adorno on music, space and objectification

7/29/2019 Adorno on music, space and objectification

1/9

Review essay

Adorno on music, spaceand objectification

Wesley PhillipsBarcelona, Spain

Book reviewed

T.W. Adorno, Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press,

2009. 511 pp. 19.99/24.00 ISBN 9780745642864 (pbk)

Current of Music is the latest in the series of Theodor W. Adornos hitherto unpublished

lectures and fragments to be published by Suhrkamp and Polity. Two points single outthis offering from its predecessors. First, much of it was originally written in English,

a language that the author was still mastering (having fled Germany for Oxford in

1934). The book documents Adornos contribution to the Princeton Radio Research

Project from his time as its Director of Music between 1938 and 1941. Second, Current

of Music is, in a too obvious sense, a failed work, given Adornos dismissal from the

Project without a complete publication (only a couple of articles appeared). Moreover,

whereas the other music themed books in the above series may be termed genuine

fragments Beethoven (1998) and Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction (2006)

Current of Music is comprised of highly worked and at times repetitive documents(seven in total, plus nine Other Materials). This weariness is exacerbated by the fact

that its subject, US radio music of the 1930s, is for us a distant one.

Having said all that, the works underlying question concerning the relationship

between cultural forms, technology and capitalism remains extremely pertinent, as I

shall attempt to demonstrate. Looking beyond the problems of its mode of presentation,

Current of Music serves as an important counterpoint to Walter Benjamins The Work

of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility (1936, in Benjamin 2006).

Adorno responded critically to that now famous essay in correspondence with Benjamin,

Corresponding author:

Wesley Phillips, C/Princesa, 15, 12, Barcelona 08003, Spain

Email: [email protected]

European Journal of Social Theory16(1) 122130

The Author(s) 2012Reprints and permission:

sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/1368431012449233est.sagepub.com
http://est.sagepub.com/


2/9

and he later discussed its use of the concept of aura in Aesthetic Theory ([1970] 1997).

But Current of Music provides a more involved consideration of Benjamins thesis,

albeit in particular sections. Adornos working title plays on the idea of electric current,

of technological reproduction generally, and the belated appearance of this projectactually allows for a rethinking of the relationship between Benjamins and Adornos

theories of art. But first, what was the Project?

Adorno in New York

After having made contact with Paul Lazersfeld, the newly appointed director of the

Princeton Project, the Institutes director, Max Horkheimer, informed Adorno that a

position had been secured for him. Horkheimer and Adorno knew Lazersfeld, since he

had contributed an article to the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung in the previous year.

Adorno had the greater misgivings about Lazersfelds positivist methodologies

David Jenemann has set out the tensions between empirical and theoretical approaches

within the Institute at this time. Ultimately, the deal with Lazersfeld was about mutual

benefit. Lazersfeld sought to repay Horkheimer having received past assistance from the

Institute though he also remained genuinely curious about the compatibility between

Adornos theory and administrative research. Horkheimer wanted Adorno near to the

Institute in New York and Adorno needed both a visa and income to make that possible

(Jenemann, 2007: Chapter 1).

Aside from these practical advantages, Adorno saw in the Project an opportunity to

study the globally most advanced culture industry at close quarters. Allied to this wasthe above-mentioned critical theorists interest in taking on Benjamins thesis concern-

ing the affinity between technological and social progress in culture. Given Adornos

ambiguous stance on empirical research, we can sense a sub-current of bad faith in this

combination of interests. It is as if Adorno had theoretically exhausted the possibilities of

any popular culture not yet having studied it (except for some jazz, famously) only to

retroactively make the empirical data scientifically contest Benjamins study. As the

editor ofCurrent of Music, Robert Hullot-Kentor, indicates, Adorno made claims about

the US radio listener not having met very many Americans.

The idea of [bringing] together people from commerce and academia sounds all toofamiliar today. The Project was established with money from the Rockefeller Founda-

tion, whose generosity happened to coincide with the generation of research useful to

commercial radio stations. The collaboration between the Institute and the Project a

joint publication was planned is an instance of this consensus around the consumer-

oriented democratization of culture, captured in Hullot-Kentors ominous line: radios

educational potential for advertisers (Adorno, 2009: 11).

