The Name of Wagner: The Antinomies of Allegory (1986)

I delivered this paper in two lectures, both March 1986, first at the Ontario College of Art (Toronto) and then at York University (Toronto). I then tried to work it into an article but never finished perhaps, other than lack of time, because it could not be finished in this form, belaboured as it was by series of long quotations. If this text has value it is as a dossier of quotations that might be revisited in a more felicitous manner.

Rudi Fuchs’ 1982 Documenta 7 is a case study in the North American reception of European, particularly German, art. The critical reaction to it was universally negative and curiously conducted with the same set of cultural resources stemming from Benjamin Buchloh’s 1980 Artforum critique “Beuys: Twilight of the Idol.” Criticism’s vehemence revealed a threat to its consensus: of the dominance of American art and criticism, long in demise. Contradictorily, Documenta was attacked for its allegorical character at a moment when allegory itself was being constructed as a new critical mode. Allegory was a troubling figure.

The Name of Wagner: The Antinomies of Allegory

If the object becomes allegorical under the gaze of melancholy, if melancholy causes life to flow out of it and remain behind dead, but eternally secure, then it is exposed to the allegorist, it is unconditionally in his power. That is to say that it is now quite incapable of emanating any meaning or significance of its own; such significance as it has, it acquires from the allegorist. He places it within it, and stands behind it; not in a psychological but in an ontological sense. In his hands the object becomes something different; through it he speaks of something different and for him it becomes a key to the realm of hidden knowledge; and he reveres it as the emblem of this. This is what determines the character of allegory as a form of writing. It is a schema; and as a schema it is an object of knowledge, but it is not securely possessed until it becomes a fixed schema: at one and the same time a fixed image and a fixing sign.... From “somewhere else” the allegorist then takes it up, by no means avoiding that arbitrariness which is the most dramatic manifestation of the power of knowledge.

—Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (pp. 183–4)*

In the first place, he is dead—a trivial piece of evidence, but incredible enough when you get down to it and when the name’s genius or genie is still there to make us forget the fact of his death. At the very least, to be dead means that no profit or deficit, no good or evil, whether calculated or not, can ever return again to the bearer of the name. Only the name can inherit, and this is why the name, to be distinguished from the bearer, is always and a priori a dead man’s name, a name of death. What returns to the name never returns to the living. Nothing ever comes back to the living. Moreover, we shall not assign him the profit because what he has willed in his name resembles—as do all legacies or, in French, legs (understand this word with whichever ear, in whatever tongue you will)—poisoned milk which has ... gotten mixed up in advance with the worst of times. And it did not get mixed up in this by accident.—Jacques Derrida, “Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name” (p. 7)*

[*Note: the names of these authors were withheld in the lecture.]

At the beginning of the 1980s, criticism responded to the “return” of painting, which it took to be a crisis, with claims of painting’s aesthetic, epistemological, and political regressions. Benjamin Buchloh’s “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression,” published in October 16 (Spring 198l), was the master article in this debate, setting both its terms and tone. The debate appeared at a certain conjuncture: at the time of the confrontation between modernism and so-called postmodernism, and the reappearance of an aesthetic category called allegory. As part of a general change in practice and discourse, the return of painting partakes in the broader perspective of periodization. Painting, however, has been invested and taken as a sign for the whole debate. [1]

“Painting” is more a false nomination than a false practice. All the issues and terms, in fact the whole conceptual structure of the debate, were already introduced in 1980, not under the name of painting, but rather under a proper name. This proper name prepared the way for the critique of painting; but, while naming an artist, it did not belong to a painter.

This name “belongs” to Joseph Beuys but he does not stand alone. In initiating the debate in “Beuys: Twilight of the Idol” (Artforum, January 1980), Benjamin Buchloh also produced a whole series of other names—proper names—through which his critique was argued. Beuys, Nietzsche, and Wagner are brought together in the impossible space of a title: Beuys by name; Nietzsche implied by the variation on the title of his book Twilight of the Idols; and Wagner through both titles’ play on his opera Gotterdammerung.

Wagner is the “true” name, for “Wagner” is the name that stands in for the whole debate. The whole complexity of the debate is condensed in this one name as if it names a symptom. For Nietzsche it did: decadence. But what does “Wagner” name for us? From Beuys, through the return of painting, to the attacks on recent European art in the form of German painting, to the hostile reaction to Documenta 7, clearly during the early 1980s and even to the present [1986], Wagner’s name has been used to stand for painting and its consequences, and Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner has been used to stand in place of a critique of this work. But the name “Nietzsche,” which indissolubly binds Wagner to Beuys and contaminates the latter, in itself is not just a third name, or a pivot between the two that allows the critique to be made. A critique made in Nietzsche’s name is not secure, for he claims to have been both names: Nietzsche and Wagner.

Nietzsche and Wagner: we have to unravel what these names mean (if names can mean: they cannot, which means names are functioning here in another way). There is another title to consider in this regard: Nietzsche’s final book, the critique Nietzsche contra Wagner. What do these names individually and together signify, and the term “contra,” moreover? Not only is Nietzsche both names, one more problem: he inhabits the contra. Beyond the problem of this contra, we have to think through this confrontation in its own terms. (It was, of course, a one-way confrontation; Nietzsche contra Wagner was written after Wagner was dead.) We find that the selective use of this strategy of naming nearly a century later, arguing against a contemporary form of art through Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner, distorts the whole historical position of Nietzsche contra Wagner. Moreover, this use is not just an argument against Wagner, his myth and music, but, by extension for our time, an argument against postmodernism.

