Context N°18
by Dubravka Ugresic
1. When I tried to explain to my eight-year-old nephew the idea of “times past,” he cut me off impatiently: “Oh, I know!” he said. “That was back when the world was black and white!” My nephew is a child of video culture: to him, the world before he was born was indeed black and white. I am a child of a different world. My first photographs were black and white, my first TV was black and white. It was a black and white world—people could be sorted into the good and the bad, and futures into better and worse. Color came along later.
2. Over the last fifteen years, much has changed in the postcommunist countries: states, borders, environments, signs, communications—the messages, the codes, even the senders and recipients. The changes have come so quickly that everyday life in the postcommunist world could remind one of cheap science-fiction television.
In Sliders, a now-defunct American show for teenagers, the protagonists “slide” effortlessly through time and space between alternate universes. The assumption is that everything around them is standing still. In one scene, two of the sci-fi heroes find themselves on an American university campus. Everything is as it should be: the university buildings, the students, a park and—a statue.
—Hey, wasn’t there a statue of George Washington here before?
—Sure. Why?
—Because we just went by a statue of Lenin . . .
And sure enough, a reverse shot shows the astonished faces of the two sliders—and then a statue of Lenin. This scenario can serve as an introduction to the transitional reality that exists inside postcommunist countries. But in the hyper-dynamic process of transition, transformation, and conversion—in all of this fast-paced traffic—no one seems to be bothered by the frequent traffic jams. And semantic jams are a part of this postcommunist world as well.
3. In the zones of transition, it is the mental landscape—the people—that has changed the most. (I base my observations on the environment I know best: the post-Yugoslav. It is, admittedly, not the most typical; its transition was the roughest because it went on through war, the collapse of the state, and the formation of new states on the ruins of the old.) The accelerated dynamic of change, adaptation, and jockeying for position has revealed all sorts of strategies that would in “times past” have defied the imagination. Now it’s all edit, delete, save, hide, show, open, close, redo, undo, cut, replace, reformat—and on a living, breathing human text. In comparison with the transformations experienced by the citizens of the postcommunist countries, Czeslaw Milosz’s famous Beta-Gamma-Delta typology from The Captive Mind, his study of intellectuals under Polish communism, falls a little short. Where is the postcommunist intellectual in all of this? Is he changing? Is his writing any better today? Is his thinking boxed in by fewer constraints? Has he got rid of his real and his imaginary censors? Does he cultivate the same drive to subvert the moral, political, and aesthetic canons as he used to?
Back in the black-and-white days, things were simpler. The Eastern European intellectual had a choice: to embrace what was referred to as official culture, or to descend into the intellectual “underground.” He could emigrate too, but that wasn’t easy. (At least that’s what it was like in the Soviet Union and the other countries of the Soviet Bloc. It was a different story entirely for Yugoslavian intellectuals. They didn’t have a dissident movement, didn’t have an intellectual underground. It was easy to leave the country, because everyone had a passport and the borders were open. Yugoslavian emigration in the 1970s was mostly economic. There was a wave of political emigration after World War II, but its orientation was not so much anticommunist as it was nationalistic, pro-Ustasha and pro-Chetnik.) Today, whether he’s conscious of it or not, the postcommunist intellectual sends what he writes to three different addresses, to three imaginary recipients, three hypothetical “sponsors.” The first addressee is his own local community; the second is “Europe,” “Western Europe” or the “European Union,” whatever that means; while the third is the global marketplace, the “world.” Compared to American writers, for example, the postcommunist writer’s situation is incomparably more complex. In his effort to satisfy all three imaginary addressees, he has become the perfect polymorph.
4. The local addressee, our intellectual’s home audience, has changed radically over the last fifteen-odd years. If he is to survive, he has to change too.
