Katerina Kolozova: HOW TO OVERCOME THE PARTY ORTHODOXY?

As long as we do not get heretic subjects of our civic public who are renegades even from their own camp and enter into dialogue, into debate, confronting attitudes, we cannot have authentic debate in the civil sector.          

The formulation “political dialog” itself and the way it is used in our public, by my opinion is a vague term, a kind of platitude behind which we never completely understand what is hiding. But, interpreting what we hear, see in public, we come to a conclusion that it is constantly referred to the dialogue between the big political parties. Unlike this perspective of things, I would like focus on the dialogue in the broadest sense of the word, therefore as a public that includes the non-governmental sector, but not necessarily organizations, but also activists, intellectuals, professors, artists etc., everything that makes the public – public.               

I assume that, in order to establish some kind of corrective in terms of what is political dialogue between parties, it is necessary to raise the level of the discussion quality inside the civil sector, but that is impossible as far as we define ourselves versus the political parties and as far as we determine our positions in advance, as positions which belong to the one or the other political group, assembly, block or party. So, as long as the perception of what is going on as a debate in the civil sector is determined by that assumption, we are nothing but a reflection of what is going on as a debate between the political parties, we are not going to have a qualitative public who authentically leads a debate.

The civil society let to define itself through that reflection and thus has deprived itself of the possibility of creative and non-self-censored debate. The self-censorship comes, above all, from the fear that if you stand for one or another position , you are automatically identified as a follower of these and those. That is to say, it is because of the fear that what can define our position as public subjects is necessary leaning towards one or another political party. In that way, the dialogue is blocked, inside the civil society. So, everything is based on the assumption that there is not an autonomous debate of the intellectuals and that it is impossible on some issues to agree with the ones, and on other to be closer to the others. It seems as if that possibility is excluded from the public perception and that is what decreases the level of the dispute quality in the civil society. 

I would detect this as a key problem and I think that the source of this problem is not only this logic of reflection, but the whole idea of representing attitudes, that we, as civil society and the politicians both share, and that is the logic of orthodoxy… That means that you orthodoxly belong to the one line – political line or line of political thought or party line, or you orthodoxly belong to the other. So, heresy is excluded. I think, that as long as we do not get heretic subjects of our civic public who are renegades even from their own camp and enter into dialogue, into debate, confronting attitudes - the intention is to understand each other, of course, and to gain some kind of harmonization at the end, but it must not necessarily come to that – we cannot have authentic debate in the civil sector.

(Katerina Kolozova is a professor of philosophy and gender studies)