Neue Slowenische Kunst in Lyon - Perspektive 2/2 (English version)
An interview with Alexei Monroe (*) :
"Alexei Monroe : Laibach and NSK 's aim is to make people "aware that totalitarianism
isn’t a discrete historical phenomenon which went on from let’s say 1933 to 1989
and then it’s over so let’s have a nice triumph of liberal democracy"
The Captain Spaulding's Bizarre Freaky Circus : Hello Alexei Monroe, you are well known in France for your work with Laibach and the NSK. Could you tell us how this first meeting in Lyon came about? How did you plan the event ?
Alexei Monroe : I’m not the actual organiser. Bertrand Thibert is the organiser and he invited me. This is a follow-up to the First Congress of NSK Citizens in Berlin which took place last October. Bertrand was one of the delegates to the Congress and he was one of the main activists. The Congress was a kind of experiment to bring citizens together for the first time to see what would happen, if they could reach common points of agreement and what they would like the state to become in the future. So Bertrand has taken the initiative to try and replicate one of the ideas which came out of the Congress which was that there should be local events for and by NSK citizens. So not by Neue Slowenische Kunst itself, not by the original artists, but by the activist citizens, and this is the first in that series.
Bertrand hopes that there will be others in Lyon. There is someone is Poland who would like to bring me to Warsaw, it is being discussed in Leipzig as well, there’s an NSK society as well. So the Congress was hopefully a kind of big bang event to try and decentralise the NSK State and force the NSK citizens to take more responsibility. Even tonight this is a sort of social, political experiment.
CSBFC : Speaking of the NSK, could you tell us how you are linked to the conceptual state?
I first discovered Laibach when I was 18 in 1987, so it has been a long time now, but seriously it has been the last 10 years let’s say. I'm not a member of Neue Slowenische Kunst but I am an associate and I cooperate with them.
Alexei Monroe : No, because I’m not sure that “utopia” itself can be described as achieved. If it is achieved, it is probably not utopian. Or at least, I don’t know of any example of a utopia which has been achieved which hasn’t lost any utopian quality in the process. It’s always in this of not quite being realised and not quite being realised in different times and different places by different people. But there is a set of basic principles underlying it which are not directly political. There is no program that you can follow. It was never a political front. It had the appearance of being a totalitarian organisation, but it never issues any orders. There is no program.
Nobody can actually prove their loyalty in a way, except by becoming a citizen and a citizen basically means that you agree with the principles. The principles are the ten basic rules of friendship which you can see in the passports. But they are not concrete in a way. So this is the issue that faced in Berlin.
The whole history of NSK and the history of my work with NSK is based on improbability, and the utopian side of improbability is in the political aspect. Because if you have the whole contemporary, technocratic, capitalist order, it is all about making things programmable, predictable, safe or normalised, actually preventing anything from breaking through unexpectedly, so any improbability. So any arts or system of thought that encourages people to manifest the improbable is valuable in that sense and to that extent it is utopian.
Alexei Monroeam :
You will see tonight. There will be NSK passport forms available. You can actually do it here and now simply by filling in the form, by paying the money, by going into that process. On the form and in the passports there are basic principles of NSK. By assuming citizenship you’re stating that agree with those principles and you are also stating that you don’t disagree with the work with Laibach and NSK have produced. They use some very controversial, painful, totalitarian symbolism, so by becoming a citizen, you are saying that you don’t disagree with those symbols being used in a new form and you are admitting the possibility that those images aren’t completely taboo and that they can be used for positive ends.
But what exactly it means depends on the citizen because there people have many attitudes to NSK, many interpretations of it. We found at the Congress in Berlin, that it was a big spectrum from Left, to Right, Social Democrat, to artistic or anarchist. All of these people were brought together in this unstable social sculpture.
CSBFC : Comical question: why should one become a NSK citizen?
It seems that there is a vast array of reasons, and we understand that a Laibach fan will not necessarily have the same reasons to join as a Nigerian person. Could you tell us a bit about this?
