Almost, but Not Quite Bored in Pula: An Anthropological Study of the Tapija Phenomenon in Northwest Croatia 9781800731363

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Figures
Preface to the English Translation
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1. On Tapija: An Ethnography of the City’s Imponderables
Chapter 2. Boredom, or the City Yawns
Chapter 3. On Dominant Articulations and Reaches of Tapija
Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

Almost, but Not Quite Bored in Pula

European Anthropology in Translation Published in Association with the Society for the Anthropology of Europe (SAE), a Section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) General Editor: Nicolette Makovicky, University of Oxford This series introduces English-language versions of significant works on the Anthropology of Europe that were originally published in other languages. These include books produced recently by a new generation of scholars as well as older works that have not previously appeared in English. Volume 10 Almost, but Not Quite Bored in Pula: An Anthropological Study of the Tapija Phenomenon in Northwest Croatia Andrea Matošević

Volume 5 Two Sides of One River: Nationalism and Ethnography in Galicia and Portugal António Medeiros

Volume 9 To See a Moose: The History of Polish Sex Education Agnieszka Kościańska

Volume 4 The Colours of Empire: Racialized Representations during Portuguese Colonialism Patrícia Ferraz de Matos

Volume 8 Heirs of the Bamboo: Identity and Ambivalence among the Eurasian Macanese Marisa C. Gaspar

Volume 3 Developing Skill, Developing Vision: Practices of Locality at the Foot of the Alps Cristina Grasseni

Volume 7 Raccomandazione: Clientelism and Connections in Italy Dorothy Louise Zinn

Volume 2 Strangers Either Way: The Lives of Croatian Refugees in Their New Home Jasna Čapo Žmegač

Volume 6 Hunters, Gatherers, and Practitioners of Powerlessness: An Ethnography of the Degraded in Postsocialist Poland Tomasz Rakowski

Volume 1 Disenchantment with Market Economics: East Germans and Western Capitalism Birgit Müller

Almost, but Not Quite Bored in Pula An Anthropological Study of the Tapija Phenomenon in Northwest Croatia

Andrea Matošević Translated by Andrew Hodges

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2021 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com English-language edition © 2021 Berghahn Books This book was originally published in Croatian by Durieux and Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku under the title Doći u Pulu, Dospjeti u tapiju: Etno-filozofska studija lokalnog fenomena. © 2019 Andrea Matošević. Knjiga je prevedena uz financijsku potporu Ministarstva kulture i medija Republike Hrvatske. The book was translated with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia.

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any informationw storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Matošević, Andrea, 1979- author. | Hodges, Andrew, (Social anthropologist), translator. Title: Almost, but not quite bored in Pula : an anthropological study of the tapija phenomenon in Northwest Croatia / Andrea Matošević ; translated by Andrew Hodges. Other titles: Doći u Pulu, dospjeti u tapiju. English | Anthropological study of the tapija phenomenon in Northwest Croatia Description: New York : Berghahn Books, [2021] | Series: European anthropology in translation ; 10 | Originally published: Matošević, Andrea. Doći u Pulu, dospjeti u tapiju : etno-filozofska studija lokalnog fenomena. Durieux and Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021005180 (print) | LCCN 2021005181 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800731356 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800731363 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Pula (Croatia)—Social life and customs. | Boredom—Croatia—Pula. | Sociology, Urban—Croatia—Pula. Classification: LCC DR1645.P85 M38613 2021 (print) | LCC DR1645.P85 (ebook) | DDC 949.72—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005180 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005181 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-80073-135-6 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-136-3 ebook

To cite one possible, but entirely non-binding occasion which has perhaps already been encountered by one or other of us, without our having explicitly noticed the emergence of this boredom and without our explicitly being annoyed of our own accord: ‘it is boring for one’ to walk through the streets of a large city on a Sunday afternoon. —Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics

Contents

List of Figures Preface to the English Translation Acknowledgements

viii ix xiii

Introduction

1

Chapter 1. On Tapija: An Ethnography of the City’s Imponderables

7

Chapter 2. Boredom, or the City Yawns

53

Chapter 3. On Dominant Articulations and Reaches of Tapija

74

Conclusion

86

References

94

Index

103

Figures

Figure 0.1. Graffiti near the centre of Pula, the title of the book’s Croatian version, 2019. © Marko Vojnić.

xii

Figure 1.1. Announcement in Il Giornaletto di Pola, 31 October 1904. Website screen capture by Andrea Matošević.

8

Figure 1.2. One of Pula’s main city centre streets, an afternoon in late February 2018. © Andrea Matošević.

40

Figure 3.1. Postcard – Tapija Is Like Lame in Pula. Website screen capture by Andrea Matošević.

82

Figure 3.2. Tapija Badge, Capital of Culture candidacy merchandise. 2018 © Andrea Matošević.

83

Preface to the English Translation

The Croatian version of the book you have in your hands was published in early 2019, after a period of intensive research and writing during 2017 and the first half of 2018. Its English title is Almost, but Not Quite Bored in Pula: An Anthropological Study of the Tapija Phenomenon in Northwest Croatia. In this book I have tried to analyse and interpret a term and concept named tapija (pronounced tahpeeya)1 as linking closely with the specific environment of the Croatian city of Pula. The entire text is dedicated to understanding this primarily oral and informal phenomenon and state of being. However, phenomena are not generated ex nihilo – their existence and intensity are drawn from a certain heritage, life conditions and situation. In this introduction, I will therefore attempt to briefly outline at least some of the contours of Pula’s urban fabric, i.e. the formal features of the city, in which tapija is generated as a specific state of being among some of Pula’s residents. The reason for this is that while I assume a large part of the cultural, historical and geographical context about which I write is clear to readers of this book’s Croatian version, readers of the English translation would likely welcome a few details and clarifications regarding the details of this text. Pula is a coastal city located on the southern tip of the Istrian peninsula in a bay of the same name, where just under 60,000 inhabitants live today. It is the largest city in the Istrian county, located in northwest Croatia near the border with Slovenia and Italy. While it has been inhabited since antiquity, under the name Pietas Iulia, which the Romans established in around 46 bc, its modern history is inseparable from the Uljanik shipyard established in 1856 as the K.u.K. See-Arsenal on a little island named Olivieninsel or Scoglio Olivi. This shipyard was active from then on almost continuously, up until 2019 when it was declared bankrupt. The city’s demographic, cultural, sport and infrastructural development is closely tied to this shipyard, which in its final days employed 2,000 people and worked with another 1,000 subcontracted workers (kooperanti). In its heyday, there were three times as many em-

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Preface to the English Translation

ployees. Often, entire families were employed by Uljanik, but construction work was almost exclusively reserved for male family members, i.e. grandfathers, fathers and sons – female construction workers were a rarity. Pula has thus been a relevant industrial centre until recently. Besides shipbuilding, it had a developed textile and manufacturing industry, and it was an important military centre during the Austro-Hungarian and Yugoslav periods. Tourism, which historically coexisted alongside these other activities, has now become the dominant economic activity. This transition from the ‘Fordist’ to the ‘Postfordist’ mode of production, to which the tourist sector is especially amenable, has entered into practically all pores of life and provides an important contextual background for the themes with which this book engages. In addition, Pula has gone through several changes of rule throughout its modern history, as has the wider territory in which it lies. These changes have not infrequently also entailed strong demographic changes. Austro-Hungary was replaced by the Kingdom of Italy, whose dominant regime became fascist from 1922 onwards. After Italy’s fall in September 1943, the city was occupied by German troops as Pula was an important military port. For that reason, the Allied Forces bombed the city with the intention of destroying the port and military facilities. However, they also destroyed residential districts that would later be restored or rebuilt completely during the period of socialist rule, which lasted until 1991. In 1947, an exodus of the Italian population occurred, alongside a trend of in-migrations from other parts of Croatia and Yugoslavia. During the period of socialist rule, industrialization was once again encouraged in the city, with new city neighbourhoods built and old ones reconstructed, as well as the creation of a strong military garrison (Istarska enciklopedija 2005). Pula and Istria were not directly caught up in the 1991–1995 war in Croatia, which was part of the break-up of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. However, they did feel its demographic, cultural and economic consequences. Furthermore, from 2006, following a merger of higher education institutions, the Juraj Dobrila University of Pula (Sveučilište Jurja Dobrile u Puli) has been operating there, as one of eight public universities in the Republic of Croatia. Pula is bilingual, as are a range of local administrations in the county of Istria, with both the Croatian and Italian language in use. In this book, some interview fragments in Italian are included, as they result from the bilingualism present in the urban fabric. In terms of institutionalized culture, besides the Historical and Maritime Museum of Istria and the Archaeological Museum, the longest-term, largest and probably the most significant film festival is also worth mentioning. The Pula Film Festival takes place during the second half of July in the

Preface to the English Translation

xi

amphitheatre and nearby locations. This event was established in 1954, first titled the National Film Review, and from 1960 was named the Festival of Yugoslav Film. It is important to note that the city’s institutional cultural activities exist alongside the somewhat less institutional or even entirely non-institutionalized. The latter are in many ways responsible for the biggest shifts that have occurred in the cultural field and the city is well known for them as well. Just some of the (superficially selected and illustrative) historical and more contemporary examples, besides the numerous bands and theatre groups, include: the Interclub and Author Festival of Amateur Film (Međuklupski i autorski festival amaterskog filma, MAFAF), held from 1965 to 1990 just before the abovementioned film festival, co-organized by the Pula Film Club ‘Jelen’. This collaboration resulted from the importance of the development and networking of amateur culture and film clubs from the 1960s in Yugoslav self-managing socialism (cf. Benčić 2010). In addition, from the early 1990s, Sa(n)jam knjige (Book Fair[y] in Istria) was held in Pula, and was a very important meeting place for authors, books and publishers. The former barracks Karlo Rojc were repurposed as a social centre which has provided a venue for numerous alternative music bands, the civic association Monteparadiso, and a well-attended punk and hardcore festival, held from 1992 onwards. Radio Rojc, one of Croatia’s few community radio stations, is also run from this social centre. This station has played an invaluable role in informing the public and providing analyses of especially difficult situations for the city, for example during the Uljanik shipyard’s closure in 2018–2019. This detail is especially important as the research for this book was completed, and the book published, before the complete collapse of the Uljanik shipyard. The shipyard’s collapse altered the entire town’s state of being and entailed a definitive and complete turn-around in its economic life, as well as in other aspects of city life closely related to the economy. Put differently, had the research for the book been completed at the time of writing this preface (March 2020), the findings would almost certainly be different. The same applies to the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown introduced in Croatia and in many other countries across Europe during March 2020. This has altered everyday life and mutated all aspects of sociability to the point that it requires a separate research project of its own. I will therefore not tackle these questions in this book, yet the pandemic has influenced the book in a more subtle way – it was translated under lockdown conditions in Scotland. From the publication of the Croatian version in February 2019, the book has received a wide variety of reactions. Some of these reactions were expected – especially the academic and social network response –

Preface to the English Translation

xii

Figure 0.1. Graffiti near the centre of Pula, the title of the book’s Croatian version, 2019. © Marko Vojnić.

while certain others astonished me. One such surprise was the appearance of graffiti in Pula that referred to the book and its central theme, either through a saying or simple allusion. I have attached a photograph of one example above. At the end of this brief introduction I would finally like to thank my colleague, the social anthropologist and translator Andrew Hodges, for having agreed to translate this book into English. His devoted and keen work on this manuscript is woven into all sections of this new version of the book.

Note 1. Translator’s note: this word will be left unitalicized throughout.

Acknowledgements

Looking back, I note that this manuscript quickly gained its final scope and its contours. For this reason, the process of its creation, from March 2017 to January 2018, was particularly intensive and full of uncertainties that required time, energy and discussions with colleagues to resolve certain dilemmas, at least somewhat successfully. In other words, while this study was not my first independent research project, nor my first published book, before this project I had not got to grips with such a difficult, fluid and ‘elusive’ topic. This made the process of researching, analysing, interpreting and, ultimately, writing the book especially challenging. ‘Hunting’ for the well-known concept of tapija in Pula’s urban fabric – both ethnographically and theoretically – also turned out to be a difficult task. Like the concept itself, that I had to translate from everyday life and speech into written form, this task involved working with fairly slippery material. Writing about one of the aspects or phenomena generated in my home town did not make this task any easier. Nevertheless, a number of Pula residents directly supported me during the research, and I would like to thank them for their efforts, insights and interest in this subject. Without the help of the versatile and highly engaged Ivana Petrinić, the librarian at the Pula Grammar School, it would have been difficult for me to find pupils for the interviews. Collaborators from the Pula citizen association Gradska radionica, especially Boris Bogunović, who invited me to hold a public lecture on the subject of this book during August 2017, clearly opened doors, enabling me to obtain part of the material, and the recorded debates and polemics that followed the presentation have also been used in the discussion. Parts of the manuscript and some recorded conversations with interlocutors started out in the University Library of the Juraj Dobrila University in Pula. The university librarians were always approachable and willing to listen to my questions and requests. Without my interlocutors, whose first and last initials are cited in the text, this book would not exist. Among them are those who agreed to take

xiv

Acknowledgements

part in fairly long and recorded conversations with me – I owe them special thanks. In addition, I would like to thank my colleague Bruce O’Neill from the University of Saint Louis, Missouri, the co-editor of the thematic section Boredom After the Global Financial Crisis: From Privilege to Precarity in the journal Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 78 (2017). He sent me several articles from the special issue, in so doing rendering the anthropological theory of the gift relevant among anthropologists too. My friend and colleague Tea Škokić, a researcher from the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies, followed the development of parts of the manuscript. She read them and her suggestions improved the final version of this book. The process of putting together the English version of the book was overseen by my colleagues Nicolette Makovicky and Tom Bonnington, I wish to thank them for their patience and persistence. I would also particularly like to thank my family. Research and writing are temperamental and isolated activities that require time and space, and they most often entail periods of long isolation and a fair amount of focus on the topic being researched, even in moments when you are physically present with the family. Such a luxury of time and space, afforded to researchers above all through organizational manoeuvres and finding a workable solution, is made possible by those closest to them. In my case this was my wife Lara and my parents Suzana and Denis. Finally, I hope that my thirteen-year-old daughter Mara, with a habitus typical of Pula’s Vidikovac, will not worry if she begins to feel the local hardship of hardshiplessness, the Pula tapija, in a year or two. Perhaps this book will serve her as an initial map or ABC to finding her way around that well-known, but at the same time foreign territory.

Introduction

This book, as I hope is clear from the title, is about the city of Pula. Yet it would be more accurate to say that it is about the city’s inhabitants, known locally in Croatian as Puležani (Pulezhani).1 Or more precisely, about one strand of the city’s residents and partly also about their relation to the environment in which they largely reside, work, go out, socialize or study – in short, where they live. Tapija (prounced tahpeeya), which will be left unitalicized from now on as you become more familiar with it, is one of the key terms that expresses this relationship between the city and one part of its inhabitants, between Pula and Puležani. Yet it is also important to emphasize that this is a relationship among Puležani themselves, as well as towards those who come from other localities. Tapija features in the book’s subtitle, and in the title of the Croatian language version (Doći u Pulu, dospjeti u tapiju), which paraphrases the title of a book from the collated Frankfurt lectures of the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk: Zur Welt Kommen – Zur Sprache Kommen (Sloterdijk 1992a). Here, the word Pula has been inserted in place of the word language [Sprache]. In this paraphrasing, the world stands for the environment in which boredom (tapija) can be found, there to be interpreted. Drawing such a close link between a city and a specific affect, concept, or indeed a phenomenon – despite oblique warnings I received about this in several casual conversations on the topic – is not an exclusive move, as such a close linkage seems to exist in other localities as well. Of course, I would never dare to deny or diminish that linkage in places in which I am unfamiliar with everyday happenings. Yet, after having conducted this research I can definitely claim that tapija, this decidedly polysemic concept, features as some kind of code in Pula, as a ‘language’ or slang whose nuances need to be mastered over time in order to understand them completely. Witnesses testifying to this fact can be found on the following pages, among a strand of interlocutors who have moved to live in Pula, as well as among residents of Pula who came across this term during primary or secondary school for the first time and, along with its

2

Almost, but Not Quite Bored in Pula

meanings, have adopted it as part of their own vocabulary. During the research I never heard of tapija having the same meaning and connotation in any other social environment and on so many levels as in Pula. This is a link wherein existing works of culture, small in number but nonetheless present, refer to tapija in a title, a postcard, songs or events. On the other hand, such remarks about the non-exclusivity of Pula and part of its residents’ tight relationship with tapija can offer a route into responses to the question I was asked most often during the field research on tapija: when and how did the term tapija emerge in Pula? I believe this question is best answered from a slightly constructivist position, as each generation not only has its own space, situations and times for using the term, but they also give it its own meanings, and these are sometimes quite distinct from those of other generations. And so, rather than homing in precisely on tapija’s ‘when and how’ – although answers to such questions are not out of bounds in the following chapters – I find it more interesting to try and fathom ‘what’ its previous and present meanings were, and ‘why’ it had them. Thus, in line with the tapija-related warnings I received, even if the term was used in other social environments outside of Pula, it was probably linked there to the completely distinct meanings the term was attributed in those contexts, and to the situations in which it was uttered. In this sense, linguistic creativity and the playfulness of the concept’s multiple, shifting meanings would, in turn, be marked by the different economic or cultural, i.e. existential contexts in which tapija was present. There is no need to compare experiences of different cities and environments to reach such a conclusion; it is enough to compare experiences of various generations from the same city. In that sense, today’s Pula is not the same city as 1980s Pula, so it is unsurprising that not only the meanings of local slang, but also the value systems that such slang expresses, are somewhat generationally influenced. Peter Burke’s conclusion therefore holds that ‘changes in the meanings of words are sometimes sensitive indicators of much wider changes in attitude’ (1991: 191, cf. Bakhtin 1980: 184). These changes in meaning depend on, while at the same time make up, a key part of changes in the wider social field. Furthermore, I understand the term anthropology in a threefold sense at least: it is comprised of ethnography, this study’s dominant methodological approach; participant observation; and also interviews with Pula residents or newcomers (došljaci). I have thus attempted to grasp the dominant meanings of the tapija phenomenon among a wider subsection of Pula residents. This is the materia prima, i.e. the ‘first matter’ from which this manuscript has been made. The meanings and understandings of tapija skirt the edges, or completely fall within the

Introduction

3

remit of certain topics that would be considered philosophy from a classical humanist perspective. I am thinking first and foremost here of the concepts of alienation and boredom. The first of these has been almost completely removed from research and writing in the social sciences and humanities, albeit not from everyday life. Meanwhile, boredom features as a kind of symptom that pertains to the times in which we live, and is currently experiencing a new lease of life and a revival in academic writing too. This book thus attempts to remind us of, and even to rearticulate, classical yet amputated concepts of thinking and possible action. At the same time, it attempts to breathe a local, specific character into certain concepts that may be described as fashionable at present. This is the real meaning of the (g)locality of tapija: it is always more than the mere sum of its parts, and may be considered a reflection or fragment of many better-known, better-elaborated concepts and affects, in terms of which tapija can also be explained in part. This is the idea from which also the English title of this book is derived from. Almost, but Not Quite Bored in Pula puts boredom in the foreground, yet at the same time leaves open space for possible differences between this contemporary symptom and the very subject of research presented in this publication. Seen from such a viewpoint, tapija appears as a specific local concept that can link the city up with broader historical and geographical contexts. However, in the text, along the lines of the conversations with my interlocutors, I will also argue the opposite. Yet, this is not an exact, unambiguous and simply explainable phenomenon, and its principal contradiction perhaps emerges from this. This marked contradiction brings us to the third stated meaning of anthropology. If understood as a fusion of ethnology and philosophy (an ‘ethnophilosophy’, as I will later explain further), then it follows an understanding of the folklore underpinning the philosophy of Antonio Gramsci, that is, ‘Its basic and most characteristic features, that it is a diffuse, disunified, incoherent, inconsistent philosophy, in line with the social and cultural position of the masses’ (2007: 1396). In other words, albeit in social conditions that have changed since the time Gramsci was writing, ethnophilosophy deals with an interpretative system found among philosophers who are not necessarily educated. This makes such a hermeneutics of everyday life especially interesting and sometimes hectic too, and so it is not that easy to find a common denominator among the different narratives. The noun ‘phenomenon’, from the subtitle, has a double meaning: it denotes and implies that tapija is endemic to and a specific phenomenon of Pula, and simultaneously implies that the phenomenon of tapija, articulated as a noun, verb and adjective in everyday speech, is also manifest as a spirit, rhythm or certain possibility of the city’s quality of life.

4

Almost, but Not Quite Bored in Pula

It can therefore ‘serve as a basis for knowledge of things’, i.e. in Pula’s case, ‘in its essence’ (Filozofski leksikon 2012). Of course, the essence of the city that tapija mediates – whatever it means, depending on the period and the context – is neither exclusive nor unchangeable. In the same way, it is also not eternal, because my understanding of tapija is at the centre of this research’s partiality. In other words, many sections of this book have a speculative character, and another researcher would probably describe the topic in a profoundly different way. Yet, on the following pages I attempt to organize and explain a topic that has largely been left unresearched and unsystematized to date. This largely means that no institutionalized ‘archive’ exists, nor any published comprehensive record of tapija for my analysis and use. Instead, such a situation pushes me to return once again to ethnography, to the field, to the ‘living archive’ which my interlocutors make up. I will not enter into a polemic here, nor will I respond to the question of whether or not I could possibly research the imponderables of everyday life differently. Tapija is – most definitely – a result or reflection of that everyday life. Many researchers and publicists have done Pula a great service with their writing, by dedicating numerous pages to analysing or depicting past or present-day life in the city. Some of their conclusions are thus included in this book, and their works can be found in the bibliography. Yet, as I will occasionally assert, the phenomenon that I seek to interpret here is one that I have primarily understood and treated as a ‘theoretical problem’ to be explained, rather than a meticulously detailed depiction of the chronology of a concept’s life. Thus, while in certain sections this book will take a diachronic perspective, delving into times near to ours, or to history further back, I will make such a move elliptically rather than chronologically. Differently put, I will focus on those periods, moments and historical places linked to tapija in my research, or to the concepts from which tapija derives. The same applies to certain places and events in Pula that are especially imprinted in residents’ memories. There are simply innumerable festivals, concerts, spaces for public gatherings, etc. that have generated tapija or been places in which the concept of tapija has been uttered, referred to, felt or enacted. Tapija’s presence in this book has been largely conditioned by the interviews with my interlocutors. This is why I do not attempt to provide an exhaustive list of places of memory in Pula here, or of places that relate to present-day events and night-time happenings. Rather, this book seeks to analyse and interpret, from various angles, the meanings of a single concept in which one part of Pula’s sociality is immersed. Analysing tapija and how it is articulated form the main topics and ‘actors’ of this book. This concept is not a casual, hermetic or ‘exotically’

Introduction

5

mentioned phenomenon inserted here, and present in writing about more malleable and easier-to-grasp topics. On the contrary, it could even be argued that situations, processes and the city are interpreted through the prism of tapija. Yet such a method is prone to multiple possible misunderstandings and therefore requires some explanation. Pula cannot be reduced exclusively to tapija or to one of its meanings because, as I will later elaborate further, tapija is drawn through comparisons. To be tapija at all, as a separate attitude, affect, situation or period of time, it must also on occasion not be present in the lives of Pula’s citizens and in the city itself. This fact is a source of possibilities for its understanding as irony, as fore (En. clever tricks/jokes) or zezancije (En. joking around), though it can sometimes simultaneously be the bearer of more powerful existential meanings. That aside, perhaps the method of wholly concentrating on this and phenomena contiguous with it may contribute to a general, final impression that overexaggerates the importance of tapija. In other words, the arguments here may aggrandize tapija, compared with the extent of its meanings in the city and in the lives of individuals. Yet this is a risk that must be accepted if something new is to be said about this topic, i.e. if we wish to analyse it, approach it from ‘within’ and look deep inside it with an ethnographic microscope and a theoretical macroscope, while accordingly avoiding mere ‘external’ and in many ways redundant description. Furthermore, the generational approach that seeps through the manuscript in places is not at all exclusive; neither does it deal with cement-cast generational meanings and practices into which this phenomenon is woven, nor with tendencies that can always be found among profoundly different tendencies and examples, including among members of proximate generations. One example is an interlocutor who claimed that his circle of friends ‘never used the word tapija’, instead calling boredom and similar words ‘mrtvilo’, which can be literally translated as ‘dead thing’ (G.P., interview). An interlocutor from a generation close to his said that ‘tapija was one word, perhaps used too frequently’ (L.P., interview), which probably says enough about this dynamic. At the end of this prologue I cannot but conclude that in Pula, besides, for example, the Amphitheatre, the Arch of the Sergii, the Twin Gates, the Augustus Templum, the Austro-Hungarian and Venetian Fortresses, the Uljanik shipyard, the Arena knitwear factory, the Pula Film Festival, the Book Fair(y) in Istria, all the well-known signifiers of the city, there are also entirely informal institutions at work. Almost always uttered briefly and informally, in a manner conveying commonly understood information, tapija also hides the fact that behind such sharp verbalizations of the term, a real, layered knowledge of it is often hiding.

Almost, but Not Quite Bored in Pula

6

Note 1. In the Croatian version, I refer to inhabitants of Pula and the surrounding area throughout the book using regional phrases such as Puležanka, Puležan and Puležani, rather than the standard Croatian Puljanin and Puljani. [Translator’s note: in the English translation, I use ‘residents of Pula’ or ‘inhabitants of Pula’ unless I deem the original Croatian terms necessary.]

Chapter 1

On Tapija An Ethnography of the City’s Imponderables

‘You will find Pula on the Adriatic Coast, towards Turkey. It is Austria’s large naval base’, wrote James Augustine Aloysius Joyce to his brother Stanislaus in a letter dated 31 October 1904, about his brief stay in Pula. Two months later, on New Year’s Eve in 1904, in a letter to his favourite aunt Josephine Murray, he wrote a sharp and much better-known characterization of the city in which he had found a steady income after a difficult period of poverty. He had worked at the Berlitz School of Languages, and planned to get his teeth fixed, ‘which hurt even when he ate soup’. He received a pair of reading glasses and awaited the arrival of his first child with Nora Barnacle: I am trying to move on to Italy as soon as possible, as I hate this Catholic country with its hundred races and thousand languages, governed by a parliament which can transact no business and sits for a week at the most and by the most physically corrupt royal house in Europe. Pula is a backof-God-speed place – a naval Siberia – 37 men o’war in the harbour . . . Istria is a long boring place wedged into the Adriatic peopled by ignorant Slavs who wear little red caps and colossal breeches. (Joyce, cited in Gilbert 1957, cf. Arambašin Slišković 1996: 424, Vidan 1972)

This description, a value judgement on an Austrian Pula on the cusp of 1905, would be later taken up by publications dealing with the life and works of the Irish writer. In Joyce’s words, published by Oxford University Press, beneath the Italian spelling of city’s name (Pola), it is described as ‘an Adriatic seaport about 150 miles south of Trieste . . . By early 1905, Joyce had become thoroughly dissatisfied with living in

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Almost, but Not Quite Bored in Pula

a place that he described scornfully as “a naval Siberia”’ (Fargnoli and Gillespie 1995: 180).1 ‘A naval Siberia, down towards Turkey’ – two metaphorical, not at all neutral geographical determinants of Pula that denote a great deal more than mere geographical coordinates. Judging by the fact that James Joyce and Nora Barnacle had managed to leave for Trieste by the beginning of March 1905, i.e. they had escaped from the ‘recesses of Pula’ (Arambašin Slišković 1996: 415), it had been, it seems, an unbearable experience for them. The geographical metaphors, in his case, conveyed a strong desire to leave, which indicated an irresistibility. Joyce was not the first author to express their lack of affection for Pula. The Slovene writer Ivan Cankar felt similarly, judging by his letters from several years earlier,2 as did Austrian ethnographers and, arguably, humanist intellectuals who wrote about the wider population of Istria at the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth century blatantly ‘from above’, using denigrating terms from evolutionary theories of that time that would be unacceptable today (cf. Nikočević 2008). However, the case of the Irish writer is quite particular. After a long period of poverty and indebtedness, as a result of which he had also emigrated from Ireland and Dublin, in Pula Joyce found material stability and ‘he had a wage of 6.6 pounds a month, more than an Austrian lieutenant’ (Balota 2005: 99), alongside the possibility of writing in peace. His ‘life became not only bearable, but also pleasant’ (Arambašin Slišković 1996: 414), while Il Giornaletto di Pola, the Italian daily newspaper in Pula, informed readers of his arrival in the city (Vidan 1972: 267)3 from which he was later happy to depart, and from which indeed he practically fled. He chose to continue his voluntary exile in a more tolerable environment for him and Nora. In Pula, Joyce was ‘Joyless’ (cf. Arambašin Slišković 1996: 407).4 The writer’s remarks and experiences of Pula, written over a century ago, are therefore based on a short-lived experience of life in the city. On the one hand, they expose the interesting topos of experiences and information about Pula, which would later be decontextualized and broadcast in publications Figure 1.1. Announcement in Il relating to Joyce’s life. On the other Giornaletto di Pola, 31 October hand, they evidence the significant, 1904. Website screen capture by substantial similarity with today’s partial experience of the city as ‘boring’ Andrea Matošević.

On Tapija

9

and ‘isolated’, or, in its somewhat more aggravated forms, as emptied (or vacant) and apathetic. These epithets are linked together by tapija, a term with an extremely broad, protean meaning that can be named as one of the key concepts of the contemporary, local, informal and especially broadly codified knowledges about the city and, partly, about its inhabitants. James Joyce did not elaborate on tapija or on any such contemporary ‘city feeling’, nor was he able to do so as tapija concerns a phenomenon largely generated in the 1960s and 1970s. However, I contend that he, along with the Slovenian writer Ivan Cankar, pointed to, or simply underlined a ‘medium-term’ phenomenon (to date), which approximately and in no way exclusively means the same as boredom. As well as being a current synonym for boredom, tapija also denotes the feeling’s semantic broadening, alongside a nested, accepted and sometimes philosophically highly elaborated knowledge that inheres among certain Pula residents – a knowledge about themselves and their city. However, the nuances in the meanings of that term are mainly of a generational nature, a topic to which I will return in multiple places throughout this book. Tapija can therefore be analysed on several levels,5 from being a simple, concise utterance that linguistically immerses a certain situation or event in a specific local substrate, to expressing rare or more refined attempts at elaborating and codifying situations and events. In this way, tapija is positioned within the domain of (in)formal city symbols, most often expressed orally at present. However, before I return to this subject, I wish to remind the reader of a text by Pier Paolo Pasolini, dated 1 February 1969 and entitled ‘L’Italia non italiana’ (non-Italian Italy), in which he describes his impressions upon arriving in Istria and in Pula.6 While the text is stylistically very poetic, the motif and context of its impressions are rather indicative: After Trieste something really ‘different’ begins. At least I, in Italy, have never seen anything like it . . . Together with the old familiarity (that forgotten air breathed in boyhood at the age of nine) present in these places, there is something in common with all backward places, in a different kind of civilization, which survives here and there in Italy and the world. The old peasants with their small sons; scattered houses on sunny ridges, where Sunday causes melancholy, the certain odour of hearths or frozen air. With this old way of life they have survived and along with them old feelings are closely bound. Which are felt in the air. In this way, with these gestures, this rhythm, these feelings, a person has lived; and they were content to live for centuries. Here, in this country, those centuries are still present . . . There are novelties, it is true: new bars, new warehouses, petrol stations, public housing (case popolari). But in all

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that has been recently constructed, there is something rough and strong, which resembles the old world it replaces. It feels, without a doubt, that it is all very popular. Those houses, built for workers, are not pitiful, a ghetto: they are houses for workers with all the dignity therein implied. And the group of workers, which, after having passed through the rusty and naked Istria,7 full of solitude, which is somewhat reminiscent of that African solitude, they meet in the city of Pula, with its gentle and empty sea (mare tenero e deserto), and the group of workers who walk and pass the street, they have a safe and powerful face: it seems that they feel, although modestly, like protagonists of this life, despite being represented as marginal and poor. (Pasolini 1995: 98–99, italics A.M.)

