BERTHOLD HOECKNER
Adorno needs no introduction.1 Instead, as a preface to this volume, let me offer a brief meditation on the word apparition. It will become apparent, I hope, that this meditation is an exercise in self-reflection that resonates with the way Adorno appears on the cover of this book in the 1963 photograph “Selbst im Spiegel” (Self in the Mirror) by Stefan Moses. New is not the man or his philosophy but the perspective from which they are seen in these eight essays.
“The artwork as appearance” said Adorno in his Aesthetic Theory “is most closely resembled by the apparition, the heavenly vision.” The original German is as follows: “Am nächsten kommt dem Kunstwerk als Erscheinung die apparition, die Himmelserscheinung.”2 The translation by Robert Hullot-Kentor nicely preserves the resemblance between Erscheinung and Himmelserscheinung in the resemblance between appearance and apparition. But despite its appearance in italics, apparition inevitably loses in English its status as a “foreign word.” In the German text it appears as a Fremdwort, marked in the original by its spelling in lower case. This Fremdwort is my point of departure.
Foreign words are, as Adorno said in Minima Moralia, “the Jews in language.”3 The aphorism was meant to expose the problematic equivalence between linguistic and racial purity. This equivalence between speaking German and being German was propagated by anti-Semitic ideology, perhaps most infamously in Wagner’s essay “Judaism in Music.” Adorno’s aphorism goes to the center of his conflicted German–Jewish identity. On one hand, he criticizes the notion of the Fremdwort as a mark of alterity; on the other, he prized the qualities of the German language as being capable of expressing what other languages cannot. This contradiction surfaces in Adorno’s essay “On the Question: What is German?” Surely, the essay is a response of sorts to Wagner’s “What is German?”, another notorious anti-Semitic tract that appeared in the Bayreuther Blätter. And surely, Adorno knew Nietzsche’s spot-on remark that “[i]t is characteristic of the Germans that the question: ‘What is German?’ never dies out among them.”4 In his own reflections on the question, Adorno explained his desire to return to Frankfurt after World War II, by pointing, among other things, to the “elective affinity” between the German language and German philosophy. He noted that “the specific quality of the German language could be made apparent in the prohibitive difficulty to translate philosophical texts of the highest pretensions, like Hegel’s Philosophy of the Spirit or Science of Logic, into a different language.”5 For Adorno, German “has retained more of the power of expression” than other Western languages — a fact that only someone not raised in those languages will be able to observe. Only someone who subscribes to the assertion “that presentation [Darstellung] is essential for philosophy … will refer to German.”6 Hence it is not surprising that the number of studies Adorno wrote in English during his exile in England and America was small compared with those written in German, many of which certainly remained a foreign body of words long before being translated into English decades later. Yet at the same time Adorno’s texts are sprinkled with foreign words. The appearance of these words in his own writings, I suggest, does precisely and paradoxically what he claimed only the German language could offer to philosophy: namely, an authentic form of expression and presentation. The Fremdwort becomes Adorno’s performance of the aesthetic.
The word apparition, then, works in Adorno’s philosophical writings like an apparition. This apparition turns Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory inside out and provides a somewhat emphatic answer to the question, once posed by Rüdiger Bubner: How can theory become itself aesthetic?7 Adorno seeks to create aesthetic experience himself by having the word apparition “appear” in his prose as a Fremdwort. Glossing the word apparition with “celestial vision” (Himmelserscheinung) is nothing less than a translation into his own language. Later in the Aesthetic Theory, Adorno also compares the apparition to fireworks, which are a “script that flashes up, vanishes, and indeed cannot be read for its meaning.”8 The foreign word is like a fleeting poetic moment in philosophical prose. It is an enigma in need of exegesis, even though its meaning is impossible to grasp. Adorno fulfills that interpretive need and articulates the impossibility of its fulfillment by suggesting that an apparition, like fireworks, is ephemeral, sudden, explosive. One of these qualities, the explosive, will help me to extend my meditation on apparition to the term it glosses in the original text: Erscheinung. In my own attempt to capture the elusive meaning of apparition, I will therefore have to turn the tables. While apparition stands out as the foreign word in Adorno’s text, Erscheinung will become the foreign word in mine.
