adorno 355they both have a ‘temporal core’ indicates. There are times in music
when use of a previously innovative technique ceases to be appropri-
ate because it is worn out. Adorno gives the example of Beethoven’s
new way of using the diminished seventh chord becoming a clich ́ein
salon music. It is, moreover, not just in more ‘serious’ music that this
happens. In these cases repetition is a problem, because it merely per-
petuates something that demands renewal. There is no need to make
a general philosophical point here: the real history of all kinds of mod-
ern art demonstrates what is at issue. Modern art is unthinkable without
constant challenges to whatever norms happen to dominate at a par-
ticular time. The problem is how to connect this critical assessment
of identity and repetition to manifestations of the negative effects of
identification and repetition in other domains.
It might seem that Kivy’s assertion that nobody ‘will be tempted to
attribute anymeaning’totheEroicawould be confirmed by the difficul-
ties here, but this is not the case. Unless one accepts Kivy’s increasingly
discredited analytical approach to meaning, there is no reason to doubt
that the journey from Beethoven’s tonal affirmations to Schoenberg’s
renunciation of tonality relates to the journey from Hegel’s attempt
to reveal a developmental rationality in the turbulent developments
of modernity to the Nietzsche-inspired sense in Weber and others that
such rationality may be a victory of often arbitrary universal structures –
the commodity form and bureaucracy – over the particulars that they
subsume into themselves.^23 Adorno’s claim that ‘Mahler’s music caught
up in an original manner with Nietzsche’s insight that the system and
its unbroken unity, the illusion/appearance of reconciliation was not
honest’ ( 13 : 213 ) can only be denied at the price of ignoring Mahler’s
relationship to the composers whose tendency to reconciliation he feels
compelled to ironise.
However, the question here is again how to get from the ‘intention-
less’ form of music to the intentional forms of philosophy and sociology,
without just making the latter the source of the interpretation of the for-
mer. One of Adorno’s answers was that the former is a ‘cryptogram’ of
the latter, but that raises the question of what the coded aspect of music
actually ‘tells’ us by being coded. Part of the more convincing answer is,
as we saw, that even a form of expression which comes to be regarded23 This assessment of the nature of rationalisation does not entail a demand to return to
what preceded these structures, merely the demand to be aware of the repressions that
they can cause. Adorno does not always remember this.