Nelson Goodman and Theodor Adorno on the relationship between authenticity and aesthetic merit.
In “The Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” Adorno offers a critique of modern music and of the musicality of modern man. It is debatable whether Adorno is entirely sincere in his sweeping condemnations as the polemical force of his rhetoric can obscure his message. For the purposes of this essay, I will engage seriously with Adorno’s criticisms as if they are meant in earnest. To my mind, the specificity of his targets and the stringent application of Marxist and Lukacsian ideas suggest that Adorno is offering more than a caricature of an arch-conservative stance.
Though Adorno rarely, if ever, speaks in terms of forgeries and fakes, his rhetoric implies a discourse of authenticity that will allow us to link his essay to Goodman’s. In fact, we can read Goodman on fakes and forgeries as a response to Adorno’s discussion about the pernicious effects of modern musical practices on the ontological status of musical works. Goodman would find Adorno’s view of arrangements as instances of musical fraud aesthetically unsatisfactory. We can view his chapter on Art and Authenticity as his attempt to arrive at a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between originals and copies.
There are two parts to Adorno’s essay. In the first, he addresses the adverse changes is music and musical performance in modern times. In the sequel, he addresses the reception of such music in a world where the arrested development of the human ear prevents sophisticated listening. Adorno addresses such issues as the shrinking repertoire of music that is found on concert programs and the fetishism attached to particular voices and instruments, the tyranny of the Maestro and the fetishization of concert tickets. All these lead to a “mistaken view of art” that turns the audience into consumers who react, the same way to “Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony or to a bikini” if at all (p. 278).
One can read a discourse of authenticity into a great deal of what Adorno writes about mass music and how it is received, but there are a few points where comparison with Goodman seems especially fruitful. These include Adorno’s discussion of musical arrangements and the barbarism of perfection; additionally, Adorno’s discourse of authenticity implies an ideal listener who could detect the authenticity or fraud of any performance.
Arrangements, Adorno writes, have pretensions to authenticity and can confuse the public in its approbation of art. The “vulgarization” of music spread by popular arrangements has “colonized large areas of music” (p. 281). Arrangements create a false totality and promote the reification of a musical work by taking “the reified bits and pieces out of their context and sets them up as a potpourri. It destroys the multilevel unity of the whole work and brings forward only isolated passages” (p. 281). Adorno’s analysis shows that he is unwilling to accept popular arrangements as works in their own rights: merely as bastardized musical commodities. He links the popularity of arrangements to the popular demand that musical works be appropriatable. This, however, is an insistence runs contrary to the music’s nature for, “A Beethoven symphony as a whole, spontaneously experienced, can never be appropriated” (p. 281).
Most strikingly – and puzzlingly – Adorno suggests that the vulgarization of music can actually affect its ontology. He asserts that “the works which are the basis of the fetishization and become cultural goods experience constitutional changes as a result.” This is a move that Goodman would resist entirely, since he separates the theory from the practice of art. Adorno discusses these changes in heavily-valenced language: “They become vulgarized. Irrelevant consumption destroys them.” The false totality that is created by over-exposure stands in for the true “organization of the whole” that the listener fails to grasp. In this way, the internal structure of the musical work is threatened by reification. The incorrect reception and appropriation of art can, therefore, be harmful to the artwork itself. This point helps explain Adorno’s insistence on authenticity as a marker of aesthetic merit (p. 281).
At the other end of the spectrum is the ideal performance whose pretenses to authenticity contribute to music’s reification. Adorno analyzes the “iron disciple” of ideal performances. He compares this “new fetish” to a perfectly-oiled apparatus that produces mechanized accounts of musical works that are devoid of meaningful content. “Perfect, immaculate performance in the latest style preserves the work at the price of its definitive reification.” He sums up his analysis as follows: “It presents it as already complete from the very first note” (p. 284). Here, the exaggerated claim to authenticity affects the aesthetic value of the performance. The barbarism of perfection with its exaggerated claim to authenticity is inimical to the aesthetic value of the musical work.
