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.

Music and Magic, Secularization and Spirit-Power

My friend Jude recently posted a nice little meme on my Facebook wall the the prompt, "discuss:" The photo was of some generic, romantic looking score and said "music is the strongest form of magic." 

As per my usual mode, I take this kind of sloganism too seriously, because it is, in effect, really easy to paint the world in very lazy abstractions and powerless metaphors, and so, people do. Were we to replace such trivialities with more depth, more creativity, we would simply have a better, more discursive, more democratic world. And of course, I already understand how silly it is to go after seven anonymous words in a systematic way, but I would hope that the discourse below would be helpful to those who find themselves in the position to confront these erroneous and terrible simplifications, especially when they are in dialog with music professionals who are trapped in these lazy modes of thought.

Commence bourgeois rationality and overly analytic argumentation: the statement makes two simultaneous direct claims, one ontological (that music is magic), and one evaluative (that it is the strongest magic). There is also a claim to be analyzed as an implicit suggestion arising from its image (that music is old scores in a bundle). The last one is preposterous enough, and a quick search of this blog for "Heidegger" will bring up my standard quote for arguments about the ontology of the score.

If we, for a moment, take the ontological claim as truth and focus on the evaluative claim, we see little more than Plato's hierarchy of the arts in the Republic. There, Plato develops his "art imitates life" aesthetics by judging the closeness of the reflection of life, as given through each category of art. Music is the highest form of art because it is the most representative of itself; it reflects life through what he thought was pure emotion, where architecture, for instance, doesn't so much reflect life, but is an ornamentation of a necessity for shelter (even if it is shelter for a deity). Further, in Book III of the Republic, Plato makes it well known that the affective work of music is dangerous, because it is so easy to translate affect into action. This leads to Socrates' idealistic ban on particular modes, scales, and instruments. This line of thought is still rampant in Western culture, but it is only as true as social fact can support it in a particular place and time.

A good way to test Plato (on the general and universal affective power of music) is to play songs on a jukebox in a bar that specifically repudiate the assumed identity of the bar and/or its patrons. If Plato's concerns are still valid, the music will transmit some overwhelming emotional power and reshape the individuals' character. Putting techno on in a country bar will be problematic, but not because the music is doing some emotional violence as music... It is about individuals taking over the physical space with sound waves and imposing their individual musical will on the other patrons who are not sympathetic to the music (for a handful of reasons that are ultimately social truths). Authoritarianism, for Socrates, is a generative force for control; the techno fan in the country bar is attempting the same coup, just without the power to do so.

Music is uniquely suited for such experiments not because of its universal qualities, but because of its universal portability. I am not necessarily interested in making this argument purely about mediums and materials, but it should be clear that the definitive ontological qualities of music, its relationship to the voice, and its ability to happen anywhere there is air, form the basis for music's specificity. Any claim that would evaluate music's "strength" against other forms of art or ritual or production would necessarily address the ontology of music, and work out to social truths at every level. The "capital t Truth" that Plato is looking for is an essentialist cage (befitting, as he could very well be called the inventor of essentialism). The universal essence of Beauty and Art, is, obviously, an illusion, since it is not capable accessing socially constructed truth. If art defines itself locally and socially, it is more likely that relative truth, from medium to medium, genre to genre, requires an interest in the emotions being reflected, the knowledge of the production process, &c. Without being able to see the larger picture of freedom of creation and freedom of interpretation, generalizations about the work of art become authoritarian and arbitrary, just as Plato's do. So goes analytic philosophy to this day, and so reads the meme. Strike one: music is nothing without relative social truths, so music cannot be evaluated against other art objects, at least not without a great deal of specificity.

The specificity that is offered by the image, does, however, suggest that Western music as noted in Western notation is the music which is magic. We need only note this, that the slogan is pointing toward the common practice period composers, because it suggests a disconnect with particular modes of production. That is to say, it attempts to make all composers into Mozarts, gifted prodigies with mystical powers for creating great art. And of course, such a model makes Beethoven look like he was ill-suited for being a composer, because his work was laborious, not magical.

And here is the fun part: the syllogistic truth that music is magic. Western languages, since Greek, have a marked distinction in the form, source, and direction of power, but the two do overlap, or at least may overlap (depending on how socially true it can be made). Mousikos, from which we get music, is the techne of the Muses, the art through which the muses can be brought into the world. The word magikos, on the other hand, is the art done by the learned man, the magos, the mage. In this sense, it is possible to envisage the overlap, as magic could be the embodiment of a Muse, performed by a mage.

It is unsurprising that the two would fit together in pre-modern European culture, not to mention all non-European cultures (which developed radically different local truths). Of course, due to the conflation of magic with illusion (which did not happen until the mid-19th century), magic is, ironically, weakened to the point of embarrassment. We must, in our defining and basic apprehension of this word, remember that today is indeed today, and that the meme suggests a possible conflation of music with illusion, as much as with ritual.

As an adumbration to a point below: illusion fulfilled itself as a grand performance art in the 18th century, as secularized magical ritual in the wake of the enlightenment, which had caused the emancipation of culture from religion. This transformation corrupted "magic," alienating it from that which gave it its ritual power. Before magic became illusion, it may have been impossible to claim that music was mysterious in a dismissive way, but in modern parlance, conflating music and magic certainly strives toward trickiness and falsehood contained in music, the negation of illusion.

But is music still magic, or capable of being magical, in the classical sense? The historical development of music, magic, and social life is speculative, but important. To address such an issue, I'll refer to two musician/philosophers with different points of view on what is important about the separation of music and magic: Theodor Adorno and Dane Rudhyar.