While, in comparison with Joyce’s letter, Pasolini’s text acts more gently and thoughtfully on the reality it describes, it can be analysed through the vocabulary of allochrony, i.e. a manoeuvre of ‘denying and refusing simultaneity’ (Fabian 2014) between the writer and the people described that, despite numerous novel developments, nevertheless live ‘in the presence of past centuries’, a somewhat paternalizing and patronizing gesture which is out of character for this particular left-oriented intellectual. The emphasis once again is of interest, with Istria described here as ‘naked’ and ‘full of solitude, which is somewhat reminiscent of that African solitude’, while the sea in Pula is ‘empty’ (deserto), which colludes with the description of ‘Istria as a long and boring place’ and Pula as a ‘naval Siberia’, an epithet behind a very common codification of the city as tapija, but expressed in other terms. However, with Pasolini, as with the previously cited writers, it is once again the recorded and published opinion8 of information or simply the impression of an author who did not reside in Pula for very long, and who did not consider himself to be an inhabitant of the city. One thing that makes today’s concept of tapija different, I repeat, is precisely its non-recordedness, its orality and acceptance as a condition, but also as a ‘code’, a ‘password’ (N.H., interview) that a subset of Pula’s residents adopt, and recognize themselves as active vectors in its reproduction. This word is some kind of ‘code – you give away that word tapija and everyone knows right away what you are talking about, or what it is about’ (R.P., interview). Consequently, searching for the term tapija in an etymological dictionary can only be of indirect benefit in researching its meanings in the local context. The Croatian Language Dictionary of the Miroslav Krleža Institute of Lexicography states that it is a word of Turkish origin, meaning a property deed, as a 2012 dictionary similarly states (Novi rječnik stranih riječi 2012), in which it is described as a deed that must be court-certified. Only in the Dictionary of the Croatian Language (Veliki rječnik hrvatskoga jezika 2004) can one find the following indica-

On Tapija

11

tive examples of this term in use: ‘I do not have (you do not have) the tapija (to that) – I do not have any kind of special rights to it, I have not subscribed, I have not rented that, it is not my property’. While remaining in the domain of property rights administration, this apposite definition is especially indicative because tapija is defined negatively, namely through the deficient key terms of not-owning and non-possession, which are the dominant characteristics of its slang, local and everyday meanings in Pula as well. Yet it is worth emphasizing once again that its local use is completely separate from its administrative and property related meanings. There are only a few internet dictionaries or web pages that deal with such local meanings removed from the original sense, which capture the somewhat wider spectrum of uses, alongside its ‘lacking’ character. And so, the blog Novi Izraz (lit. New Expression) states that it assumes the expression tapija has its origins in Fažana, a place in Istria. The expression is usually used to describe a quality of something or someone, namely their mental, physical, or social state or status. In describing a quality of something, the expression has a negative connotation, similar to the word bezveze, which means something stupid, crazy or ‘rubbish’ in English. For example: When used to describe a person, the expression tapija denotes a boring, pathetic person: – Tihomir will come with us – Come on, why did you call him, he is a tapija. – You’re a tapija. This example makes it clear that tapija is also used as a gentle insult. The already-mentioned possible use of the expression tapija is also found in descriptions of a mental state: – What are you doing? – I’m in the tapija. / Tapijarim [I’m tapija-ing] In other words: – How are you? – Tapija / Tapija The person is bored, lame, pathetic. . . (Novi Izraz 2010)9

It is therefore only the more contemporary and locally oriented definitions that come close to the meaning of the word tapija in Pula, but they stop exclusively at a simpler meaning and ‘external’ description, without taking into account the ironic, self-ironic, self-defining and symbolic dimension to the term. I contend that this dimension is partic-

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Almost, but Not Quite Bored in Pula

ularly important, although it is true that it is largely articulated through a lack or shortcoming. One interlocutor offered a very interesting solution in precisely this ironic key, when explaining the transition from the term’s ‘neutral’, administrative meaning to its local version: When I thought about where the term came from, which is really a Turkish loanword here linked with something completely different, the term tapija is like some proof of ownership, and it is a completely bureaucratic term because here the same word exists [in a different, local meaning], but who came up with this and when – I don’t know. But that term was not used coincidentally, because people like me, whenever they see some documents, rulebooks, laws, their head starts to spin. And that’s my tapija. So you can’t say there is no link. (A.A., interview)

Due to difficulties in determining the phrase’s roots across the entire spectrum of its slang meanings, I will not attempt to precisely determine its origin, although the residents of Pula, i.e. the informants and interlocutors with whom I spoke when researching tapija, would often remember without difficulty when they had heard it first. They would also offer information about it – not so much about tapija’s where, as this was practically always Pula, but rather about when that concept and its accompanying phenomenology was generated. It is therefore of significance for this research that Pula and the surrounding areas have adopted, metabolized and spawned a wide range of applications of a term that is not infrequently used as a synonym for ‘state of mind’, ‘unwillingness’, ‘inactivity’, or even the ‘indifference’ of Pula residents themselves, a kind of local zeitgeist: ‘Although it is something concrete, bureaucratic, here it is a mental category’ (A.A., interview). For these reasons, tapija is one of those terms that points in part to a ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams 2006: 41) of a period we are in. It primarily points to places, namely, to city life, given that this feeling is partly also generationally defined. As the research demonstrated, in relation to fixity of meaning, its structure is very protean, changeable and applicable. This is particularly why I would say that the Pula tapija can be interpreted as one of the ‘most sensitive and least tangible components of action’ (ibid.), in which action must be understood in a very broad sense of the word. Its position as unrecorded and empirically as local knowledge that is not simply established is very probably why it has remained outside of the domain of research to date (cf. Löfgren 1990: 14). At the same time, however, it is key to understanding city life because within tapija, as I will try to show, self-interpretation and self-irony are incorporated as part of what Bronislaw Malinowski called ‘the imponderabilia of actual life . . . but with an effort at penetrating the mental attitude expressed

On Tapija

13

in them’ (Malinowski 1979: 17–18).10 As some kind of nexus, namely of the ‘unity of theory and practice’ (Kangrga, in Hegel 1987: XVII), tapija is an interpretative frame and, on occasion, a powerfully expressed attitude towards the world, situations or events. In this case, these take on the patina of ‘boredom’, ‘lameness’, ‘futility’, ‘fallibility’ (A.A., interview), ‘entropy’ (B.K., interview), or even just ‘not doing’ and ‘inaction’. Yet, I will try to show that tapija is not exhausted exclusively through the use of such powerful signifiers, and that, rather, it has its own ironic and also relaxing aspect. In his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci wrote how ‘In this way we arrive also at the equality of, or equation between, “philosophy and politics”, thought and action, that is, at a philosophy of praxis’ (Gramsci 2007: 886). Yet tapija is also concerned with the unity of or interaction between the philosophy of ‘doing nothing’ and ‘not doing’, which creates a specific local dialectic immersed in the wider social and cultural context. What strikes me as particularly important in the theoretical development of the tapija concept is the fact that it is unrecorded, i.e. neither codified in writing nor institutionalized. Tapija is almost always a vernacular and orally transmitted form of knowledge, about (self )interpretation. Apart from publications that have emphasized it as one particularity of Pula that has not been adequately fleshed out as an idea (cf. Mirković 2016, Pula+2020),11 I have not managed to find a clearly elaborated or cogent text that has tried to analyse, contextualize or explain tapija from a local or perhaps theoretical point of view – points of view, I will also attempt to show, that are neither opposed nor conflicting. I contend that here, local knowledge focused on tapija is already theoretical to the core. Here it is worth returning to Gramsci’s thought of how it is essential to destroy the widespread prejudice that philosophy is a strange and difficult thing just because it is the specific intellectual activity of a particular category of specialists or of professional and systematic philosophers. It must first be shown that all men are ‘philosophers’, by defining the limits and characteristics of the ‘spontaneous philosophy’ which is proper to everybody. (Gramsci, op.cit. Gutiérrez 1989: 5)12

Tapija is a kind of unsystematized and uninstitutionalized local interpretative and ‘philosophical system’ in Gramsci’s sense of a ‘spontaneous philosophy’. Its specificities, as well as its territorial scope of application, are part of the framework of ‘local knowledge’ (Geertz 2010). This is precisely why, given its dominant orality and its characteristics, the interviews showed that it touched upon subversive knowledge and attitudes. This is because recorded knowledge was often also codified and

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Almost, but Not Quite Bored in Pula

the property of – presently very tentatively put – a political elite that often decides or defines what is permitted or what is important to legitimate, codify and retain (cf. Thompson 2003: 22–23, Ginzburg 1989: 9). On the topic of boredom, the philosopher Lars Svendsen noticed a similar potential from a slightly different angle, because as he claims, ‘Boredom always contains a critical element, because it expresses the idea that either a given situation or existence as a whole is deeply unsatisfying’ (Svendsen 2008: 22). As a vernacular concept, tapija, and especially its self-interpretative component, brings us back to, or at least directs us to difference and the interaction, first and foremost, between the official and unofficial, the formal and informal, but also the permitted and the prohibited, the displayed and the hidden, the recorded and the unrecorded, the ludic and the administrative. Ultimately, this phenomenon points to reaction, interpretation, but also the ironic rendering of official and dominant knowledges and practices, although they can be simultaneously largely chosen, accepted, adopted, as well as practised by a large number of Pula’s residents. In this way, stories about tapija as a concept in a ‘small tradition’ (Burke 1991: 32)13 can be situated in part if not entirely within the realm of ‘modern urban tales’ (Bošković-Stulli 2006: 155), with a congruent ethnopoetic effect.14 As is thus clear from this opening chapter, in which I have touched on some of its characteristics, tapija can surely be placed among those phenomena for which the following is true: ‘If no one asks me, I know; if I am asked to explain it, I do not know’ (Sloterdijk 2016: 243). As my interlocutor A.A. summarized it somewhat differently: That’s a big question – what [tapija] means. Everyone interprets it, but few generally pose the question of what it means. I think that’s not just the case with me, but generally. You know precisely when you need to use it, but perhaps you don’t know why, or you don’t mull over why. Everyone has that reflex, they know when to say tapija when necessary, nobody will slip up when saying tapija. (A.A., interview)

On the one hand, the following pages comprise an attempt at a partial analysis and explanation (from the perspective of Pula’s residents) of this oft-used and unsystematized ‘knowledge system’. On the other hand, these pages are an attempt at a theoretical exposition and therefore link up with and draw comparisons to similar phenomena. The book is primarily written on the basis of field research and twenty-four deep, semi-structured interviews with Pula inhabitants. The interlocutors were of different generations, ranging from those born at the start of the 1950s to younger secondary school students who were born around the year 2000. I spoke with individuals interested in this

On Tapija

15

topic, and, as with all ethnographic research based on a longer-lasting dialogue between the researcher and interlocutor, one strand of potential interlocutors did not agree to share their experiences and thoughts about tapija, while another strand was willing to discuss the topic, but did not agree to the discussion being recorded. According to the agreements I made with my interlocutors, their spoken words and parts of the interviews have been labelled and listed with their initials, to retain anonymity for ethical reasons. Albeit to a lesser extent, in this book I have also made use of personal correspondences with individuals and recorded parts of debates that developed after a public presentation of the first part of this research, entitled ‘The Phenomenology of Tapija’, held on 17 August 2017 in a space belonging to the Pula citizen association Gradska radionica [City Workshop]. The lengthy debate, and also the sharp polemic that followed the presentation, demonstrates at least in part just how much tapija, in its manifold derivative forms, links to the city of Pula and its residents, as well as how difficult it is to systematize it. I conducted the research for which I gathered and transcribed the interviews used in this book from March 2017 to January 2018. As I was born in Pula, the city in which I also live, I draw on layers of knowledge on this topic gathered over many years, and the interviews border on autoethnography. This is true across the entire period of producing the research – from the particularly non-reflexive use of the term tapija, which I, along with many residents of Pula I spoke with, heard for the first time during my first years of secondary school, to its less frequent use during university studies in Padua, Italy. This also includes juxtaposing and comparing my ‘knowledge’ about tapija with my interlocutors’ ‘knowledge’, as well as – ultimately – tapija’s theoretical elaboration. I see hidden here the interesting insight of how, while the majority of people with whom I spoke would agree that tapija as a concept and phenomenon is one of the key characteristics of the ‘city spirit’, often with that term, on the surface, individuals would take for granted almost diametrically opposed, yet widely codified definitions and articulations. I will write about these apparent contradictions, among other topics, in this chapter. In the second chapter I will attempt to show that while my interlocutors and I often name tapija as a local concept, it is in fact a (g)local phenomenon whose fine-tuning, phenomenology and nested quality has a local character. Yet to seek out its origin, one must delve into wider temporal and spatial contexts. The second chapter is about the cultural history of similar phenomena, such as boredom, while the third and final chapter will deal with the analysis and interpretation of tapija in the project Pula+2020. It will deal with it as part of the city’s

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Almost, but Not Quite Bored in Pula

candidacy for the European Capital of Culture, which was also partly based on an attempt at codification and both the ‘preservation of and moving beyond’ tapija as specific to Pula. Thus, more than a century later, the assertion that Pula can be found on the Adriatic coast on the way down towards Turkey definitely needs to be fleshed out and updated. It is not only that Pula, viewed from Ireland and Dublin, really can be found on the Adriatic coast, somewhere on the way down towards Turkey, but rather that same Pula, a former Austrian naval base, cannot be fully understood without knowledge of the multiple meanings of one Turkish word. Yet, in contrast to geographical maps that help to locate a city, dictionaries will not be of much use to you in understanding Pula’s tapija. Although the word’s original meaning relates to real estate, its later and locally applied meanings are especially mobile and variable, as this research has shown. In other words, Pula – at least from the perspective of one section of the city’s population – claims it has the exclusive rights to tapija.

The Ethnography of Self-Interpretation and Local Knowledge In researching tapija as a ‘semantic platform’, i.e. in its ambiguities, the ease with which the label tapija or tapijaroš [lit. a person who is tapija] can stick to someone or something is striking. This easily slides into a generalization and description of the city as tapija. However, it is worth repeating that at present, in contrast to Joyce, Pasolini and Cankar – who as foreigners used what were in part synonyms of tapija to qualify a view of, and also codify Pula – tapija is often represented as a certain ‘knowledge’ or ‘opinion’ that only inhabitants of Pula will utter about their city on the basis of their experiences of living in it, without necessarily knowing or paying attention to an Irish, Italian or Slovenian writer. Tapija is thus a question of local interpretation, but a much more interesting self-interpretation; in other words, we can see it and use it to characterize others, but we can also find ourselves within it, as with boredom in particular (cf. Svendsen 2008: 14). Of course, as city life cannot be reduced exclusively to tapija and its synonyms or derivatives, I do not intend to give a reductive interpretation of everyday life in Pula. Yet, besides the oft-mentioned, recorded and sometimes overemphasized cultural specificities of the Istrian peninsula – through which it is presently discursively and politically modelled as an island (cf. Bertoša 1993: 14–19; Matošević 2011: 195–207) – and the dynamic historical characteristics of Istria’s biggest city, with its rich, ancient, but also

On Tapija

17

industrial and military heritage, or its increasing reliance on tourism with its accompanying wine and gastronomic offerings, the unrecorded feeling and ‘knowledge’ present in tapija today has ‘nested’ among them. Tapija’s amalgam sometimes takes on the form of an antithesis to the dominant discourse, although it is not at all in open conflict with this discourse. One possible explanation is that, faced with cracks in attempts at commodifying local identity, tapija is the remainder or derivative of the ‘slow modern’ in today’s postmodern race towards alluring self-representations. Explained through the comprehensive range of aforementioned synonyms, such as ‘not doing’, ‘boredom’, ‘lameness’, ‘loneliness’, ‘unwillingness’, or even ‘apathy’, tapija has not let itself be spectacularized and commodified, at least to date.15 I believe it is important to pose questions about the source of tapija, about its phenomena, manifestations and articulations, and also about its coexistence with other everyday moments that have a ‘different emotional coloring’, as well as questions concerning how time flows by each year, and the possible potentials of tapija and its manifestations. This is because tapija is an integral part of a wider social, economic and cultural system, and so it can be partly explained from these angles too, in the same way as the aforementioned phenomenon of boredom (cf. Svendsen 2008: 12). In other words, tapija should be contextualized. Along those lines, I will try and elaborate something more precise, while also using a more involved methodological and interpretative apparatus than that used by James Joyce, Pier Paolo Pasolini or perhaps Ivan Cankar, who only touched on tapija.16

The Semantic Platform Before I analyse tapija from various possible points of view and therein attempt to contextualize it, I would like to start with the significant fact, underscored in the introduction, that tapija is primarily an orally expressed phenomenon. It can be uttered, or in certain situations, implied; with it, one can describe, characterize or be ironic, but up until now it has remained outside of how ‘writing tyrannically locks written words that orality eternally links to the visual field’ (Ong 2002: 11), at least with regard to more serious literary or theoretical elaborations. Although in places, tapija can be ‘visualized’ and was, for some of my interlocutors, ‘reserved for winter as in summer there is no time for tapija because of tourism and events’ (B.B., interview), for others, the situation is reversed and for them ‘these ‘events’ in the summer are a bigger tapija than in winter’ (A.A., interview). What is significant in this con-

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Almost, but Not Quite Bored in Pula

text is that they always first heard of tapija, or regularly listened to it, and it was always uttered. Writing tapija down is much rarer, as are general attempts at its organized codification, explanation or contextualization. In other words, its vectors are the ear that hears it and the mouth that utters it, much more so than the eyes that read about it and the hands that write it down. Yet why does the way in which it is mediated matter anyway? What does this tell us about tapija? One certain consequence of its dominant orality is the very broad meaning and applicability of that term, i.e. the possibility of its use as a kind of ‘platform’, which simultaneously functions as a characteristic quality of individuals (tapijaroš, zadnja tapija [lit. last tapija]), persons or situations one has found oneself in (tapija, or for example, piti na tapiju [drink at the tapija]),17 and the mental state of individuals (tapijarenje [a verb – tapija-ing], teže or žešće tapijarenje [heavier or more severe tapija-ing], istapijariti se [tapijaing as much as possible]), but also the metaphorical denotation of the experience of living in Pula ( pulska tapija [Pula tapija]), or perhaps qualifying a certain period of the year as tapija (e.g. pulska zima, pulska tapija [Pula winter, Pula tapija]). What emerged from the research was that we had not exhausted the entire range of its uses, and so individuals insisted on its implicit and connotative meanings, from ‘otherness’ to ‘lameness’ (I.Y., interview), through to the ‘self-ironic mourning of our everyday life’ (B.B., interview), to much more serious definitions of how mobilizing that term is a form of speech and a discourse on the impossibility of any kind of more serious activity in the city: As I see it, that term is – ‘nothing can [be achieved] here’. So, there’s nothing [here], and no possibilities of anything. So, that is what tapija means to me. The city is bad, in terms of so many things it is bad – an industrial and tourist city without adequate public transport, without structural components resolved . . . And now someone who is twenty looks and says – ‘eh, this is bad, why don’t you do something?’ But the answer is ‘you can’t’. Why don’t you at the university, or you at Uljanik do something, instead of only saying ‘don’t touch, don’t make waves’. That is tapija. Bad, bad tapija. (B.K., interview)

Clearly tapija has no single quality, but rather a variety of meanings. This is characteristic of oral and written communication via new media, and of the oral tradition.18 Yet, in contrast to urban stories that continue to be ‘told as the truth just about that town, about events that have supposedly happened at well-known and dear places . . . of which there is no information in historical documents’ (Marks 2000: 11), discussions of tapija are largely aimed at explaining the present-day situation, as confirmed by the interview fragment above. The time reference from

On Tapija

19

which that term derives, or in which it is immersed, is not so much diachronic, as synchronic. In other words, its role is not to compensate for a ‘lack of historical data’, but rather to detect and explain, or just mark the present moment, which – it is important to emphasize – is always experiential and personal and therefore often prone to very powerful interpretations. For this reason, it can be said that tapija is not only a result of or a lack of something, or half-knowledge, because it does not compensate for or replace different and ‘real knowledge’. Rather, in places, it is also generated as a consequence of ‘too much knowledge’ and ‘too much close familiarity’, of being informed and aware of a local or some other kind of ‘unsolvable’ problematic: ‘This is a notion that persists, but its meaning changes. But as I see it, no; only when there is tapija-ing, then it’s boring, but when you say tapija, then that means we have a problem. I have a problem. I’m not bored, but rather we have problems. It’s my tapija because I have problems’ (M.B., interview). As I emphasized earlier, the dominant articulation of tapija lies in a lack or deficiencies, which make it a term of critique, irrespective of whether it is used in a more-or-less ironic sense: ‘If someone says you are a tapija, that is not good at all, they don’t want to say anything nice or good, and when you tell someone that they are a tapija that would mean that you don’t want to have anything to do with that person’ (N.H., and M.B., interview). Although it is often used as an interpersonal ironic qualification for those individuals in societies ‘who can’t be arsed doing anything’ (A.S., interview), it can be uttered lightly, without much thinking, because it is an ‘especially light qualification’ (S.S., interview). However, its function is almost always to highlight insufficiencies, irrespective of whether they concern an individual, situation or event. Yet, on the other hand, the extent to which one can identify with tapija or its lack, in a largely ironic sense, is confirmed by the name Skate Klub Tapija and the contest held in 2016 and 2017 in the yard of the Karlo Rojc Community Centre. This was also confirmed by the fact, as one interlocutor told me, that its first email address was [email protected], as at first on the internet you want to play around a bit, you want to be a bit different and all that, and with the name and surname, you look to the internet’s anonymity, you know, it’s fucking scary, I will give some other name and surname for myself on the internet, and it has to be a laugh, some kind of joke and the first thing that came to my mind was tapija. Super, definitely no one has that, and they really didn’t. (M.B., interview)

Of course, these examples and others that are generationally defined (such as a less elaborated version used by those born around the year

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2000, in comparison with a ‘heavier’, problematic interpretation used by those born around twenty years earlier) are evidence that it is easy to identify with tapija. This is because it operates in the domain of the familiar and accepted, while at the same time, ‘some time ago, in the nineties’, it was in part a slang phrase that ‘was not used by all residents of Pula, just by those who were out and about (u điru)’ (N. H, interview). In this sense, tapija becomes a term that separates those who are familiar with it, speak and reproduce it, ‘from the others’. In other words, it contains an element of distinction established through differentiation (Bourdieu 1984: 227), and consequently, a style that belongs to a ‘scene’ or ‘way of life’ (đir) too.19 But it also opens the doors to an interesting interpretation of others and a possible self-identification with ‘not doing’, ‘inaction’, ‘boredom or getting bored’, ‘lameness’, i.e. with doing tapija. Yet such identification, recognition, approval, or perhaps the enjoyment of ‘not doing’ anything, should not be surprising as ‘agitation and haste, grimaces and gesticulation are opposed to slowness – “the slow gestures, the slow glance” of nobility, according to Nietzsche – to the restraint and impassivity which signify elevation’ (Bourdieu 1984: 177). It is thus important to note that a large number of interlocutors claim that it was particularly during the 1990s that they heard and began to use that term for the first time,20 i.e. during the same period when language was being heavily promoted in Croatia as a symbolic boundary directed at national others (Škiljan 2002: 278). At the same time, national identity was constructed in direct opposition to the idea of the Balkans (cf. Matošević and Škokić 2014). In Pula, the concept of distinction was adopted and articulated also through a term, tapija, that undoubtably came from the East, from the Balkans. However, some speakers did not necessarily care, nor are they today (especially those among the younger generations) necessarily familiar with its geographical or semantic origin. Bearing this in mind, this person’s memory is particularly interesting: I can tell you exactly which situations I first heard it in. It was around 1992 or 1993, which means my second year of high school for sure, because I know who I first heard it from. It was B., who was here before the war in Sarajevo, and he just left then, so I know. We connected it with the ‘crew’ from Klonja.21 Yes, absolutely, he was in that style [đir], they had their own style, they had their own jokes [fore] and their own language, you know, some Serbian expressions, and it was all from the underground, you know, all rural-like [čobanski], and that tapija, it stuck with us. When we spoke among ourselves, it would always be ‘you what, you what? Tapija!’ We pushed it too far, but we were just joking around. (M.B., N.H., interview, italics A.M.)

On Tapija

21

The local meaning of the word tapija lies in the domain of what Pierre Bourdieu names ‘the ability to grasp simultaneously the different senses of one word . . . [this] can only be acquired in certain conditions of existence that are capable of authorizing a detached and free relation to language’ (Bourdieu 1992: 16). In Pula, tapija really can be interpreted as a code pertaining to a double opposition. On the one hand, it is significant that a word of Turkish origin, a term from the Balkans of the 1990s, is able to operate as an ‘elite’ notion here.22 And this nesting certainly denotes a linguistic rarity and value reversal of those years, when considered in relation to the dominant linguistic tendencies in Croatia. Yet at the same time, according to certain interlocutors’ claims, it operates as a way for Pula locals to distinguish themselves from the rest of Istria: ‘Pula is not Istria, that is a Pula phrase, the city boundary is on Veli vrh [a hill by Pula], even in suburbia there is no tapija! In Muntić there is no tapija! Tapija is here, in the walls of the city!’ (B.K., interview).23 Hence, in the years when Istria (and Istrianness) was being promoted and constructed in opposition to more rigid nationalist discourses in the state, i.e. Istria as a multilingual and tolerant environment (cf. Šuràn 2011, Nikočević, manuscript), and also therefore as a sociocultural island in relation to the wider national context in which it is located, tapija was one of the concepts through which Pula articulated its sense of distinction in the Istrian context. Through the tapija phenomenon, Pula becomes an island on a peninsula: ‘It is much more linked to the metropolitan stories of Zagreb, Belgrade, Ljubljana, Trieste, Milan, New York or London, than to the village. There is no tapija in Zgrablići [a village 45 km from Pula]’ (B.K., interview). Tapija therefore denotes an insufficiency and a lack; it is also the source of positive, affirmative identifications, as one usage – frequently used by certain Pula residents – confirms: ‘I am always using that word, I think, perhaps I ought not to, but that’s how it is, because it is a good word, a really good expression!’ (I.Y., interview).

The Pula Audience Almost all interlocutors exclusively linked tapija to Pula,24 while also placing an emphasis when talking about the city on its urbanity, the Pula style [đir] or – of particular significance – the prominent music scene in Pula. Bourdieu’s aforementioned observation, that ‘nothing more clearly affirms one’s “class” . . . than tastes in music’ (1984: 18), falls on particularly fertile ground here. Along these lines, the perception and idea of the ‘Pula audience’ operates at concerts, and denotes an audience that is ‘especially demanding’:

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And that is the audience test, and for me it is linked with tapija, with the concept of tapija, especially in the sense we spoke of earlier, of pride and elitism. The best band is playing for you there, but tapija, they’re no good. . . . Any band from the former Yugoslav region was able to come, the most famous, and if it went well in Pula, then this was really great; but going well in Pula was really a test. And now, whether this was a Pula story that ‘outsiders’ wouldn’t get, an interpretation or something else, I can’t judge. But the story kept repeating . . . Because in the end, in the concept of tapija there is no form of fulfilment – because then it stops being tapija. Tapija’s goal, expressing a condition of tapija, isn’t a change for the better, but rather a consolidating of the present state – that is simply how it is. (B.B., interview, italics A.M.) Hell, there was one other thing, I felt . . . this vision, if you are in Pula, on the rock scene, if you went down well in such a way that people got a little excited or stirred up, then you had gone down well! This was the most critical rock ‘n’ roll audience – both in the 1960s and the 1970s. Everyone who passed through Uljanik [a rock club, once owned by the shipyard of the same name, in the very centre of the city] – they mostly played in Uljanik during the 1960s and 1970s – from all over the country, and even those from abroad who came, if they received three claps or something like that, it was common knowledge that – ‘man, we played well!’ This is because the audience was refined but stiff and reserved. They had a more critical attitude, the most critical, and people knew ‘if we went down well there, that means we’re OK, we’re good’. (J.P.I., interview, italics A.M.) But what was nice about Pula was that it could host, right, because we have all that historical evidence – you know, the last concerts of Belgrade bands that played in Pula, then the 1990s, and then that first big concert where Einstürzende Neubauten played,25 then that crew through the Film Festival, and using the festival’s infrastructure, developed as an audience,26 as a good audience, and then we come to the tapija phenomenon! In one moment, Pula positioned itself as a kind of point of reference and became self-sufficient, especially because there is a cosmopolitan and historical otherness there, a creative otherness. This is the moment where we arrive at a phenomenon that I think links to Pula’s tapija, to the phenomenon of the Pula audience . . . You know, in all these popular histories, this is because every band [claims] that they least like [playing] in Pula, I don’t know, maybe F. can explain what happened here, someone from those 1960s’ generations. And that self-sufficient quality, that Pula and the Pula audience positions itself as a kind of reference point, an arbitrator. [The Pula audience] even begins to enjoy it a little perversely – ‘Partibrejkersi [a band name], what is that?27 A little jumping around, commercial music and so on’. (B.K., interview, italics A.M.)

On Tapija

23

Pula residents are particular in that they are hard to please and always look at things a little negatively, instead of looking – look, something is happening – and saying – well done, they have done this and that. But instead of praising them, they will always find some kind of negative side, they will always look for the less beautiful side of that something. So, the concert happened, wow, it was nice, people gathered together, the city came to life, but they will say ‘what tapija, they haven’t played for six hours, they only played for two hours’. People in Pula are a bit like that, they don’t like to praise. You know, it’s never good enough for them . . . At the concerts, the audience always begins to spark up and heat up, but in Pula – nothing. It’s a tough audience. But go to Pazin,28 it’s different there! (I.Y., interview, italics A.M.) And those welcomes [you get] at some of those concerts, when the audience is this or that, but in Pula you can’t bullshit [ folirati], which is really good. More or less, there is always some bullshitting, but if you start to bullshit more seriously – you won’t go down well. (A.A., interview)

And yet, if applied to the field of popular music, I assume that the taste in music that Bourdieu mentions would encompass the identifications expressed at concerts through an entire range of performative acts of approving and participating. This would include dance, singing out loud with the performers, giving applause and standing in the front row before the stage. On the other hand, the idea of the Pula audience, at least in relation to popular music concerts, as is clear from the above, partly rests on somewhat different premises and ideas about itself.29 Clearly this self-concept is based on an interesting, symbolic inversion of audience and musician, in which authority is located with the audience. Through the performative acts of indifference, shattered expectations, non-reaction and non-participation, the audience constructs an idea of itself as difficult and authoritative. At least according to the idea held by one subsection of the audience, the musicians can be interpreted as always in a subordinate position when performing in Pula. There is nothing they can do to regain their pole position and expected primacy, because – let me remind you – with the ‘concept of tapija there is no means of fulfilling it – because then tapija disappears. The goal behind expressing tapija is not a change for the better, but a consolidation [of the existing state of affairs]’ (B.B., interview).30 In other words, invalidating the performative expression of boredom and indifference – invalidating tapija – would mean invalidating the idea of its superior status, which would position it entirely within the etymological and semantic context of the word pūblicum, the ordinary audience, comprised of any listeners and viewers who are passivized especially due to their participation in

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the expected performative expression of acceptance. The expression or performance of tapija, its unresponsiveness, in this sense points to resistance, as well as to a possible active critique. This critique transforms an ‘ordinary consumer’ into a ‘refined and knowledgeable’ music critic, who does not easily follow the mainstream. The musical taste of the Pula audience, an audience that primarily participates by observing, is perhaps here popular-cultural, but its habitus and status are aristocratic.31 The music performed in this array of genres can be particularly diverse, but the Pula audience’s reply is often in the same languid tone. Here we are definitely close to the aforementioned restraint and indifference that denote social elevation (Bourdieu 1984: 177): that is to say, sprezzatura or the well-studied negligence relating to self-perception, style and image that, ‘for the entire generation of the sixties or seventies’, ultimately emerges from ‘their own lived experience and becomes some kind of pose, [which then becomes] a metaphor for the elitism of tapija that we have in the project Pula+202032 . . . and a class moment becomes a style moment’ (B.K., interview). Interestingly, besides the qualification of other persons as tapija, the basic, sometimes dominant, or most frequent domain in which the term tapija is used for many is in the field of popular culture. ‘What tapija this film or music is’, ‘Ma son ndada a veder quel film in kino, però me iera giusto tapija’ [Italian-speaking inhabitants also use the term tapija: I went to the movies to watch that film, but it was tapija] (D.L., personal correspondence), ‘What a tapija of a concert’ (M.B., interview), or perhaps a book, comic, or exhibition (Dž.D., interview) – these are all epithets serving as qualifications showing the possible existence of cultural capital on the part of those who reproduce tapija in communication, as ‘through tapija you get to know people, their affinities and tastes. When someone tells you that something is tapija, it will be clear to you that it is something bad. Then you need to explain why something is tapija, because it doesn’t mean anything by itself ’ (N.H., interview). Often, it is not further elaborated, because most often tapija means criticism and something negative, or at least something of suspect value. However, here the term definitely operates as a cue for possible further analysis, which, depending on the needs of the situation in which it is uttered, entails, at least in principle, regard for the interlocutor’s expertise and analytical skills. Yet, even when further argumentation is missing, tapija operates as a code, in other words, at the connotative level of the unspoken: ‘you get that I get what I don’t elaborate to you’. Hence, where ‘there is tapija’, there is also an explicitly or implicitly present cultural capital, of the ‘I get [it]’ attitude, which is somewhat differently distributed along generational lines.

