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Furious Feedback and the Revolutionary Ode to Noise

2022; Duke University Press; Volume: 18; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/17432197-9964745

1751-7435

Geoffrey Winthrop‐Young,

Philosophy, Science, and History

The following remarks are designed to accompany Friedrich Kittler's essay “Wagner's Furious Host” (”Wagners Wildes Heer”) that is part of this issue of Cultural Politics. The goal is not to offer an overview or address all the aspects of Kittler's analysis. Rather, I want to focus on an obsession that runs through the essay much like the Furious Host invoked by Kittler's title storms through German woods at night. This obsession is the revolution—not just any revolution, but the great, final revolution, the ultimate revolution that renders all future revolutions obsolete, a revolution such as the one that plays out at the end of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung, one that burns worlds, kills its own children, and puts all gods to rest.Given that we are dealing with Wagner, this is an obvious topic that places Kittler in crowded and illustrious company. After all, one of the mainstays of Wagner criticism is the understanding that the Ring is, somehow, Das Kapital with more trombones and breastplates. From watery origin to fiery ending, the plot depicts a developmental sequence best explained by the increasingly self-destructive contradictions of capitalism. Kittler did not think highly of this approach. He was inclined to side with André Glucksmann's summary dismissal that “all the Marxist interpretations of Wagner are insipid” (Glucksmann 1980: 260). Theodor W. Adorno's analysis is, at its best, not quite the worst. Unsurprisingly, Adorno comes under fire in the “Furious Host” essay, both for belittling Wotan and for turning the Ring into a philosophical melodrama about the failed emancipation of Man from Nature (see Adorno 1981: 134, 137).Kittler's objections cannot be explained by his political conservatism alone. Nor are they rearguard actions of bygone theory wars that pitted so-called poststructuralism against Critical Theory, or Freiburg against Frankfurt. Rather, they are based on the assumption that what happens in the Ring—the revolutionary annihilation engineered by Wotan—goes way beyond the destruction of Nibelheim's factories and the bourgeois mansions of Valhalla. All that can still be contained within a Marxist paradigm. What sets apart Wotan's revolution is that it digs a great deal deeper than politics and economics. For Kittler, it enacts nothing less than an uprising of music's technological and physiological base against the many discursive, communicative, and epistemological superstructures that enable politics, economics, and their associated interpretative practices in the first place. There is an eerie variant of technologically weaponized situationism at work in Kittler; at rock (or Rhine) bottom his interpretation is itself engineering a revolution against meaning, including whatever meaning is ascribed to revolutions.Again, not much of this is new. In the perceptive words of Wagner's greatest critic and admirer, “Wagner believed in the Revolution as much as ever a Frenchman believed in it” (Nietzsche 1997: 619). Correcting Nietzsche is risky business, but at first glance it may be more accurate to say that Wagner came to believe in the aesthetic replacement of the Revolution as much as a German ever did. In other words and names, Wagner appears to be operating alongside Friedrich Schiller and Ludwig van Beethoven. To guarantee its purity, to protect it from the inevitable contaminations and corruptions of practice, to have it change hearts and minds rather than ballots and wallets, the revolution must be moved from French streets to German stages, from the unsavory ruckus of the Bastille to the rarefied chique of Bayreuth.But this transfer of the revolution from politics to aesthetics does not capture what Kittler has in mind—more precisely, what he thinks Wagner and his media technology – enhanced Gesamtkunstwerk or total work of art have in mind.1 In the case of Wagner (and Nietzsche sensed this, he just didn't have Kittler around to put it into words), the aesthetic replacement is always already a technological implosion of sensory data. Ultimately, Wagner came to believe in the revolutionary implications of technology as much as any German media theorist ever did. To reduce the “Furious Host” essay to its most rudimentary roadmap, the movement is from street to stage to sound—with the implication that sound, radically changed, will feed back into the streets. It is anything but a coincidence that the lynchpin of Kittler's essay is Wagner's 1846 Dresden performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony complete with Schiller's Ode to Joy. What better object to demonstrate the implosion of idealism and democracy into feedback and uncontrollable system oscillations than the greatest showpiece of cosmic fraternization in the history of music? The operative word, the Kitterian mantra, is not sound but noise—more precisely, Rauschen (more of which below), which just like its counterpart Geist for over thirty years wandered through Kittler's texts much like Wotan, the alleged leader of the Wild Hunt, roams the world. Talking about a revolution, to quote Tracy