(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

SONIC DREAMWORLDS
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“dreamworlds” of the nineteenth century thus sit somewhat awkwardly
side-by-side in this note — as they do in much of the scholarship on opera
that has drawn on either theorist since. Nevertheless, both thinkers also
furnish the resources to resolve this awkwardness, or, perhaps better, to
put it to work.
At its most basic, the term “phantasmagoria” refers to the aesthetic
equivalent of commodity fetishism: the commodity fetishist invests the
commodity with a life it doesn’t actually have and ignores the processes
(namely labor) of which the commodity is a mere effect. Phantasmagorias
similarly dissimulate the aesthetic processes at work in their production;
they wear the costume of something that just happens to be there, independent
of what is going on behind the scenes. What exactly is behind the
scenes is, as we will see, subject to some debate: what are the means of
production that the phantasmagoria occludes? Used by both Adorno and
Benjamin, in Versuch über Wagner and the Passagen-Werk respectively, 25
the concept has spawned two distinct usages, one in the discussion of
music and another in the discussion of media other than music: panoramas,
photography, world exhibitions, interior decorations, and so on.
While the two deployments of the term bear clear family resemblances,
they tend to differ with respect to their relative models of production.
Their variance coincides with that between the two senses of the word
“aesthetic” — one understands “aesthetic” means of production to refer
to something that brings about a work of art (the dominant usage since
Kant); the other understands “aesthetic” to refer to the production of a
sensory experience (the original sense of aisthesis). My argument in what
follows depends on the fact that both of these senses of “phantasmagoria”
seize on a factor that informs modernity’s staging in the opera house.
The first discourse of phantasmagoria is based strictly on Adorno’s
usage and is often restricted to Wagner. It reads phantasmagoria as the
dominance of things and thing-like qualities — of which the most important
musical manifestation is harmony — over the relational and social
aspects of production, exemplified in music by motivic development.
Adorno’s analysis proceeds by showing how a highly modern artistic
“technology” paradoxically serves to create an impression of the distant,
autochthonous, or mystical, all of which present the aesthetic object as
miraculously always already present and thus constitutively repress the
question of the production of these aesthetic phenomena. 26 In other
words, the archaic façade of the “technology” hides the contingency and
produced-ness of the phantasmagoria by insisting that the object is natural
or is the reiteration of something that has existed all along.
In a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, in which the traditional modes of
producing an opera are all integrated and synchronized, phantasmagoria
becomes the driving force behind the artistic form. However, even
though libretto, music, mise-en-scène, and the architecture of the opera