- Dave Black & Chris Ford, 1839: The Chartist Insurrection, 2012
- Sean Bonney, Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud, 2011
- Ben Watson, Adorno for Revolutionaries, 2011
Chris Ford & Dave Black, 1839: The Chartist Insurrection
Sean Bonney, Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud
- Sharon Borthwick , Unkant, Jun 2012
- James Heartfield, Spiked, Jun 2012
Sean Bonney, Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud
- Samantha Marenghi , London Student, Oct 2011
- Sharon Borthwick, Unkant, Nov 2011
Ben Watson, Adorno For Revolutionaries
- Mark Fisher, The Wire #311, Sept 2011
- Luke Manzarpour, Studies in Social and Political Thought #19, Summer 2011
- Dave Black, The Hobgoblin, June 2011
- David Cunningham, Radical Philosophy, June 2012
- Sheila Lahr, Revolutionary History, Vol 10 No 4, Oct 2012
Sean Bonney is a London poet, a revolutionary socialist, and “punk rocker”. He blogs at abandonedbuildings.blogspot, and does regular poetry readings in London pubs. Happiness: Poems after Rimbaud is his latest collection, published by the Association of Musical Marxists’ publishing arm, Unkant, set up by Ben Watson and Andy Wilson. Unkant blogs at Unkant.com, where you can find videos of the launch night, with a reading by Bonney, the book, however, is available on amazon.
I haven’t read Rimbaud, but as the blurb declares: “these poems have NOTHING TO DO WITH RIMBAUD. If you think they’re translations you’re an idiot." (Before adding: "In the enemy language it is necessary to lie.”) This is a Marxified Rimbaud (but is there any other?), this is poetry as commentary and commentary as poetry; divisions break down; Bonney knows that Rimbaud’s ‘I is an other’ quip can apply just as well to the ecstasy of groupthink during a protest, when things “kick off” and something new seems to be dawning. Cf. Occupy London’s Stock Exchange.
This may not be a manual for student protest and change but it is embroiled in them. The two ‘Revolutionary Legends’ sections are constellations of quotations from various sources, and the second of these sections seems to me a commentary on the Tottenham riots and their relationship to student (and other) protests – the protests as rational comprehendible shout vs. riots as irrational animalistic scream, a binary which Bonney rejects, for obvious reasons. But the ‘Letter on Poetics’ is the most impressive section. Here Bonney soars and you feel it, there’s a clarity and concreteness about it that’s quite something. He reflects on his poetry-reading in the occupied SOAS during the student protests, with a kind of painful self-laceration that can only increase one’s respect for his poetry, and poetry in general. The kind of critical reflection sorely wanting in our politicians. To describe poetry, Bonney offers us a detournement of a sentence of Adorno’s : “Poetry is stupid, but then again, stupidity is not the absence of intellectual ability but rather the scar of its mutilation.”
I remember hearing an anecdote once about a sound poet, or just a poet, being cornered or the equivalent in an alleyway by thugs or teens. For some reason, at the spur of the moment, he started reciting a sound poem at them, Scwhitters’ Ursonate or something, I dunno. The point is that they ran away. Perhaps out of guilt for threatening a gibbering idiot or cultural savant, perhaps out of fear and cowardice. Anyway, if you’re cornered by the bourgeoisie, these poems may just save your life. Even better, if a group of you corner a bourgeois, these may tip them over the edge.
Samantha Marenghi
***
About halfway through this book, Ben Watson recounts a poignant and revealing anecdote. He has just delivered a paper at a conference in which he eviscerates an academic in front of her. Said academic walks out, but returns to denounce Watson for his "Neanderthal Marxism". Watson leaves, shocked, shaken but ultimately satisfied that he has disrupted the staid rituals of academia. "[It]'s the assumption that business-as-usual ('having the discussion') is more important than saying truths," he writes, "which makes academia so gruesomely TEDIOUS." There's a similar tragicomic incident later, when Watson attacks senior members of the Socialist Workers' Party at their annual conference, and is taken aback when he subsequently hears that they are displeased.
