Let me begin with two quotations:

For those conversant with the history of Critical Theory, the lament expressed in these two citations will immediately sound familiar.If asked to identify their source, they would be likely to point to Walter Benjamin’s celebrated essay of 1936, “The Storyteller,” in which the First World War is blamed for starting a process that has impoverished something called experience (Erfahrung, not, for reasons to be discussed shortly, Erlebnis). It is here, after all, that one finds these now familiar lines: “For never has experience been contracted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power.”

We have become used to thinking of “materialism” as a name for demystification. Materialism is understood as that kind of thinking which relieves us of deluded beliefs in immaterial entities or of “ideological” conceptions of society. It has also, sometimes, been thought of as the easiest of all philosophical or social-scientific creeds to grasp. Only matter, and material needs, are real, it seems to say; any claims to know anything beyond them are “metaphysical,” or “idealist,” or “ideological.” Materialism's job is imagined as a relatively straightforward one: to break those idols and to leave us undeluded.

In practice this task of getting rid of illusions has proved much more difficult than the above remarks suggest. Materialism has found it hard to stand outside the illusions which it wants to dispel. It is easier to call oneself a materialist than it is to be one, because self-declared materialism has an unfortunate tendency to turn into its opposite. Something like this difficulty can be seen right at the origins of the tradition which came to be called “materialism.” For the early Greek philosopher Democritus, matter was the absolutely real. Amongst his chief principles was that “[n]othing will come of nothing and nothing which is can be annihilated.” The idea has had an impact well beyond Greek thought, right through to Newtonian physics and the modern common sense determined by it. Yet such an axiom already indicates how hard it is to separate the tradition of materialism from kinds of thinking with which one might expect it to have little in common. Here, for example, the Eleatic and very unmaterialist notion of substance as that which is eternal and can suffer no decay migrates into Democritus’ conception of matter: “Nothing which is can be annihilated.”

Taken from a text composed during the Second World War, the above epigraph is a formulation characteristic of Adorno. Aphoristically interweaving the personal and the philosophical, the particular and the universal, it consciously resists seamless integration into the totality of a philosophical system. Expressing his experience as an exile inhabiting what was for Adorno an especially strange life-world, and like many of the other reflections contained in Minima Moralia, it undermines the idea that Universal History could be construed in terms other than as a catastrophic logic stretching from the “slingshot to the megaton bomb.” In this sense, Adorno’s writing constitutes the literary counterpart to atonal forms of the “New Music,” whose partisan he undoubtedly was. For Adorno, who initially studied under Alban Berg in Vienna, New Music becomes not simply a mere analogue or trope but rather the concrete model for a writing that situates itself at the unstable boundary between art and philosophy. Existing precariously at this threshold, Adorno’s writing is deeply suspicious of the impulse to communicate or reiterate a transparent content determined independently of its form of presentation. Yet, at the same time, it must avoid, lest it risk incoherence, a complete submersion in particularity.

Universalism in moral philosophy has been the source of controversy among theorists in the field for years. One can still acquire a solid view of the ethics debate by sorting out the players according to their acceptance or rejection of universalism. For example, you will find Richard M. Hare, John Rawls, and Jürgen Habermas lined up on one side of the universalism divide, and Charles Taylor, Richard Rorty, and Zygmunt Bauman on the other side, with Martha Nussbaum, Seyla Benhabib, and Alex Honneth poised somewhere in between. What does Theodor W. Adorno have to do with all of this? His reflections about the aporias of the good life (des richtigen Lebens) and rational praxis date from the 1940s to 1960s. They arose in the context of the decidedly nonethical discussions of the old critical social theory. Their crucial theorems do not, at first glance, exactly invite the interest of today's moral theorists. In Minima Moralia, for example, Adorno points out the inner connection between morality and repression. He maintains the thesis that norms and moral principles have, from antiquity to the present, replicated social domination on a theoretical level and that in the false totality of advanced capitalist society the good life is not possible.

