This hypertrophied singularity in which the subjective sign becomes an all-encompassing national symbol is absent from the corporate identity, the gestures of which towards subjectivity and ontology are provisional, positional and more easily referred to economic factors. The corporate mission is in one sense a market-driven goal; but in another sense the company is also driven by the logic of its own self-representation. It may then become difficult to sort out economically pragmatic from ‘symbolic’ gestures. On 21 March 1991, an article in The Guardian described a redesigned logo for British Telecom, ‘part of the company’s plans to redefine itself for the 1990s’. This was accompanied by the news that Telecom was to cut 40,000 jobs. In one sense, the new logo was being read as a piece of cosmetic surgery, a fragment of ‘false consciousness’
concealing harsh economic realities. This is the interpretation suggested by the headline ‘BT unveils four million pound facelift and cuts 40,000 jobs’. However, these same job cuts are then described as one part of a redefinition for which the new logo is the material expression, the embracing and coordinating symbol. In an interview about the controversial new logo, its designer Wally Olins claimed that the debate provoked by the image had confirmed his intuition that
‘symbolism is emotional and causes people to get worked up’.25 Channelling emotions through the symbol in this way could also serve as a way of diverting attention from economic issues, both in the marketplace and within the company itself. However, Olins also revealed that his intention had been to create a cross-culturally recognisable image drawing on the classical symbolism of Mercury and Hermes: ‘something…immediately recognisable, in any culture, as a symbol of communication’.26 This double colonisation of Classical symbolism and the global market, and the emphasis on subjective factors such as ‘emotion’ and the corporate psyche, typify the trans-economic and supra-material aspirations of the corporate identity.
The question of the cross-culturally identifiable image is particularly relevant to Nazism, which took the globally dispersed sign of the swastika, a sign which Norman Brown27 had described in 1933 as ‘common human property’ and renamed it as a ‘national symbol’. This annexing or copyright of a universal sign parallels the process described by Olins in which an ‘internationally understood’
symbol is simultaneously recognised as the property of a particular company.
The global market is implicit in the selection of the symbol, whose sphere of semiotic influence defines the propositional space which will eventually be colonised. In this respect, the Germanically exclusive and globally inclusive sign of the swastika differed sharply from the communist hammer and sickle, which in global terms was the symbol of an ‘export drive’ on behalf of Marxist ideology. The hammer and sickle attempted to export a Western philosophy of productivity and labour as an international language of revolution. This attempt was criticised by Jean Baudrillard in The Mirror of Production, which suggested that both capitalism and Marxism were in the thrall of the same productivist ethic: ‘When Marxism speaks of the mode of production of primitive societies, we ask to what extent this concept fails to account even for our own historical societies (the reason it is exported).’28 When he wrote The Mirror of Production, Baudrillard was still preoccupied with the vision of a primitive ‘symbolic exchange’ which with its prodigality, waste and sacrifice could challenge both political economy and the economy of the code. In his later text on ‘Symbolic Exchange and Death’ this concept of a meaningless dépense (taken from the work of Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille), was seen as haunting Western society in the form of ‘an obsessive memory, a demand ceaselessly repressed by the law of value’.29 It might seem plausible to suggest that Nazism, which in the name of representations of racial purity murdered human beings en masse, in secret and with no political, electoral or economic end in view, was participating in just such a ‘symbolic exchange’ which cancelled and negated all the laws of exchange and every human value. It could also be argued that the death camps of the Nazi Holocaust were only ‘factories’ insofar as this obscene realisation of a productivist concept was linked to the uneconomic and impossible project of a
‘final solution’. This argument might be sustained were it linked to the disjunction between symbol and reality, the gulf between an anti-Semitic image and its phantom reference to an Aryan identity. It cannot, on the other hand, sustain any idea of an ‘ecstasy of sacrifice’.30
The term ‘final solution’ (Endlosung) as employed by Reinhard Heydrich at the Wannsee conference on 20 January 1942 stands as a bland euphemism for an unspeakable act. The term also carries the connotations of a paradox or logical difficulty, a squaring of the circle in which all other realities and all previous standards of judgement were abandoned to maintain the economy and equilibrium of a racial representation, the one factor by which Nazism could name and distinguish itself. The ‘sacrifice’ here is of the possibility of an alternative view, and of a different logic than the logic of mass murder. According to the testimony of one member of the SS killing squads, ‘the Jews were killed because
they were Jews’.31 This is not a tautology but a statement with its own pitiless internal logic, a sentence which is a killing machine in its own right: human beings at one end, and representations at the other.
