The relation between polemos and logos, war and language, involves in its game even those who want to escape from the concrete context. The most striking

are the actions of intellectuals who refuse direct engagement, but yet draw attention to the practices which they abstain or dissasociate themselves from. In the symbolic space, they set themselves up as the screens for virtual worlds, which may seem as warnings or correctives for our reality. In that sense, the disassembly of all kinds of identities, pointing out the flimsiness of the ground and the foundations, generating the nomadic, aesthetic discourse, insisting upon transience and perpetual renewal, the semantic multiplication of meanings in language, and the input of diverse interpretative points into every text appears as the best strategy of resistance to the effects produced by the war on the ex-Yugoslav territory which represented itself as founding (legitimate) violence by which identities and their territories are defended and remodelled afresh. Internationally, and in our country as well, the above described practice of the disassembly of identities is best legitimated by the periodicals production.

Our "registering in the book of history" has, both realistically and symbolically, foiled the printing of great theoretical volumes, monuments and mausoleums of certain "abstract" pretentions. Instructions for retaining "the sense of flying" (Oliva), as well as accounts of travels in ever since-already-unfamiliar, but still related languages, etc. loomed up before us. What could have been an outcome of a consciousness-regaining game in other countries a few decades ago, what used to be proclaimed whim or fashion, in this country proved to be the only adequate response to the proliferation of the truculent, centrist, introverted, agoraphobic thought formations. Where war was chosen instead of modernization, a death bell tolls for great theories, but also for "the little stories" which aspire to absolute uniqueness, untranslatability, to diversity indifferent towards its own consequences. A new field for connecting the ethical and the political, the aesthetic and the communicative, the theoretical and the real, the artistic and the linguistic, the seductive and the "serious", has been opened; a field in which the specific detachment and differentiation of these spheres has been preserved. Thus, certain standards have been imposed upon one (still basically) totalitarian reality, and in respect to them this reality constantly has to define itself (even though it were against its will). These standards delineate new limits below which no relevant work must fall, without compromising itself before its potential recipients, who are directed towards individual researches in the field which is certainly just outlined in the periodicals.

The price which our periodicals had to pay to "the spirit of the times", epically inclined, and imbued with politics to the very core, at the same time disclosed all the weaknesses of their textual and communicative strategies. If we have to judge the height of that price by the losses, we will certainly halt, bewildered, before the fact that in 1994 the University Library collected 34,576 periodicals, of which merely 404 were from the present Yugoslavia; out of those, 361 belonged to existing, and 43 to new publications. Ideas (Ideje), Viewpoints (Gledista), Perspectives (Vidici), Culture (Kultura), Works (Dela), Fields (Polja), The Cultures of the East (Kulture istoka), Marxism in the World (Marksizam u svetu), etc. have been erased from the list for a long time now. Their powerful "territorialization", the attachment to the educative, locally-enlightening paradigm and to the publishing houses and institutions, the insufficient exchange of experience and materials with the international scene, slowly pushed those periodicals into the position of marginal producers of discord, needed by no-one. The process of general dissociation had the influence of a catalyst in the deterritorialization of theoretical discourses. Theory in this country moved from university departments, institutes, libraries, from great editorial offices and eminent clubs, into the open space; the things that it had been only describing began to live. Circulations decreased (100 -- 2000), distribution became more difficult, publishing costs went far beyond the publishers' means, so that even periodicals of the highest quality disappeared after putting out a few issues. However, their energy was not lost for good; it rather continued to transform itself and to overflow into the projects which have managed to survive, or played a role in shaping new ones.

Hence, in these circles, periodicals are not merely a collection of notes on the present times; they do not serve just to describe what in this or that moment happened on a certain "scene" (literary, theoretical, artistic, or "cultural" in general). What we call "periodicals" have become foci in which many visions are being generated; the visions of what one day will be our "culture", with all its characteristics of different epochs so peculiarly overflowing and intermingling, with its specific reevaluating attitude towards "tradition", as well as with its refusal to enclose itself into devoted circles in which, by taking fixed positions, the total attitude would be determined according to this or that idea about "our culture" existing in the minds of those who still approach it with a certain rural and marcial disgust. Not looking for recipients in advance, the periodicals have taken over the civilizing, creative role in shaping the new discourses, the nets of connections with and separations from different visual and theoretical dispositions; they have transformed and acquired new formats and new text-processing techniques; they have also introduced some new techniques of presenting the subject matter, which more and more clearly refer to citations, fragments, or palimpsests. There is a process of self-creation at work, which will supposedly finally free us from the rigid "subjects", and put in their place nomads and navigators who will not, in an act of colonial takeover, import various foreign products, but will rather enter, from their own theoretically mediated experience and self-understanding, what Rorty calls the "cultural conversation of mankind". By means of constant "negative work" melting of all safety, discovering and overstepping of boundaries, deciphering of faded signs, reactivation and restructuring of marginalized instances — Erewhonian maps are being constructed, for a different, new country...

