adorno 315The notion of alienation recurs in Adorno’s work, and it often has
problematic consequences. He opposes any conception in which ‘the
hope that what in reality missed its opportunity should come to unity
and peace in art’, so art is an ‘anticipation’ of the abolition of alien-
ation, not an immediate counter to it. This opposition forms the basis
of his repeated claim that ‘Music, which intends reconciliation, is most
allergic to the illusion of reconciliation’ ( 16 : 143 – 4 ). The extreme –
and not strictly necessary – consequence of his suspicion of false rec-
onciliation is that music should not transcend ‘alienation’, but should
be ‘pure, uncompromising presentation of the absolute contradiction
itself’ (ibid.). This idea forms the basis of his insistence that music
should critically ‘oppose’ the nature of contemporary reality, rather
than functioning as a consolation, and of his advocacy of the techni-
cally advanced, dissonant music of the Second Vienna School. There
are, of course, plenty of contexts in which music can justifiably function
as a consolation. Adorno can therefore only be talking of music that
functions at the level of philosophy, as a form of critique of existing
historical reality, and this will involve important difficulties (on this see
Geuss 1998 ). Equally problematic is the fact that the account of what
music is supposed to resist is suspiciously vague.
It is easy to appear complacent if one criticises Adorno in relation
to such matters. Modernity unquestionably has involved ‘the worst’,
in the form of industrialised genocide, and other technologically pro-
duced mass suffering. Technology which could feed the world, increase
peaceful communication, diminish suffering, etc., often helps to do
precisely the opposite. However, it is problematic to make this into a
verdict on modernity as a whole, as though all forms of technology are
the root of the problem, rather than that root being the social forms
within which technology is employed. Adorno clearly thinks the latter
is actually the case, but he too often conflates a whole series of dif-
fering factors into the crude version of a dialectic of enlightenment.
InNegative Dialectics, referring to Marx’s Feuerbach thesis about phi-
losophy having interpreted the world and now needing to change it,
he talks, for example, of philosophy as ‘remaining alive’ because ‘the
moment of its realisation’ was missed ( 6 : 15 ). The moment in question
appears to be a revolution in a Marxian sense. Critical philosophy is
consequently based on the need to keep alive the idea of what should
have been realised – i.e. a humane society – in circumstances where it is
no longer possible to bring it about, revolution itself having been shown
to produce new kinds of inhumanity. Once such a model is adopted,