Technology of the Archaic: Wish Images and Phantasmagoria in Wagner

Technology of the Archaic: Wish Images and Phantasmagoria in WagnerAuthor(s): Alastair WilliamsSource: Cambridge Opera Journal, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Mar., 1997), pp. 73-87Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/823710 .

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Cambridge Opera Journal, 9, 1, 73-87 Printed in the United Kingdom ? 1997 Cambridge University Press

Technology of the archaic: wish images and

phantasmagoria in Wagner

ALASTAIR WILLIAMS

1

How can Wagner simultaneously herald modernism, express the quintessence of romanticism and evoke primeval experience?1 This question is illuminated by the constellation of advanced production and desire that Walter Benjamin finds in the

process of commodity manufacture, dwelling on the tendency for new technologies to create repetitive conformity while recognising their capacity to trigger unfulfilled

prospects in older forms of knowledge. When, however, Adorno frames the dilemma posed by Wagner he finds mythic deception, not a release of archaic

subjectivity. These two currents in modernity cannot be easily segregated, but

reading Adorno's Wagner through Benjamin's appraisal of modernity facilitates a more sanguine interpretation of Wagner's evocation of ur-forms through advanced

compositional technology. The rigidity of Adorno's interpretation is further softened by Jacques Derrida's reading of Karl Marx's distinction between use-value and exchange-value, while, on a broader front, Derrida's attention to the reader also

suggests that commodity production need not dominate reception strategies. Indeed, Adorno, in an essay on film first published in 1966, acknowledges that intention and effect frequently do not coincide.

Wagner's famous struggle to resolve two different conclusions to the Ring can be diagnosed as sensitivity to the tension Benjamin identifies within nineteenth- century European modernity between, on the one hand, a historical process unable to rid itself of nature-like repetition and, on the other, a range of 'natural' conventions that turn out to be reified history. In Wagner's first version, inspired by Feuerbach, a world order dominated by the gods and torn apart by internal contradictions is superseded by a new society saturated by the freedom of human consciousness; a neo-Hegelian scheme in which history is perceived as a progressive overcoming. The alternative, inspired by Schopenhauer, propounds a model of resignation whereby the restless stirring of historical progress would be pacified by renunciation of the ego. Wagner's apparent indecision or weakness reveals the two faces of modernity: the new world order inaugurated by the Ring turns out to be dependent on repetition of the ur-form that opened the cycle, with the gold in its 'natural' aquatic habitat; the Schopenhauerian conclusion, by contrast, resigns itself to a fate that has the imprint of the socio-cultural concerns of Wagner's geo-historical location and has partly been engineered by Wotan. As John Deathridge observes, both the 'earlier concept and its modification

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music, University of Exeter, September 1992.



Alastair Williams

... stand side by side in the final work like distracted icons'.2 If Wagner dramatises the two sides of modernity's impasse, does he indicate how the bind might be eluded? Perhaps. Both options receive dramatic presentation in the

person of Briinnhilde, who alone comprehends the significance of the drama's culminating events.3 When Carolyn Abbate suggests that Briinnhilde maintains a critical distance from the dominant narratives of the Ring, she indicates that the character is empowered to understand the manufactured quality of the discourses

surrounding her and to resist their apparent inevitability.4 As a transformative

agent, Briinnhilde would envisage neither a hydraulic model of revolution, whereby a new society miraculously emerges fully formed as the old withers, nor abandonment to fate; she might instead seek to release unrealised social forms embedded in the past and present.

Briinnhilde, cast as interpretative listener, seeks to unlock, or awaken, objectified subjectivity, and this goal is central to Benjamin's Arcades project.5 In his unfinished magnum opus Benjamin constellates the Paris of his day with the same city in the nineteenth century, challenging the belief in historical progress prevalent at both times, since, for him, a society unable to match technological advance with enhanced social conditions cannot be deemed progressive. He finds in the cult of the new a nature-like repetition, locating in the fashion industry a machine for

reproducing same-ness in the guise of novelty. Conversely, Benjamin argues, apparently natural modes of behaviour and familiar objects obscure their historical derivation: in a dialectical reversal, what appears to be natural is historical and vice versa. Benjamin was critical of Marx's concept of a revolutionary impulse (and hence its Feuerbachian origin) that would simply supersede the past; instead he envisaged a consciousness capable of unlocking the never-realised emancipatory potential of objects passed over by 'progress'.

The Arcades project contemplates the social spaces and everyday objects of nineteenth-century Paris and seeks to reveal their historical being, focusing on attempts 'to master the new experiences of the city in the frame of the old ones of traditional nature', collecting and listing numerous examples of new technologies dependent on the old forms they would eventually discard.6 Cast iron, for example, would facilitate modernist constructional techniques, but was used in nineteenth- century Paris to create ornamental fountains based on classical themes. The same paradox can be detected in Wagner's ceuvre when one considers that his operatic

2 John Deathridge, 'Wagner and the Post-Modern', this journal, 4/2 (1992), 158.

3 Carl Dahlhaus, Richard Wagner's Music Dramas, trans. Mary Whittall (Cambridge, 1979); see 97-104 for a critical evaluation of Wagner's drafts and thoughts on the end of his tetralogy.