Ironically, the allegorical use of these names (because “naming” is an allegorical act that follows the logic expressed in Benjamin’s quotation above) ends in an argument against allegory. What was attacked through these names is allegory, and at times it was attacked for being allegorical? Curiously, at the same time in the early 1980s that Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner, a critique of allegory, was taken into service for other purposes, allegory was being constructed as a positive mode, desire, or impulse—and as a theory of postmodernism. (Think, for instance, of Craig Owens’ “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism” [October 12 and 13, Spring and Summer 1980] and Benjamin Buchloh’s “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art” [Artforum, September 1982]). The antinomies of allegory are revealed in the fact that two contradictory positions—the critique of allegory and its positive theorization—were sometimes inhabited simultaneously—that is, unconsciously—or consecutively by certain writers.

The issues that figured in critical writing at the beginning of the decade can be reduced for our purposes here to another event: the reception of German art. The name of Wagner is attached only to this reception, not to the return of painting in general. The structure of the critique, however, will repeat itself in the ensuing general critique of painting. It seems that “art and politics” remain a German question.

Buchloh Contra Beuys

On this note, let us return to a specifically German confrontation: critic Benjamin Buchloh’s article on artist Joseph Beuys. The context for this confrontation was Beuys’ 1979 Guggenheim retrospective, the first major reception of his work in the United States. Buchloh’s article is a devastating critique. While successfully questioning Beuys’ work on formal, material, semiotic, psychoanalytic, and ideological grounds, Buchloh’s critique is perhaps too rhetorically effective. It initiated a discourse that became better known and disseminated through Buchloh’s later article “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression.” Perhaps because the Beuys’ article implicated only Beuys, a European artist at that, and “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression” implicated painting and painters in general, even though Buchloh concentrated on European artists, it is the latter article that was contested and not the former. And yet, the former maintains a secret life in the latter, and sets the structure of the succeeding debate on painting. Moreover, the critique of Beuys generally was accepted for the very reasons that the critique of painting was rejected.

[Note: Just as Nietzsche claimed he was speaking beyond Wagner to German culture as a whole (see his reference to The Case of Wagner in his later book Ecce Homo), so it is apparent, even beyond the parallels we can decipher, that in his article Buchloh is speaking beyond Beuys to painting. Perhaps already anticipating his later article, when asked in a roundtable discussion in October 12 (Spring 1980, p. 16) why Beuys could have an impact in the United States at that time, Buchloh replied: “I would think that the interest in promoting this particular figure now must be to set the scene for the coming decade in such a way that the role of the artist will be established as that of a unique individual operating within an avant-garde tradition and opposing the bourgeois class. As we know, this is by now a fairly obsolete conception of the artist.” He suggested that Beuys was “a truly crucial figure” in the “restoration of aura to the work of art” and the “expressionist ethos.”]

The procedures by which this particular “figure of authority” is dismantled are only partly analytical. While the title of Buchloh’s article “Beuys: Twilight of the Idol” refers to Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, Buchloh uses Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner instead as the particular tuning fork to sound the “idol” Beuys. In a footnote Buchloh indicates that “The idea of seeing Joseph Beuys in the tradition of Richard Wagner was proposed by the late Marcel Broodthaers in his public letter to Joseph Beuys, Dusseldorf, October 3, 1972” (p. 43). But it is Buchloh’s turn to the rhetorical devices of Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner that will have an afterlife in other critics’ analyses of German art, although the analogy perhaps was irresistible and inevitable.

[Note: As irresistible as Buchloh’s unmasking of Beuys’ “private myth of origin ... Beuys’ most spectacular biographic fable convenue, the plane crash in Crimea,” itself modelled in its language and motive on a note by Nietzsche on Wagner’s “fable convenue.” Let us take this interjection by Rosalind Krauss in the October 12 Beuys roundtable as representative of this attitude: “Do you mind a slight digression, since we’re on the subject of Beuys’ mythology, his falsified background? A digression to the plane crash? I love the plane crash” (p. 8).]

Buchloh opened his “preliminary critique” with an epigraph derived from Nietzsche’s Case of Wagner, condensing several pages of argument in the quotation:

The fact that people in Germany deceive themselves concerning Wagner does not surprise me. The reverse would surprise me. The Germans have modelled a Wagner for themselves, whom they honor: never yet have they been psychologists; they are thankful that they misunderstand. But that people should also deceive themselves concerning Wagner in Paris? Where people are scarcely anything else than psychologists.... How intimately related must Wagner be to the entire decadence of Europe for her not to have felt that he was a decadent. He belongs to it: he is its protagonist, its greatest name.... All that the world most needs today, is combined in the most seductive manner in his art—the three great stimulants of exhausted people: brutality, artificiality and innocence (idiocy).... Wagner est une nevrose.

