In Quest Of Lost Culture

In a conversation with Professor Ratko Božović Ph.D., we endeavour to understand, or better to say to find and follow paths of culture in today’s Serbia and the contemporary world.

By Vanja Savić
Photo by Milan Melka

We set out on our journey to track culture with Lexicon of Culture, by Professor Ratko Božović, a longtime professor at Belgrade University, who might also be described as: a writer; publicist; theoretician and sociologist of politics, culture and art. His book, published two years ago by the Matić Agency, is a collection of texts devised as a "glossary or subjective encyclopedia".

You may wonder why we have waited so long to speak about it, but sometimes it is better to wait and find the right moment to set out on this kind of journey. Actually, due to the intricacy of the moment and climate in which our cultural caravan set out, it was necessary to repack the items in our travelling bags. We were so advised at the very start by our guide, Professor Božović, because there are no limits for bypasses in pursuit of culture and the "errors in defining culture are nearly endless", and finally, like all curious travellers, we hope that we shall in any case reach our desired destination.

- Prior to setting out on a journey from Belgrade to the world’s cultural destinations, perhaps it would be useful to give a short definition of culture in our everyday domestic life.

- Here, in Serbia, there is great confusion regarding the place of culture in society. It is marginal mostly because its position is defined by politics. Because culture is the broadest notion and process of thinking that determines attitudes towards human existence, culture should define politics itself. Attempts to tie cultural values exclusively to humanist or spiritual culture are wrong because culture then remains within traditional experiences. Culture has descended from the heights of an untouchable Olympus to everyday life, to style and a way of living. As a vibrant, dynamic and flexible category, culture strives to go beyond achieved values, perceptions, views and beliefs. It, then, signifies intruding upon the relations of sparkling lies, ossified values and fanaticism of thinking. The idea of freedom is at the very foundation of culture. How debatable "culture" is among the uncultivated here is a tangible and appalling fact. It deepens disorder in the country so people don’t know what they should do. And criticism is the Achilles’ heel of culture because it doesn’t produce active dissatisfaction in relation to non-values, allowing them to dominate.

- It seems as if we are travelling through information space and that culture, which once signified only man’s spiritual space, today signifies man’s whole world". During this time of globalisation, how great is the difference between the notion of culture and the notion of civilisation?

- The development of new technologies unquestionably influences everything that is happening in culture and especially in the media. Interdependence between culture and civilisation is inevitable. Not without reason does the wise Isidora Sekulić fear the machinisation not only of the mind but of the heart as well. Today, the commercial media already dominate the civilisational scene. They demolish the old media environment and create a new one. It is a distinct civilizational step forward, albeit with a double face, a bright and a dark one. It is especially important that globalisation of the media proceeds not only as particular centralisation and monitoring but also as a Baroque spreading of popular culture that goes beyond regional and state borders. Thus this form of global culture destroys national and state borders in the domain of values and establishes planetary togetherness. Global media promote individualism, human rights and, especially, the rights of women, minority rights and the rights of persons with special needs. On the other hand, all of these media favour "light entertainment", violence and sex, which shows that they are mostly aimed at shaping consumer society and creating a consumer, not a free and cultivated citizen.

- How large is the distance between nature and culture today?

- The distance is drastic. The natural world is endangered. Culture hasn’t protected it. Man has devastated his habitat on earth. The basic elements of life, water, air and soil are desecrated. It is forgotten that natural systems have limited capacities. Artificial innovations have penetrated the ozone layer. The Sun, hitherto the source of energy and light, has turned into an immense threat. Modern technology has put the pragmatic interests of unreasonable "progress" in the foreground. A civilisation of waste is being created, reflecting the ugliness of the contemporary world and poisoning nature. The empirical picture is dreadful. Both in the world and in Serbia alike. Environment pollutants are almost invincible. Many people have no love for clear streams and rivers. Chemical substances released from factories seriously threaten man’s health, as well as plant and animal species. There is no end to human arrogance and laws are without effect if not implemented properly. The planet is endangered. Unfortunately, man has proved to be the main pollutant of the environment. What is worst of all, man is still unaware that his fierce hand raised against nature is the same hand raised against humanity. That’s why individual ecology is unavoidable. In any case, the need to protect nature and natural resources is, with reason, dramatic at this point, because the quality of life is deteriorating and everyday life style perturbed due to the degradation of nature. Thus, everyday culture is ruined.

