Adorno, for Doug and Matthew

This week's episode of Zero Squared with Matthew Collin contains a very confused reading of Adorno, so I'll treat it like an essay prompt. First, I'll say that I've spent a lot of time with Adorno's work, but am not a certified "Adorno expert." Second, I had the opportunity to read Adorno first as a musicologist with a background in phenomenology, and later as I was being trained in Marxist social theory and critical theory. Through this process, I found that there is a lot in Adorno that only means something when you know all of his references; I'll simply never get there, and because of this, my interpretation of his work could be called "quite subjective." Third, the Frankfurt School has come up a lot recently on Zero Squared, and always seems to lack a voice in the discussion, because I don't think Doug (or C. Derick Varn) take them seriously as Marxists. I don't have an interest (today) in explaining the epistemological and historiographical problem of Marxist orthodoxy more deeply, but there may be some things here that are tangential to Doug and Derick's previous conversation about Jacoby's Dialectic of Defeat. Suffice it to say, for now, that I did not understand why the Frankfurt School is non-canonical Marxism. When Derick said recently that Adorno and Horkheimer are "too cultural," I had a little bit of an epistemic shock; I don't know what "too cultural" could even possibly mean, since culture is the realm of all relevant truth, everyday individual and mass action, and ideology formation. It did, recently and along with other problems, make me rethink the term "Marxism," and draw the Frankfurt School, and myself, as outside of that term for the first time. As I like to tell people in conversations about Adorno: "Marxists wait for the proletariat to wake up; Adorno says 'have you met these people?'"

Adorno and Horkheimer's Critique of Structure Itself

The topic at hand is Adorno's dismissal of popular music, which is basically one of the two things that he is most known for in his musicological writing and methods. The context of all of his dismissals (popular music, Jazz, narrative film, and basically, everyone except Beethoven and Schönberg) is the totality of his overall project, and the projects of the Frankfurt School (at least Adorno and Horkheimer) more generally. 

Adorno has a reputation in musical analysis that is at the level of infamy. His name, when it appears in the work of contemporary musicological study, invites a plethora of standardized and institutionally endorsed "fallacies," counterarguments that were forged just to delegitimize any of his viewpoints. In the same way Marx's labor theory of value is wrong because it doesn't account for the exploitation of the dead laborer, animals, and grants no human rights to corn, those who would use Adorno's method for musicological inquiry are instantly creating "an authoritarian discourse, and an asocial one," as Richard Taruskin put it in the introduction to the Oxford History of Western Music. Adorno gets a whole paragraph of being called out, forty years past his death, for ruining musicological study, in today's most authoritative and canonical history of all of Western music. Taruskin carefully chose the two words that are the exact negation of Adorno's actual work, as a way of twisting the knife (Taruskin prefers the work of Howard S. Becker, that is, his aping and dishonest reproduction of Erving Goffman's work). This has led to a game that I like to play, where count how many sentences it takes an Adornian analyst to disavow him; it usually looks something like "I don't agree with everything he says, but..." The main criticism that leads to the disavowal is the one that Collin states on the podcast: he's an elitist; I will flesh this out below.

The reason for this is that musicologists rarely have enough of a background in the actual work of the Frankfurt School, and rarely understand the project of Adorno and Horkheimer, for lack of relevance to the more analytic (opposed to continental) subdiscipline of music theory, and the largely (auto-) biographical slant of historical musicology. Simply put, the social value of music is underrepresented in the musical academy because the truths are harsh and discouraging. Adorno's work is just too negative to tell people when they are in the process of specializing in music, and dreaming of being that one in fifty humanist who actually gets the job they dream of.

Musicologists who study Adorno are rarely aware of the totality and consistency of his entire project. This is because of the diversity of his interests, and the difficulty of his arguments. When he freely interchanges Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud's terminologies, usually only to extend or tear them apart, very few musicologists can keep up (I know I can't). When philosophers or social theorists read Adorno's musical work, I don't think they get anything out of it at all. This is because the implied urgency in reasoning out a musical ethics sounds arbitrary if you are not in the "business" of "classical music."

There are two points of Adorno and Horkheimer's project that I will focus on here: first, their relentless interrogation into how fascism could be the pinnacle of modernist capitalism, and the psychological and cultural implications of it; second, their general criticism of structure as a vehicle for authoritarianism, regardless of the quality of the contents of structures.

