IN THE METASTASIS OF RAMBO ZARATHUSTRA, Paul Poet 2009
IN THE METASTASIS OF RAMBO ZARATHUSTRA
Pioneer-tripping with microworlds, Paul Poet
To go down in history or go down with history? The lethal final question of globally experienced immobility and kinetic exhaustion, where omni-comprehension and unhindered consummation, de-central access, and the necessarily blurred as well as dwindling drive toward self-produced individuality have made it impossible to find the vital key to being lost in the world, to Nietzsche’s demanded childlike innocence which makes self-determined targeted action in the pursuit of progressive collective ecstasy possible in the first place. In this context, the micronational phenomenon is the last, and hence also first, subcultural movement capable of annihilating the age of great de-enlightenment through the tangible erasure of borders und self-empowered non-usability.
By Paul Poet
The state is good, clean, friendly; it guards, protects, nourishes. The statesperson knows what must be done so that this protection and beneficence in the form of a safeguard of bodily growth is accorded to the statesperson as the statespersons’ equal. The particular in this state experience is a cell synchronized with the general public, whose constructive egomaniac aims ultimately result in an exchange of goods/cell sap that then benefits every other cell in the pursuit of common growth. It is beyond any miracle, now that the illusion of western capitalist permanent prosperity crumbles, that this particular, within its deflationary coercive limits, suddenly seems wedged into and suffocated by a world state structure as if it were in the center of an oversized cancer growth bursting from pullulating metastases and directionless high blood pressure. The ultra-positivistic proto-Leibniz shopping mall of the brave, colorful New World Order collapses given the stagnation and regression that has been foreseeable since its canonization at the end of the Second World War. Sartre knew what he meant when he said that it is not the things, no, but the actions that constitute the freedom to which we are condemned. It is through the unsubstantial belief in the stipulation of these things through goods and value, rather than people, and its superimposed extensions in transnational regulation, whether the EU, the UNO, the G8, or global corporations, that we snuff ourselves out – a sea of sickly sweat; foul breath; wet neck; failing sphincter; glug, glug. The system always heals itself, says the chief physician in his role as circulation controller and respiration optimizer. And we chemo grandmas smile back at the fuehrer-figure with fondness and gratitude. That is precisely why: cable breakdown as viability technique; D.I.Y. imposition as survival strategy! Utilize and imitate the sickness; comprehend the politico-economic nervous system running amok against itself as a means of healing and resurrection in order to dance on the ruins of saturated, i.e. increasingly foodless, prosperity. Only by first setting new limits, plotting new courses, does one create a vigorous form, whether as an isolated Robinson, digging forward, or as a united, experimenting, miniature-societal Baby Leviathan.
As for Leviathan: When Thomas Hobbes, in his social contract, stylized that Biblical sea monster into a multi-functional, hierarchically structured human Babylon, who could only defeat the “evil” monster Behemoth, and hence the supposedly anarchic all-against-all state of nature, through a willingly ordered cooperation of the Many, the logical stage was already set for the great theater of fear that led directly to the collapse of the World Trade Center. Trembling unites us. Questions become obsolete. Godzilla is still prowling through the Hollywood of the Here World. Yet the powers that renew state and society were always anarchic in the sense that they could, with artistic, political and visionary strokes, dissolve, nullify and destroy established connections, and through a corrosion of behavioral rules thought to be certain, enable the critical questioning and reinvention that prevented collapse and lubricated human interaction. Yet what kind of creative, renewing motion can occur in an omni-capitalistic world of absolutist commodification, which keeps as its certain alternative only a handful of religious fundamentalism – certain in the sense that it can be quickly exposed as boring, regressive or uninvigorating, as long as not too many hopeless millions fall victim to this form of self-denial? How can this system, which consists only of fulfilling, non-creative movement, comprehend itself and thereby detect its sicknesses and missteps, if it acts and functions only as a closed system, i.e. as no longer open to the world? The vision of a quasi-objective career replaces the vision of responsible self-determination formed through an individual investigation of one’s own life. Utopias, dreams of non-places beyond known existence, paradises, desires – all these serve solely as purchase incentive adhesives, not as real human competence that one can experience. And you really can’t buy any of it. Yet for personal as well as societal evolution, it is unavoidable.
