maria_technosux (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} maria_technosux) wrote,@ 2008-10-07 12:11:00 |
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Changes by BADco (resist Bojana Cvejic's pomo disidentification!) part 3
Final part of the trilogy:
"Changes" by BADco: resist Bojana Cvejic's pomo disidentification!!!
At the beginning of this third essay, I comment on the fact that my series is now Top of the Pops at Google and Yahoo. This doesn't mean that people will now finally learn how terrible BADco really are (I only wish they would), because no one really reads these essays anyway, due to their sheer length. But the mere idea that someone might read them is unbearable enough to Cvejic. She knows for a fact that some people will actually read my essays because of Paula Caspao's plagiarism, which Cvejic wholeheartedly supported, but this case of plagiarism proves Cvejic's worst nightmare that some people will actually sit down and read a Technosux polemic. Oh shock, oh horror, they'd better NOT be curators or subsidizers!!! This paranoia on Cvejic's part will probably lead to an avalanche of BADco propaganda coming your way under the guise of performance essayism, in the next Etcetera, or TkH, or whatever other magazine Bojana Cvejic has clout at and can mobilize as a platform to counter-attack my pieces bashing her and her gullible poseur friends in BADco. I can already envision a BADco themed-issue, with syndicated pieces by Agamben, Rogoff, Cvejic herself of course, they might even drug Jean Luc Nancy himself into writing a piece praising BADco for their borefest (hey, cocaine worked for Marilyn Manson, it might work here to, if it hasn't already, tho for some reason I think Nancy might like LSD better, not that it would improve his writing, but for some reason LSD is linked to Nancy in my head, maybe it's a poetic association because of the rhyme, Nan-See/El-Ass-Dee?). If you're an avant garde theatre "poker-player", be on the look-out in the coming months, cos you will eventually notice post modern community-leaders going on and on about how great BADco are, essays by countless of pomo figure-head/god-head philosophers showering BADco with mad love, and subtle hint-hint-hints that you should go and see them, that it's a noble thing to waste your time and money "enduring" a BADco borefest, that curators should stock up on shows, well, if you see any or all of this coming your way, I am really sorry about this onslaught of BADco advertorials, it's all my fault. But they deserve it. The ass-kicking I gave them, I mean. No, seriously! *kicks BADco/Cvejic up the ass again*
Tex.
Changes
BADco
(with the extraordinary assistance of Bojana Cvejic)
Tanz im August Festival 2008
26th of August 2008
Sophiensaele, Berlin, Germany.
Maria Technosux for Damoclash.
Copyright © 2008.
All Rights Reserved.
Part three of three.
Read part one here.
Read part two here.
Ik vind het ironisch dat de zwijgende meerderheid, pas gisteren ontdekt door de intellectuelen, de brandstof levert voor de postmodernistische ineenstorting. Ik zou juist het tegenovergestelde willen stellen. De zwijgende meerderheid denkt wel. Als zij niet spreekt, dan kan dat zijn omdat wij haar het spraakvermogen hebben ontnomen en van de middelen tot enunciatie hebben beroofd; niet omdat ze niets te zeggen heeft. Het is alsof de massa een geheim heeft bewaard, terwijl de intellectuelen in kringetjes ronddraaien in een poging uit te maken wat voor geheim dat is, wat er aan de hand is. Ik denk dat Baudrillard zich voor een tijd bij de massa moet voegen en enkele tientallen jaren moet zwijgen: dan zal hij beseffen hoe dat voelt. - western 4.33
Just as I was working on this essay, the inevitable happened: We hit Top of The Pops at Google and Yahoo.
The mysterious sooper-secret Google algorithm decided to put the first part of the series (the Livejournal version, curiously not the Damoclash ones), Top of The Pops for the query "BADco, Changes". Yahoo also placed these essays Top of The Pops, but Yahoo linked to the Damoclash mirrors. Either way, my polemics are now top-of-the-pops at two of the most important online search-engines:
This top-placement of my polemics at Google and Yahoo is a thorn in the eye of Bojana Cvejic, who resents the fact that people like me have total freedom of speech on the internet, get top-level placement for it, and choose to use that freedom of speech and top-placement in order to expose frauds and charlatans (Paula Caspao, Jeroen Fabious), elite avant garde artists failing to expose all there is to the shrewdest of capitalists as they pretend to institutionally critique them (Andrea Fraser failing to note the Generali-Al Taqwa relationship), to expose performance racists (Scapino Ballet's use of Allerseelen, Jochen Roller's blackface revival), self-hating homophobes (Pere no-more-Gay i Faura) and, arguably exposing the ones that pose a true danger to us all, outright insane New Age quacks (Cora Emens). Cvejic has a huge problem with people like me exposing such creatures instead of building web-shrines for them.
Cvejic does not want people like me to have access to computers or the internet. She and her scenesters resent the fact that people like me have total freedom of speech on the internet. Me exposing plagiarists and calling racists on their shit, all this is according to Cvejic "a severe interferencity" with "the precarious careerismity" of her and her fellow scenesters. That's right folks: all it takes to bring down the elite performance scene in Europe is one little bad-mouthed immigrant underclass girl in Amsterdam calling performance artists a bunch of racists on some webpage on the internet no one will ever bother to read because of its sheer length. Not the destruction of welfare for the arts, not the encroachment of commercialization (and the monopolizing *consolidation* that comes with it), not the changes in European demographics (more old people, more immigrant/"black" people, more poor people), not the centralization of power in the EU. All those developments are essentially harmless, says Cvejic, you can ignore those. The real danger is angry immigrants with internet access. They are the ones who will bring down the elite performance arts.
You can rest assured that Cvejic, in response to the top-placement of my polemical pieces about BADco's borefest Changes, will now use her clout at "legitimate" (haha) and "serious" (hahaha) performance magazines like Etcetera, and let's not forget her other ideological base-of-operations TkH; The Journal for Performance Theory, to launch a massive campaign to recuperate the allegedly tarnished image of BADco. If you want to see BADco and Cvejic in action exonerating themselves, I guess all you have to do is buy the next issue of these publications. These are the kind of magazines where everyone knows everybody. This would be called cronyism in any other professional field, but they call it "healthy complicity", showing that there is no separation of powers in this field. At these magazines the essayists treat artists with a velvet glove in exchange for free tickets, VIP access to expert-only forums and backstage access to rehearsals. Cronyism in the media makes life hard for those of us who did not become reporters in order to make new friends.
A German reporter (who has made it to the top of the elite performance blacklist of hostile writers) posted a piece online (where else) saying that BADco's Changes was emblematic of the emptiness of the whole "conceptual dance" genre:
Wie leer und unsinnlich der sogenannte "Konzept"-Tanz geworden ist, zeigte eine Gruppe aus Zagreb, BADco. In "Changes" demonstrieren fünf junge Frauen mit in sich kreisenden, ständig wiederholten Bewegungsformeln zu Texten über John Cage den nicht nur tänzerischen Stillstand. [*]
I'm not the only one who thought BADco's performance was a total borefest! Unfortunately, the German writer, undoubtedly because he's a German, overlooked the racism in BADco's stupid jokes about being lazy Eastern artists. I personally think it's BADco's own stupidity, insensitivity, ethical bankruptcy, lack of intelligence, and lack of entertainment value (for all ye pop-scholars, haha!) that renders them unpalatable to people other than myself. This severe lack creates a tedious void in their work that BADco then try to fill up with racist "jokes" (I'm just a lazy Croat and that makes me a better artist than Western artists, I can teach the Westerners how to be lazy so they can become real artists, etc.), and whateverthefuck Cvejic tells them to do. Any artist who hasn't got anything to offer or to say will toss in a few racist jokes to keep his German hosts entertained. To a doxosopher, a true believer like Cvejic, the artist is never to blame for his racism. Instead, you can blame it all on truly free reporting on the internet. Pim Fortuyn, in an act of pomo disidentification that would have made Jean Luc Nancy proud, never openly identified himself as a racist. When the media pointed out just how racist Fortuyn was, having collected a nice anthology of all his public statements that showed a clear overlap with the racist anti-immigrant statements from the likes of LePen, Fortuyn blamed the media for identifying him as a racist. After his assassination, his supporters blamed the media for the demonization. In this day and age, no racist needs to identify himself as one; they can leave that task over to the media. Here, you can see who benefits from pomo disidentification: racists who want to expectorate racism without being called racists for doing so.
Why do Cvejic and BADco feel compelled to fight back? Do they really think that my essays will stop curators from buying their crappy peformances? Do they think that art policy-makers and subsidizers sit down with a bunch of Damoclash print-outs on their lap? I find the idea that anyone would sit down and read all these anti-racist polemics I am posting on Damoclash pretty ridiculous - unless of course they are uninspired wannabe PhDs like Paula Caspao and Jeroen Fabius (DIE YOU PLAGIARISTS DIE DIE DIE!) In our day and age of ADD and 7 second attention spans, no one is going to sit down and read these Damoclash essays. Why did Cvejic's boyfriend Jan Ritsema try to censor my writings when I was blogging on his site? Not because anyone was reading them. Not because I have any real influence. I was almost the only person blogging on the PAF site. So why are these people so obsessed with these essays which no one reads anyway?
It's because: The devil has always been the best friend the church has ever had because he kept them in business all this time. All that talk about collectivities and friendship networks is a bunch of propaganda that has nothing to do with the way these people feel or go about their artistic practice in reality. These elite performance artists are guided by *conflict*. Like the Xians with their devil, they too need enemies they can fight against. They use their enemies as an excuse to act, as a resource to seek out, feed on and then destroy. They love the abuse I am heaping upon them in these essays because it gives them a sense of crisis, a sense of urgency and makes them feel important (Wow, Maria must REALLY hate us to write all these things about us!). Despite their intellectual (read: derogatory) attitudes towards media controversy, they secretly love it. They need an "Outside" to their cliquish little scene that seems like a dangerous hostile place, and the Internet becomes that place. They need an "Other" to reject, an "Other" censor, an "Other" to co-opt, an "Other" to offset themselves against. They just crave the opportunity to act out the power of a censor, to say NO, to bestow and reject legitimacy. Their avant garde artistic identity is a NEGATIVE identity, it is an AGAINST/INSTEAD-OF identity. I take great pride in the fact that I, unlike all these performance hypocrites who think they are too intellectual for conflict and controversy, am honest about being a polemicist, about having adopted a conflict-based way of understanding the world (including the field of art), whereas they are selling you 5-year-plan/seven-year-itch-plan Hitchcock-Ychromosomecock-sucking love-fests.
