adorno 363the life of the details, but rather so that the life of the sonata becomes
one with that of the details. That is a squaring of the circle compara-
ble to the ever-renewed and deeply related effort of philosophy to join
rationalism and empiricism. All art of the highest rank has something
paradoxical of this kind, the Bachian subjective animation of the objec-
tive language of forms, Beethoven’s tour de force of creating the forms
once again from out of pure subjectivity, hardly to a lesser degree than
Mahler. That explains at the same time why the marks of failure very
apparent in Mahler, as they are in Bruckner, are not to be attributed
to an insufficiency of artistic ability, but rather to the insolubility of the
nevertheless objectively posed problem.
( 18 : 606 )Here the idea that problems of musical form relate to the processes
of rationalisation in modernity does not suffer from the rigidity we
encountered in the remarks on Schoenberg.
There is a growing difficulty for musicians and other artists in moder-
nity to find means which are individually expressive that have not been
rendered conventional by their employment by others and by their
propagation via forms of technical reproduction. The difficulty leads
from the apparently subjective problem of the individual composer to
an objectively existing state of affairs, of a kind which relates to the issue
of truth and necessary failure. This state of affairs need not, however, be
reduced to the arguments about the culture industry and the commod-
ity form. It simply is the case that the more cultural forms are used and
disseminated, the more the possibilities for innovation become prob-
lematic.^28 Music’s connection to the squaring of the circle between
rationalism and empiricism depends on the following historical situa-
tion. The problem of reconciling structures which can be generalised
to cover all objects with the particularity of how the world is given to
us is posed in new ways at the same moment as the emergence of bour-
geois society poses the problem of the reconciliation of general and
individual will, objective and subjective judgement. Music focuses this
problem precisely because it addresses aspects of human life which sci-
entific concepts cannot fully articulate, but which still involve the nor-
mative dimension of right and wrong. Adorno’s individual assessments
of music may often be highly contentious – he is, for instance, needlessly
dismissive of composers who do not fit his more rigid modernist criteria,
like Elgar, and of composers whose success he regards as unwarranted,
28 At times such dissemination can also be very productive.