social relations and consequently erasing the binary relations between the powerful and the powerless. 340
In the following chapter, I offer, as an example, a sketch of stratified social relations in neoliberal Serbia that includes labour unrest and the manner in which privileged classes are interpellated. I do this in order to illustrate, contra Todorova, that a scholastic focus on “expert informational power” and the “textually tropic” simply cannot account for the “social incoherence” produced by international and national policies of “accumulation by dispossession”, the manner in which nesting balkanisms are functions of class privilege and that economic investment in a rapidly deindustrializing state requires professional touristic pandering to stereotypes of a clean and unspoilt “European” Serbia. This sketch also serves as a segue into my critiques of Tomislav Longinovic and Marko Zivkovic, two critical balkanologists interrogating the dynamics of Milosevic and post-Milosevic era Serbia.
340 Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique , 49.
147
CHAPTER 4: SERBIA IN THE WAKE OF NEOLIBERALIZATION
Labour unrest in Serbia resumed in the mid to late 1990s involving transport, medical, and electricity supply workers and, although the winter protests of 1996 to 1997 were by and large a variegated movement for “political democracy”, “[w]orkers action was central to the final overthrow of the regime in October 2000” with a major boost provided by 17,500 striking miners and electrical supply workers that ultimately led to post-Milosevic demands for “freedom of organisation, elimination of harassment of trade union activists and fraud and robbery of the enterprise assets by management”. 1 But nothing so exacerbated the tension between unions and the post-Milosevic state like the 2001 Labour Law.
Promulgated in light of Serbia’s official integration into the world financial order, this law was conceived “within a framework of social dialogue in so far as the trade union federations were informed of the nature of the new legislation in its draft form”. 2 However, the content of the legislation was thoroughly vetted by the World Bank and IMF and approved by the Serbian Minister of Labour for its investment-friendly spirit prior to being presented to the unions. The right to strike was affirmed, but limited for those toiling in so-called “essential services” (an elastic category that comprised a good 60 per cent of all labourers). 3 Moreover, the legislation made it easier to fire workers in order to help eliminate “labour-market ‘rigidities’”. 4
“The neoliberal intent of the 2001 Labour Law,” explains Upchurch “and the ineffectiveness – from the union standpoint – of the process of social dialogue confirmed the weakness of social dialogue as a vehicle for progress by the unions.” 5 Social dialogue initiatives were initially
1 Darko Marinkovic as quoted in Martin Upchurch and Darko Marinkovic, “Wild Capitalism, Privatisation, and Employment Relations in Serbia,” Employee Relations 33, no. 4 (2011), 324. 2 Ibid., 328. 3 Martin Upchurch, “State, Labour and Market in Post-revolution Serbia,” Capital and Class , no. 89 (2006), 18. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid.
148
undertaken in order to fulfill conditions for the EU as “part of the process of transformation states’ entry into liberal democracy”. 6 This discourse, generally understood as grounding a rapprochement between business, government, and labour interests, is an intriguing ideological symptom of neoliberalism. It is precisely such conversational models of communication that are fetishized in much critical balkanology as prescriptions for the malaise of capitalist modernity.
Yet what is ignored in this privileging of social discourse is the manner in which it pacifies challenges to the status quo. For example, one of the “social sources” of social dialogue as identified by Upchurch is a (legitimate) fear of “social instability”. 7 Social dialogue is thus
“considered to be a vehicle for social peace through the development of incorporative political mechanisms” or what the World Bank sees as “institution building”. 8 The subtext here is that social dialogue becomes a de facto ruse used “to incorporate labour into the process of market reform” and “neutralise opposition.” 9 When read in light of the 2001 Labour Law, such an allegedly dialogical project reveals itself to rest on the monological interests of capital.
It is thus no coincidence that the first privatization law in Serbia was enacted in 2001 and promoted the auctioning of “socially owned capital” as opposed to exclusively state assets. These worker-controlled enterprises that previously had only been exposed to “insider share- ownership” were now open to bids from both domestic and foreign buyers. 10 In the short four years following the legalization of such asset clearance, “1,100 enterprises, employing 150,000 employees, had been sold off” including steel works, retail stores, breweries, tobacco manufacturers, and gas stations. 11 The palpable hunger of the Serbian government for FDI
6 Ibid., 10. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 11. 10 Upchurch and Marinkovic, “Wild Capitalism, Privatisation, and Employment Relations in Serbia,” 325. 11 Upchurch, “State, Labour and Market in Post-revolution Serbia”, 323.
149
resulted in 2003 amendments to the privatization law allowing “the transfer of profits out of the country” and “guarantees against expropriation (or nationalisation).” 12
The social consequences of privatization nearly a decade later are multiple; there is much material deprivation in Serbia. A 2011 study by Alexi Gugushvili reveals that roughly 20 to 23 percent of those surveyed are deprived of a sewage system, internet connection, and automobile with 56.5 percent without a heating system. 13 Mobility, health, social capital, and comfort are compromised underneath the indifferent weight of neoliberal norms that compel “everyone to live in a world of generalised competition.” 14 Furthermore, gender relations have been “re- patriarchalized” in acute conditions of economic instability and systemic poverty. As Sanja
Copic demonstrates in her brilliant “Wife Abuse in the Countries of the Former Yugoslavia”
(2004), “all forms of violence (psychological violence, physical violence, violent threats, sexual violence and violence including the use of weapons or other objects) were present in families of poor material status, or those living in changeable conditions that ultimately led to impoverishment.” 15 Economic crisis, which was precursor to and a consequence of war, led to a spike in unemployment and widespread poverty thus leading to an “intensification of social stress” in “smaller social groups such as the family.” 16 This ultimately exacerbated “the culturally determined imbalance of power that already existed between men and women.” 17
12 Martin Upchurch, “Strategic Dilemmas for Trade Unions in Transformation: The Experience of Serbia,” South- East Europe Review 4 (2006), 48. 13 Alexi Gugushvili, “Material Deprivation, Social Class and Life Course in the Balkans, Eastern Europe and Central Asia,” Studies of Transition States and Societies 3, no. 1 (2011), 45. 14 Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society (Verso: London and New York, 2013), 2-4. 15 Sanja Copic, “Wife Abuse in the Countries of the Former Yugoslavia,” Feminist Review , no. 76 (2004), 57. 16 Ibid., 49. 17 Ibid.
150
Copic states that 52.8 per cent of chronically impoverished women in Serbia are exposed to physical violence. 18
Bourgeois Europeanization
One can stockpile statistics detailing the manner in which the vulnerable are exploited and oppressed, but also important to an understanding of neoliberal dynamics is how the marginalized are perceived and coded by those with relative privilege. In the past decade, some compelling ethnographic evidence has been published illustrating the manner in which the
Belgrade urban middle class, or petty bourgeoisie, has slowly, subliminally, and meticulously persuaded themselves that, for example, Roma, Krajina refugees, LGBT and Chinese people lack the requisite “human integrity” that those urbanites who see themselves as “white” Europeans are bound to respect. If I may echo James Baldwin, in this “debasement and definition” of
(sub)proletarian and ethnic Others, the Belgrade petty bourgeoisie debases and defines itself. 19
Europeanization is thus a sadomasochistic process as it not only draws on and recuperates global structures of prejudice. Indeed, it would be quite a mistake to see this process as only recently
“modular” and/or unilaterally imported from outside; its efficacy and subsequent depth also stems from local common sense and practices of conservatism, Enlightenment rationalism, and racism that have existed in some configuration or another since the 18 th century. 20 The documented economic insecurities and identity crises of this transitional petty bourgeoisie have made it susceptible to a combination of tendencies given the political needs of the moment. But in whatever way they are composed, these tendencies all refract into a “white” European
18 Ibid., 57. 19 James Baldwin, “On Being White and Other Lies”, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 169. 20 See Michael Rossi, “In Search of a Democratic Cultural ‘Alternative’: Serbia’s European Heritage from Dositej Obradovic to OTPOR,” Nationalities Papers 40, no. 6 (2012), 853-878; and Djordje Stefanovic, “Seeing the Albanians through Serbian Eyes: The Inventors of the Tradition of Intolerance and their Critics, 1804-1939,” European History Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2005), 465-492.
151
luminescence. Baldwin, writing in an American context but no less insightful for my purposes, moralizes this process as “cowardice” which, in part, it is. However, a more historically materialist interpretation is in order. It is true, and I quote Baldwin liberally here, that “this necessity of justifying a totally false identity” is also “a moral choice”; a choice for a specific kind of cleanliness, integrity, civility, justice, in short, modernity .21 By choosing the self- designation of European whiteness, ironically, within conditions not of one’s choosing, one is opting for the myth of “safety instead of life.” 22 There is a belief that certain privileges will accrue, must accrue, in a tenuous economic climate if one makes a commitment to “white”
European modernity, however subtle this commitment may be.
The question that then arises, and one that Todorova gives a rather ambiguous answer too, is to what extent are the Balkans “white” and for whom is this self-designation expedient?
At one point she cites cultural historian George L. Mosse on the positivist nature of racism in capitalist modernity and its aestheticization of classical conceptions of beauty, namely that “[all] racists held to a certain concept of beauty – white and classical – to middle-class virtues of work, of moderation and honor, and thought that these were exemplified through outward appearance.” 23 “Whiteness” is read as a phenotypic translation of wealth, leisure and the micromanaged proprieties emanating from these. Sociologically-speaking, this is the ideology of middle class nascence. The extent to which Todorova herself is invested in its assumptions is telling. Ironically, she reads the Balkans as an oddly ex-nominative space through a European middle class positionality:
By being geographically inextricable from Europe, yet culturally constructed as ‘the other’ within, the Balkans have been able to absorb conveniently a number of
21 Baldwin, 168-169. 22 Ibid., 169. 23 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans , 123.
152
externalized political, ideological, and cultural frustrations stemming from tensions and contradictions inherent to the regions and societies outside the Balkans. Balkanism became in time, a convenient substitute for the emotional discharge that Orientalism provided, exempting the West from charges of racism, colonialism, eurocentrism, and Christian intolerance against Islam. After all, the Balkans are in Europe; they are white, they are predominantly Christian, and therefore the externalization of frustrations on them can circumvent the usual racial or religious bias allegations. 24 The Balkans non-descript “whiteness” is precisely what allows the peninsula to signify as a tabula rasa . Yet, Konstantin Kilibarda points out, claiming a white Christian European essence for this region glosses over the fact that it is far more ethnically and religiously diverse than
Todorova is inclined to acknowledge. 25 At least in the former Yugoslav republics, there is a documented history of racialized groups from the Roma and Muslim Albanians to Jews, Gorani and the Muslims of Novi Pazar. The recent modest and strictly urban influx of Chinese adds to an always historically consistent plurality.
Belgrade’s Others
Serbian Refugees
Zala Volcic in her eye-opening piece “Belgrade vs. Serbia: Spatial Re-Configurations of
Belonging” (2005), presents the results of over two dozen interviews with Belgrade intellectuals aged 23 to 35 illustrating how post-Milosevic identities are being articulated. Her informants included journalists, NGO workers, politicians, and actors who collectively iterate an exclusionary if urbanized sentiment towards (sub)proletarian and ethnicized Others. “Minority
24 Ibid. 25 Konstantin Kilibarda, “Non-Aligned Geographies in the Balkans: Space, Race and Image in the Construction of New European Foreign Policies,” Security Beyond the Discipline: Emerging Dialogues on Global Politics , eds. Abhinava Kumar and Derek Masionville (Toronto: York Centre for International and Security Studies, 2010), 41. In an unpublished early version of this paper, Kilibarda insightfully deconstructs Todorova’s demographic denial. See Konstantin Kilibarda, “Non-Aligned Geographies in the Balkans: Space, Race and Image in the Construction of New ‘European’ Foreign Policies,” Unpublished Paper, York University, April 2009, 4-7.
153
groups,” she somberly concludes “such as Gypsies, different ethnic groups, immigrants, even refugees, are excluded from the Belgrade imaginary.” 26
A sampling of some of Volcic’s informants supports my claim about the racist and classist nature of these prejudices and how they are integral aspects of emergent neoliberal forms of subjectivity. For example, a self-described scion of “old, bourgeois Belgrade families” laments the influx of Serbian war refugees from outside of Serbia proper:
But the last ten years has changed a lot – lots of educated people have left, and they have come … Serbian refugees from Kosovo, Krajina … and brought their habits with them. You cannot grill a pig (‘peci prase’) in the city, you just can’t . They have brought a lot of rural habits with them, but they don’t fit in Belgrade. Belgrade is the cosmopolitan city, it always has been, and it makes me sad to see what they are doing to it … 27
Those who directly or indirectly experienced ethnic cleansing no doubt evoke pathos in the informant, but not due to the nature of their plight. Juxtaposed against emigrating professionals and framed like a trailer for a George Romero film (“they have come”), said pathos is displaced onto the city itself (“makes me sad to see what they are doing to it”) or, perhaps more accurately, to its remaining petty bourgeois inhabitants. What our informant exhibits is reactionary gentility, clearing demarcating what the newcomers must not do – which is a moot point since they are anyway a circle to Belgrade’s square (“don’t fit”). Yet their customary practices, such as pig grilling, are feared . “Habits” are obtained through repetition and, as such, are veritably transformed into second nature. As a result, they become tough to eradicate. Not unrelated, a
“habit” might also imply an addiction of some kind, a “monkey on one’s back”, burdensome responsibility that must be acted upon. It is interesting to note that the described primal push into the city requires an incantatory repetition of the negative as if to magically exorcise it (“cannot”,
“just can’t”). Ironically, the tone of the informant is in marked opposition to her privileging of
26 Zala Volcic, “Belgrade vs. Serbia: Spatial Re-Configurations of Belonging,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 31, no. 4 (2005), 652. 27 Ibid., 651.
154
the “cosmopolitan” if by the term we mean worldly, sophisticated and at ease with other cultures.
Thus, in the context of this passage, “educated people” is more than a descriptive acknowledgement of literacy, but another species altogether, one that is rational and mature – despite the odd reliance on the occult.
Petty bourgeois cosmopolitanism so articulated is intolerant of genuine difference; it desires to embrace only those who are professionally, morally, ethnically, and class appropriate.
Volcic outs the exclusionary cosmopolitanism of the above sentiment with the musings of an artist on the arbitrary nature of Sarajevo. The informant derides the hate-producing propensity of the city’s allegedly “fake multicultural existence” thus easily blaming its “multi-ethnic and multicultural” make-up for the war: “That is why it all started, all the hatred and killings. I am for homogenisation, segregation … the city has to be clean, homogenous, healthy.” Following this logic, Belgrade is indubitably “a sick and run-down city” chock “full of people from all ethnic groups.” 28 Here we have a classically colonial bourgeois view of what peace and stability entail. One can infer that Krajina and Kosovar Serbs are in fact different ethnicities who, by their mere presence, are responsible for metropolitan blight and urban malaise. An actor underscores this inference with a “differentialist” description of her neighbours:
My new neighbours are … a Kosovo Serbian refugee family … that used to live for generations in a rural part of Kosovo … and it bothers me … how they live and behave in our apartment building … they are poor … and just different … the rumour goes that they have chickens and a pig in a bathroom … I guess they just don’t have the … cultural … skills to live in a city such as Belgrade …29
Classist gossip is enough to stigmatize people who might very well be some of the 200,000 Serbs and Roma ethnically cleansed from Kosovo in the summer of 1999. 30 They are an affront to the
28 Ibid., 647. 29 Ibid., 652. 30 “Kosovo/Serbia: Protect Minorities from Ethnic Violence,” Human Rights Watch , March 19, 2004, http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2004/03/18/kosovoserbia-protect-minorities-ethnic-violence .
155
city-dwelling actor for a number of reasons: their discernible poverty, rustic uncouthness, and bovine egalitarianism. But none of these insufficient explanations matter; these refugees unsettle urban sensibilities because they are “just different” and “just don’t” have the “cultural” wherewithal with which to subsist in 21 st century Serbia. There is a weak attempt to explain their difference, followed by an exasperated appeal to impenetrability. One either tolerates them in the pinched-nose fashion of modern liberalism or waits and hopes for their emigration or removal.
For all their post-ethnonationalist ennui, such sentiments continue to biologize the body politic
(“clean”, “healthy”, “sick”) ensuring prophylactic discourses of “cures” and the “quarantinable” flow below the surface. One might even claim that the ferociously naked logic of ethnic cleansing has cloaked itself in the business casual of social cleansing.
Roma
This is precisely what Konstantin Kilibarda demonstrates in his meticulously researched
“Clearing Space: an Anatomy of Urban Renewal, Social Cleansing and Everyday Life in a
Belgrade Mahala ” (2011). Kilibarda “examines recent shifts in Belgrade’s urban geography and built environments, with an accent placed on the landscapes of social cleansing, gentrification and commercialization accompanying Serbia’s neoliberal governmentality.” 31 Moreover, through the use of concepts drawn from the work of David Harvey and Arjun Appadurai, he undertakes an impressive “anatomy” of the globally conditioned and municipally enforced “resettlement” and destruction of 178 Roma domiciles, including a two decade old mahala (neighbourhood) under the Gazela Bridge, and the attendant forced emigration of their 1,000 inhabitants to
Belgrade’s urban peripheries. 32 The idea for resettling the Belgrade Roma was endorsed in 2003 under the auspices of Mayor Radmila Hrustanovic and World Bank official Rory O’Sullivan and
31 Konstantin Kilibarda, “Clearing Space: an Anatomy of Urban Renewal, Social Cleansing and Everyday Life in a Belgrade Mahala ,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 24, no. 4 (2011), 593. 32 Ibid.
156
operationalized by mayoral successor Dragan Djilas. The inaugural programme proposed clearing the “unhygienic settlements” to the tune of 12.5 million euros and the construction of
5,000 apartments. 33 Dovetailing nicely with the EU and World Bank sponsored “Decade of
Roma Inclusion” (2005-2015), a policy rubric geared towards confronting obstacles around the social integration of these people, these municipal proposals are informed by policy suggestions that privilege “neoliberal social assistance models” such as tying social benefits to school attendance and introducing various welfare-to-work programmes. 34 As Kilibarda observes, these
“translocal” policies “tend to reproduce racialized stereotypes of Roma communities as incessant drains on already frayed social-welfare systems” thereby “treating Roma as objects of paternalistic policy intervention and not as equal social agents.” 35
Roma communities are coded as stubbornly atavistic, threats, “eyesores”, and largely responsible for their own problems. For all their cultural exoticization, they are still rendered
“visible” as moral panic. These discursive dynamics thicken as Belgrade is slowly rebranded as
“a potentially powerful multimodal hub, where [transnational] road, rail, riverine and air traffic intersects” and decidedly “European” to boot. 36 The Gazela bridge mahala straddles Pan
European Corridor X which connects the European Union to cheap labour and resource markets in “the Near and Middle East through 800km of highways running through Serbia.” 37 In 2009,
Dragan Djilas declared that “[t]he unhygienic settlements that can be found on locations important for the development of city infrastructure will be depopulated [raseljena]” and “[t]heir inhabitants will be provided with accommodation, water, sanitary conditions, but they will only
33 Ibid., 597. 34 Ibid., 596. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 599. 37 Ibid., 593.
157
be able to use them in so far as their children begin attending school.” 38 This bigger and more comprehensive eviction followed a smaller act of social cleansing near a condominium complex where the uncompromising mayor proclaimed that “[e]veryone who has illegally occupied a portion of city land in locations where infrastructural objects must pass cannot stay there”. 39
Given that many prime ticket international events are held in the city, moral panic over so-called “unhygienic” settlements and Serbia’s global “image” and “reputation”, has, in fact, been actively encouraged by government ministries such as the Ministry of Environment and
Spatial Planning and its “Let’s Clean Serbia” public relations blitz – which includes broom- wielding tennis superstar Novak Djokovic. 40 According to Volcic, national rebranding is symptomatic of “global capitalism” and dutifully undertaken by all countries of the former
Yugoslavia. Her discourse analysis of said countries’ “official governmental websites” reveals a contradictory Europe-pining “auto-exoticism”. 41 Serbia, for example, sells itself as part of the much-maligned Balkans while iterating its “Christian and European character” as it creates “a spiritual link with Europe” and aspires to “the common European value system”, namely,
“values that reflect a western middle-class lifestyle and the accumulation of consumer goods.” 42
This is juxtaposed against a glorification of the nation-states’ idyllic and pastoral countryside and, according to a Serbian advertiser, a tourist-soliciting celebration of her libidinal energy:
“We want to show tourists who come here to Serbia, how being passionate means freedom and happiness … how this can liberate us … and how the Serbs are actually about love …” 43
38 Ibid., 601. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 602. 41 Zala Volcic, “Former Yugoslavia on the World Wide Web: Commercialization and Branding of Nation-States,” The International Communication Gazette , 70, no. 5 (2008), 399, 409. 42 Volcic, “Former Yugoslavia on the World Wide Web: Commercialization and Branding of Nation-States”, 403. 43 Ibid.
158
When openly Serb-identified administrations are co-ordinating your eviction to socially inadequate urban peripheries, one can safely conclude that this so-called emancipatory love is likely to be unrequited . Kilibarda points out how Djilas’ cleansing of Roma settlements is triangulated by three convenient and, I add, implicitly balkanist tropes: (a) an organicist rhetoric that codes the mahalas as filthy, contaminated, and unrefined; (b) a developmental expectation of civility and propriety predicated on behavioural change; and (c) a “security discourse” defining such settlements as illegal and in need of surveillance. 44 The disciplinary and civilizing aspects of nineteenth-century working class legislation are apparent as is the relevance of Bakic-
Hayden’s concept of “nesting orientalisms”. 45 Indeed, “official” Serbia attempts to appropriate a more conspicuously middle class and often implicitly white European self-designation in order to separate itself from those who, condescendingly, require sympathy, patience, and help.
According to this discourse, Serbs are European and this requires an income and home for the purchase, housing, and consumption of mass produced consumer products. Conversely, Roma are conceived of as truant scavengers in a racialized “political economy based on recycling, barter, and exchange”. 46
As a Belgrade based politician muses, the city is a cultural pillar, “it represents the greatest and deepest base of European culture” inhabited by “residents” who are “truth-loving and cultural”; in short, “unique”. 47 Yet this same politician states that “not everyone can be a
Belgrade resident … you kind of … need a family pedigree, you know …” 48 This type of
44 Kilibarda, “Clearing Space: an Anatomy of Urban Renewal, Social Cleansing and Everyday Life in a Belgrade Mahala ”, 601. 45 See Chris Harman, A People’s History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (London: Verso, 2008), 382-384; and Milica-Bakic Hayden, “Nesting Orientalisms: the Case of the Former Yugoslavia,” Slavic Review , 54, no. 4 (1995), 917-931. 46 Kilibarda, “Clearing Space: an Anatomy of Urban Renewal, Social Cleansing and Everyday Life in a Belgrade Mahala ,” 604. 47 Volcic, “Belgrade vs. Serbia: Spatial Reconfigurations of Belonging”, 652. 48 Ibid.
159
documented popular sentiment dovetails nicely with a recent academic survey of the Roma question.
In a 2013 study of Belgrade slums, Dejan Sabic and a team of researchers draw conclusions about these Roma communities that are reminiscent of post-war modernization theory. Slums are read as the cause and effect of Roma “culture”, the latter signifying practices that ensure Roma “rarely find permanent jobs” which ultimately “reduces their chances of getting away from poverty and undermine their abilities to control their own lives.” 49 Their absence of requisite documentation in order to claim social assistance is seen as a choice and the inability of Roma children to finish school is not due to “discrimination by the majority, but primarily the economic inability of their parents to provide them with the necessary resources for education”. 50 The authors claim, without any concrete evidence, that “organized begging” by children is induced by parental abuse and that Roma parents are culturally indifferent to schooling thus leading to their “educational chaos” and the high proportion of Roma children in special education schools. 51 Although recognizing societal discrimination and “a massive, outdated, bureaucratic, and inefficient state apparatus” as in part responsible for the plight of these people, the authors do so with an eye on proposing what Kilibarda identifies as neoliberal solutions to slum-sprawl. 52
Women and youth are seen as vanguards of Roma “integration” since they are allegedly
“controlled by a number of adults who often prevent [the improvement of] living conditions.” 53
“The condition for this”, writes Sabic et al, “is a radical change of the dependent and suppressed
49 Dejan Sabic, Aleksander Knezevic, Snezana Vujadinovic, Rajko Golic, Miroljub Milincic, “Belgrade Slums: Life or Survival on the Margins of Serbian Society?” Trames 17, no 1 (2013), 56. 50 Ibid., 77. 51 Ibid., 78. 75. 52 Ibid., 75. 53 Ibid., 80.
160
members of the community, especially the fulfillment of human rights standards, and punishing abuse, child abuse, and begging.” 54 Women and youth thus need to be empowered by “public sector and civil society organizations” so as to “take responsibility for community development.” 55 What is implied here is rather ominous and hints at the repossessive capacities of an emergent neoliberal state. What types of disciplinary mechanisms are to compel the production of Roma as proper neoliberal subjects? Perhaps welfare agencies that break-up families on account of alleged abuse? Or targeted basic education to a younger generation of
Roma to ensure their preparedness as cheap labour? The rationale once used to justify the existence of residential schools in Canada is not lost on the following passage:
we can conclude that the Roma in Belgrade are partly responsible for their educational inferiority, because they still harbour negative stereotypes about their own success at school and at the same time blame someone else for that . [My emphasis] Another problem is a lack of parental awareness of the need for education today, and of the fact that the Roma children who are educated are far more likely to achieve better living conditions in the future. Instead, Roma children from the slums at the age of two or three are taken to the streets by their mothers and fathers and taught to beg or at the age of 5-8 taught to collect secondary raw materials (metal, plastic, cardboard). 56
Where do these negative self-designations emerge if not from societal and administrative practices and discourses of discrimination that Sabic and company often trivialize? Why are survival strategies such as begging and recycling nonetheless viable options (if one can even give them the gloss of “choice”)? On the one hand, evictions and their attendant policing “are designed … to regulate Roma access to Belgrade’s urban core” while the coercive aspects of the state apparatus look askance at “the various football ‘firms’, hooligans, right-wing nationalist youth organizations and neo-Nazi formations” or that quotidian oppressions leveled at Roma ecologies such as “workplaces, restaurants, schools and streets (often compounded by gender-
54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., 80. 56 Ibid., 78.
161
based violence targeting Roma women or the frequent exploitation of Roma children).” 57 The protracted emergence of an alternative political economy is alloyed to a specific desire for, and conception(s) of, justice free from hegemonic and exclusivist national imaginaries and predicated on a vision of resource ownership and political autonomy. This involves a struggle to produce and protect different kinds of rights – the right to water and electricity for example – that allow these communities to reproduce themselves within “discourses of citizenship, democracy and local rights.” 58
Such an understanding of “reterritorialization” is non-existent in the study by Sabic and his colleagues – nor is any mention or analysis of the 2009 evictions. They are quite clear about their desire “to integrate the population of these enclaves into the social space of capital” which includes access to social services, “property rights”, a focus on physiological nourishment, and a normative “residential culture”. 59 All of this, somehow, is supposed to find a way “to make it possible for [Roma] to do what they know, can, and like to do.” 60 Of course, this is incumbent upon settlements being legalized. If this is unlikely, then “the competent authorities should, through a dialogue between all participants, find solutions for … relocation and displacement which would be acceptable for all the parties.” 61 Social cleansing is a foregone conclusion, but retroactively glossed as the product of a rational and dialogical process of negotiation.
Ironically, resettlement in “container” communities on Belgrade’s urban peripheries does not live up to the policy hype or meet the needs of its veritable human commodities. A fledgling infrastructure and pronounced discrimination continue to exist – from small living quarters,
57 Kilibarda, “Clearing Space: an Anatomy of Urban Renewal, Social Cleansing and Everyday Life in a Belgrade Mahala ”, 603. 58 Ibid. 59 Sabic, et al, “Belgrade Slums: Life or Survival on the Margins of Serbian Society?”, 56. 60 Ibid., 78. 61 Ibid., 82.
162
sewage problems, and pricey transportation costs to a clear absence of promised jobs, censorship, and poorly accessible schools, hospitals, and food. Gazela resident Safet demands that “[o]ur material situation should be improved first, so that there’s schools and hospitals …. It’s in vain to be resettled and have nothing there … We’re normal people like everyone else.” 62 Mica
Talipovic’s resistance to the resettlement underscores its social and physical inconvenience: “To tell you the truth I would like to stay here or move somewhere near New Belgrade. Not to go so far away. If we’re not given jobs than I won’t be able to work and pay my bills, electricity, communal services, water, clothes for the children.” 63 Clearly there’s a desire for education and economic amelioration, but on terms that properly cater to needs of the affected people and not those of wealthy business tycoons.
Chinese
Unlike the Roma, the Chinese occupy a different position in the economic and ethnic totem of contemporary Serbia. Most of the Chinese in Belgrade come from a couple of villages in
Zhejiang province located in Southeast China; they tend to be “poorly educated peasants or manual workers, and speak the local dialect.” 64 As Maja Korac points out in her generously sampled study of Chinese shops in Belgrade, Subotica, and Pancevo,
the overwhelming majority of Chinese immigrants in Serbia are self-employed small entrepreneurs involved in import, wholesale, and retail. Although all Chinese traders in Serbia are engaged in trading business, very few have become only importers, selling goods from China directly through Serbian commercial chains. This also implies that very few of them have access to the mainstream society, which contributes to their invisibility in the society at large. A minority run restaurants, fast-food outlets, and food shops. There are some who run both restaurants and wholesale-retail businesses. Although Chinese restaurants are more and more popular in Belgrade and Serbia, they are
62 Kilibarda, “Clearing Space: an Anatomy of Urban Renewal, Social Cleansing and Everyday Life in a Belgrade Mahala ”, 606. 63 Ibid. 64 Maja Korac, “Transnational Pathways to Integration: Chinese Traders in Serbia,” Sociologija LV, no. 2 (2013), 248.
163
still mainly frequented by the Chinese themselves. Food shops or stalls almost exclusively cater for the Chinese. 65
If the indifferent reception by Belgrade citizens is as pervasive as Zolcic and Korac infer, then these prejudices, amongst other factors, might explain such ethnic insularity on the part of the Chinese. Interestingly, this is often how so-called “multiculturalism” is practiced. Far from being grounded in sincere popular acceptance of “diversity” or even a well-funded state-centered project of social inclusion (whatever it’s anticipated limitations), it is the concrete realities and optics of cultural containment produced via inaccessibility to the dominant culture that are coded as “difference”. Although insular, Korac states “it would be hard to argue that [the Chinese] represent a segregated ethnic community focusing on the process of maintaining visible difference and fostering separation from the receiving society.” 66 “Their strategies of incorporation” she writes “are guided first and foremost by the transnational character of their trading and retail business and the economic betterment of their translocal livelihood strategies.” 67 As such, they are able to marshal social, cultural, and economic capital denied to the historically marginalized Roma. This is not to say that their strategies, tailored and necessitated by indigenous needs and incredible economic growth back home, do not heighten economic competition with urban Serbs. Indeed, the presence of Chinese entrepreneurs in a fledgling economy has produced inter-ethnic tensions. Some Serbian textile manufacturers disappeared due to the proliferation of comparably cheap Chinese products thus “causing resentment among trade unions and segments of the local population.” 68
On the other hand, “high levels of trust as well as inter-cultural encounters of a very special kind” are evident between some Serbs and Chinese as “both men and women … have
65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., 258. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid., 250.
164
married locals and are engaged in creating qualitatively different type of links with locals, the local culture and society.” 69 Furthermore, and contrary to the terms of entry of many Krajina refugees or the plight of Roma and LGBT people, Chinese entrepreneurs are positioned to employ and evaluate the labour of locals. Nearly 400 locals are employed at low cost in two- thirds of all the shops at the Chinese Market in Belgrade with wages dependent on “whether they were ‘trustworthy, reliable and loyal’.” 70 Local professionals, from interpreters to lawyers, “are hired on a regular basis to provide professional advice and services concerning their residence permits and the administration of their businesses” and many female retirees find employment as nannies for the kids of Chinese entrepreneurs. 71
The comparatively benign and, at best, soft integration of Chinese immigrants into
Belgrade private and public culture is in stark contrast to the manner in which a fraction of the city’s youth – namely sympathizers of and participants in football fan clubs – have treated LGBT people both on the street and online. In a rich discourse analysis, Tamara Pavasovic Trost and
Nikola Kovacevic explore the online reactions to the 2010 Belgrade Pride Parade and the public perception of young football hooligans responsible for the violence. Finally held and completed after several previous attempts, the Pride Parade had 1000 participants and a police escort of
5000 that nonetheless degenerated into violence as a result of the collaborative homophobic efforts of several football fan clubs including Obraz – the main orchestrator of the violence. 72 A church-supported counter-march of 2500 dubbed a “Family Walk” added to the already
69 Ibid., 258. 70 Ibid., 249. 71 Ibid., 250. 72 Tamara Pavasovic Trost and Nikola Kovacevic, “Football, Hooliganism and Nationalism: the Reaction to Serbia’s Gay Parade in Reader Commentary Online,” Sport in Society , 16, no. 8 (2013), 1058.
165
heightened tensions that left 140 people injured and damaged property to the tune of one million euros with 83 people charged. 73
LGBT
Pavasovic Trost and Kovacevic provide a generous survey of popular reactions to this event via sampling of the comment threads of three major online news outlets: the centre-left populist Blic , the liberal B92 , and the right-wing nationalist Kurir . What they found was expected, with the
Kurir respondents clearly condemning the parade and B92 commentators solidly indicting the hooligans. Yet, across news outlets, many posts reflected a remarkable amalgam of class despondency, homophobia and racism. Global and regional trends in inequality, continuous privatization, deregulation and shockingly high unemployment rates provide a backdrop to such sentiments. 74 An exasperated commentator in Kurir writes:
I do not want this Europe in Serbia . . . I will not have my child looking at gays and lesbians on the streets, end of story!! Is there something else in that ‘rich, unattainable and shiny Europe’ apart from twistedness? Why didn’t our politicians wish us higher standards, higher salaries, better protection of the mother and child, for pregnant women receive salaries on time, just as they do in their beloved European Union . . . not this! with faith in God, Family, and our Holy Orthodox Faith, thank these guys for a wonderful day . . . 75
One respondent in Blic implicates the police, seen as criminal defenders of class privilege, while politely denying the existence of homophobia:
Last winter the police with military equipment beat hungry workers [protesters] who laid on the railroad at -10 degrees, today that same police beats citizens, supposedly protecting the gay population. Under the pretext of democracy. The citizens of Serbia, regardless of political and sexual orientation, will live in a democracy when somebody tells us where they are spending our money and when the police understand that they exist for the citizens and not vice versa. The police are paid by deductions from our
73 Ibid., 1058. 74 For a look at global trends in youth unemployment, see United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), “The Power of 1.8 Billion: Adolescents, Youth and the Transformation of the Future,” (New York: United Nations Population Fund, 2014), 1-126. 73 million of the world’s youth ages 15-24 were unemployed in 2013 making up 36 per cent of all unemployed people. The 2013 youth unemployment rate in Serbia was nearly 50 per cent. See “About Serbia,” United Nations Development Program, http://www.rs.undp.org/content/serbia/en/home/countryinfo.html . 75 Pavasovic Trost and Kovacevic, 1065.
166
salaries, and they, in addition of taking from the salaries of the hungry, ask for an increase in their salaries, beat the poor and befriend the criminals. Every ten days a police officer is arrested as part of a criminal group. It is not easy when you have no bread to eat, and when you go out to protest, they rupture your kidneys, break your arms and legs and you have no insurance to go to the doctor. Let the government decide and publicly announce whether it will take care of its citizens and families and fight the white plague, or is it more important to it to protect the rights of gay people who are not threatened at all. 76
Another commentator, this time in B92 , echoes the class despondency of the above piece, hinting that a more generous and stable economy might curb such homophobic violence: “This demolition has nothing to do with the parade … People are frustrated by bad life, and, logically, they need only an excuse to behave like this. I blame the incompetent government and their economic policies. Therein is the root of all problems in the country.” 77
Of course, all of this is to ignore a phenomenon that is far more organized and comfortably rooted in common sense than discourses of merely frustrated or misguided youth would have us believe. Homophobic and racist football fan clubs such as Blood and Honour and
National Formation are openly neo-Nazi and some of these organizations have a sordid history of providing troops for wartime paramilitary activity – the case of Zeljko “Arkan” Raznatovic and the Red Star Belgrade fan club Delije comes to mind. 78 Resolutely anti-EU and keen on ridding Serbia of drug addicts, “perverts” and other non-Aryans, the neo-Nazi fringe is a small fraction of a fan club scene that is no doubt nationalist, but not necessarily white supremacist. 79
Some commentators see these youths as impoverished freedom fighters of sorts, standing up to an EU agenda; an agenda that many people read in conspiratorial terms as importing LGBT issues into Serbia. Whether or not tariffs on EU sexuality have been lowered for this moral
76 Ibid., 1066. 77 Ibid., 1065. 78 Ibid., 1059. 79 Ibid., 1060.
167
economy is beside the point; detailed polling data confirms a marked prevalence of homophobic sentiments within neoliberal Serbia. 80
The “social incoherence” induced and exacerbated by decades of structural adjustment and accelerated postwar neoliberal reforms has created a civil society rife with contradictory forms of everyday consciousness. Class consciousness coexists with racism and homophobia, rhetorics of liberal multiculturalism with straight-faced social cleansing, petty bourgeois cosmopolitanism with reactionary classism, a desire for the “safety” of European whiteness with nativist anti-Europe laments for a declining “white” birth-rate known as the infamous bijela kuga or “white plague”. 81 Moreover, civilizational discourses such as George W. Bush’s “war on terrorism” are being reconceptualized by young Serbian intellectuals to retroactively justify military action against Bosnian Muslims and Kosovar Albanians in the 1990s and propagate an exclusionary contemporary discourse of Muslim “terrorism”. 82
The emergent civil society is a raced, classed, and gendered sphere of necessity and inequality where those discursively and physically fenced outside of middle class Belgrade and its contemporary attempts at rebranding are seen as interlopers tainting the once renowned culture of the “White City” whether they are Krajina Serbs, Roma, Chinese immigrants or LGBT people. “I want Belgrade to be diverse,” explains an NGO activist “but on the other hand … what kind of diversity do I want, you ask me … well, to put it simply, I don’t want Shiptars or
Chinese here. Or gay parades …” 83
80 There is much recent research in this regard. For example see Isidora Stakic, “Homophobia and Hate Speech in Serbian Public Discourse: How Nationalist Myths and Stereotypes Influence Prejudices against the LGBT Minority,” The Equal Rights Review 7 (2011), 44-65. 81 See Stef Jansen and Elissa Helms, “The ‘White Plague’: National-Demographic Rhetoric and its Gendered Resonance after the Post-Yugoslav Wars,” in Gender Dynamics and Post-conflict Reconstruction , eds. Christine Eifler and Ruth Seifert, 219-243 (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2009). 82 See Karmen Erjavec and Zala Volcic, ““War on Terrorism” as a Discursive Battleground: Serbian Recontextualization of G.W. Bush’s Discourse,” Discourse and Society 18, no. 2 (2007), 123-137. 83 Volcic, “Belgrade vs. Serbia: Spatial Re-Configurations of Belonging,” 650.
168
Revisiting Todorova
Todorova’s identification of an otherwise ex-nominative Balkan “whiteness” as a blank slate ready-made for the racist transcriptions of many Euro-Atlantic intellectuals and publics astutely shows how the signifier “the Balkans” is allowed to bypass the censors of political correctness and magnetize stereotypes that would be considered inappropriate if deployed elsewhere. Yet privileging this “whiteness” in substantialist terms while also retaining an obfuscatory conception of the process by which it gains currency, i.e. the idealistic and culturalist
“Europeanization” over the more materialist and historically specific neoliberal capitalism, makes it seem as if Balkan inferiority is simply a matter of educating Euro-Atlantic knowledge producers and not organizing an anti-racist class struggle against the leisure, relative wealth and privilege – in financial and cultural terms – of a hegemonic white European middle class and the crisis-producing conditions of its ascendance and ongoing consolidation. In other words, the structural conditions of exploitation and inequality require an ideological rationale justifying why displaced, marginalized and/or exploited peoples are situated, nay, should be situated, in subordinate and/or marginalized positions. An expanding regime of exploitation and accumulation, if it is to be in any way successful, must reproduce conceptions of what it means to be human and racialize those short of the standard. More specifically, it is the relative insularity of this hegemonic white European middle class and its Cartesian privileging of mental over manual labour that is “productive of racial distinctions, of clarified notions of ‘whiteness’ and what it means to be truly European.” 84 This much is evident in the prejudices exhibited by
Djilas, Sabic, and the informants of Volcic, Pasovic Trost and Kovacevic.
84 Dusan Bjelic, Normalizing the Balkans: Geopolitics of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2011), 69.
169
For Todorova, the social physics of neoliberalism – as unemployment, poverty, increased violence against women, privatization, deregulation, social cleansing, etc. – are muted in favour of rescuing “the region from a debilitating and diachronic spatial ghettoization” so as to “insert it into multifarious cognitive frameworks over space and time.” 85 What she yearns for is “a complex palimpsest of differently shaped entities” that underscores the pluralistic nature of
Balkan life-worlds and the arbitrariness of Western representations of them. This project requires taking back the category of Europe from the West, “de-provincializing” Western Europe, which has unfairly “ expropriated the category of Europe with concrete political and moral consequences.” 86 These are no doubt important scholastic concerns given the ethnicized nature of many academic and popular balkanologies, but what is being physically expropriated in the
Balkans, in Serbia as per above and elsewhere, are the remnants of an imperfect mode of livelihood grounded in solidaristic notions of human community. In this socio-economic respect, self-mastery corresponds to owning the means of production and expropriating socialist capital for the purposes of capitalist accumulation. This shift does not occur absent class struggle, however modest this struggle may be at particular moments. Yet Todorova’s call for a stretching of the Western European “paradigm” to include “simultaneous, overlapping, and gradually waning effects” is to be sought through greater academic mastery of “Western European fields” and the calling out of Western academic ignorance with regards to Eastern Europe. “Europe” is to be redefined as a theatre of “abstract … power” as well as “dependency, subordination, and messy struggles” so as to be a template for the rest of the world. Education and civil discourse are the means through which the layered contradictions of “historical legacies” are to be
85 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans , 202. 86 Ibid. (my emphasis).
170
sanctioned and “dependency” and “subordination” refers to epistemological violence and not socio-economic exploitation.
The attempt to recuperate and revitalize “Europe”, coupled with her identification of “the
Balkans” as “white”, leaves Todorova’s project a decidedly Eurocentric affair and little more than a model for the more Europe-pining civic-oriented bourgeoisies in the region. In short, her voluntaristic prescriptions to neoliberal turbulence serve to marginalize class contradictions and, ironically, affirm their racialized resolutions. By highlighting the limitations in her pioneering critical work, I set the tone for my immanent critique of four critical balkanologies, beginning with the work of Tomislav Longinovic and the class-eliding thrust of his liberal exceptionalism.
171
CHAPTER 5: TOMISLAV LONGINOVIC AND THE PERSISTENCE OF LIBERAL
EXCEPTIONALISM
Undertaking an exhaustive survey of the manner in which the Euro-Atlantic media complex has racialized the Serbian people is beyond the scope of this project; notable studies have been published exploring the reach and durability of this propaganda in the context of broader discourses of misinformation and ethnicization. 1 One need only engage in a modest excavation of inaugural reports and documentaries on the dissolution of Yugoslavia from the 1990s to get a sense of the manner in which complex histories were shoe-horned into Disney-like narratives of
“good” versus “evil”. Preoccupations with the Serbian “mentalite” and third-rate Jungian rhetorics of the “collective unconscious” – about a people footed in allegedly “traditional” and
“primitive” folkloric practices and stories – were some of a wide variety of racist expressions recycled within a racialized discourse whose generative matrix stems from a more conspicuously colonial era. 2 Reportage such as John Kifner’s 1994 New York Times piece “Through the Serbian
Mind’s Eye” and Paul Pawlikowski’s 1992 BBC documentary Serbian Epics rejuvenated these tropes for a post-communist audience. 3
1 See David Campbell, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1998) as well as rich collection of essays on the Kosovo conflict edited by Edward S. Herman with a foreword by Harold Pinter entitled Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis (London: Pluto Press, 2000). 2 See Andrew Hammond, The Debated Lands: British and American Representations of the Balkans (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007). 3 Kifner claims that two nationalist icons, the infamous painting “The Maiden of Kosovo” by Uros Predic and its sister portrait “The Moving of the Serbs” by Paja Jovanovic are “keys to the mind-set of the Serbs.” This kind of epithetical ethno-psychology is not dissimilar from the discredited musings of Dinko Tomasic and his heir Stjepan Mestrovic. It is a glaring example of what David Theo Goldberg identifies as “race thinking”; the projection of essential properties onto a pre-defined ethnic aggregate. Kifner’s claim that “there is virtually no opposition to the war Mr. Milosevic set in motion” has been disproved in subsequent scholarship (Woodward: 1995; Gordy: 1999; Dragovic-Soso: 2002; and Gagnon: 2004). His reportage is sold in rhetorical flourishes that have a Shelley-esque feel (“nationalism under Communist rule was like a prehistoric monster, frozen in an iceberg in a science fiction movie, that runs amok when scientists thaw it out”) and anchors its reception in palatable stereotypes (“Like mountaineer communities around the world, these were wild, warlike, frequently lawless societies whose feuds and folklore have been passed on to the present day like the potent home-brewed plum brandy that the mountain men begin knocking back in the morning”).
172
Yet many attempts at deconstructing such parsimonious representations, though successful at denaturalizing their efficacy and underscoring their marked arbitrariness, nonetheless fall into the traps I identified in Maria Todorova’s work, namely, a myopic epistemological emphasis on sensuous surfaces – i.e. texts and bodies – and a politically limited focus on “expert informational power”. Only voluntaristic deconstructive practices and scholastic dialogue can undo denigrative representations of the Balkans, thus compelling
(Western) Europe to recognize the accomplishments of its Balkan Other and properly integrate this also white, Christian and European “alter-ego” into a liberal European orbit of mutual recognition. Indeed, the ability to do so is apparently an example of “European genius”. 4
Todorova’s ambivalence with regards to capitalism and class allows her to privilege this decidedly culturalist Europe; a self-contained and regenerative theatre of struggle responsible for racism, misogyny and anti-Semitism as well as its “ennobling antiparticle[s]” in anti-racism, feminism, etc. 5 For someone who glibly dismisses the creative organizing agency of Balkan federative projects, this anthropomorphizing of “Europe” as a rational subject capable of broadening its outlook with the right interlocutor affirms a post-Cold War liberal exceptionalism as it erases an awareness of class struggle. It is not the often pyrrhic struggles of oppressed and exploited people – (sub)proletarians as I prefer to call them – that construct, develop, historicize
Pawel Pawlikowski’s Serbian Epics is a perfect example of how the “primitive terms” of “obscurantism”, “savagery”, and “backwardness” can nest within the cinematic realm. Pawlikowski follows the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic during the siege of Sarajevo, and situates the eccentricities and idols of this psychiatrist as a stand-in for the Serbs as a whole. Dusky valleys and pluming mountains serve as a backdrop for the killing of a lamb, the swilling of slivovitz amongst a group of Bosnian Serb soldiers, and the singing of folklore accompanied by the one-stringed gusle . Nationalist sentiments are no doubt performed, but the gloss reads: the Serbs are nationalist by virtue of being rooted in a rural culture . The men are thus presented as semi-literate lumpen , the “Dinarics” pushing up against the high civilization that is Sarajevo. The racist and classist implications of the film are not difficult to discern. I explore the deployment of the ‘Western’ and Balkan variant of epithetical ethno-psychology of in the next chapter. Suffice to say, such epithetical “analysis” is not purely the domain of the formally “academic”. See John Kifner, “Through the Serbian Mind’s Eye,” New York Times , April 10, 1994, http://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/10/weekinreview/the-world-through-the-serbian-mind-s-eye.html ; and Pawel Pawlikowski, Serbian Epics (BBC Films, 1992). 4 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 188. 5 Ibid., 189.
173
and labour to maintain a politics of empowerment in conditions of necessity, but a nebulous
European “inheritance”.
My contention is that Tomislav Longinovic, arguably one of the pioneers of critical balkanology, in his well-received tome Vampire Nation: Violence as Cultural Imaginary (2011), practices a post-Cold War liberal exceptionalism similarly culturalist and Eurocentric. I argue that Longinovic’s tracing of the signifier “the serbs”, given its suspiciously composite nature, allows him to simultaneously disavow and embrace “cultural nationalism” as ideology. This is done by conjuring away all that allegedly marks “the serbs” as a “vampiric” antipode while iterating the equally alleged moral correctness of a liberal cosmopolitan ethic. This ethic informs his specific reconstitution of collective identity as Serbian bourgeois civility. In other words, the historical conformism he echoes voices a settled and universalizing cultural response to the complexities of real material processes. This response is filtered through the racialized discourse of balkanism; a discourse predicated on what Attila Melegh has described as an “East/West slope”; a sliding scale of moral, social, and political valuation situated, at its Easternmost point, in what Hammond establishes as tropes of “chaos, savagery, backwardness and obfuscation.” 6
Moreover, this discourse is “always already” alloyed with the signifier “the serbs”; a signifier whose circuits erase the historical conflict between those who control the economic means of production and those who do not. I contend that Longinovic proposes an intellectualist middle class politics grounded in a racialized and classed projection of the vampire metonym onto a
(sub)proletarian Other, with the attendant reactionary implications.
But before I delve into the specifics of Longinovic’s text, I provide, in two parts, an account of the historical context informing his critical sensibility. Firstly, I map the position of
6 See Attila Melegh, On the East-West Slope: Globalization, Nationalism, Racism and Discourses on Central and Eastern Europe (Budapest: Central European Press, 2006), 9; and Andrew Hammond, The Debated Lands: British and American Representations of the Balkans (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), 120.
174
poststructuralism as a theoretical tendency in 1980s Yugoslavia through a brief sketch of the
Vidici student group of which Longinovic was a founding member. Secondly, I demonstrate how the precepts of a post-Cold War liberal exceptionalism were not simply the exclusive import of power-elite publications in the Anglo-Atlantic, but also the rhetorical mettle of important Balkan
NGOs, in particular, the Belgrade Circle, publishers of an early version of Longinovic’s Vampire
Nation .7 This historical context reveals: (a) the socio-economic roots of Longinovic’s critical sensibility; and (b) the specifically Balkan appropriation of a hegemonic ethic and its persistence in the political ontology informing Vampire Nation . This is a bit of detour to be sure, but an important one for my argument.
Historical Contexts: Between Post-structuralism and Liberalism
Aijaz Ahmad, in his acclaimed polemic In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992), persuasively traces the reasons for the simultaneous retrenchment and neutering of radical theory and practice in Euro-Atlantic academia and its concomitance with the rise of neoliberalism as ideology and policy. 8 But whereas this cultural retreat into academe was symptomatic of defeated, co-opted, and receding political struggles in the Global North, as well as the consolidation of national bourgeoisies in the Global South and their post-colonial reintegration into the international division of labor, transgressive theory and practice played an important, if modest, political and moral role in the SFRY. In other words, post-structuralism was not a professional discourse of the status quo, but the reserve of marginalized clusters of intellectuals, writers, and avant-garde artists. According to Ahmad, Euro-Atlantic academia cheapened
Marxism into “a method primarily of reading ”9 within politically softened institutional spaces
7 See Tomislav Longinovic, Vampires Like US: Writing Down “the serbs ” (Belgrade: Belgrade Circle Journal, 2005). 8 Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (New York: Verso, 1992), 1-42. 9 Ibid., 4.
175
where there was “more room for eclectic borrowings and academic abstractions”. 10 On the other hand, Marxism in the SFRY, of the so-called humanist variant, was re-politicized within largely ethno-nationalist co-ordinates. 11 Revolutionary socialism, of which there is a rich intellectual tradition in the Balkans, was displaced by either open identification with some form of ethnic nativism or a reasoned embrace of broadly liberal and Europe-pining civic politics. 12 During the
1990s, some members of the once persecuted and internationally renowned Praxis school of humanist Marxism, such as Mihailo Markovic, became close associates of Slobodan Milosevic, while others, Svetozar Stojanovic and Ljubomir Tadic come to mind, evolved into pro-European
“Third Way” democrats, some of whom occupied positions of power within the fledgling
Serbian state. 13 The bureaucratized and classed history of official Marxist-Leninism in
Yugoslavia was never without its dissident Marxist challenges, beginning with Milovan Djilas’
Cold War classic The New Class (1957), but the federal states’ economic contradictions, doublespeak, and security apparatus made it easy for certain intellectuals to look elsewhere for critical and political inspiration. Herein lays the efficacy and import of post-modernism as a novel theoretical muse in cultural critique, literature, and film. Magazines such as Delo (Work) and Polja (Field) emerged in the mid-1980s, publishing critical essays on post-modernism as well as translations of international texts. 14 The journal Gledista (Viewpoints) identified this
10 Ibid., 5. 11 Laura Secor, “Testaments Betrayed: Yugoslavian Intellectuals and the Road to War,” Lingua Franca (1999), http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9909/testbet.html 12 See the terrific 2003 issue of Revolutionary History 8, no.3, The Balkan Socialist Tradition: Balkan Socialism and the Balkan Federation, 1871-1915 (London: Porcupine Press, 2003) . This issue is also available online: http://revolutionaryhistory.co.uk/index.php/87-book-index-contents/199-rh0803 . 13 Secor, “Testaments Betrayed: Yugoslavian Intellectuals and the Road to War,” http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9909/testbet.html 14 Edward Mozejko, “Postmodernism in the Literatures of the Former Yugoslavia,” in International Postmodernism: Theory and Literary Practice , eds. Hans Bertens and Douwe Fokkema (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997), 444.
176
tendency as especially pronounced in the decade after the death of Josip Broz Tito, ten years
“characterized by the absence of any ‘main current’.” 15
Post-modernist cultural currents were not warmly received in the immediate wake of
Tito’s death, even though by 1985 the “entire” legal and political framework of this economically tenuous state “was open for criticism and revision” 16 . Critical scholarship on these currents nonetheless emerged as Predrag Palavestra published his Kriticka knjizevnost:
Alternativa postmodernizma (Critical Literature: The Alternative of Postmodernism) in 1983 and
Ales Debeljak followed suit several years later with Postmoderna sfinga (The Postmodern
Sphinx) (1989). 17 Literature was profoundly shaped by Borgesian techniques of intertextuality, most evident in the output of Danilo Kis and Dubravka Ugresic. 18 Most notorious was the Neue
Slowenische Kunst (New Slovenian Art), a political art collective that birthed the sardonic
Lacanian rock group Laibach with whom philosopher Slavoj Zizek tarried, while members of the pioneering Vidici collective published their cryptic “Dictionary of Technology” (1982) to an ostensibly censorious reception. 19 Edward Mozejko states that “‘Yugoslav’ post-modernism is fragmented and emerged in varying degrees of intensity and with a somewhat uneven chronology in the various regions of which Yugoslavia was composed” and captures the
Nietzschean spirit of a lot of this cultural production. 20 “In Yugoslavia,” he writes, “as elsewhere, the postmodernist artist was a loner occupied with his/her own individual questions
15 Mozejko, 444. 16 Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1995), 50. 17 Mozejko, 441-442. 18 Ibid., 445, 443-444. 19 See Alexei Monroe, Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005); and Tomislav Z. Longinovic, “Postmodernity and the Technology of Power: Legacy of the Vidici Group in Serbia,” College Literature 21, no. 1 (1994), 121. 20 Mozejko, 446.
177
and answers, with his/her own world of signs, an individual who kept away from ideological involvement.” 21
This solipsistic “culture of critique”, the purview of young déclassé intellectuals and writers, and – borrowing from Ugresic – its implicit “anti-politics”, emerged in a time of “global depression and federal austerity”. 22 Although there was marked extra-party politicization as “new protopolitical civic groups” grew among the youth and intellectuals, groups that were impacting policy in significant ways, “citizens' responses to the deteriorating economy remained largely antipolitical, manifest in the appearance of cultural nationalism, religious solidarity, and the popularity of surrealism with the younger generation.” 23 This generation was confronted with a lack of political vehicles outside official party channels and, in many cases, outright censorship.
The experience of the Vidici group, of which Longinovic was an important member, is a case in point. The staff of the journal was purged in 1981, but not before they managed to send out a theoretically summative finale: “The Dictionary of Technology” (TDOT). 24 Banned from
Belgrade bookstores shortly thereafter for placing the entry for crkva (church) alongside a photo of the Yugoslav parliament, TDOT was an esoteric amalgam of post-structuralist neologisms and parodic irony. A negligible publication in the broader national sphere of cultural production, it nevertheless elicited a sharp rebuke from Vecernje novosti , the largest daily in the country.
Zdenko Antic stated at the time that “the student literary monthly Vidici has over the last few years developed a system of cryptographic writing in which it has criticized the existing
Yugoslav system in such a way that only the initiated could understand what was actually being
21 Ibid., 444-445. 22 Woodward, 86. 23 Ibid. 24 Longinovic, “Postmodernity and the Technology of Power,” 121.
178
said.” 25 The condemnatory exasperation behind this indictment was perhaps informed less by the size of the group than by its status as a well-educated cluster of intellectuals armed with their own specific cultural capital and homologous discourse. As Longinovic explains:
Most of the ideas formulated by the Vidici group had elements of postmodernist and poststructuralist theoretical orientation, developed through reading and critical recontextualizing of Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger from the Western and Dostoevsky and Bulgakov from the Eastern half of Europe. Although the theories of these authors differed widely…they had one common feature – the tragic conception of the individual whose destiny is compromised by the power of the institution. These writers and philosophers had been tolerated in socialist Yugoslavia, although the extreme individualism of their theories was at odds with the official “self-management socialism” and its collectivist vision of the universe. 26
It is not difficult to understand the appeal of these philosophers and writers for such a precarious group of young and fertile minds. One is hard pressed to think of a more pointed antipode to a social and political milieu defined by Marxism, however contorted as “actually existing socialism”. But the esotericism, solipsism, “extreme individualism”, and “theoretical pluralism” espoused by the group and others like it preempted any potential solidarity with the country’s working classes – not that it was a part of their program to begin with. 27 Their lack of political strength was “due to their own insistence that marginality is the only true position in an overtly ideologized political system.” 28
Pedro Ramet has labeled this critical introspective movement “apocalypse culture”, one that is “inward-looking, absorbed in a quest for meanings, and prepared to question the fundamental political and social values of the society.” 29 Defined by “normlessness and anomie”,
“apocalypse culture” is produced by “deep social insecurity…peculiar to developed societies in
25 Ibid., 122. 26 Ibid., 121. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 128. 29 Pedro Ramet, Yugoslavia in the 1980s (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985), 3.
179
decay.” 30 The worldwide recession of the late 1970s, coupled with the aforementioned increase in oil prices, were the key heteronomous factors conditioning this social malaise, while overborrowing due to meager local revenue made the Yugoslav economy even more reliant on foreign trust. 31 The demise of the Vidici group happened in the midst of 40 per cent inflation, with the number of unemployed nearly one million and rising, as well as increasing secularization, marital instability and drug addiction. Furthermore, the tension amongst power- elites between support for a relatively productive private sector and opposition to invasive austerity measures resulted in political paralysis.32 The Vidici group was an effect and participant in the broader “crisis of confidence” in politically sacred Yugoslav institutions such as self- management and its attendant symbolic justifications. In fact, it was precisely on the intellectualist plane – of words, language, and symbols – where the group tailored its politics.
Their program “was limited to the realm of theory that did not approve of violence” and “was based on the analysis of language and writing as primary technological instruments for the positing of ‘values’ and ‘truths’.” 33 The state was seen as the consummate embodiment of propaganda technology that “merely simulates reality, reproducing itself ad infinitum .” 34 As such, the group was opposed not only to the production of Communist discourses of
“brotherhood and unity” but also the nascence of Serbian nationalist discourses. For the Vidici group, the country was to be conceived “in a broader European context”. 35
30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 8, 143. 32 “During 1983,” writes Ramet, “of 25 major laws due to be considered by the Federal Assembly, only 8 were passed. The other 17 were shelved for reconsideration later. The result is that the party has been unable to fashion a coherent strategy to halt the steady economic deterioration, and living standards continue to sink.” See Ramet, Yugoslavia in the 1980s , 9. 33 Longinovic, “Postmodernity and the Technology of Power”, 122. 34 Ibid., 123. 35 Ibid., 124, 121.
