The Immanent Frame

Metal music’s obsession with religion is part of its obsession with living at the limit. The goal of metal is extremity: to push music to the boundaries of noise without concern for the comprehensibility of the final product. Of central importance to this manipulation is the need to be heavier, faster, more technical, more “brutal” or more “true” than the past generation. The point is not to create noise, but to push existing musical forms as close to the boundary of noise as possible. Although the end result may be classed as “noise” by laymen, for a small community of the faithful it is the most passionate and engaging music possible. It is as close as music can get to the absolute.

One notable aspect of the post-secular world is the renewed interest in religion and theology amongst the once ultra-secular radical Left. . . . I tend to agree with Vincent Pecora when, in his most recent post, he  claims that the collapse of a socialist teleology bound up in the Cold War accelerated some of the processes that we now understand as post-secular. It is not just that the fall of the USSR starved secular nationalist or socialist movements in the Third World of a diplomatic ally, opening up the space for more religious-inspired movements to step in. More importantly, the collapse of the USSR inaugurated a period where it has become impossible to imagine an alternative to liberal capitalist democracy.

The years of World War II—when thousands of Yugoslav workers, peasants, intellectuals and students joined the Communist-led Partisans—provided the foundation for the myth of the post-war Communist regime. Small forests were torn down just to print hundreds of thousands of pages extolling the virtues or condemning the crimes of the Yugoslav Communists in WWII. Memoirs and war diaries, historical studies and exhibitions, popular songs and films all focused on Communism. Even the most popular children’s story from post-war Yugoslavia, Branko Copic’s The Hedgehog’s House, is widely perceived to be an allegory of the partisan struggle against the Nazis. The primary sources from this period are daunting and the hagiography that accompanies them is stifling.

On June 24th, 2010, Julia Gillard replaced Kevin Rudd as leader of the Australian Labour Party and as Prime Minister of Australia. Since then, the Australian press has been at pains to emphasise the vast differences separating the two leaders. Religion quickly became a key theme. Days after she was sworn in, Gillard became the focus of a would-be scandal in the Australian press when during a radio interview she revealed that she did not believe in God and had no intention of participating in religious rituals to win over voters.  The difference with Rudd could not have been more stark.

Postwar Yugoslavia was confronted with a rather difficult task: How to give meaning to a new state that was simultaneously the protectorate of religious and national difference but also a project that transcended these differences? Bogdan Bogdanovic’s work, largely focused on monuments commemorating the victims of fascism, was ideal for trying to give this project an architectural language.