"There is nothing like a catastrophe to mark the beginning of another millennium. It renews the time just like a cataract renew the used water. Therefore, it is the time that we shall all miss, the real time. If there is no year 2000, it will be so because the time will simply disappear just like winter did at certain latitudes".

-- Baudrillard, Cool Memories

How to use the energy of catastrophe, and is the thing that is happening today really a renewal of time?

In his book "The Years Eaten by Locusts" Borisav Pekic anticipated the renewal of time here in the Balkans. The time structure round which this book has been built shapes itself into a seemingly simple texture. The prison diary, written in the years after the World War II, is re-written and copied in the mid 80's, while the footnotes contain the comments from the time when this text is being adapted. Such a book structure seems to emphatically substantiate the idea that in this part of the world every history, including a personal one, is seen as a series of interactions between the past and the present, as a balance of history structure never finally established. In his comments, Pekic, while unmasking his own naivety, warns all those who are coming that the deceit is essential, constitutive element of any epoch-making process.

He realize that it is possible to use this energy of the catastrophe to ensure one's own survival and production, but only if one stays on the margins of great historic movements. In some science fiction situation this time structure based on great historic events could be visualized as the intersection of numerous canals, where each individual cross section reminds of circles made by a pebble thrown into the water. A traveller through time could expect that changes are possible, but only on the peripheries of great events, far from the centres of these time canals. That is why there is a growing interest in the biographies of marginalised people, like chambermaids, cooks, nannies, who happened to be near the centre by pure coincidence. Finally, we are talking about the biographic notes of a secondary schoolboy who is reduced to being the subject of re-education, or more precisely, the material for investigator's practice. By using his own example Pekic showed that after every catastrophe emerge new loners. He also pointed that the way of using that energy depends, first of all, on the kind of interaction between the ions and the changed time structure.

We are witnessing one more substitution of reality, when some images of reality are substituted by others. These other images are quite different from those that we used to look at. The images of unhindered progress have been replaced by the images of catastrophe. The idyllic images of pensioners watching children's playing in the park have been replaced by the sights of people rummaging the litter bins or waiting in endless queues. Optimistic looks into the bright future changed into looks full of fear and uncertainty.

All these images are floating in a nebulous, chaotic galaxy and letting everybody organize his own meeting with reality, unimpeded and almost to his own choice, but a meeting forever missed. In this Brown's movement of extremely varied images, a particular phenomenon can be discerned on the horizon of meaningfulness. It is the phenomenon of repeats, that is, of repetition, that spread from TV screens through the living world.

We can watch the repeats of already forgotten series that had become the part of the history of TV. We can see on the screen a short history of special effects, whose naivety attract again the attention of technological monarches.

We also have the repeats of films which are most frequently grouped according to types such as erotic, science fiction, thrillers and home films. This taxonomy partly resembles the often quoted Borhes's "a certain Chinese encyclopaedia" in which the animals can belong to the following types: 1) those that belong to the Emperor, 2) those that smell nicely, 3) those that are tame, 4) little pigs, 5) mermaids, 6) monsters, 7) dogs at large, 8) those which are included in this classification, 9) those that get excited like madmen, 10) those that are numberless, 11) those that have been drawn by a thin brush made of camel's hair, 12) those who have broken the jug and 13) those that resembles flies at a distance.

Even news journals are repeated, and they seem to confirm that all TV news, from the very first broadcast till today, are nothing but the readings of tomorrow's newspapers by the authorized announcer. There are repeats of live broadcasts, ranging from pre-election confrontations to panels of intellectuals, who, even when they change their side, they keep telling one and the same story, believing that they are confirming the universality of their viewpoints. So we are being offered again the segments of subjective histories which could be more or less put under the heading "the best years of our lives". In the middle age crisis, fathers and mothers would like a repeat of their first loves with all those furtive looks and holding hands. We would all want, more or less, to repeat family rituals that were buried together with the grandmother, hoping that their homes can thus become the islands of civic meaning.

What is the function of these repeats in the general repetition of images?

