Serbia in the Mirror: Parodying Political and Media Discourses

Tanja Petrovic

The opposition between "Europe" and "the Balkans" still marks much of the political and media discourses in and around Balkan societies, particularly in the context of their accession to the European Union. Their socialist legacy makes this opposition even more salient and stable, allowing for power rela­tions, discourses, and regimes of knowledge production and dissemination that many recognize as colonialist.1 But what does this opposition mean to­day for people in the Balkans, who find themselves sharing with citizens of other countries in Europe (and around the world) the experience of being in the middle of neoliberalism's "hypernormalized reality"?2 In this social and political reality, they are all exposed to an "increasingly repetitive and self-referential political ideology" and to the normalized and highly performative discursive patterns that circulate in the corporate mainstream media.3 The increased performativity of the political, an ever-expanding media spectacle, and the intertwining of politics with media and entertainment industries are characteristics of this reality that make '"rational reply'... inadequate as a political means."4 As a consequence, a growing number of people across the

I would like to thank Deana Jovanovic, Dejan Jovic, Vjeran Pavlakovic, Nenad Zakosek, Ildiko Erdei, Maja Petrovic Steger, Kathryn Woolard, Mark D. Steinberg, and the two anon­ymous reviewers for Slavic Review for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this article. An earlier version was presented at the conference "Love and Revolution IV" at the University of the Western Cape in October 2012. Corinne Kratz, John Soske, Patricia Hayes, Ciraj Rasool, Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, G. Arunima, and other participants helped me strengthen the transnationally relevant issues discussed in the text. I am also grateful to the Njuz.net team, and in particular to Viktor Markovic, Nenad Milosavljevic, and Miro-slav Vujovic, who opened the doors of Njuz's editorial office to me, shared their thoughts and dilemmas with me frankly, and provided valuable feedback on various points made in this text.

1. Maria Todorova, "Balkanism and Postcolonialism, or On the Beauty of the Airplane View," in Costica Bradatan and Serguei Alex. Oushakine, eds., In Marx's Shadow: Knowl­edge, Power, and Intellectuals in Eastern Europe and Russia (Lanham, 2010), 189-90; Tanja Petrovic, A Long Way Home: Representations of the Western Balkans in Media and Political Discourses (Ljubljana, 2009); and Orlanda Obad, "The European Union from the Post-colonial Perspective: Can the Periphery Ever Approach the Center?," Studia Ethnologica Croatica 20 (2008): 9-35.

2. Dominic Boyer, "Simply the Best: Parody and Political Sincerity in Iceland," Ameri­can Ethnologist 40, no. 2 (May 2013): 284.

3. Ibid.; Geoffrey Baym and Jeffrey P. Jones, "News Parody in Global Perspective: Poli­tics, Power, and Resistance," Popular Communication 10, nos. 1-2 (January-June 2012): 2-13; Dominic Boyer and Alexei Yurchak, "American Stiob: Or, What Late Socialist Aes­thetics of Parody Reveal about Contemporary Political Culture in the West," Cultural An­thropology 25, no. 2 (May 2010): 179-221.

4. Stephen Duncombe, Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fan­tasy (New York, 2007), 24, quoted in Michael Shane Boyle, "Play With Authority! Radical Performance and Performative Irony," Thamyris/'Intersecting, no. 21 (2010): 211. On these media characteristics, see Donatella Campus, "Mediatization and Personalization of Poli-

Slavic Review 74, no. 2 (Summer 2015)

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Parodying Political and Media Discourses 289

globe have taken up parody and irony as a meaningful reaction to the political and social conditions in which they live and as "a politically efficacious mode of politics by other means."5

This article deals with the embrace of parody in Serbia through the fake news site Njuz.net. Citizens' choice of parody as a viable response to global structural adversities and as a strategy for grasping and managing neolib-eral reality in their everyday lives signals that Serbia is becoming "part of the world," in spite of the long way it has to go before it can confirm this status by acquiring membership in the EU. As Dominic Boyer stresses, "'Joke politi­cal parties,' political performance art, and fake news organizations have pro­liferated at a dizzying rate" in northern liberal democracies during the past decade.6 Serbia and Njuz.net are no exception in this regard. The particular context of postsocialist, pre-EU-accession Serbia is nevertheless worth our at­tention for at least three reasons: First, in addition to some specifically Ser­bian circumstances and perceptions, this context amplifies the ambiguous political conditions of our times, in which many citizens feel detached from political and economic processes but nonetheless involuntarily contribute to the maintenance of social inequalities and to the dispossession of the major­ity by participating in chains of production and consumption that make "the enemy" difficult to identify or to disengage from.7 It also makes political or economic alternatives to the current state of affairs highly improbable. Sec­ond, when juxtaposed with other contexts in which parody has been studied as an important means of social expression (both diachronically and syn-chronically), the use of parody in contemporary Serbia shows how the logic of political and economic subordination makes binary classifications such as totalitarian-democratic, socialist-postsocialist, EU-non-EU, and Balkan-European inoperable.8 It invites us to rethink the meaning of dichotomies es­tablished through sets of "posts" and "isms" and the relevance of collective identifications that seem stable and self-evident, particularly when it comes to the Balkans and its relationship with Europe. Finally, Njuz.net deserves attention as a genuine phenomenon of the political use of news parody in

tics in Italy and France: The Cases of Berlusconi and Sarkozy," International Journal of Press/Politics 15, no. 2 (January 2010): 219-235; and Catherine Fieschi and Paul Heywood, "Trust, Cynicism, and Populist Anti-politics," Journal of Political Ideologies 9, no. 3 (2004): 289-309.

5. Boyle, "Play With Authority!," 201. 6. Boyer, "Simply the Best," 276. 7. Serbia is known as and perceives itself to be one of the most challenging cases

for Europeanization and one of the most reluctant Europeanizers. See Jelena Subotic, "Explaining Difficult States: The Problems of Europeanization in Serbia," East European Politics and Societies 24, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 595. Jessica Greenberg speaks of contemporary Serbia as a postdisciplinary state, where a sense of "being normal" has been lost due to moral chaos, lack of rules, "and breakdown of disciplinary mechanisms that produce regulated and reliable subjects who can translate desire into actions." lessica Greenberg, "On the Road to Normal: Negotiating Agency and State Sovereignty in Postsocialist Ser­bia," American Anthropologist 113, no. 1 (2011): 97.

8. For other geographical contexts, see Achille Mbembe, "Provisional Notes on the Postcolony," Africa 62, no. 1 (1992): 3-37; and Lisa Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (Chicago, 1999).

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290 Slavic Review

postsocialist Europe and the Balkans that is related to both global, neoliberal and (western) Balkan, pre-EU-accession contexts.

Njuz.net: Fake News Taken Seriously

On October 11,2012, the Serbian Internet news site Njuz.net celebrated its sec­ond anniversary. Looking back on the past two years, there was a lot that its founders and contributing writers could be proud of: at the end of 2011, they published a book of "news" stories titled Ovo nam mozda nije trebalo (We did not really need this); a second book, titled Knjiga za sajam (The fair book), ap­peared immediately before the Belgrade Book Fair in October 2012. Njuz.net's editors had insisted on protecting their independence by not publishing any advertisements on the website during its first year, but then they decided to open it up to ads, which gave them the financial stability to devote more time to writing and publishing. Up until then, they had acted as an informal group, meeting in cafes and exchanging information on social networks. Journalism, a hobby for these young people, could now become their profession. At the end of 2011, the Serbian Journalism Association awarded Njuz.net the Dimi-trije Davidovic Award for editorial policy, and at the end of 2012, when Status magazine published the results of its media poll, Njuz.net was proclaimed the third-best media website in Serbia in 2012. The news site, which was at first known only to Facebook users, became one of the most visited in Serbia, with more than twenty thousand daily visits.9 In June 2012, it went worldwide by launching a global edition of Njuz.net in English, at www.theglobaledition. com. The Njuz.net group meets every day to discuss, write, and edit stories in a rented apartment in downtown Belgrade that functions as an editorial office.10 In the short time since it was founded, Njuz.net has become a media website of significant prominence and visibility on the Serbian media scene.

This success would not be so remarkable if it weren't for Njuz.net's defin­ing feature: this news site produces, publishes, and distributes fake news. As stated on the website, Njuz.net presents "news in the mirror" (Njuz: Vesti u ogledalu), in which real information about Serbia and the world is refracted through the prism of parody, irony, humor, and criticism.

Njuz.net is, of course, not a unique phenomenon. There are an increas­ing number of sites of this kind whose popularity is facilitated by social me­dia, the Onion being the most famous among them. Nor is Njuz.net the sole example from postsocialist and post-Yugoslav countries, where a number of parodic news sites have emerged within the last few years.11 But no other site

9. "Njuz.net: Ovo nam nije trebalo," Politika, January 2, 2012, at www.politika. rs/rubrike/spektar/Digitalni-svet/Njuz_net-Ovo-nam-nije-trebalo.lt.html (last accessed February 1,2015).

