Musical Temporality. Perspectives From Adorno and de Man: Robert Adlington

Musical Temporality.
Perspectives from Adorno and

de Man
Robert Adlington
This paper focuses upon Adorno's critique of musical tempo-

rality-as found in his musical criticism and as implied by his
philosophy as a whole. I shall contend that the two do not nec-
essarily coincide. Adorno presents temporality in a different
light in each, and rather than labor over Adorno's 'disparate and
diverging comments on temporality in an attempt to prove
their inner consistency, I dwell on their irreconcilability. This is
made a particularly plausible approach by Adorno's own meth-
ods, which I characterize as being driven by the principle of
antinomy. It is not for nothing that Adorno refuses to issue co-
herent, succinct theses, and we misunderstand his rationale by
passing over or attempting to explain away the apparent incon-
sistencies and paradoxes in his writing.
It does not need my intervention for the contradictory ele-
ment in Adorno's writing to be made fully apparent. Current
reception of Adorno neatly polarizes into those devotees who
5
6 Adlington Musical Temporality
discern in his philosophy a resistance to sociohistoric dogma at

every turn and less sympathetic commentators for whom
Adorno is symbolic of vested, reactionary forces. That there is
more than a grain of truth in each of these views is apparent
from the most cursory examination of Adorno's comments on
temporality. I take this contradiction to constitute, rather than
compromise, Adorno's stance-and a defense of this position is
one of the functions of the following pages. However, while the
presence of contradiction may be unmistakable if one takes
Adorno's writings as a whole, it is not evenly distributed
throughout them. The music;:al criticism gives what I perceive
to be a misleading picture of Adorno's wider position. In brief,
it presents a framework that interprets the repetitive or non-
developmental in music as false, and argues that truth may
only be glimpsed in developmental or "dialectical" forms. But
it does so without giving full consideration to the possible fal-
sity of the notion of dialectical form-a reflective scrutiny that
Adorno's philosophical method demands in other contexts.
The seeds for just such a critique may be found in Adorno's
non-musical writings, but I believe they receive valuable nour-
ishment from Paul de Man's more sustained effort to articulate
a temporality that resists compliance with social ideology. This
radical concept of temporality not only distances itself from
predominant models of time, but also suggests novel interpre-
tations of musical idioms that Adorno viewed with suspicion.
Adorno's Critique ofMusical Temporality

Adorno's stance on temporality in his writings on music is a
product of the philosophical heritage informing his thought,
especially Marx's reading of Hegel's concept of subjective tem-
porality. Hegel was in turn indebted to Kant, who rescued time
from the merely contingent status it had had under his imme-
diate predecessors. For Kant time cannot simply be dismissed
as an inexplicable a priori about existence, dictating the way in
repercussions Spring 1997 7
which objects and events are presented but essentially extrane-

ous to their properties or characteristics. Rather time is "the
form of the inner sense"; only for this reason may it be consid-
ered a "condition a priori of all appearances":
For time cannot be a determination of outer appearances; it belongs

neither to shape nor location, etc., but determines the relation of pre-
sentations in our inner state (Kant 1982, 22).
So time may not be understood to exist in itself, or as an ex-

tractable attribute of objects in the world, but is an inherent at-
tribute of subjectivity. Although this means it is not possible to
talk of the "absolute reality" of time, its intervention (according
to Kant) in all subjective appearances grants it the status of an
"empirical reality" (Kant 1982,23). And because the temporal-
ity of appearances cannot be suspended, to attempt to view the
objects of appearance "atemporally" is to deny a fundamental
aspect of our only way of knowing them-which is to say, as
appearances. Time is not merely the medium in which spatial
objects and events exist, but assists in the very constitution of
those objects and events as perceived by an individuaL
Hegel similarly emphasizes the temporality of all percep-
tions and thoughts. However, concerned to transcend the
subject-object dichotomy, he prefers not to view time as either
subjective or objective. Rather, time is the worldly manifesta-
tion of the subject's striving for adequate knowledge of itself
and its object. Time denotes the voracious development traced
by the human spirit in its quest for truth. Time is being-inso-
far as being continues to recognize limitations in its grasp upon
reality and itself:
Time is the Notion itself that is there and which presents itself to con-
sciousness as empty intuition; for this reason, Spirit necessarily appears
in Time, and it appears in Time just so long as it has not grasped its pure
Notion, i.e. has not annulled Time .... Time, therefore, appears as the
destiny and necessity of Spirit that is not yet complete within itself
(Hegel 1977, 487).
Only when Spirit is fully self-aware-when the knowing

subject-object achieves its completely contented state-will
time cease to exist.
For Hegel, art gives an indication of the state of this gath-
ering self-knowLedge-an aspect of Hegel's philosophy of par-
ticular importance to Adorno. Hegel's essays on aesthetics
relate different art forms to various stages of human history.
The diminishing externality of predominant artistic practices is
viewed as reflecting the growth and development of Spirit
toward the proper realization of its own non-corporeality.
Within this perspective, form and content in an art work be-
come difficult to separate dearly. Architecture and sculpture,
for instance, represent an early stage of Spirit's journey, their
symbolic physicality hardly reaching beyond the crude, pre-
reflective image-making of the primitive human. Music's mate-
rial evanescence, on the other hand, dearly commends it for
communication of transcendent Spirit. Musical sound satisfies
the need for "a material which for our apprehension is without
stability and even as it arises and exists vanishes once more"
(Hegel 1975, 889). Music's capacity for conveying the move-
ment of Spirit depends upon its ability to penetrate and capti-
vate the subjective consciousness, and this in turn is only
possible because of music's basis in sound:
Expression in music has, as its content, the inner life itself, the inner
sense of feeling ... and, as its form, sound, which, in an art that least of
all proceeds to spatial figures, is purely evanescent in its perceptible ex-
istence; the result is that music with its movements penetrates the ar-
canum of all the movements of the soul. ... Since the time of the sound
is that of the subject too, sound on this principle penetrates the self,
grips it in its.simplest being, and by means of the temporal movement
and its rhythm sets the self in motion (Hegel 1975, 906-08).
In this way, the subject surrenders its freedom of contempla-

tion and submits itself to the sway of music's temporal organi-
zation. Hegel gives musical meter as a specific example of how
the process of temporal "instruction" through music might
bring the individual subject nearer to the unity after which all
consciousness under Spirit strives. When the subject is gripped
by metric division, it overcomes the sprawl and fragmentation
to which it is prone in undifferentiated, empty time. Meter im-
presses on the listener the necessity of repeated acts of self-
concentration, wherein momentary experiences may be gath-
ered from their random distribution in empty time and secured
for the persisting self:
[The] unregulated running riot [in undifferentiated time] contradicts

the unity of the self. .. , and the self can find itself again and be satisfied
in this diversified definiteness of duration only if single quanta are
brought into one unity .... In [the] uniformity [of the bar] self-
consciousness finds itself again as a unity (Hegel 1975, 914-15).
Hegel does not move beyond this analysis to discuss the

