ABSTRACT
It was Theodore Adorno who first established the link between the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk (or ‘total work of art’) and phantasmagoria in his seminal critique of Richard Wagner. In anticipation of the analysis we will develop in the later chapters devoted to a thorough criticism of contemporary architecture, in this chapter we discuss theoretical concepts underpinning the notion of Gesamtkunstwerk . More specifically, we apply Adorno’s critique of the G esamtkunstwerk to the fetish character of contemporary architecture. 1
As we shall see, Adorno opens up many as yet unresolved questions regarding phantasmagoria’s relation to aesthetic practices and to modernity itself, especially the question of the supposed ‘total integration’ of high art and pop culture. In this regard, we consider contemporary architecture to represent a retreat from the political modernity that was vital to the discourse of architecture and culture in the twentieth-century metropolis. This argument is also based on three prominent views of Wagner articulated more recently by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek 2 – each of them proposing original readings of Adorno as well as Nietzsche, whose The Case of Wagner (written after his disenchantment with his former idol) was one of Adorno’s main references. 3
In a letter of 10 November 1938, responding critically to Benjamin’s draft on ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,’ Adorno reported on the progress of his manuscript on Wagner. In his strong critique of Benjamin’s essay on Baudelaire, he noted: ‘No one is more aware of the problems involved here than I am; the phantasmagoria chapter of my book on Wagner has certainly not succeeded in resolving them yet.’ According to Adorno, Benjamin’s Arcades study, ‘in its defensive form,’ would not be able to ‘avoid the same obligation.’ 4 In the completed book published first in 1952, entitled Versuch über Wagner , translated as In Search of Wagner , chapter 6 is specifically titled ‘Phantasmagoria.’ 5 Before we discuss Adorno’s argument in this chapter, we need to reflect on the meaning of Gesamtkunstwerk .
