The Philosophy of New Music is a message in a bottle.1 After all, shipwreck is one of the central images in the book. New music, claims Adorno, aims for oblivion; it is the surviving cry of despair from the shipwrecked, a message in a bottle (Flaschenpost) tossed meaninglessly on the currents of history.2 The question is: what is the message scrawled inside the bottle? If it were simply a cry of despair, new music would merely state the obvious and it would hardly demand the strenuous reflection of Adorno’s philosophy. The means of communication may speak of total oblivion (the bottle may sink without a trace), but the scrap of paper inside carries a very different message. New music is not a note of despair but a note of hope in the face of despair, for without hope it would never have been written. And given Adorno’s catastrophic worldview, this message urgently needs to be deciphered; for him, it is the riddle on which the fate of humanity depends.3 So locked within the fragile vessel of new music is a cry for salvation. And the task of philosophy is to rescue this bottle from total oblivion.
As an S.O.S, the philosophy of new music can no longer be an aesthetic philosophy; beauty is hardly relevant to the shipwrecked.4 Rather Adorno replaces Hanslick’s The Beautiful in Music with what he calls the “responsible” in music, turning the question of aesthetics into one of ethics.5 His verdict on Schoenberg and Stravinsky is a moral judgment; their aesthetic and technical competence is not in doubt; what counts, claims Adorno, is the “attitude” behind the scores.6 This seemingly tiny inflection turns out to make all the difference between Stravinsky’s illusory “objectivity” (Sachlichkeit) and Schoenberg’s “objective logic of the matter” (objektive Logik der Sache).7 Thus his analysis of their technique is not a formal exercise but a moral physiognomy of the music. And the attitude Adorno demands is precisely the ethic contained within the Flaschenpost: not the imposition of a moral law, as if there were answers to the human crisis, but a surrender to the currents of history in an aimless search for an ethic that “is ever present but not yet defined.”8 Drifting, then, is the moral attitude required of new music, involving a kind of material agnosticism where the composing subject cedes to the tendency of the musical material. Thus it is not a static position but one that blindly bobs up and down on the waves without any will power. Adorno’s term for this abandonment is sich überlassen. 9
This means that there is no vantage point from which to philosophize; to drift is to lose all bearings. The only compass available is an internal dialectic within the historical material of new music that points to possibilities and tendencies — but there are no fixed points. The result, as Adorno puts it in Minima Moralia, is “micrological moral myopia”;10 Schoenberg’s music “surrenders itself (sich überläßt),” writes Adorno, “with closed eyes”;11 it cannot see the way ahead in the “windowless quality” of this movement but hands its future over to the dialectical currents of history sedimented within the musical material.12 Thus the Flaschenpost cannot be observed from the shore; the musical material has to be tracked, “step by step,” as a process of thought with all its “exasperating antinomies.”13 Dialectics is not “a particular philosophical standpoint” writes Adorno, but “the sustained attempt to follow the movement of the object under discussion and to help it find expression.”14 In other words, you have to drift along with it, as if one were passing judgment “in the dark.”15
Darkness also shrouds Adorno’s text. Its obscure dialectical maneuvers do not yield the kind of clarity demanded by modern reason. There is no immediate result. Rather it drifts, forcing a myopic tracking of its movements. Adorno’s dialectical struggle is a way of conscripting the reader on an odyssey of disaster in which our survival is not guaranteed — only hoped for. But not everybody wants to embark on such a hazardous voyage. In fact, the immediate success of the book following its publication in 1949 registers its failure. The composers at Darmstadt who thought the Philosophy of New Music provided the “theoretical and philosophical legitimation for their experiments with multiple serialism” simply didn’t get the drift.16 They took the moral high ground instead, rehearsing the very attitude that Adorno condemned in Stravinsky. So if the book “played its part in causing the demise of neo-Classi-cism,” as Adorno claims, then the triumph of the avant-garde serialists was based on a misunderstanding that failed to grasp the dialectical movement of Adorno’s Flaschenpost;17 they heard the rhetoric and not the message, mistaking a philosophy for merely a polemic. Of course, the polarized structure of the book didn’t help;18 the contrast, neatly arranged by Adorno as two essays, one on Schoenberg and the other on Stravinsky, is supposed to provoke a dialectical voyage between extremes, but it has been more tempting — and, indeed, less Titanic — to read it as a binary opposition. There is a thesis: “Schoenberg and Progress.” And an antithesis: “Stravinsky and Restoration.” But their negative synthesis is missing. It is no wonder that the advocates of serialism unfurled the book as their banner, as if Schoenberg’s “method” was the way forward. But what is the consequence of this way of reading? You only need to produce a crude list of contrasts from the book to see the results (see table 1.1).
