Adorno and Jameson on the Dance Floor: Minimal Techno against the Charge of

the Culture Industry

Jun Zubillaga-Pow1

‘Something is provided for everyone so that no one can escape…’

- Adorno and Horkheimer2

I
Situated in the neoliberal economy of twenty first everyday century culture, musical
reception in the West today can be considered as a continual, if not persistent
engagement with the Hegelian logic of universal-and-particular dialectics. The
musical encounter is at the same time particular to the location, the sounds or the
person, but also universal in the listening experience and capitalist intervention. With
the acceleration of state-initiated laissez faire economy, the correlation between the
production and reception of music becomes an endless and vicious cycle in a society
where the demand for higher profit margins induces producers to carry out aggressive
market tactics with no concerns for either ethical responsibility or the preservation of
aesthetic quality. Once such self-regulating mechanisms get set in place, it becomes
difficult to unravel the processes that created the impeding discriminations, or to
transform these processes into modes of production that can be harnessed for personal
satisfaction. To a certain extent, as long as capitalism continues to reign over our
everyday life, the spectre of what Adorno has termed negative dialectics will continue
to haunt society, of which any engagement with music is merely one of its many
components.

The first instance then would be for critical theory to inform society that, while the
harvests of capitalist productions are being reaped, the repercussions that proved to be
detrimental to the larger social superstructure are being felt simultaneously. The logic

1
I would like to thank the anonymous readers for providing constructive feedback on this paper. I
would also like to express gratitude to Luciano Zubillaga for his support during the research and
writing-up stages.
2
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkeimer, ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,’ in
Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2002), 97.

1
of critical theory, whether led by an ethical decorum or not, will be used to examine
these errors in consumption practices and to propose a critical re-evaluation of any
‘baleful enchantments’ amidst these musical practices. Therein, the present and future
interests of musical societies will be predicated on whether the politically-charged
theories of the 1950s are able to stand the test of time. To cite but two examples,
while Andreas Huyssen has argued convincingly that the seed for Adorno’s take on
the early twentieth-century cultural industry has already been sowed in the situation
surrounding Wagner and music in the nineteenth-century, Frederic Jameson has
established the relevance of Adorno’s analyses to be practically if not contingently
applicable to the social changes of the 1980s.3 To interlock the logic of causality
between Adornian theory and contemporary practice may already be an anachronistic
move, but the drastic cultural changes vis-à-vis everyday life in the age of American
imperialism after the Cold War have re-instated and energised the invisible hand of
capitalism, neoliberal or otherwise. No wonder the conservative backlash against
Adorno and his associates from middle- and upper-class devotees of Jazz and other
popular music has hindered the development of leftist critical theory in the last
decade. Such phenomenon is akin to the fate of the eventual dilution of the Fluxus
movement in the 1970s. Being both anti-capitalist and anti-art, the Fluxus attitude was
perceived as gimmicky distortion of everyday life. Their urban youth niche being
located in a milieu tainted by the culture industry soon tapered in interest over the
banality of the art-form.

By the 1980s, artworks such as those by Beethoven and Beckett that Adorno
championed have already become reified by the fetishist consumption not via their
artistic ‘values’, but through the non-artistic ‘exchange value’. It becomes impossible
to recuperate the Benjaminian aura from these heteronymous functions. Perhaps the
only way, albeit one that is myopic, would be to engage the artwork with a conscious
effort of repressing the relative opportunity costs, or the alternatives forgone in place
of one’s experience of the artwork. In a similar vein as the ideology of l’art pour l’art,
one would have to listen to music for the sake of the music and not think of any extra-

3
Andreas Huyssen, ‘Adorno in Reverse: From Hollywood to Richard Wagner,’ New German Critique
29 (1983): 8-38, and Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno or the Persistence of the Dialectic
(London: Verso, 1990), 5.

2
musical preambles. Unfortunately the globalised state of capitalism today has very
much dislodged the agency of critical theory. For Jameson writing in 1990, the
Adornian concept of the reification of art is ‘itself [already] reified or at least easily
reifiable’ in our post-modern epoch.4 Perhaps one way of resurrecting Adorno’s
philosophy for the betterment of the present state of social globalisation might be to
situate it within a historical trajectory and draw inferences that could be appropriate
for the creative arts at the start of the twenty-first century.

