Review essay

European Journal of Social Theory 16(1) 122130 The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1368431012449233 est.sagepub.com

Adorno on music, space and objectification

Wesley Phillips Barcelona, Spain

Book reviewed
T.W. Adorno, Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009. 511 pp. 19.99/24.00 ISBN 9780745642864 (pbk) Current of Music is the latest in the series of Theodor W. Adornos hitherto unpublished lectures and fragments to be published by Suhrkamp and Polity. Two points single out this offering from its predecessors. First, much of it was originally written in English, a language that the author was still mastering (having fled Germany for Oxford in 1934). The book documents Adornos contribution to the Princeton Radio Research Project from his time as its Director of Music between 1938 and 1941. Second, Current of Music is, in a too obvious sense, a failed work, given Adornos dismissal from the Project without a complete publication (only a couple of articles appeared). Moreover, whereas the other music themed books in the above series may be termed genuine fragments Beethoven (1998) and Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction (2006) Current of Music is comprised of highly worked and at times repetitive documents (seven in total, plus nine Other Materials). This weariness is exacerbated by the fact that its subject, US radio music of the 1930s, is for us a distant one. Having said all that, the works underlying question concerning the relationship between cultural forms, technology and capitalism remains extremely pertinent, as I shall attempt to demonstrate. Looking beyond the problems of its mode of presentation, Current of Music serves as an important counterpoint to Walter Benjamins The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility (1936, in Benjamin 2006). Adorno responded critically to that now famous essay in correspondence with Benjamin,

Corresponding author: Wesley Phillips, C/Princesa, 15, 12, Barcelona 08003, Spain Email: wesleyjphillips@hotmail.com

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and he later discussed its use of the concept of aura in Aesthetic Theory ([1970] 1997). But Current of Music provides a more involved consideration of Benjamins thesis, albeit in particular sections. Adornos working title plays on the idea of electric current, of technological reproduction generally, and the belated appearance of this project actually allows for a rethinking of the relationship between Benjamins and Adornos theories of art. But first, what was the Project?

Adorno in New York

After having made contact with Paul Lazersfeld, the newly appointed director of the Princeton Project, the Institutes director, Max Horkheimer, informed Adorno that a position had been secured for him. Horkheimer and Adorno knew Lazersfeld, since he had contributed an article to the Zeitschrift fu Sozialforschung in the previous year. r Adorno had the greater misgivings about Lazersfelds positivist methodologies David Jenemann has set out the tensions between empirical and theoretical approaches within the Institute at this time. Ultimately, the deal with Lazersfeld was about mutual benefit. Lazersfeld sought to repay Horkheimer having received past assistance from the Institute though he also remained genuinely curious about the compatibility between Adornos theory and administrative research. Horkheimer wanted Adorno near to the Institute in New York and Adorno needed both a visa and income to make that possible (Jenemann, 2007: Chapter 1). Aside from these practical advantages, Adorno saw in the Project an opportunity to study the globally most advanced culture industry at close quarters. Allied to this was the above-mentioned critical theorists interest in taking on Benjamins thesis concerning the affinity between technological and social progress in culture. Given Adornos ambiguous stance on empirical research, we can sense a sub-current of bad faith in this combination of interests. It is as if Adorno had theoretically exhausted the possibilities of any popular culture not yet having studied it (except for some jazz, famously) only to retroactively make the empirical data scientifically contest Benjamins study. As the editor of Current of Music, Robert Hullot-Kentor, indicates, Adorno made claims about the US radio listener not having met very many Americans. The idea of [bringing] together people from commerce and academia sounds all too familiar today. The Project was established with money from the Rockefeller Foundation, whose generosity happened to coincide with the generation of research useful to commercial radio stations. The collaboration between the Institute and the Project a joint publication was planned is an instance of this consensus around the consumeroriented democratization of culture, captured in Hullot-Kentors ominous line: radios educational potential for advertisers (Adorno, 2009: 11). However, Adorno will not play ball with the Radio Project. He is not especially interested in Lazersfelds benevolent administrative research (Adorno, 2009: 134). The philanthropists see radio as a means of cultivation through the dissemination of a largely bourgeois, European art. According to Hullot-Kentor, the majority of US radio music during the 1930s was live classical, with light music remaining in the minority. Rather than simply allowing for the reproduction of the classics, Adorno contends, radio has changed the nature of listening itself, in a manner that calls for new production. This

