UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

altogether, but aim to suggest that it is, having been burdened with the transitionalist discourse,
essentially insufficient and in need of a better theoretical conceptualisation and practical use. 434
The cases in digital storytelling, memory and memorials related to Yugoslavia, as I have argued,
demonstrate that online remembering may not necessarily serve just the purposes of tranquilising
the individual and the collectivity, or of mere entertainment. To some extent, of course this is
inevitable, but then, even contemporary situation in the world, political and economic, does not
spur excessive awareness, social unrest let alone action (which suggests it is not necessarily the
topic that tranquilises but the feeling of pervasive ‗impactive impotence‘). This is not to dismiss
the role and importance of the demonstrations in the Middle East and Mediterranean Africa in
2009—2011 nor the 15 October Occupy demonstrations, but just a cautious remark to not invest
too much hope into their revolutionary potential of technology. However, I believe that
externalisation of memory and memory practices in DME may in the future the catalyst of offline
social action.
Thus, in order to retain the subversive character and continuity of nostalgia as a relevant sociocultural
concept and phenomenon, 435 I propose to emphasise an aspect that perhaps seems far too
obvious, but is nevertheless all too often missed: to see Yugonostalgia as a radical urge to
reassemble the historical. Discovering and posting the forgotten audiovisuals and remediating
them so as to reposition them as kernels of post-Yugoslav commonality of shared experience, i.e.
digital sociability spanning geographical and temporal determinants, the media archaeologists and
archivists resiliently keep on saving the (audiovisual) past from oblivion. And doing so they
reintroduce into the present the bits and pieces which are then often quite arbitrarily used in cocreating
a more coherent understanding of the Yugoslav socialist past.
Reassembling the Historical
The cases in digital memories, memorials and storytelling dedicated to the former Yugoslavia can
be read as a desire to ‗reassemble the historical.‘ The phenomenon and practice of reassembling
434 ―We could abandon these terms and invent new one, of course, but we would leave behind too long history of
struggles, dreams and aspirations that are tied to them. I think it is better to fight over the concepts themselves in order
to restore or renew their meaning.‖ Michael Hardt ―The common in communism,‖ in Slavoj Ţiţek and Costas
Douzinas (eds.), The Idea of Communism, London, Verso, 2010, 131–144, 131.
435 Many thanks to Tanja Petrović for elaborating on this topic.
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