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[Retrospekt I] Open Culture and
its Enemies Remarks on
Self-Images of the Cultural Elite in Postcommunist Europe (the Case of Croatia) A
contribution to the 9th meeting of the European Culture Journals Vienna,
september, 1995. |
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The purpose of my contribution is not to
give a survey of cultural journals in the postcommunist countries of the
former Yugoslavia. Rather, I will attempt to give an account of the
culture-formative political procedures in which the relevant cultural
producers in Croatia - a country which in my opinion could be considered to
some extent as a paradigmatic case among the East European countries - took
(and are still taking) part. It may be observed that I presuppose that
political procedures within a society can be considered as immediately
culture-formative and that the culture itself is being conceived in the
classical sense of higher forms of artistic and intellectual products as
opposed to the wide range of the so-called subcultural production forms.
Exactly this will be my concern. Therefore, in order to speak about the
culture-formative processes in the Croatian society, I am going to speak in
analytical terms of politics and culture, and not as it is often the case -
in metaphorical terms of a synthetically conceived "culture of
politics" or "political culture". These and similar terms -
like "democratic nationalism", or even like the Western term
"political correctness" - have often been used in and with regard
to the East European countries, both in the positive sense of being an aim of
the so-called young and fresh democracies and in the negative sense of lack
of a really modern political behavior. The War and the Quest for Representation I do not take Croatia as an example because
of its special character of being a country at war. In this respect it does
not - and this may sound paradoxical - differ essentially from other
countries exept by being, at the beginning of the war in the former Yugoslavia,
physically attacked from within and from without (a fact which makes out the
manifold character of the Yugoslav war in Croatia: such as civil, ethnic,
religious and classical war of territorial conquest). Paradoxically enough,
Croatia is not an exceptional, but rather typical country at war. The other
war which Croatia has had in common with other post-communist countries,
especially with ex-Yugoslav ones, has been an inner conflict between the
so-called real democrats and the so-called reformed or only re-masked former
communists (the latter being only in part carriers of the political and
cultural institutions under the socialist regime, and the former being the
traditionalist national intelligentsia opposed to the regime). The only
specific feature of Croatia in this respect is the radical nationalistic
character of both groups, and accordingly, of their inner struggle which is
due to the differences in position towards the center of the political and
governmental power. Why is this kind of war - formulated in
metaphorical rather than in literal terms -important for our purposes? The
answer is simple: Because the participants in this inner war-like struggle
are not just political parties but rather intellectuals belonging to
different domains of work (politicians with Ph.D.s, artists, writers,
humanities scientists, university professors converted to instant
politicians) struggling on different and, more precisely, opposite sides for
something which I am going to call the right of formulating and representing
what they believe to be the real values of the Nation. Therefore, the struggle mentioned above is
a struggle between two parts of the Croation national intelligentsia for a
kind of privilege-like national representation in politics and culture. But this
only means that cultural issues have become eminently political or, still
more precisely, that cultural issues have turned out - once again in the
Croatian cultural history after the Romantic movement in the middle of the
19th century - to play the role of a strongly political event. But why should a struggle among
intellectuals immediately become a political struggle with consequences for
the political and cultural character of the country? The answer to this
question seems to me very simple, as simple as the conflict I am talking
about being old fashioned and, if considered under radically changed
historical circumstances, historically insignificant and obsolete. However,
the insignificancy of the actual political conflict in the field of culture
in Croatia could be relevant as a paradigmatic example for cultural or, even,
civilisatory regression, (1) because the procedures and the events in this
struggle replace nearly all the cultural production the country used to have
in the last ten or fifteen years of the socialist regime; (2) because the
very replacement of cultural activities is nothing but a revitalisation of
ideology-producing machinery by intellectuals, who now take the same
ambiguous attitude - being at the same time loyalists, and critics of the
center of power as it appeared in the former system; (3) because the
participants in the struggle are representatives of one and the same
conception of culture, which as a centralized idea of culture is supposed to
be nation-and-state representing. The Croatian "Kulturkampf" In order to better specify the character of
the respective contributions to the cultural production by means of journals,
let me give a short survey of the genesis of the struggle by making a
statement: the very well known problems of Croatia - which I summarize under
the title incommensurability with the cultural and political standards of the
Western countries - have nothing to do with the war we are witnessing.