10. Njuz.net author and editor Viktor Markovic, interview, Belgrade, September 20, 2012.

11. In Croatia, there is news-bar.hr, with 80,043 followers on Facebook (for compari­son, Njuz.net has been "liked" by 146,239 people, as of October 31, 2014); in Bosnia and Herzegovina, balkantajms.com provides "second-hand news" (it has 10,482 "likes" on Facebook, as of October 31, 2014); the Croatian website www.lupiga.com also provides fake and humorous news under the common label "Konfabulator"; the Macedonian news

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Parodying Political and Media Discourses 291

of its kind in the former Yugoslavia enjoys as much popularity or is taken so seriously.

Njuz.net's serious reception (as reflected in the professional journalism society's award, the fact that it is largely considered a news source and not entertainment, and its becoming a self-sustaining enterprise that provides full-time employment for six people) and its increasing popularity and vis­ibility in the Serbian media justify a closer look at this phenomenon. Even more important, the case of Njuz.net raises crucial questions about the mean­ing and role of parodic, ironic, and humorous media discourse in politics in the postsocialist, pre-EU-accession context, but it also offers insight into the broader conditions of the contemporary social world(s). As an example of al­ternative conceptualizations of media, it provides valuable input for reflect­ing on the role of the media in collective (self-)representation and the ways citizens engage with sociopolitical reality, which is significantly shaped by political discourses. A large body of research has recently been dedicated to the aesthetics and meanings of parody and related discursive patterns under both socialism and liberal capitalism.12 Likewise, the relationship between discourse standardization and political hegemony as well as the sociopoliti­cal effects of discursive patterns' performative uses in both (late) socialism and (neo)liberalism has been thoroughly studied.13 In most of the research done in the field, however, eastern European societies are studied in rela­tion to socialist parody, whereas the political use of parody in contemporary neoliberal contexts has been studied in and linked to western democracies." Researchers have also addressed the ways non-western audiences interpret parodic patterns produced by western media.15 The political role of parody and irony in the postsocialist media and in the sociopolitical discursive con­text of Europeanization through EU accession, however, still awaits serious consideration.16 In addition, what Angelique Haugerud, Dillon Mahoney, and

site www.okno.mk has a "para-news" section; in Montenegro, www.rastanj.me is adver­tised as "the first Montenegrin satirical news site"; and Nelnovinite, at www.nenovinite. com, is a Bulgarian fake news Web page.

12. Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Gen­eration (Princeton, 2006); "Soviet Jocularity," ed. Serguei Alex. Oushakine, special issue, Slavic Review 70, no. 2 (Summer 2011); "Jokes of Repression," ed. Serguei Alex. Oushakine, special issue, East European Politics and Societies 25, no. 4 (November 2011); Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey P. Jones, and Ethan Thompson, eds., Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era (New York, 2009); and Angelique Haugerud, No Billionaire Left Behind: Satirical Activism in America (Stanford, 2013).

13. Susan Gal, "Language and the 'Arts of Resistance,'" Cultural Anthropology 10, no. 3 (August 1995): 407-24; Yurchak, Everything Was Forever; Boyer and Yurchak, "American Stiob"; and Boyer, "Simply the Best."

14. Within this enterprise, most researchers' attention has been paid to Jon Stewart's Daily Show. See Angelique Haugerud, Dillon Mahoney, and Meghan Ference, "Watching The Daily Show in Kenya," Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 19, no. 2 (2012): 168-90.

15. Michael L. Ross and Lorraine York, '"First, They're Foreigners': The Daily Show with John Stewart and the Limits of Dissident Laughter," Canadian Review of American Studies 37, no. 3 (2007): 351-70; Haugerud, Mahoney, and Ference, "Watching The Daily Show in Kenya."

16. This lack of interest in postsocialist parody and irony fits the general model of studying postsocialism described by Gerald Creed, whereby events in eastern Europe are

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292 Slavic Review

Meghan Ference point out in the case of the Daily Show can be generalized to studies of other contemporary uses of irony and parody in the media: namely, that most analyses are "by communication and media scholars or by an occa­sional political scientist," while anthropological studies that would primarily shed light on the dynamics of production, consumption, and appropriation of parody and irony through media texts are rather rare.17

This article aims to bridge this gap by focusing on precisely these dynam­ics within a Balkan, postsocialist, and pre-EU-accession society, in which an increasing number of people see rational explanations as inadequate for explaining what is happening to them and incapable of offering an effective model of political action.181 first describe the characteristics of this context in the particular case of Serbia to show how they condition the emergence and functioning of fake news stories as sociopolitically relevant texts. I center my discussion on the two features that define this context. The first is the discursive uniformity in the political sphere, where statements by both local politicians and representatives of EU institutions and European countries are highly normalized, repetitive, and performative. The second feature is the per­ception shared by many Serbian citizens that their political reality is a farce. Both of these characteristics have been recognized as important features of socialism and of totalitarian systems in general.191 show, however, that the direct link between socialist and postsocialist parody does not support a bi­nary division between socialism and postsocialism but is most saliently re­lated to citizens' perceived agency. Parody's important role in Serbian media is, I argue, a symptom of the present reality, in which people do not perceive themselves as social or political agents.

In the second part of the article, I look at how parody works in the media texts published on Njuz.net and at the dynamics of their production and recep­tion. I highlight the multiplicity of their audiences and the levels of identifica­tion and detachment parody makes possible. The ways Njuz.net texts operate in Serbian media provide a basis for my concluding reflections on the politi­cal effects of parody and laughter in the age of neoliberal performativity and media spectacle, in which "rational responses such as presenting facts and reasoned arguments on behalf of progressives inspired by Enlightenment-era sensibilities have lost much of their persuasive edge since they do not capture the imagination and aspirations of a mass constituency."20

always measured against "an already and always ideal image" coming from the west. Gerald W. Creed, Masquerade and Postsocialism: Ritual and Cultural Dispossession in Bul­garia (Bloomington, 2011), 5-6. See, however, Neringa Klumbyte, "On Power and Laugh­ter: Carnivalesque Politics and Moral Citizenship in Lithuania," American Ethnologist 41, no. 3 (August 2014): 473-90.

17. Haugerud, Mahoney, and Ference, "Watching The Daily Show in Kenya," 169. 18. Ildiko Erdei, "Basara Ruiz!," Zivljenje na dotik, May 31, 2012, at zivljenjenadotik.

esova.si/ang/novice/4281 (last accessed February 1, 2015). 19. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever; Costica Bradatan, "To Die Laughing," East Eu­

ropean Politics and Societies 25, no. 4 (November 2011): 737-58. 20. Duncombe, Dream, 24. Moreover, as Ulrich Beck warns us with his concept of re­

flective modernization, the modernity of postindustrial society involves "living with con­stant risk that challenges the traditional capacities of even the most advantaged people to act effectively to improve conditions in the first and the second worlds." Ulrich Beck,

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Parodying Political and Media Discourses 293

The Discursive Closure

In the summer of 2012, after the nationalist former radical Tomislav Nikolic, now the leader of the Serbian Progressive Party, won the presidential elec­tion in Serbia, and when it became apparent that the government would most likely be led by one of Slobodan Milosevic's closest collaborators, Ivica Dacic, the current leader of the Socialist Party of Serbia, many asked whether the country was regressing to the 1990s. Most of the politicians involved assured the public that "there is no possibility of a return to the 1990s," with some saying that it was not possible in part because all of the important political parties in Serbia, regardless of their pasts and ideological backgrounds, were now "European"—that is, devoted to the project of making Serbia a full mem­ber of the European Union.

These politicians' ideological and discursive unity vis-a-vis accession to the EU is the first point I want to draw attention to in setting the backdrop for the parodic discursive strategies at work in the Serbian public sphere. United Serbia serves as an illustrative example for understanding the breadth and depth of this radical Europeanization of the Serbian political scene. This party is the ideological successor to the one once led by the war criminal Zeljko "Arkan" Raznatovic. After the 2008 parliamentary elections, its cur­rent leader, Dragan "Palma" Markovic, declined to negotiate with the na­tionalist Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS), led by Vojislav Kostunica, or with the New Serbia Party, led by Velimir Ilic, enabling the formation of the pro-European coalition government, which included the "For a European Serbia" alliance and the Socialist Party of Serbia. Markovic explained his move as follows: "I'm a pragmatic man and an entrepreneur, so I know that patriotism cannot be poured into a tractor. I decided on the coalition with the Demo­cratic Party because of its determination as regards accession to the EU."21

The other key example is the Radical Party, which disintegrated because of internal disagreements over the ratification of the Stabilization and Associa­tion Agreement. In the 2012 elections, the "pro-European" faction won the larger share of the votes and its leader, Nikolic, became president of Serbia, while "anti-European" radicals did not receive enough votes to win seats in parliament.

