Adorno on Technology and the Work of Art

Martin J.C. Dixon

The work of art still has something in common with enchantment: it posits its own, self-enclosed area, which is withdrawn from the context of profane existence, and in which special laws apply. Just as in the ceremony the magician first of all marked out the limits of the area where the sacred powers were to come into play, so every work of art describes its own circumference which closes it off from actuality.1 The substantive element of artistic modernism draws its power from the fact that the most advanced procedures of material production and organisation are not limited to the sphere in which they originate. In manner scarcely analysed yet by sociology, they radiate out into areas of life far removed from them, deep into the zones of subjective experience, which does not notice this and guards the sanctity of its reserves. Art is modern when, by its mode of experience and as the expression of crisis of experience, it absorbs what industrialisation has developed under the given relations of production.2

Combining these two formulations, in its current state of development the artwork has a double character; on the one hand it is closed to actuality, is governed by interior laws and sides with enchantment and the mythic, while on the other it absorbs what industrialisation has developed and marks itself as the equal of the highest stage of technological sophistication and rational organisation. Put in these terms, the artwork entwines formal enchantment and technical disenchantment and it is these two processes that together constitute the inner communication of the modern and myth.3 Such communication contributes to an historical antagonism within the concept of art itself; in the process of gaining command of its own materials it disenchants itself, and with this it renounces its own powers of illusion and appearance. Arguably, the development of the modern work of art since Baudelaire has been towards its own de-aestheticisation.4

1Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 19. 2Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 34. 3Ibid., p. 22-23. 4See ibid., p. 79.

The artwork implies an artistic subject, and this subject is defenceless against the technological world: what the subject experiences and the manner in which these experiences come about cannot be shielded from the social totality. This means that what passes for a domain of subjective artistic production - the realm of creation, inspiration, even Genius - cannot be simply be dissociated from the conditions and experiences of material production that predominate in a given society. Regarding technology in general, Adornos views follow from the classical Marxian analysis. Advanced industrial technology is deployed within a specific social situation termed the relations of production. Relations of production include everything that passes between the worker and the factory owner, manager or, more generally, the capitalist for whom the worker works. In Marxs analysis it is the difference of interests of the capitalist and worker which produce the irrational and distorting phenomena such as the division of labour, the commodification of labour, time and objects, the alienation of the worker from the objects that are produced, and even alienation from him or herself. For Marx, the connection of labour and the object produced by labour is fundamental: the product of labour is labour embodied and made material in an object, it is the objectification of labour. The realisation of labour is its objectification.5 It is assumed that the object of labour is the embodiment of the subject, that it should belong to the essential being of the worker.6 Under capitalism, the overbearing externality of the object with respect to the worker, and the fact that the worker possesses neither the object nor the materials from which it is made nor the capital that is generated through its market exchange, the labourer loses not only the object but also him or herself in the process of manufacture. The capacities and time of the worker are the property of the capitalist and consequently the worker suffers a loss of reality.7 The physical and mental resources of the worker which might otherwise be put to realising immediate needs and the development of self are disposed entirely to produce an alien and meaningless object. This Marx describes as a labour of self-sacrifice, of mortification.8 It is this alienation which produces the schism between work and leisure as the attempt is made to restore outside working hours that which the worker expended during the day, a space to which aesthetic activity - both production and reception - is constantly in danger of being relegated.
5Karl Marx, Early Writings, p. 324. 6Ibid., p. 326. 7Ibid., p. 324. 8Ibid., p. 326.

