Horses are survivors / of the age of heroes.
Adorno, In Search of Wagner (Verso, 2005), epigraph.
But Wagner’s music knows more about this than do his words… The feverish passages in Act III of Tristan contain that black, abrupt, jagged music which instead of undermining the vision unmasks it. Music, the most magical of all the arts, learns how to break the spell it casts over the characters. When Tristan curses love, this is more than the impotent sacrifice offered up by rapture to asceticism. It is the rebellion—futile though it may be—of the music against the iron laws that rule it, and only in its total determination by those laws can it regain the power of self-determination. It is not for nothing that those phrases in the Tristan score which follow the words ‘that potion so dread’ stand on the threshold of modern music in whose first canonic work, Schoenberg’s F# minor quartet, we find the words, ‘Take love from me, give me your happiness!” They mean love and happiness are false in the world in which we live, and that the whole power of love has passed over into its antithesis. Anyone able to snatch such gold from the deafening surge of the Wagnerian Orchestra, would be rewarded by its altered sound, for it would grant him that solace which for all its rapture and phantasmagoria, it consistently refuses. By voicing the fears voicing of helpless people, it could signal help for helpless, however feebly and distortedly. In doing so it would renew the promise contained in the age-old protest of music: the promise of a life without fear.
Ibid., 144–45.
Adorno’s scathing Versuch über Wagner begins with an enigmatic epigraph, printed beneath a comparably incongruous dedication to his wife, Gretel; the epigraph reads: “Horses are survivors/of the age of heroes.” The essay concludes with a similarly mysterious and tender claim that if a listener can steal gold from the phantasmagoric rapture of the Wagnerian orchestra, then they might discover the orchestra’s transformed sound gives voice to “the fears of helpless people” and in turn reasserts music’s primordial protest: Ohne Angst Leben (“life without fear”). My principal aim is this introduction is simply to clarify these final three words of the Wagner essay—Ohne Angst Leben—and in doing so shed some light on the equine beginning.Although the epigraph was not included in the original 1939 Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung essay, “Fragmente über Wagner,” it first appeared in a 1937 essay of aphorisms about music called “Motifs,” which can be found in Quasi una fantasia. In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse cites the last words of the Wagner essay, translated as “to live without anxiety,” as encapsulating what he calls the Great Refusal: “the protest against unnecessary repression, the struggle for the ultimate form of freedom.” (149–150).
Very briefly, and so somewhat abstractly, here’s the connection between the ending and the epigraph. The idea is perhaps easiest to approach by way of the virtuosic finale of the “Color” chapter, where Adorno concludes that the crowning paradox of the many paradoxes that comprise “the existence of art in high capitalism” is that art critiques reification via its reification. We are not yet in a position to analyze the particulars of the “Color” finale, but to put its concluding claim in general terms: only by virtue of the social process of music’s rationalization and objectification as autonomous art alienated from social function does music have the capacity to give voice to the victims of the mastery and mutilation of nature under capitalism. And insofar as capitalist society, as Adorno often remarks elsewhere, is a form of life dominated by the “reality principle” of anxious “self-preservation,” where everything in nature is reduced to “something desired, something socially useful, something by which human beings may profit,” the giving of voice to suppressed nature gives form to a “pictureless picture” of utopia, a glimpse of happiness beyond capitalist self-preservation in negative form—in short, a conceptless concept of a life without fear.Aesthetics, e.g., 14–15 and 27. “Some Ideas on the Sociology of Music,” 11.What does this have to do with horses? Brünnhilde’s horse, Grane, who Brünnhilde rides into the fire at end of the heroic age, insisting it should repress its fear and “neigh with joy as it leaps into the flames,”In Search of Wagner, 135.is a memory of nature in its mutilated form, the same sort of trace a thinking listener might wrest from the third act of Tristan upon entering the hidden abode of Wagnerian musical production.For a different approach to the epigraph in the Wagner essay, see Peter E. Gordon, “Wounded Modernism: Adorno on Wagner.” The different isms in our respective titles index the differences in approach, which I hope to further clarify in expansions of this preliminary work.The horse helps us overcome our “muteness,” as it once did, since it knows what we don’t: that we too belong to the world of victims from which we flee. In “Motifs,” Adorno writes, “For the horse knows more about heroes than they do themselves. Horses are the survivors from the age of heroes: they appear as if the very first words had been addressed to them, so that those who have been made victims might struggle free from the condition of muteness. It is the only animal for which we feel no disgust, and hence the only one we should not eat, if we do not wish to regress to a pre-linguistic age.” It is said that the last Berlin Philharmonic performance in April 1945 concluded with this scene with this scene from Götterdämmerung, after which boys from the Hitler Youth handed out cyanide.