Instead, they have to do with New-Croatia's conception of so-called high-culture
which - carried out by representatives of opposing political groups and
tending to be dominant - like in all nationalistic "renaissances"
in Eastern Europe turned out to be either ahistoric, exclusive, antimodernist
and hence idiotic, or to produce self-contradictory concepts of politics and
culture due to the ambition to conciliate the liberal-enlightened Western
traditions with a loyalty to the principle of an ethnically defined national
state Namely, the two types of conceptions of
culture, which in Croatia are in apparent political opposition to each other,
are carried out by representatives of intelligentsia who are either loyal to
the authoritarian style of government of the President of the Republic and
his party, or by people who define themselves in terms of the liberal
conception of politics, society and culture. The trouble with Croatia is -
and this is my thesis - that these two apparently opposing conceptions of
culture are not only convertible from one into the other, but compatible and
symmetric in their efficient cultural policy. Both of them are born out of
the same undiscoursive approach to the immediatly preceding socialist-society
culture, and they both, struggling with each other, oppress or agressivly
ignore any other alternative, non-high-culture-oriented conception of
artistic production or art-theory. As a result of this dominance-oriented
attitude, and of the real policy of the cultural elite of the country, one
may observe that belonging or not belonging to the mainstream is often
considered not as a different position in theory and practice of culture, but
as a very different, or to put it more precisely: intolerable, political
position. This is what makes Croatia incommensurable with - and even
unreadable in terms of - the patterns and modes of cultural reproduction in
the Western societies. The Ahistoric Claim for Restarting
History The common starting point of both
conceptions of culture since 1989 has been the redefinition of the
intellectual and cultural history of the nation, which was generally thought
of as being deeply oppressed and negated by the radical leftish,
internationalist and totalitarian communist ideology and cultural policy.
However, that this way of reflecting the decay of the leftist socialist policy
in the domain of culture might have been wrong rather than correct was not
felt by liberal intellectuals but by the most conservative and authoritarian
intellectual in the country, who, moreover, turned out to be its President.
It is he who made the statement that the communist ideology and policy,
despite all its totalitarianism, has yielded something he calls
"emancipation of small nations and their cultural traditions". But
this statement does not only legitimate his government. It is rather an
attempt at a scientific, namely historicistic, self-justification of the
cultural policy he was about to introduce by means of state reappropriation
of all cultural institutions inherited from the socialist times and before.
In this way - meanwhile it is very well known - he succeded not only in
underinterpreting the character of the socialist culture policy as having
been in its "best part" nothing but a carrier of the nationalistic
future of Europe, but also in establishing state control over all institutions
and all relevant media. Moreover, it was he who explicitly drew the line of
sharp and antagonistic differentiation towards the competing, but
collaborative political options, which he, in defence of his own
"democratic-nationalist" position, calls the weak, liberal-individualist
front, and excludes from the state-supported institutions. Against this background, the struggle
between the so-called democratic and liberal nationalists, in my opinion,
should be seen as a conflict of interpretative approaches to the same
political topic (namely the exclusive right of representing the Nation), and
also as a political conflict in exclusive self-legitimation and, as a result,
in non-recognition among different groups of political subjects. In other
words, the conflict in the field of culture is nothing but a political
conflict between different and opposing combatants, and insofar as being a
conflict in the wrong field, it discloses the real insignificance of the
cultural war-carriers as political subject. For what occured in Croatia at
the time of the political changes in 1989-1990 can easily be explained by
means of ordinary language philosophy as applied to the political discourse.
