Adorno’s “On the Fetish-Character in Music

and the Regression of Listening”

Wednesday, July 24th: Read Theodor W. Adorno’s

“On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” pp.539-47.  

Visit and listen to the clips on our “Music” page on our outside site.

“The illusion of a social preference for light music as against serious music is based on that passivity of the masses which makes the consumption of light music contradict the objective interest of those who consume it” (539).

Adorno is here beginning with the dichotomy of light music and serious music—the popular music, be it from “the song-book,” the commercial versus rigorous/art-music/academic music, an example of the low versus high art distinction.  By acknowledging a dichotomy, it seems that there is no way by which to justify an unity of music, thus rendering problematic any sort of synthesis that could suggest the low music is like a “gate-way drug” to introduce listeners to the high music or that the high music could popularize itself by adopting features of the low, popular forms.  Why have we a dichotomy?  The initial quote has already identified the “why” as due to the “passivity of the masses;” this is furthered with the presumption that “they [the masses] actually like light music and listen to the higher type only for reasons of social prestige …” (539). 

I suspect that we will all read this with some sympathy—likely, we all have some “guilty pleasure” likes, art as sheer entertainment, fluffy movies when you are exhausted or under the weather or for a light-hearted summer night out with friends at a big Hollywood flick, or a summer day on the beach reading a pulp novel.  And, likely, we have all experienced some “art” we only engage because it is connected to status—one feels “cultured” going to a museum or symphony, feels older, refined, enlightened, or amongst some small elite who can appreciate what the “masses” cannot.  And, even if you “genuinely” like the popular, there may be instances when you admit their not being “real” art; equally, even if you really like the high art, there may be instances when such just takes too much energy to inspire yourself to go see/hear/read, etc.  I suspect there will also be some fight against this—isn’t it snobbery?, isn’t it too reductive or dismissive?—but, at once with the fight, I suspect it sounds and feels a little familiar.  Do my suspicions bear out?  (A good debate, maybe for the discussion posts!)

Hence, after identifying this dichotomy, Adorno suggests that while we cannot just add one to the other and synthesize away the discord, we can study each posture and, within each, however distantly or faintly, see “the changes of the whole”—what has happened within music itself so as to render such a fracture—and see that music itself and change itself “only moves in contradiction” (539).  Cultural change occurs by distinction and discord.  X is know by being differentiated from Y; the differentiation calcifies into being two poles and breeds discord; the discord then makes the defining feature, the definition itself, of each camp. 

Consequences of the dichotomization of music into low and high?  Clearly, the popular one wins; the serious one can have no successes, and can persist only in imitation of its true self.  “Between incomprehensibility and inescapability, there is no third way; the situation has polarized itself into extremes which actually meet.  There is no room between them for the ‘individual’” (539).  Popular music becomes music; serious music, the striving persistence of it, modifies itself into a more popular imitation of itself (the truly serious “renounced consumption,” and the “rest of serious music is delivered over to consumption for the price of its wages” (540)).  There is no other avenue, and there is, then, no other entry for something truly other: the individual.  And, if one comes along thinking oneself to be truly unique, it is only illusory.  “The liquidation of the individual is the real signature of the new musical situation” (540).

[Recall the similar idea from Benjamin when he was describing the “progressive attitude,” in which success was measured by popularity and popularity was ensured by creating the new-familiar thing, and thus, the truly, radically new was met with aversion (pp.534 ff.).  What do you think?  Is music today only a repetition or regurgitation of what has already been shown to be popular?  Is there anything truly outsider today?  Can there be?]

Thus, the “regression of listening” in the title is this new state where the popular genre has won, where everything has become “commodity listening” (540).  Both sides of the dichotomy have changed into a singular new state (not a synthesis at all, but a win for popular and a bifurcation of the serious wherein some vanishes and the rest becomes only a perversion of serious music by the popular) that are “manipulated for reasons of marketability” (540). 

Can you come up with any examples of this?  Maybe symphony performances designed to entertain, “speak to” (i.e., make money amongst) specific groups of people or “bringing classical music [down] to the people, maybe even the classical albums made to benefit, e.g., make your baby smarter, etc.?  Maybe “indie” bands made up with certain marketing campaigns to appeal to a wider audience?  Can anyone identify some concrete examples?

