Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities

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A TIME FOR DISSONANCE AND NOISE

David Cunningham

To cite this article: David Cunningham (2003) A TIME FOR DISSONANCE AND NOISE, Angelaki:
Journal of Theoretical Humanities, 8:1, 61-74, DOI: 10.1080/09697250301199

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 ANGELAKI
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 8 number 1 april 2003

it is a history, it is our history, and it is to us

that this has not ceased to happen. We must
still be absolutely modern.
Jean-Luc Nancy1

n a talk first given to a Norwegian conference

I on contemporary art and the function of
critique, published in Angelaki 4.3 (1999),
Simon Critchley argues that music “is no simple
lapse back into the pre-discursive … [I]t rather
produces an endless effort of evaluation, cogni-
tion and judgement … Musical experience is
both pre- and post-reflective” (“Sounding
Desire” 129). Critchley’s guide here is Adorno,
as he acknowledges early on in the piece,
although given that his central subject is the
black “trip hop” artist Tricky, this might well be
considered ironic. (If Adorno had not had the
good fortune to die when he did, such music
would no doubt have finished him off.)
Nonetheless, as Critchley rightly asserts, what-
ever Adorno’s own “inexcusable ignorance and
elitism,” as regards forms like jazz, if one is to
avoid “collapsing into some sort of vapid post-
modernist inversion of the high into the low,”
then it is Adorno’s claims for the “critical and
emancipatory function of art” that still provide
the best starting point for any “evaluation, cogni-
tion and judgement” of contemporary musical
forms and practices (123).2
Explicitly connecting Adorno’s “elevation of
certain forms … of aesthetic production” with
Clement Greenberg’s theorisation of “aesthetic
modernism” in painting, Critchley asserts a need
to move beyond “the now strangely démodé
conflict between modernism and postmod-
ernism” (123). While I certainly have no wish to
re-activate such debates – stale as they are – it
will be my contention in what follows that it is,
david cunningham
A TIME FOR
DISSONANCE
AND NOISE
on adorno, music, and the
concept of modernism
in fact, precisely Adorno’s philosophical concep-
tion of modernism, actually quite different from
that articulated by Greenberg, which remains of
the utmost importance for critical reflection on
contemporary art and music, including so-called
“mass art.” However, it will also be my argument
that the condition of this “importance” must be
a theoretical disentangling of Adorno’s general
(abstract) conception of modernism – as
something like an immanent dynamic logic of
artistic production or a structure of temporal
experience – from the particular objective forms
of “aesthetic production” with which he came
(more or less exclusively) to associate it in his
postwar writings. What is at stake, in general, in
such a disentanglement is, for reasons that will
hopefully become obvious, best traced through

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/03/010061-14 © 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of Angelaki
DOI: 10.1080/0969725032000093609

61
 dissonance and noise
Adorno’s theories of modern music; I will
discuss these theories, predominantly, in relation
to Aesthetic Theory and the essay in Prisms enti-
tled simply “Arnold Schoenberg,” before moving
on in the latter part of this paper to discuss the
possible applications of Adorno’s concept of
modernism – beyond his own self-imposed
restrictions – in the “evaluation, cognition and
judgement” of so-called “non-art” or “popular”
forms.
The importance of Schoenberg, not only to
Adorno’s views on music but to his critical philos-
ophy as a whole, is well documented. Martin Jay,
for example, suggests that Adorno’s own thought
might plausibly be described as “an ‘atonal’
philosophy deeply indebted to the compositional
techniques of the Schoenberg school” (28).
Nonetheless, more recent accounts have rather
tended to pass over the specific influence that
Adorno’s encounter with the musical “avant-
garde” had on his aesthetic theory, opting instead
to place him within the context of debates
surrounding the visual arts in particular.3 Peter
Osborne, for example, in an excellent account of
Adorno’s understanding of the avant-garde,
rightly states that dissonance and the new consti-
tute the two pivotal elements within his concep-
tion of modernism, yet nowhere does he refer to
the particular musical meaning from which the
notion of dissonance derives in his work.4
Now, by contrast, it will be my claim that by
too hastily detaching the concept of dissonance
from its specific “roots” in an analysis of musi-
cal form, one may lose sight of a valuable key to
understanding both the strengths and weak-
nesses of Adorno’s theory of modernism and of
the avant-garde. At the same time, this speci-
ficity must indeed be seen to mark, for Adorno,
in a particular form – that is, dissonance’s criti-
cal relation to harmony – a general question of
how (what I will term) the non-identity of moder-
nity and tradition is to be articulated affirma-
tively. The crucial context for this question is set
out in an early section of Aesthetic Theory:
since the mid-nineteenth century and the rise
of high capitalism, the category of the new has
been central … Since that moment no artwork
has ever succeeded that rebuffed the ever fluc-
tuating concept of the modern … Even [in the
case of] a composer as immune to the charge
of modernism as Anton Bruckner … [h]is
symphonies pose the question how the old is
after all still possible, which is to say as some-
thing new; the question testifies to the irre-
sistibility of the modern … That the category
of the new cannot be brushed off as art-alien
sensationalism is apparent in its irresistibility.
(19–20)
For Adorno, this quite simply is the situation or
experience of “modernity” – understood as the
non-identity of modernity and tradition – and
one which is, irresistibly, shared by proponents
of both modernism and traditionalism. As he
writes of Bruckner, his desire for the “eternal” is
“substantial exclusively as modern and in oppo-
sition to the modern” (ibid. 192). In this sense
(if only in this sense), Bruckner is as much
a “modern” composer as is Schoenberg.
Modernism, however, would be understood as
that specifically affirmative articulation of the
ineliminable non-identity of modernity and tradi-
tion, for which “the modern” is “not a chrono-
logical concept but a Rimbaudian postulate of an
art of the most advanced consciousness” (ibid.
33). This is where Adorno’s conception of
modernism has to be distanced from that gener-
ically defined “aesthetic modernism” with which
Critchley implicitly associates it. For modernism
here is neither something like a chronologically
delineated “period style” of art history – to
which a “postmodernist” style might be
opposed – nor a specific medium-based
“aesthetic” project with the kind of regulating
Idea (of “purity”) assigned to it by Greenberg.
Nor, and this will be the substance of the argu-
ment developed below, does it, in itself, insist
upon any necessary division between “high” and
“low” culture, to the extent that the situation of
modernity is the common space for both. Rather,
in its most fundamental form, modernism should
be understood as identifying an abstract, but
immanently manifested, temporal logic or
dynamic of artistic production that is not, in
principle, restricted to any fixed objective refer-
ent or particular “social” sphere.5 If the concept
of modernism (or indeed avant-garde) is to be
viewed as a cognitive category, the cognition it
marks is radically historical – that is, historical
62

