Chapter 7

Art and philosophy

Universal and particular

Adorno’s never-completed Aesthetic Theory (first published 1970) was to have had this fragment by the early German Romantic theorist Friedrich Schlegel as its motto: ‘In what one calls philosophy of art, one of the two is usually missing; either philosophy or art’. The challenge is, then, to find a form of philosophy which illuminates art without obscuring what art ‘says’ that philosophy is unable to say. The opening of the book suggests the radicality of Adorno’s approach: ‘It has become taken for granted that nothing concerning art is to be taken for granted any more, neither in art nor in its relation to the whole, not even its right to exist’ (GS 7 p. 9). We have seen how Adorno links pathologies in modern societies to the culture industry, which reinforces the status quo and undermines autonomous critical judgement. We also saw in his questionable response to jazz how his analysis could become inadequate in relation to the detail of the phenomena he is criticizing. The tension between these two aspects of his critiques of cultural phenomena recurs in Adorno’s reflections on art and aesthetics.

Art depends on making particular aspects of the world meaningful in new ways; philosophy, on the other hand, can often be seen in the terms suggested by American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars: ‘The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term’. The question is how particularity and universality in art and in philosophy relate, and what this tells us about each. Reflecting on art and Nazism in an essay written in 1945, Adorno states:

Since philosophy in the broadest sense, the general consciousness of the people, has been brought more and more under the sway of science and technical civilization, the relationship between art and truth has been profoundly affected. There is no longer any unifying common focus between knowledge or science on the one hand and art on the other, as there is no common focus between science and philosophy or religion. (GS 20.2 p. 418)

Referring to Kant and Hegel in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno claims: ‘The great philosophical aesthetics were concordant with art to the extent that they conceptualised what was evidently universal in it; in accordance with a stage of mind [Geist] in which philosophy and others of its forms, like art, were not yet torn apart’ (GS 7 pp. 495‒6). Art in the period of Kant and German Idealism can be seen as reconciling particular and universal: Beethoven’s appeals in the Ninth Symphony to the brotherhood of humankind are realized in very individual music that has shown itself to have enduring universal significance. Adorno draws parallels between Beethoven’s integration of individual kinds of new musical material into established forms, like the sonata, and Hegel’s integration of things that initially appear contradictory into his dialectical system, where the ‘whole is the true’. For Adorno, as we saw, Hegel’s assumption that there can be a rational integration of individual and society comes up against the brutality of modern capitalism. In this situation art’s integration of diverse and conflicting material via its formal organization in ‘judgementless synthesis’, rather than through concepts, can no longer be taken for granted. The unified aesthetic whole is now ‘untrue’ because it simulates something that is missing in reality. In consequence ‘What has been called the “idea” of arts during the age of great speculative philosophy has come to be regarded as an obsolescent metaphysical prejudice’ (GS 20.2 p. 418).

Modernist art undoubtedly does involve the breakdown and rejection of established ways of integrating material into a whole. This is apparent, for example, in the abandonment of tonality and the search for new ordering principles by Schoenberg and others, in the move away from representational forms of painting, and perhaps most famously in Marcel Duchamp’s ‘ready-made’ sculpture, Fountain, which involved signing a urinal and putting it in an art exhibition. Establishing what implications the breakdown of received forms has for metaphysics is, however, not straightforward. Metaphysics has traditionally been linked to questions about the meaning of existence. Adorno asserts, though, as we saw, that ‘Already before Auschwitz it was an affirmative lie in the face of historical experiences to attribute any positive sense to existence. That has consequences right into the form of works of art’ (GS 7 p. 229). He does not, then, endorse approaches that regard art as a means of overcoming human existence’s lack of metaphysical meaning. So what kind of sense can art make, once it cannot rely on established forms, and is untied from any kind of positive metaphysical meaning?

Adorno talks of ‘the aesthetic impossibility of a reestablishment of an order of art just from the will to such an order, without this order being substantially present to us any more in the thing itself and in the world in which we live’. The order found in the art of a period cannot, therefore, just be imposed by an individual artist independently of the social order. This might sound implausible, in that a modern artist who wishes to paint beautiful landscapes as a relief from the ugliness of everyday life may be perfectly able to do this, if they have the requisite skill and talent. For Adorno, though, this would not establish an ‘order of art’ that was an adequate response to the modern world. He is not denying the possibility of the painter doing what they want, or of people finding it aesthetically pleasing, but he is denying that the resulting paintings are ‘true’ of the world in which they are located.