180
The Belgrade Circle and the New Europe
Yet the cumulative liberal exceptionalism outlined earlier did not only define Anglo-Atlantic sensibilities. The Belgrade Circle NGO, an active organization since 1992, and publishers of the first incarnation of Longinovic's project as Vampires like US: Writing Down "the serbs" (2005), is a noteworthy Balkan example of this phenomenon. Broadly liberal in its aims, the BC promotes the establishment “of a free, open, pluralist, democratic and rational civil society" and supports the establishment “of a general culture of peace, dialogue and co-operation" as well as blanket tolerance of all differences. 36 Liberal internationalist in outlook, the BC preamble is nonetheless strangely vague with regards to specific political commitments, choosing to proclaim support for the "creation of institutional bases for the protection of all human and individual rights, civic freedoms and the rights of the Other" and silent on the question of who is privileged to define the terms of these "institutional bases".37 The preamble ends with an obtuse affirmation of "cooperation with similar organizations in Yugoslavia or abroad." 38
The BC, all things considered, was a very important association during the dark days of dissolution and nationalist hysteria, managing to attract the support of theorists such as Jacques
Derrida, Terry Eagleton, and Richard Rorty as well as have members participate in several conferences despite the pressure of economic sanctions and political isolation. Yet the preface to its journal, maintained out of the University of Southern Maine, encourages the creation of a progressivist Eurocentrism. This pronounced if rearticulated Eurocentrism, characteristic of
36 The “Preamble to the Statute of the Belgrade Circle” and the preface to The Belgrade Circle Journal was originally hosted on the University of Southern Maine website by Dusan I. Bjelic: http://www. usm .maine .edu/~bcj/ . This website no longer hosts these artifacts. My quotations were taken from this link when it was alive. Thankfully, email correspondence with Dusan I. Bjelic led me to the executive editor of The Belgrade Circle Journal , Obrad Savic, who provided me back issues of the journal where the original preamble is located and sources that accurately speak to the journal’s project. See “Preamble to the Statute of the Belgrade Circle,” Beogradski Krug/Belgrade Circle: In Defense of the University , no. 3-4 (1997) and no. 4-6 (1998). 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid.
181
many critical balkanologies, has been explored in some emergent post-colonial and Marxist readings of the region. But before I bring some of these important and illuminating criticisms to bear on the topic at hand, one needs to get a sense of what the nature of this Eurocentric project is. The editors of the BC Journal "wish to cooperatively participate in the symbolic process of the creation of a new European spirit " but "one which will not apply only in the too narrow geopolitical field, from within that administrative entity known as the European Union." 39 The project obviously privileges professional cultural producers as the vanguard of this progressivism
("the symbolic process"), and the notion of a neo-European soul is an indubitable idealism, positively gaseous in its imprecision. The softly religious language and tone of the preface iterates the project as a spiritual quest for rebirth, whose "born-again" catechism is that of a
"different and distinct Europe" as the precondition for membership in "the international community". 40 This precondition, however, is a tautology, since one cannot escape the sense that
"Europe" is in fact a euphemism for "international community". In short, a novel Europe is a precondition for entry into Europe. The new Benetton Europe, respectful of Others, pluralist, open, and rational, would anchor, with more than a hint of hubris, "a planetary conversation of peoples"; 41 it is this conversational, rational, and free Europe - a new humanism if you will - that one must interiorize as its attendant Subject. What must change is ones perception of neoliberal
Europe, and not necessarily neoliberal Europe itself. This neo-European renaissance might no doubt be “elusive”, but that is why it must be "heralded persistently ", 42 with the relentless blitz of a publicity campaign.
39 Obrad Savic, “Parallel Worlds: NGOs and Civic Society,” in The Politics of Human Rights , ed. Obrad Savic (London: Verso, 1999), 338. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid.
182
The political and moral sensibility enshrined in the program of the BC Journal, “ the idea of a new Europe ”43 in the exegesis above, valorizes a particular post-communist Subject in the attempt to self-civilize “the serbs”. This project of maturation carries with it some ominous implications. In fact, what stands out in the preface to the BC Journal is the coded racialized language with regards to the Others it allegedly attempts to tolerate: “the editors of this journal will attempt to draw clear distinctions and borders between themselves and the anachronistic and immature Serbia which is tired of its years, of its past, of its heritage.” 44 What, pray, is being quarantined as “anarchronistic” and ‘immature’ and who, in terms of peoples or social classes, are scholastically lined up under this category of antediluvian backwardness? It is telling that fatigue or, perhaps more accurately, ennui is the sentiment exhaled in this passage, for what is signified in some ways is the cultural exhaustion emblematic of state failure. The implication is that Serbia is a self-contained cultural entity, the frequency of the pronoun “its” telegraphing an insulated notion of negative and linear cultural development, as if the genesis of “Serbian” culture(s) was not over-determined infernally and horizontally; the effects of a counter-finality that must be theorized and not a negative linearity assumed as a cosmological principle. The latter indeed lends itself to the cultural amputation of a specific, if as yet undefined, history.
Fatigue is not the effect of unemployment, loss of status, poverty, and war, but of “past” and
“heritage”; cultural shackles that seem to weigh more on the leisured and educated urban middle classes than the mass of hungry refugees bloating Serbia’s borders. I argue that this middle class lassitude informs the direction of Longinovic’s ethico-political project in Vampire Nation . But prior to explicating this argument, it is necessary to highlight: (a) Longinovic’s immediate
43 Ibid. 44 Ibid.
183
scholarly context; (b) the key themes in Vampire Nation ; and (c) the notable virtues of his position.
Key Themes in Longinovic’s Vampire Nation
A respected scholar of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Wisconsin-
Madison, Longinovic has explored the politics of identity in Slavic fiction, translated important works of Serbian fiction and poetry into English, published two novels, and, in the past decade, pursued a theoretically dense interrogation of Serbian nationalism and US imperialism through the metaphor of the vampire, which culminated with the publication of Vampire Nation (2011).
A contributor to the on-line journal Eurozine and Director of the Cultural Translation Project
(CTP) from 1999-2001, Longinovic is one of the pioneers in critical balkanology, alongside the likes of Maria Todorova, Milica Bakic-Hayden, Larry Wolff, and Dusan Bijelic, amongst others; a cluster of largely US-based scholars from a variety of disciplines whose scholarship, taking its cue from the seminal work of Edward Said, explores representations of the Slavic Other in
European literature, political theory, and diplomacy. Todorova’s persuasive and richly documented intellectual history of “balkanism”, which she identifies as a racialized and mostly journalistic power/knowledge discourse about a real “semi-colonial” space that largely signifies pejorative “ambiguity”, initiated a much needed “crisis of representation” as it pertains to knowledge of the region. This “crisis of representation” also inspired notable scholarship from the United Kingdom by the likes of Vesna Goldsworthy, David Campbell, and, most recently,
Andrew Hammond; each in their own way building upon and/or challenging the premises put forth by Todorova. In Vampire Nation , Longinovic writes in the spirit of this intellectual capital, appropriating the metonym of the vampire as a heuristic tool through which to deconstruct a decidedly balkanist reading of what he consistently refers to as “the serbs”.
184
The intersectional discourses of “savagery , backwardness and obfuscation” define “the serbs”; a double quoted lower-cased signifier that serves as a repository of a “Gothic imaginary that invokes dismembered bodies, raped women, and death camps”. 45 With the lower-cased caveat borrowed from Jean-Francois Lyotard’s Heidegger and “the jews” (1990), Longinovic grounds his critical enterprise in “the serbs” non-identity:
The use of the common noun and quotation marks to qualify the collective identity of an ethnic group marks my departure from any notion of the nation as an essential, monumental, and historically stable category. The use of these markers serves to distinguish “the serbs,” an imaginary assemblage of dubious veracity, from the practice of everyday life of those humans who happen to be born under that particular sign of national belonging. 46
Clearly sharing an affinity with post-colonial readings of the nation, Longinovic does not mince words when it comes to ethnic nationalism, elsewhere describing it as “an ideology that appeals to the lowest common denominator; it is obvious to the point of stupidity.” 47 It is also obvious for him that this “essential, monumental, and historically stable category” cannot encapsulate the implied heterogeneity of quotidian life. 48 Indeed, by self-consciously bracketing this signifier to reiterate something quite fictitious (“an imaginary assemblage of dubious veracity”) he undertakes an analysis not of “the practice of everyday life” but of a persistent and uncannily durable cultural imaginary. 49 He is specifically interested in what “the serbs” embody .
But if this signifier is no more than a veiling of the complexity of plebeian existence—a mere ornamental partition between material social life and what amounts to a stereotype—what compels him to deconstruct it? Separated from “everyday life” the fugitive sign would seem to be something, echoing Raymond Williams, “occupying merely the top of our minds” and,
45 Tomislav Longinovic, “Internet Nation: The Case of Cyber Yugoslavia (www.yuga.com ),” in The Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain (Delhi: The Sarai Programme, CSDS, 2001), 119. 46 Tomislav Longinovic, Vampire Nation: Violence as Cultural Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 4. 47 Longinovic, Vampire Nation , 98. 48 Ibid., 4. 49 Ibid.
185
therefore, easily swept aside. 50 But Longinovic’s descriptions of “the serbs” are too variegated for such a facile understanding: “avatars”, “vampire nation”, “chimerical assemblage”,
“simulacrum”, “phantasm”, “vision”, “imaginary assemblage”, “metaphor”, “specter”, “national construct”, “disjunctive temporality”, “apparition”, etc. Yet if one was to construct a composite of the terms used to describe this signifier, the otherwise clear line between “everyday life” and the sign begins to blur. The frequency of the term “assemblage”, borrowed from Deleuze and
Guattari, speaks to a spatially-anchored “aggregate of artifacts” that are “unified” theoretically
(as an explanation for something) or physically in the form of “sculpture”. 51 What is emphasized is how that which is “disjunctive”, “fragmentary” or “discarded” can be integrated into something “three-dimensional”. 52 The notion of somatic “hybridity” is not lost in this process, as even the term “avatar” carries with it the concept of DNA. 53 Similarly, “vision” foregrounds the
“embodiment” of a “view of life.” Indeed, all of these terms denote a pronounced materiality , while “imaginary”, “metaphor”, and “phantasm” signifies “fancy” or unreality .54 One might read
“the serbs” as this fissured, vulgar, and uncritical unity, but there are significant hazards in doing so, as I explain in the balance of this chapter.
For Longinovic, the materiality of this sign is produced by ideological matrices variously described as “global media”, “the public relations industry”, “cultural mechanisms”, or the
“media complex”; matrices controlled by power-elites both inside the former Yugoslavia and
50 Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” New Left Review I, no. 82 (1973), 9. 51 “Assemblage,” Dictionary.com , http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/assemblage . 52 Ibid., http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/assemblage?s=t . 53 “Avatar,” Dictionary.com , http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/avatar?s=t . 54 Our composite would be an uncanny approximation of Gramsci’s notion of “common sense”; the veritable grammar of “everyday life”. Common sense is referred to as an “incoherent set of generally held assumptions and beliefs” and is a product of history and the historical life-process. Gramsci describes it as “a collective noun” with multiple incarnations and a basic mode of consciousness, one most embraced by the utility of mundane life. As a result of its being alloyed to the practical activities and exigencies of physical and moral reproduction, common sense is often viewed as a coarser form of consciousness. Described variously as “incoherent”, “episodic”, “fragmented”, and “lacking critical unity”, common sense occupies, if I may proffer the analogy, the doxic realm of opinion in the Platonic cave. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from The Prison Notebooks , ed. Quintin Hoare (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 323-335.
186
outside in the Euro-Atlantic. Although Longinovic is clear that the racialized terms of this discourse are predominantly set by the latter, he understands that the Gothic imaginary is as much a template for Politika as it is for CNN. It is important to emphasize that Longinovic does not choose to consciously thematize anything more than “the vampire as a shared metaphor” between the “the serbs” and the US-led West; a metaphor buttressing “sacrificial forms of identity” intrinsic to both of these entities. 55 “[O]ver mediated representations” of violence generated by “cultural mechanisms” such as “the public relations industry” and “global media networks” are the focus of his analysis, attempting as he does, with some notable success, to hold the “gaze” of the global media with regards to the framing of “the serbs”. 56 “The cultural imaginary of the Gothic period,” he writes “constituted at the end of the nineteenth-century in
English-language literature, has been transformed into a discursive lens for understanding the
Balkans and its apparently endless violent confrontations.” 57 This cultural imaginary allows him to scrutinize agonistic traditions of bloodshed in order to gauge their cultural and political presence. The vampire metaphor is thus used as a heuristic to interrogate the epistemic violence of historicist nationalisms. “By connecting the European legacy of modern nationalism as a foundation for the territorial notions of identity to the ancient bloodsucker,” he writes “this work explores the role of violence and its cultural representations in the narratives provided by oral tradition, literature, and cinema.” 58 In short, the goal of his project is to identify similarities between the discourse of nationhood and the consumptive insatiability attributed to the vampire metonym. For Longinovic, the “Gothic imaginary” is a subtext that is banalized and perceived as a second-tier of consciousness through the “media’s gaze”. He sells this imaginary as the
55 Longinovic, Vampire Nation , 8, 18. 56 Ibid., 182, 6, 5. 57 Ibid., 35. 58 Ibid., 6.
187
underside of late-capitalist consumerism, even though it is very much a part of it. Within the limited boundaries of horror culture, the vampire represents a “new cultural hybrid” that “speaks the truth”, a truth that is unconsciously translated into, other interpretive frameworks as a “deep structure”. 59
Longinovic declares that horror culture is the only viable cognitive lens through which to interpret global turbulence, shaded by the contradictory assemblage “the serbs”. Some might argue that this is a roundabout way of talking about racialized ideological production, made cumbersome by trite cinematic prose. But the relentless ubiquity of this Gothic imaginary in our present historical conjuncture deserves at least a query, and Longinovic is to be commended for exploring the subject in a duly sustained manner.
The Vampire Metaphor
One of the refreshing aspects of Vampire Nation is its conscious rapprochement with post- colonial theory and a sincere, if reductionist, critique of capitalism. Indeed, the amor imperium that characterizes much of ethnicized balkanology is noticeably absent. That said, his critique of imperialism and capitalism does not tip back the scales in favour of Serb apologetics. What he traces in the reach of the Gothic imaginary is a potential strategy of “cultural resistance” that
“undermines the Eurocentric notion of the nation based on blood and belonging.” 60 As such, the political component of this project is decidedly culturalist, geared as it is to encouraging resistance, both globally and locally, to the metonym of an atavistic and sacrificial vampirism.
This is “the primary task of those who would help ‘the serbs’ resist the phantasm of the eternal life of the nation, as well as that of the global victims of the new imperial power.” 61 In this sense, and in his own way, he is resisting what Zizek once referred to as “the double blackmail”: one is
59 Ibid., 3. 60 Ibid., 8. 61 Ibid., 18.
188
either for an ethnic bulwark against US-led Western imperialism or supportive of US-led
Western imperialism as a civilizing human rights crusade against transgressive ethnic nationalisms. 62 Said blackmail, uncannily seductive, has compromised, in various degrees, the politics of scholars such as Michel Chossudovsky and even Zizek himself. 63 Longinovic’s project is thus noteworthy for its critical refusal of Serbian political violence – the easiest position to adopt given the academic and popular consensus on the dissolution of Yugoslavia – and, perhaps most importantly, his conspicuous disavowal of US-led Western imperialism.
In the midst of US-led Western occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the still ongoing occupations of Bosnia, Kosovo, and Palestine, Longinovic’s argument deserves credit for reading the Balkans as part of what geographer Derek Gregory rightly calls “the colonial present”. 64 Longinovic goes so far as to state that “[t]he exemplary violence supplemented by unbridled erotic passion is closer to defining the present temporality of empires than their unpacified fringes.” 65 Not unrelated is his astute recognition that vampiric Balkan nationalisms are not unique in their consumptive violence and expansive belligerence, but are kindred parts of
Europe’s sanguinary history of state formation. Euro-Atlantic imagined communities are
62 Slavoj Zizek, “Against the Double Blackmail,” New Left Review I, no. 234 (1999), 76-82. 63 Chossudovsky has unearthed some invaluable information about the destabilizing imperial role of Western military and economic interventions in the Balkans, most notably in his solid The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order (2003), he has also been consistently and, some might say, uncritically sympathetic to the Milosevic regime to the extent of simplifying the nature of popular resistance to his rule. See Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order (Shanty Bay: Global Outlook, 2003); and Chossudovsky, “Occupy Wall Street and the ‘American Autumn’: Is it a ‘Coloured Revolution’?” Global Research , October 13, 2011, http://www.globalresearch.ca/occupy-wall-street-and-the-american-autumn-is-it-a-colored-revolution/27053 . Sean Homer meticulously details Slavoj Zizek’s compromises, misinterpretations and apologetics, from his facile reading of the dissolution of Yugoslavia to his ambiguous relationship to military humanism, as well as his prolonged silence about the 20,000 migrant workers who had their permanent residency revoked during his time in Slovenia’s government as a member of the Liberal Democratic Party. See Sean Homer, “To Begin at the Beginning Again: Zizek in Yugoslavia,” Slavic Review 72, no. 4 (2013), 708-727. Natasa Kovacevic provides an excellent critique of Zizek’s “ethnic hierarchies”. See Natasa Kovacevic, Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization (New York: Routledge, 2008), 165-172. 64 See Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Cambridge: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), 1- 16. 65 Longinovic, Vampire Nation , 186.
189
predicated on some sort of originary violence, whether perpetrated as coerced assimilation or genocide, and all the forms in-between. Sociologist Michael Mann, in his monumental The Dark
Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (2005), puts forth the thesis that “murderous ethnic cleansing is modern, because it is the dark side of democracy” and produces several persuasive historical case studies, from genocide in the New World to the late 20th century
Balkans, to substantiate his claim. 66 Longinovic’s project, although not as sociologically rigorous, takes its cue from post-colonial studies and thus reframes nation-state violence as a
European legacy:
Firmly rooted in the political and cultural ideals inherited from the best European traditions of nationalism and liberalism, ‘the serbs’ share military rationality and territorial logic of the nation-state with Europe proper. In fact, the Yugoslav tragedies of the 1990s are a legacy of the violence that formed the foundation of modern Europe: the political and cultural ideals made flesh and blood in the uncanny law binding the nation- state. 67
Moreover, such a reframing pointedly questions the moral authority of the US-led West with regards to military humanism. “Needless to say,” writes Longinovic “the colonially motivated genocide in which those same democracies have been engaged in for centuries hardly provided an adequate moral justification to mediate the Balkan conflicts.” 68
From this vantage point, the heuristic of the vampire opens the door to a Gothic imaginary that, as David McNally neatly argues in Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires, and Global Capitalism (2011), is often alloyed to a potent critique of the contradictions of capitalism. 69 Marx’s use of monster metaphors in Capital is not lost on Longinovic, and it seems that a systematic critique of hegemonic US capital at least gestates in his argument, in however
66 Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 2. 67 Longinovic, Vampire Nation , 10. 68 Ibid., 34. 69 See David McNally, Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (New York: Haymarket Books, 2012).
190
simplified a form. Mind you, his cursory reading of Marx centers around “lifestyles” and
“consumption” bereft of an understanding of exploitation as surplus labor extraction. 70 This focus is in line with his post-structuralist background, though his observations are not without merit. For him, the “vampire” is “a kind of lay philosophy” or “political unconscious” that has displaced mechanical and organic notions of human nature. 71 The popular currency and modular force of this new subjectivity lies in its accurate description of the nature of social intercourse in a neoliberal era; it is how we relate to both subjects and objects. Entire peoples become condensed signifiers of the monstrous and morally reprobate while social relations are coordinated by little more than exchange-value.
The “vampire” thus becomes “a new model for the global order of being – an order that is all too (post)human.” 72 This “global order of consumption” is marked as a “naturalized state of predation” that appeals to “emergent post-human subjects who reproduce the transformations of the latest incarnation of capitalism rooted in consumption.” 73 This description of the micro- politics of global intercourse is generated by the needs of a macro-politics or the “structural violence” of the “colonial present”. The US-led West is “technologically superior” and “rooted in forms of structural hunger inherent in the ideology of free consumerism.” 74 Understanding the systemic insatiability of US capital, Longinovic states that “[t]his hunger, shared with the vampire, features the actions of the sole global superpower after 1989 in its almost automated search for strategic dominance of the planet’s remaining resources.” 75
70 Longinovic, Vampire Nation , 23, 186-188, 82. 71 Ibid., 189. 72 Ibid., 189. 73 Ibid., 188. 74 Ibid., 23. 75 Ibid.
191
Vampire Nation pushes the boundaries of critical balkanology toward more progressive coordinates by (a) reading Balkan belligerence as part of a sanguinary European tradition; and
(b) hinting at a political economy of the “the serbs”. Each of these moves gesture towards a materialist interpretation of the Yugoslav drama as they implicate the Balkans in larger historical processes of state formation and dissolution as well as a globally hegemonic culture industry.
Yet a gesture it remains, in large part because these moves, for all their forthright novelty, deny an understanding of the “concrete sign” as a mediated product of exploitative social relations.
Longinovic’s post-structuralist preoccupations preempt a relational understanding of his place in this political economy, thus compelling him to reproduce precisely the vampiric ethos he attempts to critique.
“Truth” Longinovic states “is produced by literary means” and must be critiqued by these self-same means. 76 By “literary means” one means discursively ; a subject constructed as somatically durable – imputed with a materiality – through sustained speaking and writing. Of course, these practices are not innocent; they are deployed by those who occupy different positions in various constellations of power. The efficacy and reach of “truth” in this sense depends on the power-leveraged manner in which it is disseminated, made and unmade within fundamentally unequal discursive relations. For example, Longinovic argues that the
“sacrificial” masculinist rhetoric of Partisan heroism – occupying perhaps the greatest market share in the Tito-era production of “truth” – found ready-made receptacles in rural culture. This is no surprise given most of the Partisan ranks were staffed by Serbian peasants from the Military
Frontier (Krajina), and that the use of “the cult of the … warrior” 77 that made recruitment for the cause so successful, as Milovan Djilas illustrates to great effect in Wartime (1977), had its
76 Longinovic, “Postmodernity and the Technology of Power”, 125. 77 Longinovic, Vampire Nation , 83.
192
antecedents in Serbian folk culture. 78 To be sure, Partisan glory was an integral part of Titoist optics at home and abroad, from the valorization of health and virility in the annual birthday baton relay to the bankrolling of Veljko Bulajic’s big budget epic The Battle of Neretva (1969).
“Persuasive policies…” writes Carol S. Lilly “…originated at the top levels of the party. They were implemented, however, by a wide variety of committees and councils within not only the party, but also the state and various mass organizations.” 79 However, “such rhetoric was not trying to change Yugoslavia’s culture as to build upon and manipulate those aspects of existing culture that roughly coincided with the party’s own program for change.” 80 “Truth”, in this regard, was thoroughly historicized by and through an emergent political and cultural ecology.
For Longinovic, the institutional and popular heft of this ecology required a strategy of disengagement. Interestingly enough, in Vampire Nation , he reads the historicized practices and semiotics of Partisanstvo as decidedly suffocating in their collectivist consequences; the product of a “Self”-effacing rapprochement between the Titoist bureaucracy and its rural constituencies.
Within the political ontology of this text, proletarians and peasants are the ones rendered most susceptible to the Titoist production of “Truth”, leaving an unusually classed silence about who exactly is placed outside of this orbit. “The pseudo-totalitarian iconography that represented Tito as a benevolent ‘almost non-commie commie’”, Longinovic explains, “served as a paternal metaphor for the masses of workers and peasants engaged in the enforced building of
78 Djilas recounts how he consoled peasant survivors of Croatian Ustasha genocide in the Serbian Krajina by appealing to the popular “warrior” mythology around Kosovo. “I too was involved in their misfortune” he writes “– as a participant – so I addressed these peasants in the language and values of their heritage, knowing that this could best console them: “And how do you think that the Serbs can ever free themselves except by death and sacrifice? Remember Kosovo! The heroes of Kosovo also chose death in order to preserve the Serbian name! Do you remember the saying, ‘He curses like a Serb on a stake’? And would Karadjordje have freed Serbia, had he not hurled it into blood and fire? … Then one old man lamented, “Why don’t they speak to us like this, instead of using words we don’t understand…” See Milovan Djilas, Wartime (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 321. 79 Carol S. Lilly, Power and Persuasion: Ideology and Rhetoric in Communist Yugoslavia 1944-1953 (Boulder: Westview Press, 2001), 35. 80 Ibid., 78.
193
socialism.” 81 The paternal metaphor, of course, is what holds the sacrificial national imaginary in place, “brotherhood and unity” as the bedrock of Yugoslav historicist nationalism. For
Longinovic, resistance to this collectivist imaginary lies with “the living word”, a peculiar
“position of enunciation” that is unidentified with totalitarian discourses by virtue of its positional privilege. 82 The “living word” is that which cannot be appropriated or conscripted, is
“neither theoretical nor literary”. 83 Although in part operative within the framework of the dominant discourse, this “living word” is nonetheless the expression of a doubt that enables the promise of an alternative. There is a sense that he understands “the serbs” as a “living word” in this regard, expressing in its displacements new understandings of what it means to exist under this sign. In the following section, I summon Teresa Ebert’s work to challenge Longinovic’s post-structuralism in order to highlight what he invariably misses given his preoccupation with this signifier and, more broadly, the sign as a an object of interrogation.
Historicizing “the serbs” & The Limits of Post-structuralism
Teresa Ebert provides a compelling and uncompromising analysis of the political subterfuge implicit in post-modernist theorizing which allows us to see the limitations of Longinovic’s project. “the serbs”, as established, are an episodic assemblage of “common sense” as produced by the Euro-Atlantic media complex and the post-communist institutional ecology ruled by
Milosevic. Longinovic reads “the serbs” as a self-designation and an externally imposed racialized projection with both harbouring similar essentialist characteristics. What is vilified by the “global media complex” is celebrated by the local institutional ecology, namely, “sacrificial forms of identity”, a rural masculine sensibility, ethnic patriotism, and the like. This is the self-
81 My emphasis. See Longinovic, Vampire Nation , 183. 82 Longinovic, “Postmodernity and the Technology of Power”, 126. 83 Ibid., 126.
194
evident “concrete”; what people see and base their judgments on, which is what Longinovic takes as his object of deconstruction. Far from being an empty signifier in the vein originally intended by Lyotard’s “jews”, “the serbs” secrete a weighty “materiality”; a layered collage of pre-judgments, aspirations, and desires. It is, as Ebert might call it, a “delectable materialism”, a
“theory of materiality without materialism. Its concrete is the sensuous surfaces of the everyday.” 84 Longinovic’s “the serbs” are the “sensuous surfaces of the everyday” filtered through CNN and The New York Times , but also the incarnation of turbo-folk and a “vampiric” literary scene, as I detail below. He reads this concrete as a non-referential “autonomous particularity” 85 with Vampire Nation as the culmination of this “antimimetic” inheritance, where
“focus” is placed “on the mechanics of the signifier, whether it corresponds with or slides away from the signified.” 86 The “main focus is representation (and/as verisimilitude), not the represented and the historical constitution of reality.” 87 Longinovic claims that the signifier “the serbs” does not correspond to “everyday life”. But there is an implied correspondence between the vampiric signifier and (sub)proletarian culture. This much is consistent throughout the text and his contradictory definition of “the serbs” allows for such a reading.
Serbian Folklore and the Epic in Historical Context
His anatomy of “the serbs” as a repository of common sense reveals several component parts. He argues that the variegated trajectory and use of epic lore, from the expressive medieval orality of blind peasant bards to the territorialized requirements of nation-state cohesion, has always been structured by a “domination-submission formula”. 88 “[T]the serbs” torturous and heroic nineteenth century emergence from Ottoman suzerainty coincided with the spread of literacy
84 Teresa Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 25. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid., 29. 87 Ibid. 88 Longinovic, Vampire Nation , 54-56.
195
amongst a nascent pro-state middle class diaspora, therefore ensuring that the sacrificial narratives of peasant folklore would double as the founding mythology of a semi-independent and encircled body politic. “Before the age of literacy,” writes Longinovic “violence could be mourned and worked through in songs about the loss of freedom, power, and glory to the
Ottomans at Kosovo in 1389. With literacy, the monumental version of the cultural imaginary became lodged within the national body as an indivisible particle that served as a model of masculinity for future heroes.” 89 A “mythic and theological” rationale for the political and economic violence so much a part of the Age of Revolution required a composite of the Islamic
Other as “foreign conqueror and domestic traitor whose existence, for the emerging national subject, proved to be alienating, degrading, and aggressive.” 90 This composite found a most persuasive and notorious incarnation in the oral epic “The Downfall of the Serbian Empire”, an integral part of the Kosovo Cycle of indigenous folklore transcribed in the early nineteenth century by the Serbian philologist and revolutionary Vuk Karadzic. 91 This epic deals with the pre-destined annihilation of the Serbian medieval empire at the hands of the Turks, as I summarize below.
God presents Knez (Prince) Lazar with a choice: one can have either a “kingdom in heaven” or a “kingdom on earth.” Choosing the latter will ensure a terrestrial victory over the
Turks but would be a choice sanctioning the primacy of the flesh, a temporal victory that would ultimately lose its grandeur. Lazar thus opts for a heavenly kingdom thereby ensuring the immortality of his people. By making this choice, he guarantees his self-annihilation in order to preserve the honour and glory of the Serbian name. What is born from Lazar’s suffering is the
89 Ibid., 53. 90 Ibid. 91 A great English translation of this oral epic is available in Milne Holton and Vasa D. Mihailovich (eds.), Songs of the Serbian People: From the Collections of Vuk Karadzic (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), 147- 150.
196
Kosovo ethic, the need for ceaseless struggle in the face of ubiquitous evil. In the hands of the language reformers-cum - revolutionaries of the nineteenth century, this ethic inaugurates “the sublation of history and myth into a discourse of the nation” and “is accompanied by the manipulation of the temporal plane, bringing the past into the present and reviving it through violent and bloody repetition of traumatic memories.” 92 The vampirism inherent in this covenant, if you will, following the meaning of the metonym defined by Longinovic, is predicated on a concept of consumption.
Longinovic, paraphrasing Laurence A. Rickels, states that “others are often imagined as agents of that eternal being intent of robbing us of the precious life force that defines our individual and group identity. If we do not act first and pre-empt our own loss by consuming the other, the otherness threatens to lodge itself deeply within [us] and taint our blood and race with the illicit desires of the vampire.” 93 Others are rendered vampiric (“agents of eternal being”) and are intent on sucking the “life force” out of what makes us who we are. They are a constant threat. “We” must engage in a preemptive “strike”, defer and delay “our own loss”, by hungrily
“consuming the other” lest it becomes what “we” (allegedly) most despise – the “domestic traitor” that alienates and degrades. Ironically, this entire circuit is already an economy of alienation. Keeping Nosferatu at bay by striking first does not change the dynamics of the interaction; it nourishes it. Longinovic argues that the logic of historicist ethnic nationalism, with its agonistic and redemptive origin narratives, is necessarily vampiric and consumptive; utterly incapable of entertaining difference. Yet contrary to his thesis, he claims that this ethno- historicist logic is a profound part of “everyday life” since it was through the learning of
“national literature” in nineteenth century educational institutions “that this type of cultural
92 Longinovic, Vampire Nation , 56. 93 Ibid., 28.
197
imaginary was disseminated among the majority of the emergent Balkan nations.” 94 Moreover, he further erases the proposed separation between the signifier “the serbs” and the practices of
“everyday life” in his discussion of music.
By transposing and translating the form and content of popular music across history,
Longinovic iterates its role as a vehicle for ordering “common sense” into “good sense”. 95 A rereading of Vladimir Dvornikovic’s racialist Karakterologija Jugoslovena (1939) and his balkanist theories of the nineteenth century Yugoslavian folk song serve as an interpretive scheme for making sense of the persistence of contemporary turbo-folk as a musical genre. The
Ottoman linguistic inheritance in words such as dert and sevdah “denote the pain of perpetual frustration and the melancholy caused by loss or distance of the desired object” and nest as “the supreme signifiers of collective suffering that bind men together into a community of carousers ready to vent the accumulated frustrations boiling in their blood.” 96 The “collective suffering” is that of an “injured masculinity” understood as a “homosocial bond” that “is strengthened in communal settings as men drink, sing, and fight alongside one another.” 97 Yugoslav authorities even attempted to mask “differences by sponsoring folk music societies and professional folk singing and dancing ensembles.” 98 Schools, pubs, and societies are, at the end of the day,
“communal settings” that nurture the practices of “everyday life”. If these settings facilitate practices that assuage “injured masculinities”, somatize “sacrificial” forms of life, and transmit and receive within their boundaries all those characteristics embodied as “the serbs”, they must carry a weighty historical veracity even if not representative of “the serbs” in toto . This is what
94 Ibid., 53. 95 For a discussion of these concepts see Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks , ed. Quintin Hoare (New York: International Publishers, 1977), 323-333. 96 Longinovic, Vampire Nation , 107-108. 97 Ibid., 24, 108. 98 Ibid., 110.
198
Longinovic tends to underplay in his analysis. Obviously, “the serbs”, as a categorical definition of a classed, raced, and gendered populace – with multiple and often conflicting historical trajectories and tendencies – is non-identical to “everyday life” broadly conceived. This point is remedial. But the ontological ambiguity of this signifier (phantasm or a weighty materiality?) allows for a reading of “the serbs” as a distinctly (sub)proletarian entity.
My interest is uncovering the social intention behind Longinovic’s need to read these particularly stubborn and parochial aspects of Serbian culture as “vampiric”. To whom are these
“vampiric” practices attributed if they are clearly not representative of all Serbs, but nonetheless representative of some? And if the “the serbs” are indicative of parochially “vampiric” cultural baggage, then whose “everyday life” is being firmly separated from it? Furthermore, is the
“sacrificial” always to be alloyed with the national imaginary or does it speak in some ways to the neoliberal travails of the contemporary Serbian working class? What happens to transformative politics if the “sacrificial” is excised? Serbian workers have put their bodies on the line to protest plant closures, wage cuts, and layoffs. Students have felt the pinch of the
Bologna reforms in higher education and have protested against them. 99 Refugees have lost home and livelihood and live in tent cities and/or hotels. Sacrifices are constantly made in a neoliberal economy by the most vulnerable: oftentimes with pathological resignation, sometimes with an optimism of the will. Tellingly, the moral economy of vampirism Longinovic bites from Rickels is replete with bourgeois anxieties: “others” are “intent” on “robbing” “us” of “our” livelihood.
Keep them away from “our” door. Consume them as stereotypes and act on these accordingly.
Dispose of them as attire and/or music, recoil from their Satanic ventriloquy. The police and army are your silverware. Just do not let them “lodge” themselves onto your property with their
99 See Jana Bacevic, “Masters or Servants? Power and discourse in Serbian Higher Education Reform,” Social Anthropology 18, no. 1 (2010), 43-56.
199
“illicit desires”. It is my contention that Longinovic unwittingly proposes an intellectualist middle class politics grounded on a racialized and classed projection of the bloodsucker onto a
(sub)proletarian Other with the attendant reactionary implications.
Moj Grad (“My City”): Expressions of Serbian Bourgeois Civility There is a wonderfully ironic scene in Emir Kusturica’s controversial classic Underground (1995) where one of the protagonists, the oft-inebriated gangster Blacky, brilliantly portrayed by Lazar
Ristovski, is having his breakfast while the Luftwaffe drops bombs around him. 100 Enraged in the midst of the falling debris, he grabs his handgun and vows to avenge his city. “Moj grad!” he defiantly proclaims as he scolds a pachyderm stealing his shoes, threatens his wife, and kills a live wire with his bare teeth. Dressed in a hairnet and a “wife-beater”, Blacky, whose wife worries and dotes over him as he eats, parodically performs the “sacrificial” masculinity of the peasant-cum - urbanite that Longinovic interrogates. Kusturica’s scene illustrates the impotence and gendered dependency of this supposed warrior, clearly exaggerating man-childishness to the point of implosion. Blacky, perhaps a play on the name of “Black George” (Petar Karadjordjevic) – the much feted leader of the 1804 Serbian Revolution – is an evident blight on the masculine earnestness that is the Kosovo ethic.
The iteration of the possessive “Moj grad!” as an expression of urbanized identity is intentional. In choice passages throughout Vampire Nation , Longinovic is keen on expressing his urban middle class roots. Even his exegetical readings of Balkan history provide the critic with a standard against which Longinovic’s own project can be judged. One of the more telling summations of Balkan history in this regard is his discussion of Vuk Karadzic’s Herderian desire for the
“‘folkoristic’ unity of the peasantry”. 101 Karadzic, a Viennese-educated urbanite, quite the opposite
100 See Emir Kusturica, Underground (New York: New Yorker Video, 2003). 101 Longinovic, Vampire Nation , 106.
200
of the revolutionary pig farmer Petar Karadjordjevic, is defined by a “mentality” that evokes a qualified Nietzschean “pathos of distance”:
The minute Balkan urban classes, steeped in racial and cultural hybridity, developed a peculiar habit of imagining the people to whom they belonged as imaginary peasants who had spent the entire nineteenth century singing songs and shedding blood for love and free dom. Balkan urban mentality emerged as a simultaneous embracing of and distancing from the “primitive” non-culture of rural-populations, whose life was posited simultaneously as a national ideal that countered the artifice and degradation of urban life and a rustic existence that was to be avoided by all means. 102
Not unlike the urban post-structuralists of the 1980s, these cultural ancestors were “minute” and
“steeped in racial and cultural hybridity”. Their cultural politics were decidedly Eurocentric, attempting to conceive “the serbs” “in a broader European context”, and winning over the sympathies of iconic poets such as Johann von Goethe and, much later, the historian Leopold von
Ranke. Longinovic’s genealogy of “the serbs” is a fictional gesture that marks a parodic escape from the discourses of logic and philosophy invoked in the term “Academic” 103 while transferring signifying dominance to “the serbs” as a guarantor of narrative cohesion. What “coheres” is
“an…accidental montage of improbable occurrences” narrated by a “direct authorial voice steeped in mock philosophical jargon, while the impetus for the forward narrative movement is made possible by crossing between the temporal planes of the [19 th and 20 th centuries], prompted by ‘the serbs’ unpredictable movements and transformations.” 104 This sign “moves across time and space to connect episodes in the development of the plot.” 105 Furthermore, echoing Lacan, this signifier is detached from all biological bodies “as it circulates from one person to another in the fantasy structures that characterize the early processes of identity formation.” 106 Note how the circulative nature of “the serbs” is coded as a process of infantilization , i.e. alloyed to the “fantasy structures” of
102 Ibid. 103 Ibid., 16, 154, 162, 165-167. 104 Ibid., 160. 105 Ibid. 106 Ibid.
201
what is originally theorized as childhood development (“the early processes of identity formation”); it follows that those most susceptible to its discursive effects, e.g. (sub)proletarians, are stigmatized accordingly.
Indeed, “the ferocity of the war crimes” that defined the war in Bosnia is a product of the
“discursive violence stored in the national imaginary” disseminated through agonistic oral epics
“that eventually were transferred ” to the clumsy martial rhythms of the turbo-folk genre. 107 This continuity thesis makes the consumptive sado-masochism, pronounced ethnic nationalism, and androcentric narcissism of “vampiric” violence a peculiarly (sub)proletarian phenomenon. The historical mediations of this transference are not mapped; the transference is simply assumed to be eventuated in the present tense. Such an imputed continuity is not surprising given that Longinovic is essentially tracing the movement of an empty signifier intentionally elastic in its reach in order to cover literary, musical, and political “episodes” in an ahistorical fashion. It is precisely the performative aspect of this agonistic masculinist vampirism that is assumed to be eventuated in the present tense. Moreover, it is an ethic that, according to Longinovic, is lived at a profound level of materiality by those who inhabit “rural” spaces, while the literate “developing city dwellers” adhere to this agonistic vision of masculinity as little more than a benign source of pride:
The performance of this vision of masculinity has continued among the peasants of the Dinaric highlands, marked with violent returns of the submission and domination narratives. While the developing city dwellers take the written, monumental version of oral epics as a source of ethnic pride and identity, those who inhabit the rural and transitional zones of the nation nurture the burden of past injuries alongside their desire to emerge from backwardness. 108
Here Longinovic implies that “rural” or “peasant” culture is pre-literate, predominantly sado- masochistic, and, in comparison to urban culture, undeveloped. The performative orality of what one might not inaccurately describe as (sub)proletarian culture is clearly signified as insignificant vis-à-
107 My emphasis. Ibid., 76. 108 Ibid., 12.
202
vis the “monumental” authority of coded oral literature. The word is what is privileged; that which necessitates the ocular as its means of interpretation and intelligibility – assuming, of course, an ophthalmically unimpaired constitution and a requisite level of literacy. Significance is attributed to what is visible by those who – thanks to the accidents of social class, cultural capital, and education
– are actually in a position to see . Those “transitional zones” 109 of the nation, the much maligned, unsanitized spaces comprised of “those who are left to fend for themselves” 110 are rendered as de facto wordless. The tortured “desire” of these cast offs to transcend their “backwardness” is thus read by Longinovic as – plainly speaking – backward .
This prejudice is illuminated with an important ironic reversal. In his exegesis of Serbian historian Isidora Sekulic’s reading of famed novelist Ivo Andric and, in particular, the latter’s antipathy towards his “Oriental” roots, Longinovic describes a critique uncannily similar to his antipathy towards “the rural and transitional zones of the nation”. A clear proponent of an urban cyber-cultural vanguardism, he consistently reads the cultural decrepitude of “the serbs” as a rural,
“Dinaric”, nay, “vampiric” phenomenon that, through its plebeian incarnation as “turbo-folk” pop music, radiates a “cheap sentimentalism” of sorts informed by an “idleness and unfulfilled instinctual life”. 111 This “trashy” popular culture, and again echoing Sekulic’s comments on Andric’s
Eurocentrism, is no doubt a bane on Longinovic’s desire for neo-European cultural enlightenment in
Serbia. What this scion of the Titoist bourgeoisie seems to lament, understandably in some respects, is the “absence of representations of middle class life”. 112 Given the nature of its political economy, the “global media complex” has regularly focused on what occurs in public, “on the street” if you will, which is, implicitly for Longinovic as it is explicitly for Sekulic, a misrepresentation of what
109 Ibid. 110 Ibid., 126. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid., 125.
203
constitutes the proper quotidian existence of “the serbs”. This is the marked opposite of the feral world of alienated refugees and rape victims, worker-soldiers, rapists and gangsters who are routinely caught in the global media’s crosshairs. If I may rework Longinovic’s reading of Sekulic on Andric as a comment on his sensibility, then the “global media complex”:
[which] has no access to a world that is deeply concealed behind tiny windows and tall walls, is forced to represent life as it occurs on the street, populated by bloodthirsty heroes, holy fools, cripples, and perverts who are then imagined as the norm of [Serbian] Oriental reality. This fictional construct is bared to the bone and functions as the mirror image of interior life hidden from view, reflecting the excess of violence and sexuality of those who are left to fend for themselves as subjects deprived of family life; who are lonely or cast out of the mainstream of communal spaces. 113
In keeping with Longinovic’s spectro-poetics, what is observed is a “fictional construct” that nonetheless imputes perceived barbarism onto what is “deeply concealed behind tiny windows”. In the wake of the Wars of Yugoslav Secession (1991-1995) and the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia
(1999), those lucky enough to still have their original homes – or a home at all – are afforded the luxury of a retreat out from under the gaze of the “global media complex”.
This genealogy of an “imaginary assemblage” slowly reveals his class interests and political sensibility, both of which congeal on the backs of newly essentialized Others. The “humans” whose
“everyday life” he attempts to recuperate, or at least grant as worthy, are of a specific class and ideological type. He values “non-sacrificial forms of everyday life” grounded in “a culture of responsibility” and “trust” that is distinctly urban in its spatial orientation and judgments of taste. 114
Longinovic consciously sees himself as a diasporic scion of “[t]he minute Balkan urban classes” 115 , valorizing the anti-authoritarian “protest and passion” 116 of the “post-war, urban, middle class
113 Ibid., 126. 114 Ibid., 17. 115 Ibid., 106. 116 Ibid., 184.
204
Yugoslav generations”. 117 This allegedly progressive social group was informed by Western popular culture and technology and footed in a “racial and cultural hybridity”. 118 “Most of my generation” he writes “who come of age in the 1970s in the urban cultures of Belgrade, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Sarajevo,
Skopje, [and] Titograd were immersed in ironies of cultural openness to the Western youth movements paired with constant surveillance by righteous political watchdogs at home.” 119 From the
Croatian Spring to the banned films of Dusan Makavejev to the folk rock of Azra, this was no doubt a culturally fertile moment. Moreover, he observes that it was people with a similar identity of interests that overthrew Slobodan Milosevic and the “vampiric” nature of the “Slobist imaginary”:
Resistance to the banality of the Slobist imaginary was located in capillary movements of urban intellectuals and in a youth culture enraged by the isolationism and provincialism to which ‘the serbs’ were suddenly condemned as a spectral nation whose face had grown repulsive and guilt-inspiring under Milosevic’s leadership. 120
Urban intellectuals and youth, he concludes, were the “defenders of the last remnants of humanity among “the serbs””. 121 But the evident nostalgia Longinovic harbors for the urban youth culture of his adolescence, and its rebellious incarnation in October of 2000, is in many ways a symptom of the contradictions of neoliberalism in both the US and the Balkans. In fact, it is precisely this “nostalgic dimension” and its class context that informs his rather tepid remedy for
“vampiric” violence.
Longinovic’s Virtual Answer to Vampiric Violence
Longinovic is not concerned with the specific plight of refugees, labourers, women, veterans, orphans, and students, his concern is with techniques of representation. But the refugees, wage laborers, veterans, orphans, and students are amalgamated, by default, into the Serbia that the
117 Ibid. 118 Ibid., 106. 119 Ibid., 183. 120 Ibid., 165. 121 Ibid., 166.
205
Belgrade Circle refers to as “anachronistic and immature”. His “politico-epistemological project…provides concepts for the way in which capitalism is remaking the global economy in terms of traveling capital.” 122 This approach “dismantles as “outdated” essentialist depth models all the concepts – such as the labor theory of value, base/superstructure, and periphery/metropole
– that offer a critique-al understanding of capitalism. It replaces them with “new” concepts (for example, immaterial labor, assemblage, and borderlessness)”; 123 in other words, the mediatic, fragmented, and uprooted. These qualities define Cyber Yugoslavia.
Cyber Yugoslavia (CY) was inaugurated shortly after the 1999 NATO bombing of
Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) as an attempt to imagine a community free from monolithic ethnic determinants. A rather modest program based in part on Yugo-nostalgia, it operates as a parodic subversion of historicist nationalism via a digital portal. “This imaginary state” explains
Longinovic “offers possibilities for overcoming the extreme patriotic figuration of the native ethnoscape by ridiculing the political organization of the nation-state as such.” 124 “[T]he serbs” and global Others voluntarily choose to become a part of this hub, the only requirement being the selection of an often comedic “ministry” as a symbol of status. Or, as the CY online masthead has it:
This is Cyber Yugoslavia. Home of Cyber Yugoslavs. We lost our country in 1991 and became citizens of Atlantis. Since September 9, 1999 this is our home. We don’t have a physical land, but we do have nationality, and we are issuing CY citizenships and CY passports. Because this is Atlantis, we are allowing double and triple citizenships. If you feel Yugoslav, you are welcome to apply for CY citizenship, regardless of your current nationality and citizenship, and you will be accepted. Please read our Constitution for the details. If you are just curious, you are welcome to visit us as tourists.
This land will grow as our citizens wish. Neither faster, nor slower. Neither more, nor less. So, this site will always be under construction. For a solid country to grow, even a virtual one, it takes some time.
122 Teresa Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique , 53. 123 Ibid. 124 Longinovic, Vampire Nation , 18.
206
When we reach five million citizens, we plan to apply to the UN for a member status. When this happens, we will ask 20 square meters of land anywhere on Earth to be our country. On this land, we’ll keep our server. 125
The intentional ridiculousness of the entire enterprise is quite evident. The “parodic”,
“ridiculous”, and “less-than-serious” define this endeavor with Longinovic maintaining that
“[t]he nostalgic dimension is not conflated with violent appropriations of the other, since the computer-literate generations resist easy assimilation by sacrificial forms of identity.” 126 This claim is debatable, to say the least, given the selective and customized surfing that occurs, with a plethora of websites catering to “sacrificial” ethnic constituencies, many extremely virulent. But let us take his enthusiasm for CY at face value in order to tease out its problematic and often anemic prescriptions.
Recall the dichotomy he presents at the beginning of his text. We have “the serbs” and the practices of “everyday life”. Yet specific practices of “everyday life” are coded as part of an ethno-historicist logic: guslaric folklore, turbo-folk, and notable aspects of Serbian literary culture, not to mention ritualized practices inaugurated from above by politicians such as Tito and his malignant farce, Milosevic. Accordingly, Longinovic is strangely keen on pointing out that a “nationalist” writer like Dobrica Cosic is “the gentrified son of a peasant”; a strange little genetic fallacy to say the least. 127 The unsavory practices are rendered as plebeian or
“Academic” but, interestingly, the “intellectuals” are left out of this vampiric mix. This is because Longinovic envisions intellectuals like himself as capable of speaking truth to power, those who, like the ex-Serbian President Boris Tadic, have the fortitude to herald an era of truth and reconciliation. It is “the actions of different artists and activists” or “voices of difference” whose works deploy “different strategies of cultural resistance” that “are gradually transforming
125 Cyber Yugoslavia, http://www.juga.com/ . 126 Longinovic, Vampire Nation , 180, 18. 127 Ibid., 162.
207
the vampiric burden caused during the Age of Slobism.” 128 Urban intellectuals, untainted by rural culture, perform a neo-masculinity of dissent: “Since no politician will risk his masculine image in bowing in front of the former enemy , the process must begin with those who dare take the position of intellectuals after the disaster caused by the Academics”. 129 The new masculinity requires “risk” and “dare” in genuflecting before a former combatant as a promise of peace. The real men are those who sacrifice their masculine image in the name of this promise. Longinovic turns the discourse on its head, implying that cowardice resides in the “Academics”. This is no doubt a clever flipping of the script, but one obviously fraught with ironies. Moreover, given that his analysis focuses on intellectuals such as David Albahari and Slavoj Zizek, the former taking up a full twenty pages and someone whose “exile consciousness” he identifies with, one can surmise that the ideal-type intellectual is male. 130 Noble in its aspirations, the intellectual understands the “need for an identity without Kosovo as its figurative source”, i.e. without ethno- historicist logic. 131 Difference must be accommodated. Ironically, the promise engendered by CY is equally historicist and just as consumptive of the Other.
The Kosovo ethic is structured by a quixotic affirmation of connectedness which supports the need for similar kinds of camaraderie, an identity that is always “almost true”, formed through the sonorous ecology of oral epic and requiring the deseterac as a communicable form.
For example, the revolutionary if apocryphal sacrifice of Knez Lazar enables other “almost already” realities to coalesce around stories sung by guslars; a receptive field of Others who imagine their own location as a sort of “prosthetic nipple” of the decaying Serbian Empire. This is how the vampiric sensibility is nourished. Now here is Longinovic on CY:
128 Ibid., 16. 129 My emphasis. Ibid. 130 Ibid., 168-188. 131 Ibid., 17.
208
The imaginary promise of fullness, perfection, or totality is there to support the desire for an encounter with those who share the bond of belonging to the same imaginary collective. To form an identity that will be always “almost true” through a communications network requires an imaginary leap of meaning into its transmissible form. The digital revolution enables these “almost ready” realities to coalesce around speech acts sent via computer into the techno-semantic field of others who imagine their own virtual location as a sort of the prosthetic nipple of the decaying mother Yugoslavia. 132
Although the content is different, the form remains the same. What the Kosovo ethic necessitates is a de-legitimation of the terrestrial-corporeal as embodied by the Ottoman army. This is, in some ways, explained by Gramsci’s concept of “mechanical determinism” defined as “a tremendous force of moral resistance, of cohesion, and of patient and obstinate perseverance” which pertains to those classes who “don’t have the initiative in the struggle and the struggle itself comes eventually to be identified with a series of defeats.” 133 Moral resistance is part and parcel of a retreat into the “virtual”; a continuous narration of suffering that attempts to preserve
“the serbs” as an entity among peoples based on what the guslars imagined them to be. CY is also an example of subterfuge, but understood as a movement away from ethno-historicism; yet, and these are Longinovic’s words, a movement “which ultimately will lead to the complete de- legitimation of earthly tyranny and calls for a new project of global identity based on what alternative writers and activists imagined it to be.” 134 “Alternative writers and activists” or
“intellectuals” who are “computer literate” and urban-footed will reconstitute an identity of the
“good Serb”. Earthly tyranny, and one here is convinced this means the crimes and excesses of
Milosevic’s reign, would be “de-legitimated”; prestige and authority would be sullied and indicted via moral critique.
132 Ibid., 184. 133 Gramsci, 337. 134 Longinovic, Vampire Nation , 182.
209
Longinovic recognizes that substantive political organizing is precluded by this vision given that “the cyberspace inhabited by disappointingly sparse digital messaging seems to abrogate anything that might approach the realm of politics, probably due to anxieties about the return of the communist-turned-ethnic war machines that generated acts of homicidal violence.” 135 There is, he speculates, a sense that the hyper-politicization of the Milosevic years, its unremitting colonization of quotidian life, has reached its terminus. People are understandably exhausted by the jingoism, scapegoating, death and displacement. What they seek is the
“promise” of a type of “civil society” 136 that is “ironic”, frothy, “lighthearted” 137 , and squared by a “benevolent, post-Kafkaesque humor…that creates a culture of laughter”. 138 As a result, the alleged strength of the CY concept lies in its “posited variability” 139 since anyone can voluntarily become a part of this arena and assume whatever identity they wish; “a new form of identity whose boundaries should account for a maximum of fluidity and permeability among its ethnic groups.” 140 Understanding that people who enter into this digital space are not necessarily free of the cultural baggage they have accumulated over the years, Longinovic envisions it as “a valuable way to store testimonies of the victims and their loved ones” in order to ensure the persistence of memory. 141 Such “discursive practices” would “reflect their everyday anguish with the destructive, narrow-minded, and boring articulations of the national imaginary.” 142 This veritable parody of nation-building would also “act as a channel for interethnic reconciliation while addressing the issues of guilt and responsibility for those who have lost their beloved
135 Ibid., 185. 136 Ibid., 179. 137 Ibid., 177. 138 Ibid., 179. 139 Ibid., 182. 140 Ibid., 179. 141 Ibid., 185. 142 Ibid., 183.
210
country.” 143 Mind you, this is quite a political undertaking for a concept self-consciously styled as little more than a space for moral critique. He even goes so far as to see CY as a potential
“truth and reconciliation process that will operate as a supplement to the work of international justice tribunals.” 144 How this is to play itself out given the deeply partisan nature of the ICTY is left unaddressed. 145 Clearly, there is much in the concept of CY that shares an affinity with
Jurgen Habermas’ notion of communicative action, not the least of which are its limitations. 146
For Longinovic, freedom from the consumptive ideology of vampirism, as ethno- historicism and economics, does not entail a transformation of the socioeconomic structures that produce it in the first place. CY is a retreat from this type of political conflict. This is another way of saying that “emancipation is not possible in the realm of social labor” 147 . Vampire
Nation , in its displacement of all that is anti-civilizational onto a (sub)proletarian Other, conveniently amputates “anachronistic and immature” Serbia for a “de-historicized, ultra- cognitivist” utopia. 148 Longinovic’s “emancipatory politics”, if one can call it that, is a mere
“gesture towards a non-coercive public sphere where the best argument can prevail – a classically intellectualist construction.” 149
143 Ibid. 144 Ibid., 186. 145 For an exploration of the ICTY’s partisanship see Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away with Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage, and Crimes against Humanity (New York: Pluto Press, 2004). 146 There are numerous critiques of communicative action; I simply want to cite the manner in which Lynn M. Sanders complicates its fetishization of “deliberation”: “If we assume that deliberation cannot proceed without the realization of mutual respect, and deliberation appears to be proceeding, we may even mistakenly decide that conditions of mutual respect have been achieved by deliberators. In this way, taking deliberation as a signal of democratic practice paradoxically works undemocratically, discrediting on seemingly undemocratic grounds the views of those who are less likely to present their arguments in ways that we recognize as characteristically deliberative. In our political culture, these citizens are likely to be those who are already underrepresented in formal political institutions and who are systematically materially disadvantaged, namely women; racial minorities, especially Blacks; and poorer people.” See Lynn M. Sanders, “Against Deliberation,” Political Theory 25, no. 3 (1997), 349. 147 David McNally, Bodies of Meaning: Studies on Language, Labor, and Liberation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 109. 148 Ibid. 149 Ibid.,
211
Cyber Yugoslavia as Bourgeois Catharsis
Longinovic’s techno-cosmopolitan constituency is what is coded as “everyday life”, the “digital domain” being somehow predisposed to such quotidian practices. CY’s portability “recuperates culture as a possible unifier of citizens across ethnic lines and enables the realm of shared everyday practices to figure into this open form of Yugoslavism.” 150 For Longinovic, this “realm of shared everyday practices” can trace its roots to socialist Yugoslavia, practices that
“distinguished the region from the rest of divided Europe during the Cold War.” 151 Yet the practices he yearns for are not those of the alleged vampiric kind, namely, idolatry and folklore, nor do they include the anomalous and fledgling project of worker self-management, but “[r]ock culture and communications media” appropriated from the West and re-signified accordingly. In other words, he desires the tastes and aspirations of déclassé intellectuals. “The idea of [CY]” writes Longinovic “is a logical extension of this kind of youth culture that is compatible with the everyday living practices of urban populations”. 152 Internet technology, he states “extends the possibility of creating a new vision of ethnicity in the region.” 153
A new vision of ethnicity and not the transcendence of “a horizon beyond ethnic unity”.
(Sub)proletarian culture is excised rather than consumed, excluded from the techno-privilege of
CY. The communicative catharsis that CY portends is open to those who have the requisite leisure, wherewithal, and/or access to internet technology. According to Jasna Milosevic of
Strategic Marketing, “51 percent of Serbians have internet access at home, and…two thirds use it on a daily basis” while television is still the main source of information at 77 percent, “preferred
150 Longinovic, Vampire Nation , 184-185. 151 Ibid., 186. 152 Ibid., 184. 153 Ibid.
212
by those with lower formal education, living in rural areas.” 154 Dragan Stanojevic further substantiates the exclusionary nature of the CY template by illustrating the occupational and income divisions amongst internet users in Serbia. 155 Indeed, the Subject of the new ethnic propriety is housed, i.e. “private”, literate, urban, techno-optimistic if not tech-savvy, “ironic”,
“a-national”, and in tune with Euro-Atlantic cultural developments. Comfortable behind the pale glare of a laptop, the new ethnic Subject is psychically well-adjusted in its stable family life. In his attempt to retreat from the oppressive heft of “the serbs”, Longinovic ends up exalting the
“exclusionary practices and discourses” of this new conception. Far from distancing himself from the vampiric assemblage, his disciplinary obsession with the signifier simply flips it on its
Euro-friendly side; hailing as it does the call of European Union technocrats, IMF managers, and the chorus of bourgeois media the continent-over for civil society, neoliberal free zones, and the privatization of public assets. The inherent anti-authoritarian, individualistic, multicultural, and moralizing tone of this conception dovetails nicely with the post-Cold War liberal exceptionalism outlined earlier. Where the neoliberal project has shown a structural callousness for wage laborers, the poor, and the elderly, amongst others, a project no doubt vampiric in its consumption of their bodies, a parallel dismissal is evident in Vampire Nation with regards to
(sub)proletarians. The arguments in favor of CY as an ideal-type of challenge to the old politics work to control, alternate, and ultimately delete the truth of the (sub)proletarian Other. Reduced
154 “Survey Looks at Internet Usage in Serbia,” July 2, 2010, http://www.b92.net/eng/news/society.php?yyyy=2010&mm=07&dd=02&nav_id=68186 . By comparison, in 2013, 83.8 of US households reported computer ownership with 74.4 percent reporting internet use. See Thom File and Camille Ryan, “Computer and Internet Use in the United States: 2013,” American Community Survey Reports , US Census Bureau, November 2014, 3. 155 Amongst those surveyed, 68.2 per cent of farmers and 50.6 per cent of semi-skilled and unskilled workers “never” use the internet compared to only 9.3 per cent of clerks and 4.5 per cent of professionals. 48.1 per cent of professionals use the internet “1-3 hours a day” compared to only 14.9 per cent of semi-skilled and unskilled workers. 42.1 per cent of people in the lowest income bracket “never” use the internet compared to 5.8 per cent in the highest. See Dragan Stanojevic, “Media Use Among Young People in Serbia,” Sociologija LIV, no. 2 (2012), 379-380.
