Temptations of Faust: The Logic of Fascism and Postmodern Archaeologies of Modernity 9781442680449

Citation preview

TEMPTATIONS OF FAUST THE LOGIC OF FASCISM AND POSTMODERN ARCHAEOLOGIES OF MODERNITY

This page intentionally left blank

TEMPTATIONS OF FAUST THE LOGIC OF FASCISM AND POSTMODERN ARCHAEOLOGIES OF MODERNITY

EVELYN COBLEY

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2002 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-3657-0

Printed on acid-free paper

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Cobley, Evelyn Margot, 1947Temptations of Faust: the logic of fascism and postmodern archaeologies of modernity Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-3657-0 1. National socialism. 2. Fascism - Philosophy. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) - Causes. 4. Mann, Thomas, 1875-1955. Doktor Faustus. 5. Adorno, Theodor W., 1903-1969. Philosophic der neuen Musik. I. Title. JC481.C62 2002

320.53'3'0943

C2001-904284-1

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

To David

This page intentionally left blank

CONTENTS

Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii Note on Translations xv Introduction 3 PART+ONE+++DECONSTRUCTIONS OF MODERNITY Chapter 1 Neo-Romantic Roots of German Fascism 11 Chapter 2 Organic Unity and the Privileging of Reason: Hegel and Beethoven 56 Chapter 3 Fascist Undercurrents: Appeals to Authenticity and the Privileging of Reason 107 PART Tw+++++OSTMODERNITY AND FASCISM Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6

Breakthrough into Atonality (or Postmodernism) 155 Fascism and Atonality (or Postmodern Play) 184 Decentred Totalities: Fascism, Capitalism, Postmodernism 217 Notes 273 Works Cited 285 Index 293

This page intentionally left blank

PREFACE

My interest in++++++++++++was sparked in a graduate course on Thomas Mann taught by a professor who confessed having skipped all the 'tedious' philosophical passages on music. By the time he made this comment, I had already finished a research paper on the very music theory this professor now declared not only extraneous to the novel's main themes but downright impenetrable and tedious. I still remember trying to mount a spirited justification of the music theory, which I consider to this day to hold a key to Mann's conflicted and complex analysis of fascist Germany. In spite of the generous grade the professor gave me, I suspect that I did not then succeed in changing his attitude. This book,Temptations of Faust,++++++++++++++++++++++++++ present my case with greater comprehensiveness and, I hope, a larger measure of theoretical sophistication. After all, Doctor Faustus had continued to engage and excite me throughout the many years I was devoting to research in critical theories and cultural practices. After I had completed Representing War: Form and Ideology in First World War Narratives,+a monograph investiga ing the relationship between aesthetic form and the experience of a historically 'real' event, it occurred to me that Mann's novel had stayed lodged in my mind because it self-consciously foregrounds a parallel between aesthetic experimentation and the sociohistorical conditions of German fascism. Having spent my impressionable years in Switzerland, I was so acutely aware of the shadows hanging over Germany in the aftermath of the Holocaust that I wanted to know more about the cultural roots of Nazism, i.e., the conditions which had allowed a civilized people to rationalize crimes against humanity so completely at

x

Preface

odds with the self-understanding of modernity. The simplistic explanation that Germans were more evil or psychopathological than other modern peoples in the West never struck me as adequate. Although the Holocaust was a German phenomenon, the kind of hostility to liberal humanism exploited by Hitler was evidently widespread throughout Europe. Temptations of Faust thus had its simultaneous genesis in my aesthetic appreciation of Mann's Doctor Faustus and my sociopolitical curiosity about the Holocaust as the most traumatic historical event of the twentieth century. Unlike many other treatments of the Holocaust, this study deals neither with the suffering of the victims nor with the psychology of the perpetrators. While such treatments inform my own research, Temptations of Faust is specifically concerned with cultural categories which more or less unwittingly legitimized the very acts of barbarism these categories were meant to foreclose. Although the music theory laid out in Doctor Faustus pinpointed the issues at stake in my reading of fascism, my project gradually transformed itself into a broader and highly interdisciplinary study of the logic of fascism. The ideological issues raised by the novel's music theory called for a consideration of historical, philosophical, and sociological discourses which both intersect with the novel and exceed its frame. In other words, in my investigation of the logic of fascism, I approach the deconstruction of modernity and the implications of postmodernity from various and often overlapping disciplinary angles. It seems to me that Mann's montage technique already authorizes an analysis of the novel beyond the author's own intentions and control. Starting with the realization that Mann acknowledged 'borrowing' his discourse on music from Theodor W. Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music, I began to read Leverkiihn's breakthrough into atonality as symptomatic of a paradigm shift from modernity to postmodernity, a shift which has to my knowledge not been recognized in Mann criticism. Through his incorporation of Adorno's deconstruction of Beethoven as a musical Hegel, Mann alerted me to the possibility that Nazism cannot simply be dismissed as a temporary aberration from the project of modernity; instead of regarding fascism as an atavistic regression now safely behind us, Mann's novel implies that modernity is implicated in fascism both in terms of Hitler's rhetorical appeal to neoRomantic irrationalism and of his recourse to the instrumentalization of reason in the manipulation of the social and political order. The first part of Doctor Faustus, the part which precedes Leverkiihn's

Preface

xi

pact with the devil, compelled me to scrutinize the formative influences on the composer and to do so in the context of such sociological studies of fascism as George L. Mosse's The Crisis of German Ideology and Zygmunt Bauman'sModernity+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ such philosophers as Adorno and Jacques Derrida. The second part of the novel, dealing with Leverkiihn's rejection of tonality (modernity) and his 'invention' of the twelve-tone system (postmodernity), drew my attention to a parallel between atonality and Hitler's actual political strategies, particularly his reconfiguration of Germany's administrative apparatus. While critics concur that Mann intended Leverkiihn to be symbolic of Germany's pact with the devil, standard interpretations of the novel restrict this parallel to the neo-Romantic ideology articulated by intellectuals the composer encounters in social circles. What the critical consensus overlooks is that Leverkiihn's radical break with tonality is analogous to Hitler's break with the liberal tradition. This insight, then, drove me to take a close look at the tropes Mann borrows from Adorno in his depiction of Leverkuhn's aesthetic breakthrough. Aligning myself with theorists who consider American postmodernism to be a belated manifestation of the earlier avant-garde movement in Europe, I maintain that the paradoxical interdependence of totalization and fragmentation in Mann's novel suggests that the logic of fascism persists into our own postmodern times. However, I would like to guard against the possible misconception that I am anticipating a recurrence of the Holocaust in the form it took in Germany. What I hope to convey is the+++++++++that not modernity but also postmodernity remain complicit with a logic which we arrogantly and complacently place at Germany's door in its moment of historical aberration. It is my hope that those engaged in cultural studies will keep in mind that the logic of fascism holds not only historical lessons but theoretical implications whose continued pertinence ought not to be underestimated.

This page intentionally left blank

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The central ideas of this book were presented at a number of occasions to colleagues at conferences and to students in graduate seminars: their comments have proven invaluable. The greatest debt of gratitude, however, goes to my friend and colleague R.B.J. (Rob) Walker whose acuity helped me to sharpen my theoretical position. I am also grateful to Smaro Kamboureli, Pam McCallum, and Linda Hutcheon for their friendship and unwavering support. Special thanks go to my research assistants Jane Haig, Kevin Kohan, and most notably Heike Harting. Above all, I would like to thank David Thatcher for offering stylistic improvements and for his exemplary patience during the years it has taken me to complete this manuscript. I have greatly benefited from the comments and suggestions offered by the three anonymous readers for the Press, the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, and the Manuscript Review Committee of the University of Toronto Press. All three were expert and attentive in their consideration of the manuscript. I would like to acknowledge the encouraging and effective way in which the University of Toronto Press dealt with my manuscript. Suzanne Rancourt was a most supportive academic editor, Barbara Porter was a most efficient managing editor, and Judy Williams was superb as a meticulous copy-editor. Research for this book was assisted by two visits I paid to the Thomas-Mann Archiv in Zurich; the archive holdings are impressive and the staff friendly, helpful, and efficient. Preparation of this book was facilitated by the generous support of a

xiv Acknowledgments

Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada and by the study leave granted by the University of Victoria. Finally, I would like to mention two journals,++++++++++++++++ which sections of this work, in other versions, appear.

NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS

Temptations of Faust+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ W. Adorno's Philosophic der Neuen Musik in English translations. In an attempt to make this theoretical investigation into the logic of fascism accessible to a larger audience, I reluctantly sacrificed the linguistic features and precision of the German texts. Anyone familiar with the two German originals will attest that no translation is able to capture the nuances and resonances which interconnect fictional narrative and philosophical treatise. Even though I would have preferred to retain quotations in their original German, I am grateful to the translators for facilitating the difficult task of making the challenging texts of Mann and Adorno more widely available. In the case of Mann, I am indebted to both the 1968 translation of Doctor Faustus by H.T. Lowe-Porter and to the 1997 version by John E. Woods. The more recent translation is perhaps preferable on account of its greater accuracy; however, I often work with Lowe-Porter's looser version because she is better able to capture certain aspects of Mann's defining manner and tone. At the same time, I could not have dispensed with the help of Woods, since he was willing to tackle the difficult passages dealing with music theory which LowePorter, with Mann's consent, had simply and silently omitted. These missing passages I unaccountably failed to bring to the attention of my indefatigable research assistant, Heike Harting, causing her hours of unnecessary perplexity and frustration - I owe her an apology for my negligence. In the case of Adorno, I cite from the 1973 translation, gratifyingly without lacunae, entitled Philosophy of Modern Music by Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster. On occasion, I indicate having provided my own translations or amended the existing ones.

This page intentionally left blank

TEMPTATIONS OF FAUST

This page intentionally left blank

INTRODUCTION

The Holocaust remains for many of us the incomprehensible historical event of the twentieth century, confirming the acute suspicion that the forward march of civilization had generated a dark underside to which the confident self-understanding of modernity chose to remain more or less blind. The resurgence of barbarism in a nation celebrated for its cultural achievements dealt a severe blow to the humanist assumption that aesthetic sensitivity and philosophical idealism go hand in hand with an exemplary commitment to private morality and public justice. Historians, sociologists, political scientists, and psychologists have devoted extensive scholarship both to Hitler's rise to power and to the Jewish question. The specific historical and cultural conditions which combined to produce and legitimate the Holocaust continue to be debated, and the apparently aberrant behaviour of civilized human beings continues to baffle psychologists and sociologists. Although Temptations of Faust: The Logic of Fascism and Postmodern Archaeologies of Modernity draws on this scholarship, it is not primarily intended as a new account of the Holocaust or as a contribution to the moral and psychological lessons to be gleaned from this appalling failure of the civilizing process. As a theoretical study of totalitarian fascism, its main aim is to draw attention to the++++++++that the logic which allowed the emergence of Hitler and his consolidation of power to occur continues to be operative in current discourses understanding themselves to be emancipatory. This 'logic of fascism' pertains to the conceptual paradigms that the Nazis exploited and mobilized in order to legitimize the seemingly inexorable march of Jews and others toward the death camps. Examining this logic in the context of postmodern archaeologies of modernity,+Temptations of

4 Temptations of Faust

Faust not only revisits modernity's complicity with the emergence of German totalitarianism but also suggests that Hitler's strategies for solidifying power constitute a radical break with modernity. In the first place, I want to argue that German fascism is, paradoxically, both continuous and discontinuous with modernity. In addition to reinforcing the familiar contention that fascism has its roots in neoRomanticism (George L. Mosse and Ernst Bloch), I also confirm a more recent argument that the death camps can be traced to the rationalizing tendencies of modernity (Zygmunt Bauman). Temptations of Faust thus contributes to the emerging consensus that the Holocaust cannot be put behind us as an aberration from, or failure of, modernity but ought to be understood as a++++++++implicit in the emancipatory agendas of modernity. In the second place, going beyond this emerging consensus, I problematize both irrational neo-Romantic and rational enlightenment explanations by suggesting that totalitarian fascism is complicit not only with modern but also with postmodern forms of self-understanding. One of my most challenging claims is that postmodern discourses remain, by and large, blind to their continued implication in the logic of totalitarian fascism. What these discourses overlook is the complicity of processes of fragmentation with the totalizing tendencies they seek to disrupt. Given that the totalizing tendencies attributed to Enlightenment metanarratives continue to be at stake in postmodern archaeologies of modernity, I find it surprising that theorists and cultural materialists preoccupied with the emancipation of marginalized groups rarely refer to historically specific examples of totalitarianism like Hitler's Nazi Germany or Stalin's Soviet Russia. Postmodern theorists seem to assume that 'totalization' is a self-evidently oppressive notion which needs to be disrupted by counter-discourses stressing such alternatives as heterogeneity, fragmentation, and difference. When the concept of totality is subjected to critical scrutiny, it is usually approached from neo-Marxist perspectives interested in maintaining the viability of Marx's master-narrative of history (see, for instance, Martin Jay's Marxism and Totality).+But postmodern archaeologies of modernity tend to ignore th theoretical implications of the Holocaust for debates on emancipatory agendas concerned with the empowerment of social subjects in the context of a monolithic global capitalism. Although+Temptations+of Faust+++++++++++++++++++++++++ logical studies, I focus primarily on the music theory presented in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, a novel which, as a 'parable of fascism,'

Introduction 5

raises issues that invite a reconsideration of the importance of the Holocaust for postmodern archaeologies of modernity. It may appear counter-intuitive to use as my touchstone a novel by an author most often classified as a high modernist, an author whose grasp of sociohistorical and political circumstances is considered to have been at best rather vague, even if Mann is at the same time credited with a finely tuned sensitivity not only to the cultural traditions of his generation but also to the general pulse of his time. However, my main reason for channelling an exploration of totalitarian fascism through Doctor Faustus+has more to do with the interplay between aesthetic form an material conditions which Mann 'borrows' from Theodor W. Adorno's ideological analysis of the history of music in Philosophy of Modern Music.+Unlike other interpreters of++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ing the novel within Mann's++++++or within critical debates amon Mann scholars. Concentrating on the music theory as a code for the ideological and material preconditions for German National Socialism, I 'use and abuse' the novel to give direction to my inquiries into the logic of totalitarian fascism. Since Mann modelled his representation of the fictional composer Adrian Leverkiihn on Adorno's critique of Arnold Schonberg inPhilosophy+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ reading of the logic of fascism mediated by Adorno's neo-Marxist cultural materialism. Thus, Adorno is not only treated as a 'collaborator' on++++++++++++but also a figure pivotal to the connection be tween the Holocaust and postmodernity at stake in this study. Acknowledged today as a postmodernist++++++++++++Adorno pro vides Mann with a history of music which demystifies the 'dark underside' of the Enlightenment narrative in terms anticipating Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of metaphysical presence. More specifically, Temptations of Faust relies on Mann's novel in order to clarify that German National Socialism appealed in its rhetoric to modernity's investment in metaphors of organic unity while the actual strategies+used to consolidate Hitler's power constitute a radical brea with this neo-Romantic or Volkish' appeal. On the one hand, the novel announces Mosse's sociological contention that German National Socialism has its 'irrational' sources in the neo-Romanticism dramatized in the debates of Mann's proto-fascist intellectuals. On the other hand, the novel's Adorno-inspired analysis of the history of music anticipates Bauman's contention that the death camps were enabled by the 'rational' processes Adorno deconstructs in his interpretation of Beethoven as a 'musical Hegel/

6 Temptations of Faust

Mann's reliance on Adorno's sociocultural critique foregrounds methodological questions that are pertinent to current cultural studies; Adorno's interpretation of musical form as the sedimentation of material conditions sharpens the processes at work in readings of literary texts as culturally representative documents. By incorporating Adorno's music theory into+++++++++++Mann in effect introduces an ideological critique whose neo-Marxist ramifications are often at odds with his own liberal-humanist position; in consequence, the novel reveals more about the ideological contradictions of his time than the author may have 'intended.' If my Adorno-inflected philosophical and sociohistorical interpretations of the novel may appear to enact a 'reading against the grain' of Mann's 'intentions/ this strategy is not only authorized by Adorno's methodological assumptions but also entirely consistent with current theoretical practices. Treated in this way as a Mann-Adorno 'collaboration/ Doctor Faustus allows me to explore the shifts in the subject-object relationship dramatized in Leverkiihn's understanding of music from a sociohistorical perspective authorized by Adorno's dialectical materialism. In short, I read the history of music illustrated in the novel as a metaphor for the philosophical, social, and cultural manifestations which culminated in German National Socialism. A fictional text (Mann) reflects and comments on the emergence of a historical event (Hitler) by incorporating a philosophical analysis of music (Adorno) which self-consciously foregrounds the interplay of aesthetic registers and material conditions. Mediated by Adorno's negative dialectics, Doctor Faustus then anticipates an emergent consensus that the Holocaust ought not to be dismissed as a temporary aberration from the normal state of modern civilization now safely behind us but seen as 'a legitimate resident in the house of modernity; indeed, one who would not be at home in any other house' (Bauman 1991,17). Even more disturbingly, the logic of fascism implicit in Mann's appropriation of Adorno's critique of Schonberg's twelve-tone technique suggests that postmodern discourses are not sufficiently alert to the mutually reinforcing complicity of fragmentation with totalization. What strikes the retrospective postmodern theorist above all is that Adorno's description of this avant-garde music is marked by terms currently much in evidence in postmodern discourses. What symbolizes Leverkiihn's moment of crisis - the devil's appearance at the exact centre of the novel - indicates that the Holocaust is not the return to a

Introduction 7

repressed pre-modern barbarism but remains with us as part of a paradigm shift from modernity to postmodernity. Finally, the main title of this study, Temptations of Faust, is meant to suggest that the Holocaust is indeed profoundly connected to modernity's Faustian striving for new discoveries. Mann's main source, Johann Spiess's Faustbuch of++++++as well as Christopher Marlowe's Tragica History of Doctor Faustus+of 1588, depict Faust as a modern figure wit an insatiable desire for enlightenment; the pact with the devil enables these early Fausts to gain access to both scientific and occult knowledge. Challenging the religious and political traditions of the pre-modern world, Faust is a trickster figure who indulges in self-gratifying and sinful exploits. Although early legends applaud Faust's ingenuity and noncomformism, they also insist that his arrogant defiance of God's authority can only end in damnation. In contrast, Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Faust, a play he worked on between roughly 1770 and 1831, 'expresses and dramatizes the process by which, at the end of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth, a distinctively modern world-system comes into being' (Berman 1988, 39). While earlier incarnations of Faust have sold their souls for their own gain, Goethe's Faust is motivated by a 'desire for development' (Berman 1988, 39) which eventually drives him to reclaim land from the sea for the benefit of humanity. For Marshall Berman, then, Faust is the first modern developer; the 'cultural ideal of selfdevelopment,' which Goethe's Faust embodies, reflects 'the real social movement toward economic development' (Berman 1988,40). This bourgeois Faust figure is the archetypal modern hero whose 'sublime spiritual achievement' is for Goethe the 'modernization of the material world' (Berman 1988, 66). He is saved because he uses the powers he gained through his pact with the devil to emancipate the world from its pre-modern shackles. However, this emancipatory ambition legitimates projects of social engineering which remain blind to their complicity with violence. In his idealistic drive to create 'a whole new society,' Goethe's Faust destroys Philemon and Baucis, 'a sweet old couple' (Berman 1988,66) who stand in the way of progress. The monuments of modern achievement are, in Walter Benjamin's famous words, also always 'documents of barbarism' (Benjamin 1968, 256). From here it takes only a short step to the argument that the death camps constitute the culmination of this 'dark underside' of the Faustian striving for enlightenment. It is, of course, in Thomas Mann's+Doctor

8 Temptations of Faust

Faustus+that the mutually reinforcing forces of 'good' and 'evil' fin their most paradoxical articulation. As I hope to show, when this 'postmodern' Faust figure realizes the 'unintended consequences' of his Nietzschean attempt at a transvaluation of all values, he refuses to be saved to the unjust and barbaric world he condemns and rejects.

PART ONE

DECONSTRUCTIONS OF MODERNITY

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 1

NEO-ROMANTIC ROOTS OF GERMAN FASCISM

One of the most distinctive conditions that made the emergence of German National Socialism possible was an anti-liberal atmosphere manifesting itself throughout Europe. Although I will be arguing with Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment+(1947) that the dominant assumptions of the enlightenment tradi tion showed themselves to have been complicit with 'Auschwitz/1 it is also incontrovertibly the case that the Holocaust was not the planned outcome of liberal-humanist reason. While the actual strategies of the Nazis may have been calculated and rational, the rhetoric of fascism relied on the explicit rejection of the rational self-understanding of the enlightenment. In their search for an alternative to the sterility of modern life, Germans expressed a nostalgia for pre-modern social forms the premises of which were profoundly anti-rational. Without his neoRomantic rhetoric of the German Volk as the only viable social bond, Hitler's famed political opportunism would undoubtedly have left him living out his days in political obscurity. Hitler's political success is to no small degree a result of his ability to exploit the neo-Romantic yearnings of the German people. It is important to recognize that antiliberal attitudes characterized political agendas as diverse as those of socialists (and communists), Nazis, and even Zionists like Theodor Herzl. Although this neo-Romantic explanation does to some extent support the idea of a German+++++++++('special path'), it distance itself from the narrow thesis that the Holocaust was motivated by a deep-seated anti-Semitism specific to Germany. In retrospect it is perhaps tempting to suspect that to be anti-liberal was to be irrational. This temptation is all the stronger as it allows us

12 Deconstructions of Modernity

the consolation of supposing that the irrational barbarism of German National Socialism was a historical aberration open to correction through a return to the rationalism of liberal humanism. In+The Crisis of Germa Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third+Reich+(1964), George L. Mos makes a convincing case for the neo-Romantic reaction against modernity that predisposed Germans to accept Hitler's++++++rhetoric. This same neo-Romantic nostalgia is analysed in Ernst Bloch's Heritage of Our Times (1935) as a non-contemporary remnant which distracts people from the contradictory conditions prevalent in contemporary capitalist society. There can be no doubt that Hitler's speeches did indeed exploit the Romantic contention that the human imagination is capable of productive pursuits that far exceed the limits imposed on creativity by the scientific measuring of the empirical world and by the materialistic accumulation of economic wealth. Human beings are less governed by self-interest than by a desire to satisfy their inner or spiritual needs by integrating themselves into an organically coherent social whole. Prepared to dissolve the prosaic bourgeois world that failed to respond to these yearnings, the Romantics dreamed of reshaping the perceptual world into a more idealized and unified alternative. Part of Hitler's success is unquestionably attributable to his ability to transform what was essentially an aesthetic project into a political reality now generally recognized as a perversion of the lofty Romantic ideals which had inspired it. The eminently reasonable contention that bourgeois materialism threatened to atrophy human aspirations for intellectual and spiritual expression became the seed of an irrational political agenda whose tragic outcome was 'Auschwitz.' This first chapter is intended to explore the sociohistorical and cultural conditions which made it possible for Hitler to rise to power. Relying on historical records, on sociocultural analyses like those of Mosse and Bloch, and on the cultural milieu Mann draws on for his depiction of proto-fascist intellectuals in+++++++++++++I thus focu above all on what could be called the 'irrational' roots of fascism. Exploring the self-understanding of both historical and fictional proto-fascist intellectuals, I propose to++++++the material conditions and cultural trends which help us understand the appeal of neo-Romanticism. In Mosse's sociological approach, the fascist revitalization of repressed atavistic and hence irrational impulses is portrayed as the more or less straightforward consequence of Romantic yearnings. In Bloch's dialectical Marxist account, the neo-Romantic intoxication of the fascists is seen as a non-contemporaneous reaction to a genuine crisis faced by the

Neo-Romantic Roots of German Fascism 13 bourgeoisie as it entered into its decline. There is in the 'Germany of terror' an 'element of an older, romantic contradiction to capitalism' (Bloch 1990, 2) which could have served the socialist revolution but was hijacked by the Nazis. Where Mosse seems to hold Romanticism responsible for legitimating irrational tendencies in fascism, Bloch sees Romantic nostalgia as a legitimate but misused reaction against capitalism. When Mann illustrates the appeal of neo-Romanticism in his fictional dramatization of proto-fascist intellectuals, he mostly anticipates, but also complicates, Mosse's later sociological account. In his fictional recreation of an intellectual climate that he had himself experienced in the years leading up to Hitler's rise to power, he shows how noncontemporaneous Romantic elements allowed an 'aestheticization of polities' which served Hitler's rhetorical and strategic effectiveness. Although Doctor Faustus depicts the same cultural climate analysed in Crisis of German Ideology, I hope to show in this study that Mann was not satisfied with an explanation tracing the emergence of fascism to neo-Romantic irrationalism as such. As later chapters will illustrate, Mann's reliance on Adorno's music theory introduces into Doctor Faustus a Marxist perspective closer to Bloch than to Mosse. Moreover, I will show that Mann's novel raises a question which has only recently become pertinent in analyses of fascism: How can we reconcile the image of German fascism as the revival of a repressed barbarism which exemplifies 'a primeval and culturally inextinguishable, "natural" disposition of the human species' (Bauman 1991, 2) with the image of a rationalized totalitarian sociopolitical order which depends on enormous organizational capacities and resources? Instead of understanding fascism as a conservative revolution intent on reviving pre-modern philosophical foundations and social formations, I propose that it was a radical revolution capable of exploiting the contradictions of modernity to reconfigure the public space according to postmodern anti-foundational perspectives. While Mann's social and cultural depiction of the years leading up to Hitler's rise to power is confirmed by documentary evidence, the theoretical questions he embeds in his narrative point to postmodern concerns he ultimately shared with his 'co-author,' Adorno. At this point, I primarily seek to reconsider and complicate the neo-Romantic explanation for the emergence of German National Socialism. But although my focus is here on the ultimately irrational+aspects of the Nazi phenomenon, I do not neglect the rationalizations that transformed Germany's fledgling parliamentary democracy into a totalitarian regime. The pattern that interests me most of

14 Deconstructions of Modernity

all in proto-fascist self-articulations is thus the contradictory yearning for a return to a Rousseauistic natural innocence on the one hand and the appeal to a Hobbesian form of indivisible sovereignty on the other. Anti-Liberal Political Climate The historical record of the emergence of German National Socialism necessarily consists of many complex and often conflicted strands; it is certainly the case that 'Nazism was a complex phenomenon to which many factors - social, economic, historical, psychological - contributed' (Bullock 1962, 803).3 What the historical record indicates, above all, is that the Nazi phenomenon emerged in no small measure as a reaction against a world which appeared not only to Germans but to Europeans in general to have been increasingly dominated by alienating economic, social, and political institutions at the same time as the threat of chaos in the public space seemed to be intensifying. A brief recapitulation of the political and economic turmoil that made Hitler's ascendance possible is meant to draw attention to the anti-liberal attitudes permeating political life and to the reinforcing pattern of sociopolitical fragmentation and authoritarian measures to control it. Historians and social commentators generally offer documentary evidence that the failure of the Weimar Republic opening the door to Hitler's political career can be traced to Bismarck's parliamentary reforms in the late nineteenth century, reforms driven less by genuine democratic convictions than by a desire for the unification of Germany. Most obviously, as has often been pointed out, nationalism provided the ideological cement for the political narrative that was to culminate in Hitler's anti-Semitic rhetoric. On a less visible level, democratic reforms were from the start marked by repressive methods, preparing the German people for the repeated use of violence to impose domestic stability which Hitler was to exploit so successfully. Thinly disguised anti-liberal sentiments tended to surface whenever the country experienced socioeconomic crises; the new liberal system was as often as not being blamed for financial difficulties incurred as a result of reckless military spending by conservatives. Appeals to national unity legitimized not only military aggression but also hostility to liberal and socialist reforms; Hitler was above all adept at taking advantage of the contradictions and ironies that characterized Germany's belated aspirations to unification and democratization. By 1866, Bismarck had enforced a federation of previously independ-

Neo-Romantic Roots of German Fascism 15 ent sovereignties under the imprint of Prussia and had drafted Germany's first constitution, which was accepted in 1867. But the new parliament (the Reichstag) was from the beginning mostly a convenient instrument in Bismarck's authoritarian hands. A deeply conservative politician, Bismarck was above all dedicated to the preservation of 'the feudal-absolutist basis of the Prussian state' (Craig 1978,14) and hence hostile to liberal and socialist aspirations. Although there was significant agitation for socialist reforms, Bismarck could, on the whole, count on the German people's deep-seated conservatism. When the financial crash of 1873 caused economic hardships, for instance, the people blamed neither the financial speculators nor Bismarck's conservative policies but the new parliamentary system. In 1878, emboldened by widespread anti-liberal sentiments, Bismarck passed his infamous 'Socialist Law,' which, turning the constitution against itself, legally dissolved the Reichstag, outlawed the socialist movement, suppressed the liberal press, purged the civil service of liberals and socialists, and violated the rights of citizens by expelling 'from their place of residence persons whose public activities could be described as agitation for the socialist cause' (Craig 1978,. 96). Most astonishingly, to protect monarchical power, Bismarck even toyed with the 'idea of a coup d'etat against Parliament' (Craig 1978, 144).4 From its inception, then, the parliamentary system was infected with an authoritarianism whose arbitrary and repressive methods contradicted its liberal intentions. The weaknesses of the fledgling parliamentary system became glaringly obvious after the forced departure of Bismarck in 1890. Once the skilful authoritarian had left the field, the Reichstag disintegrated under the strain of short-sighted and self-interested groups whose competing demands resulted in a succession of weak coalition governments. The Wilhelmine years, between Bismarck's resignation in 1890 and the birth of the Weimar Republic in 1918, were marked by political instability, the atomization of the public sphere, the First World War, and debilitating socioeconomic crises. Where other European countries met similar circumstances by addressing the economic and political conditions confronting the country, Germany embraced nationalism to deflect attention away from self-defeating economic and social strategies at home and diplomatic blunders abroad. Patriotic rhetoric led Germany into the nationalistic adventure of the First World War, military expenditures plunging the country into a financial crisis which enriched profiteers but impoverished the middle and working classes, causing high unemployment and inflation. The country, which could ill afford the long war in

16 Deconstructions of Modernity

the first place, found itself in even worse economic trouble when it lost the war and had to agree to heavy reparation payments at the Versailles Peace Treaty signed in 1919. The reparation payments exacerbated an already critical socioeconomic situation; unemployment and a falling standard of living not only affected blue-collar workers but catapulted the newly emergent middle class into economic and social uncertainty. Although nationalism and the vicissitudes of the capitalist market were in large measure responsible for the country's socioeconomic ills, the conservatives successfully blamed unpatriotic elements like Jews and socialists for the military defeat and for the ensuing social unrest. Coming into being during the economically unstable and socially disruptive post-war period, the Weimar Republic was quite possibly doomed from the start. Far from signalling widespread support for progressive agendas, the new liberal stipulations in the Weimar Constitution were to some extent a pragmatic move to extract concessions from the Allies during the peace negotiations. From its inception to its dissolution, many well-intentioned provisions of the Weimar Constitution would repeatedly be abused to serve conservative and repressive ends while others led to unintended and disastrous consequences. Hitler's genius consisted in no small measure in his ability to seize on weaknesses in the system and turn them to his advantage. Based on the idea of popular sovereignty, the Weimar Constitution made the Reichstag the only legislative body, thereby finally ending the country's long monarchic tradition. Since elections to the Reichstag were by proportional representation, even the smallest former sovereignties were given a voice. However, this democratic arrangement fragmented the country into so many small parties that it was virtually impossible to establish a majority government. In the years ahead, Germany was to be thrown into political turmoil by a succession of weak coalition governments. Even more detrimental to the country's health was the decision to entrench in the constitution the practice of popular initiative and referendum. Although mobilized by a praiseworthy democratic impulse, such plebiscitary initiatives were unfortunately abused later for sinister anti-democratic purposes. Germany's first truly democratic constitution was so open to fragmentation and dissent that a series of coalition governments proved too weak to withstand the anti-liberal elements that undermined the republic's lofty ideals. The Weimar years were in fact characterized by such social and political turmoil that duly elected governments practised violence to

Neo-Romantic Roots of German Fascism 17

restore order in the streets. After the Versailles Treaty of 1919, social unrest was fomented by those disillusioned by the lost war and by the dismal economic outlook facing the country for years to come. Striking workers, marauding soldiers, and an increasingly impoverished middle class combined to create a political turmoil characterized by revolutionary coups, often inspired by the Russian example of 1917, followed by repressive measures against all liberals and socialists. Confronted by a highly fragmented country and chaos in the streets, the first president of the new republic, the social democrat Friedrich Ebert, reacted by violating constitutional rights and proceeding with military force against German citizens. Although Ebert was a social democrat (SPD), he belonged to the Socialists' revisionist wing and felt particularly threatened by the Communists (KPD) in Bavaria. Faced with demonstrations, strikes, and armed mobs as far north as Berlin, he felt unable to maintain order and, in a fateful step reminiscent of Bismarck, he aligned himself with the 'Supreme Army Command against the threat of the left' (Craig 1978, 404). Leaving it up to the military to restore order, Ebert empowered the free corps to use excessive force against 'rebels/ allowing the corps to kill between 1,200 and 1,500 of them in Berlin alone (Craig 1978, 411) and murdering Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in Munich. Revolutionary unrest in Bavaria had even resulted in a short-lived 'dictatorship of the proletariat,' a 'self-styled Soviet Republic' (Craig 1978, 411) which lasted only six days before being brutally broken up by a military force of 22,000 men, who 'retaliated indiscriminately, shooting dozens of people on mere suspicion of revolutionary activity' (Craig 1978, 412). Accelerating a spiral of chaos, the government met social disorder with repressive measures which in turn produced more chaos to be once again repressed. Hitler was shortly to take advantage of this volatile situation, most significantly by disabling all viable opposition to his brutal measures. In the first place, political confusion produced a split between Socialists and Communists which would prevent the left from uniting against the increasingly rabid nationalists. Another consequence was a backlash against liberal reforms; instead of remonstrating with the government for violating the constitution through repressive military action, people tended to blame socialist reforms for food shortages, high prices, and unemployment. But the truly bitter irony of the Weimar Republic's birth was that its socialist president sought to defend the constitution against dissenting voices by violating the very rights of citizens which this document was supposed to guarantee.

18 Deconstructions of Modernity

With the silencing of the left during its early years, the Weimar Republic had lost any effective opposition to a deeply entrenched conservatism. The 1920s saw a shift to the right, which empowered the nationalists to exploit the general conviction that the liberals had sold out the country during the Versailles peace negotiations. The country's dire economic straits were blamed not on military expenditures but solely on the terms of the armistice. Anti-liberal sentiments were exacerbated when the country was unable to meet the reparation payments through economic productivity and proceeded to print so much money that people's buying power was eroded by an inflationary spiral that wiped out the middle classes. Faced by such an unprecedented economic disaster, people fell back on their conservative instincts and blamed the country's problems on the liberals who had signed the Versailles Treaty and drafted the Weimar Constitution. Liberalism came to be associated with every evil the average German attributed to modernity and was considered to be responsible for the deterioration of manners and morals, for materialistic attitudes, for capitalist profiteering, for unpatriotic tendencies, and even for expressionist art. Although the financial hardships were in large part due to the military expenditures imposed on the country by the nationalistic right, the masses turned with animosity against the parliamentary system. The economic and social turmoil during the 1920s meant that a succession of governments was unable to cope with the confusion created by extremists on the left and the right. Political volatility can be measured by the fact that between February 1919 and June 1928 'fifteen separate cabinets had passed across the political stage' so that 'parliamentary politics came to resemble an endless cabinet crisis' (Craig 1978, 509-10). Election results during these years showed that the socialists kept losing support while the nationalists became more and more popular. In Munich, on 8 November 1923, the Nazis appeared on the stage by instigating the abortive 'Beer Hall Putsch/ which, resulting in Hitler's imprisonment, enhanced his reputation as a martyr. Suffering from fragmentation and indecision, democrats and socialists were in such disarray that they were in no position to mount an effective campaign against the appeal of passionate nationalists. By late 1929, rising unemployment had once again caused public order to deteriorate to the point where extremist factions on the right (Nazis) and on the left (Communists) threatened the moderate conservative government under the leadership of Heinrich Briming. Hampered by a highly atomized Reichstag of competing self-interests, Briming departed from parlia-

Neo-Romantic Roots of German Fascism 19

mentary procedures by establishing a cabinet of men 'who were not restricted in any way by party allegiance' (Craig 1978, 534) and by invoking presidential emergency powers. When the Reichstag refused to accept Briining's program of fiscal reforms, he temporarily dissolved what the constitution had identified as the country's only legal legislative body. Having hoped to regain the upper hand in the new elections of September 1930, Briining discovered to his great dismay that the Nazis, rather than the moderate conservatives, had significantly increased their presence in parliament. Hitler followed up his strong hold in the Reichstag by encouraging his troops to foment public unrest. By 1932, Briining's popularity had plummeted because he seemed to be losing control over a country plagued by an increase in 'crime, industrial unrest, political terrorism, and bloody street-fighting between Nazi stormtroopers and Communists' (Craig 1978,556). Resorting once again to emergency decrees, Briining outlawed Hitler's SA and SS, thereby increasing their popularity with disenchanted young men. When Franz von Papen replaced Briining, he tried to neutralize Hitler by co-opting him. In an attempt to entice Hitler to join a broad coalition of parties, Papen lifted the ban on SA and SS activities, unleashing once again terror in the streets. Instead of curtailing the offending Nazis, Papen deposed 'the Prussian Government by decree on the grounds that it was incapable of maintaining public order' and established himself as 'Reich Commissioner with full powers over the state' (Craig 1978, 561). It is, as Craig comments, 'one of the ironies of which the history of the Weimar Republic is full that these crimes [SA and SS violence] became the excuse for an attack, not upon their authors, but upon the last real bulwark of German democracy' (Craig 1978, 561), namely the parliamentary system. I would add that Hitler's rise to power was made possible by the simultaneous increase in Germany of authoritarian power (totalization) and of anarchic disorder (atomization). As we will see in chapter 6, Hitler exploited this paradoxical relationship between total order and wilful capriciousness to great effect. But his first amazing political triumph was to have perpetrated a++++++++by entirely legal means. When in the elections of July 1932 the Nazis further increased their seats in parliament, Hitler asked to be given the chancellor's post. Although this demand was at first rejected, he had his wish in January 1933 because Papen, who needed Nazi support, assumed that the coalition parties sharing power with Hitler would be able to contain him. There can be little doubt that deep-seated anti-liberal attitudes doomed

20 Deconstructions of Modernity

the Weimar Republic from the start. As Ian Kershaw points out, '[w]ithout the self-destructiveness of the democratic state, without the wish to undermine democracy of those who were meant to uphold it, Hitler, whatever his talents as an agitator, could not have come close to power' (Kershaw 1998,322-3). And, without the anti-liberal sentiments of German intellectuals, Hitler's volkish rhetoric would not have found a responsive echo. Anti-Liberal Sociocultural Climate Although by the turn of the nineteenth century all of Europe suffered from feelings of alienation from the whole social world, in Germany and Austria the perceived loss of spiritual values was experienced as a specifically metaphysical crisis. Young people everywhere decried the 'evils of modernity' they readily identified with the impact of capitalism, materialism, urbanization, bureaucratization, and cosmopolitanism. Where other Europeans called for social and political reforms, Germans generally adopted an ahistorical position decrying the spiritual bankruptcy of modern life. Margot Starke's satirical essay The Bank Clerk' typically articulates an opposition to the dehumanizing effects of automatization or Taylorization on the human psyche.5 For her, the anonymous bank clerk 'only acts as if he were a human being'; in reality, 'his head is a calculator' and, looking into his soul, 'we see only numbers' (Starke 1994,183). Like a piece of machinery, he is in 'perpetual motion' (Starke 1994,184) and, should he die, he would be easily replaced. This 'fundamental dichotomy between a mechanical and an organic world' (Berman 1986, 4) was already well established during the Wilhelmine years covered in the scene of the Winfried student excursion in Doctor Faustus.6 Capturing the 'neo-romantic idealization of adolescence' (Craig 1978,478) typical of the historical Wandervogel (German youth movement), Mann accentuates the fact that Germany's young intellectuals were particularly inclined to react against the bourgeois order in abstract and ahistorical terms. Conveying the conservative-romantic turn specific to the German rebellion against the sterility of modern life, Mann stresses not the socioeconomic realities but the ideas+that motivated German youth movements. Mann himself has, of course, been criticized for his own conservative politics and his reinforcement of bourgeois values; his 'hostility against history' is said to serve 'nothing but the needs of his class' (Walser 1976, 25; my trans.). Even more damagingly, his 'fundamental bourgeois attitude' is supposedly making him share many ideological presuppositions with the

Neo-Romantic Roots of German Fascism 21

fascists, especially 'the belief in essential German virtues, an uncritical hostility against democracy and enlightenment' (Boehlich 1976, 55). Claiming to have felt more at home in the nineteenth than the twentieth century, he did in fact consider himself a moderate conservative torn between his father's bourgeois work ethic and his mother's more artistic temperament. Like other intellectuals, he left politics to the politicians and retreated into the abstract idealism of German inwardness (Innerlichkeit).+It would be hard to deny that it was neither political emancipation nor social justice that filled him with passion but the defence and preservation of Germany's spiritual and cultural values. Although clearly not concerned with the political history of German fascism, his Winfried students and Munich intellectuals nevertheless reflect precisely the ahistorical reactions of the cultural milieus in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany. Russell A. Berman's cultural-materialist interpretation,+The Rise of th Modern German Novel: Crisis and Charisma (1986), traces what Mann and Mosse independently identify as a German predilection for cultural conservatism back to Bismarck. Using a passage from a literary review by Theodor Fontane published in 1872, Berman analyses it as 'a short exposition on the character of imperial culture barely a year after the founding of the Reich' (Berman 1986, 6) under Bismarck. Reading Berman's analysis, what I find remarkable are the terms in which Fontane expresses his fear that the traditional south would become the victim of capitalist progress in the north, specifically of 'the empty administrative character of Prussian ideology' (Berman 1986, 9). Privileging art as 'the mortal enemy of capitalism' (Berman 1986, 8), Fontane fears that art is not only threatened in Prussia but 'is in danger of losing its place in "German hearts" in general because capitalist modernity is fully capable of penetrating the no-longer pristine world of the south' (Berman 1986,10). That Mann shares this cultural geography is attested to by his well-known and widely shared opposition between the cold rational north and the warm sensuous south in many of his short stories and novels. But Berman's Fontane example further illuminates reasons explaining Mann's anti-liberal attitudes in Observations of an Apolitical Man [Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen] (1918-20), which find their way into the mouths of the proto-fascist intellectuals in Doctor Faustus.+The three grounds on which Fontane opposes the Reic (the parliamentary system) seem to typify the general cultural climate which Mann reproduces in his depiction of the Winfried students and Munich intellectuals: '[I]t is materialistic and therefore hostile to art, political and administrative and therefore hostile to authentic collectivit

22 Deconstructions of Modernity

and ahistorically modern and therefore separated from the superior sociability of the past' (Berman 1986,12). As we will see, Mann's intellectuals reject material accumulation as a threat to German moral values, disdain bourgeois comforts as spiritually empty, disdain political life in favour of philosophical soul-searching, and suspect subjective individualism as a mark of the nation's degeneration from a once authentically bonded social community. Yet the attitudes of cultural conservatives like Fontane and Mann were in fact widespread among European intellectuals. According to David Carroll's analysis in++++++++++++++++++(1995), Mann woul qualify as a 'literary fascist,' a label Carroll applies to fascist sympathizers like Maurice Barres, Charles Peguy, Charles Maurras, Robert Brasillach, Drieu la Rochelle, Edouard Drumont, Ferdinand Celine, Lucien Rebatet, and Thierry Maulnier. What these French intellectuals share with each other and with Mann's fictional characters is a vision of the nation 'as a unified spiritual totality' dependent on 'the myth of original, authentic national culture' (Carroll 1995, 21). These literary figures embraced fascism because they modelled their totalitarian politics on 'the totalized aesthetic work,' that is, on 'the ideal of the organic work of art as the perfect fusion of force and form' (Carroll 1995,12). It could plausibly be argued that the much-vaunted German+Innerlichkei was not as specific to Germany as Mosse and Craig assume. It is important to recall in this context that Mann's commitment to bourgeois humanism is a cultural stance rather than a straightforwardly political one. As Hermann Kurzke points out, the term citizen is contradictorily associated with 'old-German, rather conservative qualities' while also encompassing 'enlightened-liberal and capitalist features' (Kurzke 1985,46; my trans.). The conservative ideal alluded to positive political qualities like 'freedom, equality, and fraternity' but also to moral ones like 'virtuousness, honesty, truthfulness, frankness, feeling, "heart," love' (Kurzke 1985, 45; my trans.). In contrast, the economic definition of bourgeois paints a negative picture of materialist, egotistical, and 'dry-intellectual' (Kurzke 1985,46; my trans.) aspirations. Mann, of course, subscribed to the 'citizen' ideal reserved for the 'old-German type' (Kurzke 1985, 46; my trans.) promoted by the Romantics, to an 'aristocracy of feeling' (Kurzke 1985,47; my trans.) typical of the patrician bourgeois class he was born into. But, unlike the French 'literary fascists,' Mann not only rejected political fascism but undertook in Doctor Faustus to examine precisely the 'destructive power of such literary ideals when they are applied to polities' (Carroll 1995, 15).

Neo-Romantic Roots of German Fascism 23

Before 1930, though, he was, like the French literary fascists, deeply committed to his national culture, seeing in democracy a threat to the higher aspirations and values of his own art and of German public life. His critical treatment of intellectuals in++++++++++++has for a long time now been appreciated as his 'taking back' of the anti-democratic stance and chauvinistic nationalism expressed in his long 'essay' Observations of an Apolitical Man. In fact, Mann's++++++++++is a most telling document of the antiliberal atmosphere in Wilhelmine Germany. In this political diatribe he distinguishes between his brother Heinrich, who embraced a French notion of civilization, and himself, who remained faithful to a German notion of culture. True spirit++++++will have no truck with democracy 'The difference between spirit and politics contains in itself the difference between culture and civilization, soul and society, freedom and the right to vote, art and literature; and Germanness is culture, soul, freedom, art and not civilization, society, the right to vote, literature' (Mann 1983, 23). Civilization is further negatively identified with the 'mathematized-rationalized social world' (Mann 1983,28); it is progressive, materialistic, artificial, superficial, and sterile. In terms of Bloch's analysis, Mann could be said to have been '[n]auseated by the stock market age, the depression of the lost war, the lack of ideals in this dull Republic' (Bloch 1990,148). In contrast, culture suggests 'reverence for the spirit' (Mann 1983, 29); it preserves traditional values, strives for spiritual satisfaction, creates emotional depth, and has kept its soul. Those like his brother Heinrich, who want to transform Germany into a bourgeois democracy, are intent on making it 'boring, clear, stupid and un-German' (Mann 1983,46). Observations+parallels ideas expressed in Oswald Spengler's highl popular history,7 The Decline of the+++++++++++++++++++++++ read with considerable interest.8 Although Spengler began writing his pessimistic history of a decline from culture into civilization in 1914, it was not published until 1918, around the same time as Mann's++++++ tions. The world is for Spengler not a 'mechanism' but an 'organism'; drawing an analogy between 'plant destiny and human destiny/ he argues that each human culture moves through the stages of 'youth, growth, maturity, decay' (Spengler 1926, 16). In a passage underlined by Mann, Spengler reverses the standard progressive view of history by arguing that civilization is a falling away from culture: 'Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become

24 Deconstructions of Modernity

succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion ... They are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again' (Spengler 1926,31). It seems that humanity is periodically compelled to renew itself. Whereas Greece could still be considered an authentic culture, Rome was already humanity's decline into civilization: 'In a word, Greek soul - Roman intellect - and this antithesis is the differentia between Culture and Civilization' (Spengler 1926, 32). This hostility to intellect reflects the anti-liberal attitudes prevalent in Wilhelmine Germany. Anticipating the Nazis' celebration of the peasant rooted in blood and soil, Spengler disdains the 'parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman' (Spengler 1926, 32). Civilization is consistently denigrated as a 'cosmopolitanism in place of "home,"' as a 'scientific irreligion' in place of 'the older religion of the heart' (Spengler 1926, 33). Given the popularity of Decline of the West, opposition to modernity and the democratic reforms it inspired in the West was clearly widespread in Germany. The democratic values Mann despised in Observations as the most abhorrent signs of civilization are most colourfully listed in his reaction to the possibility of an 'Entente' which would have integrated Germany into Western Europe. Speculating on this possibility, he complains that 'the result would have been a Europe, - well, a little shrewd, a little flathuman, banal-corrupt, feminine-elegant, a Europe almost too "human," somehow villainous and loudmouthed-democratic, a Tango-Europe with a Two-Step morality, a Europe of business and pleasure a la Edward the Seventh, a Monte-Carlo Europe, literary like a Parisian cocotte' (Mann 1983, 58). Mann echoes a general German tendency to despise political agendas designed to bring about social change as a betrayal of those higher values encapsulated in the German term Geist. The First World War is for him not about the violation of territorial boundaries or a conflict over colonial possessions; it is above all a 'a battle between "power and spirit"' (Mann 1983,51) which Germany must fight to save humanity from the degenerate values of the rest of Europe. To speak of 'Germany's+++++++++++is consequently a call for its 'de-Germanization' (Mann 1983, 60). Since Mann had admired much in the European civilization he now claimed to despise, he needed to recover what was most German in himself and in the artists and philosophers he most admired. He consequently maintained that, in his earlier enthusiasm for Wagner's or Nietzsche's European traits, he himself had not been sufficiently in touch with his own German depth to see through

Neo-Romantic Roots of German Fascism 25

the European surface of his heroes to their German essence. His celebration of German culture led Mann to embrace the First World War as a legitimate expression of his nationalistic commitment. Despite the fact that the years leading up to Hitler's rule of terror were marked by sociopolitical turmoil, Mann's biographical record of this period and the novel covering it are devoid of sustained attempts to analyse or reproduce the historical events he witnessed. We get little sense from Mann's personal statements and fictional output that, after the First World War, Germany faced serious economic hardships, much social unrest, and an unacceptably high level of political instability. In the diaries Mann regularly comments on daily news items, and in the Observationshe provides an emotional endorsement of German nationalism. Caught up in the events of the early days of the century, Mann first rationalized Germany's military adventure and, when the war was lost, he raged against the Entente, the Versailles Peace Treaty, and Wilson's League of Nations, seeing in them further evidence of the nefarious consequences of liberalism. The highly pronounced turbulence characterizing the years immediately after the war left Mann relatively unperturbed; the struggle for emancipation could not inspire in him the patriotic passions of the war years. The diary entries covering the period from 1918 to 1921 show that Mann kept himself informed about current events but remained ultimately preoccupied with his daily comforts and occupations. On 1 May 1919, for instance, while commenting on fighting in the streets and the rumoured murder of hostages, Mann continued working on 'the first chapter' of The Magic Mountain+to 'give it a fictional, "synthetic" form' (Mann 1982, 54) and pursued his normal activities. 'All afternoon,' he tells us, 'strong cannonade and machine-gun fire. Nevertheless I slept a little after a threequarter-hour walk through the park at noon in windy, cold weather with gusts of snow' (Mann 1982, 54). At a time when German citizens risked 'being shot' for being 'seen on the streets after seven,' Mann was busy reading his wife Katia 'a few Chekhov stories' (Mann 1982, 55). The diaries certainly give grist to the mill to those claiming that Mann lacked a sophisticated grasp of political realities, for they show him wildly oscillating between disgust with what was happening and mock endorsements of communist revolution. What seemed depressingly clear to Mann was that civilization would inevitably triumph over culture; he therefore pretended not to care whether liberals, socialists, or communists would occupy the seats of power. In spite of real and simulated concessions to social and political

26 Deconstructions of Modernity

changes, Mann in fact remained so deeply conservative that he was seduced by arguments advanced by both moderate and extreme nationalists. On 12 November 1918, for instance, he echoes the self-justifying sentiments popular among nationalists. Disagreeing with left-wing socialist Kurt Eisner,9 who, in Mann's words, insisted that 'the people must atone for the misdeeds of their masters, since they gave them their full approval,' Mann makes the following point: The truth is that the German people went into this war with enthusiasm once they believed it had been forced upon them, confident that they would win it and be able to organize Europe along German lines. This heroic struggle, in the course of which prodigious feats were accomplished, was lost thanks to terrible military and political mistakes and to the German mentality, which is profoundly unsuited for such a struggle, and it is ending in incredible catastrophe' (Mann 1982, 23). This passage suggests Mann aligned himself with those who argued that Germany had not started the war, that it was destined to save Europe from wrong-headed values, that its people were heroic and self-sacrificing, and that its commitment to higher spiritual values made it unsuitable for the dirty business of war and politics. Once he seriously acknowledged that 'the worldwide triumph of democratic civilization in the political sphere is an accomplished fact,' he recommended 'the separation of cultural and national life from politics, the complete detachment of one from the other' in order to preserve 'the German spirit' (Mann 1982, 12). The intellectual withdraws into his den and cultivates the spiritual values lost in the world outside. The democratic world is for him nothing more than a 'convenience' allowing Germany to obtain 'raw materials' while 'everything cultural, national, philosophical' must be kept 'on a plane high above polities' and unaffected by 'democratic utilitarianism' (Mann 1982,13). When Katia encourages him to vote in the upcoming Reichstag elections of 1920, he decides to 'remain on the sidelines' (Mann 1982, 98), since he cannot bring himself to vote for the Democrats. His opposition to democracy is so pronounced that he declares himself in favour of communism. When Bavaria is 'on the point of declaring a soviet republic/ Mann finds this situation both 'terribly comical' and welcome 'insofar as [communism] is pitted against the Entente' (Mann 1982,43). Far from supporting proletarian aspirations, Mann approved of communism because it vilified democracy along with its rejection of capitalism. In spite of his 'abhorrence of a tyranny by the materialistic and rationalistic spirit of so-called proletarian culture' (Mann 1982,47), he is

Neo-Romantic Roots of German Fascism 27

nevertheless delighted that 'capitalism has been judged and found wanting' (Mann 1982, 44). Making it clear that his support of communism is an expression of his nationalism, he tells us that communism 'has the tremendous virtue of being hostile to the Allies' (Mann 1982, 54). Mann's nationalism leads him to support the students who forced Max Weber out of the lecture hall on 21 January 1920. Although calling the incident 'scandalous' and disapproving of Weber's treatment, he admits that the 'antirevolutionary, nationalistic mood of the students is basically gratifying to me' (Mann 1982,84). In 1921 he is still not able to recognize that his world is being destroyed not by liberalism and democracy but by conservatism and nationalism: 'What havoc has been wrought by the "revolution," by politics, programs, and "committed humanitarianism'" (Mann 1982,123). Responding to Norm und Entartung, 'an important work from the [Stefan] George orbit/ he even flirts with the most radical, neo-fascist right-wing nationalism: T cannot think of a better positive position in response to the hopelessness of a progressoriented civilization and intellectualized nihilism than this doctrine of bodily purity and the strong state. This despite the fact that I feel myself condemned by such a doctrine' (Mann 1982, 119). It is, of course, to Mann's credit that he never seriously embraced this volkish ideology and that he repudiated it retrospectively in Doctor Faustus. Watching the Nazis take power, he had enough political sense to recognize and reject the brutal tactics of Hitler's followers, and he exiled himself from Germany in 1930. German Intellectuals and Ahistoricism Given the ahistorical atmosphere in Germany, it could be argued that Doctor Faustus+accurately reflects the disinclination of German student to tackle the material causes of their feelings of social alienation. The novel anticipates the widespread view that the seeds of fascism have to be located in neo-Romanticism. Seeing their 'spiritual roots dislodged through industrialization and the atomization of modern man' (Mosse 1964, 8-9), German students called not for the creation of socialist Utopia but for the recovery of the nation's authentic essence. '[H]eir to a long development in German thought which tended toward abstract rationalism and idealism' (Mosse 1964, 9), German students were characterized by their 'super cleverness, their romantic and reactionary irrationalism, their intoxication with the mythic and barbaric primor-

28 Deconstructions of Modernity

dial state, their contempt for human values' (Faesi 1955,161). In their opinion, even Bismarck's reluctant experiment with a parliamentary system which still favoured the old establishment constituted a deplorable progressive move. They sought the future not in liberal emancipation but in a nostalgic return to a social collectivity predicated on bonds of blood rather than on political rights and freedoms. As Bloch puts it, 'Youth which is not in step with the barren Now more easily goes back than passes through the today in order to reach the tomorrow' (Bloch 1990, 99). Disenchanted with the tedium of the political debates necessary for reaching parliamentary decisions, young Germans imbued the idea of the Volk with mythical qualities capable of stirring the passions that had atrophied on the road to democracy. The Volk was 'fused to man's innermost nature, and represented the source of his++++creativ ity, his depth of feeling, his individuality, and his unity with other members of the Volk' (Mosse 1964,4). Not hampered by the uninspired process of reaching consensus, the++++could dispense with undignified political wrangling, for the spiritual cohesion of the community would naturally suggest the right course of action. For Mann's students in++++++++++++too, modernity is an existen tial problem ['"die Wesensfrage"' (Mann 1990, 163)] which must be solved on the spiritual rather than the sociopolitical level. Exhibiting anti-political 'preciosities' (Mann 1968, 118) which are accentuated in Leverkuhn's retreat from society, one of the Winfried students declares that '[y]outh in the ultimate sense has nothing to do with political history, nothing to do with history at all. It is a metaphysical endowment, an essential factor, a structure, a conditioning' (Mann 1968,116). Abstract metaphysical questioning is not an acquired talent but a gift that entails the responsibility of regenerating a moribund social order. Like the 'apolitical' Thomas Mann of++++++++++then, the volkish students embraced a 'polities' hostile to economic progress and social emancipation. As Mosse points out, volkish ideology is most 'properly termed anti-political, for the revolution it called for was to sweep away the old Rechtsstaat in favor of the thousand-year Reich' (Mosse 1964,2). And, he continues, '[ultimately the Nazi revolution was the "ideal" bourgeois revolution: it was a "revolution of the soul" which actually threatened none of the vested economic interests of the middle class' (Mosse 1964, 7). The problem Bloch identifies is that Germany, 'which had managed no bourgeois revolution up to 1918,' is plagued by 'unsurmounted remnants of older economic being and consciousness'; these remnants make it the 'classical land of non-contemporaneity'

Neo-Romantic Roots of German Fascism 29

(Bloch 1990, 106) and thus incapable of confronting the contradictions of the Now. Germany's non-contemporaneity makes for apolitical and ahistorical attitudes which render both historical and fictional intellectuals blind to the real political and economic forces that allowed Hitler to assume power. There is general agreement among readers of++++++++++++that Leverkiihn symbolizes the apolitical intellectual who is guilty of complicity with fascism in that he withdraws from society and hence fails to recognize parallels between fascist arguments and his own aesthetic aspirations. In his+Thomas Mann: Der demokratische Roman [Thomas Mann The Democratic Novel] (1977), Helmut+++++++++typically treats Leverkiihn as a Nietzsche figure, as 'a cultural and historical symbol of an inhumanity that historically explodes through fascism and is marked by an ascetic-radical and apolitical-abstract spirituality' (Jendreiek 1977, 434; my trans.). He aligns himself with those contending that Germany's 'inwardness/ its 'politically distanced spirituality' (Jendreiek 1977, 440; my trans.), was responsible for the openness of Germans to fascism. In a move characteristic also of Jiirgen Habermas, Jendreiek believes that the separation of art from the life-world is to be blamed: The guilt of aestheticism as it is analytically defined in the novel through Leverkuhn's character and in [Mann's] essay [on Nietzsche] through Nietzsche as Leverkuhn's model is the guilt of a theory that lacks a consideration of practice' (Jendreiek 1977, 439; my trans.). His main thesis seems to be that Mann analyses fascism as a failure of humanism, a failure brought about by yearnings for the 'world' (sociopolitical sphere) through misguided aesthetic means (abstract theoretical sphere). Isolating himself from the social world, Leverkiihn embarks on a theoretical adventure which irresponsibly ignores political implications. His Nietzschean search for renewed aesthetic vitality takes the form of an irrationalism whose dangerous political consequences he arrogantly fails to consider. According to Jendreiek, Mann ultimately attributes the fascist catastrophe to the unfortunate coming together of the specifically German characteristics of a tendency toward theoretical abstraction, a Romantic investment in the 'heart/ and a desire for order. Having carefully shown that Mann saw fascism as a failure of humanism, Jendreiek then concludes that Zeitblom's 'hope beyond hopelessness' at the end of the novel nevertheless expresses Mann's belief that Germany will be saved by embracing social democracy, a political system Jendreiek sees as the embodiment of the ideal of 'a social humanity' (Jendreiek 1977,475; my

30 Deconstructions of Modernity

trans.). His assessments of the music theory in Doctor Faustus are therefore informed by the specifically moral question of what aspects of music serve the social good of humanity. Working primarily within the opposition menschlich/unmenschlich (human/inhuman), he identifies fascism with an inhumanity++++++++++++++unintentionally abetted b a bold but socially irresponsible aestheticism. What is most problematical in Jendreiek's investment in humanism as a Habermassian affirmation of the life-world is that he lets himself be driven into an interpretation of++++++++++++which perpetuates th anti-intellectualism that was so receptive to Hitler's rhetoric. Demonizing theory (abstract aestheticism) as socially irresponsible, he seems to endorse an unreflective immersion in a life-world which he, moreover, considers unproblematically accessible. For him, the aesthetics/politics parallel in Doctor Faustus should be read as a deterioration into the demonic and hence the irrational: 'The political and historical change into barbarism corresponds to the "anti-cultural" change of the aesthetic into the "barbaric"' (Jendreiek 1977,454; my trans.). It seems that for this critic the Nazi period was an irrational aberration from the project of modernity into which Germany must be reintegrated. He therefore unquestioningly follows Mann's comment in a letter to Walter Molo specifying that Leverkiihn's ambiguous salvation at the end of the novel should be understood 'as the development of a "bourgeois" democracy, toward a "social" humanism, through which Germany will both overcome its sickness of loneliness and achieve the reconciliation with the world in a process of political universalization' (Jendreiek 1977, 463; my trans.). This humanist framing of the Nazi phenomenon overlooks the complicity of modernity with the very fascism that is for Jendreiek an aberration from it. It is precisely this inside/outside logic that my reading of German fascism seeks to disrupt and problematize. Neo-Romantic Appeal to Natural Origins (Rousseau) The social scenes in Halle (Winfried students) and Munich (Breisacher) may appear to reinforce Jendreiek's thesis of fascism as an irrational aberration from the Enlightenment narrative of cultural progress. In their opposition to modernity, Mann's intellectuals do indeed long for a lost 'soul' that was for the Winfried students specifically located in nature and the romanticized peasant still connected to the (mother)land. It seems to me that Mann is exceptionally sensitive to the nostalgic and apolitical intellectual aspirations of neo-Romantic proto-fascists which

Neo-Romantic Roots of German Fascism 31 prepared the way for Hitler's rise to power. It is important to recognize that the intellectuals portrayed in++++++++++++reflect Mann's thorough acquaintance with a cultural atmosphere saturated with widespread volkish attitudes. As mentioned above, the holdings of Mann's library at the Zurich Archive indicate that Mann had carefully read and underlined such influential texts as Oswald Spengler'sTheDecline++++ West [Der Untergang des Abendlandes] (1918) and Paul de Lagarde's German Faith, German Fatherland, German Education [Deutscher Glaube, Deutsches Vaterland, Deutsche Bildung] (1913). Some of the volkish ideas in these texts have found their way into Doctor Faustus by way of Mann's own quasi-volkish 'essay+++++++++++++++++++++++++ have been analysed in Bloch's prescient Heritage of Our Times, first published in 1935, and in Mosse's+++++++++++++++++++++++++ lished in 1964, nine years after Mann's death in 1955. In the scenes starring proto-fascist intellectuals in the novel, Mann was retrospectively criticizing rhetorical stances and political attitudes which he had once himself shared and which Mosse reconstructs as a social historian.11 Deeply hostile to liberal-rational modernity, historical and fictional figures dream of overcoming the social alienation they attribute to modernity by returning to a viable social community capable of creating an authentic bond with its individual subjects. The appeal to pre-modern origins is inextricably tied to the contention that the narrative of modernity has to be reversed. The Romantic pantheistic concept of nature provided both the fictional and the historical++++++++++with 'an alternative to modernity to the developing industrial and urban civilization which seemed to rob man of his individual, creative self while cutting him loose from a social order that was seemingly exhausted and lacking in vitality' (Mosse 1964, 17). Far from being inspired by 'economic incentives,' the students' revolt was motivated by the 'fact that the social and intellectual superstructure no longer corresponded to the organic nature of the Volk, of the race' (Mosse 1964,102). In conformity with the nationalistic student fraternities (Btinde) which became prominent in the late nineteenth century, Mann's Winfried students are shown to be rebelling against their own middle-class background. Fleeing their comfortable urban plight, the students imitate or 'quote' the Rousseauistic veneration for nature and simple forms of life typical of the Romantics. Since towns are 'regarded, all the way through, as ravagers of national vigour' (Bloch 1990,89), Mann appropriately shows that the countryside is for the Winfried students a site of spiritual values no longer available in

32 Deconstructions of Modernity

corrupted institutions like family, school, and church. Zeitblom is mildly amused by the Voluntary reversion and simplification' (Mann 1968, 113; my trans.), the willed immersion of conservative moderates 'into the primitive countryside and back to mother earth' (Mann 1968,113). This worship of rural values is all the more ironic as the Prussian Junkers, Germany's powerful landowning gentry, protected their own economic+self-interest by first opposing the unification of the nation an then by intimidating a succession of weak coalition parliaments. Although Mosse never alludes to+++++++++++++++++++his s confirms that neo-Romantic longings were widespread. Blind to the real political agrarian interests, the historical Wandervogel were indeed middle-class students who privileged '[t]he small towns, the villages, the peasant and burgher inhabitants' which 'symbolized the connection between the history of the Volk and its fusion with the landscape' (Mosse 1964, 16). Instead of recognizing that the peasant 'doggedly defends his economically superannuated place' (Bloch 1990, 99), the newly impoverished middle-class elevated him to a symbol of 'the prewar period when it was better off (Bloch 1990, 99). Exploiting this orientation toward a return to the agrarian past, Hitler was later to stress that the fascist movement 'will find the foundation of the new renascence' in the 'maintenance of the German peasant' (Baynes 1969, 250).12 While Zeitblom does not take the students very seriously, we know from hindsight that their Romantic nostalgia for the simple peasant life will turn out to be far from politically innocent. Where the students artificially recreate a lost Arcadian past, Leverkuhn embodies volkish ideals through his family background. His natural connection to peasant roots and medieval Germany has justifiably been interpreted as an explicit link between Leverkuhn and proto-fascist intellectuals. It could be said that Leverkuhn simply is what the students work to reconstruct. His parents are farmers who can trace their descent to a long line of 'better-off craftsmen and farmers' (Mann 1997, 14). In their 'adoration of primitivism,' the historical students relied on a 'fusion of peasant and ancient German traits' (Mosse 1964, 71) which Mann alludes to in descriptions of Leverkuhn's father and city of birth. The father, Jonathan, is described as 'a man of finest German stamp' with a 'physiognomy somehow marked by the past' (Mann 1997, 15) whose type has withstood centuries of modernization. His son, Adrian, grows up in 'old-world surroundings whose memories and monuments reach back into pre-schismatic times, back into a world of unity in Christ' (Mann 1968, 13). His earliest years were spent near Kaiser-

Neo-Romantic Roots of German Fascism 33

saschern on the family farm 'Buchel/ whose prominent 'linden tree' (Mann 1968,16) symbolizes in volkish circles, according to Mosse, 'the peasant strength of the Volk, with roots anchored in the past while the crown aspired toward the cosmos and its spirit' (Mosse 1964, 26). It is, of course, not without significance that the symbol of the tree 'was easily transformed to represent the peasant as the Faustian man persistently striving to relate itself to the spirit of life' (Mosse 1990,26). Mann's modern-day Faust speaks a dialect echoing medieval German and tends to favour isolated places in the country. Late in life, when Leverkiihn withdraws from Munich to the farmhouse of the Schweigestill family in Pfeiffering near 'Waldshut' (forest place) (Mann 1968,246), he replicates the volkish constellation of his Buchel birthplace. Does this repetition suggest that he consciously endorses volkish ideology? In the novel's mythic+terms, at least, Leverkiihn seems predestined to embrace an aesthetic ideology which Zeitblom explicitly connects to German National Socialism. In a gesture reminiscent of Rousseau, volkish intellectuals assume that the vitality they yearn for is located in the innocent beginnings of society. Pre-modern primitive societies are thus venerated for their natural social cohesion while modern civilizations are decried as degenerated deviations from authentic origins. The vitality Breisacher wants to recover is for the Winfried students located in youth; young people and young nations need to take on the responsibility of regenerating a moribund social order. This cult of adolescence assumes that the process of maturation ought to be condemned as a decline from an authentic origin into artificiality. Expressing the neo-Romantic yearnings which Mosse documents, even Leverkiihn comments that 'youth has closer relations with nature than the mature man in a bourgeois society' (Mann 1968,115). When youth is privileged as a source of vitality, then Germany's belated national unification can be rewritten as a strength; where other nations have already been ruined by processes of modern civilization, Germany has retained the necessary enthusiasm and energy to transcend the sterile ethics of rights and contracts characteristic of liberal nation-states. Where mature individuals and countries accept artificial limitations to create a boringly safe social order, young people and nations are prepared to risk this security for the sake of higher spiritual values. This self-understanding of youth as the site of renewal was to form a major blandishment in Hitler's successful wooing of young Germans: 'My German Youth! ... Seldom in the history of Germany has a fairer destiny than yours fallen to the lot of a young

34 Deconstructions of Modernity

generation. You live, as the youth of Germany, in a youthful Reich, in a youthful Reich full of joyous life, full of strong hope, full of an indestructible confidence. You live in a Reich with youthful, new ideas, full of youthful, new forces' (Baynes 1969,545). Seduced by a '"renewal" on the right,' comments Bloch, 'the blood-based, the organically young is a good soil for Nazis' (Bloch 1990, 99). This cult of youth could easily be inflected toward a glorification of 'a primitive civilization' (Mosse 1964, 26) supposedly marked by spontaneous social bonds. To be young,' exclaims Mann's Deutschlin, "means to be original, to have remained nearer to the sources of life; it means to be able to stand up and shake off the fetters of an outlived civilization, to dare - where others lack the courage - to plunge again into the elemental' (Mann 1968, 116). Privileging the origin as the source of truth and authenticity, volkish ideologues endorse 'immaturity' as a guarantee of 'directness' and hence of 'vitality' (Mann 1968, 116-17). Modern civilization is consequently rejected as an artificial degeneration of a once vital German culture. At first sight, the appeal to primitive origins seems to confirm that German National Socialism ought to be understood as a conservative revolution intended to free us from the build-up of artificial social institutions which have made us repress more authentic individual feelings and social bonds. According to this scenario, the Nazis exploited neo-Romantic yearnings to tap into people's irrational tendencies and atavistic longings.13 Nostalgia for a lost way of life is thought to have authorized Hitler's apparently irrational rhetoric of the Volk as the repository of social authenticity which the Third Reich promises to revitalize. But this popular conception overlooks rather different and disturbingly radical aspects of German fascism. The nostalgic rhetoric of firm foundations is in fact contradicted by a cynical relativism designed to dissolve+++foundations and principles. Although Mosse mor or less subscribes to the thesis that neo-Romantic nostalgia plunged Germany into a catastrophic mythopathology, Mann seems to acknowledge a tension within Romanticism itself which proto-fascist intellectuals accentuate not in a celebration of irrational impulses but in totalitarian longings for discipline and order. What drives the neo-Romantic selfunderstanding of Mann's proto-fascists is the dilemma of subjective self-expression within an increasingly complicated and alienating social order. Although the preoccupation with the relationship between subject and object dates back to Greek philosophy, it is in the nineteenth century that the individual subject no longer finds itself mirrored in the

Neo-Romantic Roots of German Fascism 35

social world. The historical symbol of this crisis of modernity is the French Revolution. The French Revolution shook and shocked Europe in the 1790s, compelling a generation of intellectuals to reexamine the claims of the Enlightenment in general and the legacy of Rousseau in particular. Through advances in science and technology, the human subject gradually gained control over nature, leading to a redefinition of the self as self-sufficient and autonomous. This modern conception differs radically from the Greek notion of the subject being in tune with the external world, existing in a state of harmony which became emblematic - for the likes of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Lukacs - of a lost moment of social coherence. According to such thinkers, the modern understanding of the subject posits an objective world standing over against it; the subject is now separated not only from nature but also from the social community. Instead of feeling at one with nature, the modern subject experiences the external world as a necessity which obstructs its desire for freedom and autonomy. Perceiving itself to be at the mercy of forces outside its control, the subject feels exposed to the vagaries of accident and contingency. The modern separation of subject from object thus empowers the subject by freeing it from dependence on final causes like 'God' while also forcing it to recognize its alienated and unstable state. Reflecting this crisis in the self-understanding of the modern subject, the German Enlightenment was contradictorily marked by what Charles Taylor articulates as a rational vision modelled on scientific inquiry and an expressivist theory based on inward-turning self-awareness. The focus on the autonomous subject could take either the form of Kant's formal categories (rationalism) or of the Romantics' mystical notions of the self (expressivism). Where Kant assumed that the subject realizes itself in relation to an ideal rational order, the Romantic subject defines itself from within. Instead of conforming to Kant's categorical imperative, the Romantic subject creates meaning out of its own inner essence. Although many Romantics began their careers as political revolutionaries, they largely tended to ignore social issues in order to develop theories celebrating inner, spiritual freedom. According to Taylor, the Romantic generation aimed 'to bring man back to unity with nature within and without, while maintaining his highest spiritual achievements, consciousness and moral freedom, intact' (Taylor 1975, 39). In contrast to Kant, they argued that it is not through reason but through harmony with nature that the subject gains its freedom: 'He must adapt

36 Deconstructions of Modernity

to unconscious, unreflective forces which are beyond the call of reason; and he can only reach harmony with them by listening to what is most unconscious, unreflective in him, the voice of instinct' (Taylor 1975,39). The Romantic period was thus marked by a series of oppositions which 'expressed most acutely the division between the two ideals of radical freedom and integral expression/ that is, the epoch contradictorily expressed 'the opposition between thought, reason, and morality, on one side, and desire and sensibility on the other; the opposition between the fullest self-conscious freedom, on one side, and life in the community, on the other; the opposition between self-consciousness and communion with nature' (Taylor 1975,36). For Taylor, then, Hegel's dialectical system constitutes an attempt to reconcile and consolidate the rational and expressive tendencies of his day and age. Pushing the Romantic veneration of nature to its logical extension, Hegel contends that 'human consciousness does not just reflect the order of nature, it completes or perfects it' (Taylor 1975, 44). His privileging of reason gestures in the direction of Kant while his call for the subject to actualize itself through union with the quasi-mystical notion of 'cosmic spirit' (Geist)+acknowledges the Romantics. For Taylor, Hegel's dialectical strug gle to reach a 'unity of opposites' is a valiant attempt to reconcile the contradictory aspirations of his age, 'to combine the fullest moral autonomy of the subject with the highest expressive unity within man, between and with nature' (Taylor 1975,49). It is this nineteenth-century tension between subjective autonomy and objective order that resurfaces in the arguments of proto-fascists and that Mann addresses in his reconstruction of intellectual debates in Doctor Faustus. Appeal to Sovereign Power (Hobbes) What is at stake for Mann's volkish dogmatists is the conflict between subject and object which has plagued Western philosophy from Plato to Foucault and Derrida. The debates of the Winfried students taking place around 1905 and Breisacher's discourses at social gatherings in Munich between 1913 and 1919 are marked by solutions to this conflict which replay the alternatives of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a thinker who holds that human subjects are naturally social and ought to free themselves from corrupting institutions, and of Thomas Hobbes, who contends that human beings are naturally warlike and require an indivisible sovereign power to ensure the survival of the commonwealth. Without denying Mann's concern with the appeal to primitive irrationalism in

Neo-Romantic Roots of German Fascism 37

volkish circles, I consider it important to recognize his concern with the totalitarian implications of the return to pre-modern origins. At issue in the Winfried debate that pits the aptly named socialist Arzt against the even more aptly named nationalist Deutschlin is the social totality whose authority the individual ought to accept. Representing the political left and the political right, neither side argues for the liberal-humanist privileging of individual rights. In other words, both students are unquestionably expressing anti-liberal tendencies which echo Lagarde's adamant rejection of 'parliament, state parliament, liberalism, progress' in favour of 'institutions which bind' (Lagarde 1913,74). In contrast to the socialist Arzt, who looks to ethical principles to create a just society serving the interests of the commonwealth, the nationalists endorse an indivisible principle of sovereignty capable of enforcing social cohesion. Arzt's Utopian vision thus takes its cue from the ethical teachings of the New Testament whereas Deutschlin's model is the powerful father figure of the vengeful Old Testament God. For Arzt, Christianity was originally a political revolution which failed because it came to privilege individual morality over social responsibility. Implicitly attacking the German tendency toward 'inwardness,' he believes that Christianity needs to complete the missed political revolution by creating a bond between social and religious aspirations. Although seemingly agreeing with Arzt that the atomistic subject needs to be reconciled with the social collectivity, Deutschlin overwrites this socialist position with a more viable nationalistic alternative. Disdainful of the 'social idea of an economic social organization,' which has to rely on 'rationalism' and 'autonomous ... enlightenfed] thinking/ Deutschlin points out that Arzt's tendency to equate 'the just' with the 'socially useful' naively overlooks the 'mighty forces either above or below the rational' (Mann 1968, 118). Echoing Lagarde's volkish contempt for all 'radical forces that promoted modernity, democracy, and socio-economic progress' (Mosse 1964, 35-6), Deutschlin accuses Arzt of being blinded by Rousseau's 'shufflings of the Contrat Social' (Mann 1968, 119). The true nation needs to feed on more powerful emotions than utilitarian self-interest. Unlike Arzt, who assumes that rational subjects consent to limitations on their freedom in the interest of social justice for all, Deutschlin maintains that emotional subjects yearn to obey a paternal authority with which they can identify and bond. What the nationalists advocate is not the negative freedom of liberation from constraint but the positive freedom of accepting one's place in a social order which articulates one's essence.

