Adorno's Concept Research Articles

Neoliberal Reason, Contemporary Music, and Proximal Critique

Abstract Theodor W. Adorno suggested that music is mediated by socially derived forms of reason, a provocation here considered with respect to neoliberalism. Drawing on a Foucauldian understanding of neoliberalism, which in Wendy Brown's summary takes neoliberalism as ‘a specific and normative mode of reason’, I consider what this means for immanent features of music and processes of its composition. This critical attention to music's formal, aesthetic register enables me to go beyond the more well-established (although nonetheless valuable) frameworks for discussing music and neoliberalism, which focus on music's relation to labour conditions and creative industries. A range of music and sonic art is discussed, work by Chino Amobi, Brian Eno, Bryn Harrison, Sarah Hennies, Johannes Kreidler, Wolfgang Rihm, Marina Rosenfeld, and John Zorn. I ultimately argue that some core features of Adorno's conception of critical art and music need reformulating for the neoliberal age.

Public Responsibility Towards Indonesian Idol's Music Talent: An Adorno Perspective

The music expressed around us, particularly in the realm of competitive music, faces significant challenges in maintaining subjectivity and objectivity to ensure a fair competition process. This study examines reality shows like Indonesian Idol, questioning whether they are pure competitions or avenues for capitalist profit. From Adorno's perspective, this issue is linked to societal impact, highlighting three main problems: standardization, commodification, and massification. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, this research involved 67 respondents who completed questionnaires to explore the systematic flaws in Indonesian Idol’s competition structure. The study aimed to analyse how these flaws align with Adorno's concepts of standardization, commodification, and massification, and their influence on public perception and critical thinking. The quantitative aspect involved statistical analysis of questionnaire responses, while the qualitative approach included in-depth interviews to gain insights into participants' views on transparency and fairness in the competition. The findings indicate that Indonesian Idol’s competition system is heavily influenced by industry standards that prioritize commercial success over artistic integrity. This results in a homogenized musical output that caters to mass appeal, undermining the authenticity of the competition. Additionally, the commodification of contestants transforms them into marketable products rather than genuine artists, while the massification process dilutes the cultural significance of the musical content presented. The study concludes that for reality shows to serve as responsible public entertainment, they must instil transparency and fairness in their competition processes. Implementing these principles can foster a more critical and discerning audience, ensuring that such shows contribute positively to the cultural landscape rather than merely serving commercial interests

The Kantian origin of Adorno's concept of metaphysical experience

AbstractMetaphysical experience is one of the most obscure concepts in Adorno's Negative Dialectics. The obscurity stems partly from the way in which metaphysical experience is antinomic. To describe the antinomic character of metaphysical experience, Adorno situates it in relation to Kant's first Critique. He distinguishes two conceptions of antinomy in the first Critique: first, the explicit conception of antinomy that the transcendental dialectic exposes and resolves; and second, the implicit conception of antinomy that remains insoluble and structures the first Critique and Adorno's own concept of metaphysical experience. Yet Adorno does not clarify what he means by the antinomic structure of the first Critique and how this structure underlies his own concept of metaphysical experience. Nor does the scholarship on Adorno. This article reconstructs Adorno's response to these questions, and, in so doing, demonstrates the Kantian origin of Adorno's concept of metaphysical experience in Negative Dialectics.