Referring to music in the essay from 1945, Adorno sums up the position of those who reject the radical music of Schoenberg and others:

The world has become so ugly and terrifying, so runs the argument, that art should no longer dwell upon distorted forms, discords and everything branded as being destructive, but should return to the realm of beauty and harmony. The world of destruction, terror and sadism is the world of Hitler. And art should show its opposition to it by going back to its traditional ideals. (GS 20.2 p. 422)

His position is the polar opposite of this: for him the avant-garde’s ‘supposed spirit of negativism and destruction’ is what ‘kept faith to Beethoven’s humanism by expressing in an undiluted way the sufferings, the anguish, the fear, under which we live today long before the political crisis arose, instead of covering it up by idle comfort. It thus has maintained the link between music and philosophical truth’ (GS 20.2 p. 422). Art and philosophy are analogous in their concern with how societies order themselves and the world. Just as successful science depends to a great extent on disinterested enquiry, rather than being wholly led by extraneous purposes, art succeeds for Adorno where aesthetic challenges are confronted, with no intended social effect getting in the way. Why the aesthetic challenges faced by the serious artist involve ‘the relationship between essential philosophical truth and art’ is, though, not explained by what he says in this context.

The order of art

In lectures on Aesthetics, Adorno tells his students: ‘you should from the outset free yourself from that concept of philosophy … which is supposed to consist of epistemology and aesthetics … as a kind of special science, and arrive at the position of seeing philosophy really as the self-consciousness of the epoch’. Art can equally be seen as ‘the self-consciousness of the epoch’, and the question is how art’s forms of self-consciousness—its critical reflection on human relationships to the world—relate to those of philosophy. Adorno claims that ‘The greatness of Beethoven has to be understood in musical concepts first. Yet, the fact that he was bound up with humanistic philosophy permeates his whole work and determines even the most subtle details of his musicianship’ (GS 20.2 p. 434). So how does philosophy permeate the musical work and other forms of art?

One way of answering this is apparent in the following, where Beethoven again plays a decisive role. In contrast to the nature of music in cultures bound more by tradition, modern Western ‘classical’ music from Monteverdi to the present keeps changing, often in very radical ways. No serious composer would now compose in the manner of Mozart, even though it is perfectly possible to do so. Composers continually question prevailing norms, and this is echoed in philosophy. The questioning takes place to the point where the most demanding music, particularly from Beethoven onwards—his ‘Great Fugue’ for String Quartet Op. 133 still challenges many listeners even today—risks no longer having an audience. In this context the idea that what happens in music is linked to other tendencies in modernity makes more sense. If, as Marx put it, ‘All that’s solid melts into air’, when capitalism replaces traditional feudal forms of order, art’s very mutability can be linked to the disintegration of such forms of order in other spheres. Beethoven is located between the heroic individualism that is enabled by the early stages of capitalism and is reflected, for example, in the Fifth Symphony, and, in his later work, especially in the late string quartets, a questioning of received musical forms because they may no longer convey anything universal.

The music following Beethoven can be seen in such a perspective as relating to the disintegration of the German Idealist attempt to construct a unified system that could overcome the antagonisms generated by modernity. Ever more triumphant symphonic conclusions in Bruckner and other late Romantics involve a sense that such musical triumph is achieved despite what is happening in the real world. Adorno claims that, with Mahler, music ‘caught up in an original manner with Nietzsche’s insight that the system and its unbroken unity, the semblance/illusion [Schein] of reconciliation was not honest’ (GS 13 p. 213). The differing conclusions of Mahler’s symphonies, from triumphant reconciliation in the Second to slow extinction in the Ninth, convey the growing sense of unease in European culture that precedes the world wars. Modern art, then, becomes perennially controversial, because a real reconciliation of individual freedom and social order is not achieved. In these terms, the choice is between art either creating the questionable appearance of such order or responding to the lack of reconciliation which underlies the historical developments.