This peculiar double movement - the drive to attack, followed by an aggrieved shock when his opponents strike back - keeps recurring here: a proper Freudian compulsion to repeat. The subtitle that Adorno used for his book Minima Moralia: Reflections On A Damaged Life - could apply equally well to Adorno For Revolutionaries. That, or How To Lose Friends And Alienate People. Sooner or later, Watson ends up biting practically any hand that feeds him - including, naturally, The Wire, the subject of a number of sideswipes here. This is writing as a form of self-destruction, a sado-masochistic jouissance. Yet what value is there in writing - writing about music especially - that is without a certain maladjustment? Watson is ferociously contemptuous of the bland mask of 'neutrality' that the worst kind of academic and music reviewer contrives to wear. Against this passive aggressive faux-neutrality, Watson demands that the critic always put him or herself into the picture - what is at stake for them in what they are writing about? And for all the gratuitous attacks, Watson at least ventures bold and risky theses, the most famous of which is his claim that none other than Frank Zappa exemplified Adorno's theory of negative dialectics. Someone recently remarked to me that the best argument against Adorno, far more damning than his notorious denunciations of jazz, is that his work could be used to make a case for Zappa. Even so, the essay on Zappa here - actually the talk Watson gave to the SWP conference - is a fine piece of writing, in part because it isn't so much about Zappa per se but about the need for political music to be more than socialist-realist agitprop. One of Watson's academic antagonists upbraids him for condemning "colourless pedagogic prose", but Watson demonstrates here that pedagogic writing need never be dull.
The least persuasive (and most migraine-inducing) pieces are those in which Watson takes freeform tours through his passions, while drive-by shooting his then-current antagonists. These old beefs sometimes have the stale odour of long forgotten turf wars, and reading them now can feel almost unseemly, like poring over comments box disputes from a decade ago. In the more focused pieces - a superb encyclopedia entry on Jazz, the take-down of Georgina Born's book on IRCAM, reviews of various books on Adorno - the polemic has greater direction, and speaks to very urgent contemporary problems.
Watson's enemy is the postmodern relativism pushed, in his view, by a depoliticised Cultural Studies. On his account, this celebrates popular culture in an uncritical way and treats Adorno's criticisms of mass culture as exemplary of a snobbish high modernism which we're well rid of. Actually, you won't be surprised to hear, this is something of a caricature of Cultural Studies, many of whose theorists now take a far more nuanced view of Adorno. Still, Watson does finger some of the features which continue to bedevil much academic writing on popular culture - his savaging of the way in which political commitments have been replaced by pallid, pietistic ticking-off of references to race, gender and sexuality is particularly acute. But the Adorno Watson defends here - an Adorno who would appreciate Jimi Hendrix and free jazz - is, in fact, an Adorno that has been reconstructed in response to 'postmodern' critiques. This Adorno, or something like him - a figure, scandalously, prepared to judge some music to be better than others, but who understands that all music is important (if only as a sedative); a figure who can make a case for a democratic modernism - is clearly what we need now. Watson's intuition is right: nothing is more damaging to music (or culture in general) than an anything-goes eclecticism. I write this review in the wake of the Glastonbury Festival. Watching the supine television coverage, in which every act, no matter how punishingly mediocre, was greeted as "brilliant", it was hard not to feel that Adorno - and Watson - had a point. At Glastonbury, music is the background noise to a world without antagonism - or, better, a world where antagonism is obfuscated and concealed by a banal rhetoric of inclusion, diversity and choice. In this context of (unconvincing but ubiquitous) boosterism and mandatory positivity, Adorno's negativity is indeed a punk gesture. But who can make such a gesture now? Where in music culture will the renewing energies of negativity come from?