4 Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1991). Abbate expounds this reading of Briinnhilde in the final chapter of her book.

5 This study would have been Benjamin's magnum opus, but was incomplete at his death. Benjamin's notes and comments have been published (though they do not represent even a first draft) in his Gesammelte Schriften, V, 2 vols. (Frankfurt, 1982). References to the Arcades project, or Passagen- Werk, in the present paper frequently draw on Susan Buck-Morss's The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). This book is part re-creation, part commentary and part development from Benjamin's surviving files for the project. 6 Trans. Buck-Morss (see n. 5), 110.

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Wish images and phantasmagoria in Wagner

reforms hail back to Greek drama, along with mythology and legend: in a strange irony, the most formative composer for musical modernism was obsessed with recapturing a pure origin for music.

Infusions of the old and the new, mythology and technology, inform Benjamin's depictions both of hell and wish images in nineteenth-century Paris. Hell appears in the hidden repetition that underlies embodiments of the new and progressive, an idea invoked when Adorno remarks that 'eternal sameness presents itself as the eternally new, the static as the dynamic' in the formal and melodic structures of Wagner's music.7 On the other side, Benjamin's opaque account of wish images explores new technologies that veer towards the mythic because their emancipatory potential remains unfulfilled: they break with the immediate past but hark back to a more distant, ur-past. Susan Buck-Morss explains that the "collective wish images" are 'sparked by the new, from which they "maintain their impulse"', but envisage the revolutionary potential of the present by 'conjuring up archaic images of the collective "wish" for social utopia'.8 However, should these constellations remain dream images (that is, unconscious), they then become phantasmagoria: 'the means for realising human dreams, is mistaken for their actualisation'.9 And, in Adorno's opinion, Benjamin's wish images do veer towards phantasmagoria because they tend to fuse discrete phenomena, without mediating them through the complete social process, with a collective ideal.10 In Wagner's search for the universal and immediate, Adorno finds an anticipation of both modernism and - notwithstanding the composer's aspirations - its partner, the culture industry (the manifestation of instrumental rationality in administered entertainment). Wagner's unexpected premonition can in part be attributed to mid-nineteenth-century Germany lagging behind the economic advances of Paris: by pursuing outmoded aesthetic ideals Wagner unexpectedly anticipated a later form of culture production. His techniques for obscuring the artifice of his music dramas are, Adorno argues, intrinsically related to the commodity form of his day, but also prefigure the production techniques of mass culture. Adorno traces the logic of the commodity both into the culture industry and into so-called abstract thought, as manifested in philosophy and art,1' relying on the distinctions between use-value and exchange-value that Marx makes in Chapter 1 of Capital.'2

7 Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London, 1981), 62. 8 Buck-Morss (see n. 5), 116. The double quotation marks refer to Benjamin's words. 9 Ibid., 118.

10 Andreas Huyssen also makes this point in 'Adorno in Reverse: From Hollywood to Richard Wagner', in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism (Indiana, 1986; London, 1988); he also notes that Adorno never undertook an analysis of nineteenth-century mass culture. However, the essay 'Commodity Music Analysed', in Quasi unafantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London, 1992), does consider light music from this era, and his Mahler essays do, of course, contemplate the roles of cafe and folk music. See Theodor Adorno, 'The Idea of Natural History', trans. Hullot-Kentor, Telos, 60 (Summer, 1984), 111-24.

12 Karl Marx, Capital, I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London, 1976).

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Alastair Williams

Before exploring further Adorno's understanding of the commodity and of

phantasmagoria in Wagner, it is worth considering Derrida's recent reflections on Marx because these loosen the distinctions between essence and appearance that

reappear in Adorno's reading of Wagner. As one would expect, Derrida examines Marx from the most excessive aspect of his writings, detecting an obsession with

tracking down and eliminating the ghosts found in the spectral economics of

bourgeois capitalism. In probing Marx's writings, the spectral in Derrida's text becomes synonymous with his well-known concept of differance. The differance that undercuts a complete presence of signification is translated into a 'spectropoetics': I think, therefore I am spooked. Nowhere, Derrida contends, does the suggestion of the supernatural haunt Marx more than in his efforts to distinguish use-value from exchange-value. Marx compares the idea of a wooden table appraised for its use-value with the same object dominated by exchange-value: as use-value the table 'continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing';13 but this state, Derrida posits, is haunted by the inability to be fully identical with itself. When contemplation of the table switches to its exchange-value, the object behaves, Marx suggests, in an

altogether more surprising manner: 'It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.'4 The labour involved in production, Marx continues, creates a social relation between men [sic], but this is obscured by the 'phantasmagoric form of a relation between things'.15 Derrida has Marx's table perform a few more tricks: it 'seems to loom up of itself and to stand all at once on its paws';16 and a little later, clearly giddy at the antics of this quadruped, he informs us that it 'goes into trances, it levitates, it appears relieved of its body, like all ghosts, a little mad and unsettled as well'.'7 Derrida obviously enjoys exploring the distinction Marx elaborates between the straightforward qualities of the table as sensuous object and its 'sensuous supersensible' qualities as commodity.18 His point, however, is that pure use-value can only be entertained by reference to exchange-value: any product carries the capacity for iterability and substitution - for a temporal dislocation of its use-value - and can assert its worth against other commodities.

