Nazi Parades as Mass Erection

"After seizing power, the Nazis tamed the floods and let them flow inside their rituals. Streams became dams, and much more. Consider the "parade of political leaders" (Appell der politischen Leiter). The participants: all party members with leadership roles. For a description, we turn to the Niederelbischer Tageblatt (Lower-Elbe Daily) of September 12, 1937: "Dr. Ley announced the "Entry March of the Banners." For a moment, one could see nothing. But then they emerged from the blackness of the night, over on the south side. In seven columns, they poured into the spaces between the formations. You couldn't see the people, couldn't recognize the standard-bearers. All you saw was a broad, red, surging stream, its surface sparkling gold and silver, advancing slowly like fiery lava. Feeling the dynamism of that slow advance, you got some small impression of what those sacred symbols meant".
The flood had a name now: "Entry March of the Banners" (encoded stream). The threat of inundation had been eradicated. But even without the danger of sinking within it, the flood remained exciting, fascinating. Its ominous aspect had been removed by those formations, by transforming streams into "columns," by converting the flowing "feminine" into a rigid "masculine."
(...)
"I can't believe my eyes . . . what in the world are they doing?"—and then the liberating thought, "But everybody's doing it ... my God, they're actually doing it!" (in the name of the law, too). This symbolic liberation of desires, this staged affirmation of drives (in the form of a monumental ornament, a model for the repression of drives), was fascism's way of depicting the dawn of freedom, a freedom in which the fascist precisely does not dissolve himself. In this ritual, the Nazis symbolically suspended the primary double bind by allowing access to its normally unattainable aspect: to incest at the very least, but also to the state of noncastration, nondismemberment; to power; and to flowing that did not signify death. Deleuze and Guattari are probably right when they suggest in passing that Hitler enabled fascists to have an erection.4 "At last, not to be castrated for once!" In a ritual that allowed the penis itself (the penis no one had) to be represented in abstract form (the seven columns), the individual, for once, was no longer castrated; he became part of the transcendantal phallus that gave meaning to everything (the emphasis on "You couldn't see the people, couldn't recognize the standard-bearers" is revealing). For the moment at least, he felt privileged to be a stream himself, one small part of an enormous, tamed flood; for that one moment, he was lifted out of every double bind. The scenario of the parade abolished the contradiction between the desiring-production of the individual and the demands of social power. In the course of the ritual, the fascist came to represent both his own liberated drives and the principle that suppressed them. This inherent contradiction never manifested itself because, during the staging of the ritual, the individual participated in power.
Benjamin's assertion that fascism built its monuments "primarily [with] so-called human material" is based on this truth: the substance of those monuments was the flow of desire. But even Benjamin seems to show traces of the Weimar Left's rationalist reflex when he says that the "execution" of fascist mass art (he rightly includes parades in this category) put the masses "into a trance that made them see themselves as monumental, that is, incapable of deliberate, autonomous actions." Revolutionary acts certainly don't need to be "deliberate"; and it is almost impossible for them to be "autonomous" in Benjamin's sense, since the type of "ego" on which that notion of "autonomy" is based rarely surfaces in oppressed classes. When the emphasis is put on the production of "trances" or incapacitation, what is left out of account is precisely the side of things that fascists have never neglected. It is far more important to stress the sense of relief, the Utopia of deliverance, which participants in such rituals find: "At last I don't have to hide anymore. ... At last, I can see and sense that other people feel the same way I do." That is how fascism translates internal states into massive, external monuments or ornaments as a canalization system, which large numbers of people flow into; where their desire can flow, at least within (monumentally enlarged) preordained channels; where they can discover that they are not split off and isolated, but that they are sharing the violation of prohibitions with so many others (preferably with all others). That's why these masses can't stand to see one man marching alone alongide their great blocks. Such a man isn't participating in their forbidden games. Worse yet, he is observing them. And how can you let yourself be observed when you are in the process of turning into a stream and becoming god?
Fine, except for one thing: All of that affirmation is theatrical; it never gets beyond representation, the illusion of production. Benjamin is right in saying that fascism may help the masses to express themselves, but that it certainly doesn't help them to gain their rights.7 We need to go one step further, though, and specify what is being expressed. For fascism does not allow the masses to express their interests (class interests, economic interests)—communists, when they come to power, are the ones who tend to let those interests be expressed, though not satisfied. No, what fascism allows the masses to express are suppressed drives, imprisoned desires. Fascist masses may portray their desire for deliverance from the social double bind, for lives that are not inevitably entrapping, but not their desire for full stomachs. The success of fascism demonstrates that masses who become fascist suffer more from their internal states of being than from hunger or unemployment. Fascism teaches us that under certain circumstancs, human beings imprisoned within themselves, within body armor and social constraints, would rather break out than fill their stomachs; and that their politics may consist in organizing that escape, rather than an economic order that promises future generations full stomachs for life. The Utopia of fascism is an edenic freedom from responsibility. That in itself, I think, is a source of "beauty in the most profound distortion." Meanwhile, communists and the left in general still stubbornly refuse to accept fascism's horrifying proof that the materialism they preach and practice only goes halfway. The desiring-production of the unconscious, as molecular driving force of history, has never entered their materialism—an omission that has had (and still has) tragic consequences.
In patriarchy, where the work of domination has consisted in subjugating, damming in, and transforming the "natural energy" in society, that desiring-production of the unconscious has been encoded as the subjugated gender, or femaleness; and it has been affirmed and confirmed, over and over again, in the successive forms of female oppression. Luce Irigaray: "To an extent, the unconscious is historically censored femaleness." In the course of the repression carried out against women, those two things—the unconscious and femaleness—were so closely coupled together that they came to be seen as nearly identical. (...) Men themselves were now split into a (female) interior and a (male) exterior—the body armor. And as we know, the interior and exterior were mortal enemies. What we see being portrayed in the rituals are the armor's separation from, and superiority over the interior: the interior was allowed to flow, but only within the masculine boundaries of the mass formations. Before any of this could happen, the body had to be split apart thoroughly enough to create an interior and exterior that could be opposed to each other as enemies. Only then could the two parts re-form "in peace" in the ritual. What fascism promised men was the reintegration of their hostile components under tolerable conditions, dominance of the hostile "female" element within themselves. This explains why the word "boundaries," in fascist parlance, refers primarily to the boundaries of the body .
As a matter of course, fascism excluded women from the public arena and the realms of male production. But fascism added a further oppression to the oppression of women (...). In this process, the wife of the ruler lost all function as a representative subjugated woman. This is clear from the fact that whereas in World War I, the Hohenzollern women had posed as nurses, Hitler concealed his "beloved" from the public. Not only was she useless for the rituals that maintained Hitler's rule, she would have gotten in the way. For the Führer's "wife," in that fascist ritual, was the unconscious of the masses who were pouring into block formations.
"And now the screams of "Heil!" erupt, becoming overwhelming, like some all-fulfilling wave that rips everything along with it. Fifty thousand voices merge into a single cry of "Heil Hitler!" Fifty thousand arms shoot out in salutes. Fifty thousand hearts beat for this man who is now striding, bareheaded, through the narrow passage formed by all those thousands"

Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 1987, v. I