Wagnerian Volkideologie, Narcissism and Aesthetics

8/3/2019 Wagnerian Volkideologie, Narcissism and Aesthetics

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Wagnerian Volkideologie, Narcissism, and AestheticsA Study in the Totalitarian Imaginary

Arthur SchechterLeventhal/German Critical Thought II/Spring '11

GRMN 313April 21st, 2011


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What I mean to submit here is a structural theory of the aesthetic, exploring its function

vis--vis the political, and desire's implication in ideology. We will use as our framework and

jumping-off point Kant's model of the aesthetic, but with some crucial revisions. From here, we

will bring psychoanalysis to bear on ideological frameworks and aesthetic judgment, and the

interplay between the two. Drawing on Freud's ego psychology and his theory of narcissism, as

well as Lacan's theory of the mirror stage and I-formation, we may understand the function and

status of primary narcissism as immanent and necessary to the formation and maintenance of

ideology as it is constituted by its Subjects on the group level, and investigate the political

ramifications of what we may term secondary ideological narcissism, and the role of theaesthetic in it. Later on, we will take Wagner's anti-semitism, Volkideologie, and his The Jews in

Music as a case study in such a dynamic, posing the question of the importance of art to, and its

role in, totalitarian culture. Utilizing psychoanalysis as our initial primary hermeneutic, we will

ultimately find ourselves asking difficult questions of Freud, whose diagnostics of narcissism on

the group level will seem more and more ontic and dissatisfying, lacking the vocabulary to ask

the question of the material conditions in which the group subsists, such as the division of labor,

and whether they can be superseded oraufgehoben; after all, the analogue of the group, nation,

or state to the individual (the body politic), with a character, with all the same neuroses, is,

when left uninterrogated, a blow to all notions of heteronomy or individual agency. The fact,

then, that we are compelled to draw the analogy is the influence, a distinct symptom, of

authoritarian culture itself.

Our investigation begins with a rereading of Kant's Critique of Judgment. This is not to

say that it is without profound structural insight. Nonetheless, his presuppositions must be

interrogated in order to make him applicable outside of his particular, totalizing Enlightenment


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milieu, particularly notions of universality. Such notions shine through, manifest blatantly in his

theory of the aesthetic; what he describes as the fundamental disinterested quality of beauty must

be called into question. To the extent that the ideological is a set of propositions which are

imaginary relations to material reality, inconsistencies are present, as in any set of propositions or

determinations. The contradictions immanent to a given ideological framework reveal

themselves with enough interrogation. Even the barest, least linguistic mediation between the

Subject and the material world as he or she observes it, or what is often referred to, unqualified,

as simply the sense faculties, is still a proposition. It is one, however, which is predicated

upon desire, which contains pleasure and unpleasure, the beautiful and its opposite, and as awhole affirms the ideology of which it is part and parcel, sensuously, desirously, and

unintellectually. Terry Eagleton submits the analogy to the Imaginary. The beautiful is the

mconnaisance, then, of objects which affirm, allude to, point to the coherence of the ideological

framework which contains the proposition which gives the object its beauty, just as the Lacanian

subject misrecognizes him or herself in the mirror, supposing a coherent or ideal subject.

The Kantian subject of aesthetic judgement, who misperceives as a quality

of the object what is in fact a pleasurable coordination of its own powers

resembles the infantile narcissist of the Lacanian mirror stage, whose

misperceptions Louis Althusser has taught us to regard as an indispensable

structure of all ideology. In the imaginary of ideology, or of aesthetic taste,

reality comes to seem totalized and purposive, reassuringly pliable to the

centred subject[]. Beauty is in this sense an aid to virtue, appearing as it

does to rally support for our moral endeavours from the unlikely resource of

Nature itself. (EIA pp. 87-89)

Eagletons critique of Kants bourgeois vantage point, and that of his entire critical philosophy, is

sufficiently withering for a properly Marxist inquiry. He understands more generally, however,

the purport of the aesthetic, and its role in the study of the ideologicalper se. Given certain

material conditions it is necessary that certain subjective responses be invested with all the


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force of universally binding propositions, and this is the sphere of the ideological, he writes,

modifying Kants universality into a usable form, which we will put to use (EIAp. 96).

