Article from Margin Notes 1
If I prefer to write about music that is because I have all the mediating categories at my disposal.
—Adorno, Toward a New Manifesto
Social reflection on aesthetics habitually neglects the concept of productive force[s].
—Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
Dialectics is the quest to see the new in the old instead of just the old in the new.
—Adorno, Against Epistemology
The goal of revolution is the elimination of fear. This is why we need not fear the former, and need not ontologize the latter.
—Adorno, Letter to Benjamin, March 18, 1936
Let us begin where one rarely does with Adorno, at the frontlines of direct proletarian action. And let us begin not simply with such worker militancy but with the validation of music for the sake thereof, since to begin in this way shifts everything, every scandalous watchword and inversion of emphasis from the formative to the late writings. Here, then, are two retrospectively odd passages from the early 1930s. In “On the Social Situation of Music,” which appeared in the first issue of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in 1932, Adorno writes the following qualification with respect to his analysis of the shortcomings of the Gemeinshaftmusik produced by his old friend, collaborator, and rival Hanns Eisler:
The agitatory value and therewith political correctness of proletarian communal music, for example, the choruses of Hanns Eisler, is beyond question, and only utopian-idealistic thinking could demand in its place a music internally suited to the function of the proletariat, but incomprehensible to the proletariat. However, as soon as music retreats from the front of direct action, where it grows reflective and establishes itself as an artistic form, it is obvious that the structures produced cannot hold their own against progressive bourgeois production, but rather take the form of a questionable mixture of refuse from antiquated inner-bourgeois stylistic forms, including even those of petit bourgeois choral literature and from the remains of progressive ‘new’ music. Through this mixture the acuteness of the attack and the coherence [Bündigkeit: the organization] of every technical formulation is lost….It is, nevertheless, worthy of notice that in the figure of the proletarian composer most consequent for the present, Eisler, the Schoenberg School, from which he came forth, comes into contact with efforts seemingly contrary to the School itself. If this contact is to be fruitful, it must find dialectical employment: this music must intervene actively in consciousness through its own forms and not take instructions from the passive, one-sided position of the consciousness of the user—including the proletariat.
Theodor W. Adorno, "On the Social Situation of Music," in *Essays on Music*, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University California Press, 2002), 411. "Coherence," which appears in the standard translation, is probably not the best rendering of *Bündigkeit*. But "concision" or "precision" is not exactly felicitous either. What is meant will become clearer below.
Adorno similarly sings the praises of “political action” and the musical activity therein in the opening paragraph of his aphoristic essay “Music in the Background,” written around 1934:
In our immediate life there is no longer a place for music. Anyone who, by himself, wanted to sing out loud in the street would run the risk of being arrested as a disturber of the peace….Only political action can possibly unleash the physical reality of song for a few brief hours….If you are looking for music, you have to step outside the space of immediate life, because it no longer is one, and find the lost immediacy where it costs the price of admission, at the opera, at a concert.
Adorno, "Music in the Background," in *Essays on Music*, 506.
A number of interrelated curiosities no doubt leaps out to anyone familiar with Adorno’s critical theory of music in its received forms. For starters, Adorno, the theorist of functionless art qua critique of praxis as unfreedom, strongly endorses functional music in the service of direct revolutionary action (even as he acknowledges the limits of such music and the evanescence of such action, as well as their baleful social implications with regard to the bourgeois individual). At the same time, he writes ambivalently about the art music cloistered away from the functional world of capital in concert halls and opera houses, to the extent that its power comes at a cost.
Nested within this inversion of one of the central oversimplifications of the reception of Adorno’s critical music theory is a perhaps more striking twist of the conventional wisdom (roughly, the view that Adorno’s theorizing amounts to, as Buck-Morss words it, “Marx Minus the Proletariat,” a Marxism that fails to heed to the practical injunction of the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach
A further curiosity with respect to the opening passages concerns the relation between theory and praxis vis-à-vis music, which points to a core tension between Adorno and Eisler. Adorno met Eisler in Vienna in the 20s. Over the next two decades, they became comrades and collaborators, “jointly and definitively” writing together Composing for the Films during their California exile (Adorno’s co-authorship was, in his words, withdrawn from the original 1947 publication when HUAC went after Eisler for his brother’s political activities, causing Adorno to fear their association might prevent him from returning to Europe).
In contrast to Eisler, Adorno returned permanently to the Federal Republic in 1953, where he continued to give shape to his revolutionary politics through music severed from material praxis and to voice his increasing dismay with the Soviet Thermidor. Indeed, he responded forcefully to the Prague Declaration in an untranslated essay titled “Die gegängelte Musik.” There he accuses Eisler et al. not only of following the Nazis in turning spirit into the delusion it once criticized and of failing to see how “exhortations to abandon subjectivism” are incompatible with “a society based on solidarity,” but also of trying to fix the so-called crisis of music (and thus the contradiction between the individual and society) by mere decree, that is, of reducing the separation of musical production and audience, originality and popular appeal, to the fault of composers and thus addressing art in isolation, when “the reasons [for what is problematic about music] lie in the social totality.”
The tension between Adorno and Eisler is sometimes portrayed as a consequence of Adorno’s supposed postwar apostasy, which is said to have put him at odds with the genuine communists, that is, those who avowed and defended Comintern politics even after the Moscow trials and execution of Bukharin—namely, Brecht, Bloch, and Eisler.
While there is much overlap in the early writing of Adorno and Eisler, and while Adorno appears to have been deeply enamored with Eisler’s composition, his mostly celebratory 1929 review of Eisler’s Zeitungsausschnitte op.11 shows reservations about the composer’s “theoretical and sociological development” with respect to the musical forces and relations of production:
There is a danger that for the sake of comprehensibility, the musical means have not been brought fully up to the current state of musical modernity….It would be possible, therefore, for a revolutionary political conviction to attract revolutionary aesthetic ones, whereas if that revolutionary conviction were to be entirely persuasive, it would have to adopt the technical methods that are in tune with the very latest historical achievements. This then is the problem with Eisler’s future development, not simply his internal development as a composer, be it noted, but his sociological and theoretical development, since he cannot remain blind to the difference between music that is appropriate in its own terms to the stage reached by society and music that is actually consumed by present-day society.
Quoted in Claussen, 155.
This passage resonates with the opening quotation from “On the Social Situation of Music.” Two tensions appear in the related excerpts: a conflict between comprehensibility, function, use-value, practice, etc. and the progressive rationalization of the musical material, that is, between the relations of production (the culture industry’s demand for accessibility and purposiveness as a prerequisite of salability) and the growth of the musical forces of production (progressive technical control over/rationalization of the musical material); and a conflict between Eisler’s composition, his formation of the musical material, and the musical material’s general state of the development. Musical material is a difficult concept, whose fuller elaboration lies ahead; it refers not to “raw” material but to the bequeathed, historically and socially determinate conventions, genres, forms, schemata, techniques, etc. that confront the composer as problems demanding negotiation in the pursuit of “musical sense” or immanent monadologcial coherence—in short, “the objectified and critically reflected state of the technical productive forces of an age with which any given composer is inevitably confronted.”
