6

Frankfurt School Blues
Rethinking Adorno’s Critique of Jazz1

JAMES BUHLER

The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass. ²

The jazz essays of Theodor W. Adorno are irritating. On the face of it, Adorno seems more intent on securing a ringing indictment of jazz though inflammatory language and rhetorical sleights of hand than through anything like a careful engagement with the music. This has left him open to charges of lacking adequate technical knowledge of the music, of being Eurocentric and elitist, and of being insensitive to issues of race, especially as they play out in an American context. Even his supporters often resort to apologia when forced to defend this body of his work. J. Bradford Robinson, for instance, declares that Adorno could not have had “real” jazz in mind when he formulated his critique since little, if any, of this music was available in Germany in the early 1930s; the target of Adorno’s jazz essays, Robinson argues, was therefore really commercial dance music, the music of such bands as Paul Whiteman’s, when it was American at all.³ The problem with this argument, even if we grant the basic soundness of Robinson’s historical account of the dissemination of jazz in Weimar Germany, is that it saves Adorno by taking the sting out of his critique; it ironically winds up following the very logic of the culture industry that Horkheimer and Adorno do so much to expose in Dialectic of Enlightenment — passive, unreflective consumption. A critique of commercial jazz that does not implicate “legitimate” jazz makes for very easy reading indeed: nothing in it disturbs thought, spurs it to greater reflection.⁴ For there is simply very little at stake in this version of Adorno’s critique — it becomes but a well-worn lament over the vacuity of the music industry, with Whiteman, the so-called “King of Jazz,” inevitably trotted out as the prime exhibit of the depravity of the industry.⁵ Consequently Adorno’s writings become largely irrelevant for current debates about mass culture. Adorno is saved only to be made superfluous.

Another tack by sympathetic critics has been to inquire why Adorno’s critique takes the particularly virulent form that it does. Yet to ask, as Robert Witkin does, “why did Adorno ‘hate’ jazz?”, even qualifying the terms of the “hate” with scare quotes, risks personalizing the issue, turning it into one of taste.6 As Witkin recognizes, Adorno’s private views on jazz are ultimately moot. For whether he liked or disliked the music, Adorno clearly understood something about its general appeal. Indeed the nature of the appeal is precisely the problem for Adorno; the appeal is pernicious to the extent that it blocks rather than aids reflection on music and society. Even the best jazz, the so-called “hot” music, Adorno says, does not substantively challenge the terms of its existence as laid down by the culture industry. Hot jazz serves only to show that the culture industry is capable of delivering a quality good that satisfies the demand of the connoisseur. The culture industry uses a relatively fixed set of distinctions (popular song, commercial jazz, hot jazz, classical music, etc.) to cater to particular taste in order to reproduce and stabilize that taste for better exploitation. “Something is provided for all so that none may escape; the distinctions are emphasized and extended.”⁷ The jazz essays remind us of the high social toll that the culture industry extracts for providing us with such pleasures as jazz; they insist that the only way to avoid paying these costs is by confronting our own complicity with the culture industry and relinquishing the masochistic pleasure — the pleasure in our own exploitation — that we obtain from it. These essays are irritating precisely where they spur us to critical reflection.

Rather than asking why Adorno hated jazz, it would perhaps be more fruitful to turn the question around and ask: On what ground has the critical reception of the jazz essays proved most contentious? Adorno’s critics inevitably attack his jazz essays on three main points: (1) Eurocentrism, which is entwined in complicated ways with the issue of race; (2) elitism, which is tied to his philosophical defense of autonomy; and (3) technical analysis, which is bound up with his account of the jazz subject. At least part of the reason these have become sore points in the reception of the essays is that Adorno has to some extent anticipated each of these challenges, even provoked them. We often find his thought on these matters refusing to occupy the common, acceptable positions of a problem.

The Jazz Critique and Racial Essentialism

One of the most frequent complaints against Adorno’s critique of jazz has been that its harshness and ostensible unwillingness to take account of the African and African-American cultural context of the music belie an ethnocentric and essentially racist attitude toward jazz. Evelyn Wilcock has recently contested this particular reading of Adorno’s critics.⁸ She reconstructs debates that raged over jazz in England in the early 1930s to get a sense of the attitudes Adorno would have confronted when he arrived at Oxford from Germany. Racism, she says, was pervasive in London during the 1930s. As in the United States, black musicians faced difficulties booking hotels there, and the situation was similar to, if not as dire as that facing Jews in Germany at the time.9 Then, too, the strong musicians’ union barred most foreign players — classical as well as jazz — from working in the country. Though hostility toward foreign workers was widespread in England, the musicians’ union was especially antagonistic toward African Americans, who were ruthlessly portrayed in union-sponsored publications as wild and unrefined.¹⁰ The general press, even when enthusiastic about jazz, was hardly more flattering, deploying a heavily racialized discourse. Thus Melody Maker, a leading British music magazine, wrote: “The reason most people understand nothing of negro music is because they do not know that the resemblance between the black and white races is only superficial. A negro is not just a white man with a colored exterior. His mind is different. He thinks differently along altogether different lines.”¹¹ A student newspaper in Oxford strikes a similar tone: “If you are an out-and-out Negro worshipper, then in all probability you will not be impressed by these records, which have a polish and charm that is all their own; you will miss, perhaps, the vitality and spontaneity of the Negros [sic] playing, the coarser rhythm section and the fierce solos.”¹²

Although the intention does not appear to be especially malignant in these passages, social difference is still perniciously reified into fundamental racial difference by treating those marks of difference as eternal and natural rather than arbitrary facets of a person’s biology. Adorno, who had recently fled Germany because of its race laws, would undoubtedly have been keenly attuned to how essentialist assumptions about race, no matter how benignly intended, perpetuate racism. Wilcock, therefore, sees the primary task of the jazz essays as challenging the basic racial, if not racist, premise of the discourse on jazz. Adorno, she says, severs the link between race and jazz in order to challenge these “cultural labels” and expose “the often unconscious prejudice behind them.”¹³ It is his fierce resistance to even a hint of racial essentialism, Wilcock argues, that accounts for Adorno’s deep suspicion of the discourse on jazz and so also the music itself, which he felt was compromised to the core by its mediation through a culture industry that exploited jazz not for its musical significance but for its ability to tap into the “popular taste for what was foreign or exotic.”¹⁴

One way Adorno works to sever the link between race and jazz is by challenging the significance of an African origin for jazz. As early as the 1933 article “Abschied von Jazz” — an article whose premature announcement of the death of jazz has frequently been ridiculed — Adorno had claimed that actual African elements in jazz were minimal and that consequently whatever barbarisms the Nazis detected in the music must be a product of a deluded European culture not Africa. As Harry Cooper notes, “Adorno’s ‘barbaric drum’ …, however unfortunate the imagery, did not travel across the water, but resounded at the origins of his/our own culture.”¹⁵ For Adorno, the “primitiveness” of jazz is not African but European through and through, a product of the European (musical) imagination. This is a crucial point, and one that has all too often been overlooked. Adorno’s refusal to endorse fully an African (or even African-American) origin of jazz was in fact meant to indict European culture — in this case specifically German culture — not to withhold from Africa (or African Americans) a claim to artistic legitimacy. Although he later softened his position on African origins of central jazz techniques such as polymetrical structures, he always insisted that the actual musical importance of such origins has been highly overrated. Even the idea that jazz is fundamentally a form of African-American folk music is ultimately pernicious for Adorno to the extent that it occludes the fundamental fact of commodification.16 In his review of Wilder Hobson’s and Winthrop Sargeant’s books on jazz, Adorno addresses this point directly: “[T]he actual existence of a clear-cut distinction between spontaneous folk music and commercialized mass production is as problematic as it is alluring. Any attempt to abstract jazz from the features of commodity production inherent in it is prone to fall prey to that type of romanticism which is fostered by the music industry in order to increase its sales figures.”¹⁷ However close the connection of jazz with the authentic folk music of African Americans, Adorno says, race itself has served primarily as a means of marketing jazz. The culture industry places an exotic black cloak of primitive otherness on jazz to disguise that it is essentially a form of commercial European music; blackness, its “hot” element, is crassly used as a mark that guarantees the music’s authenticity, its noncommerciality. But it is also this mark of authenticity that distinguishes the hot music as a commodity among commodities, “real” jazz among the dross of commercial dance music. “[T]he commercialization of the concept of primitivity casts doubt on primitivity itself.”¹⁸ Any traces of actual African music that jazz might have preserved were incidental to the musical construction of primitive otherness. They served as musically insubstantial ornaments that disguised the banality of the underlying commodity by giving it the illusion rather than substance of life and spontaneity. Venues such as the storied Cotton Club prospered by offering exquisite images of authentic (black) primitiveness for consumption by white audiences. In this sense it might be argued that Duke Ellington was particularly successful because he was remarkably adept at drawing brilliant musical images of “jungle music” from his band that satisfied his audience’s need for such images of primitiveness while also giving the appearance that those images had been safely domesticated in strikingly original but ultimately orderly arrangements. The form appealed to listeners at least in part because it allowed primitiveness to seduce while holding its danger at bay, making it safe for consumption.¹⁹ Around the same time that Ellington was working in the Cotton Club, Josephine Baker became an international sensation, especially in Paris, by proffering an image of the black body as wild and seductive but also as an object to be gawked at on stage and later film.²⁰ In each of these cases, domestication of primitiveness, whether by the arrangement or by the stage, is linked to the process of its commodification; it was primitiveness, and even “blackness” itself, that was being bought and sold.21 This perhaps explains why Adorno was so intent on listening to jazz with jaded ears: it commercially exploited marks of otherness.

