Journal articles on the topic 'Feelgood'

Feelgood Management is an emerging concept first applied in the German start-up scene in 2012. The approach is gaining popularity, even though the measurement is difficult and academic research is scarce. Accordingly, this study aims to close this research gap by answering the research question about the impact of Feelgood Management in German SMEs, especially on the employees’ heath, satisfaction and performance willingness. Our findings show that Feelgood Management is just emerging and faces several challenges, related to the ambiguous term that implies ridicule, the lack of standardization that is allowing various interpretations and opposition towards novelty. Despite being limited, due to the risk of bias and subjectivity that is natural for qualitative data collection along with the uni-dimensional perspective of solely Feelgood Managers, this study produces a valuable model of the influences on Feelgood Management and its impact on employee health, satisfaction and performance willingness.

I denne artikkelen utforsker vi 14-åringers forståelse av religion, og dennes sammenheng med valg av konfirmasjon. Vi finner at det er stor variasjon i religiøs selvforståelse, og samtidig stor grad av ambivalens. Vi argumenterer for at de unge forstår konfirmasjon i større grad som en performativ rite som skal reflektere individets identitet og i noen grad familietradisjonen. Riten fremstår for dem i mindre grad som religiøs markør knyttet til overgang fra barn til voksen. Vi bygger på materiale fra fokusgruppeintervju og survey-data fra tenåringer i forkant av konfirmasjonsvalg. Vi finner at 14-åringene i stor grad har en individualistisk tilnærming til religion og valg av konfirmasjon. Majoriteten av 14-åringene omtaler religiøs variasjon i positive vendinger, mens de uttrykker skepsis til sterk grad av religiøs overbevisning. Nøkkelord: Konfirmasjon, riter, ungdom, religiøsitet, religiøs individualisering, religiøs ambivalens

I denne artikkelen utforsker vi 14-åringers forståelse av religion, og dennes sammenheng med valg av konfirmasjon. Vi finner at det er stor variasjon i religiøs selvforståelse, og samtidig stor grad av ambivalens. Vi argumenterer for at de unge forstår konfirmasjon i større grad som en performativ rite som skal reflektere individets identitet og i noen grad familietradisjonen. Riten fremstår for dem i mindre grad som religiøs markør knyttet til overgang fra barn til voksen. Vi bygger på materiale fra fokusgruppeintervju og survey-data fra tenåringer i forkant av konfirmasjonsvalg. Vi finner at 14-åringene i stor grad har en individualistisk tilnærming til religion og valg av konfirmasjon. Majoriteten av 14-åringene omtaler religiøs variasjon i positive vendinger, mens de uttrykker skepsis til sterk grad av religiøs overbevisning. Nøkkelord: Konfirmasjon, riter, ungdom, religiøsitet, religiøs individualisering, religiøs ambivalens

In NTQ38 (May 1994) Mick Wallis explored some of the characteristics of the phenomenon of working-class political pageantry which reached its peak between the two world wars, looking in detail at one such pageant, Music and the People, mounted in London in April 1939, and at the tripartite five-day festival of which it formed a part. Here, he explores earlier and later forms of modern pageantry, from the bourgeois civic style (of which Louis Napoleon Parker was virtually inventor and remained the presiding genius) to the attempts of working-class organizations to create a people's form of pageantry, whether in the interests of Communist Party recruitment or – following in the footsteps of the Victorian monarchy and provincial city fathers – of creating its own, alternative memorializing traditions. Mick Wallis, who teaches drama at Loughborough University, has recently published on using Raymond Williams's work in the integration of practical and academic approaches to teaching. His one-man act, Sir John Feelgood and Marjorie, was an experiment in popular form for the sake of left-wing benefits.

Due to changes in legislation, the Dutch tax department has become responsible for several allowances as well. This forces the department to improve the affective and motivational responses to its forms. In an attempt to do so, the department has included photographs and examples in a form for reimbursement of medical care costs. This form was tested in a field experiment by comparing it with three versions from which either photographs, examples or both were removed. 242 senior citizens gave their evaluations after working with one of these form versions. The inclusion of photos and examples appeared to make the form more attractive, less discouraging, and a bit more favourable for the image of the tax department. It also led to more self-confidence, but only among false optimists, i.e., those who actually had their answers wrong became more certain about their performance. A post-hoc analysis revealed that the scores on affective and motivational aspects correlated strongly, and almost exclusively, with the perceived intelligibility of a form. The addition of feelgood elements seems to be of limited relevance.

