Klumpenhouwer 2001 Music Analysis

HENRY KLUMPENHOUWER
LATE CAPITALISM, LATE MARXISM AND THE STUDY OF MUSIC
It seems appropriate to begin by noting the remarkable recent wave of books

and articles within English-language scholarship that focus specifically on the
musicological and aesthetic writings of Theodor Adorno.1 The writings of
Rose Rosengard Subotnik and Max Paddison are clearly watersheds in this
development,2 as is the publication in 1996 of a new translation into English of
Adorno's Aesthetic Theory.3 Scanning the horizon more broadly, one could also
include Fredric Jameson's Late Marxism (Jameson 1990) ± especially in the
light of his assessment that Adorno may be the philosopher of the decade just
past ± and Simon Jarvis's more recent general introduction to Adorno's work.4
Both stand out from earlier well-used and celebrated introductions by Martin
Jay (Jay 1973), Gillian Rose (Rose 1978) and Susan Buck-Morss in the amount
of attention paid to musical issues.5
The emergence of the so-called `New' and `Critical' musicologies on both
sides of the Atlantic during the 1980s clearly conditioned the academic
environment for the arrival of work consciously indebted to the Frankfurt
School in general and to Adorno in particular. Potentially, such developments
could create the conditions for a more meaningful interaction between Anglo-
American musicological circles and those on the mainland European continent,
where interest in Adorno and the promise of critical theory has remained
unbroken.
This much said, in view of musicology's current preoccupation with issues
of representation and subject formation (especially in connection with gender),
it seems ironic that Adorno could have become an important touchstone,
especially in the light of the subject field's almost complete rejection of the
work of Freud and Marx, the two most important sources for Adorno's
thought. Of course, having tended to identify their writings as instances of
totalising `metanarratives' ± even as species of conceptual fascism ± the new
musicology hardly occupies a unique position among the intellectual
movements that have made their way through the humanities during the last
quarter century or so. However, unlike disciplines such as English and
comparative literature, which had experienced earlier fruitful encounters with
Marx and Freud, mainstream musicology, especially as practised in North
America, has managed to develop as an academic discipline without ever
meaningfully engaging with either figure. The wholesale rejection of Marxist
and Freudian thought among new musicologists has thus taken place within a
Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001) 367

ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK
368 HENRY KLUMPENHOUWER
context that seems to have matured in relative theoretical isolation: as if, in

fact, neither Marx nor Freud had ever existed.
Ironically, an interdisciplinary spirit thus only appeared in musicological
circles (broadly construed) at the point when a serious engagement with Marx
and Freud was no longer strictly required. Indeed, this was a time when those
in the humanities at large felt that what was needed was to go beyond orthodox
left political and psychoanalytic thought, particularly since modernism, the
bourgeois personality and classical capitalism all appeared to have reached a
terminal historical phase. On the face of it, what new musicologists have come
to find promising in Adorno is his suggestion that technical discussions of
music could be shown to connect with social and psychological categories.
Accordingly, Adorno seems to offer a model for a particular style of `critical' or
`political' writing about music. Nevertheless, it is worth asking: why Adorno,
why still and why now? How could a writer so strongly anchored in the
intellectual traditions most often reproached for the modernist sins of
totalisation, essentialism and determinism be of any use to recent musicological
concerns at all?6
The three titles considered here deal with three different aspects of Adorno's
reflections on music and its place in the cultural life of what he called late
capitalism.7 Deborah Cook, a sociologist, examines the features of Adorno's
notion of the culture industry; Shierry Weber Nicholson, justifiably well
known as the best of Adorno's translators, considers (among other things) his
ideas on the subjective aesthetic experience and the particular significance of
`lateness' as a concept; Alastair Williams, a musicologist, measures Adorno's
theorising about the nature and function of avant-garde music in capitalist
society against recent (that is, post-War) musical developments in Europe and
North America.
My essay will concentrate on these particular issues as framed in Adorno's
writings. It is worth mentioning from the outset that I am keenly interested in
carrying out this programme along Marxist lines, the only respectable `science
of capitalism' available to us, and thus the only reasonable perspective from
which to undertake the study of culture. The form of the essay ± which will
benefit from some measure of synoptic exposition ± has been determined by
the various issues examined respectively by Cook, Williams and Nicholson.
Consequently, I shall proceed by surveying and evaluating Adorno's work on
mass culture, prior to looking at the possibilities inherent in what we know as
the classical tradition of Western music for emancipation from (or resistance
to) the most pernicious features of life under (late) capitalism. Some additional
thoughts about the nature of musicology and music theory as disciplines will
offer further scope for reflection in advance of a general conclusion which aims
to gauge the suitability of Adorno's work for the implementation of a properly
Marxist ideology critique.
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LATE CAPITALISM, LATE MARXISM AND THE STUDY OF MUSIC 369
I Commodification and Cultural Production

Commodity Form
The opening chapter of Marx's Capital (Marx 1977) serves as the conceptual
starting point for Adorno's theory of what he came to call the culture industry,
in particular identifying that form of capitalist cognition ± that is to say, false
consciousness or ideology ± he termed ìdentity thinking'. Notably, too, Marx
here defines the commodity form as it appears under capitalism. Using
categories developed by classical economists (in particular, Adam Smith, Jean-
Charles-LeÂonard Simonde de Sismondi, David Ricardo and Nassau William
Senior), he discusses commodities as a particular set of features or, in Gerald
Cohen's formulation, `powers' (Cohen 1978). In the first place, such
commodities have ùse value', or the ability to satisfy some human need. Use
values, while quantifiable as units, are in the first instance qualitative, hence ±
when compared solely with respect to their uses (or useful effects) ± are entirely
incommensurable. Furthermore, a single commodity may have a wide range of
uses, only realised through consumption: prevailing historical and social
conditions thus determine the extent and expression of a commodity's utility.
Not all use values, however, are commodities. To qualify, one use value must
additionally be offered in exchange for another: the fungibility of a use value
assigns to it èxchange value', the vector of relationships a use value (measured
quantitatively) enjoys with all other commodities. While commodities are
incommensurable with respect to their use values (a qualitative power), exchange
value (a quantitative power) legislates for their commensurability.
Exchange value `changes constantly with time and place and hence it
appears to be something accidental and purely relative' (Marx 1977, p. 126).
Initially, exchange value appears to be largely determined by the relationship
between use value and relevant social needs. This impression lies at the
foundation of bourgeois economics under which exchange value is principally
set by psychological dynamics that govern the pertinent market. In Marx's
view (and the view of classical economics), however, the exchangeability of any
two commodities, always carried out in purely quantitative terms, suggests that
all commodities must share `something equal' in whose terms the exchange
relation is measured. If commodities are proportionally related to one another,
it is on the basis of a shared quantifiable substance or property, and not on the
basis of use value, which as a quality, is unavailable for the quantification
necessary to commensurability.
Marx calls the substance or property common to all commodities `value', of
which exchange value is to be considered the (phenomenal) form. The
distinction is important: exchange value and value are frequently confused
concepts and that confusion serves as the basis for Marx's well-known
discussion of commodity fetishism.
Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001) ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001

Since we must exclude use value (a quality) as the determinant of value (a

quantity), only one aspect of commodities can serve as the determinant of their
value: namely, that they are all properties of human labour power, which in
turn is considered without regard to the modality of its expenditure. The
magnitude of value is measured by the quantity (measured principally by
duration) of expended `socially necessary' labour power, that is, labour power
required to produce à use value under the conditions of production normal for
a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour
prevalent in that society' (Marx 1977, p. 129).
Under universal exchangeability, the qualities that designate and distinguish
various forms of human labour are drained away. Every kind of human labour
is funnelled into the single, one-dimensional category of expended bodily
energy. The identity of all different kinds of productive labour is false: it is
brought about by depleting each form of labour of its determinations so that it
appears only as `the productive expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves,
hands, etc.' (Marx 1977, p. 134). Furthermore, in losing qualitative
differentiation, the distinctive forms of human labour become quantitatively
comparable as so many units of simple-labour expended in time. The
quantitative valuation of labour is over-determined, within its own kind by
social necessity, and against all other particular kinds of labour by social
relations. Social necessity distinguishes between indolent and active,
productive and less-productive labourers of the same form. Put another way,
`value expresses the character of each individual commodity as a component of
the total labour of society, and, indirectly, the labour devoted to the production
of each commodity as a component of the total labour of society' (Campbell
1993, p. 151).
The binary dissolution of commodities into use and exchange value
reproduces itself in the binary character of labour under capitalism as first a
creator of use values, and second as an expression of value. It is labour's two-
fold nature that allows its exploitation as a producer of surplus-value for the
capitalist.
Fetishism
What distinguishes the appearance of commodities within capitalism from
their appearance in earlier modes of production is, in the first place, the extent
to which commodity form penetrates production under capitalism; and, in the
second, capitalism's specific subjugation of human labour to the commodity
form. Accordingly, commodity exchange ànd its structural consequences is
able to influence the total inner and outer life of society' (LukaÂcs 1971, p. 84).
One structural consequence of commodity form is a particular form of
mystification Marx famously calls commodity fetishism. He writes:

The mysterious character of the commodity-form (its transcendence of its own

sensuousness) consists in the fact that the commodity reflects the social
characteristics of [people's] own labour as objective characteristics of the
products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things.
(Marx 1977, p. 165)
The most common reading of Marx's words here understands fetishism to

mean that the social relations governing commodity production appear to be
properties of the commodity's materiality, its ability to fulfil human need,
whether that need belongs to an isolated individual, or individuals in a relation.
Moreover, it further supposes that commodities, through exchange, eliminate
the qualitative differences that arise between the multitude of labour forms. All
are reduced to a single qualitative category, while acquiring quantitative
differentiation into multiple categories determined ultimately by social capital
± that is, all capital viewed collectively.
In certain contexts, this understanding of commodity fetishism has led to the
belief that in understanding capitalism one ought generally to focus on
associated social relations rather than on the material properties of things.
However, according to more dialectically astute writers (to whom this
interpretation is hopelessly one-sided), Marx's conception of fetishism teaches
us that while the material properties of commodities do obscure the relevant
social relations under capitalism, these properties are the only way that social
relations can express themselves. Hence, the only authentic reading of material
characteristics ± such that they will be made to express rather than to obscure
social relations ± is by means of Marx's dialectical investigation of the
commodity form.
LukaÂcs's `Hegelian' presentation of Marx's notion in `Reification and the
Consciousness of the Proletariat' needs to be interpolated here in order to
understand Adorno's characteristic use of the concept. In LukaÂcs's formulation
± under which `fetishism' is renamed (significantly) `reification' ± the
abstraction of human labour and, correspondingly, the estrangement of labour
from the labourer himself, is paired with an idea anticipating Sayer's
ìnversion' as a feature of fetishism. LukaÂcs writes:
Objectively, a world of objects and relations between things springs into being
(the world of commodities and their movements on the market). The laws
governing these objects are indeed gradually discovered by man, but even so
they confront him as invisible forces that generate their own power. The
individual can use his knowledge of these laws to his advantage, but he is not
able to modify the process by his own activity. Subjectively ± where the market
has been fully developed ± man's activity becomes estranged from himself, it
turns into a commodity, which subject to the non-human objectivity of the
natural laws of society, must go his own way independently of man just like any
consumer article. (LukaÂcs 1971, p. 87)

