2001 for 2010 and Beyond the Horizon

Early New Year's morning and Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey on a major public broadcaster. Just like in the old days of New Year's Eve national television experience. The 2001 was the cream of the New Year's Eve programming until two decades ago, with the psychedelic cineastic experience of 2001 coming at some time around 3 AM, as a reminder of something "beyond". A strong reminder of the progress in time and advent of the long awaited 2001! With that real and forgotten 2001 almost a decade behind us, Kubrick's 2001 is not behind and it's not forgotten. It is beyond, with that strange sense of anticipation and advent. I am happy that 2001 is back, even if it's back for 2010. And, as if that whole experience was not enough, the New Year's party and the night after was crowned with Laza Ristovski's futuristic "Beyond the Horizon":

Only the crap!

"Very well," said Utz. "I will eat eels. You will also eat eels?"
"I will," I said.
"There are no eels," said the waiter.
"No eels? This is bad. What have you?"
"We have carp."
"Carp only?"
"Carp."
"How shall you cook this carp?"
"Many ways," the waiter gestured to the menu. "Which way you like."
The menu was multilingual: in Czech, Russian, German, French and English. But whoever had compiled the English page had mistaken the word "carp" for "crap." Under the heading CRAP DISHES, the list contained 'crap soup with paprika,' 'stuffed crap,' 'crap cooked in beer,' 'fried crap,' 'crap balls,' 'crap a la juive...'
"In England," I said, "this fish is called 'carp.' 'Crap' has a different meaning.'
"Oh?" said Dr. Orlik. "What meaning?"
"Faeces," I said. "Shit."
I regretted saying this because Utz looked exceedingly embarrassed. The narrow eyes blinked, as if he hoped he hadn't heard correctly. Orlik's wheezy carapace shook with laughter.
"Ha! Ha!" he jeered. "Crap a la juive!...My friend Mr. Utz will eat Crap a la juive!"
I was afraid Utz was going to leave, but he rose above his discomfiture and ordered soup and the 'Carpe meuniere.' I took the line of least resistance and ordered the same. Orlik clamoured in his loud and crackly voice, "No. No. I will eat 'crap a la juive'...!"
"And to begin?" asked the waiter.
"Nothing." said Orlik. "Only the crap!"

Utz - Bruce Chatwin (1989)

The Memory of Rudi Dutschke in the 1960s Cigarette Smoke

Graf Oderland pointed to a Guardian article by Natasha Chart, in which I felt a strong need for my "mediated reminder" in what I consider to be a drastic decline in the aesthetic of the language of the Left over the years. Commemorating the death of German student movement spokesperson Rudi Dutschke this day thirty years ago, I feel compelled to find a reminder of the once great and clear language of the Left.

Chart describes her disagreement at COP15 summit in Copenhagen with Naomi Klein’s use of term “reparations” as a damaging word because it calls up the idea of reparations for slavery in the US, which makes it impossible for the US to do anything referred to in that way. The word, as Chart points out, has become popular in some circles to mean getting wealthy nations to pay a responsible share of adaptation and mitigation support and to cut emissions, also referred to more neutrally as climate debt. What is a problem here is not so much the use of the word itself, but the environment in which Klein is using it, justifying it with a silly argument of “possibility” (“… you Americans have such a limited sense of the possible…”), as if the whole point is to test the possibility through words themselves. If the word makes an actual barrier in reality that is hard to overcome, is it then just too bad for the reality? But why are we at the summit then? To test the words? To test the language? Looking at how much was actually agreed to be done in reality, it could really be the case. I sense a barrier of a different kind than that which is usually used to describe global environmental policies. The barrier of language.

This is where I need the reminder:


Rudi Dutschke born Alfred Willi Rudi Dutschke (March 7, 1940 Schönefeld – December 24, 1979, Århus, Denmark) was the most prominent spokesperson of the German student movement of the 1960s. He advocated 'a long march through the institutions' of power to create radical change from within government and society by becoming an integral part of the machinery. This was an idea he took up from Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt school of Cultural Marxism. In the 1970s he followed through on this idea by joining the nascent Green movement. In 1968, he survived an assassination attempt, living for another 12 years until related health problems caused his death. Radical students blamed an anti-student campaign in the papers of the Axel Springer publishing empire for the assassination attempt. This led to attempts to blockade the distribution of Springer newspapers all over Germany, which in turn led to major street battles in many German cities. (Wikipedia)

The language of Dutschke was not the language that is testing itself. It’s the language coming from the structure of reality, from the scaffolding of the world in the need of change. The readiness of the language to act, to extend in the world like a limb, like an arm - the most important proof of its evolutionary nature, described by Levi-Strauss. Not the readiness to engage in a bickering in which you will deny somebody the sense of the possible - the possibility to extend. The true Left never denied the sense of the possible to anybody. It is a class sense! Part of the class awareness. The class is not defined nationally, unless we want the term to “slip” into an entirely different meaning in which we will divide the class into those who correspond with that?

