interview

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KP: In one of your lectures on the occasion of the publishing of the Slovene translation of your book Where are we? Where are we going? For a political epistemology of salvation, you mentioned that art is a field of cognition. Why would you say it has always been so difficult to integrate the field of art (art practices, as well as artists) as an equally relevant field of society – art often being perceived either as a kind of propaganda tool for different social, political struggles or as an isolated sphere that has its seeming autonomy?

DS: I think the answer is implicit in your last clause: art as propaganda for immediate sociopolitical conflicts or as an autonomous sphere. These are in fact the two logical extremes of an alienated state of affairs collectively and personally. What an artist needs is a public sphere or civic (civil) society to address, to grow out from and receive responses from, that is – to interpellate and be interpellated by. To the contrary, when collectivities around the artist are corrupt, s/he flees to elitist autonomy as the only defense. When individuals around her and including him are necessarily also corrupt, the artist is drawn into direct struggles to overcome this alienated corruption, as in Župančič’s great “Veš poet svoj dolg? (Do You Know, Oh Poet, Your Debt?)”^[1]  Both paths are at times very legitimate but à la longue[2] unhealthy—too much is bracketed out in each. Both are potentially cognitive but never fully so. As long as economic and political power is not fully and transparently vested into people associated in directly democratic ways, so long we shall be stuck on the horns of this inescapable but unhealthy dilemma.

And yet: the cognitions arrived by art will still be, in the best cases, be utopian foreshadowings, glimpses and guesses, of a non-alienated state of relationships between people, une promesse de bonheur[3] as Stendhal well put it. As I wrote in Essay 4 of Where are we? Where are we going?, with the title “What May the 20^th Century Amount To?”: “The best surviving articulation of lived non-official experience is in Joyce, Kafka, Meyerhold, Mayakovsky, Chaplin, Brecht, Krleža, Andrić, Picasso, Tatlin, Larionov, Magritte, Ernst, Eisenstein, Benjamin, Lorca, Neruda, Bartok, Shostakovich … Even when they were at some times forced to compromise, the compromises (Life of Galileo, Ivan the Terrible, The Leningrad Symphony, The Dove of Peace) are usually honourable, engaged, and advance our understanding.” (Dear reader, you can put your own examples instead of mine, of course.) 

KP: Here I would like you to explain a bit more why in your opinion Neruda and the rest of the artists you mentioned are not, so to speak, compromised artists. Or, maybe, what is it that distinguishes art as the field of cognition from art that is in the service of ideology, etc.? Could you explain whether art as a field of cognition is a matter that pertains to the historical moment (that is, a concrete moment in one’s life experience) or if this kind of art is always a possible choice for an individual artist regardless of the context?

DS: I'm not sure I can answer this as it deserves, for we would have to go far back notionally. First, what is “art”? This field constituted itself rather late (primarily in places like Italy, Germany, and France) as one of the supreme goods of the societies and States involved. Before, it was much more pragmatic: the proper way to understand writings, for example, was rhetorics—how to influence people. Only some specialized fields, obviously highly formalized, such as theatre plays and poetry, began to be gingerly approached by some additional rules that Aristotle called Poetics, which means simply something like Creative Work, different from everyday affairs (praxis). Horace then echoes this title in his Ars poetica. But “ars” meant what »tekhnè« meant in Greek, a set of rules not too dissimilar from other artisanal rules, say how to properly cut wood or marble in order to make useful and pleasing objects, including statues: the best translation today would be the very unromantic “technique”.

As a rule, before Romanticism in Europe, writing was done upon real or expected commission by a social group: Virgil wrote the Aeneid for Augustus, and dissident poets not readily fitting into the emperor's ideology were banished to the end of the world, like Ovid or most great Chinese poets. The great Hebrew prophets were usually dissident priests and answered to God (a personalized way to imagine the overall collectivity), while excoriating the king and the people. Of course, poets as a rule do what one of them (Sidney in England) called “look into my heart and write”. What did they find in their “heart” (subconscious?). Sometimes the need to explain the world and demystify the rulers' religion, as in Lucretius; sometimes the bittersweet delights and wounds of erotics, as in Catullus; sometimes merciless satire of Things As They Are, as in Juvenal. All these are to my mind cognitive insofar as they attempt to make sense of human life, which is not easy. But a full split between private and public, never accepted in the East Asian tradition, seems to me quite pernicious, because our lives are not split that way: private and public intimately interfuse, whether we like it or not. And it is only based on that split that the great poet but also great philistine Goethe could say “Politisch lied, ein garstig lied”: political poem – pah, horrible poem”, And it is only based on this that one can look askance at Neruda's Canto general or Brecht's poem on the Communist Party, or indeed Pound's reactionary anti-capitalist Pisan Cantos (all of them great works of “art”), as on something anomalous.