Reality was sacrificed to racist logic in successive stages. In Mein Kampf Hitler had already subordinated the economic principle of labour to the trans-economic principle of race. In defining the swastika as the sign of ‘creative work’ he adds that creative work ‘has been and always will be anti-Semitic’. In an earlier passage, Hitler had already established that ‘work’ should be done in the ‘interests of the community’, but this gesture towards a socialist ideal is undermined by his declaration that only the Aryan is capable of such selflessness.32 All labour in the Aryan state, as Hitler makes clear in his statement on the swastika, is only a means towards a racial end. Even military goals were eventually sacrificed to Hitler’s racial project: as J.P.Stern has pointed out, the murder of Jewish prisoners was carried out ‘at considerable cost to the German war effort’.33 In his identification of anti-Semitism as the guiding principle of Nazi policy from first to last, Stern has criticised the revisionist tone employed by Ernst Nolte, who whilst not denying the reality of the Holocaust, has interpreted it as a reaction to what he terms the ‘annihilation’ occasioned by the Russian revolution and a ‘copy’ of similar atrocities throughout history, thus making racism a peripheral rather than the central determinant of Nazi policy.34
Nolte’s attempt to ‘level out’ Nazism relative to other forms of oppression is manifest in his Three Faces of Fascism, a book which compares Action Française, Italian fascism and Nazism.35 In his adoption of a
‘phenomenological’ method of analysis for fascism, Nolte reifies an abstraction, since the differences between movements labelled generically as fascist outweigh the similarities which might reasonably be said to constitute a ‘phenomenon’.
However, his comparison of the Nazi swastika with the Italian fasces allowed for a radical difference in the ‘extremity’ of the visual rhetoric employed:
What was genuinely new and typically transformed was the party flag. The swastika did not, like the lictors’ bundle, recall a remote but nevertheless still tangible historical era: as an ancient and prehistoric symbol of salvation, it was supposed to proclaim the future victory of ‘Aryan man.’
Just as Mussolini’s oratorical style, even in its worst outbursts, seemed controlled and moderate compared to Hitler’s, so the recalling by the Fascists of the Roman Imperial tradition seemed…concrete and historically valid when compared with this appeal to the prehistoric and the archaic.
Not only in ideas; in sight and sound, too, the extreme nature of the young movement…is easily recognizable.36
This passage is worth quoting at length as an example of an analysis of the swastika which does not accept its own implications. Nolte allows his general fascist comparison to repress an investigation of the ‘phenomenon’ of Nazi difference qua difference. Nazism was not fascism in extremis, it was the
institution of racist extremism in the form of a fascist political programme. In other words, Nazism was fascism plus the swastika. Nolte is correct in identifying the Nazi swastika as ahistoric and archaic, but he shies away from identifying race as the ideology within which these elements functioned and for which the swastika was the emblem. The swastika differs from the fasces precisely in its explicit racism, not in its degree of fascism. Both the swastika and the lictor’s bundle express the basic fascist equation of the many contained within the one, but the swastika accomplishes this in a more literal and less literary sense as a signifying surface of identical images, in which each singularity represents the whole as one uniform represents an army. However, in Nazism, this fascist principle is used to construct not a form of the state but a form of the person, or of the state founded on the principle of racial purity. This is why the swastika should be compared not to the lictor’s bundle, but to Fichte’s autokinetic state machine of 1807, whose motive power was derived from Aryan race energy. Nazism, the historian George L.Mosse has claimed, ‘expressly reject [s] the Roman-law concept of the state as a separate corporate identity’.37
Georges Bataille also offered radically divergent interpretations of Italian and German fascism in his ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’, an essay which first appeared in the journal Critique Sociale on 10 November 1933.38 Whilst suggesting that the principle of an aristocratic ‘sovereign form of value’ was common to both political movements, Bataille implied that Italian fascism had identified the state itself as the symbol of this highest value, whereas Nazism, with its exaltation of race above all else, had given the state only a secondary and contingent role. Bataille’s central concept of fascist sovereignty as ‘an existence for itself’ was an elaboration of his theory of symbolic exchange that Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida were later to seize upon. Bataille himself had developed his theory as a reworking of Marcel Mauss’ concepts of the gift and of ‘Mana’, the force in which Polynesian mythology unites the community represented in the symbol or totem. In Maussian anthropology, both the expenditure of the gift and the mysterious force of Mana work to stabilise a primitive social structure, but Bataille saw in Mana a potentially destructive and violent force. In his essay, Bataille claimed that the ‘affective’ symbols of fascism, like primitive totems, at once constitute and represent the community, and that like Mana, the reality created by fascism ‘is that of a force or shock’ which transcends the quotidian reality of the economy and the object.39 At the centre of Bataille’s argument is the opposition of a heterogeneous and fascist ‘being for itself’ to the homogeneous and relative ‘having to be’ of the bourgeois capitalist economy.
Written in 1933, at the moment of the Nazi victory, Bataille’s essay seems both to anticipate and to defer the possibility of Auschwitz, since although he places race at the centre of the Nazi programme, Bataille’s Marxism lights upon the proletarian soldier as the intended sacrificial victim. What has become clear since 1933 is that it was the repressive reality of Nazism that sustained the racial myth of an Aryan community, and not vice versa. The oppression and murder of
‘the Jews’ was the only means by which Nazism could constitute the ‘sovereign
form of value’ called the Aryan. Within the terms of reference set by moral, ethical, military/industrial and political economies, what occurred in the concentration camps was indeed an ‘unexplainable difference’ and a one-way
‘symbolic exchange’. However, this annihilating impulse was framed by an economy of logic, a logic which committed murder to maintain the structure of representations and the racial mission of the swastika.