Autocracy leads to disappointment in the individual, while democracy leads to disappointment in people.

Vigen Oganian

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Politics and the Political

In his essay Democracy as Procedure and as Regime, Cornelius Castoriadis makes a distinction between the terms the political (le politique) and politics (la politique). In Castoriadis’ words:

“The political is everything concerning this explicit power (ways of accessing it, its specific modes of governance, etc.). This type of society covers almost all of human history. These are heteronomous societies: they undoubtedly create their own institutions and meanings, but they obscure this self-creation by attributing it to a source external to society — to ancestors, heroes, gods, God, the laws of history or the market. In these heteronomous societies, the institution of society occurs within a bracket of meaning. [...] As far as we know, this situation has only been ruptured twice in history: in ancient Greece and in Western Europe, and we are the heirs of that rupture, which enables us to speak as we do now. The rupture is expressed through the creation of politics and philosophy (reflection). Politics: questioning the established institutions. Philosophy: questioning the idols of the tribe, the collectively accepted representations” (emphasis ours). [1]

So, the political encompasses concrete and official ruling institutions — i.e., legislative, judicial, and executive powers. Politics, on the other hand, implies the very act or labor of thinking and questioning these institutions by all members of a community, and as such, can only be realized within democracy as a system of governance. In that light, we agree with Castoriadis that such action requires prior civic education in democracy.

Education for Democracy

This raises the question of whether Serbia promotes and invests in such education. If we consider the status of the school subject called Civic Education, we see that it has been marginalized and neglected — with untrained teachers, an inadequate number of hours, no grading, etc. A subject that should cultivate students’ (self)awareness of life in society and contribute to freer life choices is treated as optional and insignificant. Meanwhile, our state conducts mandatory free elections, the outcome of which should be decided by the same citizenry whose (self)awareness and freedom of choice are “optional,” i.e., insignificant. This paradox isn’t seen as a problem, since elections so far have achieved little beyond hastening the arrival of the next elections: as a society, we are perpetually consumed by the effort to divine what supposed consequences pre-election elections will have on post-election elections (from parliamentary to direct democracy — and back again). This seems a good indicator that democracy in Serbia-Electocracy is not a system of governance but a turbo-formalist procedural farce.

To all this certainly contributes a fictitious divorce of interests and values — that false dichotomy prevailing in the broader, global public discourse which produces barren polarization. There’s a persistent insistence that interests are the domain of politics (understood merely as formal procedure) and that values are their antithesis or negation — even though interests are necessarily based on some set of values (however obscure), and conversely, values guide interests (however egotistical). Interest-driven politics is most often viewed as a domain stripped of imagination, a mere variant of the banal will to power. On the other hand, values are believed to be pre-political — able, or even expected, to gild or at least disinfect interests, though in truth they are more likely to be polluted and/or absorbed by interests if they draw too near. (An underlying question here is what is meant by “values”: are they just a euphemism for conformity in the form of traditional “true values,” or can the word still refer to progressive social aspirations?)

In any case, in public discourse where the term politics is treated not as synonymous with the social but as its moral degradation(!), and the social is understood as something that precedes politics, politics loses its earlier emphasized ancient and modern polemical character and becomes a cheerleading sport. The media actively contribute to the impression that there are — if not homogeneous — then only two main camps: currently, the Honest Mice from the General Staff on one side and the Corrupt Disinformational Sound Cannons on the other. The regime is justly criticized for incompetence but even more often on moralistic grounds, so the main issue becomes how to drive out the regime or at least “civilize” it somewhat. In such a constellation, the only question worth asking is how Electocracy can fight autocracy in the name of bureaucracy (“institutions that do their job”). Meanwhile, the task of so-called progressive forces often amounts to defending long-ago and formally won social consensus — on the secular state, labor and women’s rights, social protection, etc. — from the onslaught of neoliberal-conservative currents. And given the assumption that politics is only the political, something external that exists in contrast to us, it seems the social and cultural order in Serbia is of secondary importance, and that student-citizen protest is in fact an attempt to change the means of struggle for a better society — not the society itself.