LukaÂcs's reification ± the objectification (or false materialisation) of social

relations ± seems to serve merely as an extension of Marx's commodity fetish,
and must be understood in conjunction with his concept of personalisation,
under which material properties are given social characteristics. By
comparison, Adorno's notion of fetish and its instantiation in cultural
commodities is subordinated to his own understanding of the general principle
of reification, which for him, according to Martin Jay, means `the suppression
of heterogeneity in the name of identity' (quoted in Cook, p. 46).
Adorno is careful to establish at the outset that his conceptualisation of
fetishism is neither primarily a methodological failing, nor a problem that can
be fully addressed by psychological categories alone. Rather, as Jay elsewhere
observes, it represents a pernicious economic synecdoche under which a part is
`fetishised' (here, employed in the weaker sense of being the object of perverse
or obsessive attention) at the expense of the whole (Jay 1973, p. 189). Under
this view, fetishism and (more generally) reification are themselves expressions
of the effects of abstraction in capitalism, under which the individual
characteristics of people and things ± that is, all that determines them as
unique and individual instances ± are disavowed in order to allow the principle
of universal exchangeability to operate. Individual appearances are (falsely)
collectivised under a single conceptual category.
From the beginning of his widely read essay exploring the fetish character of
commodities as it applies to musical life under capitalism (Adorno 1978),
Adorno associates music fetishism (music in particular rather than as a more
general phenomenon) with a broad range of ruinous effects of capitalism on
cultural production: the destruction of the notion of human community and
the complementary emergence of the `Mass', a false integration of people under
which traditional class distinctions between proletariat and bourgeois are
obscured; the withering of an interest in art that holds emancipatory potential;
and the fragmentation of a previously integrated totality of musical genres,
styles and practices into the irreconcilable distinctions between high and low,
light and serious. The jeremiad at the beginning of the essay ultimately leads
him explicitly to invoke Marx's notion of commodity fetishism. He writes:
`Marx defines the fetish character of the commodity as the veneration of the
thing made by oneself, which, as exchange value, simultaneously alienates itself
from the consumer' (Adorno 1978, p. 278). Then, in an often quoted passage
that follows his citation of Marx's own discussion of commodity fetishism,
Adorno clarifies how he sees the phenomenon operating in music under
capitalism.
This is the real secret of success. It is the mere reflection of what one pays in the
market for the product. The consumer is really worshipping that he himself has
paid for the ticket to the Toscanini concert. He has literally `made' the success
which he reifies and accepts as an objective criterion, without recognising

himself in it. But he has not `made' it by liking the concert, but by buying the
ticket. (Adorno 1978, pp. 278±9)
Adorno's writings on the culture industry are filled with similar

observations, and Deborah Cook quotes a number of appropriate passages
throughout her book. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and
Horkheimer 1972), the authors tell us that supersession of use value by
exchange value expresses itself in the kind of reception of cultural commodities
under capitalism described above with respect to the Toscanini tickets. In
Cook's view, this means that, for Adorno, `[c]ultural commodities serve as
exchange information or status symbols' (p. 31). Her interpretation thus
connects Adorno's notion of music fetishism to examinations of the semiotics
of prestige that govern the consumption of cultural commodities. When work
of this sort has appeared in music-sociological studies (though it must be
stressed that this is not how Adorno himself develops the idea of music fetish),
it has been commonplace to assert ± or more simply assume ± a thoroughly
determinable semiosis between musical genres and social classes. Under the
usual application of such a framework, mass musics are associated with
workers, classical with the bourgeoisie.
Such thinking underlies a whole range of writing about class and culture in
North America outside the sphere of musicology. At one end of the scale is
Paul Fussell's book, entitled simply Class (Fussell 1983), a `fun-loving' exposeÂ
of possessions and behaviours (often assembled together under the category of
taste) that signal social class position, complete with parlour-game exercises
that place oneself or one's friends properly within the hierarchy; the other
(more respectable) end is a host of academic work emanating from certain
themes in the writings of Baudrillard and, predictably, Bourdieu's Distinction
(Bourdieu 1984).
It is to this latter tradition that Cook explicitly links Adorno's theory of
commodity fetishism. This particular connection is, in my own view, not
wholly justified and requires some qualification. Furthermore, the entire
practice within cultural studies (broadly construed) of examining commodities
as a true constituent of class analysis is worth challenging. Adorno's,
Baudrillard's and Bourdieu's notions of a formal code governing the relations
between social status and patterns of consumption are more complex than
simply noting, as Fussell and many others do, that car makes and oriental rugs,
for instance, act as social markers. In Baudrillard's opinion, such
straightforward articulations of the status rules of commodity consumption
are at their core an instance of circular reasoning. As he remarks, ìn the objects
one identifies a social category which has, in the final analysis, already been
described on the basis of these objects (among other criteria)' (Baudrillard
1981, p. 35).8 As is well known, Baudrillard's view is that there is a semiosis of

use value and exchange value ± the commodity's inner dynamic ± that
corresponds to the logic of the sign. Supporting Baudrillard's truly ideological
restatement of Marx's construct is his `fetishism of the signifier', under which
`the subject is trapped in the factitious, differential, encoded, systematised
aspect of the object'. Here the subject cathects not the object in itself but the
system of codes that controls both subjects and objects in capitalism and
`delivers them up to abstract manipulation' (Baudrillard 1981, p. 92).
Bourdieu's perspective is that consumption patterns legitimate but do not
determine class structure. His famous motto, `taste classifies the classifier', is
not a reflection of class-determining function of expressions of taste, but rather
their `social function legitimising differences' (Bourdieu 1984, p. 7). And the
modality of taste itself reflects such affirmations: Kant's distinctions between
the `taste of reflection' and the `taste of sense' are recast in Bourdieu's
categories as `pleasure purified of pleasure' and `facile pleasure' (Bourdieu
1984, p. 6). This particular categorisation is grounded in the common
distinctions generated under capitalism: the primary division of labour into
mental and physical work, the temporal disintegration of the day into leisure-
time and work-time, the spatial opposition of home and workplace. The
opposition engages suggestively with Wolfgang Haug's distinction (relevant to
an older form of capitalism) between the `clear-headed bourgeois intoxication'
of chocolate, tea, tobacco and coffee, and the impairing intoxication of
substances like alcohol (Haug 1986, p. 19).
In general, such matters (along with education, political opinions, and so on)
constitute `cultural capital', a system of relations homologous to those covered
under economic capital. The dimensions of Bourdieu's `social space' are
determined on the one hand by the ratio of economic capital to cultural capital,
and on the other by the total volume of capital possessed.
In his Introduction to the Sociology of Music, Adorno explores the class
significance of cultural commodities more broadly and thoroughly than he does
in the discussion (examined above) which deals directly with the particular
fetish character of musical commodities. Here, he discounts explorations that
involve empirical surveys of consumer responses (precisely of the sort that
support Bourdieu's work), on the grounds that, under such approaches, classes
and strata cease to be a `theoretical-objective concept', but rather a
`subjectively characterised unit' (Adorno 1976, p. 56). Nor can class
significance emerge from the class position of composers, since, as a group,
all (in the nineeenth century, at least) seem to form a secularised sphere of
wandering minstrels in spite of the particularities of their origins (which were
all, with the exception of Mendelssohn and Strauss, from a lower social
stratum). Accordingly, the class character or class significance of cultural
commodities cannot, in Adorno's view, be fruitfully approached from the
perspective of `consumers' (especially within the narrow register of their likes

and dislikes) or `producers'. Instead the sole legitimate method for such
explorations is only possible under more `reflective' modes of reception, in
which structure and technique are the operative categories. Under such an
approach, Adorno reads the music of Richard Strauss as properly `grand
bourgeois', because of the psychological association of his music with heavy
industry emerging from its àura' as reflected in the composer's orchestral
complexity (ironically enough, Adorno's reading here is best understood
within the context of his childhood memory of first encountering Elektra,
whose title, he then believed (Nicholson pp. 28±9), seemed to resemble the
name of a chemical plant in Frankfurt). Adorno adduces the class significance
of Stravinsky's music to be similarly grand bourgeois. In this case, the
articulation of class is thought to be generated by (among other things) the
character of the latter's neo-classicism, under which intentional and contrived
violations of the norms of a so-called pre-classical past are handled with both
freedom and cynicism. Hindemith's music, by contrast, is `petit bourgeois', a
class significance that emerges from his heavily bound and literal
understanding of classical procedures ± in particular, according to Adorno,
as they are transmitted to him by Reger ± and his lack of confidence in non-
systematic and intuitive processes.
It seems, then, that, on the one hand, Adorno sustains a notion of false class
significance that expresses itself as a species of fetishism under which a
commodity opens up a (libidinal) pathway from the consumer to his own money
crystallised as the commodity's exchange value (or, more precisely, its exchange
value transformed into price). Logically, fetishism should ramify differently for
each class of the labour-capital dynamic. In the case of the proletariat, the money
laid out in turn represents a particular amount of his own congealed labour;
objectively, this quantum of labour is thoroughly abstracted and alienated;
subjectively, however, it seems thoroughly determined, full of all of its own
particular characteristics, and thus both (falsely) articulates one's place within
social stratification and disguises the complete extinguishing of the qualitative
features of one's labour. But in the case of the capitalist, the money laid out
represents the extra value he has extracted from the production process (and in
particular, from the labour power) he controls. Accordingly, his own achievement
and success is objectified in the cultural commodity. (The latter case seems to
interest Adorno; the former ± as far as I can tell ± does not.) In both instances, the
relations of production (regarded subjectively) become (falsely) materialised in
the attributes of the cultural object itself.
Uncovering, on the other hand, the true class significance of cultural
commodities is only possible by means of a `true' reception of them, available
only under certain styles of reflection. Such reflection may have two sides:
one's life experiences and the psychological associations they generate; and the
technical and structural features of the work. In other words, the imprint of

class-consciousness (or more precisely in this case, class ìdentity') appears (to
those willing to look) in the very structure of what Hanslick called `the music
itself', however generally or impressionistically that structure is described. The
class significance of cultural work is thus determined by the composer's class
position but not directly; rather, it is mediated by technique and structure.
Adorno is surely correct to characterise as false, and hence ideological, the
notion that class may be fruitfully analysed both subjectively and objectively by
examining consumption patterns in conjunction with a semiotics of prestige.
Certainly, his critique deals here with an aspect of commodity fetishism as Marx
defines it, although focusing so persistently (as Adorno does throughout most of
his work) on the nature of commodities themselves without continuing through the
dialectical cycle to the subsumption of labour by capital is itself a species of such
fetishism. The possible defence of Adorno (and similar sorts of commodity
studies) by means of Engels, claiming the necessity of making such connections
only in the last instance, is, as Elizabeth Wood notes, really rather weak protection
when the last instance never actually appears (Wood 1995, p. 8). If taken seriously,
Bourdieu's categories of `pleasure purified of pleasure' by means of reflection in
opposition to `facile pleasure' would seem to destabilise Adorno's own class
analysis of Strauss's, Hindemith's and Stravinsky's (or indeed anyone's) music for
its reliance on precisely the sort of aesthetic reflection Bourdieu attributes to
dominant social strata.
Yet, one ought to be thoroughly suspicious of the entire practice of
determining the class significance of things and attitudes, no matter under
which approach such determinations are made, and no matter the degree to
which such conventions have characterised various Marxisms in the past.
In contrast to the entire corpus of class analysis of this sort, it is helpful to
consider Trotsky's contention that ìt is fundamentally incorrect to contrast
bourgeois culture and bourgeois art with proletarian culture and proletarian
art. The latter will never exist'.9 Trotsky brings the proposition to bear on a
situation different from the one here ± he was engaged in a debate about the
creation of art and culture in the Soviet Republic ± but the premise is
nonetheless useful to us: all art and culture under capitalism is `bourgeois'
precisely because, fundamentally, it all serves the interests of the ruling
fraction of society, and thus if art and culture carry identifiable class traits at
all, they will be those of the bourgeoisie. Indeed, there are times in Adorno's
writing when something of what Trotsky claims is engaged: Adorno's
discussion of the sado-masochistic character of mass culture is particularly
suggestive in this connection, as is his insistence (in his commentaries from the
1930s onwards) that jazz ought to be considered a cultural expression imposed
on African-American circles by the culture industry.
However, this particular aspect of Adorno's analysis of jazz (in particular)
strikes most nowadays as naõÈ ve, clumsy or unfair; and Adorno never seemed to

