Scarce Forms, Collective Imagination, and Precarity of Socialism: Rereading Socialism and its Demise through Forms

• In Event: Precarious Forms, Forms of Precarity

Abstract

Scarce, performative, repetitive forms devoid of meaning already occupy and important place and interpretative value in the scholars’ attempts to understand socialism as historical experience and its precarity and demise. For the period usually described as late socialism, there is a seeming consensus that there was a “deep gap between ideology and reality, especially as that reality grew progressively consumerist and lifestyle-oriented” (Kruglova 2017). Such perception is familiar also in the post-Yugoslav context, where, the argument goes, a utopian imagination characteristic of an early period of socialist production became “ideologically ritualized, creatively stale” (Dimitrijević 2017) and this ritualization and performativity eventually lead to exhaustion of socialist project (Popivoda 2013).
Based on my long-lasting research of the forms that constituted life of the Yugoslav military service, in this paper I suggest a different a trajectory of evolution of ritualized and standardized forms in socialism. These forms were solidified together with the Yugoslav socialism and its military institution, had an important role in the institution’s work, but also enabled emotional ties and hosted utopian imagination; approaching the end of socialism and the violent conflicts in which Yugoslavia disappeared, these fixed forms became looser and incapable of production of meaningful connections and affects. Such evolutionary arc provides a corrective perspective to dominant views on European socialism(s), which see solidifying of ritualized forms as an indication of exhaustion of ideology and its emptying of content and meaning, and ultimate dissolution of socialism.

Author

• Tanja Petrovic, Scientific Research Centre SAZU (Slovenia)