Chapman, may sound like a whisper, but the revolution itself sounds more like a whole lot of noise that is as destructive as it is liberating.The Wagnerian leitmotif storming through Kittler's essay is the Wild Hunt. According to legend—or rather according to the 1902 edition of Meyers Grosses Konversations-Lexikon quoted by Kittler—it isWhile the superimposition of storm, sound, and war is a crucial part of his essay, Kittler objects to the term “warlord” (Lenker des Krieges) because it appears to imply a regular military unit equipped with a traditional top-down command structure. Since in Kittler's martial reading the entire Ring is about the breakdown of traditional military lines of command, this cannot stand. “As is known,” he notes with a Deleuzian inflection, “the Germanic tribes were a nomadic war machine. They did not march into battle under the command of a supreme warlord. Their courage and fury came from secret associations (Geheimbünde), that is to say, from initiation rituals.” As is known to Kittler readers, you need to be on guard when he starts off a sentence with “as is known” (bekanntlich). It may indeed refer to established facts and truisms in no further need of elaboration, but at times it is a rhetorical sleight of hand, the equivalent of slipping something into the reader's drink.In fact, there is so much wrong here it is difficult to find the right place to start. First, there is no direct evidence to back up the claim that the legend of the Wild Hunt as it is presented here “reaches far back into antiquity.” Second, there is no evidence of any long-term association with Wotan—or, north of the Danish border, with Odin. This is a tale concocted (rather than collected) by Jacob Grimm, whose Teutonic Mythology of 1835 gave birth to the whole fabrication (see Hutton 2017: 126). Grimm's reasons are known. Faced with an embarrassing dearth of surviving mythological material in the (southern) Germanic tradition when compared to the embarrassment of mythological riches preserved in northern Germanic or Old Norse sources, he chose to upgrade and mobilize German folktales and local superstitions and treat them as cognates of the core elements of Norse mythology. In doing so, to quote Ronald Hutton's very clear summary, Grimm “relied heavily on the two assumptions, so influential is his century and after . . . : that variant forms of a popular belief recorded in historic times must be fragments of an original, unified, archaic myth; and that folklore recorded in modern times can be assumed to represent remnants of prehistoric ritual and belief, and be used to reconstruct that” (126; see also Lecouteux 2011: 202 – 8). The result was an early instance of the so-called Germanic continuity hypothesis. Boiled down to its essence, this hypothesis states that there is a continuity of belief and a continuity of related social practices that can be traced back from modern Germany into Germanic prehistory. Once established and systematized (not to mention fortified with generous helpings of conscripted Scandinavian material), it can be called upon to form the backbone of a continuous Germanic identity. Which is precisely what Grimm's dedicated reader Wagner did.Third, the reference to “secret associations” and “initiation rituals.” Readers familiar with the more suspect paths taken by German studies in the first decades of the twentieth century can pinpoint the principal source for this claim. While not the first to articulate it, the most influential statement was Kultische Geheimbünde der Germanen (“Cultic Secret Associations of the Germanic Tribes”), the 1934 monograph by Otto Höfler (1901 – 87), at various stages of his career—lecturer in Uppsala, professor in Munich, professor in Vienna, and during his Munich sojourn—was associated with the SS Ahnenerbe (“Ancestral Heritage”), which was Heinrich Himmler's research institution tasked with providing textual, literary, ethnological, archeological and ultimately biological evidence for Aryan superiority through history. In his reading, Höfler resolutely opposed the more traditional understanding of the Wild Hunt as an attempt to explain natural phenomena, such as stormy nights in German forests. Rather, he saw it as a memory of prehistoric cultic practices that involved young men being initiated into ecstatic warrior cults with strong shamanic elements that straddled the boundary between life and death (further see Höfler). In a controversial move that met with the approval of those who ran the Ahnenerbe, Höfler went even further by insisting that these exclusively male associations or Männerbünde had throughout history been constitutive for the formation of Germanic societies. Here, the Germanic continuity hypothesis crossed over into a Germanic autonomy hypothesis. The custom, institution, and practice of riding along with Wotan implied that Germans could constitute themselves as a collective on their own—it was unnecessary to import and suffer the presence of foreign gods, customs, and institutions.2To the befuddlement of unsuspecting readers (and constructing his own military continuity hypothesis, as it were), Kittler has Wotan's Wild Hunt morph into Lützow's Wilde Jagd, a famous volunteer cavalry unit during the so-called German Wars of Liberation against Napoleon. The unit's exploits were immortalized in patriotic poetry by one of its