frame the question of the relation between class and culture in a way that
allowed an awareness of the complete bourgeois dominance of musical
production to ramify productively in his work. Acknowledging that the
characteristics and the deployment of cultural commodities in capitalism serve
the interests of the ruling class would seem to hold enormous implications for
those studies of culture serious about engaging with Marxist categories.
But what then are we to make of what appear to be formal codes controlling
the consumption of cultural commodities? Ironically (in the light of Trotsky's
quotation above), the complex hierarchy of taste seems directed solely at the
proletariat rather than serving to generate distinctions all the way through class
structure. This is quite clear in Bourdieu's study. All of the employment
categories that appear there are (under a properly Marxist class analysis)
labouring classes: all are now instantiations of productive labour, which is to
say, labour carried out under the control of capital. The extreme stratification
of the proletariat from poorly paid wage labourers ± which in the past
constituted almost the entire class ± to highly paid members of the salariat,
namely, managers and professionals, whose role as workers is almost entirely
obscured, serves a number of ideological functions. First, the fundamental
partition into wage and salariat workers generates a mutual antagonism that
camouflages the proletariat's true class enemy. Malcolm X's distinction
between the categories of `field slave' and `house slave' is particularly
suggestive in this regard, and the same dynamic can be seen to operate within
the proletariat. Marx himself has discussed such dynamics in connection with
how accumulation crises differently affect badly and well-paid sectors of the
working class.10 Secondly, the possibility of individual movement along a
richly stratified horizon serves to support (false) democratic notions of equal
opportunity, the (false) power of individual will and ambition, and the (false)
value to the labourer of hard work. This last aspect of social stratification has
rendered thoroughly obsolete traditional religious forms that compel extreme
exertion on the part the worker (of the sort famously studied by Max Weber),
which in turn accounts (to a degree) for the radical overhauling of the Christian
movement which has taken place over the last fifty years.
II Mass Culture, Popular Culture

No-one needs to be reminded how explosively important the study of mass or
popular culture has become to the humanities. Even musicology and music
theory, clearly the most conservative disciplines among the liberal arts, allow
for it now, after the debate about `canon formation' ± an issue originally
articulated by feminists ± had either worn out or scared off cultural
conservatives.11 General commentaries on popular performers and technical
or structural analysis of popular music (stylistic analysis as well as the

interpretation of individual works, being almost always carried out using the
analytical methodologies that had earlier been applied to (tonal) serious music)
are now common. And Adorno's notion of the culture industry is still (in spite
of its age and its putative defects) the most important conceptual gesture in the
field, even if some musicologists and music theorists have treated it merely as
an implement, a ready-made, well-respected justification for combining
discussions of musical structure with those of the social.
In this connection, Cook's presentation is helpful, even if one objects to the
particular features of her summary. In reading the relevant chapter, one must
be (appropriately) impressed how the arguments for and against Adorno's
approach have now simply begun to recycle themselves. What follows explores
the debates that emerge within Adorno's mass culture theory.
Adorno wrote a limited number of articles that directly address mass or
popular music, which for him was jazz.12 What music is covered by that referent,
along with how one ought to relate it to the music of Elvis and all that follows, are
issues Adorno's commentators feel are particularly worth arguing about.
As is well known, Adorno was, throughout his life, unrelentingly appalled
by jazz. Relating his first encounter with the word, he disclosed (in the 1930s)
the following: Ì remember clearly that I was horrified when I read the word
``Jazz'' for the first time. It is plausible that [my negative association] came
from the German word Hatz, which evoked bloodhounds chasing after
something slower'.13 One ought to be hesitant in trying to pursue the relevance
of this comment to Adorno's formal jazz critique since the association he
describes, and the need to relate it publicly, generates a fairly useless debate
that insists on putting the author on the psychiatrist's couch (even if he seems
to want to go there on his own), thereby diverting attention from other, more
fruitful features of his argument. Yet, it is not an isolated incident, and his
critique of Richard Strauss's music noted above emerges similarly from a
negative association developed in childhood.
Adorno's earliest articles on jazz, which date from the late 1920s and '30s,
and which must really be considered in the context of contemporary academic
debates in both Germany and Britain, concentrated heavily on the matter of
the music's ethnic significance. `Perennial Fashion ± Jazz', written some thirty
years later, is a more broadly conceived approach that sets out to detail the
manner in which jazz instantiates certain effects of the culture industry.
Relying on Winthrop Sergeant's Jazz, Hot and Hybrid to supply historical and
technical details,14 a book he had reviewed in 1940, Adorno approvingly quotes
the author's contention that jazz represents no technical progress but rather
èven in its most complex manifestations a very elementary matter of
incessantly repeated formulae' (Adorno 1967, p. 122).
Improvisation and rhythmic processing are, for the defenders of jazz, the
tradition's most important innovations, and the features which elevate it above

other popular musics. Yet, in Adorno's view, such factors are often so heavily
dependent on well-worn, pre-existing routines and norms that they bespeak an
oppressive and stifling conformity, rather than genuine spontaneity and
individuality. Adorno similarly dismisses claims about the novel rhythmic
processes in jazz by assuring us (not altogether convincingly) that it had all
been done in serious music since Brahms.
David Riesman's sociology of jazz fans in turn opened up a new front of
attack for Adorno. Drawing on the results of Riesman's study (which continues
to serve as a kind of conceptual benchmark for the study of fandom),15 Adorno
adduces an homology between the distinctions jazz fans draw amongst
themselves ± the core of (technical) specialists, and the periphery, characterised
as vague, inarticulate followers attracted principally to famous personalities ±
and the stratification of society at large or, more menacingly, the organisation
of fascist states. The origins of jazz in military music are in this regard
particularly suggestive to Adorno, upon whom, however, the irony of
European dictators raging against the decadence of jazz is not lost.
Many of Adorno's colleagues in Frankfurt appear to have shared his
attitudes towards mass culture, which they seem fairly readily to have adduced
as synonymous with American culture in general. The following observations
by Ernst Bloch ± written in Harvard's Widener Library during his stay in
America from 1938±49 ± ought to be read synoptically with Adorno's own
writing on the culture industry:
Where everything is disintegrating, though, the body also contorts itself
effortlessly along with it. Nothing coarser, nastier, more stupid has ever been
seen than the jazz-dances since 1930. Jitterbug, Boogie-Woogie, this is
imbecility gone wild, with a corresponding howling which provides the so to
speak musical accompaniment. American movement of this kind is rocking the
Western countries, not as dance, but as vomiting. Man is to be soiled and his
brain emptied; he has even less idea amongst his exploiters where he stands, for
whom he is grafting, what he is being sent off to die for. (Bloch 1995, p. 394)
The notion common to almost all Frankfurt mass culture analysis is

consequently that mass culture and its associated industry represents a visible
decay of cultural life brought about by the exigencies of capitalism as a protocol
of cultural production.
For her part, Cook isolates standardisation and pseudo-individualism as the
two most prominent characteristics of cultural production under capitalism
dealt with in Adorno's writings on mass culture. (Actually, Cook also lists
schematisation and stereotyping as additional features of production in the
culture industry, but it seems to me both are better understood as modalities of
standardisation.) In both respects, the case of jazz improvisation represents an
extreme localisation of the features that, for Adorno, characterise jazz as a
whole. Entirely restricted by narrow structural and technical conventions and

thoroughly streamlined melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and orchestrational

objects and operations, jazz is entirely unable to provide those who practise
it with enough technical scope, individuality and freedom to express important
content or to engage in significant musical ideation. The standardisation of jazz
as a style is, in Adorno's view, imposed by the requirements of its audience,
which are in turn framed and shaped by the managerial salariat of the culture
industry acting in the interests of capital.
The analysis so far fails to isolate the source or cause for standardisation as the
dominant production ethos of the culture industry. Adorno suggests that the
narrowing of design options for cultural products emerges from the application of
Fordist production systems. Even though these procedures are more visible in
other sectors of industrial capitalism, the economics that compel the extremely
detailed and heavily-managed production procedures (under which labour is
thoroughly controlled by the machinery of production) may also usefully be seen
to apply to cultural production (Adorno 1967, pp. 123±4).16 In other words, the
machinery of cultural production is just the technical formulae, norms, policies
and conventions. The particular shape these schemata take is developed by way of
duplicating (putatively) important technical and structural features of
commercially successful cultural products.
Extreme standardisation of technical features and structural processes in
jazz is occluded by the (false) appearance that production and consumption
(performance and appreciation) is increasingly individualised, both with
respect to the expressive potential of jazz (contained symbolically in the
practice of improvisation) and with respect to choices made available to
listeners. As a species of production, standardisation (hidden behind false
individuation) may be especially characterised by allusion and quotation.
Adorno describes the latter as a form of authoritarian parody ± a style of parody
that dictates its own reception. On occasion, mass music appropriates entire
movements and pieces from the classical and operatic repertoires and alters
them to conform to the required formal and instrumental schemata of the
cultural industry.
Corresponding to the culture of fetishism in music and the highly
administered nature of mass music, a well-defined culture of reception
emerges, a style of listening Adorno characterises as `regressive'. Adorno's use
of the concept of regression is an extension of the psychoanalytical concept of
the same name, which describes a defence mechanism involving either a
developmental or topographical retreat. In the former case, there is a return to
an earlier developmental stage (oral, oral-sadistic, anal-sadistic, and so on);
in the latter case, the retreat is carried out with reference to Freud's
`topographical' model of ego, superego and id. Here, the ego withdraws from
consciousness to unconsciousness, and occurs most prominently in the dream
situation, where ideation, finding motor activity blocked (unlike in waking

states, when ideation progresses from perceptual agencies towards motor

activity), regresses towards the perceptual system.
Adorno's own particular use of the notion arises from his view that the
capacity for listening to music has a developmental trajectory that parallels the
developmental history of the psyche as a whole. Contemporary listening
practices, then, are regressive in the sense of being arrested at an early, infantile
stage, characterised by the inability consciously to perceive music, by which
Adorno means a certain level of concentrated reflection and also, presumably, an
understanding of relevant conventional practices and their structural
contradictions. Fundamentally, regressive listening is a recoiling from the
possibilities of different and oppositional musics. It involves listening to what
Adorno calls the debris of a musical piece, a process that involves the abstraction
of melodic units from their formal concrete and consuming them as `tunes',
rather than in relation to other structural parts and in relation to the totality,
which, on the one hand, it helps to express and, on the other, by which it is
restricted. The childishness of regressive listening demands music whose
technical features are appropriate to children's music ± nursery rhymes, Sunday
School songs, and so on. The level of standardisation that controls the production
of mass music ± namely, the recurrence of a narrow set of features and processes ±
invites the deconstruction required to withstand listening to them. The attention
of listeners is drawn away from harmonic, melodic and formal characteristics
(which are simply receptions anyway) to overall sonority and instrumental
timbre. The sheer intensity of the presence of mass music in society ± its use in
advertising, the playing of music in shops and workplaces ± lays waste to the
possibility of the development of any concentrated listening practices.
*
One can hardly blame those who dismiss outright Frankfurt School theorising
on mass culture and mass music on the grounds that its analysis and critique ±
in spite of evident reliance on Marx's notion of commodity form ± are at heart
not much more than instances of the crankiness of cultural conservatives. That
impression is only reinforced when one compares Adorno's interpretations of
mass culture to those he carries out more admiringly on the music of
Beethoven, Schoenberg and the contemporary avant-garde.
Yet, however real Adorno's inability to transcend the economics of prestige
and highly generalised moralism that underlie all assertions about good and
bad art, it is entirely useless to analyse his work along these lines alone for the
very reasons I raised earlier in connection with prestige-class theory, not to
mention for the reasons one can raise to counter purely ad hominem critiques.
One debate generated by Adorno's writing on mass culture that may well be
worth engaging in ± even though the framing of positions rarely escapes the