Derrida's analysis overcomes a certain stiffness in Marx's distinction, but it is Derrida, employing an immanent critique of transcendental philosophy, more than Marx, seeking to analyse a historical condition, who is fascinated by the chimera of an absolute origin or presence. Derrida is too astute to envisage collapsing exchange-value and use-value into one another: to do so, would be to bow to the inevitability of an unconstrained market. He concedes to Marx a real distinction between the commodity form and use-value, while insisting that exchange-value is

13 Ibid., 163.

14 Ibid., 163-4.

15 Ibid., 165. I have substituted 'phantasmagoric' for Fowkes's 'fantastic'. 16

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London, 1994), 149.

17 Ibid., 153. 18

Ibid., 151.

76




not simply a spectral corruption of use-value. Derrida also provides assurances that his intention is not to endorse universal fungibility with its programme of levelling objects and concepts to equivalences, but is less than expansive in justifying this claim. He seems to suggest that capital's excess, its non-identity with itself, somehow curbs this process, and talks tentatively of the commodity, though 'a born leveller and cynic', attesting 'to the value it puts in danger'.19

The Ring provides some sustenance for Marx's mediations on the transforming effects of exchange-value and for the spectral logic Derrida finds therein. The Nibelung hoard functions as a symbol of exchange-value: the gold is seized from Alberich when he changes shape, Fafner becomes a dragon so as to guard his wealth and Freia is bartered for the treasure at an early stage in the drama. Wagner, it is well known, once considered that only by overcoming the shackles of money could humanity be open to nature's laws: in Art and Revolution he appeals to 'Ye suffering brethren, in every social grade, who brood in hot displeasure how to flee this slavery to money and become free men'.20 In keeping with this belief, the Ring presents an illusion of natural presence and plenitude whilst the gold remains in the Rhine. It is Alberich's seizure of the precious metal that releases its capacity as exchange-value, yet the gold is already spooked by the Rhinemaidens' knowledge that a man prepared to renounce love could fashion a ring that would grant him worldly dominion. The Ring embodies a tension between images of abundance and purity, which are corrupted, and knowledge of a contamination already housed at the origin.

2

Adorno's work on Wagner, as mentioned, provides a critical alternative to Benjamin's interpretation of wish images, but the rigidity of Adorno's distinctions between construction and artifice can be softened by learning from Derrida's reading of Marx. Adorno's analysis of Wagnerian phantasmagoria, which derives from Marx's analysis of how the phantasmagoric relations between things obscures the social relations between people, examines passages in which the composer's advanced 'technology' blends with images of the archaic, the distant and the magical, producing results that, like the outward appearance of commodities, draw attention away from their means of manufacture. These illusions, then, are closer to Benjamin's images of hell than to his wish images, since evocation of the archaic is a fantasy that does not engender.engagement with the present; put another way, Adorno's analysis of Wagnerian phantasmagoria confirms his critique of Benjamin's wish images, though Adorno concedes that his consideration of the commodity form in Wagner is not entirely successful.21 By mediating Wagner's phantasmagoria through the total social process, Adorno is able to portray them as more than

19 Ibid., 162.

20 Richard Wagner, Art and Revolution, trans. W. Ashton Ellis (Lincoln and London, 1993), 63. Reprinted from Richard Wagner's Prose Works, I (London, 1895).

21 Theodor Adorno, 'Letters to Walter Benjamin', in Rodney Livingstone, Perry Anderson and Francis Mulhern, eds., Aesthetics and Politics (London, 1977), 129.

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Alastair Williams

discrete phenomena that Benjamin finds in Baudelaire, and to reveal their affinity to the commodity form; but the problems lie in his homogenised view of the total social process and his depiction of the commodity form as little more than

ideological mystification. These difficulties are reduced by Derrida's reading of Marx: if exchange-value cannot be reduced to a spectral contamination of use-value, then the phantasmagoria of Wagner's advanced technology need not be entirely deceptive and may tap a frail, collective wish. The question is whether Wagnerian phantasmagoria contain wish images that can be roused from slumber.

At the level of the Gesamtkunstwerk - and the associated theory of a revival of Greek drama, as Wagner imagined it - there is both a wish image and an image of hell: that artworks should feed from the lifeworld of the community is a utopian ideal,22 but the nationalist agenda pursued by Wagner is less attractive. For Adorno, the Gesamtkunstwerk is an impossible object, and contains an inherent deception in

trying to conceal this condition. Wagner's idea, related in Opera and Drama, that the orchestra should conceal the process of poetic production but nevertheless reveal its poetic aim means that the Gesamtkunstwerk longingly 'strives towards the ideal of the absolute phenomenon which the phantasmagoria dangles so tantalizingly before it': that is, the ultimate spectre of aesthetic organicism, which finds cynical realisation in the commodity.23 Nevertheless, Adorno's aesthetics generally stress the significance of art's appearance of self-containment (alongside its dialectical opposite, the pull towards the particular) because this aspect separates culture from a pervasive means-orientated rationality. Wagner's inflation of aesthetic illusion is problematic, in Adorno's view, because it is not held in dialectical tension with a sensitivity to its constituent components: the Gesamtkunstwerk's impetus is to subsume all elements, however irreconcilable their impulse. At this level of form, the wish image is linked to readers' abilities to brush against the grain of Wagner's will to synthesis.

