Evelyn Cobley, Temptations of Faust: The Logic of Fascism and Postmodern Archaeologies of Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002)
In what she describes as her most challenging claim, Cobley contends that “postmodern discourses remain, by and large, blind to their continued implication in the logic of totalitarian fascism”. (4)
“What symbolizes Leverkühn’s moment of crisis – the devil’s appearance at the exact center of the novel – indicates that the Holocaust is not the return to a repressed pre-modern barbarism but remains with us as part of a paradigm shift from modernity to postmodernity.” (6-7)
The first chapter is an interesting look at the historical, social, and intellectual context of the decades the lead up to ‘Auschwitz’. This is done primarily to explicate the influence of these conditions on Thomas Mann and the “proto-fascist” characters of his novel, Doctor Faustus, most specifically the Winifred Students and Breisacher. According to Adorno, “it is barbaric to continue to write poetry after Auschwitz”. (11 – footnote 1)
“While the 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.” (11) Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times (1935) and George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich are two works on neo-Romanticism in Germany that Cobley makes reference to on occasion throughout the chapter.
“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 scientific measuring of the empirical world and by the materialistic accumulation of economic wealth.” (12)
“Human being 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.” (12) This is said in relation to Nazi rise to power that appealed to neo-Romantic sentiments in the Volk. “Part of Hitler’s success,” writes Cobley, “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.” (12)
Cobley states the purpose of chapter one as follows: “to explore the socio-historical and cultural conditions” that enabled Hitler’s rise to power. “Exploring the self-understanding of both historical and fictional proto-fascist intellectuals, I propose to describe the material conditions and cultural trends which help us understand the appeal of neo-Romanticism.” (12)
Pages 14-27 is a look at Germany’s anti-liberalism in the late 19th and early 20th century, including Mann’s brief flirtation with neo-Romantic sentiments before realizing the dangerousness of National Socialism and exiling himself from Germany in 1930 (27).
Speaking about Helmut Jendreiek, “Demonizing theory (abstract aestheticism) as socially irresponsible, he seems to endorse an unreflective immersion in a life-world which, he, moreover considers unproblemmatically accessible.” (30) She continues with her criticism of this unreflective immersion into a life-world. “This humanist framing of the Nazi phenomenon overlooks the complicity of modernity with the very fascism that is for Jendreiek an abberation from it. It is precisely this inside / outside logic that my reading of German fascism seeks to disrupt and problematize.” (30) In restating her thesis, Cobley highlights the stakes involved in here discussion. The problem of modernity cannot be detached from Nazism, because the latter is an extension of the former. She reads the characters from Mann’s novel as embodying this problem.
“The social science in Halle (Winifred students) and Munich (Breisacher) may appear to reinforce Jendreiek’s thesis of fascism as an irrational abberation from the Enlightenment narrative of cultural progress.” (30) Hence, the contradictions inherent in modernity are relegated to the outside; but is brought back in through this exclusion? The book then turns to a closer analysis of the characters themselves; first of all, their neo-Romanticism. She notes how nostalgia for the organic (mother)land preoccupy the intellectuals in the universe of Doctor Faustus; in a way, an expression of Mann’s struggle with “rhetorical stances and political attitudes which he once shared.” (31) Such sentiments regarding a “pure” past, of course, bring to the discussion Rousseau. “In a gesture reminiscent of Rousseau, volkish intellectuals assume that the vitality they yearn for is located in the innocent beginnings of society.” (33) As Cobley continues on pages 33-34, it becomes quite evident that this intermingling of youthful vitality and neo-Romantic nostalgia for a unified, i.e. pure, Volk contributes to the rise of fascism. But, Germany was not anymore susceptible to the allure of the Volk than any other European nation. “Modern civilization is consequently rejected as an artificial degeneration of a once vital German culture.” (34) The Kulturkampf that Schmitt is so proud of, according to the introduction of Political Theology; how is that related to this rise of neo-Romanticism? The rhetoric, i.e, the recovery of an idyllic origin, appears to be sufficiently anti-modern, but that is not the case.
“What drives the neo-Romantic self-understanding 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 social world. This historical symbol of this crisis of modernity is the French Revolution.” (34-35) This crisis of “man”, as it is often alluded to, exacerbates the alienation between people, the social. The objective world and those in it are hostile figures to the individual self, in so far that the individual is lost in fragmentation. Of course, Hegel posits a solution to this – which may be more frightening than the problem. On page 35, Cobley broaches the problem of modern subjectivity. “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.” (35) By employing the term community, Cobley appears to be continuing, if only implicitly, the discussion regarding Rousseau. “Where Kant assumed that the subject realizes itself in relation to an ideal rational order; the Romantic subject creates meaning out of its own inner essence.” (35) The problem is set quite clearly. Either meaning lies in the order one is part of, or it lies within the genuine essence of oneself.
On pages 34-35, Cobley employs Charles Taylor’s reading of Hegel to explicate the relation of neo-Romanticism to Hegel. “For Taylor, Hegel’s dialectical system constitutes an attempt to reconcile and consolidate the rational and expressive tendencies of his 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 of perfects it.” (Taylor 1975, 44)” (34-35) Cobley goes on to explicate this point in relation to Mann’s novel. “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.” (36) On pages 36-37, the debate between Arzt and Deutschlin (the Winifred students) appears to be a struggle between the individual and order.
