Polyphonous Gestures: Wagnerian Modernism from Mallarmé to Stravinsky

Abstract

In his Oper una Drama, Wagner conceives of gestures as the synthetic link between drama, music, and literature, thus formulating a theory of gesture that influences theater and performance as well as literature. The recurring importance of gestures has led me to read Wagner and a number of other writers, such as Nietzsche and Mallarme, in terms of what I call the aesthet ics of gesture. Gestures, unlike language, tend to mobilize the turbulent expressivity of the human body and thus complicate the processes through which expressivity enters the circulation of meaning; between mute matter and meaning, gestures occupy a hybrid domain of incoherent expressivity, repetitive movement, and uprooted affect. It is precisely this expressive potential of gestures that turns them into a promising category for both a reform of art and a critique of language. Starting with the synthetic function of gesture in Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, I will outline a tradition of the aes thetics of gesture that progresses through Nietzsche and Mallarme to Adorno's critique of gesture in Stravinsky, focussing on the mutual interrelation of music, language, and the theater.11 will discuss this history of gestural art and theorize its relation to the critique of language, theater reform, and primi tivism.

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