Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies

Culture of trauma and identity politics - critical frames and emancipatory lenses of cultural...
Let me gear this discussion towards the importance of artistic and scholarly inter ventions
interrogating the politics of abjection, affect, revolt and collectivity in the SFRY and post-
SFRY context which traverse the petrified ideological straitjackets of cultural politics
today when it comes to identity-memory regimes. The fracturing of biopolitics and capital,
tied to the crisis of sovereignty, statehood and statecraft only attests to contemporary losses
of the subject and the political, through very specific material bodies, experiences and
insights. For instance, it is important to provide a critique and appraisal of those gestures
that escape the post-political bind of the “culture of exception/trauma/terror” that persist
despite all state-building and democratizing efforts involving a host of international and
national agencies and globalizing processes (including “Europeanization”).
Globally, to agree with Boris Buden’s commentary on Frederick Jameson’s view of late
capitalism, “culture expands throughout the entire area of society to a point where our
entire societal life – from economic value to state power all the way to the structure of
psyche itself – has become ‘cultural’ in a sense that has not been adequately reflected
upon” (Buden, 2005). Even the therapeutic regimes of “transitional justice” in post-
Yugoslavia are getting reduced to culturalized performativity turned into “empty
politics”, with no real challenge to the dominant symbolic and ideological orders, and
far away from a reimagination of solidarity and communality, inclusivity and equality
as norms of transformative (universalist, cosmopolitan, democratic) politics. Behind
this culturalization or bureaucratization of social and political issues is the governing
paradigm of “the management of affect” through various post-political languages of law,
science or techno-managerial administration, where we face culturalist dissolution of
genuine political relation and action.
Attention must be turned to those visions, spaces and agencies that are on the margins,
cutting across the state, below and above, horizontally, in academia and scholarship, civil
society, media and arts/culture that take the risk of resisting and demystifying dominant
matrices and regimes of governance, representations of identity and belonging, assertions
of political power and authority, and that find creative and inspiring trajectories when
it comes to political engagement. Visual and performative strategies of art and politics
are of key importance here where we can engage with those practices whose innovative
concepts can help us think and intervene in our global troubles. Surely, scholarship as
transformative politics today, as always, has to be entwined with those emancipatory
gestures concerning the renegotiation of communality and solidarity, political forms of
human life, and promising political engagements towards justice and equality.
This renewed work on knowledge production in academic, activist and artistic circles
that function as “school cooperatives of radical truth” (which many of us engage in
and use to open space for action) must insist on the fusion between knowledge and
action, critical thinking and material struggles. It has to trace out emergent politics and
critical interventions that resist sovereign politics camping bare lives and managing
bodies of subjects/citizens through new technologies and rationalities globally. The
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