The British working-class pageants of the nineteen-thirties were curiously cross-bred between, on the one hand, the resolutely bourgeois civic pageants which had become popular around the turn of the century and remained so still, and, on the other, the new Soviet style of mass-declamations with agit-prop intent. Often ignored even by left-wing theatre historians, these pageants drew on other influences varying from endemic communal forms of creation such as choirs and processions to the work of contemporary, left-leaning ‘high art’ poets and musicians. Here, Mick Wallis looks in detail at one such pageant, Music and the People, mounted in London in April 1939, and at the tripartite five-day festival of which it formed a part. He goes on to explore the politics, aesthetics, and logistics of this long-neglected form of popular performance. Mick Wallis, who teaches drama at Loughborough University, has recently published on using Raymond Williams's work in the integration of practical and academic approaches to teaching. His one-man act, Sir John Feelgood and Marjorie, was an experiment in popular form for the sake of left-wing benefits.

This paper reports students’ perceptions and experiences attending an object-oriented programming course in which they developed software using the Distributed Pair Programming (DPP) technique. Pair programming (PP) is typically performed on one computer, involving two programmers working collaboratively on the same code or algorithm. DPP on the other hand is performed remotely allowing programmers to collaborate from separate locations. PP started in the software industry as a powerful way to train programmers and to improve software quality. Research has shown that PP (and DPP) is also a successful approach to teach programming in academic programming courses. The main focus of PP and DPP research was PP’s effectiveness with respect to student performance and code quality, the investigation of best team formation strategies and studies of students’ attitudes. There are still limited studies concerning relationships between performance, attitudes and other critical factors. We have selected some of the most common factors which can be found in the literature: academic performance, programming experience, student confidence, feelgood factor, partner compatibility and implementation time. The main goal of this study was to investigate correlations between these attributes, while DPP was used as the main programming technique.

Intermittent fasting (IF) has been connected with health benefits such as weight loss, lower risk of coronary artery disease (CAD) and diabetes, increased longevity, and improved quality of life. However, the mechanisms of these IF benefits in humans require further investigation. This study sought to elucidate some of these mechanisms through secondary analyses of the Fasting and ExprEssion of Longevity Genes during fOOD abstinence (FEELGOOD) trial, in which apparently healthy participants were randomized in a Latin square design to a 24-h water-only fast and a 24-h ad libitum fed day. Two pathways were investigated, with trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO) levels measured due to their association with elevated risk of CAD, along with conductance of a broad panel of metabolic analytes. Measurements were made at baseline, at the end of the fasting day, and at the end of the fed day. A fasting mean of 14.3 ng in TMAO was found versus the baseline mean of 27.1 ng with p = 0.019, although TMAO levels returned to baseline on refeeding. Further, acute alterations in levels of proline, tyrosine, galactitol, and urea plasma levels were observed along with changes in 24 other metabolites during the fasting period. These acute changes reveal short-term mechanisms which, with consistent repeated episodes of IF, may lead to improved health and reduced risk of CAD and diabetes.

Pair programming (PP) has become popular in the research and software industry as well as being studied for a number of years in computer science courses with positive findings on student performance and attitudes. Advantages of PP reported in the literature are satisfaction, design quality, code productivity, team building, and communication. More recently, distributed pair programming (DPP), which enables two programmers to work remotely, has also attracted the interest of researchers and instructors. The difference between DPP and PP is that the former allows geographically distributed teams to collaborate and share program code. Such collaboration is, thus, only feasible if an underlying infrastructure supports all necessary interactions. The integrated development environments (IDEs) for DPP should cover the basic requirements for remote software development as well as address common PP problems, such as unequal contributions from each member of a pair, feedback during DPP sessions, and communication problems. This paper presents the findings of a study on student performance and attitudes towards DPP in an object-oriented programming (OOP) course. The factors examined were student performance, in terms of assignment grade, exam grade and implementation time in relation to students’ programming experience, and confidence, as well as student attitudes towards DPP, i.e., the feelgood factor, working alone or with a partner, and the perception of their partner’s technical competence. The results suggest that a students’ performance is associated with their programming experience and confidence in programming but not with how comfortable they feel during DPP sessions. Students evaluate the DPP sessions positively regardless of their confidence on programming or their perception of their partners’ technical competence. Students who consider themselves to have about the same programming competence as their partners tend to be more satisfied with DPP sessions. Overall, students prefer working with a partner regardless of their confidence on programming.

