Subject: APPEAL AGAINST THE DECISION OF THE SLOVENIAN BOOK AGENCY JAK (JR1-KNJIGA-2009/PUBLIC CALL FOR APPLICATIONS 1–BOOK–2009) FOR THE REJECTION OF CO-FINANCING OF THE INTERNATIONAL AND MULTILINGUAL SCIENTIFIC REVIEW MONITOR ZSA EDITED BY THE PUBLISHING HOUSE ANNALES, UP ZRS (University of Primorska, Scientific Research Centre, Slovenia).*

*The appeal and the diagram are only the beginning of a more exhaustive research that is required, and not a decisive and completed account of the state of things.

Since the call for applications issued by the Slovenian Book Agency (hereinafter referred as JAK) for the year 2009 (JR1-knjiga-2009) wherein the application submitted by the multilingual and international review Monitor ZSA was rejected on the grounds that the curves of the spine of issues 4 and 2 (see note 1 below) differed, it seems that the newly established Agency needs to be congratulated for the enviable level of bureaucratisation with which it has reached or perhaps even surpassed the efficacy of the bureaucratic-cultural and bureaucratic-(anti)intellectual institutions of the Third Reich. Since its foundation (which is the result of the most effective union ever between delirious bureaucratism and average dilettantism) the Slovenian “cultural geniuses” who occupy their positions within JAK, have finally accomplished the long unrealized wish to eliminate practically all content based on hard work and people’s endeavors out of 512 proposals, 170 were rejected in the pre-selection phase, and another 140 in the following selection phase, which makes 310 rejected proposals altogether; i.e. 60,5 % of all proposals, while 7 of them were placed on the reserve list).

The real formalist excess that helped JAK get rid of the more intelligent parallel intellectual and cultural-artistic social networks – at least some of them – ended in a true farce. These networks were done away with in regards to quality, so to speak; being without state support and with a limited, although stable (and for the critical thought, truly comprehensive and cultivated) audience, even though they have been active for a number of years, some of them even for a decade or so, both at the national and international level. Such is the case with Monitor ZSA, FORUM TOMIZZA or, among them, the poetry translation workshop Golden Boat; these projects are by far more important for our society’s future than the “endemic,” “successful,” “visible” and “media” projects of the local elite. “The Great excommunication” always embodies an immense dimension of the comical – as the well-known French psychoanalyst would say it. The elite- unsovereign and (as it is again being unveiled by this paper) in terms of content completely uncertain and labile regarding cultural and technical skills, as it turns out, view serious intellectual work and engaged and non-lucrative artistic practice as a disturbing interference in a carefully protected field (or better put: pen, stockade or ring) which is intended for ethnocentric gymnastics and cultural hybridization without clear-cut criteria.

If JAK’s management thinks that by laying their responsibility on the ignorant civil servants who in the pre-selection phase threw into the trashcan almost everything that was substantially and relevantly built within the last years, leaving for the various commissions only the applications submitted by their own favorites (pets) with a free rider here and there that disguises the traces of this good-for-nothing action in order not to spoil the good public appearance of JAK, then my message to the management is that regardless of this auto-da fe (the association with the actions of 10 May 1933, of course, is not a coincidence), the moral and ethical responsibilities of JAK’s director, JAK’s Council and JAK’s expert commissions are no lesser. With its first call for applications, the Agency ranked among the list of factors that destroy the cultural and the intellectual life of Slovenia.

As a historian with a professional interest in actions and strategies of totalitarian and clientelist regime networks hidden behind apparently democratic mechanisms and decency, I must admit that I am gaining ever more interest in your activities and will also follow them with pleasure in the future. As editor-in-chief of the multilingual and international review, which after decades of work and endeavors to “enlighten” this obscure Slovenian land, I am a bit tired of the complete domination and hegemony of mediocrity permeating into almost every field of social life. I demand the answers to the following questions:

1. How is it possible that JAK and JAK’s Council, in their first point when defining the scope of their competence, refer to the “work of the Agency in the public interest,” and dare not pay regard to the principles of parity in the expert commissions related to the most important intellectual institutions in Slovenia (i.e. universities)? How is it possible that such commissions have no male or female representative from the University of Primorska, and that these commissions have so visibly overrepresented persons associated only with the University of Ljubljana and the Faculty of Humanities in Ljubljana, and, what is more, cover just a few departments, such as the Slovenian Academy of Science and Art and the publishing house The Student Publisher? The diagram clearly shows that what is involved is a systemic support of Slovenophile-Germanophone ethnocentrism flavored with literarization of “comparative studies. Do these three “empires” embody the whole public interest in Slovenia? If we were to consider also the beneficiaries of the three-year programme and other more permanent forms of public co-financing – for example the Ministry for Culture in its previous mandate – the picture would be far more contrasting.

