In 1979, I graduated from the second grade of the Tuzla High School. Tangible experiences of the world were reduced to the Yugoslav interior. But the experiences of constantly reading and listening to music developed a living, big, inner world in me. The collision of palanquin socialism that surrounded me and the endless universe of texts, rhythms and melodies produced a longing for the regions where these texts and songs were created. That longing has been simmering in me for almost half a century, until today.
It should be noted that Azra released her first single that year. Balkan was on youth shows. I preferred the second track - What should I do? Azra was actually another name for longing for a world of wild freedom, a linguistic and musical code for young people's nascent contempt for palanquin boredom. We felt that something epochal was happening. But we had no evidence for that.
Far from our intellectual horizon, the evidence was provided by the French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard in that very year. The government of the Canadian province of Quebec ordered him a study in which everything revolves around the age-old philosophical question - what can we know? The concept of postmodernism already existed. Among the first to use it around 1870 was the English painter John Watkins Chapman, demanding that English painting be even more modern than French impressionism - to be postmodern. Since then, the term has been used quite arbitrarily on various occasions.
Key book
Liotar puts it in the center of his discussion, but also on the cover of the book: Postmodern State - Report on Knowledge. Much later, reading the German translation from the French, I realized that the French original of La condition postmoderne became "Postmodern knowledge" in German, and remained faithful to the original title in English, Russian, Spanish and Serbian.
In the book, Liotar announced "the end of big stories" or "big projects". Unlike myths that explain the past, according to Lyotard, "great stories" are promises of the modern age that aim for the future. Hegel, and his follower Marx, founded thought systems that should be universal and be realized in the future. And what happened? Liotar believes that the idea of modernity was "destroyed and liquidated" during its alleged realization. This is happening above all due to the triumph of capitalist technological science, which has risen to a ubiquitous form of knowledge around the world. Liotar also rebelled against another "great project" - the "reign of truth" in dogmatic Marxism, which imposes its "truth" on the heterogeneity and plurality of the human world.
Perhaps in the West, Liotar became just another hero of feuilletons and philosophical discussions. But to the world in which I lived he was a kind of clairvoyant mind. In the eighth decade of the last century - between Tito's death and the death of Yugoslavia - our "great story" really imploded. Then she continued her life in a multitude of small stories that are not in a hierarchical relationship.
Those were really formative years for my generation. The creative explosion - an unprecedented creative freedom - ended with real explosions of shells that killed people, but it also heralded the death of touched freedom.
Postmodern as a generational slogan
In the decade before the Yugoslav catastrophe, which in the West had the taste of triumph with the fall of the Wall and which was affixed with Fukoyama's imbecile title The End of History, I also read Lyotard's texts. Little did I really understand. I was more suited to the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, from Benjamin to Adorno to Marcuse. And of course Nietzsche. And Lyotard's contemporaries like Gliksman wrote more drinkable.
Nevertheless, through student bars, at parties, during breaks between lectures, we began to say the word "postmodern" as a matter of course, not caring about its complicated and contradictory legacy.
In the circles in which I moved - the young Sarajevo literary scene - it was almost a fighting slogan against the old stuffiness: postmodern art.
Rigidity of the system, rural pseudo-partisanship, eyeless Šicardžian careerism of party members, endless repetition of phrases, on the one hand. The glittering showcase of the West from the other side. Sex & drugs & rock'n'roll. And books. From Pynchon to Oster. From Nabokov to Cohen. And movies. And art that provokes by flirting with pornography.
It was not much different in the West. With the fact that, unlike Yugoslavia, the West really fulfilled the social assumptions that Liotar had in front of his eyes - a post-industrial, atomized society entering the phase when the "great promises" of modernity have been spent. And Yugoslavia, with its hybrid socialism, was not even thoroughly modernized.
Peter Engleman, an East German philosopher and dissident, who was bought from the GDR by West Germany in the 1970s, was among the first to understand the great difference between Liotar's philosophical intention and the inflationary use of the attribute "postmodern". Architecture, music, literature, philosophy, politics, food, fashion, almost all areas of human activity received this label. In one of his texts, Engelman said: "According to vulgar sociology and Marxism, this term offers a quick orientation and arranges the world just as we are used to, before and after. With a simple "fast" one can critically distance himself from everything before and at the same time feel much better, no additional reflection is required".
I remember the enthusiasm of the young art scene over the fact that Ilona Štaler, known as Ćićolina - no one has ever pronounced the linguistically correct transcription of Čičolina - appeared on the pages of a literary magazine as a glass figure in intercourse with her American lover and artist Džef Koons. Kuns glorified consumerist kitsch, and "meatball" - that is the translation of the Italian word Ćićolina - was a Hungarian immigrant, an Italian politician, a porn star and - a postmodern icon.
