Adorno's Aesthetics
I defend Adorno’s critique of popular music against two related criticisms: firstly, that Adorno is guilty of violating his own methodology when he classes music under broad categories – and, secondly, that Adorno does not correctly identify genuinely informative categories by which to class music. I explore Adorno’s critiques of popular music, specifically those found in ‘The Dialectic of Enlightenment’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1973), ‘On Popular Music’ (Adorno, 1941) and ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’ (Adorno, 1991). I then attempt to respond to Douglas Kellner’s suggestion in his essay ‘Adorno and the Dialectics of Mass Culture’ that Adorno is perhaps guilty of betraying his own insistence on the priority of the particular over the abstract concept (Kellner, 2002). I analyse this claim by paying particularly close attention to Adorno’s comments on the nature of his immanent critique in ‘The Essay as Form’ (Adorno, 1984) and to a lesser extent ‘Negative Dialectics’ (Adorno, 2007).
Introduction
In this essay, I will be attempting to defend Adorno’s critique of popular music against two related criticisms: firstly, that Adorno is guilty of violating his own methodology when he classes music under broad categories – and, secondly, that Adorno does not correctly identify genuinely informative categories by which to class music. In the first section I will introduce Adorno’s critiques of popular music, specifically those found in ‘The Dialectic of Enlightenment’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1973), ‘On Popular Music’ (Adorno, 1941) and ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’ (Adorno, 1991). In section two I will attempt to respond to Douglas Kellner’s suggestion in his essay ‘Adorno and the Dialectics of Mass Culture’ that Adorno is perhaps guilty of betraying his own insistence on the priority of the particular over the abstract concept (Kellner, 2002). I will analyse this claim by paying particularly close attention to Adorno’s comments on the nature of his immanent critique in ‘The Essay as Form’ (Adorno, 1984) and to a lesser extent ‘Negative Dialectics’ (Adorno, 2007). I will argue that, far from betraying his insistence on the priority of particularity, Adorno’s writings on popular music in fact come to encapsulate it. I will then argue that Adorno has correctly identified genuinely informative categories by which to class music. Although a simple distinction between ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ music, or ‘autonomous’ and ‘industrial’ culture may appear reductive, a critical theory (the process of revealing inherent power structures through sociological investigation) requires the tension of a dialectic for informative insights to be made, even if those categories are partially artificial. Therefore, his criticisms of popular culture are justified.
Adorno’s critique of popular music
Against the optimism of Hegelian dialectics, Adorno takes a critical response to the view that cultural tensions will disappear when seen from the perspective of the whole. Adorno instead views his vocation as an implementation of ‘negative’ dialectics (Adorno, 2007). Against reconciliation, Adorno therefore encourages dissatisfaction; if culture and society cannot be understood from the vantage point of a universal impersonal ‘Geist’, then it is towards an ‘immanent critique’ of instances of culture that Adorno and Horkheimer turn in ‘The Dialectic of Enlightenment’ (1973). For Adorno and Horkheimer, an immanent critique requires that instances of culture be probed into and allowed to divulge their ideological basis and their inherent contradictions. Popular music must be examined in the light of an analysis of the malaise of late-capitalism and the enlightenment tendency towards rationalisation and instrumental reason. Adorno and Horkheimer argue that enlightenment has turned into its opposite. Instrumental reason, that is, rationality as a means to an end, has not delivered on its emancipatory promise of freedom and autonomy for the individual but has instead come to promote conformity and standardisation. This has resulted in a late-capitalist society of top-down imposition of homogeneous cultural values and consumer choices. In his analysis of culture, Adorno takes a broadly Marxist position. He is, however, far less optimistic than his Marxist contemporaries, such as Walter Benjamin.
Adorno argues that mass culture has lost its connection with individual expressions of freedom. Instead, it has become industrialised and administered from above. He identifies this trend with the emergence of modern technologies, the invention of the gramophone and the cinema in particular, which, Benjamin will argue, positively popularise the work of art (Benjamin, 2008). Adorno identifies a shift in cultural appreciation (Adorno, 1991). Exchange-value has taken over from use-value as capitalism begins to take over areas of life formerly resistant to it. By this, he means music has lost its uniquely appreciable elements as incomparable unrepeatable works of art and has instead become reified: another exchangeable commodity in a capitalist marketplace. Benjamin also recognises this as the necessary price of industrial production; that the work of art loses some of its original ‘aura’ (Benjamin, 2008, p.9). However, for Adorno, there is no redeeming political dimension here. The ‘culture industry’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1973) creates works which are commensurate with one another. They do not attempt to be unique expressions of freedom but instead are expressive of control and conformity. By the ‘culture industry’, Horkheimer and Adorno mean the highly capitalised ‘hit-makers’ of the music, film, newspaper and TV industries with their focus on profit over authentic art.
