The Language of Problems
Two contributions will be published here - an article by Branimir Stojanović prepared for the Vreme magazine and an interview with anonymous participants published in the Niš-based magazine Kulturkampf. By giving the title "The Language of Problems" to this contribution, I want to emphasize the purpose and outcome of these texts with regard to the issue they focus on – generating a language ensuring an emancipated political analysis of the events and phenomena constituting our everyday life.
The essay "Sacrificing the Victims" is accompanied by an explanatory text stating the reasons for its appearance. As the entire project concerning the monument to the victims of the ex-Yugoslav wars sprang directly from another project - "Discussion on Works of Art", I believe it is necessary to provide additional explanations about this series of discussions. Namely, throughout 2002 and 2003, a group of around twenty artists and cultural workers held meetings at the gallery "Djura Jakšić's House" and discussed works of art, after the artists themselves gave a short introduction to their works. The majority of discussions held there were marked by the fact that they did not fit into language and discursive patterns typical of the contemporary artistic theory and practice. In order to get acquainted with each work and understand its methodological, cultural and ideological background, it was necessary to use a language which would make it possible to locate and analyse what Milica Tomić (artist and initiator of the discussions in Djura Jakšić's house) once defined as "dormant content". If the "awakening" was to take place, it was necessary to devise a new operative language to examine the problems on which works of art centred through their transparent or dormant content. That language was cultivated in the course of these meetings.
Interview
Over the past few years, we witnessed several politically topical events in public life, events important for the majority of citizens - situations distinguished by the fact that hooligans tended to take over the prerogatives of state authorities. The most interesting situations happened in Belgrade on October 5 th 2000 , June 22 nd 2001 - during the failed attempt of organizing Gay Parade in Belgrade and on the night of March 17 th /18 th 2004 in Belgrade , Nis and Novi Sad during street protests against the violence in Kosovo. In each of them the police behaved in the same way – they did not really try to stop the riots or deliberately retreated before the hooligans. If we agree that anonymity is one of the most powerful weapons of vandals, the question is what kind of "anonymous" political thought ensures passive attitude of the state and its citizens and a peculiar neutrality of the majority of political factors in the time of such violence?
I think that the hidden roots of hooliganism or as you said "anonymous political thought" backing it up, lie in the ideology of legalism. Take, for example, the simplest form of legalistic ideology, the basic form of its operationalization in the everyday politics, in fact the situation when a politician says "I am a legalist". What does a politician actually say when he announces "I am a legalist"? This emphatic statement is meant to show that the person in question believes in Law, because, taken at a literal level, it would be either nonsensical or trivial, since no man living in a state can be anything other than a legalist. What kind of Law does a legalist have in mind? Obviously, he is referring to some other law, different from the ordinary one which keeps us – the unbelievers – in the state. What is in fact Law for a legalist, if it is not the law that applies to every law-abiding citizen: the obligation to obey the law? It follows that a legalist does not believe in Law but in the ideal of law, in a law that is above the law, law that is beyond reach. Namely, the statement "I am a legalist" indicates acceptance of the terror of the Ideal Law, some rigid and obscene Law that demands belief. What a legalist really wants is to integrate into law, not to obey it. In other words, the declaration "I am a legalist" splits the Law into the kind of Law that is obeyed and the other kind that is believed in. Moreover, by the very fact of believing in Law a legalist exempts himself from the rule of law that is obeyed, wishing, at the same time, to integrate completely into it.
Since we know that contemporary states know no examples of political parties that naively identify with the role of Law, i.e. disinterested neutrality that stabilizes and normalizes political relations, we must ask ourselves the question as to what are political aims of someone who wants to identify naively with the role of Law. This leads us to making a very simple diagnosis. A political legalist is someone who presumes to be above the law and justifies that claim by saying that he believes in law. Therefore, a political party presuming to hegemonize the neutrality of law, its equal distance from everyone, does nothing but create just the opposite effect of what is meant to be achieved by the statement "I am a legalist". Its actual meaning, in this case, is "I am usurping the law, that is to say, I can infringe the law because I believe in it". Namely, "I am using the law as an instrument in political battles". In the subjective economy of a legalist, this belief produces the following conviction: I am an instrument of law. A party that claims to be legalistic is positioned beyond the law, precisely because of its aspirations to speak in the name of law.