This ideological unity across the Serbian political spectrum has resulted in the production of a standardized, performative discourse on Serbia's ac­cession to the EU that overpopulates the media space. Renowned Serbian car­toonist Dobrosav "Bob" Zivkovic, who began collaborating with Njuz.net in 2013, captured this overabundance effectively with the following illustration. It points to the saturation of Serbian media with date-related commentary in

Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London, 1992), quoted in James W. Fernandez and Mary Taylor Huber, "The Anthropology of Irony," in James W. Fernandez and Mary Taylor Huber, eds., Irony in Action: Anthropology, Practice and the Moral Imagination (Chicago, 2001), 18. See also George E. Marcus, "The Predicament of Irony and the Paranoid Style in Fin-de-Siecle Rationality," in Fernandez and Huber, eds., Irony in Action, 209-23.

21. "Dragan Markovic Palma: Patriotizam ne pokrece traktor," Politika Online, March 11, 2008, at www.politika.rs/vesti/najnovije-vesti/DRAGAN-MARKOVIC-PALMA-PATRIOTIZAM-NE-POKRECE-TRAKTOR-i35853.1t.html (last accessed March 16, 2015).

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"MEGA MNOGO VAZAN DATUM" (MEGA VERY IMPORTANT DATE)

WOMAN FORTUNE TELLER: "Da ti gledam datum da ti kazem sudbinu?... Vidim ti datum kad ce§ da dobijei datum za vest o datuimu!... Vi-dim ti kraprau plavusu! Ne§to te merka! OoMce§! Ubodi zelju za datum! [Shall I read your date to tell your fortune?... I see the date when you will get a date for the mews about the date!. . . I see a tall blonde woman! She is checking you out! You will get it (a date)!... Make a wish for the date!]"

BOY: "Relenja datuma jeftino!... Povoljno!... Pst! . . . Doktorati? . . . Uspeh iz osnovne? [Date solutions, cheap!... Good deal!... Pst!... Doctorates?.... Primary school grades?]"

The posters and captions in the background include "Kostantin uzvraca udarac" (Constantino strikes back), referrimg to the jubilee celebrations of Constantino the Great's Edict of Milam for which enormous amounts of money were spent; "Datum je srpska majka" (The date is a Serbian mother), a slamg expression meamimg the date is a very big deal; amd "ja (heart) datum" (I [heart] date). Reproduced by permission from Bob Njuz, "Mega mmogo vazan datum," Njuz, July 1,2013, at www.njuz.net/bob-njuz-mega-mnogo-vazan-datum/ (last accessed February 8,2015).

the summer of 2013, when the country was in a fever of anticipation waiting for the date of the start of EU-accession negotiations.

This ideological and discursive uniformity has transcended the internal political context, existing in local political commentary, and the dominant discourse coming from Europe, crafted by politicians from the EU countries and high-level EU representatives. While in general, political discourse ea­gerly maintains an oppositional relationship between Europe and the (west­ern) Balkans, there is a high degree of uniformity in the discursive patterns used by EU officials and local politicians in the western Balkans in statements about these countries' Europeanization and accession to the EU. Messages

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Parodying Political and Media Discourses 295

coming from EU representatives and European politicians are no less stan­dardized and repetitive—similar to those of late Soviet officials, whose "per­formative dimension grows, while the constative dimension opens up to new meanings."22 In addition, comments on the candidate countries' EU acces­sion from the EU institutions are marked by the "the paradox of postmodern ambiguity":23 in these remarks, "the set of preconditions for entering the EU is volatile when it comes to EU newcomers, juxtaposed with Europeanization and transition construed as 'a passage from a well-defined point of departure to a unitary and well-defined destination."'24 Each step taken in this "pas­sage" earns praise from European politicians, then is inevitably followed by a statement that the target destination is still far away, albeit without a clear explanation for why this is so. A good illustration of this is German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier's statement on Serbia in 2009:

The government of Serbia has clearly chosen the course leading to Europe We can all see your great effort to enact reform in your country. Undoubtedly, there is a lot more to be done, not only in Serbia, but in the entire region. When I speak to Serbian politicians, I can sense in every sentence their de­termination to bring Serbia closer to Europe. Undoubtedly, many more ob­stacles have to be overcome, and the government in Belgrade knows this as well as I do.25

To understand the sense of ambiguity and arbitrariness felt by Serbian cit­izens when it comes to their "European future," it suffices to look at news published on and after June 28, 2013, when the EU was expected to set a date for the beginning of negotiations with Serbia. Newspaper articles and politi­cians' statements expressed different, sometimes opposite views of facts that should have been exact and unambiguous—whether the date to start nego­tiations with Serbia had been determined and which date it was. While sev­eral media sources enthusiastically reported that Serbia had a date for the start of the negotiations, some politicians claimed the opposite.26 The former president of Serbia Boris Tadic stated that "the Serbian government is deceiv­ing Serbian citizens because Serbia did not get the date to start negotiations" and criticized ruling politicians for celebrating getting a nonexistent date in

22. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 24. 23. Brigitta Busch and Michal Krzyzanowski, "Inside/Outside the European Union:

Enlargement, Migration Policy and the Search for Europe's Identity," in James Anderson and Warwick Armstrong, eds., Geopolitics of the European Union Enlargement: The For­tress Empire (London, 2007), 107-24.

24. Norman Fairclough, "'Transition' in Central and Eastern Europe," British and American Studies 11 (2005): 9-34. See also Danijela Majstorovic, "Construction of Europe­anization in the High Representative's Discourse in Bosnia and Herzegovina," Discourse & Society 18 (September 2007): 627-51.

25. Danijela Milinkovic, "Srbija na pravom putu," Novosti, January 26,2009, at www. novosti.rs/vesti/naslovna/politika/aktuelno.289.html:230917-Srbija-na-pravom-putu (last accessed February 5, 2015).

26. See, e.g., "Srbija dobila datum: Pregovori pocinju za Srpsku novu godinu!," Kurir, June 28, 2013, at www.nezavisne.com/novosti/ex-yu/Srbija-dobila-datum-Pregovori-pocinju-na-Srpsku-novu-godinu-198267.html (last accessed February 5,2015); and "Srbija dobila datum za pocetak pregovora sa EU," RTL Television, June 28, 2013, at www.rtl. hr/vijesti/novosti/809003/srbija-dobila-datum-za-pocetak-pregovora-s-eu/(last accessed February 5,2015).

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the media.27 DSS representative Slobodan Samardzic similarly claimed that "Serbia did not get the date on June 28,2013."28 European Parliament rappor­teur for Serbia Jelko Kacin for his part stated that he had "not heard anything about the date and that Serbia will choose the date to start negotiations for EU membership on its own." According to Kacin, "the steps Serbia will take and its determination to fulfill promises already made" would enable Serbia to choose this date.29

These ambiguous, arbitrary statements and formalized, repetitive discur­sive patterns not only leave ample room for subjecting candidate countries to endless conditioning; they also set a framework in which the political ac­tors involved are not held accountable for their statements. This leads to a discursive closure whereby "Europe" becomes an empty signifier used by all political subjects regardless of their orientation and thus makes the articula­tion of an alternative discourse on Europe and a collective self-representation outside the dominant political discourses impossible.30 In the particular case of Serbia, such closure allows the political elite to focus almost exclusively on accession to the EU, using it as an excuse to ignore Serbian citizens' every­day problems and existential anxieties. Moreover, ideological consensus on Serbia's "European future" paradoxically supports the already ambiguous attitude of the Serbian political elite toward events in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, eliminating any chance of establishing a new moral foundation on which Serbian "Europeanness" could be negotiated. Finally, the fact that the messages coming from the EU are just as formalized, performative, ambigu­ous, and noncommittal as those from local politicians leaves the citizens of Serbia without a choice: what is presented to them as the only possible future is not a future that bears much of a promise for a different, more decent, and more normal life. This lack of an alternative (which is also one of the most salient symptoms of the current global situation, in which neoliberal real­ity is presented as the only possible one) is what makes parody a particu­larly apt and widely embraced answer to contemporary Serbia's sociopoliti­cal circumstances. Together with other imaginative techniques such as irony, language play, and humor, parody offers citizens the ability "to bracket the

27. "Tadic: Odluka znacajna, ali nismo jos uvek dobili datum," Blic, June 29, 2013, at www.naslovi.net/2013-06-29/blic/tadic-odluka-znacajna-ali-nismo-jos-uvek-dobili-datum/6203424 (last accessed February 5,2015).