Alexei Monroe : The motivation is in a way secondary to the symbolic identification. The very fact that these very people are joining on this platform is utopian in that I can’t think of any other example of such a wide range of contradictory people all seeing some value in the same formation. When they launched this in 1992, Laibach produced music video in 1994 called “Final Countdown” and it has the slogan in many languages: “Become a state of the first global state of the universe”.
CSBFC : Does the NSK have its own reasoning? As a philosopher, could you explain retro-gardism and a little on your theories?
Alexei Monroe : Retro-gardism is a sort of acknowledgement of the failures of the Avant-garde, politically and socially but also on a continued artistic possibly potential value of the Avant-garde. So they are fully aware of what happens to the Avant-garde, especially in Soviet Russia, the way that Stalin crushed it and yet there is this idealistic charge surrounding Malevich especially, but also Tatlin and constructivism. So Retro-gardism is a non-naive and politically aware way of using Avant-garde energy in symbolism. But Retro-garde doesn’t only relate to the Avant-garde, it also gives you the freedom to incorporate a mediaeval corporate icon or Freddy Mercury or 60s Pop Art or Nazi Kunst or mediaeval alchemy...
Irwin, the artistic group of NSK described it as emphatic eclecticism. It is not the typical Western postmodernism where you take a bit of this and a bit of that simply for visual affect but with no rational. There is a specific rational about the way they use it. They say that it is based on the premise that you can only heal the wounds of past by going back to those un-dealt with traumas and taboos.
Laibach’s name itself, which is the German Occupation name for Ljubljana in Slovenia is the first Retro-garde intervention. By choosing that name, they were going back to a really painful period in Slovene history which at that time nobody was discussing. Officially, Ljubljana was a hero city because of the resistance to partisans and nobody discussed that there was a collaborationist government there for two years. By having this name, this opened up a whole debate in Slovenia about the wartime period etc.
Retro-gardism opens up closed historical areas and then I call it cultural reprocessing. If we talk about a nuclear reactor, there is a spent fuel which has been used in previous operations and which is now toxic. You can both bury it deep and hope that it doesn’t leak out slowly or you try to re-use it somehow productively and constructively. So it’s trying to find the use for previous repressed energies and also to find a way forward which does not fall into the trap of directly trying to realise utopia because they are aware of how that could lead them into totalitarianism.
CSBFC : You avidly studied Laibach for your book Interrogation Machine, so let’s talk a bit about the band. During Laibach’s American tour for their WAT (We Are Time) album, each night Peter Mlakar would announce “It’s a suicide your nation is doing to itself” and described the ex-president as the “opposite of Christ”, whose victory in the 2004 elections was based on “Christian moral values”. What do you think of the new president Barack Obama?
Alexei Monroeam : It seems like Obama is Bushism with a human face. It’s the same regime with a few humane touches around the edge. One of his first actions was to absolve the Bush/Cheney and several officials of any wrong doing and making it impossible for them to be tried. Before he was elected, there were a lot of people who didn’t dare to say it because there was such a weight of opinion in favour of Obama but people were saying that he was a sort of Manchurian Candidate.
In other words, he was a way to continue the existing regime, but just to humanise it a little and also improve America’s reputation massively. You can see it in Britain, because during Bush even the quislings, the people who are really rabidly pro-American, they were a bit embarrassed by Bush and even they felt a little apologetic. But as soon as Obama came, they were treating him like the Messiah. They could literally go back to being almost slavishly pro-American.
In terms of the international perspective, Obama is actually a lot more a part of Americanisation than Bush ever was. That is the danger of Obama, because he gives it that semi-respectable facade to the same regime. But I think that people see now that it is actually superficial and that it’s actually the same business going on. There are a few half-hearted reforms but it is basically the same system.
On the specific issue of cultural Americanisation, Obama is much more of a threat than Bush because Bush was actually making it very hard for people to argue in favour of Americanisation. Obama is exactly the sort of young, fresh, shiny, happy product that they need to sell it. .
CSBFC : One last thing on Obama: he offered the idea that everyone should get rid of their nuclear weapons... well everyone except America. Do you find that Obama may have been trying to recreate Hobbes’ the Leviathan’s old fantasy? ?
