Dialogi
Eurozine
Dialogi
2007-08-06
Summary for Dialogi 7-8/2007
Primoz Jesenko, in the introductory editorial, broaches a subject which is elusive yet very present in the air: the incestuous and nepotistic relations within the Slovenian art community. Is it true that artists who come from families with already established and well-known names in the world of art find it easier to advance their careers?
Our new film editor Robert Petrovic publishes an interview with Stojan Pelko, a film commentator and essayist as well as lecturer in the theory and history of film at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. The conversation starts off with a discussion of Pelko's latest book, The Image of Thought, an examination of how thinking about film has been enriched by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. According to Pelko, two of Deleuze's books, L'image-mouvement (The Movement-Image) and L'image-temps (The Time-Image), gave an entire generation the opportunity to think of film with the dignity of philosophy. This relationship between film and philosophy is the focus of most of the conversation between Pelko and Petrovic.
Dialogi's editor for critical thinking, Boris Vezjak, has prepared the very hot topic on media censorship in Slovenia for the summer issue.
The former communist regime exerted its influence on the media primarily through effective self-censorship among journalists, which began to let up only towards the end of the 1980s. The first media organizations to break free of the uniformity of opinion were the youth publications and radio programmes -- the weekly magazine Mladina, the Maribor student newspaper Katedra, the Ljubljana radio station Radio Student -- and the intellectual journal Nova Revija. With freedom of the press guaranteed by the new constitution, it became taken for granted by civil society.
After fifteen years of a new democratic constitutional order, in which politicians did not intervene directly in the media or did so very subtly, it now suddenly appears that freedom of the press in Slovenia is no longer a given.
After the current Slovene government came to power in 2004, an intensive struggle for the truth began: political, social, economic, and historical truth, which should be different. The media offer a window on our world and indirectly an explanation of social reality; hence what followed was also partially a story about what kind of truth journalists should write. Information started coming to light about strange things happening to journalists employed by media organizations, about political pressures on them and their writing. In 2006 and 2007 we witnessed firsthand the planned takeover of the media by capital; the state, by means of its own stake, exerted its influence over the media. Other media, for example the public broadcasting agency RTV Slovenija, were brought under control by means of new legislation.
One of the clearest manifestations of political interference in the work of journalists and editors, and also the form of pressure mentioned most frequently, is undoubtedly censorship. It can be explicit and compulsory, or veiled and indirect, brutal in the sense of omitting and filtering information or the result of the author's censorship of himself. The editors at Dialogi decided to examine the state of censorship, and in accordance with democratic principles we wanted to give both sides the opportunity to express themselves. But in fact we found three sides: journalists, i.e. those who are supposedly censored; editors, i.e. those who are assumed to do the censoring; and independent professional analysts, i.e. those who follow and observe the events.
Journalists Primoz Cirman, Janko Lorenci, Borut Mekina, Joze Poglajen, and Simona Rakusa contributed their views. Our colleague Lana Zdravkovic interviewed former editors as well as those who replaced them at the newspapers Delo, Vecer, and Dnevnik; the magazine Mladina; and the news programme at Televizija Slovenija, while analytical articles were provided by Zoran Medved (RTV Slovenija), Alma M. Sedlar (the magazine Jana), editor Boris Vezjak, and Ksenija H. Vidmar and Joze Vogrinc from the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana.
The accounts confirm that there has been a major shift of editorial policy in the majority of the media, but given the small size of the media space in Slovenia, dissatisfied journalists have nowhere to go and little chance of changing their jobs. For this reason it appears that self-censorship is common, and the professional stance of journalists is contradictory and unstable.
Analysts have found that after the most recent changes, the role of the state in the media sector in Slovenia has become indispensable and dominant. The state has found itself in the position of employer, regulator, cultivator, and manager in the public sector, both producer and consumer of products (especially military), entrepreneur and investor, and the alliance between the state and capital has caused changes in the relations between the state and civil society. When capital begins to support the bureaucratic rule of the state, the dividing line between the private (economy) and the public (politics) begins to blur, which in turn undermines the integrity of the private sphere of civil society as well as the public nature of political power and its exposure to public scrutiny. From a historical point of view, such were not the intentions of those who more than a quarter of a century ago demanded changes in the former socialist countries. The enthusiasm for the new political values and a democratic society was tremendous, as were expectations, but when the public space was occupied by political parties instead of civil society institutions, which was made possible in large part by the need for the organization of formal levers of parliamentary democracy, it was revealed that in the new practices of former socialist countries the media failed to achieve greater autonomy, and the evaluation of their activities (and frequent discrimination) was associated mainly with the general political and ideological division into the new (anti-communist) and old (pro-communist) parties. An empirical fact which can be verified daily through the articles and reports in the mass media is that in Slovenia we can still witness the division into "our" and "your" sides, into those who supported independence and those who opposed it, into those who are former communists and those who apparently never were. These kinds of distinctions are part of the retrograde processes in the political development of our society, since for some time it has appeared as though Slovenia would be able to avoid the reinforcement of political coalitions in the manner of the earlier one-party systems, i.e. of coalitions which were "ideologically homogeneous (class) alliances". All the ruling coalitions in Slovenia during the period from 1992 to 2004 were ideologically heterogeneous; only after the last parliamentary elections did Slovenia get the first coalition whose constitutive members are so similar in their programmes as well as their principles.
The first responses to the situation also came from abroad, which Gregor Repovz, the editor-in-chief of Mladina and the president of the Slovene Association of Journalists, comments on as follows: "Freedom House is essentially a conservative organization. And if a conservative organization believes that we are where we are, then it is clear to us where we are. We know that these things come from abroad slowly, but it is a fact that today when I meet someone who is, say, a politically active person from abroad, they know that all is not well in Slovenia. Whether they are from Poland, the Czech Republic, or Brussels. The same information about this anomaly in the bright star of Europe, in other words, Slovenia, is circulating and the luster is dimming as a result. And this is no joke."
In the literary section of Dialogi, we publish selected poems of the Hungarian poet József Attila (1905-1937) translated by Jure Jakob and Lukács Zsolt, and an excerpt from one of Slovenia's best novelists, Dusan Merc, from his latest novel, Dante's Death. Two young translators, Gregor Podlogar and Veronika Dintinjana present the American poets Laura Solomon and Susan Rich.
In "Cultural diagnosis", Katja Praznik reviews Arthur Coleman Danto's book The Philosophical Disenfranchisment of Art and Gaja Kos reviews picture books by Julie Donaldson about The Gruffalo and The Gruffalo's Child. Vasja Nagy presents the art project Transzentrala, consisting of exhibitions, debates, video, and sound shows of twenty creators who ignore public arts institutions or rather are ignored by them.
Whether the subject is female beauty or the aesthetic value of cultural achievements, in each case encounters between different cultures have become an everyday occurrence in Europe. Tanja Mlaker, a Slovene who lives in the Netherlands and translates Dutch literature into Slovene, writes in her diary about these and other intercultural encounters, from which new associations and images are frequently created.