I'm working on a little project now that requires a ton of Adorno.
The exhausting quality of Adorno's work is how, given the state of the world, Adorno reads very clearly in light of his tradition (Kant, Hegel, and Marx), but the criticism and thinking that he offers is maybe three or four steps beyond common knowledge and casual agreement. Each sentence that Adorno writes is worth about three of anyone else's (maybe besides Hegel). I could describe it as an increase in some kind of theoretical weight. There's an interesting dichotomy within this, because that is balanced with a little bit of unpredictability at the paragraph level, even if each sentence is burdened with many references and technicalities. There are formal tricks, in Adorno's writing, that only make sense musically, but I digress.
There's a level of competence that I've attained over the past few years that enables me to get about 80 percent of what he says--as content--when he's talking about modern philosophy. I'm still in a similar position when reading his strictly philosophical works, such as Against Epistemology and Negative Dialectics, to the one when I first read some of his essays on music as a nascent musicologist... I initially thought that "On the Social Situation of Music" was equal parts music criticism and some kind of Marxist poetry. After some formal training in social philosophy (that is, a thousand or so pages of Marx, Weber, Freud, and Horkheimer in a couple of months), the text blew up with me on the second reading. Instead of being some technical poetry with music as the subject, it was the elucidation of a theory of identity politics with which I had, as a student and practitioner of music, never been close to articulating.
That beautiful, asystematic, and scathing contemporary socio-psychological music criticism (my immediate impression) drew me into commitment to his work. That immediacy--I'd find, after years of working on thinking and knowing--was central to his conception of "how to be." (Scare quotes, here, are because of the lack of autonomy possible in identity thinking and with the division of labor's force against normative claims. This isn't really an ethical claim, nor the epistemic one that I framed it in.) The immediacy of returning to Adorno after sharpening my Marx, then after reading Hegel's Phenomenology, is a reproducible phenomenon, a structured way of finding wonder and immediacy in the relations of the tradition to itself.
Is it not telling, though, that I can justify all of the aesthetic arguments I struggled (and failed) to offer, from the age of 15 to 25, through this construct? "Why do I like this?" "Because it immediately offered me a beauty that did violence to my own expectations of what music could be." That's not a particularly good definition of "immediacy," if I have a philosopher's hat on, so: unmediated experience that doesn't involve rationalizing it out, explaining it in the world, or being expert/layperson or inside/outside (alienated) for reasons that are inescapable in the social world.
I now have to admit a transgression: I fell asleep for a few seconds in the concert hall a few nights ago while "seeing"* a performance of Elliott Carter's Penthode. I'm copping to to this because I always try to situate myself, in experiences of music and art and even leisure, as my 15 year old self and how mind-boggling those experiences would be to him. He would have berated me for being a lame, ungrateful fuck to not give utter attention to such a unique experience. (*Scare quotes, in this paragraph, are an analog to the conductor's instructions on how to listen to the piece--by tracking the motion through the ensemble--which were given over half an hour of talking that opened the concert, and likely contributed just as much to my trance-like state as the piece began.)
I frame myself that way (as an older version of who I was) because of how much the immediacy of experience dulls as time and knowledge and worry seem to accumulate. I don't mean to point out that getting old sucks... I mean to point out that knowing more of the social world makes unmediated experience less possible, and the world becomes more predictable. (And I don't mean to throw Elliott Carter under the bus, but, when my girlfriend told me a few days earlier that we would see the piece, I said "oh, yeah, that whole conversation/dialog thing where members of the ensemble are on teams." It's only one aspect of the piece, but it is the formal one, most apparent in the "structural listening" that we practice in music. The politics of the form, hilariously--in light of Adorno and of contemporary U.S. politics--are obvious in the piece as the shattered American ideal of a discourse that cannot hold in its secular form.) When I did put my expert hat on afterwards, I came to a moment of startle when I thought: "the piece taught me nothing about the ideals of discourse... they illustrated the falsity of the aspiration behind them."
The problem of immediacy (our lack of it) is something that I see everywhere. There seems to be little "left-field" of the kind that could have existed even 10 years ago... The longer "artists" (in the musical sense) stick around, the more they tend to co-opt the Pop after having come from diverse backgrounds. The only radical thing on television is the delightfully disruptive Eric Andre Show (and is probably the only recognizable heir to the tradition of Monty Python's Flying Circus, That Mitchell and Webb Look, Wonder Showzen, and Tim and Eric). Cinema may have some contemporary examples (but the most talked about movie right now is the most ferociously terrible tribute to the lives of Angelenos themselves).
The problem is, difficultly, a semiotics of negativity that isn't yet theorized. History is crucial to the creation of the work of art, not as "paying dues," but as not retreading existing work and eliminating the sensation that your audience will have in the form "this is like x but with y" (the mathematicization of art that is simultaneous with with a genetic theory of influence, a literal proof that we can't think outside of what is already provided), or in the "I like what I'm familiar with." History in the mind of the audience builds this as a complement to history in the mind of the composer. The trace is what is literally happening, literally doable (if "faithfully" performed). The trace is the only thing that cannot be an abyss, because if it were, there would no longer be labor to create the object, and art would be nothing but nature or hallucination.
Knowing is positivity, a relation to the world as it is. It's an upvote, a story supporting your worldview, a theory that proves your empirical continuity, or a claim to novelty that's understandable somehow (which is prima facie contradictory). They should all be suspect on the grounds that the world gave them and they now, as Heidegger once said, "lie in the storerooms of the publishing house like potatoes in a cellar." A true negativity would be (and is, if even through reproduction) the thing that suspends history and society for a second or less. A true negativity would not just present what is possible, but something that isn't. That can happen at any scope and make the world into immediacy, which defeats the world and its social totality... but it, itself, is only possible with unknowing and the impossible, somewhere in a system.
Society, on the other hand, could be true negativity, unleashing art and other labor as immediate and unrecognizable, as we freely engage with it, and would lead to knowing history as nothing but the (already existing) scars of a mediated and alienating world.
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