Listen to Dutschke through the televised cigarette smoke! Inhale and exhale while the language develops. Reminiscent of the times in which words were used to connect, not to divide. Not the words of the Red, but the words of the Green - understood by the Global South and the Global North.

Battle of Neretva beats Champions League Soccer

1969 Yugoslav-German-Italian-American film "Battle of Neretva", directed by Veljko Bulajić, was shown last week in prime time on Croatian national television (HRT), and it reached higher ratings than the UEFA Champions League soccer on other television channels. Battle of Neretva was seen by 16 percent of viewers, while Juventus-Bayern match scored 10,7 percent. (E-novine)

Battle of Neretva was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1969. This film is the most expensive motion picture made in the SFR Yugoslavia, starring Yul Brynner, Orson Welles, Sergei Bondarchuk, Curt Jurgens and Franco Nero, among the international crew. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the year after Sergei Bondarchuk (playing the role of Martin in Neretva) won the honour for War and Peace. The English language version features a powerful score by American composer Bernard Herrmann. One of the original posters for the English version of the movie was made by Pablo Picasso, which according to Bulajić he did without payment, only requesting a case of best Yugoslav wines. (Wikipedia)



The Battle of the Neretva (Serbo-Croatian, Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Bitka na Neretvi), codenamed Fall Weiss, was a German strategic plan for a combined Axis attack launched in early 1943 against the Yugoslav Partisans throughout occupied Yugoslavia during the Second World War. The offensive took place between January and April 1943. It is named after the nearby river, the Neretva. The operation is generally known as the Fourth anti-Partisan Offensive, while it is also known as the Fourth Enemy Offensive (Četvrta neprijateljska ofenziva/ofanziva) or the Battle for the Wounded (Bitka za ranjenike) in ex-Yugoslav sources. (Wikipedia)

I watched the film on HRT last week, while I was running a slight fever from a flu, and, although I watched it before, this time it was different! Perhaps it was some psychedelic side effect of Paracetamol, but it was very clear, direct, almost immediate! It was a normal analog signal, but the image was very sharp. Combined with the very direct and short dialogues of a war movie, it produced a great "reminder" and directed the viewers' attention to the human plain of the battle for the wounded partisans. High viewer ratings also indicate that a sharp and energy-laden broadcast of a visual monument and mediated reminder, that this film most definitely is, can easily cast the shadow on the mass produced entertainment event such as soccer. Croatian viewers, usually in a strong soccer frenzy, are a an excellent example.

Yul Brynner was and still is my favorite in the film:

Free As in "Free Beer"

Recent student protests in Zagreb and Belgrade put forth the same proposition; free higher education. Not free as in freedom, as I hoped, but free as in “free beer”. Although I support the students in their protest against the society that has turned everything upside-down, I feel that there is a lack of something in students’ demands, and that has to do something with this “free as in freedom” thing that Richard M. Stallman coined for Free Software Foundation and “free as in free beer”, where the student requests mostly ended up. I do not intend to make some logical common ground between the Free Software Foundation and student protests in capitals of Croatia and Serbia, but there is a striking similarity between what happened with development of GNU (GNU’s not UNIX) as a entirely “free as in freedom” computer operating system and with the rise of Linux, as something that is similar, but not entirely what it was supposed to be, and closer to “free as in free beer” or better to say “free as in one free beer”. The level of freedom that Richard Stallman envisioned for GNU exceeds the level of freedom intended for Linux by Linus Torvalds many, many times. Due to the need to dumb the concept down to the level where it would be understood by all programmers as something viable, it was necessary to take the latter path. The whole story of GNU and Linux is explained HERE.

The demands for free education by University of Belgrade and University of Zagreb students equally stressed the fallacies of Bologna Declaration and standardization of higher education at the European level. This is true in my opinion. Recent student protests in Germany showed the same problem of turning higher education in something more similar to trade schools, trying to enroll as many students as possible to cover the expenses. But this is a question of quality, raised by Germans. The question raised by students in Balkans is the one of quantity - something where the idea of a free and open operating system is replaced by an idea of something that is supposed to run free of charge, as a combination of free and proprietary, released under various licenses, just enough to keep it running. It is a question of quantity and dispersion, rather than quality and integration. The expressed desire here is to have a free operating system of higher education that will use a very proprietary Bologna Declaration as a framework for duration of study and formal study requirements, where there will be a constant need to push students through college in order to satisfy the statistic of the “society of knowledge” paradigm – which is very corporate and proprietary in the core, connecting European higher education to corporate needs.

There is also a very obvious credentialist tendency present here, with the expressed student demand to lower the threshold for entry in graduate studies and to get master’s degrees in the undergraduate cycle of study, which initiated the student protests in Serbia a year ago. Now, this has nothing to do with free education! This is a very open abuse of the philosophy behind the free operating system of higher education. Using images from the past in mediating the reminders (mediated reminder!) from the 1968 student protests through Che Guevara t-shirts and anarchist symbolism, is the same misconception as thinking that you’re one step closer to freedom when using some of the latest Linux distributions with non-free software included. These are dead reminders, because they don't remind anyone of the essence of 1968 student struggle for humanized higher education in the world. The request should then be “education at a lower cost”, not “free education”. Czech Republic has good higher education at a low cost. If we are talking about the freedom, we are talking about the free operating system in its entirety. If you want to be free from the commercialization, refuse the Bologna Process as a process of commercialization! But how will it be possible to finish school earlier, with less work, with continuous testing and without integral oral exams after the course, and get into graduate school immediately? It will not. How will it be possible to shut up the teaching assistant, lecturer or professor with sheer ignorance, lack of interest for reading and that mean and silent threat of teacher evaluation? It will not be possible! The free operating system is free in its entirety and the teacher is free as well.

