Art and the Concrete: A Postonian Critique of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk
2024



Richard Wagner (1813-1883), a German dramatist, theorist, and composer, remains as influential as he is controversial. The staggering and seductive beauty of his masterpieces, namely the Ring cycle, Tristan and Isolde, and The Flying Dutchman, has left an indelible mark on the history and form of opera, drama, and music. Wagner’s theoretical contributions and their manifestations in composition have introduced generations of artists to the gesamtkunstwerk, a Wagnerian term for “The great United Artwork” (Art of Future 10). The gesamtkunstwerk denotes the synthesis or totality of all arts, the ultimate unified form in which all artistic media are amalgamated into a single whole. Wagner asserts that this total “Artwork, the great united utterance” (“Art and Revolution” 14) is not only the ideal medium of art but is the only true art, and thus, the art we all must strive to effect. For Wagner, the gesamtkunstwerk cannot exist under the conditions of capitalism where “Art has no longer the will to live” (4), but must instead be made manifest through a return to nature and a renunciation of commerce. Much like his operas, Wagner’s philosophy has a romantic allure. This allure, however, is quickly revealed to be a romantic and ill-considered critique of the arts under the abstract domination of capitalism. To elucidate the falsity of Wagner’s critique and clarify the totalitarian nature of the gesamtkunstwerk, this essay will take a Postonian lens, applying the landmark essay, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism: Notes on the German Reaction to ‘Holocaust’” to Wagner’s artistic philosophies. This will assert that Wagner’s notion of the gesamtkunstwerk manifests as a foreshortened critique of the arts under capitalism through a rejection of abstraction and a fetishization of the natural and the concrete. To do so, it will first expound Postone’s essay before exegeting Wagner’s relationship with abstraction and concretion in his philosophical and artistic work, allowing the identification of the fragility, falsehood, and inherent fascism of the gesamtkunstwerk. 

Moishe Postone’s “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism” uses Marxist analysis to explain the particular relationship between anti-Semitism and German National Socialism. Rather than viewing anti-Semitism as an instance of general racism or as an unfortunate byproduct of a movement otherwise focused on labour relations, Postone grafts the dual character of the commodity form onto the lived relations of 20th-century German society. Drawing from Marx’s theory of the commodity fetish, Postone reminds us that the commodity is a bifurcated entity, comprised of use-value and exchange-value. Thus, the commodity appears “‘doubled’ as money (the manifest form of [exchange]-value) and the commodity (the manifest form of use-value)” (109). In this bifurcation, the individual comes to perceive the commodity solely as its material embodiment, as its use-value, materiality, and “thingly nature” (109). The commodity appears as purely physical and concrete, rather than as a social form comprised of both a concrete physical object of use and an abstract exchange-value: money. Because one cannot point to an exchange-value as one can a use-value, money becomes associated with abstraction, where “capitalist social relationships appear to find their expression only in the abstract dimension” (109). Consequently, commodities appear as pure use-value–material, concrete, even natural or ontologically human–as if they could be separated from capitalist domination. This enables foreshortened critiques of capitalism, wherein all blame is placed on the abstract dimensions of the economic structure while the concrete objectification remains uncritiqued. These foreshortened critiques seek to overcome abstract exchange-value, never understanding that this would require the historical overcoming of the “antinomy itself as well as each of its terms” (112). Though it is impossible to defeat capitalist abstraction without also defeating the concrete manifestations of capital, National Socialism and other such romantic anti-capitalist movements “hypostatize the concrete” (109) and operate from a pure loathing of the abstract. Postone’s essay argues that European Jewry became the biologization of this abstraction, therein tracing the origins of Nazi anti-Semitism. 

Despite Wagner’s vocal and rampant loathing for the Jewish people, including the explicit use of anti-Semitic stereotypes and tropes in his characters and plots, this essay will not be focusing on the aspects of Postone’s work that relate to Judaism in particular. Instead, it will focus on how the Wagnerian notion of the gesamtkunstwerk, in its unification and “liberation” of all arts, becomes a “mocking fulfillment” (“Culture Industry” 97) of the attack on abstraction and fetishization of the natural that Postone identifies.