The phenomena that Marx declares the consequence of capitalist relations of production are, in theory at least, separable from the question of the means or forces of production, which can equated with technological means in general. And the argument often runs that providing the existing relations of production can be dismantled and the proletariat gain ownership and control of the means of production, there is no reason why the Marxist should not have cause for optimism regarding the post-revolutionary status of technology. The current relations of production are such that they have totally distorted the notion of productivity and have diverted technology away from its supposed capacity to liberate the worker from work, towards the debasement of labour and ever greater degrees of specialisation and dependency. Furthermore, in enabling mass production, technology makes it possible to produce in quantities far in excess of what a society actually requires resulting in production for its own sake. The exponential acceleration of techno-scientific development has lead to the discovery of all manner new devices, products and consumer gadgets. This in turn necessitates the requirement to stimulate desire for these commodities and increase consumption leading to the contemporary experience of material and semiotic inundation. The consuming individual, apparently empowered by choice, is crowded out by the superabundance of purchasable goods and services and the frenetic attempts to force the existence and desirability of a given commodity into his or her consciousness. If the relations of production could be transformed, not only would these excesses come to an end, the whole techno-scientific infrastructure could be placed at the disposal of all in such a way as to allow it to be oriented and apportioned according to genuine material needs and to benefit the entirety of society. Until recently, socialist movements espoused the principle that the means of production should therefore come under the ownership of the state. Such an argument rests on the assumption that technology is of itself socially and politically neutral. As Andrew Feenberg relates in his essay on Herbert Marcuses critique of technology, this assumption takes it that the neutrality of technology consists first of all in its indifference, as pure instrumentality, to the variety of ends it can be made to serve, and secondly, that it also appears to be indifferent with respect to culture, at least among the modern nations, and especially with respect to the political distinction between capitalist and socialist society. 9 Unlike many social institutions (Feenberg mentions legal, religious institutions) the assumption is that the entirety of technology

9See Feenberg, Marcuse: Critical Theory and the Promise of Utopia, p. 229. The issue of the Frankfurt Schools attitude to technology is also discussed in Larrain, The Concept of Ideology, pp.172-210.

developed under capitalism could be transferred to a socialist context without any fundamental changes. He continues:
The socio-political neutrality of technology is usually attributed to its rational character and is related to the universality of the truth embodied in the technology, a truth which can be formulated in verifiable causal propositions. Insofar as such propositions are true, they are not socially and politically relative but, like scientific ideas, maintain their cognitive status in every conceivable social context.10

There are, however, many reasons for supposing that this is not the case and that the transferral of technology from the hands of the capitalist and into the hands of the proletariat is entirely insufficient for the recovery of a truly efficacious and nonalienating form of material production. Marcuses own critique claims that technology is fundamentally biased towards domination11 in that technical machinery - because it has been developed to serve the interests of the capitalist and these interests are always to extend the control and exploitation of the work force - has a design and manner of operation that consolidates the power of the capitalist. In line with Marxs theory of alienation, technology in and of itself is alienating. Its manner of operation isolates and disempowers the worker; it obliges the worker to perform systematic and repetitive operations; the operator regulates and structures his or her activity in conformity with the requirements of the technology which that activity then begins to resemble. Technology is both a powerful means of increasing production and profit for the capitalist and also a solution to the problem of labour discipline.12 And in direct contradiction to current ideology, the development of technology under capitalist relations of production is continually constrained by the narrow interests of profit, market competition and labour control. Accordingly, Marx could insist on a normative critique of capitalist economies in that they failed to demonstrate sufficient productive competence. The rhetoric that

10Ibid., p. 229. 11Ibid., p. 230. 12In the twentieth century, the ideology of technology has advanced considerably into the very functioning of the political and communicative spheres. As Jorge Larrain relates: ...the evolution of capitalism in the twentieth century brought about two new factors, the increase in state intervention on the one hand, and the interdependence of research and technology on the other hand. The change from liberalism to a welfare state destroyed in practice the ideology of just exchange, and the need for a new legitimating ideology arose. It is found in technology and science which have become fused and increasingly manipulative. They provide the ideological basis to justify decisions as if they were merely technical, not political. Therefore ideology in advanced capitalism means technocratic consciousness and depolitization, the concealing of communicative interaction and its replacement by a scientific manipulative system. Larrain, The Concept of Ideology, p.206.