It's interesting to note how legalists behave in political life. For instance, let's consider the activity of legalists after the last elections that brought them to power. They use the logic of the law in which they believe and execute its obscene order: DO EVERYTHING THAT YOU FORBID OTHERS TO DO. Legalists presume to lustrate their political opponents without the Lustration Act, while, at the same time, they refuse to pass that Act. To make things even more absurd, they appointed Justice Minister the man who should have been among the first to be lustrated because by adhering to law he was breaking the law, which is the sublime of legalism. That's what happens when legalism becomes the ideology of those who rule. The current Justice Minister enforced the thought crime law at the time of the total disintegration of socialism, in the era of the breakdown of the legitimate framework of legality of socialist laws. That was the time when that law was almost no longer enforced and every respected judge refused to sentence people for thought crimes. On the other hand, didn't the hooligans, similarly to legalists, use the ideal law as an excuse for beating up homosexuals in the streets? To be fair, by ideal law they mean the law of God, natural law and believe that they are integrated in it. In fact they believe themselves to be instruments of it, while by beating up others and committing violent acts they violate human laws.
On another level, the level of libidinal economy, legalists are perverts because they, like perverts, consider law to be an ideal into which they want to integrate completely; therefore we can safely say that perversion is currently in power in Serbia. Since the last perverts in the history of Serbian politics were the Stalinists who believed that they were instruments of the application of the historic law of class struggle, today's legalism is an unconscious successor of this tradition in Serbian politics. More precisely, it is a personal trauma of the inventor of legalism – anticommunist whose father enforced the law in the Stalinist era.
Judging by the paralysis of the police and other state authorities, hooligans are somewhat entitled to behave like chosen representatives of the people, authorized to carry out some anonymous but legitimate political will. What kind of voters can a politician claiming to be a legalist count on, or who wants to be interpellated into the ideology of legalism?
Hooligans are the hidden truth of the ideology of legalism, best hidden from legalism itself. A legalist distances himself from hooligans and sees himself as being on the opposite side. However, between a legalist and a hooligan there exists a relationship of immediate conversion – a legalist is the ideal hooligan and a hooligan is the ideal legalist.
Namely, you are quite familiar with Brecht's joke "what is the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?' Naive child's play". The same applies to law, "what is the violence that breaks the law compared to the violence that establishes the rule of law? - Child's play". The dark roots of law that the legalist doesn't want to know anything about lie in violence; law is founded on violence, which is a necessary element in setting the framework of law. But that element is later suppressed by the law itself; law makes it invisible so that Law can seemingly self-reproduce in its idealized, ritualized form. The statement "I am a legalist" in its emphatic form means I believe in law, in its both forms: in the violence which is necessary to set the framework of law and its idealized and ritualized form that covers up the violence inherent to law. Since legalist ideology lays hold of the "good side of law" only, that is to say, it's idealized and ritualized side, a legalist is not aware of the fact that by doing so he shows that he believes in violence too, the violence which ensures the application of law. It is a hooligan who takes it on himself to use violence; he identifies with it and believes that violence will result in a law.
As Hegel puts it : "A criminal is not a criminal because he committed a crime but because he did not universalize it". So the policy embodied in the statement "I am a legalist" is an attempt to use law to cover up crime, the crime that is impossible to universalize – genocide. If we analyze the intention of a legalist to the utmost and get to the core idea, we see that he violates laws by enforcing laws; he wants to use law to commit a crime, which is the sublime of hooliganism. To lay hold of the good, ritualized side of law is a crime.
The result of that was the inability of the police to confront the hooligans that gathered around the Bajrakli mosque and the mosque in Nis – the ideology of legalism ran into itself and stepped back at the very moment when it should have enforced the law and used violence to restore law and order. Staying true to its legalistic principles, it withdrew in the ideal of ritualized law, allowing the hooligans to use violence. By burning down mosques, the hooligans sent a message letting everybody know that they expected the legalists to stick to the ideology that legalizes crime instead of enforcing the Law (not even the most harmless form of law – maintenance of law and order) that would prevent the symbolic equivalent of genocide.