The Gesamtkunstwerk may aim to create a seamless whole, but the tension between artifice and construction is an active dramatic ingredient in the Ring, and is embodied in the object from which the cycle takes its name. The ring possesses properties beyond anything vested in its production, and Siegfried's remoulding of Nothung disdains craftsmanship; but the prevalence of the impetuous forging motif - an active ingredient in both Das Rheingold and Siegeried - suggests that Wagner was only too aware of the labour put into artefacts, whatever their appearance. Alberich, as artisan, draws attention to the obverse of the commodity's external appearance, but in renouncing love and craving dominion he experiences the commodity form from the inside. It is the hollowing out of inner life, manifest in an overlap between desire and mechanical construction, that Benjamin detects in Baudelaire's poetry for Jeanne Duval.24 In 'Je t'adore a l'egal de la voute nocturne', the poet separates sex from eros when he describes sexual activity as 'comme apres un cadavre un chceur

22 The term 'lifeworld' (Lebenswelt), adapted from Edmund Husserl by Jiirgen Habermas, refers to the socio-cultural systems by which people articulate their lives, in distinction from specialised economic and political systems. 23 Adorno (see n. 7), 98.

24 Buck-Morss (see n. 5), 188-90.

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de vermisseaux' (like a chorus of worms going after a corpse).25 The image finds

strong resonance in Wagner's description of the Nibelungs in the first prose sketch of 1848: 'in spasmodic, restless activity, they burrow their way (like worms in a corpse) through the bowels of the earth'.26 Wagner's unsympathetic portrait of artisans draws attention both to the labour process and to empty, mechanical ambition, as staged in the spectral dialogue that opens Act II of Gotterdimmerung. The contradictory status of the commodity is embodied in the Tarnhelm: it valorises surface appearance, offering a magic change of image, yet the deceptive ends to which it is applied have important structural consequences for the

subsequent narrative. The shimmering phantasmagoria of the fire music that concludes Die Walkiire

depicts control of the commodity: Wotan and Loge are concurrently mythic beings who command fire and producers who encircle Briinnhilde with their flickering commodities, the heroine simultaneously entering into an experience of time outside Wotan's teleological designs and being lulled to sleep by the synthetic image of security that envelopes her. As Adorno suggests, the passage is situated on the

cusp between the 'death of Romanticism and the birth of realism':27 only the fearless

entrepreneur can master the commodity form and enter the charmed circle.

Phantasmagoria is exemplified as a moment that appears to hang in space, engulfed by sonority and surface colour, and the interplay of finished product and manufacture is absorbed into Wagner's musical language. Such passages are marked by what Adorno calls the 'absolute reality of the unreal',28 a description that reson- ates with Derrida's extrapolation from Marx's characterisation of the sensuously supersensible commodity that 'one feels there where one does not feel'.29

Adorno analyses phantasmagoria by means of dialectical switching between history and nature, revealing technically advanced depictions of natural and mythic being. The repetitive last fifty-nine bars of Die Walkiire, accordingly, are scrutinised not as a representation of nature but as a depiction of the historically mediated commodity whose surface obscures its labour and production process. The music is undoubtedly illuminated by constellating its technology with nineteenth-century commodity production, but the process of showing nature to be history need not eclipse the portrayal of physical nature in this passage, since the innovative scoring is not subsumed by what Adorno calls second nature (that is, reified history). Adorno describes a moment in Mahler's Fourth Symphony in which the phantasmagoria of a 'transcendent landscape' is both alluded to and undercut by historical understanding,30 but in the Wagner monograph he is unable to find reflective exploration of illusion.

Adorno suggests that the fire music is the dominant phantasmagoria in the Ring, presumably because, apart from actual statements of the idea, it embodies the

25 Les Fleurs du mal, XXV; trans. Buck-Morss, 190. 26 Dahlhaus (see n. 3), 87. 27 Adorno (see n. 7), 91. 28

Ibid., 90. 29 Derrida (see n. 16), 151. 30 Adorno, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago, 1992), 57.

