GEORGE EDWARDS
703
In retrospect it becomes clear that Adorno, who presumably would
have hated postmodern music as he hated jazz and all popular music, ac–
counted for Schoenberg in essentially postmodern terms: "These works
[the Fourth Quartet and the Violin Concerto] are magnificent in their
failure . It is not the composer who fails in the work; history, rather, de–
nies the work in itself." "Music has critically invalidated the idea of the
polished work." "In no way does [Schoenberg's music] present an or–
ganic totality." Adorno explicitly sees Schoenberg's work as protest:
"This art alone designs a picture of total repression, but, by no means,
the ideology thereo( By presenting the unreconciled picture of reality, it
becomes incommensurable with this reality." Now I have little use for
much of what Adorno says about Schoenberg, and I doubt that
Adorno}s account of Schoenberg can rehabilitate him as a
postmodernist. But for leftists, one of the two essential strands of
postmodernism is Adorno's combination of the unfinished work and of
protest that cannot be absorbed by the culture industry. The other
utopian strand of postmodernism, associated with Ernst Bloch, should be
not confused with the negative utopia of Adorno:
The hermetic work of art belongs to the bourgeois, the mechanical
work of art belongs to fascism, and the fragmentary work of
art,
in its
state of complete negativity, belongs to utopia.
By 'hermetic' Adorno means 'autonomous,' not 'rebarbative': this
is the absolute music of traditional German aesthetics. Mechanical music
would include Stravinsky and jazz, while Adorno's 'utopia' is merely
another formulation of Schoenberg's 'fragmentary' protest. Bloch's
utopian residue, on the contrary, envisions music which, in addition to
representing the ideology of its own time, provides an image of a future
utopian society. Like Adorno's negative utopia (implicit in the refusal to
accept current reality), Bloch's positive vision of utopia can be explicitly
linked to Schoenberg. Here is Bloch on Schoenberg's atonality:
What this engenders is a kind of unending harmony which no longer
needs to communicate the country of origin and destination every
time, and which has even less need to shrink from journeys of
discovery in the broad spaces of the tonal vacuum.
Even the term postmodernism reveals its connections with utopia,
with the communist community after the melting away of the dictator–
ship of the proletariat, and with the 'end of history.' Like modernism,
postmodernism attempts to use a view of history to compel assent.