Mark Fisher
***
Few calls have been made on the writings of Theodor Adorno to engage in direct political action since his students vainly demanded he march them to the barricades in '68. One recent attempt to chase away his black dog of despair was the decidedly limp autonomist publication Negativity and Revolution by John Holloway (2008). Others seeking an affinity between Adorno and contemporary radicalism have sought to apply Adorno's aesthetic theory to the jazz of Coltrane or the punk of Fugazi. The most sustained effort to reconcile Adorno with contemporary praxis has come from music journalist Ben Watson, whose sprawling tomes on Frank Zappa, Derek Bailey and the avant-garde are driven by a confidence in Trotskyist politics and its consistency with the doyen of the Frankfurt School. Adorno for Revolutionaries - a collection of Watson's essays and reviews from early '90s to mid-'00s - offers an opportunity to evaluate the unique contribution to leftist thought of its author. Published under the banner of his newly-founded Association of Music Marxists (AMM), the political and philosophical bases of Watson's oeuvre are presented throughout in discussions on a wide range of targets - from The Doors to Plato - showing just why he has devoted so many exuberant pages to music of which the majority of people have no experience. An excellent introduction, then, to Watson's ideas; however, the same cannot be said for those of Adorno. Watson concludes the book's final piece - a transcript of a talk given to the SWP's annual 'Marxism' festival in 1995 - with the distinctly un- Adornian statement that "contemplation is not the task of revolutionary socialists" (2011: 212). Readers familiar with Adorno's magnum opus Negative Dialectics will immediately think of the well-known opening line - a rebuttal of Marx's condemnation of the role of philosophers as merely interpreting the world: "Philosophy, which once seemed outmoded, remains alive because the moment of its realisation was missed" (1973: 3, translation modified). Thus, he calls for a return to the problematic of German Idealism which socialism had thought concluded decisively with Marx and the class struggle. The critique of socialist theory developed in Negative Dialectics is not merely an attack on Soviet Diamat (as Watson contends) but strikes at the core of Marxist thought, exposing the primitive in its purported progress. For Adorno, in an age when certainties about how action can resolve the issues of contradiction inherent in capitalism and its philosophy are all but lost, philosophical thinking is itself an important form of praxis that will help lead us out of the quagmire of actually existing socialist opposition (or lack thereof).
Not so for Watson, who repeats the neo-Kantian dichotomy between thought and action despite his sensitivity elsewhere to such cant in sociology, favouring action over thought. Watson's reading glosses over the significant fact that, for Adorno, contemplation is action, a move which informs Watson's division between what is alive (of practical use) and what is dead ('abstract' philosophy) in Adorno's writings. This is the frustration of the music journalist; ever discussing but never making music. For Adorno, immanent critique of German Idealism fosters truths about society as a whole since he reads the philosophy as the most substantial vessel of capitalist ideology and its antithesis. Watson, however, takes Adorno as reading philosophy as simply an unmediated reflection of the categories of society. Thus, Adorno's critique of the "domination of the concept" since Plato is taken simply as his "shorthand for domination of the boss over the employee" (Watson, 2011: 45). Shorn of the nuances of Adorno's conceptualisation we are denied his vision for a reconfiguration of human relations that Watson too readily assumes will be resolved in class struggle as understood by Lenin.
In this Watson resembles the students to which Adorno referred in a 1955 newspaper article:
Many students wait expectantly to see whose side the lecturer takes; they become excited if they detect an affirmative or polemical judgement and prefer a definite position to mere reflection (Adorno, 2002: 284)The Adorno that emerges is one of unfamiliar vitality, with Watson egging him on beyond the misgivings over a revolutionary subject to embrace a politics with which Adorno the man would have been uncomfortable. Unlike Adorno, Watson sees escape routes from the otherwise all- encompassing logic of capital cropping up all over the place, primarily in music. Lacking technical musical training, Watson takes his lead from Adorno's repeated inclusion of his subjective response to music and how sounds resemble objectively existing social phenomena, as opposed to reliance on musicological insight (2011: 190). This informs a fundamental aim of Watson's project; all judgement must acknowledge and include the subjective response of the individual judging if it is to achieve objective validity - "cultural analysis is meaningless that does not admit the point of view of the observer" (ibid.: 7).
Thus, we are taken through a cornucopia of Watson's musical likes, from Snoop Dogg to Pinski Zoo. Any positive vibe Watson gets from music is put down to a progressive impulse lurking within, broadly following the criteria for radical music Adorno found satisfied through twelve-tone composition. At one point, Watson is candid about the vindication for his likes and dislikes he derives from reading Adorno:
[W]hat I especially like about Adorno is that he explains to me in rational, historical-materialist terms proclivities and animosities I'd previously thought to be subjective and arbitrary (ibid.: 31)Watson argues powerfully for an "Aufhebung of Adorno's score-based aesthetic" (ibid.: 22), applying Adorno's appreciation of modernist composition to music completely alien in the common-sense logic of market genres. In turn, he does not so much appreciate music as use it (and his response to it) for political ends. There is a certain degree of vivacity in his concern with "the establishment of social theory by virtue of explication of aesthetic right or wrong" (ibid.: 102), a celebration of true musical (and, by extension, sensual) experience that relates how one feels to the social revolutionary impulse.