Glen O'Hara is Lecturer in Modern History at New College, Oxford. He is the co-author, with Niall Ferguson, of ‘The Myth of the Feelgood Factor’, in N. Ferguson, The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World Since 1700 (London, 2001). He is currently working on a book on British economic and social planning in the 1960s.

Background: Routine, periodic fasting is associated with a lower risk of coronary artery disease and diabetes in coronary angiography patients, and may reduce weight and alter metabolic risk in obese people. Fasting reportedly extends longevity in animals. This study evaluated the effect of fasting on metabolic profiles among apparently healthy people. Methods: Individuals (N=30) with no fasting history underwent a 24-hour water-only fast and 24 hours of ad libitum eating in a randomized cross-over trial (clinicaltrials.gov NCT01059760). All participants were free from cardiovascular diseases. Study endpoints included 75 metabolic analytes measured by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. With the Bonferroni correction, p≤0.000667 was needed for statistical significance (p≤0.05 was suggestively significant). Results: Participants averaged 43.6±13.5 years of age and 66.7% were female. The 24-hour fasting intervention reduced plasma levels of proline (p=0.00002), tyrosine (p=0.00033), urea (p=0.00034), and galactitol (p=0.00058) compared to the eating day. Overall, 29 factors had p≤0.05 (the expected type I error rate at p≤0.05 for 75 hypothesis tests is 4 false positives), including 16 amino acids (all were reduced by fasting) and 6 fatty acids (all were increased by fasting). Among participants randomized to fast the first 24 hours (n=16), 48-hour levels had returned to baseline for all 29 factors except for suggestively significant lower final values of pyruvate (p=0.014), glutamic acid (p=0.025), and tryptophan (p=0.028). Conclusion: A 24-hour fasting intervention reduced plasma levels of two amino acids (proline, tyrosine), and metabolomics literature connects lower proline and tyrosine with lower insulin resistance, better cognitive function, and less depression. The other findings confirm the known utilization of urea in the natriuresis of fasting (via excretion of nitrogen) that may lower blood pressure and that, during fasting, glucose is stored as galactose such that galactitol production is limited and fatty acids are used for energy. Changes in these four plus potentially 25 other metabolites suggest a beneficial health impact, which along with the potential to reduce insulin resistance warrants further study of fasting.

Introduction: Socialism – from Eternal Reality to Passing DreamThe Year of Revolutions in 1989 presaged the end of the Cold War. For many people, it must have felt like the end of the Twentieth Century, and the 1990s a period of waiting for the Millennium. However, the 1990s was, in fact, a period of profound transformation in the post-Socialist world.In early representations of Socialism’s end, a dominant narrative was that of collapse. Dramatic events, such as the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in Germany enabled representation of the end as an unexpected moment. Senses of unexpectedness rested on erstwhile perceptions of Socialism as eternal.In contrast, the 1990s came to be a decade of revision in which thinking switched from considering Socialism’s persistence to asking, “why it went wrong?” I explore this question in relation to former-Yugoslavia. In brief, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) was replaced through the early 1990s by six independent nation states: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. Kosovo came much later. In the states that were significantly ethnically mixed, the break-up was accompanied by violence. Bosnia in the 1990s will be remembered for an important contribution to the lexicon of ideas – ethnic cleansing.Revisionist historicising of the former-Yugoslavia in the 1990s was led by the scholarly community. By and large, it discredited the Ancient Ethnic Hatreds (AEH) thesis commonly held by nationalists, simplistic media commentators and many Western politicians. The AEH thesis held that Socialism’s end was a consequence of the up-swelling of primordial (natural) ethnic tensions. Conversely, the scholarly community tended to view Socialism’s failure as an outcome of systemic economic and political deficiencies in the SFRY, and that these deficiencies were also, in fact the root cause of those ethnic tensions. And, it was argued that had such deficiencies been addressed earlier Socialism may have survived and fulfilled its promise of eternity (Verdery).A third significant perspective which emerged through the 1990s was that the collapse of Socialism was an outcome of the up-swelling of, if not primordial ethnic tensions then, at least repressed historical memories of ethnic tensions, especially of the internecine violence engendered locally by Nazi and Italian Fascist forces in WWII. This perspective was particularly en vogue within the unusually rich arts scene in