To detect affective glimpses of alternative, emancipatory past futures, Tanja Petrović turns to the most unlikely of sources: to men's recollections of military service in the Yugoslav People's Army (Jugoslovenska narodna armija, JNA). Petrović conducted conversations with men from across the former state and compiled photographs, letters, press articles, postcards, and other artefacts to establish an ‘archive of feelings’. It can't be overemphasized how counterintuitive a site this is to dig for utopian affect. In the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia, much of the JNA de facto morphed into a force of Serbian ethnonationalism. Before that, it functioned as the institutional centre of the Yugoslav military-industrial complex. Even leftist commentators, who celebrate the utopian promise of the antifascist Partisan World War II guerrilla, tend to consider the JNA – its descendant – to be an ossified structure bereft of any emancipatory potential. Military service, based on universal male conscription, was spatiotemporally isolated from ‘normal life’, in barracks ruled by authoritarian command hierarchies. As well as cultivating masculine violence, its imposed routines were standardized, ritualized, totalizing, disciplining. At best, it would seem, memories of such service could inspire dystopic despair. Tanja Petrović could have identified cracks in this edifice of homogeneity. She could have searched for memories of subversion or ambiguity during military service and conclude hopefully that totalizing aspirations were never completely realized. She doesn't take this route, and the book is all the better for it. Instead, the author reminds us that JNA military service was also explicitly organized to produce forms of affect converging around egalitarian comradeship, (inter-ethnonational) ‘brotherhood and unity’ and self-development. In this citizenship scheme, conscripts were mostly sent far from home and spent a substantial period closely together with very different men (e.g., in terms of class, ethnonationality, and place of residence). Petrović does not claim that the men she spoke to experienced JNA service as utopian. In fact, at the time, many considered it a waste of time at best. What the author traces instead is how memories of that experience came to provide a reservoir for utopia in hindsight. It is from the retrospective vantage point of ethnonationalized polities devastated by war and ‘transition’ that military service – and particularly the friendships and relations of care that sustained it – appear as beacons of another, better future that could have been. Such ‘afterlives’ of experiences of military service, Petrović argues, linger in the lives of many men across the post-Yugoslav states – and, indirectly, of many families – but, due to a dominant ‘event-aftermath straightjacket’ (p. 14), they remain poorly articulated, troubled and hesitant. It is to unearth these afterlives, and to discern an emancipatory kernel in them, that she turns to stories, photographs, souvenirs, and artistic treatments of military service. So where does Utopia of the uniform detect utopian possibility? Mainly in recollections of friendships, care, and recognition of men as ‘good men’, that is, in universal and moral terms. Petrović contrasts this with the post-Yugoslav elevation of ethnonationality to a defining factor. The inclusion of more interlocutors from worker and peasant families could have sharpened, and perhaps complicated, insights further beyond notions of ‘brotherhood and unity’, particularly regarding questions of ‘comradeship’ in terms of socio-economic egalitarianism. Yet this book is not an oral history of JNA service. Above all, it represents a critical intervention in the study of affect and utopian potential that should resonate well beyond the post-Yugoslav space. Crucially, Tanja Petrović encourages us to think through the relationship between affect and (institutional) forms. Much literature on affect, she perceptively argues, insists on affect's unpredictable, pre-cultural character. Form, then, and particularly regimented, infrastructurally robust form, is posited on the opposite pole: it is seen to numb affect. Yet it is precisely in the afterlives of such very rigid forms, ‘the routine, the ritualized, the uniformed’ (p. 19), that the author detects a capacity to unsettle today's status quo. Through the medium of bottom-up recollections of universal conscription, this book traces the ‘affective work’ of ‘the emotional fabric’ produced by a ‘ritualized, performative experience of military service that lasted for a year or longer as life as such’ (p. 156). ‘Theorizing affect’, Petrović writes, is ‘a fashionable academic enterprise of our time’ (p. 154). So it is, and, not least in the hands of Duke University Press, this has entailed a particular writing style too – elusive, dramatic, yet nonchalant in its propositions. Whether they agree with her conclusions or not, readers committed to reasoned argument based on precise formulations will be grateful to Tanja Petrović for phrasing her important intervention with crisp analytical clarity.
Stef Jansen (Fri,) studied this question.