02-03-2007, 11:05 PM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->
<b>The Swastika: Constructing the Symbol</b>
by Malcolm Quinn
[right][snapback]63915[/snapback][/right]
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<b>PREFACE </b>
This book is about the construction of the archaic within the modern, <b>and the fabrication of the swastika as a sign of identity in an era when personal and collective identities were being rapidly displaced</b>. The construction of the swastika as the icon of a supposedly immemorial and <b>indivisible race identity began in the mid-nineteenth century and reached its height in the Nazi period in Germany</b>; its echoes are unfortunately still with us, despite the fact that the gulf between the representation of identity and its quotidian social dissolution grows ever wider. High on the list of the duplicities attributable to National Socialism was its use of the swastika as an emblem of the sense of self-definition and community which capitalism was rapidly eroding. In fact Nazism, under the sign of the swastika, subsumed the 'organic' and historical model of the nation state within a totalitarian scheme based on the expansionist and market-led notions of territory and social geography which had succeeded the organic model.
<b>This book shows that a similar paradox also informed the construction of the swastika as a sign of the 'Aryan race' in the nineteenth century. The myth of an Aryan race re-assembled the archaic in the image of the modern</b>, and its <b>mythology of structure was derived from the study of Indo-European comparative linguistics,</b> which also presaged the ahistoric, structural and modernist linguistics of Saussure. 'Aryan man' was a creature born of abstraction and deracination; and the swastika, a globally distributed mark with no discernible point of origin, was his heraldic device. In the nineteenth century, the swastika was used as both Aryan sign and Aryan evidence, place and race in one, <b>and was adopted by Nazism in the twentieth century</b> in its violent erasure of the historical links between people, place and praxis. From 1889 to the present, the display of the Aryan swastika as a symbolic locus, identifying mark or point of reference has also signalled dislocation, displacement and at worst, the Nazi terror.
It is for these reasons that the modern and Occidental swastika presents a particular set of problems to the analysis of material culture 'in context', since it must be simultaneously read as contextually placed and displaced, as presenting meaning and identity and at the same time deferring and postponing it. Insofar as the term Aryan (where used in an academic sense) has historically represented an <b>unresolved problem of material evidence in the gap between Indo-European language theory and archaeology,</b> the swastika as a supposedly 'Aryan sign' has instead been used as a substitute for and evasion of the archaeological problems of accurate representation, reference and material evidence. In 1880, the German scholar Rudolf Virchow ruled the swastika out of court not simply as evidence of the Aryan race but as archaeological evidence per se, suggesting that its wide spatial distribution rendered it useless for the determination of time: for Virchow, a liberal politician, a rigorous scientist and sceptic on the Aryan issue, the swastika was trivial, marginal and unreadable. However, the obstacles which the swastika presented to an orthodox archaeological reading must be set against the construction of the Aryan symbol, with its placement and displacement of meaning from sign to identical sign across an immobile space and a frozen time. Nazism, in its turn, employed the swastika as the sign of a race identity legitimated not in the historical dimension and 'sense of place' sought by the nineteenth-century nation state, but through the conquest of new territories. This book begins by looking at the 'Aryanisation' of the swastika in the Bismarckian period; but it was not until 1933 that this migratory image with no link to geographic place or historical time could be used as the 'national symbol' of Germany.
Whilst I would not deny that this has been a difficult book to write, I do not see my work on the swastika as part of an heroic discourse of reclamation and salvage. Instead, I hope to show that philanthropic notions of a 'change of meaning' for the swastika only serve to divert attention away from the Nazi strategy which used the symbol to demarcate, divide and control social space. Ultimately, however, my concerns are not with Nazism nor, in a sense, with the swastika itself. I believe that the Aryanisation of the swastika provides a paradigmatic example of the attempt to construct, in a secular era, an inviolable and immutable symbolic space between a living tradition on the one hand, and the constant flux of the market on the other. The end result of this attempt to transcend time was that the Aryan swastika caricatured tradition as an identical repetition, and that the Nazi swastika became the commodity sign par excellence.