Dane Rudhyar (1895--1985) is a scarcely known French-American musician, philosopher, composer, painter, poet, novelist, theosopher, and astrologer. I have recently been studying his text, which is often called Art as a Release of Power (1928--1930), a series of seven essays that describe an entire, unique philosophical system. Rudhyar's most important influences are Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler, author of Decline of the West (1918). Rudhyar's thought, like Adorno's, is an unspecialized series of interpretations making up a full model of the world, disrespectful of limits to the work that can be done in speculative thought. For Rudhyar, the only thing worth talking about, in the end, is the power for humans to build their metaphors and develop them into actions that support a "universal brotherhood." In a few shining moments in these essays, Rudhyar encapsulates the project of Marxist cultural speculation, while still being somewhat apart from that tradition.

The beginning of Rudhyar's book looks for the homologue between musical intervals and social organization, and explains that consonance and dissonance are, when mapped onto society, tribal and pluralistic, respectively. Working through this lens, and always being careful to make positive analogies that facilitate a better, more universal world, Rudhyar later works through an entire theory of history, a la Spengler, with "spirit-power" at its core. Spirit-power is the work of individuals, through sacrifice, to bring a new idea to the world, and for that idea to expand to its greatest possibility in a culture or civilization. Instantly distinguishable in Rudhyar's conversation is the role of theological thought, and the language of spirituality, which he scrupulously redefines in a way of reclaiming what was lost through the secularization of Western culture. Deniz Ertan, writer of Dane Rudhyar: His Music, Thought, and Art, is fully aware throughout her analysis, that Rudhyar's work is somewhat unbecoming of a modernist philosopher, which contributes greatly to the lack of scrutiny given to his philosophical work.

Rudhyar asks specifically, in his essay "Art as a Release of Power," "what is magic?" He feels the weight of illusion's commingling with magic: "The word has become the synonym of fraud and charlatanism; and this is most unfortunate, because it was an excellent word which expressed perfectly well etymologically and otherwise an idea which the world needs intensely today." He continues with his definition, stating that "magic is merely the release of power through an efficient form by an act of will. It is in fact life itself; but life in terms of human characteristics, destiny and will-power." (emphasis original) In Rudhyar's mind, the concept of magic was a way of bringing form to abstractions. Gods that never existed were made real, visible, and touchable by art; their constituent powers gave power in the minds of man.

An example he gives in subsequent pages is an Indonesian dagger where the handle is the image of a "weird and monstrous face," a god of war or hunting. "... is [the dagger maker] attempting to create 'beauty?' Indeed not. The word probably means nothing to him. What he wants is to conjure the elemental power whose cosmic function is to kill, to force this power to incarnate into his sword; why?... so that the sword may kill better." There is power, built of abstractions, that needs to be willed by humans to make it real. This fits perfectly with the Greek sense of magic, since the dagger maker is a learned man, making a practical art from his knowledge, bringing it into the world to do physical, actual work.

Rudhyar argues that the loss of the sense of magic turns Western art into impractical, needless prettiness (earlier, he stated that Western art is better at building ornate frames than it is at building paintings to go in them). He would rather art be filled with this power, spirit-power, created by individuals and for all who would join in with the artist to sustain power and gestures of meaningfulness. Of course, if we are capable of such powerful acts, we are responsible for using it in an ethical manner, to benefit civilization (the entirety of humanity) by releasing them from the limits placed on their social relations. Such a world starts with pluralism, the full acceptance of individual difference (dissonance, harmony), and not sameness (consonance, the womb).

The difference between this view of the world and Adorno's is fundamentally tied to their respective differences in the theory of history. Where Rudhyar would say that the spirit-power of individuals to transform the world is always possible (but often defeated by reactionary ideas), Adorno's negative dialectics show that not all historical ideas can form a synthesis with each other, and hence, progress and development can stop. He creates the negative dialectic of secularization in the opening essay of Aesthetic Theory (1961--1969 [1997]), "Art, Society, Aesthetics."

"The basic levels of experience that motivate art are related to those of the objective world from which they recoil... The act of repulsion must be constantly renewed."(AT, 6) The way Adorno sees art's role in society is a reflection of what is not in the world. It is then, the individual who creates their own world, with bits of the world (material: bricks, scores, frames). This means that art strives for autonomy from the entire world, repudiating the world as it exists for a world its own. In this, the realm of the sacred was an historical fact, and art sought freedom from the sacred by employing the profane. The synthesis of the profane with art allowed it to find new types of autonomy, clean of the lies of religious metaphysics. Adorno would be referencing, here, Beethoven and Schoenberg, more than anyone else.

Beethoven's profanity was his autonomy from the church, throughout his career, whereas Mozart only gained that autonomy in the latter third of his life. Without needing to serve a metaphysical lie, Beethoven's life was the repudiation of the economic and social world (freelancing fairly unsuccessfully), and so, his music was also the repudiation of the contemporary bondage of form. (See Rose Rosengard Subotnik, "Adorno's Diagnosis of Beethoven's Late Style.") Schoenberg, on the other hand, was repudiating the world of tonality, the bourgeois common sense of music, and creating its antithesis. By doing so, Schoenberg, for Adorno, was able to create a secularization of music itself, not against the sacredness of a religious metaphysic, but against music's accepted ruling language of consonance and dissonance in moderation.

"[The] realm of the sacred is objectified, effectively staked off, because its own element of untruth at once awaits secularization and through conjuration wards off the secular."(AT, 6) This, to bring back Rudhyar's Indonesian dagger, is the process of looking at the handle as if it was beautiful, that the handicraft of the maker was somehow valuable, regardless that the subject that adorns it never existed. In this way, the objects of the world, for Adorno, lose their power because they are no longer true or universal. I doubt that Rudhyar would disagree; Adorno's social criticism often lacks his own position, to a perilous extent, and it makes it hard to figure out what he is looking for in this process. Besides, Adorno had already tenured his "Resignation" in The Culture Industry, saying that there is no positive action that seems to matter in the field modern social thought.

