ABSTRACT
In this excursus, we indulge the modernist habit of seeking properties deemed ‘intrinsic’ to a phenomenon, in order to isolate the entity we have called ‘phantasmagoria’ as a relatively stable construct. The goal, however questionable historically, is to develop a concept that can work critically to describe several notable features of contemporary architecture and urbanism. To this end, Adorno’s much celebrated (and reviled) account of Richard’s Wagner’s phantasmagorias is an obvious starting point. 1
Long considered a paradigmatic example of Marxist critique that combines ideological analysis with the highest level of formal and, in this case, musicological analysis, the text has recently come in to some considerable and not unjustified criticism, most notably from Juliet Koss in Modernism after Wagner . 2 Koss’s point, however, that Adorno offers a biased and anachronistic account of Wagner’s work that is highly questionable historically does nothing, in our view, to invalidate the critical and theoretical force of his perspective on the rise of the ‘culture industry’ and the ‘society of the spectacle.’ On the contrary, in our view, as an example of how to read music (and by extension other forms of cultural production) as a cipher of social antagonisms, this text has lost none of its force, some of which, we think, can be usefully redirected toward the present architectural scene.
