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I considered starting this on the Film forum, or even Art Fashion and Design, but it's not exclusively about either, and it's more a general topic (could even be "news", therefore Switchboard) so I thought I'd run it here first and wait for any suggested moves. I agree with the notion that Conversation isn't just for light, aimless stuff: after all, Feminism 101 and its sister-threads are on this forum.
However, my idea was perhaps that on Conversation, the discussion could be slightly less rigid and structured, and more open to personal response and anecdote.
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Countryside Alliance, National Socialism... they don't really paint a good picture, do they?
Interesting gambit here, from the Independent article linked to above:
The singer is a supporter of the pro-hunting Countryside Alliance. Anti-bloodsport campaigners called for the alliance to disown him. "Mr Ferry appears to be a man with very little sense of conscience," said Douglas Batchelor of the League Against Cruel Sports. "We would be interested to see if the alliance does the decent thing and disowns him."
ie. he's so immoral, the bloodsports alliance should disown him!
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Momus says
The reason I disagree is that I'm so steeped in Saussure, and his idea about the relationship between signifier and signified being arbitrary. If that's true -- and it obviously is, because we make language ourselves -- it means that no signifier should be vilified or anathematized, especially not one that's changed hands and been recontextualized as many times as the swastika. Why must this polysemous shape now forever remain a Nazi symbol? Why has something so slippery become a final destination? Does evil need a logo? Surely keeping the swastika forever Nazi gives Nazism more power that it deserves -- makes it, in fact, a sort of timeless principle.
In fact, I'm not sure if this is an entirely accurate semiotic approach, as it's only within language that the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary (though I guess linguistics is all Saussure was concerned with). Within the broader field of visual imagery, a signifier can have a direct, iconic, or less direct, indexical link to the signified.
The swastika is not one of these two signs ~ its link to Nazism is symbolic rather than iconic (based on resemblance) or indexical (based on cause-effect). So, true, there is only an arbitrary culturally-agreed relationship between swastika and Nazism, and I believe the same design has been used in various cultures for thousands of years to mean things very different from National Socialism. In the West in the 21st century, of course, swastika = Nazism is still going to be the strongest and most obvious association.
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The problem could be that nazi ideology and nazi/ aesthetics are so entwined that a appreciation of the latter could conceivably be construed as an appreciation of the former. In which case the appreciation itself could be seen as a form of validation or revistionist view of one of the darkest pages in human history.
I agree really ~ I think it's entirely possible to appreciate something aesthetically and distance yourself from its ideology, but I think (especially with an ideology like Nazism) you have to be extremely clear you're doing that, and very sensitive in your articulation of it, and I think Ferry didn't do either in his initial comments.
I also agree with Momus that there's been a tendency within rock music to flirt with Nazism.
In 1975 a coked- and occulted-up David Bowie called Hitler "the first rock star -- he staged a whole country". Keith Moon liked to dress up as a Nazi, and Bobby Gillespie is fond of throwing Hitler salutes, probably more in tribute to Iggy than Adolf. What Ferry is saying now is a tame, drawing room version of the same thing.
To say "the Nazis had amazing style" still carries a shock value ~ not as dangerous for your reputation as "the BNP have amazing style", but it's a way for an old rocker to remain a bit edgy and court controversy. I'm not sure if Ferry was really trying to be daring, or if he just didn't express his purely art-historical views appropriately, but I do feel Bowie was, foolishly, messing around with Nazi ideology and aesthetics in the 1970s.
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I also feel it's easy to go down that road, and that it can be dangerously tempting. Here's a personal anecdote. I grew up on Bowie, and Star Wars, and later on other SF that played around with Nazi uniforms and made them look cool, like Starship Troopers. So when I entered the Imperial War Museum's Holocaust exhibition, some years ago, with a friend steeped in the same culture as me, we started off by muttering that the uniforms looked really fucking good, and that we'd like to wear something like that. I'm sure we felt pretty subversive and radical.
By the middle point of the exhibition ~ not even at the end, with its utter horrors, but the middle point, when German Jews were being kicked in the street by their neighbours, spat at in shops and oppressed every day with a new stupid, spiteful law that stopped them from walking in parks or forced them to step into the gutter, all those radical, subversive thoughts had been flattened. I felt sick about what I'd said and thought before. I came out feeling fucking stupid and ashamed for having smirked that the uniforms were cool.
Maybe that's the most truthful response, that you can't and shouldn't separate the aesthetic from the ideology and all the cruelty it encompassed.
But on the other hand... I just don't like the idea that if I was in the public eye and said in interview that I admired aspects of Triumph des Willens, some stupid journalists who don't really get it would trumpet about my "Nazi gaffe" and phone up a bunch of spokespeople to condemn me until I made an apology. I don't like being told, by people who don't understand what it's about, that I can't recognise the importance or qualities of a film because of its politics. |
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