Censoring Wagner.
John Hutnyk
"Wherever one goes these days you will be plagued with the question: what do you think of Richard Wagner?” (Marx in Großkreutz 2013).
Thus spoke Karl Marx in September 1876, complaining in a letter to his daughter
Jenny Marx Longuet just as the Bayreuth festival was inaugurated and the first complete version of The Ring of the Nibelung performed.
There are many kinds of censorship, of which the ‘plague’ of saturation media coverage is perhaps not the least significant. Marx, as far as we know, unfortunately never responded to requests for his views on Wagner, though he is already referred to without being named, as ‘musician of the future’, in Capital volume 1 (CW 35:179).
As there is much at stake in the many and varied forms of censorship which could be discussed, we might start with this oblique and rare omission. And just as nearly everything has already been said of Wagner, as well as of censorship,
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this admission, or even admonition, that there is nothing to say is resonant. Marx in chapter 6 of Capital , with this cryptic reference, is talking of the inability of any, even the most futuristic virtuoso, to live upon future products. The political economists on the side of capital forget that the purchase of labour power will not be enough to produce value, it must be set to work, and even then the surplus value must be valourised through sale and circulation in the market. A source of much confusion, actual labour and actual exchange are necessary, but not sufficient explanations of the secret of value production.
What is obscured are the actual conditions of production. Really existing labour, as labour power, as the capacity of labour to produce more than its own value, which
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This presentation was originally given in the last session of the conference
‘Researching Music Censorship’ 8 June 2013, Copenhagen
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must be put to work to allow the capitalist to extract surplus. Is it too abstract to suggest that this expropriation, which Marx wants to make clear, can be heard in an inverted echoing form with the deafening reproach that surrounds any mention of a concord between Wagner and National Socialism? A vociferous and verbose silence around Wagner seems only to remonstrate, accuse and bellow ad infinitum
– as if the debate about Wagner was not also produced, invested, expropriated, exchanged and circulated – for profit. The scandal of Wagner is just this occlusion of the work that is done to produce the scandal, a productive censorship. In this chapter I want to ask if it is possible to develop a view of Wagner that is not already guilty of joining a crowded chorus of condemnation? So many ultimate denunciations have already been discussed, printed, published, catalogued, footnoted, sold, remaindered, pulped… a veritable culture industry.
Is it possible to discern anything new in this immense accumulation of commentary, and to learn something about cultural production that is relevant for today?
In calculated anticipation of the 200 th
birth anniversary of Wagner in May 2013, an intemperate cultural studies™ was agog with commentary on Wagner and philosophy
– described as a new elevation of Wagner to philosophy. The present writing proposes a critique of some of these newer texts on Wagner, and my insinuation will be that such criticism might suggest a different take on the censor. In the main this study takes as deep background parts of Friedrich Nietzsche’s writing on, support, and break with, Wagner, and Theodor Adorno’s critique, and appreciation, in his book In
Search of Wagner
. Walter Benjamin famously read Adorno’s Wagner text in draft before his suicide (extreme self-censure), and Martin Heidegger devotes a few pages to Nietzsche on Wagner that deserve attention, especially perhaps since Heidegger was to act as editor of the Nietzsche archive (editing as censorship) and as postal censor for the National Socialists until 1945. Thinking these authors in terms of varieties of censorship offers background interpretation for more recent commentary such as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s Musica Ficta (1991/1994), Jacques Ranciere’s
Aesthetics and Its Discontents (2004/2009), Alain Badiou’s Five Lessons on Wagner
(2010), and Slavoj Žižek’s contributions of various introductions and afterwords – and half the book Opera’s Second Death – on Wagner (2001, 2005, 2010a). Texts by
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Michael Taussig, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, and others, will add additional stage notes.
It is journalistic standard fare that Wagner’s story is now bound up with censorship.
The Israeli state will not have his works performed. Even before the Nazi’s adopted and appropriated Wagner, his festival at Bayreuth had excluded Jewish conductors and performers. The ‘political’ justification for an erasure of Wagnerian themes – excluding an occasional jingle such as the Valkyries section in a movie like
Apocalypse Now – arises exactly where Wagner is presented seriously, for example in the BBC sponsored Proms Wagner series. It should be no surprise that the 200th birth anniversary was an opportunity for jarring controversy as, in May of that year, the
RheinOper in Düsseldorf pulled a performance of Tannhäuser directed by Burkhard
Kominski. This was just the latest in a long string of rousing controversies for the chattering classes, amongst whom it sometimes seems that discord itself is a scripted part of the play. In what is itself a revealing conflation, Wagner and Adorno are each invoked as having an often-noted Jewish heritage, but only the vaguest hint of reference is permitted to contemporary geo-political drama of which controversy over
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music is a kind of code. The National Socialist context in which Adorno critiqued
Wagner is post-dated and simplified even as the pairing of these two figures is renewed. We should recall that just five years after the second world war, in 1950,
Adorno had written to Thomas Mann to report as ‘most troubling’ both the reopening of the Bayreuth Festival and discussions of lifting Heidegger’s teaching ban (Adorno to Mann, 1, August 1950). If this is something to read today in terms of resurgence of fascist ideology, I immediately want to qualify Adorno’s position, since in the same letter to Mann he mocks as ‘nonsense’ the idea that Nietzsche has some sort of
‘ancestral’ role in fascism (Adorno and Mann 2006:60), and two years later Adorno directly compares Mann’s difficulties in completing an abandoned pre-war novel,
Krull
, to Wagner’s own stalled composition of
Siegfried (Adorno to Mann 28 April
1952, in Adorno and Mann 2006:84). Adorno’s Wagner is more nuanced, which in turn should remind us that a key question is the how and why of our critics seeming so keen to rake over biographies of the past in order to score political points in the present.
Thus my questions would be: Can we decide if Adorno self-censors or rather has a more dialectical take? Do commentators on Adorno comprehend his position or simplify? Is Žižek’s new ‘Introduction’ to Adorno’s book on Wagner ‘fair’ insofar as it self-declaredly leaves readers to make up their own minds (Žižek 2005)? Is the publishing industry invested in sensation and brand more than ideas and analysis of power? How does a politics of interpretation, and even of translation, relate to the
‘battle for Wagner’ (Badiou 2010:165)? Is Badiou correct to suggest that the restaging of Wagner after WWII required a purge of any kind of national myth – or if not a purge, a theatricalisation which achieved the same end (Badiou 2010:6)? Should
Wagner rather be named as founder of modernism, creating sur -Mythic analyses – as
Claude Lévi-Strauss hints by suggesting the ‘God’ Wagner was the ‘undeniable originator of the structural analysis of myth, and even of folk tales’ (Lévi-Strauss
1964/1986:15). Žižek will make much of the structuralist connection below, while deploying a range of elemental associations, trills and a perhaps overly literal fugue a la Wagner in explaining Heidegger at one point (Žižek 1993, 2001). When Badiou links this more closely to a kind of Heideggerian propensity to seek out the originary
‘Greek’ spirit in language, is this the same as where Nietzsche shows how Wagner’s love for the German language prevails despite its ‘ponderous particles’, troubled syntax, ‘unsignable auxiliary verbs … and all those things that have entered our language through our sins and omissions’ (Nietzsche 1876/1990:289)? In the domain of these exchanges, is Wagner in need of the recalibration that Žižek puts up for auction? And finally, does this teach us anything about censorship and the status of texts (or events) from long ago, from the middle of the nineteenth century, for today?
