Catherine Samary

Professor at Dauphine University, Paris. Involved in many French and International associations and organisations of the radical Left and was active in solidarity campaigns against the war in Yugoslavia. She is mainly interested in economical history of socialisms (particularly in Yugoslav worker's self-management) and in contemporary politico-economical processes, related to economic globalization and worldwide domination of capitalism.

Abstract

Alberto Toscano

Lecturer at Goldsmiths College, London. An important contemporary theorist of the emancipatory politics, whose main research interests lie in communism and fanaticism. Also known as main translator of Badiou in English. Member of the editorial board of Historical materialism.

Abstract

Rastko Močnik

Professor at University of Ljubljana. Author of several books, covering a number of topics (literature, art, contemporary fascisms, globalization) and employing a wide arsenal of theoretical perspectives (Lacanian psychoanalysis, historical materialism, Maussian anthropology, Braudelian historiography, Althusserian theory of ideology). His current work involves analysis of the spontaneous ideology of post-Yugoslav historians and critique of post-socialist destruction of the welfare state.

Abstracts

Lev Centrih

Postgraduate student at University of Ljubljana. His research interests include dialectical materialism, commodity fetishism and Yugoslav partisans' political education during the second world war. Ex-editor of Agregat, a journal for contemporary sociopolitical polemics and ex-member of the Workers' and Punks' University, where he coordinated a course in political ecology.

Abstract

Mateja Ratej

Lecturer at Scientific Research Centre at Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts. Her main research interests are Slovenian political history between both world wars, history of Catholicism in Slovenia and postmodern epistemology of historiography.

Abstract

Slobodan Karamanić

Researcher at Institute for Sociology, Munich and postgraduate student at Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis, Ljubljana. His main research interests are post-Yugoslav ideology and politics and materialist theory of popular music of the Balkans. Used to be a member of the editorial board of Prelom (magazine for image and politics), widely recognized as the best post-Yugoslav theoretical journal.

Abstract

Ozren Pupovac

Researcher at Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastrich and postgraduate student at The Open University, London. His work includes passionate and innovative interpretations of Yugoslav people's liberation struggle and uncompromising critique of various episodes of post-Yugoslav transition (from "Slovenian spring" to rise of nationalism in Croatia). Used to be a member of the editorial board of Prelom (magazine for image and politics), widely recognized as the best post-Yugoslav theoretical journal.

Abstract

Nebojša Jovanović

Postgraduate student at Central European University, Budapest. A theoretician and translator. Relentless and sharp analyist and ciritic of various post-Yugoslav realities, from intellectual conformism to political decadence of liberal democratic experiments in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Abstract

Uneventment of History - the Case of Yugoslavia

Exact analysis of contemporary Slovenian historiography would probably show that it is - at least in a part, concerning the history of 20th century - dealing almost exclusively with great historical events, supposedly led and controled by great historical personalities. Such a method makes the impression that any social and political change takes place exclusively due to cleverness and wisdom of the rulers and the conscious strategies they excercise in the disagreements between competing political elites.

At the same time it seems that most contemporary Slovenian historiographers still cling to (neo)positivist paradigm and to an assumption that it is possible to discern positive facts from the archive material and that those facts can be organised into an objective narrative about things as they really happened. Such positivist paradigm neither requires nor demands any use of theoretical apparatus – and, consequently, there is not much of it present in Sloveniana historiography.

It could also be claimed that, since the breakup of Yugoslavia and especially in the last few years, Slovenian journalists and politicians missed no opportunity to critically evaluate historiographers and their work. Historiographers were shunned due to their allegedly communist past, while historiography itself was accused of being unobjective and politically motivated. Many politicians and journalists openly demanded the revision of the history of 20th century.

It seems that the dominance of the (neo)positivist paradigm and frequent public attacks on the work of Slovenian historiographers are somehow connected.

Wouldn’t it be possible to claim that theorethical weakness of the scientific field of historiography is, at the same time, a cause and an effect of ideological use and misuse of the science of history? A cause because epistemologically weak discipline has no effective theoretical means of resistance against ideological pressure and an effect because ideological appropriations of historiography leave it theoretically and epistemologically impoverished. Historiography, built on positivist paradigm, can justify just about any social and political order. In this regard it is truly impartial and while it remains such it opens itself both to allegations that it justified the communist regime as well as to servitude to a new, liberal democratic regime.

On the other hand, we should ask ourselves whether historiography can ever be emancipated from ideology and politics and, if such emancipation proves possible, whether it is desirable at all? Should historiography build its defence against ideologies that reproduce and sustain the existing socio-political order on "autonomy of science", on withdrawal into academic ivory tower, or is the field of autonomous science precisely the site of ideological reproduction and academic institutions ideological state apparatuses? Or should historiography, following Walter Benjamin, rather seek its inspiration in the "legacy of the defeated"?