Why else would they feel compelled to steal my shit at the same time as they respond to everything I say these essays? BECAUSE THEY TOO NEED A NEGATIVE OTHER! All their love-fest manifestos are just a bunch of propaganda bullshit to make nice-nice with their subsidizers. These artists want to be just like the capitalists who give them their money. These artists disidentify with everything else so that they can totally and completely identify with the capitalists, they want to be just as powerful, to have money, to be censors, to discriminate, to be racists, to silence, to wipe-out, they want to first exploit and then erase the inferior unworthy Other, they want to steal, plunder and destroy with impunity, just like their moneyed subsidizers do. The fact that some of these artists are products of war only makes them more likely to identify with the ones that have the power to start, run but never put an end to wars. War created them, war informs everything they do. The more they repress this, the trauma of war that led them to identify with the aggressor, the more they become the aggressor, the aggressor who plunders and erases. Why else would Cvejic&Co get so turned on by a concept like means with no ends? Because for people who find themselves in the middle of a war there seems to be no end to the war, the conflict seems never-ending. These artists are drawn to concepts that reflect their repressed war trauma. They take their Post Traumatic Stress Disorders and make them into an aesthetic for the stage. Bojana Cvejic, for all her talk of new this and new that, is in truth a reactionary writer, she feels the need to *react* to my essays bashing her, her post-modernism and all the boring poseurs she is endorsing. For these people, to be an artist is to reproduce elitist distinction. To be an artist is to be a discriminator, a censor. If you are looking for freedom of speech elite European performance art is the last place you'd want to look for it. The theater is a closet, artists are closeted (the ones who have suffered war traumas are the most repressed and in-the-closet of all), and in its post modern incarnation the theatre isn' t just a closet but a Water Closet full of shit. The old question of "is paper for books or toilet-paper" becomes superfluous when considering the works of Bojana Cvejic and her clique.
A Stupid German Whiteboy trying to exonerate BADco's racism tells me on his blog:
"If someone called me lazy, I'd be flattered!".
My jaw drops to the floor. I can't believe I am reading this. Am I really reading this?
This is how the stereotype of the lazy Other works to restrict my movement (not the Stupid German Whiteboy's movement) through the world.
This is how the stereotype of the lazy Other performs all kinds of symbolic violence (to Others like me, not the Stupid German Whiteboy, cos he is never an Other).
This is how the stereotype of the lazy Other is ideologically loaded with racism.
This is how a Stupid German Whiteboy who claims that being called "lazy" is is flattering to a Stupid German Whiteboy like him, doesn't see that he has the First World Priviledge of re-interpretating what to others is ALWAYS an insult for a flattering comment at no cost whatsoever to himself.
This is how Western European racism is privatized as "your problem not mine, because I, Stupid German Whiteboy, can take a racist stereotype (that doesn't concern me anyway) and turn it into a flattering comment, so why can't you?"
I imagine the taz-journalist who wrote about the White House being Uncle Barack's Hut walking up to Obama and saying:
"Dude, what's all the fuss about? If I was a negro who ran a realistic chance of living in the White House for four years, and some German referred the White House "Uncle Tom's Barack", damn, I'd be so flattered!".
Stupid whiteboy knows Jan Ritsema, Cvejic, BADco, and the rest of their clique. Despite pretending to be my friend, Stupid German Whiteboy values them more than the values me. Whiteboy has seen how Jan handled me (threats of censorship), whiteboy learns fast, whiteboy likes to treat me the same way Jan did, cos like Jan he too ends up threatening me with censorship: "Watch your mouth Maria, or I will lock down this blog-thread". I hate nothing more than people telling me to keep my big waffle shut on the internet (if we can't be totally honest here, then where?) and using threats of censorship to enforce this kind of gag-rule. After such a threat I do what any feminist-educated woman ought to do: I immediately run off to greener pastures where I can freely run my mouth exposing performance racists. These people still have to figure out that censorship doesn't work in this day and age of the internet. I should have known what an asshole I was dealing with when I told him about the Paula Caspao plagiarism, and how much it had hurt me, and Whiteboy callously responded with: "So what? Who cares?". So the Whiteboy locks down the thread, and removes the link I had posted to the article by the German journalist I quoted above. Whiteboy cannot stand the fact that I am not the only person bored by BADco. After I run off to my Livejournal and Damoclash, it finally dawns on the Stupid German Whiteboy that there's no point in threatening me with censorship on a place like the Internet. There are so many other places I can post. So he sheepishly re-opens the blog-thread he had shut down, sends me an e-mail complains that I am not posting again. Well, duuuuh, I definitely don't feel like posting at blogs where I am threatened with censorship, how hard is that to figure out? I post an entry, but it mysteriously disappears. Whiteboy says the blog software mistakes my posts for SPAM because of all the URLs, and automatically blocks them. Yeah right. Whiteboy then mentions some BADco propaganda he got ahold of in the mean time, while I was busy writing these essays. This makes me suspicious: where did he suddenly get those documents from? He must have been communicating with BADco behind my back. He then tells me that BADco have read the thread he initially threatened to shut down. See, I was right. BADco and Whiteboy have been talking to each other in private... If their self-assessments are anything to go by, then BADco must be too lazy to use Google for research. BADco only read the thread at Whiteboy's blog because he passed them the link himself. But the point is: Whiteboy had consulted with BADco in private about my posts. This made me furious. I hate hate HATE gossipy, behind-the-scenes bullshit like that. I immediately posted an angry entry on his blog calling BAdco a bunch of cowards for lurking all this time and mailing in private with Whiteboy without revealing themselves to ME as well. I realized that Whiteboy was on the racists' side. He knew they were lurking all this time and didn't even bother to tell me so. I should have expected this from the Stupid German Whiteboy. After I told him how badly the Shitcat had hurt me with his blackface revival, Whiteboy only wanted to hurt me all over again. Whiteboy just wanted to lay his boot where the other guy laid it before him. The BADco brouhaha was his opportunity to do so. BADco are scenesters, a scene the Whiteboy wants to belong to. BADco have clout in that scene, they can ensure his entry. I'm just a nobody on the internet. I am expendable. When it was me or the racists, he went with the racists, because I have nothing to offer. I belong to no scene. Damoclashers believe in collective activism, yes, but we are primarily a group of individualists. It was in Whiteboy's interest to befriend the performance racists, and to threaten me with censorship for exposing them. This would earn him coolness points in their scene: "Conrad is threatening to shut up Maria on his blog, he's cool, he's on our side, he defends our racism.". Just like a typical German MITLAUFER racist. So there you have it, Conrad, I answered your prayer and called you a racist censor in my essay. Fuck you very much for the pleasure. Unfortunately I cannot counter your stupid kneejerky "I'm surprised you haven't called me a racist yet" , with something equally kneejerk like, "I'm surprised you haven't called me a nigger yet", cos that's what the Shitcat did last summer when he had his fucked-up little blackface revival: that rape scene we saw was the Shitcat calling me a nigger.
Back to the media campaign that Cvejic is now mounting to recuperate the image of BADco. BADco will use the 4-pager offered to them by Cvejic in Etcetera or TkH to respond to whatever was in my essays, but of course without ever mentioning my name, Damoclash, the article itself, or ever publicly acknowledging the fact that they are responding to online criticism. This was the strategy Cvejic pursued when I kicked Martin Nachbar's ass, she did the same thing when I exposed Paula Caspao plagiarism. By now this P&R strategy has become utterly predictable. Cvejic thinks that allowing all these people plagiarize my shit - and responding to someone without acknowledging your response as a response to someone else's earlier comments IS plagiarism, every academic I consulted with on the matter said you have to acknowledge intellectual opponents - will make me so angry and frustrated, that I will give up and shut up. Let it be known through this essay that it will take more than 4-page apologetics in Etcetera to shut me up.
Zizek gives an overview of political laziness, here called non-acting, here called DECADENCE, a specifically French dezoofrahman kind of laziness more(?) lethal than its equivalent artistic laziness:
In the recent French resistance against the war on Iraq, there definitely is a clear echo of the "old decadent" Europe: escape the problem by non-acting, by new resolutions upon resolutions — all this reminiscent of the inactivity of the League of Nations against Germany in the 1930s. And the pacifist call "let the inspectors do their work" clearly IS hypocritical: they are only allowed to do the work because there is a credible threat of military intervention. Not to mention the French neocolonialism in Africa (from Congo-Brazzaville to the dark French role in the Rwanda crisis and massacres)? And about the French role in the Bosnian war?
[*]
Read this list of examples of political laziness, and tell me if you still think laziness is A Good Thing. Lo behold, he ends the list of political laziness with French laziness in the Bosnian war. Recall the man with no eggs/balls, the dez-oof-rah-man from the previous essay? The leisure that BADco misidentifies with might very well be this French provincal variety (unsurprising since Ritsema's PAF estate actually lies in France). Cvejic told BADco that laziness is no longer a "racist stereotype", but something the Frogs call "desœuvrement". Zizek on the other hand shows laziness for what it is: French dez-oof-rah-man = political decadence, a non-action that kills.
Once again, we are seeing an murderous refusal to deal with conflict. In this, indifferent artists mirror indifferent politicians. Can you say "homology of DISinterest"?