As we will see, older Adorno appears to have found this matter rather more complicated than he did in the late 20s and early 30s, but nevertheless, this objection brings us to the heart of the tension between Eisler and Adorno, which centers on themes to which the emphasis on music’s critical, cognitive character point. In “Our Revolutionary Music,” written the same year as “On the Social Situation of Music,” Eisler divides revolutionary music somewhat like Adorno into “the mass fighting song” and “music to be listened to,” the former “practical” and the latter “theoretical.”
At the start and conclusion of the opening “On the Social Situation” passage, Adorno clearly deprioritizes the self-consciousness of the proletariat in revolutionary struggle. In fact, he seems to deny the positive existence of proletarian class-consciousness altogether, insofar as the music internally suited to revolution is incomprehensible to workers. He also states that if contact between the proletarian Eisler and the apolitical, bourgeois Schoenberg School from which Eisler emerged is to bear revolutionary fruit, its music “must intervene actively in consciousness through its own forms,” rather than “take instructions from the passive, one-sided position of the consciousness of [its proletarian] user.” In whose consciousness is revolutionary music to intervene if not the worker who uses it? Adorno’s political investment in the immanently developing artwork severed from utility (from praxis under the spell of labor, praxis that has blocked happiness) also entails a political investment in the useless intellectual adequate to its understanding. As Adorno writes to Horkheimer in March of 1936 and would soon replicate in his famous March 18^th^ letter to Benjamin, “The proletariat needs intellectuals for revolution just as much as intellectuals need the proletariat”; indeed, Adorno continues, it is a mistake to place “trust in the proletariat as though it were a blind World Spirit, tolerating specifically those characteristics of it which were produced by bourgeois machinery, characteristics which our precise task is to transform with knowledge.”
What the letters to Horkheimer and Benjamin, as well as the initial quotation, elide (and what will be discussed further below) is that Adorno views the autonomous, useless intellectual he privileges much like he views the autonomous, useless artwork he privileges, as an indictment of the unfree society from which it and the corresponding division of labor arise: “intellectual pursuit is still the natural mode of existence for the sons of rich parents,” Adorno writes to Horkheimer in 1945.
To return to the “Music in the Background” passage, to Adorno’s perhaps unexpected ambivalence with respect to useless art-music as opposed to the functional songs of political action, a central aspect of Adorno’s theory of freedom and his uncompromising communism is the idea that there is no outside the “nexus of social guilt,”
Peter E. Gordon is thus undoubtedly right to deny the “gnostic” reading of Adorno and to attribute a positive moment to his thought, namely, the “maximalist” normative demand for “the right life,” which Gordon describes as a postulate of critical practice redolent of Kant’s postulates of practical reason, a requisite standard against which immanent critique determines current conditions have failed to deliver on their promises.
To further understand Adorno’s political investment in music that has retreated from direct action and is incomprehensible to the proletariat, and to better understand how this investment qualifies as “historical materialist” and “communist” (how Marcuse could speak to Adorno of “our cause” even as the two occupied opposing sides of the student movement with respect to theory and praxis
* * *
The elliptical, dense, at times disjunct prefatory material of Adorno’s first essay for the first issue of the Institute’s journal consists of a single extended paragraph unfolding over four pages in its original publication. Here Adorno offers an “Outline” of perhaps the first historical materialist theory of music, explicitly claiming the designation and contrasting it with “a mere exercise in intellectual history” (393). In brief, the “Outline” summarizes the paradoxical situation of music in “late capitalism” for the sake of clarifying the peculiar circumstances where it is “better,” where it “preserves its right to existence” and “fulfills its social function more precisely” (393), doing justice to its promise to satisfy the needs immediate social reality denies (421). In other words, the point of the “Outline” is to sketch the odd social conditions under which music does not merely fulfill its promise of happiness “ideologically” but truly lives up to it. According to Adorno, it can do so only by revealing the social antinomies responsible for its separation from social life, that is, by expressing “the exigency of the social condition” and “[calling] for change through the coded language of suffering.” Inasmuch as it calls for change by making manifest the full extent of the social contradictions in which it is mired and thus giving voice to suffering, Adorno argues, music enters into a dialectical relationship with revolutionary praxis.
The opening sentence of the “Outline” takes the form of an antinomy to which Adorno often refers in his writings about art: all music today clearly traces the contradictions and flaws of society; at the same time, it is cut off from society by society’s flaws (391). In other words, music has a critical social function, giving shape to society’s problems in its material structures with exceptional limpidity, only to the extent that it is socially functionless and incomprehensible, meaning society cannot access music’s inner, living social significance. For, Adorno suggests, “the role of music in the social process is exclusively that of a commodity.” Insofar as the general social function of music is exclusively that of a commodity, “[music] no longer serves direct needs nor benefits from direct application” but adjusts to “the pressure of the exchange of abstract units,” meaning music’s value is determined by use (for the sake of exchange) and functionless music is therefore socially worthless. “Through the total absorption of both musical production and consumption by the capitalistic process” Adorno concludes, “the alienation of music from man has become complete.” Gone are apparent enclaves of pre-capitalistic immediacy, such as those of the nineteenth-century domestic sphere before “techniques of radio and sound film, in the hands of powerful monopolies and in unlimited control over the total capitalistic propaganda machine” came to inhabit their “innermost cells.” Moreover, “[The balance between individual production and understanding]”—the equilibrium between the development of the musical forces of production and the relations of production— “has been totally destroyed,” such that progressive music is unsaleable and hated.
As in the opening chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, the emphasis on the “total” character of this situation is misleading. Adorno next clarifies that the process through which the general social function of music has become solely that of a commodity has involved “the objectification and rationalization of music” (392)—the increasing control over the musical material and the transformation of the musical construct into something objective and lawful in itself—which has meant not only “[music’s] separation from the simple immediacy of use” (presumably its transformation into functionless works of art that no longer serve the purposes of their former church and court patrons) but also the endowment of music “with the power of far-reaching sublimation of drives and the cogent and binding expression of humanity” (its communicative power, as well as its promissory and universal character, as integrated aesthetic form at a distance from sensuous, practical immediacy).
A number of overlapping points follow that are meant to elucidate the central aporia of the essay—“the situation from which every observation upon the social position of music which hopes to avoid the deceptions which today dominate discussions of the subject must proceed.” Clarifying that he is no romantic pining for return to musical immediacy, Adorno states that not only is the restoration of simple immediacy a retreat into myth but that the process of progressive development through which music has come to assume the exclusive role of a commodity has not been taken far enough; it is has been cut short, Adorno writes, for the sake of maintaining capitalist class relations: “Now…rationalized music has fallen victim to the same dangers as rationalized society within which class interest bring rationalization to a halt as soon as it threatens to run against class conditions themselves. This situation has now left man in a state of rationalization which—as soon as the possibility of his dialectic development is blocked—crushes him between unresolved contradictions.” Adorno is clearly taking a page from classical Marxism, building on the contention that if the progressive rationalization immanent to the development of wealth on the capitalist basis were carried to its logical conclusion, it would mean the overcoming of bourgeois class domination; as Adorno writes in Introduction to the Sociology of Music, a sort of update of “On the Social Situation of Music” written three decades later, the bourgeoisie is “the historic instance of a class that voids the static order and yet cannot yield, unfettered, to its own dynamics without voiding itself.”