If the aesthetic functions as the Imaginary of an ideological framework, we are driven to

carry this analogy further, drawing on Freud and Lacan, and must take into consideration the

individuals narcissism, and its analogue on the group or national (i.e. ideological) level, of

which Freud was prescient in his seminal essay of 1914, On Narcissism. The mirror stage of

Lacan, the inscription of the Imaginary Order, was, as Lacan acknowledged, foreshadowed in its

by Freuds concept of primary narcissism. Narcissism, as Freud outlined it, may be understood

as always present in the individual given the Imaginary Orders permanence, and indeed,structural necessity in I-formationper se, but in degrees varying from the innocuous to the

pathological. Freuds concept of Super-Ego, with varying possible degrees of censorious

intensities, is yet another way of framing the structural function of narcissism. However, the

moment of pathology is marked by a distinct regression. The ruthless striving toward the ideal-I

in an individual suffering from pathological narcissism results in the Ego functioning not to

relate to objects or ever to cathect, but only to subsume, sadistically force to conform to its vision

of the world as an extension of itself, in a necessarily futileattempt to replicate the experienced

omnipotence of primary, infantile narcissism. If we proceed, we will see the these tendencies

tendencies at work, by analogue, on a higher order of magnitude, on the group or national level.

What we observe here is the hypostatization of a certain (hierarchically organized) notion of the

group, whose very conceptual identity is rendered palpable, and demands deference to the

hierarchies implicated in it, that it may function so homogeneously as to draw comparisons to an

individual subject. It is this Hegelian totality which we will later problematize, but which holds

when considering the various incarnations of the nation-state in modernity which all refer back in


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some way to, and indeed constitute this hermeneutic. It is here, then, where we reach a key

moment of differentiation in our structural investigation. The Ideological Symbolic Order and

the Aesthetical Imaginary Order, as we may rightly term them, function in tandem on the

national level, and we may thus move past our prefatory outline of the mere identification of the

two structures and their cooperationper se, and begin to realize the critical application of this

structural framework as we consider the possible varying degrees of narcissism present in

nations and cultures with their own discreet Imaginaries and Symbolics.

In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud himself surmised the possibility of a culturalsuper-ego; that is, the censorious component of the human psyche whose roots were in an

originary sadism, and whose structural function was predicated upon narcissism, was

acknowledged by Freud as present and functioning at the cultural and national level. Narcissism,

while inscribed immanently into the function of the psyche inasmuch as it is instrumental to the

preservation of the Ego, is present in a spectrum of intensities, and just as he drew the line of

pathology in narcissism in an individual, Freud warned of the dangers of its manifestations on

the group level. Whichever semantic iteration we choose, we see narcissism essentially

operative in the creation, delineation, and delimitation of groups, particularly nations. The

degree to which it is manifested, however, is another matter, and does not go without saying.

An emotionally healthy individual may maintain object-relations which are ideally

predicated upon exchange and interdependence with determinate, recognizable boundaries and

limits, and the analogue may readily be drawn to a nation which is accepting of political,

cultural, and ethnic multi-valence in its constituency, or a culture which is accepting, and quite

literally, open to exchange with foreign elements and cultural productions. National identity is


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still maintained by setting the nation as a self against an Other, but the way in which it relates to

that Other is primarily congenial, and may be deemed comparatively healthy. Conversely,

pathologically narcissistic object-relations are devoid of external cathexis, and are by no means

an exchange; rather, desire is turned futilely and destructively inwards. The Ego will concede

nothing, and must see a continuation of itself in objects which it subsumes if it relates to them at

all. The same tendencies are exhibited by totalitarian culture, which is given to imperialist or

expansionist tendencies, and is ruthlessly censorious of heterogeneity, relying often on the

politico-legal realm to direct all speech, action, and cultural production to unilaterally reproduce

the ideological propositions which constitute it. The closed circuit analogy drawn from theEgo which has cordoned itself off is perhaps even more apt considering the fascist state and its

fixation on unceasing self-reproduction and self-representation and stringent delineations of its

own representations in cultural, political homogeneity, never deigning to let in that which it has

not produced or molded, and reaching out only to absorb and subjugate.