Thomas Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus (1947), about a fictional 20th-century German composer obsessed with coming up with a new, strict form of modern musical order, for which Adorno advised Mann on questions of composition, explores these issues. On the one hand, new forms of order become the aim of serious art, and Mann’s novel connects the problem of order in music with that of social and political order; on the other, there is no consensus about the value of such forms. Mann’s composer at one point asserts that ‘even a ridiculous order is still better than none at all’, suggesting the anxiety that accompanies this issue, and the violent ways in which those like the Nazis imposed social order. Adorno is a thoroughgoing modernist in these questions, because he sees no way of going back to traditional forms of social and aesthetic order: ‘The thought of future renewal, whether it be in great and rounded works of art, or in the happy consonance of music and society, just denies what happened and what can be suppressed but cannot be made not to have happened’ (GS 12 p. 36). For him the pursuit of new forms may keep open a sense of possible liberation: ‘In the liberation of form which all genuine art desires, the liberation of society is encoded above all else, because form, the aesthetic connection of everything individual, represents the social relationship in the work of art’ (GS 7 p. 379). How, though, does what happens to form in works of art relate to liberation in society?

Art, society, and politics

Debates in Europe over art and aesthetics, particularly from the second half of the 19th century onwards, and particularly in left-wing circles, often revolve around a perceived clash between ‘formalism’, for which the form of art is most essential to what makes it art, and criticism of concentration on formal matters in the name of art’s social, emotional, political, etc. ‘content’, and its potential for promoting social transformation. Taking up ideas from the playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin talked of the ‘politicisation of aesthetics’ as a means of opposing the fascist ‘aestheticisation of politics’, evident in choreographed mass rallies, etc. Adorno is, though, more circumspect: ‘All attempts to give back to art what it doubts by giving it a social function … have failed’ (GS 7 p. 9). He insists instead on art’s ‘autonomy’, without which it loses its connection to freedom by being subordinated to social purposes that are extraneous to the formal demands it involves. At the same time, he contends that art is inseparable from the social and political circumstances in which it is located. He seeks to mediate the clash between formalism and political engagement by the dialectical claim that ‘The campaign against formalism’—in the Soviet Union and other communist countries—‘ignores the fact that the form to which the content is subjected is itself sedimented content’ (GS 7 p. 218). The notion of form as ‘sedimented content’ is the core of Adorno’s thinking about art, and can explain why he links form in art to questions of freedom.

Both in metaphysics and in aesthetics, ‘form’ is often thought of in relation to ‘matter’, and the question is what ‘matter’ is in works of art. In sculpture, for example, it would seem obvious that it is the stone, clay, or whatever, given shape by the sculptor, but that is precisely not Adorno’s point. He generally refers to ‘material’, rather than ‘matter’, and uses the term in relation to all the arts, especially music. The material in question, in the form of existing artistic techniques, makes demands on the artist, which ‘derive … from the fact that the “material” is itself sedimented spirit, something social, which has been preformed by the consciousness of people. As former subjectivity which has forgotten itself this objective spirit of the material has its own laws of motion’ (GS 12 p. 39). The material is, then, another manifestation of ‘second nature’, produced by subjects, which exerts objective pressure on the artist, even when they are not fully aware of it. It does so in ways related to manifestations of humanly produced second nature such as economic and ideological pressures that we encountered in earlier chapters, and this is why modern art raises questions about freedom.

For the sculptor what they form is, then, not just the material in question, but also the history of what sculptors have done with it, and how this was received in society. The same applies to the other arts. Notes in music consist just of sound waves that occur elsewhere in nature. They become ‘material’ in Adorno’s sense when they are ordered into a harmonic system, and into the ways the system is employed in differing historical and musical contexts, where what was objectively wrong at one time can become right at another. The artist who engages seriously with art has to resist the objective pressure of existing forms and practices:

Instead of being a decisive means to express fundamentals about human existence and human society, art has assumed the function of a realm of consumer goods among others, measured only according to what people ‘can get out of it’, the amount of gratification or pleasure it provides them with or, to a certain extent, its historical or educational value. (GS 20.2 p. 418)

Art and philosophy are both subject to the pressure of second nature, and they try to distance themselves from society by seeking autonomy, but ‘no authentic work of art, and no true philosophy ever has … exhausted itself in itself, in its being-in-itself. They always stood in relation to the real life-process of the society from which they separated themselves’. This separation means they point to ‘a state in which freedom was realised’ (GS 10.1 p. 16).