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Alastair Williams

principle of a 'concealed' texture. He is critical of an undirected chromaticism that

simply hovers around the underpinning chords and the underlying E major tonality of Die Walkiire's final section. During the first ten bars of this passage the chromatic harmonies simply colour the underlying chords and emphasise the oscillating melodic shape of the fire motif, this stable form then being interrupted by the

similarly cyclic slumber motif, a triadic shape with an appoggiatura resolving from the second to third beat. Each statement of the slumber cell is approached via a

perfect cadence, which though providing a feeling of security is unsettled not by deferral in Wagner's normal fashion, but by repetition of its closure; and this process also neutralises the appoggiaturas. The theme flickers around E and C, with C

functioning both as a deviation within E and a tonal centre itself. The slumber motif is generally stated in a straightforward manner in the lower wind and is surrounded

by versions of itself and the fire motif, which it gradually assimilates, in a haze of

arpeggios: in effect, a texture of deviation and difference coagulates into a fusion of

internally articulated identity. Given the speed of the violin figuration and the number of players, a certain degree of contingency is built into the orchestration, the

sonority offering the aura of distance, of aesthetic illusion, and simultaneously, as in

Benjamin's envisioned shattering of aura, drawing us into its microscopic work-

ings.31 As Adorno suggests, the new and the old meet in a single image: Wagner's advanced techniques generate a sonority that is both elusive and rooted. But the mode of production is differentiated: there are levels of identity and different

processes, or spaces, within the sound mass. Wagner has attained an articulation of

synthesis and fusion that explores the illusory and spectral rather than imposing them.

Adorno argues that such moments anticipate mass culture; but if phantasmagoria describes articulated and not just homogenous sonorities, then the association

suggests that mass culture may well be more differentiated than he indicates, and it

may participate in more dynamic communication with modernist art than his 'torn halves' metaphor envisages.32 Consciousness need not always be the slave of commodification: though lulled to sleep, Briinnhilde does at least understand the powers at work on her; both she and the dream image slumber in the prospect of an eventual awakening. The prospect, or dream wish, is of differentiation within homogeneity and repetition, the dominant characteristics of mass production. If the texture is mediated by the commodity but is nevertheless internally diverse, then it suggests a form of commodity attuned to its mode of production, and perhaps indicates an experience of repetition beyond mass manufacture. Adorno's contention that Wagner's phantasmagoria anticipate the descent into mass culture thus obscures their affinity with a form of production, especially evident in the fire music, in which similar objects are not stamped by uniformity. What Adorno calls the 'total social process' includes the cultural codes that make up the lifeworld, and

31 See Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', trans. Harry Zohn in Illuminations (New York, 1968).

32 In a more general sense, Huyssen poses a similar question in his reading of Wagner in reverse (see n. 10).

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their diversity harbours the capacity to turn the commodity form away from a standardised perspective.

Adorno postulates that the primary media of phantasmagoria are colour and

sonority, but, again, his understanding of these components is marked by a certain ambivalence. On the one hand, their use embodies a progressive understanding of musical resources - the blind musical object becomes less opaque; on the other, they threaten to impede motivic development, the engine of temporal progression in music. At it crudest, Adorno's Wagner monograph opens a distinction between motivic development as a kind of use-value and static webs of sound as

phantasmagoria, even venturing to hold the musical event as essence apart from its

appearance as sound. The transposition of Marx's terminology works in so far as one can discern the two types of phenomena to which Adorno is referring, but in music it is even harder than in economics to maintain that one type of event - motivic transformation or sonority, for example - is a spectral corruption of its 'real' other. Motivic development is different from motivic transformation, but a motif

designed as a neutral building block can maintain a constant quality through mutation, while a motif with a strong sense of identity can be broken down into constitutive components. And, although music can establish its character primarily through pitch and rhythm, sonority has the capacity to assume more importance than these components. Neither motivic transformation nor sonority are simply neutral items in a musical economy of equivalence. So Adorno's contention, whatever his mixed feelings, that phantasmagoria hides its methods of production is skewed, since a medium dependent on sonority and fusion can hardly be accused of concealing a non-existent motivic development. In an essay written thirty years after his Wagner monograph, Adorno modified his outlook, becoming sympathetic to Wagner's talent for generating colours by blending individual elements, and even claiming that 'colour becomes tectonic' in Siegfried.33 It is reasonable to argue from this perspective that the recurrence of the fire music in Act III, shot through with Siegfried's horn motif, functions as part of a logic of colour and not simply as phantasmagoria.

In the Wagner monograph, by contrast, phantasmagoria provides the key for Adorno's analysis of Parsifa's transformation scenes, the Good Friday music and the 'dreamland brothel' of Act II.34 It is the spatial quality of the transformation scenes, referred to in the following famous exchange from Act I, that attracts Adorno's attention: PARSIFAL: 'Ich schreite kaum, doch wihn' ich mich schon weit.' GURNEMANZ: 'Du siehst, mein Sohn, zum Raum wird hier die Zeit.' (PARSIFAL: 'I scarcely tread, yet seem already to have come far.' GURNEMANZ: 'You see, my son, time here becomes space.')35 Adorno considers that the spatial effects obscure the temporal dimension of production, and concludes 'The characters cast off their empirical being in time as soon as the ethereal kingdom of essences is entered.'36

33 Adorno, 'Wagners Aktualitit', Gesammelte Schriften, XVI (Frankfurt, 1978), 555. 34 Adorno (see n. 7), 94. 35 Translation by Lionel Salter in Welsh National Opera Programme, Parsifal (Cardiff, 1993),

xiv. Eulenburg score, 203-4. 36 Adorno (see n. 7), 88.