Once upon a time, Bojana Cvejic was more honest about her Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Nowadays Bojana Cvejic is too busy "remembering the future" on behalf of her subsidizers, so we'll remember the past for her:
July l2,l992
Belgrade
Brief outline of the situation in Belgrade
Nowadays, Belgrade is probably the most despised of all the cities in the world. Yet,it is rather a peaceful town comparing to other cities in former Yugoslavia. Why does the whole world and the rest of former Yugoslavia hated us? Of all the cities that are to blame for this unfair war, Belgrade is the only one that has not paid yet for its part of the guilt. Will it collapse in a two days time or will the agony linger on?
Belgrade is a city of illusions and absurdities. "Why absurdities?" someone will ask. For I can tell you incredible stories coming from Belgrade.
Three meetings(I will only mention three of many of them I consider to be of substance)have been organized in the period of a year and a half. The demands of all of them were the same: the resignation of the president of Serbia. Nearly the same people initiated those meetings that turned out to be demonstrations: leaders of the opposition, intellectuals and students - the intelligencia of Serbia.
In the last run,there were two strongholds of demonstration: the University of Belgrade (politically independant, i.e. politically autonmous) and the plateau in front of the Parliament of Yugoslavia. The meeting on the plateau was held on the occasion of Vidovdan, one of the most significant holidays of the Orthodox Church of Serbia. There were not only people from Belgrade; on the contrary, there were more participants from the provinces. They left their homes and the fields they cultivated with so little means and so much effort and all their belongings just to say "No", to show that Serbia is not sleeping anymore and that there are people in Serbia that still think. During that week when
we thought things were happening much faster than they were, those people slept on bare earth in their tents. Those were peasants, poor, uneducated people, yet with a strong feeling of the necessity of a change. One of the slogans was in English and was very simple: CHANGE. [Well, well, CHANGE it is, huh? The great irony being that this CHANGE was actually one of Bill Clinton's campaign key-words at the time. Anyone still doubting my previous claim that it was Bojana herself who gave BADco the title of their performance, "Changes"?]
Statistics say that approximately two million of people have circulated in that area during the meeting. At the same time, almost two streets far from the plateau,in the University of Belgrade, something big was happening.The whole university was on strike. It was not just an ordinary protest with a lot of shouting and a lot of silence when someone was shouting. There was a various, intellectual programme going on for more than twenty days. All the intellectuals of Serbias visited the students: professors from diverse parts of the country, philosophers, politicians, musicians, writers, actors and others. What I admire about this protest is the spirit of our intellectual youth. A lot of plans, a lot of thinking, a lot of original ideas. These slogans illustrate it the best: "Holding one's eyes closed doesn't help in darkness" or "Daddy, should I get killed so that you would become aware of it?". Who are these slogans for, or it is better to say against? they are against a man who is blind and won t see the procession of students, 3 km long, heading to his residence. Against a man who is deaf and does not want to hear his name, a million times announced, called and a billion times sworn. How many petitions have been signed by the most important people of this country? Walk along the widest street in Belgrade and you will see the badges with these statements: "Forces of chaos and madness" (that is what the authorities call the opposition) or "It is spring and I live in Serbia" or just "Go away".
So we beg the world to help us. Don't be mistaken, it is not the overwhelming majority that supports the position, there are a lot of us striving for truth and justice. Please, help us, we are desperate. You will not help us by bombing us, the sanctions are enough.
Bojana Cvejic, Belgrade. [*]
This what Cvejic sounded like in 1992 (if I may say so: a lot more urgent and honest and direct and readable than anything she's written since) when war was too close to home to simply "disidentify" from. Many of the intellectual post-modern tendencies of Cvejic's that I examined in my previous two essays were already present in the plea above. It is this past that Cvejic wants to disidentify from, a past that nevertheless informs everything she does and advocates in the present. Bojana Cvejic has taken her war-related Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, repressed it, and, with the help of post modern terminology, has turned her repressed PTSD into an aesthetic doctrine that she imposes on the whole European elite avant garde theatre. The seemingly post-modern tendencies that were once the products of experiencing war have been abstracted from that context, and, thanks to a pomo style of writing that strips them of all specificity, have been turned into principles-as-such. The specific context, a context of war and conflict, that shaped these tendencies is what Bojana seeks to hide from view. Because of her reputation has a learned intellectual, her access to art schools and now academic institutions as a PhD candidate, and mainly thanks to her boyfriend who already had clout in the avant garde theatre circuit (aka cronyism), Bojana has the ear of a many elite performers who gobble this stuff up like it's manna from heaven, never questioning its source and origin. Admitting to memories of conflict, above all admitting that these memories have shaped her intellectually and inform her actions and thoughts in the present would mean that Bojana Cvejic would have to accept the fact that conflict shapes the world as we know it, that conflict, whether she likes it or not, shaped her for good. She would have to accept a big H History onto which the small h of her own history has no bearing whatsoever. She would also have to consider the very real possibility that the elite artists and scholars she now glorifies in her magazines and essays and dissertations are the very same people who manipulate history to the exclusion of others ("peasants, poor, uneducated people", the fact that some of us can be poor immigrants and still be educated was lost on this little girl, we can only hope she caught a clue in the mean time), and as such the elite artists are no different but are directly congruent with the powers, the vested interests, that once excluded her from having a bearing on big H History but nevertheless inscribed a way of thinking and being onto her that she CANNOT just disidentify from, however much she'd like to. Accepting history would draw Bojana back into (what was lost in) history, back into the past-as-a-material-world from which Cvejic desperately tries to escape.
Besides the pomo-babble, Bojana's texts on performance have something very, to pull out an old term, "cyber" about them. There's an echo in there of all the 1980s and 1990s texts on the collaborative (but also the escapist) potential of digital media. For Cvejic, performance is the embodied equivalent of 2nd Life. Bojana certainly tends to write about performance like it's 2nd Life. It's interesting that this year Bojana Cvejic published an essay titled "In the Making of the Making of: The Practice of Rendering Performance Virtual". For a laugh and a sneer, just scroll through the rest of this "journal" checking all the names-worth-endorsing; Bojana is pimping all her associates, including her boyfriend's real estate in France, on almost every page of the journal. Not-so-curiously, shortly before this essay was published, Cvejic-allied choreographer Ivana Muller (of How Heavy Are My Thoughts? fame) did an interview here in Amsterdam where she described her next performance project as an "investigation of virtuality". Ivana Muller, like BADco, is yet another one of Cvejic's disciples, another artist who has blindly adopted Cvejic's aesthetic dogma.
One of the things that struck me when I was looking up Cvejic's neologisms (listed in the previous part this series) using Google Scholar (which, like the regular dictionary-sites, was at loss at to what these terms mean) was the sheer amount of "false search-hits" I got that were Computer Studies related. This discovery lead me to assume that Cvejic's pseudo-scientific sounding pomo-babble is in fact loosely based on terms she must have picked up from Cybernetics and/or New Media Studies. This makes sense, because when Bojana ditched the Opera and first made her entry on the avant garde performance scene (in the late 1990s), it was just before the dot com bubble-burst. Bojana must have caught the tail-end of all the euphoria that was going on at the time regarding computers, cyberspace and virtual-whatevers. 7 years after the bubble-burst, Bojana must have thought the coast was clear (the asbest-laced clouds of 9/11 dissolved enough) to revive cyber-culture again. Hell, she might even sell her old issues of Mondo 2000 on Ebay at a profit! Unfortunately for her, "the house came down" once again, only this time it was a foreclosure. Or maybe it was that half-collapsed wall at PAF coming down, who knows... whatever it was, the new-old recession will make sure people haven't got the money for cyber-allover-again just yet.
"Instinctively" I pulled out Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto, obligatory reading for one of my New Media Studies courses. At the time I found it unreadable and refused to read it (and failed all the questions on the exam, which would have happened anyway, unable as I was to make sense of it). I only tried reading it again several years post-grad, and still didn't get it. This was my third attempt. After so many years of weeding through pomo shit and becoming immune to the pomo style of writing, reading A Cyborg Manifesto was now an almost effortless task. There it was, Haraway's own pomo call to disidentification:
It is important to note that the effort to construct revolutionary stand-points, epistemologies as achievements of people committed to changing the world, has been part of the process showing the limits of identification. The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense. The common achievement of King and Sandoval is learning how to craft a poetic/political unity without relying on a logic of appropriation, incorporation, and taxonomic identification. [T]o recognize 'oneself' as fully implicated in the world, frees us of the need to root politics in identification, vanguard parties, purity, and mothering. Stripped of identity, the ruling race seizes the power, plunders and then erases the margins. To be "Other " is to be multiple, without clear boundary, frayed, insubstantial, without substance, immaterial, erased. One is too few, but two are too many.[*]
Then came the flashback: in the same article Cvejic had referred to her position as Althusserian, she complained that some other Etcetera author had never read, amongst other things, Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto. Cvejic felt he had to read Haraway's text in order to understand contemporary performances. Whether the performers themselves have actually read haraway or whether they understood such a difficult text as A Cyborg Manifesto is a whole different matter. In the world of the pomos, it is perfectly acceptable to use performances as case-studies for philosophical texts the performers themselves have never actually read or, when they have actually read them, can ever hope to understand. But the point is: me digging up the Haraway text was not so instinctual after all. In the back of my head, I knew all along that there was a connection between the euphoric cyber-culture discourse of the 1980s and 1990s, and Cvejic's writing on performance like it was a meat-space equivalent 2nd-Life. Bojana is too far up her pomo ass to be a real nerd on 2nd Life, but Cvejic uses performance art for the same purpose that nerds use 2nd Life. Cvejic talks about performance the way nerds (used to) talk about cyberspace. This explains the misguided identification with Open Source. But wannabe-nerds like Cvejic, who think they're too cool for 2nd Life, actually resent the real nerds, which is why they end up stealing projects like Open Source. Cvejic is a historical revisionist, who will tell you that it was the Judson Church nerds who invented Open Source. After all, didn't Ivonne Rainer just give away her A Trio score to whomever? (The real reason why Cvejic and her scenesters are so fixated with Judson Church is because for all their supposed anti-Americanism, they are still obsessed with American. Their obsession stops at the 1970s, because when they looked into American dance in the 1980s, all they found was American dancers who are negro, queer, or both, none of which the Cvejic camp wants to associate itself with.) Despite such ridiculous revisions of Judson Church as the originators of Open Source, Cvejic and her fellow nerd-haters only pay lip-service to Open Source. They don't have the spine to deal with what Open Source really entails. They don't know or want to know about the close relationship between Open Source and Full Disclosure. Bojana's use of performance as a substitute-cyberspace explains her emphasis on fiction (not code, because code is hardly fictional). For Bojana, performance isn't something real, (a program isn't something coded by a human programmer suffering RSI in the process of writing it). For Cvejic, performance is merely a Real Life cyberspace for cool pomos like her. The actual cyberspace, like the WWW, is perceived as a hostile environment where Maria Tex. is allowed to post as she pleases, and is therefor still best left to the nerds that Cvejic doesn't want to know or associate with, but still ends up co-opting (or exonerating the plagiarists who do). Constructing a 2nd Life in meat-space is no better than having one in cyberspace when its ultimate purpose is to escape history, to sever memory from history, and to sever identity-formation from the conflict that brought (some) identities into being while erasing others.