Yet the author lacks the dialectical reading of all personal proclivities that would validate individual response to even the most commercial of music and thereby universalise his project. It is not made clear why Watson's personal preferences happen to correspond to a radical progressive social impulse. Even if we accept his theorisation of the music he likes, he says little about the truth content of personal responses to music he hates. Surely a dialectical approach would extend to find a truth in false form in appreciation of the music of Justin Timberlake and Lady Gaga, even if revolutionary content cannot be readily imputed. As it stands, the subjective responses of the vast majority of society are simply deemed wrong. Again, Watson smuggles in fixed antinomies between progressive and reactionary. Not that there is no true and false in music, but his method cries out for recognising the truth in the false (sensitivity to the commercialism in all music demonstrates recognition of the false in the true). With such an evident lack, a central tenet of the book - namely, that our desires and struggles are significant to the impulse for radical social change - is unsatisfyingly formulated.
Elsewhere, his assaults on undialectical celebrants of pop pap are devastating. Simon Frith, Georgina Born and Sarah Thornton are all exposed for the market promoters they are, with Watson deftly slapping down their sociological/anthropological studies with Gillian Rose-inspired polemics - "Descriptive sociology is an insult to the people it describes: it performs the condescension of generalising specific experience, of treating human beings as an object of study rather than a subject of address" (ibid.: 139). The Guardian-friendly moralism such thinking engenders in lieu of class analysis - tick-box lists of identity politics causes - is similarly swatted for being ineffectual liberal cant, as is the jargon of postmodern reverence for the 'Other' - "could anyone go on the radio and argue against immigration controls using the concept of 'otherness'?" (ibid.: 117-118). Deleuze's 'nomadic' thought is held up against a passage from Lenin promoting the right of travel for all, while the metaphysics of poststructuralist belief in the arbitrary relation between signifier and signified are dealt with conclusively in a footnote. Watson follows Adorno in holding that the thing conceived will always exceed its conception, and attempts to do justice to the negative in Negative Dialectics by insisting on the validity of that singularity contra those who would subsume it in categorical thought./sup>
In one article, parallels are drawn between the dialectic of freedom and necessity in both music and political action. Roughly, music and politics take on emancipatory roles only when fantasy, play and accident are allowed to infringe upon predetermined goals. Free improvisation is here linked to Leninist activism in what Watson believes to be a mutual concern with the specific situation and human idiosyncrasy, while presupposing a common objective ground and the possibility of communication. Rules (musical and social) are not simply rejected in this conception in the manner of anarchism/deconstruction, but instead taken as material for analysis and exploration.
At times Watson's fantasy and play produce nonsense. His assertion that the term 'academy' derives from the musical academy was picked up by Gordon Finlayson in an otherwise ineffectual rebuttal of Watson's review of Jarvis (1998) published in Historical Materialism. The full text of Finlayson's letter is reprinted here and is followed by Watson's unsatisfying response of rare cringe-worthy self-aggrandisement (e.g. "I am no stranger to controversy"). The exchange is a low point of the book and one suspects its existence and reproduction here discloses more between the two than mere intellectual animosity. Still, in provoking a comparison with the wider analytical Habermasian work of his opponent, the exchange highlights Watson's pressing impulse to get out of the academy, where the inheritors of the Frankfurt School tradition remain, and this at least offers a further vindication of those who read Adorno contra Habermas.
Watson's musical judgement can suffer from his over-excitability. His assertion that "atonal music and the blues are both protests against the repression of the tempered harmonic system" (2011:207) misses the fact that the standard blues song utilises the rigid and tonally consistent pentatonic scale (the microtones of string bends being more occasional derivations than consistent protest). The link between these two musical forms, then, must lie elsewhere. Watson also holds that the Rolling Stones answer Adorno's call for derivation from an abstractly standard beat, despite Charlie Watts seldom venturing beyond the most basic of rock beats in their entire output. At another point, we are told the inclusion of a double bass in Roni Size's lounge drum and bass "evokes the legacy of jazz and its resistance to commercial hegemony" (ibid.: 163)! This kitsch gesture toward jazz is lapped up by Watson simply because he likes the music - any jazz bassist would find the connection ridiculous.