Table 1.1 Binary oppositions in Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music
| SCHOENBERG | STRAVINSKY | ||
| SOCIAL ATTITUDE | |||
| subjective | objective | ||
| individual | collective | ||
| ego | pre-ego | ||
| freedom | repression | ||
| victim | perpetrator | ||
| social critique | social conformity | ||
| outsider | insider | ||
| isolated | sociable | ||
| tragic | ironic | ||
| serious | witty | ||
| diagnostic | symptomatic | ||
| responsible | deceitful | ||
| progressive | regressive | ||
| COMPOSITIONAL TECHNIQUE | |||
| dynamic | static | ||
| temporal | spatial | ||
| dialectical | hierarchical19 | ||
| developing variations | block-juxtaposition | ||
| internal structure (idea) | external style | ||
| ORIGINS | |||
| spirit | body | ||
| voice20 | percussion (rhythm) | ||
| language | dance (ballet) | ||
| intentional | automatic reaction | ||
These oppositions flatten Adorno’s dialectics into a kind of cardboard politics where Schoenberg too easily triumphs over Stravinsky. In this reading, Schoenberg cannot fail, for he represents the individual subject, whose quest for freedom Adorno admires. So, like that subject, Schoenberg’s music develops dynamically in time as it engages with the dialectics of history. Stravinsky, in contrast, represents the social object; his music is static, like juxtaposed blocks in space that impede the historical progress of humanity. Whereas Schoenberg reveals the expressive condition of the human spirit whose origin is in song, Stravinsky reflects the rhythmic mechanism of the social body that dances to the savage pounding of drums.21 Hence Schoenberg suffers; his music identifies with the traumatized victims of political and cultural repression.22 Stravinsky, on the other hand, oppresses; he identifies with the collective, watching his victims with a chilling objectivity. Stravinsky’s music therefore reflects an irresponsible, authoritarian society that imposes an external totality on the lives of individuals;23 he colludes with its lies, espousing an “authenticity” in a world where there is none.24 Schoenberg, in contrast, is too truthful to ingratiate himself to society; his “responsible” music bears the guilt of the world.25 If Stravinsky composes from the outside for the in-crowd, Schoenberg is the outsider who constructs his music from the inside, pursuing the dialectical laws latent in the material to fashion a language so hermetic in its search for meaning that society can only shun his work as incomprehensible and arbitrary.26 As the tragic outsider, he hones his work as a critique of the social totality, which is merely a façade of wholeness.27 In this way, Schoenberg registers the diseases of a sick world, as if his compositions were psychoanalytical case studies.28 Stravinsky’s music, on the other hand, is too sick with the delusions of authenticity to formulate a critique of anything. Indeed, his music requires psychoanalysis, and Adorno obliges by diagnosing it as schizophrenic, hebephrenic, catatonic, infantile, and depersonalized.29
It is not that these contrasts are inherently untrue; it is just that they constitute the basis for a dialectical journey. A static reading of the text, in effect, nullifies the meaning of the book both as philosophy and as new music. As philosophy, truth, for Adorno, has to be figured in the tension of a dialectic that refuses to synthesize the truth, for the Hegelian definition — “truth is the whole” (Das Wahre ist das Ganze) — can only be a lie in an unreconciled world.30 As Adorno famously puts it: “The whole is the untrue” (Das Ganze ist das Unwahre).31 A nondialectical reading of the Philosophy of New Music would not only be devoid of truth, it would positively falsify it. Second, as new music, this truth, formulated from extreme forces of repulsion, must be understood as one antithetical “essence,” and not as two alternative possibilities.32 Progress and regression are the twin results of a single “process of rationalization” in modernity.33 Thus neither Schoenberg nor Stravinsky has a monopoly on the truth; each is its symptom. As Adorno explains in the opening pages, his extreme and exaggerated position on the two composers is a provocation to dialectical thought through “the object of music itself.”34 He is not concerned with exonerating Schoenberg or condemning Stravinsky per se, as if he were toeing some party line on the quality of their music. In fact, it is quite the opposite; this is Adorno’s most negative text on Schoenberg. His criticism of the twelve-tone technique is so severe that Adorno’s invectives on Stravinsky fail as an effective antidote for Schoenberg: “Another disloyal person” was Schoenberg’s reaction to the book, and not unjustly; Adorno had secret “misgivings” about the twelve-tone technique, suspecting it to be a “totalitarian resolution.”35 So Adorno’s exaggerations do not polarize the two composers. Rather, as we will see, there is an internal dialectic within the Schoenberg essay that almost “merges” the dialectical Schoenberg with the nondialectical Stravinsky; their impossible synthesis is the negative truth of new music, which must be experienced as unresolved tension.
Thus there is something necessarily incomplete and provisional about this process; the tension creates a movement rather than an arrival; it is, after all, a message in a bottle and not a specimen behind a glass case. This means that the message in the Philosophy of New Music is subject to constant change, otherwise Adorno’s ideas “would be irreconcilable with a [his] theory which holds that the core of truth is historical, rather than an unchanging constant to be set against the movement of history.”36 Its message has to be worked out in time rather than closed off as some historical relic that has “done its duty.”37 The book is no more secure and no less fragile than a Flaschenpost tossing among the waves; and there is no telling which way the historical currents will flow and on what shores this bottle will land in the twenty-first century.
