144 music, philosophy, and modernity
work Hegel is concerned with finding ways to replace the ‘substance’
of religion, as the power which binds a community together, with what
can be achieved through human reason. One reaction to this issue at
the time is the elevation, envisaged by Hoffmann, of music and other
art to being the locus for what had previously been religious feelings.
However, in this period, art itself becomes subject to the same processes
as lead to the problem to which music is seen as a solution. Dahlhaus
talks of the ‘dialectic of emancipation and alienation, autonomy and
loss of substance’ (ibid.: 238 ) that occurs in modern music, beginning
with Beethoven. Such a dialectic also occurs in modern societies. Indi-
vidual freedom leads on the one hand to the erosion of intersubjective
bonds and shared practices, and on the other hand to the removal of
repressive traditional constraints. The two processes can occur in rela-
tion to the same practices. One consequence of this dialectic in modern
Western societies has been a need for new collective experiences which
restore a sense of community, of the kind suggested by Hegel’s notion
of ‘the universal feeling of the congregation as a whole’, which relates
to the subject’s ‘finding itself again’ in music. For music this has impor-
tant consequences that change the nature of opera and symphony con-
certs and the music played in them, and, later, change events like rock
concerts, which offer various kinds of collective escape from isolation.
There have also, of course, been much more sinister forms of the use of
music to generate collective experience. Hitler’s attempted appropria-
tion of Wagner as a means of collective seduction is the most notorious,
but the manipulation characteristic of many areas of the popular music
industry relies on the same kind of needs.
Another way of interpreting the loss of substance in art is conse-
quently in terms of the refusal to be reconciled with dominant aesthetic
expectations, of the kind which Adorno will see as essential to an art
that defies being compromised by its relationship to the culture industry
or to political repression. Adorno inverts Hegel’s worry about the loss
of the ‘universally human interest in art’, in the name of the hope that
he thinks is contained in authentic works of art’sresistanceto society. He
therefore approves a move away from the distortion of collective interest
in art by what he regards as the false universality of the culture indus-
try, in the name of precisely what concerned Hegel about Beethoven’s
potential alienation of his wider audience. This stance leads to the
dilemma that art’s collective social effects may become minimised by
the attempt to express what the dominant attitudes of a society do
not acknowledge. Art can thus be seen as suspended between fulfilling