Adorno distinguishes between Erscheinung (appearance) and Schein (semblance). The crisis of the latter is a main theme in the Aesthetic Theory. Adorno defines Schein as a surplus that lies at the heart of the aesthetic: “Nature is beautiful in that it appears to say more than it is. To wrest this more from that more’s contingency, to gain control of its semblance, to determine it as semblance as well as to negate it as unreal: This is the idea of art.”9 Schein is thus the main constituent of art. But it is also its main conundrum. Schein holds out the promise of a better world, yet its problem is that such a world is still an illusion — which is of course another word for Schein. While traditional artworks produce Schein through the seamless coherence of parts creating a whole (something for which Adorno also uses Benjamin’s term aura), modern art exposes and destroys that illusion: “The shocks inflicted by the most recent artworks are the explosion of their appearance.”10 Adorno captures this historical moment by drawing a distinction between Erscheinung as a sudden appearance and Schein as a stable semblance: “As a result of its determination as appearance, art bears its own negation embedded in itself as its own telos: the sudden unfolding of appearance disclaims aesthetic semblance.”11 In other words, Erscheinung repudiates Schein.
This repudiation lays open the dialectical relationship between the art-work’s place in history and history’s place in the artwork, which Adorno explains as follows:
Appearance … and its explosion in the artwork are essentially historical. The artwork in itself is not, as historicism would have it — as if its history accords simply with its position in real history — Being absolved from Becoming. Rather as something that exists, the artwork has its own development. What appears in the artwork is its own inner time; the explosion of appearance blasts open the continuity of this inner temporality. The artwork is mediated to real history by its monadological nucleus. History is the content of artworks. To analyze artworks means no less than to become conscious of the history immanently sedimented in them.12
In this passage alone, Adorno uses the term explosion twice. With it, he appropriates a central concern from the late Theses on the Philosophy of History by the late Benjamin — the critique of historicism — in order to assert an essential correspondence (indeed a substantial connection) between art and history. For Benjamin, historicism sought to recognize history “the way it really was” — a view famously expounded by the nineteenth-century historian Leopold von Ranke. Historicism assumes a historical continuum through the laws of causality, so that the past determines the present. Benjamin, by contrast, put forward the idea of historical materialism, which seeks to unmask that causal connection and blast open (aufsprengen) this continuum, thereby making it possible to understand the past through the concerns of the present. For Adorno, this opposition between historicism and historical materialism determines the dialectic between the autonomy and historical contingency of artworks. Historicism places artworks in a museum; they exist in a state that Adorno calls “Being absolved from Becoming.” Since artworks are active within a historical process, they possess an inner temporality that corresponds to the historical continuum posed by historicism. This temporality is most tangible in music, which Adorno treats as his paradigmatic art. The Marxist critique of the work as a historical document and the immanent analysis of the work as a piece of art interlock precisely at the moment when this continuum explodes. In the moment of explosion, the artwork releases its meaning, bringing the historical materialist and the musical analyst together. Put differently, the Erscheinung must shatter the Schein in order to make the artwork’s truth content apparent.
