Adorno and Jameson on the Dance Floor: Minimal Techno against the Charge
of the Culture Industry
Jun Zubillaga-Pow1
‘Something is provided for everyone so that no one can escape…’2
Adorno and Horkheimer
I
Situated in the neoliberal economy of twenty first everyday century culture, musical reception in
the West today can be considered as a continual, if not persistent engagement with the Hegelian
logic of universal-and-particular dialectics. The musical encounter is at the same time particular to
the location, the sounds or the person, but also universal in the listening experience and capitalist
intervention. With the acceleration of state-initiated laissez faire economy, the correlation between
the production and reception of music becomes an endless and vicious cycle in a society where the
demand for higher profit margins induces producers to carry out aggressive market tactics with no
concerns for either ethical responsibility or the preservation of aesthetic quality. Once such selfregulating mechanisms get set in place, it becomes difficult to unravel the processes that created
the impeding discriminations, or to transform these processes into modes of production that can be
harnessed for personal satisfaction. To a certain extent, as long as capitalism continues to reign
over our everyday life, the spectre of what Adorno has termed negative dialectics will continue to
haunt society, of which any engagement with music is merely one of its many components.
The first instance then would be for critical theory to inform society that, while the harvests of
capitalist productions are being reaped, the repercussions that proved to be detrimental to the larger
social superstructure are being felt simultaneously. The logic of critical theory, whether led by an
ethical decorum or not, will be used to examine these errors in consumption practices and to
propose a critical re-evaluation of any ‘baleful enchantments’ amidst these musical practices.
Therein, the present and future interests of musical societies will be predicated on whether the
politically-charged theories of the 1950s are able to stand the test of time. To cite but two examples,
while Andreas Huyssen has argued convincingly that the seed for Adorno’s take on the early
1
I would like to thank the anonymous readers for providing constructive feedback on this paper. I would also like to
express gratitude to Luciano Zubillaga for his support during the research and writing-up stages.
2
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkeimer, ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ in Dialectic of
Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. E. Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 97.
twentieth-century cultural industry has already been sowed in the situation surrounding Wagner
and music in the nineteenth-century, Frederic Jameson has established the relevance of Adorno’s
analyses to be practically if not contingently applicable to the social changes of the 1980s.3 To
interlock the logic of causality between Adornian theory and contemporary practice may already
be an anachronistic move, but the drastic cultural changes vis-à-vis everyday life in the age of
American imperialism after the Cold War have re-instated and energised the invisible hand of
capitalism, neoliberal or otherwise. No wonder the conservative backlash against Adorno and his
associates from middle- and upper-class devotees of Jazz and other popular music has hindered the
development of leftist critical theory in the last decade. Such phenomenon is akin to the fate of the
eventual dilution of the Fluxus movement in the 1970s. Being both anti-capitalist and anti-art, the
Fluxus attitude was perceived as gimmicky distortion of everyday life. Their urban youth niche
being located in a milieu tainted by the culture industry soon tapered in interest over the banality
of the art-form.
By the 1980s, artworks such as those by Beethoven and Beckett that Adorno championed have
already become reified by the fetishist consumption not via their artistic ‘values’, but through the
non-artistic ‘exchange value’. It becomes impossible to recuperate the Benjaminian aura from these
heteronymous functions. Perhaps the only way, albeit one that is myopic, would be to engage the
artwork with a conscious effort of repressing the relative opportunity costs, or the alternatives
forgone in place of one’s experience of the artwork. In a similar vein as the ideology of l’art pour
l’art, one would have to listen to music for the sake of the music and not think of any extra-musical
preambles. Unfortunately the globalised state of capitalism today has very much dislodged the
agency of critical theory. For Jameson writing in 1990, the Adornian concept of the reification of
art is ‘itself [already] reified or at least easily reifiable’ in our post-modern epoch.4 Perhaps one
way of resurrecting Adorno’s philosophy for the betterment of the present state of social
globalisation might be to situate it within a historical trajectory and draw inferences that could be
appropriate for the creative arts at the start of the twenty-first century.
