Abstract
Book reviewed
T.W. Adorno, Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009. 511 pp. £19.99/€24.00 ISBN 9780745642864 (pbk)
Current of Music is the latest in the series of Theodor W. Adorno’s hitherto unpublished lectures and fragments to be published by Suhrkamp and Polity. Two points single out this offering from its predecessors. First, much of it was originally written in English, a language that the author was still mastering (having fled Germany for Oxford in 1934). The book documents Adorno’s contribution to the Princeton Radio Research Project from his time as its Director of Music between 1938 and 1941. Second, Current of Music is, in a too obvious sense, a failed work, given Adorno’s ‘dismissal’ from the Project without a complete publication (only a couple of articles appeared). Moreover, whereas the other music themed books in the above series may be termed genuine fragments – Beethoven (1998) and Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction (2006) – Current of Music is comprised of highly worked and at times repetitive documents (seven in total, plus nine ‘Other Materials’). This weariness is exacerbated by the fact that its subject, US radio music of the 1930s, is for us a distant one.
Having said all that, the work’s underlying question concerning the relationship between cultural forms, technology and capitalism remains extremely pertinent, as I shall attempt to demonstrate. Looking beyond the problems of its mode of presentation, Current of Music serves as an important counterpoint to Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’ (1936, in Benjamin 2006). Adorno responded critically to that now famous essay in correspondence with Benjamin, and he later discussed its use of the concept of ‘aura’ in Aesthetic Theory ([1970] 1997). But Current of Music provides a more involved consideration of Benjamin’s thesis, albeit in particular sections. Adorno’s working title plays on the idea of electric current, of technological reproduction generally, and the belated appearance of this project actually allows for a rethinking of the relationship between Benjamin’s and Adorno’s theories of art. But first, what was the Project?
Adorno in New York
After having made contact with Paul Lazersfeld, the newly appointed director of the Princeton Project, the Institute’s director, Max Horkheimer, informed Adorno that a position had been secured for him. Horkheimer and Adorno knew Lazersfeld, since he had contributed an article to the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in the previous year. Adorno had the greater misgivings about Lazersfeld’s ‘positivist’ methodologies – David Jenemann has set out the tensions between empirical and theoretical approaches within the Institute at this time. Ultimately, the deal with Lazersfeld was about mutual benefit. Lazersfeld sought to repay Horkheimer having received past assistance from the Institute – though he also remained genuinely curious about the compatibility between Adorno’s theory and ‘administrative research’. Horkheimer wanted Adorno near to the Institute in New York and Adorno needed both a visa and income to make that possible (Jenemann, 2007: Chapter 1).
Aside from these practical advantages, Adorno saw in the Project an opportunity to study the globally most advanced culture industry at close quarters. Allied to this was the above-mentioned critical theorist’s interest in taking on Benjamin’s thesis concerning the affinity between technological and social progress in culture. Given Adorno’s ambiguous stance on empirical research, we can sense a sub-current of bad faith in this combination of interests. It is as if Adorno had theoretically exhausted the possibilities of any popular culture not yet having studied it (except for some jazz, famously) – only to retroactively make the empirical data ‘scientifically’ contest Benjamin’s study. As the editor of Current of Music, Robert Hullot-Kentor, indicates, Adorno made claims about the US radio listener not having met very many Americans.
The idea of ‘[bringing] together people from commerce and academia’ sounds all too familiar today. The Project was established with money from the Rockefeller Foundation, whose generosity happened to coincide with the generation of research useful to commercial radio stations. The collaboration between the Institute and the Project – a joint publication was planned – is an instance of this consensus around the consumer-oriented democratization of culture, captured in Hullot-Kentor’s ominous line: ‘radio’s educational potential for advertisers’ (Adorno, 2009: 11).