There remains, of course, the important need to have in each particular case a careful discussion of whether the cognition was truncated, maybe fully stymied, or not. Example: Brecht’s ambitious anti-Nazi play The Roundheads and the Peakheads has no doubt splendid parts but it is on the whole vitiated by his doctrinaire decision to treat the “racial” aspect of Nazism as wholly secondary to the class aspect. This is a large cognitive mistake, of course easier to see a generation later.

KP: Do you think that the context of art and literature represents a relevant arena for social struggle and change? Do you think there is a way out of the unhealthy dilemma you mentioned above? Or, what needs to be done in order for us to move beyond this state?

DS: In the age of mass media – first radio and movies, then TV, and now the whole slew of video and audio forms – literature and theatre are of course secondary in terms of mass impact and therefore of politics. Intelligent ruling classes therefore do not censor it; in really neuralgic cases, reasons can always be found for criminal pursuit (copyright, obscenity, terrorism, etc.). For ruling, it is enough if groups with a common horizon – say parliamentary capitalism – control TV and other mass media forms, so that these are also the most heavily censored as well as the most expensive ones. The exception would be internet, a real arena of more or less anarchist democracy, which is therefore being now bridled. Art and literature remain as a rule, and in the best cases, only incubators for new bearings and horizons, which then spread indirectly. This is not exactly an “arena for social change”, but at best an arena for thinking (including feeling) in new ways: without which there will be no social change.

To move beyond our unhealthy, I would even say terminal state of affairs, requires a cultural revolution, to begin with. I do not know how to achieve it. But as Brecht said, haven’t we seen disbelief move mountains? So why should salvational belief not move it? We must bet on it, as Pascal said about God.

KP: Do you think that social change is something that pertains foremost to the individual and his/her own salvational belief? For instance, do you see, in this current situation, that society is built on or encourages a conscious, critical, thinking individual? I think that most artists think of themselves as being uncorrupted or uncompromised, that they mostly believe that they are critical.

DS: In the current historical moment, so far as I can see, social affairs are everywhere ruled by classes who subordinate all values, even survival of the great majority of people, to instant profit. The best example is of course financial capital. Therefore they actively discourage critical thinking. See for just one example the so-called Bologna and Pisa programs in education, misusing the names of splendid cities for an all-out attack upon any reason that could lead to freedom. Or the scandalous treatment of huge masses of poor people immigrating to richer countries. So our only hope in the “West” (Northwest?) is in small oppositional and dissenting groups and movements. Of course they’re composed of individuals but an isolated individual can do little of consequence.

I’m not sure most workers in TV or video, journalists or PR people – who are, after all, the great majority of what sociologists call intellectuals – believe they are critical, for that would be evidently false. Perhaps it is different when we consider top people in fine arts or literature, or in cinema. But to be effective, they’d have to have control also of distribution, which they do not. There are thousands of periodicals in the USA, but only 2 (TWO) distributing chains…

KP: In your second essay “On cognition as art and politics (O spoznavanju kot umetnosti in politiki: Razmišljanja za orodjarno)”, you are discussing the problem of contemporary societies of the global North (Northwest, as you said before) that are based on closed systems, and you are in a way advocating open systems of social organization. Here you are also talking about art as the privileged form of constituting cognition and as an example of how we could learn to build such open systems. However, you also emphasize that the Marxist politics have been insensible to art. What do you think is cause of this insensibility?

DS: I don’t know but we can try out some hypotheses. First, the core cadre of really existing Marxist political parties and movements has usually been to a disproportionate degree constituted by intellectuals of a certain kind. Some have been top intellectuals (Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Castro), many have been mediocre ones. They saw the outside-of-Party intellectuals as being of two kinds. Either they were inferior propagators of bourgeois obfuscation and kitsch, drugging the working people, which was often sociologically correct. Or they were an alternative avant-garde, often allied with the Marxist party (as in Yugoslavia say 1941–60) but never quite reliable, indeed eventually advancing to a kind of dangerous bad conscience of official Marxism (say the Praxis group^[4] in Yugoslavia). Neither was psychologically tolerable to a group or class believing they had the One Full and All-Encompassing Answer (whether this be Marxism as a Science or the Invisible Hand of the Market). 