This dialectical combination of distance from and relationship to society can make Adorno’s conception hard to grasp. The distance in question is dependent on continual critical reflection, based on the likelihood of any received cultural form involving the perpetuation of delusion. However, the ‘Gnostic’ tendency we observed with respect to Adorno’s critique of jazz and the culture industry can lead him to questionable generalizations about the social reception of art. In a Spiegel interview, Adorno, having claimed Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro is ‘no longer Figaro’ if shown on TV, is asked: ‘Are you, then, of the opinion that music on TV is for now meaningless ritual [Brimborium]?’, to which he replies, ‘Yes, that is my opinion. TV concerts and TV operas are a piece of empty cultural activity’ (GS 19 p. 569). He elsewhere says much the same thing about symphonies on the radio. Adorno seems to have no concern with how very many people gain their access to great music. I developed a lifelong interest in conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler after hearing one of his recordings of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on a transistor radio: even the poor reproduction could not hide that something extraordinary was happening in the music.

The historical pressure that helps account for Adorno’s ‘Gnostic’ position is clear when he asserts in 1945: ‘Only those who know to what extent artistic and especially musical questions are involved with political issues throughout German cultural life can fully understand the emotional role played by the hatred against the music of the avantgarde within all reactionary and repressive groups of German society’ (GS 20.2 p. 436). Expression of ‘fundamentals about human existence and human society’ depends to a great extent on social and historical context, and the immediate post-war German historical context makes Adorno’s partisanship for the avant-garde as the only real manifestation of freedom understandable. At the same time, he tends to see music predominantly in terms of the specific philosophico-historical picture we have been tracing. In other contexts it becomes clear that too much that matters about music can thereby be neglected.

Expression and system

The consolation provided by music when someone is faced with experiences of loss and grief no doubt has historical and ideological components that can be reflected on in Adorno’s manner, and the music in question may have been co-opted by the culture industry. However, the immediacy of the consoling or uplifting aesthetic experience, which can offer a temporary form of liberation, need not be erased by such factors. It seems mistaken to undervalue that experience in the name of exclusive focus on philosophical understanding of its relationship to the socio-historical totality: existential dimensions of art are not always reducible to socio-historical ones. Daniel Barenboim observes of music that it is ‘so clearly able to teach you so many things’, and can also ‘serve as a means of escape from precisely those things’. Historical examples are legion where the practice of music and art of all kinds enabled people to sustain hope in what were objectively hopeless circumstances. Adorno takes too little account of such phenomena, despite his persistent concern with how art may convey hope.

Such existential responses to music do, however, make more sense in terms of Adorno’s reflections on mimesis and expression in art. There is a tension in art between expression, and the artistic means via which it is realized: ‘As something expressive music behaves mimetically, imitating in the way gestures respond to a stimulus’ (GS 13 p. 170). Elsewhere he puts it like this: ‘In music it is not a question of meaning but of gestures. To the extent to which it is language it is, like notation in its history, a language sedimented from gestures’ (GS 18 p. 154). Immediate responses in the form of gestures are part of natural, embodied human existence, hence their connection to the emotional significance of music as a non-verbal form of expression. The ‘sedimented’ form of the expression of these responses is, though, located in the intersubjective, social realm, for instance in the collective development of objective rules for the notation of music. Consequently: ‘This mimetic moment gradually coalesces in music with the rational moment, the mastery of the material; how both work on each other is music’s history’ (GS 18 p. 154). The technical resource of notation enables a massive expansion of musical form, because it counters the limitations of memory, and offers possibilities for the development of expressive complexity. At the same time, notation can rigidify music into a series of rule-bound conventions. Musicians have to transcend these in performance if something aesthetically significant is to result—hence the connection to freedom—and such transcendence, in turn, requires the mimetic.

Adorno describes the fundamental contradiction that structures large parts of his writings on the Western classical music tradition as follows:

The music which we still directly inhabit—and it begins precisely with Bach—labours from the beginning with an internal difficulty, a contradiction. On the one hand, it is enclosed in a system, the system of triads, of keys, and their relationships. On the other, the subject seeks to express itself in it, wants, instead of every norm that is just externally imposed, to produce lawfulness from out of itself. (GS 18 p. 435)