With these critical objectives in mind, this paper seeks to ground a theory for which the subgenre
of minimal techno could be artistically valued with the contemporary fillip of the culture industry
3
Andreas Huyssen, ‘Adorno in Reverse: From Hollywood to Richard Wagner’, New German Critique 29 (1983): 838 and Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno or the Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990), 5.
4
Jameson, Late Marxism, 3.
in tandem. While it is important to minimise the temporal and ideological distances between theory
and practice, this reassessment of musical aesthetics will not include the ethnographic and
essentialist methodologies for at least two reasons. Firstly, to intervene in any sector of the industry
is itself an immediate entrapment by commodity fetishism, and secondly, the reliance on a
historical foregrounding of concepts and objective perceptions remains consistent with a critical
methodology of reading artistic or cultural practices without positing oneself within the situation
and interacting with the subject. The lure of false consciousness notwithstanding, this paper will
delineate how minimal techno can unsettle commonly-held perceptions by oscillating between the
Adornian concepts of ‘artwork’ and ‘culture industry’ and the niche cultural perception of the
musical genre today.
II
The entertainment industry in 1940s United States was one of attraction and relief from the great
depression. When Adorno and Horkeimer were researchers at the University of California, they
confirmed the universal appeal of the cinema as entertainment for the masses. Whether in Germany
or the United States, the public went into the cinema to experience life away from the war and
suffering that were happening in the rest of the world. Despite the deliberate use of propagandist
tactics in films such as Citizen Kane (1941) and Casablanca (1942), the audiences remained
beguiled by the happy endings that resolved every intense conflict, such as the overtly-optimistic
exit line from the latter film that seemed to obliterate the seriousness of the penultimate narrative:
“Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”5
There was certainly none of the real and ugly truth that Adorno would prefer to be made known to
the audiences. There would be no unrequited love between Faust and Gretchen or the social
injustice between the bourgeois and the proletariat during the years after the war. By alluding to
Goethe’s aesthetics, Adorno insisted that
speaking out the negative, facing catastrophe and calling it by its name, has something
wholesome and helpful in itself which could never be achieved by the pretence of a
harmony borrowed from the surface phenomena and leaving the essence untouched.6
5
It is otherwise not surprising that this line, which is spoken by businessman Rick to corrupt police captain Louis,
undermines the level of political consciousness in terms of class hierarchy, revealing one instance of social thought
stemming from a Marxist position.
6
Theodor Adorno, ‘What National Socialism has done to the Arts’ in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 381.
For Adorno and Horkheimer, the films from the United States in the 1930s and 1940s did not reflect
the ‘essence’ or social truths of the prevailing economy.7 The proliferation of narratives that
conveyed feel-good after-effects had created false illusions of the political situation in the world as
one of recuperation and optimism; audiences in the United States have been ideologically shielded
from the genocide and terror on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. In a way, the films and popular
music as two main proponents of mass culture of the period had dishonestly censored the real
catastrophes from the people. This political tactic inevitably produced ‘standardised’ cultural
objects that provided entertainment and imposed an objective function into everyday life via the
introduction of lame amusement, not unlike the apolitical engagements of today’s television soap
operas. Adorno and Horkheimer argued that the film ‘denies its audience any dimension in which
they might roam freely in imagination… without losing the thread; thus it trains those exposed to
it to identify film directly with reality’.8 After being coerced into misguided notions that cinema
was merely banal entertainment or fabulous fairy tales, the audiences of the 1940s were unaware
of their own false consciousness and went about their everyday life partially as reality and partially
as imaginary.
If Adorno and Horkheimer had deemed that ‘for the consumer there is nothing left to classify, since
the classification has already been pre-empted by the schematism of production’, then all mass
culture under capitalism would become identical to one another.9 Filmmaking and radio
broadcasting were then fixed industries that propagated the further standardisation of the genres.
Films, whether made in 1932 or 1956, bore no aesthetic differences other than the marked presence
of technological advancement. This methodology of film production and distribution became what
Adorno and Horkheimer would describe as the ‘culture industry’, where demand and supply of
films by society on the whole is determined not by the quest for artistic excellence but by the bait
of higher profit margins. Both film and popular music therefore had to relinquish their immanent
qualities to affect viewers and listeners as commodified artworks. That is, the form of productions
had ultimately triumphed over the production of artistic contents.