What Nietzsche found so fascinating about Zarathustra was the radical separation of good and evil societal forces into active and passive or, rather, reactive ones beyond conventional ideological attributions such as good, bad, valuable, worthless; or today (and still barely) left and right. In short: Good is that which sets in motion – at least insofar as it doesn’t drive the quiescent ones, Nietzsche’s sheep, along certain lingering footpaths. Applied to the twenty-first century, this means a beautiful rejection of corporate zombies, consumer idiots, bohemian-bourgeois officials and office chair shitters. Yet, from this perspective, are world leaders from Hitler to Bush automatically heroes merely because they genuinely channeled global norms into widely noticeable and visible extremes? Not at all, if one differentiates the active forces. For every action is based on sources, social foundations, basic conditions, something that one wants to rebel against, wishes to nullify. If one considers someone like Hitler not as a deranged bogeyman, whom, despite prescribed repulsion and appropriately system-confirming fear, one looks up to, but as a calculating utilizer of socio-political trends, as a cunning opinion market trickster, as a social engineer whose genuineness and creative will are constituted not at all outside the system, but capitally from inside, and hence fundamentally reactively, then many historical and societal processes can be viewed in a significantly clearer light, in their cruel, primarily market-driven continuity.
SS officer Hans Biebow, for instance, reconstructed the ghetto of Lodz in 1940 and in a few years converted it into the largest couture center of the German Reich by using the cheapest forced labor to produce a vast amount of globally exportable fine clothing. When, due to the war, and not least to the comprehensive export and revenue stop of 1944, further production became unprofitable, the ghetto and all of its prisoners were liquidated and disposed of. The report to the Fuehrer made no reference to the triumph of pure blood or other such things, but spoke solely of the triumphant net profit of 46 million Reichsmarks. The analogy to today’s corporate “handling” of economically profitable crisis-prone Third World countries, whose “opening” to an optimized circulation of goods is stylized as a necessity, is as obvious as it is alarming. Yet these are all reactive actions, exploitive formations of a system, which bespeak its weaknesses and inequities. Correspondingly, genuinely active forces are needed to critically question and re-form it, forces that can also venture beyond of the current system of quasi-democratic and quasi-social turbo- and omni-capitalism – the Negrian Empire. Zarathustra’s Parsian demand for an imperative evolution of the individual spirit from a load-bearing camel to a self-determining lion, to a child free of relations, images, molding, desires, and striding into an open world. And what does the communication- and politics-weary, crisis-shaken, all-around disillusioned citizen of the twenty-first century, who has seemingly seen and accessed everything via secondhand knowledge and secondhand experience, aspire to more than this turn to a cathartic, wholly liberating innocence beyond all functional context?
In the postwar period of the twentieth century the so-called fashion cultures became the mouthpieces of this societal questioning – essentially rockers, hippies, punks, who struck out and rebelled against established systemic circulation, who claimed and re-inscribed the insignia of consumer power – T-shirts, cars, pop music – with alien ideology and visionary gestures. Yet it was precisely the attachment of this contextual product piracy to the system’s own main means of transport that automatically led to the death of these cultural movements, as they remained too close to the reactive, triggering, basic impulse to maintain anything resembling genuine integrity. Ultimately, they became a cute ritual of extravagance of to-be-incorporated adolescents, which in turn could be endlessly rehashed as the product machinery of ersatz experience, and hence ersatz activity and ersatz revolt. Critical questioning ended already in the eighties, when youth fashion cultures acted in a solely self-reflexive manner, either by: almost religiously totalizing systemic status symbols through exaggeration (hip hop, disco, charts culture, manga); by recasting them as the quasi-negative (goth, emo, metal); or by surrendering themselves to affirmative failure (grunge, indie rock). Hence, it is not general digitally debasing low-cost access and net-stupefaction that generates the new expressionlessness of youth cultures. It is rather an inborn, logically deduced void, an abnegation of the critically questioning mainspring of societal change. It is the result of the realization that every rebellion formulated via these cultural goods can only ever be directed against oneself, as one always remains reactive and system-immanent. New cultural receptacles and terrain must be created and captured. And this in a world that seems to have hopelessly surrendered to the western cultural system, where every stone, every ocean wave appears to have been tapped and charted, partitioned and exploited according to power claims and economic usability. Where, after the total exploitation of the universe, of every natural connection, of every subsumable event and entity able to be experienced, only complete decline, recession, ecological collapse, nuclear war, can inevitably follow. Where apparently no free step or view liberated from pre-formations – the essential sense of individual adventure that first made possible active, genuine, creative activity – seems possible.