C.D. Broad said it best:

"It is to be feared that Spinoza would not have been enlightened enough to appreciate the beneficent system of the Ph.D. degree, introduced into English universities as a measure of post-war propaganda, whereby the time and energy of those who are qualified to do research are expended in supervising the work of those who never will be."

The Seventh Continent

The third film in the "mediated reminder" connection (now it's a connection, like the French Connection) is "The Seventh Continent" by Dusan Vukotic. It's a 1966 Yugoslav-Czechoslovakian feature film in which a group of children discover the new continent of the world, uninhabited by adults. Soon, many other children are joining them in that new paradise, leaving their parents and other adults baffled on all remaining continents. (IMDB)

This is a film with a strong message of internationalism and solidarity, not in its dialogues but in its perfect imagery in Eastmancolor, which makes it a great cinematic piece. But, there is a problem with this film. It is nowhere to be found! If Graf Oderland can't find it somewhere in NYC, I'm sentenced to living in a memory of a great movie that I saw only once in a cinema as a kid, without seeing it again. This may lead me into making all sorts of constructions and fantasies in my quest for the holy mediated reminder, and I may miss the point!

Besides making this feature presentation, Vukotic was the most significant representative of Zagreb School of Animated Film. He won many prizes, including an Oscar for best animated short in 1961 for Surogat ("Ersatz"), being the first foreigner to do so. Another of his films, Igra ("The Game"), was nominated for an Academy Award in 1964. (Wikipedia)

At least "The Surogat" and "Cow on the Moon" can be seen online:

Call for Understanding

These days a friend of mine, German sociologist Bodo Weber, published a very important article about the looming political disaster and very possible outbreak of ethnic violence in my country. Bodo is an area expert for Balkans and a senior associate of the Democratization Policy Council - a global initiative for accountability in democracy promotion. This article is one of the few remaining calls for solidarity on a larger scale and for a joint effort to correct the errors made by international politics in Bosnia. Solidarity through understanding and awareness is what Bodo advocates, and I am grateful for a voice that tries to understand the planetary human trapped in the vicious circle of ethnic interpretation of Bosnia's problems – which is the European interpretation, and now also a part of a growing «the hell with it» sentiment in American foreign policy. It is important to see that this call for understanding has a history. Deeply rooted intellectual history, connected with the problem of Europe as whole, and Europe aware of the world.

In the 1990s Bodo was the editor of the German student magazine «Perspektiven» from Frankfurt/Main, which saw the light of day some time in 1989. It covered the topics of the emancipation movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The attempt of editors was to promote the feeling of international solidarity among students, especially for «adequate distribution of wealth».

What serves here as a reminder is the editorial from the first issue.

"So versteht sich PERSPEKTIVEN auch als Forum für eine Wiederaufnahme der Diskussion um den Internationalismus-Begriff, dessen Konturen seit den späten 70er Jahren zunehmend unscharf geworden sind. Die Arbeit der Redaktion läßt sich von der festen Überzeugung leiten, daß Chancen auf Änderung nur dann bestehen, wenn auf breiter Ebene die unmittelbaren Zusammenhänge zwischen schier grenzenlosem Wohlstand und entwürdigem Mangel bewußt gemacht und in der Folge endlich die überfälligen politischen und wirtschaftlichen Konsequenzen gezogen werden."

Which, roughly translated, is:

«Perspektiven are understood as a forum for reinstatement of discussion about the reach of internationalism, whose shapes have become blurred since the late 1970s. The editorial work is led by a belief that the chances for change exist only when the direct relationship between seemingly unlimited wealth and disgracing deficiency is made aware at a larger scale, leading eventually to political and economic consequences.»

Source: Perspektiven, Editorial 1/2 1989, 2

«...whose shapes have become blurred since the late 1970s.» This is an important meme, and there is a deeper meaning to it. Not only in terms of the paradigm change at the end of 1970s, but in terms of awareness and solidarity at a larger scale. Was it first lost in theory or in practice? This meme was a mediated reminder in 1989. It resonated back then and it resonates now. It is a part of the awareness that things were different beyond one point in time, the gestalt of which is blurred, somewhere on the horizon of history. I am still unable to find anything deeper than these mediated reminders, which I have introduced in my previous posts as a category in a lack of a better reference, but there is an entire language behind them. This is not apophenia. There is a planetary language behind this! Traces of this language are in the call that Bodo made. Is there anybody to read between the lines and recognize it? Or at least become AWARE of it?