members, Carl Theodor Körner (1791 – 1813); Körner's poems were set to music by Carl Maria von Weber; and Weber's compositions were transcribed by the young Wagner, as noted in his autobiography (see Wagner 1983: 29). This martial chain of fighting, writing, composing, and copying allows Kittler to link the new military Wild Hunt against Napoleon back to the old mythoecstatic Wild Hunt of Wotan; at the same time, it enables him to refer it forward to Siegfried, who is characterized as a “preprogrammed partisan.” This is all rather confusing. The problem is that Kittler dealt with military matters in greater detail in his essay “Operation Valhalla” (see Kittler 2021: 110 – 16); here, they appear in very compressed form and in need of some elaboration.3As Kittler would have it, the crushing defeat of the once-formidable Prussian army at the hands of Napoleon in 1806 prompted a set of deep-reaching reforms. The French troops were not just blessed with better military organization and more competent commanding officers up to and including the warlord from Corsica, they came equipped with a mixture of revolutionary and patriotic fervor that may have characterized the American insurgency thirty years earlier on the other side of the Atlantic but was new to Europe. It did not exist in the old conscript or mercenary armies, in which robot soldiers were either forced or paid to fight. Prussia, therefore, was faced with a quandary: how could it generate its version of French fervor without undergoing the chaos of the French Revolution? This is, of course, the question we started out with: How can Wotan's territory east of the Rhine replace the political revolution that occurred on the other side with an acceptable, maybe even superior alternative? The answer, Kittler argues, involved a total transformation of the military-cultural complex with the goal of achieving new, more effective synergies between artillery and affect.One key ingredient is to turn soldiers into subjects affectively linked to a larger phantasm called the nation. In other words, mobilize the entirety of the new middle-class education practices geared toward engineering humans capable of independent thought and processing meaning, and at the same time teach them to transfer the affect generated in and around the new nuclear family structure onto the greater social units. Nobody understands this better than Wagner's Wotan, who in act 2, scene 2 of Die Walküre subjects Brünnhilde to a convoluted history lesson that amounts to a great aria of modern military reform: So the enemy would find uswell prepared for battle.I asked you to bring me heroes;those we'd otherwise bulliedinto subjection with laws,men whose freedom of actionwe would have curbed,bound to us,made blindly obedientthrough the treacherous bondsof spurious contracts.All of you were to goad theminto attack and battle,to kindle their strengthfor bitter war . . . (Wagner 2018: 225)Out with “bullied” conscripts “made blindly obedient,” out with those rendered ineffective by blind obedience, in with new soldiers kindled with patriotic strength and uncurbed freedom.The latter requires what in the military domain will come to be called Auftragstaktik or mission tactics. Subordinate leaders are commanded to be in command: entrusted with a considerable degree of freedom, they are ordered to carry out tactical orders on their own, which requires that they are trained to think on their own, develop their own initiative, plan tactical details on their own, and react to changing circumstances without relying on constant orders from above. Frederick the Great's machine soldiers (who have other machine soldiers at their backs programmed to kill them if they refuse to fight) are transformed into modern martial subjects. (In the late 1980s Kittler would have pointed out that “modern martial” is a naive tautology.) Reflexive subjectivity, therefore, is the ability to perform under the paradoxical command of a free will, be it on the battlefield or elsewhere. According to Kittler, this is precisely what Wotan has in mind when envisioning the paradoxical Siegfried: How do I create the free manwhom I've never protected,whose defiant independencemakes him closest to me?How do I make another beingwho is no longer like me,who does what he wants,yet only what I want?(Wagner 2018: 229)Siegfried is the ultimate preprogrammed mission tactics partisan. Like so many Wagner heroes, he is so good at what he does because he does not fully understand what he is doing. His ignorance is the exaggerated illustration of the modern citizen-soldier's duty to dismiss constraining directives and undue supervision in the face of changing circumstances in order to operate more effectively. Soldiers should decide on their own what they can do precisely because they are subjects, that is, preprogrammed operators who think that they are thinking on their own. Siegfried is merely the extreme case, the ultimate embodiment of a Wagnerian universe in which the only truly reliable form of innocence is ignorance. By contrast, those who know, especially those who know too much, are always already guilty, and the onus is on them to remove themselves and their knowledge lest it contaminate the world they leave behind.Among many other things, then, Wotan is informing his daughter that the two of them are now operating within a Wagner opera