234 music, philosophy, and modernity
of reaction of the sense organs presupposes not just the absence of a
binding style, but even more the disintegration of metaphysics. In the
total work of art metaphysics does not just want to express itself but also
to be manufactured’ (ibid.: 102 ). Wagner therefore seeks to establish a
version of metaphysics 2 .Sodoes Adorno’s critique invalidate the claims
I have made about music as a form of metaphysics 2? His appraisal of
the music depends on the contrast between Wagner’s technique, which
he sees in terms of ‘the absence of real motivic construction in favour
of an, as it were, associative process’ (ibid.: 29 ), and the technique of
developing variation. In both music and language the contrast between
a world which has a ground that enables coherent meaningful artic-
ulation, and one where meaning consists in mere arbitrary relations
between discrete particulars, is the basis of the evaluation. In Wagner,
‘Music is asked to do nothing less than take back the historical ten-
dency of language, which is towards signification, in favour of expres-
sion’ (ibid.: 95 ). There is, however, something very questionable about
this argument.
The music which allows us to understand what other means of artic-
ulation do not is supposed by Adorno to be a ‘language distant from
meaning’, ‘pure sound’. Its value derives from its lack of what he terms
‘intention’, which has the sense of ‘being directed towards’ objects, thus
of ‘reference’. Other passages from Adorno’s work confirm that this is
how he conceives of music. Music ‘is’ (Adorno 2001 : 221 )–or‘aims to
be’ (Adorno 1997 : 16 , 252 )–an‘intentionless language’. Significantly,
he also says of H ̈olderlin that his poetic language is ‘intentionless’ (ibid.:
11 , 479 ), thus making a link between the very idea of art and the idea
of resistance to discursive meaning. In his essay on Val ́ery he says that
‘The longing for the meaning to disappear in the verse has its home
in music, which only knows intentions as ones which pass away’ (ibid.:
169 ). In contrast, ‘The intentional moment is specific to Wagnerian
expression: the motif mediates a congealed meaning as a sign’ (ibid.:
13 , 42 ). It should be apparent that these ideas do not square with the
criticism of Wagner as allegorist.
Adorno loads the dice by seeing allegory as Benjamin does, such that
‘everything can mean everything’. The idea depends on the notion of
a previous state of language where this is supposedly not the case, and
this relies on a theological conception of a stable relationship between
word and world. However, once one accepts the Saussurean (and early-
Romantic) idea of the arbitrariness of the signifier, which gains its
sense by its relations to other signifiers, not by anything intrinsic to