Bojana Cvejic refuses to deal with her identity as a Serb, because this was an enforced identity. For years after the dissolution of Yugoslavia Cvejic insisted on referring to herself as a Yugoslav (here's an example of a 2002 promo with the (YU) designation behind Cvejic's name), "hailing from Belgrade", a place she once referred to as "the most hated place on earth". Of course, history won in the end. She now still "hails from Belgrade". The word Serbia is still nowhere to be seen. Bojana Cvejic cannot admit to being a Serb, because she cannot admit that she couldn't beat history simply by ignoring it and disidentifying herself from it. Bojana knows that Serbs will forever bear the brunt of Milosevic's actions. Serbs will forever be remembered as the aggressors who started the war, and tried to prevent others from seeking independence. (As an side: As for me, I am generally not into regionalism, because IMO contemporary "breakaway regions" of this sort always smell too much of a bourgeois tax-evasion project, an enclave of rich bastards who are definitely not nationalists but are informed by an underlying capitalist ideology of ultra-libertarianism, the kind of people who hope to become their own little "Liechtenstein"). One day Bojana Cvejic will have to face the fact that Milosevic tried to keep his collectivity together through violence, and that he failed. For now, Bojana Cvejic does not want to deal with these facts, the consequences of being a Serb. She refuses to come out as a Serb, and acknowledge the racism inherent in her praising a Croat for calling himself lazy. Cvejic admitting to being a Serb, a historical heir to Milosevic's legacy of genocide and aggression, would mean openly accept defeat. Accepting the dreaded identity of a Serb would signal Bojana Cvejic's capitulation to history, and the disenchanted reality that Cvejic wants to escape from by means of performances-as-2nd-Life, a no-cyber-no-space where no one ever works, no one ever produces anything (no ends, only means), all objects have dematerialized (no ownership, no exchange, a plagiarist's free-for-all), nothing is ever illustrated or interpreted, everyone simply "endures" together, everyone disindentifies from things that were never worth identifying with anyway, all differences erased, everyone joins hands in the fast friendship-networks of collectivity, which is really one big all-encompassing "gesture" that points to nothing but itself, Jean Luc Nancy's (snuff) dream of a
"we", who 'do not 'have' meaning any more, because we ourselves are meaning - entirely, without reserve, infinitely, with no more meaning other than 'us'...'). (Tell me this isn't New Age feel-good crap... I bet Dr. Dragan the New Age quack-doctor would have loved this New Age bullshit). If you're a good pomo, you will go to pomo heaven and become a pomo angel, but don't worry about having to play the harp all day like angels do in the Xian heaven; just pick your harp up and put it down a few times. In pomo heaven, lights go on and off at random, just like sequential power-cuts during the Balkan Wars. Every singley wordy endsy withy any upsilony suffixy. Whenever I think of "disidentification", I imagine Bojana Cvejic as a witch at her cauldron, cooking up primordial soup, cooking up her own foundation myth of origins. "A-semanticized", free(ed) of semantics, free(ed) of any structuring principles, this primordial soup consists of "free radicals", "radical" because Andre Lepecki always uses that word to describe performance art that is anything but "radical", and "free" because you can just take them, plunder and plagiarize them at will.
Refusing to recognize anything resembling durable dispositions, the world of action becomes nothing other than this universe of interchangeable possibles, entirely dependent on the decrees of the consciousness which creates it. Hence, this universe is totally devoid of objectivity. If it is moving because the subject chooses to be moved, revolting because he chooses to be revolted, then emotions, passions and actions are merely games of bad faith, sad farces in which one is both bad actor and good audience. [*]
Laziness is really but a euphemism for Cvejic/BADco's own inability at preventing the dissolution of any collectivity. Milosevic thought that a gun would do the trick. That didn't work, so Cvejic suggests the supposed opposite of violence: total non-action, "perfect slack". This is what psychologists call Passive Aggressive Behaviour, an "obstructionist resistance to following authoritative instructions in interpersonal or occupational situations", a "resistance" that consist of "learned helplessness, procrastination, or deliberate/repeated failure to accomplish requested tasks for which one is (often explicitly) responsible". Would you want to be part of a collectivity that required you to behave this way? "I am lazy" somehow sounds better, certainly more clownish, certainly less upsetting than "I am powerless against conflict", "I do not want to deal with the consequences of my actions or anyone else's".
Laziness, with all its connotations of pastoralism, the flow of the simple life, Nazi romantic primitivism, Southern European siestas in the middle of the day... at least it's good for tourism. Lazy people are simply too lazy for genocide.
Welcome to Croatia, hope you enjoy your stay. Don't worry about any hostilities breaking out. This time around, we are too lazy to fight back. Had Milosevic invaded the country now, we'd just let him win. We're just too lazy to fight. "Lazy" sounds so much better than "demoralized".
Welcome to Serbia, hope you enjoy your stay. Don't worry about some new Milosevic starting a war. This time around, we are too lazy to fight break-away regions. If someone wants to break free from the collectivity, we just let them. Had Croatia gained independence now, we would just send them on their way. We're just too lazy to fight.
"Lazy" sounds so much better than "demoralized".
Serbs like Bojana Cvejic praising a Croatian company like BADco over their laziness posturing is decidedly NOT an act of reconciliation. It does not show that Croats and Serbs have now moved on, and are willing to praise one another's artists. It only shows a hysterical repression of historical awareness on both sides. Despite her doxosophic posturing, Bojana clearly does not have what it takes to deal with that "legacy that has never been seriously reconsidered".
The praise of laziness truly is informed by the same backwardness of Nazi romantics celebrating pastoralism, the desire to return to an earlier, supposedly simpler state of things, as a shield against a history mainly informed by conflict and unwanted "changes". And who, asks this feminist critic, are the ones still running wars, still running guns, still running oil-companies, still keeping the Military Industrial Complex up and running? That's right. The upsilons at the end of every Cvejic neologism. When it's not the Hahn am Kopf of the kippen in de vitrine/op de tribune, that Hahn is heading the battalions. Cvejic annexes words on his behalf.
Serbs and Croats (this excludes BADco and Cvejic, they will never listen to this message), do not fool yourselves. Laziness does not make you seem harmless to Western Europeans. Denial of conflict is not an act of reconciliation. Your girls look active, powerful and strong enough to carry guns and partake in militias all over again. Your assertions of laziness only create a constant sense of danger. Your girls under Congo blue light look like slabs of red meat; is this how you want to "remember your future"? A field full of dead meat? Your laziness does not disarm your adversaries, it only makes them self-satisfied in their racism. As long as you refuse to deal with the consequences of your specific positions before/during/after the war, your own memory (instead of just your former enemies) will bear you a grudge. Postmodern disidentification is not "a gift of promise" to those of us struggling with unwanted identities imposed upon us. Disidentification is a gift to all the racists who never wanted us to exist in the first place, the racists who either want to erase us or, being lazy racists, want us to erase ourselves by means of the disidentification they are now selling us. These are the same racists who try to censor our blogs and sites. When we find refuge elsewhere on the WWW, the racists plunder and plagiarize our writings, all the while denying our existence. When the racists can't silence us, when they cannot erase us, they co-opt us, stealing everything/what little we have to offer the world (often just words of anger and hope), wanting us to get frustrated because of all the plagiarism and cultural plundering, hoping that this will make us give in and give up our activism. Resist this racist erasure. Refuse to disidentify. Remember where you come from. Stand up, name yourself and be named, be acknowledged. If you must "gesture", then "point that finger" productively by exposing and identifying the racists whenever you see them. Am I calling for works of art that are QUITE SIMPLY DENUNCIATORY? Yes I am! What else could withstand such openly practiced performance racism, a racism that is out to plunder and erase? Know and show your enemies. I just did so with this essay, now it's your turn.
While I find little that is problematic in the critique of the nation, or in a recognition of its inventedness, there is nevertheless something highly disturbing both intellectually and politically with the all too common assumption these days that we may therefore take the nation out of history.
Having entered history, the nation has provided an ideological basis for self-identification, and invented or not, has served as a historical force and continues to do so. While few would deny the connection between history and the nation, moreover, that relationship has neither erased alternative conceptualisations of the past, nor has it been able to contain contradictions of its own generation that have issued in still greater complication of history - including, possibly, its negation.
To appreciate these processes, it is important not to "rescue history from the nation", but to view the nation in history, and the history in the nation, in all its complexity.
[*]
Part three of three.
Read part one here.
Read part two here.
Copyright 2008 Maria Technosux for Damoclash. All rights reserved. To prevent plagiarism, names of persons, programs, companies, scholars, books, essays, etc. in these quotations have been altered. Do your own fucking research, you lazy racists.
