adorno 311Reproduction, Adorno reflects, for example, on Wagner’s thoughts about
how to perform Beethoven’s Ninth that we looked at in chapter 7.
He approves of Wagner’s sophisticated instrumental retouching of the
score, which aims to retain the wildness of a particular passage in perfor-
mance while conveying a musical thought that would remain hidden if
Beethoven’s instrumentation were strictly followed. Wagner’s solution
is seen by Adorno as an example of a key theme inDoE, namely the con-
nection between ‘technique/technology’ (‘Technik’), which is apparent
in Wagner’s change of instrumentation, and ‘archaism’, which is appar-
ent in the wildness that Wagner seeks to preserve. Adorno then remarks
that ‘Dialectic of enlightenment is much more complex than we have
so far conceived it’ (Adorno 2001 : 60 ). This part of the work on musi-
cal reproduction is from much the same period asDoE,and it offers a
different way of understanding the notion of such a dialectic. Adorno’s
work on musical reproduction often presents his wider concerns more
effectively than some of his well-known texts, so I shall use it to lead
into the more general discussion.
One source of Adorno’s approach is Max Weber’s groundbreaking,
incomplete text of 1921 onThe Rational and Sociological Foundations of
Music.InitWeber tries to understand both the development of modern
Western ‘classical’ music based on the tempered scale and the concomi-
tant developments in the notation of music. He asks why the tempered
tonal system, and modern polyphonic and harmonically based music
emerge in Europe, when other equally intensive musical cultures, like
those of ancient Greece or Japan, did not lead in this direction.^3 The
instructive parallel here is with the question why the roughly contem-
poraneous beginnings of the scientific revolution take place in Europe,
when Chinese science in the seventeenth century, for example, was in
many ways more advanced. Heidegger’s answer to why there is a scien-
tific revolution in Europe was that modern European thinking makes
the whole world into a objectified ‘picture’, and that this process is
the correlate of the rise of the idea of the subject as the metaphysical
ground of knowledge manifested in Descartes’cogito. From the Greek
person who ‘listens’ to being, the order of which always transcends the
subject, the move is made to the modern individual who both domi-
nates the world as ‘picture’ in science and technology, and becomes
concerned with their own subjective being. This concern goes as far as
trying wholly to objectify it in ‘cybernetics’ – i.e. in what we now think of
3 This question recurs in Weber’s work and is a key to his conception of rationalisation.