In Adorno's "Theories on the Origin of Art," (AT, 331) the dialectic of enlightenment is brought in as his overarching historical force:

... strict positivism crosses over into the feeblemindedness of the artistically insensible, the successfully castrated. The narrowminded wisdom that sorts out feeling from knowing and rubs its hands together when it finds the two balanced is--as trivialities sometimes are--the caricature of a situation that over the centuries of the division of labor has inscribed this division in subjectivity. Yet feeling and understanding are not absolutely different in the human disposition and remain dependent even in their dividedness. The forms of reaction that are subsumed under the concept of feeling become futile enclaves of sentimentality as soon as they seal themselves off from their relation to thought and turn a blind eye toward truth; thought, however, approaches tautology when it drinks from the sublimation of the mimetic comportment.

Thus, we can see Adorno conflicted about the dialectical nature of enlightenment, which sought to free the West from religious lies and supplant it with empirical harshness, because it may have ripped away the possibility of feeling and emotion along with it. In this sense, the conception of music losing its magical process, having been secularized into l'art pour l'art, possibly cut itself off from a considerable amount of feeling itself, and ironically, perfected itself in a scientific manner. The irony here, is supplied by Adorno's interest in Hegel's "end of art," that art may have only been possible at a particular moment in history. Great art, says Adorno, was a feature of a secular society, because it was able to detach from the lies.

Again, the difference between Adorno and Rudhyar comes to a historiographical difference: where Adorno believes that art freed itself from lies and developed itself as a great form during this period, Rudhyar sees music and art as the Prodigal Son, who has wandered away and felt the harshness of the world, and would presumably be better off reunited with his source of power. I think a shorthand for explaining the differences of the two philosophers can be given by how seriously they take Niezsche's Madman, which I will reproduce below for those who have not read it in full. Rudhyar is interested in reestablishing what made us spiritual, but doing it now, on our terms, without an unobservable metaphysic controlling us. Since we are in control of the character of our society, if we were all to act in a universal manner, one which promotes difference and cooperation, society would change. It is now only a "seed-idea," one that needs to develop to its fullest possibilities, one that art could channel into action in the world.

Adorno's focus is more detailed and directed to what he calls the "dual character" of art, that its only options in modern life are to either be a commodity or cultural authority:

For a society in which art no longer has a place and which is pathological in all its reactions to it, art fragments on one hand into a reified, hardened cultural possession and on the other into a source of pleasure that the customer pockets and that for the most part has little to do with the object itself.

In this sense, the work of society, its irrational relations and structure, make art ineffective as a transmission of power. Because of this ineffectiveness, the superstructure and base both need to change to enable art to have a revolutionary character, one that has been stifled by the negative dialectics offered by the enlightenment. That is to say, under the current conditions, the ideas of the ruling class are too difficult to defeat. Rudhyar's point would be that there just has not been enough power invested in defeating them.

So, I suppose, if I must create an answer here, I must say that the two of these philosophers (whose viewpoints are companionate, that is, work dialogically and never break the ability for their ideas to be discussed together) assume that the time for good ideas is just historically not now. With more and more force to secularize and lose individual power in art, Rudhyar placed his thoughts in the world to reinvigorate "the new man" (a direct resynthesis of Nietzsche's ubermench), of whom there are few. Adorno worked to make better terms of social analysis in the popular consciousness, of which, a few have stuck; ultimately, the forces of the ruling class are not seeming shaky, and we have changed little in the past 150 years.

Is music magic? The problem is that people want it to be, for the wrong reasons. There are still pedagogs in the academy that believe and transmit this to their students, so that they can perpetuate a sense of doubt, one that is usually conflated with pluralism. The reason for this doubt is to keep people from committing to music, or justice, or revolution, or anything. When people are not committed to their ideals, they are easily controlled by others. Those others are sometimes Lacan's Big Other, sometimes "bourgeois stinking life" (as Rick Roderick called it), or worse, they are individual authoritarians basking in their dualities.


Epilogue, Nietzsche's Parable of the Madman:

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!"---As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?---Thus they yelled and laughed

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him---you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us---for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars---and yet they have done it themselves.

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"

Source: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, 1887) para. 125; Walter Kaufmann ed. (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp.181-82.]

Estranged Art Labor, the Ontology of Interpretation, and the Ethics of Musical Consumption

Aesthetics, that branch of analytic philosophy that tries to tease out the formal logic of art, has often boxed itself into a model of the art object that can be essentialized, eternal, and logical. The primary mode of determining the essence of a class of objects is perpetually strained by the need to unseat art from the world and find unworldly, transcendent truth, and requires the deletion of the human subject as viewing the art object.

Because of this complication, the art object usually needs to be found in the object itself, divorced from its social situation in the real world, as well as divorced from the art laborers, who presumably would provide some answers about the "logic" of art. In Arthur C. Danto's article "The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense," the philosopher gives a compelling case that aesthetics is no longer capable of dealing with art. The argument stems from his interpretation of art in the 1960s, where art was perfectly capable of defining itself without the aid of formal logic (this 6'×6'×6' block of chocolate is indeed, just chocolate; this 6'×6'×6' block of chocolate is art because it resides in a gallery). The frame, as sociologist Erving Goffman would point out, is what gives a social structure to the object and the presentation in a way that defines its function and the identities and roles of the actors. Since social frames are, indeed, explicitly social, formal logic and essences have little to contribute to understanding the difference between art objects and any other. It is the personal meanings of objects, and how actors bring them to interpret the objects that define art, it's influence, and even its existence.

It will suffice, presently, to mostly leave the realm of the difference regarding objects and art objects. I will mention Heidegger's conception just to clarify that such distinctions are easily understandable in ontologically oriented discourse. In "The Origin of the Work of Art," Heidegger works toward an art object as having both material and nonmaterial existence, with the material being nothing more than a means (equipment) for the work of art to build that nonmaterial component, itself the artistic component of the art. A score of Beethoven's String Quartets, as he says, "lie in the publisher's storeroom like potatoes in a cellar." It is the immaterial constitution of the pieces, our imagination of them as an entity, their performance, their historical significance, the theory of their construction etc., that make them art.