With these critical objectives in mind, this paper seeks to ground a theory for which
the subgenre of minimal techno could be artistically valued with the contemporary
fillip of the culture industry in tandem. While it is important to minimise the temporal
and ideological distances between theory and practice, this reassessment of musical
aesthetics will not include the ethnographic and essentialist methodologies for at least
two reasons. Firstly, to intervene in any sector of the industry is itself an immediate
entrapment by commodity fetishism, and secondly, the reliance on a historical
foregrounding of concepts and objective perceptions remains consistent with a critical
methodology of reading artistic or cultural practices without positing oneself within
the situation and interacting with the subject. The lure of false consciousness
notwithstanding, this paper will delineate how minimal techno can unsettle
commonly-held perceptions by oscillating between the Adornian concepts of
‘artwork’ and ‘culture industry’ and the niche cultural perception of the musical genre
today.

II
The entertainment industry in 1940s United States was one of attraction and relief
from the great depression. When Adorno and Horkeimer were researchers at the
University of California, they confirmed the universal appeal of the cinema as
entertainment for the masses. Whether in Germany or the United States, the public
went into the cinema to experience life away from the war and suffering that were
happening in the rest of the world. Despite the deliberate use of propagandist tactics
in films such as Citizen Kane (1941) and Casablanca (1942), the audiences remained
beguiled by the happy endings that resolved every intense conflict, such as the

4
Jameson, Late Marxism, 3.

3
overtly-optimistic exit line from the latter film that seemed to obliterate the
seriousness of the penultimate narrative: “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a
beautiful friendship.”5

There was certainly none of the real and ugly truth that Adorno would prefer to be
made known to the audiences. There would be no unrequited love between Faust and
Gretchen or the social injustice between the bourgeois and the proletariat during the
years after the war. By alluding to Goethe’s aesthetics, Adorno insisted that
speaking out the negative, facing catastrophe and calling it by its name, has
something wholesome and helpful in itself which could never be achieved by
the pretence of a harmony borrowed from the surface phenomena and leaving
the essence untouched.6
For Adorno and Horkheimer, the films from the United States in the 1930s and 1940s
did not reflect the ‘essence’ or social truths of the prevailing economy. 7 The
proliferation of narratives that conveyed feel-good after-effects had created false
illusions of the political situation in the world as one of recuperation and optimism;
audiences in the United States have been ideologically shielded from the genocide and
terror on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. In a way, the films and popular music
as two main proponents of mass culture of the period had dishonestly censored the
real catastrophes from the people. This political tactic inevitably produced
‘standardised’ cultural objects that provided entertainment and imposed an objective
function into everyday life via the introduction of lame amusement, not unlike the
apolitical engagements of today’s television soap operas. Adorno and Horkheimer
argued that the film ‘denies its audience any dimension in which they might roam
freely in imagination… without losing the thread; thus it trains those exposed to it to
identify film directly with reality’.8 After being coerced into misguided notions that
cinema was merely banal entertainment or fabulous fairy tales, the audiences of the
1940s were unaware of their own false consciousness and went about their everyday
life partially as reality and partially as imaginary.

5
It is otherwise not surprising that this line, which is spoken by businessman Rick to corrupt police
captain Louis, undermines the level of political consciousness in terms of class hierarchy, revealing one
instance of social thought stemming from a Marxist position.
6
Theodor Adorno, ‘What National Socialism has done to the Arts,’ in Essays on Music, ed. Richard
Leppert (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 381.
7
The same, however, cannot be said about the literature by their compatriots such as Ernest
Hemingway and John Steinbeck.
8
Adorno and Horkheimer, ‘The Culture Industry,’ 100.

4
If Adorno and Horkheimer had deemed that ‘for the consumer there is nothing left to
classify, since the classification has already been pre-empted by the schematism of
production’, then all mass culture under capitalism would become identical to one
another.9 Filmmaking and radio broadcasting were then fixed industries that
propagated the further standardisation of the genres. Films, whether made in 1932 or
1956, bore no aesthetic differences other than the marked presence of technological
advancement. This methodology of film production and distribution became what
Adorno and Horkheimer would describe as the ‘culture industry’, where demand and
supply of films by society on the whole is determined not by the quest for artistic
excellence but by the bait of higher profit margins. Both film and popular music
therefore had to relinquish their immanent qualities to affect viewers and listeners as
commodified artworks. That is, the form of productions had ultimately triumphed
over the production of artistic contents.

