pro and contra wagner 233arbitrarily mean something else. This possibility passes a devastating
but just judgement on the profane world: it is characterised as a world
in which details are not strictly that important’ (Benjamin 1980 :i/ 1 ,
350 ). Adorno adopts the idea for his assessment of Wagner:
He is an allegorist, not least in the fact that everything can mean every-
thing. Figures and symbols play into each other, until Sachs becomes
Mark and the Grail becomes the Nibelung treasure, the Nibelungs the
Wibelungs. Only from the extreme of a kind of flight from thought, of
a renunciation of everything unambiguous, of a negation of everything
individually formed, and not at all just in music, is the idea of music
drama unlocked.
(Adorno 1997 : 13 , 96 )Allegory points for Adorno and Benjamin to the loss of a world of
immanent meanings. For the Benjamin of the 1920 s this loss has pre-
dominantly theological connotations. However, in the 1930 s, he also
comes to see the historical development of the commodity world in
the same terms, and this brings him closer to Adorno. The value of
things becomes based on arbitrary relations between them and other
things, and this affects people’s very mode of perception of the objec-
tive world, with consequences that are apparent in fascism. Adorno’s
approach is less theological, but still relies on the contrast between the
idea of a language that is essentially connected to things, and one which
is merely arbitrary, which is affected by or which echoes the commodity
structure. In the early 1930 s Adorno says, for instance, that ‘Without an
integrated/closed (‘geschlossene’) society there is no objective, thus no
truly comprehensible language’ (ibid.: 1 , 367 ). His related claim about
Wagner is that he lacks a ‘form-apriori of inner organisation’ and so
employs ‘a principle of addition of disparate procedures with no gaps’.
This is ‘still an external principle, but appears as if it were collectively
binding’ (ibid.: 13 , 97 ).
For Adorno, Wagner tries to present a totality in art which would
articulate the truth of the real social totality, but produces something
which is actually a symptom of the nature of that totality. This is the
source of Wagner’s relationship to mythology, which mystifies the real
roots of the alienation occasioned by money portrayed in theRing.
TheRingis, like the modern world it seeks to present, merely assem-
bled from arbitrary relationships, rather than developed on the basis
of a substantial principle of the kind present in developing variation:
‘The adding together of the totality of the music drama from all forms