beyond the hold of “historicism” – in such a way
as to always displace any formation of it as a
determinate empirical category of art history.6
What has the potential to be cognitively experi-
enced or judged as modern (or avant-garde) is
radically variable, depending upon shifts and
differences within the context in which it comes
forth.
With regard to music, the particular critical
moment of dissonance is thus presented, through
the concept of modernism, as an immanent
necessity of the temporal dynamic of musical
development, deriving from “the dynamic of the
concept of harmony itself and ultimately from its
insufficiency”; that is, from its incapacity to
efface the non-identity of modernity and tradi-
tion: “The rejection of the ideal of classicism
is … the result of the coefficient of friction in
harmony itself” (Aesthetic Theory 110). Since,
then, dissonance has concrete meaning only by
virtue of its (non-identical) relation to tradition’s
determination of harmony as an ideal, it is also
inextricably connected to a concept of the new,
in general, insofar as the destructive momentum
of dissonance – and, thus, the experience of
dissonance – can be sustained (that is, non-iden-
tically repeated) only by the ongoing renewal of
its non-identity to what is encountered as proper
to music within the cultural present. As such, the
concept of dissonance, in the more expansive
sense in which Adorno employs it, must not be
understood as an invariant “property” or “char-
acteristic” of a constant musical referent (e.g.,
particular harmonic relations or intervals), but
must be connected, in its historicity, to the
general theory of what Adorno calls the most
advanced artistic material, where “material”
refers to “everything that artists encounter about
which they must make a decision” (ibid. 148).
Both critical reflection and composition require
a dynamic encounter with the “congealed
history” – the inherited cultural forms, struc-
tures and techniques – immanent in “artistic
material”; an encounter which takes place within
an always altered present where every “repetition
of the sign of modernity is different.”7 Thus,
crucially for Adorno, the particular dynamic
non-identical relation of dissonance and harmony
can, in broad terms, be understood as exemplary
63
cunningham
of that between modernity and tradition in
general (and across all the arts). It is in the light
of this exemplarity that Schoenberg’s music
takes on such an important status in Adorno’s
aesthetic theory.
Nonetheless, and this is what I want initially
to investigate, there is at least one sense in which
Schoenberg is a far from obvious example here.
For there is more than a little substance to
Boulez’s somewhat provocative description of
Schoenberg as a “traditionalist,” whose work is,
despite its apparent radicalism, marked by the
“presence of the past, the continual awareness of
re-exploiting a revered tradition, the intrusion of
old forms” (Orientations 354–55). This, of
course, accords with the familiar portrait of
Schoenberg as reluctant revolutionary, “an
explorer in spite of himself” (ibid. 326). And
certainly it is clear that Schoenberg himself
understood his work as being in continuity with
tradition in a way that does indeed seem rather
closer to, say, Greenberg’s theorisation of the
avant-garde than that of Benjamin’s: “Many
people, instead of realising its evolutionary
element, called it a revolution.”8 Adorno tries to
accommodate this assertion while, at the same
time, working against Schoenberg’s own self-
understanding of the development of atonality as
evolutionary continuity. The attempt to do so
involves a reworking of the relation between
tradition and modernity which maintains the
connection to tradition that Schoenberg himself
insists upon, while simultaneously undermining
the (more Greenbergian) “notion that progress in
artistic technique proceeds in a steady, so to
speak, organic flow” (“Schoenberg” 154). The
relation between tradition and modernity is not
to be found in a quasi-organic development of a
continuous movement from one to the other,
which would take place within the progressive
logic of the same, but in – to restate the point –
their critical relation of non-identity at the pres-
ent. It is in this way (and only in this way) that
Schoenberg can be, for Adorno, at the same time
both “heir to the tradition” (proving his fidelity
through his “betrayal”) and the exemplary avant-
gardiste, who, while “inflicting the most deadly
blows on authority,” seeks, simultaneously, “to
defend the work” before it (ibid. 151).