claims that technology saves time and money, is more reliable, or liberates, is continually contradicted by ordinary experience. But Marcuse believed that such a critique was less tenable in the context of latecapitalism since the migration of advanced technology into every sector of life has led to the situation where technology and technological rationality now monopolises not only praxis but also theory, the very means by which critique can proceed:
Not only is technical progress distorted by the requirements of capitalist control, but the universe of discourse, public and eventually even private speech and thought, limit themselves to the posing and resolving of technical problems with the double constraints of the simultaneous interest in technical advance and domination that characterizes capitalist rationality. . . The universalization of technical modes of thought changes the cultural conditions presupposed by the Marxian theory of emancipatory struggle. There is no place for critical consciousness in this world: it is one-dimensional.13

Technology has become ideological in as much as it has becomes increasingly difficult to think or act in a non-technical manner, our activities are reduced to the posing and resolving of technical problems. The relentless debilitation of the very agency that could bring about revolution a working class that is brought to critical consciousness by Marxist theory leaves the dynamic of the emancipatory struggle in tatters. The issue of how to counter the ideological force of technology while acknowledging that technology is essential to our material existence is the dilemma that the Critical Theory of technology under late-capitalism must solve. * The preceding discussion can help situate Adornos attempt to accommodate technology within his aesthetic theory. On the basis of the text that begins this paper, Adorno seems to share something of Marcuses point of view when he writes that the influence of the sphere of material production extends to, and penetrates, the subject: technology and, therefore, technical attitudes can and should reproduce themselves in theoretical undertakings and artistic practices. Adorno makes two claims here: firstly that art, if it is to be truly modern, must incorporate and reckon with the subjects experience of technology in the contemporary world; but secondly and further to this, rather than attempting to banish technology from its own sphere or suppress its negative influence,
13Ibid., p. 237.

art is in a position to employ the most advanced technical procedures in the manipulation of its own materials:
Art is mimetic comportment that for the purpose of its objectivation disposes over the most advanced rationality for the control of its material procedures. This contradiction is arts answer to the contradiction of the ratio itself. If the telos of reason is a fulfilment that is in-itself necessarily not rational . . . art makes this irrational telos its own concern. In this, art draws on an unrestrained rationality in its technical procedures, which are, in the supposedly technical world, constrained by the relations of production and thus remain irrational. . .14

What is decisive here is that the artwork should not succumb to technology and make itself merely technological but divert the ratio of technology in another direction. As is clear, this formulation conforms exactly with the Marxist problematic of the separability of the forces and relations of production. In the context of art, Adorno is insisting that rationality can be developed in an unconstrained manner; in art, productive rationality can attain its full development in a way that is impossible in society at large. One passage in Aesthetic Theory would seem to indicate that Adorno held profoundly optimistic views with regard to the emancipatory potential of the existing productive forces, albeit tempered by realism: [A]rt holds fast to a promise of reconciliation in the midst of the unreconciled: This is the true consciousness of an age in which the real possibility of utopia - that given the level of productive forces the earth could here and now be paradise - converges with the possibility of total catastrophe.15 But Adorno will also acknowledge both the ideological implications of technology and that the forces of production cannot be fetishised without becoming a reflex of that technocracy that is a form of domination socially disguised under the semblance of rationality. On this evidence, it is difficult to see how Adorno can have it both ways: how could technology bring about utopia without such a society also becoming deformed by one or other form of technocratic ideology? In the narrower context of art, however, he stands by the notion that the artwork, particularly by virtue of its separation from actuality, can effect a critical transformation in the forces of production by reorienting them to other purposes, namely, the realisation of inner-aesthetic demands. As he continues: Technical forces of production have no value in themselves. They receive their importance exclusively in relation to their purpose in the work, and ultimately in relation to the truth content of what has been written, composed or painted.16 Because the post-Kantian artwork is
14Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 289. 15Ibid., p. 33. 16Ibid., p. 218.