In his two texts concerning the gesamtkunstwerk, “Art and Revolution” and The Artwork of the Future, Wagner asserts his belief that true art exists in the realm of the natural. Just as man springs forth from the natural world in which he is contained, so too does art emerge from the natural man. Just as nature will organically produce natural beings, so too will man organically produce his natural artwork. Art-making is here a question not of culture but of nature. It is an ontological characteristic of the human being to produce creative works: “As Man stands to Nature, so stands Art to Man” (Art of Future 2). Thus, man’s artistic capacities lie not in any cultural evolutions or inventions, but in his inherent faculties – namely, his sensory faculties. Man’s capacity for sense becomes the basis of his ability to create art. Artmaking is thus rendered ontological. It becomes something innate, something inherent to the human being, something essential to human nature. Importantly, the artmaking man must use his senses to appreciate the natural, “... man must reap the highest joy from the world of sense before he can mould therefrom the implements of his art; for from the world of sense alone, can he derive so much as the impulse to artistic creation” (“Art and Revolution” 7-8). Therefore artmaking is not only intrinsic to internal human nature, but stems from external environmental nature, from the organic world in which we live and create. This dictates that art comes from concrete sense-perceptions, from the tangible experience of being a sensing individual in a physical world. The artwork is thus framed as the product of a natural human faculty to represent the natural organic world through concrete sensory capacities. 

Much like his close companion Nietzsche, Wagner’s philosophies of art are deeply intertwined with the Athenian State and Greco-Roman culture. The traditionalist ancient tragedy is, for Wagner, the supreme manifestation of true art, and fulfills his criteria for the gesamtkunstwerk. In it, multiple artistic media are combined, such as music, drama, and dance, but perhaps more importantly, Wagner believes the Grecian tragedy to be produced in alignment with the natural artistic faculty of man, as outlined above. “The free Greek, who set himself upon the pinnacle of Nature, could procreate Art from every joy in manhood” (“Art and Revolution” 7). By his appreciation of nature, his channeling it into artistic form through his organic sensory capacities, the Greek tragicist becomes the eternal artist, the universal, natural creative producer. In producing this total work in the form of tragedy, all arts are unified into a single work. Importantly, however, it is not just the arts that become total in Wagner’s gesamtkunstwerk. The artist becomes “one with the Universal, the Universal summed up in him” (6). As the artist unifies the arts, he himself is unified with nature, with his fellow man, and with the artwork. Nature and man are reconciled. Art and nature are one. The artist becomes universal as his work becomes universal as the universe is ecstatically united with all it contains, “like one of those thousand fibres which form the plant’s united life… to bring forth the one lovely flower which shed its fragrant breath upon eternity. This flower was the highest work of Art, its scent the spirit of Greece…” (6). This quotation not only exemplifies the unification under the gesamtkunstwerk but also reiterates the intense essentialism and biologization Wagner’s philosophy of art entails. It is no coincidence that a flower, an entity that appears so automatic to nature, is his metaphor for the unified artwork. For Wagner, art is ontologically natural, it is a biological process of concrete unification of the arts, nature, and man. This is also why Wagner believes that the gesamtkunswerk is the only true art, because it is the only art to unite with all of nature. Any artwork that does not unify the arts fails to meet the title of true art in Wagner’s eyes. If it is not a gesamtkunstwerk, the artwork does not spring from man’s ontological character, does not exist in unity with nature, and therefore does not meet the Wagnerian definition of art. In other words, the artwork must be in total harmony and totality with concrete nature, both in the environmental sense and in that which is internal to the human. 

Art made under capitalism is inherently mediated by its commodity form. It is, for better or worse, an industry. The artwork enters the marketplace, is bought, sold, ticketed. The artist is, if successful, compensated for his creative labour. A painting, play, or any other artwork, takes on the doubled commodity form of use-value–the concrete work, the work one can point to– and exchange-value–the cost to own or view the work, the monetary value assigned to it. As the artist needs money to reproduce his physical self, to simply stay alive, art has ceased to be the expression of concrete nature. Instead, art is made under the conditions of capitalism and is made for the purpose of financial gain. Even the best-intentioned artist cannot create outside the economic relations in which he is entangled. Modern art, for Wagner, is the expression of capitalism, not of nature, it has sold “her soul and body to a far worse mistress: Commerce” (Art of Future 9). In another evocation of Greco-Roman culture, Wagner states that art has been taken under the wing of Mercury, the god of merchants and commerce, and that modern art is no more than his handmaiden, working subserviently for him (9). Under capitalism, the arts have been severed from nature, just as they are severed from one another, and as they are severed from the ontological characteristics and impulses of man. Instead, they become expressions of capitalism, of abstract domination, and of social relations under the mediation of wages. Contemporary art is thus not art at all, but rather “artistic Handicraft” (12), while true “natural” art “has no longer the will to live” (“Art and Revolution” 4). 

