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The Total Work of Art in European Modernism Series Editor: Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Cornell University The Total Work of Art in European Modernism Series editor: Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Cornell University Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought publishes new English- language books in literary studies, criticism, cultural studies, and intellectual history pertaining to the German-speaking world, as well as translations of im- portant German-language works. Signale construes “modern” in the broadest terms: the series covers topics ranging from the early modern period to the present. Signale books are published under a joint imprint of Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library in electronic and print formats. Please see http://signale.cornell.edu/. The Total Work of Art in European Modernism David Roberts A Signale Book Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library Ithaca, New York Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library gratefully acknowledge the support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the publication of this volume. Copyright © 2011 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writ- ing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2011 by Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Roberts, David, 1937– The total work of art in European modernism / David Roberts. p. cm. — (Signale : modern German letters, cultures, and thought) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-5023-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Modernism (Aesthetics) 2. Arts, Modern—Philosophy. 3. Arts, European—19th century—Philosophy. 4. Arts, European—20th century— Philosophy. I. Title. II. Series: Signale (Ithaca, N.Y.) BH301.M54R635 2011 111'.85—dc23 2011021587 Paperback printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For György Markus Contents Preface ix Introduction 1 Part I The Artwork of the Future 1. Refounding Society 15 Ancients and Moderns: Rousseau’s Civil Religion 15 The Festivals of the French Revolution 19 Revolution and Representation 25 The Abyss of Political Foundation 30 2. The Destination of Art 34 The Secularization of Art: Quatremère de Quincy 34 Aesthetic Education: Schiller 38 Aesthetic Revolution: Hölderlin 44 The Destiny of Art: Hegel 50 3. Prophets and Precursors: Paris 1830–1848 54 Organic and Critical Epochs: Saint-Simon 54 Musical Palingenesis: Mazzini and Balzac 60 The Musical City: Berlioz 66 Ancients and Moderns: Wagner 70 4. Staging the Absolute 77 Modernism or the Long Nineteenth Century 77 The Birth of Tragedy: Nietzsche 79 The Great Work: Mallarmé 84 Dialectic of Enlightenment: From the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century 90 Part II The Spiritual in Art 5. Religion and Art: Parsifal as Paradigm 101 The Idea of Return 101 Religion and Art 105 The Profoundest Symbol: The Grail 110 The Theater to Come 115 viii Contents 6. The Symbolist Mystery 123 Homage to the Gesamtkunstwerk 123 The Ultimate Fiction: Mallarmé’s Book 131 The Last Ecstasy: Scriabin’s Mysterium 136 Gnosis and Ecstasy 142 7. Gesamtkunstwerk and Avant-Garde 144 The Avant-Garde: Analysis and Synthesis 144 From Dionysus to Apollo: Stravinsky and the Ballets Russes 150 The Spiritual in Art: Kandinsky and the Blaue Reiter 154 The Crystal Cathedral: Bruno Taut and the Bauhaus 159 8. The Promised Land: Toward a Retotalized Theatre 165 The Theatre Reform Movement 165 World Theatre: Hofmannsthal and Claudel 168 Theatre of Cruelty: Brecht and Artaud 177 Synthesis of the Arts: A Typology 184 Part III The Sublime in Politics 9. National Regeneration 189 The Community to Come 189 Romain Rolland: Le théâtre du peuple 191 Gabriele d’Annunzio: Il fuoco 195 The Nietzschean Sublime 201 10. Art and Revolution: The Soviet Union 207 The Birth of the New Man 207 Festivals of the Revolution 211 From Art to Life: The Russian Avant-Garde 217 Stalin’s Total Work of Art 225 11. The Will to Power as Art: The Third Reich 232 The Avant-Garde and the Breakthrough to Totality 232 Benjamin and the Aestheticization of Politics 238 The State as Work of Art: Jünger’s Der Arbeiter 244 Hitler’s Triumph of the Will 249 Conclusion 255 Bibliography 267 Index 283 Preface This book forms the third part of a trilogy on European modernism that drew its original impulse from dissatisfaction with Theodor Adorno’s reading of cultural modernity. The fi rst book in the trilogy, Art and Enlightenment: Aesthetic Theory after Adorno (1992), set out to show that Adorno’s theory of the rationalization of the arts, as demonstrated in his Philosophy of Modern Music, itself falls victim to the contradictions inherent in the reduction of modern culture to the single logic of enlightenment and its dialectic. The hidden romantic roots of Max Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s critique of enlightenment occlude in turn the antagonistic