possible pertinence of larger-scale musical procedures or forms
to the self-enlightenment of the subject. Nevertheless, it would
seem that the subject stands the best chance of coming face to
face with its objective condition through music that approxi-
mates most closely the movement of Spiritual consciousness it-
self. For Hegel, Spirit pursues an evolutionary path which
progresses through acts of dialectic reasoning. Corresponding-
ly, the knowing subject is best reflected "by a musical style
based upon the same principles of self-contradiction and high-
er resolution" (Johnson 1991, 160). Hegel's pessimism about
the function of art in an age where philosophical reasoning and
religious enlightenment risked reducing it to an anachronism
perhaps prevented him from explicitly voicing this conclusion
himself. However, it is a line of argument of central importance
to Adorno's musical criticism.
Adorno does not receive Hegel's philosophy uncritically.
Following Marx, Adorno is concerned to de-transcendentalize
Hegel's Spirit. The individual's situation is now assessed relative
to society, rather than Spirit:
For Adorno, [the progress of Spirit] comes to stand for "historical con-
sciousness" ... and, at the same time, "rationality" and the historical ten-
dency towards increasing "rationalization" ... in Western society
(Paddison 1993,114-15).
Adorno develops the Hegelian idea of the self-conscious sub-

ject being inextricably entwined in its objective surroundings.
But gone is the confidence in enlightened rationality to guide
the subject to perfect self-knowledge. The ultimately harmoni-
ous totality toward which the subject strives has, in the modern
world, seemingly been irredeemably fractured. Rationality has
taken a dominative turn, increasingly wielded to control rather
than liberate the subject. The rationalization processes of mass
industry and capitalist thought have become the "tempo of the
time" (Paddison 1993, 43)-passed off as nature-mythical.
This has implications for subjective temporality, summarized
by Julian Johnson:
A truly dynamic temporality is the corollary of a truly free, indepen-

dent subject, which in turn, is the corollary of a free society .... The in-
ability to proceed, to develop through time, is the mark of unfreedom
in both the individual and in society as a whole Oohnson 1993, 209).
Reified and rationalized thought increasingly stultifies the pro-

gressive consciousness of individuals-the form of conscious-
ness upon which the possibility of a utopian freedom once
depended. The dynamic nature of this free subjective tempo-
rality must never be lost from sight. But an important claim of
Adorno's philosophy is that the subject's embattled situation
limits the extent of the freedom that may currently be procured
for it. Only in the frank admission of the extent of the objective
grip on subjective consciousness can the individual make any
claim to truth. This applies as much to temporality as to any
other realm of subjective experience.
Both Marx and Freud were important influences in
Adorno's post-Hegelian formulation of rationalized time and
subjective temporality. The Marxian concept of commodified
time, of particular importance to Adorno, itself relates back to

Hegel's belief that subjective temporality and dock time are
fundamentally at odds. Hegel argues that science cannot cope
with the unrest of temporality, and is therefore forced to use "a
paralyzed form, viz., as the numerical unit, ... which ... reduces
what is self-moving to mere material, so as to possess in it an
indifferent, external, lifeless content" (Hegel 1977, 27). Tem-
porality is drastically constrained in this quantitative rendering
(Hegel calls it "lifeless"). For Marx, binding the laborer to
"commodified time"-dock time-is in an important respect
a denial of subjective freedom. The necessity of conforming to
dock time strips the subject of the possibility of a creative tem-
porality-tantamount to making him "timeless, unable to real-
ize himself existentially" (Pattma!) 1988, Ill). Instead, the
subject submits to a repetitious, animalistic existence, denied
the opportunity of exploring its temporal condition indepen-
dently of social controls. The machinery of mechanized labor
ruthlessly imposes upon the subject a relentless, depersonalized
repetitiousness.
In his essay "Free Time" (Adorno 1991, 162-70), Adorno
analyzes the infiltration of "rationalized time" (as he frequently
refers to it) into all aspects of life. Playing on the irony of the
allusion to freedom, he claims that "free time is shackled to its
opposite" (Adorno 1991, 162). Adorno sees boredom as a
product of this denial of subjective time, but notes:
It need not be so. Whenever behavior in spare time is truly autono-

mous, determined by free people for themselves, boredom rarely fig-
ures .... If people were able to make their own decisions about
themselves and their lives, if they were not caught up in the realm of
the ever same, they would not have to be bored (Adorno 1991, 166).
Adorno not only documents the malicious spread of rational-

ized time in various areas of activity, but views time relations
themselves as expressive of patterns of domination. Rational-
ized time comes automatically to have connotations of labor
and subjective enslavement; it must be recognized as "the most
profound expression of the relations of domination within the

field of consciousness" (Adorno 1991,65).
Adorno is assisted in this assessment of different types of
human temporality by Freudian psychology. While Freud him-
self said little on the specific subject of time, Freudian princi-
ples lead Adorno to identify pathologies in some of the
tendencies that the Marxian impulse had already discerned as
suspicious. In particular, the diagnostic poles of regression and
maturation provide a frame upon which to build a psychoana-
lytic theory of human temporality. Regression denotes a rever-
sion to infantilistic modes of behavior. It is thus characterized
by repetitive urges based on the interminable cycle of need and
gratification. Maturation conversely implies, among other
things, the ability to cope with, and develop in response to,
changing circumstances. The implication of this comparative
analysis is that repetition represents an infantile denial of time,
and that only development signals proper recognition of the
temporal condition.
These perspectives on human temporality-from Hegel,
Marx, and Freud-suggest a framework by which to assess and
evaluate musical temporality. Repetitive or non-developmental
music has connotations of mechanized domination, and addi-
tionally signifies worrying infantilistic tendencies. The creative
freedom of the individual is properly symbolized only by dia-
lectical musical forms. Music must record the trajectory of his-
torical consciousness, or lapse into falsity. Julian Johnson aptly
summarizes the basic thrust of Adorno's critique of musical
temporality:
Temporality in music, as in true thought, Adorno argues, must proceed

dialectically if it is to avoid the ideological stasis of reification (Johnson
1993,209).
For Adorno, Beethoven-or more precisely, certain pieces of

middle-period Beethoven-is the exemplar of this vision of
musical temporality. In works like Fidelio and the "Eroica"
Symphony, Beethoven achieved an unsurpassed "degree of free-

dom ... through the dialectical mediation of subjective content
and objective form" (Williams 1989, 195-96). But since then,
composers increasingly have failed to sustain such a temporal
ideal. Adorno traces a tradition of deliberate denial of dialecti-
cal temporality in music, extending back from Stravinsky
through Debussy to Wagner. Wagner's penchant for foursquare
phrases, filled with motives that are stubbornly self-contained
.(having none of the developmental promise of Beethoven's mo-
tives), allows Adorno to level the charge that Wagner is submit-
ting to "the reified order oftime itself" (Adorno 1981, 33).
Debussy, in hypostatizing the harmonic ambiguities of
Wagner, takes a drastic extra step, so that entire pieces give the
impression of "waiting"-the fraudulent creation of an expec-
tation that fosters anticipation in the listener without ever con-
summating it in a strong subjective act. Adorno is moved to
refer to this as a "betrayal of the temporal order" (Adorno
1991,60).
The "absolute transitoriness" of Debussy in turn signals the
"liquidation of the individual that is celebrated by Stravinsky's
music" (Adorno 1973b, 190), which is dissected in the Philos-
ophy o/Modern Music. Stravinsky insists that the falsity of qual-
itative temporality, bound up as it is with anachronistic and
unsustainable notions of subjectivity, must be 'overcome by
completely abandoning the whole edifice and returning to the
originary authenticity of simple quantitative time. Adorno ac-
knowledges the putative logic of the move on several occasions
(Adorno 1977, 180; 1984, 193; 1992, 149), and yet resists it
for all his worth. Stravinsky's music manifests
a technique of permanent beginnings .... His music is devoid of recol-