The contemporary parallel is set up: Beuys is the new Wagner; New York should not be deceived the way Paris was by Wagner. Even before his work is analysed, Beuys is linked to Wagner, or rather to Nietzsche’s “Wagner.” The introduction of Wagner’s name will be a rhetorical leitmotif that follows Buchloh’s example without much of this criticism sharing his historical analysis. After all, Buchloh’s main critical objective was: “Once put in their proper historic context, these works would lose their mystery and seemingly metaphysical origin and could be judged more appropriately for their actual formal and material, i.e., historical, achievements within the situation and the specific point of development of the discourse into which they insert themselves.” In the continuation of this debate by others, critical discourse assumes a rhetorical voice that divorces itself from historical analysis—and even from knowledge of its own origins in allegorical displacement. Henceforth, Wagner’s name will be used as judgement of the political consequences of certain artworks, a strategy Buchloh initiates here:

In the work and public myth of Joseph Beuys the German spirit of the postwar period finds its new identity by pardoning and reconciling itself prematurely with its own reminiscences of a responsibility for one of the most cruel and devastating forms of collective madness that history has known. As much as Richard Wagner’s work anticipated and celebrated these collective regressions into Germanic mythology and Teutonic stupor in the realm of music, before they became the actual reality and nightmare that set out to destroy Europe (what Karl Krauss had anticipated more accurately as the Last Days of Mankind), it would be possible to see in Beuys’ work the absurd aftermath of that nightmare, a grotesque coda acted out by a perfidious trickster. Speculators in Beuys did well: he was bound to become a national hero of the first order, having reinstalled and restored that sense of a—however deranged—national self and historic identity (pp. 38–39).

Nietzsche ironically said, that “It is full of profound significance that the arrival of Wagner coincides with the arrival of the ‘Reich’: both events prove the same thing: obedience and long legs...” [The Case of Wagner, p. 636)]. Similarly, in “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression,” Buchloh seriously implies that in the aftermath of Beuys the return to painting is made possible by, or even invites, a new political authoritarianism. Aesthetic forms imply ontology and both have political consequences that are regressive. While the name of Wagner is out of play in this article, the same model obviously is in effect. Instead of arguing from a name, Wagner, an historical precedent is evoked: the political consequences of historical fascism that followed upon a certain type of painting—“the return to traditional modes of representation in painting around 1915”—as a means of analysing the potential in the renewal of this practice for the same consequences today. What unites Buchloh’s two articles is a term: “regression.”

[Note: Perhaps it is not by chance that Buchloh countered his article on Beuys with one on Marcel Broodthaers published a few months later in Artforum (“Marcel Broodhaers: Allegories of the Avant-Garde,” May 1980). He may have been duplicating Adorno’s juxtaposition in Philosophy of Modern Music of Schoenburg and Stravinsky as the extremes of the progressive and regressive in art. Although the term “regression” is only introduced in “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression,” the terms “retrograde” or “reactionary” being used instead in the Beuys article (although Wagner is referred to as regressive), we know that for Buchloh Beuys is regressive. And the symptom that “Wagner” signifies for us is regression.

Wagner’s name, as we have received it through Buchloh, is not his name alone (he no longer has possession of it); it is Nietzsche’s “Wagner.” The “spirit” of Nietzsche’s critique has been applied, but not the letter. In fact, only a selective use of his critique is made. We can take Wagner’s name as much more than just the name for a symptom: it is also the name and symptom for a certain type of contemporary criticism, and Buchloh’s article on Beuys is the unconscious, and sometimes conscious, model for it.

The passage of names from Wagner to Beuys is interrupted by unnamed others in the transformation of terminology from “decadence” to “regression.” What we need is a genealogical analysis of this term “regression” that is the key term in the rejection of painting. Arguing from those unnamed would lead us into other difficult contradictions. For the current return to Nietzsche’s critique is subtended by the German Marxist debates of the 1930s involving Lukács and Adorno among others and would hinge once again now on the word “expression,” but not necessarily in the same sense it is polemically used now.]

Documenta 7: A Battle Over Allegory

“At each moment art is the allegory of its troubled history.”

—Rudi Fuchs

Rudi Fuchs’ 1982 Documenta 7 is a case history for both the reception of German art in North America in the early 1980s and the use and abuse of Wagner’s name in contemporary criticism. The two are implicated in one another. Wagner’s name stands in for a whole cultural reading of German painting, which in turn is taken as representative of Documenta as a whole. (We shall see that it argues, ultimately, against much more than painting.)

This reaction is gathered in three American journals reporting immediately after the event (Artforum, October, and Art in America). The September 1982 issue of Artforum was devoted to examining the “curatorial cogito” of Documenta. The editor ended her introduction by stating the now familiar demand that we have to examine “what is progressive and what is regressive” in contemporary art (p. 57).

All the Artforum writers did not mention Wagner specifically, a couple metonymically displacing his name to other terms. Thus Kate Linker refers to the “inherently mystifying discourse—the heritage of 19th century Idealism” (p. 62). And Donald Kuspit invokes nationalism: “The Germans are given a clear intellectual supremacy in the catalogue, as well as a certain supremacy in the installation. It is not just nationalism that this exhibition is proclaiming as the new dogma of artistic understanding, but German nationalism—a constellation of ideas usually associated with German culture. The catalogue is pervaded by a sanctimonious odor of obeisance to great ‘safe’ l9th-century Germans—safe in that they can in no way be associated with fascism and brutality” (p. 64). Kuspit’s attitude is a bit out of sorts with the other writers declaring, “In Documenta 7, nationalism and romanticism are inseparable. The Expressionist basis for the new German romantic style goes unmentioned in the catalogue—perhaps because, erroneously, it has been regarded as proto-fascist in attitude and therefore too dangerous to discuss.” But he does fall in with the others on the issue of regression, even if he applies the term to different referents by declaring that “The marriage of nationalism and romanticism has as its offspring very particular attitudes to the artist and art... Such regression inevitably brings with it regressive reactionary attitudes towards the artist and art” (p. 65).

