adorno 321involved here go to the heart of Adorno’s thinking, which is often most
successful when it ‘listens’ to what music can convey, rather than judg-
ing music ‘from above’ in terms of a version of the philosophical story
ofDoE. Perhaps the most illuminating element in Adorno’s approach
is the idea that comprehension of the problem of performance must
rely on the notion of necessary failure. Versions of this notion recur in
Adorno’s thinking, and they enable one to get more grip on his elusive
concept of non-identity.
The truth of performanceThe issue of notation and performance offers a way of showing some-
thing which, when stated as a philosophical idea, does not sound very
plausible. Adorno talks, for example, of the philosophical idea of ‘non-
identity’ in terms of the ‘impossibility of grasping, without there being
a surplus, what is not of the subject [i.e. some aspect of the world] in
subjective concepts’ ( 5 : 152 ). It is easy to object here that one does
not need to think in terms of the identity of a concept with its object.
Concepts can be tools for achieving a purpose, so that the idea of nec-
essary failure becomes redundant in contexts where the idea of truth
as correspondence of concept and object has no relevance to what one
does. Only if one adopts, in the manner ofDoE,the idea of the total pre-
dominance of ‘instrumental reason’, as the subjugation of the object
by the subject, can the idea of a concept as a tool be regarded as inher-
ently problematic.^8 However, by linking thought and language to the
question of music as performance and as text, the hyperbolic demands
Adorno makes on concepts in the name of non-identity can still add
up to something challenging which has consequences for the scope of
philosophical reflection about truth.
A recurrent dilemma concerning truth in modern philosophy arises
from the idea that every specific claim to truth relies on our ability to
offer justifications. Truth must, though, transcend all particular justifi-
cations, because they can never come to an end, or can, in Putnam’s
phrase, ‘be lost’. The Romantics therefore conceived of truth as a reg-
ulative idea: truth might never be reached, but without the idea the
search for it seemed to lack a goal. Crucially, this conception was asso-
ciated with the work of art’s transcendence of our interpretations as
8 Adorno consistently failed to understand how close much of what he thought about
philosophy was to pragmatism (see Bowie 2000 , 2004 b).