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is consistent with Benjamins The Author as Producer (1934), as well as The Work of Art text: Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception (Benjamin, 2006: 255). Against the orthodoxy of material base determining superstructure, Benjamin and Adorno propose an avant-gardist thesis on new cultural modes of perception changing the relations of production themselves. The second reason for the dissenting tone of Current of Music is that Adorno carries over his conclusions from his important essay The Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening (1938), according to which commodity music assumes an authoritarian character. Radio is a means of reproduction of commodity music, alongside that of the gramophone, and must be understood according to the same categories: standardization, atomization and regression. Radio is not the gramophone, however. The most interesting parts of Current of Music consider radios socio-spatiotemporal specificity. These serve, in a roundabout way, to problematize Benjamins The Work of Art.

Autonomous vs. political art

Adornos familiar critique of Benjamins essay is to be found in his letter of March 18 1936, in response to one of several drafts that Benjamin would ultimately produce, including after its 1936 appearance in the Zeitschrift. Adorno charges Benjamin with failing to mediate traditional and progressive art. On the basis of Benjamins 1934 essay on Kafka, Adorno had understood this mediation in terms of the dialectical construction of the relationship between myth and history (Adorno and Benjamin, 2003: 127). Being dialectical, there is identity, difference, and the (non-)identity of the two. Adorno sees a polarization of identity and difference and hence an impossible leap from tradition to progress. The contradiction of Benjamins narrative is that the possibility of revolutionary art is positively constructed out of the destruction of traditional art a shattering of tradition which is the reverse side of the present crisis and renewal of humanity (Benjamin, 2006: 254). Benjamin could simply have stated that traditional art is dead and that revolutionary art is an independent development. Technical reproduction destroys the ritual function of art its aura. This is the moment of radical difference from progressive art. However, the value of art as art is strangely preserved. This is the moment of identity. Without it, there is no need to ground the latter in a history of the destruction of the former. What is it that is art about progressive art? For Adorno, the answer to this problem is: autonomy both that of the work of art and of the (collective) subject. Since Benjamin does not discuss autonomy, he must find his mediation either in the fate of technology the inherently progressive nature of reproduction or in an unwittingly conservative valorization of the continuing power of art as a privileged expression of human perception. The value of traditional art is not simply destroyed; it is transvalued. Benjamin acknowledges this qualitative transformation of [the artworks] nature by means of photography and film. In Adornos mind, Benjamins misapprehensions about aesthetic autonomy stem from his polarization of art-historical (more broadly, anthropological) and politicalontological approaches (Adorno and Benjamin, 2003: 131). Benjamin reserves each approach for traditional and progressive art respectively, begging the question as to the