April 1994
<b>The Swastika: Constructing the Symbol</b>
by Malcolm Quinn
[right][snapback]63915[/snapback][/right]
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<b>PREFACE </b>
This book is about the construction of the archaic within the modern, <b>and the fabrication of the swastika as a sign of identity in an era when personal and collective identities were being rapidly displaced</b>. The construction of the swastika as the icon of a supposedly immemorial and <b>indivisible race identity began in the mid-nineteenth century and reached its height in the Nazi period in Germany</b>; its echoes are unfortunately still with us, despite the fact that the gulf between the representation of identity and its quotidian social dissolution grows ever wider. High on the list of the duplicities attributable to National Socialism was its use of the swastika as an emblem of the sense of self-definition and community which capitalism was rapidly eroding. In fact Nazism, under the sign of the swastika, subsumed the 'organic' and historical model of the nation state within a totalitarian scheme based on the expansionist and market-led notions of territory and social geography which had succeeded the organic model.
<b>This book shows that a similar paradox also informed the construction of the swastika as a sign of the 'Aryan race' in the nineteenth century. The myth of an Aryan race re-assembled the archaic in the image of the modern</b>, and its <b>mythology of structure was derived from the study of Indo-European comparative linguistics,</b> which also presaged the ahistoric, structural and modernist linguistics of Saussure. 'Aryan man' was a creature born of abstraction and deracination; and the swastika, a globally distributed mark with no discernible point of origin, was his heraldic device. In the nineteenth century, the swastika was used as both Aryan sign and Aryan evidence, place and race in one, <b>and was adopted by Nazism in the twentieth century</b> in its violent erasure of the historical links between people, place and praxis. From 1889 to the present, the display of the Aryan swastika as a symbolic locus, identifying mark or point of reference has also signalled dislocation, displacement and at worst, the Nazi terror.
It is for these reasons that the modern and Occidental swastika presents a particular set of problems to the analysis of material culture 'in context', since it must be simultaneously read as contextually placed and displaced, as presenting meaning and identity and at the same time deferring and postponing it. Insofar as the term Aryan (where used in an academic sense) has historically represented an <b>unresolved problem of material evidence in the gap between Indo-European language theory and archaeology,</b> the swastika as a supposedly 'Aryan sign' has instead been used as a substitute for and evasion of the archaeological problems of accurate representation, reference and material evidence. In 1880, the German scholar Rudolf Virchow ruled the swastika out of court not simply as evidence of the Aryan race but as archaeological evidence per se, suggesting that its wide spatial distribution rendered it useless for the determination of time: for Virchow, a liberal politician, a rigorous scientist and sceptic on the Aryan issue, the swastika was trivial, marginal and unreadable. However, the obstacles which the swastika presented to an orthodox archaeological reading must be set against the construction of the Aryan symbol, with its placement and displacement of meaning from sign to identical sign across an immobile space and a frozen time. Nazism, in its turn, employed the swastika as the sign of a race identity legitimated not in the historical dimension and 'sense of place' sought by the nineteenth-century nation state, but through the conquest of new territories. This book begins by looking at the 'Aryanisation' of the swastika in the Bismarckian period; but it was not until 1933 that this migratory image with no link to geographic place or historical time could be used as the 'national symbol' of Germany.
Whilst I would not deny that this has been a difficult book to write, I do not see my work on the swastika as part of an heroic discourse of reclamation and salvage. Instead, I hope to show that philanthropic notions of a 'change of meaning' for the swastika only serve to divert attention away from the Nazi strategy which used the symbol to demarcate, divide and control social space. Ultimately, however, my concerns are not with Nazism nor, in a sense, with the swastika itself. I believe that the Aryanisation of the swastika provides a paradigmatic example of the attempt to construct, in a secular era, an inviolable and immutable symbolic space between a living tradition on the one hand, and the constant flux of the market on the other. The end result of this attempt to transcend time was that the Aryan swastika caricatured tradition as an identical repetition, and that the Nazi swastika became the commodity sign par excellence.
April 1994