According to 'A Companion to Science Fiction', edited by David Seed, the Rand Corporation wrote a report "which suggested that...production-line sub-humans [would be available] as workers by the year 2025 (Lane 1991: 9). This inspired Stephen Gallagher to write his 1982 novel, 'Chimera', which "traces modern genetic engineering back to concentration camp experiments and thereby implies, and denounces, the parallels between capitalist exploitation and Nazi atrocity." The British t.v. version of the book (which from some of the screen shots I've seen looks slightly underwhelming) apparently "removes this theme, [although] it retains its critique of a government intending to further disenfranchise its people of economic self-determination by manufacturing subhuman workers... As it stands, it is a disturbing view of what the cooperation between capitalism and science could achieve." Gallagher, it should be noted, also wrote the Doctor Who story 'Warrior's Gate', which concerns the enslavement and exploitation of an alien species.
Found this rare photo of Hitler in 'The Third Reich: Then and Now', which was taken by an amateur photographer in the early to mid-thirties. It's quite remarkable, I think, to actually see a contemporary photo of Hitler which doesn't conform to the carefully controlled public-image of Hitler as the Weberian 'Charismatic authority' figure.
Aside from his work with German industrial noise pioneers Einsturzende Neubauten, F.M. Einheit has created a series of intriguing side projects in recent years. Deutsche Krieger is Einheit's third collaboration with Andreas Ammer; like their second project together -- Radio Inferno, Deutsche Krieger, too, has been released on the Chicago-based Invisible label.
Deutsche Krieger is an epic exploration of 20th. century German history through sound. Ammer and Einheit has excavated the German audio libraries for sound recordings of Kaiser Wilhelm, Adolf Hitler, Ulrike Meinhof, Goebbels, Kohl, Baader and dozens of other historical personalities. Samples of these people's words have been integrated into Ammer and Einheit's compositions. Centered around the three greatest periods of German crises of this century, the work has been divided into three distinct parts entitled: I. Kaiser Wilhelm Overdrive; II. Adolf Hitler Enterprise; and III. Ulrike Meinhof Paradise. At turns comical and chilling, this aural voyage through the past is at every turn fascinating. Opening with the first few bars of Beethoven's fifth symphony, the CD immediately embarks on Kaiser Wilhelm Overdrive. The crackling of the old 78 rpm vinyl sources has been retained by Ammer and Einheit. The initial phrases by the Kaiser are rather ludicrous at this distance, and they have been underscored by a whimsical keyboard soundtrack. Later, as the samples become more vulgar in their viciousness, the underlying music also grows darker and more foreboding in mood. Adolf Hitler Enterprise takes the listener through the drama of Hitler's rise to power and the second world war. This segment is richer in different sounds and voice samples than the former. The voices of various Nazi radio announcers, Hitler's political speeches, fragments of classical music, and the sounds of chaos and war are all weaved together with Ammer and Einheit's synth loops, which in turn makes extensive use of Kraftwerk's "Trans Europe Express." This segment ends with an imaginary burial ceremony for the German Fuhrer. The radio footage sounds authentic enough, and this passage is one of the most interesting on the CD, as it plays with the manipulative nature of the radio medium. The third and final segment of the CD concerns the scandal surrounding Ulrike Meinhof, who allegedly supported and protected the members of the German Baader terrorist organization. To fit the period of the early 1970s, Ammer and Einheit creates a theme that utilizes not only funky disco rhythms, but also elements of Beethoven's fifth symphony, along with their own synth and percussion loops. The segment is again rich on media samples, and especially the extensive excerpts sampled from Ulrike Meinhof's defense speeches, in which she declares Germany a police state, are very powerful. Ammer and Einheit's project is difficult to do justice in words. Deutsche Krieger is an extremely powerful work, the like of which has never (to my knowledge) been done before -- except for the musicians' own Radio Inferno, which did follow a similar design. While it is hardly a CD that one plays for its catchy dance grooves, it is a fascinating aural history book suited for careful and engaged listening.