Perhaps The Magnet (Magnet), as grey as a drawing in ashes, is the best introduction to the adventure of periodical publications in Yugoslavia. This is a periodical which, in the best tradition of 20th century avantgarde art, precisely by refusing all communication, by hindering and confusing the reader, points out the margins of words and drawings in "the over-stable disharmony" in which we live, and uncompromisingly refuses to facilely accept the worn-out material filling the forms of the total prostitution of quotidian words and images in the media. With their purposefully concocted autism they strive to defend the honour of a future audio-visual game. They speak the truth of our destroyed lives, showing us the remains of the destroyed artistic and literary expression.

The specific political discourse of the pre-war Yugoslav political system vanished among its ruins; nonetheless, the notional apparatuses of the opposing urban and pluralistic political orientations were also buried together with that discourse. Still, "the reconstruction and rebuilding" of the political culture cannot be postponed for the post-war period; the periodicals Serbian Political Thought (Srpska politicka misao) and Dialogue (Dijalog) took over in laying the ground for the exit from the overall social and spiritual crisis, brought about also by the narrowing of political culture to a cluster of political orientations and forms of political participation, which both mold the patterns of political activity. The former of these periodicals according to strict scholarly patterns of stating reasons, referring to sources, and citing empirical research — questions old as well as new paradigms in political theory, political tradition, communication, the forms of individual power in 20th-century Serbia, and the forms of the people's support to such a power (even when it is unsuccessful); the latter endeavours to convey in a popular, but not vulgarized form (which is so frequent in published political material today), the results of opposing viewpoints of intellectuals belonging to different professions and having different opinions about a topic they wish to define. The scrupulousness and high professionalism of the young editorial staff and the contributors to Serbian Political Thought receives its best counterpart precisely in the model of the communication through the media offered by Dialogue; the direct, concise presentation of one's own viewpoint before one's opponents, the ability to intellectually and articulately retort and discipline one's spirit to accept a better argument (which more successfully expresses the interests of the subjects in the discussion), all these are prerequisites for every (and not only political) culture.

The Third Programme (Treci program) still offers highly successfully incorporated thematic blocks, which even in previous times were the best heralds of the world's intellectual movements. There is a valuable novelty in the notes from the philosophical discussions among Yugoslav philosophers of different orientations; they regularly inform us about the quivering and moving layers of our intellectual ground, thus outlining the new splits, the crevices of diverse discourses, the canyons and the new, still rising peaks. Even though it is depressive, our terrain thus presents itself in its changefulness, stratification, in its tectonic unsteadiness, which certainly announce a new and, hopefully, a more passable landscape.

Theoria focused itself, after a number of problems, on the Anglo-American philosophical scene, and it endeavours, with incomparable pedagogical zeal, to inform our public (especially the young) about the heritage of linguistical-analytical philosophy, decision theory, pragmatism and neopragmatism, and the philosophy of mathematics, but it sometimes presents texts of Continental philosophers from other schools who have (more or less successfully) awoken the interest of Anglo-American theoreticians, or have started a dialogue with them.

Erewhon, journal of the Ex-Yu PEN issued in Amsterdam, reveals to us the thoughts from exile, the thoughts of those expelled, condemned, and pushed to the edge by their anthropoemic societies; of those who are refugees even if they are sitting in their homes, in their home towns; of those who have been declared to weeds in the agri-cultures of their domestic fields. Naturally, they are very obdurate weeds, capable of branching their rhizomes further and more strongly, and bearing more enduring fruit than the accepted ones, well rooted in their "native soil". The periodical consists of fragments of well-incorporated, linguistically precise prose. Those are the texts of people who write in order to reconcile alienated words, without calculating the non-textual "surplus value" which is today so easily paid out in the official PENs and in institutions of all kinds.