On a contingent level, not only did Adorno disapprove of classifying music in general, he was also
critical of the mass reception of popular styles such as jazz and swing. By the early twentiethcentury, Marxism was sufficiently influential in providing Adorno the instrumental reason to
7
The same, however, cannot be said about the literature by their compatriots such as Ernest Hemingway and John
Steinbeck.
8
Adorno and Horkheimer, ‘The Culture Industry’, 100.
9
Adorno and Horkheimer, ‘The Culture Industry’ 98.
censure the naivety of people’s responses to jazz in the 1930s. Via a critique of jazz dancers,
Adorno identified the ‘non-experts’, who ‘join the ranks’ of the ‘experts’, as ‘jitterbugs’ with a
conscious will to conform to a state of ‘self-caricature’:
The jitterbug looks as if he would grimace at himself, at his own enthusiasm and at his own
enjoyment which he denounces even while pretending to enjoy himself… it is quite unlikely
that the ceaseless repetition of the same effects would allow for genuine merriment.10
By the will of the ego, Adorno claimed that ‘jitterbugs’ were able to psychologically transmute
themselves in and out of a state of mass hysteria. For Adorno, the only prescription for these
‘jitterbugs’ was one of ‘controlled pleasure’. That is, what Adorno had considered as ‘genuine’
responses to dance music was to dance to the spell of music by reacting to its rhythmic stimuli
imbued with a self-conscious will. To enjoy dance music, one not only had to give up part of one’s
hedonistic interests, but also to overcome a psychological process of internalisation, whereby the
energy lost in fidgeting is transformed into a critical knowledge of the dance steps and musical
form. In short, dance must be an adherence to the music in its quintessential state. The jazz dancer
should neither be focusing on the pleasure obtained from wriggling nor be concerned with, say, the
time and money spent on dancing lessons. Instead, he or she should occupy himself or herself with
the music and the body movements that are core to the art of jazz dancing. In other words, it is
dancing for the sake of dancing and not dancing for personal pleasure or a relief from a hard day’s
work.
Further, Adorno associated the act of dancing to jazz with negative social and sexual nuances. He
located jazz as a derivative between the bourgeois salon music and the military march, whereby
the human gait was deregulated to an arbitrary sequence of dance steps.11 He argued that dance
should not exert a gestural control over the gait, but be an ‘escape’ from everyday life. Dance, for
Adorno, should be an art form that is non-mimetic of life. According to Adorno’s appraisals, the
‘jitterbugs’ had constructed a prototypical gait for social day-to-day living with their irregular body
movements. They had converted their ordinary way of life into a dance, and the dance into a
nihilistic way of life with a contingency between dance and social life that was fraught with
meaninglessness. Like that of the Fluxus movement mentioned earlier, the essences of art and life
10
Theodor Adorno, ‘On Popular Music’ in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2002), 467.
11
Here, Adorno was referring to the German jazz music that he had been exposed to which differs greatly from the
Black American jazz he first heard in a nightclub in Soho, London in 1937. See Richard Leppert, ‘Commentary’ in
Essays on Music (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 357ff. for an exposition of the debates on Adorno
and Jazz.
conflated into a prosaic state of reified monotony, or in Adorno’s words, ‘like the alienation of art
and society’.12 Jazz, both the dance and the music, became so bland that ‘we are hardly conscious
of it anymore,’ and when the latter is used as film music, it matches congruently with the
mechanical rhythms of city life, as if in a disenchanted diegesis between film and life (2002: 486).13
A recent and vivid example belonged to the Disney adaptation of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in
Fantasia 2000 with the storyline set in the Great Depression of 1930s New York.
