MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

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in particular, as ‘judgementless synthesis’. Music is constituted by con-
nections of signifying elements, which, unlike predicative judgements,
are not intended to identify what they relate to: ‘What art as judgement-
less synthesis loses in determinacy in its particulars, it regains by doing
greater justice to that which is otherwise cut off by judgement’ ( 11 : 270 ).
Truth in Adorno’s sense has, then, to do with doing justice to things
and people, and this has to do with not identifying them conceptually.
This does not, though, entail a relativist or sceptical position: he has no
doubt, for example, that there are advances in the explanatory power
of natural science. His concern is rather with the attempt to reveal what
can be obscured by an exclusive concentration on scientific truths, and
to explore how scientific method may be connected to certain kinds of
repression in modern culture. The notion of judgementless synthesis
highlights a series of insights and problems in Adorno’s conception,
which are vital to the issue of music, philosophy, and modernity. In
thenext sectionI want first, though, to look at the some of the most
problematic aspects of Adorno’s conception, before using the notion of
judgementless synthesis to show how that conception might be revised
in a more workable direction.

Music as socio-historical expression

The Adorno presented so far no doubt does not seem much like the
notoriously austere political critic encountered in such essays as ‘On
Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Hearing’ of 1938 .In
this hyperbolic piece Adorno uses Marx’s theory of the commodity
as fetish to analyse the contemporary state of musical culture, where
the ‘familiarity of the pop song replaces the value ascribed to it’, and
where ‘evaluative behaviour has become a fiction for the person who
finds themself surrounded by standardised market commodities’ ( 14 :
15 ). As often in the case of Adorno’s most extreme claims, there is a
grain of truth in this characterisation – it seems more apt now than
when he wrote it – but the lack of empirical investigation into the social
consequences of the decline of such evaluative behaviour means that it
is unclear what the real import of the claim is. I have so far concentrated
on other aspects of Adorno in order to separate issues which he some-
times conflates via his diagnosis of the sources of the cultural malaise
suggested in such remarks. The core problem in Adorno in this area
lies in how he deals with the relationships between the conceptual and
the non-conceptual with regard to music.