On a contingent level, not only did Adorno disapprove of classifying music in

general, he was also critical of the mass reception of popular styles such as jazz and
swing. By the early twentieth-century, Marxism was sufficiently influential in
providing Adorno the instrumental reason to censure the naivety of people’s
responses to jazz in the 1930s. Via a critique of jazz dancers, Adorno identified the
‘non-experts’, who ‘join the ranks’ of the ‘experts’, as ‘jitterbugs’ with a conscious
will to conform to a state of ‘self-caricature’:
The jitterbug looks as if he would grimace at himself, at his own enthusiasm
and at his own enjoyment which he denounces even while pretending to enjoy
himself… it is quite unlikely that the ceaseless repetition of the same effects
would allow for genuine merriment.10

By the will of the ego, Adorno claimed that ‘jitterbugs’ were able to psychologically
transmute themselves in and out of a state of mass hysteria. For Adorno, the only
prescription for these ‘jitterbugs’ was one of ‘controlled pleasure’. That is, what
Adorno had considered as ‘genuine’ responses to dance music was to dance to the
spell of music by reacting to its rhythmic stimuli imbued with a self-conscious will.
To enjoy dance music, one not only had to give up part of one’s hedonistic interests,

9
Adorno and Horkheimer, ‘The Culture Industry,’ 98.
10
Theodor Adorno, ‘On Popular Music,’ in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, (Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2002), 467.

5
but also to overcome a psychological process of internalisation, whereby the energy
lost in fidgeting is transformed into a critical knowledge of the dance steps and
musical form. In short, dance must be an adherence to the music in its quintessential
state. The jazz dancer should neither be focusing on the pleasure obtained from
wriggling nor be concerned with, say, the time and money spent on dancing lessons.
Instead, he or she should occupy himself or herself with the music and the body
movements that are core to the art of jazz dancing. In other words, it is dancing for the
sake of dancing and not dancing for personal pleasure or a relief from a hard day’s
work.

Further, Adorno associated the act of dancing to jazz with negative social and sexual
nuances. He located jazz as a derivative between the bourgeois salon music and the
military march, whereby the human gait was deregulated to an arbitrary sequence of
dance steps.11 He argued that dance should not exert a gestural control over the gait,
but be an ‘escape’ from everyday life. Dance, for Adorno, should be an art form that
is non-mimetic of life. According to Adorno’s appraisals, the ‘jitterbugs’ had
constructed a prototypical gait for social day-to-day living with their irregular body
movements. They had converted their ordinary way of life into a dance, and the dance
into a nihilistic way of life with a contingency between dance and social life that was
fraught with meaninglessness. Like that of the Fluxus movement mentioned earlier,
the essences of art and life conflated into a prosaic state of reified monotony, or in
Adorno’s words, ‘like the alienation of art and society’.12 Jazz, both the dance and the
music, became so bland that ‘we are hardly conscious of it anymore,’ and when the
latter is used as film music, it matches congruently with the mechanical rhythms of
city life, as if in a disenchanted diegesis between film and life .13 A recent and vivid
example belonged to the Disney adaptation of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in
Fantasia 2000 with the storyline set in the Great Depression of 1930s New York.

11
Here, Adorno was referring to the German jazz music that he had been exposed to which differs
greatly from the Black American jazz he first heard in a nightclub in Soho, London in 1937. See
Richard Leppert, ‘Commentary,’ in Essays on Music (Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2002), 357ff. for an exposition of the debates on Adorno and Jazz.
12
Adorno, Theodor. ‘Farewell to Jazz,’ in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2002), 499.
13
Theodor Adorno, ‘On Jazz,’ in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2002), 486.

6
Last but not least, Adorno interpreted the act of dancing to jazz as one with an erotic
nature. He went so far as to align the rhythmic impetus of jazz with that of sexual
intercourse, giving empirical evidences of ‘taxi girls [performing] dance steps which
occasionally [led] to male orgasm’.14 Adorno showed no reservation to relate this to
the capitalist superstructure, of which he deemed this libidinal dance culture to be one
that had disgusted the ascetic attitude of the petit bourgeois in the 1930s. Not only had
the bourgeois’ enjoyment of jazz underlined an order of social hierarchy, but the
erotic connotations of dancing to jazz had also offended the lower classes on ethical
grounds. In these instances, the false illusions of dancing or listening to jazz as a form
of entertainment in the 1930s had made a foolery out of the bourgeois themselves as
well as tricked the underclass into believing that learning to play or dance jazz was a
way of entertaining the rich and earning their keep. This is the exact analogy Jameson
has come to invoke from the Odyssey myth, which I will return to later in this paper.