On Tapija

25

While members of the younger generations, those born around the year 2000 or a few years earlier, mainly imbue the concept of tapija with a meaning of a strongly or weakly present boredom and annoyance (the topic of the next chapter), those born in the 1960s and 1970s almost always use it as a term of latent critique and as an attitude that, as we have seen, expresses ‘affinities and tastes’ that are ‘the source of the system distinctive features which cannot fail to be perceived as a systematic expression of a particular class of conditions of existence, i.e. as a distinctive life-style’ (Bourdieu 1984: 175). I contend that lifestyles can never be a direct result or a cross-section of conditions of existence at all, as they overlook, for example, situations like ‘class mimicry’ or ‘class longing’ (cf. Koroman 2013a: 133) that can be articulated in the field of lifestyles. Yet the question can certainly be posed: where does the idea of their own ‘aristocratic’33 status and habitus come from, an idea present among a strand of the Pula audience and also expressed through the concept of tapija as often applied to popular cultural content and production, especially that relating to music and concerts? We could find more complex replies in tracing the specific status that music in Pula enjoyed after the Second World War, with the development of cultural–artistic societies and musical amateurism, the status of rock ‘n’ roll music during the 1970s and 1980s, and also the development of music criticism in the city. The historian Lada Duraković wrote of how music criticism operated as a ‘mediator between music and its listeners’, with the audience also ‘becoming a subject of critique’ that during the 1950s and 1960s ‘constantly warn[ed] of the need for steady attendance of musical events, which facilitated the acceptance and understanding of artistic works’ (Duraković 2010: 203). Yet it is important to emphasize that the organization of musical events in Pula during the 1990s unfolded in the context of a state of emergency due to the war in Croatia and the rigid nationalist discourse present in practically all pores of everyday life. For that reason, many claimed that during that period, they would come to festivals held in Pula, such as the Art & Music Festival,34 for ‘a piece of lost normality from all over the country’ (Perković 2013: 133). This is because while ‘the storm of war raged across Croatia, Istria was like an oasis of calm, of culture and nonviolence. This was also the Art & Music Festival’s mission, which was conceived as a guitar festival for young, promising music groups and performers, alongside whom more well-known and popular names performed’ (Bašin, cited in Perković 2013: 131). Art & Music was ‘the biggest “small” festival, which brought the alternative scene to life during the bleak 1990s, [which] today has a 15-year-long tradition, and represents a unique event’ (Radman, cited in Perković 2013: 115).35 It is clear

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from the above that tapija, as criticism and qualification that develops in the field of popular culture, and especially concerts, emerges from recent historical experiences of city life in the 1970s and 1980s. The 1990s represent, if not the zenith, then a very particular period in which ‘Pula assert[ed] itself as a kind of reference point and bec[ame] self-sustaining, precisely because it has a cosmopolitan and historical otherness, a creative otherness’ (B.K., interview).36 To a large degree, Pula has articulated itself as a city rich in popular cultural output and productions. The 1990s were crucial in that sense as they gave birth to and determined tapija as a term of critique that also created distinctions in relation to a double context – the regional and the national. In that sense, tapija and its utterance had more to do with declarations of one’s own cultural capital and the status linked to it of establishing differences, characteristic of the New Wave (Novi Val – cf. Prica 1990) for example.37 This contrasts with tapija denoting merely ‘not doing’, boredom or social passivity (cf. Pula+2020, 2016: 5). On the contrary, the individuals who used the term tapija were necessarily ‘involved’ and were following or creating the events that were unfolding on Pula’s cultural scene. Yet in Pula during the 1990s, other processes were unfolding alongside those analysed above – processes that would completely reassign tapija to a meaning closer to its present-day meaning. In the diachronic development of its meaning, tapija is a floating signifier, and as we have already seen, it does not mean the same thing or process for different generations or individuals.

A City under the Weather In his text, The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin states in one section how the ‘crowd is really a spectacle of nature – if one may apply this term to social conditions. A street, a conflagration, or a traffic accident assembles people who are not defined along class lines’ (Benjamin 1986: 66). If we were to speculate on the class determination and distinction of the Pula audience in order to demonstrate their cultural capital, the processes that ensued in the city are marked by the altered, resigned meaning assigned to tapija, as well as its transclass and transgenerational reach. One of the possible meanings of tapija points to a lack of events in the city and the non-presence of people, particularly during the winter months. This is a condition known in the city as the ‘Pula tapija’ or the ‘winter tapija’, otherwise known as the ‘Pula winter’: ‘Yes, that other tapija, this Pula one, it’s a mental category’ (A.A., interview). A mental category indicating a cyclical conception of

On Tapija

27

time, as well as yielding to it, is a ‘bad recurrence’, at least according to several people’s implicit comments: And this is the annual cycle of the city, a city that breathes. The worst is in February, those are generally the most depressing months. There is another phrase too, but I do not know to what extent it has been broadened to include Pula’s cyclical annual weather. But I use it, and it is called the Pula winter. Of the Pula winter, I tell everyone; those who come during the summer and idealize Pula and decide to buy property here, or rent it, or who think to return, to come here, then I say, with good intentions, to everyone – watch out, in February you’re going to get depressed. Here, I have some phone numbers for psychiatrists, don’t worry, this is a normal cyclical thing that will come to an end.38 (B.K., interview)

If we follow Benjamin with the idea that multitude and presence can be a spectacle of nature, i.e. its consequence, can we conclude that this holds even more so in the case of non-presence, non-going out, non-socializing, at least when it comes to public spaces? Of course, what Benjamin then goes on to claim is the ‘hidden’, and therefore the ‘monstruous’, namely that: ‘They present themselves as concrete gatherings, but socially they remain abstract – namely, in their isolated private concerns . . . each acting in his [or her] private interest, gather[ing] at the market around their “common cause”’ (Benjamin 1986: 66). In the case of the Pula winter and tapija, this is not hidden at all. On the contrary, gatherings, socializing and events are, to a greater degree, reduced to private spheres of interest, with the resulting and inversely proportioned emptying of public spaces. Nevertheless, the sense of being stuck together, or at least the inseparability (in principle) of tapija and nature, in the sense of yielding to its cyclical quality, is one of the specificities of its phenomenology: But that’s nature, the [city] gives off such a negative glow, which makes it a special case. It’s more, fuck it, it’s the season that’s so gloomy and dreary, and now the city was a little livelier, especially in those times, you know, when you lived with your parents, when you felt the need, you didn’t have any money, but you went out anyway – then it meant more to you, then things were getting going. And now, for me it’s all more fucked up, because the weather is fucked up . . . night falls quickly and that makes me sad because I don’t live the rhythm of this city. This makes me sad because I don’t live it during the day, and then the evening arrives. I don’t remember going to the city [centre] in the middle of winter, without having arranged to go to the cinema with someone, or for a beer during the week. And that makes me sad. I think . . . then I say, and what . . . and what, I think is that I would like to start mingling and to drink a glass

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of wine, speaking with someone or alone, yet feeling that something. (M.B., interview) For some people it is tapija, for others, nothing. Do you get it, they are tiny nuances, but what we say – winter, tapija, darkness falls at 4 p.m., and you can sit and chill out in front of that stupid television and that’s how you spend your entire winter afternoon, ‘what tapija, I’m bored’. Or you will go to a friend’s house, then you will go for a walk, or you will make something so as not to be bored. (I.Y., interview)

When comprehended and articulated in such a way, nature and its regularities, like night falling early, dreariness or gloominess, all of which winter brings with it, become one of the dominant orientation points and authorities governing action. Put differently, nature conditions the city-centre presence and public space for a large number of Pula’s residents. Nature, therefore, is no longer opposed (cf. Sergejev 1974: 41–42, Matošević 2015: 193–98 and Matošević 2017). Nature is neither subordinated nor defied. People rarely go out and spend time in open spaces and the city centre, not in spite of, but rather in accordance with the natural and atmospheric conditions. The domination of ‘first’ over ‘second’ nature, i.e. the ‘dichotomy between nature and non-nature in the human’, which is ‘understood as the emancipation of humans from nature’ (Böhme 2002: 99), can perhaps be interpreted in this case as partly a yielding to what could be called the ‘natural rhythm’. Nature, in that sense, occupies one of the most significant positions in directing and articulating city life, though it should be understood as a bifurcation at the very least, if not also ambivalent, but as a consequence, surely very effective (cf. Sloterdijk 2007: 352). Besides my interlocutors’ stated experiences, it is not difficult to show that many people value life in Pula especially because of its ‘gentle climate’ and ‘beautiful’ sea, woods and pathways, in other words, the rich natural environment in which the city is immersed. This also complements Benjamin’s conclusion of how ‘Nothing bores the ordinary man more than the cosmos. Hence, for him, the deepest connection between weather and boredom’ (1999: 102). Or in the words of one interlocutor (Dž.D.): ‘Yes, after summer, [winter] is cold, but I think we ought to take advantage of it because only then, only when people leave, do we see how beautiful Pula is, because then nature comes to the fore’.39 Understood in this way, especially in terms of atmospheric conditions, nature literally ‘takes city life by storm’, and in that sense largely regulates the rhythm of life there. The disappearance of people from the city centre and their re-emergence, save the occasional exception, coincides precisely with the annual natural rhythm:

On Tapija

29

There is another of those annual [events], let’s say the first spring venture when there is suddenly an exodus, be it to Scandal [Scandal Express is a famous bar in the centre of Pula] or wherever, and everyone’s there in the city, everyone comes the first time. That impression of being between the Pula winter and what follows is really powerful, because really, in winter you don’t see people in the city, on the street. Suddenly it’s as if everyone disappears. And you wonder – where are all those people I was on Fratarski [a holiday island frequented mostly by locals] with,40 those I said ‘hi’ to, where are they all? You can see people all over Monte Librić41 and so on, but fragmented, they aren’t there. And that thing, it was like that before too, it is linked with the climate. And once again I remember the song by KUD Idijoti ‘while the storm is kicking off, where are all those people, are they really all pissed off ’.42 It’s that feeling that, all of a sudden, none of us are outside. With everything that’s happened demographically, given that some of the young, you know, the thirty and forty year-olds have their own houses on Muntić etc., this also says something about why the centre is empty. This is the time when we can say that it is the annual tapija. (B.K., interview)

Through its multifaceted meanings, tapija thus denotes the presence of people when, particularly at concerts, we have seen that the Pula audience constructs its status through a critical attitude. Yet tapija can also express the absence of people from public spaces and events, as well as from the city centre, as if ‘at once they all disappear’. Nature, or rather weather conditions, play a significant role here. Yet, if we link the by no means paradoxical ‘disappearance of Pula residents’ with the example of an intensive passive presence of a Pula audience and popular culture – a domain in which the term is often applied – we can reach the conclusion that it also connotes a non-presence or latency, i.e. a certain secrecy: ‘people who aren’t there, who disappear’, yet we know that they’re here, nearby, but we cannot find enough rational or justified reasons for their non-presence. There are also the unspoken arguments, with a powerful potential for connotation, that ‘you get that I get what I don’t elaborate to you’. This positions tapija as slang and also particularly as a concept in the semantic field of the word secrětu(m), i.e. in the domain of the ‘hidden’ and ‘separate’.43 In this sense, tapija as a concept in fact hides and implies more than it uncovers or makes explicit. Various and witty attempts by almost all interlocutors to grasp its theoretical essentials, to explain it, to give examples and clarify it, were often accompanied by the feeling that ‘not everything has been said’, ‘that something is missing’ and that ‘when it is further examined, the word tapija becomes very complex’ (Dž.D., interview). This says enough in favour of tapija being understood as a cryptic key among Pula residents, although it is

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about one of the key pillars of ‘informal’ knowledge about Pula, which, like almost all knowledge, in contrast to the ‘explicitness and transience of information’, is based on ‘long experience and is also often implicit’ (Han 2016: 55–56). Yet despite this, tapija possesses a surprising lack of sensationalism; rather, it has an almost inherent antisensationalism (cf. Konstantinović 2004: 80–83). In fact, across the entire range of spectacularization and the proliferation of a search for authenticity and cultural heritage, especially for the needs of the growing tourist industry (cf. Nikočević, manuscript), and in seeking to attract ‘diversity’, both on the Istrian peninsula and also the city of Pula, tapija has hardly made an appearance. Except for the project Pula+2020, there has not been one instance in which there has been an attempt to position it more seriously under the umbrella of commodified labels that relate to local authenticity or cultural heritage. However, that fact is but a small step to understanding tapija, and a big step towards understanding the tourist industry. This is because ideas like absence, distinction, lack, silence, indifference, or even, in the words of one interlocutor, ‘imperfections’ [ faličnost], have difficulty in finding an interested audience en masse outside these small circles of researchers, i.e. expert and professional ethnological–anthropological, philosophical or perhaps sociological crowds, and circles of other overly interested people that are cumulatively not attractive enough as a target group for mass tourism. Let us return to tapija as a condition that primarily defines an absence for individuals. In this sense, it singes the edges of, or touches upon, alienation. Here, dialectics can play a large role, namely, the intolerance and opposition between ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ space (Hyppolite, cited in Bachelard 1994: 212), whose emphasis and use are strongly linked to a certain period in the year, such as winter or summer. With regard to ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ architecture, Peter Sloterdijk recently came to the conclusion that ‘the apartment and sports stadium are directly related to the two most widespread socio-psychological tendencies of the period: the creation of solitary dwellers via individualizing housing and media techniques, and the concentration of uniformly aroused masses via organized events on a large scale’ (2016: 529). His analysis is fairly crude and vague, as more fine-grained insights into the anthropology of place and space would lead to the definite conclusion that the individualization of housing generates – especially via new media forms – completely new means of communication, socialization and social union (cf. Krolo and Puzek 2014). Yet, at the ‘stadium of the uniformly aroused multitude’, different class, gender or generationally motivated interests remain and are expressed in presence, interaction and behaviour. The German philosopher’s conclusion nevertheless indicates the possibility of speaking

On Tapija

31

about dichotomous tendencies of living that are architecturally conditioned, or perhaps only supported. But to reach the contemporary dichotomy between public and private, the idea of what is public must consist of some private comforts, while privacy must include an element of public appearance and interaction. Continuing along these lines, if we take into account the already highlighted important climate-related viewpoint when looking at the problem of Pula residents’ absence from public spaces or events, especially during the winter period each year, it is interesting to note the following. In order for the square, the piazza, as the quintessence of public gathering, to ‘be called as such and not be an anonymous enlarged space or field – it must operate as closed, protected, it must hide its entrances, like a large outdoor hall’ (Isnenghi 1997: 44).44 This is precisely the very essence of the Pula Film Festival’s motto – Film pod zvijezdama / Film under the stars – whose main events programme is held during July in the Pula amphitheatre, Arena or on the fortress named Kaštel, all outside. The large open-air cinemas are primarily made possible thanks to a combination of the architecture and the gentle climate during the evening, especially during the summer. This relation also operates in the opposite direction, and Mario Isnenghi, a historian of the Italian piazzas and of life in them, in the context of ‘the loss of the city centre and the decentralization of [public] life in them’ (2004: 19), reminds us that certain theoreticians of the mass media ‘suggest that the squares do not endure because we have TV: a new “virtual” and “informationrelated” square, equally rich in pictures, traders and sellers, but in contrast to the classical square, this one is no longer approached on foot, but from the comfort of one’s armchair, using a remote control to enter and leave the circus of multiple pathways in the “global village”’ (Isnenghi 1997: 43).45 Along precisely these lines, one of the speakers, as part of the round-table discussion ‘Scenario: Public Person – Public Space, at the festival Open City – Intervention’s in Pula’s Public Space’ [Otvoreni grad 2016], organized by the Association of Istrian Architects,46 advocated the thesis that ‘citizens, people in Pula, do not go to public spaces so often anymore because in the comfort of their own homes they consume Netflix series via broadband internet’. A feeling of inclusion in generally present trends in the consumption of popular culture, a consumption that occurs primarily at home rather than in public spaces, could be one cause underpinning the feeling of tapija, in the sense of ‘nothing ever happens’ (B.B., interview) in the city and in public space. Consequently, tracing the links between a presence in public spaces and the development of technology, certain interlocutors developed a concept and understanding of tapija:

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And now, that story, at least in my experience [attending secondary school during the late 1970s and early 1980s], the concept of tapija was not one of the key topics that prevailed in society, but was perhaps one side-effect relating to going out. As I can only assume of today’s young generation, what’s your main concern when you are 17–18 years old? Well, where you will go out, who you will meet up with, so making arrangements with friends etc. And especially during that time, when no channels of communication existed, I mean, a usual telephone yes, but it was little used, the best channel of communication was Korzo! 47 Because in principle you knew that on Korzo at such and such a time you would find so and so. And that worked practically flawlessly, and so it was difficult to not meet up with someone. And tapija only emerged in the sense of ‘What shall we do’. (B.B., interview, italics A.M.)

The Korzo that the interlocutors mention as having functioned as a communication channel operated in that way all year round, especially during the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s it ceased to be a place where people gathered as part of everyday city practices. It is therefore clear that when using the term tapija, it can and must be spoken of not only in ‘natural’ terms, but also as a generational period that corresponds with different social arrangements, economic tendencies and movements. All of these influenced the micro-dynamics of interpersonal relations that had their own time-stamped topography. Namely, the street in the urban imaginary and popular culture is a yardstick for the possibility of events occurring, as the ‘only space where something can even happen’ (Kolanović, cited in Piškor 2011: 380), even if on that same street, or in public spaces, there is only a ‘doing nothing’, a just ‘hanging out’, ‘vegetating’ or ‘mooching’. This is because ‘the practice of “doing nothing”, generally experienced as an interminable waste of time, does not mean the complete absence of action, but rather the directing of attention towards “nothing” – i.e. “nothing” as an absence of socially useful and disciplined activities’ (ibid.).48 It is precisely in the depths of such an understanding of ‘nothing’ that Henri Lefebvre’s conclusion on conquering politically marked spaces can be recognized – spaces such as monuments, squares or churches in Mediterranean cities – through non-political practices, as a citizen resists the state by making use of her time in a certain way. In that process of conquest, Lefebvre underscores the importance of rhythm, through which civil, and thus also social time, attempts to separate itself from the unrhythmic, measured (out) time, over which, in Lefebvre’s words, the state has a monopoly. Therefore, ‘public space, the space of display, “spontaneously” becomes a place for walking and meeting, intrigue, diplomacy, making arrangements and negotiations – it is theatricalized. For this reason, time and

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the rhythm of people who take up that space, is once again linked to the space’ (Lefebvre 2004: 96). Therefore, the present-day absence from public space and ‘the street’, whose obvious example is the ‘Korzo’s emptying’ at the beginning of the 1990s, can be partly interpreted also as a kind of metaphor for a very real form of compliance, i.e. a (self )disciplining of activities and actions in the city.49 Once again, in Lefebvre’s words, ‘the empty street at four in the afternoon has a powerful meaning, just like the swarms on the square or market’ (ibid.). Indeed, if we follow the interlocutors in their deliberations, one of the key conclusions would be that the development of part of tapija’s meaning surely follows the feeling of the development of relationships, events and possibilities for action in the city itself. While, during the 1980s, tapija functioned as its own kind of ‘possibility’ and ‘openness’ through the question of ‘what to do’, in its later articulations it becomes, at least as far as some of my interlocutors are concerned, a marker of a present-day attitude and feeling that ‘nothing can be done’, i.e. as in the earlier analysed topos of nature, of acceptance and compliance in a given situation: However, this is a metaphor that has likely changed over the past few decades. And Pula has always had metaphors. It had them before, but I think the biggest metaphor for Pula was found with tapija, that kind of sociocultural ambience best expressed through the word tapija. Because, if we go back 25 years, there was that sarcastic metaphor: Pula, to je raj [Pula, it is heaven]. Then, I don’t know – Pula punk, there was always something. Pula . . . it is heaven, that was a song by KUD Idijoti and that whole narrative of the scene and that one model that was functional and sarcastic, and now perhaps tapija has come in its place . . . I wouldn’t say that tapija is boredom, I would say that tapija is entropy to me. You know, just like that, a system in which everything is balanced out, the second law of thermodynamics, where there’s no energy. That is tapija for me. (B.K., interview)

The 1990s, which roughly coincide with the period of political transition in Croatia, are key for this change in the term’s meaning, behind which lies the particularly serious economic, social and cultural turns. When understood as a marker or metaphor, tapija becomes the core term for a feeling of ossification and the ‘orderliness’ of the local, ‘sociocultural ambience’.50 Perhaps it is not by chance that members of the generation born in the mid-1970s experience it in this way, whereas for the younger generation it is only ‘boredom, or something heavier than boredom itself ’ (E.Č., interview). Tapija must thus be comprehended as a rupture in the idea of temporal continuity, i.e. the perception that

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among the wider range of possibilities, and not only those in the field of cultural production, there have been tectonic or ‘transitional’ changes. Understood in such a broad sense, tapija underlines the rarely spoken, but present idea of the difference between a past and present time. The juxtaposition between them, dragged through the unavoidable prism of memories, generates what is sometimes a dominant, critical, but also self-critical attitude, which ‘has that dose of smart-mouthed self-irony, which is great and we can look at that as a core concept with which we might examine the city’ (A.A., interview). The difference between Pula and ‘its winter dream’ (N.H., interview) lies exactly here, in relation to the majority of small Istrian coastal towns whose economy is based exclusively on tourism. Pula remembers the time when it was not just a coastal city and a more-or-less desirable tourist ‘destination’ in which nature and the weather ended up having the last word only too frequently.

Time Passes in Cycles While most interlocutors claimed that Pula during winter was no different to the majority of other, smaller coastal towns,51 I believe that a difference present can be articulated through the phenomenon of tapija. Tapija can denote, as I have shown, the idea of ‘superiority’, or the diversity of individual, personal or ‘symbolic capital’, as well as the idea of Pula being different in relation to the geographical, local and regional context in which it lies. Yet I consider that tapija, apart from operating geographically, functions in one more interesting sense – one that not only emphasizes the difference between individuals or groups, namely, between Pula and the ‘remaining’ territorial and cultural context in which the city is immersed, but also the differences between the diachronic and synchronic Pula; the city that Pula residents remember, and the city in which they currently live. In this sense, tapija has the potential to become a source of criticism, and of change, which is not necessarily based on mere nostalgia. I will return to this topic in the later chapters. Nature, in the sense discussed above, can be understood as an especially important ‘protagonist’, or an unavoidable and influential ‘entity’ in simulating everyday life and the conditions of a presence in public or open spaces. The post-industrial transition is of similar importance and is imbricated in a powerful cause-and-effect relationship with nature. Somewhat harshly put, it is articulated as a ‘process outside of the individual subject’s power’ (Koroman 2013b: 272). Among certain

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interlocutors, this has been etched into their memory as a relatively recent phenomenon. Moreover, in earlier times, people spent time outside despite the winter ‘dreariness’, ‘gloom’ or ‘earlier falling of darkness’, as several interlocutors from the middle generation attested: When our parents were young, when someone would ask them how their winter was, and about the time they spent in the city centre on Korzo, I believe the scene was much more lively as they had that Korzo that did not know of seasons and people always gathered at their own points and positions at known times, winter, summer, always the same. So I think that the Pula we know, with that January and February and that gloominess, that tapija of January and February, it is primarily a consequence of the war, because Korzo disappeared then, socializing and gathering outside stopped, irrespective of whether the coffee-bars were open or closed, as gathering outside was a familiar concept before the war. But when the blackouts started, people were forced off the streets and that’s how it stayed. Or I saw it in the coffee-bars, because the concept of Korzo was really interesting. When I started seventh or eighth grade [13–14 years old], I was still able to escape to the city at times now and again when people would still gather and Korzo would really be packed. After the blackouts, that never happened again. It never recovered and I remember that the precise reason for the disappearance of people from Korzo was the blackouts. (N.H., interview, italics A.M.) And those blackouts, now, I have childhood memories of how the city functioned. All the shops worked, all cafes worked during winter. You know, life stopped then, but everything kept working. The war destroyed much of it. We did not have war here, but I felt it through the blackouts and other things. And afterwards, once again everything worked in the summer, you know, things are working in summer and it isn’t for you, and in winter they close because it’s not worth their while staying open. So, you have that problem – some kind of social cut, you know, a cut at the start of the 1990s and it never got going again in a way that serves the citizens and the city. (M.B., interview, italics A.M.)

We must thus speak of tapija as a term behind which a different social phenomenology is hidden: one appropriate to the time, to the individual period being discussed. Tapija becomes a marker of the ‘spirit of the city’, an assertion of a feeling of ‘superiority’, of an insufficiency and a lack, as well as a feeling of boredom, which I will demonstrate in the next chapter. Linked to the latter, many interlocutors mentioned a repetition, a feeling of a cyclic quality to time that links closely to nature’s cyclical quality. However, there is a kind of work that hastens that cyclical feeling, or perhaps even causes it. I am referring here to an increasingly

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dominant and present economic activity on the Istrian peninsula and in the town of Pula – tourism. In Croatia, tourism almost entirely depends on natural rhythms and the weather. ‘Differing notations of time [are] provided by different work-situations and their relation to “natural” rhythm’ (2009: 12), as Edward Palmer Thompson concluded in a text written in 1967. However, what Thompson was writing about was the difference in conceptualizations of working time and living time in farming, agriculture and the industrial sector, which completely transformed ‘traditional’ understandings of time. In this context, this traditional ‘subordination to nature’, ‘inseparable from the subordination to time observed in natural rhythms’ (Bourdieu, cited in Smith 2009: 41), appears very familiar, as something similar happens with tourism, as I will try and show in the following text. Social interaction and work are closely linked, and so it is necessary to note that in this analysis of tapija as a lack of possibility, and sometimes a desire for interaction in the city, the urban rhythm and structure of time almost entirely follows the rhythm of tourism’s intensity, i.e. its presence, which has infiltrated most of the pores of urban life. Viewed and analysed from such an angle, the winter tapija is an economic consequence of the annual rhythm of time, and features as one of the unavoidable, fixed and expected points that is viewed and constructed in relation to its own, just-as-expected summer opposite: ‘The summer dynamic can be extremely exhausting, yes’, as several Pula grammar school pupils claim, ‘but it isn’t tapija [like winter]!’ (S.A., N.O., interview). It is important here to underline the fact that life in societies marked by a traditional, rural economy, such as agriculture, consisted of ‘life alternat[ing] between bouts of intense effort and idleness’ (Thompson, cited in Smith 2009: 41). Something similar happens in societies and places whose economies are based on tourism, linked to the natural annual flow of time.52 The natural annual cycle therefore correlates with tourism’s cyclical quality. Tourism can be viewed as work, not only for the numerous seasonal employees, tourist workers or those who ‘indirectly’ make a living off tourism, such as those renting apartments, for example. Tourism can be a source of a feeling of ‘work’ in the sense of increasing effort needed to carry out everyday chores. This is the case for the majority of city inhabitants in a city in which, during June and September, and especially July and August, the number present doubles or triples.53 Many who are not employed in the services sector also contribute to that feeling of ‘work’, through the particularly large number of cultural events, concerts, exhibitions and festivals in the urban fabric. These events are significantly reduced in number during other periods, especially the winter months, as are the urban crowds and thick traffic and the temperature,

On Tapija

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all of which can strongly influence feelings of exhaustion in summer. Thus, the difference between tourists and citizens of places in which they reside is pronounced. It largely lies in the fact that many residents in tourist places, cannot ‘retreat from other people’s tourist retreats’, even when they would like to. As one interlocutor stated: But those summer events are a bigger tapija to me than in winter! Yes, I don’t go down to the city [centre] for weeks … I don’t know, [I don’t] feel like passing through those crowds and crashing where I set off . . . just to get to that place. If there weren’t those film festivals, and all that, I wouldn’t even go down [to the city centre]. (A.A., interview)

In other words, ‘other people’s holidays’ end up being ‘hosted by’ Pula residents – a person who comes and stays there all summer, which can be behind ‘blurring the division between “life” and “work”’ (Thompson, cited in Smith 2009: 42), both rest and effort. According to Thompson, this is another of the characteristics of agriculturally focused societies.54 The case of Pula, of course, is no exception in that sense. Yet due to the presence of the remaining economic and professional industries whose daily and annual work rhythms are completely different to those of tourism, which are juxtaposed to the tertiary sector in the city, that extra effort can result in more serious consequences, such as a feeling of ‘life and work’ being mixed up, or a feeling of saturation (cf. Orlić 2007: 29).55 Yet the significant trend that Pula residents note is a form of subordination to the ‘summer season’ and its activities. These, they claim, are only intended for them as an afterthought: Our tourism here in Istria, Dalmatia is a bit different. Here everything is focused on tourism. It’s like people live for those three or four months of the year, people create things then, people invest, something happens then! So, for those 3–4 months the focus is on everyone visiting! And then where are we? For example, the parks . . . our parks are well-equipped in the summer, you have all the swings, a slide, you have everything, while in winter – everything is disassembled! They put it all away! And people live, they want to go to the park in November too, they have them for these hotels. These kinds of situations. And then in the summer – you have seven festivals, four concerts, three exhibitions – you have a bit of everything, and then suddenly – there is nothing. Of course it’s tapija then! When you have to compare it with what’s happening in the summer, and now nothing. It ought to be a bit more spread around, at least across six months, so that we have some festivals, so that something pulls people out of their homes. So that they have their own reason to go out, and not ‘where can I go, nothing is on, I don’t know’. In Pula, everything is based on a few weird dynamics, and young people are a little bit lost, they don’t know where they want to go.

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They gather in Müller [a department store] and in McDonald’s. I think, hello operator, well where do they go? Or they go skating in Rojc [Karlo Rojc, a former barracks near the city centre; currently a social centre in which there are numerous citizens’ associations], but those are individuals, those young people don’t know where to go and what to do. And they quickly learn what tapija is. (I.Y., interview, italics A.M.) Everything goes in the direction of overplaying that summer. And the traffic infrastructure reminds you of summer, when you can fly off anywhere you like. You have more bus lines running and a train you can go to Ljubljana on, while you can’t during the rest of the year. You also have that hydrofoil that you have for a bit then you don’t, you have it again for a bit then you don’t. But, all of that is during the summer and it isn’t meant for your use! We are either working or doing something else, summer isn’t organized for our enjoyment, it isn’t organized to suit us. (M.B., interview, italics A.M.) Geographical connections – that’s what we’re missing! The train, it makes me laugh, where will you go, where, there is no train! Planes again, in the summer there are many, but if you want to fly to Berlin in November – mamma mia! You won’t. So, you have to drag yourself to one of the other airports, it isn’t that we in Pula are so far away, the problem is that the basics don’t work. (I.Y., interview, italics A.M.)