Here, Watson's assumption of a consistent coincidence between what he likes and objective radical content becomes untenable. At times, he seems to be aware of the problem. The AMM's Manifesto statement - "For US, music is a test of you and everything about you, and if you fail that test YOU ARE THE ENEMY!!!" - may sound like the joyfully implacable confidence in personal impulses of a Situationist, but it smacks of mere fun and games when, throughout the text, SWP comrades are let off for not liking 'groovacious' music (a compromise not overcome by his anticipation of its criticism). The conviction is there without the courage, something that may be remedied if the invalidity of an absolute harmony between Watson's proclivities and his politics is resolved.
Despite its shortcomings Adorno for Revolutionaries is an immensely enjoyable manifesto for the revolutionary impulse of sensual pleasure, and so far more valuable to mobilisation than the analytical consistency of those leftists with corpses in their mouths. As an attempt to steal back Adorno from academia it is much more alive than the range of available introductions to Adorno and one which, most significantly, should provoke activist readers to put aside quietist academic commentaries and reconsider Adorno for themselves.
--
Luke Manzarpour studied law at Kent and Amsterdam, and has a Masters in Social and Political Thought from Sussex. He grew up in Brighton (an experience he is commemorating in a book of Lewisian satire called The Chronicles of E-Z P) and currently works in immigration law in London. He became interested in Adorno after reading Ben Watson's Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play.
Endnotes
1. For example, see Campbell (2007).
2 . Indeed, the imprint set up by him and Wilson for AMM is named specifically in opposition to such thinking.
3 Against such academic sociology, Watson lauds three books on different genres (jazz, rock, and funk) by people involved in those scenes, and traces the unifying thread in their respective materialist content, generating a boundary-crossing universalism entirely absent in postmodern liberal relativism. The instances of isolated identity politics dissent are repeatedly redirected towards class politics in the tradition of Lenin and Trotsky. Hence the regular refrain that 'lacking a Marxist understanding' an author does not quite grasp the significance of their dissent. Thus, universality in music is taken to be the common cause of the universal working-class. Music, for Watson, is entirely social, not the other plane of meaning promoted by music hacks. In turn there is, as such, no contentless form for him; the supposedly apolitical is in fact deeply political. In fact, for Watson, form has more content than lyrics. For this reason, Watson can reject music that lacks innovation but has 'progressive' lyrical content (one thinks of Rage Against the Machine, Billy Bragg and Dead Prez here, or, indeed, Harold Pinter): "Bad form, or reactionary, derivative treatments are not something that may be excused by a 'progressive' message" (ibid.: 7). Of course, this ignores the fact that a lot of these artists turn people on to left politics, that a Rage Against the Machine are of more practical use in psyching up protestors facing violent police and/or right-wing thugs than a John Zorn, and overlooks the occasional happy marriage of left politics and innovative music (Eugene Chadbourne, Minutemen, Propagandhi), but it opens the way to recognition of radicalism in unexplored and innovative areas beyond gestures to left issues by celebrity artists.
Bibliography
Adorno, T. W. (1973) Negative Dialectics [trans. E. B. Ashton] New York: Continuum
Adorno, T. W. (2002) Kant's Critique of Pure Reason [trans. R. Livingstone] Stanford: Stanford University Press
Campbell, C. J. (2007) "Three Minute Access: Fugazi's Negative Aesthetic" in D. Burke, C. J. Campbell, K. Kiloh, M. K. Palamarek & J. Short (Eds) Adorno and the Need in Thinking, Toronto: University of Toronto Press (278-295)
Holloway, J. (Ed.) (2008) Negativity and Revolution: Adorno and Political Activism, London: Pluto Press
Jarvis, S. (1998) Adorno: A Critical Introduction, New York: Routledge
***
"It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men’s heads..."