lection and consequently lacking in any time continuum of perma-
nence .... Stravinsky's music remains a peripheral phenomenon ...
because it avoids the dialectical confrontation with the musical
progress of time. This, in turn, is the basis of all great music since Bach
(Adorno 1973b, 164, 187).
Stravinsky's musical time is a dehumanized process of measur-

ing and counting (Adorno, 1973b, 193). In some respects, ad-
mittedly, Stravinsky more faithfully records social actuality
than his Viennese contemporaries, for "the dying out of subjec-
tive time in music seems totally unavoidable in the midst of a
humanity which has made itself into a thing-into an object of
its own organization" (Adorno 1973b, 194). But in offering no
fragmentary trace of the progressive subjectivity of free selves,
faithful critique becomes indistinguishable from complicity.
Adorno acknowledges that all music in rationalized society
risks succumbing to one side or other of this dilemma. But
while the serial music of Schoenberg effects "a change in time
consciousness in the inner organization of music," replacing
the dialectical temporality of the free subject (Adorno 1973b,
194), it does not yet go to the terrible extreme-the total
"pseudomorphism"-of Stravinsky. The temporality of
Schoenbergian serialism retains a moment of subjectivity,
though admittedly it lags "far behind the historical destiny of
temporal-consciousness." Stravinsky's music, on the other
hand, "establishes itself as an arbiter of time, causing the listen-
er to forget the subjective and psychological experience of time
in music and to abandon himself to its spatialized dimension"
(Adorno 1973b, 195). In practice, Stravinsky's music, in en-
couraging the forgetting of traditional subjectivity, is little dif-
ferent from the music of the culture industry (film music, for
example). There, traditional subjectivity is invoked, but
falsely-through pastiches of disembodied stylistic cliches that
deny any temporal continuity. In fact, Stravinsky himself, in
his neoclassical works, quickly progresses from the forgetting
implied by "originary" quantitativity to the blatant lie of com-
mercial music's corruption of old styles.
Negative Dialectics, Antinomy, and the Concept of

Dialectic
In broad terms it is this framework, with its oppositi~n of ra-

tionalized time and subjective temporality, played out in repet-
itive and dialectical forms respectively, that informs and shapes
Adorno's musical criticism. Selective readings of Adorno, par-
ticularly those that focus on the musical writings alone, have
reinforced the notion that this framework is definitive of the
Adornian project. However, I believe that one can grasp the full
significance of Adorno's position only by assessing his more
general philosophical comments on temporality. Important in
this respect is a short but rewarding passage in Negative Dialec-
tics, wherein Adorno positions himself in relation to his philo-
sophical forebears on the specific issue of time. His comments
reveal a profound skepticism, rather at odds with the position
suggested in the music criticism, about the possibility of grasp-
ing or encapsulating human temporality.
Previous philosophical approaches to time may differ in
their details, but they share, in Adorno's estimation, a decisive
failing which he labels the "detemporalization of time"
(Adorno 1973a, 331). Here Adorno inverts, and thus issues an
implicit rejoinder to, a slogan from Heidegger's Being and
Time. Heidegger's phrase, the "temporalization of time," an-
nounces the possibility of an authentic human temporality
(Heidegger 1962, 352); Adorno, by contrast, is concerned with
the difficulty of identifYing such a thing. No explicit reference
is made to Heidegger in this passage in Negative Dialectics, but
it is dear that he is charged with reproducing the errors that
Adorno analyzes in earlier thinkers. Hegel, for instance, in
ontologizing time, renders a particular temporality eternal and
therefore (for Adorno) "detemporalized." Hegel treats time as a
hypothesized absolute that is assumed to exist independently of
the interpretive subjective view of the individual and beyond
the manipulative sway of society. For Adorno, this contravenes
Hegel's own principle that no concept can be supposed to fall

outside the grip of historical consciousness. Adorno's criticism
finds an echo in a comment of Paul de Man's, which points to
the paradox that Hegelian dialectic "does not include time it-
self as one of its terms," and thus fails to inject it with the con-
ceptual movement that is the liberating raison d'hre of
dialectical thought (de Man 1983,242).
For Adorno, Kant's notion of time as a subjective form is an
equal failure. In this case the falsity of supposing a supra-histor-
ical existential absolute is evident even within Kant's own
terms. This is because the "flow" that Kant believes to charac-
terize time necessitates precisely the conceptual intervention,
in the form of a visual image, that time as a pure form of intu-
ition was supposed to short-circuit (Adorno 1973a, 332). Ulti-
mately, Adorno attributes the failure of both subjective and
objective idealism to their hypostatized treatment of the sub-
ject as a concept. Both Kant and Hegel fail to see that their no-
tions of the subject are themselves historical, and thus,
inevitably, so are the conditions that they assume operate upon
the subject (Adorno 1973b, 332).
It is not only grand philosophical systems such as Kant's
and Hegel's that fail in Adorno's view. Approaches that resist
the totalizing impulse may equally succumb to false conceptu-
alizations of temporality. Henri Bergson sought to define abso-
lute, "lived" time, but in picturing it as a refuge from the fallen
states of everyday social life, he fell into the trap that awaited
later phenomenologists, namely a reinscription of particular
historical agendas: "The idea of duration [i.e. Bergson's dureeJ
is patterned after the concept of property in bourgeois society"
(Adorno 1984, 254). Adorno suspected that, outwardly con-
ceived as an authentic response to the nugatory transience of
contemporary fashions and trends, duree was thereby allied to
the "ideology of inwardness or interiority, which has long since
been exposed politically and aesthetically" (Adorno 1984,
255). Quietism and complacency find tacit sanction under this
supposedly "authentic" mode of consciousness. The danger in
claiming duree as a "particular and privileged mode of cogni-

tion" is that it is turned "into a line of business" (Adorno
1973a, 333-34), socialized because so baldly articulated. Once
again Adorno's choice of words here emphasizes the appearance
of bourgeois principles and ideals in "absolutized" form.
Adorno proceeds to comment upon the wider implications
of Bergson's approach-and that of anyone who attempts an
abstract view of temporality as a definable, autonomous con-
cepto By seeking a wholly subjective understanding of time, it
is impossible to transcend the partiality and contingency of the
subject itself:
In isolation, the time of subjective experience along with its content

comes to be as accidental and mediated as its subject, and therefore,
compared with chronometric time, is always "false" also (Adorno
1973a, 334).
For, as mentioned earlier, the subject can only claim a measure