It is precisely this critique that motivated one of Adorno’s most notorious statements. “[L]ike commodity consumption itself, the manufacture [Herstellung] of jazz is also an urban phenomenon, and the skin of the black man functions as much as a coloristic effect as does the silver of the saxophone.”²² Though this remark is often taken as evidence of Adorno’s racism, it should be obvious that Adorno is not himself comparing skin color to the silver plating on the saxophone; he is indeed objecting to how the marketing of jazz has used race this way. In the hands of the marketers, jazz now becomes “jungle music,” now a trace of past sufferings of slaves.

In no way does a triumphant vitality make its entrance in these bright musical commodities; the European-American entertainment business has subsequently hired the [supposed] triumphant victors to appear as their flunkies and as figures in advertisements, and their triumph is merely a confusing parody of colonial imperialism. To the extent that we can speak of black elements in the beginnings of jazz, in ragtime perhaps, it is still less archaic-primitive self-expression than the music of slaves.…²³

Jazz, he suggests, is not the music of “primitives” living in the Africa bush. Like the slave trade that brought Africans to the New World, the musical traces of Africa in jazz are irreducibly bound up with an exploitive, imperialist commerce. The need to negotiate racial obstacles in American society demands everything from African-American players, even their dignity. Barred on racial grounds from making a living playing anything but entertainment music, African-American musicians are forced to submit to the imperatives of the culture industry: success comes to those who proficiently mimic the often degrading cultural stereotype of the jazz player, an image reproduced and enforced by the culture industry whether or not the culture industry created the image itself. If jazz players aspire to play “hot” jazz, using it to unwind after an evening of playing tedious commercial dance music, then this becomes the limit of their musical experience and so even it constitutes a kind of trap. “Hot music can be contrasted to the minimum of march and salon music as the achievable maximum; the ‘idea’ of jazz can be construed from it if it is to be construed at all.”²⁴ The aim in production, Adorno suggests, is identical to that of consumption: the illusion of free and spontaneous choice.

Moreover, hot jazz, the most virtuosic and technically accomplished, also carries the strongest charge of exoticism, appearing archaic and primitive, seeming to fall outside the bounds of modern rationality, whereas everything about it, from its dissemination through phonograph records and radio to its shiny silver-plated saxophones, is thoroughly modern. Hot jazz, in fact, often appears more modern than most of the new music that still circulates primarily in the old technology of scores, indeed often in manuscript. The modern African American, too, is no primitive in Adorno’s view but a product of the slave trade that underwrote the great capitalist expansion at the dawn of the modern age, an expansion that would culminate in the industrial revolution and the bourgeois assumption of political power. “The archaic stance of jazz is as modern as the ‘primitives’ who fabricate it. The improvisational immediacy which constitutes its partial success counts strictly among those attempts to break out of the fetishized commodity world which want to escape that world without ever changing it, thus moving ever deeper into its snare.”25 Jazz, in Adorno’s view, is not ideologically committed to transforming a world beset by social obstacles; it acquiesces to, even reifies those obstacles through a practice that valorizes a virtuosic dodging that takes the obstacles matter-of-factly, even cheerfully, as things posited, as givens that cannot be eradicated and whose presence cannot be questioned any more than the necessity of the beat. Whether dodging is the best option among a series of bad alternatives — and there are perhaps good reasons for thinking it might be — remains an open question, but in Adorno’s terms it is clearly questionable whether virtuosity of this kind should be celebrated. (That being said, it would certainly have been helpful had Adorno acknowledged more forthrightly that pervasive racism had trapped highly talented, even brilliant musicians in an almost impossible social and economic situation and that they were right to have struggled to articulate an alternative practice, doomed though this attempt to break out may have been, rather than to have cynically given in to the situation.)

Adorno does recognize, at least in a limited way, that jazz offered marginalized black performers a cultural opportunity denied them elsewhere. In his Introduction to the Sociology of Music, for instance, Adorno writes: “[J]azz has the potential of a musical breakout from this culture on the part of those who were either refused admittance to it or annoyed by its mendacity.”²⁶ The problem, Adorno suggests, is the way that the culture industry neutralizes resistance and turns it into an “interference” that blocks reflection on the situation. “Time and again, however, jazz became a captive of the culture industry and thus of musical and social conformism; famed devices of its phases, such as ‘swing,’ ‘bebop,’ ‘cool jazz,’ are both advertising slogans and marks of that process of absorption.”²⁷ Once the culture industry has stabilized the breakout — isolating, reproducing and marketing it as something wild and provocative — the culture industry has already won.²⁸ Adorno himself argues that, like modern classical music in the 1920s, the “stabilization” of jazz, the domestication of its innovative, unruly elements through incessant repetition indifferent to musical context, ultimately proves its undoing. Still, Adorno’s critique needs careful negotiation on this point. For it is not by any means clear that the answer to the stabilization that Adorno diagnosed is to fall silent, to cease using whatever improvisatory license, however regulated and limited it may in actuality be, to explore innovative ways of surmounting socially given obstacles.

This is a point that Adorno’s critics often press. Gary Zabel, for instance, argues that “it would be odd, to say the least if a musical form that … could only develop by braving the hostility of the surrounding white culture had no element of social criticism.” Adorno, Zabel continues,

fails to distinguish between genuine and commercial jazz; that is to say, he draws no distinction between the African-American musical tradition and the shallowness of American big-band music and its derivatives. The omission is significant, because it was the development of the dance band in the 1930s and 40s that tamed jazz in the interest of social conformity. Jazz, in its most broadly disseminated expression, thereby became a form of popular music properly so-called. It was transformed from protest at the suffering of an enslaved and exploited people into an instrument of the reproduction of the dominant social order.29

The issue of whether or to what extent Adorno understood the distinction between jazz and its commercial offshoots will be addressed below, but the general point that domestication is the fate of jazz under the culture industry — Adorno would be more radical here and say the fate of all music — is well taken, even if it does not exactly count as an objection to Adorno’s position as Zabel believes.³⁰ Rather Zabel, like many of Adorno’s critics, more or less revoices Adorno’s point for a contemporary liberal sensibility, a sensibility that for all its sensitivity to the plight of African Americans, comes precariously close to a racially essentialist aesthetic, to grounding musical value in an economy of racial difference.

