In These Times - September 10, 2003
Learning To Love Leni Riefenstahl By Slavoj Zizek
<http://www.inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=359_0_4_0_C>
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The problem here is much more general; it goes far beyond Leni Riefenstahl. Let us take the very opposite of Leni, the composer Arnold Schönberg. In the second part of Harmonielehre, his major theoretical manifesto from 1911, he develops his opposition to tonal music in terms which, superficially, anticipate later Nazi anti-Semitic tracts. Tonal music has become a "diseased," "degenerated" world in need of a cleansing solution; the tonal system has given in to "inbreeding and incest"; romantic chords such as the diminished seventh are "hermaphroditic," "vagrant" and "cosmopolitan." It's easy and tempting to claim that such a messianic-apocalyptic attitude is part of the same "spiritual situation" that eventually gave birth to the Nazi final solution. This, however, is precisely the conclusion one should avoid: What makes Nazism repulsive is not the rhetoric of final solution as such, but the concrete twist it gives to it.
Another popular conclusion of this kind of analysis, closer to Leni, is the allegedly fascist character of the mass choreography of disciplined movements of thousands of bodies: parades, mass performances in stadia, etc. If one finds it also in communism, one immediately draws the conclusion about a "deeper solidarity" between the two "totalitarianisms." Such a formulation, the very prototype of ideological liberalism, misses the point. Not only are such mass performances not inherently fascist; they are not even "neutral," waiting to be appropriated by left or right. It was Nazism that stole them and appropriated them from the workers' movement, their original site of birth. None of these "proto-fascist" elements is per se fascist. What makes them "fascist" is only their specific articulation-or, to put it in Stephen Jay Gould's terms, all these elements are "ex-apted" by fascism. There is no fascism avant la lettre, because it is the letter itself that composes the bundle (or, in Italian, fascio) of elements that is fascism proper.
Along the same lines, one should radically reject the notion that discipline, from self-control to bodily training, is inherently a proto-fascist feature. Indeed, the very term "proto-fascist" should be abandoned: It is a pseudo-concept whose function is to block conceptual analysis. When we say that the organized spectacle of thousands of bodies (or, say, the admiration of sports that demand high effort and self-control like mountain climbing) is "proto-fascist," we say strictly nothing, we just express a vague association that masks our ignorance.
So when, three decades ago, kung fu films became popular, was it not obvious that we were dealing with a genuine working-class ideology of youngsters whose only means of success was the disciplinary training of their bodies, their only possession? Spontaneity and the "let it go" attitude of indulgence belong to those who have the means to afford it-those who have nothing have only their discipline. The "bad" bodily discipline, if there is one, is not the one of "collective training," but, rather, jogging and body-building as part of the New Age myth of the realization of the self's "inner potentials." (No wonder that the obsession with one's body is an almost obligatory part of the passage of ex-leftist radicals into the "maturity" of pragmatic politics: From Jane Fonda to Joschka Fischer, the "period of latency" between the two phases was marked by the focus on one's own body.)
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