Perjury and Pardon, Volume 1 by Jacques Derrida

Reviewed by: Perjury and Pardon, Volume 1 by Jacques Derrida Ralph Shain DERRIDA, Jacques. Perjury and Pardon, Volume 1. Translated by David Wills. Edited by Ginette Michaud and Nicholas Cotton. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022. 368 pp. Cloth, $45.00 This is the translation of a volume in the posthumously published series of Derrida's lecture courses. The most important of these are the early Heidegger: The Question of Being and History (1964–65) and Theory and Practice (1975–76), no parts of which were published by Derrida. Substantial portions of the first volume of the lectures on Perjury and Pardon were published as separate essays, so the main question concerning this book is what it adds to the published portions. For those readers who are familiar with Derrida's most famous work and are curious about his deconstructive ethics ("ethics beyond ethics") and have not read any of the essays drawn from this book (such as "To Forgive: the Unforgiveable and the Imprescriptible," "Literature in Secret," and "Typewriter Ribbon"), this is a good place to approach the topic. One will find here many of Derrida's classic moves, such as the deconstruction of texts, concepts, and traditions. One will find conditions of possibility that are also conditions of impossibility, concepts that are contaminated from within by their opposites, and appeals to the experience of the impossible and to the distinction between a general and restricted economy. One will also find here those points that seem to be Derrida's weakest, such as the insistence on the privacy of the mental, a rather wobbly treatment of the separation between intending and causality, and the [End Page 545] claim, important for Derrida's "poetico-performative" theory of truth, that all constatives depend on a prior performative—a promise to tell the truth, always already contaminated by failure and hence a "perjury." (The first and third of these are also found in Derrida's published work.) The topics in this book are helpful in situating Derrida vis-à-vis other thinkers, especially those in the Frankfurt School. Derrida's concept of an impossible, paradoxical pardon might be compared with Adorno's concept of utopian moments. The promise of truth implicit in every constative might be compared with Habermas's quasi-transcendental ideal speech situation. Even if one has read one or more of the published portions, if one is unsure how they fit together, these lectures will allow one to see how they cohere. In the third session Derrida provides an outline of the project, which he qualifies with the comment that "I am aware of the grossly schematic character of this outline." Grossly schematic, yes, but grossly schematic outlines are very helpful. Here's the gist of the outline: "stubbornly tracking down in the Biblio-Koranic tradition a logic of economy, an economy, a sublime ruse which . . . comes to contradict and undermine a demand for finite-infinite forgiveness, forgiveness without condition, the aneconomic forgiveness that is nevertheless at the heart of this same thinking . . . showing that on the supposed Greek side, the aneconomic notion of forgiveness comes to organize the aneconomic logic and 'syngnomic' rationality of a so-called Greek culture." In short, the concept of forgiveness that is derived from the monotheistic traditions of forgiveness claims not to be pragmatic or goal oriented, but Derrida shows that it is, whereas the Greek concept that is the closest equivalent, and is supposed to be entirely pragmatic, has moments that exceed any limited economy. (If this still sounds opaque, see Derrida's essay on Bataille and general economy in Writing and Difference.) Even those who are well versed in deconstructive ethics and have read the published parts of this book may still find it quite interesting. Derrida's verbal elucidations of the typescript are transcribed from recordings and placed in footnotes. There are quite a few of these, and some of them are interesting. The editorial apparatus will allow one to confirm that one has indeed read all of the published parts, which one should not take for granted since a couple of them are in relatively obscure venues. The readings of texts are of variable interest, but even in the...

Utopian Spontaneity: Adorno's Concept of Mimesis and Surrealist Automatic Writing

Utopian Spontaneity: Adorno's Concept of Mimesis and Surrealist Automatic Writing

Archival Silence in the Collections of Dietrich Schulz-Köhn

Archival Silence in the Collections of Dietrich Schulz-Köhn

The "Primal Pseudos": Adorno's Concept of Nationalism

Even though the term “primal pseudos” appears only once in Theodor W. Adorno’s lecture History and Freedom, it is the key for the understanding of Adorno’s concept of nation and nationalism. In the aforementioned lecture the term “primal pseudos” describes the contradiction immanent in the concept of the nation. The critical investigation into the immanent contradiction of the concept of the nation discloses the impossibility of what nationalism wants rather than its falseness.