38 Deconstructions of Modernity

Although Mann never refers to Hobbes by name, Breisacher's contention in his volkish performance in 1919 that only a strong sovereign power can ensure the smooth functioning of society represents a perversion not of Rousseau but of Hobbes. While retaining Rousseau's privileging of natural origins, Breisacher rejects the emphasis in the Social Contract+on a decision-making process based on spontaneous consensus in favour of Hobbes's view that an indivisible sovereign power is necessary to control the naturally warlike impulses of human subjects. Referring to de Tocqueville's statement that the French Revolution unleashed two historical possibilities, 'one leading men to free arrangements, the other to absolute power' (Mann 1968, 351), the student points out that the West has already relinquished the path to democratic self-determination. Freedom, he claims, is internally selfcontradictory: '[F]reedom [is] by the act of assertion being driven to limit the freedom of its antagonist and thus to stultify itself and its own principles' (Mann 1968, 352). This is, of course, the dilemma of the Social Contract. If Rousseau is forced to restrict the freedom of those opposed to the will of the majority, then some individuals are not free to act as they wish. The other side of the dilemma is the ineffectiveness of liberals in the face of those denying liberal principles. Since Zeitblom believes in tolerance, he cannot oppose Breisacher's views without appearing to be intolerant of him. Internally self-contradictory, Rousseau's version of free individuals reaching decisions based on rational consensus is no match for Breisacher's Hobbesian view of human nature. He recognizes that the liberal-humanist understanding of history as progress toward a consensual human progress is not only a sham but will inevitably culminate in raw power. Reason is helpless against brute forces because they have no need to explain themselves and are therefore not weakened by self-contradiction. In this scenario, violence always carries the day, and brutality should be admired for its vitality. To make this point, Breisacher refers to Sorel's 'Reflections sur la violence' in which the French writer maintains that democracy is inevitably ineffective because nations are by definition warlike. The masses do not respond to truth but to dynamic mythical fictions capable of releasing aggressive political energies. Recognizing brute force as the opposite of truth, human beings want to belong to a powerfully vital 'community' (Mann 1968,353). We may recall Hobbes's argument that men naturally live in a state of war; they will use violence against each other for gain (competition), for safety (self-defence), and for reputation (glory). 'Hereby it is manifest,'

Neo-Romantic Roots of German Fascism 39

he concludes, 'that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man against every man' (Hobbes 1997, 88). If human beings are not naturally social, then they can coexist only by accepting a threatening power that ensures the self-preservation of every citizen. In Breisacher's extension of this principle of the indivisible sovereign, power as such inspires awe and hence binds subjects to it. It follows that liberal concepts like truth and reason have none of the visceral appeal of brute power. In Breisacher's Sorel-inspired version of Hobbes, human history begins and ends in violence so that barbarism is its+++++++++++++ Given Leverkiihn's later invention of the rigorously controlled twelvetone system, it is significant that he concurs with Deutschlin by arguing that the Church is necessary as 'an institution for the objective disciplining' of religious impulses which would otherwise succumb to 'subject!vist... chaos [Verwilderung]' and hence to a 'world of fantastic uncanniness, an ocean of daemony' (Mann 1968,117-18). Volkish ideology contradictorily affirms both Rousseau and Hobbes. On the one hand, the naturally social individual subject is to be returned to itself, to be saved from the modern institutions which separate it from its authentic self or inner essence. On the other, any affirmation of subjectivity risks plunging society into disorder and needs to be constrained by the institution of a powerful sovereignty. That the objective of Mann's proto-fascists is less the unleashing of atavistic impulses than the establishment of an all-determining totality was in fact already announced in Deutschlin's submission to external authority as opposed to Arzt's preference for negotiation and consensus. Without denying Mann's concern with the appeal to primitive irrationalism in volkish circles, I consider it important to recognize his concern with the totalitarian implications of the return to pre-modern origins. The question that poses itself is, of course, how Hitler succeeded in combining and exploiting the conflicting tendencies of the times. As chapter 6 will illustrate in greater detail, Hitler's genius consisted precisely in his ability to absorb and combine a heterogeneity of attitudes and opinions prevalent in German culture. Tf we look back,' argues Bloch, 'three trends ran crosswise in the Now. They bear early, or at least earlier banners and symbols, those which contradict. Youth longs for discipline and a leader, the peasantry takes root in soil and homeland more strongly than ever, and the impoverished+urban centre seeks to spare itself the class struggle through the corporate state,

40 Deconstructions of Modernity

installs Germany - a blood-based, aryanized one, not the present one as gospel' (Bloch 1990,142). Where conventional politicians advanced and defended certain principles, Hitler freed himself even from the appearance of a coherent ideology, promoting instead a hotchpotch of ideas designed to contain something that would appeal to everybody. The substance of Hitler's nostalgic rhetoric of a return to more authentic social foundations was, on closer inspection, contradicted by a cynical rhetorical strategy marked by a relativism ideally suited to deceive and confuse his auditors. Nation, Race, and Exclusion of Jews It is not difficult to understand how the Rousseauistic discourse of authentic social foundations gets linked to a German nationalism which, rejecting the contractual form of modern nation-states, favours an organic social whole predicated on ties of blood and tradition. In their search for the powerful emotions needed to regenerate a moribund civilization, both the fictional Deutschlin and the historical Lagarde evoke a quasi-religious glorification of Germany's national essence. Qualities like 'honour and dignity' are more likely to inspire passionate allegiance to a shared ideal than indications of economic performance. In contrast to Arzt, then, the nation provides 'a kind and degree of control not conditioned by usefulness.' The individual yearns for integration into 'supra-individual associations' which have their source in an authentic 'original existence' (Mann 1968, 119) far removed from mere economic calculation and social management. When Deutschlin affirms that the 'legitimacy of the State resided ... in its elevation, its sovereignty' (Mann 1968,119), he suggests that it is not social justice but national pride which speaks to people. Deutschlin once again voices Lagarde's contention that the 'unity of the nation' would not be 'reestablished according to political dictates, but rather as the concrete expression of the common, spiritual, emotional, mystical qualities of the German people' (Mosse 1964, 34-5). If Germany is to assert its distinctive national character, it has to distance itself from the universal assumptions underpinning liberal aspirations and rediscover its unique spiritual essence. 'We have to break with humanism,' exhorts Lagarde, for Germans ought to rediscover 'what is only our own essence' (Lagarde 1913, 67). Calling for a government allowing Germans to 'extract our own essential self (Lagarde 1913, 74), he believes that the task of national unity 'can only be solved by falling back upon the genuine

Neo-Romantic Roots of German Fascism 41

German individualism of our fathers' (Lagarde 1913, 71). Yet his constant validation of 'individual personalities' (Lagarde 1913,129) should not be confused with liberal conceptions of individual freedom. Subjective self-expression is rejected in favour of self-identification with the Volk:+The value of a people consists in the organic unification of a natural power, curiously characteristic for a number of people, with a historical task agreeable to all of them' (Lagarde 1913,142).14 As Bloch points out, 'for the main troop of the Nazis, the sought-after field lies beyond the individual and the collective (which both appear to be liberal and mechanical to them). What are desired instead are comradely groups, as federations, camps, workforces; these give the business a deceptive consecration, rechristen it organically' (Bloch 1990,90). Arzt's socialist concept of a 'socio-religious combination' needs to be rewritten as the 'right combination' obtainable in the volkish idea 'of the people' (Mann 1968, 119). And it is in Germany that the optimal preconditions for this 'right combination' exist. Exemplifying different versions of inauthenticity, the Russians have 'profundity but no form' and Western European countries have 'form but no profundity' (Mann 1968,121-2); it is only in Germany that depth and form find themselves harmoniously combined. It follows that Germany has a special mission in Europe. 'Our obligation is exceptional,' claims Deutschlin, requiring a disposition '[t]o a genuine sacrifice' (Mann 1968, 122, 121), a daring willingness to transcend the constraints of economic and political self-interest. This narrative of German self-understanding reads like Plato's famous allegory: after having seen the sun, the philosopher-king must sacrifice himself by returning to the cave. It is only through his self-sacrifice that those in the cave may get the chance to see the light. For volkish intellectuals, Germans are a special people whose Innerlichkeit elevates them above other European nations. It is now Germany's destiny to save Europe from its spiritual crisis; to this end, it must descend from its lofty spiritual perch to do battle against the forces of modernity embodied in the West. Germany has the right to claim for itself a mission that legitimizes violence and military self-sacrifice. In his analysis of neo-Romantic nostalgia, Mosse documents how volkish enthusiasm for more primitive forms of social order gradually licensed the use of violence as a sign of (male) vitality. To exemplify this conflation of nostalgia for authenticity and the advocacy of violence, Mosse cites Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's Jiirg Jenatsch, a highly popular novel typically celebrating a peasant who liberates his enslaved people

42 Deconstructions of Modernity

through armed revolt. Mosse's narrative in+The Crisis of German Ideolog traces a logical line of development from nostalgia for primitive origins to the nationalistic affirmation of racial purity that was then used to legitimize the violent exclusion of Jews. This narrative is for him authorized by the validation of the irrational side of human nature, of feelings, passions, and instincts. Implicit in Mosse's treatment of neoRomanticism is the suggestion that the search for origins in pre-modern times positions the proto-fascists++++++modernity. Mann's examina tion of neo-Romanticism anticipates Mosse's focus on the equation between primitivism and violence; his fictional intellectuals are inordinately fond of appealing to barbarism as a vital alternative to a culture grown sterile. However, his understanding of neo-Romantic nostalgia complicates the assumption that the investment in primitive origins unproblematically frees repressed violent impulses. Although I will eventually argue that the yearning for authentic origins is precisely what characterizes modernity more profoundly than any other feature, I propose to examine at this juncture the standard assumption that neoRomantic yearnings for pre-modern social formations unleashed the primitive irrationalism or atavistic eruption of violence which marked the political terror of German National Socialism. Underneath the apparently innocent longings of young intellectuals for a return to authentic origins lurks the fascist agenda that was to result in the Holocaust. Associating authentic origins with German essence logically entailed the exclusion of the non-German other. As is well known, the dividing line was drawn in explicitly racial terms. The glorification of blood and violence on the part of Mann's fictional Breisacher finds a historical counterpart in intellectuals gathering around the poet Stefan George and the philosopher Ludwig Klages. As we have already seen, Mann himself was not entirely opposed to the volkish celebration of 'bodily purity and the strong state' (Mann 1982, 119). According to Mosse, one of the most influential figures to frequent intellectual circles in Munich was a+++++++++(airhead) by the name of Alfred Schuler (Mosse 1964,75). Schuler's most significant lecture 'may have taken place at the Bruckmanns' private house in Munich in the year 1922,' and it was rumoured that Hitler himself was 'a regular guest at the [Bruckmanns'] house and it is altogether likely that he heard some of Schuler's ideas from the Schwabingen oracle himself (Mosse 1964, 76). Rejecting 'all academic scholarship in favor of an inner correspondence with Germanic antiquity/ Schuler 'identified the life force inherent in nature more closely with that flowing in the blood' (Mosse

Neo-Romantic Roots of German Fascism 43

1964, 76). Most importantly, Schuler claimed that his 'Germanic blood had allowed him to "see with his soul," to experience deeply what Christianity with its alien dogmatism had for so long repressed' (Mosse 1964, 76). This identification with the German past, however, could not be achieved by the individual alone; '[l]ife, as understood by Schuler and his fellow mystics, could only be lived meaningfully in unity with others, in concert with the "initiates" - that is, the members of the Volk' (Mosse 1964, 76). He thus advocates an 'organic unity' which was known 'in the heathen times of old' (Mosse 1964, 76). Typical of the anti-intellectual attitudes of volkish intellectuals hostile to 'a progressoriented civilization' (Mann 1982,119), Schuler 'distinctly frowned upon individualism/ placing the greatest value 'upon the primeval substance common to all persons of the same race' (Mosse 1964, 75). This insistence on a chosen people expresses a desire compensating for the very fact that 'Germany is, as is well-known, particularly varied, also fruitfully mixed and certainly for the least part Nordic' (Bloch 1990,44). It was only one short step to the persecution and finally extermination of German Jews. 'If the swastika crusader wants to be the chosen people,' explains Bloch, 'he must slander the original today, crush it under his boots, make it into a "world plague" and exterminate it, in order to be "chosen" himself, to have any "race" at all' (Bloch 1990,46). It is Mosse who most coherently outlines the cultural logic which made Auschwitz the obvious side-effect of Germany's national aspirations.15 The Crisis of German Ideology stresses time and again how the logic of the volkish movement identified the Jew as the radically 'other' who was moreover associated with everything demonized by the extreme right. Like other historians, Mosse stresses that the history of the Jews in Europe made them easy scapegoats for recent economic and social ills. Since laws throughout Europe had for many centuries prohibited Jews from entering certain trades and professions, they had found themselves cast in the unfortunate role of money-lender or usurer. Although economic downturns in the twentieth century could most plausibly be attributed to military expenditures by nationalistic conservatives, many Germans blamed the Jews who 'stood for modernity in all its destructiveness' (Mosse 1964,7). During severe financial crises, businesses and farms tended to consider themselves at the mercy of banks they believed dominated by Jews. Reluctant to deal with the economic causes of hard times, Germans preferred to condemn the Jew, who 'was identified with modern industrial society, which uprooted the peasant, deprived him of his land, caused his death, and thereby

44 Deconstructions of Modernity

destroyed the most genuine part of the Volk' (Mosse 1964,27). Heinrich Heine, for instance, 'came to symbolize the rootlessness of the Jew as contrasted with the rootedness of the Volk' (Mosse 1964, 28). Prejudice against urban Jews was reinforced by peasant novels which 'depicted the Jew as descending from the city into the countryside in order to deprive the peasant of his wealth and land' (Mosse 1964,27). In this volkish narrative, Jews threatened the authentic German in two mutually reinforcing ways. They were first of all constructed as the 'other/ a 'foreign element' which operated within Germany's geographical borders. More threatening than an external enemy, this 'insideoutsider' seemed poised to take over the German nation. This view applied primarily to orthodox Eastern European Jews who were seen practising strange rituals and behaving like a separate people within Germany. But what about the many assimilated Jews who considered themselves to be as German as anyone else? They were greeted with an even more paranoid reaction. Their claim to German identity had to be discredited on racial rather than socioeconomic grounds. Using a typical volkish strategy, the influential prophet of the 'New Romanticists,' Eugen Diederichs, distorted Tacitus's disparaging point in Germania that the Germans had not mixed with other tribes to mean that they had retained an admirable racial purity which gave them 'the distinction of being special' (Mosse 1964, 68). Under the tutelage of Julius Langbehn, volkish thought became increasingly preoccupied with race. Since he viewed '[r]ace and the vitality of nature' (Mosse 1964,44) as equivalent forces, he insisted that Jews were racially so fundamentally different that they could never learn to become Germans. 'Assimilated Jews,' explains Mosse, 'had trespassed beyond their natural limitations and by infiltrating the body of the Volk they were polluting the purity of its blood inheritance' (Mosse 1964, 44). Jews found themselves absolutely and irredeemably excluded from the national self-understanding of Germans. Because of their religious observances, Jews were considered 'an irreconcilable foreign element on German soil/ and because of their racial difference, they were believed to be essentially incompatible with 'the inner character of the German Volk' (Mosse 1964,38). In either case, Jews were seen as 'a danger to the regeneration of the Volk' (Mosse 1964, 38). On a more profound level, the Jew was a 'scandal' in the modern rage for classification, a boundary breaker who fitted neither inside nor outside the category of 'Germanness.' Standing for an ambiguity intolerable to the mathematized modern world, the Jew had to be monitored and finally eliminated.

Neo-Romantic Roots of German Fascism 45

According to this neo-Romantic narrative, the monstrosity of the Holocaust remains ultimately inexplicable precisely because it is irrational. Although Mosse argues for a continuity between German National Socialism and its neo-Romantic roots, he fails to account for the complicity of modernity with fascism which Bauman so convincingly reveals. And, although Mann ignores the fate of the Jews (the focus not only of Mosse's narrative but also of Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust), he stresses the dark and irrational 'underside' of an Enlightenment narrative heavily invested in the neo-Romantic ideal of authentic origins.16 Modernity as Degeneration Since the sources for the powerful emotions necessary to create the conditions for vital social bonds have for Mann's volkish intellectuals been buried under an accumulation of progressive reforms whose sterile effects are only now being finally recognized, Breisacher argues that the history of the Enlightenment ought to be rewritten as a regressive rather than a progressive narrative. Modern civilization is presented as a falling away from a once organic social order whose vitality volkish intellectuals wish to recover. For him, the figure of a forgiving Christ represents a deplorable weakening of a once vital tradition anchored in the figure of a vengeful God. By the time of its interpretation of the stories of David and Solomon, he lectures his audience, religion left behind the 'old and genuine Hebraic actuality of Jahve, the Elohim of the people,' namely an 'effectively present national god,' and turned to an 'exploded late theology' predicated on an 'abstract and generally human god in heaven' (Mann 1968, 272). In short, with King David, who was 'ignorant of origins' and 'besotted' (Mann 1968, 274), religion shifted from 'the religion of the people to the religion of the world' (Mann 1968, 272). Breisacher particularly deplores that real blood sacrifice was abandoned and declared a merely symbolic religious expression. Abandoning sacrificial violence, religion forfeited its 'folk and blood and religious reality' in exchange for an ethics of tolerance which should be condemned as 'humane watery gruel' (Mann 1997, 298). Once morality was introduced as a standard of salvation, religion lost its rootedness in ritualistic magic: 'Religion and ethics represented the decline of religion. All morality was "a purely intellectual" misunderstanding of the ritual' (Mann 1968, 274). Advocating a vengeful and punishing God, Breisacher disdains prayer as 'the vulgarized and ra-

46 Deconstructions of Modernity

tionalistically watered-down late form of something very vital, active and strong: the magic invocation, the coercion of God' (Mann 1968, 274). Breisacher's underlying message is that liberals working toward political emancipation misunderstand people's real desires; political subjects do not want freedom but yearn for integration into a vital community presided over by a paternal authority figure who forces them to act in their own best interests, no matter how deeply concealed from themselves these may well be. In his colourful populist rendering of the transition from the Old to the New Testament, Breisacher exemplifies a culturally pessimistic reading of history clearly modelled on Lagarde's Deutscher Glaube, Deutsches Vaterland, Deutsche Bildung and on Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes.+Breisacher seems to reproduce Lagarde's basic argumen that ever since St Paul substituted the law for the spirit of religion, Christianity has been 'stifled in orthodoxy' (Mosse 1964, 33). What appeals to Lagarde is not the essentially Protestant injunction to examine one's own conscience but the subordination of the individual will to an all-powerful God. When Mann has the Winfried students (and Breisacher) buy into Lagarde's story of the decline of religious feeling, he does not just reinforce the volkish or neo-Romantic investment in authentic origins but illustrates the totalitarian implications of this reinterpretation of the Enlightenment narrative. Seeing in the God of the Old Testament a Hobbesian example of a powerful and indivisible sovereignty, they complain that Christians have increasingly opted to act according to their own subjective whims. Luther's reformation reinforced this subjective orientation in religion; where the Catholic church still dictated civic behaviour, Protestantism turned morality into a personal question between the individual and God. As Leverkuhn points out, it was Kierkegaard who consolidated this shift toward a radically subjective ethics when he differentiated between churchgoing and private Christian conduct. What has conventionally been interpreted as the emancipation of the subject from authoritarian traditions is reinterpreted as the degeneration of society from a once vital social bond. What disturbed Mann most of all was his belated realization that the cultural norms he valued contributed to a climate in which Nazism was able to thrive. In spite of Leverkiihn's pronounced apolitical stance, even he often makes aesthetic judgments which reflect the volkish arguments of the novel's proto-fascist intellectuals. He assumes, for instance, that uncomplicated musical form is more expressive than

Neo-Romantic Roots of German Fascism 47

more intricate configurations. According to his teacher, Kretschmar, no matter how sophisticated music grows, it remains attached to the idea of the 'elemental, the primitive, the primeval beginning' (Mann 1968, 64), a tendency exemplified by Beethoven's secular music, by 'the never extinguished homesickness of emancipated music, its desire for origins still bound to the cult' (Mann 1997, 65; my trans.). The music teacher thereby anticipates Breisacher's contention that the evolution of music from polyphony to harmony ought to be understood as 'an acquisition of barbarism' rather than as a moment of 'cultural progress' (Mann 1968, 270). In the sixteenth century, maintains Breisacher, music degenerated into the suspect 'softening, the effeminizing and falsification, the new interpretation put on the old and genuine polyphony understood as a combined sounding of various voices into the harmonic-chorda!' (Mann 1968, 271). What is from an Enlightenment perspective considered to be a more primitive musical form is for Breisacher a more authentic musical expression which deserves to be regained. It is, of course, significant that both Kretschmar and Leverkiihn admire the primitive polyphonic music of Johann Conrad Beissel precisely because it blends religious passion with a return to a simple system of notation. Stripped of all formal sophistication, this strange religious music is said to speak directly to the humble congregation of American pietists. Kretschmar implies that a composer like Leverkiihn, who wants to free music from the constraints of exhausted conventions, must be willing to regain its lost authenticity. Exclaiming that music is always poised to begin 'at the beginning, [to] discover[] itself afresh out of nothing, bare of all knowledge of its past cultural history, and [to] creat[e] anew/ he specifies that modern music would have to return to its 'primitive stages' in order to create new 'extraordinary and singular heights' (Mann 1968, 64-5). Music has remained closer to its origins than other art forms and is therefore destined to save all art from paralysis.17 Beissel's innocent music joins Deutschlin's suspect celebration of the peasant in a neo-Romantic celebration of primitive instincts. Like Breisacher, Kretschmar seems to assume that music has lost rather than gained in the process of historical development. The history of music is for him a movement toward autonomy which has increasingly severed its organic bond with the social community it still served during its liturgical phase. As music became more self-conscious of itself as music, it dissociated itself from its public function. Retreating into itself, music reflects in its formal development the sociohistorical shift away from the socially integrated individual to the alienated sub-

48 Deconstructions of Modernity

ject of modernity. Mann here foregrounds the conflict which arises when the modern subject demands the right to self-determination while also expecting to feel welcome in a protective community. As Zeitblom comments, modern music's 'liberation and elevation into the individual and culturally self-purposive' conceals a nostalgia for the 'liturgical whole' (Mann 1968, 60) which Beissel's music seeks to reconstruct. By striving for aesthetic autonomy, modern bourgeois music reflects a retreat from communal participation, a trend which Georg Lukacs denounces so memorably in Theory of the Novel (1916), where he argues that the novel form has declined under the reifying conditions of modernity. In the Greek epic, so he contends, literary form expressed the social consciousness of subjects still organically connected to a vital community. With changes in the modes of production, individuals became increasingly alienated from society. Where nineteenth-century realism reflected human beings struggling against reifying social conditions, high modernism reinforces the psychopathology of modern life. Lukacs is both nostalgic for a lost age and hostile to modernity. Kretschmar's lectures reenact Lukacs's sense that art has grown sterile because modernity's celebration of the autonomous subject has cut it off from its public roots. Having self-consciously isolated himself from society, Leverkiihn exemplifies Lukacs's psychopathological modern subject. It is this lack of an organic connection to the world that has Leverkiihn dreaming of a 'retreat' to a simpler and more communal music, to an art playing a 'more modest, happier [role] in the service of a higher union' (Mann 1968, 61). This yearning for authenticity shows Leverkuhn hoping that modern civilization will prove to be a transitory phenomenon. But Zeitblom is rather disturbed by his friend's distinction between 'cult epochs and cultural epochs' (Mann 1968, 60), warning that the alternative of 'culture is barbarism' (Mann 1968, 61) rather than the organic community. Overriding this liberal-humanist objection, Leverkuhn sounds like Deutschlin when he advocates 'that we should have to become very much more barbaric to be capable of culture again' (Mann 1968, 61). Privileging 'cult' over 'culture'18 as being closer to the natural or authentic, he believes that it is only through '[n]aivete, unconsciousness, taken-for-grantedness' (Mann 1968, 61) that a moribund civilization can regenerate itself. Dialectic of Regress and Progress German nationalism appears to have been a highly contradictory discourse. The Third Reich is envisioned by many as a mystical totality

Neo-Romantic Roots of German Fascism 49

which selectively takes from Rousseau the essentializing notion of natural origins and from Hobbes the pragmatic concept of an indivisible sovereign power that needs to be institutionalized in order to manage and control natural impulses. Hitler's genius was to sell this conflicted understanding of the relationship between subject and object to a people whose cultural traditions upheld Rousseau's idea of the free individual and whose feudal past had accustomed it to oppressive political realities. Mann illustrates that the paradoxical logic Breisacher embodies encouraged volkish intellectuals to accept contradictory premises and made liberal-humanist resistance to this rhetoric difficult. Although fascists called for a conservative return to stable foundations, in their actual strategies they availed themselves of the very relativism they decried in modernity. Those who reject the thesis that anti-Semitism provided the primary motivation for Hitler's rise to power tend to stress his ability to make indiscriminate use of whatever ideas and attitudes he knew had currency in Germany.19 His success is then not attributed to his competence in constructing a rationally consistent ideological agenda but to his ability to assimilate even the most contradictory discourses into a totality which owes its apparent coherence to the potency of emotional energies. In his dramatization of Breisacher's ability to ensnare his audience in an agenda of blood and soil, Mann seems to allude, however obliquely, to the radical relativism of Hitler's rhetoric. Selectively assimilating and rewriting various ideas, the proto-fascist pulls moderate conservatives and conventional liberals into his extreme agenda of nationalism and violence. It is not surprising that a traditional aristocratic conservative like Riedesel seems thoroughly confounded when his straight conservatism is 'outbid' by 'the frightfully clever playing of atavistic cards; by a radical conservatism that no longer had anything aristocratic about it, but rather something revolutionary; something more disrupting than any liberalism, and yet, as though in mockery, possessing a laudable conservative appeal' (Mann 1968, 274). Confronted by Breisacher's paradoxical logic, Riedesel can no longer know if he approves or disapproves of Breisacher's revolutionary conservatism. The future is for Breisacher also the past, so that 'progress and reaction, the old and the new, the past and the future became one; the political Right more and more coincided with the Left' (Mann 1968, 355).20 Although Breisacher's vocal domination of the debate accounts in part for his ability to impose his proto-fascist valorization of irrational impulses and unrestrained violence, on a more subtle level he eliminates opposition by making it difficult for his listeners to know for certain whether

50 Deconstructions of Modernity

they are confronted by a conservative or a revolutionary position. At the end of the first Breisacher episode, Zeitblom comments on how confusing to the listeners this argument for a regressive progress and progressive regress must have been. What appals a liberal humanist like Zeitblom is that the paradoxical tenor of Breisacher's offensive discourse leaves him no locus of resistance. Zeitblom may well be typical of liberal intellectuals when he acknowledges being silently disturbed by Breisacher's complacent acceptance of the apparently inevitable return of repressed violence. Without actually voicing his dismay, he objects to Breisacher's 'deliberate rebarbarization' because it dispenses with the 'cultural conquests' (Mann 1968, 356) with which Zeitblom identifies. His failure to defend liberal principles by intervening in the debate is all the more 'culpable' in that he astutely recognizes that these volkish intellectuals 'had laid their fingers on the pulse of the time' (Mann 1968,357): It was an old-new world of revolutionary reaction, in which the values bound up with the idea of the individual - shall we say truth, freedom, law, reason - were entirely rejected and shorn of power, or else had taken on a meaning quite different from that given them for centuries. Wrenched away from washed-out theories, these values were relativized and pumped full of blood, made to refer to the far higher court of violence, authority, the dictatorship of belief - not, let me clarify, in a reactionary, anachronis tic way, as of yesterday or the day before, but so that it was like the most radically novel setting back of humanity into medievally theocratic conditions and situations. (Mann 1968,354; trans, amended)

This passage epitomizes how proto-fascists were able to exploit the paradoxical formulations of a revolution which was simultaneously reactionary and radical to disorient and disarm liberals clinging to principles predicated on linear and coherent reasoning. Under the guise of freeing the individual from artificial restraints, Breisacher in fact denies individualism by reversing the meaning and values attached to the liberal principles on which notions of individual freedom are based. Reflecting the historical ironies of the Weimar Republic, liberal values are thereby made to reinforce anti-liberal ideas. Zeitblom finds himself disarmed by Breisacher's appropriation and distortion of the intellectual tradition which has informed his self-understanding. The protofascists were able to silence the liberal humanist by turning his principles against him. If Zeitblom had chosen to attack Breisacher's views, he

Neo-Romantic Roots of German Fascism 51

would have reinforced his opponent's valorization of brute force and would have violated his own liberal principle of tolerance for the views of others. More insidiously, perhaps, Breisacher knows that Zeitblom cannot argue against his position without undermining his own. Since humanist investments are reinterpreted rather than rejected, Zeitblom finds it difficult to argue with his opponent. The appeal to a future that is also the past leaves a politically liberal but culturally conservative figure like Zeitblom in a highly uncomfortable double-bind position: he is damned if he remains silent, and he is damned if he speaks. Although the demonic in+++++++++++tends to be equated with th irrational, there is compelling evidence that it ought rather to be associated with the uncanny logic of German National Socialism which Mann signals through Breisacher. While Leverkiihn plays lip service to a healthy barbarism, he is really more fascinated by the uncanny logic underpinning Breisacher's dialectical reversal of progress and regress. This logic is foregrounded in the scientific-magical experiments to which Jonathan Leverkiihn exposes his son, experiments which illustrate that boundaries between past and present, spontaneous nature and artificial culture, and superstitious magic and scientific reason are so porous that they are always open to reversals. Teaching his son that it is impossible '[to draw] a clear and certain line' between 'the noble pedagogic world of the mind and [the] world of the spirit' (Mann 1968, 14), Jonathan Leverkiihn points out that his experiments mean 'that culture is in very truth the pious and regulating, I might say propitiatory, entrance of the dark and uncanny into the service of the gods' (Mann 1968,15). Where the Winfried students (and Breisacher) dream of a return to pure origins, Adrian Leverkiihn is from the beginning aware that the demonic aspect of volkish ideology lies not only in yearnings for pure origins but also in the 'uncanny' (Mann 1968, 22) or paradoxical logic characterizing the interdependence of supposedly mutually exclusive domains. Although he is sympathetic to the volkish validation of spontaneous expression, he realizes that the rational aspects of music (or culture) cannot simply be exiled from it. Far from advocating that the scientific age ought to be replaced with pre-modern primitivism, he proposes to exploit their mutual dependence. Music offers him both emotional intensity and mathematical order. Satisfying his intellectual predilections as well as his fascination with magic, music appeals to him for combining the 'symbolism of numbers and letters' and an 'inborn tendency ... to superstitious rites and observances' (Mann 1968, 151). He is drawn to music for being contradictorily both rational and

52 Deconstructions of Modernity

irrational; the musical work appears to him under the auspice of a 'cabbalistic craft, at once playful and profound, artful and austere' (Mann 1968, 146). The volkish call for a simple return to pre-modern simplicity is here being reorchestrated in a more sophisticated register. The scene with the devil conveys the devilish sophistry which inheres not so much in the substance of fascist rhetoric as in its paradoxical logic. It has long been accepted that the devil ought to be regarded as Leverkuhn's self-projection; the scene is thus a dialogue with himself. What this dialogue reveals in the present context is that the demonic is disclosed not simply as the 'other' of reason. In this debate with himself, it seems initially that he aligns himself with the volkish yearning for spontaneity and the pessimistic interpretations of cultural history as a fall into inauthenticity. In his volkish critique of the Enlightenment, the devil argues that, having surrendered to 'the mortal domination of reason/ all human creativity has lost its 'genuine, old, primeval enthusiasm' (Mann 1968, 230). Admonishing Leverkiihn to rediscover the 'insicklied ... enthusiasm, ... divine ruptus' of creative passion operative in bygone times, the devil tells him to transcend 'destructive criticism' so as to achieve the 'shining, sparkling, vainglorious unreflectiveness' (Mann 1968, 230) of Dionysian ecstasy. Now that art has succumbed to the rational spirit of modernity and has become 'critique' (Mann 1968,233), announces the devil, the only remedy open to Leverkiihn is to accept the demonic offer of a return to 'the archaic, the primeval, that which long since has not been tried' (Mann 1968, 230). Instead of thinking of progress as the overcoming of mysticism through reason, Leverkiihn ought to acknowledge that progress owes much to the dark forces of irrational superstition. Echoing Breisacher, the devil proclaims that the history of civilization is really the story of the decline of cultural vitality: 'Since culture fell away from the cult and made a cult of itself, it has become nothing else than a falling away' (Mann 1968, 237). Mann's devil takes from volkish ideology the view that periods of Enlightenment should be condemned as evidence of the anti-human repression of Dionysian celebrations of spontaneity. If Leverkiihn is to regenerate music, he is encouraged to wed the premodern past to the vision of a Utopian future.21 Since modernity has only obscured, rather than eliminated, the dynamic energy of premodern times, it is the composer's task to free what has been repressed. In conformity with Jonathan Leverkuhn's scientific demonstrations, the devil argues that humanism is far from being an emancipation from superstition: '[Y]our humanism is pure Middle Ages' (Mann 1968,265).

NeoRomantic Roots of German Fascism 53

Instead of deploring reason's inability to free itself from myth and superstition, the devil welcomes the inescapable continuity between the old and the new (Mann 1990,341) to legitimate his demonic agenda. According to the devil, the more severe the repression of elemental instincts, the more violent will be their eruption when the repressed returns. Given that Leverkiihn exists during a liberal-humanist period dominated by scientific rationalization, his aesthetic breakthrough will be a spectacular event: 'Not only will you break through the paralysing difficulties of the time - you will break through time itself, by which I mean the cultural epoch and its cult, and dare to be barbaric, twice barbaric indeed, because of coming after the humane, after all possible root-treatment and bourgeois raffinement' (Mann 1968, 236). Whereas the narrative of modernity anticipates a progressive movement toward social justice and political emancipation, the devil argues that progress is indistinguishable from regress so that, in an apparently paradoxical move, liberal-humanist civilization generates the very return of barbarism which it had meant to foreclose. If Leverkuhn's intellectual arrogance (Hoffart) is in reality simply a masked yearning for the repressed 'elemental' (Mann 1968, 241) in him, then he is not only ideally suited but in effect 'condemned' to carry out the devil's Nietzschean transvaluation of all values. Leverkuhn's unwittingly proto-fascist affirmation of barbarism is all the more disturbing as it relies on a paradoxical logic that disrupts the linear processes and discrete categories on which the Enlightenment narrative depends. Like Breisacher, Leverkiihn plans to liberate music from outmoded conventions by uniting 'the archaic ... with the revolutionary' (Mann 1968, 184; my trans.). Offended by his friend's volkish sophistry, Zeitblom points out that Leverkiihn may not be able to control the consequences of his radical agenda. Although the intention may well be 'to resolve the magic essence of music into human reason' (Mann 1968, 188), his audacious aesthetic experiments could have the opposite result: The rationalism you call for has a good deal of superstition about it - belief in the incomprehensibly and vaguely daemonic, the kind of thing we have in games of chance, fortune-telling with cards, and shaking dice. Contrary to what you say, your system seems to me more calculated to dissolve human reason in magic' (Mann 1968, 188). Arrogantly convinced that he will be able to control the logic of the 'cultural paradox' (Mann 1968, 178) he invokes, Leverkiihn dismisses the narrator's objections and consciously exploits this uncanny logic. As early as the 'Brentano songs/ he sets out to frustrate aesthetic

54 Deconstructions of Modernity

expectations by inverting the terms traditionally employed to ground the story of human perfectibility: '[B]y inversion of the natural course of development, where the refined and intellectual grow out of the elementary, the former here plays the role of the original, out of which the simple continually strives to wrest itself free' (Mann 1968, 178). Instead of aiming to increase the level of cultural sophistication, Leverkiihn seeks to regain the primitive origins of music so as to clear the way for a different cultural trajectory. Modernity is for him not an 'incomplete' but a fundamentally misconceived project. In a move that echoes Breisacher's legitimization of violence, he defends his aesthetic program by affirming that "'[m]ore interesting phenomena ... probably always have this double face of past and future, probably are always progressive and regressive in one"' (Mann 1968,188). To what extent the dramatization of this formulation captures the spirit of the times is borne out by Carl E. Schorske's Fin-de-Siecle Vienna (1981), especially in his analysis of Austrian politics. For him, the Austrian author Robert Musil articulates the same confusion we find expressed in++++++++++++'"People who were not born then," wrote Robert Musil of the++++++++++++++++"will find it difficult to believe, but the fact is that even then time was moving faster than a cavalry camel... But in those days, no one knew what it was moving towards. Nor," Musil continues, "could anyone quite distinguish between what was above and what was below, between what was moving forward and what backward"' (Schorske 1981, 116). A humanist observer like Zeitblom was horrified not only because proto-fascist regression into barbarism unleashed a degree of violence no civilized people ought to be capable of but also because it concealed, under a rhetoric of foundational origins, what amounted to a profoundly anti-foundational strategy whose effects were experienced as a disturbing or 'uncanny' conceptual disorientation. In its historically credible reproduction of the intellectual climate prevailing in the years preceding Hitler's emergence, Mann's+Doctor Faustu both affirms and complicates Mosse's sociological thesis of the neoRomantic roots of German National Socialism. Although the novel refers both directly and indirectly to political, economic, social, and cultural conditions specific to Germany, Mann already alludes to a larger philosophical context for understanding the Nazi phenomenon within the broadly European culture which still dominates the West. For Mosse as well as for Jendreiek, fascism is implicitly treated as an

Neo-Romantic Roots of German Fascism 55

aberration from modernity. The German tendency toward 'inwardness' (Jendreiek) and 'abstract rationalism and idealism' (Mosse) is in the first instance blamed for the helplessness of liberal humanism in the face of the brute violence of fascism. For Jendreiek, the apolitical composer's complicity with the forces of fascism can be rectified through a return to the liberal-humanist tradition which had temporarily been disrupted by the forces of darkness. Along slightly different lines, Mosse constructs a historical continuity between German National Socialism and the neo-Romantic yearnings of anti-liberal intellectuals. In his view, Nazism is an anti-modern force which has collided with the main trajectory of the Enlightenment narrative and has temporarily dislodged it. In both readings, German National Socialism can safely be relegated to the historical archive. In Mann's novel, though, the conflicted ideological investments exploited by the Nazis manifest themselves both in neo-Romanticism and in the Western philosophical tradition. His treatment of the relationship between fascism and modernity posited in the intellectual arguments of proto-fascists already announces that the fascist inflection of neoRomantic volkish aspirations suggests that German National Socialism has to be understood as an implicit possibility within modernity which always awaits actualization; in other words, fascism is not only the 'other' of modernity but also its extreme extension. In theoretical terms, fascism ought thus to be approached as a limit-case of modernity. If we examine the novel's history of music from Adorno's cultural-materialist perspective, we will be alerted to a complicated and specifically dialectical relationship between modernity and fascism, a relationship which raises the issue, still problematical in our own postmodern times, of subjective agency.

CHAPTER 2

ORGANIC UNITY AND THE PRIVILEGING OF REASON: HEGEL AND BEETHOVEN

The incredulity attaching to the spectacle of a civilized nation perpetrating crimes against humanity whose genocidal intensity continues to appal us suggests that fascism crept up unawares on an unsuspecting modernity. Why did Germany and the West in general not read the signals? It seems in retrospect apparent that the possibility of fascism must have been implicit in the assumptions of modernity itself. Instead of dismissing the Nazi phenomenon as an inexplicable aberration from the progressive narrative of the Enlightenment, we need to probe not only beyond the German Sonderweg theory but also beyond the neoRomantic explanation. Although the volkish thesis stresses a historical continuity between the 'good' and the 'bad' Germany, it portrays fascism as the tragic perversion of laudable Romantic ideals, thereby understanding Nazism as the irrational 'other' of a normally 'rational' modernity. In this case, as Jendreiek's narrative of Germany's redemption through social democracy implies, the Nazi episode can be closed and modernity put back on track. If we vigilantly guard against irrational manifestations, then we will presumably be able to ward off another 'Hitler' catastrophe. But this comforting scenario is increasingly being challenged by postmodern archaeologies of modernity. What if enlightened modernity itself contains within it the seeds of violence? Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust (1991) has convincingly demonstrated that it was precisely the privileging of reason in modernity that created the administrative apparatus which not only abetted but actually instigated the escalation of terror culminating in 'Auschwitz.' Attempts to limit the complicity of the Western philosophical tradition with fascism to a marginalized Romanticism need to be reconsid-

Organic Unity and the Privileging of Reason

57

ered from a perspective informed by deconstructions of the ideological assumptions of the Enlightenment narrative of modernity. Although the dominant theories of the last fifty years or so have successfully targeted this narrative, their illustrations of the dark underside of the Enlightenment have tended to circumvent the historically specific example of fascism. A notable exception to this avoidance of Nazism as the most poignant crisis of modernity is, of course, Adorno, whose importance as a Marxist interpreter of culture has only fairly recently been recognized in Anglo-American circles. As a half-Jewish German intellectual, Adorno was deeply marked by the Holocaust events he witnessed in exile, an experience thought to have imbued him with an exaggerated sense of cultural pessimism. Dialectic of Enlightenment, coauthored with Horkheimer, is today being acknowledged as a demystification of the Enlightenment narrative which is both overly dark and yet already in tune with so-called postmodern critiques of modernity. Since Mann 'borrows' from Adorno's+++++++++++++++++++++++ specifically aesthetic study will necessarily play a more prominent role in my work than+++++++++No matter which text one considers, as postmodernist avant la lettre traumatized by the death camps, Adorno provides an exemplary opening to a complex and long-overdue recognition of the complicity of modernity with fascism. Incorporating into his novel Adorno's cultural-materialist deconstruction of modernity, Mann provides once again a convenient point de repere for my investigation into the philosophical assumptions which authorized and legitimized the emergence of fascism. At the same time, the philosophical perspective my reading of Adorno brings to bear on Mann's novel encourages me to speculate that the experience of fascism was a motivating force in the postmodern archaeologies of modernity staged by the likes of Derrida and Foucault. The Adorno-inspired archaeology of modernity carried out in Doctor Faustus is itself deeply buried in the history of music which prepares Leverkiihn's breakthrough into the atonal twelve-tone system implicated in Germany's++++++++++++++(twilight of the gods) on whic Zeitblom periodically comments from his retrospective moment of narration at the end of the Second World War. Before his breakthrough into atonality, Leverkiihn is introduced to a deconstruction of Beethoven's music through Kretschmar's lectures on the history of music, the words of which Mann 'borrows/ often verbatim, from Adorno's+Philosophy o Modern Music.+Since Adorno considers Beethoven to have been a 'musi cal Hegel/ Mann adopts more or less inadvertently Adorno's critique

58 Deconstructions of Modernity

of Hegel's philosophy, a philosophy which is for Adorno indicative of modernity's blindness to its own violence. Adorno's oblique ideological approach to the reading of cultural phenomena complicates the parallel between++++++++++++++++++ festations in+++++++++++As we have seen, the volkish explanation in Doctor Faustus explicitly foregrounds the connection between apolitical ideals and suspect political dogma, especially when Zeitblom acknowledges that Breisacher's 'cold-blooded intellectual commentary' was uncomfortably close to 'Apocalypsis cum figuris/ a musical work which '[i]n that all too homelike rural retreat... was ... built up with feverish speed ... [and] had a peculiar kinship with, was in spirit parallel to, the things [Zeitblom] had heard at Kridwiss's table-round' (Mann 1968, 357). In contrast, the archaeological stratification in Kretschmar's Beethoven lectures imposes on the reader the exertion of having to excavate a level of analysis of which Mann himself may not even have been fully conscious. Importing into his novel Adorno's deconstruction of Hegel, Mann seems to suggest that the sociohistorical conditions were ripe for the emergence of fascism because modernity had been stripped of its self-protective illusions. Tracing the crisis of modernity through Kretschmar's dialectical reading of Beethoven to Adorno's critique of Hegel, I consider the history of music in Doctor Faustus to be symptomatic of a broader cultural crisis in our understanding of the relationship between subject and object. Modernity is ultimately implicated in the emergence of fascism because the neo-Romantic or 'irrational' yearning for organic++++++finds its mirror image in Hegel's 'rational' investment in a dialectical telos. What Mann's Adornoinspired novel forces us to consider is the unpalatable possibility that fascism was not just the triumph of irrational forces but also the consequence of a firm belief in the power of+++++in German philosophical idealism. On the one hand, the volkish yearning for organic wholeness is reproduced in Hegel's sublation of opposites into a harmonious unity.1 On the other hand, the volkish call for a return to barbarism to achieve this harmony appeals to the very dialectical method so centrally associated with Hegel's system. This chapter, then, focuses on the importance of Adorno as a 'coauthor' of Doctor Faustus in order to draw attention to the hitherto unacknowledged Hegelian subtext operative in Kretschmar's counterintuitive interpretation of Beethoven's piano sonata opus 111. Balancing the emphasis on the irrational roots of fascism in the Romantic tradition discussed in the last chapter, this chapter examines the ra-

Organic Unity and the Privileging of Reason 59

tional grounds conducive to Nazism by revisiting the legacy of German idealism embodied in Hegel. I will be arguing that it is through Adorno's deconstruction of Hegel that Mann's+++++++++++touches on the complicity with the Holocaust of modernity's investment in reason. According to this perspective, fascism has to be traced not only to non-contemporaneous neo-Romantic nostalgia but also to the contemporaneous rationalizing tendencies of a capitalism increasingly thrown into crisis. Adorno and His 'Collaboration' on Mann's+Doctor Faustu The bourgeois humanist Thomas Mann and the neo-Marxist Theodor W. Adorno met in California in 1943, at a time when the first few chapters of++++++++++++had already been completed. Unlike man other intellectuals, Mann had enough political sense to recognize and reject the brutal tactics of Hitler's followers and exiled himself from Germany in 1930. After several years in Switzerland and France, he emigrated to the United States, returning to Switzerland in 1952. Adorno similarly realized that his Jewish background would prevent him from teaching or performing music in Nazi Germany; he first moved to England (in 1934), joining the other members of the Institute of Social Research in the United States in 1938. Meeting in exile, the bourgeois conservative and the Marxist critic were drawn together by a common language, by a similar social background, and by a shared commitment to the world of art and culture. The two German intellectuals seemed equally intent on understanding how the Jewish genocide could have happened in what they considered to have been one of the most cultured countries in Europe. It was, after all, Adorno who penned the most memorable phrase to signify this contradiction: To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric' (Adorno 1967,34). Documented in Mann's+The Story of a Novel [Die Entstehung des Dokto Faustus] (1949), the story of the 'collaboration' with Adorno is well known. Living in exile in California, Mann began Doctor Faustus on 23 May 1943 and, while working on chapter 7 in July 1943, he received from Adorno a book on music by Bahle (Mann 1949, 31, 41). Roughly two weeks later, Adorno gave Mann a manuscript version of Philosophy of Modern Music, whose relevance to his own preoccupations was immediately clear to the author of Doctor Faustus. In fact, Mann found Adorno's theories so congenial that he 'borrowed' significant portions from Adorno's text for his depiction of Kretschmar's music lectures

60 Deconstructions of Modernity

and Leverkiihn's aesthetic experiments. Although much has been written about the degree to which Mann 'borrowed' from Adorno and about the accuracy of Mann's interpretation of Adorno's assessment of Schonberg's music, the general tendency has been to understand Adorno's contributions as a relatively minor sharpening of ideas that are defended as Mann's own. In contrast, I consider Adorno to be a major, if largely unwitting, 'collaborator' on Doctor Faustus; I therefore maintain that Mann imports into his novel not only Adorno's expertise in music but also, and this, to my knowledge, has virtually been ignored, his sociohistorical critique of late capitalism. The novel is thus traversed by a tension between Mann's essentially conservative impulses and Adorno's neo-Marxist attitudes, a tension that has too often been glossed over rather than being examined for its effects on the reader. Pointing to Mann's verbatim quotations from Philosophy of Modern Music,+Hansjorg Dorr is one of the few critics to conclude that Adorn should be considered not only an adviser on details of musical technique but an actual 'co-author of Doctor Faustus' (Dorr 1983, 50; my trans.). Offering a 'systematic source study' (Dorr 1983, 50; my trans.), Dorr juxtaposes passages from Philosophy of Modern Music and Doctor Faustus, demonstrating Mann's enormous indebtedness to Adorno, an indebtedness that was painstakingly established as early as 1951 by Jonas Lesser in an unpublished manuscript.2 More critical than others of Mann's own account in Story of a Novel, Dorr claims that Mann does not fully acknowledge Adorno's influence. Although Mann openly admits that Adorno not only played sonata opus 111 for him but actu ally annotated a draft of the chapters dealing with Kretschmar's Beethoven lectures, Dorr demonstrates, for instance, that the novel is 'in theme and formulation' (Dorr 1983,53; my trans.) suspiciously close to Adorno's 'Beethoven's Late Style' ['Spatstil Beethovens'], an essay Mann fails to mention. What Mann found congenial in Adorno was a shared 'intellectual attitude'++++++++++++a tendency to prefer the 'triad Wagner-Nietzsche-Schopenhauer' (Dorr 1983, 50; my trans.) to the new music of Schonberg. Adorno thus supplied him with the sophisticated analyses that his own 'split between willed "novelty" and a personal-peculiar attachment to the "old"' (Dorr 1983, 50; my trans.) prevented him from seeing clearly. Dorr's documentation certainly confirms my sense that Adorno's contributions to Doctor Faustus have to be taken more seriously than has been customary. But Dorr limits his consideration of Adorno's influence to the 'philosophical, intellectual,

Organic Unity and the Privileging of Reason 61

and historical foundations of the role of music' (Dorr 1983, 49; my trans.). Although he acknowledges that Adorno's music theory satisfies Mann's search for 'an analysis of the historical times capable of adequately expressing the world depicted in the novel' (Dorr 1983,50; my trans.), he emphasizes questions of attribution and does not pursue the ideological implications of Adorno's contributions. Does the cooperation really end with Mann's incorporation of musical knowledge beyond his expertise? Although I consider it important that the record of Mann's 'borrowing' be set straight, my concern is with the specific features of Adorno's+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Doctor Faustus. Standard interpretations of the social implications of music inDoctor Faustus+tend to focus on the question of improper appropriation of intellectual property in Mann's association of Schonberg's twelve-tone system with devil's work and, by extension, with fascism. There can be no doubt that music is for Mann symbolic of German culture in its most suspect manifestations: 'Music is demonic territory ... If Faust is to be representative of the German soul, then he would have to be musical; for the relationship of Germans to the world is abstract and mystical, that is, it is musical' (Mann 1977,285; my trans.). From this perspective, the novel seems to suggest that Leverkuhn's story illustrates the crisis of modernity that produced in Germany both Schonberg's music and National Socialism. It is thus not entirely surprising that Schonberg objected to Mann's appropriation of his music. Although Mann eventually acceded to Schonberg's request for acknowledgment by adding an 'Author's Note' declaring 'twelve-tone or serial technique' to be the 'intellectual property' (Mann 1968,491; my trans.) of Arnold Schonberg, he complained in Story of a Novel that this acknowledgment distorted the function of music in the novel: 'Schonberg's idea and my ad hoc version of it differ so widely that, aside from the stylistic fault, it would have seemed almost insulting, to my mind, to have mentioned his name in the text' (Mann 1961, 36; my trans.). For Mann, then, twelvetone technique in the novel takes on the kind of demonic and magical tendencies which Schonberg's music 'does not possess in its own right' (Mann 1961, 36; my trans.). Without denying the importance of the proper attribution of ideas and the accuracy of Mann's Adornoinspired reading of Schonberg, my focus on the sociohistorical criteria, which Adorno applies in his theoretical assessments of music, sidesteps issues of 'intellectual property' and 'fair' treatment.3 It seems to me that Adorno contributes to Doctor Faustus not just an

62 Deconstructions of Modernity

analysis of music but, by treating musical forms as ideological clues to the sociohistorical conditions that made specific aesthetic manifestations possible, he provides Mann with a whole cultural-materialist methodology. Mann himself stressed that++++++++++++++is not so a 'music novel' as the more ambitious attempt at 'a novel of the culture and the era' (Mann 1949, 42; my trans.). Declaring music to be representative of culture in general, he tells us that it was 'only foreground and representation, only a paradigm for more universal phenomena, only an instrument for illustrating the situation of art as a whole, of culture, even of humankind, of the spirit itself in which our thoroughly critical epoch expresses itself. A music novel? Yes. But it was meant as a cultural and epochal novel' (Mann 1949,41; my trans.). Although music was extremely important to Mann, he confessed: Technical musical studies frighten and bore me' (Mann 1949,40; my trans.). Since music as such was not the prime impetus for+++++++++++Mann felt no strong need to present himself as an expert in music theory and gratefully accepted Adorno as his 'helper, adviser, participating instructor' (Mann 1949, 41; my trans.). What struck him immediately upon reading Adorno's manuscript version of Philosophy of Modern Music, a version which, incidentally, did not as yet include the methodological comments at the beginning of the published version,4 was that it provided 'moments of insight about Adrian's position' and about the 'desperate situation of art' (Mann 1949, 42; my trans.). More to the point, perhaps, he recognized 'something important,' namely 'an artistic-sociological critique of the historical situation marked by enormous progressiveness, sensitivity, and depth which exhibited the most peculiar affinity to the idea of my own work, to the "composition," in which I lived and on which I laboured' (Mann 1949, 42; my trans.). Adorno's influence goes far beyond questions of music, extending to his Marxist-inspired ideology critique and sociohistorical methodology. Without the benefit of Adorno's explicit methodological statements in the final version of+++++++++++++++++++++Mann seems to have encountered in Adorno's theoretical conceptualizations unmistakable echoes of his own thinking;+++++++++++effortlessly interweaves the borrowed material and makes it its own. Even the earliest scenes, produced at the beginning of 1943 before Mann had any contact with Adorno, betray obvious affinities with the Dialectic of Enlightenment, which Adorno co-authored with Max Horkheimer (completed in 1944 but not published until 1947).5 However, I would argue that Adorno did not just consolidate Mann's thinking but redirected it in significant

Organic Unity and the Privileging of Reason 63 ways. No matter what theory of intertextuality one consults, the consensus is that a quotation cannot be grafted into a new context without carrying with it the imprint of its previous context. Mann's muchvaunted montage technique is an exemplary application of intertextual grafting, illustrating his assumption that all writing is in any case always a form of rewriting. Comfortable with the act of borrowing, Mann never tried to hide his indebtedness to Adorno, honouring his collaborator by making Adorno's middle name, 'Wiesengrund/ a motif in Kretschmar's lecture on Beethoven's Arietta theme in sonata opus 111.6+Indeed, Kretschmar's lecturing style, 'the constant accompaniment and interruption of the performance [on the piano] with explanatory commentaries,' captures 'one of Adorno's characteristics' (Jendreiek 1977, 422; my trans.). Even the devil adopts for one of his incarnations the form of an intellectual music critic reminiscent of Adorno. It seems to me that Mann's direct acknowledgment of Adorno in Story of a Novel and his indirect tribute to him in the novel authorize an investigation of Doctor Faustus as the kind of collaborative effort that informs my dual focus on Mann's bourgeois humanism and Adorno's trenchant critique of it. But where Mann fell back on psychological and mythical articulations, Adorno followed the Frankfurt School propensity (also characteristic of Bloch) to see fascism as the logical outcome of the bourgeois-capitalist order. To see a connection between fascism and capitalism may appear counter-intuitive to a generation raised on the equation of German National Socialism and Soviet Communism. Yet the argument that German National Socialism was specifically German only in its reactionary ideology while it was in its economic and social function the instrument of a more broadly conceived Western capitalist system was generally advanced by members of the Institute for Social Research to which Adorno and Horkheimer belonged. Given the neoMarxist inclinations of its members, it is not surprising that the Institute would link fascism and communism as common reactions against the evils of modernity embodied in late capitalism. In his+'Rationalitat' de Nationalsozialismus+(1994), Michael Schafer provides a carefully documented analysis of the theoretical positions adopted by Horkheimer, Adorno, Friedrich Pollock, Franz Neumann, and Herbert Marcuse on the connections they saw between fascism and capitalism. He shows that Adorno and Horkheimer blamed the emergence of fascism in general on the processes of rationalization so brilliantly outlined in Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism at the same

64 Deconstructions of Modernity

time as they acknowledged the specifically German conditions responsible for the consolidation of the 'authoritarian State.' It must be said that the Institute's Marxist orientation did not result in overly reductive economist interpretations of fascism; on the contrary, they conceded not only the importance of totalitarianism but, influenced by Freud (especially Marcuse), they advanced psychological explanations for anti-Semitism. In collaboration with other Institute members, Adorno wrote+++++++++++++++++++++an empirical study of racial prejudice not typical of Adorno's usual methodology. Adorno was thus exposed to, and participated in, a complex discourse on the reinforcing tendencies of psychological factors, socioeconomic conditions, and political processes in Hitler's rise to power at a moment of crisis in the self-understanding of modernity. When Mann decided to rely on Adorno's ideological interpretations of Beethoven and Schonberg (in Philosophy of Modern Music+and 'Spatstil Beethovens') to reinforce hi psychological drama of Germany's Faustian pact (in Doctor Faustus), he more or less consciously subscribed to the Institute's equation of fascism and capitalism. Adorno was of course not alone in his Marxist framing of the Nazi phenomenon. In fact, as Ernst Nolte's survey of early fascist theories shows (Nolte 1984), the suspicion that fascism had its roots in capitalism was the dominant explanation well into the 1940s. As late as 1942, Talcott Parsons remained convinced that fascism had to be explained as one of the most radical possible reactions against the reification or rationalization of society under late capitalism (Nolte 1984, 64). Explaining Hitler as a symptom rather than the cause of the German catastrophe, Marxist theorists insisted that fascism was the logical outcome of the bourgeois-capitalist order. Or, as Bloch theorizes in more elaborate terms, Nazism inserted itself into the void left by the 'objectively+++++++++++++contradiction 'posited and growing in and with modern capitalism+itself (Bloch 1990, 109). Although the emergence of National Socialism was specific to Germany, fascism was said to have its deeper sources in the systemic characteristics of capitalism. Socialist theories thus subscribed to the belief that fascism was continuous with both capitalism and liberalism. According to Nolte, 'the thesis of fascism as the historically specific manifestation that arose out of and in reaction to a contradictory or, more accurately, liberal society' (Nolte 1984, 65; my trans.) started to fade only after 1945. It was only then that German fascism was discussed as an exemplary case of broader theories of totalitarianism which stressed 'the indisputable structural simi-

Organic Unity and the Privileging of Reason 65

larities between the regimes of National Socialism and bolshevism' (Nolte 1984, 65; my trans.).7 In an interesting twist, Hannah Arendt argues in+++++++++++++++++++++++(first published in 1948 and 195 revised in 1966) that while Hitler's German National Socialism can be equated with Stalin's Soviet Communism, it was the conditions of late capitalism which enabled the emergence of both forms of totalitarianism. Providing us with a highly complex version of such attacks on capitalism, Adorno's contributions to Mann's treatment of music need to be recognized in any serious consideration of Doctor Faustus as the sophisticated 'parable of fascism' I consider it to be. Adorno's Sociohistorical Methodology From the beginning of his career until his death in 1969, Adorno approached art as the authentic expression of sociohistorical conditions and promoted experimental aesthetic forms as moments of 'truth' and possible sites of resistance to the cultural norms of bourgeois life and art. 'Adorno's social view of art,' explains Fredric Jameson, 'lies in his unique emphasis on the presence of late capitalism as a totality within the very forms of our concepts or of the works of art themselves' (Jameson 1990,9). Where Adorno differs most radically from Mann is in his materialist assumption that aesthetic works are repositories of sociohistorical events rather than subjective expressions of unique individuals working within an autonomous aesthetic tradition. However, like other members of the Frankfurt School, Adorno distanced himself from the program of fusing theory and praxis so central to orthodox Marxism, endorsing instead the more open-ended emphasis of Western Marxism on the critique of ideology and the dialectic of cultural history. Opposed to all forms of domination, he ignored such classical Marxist themes as the class struggle and the historical necessity of the eventual triumph of socialism. Since his 'philosophy never included a theory of political action/ writes Buck-Morss, his dialectical materialism was strictly speaking 'not Marxism' (Buck-Morss 1977, 24). Without denying that Adorno insisted on 'the necessity for revolutionary social change/ she argues that 'such statements remained abstract insofar as Adorno's theory contained no concept of a collective revolutionary subject which might accomplish that change' (Buck-Morss 1977, 24). More than most other members of the Frankfurt School, Adorno exemplifies what critics have disparagingly called a Hegelian revision of Marxism, that is, the tendency 'to neglect the economy and, at times,

66 Deconstructions of Modernity

polities' so as to adopt and refine such Lukacs-influenced concepts as 'alienation, mediation, objectification, and reification' (Jay 1984, 3).8 Because of this interest in theory at the expense of economic analysis, Western Marxists are said to have severed theory from praxis, making their arguments 'far more dialectical than materialist' (Jay 1984, 3). Yet for Jameson, Adorno's 'originality' lies in the 'indispensable contribution' he makes to cultural analysis 'in terms of the economic system or mode of production' (Jameson 1990, 9). This is not to say that Adorno treats readers to detailed economic discussions; like Jameson after him, he interprets economic and political struggles as discursive++++++and assumes a reader willing and able to associate references to 'late capitalism' with a set of already familiar economic activities and social practices. Although his 'materialism' may add little to our understanding of the capitalist mode of production, his provocative way of connecting the formal properties of art to the commodity structure of capitalism contributes enormously to a social theory of art. Adorno's materialist reading of aesthetics cannot be separated from his negative reconfiguration of Marx's debt to Hegel's positive dialectic. The historical fact of 'Auschwitz' confirmed Adorno in the suspicion that both Hegel and Marx advanced theories based on the overly optimistic possibility that antagonistic social oppositions were open to sublation and reconciliation. His 'negative dialectics' stresses the radical non-identity of such dichotomies as subject and object, concept and referent, universal and particular. What is at stake in his materialist assumption of the 'priority of the object' is the ability of the subject to act as a social agent. The projected synthesis of subject and object in the dialectics of both Hegel and Marx strikes Adorno as an unfortunate mystification in that it obscures how effortlessly the subject is being absorbed by the capitalist system. His emphasis on 'negation' is intended to assist the constant struggle against the commodification of society under late capitalism. 'Negative dialectics' rejects the sublation of opposites, foregrounding instead their irreconcilable difference and contradiction. This emphasis on society as an antagonistic, rather than a unified, totality is the 'truth' that serious art ought to acknowledge in the wake of 'Auschwitz/ But this truth can no longer be expressed positively; the suffering of the dehumanized subject exceeds the grasp of the categories that were once adequate. According to Adorno, it is the task of (post)modernist9+art to criticiz the social reality by negating it not through its thematic content but through formal innovation. His aesthetic theory develops criteria al-

Organic Unity and the Privileging of Reason 67

lowing us to approach formal innovations according to their ability to articulate the 'truth-content' of the sociohistorical moment. Where Schonberg's avant-garde experiments are said to express the 'truthcontent' of late capitalism by refusing to reconcile contradictions, Stravinsky's compositions are deemed 'false' in that they reinforce the reifying impact of commodity fetishism. 'Advanced music' is at its best when it depicts the material conditions not by++++++++them++ b negating them: 'Its truth appears guaranteed more by its denial of any meaning in organized society, of which it will have no part - accomplished by its own organized vacuity - than by any capability of positive meaning within itself. Under the present circumstances it is restricted to definitive negation' (Adorno 1973, 20). If experimental art seems to be empty of meaning, then it is its inability to say anything meaningful that constitutes its social significance. It is precisely through his asocial withdrawal into art, for instance, that Mann's fictional composer Leverkuhn offers a stringent critique of society. A text speaks not only through its affirmations but also through its negations, repressions, omissions, and displacements. Art remains a viable instrument of social critique because it reflects and makes us conscious of all that 'society prefers to forget' (Adorno 1973,14). As critics never tire of pointing out, art constitutes the only Utopian moment in Adorno's otherwise unrelentingly pessimistic insistence on society as an antagonistic totality. This Utopian potential seems to me more muted than is suggested by those who examine his aesthetic theory as 'the redemption of illusion' (Zuidervaart 1991).10 Adorno turns to art as a site of possible resistance to the dominant social order because processes of formal innovation are paradigmatic of the possibility that things could be otherwise, that they could be different from the way they are. His much-vaunted utopianism amounts to not much more than this vague gesture toward an unspecified Utopian future. Rejecting the idea of art as a compensatory model for the social world, he attempts to come to grips with (post)modernist art as the persistent negation of society rather than as the cipher for a positive political program. Although Adorno differs in significant ways from orthodox Marxists, his readings of experimental avant-garde works of art are, nevertheless, materialist in a recognizably Marxist fashion. Since Adorno's demystification of the illusions glossing over the antagonistic conditions of society under the reifying impact of late capitalism targets precisely the bourgeois investments critics tend to associate with Mann, anyone taking seriously Adorno's sociohistorical

68 Deconstructions of Modernity

contributions to the history of music in++++++++++++will in some sense be reading the novel in ways Mann himself might not have recognized as his own. It is, of course, Adorno himself who argues in 1962 that 'the substance of a work of art begins precisely where the author's intention stops; the intention is extinguished in the substance' (Adorno 1992b, 13). This position anticipates Roland Barthes's famous 1968 articulation of the 'death of the author' (Barthes 1986), his claim that the author's intention has been used as an illegitimate critical norm to limit the multiplication of possible interpretations of a text. It is not that authors have nothing to contribute, but '[f]or the most part there is only the most coincidental and insignificant relationship between the private political attitudes of composers and the substance of their works' (Adorno 1973, 130). With an author like Mann, who has written not only an account of the genesis of++++++++++++but has provided insight into his attitudes through other forms of non-fictional writing, the temptation to interpret the novel by following the author's lead has proven almost irresistible, as the critical emphasis on the novel's humanist framing testifies. But, as Barthes stresses, 'a text consists not of a line of words, releasing a single "theological" meaning (the "message" of the Author-God), but of a multi-dimensional space in which are married and contested several writings, none of which is original: the text is a fabric of quotations, resulting from a thousand sources of culture' (Barthes 1986, 53). Whatever Mann may have thought he was doing, Doctor Faustus is virtually paradigmatic of a text whose 'fabric of quotations' opens the door to a proliferation of interpretations that may often strike the traditional critic as counter-intuitive. Anticipating the current trend in literary and cultural studies of reading 'against the grain,' Adorno promoted a methodology which has been described as 'a close, imaginative reading that exposes social conflicts by uncovering problems inherent in works of art, philosophical texts, or the phenomena of daily life. The critic elicits a sociohistorical truth that might not have been intended by the artist, philosopher, or social agent' (Zuidervaart 1991,5). Reading Mann's Doctor Faustus 'against the grain,' I align myself with Adorno not only in his methodology but also in his sense that writing about Mann ought to be an unsettling of received opinion: 'Understanding Thomas Mann: his work will truly begin to unfold only when people start paying attention to the things that are not in the guidebooks. Not that I would think I could stop the interminable string of dissertations on the influence of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, on the role of music, or on what is discussed in seminars

Organic Unity and the Privileging of Reason 69

under the rubric of "the problem of death." But I would like to create a little discomfort with all that' (Adorno 1992b, 13). The sociohistorical critique that I see Adorno contributing to+++++++++++++++allows f small degree of 'discomfort' not only with our understanding of Mann but also with postmodern archaeologies of modernity that fail to take into account the logic of fascism. The 'postmodernism' most evidently at stake in Doctor Faustus is Fredric Jameson's adaptation of Adorno's negative dialectics, an indebtedness he indirectly acknowledged in Late Marxism: Adorno, or, th Persistence of the+Dialectic+(1990). Jameson is today one of the mos respected Marxist theorists preoccupied with the 'political unconscious' reflected in modernist and postmodernist aesthetic practices. But Adorno's theoretical output has also been linked to other postmodern trends, especially to Derridean deconstruction. Although Adorno was for a long time largely ignored in the North American academy, this changed in the 1990s when French-dominated theory was increasingly being criticized for being insufficiently attentive to history and politics. Equally at home in abstract philosophy and Marxist sociopolitical history, Adorno was ideally placed to be (re)discovered. In the last decade or so, a significant number of critical assessments of Adorno have now been published under the imprint of prestigious presses: Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic (1990); Albrecht Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism (1991; 1993); Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno's Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (1991); Max Paddison, Adorno's Aesthetics of Music (1993); David Roberts, Art and Enlightenment: Aesthetic Theory after Adorno (1991); Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno++++++++++++++++Adorno: A Critical Introducti (1998); and Robert W. Witkin, Adorno on Music (1998). In addition, chapters on Adorno have appeared in collections of essays and general studies of the Frankfurt School. Adorno's renewed appeal is for me best captured by Roberts, who contends that 'Adorno's polemical analysis of the opposed paths of the new music anticipates in important respects the debates on postmodernism' (Roberts 1991,1). He locates the Philosophy of Modern Music at a 'point of crisis/ at 'the turning point between modern and postmodern art' (Roberts 1991, 3). Zuidervaart similarly speaks of Adorno's '"atonal philosophy" whose style and concerns prefigure the antifoundational and deconstructive themes of more recent philosophies' (Zuidervaart 1991, 5). Offering some concluding reflections on

70 Deconstructions of Modernity

'the relations between Adorno and the postmodern' (Jameson 1990, 5), Jameson is surprisingly scant in his analysis. Asking if Derrida's deconstruction might not 'share more with Adorno's critical theory than do the latter's own pupil-critics/ Jarvis draws attention to clear affinities but also cautions that 'Adorno's "non-identical" is not fully comparable to the irreducible alterity which is so often Derrida's concern' (Jarivs 1998, 223). Acknowledging Adorno as 'a rigorous antimetaphysical thinker who struggles against any form of (Hegelian) synthesis,' Hohendahl spells out that Adorno is increasingly being interpreted in the new context of 'the work of Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, and Derrida' (Hohendahl 1995, 7), that the concept of 'negative dialectics' became the 'focal point of the poststructuralist rereading of Adorno's writings during the 1980s' (Hohendahl 1995, 6). This renewed interest in Adorno is perhaps best accounted for by his cultural-materialist reading of discursive practices, a methodology that anticipates both Derrida's deconstructive strategies and Jameson's neoMarxist focus on history. It could be argued that Peter Dews's+Logics of Disintegration (1987) was particularly influential in reviving our interest in Adorno. Dews was one of the first to mount a sustained attack on postmodern theories as being guilty of ahistorical and apolitical speculations, an attack reinforced by other cultural materialists like Christopher Norris and Terry Eagleton. It is not entirely accidental that the theoretical climate was particularly welcoming to a theorist like Adorno whose 'negative dialectics' shares with Derrida the critical aim of demystifying the idealist assumptions of bourgeois philosophy while anchoring this critique in the material conditions of the sociohistorical moment. The appropriation of Adorno as a precursor of postmodernism reinforces my own tendency to read Doctor Faustus from what might loosely be called a postmodern position. When Adorno changed his title from Philosophic der modernen Musik to Philosophic der neuen Musik, he himself seems to have acknowledged that the music he is analysing is no longer part of the modernist tradition. The shift from 'modern' to 'new' in the revised title points to his uncertainty about what to call the emergent cultural dominant which now carries the still rather uncertain label of 'postmodernity.' Hegelian Echoes in Mann's Novel Mann's incorporation of Adorno's sociohistorical reading of Beethoven's importance in the development of music constitutes a perhaps intuitive

Organic Unity and the Privileging of Reason 71

recognition of the importance Adorno attributes to Hegel as exemplifying the culmination and hence the end of modernity. Any examination of Kretschmar's Beethoven lectures in Doctor Faustus should therefore be contextualized within Adorno's critique of Hegel. Since Hegel enters Mann's novel mostly indirectly through Adorno, the importance of German idealism in this parable of fascism has to my knowledge been mostly overlooked. Yet there are indications in+++++++++++++itself which justify the Hegelian perspective I bring to bear on Mann's inclusion of Adorno's music theory. It is certainly the case that Mann himself seems not to have been well acquainted with philosophy; the scarcity of philosophical texts in his library suggests that he had little direct exposure to German idealism. Although he owned a copy of Hegel in His Letters [Hegel in seinen Briefen] (1918) edited by Rudolf von Delius, his pencil markings indicate that he read the early pages, but, starting with page 26, he didn't even bother to cut the pages. His library also contains+Hegel's Aesthetic [Hegels Aesthetik (1922), a collection selected and introduced by Alfred Baeumler, who signed the copy he must have given to Mann. Once again, lines in the margins suggest that Mann had read Baeumler's introduction but not Hegel's own text. In spite of this all too obvious evidence of Mann's limited interest in Hegel's philosophy, his novel incorporates not only Adorno's critique of Hegel but manifests a Hegelianism typical of the German cultural climate in general. In the first instance, the neo-Romantic investments of volkish intellectuals are Hegelian in that they privilege organic unity and approach history as a dialectical process of progress and regress. More importantly, perhaps, Leverkiihn himself articulates his aesthetic ambitions in unmistakably Hegelian terms. One of the most explicit references to dialectical thinking in++++++++++++++++appears in a reference to K 'On the Puppet Theater' [Uber das Marionettentheater] (1810), an 'essay'11 characterized by the author's loss of confidence in Romantic adaptations of Kant's dialectic. Considered to be symptomatic of Kleist's socalled Kant crisis, the essay constitutes a critique of Kant along Hegelian lines. Although it is unclear just how much Kleist was influenced by the much younger Hegel, the passage Mann quotes is undoubtedly meant to indicate Leverkuhn's conflicted attitude toward the possibility of a sublation of opposites, whether this sublation takes the Romantic form of nature or the Hegelian one of Absolute Knowledge. What is at issue for Leverkiihn, I believe, is the dialectical process as such. He ponders the possibility of achieving an aesthetic breakthrough based on a dia-

72 Deconstructions of Modernity

lectical progression whose history Kretschmar's lectures have outlined for him. Although he may suspect that the ideal of a dialectical sublation of opposites may have lost its viability, he continues to assume that history unfolds dialectically. In his ambition to free music from its sterility, Leverkiihn expresses no specific aim beyond the need for change itself; unlike the philosophical speculations of Hegel (or Kant), his experiments will be a jump into the unknown. Dialectical thinking seems to appeal to him not because he identifies with transcendental ideals but because he appreciates its revolutionary potential to do things differently. Significantly framed by the beginning of the First World War, the discussion of dialectics touches on both aesthetic and political aspirations. In early August of 1914, when Zeitblom is on his way to join his regiment, he visits his friend in his Pfeiffering retreat and finds him working on the 'Gesta Romanorum' in typical 'personal detachment' (Mann 1968, 293) from the political situation. The war represents for Zeitblom Germany's 'breakthrough to the world' (Mann 1968,297), the volkish obligation to sacrifice himself for the nation, and for Germany to save Europe from its intellectual and emotional sterility. Since the 'Gesta Romanorum' is a piece for puppets, Leverkiihn has been reading Kleist's 'On the Puppet Theater,' a philosophical story about the relationship between spontaneity and artificiality in art. When Zeitblom vividly recalls Leverkuhn's paraphrase of Kleist's main point, he does so in the context of his own complicity with Germany's imperial ambitions. Although Kleist speaks only of the aesthetic, Leverkiihn himself recognizes the political parallel which Zeitblom's military context introduces. There are therefore many layers to the dialectical process alluded to in this crucial passage: 'How does one break through into freedom? How does one get out into the open? How does one burst the cocoon and become a butterfly? The whole situation is dominated by the question. Here too/ said he, and twitched the little red marker in the volume of Kleist on the table - 'here too it treats of the break-through, in the capital essay on marionettes, and it is called straight out "the last chapter of the history of the world." But it is talking only about the aesthetic, charm, free grace, which actually is reserved to the automaton and the god; that is, to the unconscious or an endless consciousness, whereas every reflection lying between nothing and infinity kills grace. The consciousness must, this writer thinks, have gone through an infinity in order that grace find itself again therein; and

Organic Unity and the Privileging of Reason 73 Adam must eat a second time from the tree of knowledge in order to fall back into the state of innocence.' (Mann 1968, 298; trans, amended)

Leverkiihn's self-actualization is explicitly conceived in dialectical terms as a question of freedom ('How does one break through into freedom?') necessitating a progression from a lower (cocoon or, in German, Tuppe') to a higher life-form ('butterfly'). The German word Tuppe' and the English translation 'pupa' play on two registers to suggest a tripartite structure. According to Webster's, 'pupa' is a term used to designate both 'an insect in the stage of development between the larval and adult forms' and 'a girl, doll, puppet/ that is, a human being at a stage between infancy and adulthood or a toy (puppet) occupying a position between animate matter (human resemblance) and inanimate substance (artificial construct). Preoccupied with his imminent departure for the First World War, Zeitblom explicitly translates this dialectical pattern from Leverkiihn's aesthetic aspirations into Germany's nationalistic and incipiently fascist ambitions. When Mann has Zeitblom comment on Leverkiihn's interpretation of Kleist that the '[c]raving to break through from bondage' must be considered 'the very definition of Germanism' (Mann 1968, 298), he articulates a sentiment which is entirely consonant with volkish rationalizations for Germany's Faustian pact with the devil. But, as I will show, the dialectic the novel invokes goes beyond volkish nostalgia for lost simplicity to include Hegel's belief in the civilizing process of reason. It is on this level that Mann draws attention to the decisive role of German idealism (the nation at its best) in the emergence of fascism (the nation at its worst). At issue in Leverkiihn's Kleist quotation is the conflict between spontaneous expression and artificial construction which the narrator of Marionettentheater seeks to resolve. Consisting of a dialogue between an unnamed narrator (usually identified with Kleist himself) and the professional dancer 'Herr C.' on the topic of the inhibiting influence of selfconsciousness on natural gracefulness, the Kleist essay interests Leverkiihn because he blames his highly developed self-conscious, 'cold' intelligence for his inability to produce expressive music. Kleist examines this topic with the help of three anecdotes followed by a debate on their significance between the narrator and Herr C. The first story has the narrator express astonishment at the professional dancer's interest in puppet theatre, and has Herr C. contend that a dancer can indeed learn much from the movement of puppets. Unaffected by self-consciousness, he claims, puppets achieve a level of perfection

74 Deconstructions of Modernity

which the human performer can only admire. The second anecdote deals with a youth of sixteen who, accidentally seeing himself in a mirror, is pleased by the spontaneously graceful movement he unselfconsciously executes while drying his foot. When the youth tries consciously to recreate his natural movement, he fails miserably, proving that self-consciousness kills natural gracefulness. In the third story, the narrator recalls being invited to a fencing match against a bear who instinctively parries all his thrusts and never falls for any of his feints. The self-conscious fencer's skills are no match for the bear's instinctual moves. These anecdotes are followed by an explanatory dialogue which centres on the possibility of regaining spontaneity through a dialectical movement to a higher state of self-consciousness which is predicated on the return to an earlier state of unconsciousness. The Kleist essay has most consistently been glossed as an example of Kant's contention that it is through art that a higher state of selfconsciousness can be reached; the natural state of unconsciousness needs to be overcome first through consciousness and then+++++++o a higher level of self-consciousness in art. Art is privileged as the sublation of nature (spontaneity) and consciousness (artificiality). Ignoring Kant's sceptical epistemology, Kleist reiterates the Romantic focus on Kant's aesthetic theory of the sublime. Implicit in this scenario is the volkish conviction that reason is detrimental to the unfolding of spontaneous self-expression. The essay confronts this privileging of spontaneity by subjecting it to a scrutiny that is said to anticipate Hegel's historical reworking of Kant's ahistorical schema. That Mann was aware of the puppet essay as exemplifying Kleist's so-called Kant crisis is borne out later in+++++++++++when he has Leverkuhn admit that he has learned, 'in [his] philosophy courses, that to set limits already means to have passed them/ a comment Zeitblom glosses as an expression of 'the Hegel-Kant critique' which was one of his friend's influential 'early impressions' (Mann 1968, 439). Since Kretschmar's Beethoven lectures qualify as the most important 'early impressions,' it seems rather significant that Zeitblom links these to the only explicit reference to Hegel in the whole novel. Where the neo-Romantic sources of volkish arguments point to the irrational tendencies of fascism, tracing the roots of fascism to Hegel foregrounds the possibility that German National Socialism exploited the rational tendencies of modernity. Instead of dismissing fascism as an irrational aberration, we need to confront the violence implicit in Hegel's privileging of reason. It seems to me important to remind

Organic Unity and the Privileging of Reason 75

ourselves why Hegel is the primary target of current theoretical dismissals of modernity as oppressive and exclusionary in its ideological assumptions. Since Hegel's enabling insights are inextricably implicated in his totalizing tendencies, we need to pinpoint the investments that blinded him to the violence implicit in his desire for an organic unity based on reason. Although Hegel is often painted rather simplistically as a totalizing philosopher motivated by his conservative investment in the Prussian state, a closer look at his philosophy shows that he was a highly sophisticated theorist whose reliance on dialectical processes contradictorily affirmed both the revolutionary call for historical change and the reactionary retrenching in the status quo. In any search for the roots of fascism in modernity, the most problematical aspect of Hegel's system is undoubtedly his privileging of Reason as the enabling premise of organic unity. No matter how little Mann may have been acquainted with Hegel's philosophy, Zeitblom's reference to Leverkiihn's Kleist quotation suggests that Europe's descent into a sterile rationalism can only be reversed through a resurgence of German idealism. In other words, for him, reason can only be saved through reason. However, this liberal-humanist faith in reason as an emancipatory process is always already infected by the possibility that reason may prove entirely compatible with the oppressive purposes of both late capitalism and fascist totalitarianism. Modernity at the Limit: Hegel's Dialectical Sublation of Subject and Object Before considering how Beethoven is shown to have come up against the limits of tonal music in++++++++++++I consider it important to recall how Hegel pushed the concept of philosophy as a coherent system to its breaking point. Whether Mann was aware of this or not, the critique of Hegel he incorporates into his novel by quoting from Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music was an inspired move. From our postmodern retrospective angle, Hegel offers himself up to analysis as the limit-case of modernity, for, as Derrida points out, '[i]t is often said that Hegelianism represents the fulfillment of metaphysics, its end and accomplishment. Thus, it is to be expected that Hegelianism would give to these constraints their most systematic and powerful form, taken to their limits' (Derrida 1982a, 73). In other words, what becomes manifest in Hegel (and Beethoven) is that it is precisely at the moment when modernity finds its most coherent articulation that it begins to

76 Deconstructions of Modernity

show the cracks and contradictions destined to destabilize its empire. It will be my argument that Hitler both used and abused the self-understanding of modernity. In the first case, modernity provided German National Socialism with the rational administrative apparatus necessary for the suppression of civil rights as well as the organization of the death camps. In the second case, the Nazis took advantage of the historically specific moment when modernity opened itself to the deconstruction of its illusions. Where liberals and socialists continued to cling to the Enlightenment narrative, the Nazis cynically exploited the contradictions of modernity, transforming the best intentions into sinister purposes. To start with, Beethoven's tonal system and Hegel's philosophy share an investment in harmonic wholeness or organic unity whose intention is to reconcile isolated notes or human subjects with the whole from which they have been separated. This unified wholeness is conceived as a totality that is welcoming rather than oppressive. Hegel's program is precisely the liberation of the subject from its oppression by objective forces over which it has little control. Yet, as we will see in Mann's appropriation of Adorno's Beethoven lectures, Hegel's solution relies on a dialectical tension of subject and object which is neither necessarily progressive nor indeed ultimately predictable. It is not that Hegel shares the Romantic yearning for the spontaneous or expressive organicism so typical of volkish intellectuals; on the contrary, he bases his theory on the synthesizing capacity of reason to bridge the gap between subject and object. What has not been sufficiently explored is how Hegel's privileging of reason contained within it the potentiality of the oppressive totality which the dialectic was meant to preclude. As I hope to show, by++++++++remaining blind to some of his best insights, Hegel contributes to the conditions that made the emergence of fascism possible. In the most general terms, Hegel's philosophy expresses in the first instance an awareness of human alienation in that individuals could not recognize themselves in the unreasonable reality that confronted them. The subject seemed tragically separated from the objective world it experienced as an antagonistic external force. Encountering a gap between human potential (the ideal) and human actuality (the real), Hegel theorized that the subject ought to transform actual conditions so as to make them conform to an ideal standard. In his early writings, he was a subversive thinker hostile to political authority and to 'the way things are' (the empirically 'given'). The world seemed to him to consist