III
For better or worse, dance and musical cultures in Europe and the United States have
remained fairly similar since the passing of Adorno. Sexual connotations and
expletives continue to strive in the culture industry, especially in the forms of music
and dance. One example of this would be the ‘heterosexualisation’ and eroticisation
of the tango across the world.15 It may seem as if the state of morality has declined or
there is an increase in the level of tolerance for such misdemeanours. However, the
real reason lies in the sustainability of the local economy or, as mentioned above, the
lure of higher profit margins especially in the years immediately after the Second
World War when the primary task of most country-states was rebuilding a global
economy. The fall in enthusiasm for jazz and swing has allowed other dance genres
such as funk and disco in the 1960s and 1970s to proliferate. In the 1980s, the
introduction of technology and new electronic means of production saw the
development of new subgenres of electronic dance music in the likes of Chicago
house and Detroit techno, both of which have become widespread throughout major
European cities.

14
Adorno, ‘Farewell to Jazz,’ 486..
15
Tango in its early stages is a dance for the working class men only; that is, a dance between men to
‘escape’ from the toil of working in the day. See Christine Denniston, The Meaning of Tango: The
Story of the Argentinian Dance (London: Portico Books, 2007).

7
In the 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century, the development of sonic and
web interfaces provided the resources for Minimal techno producers, such as Deep
Dish and Richie Hawtin, to widen their online listener-base. Likewise, architectural
and technological advancement also contributed to the construction of purpose-built
venues specifically for raving or clubbing. These phenomena could very well be the
first instances in the discourse of the culture industry that musical function has taken
precedence over the structure of productions. There then cannot be any accusations of
‘pseudo-individualisation’, or what Adorno has considered as the ‘synthetic means of
hiding standardisation’. The objectification of improvisation techniques (which is
meant to be free or subjective in the first place) or the presence of ‘hooks’, ‘dirty
tones’ or ‘false notes’ within popular music will immediately lose their aesthetic
utilities.16 Paraphrasing Adorno, Richard Leppert thinks that popular music is entirely
predictable or ‘catchy’ due to the ‘essence’ of
the hook, on which hangs the greatest opportunity for marketing success – a
turn of phrase, a particular riff, a specific chord change, etc., which
individualises the piece, advertises its “uniqueness”.17

Minimal techno as a form of new music is orchestrated neither with ‘unique riffs’ nor
in an endless chain of ‘catchy beats’ . In minimal techno, every phrase undergoes an
indefinite number of repetitions that coerces the listeners to either submerge
themselves in a pool of sounds or hang onto as many ‘hooks’ as their listening skills
allow them to. This phenomenon brings our argument back to the act of the human
will, that is the will to make a conscious decision and partake in the mass hysteria
akin to that of the ‘jitterbugs’. Techno dancers can learn a lesson from the false
ideologies of the ‘jitterbugs’ in the sense that dancing to techno is also a form of self-
discipline via ‘controlled pleasure’. The stimulus here is no more the syncopated
effects of jazz rhythms, but the electro-acoustic ambience of techno that dancers need
to engage with. One reason why the ‘jitterbug mentality’ continues to this day is a
result of traditional bourgeois trappings, which critical theorists are in support of
overcoming. According to Jameson, to attain a critical modernity is to ‘escape’

the cultivation of subjective refinements and of heightened ethical

discriminations enabled by social exclusion and class privilege, the

16
Adorno, ‘On Popular Music,’ 444-46.
17
Adorno, ‘On Popular Music,’ 338.

8
 fetishization of Experience [sic] as a kind of spiritual private property, [and]
the aesthetic individualism which becomes a privatised substitute for the life
and culture of groups in business society.18