Furthermore, in his 1948 paperAggressiveness in Psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan

identifies aggressiveness as a hallmark of the narcissistic condition, constituting his fourth thesis :

Aggressiveness is the tendency correlated with the mode of identification I call narcissism,

which determines the formal structure of man's ego and of the register of identities characteristic

of his world. (crits p. 89) Structurally, Lacan identifies an aggressive relativity inherent to

the ego, by which it most basically and primitively sets itself over against objects. A narcissistic,

paranoiac positionality as an adulthood regression, then, naturally correlates with an aggresivity

which is infantile in nature.

We may turn to Freud and his supposed observations of narcissism in tribal society,

dubious as they may be, for a model of the infantile national culture. The factuality of such a


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supposition is not at issue here, and is inherently problematic; rather, the primitive tribal

existence which set itself over against all other cultures out of mere survivalist necessity is

frequently posited by authoritarian nationalism to function as a sort of racial mythos. The very

possibility of regression to such an infantile aggressive position is predicated upon such a model,

with racial, national, or any such valences superadded a priori to lend intention to an otherwise

aimless, self-devouring narrative. The vicissitudes of this model, and the role of the aesthetic in

creating and sustaining it, will be considered below, with Wagner's meditations on race, and the

Volkas the crucible of art, as a case study.

In modernity, the analogue of adulthood in our provisional model, we see theauthoritarian society exhibit the aggressiveness and paranoiac behaviors of the narcissist, fitting

Lacan's profile. In particular, the obsessional position of panopticism characteristic of

authoritarian culture may be read as an expression of persecution fears, and quite literally, the

positing of real or imaginary spying and intimidation, in Lacan's own words, to be rooted out.

Phallic anxiety over the discursivity and multi-valence of culture is overdetermined in the

totalitarian struggle for homogeneity.

If we are to follow this model faithfully and completely, we should realize that the

cultural Imaginary, the very structural facilitation of cultural narcissism, is constituted and

inscribed through the production and reproduction of the aesthetic. The role of art, a national art,

in the sustenance of nationalism is instrumental. The production of beautiful objects is the

primary mode of reification of an entire ideological framework. Moreover, it is the unique

position of the aesthetic to both inscribe ideologically and desirously, given the possibility of

explicit ideological content in works of art.


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In the following, we will endeavor a trifold exploration of the function of the

authoritarian aesthetic with our case study in the particularly nationalistic instance of Wagner's

writings on music, art, and national culture. First, we will delve into Wagner's theory of race,

Volk, and creativity per a national character. Here we will investigate the deployment of the

aesthetic to, in this case, posit explicitly, but in other cases, presuppose implicitly, a pure,

tribal, national infancy and infantile narcissism, and to effect a regression to such a state. Then,

we will continue our reading of Wagner and observe what he considers the absence of national

character, in the particular case of the Jews. Interestingly enough, his anti-Semitism is

linguistically motivated, or at least justified, and we will extrapolate his criticism inJews inMusic per our observation above of the paranoiac, phallic character of totalitarian culture, here

bent on eradicating minor aesthetics (as well as poetics, music, literature, etc.) establishing the

homogeneity of the major language and its accompanying aesthetic. Lastly, we will consider the

ability, or at least aim of the authoritarian aesthetic to reroute and redirect desire in subjects, and

the consequences of the alienation of desire. Conversely, we will investigate the possibility of a

liberated aesthetic, and the position of the aesthetic in fully realized Marxism as the unalienated

production of desire of its own, chosen, rather than dictated, objects. Admittedly, such an

investigation will not yield an excess of positive knowledge, but we will find that we may graft a

properly structural aesthetic ideal to the already extant structuralist-Marxist ideal with striking

coherence. However, positive movement will certainly be manifest as the merits of a materialist

psychiatry imbued with the critical materialism of Marx become clear, furnishing a response to

and general treatment of Freud (a move beyond would be a crass undertaking at worst and a

confining description at best), adapting his vocabulary to the certain extents in which his

perceptions were ontologically incisive, whereas his more ontic observation and suppositions


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will be properly treated and interrogated as well. For instance, his treatment of group dynamics

at the end ofOn Narcissism is patently unsatisfying, as he settles for facile speculation,

presupposing the Ego Ideal's function in groups, satisfied with the hermeneutics of the Ego

which psychoanalysis had established, not bothering to question what role material conditions,

the division of labor, or some other such materialetiology might have in shaping power relations

such that narcissism is the status quo of group interaction, or even that a homogeneous, Ego-like

organization is the state of affairs. However, just as the original hermeneuticians lacked the

critical vocabulary (or even possibility thereof) which would have been given them if they had

only been able to take the Bible as literature, post-Freud we may delve even beyond ego-psychological latency which he found no reason to interrogate, and adapt him to speak on the

material conditions extrinsic to the ego which synthesize in tandem with it.