Organic Unity and the Privileging of Reason 77

of disparate and isolated subjects whose antagonisms created social conditions which kept everybody unhappy and enslaved. Where individuals ought to understand themselves as subjects, they were everywhere limited by an existence which estranged them from real consciousness of self and real understanding of the world. Hegel thus wanted to free human beings from necessity and coercion; however, unlike the Romantics, he was less concerned with the private notion of personal freedom than with the sociopolitical question of autonomy. How can the subject retain its distinctness and also exist harmoniously within the social totality? Hegel's answer is that subject and object are not mutually exclusive terms; their antagonism can be resolved through a unity of opposites. Arguing that the terms of an opposition are mutually constitutive, he contends that the subject needs the object to actualize its own identity just as the object needs the subject to achieve its potential. Antagonism or contradiction is no longer an insurmountable obstacle but the enabling condition for individual and society to progress toward their ultimate unification within a higher rational principle. In this scenario, negation is presented as a positive act in that it demystifies false appearances and thereby prepares the way for a more enlightened understanding of self and world.13 The key to this process is Reason. It is through reason that the subject recognizes the shortcomings of the present and is able to conjecture a better world. Hegel's narrative conceives of increasingly rational subjects intent on reconciling the actual or immediately given reality with the potential or ideal reality they imagine. Since subject and object ought to form a harmonious unity, a world that falls short of this ideal is 'false' in that it appears as 'a mutilated whole' (Marcuse I960, xi). In this mutilated state, the subject is alienated from itself and accepts the identity assigned to it by the object. Where the Romantics encouraged the subject to withdraw into itself, Hegel calls on it to transform the unreasonable objective world so as to make it conform to the dictates of reason. Freedom is in this case predicated on the subject becoming selfconsciously rational and on the world actualizing its rational potential: 'Hegel sees the task of knowledge as that of recognizing the world as Reason by understanding all objects of thought as elements and aspects of a totality which becomes a conscious world in the history of mankind' (Marcuse 1960, ix-x). The subject's desire for self-actualization cannot be satisfied in social isolation but only through engagement with the objective reality to be transformed. Hegel's privileging of reason differentiates him from the Romantic

78 Deconstructions of Modernity

investment in the senses (Rousseau's 'heart') while his turn to history sets his understanding of reason off from Kant's static edifice of formal categories. Marked by the influence of the Romantics' expressivist theory based on inward-turning self-awareness and Kant's rational conception of ethics, Hegel struggled to consolidate these contradictory trends. Where Kant assumed that the subject realizes itself in relation to an ideal order, the Romantics contended that it defines itself from within by creating meaning out of its own essence. In contrast to Kant, the Romantics argued that it is not through reason but through harmony with nature that the subject gains its freedom. Contending that 'human consciousness does not just reflect the order of nature, it completes or perfects it' (Taylor 1975, 44), Hegel pushed the Romantic veneration of nature to its logical extension. At the same time, his privileging of reason gestures in the direction of Kant's categorial imperative, which proposes that reasonable subjects act morally because they have internalized the regulative norms which dictate their behaviour according to rational ideals they accept as their own. On the one hand, then, Hegel's historical dialectic is not only thoroughly rational but also revolutionary in that the process allowing the subject to actualize its potential through increasing degrees of self-consciousness transforms the social world. On the other hand, though, Hegel's 'ontological dialectic' acknowledges a debt to the Romantics in that the union of subject and object is predicated on the quasi-mystical notion of 'cosmic spirit' or++++++Critics generally approve of Hegel's historical dialectic fo providing a dynamic and critical process but consider the sublation of opposites into++++to be a conservative retreat from the revolutionary implications he had opened up. By arguing that subject and object will eventually coincide, Hegel arrests the potentially unlimited process of historical transformation and ends history by freezing it into a static configuration. Unable to resolve the contradiction between his turn to history and his desire for an all-inclusive system, Hegel shifts his emphasis from an early revolutionary attitude to a later conservative reinforcement of the Prussian state. The subversive implications of the historical dialectic receive their most graphic illustration in the master-slave example,14 whose influence on recent theoretical debates can to a large extent be attributed to Alexandre Kojeve's famous rereading of Hegel. In his elaboration of the subject's identity formation, Hegel contends that 'self-consciousness exists in and for itself only in that the self is being 'acknowledged or "recognized"' (Hegel 1931, 229) by another; the self cannot exist with-

Organic Unity and the Privileging of Reason 79

out the recognition of the other. Self and other constitute each other's identity: 'Each sees the other do the same as itself; each itself does what it demands on the part of the other, and for that reason does what it does, only so far as the other does the same' (Hegel 1931, 230). This mirroring and duplication takes the form of a process of mediation: 'Each is the mediated term to the other, through which each mediates and unites itself with itself; and each is to itself and to the other an immediate self-existing reality, which, at the same time, exists thus for itself only through this mediation' (Hegel 1931, 231). Kojeve understands Hegel to mean that the subject's desire is always mediated by the desire of the other; the subject knows itself not in itself but only as it sees itself reflected in the other: '[T]o desire the Desire of another is in the final analysis to desire that the value that I am or that I "represent" be the value desired by the other: I want him to "recognize" my value as his value. I want him to "recognize" me as an autonomous value' (Kojeve 1969, 7). For this acknowledgment to have any value, the other cannot enjoy the same autonomy that the self wants to assert for itself; the other must be inferior to the self. But to be acknowledged by an inferior diminishes the value of the recognition; the other must therefore be sufficiently 'human' to confirm for the self its own value. Since all human beings want to be acknowledged as autonomous selves, they fight to establish who is the 'master' and who is the 'slave.' Since the master absolutely needs the slave to know himself as master, the slave has to survive the fight and accept his slave status: 'He must give up his desire and satisfy the desire of the other: he must "recognize" the other without being "recognized" by him. Now, "to recognize" him thus is "to recognize" him as his Master and to recognize himself and to be recognized as the Master's Slave' (Kojeve 1969, 8). The subject's selfidentity is always mediated through another who acts as both obstacle and mirror to the self. At the same time as the master knows himself to be the master, the slave becomes aware of himself 'as factually and objectively self-existent/ that is, he 'attains the consciousness that he himself exists in [his] own right and on [his] own account' (Hegel 1931, 239). The dialectical process reveals that by satisfying the master's desire for being recognized as an autonomous being, the slave achieves his own sense of autonomy so that the master cannot avoid granting the slave what he also needs to deny him. It is thus in the struggle for dominance that the world is being transformed; in his desire to become master, the slave acts to change the world which the master would like to preserve in his

80 Deconstructions of Modernity

own image. The master-slave dialectic suggests that Hegel had a far more sophisticated understanding of the mutual interdependence of binary opposites than he is often given credit for. In their celebration of heterogeneity, postmodern theorists tend to paint Hegel as a simplistic binary thinker of the closed system par excellence. As we will see, Adorno anticipates both those who condemn Hegel as a totalizing thinker and those who acknowledge him as a philosopher conscious of the contradictions he foregrounds and cannot resolve. It is important to keep in mind that, long before postmodern discussions of 'otherness' or 'alterity/ Hegel had already theorized that the self needs the 'other' in order to become aware of itself as subject; for him, identity had consequently always been implicated in difference. Whether today's theorists react against Hegel or find in his work support for their own arguments, Hegelianism continues to cast a long shadow. Theories of the subject and its 'other,' for instance, are to no small extent indebted to Kojeve's rereading of the master-slave dialectic, which figures prominently in analyses of unequal power relations in gender studies, discussions of class structures, and, most prominently, postcolonial studies. The influence on later theorists of Hegel's complex analysis of the interdependence of opposites can hardly be overstated. The centrality of subjective agency in today's theoretical debates has in turn compelled critics to reconsider Hegel's philosophical positions. In my opinion, one of the most pertinent of these for my reading of fascism is Taylor, who frames his critical readings of Hegel within the context of liberal humanism, a context informing the critique of Hegel implicit in Mann's Adorno-inspired analysis of the cultural conditions conducive to the emergence of fascism. Although conscious of contradictions in Hegel's system, Taylor's complications ultimately reaffirm standard interpretations of the Hegelian dialectic as being invested in teleological progress. In contrast, Slavoj Zizek seeks to align Hegel with Jacques Lacan's radically anti-foundational rereading of Freudian psychoanalytical theories. In Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (1993), for instance, he maintains that those who portray Hegel as a philosopher naively believing in the possibility of the sublation+++++++++of opposites overlook that he recognized the irreconcilable antagonism between 'ground and conditions' (Zizek 1993, 141) structuring all binary opposites. What Zizek most convincingly foregrounds is that Hegel himself was already highly self-conscious of the illusory or Utopian aspects of his dialectical arguments. Like Adorno, Zizek 'tarries in the negative/ showing that con-

Organic Unity and the Privileging of Reason 81

tradictions in Hegel's system could not be abolished but had to be retained and absorbed. Focusing on the 'radically anti-evolutionary character of Hegel's philosophy' (Zizek 1993, 141), Zizek is able to argue that Hegel's master-slave dialectic, for instance, is consonant with Lacan's notion of symbolic castration. In short, Hegel understood that the master owes his supremacy to a process of deferral, 'the keeping-in-reserve, of a force that he falsely claims to possess' (Zizek 1993, 160). What Zizek seems to be saying is that, far from asserting the actuality++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ recognized the 'primacy of possibility over actuality' (Zizek 1993,161), that is, the very real effects of symbolic acts. However, I would argue that Zizek foregrounds, in more pointed fashion, aspects of Hegel's complex dialectical thinking of which Taylor is already aware; although Tayor's stress is not on the radical anti-foundationalism crucial to Zizek's Lacanian position, he tends to signal the kinds of contradiction Zizek subjects to a scrutiny which is, at least partly, reminiscent of Adorno's 'negative dialectics' as a critique of Hegel. While I find Zizek's defence of Hegel as a highly self-conscious philosopher generally convincing, I rely heavily on Taylor's depiction of Hegel's philosophy because it allows me to tease out ideological assumptions which make their way into+++++++++++++through Adorno's deconstruction a 'Hegelianis whose logic is potentially complicit with fascism. If Hegel's philosophy continues to be pertinent, it is because it was thoroughly inter subjective and sensitive to the processes of history; emphasizing that the subject's self-actualization could not take place in social isolation as a personal catharsis, he called on the subject to contribute through social activity to the progressive self-actualization of history. His contention that the subject needs the object to realize itself as subject just as the object needs the subject to recognize itself as object is based on the attractive notion that subject and object are both distinctive and yet dependent on each other. In Hegel's system, every entity necessarily produces its own opposite so that difference arises out of a previous unity and is the precondition for a higher form of 'unity of opposites.' This process of mediation follows a temporal pattern: '[O]ut of original identity, opposition necessarily grows; and this opposition itself leads to a higher unity, which is founded on the recognition of the inevitability and rational necessity of this opposition' (Taylor 1975, 87). What appears as a contradiction between subject and object on one level of consciousness reveals itself as a 'unity of opposites' or an 'identity of identity and non-identity' on a higher level of

82 Deconstructions of Modernity

consciousness. This process of identity breeding opposition and opposition leading to a more advanced form of identity is logically unstoppable or infinite. In this negative dialectical sense, Hegel's thought is highly subversive of all fixed forms and established authority or tradition. This subversive edge is reinforced by Hegel's point that, although irreducibly related, subject and object are not collapsed into each other but retain their singularity. His 'unity of opposites' means that the subject can no more dominate the object than the object can control the activities of the subject. The historical dialectic as negation of the status quo represents the supreme critical moment in Hegel's philosophy. But Hegel shied away from the subversive implications of the historical dialectic; not only did he impose an orderly sequence on the historical narrative, but he constrained the 'play' of dialectical reversals by imputing to history a final purpose or end++++++Experience has for Hegel both a logical aspect, the ontological assumption that it is a coherently ordered whole, and a historical aspect, the dialectical contention that it manifests itself differently over time. Although Hegel painstakingly outlines the various 'embodiments' of the historical dialectic, he knows from the start that history will inevitably end in the coincidence of subject and object in Absolute Knowledge or+++++This telos of history not only arrests the potentially infinite expansion of the dialectical process but also gives meaning, direction, and purpose to all aspects of private and public experience. Since it is through logic (reason) that the subject recognizes both its distinctness from an object and its hypothetical union with it, the highest form of self-consciousness is also the supreme rational moment when subject and object become transparent to one another. In a harmonious dance, the rational subject would recognize itself in the social collectivity just as the rationally organized social order would be responsive to the needs of the subject. Being equivalent to Reason or Absolute Knowledge,+++++(spirit or mind) functions as a transcendental Archimedean point called upon to organize the totality and its constituent parts. Not unlike the Christian notion of God, Geist is the ultimate principle of autonomy, coinciding completely with itself and determining the meaning of subjective experience and objective events. The sublation of subject and object at the end of history reduces the historical process to 'the univocal, cumulative sequence through which the supersubject comes to know itself (Benhabib 1986, 53). Hegel's much-lauded 'turn to history' is thereby always already recaptured by the logic of transcendence and the ideal

Organic Unity and the Privileging of Reason 83

of the totally rational system. Working against the dynamic impetus of history, Reason is for Marcuse 'the undialectical element in Hegel's philosophy' (Marcuse 1960, xii). Although Hegel opened up the Pandora's box of history as the subversion of all appeals to metaphysical presence, his investment in the (bourgeois) illusion of society as a harmoniously coherent whole made him close the lid again. In addition to defeating the historical dialectic by imposing a transcendental purpose on it, the ontological dialectic insinuates itself from the start into Hegel's conception of historical progress. If the teleological end predetermines all aspects of the totality, then the telos is in some sense also the arche or origin of the system; the historical dialectic is thus undermined and recuperated by the stasis of a quasi-mystical circularity. Critics have repeatedly pointed out that Hegel assumes rather than proves the categories he uses. According to J.B. Baillie, subject and object have always already been there to be discovered by Hegel: 'In each case, the subject is ... directly aware of its object, the object is "immediately" present to the subject, and their unity is implicit' (Bailie 1967, 54). Hegel makes no more effort to account for these originary terms than he does for other key terms like Geist,+++++++++++++++and only then shown to have been developed analytically. For Baillie, then, there is in fact much that is mythical in Hegel's rational system. What strikes him as a particularly 'mythical' move is Hegel's tendency to construct history so as to confirm his a priori theory. On the one hand, the historical past is presented as the concrete embodiment and proof of Hegel's theory that progress toward human perfectibility is rational and inevitable. On the other, the future is always already written so that the Utopian gesture is recaptured by the conservative process of the 'subject coming to be "at home" in the world' (Baillie 1967, 49). In Derrida's telling terminology, the Hegelian dialectic is a process which negotiates 'between an original presence and its circular reappropriation in final presence' (Derrida 1982a, 71). In his desire to overcome the disruptive effects of difference and temporality, Hegel stages this circular process to confirm+++++(or Reason) as th 'onto-theo-teleology' (Derrida 1982a, 71) of metaphysics. The subversive potential of Hegel's negative dialectical moment is tamed by being reduced to playing a predetermined part in the absolute closure of Hegel's commitment to positivity. Distinguishing between the 'ontological dialectic' (the coherently ordered whole) and the 'historical dialectic' (the transformative narrative), Taylor confirms that both are ultimately reappropriated by meta-

84 Deconstructions of Modernity

physical presence. In the case of the 'ontological dialectic/ it is a question of perfecting an inadequate cognition or behaviour so as to bring it into line with an ideal standard. Examining the cultural past, this dialectic starts 'from the basis that a certain standard, which we identify by certain criterial properties, is fulfilled, and moves through different conceptions of this standard to more and more adequate forms' (Taylor 1975, 216). Drawing an example from Hegel's discussion of consciousness, Taylor specifies: 'We start from the basis that there is knowledge, and that knowledge is an achievement. What we do not know, if we can put it this way, is what is involved in meeting the standard' (Taylor 1975,216). Any deviations from the standard are merely detours from a predetermined destination that cannot be missed. The 'historical dialectic,' in contrast, 'starts from the thesis that a certain purpose is sought after, even though it is+++yet realized' (Taylor 1975,216). In this second case, Hegel assumes the existence of a necessity or purpose in history which requires that reality be transformed to create the conditions for its articulation and actualization. The purpose is not already given, as in the ontological dialectic, but must first be imputed or imagined. The problem is that this Utopian moment in Hegel's historical dialectic is circumscribed by the 'external purposiveness' (Hegel 1931, 83) of history as Reason. Although the content of the Utopian moment may not yet be known, Hegel presupposes that it serves the rational purpose of+++++Whether the standard is already known or has yet to be discovered, it is always measured against the final sublation of subject and object in Absolute Knowledge. Hegel's hypothesis of Geist as the end of history produces a highly suspect narrative of redemption and rationalization. Since his theoretical assumption that the movement of history is necessarily progressive seems to be contradicted by actual historical events, he has to account for what seems to invalidate his theory. His solution is to interpret irrational and violent events either as temporary aberrations or, more ingeniously, as constitutive moments of the narrative of Enlightenment. What might appear to be historical setbacks can, from a later and more informed perspective, be understood as necessary stages on the dialectical path to a more advanced cultural self-understanding. The French Revolution or Terror' was for Hegel a crisis which, from a retrospective position, showed itself to have created the enabling conditions for liberal politics; what appears to be a regressive moment in history reveals itself to have been progressive after all. If Reason is the final destination of history, then all resistant or deviant aspects of both the

Organic Unity and the Privileging of Reason 85

ontological and the historical dialectic can be integrated into this master-narrative of progress. Whenever a definition conflicts with its own fulfilment, we move 'to more adequate conceptions until we reach the fully adequate one' (Taylor 1975,218). According to this rationalization, Mann's 'evil' Germany can be redeemed as the precondition for the 'good' Germany that will necessarily reemerge at a more advanced stage of development. In this case, the subject was simply blind to the deeper meaning of seemingly disastrous events. But in some instances reality itself is resistant to the rational purpose of history: 'Certain historical forms of life are shown to be prey to inner contradiction because they are defeating the purpose for which they exist' (Taylor 1975, 216). Such 'forms of life' will eventually be eliminated.15 An extreme extension of this kind of rationalization is Hegel's argument for the 'cunning of reason.' If subjects are deaf to the call of Reason, then Reason will cunningly persuade them to act in the interest of Reason by speaking to them in the language of unreason. Masking itself temporarily as its opposite, Reason will prevail in the long run: 'It is not the universal idea which places itself in opposition and struggle, or puts itself in danger; it holds itself safe from attack and uninjured in the background and sends the particular of passion into the struggle to be worn down. We can call it the cunning of reason that the Idea makes passions work for it, in such a way that that whereby it posits itself in existence loses thereby and suffers injury' (Hegel quoted in Taylor 1975, 392). Hegel authorizes the dangerous ploy of intentionally resorting to anti-rational strategies in the firm conviction that these will ultimately serve progress by engendering a rational reaction. Knowing in advance that Geist must triumph means that historical calamities will have to reveal themselves retrospectively as having been necessary to historical progress.16 Adorno's Ideological Critique of Hegel's Philosophy The reappropriation of the historical dialectic by the argument that the external world has a rational purpose accounts for dismissals of Hegel as a conservative thinker, a judgment reinforced by his retreat from the implications of labour in the master-slave dialectic and by his eventual endorsement of the Prussian monarchy as an approximate embodiment of Geist. On the one hand, Adorno draws out the revolutionary implications of labour in the historical dialectic, and, on the other, he accounts for reactionary elements on the basis of Hegel's investment in the

86 Deconstructions of Modernity

bourgeois-capitalist order which compelled the elaboration of an 'identity thesis' considered to be 'untrue' to the best insights of the dialectic. The thesis of 'the identity of identity and non-identity' asserts a totality that Adorno calls not only the 'undialectical' moment in Hegel's system but a 'scandal'++++++++++++++++for its implicit equation of ' 'freedom.' Adorno explains this scandalous blind spot not as a personal failing on Hegel's part but as an ideological response to the sociohistorical conditions of his time. His class position prevents Hegel from acknowledging that social alienation in capitalist societies arises from irreconcilable (class) contradictions; his sublation of subject and object into Absolute Knowledge is consequently an abstract, illusory solution that conceals the real nature of social antagonisms. It follows that Hegel's reactionary 'cult of the state/ his support for an absolutist system often seen to have prepared the way for fascist totalitarianism, cannot easily be separated from his progressive understanding of the subject as the agent of social change. Anticipating Seyla Benhabib's more sustained development of this argument (Benhabib 1986), Adorno draws attention to the importance of labour or struggle in Hegelianism, an aspect of the dialectic Hegel himself could not bring himself to acknowledge. Although the masterslave example shows that the objective world is transformed through the labour and suffering of the slave, Hegel retreats from the class implications of the social subject constituting itself primarily through labour. It is this blindness or 'untruth' which expresses for Adorno the 'truth' of the bourgeois mystification implicit in the capitalist mode of production. By 'sublimating' the reality of labour - the 'brutality of the factual' (Adorno 1993,20) - into abstract theorizing, Hegel validates an epistemology which 'juggles things until the given gives the illusion of having been produced by spirit' (Adorno 1993,26). In other words, it is the trajectory toward the sublation of subject and object in Geist which necessitates that the slave labour for the master. The economic reality of labour is thereby obscured. For Adorno, Hegel is so blind to the category of labour that he cannot recognize its imprint on spirit (Geist) itself: 'The path natural consciousness follows to the identity of absolute knowledge+++++++is itself labor' (Adorno 1993, 21). Making Hegel's implicit gestures toward labour explicit, Adorno (like Benhabib after him) suggests that we treat the Hegelian 'labor of the concept' (Adorno 1993,22) as more than a mere figure of speech. Hegel's masterslave dialectic thus opened up the possibility of a materialist analysis of labour, but the historical dialectic became 'frightened of itself because

Organic Unity and the Privileging of Reason 87

Hegel could not free himself from his bourgeois investments, for, 'while his experience did indeed ascertain the limits of bourgeois society, limits contained in its own tendencies, as a bourgeois idealist he stopped at that boundary because he saw no real historical force on the other side of it' (Adorno 1993, 80). Instead of subverting bourgeois-capitalist domination, he withdrew into a resigned endorsement of Prussian absolutism. From Adorno's historical-materialist perspective, Hegel was initially on the right path, for he understood human consciousness not as a timeless category but as a historically evolving concept. He also had to be applauded for doing 'justice to an objectivity indissoluble in subjectivity' (Adorno 1993, 6). As long as Hegel kept subject and object in dialectical tension, he remained true to his best insights. But once he invoked Geist (the subject of Absolute Knowledge) as the ultimate frame of reference for the sublation of the subject-object opposition, he insinuated that the 'Hegelian subject-object is subject' (Adorno 1993, 13). Through this emphasis on consciousness, Hegel eliminates the world in its material and historical objectivity and denies the material processes of labour. This surreptitious privileging of one category (the absolute subject) means that the Hegelian system is no longer a dialectical process but a static totality. As Marcuse puts it, Hegel abolishes freedom by equating 'reason' with 'system': 'The process of unifying opposites touches every part of reality and comes to an end only when reason has "organized" the whole so that "every part exists only in relation to the whole," and "every individual entity has meaning and significance only in its relation to the totality"' (Marcuse 1960, 47). Every aspect of the system is now controlled by a totality (Geist) which Hegel never proves but asserts as an ontological priority. At the core of Hegel's philosophy thus lurks an 'abstract a priori' (Adorno 1993, 13) that contradicts the dialectical method. This unresolved contradiction expresses itself in Hegel's inability to present his notion of absolute spirit++++++'clearly'; this situation is not a problem of 'confusion or lack of clarity' but is 'the price Hegel has to pay for absolute consistency, which comes up against the limits of consistent thought without being able to do away with them' (Adorno 1993,13). In the end, Adorno attributes Hegel's 'untruth' to his bourgeois investment in metaphysical presence, which, delimiting his ability to see real (class) contradictions, compels him to assert the reconciliation of opposites in++++as a compensatory illusion that conceals the irreconcilable antagonisms produced by the capitalist modes of production.17

88 Deconstructions of Modernity

The identity thesis undoubtedly finds its most unpalatable and implausible expression in Hegel's conservative affirmation that++++is exemplified in the Prussian monarchy. The++++++++++++++(1821) no only rationalizes the status quo but legitimates paternalistic authoritarianism in general. Allowing Hegel to synthesize formal law and traditional custom and to fuse subject and state into a single coherent whole, the master-narrative of reason authorizes the state to act as the rational and disinterested arbiter in matters of dispute between unreasonable and self-interested disputants. Subjects voluntarily subordinate their self-interest to the social whole, since the state is now no longer the embodiment of an external (feudal) authority but a natural organism binding individuals together in a common cause. In this paternalistic scenario, the subject is considered free when it coincides with the objective historical purpose which Hegel late in his career identified with the Prussian monarchy. According to Taylor, Hegel has 'brought off an extraordinary tour de force' in that he reconstructs the premodern reverence for social structures like the monarchy, aristocracy, or priestly hierarchy on the basis of 'modern self-defining subjectivity, the radical notion of autonomy' (Taylor 1975,374). To obey the dictates of the state is not subservience but the ultimate expression of freedom. By showing that there is nothing in his system which 'is not transparently dictated by reason itself,' argues Taylor, Hegel creates an order that is 'utterly unlike those of the tradition/ for it is 'not an order beyond man which he must simply accept. Rather it is one which flows from his own nature properly understood. Hence it is centred on autonomy, since to be governed by a law which emanates from oneself is to be free' (Taylor 1975, 374).18 Combining revolutionary and reactionary elements in his thinking, Hegel has indeed been 'difficult to classify on the liberal/conservative spectrum' (Taylor 1975,374). The confusion between progress and regress in the volkish ideology of Mann's intellectuals and in Leverkiihn's music can thus be traced to Hegel's attempt to reconcile Romantic expressivism and Kantian rationalism. But Adorno holds Hegel responsible for more than this confusion; for him, Hegel perpetuates an illusion of freedom which blinds subjects to the real social conditions that imprison them. Where feudal oppression was direct and visible, Hegel's totalizing system insidiously masks domination as freedom, compelling subjects to internalize their subjection. This conception of the state as the embodiment of Geist exemplifies for Adorno a blind spot that is, once again, intimately related to Hegel's best insights. Although Hegel showed himself, not least of all in the

Organic Unity and the Privileging of Reason 89

master-slave dialectic, to be sensitive to the dynamic and contradictory interrelationship of subject and object, the++++++++++++++++broke of such thoughts by abruptly absolutizing one category - the state' (Adorno 1993,80). The problem for Adorno lies not only in Hegel's privileging of the state as such but in his recourse to an absolute category whose function it is to halt the process of historical change. Adorno cannot stress enough that 'Hegel's idolization of the state should not be trivialized by being treated as a mere empirical aberration or an irrelevant addendum' (Adorno 1993, 28) but should be seen as the logical outcome of his privileging of identity. Along the same lines, Marcuse maintains that the 'fault with Hegel lies much deeper than in his glorification of the Prussian monarchy. He is guilty not so much of being servile as of betraying his highest philosophical ideas' (Marcuse 1960,218). Both Adorno and Marcuse clearly distance themselves from those who condemn Hegel's philosophy unproblematically 'for its restorationist tendencies, its apology for the status quo' and from those who summarily lump 'Hegel together with German imperialism and fascism' (Adorno 1993, 28). Like Marcuse, who contends that 'Hegel's basic concepts are hostile to the tendencies that have led into Fascist theory and practice' (Marcuse 1960, xv), Adorno argues that Hegel's philosophy of the unity of opposites cannot easily be assimilated to the volkish ideology of German National Socialism, for his conservatism is quite different from the nostalgic yearning for the past we find dramatized in Mann's proto-fascists.19 Disagreeing with those (like Baillie) who insist that Hegel posits an absolute end which coincides with an absolute beginning, Adorno claims that Hegel understood the unity of subject and object not as a mystical experience but as a rational process of mediation. Hegel's disdain for foundational origins and appeals to immediate being contradict the volkish nostalgia for spontaneity: 'Hegel's being is the opposite of a primordial entity. Hegel does not credit the concept of being, as a primordial value, with immediacy, the illusion that being is logically and genetically prior to any reflection, any division between subject and object; instead, he eradicates immediacy' (Adorno 1993, 33). Hegel's reactionary move, his 'absolutizing' of the state, must be differentiated from nostalgia for the past and from a complacent acceptance of what is 'given' (the Prussian monarchy). Where Marcuse interprets Hegel's identification of Absolute Knowledge with Prussian monarchy primarily as a gesture of cultural pessimism and resignation,20 Adorno returns us to the identity thesis as the

90 Deconstructions of Modernity

main culprit. It is not only that the identity thesis blinds Hegel to Adorno's insight that '[cjivil society is an antagonistic totality' (Adorno 1993, 28) but that it allows Hegel to pass off as freedom what Adorno criticizes as the site of the violent repression of everything incommensurate with the totality. Since Hegel never proves the identity of subject and object dialectically, the absolute (totality) is the scandalous a priori concept which illegitimately both grounds the Hegelian system and acts as its Utopian fulfilment. Aside from the hermeneutic circularity of this logic, Adorno is particularly disturbed that Hegel asserts the identity of identity and non-identity as the 'full reconciliation through spirit in a world which is in reality antagonistic/ an assertion that conceals the extent to which 'the unity of the system derives from unreconcilable violence' (Adorno 1993, 27). The identity thesis legitimizes a compensatory ideology that glosses over and thereby reinforces the real material causes of unresolved social contradictions. Most damagingly, this elimination of real social antagonisms means that 'the great classical philosophy literally passes the quintessence of coercion off as freedom' (Adorno 1993,26). It is the impossibility of maintaining this compensatory illusion under the impact of changing historical circumstances that is at issue in Adorno's+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Kretschmar's Beethoven Lectures: Adorno's Deconstruction of Tonality When Mann 'borrows' Adorno's interpretation of Beethoven's role in the history of Western music, he creates the fictional music teacher Wendell Kretschmar, whose lectures are to have a lasting impact on Adrian Leverkiihn. It is undoubtedly significant that Mann gives this fictional figure a name that is close to a historical musicologist whose ideas were appropriated by the Nazis to legitimate their volkish ideology. Hermann Kretzschmar (1848-1924) was a German concert master who wanted to make music more accessible to the general population and sought to bridge the gap between abstract music theory and actual concert performance. Anticipating Adorno, he 'viewed music history as a history of culture and studied the interaction among the individual work of art, the circumstances of its composition and the social and cultural milieu of its time' (Jones 1980, 258). Author of the highly popular+Fuhrer durch den Konzertsaal [Guide through the Concert Hall] (Kretzschmar 1888), he treated music as an expression of humanistic

Organic Unity and the Privileging of Reason 91

aspirations ideally suited to improve the minds and hearts of all Germans. A firm believer in the merits of 'education for the masses' (Volkserziehung),+he developed a pedagogy designed to make music available to a wider public. He 'sought to remove musical education from its isolated position in the lecture hall' (Jones 1980, 258) by teaching it in schools and private homes. Like the historical figure, the fictional Kretschmar is said to have worked as a 'conductor' (Mann 1968, 51), participates in musical evenings at the house of Leverkiihn's uncle, and, most importantly, gives 'lectures which he held indefatigably throughout a whole season in the hall of the Society of Activities for the Common Weal' (Mann 1968, 51). Although the Beethoven lectures in the novel are indebted to Adorno's music theory, Wendell Kretschmar's last name and details of his career are so close to the historical Hermann Kretzschmar that a connection to the appropriation of his pedagogical ideal by the National Socialists imposes itself. In her Most German of++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ way the 'National Socialist concept of " Volksmusik" could allegedly be traced to Hermann Kretzschmar, and there were even attempts to imbue Kretzschmar's character with National Socialist leanings' (Potter 1998, 50). In a perversion of Kretzschmar's noble aspirations, the Nazis 'called for an "organic" union of musicology, education, and music practice, much in the same spirit as Kretzschmar, to create a "volkisch musicology that could contribute to the history of the Volk and the race' (Potter 1998,55). Whether intentionally or not, Mann turns Leverkiihn's music teacher into a figure with connections to the volkish roots of fascism (Hermann Kretzschmar) and to the neo-Marxist archaeology of the humanist tradition exemplified by Beethoven and Hegel (Adorno). What links these volkish overtones and Adorno's Hegelian reading of Beethoven in Doctor Faustus is that both focus on the concept of 'organic unity/ but from different directions; where the proto-fascists were animated by yearnings for a lost wholeness in the past, Hegel is driven by a search for the Utopian unity of opposites in the+future Although Mann couldn't resist introducing the playful volkish resonance through Kretschmar's name, the music teacher's lectures on Beethoven make him primarily the carrier of Adorno's Hegel critique. That Adorno equates Beethoven with Hegel is emphasized in the recently published notes for Adorno's projected study,+Beethoven (Tiedemann 1993), where he 'again and again discusses Beethoven as a musical Hegel' (Jarvis 1998,127). This equation appears also in the third essay of+++++++++++++++(1993) in which Adorno discusses Hegel's

92 Deconstructions of Modernity

'sublation of difference' by arguing that '[m]usic of Beethoven's type, in which ideally the reprise, the return in reminiscence of complexes expounded earlier/ represents an 'analogue' to Hegel's philosophical system which 'transcends mere analogy' (Adorno 1993,136). Through the Kretschmar lectures on Beethoven, Mann indirectly probes into the assumptions and the limitations of Hegel's complex philosophical system. Given Adorno's sociohistorical approach to both philosophy and music, it is not without significance that Hegel (1770-1831) and Beethoven (1770-1827) were almost exact contemporaries. The historical contemporaneity of Beethoven and Hegel allows Adorno to analyse both German philosophical idealism and tonal music as reflections of a social modernity that has entered into crisis. Under the reifying impact of capitalist modes of production, the traditional assumption that contradictions can be sublated into a unity of opposites has become increasingly untenable. The movement of Hegel's philosophical trajectory from a critique of the ideological assumptions of the emergent bourgeoisie to a retrenchment into the reaffirmation of the (Prussian) establishment finds a parallel in Beethoven's career. Doc tor Faustus incorporates Adorno's contention that Beethoven's struggle with the sonata form echoes a moment of crisis in the self-understanding of bourgeois modernity which he then tries to forget by continuing to affirm the aesthetic tradition he had fleetingly deconstructed. Kretschmar's lectures narrate the self-deconstruction of the harmonious work in Beethoven's piano sonata in C minor opus 111, convincing Leverkiihn that his task will be to transcend the limitations of tonal music by taking a decisive step into atonality. Beethoven's validation of a 'closed system' in music is as much a symptom of his time as is Hegel's investment in an equally 'closed system' in philosophy. In Adorno on Music (1998), Robert W. Witkin reminds us most cogently of the ideological implications that Adorno attributes to the tonal system, whose strict formal conventions begin to unravel with Beethoven's turn to romantic subjectivism. In the+'key system of classical tonality' (Witkin 1998, 44), notes and semi-notes are ordered and restricted according to a strict system of conventions. Determined by scales which use only a limited number of notes, the tonal system is organized hierarchically around a key or tonal centre which permits certain combinations of notes and semi-notes while prohibiting others. Although tonal compositions allow for a great number of variations and developments, including shifts into other keys, the key system nevertheless functions as a principle of centricity,

Organic Unity and the Privileging of Reason

93

providing 'a means of ordering the "values" of all the elements of the music in terms of their hierarchical relations within a unified totality' (Witkin 1998, 45). The aim of tonal music was that 'the freedom of the elements or parts was fully reconciled with the constraint of the whole'; more importantly, 'tonality was a means of establishing a rational ground for reconciling the demands of subjective (individual) freedom and those of objective (collective) constraint' (Witkin 1998,45). It is this tonal system which reached its apogee in Beethoven's mature or second-period compositions (roughly 1801-16). It is not without significance that the most important work of Beethoven's second period is the Third Symphony, the+++++or 'heroic symphony/ which, so legend has it, Beethoven dedicated to Napoleon, whom Beethoven idealized 'as the hero who was to lead humanity into the new age of liberty, equality, and fraternity' (Grout 1960, 479). During this progressive phase of political revolution with its promises of (bourgeois) prosperity, it seemed possible that the needs of the individual subject could be satisfied within a new political order. The subject was not only gaining mastery over external nature but finding itself reflected in the social collectivity. This reconciled totality is alluded to in Beethoven's great symphonies, 'in which the form of the music as a whole appears to be generated organically, from below, by the+++++++of the parts or elements in their mutual relations' (Witkin 1998,63). In short, for Adorno, the 'music of Beethoven's second-period compositions celebrates the development of the bourgeois subject as secure in the mastery of his world' (Witkin 1998, 63). What Beethoven celebrates above all is that the enlightenment ideal of Hegel's sublation might be on the threshold of actual historical realization. The Hegelian ideal of organic wholeness, so dominant in nineteenth-century thought, found its most satisfactory expression in the dynamic mediation of part and whole or subject and object in Beethoven's music. In a pattern reminiscent of Adorno's Hegel critique, the Kretschmar lectures recognize the revolutionary impetus animating Beethoven's second style at the same time as they signal the appearance of cracks in the ideal of harmonious coherence that started to manifest themselves in Beethoven's late compositions. Contextualizing Beethoven's achievement within the preceding tradition, Kretschmar emphasizes that Beethoven's second style marks the final emancipation of the musical material from polyphony to harmony. Polyphony is presented as a strict objective form corresponding to the feudal social order whose demise was initiated by the Napoleonic revolution. In a dialectical

94 Deconstructions of Modernity

narrative, Kretschmar traces the development of music from primitive chant to polyphonic complexity and finally to harmonic sophistication. Reaching back to the eleventh century, polyphonic music complicated monophonic chant by introducing the possibility of counterpoint and harmony. Strict polyphony is considered to be essentially static, with independent voices singing not in unison but in parallel lines. Although some development had been present in polyphony as early as the eleventh century, Kretschmar's association of polyphony with objectivity means to stress its rather fixed and static nature. Where monophonic or solo chant was relatively unconstrained and hence spontaneous, polyphony necessitated the introduction of an objective system of musical notation. For solo chant it was sufficient to provide relatively vague indications to express the duration and rhythm of notes; however, such imprecision became problematical in polyphony, which depended on the coordination of voices. A stricter system of notation had to be developed. But the development of a system can be greeted either as desirable or deplorable. If greater complexity is generally welcomed as an advancement in music, the privileging of voice in Western metaphysics tends to deplore polyphony as a degeneration from subjective spontaneity into artificial mediation. Anticipating Derrida's reading of Rousseau's vilification of writing (notation) in Of Grammatology (1967), Kretschmar emphasizes in his third lecture, 'Music and the Eye/ that music, being mediated through 'notation' (Mann 1968, 61), speaks to the eye rather than the ear. Since it is through the ear that music is received in its most sensuous immediacy, musical notation shares with writing the stigma of intellectual mediation and abstraction. According to Kretschmar, early Dutch masters of polyphonic music immediately exploited notation for its intellectual playfulness by arranging notes in such a way that they could be read both forward and backward, a visual effect which the ear could not detect.21 The gradual development of a system of notation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries could be interpreted as an artificial constraint on the spontaneity of the voice whose effect was to restrict the free expression of the singer. Although the imprecision of the system of notation in polyphonic music left singers still relatively free to interpret indicated values, the intention was to create an orderly system, usually marked by a theme based on one or more clearly defined rhythmic modes which was complicated by one or more counter-melodies. As Grout points out, 'no attempt was made to express musically any emotional or pictorial connotations of the text'

Organic Unity and the Privileging of Reason

95

(Grout I960, 91). It could be said that the individual note in polyphonic music was structurally fixed in much the same way as the individual was assigned a predetermined place in the feudal social order. In Kretschmar 's lectures, harmony liberates music from polyphonic objectivity by allowing the composer greater and greater freedom of self-expression. However, as we have seen, classical tonal music both enabled subjective eloquence and also constrained it through a highly organized, thoroughly integrated, and hierarchical key system. At its best, the classical work exemplified the dynamic tension between subjective expression and objective form that finds its philosophical articulation in Hegel's sublation of subject and object into a unity that does not obliterate their distinctiveness.22 According to Adorno, the sonataform was a particularly 'powerful means for reflecting such a dynamic equilibrium of freedom and constraint' (Witkin 1998, 45), an equilibrium also asserted by advocates of the bourgeois-capitalist social order. According to Adorno, in Beethoven's middle period, his music achieved a highly precarious, near-perfect balance between subject and object. Tonal music is thus like Hegel's identity thesis in that it reinforces a bourgeois ideology that conceals the objective constraints which earlier polyphonic music had openly displayed. The classical sonata-form perfected by Beethoven is for Adorno 'integral to bourgeois ideology,' since the 'hierarchical construction of music in which tones are related to one another through their tonal centres is paralleled by the structural ideal of bourgeois society' (Witkin 1998, 45). For Adorno, the ideal of the 'closed work' in Beethoven's music and Hegel's philosophy reflects and reinforces the confident self-understanding of the emergent bourgeoisie. In sociohistorical terms, Beethoven's life as a composer stretched from the 'heroic' phase of the emergent bourgeoisie to its decline into the reifying conditions of monopoly capitalism. Beethoven was crucial to Adorno's history of music precisely because his late work (roughly 1816 to his death in 1827)23 is marked by the suspicion that the achieved organic wholeness exemplified in the sonata-form of Beethoven's mature period might be an illusion. Where the compositions of the middle period reflected the self-understanding of the bourgeois order as a noncoercive collectivity, the later compositions foreground the illusory nature of this self-understanding. Far from existing harmoniously with the bourgeois social order, the individual subject found itself increasingly alienated from the collectivity and disempowered by the capitalist mode of production. The social order was antagonistic rather than

96 Deconstructions of Modernity

organically harmonious. As Witkin puts it, what Beethoven's late work recognizes is that in music the 'smooth "fit" of the elements is not achieved without a great deal of hidden violence' (Witkin 1998, 65). In the name of ensuring 'the lawfulness of all relations among elements/ the tonal system 'concealed the unfreedom of the individual tones and the force with which they were constrained in their relations' (Witkin 1998,45). The truth-content of Beethoven's late compositions is thus the dawning recognition that reconciliation does not arise organically from the parts but is artificially enforced by the totality. By drawing attention to this Violence/ Beethoven deconstructs his own earlier (Hegelian) illusion of fully achieved wholeness.24 Kretschmar's Lectures on the History of Music The Kretschmar lectures in Doctor Faustus narrate a history of music whose progression is marked by dialectical subject-object reversals that intensify but do not resolve the terms of this opposition. In the first instance, the near-perfect harmony between subjective expression and objective form in Beethoven's mature style began to disintegrate into a privileging of subjectivity which Leverkiihn's teacher interprets counter-intuitively as a concealed affinity with objective totality. In conformity with Adorno's insistence that the sublation of subject and object is always a compensatory illusion for their irreconcilable difference, Kretschmar suggests that subjectivity temporarily prevails over objectivity only to find itself paradoxically instrumental in the regeneration of the very objectivity it had sought to defeat. The AdornoKretschmar figure avails himself of Hegel's dialectical reversals of the mutually implicated terms of an opposition while rejecting the possibility of their harmonious reconciliation in an absolutized subject. The Kretschmar lectures can be said to be deconstructing the illusion of organic wholeness which constitutes the sociohistorical truth-content of Beethoven's mature style. The subject of the first two lectures is Beethoven's piano sonata in C minor opus 111, a sonata composed around 1820 (Mann 1968, 53), at a time when the heroic phase of bourgeois capitalism had already been betrayed and Hegel's dynamic dialectic had congealed into the 'cult of the state' in the+Philosophy of Right (published in 1821). Through Kretschmar, Mann dramatizes the self-deconstructive moment in Beethoven as a crucial step in Leverkiihn's development toward atonality and, by implication, of Germany's march toward German National Socialism. At the level

Organic Unity and the Privileging of Reason 97

of music theory,++++++++++++suggests that fascism was continuou with modernity. Kretschmar's first two lectures explain why Beethoven chose not to write a third movement for his piano sonata in C minor opus+111.25 Traditionally the sonata-form influenced by Haydn and Mozart tended to have three movements, with the last one returning to the first in order to reconcile it with the second. Ending on the slow and lyrical second movement, sonata opus 111 privileges subjective expression without executing the expected fusion with objectivity. Since this turn to subjectivity was accompanied by Beethoven's withdrawal from society on account of his increasing deafness, it was customary to interpret the sonata as a symptom of artistic isolation and personal self-expression. Growing out of the old composer's 'ego painfully isolated in the absolute, isolated too from sense by the loss of his hearing/ the sonata had generally been interpreted as the expression of the 'entirely and utterly and nothing-but personal' (Mann 1968, 54). This standard interpretation assumes that the late Beethoven, no longer able to retain the dynamic tension between subject and object, became the mark of pure subjectivity. In an apparently counter-intuitive way, Kretschmar argues instead that the triumph of subjectivity in Beethoven's late work conceals a hidden complicity with objectivity. At the moment when subjective autonomy seems to triumph in Beethoven's late style, sonata opus 11 tragically attests to the isolated composer's unacknowledged yearning for community. In the process of asserting itself absolutely, the subject overlooks its interdependence with the object and sets out to defeat it; in Adorno's critical terms, this aspiration to autonomy destroys the dialectical tension between subject and object and seeks to absolutize one category. Beethoven aspires to this absolutizing of the subject by arrogating to it functions previously carried out by musical conventions: 'Conventions were deprived of this [organizational] function, however, by autonomous aesthetic subjectivity, which strove to organize the work freely from within itself. The transition of musical organization to autonomous subjectivity is completed by virtue of the technical principle of the development' (Adorno 1973, 55). Through modulation (Durchfuhrung), Beethoven allows the subject to usurp and repress the object, forcing it to go underground. The increasingly autonomous subject destroys the objective material without realizing that it also necessarily feeds on it. It is precisely because subjectivity blindly celebrates its victory over objectivity that it opens itself up to its own

98 Deconstructions of Modernity

destruction. Retaining the historical dialectic as the critical moment in Hegel's philosophy, Adorno assumes that both subjective consciousness and material history move from less developed or intense states to more developed or intense ones. The contest between subject and object as mutually constitutive terms means that each drives the other into more and more extreme positions, creating conditions in which the repressed 'other' always returns with renewed vigour. Following this logic, Kretschmar contends that it is precisely at the moment of triumph in Beethoven's personal style that subjectivity enters into its own death, into a degeneration that will find its culmination in Leverkiihn's twelvetone technique. As will be the case with Leverkiihn, the crisis in Beethoven's career was brought about by changes in material conditions. Beethoven's withdrawal from society into his inner self is analysed as a critique of society whose increasingly alienating impact on the subject contradicts the harmonious model of the second-style. Both Beethoven and later Leverkiihn exemplify Adorno's contention that the isolated artist speaks about society precisely by withdrawing from it: "The reproach against the individualism of art in its later stages of development is so pathetically wretched simply because it overlooks the social nature of this individualism. "Lonely discourse" reveals more about social tendencies than does communicative discourse' (Adorno 1973, 43). The isolated artist is seen as a symbol of alienation, expressing a false sense of subjective autonomy which has arisen as a compensatory response to the unpalatable social conditions under late capitalism. In sonata opus 111, explains Kretschmar, 'the subjective and the conventional assumed a new relationship, conditioned by death' (Mann 1968, 55). Subject and object have entered into a Hegelian struggle of life and death; their desire to defeat each other absolutely runs the risk of the 'Hegelian murder' whose outcome would be the destruction of both. Mann suggests that Beethoven initiates a dialectical reversal that will find its tragic conclusion in the elimination of the subject in The Lament of Doctor Faustus,' Leverkuhn's breakdown, and Germany's catastrophe. What Kretschmar illustrates is that the subjective turn in music has secretly already been appropriated by the of 'cunning' of objectivity: 'Where greatness and death come together, he declared, there arises an objectivity tending to the conventional, which in its majesty leaves the most domineering subjectivity far behind, because therein the merely personal - which had after all been the surmounting of a tradition already brought to its peak - once more outgrew itself, in that it entered

Organic Unity and the Privileging of Reason 99

into the mythical, the collectively great and supernatural' (Mann 1968, 55). Kretschmar's tragic narrative depicts Beethoven as an 'ego painfully isolated in the absolute, isolated too from sense' (Mann 1968, 54) and yearning for a connection with the social community which the sociohistorical moment makes no longer available. Entering into the mythical and collective, Beethoven anticipates for Mann the anti-liberal attitudes of volkish intellectuals whose alienation from society compels them to endorse a false mythology open to exploitation by German National Socialism. Kretschmar's counter-intuitive reading of Beethoven draws out the conceptual confusions of reversals of opposites that are not recuperated by a transcendental moment to imbue them with meaning. In a move that parallels Riedesel's inability to grasp the sophisticated logic of Breisacher's proto-fascist arguments, Mann has Kretschmar comment on the reactions to sonata opus 111 by Beethoven's patron, who ha commissioned it. Count Brunswick is clearly discomfited by a sonata that abandons the formal requirement of recapitulation in the third movement, prolonging instead the slow second movement and thereby accentuating the composition's introspective, meditative, and mystical qualities. Echoing sentiments Zeitblom later voices in relation to Leverkiihn's challenge to tradition, Beethoven's patron saw in the sonata a 'process of dissolution or alienation, of a mounting into an air no longer familiar or safe' (Mann 1968, 54). Indeed, as Kretschmar exults, this sonata could not easily be appreciated as a 'well-rounded and intellectually digested work' (Mann 1968, 53). For Count Brunswick, this musical experiment confirmed 'a degeneration of tendencies previously present, an excess of introspection and speculation' (Mann 1968, 54), a self-indulgence subversive of this patron's sense of social hierarchy. But this naive reaction overlooks a far more disturbing aspect of Beethoven's provocation than the challenging of feudal authority through individualism. By refusing the transcendental moment of reconciliation, Beethoven disrupts the very framework that made categories like subject and object meaningful. What makes the sonata uncanny is the suggestion that the familiar opposition between subject and object is in the process of breaking down: Tor one would usually connect with the conception of the merely personal, ideas of limitless subjectivity and of radical harmonic will to expression, in contast to polyphonic objectivity (Kretschmar was concerned to have us impress upon our minds this distinction between harmonic subjectivity and

100 Deconstructions of Modernity

polyphonic objectivity) and this equation, this contrast, here as altogether in the masterly late works, would simply not apply' (Mann 1968, 54). Once subject and object are no longer oriented toward a transcendental point of resolution, they not only overlap and intermingle but are open to unlimited reversals that make classification difficult. Count Brunswick mistakenly assumes that polyphony denotes respect for objectivity whereas harmony expresses unrestrained subjective wilfulness. In reality, though, the turn to subjectivity in Beethoven's late work also accentuates the objective character of music: 'Untouched, untransformed by the subjective, convention often appeared in the late works, in a baldness, one might say exhaustiveness, an abandonment of self, with an effect more majestic and awful than any reckless plunge into the personal' (Mann 1968, 54-5). Classical convention makes itself most visible at the very moment when its boundaries are being exploded. Beethoven's farewell to convention is a nostalgic moment which already anticipates a yearning for its return. The triumph of the subject is consequently always threatened by the return of its repressed other. Running counter to popular opinion, Kretschmar assigns the high point of subjectivity to Beethoven's second style and argues that the late works were already moving in the direction of a reversion to objectivity. Count Brunswick is thus like Riedesel in his misconception of the revolutionary moment to which he objects. Fearing that subjectivity will destroy his world of strict conventions, he is blind to the far more real threat his social class faces from the objectified social order initiated by bourgeois capitalism. When Beethoven was thought to have expressed his most personal sense of self, he was in fact compelled by the internal logic of both the musical material and the sociohistorical conditions to reflect the paradox that the bourgeois liberation of the subject from feudal oppression produced not the self-contained liberal individual but the alienated self of bourgeois capitalism. It is not unfettered personal freedom which Beethoven's sonata anticipates but the possible elimination of the subject under the reifying conditions of late capitalism. Far from realizing its emancipation, the subject has been forced to forfeit its power of agency. In its struggle for autonomy, the subject severs its ties to the collectivity and, in the process, it surrenders itself to a more totalizing objectivity to which the mystifications of bourgeois ideology have blinded it. What masquerades as unfettered personal expression reveals itself on closer inspection to have been the desperate cry of the 'abandonment of self (Mann 1968,55) asking for reintegration into the social totality.

Organic Unity and the Privileging of Reason 101

The analysis of the 'Arietta-Thema' clarifies the potentially disastrous implications for the subject that Kretschmar glimpses in the crack of the Enlightenment self-understanding revealing itself in Beethoven's late work. Reduced to the brief motif of only three tones, this theme hints at the subject's sad farewell to convention as it reluctantly ventures forth on its own. Although the arietta theme considers itself ill prepared for its historical role, it leaves the exhausted sonata-form behind and opens the door to subjective autonomy. Suggesting that the theme would prefer to preserve itself in its 'idyllic innocence/ Kretschmar points out that it ends on a sad farewell motif that resembles 'a brief soul-cry' (Mann 1968, 56). This reluctance implies that the subject acts less out of its own volition than out of the necessities imposed on it by the socially imbued musical material. Once the dialectical tension between subject and object no longer corresponds to the antagonistic social reality, the subject withdraws from the object in which it no longer recognizes itself. The problem is now no longer that music is insufficiently subjective but that it is excessively so. In its transgression of conventional limits, the arietta theme creates an excessive emotional effect which destroys the balance required for the sublation of subject and object. The beginnings of this assertion of subjective autonomy mean that the traditional sonata-form has become outmoded. Yet the subject does not exult in its freedom; on the contrary, the farewell to the traditional sonata-form comes across as the 'most moving, consolatory, pathetically reconciling thing in the world' (Mann 1968, 57). It is as if the subject knew that its emancipation from the harmonious whole really amounted to its expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Having ventured into unfamiliar territory, the little aria finds itself in an 'utterly extreme situation/ a moment of crisis 'when the poor little motif seems to hover alone and forsaken above a giddy yawning abyss' (Mann 1968, 56). In the first place, then, Kretschmar shows that the subject's search for autonomy was motivated not by arrogance but by the demands of the changing social conditions sedimented in the musical material. The subject's situation is exacerbated when it retreats from adventurous self-assertion into fearful self-effacement. Having embarked on the dangerous road toward autonomy, the subject loses heart and takes refuge in 'a distressful making-of-itself-small' (Mann 1968, 56). Unable to return to the lost paradise of perfect reconciliation with the object, the fearful subject is now prepared to enter into an even more oppressive relationship with the object. In the end, in a moving farewell, the

102 Deconstructions of Modernity

subject 'blesses the object' (Mann 1968, 57) and the sonata accepts its dissolution ('it cancelled and resolved itself [Mann 1968, 57]). In his attempt to save the sonata-form from exhaustion, Beethoven emancipates the subject and initiates a process that destroys the convention he seeks to rescue and damns the subject he meant to emancipate. His innovation is paradoxically depicted as both a blessing and a condemnation; the sonata is provided with a new form, 'with what its master blesses' and also with 'what condemns it' (Mann 1968,56). Kretschmar points out that the 'rhythmically-harmonically-contrapuntually' (Mann 1968, 56) challenging opening of the little aria destabilizes the very (Hegelian) categories on which Beethoven relied to achieve the ideal sublation of opposites. In terms that also characterize Leverkuhn, the new form is marked by 'black nights and dazzling flashes, crystal spheres wherein coldness and heat, repose and ecstasy are one and the same' (Mann 1968,56). Once binary distinctions are eliminated, it is no longer possible to classify what counts as either subjective or objective and what is valued as either progressive or regressive. The effect of this subversion of the sonata-form is 'vast, strange, extravagantly magnificent'; it is so uncanny that it is 'quite truly nameless' (Mann 1968, 56). Translated into Adorno's sociohistorical terms, Mann suggests that the subject is damned for remaining within the bourgeois social order with which it no longer coincides, and it is damned for withdrawing from the antagonistic social world into isolation and suffering. What+Docto Faustus does not envision is the Marxist possibility of the subject labouring to transform the material conditions that impose on music the sterility from which Leverkuhn will try to save it. The more immediate consequences of Beethoven's farewell to the sonata-form in sonata opus 111 are examined in Kretschmar's next lecture on 'Beethoven and the Fugue' (Mann 1968, 57), focusing on the Missa solemnis (Mann 1997, 62), a work Zeitblom calls the 'Monster of all Quartets' (Mann 1997,63). Composed in the aftermath of the demystification of the sonata-form, this very late composition, more than any other, carries the marks of Beethoven's crisis as a struggle of life and death. At the time of its composition, Beethoven is described as a man of deep suffering who produces works so uncanny that not even those closest to him could understand them. Kretschmar stresses the suffering of the defeated subject by telling an anecdote which associates Beethoven with Christ. Finding his maids asleep at night while he was feverishly composing, Beethoven is supposed to have lamented, '"[cjould you not watch one hour with me?"' (Mann 1968, 60).26 The music the

Organic Unity and the Privileging of Reason

103

deaf composer produces, but cannot hear, strikes his listeners as 'a savage brawl between hellishly dissonant instrumental voices, wandering lost in heights and depths, clashing with one another in variant patterns at every irregular turn/ a piece ending in 'the Babel of confusion' (Mann 1997, 63). Beethoven's personal suffering and aesthetic disorientation are attributed, in the first instance, to the deaf man's painful insight into the dire situation of the subject under increasingly reifying social conditions. But Beethoven makes matters worse by insisting on producing fugues at a time when he already knows that this form is no longer adequate to the sociohistorical situation. In a crucial observation, Kretschmar claims that '[i]n spirit, the fugue belonged to an age of liturgical music which already lay far in the past for Beethoven; he had been the grand master of a profane epoch of music, in which that art had emancipated itself from the cultic to the cultural' (Mann 1997, 64). According to this reading, Beethoven's mistake was to misrecognize his own radical departure from the past. Like volkish intellectuals, he nostalgically yearns for an earlier time whose religious spirit his own aesthetic innovation had in fact just deconstructed. Where Beethoven exemplifies for Kretschmar the tendency of music toward subjective autonomy, the composers he discusses in his fourth and last lecture elucidate two contrasting reversions to pre-modern musical forms. Devoted to The Elemental in Music' (Mann 1968, 63), this lecture strikes Zeitblom as the one having made the most profound impression on Leverkuhn. Kretschmar's first topic focuses on Wagner's immersion in German mythology, reinforcing the conventional interpretation of fascism as a neo-Romantic phenomenon. In an argument recalling+++++++++++++++++++Kretschmar contends that no matter how sophisticated and complicated musical form has become, it has not been able to shake off its 'religious attitude' (Mann 1968, 64). Wagner's achievement was to liberate this repressed tendency in his 'cosmogonic myth of the Ring' (Mann 1968, 64) and to make it speak to the contemporary secular world. Through his concept of the Gesamtkunstiverk,+he was able to create an 'apparatus of sensuous si multaneity' (Mann 1968, 64) which successfully concealed the signs of its artificial construction. Only the close analysis to which Kretschmar subjects his music reveals that Wagner's compositions were 'a bit too clever after all, in comparison with certain revelations of the elemental in the art of the pure musicians' (Mann 1968, 64). Wagner's mythological work exemplifies for Kretschmar the yearning of music for a 'precultural state' which Kretschmar traces historically to monodic mu-

104 Deconstructions of Modernity

sic, to the emergence of music 'from the chaos of unstandardized sounds' (Mann 1997, 70). When Mann has Kretschmar specify that early song was no more than 'a howl across several pitches/ he associates Wagner's modern attempt to reconstruct sounds 'of which our harmonically schooled ears could have no conception' (Mann 1997, 70) with the uncanny combination of the new and the old, of progress and regress in German fascism. A more interesting case of reversion to primitive music is the objective system developed by Johann Conrad Beissel, a historical figure Mann was delighted to have discovered during the composition of Doctor+Faustus:+'At the same time I stumbled across some curious info mation, in some magazine, concerning spiritual music among the Seventh-Day Baptists of Pennsylvania, with emphasis on the strange figure of Johann Conrad Beissel, whom I then and there decided to include in the lectures with which Kretschmar the Stammerer opens up the world of music to young Adrian (and to the reader) - the buffoon "systematician" and schoolmaster whose memory haunts the whole novel' (Mann 1961, 39-40). Where Wagner represented a secular figure who revitalized religious emotion, Beissel was a nineteenth-century religious fanatic who invented a rational system of musical notation to create the illusion of simplicity and spontaneity. Having located possible sources for Mann's portrait of Beissel, Andres Briner shows that 'the biography Mann transfers from Beissel to Kretschmer is absolutely correct' (Briner 1958,36). In an effort to simplify music for his unsophisticated Baptist community in Pennsylvania, Beissel resorted to a compositional strategy which did not establish a 'fixed relation between the values of the notes' (Mann 1968, 67), relying instead on the accentual characteristics of the lyrics to indicate rhythm. Beissel's express intention was to liberate music from the complex tonal constraints of sophisticated modern music. Scales would now be marked by a differentiation between 'master' and 'servant' notes, depending on whether or not they were part of the dominant triad. In Beissel's view, European chorals were far too 'forced, complicated, and artificial' (Mann 1968, 66) to speak directly to the hearts of his congregation. However, as Briner points out, the historical sources on which Mann bases Kretschmar's lecture capture mostly the 'largely extra-musical impres sion' of the performance by the singers, whose 'human, super-natural' demeanour produced an effect of 'a strangely ecstatic emotion' (Briner 1958, 367; my trans.), an effect that reinforces Mann's depiction of Leverkiihn's susceptibility to the magical and the surreal. In fact, as

Organic Unity and the Privileging of Reason 105

Briner stresses, it so happens that 'Beissel's ideas of order stand in precise opposition to Schonberg's and Leverkiihn's order of rows' (Briner 1958,368; my trans.)- Far from deconstructing the tonal system, Beissel's musical notation 'retains music within the tonal triad' (Briner 1958,368; my trans.). The only viable correspondence between the historical and the fictional Beissel is the insistence on 'absolute order for and in itself (Briner 1958, 368; my trans.), an insistence which, admittedly, is precisely the aspect that Leverkiihn appreciates. Where Zeitblom refuses to take seriously the 'dogmatic arrangement, such childish rationalism' of this 'backwoods dictator,' Leverkiihn admires his 'sense of order' because 'a silly order is better than none at all' (Mann 1968, 69). Although the vocabulary of 'master' and 'servant' notes 'forms only a small part' of a 'simple and grotesque allegory' (Briner 1958, 368; my trans.), it is highly significant that Mann singles out a nomenclature that reverberates with Hegel's most famous example of the historical dialectic. In spite of the historical Beissel's reinforcement of tonality, Mann seems to reconfigure his system as an escape from tonality which is meant to suggest a subversion of hierarchical domination as such. At the same time, the rhetoric of 'master' and 'servant' notes provides for a simple reversal of harmony and polyphony which reinscribes rather than eliminates hierarchy; using Hegel's suspect vocabulary, Leverkiihn aspires at this point to replace one form of domination with another. Kretschmar's lectures are informed by a historical dialectic that recalls the Hegelian desire to reconcile subjectivity and objectivity within a harmonious totality. In his own music, Leverkiihn will claim to be aspiring to what Adorno calls Schonberg's 'will towards the suspension of that fundamental contrast upon which all Western music is built- the contrast between polyphonic fugal structure and homophonic sonata-form' (Adorno 1973, 54). Leverkiihn's predilection for the irrational tendencies of volkish ideas is counterbalanced by his investment in the rational slant of Kretschmar's dialectical approach to the history of music. What is strikingly brought home in Kretschmar's last lecture is Mann's (or Adorno's) recognition that violence inheres not only in the Wagnerian liberation of repressed instincts but in the rational processes called upon to control them. Unlike the volkish intellectuals yearning nostalgically for lost innocence and spontaneity, Leverkiinn seeks to create subjective expression dialectically through an excess of objective form in the same way as he intensifies objective form through an excessive immersion in sexual instinct. When Leverkiihn asserts the primacy of the cultic over the cultural, he does

106 Deconstructions of Modernity

not simply advocate a return to barbarism but invokes the anti-rational as a site for his completion of the deconstruction of tonality that Beethoven's struggle with the sonata-form had initiated. What Kretschmar's lectures confirm above all is Hegel's assumption that the historical dialectic moves from less developed or intense states to more developed or intense ones. His reading of the history of music suggests that an increase in subjectivity necessarily generates an increase in objectivity; it follows for Leverkiihn that subjective expression is bound to result in a more totalized objective order. As long as Leverkiihn believes in the Hegelian narrative of the reconciliation of subject and object in Reason (Geist), his immersion in volkish irrationalism can be exonerated as a misguided attempt to free reason from its sterile instrumentality. Whether he aims at the subject's extreme suffering or the object's extreme rational organization, he may be in a position to force a dialectical reversal. In this case, he is a tragic figure whose good intentions produce consequences he does not anticipate. But what if he knows that the historical dialectic does not obey the positive teleology of the Enlightenment narrative of modernity? We might then suspect that Leverkiihn, far from being a mystified modernist, may well be a highly self-conscious postmodernist who acts cynically in the full knowledge of the consequences he invites. In this case, he is the pathetic victim of sociohistorical forces with which he remains complicit.

CHAPTER 3

FASCIST UNDERCURRENTS: APPEALS TO AUTHENTICITY AND THE PRIVILEGING OF REASON

So far I have tried to link explanations for the emergence of fascism to assumptions deeply embedded in modernity. Through his incorporation of Adorno's ideological critique of tonal music, Mann complements the fairly standard thesis that Hitler successfully tapped into 'irrational' neo-Romantic yearnings with the more audacious suggestion that the privileging of reason in German idealism ought to be scrutinized for equally suspect 'totalizing' tendencies. What the MannAdorno 'collaboration' in Doctor Faustus alerts us to is that the emergence of German National Socialism confronts us, in unmistakable terms, with the possibility that the irrational and the rational are mutually implicated, resist sublation, and remain radically irreconcilable. Recognizing this paradoxical situation, postmodern archaeologies of modernity articulate this crisis of modernity in terms which clarify the theoretical parameters of a cognitive shift that is dramatized and historically embodied, for me, in the Nazi phenomenon. In this chapter, I revisit Jacques Derrida's critique of appeals to authentic++++++++ order to illustrate that proto-fascist volkish nostalgia can be dismissed neither as an atavistic return to a pre-modern discourse nor as a 'special case' within modernity; on the contrary, neo-Romanticism proves to be 'exemplary' of modernity's investment in metaphysical presence, an investment most fully represented by Hegelianism. In the first place, then, I will reinforce and clarify what is suspect in volkish ideology from a Derridean perspective which specifically targets the legacy of Rousseau within the broader context of the Western metaphysics of presence. In his deconstruction of a suspect yearning for authentic origins in modernity, Derrida may well have drawn on his own experi-

108 Deconstructions of Modernity

ence of fascism at the same time as his strategic philosophical intervention confirms that enlightenment has always already been complicit with violence. Although Derrida has come under attack for supposedly promoting a theory that is both apolitical and ahistorical, I would like to argue that his archaeology of modernity allows us to recognize retrospectively just how deeply fascism is, in fact, implicated in narratives of enlightenment. According to his hypothesis, it is not so much that longings for authenticity are 'irrational' but that appeals to innocent beginnings deny that they are inhabited by an originary violence. Whether we take Rousseau's validation of spontaneous being or Hegel's identity thesis, the ideal of organic wholeness or of the harmonious unity of opposites allows violence to operate undetected. Instead of explaining fascism either as the resurgence of a repressed atavism or as the perversion of desirable ideals, Derrida's critique of metaphysical presence forces us to recognize that the 'enlightenment' project itself provided the conditions conducive to the emergence of the 'dark' other which culminated in Auschwitz. Although my reading of Derrida's critique of (Rousseau's) privileging of spontaneity is primarily intended as a commentary on the volkish tendencies which Hitler's rhetoric was to exploit to such sinister ends, the target of deconstruction is not only Rousseau but Hegel too. However, since Adorno has already provided us with a quasi-postmodern critique of Hegel's identity thesis, it makes sense to investigate the suspect implications of modernity's reliance on reason as they find their most dramatic articulation in Bauman's contention in Modernity and th++olocaust+(1991) that without modernity's successful rationaliza tion of public life the death camps could not have come into existence. Bauman's sociological study provides us with concrete historical evidence for the complicity of modernity and fascism, a complicity visible in Mann's incorporation of Adorno's Hegelian critique as it is dramatized in Kretschmar's Beethoven lectures. In spite of Bauman's much-appreciated attention to sociohistorical details, his provocative study could be criticized for advancing a rather monolithic thesis which ignores, above all, the volkish influences so painstakingly traced by Mann and Mosse. What makes Doctor Faustus such a complex parable of fascism is not only that it alludes to both the irrational and the rational preconditions for German National Socialism but also, more importantly, that it addresses their dialectical interrelationship. In the last part of this chapter, I focus on the uncanny logic simultaneously binding and separating the rational and the irrational.

Fascist Undercurrents 109 In relating Jonathan Leverkiihn's magical-scientific experiments in+Docto Faustus to Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, I intend to show that reason is indeed so entangled with domination that enlightenment remains implicated in the violence it was meant to defeat. The++++++++++++++++++++confirms Bauman's suspicion that ration ality's predilection for classifying and ordering the world is in itself an act of violence; by privileging what can be counted or mathematized, reason excludes everything else by drawing a line separating an acceptable inside from an unacceptable outside. By stressing that myth and science are mutually reinforcing, Horkheimer and Adorno try to trouble and break down the line meant to keep them apart. This deconstruction of the myth/science opposition takes an even more radical form in++++++++++++when Jonathan Leverkuhn illustrates that the two sides of the magic/science opposition constitute each other while also remaining incommensurate. Once the teleological selfunderstanding of the Enlightenment narrative has been demystified, it is the uncanny logic of Leverkiihn's magic square which may help us explain the emergence of fascism. Volkish Ideology and Derridean Deconstruction This first part of the chapter discusses much-debated strategies of deconstruction both as arising, at least in part, out of Jacques Derrida's own experience of fascism in French Algeria and as a trenchant critique of metaphysical assumptions conducive to the emergence of Nazism. What are quite extended discussions of well-known Derridean arguments may strike readers as rather superfluous; however, it is my contention that the full force of these arguments has not been sufficiently heeded. It is my belief that the context of the Nazi experience sharpens the critical edge of Derridean deconstruction. Circumfession: Jewish Trace/Fascist Trauma

Although in Of Grammatology Derrida never makes explicit references to fascism, his tendency to target aspects of volkish ideology may well be a more or less conscious response to the Nazis who, at one remove, affected the life of an Arab Jew growing up in Algeria during the French colonial rule of Marechal Petain. The full extent of the impact fascism had on Derrida is brought home in Geoffrey Bennington's+Jacques Derrid (1993), a critical assessment of Derrida's main arguments which in-

110 Deconstructions of Modernity

eludes, placed in the position of a footnote running along the bottom of each page, Derrida's autobiographical account of his confrontation with his Jewishness, an account carrying the title Circumfession. This unusual typographical arrangement illustrates Derrida's point that the (autobiographical) margin is in fact what has mobilized and continues to drive the (theoretical) centre being analysed by Bennington. In a typical self-reflexive gesture, Derrida foregrounds the act of confession through direct and indirect citations from St Augustine's Confessions++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ing that '"one always asks for pardon when one writes"' (Bennington and Derrida 1993, 46), he acknowledges his theoretical work as the never-ending attempt to expiate his guilt for having remained largely silent on Jewish issues. Later in the++++++++++++he refers to th episode in+++++++++dealing with Rousseau's guilt over the theft of a ribbon which he blamed on an innocent girl, an anecdote which symbolizes for Paul de Man that writing is always an attempt at expiation which can never exhaust itself and end in forgiveness. For de Man, Rousseau's confession of his unjust denunciation of Marion suggests that '[e]xcuses generate the very guilt they exonerate, though always in excess or by default.... No excuse can ever hope to catch up with such a proliferation of guilt' (de Man 1979,299). A similar process of proliferation seems to be at work in Derrida's self-understanding of the powerful effect his repressed Jewishness had on his theoretical positioning. Derrida was in his early teens during the 1940s when Algeria, although never formally occupied by the Germans, was governed by the French under Petain's fascist and virulently anti-Semitic approach. As Bennington indicates, anti-Semitism in Algeria was 'officially authorized,' manifesting itself in the form of 'physical and verbal violence' (Bennington and Derrida 1993, 326). The traumatic event to which++++++++++returns time and again was Derrida's expulsion from school and loss of French citizenship in 1942 on account of his Jewishness.2 What little Latin he knows, he tells us, he had learned just before having been booted 'out of the school in the Latin name of the numerus clausus' (Bennington and Derrida 1993, 211) and having his French citizenship withdrawn.3 After the expulsion from the Lycee de Ben Aknoun, Derrida was sent to a Jewish school which emphasized religious instruction over academic pursuits. He speaks of 'the other school, the Jewish one' as a place where he was 'to learn and sit exams with a view to the bar mitzvah,' confessing that he 'used to flee that Jewish School,' playing 'truant without telling my parents for almost a year' (Bennington and Derrida 1993, 175).

