Michael Goddard
Michael introduces himself when I'm at the booki stand checking out a few questions with Adam Hyde, and explains that although he was in the tea lounge last night he was too shy to talk. I knew all that technology was overshadowing the conversations...
The Virtual State, Creativity and Alternate (Im)Possible Worlds: The NSK State in Time
In Massumi and Dean’s First and Last Emperors, it is claimed that the only way out of the Scylla of regressive state despotism and the Charybdis of new forms of transnational control would lie in some anti-state, post-human, post-gender deformation which they can only sketch in the vaguest of terms. But one doesn’t have to look to theory to find this kind of practice, since it is more or less the common strategy of all subcultural groups and most forms of autonomist politics. The idea is rather than directly contesting state power and its institutions, seizing the state, one attempts to create ‘outside’ extra-state space-times of creativity and relation whether these be in the forms of communes, squats, alternative community centres, free media, punk networks or political movements. This was perhaps developed to the greatest degree of force in Italy in the 1970s with the idea of the ‘area of autonomy’, effectively referring to creating urban zones ungovernable by the forces of the state, where alternative culture, practices and politics could proliferate; and it is more or less the common strategy of alternative culture in general.
But what is the state of these ‘alternative’ spaces today? In many cases they have long since disappeared and their zones of autonomy recaptured and resold as valuable inner-city real estate, or like Metelkova or Denmark’s Christiania, they continue to hold out as desperate shells of their former selves, rife with processes of addiction and mummification, or, they become fully incorporated into their respective urban capitalist economies as a kind of museum spectacle of the barely living remains of alternative cultures as in the Tacheles artist’s squat in Berlin, which is now the first stop on any Youth Hostel tour of Mitte. In short, as any-one entering these remnant spaces can testify, they have become sad places of the world, where whatever free, creative or joyful spirit that once animated them has long since vanished, leaving, even in the best of cases, only the most ephemeral traces. Generally the voracious beast of Neo-Liberal capitalism and its attendant endo-colonisation of all forms of cultural expression is blamed for this situation but this failure cannot wholly be located as an external menace and partly points to both theoretical weaknesses and pragmatic failures of alternative cultural strategies more generally.
It is here that NSK and Laibach, despite their subcultural roots, can be seen to have grasped two fundamental issues that these subcultural strategies usually missed and to come up with adequate responses to them.
Firstly, in order to create and crucially sustain something new, a complex, organised structure is needed rather than mere joyful destruction, expression or unfocused creativity. In other words to constitute an effective war machine, a level of discipline and unity is required, resources that can be better located in the form of the state with its ever complexifying bureaucracies and structurations than in the realm of nomadic desire, disorder, chaos and supposedly free expression.
Secondly, the only way to avoid capture and detection is to operate at a level of abstraction and virtuality whereby it is possible to manifest in a wide variety of forms and physical locations. Partly this is to avoid the trap that so many ‘autonomous zones’ fell into of simply being isolated in a given territory that it then becomes easy to destroy through an application of the always excessive force of the state, whether through the emptying of a squat, or the seizure of an alternative media site. However, what is really key is to embrace abstraction itself as a kind of force, the only one capable of confronting the abstract powers of existing states. It might be possible to ban the use of the word Laibach or detain some of its members but impossible to stop the abstractidea, which is autonomous from a specific group or individuals, place, or form of expression.
Finally, the lesson that I would argue is forcefully demonstrated by both Laibach and NSK is that paradoxically, the only way to effectively operate as a war machine against the state is to become a state, albeit a different type of state to existing territorial ones. In other words the genius of both Laibach and NSK has been to annex the state form to itself and this has been key to its continuation and aesthetic force over the last 30 years.
With the formation of NSK, this state became both more complex and diversified with different function being taken over by different, relatively autonomous groups while at the same time unified through the participation in a common organisational structure. So when there was the declaration of the NSK State in Time in 1992, its appearance was already virtually pre-formed and it emerged as ‘fully-formed’ corresponding closely to Deleuze and Guattari’s description of the emergence of the archaic Ur-Staat. Again the apparently retro dimensions of the NSK State in terms of the cold war aesthetics of embassies, insignia, passports and guards was misleading and generally misunderstood. These elements should neither be seen as retro nor as operating on a purely symbolic or aesthetic plane. Each aspect of the NSK State performs a specific role in how a virtual state can manifest itself: Embassies, for example, are already a type of virtual idea since they are manifestations of a particular state in alien territory (brilliantly expressed in the Final Countdown video with its culmination in NSK embassy in Mars) and express less the state as such but its relations with other states. The various temporary embassies of NSK have therefore been able to operate as operators of relation between NSK and various geopolitical sites, starting with Moscow, the former centre of the East as an ideal place to begin the kind of East-East dialogue that has been carried out especially by Irwin’s East Art Map project. Might this also no suggest the key role the NSK State might play in the 21st Century in which virtual states and transnational entities of various forms might form their own ‘united nations’ perhaps more effectively than the current anachronistic organisation of united territorial states?
The NSK State in Time can therefore be seen as the full expression and realisation of this future virtual state form in the present. The genius of the state in time concept is composed for two parts: the severing of the state from imposition on a fixed territory hence rendering it mobile and geographically unspecifiable (ie invlulnerable). Secondly the maintenance of the virtuality of the Urstaat as abstract principle of organisation and composition (immanent consistent spirit) and principle of organised abstraction (thus realising and radicalising the projects of the historical avant-garde which were subsumed within specific state regimes and therefore made victims or accomplices of state enslavement (gulags) or subjection (ideology). As Marina Grzinic puts it: ‘There is something paradoxical about this virtual state model and its connections with art (and we might add politics): they may appear kitschy, conceptual and anti-modern. Real communism, transnational capitalism, bastard Malevich, illegal Heartfield, Enthroned Magritte and Naturalised Modernism – these are all elements of the NSK State.’
Nevertheless, the NSK state remains one of the boldest experiments in both aesthetic and political organisation and one that can operate as a bridge between the utopian dreams of the historical avant-gardes and their future potential realisations.
...luckily we connect anyway and he tells me about his all-night rave party with Laibach on a Slovenian mountainside, and sends me this excellent text on NSK.
Dr Michael Goddard
Lecturer in Media Studies
School of Media, Music and Performance
University of Salford
Adelphi Building
Peru St
Salford M3 6EQ
Reviews Editor of Studies in East European Cinema (SEEC)
Member of the Publications Committee of the Network for European Cinema and Media Studies (NECS)
Author of Gombrowicz, Polish Modernism and the Subversion of Form, Purdue, 2010
Co-Editor with Dr Benjamin Halligan of Mark E. Smith and The Fall: Art, Music and Politics, Ashgate, 2010
