Written by Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
When Milo lost/handed over power, in a moment the world of an average Montenegro citizen had somewhat become more complicated. The idea that Milo was behind everything that was happening in this country vanished. No more immediate solutions to everything.
In Montenegro ruled by the DPS, Milo Djukanovic was functioning like a ‘master signifier’, as called in Lacanian psychoanalysis.
What’s that?
“Master-signifier, or if you like the other way around, ‘signifier-master’ (because it’s significant-maître in French), or simply, “S1″, is a signifier who’s on the top of the hierarchy of symbolic relations, organizing the way an individual experiences the world and himself. It’s a central point of reference that shapes other signifiers and stabilizes the identity of an individual in relation to the social symbolic order”.
In brief, it means people didn’t know how to create social reality (or an illusion) without Milo Djukanovic. Wherever they looked, they saw him. He was the mastermind of everything.
Even after the change of power, new rulers by default continued to explain every situation (primarily negative ones) by mentioning Djukanovic. Here’s the paradox. Their showdown with Djukanovic is a direct act of recognition and strengthening of Djukanovic’s authority whom they allegedly oppose. This has nothing to do with Djukanovic’s place in the political hierarchy. It has nothing to do with him himself, only with the people who use him as an excuse and reason for everything, but need him the most.
An absolutist government simply invokes such a scenario. Absolute power also means absolute responsibility. In that sense, Djukanovic got what he asked for.
In a democracy, the place of the absolutist master is occupied by conspiracy theories: the CIA, the Deep State, Jews, Rothschilds, lizard-aliens are behind everything… Conspiracy theory is a desperate, low-intellectual, therefore attractive and popular attempt to produce meaning.
In today’s Montenegro, the EU functions as a kind of perverted signifier-master. Everything done so far is for the EU, the commitment to “EU integration” is the reason behind everything. The central topic of every narrative of the rulers is the EU, being a fiction with no definition: because nobody actually knows what they’re talking about when they talk about the EU.
Here, have a look at today’s event in Zagreb: Thompson’s concert. It’s an ultra-nationalist mega-event undoubtedly suggesting that every single pore of Croatian society is imbued with nationalism. And not just any kind, but the nationalism of the Jasenovac concentration camp and ethnic cleansing. Thompson’s songs not only promote a fascist political movement, but also express clear territorial claims towards neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina. And yet, somehow, these are European values.
But not mine, I’ll add: the Chetniks and Ustashas are the same to me, just like I find the Greater Serbia, Greater Croatia and Greater Albania projects the same. But that’s what happens when you base a community (the EU) on “real property” and economics, not on ethical values. When you look at today’s explosion of Croatian nationalism under the EU flag, do you really think EU membership will solve our nationalist/revisionist/identity problems?
The tricky thing about conspiracy theories is what Eagleton noted: we cannot dismiss conspiracy theories as a means of interpreting the world, because we’ve empirically convinced ourselves many times that they’ve told us the truth.
If we were to stay in the register of conspiracy theories, now would be the right time to introduce the technological giants into the game, whose power is practically absolute. I will refer to the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski. In the book ‘Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era’, he prophetically writes: “The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.”
However, conspiracy theory is exactly the kind of cognitive mapping I reject. Let us recall that Fredric Jameson explains cognitive mapping as a process by which an individual subject situates himself within a vaster, unrepresentable totality – and this process of self-positioning is very similar to the work of ideology. What I want to say is that conspiracy theory is always an ideological attempt to dismantle an ideology whose work it recognizes as a “conspiracy”.
It’s always an optimistic concept – the idea that there really is someone who decides everything, even if with bad intentions, as well as the idea that everything happens for a reason, even if for a bad reason, is actually much easier to accept than the idea that things happen for no reason. Therefore, conspiracy theories correspond perfectly with the idea of the world of religious fundamentalists, so quite naturally it finds allies in them. But what’s the answer to the question: even if we accept that there are people who control every segment of our existence, who controls them? Again: the idea that they control themselves at all seems very, very unfoundedly optimistic.
Journalists who attended the Cannes premiere of Lars Von Trier’s masterpiece ‘Antichrist’ reported the audience responded with hysterical laughter to the scene when the fox hidden in the grass turned towards the protagonist, saying in a spooky voice: Chaos reigns.
They weren’t laughing because of the funny side of it, but in the face of fear. Records also suggest it’s how listeners were laughing while listening to Kafka‘s first texts.
When you confront people with absolute horror, that is, with the absolute absence of meaning, their defensive response is denial and ridiculing it. True horror is too terrible for us to feel fear before it. True horror is utter emptiness we’re facing while being situated in utter emptiness.
(The opinions and views of our columnists aren’t necessarily the opinions or views of the CdM news team)