Final part of the trilogy:
"Changes" by BADco: resist Bojana Cvejic's pomo disidentification!!!
At the beginning of this third essay, I comment on the fact that my series is now Top of the Pops at Google and Yahoo. This doesn't mean that people will now finally learn how terrible BADco really are (I only wish they would), because no one really reads these essays anyway, due to their sheer length. But the mere idea that someone might read them is unbearable enough to Cvejic. She knows for a fact that some people will actually read my essays because of Paula Caspao's plagiarism, which Cvejic wholeheartedly supported, but this case of plagiarism proves Cvejic's worst nightmare that some people will actually sit down and read a Technosux polemic. Oh shock, oh horror, they'd better NOT be curators or subsidizers!!! This paranoia on Cvejic's part will probably lead to an avalanche of BADco propaganda coming your way under the guise of performance essayism, in the next Etcetera, or TkH, or whatever other magazine Bojana Cvejic has clout at and can mobilize as a platform to counter-attack my pieces bashing her and her gullible poseur friends in BADco. I can already envision a BADco themed-issue, with syndicated pieces by Agamben, Rogoff, Cvejic herself of course, they might even drug Jean Luc Nancy himself into writing a piece praising BADco for their borefest (hey, cocaine worked for Marilyn Manson, it might work here to, if it hasn't already, tho for some reason I think Nancy might like LSD better, not that it would improve his writing, but for some reason LSD is linked to Nancy in my head, maybe it's a poetic association because of the rhyme, Nan-See/El-Ass-Dee?). If you're an avant garde theatre "poker-player", be on the look-out in the coming months, cos you will eventually notice post modern community-leaders going on and on about how great BADco are, essays by countless of pomo figure-head/god-head philosophers showering BADco with mad love, and subtle hint-hint-hints that you should go and see them, that it's a noble thing to waste your time and money "enduring" a BADco borefest, that curators should stock up on shows, well, if you see any or all of this coming your way, I am really sorry about this onslaught of BADco advertorials, it's all my fault. But they deserve it. The ass-kicking I gave them, I mean. No, seriously! *kicks BADco/Cvejic up the ass again*
Tex.
BADco
(with the extraordinary assistance of Bojana Cvejic)
Tanz im August Festival 2008
26th of August 2008
Sophiensaele, Berlin, Germany.
Maria Technosux for Damoclash.
Copyright © 2008.
All Rights Reserved.
Part three of three.
Read part one here.
Read part two here.
Ik vind het ironisch dat de zwijgende meerderheid, pas gisteren ontdekt door de intellectuelen, de brandstof levert voor de postmodernistische ineenstorting. Ik zou juist het tegenovergestelde willen stellen. De zwijgende meerderheid denkt wel. Als zij niet spreekt, dan kan dat zijn omdat wij haar het spraakvermogen hebben ontnomen en van de middelen tot enunciatie hebben beroofd; niet omdat ze niets te zeggen heeft. Het is alsof de massa een geheim heeft bewaard, terwijl de intellectuelen in kringetjes ronddraaien in een poging uit te maken wat voor geheim dat is, wat er aan de hand is. Ik denk dat Baudrillard zich voor een tijd bij de massa moet voegen en enkele tientallen jaren moet zwijgen: dan zal hij beseffen hoe dat voelt. - western 4.33
Just as I was working on this essay, the inevitable happened: We hit Top of The Pops at Google and Yahoo.
The mysterious sooper-secret Google algorithm decided to put the first part of the series (the Livejournal version, curiously not the Damoclash ones), Top of The Pops for the query "BADco, Changes". Yahoo also placed these essays Top of The Pops, but Yahoo linked to the Damoclash mirrors. Either way, my polemics are now top-of-the-pops at two of the most important online search-engines:
This top-placement of my polemics at Google and Yahoo is a thorn in the eye of Bojana Cvejic, who resents the fact that people like me have total freedom of speech on the internet, get top-level placement for it, and choose to use that freedom of speech and top-placement in order to expose frauds and charlatans (Paula Caspao, Jeroen Fabious), elite avant garde artists failing to expose all there is to the shrewdest of capitalists as they pretend to institutionally critique them (Andrea Fraser failing to note the Generali-Al Taqwa relationship), to expose performance racists (Scapino Ballet's use of Allerseelen, Jochen Roller's blackface revival), self-hating homophobes (Pere no-more-Gay i Faura) and, arguably exposing the ones that pose a true danger to us all, outright insane New Age quacks (Cora Emens). Cvejic has a huge problem with people like me exposing such creatures instead of building web-shrines for them.
Cvejic does not want people like me to have access to computers or the internet. She and her scenesters resent the fact that people like me have total freedom of speech on the internet. Me exposing plagiarists and calling racists on their shit, all this is according to Cvejic "a severe interferencity" with "the precarious careerismity" of her and her fellow scenesters. That's right folks: all it takes to bring down the elite performance scene in Europe is one little bad-mouthed immigrant underclass girl in Amsterdam calling performance artists a bunch of racists on some webpage on the internet no one will ever bother to read because of its sheer length. Not the destruction of welfare for the arts, not the encroachment of commercialization (and the monopolizing *consolidation* that comes with it), not the changes in European demographics (more old people, more immigrant/"black" people, more poor people), not the centralization of power in the EU. All those developments are essentially harmless, says Cvejic, you can ignore those. The real danger is angry immigrants with internet access. They are the ones who will bring down the elite performance arts.
You can rest assured that Cvejic, in response to the top-placement of my polemical pieces about BADco's borefest Changes, will now use her clout at "legitimate" (haha) and "serious" (hahaha) performance magazines like Etcetera, and let's not forget her other ideological base-of-operations TkH; The Journal for Performance Theory, to launch a massive campaign to recuperate the allegedly tarnished image of BADco. If you want to see BADco and Cvejic in action exonerating themselves, I guess all you have to do is buy the next issue of these publications. These are the kind of magazines where everyone knows everybody. This would be called cronyism in any other professional field, but they call it "healthy complicity", showing that there is no separation of powers in this field. At these magazines the essayists treat artists with a velvet glove in exchange for free tickets, VIP access to expert-only forums and backstage access to rehearsals. Cronyism in the media makes life hard for those of us who did not become reporters in order to make new friends.
A German reporter (who has made it to the top of the elite performance blacklist of hostile writers) posted a piece online (where else) saying that BADco's Changes was emblematic of the emptiness of the whole "conceptual dance" genre:
Wie leer und unsinnlich der sogenannte "Konzept"-Tanz geworden ist, zeigte eine Gruppe aus Zagreb, BADco. In "Changes" demonstrieren fünf junge Frauen mit in sich kreisenden, ständig wiederholten Bewegungsformeln zu Texten über John Cage den nicht nur tänzerischen Stillstand. [*]
I'm not the only one who thought BADco's performance was a total borefest! Unfortunately, the German writer, undoubtedly because he's a German, overlooked the racism in BADco's stupid jokes about being lazy Eastern artists. I personally think it's BADco's own stupidity, insensitivity, ethical bankruptcy, lack of intelligence, and lack of entertainment value (for all ye pop-scholars, haha!) that renders them unpalatable to people other than myself. This severe lack creates a tedious void in their work that BADco then try to fill up with racist "jokes" (I'm just a lazy Croat and that makes me a better artist than Western artists, I can teach the Westerners how to be lazy so they can become real artists, etc.), and whateverthefuck Cvejic tells them to do. Any artist who hasn't got anything to offer or to say will toss in a few racist jokes to keep his German hosts entertained. To a doxosopher, a true believer like Cvejic, the artist is never to blame for his racism. Instead, you can blame it all on truly free reporting on the internet. Pim Fortuyn, in an act of pomo disidentification that would have made Jean Luc Nancy proud, never openly identified himself as a racist. When the media pointed out just how racist Fortuyn was, having collected a nice anthology of all his public statements that showed a clear overlap with the racist anti-immigrant statements from the likes of LePen, Fortuyn blamed the media for identifying him as a racist. After his assassination, his supporters blamed the media for the demonization. In this day and age, no racist needs to identify himself as one; they can leave that task over to the media. Here, you can see who benefits from pomo disidentification: racists who want to expectorate racism without being called racists for doing so.
Why do Cvejic and BADco feel compelled to fight back? Do they really think that my essays will stop curators from buying their crappy peformances? Do they think that art policy-makers and subsidizers sit down with a bunch of Damoclash print-outs on their lap? I find the idea that anyone would sit down and read all these anti-racist polemics I am posting on Damoclash pretty ridiculous - unless of course they are uninspired wannabe PhDs like Paula Caspao and Jeroen Fabius (DIE YOU PLAGIARISTS DIE DIE DIE!) In our day and age of ADD and 7 second attention spans, no one is going to sit down and read these Damoclash essays. Why did Cvejic's boyfriend Jan Ritsema try to censor my writings when I was blogging on his site? Not because anyone was reading them. Not because I have any real influence. I was almost the only person blogging on the PAF site. So why are these people so obsessed with these essays which no one reads anyway?
It's because: The devil has always been the best friend the church has ever had because he kept them in business all this time. All that talk about collectivities and friendship networks is a bunch of propaganda that has nothing to do with the way these people feel or go about their artistic practice in reality. These elite performance artists are guided by *conflict*. Like the Xians with their devil, they too need enemies they can fight against. They use their enemies as an excuse to act, as a resource to seek out, feed on and then destroy. They love the abuse I am heaping upon them in these essays because it gives them a sense of crisis, a sense of urgency and makes them feel important (Wow, Maria must REALLY hate us to write all these things about us!). Despite their intellectual (read: derogatory) attitudes towards media controversy, they secretly love it. They need an "Outside" to their cliquish little scene that seems like a dangerous hostile place, and the Internet becomes that place. They need an "Other" to reject, an "Other" censor, an "Other" to co-opt, an "Other" to offset themselves against. They just crave the opportunity to act out the power of a censor, to say NO, to bestow and reject legitimacy. Their avant garde artistic identity is a NEGATIVE identity, it is an AGAINST/INSTEAD-OF identity. I take great pride in the fact that I, unlike all these performance hypocrites who think they are too intellectual for conflict and controversy, am honest about being a polemicist, about having adopted a conflict-based way of understanding the world (including the field of art), whereas they are selling you 5-year-plan/seven-year-itch-plan Hitchcock-Ychromosomecock-sucking love-fests.
