Thesis Eleven

T. W. Adorno's philosophy of music aims to show that music is a source of important insights into the nature of modern society. This position leads, though, to a series of methodological difficulties, some of which can be alleviated by using resources from Heidegger's hermeneutics. The essay takes the key notion of `judgementless synthesis' from Adorno's unfinished book on Beethoven and connects it to Heidegger's account of pre-propositional under-standing and to Kant's notion of schematism. This connection is shown to have consequences for how we conceive of both the meaning of music and meaning in more general terms, especially with regard to analytical philosophy. The essay argues that, despite its many important insights, Adorno's account of the meaning of music in modernity depends too much on his analogy between Hegel's claim to achieve the final philosophy and Beethoven's establishment of new forms of integration for musical material.

Adorno's first musical monograph, his book on Wagner, represents his most consistent effort to apply commodity analysis to one of the seminal oeuvres of cultural modernity. The notion of commodity character and the associated concept of phantasmagoria are to fulfil the function of mediation between the more narrowly conceived technical analysis of Wagner's music and the disclosure of its aesthetic-social substance, providing the ultimate social ground for their unity. This project, however, fails. Commodity analysis proves to be radically vague, incapable of disclosing the historical specificity of the music dramas either in respect of the tradition of Vienna classicism, or the ensuing development of aesthetic modernism. At the same time its application is burdened by contradictions. Ultimately, Adorno's critical interpretation relapses into a form of ideology critique the simplifications of which he originally attempted to overcome.

Jean-Francois Lyotard's essay `Adorno as the Devil' had argued that Theodor Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music was a `diabolic' work of `negative theology' which attributed to Schoenberg's music a secret redemptive power. However, in his later writings, such as the essays in The Inhuman, Lyotard has himself moved close to a `negative theological' position with respect to modernity, time, aesthetics and music. The paper uses the occasion of Lyotard's own theologically inspired essays on music, `God and Puppet' and `Obedience', to re-evaluate the following: Adorno's claims that music transcends mere language and `reaches' for the theological; and more general claims within modern western culture on behalf of music's ability to express the inexpressible. The argument is that the music as negative theology position is not inherently metaphysical but rather that it reflects the importance of the `unsayable' to modern conceptions of reason. In resisting the `closure' of the modern narrative of reason, music, as a temporal art, has often given expression to the more radical forms of alterity present within modern forms of time. In other words, negative theology is not the discourse of the devil; it is the impossible discourse of western reason and its internal fracturing.

The most important structural feature of the music of the New World is its often-time polyrhythmic and polymetrical character. This is also a key to unlocking the nature of social form and democratic persona in the diasporic and settler metropolises of the New World. In such settings, composers and musicians working with simultaneous temporalities, lines, groups, textures and characters offer intimations of a just totality for culturally fragmented societies.