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emancipating mediation of the one to the other. Instead of locating the question of autonomy in the historically mediated material, authenticity is pejoratively ascribed to the originality of traditional art, understood in terms of physical rarity. Hence, Benjamins initial examples are thingly artefacts. The reproduction of the painting in the woodcut, lithograph and photograph destroys the original, perhaps taking some of its value in the process (Benjamin, 2006: 2523). By contrast, with his post-Kantian concept of art (ironically, taken from the younger Benjamin) Adorno can maintain that most traditional art is simply no longer art for us (cf. Adorno and Benjamin, 2003: 129). The case of music and radio not only contests Benjamins thesis, Adorno implies, but reverses it. This reversal concerns the fact that: (a) listening is somewhat unthingly, revealing the intertwined nature of technological production and reproduction; and (b) the destruction of the original does not destroy aura especially if there is no discernible original (that conclusion only follows from the conflation of autonomy with rarity). Adorno problematizes both ends of Benjamins narrative: the destruction of traditional art and the (re-)production of progressive art. The new art of radio does not destroy aura but more often regresses back into it: what Benjamin calls the aura of the original certainly constitutes an essential part of the live reproduction (Adorno, 2009: 89). This is because the radio voice brings a mythic community into the here and now of the living room. Benjamin had connected aura, defined in terms of uniqueness and the apparition of distance, to the here and now (Benjamin, 2006: 2556). Allied to this otherworldly here and now is the notion of contemplation, to which Benjamin opposes this-worldly distraction. But for Adorno, the radio distracts without destroying aura. Benjamins account of aura and distraction has not aged well, not least because it is almost impossible to identify social progress in a technologically progressive culture. And yet, the spatial character of the transformation of art in Benjamin remains richer than in Adorno something that the latter is perhaps uncomfortably aware of. According to Adorno, there is no conceivable music . . . which is not based upon the idea of reproducibility. For, the score is, in a way, only a system of prescriptions for possible reproduction, and nothing in itself (Adorno, 2009: 89). Radio brings this tendency to its logical conclusion: In radio the authentic original has ceased to exist (p. 90). Adorno initially wants to emphasize the difference between the two levels of reproduction, performative and technical, in order to challenge the assumption shared by Lazersfeld and Benjamin that mechanical reproduction is inherently progressive. Hence, Adorno contrasts the impoverished sound of 1930s radio reproduction and its domestic space of casual listening with the living sound of orchestral production and the collective space of its concentrated listening. But once again, radio has changed the way we listen to the live music originally, and there is no going back. The levels of reproduction are interconnected as a whole listening phenomenon. Adorno actually reverses Benjamins alleged archaism by transposing the original from the past into the future. This is not to do away with the idea of an original, therefore. There is a speculative idea of the compelling musical performance, but this can neither be identified in the score nor in the performance, since there can be many compelling performances of the same composition. The line about the original ceasing on the radio now reads pejoratively, whereby the mechanical reproduction destroys all possible production. Adorno risks lapsing into Romantic humanism at this point. But it is more akin to a materialist philosophy

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of the ear. What is important is to enable the listener himself to compose the piece virtually in the act of listening (Adorno, 2009: 218). These ideas are germane to Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction. But here too the thesis tends to be limited to the past musical tradition. In one of his concessions to the radio in Current of Music, notably, Adorno suggests that the atomization of listening can be turned into a sharpening of attention upon the parts. One may listen to individual sections in radio as if through a microscope (2009: 64). This recalls Hegels afterlife of the artwork. But afterlife is not new life. Adornos paradigm of new music predates the proliferation of radio in the 1930s. The inclusion of modernist examples by Alban Berg and Hanns Eisler in his proposed lectures for New York public radio was intended to counter music appreciation (see What a Music Appreciation Hour Should Be). That the programme was pulled after a couple of weeks indicates that its presenter was pushing at the limits of the possible. But stopping at the 1920s surely constitutes a block to Adornos theorization of radio (re)production. It cuts short his own transition to new production that which is necessary though not sufficient to negate the fetish-character of dominant reproduction. Adorno even falls prey to his reservation about the democratization of bourgeois culture (Adorno, 2009: 134). In the newspaper age, Schoenberg negated the fetish-character. But the newspaper age is not the radio age. To be fair to Adorno, the musical avant-garde was not quite ready to respond to the radio, partly because of what was happening in Europe in the 1930s. The 1920s radio cantatas and Lehrstu cke of Eisler and Kurt Weill, often comprising settings of Brecht, inaugurated and temporarily ended the project of progressive radio music. The text of Eislers Tempo der Zeit (1929) even reflects upon the potential of its medium: In these times in which the speed of the airplane begins to compete with the speed of the rotating Earth, it is necessary the test the utilization of technical progress for the collective. Technology is ambiguous. Its progress is not to be taken for granted but rather should be tested and proved [zu u berpru fen] on each occasion. Despite Eislers insight, these works do not carry out this testing beyond their capacity to disseminate literary and political texts to a larger audience. The integral meeting of radio and progressive music more likely occurs during the 1950s. And curiously, Adorno was there when it happened. Having returned to Frankfurt in 1949, the critical theorist regularly attended the International Summer Courses for New Music held in Darmstadt. There, he belatedly came to recognize the new music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez and Luigi Nono (having initially disregarded these young composers as examples of The Aging of the New Music). This moment will prove to be relevant to Current of Music.