A more concrete rendering of the trajectory from the beginning to the end of the Wagner essay lies in an extended, musically specific account of the paradox sketched above. When it comes to music, the term “autonomy” points to a number of different social processes with different histories, histories which Adorno often only gestures toward with a word or two. First off, “autonomy” refers to the liberation of music not only from the archaic social functions of dance and ritual but also from the medieval social functions of court and church. Autonomy, then, means the bourgeoisification of music, which entailed, among many other developments, the emergence of a public, mediated by various industries, which consumed musical works at concert halls. By the later nineteenth century, a German who could afford the price of a ticket might find himself seated in a darkened hall listening to a wordless composition that was meant to be an event in its own right, demanding listeners suspend all other activities for an extended period of practical quiescence and focus not just on the sensual stimuli but on grasping those stimuli as a spiritual whole at a distance from empirical immediacy. The spiritual object of music in this case is functionless or useless, in the sense that it is not for worshipping, for dancing, or even for setting a convivial mood, but meant to be appreciated for its own sake. This is precisely how Kant describes liking for beauty, as opposed to liking for agreeableness or liking for goodness. When we judge an object as beautiful, according to Kant, we are saying that we perceive in the object formal purposiveness without external purpose, and Kant calls this formal purposiveness without external purpose “disinterested pleasure,” that is, a pleasure that is not directed at the practical aspects of self-preservation and the mastery of nature.
And here we return to an aspect of the paradox of art under “high capitalism,” as Adorno sees it. By virtue of its isolation from social function and its nonidentity with sensuous, empirical reality, the artwork adopts a polemical stance not only against capitalism, insofar as accumulation requires that products of labor are salable and therefore objects of utility, but also against the whole of enlightenment, rationalization, and the mastery of nature. As Adorno states:
For in empirical reality—that is to say, the world in which we live as active, “practical” people, pursue goals, use other people to achieve goals, and commit God knows what other atrocities—this world is indeed ruled by the reality principle, the principle that one behaves in such a way as to master this reality as comprehensively as possible. And the behavior of art is fundamentally a negation of this reality principle—fundamentally in the sense that it constitutes a sphere whose ambition is essentially to be the semblance and the representation of a total area that is certainly independent from the reality principle, and hence an area one cannot “get something out of” in the same practical sense as with most things in this world. And when people invoke the liberating quality that inheres in art… it is far more probably because art promises through its mere existence to exempt us from the omnipotence of that same reality principle, the omnipotence of a mechanism of self-preservation at the expense of everything else that exists in the world. This is, of course, closely connected to the fact that great art… could be said to stand with victims… and that what calls from works of art is in fact always the voice of the victim, and that there is no art which cannot truly do this
Adorno, Aesthetics, 48.
So on the one hand, the bourgeois artwork, by virtue its functionlessness, protests against capitalism and the reality principle’s drive toward the mastery of nature, which in Adorno’s thinking are both historically and socially coterminous and not.“The Odyssey is already Robinsonade.” Dialectic of Enlightenment, 48.And on the other hand, the cost of this protest is that music cannot take on a positive role in changing the world, that it cannot satisfy immediate desire. All of which is to say that the artwork gives form to what Adorno calls the antimony between the moral and the aesthetic, to the conflict between the aim to do good in the world and the intolerability of the world as it is.In Search of Wagner, 120–121.