Adorno’s “Outline” of music’s social situation does not end here. He adds that music “became conscious of its own reification and of its alienation from man” while “lacking proper knowledge of the social process” (392). As a result of this truncated reflection, “music…blamed itself and not society for this situation, thus remaining in the illusion that the isolation of music was itself an isolated matter, namely, that things could be corrected from the side of music alone with no change in society” (392). As Adorno emphasizes, the situation of music’s “social alienation,” which reformist tendencies disparage as “individualism” and “technical esotericism,” is “a matter of social fact” and cannot be redressed within music alone but only through “the change of society.” At this point, Adorno identifies the dialectical contribution that music can make toward such change, that is, the abolition of class domination:
Here and now music is able to do nothing but portray within its own structure the social antinomies which are also responsible for its isolation. Music will be better, the more deeply it is able to express—in the antinomies of its own formal language—the exigency of the social condition and to call for change through the coded language of suffering. It is not for music to stare in helpless horror at society: it fulfills its social function more precisely when it presents social problems through its own material and according to its own formal laws—problems which music contains within itself in the innermost cells of technique. The task of music as art thus enters into a parallel relationship to the task of social theory.
Adorno, "On the Social Situation of Music" 393.
Adorno is here developing an account of the dialectical (rather than immediate) relationship between music qua critical theory and revolutionary praxis in light of the fact that directly useful music offers only the “illusion of immediacy” characteristic of the commodity (394). This account is emphatically “materialist” in the sense that music is not said to enter into praxis directly as explicit instructions for what is to be done but insofar as it takes on “the character of cognition” by negotiating social problems unfolding at the level of its historically and socially determinate material:
Through its material, music must give clear form to the problems assigned it by this material, which is itself never purely natural material, but rather a social and historical product. Solutions offered by music in this process stand equal to theories. Social postulates are offered, the relationship of which to praxis might be, to be sure, extremely mediated and difficult or which, at any rate, cannot be realized without great difficulty. It is these postulates however which decide whether and how the entrance into social reality might be made. (393)
Although the inner life of useless music is dead to society, to the extent that the general social function of music is that of commodity whose value is determined by use for the sake of exchange, such music, first off, gives form to or reflects the social antinomies responsible for its isolation in its immanent, material dynamics, and also, like critical social theory, expresses “an attitude toward these aporias,” providing social postulates that enter into a “highly mediated,” dialectical relation with revolutionary praxis (393–4). Adorno is not overly forthcoming about what he means with respect to isolated, avant-garde music’s mediated relation to praxis, but he does note that “resistance [to this music] seems to indicate that the dialectical function of this music is already perceptible in praxis, even if only as a negative force, as ‘destruction’ ” (394–5). Later writing offers additional elaboration. In “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” Adorno writes that Marx’s “critique of political economy lacks all concrete transitions to that praxis that…should constitute its raison d’être.” “The theory that is not conceived as an instruction for its realization,” he adds, “should have the most hope for realization.” Regarding the unmediated translation of theory into practice, Adorno notes what Robespierre and St. Just did with Rousseau’s theory of the general will.
According to Adorno, critically self-reflexive music is “rejected” as “incomprehensible, esoteric-private, [and] thus reactionary” by those attached to a “romantic concept of musical immediacy” that sees “the empirical consciousness of present-day society…as the positive measure of a music no longer alienated but rather the property of free men” (394). But, Adorno argues, such music can do what “the current [empirical] consciousness of the masses” cannot, insofar as this state of consciousness is “suppressed and enchained through class domination”—a point, Adorno later adds, that “no one has formulated…more exactly and extremely than Marx himself” (410). As we will see, Adorno’s musical materialism is not principally oriented around the psychologies of those involved musical production, reproduction, and consumption; instead, it focuses on how music takes on the character of critical self-reflexivity in the more impartial subject-object dialectic of its material. According to Adorno, this radical music that takes on the character of critical social theory does not merely “externalize a condition in art produced by class domination” but is “internally suited” to “the fixed goal of proletarian class struggle”—namely, the elimination of class domination (410–11). To grasp this internal suitability, we need to move into the hidden abode of musical production.
* * *
The opening “Outline” is followed by a longer subsection called “Production” and a second, delimited section called “Reproduction/Consumption” (the form of the essay as a whole is thus bipartite: “Outline/Production” and “Reproduction/Consumption”). Adorno writes that “[the alienation of music from society] is tangible as an actual social fact in the relation of production to consumption.” “Reproduction,” he adds, “mediates between these two realms,” to the extent that production’s “demand for authenticity” and consumption’s “demand for comprehensibility” intermingle within it; in other words, intelligible musical reproduction applies both to the interpretation that makes manifest the “true meaning” embedded in a score as well as to the accessibility presupposed by consumption (411–12). Crucial here is Adorno’s specification that “consumption” is not simply another word for “listening” or “reception,” but a socially specific way of engaging with music qua commodity. In fact, Adorno states, “There simply is no such thing as the ‘consumption’ of new music.” By “new music,” Adorno means the critical but incomprehensible and thus unsalable music outlined at the start of the essay, that is, avant-garde, radical music of the type performed at concerts offered in the 20s and early 30s by the Internal Society for Contemporary Music, where “tickets [were] furnished to the audience gratis,” meaning such concerts were “economically totally unproductive” and “remain[ed] totally within the sphere of musical production” (420).
As Max Paddison states in his analysis of “On the Social Situation of Music”—an analysis that is, on the one hand, quite sensitive while, on the other, largely omitting Adorno’s political motivations—the essay’s first section on production communicates something “essential” about Adorno’s philosophy of music as a whole.
This prioritization of the “dark interior,” or hidden abode, of musical production with respect to the problem of mediation is a central element of Adorno’s musical Marxism.
Adorno’s investigation of musical production—which is to say bourgeois musical production
Adorno writes that while this distinction may appear to correspond to that between “light” and “serious” music, “a great deal of ‘serious’ music adjusts itself to the demands of the market in the same manner as the composers of light music” and therefore “serves the market in disguise,” even as “every effort is made to exempt ‘serious music’ from an alienation shared to an equal degree by Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms and the latest hit song of Robert Solz” (395–6). This line of argument begins to provide some insight into the musics that fall under the first category, while also complicating the familiar charge against Adorno of elitism (a charge that will be addressed in more detail in forthcoming portions of this project).