Lee B. Brown illustrates the peril of such essentialism when he criticizes Adorno for missing an “opportunity to detail the way in which the black modernists of the postwar era managed to one-up the white jazz establishment which, in the opinion of the ‘Young Turks,’ had been looting black musical resources. The response of this avant-garde was to develop forms of the music that were technically beyond the white players who were not in on the new game.”³¹ Brown inverts the terms of racial difference here, deploying a discourse that demands a stable racial identity not only of the actors (adept “black modernists” versus inept “white jazz establishment” players) but even of intellectual property (“looting black musical resources”) instead of displacing the issue of race as in Adorno’s far more radical account. Indeed, the racial constitution of the “black modernists” figures much more prominently in Brown’s scenario than do the technical innovations of bebop itself, which Brown, inadvertently doing a disservice to the music (especially given the terms of Adorno’s critique), renders as a giant figure of resentment: “Up yours!” How refreshing is Adorno’s nonpluralist antiessentialism, even when it must condemn jazz, compared to, say, Brown’s romantic, heroic account of jazz, which essentializes race and reads more like a text produced by a publicity agent than an accurate description of the historical situation. Harry Cooper, who is generally as unsympathetic to Adorno’s critique as Brown, nevertheless sides with Adorno on this point: “[A]ny appeal to a primitive Other, whether as culpable or redemptive, was [for Adorno] a hypocritical distraction. This is the best Adorno, his relentless self-criticism of ‘values’ constituting an ethnocentrism more honest than most multiculturalism.”32

Adorno has paid dearly for his honesty, for his refusal of racial essentialism. The price includes not just the appearance of ethnocentrism, which so many of his critics insist on reading as a sign of latent racism, but also a commitment to high culture, especially the modernist avant-garde, which his critics take, perhaps more fairly, as elitist but without generally seeking to understand the reason for this motif in his thought. In Adorno’s case, charges of elitism, Jay M. Bernstein reminds us, confuse high art with “its conservative appropriation, thus the fact and not the reasons for its existence becomes the enemy.”³³ Where cultural conservatives champion high art for the social uplift and edification it imparts, the high moral values it enshrines (without for a moment ever considering the high social costs required to underwrite such values), Adorno, on the contrary, defends high art for the way it underscores the unfulfilled promise of society as a whole. Where the conservatives eternalize, Adorno historicizes. Bernstein summarizes Adorno’s position this way: “[h]igh culture exists because what it promises does not. One can only defend culture by indicting the reasons for and not the fact of its existence.”³⁴ In particular, Adorno’s elitism seeks to do justice to Benjamin’s idea, succinctly summarized by Peter Bürger, that “the beauty of works does not justify the suffering to which they owe their existence; but neither may one negate the work that alone testifies to that suffering.”³⁵ Adorno’s commitment to high art, his elitism, is no intellectual stiff upper lip; it is rather an expression, in negative form, of sorrow, his blue note that counters the repetitive riff on the culture industry.

Autonomy and the Commodity Form

As many commentators have noted, the important place that autonomy holds in Adorno’s aesthetic theory puts it in close proximity to formalism, since the concept of autonomy in both cases serves to set art apart from mundane reality. This proximity is the legacy of Kant, whose account of beauty starts by bracketing off sociological issues:

If any one asks me whether I consider that the palace I see before me is beautiful, I may, perhaps, reply that I do not care for things of that sort that are merely made to be gaped at. Or I may reply in the same strain as that Iroquois sachem who said that nothing in Paris pleased him better than the eating-houses. I may even go a step further and inveigh with the vigour of a Rousseau against the vanity of the great who spend the sweat of the people on such superfluous things.… All this may be admitted and approved; only it is not the point now at issue. All one wants to know is whether the mere representation of the object is to my liking.36

If Kant here does not deny the relevance of social (or historical) factors for judgments about art, they remain beside the point for judgments about beauty, which cannot be idiosyncratic, or culturally or historically specific but on the contrary must be disinterested; that is, they must presume impartiality and universal validity. Still, it is worth considering why Kant would want to mark this distinction. On one reading, the one pursued by the early German romantics, consolidated by the formalist turn in the mid-nineteenth century (for example, Hanslick, Vischer) and that culminated in the movement of aestheticism at the end of the century, the distinction serves to carve out a space for culture not determined by the interests of the market — or by any interest other than aesthetic considerations. Still, the insistence on universality and impartiality by which this was achieved, Bürger says, is merely ideological to the extent that it is not historicized:

With his demand that the aesthetic judgment be universal, Kant also closes his eyes to the particular interests of his class. Toward the products of the class enemy also, the bourgeois theoretician claims impartiality. What is bourgeois in Kant’s argument is precisely the demand that the aesthetic judgment have universal validity. The pathos of universality is characteristic of the bourgeoisie, which fights the feudal nobility as an estate that represents particular interests.³⁷

This is the reading that idealist aesthetics, especially its historical descendant formalism, uses to valorize aesthetic autonomy as the appearance of freedom, and it is in this vein that most interpreters have understood Adorno’s use of autonomy.

Gregg Horowitz offers another reading of Kant’s defense of autonomy, one that reveals a different contour to the Critique of Judgment. In a subtle, somewhat counterintuitive but extremely provocative rejoinder to this first reading of Kant, Horowitz suggests that aesthetic autonomy is not so much the appearance of freedom as the appearance of its failure, a failure that nevertheless serves as evidence of freedom:

[I]f autonomy in art is the work’s refusal to let anything outside itself determine its form, then the autonomous work is just the appearance of that refusal. The work of art thus appears as nonreconciliation with the world of external determination only by reproducing or representing that world as deprived of its determinative powers. But this of course entails that the work is bound irredeemably to what does not determine it; it is constrained to show what does not constrain it. For the work’s power of negation to appear, it must visibly negate something and can only appear as the negation of that thing. Thus, for the work of art to be autonomous, it is bound to show what it is not bound by and so reveal itself as incapable of escaping from the world it seeks to transcend.38

Hegel in particular, Horowitz says, is attuned to autonomy as the image of failed freedom in art, but Hegel reads it as a failure of autonomy itself, promptly proclaims the death of art, and then insists on returning art to its social and historical context. But Horowitz notes that the contextualization that Hegel demands necessarily robs art of all real historical impetus, offering only the analog of a return to the blind domination of nature in place of history. That is, the more that any context determines the work from the outside, the more that such a context appears as a law of nature, what Horowitz calls “a blind play of factors that determine human action.”³⁹ Autonomy, however, should be precisely what in the artwork remains unreconciled to being determined by something external to it, by something that appears as an indifferent mechanism of nature.

To have a history, on this view, is to fail to be free yet to bridle against that failure, which is the same as saying that for some entity to be historical is for it to have a past — its past — which also establishes for it a future. That there is this concept of history at all is a conceptual consequence of the perceived intolerability that the free spirit should find itself confronted with a mechanical world that is indifferent to it and the further perception that turning away from that intolerability in favor of some chiliastic metaphysical comfort provides no solace. Instead, the intolerability of that world’s indifference yields a struggle to negate it.⁴⁰

Autonomy is crucial to art because it is through the figure of autonomy that art enters history, as a failure of art to be free, to escape its social and historical context. This is not to deny the relevance of social and historical context to understanding art. “The very idea of a historical factor, as opposed to mechanical determination, the very idea of historical context, as opposed to location in nature, presupposes the autonomy, the failed freedom, of the work of art. Historical factors and contexts are what freedom remains unreconciled to.”⁴¹ To historicize the work without reducing it to historical factors, to treat the work as being in history rather than in nature, means engaging context where the figure of autonomy, this failure of freedom, takes form: the immanent structure of the work.

If Horowitz is right that Adorno’s concept of autonomy is descended from this second (Hegelian) reading of Kant, this would help explain why Adorno remains so committed to the concept and why he is so suspicious of overly facile social and historical accounts of art, even with respect to the products of the culture industry. While Adorno’s defense of the concept of autonomy results in a sphere of art that is undoubtedly too narrowly drawn, leaving too many implicit assumptions unexamined, it is important to realize that he could not simply abandon it without, like Hegel, draining art of its emphatically social and historical character, its very reason for being. In this sense, Adorno’s defense of autonomy, too, has something of the structure of the blue note about it: it negates the essentialism of context. At the same time, Adorno refuses to follow the first reading of Kant into a formalism that fetishizes the work (as a signifier of the absolute), by inventing a “sacred” space for it set apart from the commerce of the world (the museum), which decontextualizes it by effacing its historical quality into something timeless. One of the difficulties of Adorno’s critique of jazz is that it could fully endorse neither contextualist nor formalist understandings of jazz; it must be understood in opposition to both.