Fascist Undercurrents 111

Derrida seems to have felt culturally homeless, belonging to neither the French nor the Jewish community.4 The shock of the expulsion must have been all the more severe as he came from an assimilated Jewish family. His position in Algeria, he confides, was marked by the fact that 'in my family and among the algerian Jews, one scarcely ever said "circumcision" but "baptism," not Bar Mitzvah but "communion," with the consequence of softening, dulling, through fearful acculturation, that I've always suffered from more or less consciously, of unavowable events, felt as such, not "Catholic," violent, barbarous, hard, "Arab," Circumcised circumcision, interiorized, secretly assumed accusation of ritual+murder'+(Bennington and Derrida 1993, 73; emphasis in origi nal).5 Derrida's retrospective narrative of the expulsion communicates a deep sense of cultural dislocation, injustice, and incomprehension. Even in the 1990s he still wonders why he continues to pray to a Christian God, why he talks 'to him in Christian Latin French when they expelled from the Lycee de Ben Aknoun in 1942 a little black and very Arab Jew who understood nothing about it, to whom no one ever gave the slightest reason, neither his parents nor his friends' (Bennington and Derrida 1993, 58). The Circumfession, then, is the expiation of his guilt over not having been sufficiently Jewish, for 'reaching the end without ever having read Hebrew' (Bennington and Derrida 1993, 2867). Although a victim of state terror, he implies that he always felt guilty: 'Whether they expelled me from school or threw me into prison, I always thought the other must have good reason to accuse me' (Bennington and Derrida 1993,300). 'Circumcision' comes to symbolize his ambiguous and 'guilty' relationship to his Jewishness, a cultural marking whose repression he now 'confesses.' Derrida's Jewishness is powerfully symbolized through references to circumcision and his middle name. Citing from a diary he kept since 1976, he tells us that it opens with the statement:+'Circumcision, that's al I've ever talked about' (Bennington and Derrida 1993, 70). Through the story of his secret Jewish middle name, Elie, he then connects circumcision, the repressed secret of his Jewishness, to the key notion of+differance or supplementarity in his theoretical texts. It was only on 23 February 1990 that his brother revealed to him 'the origin of my hidden name, the name of he who++++on my death you will call Elie' (Bennington and Derrida 1993, 185). What he learned from his brother was that his father's brother had been named Elie in memory of a paternal uncle who had carried him to his 'baptism,' which was also his 'circumcision/ and who was in turn named 'in memory of his uncle, the brother

112 Deconstructions of Modernity

of my grandfather Abraham, called Elie, that no one ever mentioned again in the family from the day he abandoned his wife and children to make a new life for himself in mainland France' (Bennington and Derrida 1993,185). The name 'Elie' is implicated in a double silence and a chain of supplements. On the one hand, as Derrida's middle name, it was not inscribed on his birth certificate. Derrida accounts for this omission by speculating that his family of assimilated Jews must have decided that he '"should not openly wear any Jewish sign"' (Bennington and Derrida 1993,90). On the other hand, having disgraced himself, his ancestor, Eugene Eliahou Derrida, had been excised from the family history. The Circumfession signifies the return of the repressed both in its emphasis on circumcision and in the narrative restoring his ancestor to his place in the family history. Referring to the chain of supplements the name suggests, Derrida comments: 'So I have borne, without bearing, without its ever being written' (12-23-76) the name of the prophet Elie, Elijah in English, who carries the newborn on his knees, before the still unnamable sacrifice, and I must have carried myself and the impossible port without bank and without head of this porterage is written everywhere for anyone who knows how to read and is interested in the behaviour of a ference, in what precedes and circumvents in preference, reference, transference, differance, so I took myself toward the hidden name without its ever being written on the official records, the same name as that of the paternal uncle Eugene Eliahou Derrida who must have carried me in his arms at the moment of the event without memory of me for they are the memories of an amnesia about which you wonder why+'I'm getting ready to write them, in this book of "circumcision" dreamed of after the death of my father (1970)' ... (Bennington and Derrida 1993, 96-7)

The silenced middle name and the circumcision he does not openly speak about in his work must be taken into account by those who want to know 'how to read' Derrida. At the same time, he warns his readers that 'no one will ever know from what secret I am writing' (Bennington and Derrida 1993, 207). Quoting from the notebook the acknowledgment that he was the '"last of the Jews, what am I ... the circumcised is the proper" (12-30-76),' Derrida stresses once again and retrospectively, 'that's what my readers won't have known about me' (Bennington and Derrida 1993, 154). In a typical Derridean move, he claims that the secret of his name and his repressed circumcision are supplements

Fascist Undercurrents 113

which ought to be accounted for and read back into his central theoretical preoccupations. The image for his repressed Jewishness is the 'inner scar,++++++++++++which he allegorizes through his experience of a temporary facial paralysis that kept his 'left eye fixed open like a glass-eyed cyclops' (Bennington and Derrida 1993, 98). Although the paralysis was 'gone now without leaving any visible trace/ he insists that it 'will have changed my face from the inside' (Bennington and Derrida 1993, 120). If the physical scar is like his Jewishness, then Derrida seems to suggest that his Jewishness is the trace, the++ifferance, which generates and constitutes his theoretical writings, thus making all the difference. If+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ the cultural 'centre/ then Derrida's theory of deconstruction is perhaps an equally imperfect mea culpa of the cultural 'margin's' desire for escape. Expelled from 'Frenchness/ Derrida experienced his Jewishness as a wound whose scar he was reluctant to acknowledge. The school incident confronted him with the Jew's culturally ambiguous position of the boundary-breaker who belongs neither inside nor outside a cultural community. Derrida seems to 'trace' his preoccupation with the deconstruction of oppositions precisely to his uncomfortable early experience of straddling exclusionary boundaries. '[W]hen French Algeria in its Governor-General, without the intervention of any Nazi, had expelled me from school and withdrawn my French citizenship/ he tells us that, 'thus expelled, I became the outside/ now disdaining belonging to an inside and preventing anyone from claiming him 'by fleeing the prison of all languages, the sacred one they tried to lock me up in without opening me to it, the secular they made clear would never be mine' (Bennington and Derrida 1993, 288-9). His reaction to exclusionary boundaries was to dismantle them. The 'Jew expelled from the Ben Aknoun school' became the self-conscious and deliberate boundary-breaker who, with 'the theory of the parasite virus, of the inside/outside, of the impeccable+++++++++succeeded in 'terrorizing the others through the instability he carries everywhere' (Bennington and Derrida 1993, 306). He is the 'terrorist' who subverts from his inside/outside position the philosophical edifice which has been used to legitimize state violence in all its openly fascist and more perniciously liberal forms. Speaking about the reception of his work, he gleefully stresses that 'what they can't stand' is that 'I say nothing, never anything tenable or valid' (Bennington and Derrida 1993, 272); 'and as I say nothing ... I write to alienate, drive mad all those that I will

114 Deconstructions of Modernity

have alienated by not saying anything' (Bennington and Derrida 1993, 274). This refusal to take a stand, indeed infuriating to many more dogmatic theorists, is ultimately the mark of his Jewishness. At the end of++++++++++++++++he asks, 'but after all what else am I in truth, who if I am not what I inhabit and where I take place,+Ich bleibe also Jude' (Bennington and Derrida 1993,302). To 'take place' as a Jew is precisely not to 'take place' but to be both inside and outside of 'place.' If Derrida's Jewishness is the invisible inscription or trace which marks his writing, then fascism can be understood as the equally silent or repressed target of his critique of Western metaphysics. Demystification of Authenticity Among the key concepts Derrida scrutinizes in his deconstruction of metaphysics is the appeal to authenticity so central to volkish ideology. If the target of differance or arc/ze-writing is 'the myth of the simplicity of origin' (Derrida 1976, 92), then deconstruction must be intended to disrupt a philosophical tradition whose truth claims tend to invoke what is natural, authentic, originary, and immediately given. As we have already seen, Mann's dramatization of the Winfried and Breisacher debates pinpoints precisely the continued allure of such notions, just as his Adorno-inspired Kretschmar lectures take potshots at Hegel's metaphysical system.6 It seems to me that Derrida's scrupulously close readings of 'exemplary' philosophical texts probe precisely the limits of the Enlightenment assumptions which Leverktihn seeks to transcend and which Zeitblom chooses not to see. Although reservations about Derrida's tendency to read selective texts in narrowly conceived terms that pointedly serve his particular arguments are not without foundation, I consider debates about the accuracy of his interpretations to lie outside the scope of this study. Careful consideration of Derrida's later theoretical writings and the secondary literature devoted to his work would risk diverting attention away from the limited effect I expect from my deconstructive framing of volkish ideology. Instead of debating the ahistorical limitations of Derrida's 'linguistic turn,' I want to reconsider the importance of his treatment of 'writing' as the metaphor par excellence+for institutional violence Derrida's focus on writing was from the beginning driven by his anxiety that political and social institutions tend to legitimate themselves on the basis of appeals to the natural. Demonstrating in Of Grammatology that Western metaphysics privileges the natural over the

Fascist Undercurrents 115

artificial, Derrida examines writing as a metaphor for 'culture' in Mann's sense of 'civilization/ that is, for the modernity demonized in volkish ideology. The figure at the intersection of language and politics is JeanJacques Rousseau, the French philosopher whose++++++++++is gen erally celebrated as the founding document of liberal democracy. Investing political power in the will of the people, he inspired political revolutions throughout Europe, inaugurating the demise of authoritarian feudal systems. It is not surprising that he has been hailed as a progressive thinker whose ideas signal an important moment in the history of political emancipation. In Of Grammatology Derrida revisits Rousseau's philosophical assumptions in order to show that there is a 'dark underside' to this narrative of Enlightenment. This demystification of Rousseau's Romanticism is all the more important as highly influential contemporary theorists remain indebted to his legacy. Of Grammatology opens with a discussion of language in texts by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the ethnographer Claude LeviStrauss, suggesting that 'writing' continues to be vilified to this day as the corrupting influence befalling innocent speech. Derrida's analysis of Saussure's linguistics has too often been either celebrated or condemned for promoting language as textual play rather than referential mirror. Saussure's first argument, that the linguistic sign is arbitrary, does indeed suggest that words have no natural connection with the things they designate; meaning is thus fixed by convention and hence open to change. His second main point, that the linguistic sign is differential, implies that words take their meaning from their position in relation to other words in the linguistic system; meaning is thus always relative and hence open to radical epistemological scepticism. Saussurian linguistics already subverts cherished notions about the nature of language as naturally belonging to the speaker and being transparently accessible to the listener. Although Derrida approves of Saussure, he contends that the linguist is blind to the more radical implications of his ideas. On the one hand, his linguistic theory illustrates that language is inescapably mediated and therefore arbitrary. On the other, he makes statements revealing a nostalgic clinging to the natural and immediately given. Derrida targets Saussure's nostalgic investment because it perpetuates what is to Derrida the dangerous myth of innocence as such. When Saussure claims that 'the superficial bond of writing is much easier to grasp than the natural bond, the only true bond of sound' (Derrida 1976, 36), he privileges speech as more natural than writing. A speaker's innermost

116 Deconstructions of Modernity

thoughts are more spontaneously conveyed through speech than through the 'artificial exteriority' (Derrida 1976, 35) of writing. Derrida is very careful to specify that he does not advocate a simple reversal which would valorize writing over speech. Although literary critics often take him to be proposing writing as a desirable alternative, his aim is to show that the natural is implicated in the violence which our metaphysical tradition associates with artificiality. It is this violence which is at stake in his demystification of our philosophical tradition: 'Deconstructing this tradition will therefore not consist of reversing it, of making writing innocent. Rather of showing why the violence of writing does not befall an innocent language. There is an originary violence of writing because language is first, in a sense I shall gradually reveal, writing. "Usurpation" has always already begun' (Derrida 1976,37). That language is first of all writing seems to run counter to empirical evidence. What Derrida gradually reveals is that speech is as much governed by Saussure's arbitrary and differential features as writing; Derrida invents the term 'arc/ze-writing' to indicate this condition of possibility for both speech and writing in their conventional sense. Drawing our attention to the political significance of Saussure's refusal to take his insights to their logical conclusion, Derrida comments that the contention of a 'bad nature' effacing 'a good nature by imposture' shows that 'Saussure is faithful to the tradition that has always associated writing with the fatal violence of the political institution' (Derrida 1976, 36). Appeals to the natural, originary, authentic, or immediately given are not only illusory but dangerously fraudulent in that they conceal the violence on which they in fact depend and which they perpetuate. The volkish arguments of Mann's students exemplify precisely this danger; advocating in naive innocence a return to a more natural way of life, they are instrumental in unleashing a reign of fascist terror by legitimating it on philosophical grounds. Unlike Mann's intellectuals, however, Derrida is well aware that his critique of metaphysics remains caught up in the categories of the tradition he targets. His 'meditation on writing' is modestly meant to 'disturb' rather than destroy or replace the 'opposition of nature and institution' (Derrida 1976,44-5). Although political activists are understandably frustrated by Derrida's refusal to promote or endorse political agendas, his deconstructive critiques encourage us to scrutinize ideological investments for politically suspect moments. The volkish ideas paving the way for fascism could have been disrupted and delegitimized by Derrida's reminder that the natural is inhabited by the violence it claims to exclude. Grounding their intellectual system on the

Fascist Undercurrents 117

supposed plenitude of the natural and sensible, the students assume that an initial organic community was shattered and lost under the impact of history or civilization. There are many versions of this fall from innocent plenitude into a world of contradiction and multiplicity. It is a story which presupposes that a unified whole preceded the moment of differentiation which inaugurated an uncontrollable proliferation of further differentiations. Difference is thus seen as an unfortunate degradation of a desirable original presence to which philosophy wants to return. The most obvious exemplification of this investment in metaphysical presence is the Christian story of the expulsion from the garden of Eden and of our attempts to regain it through the possibility of redemption. Derrida contests this theory of an originary and self-identical moment by arguing that identity presupposes a prior difference which functions as its non-originary origin. A unified whole is not split into separate parts but separate parts are sutured over to appear as a unified whole. Plenitude is consequently always artificially constructed rather than naturally given. This different perspective makes all the difference in that it replaces a foundational philosophy with an anti-foundational theory. In short, where identity promises a solid ground on which to build a political system, difference dismantles such foundational illusions by indefinitely deferring the moment of self-identity. If 'difference is never in itself a sensible plenitude' (Derrida 1976, 53), then we are faced with an epistemological abyss which prevents us from positing a foundational origin. '[T]he final intention in this book,' explains Derrida, is to 'make enigmatic what one thinks one understands by the words "proximity," "immediacy," "presence" (the proximate [proche], the own [propre],+and the pre- of presence)' (Derrida 1976, 70). Derrida proceeds in Of Grammatology to develop the argument that our investments in metaphysical presence make us overlook the violence implicit in what are for the Winfried students desirable and innocent notions of immediacy and presence. It is this 'innocence' that is later more cynically exploited by the more sophisticated proto-fascist Breisacher, whose enthusiasm for volkish ideas appears to be partly genuine and partly staged to conceal his desire to impose his will on his audience.7 Privileging of Origins: The Natural and the Spontaneous (Rousseau)

If Mann's+++++++++++can be said to dramatize that idealistic appeal to innocence are in fact far from innocent, then Derrida's Of'Grammatology can be said to deconstruct the metaphysical tradition which perpetu-

118 Deconstructions of Modernity

ates this myth into postmodern times. Derrida's Of Gmmmatology is centrally concerned with the nature/culture opposition which finds its most prominent expression in Rousseau's Romanticism and surfaces in Doctor Faustus+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ tion). Reinforcing a common view, Mosse's study of volkish ideology shows convincingly that fascism did indeed owe much of its appeal to a neo-Romanticism rampant among German intellectuals. Derrida's analysis of Rousseau and his Romantic legacy is consequently highly pertinent to an understanding of Doctor Faustus. Focusing on evidence that Rousseau exemplifies an investment in metaphysical presence, Derrida portrays him as a philosopher blind to the ideological implications of his arguments. Critics, most notably Paul de Man in Allegories of Reading (1979), have accused Derrida of oversimplifying Rousseau's position, trying to force the author of++++++++++++into pattern++++ consciously rejects. Although debates over the degree of Rousseau's self-consciousness would necessarily influence our assessment of Rousseau himself, they are less important to a study concerned with proto-fascist appropriations of 'Rousseauism,' that is, with the reception his philosophy has received over the centuries. While Of Grammatology alludes to the Social Contract and discusses the Discourse at some length, Derrida's main focus is on a generally neglected Rousseau text,++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ rather fortuitously for my purposes, includes a discussion of music. Although Derrida makes the same argument in other contexts, I focus on this example because it so obviously ties in to Breisacher's denigration of tonal harmony and Leverkiihn's own desire to revitalize the expressive side of music. In the preamble to his close reading of the+++++Derrida sets up a series of interrelated terms in Rousseau's thinking: speech is to writing as presence is to absence and as liberty is to servitude. The second term of these oppositions is always treated as the deterioration or degradation of the first more desirable term. Claiming that harmony is the degeneration of melody, Rousseau's analysis of music already anticipates the pattern Mann imputes to Breisacher's as well as Leverkuhn's history of musical form. Since the transition from polyphony to harmony will also play a major role in later chapters of this study, Derrida's reading of Rousseau's music theory deserves close scrutiny. It is in fact likely that Mann was acquainted with this topic in Rousseau's work, possibly through Adorno, whose knowledge of music and its history was extensive. It is probably no accident that chapters 12 to 19 in the

Fascist Undercurrents 119

Essay, devoted to music, are reminiscent of Kretschmar's lectures in that they begin with The Origin of Music and Its Relations' and end on 'How Music Has Degenerated' (Derrida 1976, 195). This connection between Kretschmar and Rousseau serves above all to stress the roots of volkish ideology in nee-Romanticism. Derrida uncovers in Rousseau's Essay a contradiction whose ramifications have to be suppressed in the ultimate interest of a politically suspect investment in metaphysical presence. Consonant with the effort to privilege nature throughout his work, Rousseau prefers melody to harmony because it is closer to the human voice and hence more expressive of the 'heart.' Tracing music not to sound but voice, he acknowledges that music is in fact a cultural rather than a natural activity. But, although there was 'no music before language' (Derrida 1976,195), music was at its most authentic at the moment it entered the social sphere. It is song, 'born in passion' and coming 'into being at the same time as human society' (Derrida 1976,195), which ought to be the model for musicians. Although music is in any case an artificial and therefore secondary form of speech, melody is preferable to harmony because it imitates '"the accents of the speaking or passionate voice"' (Derrida 1976, 196) and naturally articulates spontaneous emotion. In an argument de Man would presumably dispute, Derrida contends that Rousseau's story of the origin of music cannot admit what it nevertheless tells: For the history that follows the origin and is added to it is nothing but the story of the separation between song and speech. If we consider the difference which fractured the origin, it must be said that this history, which is decadence and degeneracy through and through, had no prehistory. Degeneration as separation, severing of voice and song, has always already begun. We shall see that Rousseau's entire text describes origin as the beginning of the end, as the inaugural decadence. Yet, in spite of that description, the text twists about in a sort of oblique effort to act as if degeneration were not prescribed in the genesis and as if evil supervened upon a+good origin. (Derrida 1976,199

Rousseau has to repress that song is implicated in a chain of supplements which disrupts his dream of a self-present original moment before its contamination by history. Derrida teases out of Rousseau's text that the usurpation of speech by song or melody by harmony is a catastrophic event which has always already taken place. When

120 Deconstructions of Modernity

Rousseau objects to harmony as calculated artificiality, he overlooks that "the necessity of interval, the harsh law of spacing' could not in fact 'endanger song except by being inscribed in it from its birth and in its essence' (Derrida 1976, 200). Contrary to Rousseau's narrative of a 'good music' being gradually corrupted by a 'bad music,' the second is already implicit in the first and is its secret accomplice. Since in 'the Dictionary,+the interval is a part of the definition of song/ it has to be, 's to speak, an originary accessory and an essential accident' (Derrida 1976, 200). Those theorists of fascism arguing for a German+Sonderwe repeat Rousseau's need to repress the knowledge that the 'bad Germany' was constitutive of the 'good Germany' and did not befall it from outside. As we will see, in Doctor Faustus, Mann recants his earlier support of the thesis that Germany had accidentally and hence temporarily lost its way. Having established that Rousseau's need to repress that his appeal to a foundational origin is from the beginning disrupted by the process of substitution, Derrida specifies++++the supplement constitutes such a danger to Rousseau's system. The supplement turns out to be a logical scandal which undermines Rousseau's rational argument for the superiority of the senses. According to Derrida, Rousseau's privileging of song exemplifies his general theory of representation, his argument that mimesis is symptomatic of art's decline into artificiality and hence inauthenticity. Since art is by definition artifice, it allows Rousseau to examine the supplement which threatens the possibility of innocent origins on which his political investment hinges. This examination is all the more pressing as Rousseau himself consistently relies on art to make his political points. He is therefore pleased to discover that, in the first instance, the supplement seems to be harmless. Although reproduction adds 'itself to the represented,' it in fact 'adds nothing, simply supplements it' (Derrida 1976,203). In this sense, art offers access to the thing-in-itself; it functions as the neutral envelope of the content to be communicated. If it adds nothing, it is mere ostentation and harmless luxury. At the same time, as Derrida stresses, Rousseau is aware that the supplement may not be as harmless as it seems. By adding itself to what it seeks to represent, the supplement points to the inadequacy of the represented. The 'imitative supplement' is consequently 'dangerous to the integrity of what is represented and to the original purity of nature' (Derrida 1976, 203). Rousseau's philosophical investment in metaphysical presence thus forces him into a contradictory position on art: 'Rousseau must at once denounce mimesis and art as supplements

Fascist Undercurrents 121

(supplements that are dangerous when they are not useless, superfluous when they are not disastrous, in truth both at the same time) and recognize in them man's good fortune, the expression of passion, the emergence from the inanimate' (Derrida 1976, 203-4). Although this contradiction cannot be resolved, it can be attenuated by more spontaneously expressive art forms like song. It is now possible to understand on what grounds Rousseau distinguishes between good and bad music. The good form of music, which, through representative imitation, produces sense while exceeding the senses/ he argues, 'would be melody' (Derrida 1976, 212). And the bad form of music is specifically exemplified by Rameau's formalism, an undesirable development not only because it is artificial but even more so because it passes itself off as natural. Rameau's fault is 'twofold: an artificialist exuberance and an illusory or abusive recourse to nature, an excess of arbitrariness which claims to be grounded solely in the physics of sound' (Derrida 1976, 210). Since harmony relies on the 'calculation of intervals,' it is coldly rational, while melody, which Rousseau depicts as 'the imitative expression of meaning (of passion, of the thing as it interests us)/ is the 'true living content of the work' (Derrida 1976, 213). In a move which anticipates volkish hostility to modernity, Rousseau sees Rameau's formalism as a symptom of 'the sickness both of the history of the West and of European ethnocentrism' (Derrida 1976,212). As Derrida points out, according to Rousseau, harmony 'is a musical perversion that dominates Europe (Northern Europe) alone, and ethnocentrism consists of considering it a natural and universal principle of music' (Derrida 1976, 212). All progress is for Rousseau a sign of decadence because it distances society from its innocent roots in nature. The political equivalent of his resistance to harmony is his suspicion of complex social and political institutions. Although touted as a progressive revolutionary, Rousseau did in reality call for a conservative retreat from modern civilization. For him, as for his volkish appropriators, the Enlightenment narrative is marked by diminished vitality. This dangerous argument suffuses Rousseau's privileging of melody over harmony. Lamenting that melody has been++++++++++ musical system which has+++++++become purely harmonic/ Rousseau contends that 'it is not surprising that its oral tone [accent] has suffered, and that our music has lost almost all its++++++(Derrida 1976, 199). Instead of accounting for the way harmony undermines melody from within, Rousseau insists that calculation enters a spontaneously expressive music from outside. His aim is therefore to combat the catastrophe

122 Deconstruct!ons of Modernity

that has befallen music with the advent of harmony. What Rousseau deplores is that harmony 'breaks in as a dangerous supplement, as a substitute that enfeebles, enslaves, effaces, separates, and falsifies' (Derrida 1976, 215). Wanting to 'restore a natural degree of art within which chromatics, harmonics, and interval would be unknown' (Derrida 1976, 214), Rousseau anticipates the anti-rational turn of appeals to authenticity and vitality which the fascists will enact in their conservative rhetoric. We will see later that Leverkuhn's atonal experiments constitute a dialectical attempt to transcend the feeble formalism to which tonal music had succumbed so as to regain for his compositions the possibility of authentic expression. Privileging of Origins: Innocence and Violence (Levi-Strauss) The sinister underside of our continued investments in Rousseau's metaphysical presence is most graphically brought out in Derrida's reading of Claude Levi-Strauss's narrative of the Nambikwara in+Triste Tropiques. Although Levi-Strauss means to display and condemn the West's Eurocentrism, his ethnography is ultimately 'limited' and thrown into contradiction by his fidelity to Rousseau's myth of naturally innocent human beginnings. Derrida focuses on two incidents to demonstrate that intersubjective violence preexisted the arrival of civilization, which Levi-Strauss blames for the corruption of the primitive community he admires. The first incident shows Levi-Strauss nostalgically insisting that '"the lost world of the Nambikwara"' exemplifies an innocent community cemented by natural bonds no longer operative in modern civilization. Fearing that this innocent world has been preserved only by a miracle, the anxious anthropologist worries that his presence might violate 'a virginal space' because 'the glance of the foreigner' would shape and reorient 'the space' (Derrida 1976, 113) under investigation. This fear seems to be justified when a group of little girls at play draw the observer into their game. The girls use nicknames because for the Nambikwara proper names are sacred and meant to remain secret. In the incident so disturbing to Levi-Strauss, one of the little girls breaks this taboo and whispers the proper name of another girl into the foreigner's ear. In retaliation, the second girl then reveals the first girl's proper name to Levi-Strauss. For the anthropologist, this scene illustrates how his gaze transformed an innocent game into a theatre of aggression. But, according to Derrida, Levi-Strauss's+++++++++++

Fascist Undercurrents 123

looks that the breaking of the taboo takes place within a system of classification which is already inhabited by the violence he does not want to acknowledge. Forgetting his own work on names in The Savage Mind, Levi-Strauss treats the 'proper name' as an essential attribute rather than as a sociolinguistic function. The taboo is in fact only the displacement of the earlier violence of naming as such: To name, to give names that it will on occasion be forbidden to pronounce, such is the originary violence of language which consists in inscribing within a difference, in classifying, in suspending the vocative absolute. To think the unique+++++the system, to inscribe it there, such is the gesture of the arche-writing: arche-violence, loss of the proper, of absolute proximity, of self-presence, in truth the loss of what has never taken place, of a self-presence which has never been given but only dreamed of and always already split, repeated, incapable of appearing to itself except in its own disappearance. (Derrida 1976,113)

Prior to being touched by modern civilization, the Nambikwara employed a system of differentiations which had already violated the natural goodness Levi-Strauss attributes to them. Far from inaugurating violence, Levi-Strauss only redirects it. His+++++++++serves to buttress his investment in Rousseau's legacy, for, as Derrida points out, 'the critique of ethnocentrism ... has most often the sole function of constituting the other as a model of original and natural goodness' (Derrida 1976, 114). What is at stake for Derrida is the dangerous assumption, shared by apologists for German fascism, that violence befalls an otherwise innocent people from outside. His investment in Rousseau's legacy blinds Levi-Strauss to the real locus of violence and makes him hostile to modernity. The second 'extraordinary incident' has Levi-Strauss giving a 'writing lesson' to the illiterate Nambikwara which is immediately exploited by their leader for political ends. This scene allows Derrida to analyse the explicit link between violence and writing which the anthropologist inherits from Rousseau's contention that social institutions are detrimental to a naturally good human disposition. Distributing pencils to the illiterate, and hence 'naturally good' Nambikwara, the anthropologist was astonished to see them imitating him by drawing wavy lines. The most 'extraordinary' moment came when the leader of the Nambikwara, who 'was the only one among them to have understood what writing was for' (Derrida 1976, 122), no longer answered Levi-

124 Deconstructions of Modernity

Strauss with words but 'traced a wavy line or two on the paper and gave it to me, as if I could read what he had to say' (Derrida 1976,125). In front of his assembled people, the leader then 'drew forth from a basket a piece of paper covered with scribbled lines and pretended to read from it' (Derrida 1976, 125). With Levi-Strauss's collusion, this play-acting allowed the leader 'to amaze his companions and persuade them that his intermediacy was responsible for the exchange [of gifts], that he had allied himself with the white man, and that he could now share in his secrets' (Derrida 1976, 126). The point of this scene is for Levi-Strauss that the leader immediately recognized the power of writing and used it to consolidate his political authority. Illiteracy is consequently identified with innocence and writing with violence. Analysing Levi-Strauss's later interpretation of the writing scene (what Derrida calls the 'rememoration'), Derrida illustrates that the 'point of the incident in effect supports an enormous theoretical edifice' (Derrida 1976, 126). In the first instance, Levi-Strauss seems to claim that the 'appearance of writing is instantaneous/ thereby proving 'that the possibility of writing does not inhabit speech, but the outside of speech' (Derrida 1976,126-7). However, as Derrida stresses, 'the scene was not the scene of the origin, but only that of the imitation of writing' (Derrida 1976, 127). Beyond this deconstruction of the exteriority of writing, Derrida points to a second significance of Levi-Strauss's reading of the scene. Since the leader did not need to understand writing in order to exploit it, 'the end of writing is political and not theoretical' (Derrida 1976, 127). In other words, writing serves power rather than knowledge. Far from disputing this association of writing with political domination, Derrida argues that Levi-Strauss was too restrictive in his interpretation. Agreeing that 'writing cannot be thought outside the horizon of intersubjective violence' (Derrida 1976, 127), Derrida is not prepared to posit a virginal space prior to the intrusion of writing. If there is nothing that 'one can call alien at once to writing and to violence' (Derrida 1976, 127), then there is nothing that can escape intersubjective violence. Fingering writing as the culprit, Levi-Strauss is blind to the violence played out in front of his eyes by the little girls. Mistaking the symptom for its cause, the anthropologist risks supporting a myth of innocence which allows violence to operate undetected and hence unchecked. Levi-Strauss's interpretation of the writing lesson also undermines the possibility of resistance to social violence. By equating writing with violence, the anthropologist blames himself and, by extension, modern

Fascist Undercurrents 125

civilization for the ills that befall the Nambikwara. Through his hostility to modernity, though, the anthropologist may well be dismissing a weapon against violence. The leader's political exploitation of writing leads Levi-Strauss to the central 'hypothesis' that 'the primary function of writing, as a means of communication, is to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings' (quoted in Derrida 1976,130). Once again, Derrida does not entirely disagree with Levi-Strauss, acknowledging that it 'has long been known that the power of writing in the hands of a small number, caste, or class, is always contemporaneous with hierarchization' (Derrida 1976, 130). However, driven by his romantic nostalgia, Levi-Strauss is guilty of a reductive reading, for, as Derrida cautions, '[w]hat is going to be called+++++++++++can equally leg mately be called liberation. And it is at the moment that this oscillation is stopped on the signification of enslavement that the discourse is frozen into a determined ideology that we would judge disturbing if such were our first preoccupation here' (Derrida 1976,131). What is 'disturbing' in this frozen ideological moment is the hostility Levi-Strauss exhibits toward the positive civilizing aspects of modernity, the kind of hostility which earlier left the sociopolitical field open to the emergence of fascism in Europe. Derrida expressly accuses the anthropologist of a dangerous anarchism which is, at least implicitly, one of the hallmarks of fascist appeals to authenticity: Tn this text, Levi-Strauss does not distinguish between hierarchization and domination, between political authority and exploitation. The tone that pervades these reflections is of an anarchism that deliberately confounds law and oppression' (Derrida 1976,131). For Levi-Strauss, '[p]olitical power can only be the custodian of an unjust power,' a thesis which is 'here advanced as self-evident, without opening the least bit of critical dialogue with the holders of the other thesis, according to which the generality of the law is on the contrary the condition of liberty in the city' (Derrida 1976,131).8 It is not a question of validating culture (the city) over nature, for, as Derrida warns, we 'must above all avoid reversing them and take the opposite view' (Derrida 1976,132). Complicating the nature/culture oppositions central to our philosophical tradition, Derrida means to lay bare assumptions we have uncritically adopted. Although writing may have played the role of domination Levi-Strauss attributes to it, it is dangerously hasty to 'conclude that speech is exempt from it' (Derrida 1976, 133). The violence perpetrated in the name of a nostalgic search for innocent origins during the Nazi period is undoubtedly the most graphic illustration of Derrida's point.

126 Deconstructions of Modernity

Having shown that 'A Writing Lesson' stages the confession or mea culpa of the anthropologist who thought that his mere presence (penetration), let alone demonstration of writing (active intervention), was sufficient to disrupt the community he wanted to preserve, Derrida concludes his analysis by foregrounding Levi-Strauss's indebtedness to Rousseau. At the end of his narrative, Levi-Strauss triumphantly relates how the 'good' Nambikwara saw through the leader's ruse and rejected writing. Invested in the ideal image of 'a community immediately present to itself (Derrida 1976,136), he nostalgically approves of the Nambikwara for having at least 'provisionally protected themselves from corruption' (Derrida 1976,134). In a gesture reminiscent of volkish intellectuals, he dismisses modern social structures as inauthentic and makes the 'criterion of authenticity' the '"neighborliness" in the small communities where "everyone knows everyone else'" (Derrida 1976, 137). In the Essay, Rousseau similarly contended that 'social distance, the dispersion of the neighborhood, is the condition of oppression, arbitrariness, and vice' (Derrida 1976,137). Having defined writing 'as the condition of social inauthenticity' (Derrida 1976,136), Levi-Strauss fails to see that he is 'dealing here [the Nambikwara] not only with a strongly hierarchized society, but with a society where relationships are marked with a spectacular violence' (Derrida 1976,135). In an explicitly political commentary, Derrida concludes: 'Self-presence, transparent proximity in the face-to-face of countenances and the immediate range of the voice, this determination of social authenticity is therefore classic: Rousseauistic but already inherited of Platonism, it relates, we recall, to the Anarchistic and Libertarian protestations against Law, the Powers, and the State in general' (Derrida 1976, 138). In the same sense, then, the appeal to a lost organic+++++in neo-Romantic ideology mus be situated within the 'classic' tradition of Western thought rather than characterized as its unfortunate aberration. At the same time, postmodern theories have to be scrutinized for the kind of politically dangerous investments Levi-Strauss unwittingly exemplifies in 'The Writing Lesson.' It is doubtful that Derrida's 'lesson' about Levi-Strauss's 'lesson' has fully entered our cultural consciousness. What we should have learned above all is that the categories we set up to frame our questions already orient and limit what can be said about an issue. Recapitulating in Of Grammatolog+his analysis of Levi-Strauss's nature/culture opposition in 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences,' Derrida reminds us that the incest taboo struck the anthropologist as a 'scandal' because

Fascist Undercurrents 127

it defied the schema he had set up. Having categorized 'nature' as everything that is 'universal' and 'culture' as everything that is 'subject to a norm/ Levi-Strauss admits to having been 'confronted with a fact, or rather a group of facts, which, in the light of previous definitions, are not far removed from a scandal ... [for] the prohibition of incest ... presents, without the slightest ambiguity, and inseparably combines, the two characteristics in which we recognize the conflicting features of two mutually exclusive orders. It constitutes a rule, but a rule which, alone among all the social rules, possesses at the same time a universal character' (quoted in Derrida 1976,104). But, as Derrida points out, the incest taboo is a scandal only because Levi-Strauss had set up and continued to valorize the categories of nature and culture which made it so. Had Levi-Strauss taken his insight into this scandal seriously, he might presumably have been compelled to question his investment in metaphysical presence. Derrida seems to imply that deconstructive self-consciousness promises to save intellectuals from becoming unwittingly complicit with ideologies they would consciously abhor. Derrida's illustration of the political implications of nostalgia for a more vital but inevitably lost world applies almost too obviously to the volkish ideology dramatized in++++++++++++++In the case of suc intellectuals as those in Mann's novel, a more suspicious reading of volkish ideas would have sounded warning bells and might have prevented the German catastrophe. However, Mann's treatment of Leverkiihn may well expose Derrida's own naivete in assuming that uncovering the violence hidden in innocence is in itself a protection against it. Challenged by Zeitblom's fear that Leverkiihn's position is radically anti-liberal, the latter self-consciously rationalizes that our understanding of barbarism is culturally constructed and framed: '[B]arbarism is the opposite of culture only within the order of thought which it gives us. Outside of it the opposite may be something quite different or no opposite at all' (Mann 1968, 61). The supplementary relationship between culture and barbarism is here exploited to affirm violence rather than to warn against it. As I hope to show later, the supplement's disruption of presence can be appropriated by the political right as well as the political left. The Holocaust and Modernity's Privileging of Reason Derrida's deconstruction of metaphysical presence forces us to confront the volkish rhetoric of Mann's proto-fascists not as an aberration from

128 Deconstructions of Modernity

modernity but as the radical extension of the philosophical assumptions on which liberal humanists like Zeitblom have legitimated their own moral and political investments. On the level of+++++++then, German National Socialism remains deeply implicated in the modernity which their anti-liberal invectives seem to despise. Volkish rhetoric is mobilized by the conviction that the project of modernity has been derailed by sociocultural developments no longer in tune with the emancipatory ambition of modernity to integrate the subject into a harmoniously coherent community. The volkish ambition to regain an organically unified social order through a return to expressive spontaneity finds a mirror image in Hegel's Utopian desire for the harmonious identity of subject and object in Absolute Knowledge. It is therefore not surprising that Derrida's deconstruction of metaphysical presence targets both Rousseau's expressive and Hegel's rational legacies. Instead of pursuing Derrida's highly abstract philosophical trajectory further, I will examine how the specifically fascist repercussions of modernity's investment in reason find their pertinent articulation in Horkheimer and Adorno's sociohistorical examination of Odysseus in+Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Marshall Berman's cultural analysis of Goethe's Faust in++++++++++++++++++++++++(1988), and Zygmunt Bauman' sociological study,++++++++++++++++++++++++ Where Horkheimer and Adorno illustrate that scientific or rational operations remain implicated in mythic or superstitious processes, Bauman and Berman stress that modernity's reliance on instrumental reason remains complicit with the very violence it is generally assumed to have attenuated or erased. According to the metanarrative of Enlightenment these theorists deconstruct, the accomplishment of modern civilization rests, above all, on the elimination of threats to survival which Hobbes depicts in the pre-modern state of nature as an unregulated and violent space. It is to combat dangerous natural impulses, both external and internal, that the idea of a social contract, whether Hobbes's paternalistic dream of a benevolent dictator or Rousseau's version of a common will, take hold of the modern imagination. Both Hobbes and Rousseau assume that violence can be controlled, if not eliminated, through proper rational constraints either imposed by the sovereign or agreed upon by the people. Yet, as Horkheimer and Adorno, Berman, and Bauman show, this project of rational methodology and social engineering was from the beginning implicated in the irrational superstitions and violences it sought to combat. Horkheimer and Adorno trace this 'dark underside' of the Enlightenment back to Odysseus

Fascist Undercurrents 129

while Herman sees it spectacularly embodied in Goethe's Faust. Although Berman gestures toward Auschwitz and Horkheimer and Adorno write in its shadow, it is in Bauman's sociological study of the Holocaust as an always possible, albeit unintentional, outcome of modernity's investment in instrumental reason that this dark underside receives its historically specific articulation. The Uncanny Logic of the Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno)

Although Mann's allusions to the demonic seductiveness of neoRomantic tendencies trace the rise of fascism to irrationalism, Leverkuhn's inclination to curse his cold intellectualism implies that the fault also lies with an excess of reason. The 'demonic' argument holds that the irrational was able to take hold in reaction to the reification of society; nostalgia for the German 'soul' was invoked to compensate for the coldly rational sterility of modern life. From this perspective, reason may have been the impetus for irrational reactions against it, but it was not directly implicated in the fascist reversion to barbarism. In other words, madness had befallen reason from the outside, and reason had failed only in so far as it had been too weak and ineffective to withstand the onslaught of irrational forces. However, Horkheimer and Adorno contend that reason was in fact complicit with the forces of evil, reinforcing mystifications that were not only to be exploited by the Nazi propaganda machine but that also served the agenda of bourgeois capitalism. Anticipating Derrida's insight into the damaging effects of the tendency in Western metaphysics to secretly privilege one term of an opposition, Adorno draws attention to the dangerous misconceptions that arise when we follow Hegel in absolutizing reason as the preferred category. In the+++++++++++++++++++++Horkheimer and Adorno undermine the Hegelian master-narrative of human perfectibility being predicated on the self-actualization of reason as the ultimate purpose of history. This polemical text stresses above all that scientific progress continues to be inhabited by the myths that modern reason believes to have transcended. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno analyse the ideological repercussions of their contention that scientific reason remains implicated in mythical superstition just as myth is always already in some sense rational. Far from rejecting the Enlightenment narrative, they try to reveal how modernity falsely assumes that science has been

130 Deconstructions of Modernity

able to expel magic once and for all, how it blindly subscribes to Hegel's teleological presupposition that history ineluctably progresses toward Absolute Knowledge. They object to the dogmatic and monolithic tendencies of modernity. By suppressing whatever cannot be accommodated by the scientific model of the mathematized world, modernity not only ignores what also constitutes it but leaves itself ominously open to the unexpected or to the return of the repressed 'other/ Where Breisacher appeals to mythology as a revitalizing power, Horkheimer and Adorno propose to++++++++++the implications of the way myth and science ar intertwined. In a dialectical fashion, they maintain, 'the myths already realize enlightenment' (Horkheimer and Adorno 1990,11) and 'enlightenment with every step becomes more deeply engulfed in mythology' (Horkheimer and Adorno 1990, 12). On the one hand, then,+Dialectic o Enlightenment anticipates and reinforces Derrida's deconstruction of dogmas appealing to the supposed innocence of some mythic origins. On the other, though, it also uncovers the complicity of reason with bourgeois capitalism by illustrating that reason itself has become a form of domination inviting resistance. Mann's fictional treatment of volkish nostalgia for German mythology and of Leverkuhn's aesthetic breakthrough owes much to the considerations Horkheimer and Adorno introduce when they draw attention to the ways that the 'dark underside' of enlightenment resurfaced in totalitarian fascism. In the first place,++++++++++++++++++argues that myth is always poised to return because science can never entirely sever its connection with its own mythological roots. It is not just that science remains mythological but that myth is necessarily implicated in reason. If scientific reason blinds itself to its repressed 'other,' then it risks being undermined by the unexpected resurgence of unbidden myths. That appeals to volkish mythologies should have proven so successful confirms the tenacious hold of superstitions in an age understanding itself to be dominated by reason. Anticipating Derrida, Horkheimer and Adorno consider it important to demystify the illusory assumption that social relations have at some time in the past been more authentic than they appear today under the reifying impact of modernity in its late bourgeois-capitalist phase. For them there has never been a moment of originary innocence when subjects were transparently present to each other. Like Derrida, they suggest that the Violence' of social mediation has always already been at work; yearnings for spontaneous social bonds overlook that myths of original innocence reveal themselves on closer inspection to have been infected by the rational processes they explicitly mean to exclude.

Fascist Undercurrents 131

The authors of++++++++++++++++++++enforce this point in a footnote rebuking Ludwig Klages, a prominent influence on the volkish proto-fascists fictionalized in Mann's novel. An 'enthusiastic apologist for myth and sacrifice' (Horkheimer and Adorno 1990, 50), Klages glorifies the exchange of gifts in mythic societies as evidence of spontaneity and disinterested self-sacrifice without realizing that this giftgiving is really rational in nature. In this appeal to 'sacrifice as a form of exchange without mediation, in which the individual is submerged in the collective' (Jarvis 1998, 29), Klages exemplifies the glorification of 'immediate pre-rational social relations' (Jarvis 1998, 28) which Mann dramatizes in the volkish arguments of his intellectuals. However, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, the 'principle of equivalence' (Horkheimer and Adorno 1990, 49) that Klages condemns as a sign of the alienated social relations in modern society has in fact always already been operative in the apparently spontaneous exchange of gifts he celebrates as an alternative model. When he approves of sacrifice as 'a purely immediate form of social exchange in which social relations are not concealed' (Jarvis 1998, 29), he overlooks that sacrificial substitution is already marked by the logic of mediation. In other words, sacrifice in mythic societies anticipates later manifestations of substitutive exchange in which sacrifice is internalized. Dominated by commodity fetishism, modern life conceals the emotional sacrifices we make in our quest for the material rewards available to us through capitalist modes of production. Attempting to historicize the modern form of rationalization by 'revealing it as a crisis of capitalism' (Wolin 1994, xxxiii), Horkheimer and Adorno show not only that 'a supposedly archaic violence remains present in civility' but also that sacrifice features in both 'rationality' and 'lack of immediacy' (Jarvis 1998, 29-30). Sacrifice therefore does 'not represent those transparent social relations for which Klages [like Mann's intellectuals] is nostalgic'; like Derrida in his demystification of the Nambikwara, Horkheimer and Adorno contend that pre-modern society's sacrifice 'contains deceit, ideology, nontransparency, from the beginning' (Jarvis 1998, 30). In magic, too, domination is always already present, but it is 'not yet internalized and mystified' (Jarvis 1998, 30). It follows that not only is there 'no time "before" domination' but 'domination would in any case be no+bette for not being concealed' (Jarvis 1998,30). Appeals to myths as sites for a return to lost spontaneity are suspect because they leave violence unchecked by suppressing awareness of it. If it is through the failure of reason that repressed myths return, it is only through reason that these myths can in turn be deconstructed.

132 Deconstructions of Modernity

Like Mann's fictional Breisacher, Horkheimer and Adorno sketch a speculative history of civilization which runs counter-intuitively from civilization to barbarism but which, unlike Breisacher's account, argues for a transformation of modernity rather than for its rejection. Since they 'do not believe that there was a time "before" domination/ they see 'no route "back" from the dialectic of enlightenment' (Jarvis 1998, 28) to a gentler past. Although Horkheimer and Adorno share with Klages the anxiety Mann also attributes to Leverkiihn that 'contemporary civilization suffers from an excess of "intellect" over "life/" (Wolin 1994, xxx), they reject the mythological critique of reason which Klages proposes when he taps into archaic images. At first glance, it seems that Leverkuhn's Nietzschean yearning for 'life' remains within Klages's volkish vitalist critique; his decision to pursue Esmeralda indicates that he may agree with Klages's conviction that 'a surfeit of consciousness' works to 'the disadvantage of heightened states of experience' (Wolin 1994, xxxv). Yet Leverkuhn's relationship to magic and (self-)sacrifice does not ultimately endorse Klages's volkish nostalgia; his behaviour is that of the 'cunning' sacrificer who knows very well that 'the magic self-surrender of the individual to the collective... and self-preservation by the technique of this magic, implies an objective contradiction which tends to the development of the rational element in sacrifice' (Horkheimer and Adorno 1990, 49-50). According to this dialectical logic, Leverkuhn feigns a predilection for the irrational so as to force the 'rational element' to triumph in the end.9 However, this cunning agenda is far from reassuring; in his attempt to absolutize reason, Leverkuhn foregrounds the complicity of reason with both capitalism and fascism. What is at stake in the++++++++++++++++++++is not only the blindness of reason to the return of its repressed other but the misplaced confidence of Hegel (and Kant) in rationality as a principle potentially capable of liberating humanity once and for all from all dogmatism and domination. Horkheimer and Adorno use the term 'enlightenment' not so much to 'designate a historical period running from Descartes to Kant' but 'to refer to a series of related intellectual and practical operations which are presented as demythologizing, secularizing or disenchanting some mythical, religious or magical representation of the world' (Jarvis 1998, 24). Against the widespread interpretation of+++++++++++++++++++++as a polemically inflated anti-enlightenment statement, I agree with Jarvis that 'Adorno and Horkheimer do not want to reverse enlightenment': The point is that positivistic and rationalistic conceptions of enlightenment are not en-

Fascist Undercurrents 133

lightened enough. They present us with an idea of reason which is actually mythical, rather than fully rational, because it suppresses, rather than reflecting on, its own relation to myth and tradition. Conversely, Adorno and Horkheimer suggest that myth is itself already a kind of rationality, a way of ordering, classifying and controlling the world' (Jarvis 1998, 22-3). Intent on purging the world of superstition, enlightenment constructs the myth of rationality having triumphed over mythology, thereby blinding itself to its tendency to revert to mythology precisely because the process of 'radical rationalization' (Jarvis 1998, 25) obscures reason's entanglement with domination. Throughout his career, Adorno was primarily preoccupied with the seemingly inescapable presence of domination and coercion in social life. The++++++++++++++++++++++moves from the human desire f mastery over hostile nature, to the domination of human beings over other human beings, and finally to the internalization of social domination in the form of self-mastery. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the dialectic of enlightenment produces the very mythology it had set out to expel. Although intended to allow the subject to dominate nature, instrumental reason ends up infecting the subject itself, alienating it from itself and the social community. Human consciousness is not liberated but reified, for 'world domination over nature turns against the thinking subject itself (Horkheimer and Ardorno 1990, 26). If reason is restricted to the domination of nature, then the subject finds itself treated as an object to be dominated. The most damaging consequence of this reifying process is that Hegel's dynamic conception of history reveals itself as an illusion in that the historical conditions under late capitalism have resulted in a static reproduction of existence reminiscent of the eternal return of 'the same' in myth. Under these conditions, reason turns against itself: 'What appears to be the triumph of subjective rationality, the subjection of all reality to logical formalism, is paid for by the obedient subjection of reason to what is directly given' (Horkheimer and Adorno 1990, 26). Modernity's reductive view of reason makes the subject blind to the real conditions of its existence and, 'deprived of hope' to change the world by the weight of the 'given,' it becomes resigned to the+++++++++f the subject's consciousness is reified, then it is blindly compelled to reproduce existing conditions in their most static form. Seen from Adorno's preoccupation with domination, reason reveals itself not as the overcoming of dogmatism, as Kant had assumed, but as a form of dogmatism in its own right; magic and science can be said to

134 Deconstructions of Modernity

serve the same purpose. When Horkheimer and Adorno claim that 'enlightenment is as totalitarian as any system/ they mean that reason excludes whatever it cannot contain and is therefore a dogmatic process whose outcome 'is always decided from the start' (Horkheimer and Adorno 1990, 24). If reason predetermines its results by recognizing only what can be counted and classified, then it is as dogmatic as the myths it claims to have outlived. Once reason has been reduced to scientific calculation and classification, the 'unknown' is converted into the 'well-known' in a process which represses 'indissolubility and irrationality' (Horkheimer or Adorno 1990, 24). Horkheimer and Adorno are not proposing that the irrational can be drawn upon to undo the totalizing tendencies of instrumental reason. Since domination is their target, they object to the dogmatic aspects of both myth and science. Myth and superstition appeal to dogmatic authorities which modernity dismisses as illegitimate and irrational. In contrast, the modern subject is supposedly free from the arbitrary power of forces outside human understanding and control. However, as Horkheimer and Adorno stress, against its rational self-understanding, enlightenment manifests a will to power which ruthlessly excludes and represses whatever threatens to escape its domain. The task of critical theory is to demystify the normally unquestioned assumptions of the Enlightenment narrative as the liberation from domination. By falsely identifying the 'mathematized world' with truth, 'enlightenment tends to secure itself against the return of the mythic' (Horkheimer and Adorno 1990, 25). But, as the Holocaust has conclusively illustrated, this sense of security is not only illusory but dangerous. Leverkiihn's uncanny laughter symbolizes his understanding of the claim by Horkheimer and Adorno that 'an actual reversion of enlightened civilization to barbarism' (Horkheimer and Adorno 1990, xvi-xvii) remains a possibility precisely because modernity prefers to remain blind to the survival of the other of reason it had falsely prided itself on having expelled. The analysis of the story of Odysseus in Dialectic of Enlightenment is meant to illustrate precisely how reason does not defeat domination but internalizes it. To secure passage for his ship, Odysseus cunningly plugs the ears of his crew so that they cannot hear the sirens, while tying himself to a mast so that he can hear them but is unable to move. Horkheimer and Adorno reinterpret Odysseus's famous cunning as a form of intellectual labour which sets him off from the crew who contribute the manual labour. This social division allows Odysseus to

Fascist Undercurrents 135

overcome nature, but it enslaves the crew and restricts his own freedom of movement. The domination of nature is thus won at 'the cost of selfblinding social and psychological compulsion'; Odysseus is the master who is also 'mastered and self-mastered' (Jarvis 1998,27). Having introduced the class division between intellectual and manual labour, Odysseus is for Horkheimer and Adorno the symbol of modern bourgeois individualism. 'Domination over nature/ explains Jarvis, 'is paid for with the naturalization of social domination. Power over nature, the real advance of human freedom, is paid for with impotent subjection to the social divisions and domination which grant that power' (Jarvis 1998, 27). What Odysseus symbolically unleashes on the world is a conceptual apparatus which reduces reason to its instrumental or practical aspects. It follows that in modern industrial society, 'being' is now 'apprehended under the aspect of manufacture and administration' (Horkheimer and Adorno 1990, 84). The relevance of this should be clear: when Mann details the frustrations and dissatisfactions of the Winfried students and Munich intellectuals, he conveys precisely how alienated individuals feel in a society serving the sterile ends of capitalist production. Enjoying the material benefits and social power of their middle-class background, these intellectuals take refuge in nostalgia rather than oppose the economic system whose emphasis on efficiency is for Horkheimer and Adorno not only symptomatic of cultural sterility but directly complicit with fascist totalitarianism. For them, German National Socialism is an extension of the violence implicit in the moral rationalizations of capitalist exploitation to which the bourgeois middle class chooses to remain blind: 'Previously, only the poor and savages were exposed to the fury of the capitalist elements. But the totalitarian order gives full rein to calculation and abides by science as such. Its canon is its own brutal efficiency' (Horkheimer and Adorno 1990, 86). Although Odysseus outwits the mythic gods, his cunning constitutes a reconfiguration rather than the elimination of domination; Horkheimer and Adorno trace the seeds of fascist totalitarianism to a moment when reason apparently triumphed over superstitious dogma. In their critique of instrumental reason, Horkheimer and Adorno seem to be deploring the same internalization of domination that the Winfried students and Breisacher indict as the mark of modernity, but they also recognize that German fascists secretly exploited for their own totalizing purposes the very rational processes they decried as the stultifying legacy of liberal and socialist

136 Deconstructions of Modernity

tendencies. Under the guise of liberating people from the domination of industrial rationalization, the Nazis in effect subjected German citizens to the most thoroughly rationalized administrative apparatus. Social Engineering and Genocide (Bauman and Berman) In 1990 Zygmunt Bauman's+++++++++++++++++++++++was awar the Amalfi European Prize for its contribution to what the author calls 'the issue of morality and utility, whose divorce ... lies at the foundation of our civilization's most spectacular successes and most terrifying crimes' (Bauman 1991, 209). What distinguishes this sociological study of the Holocaust is the perhaps rather audacious thesis that the ideological assumptions of modernity are not only entirely compatible with modern genocide but its enabling condition: 'Modern civilization was not the Holocaust's sufficient condition; it was, however, most certainly its necessary condition. Without it, the Holocaust would be unthinkable. It was the rational world of modern civilization that made the Holocaust thinkable' (Bauman 1991,13). Although Bauman refers to neither Mann nor Adorno, he provides sociological evidence for the theoretical implications I am trying to draw out of++++++++++++that is, he reinforces the contention that German fascism exploited the rationalizing tendencies of modernity. For this sociologist, Auschwitz was the ultimate triumph of the rational propensities which Mann symbolizes through Leverkiihn's cold intellectualism. Bauman's research into the organizational preconditions that witnesses and historians pinpoint in their accounts leads him to insist that the genocide was 'a product of routine bureaucratic procedures: meansends calculus, budget balancing, universal rule application' (Bauman 1991, 17; emphasis in original). Instead of indicting the neo-Romantic roots of fascism, he turns to Max Weber's analysis of the modern administrative apparatus to explain how the Nazis managed not only to annihilate 'more than 20 million people' but to 'mark' the Jews 'for total destruction' (Bauman 1991, x). The answer lies in the normalcy of the rule-determined procedures that are used to serve what civilization deems to be irrational ends. On the most obvious level, the death camps could not have come into being without the support of an array of existing private and public institutions and bureaucracies: '[Auschwitz] was also a mundane extension of the modern factory system ... The brilliantly organized railroad grid of modern Europe carried a new kind of raw material to the factories ... Engineers designed the cremato-

Fascist Undercurrents 137

ria; managers designed the system of bureaucracy that worked with a zest and efficiency more backward nations would envy. Even the overall plan itself was a reflection of the modern scientific spirit gone awry. What we witnessed was nothing less than a massive scheme of social engineering' (Feingold 1983, 399-400; quoted in Bauman 1991, 8). Not surprisingly, it is Weber's analysis of the administered society which provides the paradigm for understanding modernity's complicity with Auschwitz; referring to Richard L. Rubenstein's contribution to a symposium on the Holocaust, Bauman contends 'that in Weber's exposition of modern bureaucracy, rational spirit, principle of efficiency, scientific mentality, relegation of values to the realm of subjectivity etc. no mechanism was recorded that was capable of excluding the possibility of Nazi excesses; that, moreover, there was nothing in Weber's ideal types that would necessitate the description of the activities of the Nazi state as excesses'+(Bauman 1991,10). It could be said that the genocide happene because the organization for its occurrence was in place. What makes+++++++++++++++++++++++++so haunting is Bau meticulous analysis of the many ordinary procedures and problemsolving initiatives that combined to obscure or legitimate the immoral ends they served. The 'final solution' should not be misconstrued as an irrational aberration from modernity but 'arose out of a genuinely rational concern, and it was generated by bureaucracy true to its form and purpose' (Bauman 1991, 17). Although the 'culture of instrumental rationality' did not cause the Holocaust, it is important to recognize that its rules 'are singularly incapable of preventing such phenomena; that there is nothing in those rules which disqualifies the Holocaust-style methods of "social-engineering" as improper or, indeed, the actions they served as irrational' (Bauman 1991,18). As I have already shown in my analysis of Mann's incorporation of Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, this connection between instrumental rationality and social engineering draws attention to the 'unintended consequences' following from investments in notions of the perfect society. Such privileging of rational planning can be traced not only to Odysseus's cunning defeat of the sirens, as analysed by Horkeimer and Adorno, but also to Faust's taming of nature in Berman's reading of Goethe's Faust. Mann's announcement that Leverkiihn's 'Lament of Doctor Faustus' takes back Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy' generally entices critics to assume that Mann's Faust similarly takes back Goethe's Faust; however, Berman's examination of Goethe's play suggests that Leverkiihn is an

138 Deconstructions of Modernity

extension rather than a denial of Goethe's Faust. In the first place, Goethe's play anticipates Mann's novel in that it is marked by 'a basic irony that infuses this story from its start: in the course of working with and through the devil, Faust develops into a genuinely better man' (Berman 1988, 51). Unlike Bauman, Berman and Mann-Adorno stress that history is ineluctably dialectical. Where Goethe's Faust illustrates a dialectical development from Faust the 'dreamer' to Faust the 'lover' and finally to Faust the 'developer/ Mann's Leverkiihn achieves a dialectical breakthrough into the twelve-tone system. I would argue that Goethe's masterpiece is more pertinent to our understanding of Doctor Faustus as a parable of fascism than even Mann was prepared to recognize. Reading Goethe's Faust as the prototypical modern man, Berman's analysis reinforces Bauman's point that the possibility of fascism had from the start been implicit in the project of modernity. Berman turns to Goethe's Faust as a figure occupying a moment of historical crisis, a point of transition from pre-modern conceptions of the self to a modern self-understanding of enlightened self-actualization and social action. Suffering from intellectual paralysis and social isolation, Faust first appears on the scene ready to kill himself. He is called back to life by the tolling of church bells, which, reminding him of his innocent childhood days, intimate that he ought to overcome his intellectual separation from the daily experiences of ordinary people. He 'needs to make a connection between the solidity and warmth of life with people ... and the intellectual and cultural revolution that has taken place in his head' (Berman 1988, 46). In a move significant for Adorno's sociohistorical analysis of music, Berman connects this moment of 'Faust's rebirth' to 'the high points of European Romanticism' (Berman 1988, 44). In the temptation scene, the devil is presented as a dialectical theorist who maintains that evil and destruction are the preconditions of creation.10 Paradoxically, then, 'the demonic lust for destruction turns out to be creative' (Berman 1988,47); Faust will eventually escape the devil's control by using the tools he has been offered.11 The most 'valuable commodity' that Mephisto offers him is 'speed' (Berman 1988, 49), an aspect of modernity Berman attributes to 'all forms of modern enterprise and creativity' rather than restrict the 'dialectic of good and evil' more narrowly to 'the development of capitalism' (Berman 1988, 48), as tends to be maintained by Lukacs, and, I might add, by Adorno and Bloch. Most importantly, leaving behind the relatively static social configurations of pre-modern times, Faust embodies the restlessness of modern 'man' who emphasizes process rather

Fascist Undercurrents 139

than results. The terms of the bargain with the devil are typically modern; he will be safe as long as he strives to change himself and society but will lose his soul the moment he is content to rest. In the second dialectical phase of his development, Faust falls in love with Gretchen, the embodiment of 'childlike innocence' (Berman 1988, 53), thereby seeking to revive the pre-modern world he has left behind. Yet the door to this return to paradise turns out to be barred. That the past cannot be regained is illustrated in Gretchen's tragic fate; she can neither retain her innocence nor escape from it. In an ironically tragic twist, Gretchen is destroyed when she 'develops' and tries to leave the pre-modern world. The gender politics of the times allows the male to change himself and society while the female remains imprisoned in the narrow social context. Her 'growth is precarious because it has no social underpinning' (Berman 1988, 54); she is abandoned by her family, her society, and finally her lover. It is Gretchen who, being destroyed as a consequence of having developed, illustrates that from the start 'devastation and ruin are built into the process of human development' (Berman 1988, 57). Although Faust is responsible for her fate, he is blind to the dark underside of his Faustian striving for enlightenment and blames the world 'where things can happen this way' (Berman 1988, 57). In a further dialectical twist, it is ironically 'the destruction of Gretchen by the little world' which will turn out to be 'a crucial phase in the destruction of the little world itself (Berman 1988, 59). According to Berman's reading, '[s]o long as we remember Gretchen's fate, we will be immune to nostalgic yearning for the worlds we have lost' (Berman 1988, 60). Although the++++++of the pre-modern or Tittle world' saved Faust from committing suicide and retain their attraction in his love for Gretchen, the modern world he represents reveals that the 'Gothic vision/ which once 'might have offered mankind an ideal of life and activity' (Berman 1988, 56-7), offers a late-eighteenth-century writer like Goethe only a 'dead weight' that crushes innocents like Gretchen. But it is the third metamorphosis, into Faust the developer, that is most pertinent to my reading of Mann's rewriting of the Faust story as a parable of fascism. 'Now, in his last incarnation,' argues Berman, Goethe's Faust 'connects his personal drives with the economic, political and social forces that drive the world; he learns to build and to destroy' (Berman 1988, 61). Where earlier incarnations of Faust have sold their souls for personal gain, this Faust 'strives to change not only his own life but everyone else's as well' (Berman 1988, 61). Reacting against the 'feudal and patriarchal world/ he means 'to construct a

140 Deconstructions of Modernity

radically new social environment that will empty the old world out or break it down' (Berman 1988,61). In a quintessentially modern gesture, he seeks to control nature and organize its energy 'into the fuel for new collective human purposes and projects' (Berman 1988, 62). Instead of contemplating the natural beauty of the sea, he focuses on its instrumental use and dreams of a large reclamation project that would include 'man-made harbors and canals... dams for large-scale irrigation ... a vast intensive agriculture... waterpower to attract and support emerging industries' (Berman 1988, 62). Harnessing nature for human purposes, he embarks on a 'titanic work of economic development' which will be accompanied by the emergence of 'a new kind of man' (Berman 1988, 62). Faust is transforming himself not only into a developer but also into a social engineer. Embodying both the enormous potential and the dark underside of the Enlightenment narrative, Faust 'will work out some of the most creative and some of the most destructive potentialities of modern life; he will be the consummate wrecker and creator' (Berman 1988,63). It is finally telling that Faust will end up blind, for 'it is out of inner darkness that all his visions and all his actions have grown' (Berman 1988, 71). His project of managing nature cannot finally proceed without creating new forms of violence and oppression. Instead of the direct violence of feudal power, Faust introduces large schemes of social engineering which lead him to 'exploit whatever workers they need and displace whatever indigenous people are in their way' (Berman 1988, 63). On the one hand, Faust is the hero of modernity; indeed, as Berman points out, 'Goethe sees the modernization of the material world as a sublime spiritual achievement' (Berman 1988, 66). On the other, though, he remains oblivious to the dark underside of this project of modernity. Having turned the world into a planned garden, Faust is irritated to find that Philemon and Baucis, a 'sweet old couple' (Berman 1988,66) who represent the best values of the pre-modern world, refuse to move. In their resistance, they are 'the first embodiments in literature of a category of people that is going to be very large in modern history: people who are in the way - in the way of history, of progress, of development; people who are classified, and disposed of, as obsolete' (Berman 1988, 67). Faust's 'first self-consciously evil act' (Berman 1988, 67) further anticipates Hitler's end-oriented pragmatism and arrogance of power. Interested only in the clearing of the land, Faust does not want to know how the two old people are removed: 'This is a characteristically modern style of evil: indirect, impersonal, mediated by com-

Fascist Undercurrents 141

plex organizations and institutional roles' (Berman 1988,67). In a highly symbolic gesture, Goethe has Faust eliminate the old couple 'to make room for what Faust comes to see as the culmination of his work: an observation tower from which he and his public can "gaze out into the infinite" at the new world they have made' (Berman 1988, 67). The observation tower serving Faust's self-congratulatory gaze will later metamorphose into the emblem of surveillance necessary for the total administration of both Foucault's panopticon and the Nazi concentration camps. However, although Philemon and Baucis have to be eliminated because they resist integration into Faust's totalized world, 'there is another motive for the murder that springs not merely from Faust's personality, but from a collective, impersonal drive that seems to be endemic to modernization: the drive to create a homogeneous environment, a totally modernized space, in which the look and feel of the old world have disappeared without a trace' (Berman 1988, 68). Berman's twentieth-century examples of Faust's paradoxical striving include capitalism and Soviet-style social and economic planning; however, he fails to mention Nazi Germany's pact with the devil and Mann's Doctor Faustus. We now need to return to Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust to understand the full extent of the rationalizing tendencies unleashed by both Odysseus and Faust in their ambition to tame nature and create a better social world. In the first place, by imposing their will on nature, Odysseus and Goethe's Faust turn themselves into rationalizing machines; they initiate a distinctively modern logic of problem-solving which will find one of its culminations in the death camps. Once human 'existence and cohabitation became objects of planning and administration' (Bauman 1991,70), the total administration of the death camps and of German society became a possibility. But it is when such rationalizing machines are mobilized in the interest of social engineering projects that their deadly potential increases proportionately. The moment Goethe's Faust tolerated the murder of Philomen and Baucis, he sanctioned an inside/outside classification whose repercussions manifest themselves in all the appeals to ideal societies that have been used to legitimate the exclusion of those refusing to share in ideal visions. The most memorable metaphor Bauman introduces to illustrate that 'the murder of Jews was an exercise in the rational management of society' (Bauman 1991, 72) is the pleasing image of a well-planned garden. The persecution of Jews and other undesirables was justified

142 Deconstructions of Modernity

by the assumption that human societies, 'like garden vegetation or a living organism ... could not be left to their own devices, lest should they be infested by weeds or overwhelmed by cancerous tissues' (Bauman 1991, 70). This metaphor is particularly apt in that 'Hitler's language and rhetoric were fraught with images of disease, infection, infestation, putrefaction, pestilence' (Bauman 1991, 70). More importantly, though, this metaphor stresses the idealistic underpinnings that authorized Hitler's genocidal undertaking. If modern culture is 'a garden culture,' then it 'defines itself as the design for an ideal life and a perfect arrangement of human conditions' (Bauman 1991,92). Whether social engineers dream of a classless 'Communist world' or a 'racially pure, Aryan world/ what they conjure up is 'a harmonious world, conflict-free, docile in the hands of their rulers, orderly, controlled' (Bauman 1991, 92-3). The well-tended garden is yet another version of the privileging of organic wholeness that informs Hegel's identity thesis and counterpoint in the history of tonal music. The totalizing drive implicit in organic metaphors aims to eliminate the contingent, the resistant, the uncooperative. Social engineering is like gardening and medicine in that it is an 'activity of separating and setting apart useful elements destined to live and thrive, from harmful and morbid ones, which ought to be+exterminated'+(Bauman 1991, 70). Th pleasing garden prospect conceals a violence characterized by rational calculation rather than irrational impulses. Where pogroms tend to be motivated by racial hatred, the Holocaust was not so much marked by emotional frenzy as by the efficiency of method and the calculus of technology.12 Far from manifesting the return of a repressed primitive atavism, Nazi Germany constituted the organizational triumph of a bureaucratized society. According to Bauman, group resentment and 'traditional heterophobia played but an auxiliary role' (Bauman 1991, 82) in the genocide. The long history of European anti-Semitism hardly explains why racial dislike should take on such lethal forms in twentieth-century Germany. The Holocaust is not the other of modernity but one of its possibilities: 'If modernity "is indeed antithetical to the wild passions of barbarism, it is not at all antithetical to efficient, dispassionate destruction, slaughter, and torture'" (Kren and Rappoport, 1980, 140; quoted in Bauman 1991,97). One of Bauman's most salient contentions is therefore that the bureaucratic machinery obscured the moral dimension of Nazi rules and behaviour. When violence 'has been turned into a technique,' he argues, it is virtually 'free from emotions and purely rational' (Bauman 1991, 98). His point is that the moral evalua-

Fascist Undercurrents 143

tion of ends was obscured from participants in the genocide because these became dissociated from the instrumental-rational criteria familiar to modernity. Bauman confirms what has in fact long been recognized, namely that++++++++++++++++++++++++tend to becom 'dehumanized' (Bauman 1991,102). Like Adorno and Derrida, Bauman concludes that modernity has not eliminated violence but has rendered it invisible: 'All in all, the overall non-violent character of modern civilization is an illusion' (Bauman 1991,96-7). The Holocaust demystifies the self-understanding of modernity in profoundly disturbing ways. Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust can be said to provide the historical embodiment of a connection between the Enlightenment project and its dark underside which is all too vaguely articulated in the work of Horkheimer and Adorno. Auschwitz provides us with laboratory conditions for an examination of the paradoxical complicity between good and evil which had already been announced in Goethe's Faust. Bauman treats 'the Holocaust as a rare, yet significant and reliable, test of the hidden possibilities of modern society' (Bauman 1991,12), a test which suggests the continued presence of assumptions and practices we rarely expose to scrutiny. It is not that Hobbes's state of nature has not been sufficiently overcome but that Rousseau's ideal society has not yet been properly examined for its dark underside. Most importantly, the Holocaust forces us to reconsider the Hegelian investment not only in the identity-thesis but in Reason as the end of history. As Bauman puts it, it is not 'the Holocaust which we find difficult to grasp in all its monstrosity. It is our Western Civilization which the occurrence of the Holocaust has made all but incomprehensible' (Bauman 1991, 84). In other words, the Holocaust has defamiliarized the 'once-familiar features of our civilization' (Bauman 1991, 84). What is so unthinkable is precisely that the irrational ends achieved in the death camps were made possible by an administrative machinery whose innovative energy and calculated efficiency constitute a testimony to rational planning. In Bauman's words, 'ideational processes that by their own inner logic may lead to genocidal projects, and the technical resources that permit implementation of such projects, not only have been proved fully compatible with modern civilization, but have been conditioned, created and supplied by it. The Holocaust did not just, mysteriously, avoid clash with the social norms and institutions of modernity. It was these norms and institutions that made the Holocaust feasible' (Bauman 1991, 87). Bauman's study thus reinforces my reading of Doctor Faustus as an analysis of German fascism which recognizes that the Holocaust

144 Deconstructions of Modernity

cannot simply be dismissed either as a pathological aberration from modernity or as its failure. However, in his insistence on the Holocaust as the outcome of a rational calculus Bauman perhaps underestimates the complicity of reason with irrational forces so central to Horkheimer and Adorno'+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ that this uncanny logic is fully explored, illustrating that neo-Romantic expressivity and Hegelian rationalism reinforce each other as incommensurate terms which offer neither resolution nor choice. The Uncanny Logic of the Magic Square Jonathan Leverkuhn's Experiments

The uncanny logic of fascism is perhaps most graphically captured in Mann's depiction of Leverkiihn as a figure embodying both a coldly rational intellect and a fascination with magical phenomena. The migraine headaches, which will eventually accelerate into his fatal meningitis, are the most obvious physical symptom indicating the painful simultaneity of incommensurate opposites. Mann provides us with a most radically subversive understanding of the mutual implication of rational and irrational forces. The laboratory of Jonathan Leverkiihn and the magic square adorning Adrian Leverkuhn's study in Halle suggest that father and son subscribe to an unstable and radically open semiotic system closer to Derridean dissemination than to Adorno's negative dialectic. In an early scene, Mann treats us to the spectacle of Jonathan Leverkiihn entertaining his son and Zeitblom with 'scientific' experiments which have unmistakable 'magical' ramifications. Leaving an indelible mark on the young Leverkuhn, these experiments alert him from the beginning to the 'dark underside' of the Enlightenment narrative outlined in Dialectic of Enlightenment.13 The reversals of opposites in the father's laboratory illustrate that natural phenomena obey an uncanny rather than a rational logic; these phenomena show themselves to be radically unstable and hence subversive of Hegel's orderly sense of historical teleology. Although this scene is usually interpreted quite narrowly to prove Leverkuhn's susceptibility to the demonic, it in fact demystifies the illusory assumption of Western metaphysics that science has once and for all defeated superstition; the young Leverkuhn's laughter signals his recognition that opposites are not sublated into a higher unity but remain implicated in an unlimited process of reversals

Fascist Undercurrents 145

and transgressions. Considering the scene of Jonathan Leverkiihn's experiments in Mann's novel within the context of Dialectic of Enlightenment+allows us to appreciate why these German exiles in Californi were drawn together and why Leverkiihn's fascination with magic has to be interpreted as a demystification of the Enlightenment narrative rather than as an indication of volkish yearnings for a return to primitivism. Hegelian reason would surely have to be affronted by Jonathan Leverkuhn, who is described as a scientist fascinated by limit-cases in which the organically 'given' can no longer be distinguished from the artificially created. These limit-cases are first of all highly disorienting, making it difficult to distinguish between scientific truths and superstitious myths. Using a modern laboratory for his 'studies in natural science, biology, even perhaps in chemistry and physics,' Jonathan Leverkuhn is suspected of having a 'leaning to the black arts' and a 'tinge of mysticism' which he tries to satisfy through experiments the narrator uneasily identifies with a Faustian '"speculat[ing] [of] the elements'" (Mann 1968, 18). To make matters worse, such conceptual confusions defeat the Hegelian belief in the dialectic as the inevitably progressive process toward a desirable end. If reason can at best repress but never altogether eliminate myth and superstition, then it will forever be open to the return of its repressed 'other.' Leverkiihn's father literally+++++++this possibility. Being marked by a 'cast of features stamped as if it were in an earlier age' (Mann 1968, 17), he illustrates that archaic traits are not overcome once and for all but survive modernity's attempt to transcend them. Mann stresses that this modern scientist is a religious man who reads the 'bulky family Bible/ a tendency that identifies him as a man deeply rooted in the past. But even this bible, this icon of conservatism, is infected by the progressive forces which Jonathan Leverkiihn's traditionalism presumably opposes. This bible not only has a foreword by the 'revolutionary' Luther and a commentary by the moralist David von Schweinitz, but it has been printed at a time of political emancipation (around the year 1700), that is, 'under the ducal licence in Brunswick' (Mann 1968, 18). Medieval superstition coexists with Protestant revolution and the modern scientific laboratory. This opposition of modern science and mythology also structures the argument in the++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ suffers not so much from a lack as from an excess of reason. Once reason serves the mathematization of the world, it is for Horkheimer and Adorno yet another form of barbarism.

146 Deconstructions of Modernity

Jonathan Leverkiihn's experiments dramatize for the two boys that science and magic are indeed interconnected; however, his speculations are perhaps even more radically subversive of categories like reason and superstition than the dialectical hypotheses of Horkheimer and Adorno. Where Mann gives free rein to the bafflement experienced by the 'magician's' audience, the two Frankfurt School theorists impose a dialectical analysis on the paradoxical phenomena they uncover. They themselves are in some sense guilty of wanting to tame and dominate the 'play' of opposites they have unleashed. Written before Mann met Adorno, this scene may explain why Mann felt an immediate affinity with this other German exile in California, and it may accentuate his tendency to treat as 'inexplicable' what is for Adorno analysable as capitalist 'contradictions.' Instead of anchoring dialectical reversals in the material conditions Adorno invokes, Mann stresses the mimicry and simulation that result when opposites imply each other. Jonathan Leverkiihn's 'scientific magic' or 'magical science' destabilizes the very epistemological categories in which binary thinking as such is grounded. Mann evinces an anti-foundational scepticism which not only refers to Adorno but anticipates Derrida. Although both Derrida and Adorno foreground that binary opposites are incommensurate, Derrida draws out the resulting radical loss of ontological certainty whereas Adorno extracts a reflection of sociohistorical contradictions open to correction in some unspecified Utopian future. Jonathan Leverkiihn's experiments constitute an early warning to his son that the mutual implication of opposites is marked by a scepticism so radical that no analytical system can predict or explain dialectical reversals. What Jonathan Leverkiihn demonstrates for his son and Zeitblom is that even in nature it is virtually impossible to distinguish between the true and the false, the unconscious and the conscious, the organic and the artificial, the given and the created. Anticipating Leverkiihn's later 'demonic' voyage into outer space and into the depths of the ocean, Jonathan Leverkiihn opens a book on 'exotic lepidoptera and sea creatures' (Mann 1968, 18) which introduces motifs and themes to recur throughout+++++++++++Jonathan Leverkiihn's first lesson tells the boys that form and substance need not coincide. Mann's treatment of this speculative scientist reflects what Adorno has elsewhere called 'the tense non-identity of appearance and essence' (Adorno 1972, 317-18; my trans.). On the simplest level, external form does not correspond to internal nature. Exquisitely beautiful butterflies are often feared by indigenous people as 'evil spirits' (Mann 1968, 19) because they carry

Fascist Undercurrents 147

malaria, and the most beautiful snails are known for their 'poisonous sting' (Mann 1968, 21). The gap between 'the thing in itself' and our perception of it is the source of deceptions which are the main focus of Jonathan Leverkiihn's speculations. A butterfly of the most beautiful azure-blue colour reveals itself, on closer inspection, to be a simulacrum. The azure blue is 'no true colour at all'; the colour-effect is created by means of 'fine little furrows and other surface configurations of the scales on their wings' (Mann 1968,19). Is the azure blue 'false' because it reveals itself as an illusion or is it nevertheless 'true'? Another butterfly has no scales+++++++++making it appear transparent, except for few spots of colour which make it look like a windblown blossom. This butterfly, whose 'transparent nudity' and 'duskiness of heavy leafage' gives it the name of 'Hetaera esmeralda' (Mann 1968,19), will return as a leitmotif in both Leverkiihn's life and music. Another butterfly protects itself from predators by mimicking a leaf. Even more cunningly, some edible butterflies safeguard themselves by imitating poisonous ones which, instead of making themselves invisible, make themselves ostentatiously visible to signal their poisonous nature to predators. The perfectly edible butterfly then imitates the large shape, colourful markings, and behaviour of the poisonous specimen to deceive predators. What status are we to attribute to such cunning mimicry? The question of whether nature is already contaminated by a cultural consciousness which contradicts it is pushed even further when Jonathan Leverkiihn draws attention to mussels whose shells exhibit patterns which look like 'unreadable writing' (Mann 1968, 20). Zeitblom still recalls the shell of one mussel whose complicated pattern gave the impression of 'explanatory remarks' or a sign system (Verstandigungsmalen) which had a 'strong resemblance to ancient Oriental writings' (Mann 1968, 21). Although nobody has been able to decipher what the patterns on mussel shells mean ('They refuse themselves to our understanding' [Mann 1968, 22]), Jonathan Leverkiihn maintains that they are meaningful. He rejects the idea that such patterns are purely ornamental: 'Ornament and meaning always run alongside each other; the old writings too served for both ornament and communication' (Mann 1968,22). The purely aesthetic and the instrumental imply each other in such a way as to undermine each other's supposedly stable identity. Along similar lines, the audible and the visible violate the law of noncontradiction in the experiment of 'visible music' (Mann 1968, 22) in which 'law and miracle so charmingly mingled' (Mann 1968, 23). Such uncanny effects are reinforced by experiments illustrating the ability of

148 Deconstructions of Modernity

inorganic matter to mimic the behaviour of plants or animals. The patterns which ice crystals (Eisblumen) create on windows are not particularly disturbing as long as they remain 'symmetrical ... strictly regular and mathematical'; however, Jonathan Leverkiihn delights in their 'impudent[], deceptive[]' ability to mimic 'the vegetable kingdom/ their uncanny 'icy ability [to] dabble[] in the organic' (Mann 1968,23). The same boundary is once again overstepped when the inorganic '"devouring drop'" (Fressende Tropfen) exhibits an animal-like appetite for polish. Such simulations make it difficult to differentiate between original and copy: 'Did ... these phantasmagorias prefigure the forms of the vegetable world, or did they imitate them?' (Mann 1968, 23). In Zeitblom's words, what preoccupied Jonathan Leverkiihn was 'the essential unity of animate and so-called inanimate nature, it was the thought that we sin against the latter when we draw too hard and fast a line between the two fields, since in reality it is pervious and there is no elementary capacity which is reserved entirely to the living creature and which the biologist could not also study on an inanimate subject' (Mann 1968, 23). Nature itself is seen to violate the boundary between categories that it also imposes and authorizes. Zeitblom comments uneasily that '[n]ature itself is too full of obscure phenomena not altogether remote from magic - equivocal moods, weird, half-hidden associations pointing to the unknown - for a disciplined piety not to see therein a rash overstepping of ordained limits' (Mann 1968, 18). The culmination of the science lesson is 'a grotesque little landscape of variously coloured growth' which Jonathan Leverkiihn has grown in a water container; although these strange apparitions appear to be plants, it turns out that 'these growths were entirely unorganic in their origin' (Mann 1968, 24). For the adventurous scientist these simulations deserve the same respect as natural phenomena. Zeitblom is reluctant to consider 'the Creation, God, Nature and Life as a morally depraved field' (Mann 1968, 18); Leverkiihn's famous laughter, though, indicates that he has an affinity for this 'witchcraft,' this 'work of the "Tempter"' (Mann 1968, 22). When natural phenomena are deceptively both real and simulations, then they subvert the Enlightenment investment in the possibility of classifying phenomena according to rational categories. This scene confirms in the first instance Adorno's point that myth remains implicated in modern science; Jonathan Leverkiihn's experiments are at once a pointed marker of Mann's invitation to read history

Fascist Undercurrents 149

as mythic repetition and an equally pointed resistance to this reading. When Mann represents Jonathan Leverkiihn as one of the many Faust incarnations which anticipate Adrian Leverkuhn as the latest Faust making a fateful pact with the devil, he explicitly alludes to Freud's concept of 'mythic identification' to suggest a cyclical notion of history. History is not progressive in Hegel's terms but recursive; Leverkiihn's mythic identification with Faust figures abolishes time and history by insisting on the mythic simultaneity of past and present. He thereby reinforces the Horkheimer and Adorno argument that domination is a persistent feature of history from archaic magic to modern civilization; the allegory of Odysseus's adventures as 'stages of civilization' in Dialectic of Enlightenment conforms to 'the implacable repetitive character of the tendential enlargement of enlightenment' (Jameson 1971,103), to the idea of history not as the emancipation from domination but as its increasingly concealed manifestation at more and more sophisticated and intensified levels. The parallel between Leverkuhn and his Faustian precursors relies on a mimetic operation which allows us to identify repetitive structures. In one sense, then, repetition stresses identity at the expense of difference; in this case, mimesis is understood as the felicitous coincidence or unmediated reflection of events separated in time or space. According to Jameson, mimicry in Adorno reinforces the 'always-already' sense of 'mimesis as an archaic activity' at the same time as it forestalls 'dualistic thinking' (Jameson 1971, 104). In other words, mimesis is for Adorno the 'original form of rationality' which installs reason as an instrument serving Hegel's identity thesis. The identitary logic of mimesis must be resisted precisely because it is governed 'by a drive to make unlikes alike' (Benhabib 1986,64), thereby allowing the privileged discourse to dominate the marginalized 'other.' Yet the stress on mimesis and mimicry in the scientific experiments also draws attention to difference and non-identity. According to Adorno's aesthetic theory, mimesis is the locus of non-identitary reason which has its source in art. Mimesis is thus suspect in that it reinforces reason as 'inherently an instrument of domination' at the same time as it functions as a site of resistance to such domination in that it contains 'the non-discursive moment of truth still contained in art' (Benhabib 1986, 170). Jonathan Leverkiihn's experiments disrupt not only the dominance of scientific reason but extend the non-discursive potential of aesthetic mimesis beyond Zeitblom's comfort zone. Mimicry appears in this scene as an inflection of mimesis in the direction of simulation; no longer tied to the 'truth' of an original reality, imitation now sus-

150 Deconstructions of Modernity

pends the difference between appearance and reality on which conventional notions of mimesis have traditionally relied. Jonathan Leverkiihn's subversion of boundaries installs difference as the process radically hostile to the identity thesis on which Hegel's system depends. What discomfits Zeitblom is the intimation that his sense of reality is being undermined by an incipient shift toward the kind of hyperreality which is for Baudrillard 'no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself.'14 His father's influence thus plants an early seed that will germinate in Leverkiihn's rejection of the Hegelian identity-thesis and the Enlightenment ideology built on it. Leverkiihn's Mathematical Puzzle

The Kleist citation in Doctor Faustus stands for Leverkiihn's investigation into the possibility of adapting the dialectic of enlightenment to his agenda of liberating music from the sterility imposed on it by the conditions of modernity. It represents a last-ditch attempt to achieve his ends by 'enlightened' means. However, his early exposure to his father's experiments has already shown him that the logical progress leading to dialectical resolution is blind to the uncanny logic that undermines the categories on which the Enlightenment narrative depends. It is this paradoxical logic that is foregrounded in the '"natural," yet incredible and uncanny [phenomenal' (Mann 1968, 24) displayed by Jonathan Leverkiihn's experiments and speculations, a logic that anticipates the 'uncanny' effects of Adrian Leverkiihn's aesthetic innovations. Dialectic of Enlightenment+goes some way toward explaining the ideo logical implications of the relationship between magic and science which surfaces in the laboratory scene. The symbol of this uncanny logic is, of course, the magic square which accompanies Leverkiihn from his student days in Halle to his death. Zeitblom notices an engraving on the wall of Leverkiihn's lodgings in Halle, representing a mathematical puzzle, 'a so-called magic square' (Mann 1968,92), which happens to be one of the symbols appearing in Diirer's 'Melancolia.'15 The magic square consists of sixteen numbered fields, with the number 1 situated in the lower right-hand corner and the number 16 in the upper lefthand corner. The magic or curiosity 'consisted in the fact that the sum of these numerals, however you added them, straight down, crosswise, or diagonally, always came to thirty-four' (Mann 1968, 92). Although

Fascist Undercurrents 151

this puzzle is based on the completely rational logic of mathematics, the result, nevertheless, strikes Zeitblom as inexplicable: 'What the principle was upon which this magic uniformity rested I never made out' (Mann 1968, 92).16 In a highly paradoxical fashion, this excessively rational system is at the same time excessively irrational. When Mann has Zeitblom draw the reader's attention to the symbolic significance of this magic square, he suggests that Leverkiihn's whole life and art stand under this uncanny combination of reason and superstition. Since, as we will see later, Leverkiihn's twelve-tone technique exemplifies what is to Zeitblom this discomfiting paradox, Mann intimates by extrapolation that German National Socialism is similarly marked. Throughout++++++++++++++Leverkiihn both affirms and denies t dialectical logic of Hegel's system just as he both affirms and denies the power of irrational forces. The magic square tends to be read as a major indicator of Leverkuhn's irrational or demonic tendencies; it seems to suggest that his music unleashes the dark forces which enlightened modernity had so successfully repressed. According to this interpretation, the German catastrophe has to be attributed to a lack of reason. This conventional view overlooks that the irrational effect of the magic square is in fact the result of a totally rational system. Since this mathematical puzzle consists of a grid in which each square has a number assigned to it, there is no space left that is not subjected to rational calculation. It isn't that the rational space is subverted by a residual irrational element; on the contrary, the magical effect is produced by an excessive reliance on mathematical reasoning. It seems, then, that an analysis that is satisfied to identify 'barbarism' with the irrational tendencies of volkish ideas is blind to the 'barbarism' that Horkheimer and Adorno ascribe to the rationalizing forces of capitalist modernity. Far from being the other of barbarism, reason is itself implicated in the demonic possibilities of the Enlightenment narrative which found their extreme articulation in German National Socialism.

