(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

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culture, architecture, and art, music is left out of his considerations of the
term entirely. This is not simply because, as Susan Buck-Morss has argued,
“the sense of sight was privileged in this phantasmagoric sensorium of
modernity,” 10 but rather because music in general receives astoundingly
short shrift in Benjamin — Lutz Koepnick has spoken of a “repression”
rooted in Benjamin’s “anxieties about the role of the acoustical in the modern
world.” 11 To be sure, the Trauerspiel book (Ursprung des deutschen
Trauerspiels, Origin of the German Mourning Play, 1928) briefly discusses
Richard Wagner, but primarily by way of engaging Friedrich Nietzsche’s
Birth of Tragedy; 12 in the Passagen-Werk, on the other hand, Wagner enters
the discussion only as seen through the prism of Charles Baudelaire. As a
result, when the concept of phantasmagoria is brought to bear on music,
and specifically opera, in subsequent scholarship it is not usually in the sense
Benjamin gives it, but rather in that of Adorno’s influential essay Versuch
über Wagner (In Search of Wagner). 13
In discussing opera, Adorno’s discourse on phantasmagoria has been
used frequently, whereas Benjamin’s definition of the same term has been
employed primarily to talk about visual culture. Nevertheless, recent
scholars have undertaken an analysis of opera that draws on a sense of
“phantasmagoria” that is much closer to Benjamin’s understanding of the
term than Adorno’s. This is because they have increasingly probed the
cognitive technologies of opera in the latter half of the nineteenth century,
whether primarily as a visual spectacle or in the shape of modern acoustics.
Jonathan Crary, for instance, has argued that Wagner’s Bayreuth
Festspielhaus was intended “to exercise a fuller control over the attentiveness
of an audience,” contiguous with other forms of nineteenth-century
audio-visual spectacle. 14 Crary’s discussion of Wagnerian aesthetics owes
significantly more of a debt to Benjamin than to Adorno, and indeed an
argument can be made that Benjamin’s rather intermittent engagements
with the problem of Wagner in the Trauerspiel book and the Passagen-
Werk license this sort of reading: After all, the reason why Benjamin mobilizes
the Baroque against the total artwork is the latter’s allergy against the
dispersal and historicity of Baroque aesthetics; and what attracts Benjamin
to Baudelaire is precisely his unwillingness to manipulate away the shocks
of modernity. 15
A “Benjaminian” analysis of the “phantasmagoria” of nineteenthcentury
opera, in the mode of Crary, proceeds from the simple fact that
opera in the later nineteenth century constituted not merely an aesthetic
problem but also a cognitive one. 16 Questions of attention, of audibility,
of illusion were as much a part of Wagner’s project as they were of panoramas,
world exhibitions, train stations, and shopping arcades — that is,
the urban phantasmagoria catalogued in Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk. Many
of these questions circled around the construction of an artistic geography
and the concomitant elision of the actual geography of the opera