Last but not least, Adorno interpreted the act of dancing to jazz as one with an erotic nature. He
went so far as to align the rhythmic impetus of jazz with that of sexual intercourse, giving empirical
evidences of ‘taxi girls [performing] dance steps which occasionally [led] to male orgasm’.14
Adorno showed no reservation to relate this to the capitalist superstructure, of which he deemed
this libidinal dance culture to be one that had disgusted the ascetic attitude of the petit bourgeois in
the 1930s. Not only had the bourgeois’ enjoyment of jazz underlined an order of social hierarchy,
but the erotic connotations of dancing to jazz had also offended the lower classes on ethical
grounds. In these instances, the false illusions of dancing or listening to jazz as a form of
entertainment in the 1930s had made a foolery out of the bourgeois themselves as well as tricked
the underclass into believing that learning to play or dance jazz was a way of entertaining the rich
and earning their keep. This is the exact analogy Jameson has come to invoke from the Odyssey
myth, which I will return to later in this paper.
III
For better or worse, dance and musical cultures in Europe and the United States have remained
fairly similar since the passing of Adorno. Sexual connotations and expletives continue to strive in
the culture industry, especially in the forms of music and dance. One example of this would be the
‘heterosexualisation’ and eroticisation of the tango across the world.15 It may seem as if the state
of morality has declined or there is an increase in the level of tolerance for such misdemeanours.
However, the real reason lies in the sustainability of the local economy or, as mentioned above, the
lure of higher profit margins especially in the years immediately after the Second World War when
12
Theodor Adorno, ‘Farewell to Jazz’ in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2002), 499.
13
Theodor Adorno, ‘On Jazz’ in Essays on Music, ed Richard Leppert (Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2002), 486.
14
Theodor Adorno, ‘On Jazz’, 486.
15
Tango in its early stages is a dance for the working class men only; that is, a dance between men to ‘escape’ from
the toil of working in the day. See Christine Denniston, The Meaning of Tango: The Story of the Argentinian Dance
(London: Portico Books, 2007).
the primary task of most country-states was rebuilding a global economy. The fall in enthusiasm
for jazz and swing has allowed other dance genres such as funk and disco in the 1960s and 1970s
to proliferate. In the 1980s, the introduction of technology and new electronic means of production
saw the development of new subgenres of electronic dance music in the likes of Chicago house and
Detroit techno, both of which have become widespread throughout major European cities.
In the 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century, the development of sonic and web
interfaces provided the resources for Minimal techno producers, such as Deep Dish and Richie
Hawtin, to widen their online listener-base. Likewise, architectural and technological advancement
also contributed to the construction of purpose-built venues specifically for raving or clubbing.
These phenomena could very well be the first instances in the discourse of the culture industry that
musical function has taken precedence over the structure of productions. There then cannot be any
accusations of ‘pseudo-individualisation’, or what Adorno has considered as the ‘synthetic means
of hiding standardisation’. The objectification of improvisation techniques (which is meant to be
free or subjective in the first place) or the presence of ‘hooks’, ‘dirty tones’ or ‘false notes’ within
popular music will immediately lose their aesthetic utilities.16 Paraphrasing Adorno, Richard
Leppert thinks that popular music is entirely predictable or ‘catchy’ due to the ‘essence’ of
the hook, on which hangs the greatest opportunity for marketing success – a turn of phrase,
a particular riff, a specific chord change, etc., which individualises the piece, advertises its
“uniqueness”.17
Minimal techno as a form of new music is without any ‘hooks’ and is not orchestrated in an endless
chain of ‘hooks’. In minimal techno, every riff undergoes an indefinite number of repetitions that
coerces the listeners to either submerge themselves in a pool of sounds or hang onto as many
‘hooks’ as their listening skills allow them to. This phenomenon brings our argument back to the
act of the human will, that is the will to make a conscious decision and partake in the mass hysteria
akin to that of the ‘jitterbugs’. Techno dancers can learn a lesson from the false ideologies of the
‘jitterbugs’ in the sense that dancing to techno is also a form of self-discipline via ‘controlled
pleasure’. The stimulus here is no more the syncopated effects of jazz rhythms, but the electroacoustic ambience of techno that dancers need to engage with. One reason why the ‘jitterbug
mentality’ continues to this day is a result of traditional bourgeois trappings, which critical theorists
are in support of overcoming. According to Jameson, to attain a critical modernity is to ‘escape’
the cultivation of subjective refinements and of heightened ethical discriminations enabled
by social exclusion and class privilege, the fetishization of Experience [sic] as a kind of
16
17
Adorno, ‘On Popular Music,’ 444-46.
