13 The Politics of Hearing HANNS EISLER AND THEODOR ADORNO Theodor Adorno (1903--1969) was among the most important ue German philosophers of the 20th century. A founding member of the Fi furt School for Social Research, Adomo’s work offers a consistent critiqui contemporary culture and society aimed at resisting its ideology and ‘irrationality. With the rise of Hitler, Adorno and many of his Frankfurt Colleagues were exiled in the United States. Adorno found himself in peculiar position of living in Hollywood, the heart of what he called “the _ ture industry,” which he came to see as a form of nearly totalitat control. Music figures centrally in Adorno’s writing, and avant-garde serves as one of the few forces of resistance to “the culture indust accomplished pianist, Adorno studied compositic | with Alban Berg and alitelong advocate for Schoenberg's music. Hanns Eisler (1898-1962) studied with Arnold Schoenberg, but rejected contemporary classical music as elitist, turning instead to the position of populist worker's songs, often with lyrics :penned Brecht. Like Adorno, Eisler fled Hitler's Germany and landed in During his ten years there, he ‘composed scores for several alone, due to Adomo’s fear of | a repri cinema, sound and music should play a 1 _ and action. In this short excerpt, the authors feflect: on _ences between auditory and visual perceptior and about the politics of hearing and listening. The function of music in the cinema is one aspect—in an extreme version—of the general function of music under conditions of industrially controlled cultural con- hanns eisler & theodor adorno ¢ 73sumption. Music is supposed to bring out the spontaneous, essentially human ele- ment in its listeners and in virtually all human relations. As the abstract art par excellence, and as the art farthest removed from the world of practical things it is predestined to perform this function. The human ear has not adapted itself to the bourgeois rational and, ultimately, highly industrialized order as readily as the eye, which has become accustomed to conceiving reality as made up of separate things, commodities, objects that can be modified by practical activity. Ordinary listening, as compared to seeing, is ‘archaic’; it has not kept pace with technologi- cal progress. One might say that to react with the ear, which is fundamentally a passive organ in contrast to the swift, actively selective eye, is in a sense not in keeping with the present advanced industrial age and its cultural anthropology.’ For this reason acoustical perception preserves comparably more traits of long bygone, pre-individualistic collectivities than optical perception. At least two of the most important elements of occidental music, the harmonic-contrapuntal one and that of its rhythmic articulation, point directly to a group modelled upon the ancient church community as its only possible inherent ‘subject.’ This direct relationship to a collectivity, intrinsic in the phenomenon itself, is probably con- nected with the sensations of spatial depth, inclusiveness, and absorption of indi- viduality, which are common to all music.? But this very ingredient of collectivity, because of its essentially amorphous nature, leads itself to deliberate misuse for ideological purposes. Since music is antithetical to the definiteness of material things, itis also in opposition to the unambiguous distinctness of the concept. Thus it may easily serve as a means to create retrogression and confusion, all the more ‘so because, despite its nonconceptual character, it is in other respects rational- ized, extensively technified, and just as modern as it is archaic. This refers not only to the present methods of mechanical reproduction, but to the whole development of post-medieval music. Max Weber even terms the process of rationalization the historical principle according to which music developed. All middle-class music has an ambivalent character. On the one hand, itis in a certain sense precapitalis- tic, ‘direct,’ a vague evocation of togetherness; on the other hand, because it has shared in the progress of civilization, it has become reified, indirect, and ultimately a ‘means’ among many others. This ambivalence determines its function under advanced capitalism. It is par excellence the medium in which irrationality can be practiced rationally. It has always been said that music releases or gratifies the emotions, but these emotions themselves have always been difficult to define. Their actual con- tent seems to be only abstract opposition to prosaic existence. The greater the drabness of this existence, the sweeter the melody. The underlying need expressed by this inconsistency springs from the frustrations imposed on the masses of the people by social conditions. But this need itself is put into the ser- vice of commercialism. Because of its own rationality, so different from the way it is perceived, and its technical malleability, music can be made to serve regression ‘psychotechnically’ and in that role is more welcomed in proportion as it deceives its listeners in regard to the reality of everyday existence. Such tendencies affect culture as a whole, but they manifest themselves with particular blatancy in music. The eye is always an organ of exertion, labor, and concentration; it grasps a definite object. The ear of the layman, on the other hand, as contrasted to that of the musical expert, is indefinite and passive. One does not 74 © audio culturehave to open it, as one does the eye, compared to which it is indolent and dull. But this indolence is subject to the taboo that society imposes upon every form of lazi- ness. Music as an art has always been an attempt to circumvent this taboo, to transform the indolence, dreaminess, and dullness of the ear into a matter of con- centration, effort, and serious work. Today indolence is not so much overcome as it is managed and enhanced scientifically. Such a rationally planned irrationality is the very essence of the amusement industry in all its branches. Music perfectly fits the pattern, NOTES 1. A remark of Goethe's confirms this. ‘According to my father everyone should lean to draw, and fos that reason he had great regard for Emperor Maximilian, who was said to have given explicit orders to that effect. He also more seriously urged me to practice drawing than music, which; on the other hand, he recommended to my sister, even keeping her at the piano for a good part of the day, in addition to her regular lessons.’ (Dichtung und Wahrheit, Part |, Book IV.) The boy, visualized by the father as a representative of progress and enlight- enment, is supposed to train his eye, while the girl, who represents historically outmoded domesticity and has no real share in public life and economic production, is confined to music, as was generally the case with young upper-class women in the nineteenth century, quite apart from the role of music throughout oriental society. 2. Cf. Emst Kurth: Musikpsychologie, Berlin, 1931, pp. 116-36: e.g. ‘There is not only the perceptual space that is drawn into musical expression from outside; there is also a space for inner listening, which is an autonomous musico-psychological phenomenon’ (p. 134); or: “The spatial impressions of music also claim their independence; it is essential .. . that they should not arise by the detour of any perceptual image. They pertain to energetic processes, and are autogenous’ (p. 135). 3. This perhaps helps to explain why modern music meets with so much greater resis- tance than modem painting. The ear clings to the archaic essence of music, while music itself is involved in the process of rationalization. hanns eisler & theodor adorno « 75