“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.” (37) It is important to note that Cobley points out that Arzt’s utopian vision 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. (37) This discussion of Breisacher –
“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.” (40) Is there something similar to postmodernity to such rhetoric? Page 40-41, indicate how the revival of an “authentic being” of the past motivated “self-indentification with the Volk”.
“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 Jürg Jenatsch, a highly popular novel typically celebrating a peasant who liberates his enslaved people through armed revolt.” (41-42) Cobley appears to think that Mosse’s focus on the equation of primitivism and violence is too simplistic. She contends that the “yearning for authentic origins is precisely what characterizes modernity more profoundly than any other feature” (42). Pages 42-43 broach on the connection of the atavistic power of blood and organic unity to neo-Romantic nostalgia. Page 43 has Mosse’s discussion of Jews being the radical ‘other’, not only in Germany, but throughout European history made them easy scapegoat for recent economic and social ills. Cobley, as she often does throughout the book, clearly summarizes the discussion at the end of page 44. “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.” (44) But a further note on Mann’s novel returns the reader to the theme of the chapter. “And, although Mann ignores the fate of the Jews…he stresses the dark and irrational ‘underside’ of an Enlightenment narrative heavily invested in the neo-Romantic ideal of authentic origins.” (45)
On pages 45-46, the parallel between Breisacher’s volkish ideas and a primordial divine sovereign are made quite evident. “Luther’s reformation church still dictated civic behaviour, Protestantism turned morality into a personal question between individual and God” She continues later on to connect this to neo-Romantic nostalgia. “What has conventionally been interpreted as the emancipation of the subject from authoritarian tradition is reinterpreted as the degeneration of society from a once vital social bond.” (46) A connection between Leverkühn’s musical innovation and the problem is made on p. 47. “Kretschmar implies that a composer like Leverkühn, who wants to free music from the constraints of exhausted conventions, must be willing to regain its lost authenticity.” (47)
Cobley’s discussion of Lukács merits a citation. “By striving for aesthetic autonomy, modern bourgeois music reflects a retreat from communal participation, a trend which Georg Lukács 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. Lukács is both nostalgic for a lost age and hostile to modernity.” (48)
The final section bridges the discussion in the first chapter with that of the second, a discussion of Hegel and Beethoven.
“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 premise and made liberal-humanist resistance to this rhetoric difficult.” (49) Breisacher’s “agenda of blood and soil” may refer to the radical relativism of Hitler’s rhetoric. Confusion, hence, is the most effective weapon of rhetoric?
“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.” (50) Zeitblom is left helpless to respond to Breisacher’s rhetoric. “The appeal to a future that is also a 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.” (51)
“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.” (52)
“If Leverkuhn is to regenerate music, he is encouraged to wed the pre-modern past to the vision of a utopian future. 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.” (52)
“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.” (53)
She concludes the chapter with a reflection the relation between modernity and fascism. “For Mosse as well as for Jendreiek, fascism is implicitly treated as an 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 had 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.” (54-55) Hence, Cobley makes the claim that fascism is “not only the ‘other’ of modernity but also its extreme extension.” (55)
Early on in Chapter 2, Cobley states the purpose of the chapter. “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 origins finds its mirror image in Hegel’s investment in a dialectical telos.” (58) Hegel’s philosophy, for Adorno, is “indicative of modernity’s blindness to its own violence.” (58)
On p. 59-60, she cultivates the grounds for her claim that Adorno can be considered a “collaborator” on Doctor Faustus, namely that Mann borrows heavily from Adorno’s own music theory, i.e., the latter’s assessment of Schönberg’s music. She claims that the novel is “thus traversed by a tension between Mann’s essentially conservative impulses and Adorno’s neo-Marxist attitudes” (60). She goes on to contend that Adorno provides Mann “with a whole cultural-materialist methodology”. And that Doctor Faustus is less a ‘music novel’ and more ‘a novel of the culture and the era’. (62) She goes on to substantiate, more or less, this claim by referring to Mann’s own personal reflections on the influences behind the novel. (62 – 65)
“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.” (63) To what extent is this claim accurate? She tries to make it to substantiate the thesis that Adorno’s work is present in Doctor Faustus. However, Cobley does attempt a contrast of the two. “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.” (63) She attempts to textually substantiate this point, mainly through the thought at the Institute for Social Research, which she characterizes as primarily neo-Marxist, and concludes that in borrowing from Adorno’s “ideological interpretations of Beethoven and Schönberg”, that he “more or less consciously subscribed to the Institute’s equation of fascism and capitalism” (64).
Cobley, in the next section, provides a brief blurb about Adorno’s approach to art, for those of us with a less than encyclopaedic knowledge of the Frankfurt School and Adorno. “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.” (65) This leads into another divergence between Mann and Adorno. “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.” (65) She provides an account of Adorno’s divergences from “classical” Marxist thought, and his criticism of Marxist and Hegelian synthesis of the subject-object divide. He is opposed to this synthesis mainly because it “obscures how effortlessly the subject is being absorbed by the capitalist system”; namely commodity fetishism (67).