Coming face to face with the myth, in his “Wagner’s Head” Richard Flood combines Buchloh (he calls Buchloh’s article “a revisionist assessment of Beuys”) and Nietzsche as follows: “In ‘The Case of Wagner’, a witty, acidic purge of his onetime idol, Friedrich Nietzsche states: ‘Wagner is the modern artist par excellence, the Cagliostro of modernity. In his art all that the modern world requires most urgently is mixed in the most seductive manner: the three great stimulantia of the exhausted—the brutal, the artificial, and the innocent (idiotic).’ So too, in the Gesamtkunstwerk of Documenta, were Wagner’s stimulantia enshrined. The brutal was exalted by Hermann Nitsch, the artificial by Syberberg, the innocent by Joseph Beuys. Not inconsequently, each of these artists is also pursuing his vision of Gesamtkunstwerk, his Grail” (p. 68).

Artforum’s German correspondent, Annelie Pohlen, is a bit more reserved in her reference to Wagner by way of the German filmmaker Syberberg: “But even the murkiest technocrat is not so sinister as Syberberg’s odious association with German myth. Have we learned nothing? Wagner could not know how fully he would be used; Syberberg should. After the events leading from the turn of the century up to 1933, nothing seems more likely” (p. 59).

Now, in turn, Syberberg (an obviously allegorical artist) becomes representative of German art and Documenta 7 through an association with Wagner, proof of the complicity of art with political regression and authoritarian regimes. It was too good an analogy, too easy a set-up, and so Craig Owens in his Art in America article on Documenta, “Bayreuth ’82,” states that “The most prominent exponent of this position [...] in contemporary Germany is not a painter, but a filmmaker—Hans Jürgen Syberberg, who has appointed himself executor of the Wagnerian legacy” (p. 134). In his October 22 article “Documenta 7: A Dictionary of Received Ideas,” Buchloh implicates both Syberberg and Fuchs in “the ideologically organized dismantling of modernism” (p. 117).

Contrarily, Craig Owens takes Fuchs task to be the recovery of “the modernist ideal of esthetic autonomy, of which Bayreuth was perhaps the most grandiose expression” (p. 133). In a massively orchestrated attack on Documenta 7, Owens threads the motif of Wagner through his article, not on the basis of Nietzsche’s critique but now on Adorno’s In Search of Wagner. Owens’ epigraphic use of Adorno serves to focus attention on regression: “A regressive esthetic practice is not a matter of individual choice or psychological accident” (p. 132). But Owens enacts his own return when he writes, “How is it, then, that a century later and on German soil, Documenta—a prestigious international exhibition sponsored by the city of Kassel and devoted, until this summer, to the contemporary ‘avant-garde’—has been transformed into a Bayreuth for the visual arts” (p. 132). Compare his statement to another famous opening line: “How is it that we are nearly forced to believe that the return to traditional modes of representation in painting around 1915, two years after the Readymade and the Black Square, was a shift of great historical or aesthetic import?” (Buchloh, “Figures of Authority…,” p. 39).

What these critics attack in Documenta, through the screen of Wagner’s name, is its allegorical character, as it is consciously constructed by Fuchs in his statements, the poster, catalogue, and installation. For example, Annelie Pohlen: “the few statements that Rudi Fuchs ... made about his understanding of and involvement with art stick in one’s memory; these statements seem epitomized by such words as ‘consecration’, ‘temple’, ‘dignity’, ‘tranquility’, ‘devotion’, and so on” (p. 59). And Kate Linker: “Metaphors of ships and voyages, of rivers, tapestries, and dreams clog the literature of Documenta 7. But among them is one triumphant image—the founding figure of speech. In a missive to contributing artists, dated September l98l and rapidly pegged as ‘The Letter’, Artistic Director Rudi Fuchs described the exhibition as a kind of journey through ‘the forest of art’. Such terrain, he wrote, could not be surveyed from the ‘hill’ of analysis; no overview or perspective sufficed: ‘one has to come down and go into the forest. There one encounters the most beautiful trees, wonderful flowers, mysterious lakes and valleys—and people who speak in different tongues’. The traveller, on return, would tell of these adventures, elaborating in ‘stories’ his experiences of excitement, of blossoms exquisite and rare” (p. 62).

Owens complains that “Fuchs approached the making of this exhibition as a form of textual production. He refers to it in explicitly literary metaphors—Documenta 7 is a narrative he tells us, a ‘Story’—and has even provided an (appropriately archaic) literary subtitle: ‘In which our heroes after a long and strenuous voyage through sinister valleys and dark forests finally arrive at the English garden, and at the gate of a splendid palace’.” A strange statement coming from a theorist of contemporary allegorical impulse, who paired a statement by Laurie Anderson with the opening lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy: “In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost...”