Horizons (Horizonti), the periodical belonging to and named after a citizen's association from Novi Sad, seems to vary the topics of Erewhon, bringing in issues from politics, psychology and economy. Assigning themselves the task of contributing to "the communication of cultures", they delineate the routs of our intellectuals in exile who have discovered their homeland in writing, in their own and somebody else's books, in the broken mirrors reflecting the old meanings; and not only do those mirrors sparkle with helpless nostalgia, but they also glow with the light of what is yet to come.

Periodicals such as Transcatalogue (Transkatalog) provide compasses and references to those who will set off into the adventure of dispersing unknown languages in their mother tongue. Accounts of those theoretical adventures, contours of foreign lands, and portraits of supressed and forgotten physiognomies become more and more interesting in each new issue, being composed by younger and younger travelling writers and portraitists. Some exotic names, insufficiently researched and tabooed in these parts, such as Jinger, Weininger, Celine, as well as people who are a part of every world citizen's culture, like Cage, Borges, Jarry, etc. clash in the pages of Eterna. The tactile, colorful quality of its paper becomes just as important as the printed content. Here, the boundaries of the "external" and the "internal", of the cover and the pages, of the texts and their margins are erased, while the level of design often says more than the texts themselves. Map-like colours and patterns are not just trifling details and ornaments, but rather inherent meaningful instances; they are a part of the attitude of the editorial staff and the author towards the reader and towards their own work; they are a necessary shape of its embodiment, needed for reception.

Bridges (Mostovi), the periodical of the Literary Translators' Association, occupies itself precisely with shaping the pontoons that can transport foreign literary treasure to our unstable ground, as little damaged as possible. They transform the living, artistically transposed words of foreign poets into our "kingdom of minds", striving to keep translation on the level of creative, artistic work of transfiguration and transformation, which shows itself as the intertwined material of the translator's and the author's styles, as an overlapping of polarized meanings.

The Word (Rec) has tried to renew the traditions of quality literary periodicals (such as the one that its editorial staff ran before the "purge" in The Literary Word /Knjizevna Rec/). This periodical even more energetically points to the input of the translator, as an individual author, into somebody else's text. Publishing serilas with advice on writing and translating, and text processing, it denudes the unavoidable elements (in this country still too often mystified) of the techniques that are a mark of contemporary idioms.

Pro Femina and Women’s Studies (Zenske Studije) clear the path for "gender studies", still not accepted in our academical institutions; they articulate the theoretical feminism which certainly differs from the liberal and radical one, which have, during their short appearance here, acquired too many enemies. Once again responding, from a still marginal point of view, to the questions of the subject, political activities, insanity, shortcomings of traditional and structural psychoanalysis, violence in (predominantly male) theory, heretical writing or living within the limits imposed by pro-western phallogocentrism, the teams working on these magazines delineate "l’autre cap" of thinking. While Women’s Studies insists on professionalism, returning us to the classrooms from which our intelligentsia kept so stubbornly and quietly playing hooky, Pro femina keeps up a relaxed approach, elegant decorative design, and the "careful carelessness" which is yet to become a characteristic of our women writers and intellectuals. In the latest, second issue of Women's Studies the ambitiousness and good elaboration of the project of a research and educational centre outside of universities and institutes which, unlike mere proclamations of socially recognized institutions, really would respect the interdisciplinarity to which it has been obliged by its program, has been sturdily emphasized. In the journal itself, the statements of psychologists, sociologists, literary theoreticians, linguists and philosophers mutually evoke, produce and interlace each other.The type of cooperation arises therefrom which was for a long time blocked by professional purism and the division of labor among university departments. Along with this tendency goes also the insistence on a problem-oriented approach, and the theme of the issue (the problem of the body) is elaborated through previously unpublished texts of well-known Yugoslav authors and through essays of foreign experts who are almost totally unknown in our country.