“According to Adorno, it is the task of (post)modernist art to criticize the social reality by negating it not through its thematic content but through formal innovation. His aesthetic theory develops criteria allowing us to approach formal innovations according to their ability to articulate the ‘truth-content’ of the sociohistorical moment.” (66-67) Negation, for a virgin to Adorno’s thought, is appropriately central to any resistance of commodity fetishes. Adorno’s aesthetic theory, hence, as Cobley indicated earlier, is steeped in neo-Marxist concepts. Cobley takes this point quite a bit further, however. “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 a 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.” (67) On p. 68, the problem of interpretation, i.e. of parochial interpretation is projected against the problem of the author as being the Author-God, according to Barthes, is broached. It is interesting, to an extent, but not central to the main thrust of her argument. Cobley appears to align herself to Adorno’s methodology, with its focus on unsettling convention (69). The rest of p. 69 and p. 70 reads like a literature review of the commentaries on Adorno; once again interesting for those interested in such things, but ultimately peripheral to the central point of the study. Page 71 suggests that Mann may have had little direct exposure to German idealism, i.e. Hegel; he had at best “a limited interest” in Hegel’s philosophy. The point is, of course, that Mann got these ideas from somewhere, that being from Adorno. On pp. 71-72, she explores Leverkühn’s relationship to dialectical thinking. On pp. 73-75, Cobley discusses the theoretical implications of Kleist’s essay “On the Puppet Theater” on Leverkuhn’s own artistic aspirations and in relation to Kant’s aesthetic theory. This discussion yields some fruitful results in regards to Hegel.
“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 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.” (75) Although there is this violence implicit in Hegel’s thought, Cobley warns against simplifying Hegel as a “totalizing philosopher motivated by his conservative investment in the Prussian state”. She contends that 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”. (75)
“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.” (75) She goes on to hammer home the point. “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.” (75)
“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 show the cracks and contradictions destined to destabilize its empire.” (75 –76) She once again contends that Hitler exploits this self-understanding of modernity. “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.” (76) Cobley notes prior to the channels for this exploitation: the use of the rational administrative apparatus to suspend civil rights and then employed in the death camps; and that the Nazis seized the moment when “modernity opened itself to the deconstruction of its illusions” (76).
Pages 76-82 act as an introduction to Hegel’s thought on the subject-object divide and the relevance of Taylor’s reading of Hegel to Mann’s novel. The explanation of Hegel’s thought vis a vis the subject-object divide is quite clear; it is a search for the unity of subject and object, a unified wholeness. She tries to debunk the usual characterization of Hegel as a conservative thinker on p. 78, referring to the inherently revolutionary character of Hegel’s historical dialectic. “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 state configuration. Unable to resolve the contradiction between his turn to history and his desire for an all-inclusive system, Hegel shifts in his emphasis from an early revolutionary attitude to a later conservative reinforcement of the Prussian state.” (78) The master-slave dialectic is put forth as integral to Hegelian thought on the subject-object divide (78-80). The usual supporting characters in relation to Hegel are referred to – Zizek-Lacan, Taylor, Kojeve. Although Cobley finds Zizek’s defence of Hegel somewhat persuasive, she has chosen to turn to Taylor’s reading in the context of the present study on Mann’s novel (81).
The discussion regarding the ‘unity of opposites’ elaborates on Hegel’s theory of identity. “The 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.” (82) This reading of Hegel is one transmitted through Taylor (81). However, as Cobley points out, Hegel moved away from the subversive implications of the historical dialectic, choosing instead to “impose an orderly sequence on the historical narrative” and he “constrained the ‘play’ of dialectical reversals by imputing to history a final purpose or end (Geist)” (82). Ultimately, there are only an Absolute for Hegel. “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 Geist.” (82)
“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,” Cobley writes. “Hegel’s much lauded ‘turn to history’,” she contends, “is thereby always already recaptured by the logic of transcendence and the ideal of the totally rational system” (82-83). And as she does throughout the book, she captures the stakes involved in the discussion in a lucid manner. “If the teleological end predetermines all aspects of the totality, then the telos is in some sense also the arché or origin of the system; the historical dialectic is thus undermined and recuperated by the stasis of a quasi-mystical circularity.” (83) Taylor distinguishes between the ‘ontological dialectic’ (the coherently ordered whole) and the ‘historical dialectic’ (the transformative narrative) in contending that both are reappropriated by metaphysical presence (83-84). Where is this all leading? Cobley brings it back to the central thesis of the book.
“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.” (84) Certainly, not only does he dismiss aberrations as being outside, he brings them “inside” as part of the dialectical move towards progress. The danger is that anti-rational events, i.e. the Terror or Revolution, can be rationalized as progressive; all is permitted.