autonomous and purposeless, the essentially heteronomous and telic forces of production find themselves transfigured when they are incorporated by and in the artwork. The peculiar structure of the artwork in a sense permits Adorno to maintain both a neutral and critical stance with respect to technology. The artwork can simultaneously employ and tell the truth about the negativity of current technological forces - it mimetically adapts itself to technology and shows it at work for non-coercive, aesthetic purposes; and insofar as that technology alienates the subject and stifles the mediation of the object, the success and truth of the artwork is dependent on the extent to which the ensuing crisis becomes materialised in the immanent structure of the work. The legacy of the production issue in Marxist theory has been resituated by Adorno - largely intact - in the context of the aesthetic domain. In doing so he has, in many respects, transferred the question of what technical productive forces are, or, in a transformed society, might be, out of political economy and into a concern for the immanent critique of modern art. By incorporating both technological means and the subjects experience of technology within its own productive procedures - acknowledging respectively a neutral stance regarding technology and its ideological hegemony - art becomes a means of diverting the remorseless momentum of modern technology for the purposes of its own inner-aesthetic organisation. By internalising technology, the artwork provides an intimation of what technology might be without the distorting and corrupting influence of the capitalist relations of production. Adornos understanding of aesthetic production hinges on establishing and defending a concept of production as realisation, and this entails, in one sense, the task of re-implicating the subject in the requirement to realise the needs of the object and not to mistake the fashioning and instantiation of objective procedures - and the assumed abdication of the subject - as a binding guarantee of objectivity. Also within the concept of realisation is the idea that the artwork must mediate something that is other to it, something which Adorno names as the more [das Mehr]: For the more is not simply the nexus of elements, but an other, mediated through this nexus but divided from it. The artistic elements suggest through their nexus what escapes it.17 The artwork is always more than what it is, and this lifts the artwork out of the empirical domain:
[A]rt is an entity that is not identical with its empiria. What is essential to art is that which is not the case, that which is incommensurable with the empirical measure of

17Ibid.. p. 79.

all things. The compulsion to aesthetics is the need to think this empirical incommensurability.18

Aesthetic production which sustains a relation to material particularity and to the nonidentical, which is open to genuine objective obligations and purposes, can counter the alienation associated with technical production. Aesthetic production is the hope that one can produce without recourse to domination or coercion, that one can produce works of art that are more than empirical objects, and, the fundamental paradox of all, that it is possible to produce truth. These themes are present in many of Adornos writings, but here we focus on a number of issues raised by Adornos 1958 essay Musik und Technik. This essay is an explicit attempt to salvage a conception of composition as realisation and to pursue the interaction of Technik19 and the musical composition. Adorno deemed this a necessary intervention since the trajectory of post-war music was towards greater rationalisation and integration of technology and science. Adorno was by no means against this process of integration, but his concern was with the endangering of aesthetic immanence, the fact that the artwork should be closed to actuality in order for the internal requirements of the artwork to make themselves felt. In terms of composition, Technik is concerned with the organisation of substance and implicit in the idea of organisation is that the composition should have a goal or a purpose. Every organisation implies an organiser and consequently Technik is associated with an image of a subject, regardless of its constitution. Since on its own terms organisation can succeed or fail, Technik evokes a feeling of the impetus of ability, success and function which are the purpose and goal of the organisation. But what is more:
organisation sublimates itself to the objectivity of this impetus and to a lawfulness which, throughout the struggle on the subjective plane, lends to this force an aspect of being-in-itself. By virtue of its technical organisation the work of art attains to a context of meaning; everything in the work is able to legitimize itself in terms of technical necessity.20

Organisation sublimates itself in two respects: to that of the objectivity of the impetus [Moment] and to that of the lawfulness which lends to this impetus the quality of being18Ibid., p. 335. 19Here we leave the German word Technik untranslated. Unlike the English technology Technik has a dialectical moment since in combines the objective sense of technology and the more subjective technique. 20Ibid., p. 79-80.