One could say that in a closed society in which every contact with the outside world has been reduced to a minimum, the repeats of the elements or the fragments of one's own life that remained relatively undamaged seem to be the only way out. Of course that such a standpoint that is based on the economics of a concentration camp is a shaky one. That is so because Robin Hood syndrome has already spread in these parts, where, as is known, he takes from those who have in order to give to those who have not. In the world of high technology that is done by simply pressing the button.

The repeats, in this case, have the function similar to the psychoanalytical compulsion of repetition whose function is to help get over a traumatic experience. Every repetition brings out a certain difference. This minute change happens at a few levels, just like the butterfly effect in the theory of chaos where, as is known, one stroke of butterflies' wings on Galapagos can cause a typhoon in Okinawa.

What kind of difference is it? The kind of difference that arises every time a person faces the change of his own historic situation by the mere act of repetition of a fragment from some past situation. The repeat brings back old memories which are proof that nothing is the same any more and that nothing will be the same again. Repetition creates conditions for a possible, but so far missed, meeting with reality which, thanks to incidents and mistakes, get into the symbolic universe of a subject. When the substitution of some images of reality by other images is completed, a person, indulging in the games of repetition up to that moment, picks up the remote control, honestly believing that, thanks to that button, somebody will eventually tell him what name to call this different reality.

"I want to listen to Bach and to remain alone for some time, a day, a month, a year, an eternity". One could say that this is a common sentence for lovers of Bach or any other composer, when they feel a little tired of all that surrounds them. New loners, like particles trapped in Brown's movement, live in a great hurry, surrounded by people coming and going and trying to stay in touch by postcards, phone calls and faxes. New loneliness means to be within a network, among the screens, and to be very, very lonely. A subject, in this case, is, as Lacan would say, just a screen for some other screen or some other, already "screened"subject. The paradox of new loneliness does not lie in the fact that everybody wants to do things for which he hasn' t got any time. On the contrary, it is based on the fact that everybody has everything he wants.

Thus, time ends up in a noose, which is most frequently called a personal history. How to listen to Bach? Should one listen to Bach, or to be more precise, is it possible to listen to Bach any longer? How to do that if everything is reduced to a tiny personal history, to an autism of a pocket calculator. In fact, art helps opening up, its role is not to create a small, closed world, but to build up bridges and connect different worlds by expressing the inexpressible. Bach in Belgrade, under a blanket, with a glassy look reflecting the cold blue of the TV screen, is just a first step to the loneliness. We are witnessing the disappearance of politics in Belgrade for years. At the time of real socialism anybody who was seriously into culture had no ideal what the name of the current Minister for Culture was. Today the very same people frown at the thought who might be the minister of culture should the opposition win the elections. That is the same situation which puzzled Adorno - why in every analyst's office one can see kitsch replicas of Vienna motifs? It is probably the only kind of respect that the analysts could pay to their father, the great man from Vienna.

The "old" Belgrade is mostly missed by those who left it and now just occasionally drop by to finish a thing or two and to see the family. They would like that nothing could change, even at the price that those who remained start dying of boredom. Belgrade has always had fragmented islands of meaning, in the general lethargy of faith in the king or better future. These islands were not, as the new wave dissidents wrongly interpreted it, the centres of resistance to some political oligarchy, but the last blurred images on the horizon of sense. This is something that Europe has never understood and due to that, local intellectuals, especially those inspired by French culture, feel abandoned and helpless. Belgrade surrealism and Balkans Barbarogenius are quite all right, but that complicates the scheme of reciprocity that Europe tried to establish with its periphery, even though "Anti-Oedipus" had not been written yet at the time.

There is no longer the memory of those who left, nor of those who stayed and live a couple of trolley buses away. The nets that are build on memories are painful today and reveal weaknesses. Nobody bothers to dial somebody just like that, but does it only if he needs something. On one side, that is the only way to survive, but on the other side, it is a fractal of political unconscious.

