Hermann Weyl once described how whilst delivering a lecture on symmetry in Vienna in 1937, he spoke of the swastika; discussing its nature as a form which presents rotational without bilateral symmetry, and its use (in the form of the three-armed swastika or triskelion) in Greek art in conjunction with the Medusa’s head.35 Weyl recalled that when he pointed out how during the Nazi period the swastika had become a symbol far more terrifying than the Medusa’s head, ‘a pandemonium of applause and booing broke loose in the audience’. He concluded this anecdote with the observation that ‘it seems that the magic power ascribed to these patterns lies in their startling incomplete symmetry—rotations without reflections’.
It is significant that the examples Weyl used to illustrate his lecture were the triskelion and ‘swastika-like wheel’ patterns on the staircase of the Stefansdom in Vienna. According to the Viennese occultist Guido von List, the triskelion, swastika and other Aryan signs could be recognised in the design of the late Gothic tracery and rose windows, and, like Weyl, Guido von List saw the visual autokinesis of the swastika as the source of its power: ‘only there, uniquely and alone, understand the thrice-high-holy secret of constant generation, constant life, the uninterrupted recurrence.’36 And in 1912, Wilhelm Worringer had described the same ‘startling incom plete symmetry’ in Gothic ornament as productive of an impression of violent movement that was non-classical and essentially Aryo-Germanic:
In the North, there are a number of ornamental motives [sic] which have an undoubted centric character, but here too we note a decisive difference if we compare similar Classical ornament. For example, instead of the regular and invariably geometrical star or rosette or similar restful forms, in the North we find the revolving wheel (drehende rad), the turbine or so-called sun wheel, all designs which express violent movement (eine heftige Bewegung). Moreover, the movement is peripheral and not radial. It is a movement which cannot be arrested or checked.37
Steven Heller has claimed that ‘the swastika [is] also referred to as a sun wheel’,38 whereas in his Book of Signs, the typographer Rudolf Koch shows the sun wheel as a cross within a circle, which is then broken to form the swastika.39 Given that Worringer’s emphasis is on a turbinoform (spiralling or spinning) movement, which he then compares with a ‘so-called sun wheel’ (sogennante sonnenrad) he was clearly describing a set of forms possessing ‘swastikal’
symmetry. It is also crucial to note that for Worringer, Gothic motifs were not named symbols, but graphological ‘expressions’. In Formprobleme der Gotik, Worringer constructed an entire Aryan race psychology using the linked ideas of autokinesis and repetition. Whilst it is clear that spinning motifs are not the exclusive property of Gothic ornament, a straightforward refutation of
Worringer’s claim that autokinetic forms are, in their ‘violent movement’, expressive of the Germanic soul was countered by his emphasis on the way in which such motifs are employed. He perceived a difference in method between classical and northern ornament, and claimed that the same motif would be employed in radically different ways. According to Worringer, the emphasis of northern ornament is on repetition, and that of the south on the homogenisation of repetition in balanced mirror symmetry.
Worringer’s graphology of style, which set out the conditions of recognition for a Germanic aesthetic, bore a methodological similarity to Zmigrodski’s identification of the ‘pure’ Aryan swastika. This similarity existed in spite of the fact that Worringer’s divination of the character of the Germanic soul admitted to a morbid anxiety which is repressed in Zmigrodski’s nostalgic evocation of the Mutterepoche. Both authors constructed an Aryan morphology which was distinct, self-generative and ‘active underground…even where, obstructed by more powerful external conditions and hindered in its free expression, it assumes a foreign disguise’.40 The ahistoric and disruptive unconscious race energy that was Worringer’s ‘Gothic’ allowed him to simultaneously free his discourse from the bondage of art-historical facts and construct a psychology of style that implied the possibility of recollection, resurgence and renewal: ‘It must at once be said that the psychological conception of the Gothic style, as it will be revealed by our investigation, in no way coincides with the historical Gothic.’41 There is an entire phenomenology of style in Worringer’s writing, which is not necessarily the style of the Gothic cathedral. Nonetheless, this romanticised and Germanic concept of form caught the public imagination, and proved to be in tune with the Zeitgeist of Germany in the early twentieth century. According to his translator, Herbert Read, Worringer ‘gave the Germans what they had longed for
—an aesthetic and historical justification for a type of art distinct from classicism, independent of Paris and the Mediterranean tradition’.42 Again, the requirement is for a semiotic of distinction, and Worringer made this plain: his Gothic is
‘strength of expression’ opposed to a classical ‘Beauty of expression’.