The personal cost of fascism for the scholars of the Frankfurt School almost never comes up in any treatment of their work, even when Walter Benjamin is mentioned. But the sheer amount of thought and work that Adorno and Horkheimer put into fascist ideology, as the capitalistic ideology with the most immediacy, evidences this personal cost. Having already processed the impossibility of Marx's proposed revolution, they moved on to studying authoritarianism in general. By studying the functions of propaganda, the structure of the fascist state as a giant familial unit, and the historical fallacies that need to be held by the proletariat to be susceptible to fascism, the foundations for a cerebral resistance to fascism were in place. What Adorno and Horkheimer didn't plan on was that their exile would make them all too familiar with the privatized fascism of American consumerism. It turned out that their program for investigating fascism and authority was true for market authoritarianism; American capitalism simply shifts the authoritarianism into the private sector, a political economy that I would describe as non-totalitarian authoritarianism.

Adorno's musicology is consistent with his general conception of social structure, one that he largely shares with Horkheimer. Their fundamental structure for critique is that social formation, production, and authority are all reproductions of each other, both conceptually and practically. For Adorno and Horkheimer, the base and superstructure are a feedback loop, but this is not necessarily a feature of capitalism particularly. This theory is based equally on Marx's material history, from The German Ideology, and Freud's conception of the superego as social structure reproduced in individual subjects, from Civilization and its Discontents. This view of a minor or non-existent divide between society and individual consciousness actually caused Freud to posit that society itself can develop neuroses, but that he wouldn't be the one to prescribe a course of treatment. In similar fashion, Adorno and Horkheimer tend to look at political problems as familial problems (Horkheimer's "Authority and the Family" in Critical Theory), and advertisement as the propaganda of a "monopolistic mass culture" (Adorno, "The Schema of Mass Culture" in The Culture Industry); for them, there is no distance between the individual superego and culture.

Because there is no distance, in late capitalism, between individual identity, consumption, and production, Adorno is looking for truth values in what the producers don't know about their connection to the means of production. The fungibility of meaning (that is, social meaning is political meaning is familial meaning) makes it so every human agent that could make something is either (to put it in Adorno's Hegelian way) inside the identity of capitalism or a nonidentity. (Negative Dialectics) Since the system of production is, indeed, the bourgeois structure in its totality, any work under industrial production changes the actual meaning of music, and the structural contradictions of capitalism are embedded in the cultural meaning of industrial art. Although there is no contradiction evident to the individual composer in their environment of production, their participation in a functional, non-revolutionary institution of musical production means that they are reproducing society as music, industry as culture.

Truth values that exist in the work (in the sense of Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art," what is true in the world that the work imagines) can attach, for Adorno, to the truth values that exist in the real and social world. A good and simple example comes from Adorno's "How to Look at Television," in The Culture Industry. "Many television plays could be characterized by the soubrique 'a pretty girl can do no wrong.'" If a woman must be pretty to play the lead role (productive, consumptive truth), and convention dictates a happy ending (artistic truth), then it is merely syllogism that everything always works out for pretty girls. If the proletariat cannot identify their own chains, then what makes it likely that they'd reject such a ubiquitous but accidental truth? Why would the truth value of an advertisement for domestic normativity, the sitcom, be rejected by the proletariat, when the formal rule of sitcoms is "pseudo-realism." (ibid.) 

Here's my own, current example of the same analytic method: Meghan Trainor's three recent singles, when taken together as socially true, create a complex of ugly truths. Song 1: I'm not skinny and that's okay. Song 2: All men lie to me. Song 3: "Dear Future Husband." Simply combining the songs' artistically true messages under one personality (the brand name "Meghan Trainor") I can deduce that fat girls get lied to so much that they can only dream of having a husband in the future. And all of that is to not even analyze its blatantly reactionary musical and visual tones from the 1950's American dream. This method was reintroduced to the musicological community by Susan McClary in the late 1980s, and is currently employed in media analysis by Carol Vernallis.

Adorno as Elitist

Collin's identification of Adorno as an elitist is the obvious and most common attack leveled at him. But it is superficially true. There's actually an historical distortion here, because it is rarely understood why Adorno is so ardent a supporter of Arnold Schoenberg, and what we call Schoenberg's "emancipation of dissonance," and there are myriad misreadings of his disdain for jazz (itself, at the time, the popular music). An historically-minded, but lazy, criticism is based simply on his proximity to Schoenberg, and one can read his advocacy of Schoenberg's music as nothing more than sucking up to his teacher's teacher. But this is an oversimplification, one that serves to make a generalization where none is possible. For instance, it isn't actually Schoenberg that Adorno advocates, it is Schoenberg's pieces from 1908 to 1928. Additionally, I believe I have read that the two did not like each other personally, and didn't talk much to one another.