The transformation was not too traumatic; it was a collective process, and politically desirable. Putting themselves forward as examples, the leaders of this transition first transformed themselves, thereby freeing their followers from any feelings of anxiety. Moreover, Croats referred to their collective transformation as a spiritual renewal, and this helped them experience their conversion as a sort of spiritual cleansing. The leaders of the change were fierce nationalists, even though they had been communists before. Former antifascists became fascists, atheists became believers, murderers became heroes, thugs and thieves became prosperous businessmen, and ignoramuses became public thinkers. Aside from being ideologically and politically desirable, the transformation proved to be profitable: semiliterate immigrants became government ministers, small-town schoolteachers designed the new school system, librarians and bad poets became ambassadors and embezzlers of state funds, criminals and killers became generals bedecked with medals, and schizoid megalomaniacs became presidents of countries.
Our intellectual-in-transition lost his common cultural space with the collapse of Yugoslavia. Even for those who had never experienced this space as shared, the potential audience was noticeably diminished. If he was to hold his head above water, he had to change with the times. He had to embrace his ethnicity as his one and only identity; he had to get a new passport and a new language; and he had to move from the larger, common state to a smaller one. He had to agree to a radical break with the Yugoslav cultural legacy, particularly if he was a Croat. He had to embrace historical revisionism and make his peace with the notion that he had been living in a “totalitarian communist regime,” in a “time of darkness,” in “Tito’s Yugo-Serbian dictatorship,” although he had never really experienced that regime as “totalitarian,” nor particularly “communist,” nor even all that “dark.” Furthermore, our intellectual was now called upon to demonize his country after the fact: to spit, in other words, on the dead—on his own biography. He almost envied the Russians, Hungarians, and Czechs who had not only had communism but could point to countless proofs that it had dealt them a bad hand: their history of dissidents and political emigration, the intelligentsia that had been relegated to the underground for years, the pile of books that have been written on the subject. The post-Yugoslav intellectual, on the other hand, didn’t have nearly enough evidence to make the same case, that he had been shortchanged. He developed false memory syndrome, transformed himself into a “victim of communism.” Since everyone else had become victims too, no one asked for proof. Now he had to master a new rhetoric, swallow the host, embrace Catholicism or Orthodoxy, depending on his background. And if he didn’t swallow the host, he had to pretend to respect the priests, at the very least. Because they, the priests, were opening exhibitions, blessing schoolbags, university buildings, libraries, hospitals, and CAT scanners. The priests nearly stole his “bread and butter,” even writing introductory essays for books that had nothing to do with their spiritual merchandise.
Our intellectual had to embrace a new idea, that fascism and communism were one and the same. He had to deny the antifascist legacy in which he’d been raised. He had to close his eyes to the incidents of book burning, particularly in Croatia; to the destruction of monuments, graves, and statues—even those that had been raised to his literary predecessors, such as Ivo Andric and Vladimir Nazor. The first was a Croat, who declared himself a Yugoslav, wrote books about Bosnia and lived in Belgrade; while the second was a poet, and had been a partisan alongside Tito. But things didn’t stop here. Only a few years later the intellectual had to change his rhetoric again, because of entering the European Union. Quickly he mastered the new, European code of decorum. He found a hook in language. He started to use the phrase “Yes, but . . .” with striking frequency. “Yes” was his claim to having a firm position about a question. “But” was his cloaked defiance. His “Yes” was directed to one interlocutor, his “But” opening the possibility of revision, and his cooperation with another.
Currently, our intellectual is growing accustomed to the notion that life is packed with paradoxes. The most important new idea, however, is that young states need culture. To be the intellectual representative of a young state is to be guaranteed an income. Our intellectual has mastered the tricks of survival. He has learned first and foremost how to take the pulse of his own herd.
5. The second imaginary addressee of the transitional intellectual is the European Union. Not long ago, some ten member countries were accepted to the European Union, while others still wait patiently in line. And look, culture is a key item on the ideological agenda of the nascent EU! In the European dictionary, culture can mean any number of things—it’s such a handy word! Culture now functions as a negotiator, diplomatic mediator, as a bridge between peoples, because it knows no borders, because it reconciles and expands, because it honors difference and divergence, identity and regional specifics. With the burgeoning of the number of definitions of the word “culture,” the number of cultural workers, cultural managers, and cultural advocates grows as well. The European cultural bureaucracy reproduces itself with mind-numbing speed. Money for culture circulates from invisible sources and flows through the bureaucratic veins of the collective European body. Culture is like some sort of spiritual Euro, the ideological adhesive of the European countries.