This page intentionally left blank

PART Two POSTMODERNITY AND FASCISM

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 4

BREAKTHROUGH INTO ATONALITY (OR POSTMODERNISM)

If the conditions that allowed Nazism to emerge can broadly speaking be associated with the neo-Romantic yearnings isolated in Mosse'sTh Crisis of German Ideology and with the rationalizing tendencies identified by Bauman in Modernity and the Holocaust, we may be tempted to think that the fascist episode in European history is safely behind us. Once postmodern archaeologies of modernity have foregrounded modernity's blindness to its own violence, so the argument might run, we postmodernists are now so highly self-conscious of the dark undersides of the Enlightenment narrative that we can close the chapter on German National Socialism. Has Derrida not successfully deconstructed all longings for origins? Has Adorno not illustrated once and for all the complicity of reason with irrational superstitions? Even if we reject the thesis that postmodernism constitutes a radical break with modernity, we rarely consider the possibility that postmodernism remains, to some extent, implicated in the logic of fascism. This suspicion dawns on us when, reading+++++++++++++++++as a parable of fascism, we ta look at the identification of German National Socialism with the aesthetic innovations of avant-garde music which Mann borrows from Adorno. We have seen that the history of music in the novel initiates a critique of the tonal tradition from an ideological position we now acknowledge as Adorno's postmodernism avant la lettre. What is striking about this ideological critique of modernity is Adorno's already suspicious attitude toward the postmodernism he sees emerging in the music of Schonberg and Stravinsky. It should therefore not come as a surprise that the music theory Mann incorporates into Doctor Faustus is marked by features or tropes we now associate with the 'postmodern

156 Postmodernity and Fascism

turn.' The novel subjects Leverkiihn's atonal experiments to an ideology critique which confronts us with the unpalatable possibility that atonality deconstructs hierarchical models of domination only to produce a twelve-tone system inscribed by the paradoxical logic of the 'free' note being predetermined by the most rigorous or totalitarian system. If the twelve-tone system is meant to parallel German National Socialism, then the 'postmodern' implications of this aesthetic breakthrough reflect on ideological debates in our own postmodern times. As we have seen so far, the political imaginary assumes that ideally subject and object would exist in a dynamic but orderly interdependence. In Hegel's terms, the subject would find itself expressed in a totality with which it harmoniously coincides. But, according to Adorno's reading, Hegel's articulation of this ideal was already belated in that the material conditions in late nineteenth-century Germany no longer permitted its actualization. The bourgeois mystification of the real conditions of existence can thus be established as a major contributing factor in Hitler's rise to power. If we accept Adorno's dialectical interpretation of history, fascism was both continuous with modernity and a radical break from it. Whereas the first three chapters of this study have located the material and conceptual preconditions or 'roots' of fascism in the assumptions of modernity, the last three chapters will argue that fascism was one particularly extreme political expression of a broader cognitive shift toward a so-called postmodern self-understanding. According to Adorno's dialectical logic, avant-garde aesthetics was from the start doomed to become complicit not only with late capitalism but also with fascism. Mann's dramatization of the parallel between art and politics draws attention to the danger that revolutionary challenges risk reinstating and intensifying the patterns of domination and violence they intended to disrupt. Leverkiihn's tragic 'fate' illustrates the thesis of 'unintended consequences' which Max Weber so memorably advances in+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ puritan asceticism unwittingly serving the interests of amoral capitalist accumulation and hedonism so anathema to the original spiritual intentions. What follows in the second part of this study is an attempt to unravel the complex narrative of the paradoxical logic in its threefold manifestations: the experiments of avant-garde aesthetics, the material conditions under late capitalism, and the political reconfiguration of the public space under fascism. I want to suggest above all that German National Socialism ought to be understood as the extreme limit-case of possibili-

Breakthrough into Atonality (or Postmodernism) 157

ties opened up by the postmodern contestation of modernity. It is important for me to stress from the start that I am not claiming that postmodernism+++ascist; on the contrary, I consider the postmodern demystification of the illusions of modernity's self-understanding to provide us with indispensable critical instruments. My modest aim is merely to warn that overly optimistic emancipatory claims in postmodern debates ought to be tested against the possibility that they may be remaining complicit with fascist tendencies. Although this broader sense of fascism loses the specificity of the Holocaust atrocities, it allows us to be sensitive to less directly genocidal forms of violence. Where the next chapter will specifically analyse the paradoxical logic of fascism exemplified in Leverkiihn's masterpiece The Lament of Doctor Faustus/ this chapter focuses on the conflicted attitudes of Leverkuhn and Zeitblom to the postmodern tropes that characterize atonality in Doctor Faustus, a conflict reproduced in current debates on the ideological implications of postmodern processes and strategies. Influenced by Adorno, Jameson prominently occupies the pessimistic position that postmodernism has lost the liberatory energies still in evidence in modernism. In contrast, other postmodern theorists, most notably Linda Hutcheon, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Gianni Vattimo, detect in postmodernism strategies capable of resisting and perhaps transforming the ideological dominance Jameson decries as detrimental to emancipatory agendas. Since Adorno's critique of avant-garde music finds an influential displacement and elaboration in Jameson's hostility to postmodernism, the portrayal of Leverkiihn's innovative serial music in Doctor Faustus invites a reconsideration informed primarily by Jameson's theories of postmodernism. The historical Ungleichzeitigkeit (untimeliness) this implies has been addressed by Andreas Huyssen's contention that the North American postmodern 'revolution' of the 1960s represents a replay of the European avant-garde movements of the 1930s. Huyssen's historical documentation of the belatedness of postmodernism in relation to European avant-garde experiments confirms that 'postmodernism, which in its artistic practices and theory was a product of the 1960s, must be seen as the endgame of the avant-garde and not as the radical breakthrough it often claimed to be' (Huyssen 1993, 226). Indeed, as Peter Dews also stresses, it was only because North America did not have 'an indigenous American avant-garde in the classical European sense' (Dews 1987, 13) that postmodernism could make such strong claims for novelty.+This acknowledgment of the historically asynchronous develop

158 Postmodernity and Fascism ments of the European avant-garde and North American postmodernism creates a crucial space for Adorno, whose analysis of Schonberg's avantgarde music contributes to his recent popularity as a postmodernist avant la lettre; his theoretical approach is today appreciated both for its cultural materialist emphasis and its philosophical anti-foundationalism. In other words, Adorno anticipates Derrida's deconstructive strategies at the same time as he influences Jameson's sociohistorical readings of the forma++ategories at stake in postmodernism. Anyone familiar with Adorno's methodological approach and ideological stance toward culture is immediately struck by the impact of his work on Jameson's critique of postmodernism; Jameson himself in 1990 published a highly appreciative study of Adorno, entitled+Late Marxism Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic. As Simon During reminds us, 'current Marxist accounts of "postmodernity" are articulated in terms that repeat earlier accounts of modern culture by the Hegelian Marxism of the Frankfurt School. In particular, Adorno's important late essay "Cultural criticism and society" lies behind Jameson's text' (During 1993, 449). But where Jameson sees postmodernity specifically in relation to late or multinational capitalism, Adorno 'refers not to postmodernity but to a formation that includes totalitarian and fascist culture' (During 1993, 450). In During's opinion, Adorno 'has a stronger grasp of the contemporary disintegration of cognition, expression and reflection' (During 1993, 450) than Jameson, especially since he 'imagines a line of flight from late capitalism' (During 1993, 450) by leaving room for subjective agency. This interplay between Adorno and Jameson sharpens for me the complicity of Leverkuhn's music theory with late capitalism at the same time as Mann's references to the explicit historical context of German National Socialism in turn intensify my understanding of the complementary logic between fascism, global capitalism, and postmodern theory. Aesthetic Form and Material Conditions Doctor Faustus plays on broadly conceived parallels between aesthetic form and material conditions which are based on the broad historical conceptions advanced by Adorno and refined by Jameson. Following Adorno's history of music in+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ fies a tonal tradition in crisis which first gives rise to a moment of 'free atonality' before succumbing to the 'totalitarian' order of the twelvetone system. If we read Leverkuhn's aesthetic aspirations as sympto-

Breakthrough into Atonality (or Postmodernism) 159

matic of Germany's desire to break with its feudal past, then the moment of 'free atonality' could be identified with the emancipatory hopes riding on democratic reforms whose culmination was the Weimar Republic. The importance of free atonality in my reconstruction of the dialectical process that Mann adopts from Adorno is predicated on a set of broad equations which link tonality with bourgeois capitalism and literary realism, free atonality with the Weimar Republic and aesthetic high modernism, and twelve-tone technique with fascism and late capitalism as well as with aesthetic postmodernism. In the first instance, the development of the realist novel is generally acknowledged to be synonymous with the emergence of bourgeois capitalism. In Adorno's history of music, this stage would also include the tonal tradition in music and Hegel's system in philosophy. It is perhaps more difficult to see the association of free atonality with the Weimar Republic. However, matching episodes in the novel with historical events, Ritschie Robertson affirms this connection when, drawing on Zeitblom's discerning of 'a symbolic parallel between the decline of Leverkiihn's health and the decline of Germany's fortunes in 1918 [Mann 1968, 330],' he points out: 'In spring 1919 Leverkuhn's illness leaves him, and his spirit, like a reborn phoenix, attains freedom [Mann 1968, 339]; it was in February 1919 that the Weimar Parliament assembled, and in August 1919, when Leverkiihn completes the Apocalypsis cum figuris, the Parliament approved the constitution of the Weimar Republic' (Robertson 1993, 143). This parallel between free atonality and the Weimar constitution appears not only rather stretched but also too constraining. If democratic aspirations find their expression in a composition with the ominous title ofApocalypsis++++++++ then the emancipatory moment of free atonality must already be infected by the tropes poised to doom both Leverkiihn and Germany. Yet Robertson's scheme usefully underpins the dialectical pattern informing my reading of++++++++++++as a parable of fascism. As w all know, the hopes for a democratic Germany ended in totalitarian fascism just as free atonality resulted in the strict twelve-tone system. In Mann's novel, then, the history of music corresponds to stages in Germany's sociopolitical history from feudalism through democracy to fascism. In Germany, we can agree, democracy was a belated phenomenon; tonality remains associated with an aristocratic bourgeoisie whose hierarchical configuration finds expression in tonality. According to this perspective, atonality (or democracy) grows out of the crisis of tonality (feudalism) and becomes the precondition for the twelve-tone

160 Postmodern!ty and Fascism

system (fascism). Free atonality (or the Weimar Republic) is thus the dialectical moment whose emancipatory possibilities are already inhabited by the totalizing tendencies of the twelve-tone row (fascism). The dialectical process dramatized in+++++++++++hints at the ironic recognition that the challenge to hierarchy as a principle of oppression in both music and politics logically generates not freedom but an intensified form of domination. Liberating music from the hierarchical constraints of tonality and politics from the equally hierarchical organization of feudalism, Leverkiihn created the apparently chaotic conditions of cacophony in music and German liberals produced disorder in the streets and disorganization in Parliament. Equating freedom with anarchy, Leverkiihn will ultimately embrace the rigorous organization of the twelve-tone row to constrain free atonality and Hitler will justify his recourse to repressive totalitarian measures to combat the very anarchy that he himself often instigated. Although such broad historical explanatory patterns are always open to refutations based on evidence provided by the analysis of particular instances, they continue to appeal to our imagination and to hold our attention. It seems that the most persistent cultural theories tend to rest on rather sweeping hypotheses. From Hobbes and Rousseau to Marx and Freud, theorists have offered narratives about the history of European civilization which trace the vexing problem of social violence to mythic origins lost in time. Such explanations assume that primitive 'man' was free because he or she existed in animal-like isolation, a state of nature which Hobbes associates with violence and Rousseau with innocence. With an increase in population, argues Hobbes, human beings agreed to curb their aggression by entering into a social contract intended to provide them with security. In contrast, Rousseau contended that it was precisely social institutions which were responsible for introducing the very violence that Hobbes sought to control. According to Rousseau, Hobbes's depiction of the warlike state of nature superimposed categories which were already social. In other words, Hobbes attributed to nature aspects that were for Rousseau already marked by the detrimental effects of the social community. Hypotheses concerning the origins of society continue to inform broad historical explanations for Western civilization. Siding with Rousseau, Marx speculates that there once existed a tribal form of social cooperation (the family clan) before the division of labour destroyed this still idyllic moment in pre-historical time. And, siding with Hobbes, Freud argues that the family itself was already a site of violence in that

Breakthrough into Atonality (or Postmodernism) 161

the first social act was the banding together of the sons in order to kill the father. Depending on whether violence is seen as primary or as having befallen an initial innocence, history is then interpreted either as a progression from lower to higher forms of civilization or as the degeneration from authentic bonds to increasingly artificial constraints. Once historical development is seen in dialectical terms, there is a tendency to divide history into overlapping stages. For Hegel, as we have already noted, consciousness undergoes a process of transformation that promises an increase in self-consciousness whose final outcome will be the coincidence of subject and object in Absolute Knowledge. For Freud, on the contrary, civilization increasingly demands the repression of instincts and thereby intensifies our aggressive propensities. And Marx offers us a well-known dialectical narrative that runs from slavery through feudalism to capitalism and beyond it to a Utopian communist society. A pattern of identifiable historical stages predicated on lost mythic origins manifests itself in the history of music Mann borrows from Adorno, who in turn borrows it from Marx. Adapting Adorno's periodization, Mann offers a history of music which presupposes a homophonic stage lost in mythic times, followed by a polyphonic stage roughly equivalent to early feudalism, and finally by a harmonic or tonal stage representative of bourgeois capitalism. But what is really at stake in Doctor Faustus is the transition from tonality to atonality, a transition characterized not so much by the introduction of entirely new features as by the novel reconfiguration of existing tenets. Whether we refer to the German avant-garde in the 1930s or North American postmodernism in the 1960s, the revolutionary impetus of these movements is neither a complete break with the past nor a smooth continuation of it. In a significant argument reminiscent of Adorno, Jameson subscribes to 'a periodizing hypothesis' (Jameson 1991, 3) which rests on the assumption that historical stages can be characterized according to the dominance of a given style. Since for him historical succession is often recursive rather than linear, he maintains not only that all cultural periods are marked by multiple styles but that, at any given moment, different styles become dominant for a specific duration. This explanation allows Jameson to account for the presence of 'postmodern' features in earlier art and literature at the same time as he can retain a sense of 'the postmodern' as specific to our own sociohistorical period. Following Ernest Mandel's periodization in his book+Late Capitalis (1978), Jameson subdivides Marx's capitalist stage into 'three funda-

162 Postmodernity and Fascism

mental moments in capitalism, each one marking a dialectical expansion over the previous stage' (Jameson 1991, 35). Mandel identifies these moments as 'market capitalism, the monopoly stage or the stage of imperialism, and our own, wrongly called postindustrial, but what might better be termed multinational, capital' (Jameson 1991, 35). Postmodernity then constitutes a 'third stage or moment in the evolution of capital/ a stage which, in fulfilling the logic of capital, ought to be understood as 'a purer stage of capitalism' (Jameson 1991, 3). This 'purest form of capital yet to have emerged' is for Jameson 'a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas' (Jameson 1991,36). Acknowledging his debt to Mandel's economic model, Jameson advances his 'own cultural periodization of the stages of realism, modernism, and postmodernism' (Jameson 1991,36). Leverkiihn's rebellion against tonality can then be divided along Jameson's lines into an initial parodic play with tonality, the emancipatory promise of free atonality, and finally the restricted economy of the twelve-tone system. The concept of stages in which certain features dominate permits Jameson 'to grasp postmodernism not as a style but rather as a cultural dominant: a conception which allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate, features' (Jameson 1991, 4). Jameson is now in the position of confidently enumerating and analysing 'features of postmodernism' while also conceding that all of them 'can be detected, full-blown, in this or that preceding modernism' (Jameson 1991, 4). Although acknowledging cultural continuities, Jameson is nevertheless justified to speak of a 'break' between the older modernism and the emergent postmodernism because, 'even if all constitutive features of postmodernism were identical with and coterminous to those of an older modernism,' it would still be the case that the two phenomena would 'remain utterly distinct in their meaning and social function' (Jameson 1991, 5). According to this logic, Leverkiihn reconfigures the formal devices of tonality so as to make them take on meanings and functions never before envisioned. Along similar lines, Hitler can be said to have bent German cultural and political traditions to entirely new purposes. But what do I mean by 'postmodernism'? Or, more precisely, what does anyone mean by this term? To my knowledge, no one has claimed to have a satisfactory definition of a term whose contours are further confused by the uncertain relationships of this 'post-' to the supposedly preceding 'modernism' and to the apparently coterminous 'postmodernity' and 'poststructuralism.' In his introduction to the anthol-

Breakthrough into Atonality (or Postmodernism) 163

ogy Postmodernism: An Introduction (1993), Thomas Docherty admits that the 'term itself hovers uncertainly in most current writings between - on the one hand - extremely complex and difficult philosophical senses, and - on the other - an extremely simplistic mediation as a nihilistic, cynical tendency in contemporary culture' (Docherty 1993,1). The major source of confusion is undoubtedly a tendency to assimilate the aesthetic to the cultural. As Jameson makes clear, he does not want to limit postmodernism to stylistic features; for him, as for Adorno, aesthetic style ought to be approached as one possible manifestation of an underlying cultural logic which, in turn, expresses modes of economic production. It could then be said that 'postmodernism' is an ideological consequence of 'postmodernity.' Or, to put it another way, if postmodernism represents our culture in general, then postmodernity could be called its technological, social, and economic infrastructure. Not surprisingly, aesthetic postmodernism tends to understand itself to be radically antagonistic toward social postmodernity (late capitalism) just as aesthetic modernism had earlier considered itself opposed to social modernity (industrial capitalism). However, close analyses of the aesthetic features in question reveal that they always risk reinforcing the socioeconomic conditions which they mean to contest. In philosophical terms, postmodernism undermines any possibility of truth by placing reality beyond the claims of any explanatory system. It questions foundational categories and is highly suspicious of all totalities and metanarratives. The self is no longer understood as a unique identity or essence but as a decentred subject or socially constructed agent. Privileging the ambiguity of borderlands or lirninal spaces over the stability of categories or bounded entities, postmodernism is sensitive to complexities, contradictions, paradoxes, incommensurabilities, and differences. On this philosophical level, postmodernism explores the political implications of the radical challenges to epistemology and ontology associated with poststructuralism in general and Derrida in particular. Broadly speaking, then, postmodernism has become an umbrella term which includes the crucial poststructuralist moment of early Derrida. Although it would be possible to specify that deconstruction is strictly speaking a poststructuralist rather than a postmodernist manifestation, I consider this differentiation to be cumbersome; for the sake of simplicity, I therefore treat Derridean deconstruction as a philosophical articulation of a larger postmodern movement which is self-consciously critical of socioeconomic postmodernity.

164 Postmodern!ty and Fascism

As Jameson's discussion of postmodernism as both a style and a cultural dominant indicates, much critical disagreement has focused on the question of whether postmodernity ought to be considered an extension of modernity or a radical break from it. Siding with Jameson, I would argue that modernity and postmodernity are not exclusive categories but historically overlapping ones. It is not that postmodernity is simply an evolutionary stage in modernity's linear teleology; on the contrary, we need to think of their relationship in terms of breaks, discontinuities, and differences. The 'postmodern' moment has always already announced itself; as Jean-Francois Lyotard has so famously and intriguingly put it, a 'work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant' (Lyotard 1984, 79). What Lyotard is generally supposed to have meant through this paradoxical formulation is that the 'post-' which precedes the 'modern' makes the 'postmodern' ambiguously both continuous and discontinuous with the modernism it contests. For him, the postmodern is 'undoubtedly part of the modern' (Lyotard 1993,12) because, in its drive to suspect 'everything that is received/ it reinstalls the ceaseless search for 'the new' typical of modernism. It is not only that even the most radically 'new' builds on the tradition it surpasses but also that, when the postmodern understands itself as a 'rupture/ it in fact manifests a deeply 'modern' aspiration: The very idea of modernity is closely correlated with the principle that it is both possible and necessary to break with tradition and institute absolutely new ways of living and thinking' (Lyotard 1993,76). In his pessimistic reading of postmodernity, Lyotard suspects that 'this "rupture" is in fact a way of forgetting or repressing the past, that is, repeating it and not surpassing it' (Lyotard 1993,76). Where Derrida's Nietzschean affirmation of postmodern play imbues it with emancipatory possibilities, Lyotard fears that the postmodern revolution risks being politically far more regressive than more optimistic theorists assume. In my analysis of Doctor Faustus, I examine the tropes of Leverkiihn's atonal experiments according to current debates on the emancipatory potential of postmodernism.1 It seems to me that the conflict between Leverkuhn's endorsement of atonality and Zeitblom's resistance to it anticipates the split between theorists who celebrate postmodernism as an expression of Derrida's Nietzschean affirmation of play and those who deplore it as complicit with domination or symptomatic of resignation to the status quo. The context of German National Socialism in

Breakthrough into Atonality (or Postmodernism)

165

Doctor Faustus raises the stakes of this debate. The possibility that atonality (or postmodernism) offers a line of escape from the oppressive tendencies of tonality (or modernity) is briefly held out only to be thoroughly dashed by the rigorous determinism of the twelve-tone system (or Nazism). Leaving the implications of the paradoxical logic culminating in the catastrophe signalled by the 'The Lament of Doctor Faustus' for the next chapter, I concentrate at this point on the dialectical tension between the emancipatory potential of Leverkuhn's breakthrough into atonality and its destructive possibilities. In my reading of Doctor Faustus as a parable of fascism, the emergence of free atonality thus occupies a position roughly equivalent in the++++++++++++++ early poststructuralism, in aesthetic practice to the European avant-garde and North American postmodernism, and in sociopolitical history to Germany's democratic aspirations. But this moment of possibility already includes the seeds of its own undoing. Through Zeitblom's horrified eyes and Jameson's critique of postmodernism, we are alerted to the dangers that lurk unacknowledged in Leverkuhn's blind (or culpable?) 'play' with postmodern tropes. It is in Hitler's 'postmodern' strategies (see chapter 6) that these dangers take on a historical specificity which postmodern debates consistently ignore. The Devil and the Temptation of Atonality (or 'Postmodernism') What is abundantly clear, although seldom recognized, is that the central scene of++++++++++++++++++the so-called interview with the signals the end of aesthetic modernism and the beginning of postmodernism. In this scene we witness Leverkuhn's decisive break with a past committed to the harmonious unity of opposites, whether this commitment takes the form of Zeitblom's faith in the emancipatory potential of Hegelian humanism or the volkish desire for a return to pre-modern origins. Although Leverkiihn acknowledges Hegel's conception of the dialectical interdependence of opposites, he rejects his teleological belief in the possibility of their positive resolution. In other words, he retains Hegel's historical dialectic while refusing his identity thesis. The scene with the devil is for Leverkiihn the moment of crisis when he admits to himself that he will have to turn against the appeals to spontaneity and organicism which figure so prominently not only in volkish arguments but also in Kretschmar's Beethoven lectures. If we assume that Zeitblom is correct when he connects proto-fascist attitudes to his friend's aesthetic explorations, then we would expect that

166 Postmodernity and Fascism

the 'demonic' twelve-tone system he develops would be marked by characteristics typical of volkish thought. It should then come as a surprise when the devil informs Leverkiihn that the 'historical movement of the musical material has turned against the self-contained [closed] work' (Mann 1968,233). Instead of preaching the volkish insistence on organic closure, the devil in fact points the composer in a different direction. Leverkuhn will inaugurate a radical revolution that is less predicated on volkish nostalgia for organic unity than it is mobilized by modernity's drive for the instrumentalization of reason. Modernity's emancipatory agenda is endangered not only by the return of the repressed 'other' of reason but also by the bourgeois-capitalist tendency to absolutize the category of reason. According to this reading, fascism would then be an extreme extension of modernity's selfdeceptive blindness to its own totalizing desire for domination. In other words, Mann's novel follows Adorno in that it links German fascism and late capitalism. Where the Nazis foregrounded the irrational ends that are served by the rational organization of society, bourgeois capitalism conceals this uncanny paradox even from itself. The interview with the devil confirms above all that Leverkuhn recognizes that his aesthetic aspirations force him to say farewell to the tradition of tonal music. As the devil himself emphasizes, Leverkiihn's pact with him does no more than confirm an already existing situation. 'We make naught new,' declares the devil, '[w]e only release, only set free' (Mann 1968, 230). The interview is not so much a new narrative development as the clarification of past events. Since Mann invites us to read the devil metaphorically as a psychological projection of Leverkiihn's own inner thoughts, the scene is a dramatic device to orient the reader's interpretive activities.2 In the first part of the dialogue, the devil still reinforces the volkish contention that too much reason has destroyed vital impulses. Leverkiihn's visit to Esmeralda for the express purpose of infecting himself with syphilis shows not only that he has already promised his soul to the devil but also that he follows the volkish prescription of seeking sexual depravity so as to reawaken a higher spiritual essence. The demonic is at this point still identified in traditional Christian terms with base instincts. The pact with the devil conveys, above all, Leverkiihn's willingness to face any risk to achieve his aesthetic breakthrough. He justifies himself by arguing that the situation is so dire that exceptional steps have to be envisaged, a rationalization the devil reinforces when he confirms that the renewal of art is today possible only

Breakthrough into Atonality (or Postmodernism) 167

with demonic help. At this early stage, the devil promises 'the archaic, the primeval, that which long since has not been tried' (Mann 1968, 230), which reflects the volkish ideology of the Winfried students and Munich intellectuals. There can be no doubt that Mann alludes in unmistakable terms to the neo-Romantic rhetorical appeal of German National Socialism. But the interview also acknowledges that German fascism constitutes a radical departure from the tradition it appears to uphold. After the introductory skirmish, the devil changes appearance, taking on Adorno-like characteristics. He now looks and acts like 'a member of the intelligentsia, writer on art, on music for the ordinary press, a theoretician and critic, who himself composes' (Mann 1968, 231). Once the conversation focuses specifically on music, the devil contradicts his earlier volkish enthusiasm, rejecting the 'folklorists and neo-classic asylists whose modernness consists in ... wearing with more or less dignity the style-garment of a pre-individualistic period' (Mann 1968, 231). In this scene, Leverkiihn clarifies for himself the full extent of the impasse musical form has reached under the relentlessly reifying conditions of late capitalism. Everything the devil says about music is a rehearsal of insights and contentions which Leverkiihn had earlier communicated to Zeitblom. 'Where work does not go any longer with sincerity,' pontificates the devil, '[c]omposing itself has got too hard' (Mann 1968, 232). Leverkiihn has reached a moment of deep crisis, an intensification of the frustration Beethoven experienced during the composition of his late fugues. Although Beethoven inaugurated the farewell to tonal music in sonata opus 111, he himself and his successors worked hard to gloss over the increasing gap between musical form and musical material. The interview with the devil signals Leverkiihn's recognition that he is fated to conclude the break with tonality first intimated in sonata opus 111. As the devil puts it, 'the masterpiece, the self-sufficient form, belongs to traditional art, emancipated art rejects it' (Mann 1968, 232). The shockingly dissonant 'diminished seventh,' with which Beethoven opened sonata opus 111, has degenerated into a cliche that illustrates the inauthenticity of the 'technical general position which contradicts the actual' (Mann 1968, 232). Contrary to volkish ideology, the devil insists that history thwarts the possibility of Leverkiihn's recovering the diminished seventh as an authentic musical expression. When the devil maintains that the 'sickness' that has befallen music should not be attributed to the 'social conditions' (Mann 1968, 233), he dismisses the superficial explanation

168 Postmodern!ty and Fascism

that the public is no longer interested in serious music. His more profound meaning is that the musical material, which is so socially embedded that each 'sound carries the whole, carries the whole story in itself (Mann 1968,232), expresses within its very form the social conditions that allowed its articulation at a specific moment in time. It follows that the devil dismisses tonal music because it is no longer capable of expressing the antagonistic reality of late-bourgeois capitalism. There is only one moment in the interview in which Leverkiihn fights against the knowledge that tonality, and with it the dream of German idealism, is irrevocably lost to him. Arguing that the devil cannot preclude 'the theoretic possibility of spontaneous harmony' (Mann 1968, 233), he briefly holds out the hope that modernity is an incomplete rather than a misconceived project. The devil's rejoinder indicates his distance from the aestheticization of mass hysteria in German National Socialism; he calls the situation 'too critical to be dealt with without [analytical] critique' (Mann 1968, 233). What Leverkuhn needs to acknowledge above all is that 'the self-satisfied pretence of music itself has become impossible and [is] no longer to be preserved' (Mann 1968, 234). The first step in Leverkiihn's program of aesthetic regeneration is thus not fascist exploitation but Adornian demystification of aesthetic illusion: the 'emancipation from the concept of harmony turns out to be a revolt against illusion' (Adorno 1984,148). In his history of music, Adorno specifies that Beethoven (and Brahms) could still rely on 'the unity of the motivic-thematic manipulation' (Adorno 1973, 57) whose task was to perform a 'balance between subjective dynamics and traditional - "tonal" - language' (Adorno 1973, 57). Th pre-industrial subject could still recognize itself in the illusory reconciliation of its concrete particularity with the abstract collectivity of society. It is this illusion which the devil denounces: The subsumption of expression into a general universality represents the innermost principle of musical illusion' (Mann 1968, 234; trans, amended). In other words, social alienation has not yet reached the point where human beings express what they really suffer; they let themselves be consoled by the myth of universal progress. The closed work asks subjects to misrecognize themselves in the reconciliation of opposites in the art work's formal unity. Leverkuhn's aesthetic task is dictated by the sociohistorical imperative calling on him to demystify the 'illusory character of the bourgeois work of art' (Mann 1968,234; trans, amended). At no point in their discussion does the devil offer a positive program or blueprint for the new music Leverkuhn yearns for; limiting himself

Breakthrough into Atonality (or Postmodernism) 169

to demystifying the illusions of tonal music, he is the voice of negative dialectics. The devil's only future-oriented 'advice' is the volkish admonition that Leverkiihn transcend the sterility of modernity by immersing himself in the irrational in order to recover repressed spontaneity. This 'advice' of the Kumpf-devil is not only contradicted by the Adornodevil but finds no articulation in the discussion specifically devoted to music. In conformity with the dialectic the novel has so far dramatized, this privileging of the subjective-irrational-demonic potential in Leverkiihn's program would in any case ultimately intensify the opposite tendency toward objective totalization. Occupying the halfway point in Doctor Faustus, this scene dramatically foregrounds the farewell to Beethoven, which Adorno interprets also as a farewell to Hegelianism. The interview with the devil, then, signals the end of the parallel between Leverkiihn's aesthetic theories and the volkish ideology of Winfried students and Munich intellectuals. Far from reinforcing the conservative return to the past advocated by volkish intellectuals, the twelve-tone system he develops in reaction against the illusions perpetrated by the (bourgeois) ideals of the closed work is radically revolutionary+in that it is paradoxically both an extension of the rationalizing tendencies of modernity and an expression of the fantastic unreality of postmodernity as simulation. At the end of the novel, Leverkiihn will claim that the only help the devil extended was to free him from parody. If we recall that parody is generally acknowledged as a gesture of respect toward the precursor who is being treated ironically, then parody remains caught up within the tradition from which Leverkiihn seeks to free himself. However, as we will see, the emancipation from parody culminates in pastiche, a postmodern trope which Jameson vilifies as the reflection++++++++++++++of the loss of meaning, of su tive agency, and of historical consciousness in postmodernity. If Leverkiihn initially welcomes the disappearance of parody as a breakthrough, he later acknowledges that this 'emancipation' ought really to be understood as the displacement of one form of domination by an even more destructive one. Leverkiihn escapes from the frying pan only to end up in the fire. The Deconstruction of Hierarchy through 'Freeplay' When the devil demystifies the illusions of tonal music, he initiates a 'break' with the past which anticipates Derrida's deconstruction of the

170 Postmodern!ty and Fascism

Western metaphysical tradition. Derrida's often anthologized early essay 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences' provides us with a sophisticated articulation not only of the limits of modernity but also of Leverkiihn's emergent counter-discourse. In this well-known essay, Derrida clarifies that the conceptions of systems as centred (or hierarchical) structures are blind to the paradoxical logic on which they depend. Since the tonal tradition Leverkiihn seeks to transcend is based precisely on such notions of harmonious coherence, Derrida's critique refines our understanding of the radically revolutionary nature of the composer's aesthetic aspirations. His atonal experiments not only deconstruct the centred self-understanding of tonality but offer an alternative discourse marked by a decentring strategy which Derrida calls jeu, a term conventionally translated either as 'freeplay' or more simply as 'play.' Although this is probably Derrida's best-known essay, I would argue that its ideological implications have not been fully appreciated. In the first instance, the disruption of metaphysical presence through freeplay throws light on the dialectical history Mann borrows from Adorno. At the same time, the historically specific context of German National Socialism inflects the ideological significance and points to the limits of Derrida's counter-discourse. In a move reminiscent of Adorno's objections to Hegel's identity thesis, Derrida's 'Structure, Sign, and Play' begins by restating and critiquing notions of structure which assume that the relationship between part and whole ought to be organically harmonious. As we have already seen, the most sophisticated version of this investment in a harmonious unity of opposites is Hegel's contention that identity preserves the specificity of the parts that make up its totality. Derrida's critique of (organic) unity pinpoints the contradiction on which this conception depends for its coherence. What is at stake in this critique is the question of how systems legitimate themselves. What assumptions are we making when we accept truth-claims which privilege some discursive practices and exclude others? In Derrida's view, classical notions of structure operate on a mostly unexamined inside/outside logic. To control what Derrida calls the+++++++of the structure' (Derrid 1982c, 247-8), the structure refers to a centre or fixed origin at the same time as it paradoxically also authorizes itself by appealing to a transcendental point beyond its limits. In order to govern the structure from inside, the centre has to be 'by definition unique' (Derrida 1982c, 248). Although it has to be inside the structure to provide it with order, it cannot operate on the same level as the structure it controls; it must

Breakthrough into Atonality (or Postmodernism) 171

therefore 'escape structurality' (Derrida 1982c, 248). According to classical thought, 'the centre is, paradoxically,++++++++++++++++++++++ it' (Derrida 1982c, 248). In the case of Hegel, Geist is meant to be operative both inside the human subject and in the+++++f history; it i contradictorily both immanent and transcendent. Derrida's apparently illogical statement that the 'centre is not the centre' does in fact make sense in that the 'centre is at the centre of the totality, and yet, since the centre does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its centre elsewhere' (Derrida 1982c, 248). Appeals to origins or metaphysical presence claim that a notion like God or Geist is absolutely self-referential; its meaning is in no way determined by its position relative to other concepts. Whether the centre is thought of as an origin+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ substitution of contents, elements, or terms is no longer possible' (Derrida 1982c, 248). Grounding the system in a moment of absolute certainty, the centre does not prevent freeplay but limits it by managing it. The content of the centre is, of course, far from fixed; different concepts have at different times been privileged as foundational authorities which organize a discursive field hierarchically from the top down (God, science, nature, culture, reason,+++++++man, genius, monarch, st+++ Fiihrer principle). The 'whole history of the concept of structure' must 'be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center, as a linked chain of determinations of the center' (Derrida 1982c, 249). Derrida's critique foregrounds above all that classical conceptions of the centred structure conceal the violence that is being perpetrated by an exclusionary logic which has historically presented itself as naturally given. Derrida's radical intervention into this narrative of substitutions of centre for centre is to think 'the structurality of structure' (Derrida 1982c, 249) as being without a fixed centre or natural locus. If the centre is neither inside nor outside the structure, then it is implicated in an interplay of differences which never comes to rest in an Archimedean point. The emphasis on difference subverts all identity thinking and undermines self-legitimating appeals to truth. Pointing to the limits which have illegitimately constrained discourses, Derrida tries to liberate freeplay from the clutches of metaphysical presence. The structure is now opened up to previously prohibited discourses and escapes the totalizing tendencies of identity thinking. Derrida seems to set up 'freeplay' as a counter-discourse to classical centred conceptions. It may appear that his own thinking remains trapped in the binary structure of oppositions which he ostensibly deconstructs; the essay quite obvi-

172 Postmodernity and Fascism

ously contrasts centred and decentred conceptions of structure. However, since difference or 'freeplay' makes no claims to foundational authority, it functions as a non-originary origin which engenders neither hierarchies nor legacies. Instead of consolidating a discourse around an authorizing centre, difference decomposes and unravels the discursive tapestry, laying bare overlapping and conflicting trajectories. Most importantly, difference disrupts the drive toward totalization; lacking a centre which 'arrests and founds the freeplay of substitutions' (Derrida 1982c, 260), the discursive field resists closure. In the process of closing an inside off against an outside, the structure necessarily opens up an outside which in turn needs to be contained. By delimiting itself, a structure pushes against its boundaries and thereby concedes that it cannot exist without the outside which it also needs to exclude. It is in this sense that the center is constituted by the very margins which it seeks to exile from itself. As Derrida specifies, 'this movement of the freeplay, permitted by the lack, the absence of a centre or origin, is the movement of supplementarity' (Derrida 1982c, 260). The metaphor for this movement of supplementarity is language; by standing in for the absent referent, words participate in a chain of supplements which always also produces an excess of meaning. 'The movement of signification/ explains Derrida, 'adds something, which results in the fact that there is always more, but this addition is a floating one because it comes to perform a vicarious function, to supplement a lack on the part of the signified' (Derrida 1982c, 260-1). In this early attempt to articulate his radical decentring of the structure, Derrida celebrates freeplay in terms which suggest that freeplay is a counter-discourse to classical identity thinking. Freeplay is described as joyous 'Nietzschean affirmation,' as a 'game without security,' as 'absolute chance' and as an 'adventure' (Derrida 1982c, 264). In the conclusion to the essay, Derrida recapitulates the binary opposition between the 'two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of freeplay': The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin which is free from freeplay and from the order of the sign, and lives like an exile the necessity of interpretation. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology - in other words, through the history of all of his history - has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of the game. (Derrida 1982c, 264-5)

Breakthrough into Atonality (or Postmodernism) 173 However, Derrida was careful to remind us that freeplay should not be interpreted as an alternative to metaphysics: 'There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics. We have no language - no syntax and no lexicon - which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single destructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest' (Derrida 1982c, 250). It is not a questio of transcending or replacing metaphysics but of disrupting it by drawing attention to what it needs to conceal. Yet, as Culler comments, 'Derrida has often been read as urging us to choose the second interpretation of interpretation, to affirm a free play of meaning' (Culler 1982,132). Since the 'two interpretations of interpretation' are 'absolutely irreconcilable' (Derrida 1982c, 265), Derrida insists that there cannot be 'any question of choosing'+(Derrida 1982c, 265) between them. In the contest between Kan and Hegel, Derrida sides with Kant's stress on the aporetic relationship of opposites and speaks against Hegel's attempt at reconciliation. Where Hegel assumes that we can be both subject and object, Derrida wants us to think that we are neither subject nor object. The both-and model encourages us to harmonize differences while the neither-nor model exhorts us to trace and analyse the conflicts and contradictions foregrounded by the shift of emphasis to difference. Although Derrida's strategy is to trouble the relation of an opposition so as to change the meaning of both terms, his Nietzschean affirmation of 'freeplay' seems to privilege it as a desirable alternative to the oppressive discourses authorized by the metaphysical tradition. Speaking cautiously and in quotation marks of an 'event' signalling a 'rupture' after which the idea of structure must be thought differently, Derrida locates the metaphor for this new 'logic' in the metaphoric language of poetry. The aesthetic is for him not an illusory discourse whose function is to produce a compensatory reconciliation of contradictions which are in reality irreconcilable. He singles out literary language because it self-referentially acknowledges the sign's mediated relationship to the referent, the awareness of its supplementary or fictional status. It is through this self-consciousness that language destabilizes the totalizing myths of philosophy. Where analytical-scientific or rational-instrumental discourses make claims to factual truth, literary language knows itself to be implicated in the 'bottomless overdeterminability' (Derrida 1982d, 243) of metaphorization. Disdaining the desire for 'proper meaning,' literary language exults in metaphorical slippage and exuberance. Although instrumental language

174 Postmodern!ty and Fascism

cannot avoid using rhetorical tropes, it assumes that metaphor is merely a detour which 'will lead us back to the proper name' (Derrida 1982d, 243). In his debate with Jacques Lacan over the interpretation of Foe's short story 'The Purloined Letter/ Derrida makes the point that the 'letter/ whether as missive or as semantic marker, need not arrive at its destination. In 'White Mythology' and 'Signature Event Context/ Derrida specifically contends that words are by definition polysemic and consequently more unstable and uncontrollable than is properly allowed for by notions of the 'proper.' Since, to be legible, a word has to be repeatable, it carries with it all its possible contexts. The iterability of words at once 'fixes' their meaning and contributes to their semantic drifting. A word can be inscribed or 'grafted' onto other semantic chains; it can always be 'cited' and thereby 'break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely non-saturable fashion' (Derrida 1982b, 320). If words are inhabited by all their possible contexts, theoretically there are no limits to the combinations they can enter into. Neither author nor reader can control their distribution or confine their propagation. Instead of returning to the proper name, metaphor drifts uncontrollably, indefinitely defers arriving at a destination, and abandons itself to an excess of signification. In OfGrammatology, Derrida provides an extended explanation of the two senses of the paradoxical logic of the supplement when he discusses the relationship between writing and speech. The supplement is first of all something that stands in for what is absent; writing, for instance, is 'a sort of artificial and artful ruse to make speech present when it is actually absent' (Derrida 1976, 144). Derrida elaborates this point as follows: The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence. It cumulates and accumulates presence. It is thus that art,+++++image, representation, convention, etc., come as supplements to nature and are rich with this entire cumulating function. This kind of supplementarity determines in a certain way all the conceptual oppositions within which Rousseau inscribes the notion of Nature to the extent that it should be self-sufficient. (Derrida 1976,145)

This 'surplus/ though, not only 'insinuates itself in-the-place-of (Derrida 1976,145) but is also a 'lack' in that it points to the absence of the thing itself. No matter how felicitous a word or an image is, it can never satisfactorily compensate for what is naturally given. Whether the ac-

Breakthrough into Atonality (or Postmodernism) 175

cent falls on 'surplus' or 'lack/ the 'supplement is++++++outside of the positivity to which it is super-added, alien to that which, in order to be replaced by it, must be other than it' (Derrida 1976, 145). In more concrete terms, the role Rousseau attributes to education illustrates what I think Derrida is trying to convey. As we have already seen, Rousseau deplores writing and hence civilization as sites of inauthenticity and deception. This lack of authenticity needs to be remedied through recourse to education, which is described as 'a system of substitution [suppleance] destined to reconstitute Nature's edifice in the most natural way possible' (Derrida 1976, 145). Education is an excess which is generated by a lack: 'It is indeed culture or cultivation that must supplement a deficient nature, a deficiency that cannot by definition be anything but an accident and a deviation from Nature' (Derrida 1976, 146). In a dialectical movement, education is an artful detour which permits those of us lacking in nature to regain our natural goodness and become once again fully present to ourselves. But where Rousseau assumes that the lack/excess opposition is open to dialectica resolution, Derrida stages it as the scandal of Western metaphysics. Being both lack++++excess, the supplement is dangerous because it uncannily insinuates itself into what ought to be clearly distinguishable. 'Reason/ says Derrida, 'is incapable of thinking ... that there is lack in Nature and that because of this very fact something is added to it' (Derrida 1976, 149). What Derrida never tires of stressing is that '[t]he supplement is what neither Nature nor Reason can tolerate' (Derrida 1976,148); we have therefore tamed its subversive influence by repressing it and exiling it from our systems of thought. As Derrida tells it, 'simple irrationality, the opposite of reason/ is less frightening to 'classical logic' than the 'supplement/ which is 'maddening because it is neither presence nor absence' (Derrida 1976, 154). The 'supplement' is then a boundary breaker which disrupts the conceptual oppositions on which classical logic and metaphysics base theoretical systems and political practices. By arguing that meaning is always deferred, Derrida takes Saussure's insight that language is a differential system without positive terms to its radical extension. In 'White Mythology/ Derrida clarifies that it is not metaphor but catachresis which is the trope for metaphoricity. Selfconsciously infelicitous, catachresis is symptomatic of Derrida's insistence that all systems are radically aporetic and incommensurable. Early negative reactions to Derrida's affirmation of freeplay have focused on what seemed to Abrams or Hirsch the endorsement of an 'anything

176 Postmodernity and Fascism

goes' attitude. If there are no norms, then texts will be interpreted in arbitrary and esoteric terms. Like Zeitblom, those in the Abrams and Hirsch camp fear that literary/artistic as well as social/political texts will disintegrate into a meaningless heap of fragments. Zeitblom's anxiety when faced by atonal experiments is to a large extent produced by the 'maddening' disorientation that Leverkuhn creates when his supplementary logic destabilizes the system of opposites on which Zeitblom depends for his humanist framing of events. The Emancipatory Potential of Free Atonality Doctor Faustus+exemplifies Leverkuhn's search for a line of flight fro modernity in free atonal experiments that precede the twelve-tone system he perfects in his masterpiece 'The Lament of Doctor Faustus.' In his reaction to the exhaustion of the tonal tradition, Leverkuhn leans from the beginning toward a postmodern subversion of the philosophical assumptions on which modernity relies to legitimate its discursive practices and political institutions. In the first instance, in an early conversation with Zeitblom, he rejects all foundational appeals to the 'given/ embracing instead a radically sceptical version of philosophical relativism. Although Zeitblom acknowledges the fictional status of norms, he affirms their heuristic and strategic importance whereas Leverkuhn, in a Nietzschean gesture, is prepared to face the dangerous 'truth' of this 'untruth.' Comparing his position with Leverkuhn's, the narrator comments: 'Belief in absolute values, illusory as it always is, seems to me a condition of life. But my friend's gifts measured themselves against values the relative character of which would have detracted from them as values' (Mann 1968, 47). Severing all ties to the traditional norms of the hierarchically constituted tonal system, Leverkuhn envisages compositions in which free notes would be in a position to combine in previously unimaginable ways.3 In an attempt to break down the walls of traditional norms and conventions, Leverkuhn imitates Nietzsche by arguing for an arbitrary and differential system in which individual parts take their meaning not from their essence but from their relative function within a totality. Favouring musical formations relying on synchronic 'relations between things' (Mann 1968, 48), he determines the value of notes not according to their historical accretion of meaning but according to the position they occupy in relation to other notes at any given moment in time. He thereby shares Saussure's contention that a word has no substance of its own, acquiring its mean-

Breakthrough into Atonality (or Postmodernism) 177

ing from its relationship with other words in the system. A word gives us no unmediated access to 'the thing-in-itself/ for it takes its value from the context of the linguistic system to which it belongs. 'Instead of pre-existing ideas then/ clarifies Saussure, 'we find in all the foregoing examples values emanating from the system. When they are said to correspond to concepts, it is understood that the concepts are purely differential and defined not by their positive content but negatively by their relations with the other terms of the system. Their most precise characteristic is in being what the others are not' (Saussure 1966,117). This relativistic theory of language suggests that every speaker could act like Humpty Dumpty, who insisted that he could make words mean anything he liked. This 'freedom' to combine words in previously unimaginable ways is for Adorno most closely approximated by the 'free atonality' characteristic of works by his teacher Alban Berg and of Adorno's own compositions. Zeiblom's reactions to 'free atonality' and the responses of literary critics to the theoretical implications of Saussure's relativism manifest a fear that the loss of normative standards allowing us to make sense of music or language would result in utter chaos. Where Leverkiihn sees in the rejection of normative values the emancipatory possibility of constructing a radically new musical system, Zeitblom is frightened by the risk of losing control over the dissemination of meaning implicit in his friend's endorsement of relativism. He is discomfited by Leverkiihn's denial of normative values because he fears that it opens the door to 'a certain ill fame, a fantastic ambiguity' (Mann 1968, 21), that is, to the uncanny effects of Jonathan Leverkiihn's disruption of the categories of modernity on which Zeitblom constructs his sense of self. It is, of course, highly significant that Zeitblom uses a term like Zweideutigkeit (equivocation) which literally invokes two mutually irreconcilable references. In our postmodern vocabulary, Zweideutigkeit is the trope par excellence+of Derrida's conception of radical undecidability. Leverkiihn' aesthetic experiments are thus marked by postmodern tropes whose tendency toward 'unmaking' is for Ihab Hassan and Linda Hutcheon potentially an enabling process. Postmodern tropes are today most prominently identified with 'ambiguity, discontinuity, heterodoxy, pluralism, randomness, revolt, perversion, deformation' as well as with 'decreation, disintegration, deconstruction, de-definition, demystification, detotalization, delegitimization' (Hassan 1993,153) and with 'discontinuity, disruption, dislocation, decentring, indeterminacy, and

178 Postmodern!ty and Fascism

antitotalization' (Hutcheon 1988, 3). Although Hassan's terminology suggests a certain anxiety about the dissolution of known structures, he nevertheless takes the optimistic view that postmodernism veers toward 'open, playful, optative, provisional (open in time as well as in structure or space), disjunctive, or indeterminate forms' (Hassan 1993, 154), a position Hutcheon reinforces in her celebration of the potential of postmodern irony, parody, self-reflexivity, and provisionality to disrupt the domination exercised by the socioeconomic order. For her the 'intensely self-reflexive' (Hutcheon 1988,5) nature of postmodern texts is in itself a moment of resistance to unselfconscious commodification. In the same vein, by foregrounding 'provisionality' (Hutcheon 1988,6), postmodern texts demystify the certainties of bourgeois self-understanding. Countering Jameson's critique of postmodernism as a flight from history, she illustrates that parody, for instance, constitutes an engagement with history in that 'it is precisely parody - that seemingly introverted formalism - that paradoxically brings about a direct confrontation with the problem of the relation of the aesthetic to a world of significance external to itself, to a discursive world of socially defined meaning systems (past and present) - in other words, to the political and the historical' (Hutcheon 1988, 22). Stressing her disagreement with+++++++like Jameson,' who evaluate 'this loss of the modernist unique, individual style as a negative, as an imprisoning of the text in the past through pastiche/ Hutcheon points out that 'postmodern artists+experience this challenge to the privileging of origins as "liberat ing"' (Hutcheon 1988, 11). The conflict between Leverkiihn's and Zeitblom's attitudes toward the aesthetic experiments at stake in Mann's parable of fascism continues to play itself out in postmodern debates. Although Adorno and Mann consider atonality to be an aesthetic accomplishment of the first order, they are also highly suspicious of it as the triumph of a dangerous sceptical relativism. Since both+++++ Faustus++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ critical stance toward atonal twelve-tone technique, we need to remind ourselves first of the emancipatory potential of free atonality which lures Leverkiihn. According to Adorno, Schonberg's recourse to polyphony is indeed 'the means best suited for the organization of emancipated+music' (Adorno 1973,58; my emphasis). As Witkin points out, th 'avant-garde "free atonality" of the years around 1910, the period of [Schonberg's]+++++++++++++++remained the mode of musical const which Adorno himself was musically committed throughout his life' (Witkin 1998, 133). This commitment is not surprising in view of the

Breakthrough into Atonality (or Postmodernism) 179

fact that Adorno studied under Alban Berg and used free atonality in some of his own compositions. In 'free atonal music each work creates afresh the compositional context' (Witkin 1998,122) rather than accepting a predetermined system as in Schonberg's later twelve-tone technique. 'It is this ideal of a free "musique informelle/" explains Witkin, 'in which order is realised spontaneously and expressively from below in response to the living context, which Adorno sets up as one pole of an antimony, the other being that of an absolute subject-alien totalitarian administrative order' (Witkin 1998, 122). Around 1910, then, the 'possibility of creating a genuinely free and spontaneous music' (Witkin 1998,133) still existed, a potential later shut down by the development of strict serial music. Liberating music from the limitations of 'octave registrations/ atonality opened up 'the total rhythmic configuration' (Adorno 1973, 63) and elevated orchestral colour and timbre to organizational principles. The creative potential of new music applies not only to free atonality but also to twelve-tone technique; it is particularly impressive when we consider the virtually unlimited number of variations it allows for: 'Thus the variations for orchestra are inexhaustible in their row combinations' (Adorno 1991,65; my trans.). The richness of this open semiotic system comes across in Charles R. Hoffer's description: 'While the tone-row technique may appear limited at first glance, it has been calculated that there are 479,001,600 different tone rows available. And each row can be treated in countless ways. It can appear vertically in chords as well as horizontally in melodies. The row can be transposed, or it can be moved to a different octave. It can be subdivided into phrases of different lengths' (Hoffer 1967, 95). It appears that this technique gives the composer unprecedented scope for creative play and subjective self-expression. Leverkiihn will exploit this freedom to subvert and invert the terms of oppositions like harmony/poly phony, vertical/horizontal, voice/instrument, divine/demonic, human/inhuman, subjective/objective. 'The "emancipation of dissonance,'" explains Schorske, 'has done more here than destroy harmonic order and cadential certainty. By establishing a democracy of tones, it has vastly enlarged all the expressive possibilities, thematic and rhythmic as well as coloristic and tonal' (Schorske 1981,351). The progressive aspirations of atonality should not be underestimated. No longer assigned a specific place in an oppressive hierarchy, each musical note or element enjoys the same status, functions on the same level, exists side by side with all other elements. Where the tonal system 'was a musical frame in which

180 Postmodernity and Fascism

tones had unequal power to express, to validate, and to make bearable the life of man under a rationally organized hierarchical culture' (Schorske 1981, 346), free atonal music could be said to define the democratic ideal of equality. When Mann first quotes Adorno's analysis of Schonberg's technique, he suggests that Leverkiihn dreams of ending oppression without recognizing the reifying nightmare he is constructing. Attributing the discontent of modern times to the separation of life spheres, the fictional composer complains that Various elements - melody, harmony, counterpoint, form, and instrumentation' (Mann 1997, 204) - have developed independently of each other, in a historically accidental manner. The nightmare of history can thus be ascribed to the constant struggle for domination of one form over another. His solution is to end disputes among squabbling forms by making them all equal in what sounds like a Habermassian 'non-violent totality.' The hierarchical model of tonality is to be replaced with 'the idea of a rational total organization of all musical material... one that would clear away anachronistic incongruities and prevent one element from being the mere function of another, the way melody became a function of harmony in the Romantic period. It would be a matter of developing all dimensions simultaneously and of generating them separately so that they then converge' (Mann 1997, 205). Through a number of subtle shifts, Mann rewrites Adorno's critique of Schonberg as Leverkiihn's innocent Utopian aspiration. In political terms, Leverkiihn is not objecting to any particular manifestation of domination but wants to end the very structural possibility of one element serving the interests of another. Individuals would be allowed to develop equally and to realize their human potential. Following in Rousseau's footsteps, Leverkiihn presumably believes that such liberated subjects would naturally form non-violent communities. It is only in The Lament of Doctor Faustus,' composed to commemorate Echo's death, that Leverkiihn despairs of the emancipatory possibilities of twelve-tone technique. Even in Apocalypsis cum figuris, the work Leverkiihn completes just before 'The Lament of Doctor Faustus,' he remains confident that atonality can provide the transformative power he dreams of in his Hegelian desire for the revitalization of art and society. However, since the description of the 'apocalypse' comes to us through Zeitblom, who is both impressed and shocked by an aesthetic accomplishment which he calls the 'herald of barbarism' (Mann 1968, 359), the positive aspects of twelve-tone technique are consistently undercut. The narrator is discomfited by a reconfiguration of the

Breakthrough into Atonality (or Postmodernism) 181

tonal system which flirts with anarchy by reversing oppositions and disrupting familiar contexts. In other words, he underestimates the liberation from constraints that marks Leverkiihn's reconfiguration of technical devices. Beethoven's first experiments with 'rhythmic freedom/ for instance, had already anticipated what becomes in Leverkiihn's hands not the sublation but the displacement of 'bar-lines' (Mann 1968, 362). Ignoring symmetry in favour of accentual rhythm, Leverkiihn creates music which changes its 'rhythm ... from bar to bar' (Mann 1968, 362). But Zeitblom ignores the Utopian potential implicit in such disruptions of musical norms. His negative assessment of the glissando, for instance, overlooks that the 'gliding voice' (glissando) intervenes in the 'ordering and normalizing' of 'the notes' (Mann 1968, 360), upsetting the hierarchical order of the tonal system and thereby introducing the (utopian) possibility of doing things differently. Zeitblom only sees the 'anti-human appeal' of a strategy which threatens to return music to the 'chaos' of the untutored human voice, that is, to 'singing,' which had been, in 'primeval times ... a howling glissando over several notes' (Mann 1968, 360). Mesmerized by the thematic substance of the 'howling,' he fails to see the unconstrained formal 'freedom' to combine elements in new ways. Without an organizing centre, the system opens itself to the redefinition of values it assigns to its constitutive parts. Leverkiihn 'playfully' reverses positive and negative associations, using dissonance to represent 'the expression of everything lofty, solemn, pious, everything of the spirit' while reserving 'consonance and firm tonality' for the 'world of hell, in this context a world of banality and commonplace' (Mann 1968, 361). His ironic self-consciousness could be viewed as a Brechtian attempt to encourage us to change how we think and act. Instead, Zeitblom feels threatened not just because Leverkiihn recovers the irrational or demonic but because he erases the boundaries necessary to fix the norms which secure the claims of liberal humanism. Realizing that the 'apocalypse' upsets the categories he relies on, Zeitblom is most seriously discomfited by Leverkiihn's 'singular interchange,' by the reversal of 'the voices and the orchestra' which means that '[c]horus and orchestra are here not clearly separated fom each other as symbols of the human and the material world' and hence 'the boundary between man and thing seems shifted [verriickt]' (Mann 1968, 361). The pun on++++++++++signals that such reversals 'displace' and render sane.' For Zeitblom, these reversals carry with them all the uncanny overtones of Jonathan Leverkiihn's scientific speculations. The 'apoca-

182 Postmodernity and Fascism

lypse' is shocking precisely because it testifies to the uncanny, demonic effect of radical relativism. Once Zeitblom's 'strategic' norms are demystified, the possibility of dangerous substitutions, unforeseen reversals, and unmanageable effects is appallingly present. What fills Zeitblom with anxiety and misgivings is that Leverkiihn's fascination with part-part relationships ('relations between things') threatens the hierarchical basis of organically conceived part-whole models. Subverting the law of non-contradiction, Leverkiihn's move anticipates Derrida's paradoxical neither-nor logic which forces us to suspect, and perhaps abandon, the comforting illusions of Hegel's bothand sublation of opposites. If we assume that the arrangement of individual roots and branches receives its meaning and coherence from the whole 'tree,' then the parts are said to be defined by a finite structure. But, as Derrida reminds us, this organic metaphor overlooks that the apparently finite limit of the figure ('tree') is in fact only perceptible against a ground that necessarily exceeds it. Mann reaches for a different metaphor to represent Leverkiihn's challenge to the centred structure of tonality. Zeitblom sees Leverkiihn's bold adventure into uncharted aesthetic territory as yielding to demonic temptation. Mann symbolizes this demonic subversion of the familiar world through the composer's Faustian dream 'journey' into the bottomless depth of the ocean ('the wonders of the depths of the sea' [Mann 1968, 258]) and the unlimited expanse of the cosmos. Leverkiihn describes 'a new, unknown, irrelevant world' (Mann 1968,259), an infinity which Zeitblom identifies as 'ungraspable ... [a] stunning statistics' (Mann 1968, 262). What is uncanny about this dream journey is not so much its magical nature as its assault on the orderly logic of Enlightenment categories of thought. Through Zeitblom's reactions to Leverkiihn's affirmation of infinity, Mann articulates his uneasy recognition that the demystification of finite limits opens the system to vertiginous possibilities of undecidability and aberration. Radically sceptical of ontological foundations, Leverkiihn makes the relativistic claim that '[relationship is everything' and asserts '[t]hat music turns the equivocal into a system' (Mann 1968, 49). Atonality beckons as an anti-systemic system which decentres the tonal hierarchy of bourgeois music and thus subverts the very categories which had enabled Zeitblom to orient himself in the world. If Apocalypsis cumfiguris is indeed symbolic of the moment when Germany approved the Weimar Constitution, it expresses the democratic

Breakthrough into Atonality (or Postmodernism) 183

ideal in its radical anarchistic sense. What Leverkiihn desires above all is the liberation of the individual note from the hierarchical oppression of the key system. Free atonality aspires to a freedom from all constraints predicated on the equality of each note in relation to all the other notes. It represents a differential system which not only levels hierarchical distributions but erases all distinctions. Free atonality thus represents not the positive freedom of contractual rights and responsibilities of parliamentary democracies like the Weimar Republic but the negative freedom from all constraints typical of anarchistic liberal aspirations. Assuming that+++++++++++++++++embodies Leverkiihn's most accomplished composition in the style of free atonality, we can no longer escape the recognition that the portenous title alerts us to the tragic consequences of this aesthetic breakthrough. If Leverkuhn's turn to free atonality can be said to correspond to moments of emancipatory promise (belated democratization in Germany and belated postmodern play in North America), then his transmutation of the principle of atonality into the rigorous twelve-tone system can be interpreted as an 'unintended consequence' whose decentred totality exhibits features of fascist totalitarianism, commodified late capitalism, and postmodern indifference. Mann's parable of fascism suggests that Leverkuhn's aesthetic innovation (twelve-tone row) implies that Germany's sociopolitical revolution (Nazism) ought to be understood not as the resurgence of an insufficiently repressed pre-modern barbarism but as+++++++++ larly ominous sign of an otherwise often welcome paradigm shift from modernity to postmodernity. Although the logic of postmodernism need not by any stretch of the imagination result in fascist totalitarianism, it is important to recognize that neither does it exclude this possibility. The next two chapters are intended to make the perhaps rather outrageous claim that Hitler's Nazism ought to be understood not as the last gasp of an 'old' modernity still in the grip of a residual pre-modernity but as the sign of an emergent postmodernity. In chapter 5,1 will discuss strategies adopted by Hitler and relate these to Zeitblom's anxiety about the destructive tendencies of atonality in the context of Jameson's critique of postmodernism. Chapter 6 will then focus more specifically on the paradoxical logic that connects Leverkuhn's twelve-tone system with certain aspects of late capitalism and of German National Socialism.

CHAPTER 5

FASCISM AND ATONALITY (OR POSTMODERN PLAY)

If Leverkiihn's breakthrough into atonality presents itself as the successful transcendence of a modernity which volkish intellectuals had decried as culturally sterile, then we need to understand how such emancipatory aspirations produced or legitimated the emergence of a regime bent on murdering its own citizens. Is it possible that the demystification of the illusions of modernity created a counter-discourse which was in turn blind to its own complicity with violence? Althoug Zeitblom cannot help but admire Leverkiihn's daring aesthetic innovations, he is simultaneously horrified by the effects of transgressive compositions the ultimate triumph of which will be the tragic masterpiece "The Lament of Doctor Faustus/ a masterpiece signalling not only the composer's but also the country's descent into madness. The narra tor's anxieties express a critical assessment of Leverktihn's (postmodern) alternative which receives its full significance in Adorno's critique of Schonberg and Stravinsky in Philosophy of Modern Music and in Jameson's reservations in 'Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.' But none of these critiques directly addresses the actual historical framework of the camps which informs at the very least Mann's novel as well as Adorno's reading of music. Where Adorno occasionally refers to 'Auschwitz,' Mann alludes to fascist terror in the perhaps rather diffuse sense of Germany's tragic self-destruction. And Jameson is presumably too far distanced in time to reference the Holocaust. Yet the strategies Hitler employed are eerily evocative of Mann's Adornoinspired depictions of atonality and of Jameson's analysis of postmodern tropes. Reading Leverkuhn's aesthetic experiments through Zeitblom's critical reactions, I focus in this chapter on postmodern elements whose

Fascism and Atonality (or Postmodern Play) 185

implications are identified by both Adorno and Jameson as ideologically detrimental to emancipatory ambitions. It is then possible to connect certain aesthetic tropes with such Nazi strategies as the Nuremberg Rallies and Hitler's opportunistic pragmatism. What emerges most tellingly from this analysis is a tendency shared by both postmodernism and Nazism in the direction of increasingly hyperreal conceptions. Mann's cultural sensitivity to the profound shift in perception and attitude introduced by the Nazi revolution finds indirect expression in the postmodern tropes which emerge in Leverkiihn's twelve-tone innovations. In passages exhibiting such tropes, Doctor Faustus anticipates the postmodern suspicion, most noticeably expressed by such cultural Marxists as Jameson and Jean Baudrillard, that it is becoming increasingly difficult, if not actually impossible, to recognize and understand our 'real' conditions of existence. The focus in classical Marxism on modes of production has been superseded by a new emphasis on the circulation of symbolic forms imposed by today's information age. Although my discussion of the logic of fascism in Nazi Germany draws heavily on theoretical analyses promoted in the 1930s and 1940s, it also tries to tease out their more radical implications through the retrospective lens of postmodern theories. For this purpose, Adorno serves yet again as the mediating figure: he displays a cautious confidence in the possibility that the real remains open to analysis at the same time as he betrays a incipient fear that the real is being devoured by the hyperreal. In the first instance, Adorno remains aligned with Bloch, for whom the hyperreal tendencies of Nazism constitute the truth-content of a historical period which has succumbed to capitalism. Bloch's historicalmaterialist explanation for the volkish revitalization of anachronistic elements illustrates the insufficiency of Mosse's otherwise credible account of the+++++hat contributed to the emergence of Nazism. Bloch's claim on our attention is today assured by his concept of+Ungleichzeitigkei (untimeliness), a concept which today's theorists tend to remove from its initial Nazi context in Heritage of Our Times. Expanding the narrowly economic terms of Marx's discussion (in 'Critique of Political Economy') of the 'unequal rate of development' to embrace a broader conception of material production, Bloch explains the emergence of Nazism as the consequence of a highly complex and contradictory relationship between contemporaneous and non-contemporaneous historical elements. A contradictory element has for him both an internal or subjective side and an external or objective one. In its internal or subjective manifesta tion, this element is a++++++remnant' which appears objectively as a

186 Postmodern!ty and Fascism

non-contemporaneous 'alien and surviving' anachronism and subjectively as 'accumulated rage' (Bloch 1990, 108). It would follow that, in Doctor Faustus,the subjective display of rage by the likes of Deutschlin and Breisacher is indicative of a displaced recognition that capitalist modernity is itself 'untimely': 'The++++++++non-contemporaneous element is that which is distant from and alien to the present; it thus embraced declining remnants and above all an unrefurbished past which is not yet "resolved" in capitalist terms' (Bloch 1990,108). What defines the fertile ground for Nazism is that the subjectively and objectively non-contemporaneous contradictions meet so that 'the rebelliously crooked one of accumulated rage and the objectively alien one of surviving being and consciousness' (Bloch 1990,109) reinforce each other. At this point, Bloch's distinction between subjective and objective noncontemporaneous elements seems to confirm Mosse's explanation that Nazism was able to exploit neo-Romantic nostalgia. But+Heritage of Ou Times+does not leave it at that: for Bloch, the non-contemporaneous ca only thrive as a compensatory gesture for the dissatisfactions and frustrations experienced by people living in a Now marked both by the contemporaneous contradictions of capitalism and by the failure of Marxism to inaugurate the socialist future. As he tells it, 'the subjectively non-contemporaneous contradiction would never be so sharp, nor the objectively non-contemporaneous one so visible, if an objectively+++++++++++++one did not exist, namely that posited and gro ing in and with modern capitalism itself (Bloch 1990,109). The foundations of 'untruths' on which Nazism builds its phantasmagoric edifice thus constitute the 'truth' of the contemporary Now which is unwilling to accept that capitalism is in decline. According to Bloch, Nazism entered the void left by capitalism which the Marxist revolution had tragically failed to fill. Although highly articulate about the illusions perpetrated by Hitler's recourse to the past, Bloch still assumes that there is a displaced reality which could be reclaimed. In contrast, Adorno's cultural analysis in++++++++++++++++++++pinpoints strategies and consequences which find their more elaborate explication in Jameson's seminal essay, 'Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.' Without ever referencing fascism, Jameson examines postmodern tropes in ways that could sharpen our understanding of the Nazi period not as the last remnant of a pre-modern atavism but as the symptom of the transition from modernity to postmodernity. This transition is signalled in+Docto Faustus+through Leverkiihn's aesthetic breakthrough into atonality,

Fascism and Atonality (or Postmodern Play) 187

breakthrough marked above all by the decentring of the harmonious principle of the tonal composition and the elaboration of new combinatory possibilities. Disrupting the Hegelian identity-thesis, Leverkuhn introduces an open semiotic system which, celebrating an ungrounded relativism, allows notes to invert and displace the values that had historically accrued to them. Acting like a joyful postmodern bricoleur, the composer is able to use and abuse whatever material comes to hand. If we see Hitler not simplistically as a madman but as a cold opportunist, he comes across as a particularly sinister bricoleur. What Leverkiihn and Hitler share above all is a delight in mimicry and simulation, a tendency to exploit decontextualized 'quotations/ a general privileging of metaphor (fiction). Indirectly at stake in this chapter is the question of Hitler's ability either to persuade ordinary German people to accept his leadership or to eliminate sites of resistance to his drive for power. Aestheticization of Politics: The Nuremberg Rallies Doctor Faustus consistently foregrounds Leverkiihn's predilection for mimicry, quotation, and simulation. His father's experiments have taught him that appearances are deceptive; if the edible butterfly can camouflage itself as a poisonous one, what is to prevent a poisonous creature from taking on the markings of one which is benign? Such reversals of values are prominently displayed when volkish intellectuals present progress as regress and regress as progress, when Kretschmar illustrates how Beethoven's music is at its most subjective when it seems to affirm its objectivity (and vice versa), when Leverkuhn feigns indifference to music while secretly succumbing to its lure. Throughout the novel, the composer is ambiguously both intrigued by deceptive strategies and frustrated by his inability to escape from the prisonhouse of formal play into authentic expression. Articulating a widespread dissatisfaction in Germany with the artificiality of sociocultural modernity, Leverkuhn complains that his attempts at innovation are at best parodies of the tradition he seeks to transcend. Unable to shake off the hold of parody, he resorts to artifice in order to feign a spontaneity intended to outwit calculating reason. In other words, he exploits the resources of reason for an irrational purpose. That this paradoxical strategy proves successful is attested to in the highly ironic achievement of The Lament of Doctor Faustus,' a composition which uses the most rational means to express the inarticulate lament of human suffer-

188 Postmodernity and Fascism

ing. The calculated production of apparently spontaneous expression is most visibly exploited in Hitler's carefully crafted 'emotional' speeches and outbursts as well as in his spectacular self-staging at such events as the Nuremberg Rallies. These spectacles illustrate for Walter6+Benjami an aestheticization of politics whose effectiveness becomes visible through reproductive technologies capable of manipulating the reality they are meant to represent. The Nuremberg Rallies are today recognized as emblems of the disappearance of 'reality' into its simulacrum. The hyperreality of the Hitler years displays itself, in an insistently 'visible' way, through the spectacles he created to stage himself as the inspired leader of a tragically misunderstood people. Hitler's most amazing achievement was undoubtedly his ability to disguise his cynical political opportunism as a genuine popular groundswell of nationalistic sentiment. Exploiting the appeal of a past no longer engaged with genuine historicity, he exemplifies a nostalgic gesturing whose postmodern extension is the 'primacy of the neo' which Jameson foregrounds. It is not that the values being embraced are in themselves evil. As Bloch puts it, the Nazis 'cultivate a superannuated ideology; they have the "healthy opinions" of a backward stratum' (Bloch 1990, 89). Writing in the early 1930s, he was amazingly astute, realizing that the contradictions of capitalism produced conditions which severed historical ties: 'Precisely this relative chaos then also rolled towards National Socialism "untimely," non-contemporaneous elements from even "deeper" backwardness, namely from barbarism; and it would have needed no Nietzsche in Germany to turn the antithesis of blood against mind, wildness against morality, and intoxication against reason into a conspiracy against civilization' (Bloch 1990,107). The power of such non-contemporaneous elements is most visibly exhibited in Hitler's displays of rhetoric and self-dramatization as well as in his flair for spectacular pageantry. The Nuremberg Rallies are to this day the most representative expression of the 'mad genius' thesis for the success of Nazism. It seems that, on the most obvious level, Hitler mesmerized the masses through theatrical speeches in which volkish rhetoric played into German antimodern nostalgia for a simpler life and on the anti-liberal resentment generated by the Versailles treaty. As the most potent symbol for Hitler's aestheticization of politics, the Nuremberg Party rallies have entered into our cultural imaginary as the moment of self-consciousness when even the most apolitical aesthetic processes had to acknowledge their complicity with politics.

Fascism and Atonality (or Postmodern Play) 189

The Hitler years have been preserved above all in photographs and film clips of the Nuremberg Rallies, in scenes of ordinary people ecstatically applauding the Fiihrer's famous speeches and the spectacle of row after row of banner-waving uniformed men executing synchronized movements to the rhythmic sound of military marching music. Taking full advantage of the new technologies of radio, photography, and film, the Nazi propaganda machine knew how to construct through visual displays a 'reality' to serve the mythic image of Hitler as the messianic saviour of grateful German followers. As Bullock points out, to 'see the films of the Nuremberg rallies even today is to be recaptured by the hypnotic effect of thousands of men marching in perfect order, the music of the massed bands, the forest of standards and flags, the vast perspectives of the stadium, the smoking torches, the dome of searchlights. The sense of power, of force and unity was irresistible, and all converged with a mounting crescendo of excitement on the supreme moment when the Fiihrer himself made his entry' (Bullock 1962, 379). Although it is highly unlikely that people would stand for hours in rapt attention listening to Hitler's repetitive assertions, the myth of Hitler's ability to enchant young and old, rich and poor, intelligent and ignorant persists in the cultural imaginary. Were the grandiose spectacles designed to indoctrinate the masses or to forestall critical thinking? The Fiihrer's apparent 'ravings' and the colourful pageantry were carefully rehearsed and orchestrated to create an illusion of spontaneity in which spectators were easily swept up. The most influential and controversial visual record of the aestheticization of politics is undoubtedly Leni Riefenstahl's 'documentary' film of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, Triumph of the Will, which not only captures but exemplifies for posterity the power of Nazi propaganda. The film is itself an example of the propaganda machine whose effectiveness it purports to be reporting in the objective form of the documentary film. Susan Sontag's assessment of Riefenstahl as a filmmaker in 'Fascinating Fascism' draws attention to the calculated process that went into the making of apparently spontaneously felt emotion. Triumph of the Will,+explains Sontag, 'uses overpopulated wide shots of massed figures alternating with close-ups that isolate a single passion, a single perfect submission; clean-cut people in uniforms group and regroup, as if seeking the right choreography to express their ecstatic fealty' (Sontag 1976, 38). Aside from 'exalting two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude' (Sontag 1976, 40), these fascist visuals are marked by the paradoxical simultaneity of dynamic process and

190 Postmodernity and Fascism

totalized product. The choreography of fascist dramaturgy 'alternates between ceaseless motion and a concealed, static, "virile" posing' (Sontag 1976, 40). Such parades were anti-intellectual celebrations of the body which were reinforced in civilian life by displays of healthy bodies in sports, in youth movements, and in women's auxiliaries. The Nazis promoted sports (especially gymnastics) as a metaphor for spontaneous self-expression which conveniently intersected with nationalist calls for racial purity and with an appetite for popular entertainment and culture. Young children in uniforms were joyfully engaged in communal activities. Smiling women exercised and worked together to feed the nation and nurture the next generation. It would be dangerous simply to dismiss the aesthetic appeal of this cult of the body. Sontag's main point is that Riefenstahl's aesthetic accomplishment cannot be separated from its glorification of fascism; the ideas that inspired Triumph o+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ of courage, the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community; the repudiation of the intellect; the family of man (under the parenthood of leaders)' (Sontag 1976, 42-3) - continue to appeal to many people today. Sontag stresses that attempts to vindicate Riefenstahl as the apolitical 'indomitable priestess of the beautiful' are apt to conceal from us 'the fascist longings in our midst' (Sontag 1976, 43). In her effort to deconstruct the continued appeal of the Nazis' highly effective aestheticization of politics, she foregrounds the careful organization that went not only into Riefenstahl's film but into the Nuremberg Rallies as such. Having been commissioned and financed by the Nazis, Triumph of the Will+should not be mistaken for an objective historica record. The film consequently 'represents an already achieved and radical transformation of reality: history become theater' (Sontag 1976, 36). According to Sontag, Riefenstahl herself told the truth when she confessed that the Nuremberg Rally 'was planned not only as a spectacular mass meeting - but as a spectacular propaganda film ... The ceremonies and precise plans of the parades, marches, processions, the architecture of the halls and stadium were designed for the convenience of the cameras' (Sontag 1976,36). In a confusion between fact and fiction typical of Nazi strategies, the 'event, instead of being an end in itself, served as the set of a film which was then to assume the character of an authentic documentary' (Sontag 1976, 36). As Andrew Hewitt points out, Hitler's use of reproductive technology to reinforce his hostility to modernity is a 'sub-text' running through Benjamin's 'The

Fascism and Atonality (or Postmodern Play) 191

Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction/ where Benjamin shows that the 'big parades and monster rallies' have been 'intimately connected with the development of techniques of reproduction and photography' (Benjamin 1968, 253). For Benjamin, '[m]ass movements are usually discerned more clearly by a camera than by the naked eye/ thus favouring 'mechanical equipment' (Benjamin 1968, 253). Hewitt comments that Benjamin 'emphasizes++++++++++as something inherent to the reproducible object, rather than reproduction as a secondary and accidental process to which the object is subjected' (Hewitt 1993,167). Contradicting Benjamin's main argument that reproduction has the potential to empower the proletariat, this contention that 'reproduction reduces the specific to the reproducible' means that the proletariat is in fact turned into an 'amorphous mass' (Hewitt 1993, 167).2 Riefenstahl's film unwittingly documents the 'hyperreality' that marks Hitler's revolution in general but is most visibly displayed in his propaganda machine. Along similar lines, we know that Hitler's apparently spontaneous outbursts of passionately felt emotions were in fact carefully rehearsed spectacles. His personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, took a series of studio photographs of Hitler's rehearsals for speeches. Hitler then studied the effectiveness of his gesticulations and adapted them until they produced the impact he wanted. In his depiction of Hitler as a 'consummate actor/ Kershaw contends that 'his natural rhetorical talent was harnessed to well-honed performing skills' (Kershaw 1998, 280). Hitler would stage occasions with 'the delayed entry into the packed hall, the careful construction of his speeches, the choice of colourful phrases, the gestures and body-language' (Kershaw 1998, 280). The 'theatrical use of the hands' captured in Hoffmann's series of stills was just one of the many meticulously staged details 'carefully nurtured to maximize effect' (Kershaw 1998,280). The apparent spontaneity of Hitler's speeches, of the Nuremberg Rallies, and of Riefenstahl's film was the effect of carefully orchestrated events designed to produce an atmosphere whose emotional intensity was belied by the cynical manipulation of the reproductive technologies that are at stake in postmodern discussions of the disappearance of reality into simulation. From Parody to Pastiche Where the artificially created emotions of the Nuremberg Rallies were designed to persuade the German people to give their support to the

192 Postmodern!ty and Fascism

Nazi regime, Hitler exploited less visible strategies to create a 'hyperreal' public space in which ordinary citizens found it increasingly difficult to orient themselves. In retrospect, we recognize that Hitler's duplication of functions (Gleichschaltung) was his most effective strategy in a quest for power that did not so much destroy as reconfigure Germany's administrative apparatus and social institutions (the full extent of this strategy of duplication will be discussed in the next chapter). Hitler can be seen to have exploited processes of reproducibility on many levels and in many spheres of activity. In addition to the aestheticization of politics that manifests itself in his sense of spectacle at events like the Nuremberg Rallies, he disconnected events from their traditional context by opportunistically picking and choosing whatever cultural and material values were at hand. Far from reinforcing Germany's continuity with its heroic past, Hitler in fact adopted a position of radical relativism, a 'playful' discourse no longer constrained by conventional notions of what counts as 'real.' In the most general terms, it could be argued that Germany's belated coming to democracy meant that the historical situation condemned the Weimar Republic to a parodic imitation of a no longer viable political possibility. As chapter 4 has shown, the emancipatory aspirations implicit in free atonality (as in the Weimar Constitution) contained the seeds of its own destruction; the desired liberation from tonal constraints (and feudal authority) was blind to the ideologically sinister possibilities thereby opened up. By the time Germany embraced parliamentary democracy, the anti-liberal attitudes spreading throughout Europe had essentially doomed the Weimar Republic before it could establish itself on a secure footing. In a sense, the Weimar Republic could affirm itself only as a parody of the democratic ideal that had earlier found a more contemporaneous or historically adequate expression in the West.3 When Leverkuhn complains that even his atonal experiments are beset by the curse of parody, he can be said to articulate Mann's sensitivity to the difficulties Germany encountered by embracing democratization at a time of anti-liberal scepticism.+Doctor Faustu specifies that it was only in 'The Lament of Doctor Faustus' that Leverkuhn would eventually be able to divest himself of the grip parody had on him. However, this apparent transcendence of the chains of parody reveals itself on closer inspection to have plunged music into an even more profound crisis. What replaces parody is not the more authentic musical expression Leverkuhn envisages but the dissolution of aesthetic depth and meaning into the empty signifier of pastiche. In

Fascism and Atonality (or Postmodern Play) 193

highly condensed terms, then, it could be said that the aesthetic breakthrough in Doctor Faustus indicates the triumph of 'postmodern' pastiche over 'modern' parody. Although Leverkuhn may have dreamed of celebrating what Derrida calls the Nietzschean affirmation of play, his breakthrough evokes both Hitler's cynical raiding of the past to achieve his radical restructuring of Germany's public space and Jameson's pessimistic ideological assessments of postmodern pastiche. Although neither Mann nor Adorno uses the word 'pastiche' to identify the tropes of Schonberg's and Stravinsky's atonal revolution, Leverkiihn's aesthetic breakthrough is described in terms corresponding to Fredric Jameson's hostile assessment of postmodernism rather than to Linda Hutcheon's more forgiving attitude. It is undoubtedly significant that the elimination of parody is the only aspect of his aesthetic journey that Leverkuhn attributes to the devil's help. For it is when parody yields to pastiche that art relinquishes its critical function and succumbs to the reifying conditions of late capitalism whose logic Hitler exploited to such sinister ends. In terms that apply to+Doctor Faustus,+Jameson distinguishes between parody, whose characteristic 'ostentatiously deviate from a norm which then reasserts itself,' (Jameson 1973, 73), and 'pastiche/ which is 'blank parody,' a 'neutral practice' (Jameson 1993, 74) of mimicry devoid of any sense of normalcy. Where parody is driven by the Vocation' of social satire to transform the status quo, pastiche is the socially unmotivated 'imitation' of 'dead styles' (Jameson 1993, 74). According to Jameson, and against Mann's own terminology, we owe the concept of pastiche 'to Thomas Mann (in Doctor Faustus), who owed it in turn to Adorno's great work on the two paths of advanced musical experimentation (Schoenberg's innovative planification, Stravinsky's irrational eclecticism)' (Jameson 1993, 73). Although Mann may not be using the term 'pastiche,' Zeitblom's descriptions of Leverkiihn's atonal experiments, nevertheless, evoke the effects that Jameson attributes to postmodernism. Where Hutcheon considers parody to be politically enabling in that it signals a level of self-consciousness capable of resisting the dominant ideology, Mann makes it clear that Leverkuhn does not embrace metafictional self-reflexiveness as an emancipatory strategy. Far from making a virtue out of the artificiality that has befallen artistic expression, Leverkuhn curses postmodern features like parody, quotation, mimicry, and irony as barriers to the spontaneous expressivity to which his compositions aspire.4 Feeling condemned by the musical material to produce parodic works, Leverkuhn laments: 'Why does almost every-

194 Postmodern!ty and Fascism

thing seem to me like its own parody? Why must I think that almost all, no, all the methods and conventions of art today are good for parody only? (Mann 1968,131-2). Parody is consistently identified with cold intellectual activity which inhibits manifestations of human warmth and passion. When Leverkuhn retires to Palestrina to compose a work based on Shakespeare's play Love's Labour's Lost, he finds that love does indeed get lost in a composition which is for Zeitblom 'art for art's sake/ a selfreferential piece fit for an exclusive audience appreciative of an ambitious 'art for artists' (Mann 1968, 211). It is an esoteric piece which mocks itself through parodic exaggeration.5 Moved by both admiration and sadness, Zeitblom acknowledges the triumph of what Jameson calls 'pastiche': 'The admiration was due to a witty and melancholy work of art, an intellectual achievement which deserved the name of I know not how otherwise to characterize it than by calling it a tense, sustained, neck-breaking game played by art at the edge of impossibilty' (Mann 1968,211). In its intellectual self-mockery, art has become so selfconsciously artificial that it risks unmaking itself. On the most obvious level, pastiche is unfavourably compared to authentic expression; it is risky cerebral play with artistic forms whose serious purpose ought to be the communication of human suffering. Although the parody I call pastiche is the dominant curse imposed on Leverkuhn by the material conditions under late capitalism, his aesthetic experiments feature other aspects of what we would today associate with postmodernism. Zeitblom constantly stresses his friend's tendency to quote from the cultural archive, a tendency meant to signify his inability to express a sense of his own originality or uniqueness. When Zeitblom draws our attention to the 'oft-quoted allusion' of the "'dead tooth,"'6 he interprets this quotation as symbolizing 'certain very modern refinements of the orchestral palette' (Mann 1968, 147) which reflect self-consciously on their own empty ornamental style. Indeed, the 'orchestral brilliance' of this piece is secretly inhabited by 'parody and intellectual mockery of art' (Mann 1968, 148). This selfconsciousness is clearly meant to signify Leverkiihn's deconstruction of the illusory assumptions of traditional art forms. His 'capacity for mocking imitation' encourages him to avail himself of 'different musical styles' - including low forms like 'bourgeois drawing-room music' and jazz (Mann 1968, 361) - so as to break down constricting generic boundaries. But this appropriation and reconfiguration of the cultural archive is marked by a frustrated despair telling us that he does not celebrate the power of parody and irony to disrupt hegemonic dis-

Fascism and Atonality (or Postmodern Play) 195

courses as Hutcheon argues. On the contrary, in the scene with the devil, he sees parody as the sad manifestation of an 'aristocratic nihilism' (Mann 1968, 235), as the rejection of what Jameson would call depth and meaning. Throughout Doctor Faustus there is a constant stress on Leverkuhn's struggle to shake off the hold of parody, of the 'deadly extension of the kingdom of the banal' (Mann 1968, 148) he associates with it. Witnessing his friend's parodic quotations from the tradition he admires, Zeitblom can only reassure himself by taking recourse in Leverkuhn's own dialectical reasoning: 'With deep concern I asked myself what strain and effort, intellectual tricks, by-ways, and ironies would be necessary to save it, to reconquer it, and to arrive at a work which as a travesty of innocence confessed to the state of knowledge from which it was to be won' (Mann 1968,176).7 Although features like parody and irony 'belong' as much to high modernism as to postmodernism, they are here foregrounded as signs of a new aesthetic dominant establishing itself. The historically outmoded closed form is in the process of being replaced by a formalistic tendency which Leverkuhn condemns as empty ornamentation and mere aesthetic frivolity. The triumph of pastiche over parody exemplifies the decline of a viable modern culture into a postmodern territory which is increasingly marked by the hyperreal or simulacral tendencies implicit in both late capitalism and fascism. The tropes that count in Hutcheon's version of postmodernism as an enabling subversion of the dominant ideology are for Jameson merely the capitulation of aesthetics to the sociopolitical sphere. Like Lukacs and Adorno before him, Jameson puts much stock in aesthetic articulations which reproduce the dialectical commitment to dynamic processes of change. Where Lukacs located this commitment in literary realism and accused literary modernism of a resigned 'wallowing' in the psychopathology of commodified life (see Lukacs 1964b), Jameson approves of modernism for being 'still minimally and tendentially the critique of the commodity and the effort to make it transcend itself (Jameson 1991, x) and blames postmodernism for remaining passively complicit with late capitalism (and, I would add, with fascism). If Jameson is right when he contends that postmodern pastiche eliminates sites of resistance in an increasingly hyperreal territory, then Zeitblom foregrounds for us Leverkuhn's erasure of a position from which to criticize and resist the 'playful' reversals of values that typify his compositions; in the composer's 'postmodern' territory without a map, the liberal-humanist narrator finds himself cut off from history, meaning, his own subject position, and even reality itself.