28. At dss.rs/vidovdan-je-nas-datum/ (no longer available). 29. "Kacin: 0 datumu ne znam nista. Srbija je dobila zeleno svetlo, iako svi govore

o datumu," Blic, July 4, 2013, at www.blic.rs/Vesti/Politika/391715/Kacin-O-datumu-ne -znam-nista-Srbija-je-dobila-zeleno-svetlo-iako-svi-govore-o-datumu (last accessed Feb­ruary 5, 2015); "Kacin: Srbija dobila datum? Nisam cuo," Fond strateSke kulture, July 5, 2013, at srb.fondsk.ru/news/2013/07/05/kacin-srbiia-dobila-datum-nisam-cuo.html (last accessed February 5, 2015).

30. For detailed analyses of dominant political discourses related to EU accession in post-Yugoslav societies, see Mitja Velikonja, Evroza: Kritika novega evrocentrizma / Eu-rosis: A Critique of the New Eurocentrism (Ljubljana, 2005); Petrovic, A Long Way Home; Majstorovic, "Construction of Europeanization in the High Representative's Discourse"; and Andreja Vezovnik, "Diskurzivna konstrukcija slovenske nacionalne identitete: Ana-liza casopisnih politicnih komentarjev v obdobju vstopanja Slovenije v Evropsko unijo," Annates 17, no. 2 (2007): 469-83.

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quotidian world," and this bracketing can open their eyes "to the possibility of alternatives."31 Parody is a "survival skill, a tool for acknowledging com­plexity, a means of exposing or subverting oppressive hegemonic ideologies, and an art for affirming life in the face of objective troubles."32

Breaking the Closure

While there are several news outlets that look at the sociopolitical conditions in Serbia through the prism of sharp criticism, satire, and humor, Njuz.net oc­cupies a special position within this media landscape because of the level of attention its authors pay to form.33 They produce stories formally identical to those that circulate in mainstream online and print media, filling this format with humorous, critical, and satirical content. Njuz.net's website matches the recognizable mold of regular media outlets: the news is classified into catego­ries like "Sports," "Politics," "Life and Entertainment," "The Economy," and "Society." The stories are carefully edited to meet high journalistic, stylistic, and orthographic standards. In this way, the "news" produced by Njuz.net's authors parodies existing media and political discourses. To understand what makes their content appealing for readers, familiarity with these dominant discourses is required. By perverting and exaggerating them, these stories effectively expose the discursive unity in which both the local political elite and EU officials are engaged. They also highlight the effects of this unity, in which the highly normalized and overly formal EU discourse facilitates the maintenance of a problematic status quo in the candidate country and en­ables the production of equally normalized, performative, and noncommittal statements by local political representatives, who constantly manipulate the public by citing possible dates for Serbia's accession to the EU. The Njuz.net post titled "Srbija bi mogla da ude u Evropsku uniju" (Serbia could join the EU) parodies the conditionality imposed by the EU and its misuse for inter­nal political goals. It fabricated a statement from the then prime minister, Mirko Cvetkovic: "If we continue with reforms and plan implementation, Ser­bia could become an EU member maybe by 2016, otherwise surely by 2027." He adds that "experts expect accession to happen in 2019, but it's realistic to believe that Serbia will become an EU member in 2017. Brussels, on the other hand, says that it will most probably happen in 2022." "Nenad Slovic," the leader of an expert team, explains, "In 2025, we will most probably become a

31. Fernandez and Huber, "The Anthropology of Irony," 4,18. 32. Michael Fischer, "Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory," in James Clif­

ford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, 1986), 224, quoted in Linda Hutcheon, Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (London, 1995), 25.

33. Among the alternative and critical media outlets in Serbia, Beton (at www. elektrobeton.net), Pe§canik (at www.pescanik.net), and e-novine (at www.e-novine.com) are the most prominent. Mainstream corporate media also give some space to critical and satirical interpretations of the Serbian political reality; the most popular among the latter is the comic by Marko Somborac regularly published in the daily Blic. Satirical media has a long history in postsocialist Serbia. The satirical newspaper Nasa krmaca, published from 1996 to 2004, achieved cult status, and the satirical magazine Ere was established in the late 1990s.

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298 Slavic Review

full member of the EU." He adds that "the decisive year for Serbia will be 2023, because according to our information, we could finally be accepted into the EU in that year." The article concludes with another statement of this kind: "The European Union could grant membership to Serbia as early as in 2024, while in 2012, we could become a full member."34

Njuz.net authors expose the EU's conditionality and paternalism to witty irony: One piece of "news" informs readers that "the EU and the USA called for a new condition for Serbia's accession to the EU, once Serbia recognizes Kosovo's independence."35 Another states that "Serbia got a recommendation to become a candidate to be a candidate for EU membership." According to this piece, "The European Commission will soon list conditions that Serbia will have to fulfill to start negotiations about the start of negotiations for can­didacy to be a candidate for EU membership." The same post also sharply critiques Serbian politicians' approach to the accession through a "statement" from Milica Delevic, director of the European Integration Office: "Recommen­dation for candidacy for candidacy does not mean anything but costs a lot. We invested a lot of effort and work to receive it, and in my opinion we achieved an adequate balance between what we could get but did not and what we got but with no real effect."36

This approach of shining ironic and critical light on both the politics of the European Union and local political strategies and discourses in Serbia dismantles the conditions of media and political discourse production, which I label "discursive closure." Njuz.net posts direct readers' attention to the very word choices that lead to performativity and to the detachment of words from political actions and intentions. The post "Nestala stolica koja je cekala Srbiju u EU" (The chair waiting for Serbia in the EU has disappeared) was an imme­diate reaction to the metaphor used by Miroslav Lajcak, the Slovakian min­ister for foreign affairs, who said, "There is an empty chair waiting for Serbia in the EU."37

In addition to parodying mainstream political and media commentary through exaggeration, Njuz.net authors employ another discursive tool to cre­ate a fissure in the discursive closure and to critically intervene in the existing state of affairs. They often interrupt this formalized, repetitive, metaphorical, noncommittal, and often content-free discourse with patterns that do not usu-

34. Istok Pavlovic, "Srbija bi mogla da ude u Evropsku uniju," Njuz, January 18,2011, at www.njuz.net/srbija-bi-mogla-da-ude-u-evropsku-uniju/ (last accessed February 8, 2015).

35. Ivan Cosic, "EU i SAD raspisale konkurs za novi uslov Srbiji za prijem u EU, nakon sto Srbija prizna Kosovo," Njuz, June 28,2011, at www.njuz.net/eu-i-sad-raspisuju-konkurs-za-idejno-resenje-novog-uslovljavanja-srbije-za-prijem-u-eu-nakon-sto-prizna-kosovo/ (last accessed February 8, 2015).

36. Nenad Milosavljevic, "Srbija dobila preporuku da postane kandidat za kandidata za clanstvo u EU," Njuz, October 12, 2011, at www.njuz.net/srbija-dobila-preporuku-da-postane-kandidat-za-kandidata-za-clnastvo-u-eu/ (last accessed February 8, 2015).

37. Bane Grkovic, "Nestala stolica koja je cekala Srbiju u EU," Njuz, September 25, 2012, at www.njuz.net/nestala-stolica-koja-je-cekala-srbiju-u-eu/ (last accessed Febru­ary 8,2015); "Lajcak: Ceka vas prazna stolica u EU," b92.net, September 21,2012, at www. b92.net/info/vesti/index.php?yyyy=2012&mm=098tdd=218mav_id=644869 (last accessed February 8,2015).

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ally belong to either the media or political speech but to the urban colloquial speech.38 The sharp opposition between the two also highlights the emptiness and lifelessness of the political discourse "borrowed" from "real life," simul­taneously rendering fake news stories more real than real life. This fluid rela­tionship between real and fake, reality and its parody, which is established in the process of creating, consuming, and interpreting Njuz.net's "news," is another—and probably the most interesting—aspect of what makes Njuz.net a unique phenomenon among alternative media in Serbia. It successfully re­flects the view many Serbian citizens share about their sociopolitical reality, which may explain the site's continuing and increasing popularity and the fact that its parodic potential has not been exhausted in the four years since Njuz.net began.39

Politics as Farce, Farce as Reality

On a quiet Saturday morning in May 2012, while the car glided from the Bel­grade neighborhood of Vracar toward Terazije, the taxi driver, commenting on the political situation in Serbia, said that "politics in Serbia is a play, which we the citizens are forced not only to watch but also to pay a very expensive ticket for." He elaborated on this image of Serbia, stressing that "everybody is aware that it is all farce, no one really believes in what is said, promised, or declared, but the whole society has to accept this farce and live with it because there is no other choice available." This brief conversation illustrates a common perception shared among Serbian citizens that the political discourse does not correspond with political reality—or, as Costica Bradatan argues, that the political world is seen as a farce.40 The Serbian anthropologist Ildiko Erdei stresses the theatricality of Serbia's present-day reality: according to her, "the political and social scene in Serbia can most easily be compared to a mixture of vaudeville, an early form of circus, and the variety show." There is

the ubiquitous presence of various obscure characters and creatures on the public scene (the early form of circus), who are transforming politics into a light comedy that includes "singing and shooting" (vaudeville) and where there are strenuous physical exercises and juggling that borders on real­ity (variety show), while the hypnotized audience rolls on the floor laugh­ing and applauds heartily those persons on the stage who are making faces, singing cacophonously, making burping noises, kicking each other in the

38. See, for example, Viktor Markovic, "Dilas zahteva prevremene izbore ali nije frka, ne mora sad odmah" (Dilas [leader of the Democratic Party and mayor of Belgrade] demands early elections, but there is no rush, no need to organize it right away), Njuz, July 23, 2013, at www.njuz.net/dilas-zahteva-prevremene-izbore-ali-nije-frka-ne-mora-sad-odmah/ (last accessed February 8, 2015). The phrase "nije frka" is a common urban colloquialism that is not part of standard political discourse.

