A PREVIEW
OF THE UPCOMING MUSIC ISSUE (#16) OF
THE BLACK FLAME
Peter Mlakar, photo courtesy of NSK.
Peter
Mlakar: NSK’s Satanic Technocrat
by Michael Moynihan and Charles Krafft
Since 1980 the Slovenian musical juggernaut known as Laibach has been craftily exposing—while at the same time capitalizing upon—the weaknesses of pop culture for totalitarianism. Utilizing stylistic trappings from a half-century earlier, Laibach (whose name comes from the occupied German designation for their hometown of Ljubljana) marched onto the world stage and demanded that people take notice. And they did. But what still often remains unrecognized or misunderstood is the fact that Laibach is just one cogwheel in a greater machine, otherwise known as NSK. Short for Neue Slowenische Kunst (New Slovenian Art), NSK is a collective endeavor with an array of tentacles: an fine art group known as Irwin, a “cosmo-kinetical” theater company called Noordung, the “New Kollectivism” graphic design section, and most intriguingly, a “Department of Pure and Practical Philosophy.” Furthermore, since 1990 NSK has declared themselves a sovereign, virtual state, or in their words, “a transglobal borderless state-in-time.” They issue their own stamps, passports, and proclamations, and open temporary embassies wherever they go.
The representative for the philosophical branch of NSK is Peter Mlakar, a philosopher and writer of extreme erotic literature. For years he has spoken at the openings of Laibach concerts and other important NSK events; already a decade ago his early speeches were compiled into book form in REDEN AN DIE DEUTSCHE NATION (Speeches to the German Nation; Vienna: Verlag Turia & Kant, 1993). He has also published three philosophical works in the Slovenian language, SPISI O NADNARAVNEM (Essays on the Supernatural; Ljubljana: Analecta, 1992), UVOD V BOGA (An Introduction to God; Ljubljana: Zalozba NSK, 1997, and published in Croatian, Zagreb 2000), and HRIBI IN DOLINE (Hills and Valleys; Zalozba NSK, 1999). As one might expect, Mlakar’s style is declarative and bombastic, but his form of rhetoric also illuminates existential conundrums of the sort that most people prefer not to be confronted with. In response to Essays on the Supernatural, a well-known Slovenian Catholic philosopher remarked that such a work “cannot be opposed with counter-argument, but only with prayer and fasting.”
When not composing speeches or philosophical tracts, Peter Mlakar also pens perverse erotic tales under the nom de plume “P. Traven.” Two books of these stories—which bear titles like “Confession,” “Crime and Punishment,” and “Living Bidet”—have appeared in his native language, earning him accolades as the “De Sade of Slovenian literature.” Slavoj Zizek, the popular Lacanian philosopher, even extolled these writings as “great literature for all time,” and urged that the stories “should be lectured in primary schools.”
Peter Paracelsus is another of Mlakar’s many names. When donning his Paracelsian cap he promotes “Satanic Techno” and in 1994 released an eponymous debut CD (on the Nika + Ropot label), done in collaboration with the Laibach subgroup 300,000 V.K. A new album is reported to be imminent. The music is electronic and Luciferian, but also embodies an entire philosophy of desire: “It is our wish that the pleasure we are now experiencing might not end, and we cannot imagine the pain that is unbearable lasting forever. … Satanic Techno is that state when the pain or pleasure are no longer submitted to a process of their own natural determination, but are a matter of the will of the scientific mind, which is able solely for its own enjoyment to manage the psychological structure and has an effect on it independently of the subject’s will, and which also abolishes a cast-iron law of nature.” In a manner not dissimilar from Laibach, Peter Paracelsus subverts a pop genre to his own ends, injecting it with an overt ideology, in contrast to the insidious but covert commodity fetishizing of most music industry output.
The following interview with Herr Mlakar was assisted by Charles Krafft, an American artist from Seattle with longstanding ties with the NSK camp. Krafft has made his mark with DISASTERWARE™, a line of finely-wrought delftware pieces featuring poignant scenes from humanity’s unending history of turmoil and distress. His work so impressed NSK that they commissioned Krafft to design all the porcelain flatware for their official state functions (these works, along with Krafft’s Porcelain War Museum Project and other creations, are documented in the new monograph Charles Krafft’s VILLA DELIRIUM, San Francisco: Last Gasp, 2002). By way of concluding this introduction to our interview, a few lines of reminiscence from Krafft will shed further light on our subject:
I first ran across the writings of Peter Mlakar in the extraordinary art book Neue Slowenische Kunst (Los Angeles: Amok, 1991). Those dated translations of his short essays, aphorisms, edicts, and speeches reignited my waning interest in poetry. Years later, I still find myself copying and sending these bits out to persons who I feel can appreciate the subtlety of Mlakar’s metaphysics and “totalitarian” balderdash. I am still waiting for translators to deliver his two major books (published in German and Slovenian) on Eros and spirituality. To date, my efforts to facilitate this here have been met with academic outrage.