- Is there any free time left for culture in today’s conditions of highly intensified communication and a consumer society? What’s the greatest problem?

- Free time has brought problems not only historically, but problems that are difficult to solve at all. The dynamics of free time, relaxation, entertainment and the development of one’s personality are impacted by many intermediaries among which are new technologies. Aggressive advertising has become man’s time-killer and a form of perfidious violence. Its most divergent aspects of expression build and demolish the style of everyday life. Thus the net of addiction is being spread. The feeling of boredom is a drastic problem of free time. A philosopher would say that boredom is a "road to nothing". Others claims that boredom is a disease of imagination. True, boredom is nothing but the dead time of existence, life without active thoughts and without creative relation towards reality. It is a time of anxiousness and tedium. And what is the worst of all is that it is time devoid of either interest or curiosity alike. It is said that modern man has lost the sense of wonder. Because the ability "to wonder is the beginning of wisdom", modern man has sunk into an unnatural indifference followed by feelings of frivolity and "modern" insensitivity. Today, unfortunately, those who are always bored, even independently of "specific" external influences, multiply. They are bored as such!

- What is the influence of the media on our journey?

- That influence is of the greatest importance, sometimes adequate, sometimes controversial. Journalists are, actually, the promoters of values, including the importance of travelling. In researching acceptable life forms, a journalist becomes an irreplaceable critical mirror. In that, a journalist will be successful only if he possesses a sense of the essential, of the sense and values of travelling. When caught in the net of commercialism and conformism, when cajoling the lowest taste, a journalist betrays his profession.

- Is there any good news about travelling?

- Recently, some good news has turned up. The white Schengen visa list seems to have become our reality. Liberalisation and abolition of the visa regime will perhaps erase the memory of those awful lines in front of foreign embassies, which amounted to terrible humiliations. To begin travelling normally, our country will have to persist in stamping out corruption and organised crime. And when people begin travelling again, it will be proof that we are not hostages of a closed society.

- We know that you have travelled extensively. How would you personally define travels?

- I don’t like the act of travelling, but I do like to arrive to the country of my destination. I have always dreamed of materialising in an instant from my apartment at Zeleni Venac in Belgrade to some place else, of my own choice. To be honest, I must admit that I like returning the most of all. This is what happened to me when I travelled to America, Russia, France, Italy. Everywhere! I don’t like travelling as a task and obligation. I like when discovering the unknown goes quietly – when I slowly see otherness, difference and uncovered pulses. Objective and subjective unexpectedness is close to me. The most important to me is to turn events, small and big, into experiences, into vivid directness. Noise infuriates me and makes me restless almost to despair. "Disturbance" is something I find unbearable. In travels, as in life, I hate pressure the most. That’s why I don’t like travel arrangements as offered in advertisements nor do I like aggressive persuasion. I have never travelled in groups nor in packet-arrangements because such collective psychology is unbearable to me.

- What haven’t you forgotten from these travels?

- I remember late afternoons in Paris, bistros at the Seine, the verticals of New York, the murmurs of Italian squares, the tranquility of mountains in the early morning while the air is still crisp, evenings of total rest and surrender somewhere at the Mediterranean. The enchanting beauty of Tunisia and Egypt.

- Where is our travel taking us in the quest of Culture, where are we bound for at all? What is the change you consider the most important?