of "true" self-knowledge by a candid assessment of the extent to
which it is formed and determined by objective pressures.
Adorno "rejects every form of philosophical or aesthetic ideol-
ogy that claims in itself to transcend the bad antinomy of sub-
ject and object, individual experience versus the power of
objective dialectical thought" (Norris 1988, 151). This neces-
sary, irresolvable antinomy applies to human temporality as
much as any area of subjective life. Consequently Bergson suc-
ceeds only in alerting us to "the historic dichotomy between
living experience and the objectified and repetitive labor pro-
cess; his brittle little doctrine of time is an early precipitation of
the objective social crisis in the sense of time" (Adorno 1973a,
334). Here, then, is the rider to Adorno's acceptance of Hegel's
notion of progressive temporality. In the modern capitalist
world, the appearance of liberated consciousness is never suffi-
cient. All subjective life, however seemingly independent of so-
cial trends and ideologies, is tainted with reified thought and
categories. So the progressive or the developmental can never
be treated as guilt-free or blameless. Truth claims-such as that

of the dialectical nature of free subjective temporality-are
meaningful only in so far as their ingrained falsity is opened
out for all to see.
Adorno's writings on art and aesthetics attain their widest
scope when adhering to this antinomy of subject and object.
The subject can make its claim to individuality only by recog-
nizing the extent of its social constitution. Art has its role in
this process of critical self-scrutiny. Instead of giving voice to a
cunningly progressive metaphysical truth, art carries historical
consciousness as a "dynamic totality" (Adorno 1977,211). Pre-
cisely because it is produced under the illusion that it is auton-
omous, formalist art presents a vivid social image. The art work
becomes a site for the negotiation of the ultimately irreconcil-
able claims of the individual and collective. In music the com-
poser, conceived of as the subject rubbing up against the
objective edifice of socially posited musical material, must seek
mediation, not domination. Any attempt to subvert the inher-
ent tendencies of musical material has dominative implications
which would upset the impossibly delicate balance that must
be sought by a truthful art. True subjectivity can only manifest
itself in the face of the "freeplay of forces" (Adorno 1973b, 84)
of objective material-those elements of music that lie beyond
the direct manipulative control of the composer. Beethoven's
music shows an almost ideal relationship between the material
and the composer's creativity, allowing the emergence of a gen-
uinely dialectical musical organization. The tragedy for mod-
ern music is that the excessively rationalized state of historically
posited musical material has left the subject vulnerable to dom-
ination, making the balanced relationship of material and com-
poser practically impossible to maintain. Up to a point,
therefore, the failure of composers to sustain a genuinely dia-
lectical temporality in music (noted earlier) lies beyond their
control. And while Adorno's musical criticism gives the impres-
sion that within these confines there is still room for greater
and lesser adequacy to the plight of the subject, his wider
framework does not allow this. Composition becomes split be-

tween those who seek to remain sensitive to the demands of
musical material but in so doing risk domination by rational-
ized processes (as in serial music), and those who imagine they
are breaking away from the demands of history but whose ef-
forts are therefore doubly ineffectual in the face of all-pervasive
historical forces. This is an unavoidable consequence of the
antinomy of subjective and objective forces in rationalized
society.
The apparent hopelessness of this situation-where both
the responsibility to and the refusal of historical consciousness
succumb to ever greater rationalization-can be discerned in
Adorno's musical polemics. But it would not be true to say that
hopelessness is a predominating tone or theme. The privileging
of certain compositional idioms over others is more promi-
nent. Why this should be so is suggested later in this paper.
However, it is possible to find passages in Adorno's writing on
music that more fully recognize the intertwined, co-implicated
status of subjective and objective temporalities. The most strik-
ing example is Adorno's essay "The Schema of Mass Culture"
(Adorno 1991,53-84). This essay is unusual for the complexity
of the relationship that it perceives between subjective tempo-
rality and rationalized time in music and literature. Rather
than identify in individual works the presence of either one or
the other (the strategy in much of the musical criticism),
Adorno discerns in them the incorporation of both temporali-
ties. Music and literature may each be understood to possess
contradictory temporal characteristics.
Adorno begins by reflecting on the consequences of the tra-
ditional preoccupation in literature and music with pacing and
temporal structure:
The empty passage of time, the meaningless transience oflife was to be

seized upon through form and brought into participation with the
"idea" by virtue of the totality of this form (Adorno 1991, 63).
Adorno notes that it is this very thematicization of time, the

fact that empty duration is determinedly converted into mean-
ingful qualitative succession, that encourages such seemingly
paradoxical but popular cliches as the "timelessness" of music.
This impression of timelessness is achieved, Adorno believes,
through the principle of conflict, because "conflict concen-
trates past and future in the present," resulting in a "dialectical
arrest of time" (Adorno 1991, 64). This possibility is denied in
commercial music, which eschews conflict for the musical pal-
liatives of repetition and sequence, and is therefore unable to
transcend empty, anxiety-producing time (Paddison 1993,42).
High art, on the other hand, resists surrender ro empty dura-
tion, substituting it with a genuine subjective temporality.
Up to this point Adorno's argument resembles the ap-
proach taken in the musical criticism. Subjective temporality is
bodied forth only in dialectical musical forms; repetitive or
non-developmental music abandons the subjective and pre-
sents instead the objectified time of rationalized society. Yet in
"The Schema of Mass Culture," Adorno moves beyond this
position to acknowledge the ingrained falsity that, in rational-
ized society, necessarily attends any notion of the genuinely
subjective. No such concept can be presumed free of prevailing
ideological forces. In annulling quantitative time and thereby·
presuming an emboldened subjectivity, art at the same time be-
comes dangerously indifferent to and distanced from predom-
inating relations in society. It risks mere commemoration of an
idealized and mythical past existence. The fetishization of the
subjective only brings about a strengthening of the objective.
In an effort to avoid this danger and maintain its committed
negativity, modern art therefore sometimes reincorporates
rationalized time (Adorno 1991, 64). This is most dearly ap-
parent in literature and theater, where time can be treated al-
most as a "character," one of the dramatis personae. Adorno
mentions the works of Proust and Joyce in this respect, and lat-
er would certainly have added Beckett. In music he could per-
haps have pointed to Schoenberg's Erwartung, the scenario of
which concerns a grotesque distension of dock time-a dis-

torted quantitativity. Such a re-injection of rationalized time is
also conceivable in purely instrumental music, where there is
no explicit dramatic content. The strange scherzo of Mahler's
Sixth Symphony, with its stuttering, repetitive interludes,
might be interpreted in this way. Mahler's continually shifting
meter frustrates the possibility of dance, leaving only a futile
counting in its place. The listener is thereby confronted with a
problematic quantitative time-structure that is also crucially
mediated by the dialectical symphonic context in which it ap-
pears. The peculiar poignancy of Mahler's movement may be
partly due to the embattled qualitative subjectivity that, in this
way, it appears to portray.
"The Schema of Mass Culture" thus suggests how subjec-
tive and objective traits may intermingle in a work, faithfully
reflecting the irresoluble antinomy that they form in reality.
Subjective time is compromised as well as redeemed by its con-
frontation with its object, forming an irreducible and unan-
swerable paradox. However, Adorno's sympathetic tone works
to disguise this profoundly problematic aspect of the works of
Proust and Joyce (and maybe also Beckett, Schoenberg, and
Mahler). Contradiction is portrayed as synthesis, and in this re-
spect "The Schema of Mass Culture" is also ultimately marked
by the bias characterizing the musical criticism.' Nevertheless,
its assessment ofcontrasting temporalities acknowledges the
opposed yet equally necessary perspectives characteristic of
antinomial thought. By itself, the concept of subjective tempo-
rality always falls short.
A passage in the Philosophy ofModern Music would appear
to announce the same agenda, but once again the full impact of
the paradox contained in Adorno's formula is withheld.
Adorno identifies two "modes of listening" as characteristic of
the contemporary era:
They are the expressive-dynamic and rhythmic-spatial modes oflisten-

