The following axioms were set down by Theodor Adorno for "A Social Critique of Radio Music" (Kenyon Review, Spring 1945). It's a summary of the first part of Marx's Capital: capitalist commodity production leads to class struggle. Adorno's music criticism was not designed to stoke reverence for past achievments ("the classics") but to show that without using Marx - commodity, profit, monopoly, class struggle - all talk of culture is void: "there is nothing learned or scholarly in serious music which cannot be developed by a keen understanding of even the most trivial musical events of everyday life" (p. 271). Sandor Ferenczi made the same point rather more graphically when he said that a child's interest in flatus later surfaces in a fondness for music; a point endorsed by James Joyce when he ended the music chapter of Ulysses with Bloom's "Pprrpffrrppfff". In analysing music today, Simon Rattle's haircut - a greying fleece of pubic toss amidst the sexless regimentation - is more pertinent than talk of notes. Such psychoanalytic facts will forever amuse Zappologists (and Evil Dick) whilst outraging those seeking to erect a culture of distinction on the swamps of their scurvy dilettanteism. "We can only listen to music from our own situations." (p. 325)
a.) We live in a society of commodities — that is, a society in which production of goods is taking place, not primarily to satisfy human wants and needs, but for profit. Human needs are satisfied only incidentally, as it were. This basic condition of production affects the form of the product as well as the human interrelationships.
b.) In our commodity society there exists a general trend towards a heavy concentration of capital which makes for a shrinking of the free market in favor of monopolized mass production of standardized goods; this holds particularly true of the communications industry.
c.) The more the difficulties of contemporary society increase as it seeks its own continuance, the stronger becomes the general tendency to maintain, by all means available, the existing conditions of power and property relations against the threats which they themselves breed. Whereas on the one hand standardization necessarily follows from the conditions of contemporary economy, it becomes, on the other hand, one of the means of preserving a commodity society at a stage in which, according to the level of the productive forces, it has already lost its justification.
d.) Since in our society the forces of production are highly developed, and, at the same time, the relations of production fetter those productive forces, it is full of antagonisms. These antagonisms are not limited to the economic sphere where they are universally recognized, but dominate also the cultural sphere where they are less easily recognized.
Theodor Adorno, "A Social Critique of Radio Music", Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2006), pp. 206-207.
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