Our intellectual cautiously feels out his hypothetical European addressee. And what he notices immediately is that belonging to the EU is no guarantee of liberation from the constraints of national identity. Quite the contrary, he will be granted admission only as a clearly defined Croat, Serb, Bulgarian, or Albanian. (We can find the clearest articulation of transition in an installation by Erzen Shkololli, an Albanian artist from Kosovo, which has the unambiguous title Transition. Shkololli’s triptych consists of three small personal snapshots, each the size of an ID card photo. In the first we see a boy dressed in Albanian folk costume with a white cap on his head, a photograph taken after his circumcision. In the second we see the boy in his Tito pioneer uniform: around his neck a red pioneer scarf, on his head a pioneer cap with red star. In the third photograph the young artist is an adult with a melancholic expression. He is shown before a blue background, and around his head is a halo of yellow stars.)
6. The third imaginary address to which our intellectual sends his missives is the global marketplace, “the world.” He harkens carefully to the tune of the global marketplace. By all accounts, it’s happiest dealing in “identities.” And though it may all be a question of luck, he will send the message that is most expected of him. He will try to sell something postcommunist (which also implies anticommunist), something “made in the Balkans,” something “exotic,” something “spicy” . . . And in doing so he won’t shirk from fabrications, from retooling his “identity,” precisely like any other vendor of souvenirs. (Travelers on Croatia Airlines may find in their lunch pack a paprenjak, a sweet cookie made with black pepper, which the package claims to be a traditional Croatian pastry. There’s some text on the wrapper by the Croatian writer Zvonimir Milcec, a model example of fabricating identity for market purposes:
The pepper biscuit, traditionally made in Croatia, is not unlike Croatian history: its ingredients include honey, walnuts, and pepper, a rather contradictory combination that gives the biscuit its characteristic sweet and spicy flavor. And this, indeed, is the flavor of Croatia’s history. Through history, until the most recent times, foreign invaders and aggressors have reached for this land that combines Central Europe and the Mediterranean in ideal proportions. They were after the honey, leaving us the pepper. Now that we are finally on our own, we can enjoy both qualities of this traditional biscuit (which Croatian writer August Senoa described in her play The Goldsmith’s Gold) and share all the nuances of its rich taste with our friends and visitors. Enjoy the flavor.)
7. It seems now that our transitional intellectual is a hyperrational being, a mutant with precise inner mechanisms that let him position himself perfectly in all three cultural zones: locally, in Europe, and around the world. But this isn’t really so: our intellectual is an ordinary human being.
Recently when I was out walking in Amsterdam, I caught sight of a restaurant with an appealing name: The Lisbon. When I crossed the street I discovered to my disappointment that under the name “Lisbon” were the words “Turkish deli.” This detail is not so much representative of the Amsterdam gastronomical scene as it is a useful précis for the mental context of “Transition.”
Everyday life in the postcommunist zones is rife with such contradictory signals. These semantic nodes, these confusions of meaning, are only one of the consequences caused by the former-Yugoslavs destroying, erasing, and negating fifty years of their own history. Nothing means what it means, and nothing means what it used to mean. The whole system of communication has been turned topsy-turvy. Shared references are no longer shared.
8. Doctors say that moving to a new home is one of the worst traumas people experience in a lifetime. It’s easier on the young: moving can be a deathblow for someone elderly. The former-Yugoslavs moved overnight. And ironically, many of them lost their homes in the process. Although they keep saying that they are finally “masters on their own land,” their insistence on repeating this indicates that with each repetition they are persuading themselves anew.