 dissonance and noise
Despite his passionate attachment to
Schoenberg’s work, Adorno is, then, signifi-
cantly, not unaware of the reasoning behind
Boulez’s rather stronger depiction of Schoenberg
as “respectful” traditionalist, “haunted by
History (with a capital h) and by an obsessive
desire for order and classification based on
absolute models” (Orientations 358). For Boulez,
Schoenberg’s composition is marked by a
“tendency to shrink history … in the hope of
achieving absolute continuity” (ibid. 359); a
search for the “continuity” of an “ideal classi-
cism,” “eternal law” or “codification” which
would deny what Boulez describes as “the
constant reconsideration of what is transitory that
the artist must accept, and with it reconsideration
of his own beliefs and attitudes” (ibid. 327, 329).
Boulez’s phrasing recalls, no doubt intentionally,
what is often cited as the founding document of
artistic modernity as a whole, Baudelaire’s “The
Painter of Modern Life,” where, as is well known,
Baudelaire attempts to resolve the non-identity of
modernity and tradition through a “distillation”
of “the eternal from the transitory” (“Painter”
12). Viewed as a reading of Baudelaire’s essay,
Boulez’s comments on Schoenberg emphasise the
traditionalism still inherent in Baudelaire’s
notion. For extended beyond Baudelaire’s own
tentative dialectic, one legacy of this is, as Mark
Wigley has argued in relation to the dominant
practices of modernist architecture, that the
“modern is advertised as the return of transcul-
tural and trans-historical truth … In the very
name of modernity, time must be brought to a
standstill”; practically, change thus becomes
fixed, codified into a set of constant and invariant
signs of the modern – “once architecture has
changed, there cannot be very much additional
mobility” – of which, for architecture, the
supposed purity of the white wall is clearly
symbolic (“White Out” 163, 155, 171).
If this “desire for order and classification” is
what Boulez suspects in Schoenberg, it is,
nonetheless, the case that the apparent difference
in judgement between Boulez and Adorno is
much smaller than it may seem. For although
Adorno largely exempts Schoenberg himself (or
rather his works) from the kind of “classicism”
Boulez ascribes to him, he echoes his critique of
any attempt to use the twelve-note row as the
basis for a system around which a new constancy
and continuity might be founded, suggesting, at
one point, that “the stubborn loyalty of the later
Schoenberg to the method, as a guarantee of
comprehensive totality, merely deferred the
aporia.”9 Such deferral would, Adorno continues,
in denying self-reflection, “cripple the very
impulse that produced the system in the first
place,” through “the rejection of all that is other-
wise, of anything not already analytically assimi-
lated” (“Schoenberg” 166–67). Like modernist
architecture’s white walls, in seeking to resist the
hold of the ever-same – as manifested in the tran-
sitoriness of “fashion” – serialism risks simply
re-inscribing itself within it on another level, as
a “new” tradition. This is precisely the kind of
impasse with which, for example, Greenberg
found himself faced, in his particular defence of
“aesthetic modernism” in the mid-1960s, when,
as Osborne puts it, “historical experiences
imposed themselves at the level of artistic form
which, by virtue of their claim on the present,
could no longer be ignored.”10 It is, however,
within this remorseless logic that Adorno, unlike
Greenberg, seeks a fissure. Simon Jarvis
summarises his resulting argument well:
There is … a dialectical, rather than a unilin-
ear, relationship between tradition and the
new … What crucially distinguishes the really
new from the abstract novelty … is that the
really new work is made in undiminished
awareness of the possibilities afforded by tradi-
tion rather than by a simple forgetting of tradi-
tion. (136)
This distinction is derived from Hegel’s differ-
entiation between abstract and determinate nega-
tion. Yet the question I would want to ask is to
what extent the “awareness of the possibilities
afforded by tradition,” which distinguishes the
“really new,” actually does concern possibilities
afforded by tradition, in the way this phrasing
might be taken to suggest. It is important to
emphasise that “tradition,” “past” and “history”
are not synonyms; tradition is rather a particular
temporalisation of history. (Benjamin’s attempt,
for example, to conjoin present and past in the
“now” and “then” of the messianic is precisely
64

