SI SI 47007574 COLEGIO DE EDUCACION

The approaches outlined above are to an extent all concerned with the social and cultural management of economic transition (feudalism to capitalism, socialism to neoliberalism, peasants to factories etc.). On the one hand we have the various operations of control that accompany this transition (ideological interpellation, consensus, habitus, governmentality etc.) and on the other something we may call resistance, whether in the form of culture, class or subjectivity, which are not exclusive but produce each other. This thesis will try to speak to this tension as it unfolds through the various transitions that have taken and are still taking place in post-socialist

Macedonia. The thread of the argument will oscillate between four main points: first, the prevalence of perceptions of the economy as an embedded activity bounded by social relations of mutuality and redistribution; second, the historically changing ways in which the argument for embeddedness is being articulated by workers deprived of the currency of socialism and class as rallying points; third, the specific consequences this has for the articulation and integrity of the moral person; and fourth, the political

challenge this poses for the state and the centripetal forces of neoliberalism, particularly efforts to wither away the welfare state and introduce the arrival of homo-economicus. I use the latter term duplicitously to refer to neoliberalism both as an “art of government” in the Foucauldian sense (neoliberal rationality), and to the process of liberalization, marketization and state withdrawal that succeeded the socialist project (neoliberal capitalism) (see Ferguson 2009).

I suggest that act of rejection of socialism can be seen as part of the ritual unmaking of a social structure and the specific subjects that populate it. One useful way to approach this is through Turner’s reworking of Van Gennep’s concept of liminality. Van Gennep (1960) challenged the naturalist models of human development of his day by

demonstrating that the “journey through life” and the various transitions from one social position to another was never complete unless socially sanctioned through a carefully orchestrated ritual process. He dubbed this process the “rites of passage” and separated its functions into three distinct stages: separation, margin and aggregation. In the first stage an individual is detached from her existing place in the structure, in the second (liminal) phase she acquires ambiguous characteristics, belonging neither to the

previous nor the coming state; and the third stage the person is reincorporated in a new stable social position. Turner took on the middle liminal stage as much more than merely one more necessary component for reproducing structure. He writes that people resort to a variety of systems of classification that “keep chaos at bay” whilst in the process stifling discovery and innovation. Yet guided by the “need” to “live breathe and generate novelty” they create “by structural means” an “antistructural” liminal space where novel “suppositions, desires, hypotheses, possibilities all become legitimate” (Turner 1991: vii). Liminality is thus important not only in the ritual transition of

subjects from one social position to another within the structure, but also for introducing unforeseen changes to that structure.

Though I find certain elements of Turner’s model useful, particularly the emphasis on liminality as the site of uncharted possibilities, there are others that I expressly wish to reject; such as the implicit teleological modernism that sees liminality as part of а historical forward movement, oscillating between stable structure and controlled chaos. Also I find problematic Turner’s assertion that the transition of the subject is almost always a social movement from “low” to “high” (ibid: 197). To proceed along these lines would be to tell the story of how the old “worker” had to be undone or separated from the socialist system and tossed into an anti-structural liminal stage (of precarious unemployment), where subjects are neither what they were (the failed vanguard of

socialism) nor what are yet to become (free and prosperous entrepreneurs). Finally, order would be restored based on the ethics of market behaviour and everyone will assume their place in the new and improved system. To do this would be to fall right into the teleological web of the great neoliberal transformation (or even that of the socialist modernism preceding it).

I take a hint from Ferguson here in assuming a non-linear, non-teleological approach in order to “follow a range of reactions and strategies that shift over time in ways that do not sustain a simple linear narration” (1999: 20). From the standpoint of people caught up in the transition, liminality itself appears as the new norm. One popular joke frames this well: ‘The finance minister said Macedonia will not be affected by the global crisis. We’re already in a crisis for twenty years now!’ The seemingly endless perpetuation of this precarious state of affairs is seen as absurd and people seem perpetually caught in a state of flux. In contrast, by-gone socialist times have mnemonically crystalized as the loci of stability and abundance. When making inquiries about socialism people often told me that “Back then you would be given work [always] according to your

qualifications.” The wording is important here. One did not find work during socialism, one was given it by the state which had the moral responsibility and authority to

delegate employment in accordance with people’s needs and abilities. It was the big Other guaranteeing a semblance of order that has now withdrawn to the much humbler role of a distant administrator. In other narrative reconstructions of the past it was the loss of the socialist firm that went hand in hand with the disruption of the

developmental cycle of families and the dis-ordering of public space. As one of my neighbours put it when referring to the demise of Astibo, the local garment producing giant:

“All the workers there knew that there was always work there for their children. They even gave out stipends for the workers’ children to go on studies. But all of their kids had a guaranteed job there. Such a nice place it was, the town really was a beautiful place. Everything was clean and tidy. Now it’s all shabby and filthy it makes my soul cry. We were the regional center before and now all the nearby towns are ahead of us, we’re the

forgotten place.”

With the cycle in tatters, new flexible labour regimes have introduced a kind of

“permanent state of economic emergency” (Žižek 2010) but also a crisis of personhood (Cohen 1974: 58). No longer the vanguard of society and lacking a clear narrative and symbolic subject position in the new order, workers struggle with the subjective

experience of becoming “matter out of place” (Douglas [1966] 2001: 36), in many ways resembling those lost souls in the senseless hallways of Fredric Jameson’s swanky Westin Bonaventura Hotel (Ortner 2005: 45). Jameson is here basically referring to the stultifying effects of alienation in late capitalism, characterized by social confusion and spatial disorder, which has the makings of a world drained of meaning and affect and populated by disoriented subjects devoid of historical purpose (Jameson 1984).

There are certainly traces of these effects in the landscape of post-socialist Macedonia. In her book titled Waiting for Macedonia that focused on a group of young female engineers in Skopje in the period from 1988 to 1996, Ilka Thiessen writes that the Beckett-inspired title sprang from the way in which people of different backgrounds recounted their experiences of postsocialism and post-Yugoslavism. Much like the famous play, the starting (and ending) point is a resounding “Nothing to be done”. Macedonia is “a non-subject of action, from neither the inside nor the outside: the story of Macedonia neither creates nor resolves conflicts, does not develop either ethical or

political programs of reform, and it does not offer meaning for its human existence. Every interpretation is null. There is no direction and no aim” (Thiessen 2007: 14).

For many Macedonians, Yugoslav membership was the tether connecting them to a European community of civilization, progress and modernity as opposed to the dark pre-Yugoslav, orientalist history of a backward peasantry dominated by Ottoman rule (Thiessen 2007: 35; Graan 2010: 838). The demise of Yugoslav socialism and the ‘transition’ towards an imagined European future of economic prosperity and job security that will resurrect the middle class consumer, has made the present appear as a liminal phase filled with disorder and insecurity but also with desires of reconstitution (Turner 1991: vii). Ferguson has defined the experience of people caught up in this process as one of abjection, a term adapted from Kristeva, signifying a process “of being thrown aside, expelled or discarded … but … also being thrown down – thus expulsion, but also debasement and humiliation” (Ferguson 1999: 236). This implies the loss, rather than the lack of a world of amenities and the loss of a sense of

connectedness with a larger world of modern “first class citizens”.

This experience becomes particularly visible through the breakdown of the myth of linear modernization in the face of total economic collapse. A “myth” is after all “not just a mistaken account” of reality, “but a cosmological blueprint that lays down fundamental categories and meanings for the organization of experience” (Ferguson 1999: 13). It is in this sense that we can follow Verdery in approaching post-socialist change as a “problem of reorganization on a cosmic scale” that involves the “reordering of people’s entire meaningful worlds … including morality, social relations and basic meanings” (1999: 35). On the one hand this experience augments their sense of

precarious insecurity and can be politically demobilizing. On the other hand workers do not remain entirely passive and people are everyday caught in a struggle “to make sense

of their experience and to find new ways of conceptualizing the broad social and economic changes that rock their lives” (Ferguson 1999: 14). As Anderson contends, it is precisely when subjects reflect on their involvement in a situation of absurdity that they begin to open up the individual or collective imagination to the possibility of alternatives (2013: 478). But what might such alternatives be and what kinds of political subjects do they involve in the case of post-socialist Macedonia?