snob factor, retaining `distinction' as its fundamental gesture by dispersing

cultural works into sheep and goat categories ± involves discussions aimed at
deciding which musics might reasonably fit under his analysis of mass music.
Defenders of jazz who wish to maintain the possibility of an emancipatory
(utopian, therapeutic or nourishing) function for styles such as bebop, hardbop
and free jazz, claim that Adorno had in mind (or should have had in mind) only
the music of Paul Whiteman's Orchestra, Tin Pan Alley and jazz-oriented
cabaret music, rather than that of Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman, John
Coltrane and Bill Evans (to name but a few).
Jameson and (to a degree) Paddison are just two representatives of this
position. So, for example, in Late Marxism, Jameson writes that the proper
products of the culture industry (that is, in Adorno's conception of it) have
`little to do with the richness of Black culture we have long since then
discovered' (Jameson 1990, p. 141). And yet the fact remains that Adorno
himself explicitly counters such efforts, particularly in `Perennial Fashion ±
Jazz', written at the end of the bebop period and the dawn of cool and free jazz.
Here, in the overview of historical developments in jazz that opens the essay,
he writes that
the wild antics of the first jazz bands from the south, New Orleans above all,
and those from Chicago, have been toned down and with the growth of
commercialisation and of the audience, and continued scholarly efforts to
recover some of this original animation, whether called `swing' or `bebop',
inexorably succumbs to commercial requirements and quickly lose their sting.
(Adorno 1967, p. 121)
It is worth noting at this point that Adorno clearly derived the first half of the
history given here from Sergeant's book on jazz ± (published in 1939); the
latter half, which deals with swing and bebop, is quite certainly Adorno's own
extension. No doubt he had come across both swing and bebop during his days
in Los Angeles (a city, it must be remembered, that rivalled New York as a
leading centre of contemporary jazz).
More importantly, however, it is difficult to imagine how the particular
features of his critique of jazz ± his discussion of standardisation and false
individuation, his remarks about improvisation, and his approving citation of
Riesman's sociology of jazz fans ± cannot be made to cover the music of the
great swing bands of Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington and Count Basie, as
well as the work of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie later on. Moreover, as
far as the claims of J. Bradford Robinson go ± that Adorno's early jazz essays
are to be understood as dealing only with popular cabaret and dance band
music in Germany, and that Adorno had no real experience with `black jazz'
(Robinson 1994) ± one need only note that Evelyn Wilcock's detailed
contextualisations, supplemented with biographical evidence, of Adorno's

early jazz essays within the British jazz debate from the mid-decade, serves
extremely well as a persuasive rebuttal (Wilcock 1996). Wilcock also shows that
the racial distinctions some commentators claim Adorno implicitly made
between authentic and appropriated jazz do not stand up to much scrutiny.
The degree to which issues generated by the relationship of African diasporic
culture to mass cultural production, both in jazz and more recent popular
music, are often so clumsily handled in this debate suggests that contemporary
cultural identity studies (the context from which such matters emerge) do not
adequately address the residues of slave-based modes of production in
twentieth-century American culture.
Finally, the debate necessarily repeats itself outside the strict boundaries of
jazz styles in studies of youth culture music since the 1950s. Yet there are
technical problems with taking Adorno's jazz critique and simply replacing
`jazz' with `rock-n-roll' or `youth culture music'. While there are traditions of
improvisation (especially in styles of youth music stemming directly or
indirectly from both rural and urban blues traditions), in general, melodic
improvisation (of the sort Adorno had in mind) is an increasingly peripheral
practice in youth culture music, and while standardised production and its
attendant false individualism are clearly features of youth music, the outlines of
those processes are far more complex and variegated than are presented in
Adorno's jazz critique.
This much said, one can imagine that there might also be those who would
wish to restrict the scope of an Adorno-style critique of youth music along the
lines used by those who wish to distinguish between Whiteman and Coltrane.
The arguments run a course parallel to those carried out in the strict context of
jazz, and again often awkwardly imbricate issues of race, so that, for instance,
the entire trajectory of bubblegum music corresponds roughly to Whiteman
while hip-hop stands for Coltrane. Yet, as in the argument about jazz, one
cannot simply point to performers with putatively resistant, utopian or
emancipatory intentions, or who enjoy limited commercial success as lying
outside the range of the kind of mass music critique Adorno carries out: the
culture industry (if that concept is to have any meaning at all) produces both
dominant and dominated styles. Core and periphery (no matter how far it
appears removed from the centre) form a cohesive system of falsely
contradictory genres and traditions.
III The Mass Subject

Cook, more than many of Adorno's commentators, explores Adorno's debt to
Freud as someone who furnished a language with which to describe the
psychological effects on individuals of late capitalism on the habits of
individuals.17 Although Adorno seems far less comfortable accepting the

premises of psychoanalysis than he does those of Marxism (since in his view

psychoanalytical practice `collaborates with the universal and long-standing
practice of depriving men of love and happiness in favour of hard work and a
healthy sex life' (Adorno 1968, p. 80)), he clearly felt that Freud alone offered
the theoretical scale and scope required to address properly the processes and
structures of the psyche under capitalism.
Central to Adorno's working out of an appropriate social-psychological
critique is his intention to isolate and describe the appearance not only of the
psychological pathologies of individuals, but also (and more importantly) the
emergence of what might be called public or social pathologies. In so doing, he
makes use of the so-called `weak father thesis', developed earlier by
Horkheimer, which teaches that in the course of life under capitalism, fathers
increasingly become economically weak figures, losing the respect they
formerly commanded within the framework of the earlier bourgeois family
dynamics. The individual psyche generated under these conditions is
characterised by both Adorno and Horkheimer as `narcissistic'.
In the Frankfurt account of things, the disintegration of the bourgeois
father's power arises from the change in industrial firm structure that takes
place beginning in the early twentieth century. Whereas, in the earlier stages of
capitalism, firms were relatively small ± family-owned enterprises in which
fathers not only represented such ownership, but also served as the managers
who encountered their workers daily on the shop floor and worked to integrate
(usually) their male children into similar roles ± in its later phase, such
businesses could typically be expected to fail, or to be absorbed into much
larger, properly managerial-industrial companies owned by shareholders.
Children of such weakened fathers, the thesis goes, fail to undergo an oedipal
struggle of sufficient intensity, and in turn develop egos with severely
weakened senses of autonomy. Into the vacuum left open by weak fathers rush
the values of civil society at large; accordingly the individual's ability to resist
those values later on in life is severely restricted. Furthermore, the resulting
ego, unable to negotiate the conflicting demands placed upon by id and
superego, becomes characterised by schematic and clicheÂd patterns of thought.
This notion engages suggestively with Slovoj ZÏizÏek's more properly
Lacanian category of the `pathological narcissist', described most forcefully
in Looking Awry.18 There, ZÏizÏek organises bourgeois psychological develop-
ment into three stages, each one characterised by a particular pathology or
personality type. Each develops out of the ego's conflict with some aspect of
the superego, itself formed in the course of the oedipal struggle by the infant's
introjection of the superegos of its parents as a solution to the intolerable
conditions it suffers during this stage. As such, the superego is formed by the
ego-ideal ± an imago of what the ego ought to be ± the conscious, and the self-
observational agency.

ZÏizÏek distinguishes the first two pathologies, the àutonomous individual' of

earlier capitalism, which develops into the heteronomous òrganisation man',
as follows:
the so-called `decline of the Protestant ethic' and the appearance of the
òrganisation man', i.e., the replacement of the ethic of individual responsibility
by the ethic of the heteronomous individual, oriented towards others, leaves
intact the underlying frame of the ego-ideal. It is merely its contents that
change: the ego-ideal becomes èxternalised' as the expectations of the social
group to which the individual belongs. The subject looks at himself through the
eyes of the group, he strives to merit its loves and esteem. (ZÏizÏek 1991, p. 100)
ZÏizÏek's pathological narcissist is, however, not in thrall to his ego-ideal in

the way the other two forms are. Instead, the narcissist experiences the
superego ± not as symbolic law (which implies symbolic identification with
others) ± but as a swarm of regulations. As such, the pathological narcissist is a
radical conformist who paradoxically experiences himself as an outlaw. The
waning of the influence of the ego-ideal in pathological narcissism leaves (in
ZÏizÏek's reading of it) the way open for the emergence into domination, not of
the values of civil society as in the Frankfurt account, but rather of the
maternal superego, which does not prohibit enjoyment but, on the contrary,
imposes it and punishes social failure in far more cruel and severe ways,
through an unbearable and self-destructive anxiety. Accordingly, in ZÏizÏek's
account, the weakening of paternal authority leads not simply to self-indulgent
permissiveness, but rather to a chaotic regimen of rules (which in fact
imbricates a style of permissiveness relative to earlier codes) ungrounded in
symbolic law or moral coding.
Both the Frankfurt notion of narcissism, which still lies within the
psychoanalytical sense of the term, as the central public pathology of late
capitalism, and ZÏizÏek's subsequent trope on that notion interact fruitfully with
aspects of Christopher Bollas's Kleinian-style psychoanalytical study of early
childhood òbjects' and later transferences. In The Shadow of the Object, Bollas
describes a new emphasis in personal illness, which he calls `normotic'.19 Bollas
is unsure whether normotic illness as he outlines it represents the recent
emergence of an entirely new pathology or a new awareness of a previously
unobserved aspect of personality. From certain culture-critical points of view,
the distinction does not matter. Something has happened in society that has led
to the formation of the concept: whether the concept itself results from
technical and methodological strides forward, or from changes in personality
form and development does not affect its status as period-specific symptom.
In Bollas's account, normotic illness manifests itself as à particular drive to
be normal, one that is typified by the numbing and eventual erasure of
subjectivity in favour of a self that is conceived as a material object among

other self-made products in the object world' (Bollas 1987, p. 135). Bollas's
examination of how pathological normality instantiates itself in certain
common life situations that involve cultural production is particularly
suggestive in the present context and offers a nosological connection between
Adorno's concept of fetish and his more purely psychological notion of
narcissist mass subject, especially as that discussion is extended by ZÏizÏek's
`pathological narcissist'. As he writes, the normotic
stresses that he is going to a play or that he is in possession of season tickets. He

avoids discussing the content of the play by emphasising the play as something
to go to or to possess. He is sincerely incapable of reading or commenting on a
poem. The capacity to consider a poem is a sophisticated mental
accomplishment and requires a subjective ability which eludes this individual.
(Bollas 1987, pp. 137±8)
What ought to be important to us here, besides a particular symptomological