Expressive rhetoric has not simply replaced aesthetics, since Worringer defined it as an anti-aesthetic: ‘the so-called beauty of Gothic is a modern misunderstanding.’43
Whilst Formprobleme der Gotik described the ‘underground’ Gothic as an invisible energy which constitutes form, Worringer persisted in describing this energy using morphological criteria. Visible ornamental form traces the figures of this invisible inner geometry. Whereas for Zmigrodski the debased ornamental form of the swastika concealed its higher symbolic aspect, Worringer’s graphology proposed that this same marginality of ornament, like a specimen of handwriting, offered the possibility of an unhindered revelation. He declared that
‘it is of the essence of ornament that in its products the artistic volition of a people finds its purest and most unobscured expression’.44 Worringer claimed that when the Germanic strain was absent, as in the English Gothic for example,
then ornament did indeed become ‘arbitrary decoration’ and lost its expressive value.
In the double repetition of the revolving wheel, which repeats its own form within itself and then is itself repeated, the morbid, oppressive, feverish and exalted qualities of the northern psyche were, Worringer claimed, made manifest. This ornament could in fact be described as fractal: in Worringer’s own words, ‘a world which repeats in miniature, but with the same means, the expression of the whole’. Worringer wrote of ‘that will to form…which is as strongly and unmistakably expressed in the smallest crinkle of Gothic drapery as in the great Gothic cathedrals’.45 As well as reading from the ornamental surface to the invisible and latent psychological depth, Worringer also saw significance in the way in which his Gothic transfixed and held the viewer’s gaze on its surface. In this second reading, the race handwriting of the Gothic is endlessly reproduced as the expression of an inescapable and implacable will:
The expression of Northern ornament does not directly depend upon us; we are met rather with a vitality which appears to be independent of us, which challenges us, forcing upon us an activity to which we submit only against our will. In short, the Northern line does not get its life from any impress which we willingly give it, but appears to have an expression of its own, which is stronger than our life.46
Here visual autokinesis is linked to semiotic autonomy: the revolving wheel not only appears to have independent motion, but that self-willed movement has the hypnotic effect of imposing its secret design on us. We do not ‘decode’ the image and give it a meaning which we had already possessed: instead, the uncanny vitality which Worringer attributed to the Gothic is a force which itself takes possession of the mind. The image is not tied to a fixed or consonant meaning, nor even to a free associative range or ‘band’ of different meanings;
instead, the phantasmagoric image itself becomes the fixed point and the focus of our gaze. Worringer wrote of the outright deception perpetrated by Gothic ornament, which ‘requisitions’ our vision in the service of its autonomous and unnatural motion. In Guy Debord’s situationist text Society of the Spectacle, a similar hypnotic power is ascribed to the autonomous image. For Debord, as soon as lived reality becomes a spectacular and commodified representation, it constitutes a magnet for the collective gaze:
The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself…the spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as an instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness.47
Debord’s spectacle is also ‘the autonomous movement of the non-living’.48 We are held at the level of the purely visual, transfixed by the form of an image which appears supernatural only because it has become divorced from reality. What Worringer’s ‘eternal’ Gothic described was the spectacular form of ornament in the twentieth century, whose only function is to create a mirage of times past and to camouflage its means of its production.