It was Adorno, following his own Marxist analysis, who suggested Wagner obscures the labour of production in the fantastical scenarios of his opera? Isn’t this a parable for both critical and political ‘theory’ today? Why so much effort by so many to make
Wagner say so much by way of displacements, errors, renovations and redemption?
This is all surely symptomatic of something more fundamental.
To reclaim the topic of Wagner, I want to first try to clear away some of the obstacles that already orchestrate an interpretive frame. To make this framing visible I want to engage with some of the multiple and contradictory forms of censorship with which we have been working and which are operative in the debates over Wagner. I also want to again make the case that to focus only on formal censorship is to limit the
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political to a legal and agential rights agenda. I can only think of this as a bourgeois transactional individualistic-bureaucratic model that foregrounds the appellant supplication of the state. Those who request the authorities to keep our papers in order
(Foucault 1969/1972: 17) have already ceded responsibility, and adopt a passivesubmissive posture. Uncritical and undialectical, the law, especially censorship law, is the domain of grinning ‘hucksters’ (Adorno 1967/1983:34). We need to discuss how this version of censorship might not be the only one. This can be thought about through Wagner – himself a supplicant of the Bavarian King Ludwig II – which may have been a necessary position for bourgeois art then, but the context now is that in a more instrumental way than ever the complicity of art with commerce must register.
To what degree does Wagner self-censor as petitioner or client to power, in exile, after the failed revolutions of 1848-1849? And by extension, to what degree is
Wagner’s art a compromise with popularity? Already in his notebooks of 1874
Nietzsche wrote of Wagner’s ‘excess’ and how he employed ‘everything to achieve effects – the magnificent, the intoxicating, the bewitching, the grandiose, the mythical, the neurotic’ (Brown in Nietzsche 1876/1990:232). Adorno will say something similar, and use this to indict those who comply with the evisceration of contemporary art.
Wagner is claimed for the right – historically, obsessively, problematically – but also via 1848 and some readings of the Ring and Parsifal , by the revolutionary movement of the left:
The composer had a revolutionary phase in 1848/49, when half of Germany was fighting for democracy and freedom. During the Dresden uprising in May
1849, he wrote flyers, transported hand grenades, was in close contact with the
Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and observed the approaching Prussian troops from the tower of the city's Church of the Holy Cross. When the revolutionaries' cause was lost, he fled to Zürich, where he lived in exile until
1858 (Kurbjuweit 2013)
Adorno will do something more nuanced with this, but it is of interest that in 1848
Wagner was in Dresden with Bakunin – Marx at the same time in the same struggle was not far away in Cologne, editing the Rheinische Zeitung, urging the German working class to see through the trick of capital. In a different essay it might be interesting to delve further into this relation of Marx in Cologne while Wagner is in
Dresden, and after the uprising is defeated, they are both in Paris. Similar phraseology appears both in Wagner (‘ink and blood’ 1848/1995:138) and in Marx (‘letters of blood and fire’ 1867/1967:175) in
Capital , albeit 20 years later, but both describing the history of oppression in the transition from mercantile to industrial power. Marx does not reference Wagner’s speech, and he probably did not hear it, but is this coincidence or also a kind of censorship? Possibly comrades drifted apart, since by the time Marx had finished volume one, Wagner was reconciled with authority and very close to Ludwig II. ‘There was no money to be had from the leftists’ is the explanation given for Wagner’s new allegiance (by Bermbach quoted in Kurbjuweit
2013). Bayreuth was built with Ludwig’s funds.
Bayreuth and Marx will feature again, but I first want to set the scene with a focus on the spectacle of the 2013 Wagner anniversary and its frisson of erasure(s) in popular journalism.
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200 Years of jingoism.
The British response to the Düsseldorf RheinOper farrago was of course already loaded in ways that could have been predicted. Two world wars and one world cup – don’t mention the bombing of Dresden, and other edifying moments of British jingoism. This national chauvinist point-scoring habit – ‘don’t mention the war’ was effectively a Guardian rondo – serves only to distract and diminish the theme into older and more contrapuntal tones. Will Self, for example, writes in the Guardian on the issue of morality in music and each mention of Wagner is run alongside seemingly compulsory trills about Hitler. Initiated into the Wagner cult, Hitler loved the music ‘both despite and because’ (?) Wagner ‘was an anti-Semite’ (Self 2013).
Admittedly, this was in a review – itself another mode of censure – of Alex Ross’s book The Rest is Noise , written with baroque sophistication and an air of superiority:
The fact of Hitler’s undoubted musicality torments Ross, and runs through The
Rest Is Noise like a haunting threnody – from the 17-year-old’s [Hitler’s] claimed attendance of the 1906 premiere of Strauss’s Salome in Graz, to the
Nazi leader’s ecstatic absorption into the Wagner cult at Bayreuth … [Ross] wants to save Wagner’s sublime coloratura from the livid streak of anti-
Semitism that tainted its creator. But really there’s no need for these complex dissections to separate head from heart, or morality from art. To adopt the contemporary idiom, Hitler was indeed a great music lover – get over it! He could be one, and still prosecute the deaths of untold millions by word and deed (Self 2013)
Other examples from the UK were indicative. Kate Connolly reports medical historian James Kennaway’s view that ‘“No musician’s music was seen as such a potentially dangerous stimulant as Wagner’s … While the Nazis famously saw him as a model of musical health, at no time before or since the 1800s has one figure so dominated the debate on music as a pathogen as Wagner”’ (Connolly 2013). British assessments of Wagner often sound like a lament for loss of empire occasioned in some distorted sense by memory of military conflict. Unable to criticise American hegemony, remembering worlds of war and cups, the language of resentment sounds ever more shrill in present circumstances. The formulaic ‘do not’ attached to any mention of Wagner here is a contemporary censorship in our heads – do not mention foreign policy, militarism, weapons trade, NATO incursions, fraternizing with
Mujahadeen and unsavoury despots… and do not admit that the drive against anti-
Semitism has little to do with defence of Israel so much as it does the doublethink that declares Britain a tolerant anti-Nazi civilisation at the very same time as its immigration restrictions, demonisation of asylum-seekers, racism against economic migrants and its detention centres have escalated this ‘tolerance’ to neo-work-camp proportions. The English Defence League on the one side and the brutal execution in a London street of Drummer Lee Rigby on the other, are not just bizarre items of colonial blow-back, but another moment of the productive war-economy here and now. Away from ‘home’ this chimes with the horrors of the Palestinian siege, the
Libyan and Syrian death squads, the return of the military junta in Egypt – and all the baleful chaos that rolled back the brief optimism of the Arab Spring in favour of continued arms sales. It is Adorno who could explain that this displacement – a form
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of national-global myopia and self-censure – can take a tone of mockery and even self-denigration (Adorno 1952/2005:12). A melancholic regret that denies current bullying. Note also that much of academic commentary will slide also into this political contextualisation, though in various ways, with more or less conscious avoidance. Such that, not only in Britain, Wagner still does astonishingly flagrant duty for other agendas in a pot-kettle-called-black scenario.