Interior Minister provided the best possible proof of the assumption that violation of law is an integral part of law itself because he is completely integrated in law: in his youth he was a hooligan and as a mature individual he became the man in charge of law enforcement in the entire state. He has come full circle – self-constitution of law is complete: first he violated the law and now he enforces it. No wonder the current minister of the interior described the offence he committed in his youth as child's play, using the exact same words that Brecht had used to describe the relationship between a bank robbery and the founding of a bank. The only difference being that the legalist is a cynical Brechtian, because the only person who cannot afford to say a thing like that is the person in charge of law enforcement.
Does this mean that the society we live in is hooliganized? Are hooligan groups just the more active part of the anonymous silent majority indifferent to the incidents committed by vandals, as well as war crimes? Did political and economic processes give rise to the hooliganization of the society and if so which processes lead to this?
The entire society was hooliganized in the era that is behind us, at the time when hooliganism was the ruling ideology – throughout the period of Milosević's rise to power in 1987 until the signing of the Dayton agreement. Unlike the nineties when hooliganism was the ruling ideology, it has now become the ideology of those who rule and appears in its legalistic form. There is an interesting paradox that apparently no one examined. That's the paradox concerning the difference between left–wing and right-wing hooliganism. Namely, at the time when hooliganism was the ruling ideology, the ideology in power was leftist, but today when hooliganism became the ideology of those who rule, ruling ideology is rightist. This is an inversion that is hard to understand without introducing Lacan's view of the difference between the left and the right. Lacan says that a left-winger is a fool and right-winger a knave. Left-wingers are fools because they are eternally in possession of truth, but are unwilling to suffer the consequences of that truth, while right-wingers are knaves because they cynically distance themselves from the state of affairs, and it is precisely this cynical distance that reproduces the existing state of affairs. However, a situation may arise where left-wingers and right-wingers change places and form groups of leftists and rightists, namely, they form political parties. Then united left-wingers in power become knaves and united right-wingers in power become fools. Nowadays, this is the only way to understand the cynical blindness of the ideology of those who rule – united knaves in the party in power are fools.
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A number of events preceded the outbreak of violence in Kosovo in March 2004 which resulted in killing several dozen people, destroying property and driving Serbs out of many towns and villages in Kosovo. Serbian Prime Minister, Vojislav Koštunica announced his plan for the regionalization of Kosovo just a couple of days before it all happened. The plan essentially envisaged partition of Kosovo into an Albanian and a Serb part. Shortly afterwards, after a villager had been killed, the inhabitants of a Serbian village blockaded the road connecting Priština and Skoplje. The blockade of maybe the most important transportation route in Kosovo brought business and travel in the entire area to a standstill. Ever since 1999, Kosovo has been isolated by Serbia as far as traffic or communications are concerned. This barricading called up many disagreeable associations – for example the beginning of the wars in Croatia and Bosnia etc. The violence that broke out several days later, sparked off by the drowning / murder of two Albanian boys, for which all Kosovo media automatically blamed Serbs, was so widespread and massive that it, in itself, was also proof that pogrom had been expected and called for by everyone. After the eruption of violence, it was, of course, too late for all these analyses, but blindness of the majority of the Belgrade media to see the devastating effects of the wrong policy of the Serbian authorities towards Kosovo and in Kosovo, indirectly lead to a vandalistic revenge and burning down mosques in Belgrade and Niš, as well as total inability of both the authorities and the public to identify and punish the instigators.
Just as in the publications of the Serbian Orthodox church about the monasteries and churches in Kosovo destroyed "after the arrival of NATO troops", there is no mention of the period that preceded these destructive acts (during the three months of war in Kosovo more than two hundred mosques were damaged or demolished), the analyses and policy of the Serbian government, and most political parties in particular, turn a blind eye to what had or had not been happening before the violence occurred in March.