If we are now living in a post-Enlightenment age, then Adorno’s Flaschenpost has drifted into foreign seas; the Philosophy of New Music, writes Adorno, “should be regarded as an extended appendix to … the Dialectic of Enlightenment,” a book which he coauthored with Max Horkheimer during the years of World War II — the very years, in fact, in which the Philosophy of New Music took shape.38 Can this “appendix” thrown from the shipwreck of the Enlightenment be salvaged in post-Enlightenment times? Is the moral crisis, which Adorno locates in the mechanism of Enlightenment reason, still relevant in an age that is no longer sensitive to Adorno’s catastrophic thoughts? Or to adapt Adorno’s words, is “the hope of leaving behind messages in bottles on the flood of barbarism bursting on Europe … [merely] an amiable illusion” in an indifferent society?39
The Dialectic of Enlightenment is a dialectic of disaster. It describes the very shipwreck from which new music surfaces as the Flaschenpost; 40 modern art, claims Adorno, “feels the shattering effects of that very process of enlightenment in which it participates and upon which its own progress depends.”41 The catastrophe is that the dynamic of history has revealed how the truth, which drives humanity toward its freedom, is no longer true. The old foundations of church and court have crumbled under the critique of the Enlightenment, leaving no binding authority in the world where the individual can freely exist in harmony with itself and with its surroundings. Instead, the emancipatory potential of the individual has been invaded on all sides by false totalities that claim to be true by sheer force, asserting their spurious authenticity as a binding order; the blare of the culture industry, the domination of scientific reason, the authoritarian politics of fascist regimes, the bureaucratic control of an administered society, and the economic machinery of capitalism are all symptoms of this “objective spirit,” an untruth that finds its most chilling realization in the death camps of Hitler.42 “The world is systematized horror,” writes Adorno.43 As a result, the historical progress of modernity is suspended, because the free subject is no longer capable of conceiving its freedom as a lived experience. The “dialectic of Enlightenment” is therefore an ironic description of a historical process that drives humanity to enslave itself in its search for freedom; “freedom is inseparable from enlightenment thought,” write Horkheimer and Adorno, but that very thought contains within it the “self-destruction of the Enlightenment.”44 The totalizing and objectifying dynamic of modern reason necessarily regresses in its pursuit of progress, for the free subject in dominating the world and mastering itself becomes the object of its own oppression. In this dialectic, revolution and terror, civilization and barbarity, freedom and slavery, mastery and alienation, integration and disintegration insidiously inhere within each other. In the Freudian terms in which both the Dialectic of Enlightenment and the Philosophy of New Music are couched, modernity is schizophrenic. “Schizophrenia,” writes Adorno, “is the truth about the subject.”45 Adorno explicitly applies this diagnosis to Stravinsky, but perhaps it should be extended to reflect the structure of the book: both Schoenberg and Stravinsky represent the symptoms of this split personality.
The Dialectic of Enlightenment is a map for the schizophrenic voyage of the Philosophy of New Music. The expedition that it charts for music is the legendary journey of Odysseus as he sails past the enchanted island of the sirens hoping to avoid shipwreck. In Horkheimer and Adorno’s retelling of the story, the sirens’ song embodies the hypnotic allurement of music prior to its “reduction to the condition of art”;46 it has power to captivate the ego, filling it with both the fear and euphoria of self-destruction as the subject crashes into the rocks of desire: “no one who hears their song can escape.”47 The seduction of the sirens’ song symbolizes an impossible reconciliation with nature, which the ego must reject to affirm its rational identity.48 But the cost of individualization is the loss of art’s utopian fulfillment; the experience of freedom must be controlled. It is against this backdrop that Odysseus is described by Horkheimer and Adorno as “a prototype of the bourgeois individual”; he affirms his identity against fate through a rational mastery of the forces of nature both within himself and in the external world.49 To conquer the sirens’ song is to dominate nature. He plans to defy the sirens by cunning and deceit, so that he can enjoy their song yet escape their lure. But, unknown to him, the instrumental nature of his plan is an allegory of the dialectic of Enlightenment; he enslaves himself in his search for mastery. Odysseus has himself bound to the mast of his ship and plugs the ears of his rowers with wax so that they can neither hear the song of the sirens nor his desperate cries for release. Survival is a matter of bondage: the rowers are bound to a form of rationalized labor devoid of pleasure, and Odysseus binds himself to savor the song — but only distantly. For all his cunning, this bourgeois hero hears the song merely to estrange himself from its power; he breaks its spell by imprisoning his desires, and so kills “the instinct for complete, universal, and undivided happiness.”50 He survives at the cost of an internal shipwreck. So in mastering both outer and inner natures he renders the sirens and himself impotent — the sirens are neutralized and the ego is alienated.51 In the end, Odysseus is nothing more than a visionless bourgeois attending another jaded performance of some masterpiece whose sounds of utopian promise have long been neutralized by official culture: “The prisoner is present at a concert, an inactive eaves dropper like later concertgoers, and his spirited call for liberation fades like applause.”52
If the Philosophy of New Music is an appendix to the Dialectic of Enlightenment, then who is Odysseus? Schoenberg or Stravinsky? Neither. Or rather, both. Both composers bear traces of that fateful journey of alienation, survival, and loss as the old legend lives on in new music as schizophrenia. Their music is divided as the body and soul of Odysseus; Stravinsky (body) and Schoenberg (soul) tie themselves to the mast, to render music and humanity impotent on the seas of modern history.