“Hegel authorizes the dangerous ploy of intentionally resorting to anti-rational strategies in 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.” (85)
Pages 85-90 draw out Adorno’s Ideological Critique of Hegel. To summarize it, Adorno appears to believe that Hegel’s investment in bourgeois-capitalist society lead him to equate the state with Geist in Philosophy of Right (88). “Where feudal oppression was direct and visible, Hegel’s totalizing system insidiously masks domination as freedom, compelling subjects to internalize their subjection. The 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…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’…but should be seen as the logical outcome of his privileging of identity.” (88-89) However, Hegel cannot be ‘lumped in’ with the neo-Romantic yearnings of the fascists, as Cobley points out. “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).” (89)
Hermann Kretzschmar (1848-1924) – German concert master, who treated music “as an expression of humanistic aspirations ideally suited to improve the minds and hearts of all Germans; and whose volkish ideas were appropriated by the Nazis, and possibly the inspiration for the character of Wendell Kretschmar in Doctor Faustus (90-91). Pages 90-96 puts forth the interesting parallels between Beethoven’s tonal compositions and Hegel’s philosophy. “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 for subject and object in Beethoven’s music.” (93) The section discusses the music theory behind his music; the apparent move from polyphony to harmony that Beethoven’s music embodied (94-95). This discussion derives from Kretschmar’s lectures in Doctor Faustus, lectures which, as the novel explains, may have inspired Leverkühn step into atonality (92). But ultimately, the later work of Beethoven, according to Adorno, exposes the illusory quality of his “middle period”. “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 totality. By drawing attention to this ‘violence’, Beethoven deconstructs his own earlier (Hegelian) illusion of fully achieved wholeness.” (96) In the footnote, Cobley contends that Adorno’s critique of tonal music reflects his critique of Hegel’s identity thesis (279).
Pages 96-106, the last section of Chapter 2, continues to look at Kretschmar’s lectures on music theory and history, namely Beethoven’s sonata opus 111. The chapter lays out the central theme: namely the difficulty of reconciling subject with object. Cobley, at the end of the chapter, ties these discussions of music theory to the theme of the book.
“As long as Leverkuhn 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 of 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 the suspect that Leverkuhn, 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.”
“What the Mann-Adorno ‘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 rational are mutually implicated, resist sublation, and remain radically irreconcilable.” (107) As Cobley starts out Chapter 3 with a summation of the study so far; she leads the reader into another layer of her argument. She contends “neo-Romanticism proves to be ‘exemplary’ of modernity’s investment in metaphysical presence, an investment most fully represented in Hegelianism” (107). She plans to employ Derrida to explicate her point. “In the first place, then, I will reinforce and clarify what I suspect in volkish ideology from a Derridean perspective which specifically targets the legacy of Rousseau within the broader context of Western metaphysics of presence. In his deconstruction of a suspect yearning for authentic origins in modernity, Derrida may well have drawn on his own experience of fascism at the same time as his strategic philosophical intervention confirms that enlightenment has always been complicit with violence…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 belongings deny that they are inhabited by an originary violence.” (107-108) Pages 108-09 provide an outline of the chapter. Pages 109-114 explores Derrida’s own thoughts on his own Jewishness. Derrida, from this short biographical look, felt that he was neither inside or outside; rather, he was constantly at the margins. “Derrida seems to have felt culturally homeless, belonging to neither the French nor the Jewish community.” (111) Cobley goes on to connect this biographical note on Derrida to his thought. “If Doctor Faustus can be regarded as a perhaps imperfect mea culpa of the cultural ‘centre’, then Derrida’s theory of deconstruction is perhaps an equally imperfect mea culpa of the cultural ‘margin’s’ desire for escape.” (113) “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.” (114)
Pages 114-117 examine how Derrida approaches the mystification of authenticity implicit in volkish ideology. “Deconstruction”, writes Cobley, “must be intended to disrupt the philosophical tradition whose truth claims tend to invoke what is natural, authentic, originary, and immediately given.” (114) The obvious target of criticism is Rousseau, but not just Rousseau. Page 115 contains a brief look at Derrida’s engagement with linguist Ferdinand de Saussure; the section conveys the point that neither speech nor writing can be deemed more authentic or natural than the other. The return to lost origins, Cobley refers to the story of Eden as the obvious example, is what drives the Winifred students to turn to volkish ideas (117). “Grounding their intellectual system on the supposed plentitude of the natural and sensible, the students assume that an initial organic community was shattered and lost under the impact of history or civilization.” (116-117) She wraps up the section to proceed to discussing Derrida’s engagement with Rousseau. “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 Winifred students desirable and innocent notions of immediacy and presence.” (117) It is, thus, ‘innocence’ that is exploited by proto-fascist elements in the book. Breisacher acts in duplicity, “whose enthusiasm for volkish ideas appears to be partly genuine and partly staged to conceal his desire to impose his will on his audience.” (117)
Pages 117-122 outline Derrida’s criticism of Rousseau’s approach to art, namely music theory. The content of his criticism, although interesting, leads to a familiar point; namely that Rousseau saw civilization as a constant regress from man’s natural origins, i.e. melody preferable to harmony because it arouses ‘spontaneous’ emotion (119). “All progress is for Rousseau a sign of decadence because it distances society from its innocent roots in nature…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.” (121) Hence, this fascination with vitality and its recovery serves as ground for readings of Nietzsche and Rousseau (personal note). The obvious importance of this is that Rousseau’s valuation of natural origins “anticipates the anti-rational turn of appeals to authenticity and vitality which the fascists will enact in their conservative rhetoric”. (122)