Apart from citing paradoxical examples of legalists ignoring legalist procedures, the phenomenon/system of communicating tubes existing between legalist ideology [1] and the practice of hooliganism was also examined in the interview. To all appearances, that system brought about a certain number of important events in the public life of Belgrade and influenced their development. These events include toppling the Milošević regime on October 5 th 2000, the never held 2001 Gay Pride Parade, when a group of right-wing extremists beat up the members of a sparse crowd of people who showed up for the parade and the burning down of the mosque in March 2004. Everyone who happened to be there at that time could realize that groups of vandals were the ones managing state affairs.
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1 The government of Serbia, lead by the Democratic Party of Serbia keeps insisting on the legalistic framework and moral foundations of the methods to be applied when formulating goverment policy and running the state. In spite of that, the current Justice Minister enforced the thought crime law in the Former Yugoslavia, while Interior Minister robbed a kiosk as a young man. [back]
Sacrificing the victims
by Branimir Stojanović
The ideological mechanism of the joke: "There are no more cannibals in our village – we ate the last one yesterday" provides maybe the best way to illustrate the situation in ideological state apparatuses after October 5 th 2000. Since the person who tells this joke sees no connection between cannibals and cannibalism, eating people becomes a legalized institution in the community in which people are being eaten and, at the same time, the ban on eating people is not being breached.
However, it is clear to everyone except the one who makes the above-mentioned statement that the mechanism of the cannibalistic joke makes undisturbed ideological reproduction of the principles of a cannibalistic society possible. It is, in fact, a metacannibalistic society, because a cannibal eater eats the ban on eating people as well.
A similar mechanism is at work in the wording of the competition inviting designs for a monument to the victims of wars waged from 1990 to 1999 in the former Yugoslavia. The competition was announced by the Assembly of the City of Belgrade. Its rules were drawn up by the Commission for Monuments and Naming City Streets and Squares. Not unlike the cannibal joke teller, this commission sacrificed the victims, to whom the monument is dedicated, by reproducing ideological mechanisms of a society based on sacrifice which, on a symbolic level, always leaves open the possibility of sacrifices. This society, in effect, owes the whole of its consistency precisely to the production of victims.
By doing this, the commission found itself in a paradoxical position. Its original intention was to dedicate the monument to the victims of wars, namely, to the memory of innocent victims, as a warning never to let the situation, in which these people became victims, happen again. However, the very wording of competition rules indicates that the commission changed its own intention and the monument became dedicated to the act of performing a sacrifice i.e. to the sacrificed. To illustrate the logic behind the way in which the original intention, to erect a monument to the victims, was transformed let's see how the wording of the competition was employed in a way that brought about a gradual change of the commission's initial aim. Besides, this kind of logic is not typical of this competition only; it has become a principle that shapes our everyday life.
Namely, the initial aim to erect a monument to the victims of wars fought in the former Yugoslavia is clearly visible even in the name of the committee in charge of conducting the competition – Committee for Implementing the Decision to Erect a Monument to the Victims of Wars Waged from 1990 to 1999 in the Former Yugoslavia. However, the intention to dedicate a monument to the victims of the ex-Yugoslav wars was reversed already in the title of the competition. Namely, the initial aim was defined in such a way that the notion of victims was abstract and vague. Although undefined, this notion implied "all victims", but there the soldiers killed in action "marched in". And so the competition title reads: "The Competition Inviting Designs for a Monument to the Soldiers Killed in Action and Victims of Wars Waged in the Former Yugoslavia from 1990 to 1999".
Therefore, judging by the competition title, the victims of the ex-Yugoslav wars, suddenly, became victims of the competition itself. If an abstract and empty notion of victims was making it impossible to define which victims are referred to, as soon as the soldiers killed in action were included and singled out, the abstract notion became explicitly defined. But this resulted in sacrificing the original intention - to make it a monument to the victims, i.e. the innocent, which is the minimal consistent definition of the notion of victim. The soldiers killed in action, whatever the body that announced the competition meant by that, do not belong with the innocent. They belong to a completely different group – the sacrificed, meaning those who voluntarily sacrificed their lives, or were sacrificed against their will in the wars waged from 1990 to 1999 in the name of the nation, country, ethnic group and religious beliefs.