Let me reformulate this paradox of art in slightly less deflating terms, since Adorno emphasizes that it is productive in the sense of transforming ideology into truth and is therefore not bereft of desire exactly. The artwork’s isolation from society is, as Adorno writes, a function of the “social structure” of “the bourgeois consciousness of freedom” and the capitalist division of labor—even in extreme cases of “totally unproductive,” radically autonomous music-making, like that of Adorno’s beloved Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik, where concert tickets were “furnished to the audience gratis.”Aesthetic Theory, 225–26; “On the Social Situation of Music,” 420.Which is to say that an artwork’s autonomy character is a sort of fetish, the semblance of freedom from a society that is its origin and that constitutes a “nexus of guilt” to which “nothing stands external.”Aesthetic Theory, 227.As Adorno writes in his unfinished swan-song, Aesthetic Theory, “The absolute artwork converges with the absolute commodity.Aesthetic Theory, 21. Stewart Martin is principally responsible for drawing attention to this particular sentence of Aesthetic Theory. See Martin, “The Absolute Artwork Meets the Absolute Commodity.””And it is precisely in this convergence that the reversal of ideology into truth occurs. Insofar as the absolute artwork is functionless, it shape-shifts into the absolute commodity qua pure “exchange-value” divorced from use; and this shapeshifting, Adorno writes, reveals a truth about the commodity form in its twofold reality, that it “pretends to exist for-another [but is ironically] something merely for-itself: It exists for those who hold power.”Aesthetic Theory, 236.So it is precisely by virtue of its uselessness that the artwork makes manifest the truth of how “stunted” use-value is in capitalism, not only insofar as it is a vanishing moment of blind accumulation but also because the whole of nature (including us) is pressed into “the service of usefulness to the exploiters.”“Theses on Need.”
This late account in Aesthetic Theory is clearly prefigured in the finale of Wagner‘s “Color” chapter and its elaboration in the “Phantasmagoria,” “Music Drama,” and “Myth” chapters. The former introduces the idea that (1) the commodity form has reshaped the artwork, insofar as artistic satisfaction requires the concealment of the signs of the work that produces it, and that (2) only through the distortions of the commodity form does the artwork have the ability to speak the truth of the commodity form’s subterfuge—its effacing of the signs of work that produce it for the sake of obscuring the exploitative class structure of commodity-producing labor. According to Adorno, Wagner attempts “to escape the market requirements of the commodity known as opera” and is thereby driven “more deeply into the commodity.”In Search Wagner, 71.Oddly enough, only the word “escape” possibly suggests a crime, since, as we just learned, no artwork is innocent of commodity fetishism, meaning no artwork is any more guilty of fetishism than any other product in the “universally socially mediated world.”Aesthetic Theory, 227.
Indeed, Adorno strongly praises Wagner’s orchestration technique, which “represents the victory of reification in instrumental practice,” as Wagner’s principal musical innovation, inasmuch as it equally signals “victory over conventional schemes of every kind.”In Search of Wagner, 71, 60. All of which is to say that Wagner’s reified instrumentation practice, in which sound is made “absolute” and the “traces of its production have been removed,” is of course no crime, since the paradox of music under high capitalism is that it critiques reification precisely by means of this reification. Adorno is certainly not suggesting that Wagner should have spurned his own innovations and anachronistically embraced a Mozartian style, for as Adorno indicates, the principle that Wagner actualizes in his orchestration was already present in Mozart’s doublings at the unison and octave.Ibid., 70–1.