However, Adorno will not play ball with the Radio Project. He is not especially inter-

ested in Lazersfelds benevolentadministrative research (Adorno, 2009: 134). The phi-

lanthropists see radio as a means of cultivation through the dissemination of a largelybourgeois, European art. According to Hullot-Kentor, the majority of US radio music

during the 1930s was live classical, with light music remaining in the minority. Rather

than simply allowing for the reproduction of the classics, Adorno contends, radio has

changed the nature of listening itself, in a manner that calls for new production. This

Phillips 123


3/9

is consistent with Benjamins The Author as Producer (1934), as well as The Work of

Art text: Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long

historical periods, so too does their mode of perception (Benjamin, 2006: 255). Against

the orthodoxy of material base determining superstructure, Benjamin and Adorno pro-pose an avant-gardist thesis on new cultural modes of perception changing the relations

of production themselves.

The second reason for the dissenting tone ofCurrent of Music is that Adorno carries

over his conclusions from his important essay The Fetish-Character in Music and the

Regression of Listening (1938), according to which commodity music assumes an

authoritarian character. Radio is a means of reproduction of commodity music, alongside

that of the gramophone, and must be understood according to the same categories:

standardization, atomization and regression. Radio is notthe gramophone, however. The

most interesting parts of Current of Music consider radios socio-spatiotemporal speci-

ficity. These serve, in a roundabout way, to problematize Benjamins The Work of Art.

Autonomous vs. political art

Adornos familiar critique of Benjamins essay is to be found in his letter of March 18

1936, in response to one of several drafts that Benjamin would ultimately produce,

including after its 1936 appearance in the Zeitschrift. Adorno charges Benjamin with

failing to mediate traditional and progressive art. On the basis of Benjamins 1934 essay

on Kafka, Adorno had understood this mediation in terms of the dialectical construction

of the relationship between myth and history (Adorno and Benjamin, 2003: 127). Beingdialectical, there is identity, difference, and the (non-)identity of the two. Adorno sees a

polarization of identity and difference and hence an impossible leap from tradition to

progress. The contradiction of Benjamins narrative is that the possibility of revolutionary

art is positively constructed out of the destruction of traditional art a shattering of tra-

dition which is the reverse side of the present crisis and renewal of humanity (Benjamin,

2006: 254). Benjamin could simply have stated that traditional art is dead and that revo-

lutionary art is an independent development. Technical reproduction destroys the ritual

function of art its aura. This is the moment of radical difference from progressive art.

However, the value of art as art is strangely preserved. This is the moment of identity.Without it, there is no need to ground the latter in a history of the destruction of the former.

What is it that is artabout progressive art?

For Adorno, the answer to this problem is: autonomy both that of the work of art and

of the (collective) subject. Since Benjamin does not discuss autonomy, he must find his

mediation either in the fate of technology the inherently progressive nature of repro-

duction or in an unwittingly conservative valorization of the continuing power of art

as a privileged expression of human perception. The value of traditional art is not simply

destroyed; it is transvalued. Benjamin acknowledges this qualitative transformation of

[the artworks] nature by means of photography and film.In Adornos mind, Benjamins misapprehensions about aesthetic autonomy stem

from his polarization of art-historical (more broadly, anthropological) and political-

ontological approaches (Adorno and Benjamin, 2003: 131). Benjamin reserves each

approach for traditional and progressive art respectively, begging the question as to the

124 European Journal of Social Theory 16(1)


4/9

emancipating mediation of the one to the other. Instead of locating the question of auton-

omy in the historically mediated material, authenticity is pejoratively ascribed to the

originality of traditional art, understood in terms of physical rarity. Hence, Benjamins

initial examples are thingly artefacts. The reproduction of the painting in the woodcut,lithograph and photograph destroys the original, perhaps taking some of its value in the

process (Benjamin, 2006: 2523). By contrast, with his post-Kantian concept of art (iro-

nically, taken from the youngerBenjamin) Adorno can maintain that most traditional art

is simply no longer art for us (cf. Adorno and Benjamin, 2003: 129).

The case of music and radio not only contests Benjamins thesis, Adorno implies, but

reverses it. This reversal concerns the fact that: (a) listening is somewhat unthingly,

revealing the intertwined nature of technological production and reproduction; and (b)

the destruction of the original does not destroy aura especially if there is no discernible

original (that conclusion only follows from the conflation of autonomy with rarity).