Stravinsky in the Philosophy of New Music bears the same bourgeois character of Odysseus in the Dialectic of Enlightenment — “clever … crafty … urbane.”53 He thinks that he can escape the fate of modernity by his cunning and deception, unaware that his heroic self-preservation is symptomatic of a psychotic illness that immobilizes his music. He is the Odysseus who calculates his chances prior to the journey, and trains his balletic troops to row to the rhythm of his depersonalized music.54 In his will to dominate nature, Stravinsky develops a technique that feels no pain and knows nothing of the yearning for a truly reconciled world;55 in effect, he has lashed his music to the mast like the frigid body of Odysseus that no longer feels the need for liberation.56 Stravinsky’s objectivity, claims Adorno, is nothing more than a body bound by an immaculate technique but drained of all desire. This is a body that renounces the sensuous particulars of human existence with a “perverse joy in self-denial,” a joy that virtually annihilates the individual subject.57 The body can only react, reducing Stravinsky’s objectivity to a “monad of conditioned reflexes.”58 “The closer organisms are to death,” writes Adorno, “the more they regress to such twitching.”59 This aesthetic, he claims, is epitomized by The Rite of Spring, where the individual is sacrificed for the sake of an objective nature.60 Adorno hears this in the arbitrary blows that the rhythm inflicts on the subject, but this logic can also be found in Stravinsky’s notion of the “music itself” where even performers are relegated to “executants” who no longer interpret the score;61 they only obey its instructions, as if they were “twitching” to it.62 Music, as Stravinsky famously wrote, is “powerless to express anything at all” — for there is nothing for the subject to express.63 The performer’s individuality is sacrificed on the altar of musical objectivity. This authoritarian trick, says Adorno, lies at the heart of all rituals of human sacrifice.64 And so it is that Stravinsky’s ship, with The Rite of Spring as its figurehead, steers past the islands of the sirens with a deceptive authenticity that is cunningly championed as a heroic act, as if he had stolen the sirens’ song as objective style.65 Adorno writes:
Stravinsky’s objectivity (Sachlichkeit) rings with such illusory realism. The totally shrewd and illusionless ego (Ich) elevates the non-ego (Nicht-Ich) to the level of an idol, but in its eagerness it severs the threads that connect subject and object. The shell of the objective … is offered as truth, as a super-subjective objectivity, all for the sake of such externalization…. [His music] bows with a leer before the audience, removes the mask, and shows that there is no face under it, but only a knob.66
Like Stravinsky, Schoenberg is also Odysseus — a composer tinged with “inhuman coldness” — but something of that subliminal dreamlike state which his Expressionist phase had tapped into, clings to him like a bad conscience, accompanying the merciless process of his compositional acts.67 He is Odysseus’ soul that screams for liberation even as he is bound. It is almost as if he is driven against his will by a historical process that Adorno describes as fate — and that fate, of course, is nothing other than the dialectic of Enlightenment.68 Adorno maps out this ineluctable process as Schoenberg’s compositional voyage; the dialectical turn from Expressionism to serialism is the fateful journey that must pass the island of the sirens. Schoenberg is warned that he must sail clear of the desire for utopia, for there is no objective world that the subject can authenticate as its own in this moment of history. To survive, Schoenberg binds his subjectivity to the mast in an attempt to generate an objectivity out of the subject, for he realizes that the subject in its atonal freedom possesses nothing but its own isolation;69 it is groundless. As Adorno writes: a “sudden transformation necessarily takes place … [for] the content of Expressionism — the absolute subject — is not absolute.”70 So the subject tries to formulate an absolute to bind its freedom, pulling the ropes so tightly that the subject cannot escape however much it cries out for release. The system that Schoenberg devises is as deaf to the subject as the rowers are to Odysseus. “The subject dominates music through the rationality of the system, only in order to succumb to the rational system itself.”71 This is the dialectic of Enlightenment in microcosm: in dominating nature, the “subject subordinates itself to this blind nature.”72 Twelve-tone composition is, therefore, a kind of serial suicide, for the subject sacrifices itself to the calculations of its own system. In every dimension, in its harmony, its form, its counterpoint and development, the subject is virtually extinguished by the same indifference and frigidity symptomatic of Stravinsky’s illnesses.
So, like Stravinsky, Schoenberg survives the sirens. But, unlike Stravinsky, he is not a self-styled hero who hoists a banner of authenticity to deceive the world. He survives as one who should have died. He steers his ship with a ruthless objectivity meted out by history as his fate, and yet his soul is tormented by the memory of the sirens’ song. His cries for release replay themselves as a perpetually forbidden suicide in a music “that falls into empty time like an impotent bullet.”73 The impossibility of liberation leads to despair. As he sails away from death, all he wants to do with his music is to crash into the rocks. “Modern music sees absolute oblivion as its goal. It is the surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked.”74 It is this forbidden desire to abandon the subject to the narcotic song of the sirens that steers Schoenberg toward extreme expressions of alienation, leaving an irresolvable tension in his late music between a cold objectivity and the ghostly expression of a virtually dead subject.75 In late Schoenberg, the twelve-tone structures fragment under this tension. And it is through the fissures of these objective works that the subject finally cries. But this is not the cry of the subject for liberation as it hears the sirens; these tears almost fossilize as they drop, as if the only expression left in a music in which subjectivity has died, is the automatic release of tears.76 Like a blush, these tears bear witness to a micromorality ingrained “in our very skin,” a residue of the humane, which appears at the moment of humanity’s disappearance.77 Refracted in these micrological drops is the expression of a suffering beyond the subject, a suffering which invokes through the very negation of freedom the hope of a free humanity. So, like a ghost ship, music returns to that presubjective, mimetic origin which the sirens symbolize; its tears restore something of the sirens’ song. New music remembers its freedom on the frozen wastes of alienation.