That is, our appreciation of artworks, whether of music or dance, should not be
determined by our subjective perceptions based on hierarchical connotations founded
on social or class differences, but should be judged solely via the aesthetic merit or
use value of the artworks. Such an aesthetic experience should also not be restricted to
a selected few in the upper classes where the possibility of art appreciation becomes
limited and fetishized. For Jameson, this would otherwise lead to the liquidation of
artworks as a result of individualistic and monopolistic consumption. In other words,
the artwork cannot be evaluated based on an index of socio-economic factors. Instead,
a definitive correlation between the work of art in situ and an individual’s subjective
appreciation would be the most reflective of modern society. Paraphrasing Adorno,
Jameson considers that
the work of art “reflects” society and is historical to the degree that it refuses
the social, and represents the last refuge of individual subjectivity from the
historical forces that threaten to crush it.19

By way of theoretical application, I propose that dancers moving to the sounds of

techno (as well as those of other dance forms) be educated on the socio-historical
origins of the style and also mediate an aesthetic modernity that engages solely with
the music or the sounds. In this way, the dancers will already reciprocate what one of
the early producers of techno has deemed as most important: ‘I get inspired by a good
sound… It gives me a feeling for a rhythm or a melody.’20 Taking an approach that
adheres to Jameson’s proposition, techno dancers would better concentrate on the
surrounding acoustics so that, by evincing their personal ‘feelings’ for the rhythm and
melody, their engagement with the artwork can be subjectively maximised. This is
significant for a modern historicism when individual subjectivity become transformed
into a critical form of aesthetic individualism that, unlike the social entrainment of the
culture industry, results in a personal and authentic mode of musical appreciation.

18
Jameson, Late Marxism, 125.
19
Fredric Jameson, ‘T. W. Adorno; or, Historical Tropes,’ in Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century
Dialectical Theories of Literature (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1971), 34.
20
Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey
(London: Headline, 2000), 360.

9
IV
In contrast to the ideology advocated by Jameson, a capitalist politics of the culture
industry will severely affect the quality of music. In a Marxist vein, the superstructure
has been manipulated to focus on the exchange value neglecting the use value and
maiming the essence of the base elements. This is the crucial point in question, one
that determines the outcome of the Hegelian dialectic between form and content, or
the universal and the particular. Initially, the particular as a singular unit is set in
negation against the larger form of the universal. Later, a second negation of the first
negation occurs when the universal identifies with the particular. This process of
identification, like the Žižekian notion of the encounter with the Real, can result in
either a positive or negative dialectic, although for most of the time, it resembles the
psychoanalytic effects of shock and horror.21 This act of reconciliation via the
Hegelian movement of Aufhebung then becomes an impossible task because there can
be no precise identification of the particular with the universal, or vice versa. It will
only result in a ‘de-aestheticization’ of both the particular and the universal, not
unlike looking at oneself in the broken mirror, say, of the devil-troll from The Snow
Queen. This Hegelian dialectics can be represented with the aid of a Greimasian
semiotic square, with arrowed lines denoting contraries and plain lines denoting
contradictions (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Greimas-Hegelian semiotic square

Particular Universal

Non-universal Non-particular

Applying this concept to the reception of minimal techno, I direct the first negation to
be the initial moment when listeners experience the incongruity between the particular
riff and the entire soundtrack or the extended sequence of riff-patterns. Encountering

21
See the comparison made by Slavoj Žižek between Hegelian dialectics and Lacanian psychoanalysis
in his ‘Why Should a Dialectician Learn to Count to Four?’ in For They Know Not What They Do:
Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 2002), 193-97.

10
a new sound, the listeners have yet to be equipped with the appropriate analytical
skills in positioning the particular with or within the universal. They will eventually
arrive at a ‘breaking point’ when they become weary of the monotony and lose
concentration. This is similar to how Adorno has described jazz dancers as lapsing
into mass hysteria quasi the jitterbugs. Correspondingly, the second negation, I
suggest, is the moment immediately before the Hegelian Aufhebung or reconciliation
that is when the listeners realise the entire soundtrack is an exact replica of itself and
only that it is being divided into multiple identical portions. As forewarned by
Jameson from the quote above, this would be the instance when the particulars come
to pose a historical threat to the universal, almost like the fear aroused by a handful of
dust in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.22

For Adorno, ohne Angst leben or ‘to live without fear’ is thus ‘the deepest and most
fundamental promise of music itself’.23 Like the serial constructions of Schoenberg’s
music, the subcutaneous stratification of minimal techno imposes a threat, which is
tantamount to that of Schoenberg’s music, persistently ‘refuses the social’ and resists
being appropriated into the culture industry.24 However, reaching the omnipotent state
of Aufhebung requires a vast amount of determination, which, in this case, involves a
genuine physical and aural response to the music. Like the jazz dancer, the techno
dancer has to once again overcome the bourgeoisie culture of fetishization, putting
one’s knowledge of the dance form to critical use and devoting oneself entirely to the
aesthetic experience, albeit imbued with a kind of ‘controlled pleasure’. In any case,
the view that I have offered here is based on a critical analysis of the social structure
of the art-form. To situate minimal techno within the culture industry or at least with
respect to the culture industry, it will be most helpful to allude to Jameson’s analogy
of the Odysseus myth.

