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Metaphysics and Music in Adorno and Heidegger pp 82–112Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

The Dialectical Image of Music

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Abstract

Adorno’s essay of 1938, ‘On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’, has been received in the Anglophone context (since its appearance in English in 1991) by discourses of both cultural studies and new musicology.1 The essay can, however, be read as an eminently philosophical reflection upon the temporal experience of modernity. In this chapter, ‘On the Fetish-Character’ will serve to introduce a hitherto neglected philosophy of time in Adorno’s thought — one that can further elucidate the meaning of ‘waiting in vain’, as ‘music alone’ can express. It will be argued that Adorno’s evaluations of both ‘modern music’ and ‘commodity music’ can be understood according to music’s relation to time and to the image. And it is in this latter respect that Adorno’s dialectical understanding of music can be read in terms of Benjamin’s ‘dialectical image’, a concept largely formulated in his Arcades Project. As we have seen, Adorno is more critical of the later than then earlier Benjamin, even though Adorno appears to have appropriated several of the later concepts. Without claiming a direct appropriation of the dialectical image, a structural affinity will nevertheless be proposed between the dialectical image and Adorno’s philosophy of music — or rather, of musical experience. Moreover, it will be shown how Adorno came to appreciate the complex relationships between music, image and space through the ‘new music’ that he himself experienced in Darmstadt during the 1950s and 60s. Though largely unacknowledged by Adorno, the music of Luigi Nono can be shown to illustrate an expression of waiting in vain.

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Notes

  1. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. by Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), i, p. 165.

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  3. The ‘veneration’ that Adorno attributes to Marx seems to come closer to Freud’s contention that the fetishist ‘reveres his fetish’. Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism’, in The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents and Other Works, trans. by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), p. 157.

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    Wesley Phillips

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Phillips, W. (2015). The Dialectical Image of Music. In: Metaphysics and Music in Adorno and Heidegger. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137487254_4

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