Translation and Preface as censorship
Back to Adorno again? Adorno’s In Search of Wagner was originally drafted as an essay in 1938 – inspired in reaction to his (former) mentor Siegfried Kracauer’s 1937 volume Orpheus in Paris: Offenbach and the Paris of his Time and initially published on the eve of World War II. Offenbach and Wagner are taken as key figures in the apparently always fascinating third quarter of the nineteenth century, itself interpreted in present times from its surface level expressions rather than its own judgements about itself, where a jest could be more serious than many ‘whose seriousness was but a joke’ (Kracauer 1937/1938:360). It is not without serious intent that Adorno completed the final book version of his text just a few years after the war, in 1952. In
2005 it was reissued in English through Verso amidst another global war (on terror), and Slavoj Žižek wrote the introduction, doing so in terms of redemption. Though
Žižek largely ignores Adorno’s musical and commodity critique, the redemption is figured as Adorno’s ‘unfinished project’. I will dispute Žižek’s framing here as again a kind of occlusion of the work Adorno’s critique evokes. Žižek of course is famous for his (Lacanian) jokes, but Nietzsche had already opened his ‘Case of Wagner’ with the serious/humour couplet: ‘with many jokes, I bring up a matter that is no joke’
(Nietzsche 1888/1966:611). Kracauer was aware Nietzsche knew how deep the abyss of metaphysical speculation could be (Kracauer 1937/1938:364) and saw how this combination often disguises the least funny, most dangerous moves. It is my argument that different kinds of erasure are at stake as Žižek takes up Wagner – translation, art/labour, theory/practice, analysis/provocation, seriousness/humour.
When Spivak notices that Adorno had criticised Brecht’s use of montage as turning a political problem into a joke (Spivak 1993:254), her hope was that not all montage would do this.
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Adorno himself had praised Eisenstein’s early use of montage as progressive but it also later becomes the staple of advertising. Fortunes change – montage can cut and be cutting, and it is now so readily absorbed into advertising that we hardly see the joins. What I think is key, and missed by Žižek in a strangely humourlessly postured metaphysical moment, is the significance of a phrase quoted by Spivak where Adorno as ‘“Marxist” philosopher’ says that the subject ‘is appearance in its self-positing and at the same time something altogether historically real’ (Adorno cited in Spivak 1993:126). The discussion in this context is of Derrida reading Heidegger reading Nietzsche, but the staging of Erscheinung and appearance is not far away from the aforementioned Marx and the labour theory of value, even though Žižek’s Kantian separation of Schein and Erscheinung (Žižek 2012:9) is not so subtle – nor, as we shall see, is it equivalent to Adorno’s ‘enforced reconciliation’
(Žižek 2012:201).
2 Spivak gives Hanif Kureishi’s film
Sammy and Rosie Get Laid as example, specifically the ‘triple-fuck’ split screen scene (for discussion see Hutnyk 2012)
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To adequately unpack the problem of Erscheinung in philosophy is beyond me in this essay, but let us say that the necessary ‘appearance form’ of human labour power is congealed in objects and creations that seem to take on a life of their own. Žižek is correct to identify the persistence of that which ‘obfuscates the antagonisms’ in
‘social reality’ as decisive for Adorno (Žižek 2012:201). This is so because Adorno argues throughout his life that art tends to erase the conditions of its own production.
Classic so-called fetish character. A point we have already seen hinted at in
Nietzsche, and one which Adorno primarily diagnoses as relevant to Wagner’s opera:
‘Its perfection is at the same time the perfection of the illusion that the work of art is a reality sui generis, which constitutes itself in the realm of the absolute without having to renounce its claim to image the world’ (Adorno
1952/2005:74 my italic)
In passing, it is worth noting that the English translation fudges key words.
‘Constitutes itself’ is also a rendering of Erscheinung . This word is so often mistranslated in English, it is the very definition of obfuscation – it is indeed a difficult philosophical word – Kant, Hegel, Marx – and my noting it as important is only due to the injunctions of Spivak that we need to be ‘lexicon-consulting’ readers if we are not already to censor through monolingualism (Spivak 1999:x, 2008, 2012, and elsewhere). In her book An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization ,
Spivak further addresses ‘The
Schein of Competition’ where the Schein can be
‘illusion’, but also ‘glow, lure, and even, in the echo of Erscheinung , carrying the normativity of “appearance”, which is a necessary form, illusion if only mistaken for the contentless’ (Spivak 2012:206). My use of ‘appearance form’ follows convention but should not be taken as the definitive last word.
In close proximity to all this, in his preface to the second edition of The Birth of
Tragedy , Nietzsche takes up the theme of release and redemption only possible in the contradictory, capricious spirit of a perverse mentality (Schopenhauer) where Schein and phenomena ( Erscheinungen
) is ‘semblance, delusion, error, interpretation, manipulation, art’ (Nietzsche 1886/1999:8). This was not to say, as Christianity would, that there was a better life behind semblance, but rather that ‘all life rests on semblance, art, deception, prismatic effects, the necessity of perspectivism and error’
(Nietzsche 1886/1999:9). Hatred of life belongs to a Christian ‘secret instinct for annihilation’ that would redeem, rather than affirm, the anti-Christ Dionysus.
The point is that Erscheinung raises a crucial complication at the heart of censorship: it is both distraction and erasure, and also necessary and unavoidable. Not everything can be presented at once, there will always be some form of selection, so of censor.
What we need to distinguish are the ways the appearance form of a certain text, idea, proposition, may operate and with what ends. This is the crux of censorship and yet it also adds a problematic that tampers usefully with the notion of apparent full disclosure implied in censorship as a juridical or legal term. This is what I earlier called the appellant supplication of the state model, and all supplication to power based on an idea that censorship is not universal is faulty.
Silencing and death threat as censor and power-play.
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Certainly censorship can be several things. A silencing for reasons that belong to the state or to power, an interested exercise, or a distortion that misconstrues or misdirects with intent. The appellant appeals against this, but cedes agency. A text is received after the censor cuts, and it is received whole. It was never whole. Error and loss turns out to be the condition of saying anything at all. The appearance-form of language is a necessary cut. The brutal consequence of this is what sadly happens to Walter
Benjamin trying to cross the Pyrenees in 1940. We may never know for sure what was in the briefcase, or if that was the definitive version of the Arcades book. In
Walter Benjamin’s Grave
, Michael Taussig reports meeting the guide Lisa Fittko:
A feeling of foreboding that no matter what I said to her was lost. The briefcase – the idea of the briefcase, the image of the briefcase – had become a stupendous relic made all the more potent by its disappearance … a little later she told me how excited Rolf Tiedemann became when she told him of
Benjamin lugging a heavy black briefcase across the Pyrenees, saying it contained his most important work. “I cannot risk losing it” Benjamin had said. “It is the manuscript that must be saved. It is more important than I am”
(Taussig 2006:9)
The tragedy of this loss is personal and literary, as is on another scale the censorship that burns books at the Reichstag, or the Koran at Guantanamo. There is violence here that impinges upon political exile, assassination, incarceration or deportation – each are different forms of a vicious censure that exceeds the juridical even as each must also be dealt with in law. A bad translation is nothing compared to these erasures, and yet a wayward and legalistic interpretation sneaks in if we cannot recognise that there is no one-to-one fit to idiom, and further, that the appearance-form of capital is monstrous, a fetish-like quality that alienates and disguises the expropriation operated through money, wage, machine and market. The desire for unmediated, uncensored, representation is itself an occlusion. The legalistic is a one-sided or partial discourse, it also silences. Which is to raise the question of what a critical interpretation of censorship might achieve if we could abandon the romantic illusion of total composition? Here the way is shown by the necessary, painstaking, supplementary work of the kind that Spivak suggests several times in An Aesthetic Education (2012), where the teleological certitudes of progress, representation, globalisation or capital can be put in question sufficiently to perhaps suggest another set of desires, not wholly determined by the dictates of finance and data.