The Personal Is Political

In such a charged public sphere, not enough is said about the essentially conservative character of our society. Dominant “tribal idols” and opinions, as well as established patterns of thought and action, are rarely questioned — though that should be the very content of politics, understood in its enlightened sense. For example, how is it possible that, both this year and last, the entire city budget for culture was redirected toward a reactionary, right-wing event called Belgrade Family Days? [2] Why is the fight against corruption focused mostly on material corruption, abuse of power, and position, while spiritual corruption like this receives too little attention? How can we fight for equality and against privilege while maintaining due respect for privileged institutions like the Orthodox Church — as well as discourses such as plush patriarchy (a term we use to denote symbolic violence like promoting exclusively Serbian medieval heritage as the only valuable cultural legacy; privileging the masculine grammatical gender; the unwritten rule forbidding men from wearing “women’s clothes,” etc.)?

Is politics merely calling out those officially responsible for breaking the law, and not questioning the prejudices, fears, and intellectual/moral inertia that helped bring them to power? To what extent is a politics without addressee possible in Serbia — one not directed toward specific political representation but toward society as a whole and the written and unwritten rules that truly govern our lives, unlike the revolving-door changes of personnel, parties, and pseudo-expert cabinets?

How is it that shedding light on the implicit norms of existence that govern majority attitudes and lives is deemed apolitical and irrelevant? Is questioning so-called identity politics, which pervade our socio-cultural environment, also considered insufficiently political — in other words, not important?! These are unexamined, pre-political instances that unofficially but effectively dictate how people should behave, what to believe, what kinds of private and professional relationships to form — depending on what national, ethnic, gender-sexual, religious, age-based, linguistic, and other groups one belongs to, often just by birth or circumstance. Intertwined with these “politics,” so to speak, are many popular opinions such as: cosmopolitanism and patriotism are mutually exclusive; fluid gender identities are necessarily progressive and religion necessarily regressive (and inevitably equated with church and clergy); human beings are either men or women and must dress accordingly; Cyrillic and Latin scripts are bitter enemies; you are what you eat (meat-eating, vegetarianism, and veganism are now political slogans of the right, center, and left respectively); “Gypsies stink,” etc.

Moreover, not only collective but also individual positions fall within the domain of politics — to the extent that an individual’s life chances depend on the society they live in and on the outcome of the ongoing, inevitable negotiations they can conduct with it. That is precisely the meaning of the famous slogan of second-wave feminism — the personal is political — from the 1960s. [3] And this slogan is diametrically opposed to the motto the political is personal that guides our current political regime. Therefore, if we do not engage in politics but instead focus exclusively on the individuals who privatize it, (proto)politics will still engage with us — only without our knowledge and/or informed consent (as the previous paragraph, hopefully, demonstrates).

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Footnotes:

[1] Cornelius Castoriadis, The Rise of Insignificance, Gradac/Čigoja štampa, Čačak-Belgrade, 1999, pp. 175–176.

[2] In opposing priorities this way, the regime most amateurishly recycles a long-discarded opposition in the humanities between nature and culture (given that their interdependence has long been recognized). But appealing to nature and privileging “naturalness” has always been a cultural fetish and the rallying cry of right-wing politics/policing — which have always rested on a carefully selected model of “naturalness” (in this case, the “natural” is a supposedly transhistorical model of the so-called nuclear family, made up of two biological parents of opposite sexes and their children, not older than the second half of the 19th century). However, the 20th-century debate over nature vs. culture focused on the precedence or influence of one over the other. Today’s Serbian regime revives this conflict — but in the form of a war of extermination. In other words, following this neo-barbaric yet politically lucrative logic, there can be funding either for nature or for culture (though “nature” here is merely code for an undemanding form of culture)!

[3] The second wave articulated aspects of women's existential experience that had previously been considered untouchable private domains — such as double sexual standards, domestic violence, women’s employment, etc. Afterward, certain laws were enacted to protect against violence, but also some unquestioned discriminatory practices were changed without legal processes (e.g., there was no law forcing women to quit their jobs after marriage — it was simply an unwritten custom).