But of course, I hope somebody will come up with a more substantial explanation.

KP: Could you explain a bit more what open systems of social organization means? Could you point to some possible examples? Did some possible examples exist in history, or do you see some relevant ideas that could establish this kind of model existing in the current situation?

DS: I’m actually not sure I talk in the book  directly about open systems of social organization. I talk about the perniciousness of any cognitive and practical system which ossifies because it is not open, as a theoretical premise for thinking further. You’re right that one should then apply this to our societies today.

One could point to some examples of openness in history and even today –say, Bolivia, Chiapas, or the People’s Liberating Councils (NOO) in the Yugoslav partisan territories 1941–45 – though you’re asking me how to find ice fields in hell: not at all easy. And to get back to your previous question, any significant work of art is structurally open, to be imaginatively completed by new readers in new ways (this is foregrounded in theatre performances). But I’d rather talk to you in general terms: for we are talking here about democracy.

The crucial question seems to me how is democracy institutionalized, that is, permitted to operate. My favourite variant, since it is the precondition for openness, is direct democracy, where citizens are directly involved in the activities of political governing. One of its forms is a plebiscite or referendum, where citizens vote on various proposed laws or policies, and which can supplement a failing representative or parliamentary democracy. But more important is to my mind significant popular empowerment when real decision-making authority and resources are given to popular councils of various sorts. It includes a “binding mandate” (instructions how delegates miust vote on major matters) and the possibility of their recall upon petition by a reasonable fraction of electors, thus diminishing considerably chances that the powerful and rich could corrupt Council members away from wishes of people.

An indispensable secondary or allied form seems to me associational democracy. In it various kinds of collective organizations – for ex. labour unions, co-operatives or business associations – directly engage in aspects of political decision-making: through involvement in government commissions, through various “corporatist” forms, through organizational representation on regulatory agencies, etc. But its contribution to democracy in the interest of (the) people depends on the internal democracy of the associations themselves. In other words, they need to be in feedback with direct democracy, and viceversa.

KP: You have written the book Where are we? Where are we going? in order to reflect on the global situation since the fall of the “really existing communism” in 1989. What do you think we have lost with the “fall” of this maybe dubious but nevertheless present “opposition” to the capitalist monster?

DS: First of all, even the official designation was (I am glad to say) not the one you cite but “really existing socialism”. True, it had some elements of communism, if by that we mean what Marx called “from each according to his capacities, to each according to her needs”: largely safe employments for a livable wage, general free schooling up to university diploma, health service, pensions, holidays, and so on. But both in the social democracy of, say, the Scandinavian kind and in Stalinist or Maoists “State socialisms” the main orientation was on productive work (understandable in productively backward countries), and nobody cared much, or at all, about Marx’s demand for a transparent and direct democracy. Thus I would call the best of such “socialisms”, at best half- or quarter-communisms in Marx’s sense. This was of course in Yugoslavia a huge step forward for a patriarchal and poor Balkan country. But it was eventually overlaid by the rise of new ruling classes and a slide back into Balkan sloppiness, therefore also into falling consumption standards.

What we have lost can be seen in two ways. The first one is Karl Kraus‘s, who in the early 1920s wrote that he had no sympathy for communists (meaning the Soviet ones) but God preserve them to put some fear into our (capitalist) rulers. This is in fact how the Welfare State in western Europe and to a smaller degree in Roosevelt’s USA came about. A less cynical way would be to say that if capitalism is rapidly and inexorably leading to ecocide and barbarism, then a communist direct democracy, avoiding the mistakes of the past, would be the only alternative to the fall of civilization and probably nuclear warfare with total despotisms.

KP: The fall of the “really existing socialism” in 1989 has increased the problems of organizing a social struggle that could resist the new global order. From your historical experiences (as you have already witnessed the building of, as well as the failures of implementing, socialism in Yugoslavia after 1945), what do you think are the core issues that the younger generations of intellectuals have to deal with so that the way to a future liberated from destructive and unsustainable logics of exploitation and domination would be possible?

DS: This is not for a person of my age to say. I can identify two absolutely necessary preconditions. First, break the suppression of memory, the Denkverbot, about the splendours and miseries of anticapitalist States, parties, and realities. Second, break the theological urge toward grasping The One Full and All-Encompassing Truth, it leads to inhumanity in religion, science or wherever. That is what I too am trying to work on.

 

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