In Abstraction and Empathy Worringer had contrasted ‘the symbolic value of the motif’ with the demands of the ‘will to form’.100 In this instance the word
‘symbol’ did not refer to the romantic tradition but was instead used to indicate a rationally understood and encoded message. What Worringer had in fact done was to contrast a linguistic definition of the symbol with a romantic one (‘will to
form’), in which the symbol is freed from the task of representation to become the autonomous signifier of a national/ racial selfhood. It is significant that Worringer used this distinction in the context of debates surrounding the recurrence of the same motif in different cultural contexts. If the motif was regarded as isomorphic with a symbolic (definite) meaning, Worringer argued, then ‘the world domination of certain motifs would be inexplicable’. The ‘world domination’ of the swastika which Thomas Wilson had mapped out in 1894 had provided the anthropologist with a similar conundrum, but both Wilson’s and Worringer’s definitions of the symbol as a single locus of meaning tended to obscure the relationship of motif to overall field which their own cartographic vision had created.
The issue of ‘the constraints of signification’ placed by a single meaning on the decorative motif has also been addressed by Gombrich. He implies that patterning tends to work against signification, describing how repetition will camouflage the symbolic meaning of the motif, and stating that we ‘have purchased this order at the expense of meaning’.101 However, what the ornamentalised sign loses in depth of meaning it gains in rhetorical emphasis.
Gombrich does not address the question of whether all decorative schemes tend to negate ‘meaning’ in the same way, and whether the repetition of a figurative motif (which constitutes a semiotic law unto itself) would have the same effect as the repetition of an abstract one whose individual geometric order could be easily adapted to suit the requirements of an overall grid. In Worringer’s Formprobleme, this issue of the antagonistic relationship of motif to overall field finds a solution in the fractal ornament of the revolving wheel, in which the morphology of the part ‘symbolises’ the morphology of the whole whilst still functioning as an integral part of the scheme. This preserved the romantic fusion of subject and object, and saved the signifying image from the ignoble fate of an ersatz or mere representation. One form of servitude, however, was then replaced by another in which both part and whole traced the inner geometry of race energy, which they unconsciously and helplessly ‘express’. Both Worringer and Gombrich rely on the isomorphic or ‘one-to-one’ model of the symbol, and the corresponding notion that to understand symbolism is to decode a language.
Worringer did not describe the ‘revolving wheel’ as a symbol, since it lacked the isomorphism or correspondence that was necessary to fulfil his definition. He instead describes it as a ‘northern ornament’: northern because it possessed the requisite aspect of violent, mechanical movement through which the Aryo-Germanic soul could be recognised. Rather than seeing in the image a reference to or representation of something else, ‘Gothic man’ could instead refer to the racial mirror of the ornament, and see himself reflected.
All ornament must be seen to signify: the true issue at stake will be in what way it signifies and to whom. The Nazi swastika, as the frozen image of a dynamic motion, lay somewhere between the static typographic Germanism of Fraktur and the ornamental race signature of the nationalist Gothic, a morphology of relentless progress. Yet both Gothic script and Gothic ornament signified within
the scheme of radical autonomy and the assertion of difference that was the legacy of romanticism. They were not ‘German’ in form, but in expression and rhetorical force; form was placed in the service of a semiotic of excess, whose collectivised representation became confrontational and aggressive. The swastika was ‘expressive’ in a rhetorically Germanic sense which depended on the Nazis’
own version of romanticism transfigured and transfixed for the collective. gaze.
It is this configuring theme of race romanticism which dispenses with the
‘ornament or symbol?’ question as an a priori of discussion, since both were interpenetrative tropes of the same pseudo-aristocratic and nationalist project.
Taken out of context, Walter Benjamin’s often-quoted assessment that Nazism was ‘an aestheticisation of political life’102 tends to confuse the role of the aesthetic with that of the visual. Instead, the phrase ‘visualisation of politics’
might usefully separate the ‘distancing’ semiotics of art from those of political design. And the nature of the political message dictated the morphology of symbolic forms: an aggressive nationalism adapted signs that, as Brandon Taylor has suggested, were imbued with the values of ‘the harsh, the expressive and the coercive’.103 Yet this negatively aesthetic and aggressive morphology was immediately recognised as the essence of all that was authentically German. In 1912, Worringer wrote that when confronted with the Gothic, ‘we have an impression that we are being coerced by some alien, imperious will’.104
Arising directly from this definition is the question of whether the use of the swastika as the signifier of difference and an anti-aesthetic could be included in the total history of uses of this image, and whether such an inclusion, if possible, would be defensible as cultural anthropology. Can a cultural context for coercive form constitute the basis for a cross-cultural comparison? To effectively define cultural use, it is not sufficient simply to ask ‘why this motif?’; it is necessary to look at the problem from the other side, and ask ‘which features or aspects of this motif work within or against the context in which it is placed?’ The migration or otherwise of ‘meanings’ is irrelevant to everyone except the encyclopaedist. A more interesting question is why some forms are retained and others never adopted in a particular context. Adolf Loos’ suggestion in 1931 that
‘everything that has been abandoned by other peoples’ is ‘proclaimed thereafter as German’105 implies that a particular form of colonisation, rather than a gradual assimilation was at work. Neglected or anachronistic forms are employed because they have a distinct and recognisable character; they are both ‘foreign’
and alien to their context, yet on that same basis are recognisable as truly German. This paradoxical logic, which worked well with the swastika, caused difficulties for the Nazi regime when it attempted to employ Fraktur as the universal script of National Socialism. Fraktur could not be easily read; its hallowed and Germanic distinctness was revealed as useless in a modern semiotic environment and its disuetude entirely justified. The swastika worked better because it did not require a supplementary reading, it needed only a universal recognition. An effective communication circuit was thus completed:
everyone in Europe could recognise the swastika, but it was simultaneously
recognised as a signifier of the German. In the swastika, the degree zero of rhetoric, form as pure ‘expression’ could signify on both levels simultaneously, appearing as an unequivocal challenge to and declaration of war on the ‘un-Germanic’.