in-itself. This impetus drives the organisation towards a goal or a purpose; it is considered as something objective, that is as residing in, or as an aspect of, the objectivity of the material, an objectivity that is understood as facing the subject who experiences this impetus as something with which the subject must contend. In this process the organisation is sublimated - raised up, transformed - and thus becomes more than organisation for its own sake. The organisation of the work is, therefore, sublimated by an internal purposive necessity. Nothing in the work can appear there without reference to this lawfulness, without reference to technical necessity. Everything in the artwork looks to Technik for its justification; Technik governs the interior of the work and is the arbiter of correctness of organisation, what within the bounds of the work, and only there, can be considered as necessary. But here the logic takes on a new complication:
Gehalt und Technik sind identisch and nicht-identisch. Nicht-identisch, weil das Kunstwerk sein Leben hat an der Spannung von Innen und Auen; weil es Kunstwerk wird einzig, indem seine Erscheinung ber sich hinausweist. . . Die unvermittelte Identitt von Gehalt und Erscheinung hbe die Idee von Kunst selber auf. Dennoch sind beide auch identisch. Denn in der Komposition zhlt nur das Realisierte.21 (Content and Technik are identical and non-identical. Non-identical because the artwork itself lives in the tension between the interior and exterior; because it becomes an artwork solely in that its manifestation points beyond itself. . .The unmediated identity of content and manifestation would cancel the idea of art itself. Nonetheless, both are also identical. For in the composition only that which is realised counts.)

The conclusion that one can draw from this singular relation of Technik and content is surprising - the concept of Technik encompasses its own dialectic.22 That is, Technik both realises and determines content; it includes within it what it is designed to serve. Technik and Gehalt cannot, in the final assessment, be separated. This is not simply a logical curiosity or peculiarity; what Adorno indicates here is that this feature of Technik is in fact indicated by the historical emergence of a particular notion of compositional technique during the nineteenth century and coincides with the advent of the autonomous work of art and the concomitant gaining of volitional freedom for the composer. This freedom was the readiness to exert self-conscious and rational domination of means over the compositional material itself. Advancement in compositional technique entails a progressive domination over tonal material by the
21Gesamellte Schriften. 16, p. 229. See also Adorno, Music and Technique, p. 80. (Translation altered.) 22Da in der Musik Gehalt und Technik identisch and nicht-identisch seien, sagt nicht weniger, als da der Begriff der Technik seine eigene Dialektik einschliet. (G.S. 16, p. 230.)

means of compositional intention, and with the increasing freedom in the disposition of these means which themselves achieve autonomy through this very process.23 Domination proceeds by progressively dividing and sub-dividing what it to be dominated; only then can what is to be controlled be drawn into ones own capabilities. Adornos language is explicit: Technik advances as the aesthetic equivalent of the principle of divide and govern. Techniques can, therefore, be deployed at the behest of the composer, and techniques themselves can advance over that which they are designed to manipulate. The manner of advancement of these techniques is structurally identical to all advancement as it is conceived in the modern era: that of domination through rationalisation, the taking possession of phenomena by means of conceptual identities. Technik advances as technification [Technifizierung]. Technification draws into compositional practice responsibilities that previously belonged to other spheres and specialisms; performance and interpretation now become subject to determination by the composer. Technification results in the inclusion within the musical work of technologies not specifically related to music but which have appeared as part of the course of technological developments in society as a whole. Adornos example here is the expansion of instrumentation and the new significance given to orchestration by Berlioz. Adorno argues that whereas during the Baroque, instrumental forces were not absolutely fixed and a given score can be realised in a variety of equally satisfactory ways, Berlioz for the first time organised and exploited the forces of the orchestra as an aspect of the compositional process. The techniques of orchestration are techniques of instrumental effect, coloration - in short, they are concerned with communication to an audience, with shock, surprise, and sonic excitement. Such techniques can be considered as external and subsequent to the composition proper, and exist, to begin with, only in parallel with the compositional process, originally belonging to issues of realisation. The composer in the process of advancement acquires control of the manner of realisation of the score:
it is no longer musical meaning which is shaped in this process, but musical reproduction itself is now included, in part, in the act of composition. Since Berlioz, performance has been placed in the hands of the composer; this in turn has greatly reduced the tension between score and performance.24

23Adorno, Music and Technique, p. 80-1. 24Ibid., p. 81.