“To be active means to change the face of the world,” murmurs Uncle Sartre. In the last decade, only the phenomenon of micronations has been active in the sense of a grassroots, subcultural renaissance movement: the self-declared kingdoms, the state-restructured eco-villages, the secessionists hostile to global regulation, the enclaves of independent isolationists and megalomaniacs. New territory is staked out and bordered with barbwire; paper wars are waged; taxation refused; new passports, stamps, flags and anthems are created – egomaniac I-nationalists who redefine their own property and their own persons, and thus the surrounding communities and countries. This is not new, but actually the third wave of such phenomena sharing the same prime cause. The first wave occurred peripheral to colonial world conquest, in the form of pirates, mutineers, and the maladjusted who exploited the new narrowing of the global economy and commodity tourism to independently redefine the uncharted parts of the earth. It grew through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and culminated around 1850. From the sinking of the Bounty on the rocks of the new Pitcairn Island homeland to John Avery, the pirate king of Madagascar, countless obscure principalities and buccaneer countries sprang up like mushrooms in remote rocky lands, jungle zones and deserts: the Empire of Sahara, Kingdom of Sedang, Principality of Seborga, Republic of Saugeais, Waveland, La Gonâve, Araucania and Patagonia. With the tumult of 1968 came the “New Country Movement”, advanced by flower children, artist-freaks and alternative profiteers, which used the dropout gesture of the time to explore new areas of settlement. Apart from the communes and squats, it was above all the artistic ocean estates such as New Atlantis, the “Island of Roses” off Rimini, and the Principality of Sealand, a former anti-aircraft platform in the English Channel occupied by radio pirates, and the only one to survive today, that launched the world war of tiny nations against the great constellations of power.
In tandem with the internet, the unlimited exchange of goods, Me Inc., and free entrepreneurship, this movement has reinvented itself in the last ten years and generated at least 500 such real entities where obstructionists assemble to cast themselves as new kings into the gears of the global production machine – who perpetrate the redefinition of stipulated border demarcation; who drive existent great states mad with their pranks and self-empowered actions; who are happy to be themselves and suffice with themselves on their own land with the goal of sparking a transformation from which they do not even benefit, which in turn actually renders them an active, genuine act: an exploration and conquest of the world that does not turn back to itself in isolation, but which bites into the deadlocked flesh of the believers in the machine – where a small family of immigrants on a farm in the Australian outback can suddenly declare themselves the Principality of Snake Hill, crown the courtyard dog and, with UN recognition, correspond with the British Queen and Kofi Annan – where underground cults suddenly form their own economic, monetary and belief systems and can afford an entire, continuously expanding, piece of Italian land – where an Austrian conceptual artist like Robert Jelinek can suddenly, with the energy of an impeccable intellectual Rambo, declare his own State of Sabotage, which for five years has been persistently growing from a gallery statement to a real tangible location that must and will cut across established borders to inject the dying division of the world with a shot of freedom. These are neither paradises, nor brave new worlds, nor solutions to global problems in miniature social laboratories, but fresh and independently formed and defined worlds that possess expression and beauty and new movement – because they are; because they make their being clear, and declare it with waving flags and choral songs and all the pathos to which they are entitled.
The Slovenian band and art-cooperative Laibach, or NSK, was not mistaken to declare the totalitarianism of the “I” the only possible state form of the future, the redefinition and projection of Leviathan onto the responsible, aware, individual, that can first found a functioning free state and preclude the real capital-fascism that so many of us fear in this tilting global system. Yet it requires fierce self-empowerment and upheaval. It requires the comprehensive nullification and destruction of every existent connection of meaning and society, in order to enter into new families, territories and border zones. And the world will finally become what it lost so long ago, a place of wonder and adventure. For what kind of Leviathan can live with twenty hearts, fifty heads and grasping arm-ies, but no liver or intestine – what the liberal lie of attribution would have us believe about perfect, freely accessible, social positioning?
In this spirit: Fuck determinism! Fuck impotence! Fuck the globalization cage! Be your own king and kingdom! Be your own sanctuary, your own sperm and your own uterus, your own atom bomb, your own fuehrer, your own terrorist! Be yourself! Be your own! Be power! Be proud in your particularity and in your negation of the whole! And the after-land will be yours forever!