Adorno, ‘On Popular Music,’ 338.
spiritual private property, [and] the aesthetic individualism which becomes a privatised
substitute for the life and culture of groups in business society.18
That is, our appreciation of artworks, whether of music or dance, should not be determined by our
subjective perceptions based on hierarchical connotations founded on social or class differences,
but should be judged solely via the aesthetic merit or use value of the artworks. Such an aesthetic
experience should also not be restricted to a selected few in the upper classes where the possibility
of art appreciation becomes limited and fetishized. For Jameson, this would otherwise lead to the
liquidation of artworks as a result of individualistic and monopolistic consumption. In other words,
the artwork cannot be evaluated based on an index of socio-economic factors. Instead, a definitive
correlation between the work of art in situ and an individual’s subjective appreciation would be the
most reflective of modern society. Paraphrasing Adorno, Jameson considers that
the work of art “reflects” society and is historical to the degree that it refuses the social, and
represents the last refuge of individual subjectivity from the historical forces that threaten
to crush it.19
By way of theoretical application, I propose that dancers moving to the sounds of techno (as well
as those of other dance forms) be educated on the socio-historical origins of the style and also
mediate an aesthetic modernity that engages solely with the music or the sounds. In this way, the
dancers will already reciprocate what one of the early producers of techno has deemed as most
important: ‘I get inspired by a good sound… It gives me a feeling for a rhythm or a melody.’20
Taking an approach that adheres to Jameson’s proposition, techno dancers would better concentrate
on the surrounding acoustics so that, by evincing their personal ‘feelings’ for the rhythm and
melody, their engagement with the artwork can be subjectively maximised. This is significant for
a modern historicism when individual subjectivity become transformed into a critical form of
aesthetic individualism that, unlike the social entrainment of the culture industry, results in a
personal and authentic mode of musical appreciation.
IV
In contrast to the ideology advocated by Jameson, a capitalist politics of the culture industry will
severely affect the quality of music. In a Marxist vein, the superstructure has been manipulated to
18
Jameson, Late Marxism, 125.
Fredric Jameson, ‘T. W. Adorno; or, Historical Tropes’ in Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical
Theories of Literature (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1971), 34.
19
20
Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey (London:
Headline, 2000), 360.
focus on the exchange value neglecting the use value and maiming the essence of the base elements.
This is the crucial point in question, one that determines the outcome of the Hegelian dialectic
between form and content, or the universal and the particular. Initially, the particular as a singular
unit is set in negation against the larger form of the universal. Later, a second negation of the first
negation occurs when the universal identifies with the particular. This process of identification,
like the Žižekian notion of the encounter with the Real, can result in either a positive or negative
dialectic, although for most of the time, it resembles the psychoanalytic effects of shock and
horror.21 This act of reconciliation via the Hegelian movement of Aufhebung then becomes an
impossible task because there can be no precise identification of the particular with the universal,
or vice versa. It will only result in a ‘de-aestheticization’ of both the particular and the universal,
not unlike looking at oneself in the broken mirror, say, of the devil-troll from The Snow Queen.
This Hegelian dialectics can be represented with the aid of a Greimasian semiotic square, with
arrowed lines denoting contraries and plain lines denoting contradictions (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Greimas-Hegelian semiotic square
Particular
Non-universal
Universal
Non-particular
Applying this concept to the reception of minimal techno, I direct the first negation to be the initial
moment when listeners experience the incongruity between the particular riff and the entire
soundtrack or the extended sequence of riff-patterns. Encountering a new sound, the listeners have
yet to be equipped with the appropriate analytical skills in positioning the particular with or within
the universal. They will eventually arrive at a ‘breaking point’ when they become weary of the
monotony and lose concentration. This is similar to how Adorno has described jazz dancers as
lapsing into mass hysteria quasi the jitterbugs. Correspondingly, the second negation, I suggest, is
the moment immediately before the Hegelian Aufhebung or reconciliation that is when the listeners
21
See the comparison made by Slavoj Žižek between Hegelian dialectics and Lacanian psychoanalysis in his ‘Why
Should a Dialectician Learn to Count to Four?’ in For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor
(London: Verso, 2002), 193-97.
