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Flirting with dark power systems & avant fascism

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12:41 / 30.03.04

I suppose it depends on how literally you take the aesthetic. The more literal, the more you serve it rather than the other way around. For S/M guard/prisoner play, there's (unfortunately) a whole world of prison camps to serve as aesthetic models (like in the Boer War, where the Germans were prisoners of the British!).

Fascism is aesthetically made from a lot of elements--strong, dark colors, uniforms, simple graphics, totems, bombastic music, really large buildings and stage sets--that's six right there, leaving lots of room for non-Nazi fun.

But I agree with Anna: The Nazis will pretty much own fascism for centuries (1000-year Stench), for having taken the idea, supercharged it with German Romanticism and run with it as far as it would go. Italians may have an earlier claim to fascism, from the Roman Empire and--aesthetically--from the Futurists, but they didn't have the sheer will to destruction (but they had a few death camps). British Fascism probably *would* have looked like 1984, while Upton Sinclair's 1935 satire It Can't Happen Here looks like a fair depiction of US fascism.

Fascism creeps me out because it tends to attract people who are either powerless and frustrated or powerful and still frustrated. When both types get together, skeptics, scoffers and mockers are in deep trouble. Which reminds me, has anyone yet read Jonathan Schell's The Ungovernable World?

Tryphena Absent

13:15 / 30.03.04

I don't think that the Fascist (or Nazi) aesthetic icons existing in the world are really potent or interesting at all. They're just dead

Which is fine until you see BNP guys walking down the street and going in to the pub three doors down from your flat for a pint and suddenly the St. George's Cross is a tool of evil. When faced with that use of symbolism the aesthetic icon does mean something and it certainly isn't dead but the association has to present itself to you. Images don't mean anything out of context but that doesn't mean the context is dead it just means that you're viewing the image from a different perspective.

Some people associate the two things - I don't

But that's only because the use isn't current! If a fascist group were using Swastikas in your town then your attitude would change and you'd start to connect the image and the representation. It is precisely the objectification in hindsight that allows us to wash over the association.

15:23 / 30.03.04

I get off on it; and I would argue that if you don't, you're either lying or you have no sense of aesthetics.

i would have to say i agree here. that sums it up pretty solidly.

But that's only because the use isn't current! If a fascist group were using Swastikas in your town then your attitude would change and you'd start to connect the image and the representation. It is precisely the objectification in hindsight that allows us to wash over the association.

actually, i grew up in a town where we had a significant, active neo-Nazi presence. i used to know quite a few young fascists with SS pins and swastikas on their jackets, and i've got to say that outside of that context, i still don't associate the image with the history in other contexts, like BDSM play or whatever. basically, i still think it's possible to play with the imagery, though it's important to recognize that the imagery is extremely loaded in certain contexts.

i

10:07 / 01.04.04

Interesting stuff. Going back to a previous comment on reclaiming/disempowering stuff with previously negative associations. OK, yeah. Black dudes in the US have successfully reclaimed 'nigger' but in an atempt to do something pretty useful. Seems to me like the reclamation of, let's say the swastika, by the SM community is just an example of applying a pre existing aesthetic to a modern situation with a generally similar dynamic/sentiment as opposed to something 'good' like, world peace. Man. Don't really know if the difference of association is big enough for this to be a really good example of that.

10:55 / 01.04.04

I get off on it; and I would argue that if you don't, you're either lying or you have no sense of aesthetics.

Or I might experience the relationship between sexuality and aesthetics differently from you. Can we please avoid telling people that if they say they don't have the same forms of sexual desire as us, they must be lying? Unless by "get off on" you mean something different from what I mean, of course.

But it raises an interesting set of questions. I get huge aesthetic pleasure from some forms of art that are not representational in a way I can read (eg paintings in some Australian Aboriginal traditions), but I don't see a way of translating that into sexual practices. Surely equating the Nazi aesthetic with 'guard/prisoner' fantasies and practices is doing nothing but reinforce the relation between the aesthetic and the political/genocidal politics? Couldn't there be some more resistive, transgressive or just plain interesting modes of translating that aesthetic pleasure into sexual, political or artistic practices - modes of translation that don't just obey the Nazi's own sets of associations (swastika = fascist power)? I think this is kind of going back to the original questions raised, though, so I'll shut up.

VonKobra,Scuttling&Slithering

12:44 / 01.04.04

I see Third Reich Iconography as quite beautiful, in that way that the Imagery itself is classical, strong and bold, with images of nature, log cabins, eagles, lightning bolts etc....but this in itself would be but PLEASANT if it weren't for the associations with the reality of National Socialism. It gives it the Dark Edge. I'm not a Nazi, and have in fact put my health on the line to defend the principles of an Ethnically, Religiously free society on more than one occasion. But politically, personally, I think the Nazis, though the worst kind of toadies, are often used as scapegoats. Communism spawned more misery and death, yet it is perfectly acceptable to wear a Hammer and Sickle badge on a fur hat in public and on social occasions.

Once I believed I wore Nazi uniforms to disempower the image. Take away the mystery, disempower it by wearing it while MY personal beliefs were in direct opposition to what the uniform supposedly symbolized.
Nowadays, I just think they're extremely good looking uniforms. I mean, they're BLACK for fucksake. Fetishistic? Yes, probably.

Dirk Bogarde.

Charlotte Rampling.

I think the uniforms also symbolize the crossing of barriers, obviously. You wear this and ANYTHING is liable to happen. ANYTHING goes. All bets are off. It's the unknown. A walk into the dark maybe.

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