It is important to pause here and consider whether Adorno makes a distinction between modern products of the culture industry and music that existed before it. While newer music may be produced to conform to market expectations, surely pre-industrial music is resistant to it? For Adorno, in the modern listeners’ experience, no true distinction can be drawn here. This is because older music, while not originally produced by the culture industry, has nonetheless become fetishised by it (Adorno, 1991). By this he means the work of art is valued not in-itself but for some inherent emic value it has been assigned. This demonstrates the all-pervasive nature of the culture industry. Adorno is sceptical about the anachronistic ability of an audience to appreciate a work of art outside its original era. He complains that, in late-capitalism, older works are not really appreciated other than as a fetishised commodity. Just as with new products of the culture industry, ‘to like is almost the same as to recognize’ (Adorno, 1991, p.26) and a ‘pantheon of bestsellers builds up’ (ibid, p.31). This is particularly notable in Adorno’s criticism of the NBC ‘Music Appreciation Hour’ during his time in America (Adorno, 1992). Listeners are encouraged to recognise and identify types of music at the expense of a true understanding or engagement with them. Even without the perniciousness of the culture industry, Adorno is highly sceptical about whether a true engagement with music can ever happen outside its original cultural context (Adorno, 1991). For Adorno, a piece of music being in the classical tradition, or even being technically complex, is not enough to classify it as ‘serious’ (Adorno, 1941, I, para 1). By ‘serious’ music, Adorno means music which is autonomous in that it stands in a critical relationship with society and is progressive in its musical form. Some may define classical music (as opposed to popular music) as ‘serious’, however for Adorno, this is not necessarily the case. Much of the classical canon is not only appreciated anachronistically, but created anachronistically in so far as it does not respond to the times and also stagnates within a by-gone era (Adorno, 1991). Adorno thus promotes the creation of ‘serious’ music that is furthermore ‘new’ (Adorno, 2002, p.127), defined by its ability to appropriately and critically engage with current times.
If much of the classical canon has, necessarily or otherwise, lost its ability to confront society and represent freedom in the arts, then the situation is even worse for most ‘popular’ music (Adorno, 1941, I, para 1). The culture industry churns out music which has become standardised: it is simply a product to be sold and consumed (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1973). As is inherent in all capitalist modes of production, it is not enough to consume - consumers must consume repeatedly. Therefore, tastes have been manipulated to create an industry from which products are continuously produced and then discarded. This formula has to be precise. Music must be produced that is similar enough to previously successful songs so as to have mass market appeal but different enough so as to be marketable (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1973). Music is therefore created ‘pre-digested’ (Adorno, 1941, I, para 16) and, unlike authentic art, the listener is not required to take seriously the structure of the whole because the whole of the particular piece is already pre-ordained (its beat, harmonic range et cetera) (Adorno, 1941). Attention is only given to the variants because the variants are all that will be different. Thus ‘every detail is so firmly stamped with sameness’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1973, p.128). For Adorno, this standardisation is ‘antagonistic to the ideal of the individual in a free, liberal society’ (Adorno, 1941, I, para 14). The listener is denied the critical opportunity potentially afforded to him by engagement with ‘serious’ music which refuses to be listened to formulaically (Adorno, 1941). Adorno claims that the culture industry creates a situation where one ‘cannot always escape the feeling that the child with a sweet tooth comes to know the candy shop’ (Adorno, 1991, p.44). For Adorno, popular music is thus an aberration because it aims at standard reactions and imitates a formula that has become ‘frozen’ (Adorno, 1941, I, para 18). Therefore, the listener becomes accustomed to automated responses and is ‘arrested at infantile stage’. (Adorno, 1991, p.41). The link with infancy is interesting in light of Adorno’s remarks on the lyrical content of popular music. The form popular music takes is invocative of the simplicity of nursery rhymes, and its content of ‘baby talk’ (Adorno, 1941, I, para 9). The familiar, the comfortable and the instantly recognisable is preferable to the ‘serious’ work which may challenge, confront and unsettle. The regressive listener simply demands more of what they have repeatedly heard. The result then, for Adorno, is that popular music has little more value than as a highly capitalist distraction from work within a capitalist society (Adorno, 1941, III, para 19). Popular music can therefore have no critical quality because it stands, not against, but so ingrained within the hegemony out of which it appears.
