adorno 319is no subject–object separation, even if recalling this state may become
impossible once it is lost. Adorno analogises the case of children to
‘primitive tribes’ and their music: ‘whenever music was made tradi-
tionally, without being bound to fixed writing, memory reveals itself as
strong: the rhythmic models which are retained by primitive peoples are
so complex that no civilised person, except perhaps the trained musi-
cian, could achieve the same thing (there is still something of this in
jazz)’ (ibid.).^5 Rather than presupposing a prior state of unity before
‘alienation’, Adorno is, then, concerned here with a well-established
phenomenon whose erosion is a key to understanding what follows it.
He regards the recurrent changes in primitive music that the lack of
fixed notation makes unavoidable as ‘a function of memory, not of its
failure’ (ibid.). The past of such music is alive, and not fixed, so there
is no reason why the music cannot be sustained as itself, even when it
is modified. When notation seeks to preserve music as something iden-
tical across time, it becomes ‘reified as somethingforgotten’, such that
‘one could easily enough call notation the enemy of remembering, of
memory itself’ (ibid.). Memory of the kind familiar, for example, from
Australian aboriginal culture, which does not draw a rigid line between
‘now and previously’, is therefore submitted to musical notation as ‘a
piece of discipline’ (ibid.).
This might sound like a characteristic critique of modern rationality,
of the kind shared byDoE, Foucault, and other Nietzsche-influenced
thinkers. The difference is that Adorno makes it clear that what this
form of repression of memory is is also what makes possible modern
Western music culture.^6 The dialectical character of memory, which is
central to this culture, is based on the idea that ‘the making disposable/
available (‘das Verfugbarmachen ̈ ’) of what has been makes it at the same
time irretrievable’, so that ‘the desperate utopia of all musical repro-
duction’ is, ‘by having it at one’s disposal, to bring back what cannot be
brought back’ (ibid.: 71 ). The echo of the myth of Orpheus here is also
associated with Proust’s exploration of how, because voluntary memory
5 Adorno’s critical evaluation of civilisation makes it clear that he does not contrast the
‘primitive’ with the civilised to the simple detriment of the former. For his negative
assessments of earlier cultures he uses the term ‘barbaric’, which he also applies to
much of modernity. Positive evaluations of aspects of jazz recur in the work on musical
reproduction.
6 Zoe Hepden has pointed out to me that one can read aspects ofDoEin the same manner,
because repression makes culture possible at the same time as imbuing it with an inevitable
sense of loss. I think, though, that the dominant tendency of the main parts ofDoEis still
in the direction I have described above.