Among the instances of “light” or “vulgar” music Adorno notes in the “Reproduction/Consumption” section are the “hit song” (in addition to the tunes of the Viennese operetta composer Robert Stolz, Adorno also notes, for instance, Paul Raasch’s 1927 beer-hall sensation “Trink, trink, Brüderlein trink”
In Adorno’s elaboration of the second category of musical activity, he takes us into musical production’s hidden abode. Adorno begins this descent by dividing musical production that does not serve the market and that expresses alienation in four subcategories. This critical music consists of (1) the autonomous music of the Schoenberg School (Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern), which resembles “the monad of Leibniz,” insofar as “without consciousness of its social location or indifference to it,” this music “crystallizes” social antinomies immanently in its musical material; (2) the “objectivist” music of Stravinsky (and also Bartók), which “recognizes the fact of alienation as its own isolation” but does so “only within itself” and thus “without respect for actual society”—accordingly, it turns to “stylistic forms of the past” (“neo-classicism” in “highly capitalistic-industrial nations” and “folklore” in “underdeveloped, agrarian counties”) and tries “to evoke the image of a non-existent ‘objective’ society’ ”; (3) a surrealistic “hybrid form”—represented by Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat (“his best and most exposed [piece]” [406]) and the works Weil wrote with Brecht—which “proceeds” (like Stravinsky’s reactionary objectivism) “from the cognition of alienation,” while (in contrast to this objectivism) “[denying]…the positive solution” and “permitting social flaws to manifest themselves by means of a flawed invoice which defines itself as illusory with no attempt at camouflage through attempts at an aesthetic totality”; and (4) the Gebrauchsmusik of Hindemith and (the less commercial and more laudable) Gemeinschaftmusik of Eisler, which together comprise a type of music that “attempts to break through alienation from within itself, even at expense of its immanent form” (396–7).
For reasons that are no doubt becoming clear, the heart of Adorno’s theory of mediation and its political significance lies in his account of Schoenberg’s music (including its relation to Stravinsky’s). Therefore, this discussion will limit itself to the first two forms of critical musical production in Adorno’s taxonomy (and largely to the first). According to Adorno, Schoenberg is to be regarded, like Freud and Karl Krauss, as one of the “dialectical phenomena of bourgeois individualism…which work in their supposedly ‘specialized’ areas of problems without respect for a presupposed social totality”: “in these areas…they achieve solutions which suddenly change and turn unnoticed against the prerequisites of individualism; such solutions are in principle denied to a socially oriented bourgeois reformism which must pay for its insights, aimed as they are at the totality but never reaching the basis thereof, with ‘mediating’ and consequently camouflaging machinations” (397). In other words, Adorno positions Schoenberg’s work, along with that of Freud and Krauss, in opposition to “a socially oriented bourgeois reformism” that obscures the totality it seeks to redress. This is to say that he positions them politically, on the side of truth for the sake of something more than mere reformism.
Just as Freud only arrives at “an objective dialectic of human consciousness in history” through “the analysis of individual consciousness and subconsciousness,” Schoenberg’s music reveals the “basis [of totality]” to the extent that the composer pursues the immanent consequences of “expressive music of the private bourgeois individual” to the extreme. By seeking complete conscious disposal over the musical material, total freedom from every heteronomous element, such that every musical moment refers only to itself, Schoenberg transforms music into something altogether different than the conventional autonomous artwork—a new kind of radically independent work, one with absolutely no social function, “which even severs the last communication with the listener,” but which is also entirely without the illusion or semblance of self-sufficiency or freedom from mediation by society (397, 400).
Returning to “On the Social Situation of Music,” Adorno emphasizes that is not Schoenberg the subject per se who makes the music he produces critical. Even though Schoenberg’s composition is perhaps the first example where consciousness has “seized control of [the natural material of music],” it is not, Adorno writes, produced “out of pure spirit” (398). “It is much rather a dialectic in the strictest sense,” a movement “situated in the material itself.” According to Adorno, it is precisely in this dialectic of the musical material, wherein music’s exterior alienation (its separation from society) is perfected, that it overcomes its alienation inwardly and offers some measure of reconciliation between subject and object, individual and universality, freedom and planning (400).
The Schoenberg section of Philosophy of New Music (largely written in 1941) contains perhaps the most thorough general account of the dialectical movement of the musical material, which it might be helpful to review before elaborating the more elliptical rendering in “On the Social Situation of Music.” It is worth noting that despite the Hegel epigraphs at the start of every major section of that book, Adorno announces in the introduction that his method is “precisely” a Marxian one, insofar as it turns the dialectic “from its head onto its feet,” and what’s more, he draws a parallel between Schoenberg’s music and Hegelian Marxism: “By assimilating the direction of music from Beethoven to Brahms, Schoenberg’s music can lay claim to the legacy of classical bourgeois music much as the materialist dialectic relates back to Hegel.”
As indicated above, Adorno’s “musical material” is difficult to define. It is not raw, “physicalistic” sonorousness, independent of history and society. According to Adorno, it is more like “speech” than “the inventory of sounds.”
The exigencies of the material imposed on the subject arise…from the fact that the material is itself sedimented spirit, preformed socially by human consciousness. This objective spirit of the material, as erstwhile and self-forgotten subjectivity, has its own laws of movement. Of the same origin as the social process and ever and again laced through by its traces, what seems to be strictly the motion of the material itself moves in the same direction as does real society even where neither knows anything of the other and where each combats the other. Therefore the composers struggle with the material is a struggle with society precisely to the extent that society has migrated into the work, and as such it is not pitted against the production as something purely external and heteronomous, as against a consumer or an opponent. In immanent reciprocation, directives are constituted that the material imposes on the composer and that the composer transforms by adhering to them….He is no creator. Society and the era in which he lives constrains him not externally but in the rigorous demand for correctness made on him by the composition. The state of technique presents itself to him as a problem in every measure that he dares to think: In every measure technique as a whole demands of him that he do it justice and give the one right answer that technique in that moment permits. Compositions are nothing but such answers, nothing but the solution of technical puzzles, and the composer is the only one who knows how to decipher them and understand his music. What he does is located in the infinitely small. It is accomplished in the execution of what his music objectively demands from him. But for such obedience the composer requires all possible disobedience, all independence and spontaneity. The movement of the musical material is just that dialectical.
Adorno, *Philosophy of New Music*., 32--4.
Adorno’s principal example of the dialectical movement of the musical material in the emergence of twelve-tone technique or dodecaphony from free atonality in Schoenberg’s composition. An adequate account of this example involves distinguishing what Adorno says about it in “On the Social Situation” from what he says about it in Philosophy of New Music and in his Kranichstein lectures of the 50s and 60s, one of which was the basis of the famous essay on musique informelle or informal music. The interpretive situation is tricky insofar as there are clearly differences between the texts, which span four decades of ongoing thinking, but making sense of any given text requires all of them, since each deals with the same of themes in a more or less elliptical manner and thus calls for supplementation from its close cousins. As Adorno often points out in his lectures, he avoids definition, since he understands himself to be describing historical tendencies in a state of becoming. Instead, he seeks to elaborate what something means through the totality of what he says about it, asking interpreters to “take on the labor of the concept.”