213
to sacrificial narratives of masculinist vampirism, (sub)proletarian practices are balkanized, distanced, and flipped into Serbian bourgeois civility, thereby sidestepping any potential criticism of their originary racialization.
In a welcome critique of Zizek and the relationship between psychoanalysis and the
Balkans, Longinovic challenges Zizek’s claim that “the deepest kernel of our personality is a fundamental, constitutive, primordial lie .” 156 “If collective identity is constituted by the primordial lie,” Longinovic explains “then the ethical concerns of those psychoanalytic theorists who believe in the validity of this theory need not conform to anything but this fundamental lie.” 157 “Therefore,” he continues “the lie has been responsible not only for the successful operation of the institution of psychoanalysis, but also for the global information management of the Yugoslav implosion”. 158 Ironically, Longinovic’s entire program in Vampire Nation is anchored to the “lie” of “the serbs”, upon which all his “ethical concerns” – trust, “a culture of responsibility”, voluntarism, the fluidity of identity – manifest themselves. The obsession with the signifier, with words, signs, and representations, has indeed been responsible for the operation of the institution of post-structuralism , and also the scholarly production of knowledge on the Balkans. “the serbs” is no less a rallying point for Longinovic despite his anti-nationalist pretensions; it is the only versatile form of collectivity through which he can envision a new era since class is muted in his analysis. Zizek’s stance on the ubiquity of the lie is thus illuminating in this respect:
‘Nation’, ‘Democracy’, ‘Socialism’ and other Causes stand for that ‘something’ about which we are never sure what, exactly, it is – the point is, rather, that by identifying with Nation we signal our acceptance of what others accept , with a Master-Signifier which serves as a rallying point for all the others. In other words, identification with such an empty Master-Signifier is, in its most basic dimension, identification with the very
156 Longinovic, Vampire Nation , 99. 157 Ibid. 158 Ibid.
214
gesture of identification . We can now see in what precise sense the status of the signifier as such is virtual: virtuality is the virtuality of the signified, that is, the signifier relies on a ‘meaning-to-come’ which, although it is never fully actualized, functions as if it is already effective. When the signifier ‘our Nation’ starts to function as a rallying point for a group of people, it effectively co-ordinates their activity, although each of them may have a different notion of what ‘our Nation’ means.159
Concepts such as “immaterial labor, assemblage, and borderlessness” are part and parcel of CY, but they end up purging a qualitative idea of “social collectivity”, replacing it with, to cite
Ebert, “interpersonal affective relationships.” 160 In fact, it is precisely “[t]he culture of capital” that “is regrounded in affective relations.” 161 “Although these relations are represented as ethics,” she writes “they are actually the logic of business relationships and deal making. Affective ethics is the basis of market networking, which embodies capital’s will to deregulation of the market.” 162 Truth, love, reconciliation, and laughter become the idealized modus operandi for the new Serbian civil society. At one point in Vampire Nation , Longinovic states that “class interest was gradually replaced by ethnic pride as the main category of identification within the post- communist political universe.” 163 One could argue that, in the wake of Milosevic’s ouster and subsequent death, the privatization of public assets in Serbia and throughout the region, high unemployment, and the increased inaccessibility of post-secondary education, the hegemony of a certain kind of ethnic pride has in fact persisted, and is now coupled with the vampirism of neoliberal middle class hegemony.
159 Slavoj Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters (London & New York: Verso, 1996), 142. 160 Teresa Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique , 53-54. 161 Ibid. 162 Ibid. 163 Longinovic, Vampire Nation , 88.
215
CHAPTER 6: THE LUGUBRIOUS GAME: MARKO ZIVKOVIC AND THE “SERBIAN IMAGINARIUM” Active social forces work exactly like natural forces: blindly, forcibly, destructively, so long as we do not understand, and reckon with them. But when once we understand them, when once we grasp their action, their direction, their effects, it depends only upon ourselves to subject them more and more to our own will, and by means of them to reach our own ends. And this holds quite especially of the mighty productive forces of today. As long as we obstinately refuse to understand the nature and the character of these social means of action — and this understanding goes against the grain of the capitalist mode of production and its defenders — so long these forces are at work in spite of us, in opposition to us, so long they master us …. But when once their nature is understood, they can, in the hands of the producers working together, be transformed from master demons into willing servants. -Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring (1877) Marko Zivkovic’s well-received and analytically innovative Serbian Dreambook: National
Imaginary in the Time of Milosevic (2011) undertakes a project similar to that of Tomislav
Longinovic in Vampire Nation: Violence as Cultural Imaginary (2011). Although coming out of different disciplines, anthropology and comparative literature respectively, their methodological approaches share some basic similarities and entail conclusions that, at least politically, parallel, if not reflect, the cultural logic of neoliberalism. An obsession with ideas arising from the nature of identity, and, more specifically, “Serbian” identity as a derivative of broader balkanist discourses, define their object(s) of ironic interrogation. Furthermore, they are preoccupied with the excavation of identity fragments embodied in speech, music, mythic folklore, journalism, film, literature, and scholarship (rather eclectic genre-hopping to be sure) and, more generally, the process of identity fragmentation. Zivkovic recursively circumvolutes a “glossary of commonplaces” thereby foregrounding the dizzying ironies therein. 1 His is a study of “Serbian” common sense during the Milosevic-era; an era defined by austere economic sanctions and its attendant inflationary crisis and chronic unemployment, the ravages of a government-sponsored ethnic conflict in Bosnia, the ensuing refugee crisis, and an amputated polity birthed in the blood
1 Marko Zivkovic, Serbian Dreambook: National Imaginary in the Time of Milosevic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 3.
216
and credit of structurally-adjusted war. This was a historically and geographically specific
“anomie” with unique pathologies ranging from precedent-setting gangsterism to the sentimental and lucrative porno-pop of turbo-folk music; from the “re-patriarchalization” of social life to the ubiquity of conspiracy theorizing and a marked increase in institutional and popular racism. Yet despite the novel specificity of this “anomie” it was nonetheless, in its contours, a discernible product of a tentacular neoliberal capitalism. Susan Woodward and Branka Magas, the latter in her more objectively observant pieces, have persuasively illustrated this connection. Zivkovic, however, chooses not concretize his ethnographies by abstracting a demonstrable international political economy. His “Serbian imaginarium” is a “manifest dream content” or “common sense” that, for all its heuristic potential, is actually projected onto Milosevic-era Serbia in a manner reminiscent of the “mentalities” approach to cultural history – with a balkanist spin no less.
Middle class “Serbia” serves as a stand in for the nation as a whole; its avatars proletarianized under European eyes while simultaneously erasing the existence of (sub)proletarian Others.
Zivkovic: Flaneur
Zivkovic considers himself a part of what was called “Second Serbia”; a flexible term that encompasses everyone in the anti-Milosevic opposition who adhered to a Euro-friendly civic cosmopolitanism. Of urbanite and professional pedigree – his grandmother was a student of
English literature in 1920s Prague before being murdered in a Croatian death camp while his grandfather was Prague-educated architect – Zivkovic was born into a Serbian-Jewish family in
Belgrade and completed a psychology degree along with obligatory military service in the mid-
1980s. After a flirtation with Japanese culture at the University of Chicago, he switched his focus to Serbia at the outbreak of the Bosnian conflict. The class fraction he is most familiar with by virtue of upbringing, milieu, and interests is the exiled and urban middle class and he does not
217
mince words when he considers “the idealization of Western democracy a much lesser evil than the idealization of the ethnic nation” even though he reserves “the right to be critical about both.” 2 At the height of the Bosnian war, his urbanite friends were appalled at the influx of
(sub)proletarian Others, “primitives” and their kitschy “turbo-folk”. This is a prejudice that lingers to this day and that Zivkovic explores in his text.
He starts by undertaking a survey of Belgrade space remarkable for its expository curtness. Imagine strolling through a spiritually parochial metropolis whose denizens, as defined by some, practice the ethics of a “town square” with all the convenience and chatter this evokes.
There exists a male-centered “tavern” ecology where public opinion is articulated and debated over Turkish coffee and cigarettes. Belgrade is a veritable carsija, an overgrown village that
Zivkovic reads as a communicative non-place: “not a place but a creature that is part communicative practice/network, part a state of mind.” 3 The manner in which he analogizes the city is telling. It is not represented as a tensional centre of alienation and class strife a la David
Simon’s Baltimore in The Wire , but as a dialogical field of “tavern philosophers” which includes
(mostly male) members from several occupations. Cabbies are referred to as “mobile carsija ” always eager to have cozy conversations with customers and anyone else in their general vicinity; citizen-chauffeurs with whom “[o]ne can engage in sociological analyses, friendly gossip, common lamentation, or political argument”.4 The “intellectualist” bent of this description, for all its alleged verity, speaks as much to Zivkovic’s ethical tastes as they do to the reality on the ground. At the very least, what he chooses to emphasize and how he does this is not unrelated to his professional disposition. This purportedly urban predisposition for dialogue is considered, in part, a mental state – a manner of being in the world – thus potentially making
2 Ibid., 10. 3 Ibid., 20-21. 4 Ibid., 21.
218
Belgrade a communicative template for any post-Milosevic notion of Serbianess. In this, his description of the mobile cabbies and the character-building pedagogy of kafana culture bear a striking resemblance to Longinovic’s remedy for Milosevic-era intolerance: Cyber Yugoslavia.
Where Zivkovic differs from him, however, is through episodic gestures towards the observable and documented inequality inherent in Serbian urban life. Whereas androcentric kafana culture ideally assumes the relative equality of interlocutors, Zivkovic pointedly asks: Who has the money to be in the kafane ?5 True of the Milosevic-era as it is now, it is a query lost on
Longinovic, who chooses not to recognize the depth of Serbia’s digital divide.
Fragments of class consciousness are stumbled upon through Zivkovic’s textured tour through 1990s Belgrade. Unfortunately, he does little more than pick them up and set them down. The ethnographic emphasis on “the bodily sensual” and “epistemologically empirical” – sensuous life, fashion, smell, and habit – is duly underscored, but what stands out are colourful anecdotes and sensationalistic asides that offer clues as to the state of the economy and class relations at the time. 6 Zivkovic sees “an icon of utter degradation and misery”, namely, “a shabbily dressed pensioner digging through a garbage container”, 7 calmly mentions how a passenger in one of Serbia’s dilapidated buses “fell through the rotting bus floor and was instantly killed”, 8 sketches the proliferation of large gaudy billboards and the stubborn constancy of shoeshine stands manned by Roma who “can offer highly urbane, cosmopolitan conversations while they shine your shoes.” 9 Kiosks, in some ways the equivalent of North American convenience stores, dot the streets where our author bought newspapers with a “500 billion dinar
5 Ibid., 21. 6 Ibid., 23. 7 Ibid., 29-30. 8 Ibid., 23. 9 Ibid., 35.
219
banknote”. 10 Ostentatious building projects, which included an unfinished subway, die as soon as they begin given “the utterly bewildering temporalities of one of the highest hyperinflations in recorded history.” 11 From his balcony in the city centre, Zivkovic hears gunshots from the street; the ripping soundtrack of an amoral criminal class and their busty “sponsored girls”. 12 Moreover, enterprising Roma ensure that there is no waste in crypto-capitalist Serbia, dutifully collecting paper products in their hand-pushed or motorized carts and selling them to a paper factory. 13
Also observed is a surfeit of twenty-four hour barbecue stands often opened by rural migrants or refugees – much to the chagrin of established urbanites. 14 Streets are renamed after long closeted royalty and other non-communist “heroes” while the motorized relic known as the Fica is tended to by a “Sunday mechanic”. 15
A hollowed out automotive industry, the return of reactionary and conservative iconography, itinerant yet creative labourers for whom a formal economy is a thing of the past, chronic crime, and seniors relegated to scavenging. These are the sensuous particulars of life in
Milosevic-era Serbia; the raw material for scholarly tomes such as Eric Gordy’s The Culture of
Power in Serbia (2006), films like Srdjan Dragojevic’s The Wounds (1998), and the novels of
Dragan Todorovic. 16 The empirical and somatic materiality of these lives are thus textually coded and consumed by literate Euro-Atlantic publics. In this culture industry, the crafty Roma, die-hard Mafioso, and bold migrants become problems of representation and, more often than not, stand-ins for a broader Balkan culture of comical ingenuity, violence, depravity, and irrationality. But they are more than that. They are also symptomatic of larger processes of
10 Ibid., 32. 11 Ibid., 35, 252. 12 Ibid., 30, 29. 13 Ibid., 28. 14 Ibid., 35. 15 Ibid., 33, 30. 16 See in particular Dragan Todorovic, The Book of Revenge: A Blues for Yugoslavia (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2007).
220
exploitation and exchange that make them susceptible to denigrative coding by privileged classes in metropolitan centres – inside or outside the region in question.
Zivkovic is not unaware of these processes of exploitation and exchange. He understands that the socio-political conjuncture the Milosevic-era inherits and whose protagonists shape is the product of “the grindstones of capitalist rhythms and … the changes in national narrative shapes.” 17 Common folk were, and still are, ground up and displaced or forced into new realms of necessity; a process that occurs at “precisely the time socialist elites discover … foreign loans.” 18 Generously citing the stellar work of anthropologist Katherine Verdery, Zivkovic states that “[t]his fateful interface with capitalism … was crucial for the fall of socialism. The gears of capitalism were speeding up, and when the ever slow gears of socialism engaged them, the result was a sort of asynchrony within socialism itself.” 19 A clash of temporal orders, so goes the argument, generated specific social pathologies the most salient of which was the alleged historicization, in the Gramscian sense, of an ethnonationalist narrative of victimhood. Zivkovic does not explore the larger processes identified by Verdery, at one point reducing them to the psychological category of “anomie”, but he inventively unpacks “changes in national narrative shapes.” 20 An exposition of Zivkovic’s methodology is in order.
Serbia as a Bourgeois Dreamworld
The titular “Serbian Dreambook” is an elite affair whose recuperation of nationalist topoi is claimed as the major cause of the infamous wars of dissolution. He states that “the immense mythopoetic cluster anchored in the Battle of Kosovo, with the incredible hold it exerts on the
17 Zivkovic, Serbian Dreambook , 253. 18 Ibid., 252. 19 Ibid., 20 Ibid., 253.
221
Serbian imaginary” implies that Serbs are a “people of the Kosovo Dreaming”. 21 “If I had to summarize in one sentence,” writes Zivkovic “I would say that it has all been about an exaggerated, larger-than-life, megalomaniacal story of Serbian innocent victimhood. It started in
Kosovo and ended in Kosovo – Kosovo as both a concrete place and a central imaginary topos of the Serbian ethnonationalist myth.” 22 At first glance, this continuity thesis seems to be a classic example of circular reasoning, i.e. the reason why a nationalist war happened is because the
Serbs are a nationalist people. But Zivkovic is careful to point out that “[t]his story should not be seen as a prime mover with a force of its own but rather as the main source of slogans for political rhetoric.” 23 He wants to grant this collective mnemonic framework its materiality without slipping into discourses of “social character” and “mentalite”.
That the narrative of Serbian innocent victimhood “was promoted by identifiable individuals” and “served mundane political agendas” is a well-supported if not commonplace assertion. 24 What is refreshing about Zivkovic’s take is his claim that such a narrative had a context-dependent rationality. In other words, it made sense for a specific group of intellectuals and politicians to deploy this story of innocent Serbian victimhood at a specific moment in time.
The convenient and dangerously productive practicality of this story “rested on real Serbian grievances and claims which, in the context of the unravelling common state, had been seen as legitimate as competing grievances and claims of other groups in Yugoslavia.” 25 Many people self-identified as “Serbs” actually experienced and/or remembered events that made them susceptible to this psychologically seductive and largely distorted account that, according to
Zivkovic, “helped the Serbian authorities legitimate the violence in Croatia, Bosnia, and, finally,
21 Ibid., 5. 22 Ibid., 250. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 249. 25 Ibid.
222
in Kosovo itself, at least to their own population.” 26 But how does one account for the documented reality of opposition to this allegedly Kosovo-anchored and induced narcissism?
Zivkovic recognizes that “[t]here has been, fortunately, no lack of voices in Serbia throughout this period” summoning Serbs to take responsibility for the crimes committed under the sign of the nation. 27 If this was the case, as it indubitably was, then how many people, social classes, and organizations were ensnared or interpellated by this ethnonationalist myth? Moreover, if this
Kosovo-anchored myth is nominally not an example of “social character” or “mentalite”, then how is it defined and, subsequently, how does it operate in quotidian life? Is there an observable multiaccentuality to this myth and, if so, cannot Kosovo-anchored themes of sacrifice and endurance – veritable Brechtian values – exist outside of ethnonationalist coordinates? Indeed, as
David Campbell has amply illustrated, history can be mined and used in the present for sanguine political purposes, but this Realpolitik , to be effective, must trigger something dormant or “sub- political” in a large group of people. One gets the feeling that Zivkovic’s claim about the exaggerated sense of victimhood and parallel callousness towards the suffering of others is sedimented prior to being stirred up by the requisite authorities. This places his argument closer to those social characterologists than initially thought.
Zivkovic’s project rests on the uniqueness of Milosevic-era Serbia as a “dreamworld.”
This was a universe where both the regime and opposition were “constantly staging megalomaniacal spectacles, rallies, conferences, and carnivalesque protests … in the midst of hyperinflation and international blockade”. 28 “The incongruity between frivolous entertainment and grim reality …” he writes “… produced a widespread feeling of living in a surreal world.” 29
26 Ibid., 249. 27 Ibid., 250. 28 Ibid., 11. 29 Ibid., 11.
223
This world of “magical realism”, as some have dubbed it, serves as a laboratory for his exploration of the Serbian “imaginarium” or “national dreamlife”. 30 “Imaginarium” is a concept he borrows from Ross Chambers which “refers to a repertory of items (or images) that define what, for a given individual or a collective subjectivity, it is possible to imagine.” 31 There are shades of Raymond Williams’ “structure of feeling” and Antonio Gramsci’s “common sense” in this term, but without their crucial emphasis on “social intention”; the Serbian “imaginarium” is more of an ether that subsists regardless of who occupies power. 32 Furthermore, it is read as a
“disembodied realm” and, in this, adheres to a non-identity akin to Longinovic’s “serbs”. 33
Serbian Dreambook is a study of representations, “stories Serbs tell themselves (and others) about themselves” but stories told from a particular nodality: that of Belgrade and its professional classes.
Zivkovic is a scion of these classes so it’s not surprising that he chooses to focus on their relationship to the “imaginarium”. Belgrade is privileged as “the Capital of the Serbian imaginary” built as it around the Kalemegdan Fortress or what Zivkovic appropriately calls “a hill for contemplation”. 34 Indeed, this metaphor speaks to Zivkovic’s epistemological positioning vis-à-vis his subjects; he is situated in a fortress beyond the view of those on the ground. He may or may not be there. “I often assume a voice from nowhere,” he states “an ironic superiority, that
I then try to undermine with further irony, and as a result my voice gets hard to put down.” 35
This slippery approach to social analysis sounds more than a little disingenuous and pretentious to boot. At best, it can reproduce the contradictory nature of common sense amongst a
30 Ibid., 3, 14. 31 Ibid., 3. 32 Ibid., 2. 33 Ibid., 14. 34 Ibid., 25. 35 Ibid., 10.
224
representative sample of social agents and hold it up to the reader as evidence of how complex things are – which is a victory in itself. Yet the performed opacity of the authorial voice cannot escape its own prejudices, tastes, and desires however it might want to hide behind the stories of others. Irony is what Zivkovic discovers “on the ground” and what makes up one of his analytical “tools”. But the ground he chooses to traverse is decidedly classed. The Serbia he navigates and episodically documents at the beginning of the text is, so to speak, left on the streets. Instead, his best sources “turned out to be not ‘private voices’ of ordinary citizens but a number of excellent social commentators who picked up things that were ‘in the air’ and encapsulated them in deft turns of phrase or poignant anecdotes.” 36 He goes on to explain that
[c]ommentators were as immersed in everyday life as anyone else in Serbia but, also, in their professional role, capable of detachment and the kind of reflection that is enabled by a more synoptic view of the situation. It is not that I believe that ordinary people are incapable of detachment and reflection. They are, but only under certain circumstances. Exigencies of everyday life make most people most of the time relatively tolerant of incongruities. On the other hand, those who have the leisure and the professional obligation to comment pounce on these incongruities, and if their genre is a weekly column of, say, a thousand words, then what more economic way of exposing them than sophisticated irony? 37 This belief contradicts the fact that intellectuals are often the most ideologically indoctrinated social group in modern society. Recent support for American military invasions by the likes of
Michael Ignatieff and the late Christopher Hitchens, the ignominous history of intellectual acquiescence to totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, and the moral collapse of the intellectual Left leading up to the First World War (amongst countless other examples) persuasively challenges the claim that a “professional role” with its leisured and reflexive detachment from “incongruities” somehow immunizes “commentators” from the psychological pull of ideology. Many historical “incongruities” have been passively tolerated, if not actively
36 Ibid., 12. 37 Ibid., 12.
225
promoted, by commentators, scholars, and artists. Far from pouncing on and “exposing” various inconsistencies via regular editorials, Ignatieff, Hitchens, Thomas Friedman, and Bernard Henri-
Levy duly serve the interests of power. The “synoptic view of the situation”, for all its relative autonomy, is still bound up with class interests. This is especially true given the acknowledged immersion of intellectuals, broadly conceived, in ordinary life; an immersion that is prior to any self-individuation. “In the political sphere,” writes Paul Ransome “each social group or class
(which is itself brought into being by the particular way in which economic practices are organised) generates a need for intellectuals who both represent the interests of that class and develop its ideational understanding of the world."38 One thus wonders why the variable of
“certain circumstances” does not also apply to leisured and detached commentators and, given the work of E.P. Thompson and James C. Scott, whether ordinary people in consistently oppressive conditions actually tolerate their situation in an “uncritical” manner. 39
Zivkovic’s split between “commentators” and “ordinary people” is simultaneously a classed and balkanist affair. Unpacking his methodology helps me substantiate this claim. For him, evaluating social inconsistencies requires one to be an “ironist” and a “dream interpreter” and, not unlike his informants, a kind of “awakene[r] of the dreaming collective.” 40 For
Zivkovic, ironies spur sociological thinking: “They appear when irresolvable incompatibilities demand to be held together. To social scientists, moreover, they offer an opportunity to show hidden contradictions or unintended consequences of social action and to thus legitimate themselves as revealers of ‘deeper realities’”. 41
38 Paul Ransome, Antonio Gramsci: A New Introduction (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 198. 39 See E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin Books, 1991); and James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 40 Zivkovic, Serbian Dreanbook , 14. 41 Ibid., 239.
226
Yet his proposed “psychology of exposure” is limited by the sly yet firm emphasis it places on identitarian issues. “I use irony” he explains “not only to voice the impossibility of finding my own place to stand but also as an indicator of the similar difficulties people in Serbia experienced in finding their own bearings.” 42 The cursory jaunt through the poverty and creative desperation of Serbian plebeian life early in the text is somehow clarified by a method that reads
“difficulties” as first and foremost a matter of identity (“finding my own place”, “bearings”) and not alloyed to economic dearth and despair. This might very well be true in some instances, but he clearly projects the exilic anxieties of a diaspora intellectual onto “people in Serbia” as a whole. 43
The extent to which the plebeian classes are a part of “people in Serbia” is somewhat ambiguous. The analytical focus is clearly on intellectuals, but in order to underscore their critical potency, these “commentators” are implicitly and, at times, explicitly, juxtaposed against an undifferentiated and reactive category of agents who are perceived to be distanced from mental forms of labour. A Nietzschean “pathos of distance” informs this subtle distinction which locks Zivkovic into classed and balkanist coordinates. “Commentators” are glossed as "the noble, the powerful, the superior, and the high-minded" and, by virtue of holding an influential amount of cultural capital, set the terms in which the "low, low-minded, and plebeian" are defined. 44 Moreover, these visible interlocutors are the ones who have the capacity to respond to
“stereotypes … imposed by more powerful outsiders” 45 Thus, with regards to his project,
[a]ttention is then mostly given to literate elites, partly because they rely on readily analyzable texts. It is they, moreover, who are supposedly aware of the stigma and most
42 Ibid., 14. 43 The very abstract and imprecise “people in Serbia” is used by Zivkovic throughout his text. See Zivkovic, Serbian Dreambook , 4, 8, 12, 95, 196, 246, and 249. 44 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals , trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 12. 45 Ibid., 55.
227
sensitive to it, who most often make it their business to respond in one way or another, and who, as members of the ‘cultural apparatus’, disseminate these responses to the public at large. The literate elites, then, are the logical place to look if one wants to find out the shared opinions on these matters in a given society. 46 Zivkovic studies elites because they produce tangible things, are self-conscious, and hold a balance of power; in short, they speak out and are heard. What is telling about the above passage is the assumption that these “shared opinions”, by the simple fact of being disseminated to a general public, are necessarily shared by the broader community. Their propagation has a unilateral bent to it. Complexities of reception and resistance are not registered as part of this rationale. If it can be established that some or many Roma, working class Serbs, sex workers, and the like were outside of or at least capable of reinterpreting the “dreambook” in ways that distance themselves from it, than the “dreambook” is a slender and genre-specific tome at best.
In attempting to map the structure or “morphology” of the Serbian imaginary, Zivkovic surveys the multiple situational performances of “self-display” and “self-recognition” in the public sphere and argues that the lettered and unlettered all engage in such performativity. 47 The narratives so recycled are a “comprehensive organization of tropes, idioms, characters, and plots” and thus “beholden to … textual or … verbal models”. 48 Yet if these narratives are beholden to speech and writing, and “commentators” are the ones most adept at expressing themselves in such forms, then the gaze of the dream-interpreter must look askance at the subaltern. But the aforementioned “pathos of distance” upon which this approach rests requires some working notion of “subalternity” against which to define its virtues. Absent are the practices of Milman Parry who, Zivkovic states without a hint of irony, “stayed away from
Serbian epic singers precisely because they were most literate and were reproducing the fixed
46 Ibid., 55-56. 47 Ibid., 55. 48 Ibid.
228
songs from Vuk Karadzic’s canonical collections verbatim, whereas [Parry] was interested in how illiterate bards rapidly compose in performance without the notion of a fixed text to be memorized.” 49 The narratives of the so-defined “dreambook” are “canonical” and spread by literate elites whereas my concern lies in the cavalier erasure of non-intellectuals and how they make sense of their plight within realms of necessity.
Mille from Cubura: “the serbs” Personified
This problem is unexplored by Zivkovic. The closest he gets to it is a discourse analysis of a hit
2003 Serbian television show called “Mille vs. Transition” where he surveys “internet forum discussion[s] of the series” in constructing a typology of responses to it. 50 For Zivkovic, the titular and fictional “Mille from Cubura” serves as an “avatar” of the transition years, a “most perfect informant” 51 , whom he tries to unpack “as a hieroglyph of post-Djindjic Serbia.” 52 Aired by the television station B92, an important oppositional voice during Milosevic’s reign, “Mille vs. Transition” was indirectly financed by the U.S. Agency for International Development
(USAID) and written as a series of quarter-hour episodes.
Zoran Cvijanovic, the actor who plays Mille, explains that “[o]ur aim was to combine all the worst traits of our mentality in Mille. We wanted people to recognize themselves in Mille’s traits and to warn them, in an entertaining way, not to give into those traits, not to lose control and become – Mille.” 53 The tone of Cvijanovic’s explanation is that of a public service announcement with a note of elitism. The “worst traits” of the Serbian “mentality” are understood to be plebeian, conservative, irrationally stubborn, and uncouth – best packaged as moral deterrent through minstrelsy (“in an entertaining way”). Serbs are to “control” their
49 Ibid., 92. 50 Ibid., 241. 51 Ibid., 238. 52 Ibid., 239. 53 Ibid., 240.
229
Balkanite impulses and let “transition” take its course, even if said “transition” fuels and exacerbates moral obstinacy and political conservatism.
The protagonist, Mille, is consciously styled as a composite of several Balkan male stereotypes. Short-tempered, cocky, comical, and (in his mind) crafty, he is at once a Yugo- nostalgic and a proud participant in the overthrow of Milosevic. Yet “transitional” Serbia and its
European pretensions get his goat. He is wary of foreign influences and refuses to learn other languages, stubbornly enjoys eating pork – especially roasted pig’s head – much to the chagrin of animal rights crusaders, and fears the intrusion of Western-style children’s birthday parties and their deluge of processed and/or ethnic foods like sushi:
Neo-colonialism arrives through a small door and children’s mouths. And there you have it, brother, “multiculturalism”. That’s that. This and their “ethnic food” …. They’re selling our kids health. What do kids know? Pack them something colourful and tell them it’s healthy …. Look at how they’re living. Look at what they’re eating. I gave them money for pljeskavice and mleveno and not for raw fish and noodles like they’re some cult!” 54
Mille, arguably one of the great folk characters in a tradition filled with them, does have attractive qualities as an informant. The episodes are very well-written, interpretively rich, and expose a number of “transitional” issues. His soft xenophobia is coupled with a naïve homophobia, thereby signifying Westernization as emasculation. In the episode “Strani Jezici”
(“Foreign Languages”), he rants: “I don’t want to learn a stranger’s [language]. That’s how it starts, bit by bit, “you need to do it and you have to do it”, and then overnight … I get my ear pierced, start playing tennis and become a faggot! ‘Gay’, pardon me. Is that not the case?” 55 His statements can also be quite poignant and astute as in the episode “Pirati” (“Pirating”) where he describes the affordability and convenience of pirated CD’s sold at Belgrade kiosks. These
54 All passages attributed to Mille are my translations of the original Serbian. The YouTube video for this reference is unavailable. 55 “Mile vs Tranzicija – Strani Jezici,” YouTube video, 7:48, posted by Sinisa Brocilovic, October 22, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWn1c4HbW_c .
230
informal consumer goods attract many Westerners, who view the city-stands as one large thrift shop – a redistributive effort akin to the practice of a great folk hero. Mille notes their pleasure and adds to it a sobering epilogue:
And they immediately start telling you how this is like Robin Hood, taking from the rich and giving to the poor. These were their heroes, Robin Hood and Jesse James. Except over here [in Serbia] they’d be shooting Robin Hood in the knees … he shouldn’t be giving to the poor, he should be taking from them. 56 This statement is followed by a scene where Mille is happily dancing to the metal rhythms of
“Body Count” by American rapper Ice-T’s band of the same name as the latter roars “Body
Count nigga!” 57 The significations map our protagonist in compelling ways and yet speak to a very real and, for actor Zoran Cvijanovic, personal experience. For all his parochialism, Mille consumes global culture via pirated recordings, is happy to see foreigners milling about in the city, and yet is aware that “original gangsters” are quite capable of multiplying body counts as they did by assassinating Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic – of whose party Cvijanovic was a member.
The race politics of “Mille vs. Transition” are subtle but powerful. “Multiculturalism” and Westernization are understood as processes of whitening and bourgeoisification . A domestic cuisine of barbecued and fried meat, often eaten with ones bare hands and in large portions, is considered anachronistic in an emergent era of tooth-picked sushi and utensil-dependent noodles.
Moreover, the ethnically trivialized “international” cuisine is “ethnic food” as the white middle class Euro-Atlantic sees it. Mille sees its consumption as cultish, an inexplicable veneration of something that the salt-stained and livestock-hungry Balkan palette finds without “soul”. This is
“multiculturalism” as commodity-fetishism. One not only consumes their whiteness, but through
56 “Mile vs Tranzicija-Pirati,” YouTube video, 9:31, posted by Mateja92, October 15, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kgbt0VG9U1c . 57 Ibid.
231
enacting the ceremony around the act of consumption is allegedly refined and purified and thus freed from the coarse and immoral. In his masterful Distinction: a Social Critique of the
Judgment of Taste (1984), Pierre Bourdieu, writing exclusively in a French context, discusses the differences between working class and bourgeois culinary habits and puts forth a procedure with which to explore such differences in non-French contexts. I am fully aware that an equivalent study of Serbian culinary habits in an era of EU integration requires a serious sociological and comparative interrogation of different social classes within and across different regions and not a glib transposition of Bourdieu’s conclusions onto a television avatar like Mille. But I do find that gesturing to Bourdieu allows us to flesh out the manner in which balkanism and classism intersect. For Mille, Serbian culinary habits are not so much “uncouth” as they are
“unpretentious”. “Plain speaking, plain eating: the working class meal is characterized by plenty
… and above all by freedom.” 58 There must be an “impression of abundance” with a table filled with “elastic” and “abundant” dishes such as pasulj (bean stew) which, in the Serbian context, is consumed with a kasiku (spoon) “to avoid too much measuring and counting”. 59 Table morality is loose and informal as “there will not be self-imposed controls, constraints and restrictions – especially not in eating, a primary need and a compensation – and especially not in the heart of domestic life, the one realm of freedom, when everywhere else, and at all other times, necessity prevails.” 60 Emblematic of this is Mille’s public indulgence of roasted pig’s head, fumbling with his fingers and cutlery until his hands are lubricated with grease and belching ever so casually in front of the camera while a female colleague is slouched over a chair snoring. 61 Conversely,
European or bourgeois culinary morality at least nominally places an emphasis on healthy small-
58 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 194. 59 Bourdieu, Distinction , 194. 60 Ibid., 195. 61 The YouTube video for this reference is unavailable.
232
portioned foods where eating is an expression of “order, restraint, and propriety”. What matters is the “sequence” and “presentation” of the food and “the etiquette governing posture and gesture”. In other words,
the very refinement of the things consumed, with quality more important than quantity – this whole commitment to stylization tends to shift the emphasis from substance and function to form and manner, and so to deny the crudely material reality of the act of eating and of the things consumed, or, which amounts to the same thing, the basely material vulgarity of those who indulge in the immediate satisfactions of food and drink. 62 In the episode “Rodjak iz Inostranstva” (“Relative from Abroad”), Mille’s relative, an
“expert” ( strucnjak ) arrives in Belgrade after a decade working in Luxembourg. Mille is keen to point out that this young man received a free education in Serbia and yet preferred to ply his trade elsewhere. Such a decision would not be seen as disrespectful by Mille if it were not for his relative’s terribly pretentious, haughty, and, in a word, insufferable attitude towards the debt- ridden country of his birth. He contemptuously scolds Mille for greeting him with a bag of pork rinds ( cvarci ) and especially for killing animals to partake in such a fatty indulgence. He complains about how dirty the Belgrade airport is, insults the lemon in which Mille gives him a ride, is unmoved by the Balkan brass on the car stereo, and condescendingly asks if there’s electricity. Mille engages in a cultural tête-à-tête with him, keeping score like a football match, and finally chases him out of the country in tears with a well-planned practical joke. Yet Mille pities him and what he has shunned and laments the hegemonic pull of bourgeois whiteness and its individualistic pomposities: “I feel bad for him. It’s not his fault. The kid grew up in a capitalist jungle …. Instead of burek , corn flakes; instead of Serbia, the white world. And that gets to you like a thief, and you have no choice but to oblige.” 63
62 Bourdieu, Distinction , 196. 63 “Burek” is a Balkan cheese pastry. The YouTube video for this reference is unavailable.
233
The white world . Serbia is clearly understood by Mille as outside of discourses of
“whiteness”. This self-designation – and one that is signified consistently as a matter of pride – is contrary to Maria Todorova’s conclusion that “the Balkans … are white” 64 and “still treated as positioned on this side of the fundamental opposition: white versus colored, Indo-European versus the rest.” 65 Mille, in participating in an informal economy, eating “soul food”, living in a dilapidated apartment that often leaks, unable to travel, popping Bensedin pills to control his anxieties, and wary of a public climate where anyone with something to say might get snuffed, is clearly aware of how he is racialized and classed by the European gaze. Yet what he still holds dear, however exaggerated the claim might be, is his stubborn Balkan masculinity. He does not eat dainty fish on a stick, wears a five o’clock shadow unlike his clean cut rodjak , drinks while driving, annoys his relative with an obnoxious rendering of “Igrale se Delije” (“Heroes Dance”)
– a famous World War II ode to defiant manhood – eats pig’s head proudly and with gusto, and associates the English language and animal rights activism with a refinement and effeminacy that is understood as “queer”. From this perspective, bourgeoisification is also a type of bourgeoi sissification . “Delije” in Serbian refers to a strapping, courageous, and “hard” young man. The opposite is easy to infer. Now one must keep in mind that, from Mille’s point of view,
Europe, whiteness, multiculturalism, and the bourgeois trappings of the “capitalist jungle” are synonymous with one another. They are “neo-colonial” forces primed and aimed at transforming his subjectivity. In fact, these forces and their Balkan minions start by eradicating the word inat , a vital aspect of Serbian self-designation. Zivkovic explains that inat “is supposed to be one of those ineffable essences of being a Serb, thus by definition untranslatable. We may bewail the foolishness of doing completely irrational, often self-destructive things “just in spite” (as inat
64 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans , 19. 65 Ibid., 188.
234
translates, actually quite well), but we also think of it as unfathomably noble and would like others to take it as such.” 66 Mille’s challenge to “transition” is grounded in precisely such tongue-wagging at the proverbial Crystal Palace that, with a tip of the hat to Fyodor Dostoevsky and Emir Kusturica, emerges, wickedly, from “underground”. He does not succumb to this
Europe-decreed linguistic erasure; he creates and popularizes a replacement word – kurcenje .
Loosely translated kurcenje means “cocky” but has a far more vulgar connotation in Serbian given its root in the genitalic kurac or “cock” and is thus more accurately defined as “cock- thrusting”. 67 Mille counters his perceived emasculation with an ever more exaggerated machismo. To follow through on his earlier association with a hip hop artist, he responds to this challenge by “going hard” – figuratively of course.
The irony in this is that Mille is now more exposed to the castrating bent of bourgeois-led
“neo-colonialism”. Discourses of bourgeoisissification, if I may now run with this neologism, are nothing new. I mean, a generous look at almost anything by George Orwell brings this point home, especially The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) if not a classic such as Animal Farm (1945).
Mille could easily get behind the homophobic “our civilization produces in increasing numbers two types, the gangster and the pansy,” 68 Orwell’s description of bourgeois progress as producing “an increase in human softeness” 69 and his uncompromising feminization of bourgeois
Leftists as “that dreary tribe of high-minded women…sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers.” 70 Mollie from Animal Farm is as vain, frivolous, and effeminate a representation of the petty bourgeoisie as one can find anywhere. “Sissy”, of course, refers to a timid, cowardly or effeminate person, commonly a male, with the latter adjective’s connection to “refined” also
66 Zivkovic, Serbian Dreambook , 147. 67 Ibid., 68 Arthur Eckstein, “Orwell, Masculinity, and Feminist Criticism,” The Intercollegiate Review 21, no. 1 (1985), 48. 69 George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Penguin Books, 1989), 181. 70 Ibid., 169.
235
signifying someone cultivated and polite, in a word, civilized . Interestingly, within BDSM communities, a “sissy” refers to a submissive cross-dressing male. Thus “transition” and
“transitioning” carry both an economic, racial, and gendered connotation in the moral economy of this popular television program. The homosexualized “racial death-wish” in Eldridge
Cleaver’s brutally honest yet reprehensible attack on James Baldwin also comes to mind in this context. 71
Zivkovic provides the reader with a template to think through what I call bourgeoisissification . He understands “how much of the crucial dynamics in the ex-Yugoslav societies – rule of law, viability of states, international recognition, and travails, if not tragedies, of transition – tended to be gauged by and, even more significant, mediated through gender idioms and practices.” 72 “All these post-Yugoslav states” he states “seem to share certain common ingredients such as an ethnonationalist re-traditionalizing rhetoric of return to some sort of idealized masculinity of bygone eras coupled with ‘economic emasculation.’” 73 Re- traditionalizing rhetoric is not to be seen as an eternally recurring aspect of a self-contained culture, but as a reflex of neoliberal transition by those who have power and privilege to defend.
For example, Mille feels the heft of so-called “civilizational superiority” as Euro-Atlantic “neo- colonialism” but “likes to imagine this civilizational superiority being compensated by the masculine deficiency of civilized males.” 74 To his credit, Zivkovic understands this sentiment as grounded in an “economic emasculation”. Structural adjustment and war has eroded if not, in some instances, eliminated the ability of men to support their families as labourers thus producing a “crisis of masculinity” where conservative forces call for “a return to ‘real manhood’
71 See Eldridge Cleaver, Soul On Ice (New York: Dell Publishing, 1992), 122-137. 72 Zivkovic, Serbian Dreambook , 111. 73 Ibid., 74 Ibid., 112.
236
and denounce all sides as sissies, fags, and other emasculated men.” 75 Mille signifies that even amongst representatives of “Second Serbia”, conservative fragments of “common sense” persist or are electrified given the demands of the politico-economic conjuncture.
But the template is faulty and overly simplistic. Zivkovic conflates the “international gaze” with those of domestic women. He suggests “that the Civilized Gaze may in certain situations assume the qualities of a Female Gaze” with the latter defined as “penetrating, stern, and demanding.” 76 Furthermore, he observes that “the civilized side tends to be seen as effeminate, feminist, and feminizing all at once. Its males emasculated, its women dangerously emancipated and in charge, its scrutiny aimed at gender inequalities and critical of patriarchal, masculinist values.” 77 This is to make any local manifestation of feminist or female empowerment a conspiratorial enterprise – orchestrated from without – which may very well be seen as such by some men (and women), but nonetheless trivializes feminism as just that; a feminism . Feminisms , a plurality of feminist responses to the re-patriarchalization of Serbian social life, are denied their legitimacy. In fact, making such a suggestion reproduces the gaze he attempts to unpack. The evidence he provides for his claim is the metaphor of a “disintegrating communal apartment building”:
Now this whole disintegrating communal apartment building is under close scrutiny. The powerful outsiders are conditioning their help in reassigning rooms and apartments, as well as refurbishing and redecorating the damaged ones, on certain proprieties being observed that often strike the dwellers as strange, demeaning, and well … emasculating. Women are becoming unruly, especially since men lost their jobs, but beating them up, for instance, is a grave sin in the eyes of the powerful outsiders. The whole building is falling apart and is full of gaping holes from the recent settling of accounts (as well as general negligence). It is thus made semi-transparent, so it is hard to keep your daughter from going to school, to abuse your wife unobserved, or to beat the gay person next door without reprimand. It seems that in those unstable times, with the building crumbling and
75 Ibid., 111-112. 76 Ibid., 113. 77 Ibid.,
237
with resentful, perhaps still vengeful, neighbours all around, that muscle-bound, real masculinity is more in demand than ever, and yet the pesky foreigners insist precisely on emasculating proprieties, as do their representatives in the building itself. 78 This is a terribly problematic metaphor for three reasons. Firstly, Serbian men are stereotyped as violent Dinaric highlanders, a trope that Zivkovic elsewhere is at pains to criticize. 79 It is assumed that these men are probably highly likely to act in a certain way given the existence and ubiquity of economic depravity; it is, of course, implied that structural disintegration, unemployment, and atomized neighbourhoods have economic causes (“unstable times”). But these economic causes trigger what is ostensibly always already there, namely, a propensity for domestic and extra-domestic violence. These men are little more than tautly coiled misogyny and homophobia just waiting to spring out; an essentialist reading akin to Catherine Mackinnon’s facile view of Serbian culture and the Milosevic regime’s racialization of Albanian “terrorism”.
This is not to say that such forms of oppression are not exacerbated in conditions of dire economic necessity, they often are, but they are also discernible in the national abodes of
“powerful outsiders” as well.
Secondly, as mentioned, domestic women are read as a fifth column; minions of the
“powerful outsiders”. This is the inverse of Mackinnon’s racist claim that all Serbian women are dependents of their categorically misogynist men; a claim dutifully and effectively critiqued by
Serbian and Croatian feminists. Moreover, the projects of “powerful outsiders” such as those of the prosecutorial Mackinnon and various NGOs are often at odds with the concerns of women on the ground. Some women participated in the wars of secession while others lost sons and daughters, husbands and fathers. Many lived in socio-economic circumstances where military propaganda was more active and insidious in interpellating the unemployed and economically
78 Ibid., 113-114. 79 See Zivkovic, Serbian Dreambook , 76-93.
238
insecure of both sexes and where pre-Tito memories of genocide were akin to family heirlooms.
(Sub)proletarian women were racialized and demonized with their men by local belligerents as well as “powerful outsiders”. In Feminist Theory: from Margin to Center (2000), bell hooks writes about how differences in race and class complicate what passes for feminism amongst the privileged. The “life experiences” of “many poor and working class women” “show them that they have more in common with the men of their race and/or class group than with bourgeois white women. They know the sufferings and hardships women face in their communities; they also know the sufferings and hardships men face, and they have had the experience of struggling with them for a better life.” 80 A metaphor linking the mission civilisatrice of “powerful outsiders” with local women fails given that “men do not share a common social status … patriarchy does not negate the existence of class and race privilege or exploitation … [and] that all men do not benefit equally from sexism.” 81
Thirdly, the “powerful outsiders” are equipped with a privileged gaze that allows them to closely scrutinize the disintegrating apartment complex. The “real” Serbia is “semi-transparent”, thus observed through “gaping holes”. It is, in short, unveiled; its barbed realism affirming the desires of the gaze. “Private” Serbia is violent, insecure, unruly, lawless (“without reprimand”), patriarchal (“keep your daughter from going to school”), and masculine. One is inclined to sympathize with the privileged gaze in part because it is propounded by a privileged gaze –
Zivkovic’s. Given the manner in which Serbian private life is framed, anyone who believes themselves to be of sound morality would be hard pressed to commiserate with or even comprehend the dwellers. The “powerful outsiders” play with the structures of sunken lives by
80 bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Cambridge: South End Press, 2000), 69, 70. 81 Ibid., 69.
239
“reassigning rooms and apartments” and “refurbishing and redecorating the damaged ones” on the condition that “certain proprieties” are “observed”.
Despite these criticisms, Zivkovic’s ironic interrogation of the Mille archetype is undoubtedly compelling as it outs and foregrounds a classism and racism amongst literate elites.
He observes several different elite responses to this national caricature. Firstly, the masses are disdainfully dismissed as taking things literally and identifying with their own stereotype; they do not get the public service announcement and there is a fear that they might emulate the minstrel. Secondly, the program is seen as lowbrow trash and thus decidedly un-European.
Thirdly, the broadcaster of the show, B92, is indicted as contemptuous of Mille’s everyman persona. Finally, “indeterminate irony” is deployed by some elites where Mille is intentionally over-identified with in order to puncture the snobbishness of those who claim the masses do not and cannot get the parody. As a litmus test for elite opinion, Zivkovic’s exercise serves its purpose, uncovering as it does a classed fear of “neochuburian zombies” 82 But we are dealing with little more than an anthropomorphized version of Longinovic’s “serbs”. If this avatar is nonetheless “a good figure to think with or ponder what it is that anthropologists expect from their informants”, then attempting to filter Serbia’s two-decade “social and political life” from it substitutes the “textually tropic” in place of a sustained engagement with those actually experiencing social suffering and existential disconnect. 83 In effect, the “dream interpreter”
82 Zivkovic, Serbian Dreambook , 243. 83 “Mille is (supposedly) an impossible combination of contradictory traits; he is an everyman , a conformist eclectic merrily combining wine and beer until he pukes. He is a photo-robot of the Homo Serbicus Vulgaris, whether you despise him or identify with him. Isn’t he then a kind of super informant? If some Boasians, in their more extreme moods, claimed that they could distill a whole culture out of a single informant, perhaps the whole of Serbia’s social and political life in the last twenty or so years could be distilled from Mille.” Zivkovic, Serbian Dreambook , 247.
240
begins and ends not with “real, active men” but “from men as narrated, thought of, imagined,
[and] conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh.”84
Mille magnetizes enough issues through enough popular idioms and tropes to encourage multi-accentual readings of him. Nonetheless, in this ironic pastiche, he exists to deny many material realities. His preoccupation with cultural imperialism as opposed to economic depravity is telling. He is an urbanite and not a seljac (peasant) from a selo (village). He is never seen hungry and can engage in modest amounts of conspicuous consumption. He does not suffer the racist persecution and “social cleansing” directed at Roma, the discrimination faced by Chinese immigrants to Serbia, the documented levels of domestic violence experienced by Serbian and non-Serbian women, the “punk-hunting” directed at LGBT people by football hooligans, nor is he an impoverished Krajina refugee living in hotels or tent cities or a worker facing the liquidation of her union. This is what explains his passive and impotent concern with food, music, and language and is a major reason why Zivkovic’s reliance on him is problematic.
A Balkanist Mode of Analysis
Ironically, Zivkovic’s mode of analysis mimics the practice of his “powerful outsiders”. His is a privileged gaze that surveys, accents, refreshes, restores, lifts, conveys, and recycles “tropes, idioms, characters, and plots … beholden to … textual or … verbal models”. 85 This is done according to certain methodological “proprieties” such as assuming, first and foremost, that texts are clinically passive. Texts exist to be refurbished and reassigned, juxtaposed in “quality space”, in order to see if their cumulative form, the so-called imaginarium, meets ones tastes. “Dreams” are thus proposed as the “epistemological machines for modelling all sorts of different worlds,
84 Karl Marx, “The German Ideology,” in The Marx-Engels Reader , ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 154-155. 85 Zivkovic, Serbian Dreambook , 6.
241
self-sealing paradigms, epistemes, or frames, as well as the traffic between them.” 86 In psychoanalytic circles, dreams require close scrutiny because they are “semi-transparent”, taking as they do “banal daily residues” and, through “condensation, displacement, and overdetermination”, exaggerating their appetites, violence, and anxieties – sometimes to a nightmarish extent. 87 Zivkovic claims that Milosevic’s Serbia, which the above metaphor is supposed to represent, exhibits “bizarre, outlandish, and strange ingredients of the national imaginary”:
There was an oneiric bizarreness to it all. The banal daily residues entered as a finite number of prefabricated elements as into the most fantastic combinations both in the discourses disseminated by the media and in the words of my informants. There was evidence of condensation, displacement, and overdetermination in this material. There was a sense of twilight states of consciousness. Above all, the natives themselves, as well as foreign observers, often resorted to explicit configuring of Serbian social reality as a species of dream experience – most often, and predictably, as a nightmare. In wrestling with all this material I experienced both interpretive delirium and its frustration. And that tension between delight in finding patterns in madness and my sense of ultimate failure to impose neatness and structure onto the Serbian imaginary finally recalled to me that I am in a position of a dream interpreter. 88
He grapples with this material via an exercise he calls “frame jumping”:
It is this frame jumping that I propose to the reader of this book as a fruitful exercise. The exercise would be try out a few different frameworks through which to see the material presented – as tropology that moves and persuades in a quality space, as a repository of dialogically entwined stories, as intertextually linked genres of speech, and, finally, as a sort of national dreamwork. 89
Let me unpack these passages in some detail. Again, to be fair, Zivkovic understands the role of economic depravity in creating the conditions for such marked societal opacity and general confusion. He is also keen to specify that these, if you will, cognitive pathologies are intrinsic to the nature of Milosevic’s regime. In other words, they are historically specific. However, the
86 Ibid., 8. My emphasis. 87 Ibid., 5. 88 Ibid., 89 Ibid., 8.
242
manner in which he interprets this historical specificity is similar to the balkanist journalism framing the region at the time. “Obfuscation” and “chaos” are the pillars of his critical balkanism. Although the tropes of “savagery” and “backwardness” are somewhat subdued if not persuasively dismissed, the former two ensure that they are never too far gone. Indeed, presupposing the opacity of the social is de rigueur in social theory and especially so in the
Marxist tradition. But there is fine line between deploying a framework of social unconsciousness onto a veritably ethnic signifier, and empirically deducing a “contradictory consciousness” from real biological individuals in circumstances not of their own choosing.
From its inception, the institution of psychoanalysis has had a problematic relationship with the Balkans. 90 Zivkovic does not acknowledge this history in his analysis, thereby allowing him to casually reproduce it. “Frame jumping” allows him to hide behind discourses of colonial anthropology, philosemitism or Serbian Judeophilia, nationalism, modern minstrelsy, and the conspiratorial, amongst others, in order to demonstrate their locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary force. But he chooses not to offer a total interpretation of this so-called manifest dream content, instead preferring to document a recursive spiral of ironies. In so doing, he legitimates the “obfuscation” and “chaos” as a nightmarish “dream experience”. 91 This is material one “wrestles” with; a series of “incommensurable worlds … multiply nested and looping back on themselves.” 92 It is, not unlike Dauphinee’s reading of Stojan Sokolovic, labyrinthine, defined by an “uninterpretable core”,93 whose navigation induces “interpretive delirium and its frustration”. 94 He derives pleasure from “finding patterns in madness ”, which is,
90 See Dusan Bjelic, Normalizing the Balkans: Geopolitics of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2011), 19-74. 91 Zivkovic, Serbian Dreambook , 5. 92 Ibid., 8. 93 Ibid., 94 Ibid., 5.
243
apparently, at least a formal quality of the Serbian imaginarium. 95 Tellingly, he states that
“[o]neiocritics … depend for their continued authority on the irreducible mysterious reminders”. 96 Matter-of-fact conclusions about the documented heterogeneity living under the sign “the serbs” are thus deduced from a pre-digested archetype and/or stereotype about said people. They are normalized as “incoherent” and, in this, partake in a common human condition
– they harbour a contradictory “common sense”.
Common Sense
Language embodies common sense, in speech and silence, thought and action. Common sense is referred to as an “incoherent set of generally held assumptions and beliefs” and is a product of history and the historical life-process. 97 Gramsci describes it as “a collective noun” with multiple incarnations and a basic mode of consciousness, one most embraced by the utility of mundane life. 98 As a result of its being alloyed to the practical activities and exigencies of physical and moral reproduction, common sense is often viewed as a coarser form of consciousness.
Described variously as “incoherent”, “episodic”, “fragmented”, and “lacking critical unity”, common sense occupies, if I may proffer the analogy, the doxic realm of opinion in the Platonic cave. As practical consciousness, or what Bourdieu dubs “practical reason”, common sense is largely contradictory; split along the lines of thought and conduct. 99
The critical transcendence of common sense is the work of philosophy. “Philosophy” writes Gramsci, “is criticism and the superseding of religion and ‘common sense’. In this sense, it corresponds with ‘good’ as opposed to ‘common’ sense.” 100 But is good sense always
95 Ibid., 96 Ibid., 7-8. 97 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks , ed. Quentin Hoare (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 323, fn. 1. 98 Ibid., 325. 99 See Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 100 Gramsci, 364.
244
necessarily the product of a progressive, i.e. critical transcendence? And is good sense “good” if it is “critically” fostered under terms not consciously apprehended and chosen as one’s own?
These are crucial questions for two reasons. If good sense can only be the product of a dialogical educative process, as Gramsci implies in his remarks on education, than this is a relatively truncated view of good sense as a pedagogy grounded in mutual recognition, mindful of power relationships and the autonomy of its participants. This would speak to a minority of human experiences throughout history. Conversely, if good sense refers to any ordering or transcendence of common sense, whether dialogical or monological, imposed as imperative or voluntarily sought, than its political and critical worth as a heuristic is nullified. This leaves everything that is not good sense so defined to remain as common sense and if, in the first instance, good sense is a minority position, vaguely radical in its aims, then common sense represents the wholesale “remnant” ordering of social life. Yet Gramsci balks at this very explicitly when he states that “[r]eligion and common sense cannot constitute an intellectual order, because they cannot be reduced to unity and coherence even within an individual consciousness, let alone collective consciousness.”101 The structure of this materially incoherent system of “beliefs, superstitions, opinions, and ways of seeing things and of acting” is in fact a non-structure. 102 What insinuates itself into the practices of empirical individuals is what works in conjunction with the dynamics of their reproduction. Reactionary or revolutionary coherence, order, even politics, needs to be consciously constructed. In that sense, common sense cannot be
“reduced to unity and coherence” “freely – for this may be done by ‘authoritarian’ means”. 103
These authoritarian means may include a nationalistic education, or even a state- sponsored education in general; flags, loyalty, histories of battles and founding fathers, civic
101 Ibid., 326. 102 Ibid., 323. 103 Ibid., 326.
245
duty, etc. These authoritarian means may also be part and parcel of a formal pedagogy, a scholastic methodology, or the product of gendered familial relationships. Regardless, common sense is remolded and transformed into working notions of good sense in all these fields; the good sense itself, in turn, is diffused throughout society with the real possibility of some of its shards being received by common sense. Kernels of good sense are perceptible within common sense as the tendency “to reflect and to realize fully that whatever happens is basically rational and must be confronted as such”. 104 It follows that philosophy, in its multiple incarnations, is predicated upon an “overcoming of bestial and elemental passions through a conception of necessity which gives conscious direction to one’s activity.” 105 This statement echoes Marx’s premises from The German Ideology , in that the drive for physical reproduction also presupposes a cultural alloy that justifies one’s labouring. It is precisely in the drive for sustenance, sex, and communication that instinctual animal movement is sublimated, if still present. This originary
“ordering”, if you will, is what provides a precedent of sorts for good sense. I am going to go a step further and argue that good sense, in whatever way conceived, heralds conscious participation in the political life of one’s empirical world. This is how the “man-in-the-mass” begins to distinguish itself in intellectual and moral terms. “A human mass” writes Gramsci,
“does not distinguish itself, does not become independent in its own right without, in the widest sense, organizing itself; and there is no organization without intellectuals…without the theoretical aspect of the theory-practice nexus being distinguished concretely by the existence of a group of people specialized in conceptual and philosophical elaboration of ideas.” 106
104 Ibid., 328. 105 Ibid. 106 Ibid., 334.
246
Zivkovic’s privileged “dream interpreters” are those attempting to elaborate concretely
“the theoretical aspect of the theory-practice nexus” 107 as “good sense”. But in this elaboration, a split between “mental” and “manual” labour is constructed in order to justify the clinical import of the former. Under the category “mental” are numerous descriptions, aspirations, desires, and traits that, in fact, transcribe the “dream interpreters”, including Zivkovic himself, as embodiments of a sly balkanism. For example, these “mental” labourers are described as leisured, ironic, “public”, sophisticated, professional and so crafty in their writerly athleticism and amateur anthropology that they can simply snatch insights hovering “in the air”. A discernible lack of rigour is celebrated, especially ironic since texts on the region have been plagued by cheap and under-researched journalistic works – which is precisely what Zivkovic privileges with the category “social commentators”. These commentators are detached, reflexive, and capable of “deft turns of phrase or poignant anecdotes” that can, in a mere thousand words, expose the “incongruities” of everyday life in Serbia. 108 As a result, they harbour a more synoptic view of the situation. Moreover, Zivkovic positions himself as a “meta-observer”, 109 “a voice from nowhere”, 110 despite his refusal of the more political (and pretentious) “awakener of the dreaming collective”. 111 The voice is, of course, from somewhere; a somewhere interchangeably defined as a “Second Serbia” that is civic, anti-nationalist, and pro-European and grounded in an “idealization of Western democracy” as a “lesser evil”.
On the other side of this split are those enthralled by the “ethnic nation”, the so-called
“dreaming collective”, a “bestiary of picturesque creatures that [populate] the Serbian imaginary”, often openly described or implied to be amateur, myopic, reactive, and complicit
107 Ibid. 108 Zivkovic, Serbian Dreambook , 12. 109 Ibid. 110 Ibid., 10. 111 Ibid., 14.
247
with the imagined community. 112 They are “private” ordinary citizens, the “little man” (always
“man”) caught in the cog of indifferent machinery. 113 Like Mille, their heads are cluttered with
“socialist and nationalist narratives layered on top of one another”; 114 they are the fragmented
“common sense” to the “dream interpreters” “good sense”. They have, so to speak, little critical agency. It is after all “good sense” that secretes a tendency “to reflect and to realize fully that whatever happens is basically rational and must be confronted as such.” 115 Mille, the tropic fill-in for plebeian Serbia, reacts stubbornly, emphatically, and creatively to European “neo- colonialism”. He is constantly ranting, sometimes incoherently, in the presence of his visibly fatigued and confused wife. One gets the sense that he lacks foresight and the ability to strategize a challenge to “neo-colonialism”. There is no disciplinary impetus to do so.