It is important here to note that this critique of art explicitly condemns the abstract just as it deifies the natural and creates an intrinsic connection between concretion and true art. For Wagner, any work that stems from anything other than concrete sense perceptions through natural faculties is not art. Capitalism not only halts true unified art because art becomes dependent on money but because capitalism depends on abstraction. As already detailed, sense perception–a form of concrete thought–is what art is created from. Thus, any other mode of thought cannot be the stuff of art. Any mode of thought other than that stemming from the physical world around us is, of course, abstract. Once thought “abstracts from actuality” (Art of Future 6) Wagner no longer considers that thought to be knowledge, but rather fancy or fantasy. “The truly known is nothing other than the actual physical phenomenon, become by thought the vivid presentation of an object. Thought is arbitrary so long as it cannot picture to itself the physical present and that which has passed away from sense,” (6). If all artistic knowledge must be grounded in concrete, natural sense-perception, abstract thought becomes entirely incompatible with artmaking. The abstract is thus rendered the very thing to enslave the arts, capturing them from their free, natural, concrete, united state, shackling them to abstraction and severing them from one another. 

Before applying the Postonian bifurcation of the commodity to the gesamtkunstwerk, it must be stated that Wagner is–simply–wrong. Art has always been something that is bought and sold. It has always been produced for, and often by, the ruling class. It has always been an aspect of high culture, under capitalism and every other economic system. John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, a deeply influential text in the disciplines of art history and theory, explicitly states that “The art of any period tends to serve the ideological interests of the ruling class” (86). Both in production and in content, artworks have long celebrated wealth and industry, they have long been a vocation that people survive off of. It has always been the rulers of any economic model that commission statues in their likeness, plays to celebrate their rule, lyric poems to spread their beliefs. Art and economy have plainly always been intertwined, that is not unique to capitalist abstract domination. Art has always been a product of wealth, and often a celebration of it. The difference between art under capitalism and art in Wagner’s beloved Greco-Roman empire is that “wealth was then a symbol of a fixed social or divine order” (90). This speaks to Wagner’s flawed perception of what is concretely natural and what is capitalist abstraction. Greco-Roman art was also a form of wealth worship, but wealth was then ideologically aligned with a sense of natural order, of godly designation. In other words, wealth was then more concrete and ontological, appearing as nature, whereas under capitalism, money is an abstract form, wealth is abstracted.

 Wagner’s inability to understand the longstanding relationship between art and commerce, however, prompts him to conceive of art as incompatible with capitalism and abstraction. His gesamtkunstwerk hinges upon the notion of concrete, natural artmaking, dictating that any art produced from abstract thought or in the name of the abstract capitalist wage relation cannot be art. When examining Postone’s use of the “double-character” (Postone 107) of Marx’s commodity form in relation to Wagner’s critique of the atomized arts under capitalism, one may note an eerie compatibility between the hypostatization critiqued by Postone and the concrete/abstract theoretical lines in Wagner. For Postone, a foreshortened critique of capitalism, like that of the National Socialists, perceives the suffering and unfreedom of life under capitalism as a problem of abstract exchange-value, or money. The concrete use-value, the “thingly” (109) nature of the commodity, its physical and material properties are not considered problematic, though they are, of course, just as fundamental to the character of the commodity as their abstract counterparts. This prompts a demonization of the abstract, a foreshortened critique in which abstraction is the “root of all evil” (109). For Nazis, this manifested in a biologization of abstraction onto the Jewish people. For Wagner, this manifests in a polemic against the current state of the arts, and a lamenting plea to return the arts to concrete nature. His real insight into the state of the artwork as a commodity and the state of the artist as dependant on wages becomes buried under a “one-sided attack on the abstract” (112) and an obsession with a naturalized artmaking impulse. What could have been a thoughtful critique of the arts under capitalism’s “ruling property arrangements is diverted into a fury… obscured by the substitution of biological concepts for social ones” (In Search of Wagner 18). Wagner begs to unify the arts, to totalize them as the gesamtkunstwerk, to return creative impulses to their natural state, thus reuniting man with man, nature with art, art with man – to unify the whole universe. Instead, Wagner’s gesamtkunstwerk manifests as a foreshortened critique of the arts under capitalism through a rejection of abstraction and a fetishization of the natural and the concrete. 