'Scars of damage and disruption are the modern's seal of authenticity.' Adorno Aesthetic Theory What does Adorno mean by 'authenticity'? The concept undoubtedly occupies an important place in his aesthetics and pervades his thinking to a remarkable degree, even when the term itself is absent. But as is the case with much of his conceptual framework, his notion of authenticity is never directly defined or addressed, and its meaning has to be inferred from its relation to other concepts. This apparent fuzziness makes it prone to dismissal as mere rhetoric and lays it open to the accusation that it serves no other purpose than to conceal summative and unsubstantiated value judgments on artworks under a cloak of unattributed authority. It can appear to lack a clear identity. Its dependency on its relation to clusters of other concepts becomes obvious enough when one considers claims like the following in Ästhetische Theorie (1970): 'The seal of authentic artworks is that what they appear to be appears as if it could not be prevaricated, even though discursive judgment is unable to define it' (AT, 199).

Adorno's Aesthetic Theory is currently the object of considerable interest in this country. This is a good thing, but puzzling as well. And it is this puzzle that I want to address. The book is more distant from us than might be indicated by the immediate response its new translation has engendered. It, along with Adorno's philosophy as a whole, involves a way of making distinctions, types of distinctions, and experiences that are inimical to us; in our heart of hearts, down home, they rub us the wrong way. If Adorno's pronouncements on jazz have notoriously aggravated many, by the power of hearsay alone, without almost anyone having read the relevant essays or wondered what exactly he was criticizing, this is only the barest indication of his capacity to bother us. Of the musical compositions that might spontaneously occur to the inner ear of the overwhelming majority of the American readers of this essay - themselves an educated elite - there might not be a single song that would not have resounded in Adorno's own ear as “trash” and so stereotypical in its construction that the puzzle for him would have been how anyone could parse one such tune from another.

At the end of 1947, Dialectic of Enlightenment was published by Querido Verlag. Written with Max Horkheimer, the book was the most important product of Theodor Adorno's exile in the United States. While its significance for Adorno's subsequent work has long been recognized, less attention has been paid to its relationship to two other works, both of which appeared at about the same time: Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus and Arnold Schoenberg's Survivor from Warsaw. The three share a good deal more than their common birthdate. Brought together, they form a triptych in which each offers a different perspective on the themes addressed by the others. Produced by refugees from Hitler's Germany, all three were responses to the diabolical force that had driven their creators into exile; in differing ways, all three explored the intertwining of enlightenment and myth, reason and barbarism, civilization and cruelty; and all three were produced by men who knew one another and lived within a few miles of each another, just outside Hollywood.

In an outline of ca. 1949 for a never-written work on The History of German Music from 1908 to 1933, Adorno remarks that, when the Nazis took over, they hardly needed to suppress 'cultural-bolshevist' music - that is, 'new music', such as that of Berg or Schoenberg - because the suppression had already largely taken place within the realm of 'so-called new music' itself, so that 'certain late forms of new music (Weill's Bürgschaft) could be taken over almost unchanged by fascist composers (Wagner-Régeny)'. Adorno continues,

Understandably, many approaches to the philosophy of music or to musicology are liable to treat such statements with more than a hint of scepticism. Is it possible to legitimate an approach to music which thinks it is more likely, as Adorno claims in a related context, that one will arrive at historical insight by ‘a really technically strict interpretation of a single piece like the first movement of the Eroica that makes its discoveries transparent as discoveries about society’ than, for example, by looking at the broad history of musical styles or, indeed, at the social and economic conditions of musical production and reproduction?

Adorno was vehemently anti-Hegelian. He was also one of the most thoroughly Hegelian thinkers of the century. He was anti-Hegelian insofar as he opposed final closure - reconciliation or Aufhebung - in philosophical inquiry. His opposition was based on combined theoretical and anthropological considerations concerning what might be called the anthropogenesis of the concept. Adorno believed that conceptual thinking arose out of the need for adaptation - for mastering inner and outer nature - and because of that always carried the seeds of domination within it. As Western rationality developed from its inception in pre-Socratic philosophy through the creation of modern science and technology, that potential in fact became realized on a global scale. With Hegel's system, Adorno argued domination in the material sphere was reflected by domination in the conceptual sphere. The totalitarianism of the system - where the whole swallows up the parts - was the counterpart of the overt totalitarianism of fascism and the velvet-gloved totalitarianism of the culture industry. For this reason, Adorno rejected the Hegelian system - and systematizing thought in general - as well as any impulse toward a final synthesis, and he asserted the right of the nonidentical against them.

