318 music, philosophy, and modernity
industry. It carries out schematism as the first service to the customer’
( 3 : 145 ). Two things are important here. The first is the attempt to
give what Kant sees as the activity of the subject an objective historical
basis in the world of commodities (the authors cite examples of clich ́es
in mass-produced culture, from film to music, to illustrate their point).
The second is the one-sidedness of the interpretation, which echoes the
passage cited above on rhythm as a form of social compulsion, and sug-
gests the problem of relying on an overall philosophical principle with
regard to specific historical phenomena. Schlegel’s account of rhythm
and identification can be related to the theme of the increasing control
of nature by identification inDoE, but, importantly, he did not think
of rhythm as a form of repression, because it was also a resource which
enabled coherent thought and gave pleasure. This positive evaluation
is hard to reject out of hand: think, for example, of how important
rhythm is to the well-being of infants. Schlegel’s dialectical conception
of rhythm can make sense of Adorno’s sometimes questionable reflec-
tions on the origins of notation.
Adorno’s initial claim about writing music down, rather than play-
ing it from memory (or improvising it in an established tradition), itself
already involves a more dialectical approach. It is, he argues, when mem-
ory becomes a problem that the need develops for forms of reminder
which objectify what is to be remembered. The difficulties involved
in the historical story here are admitted by Adorno: he is speculating
about something for which the evidence is sketchy at best, and, more-
over, about a state which is assumed to precede one kind of split between
subject and object.DoEengages at times in such speculation and it tends
to lack anthropological and historical support. The emergence of musi-
cal notation, on the other hand, necessarily involves attention to a kind
of practical musical awareness that precedes this specific form of objec-
tification. The idea of such awareness can, of course, legitimately be
extended beyond the case of musical notation to writing, for example,
and to how thought is affected by it. This awareness is, furthermore,
part of very many people’s experience.
Adorno sees aids to memory as resulting from the ‘universalmediation
of experience which cuts through the original relationship of subject
and object’ (Adorno 2001 : 70 ). The idea of such an ‘original rela-
tionship’ might sound questionable. However, he specifies it by the
example of children, who have no problem in remembering language,
but do have a problem with its ‘objectification’, i.e. with learning to
write. This allows him to infer the necessity of a situation where there