realise the entire soundtrack is an exact replica of itself and only that it is being divided into
multiple identical portions. As forewarned by Jameson from the quote above, this would be the
instance when the particulars come to pose a historical threat to the universal, almost like the fear
aroused by a handful of dust in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.22
For Adorno, ohne Angst leben or ‘to live without fear’ is thus ‘the deepest and most fundamental
promise of music itself’.23 Like the serial constructions of Schoenberg’s music, the subcutaneous
stratification of minimal techno imposes a threat, which is tantamount to that of Schoenberg’s
music, persistently ‘refuses the social’ and resists being appropriated into the culture industry.24
However, reaching the omnipotent state of Aufhebung requires a vast amount of determination,
which, in this case, involves a genuine physical and aural response to the music. Like the jazz
dancer, the techno dancer has to once again overcome the bourgeoisie culture of fetishization,
putting one’s knowledge of the dance form to critical use and devoting oneself entirely to the
aesthetic experience, albeit imbued with a kind of ‘controlled pleasure’. In any case, the view that
I have offered here is based on a critical analysis of the social structure of the art-form. To situate
minimal techno within the culture industry or at least with respect to the culture industry, it will be
most helpful to allude to Jameson’s analogy of the Odysseus myth.
V
Figure 2: Greimas-Jamesonian extended semiotic square25
Superstructure
ART
[‘Odysseus’]
CULTURE INDUSTRY
[‘bad art’, ‘the victims’]
Ruling
classes
PHILISTINES
22
Oppressed
classes
NON-ART
With reference to Adorno, Richard Leppert believes that for the artefacts of the culture industry, their details will
‘never threaten the iron-clad model on which [the universal] is based’. See Leppert, ‘Commentary,’ 339. By this notion,
it can be argued that minimal techno could not be associated with the culture industry.
23
Jameson, ‘T. W. Adorno ; or, Historical Tropes’, 35.
24
A marked comparison can be made here with the music of Wagner, which has been appropriated by the Nazis as
emblematic due to its social heteronomy, as can most hip-hop music with its political, and sometimes racist and sexist,
agenda.
25
Jameson, Late Marxism, 151 and 154.
violence,
ressentiment
production
[‘the oarsmen’]
Base
To explain the culture industry, Jameson sets up his Greimasian semiotic square with the opposition
between Odysseus, who listens to the sirens without fear and experiences Art, and the victims who
fall into false ideology within the culture industry (Figure 2). The latter denotes the pleasureseeking bourgeois, who are privileged enough to hear the music of the sirens but lack the critical
tool of comprehending the sounds, thus resulting in their ultimate disenchantment. They form the
bulk of the patrons of the culture industry, who only perceive a partial version of the musical whole,
like how ten blind men’s descriptions of an elephant becomes for each an act of entity fetishization.
The third category of people corresponds to the non-hearing oarsmen who, according to Jameson,
learn something more profound about the ‘individual work of art’ to which they themselves
are deaf: namely, das Unwiederbringliche, what cannot be called back from the past; the
work’s ‘truth-content’.26
This situation, no doubt, only applies to music, given its intrinsic ephemeral quality. Compared to
other art-forms, music is one that cannot be held physically like a literary text or painted canvas. If
the ears of the oarsmen are plugged while the music sounds, the music is denied them forever. They
will then understand art’s ‘truth-content’ as one that is ostentatious and belonging to a different
class hierarchy. Adorno thinks that
[i]t is impossible to explain art to those who have no feeling for it; they are not able to bring
an intellectual understanding of it into their living experience. For them the reality principle
is such an obsession that it places a taboo on aesthetic comportment as a whole; incited by
the cultural approbation of art, alienness to art often changes into aggression, not the least
of the causes of the contemporary deaestheticization of art.27
In the end, the oarsmen are deprived of the ‘aesthetic comportment’ experienced by Odysseus or
the bourgeois. Unfortunately, there appears to be no way out of this dialectic of the capitalist world.
