Authors

Petra Pozgaj¹;  ¹ University of Zagreb, Croatia

Discussion

Over the past 20 years, the focus of research on the socialist history of Central and East Europe in various disciplines has shifted from examinations of the socio-political organization of socialist regimes towards explorations of everyday life and culture under socialism. However, many cultural analyses continue to rely on concepts and methods uncritically adopted from political science and plagued by unexamined assumptions that are a product of Cold War epistemologies. This thwarts their attempts at studying not only the meanings of cultural texts and practices in socialist societies, but also – seemingly paradoxically – the politics of culture under socialism. Namely, it is not just that some scholars continue to reduce cultural analyses to attempts at describing how cultural texts and practices were employed either by psychologised socialist states aiming to achieve certain political goals or by individuals taking a political stance in relation to these states with little regard for their meanings beyond their overtly political functions, but also that many more equate the politics of culture with narrowly understood political meanings conveyed by certain cultural texts and practices, which are privileged because they are deemed engaged and, therefore, engaging.
The main aim of this paper is to offer a critique of their methodological assumptions and outline an alternative approach to examining the politics of culture under socialism informed by the British tradition of cultural studies and feminist criticism. Specifically, this paper argues that an analysis of the value hierarchies established in the cultural field as well as the economic and cultural capitals needed to participate in it reveals more about the politics of culture than a mere examination of its political functions and meanings in the narrow sense because the hierarchies within and exclusions from the cultural field arise from power relations in the society and, in turn, support social inequalities stemming from them. It then demonstrates the value of such an approach through a case study of the field of popular culture under Yugoslav socialism focusing on the tension between the socialist ideal of the inclusivity of the said field and the gradual establishment of its exclusivity during the socialist period, which has largely gone unremarked upon even though it helps explain both historical and contemporary cultural developments. In doing so, this paper disrupts a persistent tradition in the study of socialist culture influenced by Cold War political science and lays the ground for an exploration of unexamined dimensions of socialist culture, previously often deemed trivial.