Conference Papers
Somewhere between Utopia, Compromise, and Post-modern
Borca Pavicevic
| Borca Pavicevic, |
In place of that which we call “globalization”, “integration”, and “permeative culture”, many national entities prefer to talk about “national culture”, “identity”, “differences” and - the most dangerous word of all - “roots”. The process of becoming a community can either be very complicated or very simple. It depends on political decisions which, as we have seen, often abuse the concept of democracy. The Yugoslav community violently was torn apart, and before that happened, we often heard the word “democracy" used in much the same way it was used in Hitler's orations. Hitler was speaking about peace as well. The word "democracy” - perverted, prostituted, taken in vain - became the vocabulary of hatred which poisoned our cultural terrain.
And why do I feel that I need to say this? Because it seems to me that colonialism of all kinds, including cultural colonialism, is the final outcome of nationalism, and war in the name of nationalism. I live in an environment today whose culture and style are embodied in tin-shack kiosks that overwhelm our sidewalks and sell garbage that just smells of the west. I live amongst so-called "turbo-houses” rising on every corner . These are techno-pop architectural mutants that - to borrow another term from modern music - "sample" architectural eras and elements - towers, turrets, balconies, and arches - to create unbelievable structures which defy both description and Newtonian physics. They are made of marble, concrete and iron, built from the spoils of war and the profiteering privilege of an isolated country. I live in a place where a population poisoned by nationalism waits hours in long lines just for a chance to apply for visas to the western countries that are supposed to be to blame for all their sufferings.
Those people who busy themselves with cultural matters are wrong if they think that the people who made money on war are going to become Rothschilds or Carnegies. We have not seen a rush to philanthropy. The new class built by war is interested only in consumption - not in production, and certainly not in culture. All of the resources at the disposal of the regime have been used to support crude propaganda. Certain intellectuals make the circuit of state-controlled television talk-shows to assure the population that the most important task ahead is the accumulation of capital which will then lead to a free marketplace, and then we will all live in a rosy virtual reality.
Reality is something completely different. Luxury sports cars speed down crumbling roads, past miserable, shuffling crowds who come out to wait at bus stops in the hope that may-be may-be the bus that is supposed to stop every fifteen minutes will come by at least once a day. In order to survive, a person has to be schizophrenic, because that is the only way to link the past with the present, or image with reality. Voluntary schizophrenia has a tendency to erase memory and erode individual identity. That is another way that war is waged against civilians.
The destruction of the socialist or communist utopias and the fall of the Berlin Wall muddied the entire concept of utopia for intellectuals. Those who did not participate in the war on the side of the ideological machinery of war found some resolution in postmodernism, then in escapism, in the justified destruction of language that was at the same time ideological and utopian. Where there is no utopia, there is no history That spiritual vacuum was filled by an onrush of nationalism, religiosity, and general insanity. Instead of history, we had parahistory. Instead of mythology, we had paramythology. All continuity was lost. Today, we face the same problem that existed long long before the war: how to enter into the modern world that existed long long before the war. That is why there is continuity in various former republics and regimes. To a greater or lesser extent - or the same, party or oligarchy or Mafia again is in charge today. In order to preserve themselves, and in order to prevent modernisation, the regimes destroyed a country.
What does this have to do with art or culture? Choosing between participating the machinery of war - or, on the other hand, refusing to engage in politics, leaves little room for vision. The very concept of politics has become corrupt and immoral. This makes it possible for politicians to do whatever they chose with cultural life. That is why we live among the proliferating kiosks and turbo-houses, in a virtual televized reality. Civil society is decimated.
If European globa1isation, especially economic globalisation, does not carry with it strong intellectual and cultural forces that can explain and even change the world, then we can expect nationalism, reactionary and retrograde forces. At the same time, it is nonetheless my deep belief that nationalism is only a transitional phase till a new division between left and right. That is why it is absolutely necessary for intellectual and culture forces to work tirelessly for a solution, generating new ideas, applying them in practice.
Based on my experience, it seems that today there are no leftist or rightist, Serb or Swedish, forward or backward approaches - just healthy ones or sick ones. We must pay constant attention to what is calling itself “democracy”. Just as the example of what happened in Yugoslavia shows that nothing lasts forever, my generation - and the generation younger than mine - has to fight for what we believe should last forever. That is why the European Community or the European Union must have cultural as well as economic strength. It should maintain a critical approach and diligent cultural politics towards the privileges of globalization and the privileges of individual cultural environments. That is the only way to avoid the dichotomy between cultural superpowers, on the one hand, and cultural ghettos, on the other. That dichotomy necessarily leads to conflict, and to determinations of who is an emigrant, who is an asylum seeker, and where, when and how they got there.
The politics of those of us involved in culture need not be a nightmare, but an extension of moral action. Cultural policy that claims to be unaffected by politics inevitably shares in the responsibility for its consequences.
We must modernise the idea of cultural engagement beyond its 20th century model . Recoiling from politics, or finding politics repulsive, is a poor response to the sounds of children crying in the street. A Yugoslav film director described it like this: "How do I chose, when there is only enough room in my car either for my child, or for my film?" Somewhere between utopia, compromise, and the post-modern, there must be another way which fuels our consciousness.
“Southern Adriatic”. I remind you again that, once upon a time, many of you travelled amongst us. We made theatre festivals together, we wrote books together. Today we write proposals about what used to be our real life. In order to have a culture, a person must take a stand. It has to be a political stand, because without a political stand, culture becomes immoral, and immorality becomes the rule of politics.
Borca Pavicevic