Third Topic: Vojvodina Almanac 2015-2016
As it is impossible not to be seduced and not to be enslaved in Serbia, an intellectual has developed into a kind of an applied journalist. He, as I wrote earlier, has only one place of freedom—the column. The Americans probably know it as “The Opinions page”. Over here, they are called columns, and those types of intellectuals are called “columnists”. Which is the pinnacle of intellectual heights a man from the Balkans can reach: to have a column. To respond, in vivo, to societies troubles. No silence for us! No libraries, and no unions, and certainly no NGOs!
The assistant professor whom I studied under still runs a respectable column and anything beyond it, I can’t even guess. My friend N also runs columns—the Union has its own webpage and documentaries, books and booklets, etc. If they disappeared for a single second from public view they would be forgotten in a heartbeat. Intellectually they would be dead. Because there remains nothing else but to respond. If in their University roles they sought to mold us, in their role as public intellectuals they must use their credentials as the means of justification in whatever nonsense they believe in. And this region! Politics! There is so much politics in Serbian thought one can hardly breathe! Every word, act or gesture carries implications! Carries a certain seduction, for or against a current topic of discussion! For instance, Novi Sad, while I studied, was painted all around with murals of war-criminals. Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, likewise. Same for Bosnia. The idea for this came naturally to local hoodlums, artists and columnists. Then columnists who opposed this yelled through their articles.
When they are not dragging each other to court, they are writing columns or opinion pieces—then they also go to court for the things they claimed. The wilder, the better. For instance, what is liberal? In Serbia, it is liberal to call for bombing of our Senate to stop encroaching nationalism. Then, once you are prosecuted, claim you are harassed by fascists and complain to some European court of justice. This also means, you became an endangered intellectual…
Still—you have no material. You have no short stories, poems, articles, essays, anything but your own, very modern, very recent, opinions…How will you become an intellectual? My good friend N is now a President of some Union and yet has developed no particular talent through studying. In fact—his talent was strangled precisely because he avoided eternity, timelessness, solitude…what else could he even do?
If there was some burst of creativity, he was taught not to use it since he is meant to be a scientist. Being a scientist, however, meant copying Western methodology and repeating oneself. This is also what means to be a philosopher…the connection between organic thought and analytical thought, from poetry to even geometry and philosophy, from grammar to prose, was lost. Perhaps never even discovered…
N sought acclaim but lost all possibilities of overcoming. I have nothing but time but will never achieve recognition: in fact, I might be as mad as I have come to believe. How can I, as a philosopher, or a free man, come to an understanding of myself?
The University sought to not only re-educate me, but re-fashion me in a manufacturer of consent, historical necessity of philosophical currents…anything else was not worthy of mention. Those against the University sought to conquer it in order to fashion a brigade of historically-concious nation-worshippers: we were to feel, through their theories that the minorities are out to get us. War-criminals have murals painted on the sides of buildings while intellectuals negate a crime even occurred, or exaggerate it to a point of absurdity: the amount of dead civilians from NATO bombardment rises proportionally to American political involvement in the region. To claim otherwise is to be, what else, a traitor.
So my good friend N became a public intellectual of the first rank in Serbia but not even an intellectual in Europe. Actually, not even first rank: he publishes articles online, completely ignoring scientific and philosophical research…Might never write a few silly verses, never write a bad story, never regret the act of writing as something beyond his capabilities. He will always exist within his means…
Philosophy and intellect are out there, in Europe, America, Russia…how can we waste time writing fluffy poetry when a war might break out any second? And why should we waste time since we only need the certificate in order to live a decent life.
To dare to write a philosophical book is in this country courage of the mad…I believe only a profound, solitary education can now prepare an individual for a lifetime of solitary and yes, useless, effort. Have the courage not only to be evil, but go beyond one’s capabilities and fail spectacularly. I don’t even write, I capture a madness of a diseased mind seeking to release itself from political nihilism…And for this we must not be above the filth but pass through it, seeking to comprehend the incomprehensible, even defending occasionally something which we can’t comprehend. There are traps on every field—seduction is all around us. Some idea, driven to an extreme—feminism, democracy, monarchy, whatever—rebounds in us as rebellion against submission…
I must speak precisely of the useless, not applicable effort. In fact an effort not to defend yourself as justified. Only through this manner of self-observation can one even begin to glimpse a way out of this historical period…a vast, open space where possibilities increase as one’s historical significance and prestige evaporates…
What matter accusations in a time like this? I speak of the time yet to come!
And so I must speak of this man’s solitary travels…
There are many matters a philosopher must answer to, but I believe he must reason with death, pain, solace, and meaning above most. Death, as a personal knowledge of one’s absolute insignificance given enough time…Pain, physical and moral, intellectual shame. Solace, of the only animal known to think! And meaning! But what kind of a man can be nurtured in order to ask these questions? We must build, from the ashes of a political man, a kind of reformed person, accepting of all accusations yet strong enough to oppose his lesser urges by those seeking to seduce him.
To not be seduced rises in importance as time goes on. But to be morally unfit to exist is in fact a requirement of the future man—it is his weight and burden. Because political morality is a morality of a lesser kind than something else…what else then?
What? Is it the soul? The brain? Our upbringing? Where to begin…!