I've started to have a few second thoughts about that "Chilling out in the Cities of the Dead" post. Provocative as Ultra Red's [selective] reading of Deleuze may have been in that instance, I have since come to the conclusion that to remain more consistent with the biological themes of this blog it is necessary to look at what remains when nihilism strips away everything except the laws of cause and effect: i.e. Nature. Bulent Diken's observation in his book Nihilism seems especially pertinent in this context. He highlights how the enemy/friend relationship becomes de-subjectified in the transition to post-politics:
"And it is in this movement, which is also the movement of nihilism, that distinctions such as reality/representation, biology/politics, terror/war against terror tend to disappear today. After all, the canceling of differences is a nihilistic principle par excellence [as noted by Deleuze]" (p. 88).
By extension, investigating the "post-political" rationalization behind the "transcendental fascism" that presents itself as a Third Way between liberal capitalism and communism could prove a fruitful line of inquiry. I see this form of neofascism as equal parts derived from Heidegger and Strasser. There is some affinity as well with the dark ambient I raised in the earlier post in many cases, and moreover, neofolk/martial industrial bands (Death in June, Sol Invictus, Der Blutharsch etc), along with other forms of electronic music. For example, a more disturbing spin could be put on the satire featured inSnog'sKings of Hate, given that the clip was directed by none other than self proclaimed "transcendental fascist" Richard Wolstencroft. Another song entitled The Human Germ (available on YouTube) appears thematically suggestive to some degree of Pentti Linkola's philosophy. In fairness to David Thrussell though I should probably chase up some more background to avoid reliance on guilt by association alone.
So let me turn my attention instead to someone else who is demonstrably comparable to Mr Linkola. I just happened to watch Wolstencroft's rabidly imaginative film Pearls Before Swine last night, which reminded me that the lead actor, "industrial musician" Boyd Rice, has gained some notoriety for his establishment of a thinktank advocating social Darwinist principles (particularly Redbeard's Might Is Right! credo), and also for acting as the public spokesperson for the Church of Satan.
I consider it no more coincidental that these misanthropic forms of cultural expression have come together than the fact that fellow travelers, the Process Church, later morphed into the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary. Mix nihilism in with the paganism, Deep Ecology, transcendental fascism etc then and you have the makings of a lethal cocktail. I'll give some credit to Michael Moynihan though; he was very forthright in the sense that Gods of the Blood could never have been written without him. I've been listening to (Moynihan's) Blood Axis's Gospel of Inhumanity a lot lately, and the sampling of The Wicker Man on that album is starting to make more sense. Because time is of the essence I can't comment here on Troy Southgate or related controversial figures. I'll try to save that stuff for upcoming posts and recommend checking out Heathen Harvest for a foretaste.
Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo : "If I cannot bend the Higher Powers, I will move the Infernal Regions"
"On the one hand, the defamiliarization of animation allows you initially to take some distance from the story. But at some point (I think it has to do with the way that the brain visually assimilates information) the filter or the rational distancing fell by the wayside. I felt like it was almost directly accessing a part of the brain, because after all, the brain, through evolution, processes visual images first in a primal way and then the images go up to the language center, which is actually a much smaller part of our brain.
"Watching 'Waltz With Bashir," you almost got into some primal, visual — I am going to call it — the truth center. So I found the film much more disturbing and harder to understand in a kind of removed, intellectual way, than if it had been a straight frame that I am more familiar with, which is documentary film or Hollywood war blockbusters. I think that is why it came back into our nightmares.
"We all know what Marx said about the unconsciousness of the past: that it weighs on us like a nightmare. That somehow triggered all kinds of past memories about war in my own family history. So I think it was remarkable how the film was able to achieve that kind of new channeling of a part of the brain that is not normally a part of film watching, film spectating."
James Der Derian in Open Source conversation with David Polonsky at the Watson Institute, April 15, 2009.