former-Yugoslavia. Its leading exponent was Slovenian avant-garde rock band Laibach.In this article, I consider Laibach’s career and methods. For background the article draws substantially on Alexei Monroe’s excellent biography of Laibach, Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK (2005). However, as I indicate below, my interpretation diverges very significantly from Monroe’s. Laibach’s most significant body of work is the cover versions of Western pop songs it recorded in the middle part of its career. Using a technique that has been labelled retroquotation (Monroe), it subtly transforms the lyrical content, and radically transforms the musical arrangement of pop songs, thereby rendering them what might be described as martial anthems. The clearest illustration of the process is Laibach’s version of Opus’s one hit wonder “Live is Life”, which is retitled as “Life is Life” (Laibach 1987).Conventional scholarly interpretations of Laibach’s method (including Monroe’s) present it as entailing the uncovering of repressed forms of individual and collective totalitarian consciousness. I outline these ideas, but supplement them with an alternative interpretation. I argue that in the cover version stage of its career, Laibach switched its attention from seeking to uncover repressed totalitarianism towards uncovering repressed memories of ethnic tension, especially from WWII. Furthermore, I argue that its creative medium of Western pop music is especially important in this regard. On the bases of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Bosnia (University of Melbourne Human Ethics project 1544213.1), and of a reading of SFRY’s geopolitical history, I demonstrate that for many people, Western popular cultural forms came to represent the quintessence of what it was to be Yugoslav. In this context, Laibach’s retroquotation of Western pop music is akin to a broader cultural practice in the post-SFRY era in which symbols of the West were iconoclastically transformed. Such transformation served to reveal a public secret (Taussig) of repressed historic ethnic enmity within the very heart of things that were regarded as quintessentially and pan-ethnically Yugoslav. And, in so doing, this delegitimised memory of SFRY ever having been a properly functioning entity. In this way, Laibach contributed significantly to a broader process in which perceptions of Socialist Yugoslavia came to be rendered less as a reality with the potential for eternity than a passing dream.What Is Laibach and What Does It Do?Originally of the industrial rock genre, Laibach has evolved through numerous other genres including orchestral rock, choral rock and techno. It is not, however, a rock group in any conventional sense. Laibach is the musical section of a tripartite unit named Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) which also encompasses the fine arts collective Irwin and a variety of theatre groups.Laibach was the name by which the Slovenian capital Ljubljana was known under the Austrian Habsburg Empire and then Nazi occupation in WWII. The choice of name hints at a central purpose of Laibach and NSK in general, to explore the relationship between art and ideology, especially under conditions of totalitarianism. In what follows, I describe how Laibach go about doing this.Laibach’s central method is eclecticism, by which symbols of the various ideological regimes that are its and the NSK’s subject matter are intentionally juxtaposed. Eclecticism of this kind was characteristic of the postmodern aesthetics typical of the 1990s. Furthermore, and counterintuitively perhaps, postmodernism was as much a condition of the Socialist East as it was the Capitalist West. As Mikhail N. Epstein argues, “Totalitarianism itself may be viewed as a specific postmodern model that came to replace the modernist ideological stance elaborated in earlier Marxism” (102). However, Western and Eastern postmodernisms were fundamentally different. In particular, while the former was largely playful, ironicising and depoliticised, the latter, which Laibach and NSK may be regarded as being illustrative of, involved placing in opposition to one another competing and antithetical aesthetic, political and social regimes, “without the contradictions being fully resolved” (Monroe 54).The performance of unresolved contradictions in Laibach’s work fulfils three principal functions. It works to (1) reveal hidden underlying connections between competing ideological systems, and between art and power more generally. This is evident in Life is Life. The video combines symbols of Slovenian romantic nationalism (stags and majestic rural landscapes) with Nazism and militarism (uniforms, bodily postures and a martial musical arrangement). Furthermore, it presents images of the graves of victims of internecine violence in WWII. The video is a reminder to Slovenian viewers of a discomforting public secret within their nation’s history. While Germany is commonly viewed as a principal oppressor of Slovenian nationalism, the rural peasantry, who are represented as embodying Slovenian