The melancholic gaze: Adorno's concept of interpretation as dialectical negation and critical speculation

The melancholic gaze: Adorno's concept of interpretation as dialectical negation and critical speculation

Cultural tourism policy in developing regions: The case of Sarawak, Malaysia

Abstract There is a need for empirical data that can be used to confirm or disconfirm literature that makes a case for functional linkages between cultural activity, inbound tourism and wider economic activity. This motivates a case-based investigation using Sarawak, a culturally rich state of Malaysia and which is currently trying to diversify and uplift its economy. Using interviews of tourism operators, artists and cultural brokers, visits to art venues and examination of documentary material, the paper identifies Sarawak's cultural and tourism policies, the ways they have been operationalized, and some of the concrete outcomes. The findings are interpreted by parsing Adorno's concepts of significance and function into their normative, representational and material dimensions. Tourism planners, it is found, have exoticized and marginalized local communities at the cost of developing a diversified economy. The policy dilemma extends to policy objects. How can artists relocated to urban areas be enabled to be productive on their own terms, and how can faraway communities lend support to their artists? Solutions might be sought, it is argued, using a participatory approach to cultural tourism planning.

On progress and reason: stories of gods, animals and humans

PurposeWhile transhumanists and posthumanists understand the human condition as mutable, for transhumanists, this represents the possibility for enhancement, opening up a teleological narrative of evolution toward. For posthumanists, it represents a fracturing of the liberal human subject, undermining its hegemonic principles. The former advocates the potentiality of instrumental rationality, the latter engages with values, demanding ethical consideration of the implications of the unmooring. This paper aims to conceive of a way to underpin posthumanist thought to enable to serve a more effective critique of transhumanist aims.Design/methodology/approachThis is a theoretical paper that outlines a history of transhumanist thought and the roots of posthumanism. It provides a partially reconstructed enlightenment humanist framework to bolster the effectiveness of posthumanism as a critique of transhumanist thought.FindingsThe paper recognizes Theodor Adorno's conception that the central contradiction inherent to enlightenment thinking is the entanglement of knowledge and power. Hence, the metanarrative of progress as historical fact is fundamentally imbued with an imperial, colonizing force. For reason to achieve its promise as the organ of progress, it must become self-aware of its own limitations and its own potential destructiveness. Humility is, thus, vital in the task of preventing instrumental reason leading to inhuman ends.Originality/valueWhilst developments such as “metahumanism” attempt to bring “posthumanism” and “transhumanism” into direct conversation, it is done from the perspective of uniting their positions. Here, the author endeavors instead to consider their antithetical nature and in particular whether posthumanism can provide an effective critique of transhumanism. Drawing on Adorno and Feenberg in particular, the author attempts to justify the posthuamanist theory but also to employ a partially reconstructed enlightenment humanism to bolster its fruitfulness as a critique of transhumanism.

Editing Experiment: The New Modernist Editing and Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage

This article examines the challenges experimental writing poses for textual editing, drawing on the experience of the Dorothy Richardson Editions Project, which was inaugurated in 2007 with the aim of producing new scholarly editions of Richardson's fiction and letters. Here we focus on Richardson's thirteen-volume novel sequence Pilgrimage (1915–67) and the particular problems its constantly unfolding experimental aesthetic present for both the critic and the scholarly editor. We adopt Adorno's concept of ‘constructive methods’ to describe Richardson's project, the composition of a narrative without a predictable endpoint, asking what kind of editorial practice best captures her unconventional and deliberately inconsistent approach to writing. We conclude by discussing the implications that editing Pilgrimage might have for a broader understanding of modernist aesthetics.

The "Authoritarian Personality" Reconsidered: the Phantom of "Left Fascism".

This article explores the question of "Left fascism," which emerged in relation to discussions around the Student Movement in the German Federal Republic in the crucial decade between 1967-1977. The term was originally coined by Jürgen Habermas in a lecture entitled "The Phantom Revolution and its Children" in which he suggests that the extreme voluntarism of the studentscould not but be characterized as "Left fascist." Such a characterization becomes the basis for a vitally important exchange of letters between Herbert Marcuse and Theodor W. Adorno from January to August of 1969 on the relation between theory and praxis. After first sketching Adorno's conception of the "authoritarian personality," with the help of Sándor Ferenczi's concept of the "identification with the aggressor," the article proceeds to examine the exchange of the letters between Adorno and Marcuse, illustrating Adorno's changed orientation: that "fascism" or "authoritarianism" maybe either left or right. Finally, some conclusions are drawn about the authoritarian tendencies of the contemporary Left.

