Joseph Weiss, "The Dialectics of Music: Adorno, Benjamin, and Deleuze"

Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectics of Enlightenment (1947) and the former's Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music and Philosophy of New Music (1949).Adorno's thinking-in particular, his critique of humanity's domination of, and alienation from, nature in capitalist modernity, leading to the seemingly irreconcilable split between subject and object, nature and history-by and large lays the premise for the book's dialectical approach to explicating the tensions between social, historical, and anthropological forces underpinning the material and formal content of music.The Adornoian perspective is placed in dialogue with those of Benjamin and Deleuze, two philosophers for whom art (and music) occupy a rather important position in their philosophical inquiry.As a constellation of interrelated fragments, Weiss's book seeks to probe the tensions and contradictions underlying the ontological existence of music in the modern world: if music, la Marx, does not simply function as an anesthetic distraction for the working class, keeping the repressive regime of capitalist exploitation out of their consciousness; if music is not to be employed by the state apparatus to perpetuate certain ideologies that reify mass consciousness as a means of subjugating them to the despotic regime; if music, instead, has the power to recuperate and revivify what is alive in us-our ability to create and innovate, to think and reflect upon and beyond the unquestioned laws and status quo-how then should music uphold itself in our modern society such that it can engage with the natural or social reality and potentially occasion real transformations?What is the responsibility of music for humankind, especially for the modern subject?The reduction of this book into several main theses can hardly do justice to the plethora of insightful ideas throughout Weiss's elegant and poetic prose.I would briefly point out three respects in which this book stands out from its predecessors.First, by bringing the three philosophers into a shared intellectual terrain, Weiss allows their divergent philosophical ideas to engage in dialogue with one another-sometimes one idea may complement and enrich another, while at other times they may confront each other in the form of contradiction-and precisely in the latter case that, as Weiss suggests, '[t]he irreconcilability between these thinkers is itself a moment in the movement of negative dialectics' (x).Secondly, this book explores a repertoire beyond those discussed in the original writings of Adorno, Benjamin, and Deleuze, ranging from traditional classical works such as Brahms and Wagner, the blues and jazz of Charlie Patton, Elizabeth Cotton, and Deford Bailey, to contemporary works composed by Luigi Russolo and Michael Gordon, extending the purview of musical investigations into further territories of contemporary music-making.Lastly, the book picks up on Benjamin's essay on technology and interrogates the roles technological advancement plays in music creation.Inasmuch as both Adorno and Deleuze did not expound explicitly (or positively) on the issue of technology, this book attempts to elaborate on their philosophical commentary on art with a consideration of the revolutionary force afforded by technology: on the negative side, technology inadvertently turns living-labor into dead-labor, and human subjects into objects; yet it

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