These narrations underscore the different intensity of life, as well as the possibilities characteristic of certain times of year. The feeling of time passing is thus more focused on cycles and repetition than on its linear variant. Of course, this kind of feeling of temporal recurrence is caused by powerfully marked, expected and ‘opposed’ (in fact, interdependent) points in the annual flow of time: in other words, the summer season and the Pula winter, or tapija.56 Remember the assertion that ‘the concept of tapija precludes any form of fulfilment – because then it stops being tapija. The goal of tapija is not a change for the better, but a consolidation of the current state of affairs’ (B.B., interview), i.e. ‘tapija is a permanent, unalterable state’ (N.H., interview). Here, tapija leads us to a two-pronged possible conclusion: on the one hand, with regard to the situation and ‘city spirit’, tapija definitely consists of particular content, and the expressed affect can be more powerfully or weakly critiqued. Yet, ultimately, it is accepted because, as individuals attest, it also contains a certain positive qualitative potential. However, on the other hand, such conclusions also point to its recurrence, repetition and – of particular significance – expectation (and anticipation); it therefore perhaps points to a somewhat more serious and less noticeable metanarrative within which tapija can be placed. It is especially along the lines of the ‘persistently cyclic’, ‘unchangeable’ and the time of the ‘fixed arrival’

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that I believe part of the ‘city spirit’ is present in the tapija phenomenon. Taken with a grain of salt, this includes properties understood as ritual. Given that ‘rituals fix and structure points on a calendar, their function is to preserve the continuity of the lived’ (Lévi-Strauss, cited in Agamben 2001: 71; cf. Wulf 2002: 1054–62). In its winter version, as we have seen, tapija is fixed and built into the annual cycle, while in its substance it is difficult to avoid, and also changeable (or not), depending on who I spoke to. ‘The circularity that ensures that the same things are maintained through their repetition and constant return’ (Agamben 2001: 96) is one of tapija’s properties and a phenomenon that has been strongly grafted onto Pula’s urban tissue. To paraphrase Radomir Konstantinović and his elaboration of the relationship between nihilism and language, part of the city is ‘denied’ by tapija, but the city is ‘predisposed’ to tapija; it invents itself in that ‘denial’ (cf. Konstantinović 2004: 96), which can have a very strongly expressed irony-inducing taste to it. Moving down onto the empirical level of the field, this means that my interlocutors would often criticize the winter tapija in the city, as it is connected with the ‘fact that there is no life in Pula, that’s why that word comes from Pula’ (A.S., interview), but at the same time they claim that ‘they can enjoy that tapija too, when they get tired of school and everything’ (S.A., interview). Or: ‘Perhaps it’s [tapija] OK. Just as you like to chill here and there, not doing anything, you know, non me ne frega un cazzo [I don’t give a fuck]. I think, I’m not some kind of hyperactive guy who, if he isn’t doing anything, will go crazy, but sometimes, you know, it’s really good for you’ (M.B., interview).57 *** As we have seen, the phenomenology of the concept of tapija, so strongly imprinted onto the city of Pula that it is sometimes the dominant connotation, despite its originary meaning, has several key features. Of these, its orality is emphasized, which often sets off a process of the production of personal, subcultural or perhaps urban, synchronic and diachronic difference from the context in which it is interpreted. In this way, specific phenomena by no means exclusive to Pula, such as the audience, or winter, take on a glaze with a specific, local character and are frequently expressed through descriptive phrases such as the Pula winter or the Pula audience. Nevertheless, such an idea about oneself or one’s own specificity is based on an awareness of the real historical, social, economic and cultural processes in the city and the question of powerfully expressed self-interpretations that are frequently, but not always expressed in a strong, critical tone:

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Pula is an isolated environment, although much less today than before; before you needed two or three hours to get to Rijeka, now it is easier than it was, but still. The perception is changing, what I have found intriguing is that in recent years, when speaking with people who come to Pula, younger or older, whatever, they find Pula extraordinary. They have such a good feeling in Pula that I am stunned. What do they see? And then, we used to talk about this – how is it possible to build on the concept of tapija itself. Perhaps tapija also has in it that element of self-criticism – a criticality or exaggerated critical position towards one’s own city, and then the city is judged

Figure 1.2. One of Pula’s main city centre streets, an afternoon in late February 2018. © Andrea Matošević.

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and labelled, especially because of that stronger critical position. Yes, in that sense, Pula is [special]. (B.B., interview, italics A.M.)

In this sense tapija really does function not only as a polysemic concept, a local and slang ‘semantic platform’, but also as a phenomenon in the narcissism of little, but significant differences that can be consumed and articulated in forms ranging from individual differences to ‘metaphysics’ and attempts at explaining the particularities of the ‘city spirit’. The research has shown that tapija also has its own spatial aspect, an articulation in terms of the present-day ‘winter emptying of public spaces’, of the roads and squares in the city centre. And above all, it has generational (time-related) and climatic (nature-related) aspects, combined with an economic component that links to these, the contours of which I have tried to highlight and analyse in this chapter. It is therefore worth noticing that tapija denotes perhaps somewhat unexpected relationships of subordination – that of Pula residents to nature and its cycles, as well as performers to their audience. However, what is outlined here in terms of a dominant metaphor, largely through the substance of tapija, in addition to the ethnographic field relations, is the quiet companion of the nineteenth and twentieth century – boredom. Yet, as with the aforementioned phenomenon, it does not concern just any kind of boredom. The interlocutors claim that it is a totally specific feeling of ‘Pula boredom’, inseparable from the local milieu, and which has affected the city over the course of the early years of the twenty-first century.

Notes 1. The authors state the same in the publication Critical Companion to James Joyce: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work, and add: ‘Joyce and Nora were not able to acclimate themselves to life in Pola . . . Trieste provided a much more congenial atmosphere for both Joyce and Nora. The city was much more active than Pola . . . Perhaps more important, the pair soon made a number of friends and Nora came to feel less alone than she had in Pola’ (Fargnoli and Gillespie 2006: 8; my italics). Yet Trieste also ‘devoured the liver of the Irish writer’, as Angelo Ara and Claudio Magris noted, citing part of his letter to Italo Svevo; he began ‘his literary work’ Ulysses there, referred to by Joyce as ‘Sua Mare Grega’, a ‘tantalizing expletive’ (2002: 282). 2. Cankar also writes of Pula, during his stay in the city in 1898, as a ‘boring place’, and of how he was sentenced to ‘live in solitude in that abandoned Pula, forgotten by God and people’, and he ‘swore that he would never come to Pula again’ (Arambašin Slišković 1996: 400). The city and its surroundings were also touched on in a similar context by Thomas Mann in the work Death in Venice; and Gustav Aschenbach, who after boarding a ship in Trieste for Pula, would also stay on ‘an island of the Adriatic, praised for a few years, not far from the Istrian coast, with multicoloured ruffians talking in stranger sounds and beautifully torn cliff games where the sea was open.

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3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

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Rain and heavy air alone, a little worldly, closed Austrian hotel society and the lack of that calmly intimate relation to the sea, which grants only a gentle, sandy beach, annoyed him, did not make him conscious of having made the place of his destiny’ (Mann 2004: 21). Almost immediately, the author’s hero would, as did Thomas Mann in the spring of 1911, ‘feel dissatisfaction with his choice of destination and decide to sail a few miles across the Adriatic to Venice’ (Koelb 2004: 100). On 31 October 1904 in Il Giornaletto, a notice was published that ‘informs the gentleman who did not manage to enrol in the Berlitz School’s English classes because his desired timeslot was already taken, that yesterday a second English-language assistant professor had arrived, James A. Joyce B.A., Bachelor of Arts Mod. Lit. English enrolments are therefore being accepted for each day and all hours between 9 and 12. Management’ (Il Giornaletto di Pola, 31 October 1904). Arambašin Slišković writes: ‘The Austrian authorities have uncovered a circle of spies in which the occasional Italian was involved, and they have therefore decided to banish all foreigners from the city. Joyce had to leave the city for this reason right away. Luckily, Artifoni helped him once again: he gave him a place at the Berlitz School in Trieste. Joyce, together with Nora, left Pula one Sunday in March, without the faintest idea that they would live in Trieste for the next ten years and that both of their children would be born there’ (1996: 414). It appears that in this writer’s case, a congruence existed between his desire to leave Pula and being forced to leave the city. However, tapija is, besides the urban meanings researched here, also linked to poker terminology: ‘In the moment when one of the players is left with less money than that on the table, another player can raise him through a measure that he has, and so he declares tapija. Tapija is what you have, however, you are limited by it, you are limited by that tapija, there are no more games without limits. In this way you restrict other people’s limits too. Your tapija is in fact the game’s ceiling in that round, in your hand’ (G.P., interview). After the break-up of the multiethnic Austro-Hungarian monarchy and the First World War, the Istrian peninsula, together with the islands of Cres, Lošinj, Unije, Susak and Trieste, Gorica and Gradiška, belonged to Italy, after the signing of the Treaty of Rapallo, on 12 November 1920, by the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, and the Kingdom of Italy. After the March on Rome in October 1922, the influence of fascists in Istria was increasingly strong. Only in 1945, after the end of the Second World War, did the process for the successful annexation of the Istrian peninsula to the Socialist Republic of Croatia and Yugoslavia commence, while the Italian people there, over time, would gain a status as a minority people. The phrase ‘L’Italia non italiana’ should probably be interpreted in terms of this key historical aspect. Translator’s Note: I translated the term ruggine as rusty, although Pasolini was probably thinking of the red Istrian earth, the colour of rust. Yet ruggine can also, in its non-literal meaning, refer to a feud. In the case of Pier Paolo Pasolini, it is one of the many texts he published in the weekly Tempo from 6 August 1968 to 24 January 1970. The term is also used to refer to a description of things: ‘– What do you think of this watch? – It is tapija. Person B expresses their dissatisfaction with the appearance or functionality of the watch. The watch is considered to be ugly, boring, uncomfortable’. A second website, Žargonaut, similarly states: ‘The sluggish atmosphere of a place, or an apathetic, languid person, or a group of people’, while the example given is as follows: ‘Let’s go, it’s totally tapija here. I can’t believe how tapija you are,

On Tapija

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11.

12.

13.

14.

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come on, get out of that bed’ (Žargonaut 2011). The latter definition of tapija, a grammatically feminine noun, is found in Pula. ‘Imponderables denote the very essence of an elusive reality, which can only be felt by living it’, as the ethnologist Sanja Potkonjak emphasizes in referring to Bronislaw Malinowski’s writing. She adds that ‘turning to imponderables, to the elusive, lived and experienced, has become the central focus of ethnographic work for future generations of ethnologists’ (Potkonjak 2014: 69). In addition, besides the unelaborated concept of tapija, mentioned in several places but always from the same perspective, as a mere and exclusive ‘not doing,’ in the city of Pula’s programme booklet for the European Capital of Culture 2020 (to which I will later return) it also features as a key term in cultural production. Examples include the Tapija Skate Contest, held on 22 October 2016 and 25 March 2017 in the skate park in the yard of the Karlo Rojc building. Other examples include the song by the Pula hardcore and punk band Pasmaters, from their album ‘Unload your pain’; the title of an amateur film shot by the citizen association BIS; bands from the Istrian music scene; and the Facebook group Institut ‘Tapija’, with 132 members, whose description states that it is a ‘web page for all tapijaroši [people who are tapija] desiring change. We encourage all kinds of verbal and visual expressions of Pula’s tapija’. Of course, in the sense of cultural production, looking for tapija cannot exclusively consist of a search among works in which it declaratively appears as a title or key term. One should also try to recognize it ‘obliquely’, in places where it does not necessarily appear as a signifier. Yet in the spectrum of possible meanings, tapija is retrospectively identifiable or identified. The aforementioned James Joyce and Ivan Cankar are good examples of such an ‘oblique’ and ‘retroactive’ approach to the concept and to the meanings of the term tapija. ‘Spontaneous philosophy’, of the kind that Gramsci seeks, as Christine Buci-Glucksmann explains, is a ‘system of beliefs, superstition, opinion, ways of seeing and acting’ (Buci-Glucksmann 1980: 225), in other words, ‘common sense . . . that is not stiffened and immobile, but rather constantly changes and enriches the scientific and philosophical opinions that have become habits’ (Gramsci 2007: 2271). Of course, I do not use the notion of ‘small traditions’, in the anthropologist Robert Redfield’s sense, as that ‘which keeps itself going on in the lives of the unlettered in their village communities’, i.e. ‘popular culture, as the culture or tradition of the non-learned, un-lettered, the non-elite’ (Redfield, op.cit. Burke 1991: 32–33). I will try to show that the situation, especially as regards feelings of ‘eliteness’, is in fact the opposite, because the term tapija is caught up in a striking feeling of pride as a kind of idiosyncrasy of Pula. Yet, historically viewed, isn’t such an attitude inherent to individuals, groups or communities that possess the ‘luxury’ of boredom, i.e. ‘an abundance of time’? Somewhat harsher, using a philosophical–historical vocabulary: ‘Those who bore others are the plebeians, the crowd, the endless train of humanity in general; those who bore themselves are the chosen ones, the nobility’ (Kierkegaard, op. cit. Svendsen 2008: 57). I use the notion of a ‘small tradition’ therefore as a synonym for uninstitutionalized, unsystematized, largely unrecorded and ultimately non-spectacularized knowledge. ‘Ethnopoetics is – or should be’, writes Webster and Kroskrity, ‘concerned with more than simply poetic lines, such as individual creativity and careful attention to linguistic details’ (2013: 3). They remind us that Blommaert writes, ‘ethnopoetic work is one way of addressing the main issue in ethnography: to describe (and reconstruct) languages not in the sense of stable, closed, and internally homogeneous units characterizing parts of mankind, but as ordered complexes of genres, styles, registers, and

44

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16.

17.

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forms of use’ (2009: 268). Such a perspective must engage not only individual speakers but also the languages they use and the connections they make. Blommaert also adds, ‘Ultimately, what ethnopoetics does is to show voice, to visualize the particular ways – often deviant from hegemonic norms – in which subjects produce meaning’ (2009: 271). For example, this is the case with the far better-known concept of the Portugese saudade, a yearning and the ‘Portuguese soul’, as artistically expressed in the musical genre fado. While not so much about commodification, the Spanish, Greek and Italian hora sexta, i.e. the siesta, or the afternoon rest after a meal, has been immortalized in art (e.g. Paul Gauguin) and in academic research and the popularization of its beneficial aspects in ‘reduc[ing] stress, help[ing] cardiovascular functions, and improv[ing] alertness and memory’ (Govan 2012). The fjaka is a similar concept from Dalmatia in Croatia, a ‘specific state of mind and body’, in the vein of the Italian dolce far niente. It will also be grounded in text: ‘Since the fjaka is a kind of blissful state which is beyond control, and thus defies set definitions and names, it cannot be categorized either as a layabout idleness or as relaxed respite from everyday life, or as a phlegmatic state, or as leisure time, chronic listlessness, or the mere slowing down of life functions. Actually it is, and at the same time it is not, a mixture of all of the above. . . The sense of time becomes lost, and its very inertness and languor give the impression of a lightweight instant. More precisely: it’s half somewhere and half nowhere, always somehow in between’ (Fiamengo 2009). Such explanations, primarily in the media, give rise to a range of questions on the possibilities of branding that local phenomenon. From that perspective, and particularly because I agree with Mondher Kilani’s remark that the whole array of historical writing about ‘others’, in which they are described in exotic terms, is published today without an ‘introduction, a critical apparatus and a cultural contextualisation in which those works are created’ (Kilani 1994: 28), this book can also be understood as a kind of a posteriori reply to such rash qualifications of Pula. These are, surely, less dramatic and blatant in relation to the very harsh examples provided by Kilani, which are concerned with a direct colonial relationship and the production of knowledge about the colonized, from the pens of the missionaries Las Casas and Villote, or perhaps the colonial administrator Charpentier. It is not, therefore, my intention to avoid qualifications of Pula as Siberia, evading it, for example, through the meteorological argument ‘that the winter when Joyce wrote the letter was especially cold’, an argument often invoked when mentioning the writer’s recorded opinions of the city. While such arguments do have a strong potential for irony, I consider them worth addressing and explaining from within the context that produces them. Nevertheless, let it be noted that the reply to the proponents of this weather-related theory is that during the week when Joyce wrote his letter, Il Giornaletto di Pola forecast a city temperature between a maximum of 8.1 and a minimum of 1.5 degrees Celsius, and on New Year’s Eve in 1904 a temperature between a maximum of 7.2 and a minimum of 0.3 degrees was forecast (Il Giornaletto di Pola, 23 December 1904 and 31 December 1904). As one interlocutor born in 1955 said, ‘We hardly ever used that word, and it largely meant that you don’t have any money, that today someone else is paying for the beer, today you’re a tapija. And only in that context’ (G.P., interview). Along these lines, Peter Burke discusses pre-industrial folk culture enactments in Europe, and states that, for many performers, ‘In most cases they do not learn a song or story by heart but recreate it at every performance, a procedure which gives plenty of scope for innovation. Hence, as the American folklorist Phillips Barry put

On Tapija

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it, “there are texts, but no text; tunes, but no tune”’ (Burke 1991: 97). Along similar lines, we can claim that tapija does not exist, but rather, exclusively, tapijas. 19. Memories of the 1990s are significant here. N.H. remembers when she was still in high school: ‘When we were beginning to use tapija, during those years we were still meeting up in some settings that weren’t underground, but the Monte Serpente happens to you [a coffee shop and club in a suburb of Pula, open until recently]. You still have links to a group of friends from high school that is, you know, šminkersko [fancy], and there they really haven’t heard of tapija. So there really was a difference in the concept’s use. Many knew who used it, and who understood tapija at the beginning of the 1990s. And now, how did it come about that everyone started to use it [tapija]?’ (N. H, interview). It is important to emphasize here that đir was closely, although not entirely or exclusively, connected with musical tastes, as ‘nothing more clearly affirms one’s “class”, nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music’ (Bourdieu 1984: 18). In this sense, tapija is a ‘sociocultural concept’ and is linked with ‘some people who have a link with the cultural scene, someone who comes to you, a sand-worker who comes home after work at Uljanik, he won’t say look here now I’m going tapija-ing. Perhaps he will if he is part of the scene, if it is part of his sociocultural capital, but in principle, he won’t’ (B.K., interview). For a wider insight into the meanings and memory of the Pula đir, see Kocković Zaborski et al. (2012). A somewhat younger generation also draws distinctions with regard to this term, but that differentiation acts now in a different direction – they do not so much adopt it as their own and identify with the term, but rather distance themselves sometimes from it. In the words of a fourth-grade pupil from the secondary grammar school: ‘In primary school perhaps we [spoke] it more, as young teenagers, we used to, to seem cool. We used the word tapija for something boring, something that did not interest us. And over time we lost that word, it left our vocabulary . . . I think that here there are differences, definitely in the generations, but also in education. I think that more educated people more often use more “intelligent” words – like boredom’ (Dž.D., interview). D.L. made a similar assertion: ‘I knew that I used the term tapija when I was younger; right now I use the term dosadan si [you are boring] more, or u klincu, etc.’ (personal correspondence). 20. That aspect is certainly generationally defined, and a member of the 1960s generation said: ‘But I know people, close acquaintances, who used the term in that way during the 1980s, but they were a few specific people. But I think that the next generation, so for people around ten years younger than me, the term tapija was mainly used by them, among themselves so this was the focal point’ (B.B., interview). A second interlocutor emphasized that the term was heard as early as in the 1960s: ‘My father worked in Uljanik and there, when they came for the mid-morning snack, as they didn’t have a canteen and they brought it themselves, when those doors opened, I heard those words then. Then, once in a while, you hear the word tapija, and that’s it, you pass by, and then I heard it on Korzo [one of Pula’s main streets for strolling] – everyone came in the 1960s, and then we began to mix and so on, people from Zagreb in summer and people from Belgrade, especially people from Belgrade. And the people from Belgrade had their own kind of slang, and it’s true that they were furešti [foreigners, tourists], but we were all hippies, long beards and so on. [They said] that’s your tapija! That sandwich, or what you’re doing there, that’s tapija! And then you think, well what is it, that tapija? To ti niš ne valja [That’s no good at all]. And then we started getting into it. When it was boring, then you started to say – what tapija. It’s raining, it’s winter and stuff like that. In that kind of bad sense and context. Something is, you know, weak, you don’t really like it,

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22.

23. 24.

25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

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and then you start to look at it in that context. And the 1960s were always – how was it for you, oh tapija, what’s the weather like, oh tapija, this is crappy, tapija’ (J.P.I., interview). ‘Klonja’ [a private flat in the centre of Pula that operated for a short period of time as a commune; in Serbian it literally means WC] was the place that featured in the memories of many former grammar school pupils as the source of tapija’s invention and its local use: ‘Yes, the term tapija is familiar to me, I heard it for the first time in secondary school, sometime around 1992 or 1993, so this was still during the wartime period; I know precisely who I heard it from – from D.F., a guy in my class who at that time was in a group gathering around something called Klonja. So, this is some neohippy crew who re-imagined the hippy model of the semi-commune. He came up with the expression tapija. And for a long time, I believed that he had invented that phrase, or that it really came from there. That someone in 1992 or 1993 invented it then’ (B.K., interview). Of course, it is worth noting that in these memories, there is a particular generational fixation with the origin of that term, which is somewhat fainter or even lost among the older and younger generations. On the negative meanings of Balkan, i.e. attempts to ‘escape’ from it during the 1990s, as well as the simultaneous production of Balkanisms in political discourse and the media, see Rihtman-Auguštin (2000: 2011–37). Veli vrh is a suburb of Pula, while Muntić is a village within close reach of Pula. Many with whom I spoke who had not grown up in Pula, but who had moved to the city, or who would continually visit the city, claimed that they had not heard of ‘that concept except in Pula and for them it was a totally new concept that they had to get used to’ (L.G., A.V., A.A., interview): ‘With us in Umag, when someone begins to say it, and it isn’t like you hear it every day, then they say to you – you are acting [furaš se] like those from Pula!’ (S.K., interview). ‘I spoke with people from Zagreb, and when one of us would say tapija, they would ask – well what does that mean?’ (S.A., interview). This is a reference to the Arena Festival, held on 4 August 1990 at NK Istra’s stadium, where, besides the above-mentioned group, Alien Sex Fiend, Pankow, Borghesia, Die Golden Zitronen, Disciplina kičme, Miladojka Youneed and others also performed. The aforementioned film festival was held from 1954 in Pula’s amphitheatre, and was sponsored by Josip Broz Tito up until 1980. Alongside the festival, an amateur cinema and photo production centre developed around the Foto-kino klub ‘Jelen’, which was an integral part of the Interclub Amateur and Artist Film Festival. Partibrejkersi [Partybreakers] is one of Belgrade’s most famous rock–garage punk bands, founded in the early 1980s. Pazin is a town in central Istria, fifty kilometres from Pula. Although the idea of the Pula audience is overwhelmingly present and has taken root, I hold that it cannot be generalized or applied to all concerts, not even to those popular music concerts of different genres. My interlocutors are primarily thinking of events at which non-classical music is performed, in spaces or places where there is a more powerful interaction between the audience and musicians that is not just enabled by organizing space in a certain way, but is rather expected. Yet it is not uncommon, and punk and hardcore concerts are a good example of this, for the audience and band to completely fuse, i.e. for there to be a complete and likely anticipated interaction between the audience and the musicians. Along these lines, one interlocutor recounts: ‘The 1980s were OK, with the punk [pankerija] using the spaces of the local councils etc., where the scene was created, but it was a little more

On Tapija

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open, people became a bit more approachable. They clapped or whistled more, and there was a little bit more moshing’ (J.P.I., interview). The interlocutor N.H. made a similar claim: ‘It isn’t that tapija announced the arrival of something. It doesn’t give any signals of how it will be after it [tapija] ends, nor does it have an end! Tapija is a permanent condition!’ Something along the lines of what Pierre Bourdieu writes in the book Language and Symbolic Power about the mouth’s articulatory position as an element of bodily hexis can be applied to the case of the audience analysed here: ‘It is surely no accident that popular usage condenses the opposition between the bourgeois relation and the popular relation to language in the sexually over-determined opposition between two words for the mouth: la bouche, which is more closed, pinched, i.e. tense and censored, and therefore feminine, and la gueule, unashamedly wide open, as in “split” ( fendue, se fendre la gueule, split oneself laughing), i.e. relaxed and free, and therefore masculine. Bourgeois dispositions, as they are envisaged in the popular mind, and in their most caricatured, petit-bourgeois form, convey in their physical postures of tension and exertion . . . the bodily indices of quite general dispositions towards the world and other people (and particularly, in the case of the mouth, towards food), such as haughtiness and disdain ( faire la fine bouche, la petite bouche – to be fussy about food, difficult to please), and the conspicuous distance from the things of the body and those who are unable to mark that distance. La gueule, by contrast, is associated with the manly dispositions which, according to the popular ideal, are rooted in the calm certainty of strength which rules out censorships – prudence and deviousness as well as ‘airs and graces’ – and which make it possible to be ‘natural’ (la gueule is on the side of nature)’ (1992: 77–78). Speaking from a strictly Bourdieusian perspective, the principle behind the Pula-audience concept that my interlocutors speak of would be that of relatively ‘stiff lips’ and a ‘distancing from the corporeal’, and accordingly, also feminine. This definitely does not hold for certain forms, such as the aforementioned hardcore and punk concerts where the formula in play is how ‘objectivity is paid for by a loss of proximity’ (Sloterdijk 1992b: 145). These concerts are very fired up. Although it would be interesting to research the relationship of the audience in the given examples with the habitus of audiences in turbofolk clubs, I will not deal with this topic here. At such frequently organized concerts, which the media practically never take into account as relevant events, the masculine la gueule also ‘gapes’ (sings along). This refers to part of the programme, developed during 2015–2016, after the publication of the Ministry of Culture’s Call to Submit Applications, as part of a European Union initiative, for the European Capital of Culture 2020 in the Republic of Croatia. The concept of tapija formed an important part of the cultural content with which Pula competed for the European Capital of Culture. This use of tapija will be analysed in the final chapter. In this context I do not use the adjective aristocratic in its full historical sense, but rather as that which might not point to an exceptional but surely points to a special status, based on the idea of one’s own well-informed quality and knowledge in relation to some other audience. I would say that this attitude is entirely a middle-class attitude and that it belongs to those individuals who, besides a formal musical education, have had the time and resources to invest in a process of refinement that is informal and that relates to style. For more on the meaning of the middle class that, in Yugoslavia, ‘blended technocrats, bureaucrats and workers, and was characterized by the availability of resources that resulted in prosperity’, see Škokić and Potkonjak (2016: 118).

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34. The Art & Music festival was held from 1993 to 2013. In its first years, it took place in August, and in later years during the spring months. Alongside performances by non-established bands in a competition in which the A&M functioned as a springboard to wider audiences, the festival featured workshops, comic-strip exhibitions, performances and forum discussions. 35. The same could be said of the Monteparadiso Hard Core and Punk Festival, held from 1992 onwards, always during the first weekend of August; the short-lived Melody Festival, organized at the beginning of the 1990s; the previously mentioned Arena Festival; and also the ‘Jušto u podne’ concerts held at the Rock Club Uljanik in the early 1990s. During this time, Pula was certainly an important incubator for the music scene – through the impressive number of bands who played in the city – as well as being a promoter of rock ‘n’ roll and the alternative scene, which covered a wide spectrum of genres. This, in turn, doubtlessly had a formative cultural influence on a range of generations. 36. Certain recent documentary film productions covering the Pula music scene surely come out of these ideas, as well as the audience of the 1970s and 1980s (in the film Grad izobilja [City of Abundance] (2013). The social actors involved in music events remember this period as ‘especially progressive and special’, when ‘everyone played in a band’. The film Prašina svakodnevnog života [The Dust of Everyday Life] (2011) tackles similar themes. In the film, among other themes, social actors in the contemporary alternative scene testify to the scene’s decadence and the ‘lack of audience support’ – their ‘apathy’. While City of Abundance detects the emergence of part of the alternative scene and the forming of the audience in Pula, The Dust of Everyday Life poses the question of its disappearance, and affirms tapija. Continuing in this vein, the present-day audience attend fewer events. A.A. says: ‘But when something happens, then something like 12 people come to it. So, people say it was tapija, you know, as we said before, this is complex, it can’t be explained simply, the problem can’t be easily determined. Ultimately, people make the city: however much the city influences the people, they also make it’ (A.A., interview). 37. The New Wave in the context of Socialist Croatia first appeared at the end of the 1970s, and while it was linked to the new musical genres of punk and rock, it also featured a new approach to art, including graphic design and the importance of a visual identity more generally. 38. It is important to state here that this kind of experience was only repeated by one strand of my interlocutors. Although the vast majority agreed that ‘winter is more of a tapija than summer’, some of my interlocutors claimed that they ‘know about that attitude and opinion and are familiar with that account’, but, as one put it, ‘I really don’t consider it to be like that’ (N.O., interview). Others said they ‘don’t want to burden themselves with it’ (K.S., interview), while a third strand used that term and elaborate that condition: ‘[Tapija] above all concerns the boredom [of the person who utters it], because when we are in Pula already and when we speak about Pula and when we link that term to Pula, the majority of people from Pula, or those who live in Pula, will call Pula tapija. But I would disagree with that as I believe that many of those people wouldn’t have a much more interesting life if they were to live in a bigger city. So, in fact, I would turn that judgement on tapija around as applying to the person who utters it! While often completely justified, it is exaggerated, because it is the spirit of a city that won’t emerge in that way everywhere, that word describes the situation in the city’ (A.A., interview). 39. Besides conversations with Pula residents, most of whom emphasized nature as a particular advantage to life in Pula compared with other larger and more dynamic

On Tapija

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environments like Rijeka or Zagreb for example, nature was never left out of the features emphasized when describing or promoting the city for tourists: ‘The benefits for the development of tourism lie above all in the geographic position of the city, the gentle Mediterranean climate, the preserved natural environment, the clean sea, its good transport links and rich cultural-monumental heritage’ (Grad Pula 2017; italics A.M.); ‘The true tourist asset of Pula is of course its 190 kilometres of indented coastline, the crystal clear sea and accessible beaches, “organised” by personal preference: flat stone surfaces or pebbled beaches, accessible for people of all ages, especially families with children, or “wilder” beaches, sheltered by untouched greenery, for lovers of privacy and intimacy’ (Official tourist website of the Istria Tourist Board 2017; italics A.M.). Of course, the dark side of nature, especially the winter ‘climate’, which can have powerful social and psychological consequences, as some of Pula’s residents attest and speak of, is never publicly emphasized in promotional materials or on official websites. This, I believe, is because it cannot be commodified or spectacularized. Nevertheless, its influence on the life of at least one subsection of people in the city is extremely powerful. Fratarski otok, or Veruda island, is located in the bay of the same name by the Verudela bathing site, six kilometres southwest of the centre of Pula. In summer, besides tourists, many residents of Pula stay in the camp on the island, and it can be described as an additional ‘seasonal neighbourhood’ in Pula (Zovko 2017). Monte Librić is a festival of children’s books and literature held during April. It was founded under the patronage of the Pula festival of books and authors ‘Book Fair(y) in Istria’, held at the beginning of December. This refers to the verse ‘the day when I was left alone’, by perhaps the most famous Pula punk-rock band KUD Idijoti, from their second studio album ‘We are only here for the money’, released in 1990. Part of the verse goes as follows: ‘While the storm outside is shaking everything up, I wanted to go out / Yellow leaves covered the city, the chimneys were smoking, strange, no one in front of the lift, there are always kids there, strange, no one in front of the lift, could it be Sunday today. / I quickly put my jacket on and rushed out of the lift, in front of me the street was empty and the storm was whistling, the bus was waiting for passengers at the bus stop, the motor was humming, newspapers flew from the kiosk, the money remained. / Strange, no one was in the bus, really, is today not Sunday, strange, no one was in the bus, is today not perhaps Sunday. / Where are all those people, where have they all gone, why are they hiding from me, where have they disappeared, where are all those people, are they all pissed off, are they hiding from themselves or are they gone / What’s this now?’ (KUD Idijoti, ‘We are only here for the money’, 1990). Along those lines, Byung-Chul Han traces the connections between the cryptic and unspoken, before underscoring his thoughts with the conclusion that ‘the secret loves silence: that which is fulfilled by secrecy differs from the apparent’ (2016: 74). He states that the secret prefers spaces that, together with grooves, underground spaces, hideaways, depressions and thresholds, make spreading information more difficult (ibid.). The interesting connection between space, its metaphors, its secrecy and silence, i.e. its unspoken quality and non-presence, is articulated in Pula through a dialectic of interior and exterior space. Walter Benjamin also reached a very similar conclusion, before Mario Isnenghi, when he wrote, while analysing the figure of a flâneur, that ‘The arcades are something between a street and an interieur. If one can say that the physiologies employ an artistic device, it is the proven device of the feuilleton – namely the transformation of a boulevard into an interieur. The street becomes a dwelling place for the