Any adequate understanding of morality includes its critical questioning. Critical questioning of this sort looks on morality from the outside, for it views morality as a necessarily limited perspective on our life as a whole. One can therefore characterize this questioning as an “external” reflection on morality. At the same time, however, it would be a misconception of the critical questioning of morality to view it as solely external, for it might then too readily result in a rejection, or even a dissolving, of morality. What leads to this misconception is the overlooking of the fact that the external stance is at the same time linked to a self-questioning of morality: The questioning of morality from the outside has its foundations in morality itself. For viewed correctly, morality is constituted such that it contains that which at the same time it is in conflict with from the outside. Objects thus composed may well be called “dialectical.” Part of any adequate self-understanding of morality is therefore the examination of the dialectic, or, more precisely, what Adorno would call the negative dialectic, of morality.

In the course of developing his critical theory of society - a project whose philosophical foundations were first explicitly outlined by Max Horkheimer in a programmatic 1937 essay in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung - Theodor W. Adorno came to formulate his unique concept of sociology. The formulation is the result of a process of learning and reflection whose point of departure is the attempt to make sense of the mutually conditioning relations between music and society. The importance of music theory in Adorno's sociology is also to be explained from the biographical fact that, though Adorno studied philosophy in Frankfurt am Main at the beginning of the 1920s, his heart had been bent on music from childhood. (Adorno studied composition with Alban Berg in Vienna in 1925.) Adorno's abilities as a composer influenced not only his numerous published opera and concert reviews but also his music-aesthetic analyses of individual works. These two areas of interest have in common that both were engaged in discerning the transformation of musical material amid changes in society.

Theodor Adorno would shudder - then again, maybe not - to see what's become of his celebrated 1957 essay “On Lyric Poetry and Society.” Actually, the question of whether he'd be shaken by recent interpretations of the essay may be less interesting than the related matter of whether those analyses are anticipated by Adorno's own theory. That is, the readings at issue, despite or even because of their manifestly left-wing intentions, may stem from what Adorno would see as a grimly predictable, instrumentalist negation of his negative dialectic: a perverse cancellation-by-programmatic-affirmation of the philosophical aesthetics Adorno had developed precisely to trouble the neat dialectical syntheses and closures of fellow Marxian critics.

The relevant interpretations of “On Lyric Poetry and Society” have arisen in mostly academic Anglo-American treatments of late eighteenth century through twentieth-century poetry (though applications sometimes reach back as far as Renaissance lyric); they have more or less assimilated Adorno’s essay to the influential theory or argument known, in recent literary criticism, as the “critique of aesthetic ideology,” which has at times seemed to make itself almost synonymous with Marxian or Marxian-inflected criticism in general. The critique of aesthetic ideology holds that high romantic poetics and Kantian aesthetics – building on eighteenth-century advances in bourgeois sociopolitical power – establish an essentialist or transcendental theory of cultural value. This is said to be an ideological theory whose function, enacted practically through literary/aesthetic experience and form, is to serve bourgeois hegemony by rerouting attention, interest, and energy from the sociopolitical to the artistic-cultural realm.

Ever since the academic world came to agree that philosophy is only possible as science, philosophers, who nevertheless cannot escape artistic production, go through life with both the mark of the conceptual poet and a bad conscience for it. The Phenomenology of Spirit, giving voice to an already widespread program - Hegel's own poetry notwithstanding - has it that the writers of the French Enlightenment, who presented their most important insights in the form of stories and novels, are too clever; that is to say, they write too well. Literary inferiority would certainly be a good characterization of a large part of the academic community - a community which has successfully lowered its ideal of science from the lofty heights of Hegel's investigation into things themselves down to the modest quest for knowledge about how we know things. The academic community has never forgiven Nietzsche for writing Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Dithyrambs of Dionysos and has taken this as an excuse to declare the Genealogy of Morals irrelevant to the field as well. At least in Germany these experiences have been cause for caution in intellectual matters and have even intimidated intellectual inquiry. Those who prefer to write aphorisms rather than stale but transcendentally grounded puns about the being of being would do well to keep their theses to themselves until after they have passed their habilitation.

THE ANXIETY OF LISTENING

This chapter is about what happens, according to Adorno, to the production of music under the modern condition of oppressed or improper listening and why he locates resistance to this condition in an aesthetic or dialectic of loneliness [Dialektik der Einsamkeit]. I present two models of musical listening: Arnold Schoenberg's, then Adorno's. Each is motivated, not by acoustic or physiological studies of the ear, but as a response to the charge that music of a dissonant character, particularly Schoenberg's, is unlistenable. So motivated, these models of listening are better conceived as models of reception, and of the reception particularly of what Adorno calls New Music.