However, Adorno will not play ball with the Radio Project. He is not especially interested in Lazersfeld’s ‘benevolent administrative research’ (Adorno, 2009: 134). The philanthropists see radio as a means of cultivation through the dissemination of a largely bourgeois, European art. According to Hullot-Kentor, the majority of US radio music during the 1930s was live classical, with ‘light music’ remaining in the minority. Rather than simply allowing for the reproduction of the classics, Adorno contends, radio has changed the nature of listening itself, in a manner that calls for new production. This is consistent with Benjamin’s ‘The Author as Producer’ (1934), as well as ‘The Work of Art’ text: ‘Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception’ (Benjamin, 2006: 255). Against the orthodoxy of material base determining superstructure, Benjamin and Adorno propose an avant-gardist thesis on new cultural modes of perception changing the relations of production themselves.
The second reason for the dissenting tone of Current of Music is that Adorno carries over his conclusions from his important essay ‘The Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’ (1938), according to which commodity music assumes an authoritarian character. Radio is a means of reproduction of commodity music, alongside that of the gramophone, and must be understood according to the same categories: standardization, atomization and regression. Radio is not the gramophone, however. The most interesting parts of Current of Music consider radio’s socio-spatiotemporal specificity. These serve, in a roundabout way, to problematize Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art’.
Autonomous vs. political art
Adorno’s familiar critique of Benjamin’s essay is to be found in his letter of March 18 1936, in response to one of several drafts that Benjamin would ultimately produce, including after its 1936 appearance in the Zeitschrift. Adorno charges Benjamin with failing to mediate traditional and progressive art. On the basis of Benjamin’s 1934 essay on Kafka, Adorno had understood this mediation in terms of ‘the dialectical construction of the relationship between myth and history’ (Adorno and Benjamin, 2003: 127). Being dialectical, there is identity, difference, and the (non-)identity of the two. Adorno sees a polarization of identity and difference and hence an impossible leap from tradition to progress. The contradiction of Benjamin’s narrative is that the possibility of revolutionary art is positively constructed out of the destruction of traditional art – ‘a shattering of tradition which is the reverse side of the present crisis and renewal of humanity’ (Benjamin, 2006: 254). Benjamin could simply have stated that traditional art is dead and that revolutionary art is an independent development. Technical reproduction destroys the ‘ritual’ function of art – its ‘aura’. This is the moment of radical difference from progressive art. However, the value of art as art is strangely preserved. This is the moment of identity. Without it, there is no need to ground the latter in a history of the destruction of the former. What is it that is art about progressive art?
For Adorno, the answer to this problem is: autonomy – both that of the work of art and of the (collective) subject. Since Benjamin does not discuss autonomy, he must find his mediation either in the fate of technology – the inherently progressive nature of reproduction – or in an unwittingly conservative valorization of the continuing power of art as a privileged expression of human perception. The value of traditional art is not simply destroyed; it is transvalued. Benjamin acknowledges this ‘qualitative transformation of [the artwork’s] nature’ by means of photography and film.
In Adorno’s mind, Benjamin’s misapprehensions about aesthetic autonomy stem from his polarization of art-historical (more broadly, anthropological) and political-ontological approaches (Adorno and Benjamin, 2003: 131). Benjamin reserves each approach for traditional and progressive art respectively, begging the question as to the emancipating mediation of the one to the other. Instead of locating the question of autonomy in the historically mediated material, ‘authenticity’ is pejoratively ascribed to the ‘originality’ of traditional art, understood in terms of physical rarity. Hence, Benjamin’s initial examples are thingly artefacts. The reproduction of the painting – in the woodcut, lithograph and photograph – destroys the original, perhaps taking some of its value in the process (Benjamin, 2006: 252–3). By contrast, with his post-Kantian concept of art (ironically, taken from the younger Benjamin) Adorno can maintain that most traditional art is simply no longer art for us (cf. Adorno and Benjamin, 2003: 129).