Let’s begin with the prime illustration of the dialectical movement of the musical material that Adorno provides in “On the Social Situation of Music”. According to Adorno, “the productive force” that initiates the movement entails a “psychic drive…toward undisguised and inhibited expression” that is confronted by the “objective problem” of how “material that has achieved the highest technical development” (the material bequeathed to Schoenberg by Wagner and Brahms) could submit itself to such “radical expression” (398). According to Adorno, “it must surrender all alleged connections and obligations which stand in the way of freedom of movement of individual expression; these connections are the reflections of an ‘agreement’ of bourgeois society with the psyche of the individual which is now renounced by the sufferings of the individual.” In the case of the most technically advanced music Schoenberg inherited, the obligations impeding free expression are apparently the remaining obligations to the traditional diatonic system of 24 major and minor keys (tonality) that persist in Wagner’s technique of chromatic sequence and Brahms’s diatonic technique of variation—namely, the demands for what Adorno terms structural and harmonic “symmetry” and “ornamentation.” Adorno writes that in the works of the middle period of free atonality (e.g., Erwartung, Die glückliche Hand, and Sechs kleine Klavierstücke), Schoenberg uses dissonance as the “vehicle of the radical principle of expression”—as the expression of the pain of the individual vis-à-vis society—breaking down both orthodox tonality’s “tectonic symmetrical relations” and its correlative triadic harmony. As previously noted, the account is elliptical, but Adorno does mention the emancipation of counterpoint from the homophonic constraints of diatonicism, by which he apparently means (as he writes in Philosophy of New Music) that the more dissonant a chord becomes, the more the distinction between its essential and inessential (merely ornamental) notes breaks down, meaning the more all its constituent notes become equal and independent polyphonic voices.
Adorno now turns to the social significance of Schoenberg’s “esoteric” music, writing that the consequences of the handed-down material problems Schoenberg follows to their logical conclusion in the serial compositions of his third period make manifest “the problems of society that produced this material and in which the contradictions of this society are defined as technical problems” (399). Adorno notes Schoenberg’s “replacement within all his works, in spite and because of his own expressive origins, of any private fortuitousness which might have been viewed quite correctly as a type of anarchic musical production with an objective principle of order which is never imposed upon the material from the exterior, but rather extracted from the material itself and brought into a relationship with it by means of an historical process of rational transparence.” In other words, Schoenberg qua composing consciousness, in trying to overcome the repressions of conventional tonality (a problem to which he is directed by the “preformed” material he has inherited), must avoid “private fortuitousness”—the uncalculated, instinctive, arbitrary, and so ultimately unfree repetition of a note that gives the sense of a tonal center within the diatonic system—and it precisely this radical subjection of the musical material to the power of expression that extinguishes expression in the form of the twelve-tone system, where no note can be repeated until the other 11 are heard first. Put differently, “subjective criticism of instances of ornamentation and repetition leads to an objective, non-expressive structure which, in place of symmetry and repetition, determines the exclusion of repetition within the cell.”
Now Adorno offers two readings of the dynamic through which dodecaphony emerges, or rather he clarifies that this dynamic contains two moments—the moment of “the musical style of freedom” and the moment of “the reversal into unfreedom.” The latter is bit more straightforward. As Adorno puts it in the eponymous section of Philosophy of New Music, Schoenberg, in trying to overcome the heteronomy of the tonal system by following the immanent consequences of the material bequeathed to him, produces a new heteronomous dodecaphonic system. Put differently, a new system, “alien” to the individual and characterized by “administrative domination over the whole,” proceeds from the historical tendencies of the musical material that direct the composer toward radically free expression.
[Twelve-tone technique] subjugates music by setting it free. The subject rules over the music by means of a rational system in order to succumb to this rational system itself….Whereas this freedom [the freedom of the composer] is achieved in its disposal over the material, it becomes a determination of the material, a determination that confronts the subject as something alien and in turn subordinates the subject to its constraints….The subject disclaims its own spontaneity by projecting onto the historical subject matter the rational experiences that it had in its confrontation with it. The operations that broke the blind domination of the sonorous material become, through a system of rules, a blind second nature. To this the subject subordinates itself in search of protection and security, despairing of being able to fulfill the music on its own. Wagner’s precept of establishing rules for oneself and then following them reveals its fateful aspect. No rule is more repressive than the one that is self-promulgated.
Ibid., 54-5.
In this passage, one can clearly see why Adorno refers to Philosophy of New Music as “a detailed excursus to Dialectic of Enlightenment.”
Adorno’s later work emphasizes that there is more to Schoenberg’s dialectic of the musical material than its embodiment of the social dialectic of enlightenment, even in Philosophy of New Music. From “On the Social Situation” to his later writing, Adorno refers to the dynamic that culminates in what Schoenberg called (apparently in resistance to heteronomous systematization) “composition with twelve notes” as Musikstil der Freiheit or “musical style of freedom,” a turn of phrase coined by the Czech microtonal composer Alois Hába in 1925.
Adorno describes informal music as an “anticipation” of “utopia” that “cannot be fulfilled in the world we inhabit,” something “a little like Kant’s eternal peace”—a “concrete possibility” whose realization is doubtful.
His technical forces of production [those of the subjectivity at work in art] are the immanent function of the material; only by following the latter’s lead does he gain any power over it. By means of such a process of exteriorization, however, it receives back a universality which goes beyond the individuation of the particular producer. Labor on the work of art is always social labor. It is this that legitimates the talk of artistic rationality. Where there are grounds for asserting that a composer has composed well, such universal subjectivity will have proved itself, as will reason as a positive, a logic that goes beyond the particular by satisfying its desiderata.
Ibid., 300.
If art really desires to revoke the domination of nature, and if it is concerned with a situation in which men abandon their efforts to exercise control through their intellect, they can only achieve this through the domination of nature. Only music which is control of itself would be in control of its own freedom from every compulsion, even its own. This would be on the analogy with the argument that only in a rationally organized society would the elimination of scarcity lead to the disappearance of organization as a form of oppression. In a musique informelle the deformation of rationalism which exists today would be abolished and converted to a true rationality. Only what is fully articulated in art provides the image of an unreformed and hence free humanity. The work of art which is fully articulated, thanks to its maximum control of its material, and which therefore find itself at the furthest possible remove from organic existence, is also as close to the organic as is at all possible.
Ibid., 318--19.
Central to these passages is Adorno’s later understanding of “the idea of art,” and thus of the successful artwork, which will be discussed in more detail below. In line with his rendering of the “positive” concept of enlightenment and negative dialectics, this idea consists of a moment of integration, sublimation, construction, etc. (that is, exacting incorporation of layers of material into a lawful aesthetic form through uncompromising rationalization or the progressive domination of the material) as well as a moment resistance to that process.
We are now in a position to return to “On the Social Situation.” With the “Outline” and Dialectic of Enlightenment in mind, it would seem that the social significance of the emergence of serial music is simply that it instantiates the dialectic of enlightenment. Schoenberg’s music gives form to the contradictions of capitalist society precisely through the resistance to social conventions that makes it uncommunicative, to the extent that such resistance reproduces the world against which it rebels. On this reading, Schoenberg’s achievement lies in the truth of the dialectic of enlightenment revealed by his failure to immanently overcome the aporias of music as if they were technical problems with technical solutions rather than contradictions rooted in the structure of society (neither music nor philosophy, Adorno often writes, can realize itself, since they are entangled in social forces that conflict with what they desire and make them impotent).
