Just as a piece of music compresses time, and a picture folds space in upon itself, so
the possibility becomes concrete that things could also be different than they are.
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adorno, time, and musical time 245
association with Walter Benjamin in the 1920s and 1930s, and to an extent from
the pervasive influence of the ideas of Henri Bergson in the early twentieth
century, are taken up in relation to the interpretation of Alban Bergs musicand
in particular of his opera Wozzeckin Smiths article. As well as responding to
aspects of the case made by Smith through addressing some of the important
issues he raises, I want to introduce some speculations of my own that have been
sparked from reading his article and also to pursue some alternative readings of
Adornos critical reception of Bergson.
2
One big question is strongly implied, although not addressed directly, in Smiths
special internal organ that enables us to sense time directly as such, and can only
experience time passing through our relationship to other things.8 Music, you
might say, is one of those other things that enables us to experience time, not
simply as time passing or as measured time, but in a particularly intense, focused,
and directed way that also seems to shape our subjectivity and, importantly, to give
form to the apparent continuity of our experience. On another level, howeverthat
of musical time, and the relation of the specific musical work or event to the experi-
ence of musical time (as opposed to the experience of nonmusical time, or
empirical time, as Adorno calls it)the conventions and expectations of musical
time are challenged. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno emphasizes that it remains unde-
niable that music is a temporal art, and that musical time and the time of real
experience (that is, empirical time), even though they are different in all other
3
So, to turn to Adornos interpretation of temporality in Berg: as Smith shows,
Adorno recognized the experience of stasis in Bergs music as one that is itself
expressive of a distinctive worldview, something that manifests itself in the physi-
ognomy of his music as a process of what Adorno elsewhere calls self-negation
and permanent reabsorption ( permanente Selbstzurcknahme).11 Indeed, Adorno
identifies the paradox of Bergs music in a most perceptive way when he points
out that
Bergs music is not at all a Something [ein Etwas] which forms itself, so to speak,
out of a Nothingness [ein Nichts] of the smallest possible, undifferentiated compo-
nent elements. It only seems like this at first glance. In reality it accomplishes
within itself a process of permanent dissolution [ permanente Auflsung], rather than
achieving a synthesis. . . . Its Becoming . . . is its own negation [ihre eigene
Negation].12
One of the remarkable features of Bergs music is its constant flow through time,
created to a large degree by its process of constant transition, so that when Adorno
calls the composer the master of the smallest transition (der Meister des kleinsten
bergangs) with reference to Wagners comment that music is the art of transi-
tion, it is to emphasize precisely this sense of Bergsonian continuity, with its
implications of permanent development toward a telos, largely evading the
adorno, time, and musical time 247
4
Smith recognizes that there is what could be called an antidialectical problem in
Bergson, and he draws attention to it by referring to Max Horkheimers Bergson
critique, which he argues quite plausibly had an influence on Adornos own recep-
tion of Bergson. However, it also seems to me that, in the process of applying
Bergson to the further enhancement of Adornos Berg interpretation, there are
moments when Smith could be accused of theologizing both Berg and Adorno
along Bergsonian lines, and of leaving the dialectical acuity of Adornos critical
approach to one side at certain points in what is otherwise a very thought-provoking
article. The emphasis on the utopian and idealist aspects of Adorno, and the strong
links made between Bergsons notions of continuity, immediacy, and spontaneity
as Erfahrung, as a kind of experience that is also able to reflect on itself and to bring
past and immediate present into conjunction, together with anticipation. He
opposes this, as does Benjamin, to experience as Erlebnis, which is bound to the
immediacy of the instant as lived experience. It is the latter, as pure immediacy,
lived experience, that Adorno associates with Bergson and which is the object of
his critique of philosophers such as Bergson and Edmund Husserl.16
On the second occasion, in the section Riddle Character, Truth Content,
Metaphysics, concerning truth as illusion, Adorno writes:
Adorno thus reveals the dialectical character of how he sees the relation between art
and empirical realitythe utopian promises of art are redemptive only in relation
to a potential utopian future, one that is, however, not actually present in empirical
reality as it is but only foreshadowed as an aspect of the illusory character of art.
