316 music, philosophy, and modernity
history – including the history of music – has to be seen in the light of
this fundamental failure, as though one knew for certain that the course
of things would have been radically better were x to have happened.
How the Holocaust could have been avoided and how a repetition of it
could be prevented are vital questions for philosophy, as Adorno main-
tains inNegative Dialectics. Can one, though, be sure that the ‘realisation
of philosophy’ would have been a guarantee that such an event would
be impossible? So much is invested in the notion of ‘philosophy’ here
that it is hard to know what it means.
Adorno’s reflections on philosophy and modernity should not, how-
ever, just be dismissed out of hand. The processes of rationalisation
characteristic of the emergence of the commodity structure as the dom-
inant global form of exchange do indeed have universal effects. These
make it justifiable in some contexts to see these processes as linked
both to the nature of modern philosophical thinking and to some of
the most inhumane and terrifying aspects of modernity, in which peo-
ple become mere objects to be dominated. The combination of Hegel,
Marx, and Weber involved in Adorno’s approach to rationalisation does
capture something important about the nature of modernity. At the
same time, any specific example of rationalisation is likely to compli-
cate the issue, as we already saw with regard to Weber’s music sociol-
ogy, and this is also the case with Adorno’s own approach to musical
reproduction.
Settling the scoreAdorno himself often stresses the importance of using ‘micrological’
analysis as a means of understanding historical phenomena, rather than
assuming that the phenomena are best grasped by locating them within
a historical totality.^4 Let us therefore look at the issue of notation as a
form of rationalisation in the notes on musical reproduction, contrast-
ing what is said there with a passage fromDoE.Inthe latter the authors
give a generalised anthropological account of the move from nomadic
society to a more fixed social order. This move is seen in terms of the
establishing of domination based on forms of identity, including the
following:
4 His ambivalent stance with regard to the relationship between a micrological view and
the idea of modernity as a concrete totality derives from his fascination with both Walter
Benjamin’s and Hegel’s approaches to modernity (see e.g. 10. 1 : 247 – 8 ).