One way that Beethoven's art objects share in the 6' by 6' by 6' cube of chocolate is the labor in creating the piece, labor in performing it, labor in hosting the performance, etc. ad nauseum. The labor characteristic of objects is a universal in both art objects and mundane equipment. Just because it is a universal, however, does not mean that we are talking about an essentializable character... It is historically and culturally particular in all instances. Unraveling the material history of any artwork, or better yet, social structures for work in the arts, will guarantee a solid foundation for understanding the art object, the people who make them, and how interpretation for the subject arises and proceeds.

Terry Eagleton, with his materialist aesthetics and literary criticism in Criticism and Ideology, figured that any piece could be understood most fully in these terms, by tracking ideologies that are embedded (he would say produced) in literary works by the productive realities around them. Vulgar as it may seem in reference to his project, or better yet, to Marx's project on which I will rely heavily, our task here will be to pinpoint the ontology of art through leveling of all laborious production. Fundamental characteristics of labor do matter in particular, but also in general, as a structure of objects leading to their social identity, use-value, and interpretation more broadly. I will work toward this end despite the ability for the conversation to fall into banality. The connections here (the relationship between the art laborer and their production, the interpretation of their work, and its valuation) may be obvious, and may have just spent the last 160 years being subtext to all works on artistic ontology. Since these points are not identifiable as "common sense," I will proceed as if I have something valuable to say.

Estranged Art Labor:

The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.

When Marx proceeded through the logic of production and what it means to the laborer, he assumed the position that labor is wage labor and that the means of production made the producers alienated from their work. Of course, the majority of labor (at least, the majority of the Western economy) does fall into this category, and has, unrelentingly, since Marx's time. What Marx may have missed was that estrangement is systemic in non-wage labor, that is, contracted, project-based, artistic, and free production, as well. The reason for this blind spot is the ubiquity of objectification in all forms of production, and Marx's criticism is largely about a lack in capitalist economy's ability to logically establish the valuation of an inescapable feature of human life: objectification itself.

There remains an unclear boundary in Marx's work, one which he would probably simultaneously reject and endorse. On the positive side: his analysis is about how political economy treats the objectification of labor, or more pessimistically, has no ethical system for valuation. The structures that exist in production all seem to set up a "war amongst the greedy -- competition." Social/political/economic structures, as in the case of all structures, have the capacity for a establishing an ethical judgment inside of them, but in our historical moment, never develop one; Adorno's project of watching late capitalism become valorized beyond the point of redress becomes the guide for how the development of equitable systems and fair judgments has become impossible over the past century. But Marx's consideration of political economy as a greedy war shows a conception of monopolistic capitalism, not anarchistic or early or reformist capitalism. The social structure, as his optimism and rationality still holds, could tolerate a certain amount of equitable, humane treatment of labor (or else he would have never been politically active, just as Adorno was "resigned" from activism; see "Resignation" from The Culture Industry). It did not develop to do so because of capitalist ideology, which has no drive toward fair or logical behavior.

Of course, Adorno finds fault in the production itself, as nothing more than the extension of the greedy market: 

What philosophy once called life, has turned into the sphere of the private and then merely of consumption, which is dragged along as an addendum of the material production-process, without autonomy and without its own substance. Whoever wishes to experience the truth of immediate life, must investigate its alienated form, the objective powers, which determine the individual existence into its innermost recesses... But the relationship of life and production, which the latter degrades in reality into an ephemeral appearance of the former, is completely absurd... The reduced and degraded essence bristles tenaciously against its ensorcelment in the façade. The change of the relations of production itself depends more than ever on what befalls the 'sphere of consumption,' the mere reflection-form of production and the caricature of true life: in the consciousness and unconsciousness of individuals. Only by virtue of opposition to production, as something still not totally encompassed by the social order, could human beings introduce a more humane one.

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, "Dedication."

Adorno perceives the structure and the outcome as inseparable, and tracks the social change toward consumption and away from production as an outcome of capitalist ideology. This added value to the conversation is not lost here in my critique, but it is still impractical to follow through every step. In this essay, I will grant a certain amount of autonomy to individuals, that is, the freedom to make choices about their own consumption, and believe that it is possible and important for individuals to at least make basic ethical decisions. I also recognize the fault in my assumption.

Further, contemplating estrangement and alienation is not a search for essential truth, it is only the search for that quality of an object, a commodity, in capitalism.  Marx's clear interest is in the qualitative value of the objects created by laborers, but sold by the owner of the factory. The unreconcilable inequity of wage labor is at the core of Marx's critique.

...Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each... On leaving this sphere of simple circulation or of exchange of commodities, which furnishes the “Free-trader Vulgaris” with his views and ideas, and with the standard by which he judges a society based on capital and wages, we think we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but — a hiding.

Karl Marx, Capital vol. I, chapter 6.

This ultimately defines the necessity to look to the objects of labor: political economy masquerades as the freedom and inalienable rights of both parties to build objects together. The objects, as well as the actors, must be understood in dialog with one another, but there is undeniably an illicit question to pose to capitalist ideology regarding the quality of these relationships. In fact, the inalienable rights of the laborer and the owner are instantly challenged by the alien nature of the produced object. It is owned by the owner throughout the process: they own the material to build, the labor that builds it, and the material that is built.

I've been thinking about this, in part, because of an episode of Douglas Lain's podcast Diet Soap, On Episode #220, "Marx's Reluctant Idealism," Douglas and his guest Andy Marshall work through Marx's critique of Hegel, and the theory of alienation seems to be a sticking-point for the two of them. Marshall's reaction to the concept was extraordinarily similar to my own reaction the first time I read through the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. It almost seems as though Marx is being a little touchy about the work of the laborer. It feels like Marx is saying that wage labor sentimentally detaches man from his production, which makes him spiritually bankrupt, whether or not he is making enough to escape monetary bankruptcy. Alienation from the world of objects, while capitalist production (as a social system) is continuously only concerned with such activities and their (random) outcomes, makes the laborer fundamentally detached from his own inner-life and creativity, and treats him as equipment to be sold, a commodity on a market, and leaves him to fend for himself in when it comes to the authority of the capitalist who bought him.

