Supremacy, Debasement, and Symbolic Investiture in Lawrence Kramer's Modern ‘Opera’: a Review of Lawrence Kramer, Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2004), ISBN 0 520 24173 8 (hb)

Abstract

Lawrence Kramer’s latest book offers a reading of ‘Opera’ and modernity in terms of a crisis of ‘symbolic investiture’. This latter concept, developed out of the work of Pierre Bourdieu and its application by Eric Santer, is defined by Kramer as ‘the process by which social institutions grasp the inner being of the individual in its essence, and in so doing both define and confer that essence […] Although often in need of later supplements to sustain its power, this process is dramatic and discontinuous, enacted in defining moments that resonate through the rest of the person’s life and “fate”’. This symbolic investiture ‘can come in moments of rapture as well as terror, enfranchisement as well as confinement, even if each of these terms always harbors traces (if not more) of its opposite’ (5). Kramer tackles his project through interpreting examples of revolt against the concept of the norm (which, as Foucault famously argued, is based on disciplinary regulations specific to modernity) in figures of variance, deviance, and difference. He is especially interested in how ‘normative’ subjectivity can be revitalized by borrowing from the ‘abnorm’; how the supreme, as a hypertrophied form of the norm, has a secret kinship with the debased. This is a topic powerfully expressed in the exceptional states of supremacy and debasement characteristic of ‘Opera’. It is tied to Opera’s emergence at the historical moment of the ascendancy of bourgeois subjectivity and its norms, regulations, and desires.