Music and tears open the lips and set the arrested human being free.… The human being who surrenders himself to tears and to a music which no longer resembles him in any way permits that current of which he is not part and which builds up behind the dam restraining the world of phenomena to flow back into himself. In weeping and in singing he enters into alienated reality. “The tear flows, I have returned to earth” — this [line from Goethe’s Faust] defines the position of music. Thus earth claims Eurydice again. This gesture of return — not the sensation of expectancy — characterizes the expression of all music, even if it finds itself in a world worthy of death.78
Stravinsky may be Odysseus’ body and Schoenberg his soul, but it is catastrophe either way, because there is only one Odysseus, who can steer only one course in Adorno’s narrative. The dialectic between the two composers binds them together. It is as if Adorno is trying to force Schoenberg and Stravinsky into an antagonistic and impossible synthesis by pursuing their music “until the inherent consequence of the objects is transformed into their own criticism”: the truth becomes the “ferment of its untruth.”79 It is in this negative state that the works of both composers are absorbed into a negative synthesis where they seemingly bear the same condition of history — fragmented, shocked, traumatized, paralyzed into indifference, trapped in meaningless repetition, static, cold, inanimate, objective, inhumane — but are, in fact, dialectical opposites. The same words are employed by Adorno from opposite positions as if to force the extremes to meet at the other end so that both sides are made to speak the same (un)truth. As Adorno writes in Minima Moralia: “the dialectic advances by way of extremes, driving thoughts with the utmost consequentiality to the point where they turn back on themselves.”80 The split personality of new music is reintegrated through disintegration to create an oppositional unity that brings the catastrophic process of Enlightenment to self knowledge as a dialectical stalemate.81 The Flaschenpost is held in suspension. Schoenberg and Stravinsky are not so different after all, suggests Adorno; given the perspective of time, “Stravinsky’s unrelated juxtaposed chords and the succession of twelve-tone sounds … will some day no longer strike the ear as so distinct from one another,” he speculates.82 Schoenberg’s objective structures may be internally generated and Stravinsky’s externally imposed, but they amount to the same catastrophe: the ossification of music into space as a predetermined totality that preens itself of all subjectivity.83 The shock and trauma that pulsates in both The Rite of Spring and Erwartung may be differentiated as tyrant and victim, but in the end these shudders fuse to become the gestures of a subject pulverized to nothing by the gigantic machinery of power.84 Schoenberg’s system of total organization and Stravinsky’s inorganic technique of montage, both lead to the fragmentation of new music;85 their diametrically opposed methods generate a music that “no longer recognizes history” and so renders progress null and void.86 These fragments merely repeat themselves meaninglessly; Schoenberg’s reiterations of the note-row and Stravinsky’s infantile stutterings, both stem from Wagner’s leitmotifs that rattle around as congealed objects inside the vast containers of his music dramas;87 it is just that these containers are now the outworn conventions of the Classical past which Schoenberg and Stravinsky employ as a “death mask.”88 In the end, both composers, speaking different languages, enunciate the same aesthetic — the aesthetic of failure. It is only the degree to which they recognize this failure that differentiates them.
Of course, in one sense, it is really history that fails them.89 So it is not a question of escape for Adorno, as if new music can overcome the dialectic of Enlightenment. New music is stuck. Indeed, Adorno seems to have written himself into a corner, suggests Max Paddison; by “an absolutizing of the antitheses” in the book, the dialectical material is brought to a standstill. “The extremes, as total integration and total disintegration,” Paddison writes, “become final, and no way forward is offered.”90 So how can new music respond given a dialectical stalemate where no one knows the next move? Under these constraints, the new can no longer be new. This is the fundamental issue that Adorno addresses in his account of modernity, because the idea of modernity at a standstill is tantamount to what Arnold Gehlen calls a “posthistorical” state (post-histoire), where progress stagnates as a nominal, routine activity.91 “What is new is not in the least ‘revolutionary’ or subversive,” explains Gianni Vattimo, rather “it is what allows things to stay the same.”92 Or as Adorno himself puts it: “The modern has really become unmodern.”93 Under such conditions, the clichés of “the new” and “the progressive” begin to warp. How can one speak of “progress” if there is stalemate? How can music be “new” if history has come to a standstill? The central issues of the book — the “philosophy of new music” and “Schoenberg and Progress” — is a contradiction, for, in a dialectical stalemate, there is no future, no progress, no utopia.94 Only drifting.