Alexei Monroe : Yes and no. In the sense that he is part of the American security state and he actually does very little to challenge it and in fact I think that he has even taken some new repressive measures with Bush didn’t take. In that sense yes, but in the sense of building a public state no, because he is such a corporate creature and he is empowering the corporations even further. What we have now is a kind of mutant hybrid between the old national security state and the new feudal, which I think is where his ultimate loyalty is, to the corporate powers.
CSBFC : In fact, which type of political model does the NSK use for itself?
Alexei Monroe : You could say that it is a metapolitical movement, but it is not a political movement directly. As I said, it has no program to follow; it doesn’t have any direct political agenda. In a way, its agenda is to increase political and cultural awareness. From that awareness people may draw conclusions about the existing structures that they are governed by.
This is why I named my book Interrogation Machine, because a way of their artistic practice is actually interrogating power. It seems like it’s interrogating the audience but it is interrogating the audience in order to make them think and assume a new position. It is also to make them aware that totalitarianism isn’t a discrete historical phenomenon which went on from let’s say 1933 to 1989 and then it’s over so let’s have a nice triumph of liberal democracy.
They are talking of power as such, and totalitarianism like any other human system of thought, never entirely fades away once it has been invented. It will always come back in new forms and new shapes. In a way, the lesson of it is always to be vigilant and always try to detect the new forms of power before they manifest as well as to try and see through them and illuminate them. It’s a sort of defensive practice because it is so aggressive. It’s an offensive defensive.
CSBFC : In the album "Laibachkunstderfuge", Laibach offers their interpretation of "The Art of Fugue" by Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach’s music is renowned for being straightforward, mathematical and somewhat abstract, in the same way that some previous electronic music may have been.
Is this merely Laibach’s tribute to their musical roots? Or could this be a way to demonstrate an ideology through an act, in the way that Hannah Arendt would say that the logic from an idea, being universal and abstract, imposes itself against reality in an almost violent way?
Alexei Monroe : Laibach first referred to Bach in interviews in the 1980s, so it is a longstanding interest and parallel. They even praised Bach as a sort of incarnation of totalitarian order and logic. So it is natural for Laibach to take on Bach because of his systematism and mathematical precision, which as you say also has a parallel in electronic music. But as always with Laibach there is also an element of kitsch or slight humour and they are also referring to the synthesised music of the 70s like all of the people who did very bombastic and kitsch electronic interpretations such as Wendy Carlos who did the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange.
There is never a single layer of references in a Laibach project. It is always referring and pointing in several directions at once. But as an act, it is very much a continuation of a totalitarian aesthetic, but also with the pop elements which are always present as well.
I saw the premiere of that show in 2006 in Leipzig and that was a unique performance. When they toured it recently, it was more conventional. But on this occasion, they turned up in Bach wigs. So there were four musicians standing Kraftwerk style behind the music stands with the computers and then the films behind in the usual way with black and white screens. The music played for about 40 minutes and then they went to a table behind.
This was a four sided table in the shape of a Laibach cross, on which was a four sided Laibach chess game. The four of them sat down and they played the chess, whilst smoking cigars and drinking cognac while the music continued and video continued for at least half an hour or 40 minutes. The people who had come expecting typical Laibach were quite provoked. There were one or two people at the front who were quite drunk and they were shouting out; so a bunch of drunken Germans wanting Stürmer III. But actually being forced to listen and to think and absorb this very provocative conceptual gesture has a slight Laibachian cynicism, which is always there.
This way of compelling the audience is very important. I read an account of a Bach show in Vienna in 2008 and again people were getting restless and they were calling for the old hits. Apparently some of the crowd were ordering the audience to be quiet. So instead of Laibach ordering the audience the way they did in the 80s with the totalitarian spectacle, now the Laibach audience is disciplining itself. So the abstraction of the Bach piece is very provocative in the live concerts. Again, it is another form of totalitarian social sculpture.
CSBFC : The members of Laibach often play chess by four. If the world was playing a game of chess, which would be the four States taking part? According to you, what role should Europe have?