Žižek however introduces Adorno breathlessly. Or rather, plunging in, he quickly offers a quite different take on Adorno’s In Search of Wagner , and to a surprising degree, Adorno’s musical analyses do not move him much. Consigning the argument to the deep, Žižek seems underwhelmed by the critique of commodities as much as he is averse to the musicological-theatrical criticism of Wagner’s stage. Nietzsche had already called Wagner the ‘master of the very small’ (Nietzsche 1888/2005:266), but
Žižek also ignores Nietzsche’s humour, and prefers instead to float a joke or two at
Adorno’s expense. It was Adorno who punctured this entire complex which ‘not only gives pleasure to whoever inflicts it, it also stifles any questions about its justification and tacitly presents itself as the ultimate authority’ (Adorno 1952/2005:11). I would suggest the authority claims descend in inverse order today: Marx, Nietzsche,
Heidegger, Adorno, Žižek, Badiou.
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The conceit of a non-introduction might also be understood as fetish – ideas recycled abstractly in the salon style, working an empty and declining grandeur, and insistently vacant abundance. The diminished theoretical ambition arrives by way of a cheap schematically resonant plot, sufficient now only for publicity or commercial transaction. A product at a fixed budget price – Verso too, as publisher, mass produced copies of Adorno, Žižek, Badiou, and the Anti-Nietzsche of Malcolm Bull
(2011), with no meta-critique of the way these now very marketable constructions are created on the operatic tableaux. Where Adorno offers a musicological critique, and an inspired unpacking of Wagner’s industrial-commercial tendency, Žižek often seems only to be miming his own thunderously important brand. Both are thereby diminished. Does it not matter that the bass instruments mark harmonic progression, light wood winds, weakened forte, affirmation of rhythm and time, all amount to the creation of a musical fairyland, what Adorno calls an ‘ ElfenReich ’ achieved especially through dropping out the bass and use of the ‘most archaic’ of instruments, the piccolo flute (Adorno 1952/2005:75)? Evoking a ‘pristine age’ (Adorno
1952/2005:76) – itself another mistranslation of ‘ aestheticized erscheinungsform’ – and posthumously forgotten? Instead, Žižek stays in character.
The appearance-form of art and theory as Elfenreich erases its makings – something bought by way of exclusion of labour, of the working class, and the dreams, illusions, popular culture and humour that workers might justifiably need in order to recover or occupy time in reserve. To find Žižek oblivious to the irony that serious art criticism is withheld from those who might mock seriousness will be no revelation.
Rescue and Redemption
We should not disguise the fact that Wagner in Adorno is also to be offered ‘rescue’
( Rettung
, can also be ‘salvation’), and we see a veritable surge of theoretical therapy, airbrushing figures back into the friends list of contemporary philosophy – theory subject to an injunction via the theory-practice pairing, and purposeful intervention.
Rescue, close to salvage and rehabilitation, restricts even as it implies the earlier operation of a prior censorship, and in this company some dubious heritage is readily associated in the form of the airbrush techniques of Kremlinology and former dissidents, National Socialists, or figures like Deng Xiaoping, brought back from the cold. Recruits to this program of rehabilitations can seem strange allies. In the case of
Wagner, Adorno may sound curiously incommensurate with Žižek, as well as with his more staunchly self-declared ‘Maoist’ colleague and partner in the ‘resurrection’ of the idea of communism, Badiou. Badiou rumbles the ‘dull rationalists’ and ‘abstruse hermeneuts’ (Badiou 2010:xii), though I fear he sometimes discordantly includes
Adorno in their number.
In less self-regarding supporting roles, Rancière and Lacoue-Labarthe might join a diverse group of Adorno critics who coincide in an effortful yet still seemingly confused reassessment of the unfinished work of rehabilitating Wagner. Žižek says
Adorno ‘gradually changed his position into a more positive appreciation of Wagner’
(Žižek 2005:iix), but Badiou will say it was the ‘same’ Adorno who wrote In Search of Wagner (1952, first version 1939) and 28 years later, Negative Dialectics (1966)
(Badiou 2010:27). He will also insist that for the Adorno of Negative Dialectics , art can have no salvation, reconciliation or resolution (Badiou 2010:52). Of his Wagner
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book, Adorno himself says, in 1963, that he would now ‘formulate many things differently’ but would not abandon or distance himself from the ideas (Adorno
1963/2002:584). ‘Rescue’ must still be on the cards. Whatever the solution to this apparent confusion, and both rescue and criticism can of course coincide, the rehabilitation deployed today has something of an anti-Stalin era aesthetic, the restoration of reputations to people made non-persons. Is it wrong to think that this carries the stench of show-trials and purges even if this can also be read as an all-too-
Christian redemption? Redemption must accept sin, as must censorship. But it may be a very Christian dilemma where redemption refers to the redeeming of slaves in
‘Exodus’, yet the national question is also at stake in the promise made by God to the
Israelites, and in general, in any path of salvation and deliverance that manifests as power, chauvinism or unexamined ego branding. The censor here is a power play with destructive consequences in other contexts. What will redeem Wagner if not using the opportunity of this spirited ‘search’ to really think through what Nietzsche is saying to us when he rails against the ‘contradiction of values’, or when Adorno offers a defence of Wagner as ‘victim of the first manifestation of modern culture industry [as his technique] anticipates that of the movies’ (Adorno 1959/2003:411)?
It turns out that in the epilogue to Nietzsche’s ‘Case of Wagner’ the philosopher was already talking of redemption:
If Wagner was a Christian, then Liszt was perhaps a Church-Father! The need for redemption, the quintessence of all Christian needs, has nothing to do with such buffoons; it is the most honest expression of decadence, the most convinced, most painful affirmation of decadence in the form of sublime symbols and practices. The Christian wishes to be rid of himself. Le moi est toujours Jiaissable [the ego is always hateful] (Nietzsche 1888/1966: 647)
…Modern man represents biologically a contradiction of values … Is it any wonder that precisely in our times falsehood itself has become flesh and even genius? that Wagner dwelt among us? (Nietzsche 1888/1966: 648)
That Žižek would redeem Adorno redeeming Wagner misses what is key about ‘The
Case of Wagner’ – it is an opportunity to make a diagnosis of the times. To ‘get away for a moment from the narrow world to which every question about the worth of persons condemns the spirit’ (Nietzsche 1888/1966:646). However, unlike Žižek, who sees Wagner’s ‘final message’ as a ‘profoundly Hegelian one’ (Žižek
2010a:216), Nietzsche was dismayed that Wagner conceded in the end to the camouflaged conformity of Christianity, capitulating to popular religiosity with
Parsifal . Nietzsche also alludes to Wagner quoting the Feuerbach of ‘The Essence of
Christianity’ and he detournes Marx in the process by noting that history writing becomes ‘an opiate against everything revolutionary or reforming’ (Nietzsche
1876/1990:262). Nietzsche’s high hopes in Wagner were famously punctured on arrival – for much discussed reasons, and with many mitigating or complicating factors. The point being that Nietzsche, despite a certain lack of modesty about his writing – such good books – does more in terms of diagnosis of the current conjuncture than can be gleaned from all of Žižek’s humour.