Negative freedom or integrated domination? Adorno versus Honneth

AbstractAccording to Axel Honneth, Adorno's very idea of social critique is self‐defeating. It tries to account for what is wrong, deformed, or pathological without providing any positive yardstick. Honneth's idea of critique is a diagnosis of chronic dysfunctions in the relations of recognition upon which the society in question is grounded. Under such conditions of misrecognition, institutions that embody what he calls social freedom regress to negative freedom. However, such a deficit‐based notion of critique does not square with Honneth's own diagnosis of our present: namely, the transformation from welfare capitalism to neoliberalism. In fact, Honneth's diagnosis is very much in line with Adorno's idea of late capitalism as a society of “total integration.” Adorno's matching conception of critique, it is argued, avoids the problems Honneth runs into. At the basis of Adorno's critical idiom are two key points: an explanation of how social relations can be functional while contradictory and an account of social domination that is diffused throughout society while being differentially experienced by different classes. Adorno's answer to Honneth's concern, regarding the lack of a positive yardstick, is that it is domination that gives meaning to our idea of freedom, rather than the other way around.

The aesthetics of the shock, part I

Even though Freud's well-known concept of the uncanny has gained considerable influence in the field of aesthetics and beyond, the meaning of the term still remains vague. Is it a mere psychological concept with aesthetic and social implications or is it a culturally produced experience? And although Adorno’s aesthetic theory does not place the concept of the uncanny as its central axis, when linked to Freud's theory, Adorno's conception deepens not only various interpretations of modern art, but also our understanding of the very nature of artistic practice. Psychoanalytic interpretations of modern art couple the uncanny with technology and progress since human-machine interactions usually entail disturbing experiences. Yet no psychoanalytic interpretation of art to date has seen the uncanny as the theoretical foundation of all art. The first part of this essay deals with Adorno’s concept of aesthetic representation in relation to Freud’s uncanny and examines Benjamin’s application of that reasoning in interpreting the technological uncanny and the artistic uncanny.

THEODOR WIESENGRUND ADORNO: SPUNTI PER UNA FILOSOFIA DEL TEMPO MUSICALE

Adorno was not only a very important philosopher and sociologist, but he is universally recognized as the most influential musicologist of the 20th century. As a composer he was a pupil of Alban Berg in Vienna. Adorno has often analyzed the concept of time in music, which is one of the main topics of his writings. Its importance lies in the role it plays for the ful understanding of composers such as Beethoven, Wagner, Debussy or Stravinsky. In this article, I will focus on the concept of Einstand or “suspension” of time, comparing the analysis of Beethoven's and Debussy's music. Adorno's dialectical conception of time will be commented and examined.