horizon, is the pathology's aetiology. Whereas, in the Frankfurt account, it is
the weakened authority commanded by parents under later capitalism that
generates weakened ego independence in their children, in normotic illness it is
the parent's weakened ability to mirror the child back to himself, that is, to
bring about the final stages of the child's psychological birth, that initiates the
child's conception of himself purely as an object among objects. Although
Bollas offers no properly sociological explanation for this development (if it is
indeed a new development), one might cite the disappearance under capitalism
of a historical-material basis for the formation of such family relationships.
Kinship structure and associated social institutions largely disintegrate or are
transformed because they have lost the genuine material connection with the
mode of production as a whole that they enjoyed under earlier formations.20 As
such, the family conditions that produce normotic individuals may be seen to
arise from a particular recent intensification of the demystification of the family
under capitalism outlined in the Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels 1998,
p. 38). Derek Sayer, in turn, gives a particularly suggestive account (following
up on Marx's comments in Grundrisse regarding `primitive', àncient' and
`Germanic' communal types) of how kinship relations and family culture are
imbricated in the social relations of production and how capitalism radically
estranges individuals from each other at precisely these primary points of
human interaction.21
IV Emancipatory Music
Fundamentally, all of these public pathologies are the effects of synthesis, of
the demands placed on the individual as psyche and as subject (either directly
or mediated by the family) to integrate with the interests of civil society. As

such, the traditional post-Enlightenment idealist problems of Freedom and

Nature structure most of what Jameson calls the `background narratives' of
Adorno's work (Jameson 1990, p. 77). Hegel's project ± out of which Adorno's
critique of the Enlightenment emanates ± is to show how each term of the
traditional dichotomies of History and Nature, individual and society, and so
on, reveals itself to stand not only in opposition to, but also in identity with its
paired term, since the very relations of opposition and identity are themselves
linked by their mutual inability to stand as self-reliant and self-sufficient
categories, and by their corresponding dependence on each other.22 Hence
their opposition emerges out of a primitive lost unity.
Put in familiar Hegelian terms, thinking, rational individuals are in an
identity relation with their embodiment (that is, they are their embodiment)
which carries them, by means of the drives that constitute the conditions of
existence, to a unity with Nature. Simultaneously, since reason struggles to
achieve self-realisation against the effects of embodiment, thinking rational
individuals are also in opposition to their embodiment. In short, the
(enlightenment) subject as a totality is located on a trajectory aimed at the
completion and realisation of Reason and Freedom which runs counter to the
conditions of existence itself. The task, then, is to reconcile the contradictory
conditions of the embodied subject by reconfiguring the material conditions of
existence (Nature) to serve as an expression of reason and by re-directing reason
to accept that Nature is itself directed towards perfection so that the terms
themselves are maintained, but their opposition is annulled. This recovery of
the prior unity is the famous Identity of Identity and Non-Identity, which
Hegel putatively saw realised politically in the institutions of liberal democracy,
a state devoted to the satisfaction of needs. In such social formations, the state
represents a ùnity' under which individuals' consciousness of themselves as
rational and self-interested, and their consciousness of themselves as citizens
complement (or discipline) each other.23
In Adorno's view, however, this reconciliation is a thoroughly false one.
For, in truth, individuals find themselves in thrall to the forces of adaptation to
the demands of civil society. He writes:
[t]he mechanism of adaptation to hardening realities simultaneously engenders

a hardening within the individual: the more realistic he becomes, the more he
feels reduced to a thing, the more deadened he becomes, and the more senseless
his whole `realism': it destroys everything, including, as an ultimate
consequence, naked existence itself, that it was the function of his self-
preserving rationality to preserve. (Adorno 1968, p. 80)
Accordingly, the liberal democratic Notstaat only falsely meets the needs of
individuals. As such, the individual under capitalism is subject to what Joel
Whitebrook (1996) calls the `violence of synthesis', whose cognitive and

psychological patterns Adorno refers to as ìdentity thinking', and whose

material origins lie in universal exchange of commodities on the market and
expressed within the very structure of commodity form, where incommen-
surable characteristics of labour are drained off to create a false identity of all
labour. Such thinking, which is similar to that which Marx and Engels dubbed
`the mystery of speculative construction', falsely annuls all contradictions,
oppositions, remainders and differences, smudging the distinction between
concepts on the one hand and their referents on the other.24
Philosophy and what Adorno calls àutonomous art' ± art that resists
containment by dominant logic ± are two possible registers from which
emancipatory challenges to the (false) Identity of Identity and Non-Identity
may properly emerge. In Adorno's view, mass culture music is clearly only
capable of intensifying the coercive synthesising forces of civil society (due to
the conditions of its production discussed above): instead it is left to the
musical tradition running from Beethoven onwards to carry out ± by means of
its techniques, procedures and associated (non-regressive) modes of listening ±
a challenge to the dominant identity logic. For her part, Gillian Rose
characterises (strangely) the distinction between music that adapts (mass
music) and music that resists adaptation (critical, self reflective, `subjective'
music) as modelled on either the structural or fundamental contradiction of
capitalist society, namely the contradiction between forces of production and
the relations of production (Rose 1978). Whatever the problems with Rose's
particular analogy, this brute distinction structures all of Adorno's musicology
and those musicologies emanating from it.
By contrast, Alastair Williams concerns himself with an exploration of new
music carried out largely along the lines suggested by Adorno's critique of
Schoenberg, and his theory of the avant-garde in general. What is remarkable
in his work ± and this will interest all music theorists ± is how forcefully he
executes Adorno's project of carrying out formal or technical analysis of pieces
as the pathway to uncovering their emancipatory or utopian potential.
Such analysis can take as its object either a composer's constructive pro-
cesses and techniques (materials and their deployment) or structural features of
pieces themselves (which are to be taken as imprints of compositional
procedure). In either case, such analysis is taken to reveal a work's `truth
content' by viewing musical techniques and structural features as formally
staging a critique of the false reconciliation of identity and non-identity or, in
other words, as forming a structural allegory of resistance to adaptation and
synthesis. This gives rise to the Adorno's famous dynamic of part and whole,
within which local structural details are seen to struggle against the control of
musical form. Ultimately, explorations of individual works are to be taken ± as
Williams does ± within the context of a broader historical narrative that
investigates the progressive dynamic of technical stylistic innovation.

To illustrate Williams's approach, which is concerned with tracing the

trajectory of high modernist compositional practice and technical advance
through the works of Cage and Boulez, it will be particularly fruitful to
consider his remarks on Boulez's Third Piano Sonata. In the first instance,
Williams notes, `[t]he Sonata represents a landmark not only in Boulez's
oeuvre, but in the language and concepts of post-war music because it
involves a sustained attempt to incorporate the dialectic of control and
freedom within the material itself' (p. 51). The work has five formal sections
(or `formants'); the second of these, entitled Trope, Williams finds especially
noteworthy. In discussing the deployment of the work's series, he examines
the section of Trope entitled Texte, itself partitioned into thirteen
subsections. In the following passage, Williams discusses the function in
Texte of embellishments:
[t]he majority of the auxiliary notes in Texte occur between sections, serving as
both transitions and breaks; in Derridean terms, one might call them hinges or
folds. These embellishments can be reduced to twelve-note sets (Strahnke has
identifies four such collections in Texte), but many of the notes are not directly
related to the underlying serial scheme and others connect with it in an
ambiguous fashion. Initially, the auxiliary notes constellate around central
pitches from the privileged series and echo aspects of the main section: in the
first section, for example, the framing grace notes outline the opening 7th, but
by section 8 auxiliaries have crossed the partitions, though they are within the
serial order and pre-echo the pitch organisation of the main section. In section
12 [Ex. 1] . . . functions are more ambiguous: the opening group of auxiliary
notes frames the set and constellates around the central pitch, D . . . yet it is also
group (c)+3. The next nest of auxiliary notes occurs inside the section and
constellates around G, which is not a central pitch. This nest functions as group
(b/d)+3, but because of the transposition is also (a) at its original pitch and
ordering; thus distinctions between main event and its embellishments are
blurred, though the meticulous pedal marks are designed to prevent non-
auxiliary notes from becoming completely obscured. In vintage Derridean
fashion, the frame and its content merge, the inside and outside overlap.
Despite the crossover of functions, stability is maintained here by the fact that
the auxiliaries do not cut in as separate order but, instead, are absorbed in to the
serial context. When the auxiliaries do operate outside the series elsewhere in
this development, they generally use the intervals that define the series: tone,
semitone and 4th. (pp. 56±7)
The collections labelled a to d represent the partitioning of the row into four
segments. Segments a and c each have four pitch-classes; b has one pitch-class,
and d, three. Williams uses the notation `+3' to show that the relevant
segments belong to the basic row transposed under T3.
Williams is primarily concerned here to examine how the variable or
`mobile' nature of inessential notes engages with the variable or mobile nature
of the work's larger formal design, and forms part of his larger aim in the

Ex. 1 Boulez, Third Piano Sonata, twelth section of Texte (from Williams, New
Music and the Claims of Modernity, p. 56)
analysis, which is to gauge whether or not it is composed according to what he

characterises as an Adornian ideal (under which the piece is composed `bottom
up, from particular to the form' (p. 61)). In his view, the work fails to carry the
ideal through completely. As he writes:
[t]he chaos encountered by the rigorous rationality of the Third Piano Sonata
is, in Adornian terms, inherent within the endless substitution generated by
universal fungibility, and its associated identity logic. The interaction of
controlled organisation with mobile forms does, then, have cognitive and
ethical implications, and pertains to the more general social prospect of
formulating a coherent mode of construction that does not repress the
specific. The challenge, both for music and for social forms, is to achieve a
non-substantive logic, but this task is something to be faced anew in each
creative act and is not likely to be accomplished in advance by a developed
musical syntax. (p. 63)
In general, Williams's analysis of works, auteurs and dominant cultural

logics is amongst the most accomplished Adorno-style interpretations of music
one is likely to come across. Yet, two things may strike most music theorists as
difficulties or flaws in his approach. First, Williams (like Adorno himself)
evades any discussion of analytical methodological issues ± the kind of issues
that lie at the very centre of contemporary music-theoretical discussions. As
such, to those accustomed to dealing with serial theory, set theory or

generalised interval systems, Williams's analyses will appear technically naõÈ ve

or even impressionistic. A defence of Williams could no doubt counter in the
spirit of traditional anti-formalism, by contending that the intense interest in
purely structural procedures that characterises contemporary music-theoretical
practice is a species of identity thinking functioning to engage academics in
meaningless intellectual debate along non-materialist, ahistorical lines: that is,
by presenting a framework for intellectual activity that appears (falsely) to its
participants as `rational discourse' but ultimately leads away from meaningful
critical inquiry. In this connection, I have elsewhere attempted to explain how
contemporary music theory seems trapped between, on the one hand, a
conservative memorialising ethos that has historically characterised all music
studies (since they emerge out of performance traditions which are, in turn,
guardians of a more or less well-defined and static canon), and on the other, a
progressive research ethos demanded by the larger academic community
(Klumpenhouwer 1998, p. 305).
Yet the solution is not, it seems to me, to be restrained, oblique or skittish
about methodological issues: such a strategy ends up obscuring and mystifying
discussion of the technical and structural aspects of musical works. One does
not combat identity thinking and its effects by dismissing or shunning its most
obvious expressions (such as certain dominant uses of music-analytical
methodology). In general, efforts simply to elude identity thinking will always
fail, since these evasions will themselves be false: identity thinking, as Adorno
reminds us, is fundamental to all styles of consciousness and cognition under
capitalism. Ideology critique involves more than exposing this or that concept
or practice as yet another expression of the dominant capitalist principle of
universal conceptual fungibility. Rather, ideology critique involves what
Adorno calls `thinking against thought', showing `the inequality among the
equality', carrying identity thinking forwards to express the contradictions it
sets out to obscure.25 In the current context, this means an aggressively
foregrounded engagement with analytical methodologies themselves, and their
apparent entanglement with the putative meaning effects of works and of
compositional procedures. What ought to emerge is not simply an ack-
nowledgement of the contingency of music analysis in general, or an invitation
to interpretative free-play as advocated by vulgar forms of post-structuralism,
but rather a demonstration of the radical impossibility of musical meaning
paradoxically brought about by the radical intensification and saturation of
musical meaning.26 The interpretative conservatism that still characterises
contemporary music theory ± including a reliance on an extremely narrow
methodological horizon ± ought thus to be seen as an attempt to restore or
protect the aura of canonical works (recent reconfigurations of the canon aside)
against the onslaught of cultural and social modernisation. The memorialising
culture of university-based applied music studies, the intellectual context out