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Alastair Williams

Again, however, Wagner's music is not exhausted by constellating its natural

imagery with actual historical conditions, because the whole scene, a succession of intensities, evokes an expressive opening out;37 and though one can share Adorno's

suspicion of the kingdom of essences, the music eludes a simple dichotomy between history as progress and nature as repetition.

Adorno also wrote about Parsifal many years after completing In Search of Wagner, but in this context there is no talk of phantasmagoria even though the sound quality of the work is his principal concern. 'On the Score of Parsifal' talks of a late work with a 'multi-layered dissociated sound [that is] emancipated and self-determinate',38 mentioning a 'dim orchestral sound of muted forte' that becomes important for new music.39 Neither of these comments is addressed to the Act I transformation scene

specifically, but their general nature makes such association reasonable. The dulled orchestration is certainly evident and provides a recalcitrance that refuses to flare up into spectacle. Adorno also dwells on Parsfal's aura:

It is as though the style of Parsifal sought not merely to represent musical ideas, but to compose their aura as well, as this constructs itself not at the moment of execution, but rather during the music's subsequent decay. This intention can be understood only by whoever surrenders more to the echo of the music than to the music itself.40

This ambiguous statement continues Adorno's dialogue with Benjamin, alluding to his friend's anticipation that mechanical reproduction would replace the aura of autonomous art, and suggesting that Parsifal simultaneously evokes an auratic distance and its decay.41 The illusion of artistic autonomy, Adorno seems to suggest, becomes self-reflective in the sonorities, which are orchestrated to linger without definite endings, evoking a sense of distance through their disintegration - it is as if the music, like a fine wine, has an afterglow in which the ingredients are revealed. And Adorno returns to illusion in the last sentence of the Parsifal article, when he suggests that what endures in the work is the 'expression of the frailty of conjuration itself'.42 In the Act I transformation, the moment of a decaying after-image is brought to our attention by the entrance of the bells,43 the aura again growing and withering with Gurnemanz's statement and the ensuing Knights' chorus. The commodity, it seems, no longer gleams so brightly and has some insight on its own appearance. Instead of searching for the phantasmagoric in the 'Good Friday Spell', Adorno now refers to its 'pale luminosity', which, he maintains, exerted an influence on Mahler's Ninth Symphony.

37 The spatial interleaving of the music is captured, perhaps at the expense of the tonal goal orientation intended, in Felix Salzer's neo-Schenkerian analysis of this passage in Structural Hearing: Tonal Conference in Music (New York, 1962), 2 vols. The graphs are given in vol. 2, 232-2; they are discussed in vol. 1, 216-18.

38 Adorno, 'On the Score of Parsifal, trans. Anthony Barone, Music and Letters, 76/3 (1995), 386.

39 Ibid., 385.

40 Ibid., 384. 41 Barone, ibid., 393, also notes the derivation of these comments. 42 Adorno (see n. 38), 387. 43 Eulenberg score, 218-19.

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Adorno remains critical of Parsifals fusion of old and new, particularly as it feeds into the Jugendstil aesthetic of Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande, but also notes that the separation of archaic-liturgical modes from advanced chromaticism creates a certain dissociation in the music, the false splendour of the old and the technological chimera of the new made 'matter of fact' by their intersection. Implicit in this statement is a recognition that the two domains can offset each other: a music that can reveal how the cultic is manufactured is not bewitched by it. In this later reading colour and aura are active ingredients of the work, and hence more than surface artifice, the modified perspective reflecting characteristics of Wagner's late style alongside a shift in Adorno's own receptive criteria. He still focuses on the produced object, but, perhaps unwittingly, emphasises the role of thte 'reader'. The implication is that mediation through the total social process can produce differentiated results; therefore it is reasonable to hear the passages dubbed phantasmagoric in a nuanced manner, perhaps even against the grain of Adorno's earlier argument. The 'cinematic' moments in Wagner provide good sites on which to seek such dialogues.

3

When Adorno associates Wagner's art with film production techniques the intention is - as the quip about 'the birth of film out of the spirit of music' suggests - generally disparaging:44 the Wagner monograph views film as a medium in which technology and technique converge under the pressure of the culture industry, and this marks the point at which, in Adorno's view, aesthetic organicism is subsumed by the commodity. In a study Adorno co-authored with Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films,45 one finds elements anticipated in the Wagner critique: standard film music simply duplicates, or overdetermines, stage events; individual moments are not mediated by the musical whole; leitmotifs function as musical calling cards. In film Adorno locates a contradiction between the two-dimensional characters on the screen, who have roots in the silent movies, and the spatial depth of the sound track, while attributing a similar lack of substance to Wagner's dramatic characters who, since they are only products of the myth, 'dissolve into the phantasmagoria like mist'.46 This vein is continued by his claim that Wagner's tendency to impose a response on an audience is intensified by the cliched situations of Hollywood cinema. Commercial cinema therefore presents in standardised form the surface of an administered world, repelling attempts to probe bentath it; but, crucially, the authors acknowledge that 'resistance and spontaneity' can survive the bureaucratised culture.47 Sections of the book, presumably those written by Eisler, also indicate how the film-music composer can retain some ingenuity within a streamlined production process, although, because he maps his culture industry critique on to

44 Adorno (see n. 7), 107. 45 Hanns Eisler (and Theodor Adorno), Composingfor the Films (London, 1994). Chapters I,

VI, IX and X of Versuch iiber Wagner had been published previously in 1939, as 'Fragmente uber Wagner', before the film book appeared; but other chapters date from after the film study and were published in 1952, in the first edition of Versuch.