Adorno problematizes both ends of Benjamins narrative: the destruction of traditional

art and the (re-)production of progressive art. The new art of radio does not destroy aura

but more often regresses back into it: what Benjamin calls the aura of the original

certainly constitutes an essential part of the live reproduction (Adorno, 2009: 89). This

is because the radio voice brings a mythic community into the here and now of the

living room. Benjamin had connected aura, defined in terms of uniqueness and the

apparition of distance, to the here and now (Benjamin, 2006: 2556). Allied to this

otherworldly here and now is the notion of contemplation, to which Benjamin opposes

this-worldly distraction. But for Adorno, the radio distracts without destroying aura.

Benjamins account of aura and distraction has not aged well, not least because it isalmost impossible to identify social progress in a technologically progressive culture.

And yet, the spatial character of the transformation of art in Benjamin remains richer

than in Adorno something that the latter is perhaps uncomfortably aware of.

According to Adorno, there is no conceivable music . . . which is not based upon the

idea of reproducibility. For, the score is, in a way, only a system of prescriptions for

possible reproduction, and nothing in itself (Adorno, 2009: 89). Radio brings this

tendency to its logical conclusion: In radio the authentic original has ceased to exist

(p. 90). Adorno initially wants to emphasize the difference between the two levels of

reproduction, performative and technical, in order to challenge the assumption sharedby Lazersfeld and Benjamin that mechanical reproduction is inherently progressive.

Hence, Adorno contrasts the impoverished sound of 1930s radio reproduction and its

domestic space of casual listening with the living sound of orchestral production and the

collective space of its concentrated listening. But once again, radio has changed the way

we listen to the live music originally, and there is no going back. The levels of repro-

duction are interconnected as a whole listening phenomenon. Adorno actually reverses

Benjamins alleged archaism by transposing the original from the past into the future.

This is not to do away with the idea of an original, therefore. There is a speculative idea

of the compelling musical performance, but this can neither be identified in the score norin the performance, since there can be many compelling performances of the same com-

position. The line about the original ceasing on the radio now reads pejoratively,

whereby the mechanical reproduction destroys all possible production. Adorno risks lap-

sing into Romantic humanism at this point. But it is more akin to a materialist philosophy

Phillips 125


5/9

of the ear. What is important is to enable the listener himself to compose the piece

virtually in the act of listening (Adorno, 2009: 218).

These ideas are germane to Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction. But here too

the thesis tends to be limited to the past musical tradition. In one of his concessions to theradio in Current of Music, notably, Adorno suggests that the atomization of listening can

be turned into a sharpening of attention upon the parts. One may listen to individual sec-

tions in radio as if through a microscope (2009: 64). This recalls Hegels afterlife of

the artwork. But afterlife is not new life. Adornos paradigm of new music predates the

proliferation of radio in the 1930s. The inclusion of modernist examples by Alban Berg

and Hanns Eisler in his proposed lectures for New York public radio was intended to

counter music appreciation (see What a Music Appreciation Hour Should Be). That

the programme was pulled after a couple of weeks indicates that its presenter was push-

ing at the limits of the possible. But stopping at the 1920s surely constitutes a block to

Adornos theorization of radio (re)production. It cuts short his own transition to new pro-

duction that which is necessary though not sufficient to negate the fetish-character of

dominant reproduction. Adorno even falls prey to his reservation about the democratiza-

tion of bourgeois culture (Adorno, 2009: 134). In the newspaper age, Schoenberg

negated the fetish-character. But the newspaper age is not the radio age.

To be fair to Adorno, the musical avant-garde was not quite ready to respond to the

radio, partly because of what was happening in Europe in the 1930s. The 1920s radio

cantatas and Lehrstucke of Eisler and Kurt Weill, often comprising settings of Brecht,

inaugurated and temporarily ended the project of progressive radio music. The text of

Eislers Tempo der Zeit(1929) even reflects upon the potential of its medium: In thesetimes in which the speed of the airplane begins to compete with the speed of the rotating

Earth, it is necessary the test the utilization of technical progress for the collective.

