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 as it exists, but they also often harbor little nostalgia for the USSR, and nurse no delusions about the injustices and crises that face liberal democracies in Europe and North America. Many Ukrainians across socioeconomic categories suffer from revolutionary fatigue, having lived through many cycles of social collapse, revolutionary hope, and eventual disappointment.36
It should also be noted that the Ukrainian state has recently sanctioned violence against its citizens. During the Maidan Revolution, for example, the government of then-President Yanukovych enlisted snipers to assassinate street protestors who are now memorialized as the “Heavenly Hundred” (Небесна Сотня). Further, Maria Mayerchyk and Olga Plakhotnik (2015) have argued that as war erupted in the eastern borderlands in the aftermath of the Maidan, the Ukrainian state prioritized the defense of its political sovereignty over protecting the citizens ensnared in a war zone. With respect to the post-Maidan political climate, they write,
This new precarity has been ideologically legitimized by a new rhetoric of Othering … which divide[s] the population into more valuable and less worth[y] groups on the basis of national consciousness. People from Donbas are constructed as “improper Ukrainians”: their so-called lack of national identity is associated today with the label of Soviet, as if this part of [the] population did not “grow up,” [was not] “developed,” “emancipated” from the Soviet past. They are contrasted with the apparently “nationally conscious” citizens of the other parts of Ukraine, whose national consciousness makes them valuable for the state and the nation in contrast to the people from Donbas.
As the authors outline some of the tragic realities of the postrevolutionary period through the lens of postcolonial and feminist critique, they underscore the failures of the modern, ostensibly democratic Ukrainian nation-state to care for all of its citizens. The authors draw on Victoria Hesford’s work on “feminist time” versus “nation time,” where “nation time” blurs with the “emergency time” of late capitalist societies who are in “perpetual war.” This “emergency time” emphasizes a present that is “at once both empty and full—empty of historicity and full of a mythical future” (Hesford and Diedrich 2008, 174). It does so “at the expense of a ‘historicizing, futuritial consciousness’” (193). Mayerchyk, Plakhotnik, and Hesford are in agreement that, to combat this present-oriented emergency time, “thinking matters, especially in a time of war. Speculative, non-instrumental thought, experimental approaches to the present, and a