The issue with concluding the matter here is that this account is not exactly how “On the Social Situation” describes Schoenberg’s composition with respect to the promises of the “Outline.” As it states, “Radical freedom from all objective norms imposed upon music from the exterior is coordinated with the most extreme rigidity of immanent structure, so that music by its forces eliminates at least within itself alienation as a matter of subjective formation and objective material. Music thus moves toward that for which Alois Hába coined the beautiful expression ‘musical style of freedom.’ To be sure, Adorno adds, music overcomes inward alienation only through the perfected expression thereof on its exterior” (399–400). So the example of the emergence of twelve-tone technique from free atonality is apparently supposed to reveal that the situation of music in capitalism is such that the overcoming of the hardened oppositions of subject to object and particularity to universality within the musical material intensifies music’s opposition to society and that redressing this painful impasse, where harmony takes the form of hated, ugly, and foreign discordance, would require a transformation of the relationship between musical forces and relations of production.
Adorno opposes this successful failure of the Schoenberg School, defined principally by its complete “absence of illusion,” to the composition of Stravinsky’s School, which attempts to imperiously correct the inward alienation of music without pursuing the immanent dialectic of the material, that is, by regressing to pre-bourgeois forms that are deceptively affirmed as “an original natural state of music” (403). To the extent that the goal of Stravinsky’s “objectivism” is a “musical anthropology appropriate to the being of man,” and insofar as its musical material is shaped by merely the “inclination” or “taste” of the composer and not guided by a rational relation to a “structural immanence,” a “social analogy” rooted in illusion suggests itself: “it appears that the sovereign composer stands in free control of the supposed musical organism, in much the same way that in fascism a Führerelite appears to be in control, while in truth power over the social ‘organism’ lies in the hands of monopoly capitalism” (404).
Before moving to Adorno’s self-critique of this account, it should be emphasized (if it is not already crystal clear) that the link between musical production and Marx’s hidden abode in Adorno’s oeuvre as a whole is more than a matter of superficial correspondence vis-à-vis obscurity (despite what one might be led to believe by Gillian Rose’s and Martin Jay’s general assessments of the tenuous relation between Adorno’s critical theory and Marx’s critique of political economy
The worker sells his labour-time for which he receives his equivalent. But the time he gives and the time that is needed for the reproduction of his labour-power are different….Here lies the source of surplus-value without having to consider the commodity produced. One exchanges the same for the same and simultaneously the same for the not-same. Behind this lies the entirety of class relations. Only because the worker has nothing else but his labour-power does he accept these conditions.
Adorno, "Marx and the Basic Concepts of Sociological Theory," in *Adorno and Marx: Negative Dialectics and the Critique of Political Economy,* 248--9.
Put differently, exchange, Adorno writes, is an objective “mediating conceptuality” immanent to the social activity of relating of “the same with the same to the same”—i.e., “the moment of calculatory equation [founding] the difference between bourgeois society and feudalism”—which is nonetheless “preformed” by class relations (the unequal control of the means of production).
So what does this have to do with Adorno’s account of the musical material in the 30s and 40s? As early as the 1940s Adorno links the exchange principle mediating capitalism as a “negative totality” (a false whole) with the dialectic of enlightenment that Schoenberg’s composition instantiates. Later, in the 1964 essay “Progress” (which is excerpted from the History and Freedom lectures), Adorno writes, “Bourgeois society created the concept of progress, and the convergence of the concept with the negation of progress originates in the principle governing society, namely the principle of exchange.”
* * *
We are now in a position to investigate Adorno’s self-critique of this initial presentation of musical materialism, which is to say, the mediation of music and society. In his “Postscript” to The Introduction to the Sociology of Music, which follows a dazzling final chapter on “Mediation,” Adorno writes, “The social question about the relation of productive forces and relations of production can be applied to musical sociology without doing violence to it.”
Antitraditionalist qualities…were as much elicited by the bourgeois music market as they later were socially limited in the course of the historical dialectic to which the bourgeoisie itself was subject, and finally revoked under totalitarian regimes. Even the autonomy of great music, the means of its most emphatic opposition to the dictates of the marketplace, would hardly have evolved otherwise than via the marketplace. Musical forms, even constitutive modes of musical reaction, are internalizations of social forms. Like all art, music is as much a social fact as an inner self-shaping, a self-liberation from immediate social desiderata. The freedom of art, its independence of the demands made on it, is founded on the idea of a free society and in a sense anticipates its realization. (221)
It is at this point that Adorno launches his self-critique, in a footnote appended to “the sphere of production” in the first sentence of the following paragraph:
This is why the sphere of production is not simply a basis for musical sociology as the sphere of production is a basis for the process of material living. As a matter of the mind, musical production is itself socially mediated, not something immediate. Strictly speaking, the only part of it that is a productive force is the spontaneity that is inseparable from the mediations. From the social point of view it would be the force that exceeds mere repetition of the relations of production as represented by types and species. Such spontaneity may harmonize with the social trend, as in the young Beethoven or in Schuberts songs; or it may offer resistance, as Bach and again the new music of today do, to submission of the market. The question to be raised is this: How is musical spontaneity socially possible at all? For it always contains social productive forces whose real forms society has not yet absorbed.
Ibid., 221--222.
The footnote reads:
The writers error in his essay “Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik,” published in 1932 in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, was his fiat identification of the concept of musical production with the precedence of the economic sphere of production, without considering how far that which we call [musical] production already presupposes social production and depends on it as much as it is sundered from it. This alone has kept the writer from reissuing that essay, the draft of a finished musical sociology.
Analyses of this material by Max Paddison and Gillian Rose provide crucial introductions to key terms and germane sources.
Considering the footnote in isolation from its wider contexts, the problem seems to be a relatively straightforward one (straightforward, that is, if one could in fact find evidence of the crime in “On the Social Situation of Music”). Adorno’s footnote is concerned with his portrayal of the relationship between a special sphere of musical production that made itself independent from the sphere of production in general. This concern appears to involve the representation of the relationship between matter and mind, society and spirit, infrastructure and superstructure. The crime seems to lie principally in “identification.” As early as the introduction to Philosophy of New Music, Adorno explicitly repudiates procedures “enmeshed with the inclination to takes side with the whole” and writes that a dialectical method that is faithful to Marxism (that is, one “turned from its head onto its feet”) cannot “[treat] particular phenomena as illustrations of examples of something preexisting and exempt from the movement of the concept.”
This reading would be satisfying if Adorno did not appear to already acknowledge this issue in “On the Social Situation of Music,” writing in the opening pages that the relation between music and society is “problematic in all its aspects”:
If the immanent development of music were established as an absolute—as the mere reflection of the social process—the only result would be a sanction of the fetish character of music which is the major difficulty and most basic problem to be represented by music today. On the other hand, it is clear that music is not to be measured in terms of the existing society of which it is the product and which, at the same time, keeps music in a state of isolation. It is the prerequisite of every historical-materialistic method which hopes to be more than a mere exercise in “intellectual history” that under no conditions is music to be understood as a “spiritual” phenomenon, abstract and far-removed from actual social conditions, which can anticipate through its imagery any desire for social change independently from the empirical realization thereof. It thus becomes obvious that the relation of present-day music and society is problematic in all its aspects. (393)
In any case, as will soon be made very clear, it would be a mistake to infer from the initial moment of my interpretation that Adorno simply equates truth with nonidentity; such an inference would misrepresent how negative dialectics critiques Hegel’s speculative philosophy. As Adorno writes at the conclusion of Against Epistemology, “Idealism is not simply untruth. It is truth in its untruth.”