196 Postmodernity and Fascism

Although Mann never clarifies the historical events underpinning Doctor Faustus as a parable of fascism, Hitler's strategies for consolidating power exhibit features that Mann foregrounds in his incorporation of Adorno's ideology critique in Philosophy of Modern Music and that Jameson brings into sharper focus in his analysis of postmodernism. This forging of connections stresses that Hitler's political success ought not to be attributed to his 'mad genius'; on the contrary, his rise to power was made possible by an epistemic shift whose features manifested themselves in a variety of material and cultural phenomena. Where this cognitive shift was in many ways ideologically liberating, its+++++++ossibilities are most graphically illustrated in the limit-cas of Nazi Germany. The theorist of the Third Reich most sensitive to the 'hyperreal' aspects of Hitler's consolidation of power is Hannah Arendt. In++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ with Stalin's Soviet Communism at the same time as she illustrates how the conditions of late capitalism enabled the emergence of both examples of totalitarianism. Her analysis of Nazism reinforces my reading of Doctor Faustus as a narrative that simultaneously dramatizes the propaganda value of nostalgic appeals to neo-Romanticism and the radically new conception of the subject's relationship to the social totality in Hitler's Germany. Like Adorno, Arendt is preoccupied with the threat of total domination, and, like Mann, she is sensitive to a historical period that has 'so strangely intertwined the good with the bad' (Arendt 1973, viii). As an intellectual of Jewish background, she understood that the Nazi regime constituted a radical departure from the humanist assumptions of the modernist tradition: "The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition' (Arendt 1973, ix). What makes her analysis so compelling is her focus on the twin force of propaganda and organization. To reduce explanations of Hitler's power to the fascination he exercised over the masses seemed to Arendt a grave mistake. The 'ideological programs' Hitler inherited from such pre-totalitarian movements as Pan-German Romanticism are in her eyes 'not decisive' (Arendt 1973, 415). As I will discuss in chapter 6, far more important was Hitler's construction of a machine of domination so arbitrary and yet so all-encompassing that even the Fuhrer himself was simply a function within it rather than its controlling principle. For her the attraction of mass movements meets the desire to alleviate social atomization created by the processes of reification and rationalism under late capitalism: Totalitarian move-

Fascism and Atonality (or Postmodern Play) 197

ments are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals' (Arendt 1973, 323). Terror is not just a question of police brutality but of an administrative apparatus capable of eliminating subjective agency and initiative. This apparatus exhibits characteristics that feature prominently in postmodern discussions of the decentred structure and the decentred subject. In a move significant for the present chapter, Arendt argues that the totalitarian movements in Germany and Russia signal a shift not only in political practice but in cognitive perception. What is hidden behind the 'power polities' of a ruthless elite is 'an entirely new and unprecedented concept of power' which arises from 'an entirely new and unprecedented concept of reality' (Arendt 1973,417). Documenting the way the Nazis constructed an essentially fictitious world, she worries that the distinction between reality and its simulation is being broken down. Although German National Socialism is in its ideology reactionary, in its actual practice it is a radical departure from the selfunderstanding of modernity. Zeitblom's 'Jamesonian' Anxieties Zeitblom's sense of disorientation and loss of meaning constitutes an early instance of what Jameson objects to in postmodern discourses which replace the various depth models of modernism with a privileging of surface and simulation through mimicry and quotation. For Jameson, the most important of the repudiated depth models are 'the dialectical one of essence and appearance,' 'the Freudian model of latent and manifest, or of repression,' 'the existential model of authenticity and inauthenticity/ and 'the great semiotic opposition between signifier and signified' (Jameson 1991,12). The shift from depth to surface is in each case accompanied by a flight from history and from sociopolitical engagement: modernist art and literature were still socially critical, postmodernist works are resigned to the++++++++++++++++++++++ target is late capitalism, the debilitating effects of 'postmodern' resignation and indifference manifest themselves even more graphically in the case of German fascism. How were the most blatant violations of civil rights and the most murderous actions by the state allowed to proceed without generating much viable opposition or much open criticism? This apparently incomprehensible situation was at least to some extent produced by Hitler's use of strategies that carry the imprint of the postmodern tropes Jameson analyses in 'Postmodernism,

198 Postmodernity and Fascism

or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism' and Mann dramatizes in Doctor Faustus. The points of intersection between Mann's Adorno-inspired music theory and Jameson's cultural analysis of postmodernism become most visible if we briefly recall Jameson's main arguments. Analysing Van Gogh's well-known painting of peasant shoes as an example of canonical high modernism, he contends, for instance, that the shoes evoke for the viewer 'the whole object world of agricultural misery, of stark rural poverty, and the whole rudimentary human world of backbreaking peasant toil' (Jameson 1991, 7). Making the content of toil and misery immediately accessible, the painting fills the viewer with social outrage. Yet modernism relies for its effects not on the accurate reproduction of reality typical of earlier art forms; Van Gogh's paintings are celebrated precisely for departing in both shapes and colours from the way objects really look. It is in the apparent contradiction between content and form that Jameson locates the political significance of his paintings. The willed and violent transformation of a drab peasant object world into the most glorious materialization of pure colour in oil paint' is for Jameson a compensatory appeal to the senses which, by intimating that things could be different, constitutes 'a Utopian gesture' (Jameson 1991, 7). Like Adorno before him, Jameson counteracts his pervasive cultural pessimism with moments of hope invested in the possibility of social change. In the most general terms, it could be said that Jameson favours aesthetic forms which are responsive to the dynamics of history while he disparages those complicit with the static reproduction of our commodity culture. Postmodernism represents for Jameson a capitulation to contemporary stasis. Andy Warhol's Diamond Dust Shoes, Jameson's example of postmodern art, 'no longer speaks to us with the immediacy of Van Gogh's footgear'; his shoes are 'a random collection of dead objects' and hence 'shorn of their earlier life world' (Jameson 1991, 8). Where Van Gogh's shoes act as a clue to a deeper meaning, Warhol's painting refuses to 'restore to these oddments that whole larger lived context of the dance hall or the ball' (Jameson 1991, 8). The Warhol shoes are selfreferentially concerned only with 'the glitter of gold dust' and 'the spangling of gilt sand that seals the surface of the painting' (Jameson 1991, 10). Conceding that Warhol's paintings of Coca-Cola cans or photographs of Marilyn Monroe self-consciously speak about their own commodification, Jameson contends that the 'deathly quality' (Jameson 1991, 9) of these images robs them of political and critical

Fascism and Atonality (or Postmodern Play) 199

power. In contrast to modernism, postmodernism is marked by 'the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality' (Jameson 1991, 9) which reproduces, rather than challenges, the commodification that is so thematically central to Warhol's work. Being 'debased and contaminated in advance by their assimilation to glossy advertising images' (Jameson 1991,9), Warhol's paintings lack both a meaningful connection to the life-world and a Utopian desire for its transformation. The 'decorative exhilaration' of the+Dia mond Dust Shoes is the sign of a 'gratuitous frivolity' (Jameson 1991,10) disconnected from any political intention. Since both Jameson and Mann are influenced by Adorno, it is perhaps not surprising to hear in this condemnation of postmodernism certain echoes of Zeitblom's disturbed reactions to Leverkiihn's undermining of musical meaningfulness through apparently empty atonal play.8 Mann's novel dramatizes Adorno's anxiety that Schonberg's twelve-tone technique results in the elimination of all meaningful dif ferences. Speaking of innovations in rhythm, Adorno complains that, far from creating new values, atonal transgressions run the risk of quantifying what used to be imbued with meaning: 'A quantitative, but not a qualitative difference allegedly prevails between those intervals' (Adorno 1973, 79). Where Zeitblom experiences rhythmic variations as hellish chaos, Adorno explains the shift from quality to quantity as symptomatic of the tendency toward reification in late capitalism. Once every note is equivalent to every other, we are faced with a system in which inessential atoms take their arbitrarily assigned place without being able to combine meaningfully. In a system in which temporal relations are undermined, music is reduced 'to "coincidence"' (Witkin 1998, 136) and all meaningful differentiations are eliminated. When twelve-tone music disrupts harmony through 'brutal contrasts such as those between high and low, loud and soft' (Adorno 1973, 79), the consequence strikes Zeitblom as uncanny whereas Adorno sees in it a levelling effect so severe that the very possibility of differentiation is eroded. Because the musical elements are 'simply placed alongside one another,' the 'differentiated means themselves' cannot but 'resemble each other and become indistinguishable' (Adorno 1973,79). Whenever difference is reduced to indifference, the result is not the Nietzschean freedom from constraints but an eruption of violence and oppression. Being dependent on 'exaggerated contrasts inherent in the raw material of sound,' the twelve-tone row leads to a situation where 'nuance results in the act of violence' (Adorno 1973,80). The line of escape from

200 Postmodernity and Fascism

this deplorable situation is that aesthetics ought to regain 'the lost wealth of differentiation' (Adorno 1973, 80). Instead of advocating a return to hierarchical differentiations, Adorno encourages a search for an affirmation of difference that avoids the pitfalls of being reduced to indifference. The reduction of difference to indifference threatens Zeitblom's (and Jameson's) investment in the possibility of meaningful action on the part of social subjects. Jameson seems to be reiterating Zeitblom's fear that Leverkiihn's music will result not in the revitalization but in the catastrophic destruction of aesthetic expression and subjective agency. The Adorno-devil's insistence that the sociohistorical conditions have made authentic self-expression (Ausdruck) in art impossible is articulated in Jameson's observation that postmodern culture is marked by a deplorable 'waning of affect/ the unfortunate tendency of 'all feeling or emotion, all subjectivity' (Jameson 1991,10) to atrophy. Elaborating on this point in a different version of his essay, Jameson compares Edward Munch's painting The Scream with Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe series. Assessing an unfortunate waning of affect in postmodern art 'by way of the human figure' (Jameson 1993, 69), he argues that The Scream represents 'the canonical expression of the great modernist thematics of alienation, anomie, solitude and social fragmentation and isolation/ reflecting 'what used to be called the age of anxiety' (Jameson 1993,69). Munch's figure is 'expressive' in that it externalizes the subject's inward feelings; the reader is invited to uncover meaning that lies below the surface of the painting. Although the scream is absent in the sense that paint cannot reproduce it, this very absence underscores the 'experience of atrocious solitude and anxiety which the scream was itself to "express"' (Jameson 1993, 71). What Munch's silent scream communicates eloquently is the suffering of the human subject in a world from which it is increasingly alienated. Like Van Gogh, Munch still takes a critical stance toward the world he displays. And through Leverkiihn's self-imposed social alienation, Mann condemns the world from which his protagonist does not, in the end, want to be saved. Jameson's waning of affect is intimately linked to the decentring of the subject which figures so prominently in postmodern theories. The alienating conditions that produced the postmodern subject had already announced themselves in Munch's modernist painting. Faced by a world beyond its understanding and control, argues Jameson, the alienated modernist subject sought to protect itself by retreating into itself. In so doing, the modernist subject created the 'unhappy para-

Fascism and Atonality (or Postmodern Play) 201

dox,' allegorized in Munch's painting, 'that when you constitute your individual subjectivity as a self-sufficient field and a closed realm in its own right, you thereby also shut yourself off from everything else and condemn yourself to the windless solitude of the monad' (Jameson 1993, 72), a description most fitting for Mann's aloof Leverkiihn as well as for Adorno's deaf Beethoven. The waning of affect is the price that the postmodern subject pays for escaping from the suffering experienced by the alienated bourgeois ego. In short, the subject's 'liberation from anxiety' has the deplorable side-effect of liberating the subject 'from every other kind of feeling as well' (Jameson 1993, 72). The shift from Munch's depth to Warhol's surface completes the effacement of the subject which Mann (through Adorno) finds already announced in the crisis of modernity inscribed in Beethoven's sonata opus 111. For Jameson, it is the unquestioned celebration of difference in postmodern theory and art that consolidates the decentred subject. The bourgeois self-understanding of the autonomous and self-contained unique individual is replaced by the concept of the postmodern subject as a socially constructed locus of multiple and conflicting discourses. What worries Jameson is the loss of social agency that seems to be implicit in this postmodern decentring of the subject. It will become obvious that Mann's depiction of Adorno's interpretation of Schonberg's twelvetone technique is centrally preoccupied with the repression of expression and the destruction of the individual subject. Although it is possible to argue that Mann's depiction of Leverkuhn as a socially alienated subject offers a critique of the material conditions of modernity, this possibility is at the same time undermined by Leverkiihn's aesthetic experiments. When at the end of the novel the composer refuses to be saved, he simply confirms the destruction of the individual subject that his aesthetic breakthrough had already enacted. The twelve-tone system introduces a system of infinite exchange and reproducibility which destroys what Benjamin has called an art work's 'aura' or uniqueness as surely as Warhol's hallmark repetitions of Campbell soup cans or of Marilyn Monroe. Where Benjamin welcomed the destruction of the aura as the liberation of art from an oppressive and elitist high culture, Jameson sees it as the decentred subject's abdication from sociopolitical responsibility. In Warhol's identical reproductions of a photograph of Marilyn Monroe, Munch's 'alienation of the subject is displaced by the fragmentation of the subject' (Jameson 1993, 71). The repetitive photographic reproduction of a figure already marked as a media construction accentuates the commodification of the

202 Postmodernity and Fascism

human figure, depriving it of depth, of uniqueness, and of inferiority. In twelve-tone music, individual notes lose their singularity and are oppressed by a system which forces them to submit to its requirements: 'Dissonances become mere quantities, without quality, without differentiation, and therefore suitable for use wherever the schema demands' (Adorno 1973, 86). This functional view of the singular note reflects how the reified subject serves both late capitalism and, I would argue, German National Socialism. For Adorno, Schonberg's music represents above all the triumph of exchange value over use value in late capitalism. Translating the subjection of the individual note to the total system into socioeconomic terms, human subjects are reduced to quantitative performers in an indifferent capitalist system of economic exchange. And, translated into fascist terms, it is the dehumanization of subjects that allows the Nazi organization to construct individuals indifferently either as victims or as executioners. The 'formal consequence' of the disappearance of the subject is, for Jameson, the 'unavailability of the personal style/ a consequence he associates with the 'well-nigh universal practice today of what may be called pastiche' (Jameson 1993,73). The slide from parody into pastiche is accompanied by an indiscriminate foraging in the cultural archive for styles to imitate; where parody maintains a connection with historical precursors, pastiche plays with what happens to come to hand, thereby trivializing and effacing history. By 'quoting' the past without due attention to the historical specificity of the material the postmodern text incorporates, history loses its dynamic dimension and hence annuls the dialectical basis of Jameson's historical materialism. Focusing on synchrony at the expense of diachrony, postmodernism spatializes time and aestheticizes politics. What drives Jameson's hostility to postmodernism is above all this tendency toward ahistorical stasis and paralysis. When Leverkiihn complains about the curse of parody, he shows his frustration with 'uninvited' intertexts that seem to invade his compositions at the expense of a unique style. Once notes or quotations are no longer constrained by the history embedded in them, they take their meaning from the position they occupy in relation to other notes or other texts in the system. They thus reveal themselves as arbitrary constructs which, as Zeitblom feebly hints, may open compositions to a process of 'transformation, transfiguration' (Mann 1968, 364) that may generate an uncontrollable dissemination of musical signifiers. In what is as disturbing to Jameson as to Zeitblom, Leverkiihn is seen to raid the past for forms and themes which he incorporates into his own texts

Fascism and Atonality (or Postmodern Play) 203

without any regard for their historical specificity. In other words, his 'quotations' are plucked from their sociohistorical context and appropriated by a synchronic discourse intent on erasing history. By privileging synchrony over diachrony, Leverkiihn's music removes the Utopian potential implicit in the historical dialectic, opening the door to unpredictable reversals of mutually implicated opposites. This danger is for Adorno already implicit in Berg's free atonality. Echoing Adorno, Zeitblom disapproves above all of the arrangement of notes in Leverkuhn's music that transforms the 'successive into the simultaneous' (Mann 1968, 74), of the blatant privileging of '[s]imultaneity' (Mann 1968, 74). Although Leverkuhn's predilection for relativism disrupts Hegel's identity thesis, his intertextual dissemination of meaning risks reducing difference to indifference and paralysis. Once Berg had initiated a paralysing 'indifference between the horizontal and the vertical' (Adorno 1973, 82) axis of the musical system, Berg's prefigured material 'condemns music to becoming a collection of isolated juxtaposed moments with no organic development or spontaneity in them' (Witkin 1998, 136). An aesthetic tendency that reflects the social subject in its static isolation is for Adorno a sign for the complicity of art with social reification. Although Berg's free atonality holds for Adorno the promise of a Utopian space in which all elements are free to express themselves, this moment of Derridean 'play' in the history of music is already inhabited by the tendency of compositions to construct themselves as 'meaningless' surfaces consisting of indifferent and undynamic elements, a tendency that will be accentuated in the more rigorous and restricted economy of Schonberg's twelve-tone system. Anticipating Jameson, Adorno sees difference sliding into indifference and from there leading into paralysis and hence into the denial of meaning and history. Speaking of Berg, he points out that dissonance, the musical equivalent of the privileging of difference in theoretical discourse, is a symptom of death because 'all dynamics come to a standstill within it without finding release' (Adorno 1973, 82). Indeed, the principle of variation, which emancipates music from tonality, is castigated for working against the possibility of change. Once variation has become absolute, 'there is no longer anything which undergoes change' (Adorno 1973, 102). Variation is no longer dynamic but finds itself reduced to mere 'paraphrase'; it follows that '[e] very thing remains as it was' (Adorno 1973,102). The effect is a stagnation proclaiming, 'even more vehemently than any other symptoms, that condition characterized by a loss of historical perspective in music' (Adorno 1973,

204 Postmodernity and Fascism

82), a condition anathema to both Adorno and Jameson. The static configurations are produced by a system in which '[e]ach form of the row is "the" row with the same validity as the previous row/ and even notes which count as 'set-complex' are in fact based on 'coincidence' (Adorno 1973, 99). '[O]f what possible relevance is "development"?' asks Adorno (1973, 99). The paralysing indifference of part to part produces 'twelve-tone symmetries' which are 'without essence, without depth' (Adorno 1973, 97) and marked by a 'disposition of surface elements' (Adorno 1973,100) increasingly pronounced in Schonberg's later works. Adorno's terminology is remarkably close to the vocabulary and negative attitudes of postmodern theorists in the Jameson camp. Schonberg is said to be fetishizing form in a sterile and undynamic way which fails to disrupt the dominant ideology of late capitalism. An analysis so focused on the detrimental ideological effects of postmodernism is, perhaps, bound to conclude that the emphasis on difference risks undermining our very sense of reality. In Jameson's eyes, the postmodern world becomes the repository of 'a vast collection of images, a multitudinous photographic simulacrum' (Jameson 1993, 74) which disorients the subject. Like Baudrillard, Jameson borrows from Guy Debord the term 'simulacrum' to denote 'a world transformed into sheer images of itself,' where image is defined as 'the identical copy for which no original has ever existed' (Jameson 1993, 74). It is precisely the sense of Marilyn Monroe as a unique or original human being which is erased in Warhol's multiplication of her image. Severing the connection between image and referent, the 'new spatial logic of the simulacrum' (Jameson 1993, 74) reduces history to nostalgia. Where Hutcheon treats the 'presentness of the past' as politically enabling, Jameson sees the 'play of historical allusions' (Jameson 1993, 76) as the empty connotation of what ought to be real historical time. Far from being an engagement with genuine historicity, the 'primacy of the "neo"' (Jameson 1993, 74) in postmodern culture prevents us from grasping real social contradictions. If postmodern space is experienced as a surface of images, then the subject loses its bearings and is too paralysed to effect change. For Jameson, historical temporality has been replaced by 'postmodern hyperspace,' this 'latest mutation in space' which 'has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world' (Jameson 1993, 83). Although he is specifically referring to the architectural maze

Fascism and Atonality (or Postmodern Play) 205

of the Bonaventura Hotel in Los Angeles, the dislocation he targets extends to both epistemological and ontological disorientation. Unable to locate ourselves, we have no position from which to assess and interrogate social structures. The new postmodern space has eliminated critical distance, genuine dialectical thinking, and any sense of the future. Jameson thus 'provisionally' defines the 'aesthetic of this new (and hypothetical) cultural form as an aesthetic of+cognitive map ping'+(Jameson 1991, 51), an aesthetic which would be able to represen postmodern hyperspace and help us 'regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion' (Jameson 1993,91). This capacity is all the more urgent as the mutation into hyperspace will produce 'an equivalent mutation in the subject' (Jameson 1991, 38) which has to be resisted by making 'at least some effort to think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically' (Jameson 1991, 47). Like Adorno before him, Jameson fears that postmodernism forfeits both the critical distance for analysing aesthetic as well as social texts and the Utopian potential still implicit in the emphasis on novelty and change in the cultural self-understanding of high modernism. Hitler as Bricoleur: Quotation, Mimicry, and Simulation Hitler's manipulation of political institutions could not have succeeded without his adept staging of a theatrics of power; even his successful restructuring of political and social institutions operated on a logic whose effects were so unreal that sites of resistance were difficult to locate. While people were treated to displays of neo-Romantic obfuscation and aesthetic spectacles, Hitler and his ruling elite were busy constructing an administrative machine radically disconnected from the historical past supposedly being celebrated in volkish ideology and aestheticized political spectacles. Although the suffering inflicted by the Nazi reign of terror was very real indeed, Hitler's strategies and practices could more accurately be described as belonging to the register of the postmodern hyper real. The Nazis were particularly adept bricoleurs+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ exploited this postmodern strategy for sinister purposes. Through such postmodern tactics as the reversal of opposites, mimicry, and quotation, Hitler and his Nazis created a hyperreal territory in which orientation was so difficult that an agenda of state terror met little resistance. Events registered by the citizen in the street as spontaneous happen-

206 Postmodernity and Fascism

ings were in reality, at least to a large extent, produced by opportunistic interventions designed to increase Hitler's hold on power. Staging himself as the Fiihrer chosen to lead his people into a new Thousand Year Reich, Hitler raided the German past for whatever material came to hand. Mimicking and quoting German cultural and political traditions in a radically new context, he cynically reversed and reconstituted values to serve a political agenda devoid of ideological content. In the first instance, as we have already seen in chapter 1, Hitler brazenly exploited constitutional weaknesses in the Weimar Constitution by using liberal principles in order to destroy the very liberties they were meant to guarantee. Once he had consolidated his power by quite legally assuming the post of chancellor, he set out to 'play' with German attitudes and customs until he succeeded in breaking down the boundary between political reality and its simulation. Time and again he instigated dialectical reversals to create the conditions that then necessitated his interference. With the help of his 'brown shirts,' he would disrupt the existing social order so as to plunge the country into a state of chaos from which he then 'saved' it by imposing his own totalizing system. In an effort to convince the German people that they needed a strong leader, the newly elected chancellor staged the very disorder that allowed him to justify the use of force to combat it. He had his 'brown shirts' instigate violent incidents in the streets so as to give the impression that cities were in danger of succumbing to anarchy. Claiming that the police could not maintain order, he authorized military intervention, deploying the SA and SS to quell the unrest they themselves had in fact created. Although Mann never alludes directly to such sociohistorical events, his characters - Leverkiihn no less than Breisacher - self-consciously acclaim such dialectical tactics. The disorienting effects of dialectical reversals are intimately tied to Hitler's skilful incorporation of quoted material into a new context. A minor but graphic illustration of Hitler's expert 'grafting' of elements from one context into another is the appropriation of police insignia by the SA. Having put Goering in charge of the police, Hitler convinced the Reichstag that the threat of Communism could only be countered by empowering the police to resort to 'the unconditional use of weapons' (Craig 1978, 572). SA units were suddenly legally authorized to terrorize innocent citizens: 'SA units, wearing Hilfspolizei brassards, could now break up the meetings of other parties with impunity' (Craig 1978,572). Aside from the sheer intimidation factor, citizens must have found it difficult to resist this blatant misuse of power because 'real'

Fascism and Atonality (or Postmodern Play) 207

law and order could not easily be differentiated from 'simulated' law and order. The brassards worn by the SA functioned as a symbol which 'quoted' civic order in the new context of unlawful violence perpetrated by the SA itself. On a larger scale, the famous episode of the burning of the Reichstag on 27 February 1933 may help to further exemplify the effectiveness of Hitler's tendency to rely on a logic of ironic reversals in order to fabricate a series of events intended to persuade people to give him more and more power. Having first fanned public disorder by instructing an SA/SS+++++++++++++++++to burn down the Reichstag buil then accused the Communists of having perpetrated this act of terrorism. Under pretence of protecting ordinary citizens from the Bolshevik threat, the Nazis arrested not only Communist party members but also anyone else who happened to have incurred their displeasure. The Reichstag burning convinced Germany's president that a 'Communist revolution was imminent'; Hitler was consequently able to prevail on him to sign an emergency decree suspending 'all of the rights of the citizens' (Craig 1978, 574). Although 'in the Munich of 1919 onward, there could be absolutely no question of that threat of "bolshevism" which in Italy was a reality' (Nolte 1968, 165), the government under Hitler's influence 'issued a presidential decree "for the protection of People and State": to protect the people, it suspended the clauses of the Weimar Constitution guaranteeing personal liberty' (Jarman 1968,120). The state was now authorized to order 'death or imprisonment for a series of crimes' without any recourse to 'a prompt hearing and the right of counsel, appeal, and redress for false arrest' (Craig 1978, 574). We may recall that Ebert issued a decree in 1923 which contained similar although less radical provisions. The Nazis immediately used the intensified decree to harass and persecute real and imagined enemies of the Party. A fabricated event (the Bolshevik threat) generated the 'quotation' of an earlier event (Ebert's decree) so as to legitimate the escalation (indiscriminate persecution) of a fraudulent situation (the threat was never real). The strategies Hitler employed to produce this 'hyperreality' belong to the storehouse of devices that Leverkiihn draws on and that Jameson identifies with postmodernism. The decrees that gradually but inexorably led to the death camps can be traced to tactics which had from the beginning served Hitler well. In the early days, he sought to eliminate all political opposition by manufacturing enemies he claimed were intent on destroying the German way of life. Foremost among these political 'enemies' were the Commu-

208 Postmodernity and Fascism

nists, but the German people became convinced that they were 'surrounded by enemies/ in particular 'all Communists, all Freemasons, all democrats, all convinced Christians, all nationalists even' (Nolte 1968, 201). Through the fiction of a country imperilled by uncontrollable criminal elements and dangerous political opponents, Hitler legitimized the very use of force which then made the threat of terror real. In short, he constructed a threat where none had existed and then proved that it must have existed because he had been called upon to eliminate it. As early as 1933, for instance, Hitler used the threat of Communism to take control of the police; putting Herman Goering in charge, he purged 'the whole police force of unreliable elements' (Craig 1978, 572) and forced local police forces to work closely with the SA, SS, and+++++++++++ fantastical reversal, Hitler presented terrorists as enforcers of the law and redefined the legitimate law enforces as 'unreliable elements/ Hitler consistently relied on such cynical reversals to create disorienting hyperspaces. We need only recall how the Nazis justified their intimidation of Jews and other so-called enemies by arguing that SS troops were needed to restore the civic order which local authorities could no longer maintain. Having secured the cooperation of moderate Germans afraid of a Communist revolution, the Nazis silenced the Marxist press and broke up meetings of respected democratic and conservative parties. In a cynically ironic twist, 'on the pretext of defending the Weimar constitution/ the Nazis 'replaced the legally constituted governments with Reich Commissioners' (Craig 1978,576). It was always the '"intolerable" behavior' of his so-called enemies which 'forced [Hitler] to take drastic action in self-defense' (Bullock 1962, 376).9 In conformity with a logic that cynically reversed formerly secure moral and legal values, Hitler enabled the persecution of German Jews that incrementally deprived them of their rights and finally their lives. In general, symbols of constitutional rights were cruelly and abusively 'quoted' to work against the liberal aspirations they were meant to incorporate. Such entrenched rights as freedom of the press and of assembly were cynically turned against themselves. Referring to a decree the Reichstag had earlier issued to control the Nazis, for instance, Hitler prohibited newspapers and public meetings to silence liberal voices opposed to Hitler. When a 'congress of intellectuals and artists' protested against this 'flagrant attack on the liberty of the Press' (Craig 1978, 573), the so-called police dissolved the congress, claiming that a statement read by Thomas Mann was a threat to public morality. The cynical irony of such events is not lost on the retrospective postmodern

Fascism and Atonality (or Postmodern Play) 209

observer. Is it then possible that Hitler's destruction of moral, legal, social, political, and administrative mechanisms proceeded more or less unopposed because it was no longer possible to distinguish with any kind of certainty 'original' structures from their 'copies'? It could be argued that Hitler adopted strategies which anticipate the subversion or elimination of meaning, depth, the subject, and even reality itself which Mann borrows from Adorno's 'postmodern' reading of avant-garde music and which Jameson articulates in his critique of postmodern culture. In his opportunistic use of whatever was at hand, Hitler is not unlike the bricoleur celebrated in postmodern texts as an emancipatory figure. However, where bricolage functions for Levi-Strauss as a critical tool to subvert dominant power structures, Hitler reconfigures it into an opportunistic instrument to serve the ends of power and terror. The distinction between the bricoleur and the engineer was first articulated by Levi-Strauss in The Savage Mind and has subsequently been endlessly quoted, most famously perhaps by Derrida and Roland Barthes. The bricoleur is 'someone who uses "the means at hand," that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even if their form and their origin are heterogeneous - and so forth' (Derrida 1982c, 255). Indifferent to the substance of the material they quoted, the Nazis strung together a heterogeneous tapestry of borrowings whose strands intersected randomly and arbitrarily. Mimicking whatever idea he considered opportune for the advancement of his own nihilistic agenda, Hitler 'brazenly joined forces with the monarchists; brazenly denied his own views and affected to be a reactionary. With a technique of camouflage unprecedented in Germany, he arranged the deal that associated his party with the nationalist rising which ended in the Nationalist Socialist revolution' (Rauschning 1968,138). Without denying Hitler's anti-Semitism, commentators have pointed out that neither racism nor nationalism was a deeply felt motivation driving the Nazi revolution. In a move unpopular even with his own elite, Hitler pragmatically disguised what was in reality a radical or '"dynamic" revolution as a movement of national renewal' (Rauschning 1968, 138). In more specific terms, aside from tapping successfully into 'ideas of the pan-German, "racial" policy' (Rauschning 1968,158), Hitler even managed, admittedly with some difficulty, to incorporate two further ideas

210 Postmodernity and Fascism

although they 'were diametrically opposed to one another. One was the socialist reordering of society, and the other the return to monarchy and to the dominance of the old ruling classes' (Rauschning 1968,158). The most widely documented instance of this opportunism in the cultural field is undoubtedly the selective referencing and often wilful misreading of Nietzsche's philosophical texts which Steven Aschheim discusses so convincingly in The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany (Aschheim 1992). And (as Mann captures in++++++++++++the Nazis successfully exploited the neo-Romantic sentiments of the+++++++++++++++mo to foster violence as a legitimate response to what nostalgic Germans condemned as the sterility and artificiality of bourgeois materialism. Appropriating without any concern for consistency or principle various emotional investments current in the German population, Hitler was able to establish an 'organization of dominance' which effectively 'replaced the State' (Rauschning 1968, 139). Following Jameson's distinction, the appropriate term for Hitler's use and abuse of German traditions and institutions is perhaps not parody but pastiche. Leverkiihn's demonic laugh and his abiding fascination with mimicry, quotation, and simulation now take on a political significance which has too often been overlooked. It is perhaps only in retrospect that Hitler can be interpreted as a bricoleur; the self-image he presented was that of the visionary leader called upon to perform the mission for which Germany had been historically destined. Hitler thus displays himself as an engineer, the figure Levi-Strauss opposes to the++++++++++++++++++++++++++ absolute subject who 'supposedly would be the absolute origin of his own discourse and supposedly would construct it "out of nothing," "out of whole cloth"' (Derrida 1982c, 256). It seems that Hitler's selfimage as Fiihrer was based on the assumption that he was an autonomous subject accountable only to his own sense of mission. He was the incorporation of both the Nietzschean transfiguration of all values and the Hegelian 'World-historical' individual. According to Bullock, Hitler saw himself as an agent 'by which "the Will of the World Spirit," the plan of Providence, is carried out' (Bullock 1962, 383).10 He thus 'came to believe that he was a man with a mission, marked out by Providence, and therefore exempt from the ordinary canons of human conduct' (Bullock 1962, 384). But, as Derrida points out, the engineer is in fact a myth created by the+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ was that of 'Siegfried come to reawaken Germany to greatness, for whom, morality, suffering and "the litany of private virtues" were

Fascism and Atonality (or Postmodern Play) 211 irrelevant' (Bullock 1962, 385). Whether consciously or unconsciously, Hitler masked his cynical opportunism as a decisive contribution to the Enlightenment narrative of which Hegel had been the last and also the most confident expression. Although Hitler's volkish rhetoric presented the Third Reich as the dialectical culmination of the First Reich (the medieval Holy Roman Empire) and the Second Reich (the reign of Bismarck),11 in reality the Nazis raided the German tradition so as to reconfigure it to suit their drive for power as such. Indeed, as Bloch reminds us, Hitler was most adept not only at the appropriation of the term but at its reversal of values: The very term Third Reich has a long history, a genuinely revolutionary one. The Nazi was creative, so to speak, only in the embezzlement at all prices with which he employed revolutionary slogans to the opposite effect' (Bloch 1990,117). Where Barthes and Levi-Strauss consider bricolage to be an emancipatory disruption of hierarchical systems, Hitler was able to bend it to the sinister purpose of totalitarian domination. According to Derrida, LeviStrauss sees++++++++++++++activity; he is said to 'remain faithful to this double intention: to preserve as an instrument something whose truth value he criticizes' (Derrida 1982c, 255). Although he is ready to resort to new concepts and tools, the bricoleur does not abandon or discard the old ones altogether but 'denounces their limits/ exploits 'their relative efficacy,' and employs them 'to destroy the old machinery' (Derrida 1982c, 254). In contrast, Hitler used and abused+++++++ reinforce his self-image as the engineer of a new totality he called the Third Reich. It is popularly assumed that the success of Hitler's feat of engineering ought to be attributed to his single-minded pursuit of a racist-nationalistic ideology. However, the Nazi tendency to borrow and accommodate whatever came to hand rather contradicts this view. Far from following a specific ideology, the Nazi agenda is now more often summed up as the pursuit of 'power for the sake of power.' In The Revolution of Nihilism (1939), Rauschning insists, from the insider's informed perspective, that the Nazis were not guided 'by doctrinaire program points' (Rauschning 1968,132) but by a nihilistic pragmatism whose 'only objective was the victory of the party' (Rauschning 1968, 135). This view is shared by Bullock, who contends that the 'sole theme of the Nazi revolution was domination, dressed up as the doctrine of race, and, failing that, a vindictive destructiveness' (Bullock 1962, 804). Nolte further reinforces this position when he claims that the German people were not seduced by 'the novelty or perceptiveness of [Hitler's] Weltanschauung,' but had succumbed to his 'gift of communicating an

212 Postmodernity and Fascism

emotion'+(Nolte 1968,166). This point is brought home in Bloch's anec dote of a young Nazi who exclaimed: 'You do not die for a programme you have understood, you die for a programme you love' (Bloch 1990, 59). If even anti-Semitism was initially simply one of many already available perspectives to be integrated into Hitler's drive for domination, then the Nazi revolution can indeed be described as 'a lesson in cynicism' (Rauschning 1968, 135). The effectiveness of Nazi strategies must consequently be attributed not to Hitler the engineer but to Hitler the bricoleur. The apparently ideological ravings of Hitler and his acolytes proved on closer inspection to have been empty of meaning; through quotation and mimicry, the Nazis circulated ideas as interchangeable commodities in an increasingly simulacral territory. Even Bloch, who looks for a reality behind the 'sheer fagade' of Nazi rationalities, finds nothing but the unreality of 'the total anarchy of the profit economy' (Bloch 1990,199). No longer connected to any 'depth/ social practices became mere 'surface' phenomena whose distribution anticipates Jameson's analysis of the disorientation experienced by the subject in postmodern 'hyperspace.' When Arendt astutely points out that the 'aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any' (Arendt 1973, 468), she clearly understood long before Jameson certain ideological dangers implicit in postmodern 'play.' The Nazi phenomenon foregrounds a complicity between the fragmentation of dominant master-narratives and totalitarianism which we have only recently begun to ponder and theorize. Randomly pillaging the German political and cultural tradition through historically decontextualized quotations, Hitler illustrates for us how mimicry and simulation produced conditions conducive to the imposition of a totalitarian order. Not hampered by ideological investments, moral or political principles, or 'fixed aims, either economic or political, either in home or foreign affairs' (Rauschning 1968,135), the Nazis could effortlessly adapt to and exploit changing circumstances and opportunities. According to Bullock's portrait, Hitler himself exemplifies the decentred subject of postmodernism in that he was 'a man without roots, with neither home nor family; a man who admitted no loyalties, was bound by no traditions, and felt respect neither for God nor man' (Bullock 1962, 380). Lacking depth and stability, he was a reflective surface which absorbed whatever came within its orbit. The so-called doctrine of the Nazis reveals itself as the accidental concoction of ideological bits and pieces which they stitched together to form the surface appearance

Fascism and Atonality (or Postmodern Play) 213

of meaningful coherence.12 Presenting themselves as a revisionist movement serving the moderate aims of the middle classes, the National Socialists 'succeeded in foisting on the country, in place of an authoritarian State, an instrument of dominance that serves simply and purely for the maintenance of its absolute power. Under the mask of a movement of national liberation, it achieved the despotic repression of the nation, with the voluntary assistance of the middle classes and large sections of the working class' (Rauschning 1968, 138). In the end, the totalitarian system has kicked itself free of the organizational principles constraining even the most oppressively hierarchical systems and has thus entered into the hyperreal territory of postmodernity. The popular view of Hitler as a demented genius capable of exploiting irrational impulses to persuade otherwise rational people to follow his lead into evil and perdition thus obscures other aspects of the Nazi phenomenon. Far from advancing a clearly articulated ideology, Hitler appealed to disparate and conflicting groups and individuals by opportunistically capitalizing on whatever happened to be to hand for any given situation. Or, in the words of the aggrieved Bloch, 'just as they had stolen the red flag, the first of May, and finally even the hammer and sickle, stolen and perverted them for the purpose of forgery, the Nazis have also particularly known how to make use of the less manifest symbols of the revolutions for their own ends' (Bloch 1990, 141). The ability to mimic and simulate opinions produced an apparent Weltanschauung or view of life which 'would strike a normal mind of the twentieth century as a grotesque hodgepodge concocted by a half-baked, uneducated neurotic' (Shirer 1990, 82). His most neurotic preoccupation was the establishment of a state predicated on racial purity. As Shirer points out, Hitler's 'fantastic conception of the folkish state' (Shirer 1990, 89), that was to emerge from his 'obsession with race' (Shirer 1990,88), is never clearly articulated. Yet the delirious Nazi rallies at Nuremberg depended on and perpetuated this volkish myth, creating a bond between inspired Fiihrer and entranced masses which was all the stronger for being irrational. There is little doubt that the strength of National Socialism was to a large extent its reliance on irrational elements. However, as Bullock warns, 'before accepting the Hitler myth at anything like its face value,' we need to remember 'that it was Hitler who invented the myth, assiduously cultivating and manipulating it for its own ends' (Bullock 1962, 375). Bullock speculates that Hitler's affinity with the irrational is only 'half the truth' about him, 'for the baffling problem about this strange figure is to determine

214 Postmodernity and Fascism

the degree to which he was swept along by a genuine belief in his own inspiration and the degree to which he deliberately exploited the irrational side of human nature, both in himself and others, with a shrewd calculation' (Bullock 1962,375). It is this 'baffling' mutual implication of rational and irrational forces that is most convincingly captured in the uncanny logic of the magic square that so forcefully symbolizes Leverkiihn's life and music. It is as difficult to determine to what extent Hitler consciously manipulated the political arena as it is to establish to what extent Leverkiihn was in control of the aesthetic system he developed. Did Hitler cynically mislead his followers or did he deceive himself into believing the myths he promulgated? In The Revolution of Nihilism, Rauschning insists on a distinction between the masses, susceptible to the selfprofessed Nazi program and official philosophy, and an elite, devoid of all philosophical principles and ethical standards. This early assessment of Hitler's rise to power is both legitimated and constrained by Rauschning's having been 'the only high-ranking National Socialist to leave the Party and become its declared enemy' (Greene 1968, 115). From his privileged position of the disillusioned insider, Rauschning maintains that modern revolutions 'follow irrational impulses, but they remain under rational guidance and control' (Rauschning 1968, 133). For him, the masses are duped by an unscrupulous and calculating elite. The 'perilousness' of such revolutions 'lies in their ordered destructiveness - it is a misuse on a vast scale of the human desire for order - and in the irrationality and incalculability of their pressure for the "victory of the revolutionary new order.'" The masses experience this pressure as 'completely uncalculated, unconsidered, the pressure of men with no program but action, instinctive in the case of the best troops.' In reality, though, the part played in this revolution by 'its controlling elite is most carefully and coolly considered down to the smallest detail' (Rauschning 1968, 133). His insider knowledge of the way Hitler's elite operated induced him to stress the nihilistic opportunism of the movement. He thereby anticipates Bauman's argument in Modernity and the Holocaust that the 'irrational' death camps were the result of a bureaucratic over-emphasis on 'rational' calculation. Rauschning's attempted separation between leaders and followers tends to break down even in his own actual depiction of the Nazi movement. His examples often illustrate that the elite itself was marked by an entanglement of the irrational and the rational, as when he argues for a distinction between the 'genuinely irrational revolutionary pas-

Fascism and Atonality (or Postmodern Play) 215

sion, affecting not only the mass of followers but the leaders themselves, and the very deliberate, utterly cold and calculating pursuit of power and dominance by the controlling group' (Rauschning 1968, 132). Early commentators like Rauschning (1939) and Bullock (1952) seem particularly intent on counteracting the popular picture of the raving monomaniacal Fiihrer who instinctively appealed to dangerous but largely unconscious longings in the German population. As Bullock puts it, '[s]o much has been made of the charismatic nature of Hitler's leadership that it is easy to forget the astute and cynical politician in him' (Bullock 1962, 375). It could be said that in Hitler the astute politician and the inspired madman reinforced each other in much the same way as in Leverkiihn (and in his music) the self-conscious intellectual is ultimately indistinguishable from the dabbler in demonic practices. What seems clear enough, though, is that the rhetorical register of Hitler's speeches created an illusion of continuity with the past (modernity) which concealed his radically new practice of organized chaos. If the aesthetic appeal of the Nuremberg Rallies relies on their spectacular visibility, Hitler's simulacral intensification of the 'real' has its more profound effects in the myth of the engineer he creates through+bricolage In the final analysis, it could be said that the Nazis did not so much conceal their ideological investments as the fact that there was nothing to be concealed. This articulation conjures up Jean Baudrillard's depiction of the historical stages that mark conceptions of representation (the 'image'): Such would be the successive phases of the image: it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the++++++of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is it own pure simulacrum. In the first case, the image is a++++appearance - representation is of the sacramental order. In the second, it is an evil appearance - it is of the order of maleficence. In the third, it plays at being an appearance - it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer of the order of appearances, but of simulation. (Baudrillard 1994, 6)

A naive reflection theory holds that the image corresponds like a mirror to the world it represents. But mirrors can be deceptive and convey a

216 Postmodernity and Fascism

false image of reality. In the first two phases of the image, a clear distinction between the real and its representation is still at work. In the last two instances, though, this depth model yields to a self-reflexive conception of representation in which the image refers only to itself. Where modernism still masks the gap between text and reality, postmodernism asserts either gleefully or tragically its inescapably fictional status. For Baudrillard, the 'transition from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is nothing marks a decisive turning point' (Baudrillard 1994, 6). For Jameson, too, quotation and mimicry are markers of a shift to 'a world transformed into sheer images of itself and for pseudo-events and "spectacles'" (Jameson 1991,18), which he identifies with 'Plato's conception of "simulacrum," the identical copy for which no original has ever existed' (Jameson 1991,18). What Hitler seems to have understood long before Jameson and Baudrillard is the enormous power of the image, the primacy of the sign divorced from its referent. Exploiting the nostalgia for genuine historicity, Hitler aestheticized politics not only in the obvious sense we associate with his rhetoric and pageantry but through a process of simulation which Arendt describes as the creation of 'a perfect world of appearances in which every reality in the nontotalitarian world was slavishly duplicated in the form of humbug' (Arendt 1973, 371). In addition to taking advantage of the cultural archive, it was Hitler's 'aim to fight an election with the State machinery on his side; it had long been his aim not to revolt against the State, but to take over all the machinery of the State, and to use it to make the Nazi revolution' (Jarman 1968, 118). What needs to be further clarified is the extent to which the dispersal of fragments in the wake of the 'random cannibalization of all styles of the past' (Jameson 1991,18) is not only complicit with totalitarianism but quite possibly one of its enabling conditions.

CHAPTER 6

DECENTRED TOTALITIES: FASCISM, CAPITALISM, POSTMODERNISM

My analysis of Doctor Faustus as a parable of fascism is increasingly meant to draw attention to the disturbing recognition of German National Socialism as a sinister possibility implicit in postmodern critiques of modernity, critiques expressing a concern with a radically new way of conceptualizing the relationship between subject and object. Responsive to the currents of the times, Mann sensed that Adorno's negative dialectics contained insights into a radical cognitive shift in our cultural self-understanding whose laudable ambitions and unfortunate consequences found their historical expression in Germany even before our conceptual mapping of the emergent dominant had properly begun. In our haste to dismiss the fascist episode as the last gasp of a pre-modern atavism, we have only recently started to explore links between modernity and the Holocaust. In his pioneering work, Bauman has convincingly shown that the death camps were made possible by modernity's privileging of rational organization and efficiency. Yet Bauman's focus on modernity makes him overlook that the complicity between rational order and irrational purpose constitutes a violation of the law of non-contradiction whose implications are at stake in postmodern debates. I want to argue that an analysis of Leverkuhn's twelve-tone system as an allegory of Nazi Germany alerts us to the possibility that fascist totalitarianism manifests a radically revolutionary logic, a logic foregrounded in Doctor Faustus through features which also figure prominently in discussions of postmodernity. This last chapter, then, attempts to connect the uncanny logic of the twelve-tone system to the historical record of Hitler's reconfiguration of the public space. What interests me in this context is the strategy of Gleichschaltung, the Nazis' successful neutralization and appropriation

218 Postmodern!ty and Fascism

of the existing administrative apparatus in order to make it serve different functions and to bend it to a new will. Exemplifying a totality that is paradoxically both rigorously organized and contingent, Leverkuhn's twelve-tone system captures the uncanny logic of a political totalitarianism predicated on organized chaos. Avant-garde music illustrates for Adorno precisely the truth of the untruth of the sociohistorical conditions manifesting themselves not only in fascism but also in late capitalism. The twelve-tone row foregrounds the complicity between totalization and fragmentation, a complicity made possible by an economy of infinite exchange of which capitalism is the broad manifestation while fascism constitutes one of its extreme cases. Nazi Germany's totalitarian regime distinguishes itself from traditional authoritarian regimes precisely in that it dispenses with hierarchical patterns of organization in favour of an indifferent totality set on preventing isolated fragments from relating meaningfully to each other. Where postmodern discourses tend to celebrate decentring and fragmentation as sites of resistance to hierarchically oppressive narratives, these strategies reveal more sinister sides when their implications are examined in the context of fascist totalitarianism and late capitalism to which+Doctor Faustus+draws our attention. Following Adorno's analysis of Schonberg' twelve-tone technique, Mann acknowledges that Leverkuhn's emancipatory project results in the destruction of what he had set out to save. In The Lament of Doctor Faustus/ the subject is eliminated, expression has been emptied of meaning, and art has destroyed itself. Translated into the sociohistorical register, the subject has been dehumanized either by being treated as a commodity in the capitalist system or by being reduced to a function in the carceral society exemplified by the camps; the meaning of commodified life is no more apparent than is the purpose of power for the sake of power; validations of difference risk being absorbed by the undifferentiated totality of either the global market or the fascist state apparatus. What is thus at stake in this chapter is the decentred totality that Leverkuhn's demystification of tonal music compels him to institute, a totality that stands for the triumph of the object over the subject in the dialectical process that is traced in the novel's history of music in an effort to account not only for German fascism but also for its complicity with late capitalism. The Truth-Content of Music The sociohistorical approach Mann borrows from Adorno stresses the systemic nature of the radical revolution of Leverkuhn's aesthetic inno-

Decentred Totalities 219

vation and of Hitler's rise to power. Instead of attributing Leverkiihn's aesthetic breakthrough, and hence the Nazi phenomenon, to the 'genius' of the individual artist or politician,++++++++++++dramatizes Adorno's conviction that aesthetic accomplishments and historical events must be understood as responses to specific material conditions. Although these material conditions were produced by social agents, they constrain the agency of social actors at any given time. According to this way of thinking, events are neither exactly predetermined nor exactly free to determine their own trajectories. Adorno's sociohistorical analysis is thus not entirely out of step with Mann's mythic register; if aesthetic phenomena reflect the material conditions of their times, then Leverkuhn was indeed 'fated' to produce 'The Lament of Doctor Faustus' just as Germany was 'fated' to succumb to the Nazi lure. What strikes one as so sophisticated about Adorno's methodology is his insistence that, though art may not provide us with access to universal truths, it can alert us to the+++++++blinding us to our social and cultural situation. For Adorno, some artists are able to express, and perhaps courageous enough to confront, such untruths, whereas others prefer to hide and escape from them. Commentators consistently argue that Adorno preferred Schonberg to Stravinsky because the former articulated the 'truth-content' of late capitalism while the latter took flight from history; where Schonberg took a critical stance against cornmodification, Stravinsky simply registered the complicity of aesthetics with late capitalism. In the same way, in+++++++++++Mann showed himself to have been ideologically astute enough to recognize the 'truth' of aesthetic 'untruth.' Adorno presumably approved of Mann's novel because it 'represents the truth of society against the individual, who recognizes its untruth and is himself this untruth' (Adorno 1973, 50-1). In a first move, through his social isolation, Leverkuhn criticizes society and draws attention to its 'untruth'; by the end of the novel, he further acknowledges that his masterpiece can do no more than tragically intensify this 'untruth.' Art's awareness of its 'untruth' is perhaps all we can ask of it. In spite of their critical stance toward Schonberg, Adorno and Mann appreciate the truth-content of his twelve-tone technique. Atonality heroically confronts the social contradictions which tonality resolves into a false unity of opposites. Although music has always been more or less self-conscious about the 'contradictions present in its own material/ thereby acting as a witness for the 'contradictions in the world in which it dwells,' in new music contradiction is 'actually perceived and not merely registered' (Adorno 1973, 125). In tune with Hegel's tele-

220 Postmodernity and Fascism

ological idealism, bourgeois art has tended to deny the 'reality of the contradiction' in order to retain its Utopian hope in the 'realization of the possible' (Adorno 1973,125). The crucial step in the development of atonality is the insight it provides into the radically irreconcilable nature of contradiction: '[MJodern1+art ... grasps its own contradictions with such depth that they can no longer be arbitrated' (Adorno 1973, 125). For Adorno, 'true' art has to reveal that late capitalism has created such socially antagonistic conditions that attempts at imaginary reconciliation provide nothing but false hope. Exposing socioeconomic factors, '[mjodern art permits the contradiction to remain' (Adorno 1973, 125); this is the 'truth' of the 'untruth' of late capitalism. According to Marx's 'camera obscura' metaphor,2 the social world has suffered a double inversion so that class contradiction could only be resolved through sociopolitical revolution. Art can consequently not remedy real contradictions, but it can raise consciousness about the impossibility of resolving these under present sociohistorical conditions. Atonality therefore plays an important interventionist role, a role which is not the onto-theological one of consolation but the Utopian-critical one of assisting in a paradigm shift capable of clearing away the old and ushering in the new. Adorno appreciates twelve-tone technique because it does not deny or gloss over oppositions like those between subject and object, consonance and dissonance, form and content, vertical and horizontal axes, instrument and voice. By foregrounding the radical incommensurability of contradictory perceptions, twelve-tone technique articulates the 'truth' of postmodernity's inability to escape the real contradictions of late capitalism. Senselessness thus happens to be the sense or 'truth' of Schonberg's music, for, as Adorno claims, 'the emergent moment of meaninglessness' is in fact 'constituent for twelve-tone technique' (Adorno 1973, 127). Similarly, the irreconcilable antagonism between subject and object in the social world is the 'truth' reflected in twelvetone technique: 'The quarrel between alienated objectivity and limited subjectivity remains unsettled, and the very irreconcilability thereof reveals the fundamental truth involved' (Adorno 1973,104). Schonberg's dissonance counts in Adorno's eyes as the most adequate or 'authentic' expression of the inauthenticity he attributes to cultures dominated by commodification. However, although Schonberg is on the right track in that twelve-tone technique contributes to the 'critique' of the antagonistic social conditions under late capitalism, he fails to push this critique far enough. Atonality is suspect as a 'critique' of (post)modernity be-

Decentred Totalities 221

cause it constitutes not the denial but the radical extension of the rationalized world against which Adorno is in revolt. What Adorno could not accept is the 'dream of the total integration of music' (Witkin 1998,136) which animates Schonberg's attempt to reconcile the contradictions and antagonisms he so accurately represents. For Adorno, '[m]usic that sought this kind of total integration - the product of a purified musical language - in an age of antagonistic and alienating social relations dealt in dreams and illusions, not in truth. Music could not successfully reflect the social process when its elements had been prefigured as a closed system' (Witkin 1998, 136). Indeed, as we will see, the failure to foreground contradiction risks the elimination of the subject and the triumph of the object. Schonberg could be said to have hit on the correct diagnosis of the ills of his time, but he prescribed poison to deal with them. The poison inadvertently released through the 'invention' of twelvetone music is not only the commodity structure of late capitalism but also the extreme case of fascist totalitarianism in Germany. Adorno's references to 'real contradictions' or 'social antagonisms' are undoubtedly inflected toward Marx's emphasis on the class conflict as the ultimate contradiction on which other contradictions arise. In spite of this half-hearted gesture toward class conflict, though, Adorno's dialectical narrative of the development of music is really more broadly concerned with the antagonism between subject and object. By incorporating Adorno's critique of the commodity structure into his parable of fascism, Mann suggests in Doctor Faustus that late capitalism and fascist totalitarianism are part and parcel of the same paradoxical logic that is exemplified in the complicity between extreme order and extreme contingency in Leverkiihn's masterpiece The Lament of Doctor Faustus.' By emphasizing that fragmentation and totality reinforce each other, Doctor Faustus may well be representing the 'truth' of the postmodern 'untruth' holding that strategies of decentring and fragmentation are necessarily emancipatory. In Fascist Modernism (1993), Andrew Hewitt reaches a similar conclusion from a different direction. Focusing primarily on the futurists (especially Marinetti), he contends that Lyotard's claim that '[mjodernity is rupture' (Hewitt 1993, 40) overlooks that this rupture does not disable the totality it was meant to challenge. For Hewitt, the 'semblance of rupture must be understood within a more complex process of totalization/ within a context that includes 'Max Weber's notion of rationalization as a process in which the processes of fragmentation and articulation of the totality are coex-

222 Postmodernity and Fascism

tensive' (Hewitt 1993, 40). But instead of pursuing this question on the level of the social, Fascist Modernism stresses the specifically 'philosophical implications of this interplay of fragmentation and totalization within the modernist discourse of rupture' (Hewitt 1993, 40). In my work here, I wish to explore this interplay of fragmentation and totalization by suggesting connections between Adorno's philosophical interpretation of avant-garde music and my reading of the uncanny logic the Nazis employed to impose their reign of terror. The Problem of Hierarchy and Anarchy A close reading of the theoretical treatment of music in+Doctor Faustu allows us to see that, by the turn of the century, the material conditions legitimated by the Enlightenment narrative were beginning to undermine the self-understanding of the project of modernity. Instead of being reconciled in a Hegelian sublation, subject and object became increasingly antagonistic, exposing an irreconcilable contradiction at the heart of modernity which had already manifested itself above all in the conflict between Rousseau's call for freedom from oppression and Hobbes's need for constraints on unfettered self-expression. In the history of music Mann incorporates from Adorno, counterpoint is privileged as an ideal aesthetic model for the sociopolitical; in its purest configuration, this musical form expresses a dynamic tension between subject and object which prevents the structure from degenerating into paralysing stasis and asymmetrical relations. Integrating each voice into a coherent whole, 'true counterpoint demands the simultaneity of independent voices' (Mann 1997,204), calling on individuals to participate in a collectivity which assigns them an acceptable function without asking them to sacrifice their singularity. Counterpoint is the musical equivalent of the Hegelian Aufhebung; it is a synthesis which unites opposites without subsuming one term under the other. 'Good counterpoint' reflects in its structure the democratic ideal which presupposes that free individuals make voluntary choices that satisfy their own aspirations as well as the needs of society. But music could not maintain Hegel's ideal dialectical tension between subject and object. On the one hand, Leverkiihn experiences the hierarchical structure of tonal music as an oppressive constraint on the composer's freedom to express himself. On the other hand, by the time of the late Romantics, good counterpoint had degenerated into a 'warm' fusion of subject and object which Leverktihn rejects as merely personal

Decentred Totalities 223

self-indulgence. Tonal music is paradoxically both too hierarchical and too subjective. Leverkiihn's project is to free the note from its subordination to the hierarchical key system while also curbing its anarchic tendencies toward subjective wilfulness. Advancing the theory that '[fjreedom always inclines to dialectic reversals' (Mann 1968, 185), he sets out to correct the imbalance between excessive objectivity and excessive subjectivity by combating one through the other. Yet, as we will see, the dialectical reversal he initiates tragically dooms him to eliminate rather than save music; his aesthetic breakthrough will exacerbate the plight of the subject and intensify the power of the objective system. By the time Leverkiihn appears on the historical scene, 'good counterpoint' has deteriorated into a system that is both too static and too asymmetrical; the subject withdraws into stagnating self-contemplation while the key system imposes oppressive limits on subjective expression. Long before The Lament of Doctor Faustus/ the complicity of subject and object is at stake in a debate on the question of freedom between Leverkiihn and Zeitblom. At the time of Ursula Leverkiihn's wedding, Beissel's master and slave system is revisited in explicitly political terms. On the surface, it seems that Leverkuhn's 'half-humorous respect' (Mann 1968, 184) for Beissel's rational system is meant to draw attention to the dialectical complicity between his emancipatory rhetoric and his secret longing for subordination to an external order. Shortly to be followed by the interview with the devil, this scene could be interpreted as evidence of Leverkuhn's demonic predisposition. But we should not, for all these totalitarian hints, overlook that this scene exposes above all the hypocrisy of Zeitblom's liberal humanism. Where the narrator criticizes the regressive tendencies of this 'archaic-revolutionary schoolmaster' (Mann 1968,184), his friend appreciates in Beissel's master and slave dichotomy an undisguised reflection of the sociohistorical conditions of modernity. Expressing 'something necessary to the time' (Mann 1968, 184), Beissel reveals an asymmetry in social relations which Zeitblom's investment in liberal humanism compels him to conceal from himself. Implicitly attacking Zeitblom's hypocritical self-confidence in the emancipatory project of modernity, Leverkiihn insists that he prefers Beissel's authoritarian system for openly acknowledging its affinity with hierarchical domination. Yet Leverkiihn clearly distances himself from Beissel's master-slave order: his aesthetic revolution attacks the tonal tradition precisely for imposing on notes an oppressive key system. When Mann has Lever-

224 Postmodernity and Fascism

kiihn embrace serial music, he adopts Adorno's contention that Schonberg specifically targeted the hierarchical structure of the tonal tradition. The twelve-tone series was introduced to prevent notes from being repeated too frequently, thereby risking that they might accidentally reconstitute themselves into tonal foundations and hierarchies. The system of rows 'rationalizes what is instinctive in every conscientious composer: sensitivity towards the too-early recurrence of the same pitch' (Adorno 1973,64). Although Leverkiihn appreciates Beissel's refusal to participate in the mystification of oppression in which Zeitblom indulges, he is not advocating a return to hierarchy but its elimination. The tonal tradition imposes on musical expression so rigid a set of rules that the result is not the promised 'release of the productive powers' (Mann 1968, 185) but a formal sterility no longer responsive to Leverkuhn's emancipatory aspirations. What attracts Leverkuhn is not so much Beissel's endorsement of authoritarianism as his attack on subjectivism in music, his 'ascetic cooling off (Mann 1968,70) of the 'cow warmth' (Mann 1968,69) which appeals to Zeitblom's Romantic inclinations. After Beethoven's sonata opus 111, tonal music entered into a crisis whose outcome was the tendency in Romantic music to absolutize the category of the subject. Retreating from the social world into personal self-expression, Romantic music abandoned the principles of counterpoint. The danger Leverkuhn perceives in this excessive subjectivism is that unfettered self-expression will encourage political anarchy. What is at stake in the Beissel debate is the distinction between 'negative freedom' and 'positive freedom.' On the one hand, we have Nietzsche's updated affirmation of Rousseau's call for freedom from all constraints; on the other, we have Kant's updated Hobbesian notion of freely chosen constraints to guarantee certain basic liberties. It is then the self-indulgence in late Romantic music that makes Leverkuhn advocate the 'idea of a rational total organization of all musical material' (Mann 1997, 205), an organization meant to prevent the domination of one term of the harmonymelody opposition over the other. Through his sympathetic view of Beissel, Leverkuhn endorses a system of rational rules intended to curb the capricious or anarchistic behaviour that Zeitblom's liberal yearnings for personal self-expression tend to invite. Doctor Faustus here reflects the sociopolitical conditions of Germany's turbulent history from Bismarck to the Weimar Republic. Although Bismarck's reforms formally retained the feudal authority of the monarchy, in reality the emperors from Wilhelm I to Wilhelm III continued

Decentred Totalities ++225

to lose ground to interest groups they no longer controlled. Yet demo ratization was a slow and painful process. The new parliamentary system suffered not only from vestigial investments in a long tradition of hierarchical authority but was constantly in danger of deteriorating into anarchy. The Weimar Republic was doomed from the start; too many competing parties fragmented the Reichstag, making it virtually impossible to govern the country. No party or coalition was strong enough to shape workable political platforms; indeed, political selfindulgence exposed the country to social chaos and economic disaster. Leverkiihn's attack on rigid hierarchies and his fear of anarchy surely reference the sociopolitical conditions in the years leading up to Hitler's rise to power. From Organic Form to Indifferent Totality What Doctor Faustus illustrates is that Germany's belated yearning for the democratization of its political institutions created conditions conducive to Hitler's totalitarian regime. Nazi terror did not suddenly descend on Germany but emerged as a possibility always already implicit in the dialectical reversals of freedom that Leverkiihn acknowledges. But, contrary to Hegel's progressive dialectical teleology, Leverkiihn's attempt to revitalize counterpoint fatally dooms him to eliminate it. Far from envisioning a resurgence of primitivism, he embraces Beissel's polyphony as a line of escape from an excessive privileging of subjective feeling in the harmonies of Romantic music. In fact, he assumes that he can force a cognitive revolution by imitating and repeating the dialectical patterns he observes in history; Beissel's polyphony offers him an avenue already travelled by Bach. Mann here once again models his fictional composer on Schonberg, whose 'twelvetone technique has crystallized into a genuine polyphonic style,' a style that in turn repeats and accentuates 'Bach's recourse to older polyphonic forms' (Adorno 1973, 90). However, having intended to exploit polyphony as a locus of intervention against the dominance of harmony, Leverkiihn stretches and intensifies the properties of good counterpoint until he pushes this ideal form against the limits of its possibility. According to Adorno, Schonberg both emancipated and eliminated counterpoint: 'However, it is questionable as to whether twelve-tone technique - to the extent that it carries the contrapuntal idea of integration to an absolute - does actually abolish the principle of counterpoint by means of its own totality' (Adorno 1973, 94-5). In Leverkiihn's

226 Postmodernity and Fascism

hands, the organic principle of counterpoint is reconfigured as a totalizing system. The novel already hints that fascist totalitarianism constitutes a logical extreme of Rousseau's democratic ideal of organic wholeness. If freedom does indeed always 'incline to dialectic reversals/ then Zeitblom cannot exile from his negative notion of freedom the objective constraints Leverkiihn admires in Beissel's order. In dialectical fashion, Zeitblom's liberalism can be said to generate the very radicalization of objectivity that will mark Leverkiihn's twelve-tone alternative. Since the current sociohistorical conditions have reached a point where the autonomous subject celebrated in Romanticism necessarily 'despairs of the possibility of being creative out of herself and seeks shelter and security in the objective/ Leverkiihn offers the politically ominous scenario in which freedom is to be realized through 'subordination to law, rule, coercion, system' (Mann 1968, 185). This scenario translates into the aesthetic register a cunning argument produced earlier by the theology professor Eberhard Schleppfuss. Discussing the thorny theological problem of the theodicy, the contradiction implicit in the notion of an all-knowing and all-powerful God permitting the existence of evil and sin, Schleppfuss disguises totalitarian repression as a liberal form of freedom. Anticipating Leverkiihn's paradoxical contention that the free note owes its existence to the totalizing closure of the serial system, Schleppfuss maintains that God provides us with the freedom to sin at the same time as he also proscribes this freedom. The only freedom left to human subjects is to accept God's authority by not using their freedom. To ensure salvation, the faithful are advised not to exercise their freedom, since this exercise would necessarily entail opposition to divine authority. It is only a short step from this position to the argument that to be coerced is to be loved. The fascist implications of this form of freedom are clearly drawn out when Zeitblom comments that for Schleppfuss 'the activities of the Inquisition were animated by the most touching humanity' (Mann 1968,100). It appears that both Beissel's master-slave order and the Catholic church in medieval times are introduced as repressive systems that anticipate the Nazi regime. In all three cases, we seem to be dealing with an oppressive hierarchy which exercises power from the top down. Close attention to the twelve-tone breakthrough reveals that the totality Leverkiihn introduces actually differs significantly from the hierarchical forms of oppression exemplified by Beissel and Schleppfuss. It is precisely through its hostility to hierarchy that serial music institutes

Decentred Totalities 227

a radically new kind of totality. Adorno was particularly sensitive to the dangerous implications of Schonberg's dismantling of the key system. In the process of trying to 'eliminate all such hierarchical means of ordering the new music' (Witkin 1998,134), Schonberg created a system which was for Adorno 'questionable as an ideal' (Adorno 1973, 96) because the drive toward the total integration of all elements struck him not only as totalitarian in fascist terms but also as complicit with the destruction of meaningful social relations under the reifying impact of late capitalism. Adorno blames 'the blatant emptiness of the integral composition' (Adorno 1973, 98) for merely registering, rather than resisting, the '"integration" of a society in which the economic basis of alienation continues to exist unchanged while the justification of antagonisms is denied by suppression' (Adorno 1973, 95). While providing insights into the illusory pretences of the closed bourgeois work, the twelve-tone composition does not recognize its own suspect ideological investments and mystifications. It is in the attempt to eliminate the last vestiges of hierarchy that the serial system becomes totalitarian; as we will see, it is the dream of absolute integration, of a pure homogeneous system uncontaminated by heterogeneity, that perpetrates a regime of violence symbolize for Adorno by Auschwitz. Doctor Faustus here confirms Hannah Arendt's distinction between older forms of authoritarian despotism and the radical novelty of Hitler's revolution. Contradicting popular opinion, she argues that fascist totalitarianism does not constitute a return to traditional forms of authoritarian despotism; instead, the Nazis targeted precisely the hierarchical distribution of power characterizing both monarchical and democratic forms of government. Such traditional hierarchical systems retain a degree of 'play' or 'give' that allows subjects room for manoeuvre and even resistance. As Adorno points out in the context of tonal music, it was a hierarchically oppressive order which was, nevertheless, loose enough to allow for unexpected and spontaneous developments: 'The various dimensions of Western tonal music - melody, harmony, counterpoint, form, and instrumentation - have for the most part developed historically apart from one another, without design, and, in that regard, according to the "laws of nature'" (Adorno 1973, 52). Convergence in tonal music was still experienced as 'natural' and open to creative innovation. Although there were strict rules, they were not designed to manage every aspect of the system. Hierarchical arrangements in aesthetic as well as political arenas relied not only on a controlling centre but on the relationships between parts. What makes

228 Postmodernity and Fascism

many Shakespeare plays so dramatic, for instance, are the conflicts and tensions arising between nobles whose shifting alliances determine the monarch's sphere of power and influence. Far from being autonomous, monarchs have traditionally had to rely on the shifting support of powerful feudal elites. In democracies, the centre of power is further weakened but not eliminated. Where feudal power had been exercised from the top down, democratic forms of government sought to locate power in the people, whose delegates were entrusted with decisionmaking processes. Based on the principle of checks and balances, democracies tended to create a complex administrative apparatus intended to curb the power of those elected to govern. Parliamentary democracies thus reversed the locus of power without, for all that, eliminating the hierarchical nature of the power structure. But the Nazi revolution rigorously targeted all hierarchical stratifications; they destroyed the political party system of the Weimar Republic, the social allegiances embedded in the class order, the economic power of aristocratic and military elites, the cultural privileges of intellectual groups, the legal appeals system, and the public space in which citizens were free to assemble. In her assessment of Nazism, Arendt clarifies that fascist totalitarianism differs not only from democratic but also from authoritarian regimes; Hitler's Third Reich was the result not of a conservative but of a radical revolution. As she points out, democratic freedoms 'acquire their meaning and function organically only where the citizens belong to and are represented by groups or form a social and political hierarchy' (Arendt 1973,312); the Nazis did not reinstate an old authoritarianism by simply reversing the locus of power, but targeted the hierarchical distribution of power as such. It is not without significance that, for Arendt, German fascism was, among other things, a consequence of the 'breakdown of the class system' (Arendt 1973, 312). Like the fictional Zeitblom, she observes and deplores the shift from a hierarchically structured system to a decentred totality which Mann and Adorno identify with Schonberg's twelve-tone technique. One of the most visible signs of the difference between centred and decentred political systems is that dictatorial terror distinguishes itself from totalitarian terror in that the former 'threatens only authentic opponents but not harmless citizens' (Arendt 1973, 322). In other words, authoritarian regimes create and exploit power convergences through a system of rewards and punishments while totalitarian regimes act arbitrarily in order to eliminate the possibility of locating lines of power. Although

Decentred Totalities 229

attacks on political opponents in traditional authoritarian systems may be morally suspect, they, nevertheless, make rational sense. In contrast, exceeding political expediency, the elimination of 'harmless citizens' introduces a level of unreality that anticipates Baudrillard's hyperreal space. Where authoritarian as well as democratic regimes still depend on the organizational principle of hierarchy, totalitarian systems have kicked themselves free of such constraints. Serial Music: The Decentred Totality Although Adorno acknowledges positive aspects of twelve-tone technique, 'serial music is ultimately anathema to [him] because it subordinates all expression, all inventiveness, to the domination of a rigid prefigured ordering' (Witkin 1998, 134). The totalization described in both++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ significantly different logic from what obtains for the centred hierarchical totality of bourgeois music and social organization. Organic concepts of form are inner-directed evolving systems; each part contributes to the whole and is in turn completed by it. In contrast, the form of serial compositions is representative of the mechanical aggregation of disconnected parts within an indifferent totality. What Mann conveys through Leverktihn's breakthrough is that his decentring of tonal music 'liberates' atomistic elements only to subject them to a more rigorously deterministic totality. It is as if music, having freed itself from hierarchy, could not endure the possibility of unlimited dissemination implicit in free atonality. As Schorske reminds us, Schonberg's atonal revolution was indeed initially entirely compatible with democratic ideals: 'Chromatic tones - half tones - are all of a single value, and constitute an egalitarian universe of sound' (Schorske 1981, 347). But this extreme form of negative freedom is frightening in its anarchistic overtones: 'To one accustomed to the hierarchical order of tonality, such democracy is disturbing. It is the language of flux, of dissolution' (Schorske 1981, 347). Concurring with Adorno, Schorske suggests that Schonberg retreated from the flux introduced by free atonality and took refuge in a strict serial system designed to recontain the anarchy he had let loose. It is the emancipatory gesture of free atonality which generates in turn the strict form of twelve-tone technique. Intimidated by the threat of anarchy, the decentred structure yearned for some kind of order to contain the fragmentation of the totality into unrelated atoms. The paradox Doctor Faustus foregrounds above all others is the un-

230 Postmodernity and Fascism

canny complicity between total integration and extreme contingency. In an effort to manage+++++++subjective manifestations, Leverkiihn closes down the 'play' that the 'subjective moments of expression' (Adorno 1973, 56) in Beethoven's late compositions had exposed. An objective system of rigorous integration imposes itself because, having liberated themselves 'from the continuum of time/ these subjective moments can otherwise 'no longer be held in check' (Adorno 1973,56). Mann's composer is consequently compelled to take extreme measures; he reconfigures Hegel's+++++++++f subject and object into an objec tive totality capable of accommodating all subjective contingencies. The alternative system Leverkiihn wishes to oppose to tonal music is initially conceived to empower the subject but eventually takes on a life of its own. Although he intended to 'cool' down the 'warm' subjectivism in Romantic music, he envisaged that his compositions would remain under the control of their creator. Before the scene with the devil, he still basically privileges subjectivity over objectivity. In art, he says, 'the subjective and objective intertwine to the point of being indistinguishable, one proceeds from the other and takes the character of the other, the subjective precipitates as objective and by genius is again awaked to spontaneity, "dynamized," as we say; it speaks all at once the language of the subjective' (Mann 1968,185). Making it difficult to draw a line between freedom and domination, this intermingling of subjectivity and objectivity breaks down the conventional constraints imposed on the artist-subject's free expression. In fact, by arguing that the object is always already subject ('the subjective precipitates as objective'), he puts the seemingly capricious process of dialectical reversals under the control of the artist as genius ('by genius is again awaked'). It is the subjective agent who revitalizes the system and helps it regain its dynamic spontaneity. At this point, Leverkiihn still absolutizes the category of the subject in the privileged form of the artistic genius; although the objective world may temporarily gain the upper hand, the historical process ultimately depends on the intervention of the autonomous artist who symbolizes for Adorno the atomistic bourgeois subject. Leverkiihn deceives himself into thinking that the socially imbued musical material can be bent to his will. In the Romantic tradition, he sees himself as the self-determining subject whose creation of meaning constitutes an act of originality independent of social constrictions. Yet Leverkiihn's breakdown at the end of the novel suggests that subjective agency eventually succumbs to objective material condi-