46 Adorno (see n. 7), 89. 47 Adorno (see n. 45), 121.

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film, Adorno fails to find diversity within film practice and between techniques such as camera angles, cuts and edits,48 just as his critique of popular music pays little attention to characteristic studio methods, like mixing. Since Adorno views the

commodity form as handmaid to the spectral corruption of exchange-value, he tends to regard distinctions within commodified culture as disguised repetition. Though musically trained, and hence better equipped to understand differentiation within Wagner's output than in film production, Adorno's insistence that the Gesamtkunstwerk's affinity with the commodity erodes the differences between art forms also makes him ill-disposed to trace creative non-synchronisms between them.

A later essay, 'Transparencies on Film', ventures some loosening of the culture

industry model,49 conceding that the gap between intention and effect is inherent in the medium. This slippage is not inherent within Wagner's genre, but is detected there in Adorno's acknowledgement at an early stage that Wagner's artistic aims

inadvertently both endorse and subvert a prevailing rationality. Alongside the

deceptive phantasmagoria, Adorno suggests that, especially in the Ring, the leitmotifs generate an allegorical brittleness that threatens the chimera of organicism. In 'Transparencies', Adorno describes experiencing a sequence of separate, mental

landscape images, commenting that 'it is in the discontinuity of their movement that the images of the interior monologue resemble the phenomenon of writing: the latter similarly moving before our eyes while fixed in its discrete signs'.50 He suggests that 'Such movement of interior images may be to film what the visible world is to

painting or the acoustic world to music.'51 Again the old and the new overlap: a

pre-conscious, almost spectral, association of images that seems to pre-date industrial perception of landscape - compared by Adorno to a magic lantern - finds its medium in the technological possibilities of film. Later in the article, as he and Eisler had contemplated some twenty years earlier, Adorno envisages a practice of

montage 'which does not interfere with things but rather arranges them in a constellation akin to that of writing'.52 This proposition of course describes a

potential technique of production; but when the notion of film as writing is taken together with an acceptance that reception is not always overridden by the intention of production, one can attribute some montage-building skills to the spectators. As Miriam Hansen observes:

If an aesthetics of film is advised to reconstruct an associational mode of experience in constellations akin to writing, this means nothing less than that it would aspire to the level of self-conscious construction by which - in Adorno's view - all truly modern art assumes the function of dialectical theory. Only then would film cease to be a script, which imposes a literal reading on the spectator, and become icriture - which requires a critical deciphering.53

48 Miriam Hansen makes this point in 'Introduction to Adorno: "Transparencies in Film"', New German Critique, 25/5 (Fall/Winter, 1981-2), 188.

9 Adorno, 'Transparencies on Film', trans. Thomas Y. Levin, New German Critique, 25-5 (Fall/Winter, 1981-2), 199-205.

50 Ibid., 201. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 203. 53 'Introduction to Adorno', Ibid., 197.

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It would be contrived to suggest that either the fire music or the transformation music are montages, but an associational mode of experience is certainly germane both to these passages and to Wagner's larger forms. The stage directions for a moving backdrop of scenery during the transformation scenes are, presumably, one of the features Adorno was referring to when he talks of the 'film-like technique of scene transformation' in Parsfal.54 These passages, and the fire music, partially 'naturalise' stage events, like a standard film score, but their effect is closer to interior image evocation than to general film soundtrack practice: they amplify particular moments, as camera close-ups might evoke a larger event. If Wagner does offer 'close-ups' of spatial depth, it is within the audience's ability to grasp that these are angles on an idea but not the only ones possible; indeed, the inflections and layering within the textures enable listeners to take different auditory perspectives on them instead of being overwhelmed. Adorno is right to mediate these passages through the commodity form, but they are less mystifying than Marx's characterization of exchange-value suggests. On closer inspection, these 'spectres' have been constructed and will engage with more than one reception strategy.

The late film essay is also more conciliatory towards Benjamin's concept of wish image, though the term is not actually invoked. The collective movement of the eye in watching a film, Adorno suggests, taps a mimetic collectivity (mimesis referring here to an affinity with pre-instrumental world views and an openness to our inner nature).55 'The literated film', Adorno continues, 'would have to wrest its a priori collectivity from the mechanisms of the unconscious and irrational influence and enlist this collectivity in the service of emancipatory intentions',56 envisaging in effect a subjectivity that is not simply a homogenised imprint of the administered world. The ear, Adorno argues in Composingfor the Films, is particularly attuned to the non-instrumental knowledge such a collectivity would draw on because, unlike the eye, it is an archaic organ and has not adapted to the segmented images of the commodified world, though in standard film practice music's access to this non-industrialised, aural stratum is frequently exploited to naturalise reified images. The naturalising effect is also noted in Wagner (indeed, Adorno quotes from the film book in his Wagner monograph), but here Adorno extends his argument concerning the inertness of the ear, asserting that this characteristic is exploited by Wagner's inbuilt enticements to passive listening, to the extent that the experience becomes one of 'oceanic regression'.57 However, Adorno's suggestion in 'Trans- parencies' that interior images are the medium of film provides grounds for questioning why Wagner's navigation of an archaic and mythical collectivity, his emphasis on the ear, cannot be wrested from the unconscious and irrational. Adorno's claim that the mythical and gestural in Wagner naturalise the historically constructed situation of his own day certainly carries weight, but if one views Wagner's music dramas as texts capable of responding to different interpretative