However problematic western models of primitive peoples or tribal societies are,

Freud's work on narcissism, and Wagner's justification for and basis for a definition ofdas Volk

unavoidably relate back to the same. This contiguity, this shared understanding of what

originary society meant and how it functioned, regardless of positive or negative valence, is of

vital importance and must be given credence in a proper analytic of a nationalist aesthetic such as

Wagner's. Freud understands narcissism as it characterizes primitive, tribal existence in On

Narcissism as follows:

This extension of the libido theoryin my opinion, a legitimate one

receives reinforcement from a third quarter, namely, from our observationsand views on the mental life of children and primitive peoples. In the latter

we find characteristics which, if they occurred singly, might be put down to

megalomania: an over-estimation of the power of their wishes and mental

acts, the omnipotence of thoughts, a belief in the thaumaturgic force of

words, and a technique for dealing with the external worldmagic

which appears to be a logical application of these grandiose premisses.

(p. 74)


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In this model, narcissism seems very much to be implicated in magic, ritual, the desire to

be as one with nature and the world. This desire is not innocent in any sense however; this

cultural mirror stage is one which is inherently aggressive. Psychosexually speaking, this nave

omnipotence of thoughts suggests relations with the world seeing all objects as for me,

while at the same time being thoroughly unable to relate in any reciprocal, mutualistic way to

another subjectivity, or subjectivities constituting another nation or tribe. This totalism is by

definition exclusionary and aggressive to that which is not yet, or for whatever reason may never

be, subsumed under it.

Wagner bares his understanding of the necessary role of desire in the formation of a

nation, or here, das Volkwith an eery honesty:

The folk is the epitome of all those men who feel a common and collective

want. To it belong, then, all those who recognize their individual want as a

collective want, or find it based thereon;... For only that want which is a

which urges to the uttermost is genuine want; but this want alone is the

force of true need; but a common and collective need is the only true need;

but only he who feels within him a true need has as right to its

assuagement... and it is the folk alone that acts as according to a necessity's

behests, and therefore irresistibly, victoriously, and right as none besides.

(pp. 85-6)

The conflating of want and need in Wagner's characterization mirrors the urgency and

structural necessity of narcissism to the fact that is constituted by frivolous, selfish volitions or

desires which need to be desired structurally, but are not needsper se. In the tribal society

which we posit, being one with the world is at the same time being master of it, and having a

right to it. Entitlement, desire, and need all congealed into one smack of an infantile national

positionality, and a telos which posits such an originary state as an end is a regressive one.

Wagner's understanding of the function of desire, a collective univocality, is just such a

nationalist position, one of justification, of right, of entitlement; his apparently circumspect

understanding of the function of nationalist identification notwithstanding, which is necessary for


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a theory thereof, he exhibits at the same time an infantile immersion within it. And it is precisely

what follows, the exclusionary essentialization of a people, that completes the picture of a

regressive existence, a cordoning off, and indeed an originary moment of the notion of race as a

trope.

Who are they now who belong notto this people, and who are its sworn

foes?

All those who feel no want; whose lifespring therefore consists in a need

which rises not to the potence of a want, and thus is artificial, untrue, and

egoistic... diametrically opposed to the common need.

Where there is no want, there is no true need; where no true need, no

necessary action... [but] there blossoms every vice, every criminal assault on

Nature. (p. 85)

This is a violent denial of all those Others which do not fit under a totalizing, narcissistic

and sadistic rubric: it is to deny the validity of the desire of any who are not ofdas Volk. To deny

that another has desire is in a very important sense denying the Other's nature as also a subject,

also self-consciousness. Narcissism taken to its extreme is predicated upon the impossibility of

an Other with agency, with needs, with volitions; a whole, undivided Self met without

opposition, an impossible condition which is always being encroached upon by just that very

Other, and which must therefore be defended violently. Paranoia and aggression ensue. Any

apparent cause of any deficiency in the project of omnipotence is met with a sadistic backlash.