The chapter has two parts: first, a presentation of the two models; second, a detailed expansion and commentary on Adorno’s model. I set Adorno’s model in detail and dialectically (as Adorno did himself) against a sketch of Schoenberg’s.My interest is in Adorno and why he focused on Schoenberg. To explain this, we must immerse ourselves in Adorno’s general philosophical engagement with music. My first objective is to show that there is nothing isolated or merely preferential about Adorno’s focus. He uses Schoenberg to articulate his own profound pessimism regarding the condition of his times and the response his own philosophy can have to it. He sees New Music’s radical task to be at one with his philosophical task, namely, to challenge what we take in experience to be most self-evident. He uses Schoenberg to show how we rationalize and traditionalize our listening habits and deal with the music that challenges them.

'[T]he unity of the system derives from unreconcilable violence. Satanically, the world as grasped by the Hegelian system has only now, a hundred and fifty years later, proved itself to be a system in the literal sense, namely that of a radically societalized society. Adorno' That Adorno entitled his major work of theoretical philosophy Negative Dialectics is enough, all by itself, to indicate the pervasive nature of the presence of Hegel in his thought. While Hegel is occasionally the object of Adorno's thought, most notably in “World Spirit and Natural History: An Excursion to Hegel,” a chapter of Negative Dialectics, and in Hegel: Three Studies, he is more routinely and emphatically present as its orientation, its method, approach, style, or conatus.

Although the name Franz Liszt (1811–86) is associated mainly with keyboard and symphonic compositions, in the writing of Lieder one finds some of his most progressive and finely wrought expressions. Within song's intimate setting, Liszt was able to convey musical thoughts and gestures often found to be problematic in his larger works: here he was not always the public figure leading the New German School and devoting himself to the “Music of the Future,” champion of often unpopular compatriots, such as Richard Wagner. The Lieder were a compositional testing ground, not unlike the way in which Beethoven treated his piano sonatas as harmonic and formal experiments for other genres. More tellingly, in Lieder, Liszt found it possible to convey the very complex soul of the devoted but absent father, impatient lover, often tortured and unhappy but generous man of the world, and, finally, resigned mystic.

There are eighty-seven songs for voice and piano, and sixteen for voice and orchestra, and he perhaps was the first nineteenth-century composer to conceive of orchestral Lieder for the concert hall: his orchestration of Die Vätergruft was the last composition on which he worked in the days before his death on 31 July 1886. But in reality, there are many more songs, because he was an artist who continually rethought his compositions, revising them several times after their initial state had been achieved, yielding multiple readings of the same musical text.

Of the many kinds of music to which composers from German-speaking lands have turned their attention, the Lied, or art song, is surely the most paradoxical. Among those who have fallen under the genre's spell, it is easy to discern fervent if not fanatical zealousness. Among those who have not, it is just as easy to detect bemused bewilderment as to how a musical rendering of a German poem is capable of inducing so profound a response. Suffice it to say, the Lied's fortunes seldom have been static.

The paradoxes do not end here. While Lieder often are thought of as diminutive, given that a great many last but a short time when compared to sonatas, concertos, symphonies, or operas, both the history of German song and the density of expression encountered in many works comprising the genre belie that characterization. Even in some of the most evanescent examples, such as Schubert's Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh, the timelessness that Goethe compresses into his poem combined with the music underscoring it yield an expansiveness precisely because the song is so short: succinct yes, diminutive no! At once the most private yet universalizing of art forms, the Lied, less than a century ago, stood at the forefront of late Romanticism. Together with orchestral and various types of instrumental music, and later the music dramas of Richard Wagner, it formed part of a Teutonic musical juggernaut widely regarded as without peer. On the eve of World War I, at the peak of the genre’s popularity, song settings of German poetry were to be encountered almost everywhere. In Berlin alone, between 1900 and 1914, according to a recent tally, public song recitals, or Liederabende, averaged some twenty a week and invariably were sold out. The Lied was equally ubiquitous in private performances, especially those sponsored by the artistic, intellectual, and economic elite. As one witness has recalled, “Lieder fitted particularly well into the atmosphere of . . . intimate social gatherings. The poem was generally read before each setting was sung. One could easily lose oneself in the mood produced.”