Why else would they feel compelled to steal my shit at the same time as they respond to everything I say these essays? BECAUSE THEY TOO NEED A NEGATIVE OTHER! All their love-fest manifestos are just a bunch of propaganda bullshit to make nice-nice with their subsidizers. These artists want to be just like the capitalists who give them their money. These artists disidentify with everything else so that they can totally and completely identify with the capitalists, they want to be just as powerful, to have money, to be censors, to discriminate, to be racists, to silence, to wipe-out, they want to first exploit and then erase the inferior unworthy Other, they want to steal, plunder and destroy with impunity, just like their moneyed subsidizers do. The fact that some of these artists are products of war only makes them more likely to identify with the ones that have the power to start, run but never put an end to wars. War created them, war informs everything they do. The more they repress this, the trauma of war that led them to identify with the aggressor, the more they become the aggressor, the aggressor who plunders and erases. Why else would Cvejic&Co get so turned on by a concept like means with no ends? Because for people who find themselves in the middle of a war there seems to be no end to the war, the conflict seems never-ending. These artists are drawn to concepts that reflect their repressed war trauma. They take their Post Traumatic Stress Disorders and make them into an aesthetic for the stage. Bojana Cvejic, for all her talk of new this and new that, is in truth a reactionary writer, she feels the need to *react* to my essays bashing her, her post-modernism and all the boring poseurs she is endorsing. For these people, to be an artist is to reproduce elitist distinction. To be an artist is to be a discriminator, a censor. If you are looking for freedom of speech elite European performance art is the last place you'd want to look for it. The theater is a closet, artists are closeted (the ones who have suffered war traumas are the most repressed and in-the-closet of all), and in its post modern incarnation the theatre isn' t just a closet but a Water Closet full of shit. The old question of "is paper for books or toilet-paper" becomes superfluous when considering the works of Bojana Cvejic and her clique.
A Stupid German Whiteboy trying to exonerate BADco's racism tells me on his blog:
"If someone called me lazy, I'd be flattered!".
My jaw drops to the floor. I can't believe I am reading this. Am I really reading this?
This is how the stereotype of the lazy Other works to restrict my movement (not the Stupid German Whiteboy's movement) through the world.
This is how the stereotype of the lazy Other performs all kinds of symbolic violence (to Others like me, not the Stupid German Whiteboy, cos he is never an Other).
This is how the stereotype of the lazy Other is ideologically loaded with racism.
This is how a Stupid German Whiteboy who claims that being called "lazy" is is flattering to a Stupid German Whiteboy like him, doesn't see that he has the First World Priviledge of re-interpretating what to others is ALWAYS an insult for a flattering comment at no cost whatsoever to himself.
This is how Western European racism is privatized as "your problem not mine, because I, Stupid German Whiteboy, can take a racist stereotype (that doesn't concern me anyway) and turn it into a flattering comment, so why can't you?"
I imagine the taz-journalist who wrote about the White House being Uncle Barack's Hut walking up to Obama and saying:
"Dude, what's all the fuss about? If I was a negro who ran a realistic chance of living in the White House for four years, and some German referred the White House "Uncle Tom's Barack", damn, I'd be so flattered!".
Stupid whiteboy knows Jan Ritsema, Cvejic, BADco, and the rest of their clique. Despite pretending to be my friend, Stupid German Whiteboy values them more than the values me. Whiteboy has seen how Jan handled me (threats of censorship), whiteboy learns fast, whiteboy likes to treat me the same way Jan did, cos like Jan he too ends up threatening me with censorship: "Watch your mouth Maria, or I will lock down this blog-thread". I hate nothing more than people telling me to keep my big waffle shut on the internet (if we can't be totally honest here, then where?) and using threats of censorship to enforce this kind of gag-rule. After such a threat I do what any feminist-educated woman ought to do: I immediately run off to greener pastures where I can freely run my mouth exposing performance racists. These people still have to figure out that censorship doesn't work in this day and age of the internet. I should have known what an asshole I was dealing with when I told him about the Paula Caspao plagiarism, and how much it had hurt me, and Whiteboy callously responded with: "So what? Who cares?". So the Whiteboy locks down the thread, and removes the link I had posted to the article by the German journalist I quoted above. Whiteboy cannot stand the fact that I am not the only person bored by BADco. After I run off to my Livejournal and Damoclash, it finally dawns on the Stupid German Whiteboy that there's no point in threatening me with censorship on a place like the Internet. There are so many other places I can post. So he sheepishly re-opens the blog-thread he had shut down, sends me an e-mail complains that I am not posting again. Well, duuuuh, I definitely don't feel like posting at blogs where I am threatened with censorship, how hard is that to figure out? I post an entry, but it mysteriously disappears. Whiteboy says the blog software mistakes my posts for SPAM because of all the URLs, and automatically blocks them. Yeah right. Whiteboy then mentions some BADco propaganda he got ahold of in the mean time, while I was busy writing these essays. This makes me suspicious: where did he suddenly get those documents from? He must have been communicating with BADco behind my back. He then tells me that BADco have read the thread he initially threatened to shut down. See, I was right. BADco and Whiteboy have been talking to each other in private... If their self-assessments are anything to go by, then BADco must be too lazy to use Google for research. BADco only read the thread at Whiteboy's blog because he passed them the link himself. But the point is: Whiteboy had consulted with BADco in private about my posts. This made me furious. I hate hate HATE gossipy, behind-the-scenes bullshit like that. I immediately posted an angry entry on his blog calling BAdco a bunch of cowards for lurking all this time and mailing in private with Whiteboy without revealing themselves to ME as well. I realized that Whiteboy was on the racists' side. He knew they were lurking all this time and didn't even bother to tell me so. I should have expected this from the Stupid German Whiteboy. After I told him how badly the Shitcat had hurt me with his blackface revival, Whiteboy only wanted to hurt me all over again. Whiteboy just wanted to lay his boot where the other guy laid it before him. The BADco brouhaha was his opportunity to do so. BADco are scenesters, a scene the Whiteboy wants to belong to. BADco have clout in that scene, they can ensure his entry. I'm just a nobody on the internet. I am expendable. When it was me or the racists, he went with the racists, because I have nothing to offer. I belong to no scene. Damoclashers believe in collective activism, yes, but we are primarily a group of individualists. It was in Whiteboy's interest to befriend the performance racists, and to threaten me with censorship for exposing them. This would earn him coolness points in their scene: "Conrad is threatening to shut up Maria on his blog, he's cool, he's on our side, he defends our racism.". Just like a typical German MITLAUFER racist. So there you have it, Conrad, I answered your prayer and called you a racist censor in my essay. Fuck you very much for the pleasure. Unfortunately I cannot counter your stupid kneejerky "I'm surprised you haven't called me a racist yet" , with something equally kneejerk like, "I'm surprised you haven't called me a nigger yet", cos that's what the Shitcat did last summer when he had his fucked-up little blackface revival: that rape scene we saw was the Shitcat calling me a nigger.
Back to the media campaign that Cvejic is now mounting to recuperate the image of BADco. BADco will use the 4-pager offered to them by Cvejic in Etcetera or TkH to respond to whatever was in my essays, but of course without ever mentioning my name, Damoclash, the article itself, or ever publicly acknowledging the fact that they are responding to online criticism. This was the strategy Cvejic pursued when I kicked Martin Nachbar's ass, she did the same thing when I exposed Paula Caspao plagiarism. By now this P&R strategy has become utterly predictable. Cvejic thinks that allowing all these people plagiarize my shit - and responding to someone without acknowledging your response as a response to someone else's earlier comments IS plagiarism, every academic I consulted with on the matter said you have to acknowledge intellectual opponents - will make me so angry and frustrated, that I will give up and shut up. Let it be known through this essay that it will take more than 4-page apologetics in Etcetera to shut me up.
Zizek gives an overview of political laziness, here called non-acting, here called DECADENCE, a specifically French dezoofrahman kind of laziness more(?) lethal than its equivalent artistic laziness:
In the recent French resistance against the war on Iraq, there definitely is a clear echo of the "old decadent" Europe: escape the problem by non-acting, by new resolutions upon resolutions — all this reminiscent of the inactivity of the League of Nations against Germany in the 1930s. And the pacifist call "let the inspectors do their work" clearly IS hypocritical: they are only allowed to do the work because there is a credible threat of military intervention. Not to mention the French neocolonialism in Africa (from Congo-Brazzaville to the dark French role in the Rwanda crisis and massacres)? And about the French role in the Bosnian war?
[*]
Read this list of examples of political laziness, and tell me if you still think laziness is A Good Thing. Lo behold, he ends the list of political laziness with French laziness in the Bosnian war. Recall the man with no eggs/balls, the dez-oof-rah-man from the previous essay? The leisure that BADco misidentifies with might very well be this French provincal variety (unsurprising since Ritsema's PAF estate actually lies in France). Cvejic told BADco that laziness is no longer a "racist stereotype", but something the Frogs call "desœuvrement". Zizek on the other hand shows laziness for what it is: French dez-oof-rah-man = political decadence, a non-action that kills.
Once again, we are seeing an murderous refusal to deal with conflict. In this, indifferent artists mirror indifferent politicians. Can you say "homology of DISinterest"?