Derrida’s criticism of Claude Levi-Strauss reveals the anthropologist’s affinity for the “noble savage”. This can be read in conjunction with Las Casa’s adoration for the “naturally Christian dispositions” of the Indians in Todorov’s Conquest of America (personal note). The brief story about the girl breaking taboo reflects this very well, i.e. how the modern gaze transformed the ‘innocent’ game into a theatre of aggression. But innocence never did exist or at least how the observer imagines it. “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 mea culpa 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 Of Grammatology, 114). (123) The second story about writing, ‘The Writing Lesson’, serves to reinforce this point, as well as draw out Derrida’s theory regarding writing. “Mistaking the symptom for its cause, the anthropologist risks supporting a myth of innocence which allows violence to operate undetected and hence unchecked.” (124) The self-flagellating approach that Levi-Strauss takes only further justifies a mythical authenticity. “By equating writing with violence, the anthropologist blames himself and, by extension, modern civilization for the ills that befall the Nambikwara. Through his hostility to modernity, though, the anthropologist may well be dismissing a weapon against violence.” (125) “In the same sense, then, the appeal to a lost organic Volk in neo-Romantic ideology must 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’.” (126) Stemming from this examination of Levi-Strauss lies a lesson for intellectuals, proffered by Derrida. “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.” (127) But Cobley teases out the limitations of Derrida as well. “However, Mann’s treatment of Leverkuhn may well expose Derrida’s own naïveté in assuming that uncovering violence is in itself a protection against it.” (127)
Pages 129-136 is a look at Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of modern instrumental reason. The privileging of reason, as the previous chapter hinted at, is part of the problem. “However, Horkheimer and Adorno contend that reason was in fact complicit with the forces of evil, reinforcing mystifications that were not only exploited by the Nazi propaganda machine but also served the agenda of bourgeois capitalism.” (129) But as Cobley contends, Horkheimer and Adorno do not reject the Enlightenment narrative, rather “they try to reveal how modernity falsely assumes that science has been able to expel magic once and for all, how it blindly subscribes to Hegel’s teleological presupposition that history ineluctably progresses toward Absolute Knowledge.” (130) They expose the antimony between myth and reason that modernity often tries to rubbish. “In the first place, Dialectic of Enlightenment 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 blind 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.” (130) Their contention is, once again, not a prioritization of spontaneity over reason, because neither has existed in a pure form. “Like Derrida, they suggest that the ‘violence’ of social mediation has always 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.” (130) There is a brief example from the novel to reinforce this point on 131, but we soon return to the theoretical points made by them. “What is at stake in Dialectic of Enlightenment 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.” (132) Cobley, through Jarvis, makes a key point: Horkheimer and Adorno do not want to reverse enlightenment. On contrary, they contend that enlightenment is not enlightened enough. (133) This returns to the subject-object divide as discussed in the section on Hegel’s philosophy of identity. “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.” (133) What is worse is that modernity forces the subject to capitulate to hopeless conditions. “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 status quo. If the subject’s consciousness is reified, then it is blindly compelled to reproduce existing conditions in their most static form.” (133) Once again, Cobley provides limits to Horkheimer and Adorno’s claims. “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.” (134) On pages 134-35, the tale of Odysseus and the sirens serve as an analogy for Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis. The domination of nature naturalizes social domination (135).
In reference to Bauman’s analysis of the rational methods employed in the Holocaust, “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 Horkheimer and Adorno, but also to Faust’s taming of nature in Berman’s reading of Goethe’s Faust.” (137) Pages 138-41 provides a synopsis of Berman’s reading of Goethe’s Faust as three dialectical phases of development: first, of progressive self-fashioning; second, of a revival of a pre-modern world (he has left behind); and third, of his attempt to dominate nature to create a ‘better’, i.e. more rational, social world – the establishment of a planned garden. Cobley fleshes out the connection this reading has to the violence inherent in modern progress (140-41). “The moment Goethe’s Faust tolerated the murder of Philomen and Baucis,” writes Cobley, “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.” (141) The search for utopia invariably entails the exception of those deemed threaten to the fulfillment of the perfect society, as Bauman’s analogy of a well-planned garden shows (142). “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.” (142) Like with the others, Cobley expresses a limitation to Bauman’s analysis. “However, in his insistence on the Holocaust as the outcome of rational calculus Bauman perhaps underestimates the complicity of reason with irrational forces so central to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. It is, of course, in Doctor Faustus 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.” (144) Pages 144-51 describe the affect Jonathan Leverkühn’s laboratory on his son, as well as the significance of the magic square Adrian brought along with him throughout the novel. The problem of representation and mimicry arises on p. 146 and continues on; hinting at the seamless divide between reality and illusion. “His father’s influence thus plants an early seed that will germinate in Leverkühn’s rejection of the Hegelian identity-thesis and the Enlightenment ideology built on it.” (150) And for the magic square, Cobley sees it as indicative of the theme of the chapter.
“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 no 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.” (151) This concluded Part I of the book, entitled “Deconstructions of Modernity”.