Alexei Monroe : Europe should have a strong and self-confident, unapologetic and autonomous role. Slavoj Zizek published an article in The Guardian today about how Europe should insist on universal rights. But I think that it should also insist on the right self defence, especially culturally in relation to globalisation on the American model. Without this then Europe is simply a local franchise of the global corporate regime. Europe needs to recover its cultural confidence, and it needs to assert it and defend it.
As for who would be the players, are four enough?
China, Russia, Europe, America... But now we have to consider Brazil for sure and soon we will have to consider India also. It is open to question. For Laibach, again it’s about the totalitarian harmony and aesthetic perfection, but it is also a kind of trap in a way. It forces you to compress your thinking into that narrow grid. But then hopefully in the process of doing that, you become aware that you are pressing yourself and that you are narrowing your ideas. So again, it is education.
CSBFC : Slavoj Zizek states that Laibach want to show us that they “want alienation". What do you think about this? Must the NSK be based on alienation?
Alexei Monroe : He said that in the 80s in relation to the situation in Yugoslavia under self-management, which wasn’t like post-Stalinist systems in the Warsaw Pact. Stalinist self-management was a blend of Eastern-Westernised ideas and it was much more diffuse, especially during the late stages. The Yugoslav state desperately didn’t want to appear like a classic authoritarian state. It wanted to empower people and it wanted to make people feel that they were empowered. This meant that the ideology, rather than simply being remote and part of the centralised structures, was everywhere.
Ideology permeates a society.
This is what Zizek saw Laibach as doing. They wanted to be alienated from that all enveloping ideological field. But now what we are dealing with is the all enveloping market field, and market ideology is a form of ideology in itself. So the value of creating this traumatic break and chattering the mirror temporarily, so that people are not able to maintain their illusions in the same way once you have been exposed to Laibach or the NSK artwork and you consider it seriously, I don’t believe that it is quite possible to see the world in quite the same way afterwards.
That is a form of alienation and it can even be upsetting and distressing so this is why some people react violently because it is touching on some deeply held beliefs and self-deceptions. But that is the value of alienation. It is not alienation is the sort of existentialist, gothic, self-indulgent, purely personal sense. It is alienation as a social and political critique.
CSBFC : Finally, Slavoj Zizek just published Variations Wagner and Laibach worked with the same composer on Volkswagner in 2009. Is this purely a coincidence? What provoked this interest in Wagner?
Alexei Monroe : It’s a coincidence in the sense that there is no active cooperation between Zizek and Laibach. Of course, they are aware of each other and Zizek has written about them etc, but there is no direct cooperation. There are some similarities in the approaches that Laibach and Zizek have. Especially, in the attempt to recover cultural references which are nowadays seen as obsolete or reactionary or unacceptable in many ways. So it’s a similar project. It’s trying to recover some value, while insisting that no cultural phenomenon of that scale can be ignored and there may even be some value into going back into it seeking to recover some ethical or at least aesthetic value in it.
Perhaps now is a good time for Wagner simply because of the scale of it. The idea of gesamkunstwerk which is central to NSK, which means merging art, life and many spheres into one phenomenon. Perhaps this is what we need in a response to the scale of the market and the market of evasive culture. This phenomenon on a similar epic scale which Wagner first imagined. A lot of people say that without the Wagnerian sound imagination and sense of scale there would not have been fantasy or Tolkien and in some way there wouldn’t have been Hollywood in same way or on the same scale. There are sort of cheap or kitsch Wagnerianisms throughout Hollywood’s work and in many American films. So in order to have a strong counterweight to that, the Wagnerian approach has some value to that. Also finally, the tragedy within Wagner is a very good metaphor for our times.
Interview by Dana Ziska.
Translation and transcription by Jameson Ziska.
* Alexei Monroe is an expert in industrial music and culture, author of "Interrogation Machine: Laibach & NSK" (MIT Press, 2005). Writen in Slovene (Pluralni monolit, 2003), French (Interrogation Machine, 2014) & German (Die Inquistionsmaschine, 2014).
His second book was "Autopsia: Thanatopolis" (Divus, 2016).
Both books analyse industrial, as well as alternative art and culture in former Yugoslavia. Co-editor of the book "Test Dept: Total State Machine" (PC Press, 2015), dealing with the seminal British industrial group. He also writes on other electronic music genres.