There are no more lovers in Belgrade, there are only the deceivers and the deceived. That is a matter of heritage whose framework is made of Eastern despotism. Its traces today come through in the so called "women's nets". through which the information which is more or less relevant flow. It is is a monstrous classification, not based on what sex you are, but on whether you are informed or not. That is so, even though everybody listens to some background noise and everybody knows at least a tiny bit of information. How come? Lovers would like to enjoy every fragment of their relation, although they are constantly destroying and rebuilding it with their looks, touches, movements. The relation is always focused on through a different event. Some people are just grabbing from others, squeezing from the relationship the last quanta of energy and using every look or touch to create yet another field of black market. It it the working of politically subconscious which repeats the patterns from everyday life within which the grabbing is understood as the condition for one's own survival.

"The truth is is kind of deception, without which a certain kind of human beings could not live". I am trying to clarify this Nietzsche's thought through an odd piece of conversation repeated after many years. It runs: "What if all we know about is a lie?" This sentence takes me a number of years back, back to the conversation about Castaneda and his learning when the man I was talking to utters almost identical sentence. That is not important, was my answer, for in particular situations and maybe even in whole historic periods, the only thing that pushes us forward is the energy of deception. Later, much later, this deception creates notions - I tried to quote an example from arts or sciences, to outline the part of the structure which is deception, but my friend interrupted me, telling me that I am difficult, stubborn and too serious. And the same thing happened in both conversations held on autumn days many years apart. Confidential stories about mutual friends end up as handing over the relay in a relay race, one way or another.

Friendships do not break up - they go dumb.

Belgrade images are monstrous dubbing of fragments of interiors and exteriors in which a body and its speech occur in broken, almost unlinkable pieces. Love for restaurants comes form the fact that they are the space between the street and the home, though, at the same time, they are neither of the two. The body appears there only through its touches, embraces, waving, facial expressions, seen only through brief looks, flashes and particular restaurant lights. People tried to achieve this effect at city parties, when the most successful ones were those that ended in a typical restaurant atmosphere. As for the strategies of body appearance, the restaurants and parties are two facets of the same coin. However, with the destruction of myth about restaurants and parties, the body disappears too, or to be more precise, one particular model of reception vanishes, the model which implied something of the kind of Kant's moral imperative and his universal tendencies. That is why Belgrade was shocked when first stories about secondary school children's parties came into public. Nobody noticed that something which Lacan would call Sade's motto was really in effect for a long time: "I have the right to enjoy my body, and I will fullfil my right and nothing will stop me from satisfying all the appetites and desires that I can think of". Sade's motto reflects the truth of Kant's imperative, but this time it is really the hypocricy of a generation that was transformed, without noticing, into something different, into parents, warriors, politicians without questioning the particular model of body reception. Their children did it for them at their parties, but the parents being morally disgusted failed to see that the disappearance of the body, or more precisely, the wearing out of a model of reception became the constituitive element of tragedy in which they, too, take part, while voicing their disgust.

"O, my friends, there are no friends", quotes Derrida in the centre of Belgrade, "this is a quotation of a proverb attributed to Aristotle". Any talk of about the politics of friendships should imply that we are trapped "all of us are trapped in a kind of heteronomic and asymmetric distortion of our society, in a relation towards others determined even before any organised "socius", before any "direction", before any "law". Why? Simply because "ZOOROPA effect" is in action when it comes to any kind of calculating and determining. Any view on this city, no matter how kind it may be in its intentions, makes its inhabitants feel as is they are in a ZOO. The monkeys, watched dully by freshly arrived visitors, pretend to be natural for a few peanuts. This fullfilment of the wishes of a visitor questions his structural place, but, first of all, it questions the meaning he intended to attiributed to the whole field.

We should carefully watch the film of Peter Greenaway "A Zed and Two Noughts" from 1985. The story takes place in a zoo and around it, so in a place whose only function is to have some beings looked at, observed. It is thanks to that function that ZOO, a specific institution of the Western culture, is analogous to galleries and museums. In modernity the institutions are the only way to organize the observing, the watching. That is why the growing and differentiation of institutions (even in similar registers) of moderna lead to panopticum (Benjamin, Foucault). On the other side, this analogy with galleries and museums is not accidental, for it establishes a certain symmetry according to which the art in these institutions is as "alive" as those animals in the ZOO, just as those animals are as "dead" as the institutionalized art. To be exposed to watching within particular institutions means to be part of this symmetry between "the living and the dead", whose intertwining questions the relation towards the Other.

