The document discusses the role of social media in student protests in Macedonia in March 2009 against plans to build an Orthodox church on the main city square. It explores concepts of belonging, identity, and universality in relation to the protests. Social media helped spread information about the planned protest and arguments against the church construction, but also inflamed reactions and allowed the government to more easily prosecute some protestors. The document examines oscillations between collective identities and particularities that were at stake during the protests.

1. Suzana Milevska 17.10.2009 Glocal: Inside New Media New York University Skopje Whatever Identities vs. Whatever Singularities

4. http://www.a1.com.mk/vesti/default.aspx?VestID=106431 The First Architectural Insurgence 28.03.2009, Skopje, Republic of Macedonia Initially the protests were imagined as calm and in advance announced protests of the students of the Faculty of Architecture who decided to raise their voice against the Government and the Constitutional Court for backing up the contested decision to build an Orthodox Church on the main Skopje square with public money and without consultation with the citizens or any decent public discussion.

13. 28.03.2009, the main square, Skopje Republic of Macedonia

16. A1 News, Terror over democracy, 29.03.2009 http://www.a1.com.mk/vesti/video.asp?Video=09/tepanje-28-03.wmv&VestID=106431

20. Related groups: Ne sakam crkva na plostad 7,455 members http:// www.facebook.com/event.php?eid =82168370468#/group.php?gid=23929081105 Prva Arhi Brigada, 4,768 members http:// www.facebook.com/event.php?eid =82168370468#/group.php?gid=61204922527

28. The phrase “Whatever singularities” for Agamben stands for “ belonging without belonging“, for a kind of universal " belonging of a belonging”

29. Such belonging should function without any specific attribute or property that usually defines belonging to a certain set or group.

30. Similarly Laclau rejects the possibility of formulating the Enlightenment notion of a totalising universal identity, and with it washes down the drain any project of uniting the world under a single banner of rationality. However he rejects any view of the world as a place populated by particular identity groups with no hope of commonality, as was according Agamben the students’ group in the Tiananmen Square during Chinese May protests.

31. Just as a reminder, for Agamben the most relevant distinction of the Tiananmen events (14 April-4 June1989) was the relative absence of determinate contents in the students’ demands (except the demand to mourn Hu Yaobang, an official who fought for reforms against corruption that died on 15 April).

33. For Laclau a radically alternative analysis of the relationship between universal and particular is needed, namely, a marriage between the two: they can’t live with each other, can’t live without each other, ‘ universality is incommensurable with any particularity but cannot, however, exist apart from the particular’ (Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s), p34).

34. Such paradox whose non-solution was already known in analytic philosophy (as ‘immanent universals’) is according to Laclau ‘ the very precondition of democracy’.

36. If democracy is possible, it is because the universal has no necessary body and no necessary content; different groups, instead, compete between themselves to temporarily claim the universal and to give to their particularisms a function of universal representation…. This for Laclau is ultimately the final failure of society to constitute itself as a society.

39. It is the shared negativity, the collective opposition of the emancipatory subjects that unites them against the dominant regime.

40. The naming of the emancipatory subjects or groups is not something that precedes the emancipatory struggle. When the various political agents come together to articulate the same demands against the oppressive regime the new political unity - the “people” emerges as something that is discursively constructed in this process of emancipatory struggle.

42. I want to argue that such oscillations not only may reconcile or subvert the “ representable condition of belonging” based on particularities but they also relativise the unconditional “ whatever” belonging. Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, 1992

44. My question on this occasion is actually how one negotiates such "belonging without belonging", and how one circumvents the requirements to abide to the particular belonging. Moreover, I want to call for the potentiality of not-to-belong that is not available to negotiations in the conditions where nation-states “govern too much”.

45. Here I refer to the contingency and potentiality of not-to-belong, following the Bartelbean formula “I-prefer-not-to” and thus I am trying to call into question the supremacy of the will to belong and the potentiality not-to-belong.

49. 02.02.2006, Cinema Kultura, Skopje

53. "To live in this pluralistic world means to experience freedom as a continual oscillation between belonging and disorientation." Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, 2002