39. In November 2012, Njuz.net's page had been "liked" by more than 86,000 people on Facebook; the number of those who follow Njuz.net's posts on Facebook rose to 125,000 by October 2013 and to almost 150,000 by March 2015.

40. Costica Bradatan provides a philosophical framework for understanding the world as farce and discusses its manifestation in literature; he relates it to the prominent function "theatralization played in all spheres of life in any given Communist regime: politics, economy, propaganda, even private life." Bradatan, "To Die Laughing," 740.

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300 Slavic Review

backside, and also making fun of the public that does not comprehend it at all.41

The notion of Serbian reality as farce is best illustrated in a Njuz.net ar­ticle written after the conclusion of negotiations over the new Serbian govern­ment in summer 2012: "Gradani misle da je fora sa 'novom vladom' otisla malo predaleko" (Citizens believe joke about "new government" has gone too far). Hundreds of citizens across Serbia are reported as saying, "It was a good joke, we laughed a lot, but let us now be serious—who will govern this country?" The article ends with the following: "As of this writing, it is still expected that the jokers playing the role of politicians will say, 'Ha-ha, we got you!' and reveal who will really be in charge of governing Serbia and taking care of its citizens' futures in the coming period."42

The problem for Serbian postsocialist society is that the joke never ends. Citizens are forced to accept the farce as permanent and unchangeable real­ity. That reality very often takes the shape of a parody of what is imagined as decent, normal, dignified life; politics in Serbia is seen as a parody of what politics is supposed to be.43 In a situation where reality is parody, the parody of that parody on Njuz.net is for many a more real, telling reflection of real­ity than what politicians say and the conventional media broadcast. "Every morning after I arrive at my office and make coffee, I first check the news on Njuz.net and only then read other news sites. They are better at telling me what is going on than the 'real' media, which is controlled, corrupted, and highly instrumentalized," said my Belgrade friend who works in a Ministry of Culture office. Another friend says that he does not read conventional media at all anymore and that Njuz.net is his only source of information about Serbia's political life. Many Serbian citizens with access to digital media share such at­titudes and strategies of media consumption.44 However, this is by no means a specifically Serbian, Balkan, or "transitional" postsocialist phenomenon: polls conducted in the United States suggest the same for this western soci­ety with a long democratic tradition. According to a July 2009 Time magazine survey, John Stewart's Daily Show has become "America's most trusted news source—beating by double digits the country's most prominent serious news anchors."45 On the other hand, a sociopolitical reality in which the words and deeds of those who have political power do not have actual meaning—where

41. Erdei, "Basara Ruiz!" 42. Viktor Markovic, "Gradani misle da je fora sa 'novom vladom' otisla malo pre­

daleko," Njuz, July 29,2012, at www.njuz.net/gradani-misle-da-je-fora-sa-novom-vladom-otisla-malo-predaleko/ (last accessed February 8,2015).

43. On the imagining of normal life (normalan zivot) in the postsocialist societies of the former Yugoslavia, see Greenberg, "On the Road to Normal"; and Stef Jansen, Elissa Helms, Jessica Greenberg, and Andrew Gilbert, "Reconsidering Postsocialism from the Margins of Europe: Hope, Time and Normalcy in Post-Yugoslav Societies," Anthropology News 49, no. 8 (November 2008): 10-11. On perceptions of normalcy in socialist everyday life, see Daniela Koleva, ed., Negotiating Normality: Everyday Lives in Socialist Institutions (New Brunswick, 2012).

44. Since March 2013, Njuz.net has been available in a print version as well: the Ser­bian daily Danas publishes a Njuz.net supplement on Saturdays.

45. Haugerud, Mahoney, and Ference, "Watching The Daily Show in Kenya," 168. Em­phasis in the original.

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Parodying Political and Media Discourses 301

there is a gap between form and content and where reality is perceived as farce—is usually highlighted as a defining characteristic of totalitarian re­gimes. As Bradatan argues in the case of communism, this goes hand in hand with the theatricalization of all spheres of life, an important form of which was "the transformation of citizens into involuntary actors" as a result of "general­ized fear, police pressure, and sometimes state-induced terror as forms of po­litical control."46 As my conversation with the Belgrade taxi driver suggests, it is not only state terror and fear that condition citizens' self-perception as involuntary actors in reality's theatricalization and transformation into farce but also a general perception that citizens cannot effect any social or political change. That is why I argue that the totalitarianism-democracy dichotomy is not a productive category for thinking about the meanings of laughter and parody in public sociopolitical contexts. It is exactly the perception of agency that can tell us much more about these meanings: reality is perceived as farce when social subjects perceive themselves as involuntary actors in a political farce, or, on the other hand, when they perceive themselves as not being ac­tors in social and political life at all.47 In this light, ideologically based spatial and temporal divisions such as socialism versus democracy, socialism ver­sus postsocialism, and western versus eastern Europe (and Europe versus the Balkans, for that matter) do not make much sense. Jessica Greenberg shows that in the case of postsocialist Serbia, the inability of individuals to perceive themselves as "capable of agentive action or moral inferiority" significantly influences their attitude toward the society in which they live.48 Comparing the socialist past with the postsocialist present, many Serbian citizens con­sider socialism a period in which they had much more agency and control over their own lives. Similarly, Maja Petrovic Steger describes how her inter­viewees "would often state that the everyday facts of their lives made it hard for them to imagine themselves actively participating in remaking, or just in contesting, the political and economic fabric in contemporary Serbia."49 Citi­zens' lack of agency and detachment from what is being said and done in the public sphere are certainly related to the perception of reality as farce. They are also a source of frustration, and laughter is one of the available ways of mitigating that.50 Irony and similar modes of expression have long been rec­ognized as means of "psychologically assuaging the discomfort and suffering of subordinates."51 According to Njuz.net's contributors, their writing is often motivated by a need to lessen the tension that Serbia's sociopolitical reality imposes on individuals in their everyday lives; they write parody because

46. Bradatan, "To Die Laughing," 749. 47. The imagery of politics as a show and political leaders as puppets is strongly pres­

ent, e.g., in contemporary Italy. See Noelle J. Mole, "Trusted Puppets, Tarnished Politi­cians: Humor and Cynicism in Berlusconi's Italy," American Ethnologist 40, no. 2 (May 2013): 288-99.

48. Greenberg, "On the Road to Normal," 89. 49. Maja Petrovic Steger, "Parasecurity and Paratime in Serbia: Neocortical Defence

and National Consciousness," in Martin A. Pedersen and Morten Holbraad, eds., Times of Security: Ethnographies of Fear, Protest and the Future (London, 2013), 151.

50. Ibid. 51. Fernandez and Huber, "The Anthropology of Irony," 4. See also Gabriel Torres, The

Force of Irony: Power in the Everyday Life of Mexican Tomato Workers (Oxford, 1997).

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it is fun and relaxing and they are happy that they have managed to secure such an enjoyable profession for themselves.52 Many read these posts for fun, relaxation, and joy. Njuz.net's readers and writers thus form a large affective community in which laughter plays a therapeutic role. But is there anything more than collective therapy in this, and what potential does this affectivity have in a society in which fake news is not only a reason to laugh but is also taken seriously because it often seems more real than the reality itself?

The affective nature of this activity—the pleasure that creating and read­ing this satire brings—raises a series of questions: What is the relationship between this affect and social mobilization and criticism? To what extent do laughter and the affective effects of parody sharpen social criticism, and to what extent do they produce an uncanny intimacy between those who criti­cize and those who are criticized or produce unintended effects enabled by that intimacy?

