Речник технологије: поглед изван „огледала”
Dictionary of Technology – A look behind the ‘mirror’

Author(s): Ivana Bašić, Ivan Tomašević
Subject(s): Politics, Media studies, History of Communism, Politics of History/Memory
Published by: Етнографски институт САНУ
Keywords: Dictionary of technology; (post)modernism; socialist culture; art; ideology; manifesto for possible freedom
Summary/Abstract: The paper analyzes the Dictionary of Technology, published in the edition of the student magazine Vidici in 1981, which in both formal and semantic terms represented an unusual step forward from the socialist theoretical and artistic production of the time. Having first encountered harsh ideological condemnation, the Dictionary of Technology was then curtailed, only to experience new readings and interpretations almost four decades after its publication. Analyzing the aesthetic (both visual and poetic) and ideological, philosophical and anthropological levels, we try to answer the question why this pioneering postmodernist writing of Yugoslav culture was recognized by the establishment as a subversive endeavor doomed to historical oblivion and what its significance is in the present time – as it deals with a key issue of today – technology and its social, anthropological and artistic implications. Although there have been attempts to interpret the Dictionary of Technology as a text that “restores” the ethos of Serbian Middle Ages and Orthodox spirituality, and the spirit of nationalism in the form of ethnophyletistic cult of St. Sava („svetosavlje”), as opposed to communist ideology and Yugoslavia, the Dictionary resists these simplified interpretations both visually and textually. It brings a different, universalistic message, opposing the terror of history, ideological simulacra of reality and technology of their creation, and striving for higher knowledge, which does not accept divisions into East and West, Catholicism and Orthodoxy, Cyrillic and Latin, Romanesque and Moravian style, Serbian and Yugoslav nationalism, communism and ideologized, controlled modernity versus romantic, national and ethnophyletistic/traditionalism/ (and) conservatism. The Dictionary exposes this type of oppositions as a result of amnesia. Although it resists strict genre definitions, the Dictionary can still be precisely defined as – a manifesto for possible freedom.

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