The word “precedence” in Adorno’s self-critique jumps out as affording an opportunity for additional clarification. Adorno believes the crime of the identification musical and material production has something to do with the “precedence” of the latter. But from Introduction to the Sociology of Music to his final works, Adorno insists that a sociology of music that delivers on its promises to provide “an insight into [the] essential relation [of musical phenomena] to real society” must prioritize the production of art, meaning the issue of “precedence” referenced in the footnote is not one concerning the precedence of musical production over distribution and consumption, that is, impact or reception.
Turning to the footnote’s broader contexts, Adorno also seems to be claiming that he failed in his early essay to clarify the development of the musical forces of production are mediated by the relations of production. This claim points to a radical political program opposed to the fetishization of production characteristic of Stalinism. The idea behind such opposition appears to be that a truly emancipated society would not be one liberated from the relations of production in order to freely develop the forces of production but one liberated from the compulsion to develop the forces of production, since the ground of that compulsion is the relations of the production, that is, surplus-value producing class domination. As Adorno writes in Minima Moralia, in one of his more fleshed-out, positive speculations about communism, “Perhaps the true society will grow tired of development and, out of freedom, leave possibilities unused.”
A final element of the self-critique, related to the problem of the identification of musical production with the social production of goods in general, is the paradox of the social mediation of spontaneity. The category of spontaneity plays a prominent role in Adorno’s late work with respect to the relationship between theory and praxis (including the critique of student “actionism” for which Marcuse virtuosically excoriated Adorno). According to Adorno, praxis most certainly requires theory, lest the former render itself blind and oppressive; but correct theory alone is not adequate to correct praxis—as suggested above, Adorno views the immediate translation of theory into praxis as emblematic of capitalism’s demand for functional positivities.
To illustrate what he means by spontaneity—specifically, how it entails “refusing to be a part of the prevailing evil, a refusal that always implies resisting something stronger and hence always contains an element of despair”—Adorno repeatedly recalls the bomb plot of July 20, 1944 against Hitler. After returning from exile, Adorno met with some of the survivors of the plot, including Fabian von Schlabrendorff, who was tortured and sent to several concentration camps for his role in the conspiracy. In his 1963 Problems of Moral Philosophy lectures and the 1964–5 History and Freedom lectures, Adorno remarks that upon asking Schlabrendorff how it was possible for him to take action given that it was “a seemingly absurd enterprise” (given that the chances of success were slim and that he likely faced a fate worse than death), the latter replied (in Adorno’s paraphrase) that “there are situations that are so intolerable that one just cannot continue to put up with them, no matter what may happen and no matter what may happen to oneself in the course of the attempt to change them.”
Of course [the doctrine of the victim’s freedom in the hands of the executioner] is the old untruth—but I wonder whether, precisely in the face of absolute horror, a trace of truth is not revealed in it? Doesn’t the practice of the qualitative leap always have an aspect of hopelessness when it is undertaken? Doesn’t it really depend on the woman who, as Kogon reports, snatched the revolver from the Nazi in front of the Auschwitz furnace, shot him down and was shot herself? I have a vague feeling that when the powerless minority seized power in 1917, without a ‘mass base,’ without the backing of the world spirit, it looked just as absurd, and that the world spirit was precisely therein.
Adorno, Letter to Herbert Marcuse, Los Angeles, June 25, 1948, in *Theodor W. Adorno Max Horkheimer Briefwechsel* Bd. III: 1945--1949 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005), 428--429.
According to Adorno, spontaneity is an irrational impulse of resistance in the face of intolerable conditions. But although it exceeds the purview of rationality, it presupposes theory: “[Schlabrendorff] knew perfectly well how evil, how horrifying this Third Reich was, and it was because of his critical and theoretical insight into the lies and the crimes that he had to deal with that he was brought to the point of action.”
The spontaneous action that Marx ascribes to the proletariat is supposed on the one hand to be an autonomous, free, rational form of action, action on the basis of a known and comprehensible theory. At the same time, however, it contains an irreducible element, the element of immediate action that does not entirely fit into the factor that theoretically determines it; and, above all, it does not fit smoothly into the determining factors of history. On the contrary, even though it is determined by these, it seems to be a way leading out of them—in extreme contrast to all mechanistic interpretations of the course of history….Thus, to sum up this part of the argument, the concept of spontaneity, which might be described as the organ or medium of freedom, refuses to obey the logic of non-contradiction, and is instead a unity of mutually contradictory elements.
Ibid., 216.
Interestingly, Adorno, in his later attempts to refine his dialectic of the musical material, refers to the successful artwork as a dialectic of rationality and mimesis. In this dialectic, “mimesis,” Adorno emphasizes, does not refer to imitation or mimicry in any straightforward sense—it is not imitation of an object but an imitative impulse or attitude that seeks to reestablish “a relationship of similarity and thus kinship” between subject and object. This mimetic relationship stands opposed to “the antithetical separation of the two elements” that can be seen in the progressive rationalization of enlightenment, freedom won by the cleavage of the human from the threat of nature and the latter’s reduction to an object of action, the capitalist exchange principle, and so on.
Art is the dialectic between the form-creating principle of rationality and the mimetic impulse. Art assists the latter to fulfill itself by means of techniques and rational procedures. It represents suppressed nature solely by virtue of everything it has developed in the course of the domination of nature. If, instead of carrying through the logic of dialectic, art opts programmatically for one side or the other, it becomes null and void.
Adorno, "Form in New Music," trans. Rodney Livingstone, *Music Analysis* 27/ii--iii (2008): 209. There can be no doubt that the history of music exhibits a progressive process of rationalization. Its different stages are the Guidonian reforms, the introduction of mensural notation, the invention of continuo and of equal temperament, and finally the trend to integral musical construction, which has advanced irresistibly since the time of Bach and has now reached an extreme. But rationalization—which is inseparable from the historical process of the bourgeoisificaiton of music—represents only one of the social features of music, just as rationality itself, Enlightenment, is no more than one aspect of the history of a society that is still developing in an irrational and ’natural manner even today. Within the global development in which music shared in the progressive emergence of rationality, music at the same time always remained the voice of all who fell by the wayside or were sacrificed on the altar of the rational. This defines the central social contradiction of music, and by the same token it also formulates the tension that has driven musical productivity hitherto. By virtue of its basic material, music is the art in which the prerational, mimetic impulses ineluctably find their voice, as they enter into a pact with the processes leading to the progressive domination of matter and nature. This is the material to which music owes its ability to transcend the business of mere self-preservation, an ability that led Schopenhauer to define it as the immediate objectification of the will, and to place it at the apex of the hierarchy of the arts. If anywhere, it is in music that art rises above the mere repetition of what just happens anyway….[The irrationality administered by the culture industry] constitutes a parody of the protest against the dominance of the concept of classification, a protest of which music is uniquely capable when, as with all the great composers since Monteverdi, it subjects itself to the discipline of the rational. Only by virtue of such rationality can it transcend rationality.
