On Music, Value and Utopia: Nostalgia for an Age yet to Come?

156 Pages·2018·0.89 MB·English

by  Stan Erraught

On Music, Value and Utopia
Values and Identities: Crossing Philosophical Borders
Series Editors: Paul Crowther is Professor of Philosophy at the National
University of Ireland, Galway
Tsarina Doyle is Lecturer in Philosophy at the National University
of Ireland, Galway
How do values define human identity and the different activities through
which this identity finds expression? Values and Identities: Crossing Philo-
sophical Borders publishes research-led monographs and edited collections
that face this problem head on. Titles in this series investigate specific forms
of value and, in particular, how they interact across societal contexts to form
more complex identities.
Titles in the Series:
Virtue as Identity: Emotions and the Moral Personality
Aleksandar Fatić
Human Value, Environmental Ethics and Sustainability: The Precautionary
Ecosystem Health Principle
Mark Ryan
Normative Identity
Per Bauhn
Incommensurability and Its Implications for Practical Reasoning, Ethics and
Justice
Martijn Boot
Charles Taylor’s Doctrine of Strong Evaluation: Ethics and Ontology in a
Scientific Age
Michiel Meijer
On Music, Value and Utopia: Nostalgia for an Age Yet to Come?
Stan Erraught
Partial Values: A Comparative Study in the Limits of Objectivity
Kevin DeLapp
The Value of Money: The Metaphysics of Financial Value
Eyja M. Brynjarsdottir (forthcoming)
Psychosis, Refusal and Autonomy: A Phenomenological Study of Mental
Health Detention
Owen Earnshaw (forthcoming)
On Music, Value and
Utopia: Nostalgia for an
Age Yet to Come?
Stan Erraught
Publis hed by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd
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Copyright © 2018 Stan Erraught
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: HB 978-1-78660-604-4
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ISBN: 978-1-78660-604-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN: 978-1-78660-605-1 (electronic)
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Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Introduction vii
1 Private Music: On the Harmony of the Faculties 1
On Music and Meaningfulness 3
On Aesthetic Judgement and Experience 8
Pop and Experience 19
2 Social Music: Music Says ‘We’? 33
Music and the Social 35
Sensus Communis 1 38
The Kantian Utopia 42
Sensus Communis 2 43
Pop Judging 54
3 Silent Music: A Soundless Utopia? 67
Adorno Contra Kant 68
A Constellation of the Existing and the Non-Existing 72
Drowning out the Silence 77
4 Music in Its Place/Music out of Place 93
One Modernity, One Modernism? 102
Lost in Music 108
Reading the Sensus Communis Back into Aesthetic Theory 114
Bibliography 123
Index 129
About the Author 131
v