The stance and tone that Adorno adopts throughout the piece often implies an ideal listener (the author, perhaps) who is able to appreciate the music stripped of its fetish-character caused by reification. One could level an elitist charge against Adorno for holding that the “capacity for conscious perception of music” was “from time immemorial confined to a narrow group” (p. 286). This notion implies that there are “authentic” and “inauthentic” modes of listening. Adorno perpetuates a view where the authenticity of art is bound up with the availability of qualified critics that resist the regressive listening that affects the collective ear of society.
While Adorno allows a glimmer of hope for the future (with Schoenberg, Webern and the Marx Brothers), his general tone is one of pessimism. He writes that “as a result of the displacement of feelings into exchange value, no demands are really advanced in music anymore” (p. 290). This type of point is very different from many earlier one. Instead of telling us what art is, he is telling us what art no longer can be. We’ve come to accept the barbarism of perfection and the vulgarity of arrangements so uncritically that all that we can accept are substitutes for genuine works of art. “Substitutes satisfy their purpose as well, because the demand to which they adjust themselves has itself already been substituted.” Here, Adorno links the false demands of capitalism to the false substitutes of mass music.
We find a very different view of the relation between authenticity and aesthetic merit in Goodman. Unlike Adorno, Goodman is concerned with theories of ontology rather than modes of reception. He resists the notion of an ideal listener and that a work of art’s reception can result in “constitutional change.” He is entirely opposed to Adorno’s notion of such change as brought about when art becomes a cultural good. Unlike Adorno, he thinks that modes of reception can never alter the ontological status of an artwork. He would also object to Adorno’s claim that music has become “vulgarized” through arrangement and the barbarism of perfection.
While much of Goodman’s discussion of Art and Authenticity is devoted to painting, Goodman asks what it might mean to produce a forgery in music. Goodman answer constitutes a discussion of authenticity, aesthetic merit and purity of performance that hearkens back to Adorno’s essay. Goodman’s discussion about fakes and forgeries vis-à-vis painting shows the difficulty of basing aesthetic judgments on arguments about authenticity. For Goodman, one need not imply the other: it is perfectly reasonable for a fake or copy to have a greater aesthetic impact than the original on which it is based. This is very much in contrast to Adorno, for whom authenticity is directly linked to aesthetic merit.
Goodman holds that aesthetic experience depends on more than what merely meets the eye. A work of art carries with it the entire history of its conception and production, including non-visual qualities that can make an aesthetic difference in how we come to appreciate or understand a given work of art. Goodman’s insistence on taking into account a work’s history and non-visual qualities, leads him to conclude that “a forgery of a work of art is an object falsely purporting to have the history of production requisite for the (or an) original of the work” (p. 122). The case is somewhat different when we turn to music, which Goodman says cannot be faked in quite the same way as painting.
Goodman distinguishes between autographic and allographic art. Autographic art is art were the difference between an original and a forgery is significant, such as in painting. However, in allographic art, such as music, the difference between an original and a forgery is not intrinsically significant (p.113). Goodman tries to get at a more nuanced and sophisticated account of the relationship between these two types of art. He suggests that all art started out as autographic and certain genres became allographic by developing a language or notational system in order to transcend the limits of the individual and of time (p. 120). While it makes little sense to speak of a forgery of a Beethoven symphony, Goodman allows that a performance of Beethoven’s fifth can be said to be inauthentic is if contains a false note or is performed by a fraudulent musician or a fraudulent instrument.
Both Goodman and Adorno use the Stradivarius as illustrative examples of their theory. In discussing the fetish attached to voices, tickets and instruments, Adorno writes about how an audience “goes into raptures at the well-announced sound of a Stradivarius or Amati” (p. 277). For Adorno, the “cult of the master violins” illustrates how the fetish character of musical performance makes “conscious perception of music” impossible.