In both his philosophy and his operas, Wagner “assiduously emphasizes its use-value, stressing that this is authentic reality, that it is ‘no imitation’” (90). His plots are those of nature, Volk, and ancient myth. In other words, his plots are that which he believes to be natural, concrete, and ontological. From philosophy through form and all the way to content, Wagner’s gesamtkunstwerk is desperate for a concrete art form outside abstraction, just as National Socialism was desperate for a concrete nation outside abstract wealth and the abstracted Jewish people. His operas are not, however, a return to a pre-capitalist state of true nature, but are instead a regression to antiquated aesthetics while maintaining the same economic and social relations. Walter Benjamin’s Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility clarifies how a return to Greco-Roman art, or any aesthetic of the past, would be nothing more than a change in expression, it would do nothing to change the relations under which the work is produced (41). For Benjamin, fascism too plays out on the aesthetic plain, it uses the aesthetics of the past to justify an ideology that makes no sense in the present. Wagner’s gesamtkunstwerk becomes a change in the mode of expression, not a change in the actual economic conditions. It can, therefore, never be a well-considered critique of capitalism, as it formally lends itself to fascism: “Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by fascism” (42, emphasis in the original). Wagner’s desire to liberate art from capitalism is not an act of progress but is instead a display of regress. His philosophy and his operas reflect this regressive tendency, “And in fact the atavistic moments in Wagner are always ones in which productive forces are set free” (In Search of Wagner 62). It is always in regression, never in progress, that Wagner’s characters are liberated from capitalist domination. It is always in regression, never in progress, that the gesamtkunstwerk is conceived of as liberatory.

It is no coincidence that the gesamtkunstwerk is the total artwork. To be total is to totalize, to be totalitarian. The desire for sameness is deeply rooted in the fascist agenda. The masses of Hitler youth–endless Aryan near-duplicates of one another, all in identical uniforms–exemplify this fact. Fascism wants all difference to become same. Wagner wants all different arts to become same. The individual is forced to dissolve into the collective, just as the arts are forced to dissolve into the gesamtkunstwerk. This is reflected in both form and content, as Adorno states in In Search of Wagner, “The basic idea is that of totality: the Ring attempts, without much ado, nothing less than the encapsulation of the world process as a whole. Wagner [has an] impatience towards everything isolated, everything limited and existing simply for itself” (101). The entirety of Wagner’s art and philosophy hinges upon a totalization that is inseparable from the logics of fascism. Regression and totalization play out on the aesthetic plane. Wagner and Riefenstahl have more in common than just having Hitler as a shared admirer. Everything becomes one, becomes the same, becomes total.

The gesamtkunstwerk is thus a foreshortened and ultimately fascistically-inclined critique of the arts under capitalism. Wagner fetishizes a natural mode of artmaking, characterizes artmaking as ontological or biological, and believes that the gesamtkunstwerk will reunite man with nature. Under capitalism, however, Wagner sees the arts as abstracted, both through their mediation by the wage relation, and by their being grounded in non-sensory thought. Art is not art under capitalism, and only Wagner’s gesamtkunstwerk can liberate art from the shackles of abstraction and capitalism. In other words, Wagner fetishizes the natural and concrete, while vehemently rejecting the abstract. He does precisely what Postone identifies the National Socialist as doing. His desire to liberate the arts from commerce is not only neglectful towards the entire pre-capitalist history of art, but is also intrinsically foreshortened and dependent upon a logic of hypostatization and naturalization. He seeks a change in expression, in aesthetics, while maintaining the same economic relations. This is precisely what fascism does. Thus, his totalizing gesamtkunstwerk not only totalizes the arts, but lends itself to a fascist politic, and anticipates itself as the art form of the fascist. 


Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. In Search of Wagner. Translated by Rodney Livingstone, British Library Publisher, 1981. Translated from Versuch über Wagner, 1952.

Adorno, Theodore W, and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Dialectic of Enlightenment, edited by Gunzelin  Schmid Nom, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2002, pp. 94–136. 

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W Jennings et al., translated by Edmund Jephcott et al., The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2008, pp. 1–19. 

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Chapter 5, Penguin Books, 1972, pp. [83-113].

Postone, Moishe. “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism: Notes on the German Reaction to ‘Holocaust.’” New German Critique, no. 19, 1980, pp. 97–115. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/487974. Accessed 15 Dec. 2024.

Wagner, Richard. ​ Art and Revolution. ​ Translated by William Ashton Ellis, Blackmask Online, 2002. ​
Wagner, Richard. The Artwork of the Future. Translated by Emma Warner, The Wagner Journal, 2013.