Is Adorno guilty of violating his own methodological principles?
I will proceed now by outlining some potential criticisms of Adorno’s critique and suggest how he might be able to successfully navigate them. Douglas Kellner suggests that Adorno may be guilty of failing to adhere to his own methodological standards in his analyses of music. Kellner states that arguments about the commensurability of radio-based music may have some validity but that they ‘on the whole violate Adorno’s own defense of particularity and critique of identity thinking which subsumes heterogeneous particulars to abstract categories’ (Kellner, 2002, p.101). Adorno may then be ignoring the uniqueness of individual instances of music and instead be seeing them through the polarising lens of his culture industry critique. To appreciate this criticism, it is important to understand Adorno and Horkheimer’s distrust of abstract philosophising. In the ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ Adorno and Horkheimer demonstrate their distrust of the enlightenment strategy of classing particulars under abstract universal categories (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1973). Adorno expresses this more fully in the ‘The Essay as Form’ (Adorno, 1984). Adorno argues for the importance of letting the unique particularity of individual phenomena speak for themselves and not be interpreted through grand conceptual categories. He speaks of the tendency in western philosophy to ignore this. The philosophical tradition views cultural objects of interest ‘only to the degree that it serves to exemplify universal categories, or at the very least allows them to shine through’ (Adorno, 1984, p.151). For Adorno, philosophy should avoid grand conceptualising narratives of ‘temporally invariable concepts’ through which to place individual cultural artefacts (Adorno, 1984, p.158).
Consequently Kellner’s criticism seems to be that it is hard to see how Adorno is not himself guilty of this abstract categorising tendency when he, for instance, takes interest in a piece of jazz music only in so far as it exemplifies the abstract category of ‘popular’ music. His discussion on popular music can hardly be said to ‘shy away from the violence of dogma’ (Adorno, 1984, p.158) and the view that the unique particularity of cultural phenomena deserves to speak for itself without being immediately classed under generalised categories. This is a serious criticism in so far as it represents potentially fatal inconsistencies within Adorno’s corpus. However, I believe that it is nonetheless a weak criticism for the following reasons.
Firstly, Adorno does not maintain that categories such as the ‘culture industry’ or ‘popular’ music are the same as the purported ‘temporally invariable concepts’. The target of Adorno’s critique in ‘The Essay as Form’ is, I believe, philosophy’s more abstract Platonist conceptualising, not with a critical and historically conditioned concept such as ‘popular’ music, nor the culture industry. Adorno’s categories are certainly not temporally invariable in so far as they are by no means necessary and there is hope held out for a better situation. Adorno does state in ‘Negative Dialectics’ that the concern of philosophy in the modern age should be for ‘non-conceptuality, individuality and particularity – things which ever since Plato used to be dismissed as transitory and insignificant’ (Adorno, 2007, p.8). However, there is simply no possibility of a critical theory without classing disparate phenomena under some conceptual category. Adorno himself concedes ‘the essay can (not) do without general concepts’ (Adorno, 1984, p.160). I therefore believe that classing the uniqueness of an individual pop song as a product of the culture industry is, rather than a contradiction in Adorno’s methodology, actually in line with it. How would the critical theorist or indeed the philosopher speak about anything at all without some conceptual apparatus? Even words such as ‘popular’ and ‘music’ are artificial categories to some extent. It is necessary for the methodology of critical theory to gather, to a greater or lesser extent, unique instances of culture under umbrella conceptualising. This seems to be a necessity of language itself. Adorno appears to agree - ‘even language that does not fetishize the concept cannot do without concepts’ (Adorno, 1984, p.160). Therefore, while perhaps ignoring the particularity and individuality of pieces of music, this is simply a necessity in order to gain understanding of the underlying dynamic that unites these particulars. The critical theorist must therefore be as ‘a man obliged, in a foreign country, to speak that country’s language’ (Adorno, 1984, p.161).