Second, Adorno's interest in atonal music (in which all harmonic references that were established as "correct" harmonic vocabulary from the 17th to the 19th century are avoided) is not monotonous. This is explained in his 1964 essay "Difficulties," and will become more clear with my next point. When writing about (on one hand) Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, and (on the other) John Cage, he criticizes what he sees as the main motivation of each composer: ego death in composition. Each sought a way of minimizing the role of the composer but still couldn't account for the arbitrary elements still present in their work (ego death, is, of course, death and inaction itself). Adorno saw this as the socially true powerlessness of the individual, a disregard of responsibility for the relationships of sound that the composer has always had actual freedom to choose. (To step away from Adorno for a second: Cage was clearly, explicitly interested in this distance, inspired in part by his studies of zen. It is, in my analysis, a fundamental contradiction of his work, under capitalist production, that he still put his name on his scores. Stockhausen fancied himself to be a theoretical physicist or mathematician dealing with experimental music as his field of physics, to be blunt. Boulez sounds a bit more like a structural linguist, interested in building grammars for the development of a new, expressive musical language. The later two are basically generational amplifications of the two sides of Schoenberg.)

Third, Adorno's musical analyses are more consistent within the frame of his general critique of structure. In "The Dialectical Composer" (1934), Adorno briefly explained the meaning of Schoenberg's work in a historical sense. For Adorno, Schoenberg had completely transformed musical consciousness by unleashing the contradiction of musical freedom upon musical form itself, instead of where it is normally found, the subjective will of the composer in the face of standardized modes of expression (like song form, instrumentation, decisions about the text, etc.). "Subject and object--compositional intention and compositional material--do not, in this case, indicate two rigidly separate modes of being, between which there is something that must be resolved." What Adorno is pointing to is the lack of all expectation, the creation of a musical action that is never subservient to the law of tonality (which was, itself, a standardization of the narrative expectations of the audience, and the bourgeois ideology of music). The form cannot be predicted, the conflicts embedded in the musical material are unknown, and the composer has put something into a musical language that has no grammar, but can still be spoken. A part of this observation is that there is no possibility, in free atonality, for a distinction between the ornamental and the structural; there is no necessity to satisfy anything other than the freedom of composition itself. "After Schoenberg," wrote Adorno, "the history of music will no longer be fate, but will be subject to human consciousness." By this, Adorno means "that in Schoenberg this dialectic has achieved its Hegelian 'self-consciousness,' or, better, its measureable and exact showplace: musical technology."

Two years prior, in "On the Social Situation of Music," Adorno explained that the musical language of Schoenberg's free atonality "annulled the expressive music of the private bourgeois individual, pursuing--as it were-- its own consequences, and put in its place a different music, into whose music no social function falls--indeed, which even severs the last communication with the listener." As an extension of the bourgeois musical language (tonality), Schoenberg was able to eradicate the lawfulness of structure, harmonic and temporal, from the work of music, making it impossible to conceive of in the traditional forms ("wow, that primary theme is really interesting, I wonder what will happen to it in the development section"). This is extremely technical, but, if music is a practice that can reflect other forms of human activity, this is the forging of a nonidentity, far outside of the identity supplied by the social totality. More on this point later.

Adorno's dismissal of popular music more generally is not based, as is commonly thought, on the richness of "high" music versus the vapidity of "low" music. Jazz is simply the inverse of the arguments for free atonality: jazz's structurality strives for a "perfection" of both tonal and formal structures, the complete domination of structure. The totality of a jazz leadsheet, as an immovable structure, is the invisibility of the total authority, with an offer for complete and utter freedom of the individual inside of it. Since Adorno often conceives of musical forms as the musical equivalent of social order, jazz is patently working toward bourgeois escapism in its pure form. "The improvisational immediacy which constitutes its partial success counts strictly among those attempts to break out of the fetishized commodity world which want to escape that world without ever changing it, thus moving ever deeper into its snare," Adorno wrote in his 1936 essay "On Jazz." There are other problems, such as jazz's friendliness to "sound film," its direct orientation toward the market and pleasure for the proletariat and bourgeois alike, and the development of its own, unique divisions of labor. In Adorno's view, jazz does not introduce new musical consciousness, it just gives illusions of difference through added ornamentation, both rhythmic and tonally. This is the music of the empowerment of the oppressed classes, those who don't even know that the authoritarian structure is offering them freedom (improvisation) because it cannot threaten that totalitarian structure.