The case of music and radio not only contests Benjamin’s thesis, Adorno implies, but reverses it. This reversal concerns the fact that: (a) listening is somewhat unthingly, revealing the intertwined nature of technological production and reproduction; and (b) the destruction of the original does not destroy aura – especially if there is no discernible original (that conclusion only follows from the conflation of autonomy with rarity). Adorno problematizes both ends of Benjamin’s narrative: the destruction of traditional art and the (re-)production of progressive art. The new art of radio does not destroy aura but more often regresses back into it: ‘what Benjamin calls the “aura” of the original certainly constitutes an essential part of the live reproduction’ (Adorno, 2009: 89). This is because ‘the radio voice’ brings a mythic community into the ‘here and now’ of the living room. Benjamin had connected aura, defined in terms of ‘uniqueness’ and the ‘apparition of distance’, to the ‘here and now’ (Benjamin, 2006: 255–6). Allied to this otherworldly ‘here and now’ is the notion of contemplation, to which Benjamin opposes this-worldly ‘distraction’. But for Adorno, the radio distracts without destroying aura. Benjamin’s account of aura and distraction has not aged well, not least because it is almost impossible to identify social progress in a technologically progressive culture. And yet, the spatial character of the transformation of art in Benjamin remains richer than in Adorno – something that the latter is perhaps uncomfortably aware of.
According to Adorno, ‘there is no conceivable music … which is not based upon the idea of reproducibility’. For, the ‘score is, in a way, only a system of prescriptions for possible reproduction, and nothing “in itself”’ (Adorno, 2009: 89). Radio brings this tendency to its logical conclusion: ‘In radio the authentic original has ceased to exist’ (p. 90). Adorno initially wants to emphasize the difference between the two levels of reproduction, performative and technical, in order to challenge the assumption – shared by Lazersfeld and Benjamin – that mechanical reproduction is inherently progressive. Hence, Adorno contrasts the impoverished sound of 1930s radio reproduction and its domestic space of casual listening with the living sound of orchestral production and the collective space of its concentrated listening. But once again, radio has changed the way we listen to the live music ‘originally’, and there is no going back. The levels of reproduction are interconnected as a whole listening phenomenon. Adorno actually reverses Benjamin’s alleged archaism by transposing the original from the past into the future. This is not to do away with the idea of an original, therefore. There is a speculative idea of the compelling musical performance, but this can neither be identified in the score nor in the performance, since there can be many compelling performances of the same composition. The line about the original ceasing on the radio now reads pejoratively, whereby the mechanical reproduction destroys all possible production. Adorno risks lapsing into Romantic humanism at this point. But it is more akin to a materialist philosophy of the ear. What is important is ‘to enable the listener himself to compose the piece virtually in the act of listening’ (Adorno, 2009: 218).
These ideas are germane to Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction. But here too the thesis tends to be limited to the past musical tradition. In one of his concessions to the radio in Current of Music, notably, Adorno suggests that the atomization of listening can be turned into ‘a sharpening of attention upon the parts. One may listen to individual sections in radio as if through a microscope’ (2009: 64). This recalls Hegel’s ‘afterlife’ of the artwork. But afterlife is not new life. Adorno’s paradigm of new music predates the proliferation of radio in the 1930s. The inclusion of modernist examples by Alban Berg and Hanns Eisler in his proposed lectures for New York public radio was intended to counter ‘music appreciation’ (see ‘What a Music Appreciation Hour Should Be’). That the programme was pulled after a couple of weeks indicates that its presenter was pushing at the limits of the possible. But stopping at the 1920s surely constitutes a block to Adorno’s theorization of radio (re)production. It cuts short his own transition to new production – that which is necessary though not sufficient to negate the fetish-character of dominant reproduction. Adorno even falls prey to his reservation about the democratization of bourgeois culture (Adorno, 2009: 134). In the newspaper age, Schoenberg negated the fetish-character. But the newspaper age is not the radio age.