And we can include Buchloh’s statement from his October 22 article on Documenta: “Too numerous and too frequently quoted from his notorious letter inviting artists to participate in Documenta 7 are the confessions of the Artistic Director’s creative ambitions to make the exhibition into anything other than an exhibition—a poem called Le Bateau Ivre, a story, a fairy tale, or, ultimately an opera: “I understand myself to be a composer. I will make an opera out of works of art, paintings and objects...” (p 116).

Perhaps Fuchs, who all these authors complain wanted to turn Documenta 7 into a Gesamstkunstwerk, secretly identified with Wagner. In this respect it is interesting to find a reference by Fuchs to Wagner, not in the Documenta 7 catalogue, but in one on Jannis Kounellis from 1981, the time of “The Letter.” As Wagner was Francophobic, we might glean an anti-American sentiment in what Fuchs writes: “And when the American army in 1945 reached Bayreuth, the soldiers organized a night-club in Wahnfried, Wagner’s house, and danced on the master’s grave back in the garden.”

[“There is something strange and yet very familiar about those fragments: broken and scorched. They do not only suggest tragedy. I mean, the fall of the Roman Empire was an historical necessity. The barbarians passed and of course they had to destroy the temples and the sculptures. They had to go forward! Some of your works, in a complex way, suggest that passage of barbarians: nomads from the North and the East. They leave the sculpture broken, scattered around, scorched by the huge fires in their camps. They have continued their journey. Cavafy wrote a poem about the fall of Byzantium. The old gentlemen in the city, observing the impotence of culture, whisper how the barbarians might be the solution. And when the American army in 1945 reached Bayreuth, the soldiers organized a night-club in Wahnfried, Wagner’s house, and danced on the master’s grave back in the garden. —But, you said, nomads are not tramps” (Fuchs, Jannis Kounellis, pp. 65–66).] Fuchs treats Kounellis as an allegorical artist, and in the same catalogue claims that “At each moment art is the allegory of its troubled history” (p. 33). Indeed, Documenta 7 may be taken as that allegory.]

So while redressing the balance between Europe and America, Fuchs’ Documenta was interpreted, at least by American critics, as anti-American. Thus Donald Kuspit: “Despite the large number of American artists (the largest of any nation) a more or less pervasive hyper-consciousness of Americanism—some have said anti-Americanism—is suggested by Documenta 7’s installation. Is this merely a way of equalizing the nations, finding a new equilibrium between them? Is every nation represented denied ‘supremacy’? I don’t think so. The Germans are given clear intellectual supremacy in the catalogue, as well as a certain supremacy in the installation” (p. 64). Owens found that “the German predominance ... [while] not merely a matter of statistics ... is primarily the phantasmagoric effect of the installation itself, which has been conceived by Fuchs as a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk” (p. 137–138). Owens conceived this predominance in terms of German imperialism, applying the ideological figure of “Lebensraum” to the scale of German paintings (p.137–38). He adds: “Haacke’s hommage can also be read as an allegory of the implicit anti-American spirit of Documenta 7.”

We shouldn’t merely look to Documenta 7 for the playing out of a struggle between America and Europe for supremacy in the art world, or of that between a critical practice in art and so-called new expressionism in painting. It was a contest for the right of use of allegory, even if that motive was unconscious at the time. Wagner’s name remains square in the middle of this debate.

The Antinomies of Allegory

“Wagner nevertheless gives his name to the ruin of music.”

—Nietzsche

The issue of allegory brings us back to Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner. If we read Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner and apply the whole and not just part of it to contemporary art, and not just to Beuys or German painting, we find the basis of a critique of allegory and an implicit critique of postmodernism. For Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner is a critique of allegory. Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner as an allegorist is of interest because the criticisms of Documenta 7 assumed through the name “Wagner” go hand in hand with hostility to Documenta’s allegorical character.

Just as Buchloh’s criticism of Beuys as a type was more rhetorically effective than his discussion of his actual work, so too in Nietzsche it is his criticism of Wagner as a “decadent” rather than his discussion of the structure of his music and operas that serves as a model for other contemporary critiques. I thus want to contrast two opposing views on allegory: Nietzsche’s and Benjamin’s; for it is Benjamin’s book, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, that has been used to construct a contemporary theory of allegory for the visual arts by some of the very people who denounced Wagner.

To start I will take only two representative examples. Nietzsche: “For the present I merely dwell on the question of style. —What is the sign of every literary decadence? That life no longer dwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, the page gains life at the expense of the whole—the whole is no longer a whole. But this is the simile of every style of decadence: every time, the anarchy of atoms, disintegration of the will, ‘freedom of the individual,’ to use moral terms—expanded into a political theory, ‘equal rights for all.’” Note that Nietzsche is not loath to attribute a political consequence to the aesthetic nor indeed a regressive physical consequence. He continues: “Life, equal vitality, the vibration and exuberance of life pushed back into the smallest forms; the rest, poor in life. Everywhere paralysis, arduousness, torpidity or hostility and chaos: both more and more obvious the higher one ascends in forms of organization. The whole no longer lives at all: it is composite, calculated, artificial and artifact.” (The Case of Wagner, p. 626) [“Once more: Wagner is admirable and gracious only in the invention of what is smallest, in spinning out details” (p. 627).]