The misunderstanding is obvious - on the one hand, celebration of the act of performing a sacrifice is rooted in tradition and its outcome is the preservation of the society based on sacrifice, in which it is worthwhile to give your life, offer a sacrifice, in order to preserve the values of the society for which life is given. But on the other hand, a monument to the victims neither embodies the logic of the society based on sacrifice, nor is it meant to praise the act of performing a sacrifice. In fact, in the societies where the logic of sacrifice does not apply, sacrificing victims has always been regarded as a criminal act, a pure transgression contrary to humanity.
(Belgrade, 2003)
Branimir Stojanović (Belgrade 1956), philosopher and theoretician of psychoanalysis, a founder of the School for History and Theory of Images where he lectured on the subject of Art and Psychoanalysis. Published numerous article, essays andstudies in periodical and collections of essays. Lives and works in Belgrade .
Why was this text written?
by Nebojša Milikić
On November 1 st 2002, the Assembly of the City of Belgrade announced "The Competition Inviting Designs for a Sculptural Monument to the Soldiers Killed in Action and Victims of Wars Waged in the Former Yugoslavia to be built in the Zvezdara City Park" (quoted from the competition rules). A group of artists and cultural workers forming the discussion group "Discussion on Works of Art" held a series of meetings, during which the requirements drawn up by the institution announcing the competition were analysed, attempting to put forward a possible joint proposal / solution to be submitted as a competition entry.
The representatives of NOPNU – non-governmental organization providing support for the families of the dead and wounded in the wars fought in the Former Yugoslavia, attended one of the meetings held at Djura Jakšić's House in Skadarska Street. The talks resulted in a number of jointly reached decisions regarding the competition. After a debate which lasted several weeks and an exchange of opinions, part of the group sent an official letter to the following relevant city institutions and departments: the Commission for Monuments and Naming City Streets and Squares, Committee for Implementing the Decision to Erect a Monument to the Victims of Wars Waged from 1990 to 1999 in the Former Yugoslavia, all Belgrade City Assembly members and the Belgrade City Secretariat for Culture. The letter contained a request to withdraw the competition and launch a public discussion which would include all interested parties from all over the former Yugoslavia.
This move made by this group of artists and cultural workers did not go unnoticed by the media, while the competition itself and the issues raised by it attracted public attention. It was then that a journalist with the Vreme magazine proposed that Branimir Stojanović should write an article which is published here. In his article, the author examines competition requirements laid down by the institution that announced it by analysing the wording of the competition. (By the way, the Vreme magazine did not publish that article).
After some time, the city authorities responded by sending urgent requests for the representatives of the group to become members of the jury which should choose "an entry which uses powerful sculptural language to communicate artistic expression of respect for the victims by portraying a brutal human drama" (quoted from competition rules). Besides, the official letter was delivered to the Belgrade City Assembly office on January 6 th 2003 and the members of the group started receiving urgent telephone calls on August 13 th 2003 . However, since neither the previous competition had been withdrawn (instead, it was cancelled and a new modified one announced) nor public discussion launched, no member of the group that signed the letter accepted to become a member of the jury. A telegram repeating the requests stated in the official letter of January 6 th 2003 was sent to proper city authorities.
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The monuments in Niš
Watching the monuments to the victims of NATO attacks built in front of the Niš fortress, a strange thing can be seen. On both monuments there are lists of victims. But these lists differ considerably and, therefore, it is not easy to understand what criteria were used by the then (Socialist Party and subsequent Democratic Opposition) power elites when making the lists of victims displayed on the monuments they commissioned. It is a known fact that these elites did not behave equally irresponsibly in the crucial moments of recent Serbian history, but judging by these monuments, we can conclude that the inability to understand and politically overcome the principle of sacrificing people and prevent the strengthening of this principle, by subsequently sacrificing the victims is equally inherent in the ideologies of both political movements. What is more, the distasteful vying of town authorities (consisting of democratic but still nationalist opposition parties) with state authorities (whose orientation was a national socialist one) to be the first to erect a monument shortly after the bombing, says a lot about open fighting over exclusive rights to inherit the criminal rituals of a society based on sacrifice.
(Belgrade , 2003)
Translation: Jelena Bajić