Ironically, Zivkovic feels that the disciplinary impetus towards coherence cheapens and distorts the contradictory, nay, ironic truth of popular speech and writing:
In fact, my research in Milosevic’s and post-Milosevic Serbia drove home to me that the ability to hold incompatible views is a normal human situation. It is only special training in, and sustained focus on, coherence that makes incoherence induce symptoms of motion sickness. In the end I suspected that most people, most of the time, are in fact rather like Mille. In politically extremely unsettled situations like the one in Serbia, and particularly in the acts of political self-positioning, our minds are perhaps like kaleidoscopes, filled not with regularly shaped colored glass but with irregularly shaped pieces of conspiracy theories, incompatible ideologies, and various other media junk, with the prism itself irregular and changing, so that the result is not beautiful configurations but different grotesqueries. These grotesqueries, however, in their very form, could also be seen as poetic statements on the incoherence, opacity, and grotesqueness of the social world or, alternatively, as its dreamlike functional autosymbols. 116
We must embrace the “junkyard” of our minds given that this is the “suspected” cognitive starting ground for “most people”. The topography of our ideologically saturated minds is surreal
112 Ibid., 12. 113 Ibid., 229. 114 Ibid., 189. 115 Gramsci, 328. 116 Zivkovic, Serbian Dreambook , 248.
248
if not surrealist. Indeed, the metaphor of junk or waste in an era of neoliberal transition provides a fruitful springboard for thinking about popular rationality. The popular, and it is clear Zivkovic implicates everyone under this category, is a composite of “grotesqueries” that are often, at least nominally, mutually exclusive. Yet people upholster these deformations, however patchy the covering might be, in order to make sense of “extremely unsettled situations”; to clarify and shield themselves from the violence inherent in realms of necessity. There is never any waste; everything might be useful given a context that triggers the appropriate utility. In this regard,
Zivkovic is correct to highlight the democratic potential of common sense and how its contradictory fragments offer clues as to how the opacity of social life, the inverted world of
Marx’s “camera obscura”, might be transcended or at least interpreted. 117 Yet his Serbian imaginarium, and, at this point, let us call it for what it is, common sense , is simultaneously a
“false consciousness” and a quotidian materiality; the episodic language of everyday life. There is a hefty realism or, as per above, surrealism to it. Andre Breton’s description of surrealism is illuminating in this regard insofar as it captures common sense as “thought in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” 118 Zivkovic, keen on his role as a “dream interpreter”, must understand these “grotesqueries” as “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express -- verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner -- the actual functioning of thought.”119
The Serbian imaginarium must be scoped and registered as manifest dream content or
“common sense” as it legitmates the authority of the oneiocritic. The rub is: there is no latent dream content . “Good sense” simply rationalizes “common sense” as essence . “[S]ocial
117 Marx, “The German Ideology”, 154. 118 Andre Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), 22: http://www.tcf.ua.edu/Classes/Jbutler/T340/SurManifesto/ManifestoOfSurrealism.pdf 119 Ibid.
249
unconsciousness” thus becomes a culturally invariant property of “Serbianess”. Ironically, it is the Serbian middle classes who are framed as culturally invariant and who then operate as a stand in for the entire nation, everyone considered. (Sub)proletarians are simply assumed to fall under the sign. Doubly ironic is that, via Mille, the Serbian middle classes are also proletarianized as a result of their ethnicity. This is a common balkanist conflation. If civility, whiteness, femininity, and cosmopolitanism are signified as “Europe”, its outsiders are the darker, uncouth, masculine, and parochial (sub)proletarians.
Recurring “Mentalities”
In his Varieties of Cultural History (1997), historian Peter Burke assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the “mentalities” approach to cultural history. By “mentalities” he refers to a
“stress on collective attitudes rather than individual ones” that includes the “thought” of common folk and literate professionals. 120 An emphasis on the “unspoken or unconscious” aspects of the quotidian and “a concern with the ‘structure’ of beliefs as well as their content” are part and parcel of this approach with “symbols”, “categories”, and “metaphors” the privileged objects of study. 121 Burke is keen to point out that some working notion of “mentality” is important lest one dismiss certain groups as irrational or give in to the cheap arrogance of “premature empathy”. 122
But he also presents four objections to this approach that also serve as objections to Zivkovic’s
“Serbian imaginarium”.
Firstly, there is the discernable problem of homogeneity; the danger that one might
“overestimate the degree of intellectual consensus in a given society” or “social class”. 123
Zivkovic does survey a generous variety of verbal and written material from “social
120 Peter Burke, Varieties of Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 162. 121 Ibid. 122 Ibid., 169. 123 Ibid., 170.
250
commentators” in print and media, but chooses to focus on controversial narratives (i.e. the
Serbian Golgotha) and not, for example, the quotidian concerns of Serbian students, non-Serbian commentators, and informants outside of “public” Serbia. Not only are the Serbian middle classes painted as perennially confused and incapable of political coherence, their alleged warts are assumed to be de rigueur for the nation as a whole. Secondly, Zivkovic cannot explain how exactly the “Serbian imaginarium” came to be as a Milosevic-era pathology nor why it persists after his ouster. In fact, it is consciously read as an ethereal and ahistorical phenomenon; a
“matrix” that serves and sustains whoever is in power. 124 The problem of change is never interrogated, thus making the “Serbian imaginarium” a synonym for “social character”. Thirdly,
Zivkovic treats “belief systems as autonomous” and is primarily “concerned with the relationship of beliefs to one another” – their recursive ironies, cross pollinations, self-cancelling propensities
– “to the exclusion of the relationship between beliefs and society.” 125 The beliefs are the innocent statements of “social commentators” and are not read as the “cunning … by which a particular view of the world is presented as natural.” 126 Finally, there is the obvious split between
“logical” and “pre-logical thought”, which I identify as a “pathos of distance” separating the rational “dream interpreter” from his irrational subjects. 127
In 1929, Salvador Dali painted his seminal “Lugubrious Game”, an unsettling collage signifying a disintegrating society and rife with sexual innuendo, homeless commodities, suggestive violence, narcissism, levitating body parts, and farcical idolatry – all floating clumsily in a “quality space”. Whatever its “latent-content” or interpreted truth, it also works as a metaphor for the “anarchy of production” inherent in capitalism and, of course, the sanguine
124 Zivkovic, Serbian Dreambook , 2. 125 Burke, 173. 126 Ibid., 127 Ibid., 174.
251
consequences of this mode of production. And much like the “anarchy of production”, the disjointed, episodic, and fragmented form of the “Serbian imaginarium” must be reinterpreted from those positions it excludes – the Krajina refugee, the Roma, the precarious unionist, the unemployed, etc. What Zivkovic implies is that this manifest-content is who “the serbs” in fact are; impenetrable, confused, fragmented, irrational, and prone to outbursts . As a result, repressed balkanist notions of “social character” return – as if in a dream.
252
CHAPTER 7: THE POLITICAL LIMITS OF DAVID CAMPBELL’S AGONISTIC ONTOLOGY OF TALES “You may proclaim, good sirs, your fine philosophy / But till you feed us, right and wrong can
wait!”
-Bertolt Brecht
The last half of the 1990s witnessed the publication of a number of important and transcendent critical texts on the Balkans. Spearheaded by Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans (1997), which sharply identified a racialized discourse never so thoroughly acknowledged and critiqued up to that point, these texts squarely foregrounded the deep epistemic violence committed on the
Balkans and its peoples. Vesna Goldsworthy’s Inventing Ruritania (1998) explored this epistemic violence in British popular fiction while David Norris’ underrated In the Wake of the
Balkan Myth (1999) analyzed the application of orientalist tropes projected onto and within
Serbia via readings of classic Serbian literature. An important addition to this late 20 th century flurry of critical balkanologies is David Campbell’s National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia (1998).
With mentorship from Derrida translator Peggy Kamuf, Campbell’s text is easily the most scholastically rigorous deconstructive intervention in critical balkanology. Well-versed in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, as well as New Criticism, his facility with these esoteric discourses and ability to make them intelligible in the course of his analysis is no mean feat. With regards to post-structuralist thought, he is a wonderfully generous reader, providing clear exegeses of major texts anchored by choice quotations. Yet his immersion in this tradition, and the immediate context of his writing on Bosnia, informs an ontological understanding of the conflict that is at once scholastic and idealist.
253
David Campbell
An important voice in the field of International Relations since the publication of his influential tome Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (1992),
Campbell has done much to extend the use of post-structuralist thought in this discipline. Prior to his academic career, he trained people for diplomatic service and, from 1981 to 1985, was
Principal Private Secretary to Senator D.L. Chipp, the leader of the Australian Democrats. As chief administrator and press secretary, he participated in two election campaigns for this centrist social-liberal party. A fusion of the Australia Party and The New Liberal Party, the Australian
Democrats endorsed a market economy, civil rights, and social welfare. Now some may balk at this somewhat detailed reconstruction of Campbell’s political roots, but I feel their general spirit is still an integral part of how he conceptualizes political progress. At the Democrats inaugural conference, Sir Mark Oliphant stated:
I was privileged to be in the chair at the public meeting in Melbourne when [Don Chipp] announced formation of a new party, dedicated to preserve what freedoms we still retain, and to increase them. A party in which dictatorship from the top was replaced by consensus. A party not ordered about by big business and the rich, or by union bosses. A party where a man could retain freedom of conscience and not thereby be faced with expulsion. A party to which the intelligent individual could belong without having to subscribe to a dogmatic creed. In other words, a democratic party. 128
This is in many ways a synopsis of Campbell’s political sensibility; classically liberal and cosmopolitan. Such liberalism is somewhat qualified through his engagement with post- structuralist theory, but never transcends its decidedly middle class ethos.
Campbell’s argument in National Deconstruction (1998) is a good example of what Teresa Ebert identifies as “getting class out of culture”. 129 Campbell avoids the discourse of class and consciously chooses to thematize only the identitarian aspects of the Bosnian war, a silence that
128 Darren Churchill, “Reclaim the Centre,” 2012 Australian Democrats National Conference, 28 th January 2012, 10, http://australian-democrats.org.au/downloads/speeches/churchill-reclaim-the-centre-120128.pdf . 129 See Teresa L. Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Class in Culture (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), 3-46.
254
is symptomatic of global changes in socio-economic structures and cultural production. What
Campbell understands by “human freedom” - captured in a rather nebulous and idealistic rendering of the term “democracy” - has nothing to do with “changing the existing social relations of production” and abolishing class exploitation. Production is understood in very narrow intellectualist terms as a “totalizing concept” not unlike Nietzsche’s “will to power”. The primary threat to “democracy” is “totalitarian” thinking and its remedy is the continuous unveiling of difference and heterogeneity. If anything links us to the Other in this ontology, it is not any sort of identity of interests centered on class, but the metaphysical solidarity of
“suffering, and hope”. 130 As Ebert states, “[c]lass, as the social structure of the divisions of labor and their contradictions, is dispersed by being rewritten as the flows of affect.” 131 This “quasi- religious” rewrite characterizes his work. 132
Campbell’s Ontology
Campbell, if we read between the lines, has a systematic account of existence. There are a set of entities presupposed by his deconstructive enterprise that, ironically, delimit and close off other possibilities. Let us piece together what he deems to be the nature of being. Getting a handle on
Campbell’s ontology allows us to better understand the nature of his proposed political recommendations for Bosnia, his conception of democracy more generally, and the limitations of both.
The world he assumes to be the case is a fluctuating, generally unstable, yet productively durable materiality where “we” as subjects “are always already ethically situated”; 133 ethically
130 Ebert and Zavarzadeh, Class in Culture , 78. 131 Ibid. 132 Ibid., 4-5. 133 David Campbell, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 176.
255
situated in a “complex interdependence of conditions and possibilities”. 134 This organic and complicated intersubjectivity ensures that “the very node of the subjective is knotted in ethics understood as responsibility.” 135 Given this almost umbilical relationship – umbilical in that it is not only a relationship of unavoidable dependence, but also a conduit through which power is transferred – ethics and responsibility emerge simultaneously with “subjection”. 136
“Responsibility understood as such” explains Campbell “refigures subjectivity because the very origin of the subject is to be found in its subjection to the Other”. 137 He goes on to state that ethics are not some additive to an a priori existential Self because said “subjection”, fundamentally, “precedes consciousness, identity, and freedom”. 138 In other words, the
“accusative hold” we have on an Other, and vice versa, simply happens – it is not a conscious choice but a “heteronomous” compulsion. 139 Thus, for Campbell, “there is no circumstance under which we could declare that it was not our concern.” 140
Put in such pointed terms, this is an unremittingly demanding responsibility, almost
Puritan in its expectations, and is enacted in an identitarian world of discursive violence and agonistic “play”. Campbell is preoccupied not with, as Marx would have it, “a materialistic connection of men with one another, which is determined by their needs and their mode of production”, 141 but with “performatively constituted” identities. He openly states “that our condition can be characterized by the problematic of identity/difference” and that identity “is an
134 Ibid., 20. 135 Ibid., 173. 136 Ibid., 174. 137 Ibid. 138 Ibid. 139 Ibid. 140 Ibid., 176. 141 Marx, “The German Ideology,” in The Marx-Engels Reader , ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 157.
256
inescapable prerequisite of being”. 142 Indeed, our condition is, in part, defined by this problematic – no one would dispute the premise that identity is an integral part of who we are as a species. Marx argues our mode of (re)producing the life-process “must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of individuals”. 143 Indeed, physical
(re)production does not occur outside of communicative enterprises, modes of co-operation, in short, some form of verbal and semiotic intercourse. Within this “cultural” welter is where roles are fixed and needs are articulated, challenged, and negotiated – including those of a primarily identitarian bent. “Production, distribution and consumption” writes E.P. Thompson “are not only digging, carrying, and eating, but are also planning, organising and enjoying. Imaginative and intellectual faculties are not confined to a “superstructure” and erected upon a “base” of things (including men-things); they are implicit in the creative act of labour which makes man man.” 144 Campbell is thus correct in stating that “[i]dentity should not be seen as an epiphenomenal product of a more substantive, material substructure”; it is deeply implicated with material needs and desires that are coded or materialized through language. In short, a fundamentally passive biology within a perceptibly inert physical environment nonetheless strives to transcend its natural limitations via productive activity; this productive activity, in definite conditions, expresses who we are. 145 As such, “[i]dentity functions within discourse” with discursive practices – from speech and writing to bodily gestures – working to stabilize, bound, and normalize identities. 146 Where Campbell’s reading of identities differs from a
142 Campbell, National Deconstruction , 25. 143 Marx, “The German Ideology”, 150. 144 E.P. Thompson, “Socialist Humanism: An Epistle to the Philistines,” (1957), https://www.marxists.org/archive/thompson-ep/1957/sochum.htm . 145 Here I am inspired by Sebastiano Timpanaro’s identification of “the ‘passive side’ of consciousness”. See Sebastiano Timpanaro, “Considerations on Materialism,” New Left Review l, no. 85 (1974), 6. 146 Campbell, National Deconstruction , 25.
257
historical materialist one is that, within the latter, identities are predominately normalized in the
(re)productive interests of a specific mode of production.
Consciousness, and by implication language, is from the start a “social product”. 147
Echoing Marx, if language is as old as consciousness, and consciousness a tangible extension of human labour – as physical and extra-physical (re)production – than the production of life in general is to be seen as a “double relationship”; as natural and social. 148 The social involves the co-operation of several people, regardless of the conditions, the manner of co-operation, and to what end. 149 Hence we are simultaneously looking at the manner in which individuals labour and exchange, or “industry” and “exchange”, and that both are conceived of as productive forces. 150
Part and parcel of these productive forces, especially in larger societies, is a division of labour; a division of labour truly “divided” only once mental and manual labour is separated and co- operation is defined along some form of property ownership that indubitably frees a fraction of the population to indulge in relatively autonomous ideological production. 151
My point is that Campbell’s ontology only recognizes the social aspect of this “double relationship” and, I might add, in a very limited and ideological manner. There is no recognition whatsoever of physical reproduction; bodies that labour, first and foremost, to sustain their livelihood within exploitative relations of production and consumption. To paraphrase Bertolt
Brecht, if food comes first, then morality, Campbell’s focus is purely on the second part of this conditional. As such, it is an idealist enterprise or, at best, a Feuerbachian materialism. I do not dispute that identities are products of a “‘reiterative and citational practice by which discourse
147 Marx, “The German Ideology”, 158. 148 Ibid., 157. 149 Ibid. 150 Ibid. 151 Ibid., 173.
258
produces the effects it names.’” 152 In any given mode of production, there are professional classes ensconced in relatively autonomous spaces that work to manufacture ideological conceptions of people, events, and things. In other words, those who help set durable yet disjointed terms of intercourse for the rest of society. Campbell is one of these professionals. But why are certain phenomena problematized at a given moment and not others? Furthermore, why are these phenomena framed by a unique vocabulary of concern? I’ll provide an example to illustrate my point.
Campbell states “many provocations” were “forced upon us by Bosnia” that stimulated and incited “concerns we need to find a way to address.” 153 These are prioritized as “[o]therness, representation, violence, complicity” and “responsibility”; “imperatives” to be tackled via a
“politically committed ethos of criticism” and “not an ungrounded faith in the testing of theory via evidence”. 154 The “us” and “we” in this instance refer to those international actors capable of not only interpreting, but also influencing events on the ground, and explain Campbell’s focus on diplomacy and diplomatic texts. Yet why are these provocations coded as “[o]therness, representation, violence, complicity” and “responsibility” and not, for example, class warfare, exploitation, atomization, poverty and a complicity and responsibility that goes beyond diplomacy and diplomatic texts and into the sphere of history and political economy? These are concerns denied in the midst of post-communist transition and these are concerns “we” need to find a way to address precisely through “the testing of theory via evidence” that works to inform a “politically committed ethos of criticism”. I do not understand the need to separate these according to “faith” and “ethos”. The separation speaks to Campbell’s political complicity in the ideology of the times.
152 Ibid., 24. 153 Ibid., 11. 154 Ibid.
259
This political complicity is rendered possible by his ontology. His is not an organic world of labouring bodies, class struggle, biological needs, ideological reproduction, and economic exploitation. Violence is not understood as the extraction of surplus labour or the physical, psychological and pedagogical disciplining of bodies for precisely this purpose by those who own the means of production. The kind of “violence” that is of utmost concern is “the violence of conceptual determination”; rational, systematic, and “totalitarian”. 155 This type of violence can only be privileged as urgent and in need of remedy in a world defined by “the narrativizing of reality” 156 where “violence” is read “as a form of political inscription and transcription … as a performance rather than a purely instrumental practice”. 157 Of course, surplus labour extraction is a means to an end, namely, the accumulation of capital. Moreover, although “violence” might not have a “psychogenetic cause” – thereby rescuing the term from racialist appropriations – it might very well, a la Franz Fanon, have a sociogenetic cause. 158 This presupposes the existence of an “extradiscursive” realm, something Campbell is not prepared to countenance. For him,
“nothing exists outside discourse” due to the “inescapability of narrativity”. 159 “We can no longer place faith” he declares “in the epistemological security of an extradiscursive domain, a narrative free and interpreterless zone of reference, to stabilize particular understandings via their correspondence to “facts”.” 160
Campbell does not deny that there exist entities materialized through discourse. In this regard, his use of Foucault’s concept of “problematization” is instructive. “Problematization” writes Foucault
155 Ibid., 218, 87, 172, 203-204. 156 Ibid., 34. 157 Ibid., 85-86. 158 See Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 11. 159 Campbell, National Deconstruction , 43. 160 Ibid.
260
doesn’t mean the representation of a pre-existent object, nor the creation through discourse of an object that doesn’t exist. It’s the set of discursive or non-discursive practices that makes something enter into the play of the true and false, and it constitutes it as an object for thought (whether under the form of moral reflection, scientific knowledge, political analysis, etc.). 161
So, according to this definition, “problematization” does not represent a pre-existing “Bosnia” nor does it discursively create it ex nihilo ; it compels it to partake in a dramatic performance of
“truth” in which “Bosnia” is produced as something we must think about. There are “non- linguistic” entities out there that are performatively and temporally centered, fixed, and hardened. Yet, quoting Laclau and Mouffe, “there is no way of bringing into being and comprehending non-linguistic phenomena except through discursive practices.” 162
These discursive practices exemplify a “will to power”; they work to produce a “vision and division” of the world that is justified by little more than force. 163 This is the logic of the act of interpretation as a rational practice; it is power that arbitrarily grounds the authority of reason and every interpretive act as if “to hold itself suspended above a most spectacular void.” 164 What we have here is a discursive prison system where “intelligibility” is a form of structural violence that incarcerates other interpretive possibilities.165 “The rationale for violence” Campbell explains “inheres even in the structures of intelligibility and response strategies that claim to contain it.” 166 Reason is a form of “calculative thinking” that attempts “to explain effects through their causes, rationally; it is also to ground, to justify, to account for on the basis of principles or roots.” 167 If, as Campbell and Derrida conclude, “principles or roots” 168 cannot ground
161 Michel Foucault, “The Concern for Truth,” in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984 , ed. Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 456-457. 162 Campbell, National Deconstruction , 25. 163 Pierre Bourdieu, “Social Space and Symbolic Power” in Sociological Theory 7, no. 1 (1989), 21. 164 Campbell, National Deconstruction , 29. 165 This is another way of saying that “intelligibility” itself – regardless of the content – is the incarcerating move. If it can’t be “intelligible”, it’s not “real” in any meaningfully social sense. 166 Ibid., 99. 167 Ibid., 29.
261
themselves, then we are left with nothing but the pure “violence of conceptual determination”. 169
Violence, so defined, attempts to deny, silence, or eradicate the very nature of our being as
“positive and multiple”. The aforementioned “spectacular void” over which the authority of reason attempts to stabilize itself is in fact an “ineradicable” and “heterogeneous” terrain of discernibly sensuous yet “contingent” “difference” or identities. 170 It is precisely this
“heterogeneous condition” that “problematizes” all attempts to firmly ground the authority of reason. 171 In keeping with the assumption that this is a narrativized world, that is, one created by discourse, heterogeneity refers to the agonistic theatrics of counternarratives . All narratives tend towards “closure” in a sensuously pluralistic realm of difference. 172 Yet this sensuously pluralistic realm remains continuously performative and interrogative in large part due to always already resistant counternarratives.
Counternarratives contain an ethical responsibility for the Other; they stall the logic of narrative closure and force us to confront, if not act upon, different ways of thinking about the world we inhabit. The ethical import of counternarratives only makes sense once we embrace our world as primarily discursive. An “agonistic ontology of tales” thus logically privileges “the
168 Ibid. 169 Ibid., 86. I understand that “principles and roots” are grounded via discursive performance that has to be re- performed in order to be intelligible across time and space. There is nothing objectionable about the possibility that material forces and conditions are discursively formed over time, and that intersubjective reproduction of these forces and conditions perpetuates them. These are valid material effects. What I find problematic is the rendering of this process as ethereal and thus absent social intention. “Principles and roots” are not simply upholstered incarnations of dispersed power, but also produced, challenged and sustained within a socio-economic mode of production geared towards maintaining exploitative relations for the continuous production of capital. 170 Ibid., 210. 171 Ibid., 218. 172 Granted, some narratives leave things open, or at least strive toward that as an ongoing process that precisely tries to resist closure. The workshop culture of Occupy Slovenia, which I explore in Chapter 6, is a good example in this regard. But the point here is on whose terms these narratives are “opened”. The history of liberalism is in many ways an elite discourse of difference granted within the terms of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Canadian multiculturalism is a more specific example of this general tendency. As Himani Bannerji states: “[D]iversity discourse portrays society as a horizontal space, in which there is no theoretical or analytical room for social relations of power and ruling, of socio-economic contradictions that construct and regulate Canadian political economy and its ideological culture.” Campbell portrays Bosnia in precisely this manner. See Himani Bannerji, The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Gender (Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s Press, 2000), 50.
262
symbolic character of violence and its identity politics.” 173 This requires Campbell to “recast the conflict in Bosnia as “an ethnography of surfaces – those sites, stages, and templates upon which history is constructed as a cultural object.” 174 Violence is most insidiously pronounced in narrative presentations of history and described as “symbolic”, “cultural”, “conceptual”,
“identitarian”, “interpretive”, “performative”, and “a form of political inscription and transcription”. 175 Furthermore, Campbell states that violence is best interrogated as a
“historiographic surface”, a “place for re-enactment, for the simulation of power and for making power manageable as a material force”. 176 “Simulation” and, to a lesser extent, “re-enactment”, are terms that capture the gist of Campbell’s critical project and also, upon closer examination, contain the seeds of its undoing. For all his insistence on the absence of an “extradiscursive domain” and the ubiquitous and unanchored “narrativizing of reality”, Campbell implies that there indeed exists an “outside”; a world beyond the tactile immediacy of life. A “simulation” is a “research or teaching technique that reproduces actual events and processes under test conditions.” 177 It is also defined as the “assumption of a false appearance”, something
“counterfeit” or “imitative” and, finally, an “operating procedure” or model that is capable of reproducing new rules of application. 178 In short, one can safely conclude that transcriptive violence and power is but a partial rendering of “actual events and processes”. For Campbell, moreover, there is no need to actually inquire into what these “actual events and processes” are due to a positivist bias against “ultimate causes or origins”. Indeed, there is a methodological
173 Ibid., 88. 174 Ibid., 85-86. 175 Ibid., 86. 176 Ibid., 85-86. 177 “Simulation,” Dictionary.com , http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/simulation?s=t . 178 Ibid.
263
preoccupation with “presence” or positive facts or phenomena; those things which are explicitly stated and/or expressed.
Echoing Ebert, I want to recognize and yet go beyond the anatomical textures of
“presence” as an object of inquiry. I am curious as to what these “actual events and processes” look like. In this regard, I am also interested in “silences” and their enclosures, but those
“silences” that require an act of abstraction in order to be rendered audible. The reflective
Sarajevan cab driver Campbell encounters as an example of counternarrativity, whose pre-teen son was killed in the conflict, is much more than merely a contemplative object of contemplation; he is also a labourer who works in order to survive. 179 The bereaved driver,
“whose name” Campbell ironically “sadly did not catch”, was regularly confused as to why outsiders would presuppose that, as a Muslim, he would necessarily despise all Serbs. 180 “I presume a Serb fired a shell that killed my son,” he surmises, “but I do not know which one. So why would I hate all Serbs? I live with them, I walk with them, I work with them, many are my friends.” 181 Another “face-to-face encounter” with Tuzla native Amira Muharemovic reveals her self-conscious and qualified appropriation of ethno-nationalist rhetoric. She refers to Serbs with the epithet “Chetniks” while understanding that “a distinction could be made between Serbs as a whole and those who waged war against Tuzla.” 182 This is the discoverable Bosnia of the non- nationalist or tenuously nationalist “participant-interpreters” 183 whose voices are misinterpreted or outright denied by the logic of “ontopological monoculturalism”. 184 But the ethical dialogue their questioning initiates rests on a trivialized rendering of who they are. They seem to be
179 Campbell, National Deconstruction , 2. 180 Ibid. 181 Ibid. 182 Ibid., 1. 183 Ibid., 41. 184 Dan Bulley, “Negotiating Ethics: Campbell, Ontopology and Hospitality,” Review of International Studies 32, no. 4 (2006), 658.
264
presented as no more than a means to a deconstructive end, “the single individual”, rather than an
“ensemble of social relations”. 185 Statements, positive facts, and the content of their speech are no doubt important. Furthermore, they are outside of an ethno-nationalist coup de force and, in that sense, located in a sensuous aporia. Campbell’s sensuous thinking summons into existence everything that has been securely established as a sensuous object of cognition. Thus, “not satisfied with abstract thinking,” he “wants contemplation; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity.” 186 What, then, is contemplated? Surfaces – that which is tangible, concrete, and immediate. This, Teresa Ebert argues, “is a rather new politico-epistemological project that provides concepts for the way in which capitalism is remaking the global economy in terms of traveling capital.” 187 Ebert describes this project as informed by a “flat-ist theory of culture (a spiritualism of surfaces)” and “is ostensibly a project for removing all strata of privilege by flat-ing practices, mapping them onto their exteriority and reinscribing them as assemblages free from ranks, levels, and stages, thereby producing new post-hierarchical objects and practices.” 188 Similarly, Campbell reads “Bosnia” as “metaBosnia”; a flat, diverse, and contested field of “practices through which Bosnia (indeed, competing
“Bosnias”) comes to be.” 189 The antipathy towards “total” understanding leaves little more than
“disconnected, non-explanatory and purely descriptive understandings of the surface as cutting- edge knowledge.” 190
For all the talk of displacing and unsettling “presence”, of seeing “presence” as
“violence”, of the need for epistemological ambiguity and a movement beyond “presence”, the
185 Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in The Marx-Engels Reader , ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 145. 186 Ibid., 144. 187 Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique , 52. 188 Ibid. 189 Campbell, National Deconstruction , x. 190 Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique , 56.
265
ultimate obsession of deconstructive thought is still, well, “presence” – it is “problematized” with the same technical urgency as Foucault’s “sexuality”. 191 The present, immediate, and
“concrete is valorized because it is said to be the dense materiality of culture as exemplified in language or in the body.” 192 And what kind of body is presupposed? Not the labouring body of the Marxist tradition, but the expansionist Nietzschean body . As Ebert explains “[t]he
Nietzschean body does not yield “truth or knowledge” but through the will to power drives toward “self-expansion, the movement of becoming” and increases “the body’s quantity and quality of forces and energies” that lead it toward “vigorous, free, joyful activity”. 193
To sum up, Campbell’s systematic account of existence posits: (a) a categorically heterogeneous and agonistic world of sensuous script and power-leveraged knowledge; (b) an expansionist and kinetic subject upon which and through such power and knowledge materialize themselves; and (c) the presumption that everything is mediated and constituted by discourse. I now turn to what this ontological grounding presupposes for politics, justice, and Bosnia.
Campbell’s Politics
Campbell’s political prescriptions are contradictory. On the one hand, there is a pointed and theoretically logical argument for non-violence. This argument coexists uneasily with a sly
Eurocentric desire for political intervention – defined in very open-ended terms. Similarly,
“justice” and its corollaries exist as empty signifiers that continuously hold out the “promise” or hope of something better, more inclusive, and perennially interrogative. “Justice, democracy, and emancipation” he writes “are not conditions to be achieved but ambitions to be strived for; they are promises the impossibility of which ensures their possibility; they are ideals that to remain
191 See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 77-114. 192 Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique , 24. 193 Ibid, 56.
266
practical must always be still to come.” 194 Politics retains its creative vigour when it refuses to identify its limits and/or take a taut position; it must be expansionist, ambitious, and, as such, affective . A proper political subject earnestly and ambitiously strives for “democracy” without ever seeing a concrete reward – or at least develops tentative and deconstructible positions in full knowledge of this uncertainty. Neither “justice”, nor “democracy”, nor “emancipation” are conditions to be materialized in the here and now, whatever their need and urgency; by this logic, every political project is transitional. And this, I think, is the subtext that must be teased out.
Such deconstructive politics are by definition precarious and, in their own way, a spin on Marx’s famous passage from the Communist Manifesto :
Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. 195
This passage can be read as a description of the logic and aim of the deconstructive method.
Deconstructive reading techniques are geared towards constantly revolutionizing discourse, continuously disturbing all essentialist narratives, and maintaining an “everlasting uncertainty” and “agitation” that allegedly holds open different epistemological opportunities. The allegedly
“fixed” or “fast-frozen” “presence” of “totalitarian” narratives, whether they are those of ethnic nationalism or Marxism, “with their train of venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away” and all new projects “become antiquated before they can ossify.” All narratives predicated on
“closure” are rendered empty and arid, sometimes justifiably “profaned”. The deconstructive approach claims to peel back all that is arbitrary to compel us “to face with sober senses” the
194 Campbell, National Deconstruction , 207. 195 Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx-Engels Reader , ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 476.
267
“real conditions of life”. Yet what is revealed is not reality, but the surface sensuousness of an unlimited Other; our alienated “relations with [our] kind.”
Theoretically, this has some virtues. It compels us to explore the tactile minutiae of everyday life, how identities are negotiated, the depth of the somatic wound other forces have left on us. But that is precisely the problem; the focus is on nothing more than the wound itself.
The reading technique is clinical, that is, concerned with the observable surface textures of bodies, scripts, and speech and their amoral unpacking as opposed to experimentation or theory.
There is no attempt to abstract from the sensuous concrete to larger causal forces – both structural and historical. As mentioned, there is a methodological preoccupation with “presence” or positive facts or phenomena; those things which are explicitly stated and/or expressed.
“Reconfiguring the body on the surface” writes Ebert “produces knowledge of the singular, which is the aim of the analytics of the flat. It moves the focus of cultural critique away from the collective and abstract to the concrete and individual and thus blocks any knowledge of social totality.” 196 This matters because such nose-to-the-ground deconstruction is incapable of evaluating its own ideological complicity. The sobering reality unmasked by these reading techniques is comprehended via an alienated “theoretical attitude”; 197 there is no recognition that agents secrete a “real, practical attitude” 198 to the historical conditions in which they are situated.
They are constructed by Campbell as bereft of an essential rationality. Moreover, if I may echo
E.P. Thompson, identity is not interpreted as a “historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in
196 Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique , 55. 197 Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”, 143. 198 Karl Marx, “Estranged Labour,” in The Marx-Engels Reader , ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 81.
268
consciousness.” 199 Instead, it is understood by Campbell as a “structure” or “category” that is always apprehended as “dead” in order to best de-anatomise its structure. 200 Campbell still reads the “totalitarian” narrative as akin to “the finest-meshed sociological net” that, in the case of
Bosnia, portends to give us a “pure specimen” of identity. 201 Campbell knows this “pure specimen” is an unmitigated denial of plurality, but he misrecognizes these monocultural identities as “things” as opposed to “relationships”. 202 Let me recast E.P. Thompson’s insights about class onto the problem of identity.
Pace Thompson, the experience of identity “is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born – or enter involuntarily.” 203 If, as per much discourse theory, identities “are based on the differences in legitimate power associated with certain positions”, then the question becomes one of “how the individual got to be in this “social role”, and how the particular social organization (with its property-rights and structure of authority) got to be there.” 204 These are “historical questions”. 205 Campbell does not respond to nor entertain these types of questions, but always already tackles “history from a given point”. 206 Thus, he never fully acknowledges identity as a historical relationship, thereby leaving little more than “a multitude of individuals with a multitude of experiences.” 207 What is absent in his reading is identity defined by people “as they live their own history”. 208 This recognition would force
Campbell out of his “theoretical attitude” and to a reappraisal of what a serious commitment to the marginalized might look like. As it stands, his politics consist of “reading micronarratives in
199 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class , 8. 200 Ibid. 201 Ibid. 202 Ibid., 10. 203 Ibid., 9. 204 Ibid., 10. 205 Ibid. 206 Ibid. 207 Ibid. 208 Ibid.
269
a manner that disturbs the spatial imaginaries of essentializing macronarratives” 209 in order to
“help effect a better interpretation.” 210 This is possible “[b]ecause there is thus buried within every naturalized rendering of political community the space for its dissimulation and transformation” 211 - and especially so if one is talking about the law and/or the state. “The potential for dissimulation …” writes Campbell “… is not necessarily negative. That the law or the state “is deconstructible is not bad news. We may even see in this a stroke of luck for politics, for all historical progress.”” 212
For Campbell, ethical responsibility means radical inclusivity; “the need for strategies of pluralization in the service of a radicalized ideal for multiculturalism”. 213 With regards to the
“logic of nationalism and the nation-state” 214 that sets the terms of understanding and intervention for Bosnia, “the purpose of constructing counternarratives is to offer up those dimensions of the historical and political field marginalized by ontopological narratives that contest and disturb the certainties of the “civil/ethnic/nationalist” accounts.” 215 “[T]he international community, the media, and the academy” failed “to heed the plurality of political positions and the nonnationalist voices that contested the identity politics of those prosecuting the war”. 216 This is how “responsibility to the other was not enacted.” 217 If anything, deconstruction offers “hope” by way of “a reinterpretation of the whole apparatus of boundaries within which a history and a culture have been able to confine their criteriology.” 218 Indeed, deconstructive politics is by and large a matter of producing “a better interpretation” or a
209 Campbell, National Deconstruction , 234. 210 Ibid., 87. 211 Ibid., 44. 212 Ibid., 30. 213 Ibid., 219. 214 Ibid., 218. 215 Ibid., 87. 216 Ibid., 81. 217 Ibid. 218 Ibid., 30.
270
“reinterpretation” of scholastic limits. The philosophical side of this politics is easy to discern, based as it is on “a radical questioning of limits and the identification of the ethos of the
Enlightenment as democratic”. 219 For Campbell, uncovering and iterating “alternative assumptions could have enabled different policies with potentially more progressive outcomes.” 220 Clearly, the onus is on elite actors and institutions to make positive changes and
Campbell’s role is akin to that of a policy advisor, i.e. he offers prescriptions on how these elites can make things better. Thus his distinction between the “micronarratives” of “participant- interpreters” and the “macronarratives” of “observer-interpreters” leaves no doubt as to the intrinsic conservatism of his project. 221 Yes, there is a populist spirit that animates his work insofar as the “ethos of criticism” is an integral aspect of human nature (“an ongoing ever present disposition”) 222 even if some (i.e. “observer-interpreters”) are more conscious of its efficacy and deployment than others. This is where Amira, the cab driver and the ethnographic evidence produced by Tone Bringa come into play.
Campbell uses Bringa extensively to illustrate how the millet system rendered Bosnia a
“deterritorialized” space where identities were regularly and productively negotiated:
To most Bosnians (and particularly to the post-World War II generations) difference in ethnoreligious affiliation was one of the many differences between people, like the differences between men and women, villager and city dweller. It was acknowledged and often joked about but it never precluded friendship. Indeed, for these Bosnians being Bosnian (bosanac) meant growing up in a multicultural and multireligious environment, an environment where cultural pluralism was intrinsic to the social order. Dealing with cultural difference was part of people's most immediate experience of social life outside the confines of their home, and it was therefore an essential part of their identity. In the village mutual acknowledgement of cultural diversity and coexistence was an intrinsic quality of life and people's everyday experience, and therefore an important element in the process of individual identity formation. 223
219 Ibid., 201. 220 Ibid., 227. 221 Ibid., 41, 43. 222 Ibid., 12. 223 Ibid., 212.
271
Campbell reads Bringa’s Bosnia as an example of “radicalized multiculturalism” and amenable to “an articulation of identity that embodies many of the onto-political assumptions of deconstructive thought.” 224 It is this Bosnia whose differance must be excavated and upheld contra “ontopological monoculturalism”. In the context of the Bosnian war, this meant the discovery, production, and distribution of “subjugated knowledges … so as to demonstrate the manifestly political nature of ontopological accounts, and the exclusions they depend on”. 225 In other words, a marked emphasis on “independent media” such as the 1995 “Sarajevo-Live,
Sarajevo On-Line” event, initiatives like the “Helsinki Citizen’s Assembly”, and generous funding for The Hague tribunal. 226 These types of events and organizations are seen as embodying “the ethos of the Enlightenment” by virtue of their alleged opposition to the theory and practice of ethno-nationalism. These events and organizations are Campbell’s proxies. But if democracy is an “empty place of power”, 227 “the political form enabled by and responding to the markers of certainty”, 228 then how do we evaluate the content and quality of competing “political forces and actors capable of taking the place of each other in power”? 229 Must every project be rendered “contingent”? Are there not some that are more inclusive than others? Does a pro- business party that represents one percent of the population stand on the same footing as one that speaks for a generous and diversified majority?
There is a deep liberalism embodied in Campbell’s approach that runs against his critiques of the liberal tradition and its preoccupation with “tolerance”. For him, one should not
224 Ibid., 217-218. 225 Ibid., 234. 226 Ibid., 232-234. 227 Ibid., 241. 228 Ibid., 201. 229 Ibid.
272
fetishize “a particular process or set of procedures” but engage in “insistent questioning”. 230
Contrary to those who might view this strategy as depoliticizing in its prescriptive hesitancy,
Campbell maintains that this approach is “not devoid of content, nor … shy of political preferences”. 231 Yet having a political preference, i.e. choosing one position over another, is, according to his logic, a form of representational violence or “closure”. This, for him, is not sound politics nor is it possible. Thus he reframes his deconstructive preferences as “more enabling than prescriptive”. 232 “To enable” means to give power, to authorize, to make possible or easy while “prescriptive” refers to making or giving rules, directions or commands. 233 This is the difference between outlining flexible conditions of possibility where “antagonism, conflict, plurality, and multiplicity” are nurtured and nourished and a programme that thrives on injunctions or a tentative stay on such conflict. 234
Rhetorically, such pluralism sounds inviting, but let us now read it as a political economy of sorts. Doing so might reveal more about what this “preference” means in the material world than Campbell would be inclined to admit. Defined as “enabling”, deconstructive preferences are given a deregulative gloss; “totalitarian” rules and directives must be unpacked, disassembled, and wilfully prevented from fully reconstituting themselves. “Democracy” is an always unfulfilled “promise” where “complete and final security is neither possible nor desirable” 235 but where antagonism and conflict must nonetheless not develop “at the expense of security or identity but in terms of security’s and identity’s contamination by and indebtedness to its
230 Ibid., 203-204. 231 Ibid., 204. 232 Ibid. 233 “Enable,” Dictionary.com, http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/enable?s=t; “Prescriptive, Dictionary.com, http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/prescriptive?s=t . 234 Campbell, National Deconstruction , 205. 235 Ibid., 202.
273
other(s).” 236 Whose “security” and “identity” is at stake here? This “empty place of power” is a terribly precarious space where “all that is solid melts into air” and “that what others see as contradictions comprising obstacles to a just politics are the “contradictions” – better understood as agonistic interdependencies – necessary for a politics, and as such they have to be contested and negotiated rather than transcended or escaped.”237 This space is riddled with “contradictions” renamed “agonistic interdependences” and thus emptied of any economic and meaningful political signification. If we read these “contradictions” as economic contradictions in the
Marxist sense, the political implications of this approach is clear. The economic contradictions associated with IMF-sponsored structural adjustment and the class war initiated by freshly elected ruling parties are to be “contested and negotiated rather than transcended or escaped”. In other words, such “contradictions” are dutifully “enabled” as a matter of course but tempered through what is known as “social dialogue”; what the European Commission (EC) defines as
“discussions, consultations, negotiations and joint actions involving organisations representing the two sides of industry (employers and workers).”238 The deregulation of socialist enterprises and industries is legally justified through this consensus-building process of social corporatism; any ensuing social turbulence is merely to be curbed as such. Actually enacting laws that might substantively regulate and tame the excesses of socio-economic transition and perhaps foster a
236 Ibid., 219. 237 Ibid., 241. 238 “Social Dialogue,” European Comission: Employment, Social Affairs & Inclusion, http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=329&langId=en . Richard Hyman states that social dialogue “imposes a difficult, perhaps utopian model of dialogue; if it implies that conflicts of interests can simply be dissolved through discussion, then it is misleading and may encourage an over-optimistic approach to institutionalized relations between the different social actors. In my view, effective social dialogue entails a bias towards compromise which does not however dissolve fundamental differences of interests and objectives. To employ a distinction proposed by Therborn (1993), it typically represents not the ‘institutionalisation of consensus’ but the ‘institutionalisation of conflict’.” See Richard Hyman, Social Dialogue and Industrial Relations during the Economic Crisis: Innovative Practices or Business as Usual? Working Paper No. 11 (Geneva: International Labour Organization, March 2010), 11.
274
durable social security that is both “possible” and “desirable” is, according to this logic,
“violent”.
For Campbell, “democracy” “seeks to secure … the conditions of a just transition”. 239
Again, if we focus on the term “transition”, and read it as socio-economic transition, the
“unconscious” of his rhetoric begins to speak the language of a neoliberal ethos and not a
“democratic” one per se . Let us say we understand democracy as mass participation, wealth redistribution, gender and racial equality, social welfare, high levels of employment, and other aspects loosely termed “social democratic”. Campbell’s logic would require us to read these noble and ostensibly just human aspirations as “neither possible nor desirable”, even “necessarily impossible”, and “not something that can be fully realized … certainly not fully and successfully institutionalized.” 240 Why? Granted, a deconstructive ethos categorically declares this impossibility and not just in relation to our hypothetical democracy. But such a declaration, even if registered as little more than negative critique, cannot be presented as a neutral position which, for Campbell, it is. What does the deconstructive ethos legitimate? Hospitality, hope, unrealized promises and an ethos that embodies “temporality, oscillation … disturbance, denaturalization – the “ad infinitum of nomadic movements””. 241 This is an uncanny description of the refugee experience as well as precarious, surplus, and migrant labour – both national and transnational.
Being torn from ones community via war, poverty, or what not and rendered “nomadic” in a world of scarcity simply in order to ensure ones physical reproduction is a “denaturalization” not worth turning into a virtue. I am well aware that Campbell’s focus is the insulated and exclusive
“truth” of “ontopological monoculturalism”. But when one stretches what is virtuous and democratic language from this idealist sphere into the realm of political economy, its pretensions
239 Campbell, National Deconstruction , 202. 240 Ibid. 241 Ibid., 202.
275
to interrogative neutrality are vitiated. These deconstructive procedures or “alternative praxis” hide a problematic politics. 242 Even looking at these procedures in purely identitarian terms leaves one with a narrow, if not conservative, politics that cannot acknowledge the importance of monocultural or ethno-nationalist strategies in the name of social justice . For example, Campbell states that “we should call for the cultivation of an ethos of democracy that, paradoxically, necessitates the encouragement of one form of conflict (that which contests, disturbs, and denaturalizes exclusive forms of identity) while resisting the form of conflict that effaces, suppresses, and seeks to erase plural and hybrid identities.” 243 If such an approach is sanctioned by government elites as “policy and tactics”, 244 as he seems to imply, what does this mean for historically and ethnically marginalized peoples who choose to organize along so-called
“monocultural” lines as a matter of self-preservation? I have in mind First Nations, Palestinians,
Black Nationalists, Roma organizations, and the like. “Denaturalizing” such strategic if not justifiably durable identities can easily become code for a “civilizing” process with the expected racist connotations. In this sense, plurality and hybridity might be a euphemism for cultural assimilation into, perhaps, a more white-identified or white-supremacist orbit. Here I have in mind Mayor Dragan Djilas’ cosmopolitan aspirations documented in Kilibarda (2011) where the need to rebrand Serbia as a European and “auto-exotic” middle class host coexists with a racist social policy war on Belgrade Roma justified by “culture of poverty” theses such as the one put forward by Sabic, et al (2013) and the need for social hygiene. The violently integrative residential school system in Canada, where indigenous children were stolen from their families and culturally lobotomized through Christian proselytizing and an underfunded practical education, shares a similar logic if different consequences. Indeed, the notorious “Sixties Scoop”
242 Ibid., 209. 243 Ibid., 242. 244 Ibid., 218.
276
in 1960s Canada, where indigenous children were apprehended by social services and sent to residential schools or white middle class families, occurred in the midst of Liberal Prime
Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s citizen-centred “just society”. Plurality and hybridity is what defines the contemporary bourgeois subject against an evaluative backdrop of white supremacy. 245
Of course, this subject needs an appropriate context for it to make sense. This context is idealized as “Bosnia”; a signifier “that embodies many of the onto-political assumptions of deconstructive thought.” This is a veritable “community without essence”, “a context of radical interdependence”, and an “identity” that works “in terms of the care for the complex relationship of identity/difference many want to advocate.” 246 The “many” in this regard refer to privileged elites in diplomacy, media, and academia. Tellingly, his deconstructive project “requires thinking through a set of radically different onto-political assumptions about subjectivity, laying the groundwork for which requires a detailed excursus into the realm of continental philosophy.” 247
On the one hand, Campbell promotes an ineradicable Socratic populism as a bulwark against
“totalitarian” assumptions while, on the other hand, presumes specialized academic training to be necessary for any dismantling of said assumptions. If we couple this with his belief in the ocular reach of “observer-interpreters”, then the social source of his democratic project is quite narrow.
He is not interested in the essential rationality or the intersectional textures of the nameless cabbie and others like him, but “the long established and widely held traditions of political
245 See “The Residential School System,” Indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca , http://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/home/government-policy/the-residential-school-system.html . There is an economic hybridity or “flexibility” that defines neoliberal austerity and precarity. But this is alloyed to dispossession and wage-labour and a dull reproduction of the commodity form in and through this hybridity and ostensible plurality. There is a similar process at work with regards to citizenship. "Multiculturalism” operates as an ideology against evaluative criteria bound to a white, male, bourgeois subject considered, and reproduced as, the appropriate political type. 246 Campbell, National Deconstruction , 217-218. 247 Ibid., 170.
277
thought and international practice about community and identity” and contends that critique
“requires a sustained argument about the way we apprehend ethics, identity, and politics.” 248
Sustained arguments, logically sound and meticulously researched, are constantly made, but outside of organizational politics, often have little clout. Gramsci realized this through his concepts of “counter-hegemonic bloc” and “historicization” and Campbell seems to understand that for all the talk of unrealized promise, a deconstructive ethos must in some way be embodied .
For him, the Bosnian conflict may have been mitigated or stalled if “alternative investments informed by nonnationalist assumptions could have been made”, namely, “how the proponents of the “civic concept” could have been – and still can be – aided in their efforts to overcome the extreme nationalists.” 249 The “civic concept” refers to individuals and groups, such as the “Serb
Civic Council”, allegedly operating outside an “ethnic register”. 250 These individuals and groups represent an “alternative praxis” informed by “hospitality rather than repatriation”. 251
Repatriation implies the existence of self-contained categories of identity – one is either brought back or sent to their rightful place of citizenry. An element of force, both legal and physical, is hinted at. Hospitality, however, revolves around a polite notion of friendship, “the friendly reception and treatment of guests or strangers.” 252 Yet, for Campbell, this incorporation of the
Other must not come at “the expense of security or identity but in terms of security’s and identity’s contamination by and indebtedness to its other(s).” This statement, when transposed to instances such as Dragan Djilas’ proposed 2009 evacuation of Belgrade Roma, can be read as a defense of privileged and exclusionary interests: The Roma are in our midst, they blight
Belgrade’s tourist potential, let us relocate them and provide them with schools and some
248 Ibid., 170. 249 Ibid., 218-219. 250 Ibid., 55. 251 Ibid., 229. 252 “Hospitality,” Dictionary.com , http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/hospitality?s=t .
278
variation of social aid. Yes, we will incorporate them into Serbian society through exclusionary policies since their integration cannot come at the expense of our security or identity. This seems to be the conception of “hospitality” at work here. Furthermore, it also reads as a racialized notion of multiculturalism; the Roma, for example, are incorporated on terms not of their choosing and judged according to the identitarian standards of a Eurocentric Serbian middle class. So-called “essentialist” identities can also be oppressed and subordinate identities, and cohesion and political solidarity along ethnic lines might very well be a necessary mode of self- preservation.
Campbell’s emphasis on “nonsovereign and nonstate perspectives”, 253 “nonationalist logics”, 254 and “the civic concept” 255 is not much different from the Eurocentric cosmopolitanism of one Michael Ignatieff. This is an especially odd affinity given Campbell’s awareness of the problematic “distinction between “civic” and “ethnic” nationalism,”
with the latter regarded as being prevalent in non-Western contexts where … the birth community and native culture are emphasized to the detriment of contractual notions of citizenship said to characterize Western communities. The effect is to reimport into sociological analyses the rarely used dictionary understanding of ethnicity as meaning “pagan” or “heathen,” and instantiate an assumption of political modernization whereby the less-developed polities of the East will one day catch up to the West. At the same time, this understanding obscures the extent to which racialized notions of identity are integral to the supposedly non-racial “civic” societies of the West.256
Ironically, Campbell does not heed his own warnings. The populist tendency is discernible and generally consistent; in fact, his ontology would fall apart without this tendency since it assumes
“the nationalist project could [never] be perfectly installed” due to “the contingent status of identity, the relational character of difference, and the processual nature of society”. 257 But this
253 Campbell, National Deconstruction , 232. 254 Ibid. 255 Ibid., 218. 256 Ibid., 91. 257 Ibid., 210.
279
populism serves the political and intellectual needs of his project. The deconstructive ethos is embodied in “non-state groups” pursuing “heterogeneous” “civic alternatives” and is openly associated with “justice”, “hope”, “democracy”, “hospitality” and non-violence. These qualities clearly “instantiate an assumption of political modernization” whereas “violence”, the
“primordial” and “totalitarianism” are displaced onto the easternmost ethnicity in Campbell’s scheme, namely, the Serbs. Of course, there are “civic alternatives” in Serbia, but these dwell within a “politics of the enclave” 258 and are presumably tougher to draw out. “Bosnia”, is a noble example of “radical interdependence” 259 and thus an instructive model for deconstruction.
How are these “alternatives” operationalized? Ironically enough non-violently since the deconstructive “commitment to evaluation and judgment” is “designed to encourage a nonviolent relation with others.” 260 Moreover, this pacifist commitment is assumed to be “always already present” in any given situation and “not something waiting to be imported from outside.” 261
Indeed, Campbell is clearly aware of the elitism of “external analysts” such as Mervyn Frost, who argues that “outsiders” have a moral imperative “to provide a dynamic framework … through which people may constitute themselves as citizens in a state or states.” 262 “In the oft- heard demand for an ethical theory of international relations” writes Campbell “there is the suggestion that once we, the external analysts, find the codes, norms, or rules to guide moral action, then we will be able to impart them for the benefit of the relevant participants.” 263
Contrary to the likes of Frost, Campbell explains that every “political community” contains within it a “space for its dissimulation and transformation” and this fact ensures that
258 Ibid., 169. 259 Ibid., 217-218. 260 Ibid., 12. 261 Ibid. 262 Ibid. 263 Ibid.
280
“deconstructive thought is a necessary perquisite for historical and political progress.” 264 In other words, deconstructive thought excavates a populist spirit synonymous with political maturity. 265
I agree that the question of ethics is always present and not something to be imported from outside; heteronomous activism of the sort envisioned by Frost assumes the existence of a passive if not malleable participant. Yet Campbell’s attempt to differentiate his project from such facile prescriptions is not successful precisely because the deconstructive ethos he so admires vitiates the “non-violence” that supposedly grounds its ethics. He bitterly laments the West’s approach to Bosnia, arguing that the “international community’s structural solutions … produced the very ethnicization of politics they later criticized, furthered the nationalist project they ostensibly wanted to contest, and provided no space for the nonnationalist formations they professed to support.” 266 The “policy and tactics” 267 deployed were more than an evident
“failure”; 268 they were also profoundly complicit in the violence on the ground. “Through the violence of conceptual determination” Campbell writes “the international community legitimized, replicated, and extended the violence of ethnic cleansing. Prior to Dayton, a recognition of this could have changed the course of diplomacy.” 269 In this respect, his position is no different from that of many 1990s interventionists – from Susan Sontag to her son David
Rieff. Bosnia was a diplomatic failure (and it certainly was that), but a diplomatic one understood outside of at least a full decade of Western economic meddling and Cold War geopolitics. 270 In short, Bosnia’s “failure” was an overdetermined process.
264 Ibid., 44. 265 Ibid., 12. 266 Ibid., 225. 267 Ibid., 227. 268 Ibid., 225. 269 Ibid. 270 See Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1995). See also National Security Decision Directive 54, “United States Policy Toward Eastern Europe”, The White House, Washington, September 2, 1982:
281
Campbell’s refusal to acknowledge these historical factors, a refusal connected to his disavowal of social scientific rigour, leaves his project squarely in the realm of morality. He not so much exhibits a moral politics as he possesses morals for politics. Let us take stock of his tone and silences in order to evaluate the alleged non-violence informing his project. If ethics is not something to be imported from outside, then why does he support an increase in funding from the “US National Endowment for Democracy and the Soros Foundation”? What are the ethical implications of this and how do these bodies not import ethics from abroad? What do we make of his recommendation that: “It would be to Bosnia’s advantage if those who were hosts to this ethos in its political field were aided and supported by all possible means.”? 271 Aided and supported by all possible means ? Such a statement bespeaks a complete lack of ethical awareness. This is not the same as saying “by any means necessary” which was a clear declaration on behalf of an oppressed group, by a member, nay, leader, of such a group. 272 It always countenances the possibility of violence in self-defence and shares an affinity with what
Andrej Grubacic identifies as “balkanization from below”. 273 The former is a plea by a Western academic claiming non-violence who nevertheless, given the open-ended nature of this plea, legitimates everything from military intervention to drug money and meddling by intelligence agencies as long as they support the “right” hosts.274 What escapes this position is that it is
http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/reference/Scanned%20NSDDS/NSDD54.pdf ; and National Security Decision Directive 133, “United States Policy Toward Yugoslavia”, The White House, Washington, March 14, 1984: http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/reference/Scanned%20NSDDS/NSDD133.pdf . 271 Campbell, National Deconstruction , 243. 272 See Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary: Speeches, Interviews, and a Letter by Malcolm X (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 35-67. 273 See Andrej Grubacic, Don’t Mourn, Balkanize! Essays after Yugoslavia (Oakland: PM Press, 2010), 171. 274 NATO has backed some bonafide criminals in the Yugoslav wars of secession under the pretext that they embodied the appropriate political “ethos”, however rhetorical and cynical this “ethos” proved to be. A classic example is military and arms support for the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a mafia-complicit organization engaged in heroin trafficking, organ harvesting, and ethnic cleansing. See Peter Klebnikov, “Heroin Heroes,” Mother Jones , January/February 2000, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2000/01/heroin-heroes ; Paul Lewis, “Kosovo PM is Head of Human Organ and Arms Ring, Council of Europe Reports,” The Guardian , Tuesday, December 14, 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/14/kosovo-prime-minister-llike-mafia-boss ; and
282
possible to have hosts who are rhetorically anti-nationalist and pluralist and still promote exclusivist policies against the working classes, Roma, etc – an ethos that also informs the epistemological limitations of Tomislav Longinovic’s work. What of the “ontopological assumptions” that undergird positions such as Campbell’s? Was the late Bosnian President Alija
Izetbegovic, who was under investigation by the ICTY for war crimes prior to his death, an appropriate “host”? 275 Is Serbian human rights lawyer Srdja Popovic, a “non-violence” activist who once recommended a NATO ground invasion of Yugoslavia, an appropriate host? 276
Campbell’s effort seems to transform the signifier “Bosnia” into a textual laboratory of “state- building”, “multiculturalism”, “truth and reconciliation”, “democracy-promotion”, and economic privatization. 277
A myriad of possibilities open up as a result of this “enabling” recommendation thereby pre-empting the violence inherent in “closure” or “conceptual determination”. Moreover, the civic cosmopolitanism of this recommendation is perceived as evidence of progress . Of course,
“all forms of community are bounded to at least some extent” and “no form of community is going to be free of … violence. But insofar as non-ethnic and non-national forms of community are more at home with difference and abjure less, they involve a less violent relationship with the
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia: Abuses Against Serbs and Roma in the New Kosovo, Human Rights Watch 11, no. 10 (1999), http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/kosov2/ . 275 See “Bosnia Leader was War Crimes Suspect,” BBC News, October 22, 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3203323.stm . Diana Johnstone complicates the facile mainstream understanding of Izetbegovic as some sort of multiculturalist, citing a March 1994 speech: “In one of our respectable newspapers I read that our soldiers are dying for a multicultural coexistence, that they are sacrificing their lives so we can live together. Multicultural togetherness is all very well, but – may I say this openly – it is a lie! We cannot lie to our people or deceive the public. The soldier in combat is not dying for a multinational coexistence…” See Diana Johnstone, Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions (London: Pluto, 2002), 56. 276 The case of Popovic is an interesting one, especially in light of emails released by Wikileaks “Global Intelligence Files” that implicate him with a Goldman Sachs executive, a private intelligence firm, and the US government. He is the founder of the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action Strategies (CANVAS) that some have called a “coup college” for training US-loyal activists around the world. See Carl Gibson and Steve Horn, “Exposed: Globally Renowned Activist Collaborated with Intelligence Firm Stratfor”, Occupy.com , December 2, 2013, http://www.occupy.com/article/exposed-globally-renowned-activist-collaborated-intelligence-firm-stratfor . See also Christopher Hitchens, “Belgrade Degraded,” The Nation , May 17, 1999, 8. 277 Grubacic, 43.
283
other.” 278 All forms of community are pregnant with violence and, more importantly, built upon originary violence. 279 Yet are non-ethnic and non-national forms of community really more at home with difference? What of the history of residential schools, present-day deportations, the subordinate position of Quebec in Canada, the US Civil Rights movement, the sordid history of
COINTELPRO, 280 etc.? Campbell seems to imply that liberal democracies are by their institutional nature at home with difference when history proves otherwise. The antipathy towards ethno-nationalism and so-called monolithic ideologies inherent in deconstructive thought might also be a prerequisite for historical and political regress . Anti-colonial nationalisms, Palestinian self-determination, and radical democratic and/or socialist projects are pre-emptively dismissed according to deconstructive criteria – there is no attempt to understand them as historical phenomena. They are simply rendered “essentialist” and pushed aside accordingly. Ironically, the idealized “Bosnia” is also not understood historically but instrumentalized as a means to a radical multiculturalism. How is Campbell not imputing an
“essence” onto this entity? How did “Bosnia” come to be historically? Not unlike Feuerbach, he abstracts from the historical process and fixes the deconstructive ethos as something by itself. He also presupposes an abstract and isolated human individual that is true everywhere for all time
(and includes not just “questioning” Bosnians but also the deconstructive scholar). But the
278 Campbell, National Deconstruction , 13. 279 Derrida makes this point and Campbell takes this idea of the coup de force from him. For Derrida, the founding act is always a violence. This is why Campbell’s claim that non-ethnic/national forms of community “are more at home with difference and abjure less” – apart from being hackneyed and historically dubious – is so readily indictable. For evidence against this dubious claim see Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-history (London: Verso, 2011); Illan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: One World, 2006); Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997); and James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Aboriginal Life (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2013). 280 This is short for Counter Intelligence Program, a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) project in the United that often illegally spied, infiltrated, and incited strife amongst people and political organizations considered “subversive” including numerous communist and socialist organizations, the Black Panther Party, and the American Indian Movement (AIM). One of its most notable targets was Civil Rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. It operated from 1940 to 1971. See Ward Churchill, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Cambridge: South End Press, 2002).