54 Adorno (see n. 7), 109. 55 For a commentary on mimesis in Adorno's aesthetics, see my New Music and the Claims of

Modernity (Aldershot, 1997, forthcoming), chapter 1. 56 Adorno (see n. 49), 203-4. Hansen also notes the convergence with Benjamin's views here. 57 Adorno (see n. 7), 99-100.

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strategies, rather than as works embodying mere prescribed meanings, then it becomes possible to engage the pre-symbolic dimensions of his art in a two-way exchange and so loosen their potentially coercive grip.

Where the stage characters fall silent and the orchestra takes over in the fire and transformation music, the sound appears to embody the 'cultural trope' of music as essence.58 But from the perspective of film theory, at the point where singing characters fall silent and hence lose their stage presence, when their experience is transferred to the non-diegetic orchestra, and when their bodies are not vocally projected into the surrounding space, it may be that their pre-symbolic knowledge is externalised in the acoustic environment.59 This gestural dimension can, of course, only be realised in music by symbolic construction, but the resonating space of these passages invokes a pre-linguistic comprehension. In the collectivity of this shared code, the new (Wagner's 'technology'), as Benjamin suggests, does have the capacity to spark off a wish image in the archaic part of ourselves, and it is this constellation that Briinnhilde perhaps tries to interpret. Adorno's analysis of the pre-linguistic and gestural component in Wagner maps it on to a 'reified, alienated reality';60 but if, as I have argued, Adorno's later writings in particular are potentially hospitable to Benjamin's theory of wish images, then the forcefield linking non-instrumental rationality with regression in Wagner is pulled in another direction. The dream images do not remain unconscious because, once given symbolic articulation, they can be deciphered.

By exploring the intersections between transparent composition and artifice, intended and received meaning, my intention is not to undermine Adorno's materialist aesthetics. In 'Wagners Actualitit' he argues convincingly for the historical location of progress and regression in Wagner's art: 'Everything in Wagner has its historical core. Like a spider his spirit sits in the gigantic web of 19th-century exchange relations.'61 However, Adorno's later writings suggest that the web of exchange relations need neither eliminate cultural articulation nor paralyse consciousness, and this perspective facilitates a differentiated reading of his earlier Wagner critique. In Search of Wagner, as Andreas Huyssen has shown, already investigates a model for mass culture that is not overwhelmed by administered desire,62 and mapping Adorno's later views on film on to the Wagner study releases the prospect of an experiential association that is not merely manipulative. Material conditions appear both as historical sediment and as a dramatic force in Wagner's mature works, feeding his amalgam of romantic, modernist and archaic strata, while

58 Lawrence Kramer draws a distinction between music as 'cultural trope' and music as 'disciplinary trope' in his Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley, 1995), 61-6.

9 Richard Taruskin, following Roger Sessions, makes the larger claim that music tracks our inner gestures in 'She Do the Ring in Different Voices', review of Abbate (see n. 4), this journal, 4/2 (1992), 196.

60 Adorno (see n. 7), 35. 61 Adorno (see n. 33), 562; trans. Huyssen (see n. 10), 36. 62

Huyssen (see n. 10).

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Wish images and phantasmagoria in Wagner 87

also informing the critical strategies used to interpret this forcefield. Since the fickle

properties of the commodity are inscribed at many levels in the Ring, it is hardly surprising that Abbate should find disjunction in the cycle or that it should generate conflicting psychoanalytical readings.

If Derrida's weakening of the opposition between use-value and exchange-value gives cause to question the at times too-rigid distinction between essence and

appearance in Adorno's music criticism, this knowledge allows one to pursue a more nuanced analysis of the illusory in art and its association with the commodity form. An understanding of how commodity production impinges on Wagner's aesthetic is of contemporary relevance because, judging by the number of composers and

musicologists now turning their attention to the nineteenth century, his intersections of old and new evidently enjoy an affinity with the late twentieth century. Exponents of the new musicology give patchy acknowledgement that most of the themes now flagged up - with justified urgency - have previously been tackled or

anticipated by Adorno, though in a philosophical tradition distinct from the

primarily French discourses that feed much contemporary theory. However, while

musicology is now willing to regard music as sedimented experience, it is still reluctant to explore the material conditions that feed musical manifestations of

subjectivity.



Documents

Technology of the Archaic: Wish Images and Phantasmagoria in Wagner