Since neither "relaxed" attitude towards history of the young generation nor "objective" one of the old sufficiently tackles the problems that various ideological uses of history confront us with, we have decided to organize a conference, by which we will try to open up another perspective on the revolutionary and post-revolutionary past of Yugoslavia. To this end we invited researchers and theoreticians who neither practice nihilistic refusal of the past (so characteristic of the advocates of the ideology of the end of history) nor withdraw into academic sterility (and perceive history only as a detached object).

The conference will mostly deal with two problematics. The first problematic will be a theoretical exploration of two key problems of contemporary Slovenian historiography: the possiblity of absolute autonomy of the science of history, and its epistemological shortcomings, which prevent it from becoming theoretical instead of technical discipline.

The second problematic will consist of historiographical practice on the example of socialist Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was chosen because ideological uses and misuses of its past open up various important questions, pertinent to our present like, for example, is it justified to claim that Yugoslav socialism – which was based on anti-fascist resistance of the Yugoslav partisans and which has built a welfare state with unprecedented standards of worker’s rights, healthcare, education, science and art – was totalitarian? Was socialist revolution really just a voluntary project of evil and power hungry communist elite? What effects do such claims about history of Yugoslavia have on contemporary social and political situation in the countries that emerged on Yugoslav territory after its breakup?

József Böröcz: Whitened Histories, Global Colours

Much of conventional social science regularly endows the West, and its key symbol, ‘Europe’, with lofty, indeed supposedly unsurpassable, moral qualities. Empiricist, extreme-idiographic modes of intellectual production—forms of knowledge that present themselves as transparent (i.e., objective and, hence, “scientific”)—are particularly characteristic of western scholarship, because maintaining the stability of such transparency claims requires a power differential in favour of the position from which the supposedly transparent narrator speaks. In contrast, the eastern-south-eastern half of geographical Europe is routinely left out of, tacked on to, or marginalised within, this distinguished “location,” posing a particular set of challenges to the politics of history written from this part of the world.

The end of the geopolitical defeat of state-socialism in Europe has produced a context in which a new, and remarkably vigorous, form of this west-centrism proliferates. This west-struckness whitens east-central and east European history in a triple sense of the word: /1/ It blanks out important elements of the state-socialist experience; /2/ it takes a White position on issues of the socialist revolution, producing at political discourses that are at least as biased as “scientific socialism” of the Red location they aim to “rectify,” and /3/ it inspires an image of humankind as normatively (west) European, i.e., colour-coded as white in the sense of the global whiteness that has dominated the modern world. Any deviation is, hence, typically re-read as insufficient whiteness. As a result of the political power inherent to this move, vast post-state-socialist populations, caught up in the politics of catching up with “real” Europe, try to re-imagine their histories as a carte blanche. This explains much of the general pause about socialism in the eastern buffer zone of NATO, the EU as well as along most other institutions of west European whiteness.

One way out of this morass is to re-think histories of state socialism in this marginalised part of Europe in a global critical frame. This paper proposes a reading of east(-central) European state socialist histories through the lens of three key global concepts: coloniality, empire, and ‘Europe’, and argues that much of the intellectual-political production in this part of the world, and especially the political pseudo-choice of “nationalism vs. liberalism,” can be interpreted as emerging in interaction with those global structures. Furthermore, the paper suggests that /1/ throughout the history of state socialism in eastern Europe, there existed genuinely “left,” non-autocratic, globally inclusive, non-racist critiques of state socialist practices, /2/ these critiques repeatedly manifested themselves in political ideas and movements, and that /3/ the suppression of these critiques has resulted in the current, narrow pseudo-choice set between the nationalist and liberal apologies of the same global capitalist-racist-imperial-patriarchal order.

On author

Alberto Toscano : Lenin Dancing on the Snow: Periodisation Against History

Aiming to salvage the subversive and emancipatory nucleus of the dialectic, Alain Badiou’s theory of the subject has consistently worked against a vision of History as full, legible meaning for the sake of an internal, subjective and discontinuous grasp of the periodisation of political ‘sequences’. In this talk, I will examine the theoretical movement that leads Badiou to dislocate the dialectics of history and historicity of the dialectic, generating a comprehension of political time that is no longer bound to an ordered matrix of expression and development. In order to gauge the pertinence of this conceptual proposal to debates on revolutionary historiography, I will examine Badiou’s philosophical counter-histories of the Paris Commune and of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, considering the manner in which, rather than belonging to a continuum of emancipations, these political ruptures and procedures can be seen both as internally periodised and as periodising one another. In conclusion, I will attempt to problematise the juxtaposition of periodisation and History/historiography along three axes: (1) the tension between an internalist approach such as Badiou’s and the consideration of the constraints and determinations imposed by capitalism on historical events and transformations; (2) the difficulty for a perspective founded on a concept of truth-as-exception to investigative the subjective charge and unfolding of ‘impure’ political sequences (e.g. that of the non-aligned movement and the Third World); (3) the effect of Badiou’s notion of periodisation on the very historicity and mutability of his own philosophical apparatus (i.e. the threat of an ‘absolute historicism’).