Technology is ambiguous. Its progress is not to be taken for granted but rather should

be tested and proved [zu uberprufen] on each occasion. Despite Eislers insight, these

works do not carry out this testing beyond their capacity to disseminate literary and polit-

ical texts to a larger audience. The integral meeting of radio and progressive music more

likely occurs during the 1950s. And curiously, Adorno was there when it happened.

Having returned to Frankfurt in 1949, the critical theorist regularly attended the

International Summer Courses for New Music held in Darmstadt. There, he belat-edly came to recognize the new music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez

and Luigi Nono (having initially disregarded these young composers as examples

of The Aging of the New Music). This moment will prove to be relevant to

Current of Music.

Musical spatialization

In the first, introductory document in the book, Radio Physiognomics, Adorno regardsthe radio as subject-like an alien, unfamiliar subject. By the term radio voice, Adorno

has in mind the literal sense of speaker, as well as the facial appearance of the radio-set

itself. Above all, the author refers to the concept of fetish-character. The Marxist

terminology is hidden between the lines of this ostensibly non-political study. But the



6/9

contemporaneous Fetish-Character essay would suggest that Radio Physiognomics

details the specific fetish-character of the radio.

Marx uses the term fetishism to describe a reversal of subject and object in commodity

production: the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed witha life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race

(Marx, 1976: 165). Adorno mentions the fetish without its sibling concept of alienation.

But this conceptual re-connection allows us to read Current of Music in terms of cultural

objectification(s), so as to bring Adorno back towards Benjamins emphasis upon the

necessarily spatial character of progressive culture. The formers critique of aura and posit-

ing of autonomy too often misses the basic opposition between interiority and exteriority.

In progressive art and film, Benjamin claimed, immersed attention into the here and now

gives way to the spatially dispersed attention of the collective: With the close up, space

expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. Hence,

Distraction and concentration form an antithesis, which may be formulated as follows. A per-

son who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it; he enters into the work . . . By

contrast, the distracted masses absorb the work of art into themselves. This is most obvious

with regard to buildings. Architecture has always offered the prototype of an artwork that

is received in a state of distraction and through the collective. (Benjamin, 2006: 265)

There is a precise, spatial inversion here (By contrast . . . ) that begins to respond to the

problem of mediation raised by Adorno: the contemplative distance that characterized

traditional art becomes tactile [taktisch], progressive art. To paraphrase Hegel, theI becomes We yet without, pace Adorno, the We also becoming I, since there

is no autonomy in distraction. For Adorno, in a communist society, work would be orga-

nised in such a way that human beings would no longer be so exhausted or so stupefied as

to require such distraction (Adorno and Benjamin, 2003: 130). So the question for

Adorno is: does his I also become We?

Despite the dual character of autonomous art in Aesthetic Theory, its empirical

space is of necessity absent, as can be gauged from the works non-treatment of archi-

tecture. It is notable that Adornos discussion of The Work of Art essay appears, in

Current of Music, in the midst of a subsection entitled Space Ubiquity. Adorno initiallyconflates two forms of spatial ubiquity in radio music. Music has a tendency to negate

the place of its production. But this is not specific to radio music. What radio adds is

simultaneous transmission. Adorno notes that phenomenologist Gunther Stern referred

to the experience of walking down a street and hearing the same music from several

buildings (2009: 81). The latter ubiquity is as social as it is acoustic. For Adorno, this

simultaneity of acoustically and aesthetically impoverished reproduction constitutes a

non-temporalization of music, the art of time. Moreover, Adorno repeatedly associates

non- or de-temporalization with spatialization in his essays on music, thus following

Lukacs definition of reification the process of becoming a thing from History andClass Consciousness (1923): the commodity form degrades time to the dimension of

space (Lukacs, 1971: 89).

How, then, does Adorno present the alternative social space to that of Benjamin?

There are clues within Radio Physiognomics. To speak metaphorically, symphonic

Phillips 127


7/9

works transform the time element of music into space (Adorno, 2009: 52). Art music,

like radio music, enacts a metaphorical spatialization. Responding to Paul Bekkers the-

ory of the symphony, Adorno regards this space as living, not geometric space: A

symphony does not create a community; but its inherent technical qualities are certainlylinked with the fact that it is supposed to be listened to by a community and in a large

room (p. 51). In another essay, Adorno connects the space of the performance to the

inherent (or structural) musical space of the work, which springs from the collective

implications of all music, the character of something that embraces groups of human

beings (Adorno, 2002: 150).