If man produces for a capitalist, as Marx points out, then he is not producing for himself in any way other than collecting the wages agreed upon in his contract. The more productivity that he introduces into the system, the less valuable his work is and the lower the quality of his contracted labor. Technology accelerates the process for the capitalist; with more robotic-type functions in the labor market, pushing one button may trigger the labor of what would have been hundreds of man-hours just a few decades ago. The unchanging ownership of the objects, the machinery to create them, and the drive to expedite this process is the fundamental concern of Marx throughout the beginning of Capital Vol. I. This is the key aspect that leads the creation of wealth in the capitalist political-economy (also known as the labor theory of capital).

But what is the difference between a laborer who does own their material and this laborer who must contract their labor explicitly? And specifically, what of the laborious manufacture of art? Since Mozart's arrival in Vienna in 1781, the role of the musician has been primarily as a freelancer. This socio-productive aspect has largely held for these past two centuries, and artists have been largely responsible for their own materials. There is a clear complication in the institutional support of academic artists, one that we will not delve into here. The objects of artistic creation still share fundamental identities related to the labor of producing art, which itself, does not greatly change under the contemporary conditions of academic patronage.

The Semiotic Model of Interpretation and the Necessity of Alienation:

At the core of the art object is the same process of alienation as in any other labor: work is objectified, and in some ways, can no longer belong to the artist. This process is inherent in the work simply by being "a work," a product already produced. In Marx's treatment of this process, every attempt is made to not go back to a primordial state of man to try to find the "nature" of production, since production, ethics, and economy are all historically and culturally specific. The production of music, just as any other object, creates the ability to transcode historical and cultural information with the work of the composer. This is often placed under the heading of "style," the things in the music which give a sense of an author, a period, the cultural function of music, the ideologies behind it, etc. 

In the musical semiotics model of Jean Jacques Nattiez (see Music and Discourse), this feature of the work is called the poietic level of the work. Streams of information that relate the author to their work build relationships between socio-historical facts and the identity of that particular work; knowing that Mozart was no longer working for the church, but was working for individual commissions, changes the information about how the music was written, what inspired it, and how the work must have unfolded. Musical elements can be tracked throughout the oeuvre of an a composer, an historical moment, or any other identifiable class of seemingly similar works. This process looks like a fuller conception of Eagleton's materialist criticism, because it would also take into account any non-material (that is, isolated philosophical and biographical) concerns, as more particularity about (dialectical) relationships formed by the art object, the viewer, the artist, and ideology. 

In the semiotic model, we can see that the author's world is imprinted into the object, but that alienation gives the ability for the object to be interpreted. The art object, in other words, is only one third of the equation, the thing that builds a relationship between the viewer of the art object and the author. Nattiez calls this the trace, the thing that is objectified labor, waiting for its birth as an object of discourse and relationship-building. The objectification process, in other words, is the process of becoming a part of the objective world (the world of things) by ceasing to represent only the author, and their situation. Objectification leads to valuation.

Certain aspects of Western music culture, however, point to a more marked and specific type of objectification than just an ephemeral or transcendent relationship: the score. Music literacy (which is taught in the academy under the title "music") places the primary function of musical expression on the interpretation of a performer, since the artist has already created the work. It is finished and objectified, except for the interpretational layers that are waiting for the performer to enable them. An interesting problem arises in performative interpretation, because it highlights a theoretically inherent ambiguity in all music and assumes that the performer is necessary not to simply convey what the artist has fixed into an object, but instead, resolve the ambiguity that is inherent in the notational system. In this sense, where composition would be what Husserl would call "pure music," the extension of a representational system of what can happen in music, the performer could achieve a state of "pure music performance," where they could possibly extend the meaning of the performative representation without violating the musical instructions. I've written at length on that subject on this blog before.

The locus of musical literacy and historical knowledge is a necessity for the "correct" interpretation to be deciphered by the performer and executed, which is itself a particularization of the work that becomes yet another laborious object. Estrangement, in other words, is happening twice in the performance of the Western canon: first, for the composer, who imbues an object with the artistic information that they can, and second, for the performer, who must imbue a performance with their interpretation of the composer's instructions. Beethoven has no control over how his work is performed today... he is dead. Experts and scholars can take a number of historical and social approaches to building systems of performative ethics, which tease out musical elements and streams of information into a hierarchy of importance and "correctness" of playing. These systems vary according to a number of metanarratives that govern all socio-historical ethics, and I base them on William G. Perry's theory of ethical development, with a great deal of conjecture added based on my observations of musical culture. (A companion set of observations for the music listener will be found at the conclusion of this post)

1) The dualist ethic: historiographical concerns in the dualistic mode move toward an historically accurate performance, such that the performance attempts to re-create the piece as it would have been premiered (often an impossibility because of historical distance); if it does not employ all characteristics of the historicity of the piece, it is incorrect. This is often the level of academics, having heard at some point what the correct way of playing was at a particular time, and they accepted it as the main outcome of a performer.

2) The multiplicitous ethic, marked by virtuocity, where the performer centers performance on their own prowess and bringing attention to their physical appearance, individual concern for the craft of producing music, and often, a drive toward the continuation of (often outdated) social practices; the multiplicitist knows that anyone could play music, but they must, themselves, do it better than anyone else to establish their own gratification (often as sublimated sexual desires) and authority; they defend their own authority over their work, since there seem to be so many options for how to play the piece but they do it for themselves, but will quickly submit to authority greater than their own (again, creating symbioses with sublimated sexual drives).