Decentred Totalities 231

tions. What the novel demonstrates is Adorno's understanding of the artist's complex interaction with his or her sociohistorical conditions: The demands made upon the subject by the material are conditioned much more by the fact that the "material" is itself a crystallization of the creative impulse, an element socially predetermined through the consciousness of man. As a previous subjectivity - now forgetful of itself such an objectified impulse of the material has its own kinetic laws' (Adorno 1973, 33). What distinguishes Adorno from both Hegel and Derrida is his insistence that the relationship between subject and object is asymmetrical. Although the subject is always already object, the object does not need the subject for its existence. The subject is consequently never 'free' to express his or her 'own' inner thoughts or feelings; aesthetic innovation is necessarily taking place within the context of already existing conventions. The object appears to the subject as an obstacle that circumscribes what a specific subject can say or create at any given time in history. But, since the artist is working with material that is the repository of practices by other subjects throughout history, the aesthetic material is ultimately neither exactly 'subjective' nor exactly 'objective.' Aesthetic form does not 'choose' between subject and object but is the consequence of a mediation by the subject which takes place in the object itself. It is only by ignoring the activities of social subjects in history that the musical material confronts the artist as an object. Although the subject is not 'free' in the Romantic sense of being self-contained, the objective world is, nevertheless, shaped by the activities of social subjects. It is in this sense that Adorno is said to leave room for subjective agency. From this perspective, Leverkuhn's pact with the devil is a 'fate' that is visited on him by objective conditions that are for Adorno not a natural or divine determinism but the outcome of social practices by subjects. In splendid social isolation, Mann's artist overlooks the objective conditions embedded in the musical material, surrendering subjective agency to the absolutized object. In Adorno's dialectical history of music, Brahms was already driven to bring everything contingent, coincidental, accidental, and inessential under the synthesizing power of the whole. Although in his compositions '[sjubjectification and objectification are intertwined' (Adorno 1973, 56), this intermingling does not liberate subjective caprice but aims to restrain 'all coincidental moments of music' (Adorno 1973,57). Through this 'violent' synthesis,3 Brahms anticipates Schonberg's totally organized system in which there is 'no longer anything which is unthematic; nothing which cannot be

232 Postmodernity and Fascism

understood as the derivative of the thematic material, no matter how latent it may have become' (Adorno 1973, 57). Through the 'absolute integration' of all aspects of musical expression, the new twelve-tone totality closes down the degree of 'play' or 'give' still operative in the tonal tradition. Anticipating Jameson's analysis of postmodernism, Adorno suggests that Schonberg's rejection of hierarchy deconstructs the illusions of the democratic ideal of equality by introducing a radical egalitarianism whose totalizing homogeneity reduces all singularity to undifferentiated indifference. Schonberg's ideal of 'convergence' is in fact predicated on the 'idea of rational total organization of the total musical material,' a totalizing order marked by the fact that 'not only all... dimensions are developed to an equal degree, but further that all of them evolve out of one another to such an extent that they all converge' (Adorno 1973, 53). No longer organized around the key system, this convergence transforms the hierarchical depth model of modernity into the spatial surface model of postmodernity. Although Schonberg affirms the autonomy of the note, he isolates it from other notes in the same system and from all links to history; musical features now exist on the same plane but are no longer in touch with each other or with their own past. Violating the law of non-contradiction, Leverkiihn's twelve-tone system strikes Zeitblom as diabolically uncanny in that the notes are simultaneously predetermined by the totality and exposed to unpredictable chance events. Locating the problem in the antagonistic relations between parts under late capitalism, Leverkiihn makes the Hobbesian assumption that the solution lies in the subordination of warring parts to an overarching totality. Not surprisingly, Zeitblom is made extremely uneasy by the paradox of freedom from hierarchical domination being predicated on the strictly rational organization of the totalized system. In this situation, the atomistic elements (or social subjects) are so thoroughly integrated into the system that they only exist in 'their neutrality towards each other due to complete organization' (Mann 1968,186). The 'strict style' of twelve-tone music destroys the singularity of musical elements, reducing everything to the relentless and static return of the 'same basic material' (Mann 1968, 186). Formal variation, for instance, is both the condition of freedom and its undoing. Without a norm against which variation can be measured, the arrangement of notes proceeds haphazardly; once variation becomes all-pervasive, its creative potential is neutralized. Celebration of variation combines with fear of the unconscious recurrence of 'the same' and

Decentred Totalities 233

is translated into the self-conscious inscription of 'the same' on the surface of the musical material. Since atomistic elements are now determined by their function alone, the system is no longer responsive to their specific needs and accomplishments. The paternalistic form of older hierarchies is being replaced by a predetermined totality which is as indifferent to singular notes as these notes are to each other. Mann's Adorno-borrowed depiction of twelve-tone music already exhibits the postmodern anxiety that sites of resistance to the totalizing impact of global capitalism are difficult to locate. With amazing acuity, Adorno recognizes that subjective agency is curtailed not by the absolute decrees of a visible despotic power but by the virtually invisible operations of a system which is both total and fragmented. The paradox of serial music is that each note is exposed to an order that is both inescapable and unpredictable. Once the illusion of organic wholeness has been dispelled, the notes are so disconnected from each other that the formation of accords is now 'left to chance and accident' (Mann 1968,188). It is precisely because the totality binds all musical elements to itself that these are 'free' to converge in accidental, contingent, and unpredictable ways. This chaotic totality neutralizes all resistance by incorporating and appropriating all counter-hegemonic strategies. Where hierarchical forms of domination could not avoid generating opposition, the new indifferent totality eliminates even the most basic anarchistic impulses: There is no longer any anarchistic desire for union on the parts of sound, there is only the absence of any monadic relationship between them and a calculating domination over them all. It is at this point that coincidence truly results' (Adorno 1973, 85). Once all variation has become relegated to mere coincidence, it is no longer possible to speak meaningfully of transgression and resistance. Experiencing its convergence with other notes to be both inescapable and accidental, the serial note is as predetermined as Leverkuhn is a doomed Faust figure. Through the uncanny combination of total integration and unchecked dissemination, the twelve-tone row is said to abandon its elements to fate. The act of composition itself is now no longer experienced as the creative effort of the artistic genius; it is predetermined by the twelve-tone system. Adorno draws attention to this problem when he observes that, in the absence of a tonal centre, Variation is again relegated to the material, preforming it before the actual composition begins' (Adorno 1973, 61). Subjective agency has been forfeited, for, as Leverkuhn anticipates early in the novel, the composer no longer expresses his own vision but obeys the demands of

234 Postmodernity and Fascism

the socially imbued musical material: The whole disposition and organization of the material would have to be ready when the actual work should begin, and all one asks is: which is the actual work?' (Mann 1968,187). Instead of perpetuating the Romantic illusion that the artist creates freely out of himself, that his art retains what Benjamin calls its 'aura/ Leverkiihn foregrounds the 'truth' that art is inevitably a reproduction of a reproduction, a copy of a copy without origin. For Leverkiihn, this 'composing before composition' (Mann 1968,187) means that the act of creation 'would be transferred back to the material' (Mann 1968, 188). In his eagerness to 'free' music from artificially imposed conventions, the composer is prepared to return music to its material objectivity by sacrificing his own subjective agency. Mann stresses once again that it is fear of chaos which impels Leverkiihn to initiate the predetermined serial order. In an early scene, he confuses Zeitblom by connecting his ambitions with Kant's 'categorical imperative.' At first glance, it appears that his totalizing tendency is a mistaken attempt to revitalize a liberal notion of freedom. Although composers are constrained by conventions, argues Leverkiihn, they freely choose their subjection: 'Bound by a++++++++++++compulsion to or hence free' (Mann 1968, 188; my emphasis). Although Kant's critical ethics 'affords us no answer as to why order takes precedence over chaos' (Cassirer 1981, 246), the philosopher assumes that rational subjects will recognize the benefits of freely submitting to order. This perspective is too liberal for Leverkiihn; far from objecting to the imposition of an order to restrict freedom, he protests that this system leaves the combination of notes too much open to chance: 'But [the composer] could scarcely be called a free inventor of his harmony. Would not the making of chords be left to chance and accident?' (Mann 1968,188). The twelve-tone system is meant to save the note from accidental harmonic convergence. But while his predetermined system does indeed close down such 'play' in the system, the price for this achievement is the sacrifice of the act of creation. It may appear that the twelve-tone composer is at least 'free' to choose the predetermined system; however, even this choice is determined by the sociohistorical conditions embedded in the musical material. In the final analysis, the composer has no more control over the system than do the notes within it. What makes the composer's selfsacrifice particularly tragic is that the musical elements are paradoxically not only predetermined but subjected to blind fate and accidental coincidence; the novel plays on the double meaning of 'fate' as both inescapable and unpredictable. Leverkiihn's act of composition is thus caught

Decentred Totalities 235

between the strict rules imposed by a system external to him and by the accidental convergence of elements within it. The Twelve-Tone System and Postmodernism In his fascinated but horrified response to Leverkiihn's invention of the twelve-tone system's chaotic totality, Zeitblom uses a discourse that reads not only like Adorno's critique of Schonberg but also like Jameson's indictment of postmodernism. Ultimately at stake in the indifferent totality of the serial composition is the availability of meaning, the viability of subjective agency, and the survival of non-instrumental reason. Having replaced the closed work with an even more rational totalization of the musical material, the twelve-tone composition simply registers rather than resists meaninglessness, it privileges surface at the expense of depth, it eliminates rather than liberates the work of art as well as the human subject, and it generally creates conditions of paralysis and resignation. Marked by a series of ironic reversals or paradoxes, Leverkuhn's breakthrough imports into Mann's parable of fascism Adorno's Marxist critique of late capitalism. At the same time, Adorno's emphasis on the uncanny logic at work in Schonberg's twelvetone system connects capitalism to fascism, especially when he insists that extreme rationalization implies that reason has gone 'mad.' Paying attention to Adorno's sociohistorical critique of Schonberg, the reader of Doctor Faustus cannot help but realize how 'postmodern' the features of Leverkuhn's new organization of the musical material really are. The new music constitutes a deconstruction of bourgeois modernism that compels Leverkiihn to enter into the disorienting territory of postmodernism. Although the tonal key system had at one time been meaningful, its harmonic arrangements now strike Leverkiihn as empty, exhausted, and sterile. In his search for a new form of music, he confronts an issue that preoccupied Schonberg throughout his career and continues to plague postmodernists: The question which twelvetone music asks of the composer is not how musical meaning is to be organized, but rather, how organization is to become meaningful' (Adorno 1973, 67). For order to remain meaningful (sinnvoll), contends Adorno, the subject initiating it needs to retain a dynamic relationship with the material to be organized. The organized material should not confront the subject as an alien system which it can neither understand nor control. Adorno does not suggest a return to the principle of organic unity; on the one hand, this principle no longer corresponds to

236 Postmodernity and Fascism

the antagonistic conditions under late capitalism and, on the other, it constitutes a bourgeois mystification of the capitalist mode of production. Since the 'meaningful' as such takes on the significance of a locus of resistance to the reifying impact of commodification, the task of aesthetic form is to map a system that does not reproduce the alienating social relations under late capitalism. Yet, it is clear from Adorno's description of twelve-tone technique that Schonberg tragically failed to make organization meaningful. Without a norm against which variations can be measured, the arrangement of notes becomes as meaningless and disorienting as the postmodern territory theorized by Jameson. In twelve-tone music, where '[t]he individual events, however, - the concrete relationships - are sacrificed to [the] totality' (Adorno 1973, 85), elements converge and disperse without rhyme or reason. Like the postmodern subject in a consumer society, the notes themselves may be 'free' but have lost their meaning or 'depth' as well as their connections with each other. Instead of achieving objectivity in art, that is, a work of art capable of reproducing subjective experience as a social process, serial music creates only 'postmodern' surface effects: 'All New Objectivity secretly threatens to fall into the hands of that which it most bitterly opposes: the ornament' (Adorno 1973,70). In an ironic twist, Schonberg's subjective gesture of radical innovation paradoxically enacts the historical fate of the objectified musical material. What the composer has to hide from himself about music is that '[t]welve-tone technique is truly the fate of music. It enchains music by liberating it' (Adorno 1973, 67-8). Instead of empowering music by returning to it a profound order, SchonbergLeverkiihn kill art by emptying it of meaning. Confronted by a disorienting objective order, the atonal note, which has been emancipated from the domination of the tonal system, takes fright and seeks integration into the twelve-tone totality. Leverkiihn's search for subjective expression results in the elimination of subjective agency. Having escaped the blind domination of the tonal system, the subject is driven to deny 'its own spontaneity' and to seek 'protection and security' in a 'regulatory system' which Adorno calls 'a second blind nature' (Adorno 1973, 68). Although the musical material is the accumulation of acts performed by subjects, the twelve-tone system appears to be driven not by human intention but by 'fate' (Adorno 1973, 67). Creating a preformed system that denies subjective agency, Schonberg insinuates that the subject could not have acted otherwise. He thereby closes the door to the Utopian potential Adorno locates in aesthetics; the twelve-tone system reneges on the possibility of resist-

Decentred Totalities 237

ance and celebrates the complicity of music with its own objectification. On the one hand, twelve-tone technique signals the moment when the historical spirit6+++++which had allowed it to emerge, turned, 'in the end, to destroy catastrophically the technical work of art' (Adorno 1973, 69). On the other, the subject eliminates itself along with the destruction of art. The modern subject adopts rationalization in the mistaken belief that it needs to emancipate itself from an excessive subjectivism which Mann equates with pre-modern magic and superstition. But this decision is a self-destructive move: The subject dominates music through the rationality of the system, only in order to succumb to the rational system itself (Adorno 1973, 68). Since Adorno continues to believe in subjective agency, he can only hope that 'music ... emancipate^] itself from twelve-tone technique as well' (Adorno 1973, 115). But at the present time, Schonberg's technical mastery means that the musical material 'establishes] itself as alien to the subject and finally subdu[es it] by its own force' (Adorno 1973,68). Emancipatory aspiration ends in a totalized system characterized by the forces of 'fate' (Adorno 1973,67) and 'coincidence' (Adorno 1973, 81) the other side of which is deterministic necessity and 'domination' (Adorno 1973, 67). The subjective agent 'Schonberg' may have 'intended' to revitalize music by repeating Beethoven's earlier renewal of the musical tradition; however, he allows the socially imbued musical material to impose a rationalized system which can only confirm the impossibility of his liberatory gesture. In a tragic twist, the subject eliminates itself in the process of freeing itself from material constraints: The total rationality of music is its total organization. By means of organization, liberated music seeks to reconstitute the lost totality - the lost power and the responsibly binding force of Beethoven. Music succeeds in so doing only at the price of its freedom, and thereby it fails. Beethoven reproduced the meaning of tonality out of subjective freedom. The new ordering of twelve-tone technique virtually extinguishes the subject' (Adorno 1973, 69). Where Hegel supposed that human subjects could achieve freedom through the proper application of reason, Adorno agrees with Weber that instrumentalized reason risks creating an iron cage of necessity. In any meaningful sense, Adorno is indeed right to claim that in twelvetone music it is no longer possible to speak of a '"free" note' (Adorno 1973,62). The Hegelian privileging of reason in Western culture is for Adorno above all caricatured in the increasingly rationalized world of late capitalism. In a sense, through the application of reason, human beings

238 Postmodernity and Fascism

have been able to produce their own means of subsistence and have thereby freed themselves from the domination of nature. But, through the capitalist mode of production, subjective autonomy is both achieved and compromised; the human subject is 'free' to sell its labour power but only in an economy of exchange in which it is reduced to a mere function in the flow of capital. Adorno criticizes Schonberg because his system reflects the exacerbation of the division of labour under late capitalism which leaves individuals formally free but reduces them to interchangeable elements in the consumer economy. According to Adorno's critique of late capitalism, the market has established such a reifying control over social subjects that atomistic individuals feel alienated and exposed to the vagaries of accident and contingency. It hardly matters to the global economy who produces what commodity; it hardly matters who consumes what products and under what circumstances. The market is indifferent to all actual products just as it is indifferent to the contingencies faced by unique individuals. Speaking to 'the emancipated, isolated, concrete subject of the late bourgeois phase' (Adorno 1973,57), twelve-tone technique ensures the subject's integration into a decentred rather than a hierarchical totality. The subject's desire to free itself from domination is shown to have created the conditions for twelve-tone rational order. According to Adorno, it is the 'concrete subjectivity and the material which is radically and thoroughly formulated by it [which] furnishes Schoenberg with the canon of aesthetic objectivism' (Adorno 1973,57). The totalizing objectivity of twelve-tone technique is dialectically produced by the excessive subjectivity embedded in the musical material which reflects the isolation of the bourgeois subject from the social community. Confronted by alienating social conditions, the subject withdraws into itself but continues to yearn for a meaningful connection with a social group. Both fascism and global capitalism promise the subject self-fulfilment but deliver instead an overwhelming objectifying order. The twelve-tone system seems analogous to the 'world-historical activity' of 'separate individuals' who become 'more and more enslaved under a power alien to them,' a power Marx identifies with the 'world market' (Marx and Engels 1970, 55). And, following Bauman's logic, 'Auschwitz' can be understood as illustrating+++++++++++++++orm+++++++++++++ of rational and irrational processes that Marx associates with capitalism. It is in Adorno's treatment of reason that the connection between capitalism and fascism in++++++++++++++++egins to manifest itself triumph of reason results not only in Weber's increasingly adminis-

Decentred Totalities 239

tered bureaucratic state machinery but also in Bauman's rationalized death camps. The fascist intensification of the capitalist mode of production had always already been implicit in the project of modernity. If either counterpoint or Rousseau's organic community was to be achieved in pure or ideal form, the simultaneity of voices would have to be so strictly organized as to erase all 'deviant' subjective expression. The formulaic nature of twelve-tone technique exemplifies for Adorno the reduction of Rousseau's reason to mere 'law' (Adorno 1973, 66); it thereby reflects a mathematization of the world devoid of social meaning that also characterizes capitalism. Once rationalization denies reason its contemplative purpose, reason is reduced to merely instrumental effects. Meaning and truth are then restricted to what can be calculated, accumulated, and exchanged. However, as Horkheimer and Adorno argue most pointedly in Dialectic of Enlightenment, instrumental reason is itself a mystification in that it is unaware of the superstitious elements clinging to it. Not surprisingly, Adorno maintains that ideologically the twelve-tone row is self-deceptive in that it does not acknowledge the potentially dangerous irrational elements inhabiting it. When he claims that Schonberg's aesthetic theory constitutes a 'number game' which combines '[t]welve-tone rationality' with 'astrology' and 'superstition' in order to create 'a closed system - one which is opaque even unto itself (Adorno 1973, 66), he seems to be speaking primarily of capitalism. In the famous opening statement of The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof/ Marx tells us that '[a] commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties' (Marx 1978, 319). Being both 'easily understood' and 'mysterious/ the commodity is 'blind' to the interplay of reason and magic that characterizes the capitalist system. Elaborating on this 'mystical character of commodities/ he clarifies that 'the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour' (Marx 1978, 320), that is, the commodity conceals that it is the result of social labour and hence of social relations. It follows that '[t]here is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things' (Marx 1978, 321). Capitalism thus resembles the 'opaque system' of twelve-tone music; like the magic square in Doctor Faustus, capitalism and serial music conceal from themselves that they are unable to account for their magical effects through purely rational means.

240 Postmodernity and Fascism

Whether it manifests itself in a mode of production, a political system, or an aesthetic technique, instrumentalized reason is destructive in its own right and blind to its complicity with unreason. It is in the foregrounding of its contradictory logic that serial music provides us with insight into the complicity between capitalism and fascism. Where capitalism is predominantly accused of overrating rationalizing processes, fascism tends to be condemned for overrating irrational impulses. But+++++++++++stresses that late capitalism shares with fascis a propensity to stretch both rational and irrational tendencies, at one and the same time, to extremes. Reason is for Adorno a site of possible resistance to the effects of this uncanny logic. The totalizing power of late capitalism can be disrupted not only through subjective agency but also through non-instrumental reason. This investment in a reason not captured by commodity fetishism makes Adorno privilege the aesthetic sphere as a potential line of escape from the sociohistorical slide into the indifferent totality of the market. Extending Kant's insight into the aesthetic sublime, Adorno believes that 'aesthetic conduct is free of immediate desire' (Adorno 1984,15) and is therefore capable of assisting 'the non-identical in its struggle against the repressive identification compulsion that rules the outside world' (Adorno 1984, 6), that is, the world of rationalized commodity exchange. But Schonberg's new music exacerbates for Adorno the unreason of reason. Once the subject is subjected to 'the self-contained system of rules' and thus confronted by an 'alienated, hostile, and dominating power' (Adorno 1973,117), the very concept of reasonable action is put in doubt. In this situation it is no longer possible to differentiate between the rational and the irrational: [Thorough organization of material] degrades the subject, making of it a slave of the 'material/ as of an empty concept of rules, at that moment in which the subject completely subdues the material, indenturing it to its mathematical logic. At this point, however, contradiction once again reproduces itself in the static condition of music which has been achieved. The subject cannot be content with its subjugation to its abstract identity in the material. For in twelve-tone technique, the rationality of the material - as the objective rationality of events - asserts itself blindly over the will of the subjects, triumphing thereby as irrationality. (Adorno 1973, 117-18)

In a typical dialectical move, Adorno illustrates first of all that the

Decentred Totalities 241

triumph of instrumental reason is responsible for the loss of subjective agency. Equating reason with mathematization, subjects have been duped into thinking that the accumulation of goods satisfies not just their material needs but their social nature. They have forgotten that they are social beings with intellectual yearnings and ethical responsibilities that exceed the domain of instrumental reason. However, the success of total material domination eventually forces subjects to recognize their plight. The system will then strike the alienated subjects as unreasonable, and they will rebel against it. Adorno prefers Schonberg to Stravinsky because the 'truth-content' of his works has the potential to force us into an acknowledgment of conditions that ought to be changed. The shock of twelve-tone music forces us to understand that reason has gone mad. Schonberg's music upset audiences precisely by illustrating the psychopathology of postmodern life. In his later more radical compositions, his technique gave 'voice to derangement' (Schorske 1981,355) and to the articulation of 'conflicting drives' which, in Adorno's words, 'have assume+++ force ... which prohibits music from offering comforting consolation' (Adorno 1973,42). In full revolt against the administered world, Schonberg confronted bourgeois complacency by giving full expression to formerly repressed irrational impulses like 'hatred and desire, jealousy and forgiveness' (Adorno 1973,42). By defeating subjective agency, the rational system cannot help but draw attention to its own irrationality. Ironically, of course, Schonberg's revolt against rationalization is open to exploitation by the Nazi regime; it is in Hitler's volkish rhetoric and in the death camps that the irrational is celebrated. The only hope for Adorno lies in the possibility that the psychopathological impact of twelve-tone music foregrounds the extremity of the suffering subject, thereby encouraging us to change our conditions of existence. Although the unreason of reason plunges Germany into the nightmare of fascism, suffering remains a faint line of escape or Utopian hope. The Lament of Doctor Faustus It is in the final scenes of Doctor Faustus, in the performance of 'The Lament of Doctor Faustus' and in Leverkiihn's 'confession/ that the destructive impact of the decentred twelve-tone totality is most dramatically staged. Since Zeitblom is as horrified by the parallels between his friend's aesthetic breakthrough and his country's Gb'tterdammerung as he is by each event on its own, readers have little difficulty under-

242 Postmodernity and Fascism

standing the novel's ending as a political allegory. The twelve-tone masterpiece is the recapitulation and convergence of all the volkish and 'postmodern' tropes that Zeitblom had hesitantly announced and tentatively assessed throughout his biography. The description of 'The Lament of Doctor Faustus' suggests, in terms reminiscent of Dialectic of Enlightenment, the coincidence of the mythic register of the Faust theme and Adorno's ideological analysis of the sociohistorical truth-content implicit in new music. Acting out the script that had been written for him in the Faust 'chap-book/ Leverkuhn chooses for his 'general theme of the variations' the self-interpretive lyric '[f]or I die as a good and a bad Christian' (Mann 1968,467), a paradoxical statement whose twelve syllables are matched up with the twelve tones of the chromatic scale. Although this composition continues to reverberate with Adorno's critique of capitalism, the dramatic emphasis is on the impact of the indifferent totality on the suffering subject associated with fascist terror. 'Auschwitz' represents the 'taking back' of the Hegelian narrative of the subject's self-actualization through harmony with objective conditions. 'Auschwitz' is not so much the negation as the paradoxical affirmation of modernity's self-understanding. The dream of Hegelian idealism, to achieve the 'identity of the most varied forms' (Mann 1968,468), has fatally and catastrophically come true in Leverkiihn's 'formal treatment strict to the last degree, which no longer knows anything unthematic, in which the order of the basic material becomes total, and within which the idea of a fugue rather declines into an absurdity, just because there is no longer any free note' (Mann 1968, 468). The manifold is obliterated by the totality rather than sublated into a unity based on a common identity and purpose. The twelve-tone system is both the deconstruction and the completion of the project of modernity of which the Hegelian Beethoven is the most adequate expression. On the one hand, Leverkuhn demystifies Hegel's 'identity of opposites/ the assumption that singularity would naturally and harmoniously coincide with plurality, by uncovering the violence implicit in this synthesis. On the other, though, he not only fails but actually exacerbates Hegel's totalizing tendencies. Instead of liberating and organizing the constituent parts of the hierarchically 'closed' bourgeois work, his rigorous totality threatens to absorb and subject all elements to a predetermined order. The twelve-tone system constitutes a revolution that eliminates what it set out to preserve, and it does so by radicalizing the project of modernity. Although it is unclear to what extent Leverkuhn is aware of

Decentred Totalities 243

what he is doing, the novel consistently stresses that good intentions ironically have unintended catastrophic consequences. Modelled on Adorno's prescient 'postmodern' critique of Schonberg's serial innovation, Zeitblom's analysis of The Lament of Doctor Faustus' reverberates with observations which ought to alert us to our own blindness to certain sinister ideological possibilities implicit in our own deconstructions of modernity. Although Leverkiihn's aesthetic breakthrough achieves the authentic expression he sought, it does so in a most devastatingly ironic fashion. In the process of emancipating music from sterile conventions, the twelve-tone masterpiece falls victim to its own totalizing logic. Obeying Adorno's negative dialectical logic, the predetermined 'totalized' twelve-tone system liberates 'music ... as language/ allowing the composer to let go of his paralysing intellectual control and give 'expression' (Mann 1968, 468) free rein. In this last composition, subjective affect in fact returns with a vengeance, for '[t]he creator of+"Fausti Weheklage" can, in the previously organized material, unhampered, untroubled by the already given structure, yield himself to subjectivity; and so this, his technically most rigid work, a work of extreme calculation, is at the same time purely expressive' (Mann 1968, 468). It seems that this 'break-through' (Mann 1968, 466) secures the liberation of the subject from its objectification; as Zeitblom realizes, his friend is successful in reversing his 'calculated coldness' and converting it 'into a voice expressive of the soul and a warmth and sincerity of creature confidence' (Mann 1968, 466). However, having isolated himself from society, Leverkiihn has blinded himself to the material conditions that now overwhelm and destroy his 'art-for-art's sake' achievement. Under the historical conditions of late capitalism and fascism, the only expression left to the totally administered subject is the registration of suffering and destruction. Utmost calculation and rationalization result in the reconstruction 'of expressiveness in its first and original manifestation, expressiveness as lament' (Mann 1968, 468). Although he transcends the limitations imposed on him by his rational coldness, the authentic expression he generates has shrunk to the inarticulate shriek of the suffering creature. The ideological implications of this elemental 'howling' are most pointedly brought home in Schorske's comment on Schonberg's Erwartung: 'All cohesive thematic remnants are expunged from the music: here freedom is to madness close allied. The antistructural potential of a democracy of tonal atoms is horrifyingly employed, reinforced by rhythm and orchestral color' (Schorske 1981,

244 Postmodernity and Fascism

354). It is, of course, in the death camps that the full extent of this reason gone mad and the suffering of the subject is exemplified. When Mann connects Schonberg's portrayal of 'inner disintegration' (Schorske 1981,354) to the outer disintegration of Germany, he suggests that the 'madness' of German National Socialism is in fact 'close allied' to the 'unreason' of commodity fetishism in late capitalism. Doctor Faustus conveys the pessimistic realization that the highly self-conscious subject does not advance toward Hegel's moment of Reason but is tragically reduced to expressing only its own and the world's unbearable suffering. The truth-content of twelve-tone technique is its negation of German idealism; 'The Lament of Doctor Faustus' takes back Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the 'Ode to Joy.' In a world in which the subject is at best reified and at worst put to death, Hegel's teleological dialectic has once and for all lost its currency. Leverkiihn's 'lament' is of 'such gigantic dimensions' (Mann 1968, 466) that it imposes a finality on the process of dialectical reversals from which there is little hope of escape. The dynamic revitalization of music ends in the most paralysing reiteration of despair and suffering. The effect of Leverkuhn's Variation of an ever constant element,' of a 'whole structure' so totalized that 'there is no longer anything unthematic' (Mann 1968, 466-7), is described, in terms that anticipate Jameson's postmodernism, as Very certainly non-dynamic, lacking in development, without drama, in the same way that concentric rings made by a stone thrown into water spread ever farther, without drama and always the same' (Mann 1968, 467). In a reference to the death of Leverkuhn's nephew, the metaphor for this effect is the echo. To signify the failure of the 'emancipatory epoch,' Zeitblom shows it to have been subject to an 'echo-like continuation' which suggests that 'every transformation is itself already the echo of the previous one' (Mann 1968, 468). In a composition so thoroughly marked by such echo-effects, it is no longer possible to distinguish progress from regress; Leverkiihn thus makes good Breisacher's revolutionary-conservative blueprint for the future. Although the truthcontent of twelve-tone technique foregrounds that the subject suffers from its exposure to the most paralysing objectification, this aesthetic breakthrough offers no sites of resistance to the material conditions it so adequately reproduces. Stressing that Leverkuhn's quotations, his references to the past, are nothing more than a 'mechanical imitation' (Mann 1968, 469), Mann suggests that with twelve-tone music we have entered into the postmodern hyperspace of static and ahistorical simulation.

Decentred Totalities 245 'Hope beyond Hope' The description of Leverkiihn's last composition, The Lament of Doctor Faustus/ is followed by Zeitblom's final attempt to put a more optimistic spin on this dark work. The humanist in Mann could not prevent himself from undermining the pessimistic logic of his narrative with a theologically inspired Utopian extension of the dialectical process. Pulling back from the bleak implications Mann has borrowed from Adorno's cultural pessimism, Mann has Zeitblom interpret the high G of a cello as a hopeful reverberation beyond 'silence, and night' (Mann 1968, 471). This high G is an opening beyond the pages of the novel, an opening implying that good will yet emerge out of evil. Zeitblom wants to save art, his friend, and his country from the destruction he has witnessed. Contradicting the finality of the dialectical reversal in 'The Lament of Doctor Faustus,' he hints: 'But that tone which vibrates in the silence, which is no longer there, to which only the spirit hearkens, and which was the voice of mourning, is so no more. It changes its meaning; it abides as a light in the night' (Mann 1968, 471). This 'light in the night' is analogous to the 'contrition without hope' which Zeitblom invokes to save his friend from the damnation to which his pact with the devil has doomed him. In this paradoxical scenario, Leverkiihn's Faustian arrogance is both his downfall and perhaps his salvation. In a reversal of the 'temptation idea,' Leverkiihn is a Faust figure who 'rejects as temptation the thought of being saved: not only out of formal loyalty to the pact and because it is "too late," but because with his whole soul he despises the positivism of the world for which one would save him, the lie of its godliness' (Mann 1968, 470). Although 'this dark tone-poem permits up to the very end no consolation' (Mann 1968, 471), Zeitblom asks if it might be possible that the aesthetic paradox, the emergence of expressivity out of calculation, finds a parallel in the religious paradox 'that out of the sheerly irremediable hope might germinate? It would be but a hope beyond hopelessness, the transcendence of despair - not betrayal to her, but the miracle that passes belief (Mann 1968, 471). This faint optimism is, of course, the impetus for a tendency in Mann criticism to affirm a turn to social democracy as Germany's redemption from the fascist 'hiccup' in its history. Not surprisingly, as Mann tells us in Story of a Novel, Adorno objected to an earlier, even more optimistic, version of the novel's ending. Adorno 'took issue with the end, the last forty lines, in which, after all the

246 Postmodernity and Fascism

darkness, a ray of hope, the possibility of grace, appears. Those lines did not then stand as they stand now; they had gone wrong. I had been too optimistic, too kindly, too pat, had kindled too much light, had been too lavish with the consolation' (Mann 1961, 222-3). A few weeks later, Mann read the revised conclusion to Adorno, asking him 'if it now pleased him' (Mann 1949,195; my trans.). Adorno avoided answering directly; in response to Mann's question, he called on his wife to listen to the new version. Mann interpreted this gesture as an endorsement: 'So I read the two pages again, looked up - and did not need to question any further' (Mann 1949, 195; my trans.). Adorno's narration of the same incident confirms Mann's impression while also hinting at a continuing disagreement. In 'Toward a Portrait of Thomas Mann,' he accuses himself of having 'rebelled, no doubt in a somewhat excessive fashion' (Adorno 1992b, 17) against the first version of the conclusion. It emerges that Adorno had convinced Mann to let Leverkiihn finish his Faust oratorio before going insane. The original plan had been to leave it as a fragment. What incited Adorno's excessive reaction was his recognition that the optimistic ending contradicted the logic of the novel: 'I found the heavily laden pages too positive, too unbrokenly theological in relation to the structure not only of the+Lamentation of Dr Faustus+but of the novel as a whole. They seemed to lack what th crucial passage required, the power of determinate negation as the only permissible figure of the Other' (Adorno 1992b, 17-18). Mann's 'somewhat saddened' reaction to this criticism made Adorno feel 'remorseful' (Adorno 1992b, 18). The reading of the new conclusion, which Mann read in a 'clearly excited' state, elicits from Adorno the comment that he and his wife 'could not hide how moved we were, and I think that made him happy' (Adorno 1992b, 18). This disclosure makes it obvious that Adorno was indeed well disposed toward Mann and considered the revision to be a significant improvement. However, his failure to comment on the particular aspects of the revision suggests that he could not in all honesty express enthusiasm for the theoretical implications. Adorno's objection to Mann's theological solution reinforces what I consider to be Harvey Goldman's correct contention that Mann rejected art as a line of escape and took refuge in religion (Goldman 1992). No matter how conciliatory Adorno wants to be, he can remain silent neither about his uneasiness with this escape into religion nor about Mann's retreat from the full implications of the 'determinate negation' which had dominated his depiction of twelve-tone technique. Although commentators have pointed out that it is Zeitblom, rather

Decentred Totalities 2++47

than Mann, who wants to save both the friend and the country from perdition, the meaning of this yearning for a faintly positive resolution remains problematical. It seems that the humanist in Mann could not face the very negativity which his character so paradoxically affirmed by rejecting the positivity of the world. For Adorno, the finality of suffering and destruction that constitutes the truth-content of twelve-tone music could not be broken in Mann's humanistic-theological terms. Although justifiably accused of expressing a devastatingly unredeemable cultural pessimism, Adorno does provide a line of escape for the subject from the indifferent totality. Since the material conditions are for him the result of activities by social agents, the subject remains a site of resistance capable of mitigating and even reversing the objectifying totality. The 'hope beyond hope' in Adorno's terms would have to be argued dialectically. Leverkiihn's lament could be seen as both the culmination and the transcendence of the paradoxical system he had created; his outcry is then an inarticulate reaction against the Frankenstein monster of a system operating on the mutually reinforcing opposition of predetermined totality and random chaos which he had sought to exploit for the glorious emancipation of music. Since the totality depends on an economy of the unlimited exchange of atomistic notes (or alienated subjects), the system cannot entirely expel its subjective other. Considered dialectically, the subject constitutes a possible locus of resistance simply because its suffering will become so acute as to compel it to analyse and perhaps counteract the indifferent totality. Schonberg is thus praised for initiating the necessary analytical ground for change but is indicted for reinforcing a paralysis resistant to such change. Limits of Postmodern Tlay' and Decentring Adorno's critique of Schonberg's atonal breakthrough undermines not only the redemption of Auschwitz through a return of the prodigal son into the humanist fold of social democracy but also postmodern celebrations of Derridean freeplay. If Leverkuhn's decentring of the hierarchically oppressive tonal system is acknowledged as an emancipatory intention, then his confidence in atonal play is misplaced in that he does not take into account the constraints that the material conditions impose on the musical material. Instead of actualizing the negative freedom implicit in Nietzsche's critique of modernity, the twelve-tone system anticipates a more deterministic understanding of Derrida's

248 Postmodernity and Fascism

affirmation of Nietzschean freeplay in 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences/ Early celebrations of freeplay in postmodern discourses have more recently been displaced by more sober considerations of the trope's ideological implications. In typical deconstructive fashion, Derrida himself authorizes both readings of the term. Although the celebratory evocation of freeplay in the essay gives some fodder to optimistic counter-hegemonic discourse theories, Derrida's pun on the word jeu (freeplay) suggests a more modest 'agenda.' Commentators now make much of a secondary meaning of jeu to stress Derrida's preoccupation with the necessities and limits constraining all discursive practices. Referring to a secondary dictionary meaning of jeu as '"a space in which something, as a part of mechanism, can move/" John McGowan points out that the 'play possible for a part in a machine takes place within a strictly defined space; when there is "too much play" in a part, it disrupts the machine' (McGowan 1991,104). Derrida's strategy is thus to locate the 'give' or 'slack' in a system so as to exploit it as a locus of resistance in the seemingly all-determining totality. His tireless reminders that freeplay cannot escape metaphysical presence indicate that he fears the growing dominance of the 'distopic totality' (McGowan 1991,16) which Foucault associates with the disciplinary power suffusing our increasingly administered and rationalized world. Far from claiming that 'meaning is inexhaustible,' Derrida in fact argues that 'any specification of meaning can only function as a self-defeating attempt to stabilize and restrain what he terms the "dissemination" of the text' (Dews 1987,13). Or, as Christopher Norris insists, 'Derrida is at pains to disavow any notion that difference, as a concept and a fact of experience, can be somehow transformed through the Utopian "freeplay" of a writing that blithely rejects such irksome constraints' (Norris 1993, 28). Working at and against the limits of discourses, Derrida's interventions are an attempt to shake loose the encrusted layers of the Western philosophical tradition in order to subvert the grounds on which dominant discourses continue to base their ideological claims to legitimacy. The tactics of belabouring aporias, contradictions, paradoxes, and marginalized sites are those of the guerilla fighter rather than those of the imperialist. Although it is highly unlikely that the system will grind to a halt, deconstructive interference ought to help us displace and reconfigure the discursive tapestry. However, as Derrida's own career has amply demonstrated, the system is both powerful and flexible enough to recuperate, absorb, and

Decentred Totalities 249

appropriate moments of resistance. The most damaging recent criticism of deconstruction contends that it remains complicit with the system it seeks to subvert. Gerald Graff, for instance, contends that Derridean freeplay reinforces consumer capitalism in that the heterogeneity it privileges is precisely what characterizes a society addicted to indiscriminate consumption (Graff 1979). The most sustained criticism of Derrida is undoubtedly the charge that notions like freeplay or differance are so decontextualized and ahistorical that they have no political efficacy. Instead of disrupting the totalizing social order, deconstruction is fatalistically resigned to the tragic insight that mastery and violence ultimately defeat the play of difference. Echoing Adorno's critique of Schonberg, it could be said that Derrida's tragic narrative foregrounds that the Utopian hopes attaching to the emancipatory potential of difference are consistently recaptured and transformed into the stagnation of indifference. As McGowan puts it, 'freedom is envisioned as a disengagement from the system's law, and Derrida masterfully demonstrates how such moves are continually brought back into the fold' (McGowan 1991, 120). Most damagingly, perhaps, Derrida follows Schonberg in that he erases the subject by making it, in a by now infamous statement in Positions, a mere effect of difference: 'There is no subject who is agent, author, and master of++++++++who eventually and empirically woul be overtaken by differance. Subjectivity - like objectivity - is an effect of differance, an effect inscribed in a system of differance' (Derrida 1981,28). For McGowan, then, Derrida's highlighting of play is an attempt to 'reach outside the system' which is 'to move toward mysticism' (McGowan 1991,120). Reflecting Mann's dramatization of Leverkiihn's aesthetic breakthrough, play is indeed the sphere of paradox and of the uncanny. Given its mystical tendency, it is singularly unclear how play can 'escape the necessity of violence' (McGowan 1991,110), especially since Derrida stipulates that violence is an ineradicable 'arche-writing.' It seems that the heroic struggle of deconstruction to reconfigure the totality is tragically doomed to fail. What turns Derrida's supposedly emancipatory project into 'a kind of fated, unprogressive pas de deux' is his 'strong tendency to assert the (tragic) inevitability of thought's eternal repetition of an oscillation between dialectics and their dissolution, identity and differance' (McGowan 1991, 110). In addition to the charge of being apolitical, Derrida is here accused of being resigned to a tragic inevitability which offers 'few concrete reasons for hope' (McGowan 1991,110), for a political program capable of transforming the social order. McGowan's critique seems to me sensitive to the

250 Postmodernity and Fascism

radical potential of Derrida's deconstruction of metaphysics in much the same way as Adorno appreciates the revolutionary aspects of Schonberg's aesthetic innovation. At the same time, he suspects Derrida of complicity with the socioeconomic and institutional Violence' and 'oppression' he targets in much the same way as Adorno points to Schonberg's tendency to reinforce the reifying conditions of late capitalism. In conformity with McGowan's critique of Derridean deconstruction, it could be said that Doctor Faustus incorporates Adorno's tragic narrative in which the play of difference is defeated by violence and mastery so that lines of escape are inevitably recaptured. Most crucially at issue for both Adorno and Mann is the survival not only of art as a locus of non-identitary reason but also of the autonomous subject; in an attempt to free music from its tonal constraints, Leverktihn's twelve-tone system not only installs an indifferent totality but eliminates both art and the subject. Entering into the uncharted territory of the postmodern, Leverkiihn is condemned either to recreate the echo-effects of parody (Jameson's pastiche) or to register paradoxical processes so uncanny that they drive him mad. What critiques of deconstruction overlook is that German fascism has already provided us with a concrete historical example of the violent potential lurking in the postmodern decentring of hierarchically centred systems. The Nazi Administrative Apparatus: Indifferent Totality and Atomistic Fragment The aesthetic breakthrough of twelve-tone technique dramatized in Doctor Faustus+captures the decentred totality of Hitler's radical recon figuration of Germany's administrative apparatus and its effects on the public space, especially as it manifested itself in the death camps. The uncanny logic foregrounded in Mann's Adorno-influenced music theory draws attention to the Nazi program of social engineering, which was, for Bauman, driven by modernity's desire for 'the perfect society' (Bauman 1991, 67), a desire expressed by the metaphor of 'gardening.' Unfortunately, as Bauman illustrates, modernity's investment in social planning found its most horrific implementation in the death camps, which functioned as laboratories for the social engineering the Nazis sought to impose on the whole of German society. I want to argue that Doctor Faustus alerts us to the targeting of hierarchy through the Nazi strategy of Gleichschaltung and to the uncanny logic of totalization and fragmentation characteristic of Hitler's experiments in social engineering.

Decentred Totalities 251

The historical record indicates that the success of Hitler's radical revolution ought not to be attributed solely to his rhetorical powers of persuasion but more importantly to his rapid transformation of Germany's administrative apparatus from a hierarchically organized structure to a decentred totality. The Nazi strategy which best exemplifies this decentring is the practice of+++++++++++++a purging of politic social, economic, and cultural institutions which was accompanied by duplication and mimicry, by rationally organized disorder, and by the disorienting simultaneity of totalization and fragmentation. Contrary to received opinion, I want to show that Hitler's radically new totalitarian order was marked by strategies designed to create an economy of unlimited exchange and reproducibility, a decentred totality in which differences have been reduced to indifference, and a meaningless and disorienting surface territory in which the real can no longer be distinguished from its simulacrum. Gleichschaltung foregrounds features that Adorno subjects to critical scrutiny in Philosophy of Modern Music and that Jameson identifies with ideologically suspect 'postmodern' tropes. Although the violent effects of the purges made possible by+Gleic schaltung+are immediately visible, the actual workings of this 'innova tive' Nazi technique are more difficult to locate. The highly visible destruction of opponents through 'legal' purges was in the first place set in motion to eliminate political opponents, to neutralize the legal and administrative institutions of the Weimar Republic, and even to terrorize and control Nazi party members and functionaries. As Craig explains, '[t]he elaboration of the new dictatorial regime was preceded by the elimination of those institutions and structures of the Weimar system that no longer served a useful purpose in a National Socialist state and the disciplining and co-ordinating of those that were indispensable. The term used to describe this process was Gleichschaltung literally, "putting into the same gear" - a word so cryptic and impersonal that it conveys no sense of the injustice, the terror, and the bloodshed that it embraced' (Craig 1978,578). The terror this word concealed has over time come to dominate our understanding of the Holocaust; the writings of victims and the images of official and unofficial photographs and films testify to the inhumane effects of a process that presented itself as the rational transformation of bureaucracies. I would add that Craig's translation of++++++++++++as a 'putting into the same gear' does not entirely capture the sense of a process which abolished differences by making everything alike, which eliminated hierarchical distinctions by reducing everything to the same level, and

252 Postmodernity and Fascism

which privileged a radical egalitarianism destructive of democratic civil rights. What is so radically 'new' in Hitler's recourse to Gleichschaltung is that the Nazis were able to exercise social control by applying direct force through terror while also employing indirect domination through the total administration of public life. It was modernity's investment in rationalization and efficiency that not only abetted but actually reinforced the spectacular violence of the purges. Gleichschaltung targeted a public space organized according to the organic principle of tonal music: each part received its meaning by being connected to every other part and to the organic whole. In a hierarchically stratified system, the individual citizen was constrained by rules whose primary intent was the maintenance of the system. The system knew how to perpetuate itself by granting certain freedoms and rights to citizens, both in the privacy of the home and in the public space. Although rules were sometimes intentionally and often unintentionally installed as oppressive and exclusionary constraints, hierarchical systems prided themselves on clarifying how citizens can maximize their well-being. Translated into Adorno's theory of music, the 'note' in the tonal composition was undoubtedly dominated by the key system but was still relatively 'free' to converge with other notes to form new variations. Closing down such 'freeplay/ the Nazis instituted a mechanism of power whose main aim was the total control of every aspect of the private and public space. Where democracies supposedly foreground the mechanisms of power but tend to camouflage their effects, the Nazis emphasized the effects of power but shrouded its mechanisms in secrecy. Although citizens in a democracy may not realize just how bound by rules and regulations they are, they do at least more or less understand how to either uphold or break them. In contrast, Gleichschaltung disorients by duplicating offices and functions which, while seemingly retaining familiar structures, are merely mimicking them while in actual fact displacing and reversing their earlier aims and purposes. As we have seen earlier, the Gestapo, for instance, institutionalized itself as a law enforcement agency paralleling the police. Under the guise of offering 'protective custody/ this simulated police force carried out pogroms and illegal seizures without encountering much resistance. Through this duplication of offices, Hitler was able to take charge of 'the coercive machinery of the Prussian state' (Jarman 1968, 149) by either eliminating, marginalizing, or reconfiguring the liberal state apparatus. Confounding distinctions between what was real and what was fake, the Nazis created the kind of confusion that

Decentred Totalities 253

made resistance difficult. The ingenious creation of parallel offices and functions served to assure citizens that the Nazis respected the constraints of existing institutions at the same time as this strategy introduced a contradictory degree of control and disorientation never before imagined. The process of Gleichschaltung left the old public service or military organization intact but deprived its functionaries of their previous influence. Surreptitiously the Nazis recreated the old system in a new National Socialist key: the whole administrative apparatus was duplicated with Nazi functionaries no longer committed to the values that had instituted it. In a typical move, the Gestapo gradually took over all the functions previously performed by the police without for all that removing the police as an administrative unit. The 'real' police force was in effect reduced to a mere symbol while real power had shifted to the SS, this 'simulated' Nazi arm of law enforcement. Hitler repeated this process of duplicate ministries directly under his control throughout the state apparatus. The old hierarchical organization was neutralized and, for all practical purposes, replaced by Party functionaries who took their orders from the Nazi elite. In what seems to be a counter-intuitive move, Hitler purposely refrained from+ harm nizing relations between sites and levels of administrative power. Even the state as a whole had been reduced to 'nothing but an administrative machine' (Rauschning 1939, 27), while executive power was firmly in the hands of the Nazi party: 'Instead of party and state being bound together in a harmonious union directed by the will of the Fiihrer, relations between the two were characterized by mutual suspicion, competition, and duplication of function' (Craig 1978, 591). This widespread Gleichschaltung of the public space created isolated functionaries living in a constant state of insecurity, in possession of partial information, in fear of losing their position or status to a rival ministry. The 'hallmark of [Hitler's] administrative practice' was indeed the offsetting of 'every grant of authority with a counter-grant to someone else' (Craig 1978, 596). However, far from being simply a flaw in Hitler's approach to power as Craig suggests (see Craig 1978,592), the apparent inefficiencies of the system were in reality calculated to destroy not only the Weimar Republic but the principle of hierarchical organization as such. That this was a calculated strategy rather than an accidental byproduct of Nazi incompetence is drawn out by Arendt: 'All levels of the administrative machine in the Third Reich were subject to a curious duplication of offices. With a fantastic thoroughness, the Nazis made sure that every function of the state administration would be dupli-

254 Postmodernity and Fascism

cated by some party organ' (Arendt 1973, 396). The aim of this process of duplication is not efficiency but disorientation; law-abiding citizens find themselves in the position of Kafka's anxious and frustrated Joseph K, whose endless search for the processes of law and levels of power pitches him against an incomprehensible and indifferent totality. Hitler's totalitarianism is popularly assumed to be a highly centralized organization; Jarman, for instance, rather typically claims that 'German administration reached a degree of centralization previously unknown' (Jarman 1956, 155). But this assumption overlooks that Hitlerism owes its effectiveness less to the direct control of the Nazi elite than to the paralysing impact of disorientation on bodies subjected to mechanisms of simulation and surveillance. Although all the elements of Hitler's Germany were centrally controlled, they also existed in atomistic isolation from each other; the totalizing process of integration was at the same time a process of fragmentation. At first glance it may appear that the power of the SS, for instance, is predicated on its centralized structure; accountable only to Hitler, the SS became an 'unconditionally obedient++++in the hands of the Fiihrer' (Nolte 1968 193), who used it to dominate 'the whole life of the nation' (Rausching 1939, 37). But, in an effort to keep tight control over the SS, Hitler distributed its power among autonomous rival subdivisions (Allgemeine SS, Verfiigungstruppe, Totenkopfverbande, Sicherheitsdienst, Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt). Centralization went hand in hand with multiplication; the more extreme the totalizing drive became, the more extreme the process of fragmentation had to be. Gleichschaltung introduced a logic that may appear to be counterintuitive; instead of maximizing its efficiency through cohesion, the Nazi machinery seemed to thrive on disintegration, disconnection, and disruption. Although the SS remained a remarkably efficient instrument of oppression, other gleichgeschaltete spheres of public life were distinctly hampered by a lack of coordination between ministries and by the interference of officious Nazis. Rauschning's detailed account of Gleichschaltung+shows that 'a machinery of absolute and universal do minion is being erected in an entirely disorganized State' (Rausching 1939, 26). The total integration of atomistic elements depended on and coexisted with 'an increasingly anarchic jungle of agencies whose conflicts the Reich Chancellery confessed that it was unable to resolve' (Craig 1978, 597). The fragmentation of the administrative apparatus was paradoxically the condition of Nazi domination. The multiplication of offices and layers of authority made orientation difficult at the

Decentred Totalities 255

same time as it necessitated the introduction of new controls to 'control the controllers' (Arendt 1973, 369)+++++++++++++created condition calling for increasingly totalizing measures while also generating a fluid and fragmented system which, using the strategy of divide and rule, operated according to unpredictable and arbitrary decisions by disconnected functionaries. As Rauschning specifies, proliferating offices and organizations 'are not new self-governing bodies, not organs and links in the State or the social order: they are political machines, machines for control, for propaganda, for supervision, for terrorist dominance' (Rauschning 1939, 37-8). Hitler was not interested in making order meaningful; on the contrary, he was intent on eliminating meaning from the machine he set in motion. Before exploring the theoretical significance of this uncanny complicity between totalization and fragmentation, we need to recognize just how crucial to Hitler's radical revolution this process of Gleichschaltung was. In the first instance, this strategy allowed Hitler to break down the old system:++++++++++++meant in its first stage the purging of the Civil Service, the abolition of the Weimar party system, the dissolution of the state governments and parliaments and of the old Federal Council (Reichsrat), and the co-optation of the trade union movement. Before it had run its course, it had led to a disciplinary blood-letting within the National Socialist party itself, an event which, by compromising the army leadership, marked the beginning of the Gleichschaltung of the armed forces that was to be completed in February 1938' (Craig 1978, 578). Legitimized by the Enabling Act, Hitler resorted to Gleichschaltung in order to purge all political, social, economic, and cultural institutions of real and perceived opposition to the Nazis. By July 1933, the NSDAP had legally established itself as the only party in Germany, demoting the Reichstag to a mere instrument in the Fiihrer's hands. Rival parties were either forced to cooperate (the Catholics) or silenced (Democrats, Socialists, Communists), and, in the case of the SPD, had their property confiscated. Purges further neutralized state and local governments while trade unions were infiltrated by SA and SS members until they were 'swallowed up in a gigantic Labour Front (DAF)' (Craig 1978,583) whose the main purpose was to keep the movement atomized. Some areas of German life, like heavy industry and agriculture, were so accommodating to the Nazis that they virtually escaped Gleichschaltung. Moreover, contrary to volkish ideals, Hitler financed his military ambitions by relying on 'the effective use of the capitalist structure/ having 'not the slightest intention of indulging those who had romantic no-

256 Postmodernity and Fascism

tions of breaking up the great aggregates of economic strength so that the country might return to the simpler past' (Craig 1978, 603). Big business and industry were in fact encouraged to create monopolies which rationalized production and labour.4 In short, Hitler instituted a 'command economy,' a totally rationalized system whose sole aim was to supply the armed forces.5 And, although by 'the beginning of 1934 the foundations of the totalitarian state had been well and truly laid' (Craig 1978, 585), Hitler still needed to strengthen his control over the armed forces and his own party. In a brilliant move, in an incident known as the 'Night of the Long Knives,' he ordered the murder of the leader of the SA, Ernst Roehm, and of other SA officers so as to achieve both the appeasement of the military establishment by getting rid of one of its key rivals and the elimination of a dissident voice in his own ranks.6 Attuned to the ideological importance of cultural institutions, Hitler was particularly careful to bring artists and intellectuals in line with his ambitions. Although some artists and intellectuals were flattered into co-option, most of them were silenced and had their work censored. The book burnings are only the most visible symbol of 'the war against all modern tendencies in art' (Craig 1978, 646), a 'war' which also purged the Prussian Academy of Arts of 'un-German' elements. The cultural purges were not limited to the contemporary scene; the German canon was examined for expressions deemed hostile to the aesthetic doctrine of National Socialism. Not only were theatre productions and musical performances carefully vetted, but the universities were purged of Jews and other so-called enemies. According to Craig, the celebrated Max Planck Institute lost virtually all of its faculty. Resistance to these purges was difficult since the press, too, was censored; many liberal newspapers were either shut down or appropriated for Nazi propaganda. To see the process of the purges in action, we need only recall the fate of the Jews in Nazi Germany. Jews and Communists were as early as 1933 the main victims of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, whose aim was 'to eliminate tenure and other legal safeguards' (Craig 1978,579). Unlike the Communists, the Jews represented no actual threat to the National Socialists. They were singled out partly because of Hitler's well-documented anti-Semitism and partly because the myth of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy provided a popular and convenient 'enemy' against whom to unite racially 'pure' Germans. Marked by the Star of David, Jews were literally turned into a visible sign testifying to the spectacular power of the totality to which every-

Decentred Totalities 257

one was ultimately exposed. Demonstrating that their power was both absolute and arbitrary, the Nazis proceeded to persecute German Jews in incremental steps, depriving them initially of civil liberties and finally of their lives. The pogroms of Kristallnacht (10 November 1938) tapped into a long tradition of anti-Semitism which had become increasingly virulent during the Wilhelmine period. Before forcing Jews into exile and then sending them to the gas chambers, Hitler had 'deprived them of their positions in the state bureaucracy, the judiciary, the professions, and the universities' and had 'denied their children the right of higher education' (Craig 1978, 633). Expropriation laws robbed Jews of their properties and hence their ability to earn a living. They were also excluded from the world of art and letters. On a less drastic level, even non-Jewish women were similarly victimized by being discouraged or barred from working outside the home and by being excluded from membership in the party executive, dismissed from public sector jobs, and denied the 'right to act as judges, prosecutors, or assessors' (Craig 1978, 628). But only Jews were designated as 'dangerous foreigners' and hence singled out as a threat to the nation which justified their expulsion from German life. First it was East European Jews and then 'other "undesirables" who had been naturalized during the Weimar period' (Craig 1978, 634)7 who had their German citizenship revoked. By September 1935 Aryan blood was required for German citizenship, effectively stripping all German Jews of their nationality.8 Resistance to this violence perpetrated by the state against its own citizens was diffused by the confusion the Nazis created when they carried out such purges in the name of the law. Having declared himself Germany's supreme judge, Hitler was able to remove judges who did not demonstrate unconditional obedience to National Socialism. Anyone could at any time be accused of having violated arbitrary decrees and be subjected to the mockery of the infamous show trials perpetrated by the Nazi People's Courts. The persecution of target groups and other selected individuals was carried out in the name of a sham legal system which rewrote the law and replaced those who used to uphold it. Gleichschaltung+was a pervasive technique the Nazis used to reconfigure the administrative apparatus and the public space; its effects were both spectacularly violent and insidiously disciplinary. The sheer effrontery of the terror Hitler unleashed is only the most visible aspect of a revolution that seemed to regress to pre-modern barbarism. Perhaps even more astonishing is the apparent willingness of ordinary

258 Postmodernity and Fascism

citizens to either follow his lead or fail to resist him. As Arendt puts it, the 'earnestness' of Nazi rule is indeed 'expressed much more frighteningly in the organization of its followers than in the physical liquidation of its opponents' (Arendt 1973, 364). Although some of Hitler's followers fitted the stereotype of the fanatical acolyte, many more supported him more or less inadvertently by looking after their own interests. Gleichschaltung created conditions that forced ordinary people to play their part in the disciplinary machinery of Hitler's disorganized state. Even the most powerful figures among the Nazi elite found it virtually impossible to impose themselves without the Fiihrer's consent. Having made 'contenders depend upon his arbitrament of their disputes' (Craig 1978, 596), Hitler adroitly manipulated the administrative apparatus and protected his position by compelling individuals and offices to supervise each other. The consent of followers was often not so much voluntary as it was enforced through a system of surveillance that emerged as an effect of the duplication of offices. Having been part of this disciplinary system, Rauschning observes most pertinently that the National Socialist organizations 'include also a number of checking systems which appear to the careless observer as a senseless duplication of the organization; in reality these are based on the principle of reciprocal supervision by rival parallel organizations' (Rauschning 1939, 38). Although the SS was undoubtedly an instrument of terror not to be underestimated, the arbitrary violence this repressive state apparatus symbolizes depended on the support of a disciplinary apparatus which ensured that people not only had a stake in the system but were kept too busy to analyse what was happening. That Gleichschaltung was primarily an instrument of control and discipline is brought out once again by Rauschning: The rank and file have to be kept continually on the move and continually under tension. They have to be controlled down to the smallest detail in their whole lives. They have to be kept entirely dependent and under supervision, and prevented from giving way to any undisciplined impulses of their own' (Rauschning 1939,40). Although the whole German population was exposed to this disciplinary mechanism, it was most acutely felt by the Jewish population. The persecution of German Jews was not just inspired by Hitler's antiSemitism but necessitated by his social engineering project; ordinary Germans needed constant reminding that they were not immune from the treatment the Nazis could arbitrarily visit on a target group. The disconcerting and tragic experiences of Jews are a moving testimony to the terrifying impact of the Nazi surveillance technique. Victor

Decentred Totalities 259 Klemperer's 7 Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1942-1945 (1999) illustrates the bewildered and terrified reaction of the individual when victimized by the 'fabulous tyranny, brutality, mocking humiliation' (Klemperer 1999, 5) of the Nazis. Having been whisked from a tram by a 'dogcatcher/ Klemperer is so terrorized by the arbitrary degradation he receives at Gestapo headquarters that he decides never to leave his immediate neighbourhood again. In fact, he rarely even leaves the house anymore, asking his very sick German wife to go out shopping because '/ do not have the confidence to go into town' (Klemperer 1999, 9). The daily entries record the '[b]oundless arbitrariness and uncertainty' (Klemperer 1999, 8) of life. Rumours that Jews working in the local factory would be deported kept changing so as to divide the victims into those who might survive and those who might not: 'Evacuation of all the Jews here on the coming Wednesday, excepting anyone who is over sixty-five; who holds the Iron Cross, First Class; who is in a mixed marriage, including one without children' (Klemperer 1999, 6). Realizing that 'point three' of the decree protects him, he feels lucky to be exempted at the same time as he asks himself 'for how long?' (Klemperer 1999,6). This reaction illustrates Bauman's point that the Nazis solicited 'the co-operation of the victims' by proceeding in incremental stages: 'At each stage of the destruction - except the final one - there were individuals and groups eager to save what could be saved, to defend what could be defended, to exempt what could be exempted; and thus - although only obliquely - to co-operate' (Bauman 1991,134). Throughout the diary, Klemperer looks for evidence of rules whose observance would ensure survival. But everywhere he is met with arbitrary decisions, wilful behaviour, and confusion. Explaining the constantly changing deportation order, for instance, he depicts the inefficiency introduced by+++++++++++++'Different government de partments appear to be at cross-purposes' (Klemperer 1999, 6). When his neighbour is eventually deported, Klemperer conveys the sense of disorientation produced by a process that is both completely rational in its technique and completely irrational in its purpose. In the first instance, '[b]efore a deportee goes, the Gestapo seals up everything he leaves behind' (Klemperer 1999, 9). This seemingly orderly step in fact conceals a lawlessness and violence that is visited on Klemperer's neighbours: 'Eight-man squad ... vilest abuse, pushing, blows, Frau Neumann boxed on the ears five times. They rummaged through+everything, stole indiscriminately: candles, soap, an electric fire, a suitcase,

260 Postmodernity and Fascism

books, half a pound of margarine (legitimately bought with ration coupons), writing paper, all kinds of tobacco, umbrella, his military decorations' (Klemperer 1999,12). To add insult to injury, the victim is then forced to sign 'a statement that one has voluntarily put everything at the disposal of the German Red Cross' (Klemperer 1999,12). Once a person is 'listed' for transportation, '[t]heir property is confiscated, they have to make an inventory on printed forms. These forms go into the most wretched details: "Ties... shirts... pajamas... blouses..."' (Klemperer 1999,12). In an effort to escape notice, Klemperer scrutinizes the smallest everyday details of his routines. When there is no shaving soap for Jews, he worries: 'Is there such a shortage - do they want to reintroduce the medieval Jew's beard by force? I still have a small hoarded reserve. I hope it will not be noticed during a house search. I hope being cleanshaven will not make one suspect' (Klemperer 1999, 11). It seems that nothing escapes the state's disciplinary gaze. In an interesting parallel with Thomas Mann's worries about the confiscation of his house in Munich and the fate of his manuscripts, Klemperer hopes against hope that he will be able to keep his house and that his manuscripts won't be discovered. The difference is, of course, that Mann is safe whereas Klemperer is under constant threat of death. He loses the house and 'cannot stop worrying about my manuscripts anymore/ a concern heightened by the story of a 'certain Stern, about sixty years of age/ who, having been 'arrested some weeks ago, because of a pastoral letter found during a house search/ had subsequently been placed in '[pjolice prison - then concentration camp - now an urn has been returned' (Klemperer 1999,12). But in spite of the 'fear that my scribbling could get me put into a concentration camp' (Klemperer 1999,12), he continues to bear witness to exhaustion, depression, and sheer terror of living under the threat of dogcatchers, house searches, and concentration camps. 'I can do no more than die/ says Klemperer (1999,13). But what of the men who subject him to such terror and calamity? Where the paradox of the totally contingent and yet totally administered system co-opts victims by instilling the 'hope against hope' that there is a chance that deportation and hence death can be averted, the disordered totality creates conditions that rob ordinary people of their ordinary human impulses. For his project of social engineering to succeed, Hitler had to reconfigure the public space so as to deprive the social order of its meaning. Although it has always been argued that ordinary Germans were willing to persecute and kill Jews because the Nazis had dehu-

Decentred Totalities 261

manized them, Bauman's study shows that the processes of fragmentation were as crucial to Hitler as was the apparent centralization of his power. It was the splitting and separating of tasks that allowed Germans to distance themselves morally from their participation in the Holocaust. Ordinary Germans could be turned into murderers because the 'meticulous functional dissection and separation of tasks' allowed for the 'substitution of technical for moral responsibility' (Bauman 1991, 100). Even tasks that directly served the death camps were 'reduced to a set of quantitative measures' (Baumann 1991,102); workers saw themselves engaged in the performance of tasks assigned them by a bureaucratic operation. In such a situation, morality 'boils down to the commandment to be a good, efficient and diligent expert and worker' (Bauman 1991, 102). This replacement of moral self-examination by technical expertise is enabled when a hierarchical system is replaced by a decentred totality. 'Within a purely linear division of command,' argues Bauman, 'technical responsibility remains, at least in theory, vulnerable. It may still be called to justify itself in moral terms and to compete with moral conscience' (Bauman 1991,101). A functionary will still be in a position to 'decide that by giving a particular command his superior overstepped his terms of reference' (Bauman 1991, 101). In a decentred structure, though, 'once the linear hierarchy of command is supplemented, or replaced, by functional division and separation of tasks/ the 'theoretical' possibility that moral responsibility will oppose an authoritative command either disappears or is 'considerably weakened' (Bauman 1991,101). Although Hitler was intent on concentrating power in his hands, he could not carry out his project of social engineering without fragmenting the administrative apparatus. One of the interesting and seldom acknowledged effects of the Nazis' radically decentred system was that Hitler himself was reduced to a mere function of a predetermined order. In a traditional system of government, we may recall, a 'hierarchically organized chain of command means that the commander's power is dependent on the whole hierarchic system in which he operates' (Arendt 1973, 364). Far from envisaging himself at the top of a chain of command, though, Hitler wanted to embody a sovereign power so autonomous that it could no longer tolerate the very thought of hierarchical distribution. The decentred totality he instituted works on a principle of equivalence which is indifferent to the particular aspects of what circulates in its economy. In other words, it is the type of organization that predetermines the interplay of freedom and constraint open to the parts that constitute it.

262 Postmodernity and Fascism

The decentred totality allowed subjects to behave arbitrarily as long as they submitted to the totality; Nazi party members and functionaries were 'free' to break laws and offend ethical standards in a variety of ways as long as they swore allegiance to 'Hitler.' Functions in the system were not assigned according to norms of merit or suitability; as the historical record shows, Nazi functionaries were on the whole less competent administrators than the civil servants they replaced. Since the distribution of administrative positions was driven not by the tasks to be performed but by the mechanisms of surveillance necessary for the maintenance of power, a party member could arbitrarily be inserted anywhere in the system. As in the case of the twelve-tone row and capitalist market, the system predetermines the functions in its economy but is indifferent to who fills a position. Even the victims necessary for the ruling elite to legitimate its domination are arbitrarily constructed and selected. Although atomistic elements could combine randomly, they were in fact functions in a totality over which they had no control. Contrary to popular belief, the decentred totality controlled even the Fuhrer himself. For Arendt, the totalitarian elite consisted of men who 'consider everything and everybody in terms of organization, and this includes the Leader who to them is neither an inspired talisman nor the one who is infallibly right, but the simple consequence of this type of organization; he is needed, not as a person, but as a function, and as such he is indispensable to the movement' (Arendt 1973, 387). In spite of Hitler's self-staging as the indispensable Fuhrer of the German people, he was from the start implicated in a process of supplementarity which Hewitt ingeniously connects to the aesthetic principle of reproducibility: The aura of the dictator consists in the recognition of a certain arbitrariness: in the awareness that he could be anyone. More than this, as an always already reproducible representation of individual, antidemocratic authority, the Fuhrer already is anyone' (Hewitt 1993,169). It is not surprising, perhaps, that Adorno and Mann characterize twelve-tone music as a totally organized yet highly contingent system which, as a 'composing before the composing begins/ subjects even the composer to the system he initiates. Arendt points out that those explaining the Nazi phenomenon in terms of the 'authoritarian personality'9 or leadership principle overlook that the totalitarian state is not in fact authoritarian. On the contrary, 'the principle of authority is in all important respects diametrically opposed to that of totalitarian domination' (Arendt 1973, 404). The novelty of fascist totalitarianism lies in the way domination suffuses the whole system and cannot be

Decentred Totalities 263

located anywhere in particular, not even in its ruling elite. The will of the Fuehrer/ argues Arendt, 'can be embodied everywhere and at all times, and he himself is not tied to any hierarchy, not even the one he might have established himself (Arendt 1973, 405). Since the leader himself is part of the totality, his actions are predetermined by the system he embodies. The clue for understanding the totalitarian state thus resides not in the genius or thirst for power of the leader and his elite. Instead, the emergence of totalitarianism in twentieth-century Europe exploits the paradox of 'planned shapelessness' (Arendt 1973, 402) which is for Arendt the sign of a radical break with older systems of domination. Although Hitler is consistently portrayed as the evil principle controlling German life, he is in fact merely a function of the decentred totality. Hitler himself succumbs to the economy of autonomous functions being infinitely exchangeable. It is once again Arendt who understands that the fascist totality is an 'iron cage' that works on separating rather than binding its elements; for her 'the isolation of atomized individuals provides not only the mass basis for totalitarian rule, but is carried through to the very top of the whole structure' (Arendt 1973, 407). What this means, I think, is that the Nazi elite is a centre that is not a centre. Ironically Hitler has generated a totality whose complicity with fragmentation constitutes the political 'fate' of his revolution in much the same way as the twelve-tone system is the 'fate' of music; caught between a predetermined system external to him and the accidental convergence of elements within it, Hitler initiated a revolution which took on a life of its own. In their total administration of public and private life, the Nazis exemplify the disciplinary mechanisms that Michel Foucault analyses in his historical studies of the production and containment of insane, sick, criminal, and sexualized bodies. In effect, Gleichschaltung provides us with a textbook example of the carceral society which forms the focus of much of his theoretical work and which he analyses specifically in Discipline and Punish (1979). Although the disciplinary mechanisms Foucault describes work 'without recourse, in principle at least, to excess, force, or violence' (Foucault 1979, 177), in Hitler's Germany this insidious form of domination was reinforced by the spectacular production of terror symbolized by the SS as the most visible arm of the repressive state apparatus. Ironically, perhaps, the most typical examples of the disciplinary form of power in Nazi Germany are the SS and the death camps. Both of these are organized according to the 'ideal model' of modern society which is for Foucault 'the military camp/ an

264 Postmodernity and Fascism engineered society in which 'all power would be exercised solely through exact observation' (Foucault 1979, 171). It is through the classification and regulation of the human body that administrative organizations train and discipline the bodies of citizens so as to ensure 'their utility and their docility, their distribution and their submission' (Foucault 1979, 25). The aim of the duplication of administrative offices and functions was to exploit the body as a useful tool by making it 'both a productive body and a subjected body' (Foucault 1979, 26). Victor Klemperer's diary entries illustrate the devastating effects of the mechanism of power perfected by the Nazis, a mechanism which Foucault traces to the eighteenth century, which 'invented' surveillance as an apparatus of domination. The architectural figure for this apparatus of surveillance is, for Foucault, Bentham's+++++++++A supervisor is placed in 'a central tower' from which he can see into each cell of the prison. 'All that is needed,' writes Foucault, 'is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy' (Foucault 1979,200). Each prisoner 'is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication' (Foucault 1979, 200). Feeling at all times exposed to this surveillance, the prisoner internalizes the disciplinary gaze and submits to its power. As Bauman's+++++++++++++++++++++++++ matically shows, it is in the death camps that the effects of the disciplinary gaze on the subjected body of the concentration camp inmate find their most extreme illustration. For the sociologist, the 'Holocaust records offer a unique insight into the general principles of bureaucratically administered oppression' (Bauman 1991,122). The camps illustrate 'the way power operates in modern society,' especially in++'the ability o modern, rational, bureaucratically organized power to induce actions functionally indispensable to its purposes while jarringly at odds with the vital interests of the actors' (Bauman 1991, 122; emphasis in original). As Klemperer's experiences prove, Jewish victims inside and outside the camps tried to figure out by what rules they could ensure their survival. Their aim was to turn themselves into docile bodies so as to avert calling upon themselves the wrath of the disciplinary gaze. The same mechanism made ordinary Germans complicit with a reign of terror they knew would destroy them if they did not submit to the administered order. The Star of David was for Germans a constant reminder of the gaze of the Nazis to which+++++++was exposed. The principles of the Nazi disciplinary apparatus exemplify a mecha-

Decentred Totalities 265

nism of surveillance which is captured in Foucault's description of disciplinary power in modern society: By means of such surveillance, disciplinary power became an 'integrated' system, linked from the inside to the economy and to the aims of the mechanism in which it was practiced. It was also organized as a multiple, automatic, and anonymous power; for although surveillance rests on individuals, its functioning is that of a network of relations from top to bottom, but also to a certain extent from bottom to top and laterally; this network 'holds' the whole together and traverses it in its entirety with effects of power that derive from one another: supervisors, perpetually supervised. And, although it is true that its pyramidal organization gives it a 'head/ it is the apparatus as a whole that produces 'power' and distributes individuals in this permanent and continuous field. This enables the disciplinary power to be both absolutely indiscreet, since it is everywhere and always alert, since by its very principle it leaves no zone of shade and constantly supervises the very individuals who are entrusted with the task of supervising; and absolutely 'discreet,' for it functions permanently and largely in silence. (Foucault 1979,176-7)

Since even the Ftihrer can be seen as a function of the disciplinary apparatus, power is not exercised simply from the top down but permeates every aspect of the decentred totality. Far from conforming to the integration symbolized by organic metaphors, this system is indifferent to the atomized subjects it distributes and regulates. What is most striking about German National Socialism is the way it inflected power by uncannily reinforcing the terror of the purges with the disciplinary mechanisms of the administrative apparatus. The concentration camps are in all respects an excessive reaction to deal with perceived threats to the totalitarian regime. The agenda they served was not the containment and elimination of 'enemies'; instead, they are 'the laboratories in which the fundamental belief of totalitarianism that everything is possible is being verified' (Arendt 1973, 437). Breaking down the categories in which modernity had grounded its self-understanding, Hitler's revolution anticipates Baudrillard's anxiety that the deconstruction of the Enlightenment's metanarratives lands us in a hyperreal space. Long before Baudrillard's attack on Foucault's approach to power, Arendt made what appeared to be the counterintuitive claim that the 'totalitarian form of government has very little to do with lust for power' (Arendt 1973, 407). Nazism was phantas-

266 Postmodernity and Fascism

magoric or 'magical' precisely in the sense that its economy of exchange robbed events of their reference to the 'real.' In a totalitarian system, observes Arendt, power has lost all connection with 'earthly possessions, with wealth, treasures, and riches' and has been 'dissolved into a kind of dematerialized mechanism whose every move generates power as friction or galvanic currents generate electricity' (Arendt 1973, 418). Like the commodity in late capitalism or the formal device in avantgarde aesthetics, power is no longer a use value but implicated in a selfreferential economy of exchange. What is so shockingly new in Nazi totalitarianism is that 'the real' has been reduced to an effect of simulation: The trouble with totalitarian regimes is not that they play power politics in an especially ruthless way, but that behind their politics is hidden an entirely new and unprecedented concept of power, just as behind their Realpolitik lies an entirely new and unprecedented concept of reality. Supreme disregard for immediate consequences rather than ruthlessness; rootlessness and neglect of national interests rather than nationalism; contempt for utilitarian motives rather than unconsidered pursuit of selfinterest; 'idealism/ i.e., their unwavering faith in an ideological fictitious world, rather than lust for power - these have all introduced into international politics a new and more disturbing factor than mere aggressiveness have [sic] been able to do. (Arendt 1973,417-18)

Arendt here identifies what Baudrillard provocatively terms the 'precession of simulacra,' the 'map that precedes the territory' (Baudrillard 1994, 1). Contending that simulation can no longer be differentiated from the reality it supposedly mirrors, he suggests that the image or model has swallowed up all referential substance. It is not that the simulation does not have effects but that these are not generated by any connection with the real. It could be said that the very real suffering of the victims under the Nazi regime is the outcome of a 'hyperspace' whose 'curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth,' for the 'era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials' (Baudrillard 1994,2). In a description that fits both Leverkiihn's twelvetone technique and Hitler's fascist totalitarianism, Baudrillard specifies that the real is 'artificially' resurrected through processes of citation, mimicry, and parody; in other words, 'signs of the real' are being substituted 'for the real' (Baudrillard 1994, 2). The postmodern world Baudrillard depicts is as totalizing and fragmented as twelve-tone mu-

Decentred Totalities 267

sic and German fascism; postmodernity is characterized as a system of signs that 'lends itself to all systems of equivalences, to all binary oppositions, to all combinatory algebra' (Baudrillard 1994, 2). Hitler's ability to make his followers buy into the simulated world he constructed can, to some extent, be explained by the elimination of 'any distinction between the real and the imaginary' (Baudrillard 1994,3). In Adorno's terms, the triumph of variation in atonal music eliminates the possibility of orientation provided by norms against which deviation remains meaningful. In the absence of a standard against which a representation can be called false, all resistance to the simulated order risks being absorbed by it. In an economy open to infinite substitutions, it is no longer possible to occupy a position of either power or critical difference. The Nazi phenomenon must be seen as a radical break with modernity not only because it resurrected a primitive barbarism but also because it threatened 'the difference between the "true" and the "false," the "real" and the "imaginary"' (Baudrillard 1994, 3). German National Socialism thus signals the arrival of a 'new' logic with which we are still coming to grips, a point Hewitt reinforces when he contends that '[o]ne major difficulty of fascism, which ushered in the simulacral representational episteme in which we still live, consists in the impossibility of differentiating the real from its representation' (Hewitt 1993, 172). It seems to me important to recognize that Nazism was not the last eruption of a premodern barbarism but the emergence of a 'postmodern' episteme whose 'totalitarian' implications we prefer not to examine too closely. The Logic of Fascism and Avant-Garde Aesthetics Although it is certainly the case that Mann's Doctor Faustus refrains from analysing specific political events, this parable of fascism captures a 'truth' about the Nazi phenomenon which reverberates with some of the most recent assessments of the strange logic which allowed Hitler to seize and consolidate his power base. In Fascist Modernism, Andrew Hewitt examines the relationship between avant-garde aesthetics and fascist politics in such writers as Marinetti in terms that confirm the uncanny logic I discern in Mann's++++++++++++Most significantly, Hewitt bolsters my argument that Leverkiihn's Adorno-inspired music theory demonstrates that fragmentation and totalization reinforce each other in both aesthetics and politics. This argument has more disturbing implications than the fairly standard contention that Leverkiihn

268 Postmodernity and Fascism

typifies such 'literary fascists' as Eliot and Pound in English or Celine and LaRochelle in French literature. Although Mann foregrounds the parallel between Leverkuhn's 'progressive' aesthetic experiments and Germany's 'regressive' politics, his critique of aesthetics moves beyond Carroll's point in French Literary Fascism that we cannot exonerate aesthetic practices from their suspect ideological investments. Complicating the connection between 'a "progressive" aesthetic practice and a "reactionary" political ideology' (Hewitt 1993, 1), Hewitt focuses on 'both the political appeal of the avant-garde and the aesthetic appeal of fascism' (Hewitt 1993, 21). Referring to Benjamin's famous essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,' he examines the choice 'between the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of aesthetics' (Hewitt 1993,23) which structures not only Benjamin's commentary but also postmodern debates on the relationship between art and society. Hewitt is most pertinently asking if fascism is 'reactionary because it aestheticizes politics, or because its own aesthetic sensibilities happen to be "reactionary"' (Hewitt 1993, 24). Fascist Modernism complicates Benjamin's choice by showing that avant-garde aesthetics and fascism must be understood as 'part of a broader legitimation crisis' (Hewitt 1993, 46) which I see prefigured in the dramatization in Doctor Faustus of a cultural crisis indicative of what we might simplistically call a shift from modernity to postmodernity. Leverkuhn's aesthetic progress is neither causally responsible for the emergence of National Socialism nor untouched by the logic of fascism as a revolution that is both radical and reactionary. What the avant-garde and fascism share is their distaste for capitalist systems of exchange whose logic of the unlimited substitution of part for part within an indifferent totality they nevertheless perpetuate. Hewitt's analysis of avant-garde aesthetics and fascism reinforces my reading of Doctor Faustus as Mann's Adorno-inspired recognition of a paradigmatic break which foregrounds that Leverkuhn's disruption of the 'closed work' through fragmentation coexists with rather than challenges totalization. Although Hewitt refers neither to Mann nor to Adorno,10 his understanding of the avant-garde movement confirms for me the uncanny dialectical interconnection of totalization and fragmentation that marks Leverkuhn's twelve-tone system, a system that is enabled by the very cultural tradition from which it also radically departs. 'Once modernism is defined in terms of a tradition of innovation,' argues Hewitt, 'modernism as a critical category does not allow of any radical break with modernism which would not always already exemplify the very

Decentred Totalities 269

movement++modernity itself (Hewitt 1993, 38). In fact, Hewitt seems to be making Adorno's point that the culmination of modernity is simultaneously its elimination: 'What this means, in effect, is that the realization of modernity is at one with its liquidation, its totalization at one with its fragmentation. Modernity is entrenched as a central organizing principle only when it has apparently decentered any such central principle and disseminated power to the various autonomous discourses' (Hewitt 1993, 43). The logic of modernity has to be its incompleteness; ironically, perhaps, it is Adorno's insistence on negative dialectics rather than Hegel's dream of dialectical sublation which articulates this logic. Schonberg is to be congratulated for disrupting Hegel's identity thesis at the same time as he has to be vilified for abandoning Hegel's historical dialectic; although serial music foregrounds difference, it also inaugurates a paralysing spatializing of time. Hewitt is not thinking of twelve-tone music, but his contention that innovation is both continuous and discontinuous with the tradition it seeks to surpass illuminates Adorno's critique of Schonberg: The tradition of innovation entails a process of self-affirmation through selfnegation. Progress is seen as the negation of what has gone before, and yet the repetition of the gesture of negation displays the complicity of the new with what has gone before. Within a modernity structured as the interplay of (discursive) fragment and (social) totality, however, the principle of negation as a temporal and progressive impetus has been spatialized and rendered structural' (Hewitt 1993, 43). Articulating an anxiety that Adorno links to the avant-garde and Jameson to postmodernism, Hewitt confirms that spatialization constitutes a threat not only to the monolithic narrative of the Enlightenment but also to neoMarxist investments in both positive and negative dialectical processes. The effect of this spatialization of time and history is that Mann's protofascists as well as Leverkiihn are able to break down the distinction between progress and regress basic to emancipatory projects. Being contradictorily predicated on an aim that would end the process of innovation which characterizes it, the project of modernity has always already entered into its own death: The essence of modernity as we have traditionally thought it is its incompletion, the impossibility of ruling out yet more radical negation, yet more startling innovation. A modernism that is somehow "completed" will be decidedly anti- or postmodern; it will be an avant-garde' (Hewitt 1993, 45). The disruption of modernism Hewitt locates in the European avant-garde and Jameson in North American postmodernism is thus not a calamity

270 Postmodernity and Fascism

which befalls modernism from outside but constitutes its paradoxical fulfilment. 'Consequently/ as Hewitt concludes, 'progress and reaction cannot be thought simply as movements away from or closer to the self-fulfillment of modernity, but as contemporaneous but non-synchronous impulses within modernity itself (Hewitt 1993,43-4). It is in this sense that German National Socialism can be said to be in its logic both continuous with modernity and a postmodern break from it. The emphasis in postmodern discourses on the disruption and fragmentation of linear histories, hegemonic monoliths, and metaphysical presence risks perpetuating the totalizing tendencies such discourses mean to contest. If postmodern discourses remain blind to the intermingling of fragmentation and totalization at work in German fascism, then they may unwittingly reinforce the violence they associate with the metanarratives bequeathed us by the Enlightenment. In an argument echoing the paradox of the 'magic square' in Mann's novel, Hewitt locates where, for him, 'the message of Fascist Modernism' resides: '[Totalization is necessarily a coexistence of totality and fragment; it is a totalized process of fragmentation and of the articulation of those fragments within an organized whole' (Hewitt 1993, 41). Although Hewitt takes his cue from Benjamin, his understanding of the dialectical intermingling of opposites aligns itself also with Adorno's critique of the complicity between the atomistic note and the preformed totality that finds its way into+++++++++++Warning against the unthinking celebration of (aesthetic) fragmentation as the road to (political) emancipation, Hewitt points out that '[al politics or theory of centralized action cannot foreclose the process of fragmentation, but neither can the championing of the fragment - be it the individual as fragment, the amorphous desire, or the unchained signifier - deny its own compatibility with totalitarian structures' (Hewitt 1993, 42). Implicit in this statement is a critique of the unproblematic Nietzschean affirmation of poststructuralist 'play' inaugurated by readings of Derrrida's 'Structure, Sign, and Play' that fail to heed the far more restricted economy Derrida also authorized by the secondary meaning ofjeu. Mann's incorporation of Adorno's critique of Schonberg's twelve-tone technique graphically illustrates the limitations of the demystification of modernity's closure by foregrounding the dialectical interplay of fragmentation and totalization analysed so perceptively in Hewitt's reading of the relationship between avant-garde aesthetics and fascism. What+Docto Faustus makes prominent is precisely that this logic of the mutual implication of fragmentation and totalization manifests itself both in

Decentred Totalities 271

Leverkiihn's 'postmodern' aesthetic tropes and in the political strategies of fascism. If Hewitt is right, and obviously I think he is, and 'both fascism and the avant-garde - insofar as there is any "truth" to them partake of a similar logic' (Hewitt 1993,164), then Mann produced with Adorno's help an ideologically highly astute analysis not only of German National Socialism but of the problematical shift from modernity to postmodernity which continues to be crucial to our own cultural self-understanding.