Theodore Adorno
SOMETHING IN THE AIR?
In 1968, Tuli Kuferberg of the New York band, the Fugs, in a détournement of Plato, intoned, ‘When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake’. In Britain, in 1969, Thunderclap Newman had a number one hit with ‘Speedy’ John Keene’s song, ‘Something In the Air’, the lyrics of which went: ‘Hand out the arms and ammo. We're going to blast our way through here. We've got to get together sooner or later. Because the revolution's here, and you know it's right’. Pete Townshend, as producer and bass player on the record, later saw fit to reaffirm his own sceptical reformism with the Who single, ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. Almost inevitably, ‘Something In the Air’ would end up as the soundtrack for a British Airways TV ad (minus the incendiary lyric content just quoted). In retrospect, ‘Something In the Air’, like (to give just one more example) the Situationist-inspired anthems on the Jefferson Airplane album, ‘Volunteers’, could be seen as merely reflecting the ‘naïvity’ of ‘revolutionary youth’ whose illusions were as much fuelled by Spaghetti Westerns as by Che Guevara’s martyrdom . But many musicians were, if not radical in the strict, political sense, totally radical in their resistance to producing dull, conformist music to satisfy a ‘popular taste’ that was really a function of the hidden persuaders of advertising and conformist mass media propaganda.
Did the new musical sensibilities and practices represent new anti-capitalist aspirations, or was it a case of new styles and patterns of consumption just reflecting the social and political changes? After the counter-culture of the 1960s ‘revolutionized’ the ‘music industry’, universities assigned increasing resources for research into ‘fan culture’, ‘youth identity formation’ and the ‘sociology of Rock’. Sociology and academic ‘cultural studies’, like market research, helped provide big business with important information and analysis for targeting potential consumers.
Strangely enough, the sociologists, musicologists and social anthropologists themselves tended to be of the New Left that had emerged out of anti-racist and anti-war struggles, the Student Revolt and the Women’s Liberation movement. But in the 1970s, out of the ‘Pop Sociology’ of the New Left academies of post-structuralism and the Althusserian ‘cultural turn’, came Simon Frith’s seminal book, The Sociology of Rock, published in 1978. Frith is today the eminence grise of what Ben Watson calls the ‘Popsicle Academy’, whose leading lights are assessed and duly trashed in Watson’s book of essays, collective titled, Adorno for Revolutionaries.
Watson sees a fairly straight line running from the post-structuralist academicians of the 1970s to the present day postmoderns, who love pop and consumption as much as they hate ‘whingeing’ about globalization and the tenuous ‘triumph’ of commodification in all areas of life. Postmodern intellectuals, he says, ‘who have lost their faith in Marxism, but think that listening to the Beatles instead of Beethoven constitutes some kind of rebellion, do not like to be reminded of the limits of their playpen’ -- a fact borne out in Watson’s entertaining accounts of rows he has gotten himself into at various conferences (Watson is a journalist, critic, ‘Zappologist’ and broadcaster on London’s Resonance FM, not an academic; as a founder of the Association of Musical Marxists, his political inspirations include not only Guy Debord and Theodore Adorno, but also Tony Cliff and Trotsky).
RECLAIMING ADORNO?
As Watson shows, contrary to postmodernist myth, Adorno was neither a defender of ‘high culture’ nor a detractor of ‘popular taste’; rather he wished to expose the mechanization and standardization in both classical and popular music. ‘Pop’, Watson points out, is not a musical form. Unlike ‘jazz’ or ‘folk’, ‘Pop’ does not describe anything, but is merely a speculative category about what sells in large amounts. The pop sociologists exclusively focus on ‘consumers’ and familiar tales of ‘rags-to-riches’ in subaltern social groups. Dissolving issues of genuine musical innovation into classifications of particular ‘styles’, the pop sociologists ignore the plain fact that that ‘Pop’ is meaningless without its binary opposite: what is ‘unpopular’ and ‘avant guard’. In the real world, where abstract antinomies are in continual interpenetration and transformation, postmodernism erroneously conflates the binary of ‘avant guard’ and ‘popular’ with another binary: ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. In fact, as Watson points out, all key moments in the development of innovative British music in the 1960s were experienced as interactions between the ‘avant guard’ of British youth and the ‘low’ culture of American Black Music.