But where violent enforcement to eradicate heteronomy is a negative condition of

nationalistic identification, it has its direct compliment in a positive condition to be fulfilled: the

creation of a collective want, the creation of a nationalistic object of identification. This is the

role of art vis vis nation, tribe, or other delineation. Wagner's insistence that The folk creates

art is then a clever inversion which lends legitimacy to the creation of objects which direct, or

more accurately, dictate the desire of people. His Ring Cycle, as an example, draws on Norse

myths, and on the Niebelunglieder for its body; its content is mythical (and the value of myth is


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its eternal truth, Wagner asserts), and purportedly drawn out of some originary racial font of

spirit or inspiration.

Only by the folk, or in the footsteps of the folk, can poetry really be made,said Wagner,

and by insisting that the content of a nationalistic artwork is enduring, eternally of a national

character, he sutures over the inversion which has taken place. He maintains that the

Niebelungenliederoriginally had flourished mid the folk, eked out by voice and gesture, as a

bodily enacted artwork. (p. 83) Similar to the role of magic as Freud understood it in tribal

societies, art makes materiality and the world at large bend to a narcissistic ideological vision by

inserting itself into a racial-national historiography as always already present. Wagner's art, his

own and his ideal art, functions to inscribe desire onto the minds of people; it functions

Imaginarily and desirously, and dictatorially.

The careful maintenance of a homologous, univocal direction of desire, then, requires

defense against, and elimination of, all possibility of expressive heteronomy. That is to say,

Wagner designates those not ofdas Volk(and indeed, synonymously, its enemies) as those whose

desire is not common. If we read fascism as Benjamin does, namely, the aestheticization of the

political, which is a common concern, the common desire, the common aesthetic, the national

aesthetic must be unilaterally maintained in order to facilitate fascism, and any appropriation of

the dominant Symbolic predicated upon an alternate, polyvocal multiplicity of desirous and

aesthetic potentialities, a divergent or deviant phantasmatic object, must be read as a threat. We

see this heteronomous threat in the form of what Deleuze and Guattari term minor literatures, a

dynamic and provisional utilization of major structures such as languages by minor groups for

minor purposes. We turn to Wagner's explication and justification of his own anti-semitism for

yet another eery echo of what, otherwise, only a posteriori analysis and various structural


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theories have been able to glean; namely, that care for and maintenance of structures of power,

law and the state are prima facie linguistic concerns. This can be seen by extrapolating from

Wagner's presuppositions regarding art and language, as he says:

Of quite decisive weight for our inquiry is the effect the Jews produce on us

through his [sic] speech; and this is the essential point of the Jewish

influence upon music. The Jew speaks the language of the nation in whose

midst he dwells from generation to generation, but he always speaks it as an

alien... A language, with its expression and its evolution, is not the work of

scattered units, but of a historical community; only he who has unconsciously

grown up within the bond of this community takes also any share in its

creations... the homeless [Jewish] wight has been a cold, nay more, a hostile

looker-on. [italics mine] (pp. 51-2)

The Jewish presence in European art is understood by Wagner as a heteronomous

contaminant of precisely the linguistic variety. In every extrapolation of Lacanian-Freudian

psychoanalysis, of Freud's ego psychology and of Lacan's structuralism, we see yet again the

expressions and machinations of narcissism qua group dynamic as directly analogous in many

ways to the subject's own expression. That is, the desire of the man to have phallus as the desire

of the man to control his signifying dimension is desire to have no meaning escape him, and

signifiers themselves answer to him, as it were. The nation-state, one of whose concerns is

certainly a language, and by extension, the symbolic order which is adopted by its subjects, or

the ideology which interpellates them, has an analogous concern as precisely the Big Other,

namely, to regulate language, to adjudicate, to exist(to prevent the seemingly always impending

failure of symbolic fiction as iek calls it in his article The Big Other Doesn't Exist). The

Imaginary machinations which constitute the Big Other are then engaged in a constant process

of suturing, engaged in a project of making the symbolic fiction true. So again we return to

the complementary pair of positive and negative projects which constitute this larger project; the

positing and constituting of the Imaginary, phantasmatic object of national identification, and the

constant disavowal and eradication of uses of the Symbolic which amount to a bricolage of the


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Ideological, and are a corruption of its presuppositions. The group libidinal investment in a

national project analogous to the individual aspiration of having-phallus amounts to a state

aspiration of being-phallus.