Furthermore, in Adorno’s defense, to say that popular music is standardised and commensurate is not to say that its instances are identical. Alex Thomson in ‘Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed’ argues that standardisation doesn’t reduce all cultural phenomena to equivalence; indeed the nature of the capitalist economy is such that there is a vast array of choice between cultural products (Thomson, 2006). Thus, the particularity of ‘popular’ music is noted by Adorno, indeed in places given great attention, for example ‘Deep Purple’ and ‘Sunrise Serenade’ (Adorno, 1941, I, para 13). However, the differences between them can still be classed under the category of ‘pseudo-individualization’ (Adorno, 1941, I, para 21) because their particularity arises not from formal differences but in slight variations aimed at achieving the impression of something new; their cultural energy emanates from the same source: the culture industry.
Moreover, even supposing Adorno is guilty of ignoring the unique particularity of individual instances of popular music, his response may be that this is an inevitable result of his work as a negative dialectician. Adorno may not claim that his contentions represent the whole truth of the matter but instead that they are simply a dialectical redress of an imbalance towards conformity in modern culture. Contradictions, for instance between focus on particularity and focus on broad categories, are the vocation of a negative dialectician. Contradiction and inherent tensions are what is to be expected from a method which aims to realise that the objects of consciousness contain their own negation (Adorno, 2007). Perhaps it is our insistence that Adorno displays some internal consistency that is a manifestation of our own enlightenment sensibility to systematise and gain mastery. Adorno consistently resists consistency. He does not believe any single unifying perspective can be gained (Adorno, 1973). Furthermore, Adorno does not claim to have the final word in his writing - there is more work to be done. On his own method, Adorno states ‘it says what is at issue and stops where it feels itself complete – not where nothing is left to say’ (Adorno, 1984, p.52). There may therefore be further critical work which can be done, illuminating further distinctions within contemporary culture.
Moreover, Thomson notes that Adorno is fully aware of the impossibility of truly addressing particularity through philosophy, stating that Adorno’s thought is torn between ‘a wish to allow the object to stand alone without the intervention of thought, concepts, reason, and the knowledge that such unmediated access to the object is impossible’ (Thomson, 2006, p. 43). Thus, the imposition of categories is a hermeneutic methodological necessity but it is by no means the end of the story. Therefore, Adorno may be able to absorb these criticisms quite well. There is a pragmatic necessity in classing music into categories even if those categories are to some extent artificial.
Having argued that Adorno is allowed to assign categories within music without violating his own method, we can now ask, has Adorno correctly identified genuinely informative categories by which to class music? Perhaps some music originating from the culture industry is nonetheless ‘serious’ and non-conformist in some sense, for instance music which has been banned. Many pieces of banned music are surely, almost by definition, not supportive of the status quo. Furthermore, many are clearly still an emanation of the machinery of the culture industry because they are written for the purposes of financial success. For example, John Mercer’s "A-huggin' and A-chalkin' banned by the BBC in 1946. This creates a problem for Adorno. How can a piece of music be a creation of the culture industry and simultaneously be derided by it? Furthermore, most composers whom Adorno believes epitomise ‘serious’ music were never banned or considered subversive so are they approved by the status quo?
Adorno may choose to reply by suggesting that simply being shocking in terms of (perceived) vulgarity or indecency isn’t the same as the ‘shock’ contained in the works of serious artists such as Schoenberg (Adorno, 1941, p. 396). Moreover, music which is shocking for the sake of being shocking may itself be indicative of the culture industry. Works which stand in direct opposition to the status quo are simply a photographic negative of the status quo itself. Therefore, in some sense they are a manifestation of the culture industry just as much as any other ‘approved’ product. ‘Serious’ art, however, proceeds by providing what is shocking on a formal structural level in opposition and critique of the current state of society rather than simply providing shock for shock’s sake in content alone. This, of course, is ironic when it is noted that the atonality which Adorno so admires in the ‘new’ music was used for literal shock effect in the culture industries’ Hollywood horror films of the 40s and 50s.