of which most music theorists emerge, no doubt provides excellent training in

the required ethos.
The second feature of Adorno-style analytical studies many music theorists
will find troubling is the practice of viewing compositional procedures and
formal relations as furnishing a music-structural mise-en-sceÁne of what is often
called èxtra-musical meaning', whether that involves the portrayal of
resistance or adaptation to dominant synthesising forces as in Adorno's own
work, or the depiction of gender and sexuality struggles in that of those
feminist musicologists and theorists (such as McClary and Cusick) who draw
directly on Adorno's example. This objection arises from the least credible
articulation of traditional formalist doctrine, namely the form that arises from a
strict adherence to institutional disciplinary boundaries, limits generated by an
underlying belief in the real autonomy (either absolute or relative) of politics,
society, art, philosophy and culture, not just from economics, but from each
other. As a result, musical technique and content become conceptually identi-
fied to the point that it becomes impossible even to conceive of structure and
content as distinct domains at all. But the integration is false; in place of the
dualism, a monism appears, generated simply by lopping off the content term
in the previous pairing. Consequently, as Adorno himself would have it, the
very possibility of subjectivity is expelled, the process of musical objectifica-
tion instead reducing history to a simple chronology or series without
undulations or contradictions (Adorno 1977, p. 84).
A more respectable expression of the traditional formalist position, however,
argues (putatively from the perspective of epistemological scepticism) that the
relationship between structure or technique and ideational content (of the sort
that interests Adorno) is so variable that compositions may be claimed to say
just about anything. Certainly the kind of Adornian analyses of Beethoven that
seek to portray works as critiques of Hegel ± often implementing
Schoenbergian analytical categories such as `developing variation' ± can be
countered by Schenkerian graphs that portray Beethoven as an engineer of
grand unified structures (or conversely, the poet of fragmentation if the context
requires) based on supposedly transcendent contrapuntal principles.
However, just as analysis cannot stand for proof of particular ideational
content, neither can it provide the conditions for scepticism about content.
Every analytical approach generates readable content in the first instance by
transcoding scores into its own structural categories, which in turn restricts
further interpretative movement. A Schenkerian graph, for instance, can never
outrun the reach of Schenker's grand feudal socialist project, which was to
show that the contrapuntal principles he associated favourably with feudal
court and church culture were extended by the great composers he admired,
such as Beethoven and Brahms, and threatened by lesser talents who served
what he saw as the degenerate democratic impulses of liberal capitalism.

Accordingly, the aim of Schenker's approach was to counter the view of late-
nineteenth century music historians such as Ambros, who claimed that the
Baroque represented a successful struggle against counterpoint, overcoming it
by means of harmonic principles, the structural potential of which was more
fully realised in later classical and romantic composition. The whole
technology of Schenker's approach ± Zugs, voice-leading transformations,
structural levels ± is designed solely to bring about such a realisation, the
consciousness of which can only be avoided by thoroughly naturalising it.
Schoenberg's plan (which Adorno clearly internalised), however, was to
uncover in the works of the great bourgeois composers structural repetitions at
the very level of the motive ± repetitions concealed by the transformations
(inversion, transposition and order retrogression) that characterised his own
later serial procedures. The subjective appeal of this approach (and approaches
that emanate from it, such as set theory) is the degree to which, by
transforming what seem to be non-identical details into iterations of the same
structure, they provide Àha!'-moments. Viewed from the objective side,
repetition ± whose great theorists, as Jameson tells us, are Kierkegaard (for
whom it functioned as the proper replacement for the Hegelian category of
mediation) and Freud (who saw it as the fundamental gesture of the death
drive) ± constitutes the structural residue of the logic of identity and
abstraction.
Accordingly, whether methodologies are foregrounded or not, they impose
particular ideological charges on the interpretative project at hand. This is not,
however, to be seen as a problem in need of a solution; it would be useless to
attempt the development of ideologically positive methodologies in order to
counter the putative pernicious effects of traditional methodologies. Rather,
the point is to see that the ideation structurally projected under different
analytical traditions constitutes the total topography of bourgeois thinking
about music. In other words, the different structural images of works that
methodologies form are only superficially contradictory; together, they
articulate the dynamics that support bourgeois musical ideation.
The practice of reading music-structural objects and relations as allegory or
mise-en-sceÁne for struggles against coercive social integration runs parallel to
the ideological flow generated by the analytical methodology at hand. While
the semiosis between purely technical features (regardless of methodology) and
concepts or ideational content may be opaque, such thinking characterises
much important historical music-theoretic work. Riepel's famous identification
of key relations with categories of social hierarchy (imbricating both
production relations and gender relations) is one example. Schoenberg
provides another, less famous instance in his discussion of second inversion
tonic chords, in which tonic and bass pitch vie for structural dominance. The
chord following the tonic six-four chord determines the winner: Ìf the bass

tone is victorious, then I goes to V. Sometimes, however, the concession does

not go so far, but chooses a middle. Then it can happen that the third (Terz)
becomes the root, that I goes to III' (Schoenberg 1978, p. 77). The
accompanying footnote (written in 1922) explains further: `The Europeans (I
and V), who have mangled one another for the benefit of the subdominant
(Japan) and the upper mediant (America) or some other mediant of culture'
(Schoenberg 1978, p. 77). In cases such as these, the animating notion is that
our music (which is good) is structured according to the very principles that
structure our society (which are also good).
Accordingly, such thinking (no matter how apparently illogical or inappro-
priate it appears to formalists) represents at the very least a cognitive-cultural
habit that needs to be addressed and explained: indeed, entire compositional
genres (especially texted works and programmatic music of all sorts) are
impossible without it. Hence, the argument against connections between social
narratives and musical structure cannot be that such relationships are
arbitrary. On the contrary, such relationships or associations are always
heavily determined, neither by the structural field, nor by the features of truth
content, but by the concept of totality itself, which for Adorno is circumscribed
by way of Marx's critique of capitalism.
These debates obscure the more fundamental distinctions which obtain
between Adorno's approach and current music-analytical thought with regard to
the nature of the paired terms subject and object and their relationship. In certain
important respects, traditional formalism is reliant on an absolute discontinuity
between aesthetic subjects and objects, along with commitment exclusively to
abandon the realm of the subject in favour of investigations of the logic that
controls the object realm. One ought to be careful not to collapse completely
contemporary music-analytic practice into traditional formalism: nevertheless, as
its creation myth, formalism clearly continues to supply contemporary music
analysis with its broad aims, as well as defining the regulative limits that such
(properly constituted) discussions of music may take.
In Exact Imagination, Late Work, Shierry Weber Nicholson sets out to
provide, among other things, a framework for understanding Adorno's own
conception of the aesthetic subjective realm and the role of history in its
formation and structure. Her explanation is important to the present context
since it illuminates the critical base of Adorno's approach to music analysis.
Nicholson illustrates how, in Adorno's view, the objectivity of music covers
both its extension as an artefact, text or structure, and its interaction with social
relations and institutions; in other words, the objectivity of music must be
recognised as extending both materially and socially. But objectivity is not a
self-sufficient realm: rather, it is mediated by subjectivity, extended
homologously in the perspective of the composer, the perspective of the
receiver, as well as in the subjectivity embedded within the work itself.

Accordingly, subjectivity, like objectivity, extends ± both materially and

socially ± categories that interact dialectically, in a manner that parallels the
relationship between the categories of content and form. In each case, the
terms are conceptually distinct but inseparable: recursively determining each
other, the paired terms emerge simultaneously, as a system of aggregated
determinations. The four terms in the discussion ± subject, object, material and
social ± thus form a dialectical cycle or circuit: subjectivity (in both its material
and social realms) supplies the content of the object's material and social forms,
a formulation that also extends in the reverse direction; material relations
(extended both subjectively and objectively) are given form by social relations
(again, extended subjectively and objectively), which on their own are empty.
For Adorno, to be `genuine', aesthetic experience must be simultaneously
naõÈ ve and reflective, passive and active, given over both to sensuousness and
understanding, satisfying both pleasure and reason, feeling and intellect. In
isolation, the individual term in each pair is destructive, regressive, partial.
Genuine aesthetic experience synthesises these contradictory domains so that
authenticity of experience becomes the authenticity of the work itself, by
focusing on details (non-identity) before passing over into the whole (identity).
Accordingly, subjective aesthetic experience transcends itself to re-emerge in
the objectivity of the artwork.
In this way individual childhood associations (like Adorno's own of
Strauss's music with industry) or more social associations, such as the
characterisation (widespread in Adorno's time) of Chopin's music as
aristocratic, no matter how arbitrary they seem to us now, are the pathways
to discovering the content contained in technical musical details. Thus,
subjective aesthetic experience develops and evolves over time. Correspond-
ingly, works develop and evolve through history as newer works appear, and
the work, initially a unified solid mass, disintegrates as it survives its relevant
social determinations. Hence, the original unity appears false or illusory; the
work's ideational content is exposed and, as a result, vaporises along with its
subjectivity. The work itself dies; all that remains is bones. The organic work,
synthesising objective and subjective realms, becomes inorganic.
V Closing Remarks
Adorno's cultural critique often seems animated by an underlying narrative of
social decay and increasing cultural corruption. That scarcely a page of Adorno
goes by without his grieving the dissolution of earlier cultural potential or the
extinction of worthwhile cultural contexts and conditions is often observed as
the dominant characteristic of his critical style.
Jeremiads of cultural decline characterise a whole range of cultural-
historical critique on both the right and the left. With respect to musical

