Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies

Culture of trauma and identity politics - critical frames and emancipatory lenses of cultural...
of ideological recursion in the mantra of “renewing cultural ties” hiding the body of the
sovereign (and the fact that the emperor is naked) And what is this habitus of “art statism”
that feeds into the representative model of governing aesthetics; what sorts of systems of
classification, distinction, separation, antagonisms occur here and where is the way out (It
is worth remembering heuristic toolboxes on these themes in the works of Pierre Bourdieu
(Bourdieu, 1986; 1990a; 1990b; 1998). National theatre is all about taste and class. When
Milohnić ends with a thesis proposed by Zoja Skušek some 30 years ago, 2 we find ourselves
with the question of avant-garde theatres in an oppositional political relationship they
have to assume concerning the politics of aesthetics and aesthetics of politics concerning
ideological conundrums of statist/sovereign incorporation at various levels.
As Ranciére would have it, genuine/avant-garde politics and art are forms of dissensus
because their specificity resides in “their contingent suspension of the rules governing
normal experience”, where they effect an emancipatory redistribution of the sensible,
through “forms of innovation that tear bodies from their assigned places and free speech
and expression from all reduction to functionality (…) forms of creation irreducible
to the spatio-temporal horizons of a given factual community” (Ranciére, 2010: 1).
However, the disruption that genuine artistic or political activities effect is not about
institutional overturning, but “an activity that cuts across forms of cultural and identity
belonging and hierarchies between discourses and genres, working to introduce new
subjects and heterogenous objects into the field of perception (…) reorienting general
perceptual space and disrupting forms of belonging” (Ranciére, 2010: 2).
more interesting for an independent observer. Symptomatically, journalists, critics, politicians,
producers and artists emphasized in their public statements that this exchange of theatre
performances was the first one after ten years of suspension of any kind of cultural collaboration
between these two ex-Yugoslav republics. This messianic role of the two national theatres is of
course complete mystification which reduces and castrates entire artistic production to nationally
and institutionally representative art. Exchange of independent and alternative artists from both
Slovenia and Serbia was never suspended, not even during the economic, political and cultural
embargo imposed on Serbia by the ‘international community’. Due to many obstacles, intensity of
this independent cultural exchange was reduced, its visibility in mass media was rather marginal,
events were maybe not overcrowded with visitors, but it is both arrogant and ignorant to say that
the recent exchange of performances of the two national theatres from Ljubljana and Belgrade
means the ‘recovering of cultural ties’ between the two newly established states. These states are
maybe new but the mental structure in the heads of their most influential cultural emissaries
remains old: it is the same politics of art statism and ignorance of the production which cannot fit
into the representative model of the ruling esthetic and art system” (Milohnić, 2011: 13-14).
2
“The sole existence of national theatres, an important position they still occupy, as well as the
paradox that avant-garde theatres have to define their own position precisely in opposition
to big national theatre institutions, make us believe that, when talking about contemporary
theatre, we have to confront ourselves with the ideology and practice of the national theatre”
(Skušek, 1980; quoted in Milohnić, 2011: 19).
63