culture

culture / politics — 1 Comment
19
Nov 09

Up for grabs

My dislike of U2 operates on a number of levels. Like many entertainers with a political interest, they fail to realise that you can’t speak truth to power when you are yourself one of the powerful. The meaningless kerfuffle about tickets for their MTV Berlin Wall gig exposes the precarious position such people occupy – tickets for the gig were free but limited, a deliberate marketing tactic to create a false sense of occasion.

At the time, the fall of the Berlin Wall didn’t require anybody’s help to generate a real sense of occasion – it was a real event with a real impact of an order of magnitude that is hard to understand in today’s over-mediated world. Only 20 years later, events no longer have this sense of occasion for us since they act mainly as grist for the media mill. So how to communicate the right gravitas?

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This is where U2 come in, not as musicians but as event planners whose outputs can be repurposed on demand (weddings, barmitzvahs, the collapse of Communism). Yes, U2′s album Achtung Baby was recorded in Berlin and featured a Trabant on the front cover, but it was recorded after the fall of the wall – they were piggybacking on the event for a combination of self-reassurance and self-promotion even then. This concert is just the logical next step, and everybody is complicit in making it happen – the band, the government, the media, even the people holding those free tickets.

Why am I being such a curmudgeon if everybody involved got what they wanted? It’s because a) I believe actual events have real meaning which is obscured by media events, and b) I resent companies making money from our personal experiences. Will Davies believes that we’re accelerating towards the Economy of Presence, where co-location (say, at U2′s Berlin Wall gig) will be of the highest value because it’s so scarce, but I’m not sure that I agree. The ubiquitous nature of telecoms means that the distinction between being there and not being there becomes blurred, with the encouragement of the telecoms companies – who arrange things so that they make money from our experiences both ways. Presumably that’s why the organisers of the U2 gig prevented those without tickets from seeing the concert, even though it was free – to cordon off the experience so that it could be leveraged.

It’s no use saying “I was there!” if everybody else in the world replies “So was I”, after all. Yet the very technology we’re provided with nibbles at the edges of events and causes them to bleed all over the internet. I’m not complaining about that bleeding and blurring of the lines between being there and not being there in the same way that William is (I think). I’m just suspicious of groups such as U2 who magically claim to have some sort of connection to events they clearly had nothing to do with, and who are at the same time are complicit in degrading the real meaning of those events in the popular consciousness. If we’re not careful, we’ll end up in a world where the Live Aid concert as a cultural phenomenon has more resonance in the popular consciousness than the Ethiopian famine it was meant to relieve.

Whoops. Too late.

balkans / culture / montenegro / politics — 2 Comments
11
Mar 08

Selling Balkan History Short

Transitions Online runs an interesting story on that most familiar of Balkan melodies, the rewriting of history. With its independence last year, Montenegro now has to somehow drag itself out from the shadow of big brother Serbia while making too may people angry, a trick which is hard to pull off:

A recent poll suggests that many Montenegrins share Abdomerovic’s moderate nationalism. Conducted in September and October by the independent Center for Democracy and Human Rights, the poll showed that about 35 percent of respondents favored renaming the official language Montenegrin, edging out Serbian by about 5 percent.

There’s a problem with this sort of poll in a country where demographic affiliation can be so contentious. The 2003 census estimated that at least 40% of the population is Montenegrin, while only around 30% are Serbian, and that poll result looks suspiciously like a split along those lines. So many Montenegrins Montenegrins might share that “moderate nationalism”, but they’re likely counter-balanced by Serb Montenegrins who feel short-changed by the whole deal.

The problem is that the Serbian voice isn’t very credible in Montenegro (as far as I know), despite the lack of rancour over the separation of the two countries. A good example of this is given in the article itself, as a Serb intellectual unwittingly demonstrates:

Aleksandar Stamatovic, a pro-Serb historian who lives in Montenegro, said every student in the Balkans should learn one true history, difficult as that might be to reach. Stamatovic would like to take on the job but knows that some of his claims, including that the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated, if not made up, would scuttle any such opportunity.

Possibly his lack of job opportunities aren’t related to being pro-Serb, but being an apologist for war crimes, but the idea that there is “one true history” is an interesting one for a historian to make. History is always a matter of interpretations, and anybody who tries to tell you otherwise is trying to sell you something.

There’s nothing wrong with revising history textbooks, simply on the basis that our understanding of history changes over time. The problem is that such revision implies that the previous history was false and that those who presented it were liars, which is what makes somebody like Stamatovic angry. If only he – and so many other people in the Balkans – could realise that history doesn’t have to be war by other means.

Njegos