Cooperation, Collaboration or What?
*please free to join this conversation.
Srdjan Normal:
Trebor, in your text on "working together" on the Free Cooperation List you write:
"In post-WWII times, for instance, Slovenians and Croatians were portrayed on Serbian Television broadcasts as Nazi sympathizers. Today, the Slovenian group "Laibach" provokes the audience with references to these historical traumas with post-industrial music."
We were told in the school that Kolaborator was the word used by the communist propaganda in the former Yugoslavia, for sure, yes. However, there was always a noun, of whom the kolaborator was associated with, and the noun had a national note. So you had people saying kolaborator in different languages or accents that signified whether we were talking of a good or a bad one (usually they were all bad, but at certain times collaborating with the Russians was ok, as well as collaboration with English, French and Americans was seen fine). In fact, this process of negative connotation, called: the labeling of the internal enemy, or the purge, was often ending up in a Rashomon effect of over-labeling (of the Kurosawa's movie) quite often in the critical press, for years.
However, in this quote above, I think that you point to the "doers" of political 'software' that was at hand, a very crude one, that had its sparks during the collapse of the political hardware. Still, as we were taught, and we kind of know the history, that Slovenian and Croatian governments, at the time of the WWII euphoria, were voluntarily or opportunistically in the Nazi system. One cannot deny that. This does not mean that their people were voluntarily in that system, which we also know now. Take the communists that sprang the partisan resistance in Yugoslavia: Tito himself was Slovenian, from a Croatian border, and Edvard Kardelj, the main ideologue of the liberal Communist Yugoslavia was Slovenian as well.
Trebor Scholz:
The term "collaborator" is still brutally loaded. In German, French, Hebrew, and Dutch the term for sure is referring still to Nazi collaborators. We can't just ignore that people use the word that way.
I was not pointing fingers at the Serbian government but gave the broadcasts as example of the use of the term, which was correct as indeed, like you say, Croats and Slovenians were collaborating with the Nazis.
SN:
This is a historical fact..as much as it is that Bosnian Serbs shelled Sarajevo, and Montenegrin officers, under the Yugoslava army bombed Dubrovnik "in order to rebuild it more beautiful and older" and Americans bombed Belgrade in order to initiate democracy. In my opinion, loaded terms are all over the place, perhaps this is why net-works, net-timing, and virtual architecture, and analogical architectures, succeed in inventing, or hybridizing new terms, that often sound non-human, robotic or else, however, the distinction between human and inhuman, is analogous to the fabricated distinction between nature and the human environment, like the city. Thus you have a lot of
jumble, which we also like sometimes for perverse pleasures, however with a tag that they don't last, they are self-determinable, and need to be replaced. Still we are dealing with the accumulation of the junk terminology...
TS:
I find the term "Free Cooperation" cuts you loose from many other connotations. The way Christoph Spehr describes Free Cooperation is inspiring for me. It's quite an helpful term to avoid the unclear terminology. I'm not sure, however, if the term can really replace all others. Free cooperation is not collaboration. It refers to quite a specific concept that Spehr developed in "Gleicher als andere." Another aspect that is left out is that of the gendering of the term, which was brought up by Stefan Roemer.
SN:
In that light, a debate on the meanings of collaboration is very much needed and it may be fantastic to do on a larger scale. The questions is: what would one do with the result, after the term becomes potentially absolved (and that is a Catholic tradition...to be absolved from the sins say a couple of Hail Marries instead of Heil H...you know whom I mean).
TS:
How can this all become concrete and real in the world? We need to be specific about the kind of practices that will emerge out of our cooperations. Whom do we support when working together?
There is a wide array of cooperative practices that we will look at in this conference. Despite their specific differences these projects have much in common. Issues of scalability, (collective) leadership, goals, crediting, rules, motivations, micro-sociology, organizational structures, independence, individuation, solidarity, competition, play, sustainability, equality, and organizational tools are overarching.
SN:
The senses react when the terms, or the meanings, reach beyond self-organizing potential, like when they get national, or class-like. To hash-out clichés would be one option to proceed in order to move beyond mere project to 'clear' the term from its accumulated meanings.
Another telling example, of when and how sometimes the accumulated meanings get back in use, is the New York Times reporting on the Sadam's capture. Instead of saying that he was swearing like hell (in Arabic) during the investigation, they wrote that "he was exercising his French" which is an old English slang, politically, but not nationally correct.
So...what are you actually trying to do here? Are there any fears attached to this quest of clearing out the load for "collaboration"? And, what is very important, who today is still remembering this abuse of the term, in connection to the finger-point-you-are-Nazi propaganda? It would be curious to know whether there are communities that (like Jewish organizations in fear of a repeating the holocaust) act today.
TS:
The term collaborator is still burdened with heavy historical baggage.   I'm not imagining it- I see it over and over in conversations. That may change over the years. Which terms do you suggest?