This page intentionally left blank

NOTES

Introduction 1 In Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus Mann tells us that, in addition to the chapbook+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Volksbucher, Volksbuhne, Puppenspiele, Hollenzivang und Zauberbucher++++ Scheible, Stuttgart 1847' as well as a strange study of 1836 called 'Uber Calderons Tragodie vom wundertatigen Magus. Bin Beitrag zum Verstandnis der Faustischen Fabel von Dr. Karl Rosenkranz' (Mann 1949,122-3). Chapter 1: Neo-Romantic Roots of German Fascism 1 The quotation marks around Auschwitz indicate that the name of this concentration camp is often used to refer to German fascism. This practice can be traced to Adorno's famous statement that 'it is barbaric to continue to write poetry after Auschwitz' (Adorno 1992a, 87). 2 In my translation of the German term volkisch into Volkish' in English, I follow George L. Mosse's usage inThe+++++++++++++++++ 3+My aim is not to complete, revise, or contest existing interpretations of the Nazi phenomenon. Far from trying to be either inclusive or innovative, my brief historical narrative of the Hitler phenomenon draws out those aspects featuring prominently in the theoretical reconsideration of the ideological+assumptions of fascism in this study. 4 Craig summarizes Bismarck's tactics as Violent posturing, the identification of political opposition with lack of patriotism and subversion, the ruthless employment of calumny and harassment against individuals and parties labelled as++++++++++the menacing references to worse things to

274 Notes to pages 20-43 come, the campaigns in which the issues were oversimplified and distorted' (Craig 1978,143). 5 Frederick Winslow Taylor's rationalization of the labour process by dividing production into efficient units is often pejoratively referred to as Taylorization.' (See Jameson 1981,190.) 6 Since Zeitblom left in 1905 to begin his one-year military service, this early social scene places him and Leverkuhn at the University of Halle during the Wilhelmine period. 7 As the translator tells us, the popularity of 'this severe and difficult philosophy of history' is attested by the fact that it 'found a market that has justified the printing of 90,000 copies' (Spengler 1926, ix). 8 Mann's copy of Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes in the ThomasMann-Archiv in Zurich has many underlined passages. 9 By temporarily taking over the military headquarters in Munich, Kurt Eisner established in 1918 a short-lived Bavarian Republic. 10 Focusing on music theory to support his argument for the redemption of Germany through social democracy, Jendreiek's analysis is particularly relevant to my own rather different reading of music as a code for sociocultural registers. 11 There is no evidence that Mosse had read Doctor Faustus; his few references to Mann are mostly concerned with The Magic Mountain. The novelist and the social historian seem to have arrived at similar observations independent of each other. Reading Doctor Faustus in the context of Mosse's analysis of volkish ideology allows us to reach a better understanding not only of Mann's credibility as a social observer but also of the historical climate he tries to capture in the novel. 12 In another speech, Hitler explains: 'If a people wills to reconstruct its life, it must realize that the foundation of its strength lies in its peasantry, that the force which sustains the building is the working-man. And to that must be added the mind - the intellectual leadership - and that must bind together the other two, so that there may arise the trinity of peasant, working-man, and worker with the brain (Kopfarbeiter)' (Baynes 1969,238). 13 Bloch provides us with one of the most sophisticated analyses of what he calls 'certain hooks in several differently conventional premiums of the romantic disposition, from the fairytale to colportage, indeed from various kinds of "occultism" to the myth of life' (Bloch 1990,149). 14 It is not without significance that Lagarde also encouraged German imperial ambitions. 15 Doctor Faustus avoids confronting the Jewish question. Although it is obvious from Mann's underlining that he had read Lagarde's explicit anti-

Notes to page 45 275 Jewish arguments, he rather inexplicably fails to address the exclusionary logic which leads Mosse to account for the Holocaust. 16 Given Mann's sensitive reading of volkish ideology, it is surprising that he remained silent on the racial question which is the logical concomitant of the longing for national unity. The underlined passages in his copy of Lagarde's nationalistic treatise show that Mann was well aware of the logic that had Lagarde identify Jews as 'a grave misfortune' (Lagarde 1913, 154). Arguing that it is 'the right of every people to be master of its own territory, to live for themselves, not for foreigners' (Lagarde 1913,154), Lagarde exhorts: 'Deport all the Jews who claim to be permitted to exist as Jews in Germany' (Lagarde 1913,145). Not only does Mann circumvent the logic of the Jew as the 'other,' but his most prominent Jewish characters are the proto-fascist Breisacher and the materialistic impresario Fitelberg. In++++++++++++Mann defends himself by pointing out that the portrait of the Jews is no more unsympathetic than that of most other characters in Doctor Faustus. Responding to the accusation that the novel fails to acknowledge 'the peculiar spiritual dignity of Judaism,' Mann defends himself by claiming first of all that his 'cosmopolitan Jewish impresario' is imbued with a certain dignity and, secondly, by asking: 'For that matter, leaving out Mother Schweigestill and the narrator himself, Serenus Zeitblom, are the German inhabitants of this novel any more likable than the Jewish characters?' (Mann 1961, 203). Although this may well be the case, it is not only a lame excuse but fails to explain why Mann chose not to follow the explicit implications for Jews in the volkish logic that Mosse emphasizes. A perhaps more convincing justification is Mann's contention that his 'Jews are simply children of their age, just as much as the others; indeed, by virtue of their cleverness they are often the more faithful children' (Mann 1961, 203). Although this argument does not let Mann off the hook in the context of the logic captured by Mosse, it is not without merit. The 'nasty figure of Breisacher,' this 'intellectual intriguer and forerunner of evil/ is in the novel imbued with a flattering 'quick hearing and receptivity for the coming' (Mann 1961, 203) which presumably lifts him above his more slow-witted contemporaries. In some sense, Mann can be said to have captured the spirit of his times with admirable accuracy. As Carl E. Schorske documents in Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, Zionist crusaders like Theodor Herzl were as adamant in their 'rejection of rational polities' (Schorske 1981,160) and liberalism as the anti-Semitic Schonerer and Lueger. In his determination 'to appeal not to the minds but to the hearts of the Jews' (Schorske 1981,165), Herzl assumed that the task of politics was 'to

276 Notes to pages 47-58

17

18

19 20 21

present a dream in such a form as to touch the sub-rational wellsprings of human desire and will' (Schorske 1981,164). As Schorske comments, 'Herzl's radical subjectivism separated him clearly from the cautious liberal realists, Jewish or non-Jewish, around him, and linked him to his mortal enemies' (Schorske 1981,164). Like Schonerer and Lueger, Herzl 'combined archaic and futuristic elements,' linking modern aspirations to an 'archaic communitarian tradition' (Schorske 1981,167). By making Breisacher a Jew, Mann may have wanted to convey just how widespread anti-liberal hostility to rational political processes was. At the same time, Doctor Faustus+misses a crucial opportunity to do full justice to the siniste implications of neo-Romantic or volkish ideas. Mann accentuates the connection between art and politics when he has Kretschmar single out Wagner's music for exemplifying 'the tendency of music to plunge back into the elemental'; tapping into the 'basic elements of music,' the 'cosmogenic myth of the+++++symbolizes for Kretschmar 'the music of the beginning' as well as 'the beginning of music' (Mann 1968,64). Given Hitler's well-known worship of Wagner and his primitive Germanic mythos of the+++++the reader is not likely to miss the sinister political overtones of Kretschmar's innocent enthusiasm. This distinction between cult and culture corresponds in contemporary theoretical debates to the nature/culture (or civilization) opposition first articulated by Claude Levi-Strauss and later deconstructed by Jacques Derrida. The ideological stakes of this opposition will form the topic of chapter 3. For a more extended discussion of this phenomenon, see chapter 6. This observation is historically specific in that indiscriminate hostility to liberalism in Munich resulted in Communists and Nazis being embraced by the disaffected in roughly equal measure. Bloch confirms this link between nostalgia and Utopia: 'The wish for happiness was never painted into an empty and completely new future. A better past was always to be restored too, though not a recent past, but that of a dreamed-after, more beautiful earlier age. And this golden age was not only to be renewed but also surpassed by an as yet nameless happiness' (Bloch 1990,128).

Chapter 2: Organic Unity and the Privileging of Reason 1 This goal of a unity of opposites is not peculiar to Hegel; the desire to reconcile subject and object has always motivated philosophy and continues to so in postmodern theory.

Notes to pages 60-77 277 2 The Thomas-Mann-Archiv in Zurich holds an unpublished manuscript by Jonas Lesser, Thomas Manns Doktor Faustus und Theodor Adornos Philosophie der neuen Musik' (1951), which traces the many, often verbatim, Adorno-passages Mann incorporated. 3 In this novel, which makes 'quotation' a central formal technique, the issue of 'intellectual property' is, in a sense, irrelevant. 4 At the Thomas-Mann-Archiv in Zurich, I was able to consult the manuscript version that Adorno had made available to Mann. 5 I will return to a more extensive discussion of the Dialectic of Enlightenment in chapter 3. 6 Many commentators have drawn attention to this tribute to Adorno. 7 Ernst Nolte is today, of course, at the centre of the so-called Historikerstreit (dispute among historians) concerning the sources of German fascism. I would like to stress that the material I quote from his early work is taken from his introduction to Fascism: An Anthology (1968), edited by Nathanael Green, and from the essay, 'Practice as Fulfillment,' which he contributed to this collection of essays. The tenor of his writing was at this point in time primarily descriptive, showing little evidence of his later controversial opinions. 8 In spite of his focus on the class struggle, even Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness is criticized for its 'idealist' theorizing and its failure to outline an agenda of revolutionary praxis. 9 Given the asynchronous aesthetic developments in Germany and North America, the avant-garde music that Adorno calls 'modern' is in fact already 'postmodern.' 10 The title of Zuidervaart's study is Adorno's Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion. 11 Kleist's Uber das Marionettentheater is generically (and otherwise) ambiguous in that it is a fictional story which is in fact a philosophical debate. Is it fictional or discursive? Critics consequently tend to refer to it as an 'essay' rather than as a short story. 12 This 'perhaps' is meant to signal that the degree of Hegel's self-consciousness is currently being debated by such theorists as Slavoj Zizek. 13 In a rough and ready way one could outline Hegel's sublation of the opposition between subject and object by drawing attention to the interrelated series of dialectical moves that determine the constitution of both the individual subject and the objective (natural and social) world at each stage of development. The individual subject overcomes its alienation from the natural and social world through a dialectical process gradually leading to the subject's self-actualization through increasing degrees of

278 Notes to pages 78-95

14 15

16 17

18 19

20 21 22

self-consciousness. A parallel dialectical process is simultaneously at work in the transformation of a historical reality to which Hegel attributes an objective purpose. In a mutually reinforcing spiral, the objective world requires individual subjects to realize their potential just as individual subjects profit from the progressive stages reached by a given culture. The subject born in the nineteenth century, for instance, need not repeat the historical development that produced the cultural and scientific achievements of the historical moment. Assisted by more and more enlightened subjects, the world in turn draws closer to realizing its goal of organizing itself along rational lines. The telos of history is thus the eventual union of individual subject and social collectivity. In this scenario, the individual's rights would coincide completely with the interests of the collectivity (the State). As we will see, Mann refers to this master-slave opposition in Kretschmar's lecture on the music of Beissel. The Nazis used this argument, in the first place, to construct Hitler as a Hegelian figure destined to achieve Germany's mission to renew humanity, and, in the second place, to justify the destruction of Jews and others standing in the way of Germany's destiny. As I will argue later, Leverkiihn's pact with the devil illustrates the risks involved in this strategy of the 'cunning of reason.' From Adorno's Marxist perspective, Hegel's philosophy as a whole was in fact complicit with capitalism, for, by emphasizing that 'nothing exists for its own sake' (Adorno 1993, 28), it sacrifices use value to exchange value. It follows that '[t]he forgetfulness of production, the insatiable and destructive expansive principle of the exchange society, is reflected in Hegelian metaphysics' (Adorno 1993,28). This conception of freedom will prove most telling for Leverkiihn's articulation of his system. As Marcuse points out, the state is for Hegel a rational entity which guarantees the liberty of individuals; German National Socialists consequently decried Hegel as a dangerous liberal and incipient Marxist. At the same time, Hitler clearly legitimized his leadership principle by identifying himself as a world historical figure in Hegel's terms. Marcuse also believes that Hegel apologized for the Prussian monarchy because he wanted the state to protect property rights. See Mann 1997, 67. It also found its most potent political articulation in Hegel's Grundlinien der Philosophic des Rechts (1821), which claimed that the highest form of freedom resided in the (Prussian) state, since it constituted the perfect

Notes to pages 95-107 279

23

24 25 26

embodiment of individual aspirations. As Craig points out, Hegel's philosophy was highly influential in Germany's desire for unification and conception of a new national spirit (Craig 1978, 47-9). Beethoven does double duty for Mann. In addition to the sociohistorical analysis Mann borrows from Adorno, Beethoven links up with Mann's mythic interpretation, for his music is known for 'the quality of daemonic energy' (Grout 1960, 474). Adorno's reading of tonal music clearly reflects his critique of Hegel's identity thesis. Adorno points out that the symbolic reason for there not being a third movement was Mann's own idea. This statement anticipates Leverkiihn's echo of Christ in Gethsemane at the time of his breakdown at the end of the novel (p. 648).

Chapter 3: Fascist Undercurrents 1 It may at first glance appear strange that I should choose to approach Doctor Faustus through the lens of Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of metaphysics. On closer inspection, though, it may appear almost too obvious that Mann's reproduction of volkish ideas can be regarded as an extreme example of the kind of investment in myths of immediacy and authenticity that Derrida targets, especially in the writings he published in the late 1960s. I want to revisit these early Derridean arguments not only because they highlight one aspect of Mann's treatment of fascism but also because, in the literary field, the critique of metaphysics has been too glibly passed over in favour of the pursuit of indeterminacies and a turn to cultural materialist approaches. There now attaches to Derrida's early texts a sense of the 'obvious' and the 'outmoded.' But Mann's dramatization of neo-Romantic aspirations imposes a reconsideration of Derrida's analysis of the violence concealed in appeals to innocent beginnings that were meant to reverse in volkish rhetoric a history of degeneration. Not unlike Mann, Derrida has most consistently been accused of writing from an ahistorical and abstract perspective that ignores the real material conditions under which human beings exist and labour. Although Derrida has more recently responded to these accusations by dealing with historically specific issues, it is rather obvious that he remains more at ease with theoretical speculations in a more philosophical register. Many cultural materialists consider themselves going not so much 'against' as 'beyond' Derrida; they see themselves giving concrete shape to Derrida's merely 'abstract' disruptions of powerful discursive systems, and they advocate

280 Notes to pages 110-38

2

3

4

5 6 7

8 9

10

developing and implementing his implicitly political agendas. Instead of aiming to go beyond Derrida, I propose to take a second serious look at the deconstruction of metaphysics but this time in the historically concrete context of German National Socialism. His brother and sister were expelled earlier, between 1940 and 1941. Jacques Derrida was allowed to stay in school longer because the Lycee de Ben Aknoun allowed a small quota of Jewish students. Later he tells us again, 'then expulsion from school and from Frenchness' (Bennington and Derrida 1993,248). Referring to the school incident and a brief spell of political imprisonment in Prague, he comments: 'I see the film of my whole life, henceforth, ten years after my birth, and for ten years now, framed by two sets of bars, too [sic] heavy, metal interdictions, the expulsion and the incarceration, out of school and into prison, that's what I return to every day, that's what I'm becoming, that's what I was, that's where I write' (Bennington and Derrida 1993,293). Bennington comments that the early 1940s had a profound effect on Derrida: 'No doubt these are the years during which the singular character of J.D.'s "belonging" to Judaism is imprinted on him: wound, certainly, painful and practiced sensitivity to antisemitism and any racism, "raw" response to xenophobia, but also impatience with gregarious identification, with the militancy of belonging in general, even if it is Jewish' (Bennington and Derrida, 326-7). The text of Circumfession includes many italicized passages; unless otherwise indicated, italics in this text will from now on only be indicated if they are my addition. Derrida has repeatedly and at great length confronted Hegel's philosophical system, most notably in+6++ Breisacher's ambivalence captures a characteristic that commentators attribute to Hitler; there seems to be general agreement that Hitler was partly convinced of the validity of his volkish rhetoric and partly inclined to exploit its appeal in his cynical drive for power. This warning against reducing complexity to frozen ideological positions remains timely in our own postmodern debates. Along the same lines, I will be arguing in the last chapter that the volkish appeal to mythic social bonds acts as a smokescreen for the total control of society under Hitler's totalitarian regime. We will see that the same applies to the devil Leverkuhn 'encounters' in a scene whose significance is underlined by its position at the exact centre of the novel.

Notes to pages 138-76 281 11 In Goethe's play, Faust's salvation is quite unambiguously affirmed, whereas in Mann's novel, the question of Leverkiihn's ultimate fate remains highly ambiguous. It is this difference which leads critics to interpret the later Faust as the 'taking back' of the earlier one. 12 As Bauman points out,''Kristallnacht was the only large-scale pogrom that occurred on the streets of German towns throughout the duration of the Holocaust' (Bauman 1991, 89). 13 In the early scene of Jonathan Leverkiihn's scientific experiments in chapter 3, Mann already dramatizes the instability of opposites. This scene, written in early 1943, has clear affinities with The Dialectic of Enlightenment to be published a year later (1944) by Horkheimer and Adorno. 14 This point will feature prominently in the last chapter of this study. 15 We may want to recall that volkish ideologues legitimate their ideas with frequent references to Diirer. 16 It is interesting to note that the painter Paul Klee produced in 1923, around the same time as Schonberg developed his twelve-tone system, a series of paintings which he called 'Magische Quadrate' (magic squares). Some of these, like Farbsteigerung vom Statischen ins Dynamische (Intensification of Colour from the Static to the Dynamic) or Rhythmisches (Rhythms), allude to musical motifs. Chapter 4: Breakthrough into Atonality (or Postmodernism) 1 My discussion of postmodernism does not attempt to cover all aspects and possible positions in this complex and highly contested theoretical arena. Jameson occupies such a central position in my treatment of postmodernism because his methodology and pessimistic attitude are marked by the influence of Adorno's cultural materialism. 2 Mann gives some broad hints to help us understand the interview as Leverkiihn's conversation with himself. Early in the scene, Leverkuhn says: 'You say nothing save things that are in me and come out of me but not out of you' (Mann 1968, 218). Commenting on the devil's audacity in addressing him with the familiar Du, Leverkuhn complains: '"After all I say 'thou' only to myself, which of likelihood explains why you do'" (Mann 1968, 220-1). Later on, he reminds the devil that 'you are but a bauling before my eyes' (Mann 1968,228). And, finally, the devil himself points out: "'What serves it to ask whether I really am? Is not 'really' what works, is not truth experience and feeling?'" (Mann 1968, 235). 3 It is, of course, Nietzsche who is a significant precursor of postmodern

282 Notes to pages 188-99 relativism and who functions as a model for Leverkiihn. The list of primarily French theorists indebted to Nietzsche's epistemological scepticism notably includes Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze. At the same time, it is well known that the scene of Leverkiihn's visit to a brothel, for instance, is based on an episode in Nietzsche's own life. Nietzsche is then a pivotal figure in the connection between Mann's novel and postmodern theory. Chapter 5: Fascism and Atonality (or Postmodern Play) 1 This reference is to an often discussed footnote in Benjamin's famous essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,' which will be alluded to in more detail later in this chapter. 2 We will see that Arendt also stresses the reduction of the Volk to the 'masses.' 3 Zeitblom's ineffectiveness is generally seen as Mann's contention that liberalism was too weak to oppose Hitler, a point confirmed by Bloch, who tells us that in 'the face of this undeniable seduction [of Nazism], liberalism (which is no longer useful to capital) naturally fades particularly easily' (Bloch 1990, 93). 4 Leverkiihn's whole life is, of course, a 'quotation' of the Faust chapbook; his life can be traced to an original so that the past determines the present. A rather different kind of 'quotation' appears in his nephew's nickname, Echo, where the allusion is to a copy without original (simulacrum). 5 The refined listener 'must have been ravished by this self-centred and completely cool esoteric; but which now, as esoteric, in the spirit of the piece in every way mocked and parodistically exaggerated itself (Mann 1968, 211). 6 This quotation is, of course, a self-quotation on Mann's part in that this motif appears in his own earlier novel Buddenbrooks. 7 In "The Lament of Doctor Faustus,' Leverkiihn will in fact escape from parody, but with catastrophic consequences. 8 Although Mann owes his depictions of atonal music to Adorno, he tends to transcribe the more rigorous analyses of Philosophy of Modern Music into vaguer psychological and mythical registers. He thereby often stops short of Adorno's more sustained critique of the sociohistorical conditions of late capitalism. Zeitblom's explicit reactions to the emphasis on difference in Leverkuhn's affirmation of sceptical relativism show that Mann was predominantly perturbed by the disorientation and loss of rational control resulting from chaotic or 'playful' convergences and reconfigurations. But the description of Leverkiihn's music nevertheless reproduces Adorno's

Notes to pages 208-56 283

9

10

11 12

anxieties, which seem more focused on the destruction of meaning, the paralysing consequences of indifference, and the elimination of the subject. In spite of differences in emphasis, the novel and the treatise on music anticipate Jameson's critique of postmodernism. In his analysis of Hitler, Bullock stresses that one of Hitler's 'most habitual devices' was to 'place himself on the defensive, to accuse those who opposed or obstructed him of aggression and malice, and to pass rapidly from a tone of outraged innocence to the full thunders of moral indignation' (Bullock 1962, 376). His tactics of persuasion and intimidation worked so well that only ninety-four Socialists voted against the dangerous 'Enabling Act,' which, passing on 23 March 1933, effectively confirmed Hitler as dictator. In one of Hegel's famous lectures at the University of Berlin, he countered the 'objection that the activity of such individuals frequently flies in the face of morality, and involves great sufferings for others,' by replying that '[m]oral aims which are irrelevant must not be brought into collision with world-historical deeds and their accomplishment' (quoted in Bullock 1962, 384). See Bloch 1990, 57-8 for an extended analysis of Hitler's appropriation of the term Third Reich.' According to Bloch, it is the aesthetic technique of montage which best reflects this moment in time: Tarts no longer fit together, have become soluble, can be mounted in a new way' (Bloch 1990, 202).

Chapter 6: Decentred Totalities 1 Adorno uses the term 'modern' for 'avant-garde' music; from my postmodern perspective, Adorno's 'modern' is in fact Jameson's 'postmodern.' 2 See Marx and Engels 1970, 47. 3 Adorno suggests rather ominously that Brahms enforces ('forcing') the synthesis of 'the lyric intermezzo and academic structure' (Adorno 1973, 57). 4 As Craig points out, Hitler's two four-year plans were designed to bring down unemployment and to support the rearmament effort required by his foreign policy. 5 To keep production going, Goering instituted the death sentence for economic sabotage and made 'the whole Jewish community responsible for all damage to the economy by single acts of sabotage' (Craig 1978, 613). 6 Roehm had openly opposed Hitler with calls for a permanent (socialist) revolution; after the murder of this influential rival, the Fiihrer persuaded

284 Notes to pages 257-68

7 8 9

10

the grateful armed forces to accept him as their Field Marshal. In a fateful move, the army swore an oath of allegiance which was later to impede their ability to deal with the SS, a far more formidable rival than the SA. We may recall that Derrida lost his French citizenship because of his Jewish background. Under the guise of purging the civil service of Jews, employees had to prove their Aryan descent. Arendt is here targeting Adorno's own collaborative work, Studies in the Authoritarian Personality (1950), a text that experts on Adorno's work consider to be atypical and forced on him by the empiricist orientation of the Research Institute while it was located at Princeton. I would argue that the more significant commentary on Nazism appears in Adorno's other theoretical studies. Adorno is mentioned only in one footnote.

WORKS CITED

Adorno, Theodor W. 1967.++++++Translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. - 1972. 'Einleitung zum "Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie."' In Soziologische Schriften I, edited by R. Tiedemann. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. - 1973. Philosophy of Modern Music. Translated by Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster. New York: Seabury Press. - 1984. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by C. Lenhardt. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul. - 1991.++++++++++++++++++++6th ed. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. - 1992a. 'Commitment.' In+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ edited by R. Tiedemann. New York: Columbia University Press. - 1992b. Toward a Portrait of Thomas Mann.' In+Theodor W. Adorno: Notes t Literature, vol. 2, edited by R. Tiedemann. New York: Columbia University Press. - 1993. Hegel: Three Studies. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1973.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++New York: H Brace Aschheim, Steven E. 1992.The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990. Berkeley: University of California Press. Baeumler, Alfred, ed. 1922. Hegels Aesthetik. Munich: C.H. Beck. Baillie, J.B. 1967. Translator's Introduction.' In G.W.F.+Hegel: The Phenomenology of Mind, edited by G. Lichtheim. New York: Harper and Row. Barthes, Roland. 1986. 'Death of the Author.' In The Rustle of Language, edited by F. Wahl. New York: Hill and Wang.

286 Works Cited Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1991.+++++++++++++++++++++Ithaca: Cornell University Press. - 1993.+++++++++++++Oxford: Blackwell. Baynes, Norman H. 1969. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler April 1922-August 1939. New York: Howard Fetig. Benhabib, Seyla. 1986.+Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory.+New York: Columbia University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1968. 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.' In+++++++++++edited by W. Benjamin. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Bennington, Geoffrey, and Jacques Derrida. 1993. Jacques Derrida. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Berman, Marshall. 1988. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Penguin. Berman, Russell A. 1986.+The Rise of the Modern German Novel: Crisis and Charisma.+Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press Bloch, Ernst. 1990.++++++++++++++++Berkeley: University of California Press. Boehlich, Walter. 1976. 'Zu spat und zu wenig: Thomas Mann und die Politik.' Text und Kritik,+edited by Heinz Ludwig Arnold (special issue on Thoma Mann): 45-60. Briner, Andres. 1958. 'Wahrheit und Dichtung um J.C. Beissel.' Revue Musicale Suisse+98 (10): 365-9 Buck-Morss, Susan. 1977. The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute.+Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Pres Bullock, Alan. 1962. Hitler: A Study in Tyranny. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Carroll, David. 1995. French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture.+Princeton: Princeton University Press Cassirer, Ernst. 1981. Kant's Life and Thought. Translated by James Haden. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Craig, Gordon A. 1978. Germany 1866-1945. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Culler, Jonathan. 1982. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, de Man, Paul. 1979. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. OfGrammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Works Cited 287 - 1981. Positions. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. - 1982a. The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel's Semiology.' In Margins of Philosophy, edited by J. Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. - 1982b. 'Signature Event Context.' In Margins of Philosophy, edited by J. Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. - 1982c. 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.' In The Structuralist Controversy,+edited by R.M.E. Donato. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. - 1982d. 'White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy.' In Margins of Philosophy,+edited by J. Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Dews, Peter. 1987.+Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and th Claims of Critical Theory. London and New York: Verso. Docherty, Thomas. 1993. 'Postmodernism: An Introduction.' In+Postmodernism A Reader,+edited by T. Docherty. New York: Columbia University Press Dorr, Hansjorg. 1983. 'Thomas Mann und Adorno: Ein Beitrag zur Entstehung des Doktor Faustus.' In Thomas Manns Dr. Faustus und die Wirkung, edited by R. Wolff. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag. During, Simon. 1993. 'Postmodernism or Post-Colonialism Today.' In Postmodernism: A Reader,+edited by T. Docherty. New York: Columbia Uni versity Press. Eagleton, Terry. 1996.++++++++++++++++++++++Oxford: Blackwell. Faesi, Robert. 1955. Thomas Mann: Ein Meister der Erzahlkunst. Zurich: Atlantis Verlag. Feingold, Henry L. 1983. 'How Unique Is the Holocaust?' In Genocide: Critical Issues of the Holocaust, edited by A.G.D. Landes. Los Angeles: Simon Wiesenthal Centre. Foucault, Michel. 1979.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ by Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House. Goldman, Harvey. 1992. Politics, Death, and the Devil: Self and Power in Max Weber and Thomas Mann. Berkeley: University of California Press. Graff, Gerald. 1979. Literature against Itself. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Greene, Nathanael, ed. 1968.+++++++++++++++++New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. Grout, Donald Jay. 1960. A History of Western Music. New York: W.W Norton. Hassan, Ihab. 1993. Toward a Concept of Postmodernism.' In+Postmodernism A Reader, edited by T. Docherty. New York: Columbia University Press. Hegel, G.W.F. 1931. The Phenomenology of Mind. Translated by J.B. Baillie. London: Allen and Unwin.

288 Works Cited Hewitt, Andrew. 1993. Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the AvantGarde. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hobbes, Thomas. 1997. Leviathan. Edited by R. Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hoffer, Charles R. 1967.++++++++++++++++++++Belmont: Wadsworth. Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. 1995. Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 1990. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum Publishing. Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York and London: Routledge. Huyssen, Andreas. 1993. The Search for Tradition.' In+Postmodernism: Reader,+edited by T. Docherty. New York: Columbia University Press Jameson, Fredric. 1971. Marxism and Form: T.W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Block, Georg Lukdcs, Jean-Paul Sartre.+Princeton Princeton University Press. - 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. - 1990. Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic. London: Verso. - 1991.++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Durham University Press. - 1993. 'Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.' In Postmodernism: A Reader,edited by T. Docherty. New York: Columbia University Press. Jarman, Thomas L. 1956.++++++++++++++++++++++++New York: New York University Press. - 1968. The Nazi Revolution.' In Fascism: An Anthology, edited by N. Greene. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. Jarvis, Simon. 1998.++++++++++++++++++++++New York: Routledge. Jay, Martin. 1984. Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukdcs to Habermas.+Berkeley: University of California Press Jendreiek, Helmut. 1977. Thomas Mann: Der demokratische Roman. Diisseldorf: August Bagel Verlag. Jones, Gaynor G. 1980. 'Hermann Kretzschmar.' In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians,+edited by S. Sadie. London: Macmillan. Kershaw, Ian. 1998. Hitler: 1889-1936 - Hubris. London: Penguin. Kleist, Heinrich v. 1961. 'Uber das Marionettentheater.' In Das Erdbeben von Chili: Erzahlungen und Prosastucke,+edited by H. v. Kleist. Stuttgart: Reclam Klemperer, Victor. 1999. / Witt Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 19421945. Translated by Martin Chalmers. New York: Random House.

Works Cited 289 Kojeve, Alexandra. 1969. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Translated by James H. Nichols, Jr. New York: Basic Books. Kren, George M.., and Leon Rappoport. 1980. The Holocaust and the Crisis of Human Behaviour. New York: Holmes and Meier. Kretzschmar, Hermann. 1888. Fuhrer durch den Konzertsaal. Leipzig. Kurzke, Hermann. 1985.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck. Lagarde, Paul de. 1913.+Deutscher Glaube, Deutsches Vaterland, Deutsche Bildung. Jena: Eugen Diederichs. Lesser, Jonas. 1951. "Thomas Manns Doktor Faustus und Theodor Adornos Philosophic der neuen Musik.' Unpublished. Thomas-Mann-Archiv, Zurich. Lukacs, Georg. 1964a. Essays on Thomas Mann. Translated by Stanley Mitchell. New York: Grosset and Dunlap. - 1964b. 'The Ideology of Modernism/ In Realism in Our Time, edited by G. Lukacs. New York: Harper and Row. Lyotard, Jean-Franc.ois. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. - 1993. The Postmodern Explained. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Mann, Thomas. 1949. Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus: Roman eines Romans. Frankfurt: Bermann-Fischer. - 1960. 'Freud und die Zukunft.' In Gesammelte Werke. Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag. - 1961.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. - 1968.+++++++++++Translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter. Harmondsworth: Penguin. - 1977. 'Deutschland und die Deutschen.' In Thomas Mann Essays, edited by H. Kurzke. Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag. - 1982. Thomas Mann: Diaries 1918-1939. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. Edited by H. Kesten. New York: Harry N. Abrams. - 1983. Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen. Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag. - 1990. Doktor Faustus. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer. - 1997. Doctor Faustus. Translated by John E. Woods. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Marcuse, Herbert. 1960.+Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. Boston: Beacon Press. Marx, Karl. 1978. 'The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof.' In The Marx and Engels Reader, edited by R.C. Tucker. New York: W.W. Norton.

290 Works Cited Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1970. The German Ideology. Translated by CJ. Arthur. New York: International Publishers. McGowan, John. 1991.+++++++++++++++++++++Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Mosse, George L. 1964. The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Nolte, Ernst. 1968. 'Practice as Fulfillment.' In+++++++++++++++++edited by N. Greene. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. - 1984. 'Vierzig Jahre iiber den Faschismus.' In Theorien tiber den Faschismus, edited by E. Nolte. Konigsberg: Athenaum Verlag. Norris, Christopher. 1993.+++++++++++++++++++++++++Oxford, ++++ Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell. Paddison, Max. 1993. Adorno's Aesthetics of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Potter, Pamela M. 1998. Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler's Reich.+New Haven and London: Yal University Press. Rauschning, Hermann. 1939. The Revolution of Nihilism. New York: Alliance Books. - 1968. "The Revolution of Nihilism.' In+++++++++++++++edited by N. Greene. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. Roberts, David. 1991. Art and Enlightenment: Aesthetic Theory after Adorno. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Robertson, Ritchie. 1993. 'Accounting for History: Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus.' In The German Novel in the Twentieth Century: Beyond Realism, edited by D. Midgley. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1966. Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill. Schafer, Michael. 1994. Die' Rationalitat'des Nationalsozialismus: Zur Kritik philosophischer Faschismustheorien am Beispiel der Kritischen Theorie. Weinheim: Beltz Athenaum Verlag. Schorske, Carl E. 1981. Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture. New York: Vintage Books (Random House). Shirer, William L. 1990. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. New York: Touchstone. Sontag, Susan. 1976. 'Fascinating Fascism.' In+Movies and Methods: An Anthology,+edited by B. Nichols. Berkeley: University of California Press. Spengler, Oswald. 1926. The Decline of the West: Form and Actuality. Translated by Charles Francis Atkinson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Works Cited 291 Starke, Margot. 1994. The Bank Clerk.' In The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, edited by M.J. Anton Kayes and Edward Dimendberg. Berkeley: University of California Press. Taylor, Charles. 1975.+++++Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tiedemann, Rolf, ed. 1993. Beethoven. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. von Delius, Rudolf, ed. 1918. Hegel in seinen Briefen. Munich: Ruprecht Presse. Walser, Martin. 1976. 'Ironie als hochstes Lebensmittel oder: Lebensmittel der Hochsten.' Text und Kritik, edited by Heinz Ludwig Arnold (special issue on Thomas Mann): 5-26. Wellmer, Albrecht. 1993.+The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism.+Translated by David Midgley. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Witkin, Robert W. 1998. Adorno on Music. London and New York: Routledge. Wolin, Richard. 1994. Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption. Berkeley: University of California Press. Zizek, Slavoj. 1993. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham: Duke University Press. Zuidervaart, Lambert. 1991. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

This page intentionally left blank

INDEX

administrative: apparatus, xi, 56, 76, 136,192,197, 218, 228, 250-1, 253-^, 257-8, 261, 265; machine, 205, 253; order, 179.+See also bureaucracy Adorno, Theodor W., xi, 5-6,11, 13, 55, 57-71, 75-6, 80-1, 85-93, 95-8,102,107-9,114,118,128-38, 143-6,148-9,151,155-9,161,163, 166-70,177-80, 184-6,193,195-6, 198-205, 209, 217-22, 228-33, 23543, 245-7, 249-52, 262, 267-71, 273nl(ch. 1), 277nn4, 6, 279nn23-5, 281nl, 283nnl, 3, 284nn9-10; Hegel, 86-7, 89-90, 278nl7; Philosophy of Modern Music,+x, 67-8, 97-8,105, 168,178-9, 199-200, 202-4, 21920, 224-5, 227, 230-3, 235-41, 277n2, 282n8, 283n3. See also breakthrough; dialectic; Frankfurt School; Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno; negation aesthetic, x, 3, 6,12, 22, 30,33,46,48, 54, 57-8, 60, 62, 69, 72-4, 92,97, 147,159,163,165,168,173,177-8, 180,182,184,188,194-5, 200, 203,

205, 214, 218, 222, 226-7, 238, 240, 245, 256, 262, 270-1, 277n9, 283nl2; appeal, 190, 215, 268; aspirations, 29, 73,158,166,170; depth, 192; experiments, ix, 178, 184; form, ix, 5, 65,158,198, 236; innovation, 103,150,155,183-4, 231, 250; theory, 66, 67, 74,149, 169,239. See also aestheticism; art; breakthrough; music aestheticism (aesthetics), 29-30, 66, 156,195, 200, 219, 236, 266-8, 270. See also aesthetic ahistorical, 20-1, 27, 29, 70, 74,108, 114, 202, 244, 249, 279nl alienation (alienated), 14, 20, 27, 31, 34-5, 47-8, 66, 76-7, 86, 95, 98100,114,131,133,135,168,190, 200-1, 220-1, 227, 236, 238, 240-1, 247, 277nl3 anarchy, 160,181, 206, 212, 224-5, 229. See also chaos anti-foundational, 13, 54, 69, 80,117, 146. See also foundations anti-intellectualism, 30,43,190 anti-Semitism (anti-Semitic), 11,14,

294 Index 49, 64,110,142,209-10,212,256, 257-8,280n4, 275-6nl6, 280n4. See also+Jews apolitical, 28-30,46,55, 58, 70,108, 188,190, 249 archaic, 52-3,131-2,145,149,167, 223,276nl6. See also pre-modern; primitivism Arendt, Hannah, 65,196-7,212,216, 227-8, 253-5, 258, 261-3, 265-6, 282n2, 284n9 art, 18, 21-3,29,47-8, 52, 59, 62, 659, 72, 74, 90, 98,103,120-2,149, 151,156,161,166-8,174,180,190, 193-4,197-8, 200-1, 203, 218-20, 230, 234-7, 243,245-6, 250, 256-7, 268,276nl7. See also aesthetic; aestheticism; music artificiality (artificial), 23, 33-4, 50-1, 72-4, 94,103-4,115-16,119-21, 146,161,174,187,193-4,210 Arzt, Mattaus, 37, 39-41 asceticism (ascetic), 29,156,224 Aschheim, Steven E., 210 atavism (atavistic), x, 12,34,39,42, 49,107-8,142, 217. See also archaic;+barbarism; primitive atomization (atomistic, atomized), 15,18-19, 27, 37,196-7, 229-30, 232-3,238,247,254-5,262-3,265, 270 Aufhebung,+++++++++See also Hegel; sublation authenticity (authentic), 21-2,24, 27, 31, 33-4, 39-42,44-^8, 65,107-8, 114,116,119,122,125-6,130,161, 167,175,187,190,192,194,197, 200, 220, 228,243, 279nl. See also spontaneity authoritarianism (authoritarian),

14-15,19,46, 64,88,115,213, 218, 223-4,227-9,262.++++++totali tarianism autonomy, 35-7,47-8, 65, 77, 79,82, 88, 97-8,100-1,103,201, 210,226, 228, 230,232,238, 250,254,261, 263,269. See also freedom avant-garde, xi, 6, 67,155-8,161, 165,178, 209,222, 266-71,277n9, 283nl.++++++music Baeumler, Alfred, 71 Baillie, J.B., 83, 89 barbarism (barbaric), x, 3, 7-8,1213, 27, 30, 39,42,47-8,51,53-4, 58-9,106,127,129,132,134,142, 145,151,180,183,188, 257,267. See also+atavism; primitivism Barthes, Roland, 68, 209,211 Baudrillard, Jean, 150,185,204, 215-16, 229, 265-7 Bauman, Zygmunt, xi, 4-6,13,45, 56,108-9,128-9,136-^8,141-4, 155,214, 217,238-9,250,259, 261, 264, 281nl2 Baynes, Norman H., 32,34,274nl2 Beethoven, Ludwig van, x, 5,47, 56-8, 60, 63-4, 70-1, 74-6, 90-3, 95-103,106,108,137,165,167-9, 181,187, 201,224, 230,237, 242, 244, 279n23 Beissel, Johann Conrad, 47-8,104-5, 223-6, 278nl4 Benhabib, Seyla, 82,86,149 Benjamin, Walter, 7,188,190-1,201, 234, 268,270,282nl Bennington, Geoffrey, and Jacques Derrida, 109-14, 280rm3-5. See also Derrida, Jacques Berg, Alban, 177,179,203

Index 295 Herman, Marshall, 7,138-41 Berman, Russell A., 20-2 Bismarck, Otto von, 14-15,17, 21, 28, 211, 224, 273n4 Bloch, Ernst, 4,12-13, 23,28-9, 31-2, 34, 39-41,43, 63-4,138,185-6, 188, 211-13, 274nl3, 276n21, 282n3, 283nnll, 12 Boehlich, Walter, 21 bourgeoisie (bourgeois), 7,12-13, 20-3, 28, 30, 33,48, 53, 59, 63-5, 67, 70, 83, 86-7, 92-3, 95-6,100, 102,129-30,135, 156,159,161, 166,168-9,178,182, 194, 201, 210, 220, 227, 229-30, 235-6, 238, 241-2 Brahms, Johannes, 168, 231, 283n3 breakthrough, x-xi, 53, 57, 71, 72, 130,138,156,157,165,166,169, 183,184,186,187,193, 201, 219, 223, 226, 229, 235, 241, 243-4, 249-50.+++++++aesthetic Breisacher, Chaim, 30, 33, 36, 38-9, 42, 45-7, 49-54, 58, 99,114,117-18, 130,132,135,186, 206, 244, 2756nl6, 280n7 bricoleur, 187, 205, 209-12 Briner, Andres, 104-5 Briining, Heinrich, 18-19 Buck-Morss, Susan, 65 Bullock, Alan, 14,189, 208, 210-15, 283n9-10 bureaucracy (bureaucratic), 136-7, 142-3, 214, 239, 251, 257, 261. See also administrative capitalism (capitalist), 4,12-13,16, 18, 20-2, 26-7, 59-60, 63-7, 75, 86-7, 92, 95-6, 98,100,129-33, 135,138,141,146,151,156,158-9, 161-3,166-8,183,185-6,188,

193-7,199, 202, 204-5, 218-21, 227, 232-3, 235^0, 242-4, 249-50, 255, 262, 266, 268, 278nl7, 282nn3, 8. See also commodity; Marxism; reification Carroll, David, 22, 268 Cassirer, Ernst, 234 chaos, 14,17, 39,104,177,181,188, 199, 206, 215, 218, 225, 234, 247. See also anarchy civilization (civilized), ix, 3,6,23-7, 31,33^, 40,43,45,48, 52^, 56, 115,117-18,121-3,125,128,132, 134,136,143,149,160-1,175,188, 276nl8 commodity (commodified), 66-7, 131,138,183,195,198, 218, 221, 238^0, 244, 266.++++++capitalism;+Marxism; reification concentration camps, 141,260, 264-5, 274nl. See also death camps conservatism (conservative), 13, 15-16,18,20-2, 26-7, 32, 34, 49, 50, 51, 59-60, 75, 78, 83, 85, 88-9, 121-2,145,169, 208, 228, 244 contradiction, 6,13-14, 29, 38, 59, 64, 66-7, 76-8, 80-1, 85-7, 90, 92,117, 119-22,132,146-7,163,170,173, 182,186,188,198, 204, 217, 219, 220-2, 226, 232, 240, 248 Craig, Gordon A., 15,17-20, 22, 206-8, 251, 253-8, 273n4, 274n4, 279n22, 283n4 Culler, Jonathan, 173 cult, 33-4, 47-8, 52-3, 86, 96,118, 190, 276nl8 de Man, Paul, 110,118-19 death camps, 3-5, 7, 57, 76,108,136, 141,143, 207, 214, 217, 239, 241,

296 Index 244,250,261,263^. See also concentration camps decentring (decentred), 163,170, 172,177,183,187,197, 200-1, 212, 218,221, 228-9,238,241, 247, 2501,261-3, 265,269 deconstruction, x, 5,57-9,69-70, 76, 81, 92, 96,103,106-9,113-14,116, 124,127-8,130-1,155,158,163, 169,177,194, 235, 242-3, 248-9, 250,265, 279nl, 280nl. See also demystification; Derrida; freeplay democracy (democratic), 13-14,16, 19-21, 23-4,26-30, 37-8, 56,115, 159,165,179-60,182,192, 208, 222, 226-9, 232, 243,245, 247, 252, 274nlO; anti-democratic, 16, 23; democratization, 14, 24,183,192, 225 demonic, 30,51-3, 61,129,138,144, 146,151,166-7,169,179,181-2, 210, 215,223,279n23. See also devil demystification, 57,67, 70,102,109, 115,116,130-1,134,145,157,1689,177-8,182,184, 218,270. See also deconstruction; Derrida, Jacques Derrida, Jacques, xi, 5,36, 57, 70, 75, 83, 94,107-31,143,146,155,158, 163-4,169-75,177,182,193, 20911, 231, 247-50, 270, 276nl8, 279nl, 280nnl, 2,4, 6,282n3(ch. 4), 284n7; OfGrammatology, 11417,119-27,174-5. See also Bennington, Geoffrey, and Jacques Derrida; deconstruction; demystification;+freeplay determinism, 92,125,136,165,171, 229, 231, 233-4, 237, 247 Deutschlin, Konrad, 34, 37, 39^1, 47-8,186

devil, xi, 6-7, 52-3,61, 63, 73,138-9, 141,149,165-9,193,195, 200,223, 230-1, 245, 278nl6, 280nlO, 281n2. See+alsodemonic Dews, Peter, 70,157,248 dialectic(s) (dialectical), 6,12,36, 51, 55, 58,65-6, 69-76, 78-87, 89,93, 96-8,101,105-6,108,122,130, 132-3,138-9,144-6,150-1,156, 159-62,165,169-70,175,195,197, 202-3, 205-6, 211, 217-18, 221-3, 225-6,230-1, 240, 243-5, 249, 26870; historical, 78, 82-6,106; logic, 156, 277nl3,278nl3; method, 58, 87; ontological, 78, 83, 84; process, 71,82,87,160, reversals, 96,146; sublation, 75; undialectical, 83, 86. See also+Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno disciplinary, 248,255, 257-8, 260, 263-5 Docherty, Thomas, 163 dominant, 11,57,64,67, 70, 93,104, 161-2,164,193-5, 204, 209, 212, 217, 248 domination (dominance), 49, 52, 65, 79, 87-8,105,109,124-5,130-6, 149,156-7,160-1,164,166,169, 178,180,196, 210-13, 215, 223-5, 229-30, 232-3, 236-8, 241, 248, 252, 254-5, 262-4 Dorr, Hansjorg, 60-1 duplication, 79,192,251^, 258,264. See also+Gleichschaltung Diirer, Albrecht, 150, 281nl5 During, Simon, 158 Eagleton, Terry, 70 Ebert, Friedrich, 17,207

Index 297 Eisner, Kurt, 26, 274n9 emancipation (emancipatory), 3-4, 7, 21, 25, 28, 46, 52-3, 75, 93,1001,115,128,145,149,157,159-60, 162,164-6,168-9,177-80,183-5, 192-3, 209, 211, 218, 221, 223-4, 229, 244, 247, 249, 269-70.+See als freedom; liberation Enlightenment (enlightened), 4-5, 7, 21-2, 30, 35, 45-7, 52-3, 55-7, 69, 76-7, 84, 93,101,106,108-9,11415,121,128-30,132^, 138-40, 143-5,148-51,155,182, 211, 222, 265, 269-70, 278nl3. See also Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno Faesi, Robert, 28 fascism (fascist), ix-xi, 3-7,11-14, 21-2, 27, 29-32, 34, 42, 45-6, 49, 52-9,61,63-5, 69, 71, 73-6,80, 81,86, 89,91,97,99,103-4,10710,113-14,116-18,120,123,125, 128-30,132,135-6,138-9,143^, 155-60,165-8,178,183-6,189-90, 195-7, 202, 217-18, 221, 226-8, 235, 238-43, 245, 250, 262-3, 2668, 270-1, 273n3, 275-6nl6, 277n7, 279nl.++++++genocide; Hitler, Adolf; Holocaust; National Socialism;+Nazis Faust (Faustian), 3-5, 7-8, 33, 61, 64, 73,128-9,137-41,143,145, 149,176,182, 233, 242, 245-6, 273nl(intro.), 281nll, 282n4 Feingold, Henry L., 137 First World War, 15,24-5, 72-3 Fontane, Theodor, 21-2 Foucault, Michel, 36, 57,141,248, 263-5, 282n3

foundations (foundational), 13,32, 34,40,49, 54, 61, 89,114,117,120, 136,163,171-2,176,182,186, 224, 256.++++++++anti-foundational fragmentation (fragmented), xi, 4, 6, 14,16-18, 200-1, 212, 218, 221-2, 225, 229, 233, 250-1, 254-5, 261, 263, 266-70 Frankfurt School, 63, 65, 69,146,158. See also Adorno, Theodor W.; Horkheimer, Max freedom, 22-3, 35-8,41,46, 50, 72-3, 77-8, 86-8, 90, 93, 95,100-1,135, 159-60,177,179,181,183,199, 208, 222-6, 229-30, 232, 234, 237, 243, 247, 249, 261, 278nnl8, 22. See also autonomy; emancipation; liberation freeplay, 169-73,175, 247-9, 252. See also deconstruction; Derrida, Jacques Freud, Sigmund, 64,149,160-1 Fuhrer, 171,189,196, 206,210, 213, 215, 253-5, 258, 262, 265, 283n6. See also+Hitler, Adolf Geist, 23^, 36, 78, 81-8,106,171, 237. See also Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich genocide, 59,136-7,142-3.+See also fascism; Hitler, Adolf; Holocaust; National Socialism; Nazis George, Stefan, 27, 42 Gestapo, 252, 259. See also SA; SS Gleichschaltung,+192, 217, 250-5, 257-9, 263. See also duplication Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 7, 128-9,137^1,143, 281nll Goldman, Harvey, 246 Graff, Gerald, 249

298 Index Greene, Nathanael, 214, 277n7 Grout, Donald Jay, 93-5, 279n23 harmony (harmonious), 35-6,58, 76-8, 82,108,128,142,165,168, 242, 253. See also music Hassan, Ihab, 177-8 Haydn, Joseph, 97 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, x, 5, 35-6, 56-9, 66, 71-93, 95-6, 98, 105-6,108,114,128-30,132-3,142, 144,149-51,156,159,161,165, 170-1,173,182, 203, 211, 219, 222, 225, 230-1, 237, 242, 244, 269, 276nl, 277nnl2-13, 278nnl3,17, 19-21, 279nn22, 24, 280n6, 283nlO. See also+++++++++dialectic; Geist;+Hegelianism; master-slave; sublation Hegelianism (Hegelian), 58, 65, 70-1, 75, 80-1, 83, 86-7, 90-1, 93, 96, 98, 102,105-8,129,143-5,150,158, 165,169,180,187, 210, 222, 237, 242,278nnl5,17. See also Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Heidegger, Martin, 70 Heine, Heinrich, 44 Herzl, Theodor, 11, 275-6nl6 Hewitt, Andrew, 190-1, 221-2, 262, 267-71 hierarchy (hierarchical), 88, 92-3, 95, 99,105,156,159-60,170-1,176, 179-83, 200, 211, 213, 218, 222-9, 232-3, 238, 242, 247, 250-3, 261, 263 Hitler, Adolf, x-xi, 3-6,11-14,16-20, 25, 27, 29-34, 39-40,42,49, 54, 56, 59, 64-5, 76,107-8,140,142,156, 160,162,165,183-93,196-7, 20517, 219, 225, 227-8, 241, 250-8,

260-3, 265-7, 273n3, 274nl2, 276nl7, 278nnl5,19, 280nn7, 9, 282n3,283nn9,11,4, 6. See also fascism; Fiihrer; genocide; Holocaust;+National Socialism; Nazis Hobbes, Thomas (Hobbesian), 14, 36, 38-9, 46,49,128,143,160, 222, 224, 232 Hoffer, Charles R., 179 Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, 69-70 Holocaust, ix-xi, 3-7,11, 42, 45, 56-7, 59,108,127-9,134,136-7, 141-4,155,157,184, 214, 217, 251, 261, 264, 275nl6, 281nl2. See also genocide; Jews Horkheimer, Max, 63,143,146,151 Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno, 135; Dialectic of Enlightenment,+11, 57, 62,103,109,128-34 137,144-5,149-50, 239, 242, 277n5, 281nl3.++++++Adorno, Theodor W.; Frankfurt School humanism (humanist), 3, 6,11-12, 22, 29-30, 37-8, 40, 48-55, 59, 63, 68, 75, 80, 90-1,165,172,176,181, 195-6, 223, 245, 247 Hutcheon, Linda, 157,177-8,193, 195, 204 Huyssen, Andreas, 157 hyperreality (hyperreal), 150,185, 188,191-2,195-6, 205, 207, 213, 229, 265.+++++++++++hype hyperspace, 204-5, 212, 244, 266. See also hyperreality idealism, German, 59, 71, 73, 75,107, 168, 244 identity thesis, 86, 88-90, 95,108, 142-3,149-50,165,170,187, 203, 269, 279n24

Index 299 ideology (ideological), x-xi, 5-6,1214,20-1, 27-8,31,33,39-40,42-3, 49, 51-2, 55, 57-8, 61-5, 75, 80-1, 86, 88-90, 92, 95,100,107,109, 114-16,118-19,125-7,129,131, 136,150,155-8,163,167,169-70, 188,193,195-7, 204-6, 211-13, 215, 227, 242-3, 248, 256, 266, 268, 273n3, 274nll, 275-6nl6,276nl8, 280n8 indifference, 183,187,197,199, 200, 203-4, 232, 249, 251, 283n8 integration, 40, 46,141, 221, 225, 227, 230, 232-3, 236, 238, 254, 265 irrationalism (irrational), x, 4, 5,1113, 27, 29-30, 34,36, 39, 42, 45,49, 51-2, 56, 58, 74, 84,105-8,128-9, 132,134,136-7, 142-4, 151,155, 166,169,181,187,193, 213-14, 217, 238-41, 259 Jameson, Fredric, 65-6, 69-70, 149,157-8,161-5,169,178,183-6, 188, 207, 209-10, 212, 232, 235-6, 244, 250-1, 269, 274n5, 281nl, 283nn8(ch. 5), l(ch. 6); 'Postmodernism,+or the Cultural Logic of Capitalism,' 161-2,193-5, 200-2, 204-5, 216 Jarman, Thomas L., 207, 216, 252, 254 Jarvis, Simon, 65, 69-70, 91,131-3, 135 Jay, Marin, 4, 66 Jendreiek, Helmut, 29-30, 54-6, 63, 274nlO Jews (Jewish), 3,16, 42-5, 57,109, 110-14,136,141,196, 208, 256-60, 264, 274nl5, 275nl5, 275-6nl6, 278nl5, 280nn2, 4, 283n5, 284nn7-

8. See also anti-Semitism; Jews; race Jones, Gaynor G., 90-1 Kafka, Franz, 254 Kant, Immanuel, 35-6, 71-2, 74, 78, 80,132-3,173, 224, 234, 240 Kershaw, Ian, 20,191 Kierkegaard, S0ren, 46 Klages, Ludwig, 42,131-2 Klee, Paul, 281nl6 Kleist, Heinrich, 71-5,150, 277nll Klemperer, Victor, 259-60, 264 Kojeve, Alexandre, 78-80 Kren, George M, and Leon Rappoport, 142 Kretschmar, Wendell, 47-8,57-60, 63, 71-2, 74, 90-106,108,114,119, 165,187, 276nl7, 278nl4 Kretzschmar, Hermann, 90-1 Kurzke, Hermann, 22 Lacan, Jacques, 70, 80-1,174 Lagarde, Paul de, 31, 37,40-1,46, 274nnl4-15,275-6nl6 Langbehn, Julius, 44 Lesser, Jonas, 277n2 Leverkiihn, Adrian, x-xi, 5-6, 28-30, 32-3, 39, 46-8, 51-1, 57, 60-1, 67, 71-5, 88, 90-2, 96, 98-9,102-6, 109,114,118,122,127,129-30,132, 134,136-8,144-51,156-60,162, 164-70,176-87, 192-5, 199-203, 206-7, 210, 214-15, 217-19, 221-6, 229-36, 241-7, 249-50, 266-9, 271, 274n6, 278nnl6,18, 279n26, 280nlO, 281nnll, 2, 282nn3(ch. 4), 4, 7-8(ch. 5); 'Apocalypsis cum figuris,' 58,159,180-3; Arietta theme, 63,101; The Lament of

300 Index Doctor Faustus/ 165,180,187,192, 218-19, 221, 241, 244-5, 282n7 Leverkiihn, Jonathan, 32, 51-2,109, 144-50,177,181, 281nl3 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 115,122-7, 209-11, 276nl8 liberalism (liberal), x-xi, 6,11-12, 14-18,22, 25, 27-8,31, 33, 37-41, 48-51, 53,55,64, 75, 80,84, 88, 100,113,115,128,135,181,183, 192,195,206,208,223^, 226, 234,252,256,275-6nl6,276n20, 278nl9,282n3; anti-liberal, 11,1416,19-21, 23^, 37,50, 55, 99,1278,188,192 liberation, 37,48, 76,100,105,125, 134,181,183,192, 201, 213, 243. See also+freedom Lukacs, Georg, 48, 66,138,195, 277n8 Luther, Martin, 46,145 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 157,164, 221 magic (magical), 45-6, 51,53, 61, 104,109,130-3,144-6,148-51, 182,214, 237, 239, 266, 270. See also magic square; myth; mythology; superstition magic square, 109,144,150-1, 214, 239, 270, 281nl6 Mandel, Ernest, 161-2 Mann, Heinrich, 23 Mann, Thomas, ix-xi, 4,20-1, 24-6, 42-3,45-7, 55, 67, 76, 80, 85, 88-9, 101,114-16,129-32,135,139,149, 156,170,183,199-201, 206, 208-9, 228,231, 237,246-7, 249, 260,262, 269,271,275-6nl6,277n2,278nl4, 279nn23,25,1,281nnll, 13,2, 282nn3(ch. 4), 3,6,8(ch. 5); Diaries,

25-7,42-3;++++++++++ix, 5-7, 12-13,20-3,27-34,36^1,45-54, 57-65, 68-75,81,90^, 96-100, 102-5,107-9,113,117-18,120, 127,136-8,141,143-8,150-1, 155,157-61,164-9,176-8,180-2, 184-7,192-6,198,202-3,210, 217-19,221-7,229-30,232-5,238, 239- 45,250,267-8,270,274nll, 275-6nl6,278n21,279nl, 281n2, 282n5;+Observations (Betrachtungen),+++++Story of a Nove (Entstehung), 59, 61-2, 65, 70,104, 246, 273nl(intro.), 275-6nl6. See also+Leverkiihn, Adrian; Leverkiihn,+Jonathan; Zeitblom, Serenus Marcuse, Herbert, 63-4, 77, 83, 87, 89, 278nnl9-20 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 221, 267 Marlowe, Christopher, 7 Marx, Karl, 4, 66,160-1,185, 220-1, 238-9, 283n2. See also Marxism Marxism (Marxist), 4-6,12-13, 57, 59-60, 62-5, 67, 69-70, 91,102, 158,185-6, 208, 235, 269, 278nnl7, 19. See also capitalism; commodity; Marx, Karl; reification master-slave, 78, 80-1, 85-6, 89,223, 226, 278nl4; 'master' and 'servant' notes, 104-5.+++++++Hegel, Geo Wilhelm Friedrich; Kojeve, Alexandre materialism (materialist), 5-6,12, 20-2, 55, 57, 62, 65-7, 70, 86-7, 158,185, 202, 210, 279nl, 281nl McGowan, John, 248-50 metaphor (metaphorical), 5-6,11415,141-2,172-5,182,187,190, 220, 244, 250

Index 301 metaphysics (metaphysical), 5, 20, 28, 75, 83, 87, 94,107-9,114,11620,122,127-9,144,170-3,175, 239, 248, 250, 270, 278nl7, 279nl, 280nl Meyer, Conrad Ferdinand, 41 mimicry (mimicking), 146-7,149, 187,193,197, 205, 210, 212, 216, 251-2, 266 modernity (modern), ix, xi, 3-7,1113,18, 20-2, 24, 27-8, 30-1, 33, 35, 37, 39^5, 47-9, 51-3, 55-9, 61, 634, 69-71, 74-6, 88, 92, 97,103-4, 106-8,115,121-6,128-32,134-45, 148-51,155-8,163-70,176-7,180, 183-4,186-8,190,193-5,197, 201, 214-15, 217, 220, 222-3, 232, 237, 239, 242-3, 247, 250, 252, 254, 2567, 263, 265, 267-71,275-6nl6, 277n9, 283nl Mosse, George L., xi, 4-5,12-13, 212, 27-8, 31-4, 37, 40-6, 54-5,108, 118,155,185-6,273n2,274nll, 275nl5, 275-6nl6 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 97 Munch, Edward, 200-1 Munich intellectuals, 21,135,167, 169 music, 4-6,13, 30, 47-8, 51-4, 57, 5963, 65, 67-73, 75, 88, 90-8,100-5, 107,118-22,138,142,147,150-1, 155,157-61,166-9, 177-82,184, 187,189,192,194,198-200, 202-3, 209, 214-15, 218-27, 229-37, 23944, 247, 250, 252, 262-3, 267, 269, 276nl7, 277n9, 278nl4, 279n23, 282n8, 283n8; atonality (atonal), x-xi, 57, 69, 92, 96,122,156-65, 170,176-80,183^, 186,192-3, 199, 203, 220, 229, 236, 247, 267,

282n8; consonance, 181, 220; counterpoint, 94,142,180, 222-7, 239; dissonance, 179,181, 203, 220; form, 6, 46-7,103,118,167, 222; history of, 5-6,47, 55, 57-8, 68, 95-6,105-6,155,158-9,161,168, 203, 218,222, 231; harmony (harmonic),+47, 76, 92-6, 98-101,105, 118-22,161,165,168,170,179-80, 187,199, 224-5, 227, 234-5; homophonic,+105,161; melody, 118-19, 121,180, 224, 227; polyphony (polyphonic), 47, 93-5, 99-100, 105,118,161,178-9, 225; serial, 157,179, 233, 236, 239; theory, ix-x, 4-6,13, 30, 61-2, 71, 90-1, 97,118,155,158,198, 250,267, 274nlO; tonality (tonal), xi, 75-6, 90, 92-3, 95-6,104-7,118,122,142, 155,158-62,165-70,176,179-82, 187,192, 203, 218-19, 222^, 227, 229-30, 232-3, 235-7, 243, 247, 250, 252, 279n24; twelve-tone, xi, 6, 39, 57, 61, 98,138,151,156,15860,162,165-6,169,176,178-80, 183,185, 199, 201-4, 217-21, 2249, 232-44, 246-7, 250, 262-3, 26670,281nl6; variations, 92,179,199, 203, 232-3, 236, 242, 244, 252, 267. See also aesthetic; aestheticism; art; avant-garde; harmony; Leverkiihn,+Adrian; Schonberg, Arnold Musil, Robert, 54 myth (mythical), 22, 27-8, 33, 38,53, 63, 83, 99,103,109,114-15,118, 122,124,128-35,145,148-9,1601,168,189, 210, 213, 215, 219, 242, 256, 274nl3, 276nl7, 279n23,1, 280n9, 282n8. See also magic; mythology; superstition

302 Index mythology (mythological), 99,103, 130,132-3,145. See also myth nation (national), 3,14,22-3, 26-7, 31-3, 37,40,43-5, 56, 72-3,190, 209,213,254,257,266,275-6nl6, 279n22 National Socialism, German, 5-6, 11-14, 33-4,42,45,51, 54-5, 63,65, 74, 76, 89,96,99,107-8,128,135, 151,155-6,158,164,167-8,170, 183,197, 202, 217,244,265,267, 270-1, 278nl9, 280nl.+See also fascism; genocide; Hitler, Adolf; Holocaust; Nazis nationalism (nationalists, nationalistic),+14,15-18,23,25-7,31,37,40, 42-3,48-9, 73,188,208-9,211,266, 275-6nl6 Nazis (Nazism), ix, x, 3-4,11,13-14, 18-19,24,27-8,30,34,41,46,54-7, 59, 64, 76, 90-1,107,109,113,125, 129,136-7,141-2,155,165-6,183, 185-6,188-90,192,196-7, 202, 205, 207-19, 222, 225-8, 241, 250-67, 273n3, 276n20, 278nl5, 282n3, 284n9. See also fascism; Fiihrer; genocide; Hitler, Adolf; Holocaust; National Socialism negation, 66-7, 77,82, 242,244,246, 269 Nietzsche, Friedrich (Nietzschean), 8, 24,29, 35, 53, 60, 68,132,164, 172-3,176,188,193,199,210,224, 247-8, 270, 281n3, 282n3(ch. 4) Nolte, Ernst, 64-5,207-8, 211-12, 254, 277n7 Norris, Christopher, 70,248 nostalgia (nostalgic), 11-13, 28,30, 32,34, 40-2,48,59, 73, 89,100,

107,115,125,127,129-32,135,139, 166,186,188,196, 204, 210, 216, 276n21 Nuremberg, 185,187-92,213, 215 objectivity, 87, 94-100,105-6,220, 223,226,230, 234, 236,238, 249 Odysseus, 128,134-5,137,141,149 organicism (organic), 5,12,20,22, 31, 34,40-1,43,45,47-8, 58, 71, 75-6,91, 93,95-6,108,117,126, 128,142,145-6,148,165-6,170, 182,203, 226, 228,233, 235, 239, 252, 265 origin(s) (original), 22, 31, 33-4, 37-43,45-7,49, 51,54,58, 68, 81, 83, 89,107, 111, 114,117,119-20, 123-5,130,143,148-9,155-6, 160-1,165,170-2,178, 204, 20910, 216, 234, 243, 246, 264; originality,+66,194, 230; originary, 83, 108,114,116-17,120,123,130,172 Paddison, Max, 69 Papen, Franz von, 19 paradox, 53,100,151,166,229, 2323,245, 249,260,263, 270; paradoxical+logic, xi, 49, 51-3,150, 156-7,165,170,174,183, 221 paralysis, 47,113,138, 202-3, 235, 247 parody (parodic), 150,162,169,178, 187,192-5, 202, 210, 250, 266, 282nn5, 7. See also pastiche pastiche, 169,178,192-5,202, 210, 250. See also parody Plato (Platonism), 36,41,126,216 postmodernity (postmodern), x-xi, 3-8,13,55-7, 69-70, 75, 80,106-8, 118,126,155-8,161-5,169,176-8,

Index 303 183-8,191,193,195,197-8, 200-5, 208-9, 212-13, 217-18, 220-1, 2323, 235-6, 241-4, 247-8, 250-1, 26671, 276nl, 277n9, 280n8, 281nnl, 3, 282n3(ch. 4), 283nn8(ch. 5), l(ch. 6); poststructuralism, 70,162-3, 165, 270 Potter, Pamela M, 91 pre-modern, 7,11,42, 52,128,131, 138^10, 237. See also archaic; atavism;+primitivis primitivism (primitive), 32^4, 36, 39, 41-2, 47, 51, 54, 94,104,122,142, 145,160, 225, 267, 276nl7.+See also archaic; atavism; barbarism; premodern progress (progressive), 7,16, 21, 23, 27-8, 30, 37-8, 43, 45, 47, 49-54, 56, 71, 76-7, 80-1, 83, 85-6, 88, 93, 102,104, 115,121,129,140,145, 149-50,168,179,187, 225, 244, 268-70, 278nl3 purges, 251-2, 256-7, 265, 284n8 quotation(s) (quote), 31, 60, 63, 68, 73, 75, 173, 187, 193-5,197, 202-3, 205, 207, 210, 212, 216, 244, 277n3, 282nn4-5 racism (race, racial), 31, 42^1, 64, 91, 142,190, 209, 211, 213, 275-6nl6, 280n4. See also Jews rationalization (rationalized), 4,13, 23, 25, 53, 59, 63^, 73, 84-5, 88, 108,131,133,135-6,141,151,155, 166,169, 221, 235, 237, 239-41, 243, 248, 252, 256. See also reason Rauschning, Hermann, 209, 210-15, 253-5, 258 reason (rational), 4-5,11, 21, 31, 35-

9, 50-3, 56, 58-9, 73-9, 81-5, 87-9, 93,104-9, 111, 120-1,128-37,1416,148-9,151,155,166,171,173, 175,180,187-8, 213-14, 217, 2234, 229, 232, 234-41, 243-4, 250-1, 259, 264, 275-6nl6,278nnl3,19, 282n8; anti-rational, 11,85,106, 122; cunning of, 85,278nl6; instrumental, x, 128-9,133-5,166, 235,239^1; unreason, 85, 240-1, 244. See also rationalization regression (regress, regressive), x, 45, 50-1,53-4, 71,84,88,102,104, 164,187, 223, 244, 257, 268-9 Reichstag, 15-16,18-19, 26, 206-8, 225, 255 reification (reified), 64, 66,129,133, 196,199, 202-3, 244.+See also commodity; Marxism revolution, 13, 25, 27-8, 34, 37-8, 50, 93,138,145,157,164,166,183, 185-6,191,193, 207-9, 211-12, 214, 216, 218, 220, 223, 225, 227-9, 242, 251, 255, 257, 263, 265, 268, 277n8, 283n6 Riefenstahl, Leni, 189-91 Roberts, David, 69 Robertson, Ritschie, 159 Roehm, Ernst, 256, 283n6 Romanticism (neo-Romanticism), x-xi, 4-5,11-13, 27, 30, 32-6, 41-2, 45-7, 54-9, 71, 74, 76-8, 88,107, 118-19,129,136,138,144,155,167, 180,186,196, 205, 224, 226, 230, 234, 274nl3, 275-6nl6, 279nl Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (Rousseauism), 14, 30-1, 33, 35-40, 49, 78, 94,107-8,110,115,117-23, 126,128,143,160,174-5,180, 222, 224, 226, 239

304 Index SA, 19,206-8,255-6,284n6.+See als Gestapo; SS Saussure, Ferdinand de, 115-16, 175-7 Schafer, Michael, 63 Schleppfuss, Eberhard, 226 Schonberg, Arnold, 5-6, 60-1, 64, 67, 105,155,158,178-80,184,193, 199, 201-4, 218-21, 224-5, 227-9, 231-2, 235^1, 243-4, 247, 249-50, 269-70, 281nl6. See also music Schorske, Carl E., 54,179-80, 229, 241, 243-4, 275-6nl6 science (scientific), 7,12,24, 35, 51-3, 109,128-30,133-5,137,144-6, 148-50,171,173,181, 278nl3, 281nl3 Shirer, William L., 213 simulacra (simulacral), 195, 212, 215, 266-7, 282n4. See also simulation simulation, 146,149,169,187,191, 197, 206, 210, 212, 215-16, 244, 254, 266. See also simulacra social engineering, 7,128,137, 140-1, 250, 258, 260-1 Son tag, Susan, 189-90 Spengler, Oswald, 23-4, 31, 46, 274nn7-8 Spiess, Johann, 7 spontaneity (spontaneous), 34, 38, 51-2, 72-4, 76, 89, 94,104-5,108, 119,128,130-1,165,168-9,179, 187-91,193, 203, 205, 227, 230, 236. See also authenticity SS, 19, 206-8, 253-5, 258, 263, 284n6. See also Gestapo; SA Starke, Margot, 20 Stravinsky, Igor, 67,155,184,193, 219, 241 subject and object, 34,36,49,58,66,

76-8, 81^, 86-7, 89-90, 93, 95101,106,128,156,161,173, 217, 220, 221-3, 230-1, 276nl, 277nl3 subjective agency, 55,80,158,169, 197, 200, 230-1, 233-7, 240-1 subjectivity (subjectivism), 39, 87-8, 92, 96-100,105-6,137,187, 200-1, 220,223-4,230-1,237-8,243, 275-6nl6 sublation, 58,66,71-2, 74, 78,80-2, 84, 86-7, 92-3, 95-6,101-2,107, 181-2,222,269,277nl3. See also Aufhebung; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich suffering, x, 18,66,86,102-3,106, 138,194, 200-1, 205, 210, 241-4, 247,266, 283nlO superstition, 52-3,128-30,133-4, 144-6,151,155, 237, 239.+++++ magic; myth supplement (supplementary), 11112,119-22,127,172-6, 262 surveillance, 141, 254, 258, 262, 264-5 Taylor, Charles, 35-6, 78, 80-1, 83-5, 88 terror, 13,19, 25, 42, 56, 111, 116,184, 205, 208-9, 222, 225, 228, 242, 2512, 257-8, 260, 263-5 Third Reich, 12,34,48,196,211, 228, 253, 283nll Tiedemann, Rolf, 91 totalitarianism (totalitarian), 3-5,13, 22,34, 37, 39,46, 64-5, 75, 86,130, 134-5,156,158-60,179,183,1967, 211-13, 216-18, 221, 223, 225-9, 251, 254, 256, 262-3, 265-7, 270, 280n9.++++++authoritarianism totality, 4, 22, 37, 39,48-9, 65-7, 76-

Index 305 7, 82-3, 86-7, 90, 93, 96,100,105, 156,170-1,176,180,183,196, 211, 218, 221, 225-30, 232-3, 235-S, 240, 241-2, 247-51, 254, 256, 2603, 265, 268-70.++++++totalization totalization (totalized), xi, 4,6,19, 22,106,141,169,172,190, 218, 221-2, 229, 232, 235, 237, 243-4, 250-1, 255, 267-70. See also totality uncanny, 53^, 99,102,104,134, 147-8,151,166,177,181-2,199, 232-3, 249, 255, 268; logic, 51, 53, 108-9,144,150, 214, 217-18, 222, 235, 240, 250, 267 unification, 14, 32-3, 41, 77, 279n22 unity of opposites, 36, 77, 81-2, 89, 91-2,108,165,170, 219, 276nl Utopia (Utopian), 27, 37, 52, 67, 80, 83-4, 90-1,128,146,161,180-1, 199, 203, 205, 220, 236, 241, 245, 248-9, 276n21 Van Gogh, Vincent, 198, 200 Vattimo, Gianni, 157 violence, 7,14,16,19, 38-9, 41-2, 45, 49-50, 54-6, 58, 74-5, 90, 96,105, 108-10, 113-14, 116-17, 122-8, 130-1,135,140,142-3,155-7,1601,171,184,199, 207, 210, 227, 242, 249-50, 252, 257-9, 263, 270, 279nl Volk,+11, 28, 31-4, 41, 43-4, 91,126, 282n2 volkish, 5,12, 20, 27-8, 31-4, 36-9, 41-6, 49-53, 55-6, 58, 71^, 76, 8891, 99,103,105-9,114-19,121,

126-8,130-2,145,151,165-7,169, 184-5,187-^8,205,211,213,241-2, 255,273n2,275-6nl6,279nl, 280nn7,9,281nl5 Wagner, Richard, 24, 60,103-5, 276nl7 Walser, Martin, 20 Wandervogel, 20, 31-2, 210. See also Winfried students Warhol, Andy, 198-201,204 Weber, Max, 27, 63,136-7,156, 221, 237-8 Weimar, 14-21, 50,159-60,182-3, 192,206-8, 224-5, 228, 251, 253, 255, 257 Wellmer, Albrecht, 69 Wilhelmine years, 15, 20-1,23-4, 257, 274n6 Winfried students, 20-1, 28, 30-1,33, 36-7,46, 51,114,117,135,167,169. See also+Wandervogel Witkin, Robert W, 69, 92-3,95-6, 178-9,199, 203, 221, 227, 229 Wolin, Richard, 131-2 Zeitblom, Serenus, 29, 32-3, 38, 48, 50-1, 53-4, 57-8, 72-5, 99,102-3, 105,114,127-8,144,146-51,157, 159,164-5,167,176-8,180-4, 193-5,197,199-200, 202-3, 223-4, 226, 228, 232,234-5, 241-6, 274n6, 275-6nl6, 282nn3, 8 Zizek, Slavoj, 80-1,277nl2 Zuidervaart, Lambert, 67-9, 277nlO