The Politics of Repressed Guilt: The Tragedy of Austrian Silence by Claudia Leeb

Reviewed by: The Politics of Repressed Guilt: The Tragedy of Austrian Silence by Claudia Leeb Catrina Hoppes Claudia Leeb, The Politics of Repressed Guilt: The Tragedy of Austrian Silence. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2018. 248 pp. What form of guilt for the crimes of the Third Reich concerns Austria? Can political guilt be passed down through the generations? How should Austrians engage productively with collective and individual feelings of guilt? These and other questions have been a main focus of political discourse in Austria in the last decades. With the rise of the far right in both Europe and the United States, addressing these concerns has become all the more pressing. While many recent contributions to this ongoing memory debate perhaps all too optimistically highlight Austria's increased willingness to question its official historical narrative, Claudia Leeb sets out to define the means by which Austria's relationship to the past continues to be characterized by "immense repression" (9). Drawing mainly on early Frankfurt School critical theory and psychoanalytic theory, Leeb argues for the importance of what she terms "embodied reflective judgment." This form of judgment, which requires both critical thinking and intuitive feelings, works to negate the artificial dichotomy often drawn between the mind and the body. It is a useful corrective against defense [End Page 122] mechanisms used by guilty nations and past scholarship that devalues the role of emotions in making critical judgments. Recognizing thinking and feeling as deeply connected, Leeb claims, is essential for an authentic (and long overdue) engagement with Austria's past collusion with the Hitler regime. She demonstrates this claim convincingly in comprehensive analyses of a wide variety of sources that demonstrate that the suppression of feelings of guilt leads to a reduced capacity for critical thinking. Leeb lays the groundwork for her discussion of history, memory, and emotions with a critical analysis of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem. By putting Arendt into conversation with Theodor Adorno, Leeb highlights the central differences in their conceptualizations of individual and collective guilt. In so doing, she successfully situates her notion of embodied reflective judgment within a broader theoretical context. Leeb engages more sympathetically with Adorno, finding Arendt guilty of a "one-sided focus on thinking and rationality at the expense of feeling and emotion" (2). Drawing on Adorno's concept of non-identity, Leeb introduces the "moment of the limit," a concept she previously developed in her Power and Feminist Agency in Capitalism (2017). Through the moment of the limit, or the moment agency becomes possible, Leeb insists that resistance to totalitarianism is an option. Leeb substantiates her theoretical framework with two disturbing case studies of actual Austrian Nazi perpetrators: the case of Dr. Franz Niedermoser, a psychiatrist who "euthanized" countless patients in a Klagenfurt hospital, and Dr. Wilhelm Beiglböck, a professor at the University of Vienna, who tortured and murdered Roma and Sinti inmates in the Dachau concentration camp. Leeb identifies and dismantles the defense mechanisms used by not only perpetrators in the courtroom but also lawyers and court "experts" who, in their continued use of racist constructions and Nazi euphemisms (for instance, Umsiedlungsaktion to refer to forced deportation), further obscured the extent of Austria's responsibility for the crimes of the Holocaust. Such defense mechanisms, she argues, are the result of both a lack of feeling and an inability to think critically. Perhaps most compelling in these chapters was the exploration of the highly educated classes' frequent use of defense mechanisms that rely on the presumed divide between the body and the mind. This challenges the recurring claim that it's primarily working-class individuals who are most susceptible to authoritarianism. In the final two chapters, Leeb moves beyond her discussion of individual guilt and examines the defense mechanisms that contemporary Austrians [End Page 123] make use of to avoid collective feelings of guilt. She boldly intervenes in the continuing heated (and frequently violent) debates around the staging of Thomas Bernhard's drama Heldenplatz. Challenging recent contributions to the current Heldenplatz debate that claim Austrians have successfully come to terms with their history, Leeb insists that Austria's judgments continue to be flawed and paranoid when it comes to the Nazi past...

Imagining the Postcolonial: Discipline, Poetics, Practice in Latin American and Francophone Discourse

Imagining the Postcolonial: Discipline, Poetics, Practice in Latin American and Francophone Discourse

Competing Accounts of Progress: The Redemptive Purpose of Memory in J.B. Metz and Theodor Adorno

What unifies the accounts of history and progress presented by Adorno's Critical Theory and Metz's political theology? I show: (i) that both resist the ‘magic spell’ of an Enlightenment totality on whose strength the violent excesses of modernity have been built; (ii) that both accomplish this resistance by memory of victims or the ‘losers of history’; and (iii) that both hold out hope for the possibility of progress in time. However, the two accounts differ in important ways. These differences stem from: (i) the transference of historical subjectivity from homo emancipator to the God of Jesus’ passion; (ii) the role of the ‘eschatological proviso’ in guaranteeing theological futuricity; and (iii) the fullness of Metz's eschatological justice as compared to Adorno's conception of progress as the mere ‘avoidance of catastrophe’. This project brings the work of one of the most influential social critics of the twentieth century into dialogue with that of a politically engaged theologian of the same historical‐cultural context. In doing so, I hope to suggest the theological richness of Metz's approach but also the significant contributions of dialectical criticism to the practice of theology in the modern era.

