Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia, 1945–1991 by Branislav Jakovljević (review)

The country of Yugoslavia aggregated the six republics of Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzogovina, Macedonia, and Montenegro, and the two autonomous regions of Kosovo and Vojvodina. In the 46 years between the end of World War II and the cataclysmic violence of its dissolution that resulted in the formation of seven independent states, Yugoslavia — largely under the leadership of Marshal Josep Broz Tito — pursued its own style of socialism independent of the USSR, and as a nonaligned country, mostly open to the West. The social-economic formulation of self-management as realized in Yugoslavia aspired to "social ownership over the means of production and collective decision-making" (289) in many manifestations across the labor spectrum. Throughout these four decades, thriving art scenes produced vigorous works of theatre, performance, and conceptual art. Communal intellectual rigor and activism, as exemplified by the group of philosophers and sociologists who founded the journal Praxis and the annual summer schools on the Croatian island of Korčula, intertwined with the arts and the emergent political developments of self-management. This intertwinement might constitute the fundamental subject of Branislav Jakovljević's invaluable volume, as he methodically elucidates the ways in which artworks and the modes of their creation and distribution became major components in the unfolding of events of those decades, thus offering a singular lens for viewing and understanding historical change.

Folding Marxian notions of alienated, thus inauthentic, labor, with the philosophical work of Jean-François Lyotard and the poetics of Antonin Artaud, "after the romance about art as an inherently disalienating force has been dispelled" (24), Jakovljević proposes: "alienation is not an affliction; not even a condition. It is constitutive of the subject, and because of that we, the modern subjects, are responsible to that which is the other and the alien" (23). He approaches alienation's effects by reaching back to Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky's 1917 essay "Art as Technique" with its theorization of defamiliarization, introducing the famous neologism ostranenie as a name for the way "an image [...] creates a 'vision' of the object instead of serving as a means of knowing it" (173). This syntactical concept preceded Bertolt Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt strategies for the theatre. Drawing from Gilles Deleuze, Jakovljević defines effects as a different species of incorporeal events than the bodies whose relations set them in motion, understanding effects as "logical or dialectical attributes," like sonic or optical effects, both sense and nonsense, copresent and coextensive (29–30). Jakovljević makes the claim that

Self-management knows alienation in a way that no other social order does. Starting from Marxist alienation, it reveals its multiplicity; in its encounter with psychoanalysis, it shows its constitutive nature for subject formation and removes subject formation from value judgment. In short, taking effects into account does not lead to restoration of performances or their interpretation, but to their eventalization.

(30)

The statement sets the stage for the complex investigation of the role of subjecthood, as demonstrated in the shifting structures of self-management, in Yugoslavia's ultimate demise.

At the outset, Jakovljević scrupulously differentiates the research methodologies of each of the three long chapters. The first of these, "Bodywriting," relies "exclusively on archival material" (32). It examines visual/schematic strategies for metaphoric renderings of workers in relation to the earth, bodies conforming to diagrammatic geometry, commencing with the landmark 1949 social-realist painting Sondage of the Terrain in New Belgrade by Boža Ilić. He regards Youth Day celebrations, which, under Tito, sought to mobilize the entire population of the country, and included a relay race carrying a baton through the countryside. Massive stadium events choreographed athletes in spectacular geometric patterns, with an idea of Yugoslavism that "was, at least in part, fueled by the pan-Slavic sentiments" that Czech Sokol gymnastic organizations "espoused and promoted" (66). Socialist realism, he demonstrates, "demands efficacy from all representational forms [...and] attempts to...