Reading back beyond the “post” prefix. The politics of the signifier post-socialism and its opportunities for the enrichment of participatory media th
Reading back beyond the “post” prefix. The politics of the signifier post-socialism and its opportunities for the enrichment of participatory media th

Summary/Abstract: The article sets out to develop a post-socialist reading back into the past strategy, which combines the tactics of disarticulation and rearticulation. The intellectual-critical post-socialist strategies have often been (rightfully) used to critique contemporary societal configurations for allowing the problematic past to almost unconsciously impact on the present and for erasing, forgetting, essentializing or reducing that very same past. This article carefully raises a different question, going back into the past, bypassing the discontinuities to look whether we can import some of its concepts into the present. This reading back into the past strategy consists in other words of disarticulating “old” concepts from their original discursive frameworks, and re-articulating them within a (radical-maximalist) democratic framework. In order to ground this rescue operation, the article starts with an overview of a number of prefixed concepts (using both “post” and “trans”) to show their complicated relationship with their original signifiers, and with the dislocations they try to capture. The article then uses these debates on prefixed concepts, and more specifically on post-socialism and post-colonialism, to identify a position within the intellectual-critical post-socialist tradition that allows a re-reading of the past, and a deployment of the tactics of disarticulation and rearticulation. The final part of the article illustrates the post-socialist reading back into the past strategy by focusing on the media and participation debate, attempting to rescue the potentially valuable concept of narodnost, in order to open up new ways of thinking about media and participation and to illustrate the strength of the post-socialist reading back into the past strategy.

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