Musical spatialization
In the first, introductory document in the book, Radio Physiognomics, Adorno regards the radio as subject-like an alien, unfamiliar subject. By the term radio voice, Adorno has in mind the literal sense of speaker, as well as the facial appearance of the radio-set itself. Above all, the author refers to the concept of fetish-character. The Marxist terminology is hidden between the lines of this ostensibly non-political study. But the

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contemporaneous Fetish-Character essay would suggest that Radio Physiognomics details the specific fetish-character of the radio. Marx uses the term fetishism to describe a reversal of subject and object in commodity production: the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race (Marx, 1976: 165). Adorno mentions the fetish without its sibling concept of alienation. But this conceptual re-connection allows us to read Current of Music in terms of cultural objectification(s), so as to bring Adorno back towards Benjamins emphasis upon the necessarily spatial character of progressive culture. The formers critique of aura and positing of autonomy too often misses the basic opposition between interiority and exteriority. In progressive art and film, Benjamin claimed, immersed attention into the here and now gives way to the spatially dispersed attention of the collective: With the close up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. Hence,
Distraction and concentration form an antithesis, which may be formulated as follows. A person who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it; he enters into the work . . . By contrast, the distracted masses absorb the work of art into themselves. This is most obvious with regard to buildings. Architecture has always offered the prototype of an artwork that is received in a state of distraction and through the collective. (Benjamin, 2006: 265)

There is a precise, spatial inversion here (By contrast . . . ) that begins to respond to the problem of mediation raised by Adorno: the contemplative distance that characterized traditional art becomes tactile [taktisch], progressive art. To paraphrase Hegel, the I becomes We yet without, pace Adorno, the We also becoming I, since there is no autonomy in distraction. For Adorno, in a communist society, work would be organised in such a way that human beings would no longer be so exhausted or so stupefied as to require such distraction (Adorno and Benjamin, 2003: 130). So the question for Adorno is: does his I also become We? Despite the dual character of autonomous art in Aesthetic Theory, its empirical space is of necessity absent, as can be gauged from the works non-treatment of architecture. It is notable that Adornos discussion of The Work of Art essay appears, in Current of Music, in the midst of a subsection entitled Space Ubiquity. Adorno initially conflates two forms of spatial ubiquity in radio music. Music has a tendency to negate the place of its production. But this is not specific to radio music. What radio adds is simultaneous transmission. Adorno notes that phenomenologist Gunther Stern referred to the experience of walking down a street and hearing the same music from several buildings (2009: 81). The latter ubiquity is as social as it is acoustic. For Adorno, this simultaneity of acoustically and aesthetically impoverished reproduction constitutes a non-temporalization of music, the art of time. Moreover, Adorno repeatedly associates non- or de-temporalization with spatialization in his essays on music, thus following Lukacs definition of reification the process of becoming a thing from History and Class Consciousness (1923): the commodity form degrades time to the dimension of space (Lukacs, 1971: 89). How, then, does Adorno present the alternative social space to that of Benjamin? There are clues within Radio Physiognomics. To speak metaphorically, symphonic

