(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

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house may be conceived and controlled by one and the same person, the
opera cannot fully divest itself of the embarrassing fact that there is still a
multitude of hands involved in its production: phantasmagoria is at heart
an “impossible object.” 27 The reasons for its impossibility reside in the
social world: in a contradictory, antinomial world any representation of a
fused “whole” belies the ineluctable antagonism underpinning all (bourgeois)
reality. 28 Because this reality resists fusion, the Gesamtkunstwerk
must proceed by means of a violent synthesis: the various elements of the
Gesamtkunstwerk are made to regurgitate the dictated synthesis to one
another, each subordinated to the abstract logic of musical (phantasmagoric)
production. 29 Their “wholeness” (as one of Adorno’s most famous
aphorisms runs) is their untruth. 30
For Adorno it is primarily the denial of time, of development, of newness,
that marks Wagnerian music as phantasmagoric, 31 the falsely naturalizing,
totalizing, and spatializing in Wagner’s compositional technique.
But this approach seems to subscribe to a relatively limited view of what
constitutes a “technology,” focusing on the work of the composer and
librettist repressed in phantasmagoria. While this Wagner-focused reading
of phantasmagoria is perfectly accurate when it comes to the work of art,
it gives short shrift to the various technologies that actually contribute
to a performance of, say, the Ring of the Nibelung. 32 Phantasmagoria, in
other words, is not merely a concept to be applied to color, tone, texts,
or sets — it is also a concept intimately related to the fact that Wagner’s
operas were performed in Bayreuth and in the many opera houses subsequently
styled after it, and that they were performed at a particular point
in time, as certain technologies of performance had become available. 33
In Benjamin’s words, it is a theater “komplizierter Maschinerien, riesenhafter
Statistenaufgeboten, raffinierter Effekten” (GS II:697; “of complicated
machinery, gigantic human resources, and sophisticated effects”). It
is crucial that these technologies enabled not a new work of art but rather
a new kind of sensory experience.
III
This emphasis on a new (and particularly modern) kind of sensory experience
moves our discussion of the concept closer to Benjamin’s understanding
of what constitutes “phantasmagoria.” For while the Passagen-Werk
explicitly invokes Adorno’s use of the concept with respect to Wagner, it
is clear that Benjamin deploys the term differently (albeit analogously).
Benjamin follows Marx in reading phantasmagoria as fetishes that divest a
world of commodities of its historical contingency and transfigure it into
something universal, natural, inevitable. 34 But the suppression of labor in
the fetish also translates into an elision of the world of industry in favor of
Feerien (fairytales), preserved seemingly isolated from the industrializing