ing. The former has its origin in singing; it is directed towards the
fulfilling domination of time and, in its highest manifestations, trans-

forms the heterogeneous course of time into the force of the musical
process. The latter obeys the beat of the drum. It is intent upon the ar-
ticulation of time through the division into equal measures which time
virtually abrogates and spatializes. The two types are separated by force
of that social alienation which separates subject and object. ... The idea
of great music lay in a mutual penetration of both modes of listen-
ing ... in the sonata (Adorno 1973b, 197-98).
Here Adorno explicitly connects his dynamic and repetitive

temporalities to the subject and object respectively, and hints at
the essential importance of their interpenetration. Neither one
nor the other is sufficient by itself> and to think otherwise is to
be deluded by ideology. But the profound ambiguity of the
antinomy contained in this succinct formula is seemingly de-
flated at the last moment. Adorno proposes sonata as an ade-
quate response to the problems described. Once again it
appears that the developmental and progressive in music is
being privileged in Adorno's critique. Music's contradictory
condition finds a measure of synthesis and resolution in the ex-
emplar of dialectical forms (at least as conventionally viewed),
the sonata. Yet this argument contravenes the principle that
true antinomies may never be resolved or neutralized-that
they are by definition insurmountable paradoxes. And, on dose
inspection it can be seen that no real resolution is in fact being
offered here. Instead the teleological dialectic of Hegelian sub-
jective temporality is implausibly claimed to represent an ade-
quate response to the antinomy formed between temporalities.
In other words, the fetishization of subjective temporality that
Adorno warns against in Negative Dialectics has sneaked in un-
der the guise of an illusory higher reconciliation.
If this is a fair assessment of the failings of the dominant re-
ception of Adorno's stance on musical temporality, it should be
noted that, at least in the quote above, such a false resolution is
not directly implied by Adorno's remarks themselves. The dia-
lectical status of sonata-even middle-period Beethovenian so-
nata-is more often assumed than proven, and Adorno avoids
making the connection explicitly. And then there is the ques-

tion of what dialectic itself is taken to mean. Adorno's reference
in this passage to the "mutual penetration" of opposing con-
cepts signals a dialectical strategy that may be felt to be mir-
rored in the supposedly dialectical processes of sonata. If so,
Adorno's argument seems unproblematic: he may be construed
as offering a dialectical response (namely, dialectical musical
form) to a dialectical problem (the opposition of subjective and
rationalized times), a seemingly valid proposal. But this as-
sumes that "dialectic" means the same thing in each case. I am
not sure that this is so. On the one hand, the setting up of an
irresolvable paradox-an antinomy-may be understood as a
dialectical strategy. More precisely, however, we must follow
Adorno and talk of negative dialectics, for antinomy allows of
no synthesis or transcendent resolution. Susan Buck-Morss re-
fers to this central aspect of Adorno's thought as "non-reconcil-
iatory thinking," and describes how it crucially differs from the
Hegelian dialectic to which it is indebted:
As with Hegel, contradiction, with negation as its logical principle,

gave this thinking its dynamic structure and provided the motor force
for critical reflection. But whereas Hegel saw negativity, the movement
of the concept toward its "other," as merely a moment in a larger pro-
cess towards systematic completion, Adorno saw no possibility of an
argument coming to rest in unequivocal synthesis. He made negativity
the hallmark of his dialectical thought precisely because he believed
Hegel had been wtong: reason and reality did not coincide .... Adorno's
antinomies remained antinomial (Buck-Morss 1977, 63).
Yet it is the Hegelian concept of dialectic, with its possibility of

developmental synthesis that is typically used to describe musi-
cal forms. The sonata principle, for instance, is described as di-
alectical because of its supposed purposeful synthesis or
resolution of musical oppositions-its "self-contradiction and
higher resolution," as Julian Johnson put it in a passage quoted
earlier. As such, it differs crucially from negative dialectics. The
suggestion that dialectical musical form is an apt manifestation

of the subject-object antinomy cannot be accepted.
These different possible meanings of dialectic were high-
lighted in order to problematize an unthinking interpretation
of Adorno's argument. But they also offer an alternative way of
understanding Adorno's suggestion that a musical presentation
of dialectic properly reflects the subject-object antinomy. By
making such a proposal, he is not, as many commentators as-
sume, claiming that developmental and progressive idioms
constitute an adequate response, but that music that presents a
non-reconciliatory dialectic might. In setting store by "dialecti-
cal musical form" Adorno is not necessarily thereby resorting to
the image of developmental subjectivity that he himself so dev-
astatingly analyzed as compromised. On the contrary: the val-
ue of non-reconciliatory thinking (and its particular relevance
in the context of this discussion) is that it implies no necessary
subscription to socially dominant conceptions of time and the
ideologies about the "nature" of existence that they sustain.
These conceptions have to be recognized as underlying the
view of subjective temporality as essentially progressive or de-
velopmental, its claim to represent an alternative to rational-
ized time notwithstanding. Ultimately the quantitative and
qualitative aspects of time-crudely put, its numerical and mo-
tional properties-present no real opposition but rather go
hand in hand, part and parcel of the same flawed spatializing of
existence. The "ingrained falsity" of the post-Hegelian under-
standing of subjective temporality comprises this continued
dependence upon prevalent spatio-linear conceptions of time.
This argument is dearly seen if we treat the two concepts of
dialectic as contrasting types of organization. Hegelian dialec-
tic supposes the availability of resolution to a conflict or appar-
ent contradiction. It thereby inscribes a linear temporal
progression: opposing theses are followed by their synthesis.
Hegelian dialectic organizes sequentially, in conformity with
(and thereby implicitly bolstering) predominant social
concepts of time. Negative dialectic however, in offering no
resolution, presents no sequential form. The irreducible con-

frontation of two opposed theses presumes no sequence, no
temporal "shape." It is a way of counterpoising ideas that is not
dependent for its validity upon the existence of a linear time.
Music sits interestingly in relation to these two types of or-
ganization. The tonal classical tradition has typically fostered
an emphasis upon its linear, sequential aspects, a view of music
emboldened by the centrality of notation to this tradition. It is
no surprise, then, to find Hegelian dialectic used as an analogy
for musical organization: certain types of music appear to
present a sequence of contrasting or opposed ideas that works
toward some eventual resolution. However, this linear property
of music is arguably less ambiguously apparent in a musical
score than it is in musical sound. Too seldom do we question
the degree to which the score, and forms of discussion focused
on the score, constrain the sorts of organization we attribute to
heard musical experience. l From a rigorously Adornian per-
spective this uncritical confidence reflects only upon the hege-
monic grip that spatio-linear concepts of time, with their
reassuring materiality, have upon the modern mind. Music as
sound is in fact uncommonly well-placed to alert us to other
possible forms of organization, ones less obviously spatio-linear
inindination. It is an important part of my argument in the re-
mainder of this paper that Adorno was alert both to the possi-
bility and the dissenting potential of forms of temporal
organization resistant to spatial representation, and that for
him this constituted a large part of both music's and negative
dialectic's importance. The fact that this is not generally recog-
nized as such partly reflects upon our reluctance to think (or
incomprehension of the possibility) that music, and other
forms of experience, might be organized "non-spatially."
So the presentation of negative dialectic in music is unlike-
ly to be a simple matter of the bald, sequential juxtaposition of
1. These are issues I confront in greater detail in my doctoral thesis