comple- mentarity of the two imaginaries—enlightenment and romanticism—that defi ne cultural modernism. In the second book, Dialectic of Romanticism: A Critique of Modernism (2004), Peter Murphy and I distance ourselves from enlightened and romantic modernisms and their rival historicisms, from the perspective of a third, classical modernism, which stresses civilizational continuities against the will to remake society in the name of the most advanced techniques or the most potent myths. The recurrent polarity of futurisms and archaisms across the whole epoch of modernism is refl ected aesthetically in the idea of the avant-garde, on the one hand, and the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, on the other. The idea of the total work of art thus emerged as the focus of the present investigation, which undertakes a re-vision of modernism in the light of the counterimaginary of aesthetic totalization, as opposed to the more familiar accounts of the avant-garde in terms of aesthetic rationalization. I would like to thank the colleagues and friends who have read and commented on parts of the manuscript. Andrew Benjamin, Marie and Leslie Bodi, Götz Grossklaus, Andrew Milner, Peter Murphy, Brian Nelson, Ken Segar, and Philip Thomson have all helped me to correct my errors, simplify my sentences, and clar- ify my argument. I would especially like to thank Robert Savage for reading the entire manuscript with such careful and helpful attention. My greatest thanks are due to György Markus, who has been the mentor of this project since its inception. As my sternest critic, he has constantly challenged me to rethink and reformulate my ideas. Finally, I should like to express my appreciation for the interest and sup- port that Peter Uwe Hohendahl has brought to my work. I am delighted that both Art and Enlightenment and The Total Work of Art in European Modernism have been published in series of which he is the editor. The Total Work of Art in European Modernism Introduction This is the fi rst book in English to treat the total work of art as a key concept in aesthetic modernism, and, as far as I can see, the fi rst to attempt an overview of the theory and history of the total work in European art since the French Revolu- tion. It is therefore both an ambitious and necessarily preliminary undertaking, in which my guiding concern has been to demonstrate the signifi cance of the idea of the total work for modern art and politics. The term “total work of art” trans- lates the German Gesamtkunstwerk, coined by Wagner in the wake of the 1848 revolutions. If the total work of art is usually understood as the intention to reunite the arts into the one integrated work, it is tied from the beginning to the desire to recover and renew the public function of art. The synthesis of the arts in the service of social and cultural regeneration was a particularly German dream, which made Wagner and Nietzsche the other center of aesthetic modernism, alongside Baude- laire and Mallarmé. A spectrum of questions is posed by the idea of the total work of art, which run counter to key assumptions of aesthetic modernism, such as the separation and autonomy of the arts. Separation foregrounds and privileges the in- ternal logic of the individual arts and fails to recognize the countervailing quest for synthesis, especially in avant-garde theory and practice. Autonomy foregrounds the emancipation of the arts from social controls and fails to recognize the coun- tervailing quest for a new social role for art, especially in avant-garde theory and practice. The total work, moreover, cuts across the neat equation of avant-gardism 2 The Total Work of Art in European Modernism with progress and deconstructs the familiar left-right divide between revolution and reaction, or between the modern and the antimodern. Situated at the interface between art, religion, and politics, the total work of art invites us to rethink the re- lationship between art and religion, and art and politics, in European modernism. The European reception of Wagner’s music dramas and ideas from the 1880s onward, led by the French symbolists, was the catalyst that drove the quest for synthesis of the arts and the utopian dreams of cultural and political regeneration. Standing at the center of what Heidegger called the long nineteenth century, Wag- ner united in his theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk the two main conceptions of the total work of art that emerged out of the shock of the French Revolution and the corresponding consciousness of a new historical epoch. I therefore argue for twin lineages of the total work, a French revolutionary and a German aesthetic, which interrelate across the whole epoch of European modernism, culminating in the aes- thetic and political radicalism of the avant-garde movements in response to the cri- sis of autonomous art and the accelerating political crisis of European societies from the 1890s on.
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