Toscanini:  Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957), an exceedingly popular Italian conductor who was the musical director for La Scala Milan, the Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic, NBC Symphony Orchestra (started by the television network with Toscanini as director, performed on air from 1937-54), etc.  His talent is widely recognized, but it is likely the combination of two factors that earns him such disdain from Adorno: first, in 1919 he unsuccessfully ran for parliament in Milan as a Fascist candidate (initially proclaimed the world’s best conductor by Mussolini, Toscanini eventually became disillusioned with Fascism and came to hate Mussolini), and, second, his venture with NBC Studios was seen as a watering down of classical music, making it consumerist/entertainment-friendly (which was not aided by a sound deadening studio; at the end of his reign there, he left with hostility, refusing to resign a contract, although did reappear as co-director several years after his replacement was found). 

[[[ {Click here for a video of a 1937 NBC broadcast} ]]]

In reference to Toscanini, Adorno calls “that world of that musical life … is one of fetishes” (540).  Most literally, a fetish is some material or inanimate thing worshipped for its supposed magical powers—a charm—or its being inhabited by a spirit.  The term also carries the implication, more generally, of an inordinate obsession with something that has no rational ground and also to the degree of bearing an abnormally high sexual interest in a particular thing (e.g., a fetish for shoes, for bound feet, for scars, etc.).  Both psychoanalysis and Marxist thought analyzed the idea of fetishism in relation to personal and social conditions.  Note Adorno’s use of it as inspired by Marx:

“Marx defines the fetish character of the commodity as the veneration of the thing made by oneself which, as exchange-value, simultaneously alienated itself from producer to consumer—‘human beings.’  ‘A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labor appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labor: because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labor is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labor’” (542). 

Here, the creator of the good becomes alienated from that role of creator to become beholden to the thing created as its consumer.  Instead of the flow of power being from the maker to the thing made, the thing made takes up the power and holds it over the maker (the thing made that has now attained value becomes “the commodity”).  In this, what has value is not the human being who can make things, but, instead, the things made, which makes the maker less value than his or her product of labor.  This is alienation.  We are devalued; torn from the dignity inherent in being creators.  No longer do we have a social structure based upon the relations between valuable producers; instead, the social structure becomes determined by the power-value relations between commodities. 

In relation to music, this cult of the popular takes on fetish status.  “The star principle has become totalitarian” (540)—the musical stars are fetishized and hold an undue and alienating power over us.  And, not just the stars, but even particular works of music are held up an unduly venerated—the “best sellers” or “greatest hits.”  “This selection reproduces itself in a fatal circle: the most familiar is the most successful and is therefore played again and again and made still more familiar” (540).  A fetish drives our attention to one thing, and we desire this one thing over and over again.  Every new thing we like has to fit our irrational and abnormal obsession with the same—everything starts to sound alike, and we like what all sounds alike.  It is a vicious circle: we like X so every new A, B, and C are only imitations of X, fueling our like of X and our demand that there is nothing but what we like, which is X.  And, how X is chosen is not due to our own free choice or “personal taste,” instead, it is determined by that which we have raised over all else—the ruling powers we elevated through fetishistic obsession determines what it is we obsess about, it “dates back to the command of publishers, sound film magnates and rulers of the radio” (540).  How they choose what they choose is done according to the principle of “effectiveness”—what will become adored, what will fascinate listeners, what will be popular. 

Adorno then analyzes two categories wherein this music fetishism is most strongly seen: vocal music and brands of violins (541)—the key here is how we are not judging this or that new singer for his or her actual voice, but for the voice to fit the model; we are not listening to the actual composition or technical quality of the playing, but to the power garnered by playing a Stradivarius or Amati violin.  That the fetish dimension is guiding this can be evidence by the horror of someone questioning any of these examples—to ask whether singer X really has a good voice, or whether the Stradivarius-played performance is really as good as the no-brand violin performance. 

Adorno accuses us of becoming utterly anesthetized into not judging performances, completely passive in our acceptance of X or Y being great.  (“Where they react at all, it no longer makes any difference whether it is to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony or to a bikini” (541).)

Our deadened capacity for reaction (authentic aesthetic judgment) explains why “The concept of musical fetishism cannot be psychologically derived” (541)—commoditized culture so determines the objects of our fetishes, it so creates our “values,” personal taste and feeling is no longer personal, no longer ours.  “Music, with all the attributes of the ethereal and sublime which are so generously accorded it, serves in America today as an advertisement for commodities which one must acquire in order to be able to hear music” (541-2). 

