adorno 345material, many of Adorno’s insights in the work on musical reproduc-
tion and elsewhere into how the subjective is formed by the objective,
and vice versa, become impossible to defend.
The problem here is Adorno’s tendency to regard a certain version of
the determination of the subjective by the objective as being the essen-
tial truth about modernity. In this view subjective self-determination
becomes wholly subordinated to the culture industry and to the ‘con-
text of delusion’ resulting from the domination of consciousness by
the commodity form and by related forms of modern rationalisation.
Tothis extent there would, as Adorno sometimes claims, be no point in
presenting the delusions and projections of the actual listeners, because
these can be read off the commodified forms of culture which perpet-
uate the listeners’ delusions. The truth therefore has to be sought in
the art which seeks to oppose delusion, hence Adorno’s extreme idea
of music as counter to social reality, as ‘pure, uncompromising pre-
sentation of the absolute contradiction itself’. For Adorno, then, the
technically advanced dissonances in ‘new music’, which result from a
composition’s appropriateness to the history to which it is a response,
‘horrify’ the concert-going public and ‘speak of their own state: only for
this reason are they unbearable to them’ ( 12 : 18 ). Once again there is
a grain of truth in such a position, which manifests itself, for example,
in the horrific consequences of the conformism of the ‘authoritarian
personality’, who is indeed very often an enemy of musical modernism.
However, this way of thinking can too easily obscure how resistance
to domination comes about, as though only the esoteric domain of
advanced music is free from delusion.^20 As I have suggested elsewhere,
in the light of remarks by Nicholas Cook on the use of Ligeti (whom
Adorno greatly admired) in Kubrick’s 2001 , Adorno also overlooks ways
in which such music may become acceptable to many audiences (see
Bowie 2004 a).
The relationship between what one can term ‘philosophical music’,
and ‘musical philosophy’, can crystallise the dilemma faced by Adorno.
‘Musical philosophy’ involves the demand for expression in philosophy,
and I shall suggest in thenext sectionhow his most successful work can
be regarded in such terms. ‘Philosophical music’ can be explained via
Adorno’s more problematic approaches to history and society. The key20 The fact that Mussolini was happy for Berg’sWozzeckto be performed suggests how
problematic this is. There is no simple correspondence between advanced modernism
and any political position.