New Moment continues with publication, extending the borders of the category of the "urban" (life, design, and thinking), and successfully organizing stunning clashes of the international and the local. Moreover, the visualization of the topics is not debased to the level of mere illustrations of the theoretical texts published; it is rather as if the theory were emerging from the images themselves, if only one entered their structure and analyzed the sedimentary traces in each individual motif. Mixing irony and nostalgia, issue no. 5 deals with researching the avantgarde, its longing for purity and perfection of forms, its asceticism, its Faustian experimentation, its refusal of all compromises, its search for the authenticity and conciseness of things which were praised as "primitive". Nowadays, these guidelines are relevant again, because they stimulate resistance to our (in this area, even pre-modern) everyday life. Therefore, it is not strange that the authors who are most often counted as "postmodernists" take the artefacts of the avantgarde as a starting point. That is why previously unpublished calendar-bibliography and the pictures of original avantgarde artefacts are so important, while some interesting articles, in spite of the obvious theoretical pretentions of the authors, nevertheless do not succeed in precisely defining and distinguishing the notions of modernism and avantgarde. Issue no. 6, observing the magazine's usual standards, is wholly devoted to the phenomenon of advertising and its ramifications.

Professional dignity is positively the crucial element saved in the periodicals such as: Music Wave (Muzicki talas), Sound (Zvuk), Encore (Bis), Orchestra and Accelerator (Akcelerator; see separate article by Stevan Vukovic in this issue).

Through the goodnatured gaze of Serenus Zeitblum, through his elegantly stiff expression, the old musical magazines described, from a great distance, the excentricities of their Leverkühns, into whose hands Musical Wave and Encore have finally placed pens. As usually happens, perhaps the authors themselves have not grasped their own works the most clearly; their essays might not be the material most adequate for future textbooks of musical aesthetics or musicology, but they are, if regarded as auto-histories and attempts at analyses, solid material for inciting changes in the minds of the composers and performers who will one day, hopefully, meet a sufficient number of competent interpreters. The Sound periodical, supplied with CDs, inclines towards a more limited circle of readers, eager to overcome the lack of recent foreign musicological publications and of detailed scholarly analyses in the Yugoslav publications.

Orchestra is in a better position primarily because in this country there were already a rather large number of experts in the semiotics of movement, the elements of coreography and the articulation of body expression in general, who were also able to transfer their knowledge onto the stage. The momentary slowdown, the concrete problems nowadays faced (hopelessly?) by ballet performers, possibly allows more time for previous results to be reexamined, and for future steps to be conceived. Things of current interest are seemingly supposed to reach our stages in complete silence, on the tips of pens, instead of on tiptoes.

Accelerator, dedicated to architecture, has gathered a young staff, sufficiently conscious of the meaning of an elitist, uncompromising, professional approach to their own profession and to having insight into new tendencies within it in the situation created when the scruples of the metier were discarded along with the conscience of those who respect their own, as well as other people’s work enough to know their limits, and are not exposed to the temptation to use their "bricolage" of thoughts, their myth-creating work, in the self-deceiving, odds-and-ends drive of ideological propaganda. While everywhere around us kitschy shopping centres and expensive multicoloured residential districts are being built, and while the most important edifices of traditional Belgrade architecture (that emanated the spirit of its culture and its specific forms of communication) are becoming neglected or even derelict, the journal's collaborators contribute their sketches and plans of successful solutions for the landscapes, which are, for the time being, too close to us both in time and space to be real. Architecture, which in the last few years experienced the largest number of transformations by adopting, ironizing and giving new meaning to old forms, by destroying the enclosed architectural form, which first began to search for the way towards liberal forms of communication, it is precisely architecture that might perhaps best explain how much the work of shaping civic society is connected with the rennaissance of the urban tissue. The renewal of "the public" and of "the civic" can really occur only on some transformed ground.

Current periodicals are inscribing the virtual configurations, the modified structures that remove old and generate new symbolical spaces. They seduce "reality" by playing with "the artificial", shaping perpetually new identities in an imaginary act, multiplying their faces, their expressions and their rituals, tearing and complicating the segments of discourse, and producing different constellations out of the fragmented instances of the critical disintegration. They create a new Babylonian chaos, disabling the usual processes of translation, equalisation, and guidance in one definite direction. They are not maps belonging to prospectors searching for some lost "treasure", or for the Stone of Philosophers; these maps are the very "ground", they themselves are the "treasure". Where they disintegrate and disappear, even the very territory they "represented" fades away. That is why the extinguishing or the crushing of any periodical is also an immeasurable loss of their virtual perspectives, of those microutopias.

Webmaster: Slobodan Markovic (twiddle@eunet.yu)

All rights reserved. Belgrade Circle Journal encourages the reproduction of material appearing on its pages, provided that the source and the author are cited, except in cases where this would constitute violation of copyright held by other organisations or individuals.