Adorno, quoted by Watson, writes:
"The purity of bourgeois art, hypostatized itself as a world of freedom in contrast to what was happening in the material world, was from the beginning bought with the exclusion of the lower classes – with whose cause, the real universality, art keeps faith precisely by its freedom from the ends of false universality."Watson sees in such statements ‘a highly political defence of critical avant guard art – arguing that in attempting to be free in its own terms, refusing the temptation to feed the market… art does more to help the cause of the proletariat than by seeking to be “effective” in a commodity world’. The work of art is only ‘truthful’ by relating to its commodity role. Therefore, claims Watson, Adorno’s ideas ‘explain what was so valuable about Punk’, which ‘brought discussions of record contracts and money and manipulation into pop music’.
Adorno says: ‘The distinction between entertainment and autonomous art points to a qualitative difference that ought to be retained, providing one does not overlook the hollowness of the concept of serious art or the validity of unregulated impulses in low-brow art.’ Watson argues that unleashing the unregulated impulses can sabotage ‘low’ art’s subservience to commodification. According to Watson, against ‘lifestyle’ marketing,
"The vibrational universalism craved by every conscientious musician is the revolutionary Aufhebung of this material homogeneity. This is how Hendrix playing “Johnny B. Goode” could simultaneously be rock’n’roll, rhythm’n’blues, political protest, electronic composition, funk, free improvisation, mass orgy, Situationist évènement and pub rock."Many Adorno scholars might see in Adorno for Revolutionaries an attempt to conjure up, in the manner of a Philip K. Dick fantasy, a spectral Adorno, who never existed, but ought to have done: one who, instead of calling the cops on his students for taking his critique of capitalism too seriously, ought to have joined the boshevised New Left and moved from ‘permanent critique’ to permanent revolution; one who in his last years (Adorno died in 1969) ought to have supplemented his musical diet of avant-guard Serialism with a stiff dose of Krautrock or Free Jazz. Watson however, argues that in the artistic sphere Adorno’s analysis ‘runs parallel’ to Trotsky’s take on Marx’s ‘revolution in permanence’; like bourgeois revolutions, developments in artistic production create opportunities for autonomous and independent actions initiated by the ‘vanguard’. It is certainly the case, as Watson shows, that Adorno was something of closet Leninist; and like Lenin, a ‘materialist’ critic of Hegel’s ‘idealism’.
THE OBSCURE SUBJECT OF ‘NEGATIVE DIALECTICS’
The methodologies of the pop sociologists originated in a ‘cultural materialism’ which denounced what it saw as ‘essentialism’ and ‘idealism’ in a futile search for ‘authenticity’. But the pop sociologists are, in Watson’s terms, really ‘idealist’ Kantians, attempting to fit social phenomena into predetermined categories as ‘consumers’ of ‘styles’.
If, in what follows, I digress somewhat with some strictly ‘philosophical’ observations, I do so in order to address one of Watson’s key concerns: how to overcome the narrow individualist subjectivity of bourgeois culture with socially liberating creativity (which for him is nourished in such fields as Free Improvisation as well as class struggle). In the Kantian world rent by the divide between subject and object, we only perceive the world as ‘prisoners of our own constitution’. However, in Adorno’s interpretation (in ‘Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy’, in Hegel; Three Studies), in the Kantian transcendental synthesis there is already the notion that the world of appearances is not the ultimate. Hegel adds to this notion the idea that by conceptually determining the limits of subjectivity we can pass beyond it towards objectivity in the sense of Plato’s objective Reason, whose heritage Hegel ‘chemically compounded’ with the subjective Kantian philosophy of transcendentalism. As Adorno puts it, ‘Although the structure of Hegel’s system would certainly collapse without [the Absolute Idea], the dialectic’s experiential content does not come from this principle but from the resistance of the other to identity’. But Adorno is enough of a Nietzschean to reject totality as system building: ‘Universal history must be both construed and denied’.