Wagner is controversial, but in specific ways. Of course he cannot live up to such expectations. Heidegger discusses Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner and in a few short
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pages condemns the ‘frenzied feeling of “affects” … especially in view of the growing impoverishment and deterioration of existence occasioned by industry, technology, and finance’ (Heidegger 1961/1991:88). Is it a surprise to see Heidegger make this Adorno-like, Marxist point? Today a superficial but clamourous critique of
Wagner does duty for the anxieties of those who cannot necessarily name the enervations and degradations of the current conjuncture except perhaps through a strangely paranoid self-projection. Žižek is verbose on this score, and it would not do to dismiss him as uninterested in making analyses of the present, and even of inspired critiques of the worst nationalisms – however much it might be necessary to disagree with some of his postures – but in talking about Wagner and Adorno by not talking about them, the occlusion is a self-promotional one that must be raised as a question of desire and self-staging, even self-deception. Žižek introduces Žižek as introducer of Wagner, cutting out Adorno. It might be appropriate to remember here Nietzsche’s
‘untimely’ question in ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’: ‘Who among you, knowing and learning that power is evil, wants to renounce power?’ (Nietzsche 1876/1990:304).
Oftentimes the loudest speaker says the least but gathers the most attention – indictment of our times.
I think this means that if we are to talk of a new redemption-elevation of Wagner to philosophy, we should take seriously what is jettisoned when Žižek’s co-conspirator
Badiou offers three stages of Wagner commentary: debates around nationalism and aesthetics, debates between the world wars and after over Wagner’s anti-Semitism and Nazism, and debates up to the present day about music and philosophy as analysis of the present. It is ‘absolutely essential for a philosopher to take a position on
Wagner’ (Badiou 2010:55), though worth remembering that, so far as we know for sure, Marx explicitly didn’t. Badiou recalls the well known ‘ideological compromises between Wagnerism and Nazism’ as well as ‘personal compromises between the
Wagner family and the Führer’ (Badiou 2010:5). While noting Lacoue-Labarthe’s critique of Adorno for not being ‘sufficiently anti-Wagnerian’ (Badiou 2010:7), he helpfully points out that Lacoue-Labarthe’s problem with Wagner has to do with the
‘aestheticisation of politics’ (Badiou 2010:9). It is in light of this that Badiou seems overly keen to show that Adorno’s question is only whether music can be ‘a programme for difference’ (Badiou 2010:34) and while he happily plays devil’s advocate to describe Wagner as enchanter, sorcerer, sexual, metaphysical, theatrical and military spectacle (Badiou 2010:60-1), I think Badiou is insufficiently dialectical since Adorno would likely be suspicious of a practical role for music, as art, and the perspective of the God-like observer who arbitrates difference at the very moment of purveying the same. When Badiou quotes Adorno saying ‘Art is appearance’ (Badiou
2010:45) he takes far too literally what is key to Adorno’s dialectics. He should read further along the paragraph in German and see Schein (semblance is an inadequate translation) is framed in resistance to die Welt des Tausches (the world of exchange) and that the prospect of another world is suggested:
‘Im Schein verspricht sich als
Scheinlose’ – perhaps better rendered as ‘in semblance there is a promise of nonsemblance’. Art is not just appearance, and Badiou appears to have missed the reference to Marx’s fetish character of commodities here. Badiou’s ‘thesis’ is that
Adorno’s overall project is to construct a place for ‘a music that might be possible in the historical conditions obtaining after Auschwitz’ (Badiou 2010:46) but I think this is also to miss the point of Adorno’s most famous comment, even if, as Badiou claims, Adorno revised it (Badiou 2010:40). Revision or clarification, in any case a careful reader should expand the Auschwitz citation in Adorno to see that he offers up
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a lament for the barbarism of writing poetry after Auschwitz and denounces the commercial traffic of those who keep asking the question without possibility of understanding, preferring instead the ‘idle chatter’ of self-satisfied ontological contemplation (Adorno 1963/1983:34). Hucksters was Adorno’s word piercing here.
Representation as censorship
Censorship is in denial that all rehabilitation is a control order with an affinity to corporate law, malignant bureaucracy and a militant monetization of every expression. ‘Nothing should be moist’ (Adorno 1970/1997:116). Practicing as a kind of para-legal representative, Lacoue-Labarthe singles out Adorno’s discussion of
Shönberg in relation to the ‘questioning of Darstellung (art is not essentially
[re]presentation)’ (Lacoue-Labarthe 1991/1994:124) along similar lines, and notes that Adorno goes beyond Heidegger in relating the problem of Darstellung to the difficulty art has today in being anything more than a ‘trace’, of art having both technical ‘fabricated’ quality and a spiritual ‘great content’ (Lacoue-Labarthe
1991/1994:124-5). Yet, in Lacoue-Labarthe’s appreciation of the ‘well known’ effort of Adorno to look forward, to maintain a project of aesthetics need not appeal to
‘nostalgia for a religion …which is to say a community’ (Lacoue-Labarthe
1991/1994:125). Do I need to explain, by way of a triangulation with Žižek, Adorno and Wagner, why a too quick dismissal of Adorno’s effort to grasp Wagner in relation to larger economic parameters of ‘aestheticized politics’ (Lacoue-Labarthe
1991/1994:18) and Lacoue-Labarthe’s surprise that Adorno did not instead resort to the Kantian sublime, is part and parcel of a too quick reading? Žižek will insist that only a betrayal of Adorno’s ‘explicit thesis’ in the Wagner study allows us, today, to
‘remain faithful to its emancipatory impulse’ (Žižek 2005:xxvii). The concluding paragraph of the ‘Introduction’ to Adorno’s Wagner is brought forward to open the
‘Afterword’ to Badiou’s
Five Lessons on Wagner , as if these five years were just a pause for breath, by a Žižek who writes as if to censor.
In Living in the End Times we are treated to the spectacle of Žižek using Adorno’s critique of Wagner’s simple leitmotifs as ‘a kind of inner-structural commodification of his music’ to then argue that Adorno’s various one-liners and dazzling aphorisms are, similarly, at the cost of a deeper theoretical ‘substance’. Žižek says, no doubt as po-faced as possible, that ‘this unintended self reflexivity is something of which
Adorno undoubtedly was not aware, his critique of the Wagnerian leitmotif was an allegorical critique of his own writing’ (Žižek 2010b:227). It will not be necessary to point out that this ‘is an exemplary case of the unconscious reflexivity of thinking’
(Žižek 2010b:227) which also must ring relevant to readers of Žižek’s own trademark style, grinning madly at his own jokes as he writes himself modestly into a trajectory of names that flow: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Adorno, Žižek, Badiou. But jokes aside, the point here is that the suggestion that Adorno’s aphoristic style and his critique of
Wagner are mutually allegorical misses the significance of Adorno’s argument.
The critique of Wagner is an illustration of the quite substantial theoretical appreciation of how the music replicates the production protocols of industrial capitalism, breaking things into small manageable units, ‘the totality is supposed to become controllable, and it must submit to the will of the subject who has liberate himself from all pre-existing forms’ (Adorno 1952/2005:39). This is presented as a
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moment in an unfolding dialectical analysis, that will later also show how the commodity character of the music is aestheticised and must purvey illusions, and does so all the more in order to disguise – to ‘spirit away’ – any trace of its origins in human labour – to emphasize its use value all the more in thrall to the furthering of
‘the cause of exchange value’ (Adorno 1952/2005:79). It is not just a quip when
Adorno says that in this way Wagner’s operas become commodities, ‘their tableau wares on display’ (Adorno 1952/2005:79) – this is also a substantial critique of the
Culture Industry, of the torn halves of a promised cultural freedom that is damaged beyond repair. Is it not significant that Žižek’s introduction to the Verso edition of In
Search of Wagner studiously avoids substantial discussion of Adorno’s critique of the barbarism of official cultural values (Adorno 1959/2003:410), beyond a couple of puns to open and then close the preface?