Part II, as Cobley indicates throughout the first part, deals with Leverkühn’s turn to atonality; and by proxy, it will also examine how postmodernity may be implicated in the logic of fascism. “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.” (156)
“Equating freedom with anarchy, Leverkühn will ultimately embrace the rigorous organization of the twelve-ton 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.” (160) This quote poses the dilemma facing Leverkühn; one that may or may not have eluded him. But theorists have often attempted to theorize with sweeping hypotheses that tend to neglect this dilemma as well. “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.” (160) She goes on to reiterate how each of these figures go about this (160-61). How does this connect to Mann-Adorno’s collaborative work Doctor Faustus? “A pattern of identifiable historical stages predicated on lost mythic origins manifests itself in the history of music Mann borrow from Adorno, who in turns borrows it from Marx.” (161) Pages 161-165 serve as an exploration of what postmodernism is and its relation to modernity. “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).” (165) This is the focus of their investigations in this chapter 4. Pages 165-69 recount the interview between Leverkühn and the devil, most likely a discussion with his psychological self-projection (166). Cobley concludes, “The interview with the devil, then, signals the end of the parallel between Leverkühn’s aesthetic theories and the volkish ideology of Winifred students and Munich intellectuals”. (169) The twelve-tone system that Leverkühn develops “is paradoxically an expression of the rationalizing tendencies of modernity and an expression of the fantastic unreality of postmodernity as simulation”. (169) “If Leverkühn initially welcomes the disappearance of parody as a breakthrough, he later acknowledges that his ‘emancipation’ ought really to be understood as the displacement of one form of domination by an even more destructive one.” (169) Cobley regrettably ends the section with a cliché; from the frying pan into the fire.
Pages 169-176 explicate Derrida’s deconstruction of the Western metaphysical traditions. “In Derrida’s view, classical notions of structure operate on a mostly unexamined inside/outside logic. To control what Derrida calls ‘the freeplay of structure’…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’.” (170) This is reminiscent of Schmitt’s prescription “the norm explains nothing, the exception everything” (Political Theology, 12). The connections between metaphysics and the logic of Schmitt’s conception of sovereignty must be kept in mind (personal note). “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. Where the centre is thought of as an origin (arché) or an end (telos), it is always ‘the point at which the substitution of contents, elements, or terms is no longer possible’ (Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”, The Structuralist Controversy, p. 248).” (171) “Grounding the system in a moment of absolute certainty, the centre does no prevent freeplay but limits it by managing it.” (171)
But as Cobley notes, the content of the centre cannot be fixed; “different concepts have at different times privileged as foundational authorities which organize a discursive field hierarchically from the top down (God, science, nature, culture, reason, Geist, man, genius, monarch, state, the Fuhrer principle).” (171) She points out the stakes involved in Derrida’s analysis. “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.” (171) The naturalization of ‘centred-ness’, hence, is integral to any foundational narrative.
To provide further connections to the Schmittian analysis of transgression, Cobley notes the relation of deconstruction to limits. “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 it seeks to exile from itself.” (172) The inside/outside logic is related to the identity thesis Hegel presents? Derrida does not pose freeplay as an alternative to metaphysics. “It is not a question of transcending or replacing metaphysics but of disrupting it by drawing attention to what it needs to conceal.” (173) And then a very important note is conveyed by Cobley about Derrida. “In the contest between Kant 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.” (173) Pages 172-75 explicate Derrida’s thoughts on supplementarity. The long and short of it, as it were, is expressed by Cobley near the end of the section. “The ‘supplement’ is then a boundary breaker which disrupts the conceptual oppositions on which classical logic and metaphysics base theoretical systems and political practices.” (175) It is the fear that all the cherished systems of opposites will be left a meaningless heap of fragments which affects Zeitblom’s anxiety when confronted with Leverkühn’s atonal experiments. (175)
Pages 176-183 explore Leverkühn’s atonal system and the reaction of his liberal humanist friend Zeitblom. 179-180 discuss the “levelling of hierarchies” that Leverkuhn aspires to in his twelve-tone technique, borrowed by Mann from Schönberg. But this Habermassian “non-violent totality” conceals the violence necessary to create the conditions under which it can exist. “When Mann first quotes Adorno’s analysis of Schönberg’s technique, he suggests that Leverkuhn dreams of ending oppression without recognizing the reifying nightmare he is constructing.” (180) The anarchic dream of emancipation that Leverkühn envisions, as Cobley notes, is an atavistic turn to Rousseau, to a belief that non-violent communities are the organic product of liberated subjects (180). But Zeitblom’s apprehension regarding his friend’s atonal masterpieces reflects the problems inherent in postmodernity. “Through Zeitblom’s reactions to Leverkühn’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.” (182) “Atonality,” Cobley goes on to elaborate, “beckons as an anti-systematic 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.” (182)
In concluding the chapter, Cobley transitions the study toward an examination of the specific relationship between postmodernity and Nazism. “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 suggest that Leverkühn’s aesthetic innovation (twelve-tone row) implies that Germany’s socio-political revolution (Nazism) ought to be understood not as the resurgence of an insufficiently repressed pre-modern barbarism but as one particularly 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.” (183)
Chapter 5 is entitled “Fascism and Atonality (or Postmodern Play)”. Cobley lays out her thesis early on in the chapter. “Reading Leverkühn’s aesthetic experiments through Zeitblom’s critical reactions, I focus in this chapter on postmodern elements whose 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 share by both postmodernism and Nazism in the direction of increasingly hyperreal conceptions.” (185) In other words, this chapter appears to deal with simulation and dissimulation in the context of Doctor Faustus and Nazi Germany. If the former is a parable of fascism, such correlations would be almost self-evident. The play of semiotics and signs, hence, is central to the ‘hyperreal’. “Disrupting the Hegelian identity-thesis, Leverkühn 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 composes is able to use and abuse whatever material comes to hand. If we see Hitler not simplistically as a madman but as a cold bricoleur, he comes across as a particularly sinister bricoleur. What Leverkuhn and Hitler share above all is a delight in mimicry and simulation, a tendency to exploit decontextualized ‘quotations’, and general privileging of metaphor (fiction). Indirectly at stake…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.” (187)