A couple of years ago, I saw a film on SBS about the case of a serial murderer in Nazi Berlin; unfortunately, I was unable to find any further info on the events depicted in the film. Recently, however, I stumbled across an article by the historian, Roger Moorehouse, on his blog and the BBC History Magazine site, in which he detailed the actual events of this long overlooked case. Paul Ogorzow, known at the time, as the 'S-Bahn' murderer, is significant in that his case highlights the tensions that exist when a more individualised form of murder occurs in the context of a State where mass murder is both institutionalised and legitimated by a political/racial ideology determined to remove all its' 'enemies'. In the case of Ogorzow, this meant that his killing spree (eight murders, and numerous attempted murders, within a ten month period) was unacceptable to authorities, particularly, as his crimes were against fellow 'racial comrades'. This case negates the fantasies and fascination of many modern day serial/mass murderers, such as, Ted Bundy, Eric Harris, etc, who saw Nazi Germany as an ideal- type society in which they, essentially, believed that had they lived at the time, they would have been able to run amok and murder at will.
ahuthnance, we were talking about Roger Griffin and his [separate] interests in electronic music and Nazi Germany. The interesting question is whether any commonalities could be teased out in how he discusses palingenesis? Or is his musical frame of reference so tightly tied to rave culture that it becomes impossible to imagine other settings and genres being used as props for Victor Turner style liminal rituals (even if the participant is a lone individual not directly fusing with a collective)? What if the music is used to provide a commentary on violence in such contexts as well?
In the absence of other writings on electronic music more generally by Griffin, I've had to content myself with other artefacts, such as the brilliant rescoring of Salo, using Kelly Bailey's evocative soundtrack from Half Life 2 (notwithstanding any historical differences between Italian and German variants of fascism, we would agree that each bears examination as a palingenetic populist form of ultranationalism). And then there is the stunning Tangerine Dream track from the opening of The Keep......
The following clips are of two surviving examples of Nazi Germany's enormous flakturms (flak towers) found in, respectively, Berlin and Vienna. While like most Nazi military structures flakturms embodied the Nazi pursuit of, both literal and metaphysical, borders and boundaries between themselves and their 'enemies', on a more practical level the towers, generally, fulfilled several important roles, including: the principle role of anti-aircraft towers; air raid shelters for up to 30,000 people; storage facilities; and defensive strongpoints. Indeed, the towers in Berlin proved to be impregnable even to the largest Soviet weapons, and provided significant assistance for German troops by using their heavy flak guns in a ground support role.
At the moment, I'm keen to play the newish (its been out for several months now) game 'Turning Point: Fall of History,' which presents an alternative history in the form of a successful Nazi invasion of the USA in the 1950s. While some of the games' images look stunning, of equal interest will be the degree to which its themes, perhaps, accord with those raised in Gavriel D. Rosenfeld's excellent book, 'The World Hitler Never Made'. Rosenfeld offers a comparative cultural history of allohistorical treatments of the Nazi period found in a broad range of mediums extending from academic essays to popular cultural representations in television programmes, film, and novels. Through these, Rosenfeld examines to what degree the Nazi era, Hitler and the Holocaust have been 'normalized,' and what these various treatments suggest(ed) about different national identities, memory, and past and current politics. In this sense, I wonder what 'Turning Point' might point to (i.e, in a celebratory or self-critical manner) re America's actual participation in WW2 , how it views itself today, and its role in the post 9/11 world?
I recently was suprised to find the above miniatures in a Sydney hobby shop. They remind me of the work of photographer David Levinthal who has produced some amazingly provocative images, perhaps most famously those collected in the book 'Hitler Moves East: A Graphic Chronicle, 1941-1943', Levinthal and Gary Trudeau, and his 1994 exhibition titled 'Mein Kampf'. See the following link for more:
This horrific image (which, to me, always brings to mind similar images from Gulf War 1 along the Basra Road) is of two incinerated German panzer grenadiers who died when their Panther tank (belonging to the Panzer Lehr Division) was ambushed by American tank destroyers of 899th TD Battalion. This occurred at La Caplainerie near Le Desert, Normandy, on 11th July, 1944.