On author

Mateja Ratej: Relativization of the Author (Historian) as a Premise of Post-Modern Historiography in Slovenia after 2000

Giovanni Levi (born in 1954), internationally renowned Italian historian and one of the leading microhistorians, is a representative of so-called engaged historiography that demands the separation of history from ideology and is one of the defining frameworks of the post-modern division of historiography. For Levi, one of the main problems of modern historiography is the authoritative style of interpretation. Historians relate narratives as if they were speaking about some objective reality, rarely mentioning the painstaking research process which would lend to their conclusions an air of hypothesis, non-conclusiveness or doubt. Levi points out that other humanities have long since relativized the author's authority, while history lags behind in this respect by ignoring a modern sociological critique of the concepts of rationalization. Similar to some other critics of historiography, Levi, too, thinks that the role of a historian is not solely to give sense to an event, but also to check to what a degree that specific event is an issue of general interest. He draws attention to an important aspect saying that an event is not necessarily something that has happened but something that people are willing to accept as such. A historian should therefore concentrate primarily on MEANINGS, while questions about how the things actually occurred should be understood as a kind of exorcism that is meant to bring the chaos under control and give it a suitable shape. Knowing this, it is not difficult to understand why Levi argues that history is a continual reinterpretation of something already known and that rekindling in people's minds of something that has been forgotten is not the core task of a historian. He further maintains that historical discoveries are rather accidental, with the underlying truth being more or less known and emerging from the novel questions posed by historians/historiography. In Levi’s opinion, the search for answers to the questions of what cultural aspects are shared by a community, what is legitimate, what that common thread is that binds us together forming our shared foundation of values, are the issues over which a continual war is fought by various representations of the past.

Taking Levi's theoretical positions as the basis, I will try to give answers to the questions relating to the role of an author (historian) in modern Slovenian historiography. Is he/she an observer or a judge? An interpreter or an objective eye? In so doing I will concentrate on some eminent monographs by the Slovenian historians of the third millennium.

On author

Catherine Samary: "Immediate History" in Socio-economic Research in/after the Cold War: The Yugoslav Issue

I will make explicit the methodological criterions of my research on the Yugoslav titoist economic reforms and the recent systemic transformations.[1]

Those criterions deal with conflicting approaches of "scientificity" in economy – and more broadly in social sciences: they raise the question of "objective laws" versus conflicting choices both in economy and history; but also the question of autonomy versus organic links between economy, sociology, history and political sciences; and, finally, the question of the viewpoint and commitment of the researcher him/herself...

Specific difficulties are to be stressed in the context of the Cold War for academical research on Yugoslavia which was in fact dealing with "immediate history" before it was explicitly defined as a new field of research for historians[2]. The fall of the Berlin Wall opened a new period where economists as well as historians were confronted with a mainstream new "official" thinking. Resistances to non pluralistic approaches appeared in both fields – "against autistic economy"[3], as well as against the simplification of "immediate history" - in reality simplication of the past under the pressure of a simplification of the present.

Looking for possible "honest" and professional research, opposing those simplications and new official thinkings, meant accepting pluralistic views including explicit subjective commitments of the researcher; that did not mean "relativism" and a lack of ethic criteria based on long term trends of human societies and search for universal values. But the emphasis were to be put on the condition of open critical and international (democratic) research – as opposed to eurocentric, ethnocentric, "male"-centric, or any corporate views... The refusal of any (state or academical) monopoly on knowledge also meant being open towards human beings in their diversity and to movements of resistances of the civil society as a source of information, knowledge and resistance to "official memory" and oppressive thinking...

Walter Benjamin's approach to history permits us to integrate those viewpoints in an understanding of a conflicting and non linear history, looking for "holes" in memories.

I'll illustrate those methodological standpoints on the Yugoslav case.

On author

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[1] Catherine Samary, Le marché contre l'autogestion – l'expérience yougoslave , Edition publisud/La brèche, Paris 1988 ; Yugoslavia dismemberd, Monthly Review press, USA, 1995

[2] http://www.h-debate.com/ (Historia A Debate – History under debate – l'Histoire en débat) ; and Groupe de recherche sur l'histoire immédiate – Université de Toulouse2 : http://w3.univ-tlse2.fr/grhi/index.htm

[3] http://www.autisme-economie.org/, and post autistic economic network www.paecon.net