On the one hand, any post-mortem explanation would be detrimental to the artwork in terms of its
aura; on the other hand, any attempt to enlighten them would also highlight the very polemic
hierarchy of class differential between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The onset of a negative dialectics is in
posing the question that if everyone were bound to the mast enjoying the pleasure derived from the
26
27
Jameson, Late Marxism, 130.
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2004), 160.
music, who is going to row the boat? Or to paraphrase an imperative set by Paul Attinello, you
have to move your feet if you want to dance.28
Referring back to Jameson’s extended square, the last category is the most difficult to define
because it is one that includes neither ‘bad art’, which really belongs in the culture industry, nor
‘non-art’, which is without any artistic value.29 Unlike the labouring oarsmen or the betrayed
victims, the producers or listeners of this aesthetic category have thorough awareness of the
characteristics of what art and anti-art are. For Jameson, such a project is one that enacts the
negation of the negation between art and anti-art, ‘and their refusal [of objectification] is a gesture
that has a social meaning which ultimately transcends the matter of art itself and the more limited
sphere of the aesthetic’.30 These cultural philistines, as Jameson has coined, refuse to be
compartmentalised as consumers of art or culture, thus threatening the analytical paradigm of the
dialectic. They pretend to be the inferior class in the society but in fact, given their knowledge and
power, they are part of the ruling classes. They react against the others with such violent rejection
that carries over the psychological nuances of ressentiment, or what Nietzsche has deemed as a
sense of resentment directed with hostility towards the cultured or civilised. They seize every
opportunity to destroy the art and culture of the others and establish themselves as the supreme
race. After Adorno and Horkheimer, Jameson associates this category of listeners with the antiSemitic.
That said, this is the very point where I will diverge from Jameson in the analysis of the final
position in the Greimasian semiotic square. I concur with his analyses of the presence of true art
consumers, the bourgeois manipulation in the culture industry, and the inaccessibility of both forms
to certain oppressed classes due to economic factors. Yet, for the final position, I want to paint a
more optimistic picture than that of the philistine situation. With respect to the logic of the
Greimasian semiotic square, the final position should be described as ‘non-anti-art’. That is, these
are works created not for higher surplus values than those occupying the position of anti-art in the
culture industry, but works considered to be complementary, though not necessarily autonomous,
to artworks and still transcend the social hierarchy of wealth and class.
28
This is a paraphrase of the line ‘you can’t dance if you’re always looking at your feet’ in Paul Attinello,
‘Passion/Mirrors’ in Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing, ed. Andrew Dell’Antonio (Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 172.
29
Jameson, Late Marxism, 154.
30
Jameson, Late Marxism, 152.
This is the position where I situate minimal techno, alongside the more popular works of Björk and
Radiohead, to give but a couple of examples. These works share an identity of being non-identical
to each or any other. Their ‘uniqueness’ is unlike those accused by Adorno as pseudoindividualistic, because they do not contain the fake melodic ‘hooks’ that fall off the charts like so
many other hit songs of their time. Unlike the reified works of the culture industry, this ‘non-antiart’ rejects the trap of compulsory commodification. Relevant examples of artists whose music are
available for downloading off the internet without costs are the Iranian-American duo Deep Dish
and the English-Canadian musician Richie Hawtin who goes by the stage name Plastikman Richie
Hawtin.31 For this very reason, their music become ‘music for the masses’ and gratifies the
Stendhalian notion of le promesse de bonheur. If these artistic creations were to be ‘subtracted’
from the Adornian concept of the culture industry, they would definitely contribute immensely to
a culture that belongs truly to each and every listener regardless of his or her social standing. In
other words, an emancipating process of de-industrialisation and aestheticization of the musical
arts is happening beyond the culture industry. The critical act of listening or dancing to minimal
techno is then an aesthetic experience that does not alienate individual subjects or reduce them to
the ‘dishonest manoeuvre’ of late capitalism. Instead, such an ethics creates an authentic dance or
techno culture. In the words of Marcuse, these are sounds ‘of gratification that would dissolve the
society which represses it’.32
Integrating Jameson’s critique of the culture industry with the extended Greimasian semiotic
square, a socio-musical semiotic square can be constructed critically (Figure 3). While the artistic
values of traditional and folk music negates the artificial appeal of disco beats and television
jingles, Minimal techno and other similar musics serve a contrasting social function to the noises
of, say, machines, waves and birdsongs, all of which would fall under what Adorno calls das
Amusische. Correspondingly, I contend that Minimal techno complements classical music as a
modern and critical form of dance music.
