Long-term dissolution process

(oslobodjene.ba)

"Our past always resembles our present," Mirko Kovač would write in a book of letters he exchanged with Filip David during the nineties. Rereading this impressive correspondence, which precisely detects all the stumbles we agreed to, one can notice all the constants that are still the dominant narratives in which we live in this region. In other words, even then, after the collapse of Yugoslavia, it was obvious in which direction the events of the people here would go. This was certainly not a short-term category of upheaval, but a long-term process of dissolving all forms of constructed sociality. It destroyed everything that concerned the achieved values, systems and categories on which, despite all the shortcomings, it was still possible to think of some utopia of the future. The moment in which everything was plunged into the abyss of ethno-national feudalisms returned us to a general regression, from which we have not been able to escape even after the end of the wars, nor even with the transition to the new millennium. Moreover, the insistence on a state of concrete conflict, the constant manipulation of fear, the nationalistic engineering of nurturing differences, which is used whenever necessary in a slippery political moment, has proven to be the only real continuity.

Everything that came before, everything that was achieved in terms of civilization, was to be degraded, annulled and dismantled. This primarily refers to the general deculturalization of the people, their reduction to backward traditionalisms that will turn minor differences into vast fields of hatred, while all those links that are our common experience will be marginalized and denounced as destructive. So, from history as a flow forward, we have turned to a constant return backwards, so the past is not what is left behind us, but what is constantly coming and struggling with the present moment. Hence the irreparable impression that we repeatedly remain unfinished in our formation, the nineteenth-century models of establishing a nation as an unsurpassed value keep us imprisoned with collective amnesia. We have to go through all the steps again, with the difference that the space for some new avant-garde idea has narrowed to such an extent that its contours cannot even be discerned. There is simply no boldness, everything is numbed, reduced to a concept. What remains are crumbs of meaning that can neither pull us forward, nor do we have the strength to completely destroy them. So that from a zero position we try to think up something that would truly be a desirable framework for coexistence.

And here it is clear why the wars were fought, what their background was and how much they were an aggressive nullification of a project that, if nothing else, produced some results, had a vision that everything around us and within us could be built outside the paradigm of resentment as the only way of existence. And how much potential that project had is evident from the fact that even after its time has passed, we have not managed to come up with anything better, and now we parasitize on its ruins in our zombified manifestations. Perhaps in a short period there were some weak messengers of hope that things could somehow return to normal, but as soon as new crypto-democratic systems were established, the logic of circles burdened with the narcissism of small differences crystallized, which, under the guise of protecting the people, implements neoliberal agendas of transitional and post-transitional dismantling of everything that was built and conquered earlier. Every common good, every desire to build something, has been turned into passivity and collective depression without the possibility to free ourselves, to imagine our lives as ones that will not just surrender to the worthlessness of the grinding wheel of time.

Because in order for something to be possible to change, it is necessary to acquire some form of belief and have an awareness of the community, not as irreconcilable differences and disintegration, but a community that can dialectically include the widest range of attitudes. And what, in the end, do we have today? Vegetating on worn-out myths and parodies about the alleged magnificent victories of the nineties, everyone in their own way is convinced that they were on the right side, that the category of truth is only theirs. While reflecting on our common defeat, from which something could be learned as a confrontation, is ignored and viewed as a weakness. Only when we accept that we have consciously agreed to defeat, to our own degradation, will it be possible to take a step forward. Beyond that, everything is a meaningless shell, to which we are slaves and which blocks us, becoming tribes that behave like fans even when there are actually no results.