Summary
Philosopher and critic whose Philosophie der neuen Musik (1948) is read in essay 37 of Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile and Other Essays as a traveling theory gone tougher: Adorno takes György Lukács’s subject-object dialectic and refuses its reconciliation, finding in Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music the impossibility of synthesis (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.411-414).
Details
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Adorno is virtually unthinkable without History and Class Consciousness, and also without his resistance to its triumphalism; he called Lukács’s choice, in a famous anti-Lukács essay, a kind of false reconciliation under duress (PDF p.411).
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For Adorno, modern music’s premise is dissonance, the subject-object impasse raised to an uncompromisable principle; instead of class consciousness there is the monad, instead of positive thinking “definitive negation” (PDF p.412-413).
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Schoenberg’s mastery of the atonal technique ends by dominating him — the technique becomes “a second blind nature” and “virtually extinguishes the subject” (PDF p.414).
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Earlier in the book Adorno figures in the Introduction and essays 16-17: music, with Adorno as model, cross-fertilizes the worldly concerns (PDF p.25), and exile is read through his “it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home” (PDF p.190).
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In “From Silence to Sound and Back Again” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Adorno’s Philosophie der Neuen Musik (1948) gives the negative teleology of new music: Schönberg’s achievement carried music beyond Wagner into unreconciled intransigence, and new music, having taken upon itself “all the darkness and guilt of the world”, dies away unheard and sees absolute oblivion as its goal — “the surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked” (quoted PDF p.477); against Mann’s Zeitblom twist, Adorno’s finality requires music’s self-termination in silence. Beethoven is a privileged figure for him, with his late phase and “spätstil” (as printed), and, on Beethoven’s third-period masterpieces, late works are the catastrophes (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.477-478, 498).
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In the closing essays of Reflections on Exile and Other Essays Adorno is the theorist of the lost cause, of annulment and of writing as dwelling: his analysis of resignation at a moment of defeat (quoted at pp.167-168) — capitulation to the collective as the sacrifice of autonomous thinking, against which “the uncompromisingly critical thinker, who neither superscribes his conscience nor permits himself to be terrorized into action, is in truth the one who does not give up” — is offered in tentative conclusion to “On Lost Causes” (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.508-509); Minima Moralia’s annulment of the émigré’s past life, its “background” rubric included, is the principle Said realized he had willy-nilly accepted (PDF p.517); and “Between Worlds” takes from him both that reconciliation under duress is cowardly and inauthentic and that “the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing” (PDF p.521-522).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, György Lukács, Traveling theory, Exile