Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies

Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies
art and culture and the history, economics or politics of these geographical points.
Another thing clear in the text is that this “[collectivist] space is not contaminated
by ideology and capital” (WHW, 2005: 16). One of the main ideological problems is
that the collective is discussed using terms referring to experience, rather than to social
and political emancipation. “Social struggle”, “conflict”, “society” and “political” always
accompany the collective’s real driving forces such as individuality, play or creation.
Nevertheless, as WHW state, “experiences of collectivity are imposed as crucial
transformation forces of individual and society” (WHW, 2005: 15). In this case, where
society has been stripped of its production aspect, the individual becomes the dominator
of the collectivity experience. This individualism, as WHW explain, does not diminish
in this collectivist experience, “rather it is only within them that we can imagine the
realization of our potentialities” (WHW, 2005: 14-15). In this case, WHW suspended
the productivity aspect of the collective (by not mentioning it at all) with “creativity” as
the main indicator of the collectivist experience. They also managed in this valorization
of collective experience to guarantee the autonomy of the artist as subject, an individual
who constitutes his/herself in this experience.
Ljiljana Filipović’s essay, “Breakdown of Collective”, which appeared in the catalogue
of the WHW exhibition, is even more explicit in the emancipation of collectivist
experience solely through creative terms. Apart from defining this emancipation in most
conservative psychological terminology, such as “the collective creation becomes the
flight of fear from death” (Filipović, 2005: 106), “the isolation imposed by prohibition
actually paradoxically stimulates collective creativity” or “the collective unconscious
always leads us to those who create the collective” (Filipović, 2005: 108), Filipović offers
an explanation for the frequent breakdowns of collectives. Even though she is silent about
it, it is for us, the readers, to understand that this broken collective is in fact the collective
of socialist Yugoslavia. In this metaphorical article a proposed explanation of what keeps a
collective together is tolerance and experience of the “other” inside the group’s creativity.
In order to fight these destructive (“death drive”) forces inside the collective, Filipović
proposes an alternative which, when considering most of the contemporary artistic
alternatives mentioned in this article, does not sound so different: “creative inner forces
could perhaps be the only ones to transform such a situation if collectivism would be
understood as a vision of transitional utopia” (Filipović, 2005: 110).
With these complementary examples I have tried to show that it is possible to arrive
at the same conclusion as Breznik as to the identity problems of the authors and artists
facing the contradictions between the productive forces and the relations of production.
By emphasizing the issue of “collectives” and their discourse I have managed to explain this
contradiction even further by showing the complete transformation of the conceptualization
of the object in this discourse of transition. It is a necessary task for the future to carry out
more rigid theoretical observations of this shift in conceptualization together with strict
empirical observation and this could offer us more concrete analyses of the situation.
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