Njuz.net's writers, a group of well-educated young men, experts in com­munications, new media, and foreign languages, university teachers, and ac­tivists (both traditional and digital), point to social criticism as the primary goal of their journalistic endeavor. On the other hand, they are aware of the ambiguous role that humor and the emotion invested in and emerging from writing for Njuz.net (on their part) and the mapping of that parodic content onto Serbian reality through interpretational labor (on the part of readers) play in social criticism and mobilization: in the words of the website's editor, Marko Drazic, humor has marked their activities more than they desired. As a consequence, "sharp criticism withdraws, making way for pleasing, 'feel­good' texts."53

Pointing to this ambiguity, Njuz.net's authors touch on fundamental is­sues regarding humor and irony's capacity for resistance and mobilization in situations where sociopolitical hierarchies and discourse production are characterized by hegemony.54 According to James Fernandez and Mary Tay­lor Huber, the most serious question in the politics of irony is its "practical consequences in either encouraging people to change the world, or, in be­ing so corrosive to commitment as to lead to the abandonment of any serious hope or work toward change."55 Fernandez and Huber do not have a definite answer to this question, just as Njuz.net's writers cannot unambiguously say what the concrete effects of their endeavor are. Scholars of socialism have also paid particular attention to these issues. Thus, Serguei Oushakine warns that "the comic genre provides symbolic mechanisms for simultaneous de­scription of and distancing from the disgraceful" but is "accompanied by a particular process of affective translation" that makes the disgraceful "not a cause for disgust or recoil; instead, it acts as an object of scoffing attraction, if

52. Markovic, interview. 53. "Njuz.net: Ovo nam nije trebalo," Politika, January 2,2012. 54. In a similar vein, Mikhail Bakhtin highlights ambiguity as the principal charac­

teristic of the carnivalesque: with the temporary violation of norms, it actually affirms and confirms established social hegemonies. Mikhail Bakhtin, Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaia kul'tura srednevekov'ia i renessansa (Moscow, 1965).

55. Fernandez and Huber, "The Anthropology of Irony," 16.

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not attachment." In this way, laughter becomes "a laughter of reconciliation, an acoustic and bodily analgesics—a socially acceptable painkiller that modi­fies the perception when the perceived situation cannot be changed."56 This quality of laughter in social circumstances characterized by hegemonic power relations and hierarchies produces what Neringa Klumbyte labels "political intimacy"—"the coexistence of state authorities and other subjects in fields of social and political comfort, togetherness, and dialogue as well as in the zones of shared meanings and values."57

(Dis-)Pleasures of Laughter

The ambiguous role of laughter, parody, and irony in social criticism, resis­tance, and effective political action against hegemonic relations does not only lie in attraction and intimacy between the bearers of hegemonic power and those subordinated to that power. It is also related to the fact that these dis­cursive strategies require their audience's awareness that their content should not be understood literally but demands interpretational labor, by which the addressees understand the author's intentions. Because they demand "par­ticipation through interpretation," irony and related discursive strategies transform the audience into proactive and engaged participants in meaning-making.58 Those interested and engaged in political activism in western de­mocracies stress their ability to stimulate critical reflection.59 On the other hand, the use of these discursive tools is always characterized by uncertainty that the audience will fail to understand the intended message, which would eliminate the effect and their potential for political effectiveness. In Irony's Edge, Linda Hutcheon, following Stanley Fish, warns that irony is "risky busi­ness," since "there is no guarantee that the interpreter will 'get' the irony in the same way as it was intended."60 In the same vein, Larry Bogad suggests that "an audience member may 'get' irony as intended, may not even under-

56. Serguei Oushakine, "Introduction: Jokes of Repression," East European Politics and Societies 25, no. 4 (November 2011): 655.

57. Neringa Klumbyte, "Political Intimacy: Power, Laughter and Coexistence in Late Soviet Lithuania," East European Politics and Societies 25, no. 4 (November 2011): 659. Investigating humor and cynicism in Syria, Lisa Wedeen points to "the habituation obe­dience—the combination of cynical lack of belief and compliant behavior," which may be found in both authoritarian regimes and western liberal democracies. Wedeen, Ambigui­ties of Domination, 154, quoted in Mole, "Trusted Puppets, Tarnished Politicians," 291.

58. Boyle, "Play With Authority!," 209. 59. Andrew Boyd, "Irony, Meme Warfare, and the Extreme Costume Ball," in Ronald

Hayduk and Benjamin Shepard, eds., From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Com­munity Building in the Era of Globalization (London, 2002), 245-53; Larry Bogad, "Tacti­cal Carnival: Social Movements, Demonstrations, and Dialogical Performance," in Ian Cohen-Cruz and Mady Schutzman, eds., A Boal Companion: Dialogues on Theatre and Cultural Politics (London, 2006), 47; Nina Felshin, introduction to Nina Felshin, ed., But Is It Art? The Spirit of Art as Activism (Seattle, 1995), 16.

60. Hutcheon, Irony's Edge, 11. See also Stanley Fish, "Short People Got No Reason to Live: Reading Irony," Daedalus 112, no. 1 (1983): 176.

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stand it to be ironic, or may receive it in an unintended way. Irony has an edge, and it is risky for it can cut both ways."61

This risk is a significant concern for those involved in radical activism and art. In the case of Njuz.net, however, failure to "catch the drift" and mistak­ing parody for reality is also an effect that the site desires and makes use of. This is despite the fact that, according to Njuz.net's authors, it is never their intention to deceive their audience. Writer Nenad Milosavljevic stressed that their news pieces are never hoaxes in the classic sense (something that is pur­ported to be true but is not) and they always equip them with signals that the content should not be taken literally.62

The audience's failure to understand the news' inauthenticity or its au­thors' irony not only confirms how intertwined farce and reality are nowadays but also provides a basis for multiple intimacies and differentiations. Njuz.net became famous when several regional and global news agencies, including the New York Post, published its report that a drunken Serb had jumped into the ocean in Sharm el Sheikh and killed a shark.63 From the Njuz.net authors' viewpoint, this case disrupted the contemporary media sphere's usual func­tioning, with its uncritical reproduction of news content without verification. The story was written with the intent to warn readers not to believe everything they read or hear in the media.64 This particular piece relied on certain cul­tural stereotypes about unique, if not extraordinary, Serbian qualities (wild-ness, craziness), a stereotype maintained both in Serbian society and outside it.65 Because of this presumption, both Serbian and international readers took the story seriously, despite indications in the text of irony and parody. It man­aged to mock disparate audiences simultaneously, and this multiplicity of au-

61.L.M.Bogad,ElectoralGuerrillaTheatre:RadicalRidiculeandSocialMovements{Lon-don, 2005), 37. On the kind of ambiguities irony implies in the context of contemporary African art, see Paolo Israel, "Irony, Ambiguity and the Art of Recycling: Reflections on Contemporary Rural African Art and 'Africa Remix,'" Third Text 20, no. 5 (2006): 594.

62. Nenad Milosavljevic, interview, Belgrade, July 12,2013. 63. Nenad Milosavljevic, "Srbin ubio ajkulu ubicu u Sarm el Seiku," Njuz, Decem­

ber 10, 2010, at www.njuz.net/srbin-ubio-ajkulu-ubicu-u-sarm-el-seiku/ (last accessed February 8, 2015).

64. Nurturing a more critical and reflective stance toward the content, production, and circulation of news in Serbia is one of Njuz.net's most important missions. Under the auspices of the NGO Njuz.org, Njuz.net's team is engaged in media education (see the website www.posmatrac.rs [last accessed February 8, 2015]). The project monitors me­dia content and points out unprofessional practices and low-quality reporting. The team says it was motivated to start this project because its members were aware of "the current situation in the media sphere in Serbia and the neighbouring countries, and the status of journalists who, 'torn between the dictates of the market and the ethics of their profes­sion, lose the battle for right information.'" Dejan Georgievski, "NGO Launches Website to Monitor Unprofessional Media Reporting," OneWorldsee, June 11,2013, at www.oneworld-see.org/content/ngo-launches-website-monitor-unprofessional-media-reporting (last ac­cessed February 8,2015).

65. For a discussion of such Serbian (self-)perceptions, see Dusan I. Bjelic and Lu­anda Cole, "Sexualizing the Serb," in Dusan I. Bjelic and Obrad Savic, eds., Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 279-310; Marko 2ivkovic, Serbian Dreambook: National Imaginary in the Time of Milosevic (Bloom-ington, 2011); and Tomislav Longinovic, Vampire Nation: Violence as Cultural Imaginary (Durham, 2011).

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diences, just like the multifaceted parody of both local and EU discourses, is an important aspect of what Njuz.net does.