scholarship alone, the notion of capitalism's destruction of musical creativity

flourishes in Schenker's resolutely reactionary work as much as it does in the
writings of Adorno. That said, the two pinpointed the watershed of cultural
descent and corruption at different historical points. For Schenker, it was
Schoenberg and Stravinsky in particular who had abandoned (in favour of
chaos and disorder) the principles of contrapuntal music developed in feudal
aristocratic and clerical circles and extended by Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.
By contrast, Adorno saw the development of the culture industry and the
corresponding `Halbbildung' of individuals in its thrall as the critical historical
moment in the trajectory of cultural decline. Both writers are thus trapped in
cultural narratives of nostalgia, resentment and mourning. Hence, while
Schenker laments the dissolution of feudal culture and the social relations that
generated it, Adorno's nostalgia appears aimed at the culture of the earliest
stages of capitalism itself and the potential it represented.
Attacks on capitalism and its effects are, in fact, a penny a dozen. In the
Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels (1998) examine various traditions of
anti-capitalism (all of which they term `socialism') ± feudal socialism, petty-
bourgeois socialism, conservative or bourgeois socialism and German socialism
± in order to demonstrate how most end up misdiagnosing the central problems
of capitalism as a mode of production, thereby identifying false avenues of
escape that in the end only serve the interests of the ruling class. Adorno's own
critique may often seem more interested in attacking what is frequently called
the Fordist and Taylorist stages of capitalism than the system tout court as a
mode of production. Accordingly, Adorno's outlook has, in certain important
respects, many of the features of petty-bourgeois socialism: that form which
Marx and Engels characterise as simultaneously regressive and utopian on
account of the fact that it advocates a return to earlier styles of production and
exchange along with their associated social relations as the solution to the
disastrous effects (keenly felt by the petty-bourgeois as a class) of modern
industrial capitalism. Inevitably, the history of capitalism written in the petty-
bourgeois socialist mode is written as pure tragedy.
In the terms of Marx's analysis of the accumulation of capital, earlier stages
of capitalism are typified by what he called the formal subsumption of labour
by capital, under which capital takes over a mode of labour `developed before
the emergence of capitalist relations, and where the actual labour process is
unaffected' (Marx 1977, p. 1021). Under this arrangement, the only road open
to the capitalist in the further accumulation of surplus-value is to compel
workers to lengthen the working day, a mode of accumulation Marx calls
àbsolute'.27 From this early arrangement emerges the real subsumption of
labour by capital, under which the labour process in the capitalist's control is
constantly revolutionised by means of increased fragmentation of the labour
process (division of labour), and the introduction of new technological

production designs as a way to lower the cost of labour power (variable capital)
while maintaining or intensifying labour's unique characteristic as the
producer of value, a mode of surplus-value accumulation Marx calls
`relative'.28
As the quality of capital's subsumption of labour changes in the course of
capitalism, it also ceaselessly transforms what classical economics called non-
productive labour (labour not exchanged for capital ± as expended by the self-
employed artisans, tradespeople and professionals who in large part make up
the petty-bourgeoisie) into productive labour (labour purchased or, more
precisely, placed in opposition to capital to yield surplus-value).
This later stage of capitalism develops into the Taylorist and Fordist mass-
production style that Adorno seems to have associated uniquely with American
capitalism and which he continually characterised as a decline from earlier
forms. Yet there is nothing of the earlier stages destroyed by Fordist or
managerial capitalism worth mourning here: the attempt to hold back
developments or to protect one or another aspect of life from their effects
are at best regressive gestures that underestimate the power of capitalism in
daily life. Furthermore, the aspects of early capitalist production, their relevant
social relations and cultural products, are more properly viewed as transitional
remnants of feudal production (non-productive labour and the formal
subsumption of productive labour): they do not represent the radical solution
to capitalism but in fact the very conditions for its existence as a mode of
production. Fordism cannot represent a deterioration within capitalism,
because it only emerges as a mode of accumulation and a corresponding mode
of organising labour (by further rationalising the labour process, or by
transforming formerly non-productive labour into productive labour) from the
conditions compelled by accumulation crises generated within capitalism as a
system of surplus-value production. Accordingly, institutions and practices of
musical production under early stages of capitalism (though it is even debatable
whether, say, Beethoven's labour is properly characterised as non-productive
labour) cannot represent a cultural highpoint.
As a challenge to the narrative of life under capitalism as pure tragedy, we
could trope Marx's own trope on Hegel, asserting that history needs to be
narrated twice: once as tragedy, and once as farce (Marx 1964, p. 7). The
purely tragic version of capitalism is doomed never to get off the ground,
dialectically speaking.
If Adorno's cultural tragedy (counterpointing the larger tragedy of
capitalism as a decline) is suspect from certain Marxist perspectives, then so
is his characterisation of the nature and function of art within capitalist society.
The notion of the emancipatory potential of art and the corresponding
possibility of genuine aesthetic subjectivity proposed by Adorno (a notion
supported by his putatively dialectical association of art with philosophy), only

allows the two categories (which, interestingly, often seem to stand respectively
for Pleasure and Reason) to mystify one another mutually and in alternation.
In general, this perspective is premised on non-dialectical forms of the
concepts of Freedom, Will and Necessity, purely idealist categories that have
no historical-material support and can never be realised in our present mode of
production. Hence, as Terry Eagleton, for example, has argued, under
capitalism, Freedom and Necessity end up rarely anything more than vulgar
Reichianism and genetic causal determinism, respectively (Eagleton 1990,
p. 207). Correspondingly, these categories can only serve to confuse and
mystify aesthetics, ultimately transforming it into a purely moralising style of
cultural critique. As a rule, the dependence on moral arguments ± to which
Marx was particularly opposed ± increases as proper theorising founders. As a
method for smuggling `transcendent' categories either into a stalled or deficient
debate, or into a debate threatening to progress to uncomfortable conclusions,
moral categories signify an improperly framed argument or the failure of a
particular theoretical trajectory.
Consequently, searching within the current or past system of musical genres
for signs of oppositional or resistant impulses ± including those produced by
residual feudal tendencies ± is a fruitless exercise. The alleged cultural
mustering points for such defiance against capitalism ± avant-garde music,
certain popular musics, jazz and certain classical traditions, this or that
composer, performer or group ± are practices nicely described by the Marxist
historian of architecture, Manfredo Tafuri, as ùselessly painful' ± in short,
because it is pointless to struggle towards an exit in such a closed system as
capitalism (Tafuri 1976, p. 181). Tafuri's words are even more important now
in the midst of contemporary social developments many post-structuralists and
feminists incorrectly identify as `post-capitalist'. The recent work of J. K.
Gibson-Graham (1996), in which the author advances the view of a closed
social totality as `capitalocentric', is an example of the fruits of such thinking. It
is highly instructive to note how the same faith in the end of capitalism and of
the market has flourished within recent bourgeois management theory. So, for
example, in Managing in a Time of Great Change, written in 1995, Peter
Drucker ± America's most respected management consultant ± begins with a
discussion, apparently in complete seriousness, on something called the `Post-
Capitalist Executive'.
All of these theoretical tendencies ± the concept of potential resistant or
autonomous social regions, the notion that capitalist society is characterised
by a complexity and pluralism that defeats the reductionism of Marxism, and
the putative appearance of the post-capitalist market as a autonomous
horizon of free expression that defies older modernist limitations ± arise from
the revival in certain traditions of the notion of a civil society. Indeed, the
concept of a social realm that is potentially free (read: resistant) or

incognisably complex and pluralistic undergirds the entire project of

contemporary cultural studies and develops out of a corruption of certain
strains in Gramsci's thought.
While Marx saw civil society and the state not as opposed powers but rather
as two modalities of the same aggregate of forces, processes and relationships
under capitalism, Gramsci, as Wood observes, revived the notion of civil
society to accommodate
both the complexity of political power in the parliamentary or constitutional

states of the West, in contrast to more openly coercive autocracies, and the
difficulty of supplanting a system of class domination in which class power has
no visible point of concentration in the state but is diffused throughout society
and its cultural practices. (Wood 1995, p. 240)
The current uses of the concept of civil society revitalise, she notes, the notions
of `formal' democracy as developed in the West, including putative recent
advances in racial, sexual and gender equality, faithfully recorded and celebrated
by university research culture. As such, the category seems usually to cover non-
state, market or privately-run institutions and procedures that arrange
themselves in opposition to state organisations and institutions (legal, executive
and regulatory agencies alongside cultural bodies), although the categorisation
procedure can apparently be fruitfully reversed as needed. However internally
constituted, this binarism develops into the crude separation of all objects,
procedures and practices into negative operations carried out in the interests of
civil society against the state or, alternatively, affirmative operations carried out
in the interests of the state itself (Wood 1995, p. 243).
Needless to say, from a properly Marxist perspective (which Gramsci was in
fact eager to promote) the dichotomy generates an internally dispersed and
fragmented vision of contemporary social and cultural life often casting itself as
a celebration of pluralism, difference, complexity and diversity. Yet, rather
than advancing a useful critique of cultural practices (including musical life
and its artefacts) under capitalism, the same binarism serves to obscure the
relevant underlying mechanisms and laws of motion basic to the system.
*
Adorno does not forsake traditional Marxist aesthetics. In fact, his main
usefulness may be that he makes clear how deeply flawed by indebtedness to
bourgeois mystifications of art the traditional forms of Marxist aesthetic
theory have been. Michael Sprinker's observation is particularly appropriate
here: in his view, `[c]lassical Marxism shares with bourgeois aesthetics the
conviction that in art one attains freedom, and that this freedom consists,
among other things, in the liberation from ideological determinism and

historical contingency' (Sprinker 1987, p. 13). Sprinker further points out

that the problem can be traced back to Marx himself (and, from there, to
LukaÂcs and the Frankfurt Marxists), who maintained that Greek art,
although tied to its relevant social forms, also transcended them: the measure
of this transcendence according to Marx is the pleasure they continue to give
and their apparent normative value (Sprinker 1987, p. 12). Already here, the
Marxist reception of art is trapped within the insoluble narrative of
pessimism over the increasing abandonment during capitalism of
transcendental aesthetic norms, on the one hand, and, on the other, art's
`privileged means of access to that mode of existence which, ex hypothesi,
mankind will one day attain when the realm of necessity has been
transformed into the realm of freedom' (Sprinker 1987, p. 13). Marx's
own writing on aesthetics is certainly much more than this, and Eagleton in
particular has shown how fundamentally important to Marx the category
aesthetics (in both Baumgarten's sense and the more narrow modern sense of
the word) was.29 Nevertheless, Sprinker's diagnosis does point to a poorly
framed problematic at the very kernel of Marxist aesthetic thinking.
Maynard Solomon's classical Marxist approach, which clearly extends from
the perspective provided by Marx himself, is instructive in comparison with
Adorno's, since it is overtly dependent on the belief in the transcendent value
of great masterpieces, values which can only be appreciated by means of proper
interpretative programmes. For Solomon,
[a]rt is itself (like Marxism) a strategy of demystification, a withdrawal from the
negative reality of an alienated class society into a different order of reality
which common sense deems illusion but which is actually the symbolic
precipitate of material-sensuous substructure of human relations and desires.
Art is a distinct form of the labour process in which ± amid the myriad effusions
and narcotic productions of class culture ± is kept alive the materialised imagery
of man's hope and of that very same human essence which Marxism seeks to
reveal. Marxism, having supplied the theoretical means of analysing the
historically shaped contradictions which give rise to art, has the greater task of
preserving and liberating the congealed symbols of beauty and freedom which
live on within the masterworks of art. (Solomon 1973, p. 20)
Quite clearly, such sensibilities can only lead, as they do in Adorno, to extreme
cultural disappointment as society under capitalism continues to shed older
cultural forms and objects for which it no longer has any use. Important
debates within Marxism about realism, naturalism and modernism ± which
have yet to be appropriately applied to musical study ± have been severely
hamstrung by such poorly framed broader contexts.
To be consonant with Marx's project at large, a properly Marxist aesthetics,
and the broader cultural interpretative methodologies and approaches that
emerge from it, ought to begin with the realisation that developing strategies

for reconciling sundered and mutually alienated social domains, or for

`liberating congealed symbols of beauty and freedom which live on within
the masterworks of art' is in the end only futile and distracting. Critical
projects committed from the outset to the view that art is foremost a nourishing
or therapeutic enterprise, as capitalism's spiritual payoff, consolation prize or
moral life raft (depending on the relevant variety of anti-capitalism), have lost
their radical critical edge even before they begin.
In many respects, the flawed Marxism of Adorno's aesthetics contributes to
his continued appeal, and the appropriation of important aspects of his work by
both cultural conservatives and liberal postmodernists. For the former, Adorno
provides one of the most sophisticated attacks on modern cultural life available;
for the latter, Adorno's aesthetics functions as an inoculation against the
broader, more radical claims of Marxist critique of our current social
formation.30
Nevertheless, it must also be recognised that Adorno supplied the first
serious theoretical framework for integrating technical discussions of musical
structure with discussions of content as determined by social relations and
institutions. The dialectical cycle of (historicised) subject, object, material and
social relations represents the most fruitful context yet available for illu-
minating the phenomenon of music and its relevant interpretative disciplines
under capitalism. However, Adorno's usefulness to us may just turn out to be
that he brings to their dazzling conclusion certain doomed strains within
traditional Marxist aesthetics and cultural critique. In so doing, his spectacular
theoretical failure opens the door to the genuine possibility of a properly
Marxist theory of culture in general and music in particular.
NOTES
1. In view of the unbroken native interest in his work since its appearance, such an
observation will almost certainly be received as sadly typical in German-language
musicological and cultural studies circles.
2. See, for example, Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Developing Variations: Style and
Ideology in Western Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991);
Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Max Paddison, Adorno's Aesthetics of
Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Adorno, Modernism and
Mass Culture (London: Kahn and Averill, 1996).
3. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. and ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor
(London: Athlone Press, 1997).
4. Simon Jarvis, Adorno: a Critical Introduction (Oxford: Polity Press, 1998).
5. Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno,

Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (Hassocks: Harvester, 1977). The
titles by Jay and Rose are listed below under References.
6. For a detailed reflection on such challenges to Marxism, see George McLennan,
`Post-Marxism and the ``Four Sins'' of Modernist Theorising', New Left Review,
218 (1996), pp. 53±75.
7. Deborah Cook, The Culture Industry Revisited: Theodor W. Adorno on Mass
Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996). xiv +190 pp. £44.50.
ISBN 0-847-68154-8 (hb); Shierry Weber Nicholson, Exact Imagination, Late
Work: On Adorno's Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). 270 pp.
£23.95. ISBN 0-262-14062-4 (hb); Alastair Williams, New Music and the Claims
of Modernity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997). xi + 163pp. £45.00. ISBN 1-859-
28368-3 (hb).
8. Àmong other criteria' is obviously an appropriate qualification and one which
weakens the charge of circular logic somewhat. It is enough, though, that there is
any determination whatsoever extending in both directions between status
markers and class formation.
9. Quoted in Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno's Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of
Illusion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 33.
10. See in particular the passage beginning on p. 802 in Marx 1977.
11. Actually, one suspects that competition for students in the academic market,
which the vicissitudes of demographics in North America had turned into a blood
sport, was perhaps the conclusive argument for accommodating the study of
popular culture. One can just imagine Adorno's reaction.
12. In addition to Adorno 1967, one may note the following: `Schlageranalysen',
Anbruch, 11/iii (1929), pp. 108±14; Àbschied vom Jazz', EuropaÈische Revue, 9/v
(1933), pp. 795±9; Òn the Social Situation of Music', trans. Wes Blomster, Telos,
35 (1978), pp. 128±64; ÙÈber Jazz' [under the pseudonym `Hektor Rottweiler']
Zeitschrift fuÈr Sozialforschung, 5/ii (1937), pp. 235±59; Òn Popular Music',
Studies in Philosophy and Social Sciences, 9 (1941), pp. 17±48.
13. Quoted in Jay 1973, p. 186.
14. Winthrop Sergeant, Jazz: Hot and Hybrid (New York: Da Capo, 1975).
15. Riesman is explicitly considered along these lines in Barbara Ehrenreich,
Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs, `Beatlemania: Girls Just Want to Have
Fun', in Lisa A. Lewis (ed.), The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular
Media (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 84±106.
16. Specifically, Adorno writes that the `vitality' of the rhythmic processes in jazz is
`difficult to take seriously in the face of an assembly-line procedure that is
standardised down to its most minute deviations' (Adorno 1967, pp. 123±4).
17. Whitebrook 1991 (which Cook uses as an important source for her own study) is
even more remarkable in this respect: his book lies in the tradition of Marcuse
and Ricoeur but expands greatly on their respective missions as well as updating

their findings and observations.

18. See the passage beginning on p. 100 in ZÏizÏek 1991.
19. See the passage beginning on p. 135 in Bollas 1987.
20. One ought not to feel nostalgic on this account: earlier conditions contain the
logical seed for current conditions.
21. See Sayer 1976, in particular pp. 50±83.
22. See Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975),
especially pp. 3±50.
23. See especially Terry Pinkard, `The Successor to Metaphysics: Absolute Idea and
Absolute Spirit', The Monist, 74/iii (1991), p. 316.
24. See especially the passage beginning on p. 77 in Marx and Engels 1956.
25. See especially the passage beginning on p. 141 in Adorno 1973.
26. This observation engages with certain aspects of Benjamin's notion of aura and
his characterisation of all modern interpretation as a species of allegorical
thinking under which àny person, any object, any relationship can mean
absolutely anything else'. See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic
Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977), p. 175.
27. See Marx 1977, in particular pp. 323±428.
28. See Marx 1977, in particular pp. 429±642.
29. See the chapter entitled `The Marxist Sublime', in Eagleton 1990, pp. 196±223.
30. The various attempts to claim Adorno as an early post-structuralist thinker ± a
claim thoroughly discredited by Jameson ± must be seen as a fairly transparent
extension of the strategy of inoculation.
REFERENCES
Adorno, Theodor W., 1967: `Perennial Fashion ± Jazz', in Prisms, trans. Samuel
and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
______, 1968: `Sociology and Psychology I', trans. Irving Wohlfarth, New Left
Review, 46, pp. 67±80.
______, 1973: Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum).
______, 1976: Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton (New
York: Seabury Press).
______, 1977: `Music and Technique', trans. Wes Blomster, Telos, 32, pp. 79±94.
______, 1978: Òn the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening',
trans. Maurice Goldbloom, in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (eds.), The
Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Urizen Books).
Adorno, Theodor W., and Horkheimer, Max, 1972: Dialectic of Enlightenment,

trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder).

Baudrillard, Jean, 1981: For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans.
Charles Levin (St Louis: Telos Press).
Bloch, Ernst, 1995: The Principle of Hope, Vol. 1, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen
Plaice and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Bollas, Christopher, 1987: The Shadow of the Object: the Unthought Known (New
York: Columbia University Press).
Bourdieu, Pierre, 1984: Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste,
trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press).
Campbell, Martha, 1993: `Marx's Concept of Economic Relations', in Fred
Moseley (ed.), Marx's Method in Capital: a Re-examination (New Jersey:
Humanities Press), pp. 135±55.
Cohen, Gerald A., 1978: Karl Marx's Theory of History: a Defence (Princeton:
Princeton University Press).
Drucker, Peter, 1995: Managing in a Time of Great Change (New York: Truman
Tulley Books).
Eagleton, Terry, 1990: The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell).
Fussell, Paul, 1983: Class (New York: Ballantine Books).
Gibson-Graham, J. K., 1996: The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): a Feminist
Critique of Political Economy (Oxford: Blackwell).
Haug, Wolfgang F., 1986: Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance,
Sexuality, and Advertising in Capitalist Society, trans. Robert Bock
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Jameson, Fredric, 1990: Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic
(London: Verso).
Jay, Martin, 1973: The Dialectical Imagination (Berkeley: University of California
Press).
Klumpenhouwer, Henry, 1998: `Commentary: Post-Structuralism and Issues of
Music Theory', in Adam Krims (ed.), Music/Ideology: Resisting the Aesthetic
(Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach).
LukaÂcs, Georg, 1971: `Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat', in
History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press).
Marx, Karl, 1964: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York:
International Publishers).
______, 1977: Capital, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books).
Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, 1956: The Holy Family: the Critique of Critical
Critique (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House).
______, 1998: The Communist Manifesto (London: Verso).
Robinson, J. Brandford, 1994: `The Jazz Essays of Theodor Adorno: Some
Thoughts on Jazz Reception in Weimar Germany', Popular Music, 31/iii,
pp. 1±25.

Rose, Gillian, 1978: The Melancholy Science: an Introduction to the Thought of

Theodor W. Adorno (London: Macmillan).
Sayer, Derek, 1976: Marx's Method (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Blackwell).
Schoenberg, Arnold, 1978: Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy E. Carter (London:
Faber and Faber).
Solomon, Maynard, 1973: Marxism and Art: Essays Classic and Contemporary
(New York: Knopf).
Sprinker, Michael, 1987: Imaginary Relations (London: Verso).
Tafuri, Manfredo, 1976: Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist
Development, trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Whitebrook, Joel, 1996: Perversion and Utopia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Wilcock, Evelyn, 1996: Àdorno, Jazz and Racism: `ÙÈber Jazz'' and the 1934±7
British Jazz Debate', Telos, 107, pp. 63±90.
Wood, Elizabeth, 1995: Democracy Against Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press).
ZÏizÏek, Slovoj, 1991: Looking Awry: an Introduction to Jacques Lacan through
Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

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HENRY KLUMPENHOUWER

LATE CAPITALISM, LATE MARXISM AND THE STUDY OF MUSIC

It seems appropriate to begin by noting the remarkable recent wave of books

Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001) 367

context that seems to have matured in relative theoretical isolation: as if, in

ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001 Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001)

I Commodification and Cultural Production

Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001) ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001

Since we must exclude use value (a quality) as the determinant of value (a

ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001 Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001)

The mysterious character of the commodity-form (its transcendence of its own

The most common reading of Marx's words here understands fetishism to

Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001) ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001

LukaÂcs's reification ± the objectification (or false materialisation) of social

ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001 Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001)

Adorno's writings on the culture industry are filled with similar

Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001) ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001

ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001 Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001)

Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001) ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001

ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001 Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001)

II Mass Culture, Popular Culture

Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001) ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001

ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001 Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001)

The notion common to almost all Frankfurt mass culture analysis is

Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001) ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001

thoroughly streamlined melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and orchestrational

ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001 Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001)

states, when ideation progresses from perceptual agencies towards motor

Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001) ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001

snob factor, retaining `distinction' as its fundamental gesture by dispersing

ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001 Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001)

III The Mass Subject

Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001) ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001

premises of psychoanalysis than he does those of Marxism (since in his view

ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001 Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001)

ZÏizÏek distinguishes the first two pathologies, the `autonomous individual' of

ZÏizÏek's pathological narcissist is, however, not in thrall to his ego-ideal in

Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001) ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001

stresses that he is going to a play or that he is in possession of season tickets. He

What ought to be important to us here, besides a particular symptomological

ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001 Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001)

such, the traditional post-Enlightenment idealist problems of Freedom and

[t]he mechanism of adaptation to hardening realities simultaneously engenders

Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001) ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001

psychological patterns Adorno refers to as `identity thinking', and whose

ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001 Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001)

To illustrate Williams's approach, which is concerned with tracing the

Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001) ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001

analysis, which is to gauge whether or not it is composed according to what he

In general, Williams's analysis of works, auteurs and dominant cultural

ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001 Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001)

generalised interval systems, Williams's analyses will appear technically naõÈ ve

Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001) ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001

of which most music theorists emerge, no doubt provides excellent training in

ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001 Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001)

Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001) ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001

tone is victorious, then I goes to V. Sometimes, however, the concession does

ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001 Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001)

Accordingly, subjectivity, like objectivity, extends ± both materially and

Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001) ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001

scholarship alone, the notion of capitalism's destruction of musical creativity

ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001 Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001)

Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001) ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001

ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001 Music Analysis, 20/iii (2001)