adorno 343difficulties involved in its production are confronted, rather than being
circumvented. Adorno thinks that only ‘advanced’ music, which can-
not just be consoling, because it rejects existing means of expression
on the grounds that they have become like a fixed language, is able to
express such negativity. These remarks, which might seem as if they were
rooted in the terrible events commonly associated with Adorno’s cul-
tural criticism,precedethe Holocaust and its effects on Adorno’s concep-
tion of music’s cultural and political role. It is also notable that Adorno’s
remarks about it being ‘barbaric’ to write poetry after Auschwitz are pre-
figured in an essay of 1929 on Hanns Eisler’s songs ‘Zeitungsausschnitte’
(‘Newspaper cuttings’): ‘that no true lyric poetry is possible today, that
our existence lies so cruelly in the dark, that is all the newspaper texts
wish to mean’ ( 18 : 525 ).^19 The newspaper cuttings set to music by
Eisler just reflect the staleness and confusion of society, so it is music’s
‘function’ to ‘grasp the latent contents’ of the cuttings ‘in their inap-
propriateness to words’ (ibid.). How is one to read such examples of
‘social theory by dint of the explication of aesthetic right and wrong’
in music?
From one perspective the second example in particular could be
seen as being prescient. The idea of the failure of linguistic represen-
tation will later become a central post-Holocaust concern. This failure
can be related to the idea of the destruction of meaningful ‘experi-
ence’ by the First World War described by Benjamin in his essay ‘The
Storyteller’, where he points to the lack of literary texts about the war
in its immediate aftermath. Both Karl Kraus and Benjamin also link this
destruction to the debased language of newspapers. Although such lan-
guage did indeed contribute to what made the Holocaust possible, one
must be wary of such retrospective judgements. This is not least because
Adorno’s assertions are informed by something like the idea of alien-
ation I criticised earlier, which translates rather too easily from one area
of human misery and cruelty in the twentieth century to another. The
kind of musical modernism used to express the ‘latent contents’ that
are ‘inappropriate to words’ can slip into being a rather indeterminate
sign of a cultural climate, associated with ‘Weimar’ and ‘Expression-
ism’, that can easily lose its signifying force. Can even a precise techni-
cal analysis on the musical level really avoid this consequence? While
musical analysis can and should investigate the particular response
in a piece to widermusicalproblems of its period, how exactly do
19 My thanks to Leonard Olschner for pointing this passage out to me.