Essentially, our listening to music is not guided by our personal tastes and wants—those are created for us by the empowered rule and given to us: capital creates our likes and creates our desires for (our given) wants and creates what satisfies our desires, which then reinvigorate our wants: “He [any of us passive masses] has literally ‘made’ the success [the popular star or piece] which he reifies [makes into a fetish] and accepts as an objective criterion [i.e., it must be great], without recognizing himself in it [as an agent who made it popular]” (542).  And, capital has essentially affected even how we listen: our listening has become consumption: “But he has not ‘made’ it by liking the concert, but rather by buying the ticket” (542).  To consume music, we purchase it; since popularity rests in quantifiable data, our “listening” to it becomes our purchasing of it, thus, our actual listening to it is of no importance.

From here, Adorno turns to a closer examination of the listener in this “regression of listening,” that “counterpart to the fetishism of music” (542).  “Regression” here does not mean that a person at some developmental stage D sinks back to a stage A or B, or even that society today has regressed back to a less-developed stage.  Due to the radically new changes that capital has affected in culture, we today cannot be compared to listeners of some earlier, pre-capital day.  Thus, we have not become “childlike” in our listening, but we are “childish” (543).  In harsh and a bit offensive terms, Adorno writes: “their primitivism is not that of the undeveloped, but that of the forcibly retarded” (543)—we have retarded or repressed something that should be developed or natural to us: the capacity to freely judge.  Our repression is that we “sense the other but exclude it in order to live in peace” (543).  What we have regressed from is “the possibility of a different and oppositional music” (543).  Thus, we do realize our passivity, the artificiality of our consumption, but we do not do anything about it because … really … do we want to engage opposition?  Isn’t it easier, more peaceful, to not confront that which is truly different?  The artificial infantilizes us, and “The sickness has a preservative function” (543), preservative of an artificially imposed, comfortable, easy calm.

We may think we are a culture of nothing but critics, for (as Benjamin noted in our last reading) everyone has the opportunity to voice their own opinions and critiques.  But, when the voice of critique is done only from the standpoint of irony, it is no real critique spawned by a real, proactive self-reflection.  We get a first hint of this (and a more explicit address, below) when Adorno speaks of the reception of the pre-war pop song “Puppchen” [[[ click here to hear one version, AND here to hear another version ]]] as parallel to that of some post-war “synthetic jazz children’s song” (543)—in both, what we embrace in these examples is nothing but a “masochistic mocking of one’s own wish for lost happiness …” (543).  Neither were truly new or showed something about our true selves; they only showed how nothing “remains exempt from this system of assimilation” (543).  The assimilation is so very powerful that it now not only infects the receivers of mass culture, but also its producers: “… the new listening extends so far that the stultification of the oppressed affects the oppressors themselves” (543).

“Regressive listening is tied to production by the machinery of distribution, and particularly by advertising.  Regressive listening appears as soon as advertising turns into terror, as soon as nothing is left for the consciousness but to capitulate before the superior power of the advertised stuff and purchase spiritual peace by making the imposed goods literally its own thing.  In regressive listening, advertising takes on a compulsory character” (543-4). 

We have been conditioned to identify with the fetish-commodity so thoroughly we take the forced wants as if they were our own.  “This identification initially gives the hit songs power over their victims,” it breeds subsequent forgetting and remembering, advertising is conspicuous and inconspicuous (544).  This squashes any and all true individual action.  Thus, it brings us back to how we do not actually critique anything.

The more explicit address of this faux-critique comes when Adorno discusses “pseudoactivity” (544 ff.):

“The ambivalence of the retarded listeners has its most extreme expression in the fact that individuals, not yet fully reified, want to extricate themselves from the mechanism of musical reification to which they have been handed over, but that their revolts against fetishism only entangle them more deeply in it.  Whenever they attempt to break away from the passive status of compulsory consumers and ‘activate’ themselves, they succumb to pseudoactivity” (544).