284
essences he takes apart – and the one he unwittingly proposes above – is in each instance little more than what Marx would call a ““genus”; an internal, dumb generality which naturally unites the many individuals.” 281 The “deconstructive ethos” (the character or spirit of a community – and only an audible “n” away from “ethnos”) unites “Bosnia” and “Bosnians” into an “identity that was realized in a community without essence” and “that operated in terms of the care for the complex relationship of identity/difference many want to advocate.” 282 But Bosnia was/is a territory plagued by imperial/colonial realpolitik, class struggle, gender injustice, ageism, ableism, homophobia, all of which signify differently when intersecting with one another. The
“instructive reflections” may actually be those Campbell overlooks. 283 The Austro-Hungarian
Empire played up differences to secure its influence in the region; the Ottoman millet system also had as much to do with pacifying a taxable peasantry than any real or perceived proto- liberalism. 284 “Bosnia”/”deconstructive ethos” thus becomes little more than a “genus”.
Moreover, his reading of historicist nationalisms, Serbian and Croatian for example, also codes them – disingenuously – as little more than dumb generalities to be deconstructed. They have also been historicized in a Gramscian sense; signify differently in different contexts, whose precepts and mores have a profoundly ethical if not life-affirming effect in specific historical conditions. There are peasant Serbs from the Krajina who fought under the communist banner but were inspired by the folk songs of Kosovo and the poetry of Njegos – staples of the Serbian
281 Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” 145. 282 Campbell, National Deconstruction , 218-219. 283 Ibid., 218. 284 Benjamin von Kallay, the Austro-Hungarian Minister of Finance and governor of Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1882-1903, attempted to suppress Croatian and Serbian nationalisms by fostering “the idea of separate Bosnian nationhood ( bosnjastvo ) which was meant to prevent the development of separate – necessarily irredentist – nationalist movements on the basis of confessional divisions.” See Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 360.
285
nationalist diet. 285 Turbofolk may be kitschy patriotic tripe to urban middle class Belgrade intellectuals and Euro-Atlantic scholars, but individual songs may galvanize, make sense of, and, perhaps even transcend the social conditions in which they are produced. 286 If a people are ethnicized and oppressed as a group, then a nationalist approach might be an important strategic move. More to the point, the variegated materiality of historicist nationalist narratives – if one is to change them – requires more than scholastic argumentation, an excursus into continental philosophy, and the questioning of their philosophical assumptions. Perhaps a wholesale transformation of the social conditions that make people amenable to such narratives is in order.
This, of course, requires that Campbell abstracts to a larger totality – one that takes into consideration the social physics of neoliberalism in the late-capitalist world order.
Outside of this, one is left with academic moralism. “One of the principal effects of the historical fatalism associated with the ontopological rendering of the Bosnian war” writes
Campbell “has been to disenable calls for political or military action, to the despair of those who think we have witnessed a genocidal conflict, and to the relief, if not satisfaction, of those who prefer to sidestep responsibility.” 287 Indeed, the “failure” to challenge “the identity politics of those prosecuting the war is a testament to the way in which the responsibility to the other was not enacted.” 288 There is a very clear either/or dichotomy at work here. Campbell clearly does not rule out military action, which leads one to believe that political action – given his fidelity to
285 Milovan Djilas inadvertently reveals the elasticity of this cult of the warrior and its significatory richness by comparing the manner in which, during World War II, both Communists and Montenegrin Chetniks justified their respective politics with recitations from “warrior” classic the Mountain Wreath by Montenegrin poet Njegos: “For people with such single-minded, heady views, all traditional values take on a one-dimensional distorted aspect, the Communists in Montenegro celebrated Christmas Eve in early 1942 … with recitations against aggressors and traitors from Njegos’ Mountain Wreath , while the Montenegrin Chetniks celebrated the same holiday the following year by the ‘inspirational reading’ of the Massacre of the Renegades – the Moslems – from that same Mountain Wreath .” See Milovan Djilas, Wartime (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 150. 286 A refreshing intelligent reappraisal of this much-maligned genre is provided by Rory Archer. See Rory Archer, “Assessing Turbofolk Controversies: Popular Music between the Nation and the Balkans, Southeastern Europe 36 (2012), 178-207. 287 Campbell, National Deconstruction , 84. 288 Ibid., 81.
286
diplomatic and policy documents – should be the responsibility of diplomats and supranational bodies. Ontological pluralism does not seem to include an anti-imperialism organized from below. Far from “sidestepping responsibility”, many critics of the war indicted the
“responsibility” that had already been “enabled”; some arguing that the international involvement inadvertently facilitated genocide. 289 I agree that historical representations have political consequences, but to essentially write off, say, alternatives to military action as apathy, cowardice, or what not, is to show a remarkable amount of contempt for those who might have sincere and well-reasoned alternatives to martial prescriptions. 290 Moreover, it completely ignores the post-World War II history of Western military interventions and their sanguine and unproductive consequences. 291
Campbell’s discourse of responsibility anticipates some well-intentioned but no less ominous 21 st century developments in international relations. There is a striking similarity between his rhetoric of responsibility to the other and the debates preceding and informing the
2001 ICISS (International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty) report “The
Responsibility to Protect” – a readymade rationale for military interventions in Libya and
Syria. 292 Although he does not state that “large-scale military intervention should have been undertaken”, he laments the vacuity of the “humanitarianism” that was nonetheless proposed:
289 See David N. Gibbs, First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009). 290 See Orli Fridman’s study on the protest tactics of the Belgrade feminist anti-war group Women in Black: Orli Fridman, “’It was like fighting a war with our own people’: anti-war activism in Serbia during the 1990s” in Nationalities Papers 39, no. 4 (2011), 507-522. 291 A classic survey of US military interventions is William Blum’s richly documented Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (London: Zed Books, 2003). See also Gregory Elich’s underrated Strange Liberators: Militarism, Mayhem, and the Pursuit of Profit (New York: Llumina Press, 2006). On military humanism and its consequences, see Richard Seymour, The Liberal Defense of Murder (London: Verso, 2012); and David Chandler, Bosnia: Faking Democracy after Dayton (London: Pluto Press, 2000). 292 See The Responsibility to Protect: Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001), 1-108.
287
the ontopological representations of the conflict had specific consequences for how the international community conceived of its responsibility. Because it struggled to make sense of the fighting in terms of “the national interest,” it resorted to a depoliticized notion of “humanitarianism” to position itself in relation to what was seen as an intractable situation. In this context, Gulf War-like military interventions were ruled out, and negotiations emphasized.293
It is more than a little naïve to take the rhetoric of the international community at face value, but unsurprising given Campbell’s diplomatic career and the inferable sympathies thereof. There were still discernible and, after the fact, definite “national interests” at work. The point being that
Campbell’s moral defense of deconstructive non-violence is untenable. “Democracy’s structure as a promise,” he writes “therefore, keeps the horizon of impossibility firmly in view so that a plurality of possibilities can be conceived, thereby rendering contingent whatever is put in its place as possible.” 294 A consciousness of contingency is important, but it is also dangerously close to philosophical scepticism. Because every totality is potentially undemocratic, and every democracy potentially totalizing, we should not entertain the possibility that a relatively stabilized position might have something worthwhile to contribute and that this contribution requires a probationary period in order to be evaluated. Just as a philosophical sceptic might say it’s best to suspend judgment and not embrace any truth that we do not have absolute knowledge of, the deconstructionist denaturalizes any possible truth whose creeping violence cannot be restrained. Yet, contra the sceptics, we constantly operate in a world where we act on truths based not on absolute knowledge, but reasonable doubt in much the same way that, perhaps, not all prescriptions are to be pre-emptively unsettled but may very well possess some reasonable clout – and one that, given systemically unequal and exploitative social relations, might require stubborn historicization in order to serve justice.
293 Campbell, National Deconstruction , 226. 294 Ibid., 201-202.
288
Campbell applies a fixed strategy or “grammatological” approach in order to interfere with the normal functioning of things, destabilize, or even “decolonize” that which has imposed itself on the “undecidable” context. Signified by the suffix “-ology” and its variations is a branch of learning, but one divested of scientific pretensions and/or rules. The point is not to explain an event or produce an argument; it is simply to denaturalize a settled narrative. There is something empowering in such a movement, empowering in the act of saying “this is not eternal”, “this power is arbitrary”, and/or “so and so interests inform this narrative”. Such questioning can inspire confidence and mitigate fear. Yet the built-in absence of a prescriptive aim can also lead to inaction and cynicism, the chronic inclination to believe that all narratives are somehow insincere, disingenuous, and riddled with “ulterior motives”. The conception of human nature implicit in this pessimism is deeply reactionary, even if justified by the context that sculpts and incites it. In as much as the act of questioning or, more specifically, deconstruction might contain an “affirmative and just character” that leads “us to a reinterpretation of the whole apparatus of boundaries within which a history and a culture have been able to confine their criteriology”, 295 there is also, parallel if not implicit, the potential for a paralytic politics of suspicion. One must underscore the difference between a progressive critique grounded in the desires and needs of a substantial portion of oppressed and exploited humanity and the voluntaristic harangues of libertarian mistrust. There is plenty of the latter in the US today, from the conspiracy theorizing of Alex Jones to the corrosive individualism of the Tea Party. Furthermore, scholastic deconstructions on their own, without a concerted commitment to their popular historicization, can be rather impotent given the classed and ideological ecologies of modern industrialized states. For example, changing the hegemony of nationalist thinking in Bosnia requires more than an op-ed piece in Oslobodenje or the intelligent musings of a lone Sarajevan cab driver. It
295 Ibid., 30.
289
requires exactly what happened in Bosnia in February of 2014 – timely and concerted social protest with mechanisms, such as plenums, for the airing out of grievances and the building of strategies. These were organs of direct democracy convened on a town-scale with working class roots. In a conjuncture with 30 per cent of Bosnians unemployed, these assemblies demanded an annulment of privatization, guaranteed health benefits, and the rehiring of workers who had lost their jobs. These were concrete material demands that went beyond a mere Socratic ethos.
Unpacking Campbell’s “Totalitarian” Obsession
The bedrock of Campbell’s politics is an obsession with epistemic and political “totalitarianism”.
He reading and use of this term is not innocent and must be historically contextualized and unpacked. “Totalitarian” refers to something centralized and dictatorial that requires complete subservience to the state. It cancels “historicity” in much the same way Orwell’s infamous
“memory hole” vacuums away any inconvenient or oppositional pieces of information; anything that might challenge and unsettle the status quo de-limited by the Ministry of Truth. Historicity in this sense is a synonym for plurality. What Campbell projects onto Marx is a Cold War prejudice. Marx is read anachronistically, “totalitarianized” with the hindsight of the Stalin
Revolution and its consequences. Keep in mind that Campbell’s intellectual inspiration is
Jacques Derrida, a product of a French intellectual milieu with a very peculiar relationship to communism. Numerous French intellectuals, from Jean-Paul Sartre to Georges Bataille, as well as Michel Foucault, were influenced, in various degrees and not altogether insignificantly, by
Alexandre Kojeve’s teleological interpretations of Marx. The “archeo-teleological concept of history” is certainly a plausible tendency in what is a large corpus, but one also taken to task by many. What Campbell attributes to Marx via Derrida is far more historically and nationally specific than he recognizes and perhaps undeserving of such a, let us say, “totalitarian” reading.
290
Derrida’s vaguely social-democratic prescription in Specters of Marx (1994) is clearly indebted to Kojeve’s “end of history” thesis and has been thoroughly critiqued from various Marxist perspectives. 296 More to the point, French intellectual circles were hard hit by Alexander
Solzhenitsyn’s revelations in the 1974 French publication of his dissident classic The Gulag
Archipelago . The publication of this seminal text coincided with a major shift in French mainstream media and, not unrelated, the rise in clout of Andre Glucksmann, Bernard Henri-
Levy, and Pascal Bruckner – also known as the nouveaux philosophes . The 1975 debut of the talk show Apostrophes chaired by Bernard Pivot “assumed a major place in [French] literary and intellectual life.” 297 As Benoit Peeters writes, “the mere presence of an author on the panel often increased his or her sales considerably, and a brilliant performance could transform a difficult work into a bestseller.” 298 This new unmediated platform allowed writers to “address the general public directly .” 299 “The convergence of their interests with those of Apostrophes” writes Peeters
“was ideological as well as being a consequence of the media involved: what counted for
Bernard Pivot was less the books than the debate they would arouse. This favoured the great questions of the day, starting with that of totalitarianism”. 300 Solzhenitsyn was one of the inaugural guests and “the nouveaux philosophes … would always find a major platform for their ideas on Apostrophes .” 301
Solzhenitsyn’s testimony served as evidence justifying the departure of many French intellectuals from Marxism. As Jan Plamper argues in “Foucault’s Gulag” (2002), “Foucault's own break with Marxism occurred during this period and he chose to enter an alliance of sorts
296 See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994); and Michael Sprinker, Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (London: Verso, 1999). 297 Benoit Peeters, Derrida: A Biography (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 298. 298 Ibid., 298. 299 Ibid. 300 Ibid. 301 Ibid.
291
with the nouveaux philosophes .”302 Indeed, “the discovery of the Gulag, the break with Marxism, the alliance with the nouveaux philosophes , the drift into Nietzsche's orbit, the adoption of the genealogical method, and anti-Soviet political activism” had a marked impact on Foucault’s scholarship as he shunned “hermeneutics and causal inquiry altogether.” 303
Campbell’s sometimes militant appropriation of this historically specific and, at the same time, deeply ideological take on Marx and Marxism is nothing new. The veneration of pluralism in an unnecessarily attenuated pair of choices between “totalitarianism” and “democracy” lends itself to such commonsensical valorization. More to the point, he defends “postmodernism” against some embarrassingly glib attacks, attacks which may be de rigueur in IR, but are far more nuanced and sympathetic in other disciplines. This leads to an overdrawn militancy on the part of Campbell that barely differs from that of his targets. Ironically, what his criticism of the likes of IR mandarins such as John Ruggie and Stephen Krasner does is foreground his own hastily generalized reading of Marx and Marxism. Campbell rightly chastises Ruggie and others for taking Paul de Man’s wartime writings as “indissolubly linked with a body of theory, such that ‘the primary goal of the rage in question is a settling of accounts with ‘deconstruction.’” 304
Similarly, one might take Campbell’s fetishization of “totalitarianism” and the “continuity thesis” that informs his reading of Marx as linking a specific moment in the history of communism in practice with a diverse body of theory and practice. Inasmuch as de Man does not stand in for as variegated a tradition as “deconstruction”, Stalinism – and it is this ideology and practice that buttresses discussions of “totalitarianism” – cannot be said to stand in for as rich and internally contested a tradition as Marxism, especially given the pronounced and majoritarian presence within this tradition of anti-Stalinist tendencies from Trotskyism to British
302 Jan Plamper, “Foucault’s Gulag” in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3, no. 2 (2002), 256. 303 Ibid., 304 Campbell, National Deconstruction , 6.
292
Marxism. Equating Stalinist “totalitarianism” with the supple yet precise conceptions of
Raymond Williams or the sensitive empirical emplotments of E.P. Thompson reflects a superficial understanding of a critical solidarity that is far from monolithic. Quoting Campbell against himself, “[i]t is hard to know where to begin when confronted with such statements, for they beg numerous questions and rely on various unexplicated assumptions.” 305 To appropriate
Derrida so unproblematically and authoritatively, Campbell had to avoid an engagement with the serious and interdisciplinary critical literature surrounding “deconstruction” and not simply its caricatural dopplegangers in IR. Moreover, he would not have been so quick to trivialize
Marxism as a mere reading technique. Indeed, inasmuch as Paul de Man cannot be referred to as an “academic Waldheim” in a silly act of “moral leveling”, 306 the same can be said of equating the theoretical frameworks of Sheila Rowbotham or Teresa Ebert with “totalitarianism”. Drop the epithet and grant the source its experience; it would be the “deconstructive” thing to do.
This of course would require an engagement with, or at least a gesture to, developments in Sovietology. It would be enough here to mention Stephen F. Cohen’s seminal intervention in
Rethinking the Soviet Experience (1985). Cohen takes to task the “totalitarian school” of
Sovietology which popularized the “continuity thesis”, i.e. that there exists a “fundamental continuity from Lenin to Stalin” that explains everything from “secondary events” to “the most murderous acts of Stalinism from 1929 to 1939, and even beyond, from forcible collectivization to the execution and brutal imprisonment of tens of millions of people.” 307 “All of that, it is argued,” writes Cohen “derived from the political – that is, the ideological, programmatic, and
305 Ibid., 7. 306 Ibid., 6. 307 Stephen F. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History since 1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 43.
293
organizational – nature of original Bolshevism.” 308 Stalinism is thus rendered as having “a single causal factor.” 309 This consensus opinion “was not the work of university scholars alone” 310 and relied heavily on first-person narratives by the aforementioned Alexander Solzhenitsyn as well as
Milovan Djilas, and Arthur Koestler. These texts provided important perspectives on a regime whose brutality is well-documented, but were deeply subjective accounts and in no way complete pictures of the Soviet experience. Frances Stonor Saunders points how many of these authors had their print runs financed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and related fronts and organizations, including a 50,000 copy run of Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940), snatched up in its entirety by the French Communist Party (PCF). 311 Koestler’s text presented a particularly terse and graphic take on the “continuity thesis”.
These were ideological times and scholarship was not immune from the political war for minds. Jacob Talmon, Isaiah Berlin, and Karl Popper contributed to “totalitarianized” readings of
Jean Jacques Rousseau’s General Will. Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology (1960), anticipating in many ways the post-Cold War wake informing Campbell’s sensibility, claimed that “old nineteenth century ideologies were ‘exhausted,’ undermined by the horrors of Soviet communism and the success of liberal capitalism.” 312 “[T]he old passions are spent” declared
Bell “the old politico-economic radicalism … has lost its meaning.” 313 Such a Manichean climate fostered the cultural hegemony of specific lines of thought, however questionable their academic merits. In Sovietology, it was not until the mid-seventies and eighties that the “totalitarianism
308 Ibid. 309 Ibid. 310 Ibid., 44. 311 Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 1999), 60. 312 Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 4. 313 Ibid.
294
school” was squarely and effectively challenged by the likes of Moshe Lewin, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Alexander Rabinowitch. 314
Campbell’s take on Marx and Marxism, filtered as it is through Derrida, takes the
“continuity thesis” a little further than even its more vociferous proponents had intended; it lays the blame for material excesses on the shoulders of an idea and its alleged propensity for
“closure” regardless of the social conditions in which it might be overdetermined and re- signified. There is a sense in which such a claim resembles a straw person fallacy; the history of
Marx and Marxism is trivialized if not stigmatized by a term, “totalitarianism”, whose efficacy depends upon popular and systemic ignorance of Marxist theory and practice. Over one hundred years of often lavishly funded, confrontational, and media-saturated anti-communist conditioning ensures that such projections succeed on more than just persuasive arguments (if that).
Furthermore, for a reading technique that valorizes an “an ethically and politically committed ethos of criticism”, and one rightly opposed to facile teleologies, the glib and, at best, unquestioned appropriation of Cold War ideology opens this deconstructive ethos up to its own agenda. What does it say about a reading technique that sees – that must see – “teleology” and
“closure” in theoretical spaces that are demonstrably more pluralist and open-ended than initially assumed? A political ethos of criticism that de-prioritizes science and privileges a moralism of sorts need not inquire into these things.
A New Balkanism
Enslavement may be too strong a word, but, pace Sijakovic, a disciplinary semantics is definitely at work in Campbell’s prescription that obtains the desired confession.315 The denizens of
314 See Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968); Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2004); and Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
295
“Bosnia” are “Othered” by this outsider who uses it as a screen to project his own interests and frustrations. 316 Campbell’s discourse is not pejorative or conventionally “anti-Balkan” by any stretch, but there is a certain lionization of “Bosnia” that some might interpret as a measured form of exoticism. There is “moral and civilizational” condescension for the “natives” against whom is positioned the “moral law and civilizational obligations” of the “outsider”. 317 For all his alleged scholastic “radicalism” and attempt to outflank liberal discourse to its left, Campbell’s
“stereotypes” “conform to the ruling values, social structures, and media” and, as evidenced, his
“truth” about “Bosnia” is “stated in the interests the ruling politics.” 318
Reading Campbell against himself, this is a “politically correct” pro-Balkan stereotype that serves to establish the desirable identity of the Balkans, to legitimize deconstructive procedures applied to it, to obscure true political and scholastic interests, namely, those of neoliberalism and poststructuralist academia, yet to qualify it as a rich source of “radical multiculturalism”. Campbell is directly challenging the assumptions of a denigrative era, but doing so in such a way that articulates, much to his anticipated chagrin, a “new balkanism” akin to the one identified by Andrew Hammond in and around the First World War. The motif of
“backwardness” was very much still a part of the “conceptual apparatus” of the immediate post-
Cold War world – in fact, the consensus narrative – but “assigned a different value” in academic texts such as Campbell’s where “’Balkan’ backwardness’ was approvingly constructed as progress in a latent form.” 319
315 Bogoljub Sijakovic, A Critique of Balkanist Discourse: Contribution to the Phenomenology of Balkan Otherness (Toronto: Serbian Literary Company, 2004), 40. 316 Ibid. 317 Ibid., 42. 318 Ibid. 319 Hammond, The Debated Lands , 118-119.
296
To paraphrase Hammond, the point can be underlined by noting how much of the new balkanism is a projection on to Bosnia of the personal and political values that Campbell and the
Euro-Atlantic bourgeoisie hold most dear about themselves. 320 What Campbell reframes are the racialist aspects of balkanism. “New balkanism” is “now linked to the discursive constructions of nationalism.” 321 Indeed, the new “imagined communities” are imagined as resolutely civic cosmopolitan, bourgeois, oddly bereft of class consciousness, and little more than the
“contemplation of single individuals and of civil society.” 322 In an era defined by economic crisis, protests in Greece, the Middle East, North America, Russia and elsewhere, such scholarship, if we are to take it, as Campbell suggests, as a template for democratic practice, is strangely and unproductively out of touch with reality.
320 Ibid., 120. 321 Ibid., 127. 322 Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”, 145.
297
CHAPTER 8: THE SCOPE OF VIOLENCE: ELIZABETH DAUPHINEE AND THE NEOLIBERAL MOMENT
“I don’t know these theories,” he said quietly. “I wish I did know them.” “No you don’t,” I interrupted him swiftly. “They fucking ruin your life.” I didn’t know what made me say that. It was not true.
-Elizabeth Dauphinee, The Politics of Exile (2013)
the salvation of Europe is not a matter of a revolution in methods. It is a matter of the Revolution.
-Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1955)
Dialectical logic demands that we should go further … [I]f we are to have a true knowledge of an object we must look at and examine all its facets, its connections and “mediations”. That is something we cannot ever hope to achieve completely, but the rule of comprehensiveness is a safeguard against mistakes and rigidity.
-Vladimir Lenin, Collected Works
In The Politics of Exile (2013), 1 Elizabeth Dauphinee has produced a remarkable narrative that will undoubtedly shift the terms of debate within the discipline of International Relations, but also set a standard for fictional treatments of the Balkans. She foregrounds both the ethical and the political in a manner unmanaged by establishment-feted auteurs such as Aleksander Hemon,
Dragan Todorovic, and Ismail Kadare – a foregrounding ever more urgent in our contemporary conjuncture. 2 I find a lot to meditate on in both TPOE and her theoretical treatise The Ethics of
Researching War (2007): 3 the devastating critique of institutionalized research practices, the promising non-representational approach to “truth”, the sensitive elucidation of the consequences of occupational privilege, and the role of love in knowledge production and ethico-political
1 This is abbreviated to TPOE from here on. 2 Here I refer to a conjuncture originating with the 2008 financial crisis, the ensuing neoliberal restoration, and the waves of resistance emergent, if not fully sustained, in its wake. 3 This is abbreviated to TEORW from here on.
298
intercourse. Yet what I want to do in this piece is somewhat different from the sympathetic but oddly tangential critiques her books have received.4
I elucidate my argument in large part via “immanent critique” of Dauphinee’s theoretical assumptions in TEORW and TPOE. Hers is a well-intentioned attempt to rethink the disciplinary boundaries of IR in a manner that includes modes of reading and writing that might very well lead to “non-violent” ethnographies where the sensuous details of a damaged life are recuperated and incorporated as unique qualities within and amongst “Others”. The project she proposes and practices is, if I may proffer the term, a heightened if impressionistic realism; one grounded in affective relations. Love is deemed an integral part of an intellectual practice that executes a wide and non-judgmental embrace of a meticulously rendered Other – humanism is in the details. Boundaries between victim and perpetrator are often hazy and, if we are to go beyond
Manichean narratives of good versus evil, then victims and perpetrators must be understood on their own terms. This, of course, does not mean that their crimes are to be absolved; it simply means that they are implicated in global economies of violence we all inhabit and that an awareness of that injured and barbed commonality should be a prerequisite for intellectual work.
If we are to judge, and we inevitably must, we must first attempt to do no harm. This is an arduous task given that we are complicit in an ethereal and ubiquitous violence an awareness of which Dauphinee renders an inescapable responsibility if we are to entertain any justice worth its name. 5
4 The entire August 2013 issue of Security Dialogue is devoted to a critical engagement with Dauphinee’s watershed The Politics of Exile (2013) and is a case in point. Most of the contributors tackle Dauphinee’s text in the final third of their pieces, either working their way towards a critique through illuminating yet tangential references to popular novels, or front-loading their articles with theoretical exegeses. The notable exception is Himadeep Muppidi’s generous reading in “On The Politics of Exile ”. See Himadeep Muppidi, “On The Politics of Exile ,” Security Dialogue , 44, no. 4 (2013), 299-313. 5 Elizabeth Dauphinee, The Ethics of Researching War: Looking for Bosnia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 11
299
Dauphinee’s literary moral universe revolves around her fictionalized avatar Stojan
Sokolovic. Raised in an economically modest Bosnian Serb family in a rural area outside of
Sarajevo, this former engineering student had no particular taste for nationalist jingoism when ultimately mobilized into the Bosnian Serb army. Socialized in some ways according to the dictates of a Serbian nationalist imaginary, Stojan nonetheless secretes what David Campbell terms a “deconstructive ethos”; he regularly exhibits doubt or disdain towards the categories that pit Serbs versus Muslims and the ominous and martial masculinities performed by colleagues and family members. 6 The death of his brother Luka is blamed on Muslims when it is later revealed that he was in fact executed by a carnivorous Serb by the name of Ivan. Unable to leave his unit to attend his brother’s funeral, Stojan takes literally the words of his commanding officer to kill thirty Muslims before being granted leave. He scopes out and snuffs four people, mostly women and children, much to the surprise of his superiors, and is brutally beaten as a result. His subsequent alienated life as a translator in Canada is spent trying to come to terms with the war and chasing down the one person who might tell him exactly how his brother died. Dauphinee constructs Stojan in such a way that reveals the ambiguity and contradictory nature of moral choice. Her compelling avatar is constructed on two levels, one abstract or “theoretical” and the other detailed and concrete, in short, wholly aestheticized. Each one can be read as on its own terms, but, woven together, work to tautly upholster a representation that co-opts elements of
“denigrative” balkanism precisely as it attempts – and somewhat succeeds – in subverting it; a balkanism triangulated by “obscurantism”, anarchy, and truculence.
6 For Campbell, a radical multiculturalism “pluralizes the possibilities of being on the same territory” rather than suppressing “those possibilities through the proliferation of territorially distinct enclaves.” See David Campbell, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 169.
300
Dauphinee’s theoretical commitments and attendant ontological co-ordinates cannot account for present and emergent examples of social empowerment, thus leaving Stojan
Sokolovic as little more than an unsettling “truth” through which her self-reflexivity is nourished. She paints a not inaccurate world of chronically serialized “Others” that are understandably jaded and exhausted by collective projects, but emphasizes little more than the minutiae of intimate encounters; the confessional, delectably materialistic interactions of rootless individuals. The most one can do is grant the moral contradictions of another’s life and uphold them as living “truth”. Ironically, this reaffirms a neoliberal order of fundamentally opaque and alienated Others. Her method maps spaces of miscommunication in a structurally unequal world of aspiration and dispossession; spaces where Others – always civilizational – are first and foremost harbingers of psychic discomfort instead of social beings damaged by complex processes of dispossession and exploitation.
Using the Marxist-influenced work of Teresa Ebert, as well as contributions made by
Maria Todorova, Andrew Hammond, and Bogoljub Sijakovic, I undertake a close and charitable reading of the both TEORW and TPOE in order to highlight: (a) the liberal atomism that defines her theoretical approach and whose alienated practice is evident in her literary text; (b) the balkanism entrenched by this approach; and (c) how the end product of her enterprise works to preempt the interpretive potential of a more class conscious reading. For all the conspicuous and subtle cultivation of a “deconstructive ethos” and a radical multiculturalism, Dauphinee’s texts downplay the import of class and distract the reader from an interpretation that might foreground the social conditions that make possible not only the existence of Stojan Sokolovic and people like him, but also the theories that preemptively atomize and balkanize such subjects.
301
The Ethnicized Limitations of “Otherness” On a theoretical level, we are dealing with the various heuristics of “Otherness”; what one can loosely group under the category “contemporary cultural critique”. Dauphinee deploys, explicitly in TEORW and implicitly in TPOE, “an oscillating series of objectifying strategies” – borrowed sympathetically yet critically from Levinas, Derrida, Caputo, and Agamben – that allow her to construct a place, or more specifically, a person, to suit her purposes. These strategies distance and trivialize her analytic “gaze”, thus increasing the role of “cultural signs” in her consumption of “Bosnia” and “Stojan Sokolovic”; signifiers that ostensibly represent more complicated realities. Since the first shots were fought at Borovo Selo in 1991, Balkan peoples became objects of scholastic manipulation; it is these “traditional”, “primitive”, and “violent” peoples that scholars come to see. Indeed, religious fanaticism, an informal economy, genocide, and rape were (and in some respects still are) several of many realities on the ground. Thus, it is the very disaster of structural adjustment, civil war, and ethnic cleansing that lay the groundwork for the
(Anglo-Atlantic) scholastic desire to seek out and experience the social pathologies of this conjuncture as authentic and invariantly representative of these peoples. Dauphinee clearly understands that:
[e]ven those who are engaged in non-positivist or non-structural approaches to scholarship and fieldwork still have to address the fact that fieldwork is fundamentally implicated in representation, which is fundamentally implicated in relationships of power because it is the researcher who determines what counts in the narrative of the informant, and who interprets the objects of the gaze. The authority of the immersed researcher is necessarily achieved through the silencing or appropriation of local authority. What is needed is a fundamental reconsideration of the epistemological and ontological commitments that inform most fieldwork. 7 She attempts this fundamental reconsideration using the aforementioned objectifying strategies. I question this use of what Bogoljub Sijakovic describes as “the phenomenology of
7 Dauphinee, The Ethics of Researching War , 53.
302
Otherness”. I find the “phenomenology of Otherness” structures an environment where race- thinking and alienation are prefigured. There is nothing inherently wrong with this as a descriptive enterprise. We all live in societies where racism and sexism are, in varying degrees, normalized. My concern is that Dauphinee’s attendant fear of “totalizing discourses”, “closure”, and “epistemic violence” works to impressionistically freeze such race-thinking and alienation in a manner that brooks no escape. What is implicitly and ironically prescribed is a structural failure of the ethics posited to remedy ubiquitous economies of violence in the first place. For the purpose of stimulating debate, I state that the “phenomenology of Otherness” is, in fact, “anti-
Balkan” 8. In her own way, and here I echo Sijakovic, Dauphinee sculpts Balkan identity as
Otherness from her respective position of power. She universalizes partial aspects of it (e.g.
Sokolovic categorically embodies a “deconstructive ethos” and a radical multiculturalism), naturalizes specific socio-economic conditions (the social physics of neoliberalism is an ontological truth), and forces Otherness to reaffirm the ways in which it is not quite humane (e.g.
Sokolovic’s rough comportment and blood-curdling confession) thus ensuring that “the desired perception of Otherness is transformed into the reality of that Otherness.” 9
For example, in Andrew Hammond’s reading of a nineteenth-century British traveler to
Montenegro, I am reminded of how Dauphinee’s representational framework, in some crucial respects, in fact personalizes broader balkanist discourses. Instead of obscurantism being an integral aspect of place as perceived by the likes of travelers such as H.A. Brown, Dauphinee relocates it in an impenetrable human psychology thus undergirding the post-structuralist privileging of miscommunication. TPOE is clearly an attempt to wrestle with the traumatic circumlocutions of injured bodies and their seemingly other-worldly stories. But this difficult
8 Bogoljub Sijakovic, A Critique of Balkanist Discourse: Contribution to the Phenomenology of Balkan ‘Otherness’ (Toronto: Serbian Literary Company, 2004), 39. 9 Ibid.
303
communication, recognition of which is necessary in order to practice “a difficult freedom”, must be separated and/or highlighted as part of wider historical discourses that still work to denigrate the region to its targeted audiences. Dauphinee perceptively recognizes that basic human needs are “executed differently” but nonetheless overdraws the chasm between, let us call them, “civilizational Others” or, more accurately, between herself and her civilizational Other,
Stojan Sokolovic. 10
In Dauphinee’s texts there in part exists, if I may paraphrase Hammond, an uncanny curtailment of human presence despite a rendering of the Other’s visage as “the ultimate location of sensibility and sensuousness.” 11 The sense of the Other that we receive is that of a “blank enigma”; a private domain always already fenced off. What the Other contains is unique,
10 Here is a sampling of such “distanced nearness” from Elizabeth Dauphinee, The Politics of Exile (New York: Routledge, 2013):
We are not born the same, we do not die the same, we do not sleep the same, and we do not see the same. I saw but could not see. (161) “It’s like being trapped between two worlds,” he went on. “But more than that, it’s like being trapped in two different times. It’s strange.” (112) “You don’t owe me any explanations,” he said quietly. “We don’t know the same Bosnia. We have different eyes. Different souls. And that’s just the way it is.” He shrugged. “We want to know different things.” (118) “You guys writing on Bosnia don’t hear our questions, because you don’t speak our language.” (114) We sat regarding each other with our differently colored eyes, each on our own side of the scarred milk crate that served as a makeshift table. The distance between us was immeasurable. (1)
And here are some supplementary passages from her theoretically rich if “repudiated” 2007 monograph The Ethics of Researching War :
“that my inability to explain and understand is not the mark of my ignorance, but is the very basic form of my existence.” (14) I cannot represent you because you lie outside of my tangible experience – outside of my skin – there is no possibility of drawing you with ink or words. (78) “It is a love that admits that I and the one who sits across the table facing me over a cup of espresso on the coast beside the sea are indiscernible, ethereal, gossamerthin, inapprehensible, subject to change, subject of change.” (14) “we have entered into a sphere of radical indeterminacy, where the sign or symbol can never stand as a faithful representation of the real” (89) For Kierkegaard, human calculation must be suspended in order that faith can enter in – faith in what is incomprehensible and in what is otherwise impossible. (100) “there is no possibility of cognition, interpretation, calculation, and no amount of time allotted to the ‘problem’ will overcome it.” (98)
11 Dauphinee, The Ethics of Researching War , 22.
304
original, and resistant to epistemic standardization; it cannot be packaged and sold according to industry-wide dictates. In other words, it has a use-value insofar as it carries unique “physical properties” that fulfill specific needs. A charitable reading of Dauphinee’s work must emphasize the fact that she makes a concerted attempt to transcend simple rights talk and mechanical relations of exchange. Her prescriptive reading of human intercourse is informed by an honest desire for a richer solidarity; one that strives to go beyond the platitudes of liberal rights discourse. Indeed, Stojan Sokolovic and his interlocutor are, in many ways, quite different. They are clearly separated by ethnicity, language, class, occupation, gender, and culture (broadly conceived) – both inside and outside the defined region of study. They also occupy different positions in an economy of trauma. This difference, if we are to practice “a difficult freedom” worth its name, must be granted its experience. Anything less is a form of epistemic violence.
But what exactly is recognized? An intersectional reading of Stojan Sokolovic is absent in TEORW. His murder of two women and a child, the tight socio-economic, moral, and existential spaces that compel him to enlist in the first place, and the ethnic interpellations that hail him to a specific side are untouched. In that regard, it is a somewhat neutered philosophical study. Conversely, TPOE suggestively broaches precisely these omissions – perhaps a testament to the multi-mediated and affective form of the novelistic genre. This seems to be the point. Such potential connections are left in the hands of the reader. Yet in my reading of the novel I notice a pastiche of reified trauma; reified precisely because its connection to class, gender, ethnicity, et al is nonetheless underplayed.
What in a bygone and denigrative era was used to describe atmosphere and place is in these postmodern times compressed as psychic torment inside a single individual situated in an
(un)civil society. Here is Hammond summarizing H.A. Brown’s description of the architecture
305
of Cattaro (Kotor): “In fact, the walls, labyrinths and `fortresses' seem almost designed to guard against the foreign gaze, tantalising the English traveller at the same time as repelling him, and pronouncing that repulsion by their concealment of the town's domestic quarters, the most intimate of local spaces.” 12 This is also a quite effective encapsulation of the psychology of
Others and especially the above evidenced chasm between Dauphinee and her subject. The labyrinthine defenses of the Sokolovic Self shatters the gaze of the privileged professor,
“tantalising” and “repelling” her while hiding an essence (“domestic quarters”) if it exists at all.
Byzantine intrigue and obfuscation move inward. Hammond has effectively demonstrated that the Balkans “could also draw a positive, sympathetic style of representation that mingled with, or even overshadowed, the denigratory elements within a text.” 13 “Nevertheless,” Hammond writes
“the dominant paradigm remains that mixture of `preternatural barbarism [... ], congenital perfidy, inveterate cruelty and unfathomable complexity', a paradigm which, to begin a more general analysis of balkanism, should be established as the racial discourse that it is.” 14 The first four ingredients in this mixture Dauphinee effectively undermines. The last one, “unfathomable complexity”, she privileges to such an extent that one wonders if her discernible desire for a more profound human understanding and richer solidarity is even worthwhile. It is also the one ingredient that leaves her otherwise transgressive narrative parasitic on dominant balkanist discourses.
This is because the discourse of the Other as deployed in her narrative is fraught with some limitations; limitations that make her complicity with “colonial” power structures cozier than initially thought. Her narratives are saturated with details; they are concrete yet,
12 Andrew Hammond, The Debated Lands: British and American Representations of the Balkans (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), 31-32 13 Ibid., 37 14 Ibid.
306
simultaneously, oddly abstract. Her mode of representation, its significatory richness, implies that there is a possibility of truth and it is to be found in the minutiae of immediate exchanges.
The judicious and not uncritical use of Levinas and Derrida ensure that her focus is the present, if she is nonetheless suspicious of “presence” as a philosopheme. This present is read as, if I may echo Teresa Ebert, a “weighty materiality” located in “language or the body”; a “delectable materialism” whose “concrete is the sensuous surfaces of the everyday.” 15 Stojan Sokolovic’s world in particular is an “autonomous particularity” whose conditions of existence are generally left unexplained. Any attempt to abstract these conditions of possibility is liable to be violent and might very well depersonalize the fleshy intimacies of Otherness. Thus, what is emphasized are immediate encounters couched in a language of “distanced nearness”. “Contemplation without violence,” writes Adorno “the source of all the joy of truth, presupposes that he who contemplates does not absorb the object into himself” 16 This is, summatively, the gist of
Dauphinee’s approach. She writes:
We are trapped in violence, discursive and material, and discursive that leads to material, and material that emanates from and leads back to discursive. Accepting that there is no pure non-violence simply requires (as though it were indeed simple) that writer of violence (that is, myself) keep a vigil of sorts over the ever-present possibility of violence, always trying to minimize its impact – to choose what is less violent – to be aware, as it were, that there are ever only ‘degrees and economies of violence, some of which are more fruitful than others.’ 17
This is, to be sure, a sobering and guarded pacifism. “For Levinas” explains Dauphinee
“ethical proximity is understood as ‘contact with the other. To be in contact is neither to invest the other and annul his alterity, nor suppress myself in the other. In contact itself the touching and the touched separate, as though the touched move off, was already other, did not have
15 Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 24-25. 16 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, Reflections on a Damaged Life (London: Verso, 2005), 89-90. 17 Dauphinee, The Ethics of Researching War , 11.
307
anything in common with me.’” 18 Yet we are, for Dauphinee, always already “uniquely commanded” by the “Other” we encounter through choice or happenstance into an “ecstatic” responsibility; a responsibility in spite of ourselves. It is “[o]utside of consciousness” where “the
Other seizes me, which I experience as a moment of caress, a grip of madness that falls outside the realm of rationality, function, or ontological analyses … The ecstatic encounter, this brushing up against another world with a face and a skin that is more than a surface, but which is, at its core, a contestation, an accusation, a challenge.” 19 The “Other”, evidently, reaches out from the realm of unconsciousness – outside of reason, causality, and any sense of what ‘is’ – with discernible violence and subsequently induces insanity. One is forced to stand outside oneself; to brush up against those in whose presence s/he is condemned. I find the “ecstatic” surprise at such an encounter to be extraordinarily classed. Of what “identity of interests” is the author to find this animated and fleshy epidermis a necessarily violent “challenge”? Does she practice taken- for-granted bonds of solidarity where such surprise is so normalized it is never registered as such? Are her professional colleagues registered in the same manner? There is a clear class privilege that is subverted via contact with the “Other”, a Balkan “Other” to be more specific.
Dauphinee gets this. 20 She recognizes that Sokolovic is not her “peer in the empire of knowledge” and that she has always tried to anticipate what may befall her, writing “[i]s this not what seals my place of privilege and what allows for the wealth and luxury of anticipation?” 21
18 Ibid., 25. 19 Ibid., 24. 20 Ibid., 38. “For the Western academic,” she writes “being at large in the rest of the world for the purposes of knowledge collection and dissemination is a relatively facile accomplishment. Movement is normally a circular phenomenon, involving a lateral and hierarchical shift from here to there and back again.” 21 Ibid., 9, 8.
308
Moreover, she acknowledges, at the very least, the power/knowledge associated with professional clout. 22
Yet despite this class/professional consciousness, she is deeply unsettled by her encounters. The manner in which she is unsettled, and how she conceptualizes this shock, is telling. Built into the discourse of Otherness is an inability to fully and completely explain and/or understand things; communication is always partial, a miscommunication of sorts. “[M]y inability to explain and understand is not the mark of my ignorance,” she iterates “but is the very basic form of my existence.” 23 Making a choice to act in a particular manner “erupts out of the space of the fundamentally unknown and unknowable”, the incalculable, an “undecidability” that
“renders decision-making impossible and imperative.” 24 What such a deconstructive enterprise allows for is a heightened sense of care in ones relations with “Others”; an ethic of ‘first do no harm’. However, this allegedly aporetic space of non-violence is nonetheless violently procured.
Firstly, one must explore the violence induced simply through usage of the
“phenomenology of Otherness”. This phenomenology, for all its talk of “fraternity”, “love”,
“ecstasy”, and “responsibility” is anchored in a decidedly atomistic ontology. The natives of the
Balkans and their practical social life are trivialized via “Otherness” by exogenous scholars whose own anxieties and frustrations set the terms of interaction. Instead of attempting to subjectively capture one Stojan Sokolovic’s place within the larger social physics of international capitalism, the relations of production (economic and ideological) in pre-war and wartime
Bosnia, and the network of power relations that sculpted, injured, and armed his subjectivity –
22 There is an entire social value hierarchy in place in the academy which institutionalizes the phenomenon of the gaze, and which forms spectacles for academic consumption whose purposes are twofold and interrelated: the creation and transmission of knowledge, and the securitization of the researcher as ‘expert’ in the academic hierarchy. See Dauphinee, The Ethics of Researching War , 42. 23 Ibid., 14. 24 Ibid., 28.
309
thereby rendering him both violated and violent in the way Dauphinee wants to understand him – he becomes little more than an impressionistic “Other”. This impressionistic “Other” is no doubt sensuous, represented as a biological individual, nay, humanized on some necessary and fundamental level despite the traditionally anti-humanistic methods deployed, but is, to echo
Marx, only contemplated as a single individual in, ironically, an (un)civil society.
Secondly, one must also explore the way in which said “Otherness” is fleshed out, i.e. its defining content . The aforementioned single individual is written about in a manner parasitic on historically denigrative representations of Balkan peoples; s/he is fleshed out with balkanist qualities. The style in which Dauphinee describes her avatar speaks to the third characteristic in
Hammond’s useful typology of Balkan inferiority, namely, “obscurantism” or “obfuscation”.
This is how she describes her relationship to coffee-partner Stojan: “It is a love that admits that I and the one who sits across the table facing me over a cup of espresso on the coast beside the sea are indiscernible, ethereal, gossamerthin, inapprehensible, subject to change, subject of change.” 25 The “Other” is an “infinitude” that cannot be reduced to an Archimedean “what is”.
Yet an ontology is nonetheless presupposed; the world generally, and the Balkan world in particular, is read as lacking “coherence” and “systematization” and is constantly “unfolding” 26
Now viewing the Balkans as having an ontology of change is nothing new – Todorova and
Sijakovic make a similar claims. But the summative thickness of these adjectives ground a foundation for understanding that is ethnicized.
The Balkan agent (Sokolovic) is described as “indiscernible”, “ethereal”, “gossamerthin”,
“inapprehensible”, and “infinitude”. His world is “without coherence” and “systematization”. He simply cannot be understood because “the basic form of your existence” is your “inability to
25 Ibid., 14. 26 Ibid.
310
explain and understand”. All you can do is note “impressions, perceptions, and sensations”; affects in other words. 27 For Dauphinee, this specific “interpersonal affective relationship” is grounded in a phenomenology of darkness that is “colonial” in form. The impressionistic Stojan
Sokolovic is elucidated as mystery. For Dauphinee, the “intellect” can only “master the heart in daylight.” 28 The “difficult to grasp” “image” of Sokolovic is akin to “a terrible drive in the darkness” since it lacks the luminous lucidity of “the reality of things”. 29 Tropics of night and darkness ultimately do much to reveal her sensibility. “At night,” she writes “there [is] no rational order, because without seeing you cannot order, but you can imagine … because darkness is something Other in a world apprehended and mediated by vision. We huddle against it .” 30 Sokolovic is not only elucidated as a mystery, but is implicitly equated with unreality, irrationality, chaos, and imagination. At the very least, he is someone to be suspicious of. 31
As Mary Louise Pratt points out, the elucidating of mystery is an imaginative conquest of the travelled environment, ‘a way of taking possession without subjugation and violence’. 32
Hammond writes that “[i]t is here that the significance to balkanist discourse becomes evident.
Resembling the performative functions of discord, savagery and backwardness, the charge of obfuscation [is] essential if the rationality and cognitive authority of the autobiographical persona [is] to find any expression at all.” 33 Post-structuralist theory in the hands of Dauphinee is filtered into a sensitive universal humanism, a remedy or alternative to “totalitarian” thinking,
27 Ibid., 5. 28 Ibid., 7. 29 Ibid., 6. 30 Ibid., 7. My emphasis. 31 In fact, the inevitable “command of the Other is experienced as a convulsive trauma – an incalculable shock – an ecstasy which falls outside of the net of reason and rationality.” See Dauphinee, The Ethics of Researching War , 22. 32 Hammond, The Debated Lands , 85. 33 Ibid. Evald Ilyenkov once wrote about Lenin’s bête noir Ernst Mach that his “scheme of thinking is the scheme (logic) of thinking of an empiricist in principle who is trying to turn the peculiarities of an historically limited mode of thinking into a universal definition of thinking in general.” See Evald Ilyenkov, “The Metaphysics of Positivism: Marxism against Machism as the Philosophy of Lifeless Reaction,” Marxists.org , https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/positive/positi.htm .
311
but is “an historically limited mode of thinking” that gained (and continues to gain) popular clout in a neoliberal era and whose frameworks and methods cannot identify the manner in which they are mediated by the social physics of this era. This “scheme” corresponds to the sensibilities of a professional class concerned with preserving the equilibrium inside its universe or how to restore this equilibrium if it has been upset. Dauphinee’s equilibrium is shattered and it is in the midst of its jagged pieces where she attempts to grapple with her contradictory position.
Representing the “Other” in the terms listed above places Enlightenment rationality in the hands of the middle class professional. Knowledge of the “Other” is extended to “impressions”,
“taste”, “grief”, and “love”; the “Other” is a locus of the sensuous and it traumatizes, “disturbs”, and takes “hostage” the one who has no choice but to heed its call. 34 The “Other” is instrumentalized as a means through which one is unsettled into a more profound level of consciousness: “The approach of the Other breaks the ego away from a concern for its own existence; with the appearance of the Other, Dasein is no longer a creature concerned with its own being.” 35 Ethics, as such, is pitched “prior to being – prior to our ability to situate ourselves in a matrix of existence marked by the temporal fixity and metaphysical reliability of relationships and identities.” 36 More revealingly, “‘a responsibility for my neighbour, for the other man, for the stranger or sojourner” is something “to which nothing in the rigorously ontological order binds me – nothing in the order of the thing, of the something, of the number or
34 Dauphinee, The Ethics of Researching War , 9, 22-23. 35 Ibid., 21. There is an emancipatory aspect to this type of encounter that is simultaneously a kind of bondage, for it entails a responsibility for the Other that, to quote Dauphinee on Levinas, goes beyond what I may or may not have done to the other or whatever acts I may or may not have committed, as if I were devoted to the other man before being devoted to myself.’ This ineluctable responsibility frames my fundamental orientation toward the Other, and this is a responsibility that I cannot pass off onto another person. See Dauphinee, The Ethics of Researching War , 22. 36 Ibid.
312
causality.’ 37 This is a rather odd claim given that the Levinasian relation to the other “is not ontological or even phenomenological” 38
Mutual recognition or accompaniment does not seem compatible with this scheme because ethics has its origin outside of human social relations in some a priori eternal soul. It is said that “nothing in the rigorously ontological order binds me” to the other, but I am nonetheless externally compelled, at the risk of moral approbation, to heed its call. This is to define space as occupied by little more than isolated monads, chest-clutching monads to be sure, but no less isolated for all their existential angst. In fact, there is much in the “rigorously ontological order” that binds us, unbeknownst to us. Evolutionary biologists, historians, and political theorists from
Aristotle to Marx and Rousseau have identified and proven beyond a reasonable doubt our indomitable nature as “political animals” or “social beings”. As such, one can safely conclude that our ethics emerge simultaneously with being and not “prior to our ability to situate ourselves in a matrix of existence marked by temporal fixity and metaphysical reliability of relationships and identities.” Marx, in particular, is illuminating in this regard. “The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness,” he writes “is at first directly interwoven with the material
37 Emmanuel Levinas as quoted in Elizabeth Dauphinee, The Ethics of Researching War , 22. 38 Be that as it may, let us tease out the implications of these passages. Let us imagine the “Other” as a sub- proletarian since we have already read it through the lens of professional privilege. In other words, let us imagine the “Other” as Stojan Sokolovic. Sub-proletarians do not produce moral principles that govern or serve their behaviour, which might provide them with the psycho-genetic mettle to deal with the often humiliating and mortifying compulsion of economic relations. For Levinas, a stubborn and hard-earned ego, replete with cracks and fissures to be sure, is “demolished”; a compass of sorts is lost. What is left in its wake is ‘subordination’ to an-other’s power to restrain, control, and direct. An ego, however fragile or weighted down with resentment and its polemical locutions, nonetheless offers potential resistance to such crypto-managerial authority. Levinas renders the face of the other harbouring such authority as “unavoidable” and “imminent”, inescapable and hinting at danger, an always extant violence that mutilates any attempt the sub-proletarian might make at transcendence. When this crypto-managerial other faces me, its gaze charges me with an offense that reminds me of the ownership I lack over myself and that I am “fundamentally responsible” to its “cry” regardless of the consequences of my actions “as if I were devoted to the other man before being devoted to myself.” This is a psychology of dependence that might be a useful diagnostic of interpersonal relations in late-capitalism, but, even when viewed as a descriptive enterprise, leaves a lot to be desired. As a prescriptive enterprise it is, more often than not, contemptible. Fear for the crypto-managerial other, for their livelihood and profit-line in the anarchy of production, a world “without coherence” and “without systematization”, is also my fear. My sense of being is unsettled only insofar as the sanctity and privileges of the other are under threat. See Dauphinee, The Ethics of Researching War , 22.
313
activity and material intercourse of men, the language of real life.” 39 Furthermore, “[t]he production of life, both of one’s own in labour and of fresh life in procreation, now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relationship.” 40
We produce ethics as we produce the means of life. Marx is quite convincing about the simultaneous nature of this peculiarly human project. 41 The production of life implicates everything from “[m]orality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness”. 42 The production of life always already alloys the economic with the social. Human beings do not mutely rummage around looking for food, satiate themselves first, then find or make clothing, then procure shelter, and then, finally , begin talking, learning how to treat one another, naming or “othering” one another for the sake of intelligibility, etc. A “double relationship” entails that, at the very least, rudimentary forms of “language”, basic concepts signifying differences, authority, love, and what not, are part and parcel of the necessary quest for socio -economic sustenance. Several individuals simply cannot ration, organize, delineate tasks, distribute goods, i.e. co-operate , without these indispensible social skills. 43
Instead of taking as our starting point “consciousness taken as the living individual”, the ideological conceit of late-capitalism, – which is what Levinasian ethics and its critical adherents
39 Karl Marx, “The German Ideology,” The Marx-Engels Reader , ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 154. 40 By social we understand the co-operation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner and to what end. It follows from this that a certain mode of production, or industrial stage, is always combined with a certain mode of co-operation, or social stage, and this mode of co-operation is itself a “productive force.” See Marx, “The German Ideology,” 157. 41 Contemporary scholars such as Himani Bannerji have shown how such a reading of Marx allows for productive intersectional readings of class, race, gender, sex, disability, etc. See Himani Bannerji, Thinking Through: Essays on Feminism, Marxism, and Anti-Racism (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1995). 42 Marx, “The German Ideology,” 154-155. 43 “From the start” writes Marx “the ‘spirit’ is afflicted with the curse of being ‘burdened’ with matter, which … makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short, language.” “Language” he continues, “is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it exists for me personally as well; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men.” See Marx, “The German Ideology,” 158.
314
seem to emphasize – we begin with “real living individuals themselves” and consciousness considered as solely their consciousness. 44 So instead of starting from a transhistorical “Other”, we abstract a world in which the so-called “Other” is ostensibly situated in order to more fully concretize her existence. Dauphinee is correct to state that “one is rarely ever a transhistorical and trans-situational voiceless victim or cold-blooded perpetrator”, but one is also rarely ever “a transhistorical and trans-situational” and unnecessarily serialized “Other”. Dauphinee’s premises uphold “men” in their “fantastic isolation and rigidity” and cannot account for the pernicious ideological effects of neoliberalism. These premises, one can safely claim, are precisely the
“ideological reflexes” of a neoliberal conjuncture; reflexes that can be thought of in three ways.
Firstly, Ebert argues that the contemporary “culture of capital is regrounded in affective relations. Although these relations are represented as ethics, they are actually the logic of business relationships and deal making. Affective ethics is the basis of market networking, which embodies capital’s will to deregulation of the market.” 45 Indeed, relationship marketing “refers to a short-term arrangement where both the buyer and seller have an interest in providing a more satisfying exchange. This approach tries to disambiguously transcend the simple post purchase- exchange process with a customer to make more truthful and richer contact by providing a more holistic, personalised purchase, and uses the experience to create stronger ties.” Now such characterizations do little more than trivialize Dauphinee’s far more complex and self-reflexive approach, but there is nonetheless an interesting analogy to explore. “‘Ethics is not a moment of being,” Levinas states “‘it is otherwise and better than being; the very possibility of the beyond.’” 46 In that regard, it is more than impersonal exchange, but something “truthful and richer”, and “personalised”. A language of experience and feelings is thus mobilized in the
44 Marx, “The German Ideology,” 155. 45 Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique , 53-54. 46 Dauphinee, The Ethics of Researching War , 22.
315
pursuit of “stronger ties”, but for what purpose? Whom does this heightened awareness serve if the socio-economic divide between ethnographer and informant remains unchallenged?
Secondly, during the inaugural phases of structural adjustment between 1980 and 1991 many Yugoslavs, not unlike Stojan Sokolovic, reacted to austerity in a way that “was restricted to the personal level and to a growing realm of anti-politics.” 47 There is much truth to this and, in fact, helps to explain the dynamics of the nationalist response to the multiple mobilizations against it. The loss of purchasing power was supplemented with the emergence of more nakedly interpersonal means of procuring goods and services such as “barter, gifts, friendships, political networks, and connections, and the reciprocal obligations of kinship and ritual kinship.” 48 An economic habitus of the sort envisioned and anticipated by both neo-liberal theory and the dull compulsion of its practice failed to materialize. “Instead of encouraging market behavior as intended,” explains Susan Woodward “the reforms – by forcing people to resort to the older norms of reciprocity and mutuality – reinforced the localization of economic redistribution and the social divisions within the labor force prevalent in preceding decades.” 49 Affective relations emerge out of necessity in a conjuncture defined by accumulation by dispossession. Whether the
“in blood” loyalty of gangsterism, or the voluntaristic reciprocities of kinship networks, these are responses to a reality where socialized welfare is dissolving and exploitation and alienation ever more pronounced. Ironically, the politics of affect in many ways describes the competing cultures of nationalism and jingoism in the region. For many, the “ecstatic” nature of national belonging works to transcend oppressive alienation amongst displaced labourers, peasants, and bureaucrats through discourses of “Serbianness” or what not.
47 Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1995), 58. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid.
316
Thirdly, the politics of affect that define Dauphinee’s approach in effect reduces the
“Other” into something akin to a commodity as understood by Marx. There is fetishism at work here. In her scheme, real living and multi-mediated individuals imbued with their own consciousness step forth as “Others” and are thus “changed into something transcendent.” 50 They are already different from real living individuals. The products of intellectual labour that frame them as “Others” have no connection to their physical properties and with the material relations that arise from them even if upholstered in thick descriptions. With “Others” and those cultural workers who, like Dauphinee, “produce” them, “there … is a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.” What
Dauphinee privileges are the products of intellectual labour as soon as they are produced as
“Others”. Post-structuralist reading techniques limit her to this. Hers is a “touristic vision … constructed by way of an oscillating series of objectifying strategies: reduction to surface spectacle; mystification; assimilation to Western structures of aesthetics, narrative, or scientific explanation; reduction to a simplistic surface/depth model demanding unveiling; totalization; essentialization; and synecdochic consumption, accumulation, and representation.” 51
Her semi-fictional approach, ironically, shares these properties. Sokolovic is immobilized in TPOE; his sensuous practical life-activity is lost. His intentions are “incomprehensible”, his name itself a kind of witness protection. The sound of his voice is mediated by Dauphinee and the content of his conversation is reconstructed, which is, if we are to take her theoretical
50 Karl Marx, “Capital, Volume One” in The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 320. 51 Dauphinee, The Ethics of Researching War , 43. In fact, she takes as her starting point an image she kept ever since her first trip to the Balkans and that adorns the cover of The Ethics of Researching War ; a snapshot of a stoic Orthodox priest with a man praying just behind him. This is an objectification to be sure, a compelling simulacrum, but whose form Dauphinee takes as an ontological assumption. “The priest is immobilized in the film,” she meditates “his intentions are lost, his name is denied, the sound of his voice and the content of his conversation destroyed. Photography is a hostage-taker. Devoid of any core meaning outside of the unknown intentions of the photographer, the politics of imaging seeks to naturalize particular interpretations of meaning, and the photograph becomes a tool in the service of other goals.” See Dauphinee, The Ethics of Researching War , 59-60.
317
approach at face value, a kind of destruction. The delectable materialism of her approach is a hostage-taker. Devoid of any core meaning outside of the intentions of the researcher, the politics of fictionalizing ironically naturalizes dominant interpretations of meaning. 52 In short, a fundamentally unequal world of atomized and “hyperreal” “Others” is the ontological starting point for her reflections.
