adorno 317The recurring, eternally identical processes of nature are hammered into
the subordinates as the rhythm of work, according to the beat of the cosh
and the stick, whether by alien tribes or by their own cliques, and this beat
echoes in every barbaric drum and every monotonous rhythm. Symbols
take on the expression of the fetish. The repetition of nature which they
signify always reveals itself eventually as the permanence of the social
compulsion which they represent.
( 3 : 38 )Although there are echoes of the links between rhythm and language
which we encountered in the Romantics, the links are seen here essen-
tially in terms of repression based on the will to power. In the work
on musical reproduction, on the other hand, the account of much the
same phenomena is more differentiated. Furthermore, by examining
the emergence of musical notation and how it relates to other themes
in the work on reproduction, the ambivalence of the notion of rational-
isation in modernity becomes evident, making sense of part of Adorno’s
claim that ‘extra-artistic, social rationality’ appears in music.
The philosophical importance of notation derives from its relation-
ship to memory. For Kant memory was linked to schematism, which
connects sensuous receptivity and the spontaneity of thought. The
‘input’ of intuitions from the world without any structuring by thought
would involve a chaotic multiplicity in which nothing is really identical
with anything else, so that nothing could be remembered. Schema-
tism makes judgement possible, rendering material that is empirically
never identical the same by enabling it to be classified in categories and
concepts, and therefore to be retained as something intelligible. The
retention can, however, be seen as demanding the sacrifice of qualita-
tive aspects of the particular experience. For this reason Adorno relies
in many contexts on the assumption that ‘Thinking is identifying’ ( 6 :
17 ), because it may neglect what cannot be said to be identical.
The point of the Romantic version of schematism we looked at was
that it depended on rhythm, on a pre-conceptual intelligibility which
cannot simply be located in the subject, because it belongs to what it is to
exist in a world. The account of schematism in the chapter on the ‘Cul-
ture Industry’ ofDoEalso does not present schematism as simply part
of the cognitive capacity of the subject, but its extension of the notion is
characteristically hyperbolic: ‘The achievement which Kantian schema-
tism still expected from subjects, namely the initial connection of the
sensuous manifold to fundamental concepts, is taken off the subject by