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  • On Adorno, Wagner, and the Trials of Reading
  • Lutz P. Koepnick
Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Pp. 287. $40.
Weiner, Marc A. Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Pp. 439. $40.

The popular success of such events as the recent “Three Tenor” concerts, commercially promoted and proliferating through various media channels, indicates a profound change not only in the social status of auratic art in postmodern information societies, but also in the ways that we make use of cultural material in order to negotiate meanings and construct identities. Under the aegis of remote controls and fast-forward buttons, nineteenth-century high art experiences a curious process of cultural airlifting. First de- and then recontextualized, the fragmented masterpieces of the past reemerge in mega-spectacles that, for many, signal the arrival of new modes of cultural access and consumption as well as a liberating dispersal of cultural authority. Responding to such changes, and shifting attention away from traditional models of hermeneutic understanding, an increasingly dominant tendency within postmodern criticism locates the production of cultural meaning primarily in gestures of appropriation and evaluation, in social practices that make use of symbolic material within the structures of everyday life. What Jim Collins writes about the status of art today, namely that the category of aura needs to be reexamined in terms of individual introjection rather than of textual production, seems to extend equally to the realm of theoretical speculation. 1 Like nineteenth-century opera, contemporary digital society and academic culture turns the highlights of intellectual history into construction sites allowing for multiple, highly selective, and often deliberately contradictory ways of post-hermeneutic appropriation. There are no doubt good reasons for this vanishing of hermeneutic sensibilities today, reasons that have perhaps less to do with changing vogues of academic agendas, cultural moods, and styles of diversion themselves [End Page 169] than with the emergence of new technologies of communication, diversified modes of economic production and consumption, and the concomitant transformation of general structures of experience. Without wanting to reinstate an authoritative notion of author, text, or oeuvre, one may wonder, however, what the accelerated transformation of past aesthetic and theoretical cultures into collector’s items will do to the continuous need for critical examinations of a particular work’s historical relevance and actuality. For, as I would argue, such an examination can succeed and be fair to its object only if it situates cultural manifestations thoroughly within their own time and contexts, while simultaneously exploring those moments that link them to our own itineraries, moments that in fact may only become visible to the gaze of posterity in the first place. Though they focus on two very different representatives of modern German culture and their respective legacies, both Peter U. Hohendahl’s book on Adorno and Marc A. Weiner’s study of the anti-Semitic construction of body and identity in Wagner present their readers with examinations that successfully master this complex task. Carefully infusing their historical explorations with contemporary theoretical perspectives and interventions, both studies negotiate in an exemplary fashion the historical relevance of their subjects without tagging it as a sell-out item in a postmodern academic retail store.

One might be tempted to modify Adorno’s famous opening sentence of Aesthetic Theory to read instead: today it goes without saying that nothing concerning Adorno goes without saying, much less without thinking. 2 Conflicting views of Adorno abound. Fredric Jameson argues that the modernist Adorno, though least compatible with the postmodern aesthetic, paradoxically represents the most appropriate critic of the 1990s, an author who still needs to be discovered. Impassioned voices in the current popular culture debates relegate Adorno’s work to the dustbin of history, urging that it articulates merely the phobic thought of a mandarin intellectual who divorces the realm of high culture from the popular dimension. Poststructuralists contend that Adorno’s concept of negative dialectics is much closer to their critique of Enlightenment and Western humanism than the second and third generations of German Critical Theory want to admit, whereas some die-hard apologists envision an unswerving return of...

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