On a recent episode of 'New Tricks', the Battersea Power Station featured prominently. This sparked two trains of thought for me. Firstly, and in line with this blog's interest in dead-tech, etc., I was curious to follow up the current status/use of this building. Not surprisingly there are many websites devoted to it, which, in part, outline the many proposals for its future; these include a massive redevelopment which would see the building housing restaraunts, cinemas, shops, etc., !
Secondly, in the show, the character Brian remarked that in mid-20th century Britain, the Battersea Power Station represented a "quasi-religious monument to electricity and power", and how appropriate then that its' art-deco exterior was designed by the architect of Liverpool Cathedral, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott . These comments reminded me of a paper written about the "sacred" importance of the science and technology "megaprojects" undertaken by mid-20th century totalitarian regimes (characterised, most recently, by Michael Burleigh as political religions). Such movements sort to bring about their 'mission' of creating 'heaven on earth', indeed, the very remodelling of humanity itself, through, among other things, the implementation of massive social engineering, building, and modernisation projects. Viewing people as "clay" to be reworked as necessary, death on a massive scale was inevitable.
I had composed a long reply to Joseph's comment on the excerpt from Werber's piece on Tolkien, but then blogger crashed and I've lost the work as a result. Working briefly from memory, what interested me in putting a tiny selection from the article on this blog was that I thought it raised some interesting questions. Is Werber claiming in Gramscian terms that the hegemony of popular culture, predicated on its notion of "common sense", (tantamount to Joseph's comments about the irreducibility of art to its original contexts of production and dissemination), is threatened by a historic bloc composed of biocultural interests, that works by recuperating "innocent" entertainments such as Tolkien? Or is the irony somewhat greater, that Werber's warnings are themselves the paramnesiac symptom of that which they are trying to disavow i.e. colonisation of common sense by biopolitical discourses?
But doesn't this undecidability prove Gramsci's original point, that what constitutes common sense remains contested in hegemonic struggles? Hence Joseph's preferred option may be credible in its own terms, but ultimately it is unable to indemnify itself against contestation. Moreover, isn't the interesting point, which I tried to raise by posting Werber in the first place, how Nazism has to some extent undergone postmodernisation? While not an empty signifier by any means, it has a "floating" capacity in today's media culture to attach itself to other discourses. By tagging that post as "bioculture", I am really asking why today is this one of the most prominent forms of articulation? Are certain problematiques recurring or would they be better understood as novel? Should we see this "ambivalence" as one of the problems of living our relation to history in our late/post modern times? Dery seemed to be pointing in this direction, which is why I earlier posted his "Why the Nazis Matter Today".
Furthermore, even though I have pointed more to a struggle between discourses, which is implicit in what motivated Werber's calculated reference to "hegemony", even without this, I question whether Joseph's points would withstand close scrutiny, even on their own restrictive terms. Afterall, little support was forthcoming for Bryan Ferry when he earlier this year made his comments about the "beauty" of Nazi aesthetics....In any case, the associated critical imperative to police these boundaries is indissociable from tension, difference, (if not contradiction), and we need to be alert to the blindness of the observer and the subsequent undetected re-entry of the originally exluded term in another guise. I say this because Werber is a student of Luhmann as well, and he would surely be aware of the potential of this contingency to undercut the premises of his own argument. To be consistent though, he would also be appreciative of how they could work to undercut the attempted drawing of distinctions by critical observers such as Joseph.