Goodman is up to something very different when he brings in his own Stradivarius example to illustrate what a forgery of a musical performance might look like. The hypothetical he presents is of a performer claims falsely to be playing a Stradivarius. Such a performance would count as a forgery, “not of the musical composition, but of a given performance or class of performances” (p. 118). But on the next page, Goodman reminds us “not to confuse genuineness with aesthetic merit. That the distinction between original and forgery is aesthetically important does not mean, as we have seen, that the original is superior to the forgery” (p. 119). In other words, to base aesthetic judgment solely on a work’s authenticity would be as wrong for Goodman, as going into raptures at the well-announced sound of the Stradivarius would be for Adorno.
Goodman provocatively asks about the status of a musical performance that contains one wrong note. Can this be said to be a genuine or authentic instantiation of the composer’s idea, and hence, a genuine performance? Though Goodman admits that conventionally we would affirm this suspicion, the theory complicates matters. Goodman uses the example to pose an aesthetic conundrum and show how “ordinary usage gets us quickly into trouble” (p. 186). Since a performance of a musical work is an instantiation of the composer’s musical idea made intelligible through a series of notational markings on a score, a performance with one wrong note could not, theoretically speaking, be considered an authentic instance of that work. Hence, “Beethoven’s Fifth” would become “Beethoven’s Fifth plus an extra G flat.” Goodman maintains this position so that Beethoven’s Fifth cannot morph into Three Blind Mice via a success of tiny alterations, à la Sorites’ Paradox (p. 186).
Undercutting – or at least complicating - the possibility of authenticity in musical performance is the example of musical conventions such as cadenzas and figured bass. In these instances, nominal musical notation serves as a basic guideline for musical performance (p. 184). Goodman throws this our way in order to remind us of even the difficulty of making judgments regarding authenticity in the first place, even before we begin to judge a music work for its aesthetic merit. Thus, he provides a compelling justification for divorcing questions of genuineness from questions of value.
In fact, Goodman allows that a technically incorrect performance of a musical work could in fact be superior to a technically perfect one. “An incorrect performance, though therefore not strictly an instance of a given quartet at all, may nevertheless – either because the changes improve what the composer wrote or because of sensitive interpretation – be better than a correct performance” (p. 120). So thorough is the line that Goodman draws between authenticity and aesthetic merit that he allows an ontologically non-genuine instantiation of a musical work to be the aesthetically superior one.
What accounts for the fact that these two thinkers are at opposite ends of the interpretive spectrum is the vastly different natures of their projects. While Goodman offers up ontology of art in semantic terms that will be universally binding, Adorno has a very definite target: music made vulgar by commodity fetishism and by reification. And though Adorno never speaks in terms of forgeries and fakes, his rhetoric abounds with concepts such as “purity” and “vulgarity,” which implies a latent discourse of authenticity.
Goodman’s analytic approach shows the problematic nature of value theory. His discussion of autographic versus allographic art can be helpful in trying to differentiate ontologically between various genres but is thoroughly impotent as far as making judgments is concerned. Adorno, on the other hand, provides us with a radical and perhaps overstated case for supposing that the value of art is bound up in the authenticity of the artistic product.
Whereas Adorno constantly asserts that the commoditized musical product is a debased aesthetic work, Goodman tirelessly advocates separating value judgments from questions of authenticity. Thus, when Adorno writes that “appearance is no longer valid as verification of essence” it is in a spirit of disenchantment (p. 285). Goodman agrees with Adorno that it is impossible to verify art’s essence via mere looking or listening: he just doesn’t think it’s a bad thing.
Bibliography:
Adorno, Theodor W. “The Fetish Character in Music and Regression of Listening” in Esthetic Theory and Cultural Criticism (pp. 270-299)
Goodman, Nelson Languages of Art (pp. 99-123, & 177- 192)
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