Wagner's anti-semitism moves from his linguistic premise to a wholesale condemnation

of Judaic art and cultural production in its supposed inauthenticity, and indeed, its minority, a

rationalization of a total inability to relate to a cultural Other: Who has not had occasion to

convince himself of the travesty of a divine service in song, he asks, presented in a real folk

synagogue? Who has not been seized with a feeling of the greatest revulsion, of horror mingled

with the absurd... which no caricature can make more repugnant than as offered here in full, in

nave seriousness? (p. 55) What we see exhibited then, in Wagner, is a keen understanding of

the structural fact of nationalism, of anti-semitism, but in a way which does not sublate that

structure and realize it as such. His partial inquiry is completely uncritical, and is indeed a

reifying force inasmuch as it provides rationalization. Over the course of the brief vignette

giving us a look into Wagner's hatred and insecurity which came to be called The Jews in Music,

this initial rationalization, a partial understanding of structure written into that particular

ideological structure itself, relatively unemotional, gives way once the author seems no longer

able to contain himself. He ends with a polemic against the poet Heinrich Heine, and has

advanced from denying Jewish verse the status of poetry to calling it versified lies. The

Imaginary transvaluation between beauty and truth is seen in its converse, the relationship

between ugliness and untruth. No one could be as beautiful as Narcissus, and no one could ever

produce art as beautiful (as true, as good) as das Volk; Judaism, Wagner concludes, the Other,

is the evil conscience of modern civilization. One might jokingly suppose that, in a

sociopathic reimagining of Levinas' talmudic reading, Wagner would prepare for Yom Kippur by


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going door to door killing his neighbors to be forever rid of their unbearable, unfathomable

alterity.

Perhaps the greatest challenge which faces a nationalistic artistic ideal such as Wagner's

is that of creating an ideal Volkout of the actual populace; the very same piece in which Wagner

defines the Folk is indeed termed Cultural Decadence in the Nineteenth Century, and contains a

subsection entitled The rabble and the Philistines set artistic standards. Wagner laments, Our

theatrical institutions have, in general, no end in view other than to cater for a nightly

entertainment... lazily swallowed by the social ennui of the dwellers in our larger cities. (p. 41)

The role of the purveyors of art to the public in its inauthenticity, as Wagner sees it, can only be

so prominent, and he laments also at the same time the passivity, the readiness with which the

public consumes the same cultural production. This is, after all, what would earn them the

designation of the rabble. The project, then, of turning the rabble into das Volkis the project

of national artpar excellence. The realization of this goal is arguably in fascism, and an end

which Wagner never lived to see, but certainly foresaw with an uncanny prescience. What the

equation lacked, then, and what Wagner was necessarily unaware of, were the technological and

industrial preconditions for such a triumph of the will. The word choice here is decidedly un-

ironic, in that fascism, as the aestheticization of the political per Benjamin (seeIlluminations

p. 241), has its crucial inchoate kernel in Wagner's theory of the aesthetic.

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin marks a paradigm

shift in the way in which aesthetic objects are consumed. The consumption of an aesthetic

object by the masses is only possible through its mass production and reproduction. But its

form, and the manner of its consumption, are necessarily altered to fit precisely the material


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realities of its replication (pp. 223, 234-5). The rehashing of the aesthetic artifact to precisely

such a reproducible object, and nothing more, we then understand as a prima facie fascistic

reduction, a sort of subjection or putting to use. The reasoning behind this may be distilled and

some further understanding of this dynamic gleaned.