An initial and discourse-formative enunciation is to be found in the
performative-like, tautological self-definition (of the type "I am the
One who I am") by the leader of the governing nationalist party (defined
as a "community"). Through this enunciation he turned out to be not
only the new Subject in politics, but the Creator and the Definer of the only
"authentic" cultural policy of the Nation. As a result, the
enunciation performed by him has become at the same time the paradigmatic
form of the political discourse which aims at "subjects" supposed
to believe in (or to know, to want) exactly the same thing which, among the
subject-objects of the ideological interpellation, is supposed to be the only
authentic and really "ours". The national and cultural identity of
Croats has thus become a kind of paradoxical secret: inexplicable, but understandable
in itself and accessible to all willing participants (even for French new
philosophers like A. Finkielkraut). In other words, the national identity has
turned out to have become a cult of the Nation with all possible regressive
phenomena. Yet, since the political field within a
society cannot, by definition or empirically, become absolutely homogeneous
and the society itself cannot in spite of all of the efforts of the policy
creators, especially of the state-supported media, regress to an indistinguishable
community, the ahistoric and regressive character of such a claim for an
absolute new beginning from without history becomes apparent. Nevertheless,
what occured in Croatia because of that same ahistoric act of redifining the
national history, culture and politics was the exclusion of all isogene but
competing conceptions which are beeing carried out by intellectuals who,
belonging mainly (but not only) to the opposing traditionalistic
intelligentsia of the former socialist regime, conceive themselves as liberal
nationalists and opponents of the monocratic and centralized system of
government in politics and culture. As a result, what came into being within
the Croatian cultural elite after the political changes in 1990 - and this is
older than the internal war among the Yugoslav nations - was a deep dividing
line between the state-nationalist conception of culture and the competing
liberal conception. And as a further result of the state-refounding
discourse, the carriers of the latter conception, being themselves
paradoxically excluded representants of the beloved nation, are forced to
redefine their political position only in terms of cultural policy and, as a
result of its political failures, to ever fall back into this necessity. For
the owner and user of the most famous slogan by which the nation has been
re-gathered and brought to recognize itself, the slogan "Zna se!"
("One knows!" sc. for whom to vote), has absolutely assured his
property (i. e. the uncontestably autocratic government) by rendering it
public, and this means accessible to all those who are supposed to be
subjects willing to participate. Thus the best assurance for the political
power turns out to be exactly this kind of ideological circle: that common
thing which has been politically offered, namely "being ourselves",
has been presented as the everlasting desire of the Nation of "being
ourselves". The Blind Sight of the Croatian
Self-Imagination This contradictory position of being an excluded
patriot is, in my opinion, the source of all troubles that the so-called
liberal-nationalistic intelligentsia in Croatia is experiencing while
attempting to articulate its own national conception of culture. Currently,
its only success is in not articulating a really alternative conception
versus the official one, but only in being concerned with its own position in
the society as excluded political subjects. However, what this example proves
is, in my opinion, only that it is not possible to think and to represent the
so-called national values in culture via artistic, intellectual, and
scientific procedures without falling back into a nationalist discourse in
culture. In other terms, no national conception of culture is able to become
anything but a nationalist conception of culture. And exactly this point has
been confirmed in a more drastic than thoughtful form by a piece of
reflection and self-reflection by a representative of the Croatian cultural
intelligentsia. Two metaphors characterize, he says (and nobody protests!),
the radical change from being oppressed in the former regime and of becoming
free in the new Croatian state. This change consists in the twist between the
metaphor of "giving the regime the finger while keeping the hand in the
pocket", symbolizing unwillingly the constantly opportunistic political
behaviour of the Croatian cultural elite under non-Croat regimes, and the
other metaphor of "having a finger on the trigger" symbolizing,
apparently, the unlimited self-identification of the cultural elite with the
militaristic turn in Croatia, even with its most drastic phenomena, such as
slaughterers of children and the elderly, rapists, ethnic cleansers, and all
other heros who push us back into the old forms of a new barbarism. For reasons of brevity, but also of the
character of this meeting, I am not going to give a theoretical argumentation
for the statement that a conception of culture which is defined in terms of
nation cannot but turn out to be a nationalistic practice in culture. What I
can do instead, is to call your attention to some symptoms of this
impossibility: They are to be found in the fact that the
only cultural production in such a country as Croatia belongs to the
so-called high-culture, and with all its disasters is supported by the state,
while the few independently working artists, writers, and intellectuals in
the field of culture have either been forced to emigrate or to reduce their
production to an elementary level, working, at best, on low-budget projects,
and, as an effect, being generally ignored. Further on, the symptoms are to be found on
the opposite side in the surrogate-like products of the state-culture
discourse by liberal writers and professional thinkers, such as love for his
own nation instead of possessing of nation; in some misled theoretical