In the light of the dialectical property of Technik that Adorno outlines above, though such techniques begin as external to the musical composition itself, they are also capable of penetrating into the interior form of the music; the exterior no longer exists in a state of dialectical tension with the interior, but has become implicated with the interior, and transforms it: This externalized aspect of music - in a certain sense its communicative aspect - then penetrates into the interior of the formal law of music.25 Previously, realisation was exteriorisation; the realisation that was part of the process of discovering meaning in the work is now included in the domain of compositional intention. The content of the work is profoundly affected by such a transformation. The second form of technification is that of the appropriation of non-musical technologies in order to expand compositional resources, the inclusion in music of techniques which had developed extraterritorially within the total course of technical and technological advancement.26 Adorno suggests as examples of developments in instrumentation the valve horn and the saxophone. Each appeared as a discrete invention in its own right before its compositional hour tolled, before, in other words, the potential of these new instruments is ever explored within an aesthetic context - he even goes so far as to say that the valve horn was a decisive precondition of Wagners art of instrumental composition. But more significantly:
Means which are in no way primarily a product of the composition are admitted to the composition for the sake of its expansion; in doing so, however, these means raise demands of their own. This results in the establishment of an extra-aesthetic factor normatively - as it were - within the aesthetic realm. The unity of an epoch, which is actually the unity of its total social tendency - asserts itself above and beyond works of art through its presence in these very works themselves.27

In the attempt to capitalise on extra-aesthetic advancement, the artwork incorporates new means into itself and thus society can be said to appear within and assert itself through the artwork. But in addition, these new techniques raise demands of their own, aesthetic demands, and the purpose which the artwork is intended to serve. Here we arrive at what Adorno calls the dialectical law of motion regarding the technification of the work of art which is the law of its increasing integration and its self-alienation.28 Integration comes about because, as we have already seen, the composer is able to exercise greater
25Ibid. 26Ibid. 27Ibid. 28Ibid.

discrimination over a greater range of forces and these have become included in the aesthetic configuration. Self-alienation results because new compositional means are procured through specialisation and objectification, which are themselves cut-off from content and subjectivity. These new means bring with them ideology and what transpires is a dialectic of domination: the aesthetic goal of the artwork relies more heavily on the means, the means therefore come to threaten the ends by dominating them, it is the aesthetic dialectic of master and slave [Herr und Knecht].29 In making reference to Hegels analysis of Lord and Bondsman in the Phenomenology of Spirit Adorno deepens the underlying theme concerning subjectivity. Hegels argument is that for self-consciousness to develop, an individual must encounter another self-consciousness, the reciprocal interaction of which results in a mutual development of consciousness. Self-consciousness can only exist in and for itself through being acknowledged by an other. This process breaks down in certain instances, such as in the relation of master to servant. Here the master does not encounter the servant as a self-consciousness but as a thing, and it is the servant that encounters the material world on the masters behalf, also depriving the master of a potential engagement with the world and of possible self-development. The consciousness of the master suffers as a consequence. Adornos implication is that in the process of domination of means over ends not only do the means become tyrannical but the development of consciousness is at stake. The gathering together of ever more powerful means by the composing subject results in a deformation of the consciousness of the composer; the composer loses touch with the materials which are not encountered directly, but with techniques as intermediaries. With integral serialism, which at this time had become transparent as the telos of composition30, the processes of technification achieve new levels of material control and the relation between Technik and content enters a crisis. Integral serialism is the latest stage in the rational command of content and material. To begin with, Adorno addresses the issue of the realisation in performance of the serially composed work and the fact that specific interpretation becomes superfluous if everything in the score has become predetermined and the performers role can only be one of mute reading.31 Blind accuracy might be the only significant performance criterion; no additional insight into the music is in fact necessary since the integral serialist work which has satisfied
29Ibid. 30Ibid. 31Ibid.