an attempt to work against the forms of trans-
mission of tradition.) For one might argue that
the possibilities Jarvis evokes, following Adorno,
are only critical possibilities by being, in a way,
received as non-traditional; that is, to paraphrase
Benjamin, received in a manner other to their
presentation by tradition, through the blasting
apart of their transmission as anything like
“heritage.”
Adorno knew this, of course, and as such the
above may well seem like mere terminological
quibbling. Yet I want to suggest that there is
something of significance here, to do with the way
in which the “really new” is understood, in the
particular exemplification Adorno makes of
Schoenberg, and the nature of the critical connec-
tion to a tradition it implies. It is at this point
that I want to come back to the importance of the
particular role that the concept of dissonance
plays in Adorno’s theory of modernism, with
regard to its specific musical meaning.11 The
place of Hegel in Adorno’s argument is clearly
crucial. Although Adorno refuses Hegel’s own
teleological directing of determinate negation, on
the conventional reading at least, toward the posi-
tive result of the identity of identity and non-
identity, one might wonder if, at the same time,
he remains still too tied to an “orthodox”
Hegelian conception of history in the way in
which he thinks what he calls the historical neces-
sity of dissonance. For there is a sense in which
this conception of necessity works, even if only
retrospectively, to construct something like a
continuity of negation itself, in which the deter-
minate critical movement underlying the progress
of material from tradition comes to be inscribed
in the singular, thus returning to the unilinearity
of progress in another form by virtue of allowing
for only one true direction for artistic experimen-
tation (as negation) to take at any one time.
Now, despite Adorno’s own ambivalent atti-
tude to serialism, he did, clearly, share many of
the assumptions of its central postwar adherents
in so-called “total serialism,” to the extent that,
as Georgina Born notes, “serialist principles
[also] prescribe an aesthetic that is completely
antithetical to and so a negation of tonality”
(Rationalizing Culture 48).12 The problem here
concerns not this temporal logic of negation
65
cunningham
itself, which is obviously key to any understand-
ing of modernism as a temporal modality, but
the form of continuity within which this negation
might be understood, insofar as it is entirely
directed toward (or at least organised around) the
progressive dismantling of tonality as a specific
mode of musical organisation. As Born states
again, postwar “total” serialism characteristically
presented itself as an attempt “to purify the
correct, rigorous direction of the avant-garde – a
direction that was posed as absolute and
inescapable” (ibid. 51).13 It is this implication of
a single “inescapable” direction that Adorno
tends to echo, by, on Peter Bürger’s reading,
suggesting that there is, as an “authentic” neces-
sity, “only one material in a given epoch.”14 The
result would be, as Lyotard puts it in relation to
painting rather than music, the subtle judging of
any “true” non-identity at the present in terms of
its apparent place within a narrative in which
“[a]fter one pictorial work, another is necessary,
permitted or forbidden. After one colour, this
colour; after this line, that one” (Inhuman 91).
Yet, of course, Adorno is, at the same time, the
theorist who asserts, against the more strident
serialists, the dangers of a “rejection of all that is
otherwise.”
Matters are thus far from straightforward, but
it seems to me that this tension in Adorno’s work
relates, finally, back to the specific way in which
he develops his own well-known conception of
art’s autonomous status. On this point, almost all
critiques of Adorno have wildly missed the mark,
insofar as the claim Adorno makes that “politics
has migrated into autonomous art” is not, as it is
all too often presented, a simple aesthetic “pref-
erence” or chosen theoretical “standpoint,” but is
understood as a historical and irresistible occur-
rence resulting from art’s social determination
(“Commitment” 194). Contra Greenberg, auton-
omy is produced out of the social relations which
constitute “art.” It is not simply a property of the
object itself that would serve, invariably, to
“elevate” certain forms of “aesthetic production”
(Aesthetic Theory 229). Autonomy is not, there-
fore, somehow an option for cultural production.
Conversely, as one critic writes from an Adornian
perspective – arguing against the utopianist
vision of an avant-garde sublation of art into life
 dissonance and noise
famously outlined by Bürger15 – radical art
“cannot live, qua art, within the everyday as
everyday. Rather, qua art, it necessarily inter-
rupts the everyday, from within, on the basis of
the fact that it is always both autonomous and
‘social fact.’”16 In fact it is a crucial advantage of
Adorno’s work that he displaces the kinds of
absolutised dialectical oppositionality which are
so evident, from entirely contrary positions, in
both Bürger’s and Greenberg’s understandings of
the historical character of avant-garde practice.
Nonetheless, before exploring this further, it
should be conceded at this point that Adorno’s
version of the history of modernity, in a more
straightforwardly periodising socio-historical
sense, is undoubtedly problematic in another
way, as Critchley rightly asserts, insofar as it is
specifically built around what the latter describes
as “the contestable – indeed, dubious – thesis
that we inhabit totally administered societies,
where the Lebenswelt contains no uncolonised
moral practices that might function as sites of
resistance to instrumental rationality” (Very
Little 155).17 Now, it seems to me, it is precisely
this social theory of a movement toward the total
reification of all relations – and not the philo-
sophical elaboration of modernism as a general
concept of aesthetic theory – which makes
Adorno’s work itself appear so démodé with
regard to radical artistic and musical practice
since the 1960s. The problem with the unilinear
and totalising form of Adorno’s social theory is
that it does, as Critchley recognises, finally result
in a questionable equation between the historical
development of autonomy and the movement
toward a kind of self-destructive formal hermeti-
cism, because of his problematically totalising
perception of the elimination of all social rela-
tions other than those determined by capital.18
(Capitalism, as a social structure, cannot be
reduced to the sole social determinant of capital
itself, even if it sometimes seems like it.)
Yet countering this should not be a question
of asserting a facile populism or optimism
against Adorno’s supposed high-cultural elitism
and pessimism. Rather, the question at this point
must be to what extent Adorno’s more general
conception of modernism, as an affirmative
temporal logic of non-identity, may still serve to
aid critical reflection on recent cultural practices,
if indeed his social theory can be shown to be
“contestable” (as I, like Critchley, believe it can).
Adorno’s strength, I would argue in line with
what has already been said, is, in principle, his
expansive understanding of modernism as a
general abstract temporal dynamic, his refusal to
foreclose upon the indeterminacy of the future in
the face of this abstraction, and, as such, his
acknowledgement of its necessarily aporetic
conceptual character which denies its reduction
to any sort of empirical category or invariant,
univocal project. Yet it also seems clear that
Adorno’s own extreme totalising account of capi-
talist development means, given the “palpable
dependencies” (Aesthetic Theory 229) between
art and society that he himself insists upon, that
there is, nonetheless, an unjustifiable limitation
of what might be potentially judged as truly new
or experienced as avant-garde within the cultural
present, which allows for the misplaced critical
identification of his work with the kind of
defence of aesthetic modernism to be found in
someone like Greenberg.
In this respect, let me point to two issues
which suggest the ways in which Adorno’s
restricted narrativisation of historical develop-
ment would indeed need to be complexified. In
the case of the first issue, as Witkin states, for
Adorno, to compose or to listen “involves keep-
ing an appointment with history” (130). Yet, the
question is then: which history? It is here,
perhaps, that the theorisation of determinate
negation as an “awareness of the possibilities
afforded by tradition” takes on, as I suggested
above, a more problematic aspect. In this light,
Adorno’s much-debated readings of jazz seem to
me, for example, to be not simply a contingent
subjective expression of Arnoldian distaste, but
reflective of an incapacity to understand jazz in
relation to any history other than that of
European art music. As such, the harmonic inno-
vations of something like be-bop could only
appear to him as retrogressive. (See also, for
example, his cringe-inducing description of the
African-derived banjo as an “infantile” instru-
ment.19) However, this fails to recognise the
different way in which these innovations relate to
the particular history with which they are
66

