Lords of meaning and the head of the octopus

It turned out that the way the student demands were set was a small masterpiece of political art, and that behind the articulation of those demands was not a genius individual, an experienced political broker, or an organization engaged in political engineering. None of that.

Collective genius (genius = spirit) realized that there was a struggle for meanings, in which one name was not mentioned: the name of the dictator. Because if that name appeared in the requests, it would "eat" the requests themselves.

In this way - removed, rejected, buried, ignored, reduced to an institutional measure (the president of the republic) - that name loses its privileged interpretation of meaning. Hence the main stake of the struggle that the students started: the institution.

Institution and function

The institution is not tied to the name, but to the function. The president of the republic is a position performed by a person with a first and last name, so if there is an individual of integrity and integrity in that position, and not a scoundrel, the institution is said to be functioning.

If, however, as in the case of Serbia or Russia, the institution is personalized, if the name covers the function it performs, the institution collapses. Even when someone introduces it by name and surname (institutions are people), the institution, in its essence, remains anonymous: names change, the institution remains.

Dictatorship is, to that extent, an organization in which one man, outside the institutional order (therefore arbitrarily and according to his boss), asks questions (determines topics), answers those questions and interprets the answers. In the second conceptual register: the same person makes laws, arrests, judges, determines and executes the sentence, while the accused does not have the right to speak.

The dictator is the master of meaning. In a republic, on the contrary, there is no master of meaning, and different interpretations of the same fact compete with each other in the public sphere, so that the citizens, in free and fair elections, choose one of those interpretations. Until the next election.

Octopus

That is why the student demands do not name the head of the corrupt and corrupt octopus, but they clearly aim at it. Each of the tentacles leads to the head, but the requirements do not say so, and it is precisely this omission that is the ingenious loop of the requirements. The usurper of the institution of the president has been deprived of the meaning base on which he stands. He mastered the meanings that destroyed the ties of civilization, but now he is back in the place of ruins (literally: Hercegovačka street where, to the same extent, houses and institutions were demolished). And he doesn't manage.

This is precisely why the lies, procrastination, destruction and falsification of documents, and especially the refusal to talk about the flow of money in the reconstruction of the Novi Sad railway station (with the remark that the investigation into the flow of money is rarely conducted in front of the public, but it is precisely for this reason that it is necessary for the Prosecution to organize regular press conferences).

But if the student demands, in their genius, left aside the name of the head of the octopus, the demands of political parties of civil origin, on the contrary, are articulated in a different conceptual regime and they aim directly at the head. (For no confusion: student requirements are par excellence political because they are presented by a group and are presented publicly.)

Here we should dispel certain confusions: the opposition parties of civil origin are on the same level of civilization as the student demands, and their "sin" is not in betraying civilizational demands, but in the fact that they failed to strategically and tactically oppose the octopuses. Political parties, by their very nature, fight for power on behalf of those who support them, and in this situation there is no difference between the demands of students, citizens and opposition parties of the civil media. Here, too, the struggle for meanings is at work.