The idea of truth content is, of course, of paramount importance in Adorno’s aesthetics. It registers a shift from Kantian to Hegelian concerns. To specify the Erscheinung in art, Adorno suggested in the Aesthetic Theory: “That through which artworks, by becoming appearance, are more than they are: This is their spirit.”13 The spirit thus participates in a process of internal disruption though which the truth content of the artwork becomes apparent. That is the moment when Erscheinung shatters the Schein:
In the spirit of the works critique recognizes their truth content or separates truth content from spirit. Only in this act, and not through any philosophy of art that would dictate to art what its spirit must be, do art and philosophy converge. The strict immanence of the spirit of artworks is contradicted on the other hand by a countertendency that is no less immanent: the tendency of artworks to wrest themselves free of the internal unity of their own construction, to introduce within themselves caesuras that no longer permit the totality of the appearance. Because the spirit of the works is not identical with them, spirit breaks up the objective form through which it is constituted; this breakthrough [Durchbruch] is the instant of apparition.14
The word breakthrough has multiple resonances, bringing together the philosophy of history and the history of art. The most prominent appropriation of the idea of the breakthrough comes in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, where it denotes the historical breakthrough that the composer Adrian Leverkühn creates in his last work, the Lamentations of Doctor Faustus. With the help of the devil, Leverkühn achieves this breakthrough by bringing about a full turn from the utmost of musical construction to the extremes of musical expression.15 In the novel, Mann seized on a dilemma, which Adorno had seen in the historical development of modern music and which he had tried to solve in his Philosophy of New Music: how music could “wrest itself free” from the ongoing process of rationalization leading to barbarism, destruction, and death. This is an aesthetic problem, insofar as it points to a general dialectical tension between constructive tendencies and expressive impulses in any work of art. But it is also a historical problem that points to a specific moment in the history of music, namely when the automatism in dodecaphony and serialism began to threaten the agency of the compositional subject. By drawing attention to this crisis, Adorno made a truly extraordinary appearance as a critic in the history of twentieth-century music.
To say in German that someone is an Erscheinung is a complimentary way of saying that a person is impressive. Adorno hardly dazzled people by his outward appearance, but it is fair to say that he left a lasting impression on the discussion of musical modernism — an impression that was influential because it was so provocative. It was, in other words, explosive. When Adorno appeared on the music scene, his way of thinking about music certainly broke with a tradition of music criticism that had served to explain and preserve the timeless value of great masterworks. Equally competent in music and philosophy, Adorno chose music as the prime site for philosophical and sociological inquiry. He proposed a fundamental link between music and reality, where the work’s autonomy no longer presented a world of its own, but became a fait social that embodied the conditions in the real world. This is not the place to detail Adorno’s achievements as a critic (or to relate anecdotal evidence about his appearances as a public speaker) but to remind us of the disruptive dimension of his ideas and their profound impact on the way we have come to think about music. Yet if Adorno, as the most impressive music critic of the twentieth century, shattered the Schein of traditional artistic values and aesthetic discourse, it is legitimate to ask whether his impact was merely momentary; whether the explosive power of its historical materialism has been lost.
During the Adornokonferenz in Frankfurt in 1983, upon the occasion of Adorno’s eightieth birthday, Carl Dahlhaus asked whether it would be appropriate to speak about the aging of a philosophy — Adorno’s philosophy.16 Dahlhaus surely alluded to Adorno’s trenchant 1955 essay “On the Aging of the New Music,” which had identified the shocking turn from tonality to atonality, by Schoenberg and his students, as the “heroic period” of new music, bemoaning that its initial “critical impulse” was “ebbing away.”17 Dahlhaus’s question is still pertinent in the wake of the recent Adorno centennial, but it had already been asked by Heinz-Klaus Metzger in an immediate response to the “Aging” essay. The main thrust of Metzger’s response was to show that Adorno himself had retreated from the critical positions of the Philosophy of New Music and was out of touch with what composers were doing in the mid- 1950s. Already at the time Metzger was asking whether Adorno’s own critical impulse was ebbing away.