dynamically engaged. Although the “flattened
fifth” of be-bop may, when interpreted musico-
logically, look the same as developments already
established in nineteenth-century art music,
quite simply it is not, because its own immanent
logic relates to the different harmonic structures
of the blues (which, in their use of note “bend-
ing” and microtonalities,20 have their own
harmonic complexities with little counterpart in
European art music until the postwar period). To
take another example, Alan Licht has referred to
the New York band Sonic Youth’s “embrace of
atonality” on mid-1980s records such as Bad
Moon Rising, Evol, and Sister (Licht 34). Yet
this should not be seen as a belated catching up
with, or borrowing from, early twentieth-century
art music. For Sonic Youth’s “embrace of atonal-
ity” is actually driven by an immanent produc-
tive logic at work within a certain history of rock
itself, leading back through the likes of Richard
Hell and the Voidoids, Pere Ubu, The Stooges,
and Bo Diddley.21 It is therefore quite possible
for such innovations to be experienced in this
context as avant-garde – as an interruptive shock
to continuity – when superficially similar
constructions could no longer be experienced as
such in the context of art music’s history.
Moreover, the increasing cross-articulation of
different histories – art, jazz, rock (and, from the
1960s, African and Indian musics also) – would
serve only to complicate this further, in what can
be extremely productive ways, through the
particular interruption of one history by another.
(This notion of “interruption” needs to be
rigorously distinguished from any “vapid post-
modernist inversion of the high into the low.” A
variant upon the latter can be found in theorisa-
tions of the significance of minimalism as the
form marking a break with the exemplary
modernist “style” of serialism.22 Jameson’s
description is typical, presenting musical post-
modernism (after Cage) as the “synthesis of clas-
sical and ‘popular’ styles found in composers
such as Philip Glass” (my emphasis).23 This
conception of “synthesis” can all too easily pres-
ent itself as a kind of imperialistic sublation
through which high culture takes up “stylistic”
elements of popular culture in order to rejuve-
nate and reconsolidate itself through the absorp-
67
cunningham
tion of an exotic other, legitimated by dubious
claims to accessibility.24 By contrast, a piece like
Can’s “Halleluwah,” for example, from their
1972 album Tago Mago, collides together
Stockhausean harmonies and timbres with James
Brown funk rhythms. Yet the result is not a
comforting Aufhebung or “synthesis” of the
two – whatever that might mean – but a produc-
tive dislocating and energising of each through
their critical juxtaposition, opening up new
creative possibilities.25)
Second, and this is my major point, the prob-
lematic unilinearity of Adorno’s account of artis-
tic development is, I think, to some extent
implicit in the primary musical meaning
accorded to the very term dissonance itself, inso-
far as it tends to work, in Adorno, towards a
restriction of the dynamic of musical non-iden-
tity, and the “artistic material” with which it
works, to something like a programme of the
progressive dismantling of the specific identity of
tonality as determined as an ideal by the classi-
cal tradition, reflecting, in this sense, like
Schoenberg himself (whose most important theo-
retical writings were on the development of
harmony),26 the prioritisation of harmonic devel-
opment (in a more limited musicological sense)
within that tradition itself from the historical
emergence of equal temperament, at least,
onwards. This has the effect of either marginal-
ising other forms of experimentation, in the
spheres, for example, of rhythm or timbre, or, as
in total serialism, presuming that such spheres
can be assimilated to the same essential proce-
dures as those underlying the negation of tonal-
ity. The most obvious result of this is a complete
dismissal of the possibility of avant-garde work
and experience in relation to forms like rock or
funk music – which are far more driven by
timbral and rhythmic innovations than by
harmonic ones – as well as the difficulty one
would have in extending Adorno’s precise theo-
ries to account for that radical twentieth-century
art music which does not follow on from the
broadly Schoenbergian path of development and
the experimental priorities it implies, e.g.,
Edgard Varèse, Terry Riley, La Monte Young or
Harry Partch. (And, indeed, Cage would present
a tricky case, as he was for Boulez also.)
 dissonance and noise
In this respect, when read in conjunction with
Adorno, Jacques Attali’s notion of “noise” may
provide a better conceptual framework for think-
ing a generality of musical non-identity than that
of dissonance (at least as it is purely defined in
harmonic terms): “Subversion in musical
production opposes a new syntax to the existing
syntax from the point of view of which it is
noise” (Noise 34). Regardless of the plausibility
or otherwise of Attali’s particular account of
musical history, it is this definition of the new in
musical production, as having “the nature of
noise,” which allows Attali to resist the restric-
tions implicit in Adorno’s conception of disso-
nance, thus making possible theorisations of
cultural forms like rock and free jazz as having a
revolutionary significance: “Both Cage and the
Rolling Stones, Silence and ‘Satisfaction’,
announce a rupture in the process of musical
creation” (ibid. 137).27 Yet this comparative
breadth in Attali’s reference point reflects
neither a simple populist call for a striving to
communicate,28 nor an anarchic and utopian
vision of “anything goes.” As Attali reminds us,
noise “does not exist in itself, but only in rela-
tion to the system within which it is inscribed”
(ibid. 26). In this sense, although he himself does
not make the connection, Attali’s mobilisation of
a general concept of “noise” needs to be read
back into the temporal structure of experience
which is described by Adorno’s philosophical
conception of modernism. For what is experi-
enced cognitively as “noise” is precisely subject
to historical variation, depending on the cultural
field within which it comes forth.
It needs to be made quite clear, then, that
this is not, in any sense, an argument for either
the false utopianism of a total effacement of
the boundary between high and low culture,
which Critchley associates with postmodernism,
or the exchangeability and indifference of a rela-
tivistic pluralism – which is that “eclecticism”
whose “realism” is, as Lyotard notes, “that of
money”29 – because evaluation, cognition and
judgement are precisely what is at stake in this;
the judgement of what is avant-garde or modern
now. It is simply that this now cannot be reduced
to the unity of a single present time or social
space and its opening onto the future cannot be
restricted to the path of a unilinear development,
even retrospectively. Benjamin is often opposed
to Adorno on the basis of his comparative open-
ness to popular culture, but in fact the distance
between them on this point is, in a sense, not as
wide as it can seem, given that Benjamin’s theo-
risation of film is itself, I would argue, precisely
a theorisation of it in terms of its potential for
avant-garde experience. And, indeed, Adorno
himself asserts his “complete approval” of
Benjamin’s account of “the disenchantment of
art.”30 As such, if Benjamin does have, in certain
respects, the advantage here, it is not in terms of
the specifics of his understanding of film’s inher-
ently revolutionary mass potential – which would
be very hard to maintain today (although some
have tried) – but because he does not prejudge
where, in either generic or sociological terms,
avant-garde experience might be possible. In this
sense, for example, assessing the “legitimacy” of
a definition of 1960s free jazz as avant-garde –
Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Cecil
Taylor, etc. – would involve a specific analysis of
the character of its particular intervention within
a particular field or historical moment and its
own implicit temporalisation of jazz history.31
Discussing Chinese modernism, in painting
and film, Peter Osborne has recently argued that
it would be a mistake to regard such forms as
“culturally specific variants or exotic indigenous
inflections of medium-specific modernisms
conceptually defined in formal-stylistic terms by
their Western counterparts” (Philosophy in
Cultural Theory 60). Rather, he suggests, the
“changes that the concept of modernism under-
goes as a result of its translation into ‘non-
Western’ contexts,” driven by the globalisation
of capitalist culture, must be viewed as “histori-
cally specific conjunctural relations, constructed
by the … terms of identification of particular
fields of negation” (ibid. 61, 60). As such, the
“power of generalisation” exhibited by
modernism as a “philosophical concept” is
nonetheless dependent for its “concrete mean-
ing” upon “the delimitation of the received
cultural field upon which, and within which, it
acts” (ibid. 59). Yet, in fact, as the above citation
of free jazz shows, one does not necessarily have
to look to “non-Western” forms and practices, in
68