nationalism most, were also the most willing collaborators in imperialist processes of Germanicisation. The second purpose of the performance of unresolved contradictions in Laibach’s work is to (2) engender senses of the alienation, especially as experienced by the subjects of totalitarian regimes. Laibach’s approach in this regard is quite different to that of punk, whose concern with alienation - symbolised by safety pins and chains - was largely celebratory of the alienated condition. Rather, Laibach took a lead from seminal industrial rock bands such as Einstürzende Neubauten and Throbbing Gristle (see, for example, Walls of Sound (Throbbing Gristle 2004)), whose sound one fan accurately describes as akin to, “the creation of the universe by an angry titan/God and a machine apocalypse all rolled into one” (rateyourmusic.com). Certainly, Laibach’s shows can be uncomfortable experiences too, involving not only clashing symbols and images, but also the dissonant sounds of, for example, martial music, feedback, recordings of the political speeches of totalitarian leaders and barking dogs, all played at eardrum-breaking high volumes. The purpose of this is to provide, as Laibach state: “a ritualized demonstration of political force” (NSK, Neue Slowenische Kunst 44). In short, more than simply celebrating the experience of totalitarian alienation, Laibach’s intention is to reproduce that very alienation.More than performatively representing tyranny, and thereby senses of totalitarian alienation, Laibach and NSK set out to embody it themselves. In particular, and contra the forms of liberal humanism that were hegemonic at the peak of their career in the 1990s, their organisation was developed as a model of totalitarian collectivism in which the individual is always subjugated. This is illustrated in the Onanigram (NSK, Neue Slowenische Kunst), which, mimicking the complexities of the SFRY in its most totalitarian dispensation, maps out in labyrinthine detail the institutional structure of NSK. Behaviour is governed by a Constitution that states explicitly that NSK is a group in which, “each individual is subordinated to the whole” (NSK, Neue Slowenische Kunst 273). Lest this collectivism be misconceived as little more than a show, the case of Tomaž Hostnik is instructive. The original lead singer of Laibach, Hostnik committed ritual suicide by hanging himself from a hayrack, a key symbol of Slovenian nationalism. Initially, rather than mourning his loss, the other members of Laibach posthumously disenfranchised him (“threw him out of the band”), presumably for his act of individual will that was collectively unsanctioned.Laibach and the NSK’s collectivism also have spiritual overtones. The Onanigram presents an Immanent Consistent Spirit, a kind of geist that holds the collective together. NSK claim: “Only God can subdue LAIBACH. People and things never can” (NSK, Neue Slowenische Kunst 289). Furthermore, such rhetorical bombast was matched in aspiration. Most famously, in one of the first instances of a micro-nation, NSK went on to establish itself as a global and virtual non-territorial state, replete with a recruitment drive, passports and anthem, written and performed by Laibach of course. Laibach’s CareerLaibach’s career can be divided into three overlapping parts. The first is its career as a political provocateur, beginning from the inception of the band in 1980 and continuing through to the present. The band’s performances have touched the raw nerves of several political actors. As suggested above, Laibach offended Slovenian nationalists. The band offended the SFRY, especially when in its stage backdrop it juxtaposed images of a penis with Marshal Josip Broz “Tito”, founding President of the SFRY. Above all, it offended libertarians who viewed the band’s exploitation of totalitarian aesthetics as a route to evoking repressed totalitarian energies in its audiences.In a sense the libertarians were correct, for Laibach were quite explicit in representing a third function of their performance of unresolved contradictions as being to (3) evoke repressed totalitarian energies. However, as Žižek demonstrates in his essay “Why Are Laibach and NSK Not Fascists”, Laibach’s intent in this regard is counter-totalitarian. Laibach engage in what amounts to a “psychoanalytic cure” for totalitarianism, which consists of four envisaged stages. The consumers of Laibach’s works and performances go through a process of over-identification with totalitarianism, leading through the experience of alienation to, in turn, disidentification and an eventual overcoming of that totalitarian alienation. The Žižekian interpretation of the four stages has, however been subjected to critique, particularly by Deleuzian scholars, and especially for its psychoanalytic emphasis on the transformation of individual (un)consciousness (i.e. the cerebral rather than bodily). Instead, such scholars prefer a schizoanalytic interpretation which presents the cure as, respectively collective (Monroe 45-50) and somatic (Goddard). Laibach’s works and pronouncements