Adorno was no longer a hero. Clearly, the bourgeois notion of the heroic smacked then, as it smacks now, of a dubious investment in a history of great men and great deeds that seemed so contrary to Adorno’s (and Benjamin’s) thinking. If Adorno registered a Copernican turn in Schoenberg’s compositions from around 1910, we should remember that his radical affirmation of the breakthrough to atonality went hand in hand with his radical critique of its later rationalization through dodecaphony. What Schoenberg and his students had achieved, and what they had lost, became not only a lens through which he looked back at nineteenth-century music, especially at late Beethoven; it also became the yardstick for the music of the future. The heroic deed of 1910 looms large in Adorno’s essay of 1961, “Vers une musique informelle,” in which he advanced as a music free from traditional, formal constraints. This utopian music was not formless. Rather it created its own unique form out of its own material tendencies — the ultimate realization of artistic autonomy.18 Since the new music, whose newness Adorno wanted to preserve, was no longer new in the 1960s, he struggled to keep the critical impulse of his philosophy — so intimately tied to that music — from losing its momentum as well. Whether Adorno was successful in this struggle is, in a nutshell, the very question asked by the first five essays of this book.
These essays are torn between defusing Adorno’s explosive potential and rekindling it. They either continue the historicist project or develop a historical materialist one. The essays revolve around two important moments in Adorno’s creative life: the immediate impact of the Philosophy of New Music and Adorno’s struggle with contemporary music during the 1950s and 60s. As Daniel Chua puts it, “Adorno’s morality can never be true in a cosmos that is no longer binding,” but the essence of his critical thought — not to think with the status quo, but to think otherwise — need not necessarily be tied to the repertory from which it sprang in the first place.19 Once Adorno, as a historical figure, is seen within the broader context of this postwar period, we realize, as Keith Chapin demonstrates, that Adorno no longer appears as an irreconcilable opponent of, say, Hindemith, but shared the latter’s investment in a metaphysics of counterpoint for a new music that was rooted in the idea of absolute music. Moreover, as the essays by Gianmario Borio, Julian Johnson, and Alastair Williams show, Adorno influence on postwar composers was a two-way street, leading ultimately to a far less rigid reception of his aesthetics. In this respect, the title and character of György Ligeti’s breakthrough composition Apparitions for orchestra, which caused a scandal when it was first performed under Ernest Bour in Cologne in June 1960, surely resonates with and beyond the apparitions in the late Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory.20
Yet if the unfinished Aesthetic Theory — a theory of high art — has become Adorno’s own manifestation of a “late style,” nowhere perhaps is the ongoing challenge of his critical philosophy more palpable, more contested, more misunderstood, and more pressing than in the realm of mass culture, popular music, and jazz. If Adorno was the first one who laid down a critical framework for the understanding of this music, the last three essays of this book by James Buhler, Larson Powell, and Martin Scherzinger are more than a reminder that Adorno did not blindly pursue an elitist agenda against non-classical music. Instead, he pointed, unfailingly, to the dangers of a commercial exploitation of music in the service of ever consolidating political powers that continue to threaten social justice and peace.
The expression that books appear (erscheinen) in print is a distant reminder of the fact that the medium of the printed word — perhaps modernity’s most momentous invention — carries an ambivalent power, which is as productive as it is destructive (often at the same time). The appearance of Adorno’s monographs and essays in translation has had a riveting effect in English-speaking academia. No longer a body of foreign words, they are likely to resonate beyond the Adorno centennial. Yet should Adorno’s own Erscheinung in print fall prey to the illusion of Schein —the illusion of Being over Becoming — the essays in the present book hope to break through that very illusion. In other words, I hope that they appear just at the right time.
Let me conclude by offering sincerest thanks to a number of people without whom the book would not have come into being nor made it into print: to Joseph Auner for putting the idea into my head; to Robert Kendrick for translating Gianmario Borio’s essay; to Daniel Barolsky for assiduously checking notes, words, and facts; to Peter Kupfer for taking over from Daniel just before the finishing line; to Stefan Moses for allowing me to use his revealing picture of Adorno; to Richard Carlin for waiting patiently for things to come to fruition; to the members of Adorno Seminar in the spring of 2004 for many critical insights; and to the authors of this volume for giving some of their best work.