This links music to the dialectical reflections on subject and object we have encountered in earlier chapters. The social subject produces the ‘second nature’ of tonality—Adorno insists that tonality is not based on ‘natural’ intervals because these are now mathematically rationalized in the tempered scale, which, from Bach onwards, expands formal possibilities in music. Tonality’s restrictions on permissible dissonance then come to be seen as inhibiting the subject, and this leads the subject to seek ways of freeing itself from the second nature which it at the same time reproduces. Beethoven plays a decisive role in the move to the new situation, which is explored in Philosophy of New Music. Adorno argues that Beethoven is sometimes able successfully to negotiate the relationship between individual expression and the existing objective constraints of musical form. The ‘setting’ of Beethoven’s music is ‘socially transmitted forms’—like sonata, variation, rondo, etc.: as such, it is ‘ascetic with respect to the private expression of feelings’. His music also reflects the social conflicts of its day, and yet at the same time ‘draws the fullness and power of the individual from this asceticism’ (GS 4 p. 170), in the kind of reconciliation of individual and social which Hegel seeks in his philosophical account of rationality in modern society.

Adorno’s most extreme position results from his interpretation of the social and philosophical significance of the ‘new music’ of the Second Viennese School, which parts company with ‘traditional music’. The latter

had to make do with a very limited number of combinations of notes, especially in the vertical [i.e. in terms of harmony]. It had to get used to always achieving the specific once again through constellations of the universal, which, paradoxically, saw the universal as identical with the unique. Beethoven’s whole oeuvre is the explication of this paradox. (GS 12 p. 55)

This reconciliation of universal and particular, in which the individual composer exercises their freedom by manipulating the possibilities of pre-given musical material, gives way to a radical new situation, via the loosening of forms and extension of permissible dissonance.

The vital transitional figure here is Richard Wagner, whom Adorno links to the dissolution of the kind of philosophical system advanced by Hegel: ‘In art no less than philosophy the systems aim to produce the synthesis of the manifold from out of themselves. … With Wagner this is no longer the case’ (GS 13 pp. 46‒7). Before Wagner, ‘In Beethoven and right into high romanticism the harmonic expressive values are fixed: dissonance stands for the negative, consonance for the positive and fulfilment’ (GS 13. p. 64). This stability dissolves with Wagner’s use of chromaticism, which opens up more complex, ambiguous forms of expression, at the same time as posing new questions about how to organize musical material. The fact that anti-systematic philosophers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche play a substantive historical role in any attempt to understand Wagner’s music justifies Adorno’s link of music and philosophy in this case, but things get more difficult with respect to music and art after Wagner.

The dilemma that results for new music is seen by Adorno as follows: ‘Since the compositional process is measured only by the particular form of each work, not by tacitly accepted universal demands, what is good or bad music can no longer be “learned”’ (GS 12 p. 18). In principle, any combination of notes is allowed, once restrictions on dissonance based on tonality are no longer binding. However, in reality: ‘The dissolution of everything pre-given has not resulted in the possibility of manipulating every material and technique at one’s own discretion’ (GS 12 p. 25). Whereas degrees of dissonance and consonance in traditional music are a pre-given basis for the build-up and release of tension which enables formal coherence, the ‘emancipation of dissonance’ means this way of creating form can no longer function. Schoenberg himself suggests a key difficulty of atonality when he talks of only becoming able to use it ‘to construct larger forms by following a text or poem’, the lack of tonal resolutions having ruled out a central way of structuring a larger composition. This leads him to the idea of ‘composition with 12 tones’, where each note of the chromatic scale is used to construct a 12-note ‘row’, which then is used to determine the pattern of notes in the whole composition. For Adorno, in tonal music: ‘The harmony of particular and universal corresponded to the classical-liberal model of society. As in that model the totality asserted itself behind the scenes as the invisible hand, by dint of the individual spontaneities and over their heads’ (GS 17 p. 284). What results from the breakdown of this link between tonality and social order is music whose truth ‘seems rather to be contained in the fact that it denies the meaning of organised society, of which it wishes to know nothing, by organised emptiness of meaning, rather than being capable of producing meaning of its own accord. In the present conditions it is limited to determinate negation’ (GS 12 p. 28). The music is, then, limited to the refusal to follow the direction given by the musical tradition, while yet depending on it as what it has to leave behind to make any sense at all.