Why does this matter? Badiou also gets into Wagner’s commodification, wanting us to decide if Adorno is correct to ask if the suffering and heartbreak in the strings of
Wagner is ‘irreducible heartbreak, or is it ultimately incorporated into the sentimental effects of the spectacle … an ambiguous link with religion’ (Badiou 2010:62). We know this is the theme, but the resurgence of interest itself might give us cause for reflection on just why what Žižek calls a rehabilitation, of Wagner, should occupy the efforts of so many writers just now. Rehabilitation of Wagner, not Adorno, who Žižek accuses of ‘rather vicious’ hypotheses in relation to Wagner’s difficulties [poignantly, also Mann’s] in finding the ending to the
Ring (Žižek 2010a:193).
What I would argue is that to focus upon the rehabilitation or not of Wagner is something of a mistranslation that sidelines Adorno’s critical effort and does not learn what might be learnt about our situation today. Or rather, to be fair to Žižek, having no escape from reification in conditions of barbaric published officialdom, he tries to learn something else, while selling Verso back-stock. This has a wider significance than any merely academic operation. In the 1959 essay ‘Wagner, Nietzsche, Hitler’,
Adorno describes a haranguing ego that insists there be no disputation – the orator who monopolises attention and opinion, or wants to, is on the path to fascism, not democracy (Adorno 1959/2003:406). With stark relevance for the discussion here, and the way in which the staged ‘controversies’ of the Wagner anniversary enacted just the opposite of what they ostensibly declared, Žižek rehearses: ‘The paranoid tendency of projecting upon others one’s own violent aggressiveness and then indicting, on the basis of this projection, those whom one endows with such pernicious qualities’ (Adorno 1959/2003:407) This is the contradictory drive of the censor.
Which is only the inevitable outcome of a kind of unspoken jealous protection racket, made all the more explicit if we step back to look at even earlier versions of the censor operative in Žižek’s Wagner texts. In a way if this is to accuse Žižek of censoring Adorno, then it is also to do something like the same to Žižek when also identifying what he says about Wagner as an operative censorship in humour and writing. Learnt in fact from Žižek, this psychoanalytic trick is the obverse accompaniment of the
Lévi-Strauss move Žižek makes in the Opera’s Second Death book (2001), where three ‘solutions’ to Wagner’s ethical question are provided across the three Wagner operas analysed in the second half of the volume. Can we see the same structural pattern in Žižek, and redeem him in turn? In structural analysis there is a requirement
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to provide more detail in the analysis of elements than is here offered re Wagner, but it would not be wrong to ask about the operation of the ‘extraneous’ examples Žižek uses as elements of his own myths of Wagner. And the extraneous reach brings us back, somehow, to the kind of free association that is surprisingly close to the journalistic jingoism of the earlier commentaries on Will Self and the RheinOper et al., but Žižek’s repertoire has seemingly has fewer limits: Hitchcock, Hegel, Lacan, the Marx Bros, Stalin, Lenin, Freud, castration, James Bond movies, reversals, doubles, the unburied dead, and Caduvo facial tattoos from South American anthropology...
It is these asides and twitches, with abundant examples from outside the Wagnerian sphere, that Žižek deploys as his trademark brilliant and explosive style. These are, surely, symptomatic, but also elements of a purposeful mythos. The most familiar passages provide an overture to Hegel and Lacan, a salacious refrain about Lenin and his mistress, then a melodious move towards Judith Butler, only for her not to be seen again until much later in the text. There is something strange here in the echo of The
Elementary Structures of Kinship (Lévi-Strauss 1949/1969), which Žižek invokes, recalling the exchange of women as commodities alongside acknowledgement of
Lévi-Strauss as that ‘great Wagnerian’ (Žižek 2001:156). The anthropologist had, according to a separate footnote in Tarrying with the Negative , ‘proposed a detailed structural analysis between Parsifal and the Oedipus myth’ (Žižek 1993:278). A careful reader of Lévi-Strauss would recognise that it would be unlikely that the analysis would extend to politics and current affairs, as Žižek seems to think it can when he links the facial tattoos of the Caduveo Indians to how ‘it was the same with
Heidegger in 1933’ (Žižek 2001:163). Nevertheless, the unrepentant fascist – in
‘retreat from the real’, and ‘identity without content’ of the mass figure – displayed in
Heidegger’s employment throughout WW2 as postal censor, as mentioned above, appears as an example and is surely a little more than merely random? Does this redemption not also recall another kind of censor, a strange never quite convincing post-dated censorship of commentary on the Nazi character of Wagner? Repeatedly not mentioning the Nazi’s in a kind of displacement in which an unattributed accusatory mention circulates. In
Opera’s Second Death
, Anne Frank is quoted thinking about good and bad people, we meet Leni Riefenstahl, but she is in her late career with the Nuba, and dunked in deep water photographing ‘sea life’ and we fear she will never die (Žižek 2001:111). Then there is Goebbels demanding the submission of the masses, just before Žižek wonders if Kracauer is not correct to also denounce the mass rallies of the Left as proto-fascist. While we should notice that all
Žižek’s women are brought in as marginal or peripheral figures, we can also wonder at how the associative pattern of Nazi-Left-Wagner does a strange organising work in the text. As if actually saying Wagner was a Nazi cannot but be mediated, and in structuralism the thing to look for is the mediating element, through the figure of the masses at the Winter Palace. Of course these masses are linked to Goebbels address to them and their return cry of yes please, more repression (Žižek 2001:157). What a censorship mechanism this is, and what a curiosity that it operates in Žižek’s text both as manifest and unconscious content. The ‘key moment in Wagner’s fundamental matrix’ (Žižek 1993:174) is said to be woman’s willing self-sacrifice, but here they seem to be exchanged to do another duty. This is not to require an author of a book on
Wagner to never mention the Nazi’s, but the manner of doing so, in a book that also raises the investments of the alienated proletarian hysteric as rehabilitation is strange.
Not to say that turning a discussion of Parsifal into a commentary on the Bolshevik
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revolution is unwelcome. It is however, curious to look to the tensions and associations of the text.
Paranoid aggression.
Still others who have discussed Adorno’s Wagner seem to think such bon mots are fine but overall miss the substance. For example, when Rancière also leaves Adorno adrift, we still do not get the larger modes of production appreciation that also underpins In Search of Wagner . Instead the argument drifts towards a aesthetic register: ‘The modernist rigour of an Adorno, wanting to expurgate the emancipatory potential of art of any form of compromise with cultural commerce and aestheticised life, becomes the reduction of art to the ethical witnessing of unrepresentable catastrophe’ (Rancière 2004/2009:131). This is incompatible with what Adorno has to say about it being an as yet undecided question as to whether art might not yet still behold a ‘secret omnipresence of resistance’ (Adorno 1991:67) in its kernel of refusal of everything that insists on injunction and dryness. The refusal of the order that
‘nothing should be moist’ is also not just a raucous quip, but a critique of morality and an appeal to life and joy. And the notion that for Adorno simple witnessing of catastrophe might ever make sense is countered so often it is astonishing to read this criticism. Quoting Adorno on Hegel once more should suffice, Adorno says:
‘nothing can be understood in isolation, everything is to be understood only in the context of the whole, with the awkward qualification that the whole in turn lives only in the individual moments. In actuality, however, this kind of doubleness of the dialectic eludes literary presentation’
(Adorno1963/1993:91).