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flaneur; he is as much at home among house facades as a citizen is within his four walls’ (Benjamin 1986: 45). It is worth noting that squares, public life and the development of technology were often considered irreconcilable throughout history. In this way, Camillo Sitte, a fan of Italian history, wrote in 1889: ‘about the death of the piazza. But the murderer who irreversibly changed the traditional balance of place, was the predecessor of the car, the horse-drawn coach’ (Isnenghi 1997: 44). The festival was focused on a revival of abandoned and neglected spaces in the city centre, especially in three locations – the ‘house without a roof,’ ‘Terasa tržnica’ (Pula’s department store) and Ex-Cinema Belgrade – and on 10 September 2016 a round-table discussion was held. More information about the round-table discussion is available at: http://dai-sai.hr/web/?p=5593. Korzo was the central place of memory for the ‘youth culture’ of an entire generation in Pula, from the 1950s, when ‘a walk on Korzo down Giardini was an unavoidable part of a Saturday afternoon, of twilight evenings in autumn and winter’ (Bertoša 2012: 48), through to the 1960s when ‘it remained the main gathering place for young people every day after school, from Monday to Friday, to 8.30 p.m., while going out at the weekend for most lasted until 10.30 p.m. at the latest. This is where the whole group gathered, walked between the tree-lined avenue, from the building of what is presently FINA, right up to the Arch of Sergii’ (Piljan et al. 2012: 19). In the 1970s and 1980s, Korzo remained ‘a phenomenon in Pula, a real thing, in the spirit of tolerance of the coexistence of the community’, while Pula residents of the ‘1980s on Korzo could see whoever they wanted. Korzo was what Facebook is today’ (L.D., quoted in Piljan et al. 2012: 24). It is also worth remembering that on Korzo or close by, there were four cinemas operating in those years: Zagreb, Belgrade, Istria and Partizan, and also Club Uljanik, the JNA Hall and Club Marelica. In the 1990s there was a break with the tradition of mass gatherings on Korzo; groups from differently styled subcultures began to gather at various locations, such as Kaštel, Monte Zaro or Lungomare. The thesis could perhaps be developed that the 1990s represent a moment of different, fragmented ‘appropriations of space’, by various subcultures that, despite their differences, previously all spent at least some of their time at the same location – on Korzo. The 1990s also brought with them a displacement from the ‘urban epicentre’ towards somewhat more ‘peripheral’ city spaces, suggestive of the move towards the incomplete, but pronounced contemporary tendency of the winter ‘disappearance of people’, when ‘Facebook becomes a kind of Korzo’. Nevertheless, it should be recognized that today many high-school pupils and students, especially at the weekend, gather in Tito’s Park. Yet the ‘mythic quality’ of that place (cf. Piškor 2011: 377), i.e. its articulation and contemplation as a ‘place of possibility’, will have to wait a little while longer to be attained. Bruce O’Neill reached similar conclusions in his ethnographic research into boredom and unemployment in Bucharest. It can be said that behind the phrases of ‘working’ or ‘doing nothing’, there is almost always an ethnographic treasure trove of invisible practices hidden from the naked eye: ‘Rather than being inert, those claiming to be “doing nothing” are in fact actively doing something, such as generating social networks (Ralph 2008), undertaking entrepreneurial schemes (Simone 2004) or participating in political projects (Schielke 2008)’ (O’Neill 2017b: 25). Walter Benjamin’s conclusion is important here, that the temporality of the flâneur, of the layabout, as read in his or her ‘debauched nonchalance’, is in fact a protest against a production process that causes boredom (Benjamin, cited in Salzani 2009: 136).

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50. On this kind of long-lasting ‘orderliness’, as well as from a political viewpoint that has a powerful influence on the direction of development, but also on the ‘structure of feeling of the possibility’ of acting and doing, see the study Naša zarobljena mista [Our Captured Places]: A Research Report of a Study into the Quality of Local Public Administration in Croatia. It contains an analysis of the ‘mechanisms of partial or complete political and regulatory capture of public institutions and resources to realize the particular interests of individuals, groups, or power networks, as well as the insights and attitudes of citizens in these communities regarding such practices’ (Hoffmann et al. 2017). One significant role in the research was played by the ‘County of Istria, whose main feature in politics and political processes from its founding in 1992 has been the marked domination of a political party, the Istrian Democratic Assembly’ (ibid.: 29). B.K. referred to this situation and claimed that ‘this economic and political system exists, which has been stable for some time. And tapija is the impossibility of overcoming this system creatively’ (interview). 51. For example, A.A. states: ‘I lived in Rovinj and the difference there between the two seasons [summer and winter] of the year are much more obvious than in Pula. In Pula you see it, but nowhere near as much as in other places that rely on tourism as basic to their existence. Unfortunately, Pula has pushed in that direction, by closing down all kinds of industries with a reduction in areas of employment, as well as through its transition to the tertiary (service) sector. But, we still cannot say that Pula has two seasons each year; summer has several of those bigger events and the rest is often rubbish for the masses, it isn’t up to much. Now, during winter, every weekend I can go to a concert or exhibition, it doesn’t have to be anything big. So in Pula I don’t see any big polarization, those two sides, day and night. No’ (A.A., interview). Nevertheless, the ‘closing down of industry’ that A.A. mentions, such as, for example, the Arena Trikotaža [a textiles factory], or the Uljanik Shipyard’s bankruptcy – combined with the fact that Pula is no longer a military city – are all significant details. They are remembered, at least by the middle-aged or older generations, as ‘what the town used to be like’, and so certain interlocutors ironically conclude that ‘Pula needs to be militarized again, in order to be a city. Oh yes!’ (N.H., interview). 52. In that context, but through a Soviet example, Stephen E. Hanson noted that the ‘traditional economy, based on the concrete cycles of the cosmos, could by its very nature never exceed one harvest period a year. The first Five Year Plan, by contrast, achieved a constant “harvest” ethos in production for four years’ (Hanson 1997: 208). Is not, therefore, the attempt to expand the tourist season to the months outside of summer and to break records during summer for the number of overnight stays and arrivals of tourists, compared with those achieved during the previous tourist seasons, in fact an attempt to ‘reap’ the rewards of that economic activity all year round, alongside an according ‘shockwork’ [udarnički] ethos? The winter tapija, understood in such economic contexts, really does act as time off, time for a break and vacation in the service sector and from the service sector, a kind of communal city yawn. 53. The official statistics on the number of tourist visits to Pula, a city in which officially 57,460 people live, during July and August 2014, 2015 and 2016 are as follows: 58,676 and 79,360 (2014), 69,440 and 87,331 (2015) and 87,784 and 105,520 (2016), while visits during the winter months – January and February – are much lower: 1,720 and 1,914 (2014), 2,013 and 2,289 (2015) and 1,573 and 1,868 (2016) (Tourist arrivals and overnights in Istria 2016–2007, 2017). This is official data on the number of guests, not on the number of overnight stays. But with regard to the possible presence felt in the city, especially during the summer months,

52

54.

55.

56.

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the number of unregistered guests is not listed, nor the number of guests in nearby locations or municipalities, which are almost entirely focused on tourism, such as Medulin, Rovinj or Fažana. Along those lines, the philosopher Fulvio Šuràn observed that ‘civilizations in the past recognised time as mediated by a “natural”, “organic” approach that was more comfortingly linked with the rhythms and cycles of nature. This was an approach that did not include a strict “division” of time that is typical of the modern world’ (2016: 117). The rhythm that tourism grafts onto a society’s everyday life, where the tourist season is particularly based on, or strongly correlates with ‘nice weather and natural surroundings’, holds an ‘organic’ form, with the rhythm and cycle of nature linked to how time is approached. The summer season, the ‘natural’ climax of life which results from and strongly corresponds with the ‘mechanic’ division of guests’ time, is followed by a ‘winter anti-climax’ and a radical slowing-down of everyday life rhythms. Nevertheless, here it is worth emphasizing that what is missing – or what I have not managed to find – is more qualitative research into the conditions of those employed in tourism. During the tourist season, those on the coast often work double shifts. As a result of this, they often miss out on the ‘organic’ and ‘mechanical’ boon in consumption of rest and of free time in that period (cf. Rad, no. 3, September 2015). The example of students who must move out of rented flats by the middle of May or the beginning of June, just before the summer exam period, so that landlords can rent real estate to tourists in the summer months, is a trend present in all Croatian coastal cities home to universities, and this is the case in Pula too. Of course, the kind of dichotomy that I elaborate and advocate here is very conditional; above all, it is about ‘powerful tendencies’, and not in the slightest about clean categories that would correlate with my interlocutors’ one-sided value judgements. In other words, the structure of the annual cycle is marked by transitional phases between these two main phases, which also have their own culture and points in time: ‘Let’s say, the first spring outing, when there is suddenly an exodus, be it around Scandal or wherever, and everyone is there in the city, and everyone comes the first time’ (B.K., interview). In addition, not all interlocutors placed an unambiguous value on ‘winter tapija’ and ‘the summer season’ and the latter’s accompanying events. Such judgements almost always depended primarily on generational belonging and experience, and on related expectations. It is interesting to note that the term tapija, it seems, has at least partly taken hold among Italian speakers, as well as speakers of the Istria–Venetian dialect. As there is no equivalent translation of the term tapija in Italian or the dialect, it is most often used in its original form, but very often as part of a process that linguists call code switching. In this case, it refers to the simultaneous use of words from two languages in the same sentence. Of course, it is always worth bearing in mind with such claims the generation that the speaker and the person acquainted with that term belong to. Interlocutors born in 1989 or 1991 would say: ‘ke/che tapija’ (what tapija), ‘ti son proprio tapija’ (you are really tapija), ‘quel tipo xe proprio tapija’ (that guy is really tapija), or even ‘che tapija che xe sta canson/ libro /sto film/ concerto’ (what a tapija this song/book/film/concert is), or ‘ogi jero a casa tuto el giorno e no gavevo voja de far niente, ma ti sa che tapija’ (today I was home all day, I didn’t have the will to do anything, what tapija) (I.M., R.M. and D.M., personal correspondence). Used in this way, the term is entirely aligned with its generational meaning: ‘Boring,’ ‘monotone,’ ‘stupid,’ ‘you are really tapija’ – ‘ti son proprio tapija’, which meant that ‘you’re not up for it [za akciju], you’re boring’ (I.M., personal correspondence).

Chapter 2

Boredom, or the City Yawns

Waiting is, in a sense, the lined interior of boredom. —Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project You can’t say that January and February aren’t tapija! Who would say they’re OK? —N.H., interview Boredom is only possible at all because each thing, as we say, has its time. If each thing did not have its time, then there would be no boredom. —Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics

Choosing to write about or analyse boredom in a specific context such as Pula is fundamentally about getting to grips with the essence of one of the dominant symptoms of the modern era. Boredom is a mental state that, according to the fairly voluminous literature on the topic, has become a kind of by-product of, or ‘silent companion’ to, the development of all contemporary societies over the last two centuries. Furthermore, this means that boredom is the last in a long line of signifiers of related moods or mental states characteristic of a certain time or the sociocultural context inside of which they are generated. Acedia, taedium vitae, tristesse, melancholy, spleen, ennui, etc., are all terms typically used to explain the genesis and development of contemporary feelings of boredom, as well as conditions closely related to it. For example, acedia or daemon meridianus, the noon-day demon, ‘the most cunning of all demons’, attacked monks in the middle of the day and caused him ‘to detest the place where he finds himself – and even life itself. It caused the monk to remember the life he lived before becoming a monk, with all its attractions, tempting him to give up a life devoted to God’ (Svendsen

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2008: 50). Acedia, or apathy, a laziness that ‘empties the world of any meaning’ (Dalle Pezze and Salzani 2009: 8), from the fourth century up to the Renaissance, thus had a strong moral dimension, but it was also a fundamental sin from which other sins emerged. During the late middle ages, particularly during the Renaissance, acedia was replaced by melancholy, which was thought to have a physiological cause. It was thought that mélan kolé, or black bile, caused a sluggishness, laziness and sadness in the body, while the ‘creative side of acedia was also blown up in melancholy, which ambiguously combines illness and wisdom, passivity and creativity. It became in fact the malady of kings and philosophers and was attached as a label to the stereotype of the artist, the thinker, the “creator”’ (Dalle Pezze and Salzani 2009: 9).1 Ennui was a term closer to acedia and melancholy than contemporary boredom because ‘it implies a judgement of the universe; boredom, a response to the immediate. Ennui belongs to those with a sense of sublime potential, those who feel themselves superior to the environment’ (Dalle Pezze and Salzani 2009: 9). While directly related to the latter conditions, boredom turned out to be a more democratically distributed feeling; it is no longer, it seems, only reserved for the chosen ones – kings, artists, monks or simply individuals with a feeling of superiority – because everyone is susceptible to its weight. From the eighteenth century onwards, through Romanticism (cf. Svendsen 2008: 30–32) and the Industrial Revolution that brought with it an entirely new understanding of individuals and of time, boredom became engrained in everyday life. The literature offers various descriptive and analytical versions – ‘the silent fog’ and ‘Langeweile’ (Heidegger 1995: 77), ‘experience without qualities’ (Goodstein 2005), ‘the gentle monster’ (Dalle Pezze and Salzani 2009), ‘experience atrophy’ (Salzani 2009), ‘blind introspection’ (Leslie 2009: 38), ‘the social emotion of mild disgust’ (Toohey 2011: 45), ‘the hardship of hardshiplessness’ (Sloterdijk 2016: 678), ‘joyous pessimism’ (Demant Frederiksen 2017), etc. All these terms testify not only to the presence and tough existence of boredom, or perhaps the fact that, at least in the latter examples, boredom is frequently expressed through oxymorons, but rather to the perceived levels and intensity with which it affects life. In fact, it seems that the attempt to escape boredom, largely in the direction of affects that denote the opposite side of the spectrum of states and emotions, sometimes ends with a further falling into boredom’s ‘shallower’ or ‘deeper’ version. In such an escape from deep boredom, from its chronic and therefore heavier levels, as Peter Toohey writes, individuals with low levels of dopamine are predisposed to dangerous and exciting activities: parachuting, speeding, compulsive shopping and spending,

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risky sexual behaviour and the consumption of drugs. In this sense, as he concludes, chronic boredom is ‘also a potentially dangerous emotion’ (Toohey 2011: 51–55) that can also have moral repercussions, along similar lines to acedia. Yet, regardless of speculation over its effects, that are translated, at least for a moment, as ‘transgressions that fulfil’, it is important to emphasize that boredom is a modern feeling that roughly denotes a ‘failure to meet expectations’ (Auerbach 2005: 300), made manifest through monotony and a feeling of emptiness and lethargy. This comparative aspect of boredom, namely, the necessity of it consisting of or being compared with its own opposite (i.e. expectations), is of particular importance in articulating it: ‘Boredom is thus related to the notions of overstimulation, shock, repetition, the reification and mechanization of time, the eternal return of the same, novelty and so on, and is an inescapable feature of modern life’ (Dalle Pezze and Salzani 2009: 24–25). This makes it, the same authors claim, a privileged analytical tool with which we can read and understand the modern and postmodern crisis of experience. It is also important to emphasize, for a comparative perspective on the phenomenon, that boredom arose at the same time as the concept of ‘leisure’, to which it is deeply connected (ibid.: 22, 13). With boredom, the emphasis is often placed on its negative, emptying aspect with respect to individuals, groups and communities; however, it is also important to underline its ambivalence. Walter Benjamin warned of this, it seems, in the conclusion: ‘Boredom is the threshold to great deeds. – Now, it would be important to know: what is the dialectical antithesis to boredom’ (Benjamin 1999: 105). In the same work, The Arcades Project, in which life in nineteenth-century Paris is thematized, in chapter D, entitled Boredom, Eternal Return, the author links that feeling, significantly, to the economy. It is linked to the always identical and mechanical repetition of actions in the work process, as was also noted by Friedrich Engels in 1848: ‘Factory work as economic infrastructure of the ideological boredom of the upper classes, “The miserable routine of endless drudgery and toil in which the same mechanical process is repeated over and over again is like the labour of Sisyphus. The burden of labour, like the rock, always keeps falling back on the worn-out labourer”’ (Engels, cited in Benjamin 1999: 106).2 It is useful to highlight several commonplace lines of argument in Benjamin’s sketches on boredom: boredom here is at the very least ambiguous and ambivalent, and does not take on an exclusively negative character. Rather, the author emphasizes boredom as a possibility, as a potential. Furthermore, boredom in Benjamin’s writing also has a class aspect – it is important to distinguish between the ‘ideological boredom’ of the

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upper classes and the ‘monotone Sisyphean work in the factory’, characteristic of the ‘lower’ social strata. These two categories are linked and inseparable: both experiences are named boredom, but a more precise analytical approach would show them to be in a diametric, and also dialectic relationship.3 Let us remind ourselves, along those lines, of Kierkegaard’s related conclusion that ‘Those who bore others are the plebeians, the crowd, the endless train of humanity in general; those who bore themselves are the chosen ones, the nobility’ (Kierkegaard, cited in Svendsen 2008: 57; cf. McDonald 2009: 62).4 Albeit not exclusively, boredom directly links to work and the economy, which are class questions par excellence. The differently distributed states of contemporary taedium vitae can thus be articulated through these aspects. The implementation of Taylorism and Fordism in the economies of the first half of the twentieth century had just such an effect, imbued with monotony, mostly of the ‘those who bore’ variety. The reactions to this kind of ‘additional heaviness’, of work-related monotony such as slacking, helping or ‘covering’ for work colleagues in the production process, were always expressed and underlined (cf. Littler 1982). Thus, while Engels was writing about the double burden on the lower social strata – the effective physical heaviness of work, but also the monotony in which people are immersed everyday – the class distribution of feelings or states of boredom also affected the higher strata of that society from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. Jeffrey Auerbach, in a text dedicated to British ‘imperial boredom’, mentions how ‘Yet in the public mind, the British empire was thrilling – full of novelty, danger and adventure, as explorers, missionaries and settlers sailed the globe in search of new lands, potential converts, and untold riches’ (2005: 284), and by the third quarter of the nineteenth century ‘oceanic travel had become much more monotonous: it was less dangerous, the route was well known, there were few if any stops, land was rarely in sight, and there was little novelty in seeing birds and fish that had been seen and described before. This routinization of travel parallels the bureaucratization of work’ (Hassam, cited in Auerbach 2005: 297). Along the same lines, Garnet Wolseley, one of the most well-known and prominent figures of the imperial Britain of the late nineteenth century, a commander-in-chief of the British Army during its residence in the British colony Natal, located in southeast Africa, wrote in his diary how ‘nothing worthy of noting took place’, and his wife would confide that ‘I shall not weary you by recording the dullness of each day’. After his sixmonth service was over, he immediately returned to London (Preston, cited in Auerbach 2005: 288). Other figures wrote similar commentaries, such as the lieutenant-colonel William Denison, who was governor

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in what is now Tasmania, New South Wales and Madras, and Richard Burton, the adventurist, researcher, soldier, linguist, anthropologist and orientalist, who translated the Kama Sutra and Arabian Nights into English, and resided in India in the middle of the nineteenth century. Denison’s life in the colonies, writes Auerbach, consisted of an unending series of meetings and ritualized evening entertainment with the occasional dance, and in 1863, shortly after arriving in India, he wrote in his diary that his life ‘here is monotonous enough’. During his journey from Bombay to Goa, Burton noted how ‘“the coast, viewed from the sea, merits little admiration. It is an unbroken succession of gentle rises and slopes, and cannot evade the charge of dullness and uniformity” . . . Even as Burton drew closer to Goa, the coastal view did not improve. All he saw were an “eternal succession of villages, palaces, villas, houses, cottages, gardens, and cocoa-nut trees”. He therefore decided to skip over these “uninteresting details” and instead provide his reader with “a short historical sketch of the hapless city’s fortunes”’ (Burton, cited in Auerbach 2005: 296).5 One of the sharper conclusions based on such judgements was published in The Daily Telegraph in 1866. It declared emphatically and unreservedly: ‘Africa is a bore’ (ibid.: 305). In the context of this period, writing such as Joyce’s and Cankar’s characterization of Pula and Istria as ‘boring’ places at the end of nineteenth century and start of the twentieth century make much more sense. While these two writers were certainly not colonial workers, it appears that this almost categorical judgement of the city falls inside the dominant discourse of their time. During that period, we can say that boredom was coped with, or had to be coped with. It is possible to interpret the Geist der Stadt, city spirit, which some writers recorded, as also deriving from the era’s Zeitgeist, the spirit of the time. In any case, it will be interesting to see how their pejorative judgements open up a space for thinking through boredom with at least three features. On the one hand, as we have seen, boredom links to modernity and the modernization of life, which necessitates order, routine and bureaucratization. Thus one has to read between the lines of this characterization of the city of Pula and Istria, as a synonym for unspoken modernization.6 Furthermore, it seems that Joyce confirms – at least partly and roughly – the cliché of the ‘English tourist’, in which the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard noted that: The true genius of indolence is seldom encountered; it is not found in nature; it belongs to the world of spirit. At times one meets an English tourist who is an incarnation of this genius, a heavy, inert woodchuck, whose total resource of language consists of a single monosyllable, an in-

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terjection with which he indicates his highest admiration and his deepest indifference, for admiration and indifference have become undifferentiated in the unity of boredom. No nation other than the English produces such oddities of nature; every individual belonging to another nation will always be a bit more lively, not so altogether stillborn. (Kierkegaard 1987: 290)

Of course, Joyce’s indolence was not linguistic, but of a cultural nature, and his ‘monosyllabic interjection’ is expressed in the uninterested and rash characterization of the human diversity of those he met in Pula. This surely positions this Irish writer among the ‘superior, those who get bored’ (ibid.: 289).7 Yet despite the negative implications, the observation that boredom ‘attacks’ or ‘infects’ the state of consciousness lying between the ideal and the actual will be important for further reflection (McDonald 2009: 68). This is the space between an imagined and a real-attained order, which therefore has a powerful critical potential that is closely linked to expectations, hopes and desires. In other words, despite his largely denigratory judgements, Joyce considered and reflected on Pula.8 This fact will be important for an analysis of the triangle of relations ‘tapija – Pula – boredom’, which leads us to the third subtopic, and a potential space for the analysis of boredom here. Besides the example of Pula, the theme of the links between a city and the feelings of boredom that may ensue, we have seen, is also present in Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, in which he writes about Paris. And the anthropologist Bruce O’Neill analysed the theme of ‘socially imposed’ boredom, particularly in Bucharest (O’Neill 2014, 2017a, 2017b). In one of the fundamental chapters of twentieth-century history, on the topic of the phenomenology of boredom, published in the book The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Martin Heidegger analyses three kinds of boredom. In this book, it is important that in an analysis of a third form, ‘profound boredom’, Heidegger does not link boredom to one concrete situation, but nevertheless lists a non-committal example: ‘To cite one possible, but entirely non-binding occasion which has perhaps already been encountered by one or other of us, without our having explicitly noticed the emergence of this boredom and without our explicitly being annoyed of our own accord: “it is boring for one” to walk through the streets of a large city on a Sunday afternoon’ (Heidegger 1995: 135).9 The city, boredom and the big expectation invested in it, and the monotony that frequently comes about, is one significant nexus, among several, of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This cause–effect relation can result in certain features of critical thinking: in Pula it can result in something more interested, better ar-

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ticulated, and therefore also more precisely established by ‘Joyce’s reflection’ – through consideration of or action in the city. That aspect of reflection, interpretation and possible reaction to the ‘given state of things’ can be manifested in various ways, which can be more-or-less explicit or immersed in everyday practices or theory, but they are nevertheless often linked by Pula’s guiding thread – tapija.

Pula, the Tapija Path to Boredom The feeling of boredom – that especially interesting condition, irreducible to simple terms – has its own history, as I earlier elaborated. It has its various articulations, inseparable from class or gender perspectives, and its own accompanying terminology, as well as examples and authors who have placed boredom within literary canons. Furthermore, at least within such canons, it seems that boredom is reserved more for cities rather than for ‘smaller places’, generally speaking. This is one of the important characteristics that places tapija on the same level as boredom. Let us return to my interlocutor’s claim that tapija ‘is much more linked to the metropolitan narratives of Zagreb, Belgrade, Ljubljana, Trieste, Milan, New York or London, than it is linked to the village . . . even in suburbia there is no tapija . . . tapija is here in the city’s walls’ (B.K., interview). A conversation with younger interlocutors born in the second half of the 1990s or around the millennium, reveals their generationally defined experience of tapija, as earlier mentioned: [Tapija is] more a kind of arduous boredom than just boredom, when you can no longer endure the boredom and so you then say – tapija. Everything can be tapija, sometimes it’s OK, but all the same you say – come on, that’s enough now! (K.S., interview, italics A.M.) When something constantly repeats, that can be tapija. (S.A., interview) Tapija is something more than boredom, something heavier than boredom itself. (E.Č., interview, italics A.M.) Tapija is an excellent term because it encompasses all terms and is more conspicuous and also worse than boredom! It is a heavier form of boredom! It’s one of our words, from Pula, we thought it up out of boredom! (A.S., interview, italics A.M.)10

One of the generational definitions of tapija could be summed up as ‘boredom, albeit a little greater or a little heavier’. Nevertheless, it is im-

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portant to ask: what is it that makes it greater or heavier than boredom alone? Is that excess – that unnamed ‘something’ – key to interpreting tapija in terms of boredom?11 Here it is worth adding, along the lines of the interlocutor who claims that tapija is ‘one of our words from Pula’ that we ‘thought . . . up out of boredom’, that there is a creative aspect to boredom, which, if we follow this interlocutor, is inherent in that initial impulse, idea and practice that renames boredom – in which we can, following Walter Benjamin’s suggestion, recognize one of the layers of its potential. In other words, an inventive reaction to boredom is already inherent in ‘the unconstrained linguistic practice’ of its renaming. According to Bourdieu, once again, this is attained in certain ‘social conditions of existence’ (1992: 16). The fact that the interlocutors who most explicitly link tapija to boredom are largely students and secondary school pupils is not unimportant in relation to the ‘social conditions of existence’. Furthermore, along the lines of the mentioned interlocutor’s statement, tapija is some kind of reaction to the experience of ‘the conditions of life in the city’, i.e. the fact that they experience the city as boring: ‘Yes, you can say, the city is tapija, because there is nothing to do, so everyone says then – the city is tapija’ (E.S., interview), or ‘Yes, perhaps because there aren’t many things to do, because there aren’t as many possibilities as in some other cities, then we say – it is really tapija’ (L.Š., interview). A number of interlocutors made a similar assertion: Unfortunately, [Pula can be identified with tapija] more and more. Because in Pula, simply put, when we speak of people, especially local people, but also foreigners, there is nothing interesting on for young people. The city is literally dead, whether or not we are talking about winter or summer when the city becomes a bit more lively, it isn’t a city for young people. Pula has become a city for old people. (R.P., interview) I often use tapija as a metaphor for the city. Every time when I spoke with my friends about how there is nowhere to go out, or how in Pula there are no special events on, we would come to the same conclusion of how Pula is tapija. Most often this would be linked to nights out – how in Pula there isn’t something on for the different tastes in music, how every disco is the same, or how in Pula winter is tapija because you can’t find anyone, anywhere. (R.M., personal correspondence) I agree with that, and I would say that Pula as a city, at least as it seems to me, does not really have an identity. There are lots of mixed-up things, everything is mixed and there is nothing characteristic, everything is something and there isn’t one thing that is characteristic [of Pula]. (E.Č., interview)12

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This kind of concept is explicitly generational and falls inside what the older interlocutors emphasized as ‘a particular criticality or selfcriticality towards one’s place, inherent in the concept of tapija’ (B.B., interview). This points to the fact that this local concept, just as with boredom, is never a generally accepted ‘objective’ state of things, as it does not encompass all possible subjects, or because certain subjects don’t recognize themselves in it. It is instead, primarily, an ‘interpretive category’ (Meyer Spacks, cited in Dalle Pezze and Salzani 2009: 12). This is reflected and articulated in relation to expectations, hopes and desires. In other words, it is a reply to Benjamin’s question of what ‘a dialectic antithesis to boredom’ would be (1999: 105). In Pula, ‘the plenitude of experience’ is linked with tapija, and is connected roughly with the summer and the specific, accompanying dynamic events such as ‘festivals, concerts, more frequent cafe socializing’: Then it isn’t tapija. Although everyone who lives here by the sea mostly has to work a little, it isn’t tapija despite that as it is somehow interesting – because it is dynamic and because it doesn’t tire us out the whole time. It isn’t that we have to do something, it is more relaxed, and then, when we’re more relaxed, when we do something we find cool – then it isn’t tapija anymore! (S.A., interview) Pula in winter, so to say, is dead and people then say – tapija this, tapija that – and in the summer it comes to life and then it’s different, better. That’s where tapija came from, it’s so boring, it’s so tapija. (A.S., interview) Well yeah, but the whole of Istria is a bit tapija in winter . . . Here we go from one extreme to the other. You know, summer is great, but winter is horrible, horrible. Winter is catastrophic. (S.K., interview) Over the summer there are quite a few of these cultural and social events, but in winter there isn’t really anything. There is nothing cultural that interests me or other teenagers, so then most go, let’s say, somewhere outside of Pula, most go to Zagreb. There are quite a few of these cultural attractions there. (N.Ž., interview) I think that the summer by itself isn’t tapija because there are things [to do] – and tourists [in the city]. – The tourists don’t come to Pula to the sea without reason, because if it were tapija they wouldn’t come! – Well, because of them there are some activities that wouldn’t be there without them. (S.A. and L.Š., interview, italics A.M.)

