Shifting extremisms

on the political iconology in contemporary Serbia

Daniel Šuber

Slobodan Karamanić

pp. 119-138

in: Jeffrey C. Alexander, Dominik Bartmański, Bernhard Giesen (eds), Iconic power, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

What the founder of "mediology" captured in this citation is generally held as true with respect to the sociopolitical context, which shall be the subject of our analysis. Serbia is not only depicted as the main culprit of the recent Balkan Wars, but also as a paradigm case of a modern society that is (still) imbued with a mythically distorted perception of the past and the present. In his acclaimed work on The Politics of Symbol in Serbia, the Serbian anthropologist Ivan Čolović detailed the ways in which the (re)presentation of politics in Serbia draws on epical story telling and narrative genres (2002: 5–12). However, it is quite remarkable that Čolović's anthropological account does not deliver any analytically derived information about how exactly the complex transmission of political meaning is actually managed and achieved within the specific context of the area.¹ The aim of this contribution is to provide initial steps towards the difficult task of tracing the "peculiar logic which mediates the pictorial and the political" (Müller 2004: 335) in Serbia. What this task entails is not self-evident since two decades after the announcement of the "iconic turn" "an overarching visual approach that unites all social sciences is missing so far" (Müller 2008: 102). Therefore, we deem it appropriate to clarify the theoretical foundations and conceptual tools with regard to our empirical case in the first section. In the rest of the essay, we will introduce an empirical study of street-art and graffiti production in Serbia undertaken from 2008 until 2010 (section 2), and provide an iconological analysis of the most visible political icons of the contemporary Serbian visual landscape (section 3).