31
For more information on Deep Dish and Plastikman see http://www.myspace.com/deepdish and
http://plastikman.com/ (accessed October 1, 2012).
32
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1966), 60.
Figure 2. Greimas-Jamesonian extended semiotic square33
Consumers
Traditional, folk,
classical music
Rock, disco music,
advertising jingles
Use
value
Exchange
value
Minimal techno,
Radiohead, Björk
Noise, machines,
waves, birdsongs
Producers
VI
By way of conclusion, I wish to raise a few points of contention pertaining to my suggested
trajectory. Firstly, the a priori Kantian conditions of time and space, vis-à-vis the inherent structure
of the artwork, are dynamic receptive factors that would inform the arguments proposed above. On
the one hand, the musical morphology of popular music and electronic dance music are rather
different from that of art music. No standard, institutionalised analysis would be more accurate
than a combination of structural and ethnographic methodologies, such as those conducted by Mark
33
Jameson, Late Marxism, 151 and 154.
J. Butler and Alejandro L. Madrid.34 On the other hand, it is precisely the fact that jazz has today
transfigured into a form that barely resembles that of jazz during the fin-de-siècle is a good lesson
for critical theory to draw alongside the developments of the socio-cultural praxis.
As much as Jameson’s theories from the 1980s have deviated from Adorno’s theories from the
1940s, so will the theories of the twenty-first century eventually come to restrict future
understandings of the past vis-à-vis the present. An apparent reason is that, whether the ‘formalprocedural straitjacket’ used at any one time for analysing music could be tightened or loosened, it
is still very much dependent on the development (or regression) of our historical consciousness.35
This mysterious psychic entity naturally relates sociologically either to a personal amnesia or
cultural censorship. Thereby, even though both Jameson and I myself have used Adorno’s
arguments in grounding our respective theses, these critical theories should continue to be renewed
or even be disregarded on account of its anachronistic irrelevance.
However, any critique of Adorno could still correlate to the criteria set up by himself, such as his
own agenda or his limited geographical and historical influences. The immanent act of
objectification has already resisted further semantic analysis because every theory is an a priori
negation of the negation. For a classically trained musicologist like myself to analyse a work of
minimal techno via the ancient logic of a coherent universal and its substantial particulars is always
already an emphasis on the notion of an otherness. This indicates one of the well-known limits of
critical analysis that affects both popular musicology and ethnomusicology. In order to escape this
discursive thinking by engaging with the subjective is then to erect a Deleuzean flux between the
functions of objectivity and subjectivity.36 For Jameson,
it would not be the first time that the ideological vested interests of a group also… expressed
the objective tendencies of the social system itself. At any rate, Adorno’s ‘objectification’
of the aesthetic seems to me to satisfy other contemporary demands raised not merely by
the contradictions of the aesthetic in our time, but also… by the dilemmas of contemporary
historical consciousness.37
The deception of the culture industry will persist and it is for theorists to salvage the arts from its
further reification. Yet, it will be one that continues to be inflicted with a persistent dialectic.
34
Mark Butler, Unlocking the Groove: Rhythm, Meter, and Musical Design in Electronic Dance Music (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2006) and Alejandro L. Madrid, Nor-tec Rifa!: Electronic Dance Music from Tijuana to the
World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
35
Leppert, ‘Commentary,’ 337.
36
See also Adorno’s idea on the reversal of objectivity and subjectivity in Jameson, Late Marxism, 125.
37
Jameson, Late Marxism, 126.
Notwithstanding these perplex philosophical problems and the unstoppable expansion of the
culture industry, there will definitely be some smaller venues around the world today where real
dance connoisseurs can keep the critical aesthetic of minimal techno alive.
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Websites
Deep Dish. http://www.myspace.com/deepdish (accessed 1 October 2012).
Richie Hawtin presents Plastikman. http://plastikman.com (accessed 1 October 2012).