Adorno’s Years in California 277Schoenberg drew the conclusion that offers itself to the contemporary
artist as a way of expressing the fragmentariness and fractured nature
of the work of art. ‘Today the only works that really count are those
which are no longer works at all.’^20 The twelve-tone composer must not
blind himself to this insight. He must remain conscious of the historical
significance of dodecaphonic thinking since it made it possible to
overcome tradition and open up the horizon. But equally, it may itself
be vulnerable, since otherwise it would never be possible to develop a
qualitatively new language of music, an emancipated language.
Adorno tried to apply the lessons of his own philosophy of music in
his own compositions, which he had taken up again before the move to
California.^21 The songs for piano that he wrote no longer stuck dogmat-
ically to the rules of twelve-tone technique. In the six Trakl songs, op. 5,
which he completed in 1941, he freely varied the scope of the technique.
For example, in Entlang, op. 5, no. 4, the row was expanded to ninety-
eight notes. The length of the row differed in all six settings.^22
Adorno’s dictum that contemporary composition must prove itself
through its reflection on the antinomies it contained within itself was
accentuated by his assertion that art in general must be a form of know-
ledge. But how is it possible for a work of art to become knowledge –
and not just any knowledge, but a radical form of knowledge that
amounts to a critique of the catastrophic state of the world that also
connects up with the state of art? Adorno’s answer, one that then became
a focal point of his theory of aesthetics, is that the critical insights of
a Schoenberg, a Picasso, a Joyce or a Kafka are released in the frag-
mentary structure of their works.^23 This fragmentation involves not just
the loss of aesthetic form, but in modern art it also spells the liquidation
of meaning. For music, the ‘dissociation of meaning and expression’
means that its end links up with its origin. That origin ‘is gestural in
nature, and closely related to the origin of tears. It is the gesture of
release.’^24 The music of the avant-garde resists social constraints and, as
oppositional art, represents the gestures of lament about the suffering
produced by growing social antagonisms. Authentic music ‘has its
happiness in the perception of misfortune; all of its beauty is in denying
itself the illusion of beauty.’ Because its fragmentary nature makes
enjoyment difficult, ‘no one... wishes to become involved with it.... It
is the surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked.’^25
This image of messages from the shipwrecked, or messages in a
bottle, which appealed to both Adorno and Horkheimer, provided
the underlying motif in the texts they worked on intensively from the
beginning of 1942, and which were brought together as Philosophical
Fragments two years later. The manuscript contained a sentence that
was programmatic for the whole work and which could well have found
a place in the Philosophy of Modern Music. The authors spoke of their
notes as a ‘message’ (Rede) addressed to an ‘imaginary witness’... ‘to
whom we can pass it on – lest it perish with us.’^26 Just as Adorno and