The relations of production and reproduction of an object will undoubtedly influence that

object's final form. In a corporatist economic constellation, that is, primarily seen in imperial

stage capitalism where corporations work in tandem with the state and constitute a national

identity (as opposed to multinational late capitalism), the particular relations of production which

constitute corporatism, or corporate-state collusion, will be inscribed upon mass-produced

objects. This is the perfect condition containing within it not only the potential, but the inherent

tendency, toward reproducing aesthetic objects which serve only to conduct public desire in a

coherent manner, which bring into line with one another and elevate the individual, molecular

aesthetic egoisms of discrete subjects in their consumption of art to a homogeneous, univocal

relation of desiring production to a national object. The aesthetic object in the industrial era,

then, contains within it a necessary political valence, precipitating the aestheticization of the

politicalper se.

Taking Wagner's idea of common desire into consideration, we would also do well to

refer to Horkheimer and Adorno on fascism, media, and language. In theirDialectic of

Enlightenment, the pair identify in fascism, particularly with the radio presence of theFhrer, a

distinct univocality, in the most literal sense of the term; that is, a flattening, deadening, an

ossification of language, the end of discursivity in representation and communication (p. 135). If

we understand the Symbolic as always worked on to some degree by the heteronomy of desiring

subjects, the mutability that occurs in the space where the nonexistent Big Other is supposed to


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be, the elimination of that heteronomy in a desiring unity would undoubtedly result in the death

of that language. If we take Horkheimer and Adorno at their word, we see at the root of this

dynamic the unchecked reproducibility of the aesthetic object constituting an overblown,

univocal, uncompromising national Imaginary preceding the Symbolic, or language. We see the

essential hypostatization of Wagner's theory in the totalitarian project; what Horkheimer and

Adorno identify as a carrying-out of Enlightenment, we may term the construction of Phallus

itself as the material facilitations and manifestations of nationalist feeling.

When, materially, that which the rabble consumes is always-already dictated in form by

the relations of production which have conceived of it, Wagner's dream is realized. This want,however, is not being conjured out of them from some hidden place, the hypothetical well ofdas

Volk, we must add in a key qualification. But it is an act of exploitation, of manufacturing

manque to spur corresponding want as per Deleuze and Guattari, that creates the wound, only to

fill it, and maintains the illusion that the wound was always present. As Benjamin says,

Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the

property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these

masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. (p. 241) Or, to paraphrase,

fascism shorts the masses' material investments, but provides returns on their masochistic

libidinal investments. But, as Deleuze and Guattari submit inAnti-Oedipus, this deprivation of

the masses' right goes deeper than material iniquity. One of the insights of the pair's

materialist psychiatry is the ability to glean psychosexual insight from economic circumstances.

As the pair observe,

Lack(manque) is created, planned, and organized in and through social

production. It is counterproduced as a result of the pressure of

antiproduction; the latter falls back on (se rabat sur) the forces of

production and appropriates them. It is never primary; production is never

organized on the basis of a pre-existing need or lack(manque). (p. 28)


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It has become clearer, then, the dynamic which fascism exploits by way of the aesthetic.

The multivalence of the french manque is noted in the translation ofAnti-Oedipus, and we

understand the entanglement of material need and desirous want which Deleuze and Guattari

posit. This is the location, as it were, of fascism's respective ideological and aesthetic

manifestations. We may even understand the manufacture ofmanque as the production of

individuals with full, unhealthy libinal investments towards the group ego-ideal, and therefore by

extension, ultimately the positing of one ideal mind, one ideal body to fill each subject's

wounded Imaginary. We find ourselves at the conclusion once again, that the very applicability

of analogies from the individual to the group level signal the already impending, if slow death of

heteronomy, of creative, desirous, discursive agencies in favor of, for lack of a novel term,

dogma. One could argue that Freud wrote on narcissism at a time when the wound which

fascism would try to fill had already begun festering.

We are also compelled here to ask the question of a liberated aesthetic. It is difficult,

given the place of the aesthetic in modernityper se (not even to mention postmodernity), to

imagine its role in a Marxist society. However, we can go about our investigation ex negativo; if

we see theproductive power of desire and not just the consumption implied in the very notion,

and understand a richer dynamic that does not presuppose lack but sees it as synthesized like

Deleuze and Guattari, we can understand an alienation of desire. If we understand Ideology as

materially manifest, and therefore materially reproducible, the Marxist object is contained in the

realization by people of their propriety over the products of their work, and their agency in

shaping ideologyper se in their work; this realization is also precisely that shaping. As Ideology

is reproduced, so is the specific Ideological proposition of beauty, which we maintain is its


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lynchpin. If we take Kant's statement that the beautiful is the image of the morally good with

the key qualification that good is an ideological proposition, a beautiful object, an object of

desire, will reflect in it the economic realities of alienated production which Ideology deems

good, or proper, in an alienated configuration of desire.