Even supposing that Adorno has not fully registered the subtlety in different forms of music, and that his distinction between ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ music may, to some extent, be too simplistic, this shouldn’t in theory matter. This is because the job of the negative dialectician is to crystallise the tensions present in opposites so as to tease out underlying truth. This can be seen in the categories of ‘enlightenment’ and ‘myth’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1973). Horkheimer and Adorno recognise that both categories are pragmatically useful but also to some extent misleading in that they are the opposite and the condition of one another (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1973). In ‘The Culture Industry Reconsidered’, Adorno suggests that broad categories such as ‘industrial’ are ‘not to be taken too literally’ (Adorno, 1991, p.100). Therefore, perhaps the distinction between ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ music is helpful in so far as it focuses our attention on the real issue: the possibility of freedom and autonomy in culture. Thus, Adorno draws our attention to polar opposites: music derived through free expression and music reflective of a larger ideology. Adorno himself admits that these categories are to some extent artificial. He states the process of teasing out the vast array of potential critical awareness found within phenomena is through the ‘spontaneity of objective fantasy’ (Adorno, 1984, p.153). I believe Adorno is not stating that the distinction between ‘serious’, ‘popular’, ‘industrial’ or ‘new’ music is rigid, only useful. Thomson makes a similar point, arguing that Adorno introduces the distinction between ‘popular’ and ‘serious’ music as a ‘starting point’ and not ‘in order to re-enforce it’ (Thomson, 2006, p. 47). The distinction enables him to make critical insights but is by no means a fixed or universal category. Critical theory is an evolving practice as society develops.
Conclusion
I have endeavoured to show that Adorno is entitled to claim he has identified genuinely informative categories through which to classify music, as well as the right to classify music at all despite the appearance of an enlightenment abstracting tendency. Yes, to some extent the distinction he creates between ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ music is artificial, but tensions are inevitable within the negative dialectical method.
I began this essay by introducing Adorno’s critique of mass culture. I then outlined Douglas Kellner’s criticism in his essay ‘Adorno and the Dialectics of Mass Culture’: that Adorno is perhaps guilty of betraying his own insistence on the priority of the particular over the universal concept. I then argued that, far from betraying this view, Adorno’s writing on music in fact comes to encapsulate it. This is because cultural critique cannot take place within a vacuum and, in order to elucidate the tensions contained in the particularity of individual instances of culture, they must be understood according to somewhat artificial categories in order to illuminate emerging dynamics in contemporary society. I have therefore aimed to answer two questions. Firstly, is Adorno guilty of violating his own methodological principles? To this my answer is ‘no’ because elucidation of particularity, to some extent, requires the submission of particulars to concepts. Secondly, has Adorno correctly identified genuinely informative categories by which to classify music? To this my answer is ‘yes’ because a critical theory requires the tension of a dialectic in order to tease out the distinctions contained between pieces of music even if those categories are to some extent artificial. Therefore, Adorno’s criticisms of popular culture are justified.
Bibliography
Adorno, TW. ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ in ‘Prisms’. (1967) Cambridge MA
​
Adorno, T.W. ‘On Popular Music’. http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/SWA/On_popular_music_1.shtml
​
Originally published in: Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, New York: Institute of Social Research, 1941, IX, 17-48
​
Adorno, T.W, ‘Negative Dialectics’ (2007) Continuum
​
Adorno, T.W. ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression in Listening’ in ‘The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture’, Ed. Berstein, J.(1991) Routledge
​
Adorno. T.W, ‘Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays in Modern Music’ (1992) Verso.
​
Adorno, T.W. ‘The Essay as Form’ in ‘New German Critique, No. 32. (Spring - Summer, 1984) New German Critique
​
Adorno, T.W. ‘Essays on Music’ Ed. Leppert, R (2002) University of California Press
​
Benjamin, W. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (2008) Penguin
​
Geuss, R. ‘Art and Criticism in Adorno’s Aesthetics’ in ‘European Journal of Philosophy 6:3’ (1998) Blackwell
​
Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T.W. ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ (1973) Penguin
​
Jarvis, S. ‘Adorno: A Critical Introduction’ (2007) Polity Press
​
Kellner, D. ‘Thedor W. Adorno and the Dialectics of Mass Culture’ in ‘Adorno: A Critical Reader’, Ed. Gibson, N. and Rubin, A. (2002) Blackwell
​
Adorno T.W. ‘Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays in Modern Music’ trans. Livingstone, R (1992) Verso.
​
Subotnik, Rosengard, R. ‘The Challenge of Contemporary Music’ in Subotnik, R. ‘Developing Variations’ (1991) Minneapolis.
​
‘The Cambridge Companion to Adorno’, Ed. Kuhn, T. (2004) Cambridge University Press
​
Thomson, A. ‘Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed’ (2006) Continuum
​
Witkin, R.W. ‘Adorno on Popular Culture’ (2003) Routledge