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Postapologetic

“No apologies.” These words begin Monroe’s Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK, or rather they begin his “Preface,” which is the third section in the book, following two prefaces by Slavoj Zizek — one introducing MIT Press’s Short Circuits series which he edits and of which this book is a part, and the second previewing the radical encounter with the interlinked Slovenian avant-garde artistic and political collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) and post-punk band Laibach that is the subject of the book.

But before Monroe’s rhetorical refusal to atone for the complexity and difficulty of his study, Laibach get the first words: “The explanation is the whip and you bleed.”

This line is a lucid capturing of the power of Monroe’s project and the avant-garde cultural production it tackles; his is the first book to engage the work of NSK (the primary groups within which are Laibach, Irwin, Noordung — formerly Red Pilot and prior to that Scipion Nascise Sisters, New Collectivism Studio, and the Department of Pure and Applied Philosophy) with serious historical and theoretical rigor. Laibach’s words also offer a crystallized forecast of the methodological problems of a study that tries to couple this sort of brutal practicality together with complex historiography and theoretical sophistication.

This is the sort of book that eschews any particular methodology in favor of throwing itself headlong into an experimental engagement with a vast, difficult, and continually changing historical and aesthetic terrain. If punk meant never having to say you’re sorry, then Interrogation Machine aims to perform a kind of Laibachian scholarship; what unfolds over the course of Monroe’s book is a variety of cultural history in which a way of being in the world is not just at issue but genuinely at stake. But for that kind of scholarship to produce modes of “explanation” that can become operational, it has to succeed in making contact with flesh and making something or someone bleed. In endeavoring to do so Monroe produces an exhilarating and properly punitive study, one that occasionally loses its own thread through the complexity it relishes, but that nevertheless does some serious and deserved violence to the clinical complacency of the art history industry and its well-oiled recuperations of any and all avant-garde activity. Interrogation Machine’s appearance in English means that the Anglophone academy can have no excuse for skirting the provocation this book offers to virtually all existing efforts to theorize the various avant-gardes and their histories.

The established histories of the avant-garde that have been produced by and for the West have little room for this sort of enterprise. It is no surprise but nevertheless a disappointment worth registering that the recent tome Art Since 1900, team-written by four of the most accomplished art historians and theorists of our time and imagining itself to be (however partial) a comprehensive panorama of important radical artistic practice over the last century, does not have the time of day for one of the most consequential avant-gardes in contemporary history (NSK).

And the only Irwin it mentions is Robert.