(Adlington 1997).
two unrelated ideas. Rather its very significance rests in its re-
siding in aspects of musical content other than those revealed
by a linear or spatial purview. There is something to be gained,
however, in treating the description of music in terms of nega-
tive dialectic as a stop-gap device, rather than a literal imputa-
tion of two identifiable components in contradictory
opposition. From Adorno's perspective, viewing temporality
through the lens of negative dialectic arguably has a metaphor-
ical rather than a literal purpose. It serves to emphasize, for in-
stance, that the alternative to standard spatio-linear time is no
static, quiescent permanent present; that this alternative tem-
porality possesses a dynamism that yet may not be explained in
terms of sequential development or teleology. It is the perti-
nence of this more generalized view of temporality to Adorno's
thought that the second half of my paper sets out to examine.
It would in any case be disingenuous to propose that all of
Adorno's references to dialectic in relation to musical form have
this particular non-reconciliatory concept in mind. Adorno
frequently dismantled the subject-object antinomy in his mu-
sical criticism, siding unambiguously with the subjective qual-
ities of music as determined by his philosophical predecessors.
This was undoubtedly as much due to his personal affiliations
with composers of the "Second Viennese School," as any con-
servative bias toward Austro-German idioms and tradition.
These affiliations may well have constrained his musical criti-
cism, and they frequently grated with the philosophical princi-
ples that are less guardedly presented in the non-musical
writings.
Overview
A review of where we stand in relation to Adorno's critique of

musical temporality may be useful at this stage. I have at-
tempted to show how the Hegelian, Marxian, and Freudian in-
fluences upon Adorno support a view of free subjective
temporality as essentially developmental, rather than repetitive

or steady-state. However, Adorno emphasizes that any such
view must be considered false without a concomitant assess-
ment of the degree to which such a supposed attribute of the
subject is itself objectively determined. No claim to truth can
be made without recognition of the falsity that lies within it.
"The Schema of Mass Culture" shows how music and literature
may attempt to reflect the contradictory constitution of hu-
man temporality out of subjective and objective components.
But Adorno's musical criticism does not dwell on such contra-
dictions. In opting to view dialectical form as the subject's sal-
vation, it risks exempting itself from the responsibility of
locating the falsity in the nineteenth-century notion of the
developmental subject. It is precisely the reinscribing of the
nineteenth-century Austro-German dogma of developmental
forms of which Adorno is accused by some commentators.
However, I have also suggested that it is possible to take
antinomy as the model for a concept of dialectic which would
allow Adorno's critique to be read as supporting an alternative
interpretation of musical temporality. In urging the necessity of
dialectical musical form, Adorno could be seen to be arguing
for a "non-spatial" rather than a developmental approach to
temporality in music. But Adorno is sufficiently cautious about
the idea for it to remain largely veiled in his wri'tings. (At the
end of this paper, however, I will show how a number of his
comments support it.) It is here that we may turn to Paul de
Man's literary theory for valuable support. De Man's writings
suggest, in contradistinction to predominant concepts of time,
that temporality is properly grasped only insofar as all attempts
to spatially represent it are resisted. As I detail below, de Man
defiantly asserts the possibility of a type of experience that re-
sists encapsulation, representation, or any other form of sym-
bolic determination. In one essay, he explicitly associates
temporality with certain sorts of music, and I pursue these
comments with reference to some examples of my own. How-
ever, the basic function of the following discussion-namely, as
28 Adfington Musical Temporality
a useful means of drawing out incipient motifs in Adorno's

writings-is kept in mind, and motivates a concluding attempt
to relate de Man's concept of temporality back to a broadly
Adornian framework. This move demands the delimitation of
de Man's approach, but in compensation harnesses some of the
critical force of the older philosopher's thought.
De Man and Temporality

Paul de Man is best known to students ofliterature for his writ-
ing on interpretation. He is preoccupied specifically with the
difficulty of interpretation and the impossibility of ultimate
readings:
[De Man] is a critic who declares reading itself to be in some sense an

"impossible" activity; who asserts the aberrant or error-prone nature of
all understanding; and who argues (notoriously) that every form of
knowledge-from primitive sense-certainty to pure reason, from ethics
to history and politics-is somehow contingent on the radically figural
character oflanguage (Norris 1988, 105).
Picking up from Nietzsche's view of language as a set of tropes

and metaphors whose figural nature has long since been conve-
niently forgotten, de Man charts the impossibility of all theory,
in so far as it
aims-as most theories do-to achieve a sense of having thoroughly

mastered the relevant problems and issues. To de Man, such illusions
are precisely what criticism has to give up as it comes to recognize those
deviant linguistic structures, or elements of rhetorical "undecidability,"
that work to undermine any form of self-assured hermeneutic under-
standing (Norris 1988,42).
The paradox of saying such a theory-of constructing a theory

that seeks to undermine the very process of theory construc-
tion-is not lost on de Man. In an essay on Nietzsche which
may be seen as a self-defense, de Man argues that such a tau to-
logical position may be tenable if it is sufficiently earned by the

overall deconstructive thrust of the analysis. This does not pre-
vent the theory from suffering the contingency and equivoca-
tion that, as it itself points out, are features of all texts.
De Man approaches this complex of problems specifically
through the prism of temporality. In his essay "The Rhetoric of
Temporality," de Man pictures human temporality as a form of
permanent "negation," a disturbing existential predicament
from which the self continually wishes to hide. The human ob-
session with preserving experience as a means of establishing
identity is little more than a "defensive strategy" (de Man 1969,
191), akin to cowardice:
The temptation exists ... for the self to borrow, so to speak, the tempo-
ral stability that it lacks from nature, and to devise strategies ... [to es-
cape] "the unimaginable touch of time" (de Man 1969, 181).
De Man argues that this anxiety to root and preserve in the face
of change finds its principal and most influential expression in
nineteenth-century aesthetic ideology. This holds that art al-
lows an act of unified perception-a "perfect, unimpeded com-
muning" where "thought overcomes its enslavement to the
laws of time, contingency and change" (Norris 1988, xviii, 28).
De Man believes that this ideology has taken control of our un-
derstanding of language, as demonstrated by the widespread
privileging of symbolic over allegorical modes of expression.
Symbolic language has come to be understood as allowing the
coincidence of thing and representation; object and word are
treated as "part and whole of the same set of categories":
Their relationship is one of simultaneity, which, in truth, is spatial in