But, if the acknowledged affinity between the “touristic experience” and fieldwork is true, then her experience “is always already mediated through … technologies that explore, apprehend, and reify the peoples and cultures that serve as objects of the traveler’s desire.” 53
This is my point. Her attempt at concretizing life on the ground is in actuality an “objective idealism”. Sokolovic is mystified, reduced to surface spectacle, with the backdrop that anchors his movements decidedly cinematic in form and content. He is a part that stands in for a whole – the “war criminal”, “aborigine”, “Serb”, and/or “the Balkans” broadly conceived – and is thus consumed synecdochically. Moreover, as stated above, Dauphinee’s entire problematic starts from a “surface/depth model demanding unveiling” and unveil she does, stripping bare and complicating stock and barrel prejudices fixing Serbs, war criminals, and Bosnians under a specific gaze. In other words, she empties out consensus stereotypes in order to construct afresh a counter-discourse, i.e. she grants the proverbial void its experience. She smells, touches, listens to, and sees it. But by immersing herself in the void, in the aporia that is the Balkans, its complications, intrigue, and black humour, and representing it as such, she recuperates as counter-discourse a classic balkanist trope. “Voids and vacuums are heralds of danger” she
52 Yet it cannot be said across the board of fiction that it “naturalizes dominant interpretations of meaning”. Fiction has a prominent literary place in challenging dominant interpretations of meaning at many historical junctures. Indeed, the list of subversive fiction is endless; from the race-consciousness of James Baldwin and Richard Wright, to the feminist modernism of Virginia Woolf. 53 Dauphinee, The Ethics of Researching War , 43.
318
writes “When we start talking about voids and vacuums, we answer with the language of occupation, penetration, filling up – with the language of ontology – ‘thingness’.” 54 Or when we decide to embrace the void and maintain a vigil over penetrative violence, even sometimes holding it back to preserve a vibrating “now”, what we are left with is still violently representational, if put forth as non-representational. Where she stands is popularly understood as unoccupied, unfilled, useless, empty, having no legal force or validity, and, appropriately, containing no matter. This is classic balkanist obfuscation, hinting as it does at backwardness and chaos. This is the theatrical stage for phenomenal “Others”. 55
What seems to be most dangerous in her implied economy of violence, no doubt due to her position as a tenured professor and field worker, is scholastic violence; speech and, especially, writing. One must unveil, deconstruct, and stall the trajectory towards representational closure; the “will to power” in other words. Doing so might produce a politically navigable present: “The suspension of time as telos and trajectory – the opening up of time as an immediacy, which is its corresponding urgency – provides the framework of engagement with the Other because it retains the urgency of the need to respond without postponing it into an ever-more-distant future.” 56 But how do we properly respond if we do not also try to attain a
54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., 85. 56 Her reconsideration “of the epistemological and ontological commitments that inform most fieldwork, for all the novel insights it provides, is still a prisoner of neoliberal balkanism. Here is Dauphinee on the “Other’s” relationship to “justice” – a case in point that highlights a number of the themes brought up above:
The Other calls for justice just out past the water’s edge. Particular Other’s call out – they cry out – sometimes without speaking or articulating anything at all – sometimes just with the expressions on their faces or the moisture in their eyes or the way their hands reach out before them – to supplicate, to grab hold of, to balance their fragile bodies as they run – to throw their exhausted, salt-soaked faces down on the earth – to get there before they are gotten. The cry of the Other is equally a speaking; it is equally a string of profanity in a throat full of rage. It is not the call of the Infinite that makes me sleepless, but of the particular – of those who bear proper names. The call comes only in the here and now, over a particular event, it proceeds from human throats – from living flesh and dead – from bound and binding agents. (Dauphinee, The Ethics of Researching War , 53, 101)
319
“total” knowledge of the Other? The “opening of time as an immediacy” ensures that any inquiry starts with the particular. But is it enough for either party – the interlocutor and the Other – to begin and end a study merely with what people say and think? Dauphinee is astute enough to know that a proper social scientific inquiry cannot start with “men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh.” Indeed, there is a thick and weighty discursive mummification that immobilizes the likes of Stojan Sokolovic as “war criminal”,
“genocidaire”, “Balkan”, and “Serb” – with these strips of signification not at all unrelated to one another in such an embalmment. Conversely, Sokolovic’s utterances and queries alone, bereft of an examination of “all [their] facets … connections and ‘mediations’”, might compromise the quality of our engagement with him and Others like him. His may very well be an experience one is sufficiently distanced from due to class, language, and status to warrant the appellation
“incalculable”, but the sensitive suspension of judgment that might minimize the violence inherent in such an encounter need not forsake a more thorough or multi-mediated understanding
I call this instance of poetic license an example of “deconstructive de-civilizing”; a narrative stripping bare of everything that renders the “Other” human in order to “re-civilize” it according to deconstructive principles. In this instance, the particular is generalized. The Other is someone forever under threat of drowning or being washed away. Why? What kind of conjuncture is it that either (a) produces material agents/victims of this sort; and/or (b) popularizes a critical framework geared towards viewing Others in such declassed, de-raced, and de-gendered ways? What is signified here is a visible yet muted subalternity; a hungry, teary, and physically “exhausted” body – “bare life” as Agamben might call it or “a life exposed to death”. Yet this so-called subaltern can speak, if only in “a string of profanity in a throat full of rage.” These particular Other’s angrily curse their plight in faithless locutions of vulgarity strangely reminiscent of the stereotyped “mob” or “underclass” – only this time conceptually separated from the pack. This call is read as a presence emanating from real bodies, dead or alive, imbued with a nominal identity; they are identifiable insofar as they are little more than labeled meat. Indeed, there are many tropes at work in this colourful example of literary license. Firstly, the named flesh is seemingly mortified, attempting to escape, profanely crying out for justice and thus leaving the authorial agent “sleepless”; the connotations with nightmares and, given their outstretched arms and tenuous gait (“balance their fragile bodies”), zombies is rather pronounced. If they are not “bare life”, then they are surely “barely life” given the symbolism deployed. Secondly, and following from the suggested correlation with proletarian stereotypes, these bodies are tired and wanting – labored in some way or another – with an evident allusion to the “salt of the earth” (“salt-soaked faces down on the earth”); in other words, they signify humble and unpretentious people. Finally, the trope of endangered children, not unrelated to the other two, is easily discernible. A kind of tortured and surreal birth ritual seems to be taking place in the move away from water and the beggarly weakness that defines their inarticulate and crying (“moisture”) bodies. What can we conclude from the subtext that animates these philosophical abstractions? Why is the Other aestheticized as such and what does this ultimately obscure? What presently makes such representations so lucrative, convenient, and possible? Finally, how does this help us think through the metonymic Stojan Sokolovic in a manner that does not trap us in discourses of victimhood?
320
of the Other. Dauphinee seems to recognize this when she approvingly quotes Derrida as saying:
‘Not only must we calculate, negotiate the relation between the calculable and the incalculable
… but we must take it as far as possible, beyond the place we find ourselves and beyond the already identifiable zones of morality or politics or law.’ 57
But this political and epistemological outreach is substantively different from the one operative in, for example, the Marxist tradition. Yes, any viable notion of “justice” must be footed in a concrete present – and multiple ones at that. Setting off from some all-encompassing
“mystical authority of beginning” lends itself to specific power-leveraged interests claiming to speak on behalf all others. It is not the starting point per se that is problematic, but the manner in which this starting point is conceived. The starting point for ethics and/or analysis is “the pain of the undecidable”; “suffering”, “pain”, and “madness” because it is, allegedly, a locus of “human sweat and tears”. 58 This is analogous to a discourse of victimhood. However, this is to speak and write about anything “opened” in these terms as categorically languishing, injured, and/or hysterical. This is only one part of the equation, and it may not even be an accurate one. Once coded in these terms, “justice” can easily take the shape of a civilizing mission – although it is not predisposed to do so. One, in effect, starts from a position of assigned victimhood. Everyone is, in different degrees to be sure, violated; a perennial subject of violence. Dauphinee’s approach declares, theologically, that we are all sinners. This is a step forward. “[T]he point” she explains,
is to recognize that categories of perpetrator and victim are not unambiguous, that the grey zone which Agamben identifies means that we cannot unproblematically elevate the particular into the universal. To do so is to recognize that none of us is wholly innocent, that there is no pure non-violence, that we are all participants in political and social
57 Dauphinee, The Ethics of Researching War , 83. 58 Ibid.
321
practices that reify frontiers and excise what does not fit into the narrative that constitutes the myth of the righteous Self. 59
Stojan Sokolovic is “morally bankrupt” and as an “Other” he cannot be represented because he lies outside of Dauphinee’s “tangible experience”, “outside of [her] skin”. 60 “[T]here is no possibility of cognition, interpretation, calculation,” she states “and no amount of time allotted to the ‘problem’ will overcome it.” 61 In fact, “human calculation must be suspended in order that faith can enter in – faith in what is incomprehensible and in what is otherwise impossible.” 62 Balkan Others are obscurantist, obfuscated – you cannot use “human calculation” on them; the methods of scientific inquiry are useless since “there is no possibility of cognition, interpretation, calculation”. One must simply have faith in what is “incomprehensible … impossible.” One must maintain a “non-ethical opening of ethics”, i.e. ensure that bodies and their speech are never foreclosed, regardless of how painful their “truth” might be. Ironically, the discourse that is deployed to jack open closures is not value-neutral and shares much in common with existentialism, including its more egregious limitations. For all the talk about “thingness” being a consolidation of the totalitarian moment in the “void”, it is in fact the ontological content of the “void” itself. What deconstruction shares with existentialism is a (violent) universalization of a world of “thingness”. Primacy is given to surface bodies; hell really is “Other” people.
Seeing “Others” first and foremost as harbingers of psychic discomfort is a great way to undermine potential solidarities. These are the sentiments of capitalist civil society. Ironically, biological individuals end up coming across as property to be preserved as opposed to personalities capable of transformation. “No Trespassing” seems to be the implied motto of aporia. Moreover, the veritable value-loaded language of “voids”, “vacuums”, and “aporias”, and
59 Ibid., 94-95. 60 Ibid., 78. 61 Ibid., 98. 62 Ibid., 100.
322
what they are alleged to do (i.e. “unsettle”, “destabilize”, etc) brings with it its own racial apparatus. The consequences of this as politics and representation need to be addressed.
Dauphinee sees any knowledge of social totality as necessarily violent. As a discursive or political regime, totalitarianism renders people superfluous. The closure induced by totalitarian thinking amputates all other possible modes of being and creates limited agents. Politically, liberty is muted and only basic needs are met. Her decision to quote Arendt in this regard is telling. Here is the passage in full: “‘Men insofar as they are more than animal reaction and fulfillment of functions are entirely superfluous to totalitarian regimes. Totalitarianism strives not over despotic rule over men, but toward a system in which men are superfluous.’” 63 This hints at the fact that Dauphinee is indeed aware of the import and sinister influence of systems ; that all is not simply a matter of a thickly-detailed concrete. One wonders why such awareness is not brought to bear on the abstract forces that condition her work and, tangentially, why Cold
War battles are still being fought in the 21 st century. She does at one point acknowledge that capitalism ‘transmutes all culture, emotion, identity, into a form open to exchange’ and her project is undoubtedly an attempt to transcend such narrow forms of human intercourse – especially the narrowness of the academic research project that claims to apprehend a social totality. 64
63 Ibid., 87. 64 Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique , 55. A starting point for discussion might be provided by Ebert: “Reconfiguring the body on the surface, in other words, produces knowledge of the singular, which is the aim of the analytics of the flat. It moves the focus of cultural critique away from the collective and abstract to the concrete and individual and thus blocks any knowledge of social totality. Knowledge of social totality is a dangerous knowledge for her project because any critique that makes sense of the material logic of culture – showing how all the seemingly disparate practices are connected to the logic of production – will unmask corporeal epistemology as an ideological project aimed at normalizing the logic of the market through an inversion of depth and surface (essence and appearance). Such an inversion represents the reality of the market – its concrete everyday – as the real, when it is, in actuality, an inversion of what takes place at the point of production.” See Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique , 55
323
Yet precisely because she does not historicize her own theoretical approach, the bogeyman of “exchange-value” continues to exist in her ontological co-ordinates. Here it might be helpful to read Arendt through Marx while foregrounding the ubiquity of neoliberal capitalism in order to state that men insofar as they are more than animal reaction and fulfillment of functions are entirely superfluous to neoliberal capitalist regimes . Neoliberal capitalism strives not over despotic rule over men, but toward a system in which men are superfluous. In other words, they are made unnecessary, needless, and easily replaceable – by other men or machines – as soldiers, labourers, lovers, etc. Her characters in TPOE demonstrate this.
Reframing the problem away from ossified Cold War concepts and towards a political economy of sorts allows us to posit questions such as: Why is Stojan Sokolovic superfluous? Who was successfully interpellated as a soldier and why? What were the socio-economic origins of soldiers in the Bosnian Serb army?
Stojan Sokolovic is an ethnographic and philosophical problem insofar as he is also a problem of political economy. Vacating the terrain of the latter delinks the social from the economic, breaking the “double relationship” Marx writes of and subtracting the agent in question from the multiple mediations of social humanity. Moreover, what remains is a meditative form of civic emancipation; let’s simply recognize ourselves as unencumbered difference in a world of structural inequality – which is tantamount to legitimizing that inequality. The deconstructive ethos, abstracted from the social physics of neoliberal capitalism
(and the historical process broadly conceived), becomes an internal generality that unites displaced wage-labourers, disabled veterans, raped women, et al, as “Others” and, as such, fixes them as abstract and isolated. They are, of course, more than that and such identitarian and, more importantly, historical surpluses cannot be mapped without a more athletic logic. Dauphinee is
324
correct insofar as we must go beyond identifiable zones of politics, morality, or law. But the means used in pursuit of this simply cannot prioritize the democratic potential of the concrete without fully historicizing said concrete in order to thoroughly, well, concretize it. The “whole of human experience” is inextricably linked “with human wants”, i.e. our practical sensuous activity, and Stojan Sokolovic’s subjectivity must be mediated within a historically specific set of social relations; his “purpose, use and connection with the surrounding world.” “Total” knowledge is not something we can completely achieve, but to not even make the attempt leaves the object of our knowledge as little more than an instrumentalized plaything whose primary purpose is heightening our “self-reflexivity”. Contrary to the-violence-of-abstraction critics, this method iterates that “there is no such thing as abstract truth, truth is always concrete”. 65
Balkanist Significations
The second level in which Stojan Sokolovic is constructed is detailed, concrete, and impressionistic. But before illustrating the extent to which Dauphinee’s theoretical and fictional universes are parasitic on what Andrew Hammond perceptively refers to as a new “denigrative” era of balkanism, it is important to clearly define my use of the term. Popularized by Maria
Todorova in her 1997 classic Imagining the Balkans , balkanism is defined in opposition to
Edward Said’s influential concept of Orientalism. Balkanism is not Orientalism insofar as it relates to: (a) a concrete geographic locale; (b) signifies robust masculine notions of uncouth vigour often slipping into truculence; (c) privileges the liminal vis-à-vis Europe and “the Orient”;
(d) is preoccupied with a “white” Christian “Other” already constituted against a shady, i.e.
Islamo-Turkic, image; and (e) refers to a part of the world no doubt at the whim of Great Power intrusions, but not “colonized” in the same sense as India or Africa. Nonetheless, balkanism is a
65 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (The Crisis in Our Party),” Marxists.org , https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1904/onestep/r.htm .
325
power/knowledge discourse concomitant with the rise of industrial society in Great Britain and continental Europe that, according to Todorova, congeals into its familiar denigrative form during and after the First World War. Moreover, Hammond views Todorova’s definition as
“useful shorthand” for the tropes of “chaos, savagery, discord, and obfuscation” that he deploys in his study and finds balkanism to be “a far more unstable and mutable concept”. I use his persuasively-distilled tropes in my critique of Dauphinee’s texts due to their elasticity and economy while paying heed to points (b) through (e) above.
If we are to see Dauphinee as representative of Euro-Atlantic power, insofar as she consciously traverses the space disciplined by the EU, UN, and NATO – akin to anthropologists of a bygone era (an analogy not lost on her) – one could argue, a la Sijakovic, that she is a
“colonizer” who “dominates” because that is simply what power/knowledge does. The rub is that these “colonizers”, in their own way, present themselves as “civilizers”: “A civilizer generously invites the ‘Other’ to become a human being and equal to him, but through self-destruction and acceptance of a role as the object of domination”; perhaps not self-destruction, but self-reduction for sure. 66 Dauphinee grapples valiantly with her own complicity in “colonial discourse” and the authorial power she cannot help but wield over her “aborigine” Stojan Sokolovic. Sijakovic writes:
In the colonial discourse the colonized is the aborigine, and the colonizer is his civilizer, so that domination (which is always established for the purpose of making a profit) has a moral excuse: the ‘Other’ is a barbarian (it seems that only in the scientifically imagined etat naturel de l’homme may he receive the mark ‘good’: bon sauvage ). And as a bon sauvage he is outside the sphere of morality. According to this he could be, or should be, pushed out of the sphere of law too: moral and judicial norms are not to be applied to the lower orders of humanity, and the ‘civilized’ are exempted from the responsibility of what happens to the ‘uncivilized’ (that is an ethical and juridical selectivism). When the ‘Other’ is constructed as ‘foreign’ and ‘alien’, then communication with him is principally impossible. 67
66 Sijakovic, A Critique of Balkanist Discourse , 50. 67 Ibid., 54.
326
Sokolovic is her “aborigine” whom she “dominates” epistemologically – he is an avatar, a composite of people she encountered while conducting fieldwork in the Bosnia. Of course, the shift away from an empirical and detailed rendering of one’s participant observation to a semi- fictional register is pregnant with its own violence, the violence of license. As readers, we are not privy to Dauphinee’s research notes; to the people she swore secrecy to and to what aspects of this semi-fiction ring closest to the “truth”. What we do get is an affective and impressionistic representation that is parasitic on balkanist discourses (albeit in the service of a progressive ethics).
I argued how Stojan Sokolovic is a classic example of balkanist obfuscation gone
“inside” or psychologized. I now want to read him in conjunction with Todorova’s definition of balkanism. He embodies a robust yet sensitive masculinity, not being afraid to cry, but commanding and insistent when it is a matter of something he wants. 68 The author encounters him “[o]n the other side of a threshold”, “tall, broad-shouldered … with eyes that were so light they were unsettling.” 69 Throughout the novel Dauphinee regularly foregrounds his eyes and, more generally, the epistemological importance of the ocular. 70 These “dark”, “strange”,
“colorless”, and “pale” receptacles are, in a word, uncanny and enlivened in opaque and/or dark environments; “illuminated” by the “muted and grey” light shining through a “Victorian window” while achieving an incandescence “in the pale light of the moon” as they sit “deep in the gathering twilight”. 71 Such ocular luminescence buttresses a masculinity that has a magnetic pull to say the least. Sokolovic’s “gaze” is quizzical and “unwavering” as it emanates from eyes that are “really very strange … - really nearly colorless so that they contrast between the pupil
68 Dauphinee, The Politics of Exile , 110, 28. 69 Ibid., 5, 26. 70 Ibid., 2, 43, 180, 23, 1, 128, 208, 121, 12, 26. 71 Ibid., 28, 162, 121.
327
and the iris [is] actually rather jarring at first.” 72 “The seconds ticked by” Dauphinee writes
“while Stojan Sokolovic stared patiently at me. And I saw that I wanted to go with him, but I didn’t know why. Against my rational judgment, I gathered up my coat and my wallet in silence.” 73 The inexplicable imperative induced by his presence softens the rational faculty of a professor who in another instance is described by Sokolovic as “too economical”. 74 He clearly gives off a bit more than a hint of the vampiric, and one intimately tied to his masculinity.
However, it is important not to overdraw this analogy as Sokolovic, as a displaced and traumatized immigrant, nonetheless embodies a complexity that is deeply and familiarly human.
Yet he enters a scene in the rain with an unreadable face, has a “long-voweled accent” and, at one point, our female narrator, while crashing at his place, expresses how she “struggled with the urge to get up and go into his bedroom.” 75 The conflation of a classic Balkan stereotype with a sturdy masculinity is not insignificant, if not as egregious as representations past. “Stojan” literally means “to stand fast”; a firm pillar in the face of chaos and strife. There is a phallic currency to this characterization that is not lost on our author who, I suspect, is more than a little well-versed in Serbian folklore.
This masculinity is also underscored by a casual gregariousness and charity that has an orientalist timbre – thereby also iterating Sokolovic’s liminality – and often takes our narrator aback. Sokolovic is imbued with “a deep, rich laugh that made him happily unaware of himself”, reads coffee grounds as per tradition, and harbors a majestic singing voice that triggers orientalist awe in our narrator. 76 “[H]is singing” she reflects “filled my veins up with a kind of strange,
72 Ibid., 26, 28. 73 Ibid., 28. 74 Ibid., 116. 75 Ibid., 23, 12, 122. 76 Ibid, 114.
328
muted ecstasy.” 77 Of course, his cavalier approach to structured time, always interrupting our narrator at random moments, surreptitiously attending her lectures, and asking pointed questions while insisting on coffee and/or lunch, reveals him to be a casual laborer. He translates texts for the courts and picks up freelance work of a similar vein when and where he can – a far cry from the engineering studies he dropped because of “a logic” in them he detested. 78 This occupational precarity also speaks to the nature and quality of his material possessions which Dauphinee describes as an extension of his rough proletarian comportment. Initially irritated by his Socratic pushiness, she begins to feel pity towards him. Even his propensity to question the unnamed professor’s academic expertise is grounded in a Balkan self-identity at once ethnicized and classed. “If I say it’s wrong,” he declares “you will tell yourself that I’m a Serbian peasant that doesn’t understand what he’s read.” 79 Moreover, his “worn brown leather” bag and the torn sole of his shoe iterate a relative poverty that he is also quite conscious of. 80 “I’m from a small, pathetic village,” he says “[w]hich means I have no taste for fashion.” 81 Nor does he adhere to the stuffy proprieties of middle class table manners as he at one point places a roasted chicken down on a milk crate, silently tears a leg off of it, and, while eating, hand-gestures to his guest to take part in this coarsely egalitarian set up. 82 Amongst other things, he lacks access to the
Internet, eats at the nightmarish “Gurkha Grill”, and incites enough magnanimity in our narrator that she considers overpaying him for his translation of her work. 83 At one point, she wonders if what ineluctably draws her to him is precisely his hardship.
77 Ibid., 134. 78 Ibid., 126. 79 Ibid., 119. 80 Ibid, 24, 12, 25. 81 Ibid., 110. 82 Ibid., 127. 83 Ibid., 126, 7, 25.
329
An integral part of balkanist discourse according to Todorova and Hammond is its conflation with discourses of class. Hammond states that cross-cultural discourses “can mirror the discourses of class, both working to legitimate forms of bourgeois cultural authority.” 84
Similarly, Todorova points out how nineteenth-century balkanism was often directed against “the poor and unpolished, but Christian, upstarts, who have been described in a discourse almost identical to the one used to depict the Western lower classes, a virtual parallel between the East
End of London and the East End of Europe.” 85 Dauphinee’s exilic Stojan Sokolovic is cut from this tattered cloth. Slyly vampiric, in time and presence, an embodiment of the extra-logical and ecstatic, he is indeed Christian, “poor and unpolished” and an “upstart” steadfastly trying to live a damaged life. He chats up his interlocutor “while sitting on milk crates” in a “small apartment” holding a “modest cluster of books”. 86 His tacky yet tidy “peasant” tastes exist to be forgotten. 87
“Things were clean and well cared for,” the narrator explains “but that was the most that could be said for the place. The pictures on the wall were generic poster prints of green fields and sunsets and sailboats in plastic frames. One would be tempted to forget them on moving day, I thought.” 88 Not unlike the creased countenance of Sokolovic himself, the apartment walls looked
“tired” and the hardwood floor “scuffed” in this “old concrete building with balconies that looked like they were going to collapse in a heap of tangled, flaking rust at any moment” – an architectural foreshadowing of Sokolovic’s psychological breakdown near the end of the novel. 89
Dauphinee’s “delectable materialism” often translates spatial details and otherwise unnoticed minutiae into the elegiac:
84 Hammond, The Debated Lands , 61. 85 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 18. 86 Dauphinee, The Politics of Exile , 52. 87 Of course, these tastes only exist to be forgotten in conditions of exile, and not because of where he hails from. 88 Dauphinee, The Politics of Exile , 52. 89 Ibid., 52, 183-189.
330
And then he carried [coffee] on an old tray out onto the rusting balcony, where he set it on the scarred plastic milk crate between two folding chairs that were held precariously together with tarnished brass hardware. Each chair had a blue cushion, but it was a different hue than the blue of the coffee cups. And these were both a different hue than the blue in the eyes of Stojan Sokolovic, which were so strangely pale. 90
But they were all blue. Stojan Sokolovic is rendered an organic extension of his environment; the post-traumatic stress that coils and trembles just under his public persona is reflected in a material world always already on the cusp of falling apart. “I was the professor,” surmises the narrator “and he the one that worked at odd jobs that probably barely covered his rent. I didn’t know then that poverty was a relative term.” 91
Theoretically, Dauphinee is unsatisfied with abstract “totalitarian” thinking; she wants contemplation – a world apprehended via religious sentiment as filtered through the theological sensibilities of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Yet this religious sentiment, anchored as it is to a deconstructive exercise, is itself a social product and the avatar she analyzes – one
Stojan Sokolovic – is, ironically, an abstract individual who belongs to a particular form of society. Stojan Sokolovic is a working class neoliberal subject; alienated, culturally liminal, occupationally precarious, and a product of what Pierre Bourdieu has called “social suffering”.
This particular form of society, in its overdetermined causation, registers as a stable yet impenetrable backdrop in her narrative. In TEORW, we get clues as to Sokolovic’s socio- economic position:
Stojan Sokolovic could not get a visa to interview me in my authentic surroundings if his life depended on it. For Stojan Sokolovic, having the money to visit me makes him all the more suspicious to consular officials. For Stojan Sokolovic, the boundaries are marked by rigidity and exclusion. So the notion of being at large does not necessarily coincide with the traversing or erasure of boundaries, although boundaries for western academics (and tourists) are rather porous. Instead, being at large depends fundamentally on the nature of boundaries, especially for Others, which is the way in which we become aware of our
90 Ibid., 53. 91 Ibid.
331
own freedom of movement. Were it not for Stojan Sokolovic’s physical confinement to the territory on which he lives, my freedom to enter his world would be a non-issue, not even interesting enough to comment on. It is his incarceration, imposed by the poverty of the passport that underwrites the range of my mobility. And so one still operates, even at large, in a state informed by confinement of the Self and of the Other which underwrites the notion of being at large. 92
Sokolovic experiences territorial “physical confinement” or “incarceration” that is rigid and exclusive. He is written up as almost congenitally incapable of getting a visa. The mere fact of having money stigmatizes him in the eyes of border guards. Is he a war profiteer or perhaps a seljac (peasant) to whom disposable income is viewed as anomalous? Why is he so fixed? What might help explain his “confinement” rather than simply stating the fact that he is confined?
These are questions Dauphinee must answer if she is interested in understanding Stojan
Sokolovic as an “Other” or, more importantly, more than a mere “Other” – a social being. In
TPOE, clues as to the social class of her informant as well other combatants emerge. Located in the hills around Sarajevo the rural Sokolovici do not strike one as middle class or opulently privileged in any way. Amongst the brothers, Vladimir works as a foreign temp or Gastarbeiter in Germany while Luka briefly tries his luck in Belgrade with Stojan taking up more martial pursuits out of obligation and/or necessity. As children and adolescents it was evidently quite an event for them to trek down to the city and “look in record stores or visit nightclubs.” 93 A motherless brood, the Sokolovici were not one of the many Serbs who Tim Judah identifies as being able to flee the country prior to, and just during, the outbreak of war. 94
92 Dauphinee, The Ethics of Researching War , 38. 93 Dauphinee, The Politics of Exile , 42. 94 Judah writes that “[t]he hardest hit by the impoverishing effects of the war and economic collapse were Serbia’s professional and middle classes. Unlike most ordinary workers, they were far less likely to have family in the villages or living abroad as Gastarbeiters .” But these professional and middle class refugees – nearly 200,000 from 1991-1995 – did have much-in-demand cultural and social capital that especially impressed Canadian officials. They “were highly skilled and highly educated” and “were not just from Serbia and Montenegro” but “included the remnants of the educated middle classes from Krajina, Serbs who had left government-controlled Croatia and Bosnian Serbs too.” See Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 276-277. I might add to this that the new Europe is little more than a desire, if not an
332
Stojan Sokolovic and his broken family and friends ultimately immigrate to Canada, a country that Himadeep Muppidi persuasively argues “is the new Europe.” 95 Muppidi’s commentary on the Eurocentric conceits of Dauphinee’s novel is one of the more astute critiques available, and helps me develop parts (c) and (d) of Todorova’s definition of balkanism as it pertains to the novel’s tropics. With Stojan Sokolovic, we are dealing with someone whose liminality operates on multiple planes; an engineering student who writes freelance copy; a rural
Bosnian Serb in a broader ethnic economy of Serbdom dominated by “Serbian Serbs”; an
Orthodox Christian defined in opposition to Islam yet rendered strange in a Canadian context; a soldier sculpted by a culture of Balkan patriotism, a perpetrator of its crimes no less, who chooses a “communist” church for advice as opposed to a “nationalist” one; one who occupies a space that according to friends and family is simultaneously “Europe” and something pejoratively other; someone who speaks a nominally nether-language that is and is not “Serbo-
Croatian”; and one who does not fully feel “at home” in Canada as encapsulated in his pastiche understanding of English: “I feel confused a lot. When I’m translating things sometimes, I forget
English words, and then I forget Serbian words. I feel like I’m losing my Serbian, but then I think my English will never improve enough.” 96 His Self is a mirror-stage webbed in fissures, yet still struggling to reflect a whole image.
Sokolovic’s Serbian identity is present but loose; one noticeably deconstructed through experience. He does little to humour a war comrade’s nervous crypto-eulogy to Kosovo, at one point blurting out “Fuck Kosovo” in response. 97 Appalled by his father’s parroting of state television’s warning that “the Turks mean to kill us”, he desires to have the television turned
outright impossibility, as it often denies and even deports those it rhetorically claims are welcome. The attempt to create a new Europe in Canada is as unsuccessful as “Europe” ever was. 95 Muppidi, “On The Politics of Exile ”, 306. 96 Dauphinee, The Politics of Exile , 111. 97 Ibid., 105.
333
off. 98 He is in many respects the exact opposite of the Kurtz-like uber-nationalist Ivan, whom
Dauphinee objectifies as “the Ivan”, a frothing Id of a man reminiscent of Joseph Conrad’s infamous character and Tom Berenger’s Bob Barnes from Platoon (1987). The seeds of
Sokolovic’s deconstructive disposition is planted early and this against an ecology of patriotic interpellation that has his mother sympathize with Gavrilo Princip, refer to her sons martially as
“falcons”, and excite his father into a nationalist frenzy. Refreshingly, Dauphinee seems to have faith in everyday people coming to critical terms with conditions into which they are seemingly punted. There is populism at work here that is open to all; a faith in what David Campbell terms
“a deconstructive ethos”.
Whither “Europe”? Early on, Sokolovic’s brother routinely denies the coming of war with the mantric “This is Europe!” War happening on “European” soil is simply unreasonable to him whereas his lover Jelena and Stojan are firm in their Balkan self-identity with Jelena declaring “It’s not fucking Europe!” 99 Muppidi argues that Dauphinee anchors this balkanist liminality to a rearticulated “Europe” as a transportable ideal of peace, order, and, well, good government:
In Europe there is no war; there can be no war. Europeans are not allowed to kill each other by the world. In Europe, one can be something else, something better. Europe is different and better than the rest of the world. Maybe, difficult as it is to imagine, Bosnia is not in Europe; Bosnia once was but is no longer in Europe; Bosnia has exiled itself from Europe, and hence war and irrationality and disorder are all coming their way. But Europe is still alive. It is now in Canada. Canada is the new Europe. Whether they were in Europe or not, whether Bosnia was exiled from Europe or not, Europe remains the ideal home … 100
Europe, its alleged civility, “whiteness”, freedom, and tranquility, is something to aspire to; an ideal, ironically, within whose Canadianized borders Sokolovic suffers both
98 Ibid., 47. 99 Ibid., 35, 47-48. 100 Muppidi, “On The Politics of Exile ”, 306.
334
psychologically and socio-economically. Muppidi is correct to point out that this recuperation of
European exceptionality is “ugly”, but Dauphinee’s noted stand on “Europe” is far less idealistic.
“Europe justified its own history of outrage” she writes “by identifying it now everywhere else.” 101 “Europe”, in this register clearly a reference to its Western half since the “everywhere else” includes Bosnia, possesses its own internal history of violence. There is nothing to idealize here. In TEORW, Dauphinee is unambiguous about Western Europe’s sanguinity and the global reach of the sanguine more generally:
The political and mechanical technologies of death that made possible the Shoah are not exceptional. They make possible the camp, the gas chamber, the killing field, the torture chamber, the electric chair, the firing squad, the tenuous torturous limbo of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. We are part of the politics of normalization with respect to mass violence and the normality of our everyday lives bears witness against us to that effect. 102
Thus one does not rule out the inference that such violence is indeed part and parcel of the Canadian past and present and in fact a documented legacy of the ocean-hopping “Europe”.
As Aime Cesaire points out, the Shoah is an example of intra-European colonialism, honing as it did the prejudices and techniques of extra-European colonialism for domestic application. The outrage so generated grounds the exceptionalism Muppidi rightly calls to account. However,
Western Europe’s “semi-colonial” relationship to the Balkans is discernible in TPOE via allusions to the NATO bombing and the somber inevitability of structural adjustment. 103 If anything, Dauphinee’s alleged transposition of a utopic European ideal to Canada is symptomatic of an individualized politics that privileges subterfuge and lateral movement over standing ones ground in solidarity with others. This is not a failure on Dauphinee’s part, but more a comment on the theories that inform and delimit her gaze.
101 Dauphinee, The Ethics of Researching War , 88. 102 Ibid. 103 Dauphinee, The Politics of Exile , 88, 19, 96, 87, 94, 26, 82, 99, 18.
335
The consequences of neoliberalism are everywhere evident in TPOE in both form and content. With regards to the latter, Dauphinee’s penetrating eye for quotidian detail provides the reader with descriptions and dialogical moments where the systemic heft of neoliberal coercion is revealed as more than a mere backdrop, but an integral and corrosive aspect of human intercourse. Sokolovic’s relative poverty and alienation is just one of many unique “realms of necessity” in what is an aspirational economy of dispossession. The unnamed female narrator in
TPOE lives a decidedly solitary life. She studies and slumbers in a barren office, harbours a marked antipathy towards an equally austere apartment which she rents but rarely ever inhabits, and is wholly committed to excelling in her profession and in cultivating the intellectual curiosities that justify it. The apartment in which “nobody lives” is equipped with little more than bedding that “did not smell like anyone’s skin”, “two English bitters”, and an oppressive
“unfamiliarity”. 104 “It was a lonely, empty place. It had not even witnessed the cooking of a proper meal. It had not received guests, or been laughed in.” 105 Similarly, her office retains the non-descript seriousness of toil, little more than a space for Puritan labour, where one “slept under [a] desk” and “kept a toothbrush”. 106 Her passionate investment in her work is never reflected in her students given their lead-like apathy and one-note aspirations. “These days,” she writes “they mostly just worried about law or business school applications and came slinking around the office, pressing for grades to be raised.” 107 Students simply exist to “generate fees” in a “world of commodity accumulation and exchange”. 108 “Dauphinee” affirms Muppidi
“understands the workings of the economy very well, so much so that she is able to realize her own helplessness” in halting a process of “epistemic cleansing” where “diversity in modes of
104 Ibid., 124, 134, 135, 134. 105 Ibid., 134. 106 Ibid., 13. 107 Ibid., 21. 108 Ibid., 20, 5.
336
learning” everywhere generate “the same economy of truth”. 109 From the viewpoint of academics and intellectuals, this is seen as a major crime of neoliberalism and a contributing factor in the myriad misunderstandings between teacher and student, researcher and informant, etc. We are
“bury[ing] once and for all” modes of learning that emphasize thoroughness, patience, and the sort of sustained engagement that might foster a degree of emotional intimacy with the object of study. Students thus end up apprehending the world through means-to-an-end abstractions; something to be used in the service of “getting a job” and not as an end in-itself.
Muppidi rightly discourages curmudgeonly and reactionary dismissals of students as laggards or insouciant bores, sympathetically viewing their indifference as symptomatic of structural problems that implicate everyone. After all, “the servers” at the Gurkha Grill “were all students”, a clear indication that their instrumental attitude is footed in a political economy. 110 Of course, Dauphinee’s impressions are filtered through the experience of her unnamed avatar, and we share her in-class frustrations. Yet she understands the global reach of neoliberalism, even if she does not consistently focus on its structures. One telling scene illustrates an exchange between the professor and Mia, a Bosnian professor of literatures. Mia’s employer, the
University of Banja Luka, is experiencing a severe funding crisis with “[t]he union considering strike action.” 111 Both tacitly know that the strike action “would make no difference”. 112 Mia suggestively asks the narrator if some Western university might offer financial help. In response, our narrator affirms the futility of the global status quo while, at the very least, recognizing its oceanic reach:
Mia did not understand that the vast proportion of our own funding was generated by the exorbitant fees that international students paid – perhaps some of her own among them –
109 Muppidi, “On The Politics of Exile ”, 307-308. 110 Dauphinee, The Politics of Exile , 8. 111 Ibid., 18. 112 Ibid.
337
for the privilege of a diploma from a Western university. Mia did not understand that our students were swallowing down neoliberal economics like mothers’ milk and that any of her students who were ‘lucky’ enough to study at my institution would come back to be exactly those neoliberal-minded professors whose job it was to bury once and for all that old, annoying socialist order. 113
The gloss here is that Western universities exploit immigrant mental labour in order to produce a narrow and exportable “economy of truth”. They look for privileged recruits who are ostensibly already susceptible to specific class-leveraged sensibilities and aspirations. Dauphinee organicizes this process (“swallowing down neoliberal economics like mothers’ milk”) in an era when a nominally egalitarian project is experiencing rigor mortis. The biological metaphor underscores her belief that neoliberal economics is the naturalized order of things. Her tacit understanding with Mia is remarkable for its pessimism of the will:
The international ‘donors’ had a vested interest in seeing the old socialist guard disappear from the universities in that part of the world, paving the way for neoliberal-minded faculty who could teach their students about the inevitable triumph of progressive capitalism and the virtues of structural adjustment. We both knew it. But this was a tide bigger than any who might want to oppose it, and the recognition that this was so made any conversation pointless. 114
The defeatism signified in this passage proves the extent to which Dauphinee and her characters have internalized neoliberal presuppositions. Even Stojan Sokolovic, exhausted by his plight, “didn’t want to do anything collectively anymore. He wasn’t interested in community.” 115
The Promise of Theory
In an international conjuncture that, since 2008, has birthed the likes of SYRIZA, Occupy, the
Arab Spring and, more directly related to Dauphinee’s concerns, the Maple Spring in Quebec, as well as Balkan-specific forms of resistance in Montenegro, Serbia, and protests against the
Bologna educational reforms in Croatia, the obscene silence with regards to popular resistance in
113 Ibid. 114 Ibid. 115 Ibid., 139.
338
her narrative is unusual. These are struggles, first and foremost, against attempts to minimize and/or eradicate institutions necessary for the fulfillment and cultivation of human needs. They are socialized spaces insofar as they have historically and, in many instances, forcibly brought people together in order to sustain the production and reproduction of society. They are also, given the nature of recent social movements, best challenged in precisely the same manner: socially . More to the point, one of the great tragedies of the dissolution of Yugoslavia was the canalization of popular energies into nationalist practices and institutions. As V.P. Gagnon,
Susan Woodward, and Branka Magas point out, there was discernible if serialized popular resistance to the emergence of Milosevic, Tudjman, et al; direct challenges to nationalist options, worker mobilizations, an open desire to preserve a fledgling if imperfect post-war polity. The absence of durable alternatives in the face of structural adjustment allowed nationalist programs to claim the promise of these movements as well as the intellect of scholars like Magas. Whether or not these movements would have coalesced into something tenable enough to prevent war is debatable, but choosing a theoretical framework that at least allows us to gauge why they emerged and why they failed – to map the social conditions that turn labourers into war criminals
– is its own pedagogue. Dauphinee’s theological approach leaves Others as they are; as Others, as somatized traumas in (un)civil and structurally unequal societies. Theories might not “ruin your life”, but some of them might very well prevent us from seeing a qualitative hope amongst the ruins.
339
CHAPTER 9: TOWARDS A PROLETARIAN REALISM: THEORIZING CRITICAL BALKANOLOGIES FROM THE MARGINS
In the course of the 1990s, in the decade of wars, economic sanctions and crisis, Serbian society was corroded by fear, distrust and selfishness. After 2000, since the beginning of transition in the direction of capitalism and democracy, instead of the renewal of stability and relations of trust and support among colleagues, the top levels of financial and political power are sending us the message that solidarity is not a virtue any longer, that each one of us has to fight for [themselves], that everyone else is our enemy because those who arrive first at the finishing line are entitled to everything, leaving those behind without basic rights.
-Zdravko Deuric, Union of Workers and Shareholders of Serbia, April 2008 Author: Who is the poor narod? Filip: Poor narod are Croats, Serbs, and Muslims, you and me, and kids who will be born tomorrow. I am the first one … I am not guilty for who I am, or my friend Harun … we are not guilty for the war that happened. Author: Who is doing injustice to narod? Filip: Politicians, the people who are in power now. They are just looking for where they can steal something, and they only want to start fights among narod, and then to reconcile narod again, as if nothing happened. -Filip, a student at Mostar Gymansium, as interviewed by Azra Hromadzic, 2006 It was our government that sold state assets for peanuts and left the people without pensions, jobs or health insurance. -Hana Obradovic, 24 year old unemployed graduate from Sarajevo, February 6, 2014 There is a crowd on Congress Square, 5000 people. Nobody expected this. Sound system too weak. At first glance the crowd is mostly composed of individuals without organized groups. The legacy of the 20-year monopoly of “democratic parties” over political life. We open the microphone. People are stepping forward to share their hardships, their lack of future. Yesterday’s teach in at the bank has, it seems, already initiated the process of destigmatizing poverty. The multitude is organizing through personal stories, critiques of the system and alternative proposals drawn from daily life. The call to head to the Stock Exchange is widely accepted. -15o, “Occupy Slovenia”, Vecer, 2011
340
Since at least the late 1970s, economic austerity has been a constant part of both the prewar and postwar socio-economic context in the SFRY and its successor states. A rise in oil prices from
1978 to 1979 and an end to free market commercial bank lending led to the curtailment of foreign goods and, in 1982, the acceptance of a three year stand-by loan leading to “radical austerity”. 116 So-called “stabilization” dominated policy in the 1980s, culminating in Yugoslav
Prime Minister Ante Markovic’s acceptance of comprehensive IMF reforms in 1990 foreshadowing the first post-Milosevic privatization law enacted in 2001. 117
The 2008-2009 global financial crisis continued this trend and severely impacted Balkan economies with regards to external trade, foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows and remittances, ultimately generating episodic yet invigorating instances of political coherence amongst the exploited and oppressed. 118 For example, remittances, or “migrant worker transfers”, “a major economic force”, represented as much as a 14 per cent share of GDP across
Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, and Albania. 119 The Eurozone crisis, which laid off large numbers of workers across Europe, limited migrant labourers from sending invaluable sums back home. 120
After all, most of these 21 st century Gastarbeiter worked in sectors hardest hit by the recession, such as automobile manufacturing, construction and domestic work; a drying up of remittances created significant social suffering for families abroad. 121 The “double-dip” recession of 2012 resulted in remittances falling a tangible 15.8 per cent in Serbia and between 5 and 11 per cent in other Balkan countries. Moreover, Balkan exports to the Eurozone fell noticeably from 2011 to
116 Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1995), 48-49. 117 Martin Upchurch and Darko Marinkovic, “Wild Capitalism, Privatisation, and Employment Relations in Serbia” in Employee Relations 33, no. 4 (2011), 325. 118 Will Bartlett and Ivana Prica, “The Deepening Crisis in the European Super-periphery,” Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 15, no. 4 (2013), 367. 119 Ritsa Panagiotou, “Effects of the Global Economic Crisis on South-east Europe” in Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 12, no. 2 (2010), 191. 120 Ibid. 121 Ibid.
341
2012 in major industries such as aluminum and steel with Montenegrin exports dropping a staggering 51.6 percent. 122 In 2009, sales of state-owned firms, such as the proposed transaction between Zastava and Fiat, were stalled by the crisis and “a quarter of privatisation contracts had fallen through as new owners failed to honour the deals.” 123 The documented fall of consumer demand in the Eurozone for everything from tourism to copper and iron to automobiles adversely affected these sectors in Serbia, Croatia, and Romania. 124 Most FDI prior to the crisis was pumped into “banking and telecommunication sectors” in Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro. “The foreign takeover of banks” writes Bartlett and Prica “led to an explosion of debt-financed consumption growth and the financialization of the Western Balkan economies based on credit expansion, mass importation of household consumer goods, and an unsustainable surge in the prices of houses and apartments.” 125 Substantial investments in knowledge-based industries were neglected which further exposed these economies to the crisis. 126 Add to this the catastrophic levels of external debt in some Western Balkan countries – Croatia’s $45.8 billion debt, for example, making up 100 per cent of its GDP – and conditions for “social incoherence” are undeniably established. 127
In this final chapter, I explore some of the popular political responses to the “social incoherence” engendered by neoliberal restructuring, from strike mobilizations and direct actions to hip hop music and the seductions of populist nationalism in order to complicate and expand my immanent critique of critical balkanologies. Critical balkanologies exhibit a theoretical and institutional retreat “from the structures of political economy” and anything remotely
122 Bartlett and Prica, “The Deepening Crisis in the European Super-periphery,” 371. 123 Martin Upchurch and Darko Marinkovic, Workers and Revolution in Serbia: From Tito and Milosevic and Beyond (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 125. 124 Panagiotou, “Effects of the Global Economic Crisis on South-east Europe,” 191. 125 Bartlett and Prica, “The Deepening Crisis in the European Super-periphery,” 373. 126 Ibid. 127 Ibid.
342
recognizing class as a mediating factor in human relations. I maintain that abolishing balkanism requires a popular social movement transforming the social relations that place these peoples in a pronounced position of political and economic dependence. Moreover, a movement of this sort must also redefine what it means to be an intellectual. This might include a shift away from isolated and competitive professional trajectories towards a rapprochement of sorts with the immediate community in which knowledge is produced and/or “accompaniment” with the people and communities intellectuals claim to speak for. This is a radical proposal to be sure, but there are, as Andrej Grubacic highlights, notable historical precedents for it; it is in this final chapter where I acknowledge their contemporary incarnations. I do not pretend to have a concrete theoretical or political solution to the problem I critique, but I do gesture towards living solidarities from which a movement of the kind I find necessary might find moral and critical nourishment. The interpretive schemes deployed by critical balkanologies upholster the binary of class conflict. By highlighting the struggles of Serbian workers against privatization, the dynamism of Occupy Slovenia, and the critical solidarities cultivated in Bosnian plenums, I encourage an epistemological reappraisal of critical balkanologies via “proletarian realism”.
Towards a Proletarian Realism The concerns of critical balkanologies are coded as moralistically identitarian and prioritize, as
David Campbell argues, “[o]therness, representation, violence, complicity” and “responsibility”; problems to be tackled by moral critique as deconstruction and “not an ungrounded faith in the testing of theory via evidence”. 128 These are also the analytic concerns of reading techniques that have achieved primacy in Euro-Atlantic academia during an era of “accumulation by dispossession”; techniques upon which careers have been built, allegiances solidified, and new
128 David Campbell, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 11.
343
scholars trained. Broadly post-structural, these reading techniques have a built-in myopia; their gaze is informed by “principles of contingency, fragmentation and heterogeneity” and “hostility to any notion of totality, system, structure, process, and ‘grand narratives’.” 129 Furthermore, these techniques have gained traction in an era of weakened left alternatives and relentless accumulation by dispossession in both the Global North and the Balkans.
If capitalism is a totalizing process, and from Adorno to Harvey there seems to be consensus on this, then post-structuralist methods can only provide specific, limited insights that do not and cannot build the kind of solidarities required to address the conditions of life in late- capitalist modernity. These methods presume the world to be “a pastiche of fragments and
‘difference’”. 130 “The systematic unity of capitalism,” explains Ellen Wood, “its ‘objective structures’ and totalizing imperatives, have given way (if they ever existed) to a bricolage of multiple social realities, a pluralistic structure so diverse and flexible that it can be rearranged by discursive construction.” 131 Critical balkanologies posit textual worlds amenable to such rearrangements, “equating appearance with essence” and marginalizing or “obscuring the invisible material structures that could actually produce and … explain … the autonomous objects and practices.” 132 Surfaces are fetishized as Longinovic’s “the serbs”, Campbell’s
“Bosnia”, Todorova’s “the Balkans”, Dauphinee’s “Sokolovic”, and Zivkovic’s “imaginarium”; each sign a placeholder for multiple interpretations. These surfaces have no intrinsic meaning behind them, they are perspectival. “Truth” itself is an assemblage, a “bricolage” of interpretations, none actually synthesized or sublated. They are integrated, but autonomous, exteriorized and textured; in other words, Marx’s “commodity form”. This “queer thing” is
129 Ellen Wood, Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1. 130 Ibid., 238. 131 Ibid. 132 Teresa Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 52.
344
sentimentalized as transcendent; a discursively forced object of love, pity and/or nostalgia.
“Stojan Sokolovic”, “the serbs”, “Bosnia” or the Serbian “imaginarium” fit this description. For example, Zivkovic’s “imaginarium”, gleaning as it does its meaning from “imaginary” and the presumed distance from sensuous life, shares with nostalgia a yearning for the fanciful. His
“ironic” deconstructions leave the Serbs as atavistic objects of pity; pathetically Judeophilic, conspiratorial, nationalistic and criminal. Campbell’s Bosnians are sentimentalized as multicultural Socratics performing the “real” “Bosnia” in the face of historicist nationalisms while Dauphinee’s “Sokolovic” is a flawed and cryptic object of love and pity. Longinovic’s
“serbs” are descriptively pitied and prescriptively nostalgized.
On the other hand, making a move away from these deconstructible simulacra and towards a “total” understanding, a shift from concrete singularity to abstract forces and back again, de-mystifies such interpretations “by examining the relations of the subject to the totality of social relations that situate the subject in the social division of labour.” 133 This is what Teresa
Ebert means by “proletarian realism … a realism that de-reifies reality by grasping the essence of its specific stage of historical development”. 134 Instead of upholding scholastic binaries of
“civic”/“ethnic”, “Other Serbia”/“Serbia”, “Europe”/“Balkans”, “Bosnia”/“Serbia”, etc., intentionally or unintentionally purging the less desirable signifier in each couplet, the point is to identify who is actually changing the world, why they are doing it, and in what historical conditions. The aforementioned dichotomies are never so cleanly separated in the minds and actions of those (sub)proletarians uniquely situated in neoliberal social structures; from the striking worker-shareholders of Jugoremedija to Belgrade’s petty bourgeois professionals.
133 Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique , 30-31. 134 Ibid.
345
One of the pitfalls of critical balkanology, in particular the work of Todorova, is its individualist ethos. Whereas participatory movements are building resistance cultures through struggle, Todorova privileges “politicians” as the agents most capable of elevating the culture and self-respect of “the individuals who inhabit the large space of what is conditionally designated as the Balkans.” 135 This is because “[p]oliticians have a crucial and responsible role to play not simply in the effort to improve the culture of the political class and society at large
(i.e. the political culture), but in contributing to elevate the culture of every single member of each Balkan society, because, in the end, culture is not a collective entity, but a notably individual process.`` 136 This is an elitist recommendation to say the least, and coupled with a cautious suspicion of attempts to build federative regional solidarities, leaves change as little more than a scholastic and politically modest endeavour. Her belief that cross-regional solidarities are futile, an oddly dismissive claim given that Balkan anti-war movements are predicated on precisely these types of connections, put her in some, let us say, “balkanist” company.
Elementary Living Conditions
Despite Todorova’s antipathies, I highlight class antagonisms to make a general point, namely, that critical balkanologies inherit techniques of reading that “has made it impossible to understand social injustice, class differences, and the violent rule of capital as objective historical reality.” 137 One of the key characteristics of the post-1989 conjuncture vis-à-vis the Balkans is that the physics of “social incoherence” – shorthand for the socio-economic consequences of neoliberal restructuring – is coded as cultural invariance ; a cultural invariance that critical
135 Maria Todorova, “What Is or Is There a Balkan Culture, and Do or Should the Balkans have a Regional Identity?”, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 4, no. 1 (2004), 185. 136 Ibid., 176. 137 Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique , ix.
346
balkanologies affirm as truth and/or deconstruct as arbitrary (which of course assumes its concrete singularity). Unpacking this presumed cultural invariance requires foregrounding, as structural effects, major symptoms of “social incoherence” and the ameliorative political coherence made in response to it
A major symptom and catalyst of “social incoherence” in the aftermath of the 2009
Eurozone crisis is unemployment. In what Bartlett and Prica call the Balkan “super-periphery” this has reached epidemic proportions, comparable to, if not surpassing, the unemployment rates of IMF-pillaged Eurozone countries such as Greece and Spain. In 2012, the unemployment rate in the Eurozone as a whole was 11.2 per cent with Macedonia, Bosnia, Serbia, and Montenegro at 31, 28, 24.6 and 20.8 percent respectively. 138 Youth unemployment in the same countries was nearly double these rates. For those aged 15-24 in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and
Croatia, the unemployment rate – not including students – was 63.1, 49.7, 45, and 43.1 per cent respectively. 139 Governments informed by neoliberal ideology are not concerned about protecting and sustaining industries that employ a significant number of labourers. For example, in Serbia as early as 2002, several development banks such as Beobanka, with the potential to nourish weakened industries with low-interest credits, were pushed into bankruptcy with the backing of the World Bank and local IMF cadres in order to make room for foreign financial firms. National industries were thus bereft supportive lines of credit and factories were sold off to buttress the national budget, pacify emergent resistance, and fund political parties. Those savvy, crafty, or privileged enough to secure work did so (and continue to do so) in so-called
“free zones”. As Milenko Sreckovic explains “a favourable infrastructure for foreign investors” was “created so that they could engage in green-field investments in the newly opened “free
138 Bartlett and Prica, “The Deepening Crisis in the European Super-periphery,” 370. 139 Ibid.
347
zones”.” 140 He goes on to define “these “free zones” as “characterized by working conditions that offer minimal pay, thereby allowing foreign investors to use cheap-labour.” 141 Such realms of necessity and others like it are almost completely devoid of labour regulations, geared as they are to needs of investors who are “handed many services free of charge. Even laws are amended to optimize the operational environment, such as tax reductions for a limited time period.” 142
Those people lacking social, cultural, and/or economic capital are worst hit by such infrastructural changes, changes that have a profound impact on their mode of conduct and self- perception. In a compelling sociological study of coping mechanisms used by people in recession-era Serbia, Cveticanin, Spasic, and Gavrilovic highlight how, amongst the least privileged, a Crusoean habitus of self-sufficiency congeals and hardens in circumstances perceived as patently unalterable. This leads to a preoccupation with “biological resources” in the pursuit of biological needs or “elementary living conditions”. 143 Tanja, a middle-aged woman from southern Serbia with no more than an elementary school education embodies this individualistic ethos:
I am a housewife and I needed no help with the kids. And my parents died very early, my husband’s parents were there but they didn’t have much time to help. There was no financial help. We built a house ourselves, at a time when such things were possible. So we manage somehow. ... I don’t expect too much from friends, small favours are all I can receive and give. My friends aren’t in positions where they can help with employment. My friends are humble, so they need help themselves. 144
Similarly, Belgrade born Petar, the son of a single mother, one time athlete, and car accident survivor explains the roots of his survivalist spirit:
140 Andrej Grubacic, Don’t Mourn, Balkanize! Essays after Yugoslavia (Oakland: AK Press, 2010), 243. 141 Ibid. 142 Mayor of Indjija Goran Jesic as quoted in “Serbia on Verge of Biggest Investment,” B92 , August 2, 2007, http://www.b92.net/eng/news/business.php?yyyy=2007&mm=08&dd=02&nav_id=42790 . 143 Predrag Cveticanin, Ivana Spasic, Danijela Gavrilovic, “Strategies and Tactics in Social Space: The Case of Serbia,” Social Science Information 53, no. 2 (2014), 224. 144 Ibid., 225.
348
As for a family and everything, as they say, I’ve been making my own way all my life – I have no father, my mother was deaf. I got my schooling for life this way, through friends, on the street, through neighbours. ... I listened to any advice I got, but I steered my own course and that’s what I’m doing even now. 145 These people exist, “manage somehow“, make their own way, and have very little to no expectations. One wonders where their place is in Longinovic’s lionized Cyber Yugoslavia or if
Zivkovic’s Serbian imaginarium even matters to them in its neutered identitarian form(s).
Critical balkanologies of this sort attempt an ironic deconstruction of Serbian popular culture, taking its martyric tendencies as signifying a halycon era of heroic and sacrificial masculinity.
To be sure, the manner in which these tendencies have been used and resignified by various elites in the service of national security, aggrandizement, and war is problematic. But if we take them in their full elasticity, what do we lose if we empty politics of “sacrificial forms of identity”? Are all forms necessarily retrograde? Many people face, repress, swallow, and/or displace the cumulative back-arching heft of countless everyday humiliations and oppressions.
Some break. Many do not. Compromises are made, teeth gritted, “small favours” are exchanged, and knowledge gleaned from anywhere – “friends”, “on the street”, etc. There is a sacrifice that is demanded of such agents in a neoliberal economy, a mortification of the flesh that all too often renders them politically feeble as it draws their labour. Concerns turn inward, towards the immediate, and an attritional discipline is learned where a loss of esteem coexists with a need to harden one’s resolve. The sociological term for this is exploitation. Marija, an older urbanite with four adult children who lost her job and struggles with a monthly familial income of 150 euros describes her plight:
My parents are dead. My husband’s father is also dead, and his mother is a pensioner with a minimal family pension. We don’t get anything from anyone ... we have to rely on ourselves. I go and clean someone’s flat and I earn a little ... my husband also goes and does something, since he finished vocational school for electricians, he fixes something
145 Ibid., 224.
349
about electricity. And when I show up somewhere to apply for a job, they say ‘sorry, we didn’t mention age, but ...’ 146
Finding a rationale for these examples of “social incoherence”, i.e. the political and economic violence so much a part of the age of austerity, is a political question. This is little evidence with which to confidently map the common sense of labourers such as Tanja, Petar, and Marija – a large undertaking beyond the scope of this project. Yet one may ask preliminary questions about such subjects: What are their politics? Can the sacrifices demanded of them by economic austerity be transformed into something less insular and more progressive? Are their experiences amenable to being hijacked by precisely the types of nationalist elites Longinovic critiques? To what extent do they harbour fragments of Zivkovic’s imaginarium, if at all? How do these fragments coexist with a decade of “civic” propaganda? One of the great coups of the Radikali , the Serbian Radical Party under the leadership of Vojislav Seselj, was their appropriation of an anti-imperialist and nominally anti-capitalist discourse. 147 A “mythic and theological” rationale for the political and economic violence so much a part of the age of austerity required a composite of the Western Other as “foreign conqueror and domestic traitor whose existence, for the emerging national subject, proved to be alienating, degrading, and aggressive.” 148 As
Theodora Vetta demonstrates, far from a straight deception, this is almost an analysis. More to the point, its confluence with a specific imaginarium is uncanny. The empirical existence of neocolonialism and comprador elites bent on privatization really is “alienating, degrading, and aggressive” for the bodily mortified neoliberal subject. How people make sense of austerity very much depends on the concepts, metaphors, and allegories available to them in popular culture
146 Ibid., 226. 147 Theodora Vetta, “‘Nationalism is Back! Radikali and Privatization in Serbia,” Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class: Working Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe , ed. Don Kalb (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 51-54. 148 Longinovic, Vampire Nation , 53.