22
With reference to Adorno, Richard Leppert believes that for the artefacts of the culture industry, their
details will ‘never threaten the iron-clad model on which [the universal] is based’. See Leppert,
‘Commentary,’ 339. By this notion, it can be argued that minimal techno could not be associated with
the culture industry.
23
Jameson, ‘T. W. Adorno,’ 35.
24
A marked comparison can be made here with the music of Wagner, which has been appropriated by
the Nazis as emblematic due to its social heteronomy, as can most hip-hop music with its political, and
sometimes racist and sexist, agenda.

11
V
Superstructure

ART CULTURE INDUSTRY

[‘Odysseus’] [‘bad art’, ‘the victims’]

Ruling Oppressed
classes classes

PHILISTINES NON-ART
violence, production
ressentiment [‘the oarsmen’]

Base
Figure 2: Greimas-Jamesonian extended semiotic square25
To explain the culture industry, Jameson sets up his Greimasian semiotic square with
the opposition between Odysseus, who listens to the sirens without fear and
experiences Art, and the victims who fall into false ideology within the culture
industry (Figure 2). The latter denotes the pleasure-seeking bourgeois, who are
privileged enough to hear the music of the sirens but lack the critical tool of
comprehending the sounds, thus resulting in their ultimate disenchantment. They form
the bulk of the patrons of the culture industry, who only perceive a partial version of
the musical whole, like how ten blind men’s descriptions of an elephant becomes for
each an act of entity fetishization. The third category of people corresponds to the
non-hearing oarsmen who, according to Jameson,
learn something more profound about the ‘individual work of art’ to which
they themselves are deaf: namely, das Unwiederbringliche, what cannot be
called back from the past; the work’s ‘truth-content’.26

This situation, no doubt, only applies to music, given its intrinsic ephemeral quality.
Compared to other art-forms, music is one that cannot be held physically like a
literary text or painted canvas. If the ears of the oarsmen are plugged while the music

25
Jameson, Late Marxism, 151 and 154.
26
Jameson, Late Marxism, 130.

12
sounds, the music is denied them forever. They will then understand art’s ‘truth-
content’ as one that is ostentatious and belonging to a different class hierarchy.
Adorno thinks that
[i]t is impossible to explain art to those who have no feeling for it; they are not
able to bring an intellectual understanding of it into their living experience.
For them the reality principle is such an obsession that it places a taboo on
aesthetic comportment as a whole; incited by the cultural approbation of art,
alienness to art often changes into aggression, not the least of the causes of the
contemporary deaestheticization of art.27

In the end, the oarsmen are deprived of the ‘aesthetic comportment’ experienced by
Odysseus or the bourgeois. Unfortunately, there appears to be no way out of this
dialectic of the capitalist world. On the one hand, any post-mortem explanation would
be detrimental to the artwork in terms of its aura; on the other hand, any attempt to
enlighten them would also highlight the very polemic hierarchy of class differential
between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The onset of a negative dialectics is in posing the question
that if everyone were bound to the mast enjoying the pleasure derived from the music,
who is going to row the boat? Or to paraphrase an imperative set by Paul Attinello,
you have to move your feet if you want to dance.28

Referring back to Jameson’s extended square, the last category is the most difficult to
define because it is one that includes neither ‘bad art’, which really belongs in the
culture industry, nor ‘non-art’, which is without any artistic value.29 Unlike the
labouring oarsmen or the betrayed victims, the producers or listeners of this aesthetic
category have thorough awareness of the characteristics of what art and anti-art are.
For Jameson, such a project is one that enacts the negation of the negation between art
and anti-art, ‘and their refusal [of objectification] is a gesture that has a social
meaning which ultimately transcends the matter of art itself and the more limited
sphere of the aesthetic’.30 These cultural philistines, as Jameson has coined, refuse to
be compartmentalised as consumers of art or culture, thus threatening the analytical
paradigm of the dialectic. They pretend to be the inferior class in the society but in

27
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2004), 160.
28
This is a paraphrase of the line ‘you can’t dance if you’re always looking at your feet’ in Paul
Attinello, ‘Passion/Mirrors,’ in Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing, ed.
Andrew Dell’Antonio (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 172.
29
Jameson, Late Marxism, 154.
30
Jameson, Late Marxism, 152.