The path of a philosopher must not be overcome by the journalist and the public intellectual. And yet is being current the only thing demanded of us. But if you told me I had to offer meaning to my friend N which went even beyond his affiliations, and to my old assistant professor, what could I possibly offer them? Nothing beyond use, nothing below application…do I tell you of the years I studied in solace? The amount of books I read on English which clashed with books read on another language? The incapability to be politically fit for a European, and politically unfit for a native? How to overcome myself? In this was the University my fiercest enemy…
It became apparent that many war criminals which emerged arose out of the intellectuals rebuilding of society—a complete disarmament of society over time leads to the criminals being the last with the courage to defend society and these people simply don’t have the capabilities of a higher type of man to understand what is wrong in the way they defend society. The intellectuals here as an outcome can only produce criminals, then blame society for their own manner of nurturing a character. They failed—as secular priests, as philosopher-kings, as leaders of a democracy, as lecturers and nurturers, even as pure intellectuals. In fact the war-criminal sitting across me was justified by intellectuals…Then, I ask: who educates the educated?
You can glimpse upon N and the assistant professor’s struggle daily: the modern inability not to respond to provocation, going so far to a point of a certain fright has been lost: the artist in Serbia now has lesser potential than a street artist! Because the street artist, graffiti scribblers are the barbaric, unconscious underpinning of mad, corrupted, unfocused creative power: one sees more art on the streets than in the galleries because artists, like all intellectuals, fashioned themselves into correspondents of political reality, and this is always effective more with demagoguery. Brutal and exaggerated stylistic shrieking, can be wielded better by a criminal, who—it must be understood these types are likewise a kind of an artist—painting the cities with grim murals give everything a kind of tribal, anti-Greek, anti-European, post-Christian décor…In the alleyways and on the sides of buildings stare at you war-criminals painted in the highest of journalistic demands: expanding the field of battle to reality itself, “talked about”, even if the price for this is in fact, the darkening of society. In this struggle, which corrupts, a person is learned to respond first: with what ease do American opinion pieces write about the heaviest burdens of their country! With what ease would they open their borders to prove their modernity, or smash apart the education system, only to come out shell-shocked the people they created are in fact only capable of a short historical moment! Everything must be finished now—solitude terrifies us, old age without being talked about is felt as a death in life! Observe with what fear and trepidation your average columnist must write in more despotic lands and how this, in fact, gives all public authority a kind of terrifying presence! In Serbia, however, once it became clear that the University is for creation not of artists but artistic journalists, the streets, always two steps ahead with their cunning and gossips, proved more “in-touch” with the people…Then, one ought to be out of touch but is theirs some greater horror for this age than missing an intellectual fashion? An unfashionable democracy—say, a constitutional republic—is wrong because it is unfashionable. I get fits knowing that, come morning, there will be ten new opinion pieces. This great historical momentum, this practical application of one’s efforts to educate oneself now has a ready-made shortcut—it is barbarism, of course, but of a democratic, egalitarian kind which swallows intellectuals and spits out “concerned citizens”. And the murals of Serbia—I must notice their absolute opposition to iconic imagery, a kind of current saintliness—make every street corner an object of spiritual seduction. The liberals are now trying to have many removed—but for one removed, ten pop up because the liberals got what they sought: democratic, egalitarian art! Not the art of their fantasy, but reality manifesting itself through, I could even say, spite…Anti-liberal spite, can there be a greater journalistic, columnist effect?
What greater effect is desired than this? The columnist’s sole desire is to provoke the middle-classes; he feels good and enlightened, the middle-class can always be bruised these days. Their “petty values”, their gasps of shock fill him with a kind of demonic joviality, leering mockery of superstitions…then one day walking across town he encounters a demon’s mural. Suddenly the great cosmopolitan calls the police! Suddenly he is calling the local newspapers complaining about art “which brings a bad influence to the children!” Suddenly, he is protesting completely oblivious he produced the same sense of fury before and now a more cunning, more cutthroat “opinion-maker” discovered a new way to giggle! Ah, he is becoming outdated! Middle-class! A suburban wife gasping in shock…!
And the street artists without a name are filled with demonic joviality.
Recently, a group of “concerned citizens” attempted to remove one mural in Novi Sad and the streets responded. Young men, bald, in army boots and pants, in spitfire jackets. Heads were bloodied, shouts were heard and the historical moment, the practical application of history won. There was our great hero…! Look at him, smiling down on you every time you pass! What greater mockery could be produced of art than that? It is a new, local type of art, art of spite, of street rhetoric. The response to a dialectical accusation one gets is responded through inaction: I was thoroughly amused that my assistant professor was furious because he banished us from university seeking slaves, and the only free men left were thugs! Thugs who also had the same potential for wild nonsense, hysterical modernity: his true students…!
Such is the only outcome of a thoroughly modern education: we sit and fidget, constantly crushed between desire for acclaim, our mention, and the fact it is our most devastating poison. Our institutions can be bypassed through a series of shortcuts which they made necessary in order to think, only to accuse us of intellectual barbarism. And, as the world becomes darker and more difficult to live in, my old friend N becomes more furious, fidgeting in a different sense: there is always a danger of him trying out the new fashion, the spitfire…
The assistant professor, in order to prove a point, jumps about wildly, to mad, spiteful glee of thugs who have made their case heard, after all, they are now artists, they forced him to respond…
I end this short topic with a warning to myself: strive not be current in mad currents of these times! Now we must move away from the streets to our fourth topic…
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Edward Goodwin Moorcraft is a young man who likes to read simple horror stories and write them.