Introduction
This is a book about music and philosophy. More specifically, it is a book
about popular music and philosophy. More specifically still, its philosophi-
cal commitments are rooted in the critical theory of Theodor Adorno and his
most significant antecedent, Kant.
It might be the case that, from his large corpus of writing, among Adorno’s
most read pieces are a handful of essays he wrote about jazz and popular
music1 more generally. These are often read in isolation, by those studying
popular music, cultural studies or sociology, and the obvious hostility to the
qualities admired in such music by devotees can be irritating to many who
read him. It seems immediately clear to many who encounter his work this
way that he simply does not ‘get’ popular music, that he is elitist, unable
to see that the music he privileges – the ‘classical’ – is just as socially con-
ditioned as jazz or pop and that the autonomy that Adorno claims for it, in
contrast to the complicity of popular music with ‘the culture industry’, is
predicated on a great deal of social machinery working ‘backstage’ to sustain
it. The temptation to pass over Adorno’s work on popular music as either
snobbish and possibly racist elitism, or as work that, while managing to
describe in somewhat broad strokes certain social truths about popular music,
its production and its reception, his deafness to the potentially emancipatory
qualities and aesthetic worth of at least some works in the broad area renders
his critique one-sided.
My starting point is that, unless read in conjunction with other aspects
of his authorship, these essays will indeed seem one-sided: the view is that,
without grasping some of the complexities of Adorno’s understanding of the
relation between the aesthetic and the social, as most completely expressed
in his final, unfinished and posthumously published work, Aesthetic Theory,
vii
viii Introduction
it is impossible to fully grasp the reasons why he was so venomous in his
criticism of popular music.
Before exploring the reasons why I think it is necessary to bring Aesthetic
Theory into the debate about popular music, I will summarise what Adorno
did say about jazz and pop and look at some of the critical reception of these
essays. The corpus of Adorno’s writing about popular music amounts to
maybe half-a-dozen essays all told, of which three express the core of what
he has to say on the subject. These are ‘On Jazz’ (1936), ‘On Popular Music’
(1941) and ‘On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression in Listen-
ing’ (1938). As has been noted,2 Adorno, sensitive to the most minute detail
when writing about music he liked, was often surprisingly vague when talk-
ing about popular music. In ‘On Jazz’, for instance, it is unclear exactly what
kind of jazz he is talking about: he refers to ‘orchestras’ quite frequently,
suggesting that the commercial and rather staid swing style of the white
bands such as Paul Whiteman’s is closer to what he has in mind than either
New Orleans small bands or the more rhythmically complex work of Count
Basie’s band and others. He dismisses as ‘highly questionable’ the notion that
jazz is ‘genuine black music’3 and in any case, whatever the origin story, its
works are now ‘completely abstractly preformed . . . as commodities’.4 All
of the music’s supposed qualities, its syncopation, it harmonic freedom, the
blue notes are taken to be formulaic, an overlay of false spontaneity on top
of a mass-produced base. Most egregious from Adorno’s point of view is the
notion that this music is somehow democratic: championing jazz because it
is ‘the people’s music’ is the worst kind of condescension. In ‘On Popular
Music’, Adorno repeats his identification of the difference between popular
music and ‘serious music’ as rooted in the standardisation that permeates
‘the whole structure’ of the former.5 It is the eternal repetition of the nothing
new. In serious music, by contrast, ‘the detail contains the whole’.6 Every
element is necessary and thought through, by the composer, ab initio, from
whole cloth: this is only true of ‘good’ serious music – bad music can be as
‘rigid and mechanical’ as pop. The standardisation implicit in the structure
of popular music is replicated in its marketing and consumption: a series of
‘response-mechanisms’ is assumed, entirely ‘antagonistic’ to the ideal of
‘individuality in a free, liberal society’.7 Popular music is implicitly totali-
tarian. These ‘response mechanisms’ are characterised by laziness, by the
expectation that the music will ‘do the listening for us’. They depend on the
notion of ‘leisure-time’ as distinct from work, where pleasure is to be taken
without effort. Thus, pop is regressive in form and in content: ‘baby-talk’,
infantilised lyrical expression, is valorised. Because of the essential shallow-
ness of the form, the audience, uncritical as it is, needs constant novelty, and
a kind of pseudo-expertise develops, whereby ‘jitterbugs’ – devoted fans –
fetishise minor differences and instances of ‘pseudo-individuality’. In ‘On
Introduction ix
the Fetish-Character of Music’, the complicity of serious music in the com-
modification and mystification of music is brought into the equation. Adorno
blames radio, and the popularisation of the classical through that medium,
for desensitising the listener to anything other than the surface charm of
the work. The corollary of this listener is the jazz fan with his contempt for
the ‘corny’ and abuse of all that is not ‘up to date’. Neither is able to listen
properly, and, in their antagonistic cooperation, they cause all listening to
regress. Worth noting here is the fact that Adorno understands that the social
situation of music implicates everyone – it is not possible to withdraw from
the depredations of the era.
Adorno’s method in these essays is to read the social situation off the
music: the stilted, pseudo-novelty of jazz suggests a form of life appropriate
to it, and he has little compunction in deciding, without much in the way of
empirical evidence, that the form of life suggested by the debasement of the
music must, in fact, be at least latent in its reception. He is, however, alive
to the danger of ironising ones fetishistic absorption in music one knows to
be beneath you: it is, as he outrageously suggests in ‘On Jazz’, a surrender to
castration.8 To summarise: popular music, for Adorno, is essentially different,
not just in quality, but in kind from ‘serious’ music, although the latter runs a
serious risk of infection. It is characterised by means and relations of produc-
tion and consumption that are wholly inimical to grown-up aesthetic compre-
hension. Any claim it may have to being ‘progressive’ is bogus: it is wholly
in hock to capitalism and signifies a complicity in one own oppression.
It is important, however, to recall that Adorno wrote in a number of distinct
registers, and in a variety of contexts. So, while the essays in question were
not written as ‘cultural theory’, they can be read and taught in such a context,
while all the time sounding and feeling a little off-key. Aesthetic Theory,
though, is certainly not cultural theory; it is a work of philosophical aesthet-
ics, albeit one that fundamentally questions the validity and procedures of the
tradition it wishes to both complete and supersede. As with all of Adorno’s
philosophical work, Kant and Hegel are fundamental to understanding both
his method and the conceptual content of his arguments, even as they prob-
lematise both method and conceptual determination as the proper employ-
ment of philosophy.
I believe that Kant’s Critique of Judgement is central to any understand-
ing of Aesthetic Theory. Adorno does not always mention his interlocutor by
name, and arguments will be referenced without attribution. Nevertheless,
I think it is clear to anyone familiar with the third Critique that Adorno has
Kant’s foundational contribution to modern philosophical aesthetics con-
stantly in view. The connecting tissue I wish to examine between the third
Critique and Aesthetic Theory will be concerned in the main with interro-
gating Adorno’s reconceptualisation of the third and fourth moments of the