Drifting in a “posthistorical” state, however, does not mean the abandonment of the new for Adorno; the bottle may drift aimlessly, but the message of hope is still scrawled within it. Moral order, as Adorno explains in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, requires a goal for meaningful action, even if the conditions for such action no longer exist.95 Thus the “new” in new music becomes a goal, recast by Adorno as a moral imperative, a demand, promised by music, that things should be different.96 Or to put it negatively, the new, states Adorno, should be “a rebellion against the fact that there is no longer anything new.”97 “Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category,” he writes.98 As a moral projection, the new is not an act that can be realized now but an attitude that yearns for a way out of the dialectical stalemate. As Adorno states: “The new is the longing for the new, not the new itself.”99 This fragile longing offers a tattered teleology to the standstill of the modern world, and art, while submitting to this reality, must never relinquish the search for a new order. “[T]he goal of new music must be the complete liberation of the human subject,” declares Adorno.100 Only then would new music be truly new.
In the meantime, new music can only protest; it can only rebel “against the fact that there is no longer anything new.” But how is music to do this? If, as Adorno famously writes, “[t]he only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption,” then the only music that can be responsibly written is one that “estrange[s] the world, [to] reveal it to be … as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.”101 This is not the moral tradition of the Beethovenian hero “[shouting] to us the avowal of his Godhood,” as Wagner once put it;102 history is not overcome in a blaze of C major. Adorno’s “standpoint of redemption” — the “messianic light” — is a revelation of darkness. On the one hand, writes Adorno, this is the “simplest of all things,” since “consummate negativity … delineates the mirror-image of its opposite”; or as Simon Jarvis puts it, “total despair is unintelligible” without imagining hope.103 Yet, on the other hand “it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a standpoint removed … from the scope of existence”;104 hope is simply unknowable today. “[I]t is not ‘there’,” claims Adorno, because this world contains no genuine experience of freedom.105 This means that any moral law that lays claim to freedom is a lie. If music were to configure this law positively it would merely falsify the truth as a graven image. Stravinsky’s idolatry is his collusion with the lie. His objective style is no better than the modern imposition of an ethical order, a coercive force, which, by its very oppression, contradicts the freedom it claims. Stravinsky’s authenticity, his desire to ground music in the delusion of an objective cosmos, refuses to acknowledge the stalemate. He tries “to reconstruct the authenticity of music,” writes Adorno, “to impose upon it the character of outside confirmation, to fortify it with the power of being-so-and-not-being-able-to-be-otherwise.”106 But this merely reduces Stravinsky’s objectivity to “nothing but an illusory façade of power and security.”107
Schoenberg’s “failure,” on the other hand, succeeds precisely because he obeys the only commandment that Adorno upholds, the very law which Stravinsky failed to keep: the Bilderverbot, the Mosaic prohibition against graven images.108 Schoenberg never sets up the new as an idol, but through a process of continual negation, he acknowledges the impossibility of progress even in his desire to pursue it.109 The new — “the standpoint of redemption” — is bottled up as a yearning that drifts on the ocean of modernity. Thus when Adorno speaks of Schoenberg’s progress it is no longer the march of some revolutionary activist across the history of art. In fact, Adorno refuses to enshrine Schoenberg among “the pioneers of future works,” as if the “old” categories of progress — the “new,” the “experimental,” the “most advanced” — could still be employed without critical reflection.110 Schoenberg is no pioneer; rather he functions as a secular Messiah, whose music bears “all the darkness and guilt of the world.”111 Self-sacrifice, then, is Adorno’s instrument of progress. The new is a surrender and not an advance, a form of drifting that willingly gives itself up to the insurmountable forces of suffering and oppression in order to “illuminate the meaningless world” with the meaninglessness of its own death.112 This is the revelatory darkness of “messianic light.” In effect, Schoenberg surrenders the present for a stake in the future, and so acknowledges the failure of his music as an interim aesthetic caught in a dialectical stalemate. This means that for Adorno Schoenberg’s development of the twelve-tone system is not some technical advance that overcomes the present crisis of art; its “progress” is merely provisional. It is not “new” as such, but a longing for the new. By extinguishing freedom, this “merciless [S]amaritan” as Adorno calls it, trains music for freedom.113 This is why Adorno describes the technique as if it were a preparatory exercise, some kind of species counterpoint for the future of composition.114 This is hard music for hard times. Those who come after Schoenberg will “have a better lot.”115 No wonder Schoenberg accused Adorno of being “another disloyal person.”
Yet it is precisely by making the stalemate provisional that history — or the new — is still possible for music. Failure as an interim measure allows Adorno to project an imaginary dialectic, in the hope that Schoenberg’s sacrifice might somehow result in the miracle of redemption. This means that Schoenberg’s technique is rescued by the narrowest of margins through a virtual dialectic which history has yet to fulfill, and, indeed, may never fulfill. Adorno’s inability to specify in any detail how Schoenberg’s late works might prefigure a resurrection attests to the fragile nature of his salvation history. Adorno, too, obeys the Bilderverbot, merely extrapolating from Schoenberg’s “secondary works” (those compositions and arrangements of the serial period that employ tonality), a “counter tendency” latent in the composer’s character, as if his growing indifference to a technique of indifference would force the composer to break the shackles of the system.116 But such a rupture, for Adorno, must arise from the necessity of the material; freedom is not an arbitrary act imposed from the outside, but a necessary one which has yet to materialize from within the dialectic of Enlightenment itself. The task of the dialectical composer is not merely to fashion the historical material but to follow its drift.