This conflation of a universal and a nationalist/racist message is one reason why the Nazi swastika cannot be rehabilitated in a European context, since its signifying form and its ‘meaning’ have become interchangeable: there is no space between a signifier and its signified into which a new meaning could be inserted. If the image cannot be reassigned, could it be replaced within the global diaspora of similar signifying forms? The paradoxical status of the Germanic swastika, which was adopted only in order that it could signify something distinct, pure and ‘set apart’, would seem to suggest that orthodox models of cross-cultural comparison are inapplicable. Throughout this book, however, I am proposing that in the case of a form ‘like unto itself’ the ideas of context and comparison should be used literally: that is, context (from contexere, to weave together) should be used to indicate a patterned or ornamental scheme, and comparison should consist of the relationship of motifs within this scheme. For the swastika, the largest of these schemes is the world map drawn by Thomas Wilson; yet the example of Nazism, a local race politics with global ambitions, indicates how the particular relates to the general in a way which Wilson overlooked. Diffusionism, an idea which fed on metaphors of expansionism, colonisation and war, provided a precedent for the Nazi Blitzkrieg.
The fact that Fraktur was unreadable and the swastika could command immediate recognition also suggests how diffusion and ‘migration’ are facilitated. In the swastika, the typographic or graphological ‘symbolic’ element exists in its own right; in Fraktur, the symbolic (Germanic) and the linguistic (German) elements are inextricably linked. But as Loos had pointed out, the Germanic element of the equation was not linked to the language in any essential way, and constituted a detachable, portable and therefore transmissible element that was adopted at some point in the past. Dan Sperber has argued that this is the reason why ‘symbols’ can migrate, and languages tend to stay within well-defined limits:
The fact that a datum participates in the symbolism of one culture does not prevent its symbolic processing in a second culture… In the case of language, the set of data is defined by a state of the language at a given time and place, and no fact foreign to this state will be processed. But the corresponding notion of a state of symbolism for a given culture at a given moment does not imply any strict criteria of inclusion or exclusion.106 Here the structural consistency of language is contrasted with the symbol, which is either a heterogeneous ‘landmark’ which draws together particular elements of the existing context into a recognisable cultural pattern, or a floating value around which new cultural paradigms can form. Although Sperber’s ideas do not
rule out the possibility of independent invention, they show how migration might occur, insofar as the symbol in this model is not supplementary to a particular language, but to established language per se. This might provide a partial answer to the question that Thomas Wilson had posed when he asked ‘whether it was by migration and contact or independent invention’ that the swastika had come to be globally dispersed. By separating the creation of the swastika and its cultural institution as symbol into two distinct acts, it is possible to explain what might have befallen the mysterious ‘original meaning’. Images or objects, once employed as symbols or used in ritual, can be used elsewhere for the same purpose without their attached meanings being employed as well, but they must be reinstituted as symbols in each new situation. The swastikas which Schliemann found at Troy and the swastikas of the Nazi party rallies are united by the fact that Schliemann is at the beginning and Hitler is at the end of a single process in which a ‘found image’ has begun to function symbolically within a particular culture. This cultural invention of the symbol is the act of ‘setting apart’ an image from existing texts, and the construction of a new set of texts around it. This suggests that rather than invariably reading symbols as the
‘products’ of a cultural context, they may also be seen as deliberately sited ‘non-texts’ (Sperber’s ‘nonsense’) to be read against, rather than with the grain. This is not meant to imply that cultural context is irrelevant, because the nature of the context dictates the nature of its subversion: new myths are spun from existing material, using symbols which facilitate both the unpicking and the rebinding of textual threads. The power of the symbol ‘in its own right’ is to imply the possibility of such a transformation. In the case of the Nazi swastika, the already unstable context was Weimar Germany, and the objectification and
‘enlargement’ of the nostalgic and reactionary fantasies that the Aryan swastika had come to represent occurred in a situation in which these fragmentary texts could be effectively politicised. In this instance, the symbol acts as foreign or irritant matter to the existing context, and becomes the nodal point around which other discourses can reify and establish themselves.