342 music, philosophy, and modernity
is a version of his ideas about the mimetic: ‘All forms of music...are
sedimented contents. In them survives what is otherwise forgotten and
can no longer speak in a direct manner... The forms of art draw
the history of humankind more justly than documents’ (ibid.: 48 ). The
last comment can be interpreted in terms of the idea of ‘doing greater
justice to that which is otherwise cut off by judgement’. Documents will
judge, in the sense of convey what can be said in identifying terms, and
thus will fail to communicate the particular truth about human history
that is communicated by art.
The truth in question often has to do with suffering, which may not be
adequately responded to in judgements, and so needs to be expressed
in other ways. Walter Benjamin’s remarks about the history of culture
being the history of barbarism suggest one reason why. Adorno is seek-
ing a kind of history which will not be that of the victors, and this means
one must seek responses to the suffering of the vanquished that cannot
be conveyed just by description. InNegative DialecticsAdorno claims that
‘The need to give a voice to suffering is the condition of all truth. For
suffering is objectivity which weighs on the subject; what it experiences
as most subjective to it, its expression, is objectively mediated’ ( 6 : 29 ).
Giving a voice to suffering demands objectification, but this means that
what is most personal and individual must be mediated by the gen-
eral forms in which it is expressed. These forms can themselves have
played a role in oppression, when, for example, language serves merely
to label, rather than to discriminate in a just manner. This situation
leads in turn to the need for ways of sustaining the oppressed individ-
ual, mimetic element, and thence to the questions of music, language,
and truth that we have been pursuing. The dialectic here is the key to
Adorno’s conception of the relationship between music and philoso-
phy, but it appears in a variety of forms, some of which are illuminating,
others of which are deeply problematic.
Consider the following two examples of music as expression. In the
essay ‘On the Social Situation of Music’ of 1932 Adorno says that music
will be ‘all the better’ the more it ‘expresses in the antinomies of its
own language of forms the misery of the state of society, and demands
change in the coded-language of suffering’ ( 18 : 731 ). If music can
demand social change it must possess a performative element, but,
being ‘coded’, it cannot state what this change is, and so would seem
to require something – which in Adorno is generally philosophy –
to decode it. Music on its own can therefore only express the suffer-
ing which is otherwise forgotten by the manner in which theformal