I think the final point relates to some of the more general issues about "hauntology" that have featured on this blog. Part of what could be extracted from them is an awareness that past, present, and future, cannot be neatly cordoned off from each other (not surprisingly, the notion of a "return of the repressed", even when risking trivialisation or banality in cultural representations of this theme, makes for potent material for a horror themed film. One could consider not only the upcoming Dutch film, "Worst Case Scenario", trailers for which I've posted here, but also precursors such as "Shockwaves"). In other words, I recognise Joseph's critique as characteristic of certain reservations others have expressed about cultural studies, as per, for example, Janet Wolff's and Andrew Goodwin's assessment of one scholar's efforts to contextualise the singer Sam Cooke. For them, the irony is that the scholar can demonstrate, in keeping with the lyrics of Cooke's song a great deal of knowledge about "history" etc, but is apparently unable to explain anything about why he actually "likes" Sam Cooke. This kind of argument thereby works well in its own terms. Where it encounters difficulties though is in accounting for public forms of enquiry, of deciding who can participate, and for whom such distinctions would "work". At issue would be the extent to which post-war generations in Germany feel a responsibility for transparent public disclosure, even if this means engaging with articulations that may be abhorrent or unexpected to them. It was certainly in this spirit that I welcome Joseph's comment, but it is also affirmative of the positive sense I got from travelling in Germany a few years ago. By extension, Werber is arguing that drawing too great a distinction between "the downfall" and what now is, and may be to come, is a notion worthy of critical attention in as many forums as possible.
Who would want to disagree with this democratic imperative, even if they think Werber is drawing some very long bows? I feel we should applaud his principle of public enquiry, whilst recognising its paradoxical effects: by reinscribing its subject within larger frameworks of meaning, it is freed up for other forms of engagement. And which artists or democrats could credibly disagree with that?
Finally, the reference to "symptom" earlier might alert some to Zizek's Lacanian style of cultural analysis: it too would question whether things can be enjoyed simply on the basis of what they appear to be, or whether the enjoyment is really symptomatic of something else. I chose in this post to place Werber closer to Gramsci and Luhmann as it seems like a tighter fit to some of the terms he actually uses, both in that article quoted, and in his other work. There are also demonstrable problems in Zizek's accounting for "common sense", which Andy Robinson documents in the link below.
Baudrillard, Zizek and Laclau on "common sense" - a critique POST-MARXISM, POST-STRUCTURALISM AND EVERYDAY WORLDVIEWS
I. Race and Space in German Discourses—After the Downfall
"This year, 60 years after the end of the Third Reich, the German public predictably is celebrating the collective reminiscence of this era. The Oscar-nominated German movie The Downfall, with its "human" perspective on high-ranking Nazi "protagonists" and their entourage performing the regime's last act in the "Fuehrerbunker," is playing a significant part in this culture of remembrance. Whereas the protest generation in the 1960s and '70s criticized the hundredfold continuity of Nazi institutions, staff, laws, and ideology, The Downfall is styling the end of the National Socialist dictatorship as an epochal tabula rasa. Whoever outlived the breakdown of the Reich was sentenced in Nuremberg or reeducated under Allied surveillance. Therefore, May 8, 1945, can be seen as Hour Zero, "die Stunde Null." Such a standpoint gets backing from The Downfall, which dramatizes the end of the Third Reich in very suggestive pictures of destruction, annihilation, death, and suicide. Based on the destroyed battlegrounds in the film, the audience may assume that something altogether new would be built. However, in this essay I will investigate which components of the Third Reich have survived the collapse and are still present today.