Once upon a time, Bojana Cvejic was more honest about her Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Nowadays Bojana Cvejic is too busy "remembering the future" on behalf of her subsidizers, so we'll remember the past for her:
July l2,l992
Belgrade
Brief outline of the situation in Belgrade
Nowadays, Belgrade is probably the most despised of all the cities in the world. Yet,it is rather a peaceful town comparing to other cities in former Yugoslavia. Why does the whole world and the rest of former Yugoslavia hated us? Of all the cities that are to blame for this unfair war, Belgrade is the only one that has not paid yet for its part of the guilt. Will it collapse in a two days time or will the agony linger on?
Belgrade is a city of illusions and absurdities. "Why absurdities?" someone will ask. For I can tell you incredible stories coming from Belgrade.
Three meetings(I will only mention three of many of them I consider to be of substance)have been organized in the period of a year and a half. The demands of all of them were the same: the resignation of the president of Serbia. Nearly the same people initiated those meetings that turned out to be demonstrations: leaders of the opposition, intellectuals and students - the intelligencia of Serbia.
In the last run,there were two strongholds of demonstration: the University of Belgrade (politically independant, i.e. politically autonmous) and the plateau in front of the Parliament of Yugoslavia. The meeting on the plateau was held on the occasion of Vidovdan, one of the most significant holidays of the Orthodox Church of Serbia. There were not only people from Belgrade; on the contrary, there were more participants from the provinces. They left their homes and the fields they cultivated with so little means and so much effort and all their belongings just to say "No", to show that Serbia is not sleeping anymore and that there are people in Serbia that still think. During that week when
we thought things were happening much faster than they were, those people slept on bare earth in their tents. Those were peasants, poor, uneducated people, yet with a strong feeling of the necessity of a change. One of the slogans was in English and was very simple: CHANGE. [Well, well, CHANGE it is, huh? The great irony being that this CHANGE was actually one of Bill Clinton's campaign key-words at the time. Anyone still doubting my previous claim that it was Bojana herself who gave BADco the title of their performance, "Changes"?]
Statistics say that approximately two million of people have circulated in that area during the meeting. At the same time, almost two streets far from the plateau,in the University of Belgrade, something big was happening.The whole university was on strike. It was not just an ordinary protest with a lot of shouting and a lot of silence when someone was shouting. There was a various, intellectual programme going on for more than twenty days. All the intellectuals of Serbias visited the students: professors from diverse parts of the country, philosophers, politicians, musicians, writers, actors and others. What I admire about this protest is the spirit of our intellectual youth. A lot of plans, a lot of thinking, a lot of original ideas. These slogans illustrate it the best: "Holding one's eyes closed doesn't help in darkness" or "Daddy, should I get killed so that you would become aware of it?". Who are these slogans for, or it is better to say against? they are against a man who is blind and won t see the procession of students, 3 km long, heading to his residence. Against a man who is deaf and does not want to hear his name, a million times announced, called and a billion times sworn. How many petitions have been signed by the most important people of this country? Walk along the widest street in Belgrade and you will see the badges with these statements: "Forces of chaos and madness" (that is what the authorities call the opposition) or "It is spring and I live in Serbia" or just "Go away".
So we beg the world to help us. Don't be mistaken, it is not the overwhelming majority that supports the position, there are a lot of us striving for truth and justice. Please, help us, we are desperate. You will not help us by bombing us, the sanctions are enough.
Bojana Cvejic, Belgrade. [*]
This what Cvejic sounded like in 1992 (if I may say so: a lot more urgent and honest and direct and readable than anything she's written since) when war was too close to home to simply "disidentify" from. Many of the intellectual post-modern tendencies of Cvejic's that I examined in my previous two essays were already present in the plea above. It is this past that Cvejic wants to disidentify from, a past that nevertheless informs everything she does and advocates in the present. Bojana Cvejic has taken her war-related Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, repressed it, and, with the help of post modern terminology, has turned her repressed PTSD into an aesthetic doctrine that she imposes on the whole European elite avant garde theatre. The seemingly post-modern tendencies that were once the products of experiencing war have been abstracted from that context, and, thanks to a pomo style of writing that strips them of all specificity, have been turned into principles-as-such. The specific context, a context of war and conflict, that shaped these tendencies is what Bojana seeks to hide from view. Because of her reputation has a learned intellectual, her access to art schools and now academic institutions as a PhD candidate, and mainly thanks to her boyfriend who already had clout in the avant garde theatre circuit (aka cronyism), Bojana has the ear of a many elite performers who gobble this stuff up like it's manna from heaven, never questioning its source and origin. Admitting to memories of conflict, above all admitting that these memories have shaped her intellectually and inform her actions and thoughts in the present would mean that Bojana Cvejic would have to accept the fact that conflict shapes the world as we know it, that conflict, whether she likes it or not, shaped her for good. She would have to accept a big H History onto which the small h of her own history has no bearing whatsoever. She would also have to consider the very real possibility that the elite artists and scholars she now glorifies in her magazines and essays and dissertations are the very same people who manipulate history to the exclusion of others ("peasants, poor, uneducated people", the fact that some of us can be poor immigrants and still be educated was lost on this little girl, we can only hope she caught a clue in the mean time), and as such the elite artists are no different but are directly congruent with the powers, the vested interests, that once excluded her from having a bearing on big H History but nevertheless inscribed a way of thinking and being onto her that she CANNOT just disidentify from, however much she'd like to. Accepting history would draw Bojana back into (what was lost in) history, back into the past-as-a-material-world from which Cvejic desperately tries to escape.
Besides the pomo-babble, Bojana's texts on performance have something very, to pull out an old term, "cyber" about them. There's an echo in there of all the 1980s and 1990s texts on the collaborative (but also the escapist) potential of digital media. For Cvejic, performance is the embodied equivalent of 2nd Life. Bojana certainly tends to write about performance like it's 2nd Life. It's interesting that this year Bojana Cvejic published an essay titled "In the Making of the Making of: The Practice of Rendering Performance Virtual". For a laugh and a sneer, just scroll through the rest of this "journal" checking all the names-worth-endorsing; Bojana is pimping all her associates, including her boyfriend's real estate in France, on almost every page of the journal. Not-so-curiously, shortly before this essay was published, Cvejic-allied choreographer Ivana Muller (of How Heavy Are My Thoughts? fame) did an interview here in Amsterdam where she described her next performance project as an "investigation of virtuality". Ivana Muller, like BADco, is yet another one of Cvejic's disciples, another artist who has blindly adopted Cvejic's aesthetic dogma.
One of the things that struck me when I was looking up Cvejic's neologisms (listed in the previous part this series) using Google Scholar (which, like the regular dictionary-sites, was at loss at to what these terms mean) was the sheer amount of "false search-hits" I got that were Computer Studies related. This discovery lead me to assume that Cvejic's pseudo-scientific sounding pomo-babble is in fact loosely based on terms she must have picked up from Cybernetics and/or New Media Studies. This makes sense, because when Bojana ditched the Opera and first made her entry on the avant garde performance scene (in the late 1990s), it was just before the dot com bubble-burst. Bojana must have caught the tail-end of all the euphoria that was going on at the time regarding computers, cyberspace and virtual-whatevers. 7 years after the bubble-burst, Bojana must have thought the coast was clear (the asbest-laced clouds of 9/11 dissolved enough) to revive cyber-culture again. Hell, she might even sell her old issues of Mondo 2000 on Ebay at a profit! Unfortunately for her, "the house came down" once again, only this time it was a foreclosure. Or maybe it was that half-collapsed wall at PAF coming down, who knows... whatever it was, the new-old recession will make sure people haven't got the money for cyber-allover-again just yet.
"Instinctively" I pulled out Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto, obligatory reading for one of my New Media Studies courses. At the time I found it unreadable and refused to read it (and failed all the questions on the exam, which would have happened anyway, unable as I was to make sense of it). I only tried reading it again several years post-grad, and still didn't get it. This was my third attempt. After so many years of weeding through pomo shit and becoming immune to the pomo style of writing, reading A Cyborg Manifesto was now an almost effortless task. There it was, Haraway's own pomo call to disidentification:
It is important to note that the effort to construct revolutionary stand-points, epistemologies as achievements of people committed to changing the world, has been part of the process showing the limits of identification. The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense. The common achievement of King and Sandoval is learning how to craft a poetic/political unity without relying on a logic of appropriation, incorporation, and taxonomic identification. [T]o recognize 'oneself' as fully implicated in the world, frees us of the need to root politics in identification, vanguard parties, purity, and mothering. Stripped of identity, the ruling race seizes the power, plunders and then erases the margins. To be "Other " is to be multiple, without clear boundary, frayed, insubstantial, without substance, immaterial, erased. One is too few, but two are too many.[*]
Then came the flashback: in the same article Cvejic had referred to her position as Althusserian, she complained that some other Etcetera author had never read, amongst other things, Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto. Cvejic felt he had to read Haraway's text in order to understand contemporary performances. Whether the performers themselves have actually read haraway or whether they understood such a difficult text as A Cyborg Manifesto is a whole different matter. In the world of the pomos, it is perfectly acceptable to use performances as case-studies for philosophical texts the performers themselves have never actually read or, when they have actually read them, can ever hope to understand. But the point is: me digging up the Haraway text was not so instinctual after all. In the back of my head, I knew all along that there was a connection between the euphoric cyber-culture discourse of the 1980s and 1990s, and Cvejic's writing on performance like it was a meat-space equivalent 2nd-Life. Bojana is too far up her pomo ass to be a real nerd on 2nd Life, but Cvejic uses performance art for the same purpose that nerds use 2nd Life. Cvejic talks about performance the way nerds (used to) talk about cyberspace. This explains the misguided identification with Open Source. But wannabe-nerds like Cvejic, who think they're too cool for 2nd Life, actually resent the real nerds, which is why they end up stealing projects like Open Source. Cvejic is a historical revisionist, who will tell you that it was the Judson Church nerds who invented Open Source. After all, didn't Ivonne Rainer just give away her A Trio score to whomever? (The real reason why Cvejic and her scenesters are so fixated with Judson Church is because for all their supposed anti-Americanism, they are still obsessed with American. Their obsession stops at the 1970s, because when they looked into American dance in the 1980s, all they found was American dancers who are negro, queer, or both, none of which the Cvejic camp wants to associate itself with.) Despite such ridiculous revisions of Judson Church as the originators of Open Source, Cvejic and her fellow nerd-haters only pay lip-service to Open Source. They don't have the spine to deal with what Open Source really entails. They don't know or want to know about the close relationship between Open Source and Full Disclosure. Bojana's use of performance as a substitute-cyberspace explains her emphasis on fiction (not code, because code is hardly fictional). For Bojana, performance isn't something real, (a program isn't something coded by a human programmer suffering RSI in the process of writing it). For Cvejic, performance is merely a Real Life cyberspace for cool pomos like her. The actual cyberspace, like the WWW, is perceived as a hostile environment where Maria Tex. is allowed to post as she pleases, and is therefor still best left to the nerds that Cvejic doesn't want to know or associate with, but still ends up co-opting (or exonerating the plagiarists who do). Constructing a 2nd Life in meat-space is no better than having one in cyberspace when its ultimate purpose is to escape history, to sever memory from history, and to sever identity-formation from the conflict that brought (some) identities into being while erasing others.