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works transform the time element of music into space (Adorno, 2009: 52). Art music, like radio music, enacts a metaphorical spatialization. Responding to Paul Bekkers theory of the symphony, Adorno regards this space as living, not geometric space: A symphony does not create a community; but its inherent technical qualities are certainly linked with the fact that it is supposed to be listened to by a community and in a large room (p. 51). In another essay, Adorno connects the space of the performance to the inherent (or structural) musical space of the work, which springs from the collective implications of all music, the character of something that embraces groups of human beings (Adorno, 2002: 150). The two spatializations of music, reified and non-reified, are outwardly opposed in Adornos thinking. His dispute with Benjamin concerns the fact that, far from opening up an emancipatory space, reproduction of itself tends to pre-empt this with an authoritarian space of its own. Adornos point should be conceded without negating the more promising theorization of space in Benjamin one that Adorno in fact requires. In order to find a way between Adorno and Benjamin, we should briefly reconsider Marxs earlier account of social reproduction. For this contextualizes the dialectical understanding of commodity fetishism in Capital, the source of Adornos fetish-character, so that we may revise his concepts of reification and objectification.

Dialectic of objectification
The 1844 Economic and Political Manuscripts develop a distinction between, on the one hand, objectification, Vergegensta ndlichung, and, on the other, both estrangement, Entfremdung, and alienation, Enta uerung. The relation between these latter concepts is of importance here. In The Young Hegel ([1938] 1975), Lukacs suggested that Entfremdung and Enta uerung are more or less interchangeable, since each translates the English alienation (p. 538). Chris Arthur noticed the crucial difference in emphasis, however, only to worry that rendering Enta uerung literally as externalization risks confusion with objectification (Arthur, 1986: Appendix). In fact, there must be something of objectification in externalization a relation of difference and not simple opposition. This differentiation allows for a means of the negation of the negation. Objectification is, on the one hand, the alienating loss of and bondage to the object. But on the other hand, to be genuinely human is to objectify: It is in the fashioning of the objective that man really proves himself to be a species-being (Marx, 1975: 329). The capitalist mode of production constitutes one, regressive objectification from the standpoint of communist objectification: it is only when mans object becomes a human object or objective man that man does not lose himself in that object . . . he himself becomes the object (p. 353). This dual account of objectification is the consequence of Marxs mediation of externalization, which is partly objective, and objectification, which is partly externalizing. The question of technological reproduction (and for Marx, industry) lies in the midst of this struggle, as Benjamin was right to emphasize. History and Class Consciousness predates the eventual publication of Marxs Manuscripts by some nine years. In 1967, Lukacs recalled realizing that he had disastrously conflated alienation with objectification. He methodologically salvaged the latter by way of Hegelian panlogicism: the subjective consciousness of the commodity-worker is

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raised to objective self-consciousness by way of an assumption about dialectical logics solution to the antinomies of bourgeois thought (Lukacs, 1971: xxiv). Ultimately, the young Marx must make a similarly Hegelian move, albeit in a more sophisticated manner. Alienated objectification follows the dialectical self-externalization of spirit familiar to the Phenomenology of Spirit (Enta uerung and Erinnerung), whose only fault was to determine spirit as the bourgeois mind. Marx thus turns to a consideration of the Phenomenology in the same, third manuscript, and also optimistically defines industry as the exoteric revelation of mans essential powers (Marx, 1975: 355). My digression into Marx and Lukacs is justified to the extent that the socio-spatial status of objectification and reification lies behind the distinction between regressive and progressive spatializations within cultural forms of the technological present. Again, Adornos critique of the culture industry often seems to offer no real alternative space to that of globalized reification. Autonomous art shows that the world could be other than it is (Adorno, 1997: 138). But this other remains perpetually deferred a utopia that must never come. The composer Luigi Nono whom Adorno met at Darmstadt provides an interesting case study at this point, insofar as he remained both a student of Adorno, with his adherence to advanced musical language, and of Benjamin, with his use of tendential (and literary) texts. Equally pertinent to this discussion: Nono became interested in radio technology during the 1960s. This formed a part of the avant-garde production in radio studios in Italy and West Germany from the mid-1950s onwards. For La Fabbrica illuminata (1964) Nono recorded sounds from the Italsider forgery of Cornigliano, northern Italy, and manipulated them together with text sung by soprano Carla Henius. The texts decry the working conditions of the factory. La Fabbrica uses a multiplicity of radio technology in the service of multiple spatializations including being taken out into the factory (except that this was blocked by the radio authorities). At the same time, Nonos acerbic sonorities and long durational values render the work a mimetic expression of reification, in keeping with Adornos theory of de-temporalization. This is because, for Adorno, mimesis is fundamental to arts modernity: art is modern art through its mimesis of the hardened and alienated (1997: 21). But equally, contra Adorno, Nonos static or spatial character only becomes temporalized by way of the concrete spaces of political struggle and possibility. As if in response to Current of Music, Nono indicates how a negation of regressive objectification, reification, must accompany a positing objectification, albeit as a gesture of solidarity. This might constitute a corrective to Adornos aesthetic theory, without losing the concept of autonomy. As the young Marx recognized, only arts mediation of the regressive and progressive spatial objectifications sanctions the claim to social progress. It is Benjamin who knows that the question of technology is bound to the question of externalization his problem being the conflation of the two. Like Eisler before him, Nono cautiously takes up Marxs promethean claim for industry, or the revolutionary orientation of objectification (Prometeo is the title of Nonos most important later work). Because of its spatial fluidity, radio technology holds a historically symbolic role in this process, though one that is now being superseded by other technologies. Adorno almost theorizes this mediation of spaces, yet once again without finding contemporary examples. In the Fetish-Character essay, the author refers to two spheres of music, commodity and autonomous music (we might even read Spha ren