When using parody and irony to protest neoliberal capitalism, tactical media and radical performances take clearly defined, irreconcilable posi­tions vis-a-vis the discursive practices they expose. Their intervention "does not depend on a perfect resemblance to the 'original' that it refers to. On the contrary, the very effect of such radical performances depends on successful failure of resemblance."66 On the other hand, Njuz.net's writers aim to blur the line between fake and real as much as possible. In so doing, they constantly question and challenge any static, fixed positioning of reality and its parody and they highlight a multifaceted, often unexpected relationship between the two in contemporary Serbia. Both the authors and the readers of Njuz.net often reveal their awareness of this relationship between reality and parody: Dejan Nikolic, the editor in chief, said in an interview, "We are first and foremost a critical website. Some people do not know it and leave comments like, 'This is not funny at all.' It shouldn't be funny."67 "Very often," noted another editor, "people protest, commenting under a story 'this is not funny' or 'why do you write about this here.'"68 One of the posts that provoked many reactions of this kind was published on July 11,2012, when the victims of the Srebrenica geno­cide were commemorated in Bosnia and Herzegovina. According to the Njuz. net post, July 11 is the day Serbia commemorates the phrase "And what have they done to us?"69 The piece is an ironic critique of Serbia's refusal to face what happened in Srebrenica and, more generally, Serbian society's respon­sibility for the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia. The post provoked heated debate, in which many commenters used the very same phrase, asking the author why there is no post about Serbian victims and what was done to Serbs during the wars. In this way, parody again became reality, making the satire more real than most of what appeared in Serbian media about Srebrenica on that day. The following exchange of comments is a good illustration of this inversion of the reality-parody relationship:

NS: It is unbelievable how fast [commenters] confirmed what is said in the post. But there is something I want to complain about: this is not news in the mirror, this is cruel truth.

SLAVISHA: @NS, you are so right—it took less than half an hour for those in charge of the commemoration of the phrase to raise their voices. As regards your complaint, Njuz has become a mirror that shows real news; if you want fake [news], you should read Blic, Novosti, Kurur, etc., and of course watch public television. , When I want to get the real information, I go to Njuz.net.

An unexpected reversal between truth and parody does not always de­pend on the audience and its interpretative labor—it can happen in the course

66. Boyle, "Play With Authority!," 206. 67. "Njuz.net: Ovo nam nije trebalo," Politika, January 2,2012. 68. Markovic, interview. 69. Viktor Markovic, "U Srbiji obelezen dan fraze 'A sta su oni nama radili,'" Njuz,

July 11,2012, at www.njuz.net/u-srbiji-obelezen-dan-fraze-a-sta-su-oni-nama-radili/ (last accessed February 8, 2015).

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306 Slavic Review

of time as well. Something articulated as parody may indeed turn out to be reality; in retrospect, parodic texts may become prophetic.70 On September 9, 2011, Njuz.net published an article under the headline "Double Murder in Ze-mun the Beginning of Ad Campaign for 'I Love the 1990s' Festival."71 The ar­ticle criticized the festival organizers' intent to present the legacy of the dark­est period in recent Serbian history, characterized by violence, insecurity, and the deterioration of moral values, in a favorable light, and the author built on the irony of a double murder marking the start of an ad campaign for this cel­ebration. But the story did not end there. Only a couple of days after the Njuz. net post was published, a bomb exploded in New Belgrade, injuring three people. Not only did satire turn into reality, the festival's main promotional song, "The 1990s Are Here," suddenly sounded ominously real, in just the sense Njuz.net was pointing to.

Finally, both Njuz.net's authors and readers are no doubt aware of and engaged with the dynamic relationship between reality and parody because an increasing number of real events and serious news reports look more like parodies than the fake ones on the site. "Is this from Njuz?" is a comment that readers often leave under such stories in the mainstream media.72 Journalists frequently preface their articles' titles with the disclaimer "This Is Not Njuz."73

70. Parody as prophecy is already well known to citizens of the successor states of the former Yugoslavia. Between 1984 and 1991, Radio Sarajevo and TV Sarajevo broadcast a cult comedy called Top lista nadrealista (The surrealists' hit parade), written by Sarajevo's New Primitives. The show comprised mostly parodic sketches of the political situation in the late Yugoslav period. Many of the sketches proved to be prophetic, as they depicted situations like Sarajevo being divided into different republics and a single family split into two clans and warring over control of different rooms in an apartment, with a UN peace­keeping force's "significant" presence adding fuel to the conflict.

71. Nenad Milosavljevic, "Dvostruko ubistvo u Zemunu pocetak reklamne kampanje za festival 'Volim devedesete," Njuz, September 9, 2011, at www.njuz.net/dvostruko-ubistvo-u-zemunu-pocetak-reklamne-karnpanje-za-festival-volim-devedesete/ (last ac­cessed February 8,2015).

72. See, for example, "Kazne za ubistvo insekta 100 evra, za krupnije zivotinje 300" (Fines for murder of an insect 100 euros, for bigger animals 300 euros), Blic, August 23,2011, at www.blic.rs/Vesti/Drustvo/272980/Kazne-za-ubistvo-insekta-100-evra-za-krupnije-zivotinje-3000/komentari/3390249/komentar-odgovor (last accessed February 8, 2015); "Srpski skijas Cedonir Chadda savetuje: Svi bi trebalo da posete Himalaje i Pakistan" (Ser­bian skier Cedonir Chadda's advice: Everyone should visit Pakistan and the Himalayas), Blic, June 29, 2013, at www.blic.rs/Vesti/Politika/396102/Srpski-skijas-Cedonir-Chadda-savetuje-Svi-bi-trebalo-da-posete-Himalaje-i-Pakistan (last accessed February 8, 2015); and "Cak Di cestitao Lazaru Ristovskom za 'Radnicki rep'" (Chuck D congratulates Lazar Ristovski on "Workers' Rap"), Blic, April 11, 2013, at www.blic.rs/Zabava/Vesti/247277/ Cak-Di-cestitao-Lazaru-Ristovskom-za-Radnicki-rep (last accessed March 17,2015).

73. E.g., "Nije Njuz: Sudovi u Nisu prekinuli sudenja—KPZ odbio da prevozi zatvore-nike zbog goriva!" (Not Njuz: Courts in Nis abandoned trials and the corrective institu­tion ceased to transport prisoners because of gasoline shortage), Telegraf, July 18,2013, at www.telegraf.rs/vesti/786064-nije-njuz-sudovi-u-nisu-prekinuli-sudjenja-kpz-odbio-da-prevozi-zatvorenike-zbog-goriva (last accessed February 8, 2015); "Nije Njuz.net: Dacic i Taci kandidati za Nobelovu nagradu za mir" (Not Njuz.net: Dacic and Thaci candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize), Na dlanu info, April 7, 2013, at www.nadlanu.com/pocetna/ info/srbija/Nije-Njuznet-Dacic-i-Taci-kandidati-za-Nobelovu-nagradu-za-mir.a-175645. 291.html (last accessed February 8,2015); and "Nije Njuz: Hrvat uhvacen bez dozvole 996 puta" (Not Njuz: Croat caught driving without license 996 times), Telegraf, April 24,2013,

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Parodying Political and Media Discourses 307

This not only confirms that Njuz.net has become a widely used cultural refer­ence in grasping the reality of postsocialist Serbia but also highlights main­stream corporate media's capacity for making a farce of its own discursive closure and shows how journalists working for these news outlets willingly seize on farcical elements in Serbian politics and society.n Njuz.net's writers thus not only refract Serbian reality through the prism of parody and irony but are also often in a position to compete with that reality and the other media outlets that write about real, but no less farcical, situations and events. Nenad Milosavljevic described this position in the following way: "Reality sometimes parodies itself more skillfully than we can do it. We at Njuz.net are in constant competition with the crazy reality of Serbia."75

Conclusion: Parody and (Self-)Reflection on the Adversities of Modern Politics

Stories published on Njuz.net have multiple audiences and enable identifi­cation and detachment on several levels. The addressees have at their dis­posal a wide range of possible reappropriations and interpretations of the intended message, not always in accordance with the authors' expectations and wishes. For example, the episode of the Sharm el Sheikh shark story was covered in most Serbian media outlets with triumphalism and interpreted as more proof of the superiority of Serbs (who—according to widespread stereo­type—always manage to fool the rest of the world).76 Commenters often pro­test if the posts are not "funny enough" and thus fail to provide the expected pleasure of laughter. In some cases, readers keep insisting on misreading the posts—they continue to interpret them literally, even when other commenters have explained that they are irony or parody. Njuz.net's writers have men­tioned another unintended use of their work: Serbian politicians sometimes post links to parodic texts about them on their personal websites, apparently interpreting them as affirmative.77

With all this in mind, the question of the nature of Njuz.net as a medium and the effects of its activities is not easy to answer. Part of the difficulty is

at www.telegraf.rs/vesti/666874-nije-njuz-hrvat-uhvacen-bez-dozvole-996-puta (last ac­cessed February 8,2015).