that is taking great liberties with its source material. The end will not come when (as per the Eddas) good gods and evil giants line up on either side of Vígríðr to face off against each other in Waterloo fashion. It will be the result of an irregular partisan operation that occurs from within. No true revolution asks for outside assistance. The system breaks best from within.Rheingold, the first words unleashed on the audience. German or English, ridicule and parody come easy:We will address the programmatic role of semisensical words like Weigalaweia that straddle and negotiate the transition from noise to meaning and back in the concluding section. At this point, we are concerned with alliterations. Unlike Greek and Romance languages, Germanic languages tend to fix the accent on the root or first syllable, which explains the traditional preference for alliterative verse (German Stabreim), especially in older Germanic texts (e.g., Old Norse, Old High German, Old English). Ironically, Wagner's modern German is less equipped for alliterative verse than many of its siblings, which in no small part is due to the growing presence of unaccented Germanic verb prefixes like be-, er-. ent-, ver-, and zer-. Had Wagner been Icelandic, Swedish, or even English, the Ring may have been less prone to pillorying parodies.Next to the many alliterations, there is a lot of incest. The two, of course, are rather similar: alliteration is an incest of language, while incest, in turn, is a form of procreative alliteration. Be it by sound or sex, same returns to same to produce more of the same. Siegfried is the son of a brother and a sister who then proceeds to sleep with his aunt; in fact, it takes him one and a half operas before he meets (to quote Anna Russell's immortal description) a woman who is not his aunt. At first glance, the incest of the Ring has a certain vaudeville quality to it not found in its main source, the Volsunga Saga. The formidable Signy is unhappily married to King Siggeir. He is responsible for the death of her father Volsung and her ten brothers, with the exception of her twin Sigmund, who is hiding out in the woods. She has two sons with Siggeir whom she sends to her brother so that he can train them to kill her husband, that is, their own father. They fail the initial test, and Signy has Sigmund dispose of them. To avoid further failures, she adopts a disguise and sleeps with her unsuspecting brother; the result of the incest, Sinfjotli, passes the obligatory test and together with his father brings about the death of the husband of his aunt who also happens to be his mother. The Volsunga Saga is an extended chronicle of Odin's greatest breeding venture. Incest combined with infanticide is the means by which the treacherous and self-interested god ensures the necessary martial purity and prowess of his Valhalla recruits. In the course of the Ring, however, Wotan loses interest in breeding warriors for Valhalla battles and banquets; incest will be used to create the preprogrammed partisan Siegfried to bring down the world from within.From within is the operative phrase. It allows us to extend the sequence that links same to same from sound and sex into technology. The supreme escalation of alliteration and incest is feedback, arguably the Holy (Destructive) Grail of Kittler's essay. It is at the core of the long quote from Wagner's autobiography that describes the feedback-infested performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Wagner sings or rather bellows Schiller's Ode to Joy, but as a result of positive feedback involving conductor and choir, the former's voice, singing of embracing millions, is itself embraced and submerged by the many voices of the latter: “I think I really got everyone into quite a state,” Wagner recalls, “and I didn't stop until my own voice, which I previously had been able to hear through all the others, was no longer audible, and I could feel myself drowning in a warm sea of sound” (Wagner 1983: 332).For Kittler, the crucial point is not only the feedback as such but the fact that it affects, of all musical compositions possible, the canonized showpiece of freedom and democracy. It is not necessary to wait for Thomas Mann's anti-Beethoven Adrian Leverkühn to “take back” the Ninth Symphony (Mann 1997: 501). Message and meaning, and with it freedom and brotherhood, had already imploded in Dresden in 1846: This, then, is what has become of the phantasm of the “embraced millions,” that is, of democracy, as once dreamt up by the French Revolution and its honorary citizens Schiller and Beethoven. Evidently, the basic difference between democratic phantasms and real mass media effects is that the embraced millions were referred to as “brothers” and therefore as sons of a “dear father above the starry canopy,” whereas the ecstatic feedback system between Wagner and his choir or orchestra simply eliminates all transcendental references to heavens, fathers or parliaments. It is nothing but elementary air (Kittler 2022: 289–90).This recalls one of the very few “political” passages in Kittler's Gramophone, Film, Typewriter: If “control,” or, as engineers say, negative feedback, is the key to power in this century, then fighting that power requires positive feedback. Create endless feedback loops until VHF or stereo, tape deck or scrambler, the whole array of word