a literal geographical sense, in order to make such
a point. The same is quite true within Western
cultures, where different practices and histories
inhabit the shared space of modernity. In this
sense, there is no reason to suppose that the kind
of differentiation Adorno theorises between the
articulations of the non-identity of modernity and
tradition in, say, Bruckner and Schoenberg,
cannot be extended to cultural forms and prac-
tices other than those of the aesthetic modernism
with which he himself is more or less exclusively
concerned. The différend – to borrow a term
from Lyotard – between free jazz and the tradi-
tionalist presentation of jazz as black classical
music in the work of someone like Wynton
Marsalis would be one potential example here.
Alternatively, to follow up Critchley’s essay, one
could argue that the critical and emancipatory
possibilities of Tricky’s music would open them-
selves up to critical reflection, evaluation and
cognition most obviously through their contrast
to the nostalgic reinforcing of an existing syntax
apparent in something like Britpop (Oasis, Blur,
etc.). Indeed, without such contrasts how would
one “judge” or “evaluate” the “dislocating”
power of Tricky’s music, or its “original, innova-
tive and experimental” character (“Sounding
Desire” 129)? It is only some conception of
modernism – acknowledged or otherwise – which
would furnish the conditions of possibility for
such a process of “evaluation” and for a percep-
tion of “emancipatory” potential through it (ibid.
125).32 At any rate, unless autonomy is indeed
in line with certain reductive sociological
approaches, to be restricted to very specific social
institutions and artistic disciplines, evaluation
would in each instance require, as a judgement of
possibility, detailed readings of particular works.
The task should thus be one not of sidestepping
the question of the modern (as Critchley might
be taken to imply) but of re-interrogating
Adorno’s exemplification of modernism in rela-
tion to his own, more abstract, conceptualisation
of its temporal form.
Adorno writes in Aesthetic Theory that with-
out “the conception of anti-art … art is no longer
thinkable” (29). This suggests a convergence
with someone like Bürger and divergence from
Greenberg, just as his defence of autonomy
69
cunningham
would seem to imply the opposite. Yet either
conclusion would fail to recognise the relation
between autonomy and anti-art in Adorno’s
theory, insofar as it is only this connection that
renders the autonomous work socially critical
rather than mere “social fact.” For if autonomy
is precisely not a transcendentalist separation of
the aesthetic (or a mere matter of artistic choice),
but radically historical, then its own renewal, in
resistance to “stagnation,” depends upon its crit-
ical engagement with what is already given. As
John Roberts puts it:
in order to distinguish itself from what has
become aesthetic, art is forced to expand into,
or reclaim, non-aesthetic experiences, forms or
practices (popular and discursive modes of
attention, the ready-made, the textual etc.) …
[A]nti-art is a transgression that autonomy
must undergo in order to reconstitute itself.
(“After Adorno” 232)
Yet, for Adorno, this is not, as it is for Bürger,
a utopian vision of the dissolution of autonomy
(into everyday life) – if it were it would simply
destroy all possibility of critique itself – but
the condition of its renewal in an always
altered form, critically related to the situational
context – what Osborne calls a “field of nega-
tion” – in which it emerges. Without this
dynamic of renewal, autonomy relapses into the
repetition of tradition. As Adorno states in
Aesthetic Theory, “art must go beyond its own
concept in order to remain faithful to that
concept. The idea of its abolition does it homage
by honouring its claim to truth” (29).
Nonetheless, as Roberts also notes, Adorno
himself, as a result of his social theory, had such
an exaggerated concern about the threat of disso-
lution that he always risks disengaging autonomy
from the temporality of newness which sustains
it, in the process drastically restricting the possi-
bility of the new to a very limited formal domain,
which allows for the misplaced identification
with Greenbergian aestheticism. At the same
time, this is, I think, the source of Adorno’s
impasse with serialism. Because, for Adorno,
serialism, developed from Schoenberg’s twelve-
note row, is understood as the immanent musical
necessity of the postwar era, in its continuation
 dissonance and noise
of the negation of harmony as a formal ideal,
doubts about its fixing of models mean that the
possibility of newness itself is put in doubt.
I would suggest that contemporary music is of
particular interest if we are to exceed Adorno’s
own limitations. Rather more so, in fact, than the
visual arts, with regard to which such issues are
customarily debated. Much as I agree with his
central point, if one takes, for example, Roberts’
formulation cited above – “in order to distinguish
itself from what has become aesthetic, art is
forced to expand into, or reclaim, non-aesthetic
experiences, forms or practices” – it is clear that
this reflects the particular character of the
“reclaiming” of “popular” forms prevalent within
the visual arts since pop art, and which consti-
tutes at least one definition of the distinctive
nature of “postmodernism” within that sphere. In
this, the critical frisson of such “reclamation” is
usually reliant upon a continuing situating of
popular culture as kitsch – at its most extreme in
someone like Jeff Koons – such as to enable the
“vulgarity” of the advert or the comic strip to
operate as a deflation of Greenbergian aestheti-
cism or of the “high cultural” aura of the gallery.
Yet what this does not allow for is in any real crit-
ical or emancipatory potential within those
cultural forms and practices which actually
emerge out of the technologies of mass produc-
tion itself, in their own right. (Film is, of course,
a partial, and complex, exception here, develop-
ing, as it did, its own kinds of “high cultural”
status fairly early on). Although, therefore,
Roberts himself refers to “the expanded social
content of autonomy” over the course of the post-
war era, what he risks eliding is the modernist
logic at work within something like (certain forms
of) popular music itself; a logic which is not
simply reducible to the repetition of the new as
the ever-same that characterises commodity
production, and which may therefore, quite plau-
sibly, be understood as autonomous in the
dynamic sense in which Roberts, following
Adorno, defines it, as a critique of “tradition”
and a “challenge to the instrumentalities of
market and academy” (“After Adorno” 236–37).
It is as well to remember, in this light, that
commodification and the mass production of
technologically reproduced music are not simply
interchangeable terms. The ex-Henry Cow and
Pere Ubu drummer Chris Cutler argues, in his
important book File Under Popular:
the battle for the immediate future of music
will be fought out through the medium of
recording. The qualities of this medium which
are useful to the status quo are already well
developed and constitute the imperatives of
“mass culture,” mediated through the form of
the commodity. The crucial point about this is
that its value to economic and political vested
interest is not so much expressive, as commer-
cial – and in some cases ideological – certainly,
leaving the profound and innate potential of
the medium for cultural and aesthetic expres-
sion essentially undeveloped. (33)
As Cutler recognises, the confusion apparent in
many accounts of contemporary music relates to
the ambiguities inherent within the term “pop
music” itself, which may be understood either in
statistical terms, as a form actually “of the
people” (like folk), or as something like “a
genus, definable ultimately by its means and
relations of production, circulation, and
consumption” (ibid. 9). It is clearly the latter
definition which most demands our attention,
but even here, as Cutler goes on to note, further
differentiation is required insofar as “popular
forms which live for the market … and whose
role is to reinforce and hypnotise, are made out
of the same stuff as those that struggle to liber-
ate the communicative and aesthetic power of the
new media … and whose aim is to engage and
reveal” (ibid. 14). Such a différend is not, of
course, absolute, yet it is of the utmost impor-
tance for any cognition, evaluation and judge-
ment of the critical and emancipatory
possibilities of contemporary musical forms and
practices.
The advantages of Cutler’s approach are
apparent in the specific immanent logic it gives
to this music by virtue of its self-defining rela-
tion to the “new media” of tape and digital
recording, electrification and amplification. It is
this, too, which most obviously serves to mark
such music apart from the score-based aesthetic
of the “classical” or “art” tradition to which
Adorno remains so clearly tied in his under-
standing of dissonance.33 Cutler’s attempted
70