74.1 thank one of the anonymous reviewers for raising this point. 75. Milosavljevic, interview. 76. As Marko Drazic remarked, "Vecina naslova u medijima je u nastavku bila—ha,

ha, ha, Srbi zeznuli ceo svet, sto je ponovo potvrdilo ono sto smo mi u torn tekstu kritik-ovali [Most of the news headlines (after we published this shark story) were—ha, ha, ha, Serbs fooled the whole world, which confirmed once again the very point we criticized in this news]." Quoted in Iva Martinovic, "Fenomen srpskog portala Njuz.net: Realnost kao satira," Radio Slobodna Evropa, August 11, 2012, at www.slobodnaevropa.org/content/ njuz-net-realnost-kao-satira/24672916.html (last accessed March 10,2015).

77. Markovic, interview. For discussion of how political leaders make use of humor in late liberal western democracies, see Mole, "Trusted Puppets, Tarnished Politicians," on the case of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy; and Chris Smith and Ben Voth, "The Role of Humor in Political Argument: How 'Strategery' and 'Lockboxes' Changed a Political Campaign," Argumentation and Advocacy 39, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 110-29, on George W. Bush in the United States.

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308 Slavic Review

the ambiguous nature of parody and irony and the comforting, relieving, and therapeutic effects of the laughter they provoke. One ambiguous effect of this laughter is intimacy between politics and media, but that is also a condition for the site's success: to be able to effectively criticize the political and media spheres, Njuz.net's writers need to know them well and to consume them on a daily basis.78 The same is also true for their audiences. The absence of a clear dividing line between satire and reality, sincerity and cynicism, parody of the present and prophecy for the future, all of which make it possible for Njuz. net and similar endeavors to be so successful and to be taken so seriously, simultaneously contributes to the impossibility of effectively transforming a critical stance into political action—a dilemma most radical activist groups struggle with in today's world. The other part of the difficulty comes from Njuz.net's insistence on multifaceted irony and parody, which spares no seg­ment of Serbian society nor those who shape the situation in that society from the outside (such as the European Union or the "international community"). Multiple ironies and parodies also entail multiple identifications and distanc­ing: the question of who laughs and who is the object of that laughter depends on several contextual parameters, which are defined by both the authors and the audience of Njuz.net's posts. In contrast to most radical and tactical media and other independent critical and satirical news sources in Serbia, Njuz.net does not take a clearly positioned political stance. In the view of its writers, such fixed radical positioning would inevitably lead to the production of yet another more normalized and predictable discourse and would make Njuz. net an instrument of certain political forces.79 At the same time, its multifac­eted approach and its lack of a clearly defined position, and refusal to take one, reveal one of the most significant symptoms of our time: the impossibility of pointing out, delimiting oneself from, and critically targeting "the enemy" in the first place, because labor and everyday practices are organized such that we all inevitably contribute to maintaining that enemy's well-being. Njuz. net's writers see what they do as a continuation of the parodic and satirical media tradition that existed in Serbia in the 1990s (in publications like Nasa krmaca and Bre), but they also emphasize the crucial difference between the two sociopolitical contexts. In the words of Nenad Milosavljevic, "In a way, it was easier in the time of Slobodan Milosevic—then, one could clearly articu­late what one was for and against. Today, it is much more difficult to take a clear position, especially with regard to what one is for. What we do with Njuz. net and our other projects is an attempt to argue for universal values and prin­ciples that are beyond the particular interests of everyday Serbian politics and to promote awareness, reflection, and critique among the citizens of Serbia."80

It was not similar political views and attitudes toward local politics that gath­ered Njuz.net's writers together. They admit that they often have opposing opinions about political issues in Serbia. What drew this group—composed of a teacher of Norwegian, a journalist, an IT specialist, an art historian, a

78. For this reason, Njuz.net's writers emphasize that it is much more difficult and less effective to produce texts for the global edition. Markovic, interview.

79. Markovic, interview. 80. Milosavljevic, interview.

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Parodying Political and Media Discourses 309

designer, and others—together was rather a desire to participate in a project that simultaneously brings a lot of joy, enables social criticism, and provides an income—a combination most people can only dream of in these times.

Njuz.net's writers and editors strongly emphasize that their mission is to critique Serbian social, political, and media conditions. At the same time, they are interested in making use of the website's cultural capital and popularity. They give interviews and sometimes even write for the mainstream media in Serbia—the same media that is the target of their criticism. They are ea­ger to be visible and present in the Serbian public and use different channels to do so. Njuz.net's team established a nongovernmental organization, Njuz. org, which participates in various media projects and competes for financial support. The team's parodic news is now published in print form as well (as a supplement of the daily Danas), and they are writing for a Serbian version of The Daily Show (24 minuta sa Zoranom Kesicem, on the B92 television chan­nel). And after all, Njuz.net-related activities are the main source of income for these young people, and this fact significantly affects the nature of their social activism.

Njuz.net's undefined, in-between position prompts a lot of uneasy ques­tions for both its writers and its audience. Such a position, however, is the only one that enables this site, which publishes "news in the mirror," to hold that mirror up to us all and make us ask the same uneasy questions about the multiple, often unwanted, unexpected, and uncanny ways we are engaged with the (sur)reality of our neoliberal societies. The writers of these fake news stories whom I interviewed struggle with these questions and openly reflect on their inability to answer them unambiguously. This reveals an important dimension of political parody: it is not only a form of social criticism but also offers the possibility of (self-)reflection on the complex, ambiguous nature of modern politics and on the equally ambiguous ways citizens position them­selves vis-a-vis those politics.

In the end, questions remain: Why Serbia, and why now? That is, why have people in Serbia, of all post-Yugoslav societies, so widely embraced parody to explain and deal with their political and social reality, and why has this hap­pened within the last few years? The answers to these questions certainly have to do with the specific historical trajectory of postsocialist Serbia and the way this recent history has left its mark on all citizens' lived experience as well as with the country's media landscape and the spectrum of perceived possibilities for political action. Serbia's citizens went through several cycles of disillusionment during the 1990s and 2000s. A lot of positive energy and enthusiasm was wasted in massive protests against the Milosevic regime: one in 2000 finally managed to oust him from power on October 5, but, as many would argue, October 6 never really came for Serbia; there has been too much continuity with the Milosevic period. The country never managed to establish a firm moral foundation that would enable its citizens to perceive themselves as "normal agents capable of effective action."81 This helps explain the ab­sence of citizen activism and the general apathy that accompanies frequently heard statements that the current situation in Serbia is worse than ever. Mas-

81. Greenberg, "On the Road to Normal," 88.

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310 Slavic Review

sive popular protests against the corrupt political elite never emerged after 2000; the most recent wave of protests in Croatia and Slovenia, in 2012, did not spread to Serbia. If anyone is still capable of mobilization, it is the right-wing nationalist organizations; but nationalist imagery, overused in the 1990s, has largely lost its attraction. Caught in a social and political reality that looks as dire and absurd as a (bad) play—one in which no political actors, including the NGOs, seem to act beyond their own narrow political interests and one cannot differentiate between leftist and rightist populism and is equally irri­tated by local politicians' and European Union officials' performative, mean­ingless, and noncommittal words—Serbia's citizens embrace an ironic stance toward their political reality and use parody to interpret it. And Njuz.net has proven to be an adequate medium for this. It would be wrong, however, to claim that the critical distance parody enables results only in cynicism and a lack of belief that real political change is possible. Parodic and humorous takes on politics, motivated by the "discrepancy between reality and what we desire and expect," also point to citizens' affective engagement and emergent hopes and desires to create or at least imagine different political conditions and new horizons for moral citizenship.82

Like other transitional postsocialist societies, Serbia experienced a radi­cal tabloidization of its media landscape, paralleled by many nontransparent privatization takeovers as well as the commercialization of the newly priva­tized "serious" media. This process was already well underway in the first half of the 2000s, but it then took almost a decade for Njuz.net to appear on the Serbian media scene and become a widely read and "trusted" site. This may be related partly to increased Internet access and thus greater digital media consumption, but more importantly, for parody to become the most appropriate lens for looking at political and social reality, the idea of Europe had to be compromised by discursive closure and ideological unity among the political subjects involved, which left no room for any moral, political, or dis­cursive alternative. The parody broadcast by Njuz.net thus comes to represent a symptom of the Serbia's Europeanization and its inclusion in the global cur­rents of neoliberal capitalism into which Serbian citizens were thrown after the futile struggle of the 1990s to regain a sense of agency and to reimagine their state as a space in which they could participate in establishing moral principles and the rule of law.

82. Dean L. Yarwood, When Congress Makes a Joke: Congressional Humor Then and Now (Lanham, 2004), 14. See also Boyer, "Simply the Best"; Angelique Haugerud, "Jon Stewart Returns to The Daily Show—Why Satire Matters," Huff Post Media, September 5, 2013, at www.huffingtonpost.com/american-anthropological-association/jon-stewart-returns-to-th_b_3844730.html (last accessed November 25, 2014); and Klumbyte, "On Power and Laughter."

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