In such an interpretation, for many, albeit not for all, the city becomes in Heideggerian terms a winter terminal in which people wait for

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summer (cf. 1995: 93), or put more harshly and dramatically, ‘a Sunday afternoon in the city that lasts all winter’. Yet, as I mentioned in the last chapter, and as the conversations with interlocutors and their developed theses confirm, the condition of an idea of cyclicity, cut through with ‘extremes’ in the intensity of life, is inseparable from economic movements on the peninsula and in the city. The service sector’s powerful rotational movement, especially in tourism, is based on a natural rhythm that comes close to practices linked with the structure of time’s flow that dominate in agrarian, agricultural societies, where ‘everyone who grows crops has to be able to wait’ (Sloterdijk 2016: 475). The same goes for societies or communities in which the quality of life depends on the tourism-related ‘harvest’, with its climatic character. Within this, cyclical time particularly dominates, which entails ‘being held in limbo by time as it drags’ (Heidegger 1995: 99), above the winter period’s ‘not-yet and no-longer’ (ibid.: 124), up until the next ‘fulfilment’ and the summer tourism-related ‘harvest’. Thus the winter tapija, boredom and waiting, as well as its experiential antithesis – anticipating and ‘fulfilling’ – that the summer tourist season brings with it, are closely interrelated, and comprise a dialectic ‘unity in opposition’ (Lefebvre 2004: 8). Furthermore, such a distribution of time also directly links tapija with boredom – the experience of ‘winter limbo’, ‘winter tapija’, when time is ordered, organized and automated by obligations, equivalent to where ‘the boredom is no longer nailed fast to something, but is already beginning to diffuse. Boredom has then not arisen from this particular boring thing, on the contrary it radiates out over other things . . . It does not merely relate to the particular thing that is boring us, but settles over several things, over other things: everything becomes boring’ (Heidegger 1995: 92). Do very general assertions, such as ‘Pula is boring’, ‘Pula is tapija’ or ‘this and that are tapija’ not confirm the fortitude of a boredom that swallows, infects and rubs off on everything, when it is present? In other words, everything is stupid, monotonous – everything is boring? ‘Everything’ in this context consists of a very general understanding of the city, interpreted through the prism of a routinization ‘that is endured’, on which everyday life is based. It is very difficult to break loose from it. This is why boredom, in the words of an interlocutor, is difficult to do away with: Well, yeah, sometimes [I feel tapija], every day is the same, every day we go to school. Saturday and Sunday are school free, but although everyone is free – they are never free as they have to learn, to prepare for the coming week. We have all become robots, all thirty of us in the class, we have

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to shut up and listen. . . . But it ought to be that, for everyone present in class, that they don’t get bored and that it never occurs to them that they are bored. (Dž.D., interview)

Yet, such comments can also be ‘critiqued’ or interpreted from a Heideggerian angle. It was Heidegger who noticed that when referring to boredom, it is easy to see how we directly qualify different things (‘objects’) as ‘boring’ (langweilig), as the ‘mood belongs to them. The characteristic of “boring” thus “belongs to the object” (objectzugehörig) and is at the same time related to the subject (subjektbezogen). By this Heidegger, stated more correctly, wants to indicate that the phenomenon of mood makes apparent the inappropriateness of the general distinction between subject and object’ (Boss 2009: 91; cf. Heidegger 1995: 84–86). The link between subject and object, that inseparability of (in Pula terms) tapija from tapijaroši – while one cannot dare to forget that it can have not just an ironic but also a powerful philosophical–interpretive character – was also noted by interlocutors who explicitly introduce a new self-reflexive moment when analysing ‘local moods and conditions’: And when somebody isn’t satisfied with someone or something, and characterizes it as tapija, that also says something about the person who says that something is tapija. So, if you yourself start making judgements about something being tapija – [that something] to the other person definitely isn’t a tapija, you are a tapija to someone else . . . So you can’t just look at it from the position of something being missing and lacking. In fact, it is inside you, in the one who judges, the one who makes the judgement, something is missing in it to even grasp it . . . So, I completely turn around that judgement on tapija, in fact, to the one who utters it. (A.A., interview)

Nevertheless, the example that almost all interlocutors gave, and which is also present in the previous chapter’s analysis of the Pula audience, points to the fact that when we analyse tapija as boredom, we end up with a kind of middle-class version. Taken with a grain of salt, it appears that the sort of boredom my interlocutors often bore witness to was, tentatively speaking, ‘the hardship of hardshiplessness’ (Sloterdijk 2016: 678). This is because it most often emerges from those privileged practices that have a cultural-capital connotation (popular culture and schooling), or leisure activities that are not imposed and that at least in principle entail sociability, social inclusion and a certain amount of economic power (going out, consumption).13 Yet, as certain authors have shown, boredom can be a symptom of social exclusion and of the mar-

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ginalization of economically vulnerable groups and individuals. It refers to ‘an emergent form of boredom [that] is tied to a new economy, but it has clear historical roots’ (Van den Berg and O’Neill 2017: 2).14 In the latter case it is a feeling of boredom and of getting bored, whose cause is located in the trauma of losing jobs, driven by a sudden economic weakening and linked to the fall in social status that some individuals have experienced. In other words, this boredom, and the feeling that ‘there is nothing to do’ because there is no paid work, is a symptom closely connected with an ‘inability to participate in consumption practices’ (O’Neill 2014: 23). In the words of Bruce O’Neill, the dramatic result of the economic marginalization generated for many by the political and economic transition, which the author researched in the context of homelessness in Bucharest, was a feeling of abandonment and of not belonging: ‘“My life is awful. This is so demeaning”, concluded Radu. “Everyone is watching you, everyone sees you don’t have money, decent clothes, a place where you can wash, and that changes a person. You realize there is no God, you don’t feel anything – very simply. Your life flickers out in an endless wait for nothing. It is deathly boring”’ (ibid.). The examples of former workers at the Sisak Ironworks, as discussed by Sanja Potkonjak and Tea Škokić, point to the fact that these aspects, and the ‘endless boredom’ and feeling of a ‘hopeless future’ that unemployment brings with it, can also be found in Croatia. Yet these examples, including those noted by Bruce O’Neill in Romania’s capital city, conflict with the feeling and condition of the Pula tapija, of enacting tapija and the boredom that it also entails.15 I have shown that while the latter directly relates to the economy, it does not originate from an existential de-privileging and cannot be easily characterized by heavy ‘affective suffering’ (ibid.: 25) or by absolute resignation and surrender. Indeed, at least as far as my interlocutors are concerned, tapija never points to a feeling of one’s own economic exclusion, nor to the socially declining mobility of individuals or their displacement from dominant sociocultural activities in the city. While these can be performed, they do not link up directly with the feeling of tapija. Furthermore, in tapija’s conjuncture with boredom, it has almost always denoted an opposite dynamic – it is not that individuals cannot participate in consumption processes, entertainment and inclusion, but rather, in the words of some of my interlocutors, they have no place to participate in those processes. Therefore, in contrast to the earlier examples of difficult, paralysing and existentially established boredom, the individuals here are not ‘pushed out of ’ dominant sociocultural currents. Instead, in the words of a younger interlocutor,

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festivals, cultural events and places for going out are ‘postponed’. These are the same sociocultural events and locations that coincide with their tastes and desire to attend things, i.e. with those events that would denote a feeling of inclusion. In addition, the time invested in that ‘feeling of inclusion’ is not endless time they have at their disposal. It therefore denotes a significant problem most often for those ‘sentenced to a life without an income’ and can be a source of powerful ‘social suffering’ (Van den Berg and O’Neill 2017: 5–6). This is the reduced free time that they wish to spend in a space bound by everyday routinized commitments. In contrast to difficult, existential boredom, tapija neither reveals nor marks an individual’s marginalization. It is rather a feeling and judgement about the marginalization along with the displacement of the event in which they wish to participate, but cannot during a certain period of the year. The feeling of tapija and the associated condition of ‘winter emptiness’ is here generated by the sudden change in the city’s social fabric, with a cyclical feeling of inclusion and sometimes, for certain interlocutors, a very welcome ‘exclusion’ and a ‘deep feeling of boredom – the peak of spiritual renewal’ (Han 2012). This state of affairs definitely confirms the fact that tapija cannot be equated at all with defeatism and resignation – it rather points to a feeling of ‘incubation’ and waiting, for a long, but ultimately bearable period of Langeweile, the tentatively understood ‘middle-class’ boredom whose end, but also repeated beginning, is foreseeable and very apparent. Thus, if we analyse tapija or speak of it in terms of boredom, it surely must be grasped as a boredom that is safeguarded from its most difficult, existential and aimless versions. This is because, for many and especially for the young generation, tapija disappears with the arrival of spring and the summer season, only to return again the following winter, with a highly ordered and automatized, and therefore more predictable, everyday life rhythm. Although individuals will testify to this, as was emphasized in the first chapter, which covers the difficult winter period that brings with it the most depressing months of the year, across the entire spectrum of its phenomenology, tapija can also be viewed through a less fatalistic prism: [Tapija is] the one concept that meant so many things to you, but everyone knew it – you join the army, you don’t like it and it is tapija, that snack [marenda] is tapija, something isn’t good, but on the other hand, as it is good for us here, you go to Lungomare, you smoke weed, joke around, hit on chicks, but tapija, it is time to go to Uljanik, tapija, but it’s nice here for us. Loads of these things can be linked, but tapija remained right here in Pula. It has been dragging on for years, and I say, I have

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travelled a fair bit, but that concept hasn’t found a home for itself or stuck around anywhere like here in Pula. (J.P.I., interview) No, no, tapija isn’t a depressive condition at all! It has a lot of self-irony, so everything came crashing down, but in an ironic sense. Not a literal and real feeling of hopelessness – that means everything has fallen apart and you don’t have anything, but more of the kind, well, as I’d say, grief about our everyday life. You know, bar-conversation style [šankerski sistem] as they would say, bar-conversation moaning. Lamenting across a bartop in principle, similar to that . . . It reminded me of that feeling of mal du siècle, that illness, romanticism, the world weariness, in that sense. A link could be made between tapija and this, but not in the sense of desperation, but on one level . . . a certain amount of pride that flows from that. And the optimism that flows from that. (B.B., interview)

In other words, where there is optimism, there is also hope, and together with hope, we can think through the privilege of experiencing tapija, which not everyone can be resigned to, or – of further significance – not everyone knows how to become resigned to. This leads us once again to a feeling of particularity dragged through multiple repetitions of and meanings of tapija: No, not everyone has the privilege of tapija. There are loads of people here who have a Bezaki protestant spirit,16 you know, I won’t sit around feeling bored [neću tapijariti], I will set off for my field. Central Istria, Protestantism and that area. There are loads of them. And our generations, hard-working people. No one speaks of tapija, it is urban . . . however much we speak of it, it’s an urban term. And they had to be constituted, historically, tapija and Pula, together with the Pula audience and Pula criticality in relation to something else. (B.K., interview)

Here, tapija is undoubtedly linked to the free time and leisure that generates a feeling of boredom and the condition of tapija if it is not filled with activities expected to be, or understood as, satisfactory. In other words, this is a reaction to a lack of external stimulation. Is Heidegger’s idea that ‘only those who can truly give themselves a burden are free’ (Heidegger 1995: 166) not running through the lines of the above text? Perhaps only those who are immersed the whole time in their thoughts and actions, in their tasks, chores, required activities and work, will not feel time passing, but will be freed from its weight. According to that take on a feeling of particularity, and even the tentatively understood elitism that passes through its multiple meanings and phenomenology, tapija will perhaps, as a comparison or fusion with

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boredom, be more accurately characterized as a contemporary feature of ennui. Looking back, this is linked to those with a feeling of superiority or contrasted with the ‘dull boredom of the worker and the low classes’ (Salzani 2009: 149). Yet, in contrast with ennui, tapija cannot speak of a touch of glamour (ibid.), which perhaps best corroborates the desire for a ‘crowd, people, nights out and visits’ (G.Š., A.S. and S.K., interview). These are also in no way exceptional situations, yet they partly entail practices pertaining to the somewhat ‘privileged’ social strata, namely high-school pupils and students. Therefore, being critical of the winter tapija and considering summer as its absolute antithesis, as a de-tapijaified period, is suggestive of a number of conclusions. Such an interpretive angle foresees the cause–effect relation and the dialectic with which they co-create one another. This is because only where there is fun, where time does not weigh down on us, can a pressing feeling of too much time on our hands emerge through a feeling of boredom, which relates to time’s ‘lighter flow’. In this sense, tapija is always outlined comparatively. It is a category that is, more-or-less explicitly, generated through comparisons of experiences. Moreover, let us remind ourselves of Heidegger’s conclusion about the unsuitability of making general distinctions between subject and object: ‘even those characteristics of the object that appear the most objective, belong to the subject. It is thus nothing exceptional for the property “boring” to belong to the object and be related to the subject; rather it is like this with every property’ (Heidegger 1995: 84).17 I therefore contend that we are in the field of potentials that tapija, also understood as a local kind of boredom, certainly possesses. Such potentials can be outlined in two ways. If we agree with Heidegger and apply the thesis to the local field context of how ‘apparently even the most objective characteristics belong to the subject’, i.e. if we accept responsibility for moods and view the Pula tapija through the prism of the subject, we then have to speak here of a local Pula tapija transferred onto the city.18 Interpreted from that angle, there is no tapija without people who embody it, without tapijaroši. Boredom therefore, just as with tapija, carries in itself a grain of criticism and non-acceptance ‘because it expresses the idea that either a given situation or existence as a whole is deeply unsatisfying’ (Svendsen 2008: 22). Accordingly, it opens the doors to possible change.19 This leads us to the second stream of thought on such a potential of interpretation and change – that of the symptoms of boredom, which Hegel touched on: ‘The frivolity and boredom which infest the established order, the vague foreboding of something known, these are the

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heralds of approaching change’ (Hegel, cited in Sloterdijk 2016: 664). Of course, dropping down to the local level, the feeling of boredom that precedes or points to upcoming changes is not generated in the same historical or political context as that in which the German philosopher wrote, and so somewhat different meanings and possibilities have to be uncovered. In the Pula context, the feeling of boredom appears to primarily mean ‘being present’, i.e. residing in the city and thinking it through and reflecting on it. It thus also denotes the always-latent possibility of change from a local perspective. In a time when ‘some of the young thirty- and forty-year-olds have their own houses on Muntić etc. [in the surrounding villages in which they live or reside at the weekend], this also says something about the centre being empty. This is the time when we can say that it is the annual tapija’ (B.K., interview), which is no small thing. Hence, uttering and feeling tapija, getting bored, tapija-ing in the city and being tapija-ed out, or fed up with the city, is also one precondition among others that relates to residing within Pula’s urban fabric. To measure Pula’s streets in terms of potential tapijaroši can lead to their own expectations of the city, but also to contribute to its everyday life through one’s own presence. Thus, James Phillips’ conclusion, that is, his idea that ‘Boredom may be an occasion for the subject’s judgement on the world, yet it is also a power to which the subject falls victim’ (2009: 113), ought to be taken with a grain of salt, with the subjects’ victim position being removed from the equation. This is because, while tapija is being transferred, the real victim of such discursiveness and appropriate practices is the very city itself. In other words, the ‘subjectivity of creation and possibility’ (cf. Supek 1953: 53) and the self-understanding of certain interlocutors is inscribed as an object, namely, as those who consume, but who do not necessarily recognize themselves as those who are creators.20 Along those lines, perhaps with tapija it is worth searching for an answer to the previously posed question of what would be the generational experience of ‘something heavier’ or ‘greater’ than boredom alone in this context. At least while roughly understood as a synonym or as one of the derivatives of boredom, the answer would definitely include the feigned ignorance of its non-fatality. Instead, it would claim that the locally derived version of Langeweile, the ‘gentle monster’ or perhaps the ‘hardship of hardshiplessness’, is almost always consented to. It is principally this arbitrary aspect that is one of the characteristics, besides generational insights into the spectrum of its meanings, which is lacking in the very infrequent and sporadic, but no less important attempts to make a spectacle out of the phenomenon of tapija.

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Notes 1. For an interesting etymological and cultural discussion of those terms and states of affection that preceded boredom, see Dalle Pezze and Salzani (2009: 7–11). 2. Although he was a strong advocate of the division of labour in the production process, in whose monotony and mechanics Engels detected the heaviness of work, Adam Smith did pose a question along those lines: ‘What would become of people, who would throughout their lives perform the same number of simple tasks over and over again? Would this not lead to the deterioration of their mental faculties?’ (Smith, cited in Durkheim 1984: xi). One of the results of such a separation is the alienation that cannot be simply separated from the weight of the contemporary feeling of boredom. 3. The temporality of the machine, as Carlo Salzani wrote in an analysis of Benjamin’s conceptualization of boredom, makes up the temporality of modernity in work. This is also the case in leisure; the ‘flamboyant colours’ of the upper classes’ leisure hours are simply a (futile) attempt to escape from exertion through sensation. Leisure offers the illusion of an escape from the monotony of machine time. Furthermore, leisure time is informed by the mechanical repetition of machine time, which thus constitutes its ‘qualitative unchangeability’: leisure time and machine time are qualitatively equal (Salzani 2009: 133). Although such an interpretation has a negative ring to it, and seems to me too harsh in its analysis of boredom, it nevertheless emphasizes the important theme of the inseparability and entanglement of boredom and entertainment. 4. In his sketches, Benjamin lists an interesting example of such a form of boredom, characteristic of the upper social strata: ‘Boredom began to be experienced in epidemic proportions in the 1840s. Lamartine is said to have been the first to give expression to the malady. It plays a role in a little story about the famous comic Deburau. A distinguished Paris neurologist was consulted one day by a patient whom he had not seen before. The patient complained of the typical illness of the times – weariness with life, deep depressions, boredom. “There’s nothing wrong with you”, said the doctor after a thorough examination. “Just try to relax – find something to entertain you. Go see Deburau some evening, and life will look different to you.” “Ah, dear sir”, answered the patient. “I am Deburau”’ (Benjamin 1999: 108). Does this wonderfully simplified example not point to the essence of a contemporary holistic principle that ends, but also causes boredom at the same time? Those who have fun, must also become bored, to be able to possibly have fun again (to be fulfilled). ‘Just for fun’ also brings with it the heaviness of not having fun, namely boredom. 5. It seems that technological and socioeconomic development and change ‘undermine the sense of excitement and adventure that had characterized overseas travel and exploration in the early modern period. These changes include, ironically, improvements in navigation and oceanic travel; the rise of tourism; the proliferation of guidebooks about distant lands which heightened expectations about the beauty of imperial landscapes and the grandeur of imperial cities and ruins. Together, these developments transformed the British empire from a place of wonder and marvel to one of monotony and boredom (Auerbach 2005: 287). 6. For example, Mijo Mirković (Mate Balota) notes that at the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘The speed of development and quality of people meant that Pula gained the colours of a large city, above other cities on the Adriatic coast. It became more of a large city in character than Rijeka, Trieste or Venice. The Navy and its

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multinational composition gave Pula an international and cosmopolitan mark. The first edition of “Polaer Tagblatt” in 1905 included an advert searching for a teacher of Japanese’ (Balota 2005: 99). Igor Duda writes that from ‘1842, when there were 1126 people residing in Pula, up to 1910, when there was 58, 562 inhabitants, the percentage increase was 1614%, which is a spectacular growth in number’ (2000: 105). The construction of the Arsenal, harbour and shipyard from December 1856 onwards largely underpinned such growth, and so the Pula of that time had features such as ‘characteristic industrialization and development of the workforce. At the end of 1910, Pula would be the second biggest city (after Zagreb) in the region from the Drava river to the sea, and it would become ever more European and cosmopolitan. It only took six years (1863–1869) from the idea to approving the construction of the Hydrographic Institute and the Pula Observatory. From 1904, a city tram line went up to the train station. In 1881, Pietro Ciscutti built and opened a new theatre with eight hundred seats, which was named Politeama Ciscutti after him. In 1871 the city gained a gasworks, while in 1903 the modern, city central market hall opened: Središnja tržnica – Zentral-Markthalle – Mercato Centrale’ (Dukovski 2011: 118, 122–26). As the city largely had a military-industrial character, ‘from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, up until 1918, around ten brothels opened in Pula . . . Their opening, maintenance, house rules, residence and activity were regulated by a Rulebook on Brothels, which every city that had brothels had to implement up until the beginning of the twentieth century’ (Dukovski 2016: 285). Many aspects of modernity were present in the city. 7. Does the explicitly expressed boredom in this context not point to Joyce’s change in status? While in Dublin he hardly made a living and fell into debt, in Pula his status and reputation, as we have seen in the previous chapter, grew. This opens up the interesting question of the possibility of Westerners changing their own status through a change in geographical context, which can be interpreted not only from a class perspective but also from a gender one. Similarly, the high point of travel writer Edith Durham’s journey through the Balkans at the start of the twentieth century was ‘complete acceptance in the world of men, her political affirmation, equally in Albania and in England’ (Matošević and Škokić 2014: 89), while ‘Vesna Goldsworthy, in reply to the question of why Western women love the Balkans, stated the possibility of self-confirmation, “a kind of honorary male status” and the discovery of her own feminist utopia, which does not look for confirmation in women’s knowledge and experience, but rather in the public, political, men’s world’ (ibid.). Yet, while Western writers’ ‘escape from the boredom at home’ was cut short by their travelling to the Balkans, Joyce was immersed in boredom with his arrival in this region. Boredom is thus closely connected to and defined by the sociocultural milieu that various individuals belong to. 8. In 2003, James Joyce became immortalized by a sculpture in Pula, sitting in a somewhat reflexive, relaxed and pensive pose. The work was completed by the academic sculptor Mate Čvrljak, erected in the city centre near the Arch of the Sergii. A few interlocutors disapproved of attributing such an honour to a man who never loved Pula, saying ‘it would be better if they had made a sculpture of our Pula Džekson or Grga [two famous city characters], Joyce did not deserve it’ (G.P. and L.P., interview). Yet, despite such an ingrained and correct opinion, might its meaning be more complex? Can that dedication be interpreted in another context? Namely, viewed from the perspective of the dynamic relation between the writer and the city, Joyce’s sculpture can also be interpreted as the biggest, never explicitly uttered,

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symbolic punishment. In being eternally cast in a relaxed pose as a sculpture in a city from which he wanted to escape as quickly as possible, he will therefore always remain frozen in that city, eternally still in the public space of the ‘naval Siberia, back-of-God-speed place’. Although this was not the first intention when the Joyce statue was erected, it can be interpreted as a final punishment, and as a symbolic vendetta for the characterization of a city the likes of which he elaborated in his letters. Understood from that perspective, the sculpture also points to a rhetorical question and an appropriate answer: – Did you want to escape the city? – Now you will (eternally) remain there. 9. In his classification of three levels of boredom, Heidegger lists explicit examples of the first two levels. First, ‘the passing of time as driving away the boredom that time attracts’, in which the ‘time drags’, with the example given of waiting ‘in the tasteless station of some lonely minor railway. It is four hours until the next train arrives. The district is uninspiring. We do have a book in our rucksack though – shall we read? No. Or think through a problem, some question? We are unable to. We look at the clock – only a quarter of an hour has gone by. Then we go out onto the local road. We walk up and down, just to have something to do. But it is no use . . . Hours walking back and forth. We sit down on a stone and draw all kinds of figures in the sand, and in so doing, catch ourselves looking at our watch yet again – half an hour – and so on (1995: 93). An example of the second form of boredom, named ‘Getting bored with something and the passing of time associated with it’, is exemplified as follows: ‘We have been invited out somewhere for the evening. We do not need to go along. Still, we have been tense all day and we have time in the evening. So we go along. There we find the usual food and the usual table conversation, everything is not only very tasty, but tasteful as well. Afterward people sit together having a lively discussion, as they say, perhaps listening to music, having a chat, and things are witty and amusing. And already it is time to leave . . . There is nothing at all to be found that might have been boring about this evening, neither the conversation, nor the people, nor the rooms. Thus, we come home quite satisfied. We cast a quick glance at the work we interrupted that evening, make a rough assessment of things and look ahead to the next day – and then it comes: I was bored after all this evening, on the occasion of this invitation’ (1995: 109). For Heidegger, the problem of boredom is primarily a problem of time and its various manifestations and flows, the fact that in a more-or-less conscious boredom through waiting, it is time – Langeweile, a long moment, that ‘holds [us] in limbo’. 10. The interlocutor born in 1959 would exclusively link tapija to a feeling of boredom: ‘In the 1970s we used it, in a context that everyone found a bit boring; you know, when you are very young, you expect something from others and you don’t know, of course, it depends on the atmosphere, it depends on the atmosphere there where you are found, tapija is one word, perhaps overused. We really used it a lot, that word. It is a moment, an atmosphere in that moment when you are outside and that’s it. And it was continually present, when I was really young – from sixteen even up to twenty-something. Later it was used somewhat less, when I think about it’ (L.P., interview). 11. Of course, as is demonstrated in the previous chapter, tapija does not have one exclusive interpretative current or intensity of meaning. It can and must be interpreted as something ‘much less’ than ‘intense boredom’, namely, through a characterization that has a ‘gentle ironic effect’: ‘Let’s say, I ask S. if she wants to go out and she says, no – then – you are so tapija!’ (S.S., E.R. and L.Š., interview).

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12. Such experiences are not ubiquitous, and some interlocutors would express somewhat different opinions and assert that, while there is a very strong attitude that equates Pula with tapija, ‘I really don’t consider it to be like that’: ‘Many people say it, but I think they don’t think it through any more when they say – “and Pula is tapija”, “people here are like this or like that”. Pula is a wonderful city, and how some person experiences certain people or situations should not be allowed to be linked with the city’ (S.A. and N.O., interview). Nevertheless, if we equate tapija with boredom and agree that the latter is often generally ‘understood, also as a “sign of shallowness and superficiality”’ (Phillips 2009: 113), perhaps individuals’ dissociation from it will become clearer, as will the equation of others, tapijaroši, with it. 13. Along those lines, see the interlocutor’s remark of how he is ‘not burdened [by tapija]. There are enough bars and places to go out so you can choose. When you are fifteen or sixteen years old, you want to go out, and when you are at secondary school you have Student Party and Pietas. [Student Party is a themed evening held on Thursday nights in Club Uljanik, and Pietas Julia is a cafe-bar and club on the Pula seafront [riva], near the train station.] Hence, the older you are, the more options you have, but those who are thirteen or fourteen years old, when around fifty of them gather by the post office, well of course they aren’t having much fun’ (K.S., interview). 14. On the links between the economic crisis, hope, hopelessness and the ensuing ‘surplus of time’ that unemployment causes in Croatia, see Potkonjak and Škokić 2013 which discusses the example of the collapse of the Sisak Ironworks. Forced boredom is that which grows through unemployment and economic vulnerability and the surplus of time linked with it. It must necessarily be interpreted in terms of a feeling of a loss of privilege. This kind of boredom most often bears the marks of social stigma and shame. 15. At the end of the 1920s, Mikhail Bakhtin warned of such a class-based use of language and words, namely, of the different articulation of practices and of situations presupposed by the same use of language and terms. He did so through the example of ‘hunger’: ‘Let us assume that those who go hungry belong to a collective in which hunger is not random but instead has a collective character, yet the collective of those who go hungry is not firmly materially connected – instead they go hungry in a non-uniform manner. In the majority of cases, the peasant is found in such a position. Hunger is here experienced “among people”, but without material uniformity, without a link to a uniform economy, everyone suffers in the small, enclosed world of their individual households. Such a collective does not have a uniform material body for uniform action. A resigned but unashamed and undemeaning apprehension of one’s hunger will be the rule under such conditions – “everyone bears it, you must bear it, too.” Here grounds are furnished for the development of the philosophical and religious systems of the non-resistor or fatalist type (early Christianity, Tolstoyanism). A completely different experience of hunger applies to a member of an objectively and materially aligned and united collective (a regiment of soldiers; workers in their association within the walls of a factory; hired hands on a large-scale, capitalist farm; finally, a whole class once it has matured to the point of “class unto itself ”). Overtones of active and self-confident protest with no basis for humble and submissive intonation will prevail here. These are the most favourable grounds for an experience to achieve ideological clarity and structuredness’ (1980: 98). It would be interesting to further develop the theme of the connections between the previously analysed cyclical ‘seasonal’ rhythm of life in the city with boredom

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16.

17.

18.

19.

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and hunger, understood through the metaphor of a craving. However, in order to move the narrative on, I will not do this here. Bezjaki or Bezaki are names given to an ethnic group used to refer to inhabitants of a certain part of Istria’s interior (named Žminjština) and certain villages south of the town of Pazin. The Bezjak identity is formed in relation to the neighbouring Vlachs. These observations lead us to an interpretation of the interesting and active relation between subjects, objects and situations in which, it is important to note, the German philosopher inverts the object–subject primacy of action, because things alone do not bear traits and moods: ‘All such properties – boring, cheerful, sad (event), funny (game) – these properties which have to do with attunement are related to the subject in a special sense; not only that, they stem directly from the subject and its situation. We transfer subsequently those attunements which things cause in us onto the things themselves. Ever since Aristotle’s Poetics we have had the expression “metaphor” for this. . . . We speak of a “laughing meadow” and do not mean that the meadow itself is laughing, we speak of a “cheerful room,” of a “melancholy landscape”. The landscape is not itself melancholy, but merely attunes us in such a way, causes this attunement in us. And similarly with the “boring book”’ (Heidegger 1995: 85). Following these ideas, a response to the question of who from the cityobject transfers the mood of tapija (in the sense of the ‘spirit of the city’) bears the always hinted at, but sometimes more explicitly spoken knowledge that tapija-like boredom always concerns a subject who consents to such a mood. Understood in this way, there is a transferred boredom wherein subjects are not reduced to a lethargic framework but rather actively participate in the process of getting bored, they transmit boredom. This can be also used as an impetus for overcoming tapija, if one wished to take things in that direction at all. In other words, according to such an interpretation, an interlocutor summarized what is generally a very problematic topic: ‘I am generally not fond of thinking about the mentality of a certain town’s inhabitants, but if I were forced to think in that way, then I would say that this was largely about mentality. Pula’s inhabitants [Puležani ili Puljani], whatever you call them, if some were forced to, you know, describe them as people, as inhabitants, then maybe they would say that they are a bit inert, a little apathetic. Which is by no means only the case with inhabitants of Pula’ (N.H., interview). This is necessarily indicative of a situation that, without making intergenerational generalizations and causing prejudice, must be described through the drawing of oppositions: ‘Well, young people think like this, “I am one small individual, why would I try hard, if I do it won’t make a difference.” Unfortunately, this is how it is for us with everything, and especially the case with many students’ (R.P., interview). In this process it is certainly possible to recognize the contemporary conditions of a ‘crisis of the subject’, which is not exclusively related to the local context discussed here.