This interest in a "subliminal" continuity of pre-1945 modes of thinking was enhanced by the tremendous success of John Ronald Reul Tolkien's epic novel The Lord of the Rings on the German book market and the awesome triumph of Peter Jackson's movie adaptation on German movie screens. Both novel and motion picture are obviously obsessed with the differences between certain races (Elves and Numenór, Dwarfs and Hobbits, Orcs and Southrons, Istari and Balrogs), their genealogies, bloodlines, crossbreedings, and even their biogenetic procreation (Uruk-Hai). Their respective realms (pretty Shire, proud Gondor, beautiful Imladris, terrible Mordor) mirror these differences. Through reading Tolkien's novels, seeing the movies, or playing computer games like "The Battle for Middle-earth" (EA Games, 2004), one is introduced into a certain bio- and geopolitical knowledge: first of all, races are different not only in terms of skin color or height, but in moral worth, refinement, wisdom, and political integrity. The races are either hereditarily good and wise like Elves or genetically evil and dumb like Orcs, and therefore they make "natural-born" enemies. The absolute and insurmountable hate between Elves and Orcs is not outlined as a consequence of political decision-making, but as a result of their opposing DNA sequences. To pass off contingent, historical, and changeable political differences as "natural" or "given" oppositions is paradigmatic in discourses of social Darwinism since the mid-nineteenth century. That "the Slavs" were a race hostile to "us" or "France" was "our" sworn enemy were typical phrases in this German context. In Nazi Germany, the construction of a strict difference between "us" and "them" itself was dramatized as threatened through the menace of mingling: "the Jew" was tainting "our" blood in a biogenetic warfare against the body of the German nation. Within the biopolitical discourse, this threat directly provided the justification for an extermination campaign against the Jewish race. Secondly, in a purely geopolitical context, one is taught that the differences between the territories of these races should be considered results of intense interactions between the cultivating nations and their soil. A primary result of this relationship is that the literal ground of a racial war of extermination is not neutral, but partisan. The whole world, including the territories and landscapes, climates and flora, the waters and their tides and currents, the birds and animals—everything is playing its "natural" role in the conflict between the free, noble races of Elves, Men, and their allies, on the one hand, and the "slaves" or "creatures" of evil and their collaborators, on the other hand. The realms, territories, and regions of the different nations have been molded through years of control in such a deep way that they should be counted as important parts of the political and military power of Middle-earth's races. Space and nature are highly politicized, to such a degree that one has to take into account the geopolitical and biopolitical dimensions of Tolkien's world. To view "natural borders" like rivers or mountains as a living periphery of the society and, vice versa, to understand society as a living organism or political body are integral parts of a geopolitical perspective.Thus, a reader of a German geopolitical author, like Carl Schmitt, Karl Haushofer, or Friedrich Ratzel, or a scholar of the discourses of eugenics, breeding, social Darwinism, or racism, either of whom is reading Tolkien's best sellers or viewing Jackson's blockbusters, would easily be convinced of the proposal that he is encountering a world of fiction that could be described best by pre-1945 discourses. It is not only that the analogies between the battle for Middle-earth and the Nazi campaign of racial warfare are striking and not only that some random elements of the Third Reich's politics seem to have survived the "downfall" in the genre of fantasy books, films, and games: rather an analysis of deep structure, narrative logic, rhetoric, and topology in Tolkien's works reveals in terms of geo- and biopolitics an almost frightening coherence.
I do not assert that Tolkien has written his novels in order to reproduce German discourses of race and space, but I would like to argue that a German audience might find a field of differences, models, and arguments in them that was essential to a pre-1945 hegemonic discourse, but fervently is declared dead in the Federal Republic of Germany. The eminent scholar of East European history Karl Schlögel has remarked in his latest book on Geopolitics and the History of Civilizations that the postwar generations have forgotten or repressed everything of the Nazi semantics of space and race, including its long tradition of German political geography. That discourse has completely "vanished in Germany," he claims".
NB: THE PAINTING CHOSEN TO ILLUSTRATE THIS POST:
Judy Chicago - HUC Show Banality of Evil/StruthofAcrylic, Oil & Photography30.24 in x 43.25 inframed
Please no citation or reproduction of any original writings or images appearing on this blog without the permission of its authors.
"Defects of empirical knowledge have less to do with the ways we go wrong in philosophy than defects of character do; such as the simple inability to shut up; determination to be thought deep; hunger for power; fear, especially the fear of an indifferent universe" (David Stove The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies 1991: 188)