While contextualists, those who insist on determining the meaning of the artwork from its historical and social context, question whether autonomy and the related concept of the musical work are the appropriate standards by which to evaluate jazz, whether imposing alien aesthetic concepts such as autonomy and the work on jazz does not deform our understanding of the social practice of jazz, Adorno insists that it was only through autonomy and the work concept that an artwork can intervene at a social level, can challenge what is by resisting determination by the otherwise universal principle of commerce.42 Adorno’s point with respect to jazz is that it is not autonomous music. The more jazz appears to be formulated as a work the more it becomes an illusion that serves to disguise its social and historical context. Because, in Adorno’s view, jazz is reconciled to its commodity status — it accepts mediation, he thinks, by the culture industry without real resistance — this illusion of the work is phantasmagorical: it conceals the commodity character of the music.

We should not let Adorno’s emphasis on the commodity character distract us from a central point of agreement between Adorno and the contextualist here: a formalist conception of jazz distorts what is at stake in the music. There is even broad agreement between Adorno and the contextualists that the way formalism abstractly decontextualizes jazz — the creation of a canon of great works, the appeal to timeless traits of beauty — is bound up with commodification. The difference lies primarily in how commodification is evaluated. Contextualists tend to battle commodification with a romantic image of the folk; the appeal here, whether consciously articulated or not, is to a folk tradition as a sustainer of aura, as a guarantor of a plenitudinous meaning outside the culture industry. The culture industry in this view appropriates the striking form of the social practice, what it takes to be an artwork, but not its culturally specific meaning that derives from its embeddedness within the tradition of a particular social practice; for this meaning the culture industry substitutes a suitably banal and abstract one more or less of its own invention, sufficiently general in any event to ensure a market. Because the object is thus double-voiced, one meaning for the originating folk another for the market, contextualists can appeal to a return to an originary meaning, a meaning outside commodification.

Adorno himself occasionally gestures in this direction when he writes, for instance, that jazz “stems from the Lumpenproleteriat, and it appears that it fulfills its promises only there, while it cheats the masses as soon as it holds them in its grip.”43 In the case of jazz, the African-American context (however that may be defined) is thus given precedence in guaranteeing a noncommodified meaning of jazz. Beyond the basic problem that the meaning, significance, and indeed value of jazz was contested even in the African-American community, it also racializes this meaning to the extent that it decommodifies it: since the African-American community guarantees authenticity, the contributions of white musicians are marginalized or carry only a negative charge, and the extremely large white audience is simply discounted as the market for the culture industry.⁴⁴ Moreover, it ignores the difficulty of feedback, the way that the African-American community is sensitive to the meaning that the culture industry places on jazz and so also to the meanings jazz assumes in American culture at large. These meanings, in turn, affect the self-understanding of jazz in the African-American community; there is no pristine origin of meaning outside the mediation of the culture industry to which a contextualist can appeal. It is exceptionally difficult to extricate jazz from the culture industry because it is the first music whose actual musical development is predicated on the mechanical reproduction of sound via the phonograph and its dissemination over radio. Without the mechanical reproduction and distribution of the music it is extremely doubtful that the confluence of popular song, the improvisatory tradition of the blues from various locations, but especially New Orleans and Chicago, and the syncopation of ragtime could have crystallized in such a strikingly provocative and original way, and it almost certainly would not have been able to establish a virtuosic performing tradition as its distinctive artistic contribution. Attempts to bracket off the culture industry, far from contextualizing the music in any rigorous way, in fact end only in selective contextualization, one that expresses nostalgia for a lost auratic art.

Adorno moreover does not, like the contextualist, consider jazz as folk art or low art proper — at least not once it has been taken up by the culture industry. In fact, Adorno attacks jazz because, as a product of the culture industry, it is commercial art produced for a mass audience, not a product of that audience. As Adorno writes, he and Horkheimer use the term culture industry instead of mass culture

in order to exclude from the outset the interpretation agreeable to its advocates: that it is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art. From the latter the culture industry must be distinguished in the extreme. The culture industry fuses the old and familiar into a new quality. In all its branches, products which are tailored for consumption by masses, and which to a great extent determine the nature of that consumption, are manufactured more or less according to plan.45

The distinction between low and commercial art is key to understanding Adorno’s argument with Walter Benjamin’s work on mechanical reproduction, especially film. In that debate, Adorno questions whether the popular products of the culture industry are really low culture as Benjamin imagines.⁴⁶ The culture industry, Adorno suggests, does not produce low art; its products are not spontaneous expressions of the masses. Rather, by polishing the materials of low art so that they come to appear technically accomplished, the culture industry produces mass art that seems to call into question the rupture between high and low art, a rupture Adorno and Horkheimer call the truth of an untrue society.⁴⁷ “The culture industry intentionally integrates its consumers from above. To the detriment of both it forces together the spheres of high and low art.”⁴⁸ In fact, Adorno always defended the right of genuine low art to exist because it retained liberatory impulses that high art could no longer express except in negative form.⁴⁹ The disappearance of low art, for which the technical advances of the culture industry are largely responsible, is every bit as problematic for Adorno as the devaluation of high art.

What Adorno objected to, then, is the culture industry per se, which neutralizes the critical force of both spheres by collapsing all distinctions between them: high art, which has critical force only when universal, is particularized, while low art, which has liberatory potential only when particularized, is universalized.⁵⁰ “The seriousness of high art is destroyed in speculation about its efficacy; the seriousness of the lower perishes with the civilizational constraints imposed on the rebellious resistance inherent within it as long as social control was not yet total.”⁵¹ In this way, Adorno claims, the utopian potential of both spheres fades. On the one hand, high art takes its place among other products of the culture industry, one specialty market niche among many. To the extent that the significance of high art is restricted to particular demographic groups, however, its claim to universal validity, the very reason for the existence of the artwork, is necessarily withdrawn. On the other hand, the production process in the culture industry means that the materials of low art receive a polish that eliminates, or at least conceals, embarrassing flaws, but the advanced techniques remain on the surface and never extend to the substance of the material as in authentic art. To put it somewhat formulaically: the culture industry produces the illusion of art rather than the critically transformative illusion necessary for art; the culture industry confuses artistic sheen with aesthetic illusion.52 “The same force of reification which constituted music as art has today taken music from man and left him with only an illusion [Schein] thereof.”⁵³ Both high and low art lose their critical and liberatory potential; art becomes wholly meaningless, nothing but a pleasant diversion evaluated only in terms of the pleasure or social standing it affords its audience.⁵⁴ Art reverts to its commodity function: pure entertainment.

Adorno attacks the more technically polished products of the culture industry — Toscanini, hot jazz, prestige films, for instance — because they feign to be art and so make a claim to universality; yet these products, he maintains, cannot generally withstand extended aesthetic scrutiny and so the universality they claim miscarries. They fail to live up to the responsibility of art; moreover the market serves as a ready excuse to release the culture industry products from this responsibility. Through continual exposure to this process of finding claims to universality as void, people become skeptical of all art’s claim to universality, to transcending current conditions and instead mistake their own historically specific pleasure for universality. It is not that Adorno thinks jazz or popular music to be wholly incapable of generating anything of artistic worth; rather he thinks that anything of worth that the system generates is immediately neutralized, and that this neutralization figures as an irreducible aspect of musical structure. The exceptions, however many there may be, do not actually matter because they never threaten the system, which could only happen, Adorno thinks, by problematizing the culture industry’s conditions of possibility. (Adorno valorizes serialism precisely because he hears such self-critical sounds in its music.) Adorno is not hostile to the better products because they contaminate the rarefied air of high art, but because they seem to abolish the qualitative distinction between high and low art, a distinction that, for him, alone reflects the truth of a false society. The very point of his critique is that mediation by the culture industry means the ruin of art, in the sense that art loses its autonomy, its struggle to achieve a value beyond the market.