As becomes clearer in the succeeding chapters, Wagner’s musical crime is neither resistance to market pressures nor the convergence of his art with the commodity, but that he tries to escape the commodity form in ways that redouble its deceptions—he has lost his “good conscience” in the bourgeois fetishization of art but responds by fetishizing art anew. Wagner’s rebellion, Adorno emphasizes, is a “bad infinity” that lacks any “authentic dialectical interaction”Ibid., e.g., 47 and 40.—it is a betrayal of the dream of happiness contained in the rebellion. By attempting to heroically dereify his art, Wagner only intensifies the spell of reification. His music thus anticipates the illusory character of the commodities produced by the culture industry in the twentieth century. Indeed, Adorno sees Wagner’s phantasmagoric Zukunftsmusik as the matrix in which the commodity art of the future grows: “the magic work of art dreams its complete antithesis, the mechanical work of art.”Ibid., 98.
Of course, it’s not just the neutralization of music’s protest against the commodity form that is the issue, but rather how this neutralization, which seems to undergird all Wagner’s musical procedures as much as his words, instantiates the core dynamic of a meretricious romantic anti-capitalism which bespeaks the bourgeois revolution and Nazism as well as a pessimism more “dubious” than Schopenhauer’s.Ibid., 132.At the core of this dynamic is something akin to the dialectic of enlightenment described by Adorno and Horkheimer in their Odysseus excursus: “self-preservation destroys that very thing which is to be preserved” at the moment humans “cut themselves off from the consciousness of themselves as nature” and thereby “[enthrone] the means as the end, which in late capitalism is taking on the character of overt madness.”Dialectic of Enlightenment, 42–3. That excursus ends with a reflection on the phrase “not for long” from this sentence from Book XXII of the Odyssey, describing the hanging of maidservants for harlotry: “For a little while their feet kicked out, but not for long.” That analysis, both in form and content, bears certain similarities to the ending of the Wagner essay, which I bring up to further highlight how much of the Wagner essay material anticipates Adorno’s later work.It’s clear enough in the first chapter of the Wagner essay that in the whole of Wagner’s life and art, from the moment of Rienzi to that of the Ring, rebellion takes the form of purifying “integration” rather than of class conflict, and defines itself in natural or biological terms rather than historical or social ones, such that it ultimately serves terroristic domination rather than the freedom it purports to. But the transformation of this initial formulation at the conclusion of the essay is more obscure, even as the themes of false identity, false reconciliation, and bad infinity return throughout. In the analysis of the Ring in the concluding chapters, Adorno reframes the betrayal immanent to Wagnerian resistance, writing, “The dominion over nature and subjugation to nature are one and the same.”Ibid., 126.He seems to in part mean that the rebel’s wish to exit “the nexus of social guilt” for the “asocial innocence” of nature is a further act of domination over nature, insofar as it presents nature as “unmutilated” and therefore further represses the oppression, fear, and pain whose source it is trying to escape, replacing “compassion” with an exculpating but freedomless “total determinism.”Ibid., 120 and 135.
We have come quite a way, as far as most go, but still not far enough, because we have not yet arrived at an account of the dialectic of rationality and nature that is most applicable to the conclusion of the Wagner essay and most central to Adorno’s aesthetic theory. And in order to do so, we need to move beyond an “external” and “reproductive” relation to music and move into the hidden abode of musical production, specifically, the internal development of the music’s objective technical aspects. Indeed, Adorno strongly rejects Kant’s “castrated hedonism” and “aesthetic subjectivism,” where pleasure is disinterested and beauty is defined as a mere effect on the subject. Instead he embraces a more Hegelian “objectivism,” which takes as its starting point Hegel’s definition of beauty (“the sensuous appearance of the idea”) and locates musical meaning in the immanent dynamics of the musical material itself.On the rejection of Kant’s aesthetics, see both Aesthetic Theory, 11 and his lectures on aesthetics.As Adorno points out, this materialism is historically appropriate, since “the absurd situation” in which art increasingly finds itself, “[searching] for meaning in its materials where it says something without knowing what to say,” expresses “the current state of the world with absolute purity.”Aesthetics, 72.
