from Contemporaneities

In early 2020, the world seemed to slow down. Instead of still newer models of gadgets, cars, designer clothes, fast-food menus, skin rejuvenating formulas and other things those living in materially comfortable conditions usually deem essential for their everyday existence, people were forced, at least for a moment, to differentiate between the fulfilment of basic needs that secure survival of the human animal and items that function as distractions. But although the economic, social and psychological impact of the pandemic still cannot be comprehensively predicted, one indicator is quite clear: despite the slowing down of production and transport, the amount of emissions in 2020 only dropped by 6.4 per cent and in 2021, carbon emissions rapidly rebounded. One reason why our obsession with novelty during the past century—even the retro novelty of nostalgia—is so effective as a marketing strategy, has surely something to do with the fear of emptiness accompanying the death of grand and, increasingly, also small and personal narratives.

In a country like Slovakia, however, it has not been that long since the utopian grand narratives of the new man and brave new world—not just a new phone or anti-wrinkle cream—ceased to occupy official public discourse. The latest book by Nóra Ružičková, a Slovak conceptual poet and intermedia artist, explores the discursive manipulation by (and of) the concept of the new in Slovak culture in the past century. In Súčasnosti (Skalná ruža, 2021), Ružičková continues her investigations into the gaps between language and (social) reality. The texts of this hilarious and chilling guide through Slovak cultural history from the end of WWI to the very present invite us to question the fabric of discourse, in which we, as subjects living in and through linguistic representations, are held captive; and, at the same time, they provide clues for achieving greater critical distance from the ideologies that manipulate us. Textual material, appropriated from period documents, collaged, recontextualised, creatively selected and juxtaposed, investigates, in the author’s own words, the modern and modernist fascination with novelty, contemporaneity and the present.

For this selection, I have chosen texts addressing key periods in Slovak history. Although geographically and culturally specific to a small Central European nation, the historical moments resonate, reflect, and deflect the wider historical circumstances—from the early-twentieth-century enchantment with Marxist ideas, through divided post-WWII coping strategies, and the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s to the “ends of empty corridors” that is the present—a time devoid of any unquestioned explanatory models of human existence or vigorously manufactured futures we might want to strive for.