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spatially here), as comprising an unresolved contradiction. The whole cannot be put back together by adding the separated halves, but in both there appear, however distantly, the changes of the whole, which only moves in contradiction (Adorno, 2002: 293). If we extend Adornos logic to Current of Music, objective unity is to be conceived in terms of the contradiction between reified and non-reified spatial objectifications. In making this concession to Benjamins technological modernism (pre- On the Concept of History), we nevertheless inherit a different problem from him. In the absence of a concept of mediation, Benjamins concept of negation is pressed into a philosophically less sophisticated active nihilism. By opening up the empty space of reification, music (pure exchange, repetition, reproduction) forces the question of human objectification. Music as nihilism is hardly new to philosophy, from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche to Attali. Lukacs reminds us that it is the modern philosophers and not the anti-philosophers who can offer a concept of mediation rather than faith in redemption from nothingness. Adorno is right to oppose panlogicism. Progress through technology can hardly be taken for granted. Yet the whole is the false lapses into ordinary scepticism (Adorno, 2005: 50). As Eisler predicted in theory, cultural practices such as Nonos show an alternative way: the concrete instantiation of intermittent mediation. References
Adorno T W ([1970] 1997) Aesthetic Theory. London: Athlone Press. Adorno T W (2002) Essays on Music, ed. R. Leppert. Berkeley: University of California Press. Adorno T W (2005) Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. London: Verso. Adorno T W (2009) Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Adorno T W and Benjamin W (2003) The Complete Correspondence, 19281940. Cambridge: Polity Press. Arthur C (1986) Dialectics of Labour: Marx and his Relation to Hegel. http://chrisarthur.net/ dialectics-of-labour/appendix.html (accessed 4 April 2012). Benjamin W (2006) Selected Writings, vol. 4, 19381940, ed. H Eiland and M W. Jennings Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jenemann D (2007) Adorno in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lukacs G (1971) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. London: Merlin Press. Lukacs G (1975) The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations Between Dialectics and Economics. London: Merlin Press. Marx K (1975) Early Writings, ed. L Colletti. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx K (1976) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

About the author

Wesley Phillips is an independent scholar living in Barcelona. His research lies in the areas of German idealism, historical materialism and Frankfurt School critical theory. Wesleys recent publications include Spaces of resistance: the Adorno-Nono complex, Twentieth Century Music, 9, 2012, The future of speculation?, Cosmos and History, 7(1), 2012, Melancholy science? Critical theory and German idealism reconsidered, Telos, 156, Winter 2011/12, and History or counter-tradition? The system of freedom after Walter Benjamin, Critical Horizons, 11(1), 2010.