Adorno clearly does not defend the concept of high art to preserve a sphere of music above contamination by the culture industry — an impossibility in any event. Adorno would therefore never contend, as one of his critics puts it, that popular music should not “be sold in the same store as Beethoven because this sort of merchandising only creates the illusion that, as music, it is all just different types of the same thing, reducing Beethoven to the same vulgar level.”55 True, the fact that Beethoven can be recorded and sold as a commodity does degrade the music in Adorno’s view; but all music suffers this fate under the culture industry, low and high alike. Instead, Adorno’s point is rather obvious, even commonsensical: “The differences in the reception of official ‘classical’ music and light music no longer have any real significance. They are only still manipulated for reasons of marketability.”⁵⁶ The divisions of the music industry, Adorno says, operate on quantitative principles of the market rather than qualitative musical ones, and this fact has profound musical significance: the fetishization of music as tunes on the one hand and the regression of listening on the other.⁵⁷ “The categories of autonomously oriented art have no applicability to the contemporary reception of music; not even for that of the serious music, domesticated under the barbarous name of classical so as to enable one to turn away from it again in comfort.”⁵⁸ As Robert Hullot-Kentor explains, the culture industry produces “classical” music in the form of a canon: “in so far as ‘classical’ music is a canon of works literally being played to death, the principle of its performance is ‘popular,’ that is, repetition: and it is popular in the form in which it is listened to in that distraction is the rule: hardly anyone is listening, as the automatic hootings and bravos in the concert hall make plain.”⁵⁹

In this sense such a figure as Toscanini is in many ways far more troubling for Adorno than jazz because it is through him that even a Beethoven symphony is reduced, through fetishization and its “star principle,” to commodity status.⁶⁰ Ultimately, Toscanini produces the illusion of success only by risking nothing and thereby vacating any claim to art. “[T]he performance of a symphony in which nothing can go wrong is also one in which nothing happens any more either.”⁶¹ Toscanini’s performance of Beethoven is degraded then because Beethoven’s music is no longer taken as universally valid, whether or not it is still marketed under such banners as “the universal language of music” (a slogan that appeals primarily to those worried about social standing in any case); under the culture industry, musical content is particularized while the form of consumption, the commodity form, is universalized, whereas art demands just the opposite. Toscanini’s Beethoven, like all products of the culture industry, is a commodity targeted at a specific demographic group, and, consequently, its claim to universality and truth, which is precisely the claim to art in an emphatic sense, miscarries. The separation of classical music (or jazz) in the record store only reveals the marketing strategy. In the record store, musical distinctions between high and low art, which were once made in qualitative terms, have been eroded into marketing categories made strictly in terms of quantitative analysis, that is, demographics and what moves the product from the bins. To put it somewhat facetiously: the problem for Adorno isn’t the filing system but the record store itself, which imposes its own insidious logic, that of capital, on musical judgment.

If, as Horowitz puts it, autonomy is the moment where the work struggles immanently against being determined by its social and historical context (and fails — immanently), this struggle finds its most characteristic manifestation in the resistance the work offers to the commodity form. This is why, as Max Paddison notes, Adorno proposes that

the split is not essentially between serious and popular as such — a division which has become, in his view, increasingly meaningless due to the effect of the culture industry and the almost inescapable commodity character of all cultural products in the twentieth century. The split is much more between, on the one hand, music which accepts its character as commodity, thus becoming identical with the machinations of the culture industry itself, and, on the other hand, the self-reflective music which critically opposes its fate as commodity, and thus ends up by alienating itself from present society by becoming unacceptable to it.62

Reconciled music, Paddison says, “actually encompasses all music which is unable to resist exploitation as commodity, however unwittingly. It includes not only popular music, but also serious music of the past, now reduced to the level of museum exhibits or mere entertainment, as well as that ‘modern’ music which attempts some form of compromise for the sake of accessibility.”⁶³ Autonomy, the refusal of the work to be reconciled to the commodity form, is not, as the common misconception has it, thereby divorced from the commodity form, but directed at it. In remaining unreconciled to any external context, to the demand that it earn its keep by serving some profitable social purpose, the autonomy of the artwork preserves the possibility of a space not determined by instrumental reason, by the logic of the market; and it is in this space that hope for a better world, the dream that the world might be otherwise, takes refuge. Art that reconciles itself to its context, to its production as a commodity, on the contrary, cannot be authentic, cannot preserve this space, no matter how well-wrought it might appear on the surface, because the context, the commodity form, has determined the form of the work, leaving nothing to resist the context. The context collapses into the work, transforming the work into an affirmation of what is, that is, into ideology. As Jameson explains, “[w]hat is inauthentic in the offerings of the Culture Industry, then, is not the remnants of experience within them, but rather the ideology of happiness they simultaneously embody: the notion that pleasure or happiness … already exists, and is available for consumption.”⁶⁴ The value of a product of the culture industry is accounted by its context, by its commerce with the world; that is, art becomes merely what its social and historical context determines it to be — a commodity and nothing more. Whereas authentic art resists and problematizes the commodity form, deploying artistic technique to disclose the tensions within the schema (if it accepts the schema at all), the culture industry naturalizes the schema, accepts it as an unproblematic given, as a natural artifact, deploying artistic technique to cover up all tensions and all real resistances within it. What is decisive is whether the autonomy is real, that is, a function of immanent resistance to commodification in the artwork; or the autonomy is purely formal and so illusory, that is, a result of an only apparent decommodification of the object.65 “Autonomy” is thus not an eternal and timeless quality of art as in formalism but the site of a historically specific intervention, a resistance to being determined by the commodity. It is Adorno’s insistence that the commodity form must be accounted for, that it is precisely the context of the commodity that cannot be wished away without falsifying its meaning, rather than his ignorance about jazz, that explains Adorno’s refusal to separate commercial music from “genuine” jazz.

For Adorno, honoring a distinction between commercial and legitimate jazz by discounting the commodity form of the latter serves to falsify the work and obscure the commerciality of the entire sphere: this, Adorno argues, is the reason the culture industry itself promulgates the distinction. Effacing the commodity form decontextualizes the work in a pernicious way because it destroys the possibility of resistance and so also of autonomy. It is this refusal to understand autonomy primarily in terms of this sort of decontextualization that at least partially accounts for his opposition to formalism, despite often drawing from a similar conceptual field. Formalist decontextualization — the reduction to mere illusion (Schein) — replaces the immanent structure of the work, which is bound to the expression of autonomy, with the formula of the commodity, the schema; its illusion of timelessness merely conceals the timebound character, the commodity form. Indeed, Adorno’s analysis of the culture industry is at one level a tracing of the displacements and disfigurements that autonomy undergoes, once economic exploitation extends commodity fetishism (the reification of marketability into an objective quality of the work) deeper and deeper into the realm of culture. His analysis uncovers the way economic exploitation of culture replaces autonomy, the logic of the work, with commodity fetishism.⁶⁶

In this sense, the idea of jazz as “America’s classical music” becomes the ultimate marketing ploy that tries to lure consumers into forgetting the origin in commerce; it is a perversely concealed manifestation of the fetish-character of the commodity — a phantasmagoria that does not resist its commodity status but merely interferes with our perception of it.

The ideological function of jazz when it first asserted itself as the upper bourgeois form of contemporary vulgar music was to conceal the commodity character and alienated manner of production of this music; it was to be offered under the trademark of “quality goods.” Jazz was to evoke the appearance of improvisational freedom and immediacy in the sphere of light music; this is why it could be so adapted so conveniently by efforts of similar intention in art music. The maneuver of jazz has been psychologically successful for years thanks to the structure of a society whose mechanism of rationalization inevitably produces the necessity of disguising itself in the interest of turnover on the market-place.67

Adorno, indeed, fears jazz becoming a classical music for the same reason that he finds the name classical music “barbaric”: “elevated” into “the pantheon of cultural commodities,” jazz loses its critical force because its classical status radically decontextualizes it. The appeal to some abstract, timeless canon of classical beauty is essentially an attempt to wish the commodity status away. Already at the end of “On Jazz” Adorno worries that hot jazz in particular is being “too soon condemned to classical status,” a status that he feels will surely deprive it of any critical force it might have.⁶⁸ This worry returns as a latent theme of the jazz article in Prisms, where Adorno complains that jazz has become “timeless fashion,” dressing up popular songs with the latest musical techniques, so that the songs themselves never perish. “Fashion enthrones itself as something lasting and thus sacrifices the dignity of fashion, its transience.”⁶⁹ This is to say that authentic low art makes no claims to art in the emphatic sense; it has the dignity to die. Timeless, heteronomous fashion becomes confused with autonomous art, a confusion that necessarily leads to historical distortions. In transforming jazz into an autonomous art, for instance, its advocates must ignore the historical circumstances of production, in particular the important and fundamental role that commerce plays in reproducing and distributing jazz. In jazz there really can’t be a question of “selling out,” because everything from the beginning has already been sold out in the very process of production, which requires the use of the mass-media distribution channels to be heard “as jazz” in the first place. Jazz becomes autonomous art, music for music’s sake, by concealing rather than resisting its actual heteronomous quality, its relation to commerce.