350
and their cross-pollination with other schemes of perception not necessarily indigenous to the region. As Milica Bakic-Hayden suggests “in Serbian self-definition of cultural, religious and national identity, Kosovo is not a negligible thing, a mere ‘myth’ like any story-telling: it is a narrative that continues to interact with reality in a unique way.” 149
“Subversive” Sacrifices This is precisely where Longinovic’s desire to purge “sacrificial forms of identity” sounds like a glib moralistic exercise. If conditions are such that they encourage, incite, and create such
“sacrificial” modes of conduct, then, absent a total critique of said conditions, cultural and political forms will not be absent some incarnation thereof. “Sacrificial forms of identity” are not solely the domain of “vampiric” nationalist imaginaries. Hunger strikes are not uncommon in austerity era Serbia. In 2009, 73 workers in the Kragujevac-based Partizan Leather Company went without food for 18 months "as they [saw] no other way out of the difficult economic situation". 150 The workers ultimately won severance pay in exchange for giving up their demands for overdue salaries while subsequently encouraged “to find a solution to their demands through dialogue and not to resort to such radical tactics as hunger strikes.” 151 Two years earlier 400 workers from the state-run YUMCO clothing plant, 3000 of whose “redundant” workers were to be employed by the state-subsidized British clothing producer Alena, stormed the head offices of the former and threatened “collective suicide” if law enforcement threatened to remove them. 152
With workers facing low wages and unpaid overtime, hunger strike leader Snezana Velickovic
149 Milica Bakic-Hayden, “National Memory as Narrative Memory: The Case of Kosovo,” in Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory , ed. Maria Todorova (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 40. 150 “Serbia Hunger Strike Drama Ends,” Balkan Insight , May 11, 2009, http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/serbia-hunger-strike-drama-ends . 151 Ibid. 152 “Serbia Workers on Hunger Strike,” Balkan Insight , November 5, 2007, http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/serbia-workers-on-hunger-strike .
351
proclaimed "We are ready to sacrifice our lives for our goals". 153 Interestingly, strikes and other kinds of direct action, if we may read them not inaccurately as progressive acts of sacrifice – in time, labour, and reputation – were most militant where women were a majority. “In the cases of
Jugoremedija and Zastava-Elektro,” states Sreckovic “more than 70% of those employed are women.” 154 Thus, contrary to Longinovic’s observations, “sacrificial forms of identity” need not be categorically somatized as masculine or male – a point I expand upon below. Finally, in a macabre exhibition of human desperation, Textile Industry strike leader Zoran Bulatovic’s infamously cut off and ingested his own finger, forcing labour minister Rasim Ljajic to negotiate with striking workers. 155 “Dialogue” followed such extreme measures.
Longinovic’s fetishization of “dialogue”, embodied in the utopic CY as a “truth and reconciliation process”, is the voluntaristic musing of a comfortably tenured intellectual. There is more than a hint of nostalgia in his privileging of an urban “[r]ock culture and communications media” appropriated from the West over “peasant” folklore or the anomalous and fledgling project of worker self-management. 156 “The idea of [CY]” he writes “is a logical extension of this kind of youth culture that is compatible with the everyday living practices of urban populations”. 157 It is “the actions of different artists and activists” or “voices of difference” whose works deploy “different strategies of cultural resistance” that “are gradually transforming the vampiric burden caused during the Age of Slobism.” 158 Urban intellectuals, untainted by rural culture, perform a neo-masculinity of dissent: “Since no politician will risk his masculine image in bowing in front of the former enemy , the process must begin with those who dare take
153 Ibid. 154 Interview with Milenko Sreckovic, “Anti-Privatization Protests in Serbia” in The Bullet , Socialist Project, E- Bulletin No. 252, September 11, 2009, http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/252.php . 155 Martin Upchurch and Darko Marinkovic, “Wild Capitalism, Privatisation, and Employment Relations in Serbia,” 327. 156 Longinovic, Vampire Nation , 184. 157 Ibid. 158 Ibid., 16.
352
the position of intellectuals after the disaster caused by the Academics”. 159 The new masculinity requires “risk” and “dare” in genuflecting before a former combatant as a promise of peace.
Former Serbian President Boris Tadic is name-checked as such an intellectual. The leader in charge when the Zastava automobile company was sold to Turin-based Fiat – which helped win him an election in 2008 – Tadic was a member of the neoliberal Democratic Party. Committed to
EU integration and privatization, as well as a relatively conciliatory nationalism, he helped undermine Zastava workers by giving plants to Fiat free of charge, creating a “free zone” for the duty-free import of products from Italy, and exempting the company from communal taxes for a decade. 160 Longinovic’s neo-masculinity is servile and neoliberal if somewhat contradictory.
Tadic’s team included Roma evacuator Dragan Djilas, World Bank consultant Gordana
Matkovic, actor Vojislav Brajovic, former punk rocker Nebojsa Krstic, an ex-member of the
Praxis School, and the former editor of Longinovic’s “Vidici” vehicle, Trivo Indjic. In short, this was an amalgam of 1980s dissidents, technocrats, and celebrities; a distinctly Serbian middle class allied with foreign investors, corporations, bankers, and the military; in other words, a comprador bourgeoisie.
The rhetoric of “democracy promotion” and “social dialogue” occurs within a deeply class-conflicted and asymmetrical realm. Upchurch and Marinkovic argue that transition in
Serbia was defined by “wild capitalism” with comparative advantage secured through “extensive labour exploitation … lax working conditions and relatively low pay”. 161 This was/is a veritable void, bereft of a mature consumer market and entrenched forms of social welfare, where those elites with social capital and political clout could parlay such advantages into economic power
159 Ibid. 160 Lucia Manzotti and Silvestro Rivolta, “Serbia: Waiting for Fiat”, Osservatorio Balcanie e Caucaso , January 21, 2010: http://www.balcanicaucaso.org/eng/Regions-and-countries/Serbia/Serbia-waiting-for-Fiat-55812 . 161 Upchurch and Marinkovic, “Wild Capitalism, Privatisation, and Employment Relations in Serbia,” 320.
353
“in an orgy of personal asset accumulation and insider dealing”. 162 In this context, organized labour is seen as a threat and “the resultant weak structural position of unions has meant they have found it difficult to establish social legitimacy and engage in pluralist processes of collective bargaining or social dialogue.” 163 These processes often operate as a ruse; unions are
“informed” of legislation but often fall short of being properly consulted due to a “deliberative” approach that privileges policy goals over legal supervision. 164
This “deliberative” approach is what Longinovic fetishizes in Vampire Nation ; a utopic
“talking cure” that negotiates identity through voluntary online interactions. “This imaginary state” explains Longinovic “offers possibilities for overcoming the extreme patriotic figuration of the native ethnoscape by ridiculing the political organization of the nation-state as such.” 165
“Alternative writers and activists” or “intellectuals” who are “computer literate” and urban- footed will reconstitute an identity of the “good Serb”. The “parodic”, ‘ridiculous’, and “less- than-serious” define this endeavour with Longinovic maintaining that “[t]he nostalgic dimension is not conflated with violent appropriations of the other, since the computer-literate generations resist easy assimilation by sacrificial forms of identity” – a debatable point to say the least. 166
162 Ibid. 163 Ibid., 321. 164 Ibid., 328-329. 165 Longinovic, Vampire Nation , 18. 166 Ibid. Gregory Cameron argues that “[t]his ability for the user to control the kinds of information he/she/it receives is simply not present to the same degree in any other mode of communication. This does not eliminate the fact of intersubjectivity, but it does seriously transform the conditions of object constitution and the objectivity of that about which we communicate. This transformation rather than opening the user onto the world of infinite possibility has the potential to merely sediment, to an unprecedented level, previous acquired meaning structures. Moreover, while the otherness of the other is still a fact to be taken into consideration, this otherness can, at least to a certain extent, be controlled by the user and this seriously transforms the conditions of community constitution. That it is the user who controls the conditions of constitution of both community and objectivity seriously compromises the possibility of anything like a politics or a public sphere from emerging. Much like suburban car culture, the internet user controls and perhaps even eliminates his or her encounters with those who may have the potential to upset processes of sedimentation, and as a result seriously jeopardizes the possibility of the emergence of objective meaning structures. The internet has the potential to work towards the subjectivization of all meaning and community, eliminating the necessary otherness of the other, be it object or ego.” See Gregory Cameron, “Politics and the Internet: A Phenomenological Critique” in Meta: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy 3, no. 2 (2011), 335-361.
354
The alleged strength of the CY concept lies in its “posited variability” 167 since anyone can voluntarily become a part of this arena and assume whatever identity they wish; “a new form of identity whose boundaries should account for a maximum of fluidity and permeability among its ethnic groups.” 168
Leaving aside for the moment the built-in exclusionary nature of this ideal, what it offers is “free expression” – a rebranding of Serbdom as a cacophony of voices. And for all its Cyber
Yugoslavism , this is, once again, a re-inscription of Serbdom through a Yugoslav ideal. Tellingly, there is no version of the online “constitution” in Albanian. The entire concept is still obsessed with identity as a determinant and mode of intercourse. Moreover, as of 2013, only 51.5 per cent of the Serbian population had access to the internet with a significant majority either students or professionals. 169 There is no acknowledgement of the socio-economic barriers to such a techno- optimistic vision. This is, in part, an effect of the disciplinary obsessions of critical balkanology and its often exaggerated emphasis on ethnicity and religion in the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Of course, catapulting this obsession into the second decade of the 21 st century obscures an understanding of neoliberal transition and its constitutive role in identitarian strife. As Richard
Seymour states “the break-up of Yugoslavia, for all that it involved the instrumentalisation of nationalism, was not fundamentally about that. It was about changes in property forms, a neoliberalisation enforced by the IMF with predictably catastrophic results. Producing waves of strikes and protests, it also led to intense competition among the players in the federation about the political forms in which the changes would take place, who would benefit, and how.” 170
167 Longinovic, Vampire Nation , 182. 168 Ibid., 179. 169 Dragan Stanojevic, “Media Use Among Young People in Serbia,” Sociologija LIV, no. 2 (2012), 379. 170 Richard Seymour, “Resisting the Demonological Temptation,” Lenin’s Tomb , February 22, 2008, http://www.leninology.co.uk/2008/02/resisting-demonological-temptation.html .
355
Sacrificial cultural forms have an essential rationality in such a conjuncture – as they do to this day. This is quite evident in the music and lyrics of Balkan hip hop.
Hip Hop as the New Music of Commitment
Hip hop, a hybrid and multi-faceted musical culture originating in the South Bronx and indebted to Jamaican sound system practices, is an example of the Americanization of Balkan popular culture. 171 An insignificant subculture in the last decade of the Cold War, Balkan hip hop gained increased relevance around the end of the Bosnian conflict. As Ante Perkovic explains:
By the mid-1990s … rock-music lost its credibility. It was very difficult to see in it the clear roots of the real, the traces of what kids lived through on a daily basis in their neighbourhoods. Techno and rave offered a quick escape from the problems, but they offered very little to identify with. Something else needed to appear. Quickly …. Using the street vocabulary and a refined sense of justice, hip hop told what’s coming to whom directly, openly and without metaphors. 172 “[T]he most pathological aspects of today’s sociocultural and political realities … injustice, corruption, nationalism and religious influence on politics” is addressed by this “new music of commitment”. 173 Rap artists such as Frenkie and Edo Maajka in Bosnia, and Marcelo and the controversial Beogradski Sindikat in Serbia, exhibit a discernible class consciousness sometimes spliced with a national populism while, at other times, little more than an expression of the
Gramscian “subversive”; a “basic negative, polemical attitude” towards “the civil servant”. 174 An arresting example of this “subversive” sacrificiality is Beogradski Sindikat’s “Welcome to
Srbija” (2010):
This is a matter of life or death And you were first to shed these rivers of blood
171 See Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005), 5-85. 172 Ante Perkovic as quoted in Dalibor Misina, “‘(What’s So Funny ‘bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding’: Rock Culture and the Rebuilding of Civic Identity in the Post-Conflict Balkans,” Identities 20, no. 3 (2013), 317. 173 Ibid. 174 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks , ed. Quintin Hoare (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 272-273.
356
Cornered, I have no other choice I'm aware that I'm losing, but you will suffer casualties too This is a matter of life or death I curse you by God because you're making me hate The answer is terror, to make you hear me I'm aware that I'm losing, but you will suffer casualties too
You took everything from us, honor and dignity So what don't you understand when tomorrow someone with a mask Someone desperate armed to the teeth in the public transport To make it loud and clear - blows everything up You walk over us, you walk over the dead too You don't look back, as long as the money keeps rolling in While respectable citizens are cutting kilos of drugs Workers are cutting off their own fingers in the courtroom It used to mean something when you've got education Now thousands of those are waiting at the unemployment bureau Looking at a cup of coffee for a job While you're looking at offers to bet the best one Selling the country, pulling tricks with the money Letting the cattle to slaughter each other You don't get your hands dirty, that's not for gentlemen You 're killing Serbia without leaving fingerprints on the gun While you turn your heads away from hardships and poverty Holding the media who can take care of everything People are on hunger strike 'cause they've got nothing to eat They'll rather die loudly than fade away silently From a subway in Tokyo to a train in Mumbai By any means necessary, let them know of our struggle Life is cheap when you're not given a choice That's why we won't go down easily, to make the message last 175
These sample passages exhibit incredibly astute and well-informed social commentary. There is much to unpack here, but let me underscore some obvious points. The chorus is ineluctably tied to the Serbian epic tradition Longinovic wants to transcend not because Serbs are somehow categorically tainted by a viral nationalism, but because these themes, sentiments, concepts, and metaphors speak to conditions that are historically constant . The Lazarian “matter of life or death” and the attribution of blame to others who “were first to shed these rivers of blood”
175 Beogradski Sindikat, “Welcome to Srbija” from Diskretni Heroji (Beograd: Srbija not Siberia, 2010). This accurate and evocative translation courtesy of www.lyricstranslate.com: http://lyricstranslate.com/en/welcome- srbija-welcome-serbia.html .
357
promotes a radical solution to social ills. There is no “posited variability” here; the author is what s/he’s interpellated as and must act accordingly (“Cornered, I have no other choice”). S/he is fundamentally a morally sound person stripped of “everything” (“honor and dignity”) and made to “hate” by power. Power in this instance is not incarnated as “the Turk”, as in classic Serbian folklore, but the propertied and profiteering elites of neoliberal transition; an amoral cabal who
“walk over the dead” and “don’t look back … as long as the money keeps rolling in”. Tycoons such as Miroslav Miskovic and Milan Beko come to mind, as do elected leaders such as Dragan
Djilas and Boris Tadic, who continue “selling the country, pulling tricks with the money”. These sanitized gospodini (“gentlemen”) – a populist term of mockery – are “killing Serbia without leaving fingerprints on the gun”; a sly allusion to the “invisible hand” of the market and its opaque violence(s). In a final rebuke to the hypocrisy of civic pluralism and consumerist possibilities, they proclaim “life is cheap when you’re not given a choice”. 176
People are exploited, interpellated in “sacrificial” terms, and forced to create strategies of resistance capable of recognizing their suffering and transmuting it into confidence and empowerment. As Fedja Dimovic, the frontman for Beogradski Sindikat explains “I want my generation to draw the line and build a new Serbia. Our messages are more social than political; we are for the little man, the one who suffers." 177 The one who suffers can find redemption in
Fanonesque violence and move from being a “thing” upon which violence happens, to an active agent capable of dictating the terms of their freedom (“The answer is terror, to make you hear me”; “They'll rather die loudly than fade away silently”). True to the old hip hop adage to “make some noise” or “bring the noise”, Sindikat’s polemic is calculated to unsettle. The chorus echoes
“The Downfall of the Serbian Empire” in its embrace of resistance in defeat (“I'm aware that I'm
176 My emphasis. 177 Daria Sito-Sucic, “Balkan Rappers Speak Out on Peace and Justice,” Reuters , November 24, 2006, http://uk.reuters.com/article/2006/11/24/lifestyle-life-balkans-hiphop-dc-idUKL2329247820061124 .
358
losing, but you will suffer casualties too”) and its historical reincarnation in the acts of national heroes such as Stevan Sindjelic and Gavrilo Princip. Yet there is a clear and documented rationale for these boasts and a clever appeal to internationalism. From unemployment and the
Bologna process to hunger strikes and more egregious forms of worker protest, the song foregrounds “hardships and poverty”. In its own way, it reads as a people’s history of neoliberal
Serbia. Most importantly, it takes the early 1990s football slogan-cum-nationalist boast “Serbia to Tokyo” and flips it into an internationalist plea for social justice – complete with a reference to Malcolm X (“From a subway in Tokyo to a train in Mumbai/
By any means necessary, let them know of our struggle”). If Longinovic is interested in cultural forms of resistance, his neglect of this genre and its politicized realism is telling. Renowned
Bosnian rapper Frenkie states: “The more people listen to this music, the more they think about these problems. The more they talk about them, the more a critical mass grows”. 178 He goes on to explain “I understand (activism) as an obligation, it doesn't make sense to write about other stuff at this time." 179
The Narod Speak
This focused commitment on the physics of neoliberalism by these writers and activists offers a contrapuntal reading of critical balkanology. For example, Marko Zivkovic’s Serbian
“imaginarium” seems to be more of an ether that subsists regardless of who occupies power. 180
Furthermore, it is read as a “disembodied realm” and, in this, adheres to a non-identity akin to
Longinovic’s “serbs”. 181 Serbian Dreambook is a study of representations, “stories Serbs tell themselves (and others) about themselves” but stories told from a particular nodality: that of
178 Ibid. 179 Ibid. 180 Zivkovic, Serbian Dreambook , 2. 181 Ibid., 14.
359
Belgrade and its professional classes. 182 Irony is what Zivkovic discovers “on the ground” and what makes up one of his analytical “tools”. But the ground he chooses to traverse is decidedly classed. The Serbia he navigates and episodically documents at the beginning of the text is, so to speak, left on the streets. Instead, his best sources “turned out to be not ‘private voices’ of ordinary citizens but a number of excellent social commentators who picked up things that were
‘in the air’ and encapsulated them in deft turns of phrase or poignant anecdotes.” 183 He goes on to explain that
[c]ommentators were as immersed in everyday life as anyone else in Serbia but, also, in their professional role, capable of detachment and the kind of reflection that is enabled by a more synoptic view of the situation. It is not that I believe that ordinary people are incapable of detachment and reflection. They are, but only under certain circumstances. Exigencies of everyday life make most people most of the time relatively tolerant of incongruities. 184 This is in opposition to David Campbell’s populist belief in a Bosnian Socratic ethos. In each case, “ordinary people”, or what Azra Hromadzic problematizes as narod , are either dismissed as passive agents or over-exaggerated as ideal liberal subjects. 185 For Zivkovic, “ordinary people” are denied a critical acumen and accordingly pushed aside, their tolerance is contemptible, and
“incongruities” are to be confronted by educated professionals. There is no inquiry into the production side of these “incongruities” or, as Campbell would have it, “antagonisms” – what I call “social incoherence”. They are classically ideological; naturalized as “here”. Yet Hromadzic persuasively illustrates the multi-accentuality of narod as an integral part of Bosnian quotidian life and, in doing so, recuperates a conceptual system far less tolerant of “incongruities” than
Zivkovic imagines. “For example,” writes Hromadzic “in its broader, economic sense, narod is explained in a Marxist way: narod are all the people who were tricked by the war, regardless of
182 Ibid., 4. 183 Ibid., 12. 184 Ibid., 12. 185 See Azra Hromadzic, “Discourses of Trans-ethic Narod in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Nationalities Papers 41, no. 2 (2014), 259-275.
360
which side they come from, and who suffer economic and political injustices orchestrated by the elites above, including the International Community.” 186 He quotes a Mostar high school teacher named Marijana who lucidly states that “ Narod cannot be the politicians … well, narod are all normal people in this Bosnia and Herzegovina of ours” with “normal”, according to her colleague Gordana, referring to “the middle class which does not exist [any more]!” 187
Normalcy refers to a non-existent middle class, a marked recognition of pauperization;
“no jobs, no money, no brotherhood and unity”, declares Bosnian rapper HZA, as “mullahs, priests, hate” and “thieves are now in power”. 188 The source of such “trans-ethnic” critique,
Hromadzic points out, are popular idioms such as the gendered “Politika je kurva” (“Politics is a whore”) where politics is registered as a sexual deviant one must be suspicious of. 189 Narod is thus signified as pure if not virginal, a space where “ordinary people”, not unlike those in
Beogradski Sindikat’s “Welcome to Srbija”, are fundamentally innocent. Emir Hodzic, an activist and participant in the 2014 Bosnian protests, concretizes the divide between popular nobility and elitist decadence:
I am very bitter about the fact that certain media are presenting all demonstrators and all citizens who were on the streets yesterday as hooligans and vandals. This is simply not true. A lot of women, unemployed people, and pensioners were there. It is not clear to me how thousands of people in numerous cities of BiH could suddenly become vandals? To me, it is very hypocritical that the political elites now claim that the people – who took to the streets in anger – are all at once vandals. 190
“Hooligan” denotes a lawless person, a “rough-neck” in its more classed inflection, with
“vandals” signifying destructively cultureless intruders. For Hodzic, these descriptions are
186 Ibid., 269. 187 Ibid. 188 HZA, “Dragi Tito” (2007). Translated lyrics are found at http://lyricstranslate.com/en/dragi-tito-dear-tito.html . 189 Hromadzic, 268. 190 Emir Hodzic interviewed by Marija Artaunovic, “Eyewitness Account of a Protestor: ‘We are Neither Vandals nor Hooligans’,” Bosnia-Herzegovina Protest Files , February 13, 2014, https://bhprotestfiles.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/eyewitness-account-of-a-protestor-we-are-neither-vandals-nor- hooligans/ .
361
patently false, recuperating as he does the opposite of their elite-projected meanings, i.e. justified anger and an upstanding citizenry (“women, unemployed people, and pensioners were there”), while displacing the negative traits onto the elites themselves (“hypocritical”). It is precisely the elites who are interlopers and foreigners as a result of their media-leveraged betrayal of the narod . Indeed, this act of elite naming is not unilateral and without challenge. Forms of “counter- discourses” lie dormant in popular culture, if only as “hidden transcripts”, and provide working vocabulary and clarity for somatic and mental anguish. Edina, an employee from East Mostar, states that those in power “only divide narod . What narod you ask? All those from whose backs the politicians, nasi i strani (ours and foreign), live. Narod are Serbs, and Croats, and Muslims, all of us who suffer and whose children do not know what to do about their lives.” 191 The sentiments of Edina, Marijana, and Gordana predate the Bosnian protests by almost a decade and speak to the manner in which the physics of neoliberalism were being interpreted by people on the ground, specifically women . As Hodzic stated at the outbreak of the 2014 protests, “we’ve truly seen that this is a socio-economic rebellion” – a sentiment expressed eight years earlier by
Lana from Mostar: “It is about money, but they [the rich, the mafia, the politicians] … mask our eyes with the talk of nationalism.” 192
Civic Discourses, Material Realities, Working Class Proposals
I suggested that “sacrificial forms identity” operate both as a descriptive reality and might prefigure – or at least serve as a starting point – for a politics that goes beyond the tepid “social dialogue” of the so-called “Civil Balkans”. By “Civil Balkans” I am referring to the protracted, often externally-funded, and technocratic historicization of NGOs in the multi-party era after the signing of the Dayton Agreement. In Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia, “civil society” was
191 Hromadzic, 268. 192 Ibid.
362
legitimated as an elastic and privileged concept through which organizational politics was practiced. Denotatively and nominally “democratic” with its often abstract if not nebulous affirmation of pluralism, individualism, civil rights, and liberal capitalism – amongst other classically liberal qualities – the unveiled connotative or mythological aspects of this concept tread into the realm of Euro-centrism, a cult of economic efficiency and private property, contempt towards the working class and collective projects from below, and, in its human rights advocacy, “a kind of paternalism which involves the denial of full agency to so-called
‘vulnerable subjects’.” 193 Often financially and politically indebted to “democracy” promoters such as USAID and George Soros’ Open Society Institute, coalitions such as Glas 99 (Vote ’99) in Croatia and the 2000 CIA-backed Otpor student resistance movement in Serbia heralded the consolidation of a “third sector” in the political field with subsequent civic projects, according to
Croatian activist Vanja Nikolic, developing “an American NGO structure” – one that facilitates technocratic employment opportunities. 194
Marek Mikus and Daniel Jakopovich outline the extent to which “civil society” discourses have defined the terms of debate in Serbia and Croatia amongst activists and intellectuals. In the first decade of the 21 st century, such discourses incubated and birthed disjointed and persuasive terms of intercourse that settled into common sense. “[T]he NGO world captured by the term [“civil society”]” explains Mikus “expanded and became much more heterogeneous socially, politically, and functionally, so that today ‘civil society’ seems to refer to something broader than the more elite and exclusive Civil Serbia.” 195 Jakopovich argues that
“NGO activism actually developed simultaneously and in conjunction with informal “New Left”,
193 Paul Stubbs, “Networks, Organisations, Movements: Narratives and Shapes of Three Waves of Activism in Croatia,” Polemos 15, no. 2 (2012), 20. 194 Ibid., 21. 195 Marek Mikus, “‘European Serbia’ and its ‘Civil’ Discontents: Beyond Liberal Narratives of Modernisation,” Centre for Southeast European Studies, Working Paper, no. 7 (2013), 11.
363
anarchist and ecologist currents.” 196 He goes on to state that “[t]he strategic alignment of this
NGO and informal, “affinity group” activism has persisted beyond those early years of political reconfiguration following the downfall of Yugoslavia, and has largely managed to set the agenda for progressive activist protest ever since.” 197 Indeed, in Serbia, the overthrow of the Milosevic regime in October 2000 ushered in roughly a decade of modest credit-infused growth, but was “a political rather than social revolution, in the sense that regime change was the main objective rather than worker’s revolution and the overthrow of property relations.” 198 The revolutionary demands were classically liberal in content, centered as they were on “democracy, freedom of expression and freedom of association.” 199 These post-Milosevic “civic initiatives” and their attendant schemes of perception gained political traction with many workers, not the least of which were the strikers of Jugoremedija led by Zarko Deuric. 200 In this regard, Mikus’ anthropological understanding of popular common sense as necessarily contradictory with agents capable of simultaneously holding “liberal”, pro-worker, and nationalist sentiments complicates the rather Manichean approaches by Longinovic, Zivkovic, and Campbell – all three of whom, silently or explicitly, juxtapose as developmental benchmarks the “urban classes”, “Europe”, or
“Bosnia”, against a “Serbian ‘ideological system’” that is read “as ‘anti-modern’ and ‘anti-
European’” and “reflects a normative bias according to which the only modernisation and modernity worthy of the name are … liberal modernisation and modernity.” 201
What the prescriptions of Longinovic, Zivkovic, and Campbell lack is an understanding of the malleability of “civic initiatives” as they are pushed to their limits by real material
196 Daniel Jakopovich, Scorched Earth and Subterranean Blues: Notes on the Landscape of the Democratic Left in Croatia,” Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 20, no. 2-3 (2012), 173. 197 Ibid. 198 Upchurch and Marinkovic, Workers and Revolution in Serbia , 118. 199 Ibid. 200 Goran Music, Serbia’s Working Class in Transition 1988-2013 (Belgrade: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2013), 54- 55. 201 Mikus, 29.
364
solidarities made possible, even necessary, by neoliberal restructuring. Scholastically deconstructing allegedly monolithic ethno-nationalisms or any perceived “totalitarian” project so as to open up “democratic” possibilities presumes that “democracy” is simply a matter of embracing a new ontology, thus overlooking the complex genesis of civic solidarity movements in the Balkans over two decades of economic transition. There is no doubt that many Bosnians are rightly suspicious of monolithic ethno-nationalisms, that there is a history of such populist irreverence in the region, and that a plurality of voices is not to be glibly dismissed. But such an approach prevents us from identifying a common denominator among the popular challenges to the status quo in early 2014 Bosnia, the confident move towards direct democracy in Slovenia at the end of 2011, the contradictory development of Serbian labour politics from 2007-2009, the
35 day student occupation of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb in 2009, and the 2006-2007 Belgrade student protests against the Bologna Process. These are all symptoms of a totalizing neoliberal capitalism attempting to discipline and interpellate proper subjects for its needs. People must be made to consent to the extraction of their surplus labour or persuaded to ignore or distort potential opportunities for resistance. Thus the neoliberal project, in transforming the economic relations of production, simultaneously historicizes practices that are geared to consensually expedite this transformation. Roma are racialized, pathologized, and displaced in a manner that potentially reconstitutes them as migrant labourers. Many workers are deracinated, ethnicized as urban interlopers, and forced to rely on tenuous familial networks to survive, while students are subject to educational reforms emergent with tuition fee increases unindexed to income growth. 202 As Jessica Greenberg points out, these educational reforms are
“meant to create a community in which standardized units of knowledge – credits – would
202 See Jana Bacevic, “Masters or Servants? Power and Discourse in Serbian Higher Education Reform,” Social Anthropology 18, no. 1 (2010), 43-56.
365
enable the mobility and circulation of “European” citizens.” 203 “The idea of the knowledge citizen and worker” she writes “meant that students would be trained not only in particular areas of specialization; they would also be trained to be entrepreneurial and flexible, to consume and produce knowledge valuable in a global market.” 204 Indeed, two decades of “democracy promotion” and “civil society building” across the Peninsula profoundly impacted common sense, widening and stabilizing “the normative assumptions of liberal democratic activists”. 205
These “normative assumptions” also inform the works of critical balkanology. Indeed, the ideology of “single individuals in civil society” that define the surveyed works of critical balkanology reserve very little ontological space for solidaristic readings. This is because they are indebted in part to a Cold War understanding of solidarity as necessarily incompatible with liberty. In other words, solidaristic or collective projects are undemocratic by definition; they suffocate, repress, and/or erase the individual. Their prime objects of analysis in this regard, and not without merit, is the nation and nation-state, and serious and timely deconstructions and complications of this concept rightly find a receptive and engaged academic audience. Yet the nation and nation-state and its mythic embodiments in deconstructible avatars are examples of scholastic and political instrumentalization – it makes sense to study and politicize such things; they are academically lucrative and politically legible. A “civic”/“ethnic” duality is primed for media consumption, spun as it is in subtly theological terms as a battle between “good” and
“evil”. But the scholastic terms in which the nation/nation-state is studied, and its deployment as a means of securing political power for post-communist elites, is also an ideological effect.
203 Jessica Greenberg, After the Revolution: Youth, Democracy, and the Politics of Disappointment in Serbia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 95. 204 Ibid. 205 Maple Razsa and Andrej Kurnik, “The Occupy Movement in Zizek’s Hometown: Direct Democracy and the Politics of Becoming,” American Ethnologist 39, no. 2 (2012), 248; and Music, Serbia’s Working Class in Transition 1988-2013 , 61.
366
A Complex Populism
The 2014 Bosnian protests were not ethnically exclusive affairs. The plenum culture that emerged in the Bosnian protectorate originated in the Croatian student occupations of 2009. 206
Organizations such as Pokret za Slobodu in Serbia and Occupy Slovenia espouse and/or are inspired by a conscious internationalism, whether identifying with Occupy Wall Street or the
Arab Spring. 207 Left intellectuals such as Dragan Plavsic, Andreja Zivkovic, and Andrej
Grubacic are eloquent proponents of a Balkan Federation. 208 If not explicit “attempts to hypostatize a Balkan identity”, 209 these movements and groups are nonetheless keenly aware of the transnational nature of structural exploitation and oppression. Srecko Horvat and Igor Stiks rightly highlight the emergence of “anti-Regime” forms of popular consciousness that go beyond criticisms of this or that corrupt government and towards an understanding of neoliberalism as a multifaceted ecology that cannot be transformed with a ballot pull. Horvat and Stiks define
Regime
as a conglomerate grouping political elites, attached businesses and their Western partners, serving media corporations, NGOs promoting the holy couple of electoral democracy and neoliberal economy, organized crime itself intimately related to political and economic elites, foreign-owned predatory banks and, finally, a corrupt judiciary and controlled unions. 210 This is a system that requires a systematic critique and not simply a deconstruction of elite nationalism. Uncovering other voices muffled under the lead cloak of elite nationalism cannot
206 Igor Stiks and Srecko Horvat, “The New Balkan Revolts: From Protests to Plenums and Beyond,” March 12, 2014, https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/igor-%C5%A1tiks-sre%C4%87ko-horvat/new-balkan- revolts-from-protests-to-plenums-and-beyond . 207 See Pokret za Slobodu: http://www.pokret.net/ ; and Razsa and Kurnik, ““The Occupy Movement in Zizek’s Hometown: Direct Democracy and the Politics of Becoming,” 238-258. 208 See Andreja Zivkovic and Dragan Plavsic (eds), The Balkan Socialist Tradition and the Balkan Federation, 1871-1915 , Revolutionary History 8, no. 3 (London: Porcupine Press, 2003); and Grubacic, Don’t Mourn, Balkanize! Essays after Yugoslavia (Oakland: AK Press, 2010). 209 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans , 183. 210 Igor Stiks and Srecko Horvat, “Welcome to the Desert of Transition! Post-Socialism, the European Union, and a New Left in the Balkans,” Monthly Review 63, no. 10 (2012), http://monthlyreview.org/2012/03/01/welcome-to-the- desert-of-transition/ .
367
explain the latter’s relationship with transnational corporations, trans-ethnic organized crime networks, cosmopolitan NGOs, and European Banks. Such a deconstruction underestimates elite nationalism – it is in fact a highly sophisticated and pragmatic discourse nesting multiple significations and implies the problem “solved” once its “totalitarian” limits are shattered. This approach cannot explain the personal concerns and political sentiments of Theodora Vetta’s sixty year old informant Milica – a Serbian employee of the Livnica firm who in 2006 was forced into early retirement after her salary was cut by a third. Her post-Milosevic disillusionment is palpable:
People believed it would be better after the 5 th of October. Everyone thought that there would be a lot of money and so, a lot of them also took credit … and now look! Livnica had 5,000 workers; now it has 2,000 … All this happened when they sold our country to foreigners, Slovenians and French bought it and they kicked people out … I don’t know, it was not paradise before but at least nobody was fired. 211 Milica is a supporter of the far right Serbian Radical Party led by alleged war criminal Vojislav
Seselj. In the absence of strong left alternatives and durable progressive institutions, the Radikali provide an outlet and vocabulary for those affected by neoliberal restructuring. Acknowledging that their brand of Serbian nationalism is exclusivist does not explain why people from “different walks of life”, most of them educated, gravitate towards their platform. People are deeply aware of their material dispossession and the stifling of their “own common interests and needs.” 212
Many who voted for the Radikali in 2008 focused blame not on other ethnic groups, but on “the absolute ‘other’, … created by the ‘obscure powers’ of the international community and their cosmopolitan, local political puppets that daily parade in economic scandal stories.” 213 Seselj and company provide a visible and pointed if limited critique of global capitalism, but are not an anti-capitalist party. Surely these are not the “politicians” Todorova had in mind as responsible
212 Ibid., 50-51. 213 Ibid., 51.
368
for elevating culture and self-respect amongst the masses. Then what of those “politicians” keen on making education more entrepreneurial and less accessible to the people? How does one raise culture if so many are excluded? Her judgment is clouded by referring to capitalism as
“Europeanization” thereby regionalizing and culturalizing this specific stage of historical development. 214 Granted, her political recommendations were put forth in 2003, the high noon of
“civil society”-mongering, when emergent and oppositional social forces of the kind seen today were barely fetal. That being said, her dismissal of attempts to build federative regional solidarities as “noble but utopian political exercises … doomed from the outset both by internal opposition, but, more significantly, by outside forces” is an indictment of the resistance movements of today. 215 She implies that a history of struggle from below is apparently not worth looking into, thus sharing an eerie similarity with Marx and Engels’ infamous dismissal of
Balkan Slavs as naïve, impotent, and non-historical peoples. “Faced with stark political realities,” writes Todorova “and working within the confines and with the modest means of academe, one can only hope to subvert the informative power of expert authority.” 216
Representing the Single Individuals of Civil Society
“Expert authority” is brilliantly problematized in Dauphinee’s work and is a bridge of sorts between critical balkanology and the re-materialization of knowledge production I propose in this thesis. She recognizes that Sokolovic is not her “peer in the empire of knowledge” and that she has always tried to anticipate what may befall her, writing “[i]s this not what seals my place of privilege and what allows for the wealth and luxury of anticipation?” 217 Her prescriptive reading of human intercourse is informed by an honest desire for a richer solidarity; one that
214 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans , 199. 215 Ibid., 183. 216 Ibid., 188. 217 Dauphinee, The Ethics of Researching War , 9,8.
369
strives to go beyond the platitudes of liberal rights discourse. Moreover, the consequences of neoliberalism are everywhere evident in TPOE in both form and content. With regards to the latter, Dauphinee’s penetrating eye for quotidian detail provides the reader with descriptions and dialogical moments where the systemic heft of neoliberal coercion is revealed as more than a mere backdrop, but an integral and corrosive aspect of human intercourse. Sokolovic’s relative poverty and alienation is just one of many unique “realms of necessity” in what is an aspirational economy of dispossession. One telling scene illustrates an exchange between the professor and
Mia, a Bosnian professor of literatures. Mia’s employer, the University of Banja Luka, is experiencing a severe funding crisis with “[t]he union considering strike action.” Both tacitly know that the strike action “would make no difference”. 218
Yet despite this class/professional consciousness, she is deeply unsettled by her encounters. The manner in which she is unsettled, and how she conceptualizes this shock, is telling. Built into the discourse of Otherness is an inability to fully and completely explain and/or understand things; communication is always partial, a miscommunication of sorts. She privileges the trope of “unfathomable complexity” to such an extent that one wonders if her discernible desire for a more profound human understanding and richer solidarity is even worthwhile. It is also the one ingredient that leaves her otherwise transgressive narrative parasitic on dominant balkanist discourses. Mutual recognition or accompaniment does not seem compatible with this scheme because ethics has its origin outside of human social relations in some a priori eternal soul. Balkan Others are obscurantist, obfuscated – you cannot use “human calculation” on them; the methods of scientific inquiry are useless since “there is no possibility of cognition, interpretation, calculation”. 219 One must simply have faith in what is “incomprehensible …
218 Dauphinee, The Politics of Exile , 18. 219 Dauphinee, The Ethics of Researching War , 98.
370
impossible.” 220 One must maintain a “non-ethical opening of ethics”, 221 i.e. ensure that bodies and their speech are never foreclosed, regardless of how painful their “truth” might be.
Dauphinee’s theoretical commitments and attendant ontological co-ordinates cannot account for present and emergent examples of social empowerment, thus leaving Stojan
Sokolovic as little more than an unsettling “truth” through which her self-reflexivity is nourished. The most one can do is grant the moral contradictions of another’s life and uphold them as living “truth”. Ironically, this reaffirms a neoliberal order of fundamentally opaque and alienated Others. Her method maps spaces of miscommunication in a structurally unequal world of aspiration and dispossession; spaces where Others – always civilizational – are first and foremost harbingers of psychic discomfort instead of social beings damaged by complex processes of dispossession and exploitation.
Her radical empathy might become a radical solidarity if the attempt to understand Stojan
Sokolovic abstracts to the larger forces of post-communist transition and the late-capitalist hegemony of neoliberal theory and policy. Stojan Sokolovic is a working class neoliberal subject and war veteran; alienated, culturally liminal, occupationally precarious, and a product of what
Pierre Bourdieu has called “social suffering”. 222 Are there others like him? What are they doing?
Moreover, instead of acceding to the defeatist cynicism of one Mia, a sustained theoretical eye on “[t]he union considering strike action” or the “students” working at the “Gurkha Grill” – an interpretation, however contemplative, from their standpoint – may have brought Dauphinee into conversation with student movements and working class mobilizations. The ontology of “single
220 Ibid. 221 Derrida, Of Grammatology , 140. 222 Pierre Bourdieu, The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
371
individuals and of civil society” informing her work and other critical balkanologies leaves no contrapuntal space within which to engage horizontal forms of solidarity.
The absence of this space matters since “pathos of distance” is ill-equipped to do more than simply observe changes and interpret them – whether these changes involve a movement towards more inclusive and egalitarian societies or a phallus-comported march towards barbarism. Lest sanctimonious defenders of the ivory tower attempt to justify this institutionalized passivity with a discourse of professional “objectivity” and a principled separation of scholarship from “politics”, let it be said that all the texts analyzed imply or propose a prescriptive politics, from more investment and education in the region, to a need for deeper ethical relations, communicative action, and/or “civic initiatives”. Thorough, well- researched scholarship that adheres to disciplinary standards of argumentation and ethics need not, and simply cannot, secrete the purity of mathematics. But it also need not be the exclusive enterprise of middle class ontologies and sensibilities. What another approach might look like is dictated by the people themselves, their appraisal of their plight and possibilities, and conditions that compel or constrain organically emergent alternatives. Yet, as proposed and practiced by
Razsa and Kurnik, Grubacic, and others, intellectuals can play an accompanying role in such popular empowerment.
One promising outcome after the 2008-2009 financial crises, in Greece, the Middle East,
Quebec, and the Balkans, is a marked interest in forms of direct democracy. Representational distance is privileged in critical balkanology through terms such as “expert authority”, “observer- interpreters”, “intellectuals”, “politicians”, and the “objective observer”. These terms are coupled with, if not facilitate, the dismissal of popular voices in the work of Longinovic and Zivkovic, their empathetic yet contradictory treatment in Dauphinee’s texts, the classist condescension of
372
Todorova’s documented politics, and Campbell’s partisan celebration of a uniquely Bosnian demos. Most disturbingly, these terms speak to a theoretical stasis that parallels the failure of representative democracy in the region . The practitioners of critical balkanology are class- situated, specialized professionals trained in techniques of inquiry that emerged as de rigueur during their institutional convalescence. These techniques problematize representations and signs as the bane of peninsular strife. They are important ant-racist contributions. Yet they all re- inscribe a classed balkanism that denies the socio-economic transformations de-limiting their gaze as said gaze refracts, distorts, and condenses the practical life-activity of those they strive to represent.
I am concerned with what we lose if we refer to these people with the philosopheme
“Other(s)” and subsequently fetishize their “complexity”. Are they only capable of understanding each other? What are the implications of this “miscommunication” for building solidarities? From such a representational standpoint, can they be anything more than, in the case of Campbell, utopian subjects, or, in the case of Dauphinee, dystopian ones? Class struggle is a historical fact, and has been pronounced leading up to, including, and following the demise of
Yugoslavia as a sovereign entity. What was a spectacular victory for conservative nationalist forces in the 1990s, finds a weakened strategic refuge in contemporary “imagined communities”.
This is because, as protestor and law graduate Sadzida Tulic explains “neo-liberalism is hand in hand with ethno-nationalism and corruption. They all work together. The ‘transition’ couched in the language of freedom is all a façade where everything inside is rotten.” 223 A critique of nationalism alone is now understood as inefficient, sentiments that have been percolating for years amongst Balkan (sub)proletarians.
223 Heather McRobie, “Breaking the Old Narratives of Bosnia,” Precarious Europe , September 20, 2014, http://www.precariouseurope.com/power/breaking-narratives-bosnia .
373
Jugoremedija
New protest movements have proved creative, organized, and highly suspicious of “Western democracy” and liberal capitalism – even going so far as taking shards of “civic” common sense and making it re-signify in more radical ways. In 2007, Jugoremedija pharmaceutical workers, three quarters of which were women, engaged in a lengthy occupation of their factory after the state sold its 42 percent share in the company to “an indicted criminal.” 224 Zdravko Deuric, a skilled labourer and “worker-shareholder” in the pharmaceutical enterprise, keenly understood the corrosive atomization of everyday life. 225 Inspired by the writings of left-liberal intellectual
Nebojsa Popov, the Jugoremedija strikers couched their critique of privatization in moral terms.
The problem was not privatization per se , but its illiberal and irresponsible variant –
“corruption”. 226 Writers such as Popov and the publication “Republika” advocated a normalization of private property “based on small property owners.” 227 “The state was called upon” writes Goran Music “to recognize that workers can act as successful managers.” 228 Indeed, when articulated in these terms, the workers struggle was not dissimilar from the needs and ethos of the ruling order. Yet civic concepts proved elastic when materialized within a diverse workers protest. “The actual content of the emulated liberal concepts” writes Music “could differ when used by workers or civil society activists” as classically liberal concepts “gained class character and democratic potential by being co-opted by the blue collars.” 229 Although receiving lukewarm support from “national trade unions”, Jugoremedija workers managed to lean on NGOs and local labor in order to regain “worker-shareholder” control of their firm. 230
224 Upchurch and Marinkovic, Workers and Revolution in Serbia , 122. 225 Music, 67. 226 Ibid., 61. 227 Ibid. 228 Ibid. 229 Ibid., 65. 230 Upchurch and Marinkovich, Workers and Revolution in Serbia , 125.
374
Now Jugoremedija worker-shareholders may have won a “pyrrhic” victory strategized within terms that were not exclusively expressing traditional working class demands, the most radical of which was a long neglected and unrealized demand for a Constitutional Assembly, but they were fighting for “authentic political mechanisms” which might audibilize their concerns. 231
Although spearheaded by worker-shareholders and coded in a discourse of virtuous privatization, i.e. the belief that the state had to more consistently uphold the property rights of everyone and not simply a select few, management boards were nonetheless staffed with workers and strike leaders and “Jugoremedija’s activists remained dedicated to the support of other workers in hardship.” 232 As Music astutely points out, “the wider perception of workers’ efforts is never one-sided and successfully controlled.” 233 Meaning is, after all, decoded through its specific class and status positions within civil society and the broader mode of production. New institutional forms of workers’ power did not take shape, but there were greater degrees of worker socialization and an important hardening of political instincts. No movement is ever completely co-opted. Yes, some workers exhibited fidelity to property ownership as a way of expressing their needs, but a discernible majority stood for “radical action and the notion that privatization remained theft in principal.” 234
231 Music, Serbia’s Working Class in Transition 1988-2013 , 65. 232 Ibid., 67. 233 Ibid., 63. 234 Ibid., 63. Music states that “[w]orkers were not just passive recipients and conveyers of different ideas circulating around them.” (64) In the course of their struggle against neoliberal privatization, they sculpted “borrowed concepts” in ways different from “civil society activists”. For many labourers, “workers’ participation or workers’ shareholding were different code names for an old idea, formed under socialism – that of society based on labor, in which the working class occupies the most prominent place.” See Music, 63-64. These “liberal concepts”, the inheritance of “Other Serbia”, were received through the residual vocabulary of Balkan socialism and tempered by newly restructured economic and political conditions. Indeed, there are structural limits to organizing, a lack of resources and solidarity in milieux where owners were at best cavalier about maintaining production to extremely complicated strike laws that narrow the meaning of what constitutes a legal strike action. See Marko Grdesic, “Workers and Unions in Yugoslavia,”, 7-8, http://www.markogrdesic.com/uploads/3/1/8/0/31809299/workers_and_unions.pdf .
375
Marko Grdesic argues that most of the worker protests were “defensive in nature” and revolved around unpaid wages, bad privatization, and pleas to not further erode collective agreements. 235 There is some truth to this, but he seems to underplay the pedagogical role these actions, whatever their limitations, might have. For example, the trade union of Zastava Elektro pressured the government for a lawful privatization, going so far as select a foreign corporation of their choice to undertake this process. Of course, there is nothing radical about this. Yet the union nonetheless managed to force themselves into negotiations between Zastava Elektro and the state as a third party. “Workers” explains Music “were therefore quick to seize all opportunities to find connections to various official procedures and interpret them from their particular vantage point.” 236 He adds “such autonomous conceptions and initiatives was the result of the exchange of ideas between strikers from different companies. Once they came together, workers had the opportunity to compare experiences and start developing their own analysis of the crisis.” 237
Cross-factory organizing, debates, worker commiseration and the like helped develop a fertile autodidacticism in an era where workers had little to no institutional support and were viewed with hostility by the media. The recessionary strike wave of 2009 created conditions for more inter-factory initiatives, initiatives led by Freedom Fight activists who helped connect
Zrenjanin workers to more militant actions in other parts of Serbia. Out of these interactions emerged the now defunct Workers’ Protest Coordinating Committee (WPCC). Still “legalistic” in political orientation, the WPCC nonetheless “had a more pronounced blue collar character” with “with representatives from the factory strike committees and trade unionists, as opposed to
235 Ibid., 8. 236 Music, Serbia’s Working Class in Transition , 64. 237 Ibid.
376
previous initiatives, in which activists gathered primarily as shareholders.” 238 Emphasis was placed on protecting workers via safeguarding workplace production and subjecting union leadership, collective agreements, and “social dialogue” to ruthless criticism. Strike committees attempted to position themselves as prime negotiators in tripartite agreements. Although these actions were framed within the limits of virtuous privatization, worker consciousness nonetheless sharpened and a keener sense of who was at fault for their plight started to emerge. “During the previous years” writes Music “the opponents remained murky and numerous (mafia, state, political parties, corrupt businessmen). Now, large local capitalists, emerging under the common name “tycoons”, became the prime target of popular anger.” 239 The process of resistance is its own pedagogue, reconfiguring common sense in the face of “social incoherence” and learning from previous struggles and mistakes. There is no democratic guarantee: popular political pressure might wane or more conservative movements might successfully co-opt parts of a progressive message. Simply pointing out that there is resistance a la Campbell without identifying and explaining how it is evolving, splintering, congealing, and re-signifying in the face of concrete limits and obstacles is to subtract its historical rationality and contemplate it as a textured and sensuous “commodity form” – a proposition I get back to later. Milenko Sreckovic, one of the activists behind Freedom Fight, articulates this problem in a 2014 interview with Ana
Vilenica:
Today there is probably more freedom in prison than for people who are “free”; at least it is so for the majority of people. But knowing that we are not free is not enough; it requires a response to this situation, it requires some struggle for freedom. No one knows in advance precisely how and what kind of fight we should wage but learning about it is likely to occur only in a certain process rather than in passive contemplation or in thinking that we already have the answer and just need to convince the rest to believe us … For me personally, the individual should appropriate the right to freedom regardless of whether he is allowed to have this right or not. And the individual should do it without
238 Ibid., 67-68. 239 Ibid., 68.
377
excessive pathos, without calling for compassion and mercy. But when putting in question authorities that cannot justify the reason for their existence, we should also refrain from imposing our own authority as an alternative. If we believe that people should accept our path, our struggle, then they should accept us voluntarily. Also the need to fight for a reinterpretation of the concept of freedom – we know that there are many representatives of big business who are trying to say that freedom is their right to have no interference in their market transactions – that way we have “free market” but enslaved population. So, what is taking place is a class struggle, wherever you turn. Freedom exists only in the practice of providing organized resistance. 240
Marx’s eleventh thesis is clearly on display here. Theorists have interpreted the world, in
“passive contemplation”, summoning authoritative proposals that simply need to be operationalized, i.e. Campbell’s deconstruction, Longinovic’s communicative action, Zivkovic’s irony, Dauphinee’s radical empathy, etc. The built-in antipathy towards epistemological or authorial violence shared by these writers is echoed politically by Sreckovic (“refrain from imposing our own authority”), but he is quite clear that Freedom Fight has a “path” grounded in
“class struggle” that consciously excludes at least one conception of “freedom”. Recognizing a la
Gramsci that civil society is a realm of inequality and that a “majority” are denied “freedom”, mere knowledge of exploitation and oppression is not enough. What matters is a concrete
“response” to inherited circumstances, a “struggle for freedom” where tactics and strategies are worked out through a “process” of “organized resistance”. Only through a process in large part instigated by the historical conditions of neoliberalism can a substantive “reinterpretation of the concept of freedom” occur. Moreover, this reinterpretation must be predicated on a voluntary acceptance of Freedom Fight’s project. There is nothing “totalitarian” about this.
Music observes that systemically invisible processes of capital accumulation and dispossession, processes intrinsic to capitalism itself, are ever so slowly made visible through the resistance of workers and other marginalized people and the political education learned therein.
240 Ana Vilenica, “Interview with Milenko Sreckovic on ‘Workers Resistance to Deindustrialization and Land Grabbing’,” Freedom Fight Info, July 27, 2013, http://www.freedomfight.net/interview-with-milenko-sreckovic-on- workers-resistance-to-deindustrialization-and-land-grabbing/ .
378
He understands “social reality” as an ideological realm, no doubt a lived “truth”, durable and sense-making, but nonetheless something that conceals or obscures “fundamental processes”. 241
Multiple instances of struggle and resistance have “introduced new clarities” for those participating in them. In a discerning passage that also serves as a criticism of critical balkanology, Music concludes:
The dominant ideas of the past two decades are being exposed as ideological dogmas, not corresponding to real life economic practices, nor the real interests of an overwhelming majority of the population. These concepts are not able to offer an adequate explanation of mechanisms which created the crisis, thus, they also fail to provide a valid model to overcome it. 242
In other words, the “reality and power” of poststructuralist approaches and “civic initiatives” are having trouble demonstrating their “truth” in practice.
Occupy Slovenia
In as much as the Serbian workers’ movement was penetrated by the civic discourses of anti-
Milosevic activists, the Slovenian Occupy Movement was an organic product of previous struggles around NATO expansion, the occupation of Iraq and early anti-globalization movements. 243 Yet the most important cause and precursor to the “direct democracy” practiced by Occupy Slovenia was the fight for the migrant and immigrant rights of the Erased. In 1992,
25,000 people, mostly born in other Yugoslav republics, were “erased” from the Slovenian register of permanent residents – a good one per cent of the population. 244 People who were living or born in the former republic were quickly turned into “illegal migrants”, thus losing their residence, “medical care, work permits, pensions, even the ability to obtain a driving license or
241 Music, Serbia’s Working Class in Transition 1988-2013 , 69. 242 Ibid., 69-70. 243 Razsa and Kurnik, “The Occupy Movement in Zizek’s Hometown,” 245. 244 Ibid., 246.
379
to travel outside Slovenia.” 245 Specifically targeting Roma and “Southerners”, this racist policy did not come to public attention until a decade after its implementation. Associating with groups centered on Social Center Rog, activists encouraged the Erased to protest and research their plight thereby iterating their political agency. 246 The Erased and their supporters pursued claims at various levels including an international solidarity campaign and despite 95 per cent of
Slovenians voting against them in a 2004 referendum. 247 Whether subject to such racist majoritarian dismissals or infantilized through the victim-baiting of NGOs, in both instances they were denied the ability “to articulate their own politics.” 248 The cultivation of “the democracy of direct action” within Occupy Slovenia emerged in direct response to this dilemma.
In their eminently compelling anthropology of Occupy Slovenia, activist-scholars Maple
Razsa and Andrej Kurnik deeply implicate themselves in the organizing occurring in their midst unlike Campbell, Zivkovic, and Dauphinee, whose field-work, sometimes self-admittedly, smacks of “tourism”. What Razsa and Kurnik practice is a narration of accompaniment, writing
“quickly … in, with, around, and against the news” in order to follow how a movement is
“producing emergent forms of life and … even self-consciously engaging in a process of becoming.” 249 Resisting the clichéd advocacy of “prefigurative” politics, they propose a “politics of becoming-other-than-one-now-is, toward forms of open-ended subject making that are embodied in and constitutive of collective struggle.” 250 This is why their article is a politically engaged collaborative effort; they want “to document the ways … political analysis and theorizing are directly tied to … radical engagement” thereby dissolving the privileged role of
245 Ibid. 246 Ibid. 247 Ibid, 247. 248 Ibid. 249 Ibid., 240. 250 Ibid., 240-241.
380
the “objective observer”. 251 This requires deferring to their subjects’ interpretive frameworks in an act of “epistemological humility” while taking into consideration their “daily conditions and lived experience”. 252 Unlike Campbell who excavates unmediated voices as another artifact in an un-synthesized archeology, Razsa and Kurnik “[jostle] among other voices attempting to make sense of and give sense to social life as it unfolds.” 253
Yet in this “jostling” there is a marked class consciousness, one developed through a collective encounter with the socio-economic conditions and lived experiences of Slovenian people; their real life-activity as practiced in a unique conjuncture. In other words, there is an
Archimedean point that centers the importance of physical reproduction. Where is all the wealth going if not to feed, shelter, clothe, and educate the people? Tellingly, Occupy Slovenia’s first teach-in was in front of the Nova Ljubljanska Banka (NLB) and later other financial institutions such as the Stock Exchange. 254 Activists consciously saw “themselves as filling a vacuum created by the crisis of representative politics.” 255 Elected leaders, the “objective-interpreters” of popular concerns, were rightly understood as “captured by economic elites” indebted to corporations and finance capital and representing a ruling structure that had institutionalized
“property rights”. 256 “The goals that oriented public life for two decades” write Razsa and
Kurnik “–economic liberalization, European integration, and democratic consolidation – had lost their self-evidence in the face of the political and economic crisis.” 257 The decision to target financial institutions is a watershed moment in left activism for what it portends; it clearly marks a movement from mere expression, the disembodied singular voice of liberal politics, to
251 Ibid., 241. 252 Ibid. 253 Ibid. 254 Ibid., 238, 242. 255 Ibid., 239. 256 Ibid. 257 Ibid., 242.
381
something much more proactive. After all, as Serbian President Boris Tadic remarked during anti-NATO protests in Serbia six months before Occupy Slovenia took off, protests are “part of the democratic procedure” and “any democratic and legal expression of opinion is completely natural”. 258 Tadic was pandering to Freedom House, a Washington D.C.-based NGO committed to “democracy promotion” that “qualified Serbia as a country of political freedoms”. 259 The point being that the pauperization and “social incoherence” engendered by neoliberal restructuring can afford a classically liberal expression of discontent; it helps legitimate the system. What the unrealized Constitutional Assembly and defunct WPCC anticipated for Serbian workers, and what the assemblies and plenums in Croatian higher education, Occupy Slovenia, and 2014
Bosnia, manifest are solidaristic entities wherein people actually affected by socio-economic hardship can debate, formulate, and collectively attempt to take power. In short, these are movements from “protest” to “resistance”:
In front of the stock exchange protest becomes resistance; demonstration becomes assembly. The letter “R” is knocked off Borza (Stock Exchange) and a “J” is inserted to spell Boj za (The Struggle for …). With television broadcasting live, the assembly decides to occupy. We have broken with the dictates of financial capitalism and representative politics. We are building a movement based on principles of direct democracy and direct action – horizontally, in network form. We will liberate our strivings, our desires.” 260
This entry in the Occupy Slovenia diary published in Vecer frames capitalism, at least in its financial incarnation, as the cause of “social incoherence”. 261 They name the problem and prescribe an open-ended solution, physically occupy space instead making “civil” requests of power, exhibit a tactical media-savvy, and explicitly foreground a politics of empowerment over
258 “Tadic: Protests Contribute to Democracy,” B92 , June 13, 2011, http://www.b92.net/eng/news/politics.php?yyyy=2011&mm=06&dd=13&nav_id=74903 . 259 Ibid. 260 Razsa and Kurik, “The Occupy Movement in Zizek’s Hometown: Direct Democracy and the Politics of Becoming,” 242. 261 Ibid., 245.
382
mediation. The key to this politics of empowerment are workshops initiated and put into practice by anyone who has an idea or concern they want addressed. Operating under the umbrella of
Occupy Slovenia and reporting back to the assembly, workshops can be initiated by anyone with a specific concern capable of attracting supporters. The point to be emphasized is that the proposer must put their workshop ideas into practice. Kurnik explains:
Emil, for example, can propose a workshop on his specific concerns at the workers’ dormitory without needing anyone’s approval. Or I don’t have to worry if that guy at the assembly doesn’t fully understand our approach to addressing evictions. The emphasis is on action by anyone who feels a workshop addresses issues of real concern to them. That’s the reason we ground these proposals in willingness to participate in them, to take action. 262
This approach creates agential space for minority positions and can attract collaborators as diverse as immigrants, professors, drug-addicts, and students. The pedagogical opportunities in the process of becoming catalyzed by such socialization help fissure conventional subjectivities and collectively develop new ones. “Through the process of dialogue, common study, and reflection – as well as weekly direct actions – those who participate build a new intersubjective understanding and consensus, especially in the original sense of the term as ‘common sentiment’ or feeling.’ The workshops thus serve as spaces of encounter grounded in common struggle, spaces in which differences come together and are transformed in the process.” 263
Spaces such as these were consolidated on May 1 st , 2013 as the Initiative for Democratic
Socialism (IDS), the first consciously-styled new left party in the Balkans since the dissolution of Yugoslavia. 264 Headed by a “legal representative” and not a formal presidency, the IDS is committed to non-hierarchical principles of organizing and direct democracy, with a 31 member
262 Ibid., 244. 263 Ibid., 249. 264 Gal Kirn, “The Emergence of the New Left Party in Slovenia,” Chronos , March 2014, http://www.chronosmag.eu/index.php/g-kirn-the-emergence-of-the-new-left-party-in-slovenia-initiative-for- democratic-socialism.html .
