Monday, September 20, 2010

To whoever recalled Interogation Machine I'm gonna kill you.




In Slavoj Zizek's foreword to Alexi Monroe's book Interrogation Machine he makes an analogy between the actions of NSK musical group Laibach and Robert Schumann's piano composition Humoresque. Zizek describes how Schumann's 1838 piece is written as a song without the vocal line, so the composition then becomes a piano accompaniment to an absent vocal. Zizek explains that later in the piece the absent vocal line itself becomes absent from the composition, with the notes 'losing what they never had'. Monroe later writes

Laibach interrogate regimes by rendering audible/visible a series of connections that "common sense" ideology has to keep concealed in order to maintain the ideological self reproduction of "the system".

Or as NSK themselves explain in the video posted by Matthew, every political system includes its own inherent systems of transgressions which must remain unspoken and hidden in order to be self perpetuated. Laibach, by adopting these transgressions more fervently and more openly then the systems themselves, bring such transgressions to the surface, because it is only here that they may then be neutralised. The promotion of these transgressions by Laibach as a means to critique them is what creates such an uneasy tension within the group's work.

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