To be fair to Adorno, the musical avant-garde was not quite ready to respond to the radio, partly because of what was happening in Europe in the 1930s. The 1920s radio cantatas and Lehrstücke of Eisler and Kurt Weill, often comprising settings of Brecht, inaugurated and temporarily ended the project of progressive radio music. The text of Eisler’s Tempo der Zeit (1929) even reflects upon the potential of its medium: ‘In these times in which the speed of the airplane begins to compete with the speed of the rotating Earth, it is necessary the test the utilization of technical progress for the collective.’ Technology is ambiguous. Its progress is not to be taken for granted but rather should be tested and proved [zu überprüfen] on each occasion. Despite Eisler’s insight, these works do not carry out this testing beyond their capacity to disseminate literary and political texts to a larger audience. The integral meeting of radio and progressive music more likely occurs during the 1950s. And curiously, Adorno was there when it happened. Having returned to Frankfurt in 1949, the critical theorist regularly attended the International Summer Courses for New Music held in Darmstadt. There, he belatedly came to recognize the ‘new music’ of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez and Luigi Nono (having initially disregarded these young composers as examples of ‘The Aging of the New Music’). This moment will prove to be relevant to Current of Music.
Musical spatialization
In the first, introductory document in the book, ‘Radio Physiognomics’, Adorno regards the radio as subject-like – an alien, unfamiliar subject. By the term ‘radio voice’, Adorno has in mind the literal sense of ‘speaker’, as well as the facial appearance of the radio-set itself. Above all, the author refers to the concept of ‘fetish-character’. The Marxist terminology is hidden between the lines of this ostensibly non-political study. But the contemporaneous ‘Fetish-Character’ essay would suggest that ‘Radio Physiognomics’ details the specific fetish-character of the radio.
Marx uses the term ‘fetishism’ to describe a reversal of subject and object in commodity production: ‘the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race’ (Marx, 1976: 165). Adorno mentions the ‘fetish’ without its sibling concept of alienation. But this conceptual re-connection allows us to read Current of Music in terms of cultural objectification(s), so as to bring Adorno back towards Benjamin’s emphasis upon the necessarily spatial character of progressive culture. The former’s critique of aura and positing of autonomy too often misses the basic opposition between interiority and exteriority. In progressive art and film, Benjamin claimed, immersed attention into the here and now gives way to the spatially dispersed attention of the collective: ‘With the close up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended.’ Hence,
Distraction and concentration form an antithesis, which may be formulated as follows. A person who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it; he enters into the work … By contrast, the distracted masses absorb the work of art into themselves. This is most obvious with regard to buildings. Architecture has always offered the prototype of an artwork that is received in a state of distraction and through the collective. (Benjamin, 2006: 265)
There is a precise, spatial inversion here (‘By contrast … ’) that begins to respond to the problem of mediation raised by Adorno: the contemplative distance that characterized traditional art becomes ‘tactile’ [taktisch], progressive art. To paraphrase Hegel, the ‘I’ becomes ‘We’ – yet without, pace Adorno, the ‘We’ also becoming ‘I’, since there is no autonomy in distraction. For Adorno, ‘in a communist society, work would be organised in such a way that human beings would no longer be so exhausted or so stupefied as to require such distraction’ (Adorno and Benjamin, 2003: 130). So the question for Adorno is: does his ‘I’ also become ‘We’?
Despite the ‘dual character’ of autonomous art in Aesthetic Theory, its ‘empirical’ space is of necessity absent, as can be gauged from the work’s non-treatment of architecture. It is notable that Adorno’s discussion of ‘The Work of Art’ essay appears, in Current of Music, in the midst of a subsection entitled ‘Space Ubiquity’. Adorno initially conflates two forms of spatial ubiquity in radio music. Music has a tendency to negate the place of its production. But this is not specific to radio music. What radio adds is simultaneous transmission. Adorno notes that phenomenologist Günther Stern referred to the experience of walking down a street and hearing the same music from several buildings (2009: 81). The latter ubiquity is as social as it is acoustic. For Adorno, this simultaneity of acoustically and aesthetically impoverished reproduction constitutes a non-temporalization of music, the ‘art of time’. Moreover, Adorno repeatedly associates non- or de-temporalization with spatialization in his essays on music, thus following Lukács’ definition of reification – the process of becoming a thing – from History and Class Consciousness (1923): the commodity form ‘degrades time to the dimension of space’ (Lukács, 1971: 89).