‘Philosophical music’

At this point Adorno’s ‘Gnostic’ tendency re-emerges because of the way in which he analogizes music to philosophy: in doing so, he tends to exclude too many aspects of music’s social significance by assimilating them to the meanings of ‘organised society’. His interpretation of the frequent rejection of the new music of Schoenberg and others by the public is consequently too undifferentiated: ‘The dissonances that scare them speak of their own condition: for this reason alone they are unbearable to them’ (GS 12 p. 18). Audiences will, though, actually often accept dissonant modern music if the context in which it is presented makes sense to them, for example in a film. This can then lead to its acceptance in the concert hall, as can effective musical education. Moreover, children often have no difficulty with new music that adults may reject.

Adorno at times thinks too much in terms of what one might call ‘philosophical music’, that is the music that most obviously chimes with his philosophical concerns. In consequence, he overestimates—important as it undoubtedly is—the Second Viennese School’s approach to composition, and tends towards what pianist and musicologist Charles Rosen has called an ‘ethnocentric’ stance, aspects of which we saw in his misjudgement of the significance of jazz. He makes similar reductive judgements with respect to Stravinsky, talking, for example, of the ‘liquidation of the individual which Stravinsky’s music celebrates’ (GS 12 p. 174), and seeing him as a ‘restoration of the past’, rather than, like Schoenberg, as a progressive modernist. The contortions Adorno goes through to pass such negative judgements on pieces like the Sacre du printemps now just sound tendentious: ‘Stravinsky sets out schemata of human forms of reaction which then became universal under the unavoidable pressure of late industrial society’ (GS 12 p. 156), and his music is just ‘music about music’ (GS 12 p. 167). Stravinsky is not without his problematic aspects, especially in his neo-classical works, some of which arguably are just ‘music about music’, but the continuing importance of his best work testifies against Adorno’s reductive judgements on him. Adorno claims with respect to new music of the Second Viennese School, in contrast, that ‘only in the extremes is the essence of this music made clear; they alone permit the recognition of its truth-content’ (GS 12 p. 13). Music has to live up to the most advanced ‘state of the material’ evident in the extremes of free atonality and dodecaphonic music. These testify to the situation in which ‘universal and particular cannot be brought together again by an act of will; nor is tonality, as it was thought from time to time, restorable’ (GS 17 p. 283). The simple objection to this is, though, that tonality does not need restoring: its possibilities are still being productively explored in all kinds of music.

In a characteristic move, Adorno applies his conception of the domination of nature to the understanding of new techniques in art, and proposes the following not very convincing dialectical reversal: ‘The opposition of works of art against domination is mimesis of domination. They have to become like dominating behaviour, in order to produce something that is qualitatively different from the world of domination’ (GS 7 p. 430). Nature, in the sense of that which is oppressed and repressed, is supposed to speak via what is opposed to it, that is technical command—‘domination’—of complex musical material. What sounds in many ways furthest from nature, because its mimetic moment has been repressed in the gaining of technical command, is supposed to express what has been repressed in our relationship to internal and external nature. Schoenberg’s Erwartung, which tracks, in highly organized but dissonant and expressive atonal music, the traumatic experience of a woman finding the body of her lover at night in a wood, exemplifies what Adorno intends. There is, though, no necessity to assume that only technically advanced music that fits Adorno’s criteria can enable what is repressed to speak. His dialectical reversal is too dependent on a philosophical idea. This becomes apparent in the subsequent development of music. While atonality and dodecaphony still play a role in contemporary new music, they are largely seen as just one musical tool, rather than being mandatory.

The diversity of contemporary music is simply at odds with Adorno’s philosophical appropriation of music. Who would now trust themself to make a general judgement on the ‘state of the material’ that would determine critical assessment of a piece of music’s significance? Within many modern musical traditions the demand not just to repeat the past is widely accepted, but there is no one ‘state of the material’ which can be used to judge what is aesthetically significant and what isn’t. The story of European music from Bach to Schoenberg and beyond that Adorno tells, and its connection to philosophy from Kant to Nietzsche, contains many revealing insights, but also leads to dead-ends and neglects too many other kinds of music. Where would music go next, if ‘organised emptiness of meaning’ is now the only expression of musical truth? That Adorno saw music at the end of the war in such terms is understandable, but his stance leaves too little room for assessing the diverse ways in which music continues to develop in differing social and political contexts.