Chapter 3

On Dominant Articulations and Reaches of Tapija

Up until this point we have interpreted tapija in a variety of ways – as a self-interpretation of unwillingness; as a lack or inadequacy; as ‘not doing’ and ‘inaction’, boredom, and entropy; but also as irony, as a marker of status and belonging; as a specific situation or period in the annual cycle; and as an atmosphere and ‘spirit of the city’. And yet, even if we could determine that the problem lies with changes within Pula, we would still be missing something. This is because the role and fate of tapija in the seldom found, scattered yet existing articulations on the market of local cultural specificities, is also of particular interest. Besides for example, the illustrated postcard that states in English ‘Tapija is like lame in Pula’,1 clearly intended for foreign, anglophone guests and tourists, tapija also featured as one of the core concepts in the Pula bid book, a programme guide and application for the European Capital of Culture 2020.2 It is entitled Pula+2020 Demilitarise! From Fortress to Forum.3 Besides other emphasized cultural characteristics of the region and the city, such as inter- and multiculturalism, gastronomy, legacies, heritage, and partly industry too, tapija features, entirely deservedly, as some kind of ambivalent local specificity woven in here and there into the one hundred or so pages of the programme guide. Yet, its ambivalence in that programme is articulated somewhat differently from how it emerges in the generational and diachronic polysemy analysed in the previous chapters. The material covered earlier also demarcates changes in the wider political, cultural and social sense in the city of Pula. In contrast to a discursivity and their encouragement of the development of the aforementioned localisms and regionalisms in the application, in

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which Pula residents will recognize themselves clearly, the articulation of tapija in the bid book gives rise to a very strong and serious paradox. According to one part of the bid book, Pula needs to gain the title of City of Culture 2020 ‘in order to send a strong signal against passivity which in our city is called tapija’ (2016: 5). Furthermore, it is emphasized and defined as one of the city’s core problems: ‘Tapija – a state of mind’ (ibid.: 96), ‘Tapija excludes people from feeling empowered’ (ibid.: 6), ‘Tapija is the mentality’ (ibid.: 6, 19), alongside positioning it in the same chain of signifiers alongside feelings of ‘powerlessness’, ‘frustration and passivity’ (ibid.: 23), ‘fear and hatred’ (ibid.: 6), ‘civic passivity, toxic narratives and militarised violent solutions’ (ibid.: 73). According to one of the definitions, tapija would thus be the social passivity that develops on feelings of having little hope and even less power to change things, expresses itself in a refusal to take decisions into our own hands. But this all triggers a vicious circle of more resignation and less hope and more fear and frustration – fertile ground on which all kinds of narratives and rhetoric of fear, intolerance and hatred flourish and thrive. (Ibid.: 5)

Of course, the solutions and definitions provided, as well as Pula’s specificities, are not necessarily incorrect, but they are certainly partial and overstressed. This likely results from a lack of research into the phenomenon about which they are writing, as well as a need for the project to have a powerful, meaningful effect. The need for pragmatism and an economic approach to writing and explaining, as required in the bid book genre, in books and applications, is also present. Tapija rejects these, as the field research for this book has demonstrated. In order to strengthen such a conclusion, there is no need to juxtapose the previous chapters and results of their analysis with how tapija is articulated in Pula+2020 Demilitarise! It is enough to read through the material in the envisaged programme in more detail – and especially those parts that deal with tapija, because tapija is also advocated as a specificity that must be ‘overcome’ (ibid.: 19, 82, 91). However, it is also simultaneously constructed as a local particularity, through which the globally important title of the City of Culture will be won. Along those lines, the bid book writers planned to launch a ‘Tapija Festival’, which would be An annual event dealing with local specificity, the tapija attitude that means passivity and indifference. It approaches tapija in an amusing and ironic way, through various artistic forms, from musical concerts and public readings to stand-up performances. The festival programme fo-

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cuses on humour as one of the most effective ways of fighting tapija. (2016: 44) The Tapija Disco was held on Tito’s Square in front of the Arena Colosseum, a place that young people have spontaneously ‘occupied’ in recent years. (2016: 93)

Tapija is thus articulated as a differentia specifica of Pula, from where part of a contemporary urban particularity emerges. It is worth noting that this name has been given to some of the events, and is therefore a phenomenon that should be recognized and preserved as the city’s ‘intangible heritage’.4 But at the same time, it advocates that tapija should be overcome, reduced exclusively to mere ‘non-doing’, to apathy or indifference, and close to ‘toxic narratives’ that ought to be ‘done away with’. Outlined in this way, tapija should serve as a ‘vanishing mediator’ (Jameson 1973) in winning the title of the European Capital of Culture 2020: had the city won this title, Pula would have managed to do away with tapija. Or, to draw a harsh comparison from the domain of material heritage, would a similar situation not be Pula’s attempting to win the same title on the basis of the amphitheatre being in the city, in order to remove and destroy it after winning the title? Such logic, as provided in the bid book, of course, does not work, but it is not the only oxymoron flowing from its pages. How can we explain the articulation of tapija as ‘fear’, as a ‘mentality of passivity and inaction’, ‘little hope, and even less strength, to change things’, alongside the following answer to the question that explains the city’s general cultural profile: Pula has three key cultural features. The first is interculturality, since our city is officially bilingual and shared by Croats and ten minorities. The second is heritage: the symbol of the city is the iconic Roman amphitheatre, the Arena, a symbol with over two thousand years of history and cultural tradition . . . Pula is a city where young energy bursts behind every corner. It is well known for its punk and underground culture, alternative music, long tradition of activism and resistance, and a small but vibrant and cohesive artistic scene. It is typical for Pula’s culture to fuse art, heritage and interculturality into new forms of expression that make the city unconventional and exciting. ECoC (European Capital of Culture) is for us the upgrade platform that ignites the right spark and catalyses all this energy Pula already has. (2016: 10, italics A.M.)

Thus, in detecting Pula’s ‘mentality of passivity and inaction’, as well as the ‘lack of hope’, the bid book description directly conflicts with the requirement that the city be showcased as a vibrant, lively and en-

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ergetic place, where young energy bursts behind every corner [sic].5 This contradiction was also underscored by the fact that on the final pages of the application book, around 430 individuals and several city and local institutions were listed ‘without [whom] Pula+2020 would not be alive and kicking’ (2016: 98).6 Although there are people on the list of individuals who are not residents of Pula, the vast majority are. This points to the process of their engagement, participation and contribution and defies the idea of a ‘mentality of passivity and inaction’. As this example well illustrates, the phenomenon of tapija cannot be simply denoted and defined from a perspective focused on the spectacular without significant problems resulting with regard to consistency and the ability to maintain the argument. A contradiction can be detected in the envisaged materials, concerning the fusion of tapija with Pula. Namely, the ‘spirit and the city’ act along an axis of ‘enlightenment–Romantic indecisiveness’, which the Zagreb-based scholar Tea Škokić has noted in certain strands of Croatian ethnographic writing. According to this view, for example, ‘the village is proclaimed the source of real Croatian values’, and therefore the source of local heritage, while ‘on the other hand, [the village] gains a pejorative meaning of being a backward, behind and rigid environment, which imprisons the individual’s individuality’ (Škokić 2011: 89). Although with the bid book we are obviously not dealing with an ethnographic text tout court, in the description entitled ‘city cultural profile’ under the city’s characteristics or ‘specificities’, it is necessary to use material that traditionally falls within the field of ethnographic writing. With its articulation in a somewhat altered literary genre, we reach the indecisiveness that can be read in the contradictions between the simultaneous interest in and planned spectacularization of tapija, as well as in the end goal and need to eradicate or overcome it. Through such a manoeuvre, the tapija phenomenon is first and foremost reduced to uniformity, to having an inherently negative and ‘fatal’ meaning prefixed to it. At the same time, its specifically important, historical, ironic, productive or situational aspects are cut off, while certain residents of Pula, as this research demonstrates, do not agree on the multiplicity of its meanings.7 Although it seems that the nuances of those contradictions were lost on the preselection and selection commission for the European Capital of Culture, they did, however, recognize the phenomenon of tapija as a welcome addition to the Pula bid book. Yet in their reports they also stated the following: The team who put the proposal together placed a significant emphasis on behaviour change as a goal – i.e. changing the ‘tapija’ mentality. The com-

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mission noticed this ambitious challenge, in overcoming a social passivity that is not exclusively characteristic for Pula as it exists in many European cities. Yet the commission did not feel that the projects and approaches proposed in the bid book were based on evidence of how to achieve this change. Empowering citizens through small-scale projects initiated in the local community, is one step towards trusting those citizens. This dimension to the proposal requires a deeper analysis and consideration. (Selection of the European Capital of Culture in 2020 in Croatia. The Selection Panel’s Report, Pre-Selection Stage, 2015: 11) Many cities across Europe are also in postmilitary position, whether through post-Cold-War events, or through changes in military strategies. The same could be said for the ‘tapija’ mentality: civic passivity is not specific to Pula. Although the bid book sketches links to other similar cities, the commission considers that these themes could be researched more widely and more deeply at the European level. (Selection of the European Capital of Culture in 2020 in Croatia, The Selection Panel’s Final Report, 2016: 12)

From these conclusions it is clear that the phenomenon of tapija, besides representing an amalgam of ‘humanist–enlightenment worries’ and ‘romantic abandonment’, first and foremost presents a window onto a theoretical problem. Because, by uttering tapija, feeling it, or by tapija-ing, this does not imply that tapija can be simply explained, that it will not remain misunderstood and be cut short. This is the case, at the very least, in relation to a wider audience of the kind that made up the preselection and selection commission. In other words, they did not manage to convince the commission that tapija was ‘a void, a lack that motivates’ (cf. Hegel 1987: 25). The selection commission’s suggestion from 2016 could be understood quite seriously then, because ‘civic passivity’ really ‘is not specific to Pula’. It is rather a wider phenomenon, a symptom of the present-day period. Yet at the same time it can be claimed that tapija is irreducible exclusively to inaction or passivity. However, if we agree with the precise, but mutilated interpretation of tapija detected in the bid book, as a ‘social passivity that comes with feeling disconnected and powerless and the reluctance to take action’ (2016: 12), then it would be useful to use another common signifier to refer to such a scattered ‘symptom of the present-day period’, as defined by feelings of passivity, exclusion, impotence, reluctance, etc. This could be a term no longer widely used – alienation. Perhaps through this rejected and forgotten term we can get a glimpse of part of the present-day theoretical and practical problematic linked with the phenomenon of tapija. At the very least, we might gain a

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glimpse of one strand of its meaning as well as of the possibilities denoted in the previous chapter.

Why Say Tapija, When You Mean Alienation? In his now well-cited and influential book A Philosophy of Boredom, Lars Svendsen emphasizes how, when dealing with boredom: ‘I prefer to talk about an indifference, for I do not believe that the concept of alienation is all that applicable any more’ (Svendsen 2008: 36). Precisely one hundred pages later, in a similar tone, he continues: Or take such a concept as alienation, which practically no one talks about today. Such an expression is only meaningful to the extent that it can be contrasted with a state of participation, identification or unity, because the concept of alienation itself does not express anything except a lack of such a state. Why does no one talk about alienation any more? Two obvious possible answers are: Alienation no longer exists, and consequently there is no use for such a concept; Alienation has become so widespread that we no longer have anything with which we can contrast it – the absence of such an absence has become total. What the correct answer is remains unclear. It is, however, clear that a society that lacks social substance, in the Hegelian sense, is not a society one can be alienated from. Are we without alienation and without history? (Ibid.: 136)

Indeed, a third reason for disregarding the concept of alienation, which Svendsen does not mention in the cited paragraph, is that alienation, albeit not exclusively, is a term mainly associated with Marxist theory and the problematics relating to labour and social participation. With the fall of socialist societies, the concept has also apparently undergone the fate of Marxist concepts’ proclaimed ‘inapplicability’, splintering into a spectrum of concepts that are not entirely identical, such as indifference, passivity or individual lethargy.8 Hence, whether or not we agree with the philosopher Gajo Petrović that ‘the concept of alienation is a kind of “summary” of the whole history of Western philosophy’, it will more likely remain some kind of undeclared, ‘unspoken assumption’ (Petrović 1969: 49–50),9 rather than a term without any kind of contemporary applicability to local realities and relationships. This leads to Lars Svendsen’s fourth, also undeclared reason for passing over alienation, which at least partly relates to boredom. This is that the Marxist theory of alienation is also a ‘critique of and invitation to the practical struggle against alienation, an invitation to the revolutionary

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transformation of the self-alienated person and society’ (ibid.: 49; cf. Vlahović 1964: 476). Yet, in contrast to boredom or indifference, which are affects that can but do not necessarily have to operate as a critique of a situation, alienation is ‘a state in which a person does not feel part of a wider community’ (Vranicki 1964a: 481, Vranicki 1964b: 231). It is also an invitation to radically transform general social relations that entails serious theoretical and practical efforts. Alienation is ‘a feeling of loneliness, anxiety or despair, which according to many, is characteristic of the modern age’ (Lachs 1966: 239). It is thus positioned on the same level as feeling ‘disconnected and powerless and reluctant’ (Bid Book 2016: 12), as the bid book characterizes the local phenomenon. Alienation therefore strikes me as a much more appropriate term than tapija to use as part of explicit attempts to change the current sociopolitical situation.10 Thus, in the sense of ‘theories of overcoming the current situation’, it is worth explaining the Praxis School11 and philosopher Zagorka Pešić-Golubović’s theory of alienation: the essence of Marx’s understanding [of alienation] can be expressed through the concept’s dialectical character. Irrespective of whether Marx narrows the concept by applying it exclusively to class society, or uses it in the wider sense of a general historical phenomenon, alienation contains elements of a dialectically conceptualized ‘limit’ (in the Hegelian sense), which carries within itself its own negativity and implies transcendence. Alienation is thus not only a state of alienation, but rather the only possible historical means of human beings’ realization . . . The worker is an alienated person (because s/he is only partly actualized), but as a worker, s/he attains a historic position that opens up new historical viewpoints to him or her; just as mechanization and the development of technology are a source of alienation from labour, at the same time they are an introduction to a new historical chapter in which people will jump from the branches of necessity into the realm of freedom. (Pešić-Golubović 1966: 355)

In contrast to theories of alienation that include preconceived assumptions or at least a theory of how to transcend the current state of affairs, and going beyond the examples of work and the workforce that Pešić-Golubović lists, in its essence alienation implies transcendence and change. Tapija does not necessarily imply this, for, as demonstrated during the field research, it implies not a ‘change for the better, but a consolidation of the current state of affairs’ (B.B., interview), because often Pula residents themselves experience it as a ‘permanent, unchangeable state’ (N.H., interview) in the city itself. Furthermore, while tapija is perceived as an exclusively local phenomenon, with a strong ironic

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character in places, alienation is not at all rooted exclusively in the local context. With regard to the bid book, this was one of the dominant objections voiced by the project’s preselection and selection commissions. ‘Citizen’s [sic] passivity is not specific to Pula. Although the bid book sketches links to other similar cities, the panel felt these themes could have been explored further and deeper on a European level’ (Selection of the European Capital of Culture in 2020 in Croatia, 2016: 12). Perhaps alienation, that philosophical and sociological concept little used today, could be a core concept linking up other settings and cities in Europe, in the context of a ‘general feeling of powerlessness, frustration and passivity, when speaking of political or social inclusion’ (cf. Bauman 2007, Paić 2017). However, in that case it would be especially important to seriously question the ethical underpinning of collaborating with economic actors like the stone wool factory Rockwool. Indeed, Rockwool recently caused a significant controversy due to fears of their having seriously polluted the environment in the Pićanština community, located in a valley in east Istria (see Dnevnik HTV, 22 August 2008 and Hrvatska uživo, 16 June 2011). Here, it is also worth thinking about the categories of ‘migrants, the marginalized and the unemployed’, whose inclusion, among other groups, was planned in the programme. What purpose would such a project structure serve if the ‘most alienated’ in society remain that way, if they are reduced to the purified identities of the unemployed, marginalized or migrants? Of course, such projects should be co-opted in the process of their de-alienation, rather than these identities being fixed as permanent and of use to the project. In this case, this means that the project Pula+2020 has to entail the possibility of transcending such taken-for-granted things. This is because the key to overcoming alienation ‘is not a return to the past but the projection of new futures’ (Petrović 1969: 58), and future change in the city is a goal for which the project Pula+2020 strove. At the end of this chapter I will try to provide a theoretical answer to the question of why tapija is employed instead of alienation in the Pula+2020 project, despite the stated arguments suggesting that the project applicants were thinking of alienation. In addition to possible responses from the history of ideas already provided at the start of this section, I believe that the project chose tapija because, in linking that phenomenon to Pula alone, and in emphasizing it as a differentia specifica – which was not at all mistaken – the problems of interpersonal relations and sociopolitical engagement in the community or city become culturalized. In other words, emphasizing tapija almost completely territorializes the project and explicitly reduces the problem to one of ‘mentality’, through which a fixed and problematic state of affairs can-

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not change in a more significant way. Thus articulated, along the axis of an Enlightenment–Romanticist attitude, tapija is a call for change and simultaneously the negation of that change. We can thus say that the bid book offers a mistaken, local and mainly culturalist reply to the correctly detected problem of a general feeling of political, economic or social powerlessness. In so doing, it seems that a double blunder has been made, as tapija also relinquishes its everyday ludic, distinctive, productive, playful, class and especially its idle aspect. The latter aspect, as a phenomenon, undoubtedly possesses and connotes that historically present ‘yes, it’s our tapija, but we like it here’ ( J.P.I., interview), or a ‘level of pride and optimism’ (B.B., interview) that this feeling exudes. At the same time, no answers are found to the problem of alienation,

Figure 3.1. Postcard – Tapija Is Like Lame in Pula. Website screen capture by Andrea Matošević.

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nor should there be an attempt to find real answers. This would require a somewhat more serious effort than just a simple, pejorative, semantic fixing of a local phenomenon. Tapija is thus, in this part of its co-optation, a mistaken reply to a necessary and correctly posed question about the current situation in society, the city and the community. Such answers, we can speculate, also point to limits on Figure 3.2. Tapija Badge, Capital of the meanings and possibilities Culture candidacy merchandise. 2018 of tapija, because it really is, as © Andrea Matošević. has been earlier demonstrated, a semantic platform, obviously neither infinite in its meanings, nor in its possibilities. This is particularly the case concerning attempts at its spectacularization. This is because within the particularly wide range of its applications and connotations in everyday life, this serious attempt at its commodification in the sphere of officially sanctioned culture probably lies among the rarer examples in which tapija has not managed to embed itself.

Notes 1. This relates to one of a series of illustrated postcards on which certain cities are linked to local expressions or slang phrases, with their translation into English: ‘Kaj briješ? is like AAA What?! In Zagreb’, ‘Kužiš? Is like Got it? in Zagreb’, ‘Ejla! Is like Hello from Rovinj, Croatia’, ‘Ćemo ben is like Take it easy in Rovinj’, ‘Kenova is like What’s up in Dubrovnik’. I wish to thank Mario Buletić, curator of the Ethnographic Museum of Istria in Pazin for these details. It is interesting how tapija is the only slang phrase linked to Pula, while other cities have several such illustrative expressions. 2. The title of European Capital of Culture for 2020 was won by the city of Rijeka, with the programme Luka različitosti [Port of Diversity], along with the Irish city of Galway, with the programme Making Waves. 3. The version of the book I managed to obtain does not contain an imprint page with publisher details, so no names of the editorial or authorial team could be found, nor an ISBN and CIP – the publication’s international standard book number and library cataloguing details. On the first inside page and the final page, the City of Pula and the County of Istria are listed, I presume, as project holders. As I have managed

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to acquire the English version of the bid book, all cited passages are taken directly from it, and therefore require no translation. 4. As part of the Capital of Culture candidacy, badges were handed out on which tapija pula+2020 was written in black, green and blue letters on a white background. It is interesting that the interpretation of the message, which you can glean from the simply designed fashion accessories, can only function in an affirmative semiotic space. From the feminine noun that tapija denotes in the programme, designed and stated in this way, it is impossible to reach the conclusion that this ‘mentality’ or ‘state of mind’ should be overcome. I believe that this favours the special ambivalence and multifaceted quality of the concept, of which the authors of the programme Pula+2020 Demilitarise! were aware, but which they did not develop enough in the project. 5. I assume, along these lines, that Pula residents by 2020 would ‘create and use the envisaged programmes’ themselves, based on a social stratum of such, already present ‘energy’. Residents as programme users bring new rules to the game, as participants who know and understand: ‘The Pula+2020 programme is for us and with us and is developing through our input. Our vision is that in the years towards 2020 and in the year itself, all citizens – children in kindergartens, children in elementary schools, young people in secondary schools, universities and vocational trainings, school drop-outs, young professionals, people in prison, exchange students, unemployed, families with and without children, migrants, single parents, marginalised people, tourists, refugees, the +30, +40, +50 and +60 age groups, disabled people, senior citizens, citizens from all social groups and ethnicities – all of them become connected to at least one of the projects of Pula+2020 not only as audience but as creators’ (2016: 33). Nevertheless, beyond the legitimate question of means and possibilities, and the very welcome engagement and encouragement of Pula’s citizens, who are said to be suffering from ‘a mentality of passivity and inaction’, or ‘social passivity’, the strand regarding fixed social categories remains. It is assumed that at least one of the project streams will deal with this. For what is the point of such a grand project structure, if it does not insist on a real change in paradigm, inside of which a migrant becomes a citizen, the unemployed become employed, and the marginalized become included in the economic, cultural and political events of the environment in which they live? Such fixed categories, through which and due to which people participate, favour a consolidation of the current situation, and much less the real social changes that a project of this weight could bring. Along these lines, questionable ethics are also set out and (possible) collaborations with potential partners are listed, including with Rockwool (the stone wool industry), Hempel (the chemical industry) and Holcim and Calucem (cement). As regards the former mining area of Pićanština, Rockwool in east Istria, where their facility is located, has caused significant controversy in the local community, due to suspected serious environmental pollution and detrimental effects on the quality of life in the area. At the same time, they have financed projects and pupil and student grants in the local community (cf. Matošević and Baćac 2015). 6. In this manuscript I do not deal with the individual engagement or with the engagement of the above-mentioned companies, nor with the volume or contents of their services in the phase of developing or producing the bid book for the project Pula+2020. I will keep the analysis entirely focused on the sections of the bid book that concern the articulation of tapija. Among the few written and available critical reviews of the process of initiating this project, see Noel Mirković: Pula+ 2020?, published on http://radio.rojc.eu, 19 March 2016.

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7. One interlocutor had a firm view about the categorization of the concept of tapija in the programme and materials for the European Capital of Culture: ‘I didn’t like the idea of tapija, because it is some kind of ghettoized narrative, but again, it is a narrative that speaks of two generations of people, and they know that, they were marked by it [tapija]; we can talk about it for hours and we will always be right, but where are the others? The other generations, older, younger, how can the others identify with something that ought to be a guiding thread, but who does it link up? Me and you and three other people, but it doesn’t go further, not to the whole of Pula’ (M.B., interview). Although I have already shown how the term tapija is used by the older and much younger generation, but as a different code, what does emerge from this opinion is a feeling of ‘generational exclusivity’ around the use of the term. This can be monitored diachronically and is therefore not exclusively linked to the present day. 8. It is worth mentioning that during the twentieth century in the socialist period, alienation was also often left aside as a theoretical concept critiquing society. It was assumed that de-alienation had been achieved through the establishment of socialism. This was, of course, deeply mistaken. Along these lines, Predrag Vranicki wrote in the mid-1960s that socialism was ‘making the political sphere of life absolute, it produced a range of mystifications, demonstrating once again that alienation had not stopped existing through a political revolution or socialist rule . . . Thus, in opposition to the thesis on the irrelevance of the problem of alienation to life in socialism, we have to resolutely advance the thesis that the problem of alienation is socialism’s central question’ (Vranicki 1964b: 232–33, italics in the original). 9. As philosopher Gajo Petrović further explains: ‘Marx did not come up with the concept of alienation ex nihilo . . . it was alive, under different names, since the beginning of philosophical thought . . . But Marx did transform it, and gave it a new content and life’ (ibid.). 10. We can further mention that the extensive corpus of literature on the topic of alienation, which is varied in its attempts at defining and doing away with alienation, is also not unanimous with regard to its empirical and interpretative insights. A significant number of the authors find the multiplicity of its derivatives, meanings and processes as linking to ‘powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, isolation and self-estrangement . . . it becomes less a description of a single, specific symptom than an omnibus of psychological disturbances having a similar root cause – in this case, modern social organization’ (Seeman 1959: 783 and Glazer, cited in ibid.: 785). Thus, what links alienation and tapija is the abstractness of their meanings; it is therefore no wonder that a large number of texts on the topic of alienation have been dedicated to the search for its meaning and empirical grounding, and to questions that concern its ‘normative and prescriptive, or descriptive and predicative potential and character’ (Archibald 1978: 119). 11. The Praxis School was a Marxist and humanist philosophical movement that originated in Zagreb and Belgrade during the socialist period. From 1964 to 1974 the bimonthly journal Praxis was published. An important focal point of their work was the Korčula summer school [Korčulanska ljetna škola], a workshop in which Yugoslav and international scholars participated, including Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Henri Lefebvre, Jürgen Habermas, etc.

Conclusion

At the first public presentation relating to this study, entitled ‘The Phenomenology of Tapija’, held following an invitation by the Pula citizen association Gradska radionica on 17 August 2017, a debate followed the introductory presentation of certain results. During this debate, in a conversation that lasted almost two hours, one of the active participants concluded that ‘invoking tapija means invoking an arrogance that stems from vanity’.1 The audience largely endorsed that conclusion. This cutting, apodictic and sharp remark is interesting for several reasons. First, along the lines of the arguments that I have attempted to highlight in the previous sections, this remark is reminiscent of a continuity between the subject and the ‘objectivity’ expressed: in other words, the inseparability of that which characterizes and the characterization itself. Yet also, because of such premises, we can speak of a boomerang effect of ‘invoking’, ‘denoting’, or naming someone or something as tapija.2 According to such an interpretation, which was established as surprisingly present during research, those who assert tapija in their surroundings are in fact those most marked by tapija as a characteristic. This is because things and events do not bear traits and moods themselves, but we constitute them as such through a process of transfer. Nevertheless, such a process is not characteristic of the local phenomenon of tapija, but rather concerns a wider spectrum of affects. Among these I have especially touched on boredom, which tapija closely relates to. Furthermore, I think that the interesting observation that links tapija with ‘arrogance and vanity’ only tells half the story. Such an interpretation wholly reveals that the articulation of tapija can link to an experience of one’s own superiority in relation to who or what is characterized as tapija. This is the case with the analysis of the Pula audience, which attributes to it symbolic capital, but nevertheless places it exclusively in the domain of overly strong and rigid signifiers. This takes away its ludic and relaxing character, which it had across the full range of interlocutors. I have tried to show that this kind of multifaceted positioning of phe-

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nomena within the city of Pula is mapped out along generational lines. This definitely guarantees its survival through the changes in meanings and practices that it presupposes. It is therefore inseparable from such transgenerational insights into its meanings. It is important to note that tapija also denotes difference, i.e. distinction, given that it operates as a largely negative value judgement and as a source of positive indulgence, while sometimes also defining a state of relaxation. The latter usage brings us to the concept of enacting tapija as active non-doing, or the previously mentioned ‘doing nothing’. This does not mean lethargy and apathy but precisely the opposite – it points to a relaxing of everyday obligations and a whole range of micro-socially important actions, dynamics and situations, such as socializing, meeting up, organizing, agreeing and negotiating, all of which had their own strong spatial originary point in Pula’s past. Here, of course not exclusively, but in many aspects, Korzo, the main street along which people stroll in the city centre, can be interpreted as an originary point of that space of ‘doing nothing’. Based on the interlocutors’ comments, we can here suppose that if they did not oppose it, then they at least found a sanctuary from the everyday rhythm of work and education: My growing up, coming of age on the scene, it started with Korzo in the 1950s and 1960s, beneath čokolatina or ladonje [a tree with a dense treetop]. From tree trunk to tree trunk. The first trend, and then the second or third where we went up and down [Korzo] and got to know each other. This was the equivalent of what social networks or Facebook are today. And then the 1980s arrived. Korzo was still fashionable, but there was a small shift – from Korzo to the wall of Kluz, and this was followed by punk [pankerija] and so on . . . it was possible to go up and people would head off to Kaštel, in front of the archaeological museum and the small Roman theatre, where people would sniff glue and smoke weed. And here there was this kind of semitrend of going to Generalturist [a travel agency] and the Partizan cinema; it was a nice stop and the punk scene started there, but here people had a different relationship to tapija! Tapija was everything – time, state, system and school. The punk period that exploded; . . . but it was also because the old man [Tito] had died. Tito had died, but an opening up was in the air – policemen didn’t mess you around any more, are you this, are you that, everyone was more-or-less nervous, but that tapija was the bad version, but on the other hand it was also the good version. It’s going well for us, tapija your mothers’ cunt, we are joking around, smoking a joint, the sun is shining, we are well fed and we don’t give a . . . ( J.P. I., interview, italics A.M.)

Thus, before we ‘determine’ tapija as part of a series of powerful signifiers, such as arrogance, vanity, apathy, resignation or perhaps powerless-

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ness, it is worth taking into account its potential for the ironic reversal of the same signifiers and situations. This is surely a possibility that draws its power from the fact that we are mainly dealing here with an oral and fluid phenomenon, widely codified in meanings and domains of application. As such, this phenomenon could be viewed as produced, tentatively speaking, as a result or effect of leisure and the ‘production of non-productivity’ (cf. Agamben 2014: 130–31). Its utterance or assertion can therefore convey – and I hold this to be particularly important – a feigning of powerlessness and resignation, acting, and to some degree, a performative lethargy and apathy, at the same time as ‘condemning’ such a state of affairs, at least among some interlocutors. This is the full sense of the conclusion that tapija really can negate the ‘city’, a ‘situation’ or ‘event’, but that at the same time this ‘city’, ‘situation’ or ‘event’ can be experienced as identified, ‘sheltered’ or ‘discovered’ in this ‘negation’. I believe that one of the results of such a split is the flow of time and its rhythm in the city. As I have shown, among other things, this is a result of contemporary economic motions and the rotational dynamic of seasonal work and the tertiary sector. Henri Lefebvre writes how ‘social practice is made up of rhythms – daily, monthly, yearly and so on. That these rhythms have become more complicated than natural rhythms is highly probable. A powerful unsettling factor in this regard is the practico-social dominance of linear over cyclical repetition – that is to say, the dominance of one aspect of rhythms over another’ (Lefebvre 1991: 206). Yet, compared to other coastal tourist locations, does linear time dominate cyclical time more in Pula? It is more likely that those two rhythms of time’s passing co-exist: the linear and cyclical rhythm of presence and absence, everyday obligations, the filling and emptying of public spaces and surfaces in the city centre, and a kind of predictable weather cycle that has a powerful influence on them. This coexistence is a specific amalgam of the linear and the repetitive, a predictable experience of time. The collective rhythm of life in agrarian societies and that among those who live off seasonal tourism actually resemble one another. The winter tapija, in that sense – let me remind you – can and must be interpreted as a result of economic tendencies in the city that emerge from the ‘over-expression of the summer’ (M.B., interview). It would be especially interesting to gain better insights into the coexistence of friction between such a fundamental over-expression of the tourist season and the previously mentioned arrogance that, in a somewhat different context, certain other interlocutors emphasized during the research: I found it weird, when I was fifteen, sixteen years old, how older people always loved to say, to me and my sister, that we were well-brought up.

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Terribly well-brought up, but in my family they curse when they argue, everyone swears, but no, you are unbelievably well-brought up. You know, I also play the violin, I do performances on the road and I drink, you know, you can find me drunk, but no, you are well-brought up! Actually, I realized that there’s an inherent coarseness, roughness, an acerbic quality to communication in Pula. One kind of extreme indecency, or the avoidance of decency. You are really weird if you say thank you. It is a class thing, and again linked with these authoritarian, military narratives and families . . . How many of our friends in Pula had a father who was in the military – you know, he is a major – ‘how did you do that, fucking hell!’ You know, that principle, he had to be heard! It’s just how he communicates. There’s that kind of model of roughness, harshness. (B.K., interview, italics A.M.)