itself in its notation and is concerned only with its own structural articulation, has already developed into its own realisation.32 This Adorno sees as a threat to the idea of the work. With the integral serial work, nothing can be perceived in the material beyond its abstractions; what stands for the work is nothing but the execution of certain formal procedures. For Adorno, this is a travesty of what it is to compose. The coherence that such a logical and systematic approach would seem to guarantee in fact yields its opposite: the musical material, reduced to logical primitives, cannot be re-integrated into a continuity. In isolating compositional components, and in rationalising their relationships, all effective spontaneous interrelation between individual moments, and participation in and contribution to a sense of the wholeness of the work is blocked. Because the material of the serial work is pre-formulated at the outset, nothing is actually required of the composer other than the writing-out of the results. Nothing is required of the performer other than the obedient rendering of these results as sound. In both cases, the musical subject is no more than an executant. The arbitrary system of ordering that is put in place is willed by the composer in order to exclude him or herself. This cannot yield a pure objectivity; it approximates to, but is in reality only a surrogate for a true sense of objectivity. The subjectivity that wields serial techniques is deluded by the perfection of the material and the perfection of the material coincides with its suppression. With the material subdued, the compositional subject experiences no obligation with respect to the material since it has no being, and no longer offers resistance and, consequently, no longer exists.33 Resistance is what places the composer under obligation in the first instance; the demand of the material is experienced as resistance to compositional intention, an obstacle to the compositional will. The abolition of resistance in the material makes it absolutely commensurable with thought and nothing obstructs the capriciousness of subjectivity. The compositional subject reduces material to itself, material and construction being indistinguishable. Compositional activity falls under Adornos critique of idealism: composition consumes its object and makes the material identical to itself. Resistance is history sedimented in the material, the history of previous subjective activity on and with that material. Atomisation and systematisation, heedless to the material, dispossess it of that history:
The continuity of meaning is undermined by the reduction of all musical elements and dimensions to the same level; this is done in order to promote the complete continuity of meaning and the liberation of it from anything alien or heteronomous
32Ibid., p. 83. 33Ibid., p. 84.

which is unable to resolve within itself. The destiny of every musical phenomenon, disrupted in this way, is that the disposition of material in a manner no way identical with the material befalls the material itself, rather than paying heed to the direction which the phenomenon would take of its own free will . . . [wohin das Erscheinende von sich aus will].34

What lies at the root of Adornos critique of serialism is identity; the technological work of art dreams of an absolute identity. The process of technification has as its telos the total reduction of all and every aspect of the composition to a single principle. Constructions based on identity expel what is heteronomous to the system and establish a false, that is pre-given, consistency. Against this, Adorno states that the phenomenon has a will of its own, the material has an historical momentum which awaits release through the subject, a will which is effaced in systematisation. The reduction of musical elements is achieved through the device of the parameter, and it is the parameter that serves identity. Parameters permit the construction of spurious identities between the separable, but non-identical elements of music, which Adorno compares to multiplying oranges by typewriters [Apfelsinen mit Schreibmaschinen multipliziert].35 Moreover, mechanical means of reproduction have made it possible to define music as independent from ephemeral performance and this can react in the content of the artwork:
Technological development, understood at first as extra-musical, then guarded by compositional intentions, converges with inner-musical development. If works of art become their own reproduction, it is then foreseeable that reproductions will become works.36

In marked contrast to Walter Benjamins views on this topic, the mechanical means of reproduction such as tape and early electronic devices were seen by Adorno as threatening to the work concept because it meant that the musical work would exist ready-realised in a medium that formerly was given over to reproduction only. The aesthetic potential of the non-identity of production and re-production is necessarily forfeited. For Adorno, one of the ways by which this potential can be protected is in fact the mediating capability of notation. What concerns him is that with electronic media comes the possibility of making music as:

34Ibid. (G.S. 16, p. 235.) 35G.S. 16, p. 237. 36Ibid.

directly as one paints a picture and the significative intermediate level, notation, could be by-passed as though it were an ornamental formality. In this process, the tension between Technik and content is necessarily reduced further. The less musical portrayal continues to be the portrayal of something, the more the essence of the means comes to agree with the essence of that which is portrayed.37