kind, and in which the intervention of time is merely a matter of con-
tingency (de Man 1969, 190).
But de Man believes that human temporality dictates that

this view of language is wholly illusory. His principal theme is
that while language thinks to transcend temporality, it is in fact
irrevocably temporaL He proposes that allegory, not symbol, is

a better model for the operation of language as a whole. In al-
legory, "time is the originary constitutive category" (de Man
1969, 190). Only allegory acknowledges "the inevitable failure
of all attempts to make meaning coincide with the realm of in-
tuition" (Norris, cited in Street 1989, 102), a failure that hu-
man temporality makes inevitable:
Allegory holds out against the lure of transcendence or visionary pa-

thos, insisting absolutely on the timebound nature of all understanding
and the plain impossibility that language should achieve-as the Ro-
mantics desired-a state beyond the antinomies of subject and object,
mind and nature, the temporal and the eternal (Norris 1988, 10).
The allegorical sign refers not to an object with which it coin-

cides (a spatial relationship) but to another sign that precedes it
(a temporal relationship). Allegory thus implies an "unreach-
able anteriority" (de Man 1969, 203), the possibility of "pres-
ence" being denied by our perpetually changing condition. As
a result understanding is always "in arrears." It may be consid-
ered complete "only when it becomes aware of its own tempo-
ral predicament" (d~ Man 1983, 32). And because this
predicament cannot be avoided, so allegory must no longer be
seen as the suspension of truth, but rather constitutes the "pur-
veyor of demanding truths" (de Man, cited in Norris 1988,
100).
Thus while symhol is exposed as "a veil thrown over a light
one no longer wishes to perceive" (de Man 1969, 191), allegory
implies no such deception. However, allegory is not the only
literary form to give such insight. Irony also acknowledges our
temporal predicament. The ironic mind is characterized by an
endless "dialectic of self-destruction and self-invention" (de
Man 1969, 202). Irony comprises a series of disruptive acts
that shatters the illusion of an organic, linear time and re-
peatedly forces one back to a blind present. Allegory and irony
thus place differing emphases on the notions of past and
present. Both, however, share "the discovery of a truly temporal
predicament" (de Man 1969, 203)-be it through the un-

graspability of the present on account of its continual reference
to what was, or the relentless reforging of a present that is re-
fused the solace of a rationalized past. These are "the two faces
of the same fundamental experience of time" (de Man 1969,
207), and de Man believes that all language ultimately suc-
cumbs to one of these two modes of problematic signification.
Accordingly, he is moved to speak of the "temporality of all lan-
guage" (de Man 1969,204).
While temporality is obviously afforded a central place in
de Man's criticism, precisely what constitutes that temporality
is never summarily stated. There are good reasons for this, giv-
en de Man's concern with the limitations of symbolic language.
However, isolated comments in his writings give at least a sense
of the ramifications of the idea-the way in which adherence
to a despatialized notion of temporality necessitates the prob-
lematization of many related concepts. These are often of the
greatest relevance to musical experience. For instance, de Man's
claim that irony divides temporal experience "into a past that is
pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever
by a relapse within the inauthentic" (de Man 1969,203) is typ-
ical of a skeptical approach to the notions of past and future.
De Man views linear time as a fiction that originates as a direct
response to the equally illusory synchronicity of vision:
The misleading synchronism of the visual perception which creates a

false illusion of presence has to be replaced by a succession of discon-
tinuous moments that create the fiction of a repetitive temporality (de
Man 1983,131-32).
De Man points here to the way in which society's prevailing be-

lief that the visual domain is opposed to the temporal, rather
than subject to it, dictates the attempt to construct the tempo-
ral in a contrasting manner. Yet behind both synchronicity and
succession lies the same obsession with identity, manifested in
the latter case as an orderly sequence of identical (and thus
32 . Adlington Musical Temporality
basically "repetitive") moments. De Man thus concisely attacks

both conventional formulations of "presence," and the sequen-
tial sprawl frequently treated as its opposite. Temporality, prop-
erly understood, makes room for neither.
This skeptical approach to linear time leads to memory and
expectation being treated with equal suspicion. For instance,
the convention of positing an anticipated future, extending
"forward" in symmetrical relation to the remembered, "back-
ward" -extending past, betrays only a profound anxiety about
the vulnerability of the temporal condition-a need to be reas-
sured about the orderly progression of human existence. It rep-
resents no necessary truth about human temporality. Memory,
too, with its notorious fallibility and selectivity, is viewed skep-
tically. In his essay "Literary History and Literary Modernity,"
de Man's reading of Nietzsche makes it clear that he is sympa-
thetic to Nietzsche's rejection of remembering: "Moments of
genuine humanity .. ,are moments at which all anteriority van-
ishes, annihilated by the power of an absolute forgetting" (de
Man 1983, 147). De Man describes the idea that memory is
able to link past to present as a "naive illusion":
The power of memory does not reside in its capacity to resurrect a sit-
uation or a feeling that actually existed, but it is a constitutive act of the
mind bound to its own present and oriented toward the future of its
own elaboration (de Man 1983,92).
The act of remembering, in other words, provides evidence not

so much of a mind's past, but of its desire for a verifiable future.
As can be seen, de Man is at pains to resist the translation
of concepts from the spatial to the temporal domains. Heideg-
ger's discussion of "dwelling" within Holderlin's poetic lan-
guage, Gadamer's concept of "horizon" denoting the
generalized background against which specific perception takes
place, and Jauss's talk of "concretization" and "defamiliariza-
tion" are all criticized on these grounds. Similarly, the discus-
sion of temporality in terms of organic metaphors-of
generative processes such as the growth of a tree-is guilty of a

dangerous inexactitude. Metaphors of this kind may appear, on
the surface, to identify the aspect of consciousness that resists
the stultification of social control. Yet they in fact serve ~o per-
petuate that control of the subject by envisaging temporality in
visual terms. De Man makes this point in poetic fashion:
In becoming trees, we have lost the precarious situation of being on the

earth to become creatures ofthe earth ... [with the result that we] inte-
grate [ourselves] with the soil without opposing it (de Man, cited in
Norris 1988, 169).
The image of a parental begetter, conceiving in a moment of

unmediated presence, is similarly false, by dint of positing a
moment of original meaning which temporality can never ac-
commodate (de Man 1983, 164). Inevitably, Marxist criticism,
with its adherence to a "linear temporal development," is vul-
nerable to criticism from this perspective. De Man, in remarks
reminiscent of Adorno's critique in Negative Dialectics, claims
that
a truly historical poetics would attempt to think ... in truly temporal di-
mensions instead of imposing upon it cyclical or eternalist schemata of
a spatial nature .... Such a poetics promises nothing except the fact that
poetic thought will keep on becoming, will continue to ground itself in
a space beyond its failure (de Man 1983,242).
It is ironic (and perhaps so intended) that de Man capitulates

to the imagery of space the moment he has damned it. Lan-
guage is not readily stripped of its spatial imagery.
De Man's comments correspondingly alert us to problems
attending the very idea of temporal "form"-a basic assump-
tion in so much writing about music. For instance, it follows
from de Man's reservations about conceiving the temporal in
relation to the visual that, "in a purely temporal world, there
can be no perfect repetition, as when two points coincide in
space" (de Man 1983, 76). The very concept of repetition is
false, insofar as it suggests that criteria for determining identity