13
fact, given their knowledge and power, they are part of the ruling classes. They react
against the others with such violent rejection that carries over the psychological
nuances of ressentiment, or what Nietzsche has deemed as a sense of resentment
directed with hostility towards the cultured or civilised. They seize every opportunity
to destroy the art and culture of the others and establish themselves as the supreme
race. After Adorno and Horkheimer, Jameson associates this category of listeners
with the anti-Semitic.

That said, this is the very point where I will diverge from Jameson in the analysis of
the final position in the Greimasian semiotic square. I concur with his analyses of the
presence of true art consumers, the bourgeois manipulation in the culture industry,
and the inaccessibility of both forms to certain oppressed classes due to economic
factors. Yet, for the final position, I want to paint a more optimistic picture than that
of the philistine situation. With respect to the logic of the Greimasian semiotic square,
the final position should be described as ‘non-anti-art’. That is, these are works
created not for higher surplus values than those occupying the position of anti-art in
the culture industry, but works considered to be complementary, though not
necessarily autonomous, to artworks and still transcend the social hierarchy of wealth
and class.

This is the position where I situate minimal techno, alongside the more popular works
of Björk and Radiohead, to give but a couple of examples. These works share an
identity of being non-identical to each or any other. Their ‘uniqueness’ is unlike those
accused by Adorno as pseudo-individualistic, because they do not contain the fake
melodic ‘hooks’ that fall off the charts like so many other hit songs of their time.
Unlike the reified works of the culture industry, this ‘non-anti-art’ rejects the trap of
compulsory commodification. Relevant examples of artists whose music are available
for downloading off the internet without costs are the Iranian-American duo Deep
Dish and the English-Canadian musician Richie Hawtin who goes by the stage name
Plastikman Richie Hawtin.31 For this very reason, their music become ‘music for the
masses’ and gratifies the Stendhalian notion of le promesse de bonheur. If these

31
Deep Dish and Plastikman aka Richie Hawtin, accessed October 1, 2012, http://deepdish.com/ and
http://plastikman.com/.

14
artistic creations were to be ‘subtracted’ from the Adornian concept of the culture
industry, they would definitely contribute immensely to a culture that belongs truly to
each and every listener regardless of his or her social standing. In other words, an
emancipating process of de-industrialisation and aestheticization of the musical arts is
happening beyond the culture industry. The critical act of listening or dancing to
minimal techno is then an aesthetic experience that does not alienate individual
subjects or reduce them to the ‘dishonest manoeuvre’ of late capitalism. Instead, such
an ethics creates an authentic dance or techno culture. In the words of Marcuse, these
are sounds ‘of gratification that would dissolve the society which represses it’.32

Integrating Jameson’s critique of the culture industry with the extended Greimasian
semiotic square, a socio-musical semiotic square can be constructed critically (Figure
3). While the artistic values of traditional and folk music negates the artificial appeal
of disco beats and television jingles, Minimal techno and other similar musics serve a
contrasting social function to the noises of, say, machines, waves and birdsongs, all of
which would fall under what Adorno calls das Amusische. Correspondingly, I contend
that Minimal techno complements classical music as a modern and critical form of
dance music.

32
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 60.

15
 Figure 3: Greimas-Jameson-Musical extended semiotic square
Consumers

Traditional, folk, Rock, disco music,

classical music advertising jingles
Use Exchange
value value

Minimal techno, Noise, machines,

Radiohead, Björk waves, birdsongs

Producers
VI
By way of conclusion, I wish to raise a few points of contention pertaining to my
suggested trajectory. Firstly, the a priori Kantian conditions of time and space, vis-à-
vis the inherent structure of the artwork, are dynamic receptive factors that would
inform the arguments proposed above. On the one hand, the musical morphology of
popular music and electronic dance music are rather different from that of art music.
No standard, institutionalised analysis would be more accurate than a combination of
structural and ethnographic methodologies, such as those conducted by Mark J. Butler
and Alejandro L. Madrid.33 On the other hand, it is precisely the fact that jazz has
today transfigured into a form that barely resembles that of jazz during the fin-de-
siècle is a good lesson for critical theory to draw alongside the developments of the
socio-cultural praxis.