How, then, does Adorno present the alternative social space to that of Benjamin? There are clues within ‘Radio Physiognomics’. ‘To speak metaphorically, symphonic works transform the time element of music into space’ (Adorno, 2009: 52). Art music, like radio music, enacts a metaphorical spatialization. Responding to Paul Bekker’s theory of the symphony, Adorno regards this space as living, not geometric space: ‘A symphony does not create a community; but its inherent technical qualities are certainly linked with the fact that it is supposed to be listened to by a community and in a large room’ (p. 51). In another essay, Adorno connects the space of the performance to the inherent (or structural) musical space of the work, which ‘springs from the collective implications of all music, the character of something that embraces groups of human beings’ (Adorno, 2002: 150).
The two ‘spatializations’ of music, reified and non-reified, are outwardly opposed in Adorno’s thinking. His dispute with Benjamin concerns the fact that, far from opening up an emancipatory space, reproduction of itself tends to pre-empt this with an authoritarian space of its own. Adorno’s point should be conceded without negating the more promising theorization of space in Benjamin – one that Adorno in fact requires. In order to find a way between Adorno and Benjamin, we should briefly reconsider Marx’s earlier account of social reproduction. For this contextualizes the dialectical understanding of commodity fetishism in Capital, the source of Adorno’s fetish-character, so that we may revise his concepts of reification and objectification.
Dialectic of objectification
The 1844 Economic and Political Manuscripts develop a distinction between, on the one hand, objectification, Vergegenständlichung, and, on the other, both estrangement, Entfremdung, and alienation, Entäußerung. The relation between these latter concepts is of importance here. In The Young Hegel ([1938] 1975), Lukács suggested that Entfremdung and Entäußerung are more or less interchangeable, since each translates the English ‘alienation’ (p. 538). Chris Arthur noticed the crucial difference in emphasis, however, only to worry that rendering Entäußerung literally as ‘externalization’ risks confusion with ‘objectification’ (Arthur, 1986: Appendix). In fact, there must be something of objectification in externalization – a relation of difference and not simple opposition. This differentiation allows for a means of the negation of the negation.
Objectification is, on the one hand, the alienating ‘loss of and bondage to the object’. But on the other hand, to be genuinely human is to objectify: ‘It is in the fashioning of the objective that man really proves himself to be a species-being’ (Marx, 1975: 329). The capitalist mode of production constitutes one, regressive objectification from the standpoint of communist objectification: ‘it is only when man’s object becomes a human object or objective man that man does not lose himself in that object … he himself becomes the object’ (p. 353). This dual account of objectification is the consequence of Marx’s mediation of externalization, which is partly objective, and objectification, which is partly externalizing. The question of technological reproduction (and for Marx, ‘industry’) lies in the midst of this struggle, as Benjamin was right to emphasize.
History and Class Consciousness predates the eventual publication of Marx’s Manuscripts by some nine years. In 1967, Lukács recalled realizing that he had disastrously conflated alienation with objectification. He methodologically salvaged the latter by way of Hegelian panlogicism: the subjective consciousness of the commodity-worker is raised to objective self-consciousness by way of an assumption about dialectical logic’s solution to ‘the antinomies of bourgeois thought’ (Lukács, 1971: xxiv). Ultimately, the young Marx must make a similarly Hegelian move, albeit in a more sophisticated manner. Alienated objectification follows the dialectical self-externalization of spirit familiar to the Phenomenology of Spirit (Entäußerung and Erinnerung), whose only fault was to determine spirit as the bourgeois mind. Marx thus turns to a consideration of the Phenomenology in the same, third manuscript, and also optimistically defines industry as ‘the exoteric revelation of man’s essential powers’ (Marx, 1975: 355).