As music in Europe isolates itself from society, it develops an internal history of its own that replicates the social totality and its core dynamics. In other words, we find in music, as Jameson puts it with his usual charm, “a tiny history of inventions and machines” redolent of “the larger world of business and industry”—that is, a history of the development of instruments and techniques for the sake of the control of the musical material, the control of nature.Jameson, Marxism and Form, 14. Jameson does not elaborate the dialectic of enlightenment aspect of my account. That can be found, for instance, in Adorno, Aesthetics, 51–52 and Adorno, “Some Ideas on the Sociology of Music.”According to Adorno, Wagner’s relation to the mastery of the musical material is both progressive and regressive. A conductor concerned with the effect of his music on an increasingly inattentive public, Wagner, we are told, constructed his music around the static repetition of allegorical leitmotivs—discrete theme-like units akin to “advertising slogans.” As a result, he “softened up” the “musical logic” embedded in the material of his epoch and regressed to a gesticulating, pre-linguistic mimesis without entirely sloughing off quasi-linguistic elements, “rather the way agitators substitute linguistic gestures for the discursive exposition of their thoughts.”In Search of Wagner, 24.In contrast to the motivic development Beethoven’s sonatas and symphonies, Adorno writes, the stasis of Wagner’s leitmotiv technique “revokes [time],” creating “a state of immutability that refutes all history by confronting it with the silence of nature” and thereby consecrating “everything that is insufferable in the actual social reality from which [Wagner’s] work seeks to flee.”Ibid., 30. But insofar as the regressive element of the musical material raised the problem of generating the required allegorical meaning of the leitmotivs through the “developing sequence” technique, it also placed demands on Wagner to develop a progressive harmonic practice. In brief, Wagner’s harmonies sometimes, particularly in Tristan, break free of the conventional diatonic system based on the bourgeois symmetry of dissonance and consonance or tension and resolution, anticipating Schoenberg’s free atonality and 12- tone technique.
The function of this antinomy of progress and regression within the Wagner essay is not as obvious as it may seem. Adorno judges the quality and truth of artworks produced after Beethoven, when the idea of human autonomy hardened into a defense of heteronomous class society, by virtue of how precisely they give form to capitalism’s irreconcilable antagonisms—the actual and the possible, the particular and the universal, subject and object. And in much of the “Motiv” and “Sonority” chapters, one even gets the impression that the antinomic character of Wagner’s art speaks the truth of its historical moment. At the same time, Adorno emphasizes that Wagner’s music fails music when it endeavors to identify regressive elements with progress. This is perhaps most evident in the case of the Gesamtkunstwerk, where the rationalization of the musical material is curtailed by the regressive nature of the progressive formal aspirations. Like Horkheimer, Adorno often speaks of the irrational and mythic character of capitalist rationality—the blind, aimless way capitalist society reproduces itself, the way it makes the satisfaction of needs impossible by virtue of it how satisfies needs, and so on. But in the rejection of rationalization for nature, Adorno primarily sees reaction. As he writes in his 1932 essay “On the Social Situation of Music,” for example, “Class interests bring rationalization to a halt as soon as it threatens to turn against class conditions themselves.”“On the Social Situation of Music,” 392.At the end of the “Music Drama” chapter, Adorno makes what seems like a fairly straightforward political analogy along these lines, saying that in the production of the Gesamtkunstwerk Wagner fails “to enlist the rational control of the labor process in the cause of freedom.”In Search of Wagner, 99. In other words, by trying to singlehandedly unite poetry, theatre, and music into a seamless total artwork through an act of genius that repudiates specialization, Wagner produces a false whole that comes closest to the rationalization of technique only in his specialty of music. But even in the case of music, the exigencies of the Gesamtkunstwerk fracture it into the orchestra and Sprechgesang and precipitate a new division of labor “unprecedented in the history of music” (98). “A valid Gesamtkunstwerk, purged of its false identity,” Adorno writes to hammer-home the political analogy, “would have required a collective of specialist planners” (99). In short, Wagner’s progressive attempt to individually will into being an “irrational” and “undivided primordial world” (97), which paradoxically produces an even more rationalized division of labor than the one from which it sought to flee, stands opposed to a communist program of bringing reason into the world through planning.