The Discursive Field: Jazz Subject as Artful Dodger

It is ultimately this classicizing discourse, the “aesthetic program,” rather than jazz per se that is the object of Adorno’s critique.⁷⁰ That is, the critique is directed not so much at jazz itself as at its claim to art, which Adorno argues the music may promise but cannot successfully deliver. It is, indeed, as Witkin puts it,

the ideology that surrounds jazz that can, in part, explain the fierceness of Adorno’s attacks. Jazz in the popular imagination appeared to have many of the features that belonged to Adorno’s utopian ideal and which could be compared to the disadvantage of the classical tradition.… If classical music was more or less completely “scripted,” leaving little room for variations in response to events, audiences, or mutual interactions among performers, jazz was seen, in some of its forms, as informal, as spontaneously made, as involving mutual mediation among performers, improvisation. It seemed to be quintessentially modern, innovative, and at the same time to be in some measure radical and subversive and to point the way to a genuine sociality beyond stultifying conventions.71

Jazz is important to Adorno, then, because it makes certain claims — or, more precisely, certain claims are made on its behalf — to being art in the emphatic sense, claims that he does not ignore but takes seriously. “Jazz” in other words is as much a discursive as a musical referent in his critique. Adorno attacks jazz less for what it is in itself, that is, what it is musically, than for how the term jazz operates in the discursive field, for what the discourse on jazz claims for it. The difficulty arises when aesthetic claims are made on its behalf that the music does not, indeed, cannot support. “Jazz calls for criticism only when a timeless fashion, organized and multiplied by special interests, comes to misconceive itself as modern, if not indeed as an avant-garde.”⁷² This explains why Adorno takes aim at jazz rather than the idiom of the hit song: its virtuosic performing tradition is the very ground on which its advocates elevate it above the supposedly more commercial products of the culture industry.⁷³ Adorno’s critique consequently does not proceed so much by evaluating individual pieces as by sketching out the philosophical and social implications of the constellation of traits that had been, and often still is, claimed for jazz as its unique artistic contribution.

In fact, Adorno’s critique generally engages musical referents only to the extent that they contribute to the legitimating discourse of jazz. Thus, when Adorno attacks claims of immediacy, spontaneity, rhythmic freedom, African origin, and so forth; or when he suggests that evaluating syncopation, improvisation, and blue notes from the perspective of how they function in terms of musical technique shows that they unwittingly constitute a mutilated jazz subject, he is attacking the fundamental discursive claims for jazz as art. Adorno argues that each of the claims made for jazz are either wholly illusory or that the musical technique performs a function other than it seems, or both. This, too, is why Adorno directs his critique primarily at the so-called hot jazz. ⁷⁴ The claims for art are obviously made on the basis of this music rather than the run-of-the-mill commercial music; if any jazz has artistic import, an artistic “idea” in the Hegelian sense in which Adorno here uses the term, it will be this hot music. Admittedly there is sometimes a frustrating slippage in Adorno’s jazz essays from evaluating discursive claims about jazz to the music itself. That is, Adorno does not always differentiate sufficiently between musical and discursive referents and so it is not always clear whether he believes that jazz raises claims to art, musically, on its own or whether these claims for art are made merely discursively on behalf of jazz. In any case, it may now be somewhat clearer why Adorno believed he did not need to be attentive to individual pieces of jazz: it is the overall discursive field of jazz that is constructing the jazz subject. In other words, Adorno on this level of his analysis is not interested in individual pieces, which might in themselves and under closer inspection, demonstrate real resistances. Rather he works to decipher the composite image of jazz being proffered by the culture industry, an image that appears when the hot music is considered as a kind of oeuvre. It is this body of hot jazz and even more importantly the discourse on it that constructs the jazz subject and not any particular piece.75

The most straightforward explanation of the jazz subject comes not from the essay “On Jazz,” where the figure is introduced, but from his contribution to the so-called “positivist dispute,” where Adorno invokes his work on the jazz subject as an example of a mode of sociological inquiry that cannot be reduced to falsifiable protocol statements as a positivist philosophy of science would demand.⁷⁶ Adorno explains his jazz study this way:

Jazz was regarded as a totally symbolic process in which this jazz subject, confronted by the collective demands represented by the basic rhythm, falters, stumbles and “drops out” but, while “dropping out,” reveals himself in a kind of ritual to be similar to all the other helpless subjects and is integrated into the collective at the price of his self-cancellation. One can neither put one’s finger on the jazz subject in protocol statements, nor reduce the symbolism of the process to sense data in a completely stringent manner. Nevertheless, the construction which interprets the smooth idiom of jazz, stereotypes of which await such deciphering like a secret code, is hardly devoid of meaning. This construction should promote the investigation of the interiority of the jazz phenomenon, namely of what it generally signifies in societal terms, more than do surveys of the views of various population — or age-groups on jazz, even if the latter were based upon solid protocol statements.… In any case, what is implied by such a thesis as that of the jazz subject, in his capacity as the latent embodiment of this type of popular music, is intelligible even if it is neither verified nor falsified by the reactions of the jazz listeners questioned. Subjective reactions by no means need to coincide with the determinable content of cultural phenomena which provoke a reaction. The moments which motivate the ideal construction of a jazz subject must be adduced.⁷⁷

Adorno’s analysis is directed at elucidating the “interiority of the jazz phenomenon.” What sort of subject, Adorno asks, is presupposed by jazz?

This approach, it should be noted, introduces a potential point of slippage from discourse to music. For Adorno bases his analysis of the jazz subject on the traits that have been discursively recognized as constituting the distinctive musical elements of jazz rather than drawing it out of individual pieces and performances.78 Adorno moves his analysis from discourse to music by assuming that any jazz music will necessarily embody these elements if it is to be socially identified as jazz. Thus Adorno can claim that the jazz subject is reproduced objectively in the music to the extent that jazz practice has internalized and so reproduced just these elements. In this way, jazz also becomes a subject of social identification for listeners, a model, as it were, for their socialization, which is why the jazz subject, in Adorno’s view, is socially significant. The jazz subject is not identical to the listener; but the listener who purchases the music to identify with it, that is, the consumer, is structured by the ego image of the jazz subject projected by the music. As Jamie Owen Daniel suggests, consumers find in jazz the image of “a release from the rigid class-boundaries and sexual repression of traditional European music; jazz presents itself to the consumer as the unstructured framework within which he is allowed to transgress, within which he can ‘libidinize’ his ‘leisure’ time.”⁷⁹ Beyond such sociological concerns stands the problem of interpreting products of the culture industry, which both demand a kind of aesthetic analysis (inasmuch as they have the appearance of art) and thwart it (inasmuch as aesthetic appearance serves not to articulate the meaning of the product in itself but serves instead to differentiate it from other products so that aesthetic analysis is curiously beside the point in understanding the product’s basic status as a commodity). The meaning of products of the culture industry is, in Adorno’s view, hieroglyphic; they mean something other than they appear. The hieroglyphic formation is the product of ideology, which multiplies the voice of jazz, dividing it into appearance and reality. And this hieroglyph, the divided voice, will be most legible in well-formed works. If jazz in particular “awaits deciphering as a secret code,” this is because jazz, especially hot jazz, is more rigorously formulated from an artistic point of view, more technically adept than most products of the culture industry. The aesthetic layer runs deepest here, so social tensions are also most consistently revealed and concealed in hot jazz. It is out of the script of these tensions that Adorno reads the jazz subject.