war army equipment produces wild oscillations. . . . Play to the powers that be their own melody. (Kittler 1999: 110; cf. Kittler 2021: 118)The real fight against power, then, takes its cue from a musico-technological aside in Marx's A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: “Every sphere of German society must be shown as the partie honteuse of German society: these petrified relations must be forced to dance by singing their own tune to them!” (Marx 2008: 45; emphasis added). To cut to the chase, positive feedback here appears as the only true revolutionary mechanism because it uses systemic properties to disrupt the system without any reference to an outside. An output signal from a given device returns to the same device, effectively rendering it incapable of producing any further meaningful output. Alliteration leads to meaningless garbling; incest leads to deformation and infertility; feedback leads to noise. In political terms (and here Kittler is conjuring up the Wild French Hunt of his early poststructuralist days), feedback effectively annihilates all present and possible future instantiations of the great Lacanian bugaboo known as the transcendental signifier. The only true revolution is the one that prevents power from simulating its own disappearance by cunningly metamorphosing into something unrecognizable.Schiller's “loving father” blissfully residing “above the starry canopy”—who in Kittler's symmetrical account is the opposite of the far less loving Allfather Wotan raging across the land in noisy thunderclouds—is gone, along with all possible future fathers. Whatever promesse de bonheur (or rather, promesse d'extase) Beethoven's revolutionary Ode to Joy may contain, it does so because it can be turned into an Ode to Noise. Wagner, of course, didn't need to fall back on Beethoven; he set out to compose his own paean to noise. It turned out to be a bit louder, a bit more convoluted and, clocking in at around fourteen hours, a bit longer. It has to be because the revolution it stages is supposed to be more durable.There is a Beckett-like quality to Wagner.4 No other composer stages so many instances of failed face-to-face communication full of misunderstandings, ignorance, or utter obliviousness. Time and again, the characters on stage are not singing to or with, but rather at (if not against) each other. Audiences witness the exchange of copious discharges of voiced breath that frequently leads nowhere (cf. Kittler 1994). To attend a Wagner performance is at times a bit like sitting through a lengthy Turing test: are the people up there really humans, maybe even certified subjects, or are they machines pretending to be human by pumping air through wired assemblages of lips, lungs, and larynxes? A question or suspicion that is all the more ironic because so many of Wagner's characters are driven by a single-minded erotic or religious rage for communion. But that is precisely what precludes successful communication. Take one of Kittler's favorite scenes, the first interaction between Brünnhilde and Siegfried. Freshly awakened, she launches into a voluble history lesson about their respective pasts. The lesson, however, is lost on Siegfried: But what you tell me in song,I'm amazed to say I don't grasp.I cannot relate to thingsthat aren't there,if all I can seeAnd feel is you!—(Wagner 2018: 523)She had him at hello; to his (in Kittler's precise differentiation) “purely musical, purely physiological and purely sexual ears [that] cancel logos itself,” the rest is just so much sensuous noise.The greater irony is that the opening of the Ring stages nothing less than the emergence of the very conditions for understanding. Once again,David Trippett (2020: 289) notes that while a large array of heterogeneous movements running all the way from symbolism to structuralism were engaged in severing “the word from any reference it had in an external, physical world,” which in the understanding of some would serve to restore to poetry and words what they had lost to music, “Wagner was moving in the opposite direction with the Ring poem, seeking a language whose phonemes were ever more firmly referentialized, resulting in an ever-greater hedging-in of meaning through sound.” This is what makes the Rheingold prelude so important to Kittler. The sonic spectacle begins—or rather, gradually arises from the orchestra pit—with the “infinite swelling” of an E-flat major triad that is dissolved “in the first horn melody as if it were not a matter of musical harmony but of demonstrating the physical overtone series . . . Wagner's musico-physiological dream at the outset of the tetralogy sounds like a historical transition from intervals to frequencies, from a logic to a physics of sound” (Kittler 1999: 24). Once again, recursive self-absorption, the system returning to itself, is precisely what enables it to refer to an outside.Then, the words. Alliteration here is not incestual system sabotage but rather an additional increase that will result in an emergent property called “meaning.” As Wagner explained, he refashioned Old German heilawac (related to modern German Weihwasser or holy water) into the more singable weiawaga and then conjured up the roots of the verbs wogen (to surge), wiegen (to rock or nurse a baby), wallen (to seethe) and wellen (to billow). The outcome of this alliterative sampling