Benjamin, on the contrary, finds value in the allegorical disintegration of the whole into fragments (for this was what Nietzsche was complaining about): “It is not possible to conceive of a starker opposite to the artistic symbol, the plastic symbol, the image of organic totality, than this amorphous fragment which is seen in the form of allegorical script.... The false appearance of totality is extinguished” (p. l76). [Moreover, Benjamin sees in allegory, as he would in Dada and surrealism, the very emancipation of words and syllables Nietzsche abjured: “The practices of these writers combine with the principles of their linguistic theories to bring out a basic motif of the allegorical approach in the most surprising place. In the anagrams, the onomatopoeic phrases, and many other examples of linguistic virtuosity, word, syllable, and sound are emancipated from any context of traditional meaning and are flaunted as objects which can be exploited for allegorical purposes. The language of the baroque is constantly convulsed by the rebellion on the parts of the elements which make it up... In this way language is broken up so as to acquire a changed and intensified meaning in its fragments” (pp. 207–8).] On the “composite, calculated, artificial and artifact,” Benjamin states, “The writer must not conceal the fact that his activity is one of arranging, since it was not so much the mere whole as its obviously constructed quality that was the principle impression that was aimed at” (p. 179).]

On another front Nietzsche claims of Wagner (in a quotation that Buchloh then applies to Beuys), “As a matter of fact, he repeated a single proposition all his life long: that his music did not mean mere music. But more. But infinitely more. —‘Not mere music’—no musician would say that. To say it once more, Wagner was unable to create from a totality; he had no choice, he had to make a patchwork, ‘motifs’, gestures, formulas, doing things double and even a hundredfold—he remained an orator even as a musician—he therefore had to move his ‘it means’ into the foreground as a matter of principle. ‘Music is always a mere means’: that was his theory, that above all the only practice open to him. But no musician would think that way” (p. 633). [Nietzsche had indicated earlier in the text that Wagner “has increased music’s capacity for language to the point of making it immeasurable” (The Case of Wagner, p. 629).]

On the patchwork and repetitive, Benjamin claims: “For it is common practice in the literature of the baroque to pile up fragments ceaselessly, without any strict ideal of a goal, and in the unremitting expectation of a miracle, to take the repetition of stereotypes for a process of intensification” (p. l78). And on the “it means,” Benjamin states: “The function of baroque iconography is not so much to unveil material objects as to strip them naked. The emblematist does not present the essence implicitly, ‘behind the image.’ He drags the essence of what is depicted out before the image, in writing, as a caption, such as, in the emblem-books, forms an intimate part of what is depicted” (p. 185).

This sequence of quotations above partakes in criticism’s allegorical practice. Part of the contemporary contradictions of criticism stems from its intertextual nature, its method of constructing theoretical statements from a chain of corresponding quotations that resemble one another in some way. That is to say, criticism is allegorical. Criticism is allegorical in that it does not need to go outside texts. This procedure is complicated, and initially contradicted, by the procedure of naming—something that comes from the outside, but which is internalized in the allegorical system and in turn becomes a fragment that can be allegorized (i.e., named) in other writing. (Statements and events take on the character of names and in turn names become events. Cf. Nietzsche: “this essay [The Birth of Tragedy] was an event in the life of Wagner: it was only from that moment on that Wagner’s name elicited high hopes” [Ecce Homo, p. 726 my emphases].) This coming from the outside is part of the intentionality of allegory. It is the outside—an outside that arises through the name—that makes the reference political, or what seems to give writing the character of being political. Actually, politics is ascribed through an intertextual operation, a verbal strategy of one name substituting for another. In other words, politics is simply named: politics becomes a name and naming a way of conducting politics. In substituting one name for another, the outside—a concrete political reality—is reduced to a critique already in place, and the labour of analysis is short-circuited by rhetoric. The outside is never an outside; it is only a sign, here a name. Naming constitutes an allegorical act, which is where the two quotations which opened this lecture come together.

[Before leaving Nietzsche we should remember another essay that provoked a debate on the scale of “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression.” We note similarities to Michael Fried when Nietzsche indicates as the first of “the three demands for which my wrath, my concern, my love of art has this time opened my mouth”: “That the theatre should not lord it over the arts” (The Case of Wagner, p. 636). Fried’s three demands were: “1) The success, even the survival, of the arts has come increasingly to depend on their ability to defeat theatre.... 2) Art degenerates [note “degenerates”] as it approaches the condition of theatre.... 3) The concepts of quality and value—and to the extent that these are central to art, the concept of art itself—are meaningful, only within the individual arts. What lies between the arts is theatre” (pp. 139-42). Of course, what is between the arts could only be thought of as allegorical as when Benjamin says: “In speaking of the Gesamptkunstwerk as the summit of the aesthetic hierarchy of the age and the ideal of the Trauerspiel itself, the baroque critic provides a new confirmation of this spirit of weightiness. As an experienced allegorist, Harsdorffer is, among many theoreticians, the one who spoke out most radically for the synthesis of all the arts. For this is precisely what is required by the allegorical way of looking at things” (p. 181).]