On the third occasion, to be found in a fragment in the appendixes to Rolf
Tiedemanns edition of Aesthetic Theory, Theories on the Origin of ArtAn
Excursus, Adorno writes concerning the philosopher of art Benedetto Croce: His
idealism and the Bergsonian streak in his aesthetics combine to make it impossible
for him to see the constitutive relation that art has to what lies beyond spontaneous
subjectivity.18 I have argued elsewhere that the polarization of continuity and dis-
continuity is a problem fundamental to the philosophy of duration, because
Bergson appears to insist that the flux of continuity has to be free of discontinuity
and (because it is conceived as being characterized by pure immediacy, intuition,
and spontaneity) that it is not in need of rationality and reflection.19 In Negative
Dialectics Adorno criticizes Bergsons philosophy for the irrational immediacy of
the concept of dure: Intuitions succeed only desultorily, however. Every cognition
including Bergsons own needs the rationality he scorns, and needs it precisely at
the moment of concretion. Absolutized duration, pure becoming, the pure act
these would recoil into the same timelessness which Bergson chides in metaphy-
sics since Plato and Aristotle.20
Adorno argues that, in absolutizing his concept of dure as the uninterrupted
flow of a perpetual becoming (devenir), Bergson renders it indistinguishable from
an uncritical timelessness, a metaphysical Absolute. This raises an interesting
question with regard to Smiths interpretation of Adornos reception of Bergson.
With the use he makes of Adornos grass angels image (from one of the frag-
ments in the posthumously published Beethoven book) in relation to Bergsons
account of dure, does Smith risk imputing a metaphysics and even a theology to
250 max paddison
Adornos position that it does not really possess? Smith writes that if Bergson sees
in dure the refutation of a world that dies and is reborn at every instant, then
Adornos metaphysics of musical time entails precisely thisa teeming, disjunct,
and discontinuous multiplicity of constant creation and constant destruction.21 I
can understand why he has arrived at such a conclusion, but the question that
arises for me is: does Smiths interpretation stop just one stage short in its pursuit
of Adornos dialectical convolutions, and could the process not be pushed a bit
further? I have argued here that an essential point about Adornos dual conception
of musical time and empirical time is that the relationship between the two is crit-
ical, in the dialectical sense that musical time constitutes a critique of empirical
time. This critique may change in character, depending on whether it is the music
of Berg, Wagner, Stravinsky, or Debussy that is being discussed, but I argue that
5
It is striking that Adorno, in his insistence that the modernist work of art has no
choice but to manifest discontinuity through the fractured character of its form, also
recognizes that discontinuity of this kind still exists critically within the continuity
of musical time, while simultaneously invoking the world outside musical
time. Adorno makes his distinction between musical time (musikalische Zeit) and
empirical time (empirische Zeit) in terms that recall Bergsons temps dure and temps
espace. I have made a case elsewhere for this in the context of Adorno along the fol-
lowing lines:
For Adorno, the experience of musical time suggests that the experience of the
world could be other than it actually is, and this constitutes for him the utopian
moment of art and the aesthetic experience.24 These are the terms of reference
adorno, time, and musical time 251
that Smith takes on to explore the nuances of Adornos interpretation of Berg, and
in particular of Wozzeck. In doing so he succeeds impressively in demonstrating
something that Adorno had always claimed should be the case: that the relation of
music to formal musical time is defined not abstractly, but in the context of a con-
crete musical event.25 My (unquestionably abstract) critique of his article does not,
of course, detract from this achievement but seeks rather to offer an alternative
reading of its Bergsonian idealism.
notes
Max Paddison is Professor of Music Aesthetics belongs to things absolutely, as their condition or
at the University of Durham. He has published property, independently of any reference to the form
extensively on Adorno, aesthetics, and critical of our sensible intuition. Immanuel Kant, Critique
17. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 192; sthetische 21. See Stephen Decatur Smith, Even Money
Theorie, 200. Decays: Transience and Hope in Adorno, Benjamin,
18. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 448; sthetische and Wozzeck, Opera Quarterly 29 (2013): 21243.
Theorie, 481. 22. Gaston Bachelard, The Dialectic of Duration,
19. See Paddison, Performance, Reification, and trans. Mary McAllester Jones (Manchester:
Score. Clinamen, 2000), 44.
20. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 23. Paddison, Performance, Reification, and
trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge & Kegan Score, 176.
Paul, 1973), 89. Original German text: Theodor 24. Ibid., 177.
W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Gesammelte 25. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 34; sthetische
Schriften, vol. 6, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Theorie, 42.
Suhrkamp, 1970), 20.