Pages 187-191 recount the power of simulation as demonstrated by the Nuremberg Rallies. “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?” (187) The production of the film Triumph of the Will, that documented the 1934 Nuremberg rallies serves to explicate the use of semiotics and sheer spectacle by Nazi propagandists. “Unable to shake off the hold of parody, he (Leverkühn) 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.” (187) Of course, propaganda is by definition a type of deception that aids in manipulation. Hitler, of course, tried to simulate spontaneity as well; in order to show the genuine enthusiasm of the masses at the rally. “Riefenstahl’s film unwittingly documents the ‘hyperreality’ that marks Hitler’s revolution in general but is most visibly displayed in his propaganda machine.” (191) Hitler’s rehearsed outbursts of emotion, calculated to project a maximum affect is an interesting point in regards to the rational-irrational antimony. “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.” (191)
191-197 demonstrates the various debates amongst postmodernists and critics of postmodernism like Fredric Jameson regarding parody and pastiche. Jameson contends the postmodernism slides into pastiche, “blaming postmodernism for remaining passively complicit with late capitalism (and Cobley adds, with fascism)” (195). Is it a displacement of reality? If Jameson is right when he contends that postmodern pastiche eliminates sites of resistance in an increasingly hyperreal territory, then Zeitblom foregrounds for us Leverkühn’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 of from history, meaning, his own subject position, and even reality itself.” (195) Then comes Arendt. Cobley contends that Arendt’s reading of Nazism reinforces her (Cobley’s) argument (196). “For her (Arendt) the attraction of mass movements meets the desire to alleviate social atomization created by the processes of reification and rationalism under late capitalism: “Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals (Arendt The Origins of Totalitarianism, 323). Terror is not just a question of police brutality but of an administrative apparatus capable of eliminating subjective agency and initiative.” (196-97) “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 self-understanding of modernity.” (197)
197-205 looks at Jameson’s criticism of postmodern art, most specifically the work of Andy Warhol. Postmodernity, Jameson contends, neglects the depth models of modernism and ends up with aesthetic representations that are merely surfaces. “Postmodernism represents for Jameson a capitulation to contemporary stasis.” (198) He cites Warhol’s painting of Campbell Soup cans and photo of Marilyn Monroe as images that “self-consciously speak about their own commodification” and that the ‘deathly quality of these images rob them of political and critical power (198-99). This of course follows from Adorno and Lukács thoughts on reification in late capitalist society (199). Much of the chapter explores Jameson’s relation to Adorno. “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.” (205)
From 205-216, Cobley concludes Chapter 5 with an astute analysis of Hitler’s use of simulation to eradicate any sites of resistance to the Nazi revolution. “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.” (205) To characterize Hitler as a madman may obscure the political tactics he employed to get to power. “Through such postmodern tactics such 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.” (205) Pages 206-209 demonstrate how Hitler gained totalitarian control through the simulation of threats, i.e., the Communists and the Jews, and reading past decrees (1923 Ebert decree on ‘emergency situations’) out of context to gain the upper hand (207). Page 209 contains a brief discussion of bricolage in relation to Levi-Strauss and Derrida’s reading of it. “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.” (209) Page 210 contains a brief discussion of the textual opportunism of Hitler and his ilk, referring directly to “the selective referencing and often wilful misreading of Nietzsche’s philosophical texts” (210). The Steven Aschheim book The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany (1992) appears to be a good source on this topic. 210-212 look at the relationship between the engineer (rational modern) and the bricoleur (postmodern) is interesting. Whereas Levi-Strauss sees bricolage as a critical activity that does not discard old concept or tools, but merely employs them to destroy the old machinery, “Hitler used and abused bricolage to reinforce his image as the engineer of a new totality he called the Third Reich” (211). Cobley convincingly argues that the Nazis, rather than having a coherent ideology, pursued power for the sake of power (211). “Lacking depth and stability, he was 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 of meaningful coherence.” (213) Rauschnig ‘insider’ assessment of Nazi opportunism, Cobley contends, anticipates Bauman’s contention “that the ‘irrational’ death camps were the result of a bureaucratic over-emphasis on ‘rational’ calculation” (214). Cobley provides a lucid reflection on this note. “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.” (215) The last part of the chapter pp. 215-16 examine Baudrillard’s theory of simulacrum and representation, in relation to dissimulation – echoing a familiar point. “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 slavishly duplicated in the form of humbug’ (The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 371).” (216)
In the final chapter, Cobley returns to focus on Doctor Faustus, specifically the twelve tone system developed by its main protagonist, Adrian Leverkühn, which according to her is demonstrative of postmodernity’s complicity to the logic of fascism. “Art’s awareness of its ‘untruth’ is perhaps all we can ask of it,” she writes early on in the chapter (219). A neglect of contradiction lead to catastrophic results. “Indeed, as we will see, the failure to foreground contradiction risks the elimination of the subject and the triumph of the object. Schönberg could have been 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 twelve-tone music is not only the commodity structure of late capitalism but also the extreme case of fascist totalitarianism in Germany.” (221) She comes back to the main thesis again. Pages 222-225 examine the paradoxical relationship between order and anarchy in the twelve-tone system as well as in the logic of fascism. “Yet, as we will see, the dialectical reversal he (Leverkuhn) 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.” (223) The note on counterpoint on p. 224 proves to be invaluable later on.