This detected layer of arrogance within a roughness in Pula could be a question of class belonging, style, subcultural belonging and ways of communicating. Irrespective of its source, in its link here with tapija, it might be worth understanding it as a counterpoint to the proclaimed, general Istrian ‘comfortable life’, ‘simplicity’ and, in the encroaching tourism-related vocabulary, ‘hospitality’. This counterpoint can be interpreted on several levels as it is not precisely coded, it has not been recorded, and it is therefore not systematized. This lack of form and, above all, an ‘inconsistency of content’, will be ‘that something’ left undefined in the entire range of policies and proclamations about courtesy based on policies of positive and commodified experiences, and especially those related to material heritage.3 Tapija does not necessarily entail their opposite and a lack of experience – to the contrary. But it can mean a drowning in ‘emptiness and vanity’, ‘boredom and alienation’, or simply an experience of ‘lameness and arrogance’, and therefore a much more difficult-to-achieve commodification of this and such parts of life. If, for example, Czechs have codified lítost in their literary canon with Milan Kundera,4 and the Portuguese have succeeded in creating an entire recognizable brand through the nationalization of yearning and saudade,5 the concept of Pula’s tapija, as a local specificity, has still not succumbed to the various trends and attempts at its commodification and definition. Thus, with regard to its wider detection, the same principle holds as for the historiographical discovery of feelings of boredom that remained hidden and overlooked, such as those in colonial Great Britain: Scholars have overlooked the pervasiveness of imperial boredom because they have depended too much on official biographies, best-selling novels and articles in popular press, all of them akin to imperial propaganda. It

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is largely when reading against the grain of published memoirs and travel logs, supplemented by private diaries and letters that were in all likelihood never intended for publication, that the extent to which monotony and melancholy characterized imperial service emerges (Auerbach 2005: 286)

Tracing such a ‘reading between the lines’ and detecting the ‘unofficial and everyday’, ethnographies search for ‘implicit social knowledge’ (Taussig, according to van de Port 1999: 21), described by Mattijs van de Port as an ‘underground reservoir of knowledge in a society . . . In its vagueness and intangibility, implicit social knowledge is everything that social scientists who define research as an empirical fact-finding mission would want to avoid. Yet to do so would be to deny the enormous power of this motivational force in the lives of individuals and groups’ (van de Port 1999: 21–22).6 Along similar lines, Michael Herzfeld uses the term disemia – ‘the formal or coded tension between official self-presentation and what goes on in the privacy of collective introspection’ (2005: 14). I believe that this space of ‘introspection’, ‘implicitness’ and the ‘rare official articulations’ in particular are the ‘first matter’ (materia prima) located and researched here: the affect and concept of tapija closely linked to Pula and a number of Pula inhabitants, which almost never goes beyond the threshold of implicit levels of ‘implication’ or ‘codification’. It almost never passes over into ‘explicitness’, ‘elaboration’, ‘decodification’, or into the corpus of official knowledge about Pula and its inhabitants, as validated through the repeated mentioning or, more importantly, exposition of tapija in a wider system of academic and artistic production, or perhaps through a tourist offering on the growing market of experiences.7 In this sense, the project Pula+2020 not only represents a significant attempt at redirecting this trend away from implicit knowledge about tapija towards its explicit version, but rather indicates the existence of this phenomenon to a wider audience. It is also an attempt at finding a common denominator for all Pula inhabitants. In this all-encompassing ‘embrace’ of tapija, the bid book even mentioned James Joyce, and to the final question in the application, in which you can ‘add any further comments that you deem necessary in relation with your application’, in the chapter named ‘Additional Details’, a short reply entitled ‘Joyce’s Tapija’ was written out, along with a list of the better-known passages from his New Year’s letter (2016: 5). There appear to be particularly broad links between tapija and the cited content from Joyce’s letters at the beginning of this book, especially in relation to experiences or the detection of ‘seclusion’ and boredom in Pula and Istria during the nineteenth century in the Austro-Hungarian

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Army. These also characterized Zadar and Dalmatia as the ‘Austrian Siberia or the Austrian Albania’ (Knight and Barry, cited in Jezernik 2007: 81). However, it is difficult to show that they can be directly displayed as identical in meaning, without a wider social and cultural contextualization. This is because, as I previously stated, this book can also be understood as a retrospective response to such a rash qualifying and codifying of Pula and Istria. This reply chiefly entails an attempt at a somewhat different interpretation of rather well-nested and well-known facts, such as the contents of Joyce’s and Cankar’s letters,8 as an original source of the codification of local, Pula boredom and the affect that has passed through the city, at least during part of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, through the significant changes caused by political, social and economic developments. With regard to Joyce’s characterization of Pula, some contemporary interpretations will once again establish a boomerang effect, and some interlocutors will argue that ‘when a boring writer writes about a boring city, it means nothing’ (G.P., interview). In an interpretive chain imbued with resistance, the sculpture of James Joyce in Pula also partly deserves a place. It was erected in 2003, because the reply by the back-of-God-speed place, the former maritime Siberia, was to make a sculpture of him and capture his presence in public space, in the city centre. In taking a slightly different interpretive angle from the official narrative, we can see this as contradicting the writer’s wish to leave. This is, in fact, the situation that I labelled an unnamed, symbolic vendetta in the previous text. It replies to Joyce’s letter with a sculpture, and to his departure and escape with his ‘eternal’ and coerced ‘remaining’. His boredom, besides its recognition in Kierkegaard’s generalizing epithet of an English tourist ‘whose total resource of language consists of a single monosyllable, an interjection with which he indicates his highest admiration and his deepest indifference’, (Kierkegaard 1987: 290), perhaps says something of the change in status that followed his arrival in Pula. The resolution of questions about how to get by and make a living was permitted by the new context in which he was immersed, which he experienced as ‘out of the way’ and ‘boring’. This was also a question of the encroaching modernity to which the feeling of boredom would be linked as one of its symptoms. Thus, if we place today’s tapija on that level and view it through the prism of the possibilities of leisure and at least somewhat, for some of my interlocutors, not having to worry about how to get by, it is worth noting who codifies it, asserts it, utters and detects it, as part of a widely understood system, primarily of the production of popular culture, with it being used as a synecdoche to link together the whole city. The replies point to another kind of present-day modernity, and to the scope, in-

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tensity and range of critiques that can be and are made. These critiques in and of Pula exist and survive in their own typical style of articulation. Irrespective of whether we comprehend it as ‘arrogance’, ‘vanity’, ‘irony’, ‘distinction’ or perhaps ‘boredom’ and ‘ennui’, tapija is one derivative of a critical attitude that – today almost always – pretends that states, processes and situations cannot change. Such a process, locally in Pula, reminds its residents of the immediate symbolic capital of the kind of assertion that tapija can deliver. Yet it also points to a wider crisis of the subject, whose local and especially situated articulation in the here and now is an attempt to compensate for it.

Notes 1. Part of the presentation and discussion is available via the following link: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap3oaRNtdes. 2. This boomerang effect can be traced in one interlocutor’s already-mentioned assertion that he would actually twist ‘that judgement on tapija [back] on the person who utters it!’ (A.A., interview). This extends to the sometimes powerfully expressed opinion that the project Pula+2020 ‘went for that specificity of tapija, but they did not define what tapija was anywhere. The entire problem – as I saw it – is that those good things that were inside it, had been broken up through that infernal tapija, because it had been used a lot to pump it up [nju se puno furalo unutra]’ ( J.P.I., interview). 3. For example, this was the case with a promotional video by the Tourist Board entitled ‘Wonderful Istria’, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI8k856WKt0. 4. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera devoted a chapter to the term lítost, which ‘is an untranslatable Czech word. It encompasses a wide range of feelings, like a stretched-out accordion, or a feeling that is a mixture of many feelings: grief, pity, yearning and self-reproachment. Its first syllable, which is long and stressed, sounds like the wail of an abandoned dog’. Certain translations of the book into Croatian translate lítost as ojađenost, as a ‘a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery’ (Kundera 2001: 137–81). 5. João Leal writes that saudade can be loosely translated as ‘“homesickness”, “nostalgia”, “missing someone (or something) beloved”, “remembering (and longing for) a past state of well being”, etc., and all the people I mentioned that word – or shall I say concept? – have used it to stress the main features they attribute to Portuguêseness. According to them, the Portuguese possess a particular feeling, unknown to other cultures, called saudade, which is a unique mixture of sadness and passion, of past memories and imagined hopes’ (Leal 2000: 268). But saudade also has its own history of commodification as a national project, i.e. ‘Ethnic psychology: something non-replaceable that “the Portuguese” possessed and “others” did not, something truly “ours” that defined “The Portuguese” as different from the “rest” . . . Portuguese ethnic psychology was, first of all, structured – following Teófilo Braga’s ideas – around feelings. The nation as a collective individual was thus regarded as an emotional entity’ (ibid.: 273–74). For a comparison of saudade and the Romanian feeling of dor (loneliness and alienation), see Teletin and Manole 2015.

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6. It is interesting that van de Port attempts to understand lumpovanje, or ‘the peculiar musical and extra-musical communication between Serbs and Gypsies during bacchic celebrations’ (1999: 7), in his research, while tapija, in at least one of its meanings, can be defined by the absence of fun and debauchery in public space. Yet the meanings of both phenomena are nested under the common denominator of the knowledge’s implicit quality. But while the ‘obstinate Others’ who van de Port came across ‘fiercely denied the possibility of intercultural understanding’ (ibid.: 8), my research into tapija was largely marked by the ‘enormous permeability of the concept researched’, and so a significant number of conversations passed over into ‘sharing authority’ (Raleigh Yow 2005: 2), with interlocutors engaging in the process of a joint search for possible domains of the meanings and definitions of tapija. Such a situation surely points to the fact that one need not always travel far to come across foreign or simply untangleable concepts, ideas or worldviews. Sometimes staying in one’s own city, and viewing well-known phenomena from a different angle, is enough. 7. Among academic sources, I managed to find a text that mentioned this term casually, as part of the ‘Pula slang with a negative connotation’ (Kalčić 2012: 73). In addition, let me remind you of the aforementioned Tapija Skate Contest, held in 2016 and 2017 in the skate park that is part of the former military barracks, Karlo Rojc. There was also an amateur film entitled Tapija, filmed by the citizen association Bendovi istrijanske scene, BIS (bands from the Istrian scene). I contend that these latter examples speak in favour of the ‘taken-for-grantedness’ of the knowledge about which I am writing here. 8. Various publications on Pula also partly show that the city, in relation to Joyce, will almost always be labelled as boring, with the manner of an unavoidable commonplace. Along those lines, the writer Dragan Velikić, in the novel The North Wall, a work that writes of Joyce’s life in the Austro-Hungarian military port, assigns the following sentences to certain characters: ‘Marta said that Pula is boring, and that she reads a lot. She can’t wait for summer, to leave for her cousin’s home in Trieste. Amalija noticed that Pula is boring, but that the city is getting more lively day by day’ (2017: 67). ‘James feels the gentle pine canopy, its scent and pungency, as a kind of grand canopy that protects that boring city, which he ended up in by chance’ (ibid.: 111). Writer Zdravko Zima reminds us similarly: ‘Joyce didn’t keep quiet enough in Pula, he declared that city and region to be a maritime Siberia. But we should not think bad of him for that, especially as he didn’t describe his native Ireland rosily either’ (2017: 270). While this information is completely accurate, what is largely missing in its repetition here is, it seems to me, the broader spirit of the time in which it was generated, as well as the more significant marking of Joyce’s altered social status, which that boredom can point to.

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Interviews A.A., born 1977, interview conducted on 9 March 2017. I.Y., born 1976, interview conducted on 13 March 2017. B.B., born 1962, interview conducted on 13 March 2017. B.K., born 1976, interview conducted on 16 March 2017. N.H., born 1976, interview conducted on 21 March 2017. M.B., born 1976, interview conducted on 21 March 2017. A.S., born 1994, interview conducted on 27 March 2017. L.G., born 1995, interview conducted on 27 March 2017. A.V., born 1996, interview conducted on 27 March 2017. S.K., born 1994, interview conducted on 27 March 2017. E.Č., born 1985, interview conducted on 30 March 2017. R.P., born 1991, interview conducted on 30 March 2017. S.S., born 2000, interview conducted on 31 March 2017. Dž.D., born 1998, interview conducted on 31 March 2017. S.A., born 2000, interview conducted on 31 March 2017. N.O., born 2000, interview conducted on 31 March 2017. K.S., born 1998, interview conducted on 31 March 2017. S.S., born 2001, interview conducted on 31 March 2017. E.L., born 2001, interview conducted on 31 March 2017. L.Š., born 2000, interview conducted on 31 March 2017. N.Ž., born 1998, interview conducted on 31 March 2017. G.P., born 1955, interview conducted on 17 August and 15 November 2017. L.P., born 1959, interview conducted on 17 August and 15 November 2017. J.P.I., born 1951, interview conducted on 26 September 2017. I.M., born 1989, personal correspondence, 20 January 2018. D.M., born 1991, personal correspondence, 20 January 2018. R.M., born 1991, personal correspondence, 23 January 2018. D.L., born 1994, personal correspondence, 24 January 2018. Discussion following the presentation Fenomenologija tapije [The Phenomenology of Tapija], Gradska radionica Pula, 17 August 2017.

References

102

Internet Sources ‘Fenomenologija tapije [The Phenomenology of Tapija]’. 2017. Gradska radionica – Vrtni đir: Andrea Matošević. Retrieved October 2017 from https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap3oaRNtdes. Fiamengo, Jakša. 2009. ‘The Fjaka, as a Specific State of Mind and Body’. Retrieved November 2017 from http://www.croatia.org/crown/articles/ 9842/1/Fjaka—-Between-Times.html. Govan, Fiona. 2012. ‘Spanish Scientists Prove the Siesta is Good for You’, Telegraph, 7 August 2012. Retrieved November 2017 from http://www .telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/spain/9458799/Spanish-scien tists-prove-the-siesta-is-good-for-you-and-issue-guidelines-for-a-perfectnap.html. ‘Grad Pula’. Retrieved May 2017 from http://www.pula.hr. ‘Novi Izraz – tapija’. 2010. Novi Izraz website. Retrieved February 2017 from http://blog.dnevnik.hr/noviizraz/2010/05/1627648001/tapija.html. ‘Official tourist website of the Istria Tourist Board’. Retrieved May 2017 from http://www.istra.hr. ‘Otvoreni grad 2016’. 2016. Društvo arhitekata Istre – Società architetti dell’ Istria. Retrieved June 2017 from http://dai-sai.hr/web/?p=5593. ‘Pasmaters, Unload Your Pain’. Retrieved November 2017 from https://pasmaters.bandcamp.com/album/unload-your-pain. ‘Tapija’. 2010. Retrieved February 2017 from https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=6H2QGlaApUI&t=456s. ‘Tourist arrivals and overnights in Istria 2016–2007’. Retrieved June 2017 from http://www.istra.hr/hr/pr/statistika/arhiv. ‘Wonderful Istria’ 2013. Istria Tourist Board. Retrieved October 2017 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI8k856WKt0. ‘Žargonaut – tapija’. 2011. Žargonaut website. Retrieved February 2017 from http://www.zargonaut.com/tapija.

Films Grad izobilja. 2013. Mladen Medić and Zlatko Gotovac. Prašina svakodnevnog života. 2011. Danilo – Lola Ilić and Marko Jovanović.

Other Dnevnik HTV, 22 August 2008. Hrvatska uživo, 16 June 2011. KUD Idijoti, Mi smo ovdje samo zbog para, Helidon, 1990.

Index

absence of fun (a meaning of tapija), 93n6 acedia as apathy, 54 as dangerous emotion, 55 as melancholy, 53–54 acting (furaš se), 46n24 affective suffering, 64 alienation (from tapija), 79–83, 85n10 allochrony, 10 apathy, 17, 48n36, 54, 73n18, 76, 87–88 Ara, Angelo, 41n1 Arabian Nights, 57 Arambašin Slišković, Tatjana, 7–8, 41n2, 42n4 The Arcades Project (Benjamin), 53, 55, 58 aristocracy, 47n33 arrogance, with tapija, 86–89 Art & Music Festival (Pula), 25–26, 48n34 Aschenbach, Gustav, 41n2 audiences, 21–26, 29, 39, 46n29 Auerbach, Jeffrey, 56–57, 89–90 Austro-Hungary, x, 5, 42n6, 90–91, 93n8 bad recurrence (a meaning of tapija), 26–27 bad weather (a meaning of tapija), 45n20, 53

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 72n15 Balkans, 20–21, 70n7 Balota, Mate, 69n6 Barnacle, Nora, 7–8, 42n4 Barry, Phillips, 45n18 belonging to object (objectzugehörig), 63 belonging to subject (subjektbezogen), 63 Benjamin, Walter, 26–28, 49n44, 50n49 on boredom, 53, 55–56, 58, 60, 69nn3–4 in discourse, 61 Berlitz School of Languages, 7 bezveze (stupid, crazy, rubbish), 11 blackouts, 35 Bloch, Ernst, 85n11 The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Kundera), 92n4 boredom existential, 65 ideological, 55–56 imperial, 89–90 from nature, 27–29, 33–36, 41 philosophy of, 79–80 from weather, 26–34, 44n16, 45n20, 48n39, 52n54, 88 boredom (a meaning of tapija), ix, 11, 33–34 Benjamin on, 53, 55–56, 58, 60, 69nn3–4 chronic, 55

104

critique of, 92 foreboding in, 67–68 with friends, 5 for Heidegger, 53, 58, 71n9 after industrial revolution, 54–55 in interaction, 14 for Joyce, J., 93n8 local understanding of, 59–68 middle-class, 65–66 in modern era, 41 overuse of, 71n10 in Pula, 90–91 robotic nature of, 62–63 in social phenomenology, 25–26 social stigma of, 72n14 from socioeconomics, 63–64 thinking about, 3 weather and, 28 boredom (ennui), 53–54, 67, 92 boring (langweilig), 63 boring, pathetic person (a meaning of tapija), 11 Bourdieu, Pierre, 21, 23, 47n31, 60 Burke, Peter, 45n18 Burton, Richard, 57 call for change (a meaning of tapija), 82 Cankar, Ivan, 8–9, 16–17, 41n2, 43n11, 57, 91 Ciscutti, Pietro, 69n6 City of Abundance (Grad izobilja), 48n36 city spirit (a meaning of tapija), 15–16, 35–36, 60 city spirit (Geist der Stadt), 57 class in communication, 89 consumption, 63–64 cosmopolitan, 26, 69n6 divisions, 64–65 middle-class, 65–66 mimicry, 25 tapija as, 74, 81–83 climate. See weather

Index

communication, 32, 88–89 consumption class, 63–64 cosmopolitan class, 26, 69n6 Critical Companion to James Joyce (Fargnoli/Gillespie), 41n1 critique (tapija as), 19, 22–26, 38, 79–80 philosophy of, 63 self-criticism, 40–41 of tapija boredom, 92 Croatia cities in, 48n39 ethnographic writing from, 77 history of, x–xi Portugal compared to, 44n15 Socialist, 48n37 tapija slang in, 45n20 tourism in, 36 youth culture of, 33–34 Croatian Language Dictionary, 10–11 cryptic nature, of tapija, 29–30, 49n43 culture. See specific topics Čvrljak, Mate, 70n8 cyclicity, 62 cynicism, in Pula, 23–24 daemon meridianus (noon-day demon), 53–54 dangerous emotion (acedia), 55 dead thing (mrtvilo), 5 Death in Venice (Mann), 41n2 Denison, William, 56–57 deserto (empty), 10 Dictionary of the Croatian Language, 10–11 differentia specifica of Pula (a meaning of tapija), 76, 81–82 đir (way of life), 20–22, 45n19 distinction (tapija as), 20–21, 26, 30, 45n19, 63, 87 doing nothing, 13, 32, 50n48, 87 dosadan si (you are boring), 45n19 došljaci (newcomers), 2 double opposition, 21

Index

dreariness, 35 drink at the tapija (piti na tapiju), 18 drugs, 55 Dublin, Ireland, 16 Duraković, Lada, 25 economic marginalization, 64 education, 87 elitism, with tapija, 24, 66–67 emergence, of tapija as slang, 1–2, 15, 17–18, 20–21, 44n17, 45n19 empty (deserto), 10 Engels, Friedrich, 55–56, 69n2 ennui (boredom), 53–54, 67, 92 entropy (a meaning of tapija), 33 ethnographic writing, 77, 89–90 ethnopoetics, 43n14 Europe, 15–16, 45n18, 47n32 existential boredom, 65 fado (music genre), 44n15 fancy (šminkerski), 45n19 Fargnoli, Nicholas, 41n1 Fažana (Istria), 11 feeling bored (neću tapijariti), 66, 68 fjaka (specific state of mind and body), 44n15 flâneur (stroller), 49n44, 50n49 Fordism, 56 foreboding, in tapija, 67–68 foreigners (furešti), 45n20 Fratarski otok (island), 29, 49n40 fulfillment, 22 Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (Heidegger), 58 furaš se (acting), 46n24 furešti (foreigners, tourists), 45n20 futility (a meaning of tapija), 13 Geist der Stadt (city spirit), 57 Gillespie, Patrick, 41n1 gloom, 35 Grad izobilja (City of Abundance), 48n36

105

graffiti, xii Gramsci, Antonio, 3, 13–14, 43n12 Habermas, Jürgen, 85n11 Han, Byung-Chul, 49n43 Hanson, Stephen, 51n52 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 67–68, 79–80 Heidegger, Martin, 53, 58, 61–63, 66–67, 71n9 Herzfeld, Michael, 90 historical documents, 18–19 Hodges, Andrew, xii homesickness (a meaning of saudade), 92n5 hope, 66 humor, 5 hunger, 72n15 ideological boredom, 55–56 imperial boredom, 89–90 incubation (langeweile), 65, 68 individuality, 30 informal knowledge, 30 informal phenomenon, of tapija, ix, 9 as city spirit, 38–39 communication in, 32 elitism in, 66–67 inseparability as, 27–28 as knowledge base, 3–4 problems with, 78–79 production of, 88 in Pula, 86–87 research on, 75 time related to, 34–35 inseparability (a meaning of tapija), 27–28, 63 invoking tapija, 86 Ireland, 16 irony (tapija as), 12–13, 34, 39, 74, 92 from alienation, 80–81 by comparison, 5, 87–88 self-irony within, 65–66

106

Isnenghi, Mario, 31, 49n44 istapijariti se (tapija-ing as much as possible), 18 Istria (region), ix–xi, 5 culture of, 25, 30–31, 43n11, 49n41, 50n47, 51n51, 83n1 dialect of, 52n57 economy of, 35–36, 84n5 Fažana in, 11 history of, 42n6, 90–91, 92n3, 93n7 people of, 8, 21, 73n16, 81 politics of, 16–17, 51n50 reputation of, 7, 9–11, 34, 57–58, 61, 66 seclusion in, 90–91 tourism in, 37, 48n39, 51n53, 89 Žminjština, 73n16 Italy, x, 52n57 joking around (zezancije), 5 Joyce, James, 16–17, 42n4, 43n11 letters, 7–8, 10, 41n1, 44n16, 70n8, 90–91 as professor, 42n3 on Pula, 7–10, 57–59 reputation of, 70nn7–8, 90–91 tapija for, 90–91, 93n8 Joyce, Stanislaus, 7 Kama Sutra, 57 Kierkegaard, Søren, 56–58, 91 Kilani, Mondher, 44n16 knowledge in aristocracy, 47n33 base, 3–4 discourse of, 16–17 half-knowledge, 19 informal, 30 Korzo (city center) for doing nothing, 87 for locals, 32–33, 35, 45n20 for youth culture, 50n47 KUD Idijoti (band), 49n42 Kundera, Milan, 89, 92n4

Index

labour (work), 55, 69n2, 79–80 lame (lameness), 11, 13, 17–18, 20, 74, 82, 89 langeweile (incubation), 65, 68 Language and Symbolic Power (Bourdieu), 47n31 langweilig (boring), 63 Leal, João, 92n5 Lefebvre, Henri, 32–33, 85n11, 88 leisure, 44n15, 55, 63, 66, 69n3, 88, 91 leisure, with tapija, 91–92 lethargy, 88 Letters (Ivan Cankar), 8–9, 16–17, 41n2, 43n11, 57, 91 Letters (James Joyce), 7–8, 10, 41n1, 44n16, 70n8, 90–91 litost (remorse), 89, 92n4 living in Pula experience (pulska tapija), 18 lumpovanje (peculiar musical connection), 93n6 Magris, Claudio, 41n1 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 12–13, 43n10 Mann, Thomas, 41n2 Marcuse, Herbert, 85n11 marenda (snack), 65 maritime Siberia (Pula as), 91, 93n8 Marxism, 79–80, 85n9, 85n11 mass tourism, 30 Matošević, Andrea, 8, 40, 82–83 meanings, of tapija, ix, 10–11. See also specific meanings absence of fun, 93n6 apathy, 17 bad recurrence, 26–27 bad weather, 45n20, 53 boredom, ix boring, pathetic person, 11 call for change, 82 city spirit, 15–16, 35–36, 60 class, 74, 81–83 descriptor, 42n9

Index

differentia specifica of Pula, 76, 81–82 entropy, 33 fulfillment, 22 futility, 13 going out, 31–32 half-knowledge, 19 lack of possibility, 36 not caring, 39 not doing, 43n11, 87 openness, 33 permanent, 47n30 possibility, 51n50 repetition, 38–39, 58 reply, 83 shallowness, 72n12 sociocultural ambience, 33–34 superficiality, 72n12 taken-for-grantedness, 93n7 unwillingness, 12, 17, 74 melancholy, 9, 73n17, 90 melancholy (acedia), 53–54 memory, 4, 20, 35, 44n15, 45n19, 50n47 metaphor (a meaning of tapija), 60 middle-class boredom (a meaning of tapija), 65–66 military life, 56–57, 90–91 Mirković, Mijo, 69n6 modernity, 91–92 mrtvilo (dead thing), 5 Murray, Josephine, 7 music, 21–26, 48nn34–37, 49n42, 50n47 fado, 44n15 KUD Idijoti, 49n42 lumpovanje, 93n6 narcissism, with tapija, 41, 43n13, 86–87 nature (source of boredom), 27–29, 33–36, 41 neću tapijariti (feeling bored), 66, 68 neglected space, 50n46

107

negligence in self-perception (sprezzatura), 24 newcomers (došljaci), 2 New Wave music, 26, 48n37 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 20 noon-day demon (daemon meridianus), 53–54 The North Wall (Velikić), 93n8 objectzugehörig (belonging to object), 63 O’Neill, Bruce, 50n48, 58, 64 openness (a meaning of tapija), 33 optimism, 66 oral phenomenon, of tapija, ix, 3–5, 9–10, 39–41 orderliness, 51n50 ordinary audience (pūblicum), 23–24 out and about people (u điru), 20 pankerija (punks), 46n29 The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire (Benjamin), 26 Partibrejkersi (band), 22 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 9–10, 16–17, 42nn7–8 passivity, in Pula, 76–79, 81 pathetic person (a meaning of tapija), 11 people who are tapija (tapijaroš), 16, 18, 43n11, 67 perception, of time, 33–39 performances, 23–24 personal correspondence, 45n19 Pešić-Golubović, Zagorka, 80 Petrović, Gajo, 79, 85n9 phenomenon. See informal phenomenon; oral phenomenon Phillips, James, 68 philosophy of alienation, 79–80 spontaneous, 43n12 tapija, 2–3, 13–14

108

of tapija critique, 63 winter in, 52n54 Philosophy of Boredom (Svendsen), 79–80 Pićanština community, 81 piti na tapiju (drink at the tapija), 18 Portugal, 44n15 possibility (a meaning of tapija), 33–34, 36, 51n50 Potkonjak, Sanja, 43n10, 64, 72n14 Praxis School, 80, 85n11 Prison Notebooks (Gramsci), 13 private space, 30–31 public space, 30–31, 49n44, 50n45 pūblicum (ordinary audience), 23–24 Pula+2020 (project EU Capital of Culture), 74–77, 81, 84nn5–6, 90, 92n2 badge for, 83, 84n4 diversity in, 30 tapija in, 24 Pula bid book, 77–78, 84n6, 90 Pula, Croatia. See specific topics Pula Film Festival, x–xi, 5, 31, 46n26 Puležani (residents of Pula), 1–5, 6n1, 73n18 pulska tapija (living in Pula experience), 18 punks ( pankerija), 46n29 Redfield, Robert, 43n13 remorse (lítost), 89, 92n4 repetition (a meaning of tapija), 38–39, 59 reply (a meaning of tapija), 83 Rojc (Karlo Rojc, former barracs, today Community Centre), xi, 19–20, 38, 43n11, 93n7 rubbish (bezveze), 11 ruggine (rusty), 42n7 Salzani, Carlo, 69n3 saudade as homesickness, 92n5 as yearning, 44n15, 89

Index

Scandal Express (bar), 29 sculptures, 70n8 seclusion, 90–91 secrětu(m), 29 self-criticism, 40–41 semantic platform, tapija as, 16–21 sex, 55 shallowness (a meaning of tapija), 72n12 shock work (udarnički), 51n52 Sitte, Camillo, 50n45 Škokić, Tea, 64, 77 slang, tapija as in Croatia, 45n20 emergence of, 1–2, 11–12, 15, 20–21, 44n17, 45n19 oral phenomenon of, 39–41 in postcards, 83n1 research on, 93n7 understanding of, 29–30 Sloterdijk, Peter, 1, 30–31 šminkerski (fancy), 45n19 snack (marenda), 65 Socialist Croatia, 48n37 social phenomenology, 25–26 social stigma, of tapija, 72n14 sociocultural ambience (a meaning of tapija), 33–34 specific state of mind and body ( fjaka), 44n15 sprezzatura (negligence in selfperception), 24 state of being (a meaning of tapija), ix–xi state of mind (a meaning of tapija), 12, 18, 75, 84n4 stroller (flâneur), 49n44, 50n49 stupid (bezveze), 11 subjektbezogen (belonging to subject), 63 summer generational differences with, 52n56 as not tapija, 61 tourism in, 52n55

Index

winter compared to, 36–38, 48n38, 51n51 superficiality (a meaning of tapija), 72n12 Šuràn, Fulvio, 52n54 Svendsen, Lars, 14, 79–80 taken-for-grantedness (a meaning of tapija), 93n7 tapija. See also specific topics alienation from, 79–83 arrogance with, 87–89 with audiences, 29 class divisions in, 64–65 cryptic nature of, 29–30, 49n43 elitism with, 24, 66–67 essence of, 4 in ethnographic writing, 89–90 experiences of, 1–2, 18 foreboding in, 67–68 generational uses of, 19–20, 24 in historical documents, 18–19 humor within, 5 importance of, 5 individuality related to, 30 inseparability with, 27–28, 63 intensity of meaning with, 71n11 in Italian language, 52n57 for Joyce, J., 90–91, 93n8 judgment of, 92n2 leisure with, 91–92 in memory, 4 mentality, 77–78 as metaphor for Pula, 60–61 narcissism with, 41, 43n13, 86–87 philosophy, 2–3, 13–14 in poker terminology, 42n5 relationship of Pula and inhabitants, ix research on, 12–15, 75, 93n7 spectacularization of, 77–78 as state of mind, 75 vanity with, 86–87 in written language, 18 in youth culture, 45n19, 72n13

109

Tapija (film), 93n7 Tapija Festival, 75–76 tapija-ing as much as possible (istapijariti se), 18 tapijaroš (people who are tapija), 16, 18, 43n11, 67 Taylorism, 56 Thompson, Edward Palmer, 36–37 time, 33–39 Tito, Josip Broz, 46n26, 87 Toohey, Peter, 55–56 tourism for culture, 17–18, 37–38, 52n54, 88–89 for economy, x, 34, 36, 51n51, 62 furešti, 45n20 globalization of, 69n5 in Istria, 37, 48n39, 51n53, 89 mass, 30 in Pula, 69n6 in summer, 52n55 travel in, 69n5 in winter, 34, 88–89 travel, 69n5 Turkey, 16 Turkish language, 16, 21 udarnički (shock work), 51n52 u điru (out and about people), 20 Uljanik rock club, 22 unwillingness (a meaning of tapija), 12, 17, 74 urban fabric, of Pula, ix vanity, with tapija, 86–87 Velikić, Dragan, 93n8 vocabulary, in language, 1–2 Vranicki, Predrag, 85n8 way of life (đir), 20–22, 45n19 weather (source of boredom), 26–34, 44n16, 45n20, 48n39, 52n54, 88 weather subordination, 37–38 winter (source of tapija)

Index

110

audiences in, 39 climate, 48n39 cyclicity of, 62 generational differences with, 52n56 gloominess of, 28 in philosophy, 52n54 public gatherings in, 26–27 repetition of, 38–39 Scandal Express during, 29 summer compared to, 36–37, 48n38, 51n51 tourism in, 34, 88–89 Wolseley, Garnet, 56 work, 37–38, 87. See also tourism yearning (a meaning of saudade), 44n15, 89

you are boring (dosadan si), 45n19 youth culture communication with, 88–89 of Croatia, 33–34 energy of, 76–77 Korzo for, 50n47 middle-class boredom for, 65–66 music for, 24–25 tapija in, 45n19, 72n13 weather subordination for, 37–38 work for, 37–38 Yugoslavia, x, 47n33 Zagreb, 46n24 zezancije (joking around), 5 Zima, Zdravko, 93n8 Žminjština (Istria), 73n16