- Changing one’s self. It is the precondition not to be left without courage, passion or dreams. This enables us not to go downstream towards collective hopelessness and not to sink into the total average. To agree to the pressures of mind, knowledge and wisdom means to settle accounts with the self – without mercy. It is at the same time also a blow to our vices, narrowness and prejudices. Not to agree to predominant uncritical thinking and trivialisation of reality leads us to deny the "cheapness" of low taste and banality.

- Perhaps it would be advisable to return to Serbia and to attempt to understand the vestiges of time in our culture? What would be a dark side of these vestiges?

- Kitsch is with us in all areas of human life – from fashion to politics. Political stereotype kitsch is the purest form. The media, and above all television, incline to all sorts of kitsch. Kitsch has found its most secure basis in political extremism. We are witness to bad political theatre with untalented actors engaged in a brutal performance. It is the spectacle of high risk. "Patriots" are the noisiest in this theatre. Their overly heavy words appear fatal and evil. Charged with hateful passion they live in both virtual and parallel worlds. They can only feel themselves as saviors and messiahs. Their demands in the style of all-or-nothing have ended as nothing. Passionate patriots and feebleminded warmongers seem to have been necessary for our belligerent neo-primitivism. This was most convincing, as was seen in the nationalist orgies – induced by cajoling media and folklore trash that ended in chauvinism. The environment in which all this can exist and does exist is the birth place of the most vulgar kitsch. It is a clear indicator of the destruction of the scale of values.

- "Culture is everything from reality to eternity" wrote Hellenist Miloš Đurić in 1929. How can we let Culture find its way to us independently and teach us the joy of life in the new millenium?

- Modern societies have become too insensitive to the entire domain of play. Theoreticians of culture dramatically call attention to the fact that play in modern culture does not have the important role it had in the Greek and Latin traditions. Techno-economic civilisation has reduced its presence. Homo ludens is endangered because he remains without inner contents and inner dynamics. The reconstruction of everyday as a style of man’s active and creative self-confirmation is unimaginable without the fertile experiences of play. Outside enforced and imposed order, in the inseparable unity of reality and non-reality, play can be found where man realizes his dream about his completeness and freedom of being. It is widely considered that modern man is not accustomed to play in the world. The worst is that the rules of that play appear as fate and the "player as a toy". And that is the reason for restlessness, because the borders of human freedom are at the same time the borders of play that is the foundation of culture.

- We have finished our "road to Katmandu" not leaving Belgrade because sometimes it is better to search for culture in the self. We don’t have to wander through the wide world searching for it because it can be discovered in this era only in confirmed, mostly hidden fields of the planet Earth. Because, this true, most valuable and genuine Culture of our civilisation is actually the most distant from its creator, man and the public, placed deeply in our free spirit.

Prof. Ratko Božović, PhD, graduated from the Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy and received his doctor’s degree in 1971. His narrow specialisation: theory and sociology of culture, the sociology of free time and the sociology of art. He was the Head of the Department of Sociology of Culture and Cultural Policy in the graduate department at the Faculty of Political Sciences. He lectured at the Faculty of Drama Arts and the Faculty of Fine Arts, at the Faculty of Philology at the Department of Sociology of Language and Literature in graduate studies and professor in the graduate department at the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade. He is currently teaching at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Belgrade and the Faculty of Visual Arts in Podgorica.   Works: The Culture of Free Time (1971), Metamorphoses of Play (1972), The Challenges of Free Time (1975), Doubts About Culture (1978), The Labyrinth of Culture (1984), Under Question Mark (1985), Through Red (1989), Cult – hoorah (1990), The Nightmare (1990), The Report From A Madhouse (1992), The Broken Mirror (1997). The Travel Into Night (1997), Zero Point (1997), Seven Men From Stradija (1998), The Book Of No Use (1999), Without Mask (1999), The Seventh Heaven (200), The Diary 2000 (2000), Domination and Resistance (2000), In Search For Leisure (2004), Fooleries of Mind (2006), Lexicon of Culture (2006), From Stradija to Stradija (2007), The Point (2007)