3) The relativist ethic, which is based on the understanding that there are indeed historical movements and styles that are options for any performance, but that any could be utilized. Relativist ethics are extraordinary open to different compositional and performative situations, but lack a decisive valuation of material. This ethical stage is correlative to a performer who will play because of difference or newness, and is attracted to those qualities in the work, because the performative experience offers another viewpoint that may be new. Often, however, such situations lead to reductive playing (just the pitches and rhythms), since the situation is different but not specifically attached to distinctive historical or contextual cues for successful performance. Successful performance is usually, in the relativist ethic, based on extramusical factors, such as communicating a "radical" message, or performing something to make people think that it is esoteric or "weird."

4) The committed ethic, characterized by a reliance on the freedom of interpretation and the application of a "presentist" mentality, where the performer socially and historically centers performance on contemporary philosophies and social structures in an attempt to reproduce the piece with a greater sense of relevance. This performer understands the labor of performance and composition as a cooperative relationship between people (composer, performer, and audience) in which meaning is freely established.

The existence of different modes of interpretation highlight the alienation of the composer and the distance between their will, as embodied in the musical object, and the will of those who would reproduce the works. At its core, the development of different performative ethics is only possible with alienating the composer from their work, because even a staunchly "composer intent" ethic assumes that the musical object cannot be repurposed or transfigured into other meanings. Were this the case, the score would not have any ambiguity in it, and the musical representation system (notation) would have probably developed to eliminate ambiguities if they were somehow a problem to the greater structure of musical performance and literacy.

Nattiez also refers to the esthesic level, the streams of information that arise from the interpretation of those works. The estrangement of the composer, who provided the initial labor and hence, the original intentions of the piece, are now met by the ambiguities of the object, and require the streams of information given by interpretation to decipher these ambiguities. The ethical situation of that interpretation is itself historical and social. The ethical interpretation of music can be fleshed out from any particular musical culture, individual choices, and style ideologies. These categories are, from my observations, the existent Western classical performative ethics (itself historical and cultural in name and content). As ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino has pointed out in Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation, Western music culture is closely correlated to the capitalist mode of production: the function of music tends to be presentational, in a concert hall, because of the capitalist ideology of specialization; virtuosity is played up in capitalist cultures because of the ideology of the individual agent competing against the market; etc. Each facet of the social world that impacts the mode of production has musical consequences, and implies certain ethical systems that maintain music as a social institution, which explicitly socializes participants into an homologous structure that is just a subset of wider socio-cultural norms, as well as the contributing pedagogical necessity that leads to prolonging those norms.

Private Art Property:

Because of the homologous social nature of musical work as labor, cultures have had property rights built into the musical object in every tradition, even when a lack of property rights is what is encoded in musical objects. Anonymous composition is more indicative of traditional cultures, where communal property and collaborative production are more common modes of production. One tradition that falls into this category, and that I am familiar with is, the Central Javanese classical tradition, where composers basically never signed their name to a composed piece before the mid-twentieth century, since the music is culturally, communally, owned, as a portrayal of their social history and religions. This trend has changed, however, as Westerners have done a great deal of archival research and transcription, wanting to know a bit more about the genealogy of pieces for the historical record, and master musicians find themselves in teaching positions in the United States and the United Kingdom.

"Intellectual property," on the other hand, is an indicator of private property rights, and restriction of performance on the grounds of social institutions such as the market, labor, and ownership of the means of production. Even in Western culture, the musical work as property was markedly different for a composer who worked under patronage of the church, since the music would become communal property of the church for the edification of the congregation or the glorification of God. The historical move from feudalism to capitalist accumulation is mirrored (albeit much later, in historical terms) by Beethoven's lack of church patronage and individualistic move toward his own musical desires and goals. Without being able to mass-publish his works, his desire to write for an audience that may not exist for fifty years after his death points directly to the newfound emphasis on private property in European culture, and specifically the "liberal period." These attitudes simply hadn't existed in previous centuries, since the branding of working for posterity was condemned by the Catholic Church as immoral (see Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism).

The conception of ownership for Beethoven was spiritual in nature, about the authority and prestige of the individual composer, and this conception has had serious longevity in Western culture. As this concept of intellectual property has moved from an entirely spiritual and artistic (transcendent realm), into a legal and monetary realm, we see the ability for the commercialization of art that happened in the early twentieth century. The ownership function in music has dictated social function, use cases, and technological development in musical labor. The radio transmission of music prompted the public to buy records of their favorite tunes, reforming the social work of musical performance into a new venture, with capital at its core. This fundamentally undermined the previous commodity of music: sheet music. Of course, this material change has a distinct repercussion, which changes the music listener into a passive conduit, instead of a participating laborer in the creation of music (even if it is just playing and singing in the parlor).

On the industrial side, however, ownership is ever in the favor in the owner of the means of production. Even though the record industry utilized technology that lead to a greater freedom of "reproducing" (in Benjamin's sense of the word) performances by placing an object on the record player, the social formation of musical work in creating those objects developed to devalue the work of most musicians. Throughout the first 70 years of commercial music making, there are horror stories of the undervaluation of musical labor, stemming from the conception of what it means to "write" a copyrighted song: the owners of musical property are generally the persons who wrote the vocal melody and the words; studio musicians, musicians who play instruments on recordings (often without billing or recognition) were regularly given a flat fee for their services, which often involved writing a novel part for their own instrument. Despite being a presumably equal member of the group (their contribution to the recording is musically equivalent to the writer of the vocal melody), studio musicians rarely, if ever, were able to collect royalties on their work. They had no protection under the law because they did not own the means of producing the musical commodity, and received the contracted amount of money, with no say in how their musical labor manifested once it was controlled and distributed by the culture industry. Thus, the musicians who fell into this category became classed as "studio musicians," a type of musician whose function was not stardom or branding, but exploitation through music production technology, which sought increase the speed by which music was created and drive down the wages of performing musicians.