I got to know Peter Mlakar personally when I accompanied Laibach on their “Occupied Europe NATO Tour” to Sarajevo in 1995. For an American to fully understand Laibach and the NSK enterprise you must spend some time with them and this I naively did. The highway to Sarajevo was being held by Serbs so we drove along the bombed-out back roads, through devastated Mostar, down into the besieged city for two historical concerts in the National Theatre which happened to coincide with the announcement of the Dayton Peace Accords. It was the rock’n’roll experience of a lifetime and Peter rose to the occasion with a series of official speeches delivered with his usual panache. One night, on the way back to our guest house overlooking the burned-out 1984 Winter Olympics facility, the taxi couldn’t make it up the icy hill so we climbed out and started walking home. Halfway there he stopped in the full moonlight to access the ruined city and declared, “I love the smell of blood and snow! It’s so Tolstoy. If I could bottle this scent I would make a new perfume for the 21st century and call it ‘FORGIVENESS.’”
What events led to your becoming a prominent figure in the NSK Dept. of Pure and Practical Philosophy?
The Department of Pure and Practical Philosophy (DPPP) was established in Hamburg, Germany in l987. I was performing with Laibach there in a production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. As a result of our presence many philosophical issues emerged along with the need for a special philosophical department to address them. Laibach develops its own philosophy, but there are subjects which are not completely expressed in the language of this philosophy, and there arose a need to articulate the essence of the Laibach and NSK spirit in a more theoretical way. In this sense I can say that my “prominent role” is to explore the issues which emanate from the substance of Laibach and NSK in relation to classical theoretical and philosophical problems and their anomalies.
What are the greatest philosophical problems facing mankind today?
Among them, if anything is certain at all: what is the ultimate criterion of truth and certainty? Why is nothing better than anything (the reverse form of the most important question in metaphysics)? Is Being—which is “difference from that” (as Heidegger puts the form of ontological difference)—the only inhabitant in its dark country, or are there some other monsters beside it, which are not known yet, except for Nothing, or whatever supports it? Is there the One, or only a mass of particulars? And there’s the question of the substantiality of mind: is the mind only a matter of symbols, words, denotations, language, logical operations, biochemical processes? Also we have the problem of the ontological value of logic, and we can pose the question, does the existence of the natural order of things lead to a deeper essence of reality (as Whitehead asks)? And there is the question of the sense of life—in other words, is there anything in life besides its finite chemobiological structure? Then, we also have the question of God: does he exist or not, and do existence and non-existence have anything to do with him? The meaning and absurdity of evil is another dilemma. Furthermore, does the technological development of man, his structural changes in body (via biotechnology and genetics) and mind (via artificial intelligence)—that is to say, the man-made construction of the human being and his consciousness—negate the basic philosophical and theological categories of God, mind, soul, and the Self? Finally, there is the question of the existence of the external world (and this is linked to the problem of virtual reality).
Does the DPPP offer suggestions on how such problems might be reconciled or solved?
The Department tries to investigate them, it searches for the answers, and it offers some answers that at the moment are to a larger extent about God, evil, and the infinite. But there are many epistemological and logical questions generally open to exploration, as well as those concerning certainty, and the different criteria of truth, which are some of the topics of our future work.
What role does this particular Department play within the totality of NSK?
The model is similar to that of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican. As I said, the prime role of the DPPP within NSK is to operate professionally on issues which form a sort of “ontological” basis of NSK, and which also create the objects that excite NSK most. These issues are the dialectic between eternity and death, enjoyment and evil, God and sex, the absolute and nothingness, the ethical and non-ethical, metaphysics through psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis and science through metaphysics, negative theology, and absurdity.
It would seem that NSK has always been very concerned with other issues, such as that of the relationship between the state and the individual, totalitarianism and the “free” world, art and the state, and the deliberate fabrication of culture. Can you comment on some of these issues from the perspective of the DPPP?
In relation to the other NSK views on these topics, the DPPP view is mostly identical. In the relationship between individuality, totalitarianism and the “free world,” our position is that freedom is the freedom of those who think alike.
[To
read the rest of this interview, you will need to purchase issue #16 of The
Black Flame,
which will be going to press before the end of 2003]
Visit Mute Records’ Laibach site.
You
won’t want to miss Laibach’s newest album WAT.
It contains a track called “Satanic Versus” which
seems to pledge solidarity with the Great Satan. Click on the cover image
to purchase it from Amazon.com
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