display, often awareness of such abstract theoretical ideas. However, they also display attentiveness to the concrete realities of socio-political context. This was reflected especially in the 1990s, when its focus seemed to shift from the matter of totalitarianism to the overriding issue of the day in Laibach’s homeland – ethnic conflict. For example, echoing the discourse of Truth and Reconciliation emanating from post-Apartheid South Africa in the early 1990s, Laibach argued that its work is “based on the premise that traumas affecting the present and the future can be healed only by returning to the initial conflicts” (NSK Padiglione).In the early 1990s era of post-socialist violent ethnic nationalism, statements such as this rendered Laibach a darling of anti-nationalism, both within civil society and in what came to be known pejoratively as the Yugonostagic, i.e. pro-SFRY left. Its darling status was cemented further by actions such as performing a concert to celebrate the end of the Bosnian war in 1996, and because its ideological mask began to slip. Most famously, when asked by a music journalist the standard question of what the band’s main influences were, rather than citing other musicians Laibach stated: “Tito, Tito and Tito.” Herein lies the third phase of Laibach’s career, dating from the mid-1990s to the present, which has been marked by critical recognition and mainstream acceptance, and in contrasting domains. Notably, in 2012 Laibach was invited to perform at the Tate Modern in London. Then, entering the belly of what is arguably the most totalitarian of totalitarian beasts in 2015, it became the first rock band to perform live in North Korea.The middle part in Laibach’s career was between 1987 and 1996. This was when its work consisted mostly of covers of mainstream Western pop songs by, amongst others Opus, Queen, The Rolling Stones, and, in The Final Countdown (1986), Swedish ‘big hair’ rockers. It also covered entire albums, including a version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. No doubt mindful of John Lennon’s claim that his band was more popular than the Messiah himself, Laibach covered the Beatles’ final album Let It Be (1970). Highlighting the perilous hidden connections between apparently benign and fascistic forms of sedentarism, lead singer Milan Fras’ snarling delivery of the refrain “Get Back to where you once belong” renders the hit single from that album less a story of homecoming than a sinister warning to immigrants and ethnic others who are out of place.This career middle stage invoked critique. However, commonplace suggestions that Laibach could be characterised as embodying Retromania, a derivative musical trend typical of the 1990s that has been lambasted for its de-politicisation and a musical conservatism enabled by new sampling technologies that afforded a forensic documentary precision that prohibits creative distortion (Reynolds), are misplaced. Several scholars highlight Laibach’s ceaseless attention to musical creativity in the pursuit of political subversiveness. For example, for Monroe, the cover version was a means for Laibach to continue its exploration of the connections between art and ideology, of illuminating the connections between competing ideological systems and of evoking repressed totalitarian energies, only now within Western forms of entertainment in which ideological power structures are less visible than in overt totalitarian propaganda. However, what often seems to escape intellectualist interpretations presented by scholars such as Žižek, Goddard and (albeit to a lesser extent) Monroe is the importance of the concrete specificities of the context that Laibach worked in in the 1990s – i.e. homeland ethno-nationalist politics – and, especially, their medium – i.e. Western pop music.The Meaning and Meaningfulness of Western Popular Culture in Former YugoslaviaThe Laibach covers were merely one of many celebrations of Western popular culture that emerged in pre- and post-socialist Yugoslavia. The most curious of these was the building of statues of icons of screen and stage. These include statues of Tarzan, Bob Marley, Rocky Balboa and, most famously, martial arts cinema legend Bruce Lee in the Bosnian city of Mostar.The pop monuments were often erected as symbols of peace in contexts of ethnic-national violence. Each was an ethnic hybrid. With the exception of original Tarzan Johnny Weismuller — an ethnic-German American immigrant from Serbia — none was remotely connected to the competing ethnic-national groups. Thus, it was surprising when these pop monuments became targets for iconoclasm. This was especially surprising because, in contrast, both the new ethnic-national monuments that were built and the old Socialist pan-Yugoslav monuments that remained in all their concrete and steel obduracy in and through the 1990s were left largely untouched.The work of Simon Harrison may give us some insight into this curious situation. Harrison questions the commonplace assumption that the strength of enmity between ethnic groups is related to their cultural