The estrangement of the art object allows this treatment in the same way all estranged labor makes it impossible for the laborer to own their product, to continue gaining from their own labor and its formation of commodities in the market. The law (in America, the whole of corporate interest enshrined by the ruling class while masquerading as empirical judgement by the proletariat) developed to protect intellectual property, including musical commodities, in the same way the owner of factories are recognized to have both the liability and the right to profit on the produced commodity. This right involves the use of the commodity in a way determined by a corporate entity or owner, to be exhibited only under completely restricted conditions, set by the owner.

And it is in this way that the estranged object finds itself presented for explicitly capitalist functions: licensing for use in other conglomerate works (film and television), use in advertising for lending meaning to another product (in the tradition of fascist propaganda), and the rights to distribution in physical or digital media. In regards to this last item, the consumer is limited in the ways that they may use the work, and, as we have seen develop in the past two decades of American law, are only purchasing a license that entails private contemplation of the object, and not a physical copy of the musical work. 

On the other hand, the law, as we have also seen, has been powerless to combat the privatization of the musical object, once it became portable through digital technology. Intellectual property, in other words, was designed for objectified labor alone, presuming that a physical medium was necessary to convey the musical object. Protecting the property rights of individual artists, unknowingly, was only feasible when the labor was physically objectified into a unique medium, a physical medium, not a digitally encoded one.

The Ethics of Having:

Intellectual property rights are clearly backed by legal ethics, which seek to make sure that labor is valued properly (that is, by the market) and that piracy does not make freely available that which should cost the end-user directly. It is a fundamental pillar of the rule of law in Western society. This is because of the valuation of success and deserved compensation are only measured in monetary forms throughout capitalist ideology. How, indeed, would you know your musical work is successful without a trade group like Billboard counting how many legal copies of your music were sold by legitimate retailers? For academic composers, if you are not being paid commissions for your new works, how well could you really be doing at your job? This viewpoint, however traditional and accepted it may be, has not been the focus of the music consumers since the inception of peer to peer file sharing in the late 1990s.

From the opposite direction, ethical consumption was never the goal of music fans, and as soon as technology allowed the consumption of all recorded musical objects without monetary consideration, listeners jumped at the chance. Rarely is it considered that the music listening public may have actually benefited from this in the educational and recreational aspects of musical consumption. Simply put, there is no reason to think that we have a more enlightened and musically literate population because of access to music. One would think that having a public with unfettered access to all recorded musical works would have an impact on overall musical education; an apt simile may lie in the fantasy that we suddenly recovered all of the documents lost at the Library at Alexandria. It seems, however, that the estranged labor of musicians continued in the use-value of musical objects; the privatization of musical experience into music-consumption plus subjective mystery, the lack of technical language in the average listener, and the unrelenting belief that music is irrational and disconnected from personal identities continued, and were all valorized beyond reproach. The average listener did not consume for broadening their own horizons, but instead, for re-presenting, on-demand, the music they already identified with that was already offered them by the culture industry.

This facet of music consumption illustrates the structural nature of estrangement: the ideology of ownership of the means of production, support of private property and private listening, and the lack of freedom by means of a lack of critical listening. The structure of distribution is not the content of the experience, nor does it mandate any particular viewpoint or ethics be upheld in the process of music apprehension. Even when the structure of the music distribution system was shattered, and replaced by a newfound social convention that looked more like an "open-source" and "fair-use" culture, the hegemony of popular culture circumscribed a ground-up advance in musical literacy (at least, one is not yet noticeable). Just as the nature of labor is regulated only by the culture that gives us estranged labor as nature, music listening is given as private and subjective, awash in personal identities without a critical analysis or understanding of identity formation with musical objects.

Where estranged labor can be circumvented by designing other structures for work environments (co-ops, communes, entrepreneurism, non-profit, and pay-what-you-will are all viable models that modify wage labor and work toward craft and collaborative ownership), it is still entirely the valuation process inside of that structure that determines the individual outcomes of artistic labor. It is still improbable that independent musicians and artists can survive in a culture that has privatized all musical action into a personal, subjective, and isolated experience. This is the world in which it is no longer possible to value any musical labor because it has been sold as a transcendent and invaluable object, as far as the capitalist ideology cares, since the market can no longer set any value for it, and so, sets zero for music's value.


The Ethics of Listener Use:

At its core, the estranged musical object does have something transcendent about it as a generalized form of identity building, but this relies on the relationship of the listener to both the musical object and their entire experience of life. The listener, in a very real and social sense, should feel obligated to understand the music that they "like" as much as they understand their daily motivations. In response to estranged musical labor, there remains, for those who are free to think and learn, a necessity to understand the grounds on which the object is created, its function, and the streams of information relevant to understanding this musical object. A dynamic model could be created that unravels personal identities and social knowledge of the world into a musical ethics that is unearthed from the possibility of being trapped in a single historical or evaluative model; this model, again, resembles William Perry's stages of ethical development.

1. Dualism
This initial stage holds that there is truth, correctness, falseness, and lies. In listening applications, a dualistic thinker says that there are many examples where someone seems to be laboring on "music" but that the product is so far outside of their context of what music means that such works are actually not music. In American culture, our two-party political system is the greatest example of dualistic thinking, leading people to believe that the correctness of one particular party over the other is the greatest chance at solving problems. This stage of development is associated strongly with authoritarian thinking, and can be seen in listeners who "like what they like" but only because they perceive it as the correct thing to like. Often, people who subscribe to a dualistic ethic develop affinities for things that are clearly offered in their family life, or by an industry that would rather people know exactly what they will buy before it is even made (or just buy reissues of the same albums over and over). The dualistic listener is overly critical of any music for which they do not think they have enough information to understand, because it appears to be a waste of time or resources.

