The Utopia of Postutopia

Sarajevo je sada cudno mjesto, gotovo nadrealno. Spaljene kuce, spaljeni automobili, velike rupe u zidovima. Kroz rupu ponekad mozes vidjeti neciji stan, sa stolom i stolicama. . . Volim Sarajevo vise nego ikad (fatalna atrakcija!)

— Izeta Gradevic (10 Feb. 1993) ¹

1. Na Soncni Strani Alp

Summer 1993. I’m traveling from East Germany to Slovenia, passing through former Czechoslovakia and along the Austrian Alps toward the northern part of former Yugoslavia hoping to reach Sarajevo. I haven’t yet gotten a UN visa to cross the borders into the war-torn areas of Bosnia-Herzegovina, but I trust the help of my friends in Ljubljana. I’m prepared to improvise and follow the advice of Croatian playwright Slobodan Snajder who once told a captive audience in Germany that history is changing too quickly to comprehend it anymore. He probably meant it had become impossible to write plays. When I listened to him or read the reports about the ongoing war in Bosnia and Sarajevo-under-siege, I tried to imagine the immediate impact of such deadly destructiveness on the cultural imagination of both the people affected directly and those watching the siege. When these reflections appear in print, will the war have passed into silence—that other side of Western diplomacy, media coverage, and complacent rhetorical compassion? Or will the destruction have been so complete that it is merely an insolent mockery to raise the issue of utopianism at the end of this bloody century?

As I cross the Slovene border, I see the advertising for the first time: Na soncni strani Alp (On the sunny side of the Alps), a gentle invitation to the Western tourist to enjoy Slovenia’s new independence as a country preparing to join the Western markets of democratic capitalism. Behind the advertising billboard lies the failed historical utopia, communism’s promise of revolutionizing human relations and the social and economic conditions of production. What some in the West sought to celebrate as the “end of history,” or the triumph of Western-style democracy, looks rather more like a continuing historical crisis overshadowed by economic recessions, unequal development, social conflict, and the resurgence of ultranationalism, provincialism, and ethnic separatism both in the West and the East. On the sunny side of postcommunism, the collapsed central authority in socialist culture has been replaced by separate national governments. In Slovenia, several political parties struggle over the new ideology of national unity; the euphoria of democratic revival (“civil society”) didn’t last very long.

In Ljubljana, I meet artists from Russia and from different republics of former Yugoslavia. Some are refugees, others have become transnational border crossers exploring the new freedom to travel between East and West. The Slovene artists seem to exude a cosmopolitan air, and yet are intensely conscious of their local predicament—their small country’s barely established national sovereignty based on the presumed homogeneity of the two million inhabitants who speak the same language. ² My dialogue with them concerns the redefinition of their positions vis-à-vis the “unofficial” culture of the Slovene Spring (1980s) and the new social movements that evolved during the uncertain period of the republic’s political/economic transition. It also concerns the highly speculative address to the future that their art undertook during this time, prefiguring current dislocations of the social and political context.

2. Ballet Utopica, or the Noordung Syndrome

On the tenth floor of an office building shared with the theatre magazine Maska, theatre director Dragan Zivadinov explains his visionary design for the architectonics of his ongoing Noordung project. ³ Each installment involves the creation of a new “space design” to be constructed inside an existing theatre or public space, intended to alter the relations of stage and auditorium and of public space itself (polis: the theatre/the state). The Noordung project refers to Herman Potocnik Noordung (1892–1929), a Slovene scientist and the first person to deal with the problems of space travel. Potocnik’s research was published in German under the title Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums: der Raketenmotor (1929) but did not appear in Slovene until 1986. ⁴ Zivadinov claims that Potocnik envisioned the...