Outernationality
“The entire Industrial movement in England was not just inspired by Can, Cluster and Kraftwerk – they were all-pervasive. As an Englishman it’s hard for me to judge just how German the German avantgarde was back then. But I reckon very little about it was specifically German, otherwise those bands wouldn’t have become so important for musicians around the globe. I even believe the Germans put up much more resistance to being identified with their country than we Brits did. I was always fascinated by how international Can were: maybe they used world receivers, Morse code and Afro beats because they wanted to distance themselves from that accursed image? We were so fascinated by Can precisely because they treated all forms of national or ethnic music purely as a question of the sound – and in that way arrived at an international form.” Richard H. Kirk (Cabaret Voltaire) in Martin Büsser´s Testcard Zwei (1995)
“The colonial exploitation that annihilates the ‘other’ in favour of the ‘own’ and the ‘same’ must be strictly distinguished from appropriation, which is constitutive for education and identity. Only an idiot, or God, lives without appropriation. The ‘own’ is not simply given like a date. Rather, it is the result of successful appropriation. Without appropriation there is also no renewal. (…) Those who appropriate the ‘other’ do not remain identical with themselves. Appropriation entails a transformation of the own.” Byung-Chul Han, Hyperkulturalität (2005).