My digression into Marx and Lukács is justified to the extent that the socio-spatial status of objectification and reification lies behind the distinction between regressive and progressive spatializations within cultural forms of the technological present. Again, Adorno’s critique of the culture industry often seems to offer no real alternative space to that of globalized reification. Autonomous art shows ‘that the world could be other than it is’ (Adorno, 1997: 138). But this ‘other’ remains perpetually deferred – a utopia that must never come.
The composer Luigi Nono – whom Adorno met at Darmstadt – provides an interesting case study at this point, insofar as he remained both a student of Adorno, with his adherence to advanced musical language, and of Benjamin, with his use of ‘tendential’ (and literary) texts. Equally pertinent to this discussion: Nono became interested in radio technology during the 1960s. This formed a part of the avant-garde production in radio studios in Italy and West Germany from the mid-1950s onwards.
For La Fabbrica illuminata (1964) Nono recorded sounds from the Italsider forgery of Cornigliano, northern Italy, and manipulated them together with text sung by soprano Carla Henius. The texts decry the working conditions of the factory. La Fabbrica uses a multiplicity of radio technology in the service of multiple spatializations – including being taken out into the factory (except that this was blocked by the radio authorities). At the same time, Nono’s acerbic sonorities and long durational values render the work a mimetic expression of reification, in keeping with Adorno’s theory of de-temporalization. This is because, for Adorno, mimesis is fundamental to art’s modernity: art ‘is modern art through its mimesis of the hardened and alienated’ (1997: 21). But equally, contra Adorno, Nono’s static or spatial character only becomes temporalized by way of the concrete spaces of political struggle and possibility.
As if in response to Current of Music, Nono indicates how a negation of regressive objectification, reification, must accompany a positing objectification, albeit as a gesture of solidarity. This might constitute a corrective to Adorno’s aesthetic theory, without losing the concept of autonomy. As the young Marx recognized, only art’s mediation of the regressive and progressive spatial objectifications sanctions the claim to social progress. It is Benjamin who knows that the question of technology is bound to the question of externalization – his problem being the conflation of the two. Like Eisler before him, Nono cautiously takes up Marx’s promethean claim for industry, or the revolutionary orientation of objectification (Prometeo is the title of Nono’s most important later work). Because of its spatial fluidity, radio technology holds a historically symbolic role in this process, though one that is now being superseded by other technologies.
Adorno almost theorizes this mediation of spaces, yet once again without finding contemporary examples. In the ‘Fetish-Character’ essay, the author refers to ‘two spheres of music’, commodity and autonomous music (we might even read ‘Sphären’ spatially here), as comprising ‘an unresolved contradiction’. ‘The whole cannot be put back together by adding the separated halves, but in both there appear, however distantly, the changes of the whole, which only moves in contradiction’ (Adorno, 2002: 293). If we extend Adorno’s logic to Current of Music, objective unity is to be conceived in terms of the contradiction between reified and non-reified spatial objectifications.
In making this concession to Benjamin’s technological modernism (pre- ‘On the Concept of History’), we nevertheless inherit a different problem from him. In the absence of a concept of mediation, Benjamin’s concept of negation is pressed into a philosophically less sophisticated active nihilism. By opening up the empty space of reification, music (pure exchange, repetition, reproduction) forces the question of human objectification. ‘Music as nihilism’ is hardly new to philosophy, from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche to Attali. Lukács reminds us that it is the modern philosophers and not the anti-philosophers who can offer a concept of mediation rather than faith in redemption from nothingness. Adorno is right to oppose panlogicism. Progress through technology can hardly be taken for granted. Yet ‘the whole is the false’ lapses into ordinary scepticism (Adorno, 2005: 50). As Eisler predicted in theory, cultural practices such as Nono’s show an alternative way: the concrete instantiation of intermittent mediation.