The act of notating is the notating of something; the notation is non-identical with that which it attempts to capture as notation. Notation, as a musical means, as a specific musical Technik, safeguards the work from becoming identical with its realisation and therefore reified. One can aver that the same can be said of contemporary trends concerning live electronics which re-implicate the performer/interpreter in specific acts of realisation, none of which can be considered identical with the work. * It has become apparent in the preceding discussion that Adornos concept of Technik is bivalent; it both governs the internal constitution of the work - its logic - and, as technification, it is the process by which that interior becomes expanded through the importation of extra-aesthetic Technik. Both the development and the ageing of the work of art are by way of such intrusions. The most virulent intrusion into the aesthetic context, and the extreme of technification, is that of the wrong logic, a logic of identity. The judgement as to the incorrectness of this logic is not brought to the artwork from the outside; it is not a philosophical judgement, the artwork itself testifies to the damage done and therein lies its truth content. It can be said, therefore, that technification - and the history of technification is the history of the modern artwork - is the process whereby the un- or under-defined limit that encircles the artwork, that marks off the interior and its special laws, is breached. What comes in from the outside may well be placed under a new obligation, that of an aesthetic context of unity, but it also distorts the interior of the work, dispersing and exploding, its meaningfulness. But because of the singular logic of Technik, the fact that it encompasses its own dialectic, ultimately it cannot be conveniently assigned to either the inside or the outside of the artwork. Without the operation of some notion of a limit between art and empirical world, Adornos theory of technification would not be possible. To reiterate the point made earlier, the artwork must mediate something which

37Ibid.

is other to it, something, that which in the sphere of the made is nevertheless non-made, the non-factual in their facticity.38 The conclusions for the composer from Adornos theory of Technik are suggestive. While Adorno is sympathetic to the admittance of Technik into the interior of the artwork, in the final analysis, what makes it an artwork does not come under the jurisdiction of the composer and cannot itself be composed, but arises out of that which is composed. It is so only to the extent that Technik is a means of realisation and, as the realisation of the non-identical, performs what Adorno calls a Mnchausean trick.39 The binary logic of interior/exterior is intensified by the presence of the nonidentical, and ultimately the stability of the interior of the musical work is always threatened by the non-identical. Because of the non-identical, the interior of artwork becomes unstable and brings about a rupture of the limit between interior and exterior:
The strict immanence of the spirit of artworks is contradicted on the other hand by a countertendency that is no less immanent: the tendency of artworks to wrest themselves free of the internal unity of their own construction, to introduce within themselves caesuras that no longer permit the totality of the appearance. Because the spirit of the works is not identical with them, spirit breaks up the objective form through which it is constituted; this rupture is the instant of apparition.40

This rupture precipitates the disintegration of the artwork, which is where Adornos theorisation of modernity culminates. Adorno encourages the integration of extraaesthetic Technik with the musical composition so as to heighten and intensify this moment of rupture. The increased constructional unity that the rationalising tendencies of Technik allows must, therefore, be answered by an ever greater disintegrating tendency, a greater sensitivity to the blind spots and fissures in the technical constitution of the resulting work. The individual artist that reckons with these problems develops in terms of what Adorno calls human productive forces - that is, the ability on the part of the subject to differentiate the materials under his or her command and to become aware of the history that is stored in the material. Progress in the area of Technik must be matched by progress in consciousness: Progressive consciousness ascertains the condition of the material in which history is sedimented right up to the moment in which the work answers to it; precisely by doing so, progressive consciousness is also the transforming
38Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 86. 39Ibid., p. 22-23. 40Ibid., p. 88.

critique of technique [Technik]; in this moment, consciousness reaches out into the open, beyond the status quo.41

41Ibid., p. 193.

References
Adorno, Theodor; Horkheimer, Max. The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1997) Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory, trans Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: The Atholone Press, 1997) Adorno, Theodor. Music and Technique, trans. Wesley Blomster, Telos 32 (Summer 1977) Adorno, Theodor. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 16, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978) Feenberg, Andrew; Pippin, Robert; Webel, Charles P. (eds.). Marcuse: Critical Theory and the Promise of Utopia (London: Macmillian Education Ltd, 1988) Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: OUP, 1977) Larrain, Jorge. The Concept of Ideology (London: Hutchinson, 1979) Marx, Karl. Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregory Benton (Harmondsworth: Penguin Bools Limited, 1975)