In fact, we considered this glittering aesthetic buffoonery, this celebration of eclecticism and vulgarity to be a hint of a bright future. And the future came mainly as a punishment, not as a fulfillment of immature dreams.
Liotar should have been read more carefully.
In search of the Postmodern state
Liotar's books were burned in my shelled and looted Bosnian apartment in the spring of 1992. Then I read his texts in German. Since today is exactly one hundred years since Liotar's birth, I decided to see if the most famous philosophical godfather of the famous term is present in Belgrade bookstores.
August in Belgrade can be hot. It's the same this morning. I get off the tram at SKC. I enter the bookstore, which is rumored to be the best-stocked in the city. Unlike many others, she still has a special corner for poetry. It's not a choice, but it's more than the complete disappearance of lyric from the big bookstores both here and in the West.
Right next to it is a shelf that says PHILOSOPHY.
The young saleswoman asks me how she can help me. I say the name of a man she has never heard of. Jean-Francois Lyotard. Search under L. None. Search in a smartphone clipped to a digital register of deliverable books. There is none.
"Shall we try the title?" he asks. "Postmodern condition". There is none.
It was like that in several other bookstores.
The postmodern state was already hinted at in 1975 by the Austrian philosopher Paul Fajerabend with his provocative slogan - Anything goes (translated into German as "Do what you want").
In the "Ivo Andrić" bookstore on Knez Mihailova, they took it literally. It is still written above the window that it is the Bookstore of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. As a student, I used to find the best books there. Now, next to books, school bags and various trinkets are in the windows. There is no Liotar, but there are books about Adidas or about leading fashion companies.
I walked to the Youth Center. In the 1991s, there was a Dočka bookstore where I was able to read an entire book for which I had no money. Old books are also displayed in the bookstore that is now there. The lady I ask about Liotar doesn't look at me in amazement, she obviously knows what she's talking about. He takes out Liotar's book "Raskol", translated in XNUMX.
Post-truth as destiny
There are no renewed editions. He advises me to try one of the platforms on the Internet.
Liotar does not even live in the most famous Belgrade bookstore "Geca Kon". It is not even in the window of the French Institute. Appropriate stories about women at the Olympic Games were told there.
If it weren't for postmodernism, we wouldn't have ended up in the embrace of post-truth. Every day we face the pluralism of language games above which there is no meta-instance that will judge what is true and what is not. Liotar died in 1998, on the threshold of the digital era, which fully realized his theses. The discursive islands in the endless archipelago that he talked about are the so-called bubbles, echo chambers, countless digital communities on social networks that decide for themselves what their truth is, and ignore everything else as ignorance or attack it as a lie.
Marxist and pseudo-Marxist "big stories" have devoured themselves. But one story remains that consumes all others. This knowledge is organized as technology. It turns into power and profit. Knowledge is only what increases benefit. "Unnecessary" knowledge such as poetry, philosophy, art are pushed to the social margins. Human relationships that unnecessarily slow down the deadly march of utilitarianism also become redundant. Friendship, love, solidarity, playfulness of art, neighborhood, family, healthy environment for children become anachronistic utopias.
Peter Engelman offers us comfort when he says that the concept of modernity should not be equated with its values. It is a noble attempt to convey freedom, equality and fraternity across the colorful postmodern swamp of today.
From Ćićoline to Stoye
What is not mass entertainment with the flavor of blood or sex no longer has a legitimate right to exist. Thus, the most down-to-earth thoughts packed into books occupy a central place in today's bookstores.
Lyotard's opponents accused him of encouraging irrationalism because he dethroned the Enlightenment and reason.
That, of course, is like pulling a gun on a man who brings bad news. We should only ask ourselves, is our world driven by the dismal technological knowledge described by Liotar, or are we closer to Habermas's communicative community? The French philosopher says that techno-science is actually destroying the project of modernity, which he claims is realizing it. Liotar himself saw himself as a man who defends heterogeneity from the despotism of "big stories". A man who tries to save enlightened, emancipatory impulses from the collapse of great promises.
I accepted the creative freedom offered by postmodern literature without hesitation. But I've never been under the illusion that a bad postmodern piece of literature is in any way better than a piece from ancient times. Expressionists, Futurists or Dadaists from the first half of the last century are more radical, significant and interesting than much of what is offered to us under the postmodern label.
"Some work is only modern if it was postmodern before that. Seen in this way, postmodernism does not represent the end of modernism, but its birth, its permanent birth," Liotar warned. He was on the side of the avant-garde, not academicism or kitsch. Three-quarters of the books on our shelves would be anti-modern, not post-modern.
In Belgrade bookstores in August 2024, I did not find Liotar's Postmodern condition, but the fact that I found it as a hit, the fact that it is selling like an alva, was mostly a confirmation of his gloomy prophecy about the liquidated enlightenment.
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