Adorno, "Some Ideas on the Sociology of Music," 7.
With respect to the question of quality or dignity, and bespeaking Dialectic of Enlightenment and Negative Dialectics, Adorno describes the artwork’s moment of rationality in terms of integration and its mimetic moment in terms of resistance to that integration, such that “in artworks, the criterion of success is twofold: whether they succeed in integrating layers of material and details into their immanent law form [what Adorno usually sums up as semblance] and in this integration at the same time maintain what resists it and the fissures that occur in the process of integration. Integration as such does not assure quality.”
Despite young Adorno’s criticisms of Hanns Eisler, quality is not simply a matter of progressive rationalization or integration. Indeed, Adorno never gives Schoenberg’s composition a prominent place in his aesthetics simply because the musical means are more advanced than those of Schoenberg’s contemporaries. The fact that one might surmise this from “On the Social Situation of Music” is perhaps another source of Adorno’s reticence to reissue the early essay. In his later works especially, Adorno speaks of the dubiousness of technical progress and emphasizes a point “made with great force by Hegel in his aesthetics,” that there is no direct relationship between the progressive mastery of the material of art and the quality of particular works, meaning that one cannot simply say one composition is better than another by virtue of the degree of formal mastery.
Rather than a matter strictly of rationalization, quality, Adorno claims over and over again, is “essentially related with the structure’s own social truth-content.”
Progress is not only that of the domination of material and spiritualization but also the progress of spirit in Hegels sense of the consciousness of freedom. Whether the domination of the material in Beethoven goes beyond that in Bach can be disputed endlessly; with regard to various dimensions, each had superior mastery of the material. Although the question of whom to rank higher is idle, the same cannot be said of the insight that the voice of the maturity of the subject, the emancipation from and reconciliation with myth—that is, the truth-content—reached a higher development in Beethoven than in Bach. This criterion surpasses all others.
Adorno, *Aesthetic Theory*, 212.
Before addressing the meat of this quotation, let me first note that Adorno on several occasions speaks of truth-content with respect to Beethoven’s adagios in the final “Paralipomena” section of Aesthetic Theory, providing some of the unfinished work’s very few examples. With respect to the ascending introduction to the second theme of the Tempest sonata’s slow movement, for instance, he writes of “what is overwhelming in Beethoven’s music and that could be called the spirit of his music: hope, with an authenticity that—as something that appears aesthetically—it bears even beyond aesthetic semblance.” His argument appears to be that the “transcendent” character of the second theme is mediated by the configuration of the thematic elements into an aesthetic form—since the atmospheric first thematic complex that precedes the second theme “awaits an event that only becomes an event against the foil of this mood” and thus is essential to the latter’s double character as “reconciliation” and “promise”—but such transcendence is not immanent to the configuration or its elements. Hence his culminating claim: “In the authentic artwork, what is dominated—which finds expression by way of the dominating principle—is the counterpoint to the domination of what is natural or material. This dialectical relationship results in the truth-content of artworks.”
A related example of truth-content that Adorno mentions in the Aesthetic Theory “Paralipomena” section is the D-flat major passage from the adagio of the op. 59, no. 1 quartet. In his sketches for an unfinished book on Beethoven, he speaks of that passage much like the second theme of the Tempest. The example is meant to establish how Beethoven’s music is like Hegel’s philosophy but truer, how “it is informed by the conviction that the self-reproduction of society as a self-identical entity is not enough, indeed that is it false.” As Adorno continues, “Logical identity as immanent to form…is both constituted and criticized by Beethoven. Its seal of truth in Beethoven’s music lies in its suspension: through transcending it, form takes on its true meaning. This formal transcendence…is a representation…of hope.” How does the D-flat major passage illustrate all this? According to Adorno, “This passage appears superfluous since it comes after a quasi-retransition, after which the recapitulation is expected to follow immediately. But when the recapitulation fails to appear it is made clear that formal identity is insufficient, manifesting itself as true only at the moment when it, as the real, is opposed by the possible which lies outside identity. The Db major theme is new: it is not reducible to the economy of motivic unity.”
As these examples clarify, the truth-content that emerges from the dialectic of rationality and mimesis—truth-content qua “the emancipation from and reconciliation with myth”—points to negative dialectics qua a critique of Hegel’s philosophy of identity (the anamnesis of the violence in the thought that carries out the identification
Now it is perhaps clear what Adorno believes he failed to adequately articulate in his initial exposition of the dialectic of the musical material: that is, an account of the spontaneous truth-content that exceeds the illusion of technical integration even as it is mediated by it. To recap, through the composer’s stringent adherence to the demands of the socially “preformed” musical material (that is, through the attempt to master this material totally), the consequent composition gives voice to that which resists and destabilizes this process of rationalization and integration, revealing the wholeness of the work qua semblance to be false. In other words, such music makes manifest not only the guilt of art’s semblance character but also an aspect of semblance that is more than semblance—the truth of the suffering of all that falls victim to the social process of rationalization of which art’s autonomy is a part. It thus becomes “the organ or medium of freedom” in ways that point to communist politics. First off, it anticipates utopia in the specific sense of a rationally planned communist society that makes possible universal freedom insofar as it eliminates the fateful, irrational compulsion of privation on which accumulation is based without repressing the nonidentical. Second, it offers intimations of the bridging of the gap between theory and praxis, embodying “the qualitative leap,” the situation where what is determined by history nonetheless escapes determination, a nonrepressive practice that rejects the polarized alternatives of organization and freedom, a glimpse of life without fear that transcends the business of mere self-preservation, and so on. In sum, then, precisely in the failure of the artwork to fulfill its promise of happiness—“in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity,” for unity between “form and content, inside and outside, individual and society”
Only in light of all this does Adorno’s commitment to theory as a communist politics, articulated already in “On the Social Situation,” make any sense. As Adorno wrote in a 1934 letter to Hans Redlich:
But since I am aware of no revolution that has any form other than logical consistency, that is to say, none that has ever emancipated itself from its basis in history, and since absolutely every other procedure, every other ostensibly more radical venture that starts from scratch, takes the form of a bad utopia and for the most part simply represents a backsliding into conditions of production whose substance cannot be recreated out of pure immediacy, I am compelled to stick with logical consistency until an inconsistency makes its appearance whose own truth-content proves to be genuine.
Claussen, 157.
And only with all this in mind can one sense a strange, feeble light in the tragic, sable circumstances of Adorno’s untimely death, the cause of which is often portrayed not simply as a heart attack but as heartbreak from the conflict with his students, a political failure that has cast a shadow over his life’s work. For this irony (wherein Adorno came to be seen as the police-state authoritarian against which he always inveighed) entails another. Through his efforts to discredit his students, Adorno, much like the dialectical composer at the heart of his critical theory of music, develops an account of spontaneity congenial to their aims. “Reason is a poor ally of reaction,” Horkheimer writes in 1939 with respect to Hegel.
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