We desire to break free, but our revolts only entangle us even more intensely in the commodification of culture.  Adorno’s examples of this consider the “jitterbugs” and ham radio enthusiasts—great examples, but a little dated, perhaps, to our ears.  Still dated, but a little bit less so, I personally remember an illustration of this from about 13 years ago.  In the late 1990’s I was living in New York and attended many “indie shows” and especially the annual CMJ music festival that would allow independent labels to hold showcases for their bands.  The crowds were very hip, all the insider city kids.  Then, in the year 2000, I was in a small town in Ohio picking up something at a big-box store (Kmart, Target, one of those) and saw, in the little boy’s clothing section, prepackaged “indie rocker” outfits next to prepackaged “punk rocker” outfits next to prepackaged “grunge” outfits next to prepackaged “goth” outfits—variously black shirts or new vintage-look tees, tight jeans, belts with chains attached, safety pins already added, premade holes and stains, 1950’s style plastic glasses or dark 1980’s sunglasses, hoodies, socks, and even shoes with laces mismatched and pre-knotted … all already assembled for your 6 to 13 year old boy.  In just a few years time, what had been (hardly new, but still) “independent” had become co-opted by the system, distilled to a specific, identifiable type, mass-replicated, and presented for sale as the most convenient product possible to aid one in looking as anti-system as possible.  (… But, hey, we still were given [the illusion of] freedom of choice … you [well, more likely the mother shopping for her young son] could choose what image you wanted to be …!)

1. Jitterbug:
   

2. Nebulously a dance of the early 1930’s to 60’s, a class of dances including different forms of swing dance, a dancer of these dances, an enthusiast for this dance, the music to which the dances are set, the craze of the same period for the entire ethos associated with the dance/music, and even a verb for the activity of the dancing or music making.  [[[ Click here to see a brief essay on Jitterbugs ]]]  

   

   The term was in use in the early 20th c. in relation to intoxication, but the jazz musician Cab Calloway is credited with its coinage, and especially it popularization through his 1934 song “Call of the Jitter Bug” [[[ click here to hear the song ]]]   and the Fred Waller film “Cab Calloway’s Jitterbug Party” (1935). [[[ Click here to see a brief clip of the film ]]]  
   
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4. As a jazz lover myself, I cringe at times about Adorno’s disdain for jazz music, especially since jazz nicely illustrates many of the same positive traits he identifies (in other writings) in twelve-tone classical composition, which he greatly admired.  On the one hand, what Adorno is identifying as jazz is a very limited, popularized segment of the genre and it strictly seems unfair to explode the critique against the commercialized bits to apply to all that is jazz.  On the other hand, the core of his critique as to the vacuous enthusiasm for jazz as radically rebellious and ecstatically freeing is valid, even as it cannot be limited to jazz alone. 
   

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6. As he points out in the very name “jitterbug,” it is “as if they simultaneously wanted to affirm and mock their loss of individuality …” (545).  Further, while jazz was identified as minoritarian, other, radical, sensual, and ecstatically freeing, the rush of crowds to “get in on” the trend clearly exemplifies the transformation of the other into one more of the appropriated, prepackaged, and sold to us same things.  The seeming ecstasy of this jazz is empty; it is only an exemplar of our pseudo-activity. 
   

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8. Ham Radios:
   

9. Ham radio is amateur radio: the use of certain radio frequencies for private, non-commercial communication.  It is what is not commercial and not run by government or other non-profit agencies.  So, again, it seems to represent everything that is truly individual, free, a space of and for pure, open communication.  But, Adorno points out, it is just the introvert’s version of jitterbug.  The freedom that was there had been co-opted, strictly structured and organized, yet still packaged as if

   

   free.  “Verification cards” were designed and distributed, a desire for them was created, contests were held wherein the winner was s/he who had collected the most.  [[[ Click here for more on Ham Radio ]]]
   

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The enthusiast may see him or herself as the individual, one acting on one’s own desires, but these desires have been co-opted from the realm of the truly individual or simply created and fed to the masses to create mass-enthusiasm.  “He pictures himself as the individualist who whistles at the world.  But what he whistles is its [the system’s] melody …” (546).

In the face of all of this, regressive music, Adorno explains, takes on a comic aspect.  The appearance of the seriousness barely covers the comic just beneath.  Comedy, perhaps, as an absurdist sort—laughing when we ought be crying, changing, rethinking our way of being: “involved in this laughter is the decay of the sacral spirit of reconciliation” (546).

So what is to be done?  “Perhaps a better hour may at some time strike even for the clever fellows: one in which they may demand, instead of prepared material ready to be switched on, the improvisatory displacement of things, as the sort of radical beginning that can only thrive under the protection of the unshaken real world” (547). 

“As little as regressive listening is a symptom of progress in consciousness of freedom, it could suddenly turn around if art, in unity with the society, should ever leave the road of the always-identical” (547).  That is, in our development, regression is the opposite of the fulfillment of freedom; but, we could reignite this proper development if we could embrace music that is free from sounding like everything else out there.  But, remember, we are hooked on the identical—hooked on liking new songs that sound like all our old songs.  New music, the truly new, is always a harsh assault against us, they force us to listen in uncomfortable ways, and ways that require work and discipline. 