The two spatializations of music, reified and non-reified, are outwardly opposed in

Adornos thinking. His dispute with Benjamin concerns the fact that, far from opening

up an emancipatory space, reproduction of itself tends to pre-empt this with an author-

itarian space of its own. Adornos point should be conceded without negating the more

promising theorization of space in Benjamin one that Adorno in fact requires. In order

to find a way between Adorno and Benjamin, we should briefly reconsider Marxs earlier

account of social reproduction. For this contextualizes the dialectical understanding of

commodity fetishism in Capital, the source of Adornos fetish-character, so that we may

revise his concepts of reification and objectification.

Dialectic of objectification

The 1844 Economic and Political Manuscripts develop a distinction between, on the one

hand, objectification, Vergegenstandlichung, and, on the other, both estrangement,Entfremdung, and alienation, Entauerung. The relation between these latter concepts

is of importance here. In The Young Hegel ([1938] 1975), Lukacs suggested that

EntfremdungandEntauerungare more or less interchangeable, since each translates the

English alienation (p. 538). Chris Arthur noticed the crucial difference in emphasis,

however, only to worry that rendering Entauerung literally as externalization risks

confusion with objectification (Arthur, 1986: Appendix). In fact, there must be some-

thing of objectification in externalization a relation of difference and not simple oppo-

sition. This differentiation allows for a means of the negation of the negation.

Objectification is, on the one hand, the alienating loss of and bondage to the object.But on the other hand, to be genuinely human is to objectify: It is in the fashioning of the

objective that man really proves himself to be a species-being (Marx, 1975: 329). The

capitalist mode of production constitutes one, regressive objectification from the stand-

point of communist objectification: it is only when mans object becomes a human

object or objective man that man does not lose himself in that object . . . he himself

becomes the object (p. 353). This dual account of objectification is the consequence

of Marxs mediation of externalization, which is partly objective, and objectification,

which is partly externalizing. The question of technological reproduction (and for Marx,

industry) lies in the midst of this struggle, as Benjamin was right to emphasize.History and Class Consciousness predates the eventual publication of Marxs Manu-

scripts by some nine years. In 1967, Lukacs recalled realizing that he had disastrously

conflated alienation with objectification. He methodologically salvaged the latter by way

of Hegelian panlogicism: the subjective consciousness of the commodity-worker is



8/9

raised to objective self-consciousness by way of an assumption about dialectical logics

solution to the antinomies of bourgeois thought (Lukacs, 1971: xxiv). Ultimately, the

young Marx must make a similarly Hegelian move, albeit in a more sophisticated man-

ner. Alienated objectification follows the dialectical self-externalization of spirit familiarto the Phenomenology of Spirit(EntauerungandErinnerung), whose only fault was to

determine spirit as the bourgeois mind. Marx thus turns to a consideration of the Phe-

nomenology in the same, third manuscript, and also optimistically defines industry as

the exoteric revelation of mans essential powers (Marx, 1975: 355).

My digression into Marx and Lukacs is justified to the extent that the socio-spatial status

of objectification and reification lies behind the distinction between regressive and progres-

sive spatializations within cultural forms of the technological present. Again, Adornos cri-

tique of the culture industry often seems to offer no realalternative space to that of globalized

reification. Autonomous art shows that the world could be other than it is (Adorno, 1997:

138). But this other remains perpetually deferred a utopia that must never come.

The composer Luigi Nono whom Adorno met at Darmstadt provides an interesting

case study at this point, insofar as he remained both a student of Adorno, with his adher-

ence to advanced musical language, and of Benjamin, with his use of tendential (and

literary) texts. Equally pertinent to this discussion: Nono became interested in radio

technology during the 1960s. This formed a part of the avant-garde production in radio

studios in Italy and West Germany from the mid-1950s onwards.