dissimilarity — in short, the bigger the difference the bigger the biffo. By that logic, the new ethnic-national monuments erected in the post-SFRY era ought to have been vandalised. Conversely, however, Harrison argues that enmity may be more an outcome of similarity, at least when that similarity is torn asunder by other kinds of division. This is so because ownership of previously shared and precious symbols of identity appears to be seen as subjected to appropriation by ones’ erstwhile comrades who are newly othered in such moments.This is, indeed, exactly what happened in post-socialist former-Yugoslavia. Yugoslavs were rendered now as ethnic-nationals: Bosniaks (Muslims), Croats and Serbs in the case of Bosnia. In the process, the erection of obviously non-ethnic-national monuments by, now inevitably ethnic-national subjects was perceived widely as appropriation – “the Croats [the monument in Mostar was sculpted by Croatian artist Ivan Fijolić] are stealing our Bruce Lee,” as one of my Bosnian-Serb informants exclaimed angrily.However, this begs the question: Why would symbols of Western popular culture evoke the kinds of emotions that result in iconoclasm more so than other ethnically non-reducible ones such as those of the Partisans that are celebrated in the old Socialist pan-Yugoslav monuments? The answer lies in the geopolitical history of the SFRY. The Yugoslav-Soviet Union split in 1956 forced the SFRY to develop ever-stronger ties with the West. The effects of this became quotidian, especially as people travelled more or less freely across international borders and consumed the products of Western Capitalism. Many of the things they consumed became deeply meaningful. Notably, barely anybody above a certain age does not reminisce fondly about the moment when participation in martial arts became a nationwide craze following the success of Bruce Lee’s films in the golden (1970s-80s) years of Western-bankrolled Yugoslav prosperity.Likewise, almost everyone above a certain age recalls the balmy summer of 1985, whose happy zeitgeist seemed to be summed up perfectly by Austrian band Opus’s song “Live is Life” (1985). This tune became popular in Yugoslavia due to its apparently feelgood message about the joys of attending live rock performances. In a sense, these moments and the consumption of things “Western” in general came to symbolise everything that was good about Yugoslavia and, indeed to define what it was to be Yugoslavs, especially in comparison to their isolated and materially deprived socialist comrades in the Warsaw Pact countries.However, iconoclastic acts are more than mere emotional responses to offensive instances of cultural appropriation. As Michael Taussig describes, iconoclasm reveals the public secrets that the monuments it targets conceal. SFRY’s great public secret, known especially to those people old enough to have experienced the inter-ethnic violence of WWII, was ethnic division and the state’s deceit of the historic normalcy of pan-Yugoslav identification. The secret was maintained by a formal state policy of forgetting. For example, the wording on monuments in sites of inter-ethnic violence in WWII is commonly of the variety: “here lie the victims in Yugoslavia’s struggle against imperialist forces and their internal quislings.” Said quislings were, of course, actually Serbs, Croats, and Muslims (i.e. fellow Yugoslavs), but those ethnic nomenclatures were almost never used.In contrast, in a context where Western popular cultural forms came to define the very essence of what it was to be Yugoslav, the iconoclasm of Western pop monuments, and the retroquotation of Western pop songs revealed the repressed deceit and the public secret of the reality of inter-ethnic tension at the heart of that which was regarded as quintessentially Yugoslav. In this way, the memory of Yugoslavia ever having been a properly functioning entity was delegitimised. Consequently, Laibach and their kind served to render the apparent reality of the Yugoslav ideal as little more than a dream. ReferencesEpstein, Mikhail N. After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture. Amherst: U of Massachusettes P, 1995.Goddard, Michael. “We Are Time: Laibach/NSK, Retro-Avant-Gardism and Machinic Repetition,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 11 (2006): 45-53.Harrison, Simon. “Identity as a Scarce Resource.” Social Anthropology 7 (1999): 239–251.Monroe, Alexei. Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005.NSK. Neue Slowenische Kunst. Ljubljana: NSK, 1986.NSK. Padiglione NSK. Ljubljana: Moderna Galerija, 1993.rateyourmusic.com. 2018. 3 Sep. 2018 <https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/throbbing-gristle>.Reynolds, Simon. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. London: Faber and Faber, 2011.Taussig, Michael. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.Verdery, Katherine. What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Žižek, Slavoj. “Why Are Laibach and NSK Not Fascists?” 3 Sep. 2018 <www.nskstate.com/appendix/articles/why_are_laibach.php.>