efforts to replace authoritarian nationalism by patriotic feelings pressumed
to be private and natural; in efforts such as re-interpreting categories of
the current political philosophy like "recognition" or "politics
of recognition" as being a term for self-identification via specular
self-recognition of the same or similar people forming a nation or any other
solidary group. As a result, in these typically Croat versions of current
liberal theories of politics, it is by pseudo-cognitive and not by genuine
political procedures that a society is being shaped, and the political
categories themselves become a kind of national aesthetic self-sufficiency. Furthermore, the symptoms of this
impossible and self-contradictory policy of thinking are to be recognized in
some authoritarian features of the social practice of the national-liberal
intelligentsia: being itself excluded from the state-controlled sources of
financial aid, it is tempted to control exclusively other available sources
(such as foreign foundations, be they private or governmental). Small Talk of the Democratization
Process: Searching for an Enemy The symptoms mentioned above are also to be
identified in the policy of excluding, ignoring, or even oppressing different
cultural practices which oppose the mainstream-like or high-culture-like
conceptions, in revisionist-like and deliberate interpretative approaches to
issues like tradition and modernism, and last but not least, in the policy of
refusal of any form of self-reflection and self-criticism, be it by
national-democratic or national-liberal representatives of culture. What they
have in common is a higly fictive idea of a "culture of politics",
being conceived of by Croatian traditionalists as "more national"
and self-sufficient, or speaking in terms of the wrongly understood idea of
recognition by the Croatian liberal Westernizers - more recognizable and more
"imageful" picture of the nation as seen from without. As a result,
the Croatian conceptualizers of national culture, be they democrats or
liberals, do not feel the temptation to put in question their obsession with
the primacy of the national culture to a radical national democracy. Instead,
they rather seek to recognize a new figure of the internal enemy. This is why
the political and philosphical category of recognition has not yet, even
after some hundred fifty years of the first attempts in the Croatian
political literature, been distinguished from its popular-cognitive meaning. But, to conclude my statement on the
cultural policy in Croatia at the end of the 20th century: the specific
feature of this widely known pattern of all mainstream conceptions of
cultures is, once more in the cultural and political history of Croatia, the
replacement of a culture-specific argument by a political one. As a
consequence of this, one may observe a deep fall not merely into the
19th-century level of political and cultural psychology, but rather to its
inverted picture. For if the idea and the principle of "the specific
spirit of the Nation" - a term by which the Romantic philosophy of
history succeeded in replacing the secular Enlightenment idea of
"people"as being the subject of both history and politics - played
the decisive role in the struggle by the bourgeois cultural intelligentsia
for political recognition, such a claim for the "national spirit"
can only, under new historical conditions, become a vehicle directed both to
an hyperhistorized consciousness and to an infantilized anachronistic policy.
For the failure in the idea of "national spirit" consists obviously
in taking it literally as constitutive of the politics of modern times,
whereas in the history of cultural and political ideas in Europe it served
only as a metaphoric means to the claim for the national governmental
sovereignity. As a neccessary result of such a historical
self-misunderstanding, the replacement of the literal meaning of an idea with
its metaphorical figure can only mean a replacement of real responsability in
politics with an anachronistic historical self-image. Against this background, both conceptions
of the nation-representative culture in Croatia (the democratic and the
liberal one), while replacing the political argument with the
"Kulturkampf", i. e. replacing the real with the immaginary, are
about to prevent the nation from achieving real inner political
differentiation and, as a consequence, from becoming a real democratic
society recognizable in terms of modern political practices and theories.
Instead, the producers and theorists of the national culture once again
imagine a new figure of the national and cultural enemy. After the recent
political and military events in Croatia, as a result of which more than half
of the Serb population has (willingly or unwillingly) left the country, all
the agressive capacities of the national conception and policy in culture
have been turned towards a few barely tolerated alternative media opting for,
and practicing, more bastardized than centralized and representative forms of
cultural communication. They are not believed to stand for a culture-specific
argument against the official and state-supported cultural practices, but
rather to be a remainder of the former political system. The main failure of
their cultural practice and theory seems to be their ignoring the
traditionalism of national values. But to do this means to be a "bad
internationalist". In terms of political denounciation in culture, these
enemies or new aliens of both the state-representative and the self-imagined
liberal idea of the high-culture happen ironically to be bad kids of the
great Nation, or more precisely, carriers of outsider cultural practices and
theories. As a result, what at the End of the Century
in Croatia is being considered as representative is nothing but the policy of
stealing Western signifiers in culture and politics such as
"democracy" or "recognition". Even more nationally
authentic happens to be the nostalgic idyll of apples in grandmother's
sleeping room, of remembering the tradition in essays, poetry or painting,
and similar small-talk-forms of the renewed Croatian
"Central-European" sentimentality. |
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