Reconceiving Structure in Contemporary Music: New Tools in Music Theory and Analysis by Judy Lochhead

FORM AND THEORY Reconceiving Structure in Contemporary Music: New Tools in Theory and Analysis. By Judy Lochhead. (Routledge Studies in Theory, 2.) New York: Routledge, 2016. [xiv, 179 p. ISBN 9781138824331 (hardcover), $145; ISBN 9781315740744 (e-book), various.] examples, illustrations, bibliographic references, index.Lochhead's recent study is a significant contribution to music analysis that corresponds to the conceptual shiftWestern art music has undergone since the period of high modernism. The book argues that critical engagement with recent music is lagging behind; it aims not simply at reproducing the knowledge inherent in the artwork, but sets out to produce knowledge about musical experience itself-hence its insistence on structuring (rather than structure), conceived as emergent, phenomenal, and malleable (p. 7). This relates to a phenomenology of music, which has to be employed critically by the analyst, invoking a certain post-phenomenological attitude: the object of analysis is the content of listening, as a mediated, self-reflexive (p. 76).The book is divided into two parts comprising theory and practice. The first part traces the concept of in the post- WWII European and U.S. avant-garde, before introducing the tripartite framework of Lochhead's contribution to analysis: Investigating, Mapping, Speculating. The second part comprises four different case studies, designed to demonstrate the main procedures of Lochhead's productive analysis.The opening section attempts a definition of via a historiographical investigation of New according to the scientific research paradigm of the 1950s and 1960s, which served as the foundation of compositional [and therefore analytical] craft (p. 19). The interlinking of composition and analysis was furthered by several factors, examples of which include the founding of Die Reihe in Europe and of Perspectives of New in the U.S., as well as developments in academic practice. Lochhead's central claim here is that today's theory and analysis still bear the traces of the composer-theorist paradigm and of postwar epi stemic authority (p. 37).This epistemic metaphor is further traced via a comparison between musical and sociological references, while musical is shown to be frequently underdefined, at times hovering between the empirical activity of determining structural units (Ian Bent and Anthony Pople) and the discursive effect of evaluative terms such as (Robert Morgan) (pp. 51-52). In a revisiting gesture, Lochhead finds a resonance between Jacques Derrida's proliferating play of structure (p. 63) and the generative structural function of the series in Pierre Boulez (with its overtones of Theodor Adorno's conception of as distinct from the concrete elements of the work, but arising from them) (pp. 48-49).Lochhead's questioning leads not to merely another definition of structure; rather, it opens up the space for an analytical practice that involves musical listening and temporality. The former assumes the possibility of several performances (including indeterminate works) and is viewed as an interpretive activity; the latter implies that analysis is concerned with the work's becoming. As listening is phenomenologically involved in the of the work, the self-aware analyst must employ a reflective approach: Music analysis is a formal process of reflective engagement with musical works with the goal of producing knowledge by proposing new modes of engaging the work and as such contributing to the work's becoming (p. 77). The immediate implication for musical is now obvious: for Lochhead this engaging is dynamic and, to the extent that is a static unity with a fixed single origin (p. 78) it is not the object of analysis. Instead, she proposes the term structuring, to emphasize the temporality of the work's (p. …

Riddle-Character, Interpretation, and Dialectical Image: Adorno's Philosophy and the Case of Musical Performance

This article proposes that it is the notion of the “image” that provides the key to how Adorno understands interpretation in both philosophy and art. It seeks to show that it is especially music, and musical interpretation as performance, that provides the model for Adorno's conception of philosophical interpretation. It argues that interpretation is a practice that also involves the making of something, as poesis, and that Adorno's ideal for this is interpretation as musical performance. Through a rereading of the concepts of riddle-character (Rätselcharakter), interpretation (Deutung), and image (Bild) in Adorno's philosophical and musical texts from the early 1930s to the late 1960s and material from the Nachlass, the case is made that his conception of interpretation involves not only the decipherment of the riddle-character of art but also the construction of further “interpretive” riddle figurations, as “dialectical images.”