As much as Jameson’s theories from the 1980s have deviated from Adorno’s theories
from the 1940s, so will the theories of the twenty-first century eventually come to
restrict future understandings of the past vis-à-vis the present. An apparent reason is
that, whether the ‘formal-procedural straitjacket’ used at any one time for analysing

33
Mark Butler, Unlocking the Groove: Rhythm, Meter, and Musical Design in Electronic Dance Music
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006) and Alejandro L. Madrid, Nor-tec Rifa!: Electronic
Dance Music from Tijuana to the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

16
music could be tightened or loosened, it is still very much dependent on the
development (or regression) of our historical consciousness.34 This mysterious
psychic entity naturally relates sociologically either to a personal amnesia or cultural
censorship. Thereby, even though both Jameson and I myself have used Adorno’s
arguments in grounding our respective theses, these critical theories should continued
to be renewed or even be disregarded on account of its anachronistic irrelevance.

However, any critique of Adorno could still correlate to the criteria set up by himself,
such as his own agenda or his limited geographical and historical influences. The
immanent act of objectification has already resisted further semantic analysis because
every theory is an a priori negation of the negation. For a classically trained
musicologist like myself to analyse a work of minimal techno via the ancient logic of
a coherent universal and its substantial particulars is always already an emphasis on
the notion of an otherness. This indicates one of the well-known limits of critical
analysis that affects both popular musicology and ethnomusicology. In order to escape
this discursive thinking by engaging with the subjective is then to erect a Deleuzean
flux between the functions of objectivity and subjectivity.35 For Jameson,
it would not be the first time that the ideological vested interests of a group
also… expressed the objective tendencies of the social system itself. At any
rate, Adorno’s ‘objectification’ of the aesthetic seems to me to satisfy other
contemporary demands raised not merely by the contradictions of the aesthetic
in our time, but also… by the dilemmas of contemporary historical
consciousness.36

The deception of the culture industry will persist and it is for theorists to salvage the
arts from its further reification. Yet, it will be one that continues to be inflicted with a
persistent dialectic. Notwithstanding these perplex philosophical problems and the
unstoppable expansion of the culture industry, there will definitely be some smaller
venues around the world today where real dance connoisseurs can keep the critical
aesthetic of minimal techno alive.

34
Leppert, ‘Commentary,’ 337.
35
See also Adorno’s idea on the reversal of objectivity and subjectivity in Jameson, Late Marxism,
125.
36
Jameson, Late Marxism, 126.

17
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Websites

Deep Dish. http://deepdish.com/ (accessed 1 October 2012)

Richie Hawtin presents Plastikman. http://plastikman.com/ (accessed 1 October 2012)

_____________________________________________________________________
Abstract: For Adorno and Horkheimer, the different genres of twentieth-century
mass culture, such as jazz and film, had to be considered as part of a culture industry
that is baleful to their Marxist and aesthetic ideologies. Analogising this notion,
electronic dance music and culture would then be the culture industry par excellence
because of the prerequisite of using technological means of production and an
adherence to the Benjaminian criterion of the mechanical production of art.
Dehumanised and reified, this form of mass media undergoes a process of compulsory
commodification. The aesthetic experience which should have been the promesse de
bonheur for clubbers became a broken promise, reducing individual subjects to the
dishonest manoeuvre of late capitalism. Situated without ethnographical perspectives,
this paper aims to reassess the base/superstructure relationship of electronic dance
music culture by using the Greimasian rubric set up by Fredric Jameson and thereafter
attempts to reclaim the sub-genre of minimal techno as a heterogeneous art-form.
Jun Zubillaga-Pow is PhD candidate in Music Research at King’s College London.
His research thesis is an epistemological study of musical analysis, ethnography and
history via Lacanian psychoanalysis. Originally from Singapore, Jun studied Music at
York and Birmingham before completing a Master of Arts in Critical Methodologies
(Distinction) from King’s College London. He is the editor of two books entitled
Singapore Soundscape: A Musical History of the Global City and Queer Singapore:
Illiberal Citizenship and Mediated Cultures.

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