In contrast, Gillian Rose, in Hegel Contra Sociology, shows the difficulty, if not impossibility, of separating form and content in Hegel’s dialectic, i.e. of separating the dialectical method from the universal form which unifies theory and practice in the Absolute Idea. Rose argues that with the concept of the Absolute removed, ‘dialectics’ regresses to the Kantian formal method for justifying pre-supposed conclusions, whether by the analytical method of imposing dialectical categories on phenomena through abstraction, or the synthetic method of subsuming contradictions under a ‘dialectical unity’. Hegel in breaking the limits of Kantian subjectivity, sees that behind the intellect of the Spirit lies objective, empirical reality and the collective mind of the social whole. But if Hegel’s dialectic is wrongly interpreted to mean that it is Spirit that creates the world, then such an idealism can be inverted as a metaphysical materialism, with ‘matter’ serving as the first principle from which all is derived, and economics serving as the source of all social movement. In that case subjectivity is abolished under the banner of ‘dialectical materialism’ – an inverted idealist theology, of use only to ideologists and ‘believers’.
Raya Dunayevskaya points out in her 1974 paper for the Hegel Society of America (published in the collection The Power of Negativity) that Adorno, writing in 1958 in ‘Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy’, insists that ‘Subject-object cannot be dismissed as a mere extravagance of logical absolutism’; for if genuine cognition isn’t just a photocopy theory of reality then it ‘must be the subject’s objectivity’. However eight years later, in Negative Dialectics (1966) Adorno argues that the ‘utopian aspect’ of Hegel’s thought had been negated by such horrors as Auschwitz. Adorno, who calls his own philosophy ‘negative dialectics’ because he is so opposed to identifying human beings with fetishized, inhuman social systems, takes Hegel’s concept of absolute negativity (the negation of the negation) as a final affirmation of identity philosophy. The critique of commodity fetishism is extended to the ‘fetishism of the concept’ in such a way that the subjectivity is barely conceptualized at all, and least of all as the proletariat. Adorno, in tackling what he takes to be the ‘theoretical inadequacies of Hegel and Marx’ seeks ‘to free dialectics from such affirmative traits’ as Hegel’s ‘negation of the negation’ and implicitly Marx’s ‘expropriation of the expropriators’. In Dunayevskaya’s view, for Adorno, ‘the next step was irresistible, the substitution of a permanent critique, not alone for absolute negativity, but also for “permanent revolution” .’
For Gillian Rose also (though from a different, not entirely Marxist perspective), the shortcomings of Adorno’s critique of Hegel are related to how he, as a Marxist, views subjectivity: ‘[In Adorno’s work] Marx’s theory of value is generalised as “reification” with minimal reference to the actual productive relations between men, and without any identification of a social subject’ (Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science p. 141). Such observations would suggest that Adorno’s retreat from revolutionary theory was philosophical rather than just due to the world-weary ‘cynicism’ and ‘pessimism’ that Watson thinks defined his last years.
ADORNO ON JAZZ
Adorno assesses great bourgeois works of art and philosophies as expressions of social truth and even ‘scientific’ knowledge, however unintentionally. As he shows, the most interesting works of music are those composed and performed as reactions to changes in mass production, reproduction and marketing. But although Adorno sees mechanization and standardization in both classical and popular music as a direct result of capitalistic production he never examines the work process itself. Watson says of Marx’s debt to Hegel, ‘Without Hegel’s dialectical logic and its assault on the subject/object antinomy, the humanist polemic of Capital becomes inaccessible’. This is very true, but Adorno, like many theorists, at times seems stuck in the realm of circulation and exchange-value, and ignores value-production itself.
Adorno does explain forms of ‘bourgeois’ music in relation to the categories of production; relating for example the division of labour in the symphony orchestra to the capitalist division of labour in industry. But Adorno does not relate proletarian labour or class struggle -- through the subjectivity of the labourer -- to musical production. Nor, crucially, as Rose argues in The Melancholy Science, is Adorno ever able ‘to distinguish between the political effects of different forms of popular art’. Therefore, Adorno’s inability to see Jazz as a musical object worthy of study in itself is not surprising.
Nevertheless, Adorno’s work is, despite the shortcomings of its philosophical underpinnings, certainly worthy of study in itself; as is the music Watson writes about from his Adorno-inspired standpoint. For those who have the ears to hear I strongly recommend Adorno for Revolutionaries as a substantial and very readable effort.
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