For La Fabbrica illuminata (1964) Nono recorded sounds from the Italsider forgery

of Cornigliano, northern Italy, and manipulated them together with text sung by soprano

Carla Henius. The texts decry the working conditions of the factory. La Fabbrica uses amultiplicity of radio technology in the service of multiple spatializations including being

taken out into the factory (except that this was blocked by the radio authorities). At the

same time, Nonos acerbic sonorities and long durational values render the work a mimetic

expression of reification, in keeping with Adornos theory of de-temporalization. This is

because, for Adorno, mimesis is fundamental to arts modernity: art is modern art through

its mimesis of the hardened and alienated (1997: 21). But equally, contra Adorno, Nonos

static or spatial character only becomes temporalized by way of the concrete spaces of

political struggle and possibility.

As if in response to Current of Music, Nono indicates how a negation of regressiveobjectification, reification, must accompany a positing objectification, albeit as a gesture

of solidarity. This might constitute a corrective to Adornos aesthetic theory, without los-

ing the concept of autonomy. As the young Marx recognized, only arts mediation of the

regressive and progressive spatial objectifications sanctions the claim to social progress.

It is Benjamin who knows that the question of technology is bound to the question of

externalization his problem being the conflation of the two. Like Eisler before him,

Nono cautiously takes up Marxs promethean claim for industry, or the revolutionary

orientation of objectification (Prometeo is the title of Nonos most important later work).

Because of its spatial fluidity, radio technology holds a historically symbolic role in thisprocess, though one that is now being superseded by other technologies.

Adorno almost theorizes this mediation of spaces, yet once again without finding

contemporary examples. In the Fetish-Character essay, the author refers to two

spheres of music, commodity and autonomous music (we might even read Spharen

Phillips 129


9/9

spatially here), as comprising an unresolved contradiction. The whole cannot be put

back together by adding the separated halves, but in both there appear, however dis-

tantly, the changes of the whole, which only moves in contradiction (Adorno, 2002:

293). If we extend Adornos logic to Current of Music, objective unity is to be conceivedin terms of the contradiction between reified and non-reified spatial objectifications.

In making this concession to Benjamins technological modernism (pre- On the Con-

cept of History), we nevertheless inherit a different problem from him. In the absence of

a concept of mediation, Benjamins concept of negation is pressed into a philosophically

less sophisticated active nihilism. By opening up the empty space of reification, music

(pure exchange, repetition, reproduction) forces the question of human objectification.

Music as nihilism is hardly new to philosophy, from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche to Attali.

Lukacs reminds us that it is the modern philosophers and not the anti-philosophers who can

offer a concept of mediation rather than faith in redemption from nothingness. Adorno is

right to oppose panlogicism. Progress through technology can hardly be taken for granted.

Yet the whole is the false lapses into ordinary scepticism (Adorno, 2005: 50). As Eisler

predicted in theory, cultural practices such as Nonos show an alternative way: the concrete

instantiation of intermittent mediation.

References

Adorno T W ([1970] 1997) Aesthetic Theory. London: Athlone Press.

Adorno T W (2002) Essays on Music, ed. R. Leppert. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Adorno T W (2005) Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. London: Verso.

Adorno T W (2009) Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Adorno T W and Benjamin W (2003) The Complete Correspondence, 19281940. Cambridge:

Polity Press.

Arthur C (1986) Dialectics of Labour: Marx and his Relation to Hegel. http://chrisarthur.net/

dialectics-of-labour/appendix.html (accessed 4 April 2012).

Benjamin W (2006) Selected Writings, vol. 4, 19381940, ed. H Eiland and M W. Jennings

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Jenemann D (2007) Adorno in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Lukacs G (1971) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. London: Merlin

Press.Lukacs G (1975) The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations Between Dialectics and Economics .

London: Merlin Press.

Marx K (1975) Early Writings, ed. L Colletti. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Marx K (1976) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

About the author

Wesley Phillips is an independent scholar living in Barcelona. His research lies in the areas of

German idealism, historical materialism and Frankfurt School critical theory. Wesleys recent

publications include Spaces of resistance: the Adorno-Nono complex, Twentieth Century Music,

9, 2012, The future of speculation?, Cosmos and History, 7(1), 2012, Melancholy science? Crit-

ical theory and German idealism reconsidered, Telos, 156, Winter 2011/12, and History or coun-

ter-tradition? The system of freedom after Walter Benjamin, Critical Horizons, 11(1), 2010.


adorno on music, space and objectification

Documents