is a song fashioned in analogy to the German nursery rhyme Eia popeia, which dips and dives in and out of meaning just like the singing maidens dip and dive in and out of the waters of the Rhine.This, of course, is more than the creation of a mere world: it is the creation of Kittler's habilitation thesis Discourse Networks, the first half of which traces the rise the new eighteenth-century language acquisition and child-rearing practices that revolved around mothers as the principal source and conveyor of language. As infant ears were locked to mothers’ mouths, they came to experience language in the shape of minimal signifieds, that is, lovingly voiced syllables brimming with the promise of a meaning that naturally emerged when syllables merged into meaningful words. In more technical terms, a great feedback cycle along gender lines was established: mothers—and by extension, other female muses including Brünnhilde—provided the input, and the circuits of a male-dominated meaning industry, processed the output and fed it back into the cultural techniques of education.Kittler, then, hears the Rheingold prelude as a piece of early sound engineering that simulates a seamless evolution from nature to culture by unfolding in almost quasi-mathematical fashion its own acoustic properties. At the same time he hears the song of the Rhine maidens as a performance of semantic engineering that showcases a no less seamless transition from words to meaning. Meaning is indeed hedged in, as Trippett writes, not packed on. The two synchronized beginnings add up to an ontological emergence of meaning and music from matter and noise. Any revolutionary attempt to undo all this has to be located at the very same level.Which brings us to the very end, the Wagnerian set piece that Kittler discusses more than any other: Götterdämmerung, act 3, scene 2. Brünnhilde, horse in tow, is about to ascend and set fire to Siegfried's funeral pyre. There are only two things left to do. First, she sings at great length about Siegfried to her horse, though there is little evidence that the horse displays any more comprehension of Brünnhilde than Siegfried did at their first meeting. Second, she informs her god, father, and former jailor Wotan, who has withdrawn into a final lockdown in Valhalla, that the great incineration is at hand. To communicate the final tidings, she employs his messenger ravens: All, all,I know all things,—All freedom has now become mine.Also I hearYour ravens’ whispers;This instant I send them both homeWith their news, awaited in fear.—Rest, rest, you god!(Wagner 2018: 713)At this point, it is crucial to reference the German original because Kittler's reading hinges on the very special verb rauschen, here rendered as “whispers” (other translations use “rustle”). Rauschen is not just any word; it is so intriguingly hospitable that Kittler effectively squeezes the entire Ring into it. An onomatopoetically charged verb frequently deployed in German poetry, rauschen refers to the sounds made by rustling hedges, windswept treetops, rushing water, and breaking waves. In a remarkable semantic extension, however, German scientists opted to use the noun Rauschen to denote a disturbance variable with a broad frequency spectrum—what in English is called “static” or “noise.” The noun Rausch, in turn, translates as frenzy, intoxication, rapture or even ecstasy, that is, everything experienced by Wotan’ s ghost riders and those listening to Wagner's musical evocation of their wild hunt. On this level, Kittler's interpretation makes perfect (German) sense: The ravens’ final message is indeed nothing but noise or Rauschen because it has no traditional message content. Kittler's (2022: 295)parting message is no less final than Brünnhilde's: The message Brünnhilde sends her dying god and father no longer has anything to do with the functions of thought and memory, that is, with articulated speech. To hear the ravens’ rustle is to receive the message. Under high-tech conditions that no longer allow for any gods, emission and transmission, message and noise coincide, Wagner's Ring ends in the very noise with which it began.And that is a glimpse of the true revolution. The revolution is the undoing and unleashing of the techniques and technologies that were harnessed, domesticated, and (in Wotan's words) “bullied into subjection” in order to create an order that will never escape its compromised origin. The revolution will create a future that will be saved from its past by losing the very foundations that enable any kind of recollection in the shape of “thought and memory.” The true revolutionary therefore is someone like Siegfried whose ignorance of what he is doing anticipates that innocence of a new world that does not know what came before it.Of course it doesn't work that way. The final stage directions (arguably some of the most important and unrealistic in the history of opera) note that when the pyre starts burning “men and women surge to the foreground as far as possible” (Wagner 2018: 719). In other words, they are trying to escape into the auditorium. The very last direction reads, “When the gods are completely engulfed by the flames, the curtain falls” (721). It does not specify whether the curtain hides everything or whether it falls between the burning gods and the human players who have now become part of the audience.