There are models out there for the sort of music that could come along and be truly new; Adorno mentions three: Mahler, Schönberg, and Webern, spending more time on the first, just referencing the latter two who seem distinct as models.

Mahler is noted more for the breakage from the obsessed culture of brand (playing the “beat-up melody,” not the new and shiny repetition).  He takes what is already out there in its vulgar form (“his themes are expropriated ones”), but “nothing sounds as it was wont to; all things are diverted as if by a magnet” (547).  It is not just like what we hear today in a “remix,” but it is a radical replaying of the vulgar; a play upon what is familiar, but so radically, that it makes the familiar (what has become the norm, the real) sound uncomfortably altered (the surreal).

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911):  A Jewish Austrian composer and conductor who was a bridge-figure between the late-Romantic style of the 19th c. Austrian tradition and the rise of 20th c. modernism.  He uses features from the Austro-German tradition (e.g., Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner, etc.) such as soloists plus choirs, inherent narratives, and new movement formats, and using these in ways to push their innovation further than had been done.  Many of his symphonies were considered controversial when first performed on musical grounds, then, on religious-political grounds, his music was banned in most of Europe during the Nazi reign, but after the war, his work was rediscovered and championed.  It is considered “heady” music that engaged intellectual themes of struggle.  [[[ Click here to see an NPR page of interviews, performances, etc. on Mahler ]]]

Schönberg and Webern are hardly discussed, but we get the hint that they are not doing the strange rethinking of the familiar to make it unfamiliar, but have wholly walked down that “road of the always-identical.”  The receipt of their music is the receipt of “terror,” maybe partially in the sense of fear, but also partially in the sense of an aggressive terrorizing.  This “comes not from their incomprehensibility,” which is a complaint one hears against them, “but from the fact that they are all too correctly understood.  Their music gives form to that anxiety, that terror, that insight into the catastrophic situation which others merely evade by regressing” (547).  This music makes us confront things we prefer to shrink from.  This music is truly individual, in the sense of not being identical to everything else out there, but their individuality is in their not being singular or singularizing; they do not speak with one voice, but bring forth the cacophony of that to which we typically fail to listen.  Their multi-voiced provocation are the only way to consciously represent the true aims of the collective (not the capitalist constructed masses, but the true, free unity of people).

Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951): Schönberg (later spelled Schoenberg when he moved to America), a Jewish Austrian composer, radicalized 20th c. music and musical theory.  Mostly self-taught, he and Webern are considered part of the “Second Viennese School,” the musical successors of Mahler, with Schönberg often identified as the leader.  Like Mahler, Schönberg suffered under the Nazi rise, with his works banned, being labeled as “degenerate art.”  His earlier work pushes the limits of the Austro-Germanic and Romantic traditions, but later pioneered “twelve tone composition,” often called “atonality” for its breakage from the standard form of a central melodic idea and manipulation of an ordered series of the twelve tones in the chromatic scale.  Schönberg also was recognized for being a teacher of composition (notably to Webern, Alban Berg, John Cage, etc.), a musical theorist, and an interesting painter.  (Image is Schönberg’s Self-Portrait, 1910)  [[[ Click here to visit the site for the Arnold Schönberg Center ]]]  

Discussion Prompts:

Thursday, July 24:  Discussion Post Six Due: Thoughtfully and thoroughly engage the discussion questions posted in the “Adorno” Discussion Forum on Blackboard.

(1) Explain, offer examples, and evaluate Adorno’s idea of the “regression of listening” wherein everything has become “commodity listening,” wherein music is “manipulated for reasons of marketability” (540).

(2) Explain, offer examples, and evaluate Adorno’s claim that commoditized culture so determines the objects of our fetishes and creates our “values,” that personal taste and feeling are no longer personal, no longer ours: “Music, with all the attributes of the ethereal and sublime which are so generously accorded it, serves in America today as an advertisement for commodities which one must acquire in order to be able to hear music” (541-2). 

(3) Adorno proposes that “Perhaps a better hour may at some time strike even for the clever fellows: one in which they may demand, instead of prepared material ready to be switched on, the improvisatory displacement of things, as the sort of radical beginning that can only thrive under the protection of the unshaken real world” (547).  What do you think?  Is this possible?  Do we see any examples of it?