Adorno's criticism and dismissal of popular music is more specifically about production. The logic behind this is that, if, for instance, the popular music industry is capable of producing sentimental or anti-status quo music, such as protest songs, it's probably a really bad sign that the message is even tolerated by the market. It is what we now recognize as a form of "ethical consumption," a market choice offered as a solution to the problem that the market created in the first place. I like to equate this to Hannah Arendt's essay "What is Freedom?" from Between Past and Future. For Arendt, the reason that the "human rights" were afforded to the subjects of bourgeois republics is because the quality of "freedom of speech" and "freedom of religion" cannot affect the structure of the republic in the first place. It is a seeming concession from the state, one that makes its subjects think that the structure of the state is there to protect them, but all of the rights it affords to its citizens are rights that never amount to a "freedom to action" in the public sphere. Republics, simply, cannot tolerate "freedom to action" because action may threaten the structure of governance, and may deconcentrate power from the ruling class, or transform bourgeois culture into something that opposes itself. Adorno recognizes that musical freedom operates in the same way. If the culture industry can produce anti-war rhetoric, itself not remotely close to action, then it is memorializing, and cashing in on, the real atrocity of war. If the market is ready for protest, we are probably worse off than we think, since it shows the ineptitude of that protest. Why, for instance, was there no marketable musical movement attacking the Iraq War in the mid 2000s? Because it was such a marginal social view that it could only attach itself to marginal musical vocabularies.

Collin brings up a great point when discussing this, by questioning the dismissal of popular music when it is politically engaging (and I must add, I feel exactly the same way about Public Enemy as Doug and Matthew did). His example is James Brown's "Say It Loud--I'm Black and Proud," and he asks why this isn't a progressive step in culture, if it allows people to be more aware of racial identity. If I can speak for (or maybe update) Adorno, it's because even the positive fetishization of blackness, through musical reflection, doesn't do anything to change the system of oppression. Epistemologically, we cannot ensure that popular music consumers will ever know anything more about race and oppression than what James Brown or Hollywood can tell them. We should not expect that positive cultural representations have ever led to a less oppressive capitalism.

This points to a larger problem that is suffered by all subaltern forms of criticism and theory, particularly non-radical feminism. Engels traced female monogamy to the need for proper dispersion of accumulated wealth at the onset of capitalist patriarchy in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Without a systematic rejection of private property, it is unlikely that capitalism will ever develop the slightest bit of gender equality. But a message of empowerment, promoting indefinite perseverance against this structure, authoritative and oppressive, solves no social ills. Shulamith Firestone takes this to its logical end in The Dialectic of Sex, showing that feminism is nothing without global socialism, global socialism nothing without radical feminism, and as long as biological difference exists, women are reproductive laborers that are classed into oppression. Of course, the quality of "radical" in that sentence is immense; her solution is the advancement of non-human birth technology, the eradication of the family, and a totally automated socialist society to eventually eliminate all labor (pardon the double entendre). Such radical structural change would assume no gender oppression to be possible.

Adorno's Endgame

Adorno, when he speaks of Schoenberg's "revolution," is hopeful that music will continue to be revolutionized, despite its inability to create revolutionary force in the social world. Often, his essays open with a reminder that the social realm is a reach too far for music, and that music cannot create its own forces for the destruction of capitalism. So in this way, Doug's understanding of Adorno's view of music is half right. Adorno wants to see musical revolution and the entry of new forms of musical consciousness as a way of proving that there are new forms of social consciousness that are possible; since the proletariat is hopeless and all politics is authoritarian, escaping the psychological components of capitalism mandate a new paradigm for revolution, one that doesn't wait for impossible proletarian revolutions or involve a planned walk through material history into the magical future.

Adorno, when tendering his "Resignation" (The Culture Industry), basically conceived of revolution itself as nothing worthy of intelligent, conscientious people: "The objection raised against us can be stated approximately in these words; a person who in the present hour doubts the possibility of radical change in society and who for that reason neither takes part in nor recommends spectacular, violent action is guilty of resignation... Political acts of violence can also sink to the level of pseudo-activity, resulting in mere theatre." Adorno knew that action against the bourgeois structure is itself bourgeois action; it is playing the bourgeois game, just on the level larger than the current game. Although he sees no hope for eradicating structural deterrents to freedom, he does tend to leave his essays with a glimmer of hope (even though it is sometimes more like a dot of hope).

Whoever thinks is without anger in all criticism: thinking sublimates anger. Because the thinking person does not have to inflict anger upon himself, he furthermore has no desire to inflict it upon others. The happiness visible to the eye of a thinker is the happiness of mankind. The universal tendency toward suppression goes against thought as such. Such thought is happiness, even where unhappiness prevails; thought achieves happiness in the expression of unhappiness. Whoever refuses to permit this thought to be taken from him has not resigned.