WAGNER ‘ecstasy and the heady brew of the unconscious become necessary to sustain the delusion of an aesthetic roclity. This isthe fare Wagner serves up in the ‘music dramas. ‘The autonomy of the individual arts is noc sacrosanct. It is simply a conse- {quence of the division of labour. Wagner's attack on it may have been in the ‘name of humanity but what he offered was not liberation but intoxication and delusion. The greater the degree of commodification and of reification, the more the bourgeois resorts to the unconscious mind to produce an intoxi- cating and magical world of sensuous events and relations. Ie is magic in the sense of the irrational and the unconscious which corresponds to the reified consciousness of a commodified society. It is at the level of « more or less primitive irrationality that an attempe can be made vo unify che sensuous elements of bourgeois life. Consciousness, which is of the specialising and differentiating type — that is, ordinary rational-technical bourgeois ‘consciousness — would prevent any such project from achieving fruition, ‘What is needed, Adorno argues, is for a spiritual regeneration of society to arise from genuine and rational co-operation in social production. (It is insceuctive, in this respect, to consider Adorno's rejection of the authenticity (of the social co-operation in the composition and performance of jazz.) ‘Wagner's world is but a reflection of the alienated and impoverished consciousness of bourgeois society which would seek to recover at a sensuous Jevel what it as lost chrough instrumentality. Bu such a unification has no basis in social reality; chere are no means to achieve it in anything but appearance. Genuine liberation would have demanded the rational control of the labour process in the cause of freedom, bue this was not possible for ‘Wagner: his totality was no real totality, but the fragmented world of the individual pretending to be totality. It was again the reified and de-sociated ‘ego taking totality upon itself a feat that would be quite impossible under modern conditions forthe sociated individual. It is not possible for the indi vidual to renounce the division of labour to which s/he owes everything, not possible to conjure from within him/berself all the specialist skills necessary for the Gsamtbenstwerk. ‘Adorno cites Wagner's own critical insight into the necessary conditions for a Gesamthunstwerk [No one can be better aware than myself, that the realization of this drama depends upon conditions which do not lie within the will, ‘nay, not even within the capability ofa single individual ~ were this ‘capebility ifinicely greater than my own — but only in community, and in mutual cooperation made possible thereby: whereas, at the present time, what prevails is the direct antithesis of both these factors. (F. Adorno 1981: 112) 8WAGNER Phantasmagoria ‘Adorno explores this illusory world of Wagnerian music drama as a species ‘of ‘phantasmagoria’. While the world of Wagnerian heroes and heroines such 1s Siegfried and Briinnhilde, Tristan and so forth may seem to be a million miles away from the sober tealities of European business culture, Adorno treats them as the very product and reflection of bourgeois life. In the first place the character of the operas themselves — as phantasmagoria — simply reflects their character as ‘commodities’. The term ‘phantasmagoria’ was one used by Marcin his discussion of commodity fetishism’. The commodity is 1 phantasmagoria because it conceals the sinewy socal relations that went into its production and presents itself to the consciousness of the subject as a ‘reified’ object belonging to a world of such objects. The real substructure of the commodified world consists in the social relations of production through ‘which commodities are produced. These disappear from view in the process, and recur in the guise of a more or less fancastic world of appearances. Because the commodity world appears to the mind of the subject as possessed of a purely external and independent existence, as though it were sn aucoclithonous thing, che relationship of che subject wo che externality of the commodity becomes fetishistic and the ftishised world of commodities appears possessed of mythic powers that are non-rational. The occultation of production by means of the outward appearance of the product is what ‘Adorno claims to be the law chat governs the works of Richard Wagner (T. ‘Adorno 1981: 90). ‘Any such occultation of the relations of production through which the work is produced is, for Adorno, a flight from time and from ‘nature’. Both timeless and perfect totality, stands revealed, in Adorno's oching more than what Schopenbaucr decribed a ‘the ouside of the trerhles commodity’. Wagner could noc have achieved such atoraity had his subject-matter been genuinely historical, involving real change and which represents the moment as the eternity which endures, Writing of the image of timelessness in which Brinnhilde sleeps in the phantasmagoria of the magic fire, Adorno observes of the music: ‘While the manner of its production is completely concealed in its string sections, harmonically, ies progression is most ingeniously thae of a state of rest. Not only do the constant harmonic changes produce no new progressions; at che same time systematic modula- 79WAGNER any given moment, like a fire chat perpetually flickers without ever moving from the spot. (T, Adorno 1981: 89) ‘Adorno sees the phantasmagoria as the image of the impoverished imagi- native world of the bourgeois. He cites Wagner's own claim, ‘Thus, in the completion and production of Te Mastersinger, which I at first desired in Nuremberg, I was governed by the idea of offering the German public an image of its own true nature, s0 botched for it before’ (T. Adorno 1981: 96). ‘Wagner's commitment to the production of a timeless eternity in the present is to be found in his own account of his aesthetic ideals. Wagner Danishes all historical specificity from his works in his conviction that poetic depth is synonymous with the absence of historical specificity. In his effort to conceive of an unvarying human nature which lies beyond categories such as the natural, or even the supernatural or history, to a stratum where all is undifferentiated, Wagner resorts to myth. “The pure human being turns out to be an ideal projection of the savage who finally emerges from the bour- sgeois, and he celebrates him as if, metaphysical, he really were the pure ‘human being’ (T. Adorno 1981: 116). This, for Adorno, is bourgeois force unmasked and the reason for the fascination of modern bourgeois culture with the idealisation of savagery and primitivism. ‘Wagnerian characters are representatives of ideas and as such are t00 empty, in themselves, co have anything to express. Music as accompaniment is essential to their dramatic effect. The characters are not required to be individuals. They are the mouthpiece for Wagner the poet, who speaks through them. The connection berween bourgeois ideology and myth is stressed by Adorno throughout. Thus, he argues, in Labengrin the links can ‘be seen at their clearest; the establishment of a sacrosanct sphere inviolable by any profane tampering coincides directly with the transfiguration of bourgeois arrangements. Adorno deconstructs the bourgeois form of gender ideology that appears in the oper: In line with the authentic spirit of ideology, the subjugation of ‘women in marriage is dressed up as humility, as ehe achievement of 4 pure love. Male professional life, which must of necessity be incomprehensible to women by virtue of their strict exclusion from it, appears as a sacred mystery. The Knight of the Swan bestows tlory, where the husband merely disburses money. .. . Female ‘masochism generally cransforms the brutality of the husband's "That ‘concerns you not’ into the fervent ‘My Lord, never shall this ques- tion come from me’. The Master's whims, his imperious commands and above all the division of labour which Wagner overtly criticizes, are all unconsciously affirmed. The man who ‘fights’ for his means of existence out in the world becomes a hero, and after Wagner 80