The maniacal project of Franjo Tudjman, the former president of Croatia and a historian by training, to eradicate fifty years of shared Yugoslav past and establish the continuity of a Croatian state by connecting it to the four years of Nazi rule—when Croatia was, indeed, an independent state—resulted in serious damage. He opened the door to reinventing the past and a positive re-evaluation of the fascist Ustasha state, while stigmatizing the recent past as “Yugoslav,” and “communist.” In this light the recent war could be interpreted as a continuation of World War II, as an attempt to change its outcome, turning the victors into the losers, and the losers into the victors—which is precisely what did ultimately happen.
Apparently, a ten-year ban on the culture of the former Yugoslavia—including movies, books, television, music, and public figures—was enough to convince ordinary people that they had only dreamed their communist past. The older population lives today in an imposed amnesiac limbo, while the young don’t even know that there was once a Yugoslavia. The Ministry of Education saw to this by changing the school system, changing the textbooks, revising the history and the language.
9. All in all, the fear of being ostracized from the community, this conformism, the pervasive “culture of lies” and the voluntary engagement with it, the self-censorship, the violent rupture with the past, the discontinuity, and therefore the relativization of value, and its ridiculization at the hands of the new culture—all these form the constellation in which our intellectual has found himself; and, more to the point, that he himself has fostered. In an environment where the recent past has been erased, in which there is no longer any stable system of common reference, reliable history, historical expertise, reliable media, critical debate, dialogue and polemic, public figures with reliable moral credentials; in communities where all the values have been turned inside out, in which an absence of critical awareness reigns supreme, our intellectual finds himself in the schizoid position of a lack of authenticity. And that is why he so easily becomes a slider, a polymorph.
10. Alina Vituhnovskaya, a contemporary Russian poet, found herself in prison on drug charges. She sent her parents the following message: “Fantômas says: these are times when a great person is nothing without the media.” Her parents immediately notified the media, resulting in a media uproar, after which Alina Vituhnovskaya was released from jail. Her comment: “I interpreted the period of my incarceration as a conceptualist action, as a performance. It was a perfect opportunity for me to become a hero—a gift, in fact. I thought: why should these pitiful agents of the secret service become the authors of my life? I preferred to arrange the spectacle of it myself.”
Let us conclude. It seems that only in environments with rigid, frozen values—political, religious, moral, aesthetic—can a writer, an intellectual, have the special status and role of the “voice of the people.”
Today, in the current postpolitical, postmodern, conflict-free, market-oriented culture zones, the intellectual must first of all fight for his voice, if he is to have a voice at all. When he steps outside his local surroundings, he will discover that his voice is only one of millions. Now he feels that it was worthwhile to have gone through the local school of conformism. Because had he been subversive, his subversion—a gesture, an act, a dangerous word—would now be swallowed by the marketplace. Our intellectual, furthermore, will discover the ironic yet liberating fact that—at least as far as the European-American cultural zone is concerned—he is merchandise, his books are merchandise, and therefore any intellectual subversion is valued in terms of its market impact. And finally, he will discover with relief that the writer, the intellectual—whether transformed or intact, authentic or inauthentic, conformist or nonconformist, good or bad—is just one of the varied participants in the global market spectacle, where he is a performer, an entertainer, a vendor of souvenirs.
And in order to complete his transformation, to put on the finishing touch, our postcommunist intellectual will try to promote his own morphing skills as being a common value. “The majority of people living in this age, including myself, could be described as spineless. This isn’t so bad,” claims Svetislav Basara, the Serbian writer and ambassador to Cyprus, in a recent interview.
After all his metamorphoses, entering the world market, our postcommunist intellectual will have the strange sense that he’s finally come home. He will see a welcoming notice waiting for him at the door. Our intellectual reads the message, written by his fellow writer Bernard Henry-Lévy, with a smile: its content perfectly matches his ambitions:
Intellectual: masculine noun, social and cultural category, emerged in Paris during Dreyfus Affair, died in Paris at the end of twentieth century.
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Translation by Ellen Ellias
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