Translating Adorno: Language, Music, and Performance

The Unwritable in Full Pursuit of the Unreadable:1 Adorno'sPhilosophie der neuen Musikin Translation

“…Where Benjamin (and, in following him, Adorno) becomes difficult to accept, at least from the perspective of a secular twenty‐first‐century reader, is in the metaphysical import he imputes (see Borio 2006, pp. 54 and 56, and Gillespie 1995, p. 60) to what one might call a perfect, pure, or truly universal language 22 . It seems telling that in both ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1968b, p. 84; 1996a, p. 257; and 1968a, p. 87) and ‘On Language as Such’ (1996b, p. 67, in connection with the Bible), Benjamin gives a place of privilege to the notion of revelation.…”

“…English‐language commentators on Adorno these days seem eager to emphasise the non‐propositional (and at times performative) character of his writings (see especially Gillespie 1995, pp. 55, 62 and 63).…”

“…Alongside Adorno's relentless attempt to evade fixed metaphysical positions, which so readily become the basis for the self‐deceptions of ideology (well described in Paddison 1993, pp. 10–14, especially 13–14), it is this sort of critical stance towards propositional writing that fuels what Gillespie calls ‘the willed lack of development’ in Adorno's texts (1995, p. 63). For musical scholars steeped in Adorno's unwavering commitment to the logic of musical development, first as a bearer of utopian hope (Beethoven's middle period), then as a ghostly negative image of hope lost (Schoenberg's ideal of ‘developing variation’), that ‘willed lack’ can be painful to contemplate.…”

“…Paddison conflates this idea with an image of fragments ‘each equidistant from an unstated centre’, a spatial image that Adorno himself suggested repeatedly as a norm for new music, and which others have applied to a variety of Adorno's own writings, most notably, perhaps, his Aesthetic Theory 35 . Another such notion is ‘force‐field’ ( Kraftfeld ); 36 still another is ‘aconceptual synthesis’, an image with Kantian overtones through which Adorno explicitly links language with music (Adorno 1992b, p. 130; Adorno 1974b, p. 471; Gillespie 1995, pp. 60 and 62; and n. 92 below).…”

“…On a more abstract level, he thought of paratactical forms as a ‘musiclike ... transformation of language into a series whose elements are conjoined otherwise than in a proposition [ Urteil ]’ 40 . He explicitly associated parataxis with a condition of ‘aconceptual synthesis’ typical of ‘great music’, and, more generally, with a mimetic‐expressive realm that constituted an ‘opposite pole’ ( Gegenpol ) to language (see 1992b, p. 130, and 1974b, p. 471; see also Gillespie 1995, p. 60). And he praised the concept as a kind of liberating ‘antiprinciple’ ( Antiprinzip ) for the organisation of language (1992b, p. 140, and 1974b, p. 481; and Gillespie 1995, p. 60), which is ordinarily ‘chained to the form of proposition and statement [ Urteil und Satz ] and thus to the synthetic form of the concept’ 41 .…”