2. Multiplicity
The second stage offers the first glimpse of relativism, where correctness and truth do not seem to lead to every answer to every question one could have about the social world. In Western culture, "hard sciences" promote the viewpoint that there is some relativity in the world, but that there are only things that we know to be true, and things that are not yet understood. In this stage of development, a subject moves toward an understanding that authority is not centralized, because asking a line of reasonable questions may end up in the answer "we don't know yet" (with the blind-spot being of no worth). This type of thinking, applied musically, is the listener who begins to realize that there is no grand authority governing their or anyone's musical tastes, and samples all types of music to find what their own subjective preferences are, and who they are. Characteristically, this would be the person who recognizes that "everyone is entitled to their own taste," and consider the end-game of musical consumption to be an act of freedom of speech. While this listener is an open-minded individual who does not reject or dismiss others because of musical listening, they do not have any ethical attachment to the work of those who do not make music that is appealing to their own subjective viewpoint. They are possibly critical of the music industry, but only if their primary selection for musical consumption is itself marginalized by the industry, or not understood by a segment of the population, while they believe that "their music" should be more popular than it is. This is the stage of ethical listening with the most privatization of taste; multiplicitists tend to not even talk about music as to guard their personal authority from attack.

3. Relativism
In the third stage, the subject becomes aware that context determines the ability to understand what relevance any fact or data may mean for any individual situation. Here, the subject is ready to listen, equitably, to any explanation of the context in which any problem resides. There may be a better or worse way of addressing the matter, and this subject will usually defer to an authority who has distinction (in Bourdieu's terms) in the field that the problem arises. Having already collected a great deal of knowledge about the different styles of music that actually exist, a relativistic point of view implies at least a basic layout of the musical world, and how musicians work toward different goals, make music that serve different functions, and pursue different aesthetic goals. No longer chiefly concerned with their own subjective tastes, a relativistic listener can now understand that musical work is indeed labor, and that the labor of a musician creates musical work (it is not just something that speaks to them, but something that exists in the social world). The relativistic listener understands that styles and productive methods have changed throughout the history of musical work, and know some of the ways that this has developed over the course of humanity. They can place themselves in any musical situation and gather enough streams of information to be able to get an idea of how this music fits in the world, and what it may say about the identities of those who are in that musical situation, and maybe even understand the appeal of a wide range of aesthetic goals. They are critical of musicians who seem to not understand the musical culture that they, themselves, are pursuing, but generally supportive of those who are in the process of learning how to be a part of that musical culture. This stage is somewhat liminal, and is more of a process than the others, as long as a sense of value and historical significance continue to gain influence inside of the listener's development.

4. Commitment
The final stage, commitment, is the ethical position that synthesizes the recognition of the relativist world with an ethical attachment to particular goals and meanings. The commitment stage is where ambiguity stops interfering with meanings in the subject's identity, and ambiguity does not debase any of the knowledge that the subject has. In musical commitment, a recognition of all forms of musical labor as a fully integrated notion of culture, and as a legitimate form of labor, lead the committed listener to support music which furthers a broader understanding of cultural life, historical development, and balancing the author's intended meanings with the listener's freedom to interpretation. In this scheme, the committed listener is cognisant of the state of music in the world, the necessity to support musical labor (as long as it is done in an honest, creative, and equitable way), and the advocation of musical understanding as a tool for understanding all other aspects of human life. Ethical development to this point creates a drive to collaborate and express the connections of musical work to human work more generally (pedagogy), strives toward dialog with others and education about disparate types of music, and works to support all those who participate in cultural, philosophical, and pedagogical fields who share this project. Commitment strives toward making the world better, implies a Sociological Imagination (from C. Wright Mills, where the actor looks to real world problems to propose solutions at any hierarchical level, and gives attention to making the world better instead of suspending bias to appear relativist), and collaboration instead of competition. Committed listeners are critical of views that discount human ingenuity and its ability to reform the world's structures in positive ways, and critical of industries who stand to profit from music in inequitable or predatory ways. They are also critical of music and musical education which furthers traditional or ideological concepts that lock listeners into lower forms of listening ethics. It would be necessary for a committed listener to be fully capable of understanding the streams of information presented in a majority of the world's music, a scholar of both music and culture in the most general ways.

It should also be pointed out that commitment is a critical pursuit: there is little chance that a committed listener will be content with the general ideology or a mode of production which does not create the conditions for furthering human life, creativity, and freedom (for both individuals and groups), or an ideology that the social world is in a constant state of natural harmony, i.e. the market.

The estranged labor of any musical object, in a world where all labor is objectified and brought to market, begs the question of value, one that can only be posed in a conversation that does not instantly conflate market forces and successful labor. The economic truth hiding inside of this question is that without support in the grander scheme of capitalism, music could, indeed, die an economic death. The music industry has claimed its own death since the turn of the century. Hegel, Adorno, and Danto have all worked on "the death of art," but never really thought that people would stop playing instruments or painting, just that the objects that art produced (and their localized mode of production) would change so radically through history that it no longer appears connected to itself. 

There is a real, existential threat to music, because it is systematically undervalued in market institutions, resulting in a class of laborers with their own distinct identity in political economy, and a systematic drive away from ethical valuation in the transcendent, meaning based realm (affective and epistemic alike). The death of art attacks both individuals and institutions. The threat is to lose musical institutions, the personal practice of music by individuals, and musical modes of thinking: the understanding of the cognitive, social, economic, aesthetic, philosophical, political, historical, technological, literary, and performative aspects of music, themselves equal parts of not only the constitution of human meaning, but the process of life, and our strategies that link the two.

A more equitable world would imply a broader understanding of the work of musical laborers, as well as other classes of laborers. The valuation of human experience, production, quality of life, creativity, and justice is left to the randomizer of the market system, and trusted to the mechanism of wage labor and its "fairness," despite being a consequence of the random interaction of an entire market system. We cannot leave it to market opportunists, finding exploitative patterns and holes in the system, to determine the musical life of the entire world. Since musical labor is objectified and the musician alienated from their work, it is the responsibility of listeners to provide ethical valuation and understanding to the labor of music. We must, in the words of Zlavoj Zizek, take the ideology more seriously than it takes itself. We must meet the ideology with the criticism that objectified labor presents the human element of musical objects, the identity of its producer as they march toward death, and give us their labor to show us who we are.