As I suggested above, however, the political implications of Adorno’s critique go beyond this fairly straightforward analogy. The rationalization of the musical material, as Adorno writes in his more comprehensive theorizing about art, gives voice to suppressed, mutilated nature, thereby impeding the sacrifice of particularity to universality in the dialectic of enlightenment. According to Adorno, art regresses into a sort of mythology, into “something blind and unilluminated,” when it fails to liberate itself from the heteronomy of nature, when it remains dependent on “some material that stands outside the artistic process as something… unpenetrated, and which exercises a power over humans that they perceive… as foreign, as other.”Aesthetics, 51.But when art liberates itself from nature through the technical domination of its materials, it gives voice to everything that falls victim to the process of rationalization, not only the “natural world mangled by humans” but also “the infinite abilities of humans themselves, such as all the abilities that were once mimetic abilities and which we perceive in ourselves only in scattered, fragmented state.” As Adorno writes, “one could say that art is an attempt to do justice to all that falls victim to this ongoing concept of control over nature, to give nature its due, albeit now for only a symbolic portion—namely the portion of memory, the memory of the suppressed, of that which becomes victim, and also the memory of all those internal human powers which are destroyed by this process of progressive human rationalization.”Ibid., 47–8. Wagner’s music fails music, then, to the extent that it tries to sever progress from the rationalization of its materials and thus victimizes the victims further. As the well-known critique of “blood and soil” anti-capitalism goes, trying to escape from the mutilating rationalization of capital by locating the progressive in the regressive only releases more mutilating rationalization. Giving voice to what rationalization represses requires progressive rationalization. Just as music critiques reification via reification, it critiques rationalization via rationalization.
Let’s now return to the end of the Wagner essay, which is not exactly the dramatic change of course it is usually said to be. Indeed, once one is exposed to Adorno’s theory of music’s inner dialectic of enlightenment, it becomes clear just how many set-ups Adorno has planted.To note only a few examples, principally from the “Color” chapter of Adorno’s Wagner: “And this remains true even when it gives expression to suffering” (71); ““But by the same token, the social isolation of the work of art from its own production is also the measure of tis immanent progress, that of its mastery of its own artistic material” (73); “The music leaves us in no doubt about this” (126). Despite Wagner’s deceptions and failures, his music, by virtue of the fact that the introduction of the leitmotiv technique put further demands on him to rationally control the musical material, gives voice to mutilated nature, to the free play of dissonance outlawed by the tonal system. And in doing so, this music seems to provide both a negative image of and some justification for the political program that Adorno offers as an alternative to bourgeois nihilism—a form of sociality where nature need not be enlisted into usefulness for the sake of profit and a form of rationality that does justice to the otherness within it. In his Lectures on Negative Dialectics, Adorno says “the mental reflex” of “the mastery of nature” is “the principle of identity, by which I mean the intrinsic aspiration of all mind to turn every alterity that is introduced to it… into something like itself and in this way to draw it into its own sphere of influence.”Lectures on Negative Dialectics, 9. And as is well known, Adorno, in the final part of Negative Dialectics, says, “Auschwitz confirmed the philosopheme of pure identity as death.”Negative Dialectics, 362. In the last pages of the Wagner essay, Adorno seems to be saying that if one can listen with a certain kind of effort, then one might hear in the terror-filled life of self-preservation that leads to the gas chambers over and over again, the real possibility of a conflicting life without fear—in short, the sensual appearance of the idea and “what cannot be pinned down” within it.