For Adorno the key to deciphering the hieroglyph of the jazz subject is recognizing its contradictory ability to “fit into” (einfügen) society by “dropping out” (herausfallen).⁸⁰ This explains at different levels the phenomena of syncopation, a dropping out of the meter; blue notes, a dropping out of normal intonation; improvisation, a dropping out of the song; and the soloist, a dropping out of the band. Syncopation gives the illusion of being free of the beat and meter, just as a blue note gives the illusion of being free of the tempered scale and functional harmony, just as the solo break gives the illusion of being free of the tune on the one hand and the discipline of the orchestra on the other.81 In addition, arrangement serves as an overarching principle in which disparate elements are “adapted to each other, contrastingly rich and varied, carefully considered yet neither constrained to unity in variety nor polemically negating unity; rather … ‘stylishly’ balancing heterogeneous elements against each other.”⁸² Arrangement assures that everything fits in.

In jazz, Adorno says, departures from the norm are integrated into the norm and so seem to celebrate “the inevitable triumph of order.”⁸³ These fundamental constructive elements of jazz, Adorno suggests, remain ornamental; rather than resisting the norm, they are secretly dependent on it for their effect and so only confirm it.⁸⁴ The jazz subject is therefore characterized by inversion and disfigurement of norms rather than their real displacement. The deviations stand for that from which they depart rather than for themselves.⁸⁵ Adorno’s critique of the jazz subject is not directed against the fact that jazz uses norms and constraints, but rather against the fact that it naturalizes those norms and constraints even as it pretends to challenge them, presenting an illusion that the music is wholly unrestrained, free, and spontaneous, when it is not.⁸⁶ This goes to the heart of Adorno’s critique: the illusion of art that jazz produces. In each case, an illusion is produced that “dropping out” frees the particular from the force of the whole, the individual from society; the individual finds expression not in itself but in a virtuosic dodging of the whole. You can do whatever you like “as long as it fits” — freedom to conform, “to obey the law and yet be different,” to freely honor constraints even when they are unjust. This is the theme of the jazz subject, which therefore never problematizes its conditions of possibility. Because dropping out always remains bound to the schema from which it seems to depart — dropping out must always “fit in” as well — it does not cancel the schema or even suspend it: the “subject is not a ‘free,’ lyrical subject which is then elevated into the collective, but rather one which is not originally free — a victim of the collective.”⁸⁷ Consequently, despite what his critics maintain, Adorno does not deny that improvisation requires certain constraints; that the harmonic structure, for instance, is an enabling condition of jazz improvisation; he merely reads the enabling conditions hieroglyphically, decoding the ideological content.⁸⁸ The appearance of jazz is of free, spontaneous improvisation where the only limitation is a player’s tonal imagination; but, contrary to this appearance, improvisation is actually highly constrained, not only by the underlying chord progression but also by the codification of tricks of the trade that help players navigate the progressions. “Even though jazz musicians still improvise in practice, their improvisations have become so ‘normalized’ as to enable a whole terminology to be developed to express the standard devices of individualiza-tion.…”⁸⁹ Improvisation presents itself as a last vestige of a spontaneous orality when in fact it is always already written. “[J]azz improvisation is largely an interchangeable substitute for regular, fixed and written musical structures … The authority of the written music at any moment is still apparent behind the liberty of the performed music.”90 What Adorno faults is not the constraint per se, but the celebration of limitation as an unproblematic given. It is indeed the self-certainty of jazz, the way it “asserts its existence [Dasein] as something self-evident,” that bothers Adorno.⁹¹ Jazz, Adorno writes, never questions “what its purpose is, why it is there at all.”⁹² The enabling conditions of jazz are not ideologically neutral; rather such givens form the ideological substrate of the music.

Adorno’s critique of syncopation and blue notes follows the same contours as that of improvisation. Syncopation, Adorno says, rebels against the beat but always resolves itself back into the beat, and listeners derive satisfaction, not so much from the dizzying disorientation per se, as from the return home, from the resolution back into the basic beat.⁹³ “[O]ne gets into a ‘jam’, into rhythmic problems, which can be instantly disentangled by the triumph of the basic beat.”⁹⁴ Note that Adorno does not deny that the meter is an enabling condition of syncopation. Adorno’s claim here is that the rhythm, despite its appearance as syncopation, relies on the social ground of the recurring beat to be heard as such.

Hobson raises the question of why the convention of the groundbeat is always observed. His answer is the common-sense one that it is difficult enough for most ears to understand improvisation within an established framework; without such a framework the listener would be altogether disoriented. In other words, the sacrifice of jazz liberty to convention springs from the postulate of easy understandability and therewith from the desiderata of the market. It is precisely at this point that the commodity character of jazz reveals itself as the very core of the whole genre.⁹⁵

Just as at the level of improvisation, Adorno notes the tendency to organize the images of spontaneity into conventions: “the more the cross-rhythms are developed and the more the accents of the groundbeat are suspended, the more the cross-rhythms tend to become symmetrical in themselves as ‘pseudo-bars.’ They form a sort of second convention, a derivative, as it were, of the first one.”⁹⁶ Syncopation, Adorno points out, does not alter the meter of the recurring beat, though it does produce the illusion of doing so. It is, he says, “a living ‘as if’.”⁹⁷ The apparent rebellion of syncopation against the meter — the “idea” of syncopation — is ultimately impotent, suggesting effective resistance where there is none, because it does not transform the formal situation of the underlying meter, which is unchanged. Syncopation remains a metrical event, deformational rather than transformational. “The syncopation is not, like its counterpart, that of Beethoven, the expression of an accumulated subjective force which directed itself against authority until it had produced a new law out of itself. It is purposeless.…”98 Syncopation in jazz is a negation, Adorno believes, but one that is not, like Beethoven’s, determinate; its negation ends in a bad infinity. (It is certainly proper to push Adorno’s analysis on this point: does syncopation always work as he describes it — either for Beethoven or for jazz? In particular, is it necessary to think the syncope only in opposition to the beat, as a figure of negation? Does this opposition not commit his analysis to an ontology where the pounding out of the metrical grid serves as the social ground against which the individual rhythmic figure struggles to define the terms of its autonomy? Within the limits of that musical conception of syncopation, can the syncope ever appear otherwise than doomed? Finally, can it represent something other than the fate of the individual in society?)

Likewise, for Adorno, a blue note simply introduces a striking intonational effect, which, because it does not carry structural implications for the work as a whole, merely draws attention to that which it is not.⁹⁹ That the blue note has its origin in overlaying pentatonicism on a diatonic harmonic system, as one common theory holds, may be true from a historical point of view and yet irrelevant in terms of its musical significance. Regardless of its historical genesis, a blue note sounds outside diatonic intonation. Adorno’s claim then is not that the blue note is a “mistake.” Rather Adorno says that a blue note functions as a substitute, an exotic inflection of the “normal” diatonic scale. But this substitute, Adorno says, remains an intrusion of an alien element exploited for exotic coloristic effect; it does not, according to Adorno, alter the substance of the music, which could do just as well with another striking effect — or indeed without any at all if it were willing to confront its own banality. As with improvisation and syncopation, it is the status of being a deviation without systemic consequences that Adorno finds troubling about blue notes. The negation of the blue note, Adorno thinks, is not determinate and so also not structural. The logic is that of the deviation. The blue note is a mere ornament that stands for what it itself is not; as an ornament, it can be freely exchanged for other ornaments. The ornament is a disguise of commodification: one blue note, one striking detail can just as well be substituted for another. (Whether Adorno is right about how blue notes function in jazz is a different question, one on which Adorno is on shakier ground. But Adorno teaches us that a critical theory of the blue note would have to show either that blue notes are not intonational displacements of normal tones, ornamental substitutes, piquant and soulful coloristic effects, but deviations that stand for themselves, that carry structural implications that reach beyond a mere instantiation of an exotic sounding blues scale; or that coming at the question of blue notes in terms of ornament and structure rests on a problematic opposition of the essential and the inessential, an opposition that needs to be critically examined and displaced.)

