an expression of the broad desire for—Ukrainian political sovereignty. In wilding the national anthem, the concert expressed the potentiality of emergent politics articulated within the fractured space of an imperiled state.25 Pleasure, sociality, spontaneity, and the deus ex machina effect of a temperamental bout of weather merged to foster this kind of ecstatic space. Thus, the festival night resembled a “temporary autonomous zone” (Bey 1991 [1985]), with acts of symbolic remaking akin to what Alexei Yurchak (1999) identified in the fleeting utopian promise of post-Soviet raves.26
In Unizh, the performance of the Ukrainian anthem gave voice to an emergent “intimate public” of festival participants (Berlant 2008; see also Shank 2014). Here, as festival attendees swayed and sang the words of the Ukrainian national anthem, the political became foregrounded and interwoven with the sociality and pleasure of the festivalgoing experience. As the seated attendees joined those standing to stomp their feet, clap, and hoot following the anthem, the performance achieved, in Benedict Anderson’s terms, “unisonance”—the selfless feeling of simultaneity and solidarity through which the “imagined community” of the nation is conjured (1991, 145). What interests me here, however, is how this unisonance was diverted from the idea of nationhood and toward an idea of statehood—of the integrity of sovereign borders and the power of the state to enact protections for the ways of life enclosed within those borders.
Since it declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine has tried and failed to conform to European liberal democratic models that presume an isomorphism between nation and state. Begoña Aretxaga memorably dismantled logics of the nation-state by pointing out its “untenable hyphen” (2003, 396); Ukraine offers some proof of how ill-fitting that conjunction really is. A nation, at least in its idealized form, is generally defined through its shared history located on a distinct territory, with a common language and expressive culture. Ukraine confounds these criteria.27 First, Ukraine was partitioned and re-partitioned among numerous imperial powers (including the Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian Empires, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and, if one advances the belief that the USSR operated in Ukraine as a quasi-imperial formation, the Soviet Union).28 Second, language usage in Ukraine is a contentious subject since Ukraine functionally—though not legally—has two national languages, Russian and Ukrainian, and a widely utilized hybrid form of those two languages called surzhyk.29 Third, Ukraine is and has always been multiethnic and multinational. Though its population is majority Slavic (including people and groups that may identify as ethnic Ukrainians, Russians, or Poles, or more localized forms of affiliation such as Hutsuls, Polissians, Rusyns, and others), it also has significant numbers of protected minority groups (Greeks, Armenians, Germans, Bulgarians). Then there are the Muslim-majority Crimean Tatars, whose post-Soviet struggle for human rights has largely been predicated on gaining recognition as “Indigenous people” (in Ukrainian, корінній народ; in Russian, коренной народ), a status mediated in large part through the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.30 In the period of post-Soviet independence, and especially since the 2004 Orange Revolution, reductive yet tenacious narratives of a Ukraine split in two along an East-West axis have characterized media representations and many academic analyses of Ukraine (Portnov 2013, 242). As I write in 2019, Ukraine’s sovereign borders remain disputed.
In the performative wilding of the national anthem at ArtPóle, instrumentalists and audience members voiced a collective wish for a sovereign state that could protect its citizens across the lines of identity that were present in that moment. This suggests an awareness of power in “its capillary form of existence,” at “the point where [it] reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives” (Foucault 1980, 39). The metaphor of the capillary, however, also suggests circulation. This begs the question: How do individuals agentively tap into and instrumentalize this power as it trickles into their bodies, voices, actions, and attitudes? How do they redirect its flow, or allow it to pass through, in order to animate new ways of life? Giorgio Agamben (1998) critiques Foucault on similar ground in the opening pages of Homo Sacer.31 I propose that if we hear the Wildness in this national anthem as a collective and creative expression of a wish for sovereignty, then we also witness how “technologies of the self” link to the “political techniques of the state” through musical practices (cf. Agamben 1998, 5).
A core premise of this study is that citizens not only desire, but demand the state’s sovereign power. Even when its institutions are weak and corrupt, the state form endures as a modern “screen for political desire” (Aretxaga 2003, 394). Citizens dream of the sovereignties that would best suit the state they inhabit and attempt to bring such potentialities into being. This claim therefore positions this study in productive tension to the broad literature that documents how people have historically resisted, been silenced by, or refused the coercive forces of state power (Scott 2009; Mbembe 2003; Simpson 2014). But here, rather than document the violent and necropolitical effects of sovereign power, I center on the potential of the sovereign state to enact policies of care for its citizens, who, in Ukraine, creatively voice their wishes for such care through Wildness and its historically freighted, imaginative, and revolutionary potentials. The musical articulations of Wildness that interest me most circulate widely and destabilize entrenched nodes of power, elevating instead the peripheral and seemingly inconsequential ways of life that offer alternative models of citizenship and belonging.32
Apprehending Wildness in this way, of course, presupposes that citizens can harbor sentiment for institutions, infrastructures, and bureaucracies—perhaps easier to imagine when we consider how the refusal of institutions and bureaucracies to succumb to the demands of powerful leaders can actually thwart or block corruption.33 Beyond the state’s monopoly on violence, or the well-studied quasi-theological power its sovereign power exerts to discipline its polity and protect its borders (Schmitt 1985 [1935]), a state, of course, maintains its legitimacy by providing stable governance for its citizens. The often under-emphasized formulation of Max Weber’s idea of the modern “state as enterprise” is helpful here to understand how a modern state’s entrepreneurialism—its pursuit of certain strategies aimed at the betterment of the quality of life for its subjects—is key to maintaining the state’s legitimacy (Anter 2014, 206).34 Put simply, the state is the guarantor of the ways of life desired by citizens, as well as the formulator of their desires. In 2018, we see such desires for renewed sovereignty articulated in care-giving terms both in global superpowers such as the United States (where attacks on “globalism” are core tenets of Trumpist populism) and in vulnerable states such as Ukraine (where these desires take various defensive forms).
An important distinction lies embedded in the chasm between the possibility that a state would act with care and compassion on behalf of a citizenry and the reality of the violent and exploitative mechanisms through which state power is typically consolidated (that is, the better-known components of Weberian state theory). I do not intend to paper over this reality, nor over the specific and egregious inadequacies of the modern Ukrainian state. In fact, since its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the Ukrainian state has repeatedly proven its untrustworthiness, incompetence, and disregard for its non-elite subjects. In the post-Soviet period, with the influx of foreign aid and business, the growing population of migrants from Asia and Africa, and the rush of consumer items into a starved marketplace, a kleptocratic regime emerged along with stark socioeconomic inequalities that forced the vast majority of Ukrainians into conditions of poverty. The brutal conditions wrought by neoliberal capitalism might also explain why many Ukrainians today harbor nostalgia for aspects of Soviet life, or—in extreme cases such as those pro-Russian separatists in the eastern borderlands—desire Russian state power.35 Ukraine’s political-oligarchic class has been compromised through the influence of both Russian and Western governmental entities. The state is deeply in debt to Russia and to the International Monetary Fund. Its bureaucracy is penetrated by corruption at all levels. The nascent middle class of urban Ukrainians, those who came of age in the late and post-Soviet eras, tend to have a profound mistrust of the state