Translating Nietzsche’s comments through Benjamin’s terminology, we understand that Wagner is an allegorist. That Wagner could be seen to be an allegorist and to suggest that the allegorical might accommodate diverse views, some of them positive, we can turn to Annette Michelson’s “Bayreuth: The Centennial Ring,” the article following two issues after the Beuys roundtable in October l4 (Fall l980), in which she asserts that Chereau’s “production of the Ring will stand as more than a chapter in the history of Bayreuth or, more generally, of performance; it is our conviction that it constitutes a major stage in the renewal of performance as textual production within our culture” (pp. 65–66). This “textual” production is allegorical; it is “the restitution, through the free play of concrete and contradictory, articulate detail, of temporality and history in a reading that is allegorical…. [T]he Wagnerian project is presented as issuing from a framework of contradiction whose organic form is that of allegory, vigorous in its abundance of concrete narrative detail and purposeful anachronism” (p. 68–69). We should note that in the October 12 discussion of Beuys Michelson was the only one who was supportive of some of Beuys’ endeavors since she understood him in terms of performance, a hybrid form modernism could not recognize.

[In a language that could only be taken as post-structuralist and allegorical, Michelson elaborates: “It was Chereau’s constant insistence on both the concrete materiality of the dramatic action and its means of production which, joined ... set this production apart.... It is that tension, consistently maintained throughout the work’s four sections, extended in the succession of disjunctions, gaps, breaks, clashes, encroachments, overlaps, enjambments, dissonances, paradoxes, through which the relation of musical to dramatic structure, of drama to myth, is articulated—all of this composing a text that is at every point polysemantic. It is through that succession that the Wagnerian project is presented as issuing from a framework of contradiction whose organic form is that of allegory, vigorous in its abundance of concrete narrative detail and purposeful anachronism” (p. 69).]

Allegory is a troubling, contradictory figure. We must re-question it in light of these observations. Allegory began to be adopted as a theoretical model by art critics around 1980 (Owens, for example) at the very same time that it was seen, sometimes by the same writers, to be a threat. Documenta represented a threat. So did postmodernism.

Buchloh was one of those who changed his attitude from “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression.” That allegory there was conceived of as part of the problem is obvious from the following quotations: “If the current debate does not place these phenomena in historical context, if it does not see through the eagerness with which we are assured from all sides that the avant-garde has completed its mission and has been accorded a position of comfort within a pluralism of meanings and aesthetic masquerades, then it will become complicit in the creation of a climate of desperation and passivity. The ideology of postmodernism seems to forget the subtle and manifest political oppression which is necessary to serve the existing power structure. Only in such a climate are the symbolic modes of concrete anticipation transformed into allegorical modes of internalized retrospection. If one realizes that melancholy is at the origin of the allegorical mode, one should realize that this melancholy is enforced by prohibition and repression” (p. 4l). Like Nietzsche, Buchloh opposes the symbolic to the allegorical, valuing the former and relegating the latter to a consequence: allegory is a symptom, or rather, allegory is the ideological consequence of certain forms of art. It is not even clear, however, if it is the practice or the content that produces this consequence.

[“This transformation of art from the practice of the material and dialectical transgression of ideology to the static affirmation of the conditions of reification and their psychosexual origins in repression have been described as the source of a shift towards the allegorical mode by Bersani: ‘It is the extension of the concrete into memory and fantasy. But with the negation of desire, we have an immobile and immobilizing type of abstraction. Instead of imitating a process of endless substitutions (desire’s ceaseless ‘travelling’ among different images), abstraction is now a transcendence of the desiring process itself. And we move towards an art of allegory’” (p. 45).]

The allegorical reading of content is obvious in the following: “The Harlequins, Pierrots, Bajazzos, and Pulchinelles invading the work of Picasso, Beckmann, Severini, Derain, and others in the early twenties (and in the mid-thirties, even the work of the former constructivist/productivist Rodchenko in Russia) can be identified as ciphers of enforced regression. They serve as emblems for the melancholic infantilism of the avant-garde artist who has come to realize his historical failure” (p. 53).]

In the passage to Buchloh’s “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art” (Artforum, September 1982), allegory is re-evaluated. The value of allegory is reversed, not its concept or description, for the description was always based upon Benjamin. What changes is the “object” of its application: from content to form. What was previously criticized as allegorical was content or the ideological consequence of content; what is now validated as allegorical is form. What was reserved for modernism and the modernist collage in “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression” now is offered to allegory.

In “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression,” Buchloh opposed the modernist collage to the return of figurative art in stating of the latter: “Quite unlike the modernist collage, in which various fragments and materials of experience are laid bare, revealed as fissures, voids, unresolvable contradictions, irreconcilable particularizations, pure heterogeneity, the historicist image pursues the opposite aim: that of synthesis, of the illusory creation of a unity and totality which conceals its historical determination and conditioned particularity” (p. 54). (Remember that the use of the allegorical was not applied to the form of this work, which implied a totality against the interpretation of allegory we have been following, but was applied to form’s ideological consequences and usually to its content. Buchloh reserves totality for allegory.)