2. How is it possible that the distribution of public funds, to which we all contribute (including those who are constantly hindered) are used as sanctions (formally or otherwise) only against the applicants who respond to the calls by JAK , and do not penalize those bureaucrats who receive a regular monthly pay for their regular work from these very funds? In the call for applications, formal and linguistic mistakes and nonsense abounded, (which the applicants didn’t pay serious attention to) while these official executioners proved to be delighted in warning us about missing dates and signatures in the applications, or even about the wrong number of applications submitted in an envelope, not to mention the fatuity of the “argument” regarding the supposedly “unbalanced financial construction.” For example, due to the copy-paste method applied by JAK’s administration, some forms relating to the expected date of realization contained the year 2008 instead of 2009, some specifications were at the least ambiguous if not more than that (Annex 2), in one of them (no. 5.2.2 Izdaja revij/Publication of journals) for example), it was noted that ”the requirements needed in order to officially take part in the open call are to be fulfilled when the future applicants publish their ‘project’ only twice a year in a printed form” (I thought that what is being published are journals, books, and other publications, and not projects …), not to mention the idle postponement of the call for applications which was announced months before, and the evil timing of the publishing of results during holiday times. If the officer’s notes in the “Notice to applicants” (no. 6130-127/2009/23 as of 23. 6. 2009) were to be sanctioned with the same extent of consistency as the applicants’ applications to JAK’s call, this last should be invalidated for the note contained under the reference number 32 (3. Področje prevodi v tuje jezike/Translation into foreign languages) that included the word “TOTAL” meaning the total amount of money dedicated to this field, while the note on the field “Mednarodno sodelovanje”/“International collaboration” is completely missing in the document of rejected projects.

I therefore demand a “balanced” sanctioning for the violators of regulations from both sides (the officials and the applicants) with regard to the open calls for applications issued by JAK at all levels (from temporal to linguistic).
This, of course, means that far more rigid measures shall be applied for the professional bureaucracy than for people who do other jobs and only occasionally deal with application forms.

3. In the “Notice to applicants,” the Commission evaluated the book by Oswald Spengler The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte, 1918–1922; a proposal by the Slovenian Literary Society i.e., Slovenska matica for the year 2009) as a “masterpiece” and allocated 12.000 Euro for its translation. This shows the utmost obscure (dis)orientation of the commission. Namely, the book is completely ideological and remains one of the conceptual basis of Nazism; soon after its publication, the book was critically evaluated by Robert Musil (and to date by numerous other female and male authors as well). Of course it is no mystery today that this book is a model of the regressive ideology expressing the inability of the quickly industrialized and urbanized German society in the second half of the 19th century to reflect upon its new position; on this grounds it is completely opposite to Max Weber’s works (the translation of which would be much more appropriate than the translation of Spengler’s atavistic utopia). But now, as it seems, it was discovered (obviously as a positive model) by Slovenian “intellectuals” or intelligentsia, who considered it nice (and with no doubt also included it in a very specific and politically motivated revival of the global obscurantism). It would be fine if the book had already been translated along with Musil’s or someone else’s serious critique (and above all, coherently critically reviewed with a precise indication of the context and all successive objectivations), however there are much more important books in the world which the translation of should take priority. How is it possible that the “expert commission”, with an amount of money that is usually determined as the maximum amount dedicated to journals on an annual basis, finances Spengler’s fully doxical construction? And how is it possible that that same commission proclaims the book as a “masterpiece”? Are we to expect, then, a publication similar to Hitler’s My Struggle (without any critical reflection; Mavrica Publishing House, Ljubljana) which Slovenians have enjoyed buying so much lately that it has been reprinted quite a few times?

I expect the answers from the competent persons in due legal time and wish you a whole lot of new adventures which for me represent new sources, documents and material for scientific research.

1 This of course is an allegedly “wrong” application for 14.000 instead of 12.000 Euro, (which is what was stated in the terms and conditions for collaboration) and apparently also for such a “big violation” that for JAK’s public servants, with anticipatory consent of its commission members (?), it was easier to eliminate the whole field of historical and social anthropology from the overall number of journals on humanities and social sciences in Slovenia due to one (and only a numerical) “mistake” than to excuse the absurdity of their own terms and conditions. Since Monitor ZSA applied for 14.000 and not for the normative 12.000 euro, it failed to meet the conditions of the call of applications. Thus an ever more aggressive formalist anti-intellectual delirium is being confirmed, which more and more substitutes the content and cognitive criteria in such a relevant field- the field of social science and humanity- where content represents 95 % of the engagement and is thus in relation to the trifling public servants’ pedantry far more decisive. The determination of the amount (from 12.000 to 14.000 Euros- why not then 11.236,86 Euros or 0,342578648764 Euros?) is as important for this issue as much as it is important for science if two members of the “expert commission,” (e.g. Mr. Matija Gogala and Mr. Vojislav Likar or the director Mr. Slavko Pregl), while reading these lines, are wearing yellow socks with violet stripes. What would matter, however, is if they are able to think and assess competently what is and what is not important for the development and troublesome differentiation of a specific scientific field in an already deformed and completely anomalous Slovenian social space. But it seems, though, considering the unproblematic acceptance of the so-conceived call for applications (such as JAK 2009) or even regarding its motivated launching, that they rather opt for the “proper” socks.

Taja Kramberger is doctor of history and historical anthropology, lecturer at the Faculty of Humanities Koper, University of Primorska, and initiator and editor-in-chief of the multilingual scientific publication Monitor ZSA – Review of Historical, Social and other Anthropologies.