(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

12: Sonic Dreamworlds: Benjamin,
Adorno, and the Phantasmagoria
of the Opera House
Adrian Daub
I
I
F THERE IS SUCH A THING AS “popular imagination” among cultural
theorists, then Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno have come to
occupy nearly opposite positions in it. Benjamin, the flâneur, the collector,
the producer of fragments, hero of the academic precariate; Adorno,
the professor, the secret (or not-so-secret) systematician, the comfortable
resident of the “Grand Hotel ‘Abgrund,’” the fuddy-duddy felled by a
couple of bare breasts. And yet it is the very lectures at the Frankfurt
Institute for Social Research that the infamous Busenaktion interrupted 1
that at times find Adorno practicing the hermeneutics commonly associated
with Benjamin: distraction, illumination, flânerie. It is one such
particular moment that forms the basis for this article: Adorno steps
into his dead friend’s shoes and embarks upon a flânerie. He is heading
to the opera rather than the cinema, and readers might brace themselves
for another denunciation of anything that is not Alban Berg, or another
of Adorno’s paladins of the musical avant-garde. But Adorno has something
different in mind, for he arrives late.
Arriving late as a hermeneutic trick — in an excerpt from his 1958
lectures on dialectics Adorno takes the flâneur to the opera. It is a rare
moment in Adorno where distraction becomes a “method of attention” 2
and where, as Edmond Jaloux, in a passage quoted by Benjamin in the
Passagen-Werk (Arcades Project), puts it, “le fait seul de tourner à droite
ou à gauche constituait déjà un acte essentiellement poétique” (“the mere
turning right or left already constitute[s] an essentially poetic act” (M9a,4).
This is a step Benjamin’s solitary wanderer never took: The Passagen-Werk
discusses “Die Oper als Zentrum (GS V.2:1212; “the opera as center,” AP,
906) and pays special attention to Haussmann’s Avenue de l’Opéra, but it
stops short of the building itself. Benjamin himself, however, discusses a
visit to the opera in his Moskauer Tagebuch (Moscow Diaries), and applies