adorno 361notation in its history, a language sedimented from gestures’ ( 18 : 154 ).
Gestures are inherently contextual and can be based on convention
(they can also be mimetic). The conventional employment of gesture
is evident in the use of music as a signifying practice for social functions.
Mere repetition of a gesture can consequently involve identity of the
kind which is the target of Adorno’s criticisms of the commodity world.
Convention in cultural forms can therefore be an obstacle to critical
awareness, and it can mar even everyday communication, when one’s
responses become automatic and no longer address the particularity of
one’s interlocutor.
The dialectic here which connects the level of the individual subject
to the level of general symbolic forms is, then, between the expressive-
ness of gestures and their reliance on convention.^27 Adorno’s assertion
that it is not a question of meaning in music therefore relates only to
the non-intentional aspect of music. If gestures rely on understanding
to be gestures at all, rather than being mere behaviour, they must, as a
form of social intercourse which may be performatively more effective
than words, possess meaning. Musical gestures can renew the force of
emotions, enable new emotions to emerge, evoke the mood of a partic-
ular situation, evoke a landscape, a time, etc. It is because of this power
that music can enter the realm of ideological conflict in which Adorno
locates it. There is again no need for a philosophical argument to back
up such an assertion. The history of music in modernity, both within
the immediate sphere of musical production and in music’s relation-
ship to politics, most obviously in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union,
testifies to the many ways in which music is perceived as adhering to a
social order or as opposing it. Musical conventions therefore become
the location of ideological and philosophical conflict by connecting to
other cultural forms of expression.
When Adorno tries to incorporate the idea that music conspires with
an unjust social order into the philosophical story deriving fromDoEhe
is open to the criticisms detailed above. When he uses a more flexible
framework, which takes more account of music’s openness to diverse
interpretations, the results are much more interesting. The following
passage makes sense, for example, of why a crisis develops in the Euro-
pean tradition of modern music via a shift away from the productive27 Cf. Wittgenstein’s remark that musical gestures ‘always remain gestures for me, although
I know what will come. Indeed, I can even be surprised over and over again. (In a certain
sense.)’ (Wittgenstein 1980 : 73 ).