In “Allegorical Procedures,” the modernist collage or montage turns allegorical. Buchloh opens with this statement: “From the very moment of its inception, it seems that the inventors of the strategy of montage were aware of its inherently allegorical nature: ‘to speak publicly with hidden meaning,’ in response to the prohibition of public speech” (p. 43). He begins to rearticulate allegory, without changing Benjamin’s description of what it is, as a positive procedure rather than a passive consequence: “The allegorical mind sides with the object and protests against its devaluation to the status of a commodity by devaluating it a second time in allegorical practice. In the splintering of signifier and signified, the allegorist subjects the sign to the same division of functions that the object has undergone in its transformation into a commodity. The repetition of the original act of depletion and the new attribution of meaning redeems the object” (p. 44).

At this point we have passed through such a contradictory circuit of statements that we can return to the two quotations with which I opened this lecture but did not want to name, in order that this naming did not overvalue the statements. I can name them here: Benjamin and Derrida.

We have seen how the practice of naming finds an association with allegory through the example of Buchloh’s use of Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner. The contemporary critique was made at a time when allegory itself was making a reappearance in theory. This form of naming and the reproduction of its “critique” in itself is an allegorical act. But the security of that act is exposed when its procedures of naming criticize allegory, as in Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner, Buchloh’s critique of Beuys and neo-expressionist painting, and the general criticism of Documenta. Contradiction ensues when allegorical acts deconstruct allegorical acts, and allegory itself changes its critical value: as in Buchloh.

The opening quotation from Benjamin describes the operations at play in allegory as applied to criticism as I have outlined it here. Wagner’s name—or Beuys’—is a mere allegorical token. This name is dead. [This lecture was delivered before Beuys died.]

The quotation from Derrida, does not refer to Wagner—his is not the name of the one who is dead: that name belongs to Nietzsche. But in turn Derrida has shown—in every case I stated reservations about Nietzsche’s own name—the insecurity in using his name, as a politics of the proper name.

NOTE

1. I will therefore be talking about the practice of naming which encompasses a number of functions and operations. Specifically here I will discuss a certain rhetoric of naming which is a politics of naming. This concerns criticism only. What I am attempting to address is an internal matter of criticism—a self-questioning of the methods of criticism, a questioning in order to establish the limits of what can be said by it. It is not theoretical, but retrospective in cast: it examines a complex of statements and events that have had ramifications from the late 1970s to the present [1986], but which were specifically set in place from 1980–1982. But while this examination is an internal matter of criticism, the practice will come to include everything: because naming attaches itself from the outside. Those statements and events as well take on the character of names, and in turn names become events. We will see that there is no necessary link between a statement and original event (if that event is a work of art or an exhibition), but that the statement becomes an event within a verbal strategy, and naming takes place within a linguistic structure of reference. I will concern myself with a type of criticism where politics becomes a name, and names a way of conducting politics. “Naming”—names calling forth names (and quotations)—will be seen to be what constitutes an allegorical act. (This is where the two quotations above that preface this lecture start to come together.) As an allegorical act, this naming is problematical: a problem because at times it denies or denounces allegory. And of course we will not be able to talk about the politics of naming without mentioning particular proper names: those names under attack; those names attacking; and those names through which the attack is made.

Part of the contemporary contradictions of criticism stem from its allegorical—or intertextual—nature: its method of constructing theoretical statements from chains of corresponding or resembling quotations. Criticism is allegorical in that it is textually self-sustaining and does not need to go outside its status as text to generate itself. Its internal, textual procedure is complicated, and initially contradicted, by the procedure of naming—which is something that comes from outside and then is internalized in an allegorical system to become a fragment itself that can be further allegorized (named/quoted) in other writing. (This coming from the outside, however, is part of the intentionality of allegory—i.e., Benjamin’s “from ‘somewhere else’.”) The outside is what seems to make the practice political, or what seems to give it the character of being political. But actually politics is ascribed only through an intertextual operation: politics is simply named. It is through naming alone that this strategy takes on a political character, the attribution of value in a political statement or judgement. But in these cases the outside is never an outside; it is only a sign, here a name.

Sources Cited

Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (New York: The Seabury Press, 1973).

Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingston (London: NLB, 1981).

Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977).

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art,” Artforum 21:1 (September 1982), 43–56.

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Beuys: Twilight of the Idol,” Artforum (January 1980), 35–43.

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Documenta 7: A Dictionary of Received Ideas” October 22 (Autumn 1982), 104–126.

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression,” October 16 (Spring 198l), 39–68.

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, “Joseph Beuys at the Guggenheim,” October 12 (Spring 1980), 3–21
.

Jacques Derrida, “Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name,” [trans. Avital Ronell], in The Ear of the Other (New York: Schocken Books, 1985.

Richard Flood, “Wagner’s Head,” Artforum 21:1 (September 1982), 68-70.

Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood,” in Minimal Art, ed., Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1968).

R. H. Fuchs, Jannis Kounellis, (Eindhoven: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, 1981).

Donald Kuspit, “The Night Mind,” Artforum 21:1 (September 1982), 64–67.

Kate Linker, “Grim Fairy Tale,” Artforum 21:1 (September 1982), 62–63.

Annette Michelson’s “Bayreuth: The Centennial Ring” following in October 14 (Fall 1980), 65–70.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968).

Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” October 12 and 13, (Spring and Summer 1980), 67–86; 59–80.

Craig Owens, “Bayreuth ’82,” Art in America 70:8 (September 1982 132–139, 191.

Annelie Pohlen, “The Dignity of the Thorn,” Artforum 21:1 (September 1982), 58–61.