“If you recall the arguments against basing theoretical aesthetics on natural beauty… you will not be able to shake off the feeling that a motif is at work here which is familiar to those who are acquainted with Hegel’s philosophy: the motif that the elusive, that which has not taken on fixed form, which has not been objectified in a certain sense in order to be reconciled with the living subject again after passing through its objectification—that, I mean to say, anything elusive or ephemeral means very little to this philosophy…. On the one hand, of course, this holds great power against the sentimentalism of a mere romantic mood, but… on the other hand, this fundamental stance against…the powerless in Hegel’s philosophy also sees the growth of that tendency which ultimately drew this philosophy as a whole too much onto the side of prevailing conditions. But with regard to art, or the question of beauty in general, it is undoubtedly the case that this very aspect of the elusive, the not-quite-graspable, that which cannot be pinned down, is its vital principle…. The progress made by Hegel… comes at thee price of an aspect one could almost call inartistic, a surplus of materiality which sometimes give rise to the suspicion that, for all its greatness, this philosophy of art has not, in fact, fully accessed the work of art itself, which consists precisely in this ephemeral element” (Adorno, Aesthetics, 23–4). Speaking of Hegel, this might be the time to clarify a possible link between the epigraph and the ending. Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics, which Adorno praises highly in his own aesthetics lectures, includes the following passage on the “Heroic Age” of Odysseus (who of course is also central to Dialectic of Enlightenment): “The means of satisfaction have not been degraded to a purely external matter; we see their living origin itself and the living consciousness of the value which man puts on them because in them he has things not dead or killed by custom, but his own closest productions” (Vol. 1, 260–61). This strikes me as another plausible source for the horse epigraph, insofar as it brings use-value into the equation—the horse is not just a survivor and therefore a memory of the mutilation of nature but also of the mutilation of the human relation to production and usefulness.
To say art gives voice to mutilated nature is not to say that it is a “nature reserve” for our horses to roam. Adorno calls such a vision a “satanic parody of the establishment of art as a special area strictly separated from empirical reality.” In his explanation of what he means, Adorno speaks of a gifted “young Englishman” he “befriended” who wept regardless of what Adorno played for him at the piano. Adorno cites this kind of weeping, severed from the specificity of the musical material, as an example of the way music has become a receptacle for the affects capitalism represses—the crying, he says, has nothing to do with the particular material that triggers it, and so in this case, one is not so much giving voice to mutilated nature as further dominating it, sequestering it away from real life. Adorno describes this sort of engagement with music, where listening is severed from its material aspect, as indicative of the separation of work from leisure and the assignment of art to the latter. Music’s transformation into “something that absolves us from effort,” is also its transformation into a leisure activity for the sake of the reproduction of labor power.Aesthetics, 183-7.
Now it is perhaps a bit clearer why Adorno distinguishes aesthetic experience from both commodity consumption and immediately political music and also how he can claim a dialectical asceticism for art even as he rejects Wagner’s ascetic politics.In Search of Wagner, 69. According to Adorno, consumption of music, by its very structure, offers “culinary” pleasure, the attempt to extract enjoyment worthy of the money one pays for it, but not what Adorno calls “immanent recognition of the matter itself.”Aesthetics, 189. Such recognition is more giving than taking, Adorno says. Meanwhile, Adorno writes, “The agitatory value and therewith the political correctness of proletarian communal music is beyond question and only utopian idealistic thinking could demand in its place music internally suited to the function of the proletariat, but incomprehensible to [them].” Yet when such “music retreats form the front of direct action, where it grows reflective and establishes itself as an artistic form,” it fails to express the antinomies that would best serve proletarian practice, since its material has not been adequately rationalized.“On the Social Situation of Music.” At this point one might be able to tell a history of jazz that Adorno was not able to tell in the 1930s, one based on the development of the material that unfolds in a way that is tantalizingly similar to European art music, beginning with the polyphony of New Orleans jazz and culminating with abstract and dissonant free jazz. The similarity in trajectories of material development poses interesting questions for the historical materialists about the artification and its retroactive force. In this materialist criterion above all does Adorno see the possibility of a music that can think both the end of art and its beginning: “If classless society promises the end of art by sublating the tension between the actual and the possible, then at the same time it also promises the beginning of art, the useless [das Unnütze], whose intuition tends towards reconciliation with nature because it is no longer in the service of usefulness [Nutzen] to the exploiters.”