breakdown of those factors which constitute the
specific mode of production of pop – debatable
as some of them may be in the details – thus
deserves to form the basis for the future research
which must be undertaken in this area:
(i) its commitment to collective work, espe-
cially collective composition; (ii) its intimate
relations with the new means of music produc-
tion, particularly with electric instruments,
electrification and the use of recording equip-
ment; (iii) its elision of composition and
performance, composer and performer – and a
propos of this; (iv) the profound status of
improvisation, both in the formation and re-
creation of musical material; and (v) its roots
in a transformed folk music, the music of an
oppressed people. (Ibid. 10)
Despite the shared Marxian vocabulary, Adorno
may seem an unlikely theoretical resource for
extending Cutler’s analysis. Yet two points are
worth stressing here. First, Adorno is very
emphatic that the “culture industry” is not iden-
tical with “mass culture.” Rather, it is some-
thing, so to speak, done to mass culture.34 In this
sense, there is no essential reason why mass
forms should not resist such violence; it’s simply
that, because of his social theory of modernity,
Adorno was unable to see any hope of this
happening. Second, and most importantly for my
concerns, it is the expansive conception of
modernism outlined in Adorno’s work which
actually provides the best conceptual framework
for understanding the différend within pop
music that Cutler articulates, as well as the
immanent logic of the attempted “liberation and
development of the revolutionary new musical
means” (ibid. 36) at work within its most radical
forms and practices. (This relates, too, to the
special place of timbral experimentation or
“noise” within pop insofar as it is this sonic
dimension which such “new musical means”
most obviously open up.) Cutler argues that,
despite the “field” of pop music’s undoubtedly
“dominant commodity character,” there is a
tension between “the commercial imperatives
of the commodity” and “the expressive and
progressive imperatives of the new media of
musical production” (ibid.). Such tension is
clearly not resolvable in the society in which we
71
cunningham
live. Yet the particular importance of pop music,
I would argue, is in its immanent registerings of
this tension precisely by virtue of its intimate
relation to new media and to the productive
mechanisms of commodity production. At the
same time, the condition of this registering is its
own modernism, an ongoing reconstitution of its
always incomplete autonomy through a dynamic
of negation which poses a “challenge to the
instrumentalities of market and academy.”
A final point: with a few honourable excep-
tions (mostly outside of the academy, like
Cutler), the study of “non-classical” music has
tended to take two, equally limited, theoretical
forms; that is, either sociological accounts of
music as a mere soundtrack to the formation of
subcultural identity – abandoning qualitative or
critical judgement altogether – or rather simplis-
tic discussions of aesthetic value of the type
reflected in the tediously recurring “Keats vs.
Dylan” debates. Yet an “experience of critical
evaluation” (“Sounding Desire” 123), to use
Critchley’s own term, cannot but take account of
the ways in which modernity, in its broadest
sense, impacts upon notions of value in art. (As
in the “Keats vs. Dylan” example, discussions of
the aesthetic value of pop music, both for and
against, all too often assume the most tradition-
alist conception of the aesthetic, as if, say,
Duchamp, Rimbaud or Cage had never existed.)
Dimly, perhaps, the sociological/cultural studies
approach recognises this, but at the cost of a
refusal to judge or evaluate at all. Although this
is frequently theorised in “democratic” terms it
does little for its supposed object or for the elab-
oration of possible sites of resistance to either
commodification or aestheticisation. Somewhat
ironically, given his own ignorance of jazz or
rock, it is in this light that Adorno’s conception
of the ongoing construction of art, as a dynamic
process at once aesthetic and social, is so crucial,
not least because it refuses to give up on the
necessity of judgement. But such judgement is
marked by its own radical
historicity which can achieve an
experience of aesthetic evalua-
tion only through a continual
questioning of the aesthetic
itself.
 dissonance and noise
notes
1 Nancy 286–87. I would like to thank Alex
Warwick, Aden Evens and Greg Hainge for their
comments upon this essay, and Barry Thompson,
Stephen Lemon and Simon Ward for several
discussions concerning dissonance and noise over
the years.
2 My thanks to Tim Bewes for first pointing out
Critchley’s essay to me.
3 See, for example, Roberts, “After Adorno”;
Bernstein,“Social Signs and Natural Bodies.”
4 Osborne, “Adorno and the Metaphysics of
Modernism” 23–48. Despite my criticism of
Osborne on this point, I am considerably indebted
to him for the reading of Adorno’s conception of
modernism that follows.
5 See Osborne, Philosophy in Cultural Theory 53–62.
6 See Buck-Morss 62.
7 Osborne, Philosophy in Cultural Theory 82.
8 Schoenberg, “How One Becomes Lonely” in
Style and Idea 49–50.
9 The twelve-note row or series refers to the
compositional form developed by Schoenberg in
the mid-1920s, after his properly atonal period,
and pursued by Berg and Webern. In this all the
twelve notes of the octave are given an equal
(non-hierarchical) status, as opposed to that priv-
ileging of certain notes found in the major–minor
key system. Twelve-note compositions are thus
constructed around an implicit theme or formula
in which each of the twelve notes appears once.
Such compositions are also termed “serialist.”
10 Osborne, Philosophy in Cultural Theory 83. As
Osborne rightly argues, this serves to reveal the
“suppressed contradiction” in Greenberg’s work
between “the historical and the (idealised)
‘aesthetic’ aspects” of his approach. It is precisely
because this “contradiction” is not suppressed in
Adorno that his defence of modernism needs to
be distanced from that of Greenberg.
11 Dissonance is conventionally linked to discord
and, as such, is viewed, musicologically, in specific
relation to the rules of harmony, and thus of tonal-
ity.
12 Total serialism refers to those composers who,
after the Second World War, sought to extend
serialism’s organisation of pitch – as structured by
the non-hierarchical ordering of the twelve notes
of the octave – to the sonic domains of rhythm,
duration, dynamics and, ultimately, timbre.The key
early works here are often said to be Boulez’s
Structures for two pianos and Stockhausen’s
Kreuzspiel, both composed in 1951.
13 See also Born, “Music, Modernism and
Signification.”
14 Peter Bürger, “The Decline of the Modern
Age,” Telos 62 (winter 1984/1985): 120. Cited in
Osborne,“Adorno” 44.
15 See Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde.
16 Osborne, “Non-Places and the Spaces of Art”
192.
17 See also Cunningham, “Trying (Not) to
Understand” 135–38.
18 See Osborne,“Adorno” 43–45.
19 Adorno,“On the Fetish Character” 45.
20 Microtonalities refer to pitches outside the
equal-tempered Western scale of the twelve-note
octave.
21 Sonic Youth’s own recent recordings of pieces
by Cage, Steve Reich, and Fluxus composers like
George Macunias and George Brecht, on the 1999
album Goodbye Twentieth Century, should thus be
viewed as a recognition of a parallel trajectory, and
not as either a revelation of their “sources” or a
late claim for classical respectability – a point
quickly borne out by the character of the
performances themselves.
22 “Minimalism,” as it comes to be defined through
the work of Glass, Nyman, and others, needs to be
distinguished from what has come to be described
retrospectively as “early minimalism,” i.e., La
Monte Young and the work of various composers
associated with the Fluxus group. These early
forms had their own immanent productive logic –
which led them towards non-Western and blues
forms – in an exploration of microtonalities and
non-tempered tuning; a logic which, given its criti-
cal relation to the limitations of serialism, can
indeed be regarded as modernist in the expansive
sense in which I am employing it. Significantly,
perhaps, the most important musicians associated
with Young’s Dream Syndicate – John Cale and
Tony Conrad – both went on to work in a cultural
field usually presented as rock; Cale with the Velvet
72