Bojana Cvejic refuses to deal with her identity as a Serb, because this was an enforced identity. For years after the dissolution of Yugoslavia Cvejic insisted on referring to herself as a Yugoslav (here's an example of a 2002 promo with the (YU) designation behind Cvejic's name), "hailing from Belgrade", a place she once referred to as "the most hated place on earth". Of course, history won in the end. She now still "hails from Belgrade". The word Serbia is still nowhere to be seen. Bojana Cvejic cannot admit to being a Serb, because she cannot admit that she couldn't beat history simply by ignoring it and disidentifying herself from it. Bojana knows that Serbs will forever bear the brunt of Milosevic's actions. Serbs will forever be remembered as the aggressors who started the war, and tried to prevent others from seeking independence. (As an side: As for me, I am generally not into regionalism, because IMO contemporary "breakaway regions" of this sort always smell too much of a bourgeois tax-evasion project, an enclave of rich bastards who are definitely not nationalists but are informed by an underlying capitalist ideology of ultra-libertarianism, the kind of people who hope to become their own little "Liechtenstein"). One day Bojana Cvejic will have to face the fact that Milosevic tried to keep his collectivity together through violence, and that he failed. For now, Bojana Cvejic does not want to deal with these facts, the consequences of being a Serb. She refuses to come out as a Serb, and acknowledge the racism inherent in her praising a Croat for calling himself lazy. Cvejic admitting to being a Serb, a historical heir to Milosevic's legacy of genocide and aggression, would mean openly accept defeat. Accepting the dreaded identity of a Serb would signal Bojana Cvejic's capitulation to history, and the disenchanted reality that Cvejic wants to escape from by means of performances-as-2nd-Life, a no-cyber-no-space where no one ever works, no one ever produces anything (no ends, only means), all objects have dematerialized (no ownership, no exchange, a plagiarist's free-for-all), nothing is ever illustrated or interpreted, everyone simply "endures" together, everyone disindentifies from things that were never worth identifying with anyway, all differences erased, everyone joins hands in the fast friendship-networks of collectivity, which is really one big all-encompassing "gesture" that points to nothing but itself, Jean Luc Nancy's (snuff) dream of a
"we", who 'do not 'have' meaning any more, because we ourselves are meaning - entirely, without reserve, infinitely, with no more meaning other than 'us'...'). (Tell me this isn't New Age feel-good crap... I bet Dr. Dragan the New Age quack-doctor would have loved this New Age bullshit). If you're a good pomo, you will go to pomo heaven and become a pomo angel, but don't worry about having to play the harp all day like angels do in the Xian heaven; just pick your harp up and put it down a few times. In pomo heaven, lights go on and off at random, just like sequential power-cuts during the Balkan Wars. Every singley wordy endsy withy any upsilony suffixy. Whenever I think of "disidentification", I imagine Bojana Cvejic as a witch at her cauldron, cooking up primordial soup, cooking up her own foundation myth of origins. "A-semanticized", free(ed) of semantics, free(ed) of any structuring principles, this primordial soup consists of "free radicals", "radical" because Andre Lepecki always uses that word to describe performance art that is anything but "radical", and "free" because you can just take them, plunder and plagiarize them at will.
Refusing to recognize anything resembling durable dispositions, the world of action becomes nothing other than this universe of interchangeable possibles, entirely dependent on the decrees of the consciousness which creates it. Hence, this universe is totally devoid of objectivity. If it is moving because the subject chooses to be moved, revolting because he chooses to be revolted, then emotions, passions and actions are merely games of bad faith, sad farces in which one is both bad actor and good audience. [*]
Laziness is really but a euphemism for Cvejic/BADco's own inability at preventing the dissolution of any collectivity. Milosevic thought that a gun would do the trick. That didn't work, so Cvejic suggests the supposed opposite of violence: total non-action, "perfect slack". This is what psychologists call Passive Aggressive Behaviour, an "obstructionist resistance to following authoritative instructions in interpersonal or occupational situations", a "resistance" that consist of "learned helplessness, procrastination, or deliberate/repeated failure to accomplish requested tasks for which one is (often explicitly) responsible". Would you want to be part of a collectivity that required you to behave this way? "I am lazy" somehow sounds better, certainly more clownish, certainly less upsetting than "I am powerless against conflict", "I do not want to deal with the consequences of my actions or anyone else's".
Laziness, with all its connotations of pastoralism, the flow of the simple life, Nazi romantic primitivism, Southern European siestas in the middle of the day... at least it's good for tourism. Lazy people are simply too lazy for genocide.
Welcome to Croatia, hope you enjoy your stay. Don't worry about any hostilities breaking out. This time around, we are too lazy to fight back. Had Milosevic invaded the country now, we'd just let him win. We're just too lazy to fight. "Lazy" sounds so much better than "demoralized".
Welcome to Serbia, hope you enjoy your stay. Don't worry about some new Milosevic starting a war. This time around, we are too lazy to fight break-away regions. If someone wants to break free from the collectivity, we just let them. Had Croatia gained independence now, we would just send them on their way. We're just too lazy to fight.
"Lazy" sounds so much better than "demoralized".
Serbs like Bojana Cvejic praising a Croatian company like BADco over their laziness posturing is decidedly NOT an act of reconciliation. It does not show that Croats and Serbs have now moved on, and are willing to praise one another's artists. It only shows a hysterical repression of historical awareness on both sides. Despite her doxosophic posturing, Bojana clearly does not have what it takes to deal with that "legacy that has never been seriously reconsidered".
The praise of laziness truly is informed by the same backwardness of Nazi romantics celebrating pastoralism, the desire to return to an earlier, supposedly simpler state of things, as a shield against a history mainly informed by conflict and unwanted "changes". And who, asks this feminist critic, are the ones still running wars, still running guns, still running oil-companies, still keeping the Military Industrial Complex up and running? That's right. The upsilons at the end of every Cvejic neologism. When it's not the Hahn am Kopf of the kippen in de vitrine/op de tribune, that Hahn is heading the battalions. Cvejic annexes words on his behalf.
Serbs and Croats (this excludes BADco and Cvejic, they will never listen to this message), do not fool yourselves. Laziness does not make you seem harmless to Western Europeans. Denial of conflict is not an act of reconciliation. Your girls look active, powerful and strong enough to carry guns and partake in militias all over again. Your assertions of laziness only create a constant sense of danger. Your girls under Congo blue light look like slabs of red meat; is this how you want to "remember your future"? A field full of dead meat? Your laziness does not disarm your adversaries, it only makes them self-satisfied in their racism. As long as you refuse to deal with the consequences of your specific positions before/during/after the war, your own memory (instead of just your former enemies) will bear you a grudge. Postmodern disidentification is not "a gift of promise" to those of us struggling with unwanted identities imposed upon us. Disidentification is a gift to all the racists who never wanted us to exist in the first place, the racists who either want to erase us or, being lazy racists, want us to erase ourselves by means of the disidentification they are now selling us. These are the same racists who try to censor our blogs and sites. When we find refuge elsewhere on the WWW, the racists plunder and plagiarize our writings, all the while denying our existence. When the racists can't silence us, when they cannot erase us, they co-opt us, stealing everything/what little we have to offer the world (often just words of anger and hope), wanting us to get frustrated because of all the plagiarism and cultural plundering, hoping that this will make us give in and give up our activism. Resist this racist erasure. Refuse to disidentify. Remember where you come from. Stand up, name yourself and be named, be acknowledged. If you must "gesture", then "point that finger" productively by exposing and identifying the racists whenever you see them. Am I calling for works of art that are QUITE SIMPLY DENUNCIATORY? Yes I am! What else could withstand such openly practiced performance racism, a racism that is out to plunder and erase? Know and show your enemies. I just did so with this essay, now it's your turn.
While I find little that is problematic in the critique of the nation, or in a recognition of its inventedness, there is nevertheless something highly disturbing both intellectually and politically with the all too common assumption these days that we may therefore take the nation out of history.
Having entered history, the nation has provided an ideological basis for self-identification, and invented or not, has served as a historical force and continues to do so. While few would deny the connection between history and the nation, moreover, that relationship has neither erased alternative conceptualisations of the past, nor has it been able to contain contradictions of its own generation that have issued in still greater complication of history - including, possibly, its negation.
To appreciate these processes, it is important not to "rescue history from the nation", but to view the nation in history, and the history in the nation, in all its complexity.
[*]
Part three of three.
Read part one here.
Read part two here.
Copyright 2008 Maria Technosux for Damoclash. All rights reserved. To prevent plagiarism, names of persons, programs, companies, scholars, books, essays, etc. in these quotations have been altered. Do your own fucking research, you lazy racists.