Responsibility in music, then, is not a matter of imposing responsibility, but of setting the conditions for its feasibility in this negative interval of history. Ethics is work in progress. It means admitting the virtual, if not actual, impossibility of finding a moral order.117 In musical terms, it means rethinking everything preestablished as unstable; it means negotiating the terrors of history contingently, without specifying utopia. New music must “surrender itself (überläßt) step by step,” without a vision of the totality, but with just the material that one stumbles upon, to see if this could be some clue to the possibility of an authentic world.118 This is why new music is a moral projection that fades into the dark. In obscuring the image, darkness obeys the law of prohibition. “Art,” writes Adorno, “is able to aid enlightenment only by relating the clarity of the world consciously to its own darkness.”119
Darkness is therefore light for Adorno, because those, like Stravinsky, who claim to see are blind.120 Adorno’s “micrological moral myopia” is an attempt to see in the dark.121 Darkness, after all, is a condition of hermetic artworks; they are “windowless monads,” as Adorno describes them, operating within the confines of their own laws. Indeed, Adorno’s myopic morality is modeled on a form of aesthetic judgment — Kant’s reflective judgment — which searches for the universal from the particular, without subsuming it under an external concept.122 It is a search for an outside truth from an inner blindness.123 As Adorno explains:
Aesthetic judgments appear as if in obedience to a rule, as if thought were governed by a law. But the law, the rule contained in artistic judgment is, to paraphrase Kant’s idea, not given, but unknown; judgments are passed as if in the dark, and yet with a reasoned consciousness of objectivity. Our search for musical criteria today should also proceed along much the same paradoxical lines; in other words, we should search for an experience of necessity that imposes itself step by step, but which can make no claim to any transparent universal law. Actually, we miss the point if … we posit something like rules where none can exist, but only an infinitely sensitive and fragile logic, one that points to tendencies rather than fixed norms governing what should be done or not done.124
Whereas for Kant, aesthetic judgments embody moral duty as “a palpable experience of freedom” that align the senses with the imperatives of reason, in Adorno’s mind, Kant’s moral reason ultimately excludes that experience by isolating ethics as an external set of binding maxims.125 Indeed, the “brutal efficiency” of totalitarian regimes is the dialectical result of Enlightenment morality.126 Aesthetics therefore cannot serve Kant’s moral imperatives as the sentiment of reason, rather it is the other way around; ethics reverts back to aesthetics. Morality must abandon its prescriptive concepts and search for its authority aesthetically, as a reflective judgment — step by step, drifting in the dark. Hidden within the artwork is a workshop for an unknown ethical future. Thus aesthetic darkness is the light by which reason may discover its social ethics. History may cause the failure of the aesthetic, but the aesthetic is the only way to redeem the failure of history.
So, in a final dialectical twist, Schoenberg’s moral victory is also an aesthetic one. New music, as the custodian of an “aesthetic” morality, must attempt to model an objective future through the logic of its own particular materials, providing that its logic drifts like the movement of the Flaschenpost. Hence Schoenberg sacrifices the idea of “authenticity” and casts his music upon the waters of history;127 he follows music’s internal movement, to let it blindly acknowledge the condition of the world, to assume it without total collusion, to fashion it without willing it; in other words, to drift. But ultimately the task is to relinquish it. As one who has rejected “what he has previously possessed,” Schoenberg, claims Adorno, is sovereign over the system to which he submits.128 After all, if by following the logic of the musical material, Schoenberg progresses dialectically from extended tonality through atonality to serial construction, then he might just stumble upon the path to freedom by way of artistic necessity. History may yet produce a dialectical turn that Schoenberg, as a dialectician, will master as a way out of serialism. Schoenberg’s art, says Adorno, “does not conceive … the ideal of comprehensive totality, but surrenders itself (überläßt) step by step upon that which becomes concrete as a demand in the encounter between the compositional subject which is conscious of itself, and the socially established material. In so doing he preserves with particular objectivity the greater philosophical truth as the free and independent (freiweg, auf eigene Faust unternommene) attempt at the reconstruction of obligation.”129 In the inner logic of this myopic process, new music hopes to prefigure the key that would unlock the prison of humanity. “Works of art,” says Adorno, “attempt to solve the riddles designed by the world to devour man. The world is a sphinx, the artist is its blinded Oedipus, and the works of art resemble his wise answer that plunges the sphinx into the abyss.… In the elemental ‘material’ of art, the ‘answer’ — the only possible and correct answer — is already present, but not yet defined (ungeschieden).”130
It is this definition that Schoenberg and Stravinsky attempt to elucidate and so solve the riddle of authenticity; both run up against the same problems that shatter their music. Both composers offer sacrifices to modernity. But only one is acceptable to Adorno. As he explains: “Everything depends … upon whether this music, by its attitude, advertises this authenticity as something which it has already attained, or whether — with closed eyes, as it were — it surrenders itself (sich überläßt) to the demands of the matter, in order to master it in the first place. It is the willingness to do this which defines — in spite of all the exasperating antinomies — the incomparable superiority of Schoenberg over the objectivism, which in the meantime has degenerated to everyday jargon.”131