Badiou does note that for Adorno there can be no reconciliation. There is waiting, waiting in vain, but no salvage or salvation, no Hegelian ‘result’ (Badiou 2010:51).
Contra Žižek. But Adorno’s position is also contra-Badiou, who further on says ‘we are on the cusp of a revival of high art … high art uncoupled from totality’ (Badiou
2010:83). This wish for reconciliation of the two torn halves of a damaged culture was already noticed by Adorno and seen itself as symptomatic of fascism. I would call it a melancholy paranoid aggression, the displacement of accusations that should be laid against oneself.
Paranoid aggression is staging as a mode of control, of excluding the interwoven and interrelated historical frames, of desperately narrating a next next next story of consecutive, and even teleological, destiny. Žižek does this against Adorno, as we have seen, but my suggestion is that what is at stake here is a deeper and disturbing syndrome of power. Might it be possible to comprehend the general problematic around the complexity of censorship and silencing as a matter of an aggressively articulated commercialised game of power? Censorship as translation with ideological idiom in the present – recognising no one-to-one correspondence, but claiming authority in a counter-democratic, institutional political conformity. In this mode, might paranoid aggression be a way to describe facts, for example, like the state of
Israel participating in globally sanctioned proxy attacks on others – no formal ban on
Wagner, but bombing and incursions into Palestine, Lebanon, Syria – a hyperbolic occlusion and distraction that the culture industry brings to history then manifests in
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the tabulation Badiou so eloquently posits without making the necessary links. Might paranoid aggression also be a way to describe the state of America as global cop?
Dispensing justice by remote drone, among other ways, often digital (what erasures of experience and empathic humanity must be bracketed in digital distance?). Might paranoid aggression be a way to describe the UK in Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, its military sales, its war overseas and its keep calm and carry on at home? Can such a move be offered any redemption? What is the relation of redemption to censorship, and confession that wipes the slate clean? The publicly admitted unmentionable secret that all acknowledge in an oblique denial – perhaps this is the contradiction beating at the heart of both redemption and censorship as productivity.
Not every example of misinterpretation, error, omission or wilful refusal to represent a position should become a ‘case’ or be subject to a court appeal or brought before a board of censors. Evaluation of faulty interpretation is a matter for public debate – the
‘case of Wagner’, whether Nietzsche, Adorno, Žižek or Will Self as interpreter, is not best discussed behind closed doors or in some para-juridical forum. The power of publishing houses and newspapers, university seminars or state legislatures – even the authority of those translation-lexicon rule-books we call dictionaries – should each be subject to public scrutiny. The obligation, and indeed the right, is upon audiences to read, listen, see, debate and decide for themselves. Nothing is more important than to be able to have a look and make up your own mind. This does not mean that interpreters, Žižek for example, cannot mislead readers – and do so with the substantial resources and authority of a prominent platform from which to speak. But equally, others can challenge, compare and contrast. And after all, Adorno’s book remains available to read. Wagner’s ‘case’ can still be judged – and if there is anything to quibble about it is the staging of the case, the evaluators, the prosecution and defense, the accusations and the rehabilitation, the judges and the judging, and whether this is open to all.
Fascism now.
Adorno’s study of Wagner seems richer, far-reaching, and more open because it makes the links. The context of the national socialist ‘interest’ in Wagner is so ideologically loaded that it is assumed that this hardly needs to be mentioned – it becomes short-hand: Hitler’s favorite, used to ‘re-educate inmates at work camps etc
– but we can pause to learn something where Adorno consistently points to a wider limitation in thinking the social mediation that frames the music. Why was it ‘most troubling’ that Bayreuth was to be reopened in 1950? Adorno’s book was not yet out and Wagner remained to be rescued from the appropriation of a fascist mentality that was not yet defeated. Adorno is not yet defeated. To ‘No Platform’ Wagner would be to refuse to debate, to close the case with a premeditated judgment, with a rush to legal pretention, and an abdication of responsibility on all sides. Censorship, censure, interpretation and translation are not all the same, but morality claims and platform authority couched in legalese are operative in any case. To ban Wagner or claim him for Nazism both imply an authority judgment in the same way that a book publisher or an author ‘chooses’ what will appear – a necessary partiality where no impartiality can exist. This is the elementary structure of the Erscheinungsform .
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Instead then, the occasion of a debate over censorship and Wagner today can either avoid the question of fascism, and thereby accede to its secret continuity, or open the opportunity to offer yet another interpretation, a different set of links and contexts that might provoke. As I have been writing this text, a pogrom has been taking place in
England against Wagner. To ‘mainstream’ this material is an enabling violation of the polite courtroom procedures that would otherwise be expected in a discussion of censorship. How important is it then to say then, that in England, while writing this text, a return of fascism has been studiously ignored. More than 200 anti Muslim incidents were logged in the two weeks since the grotesque murder of Lee Rigby in
Woolwich. This includes the fire-bombing of an Islamic Centre in Muswell Hill on the 5 th
June 2013. The press had a field day documenting the outrage of the killing, with gruesome pictures on every front page, but the more insidious responses of a large segment of the British population in retaliation – itself couched in an anti-fascist
‘never here, never again’ discourse – was barely reported. Police actions against the
English Defence League (EDL) mob were defensive, but rarely interventionist and those responsible were not pursued. If the burnt mosque had been a synagogue it might have been a different mater. What would oppose the white supremacist exceptionalism that co-ordinates detention programmes, restricted immigration, machine production, militarization, authoritarianism with appeals to bias and monstrosity? ‘Culture’ in general, and music in particular, disguises the true face of the total war economy and fails to engage within a culturalist project that works so hard to threaten ‘us’ all.
On music, Adorno quotes Nietzsche lamenting the ‘fate’ of what has happened to music which threatens our ‘ability to transfigure and affirm the world’ because ‘it is decadent music [
Dècadence-Musik
] and no longer the flute of Dionysus’ (Adorno
1952/2005:83, 1952/1971:89). It is Lacoue-Labarthe who reminds us, without citation, that Nietzsche thought the decline of Opera, and European music, could be dated from ‘the deployment of an enormous machinery of instruments and people to produce the effect of the beyond, and to incite terror’ in the overture to Don Giovanni
(Lacoue-Labarthe 1991/1994:xx). Adorno himself links something like this to the
‘anathematizing’ of pleasure in Wagner, where ‘phantasmagoria is infected at the outset with the seeds of its own destruction’ (Adorno 1952/2005:83) – though we should note that the German text says nothing about seeds or infections, and ‘ ist der
Phantasmagorie von Anbeginn das Element ihres eigenen Untergangs beigesellt
’
(Adorno 1952/1971:89) might be better rendered as: ‘so the phantasmagoria is joined at the outset with its own characteristic decline’. Why is this important? Because
Adorno makes a point that inside the illusion dwells disillusion, and that Wagner’s model is Don Quixote and he ‘puts the hero into the role of the man who fights against windmills’ in an effort to re-establish the old feudal immediacy, as opposed to the bourgeois division of labour enshrined in the guilds’ and thus ‘becomes a potential figure of comedy [ latent komischen Figur ] in the face of bourgeois reality in which the feudal world is transformed into myth’ (Adorno 1952/2005:83). The resultant conflict in which Quixote fights the windmill as if to struggle back to the bygone age, and in which the guilds fight one another without comprehending their place in much larger epochal shifts, is ‘merely a poor substitute for political action’ (Adorno
1952/2005:84). But the windmills represent the enemy, icons of the systematic oppression. And the very contradiction of political art, the contradiction that Rancière decries, is identified and transformed into conscious critique by Adorno. It is right here that a song, a dream, a chivalry code that does not compute – each contradiction
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played out as illustrative and instructive intervention – seems particularly relevant to the critique of the aphoristic style that both Žižek and Rancière wrongly attribute as a limit in Adorno. I imagine this as the point at which Adorno does line up, as Rancière points out, with Friedrich Schiller and the ‘double bind of aesthetic experience’
(Rancière 2004/2009:102). For Rancière, ‘Adorno shares the same central preoccupation with Schiller’ which is to ‘revoke the division of labour implying the separation of labour and enjoyment’ (Rancière 2004/2009:102). But this is not a reconciliation, it must be brought into critical mediation with a movement and a resistance, at present drowned out in the clamour of the popular.