The otherness appears in the double role then.On one side, theoretically speaking,Other is thought of as a structure without which the whole field would not function at all. In brief, the otherness as a structure is the expression of a posible world. On the other side, the Others as a difference, as the right to be different multiplies ad infinitum so as to hide away the racism behind the logic of the difference. "ZOOROPA effect" is the outcome of precisely that intention to remain the master of the general symbols of otherness and differences, the master of the world, and to do that through the altruistic respect of the right to being different. Those who do not see the difference, who do not take part in the game of differences, in that monstrous symmetry of "the living and the dead", have thus chosen death. On the other side, the arrogance of the observers makes them blind to the fact that they too are being watched and thus drawn into a network of watching with unforeseeable effects. In fact, they have never recognised an evil look behind the thing they are watching with their warm, altruistic eyes.

When Enzesberger was in Belgrade he was asked how a wise man should behave in this historical situation. He replied that everybody should do his job. This is no longer the position of the wise man from Plato's "The State", but a cynical position which one adopts in this part of the world even against his will. Why? Simply because that is the outcome of structural shifting. In this city everything normal sounds cynical for a very simple reason - there is nothing that could be established as a framework of "normality" round which the fragments of sense would gravitate. The endless shifting of sense, as the substitute for the eternal recurrence of the same, leads to a completely different establishment of inter-subjective networks.

How is such a field structured? Mere joining of the institutions with the already fixed rules of the game, where it it enough to repeat already coded phrases like the heros of "The Red and the Black" do, is no longer enough after the fall of the Berlin wall. That does not mean that there are no rules of the game, but that there is no stage any more and the acting and prescribing become one and the same thing. In some kind of Heiddegerian event or Baudrillar's ecstasy of communication (whichever) new kind of loneliness is being born. The pathos of the essence keeper, the poetic listening on the clearing in the woods or the frenzied appearing on the screen, are the strategies of representation, about whose possibilities of rational or wilful choice we should yet to think about. All this is happening in momentary emissions of time and no one know where the next event is leading him to. That punctuality of time makes it possible to realise the meaning, not through the mosaic structure any longer, but through the fluxes of different intensities.

Plutarch quotes the anecdote about Solon, who walked out of one of the first theatre plays, even before the setting up of the competitions for tragedies. "Not much time will elapse, before the consequences of such fictions become visible in the relations among people", he replied to Thespid, whose viewpoint was that is was all just a play. This anecdote raises a question: Isn' t a tragedy, as a completely new paradigm, at the same time the first document of the civilisation which announces the necessity of the renewal of time through a catastrophe? Catastrophe should be understood, above all, as a sudden, radical change of a system from one state of affairs into another. We also should not forget that tragedy is not just one of the arts forms, but a social institution which came into the same level with political and judiciary bodies of the city state by the establishment of competitions in tragedy. So this anecdote shows us that the renewal of time is anticipated from the field which is today classified as the notion of arts, or more widely, the notion of culture. It also warns us that it is not accidental that audia and visual products are the subject of global trade agreements today. Even today there is a Thespid who believes that it is just a question of playing, without recognizing behind the benign products of fiction the new patterns which will change the relations among people. On the other side, there are maybe some wise men, who, like Solon, shake their heads, but the working of the cataract is unstoppable. Finally, maybe there are no wise men any more who could grasp the idea of time in their thoughts. Maybe this ability of grasping of such radical changes is placed in some other plane and is sliding between the screens in completely different registers. We should look somewhere behind the stage of Zooropa - U2, among the screens, where Bono's voice still echoes:

"Hello, hello, mister President please, yes, yes, Bono speaking, I' ve got something to tell him, yes, hello, to tell him.".

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