Adorno’s position on the denial of meaning in modernist art does, at the same time, point to something significant. There are reasons to question ‘affirmative art’ that ignores the persistence of a manifestly unjust world. His aesthetic reflections are sometimes more convincing when he explores the disintegration of redemptive metaphysics that would seek to make sense of the traumatic history of modernity. This exploration leaves more space for the articulation of other kinds of sense that still inform people’s lives, despite the disintegration of metaphysical sense that would make history as a whole meaningful. By taking seriously the concrete failure of such metaphysics, new ways of making sense are opened up:

The key to contemporary anti-art, with Beckett as its pinnacle, may be the idea of concretising that negation of sense; to discern something aesthetically meaningful in the relentless negation of metaphysical sense. The aesthetic principle of form is in itself, by synthesis of what is formed, the positing of sense, even where sense is repudiated by content. (GS 7 p. 403)

Even art which does acknowledge the destruction of meaning in its ‘content’—for example, in Beckett’s Endgame: ‘Hamm: We’re not beginning … to … to … mean something? Clov: Mean something? You and I mean something? (Short laugh)’—remains a resource for making sense. Such expressions of meaninglessness in artistic form constitute their own particular kind of meaning, which in Beckett is often bleakly comic.

Adorno, however, does not sufficiently attend to the everyday ways in which, as Albrecht Wellmer puts it, one still has to ‘grant to art a function in connection with forms of non-aesthetic communication, or with a real change of relationships between self and world’. Significant art need not just be, as it largely is for Adorno, the ‘presence in the forms of semblance of a state which does not yet exist’. There is a quasi-theological, utopian aspect to Adorno’s ‘Gnostic’ insistence on true modern art’s radical negation of meaning. Art is sometimes seen as mere semblance, so that only a total transformation of the world would be ‘real’. The myriad ways in which art still actively intervenes in transforming the everyday world for the better can be neglected in such a perspective. Involvement with art as a social practice produces real changes in people’s lives: art does not just offer a semblance of a utopian new world. The latter need not be excluded from thinking about art, but nor should the former (Figure 7).

7. Paul Klee, Death for the Idea.

Adorno was arguably better at writing about music he clearly liked, than about music he saw as philosophically important, let alone music he evidently disliked. His ‘Gnostic’ stance is, for example, less decisive in relation to music such as that of Gustav Mahler. In his writings on Mahler, Adorno achieves a kind of ‘musical philosophy’ by the way in which he engages with Mahler’s compositions, mixing technical analysis with evocative descriptive passages that make one hear the music in new ways. He makes great sense, for example, of Mahler’s use of hackneyed musical material:

Every Mahler symphony asks how a living totality can emerge out of the ruins of the musical world of things. Mahler’s music is not great despite the kitsch towards which it tends, but because its construction unties the tongue of kitsch, releasing the longing, which commerce just exploits, that is served by kitsch. (GS 13 p. 189)

The way that music which has been rendered meaningless—thing-like—by becoming a commodity makes new sense in Mahler’s work is here conveyed by prose which reveals what cannot be described by objectifying musical analysis or by philosophical analogy.

Remarks like the following bring out the best in Adorno’s focus on the working out of contradictions in his exploration of modern culture: ‘in terms of the philosophy of history, Mahler’s form approaches that of the novel. The musical material is pedestrian, the presentation sublime. The configuration of content and style was no different in the novel of all novels, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary’ (GS 13 p. 209). Flaubert’s style transforms the mundane world his novel presents, just as Mahler’s music lives from the opposition between the ‘course of the world’, the repressive, unjust status quo that is manifest in banal musical material, and ‘breakthrough’, the evocation of a new, fulfilling world by music which transforms the banality.

Adorno’s most productive approaches to art give full weight to formal issues, as well as to their historical significance, but he can lose sight of the aesthetic by assimilating it to the philosophical. This is what, for example, vitiates parts of Philosophy of New Music, as he himself later realized: ‘The decisive thing, the interpretation of the compositions of Schoenberg, was always inadequate. In consequence it appeared that music was supposed to be completely dissolved into cognition’ (GS 18 p. 165). In the Mahler book, and many smaller pieces on music, literature, and other topics, the interplay between philosophical interpretation and the evocation of the experience of art of those who participate in it offers a model that can counterbalance some of Adorno’s one-sided theoretical approaches. The precarious balance between art and philosophy in Adorno’s work is a reflection of the fact that in the modern period the status of both art and philosophy can no longer be taken for granted. At his best, though, Adorno shows, against a dominant trend, especially in anglophone philosophy, how art may sometimes offer better responses to philosophical issues than philosophy itself.