Manque is precisely such alienated desire. A Marxist aesthetic ideal will, then,

necessarily run analogously and parallel to its goals concerning the ideological. What Wagner

has termed egoism is the insubordination of the individual subject in producing a beautiful

object which, as a material production, has ideological reverberations, and threatens control. The

artistic and linguistic heteronomy which threaten fascism are precisely the image of a liberatedaesthetic. If Marxism will be realized when ideology is understood as by, and subsequently, for

the Subjects which it interpellates, the aesthetic will be liberated when it is not predicated upon

manque, upon sadomasochistic class stratification, but when the notion of beauty is determined

discursively, in intersubjective heteronomy, when it is determined positively,productively, and

not reactively, where its productive power is consigned to servility.

Materialist psychiatry, a powerful tool in our inquiry (which appears to have only begun),

ought to turn frequently to Freud. However, their relationship is complex. Freud's vocabulary

and many of his definitions are indispensable. However, the main criticism of Freud and many

of his categories which ossify existing power structures may be summarized, in the materialist

camp, by deeming him an ideologist ofmanque Freud's treatment of the neuroses, and the

group especially, simply lack in their criticism of the material realities of political economy as

Ideology which subtend them, by which desire is produced as such. This does not, however,

undermine our decision to use his theory of narcissism, or make it any less applicable or effective

in explaining fascism as long as we do not settle for simple diagnosis. It should be noted, also,


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that the moment ofUmriss must come at the level of the group, that the critical moment is not at

the level of the individual.

As such, the problem with much of Freud is not in him, or even in his work in ego-

psychologyper se, but precisely in that which he himself observed, the material circumstances

which engender the broader group dynamics which we must criticize. Such is the case in this

particular study, where we find that the division of labor and the skewed material relations in

capitalism and state capitalism themselves engender the imbalance of libidinal investments

which constitute group narcissism. The structural necessity of narcissism to the ego then,should

not apply to the group in the way that it does in fascism. The cultural super-ego certainly exists,but its existence is not immutable. We must use in tandem Freud's keen observation, his

particular method of ordering, but cease in observation in order to criticize, to, as Slavoj iek

puts it in his 2008 workIn Defense of Lost Causes, produce asymbolic fiction (truth) that

intervenes into the Real, that causes a change in it. (p. 33) In this sense, materialism and its

treatment of psychoanalysis offers nothing unheard of, following in some ways the tradition of

tarrying with the Freudian negative (which some may argue describes the 20 th century since

Freud altogether). What if the treatment of individuals could be subtended by some broader

aufhebungin the conditions which rendered them neurotic, constricted in their desire as they

were? What if this aufhebunggave us a notion of desire other than what Deleuze and Guattari

call the abject fear of lacking something? (p. 27) Our understanding of relations of production

constitutes the perverted status quo, and the same goes for what we must term, digging deeper

than Freud, relations of desire.


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Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age..."Illuminations: [essays and Reflections].

Comp. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1988. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Flix Guattari.Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota, 1983. Print.

Freud, Sigmund, and James Strachey. "On Narcissism." On the History of the Psycho-analytic

Movement: Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works. London: Hogarth, 1991. 67-102. Print.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno.Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical

Fragments. Trans. Noerr Gunzelin. Schmid. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2002. Print.

Lacan, Jacques. "Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis."Ecrits: the First Complete Edition in

English. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2006. Print.

Lacan, Jacques. "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function." Ecrits: the First Complete

Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2006. Print.

Wagner, Richard. Wagner on Music and Drama: a Compendium of Richard Wagner's Prose

Works. New York, NY: Da Capo, 1988. Print.

iek, Slavoj. In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso, 2008. Print.

Documents

Wagnerian Volkideologie, Narcissism and Aesthetics