The commodification of the striking detail, Adorno says, is furthered by the arranger, who is concerned primarily with the ornamental function of the detail, the way it helps dress up the tune. Because the song remains in a sense sacrosanct; because a substantive intervention that might treat the song as material to be broken down and reworked is precluded by the marketing needed to put the song on display, Adorno asserts:

The interjection of the interpreter or arranger in jazz does not permit, as the improvisations of the great stage actors still do, a real altering of the material in order to give rise to a subjective proclamation. The stimulation and the artistic piece, the new color and the new rhythm are merely inserted along with the banal — just as the jazz vibrato is inserted into the rigid sound, and syncopation in the basic meter.100

Arrangement does, however, serve a function: it gives the work the appearance of art. The arranger fixes things up, makes sure that everything is up to date and just so. “Nothing is permitted to remain what it intrinsically is. Everything must be fixed up, must bear the traces of a preparation which brings it closer to the sphere of the well known, thus rendering it more easily comprehensible.”¹⁰¹ The rough edges are taken off, smoothed out, and polished instead of being sharpened into a critical edge. Arrangement in Adorno’s view thereby furthers the tendency of jazz to render the unruly as harmless, to domesticate those elements that once raised the possibility of resistance. “[A]rrangement stamps the music with the official seal of approval, which in turn testifies to the absence of all artistic ambitions to achieve distance from reality, to the readiness of the music to swim with the stream; this is music which does not fancy itself any better than it is.”¹⁰² Rather than drawing on the productive tension between the whole and the detail as in composition, arrangement, Adorno thinks, remains committed to the underlying material, the popular song, as something more or less inviolable: it wants to put it on display.

This commitment to the song, however, makes arrangement relatively indifferent to the structural potential of the individual detail, which either belongs to the abstract particularity of the song itself or serves to dress the song up for show; in either case, the detail does not create the whole out of itself but instead merely fills in the underlying schema in a way that ensures the illusion of a harmonious whole, a striking arrangement where nothing sticks out or appears out of place. The arranger is therefore concerned with the detail only insofar as it helps fill out the schema and produce this illusion of the harmonious whole; that is, the detail simply instantiates its function within the schema, which might have just as easily been filled in with a different detail. The detail and schema do not really intersect to form an integrated whole; they do not enter into a dialectical relationship. (A crucial question yet to be even satisfactorily posed is: what would jazz heard in terms of such a relationship sound like? Would it be convincing to the social and aesthetic experience of the music?) In short, arrangement remains something less than composition. This is not to deny that, like a well-crafted improvisation or a well-constructed song, a good arrangement takes account of what happens musically. The striking detail may indeed fit into the schema in the sense that it returns where it seems musically appropriate; it may even unfold with a relatively sophisticated development. This, rather than freedom from commercial pressures, is what distinguishes polished arrangements from the run of the mill. Even good arrangements, however, do not call into question the schema any more than they can intervene substantively in the song. The contours of the piece “remain the old ones. The schema can still be heard, even through the most digressive breaks in the arrangement. He who is reproducing the music is permitted to tug at the chains of his boredom, and even to clatter them, but he cannot break them.”103 Arrangement takes the schema as brute fact, as something natural and given absolutely when the schema is actually arbitrary. Rather than problematizing its condition of possibility, the schema extends its arbitrary order to the details, which serve as empty tokens without regard to the whole as something more than the sum of its parts.

In this sense, arrangement, Adorno says, models music on a semiotic conception of language as a system of arbitrary signs; it is, as it were, an applied musical semiotics. This, however, is indictment rather than a validation of arrangement since Adorno allies the semiotic theory of language with instrumental reason. Semiotics, Adorno thinks, valorizes a debased form of language that relies on the repetition of arbitrary signs for the sake of communicative efficiency; this communicative efficiency has a cost, however, as the repetition wears away the articulateness of language into a series of empty signifiers. “Considered as a whole, the perennial sameness of jazz consists not in a basic organization of the material within which the imagination can roam freely and without inhibition, as within an articulate language, but rather in the utilization of certain well-defined tricks, formulas and clichés to the exclusion of everything else.”¹⁰⁴ The element of fantasy and imagination, which in articulate language seeks to escape the arbitrary signifiers, instead returns in the semiotic system as a mere play among signifiers, as a political economy of the sign, with the resulting loss not only of artistic illusion but also of the other, of what might be otherwise — in short, of everything that extends beyond what is the case. “Art is deprived of its aesthetic dimension and emerges as part of the very adjustment which it in principle contradicts.”¹⁰⁵

That the world might be otherwise but is not, that genuine society does not yet exist: this is what the difference of the blue note announces with pain and releases as expression. Refusing to order itself to the intonation of the Western tempered scale, it lodges a protest against the order of a world that neither lets it in nor lets it be: nicht diese Töne. But no other is available, so its protest speaks to an otherness that would be more than mere difference. This too, in its own way, is what Adorno’s critique of jazz announces: his critique takes aim at the happy face of jazz, its reconciliatory tone, its celebration of the artful dodger, its trafficking in otherness. These are, Adorno thinks, all figures of a music that, for all its cleverness and virtuosic brilliance, sides with the forces of untruth and inhumanity. If Adorno was deaf to potential sites of resistance in jazz, if he could hear only empty negations taking form as the bad infinity of an interference that disguised the process of commodifying culture, it may be the din of the culture industry itself that was at least partly to blame. Yet to point this out does not mean that Adorno was directing his critique at the more commercial products of the culture industry, nor does it necessarily release the best works from the point of his critique. His concern is with commerciality per se, especially with commerciality that disguises itself as art. Thus inhumanity presents itself as the illusion of humanity. Quality in the context of the culture industry becomes a means of quantification, a means of upscale marketing. Of course there is little that can effectively resist the culture industry in this respect, since its machinery efficiently wears down any resistance that it encounters. Thus, expressionist atonality, even serialism, which Adorno champions for its heroic and principled resistance through its commitment to total rational organization of the material in service of an expressive resistance to such total organization, was relatively easily assimilated to film by degrading it into a univocal musical signifier of horror and psychological disturbance.106 Adorno and Eisler point to the real futility of such resistance in Composing for the Films:

It is true that occasionally skillfully composed music can rebel …, either by ruthless opposition [to the film] or by revealing exaggeration. But the value of such stratagems must not be overestimated, any more than that of artistic sabotage in general. Under the present cultural conditions, they would hardly be noticed by the public, and would usually be nipped in the bud by the agencies in control within the industry. And even if such extraordinary tours de force could get across, they would remain exceptions that prove the rule. They would degenerate into specialized and ingenious applied art, adding a “sophisticated touch.”¹⁰⁷

In fact, ruthless opposition is likely to get one fired for incompetence. The only strategy that is likely to survive scrutiny by “the agencies in control” is an ironic one of exaggeration, a double voicing that plays the tune, but in a way that uses its “sophisticated touch” not to mark itself as a quality product but to open itself to an alternate, coherent interpretation that calls into question its own condition of possibility. Yet the din of the culture industry makes hearing this voice of secondary, ironic signification extremely difficult even when primed to listen for it. The field of irony itself must also be carefully traversed. Adorno indeed agrees that the voice of jazz is doubled, but he finds its irony, which he decodes as the appearance and reality of ideology, suspect: jazz in his view is content to play the clown for laughter indifferent to its victims; its ironic parody he believes is ultimately regressive and inhumane. Another problem is that irony and other forms of double voicing can always be taken at face value.108 The voice of the dominant signification remains a voice that cannot be simply wished away any more than the history of any music of the twentieth century can be divorced from its mediation by the culture industry; the “sophisticated touch” remains the distinguishing mark of a quality product. And to ignore this is to fall prey to ideology: that it is possible to step outside the culture industry and till the pristine field of original meaning. Such meaning, however, is not only falsely pristine; it is as monolithic and monological as the happy but empty sounds of the culture industry. It too wants to eschew the contradictory meanings that irony necessarily imparts for the ready intelligibility of the secondary meaning. For Adorno, music earns significance from the depth of the contradictions it gives rise to and the way it forms these contradictions into a force field of productive tension.¹⁰⁹ To insist on the secondary meaning to the exclusion of the first is to strip the music of its irony, of its contradictoriness, of its struggle to articulate difference within identity, humanity within inhumanity; it replaces the struggle for autonomy with a field of dreams.

Adorno’s critique is a path of disillusion that draws us to the site of this struggle. Bearing the negative imprint of the blue note, it protests against what is by refusing the conditions of possibility as something fixed. Jazz, his critique tells us, cannot be redeemed through facile appeals to syncopation, improvisation, spontaneity, and so forth; we must listen instead for the ironic sound of critique, for the blue note that mourns the loss of the individual to the collective. In this way, Adorno’s critique far from condemning jazz releases its truth content as more than the mere appearance of what is.