Ten years after the publication of the Philosophy of New Music, Adorno, in the preface of the 1958 edition, wrote: “the fulfillment of the thoughts out of which the book is composed still remains to be accomplished.”132 This may seem a strange statement given the effect of the book on postwar composers who embraced the “merciless Samaritan” of Schoenberg and denounced the neoclassicism of Stravinsky. But if the postwar avant-garde thought they were fulfilling the book by extending the serial technique, they were mistaken. The abstract constructions that resulted, which were an attempt to blot out the very history that Adorno wanted to remember in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, were hardly “responsible” or critical, and they certainly did not prefigure a way out of the dialectical stalemate;133 total serialism (Boulez) was merely replaced by total contingency (Cage), replaying rather than resolving Adorno’s dialectical extremes.134 History, in the modern sense, continued to fail music in the 1950s as it still does today; and “new” music continues to grow old in its inability to renew its critique and disturb the affirmative culture of the West.135
But how can this book ever find its fulfillment? As a critique, it can never arrive, but can only move by negation, unmasking the ideological façades to lay bare the conditions of history; it is designed to provoke the future without a clear direction; it is a prohibition and not a prescription. As such it is a message that drifts into the future (which is our present), with its hope and despair still bottled inside like a time capsule, waiting to aggravate our present with its past. Unstop the bottle and the message is still relevant even if the music it describes has failed to procure freedom. There is still no binding order; postmodernity may solve the problem by no longer requiring one, but that hardly justifies the problem of “new” music today; it merely removes Adorno’s reason for its existence.
So how are we to respond to Adorno’s message? Are we supposed to believe him? In a sense, Adorno’s morality can never be true in a cosmos that is no longer binding. Indeed, it can only be repellent in a world deluded with its own authenticity. “We shudder at the brutalization of life,” writes Adorno, “but lacking any objectively binding morality we are forced at every step into actions and words, into calculations that are by humane standards barbaric, and even by the dubious values of good society, tactless.”136 Given this enforced tactlessness, Adorno’s moralizing tone can cause a kind of moral revulsion that alienates the “good” reader. But perhaps Adorno’s repulsiveness is deliberate. Content and form are inextricable in Adorno’s texts, and the Philosophy of New Music reenacts the very music he champions. His ethics are like those “intransigent works of art” he describes: “Through a realization of their own intrinsic principles of enlightenment … they become … repulsive because of their truth.”137 Adorno knows that he can only construct a moral philosophy out of his own damaged subjectivity, in imitation of the twelvetone system, to bind and isolate himself in a microethics that rehearses the oblivion of new music. Nobody wants to listen to his moralizing tones. As with Schoenberg, he is too serious. His thought is too rigorous, too rational, too opaque. He amasses his impenetrable dialectics like a “solipsistic piece for large orchestra” that plays before rows of empty seats;138 the means are totally disproportionate to the effect. Its massive isolation speaks of an alienated ethics in which the reconciliation between the individual and society can only be illuminated by “definitive negation.”139 Adorno could have played to the gallery, drumming up the kind of neutral objectivity that he hears in Stravinsky, but he insists on reading the “attitude” behind the scores. No one objects to his analyses — indeed, he is often criticized for their scarcity.140 Yet the moment he performs a moral physiognomy of the musical structures, his statements are no longer binding; they are objectionable.141 But perhaps this dialectical failure to win over his audience is Adorno’s “open attempt” to reconstruct a responsible world, for if he were to leave the matter merely in technical or affirmative terms he would espouse the positivism he denounces; he would have appeased the collective by annihilating the subject.
If one reads the text as Adorno listens to Schoenberg, then his “repulsive” prose may not be as overbearing as it might seem. The sense of being unable to subsume Adorno’s text under some clear and concise concept is a form of reflective judgment; its impenetrable difficulties, its darkness gestures to its provisional, exploratory, noncoercive nature; the book is a form of critical drifting: sich überlassend. To quote Adorno, it is “an infinitely sensitive and fragile logic, one that points to tendencies rather than fixed norms.” The Philosophy of New Music is a contingent search for order without prescribing one. Neither absolute nor relative, Adorno’s dialectics offend because it teeters precariously between the moral extremes of the West. Indeed it unmasks its moral presumptions of relativism and fundamentalism. How dare he search for fundamentals within the relativism of a “tolerant” society, while simultaneously undermining the objectivity of modern “reason”? If by speaking, he consigns his thoughts, like new music, to oblivion, then it is because society is deaf (indeed, intolerant) to what he wants to say. To refuse to listen, to regard his opinions as irrelevant, is to be implicated in the ideology he criticizes. To take Adorno seriously may mean reflecting on what is most repellent and unacceptable about the text. The revulsion that alienates the reader is a challenge to dialectical thinking. Adorno does not require us to assume his position, but to engage with the work as a process of “open reconstruction” that allows for the possibility that what he says might point, if only darkly, toward the truth, even if that truth must be responsibly negated by the reader. The dialectical challenge of the Philosophy of New Music is not to think with the status quo — being-so-and-not-being-able-to-be-otherwise — but, rather, to think otherwise.