383
council elected annually and 26 local party delegates. 265 “The most immediate goal of the IDS”, writes IDS member Gal Kirn, is “to bring into public discourse a new vision of socialism and to extend the grassroots political organization that would mobilize around a socialist inspired agenda.” 266 This new vision includes fighting for participatory budgets, worker self- management, an increase in the minimum wage, and the socialization of banks. 267 With roots in the Workers Punks’ University operated by the Institute of Labour Studies in Ljubljana, an almost two-decade long educational project comprising researchers, lecturers, and activists and dedicated to the production of useful critical theory, the IDS is the practical political arm of a long-gestating theoretical vision that has attracted leftist scholars and activists from around the world. 268 Similar if comparatively embryonic spaces of participatory “becoming” defined the
2014 Bosnian uprising.
Bosnian Plenums
The Bosnian protests originated on February 4 th , 2014 in the industrial town of Tuzla, a focal point of decade-old worker unrest, corrupt privatizations, and subsequent industrial collapse. On average, unemployment hovered around 30 per cent – half the shocking youth unemployment figure – with a significant part of the populace engaged in the informal economy. 269 Several hundred protestors stormed the local government building in the wake of firm closures, fought law enforcement, and damaged property. With the protests spreading through the country, from
Bihac to Sarajevo as well as Banja Luka in RS, a marked class consciousness was apparent, with
265 Ibid. 266 Ibid. 267 Ibid. 268 See Delavsko Punkerska Universa DPU, http://www.delavske-studije.si/en/the-workers-and-punks-university/ . 269 Denis Dzidic, “Bosnia-Herzegovina Hit by a Wave of Violent Protests,” The Guardian , February 7, 2014, https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/valerie-hopkins/we-are-hungry-in-three-languages-citizens-protest-in-bosnia .
384
one protest sign declaring “we are hungry in all three languages”. 270 Three days after the Tuzla uprising, protestors rushed the Presidency in Sarajevo. Renowned Bosnian author Faruk Sehic describes the scene:
At one point, as a group of protesters rushed toward the wooden door of the Presidency, I felt a bit sick. Someone on the other side of the door was desperately fighting, pouring water on the protesters who were trying to break the door down using a beverage fridge from a nearby kiosk as a battering ram. It was a fight to the death and no one would concede defeat. Later, when I talked to one of the guys and told him I felt sorry for the people inside, he said, ‘Fuck them, they make three and a half thousand a month.’ And with that, the discussion was closed. 271
And another discussion, about class exploitation and political misrepresentation was, finally, opened . Moreover, far from the inter-ethnic obfuscation of the 1990s, the protests in Sarajevo stemmed in part from recognition of the oppressor as internal . Sarajevan law graduate Sumeja
Tulic explains this extra-ethnic turn: “One thing that really fuelled it was the young men, boys really, being mistreated by the police, they’re “our boys” in the sense that, whatever ethnicity, if you’re from Sarajevo you’re ‘ours’. It was a shock that this violence was our own, it didn’t come from ‘outside’ and you couldn’t use that language to explain it away. You couldn’t use the language of the external aggressor.” 272 An old pensioner, when asked if the burning of a government building will solve anything, replied that the arsonists should have “suffocated them all and wiped the criminals out” before going on to explain how the Minister of Finance’s salary is 24 times his pension amongst other associated perks. 273 The Women’s Network of Bosnia
Herzegovina underscored the structural roots of the unrest as the “products of the state and
270 Valerie Hopkins, “‘We are Hungry in Three Languages’: Citizens Protest in Bosnia,”, Open Democracy, February 13, 2014, https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/valerie-hopkins/we-are-hungry-in-three-languages- citizens-protest-in-bosnia . 271 Faruk Sehic, “Fuck them, they make three and a half thousand a month,” trans. Amila Bosnae, Bosnia- Herzegovina Protest Files , February 12, 2014, https://bhprotestfiles.wordpress.com/2014/02/12/fuck-them-they- make-three-and-a-half-thousand-a-month/ . 272 Heather McRobie, “Breaking the Old Narratives of Bosnia,” http://www.precariouseurope.com/power/breaking- narratives-bosnia . 273 “‘Twenty Years They’ve Been Suffocating Us’,” Bosnia-Herzegovina Protest Files , trans. Amila Bosnae, February 8, 2014, https://bhprotestfiles.wordpress.com/2014/02/08/twenty-years-theyve-been-suffocating-us/ .
385
society of Bosnia and Herzegovina” and called “upon the government and the political elite of
BH to create an educational system that will promote the human rights of marginalised groups and nonviolence, to construct a just social care and health system, so that all citizens, men and women, can have access to a decent life”. 274
These concerns, amongst others, were addressed in plenums: popular assemblies of direct democracy. Such institutions were initially created during student protests against the standardization and commercialization of higher education in Serbia and Croatia with the latter leaving a wonderful testament in The Occupation Cookbook: or the Model of the Occupation of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb (2009). 275 Popular assemblies and their autonomous workshops also defined the actions of Occupy Slovenia in 2011. In other words, there was a recent history of popular mobilization against the specific consequences of neoliberal restructuring. What made the Bosnian protests different was its working class roots amongst
Tuzla labourers. The Tuzla plenum was convened at the scale of the entire town and demanded the resolution of privatization questions pertaining to several firms, including annulling privatization agreements, returning factories to workers, recognizing the seniority and health insurance of workers, parity between worker and government salaries, ministerial resignations, and a “technical government” of “uncompromised members” required to report to the people. 276
Demands and declarations were made throughout Bosnia as the protests spread and circumstances changed. Some talking heads dismissed these gatherings as “collective therapy sessions” or mere “correctives” to representative democracy instead of critical solidarities geared
274 “Women’s Network of Bosnia-Herzegovina: Violence is not the Only Problem,” trans. Eric Gordy, Bosnia- Herzegovina Protest Files , February 13, 2014, https://bhprotestfiles.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/womens-network- of-bosnia-and-herzegovina-violence-is-not-the-only-problem/ . 275 See The Occupation Cookbook: Or the Model of the Occupation of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb , intro. Marc Bousquet (New York: Minor Compositions, 2009). 276 “Tuzla’s Declaration of Citizens and Workers (Tuzla # 1),” Bosnia-Herzegovina Protest Files , trans. kolekili, February 7, 2014, https://bhprotestfiles.wordpress.com/2014/02/07/declaration-of-citizens-and-workers-in-tuzla-1/ .
386
towards decision-making and socio-economic demands.277 Damir Arsenijevic describes these organs as bereft of “leaders or prohibitions” as “[d]ecisions are made through a public vote.” 278
He goes on to add: [a] plenum is not a political party, or an NGO, or a one-person association. A plenum is the real, and the only, democracy. A Plenum makes and adopts demands to all the institutions of state power by its own declaration. Everybody stands behind the declarations, because they are the words of us all and the demands of us all.” 279 Efficiency and efficacy is maintained in a practice of one person, one vote, no abstentions, in a majority ruling.
“Actually the plenums began to organize subgroups,” explains Sumeja Tulic “committees to debate and decide on different topics, of what we put to the government like demands to stop corruption and also on what people wanted as citizens, it was like an exercise in learning rights as well, people were learning through this process that they do have rights and they can ask for them, and the government works for them, or should work for them.” 280 Her sister adds that the plenums facilitated encounters with “people you would never normally have spoken to, like these kids in university, or unemployed kids, usually everyone just hangs out in their own social group in Sarajevo, but the protests were such an intense experience, and through that we also grew new networks.” 281 Of course, democratic gains were complicated by the politics of representation.
The word “citizens” was made gender inclusive yet “sometimes people would push a young person forward who is seen as more ‘educated’ and say “you speak, you know about this, you
277 Marina Antic, “Sometimes a Plenum is Just a Plenum,” Bosnia-Herzegovina Protest Files , February 16, 2014, https://bhprotestfiles.wordpress.com/2014/02/16/sometimes-a-plenum-is-just-a-plenum/ . 278 Damir Arsenijevic, “Damir Arsenijevic: What is a Plenum?”, trans. bakercatherine, Bosnia-Herzegovina Protest Files , February 12, 2014, https://bhprotestfiles.wordpress.com/2014/02/12/damir-arsenijevic-what-is-a-plenum/ . 279 Ibid. 280 Heather McRobie, “Breaking the Old Narratives of Bosnia,” http://www.precariouseurope.com/power/breaking- narratives-bosnia . 281 Ibid.
387
know law or you know what to say”, and then it got difficult because there was a fear it would lose its egalitarian quality, of course.” 282
Some have rightly underscored this fear, with workers’ voices muffled in the media rush to hear statements by professors and the like. The purpose of the plenum is to plan the next move, to cultivate solidarities through which material needs are met and, in the process of self- organization, to break out of what Immanuel Kant dubbed a “self-incurred minority”. This is indeed what happened. “On the basic level,” concludes Sadzida Tulic “I would say that for instance there are 5,000 people in Sarajevo who can never go back to how they were or who they were a year ago. So there is that, on the basic level, people who now feel empowered to the point their lives are changed completely, their daily lives and what they will do with their lives.” 283
On February 28 th 2014, as part of the Bosnian protests, 2000 war veterans in Republika
Srpska hit the streets demanding the resignation of Pantelija Curguz, the president of the
Veterans Organization of the Republika Srpska (VORS). These are veritable “Stojan
Sokolovic’s”, marching in unison against corrupt elites and for socio-economic justice. As one participating veteran put it, “[w]hile they enlarge their bank accounts, fleets of vehicles and build villas, they make welfare cases out of us and our children.” 284
282 Ibid. 283 Ibid. 284 Elvira M. Jukic, “Bosnian Serb Leader Slates Veteran’s Protest,” Balkan Transitional Justice , February 27, 2014, http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/dodik-claims-protests-targeted-against-republika-srpska .
388
CONCLUSION: “BALKANIZATION FROM BELOW” AS A STANDPOINT OF SOCIAL HUMANITY Dauphinee’s Balkan dystopia is pregnant with these potential oppositional forces as asides and suggestions given her implicit class consciousness yet the overall impression is one of defeat.
Campbell simply cannot register such forces as little more than liberal expressions of opinion contra ethno-nationalism with the latter positioned as the unequivocal plague of the region.
Zivkovic’s imaginarium positions Serbian psychic life as surreal and oddly durable in a neoliberal era to which he expresses resignation. Longinovic scholastically exorcises “sacrificial forms of identity”, expungable unconsciousness, without exploring its sociology – all the while gesturing towards a techno-optimistic future bereft of class. For Todorova, faith in the culture- building acumen of elite politicians coupled with a moral critique of “expert informational power” trump transnational solutions from below. How does one reconcile works that effectively critique egregious types of balkanist discourse with their political quietism? Is not their political quietism, grounded as it is in an obsession with the unmediated concrete – the avataric sensuousness of the “commodity form” contemplated from a distance – connected to their re- inscriptions and clever displacements of balkanism? This “commodity form”, or philosopheme of the “Other” – as “the serbs”, “Bosnia”, “Sokolovic”, “the Balkans”, “imaginarium”, etc. – has its origin “in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them.” 285 In other words, I am describing institutionalized, salaried, “mental” labour subject to the competitive pressures of academia and indulging the leisured play of language; a space where, in the post-Cold War era, social relations are discursively “Othered” as “the labour of private individuals or groups of
285 Karl Marx, “Capital, Volume One,” in The Marx-Engels Reader , ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 321.
389
individuals who … work independently of each other.” 286 At best, in the case of Zivkovic,
Campbell, and Dauphinee, this becomes a practice of “individual tourist activism” 287
The work of the selected critical balkanologists I interrogate grapple with “common, everyday [things]”; media and/or public representations of Serbs, diplomatic readings of Bosnia, or the quotidian experiences of war survivors. But these everyday phenomena are consciously coded as “Others” and thus “changed into something transcendent”, “grotesque”, “mysterious”,
“perceptible and imperceptible by the senses”; 288 an “unfathomable complexity” 289 – utopic or dystopic – or an irrational sacrificiality which sometimes amounts to the same thing. What is absent in these texts that is present, for example, in the work of Razsa and Kurnik or the dynamics of the Bosnian plenums, is a “physical relation between physical things”. 290
Instead, the politics of affect that define these approaches in effect reduces the “Other” into something akin to a commodity as understood by Marx. There is fetishism at work here. In these schemes, real living and multi-mediated individuals imbued with their own consciousness step forth as “Others” and are thus “changed into something transcendent.” They are already different from real living individuals. The products of intellectual labour that frame them as
“Others” have no connection to their physical properties and with the material relations that arise from them even if upholstered in thick descriptions. With “Others” and those cultural workers who, like critical balkanologists, “produce” them, “there … is a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.” 291
286 Ibid. 287 Andrej Grubacic, Don’t Mourn, Balkanize! Essays after Yugoslavia , 168. 288 Karl Marx, “Capital, Volume One,” 320-321. 289 Hammond, The Debated Lands , 37. 290 Ibid., 321. 291 Ibid.
390
What critical balkanologists privilege are the products of intellectual labour as soon as they are produced as “Others”. Post-structuralist reading techniques limit them to this.
Thus there is a theoretical inability to leave the ideology of “Otherness”. Longinovic persuasively deconstructs conservative incarnations of “the serbs”, but displaces their sacrificiality onto (sub)proletarians in his celebration of middle class and EU-pining “Civic
Serbia”. Zivkovic’s “imaginarium” is a dreamscape where, once again, Serbian nationalism is ironically problematized. Yet the dreamscape itself secretes the characteristics of a sociological functionalism as the Serbian unconscious is fixed as surreal and inexplicable. Similarly,
Campbell excavates and exoticizes a “Civic Bosnia” while making ethno-nationalism a peculiarly Serbian problem. Finally, Dauphinee recuperates a more human, self-effacing, and deeply reflexive Serb in one “Stojan Sokolovic” while simultaneously reconfiguring balkanist tropes of obscurantism that fix him in another level of objectification. “Commodity forms” as
“Others” are constantly birthed.
Is there a way out of this? This is an epistemological and political question and court not categorical answers per se , but always fluctuating prefigurative proposals in popular struggles throughout the peninsula, some of which are documented above. At the very least, and this plea is directed towards those of us ensconced in some manner in academic institutions, “it is necessary to” as Grubacic declares “… renounce abstract social-schmertz and opt for social conflict, for breaking up with traditional social-political communication and organization.” 292
Yet intelligent “social conflict” requires the clarification provided by “abstract social-schmertz” lest we again indulge the cul de sac that is the “commodity form” of the “Other”. The 2008-2009 global financial crisis clearly demonstrates that power “is the effect not of discourse formations but of private property – accumulated surplus labor. Owning the means of producing wealth
292 Grubacic, Don’t Mourn, Balkanize! Essays after Yugoslavia , 171.
391
causes the power to become powerful.” 293 Theoretical techniques that dismantle “the relation of cause and effect … by destratifying all social relations and consequently erasing the binary relations between the powerful and the powerless” leave us helpless in the face of a global system with a singular social intention: accumulation and dispossession. 294 This is why, epistemologically, there must be an engagement and reappraisal of the explanatory force and political efficacy of a “proletarian realism”; “a realism that de-reifies reality by grasping the essence of its specific stage of historical development and by examining the relations of the subject to the totality of social relations that situate the subject in the social division of labor.”295
Such realism is suspicious not of “totality” but of deconstructive enterprises that fetishize an unmediated and ahistorical concrete and that siphons off what it cannot explain as something akin to an unpredictable and labyrinthine “unconscious”. When dealing with people, such labels can and do have the force of prejudice. Balkanism as a racialized inheritance of nineteenth- century capital expansion, imperialism, and colonialism, will be abolished only once these still present processes are abolished. What is racialized as “unconscious”, “that last retreat of the bourgeois from daily social conflicts … is the residue of the unresolvable class contradictions in which the subject is trapped in class societies…” 296 “Realism” writes Ebert “is a social relation, a historical analysis of existing social reality that can provide the knowledge needed to remake it.” 297
What has been initiated since 2008 is what Grubacic would call a kind of “balkanization from below” or “a horizontal social dialogue conducted among all participants in the social- economic processes – all workers, including those who are going to lose their jobs and
293 Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique , 30-31. 294 Ibid., 49. 295 Ibid., 30-31. 296 Ibid., 30. 297 Ibid., 30-31.
392
unemployed workers who have already lost them; refugees and ‘displaced persons’ who have nothing to lose; Roma who have never had anything; students who cannot afford to go to university; farmers; social movement activists; women; and many more.” 298 Where such a dialogue might move in response to changing socio-economic conditions is debatable. But a voluntary and sensitive accompaniment of such movements, from in close or afar, bringing requisite theoretical skills in the service of struggle while learning from those whose very biological being depends on its growth, success, and structural legacies might be a start.
Grubacic describes what this might entail in a 2010 discussion of how the Jugoremedija strikes and protests managed to takeoff and sustain themselves:
A few activists, students from Belgrade University and the core of what was to become the Freedom Fight collective, recognized that the only organized resistance to the encroaching tide of privatization and neoliberalism was coming from workers in the Serbian countryside. They decided to go to northern Serbia, to a city called Zrenjanin, and approach the workers from Jugoremedija factory. These workers were very different from the activists. Some of them had fought in the recent Yugoslav wars. Most of them were very conservative, patriarchal, and traditional. The students went there and offered their skills. They had a few. They spoke foreign languages. They had internet access and know-how in a country where only 2 percent of the people used this service. They had connections with workers and movements outside of Serbia. Some of them were good writers. A few had legal expertise. Workers were grateful but understandably quite skeptical, as were the activists. Soon, however, something like a friendship emerged. They started working together and learning from each other. In the process of struggle against the boss, the private armies he sent to the factory, and the state authorities, they started to trust each other. They both changed – workers and students. Today, after ten years of accompaniment, the same group of activists from the freedom fight collective plays an important role in the Coordinating Committee for Workers Protests in Serbia, where five Strike Committees represent workers from three cities and five branches of industry. 299
In 1910, a year of tumultuous worker unrest, nationalist aspirations, and imperial violence, the courageous Dimitrije Tucovic, leader of the Serbian Social Democratic Party, the only other party outside of Lenin’s Bolsheviks not to vote for war credits in the lead up to the 20 th century’s
298 Grubacic, Don’t Mourn, Balkanize! Essays after Yugoslavia , 171. 299 Ibid., 160-161.
393
first truly global slaughter, argued the importance of historicizing amongst the people a systemic understanding of capitalist exploitation. “By pointing out the tendencies of capitalism towards brutal and murderous colonial policies,” he wrote “we show the need not just for proletarian class politics, but also for an impetus towards a sound national policy. It is very important for us to draw attention to the fact that the policies of all the capitalist states represent in the Balkans the unquenchable thirst of capital for exploitation – important not only for the political education of the masses, but for practical success as well.” 300 Not unlike the Freedom Fight narodniks of today, Tucovic understood the importance of cultivating a popular consciousness grounded in the
“subversive” understandings of (sub)proletarians, but one also capable of taking the axe to the root and identifying the precise nature of these unchosen conditions. This critical consciousness cannot be imposed from outside, but must organically grow out of (sub)proletarian-controlled political organs such as plenums.
As of the writing of this thesis, the Bosnian protests have petered out, for reasons that include the alleged narrowness of the demands and lack of coalition-building amongst non- nationalist forces, to an impoverished infrastructure at once the cause and effect of terrible floods. Serbian workers are still playing a defensive game and Occupy Slovenia, as with Occupy movements worldwide, have reached a terminus of sorts – at least in their inaugural incarnation.
Yet people have been schooled in the crucible of fighting for their livelihood, are turning “civic initiatives” into pro-worker demands, mingling with people across classes, genders, and ethnicities, and publicly debating the issues of the moment amongst each other. In other words, communicating and taking direct action against tycoons, banks, corrupt politicians, university administrators, racist mayors, the stock exchange, and condescending journalists. More and more
300 Dimitrije Tucovic, “The First Balkan Social Democratic Conference,” in The Balkan Socialist Tradition , ed. Andreja Zivkovic and Dragan Plavsic, (London: Porcupine Press, 2003), 173.
394
people are interpreting their actions not as an isolated assault on a specific national government, but on a neoliberal state system with an awareness of similar struggles around the world. This knowledge is refracted in popular culture as rap music has become a literate outlet for frustration and critique.
Although described as an economic “super-periphery” and home to American military bases such as Camp Eagle in Tuzla and Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, the latter described as “a smaller version of Guantanamo”, the Balkans are not exactly “colonized” in the manner understood by Franz Fanon. Nonetheless, his words accurately describe recent developments in the region; mass protest that “never takes place unnoticed, for it influences individuals and modifies them fundamentally. It transforms spectators crushed with their inessentiality into privileged actors, with the grandiose glare of history's floodlights upon them. It brings a natural rhythm into existence, introduced by new men, and with it a new language and a new humanity.” 301 The process transforming a Tanja, Petar, and/or Mia into the Tulic sisters or
Freedom Fight activists is a complicated one, but whose conditions of possibility are now much less opaque. These episodic yet impactful protests and have inadvertently raised the stakes for critical balkanology. Participants in these movements do not owe their legitimacy to any supernatural power even if critical balkanology might owe theirs to a “supernatural” “Other”.
Now it is time for critical balkanology to account for the racialized “thing” becoming human via the same process by which it frees itself. If the standpoint of critical balkanology is civil society, the standpoint of materialist balkanology must be social humanity.
301 Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 36.
395
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adamic, Louis. Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America, 1830-1930 . Oakland: AK Press, 2008. Adorno, Theodor, Minima Moralia, Reflections on a Damaged Life . London: Verso, 2005. “Against The Double Blackmail Slavoj Zizek. New Left Review 234, March-April 1999.” http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/against-the-double-blackmail/ . Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London & New York: Verso, 1992. Allcock, John B. “Rural-Urban Differences and the Break-up of Yugoslavia.” Balkanologie VI, no. 1-2 (2002): 101-125. ———. “The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.” In Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies: A Scholar’s Initiative , edited by Charles W. Ingrao and Thomas A. Emmert, 347-389. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2013. Anderson, Perry. “Modernity and Revolution.” New Left Review I, no. 144 (1984), 96-113. Antic, Marina. “Sometimes a Plenum is Just a Plenum.” Bosnia-Herzegovina Protest Files . February 16, 2014. https://bhprotestfiles.wordpress.com/2014/02/16/sometimes-a- plenum-is-just-a-plenum/. Antonio, Robert J. “Immanent Critique as the Core of Critical Theory: Its Origins and Developments in Hegel, Marx and Contemporary Thought.” The British Journal of Sociology 32, no. 3 (1981), 330-345. Anzulovic, Branimir. Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide . New York: New York University Press, 1999. Arandarenko, Mihail. “Waiting for the Workers: Explaining Labour Quiescence in Serbia.” In Workers after Workers’ States: Labor and Politics in Postcommunist Eastern Europe, Edited by Simon Crowley and David Ost, 159-179. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. Archer, Rory. “Assessing Turbofolk Controversies: Popular Music between the Nation and the Balkans.” Southeastern Europe , 36 (2012), 178-207. Arsenijevic, Damir. “Damir Arsenijevic: What is a Plenum?” Bosnia-Herzegovina Protest Files . February 12, 2014. https://bhprotestfiles.wordpress.com/2014/02/12/damir-arsenijevic- what-is-a-plenum/ . Artaunovic, Marija. “Eyewitness Account of a Protestor: ‘We are Neither Vandals nor Hooligans’.” Bosnia-Herzegovina Protest Files . February 13, 2014. https://bhprotestfiles.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/eyewitness-account-of-a-protestor-we- are-neither-vandals-nor-hooligans/ . “Assemblage.” Dictionary.com . http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/assemblage. “Avatar.” Dictionary.com . http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/avatar?s=t. Bacevic, Jana. “Masters or Servants? Power and Discourse in Serbian Higher Education Reform.” Social Anthropology 18, no. 1 (2010), 43-56. Bakic-Hayden, Milica. “National Memory as Narrative Memory: The Case of Kosovo.” In Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory , Edited by Maria Todorova, 25-40. New York: New York University Press, 2004. ———. “Nesting Orientalisms: the Case of the Former Yugoslavia.” Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (1995), 917-931. Baldwin, James. “On Being White and Other Lies.” In The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings . New York: Vintage Books, 2010, 166-170.
396
Banac, Ivo. The National Question in Yugoslavia . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. Bannerji, Himani. Thinking Through: Essays on Feminism, Marxism, and Anti-Racism . Toronto: Women’s Press, 1995. ———. The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Gender . Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s Press, 2000. Bartlett, Will and Ivana Prica, “The Deepening Crisis in the European Super-periphery.” Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 15, no. 4 (2013), 367-382. Batinic, Jelena. “Feminism, Nationalism, and War: The ‘Yugoslav Case’ in Feminist Texts”, Journal of International Women’s Studies , 3 (I), 2001, 1-23. Benderly, Jill. “Rape, Feminism, and Nationalism in the War in Yugoslav Successor States.” Feminist Nationalism , Edited by Lois A. West, 59-72. New York: Routledge, 1997. Beogradski Sindikat, “Welcome to Srbija.” Diskretni Heroji . Beograd: Srbija not Siberia, 2010. Translated lyrics available at: http://lyricstranslate.com/en/welcome-srbija-welcome- serbia.html . Berend, Ivan T. History Derailed: Central and Eastern Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Bethlehem, Daniel L. and Marc Weller. The “Yugoslav” Crisis in International Law: General Issues, Part 1 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Bjelic, Dusan I. Normalizing the Balkans: Geopolitics of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2011. Blum, William . Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II. London: Zed Books, 2003. “Bosnia Leader was War Crimes Suspect.” BBC News. October 22, 2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3203323.stm . Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984, 112, 102’ ———. Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. ———. “Social Space and Symbolic Power.” In Sociological Theory 7, no. 1 (1989), 14-25. ———. The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Boyce-Davies, Carol. Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones . Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Breton, Andre. Manifesto of Surrealism . (1924), 1-42. http://www.tcf.ua.edu/Classes/Jbutler/T340/SurManifesto/ManifestoOfSurrealism.pdf Brubaker, Rogers. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Bulley, Dan. “Negotiating Ethics: Campbell, Ontopology and Hospitality.” In Review of International Studies 32, no. 4 (2006), 645-663. Burg Steven L. and Paul Shoup. The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Ethnic Conflict and International Intervention . Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1999. Burke, Peter. Varieties of Cultural History . Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997. Bush, George H.W. “Inaugural Address of George H.W. Bush.” The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy . Friday, January 20, 1989. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/bush.asp . Cameron, Gregory. “Politics and the Internet: A Phenomenological Critique.” In Meta: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy 3, no. 2 (2011), 335-361.
397
Campbell, David. National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism . New York : Monthly Review Press, 2000. Chandler, David. Bosnia: Faking Democracy after Dayton . London: Pluto Press, 2000. Chang, Jeff. Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation . New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005. Chirot, Daniel. The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe . Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989. Chossudovsky, Michel. “Occupy Wall Street and the ‘American Autumn’: Is it a ‘Coloured Revolution’?” Global Research . October 13, 2011. http://www.globalresearch.ca/occupy- wall-street-and-the-american-autumn-is-it-a-colored-revolution/27053 . ———. The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order . Shanty Bay: Global Outlook, 2003. Churchill, Ward . Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement . Cambridge: South End Press, 2002. ———. A Little Matter of Genocide . San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997. Churchill, Darren. “Reclaim the Centre”, 2012 Australian Democrats National Conference. 28 th January 2012, 1-13. http://australian-democrats.org.au/downloads/speeches/churchill- reclaim-the-centre-120128.pdf. Clark, Janine Natalya. “Collective Guilt, Collective Responsibility and the Serbs.” In East European Politics and Societies 22, no. 3 (2008), 668-692. Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul On Ice . New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968. Cohen, Lenard J. Broken Bonds: the Disintegration of Yugoslavia . Boulder: Westview Press, 1993. Cohen, Stephen F. Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History since 1917 . New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Cooper, Henry R. “Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History.” In Slavic Review 52, no. 3 (1993), 592-593. Copic, Sanja. “Wife Abuse in the Countries of the Former Yugoslavia.” In Feminist Review , no. 76 (2004), 46-64. Cushman, Thomas and Stjepan G. Mestrovic. This Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia . New York: New York University Press, 1996. Cveticanin, Predrag Ivana Spasic, and Danijela Gavrilovic. “Strategies and Tactics in Social Space: The Case of Serbia.” Social Science Information 53, no. 2 (2014), 213-239. Cyber Yugoslavia. www.yuga.com . Danforth, Kenneth C. “Yugoslavia: A House Divided.” In National Geographic 178, no. 2 (1990), 92-123. Dardot, Pierre, and Christian Laval. The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society . Verso: London and New York, 2013. Daschuk, James. Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Aboriginal Life . Regina: University of Regina Press, 2013. Dauphinee, Elizabeth. The Ethics of Researching War: Looking for Bosnia . Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. ———. The Politics of Exile. New York: Routledge, 2013. Delavsko Punkerska Universa DPU. http://www.delavske-studije.si/en/the-workers-and-punks- university/ .
398
Denitch, Bogdan. Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology . Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. ———. Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International . New York: Routledge, 1994. Despalatovic, Elinor Murray. Ljudevit Gaj and the Illyrian Movement . Boulder: East European Quarterly, 1975. Dirlik, Arif. History after the Three Worlds: Post-Eurocentric Historiographies . Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. Djilas, Aleksa. “The Academic West and the Balkan Test.” The Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans 9, no. 3 (2007), 323-332. Djilas, Milovan. The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System . New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1957. ———. Wartime . New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. “DNA Results of the International Commission on Missing Persons Reveal the Identity of 6,186 Srebrenica Victims.” International Commission on Missing Persons . July 9, 2009. http://www.ic-mp.org/press-releases/dna-results-of-the-international-commission-on- missing-persons-reveal-the-identity-of-6186-srebrenica-victims-dnk-izvjestaji- medunarodne-komisije-za-nestale-osobe-icmp-otkrili-identitete-6186-sreb/. Dragovic-Soso, Jasna. Saviours of the Nation: Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism . Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002. Drakulic, Slavenka. “We are all Albanians.” The Nation , May 20, 1999. http://www.thenation.com/article/we-are-all-albanians . ———. “Who are the Real Targets?” Bosnia Report . April-July, 1999. http://www.bosnia.org.uk/bosrep/report_format.cfm?articleid=2749&reportid=126 . ———. “Who Created Ratko Mladic?” In Eurozine . June 11, 2002. http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2011-06-02-drakulic-en.html. Du Bois, W.E.B. Color and Democracy: Colonies for Peace . New York: Harcourt, Bruce and Company, 1945. Dzidic, Denis. “Bosnia-Herzegovina Hit by a Wave of Violent Protests.” In The Guardian . February 7, 2014. https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/valerie-hopkins/we-are-hungry- in-three-languages-citizens-protest-in-bosnia . Ebert, Teresa L., and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh. Class in Culture . Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2008. ———. The Task of Cultural Critique . Urbana: University of Illinois, 2009. Eckstein, Arthur. “Orwell, Masculinity, and Feminist Criticism.” The Intercollegiate Review 21, no. 1 (1985), 47-54. Elich, Gregory. Strange Liberators: Militarism, Mayhem, and the Pursuit of Profit . New York: Llumina Press, 2006. Erjavec, Karmen, and Zala Volcic. ““War on Terrorism” as a Discursive Battleground: Serbian Recontextualization of G.W. Bush’s Discourse.” Discourse and Society 18, no. 2 (2007), 123-137. Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006. Fanon, Franz. Black Skin, White Masks . New York: Grove Press, 1967. ———. The Wretched of the Earth . New York: Grove Press,
399
Figes, Orlando. A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution . London: Penguin, 1998. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. The Russian Revolution . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Fleming, K.E. “Orientalism, Balkans, and Balkan Historiography.” The American Historical Review 105, no. 4 (2000), 1218-1233. Foucault, Michel. “The Concern for Truth.” In Foucault Live: Collected Interviews 1961-1984 , Edited by Sylvere Lotringer, 455-464. New York: Semiotext(e), 1996. ———. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction . New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Fridman, Orli. “’It was like fighting a war with our own people’: anti-war activism in Serbia during the 1990s.” Nationalities Papers 39, no. 4 (2011), 507-522. Fromm, Erich. Escape from Freedom . New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1941. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man . New York: Avon, 1993. Gagnon, V.P. The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. Gibbs, David N. First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia . Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009. Gibson, Carl, and Steve Horn. “Exposed: Globally Renowned Activist Collaborated with Intelligence Firm Stratfor.” Occupy.com , 12 February 2013. http://www.occupy.com/article/exposed-globally-renowned-activist-collaborated- intelligence-firm-stratfor . Glenny, Misha. The Fall of Yugoslavia: the Third Balkan War . New York: Penguin Books, 1996. Global Balkans, “Interviewing Tariq Ali: Neo-Liberalism and Protectorate States in the post- Yugoslav Balkans.” ZNet . February 19, 2008. http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16560. Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. “A New Serbia.” The New Republic 220, no. 20 (1999), 16-18. ———. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. Goldstein, Ivo. Croatia: A History . Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 1999. Goldsworthy, Vesna. Inventing Ruritania: the Imperialism of the Imagination . New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Gordy, Eric. The Culture of Power in Serbia: Nationalism and the Destruction of Alternatives . University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1999. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks , Edited by Quintin Hoare. New York: International Publishers, 1971. Grdesic, Marko. “Workers and Unions in Yugoslavia.” http://www.markogrdesic.com/uploads/3/1/8/0/31809299/workers_and_unions.pdf . Greenberg, Jessica. After the Revolution: Youth, Democracy, and the Politics of Disappointment in Serbia . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. Gregory, Derek. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq . Cambridge: Wiley- Blackwell, 2004. Grubacic, Andrej. Don’t Mourn, Balkanize! Essays after Yugoslavia . Oakland: PM Press, 2010. Gugushvili, Alexi. “Material Deprivation, Social Class and Life Course in the Balkans, Eastern Europe and Central Asia.” Studies of Transition States and Societies 3, no. 1 (2011), 39- 54. Hammond, Andrew. The Debated Lands: British and American Representations of the Balkans . Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007.
400
Harman, Chris. A People’s History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium. London: Verso, 2008. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. ———. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change . Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Hastings, Adrian. The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 . Hayden, Robert M. Blueprints for a House Divided: The Constitutional Logic of the Yugoslav Conflicts . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. ———. “Moralizing about Scholarship about Yugoslavia.” East European Politics and Societies 21, no. 1 (2007), 182-193. ———. “Reply to Ramet.” East European Politics and Societies 21, no. 1 (2007), 204. ———. “Schindler’s Fate: Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and Population Transfers.” Slavic Review 55, no. 1 (1996), 767-778. ———. “The Tactical Uses of Passion on Bosnia.” Current Anthropology 38, no. 5 (1997), 924- 926. Hedges, Chris. “Fascists Reborn as Croatia’s Founding Fathers.” The New York Times . April 12, 1997. http://www.nytimes.com/1997/04/12/world/fascists-reborn-as-croatia-s-founding- fathers.html . ———. “Muslims from Afar Joining 'Holy War' in Bosnia.” The New York Times . 5 December 1992. http://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/05/world/muslims-from-afar-joining- holy-war-in-bosnia.html. Hemon, Aleksander. “Genocide’s Epic Hero.” The New York Times. 27 July 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/opinion/27hemon.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 . Herman, Edward S. Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis . London: Pluto Press, 2000. Hitchens, Christopher. “Belgrade Degraded.” The Nation 268, no. 18 (1999), 8. Hobsbawm, Eric. “Out of the Great Dark Whale.” London Review of Books 18, no. 21 (1996), 3- 5. Holton, Milne, and Vasa D. Mihailovich. Songs of the Serbian People: From the Collections of Vuk Karadzic . Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. Homer, Sean. “Retrieving Emir Kusturica’s Underground as a Critique of Ethnic Nationalism.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media , no. 51 (2009), 1-3. http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc51.2009/Kusterica/ . ———. “To Begin at the Beginning Again: Zizek in Yugoslavia.” Slavic Review 72, no. 4 (2013), 708-727. Hopkins, Valerie. “‘We are Hungry in Three Languages’: Citizens Protest in Bosnia.” Open Democracy . February, 13 2014. https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/valerie- hopkins/we-are-hungry-in-three-languages-citizens-protest-in-bosnia. hooks, bell. Feminism Theory: From Margin to Center . London: Pluto Press, 2000. “Hospitality.” Dictionary.com . http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/hospitality?s=t . Hromadzic, Azra. “Discourses of Trans-ethnic Narod in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Nationalities Papers 41, no. 2 (2013), 259-275. “Federal Republic of Yugoslavia: Abuses against Serbs and Roma in the New Kosovo.” Human Rights Watch 11, no. 10 (1999). http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/kosov2/ .
401
Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order . New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. Hunt, Tristram. Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels . New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009. Hyman, Richard. Social Dialogue and Industrial Relations during the Economic Crisis: Innovative Practices or Business as Usual? Geneva: International Labour Organization, March 2010. HZA, “Dragi Tito” (2007). Translated lyrics are found at http://lyricstranslate.com/en/dragi-tito- dear-tito.html . Ignatieff, Michael. Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism . Toronto: Penguin Books, 1993. Ilyenkov, Evald. “The Metaphysics of Positivism: Marxism against Machism as the Philosophy of Lifeless Reaction”: https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/positive/positi.htm . Imre, Aniko. “Lesbian Nationalism.” Signs 33, no. 2 (2000), 255-282. Jacoby, Russell. The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Jakopovich, Daniel. “Scorched Earth and Subterranean Blues: Notes on the Landscape of the Democratic Left in Croatia.” Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 20, no. 2-3, 171-184. Jameson, Frederic. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Jansen, Stef, and Elissa Helms. “The ‘White Plague’: National-Demographic Rhetoric and its Gendered Resonance after the Post-Yugoslav Wars.” In Gender Dynamics and Post- conflict Reconstruction , Edited by Christine Eifler and Ruth Seifert, 219-243. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2009. Jelavich, Charles. “Serbian Textbooks: Towards Greater Serbia or Yugoslavia.” Slavic Review 42, no. 4 (1983), 601-619. ———. “The Issue of Serbian Textbooks in the Origins of World War I.” Slavic Review , 48, no. 2 (1989), 214-233. Jezernik, Bozidar. Wild Europe: The Balkans in the Gaze of Western Travellers . London: Saqi, 2004. Johnstone, Diana. Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. London: Pluto, 2002. Judah, Tim. The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. ———. “Will there be a War in Kosovo.” The New York Review of Books : http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1998/may/14/will-there-be-a-war-in-kosovo/ Jukic, Elvira M. “Bosnian Serb Leader Slates Veteran’s Protest.” Balkan Transitional Justice . 27 February 2014. http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/dodik-claims-protests-targeted- against-republika-srpska . Kaplan, Robert D. Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History . New York: Vintage Books, 1993. ———. The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post-Cold War . New York: Vintage, 2001. ———. Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos . New York: Random House, 2002.
402
Kesic, Vesna. “A Response to Catherine MacKinnon’s Article ‘Turning Rape into Pornography: Postmodern Genocide.” Hastings Women’s Law Journal 5 (1994) 267-280. ———. “The High Price of Free Speech.” Women’s Review of Books X, no. 10-11 (1993), 16- 17. ———. “Witch Hunt, Croatian Style.” Women’s Review of Books , X, no. 10-11 (1993), 16. Krieger, Heike. The Kosovo Conflict and International Law: An Analytical Documentation 1974- 1999 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Kifner, John. “Through the Serbian Mind’s Eye.” The New York Times , April 10, 1994 Kilibarda, Konstantin. “Clearing Space: an Anatomy of Urban Renewal, Social Cleansing and Everyday Life in a Belgrade Mahala .” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 24, no. 4 (2011), 593-612. ———. “Non-Aligned Geographies in the Balkans: Space, Race and Image in the Construction of New ‘European’ Foreign Policies.” Unpublished Paper. York University: April 2009, 1-34. Klebnikov, Peter. “Heroin Heroes.” Mother Jones . January/February 2000. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2000/01/heroin-heroes Kolodko, Grzegorz W. From Shock to Therapy: the Political Economy of Postsocialist Transformation . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Korac, Maja. “Transnational Pathways to Integration: Chinese Traders in Serbia.” Sociologija LV, no. 2 (2013), 245-260. “Kosovo/Serbia: Protect Minorities from Ethnic Violence.” Human Rights Watch . March 19, 2004. http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2004/03/18/kosovoserbia-protect-minorities-ethnic- violence . Krleza, Miroslav. The Return of Philip Latinowicz . Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995. Kovacevic, Natasa. Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization . New York: Routledge, 2008. ———. “Orientalizing Post/Communism: Europe's ‘Wild East’ in Literature and Film.” Reconstruction 8, no. 4 (2008). http://reconstruction.eserver.org/Issues/084/kovacevic.shtml . Kusturica, Emir. Underground . New York: New Yorker Video, 2003. ———. “Underground - like a thunderstorm.” Le Point , no. 1205, 21 October 1995: http://www.kustu.com/w2/en:itv_95-10-21_le_point . Lalic, Mihailo The Wailing Mountain . Harcourt Brace and World, 1965. Lampe, John R. Balkan Economic History, 1550-1950, From Imperial Borderlands to Developing Nations . Indiana University Press, 1982. ———. Yugoslavia as History: Twice there was a Country . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Lampe, John R., and Sabrina P. Ramet. “Responses to Aleksa Djilas, “The Academic West and the Balkan Test.’” The Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans 9, no. 3 (2007), 113- 120. Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (The Crisis in Our Party)”: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1904/onestep/r.htm . ———. The Lenin Anthology , ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1975.
403
Lewin, Moshe. Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization . Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Lewis, Paul. “Kosovo PM is Head of Human Organ and Arms Ring, Council of Europe Reports.” The Guardian. December 14, 2010. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/14/kosovo-prime-minister-llike-mafia-boss . Lipstadt, Deborah E. Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory . New York: Free Press, 1993. Lilly, Carol S. Power and Persuasion: Ideology and Rhetoric in Communist Yugoslavia 1944- 1953 . Boulder: Westview Press, 2001. Longinovic, Tomislav. Vampires like US: Writing Down “the serbs” . Belgrade: Belgrade Circle, 2005. ———. Vampire Nation: Violence as Cultural Imaginary . Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. ———. “Postmodernity and the Technology of Power: Legacy of the Vidici Group in Serbia.” College Literature 21, no. 1 (1994). ———. “Internet Nation: The Case of Cyber Yugoslavia (www.yuga.com) .” The Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain . Delhi: The Sarai Programme, CSDS, 2001. Losurdo, Domenico. Liberalism: A Counter-history . London: Verso, 2011. Mackenzie, Georgina Muir, and Paulina Irby. Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey in Europe . London: Bell and Daldy, 1867. MacKinnon, Catharine “Turning Rape into Pornography.” In Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues , Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. ———. “Postmodernism and Human Rights.” In Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues , Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. ———. “Crimes of War, Crimes of Peace.” In Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006). ———. ““From Auschwitz to Omarska, Nuremberg to The Hague.” In Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues , Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. ———. “Rape as Nationbuilding.” In Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues . Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. Magas, Branka. The Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracking the Breakup 1980-92 . New York: Verso, 1992. Mandel, Michael. How America Gets Away with Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage, and Crimes against Humanity . New York: Pluto Press, 2004. ———. The Dark Side of Democracy . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Manzotti, Lucia, and Silvestro Rivolta. “Serbia: Waiting for Fiat.” Osservatorio Balcanie e Caucaso , 21 January 2010: http://www.balcanicaucaso.org/eng/Regions-and- countries/Serbia/Serbia-waiting-for-Fiat-55812 . Marx, Karl. “Capital, Volume One.” In The Marx-Engels Reader , edited by Robert C. Tucker, 294-438. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978. ———. “The German Ideology.” In The Marx-Engels Reader , edited by Robert C. Tucker, 146- 200. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978. ———. “The Philosophy of True Socialism.” Marxists.org . https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch04b.htm .
404
———. “Theses on Feuerbach.” In The Marx-Engels Reader , edited by Robert C. Tucker, 143- 145. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978. McNally, David. Bodies of Meaning: Studies on Language, Labor, and Liberation . Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. ———. Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism . New York: Haymarket Books, 2012. McRobie, Heather. “Breaking the Old Narratives of Bosnia.” Precarious Europe . September 20, 2014. http://www.precariouseurope.com/power/breaking-narratives-bosnia . Melegh, Attila. On the East-West Slope: Globalization, Nationalism, Racism and Discourses on Central and Eastern Europe . Budapest: Central European Press, 2006. Mestrovic, Stjepan. Habits of the Balkan Heart . College Station: Texas A&M University, 1993. ———. The Balkanization of the West: The Confluence of Postmodernism and Postcommunism . New York: Routledge, 1994. ———. The Barbarian Temperament: Towards a Postmodern Critical Theory . New York: Routledge, 1993. Mikus, Marek. “‘European Serbia’ and its ‘Civil’ Discontents: Beyond Liberal Narratives of Modernisation.” Centre for Southeast European Studies, Working Paper, no. 7, June 2013, Milic, Andjelka. “The Family and Work in the Post-socialist Transition of Serbia: 1991-2006”, International Review of Sociology 17, no. 2 (2007), 359-380. “Mile vs Tranzicija-Pirati.” YouTube video, 9:31. Posted by Mateja92, October 15, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kgbt0VG9U1c . “Mile vs Tranzicija – Strani Jezici.” YouTube video, 7:48. Posted by Sinisa Brocilovic, October 22, 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWn1c4HbW_c . Misina, Dalibor. “‘(What’s So Funny ‘bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding’: Rock Culture and the Rebuilding of Civic Identity in the Post-Conflict Balkans.” Identities 20, no. 3 (2013), 304-325. Mocnik, Rastko. “The Balkans as an Element in Ideological Mechanisms.” In Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation , edited by Dusan I. Bjelic and Obrad Savic, 79-116. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Monroe, Alexei. Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK . Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. Mozejko, Edward. “Postmodernism in the Literatures of the Former Yugoslavia.” In International Postmodernism: Theory and Literary Practice , Edited by Hans Bertens and Douwe Fokkema, 441-446. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. Munk, Erica. “What’s Wrong with this Picture?” The Women's Review of Books 11, no. 6 (1994), 5-6. Muppidi, Himadeep. “On The Politics of Exile .” Security Dialogue 44, no. 4 (2013), 299-313. Murphy, Kevin J. “Can We Write the History of the Russian Revolution? A Belated Response to Eric Hobsbawm.” Historical Materialism 15, no. 2 (2007), 3-19. Music, Goran. Serbia’s Working Class in Transition 1988-2013 . Belgrade: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2013. Njaradi, Dunja. “The Balkan Studies: History, Post-Colonialism and Critical Regionalism.” Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 20, no. 2-3 (2012), 185- 201.
405
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals . Translated by Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Nikolic-Ristanovic, Vesna. “Serbia between Civil War and Democracy.” Peace Review 10, no. 2 (1997), 249-255. Norris, David. In the Wake of the Balkan Myth: Questions of Identity and Modernity . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. Nordland, Rod. “Vengeance of a Victim Race.” Newsweek 133, no. 15 (1999), 42-43. “United States Policy Toward Eastern Europe.” National Security Decision Directive 54. The White House, Washington: September 2, 1982. http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/reference/Scanned%20NSDDS/NSDD54.pdf. “United States Policy Toward Yugoslavia.” National Security Decision Directive 133. The White House, Washington: March 14, 1984. http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/reference/Scanned%20NSDDS/NSDD133.pdf . Obradovic, Marija. “The Socio-Historical Consequences of Privatization in Serbia.” South-East Review for Labor and Social Affairs 1 (2007), 39-60. Ollman, Bertell. The Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Orwell, George. The Road to Wigan Pier . London: Penguin Books, 1989. Palairet, Michael. The Balkan Economies c. 1800-1914: Evolution without Development . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Panagiotou, Ritsa. “Effects of the Global Economic Crisis on South-east Europe.” Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 12, no. 2 (2010), 187-194. Pawlikowski, Pawel. Serbian Epics . BBC Films, 1992. Pappe, Illan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine . Oxford: One World, 2006. Peeters, Benoit. Derrida: A Biography . Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. Pokret za Slobodu: http://www.pokret.net/. Popper, Karl. The Open Society and its Enemies . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963. Plamper, Jan. “Foucault’s Gulag.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3, no. 2 (2002), “Preamble to the Statute of the Belgrade Circle.” Beogradski Krug/Belgrade Circle: In Defense of the University , no. 3-4 (1997), No. 4-6, 1998. Pugh, Michael. “Transformation in the Political Economy of Bosnia since Dayton.” International Peacekeeping 12, no. 3 (2005), 448-462. Rabinowitch, Alexander. The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd . Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2004. Ramet, Sabrina P. “A Review of One Chapter: An Example of Irresponsible Self-Indulgence.” East European Politics and Societies 21, no. 1 (2007), 194-203. ———. Thinking about Yugoslavia: Scholarly Debates about the Yugoslav Breakup and the Wars in Bosnia and Kosovo . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Ramet, Pedro. Yugoslavia in the 1980s . Boulder: Westview Press, 1985. Ransome, Paul. Antonio Gramsci: A New Introduction . Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992. Razsa Maple, and Andrej Kurnik. “The Occupy Movement in Zizek’s Hometown: Direct Democracy and the Politics of Becoming.” American Ethnologist 39, no. 2 (2012), 238- 258.
406
The Responsibility to Protect: Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty . Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001. Rosenthal, John. “Kosovo and the ‘Jewish Question’.” Monthly Review 51, no. 9 (2000). http://monthlyreview.org/2000/02/01/kosovo-and-the-jewish-question/ . Rossi, Michael. “In Search of a Democratic Cultural ‘Alternative’: Serbia’s European Heritage from Dositej Obradovic to OTPOR.” Nationalities Papers 40, no. 6 (2012), 853-878. Sabic, Dejan, Aleksander Knezevic, Snezana Vujadinovic, Rajko Golic, Miroljub Milincic. “Belgrade Slums: Life or Survival on the Margins of Serbian Society?” Trames 17, no. 1 (2013), 55-86. Said, Edward W. Orientalism . New York: Random House, 1979. Sanders, Lynn M. “Against Deliberation.” Political Theory 25, no. 3 (1997), 347-376. Sartre, Jean-Paul Sartre. “I. Marxism and Existentialism.” Marxists.org . https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/critic/sartre1.htm . Saunders, Francis Stonor Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War . London: Granta Books, 1999. Savic, Obrad. “Parallel Worlds: NGOs and Civic Society.” The Politics of Human Rights , Edited by Obrad Savic, London: Verso, 1999. Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday forms of Peasant Resistance . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Secor, Laura. “Testaments Betrayed: Yugoslavian Intellectuals and the Road to War.” http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9909/testbet.html Sehic, Faruk. “Fuck them, they make three and a half thousand a month.” Bosnia-Herzegovina Protest Files . February 12, 2014. https://bhprotestfiles.wordpress.com/2014/02/12/fuck- them-they-make-three-and-a-half-thousand-a-month/ . Sells, Michael. The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. “Serbia Hunger Strike Drama Ends.” Balkan Insight . May 11, 2009. http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/serbia-hunger-strike-drama-ends. “Serbia Workers on Hunger Strike.” Balkan Insight . November 5, 2007. http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/serbia-workers-on-hunger-strike . “Serbia on Verge of Biggest Investment.” B92 . August 2, 2007. http://www.b92.net/eng/news/business.php?yyyy=2007&mm=08&dd=02&nav_id=4279 0. Seymour, Richard. “Resisting the Demonological Temptation.” Lenin’s Tomb . February 22, 2008. http://www.leninology.co.uk/2008/02/resisting-demonological-temptation.html . ———. The Liberal Defense of Murder . London: Verso, 2012. “Simulation.” Dictionary.com . http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/simulation?s=t . Sito-Sucic, Daria. “Balkan Rappers Speak Out on Peace and Justice.” Reuters . November 24, 2006. http://uk.reuters.com/article/2006/11/24/lifestyle-life-balkans-hiphop-dc- idUKL2329247820061124 . “Social Dialogue.” European Comission: Employment, Social Affairs & Inclusion. http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=329&langId=en . Spencer, Edmund. Travels in European Turkey in 1850, Vol. I. London: Colburn and Company, 1851. Spielberg, Stephen. Schindler’s List . Universal City, CA: Universal, 2004.
407
Sijakovic, Bogoljub. A Critique of Balkanist Discourse: Contribution to the Phenomenology of Balkan ‘Otherness’. Toronto: Serbian Literary Company, 2004. Silber Laura, and Alan Little. Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation . New York: Penguin Books, 1997. Simic, Goran. Immigrant Blues . London: Brick Books, 2003. Smith, Dorothy E. The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987. Spencer, Edmund. Travels in European Turkey in 1850, Vol. I. London: Colburn and Company, 1851. Sprinker, Michael. Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx . London: Verso, 1999. Sreckovic, Milenko. “Anti-Privatization Protests in Serbia.” The Bullet , Socialist Project, E- Bulletin, no. 252 (2009). http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/252.php . Stakic, Isidora. “Homophobia and Hate Speech in Serbian Public Discourse: How Nationalist Myths and Stereotypes Influence Prejudices against the LGBT Minority.” The Equal Rights Review 7 (2011), 44-65. Stanojevic, Dragan. “Media Use Among Young People in Serbia.” Sociologija LIV, no. 2 (2012), 369-385. Stanojevic, Miroslav. “Workers’ Power in Transition Economies: the Cases of Serbia and Slovenia.” European Journal of Industrial Relations 9, no. 3 (2003), 283-301. Stefanovic, Djordje. “Seeing the Albanians through Serbian Eyes: The Inventors of the Tradition of Intolerance and their Critics, 1804-1939.” European History Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2005), 465-492. Stiks, Igor, and Srecko Horvat. “The New Balkan Revolts: From Protests to Plenums and Beyond.” March 12, 2014: https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/igor- %C5%A1tiks-sre%C4%87ko-horvat/new-balkan-revolts-from-protests-to-plenums-and- beyond . ———. “Welcome to the Desert of Transition! Post-Socialism, the European Union, and a New Left in the Balkans.” Monthly Review 63, no. 10 (2012). http://monthlyreview.org/2012/03/01/welcome-to-the-desert-of-transition/ . Stubbs, Paul. “Networks, Organisations, Movements: Narratives and Shapes of Three Waves of Activism in Croatia.” Polemos 15, no. 2 (2012), 11-32. Sudetic, Chuck. Blood and Vengeance: One Family’s Story of the War in Bosnia . New York: W.W. Norton, 1998. Sullivan, Stacy. “Milosevic’s Willing Executioners.” The New Republic 220, no. 19 (1999), 26- 35. “Survey Looks at Internet Usage in Serbia.” July 2, 2010. http://www.b92.net/eng/news/society.php?yyyy=2010&mm=07&dd=02&nav_id=68186 . Tabeau, Ewa, and Jakub Bijak. “War-Related Deaths in the 1992-1995 Armed Conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Critique of Previous Estimates and Recent Results.” European Journal of Population / Revue Européenne de Démographie 21, no. 2/3, (2005), 187-215. “Tadic: Protests Contribute to Democracy.” B92 . June 13, 2011. http://www.b92.net/eng/news/politics.php?yyyy=2011&mm=06&dd=13&nav_id=74903 . “The Story of Nusreta Sivac.” United Nations Human Rights: Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights , June 23, 2009. http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/StoryOfNusretaSivac.aspx
408
“The Residential School System.” Indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca . http://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/home/government-policy/the-residential-school- system.html Thompson, E.P. “Socialist Humanism: An Epistle to the Philistines.” (1957). https://www.marxists.org/archive/thompson-ep/1957/sochum.htm. ———. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Penguin, 1991. Timpanaro, Sebastiano. “Considerations on Materialism.” New Left Review I, no. 85 (1974), 3- 22. Todorova, Maria. Bones of Contention: the Living Archive of Vasil Levski and the Making of Bulgaria’s National Hero . Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009. ———. Imagining the Balkans . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. ———. “The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality, and the Study of East European Nationalism.” Slavic Review 64, no. 1 (2005), 140-164. ———. “What Is or Is There a Balkan Culture, and Do or Should the Balkans have a Regional Identity?” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 4, no. 1 (2004), 175-185. Todorovic, Dragan. The Book of Revenge: A Blues for Yugoslavia . Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2007. Tomasic, Dinko. Personality and Culture in Eastern European Politics . New York: G.W. Stewart, 1948. Trost, Tamara Pavasovic, and Nikola Kovacevic, “Football, Hooliganism and Nationalism: the Reaction to Serbia’s Gay Parade in Reader Commentary Online.” Sport in Society 16, no. 8 (2013), 1054-1076. Trotsky, Leon. History of the Russian Revolution . Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008. Tucovic, Dimitrije. “The First Balkan Social Democratic Conference.” In The Balkan Socialist Tradition , ed. Andreja Zivkovic and Dragan Plavsic, 167-174. London: Porcupine Press, 2003. “Tuzla’s Declaration of Citizens and Workers (Tuzla # 1).” Bosnia-Herzegovina Protest Files . February 7, 2014. https://bhprotestfiles.wordpress.com/2014/02/07/declaration-of- citizens-and-workers-in-tuzla-1/ . “‘Twenty Years They’ve Been Suffocating Us’.” Bosnia-Herzegovina Protest Files . February 8, 2014. https://bhprotestfiles.wordpress.com/2014/02/08/twenty-years-theyve-been- suffocating-us/ . United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). “The Power of 1.8 Billion: Adolescents, Youth and the Transformation of the Future.” New York: United Nations Population Fund, 2014, 1- 126. Upchurch, Martin. “State, Labour and Market in Post-revolution Serbia.” Capital and Class , no. 89 (2006), 1-30. ———. “Strategic Dilemmas for Trade Unions in Transformation: The Experience of Serbia.” South-East Europe Review 4 (2006), 43-64. Upchurch, Martin, and Darko Marinkovic. “Wild Capitalism, Privatisation, and Employment Relations in Serbia.” Employee Relations 33, no. 4 (2011), 316-333. ———. Workers and Revolution in Serbia: From Tito to Milosevic and Beyond . Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Vetta, Theodora. “‘Nationalism is Back! Radikali and Privatization in Serbia.” In Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class: Working Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe , Edited by Don Kalb, 37-56. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011.
409
Vickers, Miranda. Between Serb and Albanian: A History of Kosovo. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Vilenica, Ana. “Interview with Milenko Sreckovic on ‘Workers Resistance to Deindustrialization and Land Grabbing’.” Freedom Fight Info , July 27, 2013. http://www.freedomfight.net/interview-with-milenko-sreckovic-on-workers-resistance- to-deindustrialization-and-land-grabbing/ . Wachtel, Andrew Baruch. Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Williams, Raymond. “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.” New Left Review I, no. 82 (1973), 3-16. ———. “Problems of Materialism.” New Left Review I, no. 109 (1978), 3-17. Wilson, Duncan. The Life and Times of Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic, 1787-1864: Literacy, Literature and National Independence in Serbia. London: Clarendon Press, 1970. Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). “Women’s Network of Bosnia-Herzegovina: Violence is not the Only Problem.” Translated by Eric Gordy, Bosnia-Herzegovina Protest Files . February 13, 2014. https://bhprotestfiles.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/womens-network-of-bosnia-and- herzegovina-violence-is-not-the-only-problem/ . Wood, Ellen Meiksins. Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Woodward, Susan. Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War . Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1995. X, Malcolm. By Any Means Necessary: Speeches, Interviews, and a Letter by Malcolm X . New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970. Zarkov, Dubravka. The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Break-up of Yugoslavia . Durham: Durham University Press, 2007. Zivkovic, Marko. Serbian Dreambook: National Imaginary in the Time of Milosevic . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. ———. “Violent Highlanders and Peaceful Lowlanders: The Uses and Abuses of Ethno- Geography in the Balkans from Versailles to Dayton.” Replika (1997). http://www.c3.hu/scripta/scripta0/replika/honlap/english/02/08zivk.htm . Zivkovic Andreja, and Dragan Plavsic. The Balkan Socialist Tradition: Balkan Socialism and the Balkan Federation, 1871-1915 , Revolutionary History 8, no. 3. London: Porcupine Press, 2003. Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Stories . London: Verso, 2002. ———. “Against the Double Blackmail.” New Left Review I, no. 234 (1999), 76-82. ———. “The Morning After.” Eurozine . March 3, 2001. http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2001-03-27-zizek-en.html. ———. “Human Rights and its Discontents.” Bard College. November 15, 1999. http://www.lacan.com/zizek-human.htm. ———. “Euronews Talks Films and Balkans with Slavoj Zizek.” Euronews . December 9, 2008. http://www.euronews.com/2008/09/12/euronews-talks-films-and-balkans-with-slavoj- zizek/ .
410
———. The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters . London & New York: Verso, 1996. ———. The Plague of Fantasies . London: Verso, 1997. Zuvic, Dado and Maja Zuvela. “Bosnia Rocked by Anti-government Unrest.” Reuters . February 7, 2014. http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/07/us-bosnia-unrest- idUSBREA160UU20140207 .
411