Nietzsche wrote of any ‘censure which applies to sporadic exuberance’ as ‘petty and sterile’ (Nietzsche 1876/1990:289). It is not the case that he is arguing here against the press, but rather against interpreters of Wagner whose criticisms of expression run cover for more fundamental objections. At the same time, the high publicity given to a censorship that would protect the public from the (never again) rise of a devastating nationalist chauvinism has inadvertently permitted its return. Adorno’s position changes in ways Žižek does not fully grasp, and this should give us cause for concern today. Adorno says that ‘with the integration of nations into blocs’ Wagner’s form of nationalism is ‘no longer so immediately threatening’, though ‘one should not overestimate’ the ‘Nationalist Socialist potential’ which ‘continues to smoulder’
(Adorno 1963/2002:585).
Recalling how Adorno notes that Wagner occludes the work of making fantasy, we might now point to the labour that goes into the pogroms against Islam in the current crusades, where the work – voice, agency, collective opposition, crazed attacks – of those shouting fire or enduring terror are treated by scholars as having ‘no meaning’,
‘no message’, ‘mute’, ‘less than nothing’ – these are all phrases from Žižek and
Badiou that I discuss in the book Pantomime Terror (Hutnyk 2014). Here the variety of forms of censorship, agenda-fuelled interpretation, translation errors, and occlusions together form a public secret distraction. While the killing of Lee Rigby provoked widespread retaliation there was also a police public relations division
(mis)management of the social forces assembled in a contest over the rise of the right
– a police order prevented both an inflammatory British National Party (BNP) march which then dampened and defused the growing political opposition to the EDL marches. After this, mosques burn. The dogs of war show their fangs, public opprobrium is managed into mute-ness. No social development is possible; the legal appellant model leads to a dangerous stalemate, bordering on quietism. Fascism can step into this gap.
Yes the National Socialists in Germany in the middle of the twentieth century, more than 70-80 years ago, adopted both Nietzsche and Wagner as ideological support in a war these two nineteenth century giants were not alive to see, both dead by 40 and 60 years respectively. The pogroms to which their names were lent were horrific and
‘never again’ was the slogan of a left that seems to watch the repetition abundantly played out on television news screens. That the British interpreters gloat about the bad reputation of Wagner says more about the current conjuncture than of Wagner or anti-
Semitism. The difficult staging in the Düsseldorf RheinOper of course should also be read in Germany in the context of the concurrent Nationalsocialitische Untergrunds
(Nationalsocialist Underground) trial in Munich and the attacks on mosques, in Mainz for example, and the Rosa Luxumberg Stiftung, but the British response has its own
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specificities with international significance. The British recourse to outmoded stereotyping and simplicity reveals something about pantomime fear in a lost empire in denial. At war at home and abroad, accusing others of a fascist complicity it so abundantly displays in its own polity, eyes averted from the crimes it so intimately knows, like a censor.
Wagner himself is not the problem – saying something new is perhaps more pressing.
Adorno contends that in Wagner, the appearance [ Schein ] of novelty is resolved and dissolved so that ‘nothing new takes place’ – a perfect fascist commodity (Adorno
1952/2005:31). Reconciled. Even redeemed. I would suggest that the energy spent on rehabilitation projects is of the same bad blood as the anti-Semitism it might oppose.
Instead, let us look to halt the pogroms of our times.
Mine is an experiment that would try to update Adorno channeling Kracauer reading the surface for undiscovered truths, looking to the production, the work, of censorship, as appearance-form of a contradiction at the heart of popular culture that must constitute itself through exclusion, as an agenda for addressing the current conjuncture. Adorno, not without a smirk that is also serious, makes the case for music as a promise and protest that can be renewed. In the last incendiary pages where Wagner is a ‘diligent lackey of imperialism and late bourgeois terrorism’ he also has his ‘commerce’ with the ‘forces responsible for his own decadence’ (Adorno
1952/2005:143). Here, the ‘bourgeois nihilist sees through the nihilism of the age that will follow his own’ (Adorno 1952/2005:144). Nietzsche’s abyss of metaphysics is here resisting ‘enforced reconciliation’ at the hands of the censorious aggressors of comic seriousness.
Tristan’s rebellion is no impotent ascetic’s sacrifice, but a rebellion in music against the iron laws that rule – in its total determination by those laws it can regain the power of self-determination. And hence, in this music, surprisingly, the ‘promise of a life without fear’ (Adorno 1952/2005145). Perhaps the point is neither to redeem or resurrect Wagner, but to see the renewed workings of the culture industry operative in new bureaucratic times; the complicity of philosophers, even self-regarding
Philosopher-Maoists, mathematico-Lacanian communists, critics of Heideggerian hermeneuts, etc., is such that if a focus on formal censorship does not limit the political to a legalistic frame, or some administrative appellant willingly subjected to the state, then the censors in our heads here and now might be opposed. Adorno insists a censor’s ‘visa stamp of theorising as practice meant practice became nonconceptual, a piece of the politics it was supposed to lead out of’ (Adorno
1966/1973:143). Reading this might suggest we can at least agree with Badiou that
‘the battle for Wagner is not over … it is entering its decisive phase’ (Badiou
2010:165). To snatch a life lived without fear from the surge of Wagner’s orchestra is something – a refusal of the censor, in law, in the press, in the rescue team, and in translation among ourselves, might one day offer something with more moisture and glow than merely a remote idea or semblance of communism.
References:
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Adorno, Theodor 1952/1971 ‘Versuch über Wagner;’ in Die Musicalishen
Monographien, Frankfurt: Surkamp.
Adorno, Theodor 1952/2005 In Search of Wagner , London: Verso.
Adorno, Theodor 1959/2003 ‘Wagner, Nietzsche, Hitler’ Musikalisches Schriften VI ,
Frankfurt: Surkhamp.
Adorno, Theodor 1963/1993 Hegel: Three Studies, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT
Press.
Adorno, Theodor 1963/2002 ‘Wagner’s Relevance for Today’ in
Essays on Music ,
Berkeley: University of California Press, pp584-602.
Adorno, Theodor 1966/1973 Negative Dialectics , London: Routledge.
Adorno, Theodor 1967/1983 Prisms , Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press
Adorno, Theodor 1970/1997 Aesthetic Theory , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Adorno, Theodor 1991 The Culture Industry: Selected Essays in Mass Culture,
London: Routledge.
Adorno, Theodor and Thomas Mann 2006 Correspondence 1943-1955 Cambridge:
Polity.
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