“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 pure homogenous system uncontaminated by heterogeneity, that perpetuates a regime of violence symbolized for Adorno by Auschwitz.” (227) Cobley reads Arendt’s work as positing fascist totalitarianism not as a return to traditional despotism, but an attack on those traditional forms. She cites that traditional authority rested on the power of landed gentry; hence lines of power were present and an integral part to traditional despotism. But the point Arendt makes is that the very destruction of these traditional forms facilitated Hitler’s simulation of public space, hence controlling the channels of oppression and quashing the channels for resistance. “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.” (228)
“Once all variation has become relegated to mere coincidence, it is no longer possible to speak meaningfully of transgression and resistance.” (233) From pages 229-233 Cobley outlines how the ‘emancipatory’ move of Leverkühn’s twelve-tone system leads ultimately to a more rigorous deterministic totality. It is a cautionary note about anarchism. “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.” (234) The twelve-tone system is one that provides the composer with no choice. “What makes the composer’s self-sacrifice 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. Leverkühn’s act of composition is thus caught between the strict rules imposed by a system external to him and by the accidental convergence of elements within it.” (234-35)
Cobley encapsulates all of this in a simple way. “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.” (235) It becomes clear that by ‘freeing’ art from its traditional constraints Leverkühn has made it devoid of meaning. “Instead of empowering music by returning to it a profound order, Schönberg-Leverkühn kill art by emptying it of all meaning.” (236) In freeing itself from constraints, the subject eliminates itself as well as art. “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 twelve-tone music it is no longer possible to speak of a “free” note.” (237) Page 238 reiterates Adorno’s critique of late capitalism and its commodification of subjects. “Confronted by alienation 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.” (238) The connection between capitalism and twelve-tone system is made, through Adorno and Horkheimer. “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.” (239) The other connection, of course, is between fascism and capitalism. “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.” (240) Or, as Cobley points out, both have a tendency to reach for extremes. Adorno turns to reason, not instrumental reason, to combat this; to confront the ‘truth-content’ revealed by Schönberg’s twelve-tone system rather than capitulating to the nihilistic grounds it also presents (241). “Although the truth-content 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 Leverkühn’s quotations, his references to the past, are nothing more than a ‘mechanical imitation’, Mann suggests that with twelve-tone music we have entered into the postmodern hyperspace of static and ahistorical simulation.” (244)
245-47 looks at Adorno and Mann’s relationship in regards to the concluding sections of Doctor Faustus. 248-50 revisits criticisms thrown at Derrida, namely that his theories are too decontextualized and ahistorical to affect change. Cobley responds to such criticisms by pointing back to a central thread in her study. “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.” (250) This brings the study back to the context of Nazi Germany. “The historical record,” writes Cobley, “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 the hierarchically organized structure to a decentred totality.” (251) Borrowing from Bauman and Arendt, Cobley contends, “It was modernity’s investment in rationalization and efficiency that not only abetted but actually reinforced the spectacular violence of the purges.” (252) She reiterates a previous point later on, “Confounding distinctions between what was real and what was fake, the Nazis created the kind of confusion that 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 control and disorientation never before imagined.” (252-53) The obvious connection to Joseph K is made on 254, citing that the duplication of state function by party organs was to disorient (253-54). “Hitler was not interested in making order meaningful; on the contrary, he was intent on eliminating meaning from the machine he set in motion.” (255) Hence, any accusations that Weber facilitated the rise of Nazism can be rubbished? Pages 254- 67 basically recounts the historical events that mark the rise of this meaningless machine. “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.” (258) The reconfiguration of public space by the Nazis leads to grave consequences. “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 kills Jews because the Nazis dehumanized 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.” (261)
A very interesting point is raised by Cobley. “Contrary to popular belief, the decentred totality controlled even the Fuhrer himself.” (262) This follows if the twelve-tone music system operates on the same logic as fascism. “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.” (262) In referring to Arendt OT, 405, Cobley writes, “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 shaplessness’ (OT 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.” (262-63) As it quickly becomes evident to the reader, this is parallel to the twelve-tone system. 263-66 looks at the significance of Foucault’s panopticon to the discussion. “Nazism was phantasmagoric 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 (OT 418). Like the commodity in late capitalism or the formal device in avant-garde aesthetics, power is no longer a use value but implicated in a self-referential economy of exchange.” (265-66) Cobley restates her thesis; “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.” (267)
“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 in Hewitt’s (Andrew) reading of the relationship between avant-garde aesthetics and fascism. What Doctor Faustus makes prominent is precisely that this logic of the mutual implication of fragmentation and totalization manifests itself both in Leverkühn’s ‘postmodern’ aesthetic tropes and in the political strategies of fascism.” (270-271) And Cobley concludes by stating that this problematic shift from modernity to postmodernity “continues to be crucial to our own cultural self-understanding.” (271)