Underground and Conrad in collaborations with
the German group Faust.
23 See Jameson,“Postmodernism” 111.
24 Moreover, far from resisting commodity
culture, this can appear as an especially cynical
embrace of it; utilising certain rock stylistic devices
to improve the marketability of particular musical
practices, as well as legitimating an uncritical
return to tonality under the guise of populism.The
peculiar end result is a manifestation of art music
which is actually far more aesthetically “con-
servative” – in terms of its harmonic or timbral
qualities – than the average techno record.
25 Can are perhaps – like the Velvet Underground
with ex-La Monte Young sidekick John Cale – an
exceptional case insofar as two of their members,
Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay, actually trained
under Stockhausen. However, my real point here is
not restricted to the merits of such direct displac-
ing of the institutional separation of high and low.
If, say, Cale’s exploitation of dissonance and just
intonation in his viola playing on Velvet
Underground recordings can be traced back to
earlier pieces performed with La Monte Young,
other critical and emancipatory practices within
rock or jazz are liable to be misunderstood if they
are seen as somehow derived from the classical
avant-garde, insofar as they in fact have their own
immanent productive logics.
26 Schoenberg’s own treatise on harmony written
in 1910–11 includes atonality only as a postscript.
27 Attali does, however, go on to say that this does
not amount to “the new mode of musical produc-
tion, but the liquidation of the old” (ibid. 137).The
distinction here relates to Attali’s somewhat
utopianist projection of a “truly different system of
organisation” which he terms “composition”; a
music produced “for pleasure outside of meaning,
usage and exchange” (ibid.).
28 See Susan McClarey, Afterword to Noise 157.
29 See Lyotard, “Answering the Question” 76.
30 See Adorno, “Letter to Walter Benjamin,
March 18 1936” 120.
31 “The Avant-Garde” is the title given to a 1986
Atlantic compilation (including recordings by
Coleman and the Art Ensemble of Chicago) as well
as to a 1961 album by John Coltrane and Don
Cherry.
73
cunningham
32 Moreover, the possibility of such judgement –
as regards the likes of Can, Sonic Youth or Tricky –
gives the lie to frankly preposterous statements
such as Steven Connor’s claim that rock has never
“really explored the nature of its own medium,
conventions or institutions.” See Connor,
Postmodernist Culture 185.
33 It also marks it apart, of course, from the forms
of “biological memory” which constitute the “folk
mode.” See Cutler 24–27.
34 I am indebted to Ben Watson for this formula-
tion.
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