on a spatial plane may be unproblematically translated to the
temporal world. Similarly, de Man asserts that "form is never
anything but a process on the way to its completion" (de Man
1983,31). To attribute temporal organization with the sort of
self-containedness and completion normally held to be charac-
teristic of spatial objects is to indulge in a false and ideological-
ly dubious comparison.
If temporal experience presents no "form" in any literal
sense, how might it be positively characterized? The image, in
the passage just quoted, of thought "grounding itself in a space
beyond its failure" is suggestive in this respect. It evokes the
Nietzschean idea of the "moment," a concept intended as an al-
ternative to conventional notions of the present. According to
David Wood, the Nietzschean moment denotes a "self-exceed-
ing that is not appropriated, but that, precisely, risks the self,
and does not aim at a higher reconciliation" (Wood 1989, 29).
De Man and Nietzsche together suggest that, far from being
predicated upon the notion of presence, temporality is proper-
ly conceived as an exploding of the present-not in a Heideg-
gerean "thrownness" along axes of past and future, but in a
denial of self-appropriation. The relevance of this suggestion to
certain sorts of musical experience will be assessed shortly.
However, de Man's analysis is hardly marked by the euphoric
connotations of Nietzsche's formulation. On the contrary, his
account is almost unrelievedly pessimistic in tone. For de Man
the recognition of temporality can barely be conceived as a lib-
eration. Rather it represents the brutally truthful admission of
our enslavement to change.
So far, de Man's understanding of temporality has been
traced via his writings on language and literature. Yet de Man
was himself a keen musician, and music is not totally neglected
in his theorizing. It is a particularly prominent element of his
essay "The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida's Reading of
Rousseau" (de Man 1983, 102-41). In it de Man elaborates
upon Rousseau's view of music as a "mere play of relation-
ships," lacking substance or content. This he contrasts with

language's illusory representational immediacy:
[Music] "means" the negation of all presence. It follows that the musi-
cal structure obeys an entirely different principle from that of struc-
tures resting on a "full" sign, regardless of whether the sign refers to
sensation or to a state of consciousness. Not being grounded in any
substance, the musical sign can never have any assurance of existence.
It can never be identical with itself or with prospective repetitions of
itself (de Man, 128).
Music does not collude with language's pretense of transcen-

dent signification. Its meaningfulness rests not on an assump-
tion of the perfect coincidence of sign and meaning, but in a
system of functional relationships that are intrinsically and
overtly temporal. Music's temporality is assured and ever-
apparent, regardless of the subject's interpretation of its con-
tent-it is implicit in its nature as sign ifian t. This is well
captured by de Man's description of music as a "persistently
frustrated intent towards meaning" (de Man, 129). Music may
therefore stand as a model for language's actual operation: mu-
sical organization presents more overtly the temporality that
exists in all acts of interpretation. It "could be said to [be] ... the
allegorical art par excellence' (Street 1989, 103).
De Man gives some intriguing details in his account which
suggest how speCific musical elements take their place in this
view of music. He suggests that, "considered as a musical sign,
the single sound is in fact the melody of its potential repetition"
(de Man 1983, 129). The single tone signifies nothing-except
in so far as it implies a further sound with which the "meaning-
ful play of relationships" may be established. The implication is
(presumably) that melody is permanently touched by this con-
tingency of meaning. Successive pitches only further delay the
arrival at a definitive "meaning." I will review the plausibility of
this suggestion in a moment.
Harmony is opposed to melody in de Man's reading.
Harmony misleads in presenting "the mistaken illusion of
consonance within the necessarily dissonant structure of the

moment. Melody does not partake of this mystification" (130).
This is consistent with Rousseau's rejection of harmony and
privileging of melody, for the former contravened his concept
of music as a "play of relationships" in its suggestion of the pos-
sibility of immediate meaning. De Man suggests that even
Rousseau's own writings are fashioned after the ideal of mel-
ody: despite their narrative semblance, they
do not "represent" a successive event, but are the melodic, musical, suc-
cessive projection of a single moment of radical contradiction-the
present-upon the temporal axis of a diachronic narrative (de Man,
132).
De Man's analysis is undoubtedly simplistic, as may be seen

by taking a closer look at his understanding of melody. He in-
terprets melody as a denial of the illusion of presence, for it re-
fuses the symbolic ideals of closure, sufficiency, or immediacy
of meaning, while it is just these ideals that (tonal) harmony
appears to possess. But the distinction is difficult to sustain ab-
solutely, at least in so far as melody has been treated for a good
part of its history as the horizontal presentation of vertical so-
norities. In tonal music, melody is precisely subordinate to har-
mony, its decorative "freedom" only giving pathos to its
confinement. And this subjugation of melody to harmony is by
no means unique to tonality; intervallic atonal idioms arguably
perpetuate such an arrangement. In striving to separate melody
from the symbolic realm, de Man also conveniently ignores the
traditional conception of melody as a form of rhetoric, a con-
ception that overtly recognizes the proximity of melody to lan-
guage in certain respects. Despite these difficulties, it is not
impossible to imagine a type of melody that conforms more
closely to de Man's stipulations, as I will presently suggest in re-
lation to one of my musical examples.
What of de Man's interpretation of harmony? The claim
that harmony connotes an immediate and unproblematic rela-
don between sign and signified would certainly seem to be sup-

ported by the widespread practice of attributing individual
harmonies with functions. In tonal music these functions are
normally syntactic in kind; in post-tonal music the "function"
ascribed to a harmony may take the form of a more generalized
.structural or motivic role. Neither kind of harmonic function
has the degree of semantic autonomy associated with words.
The "meaning" of individual harmonies is frequently entirely
dependent upon the particular harmonic context in which they
appear. On the other hand, that meaning is unambiguously as-
cribed to a particular harmony, despite its context-dependence.
To this extent harmonic function is not treated as a partial or
incomplete signification, contingent on further developments.
This is the case even if those further developments (that is, the
continuation of a harmonic sequence) show a prior ascription
to have been mistaken. In such an instance the initial meaning
ascribed was wrong, but not incomplete. So de Man's descrip-
tion of harmony receives a measure of support from the pre-
vailing practice of attributing harmonic function.
Whether such functions-such unambiguous meanings-
are literally possessed by musical sounds is a matter for debate.
It has been argued that the determinacy of meaning suggested
by (among other things) harmonic functionsi.s, a property of
descriptions of music rather than the music itself Music lacks
the subject and predicate necessary for such semantic determi-
nacy (Nattiez 1990).2 So, if this argument is accepted, harmo-
ny does not "itself" deny temporality but is subject to social
conventions of description that do. But then this is precisely
the argument that de Man has against symbolic literature: lan-
guage, literally viewed, may never escape its temporality, but
certain uses of it perpetuate the illusion that it can. It is this
perpetuation that de Man resists for all his worth. And along
similar lines there emerge grounds here for a comparable
2. I grapple with this argument in greater detail in my doctoral thesis

(Adlington 1997).
critique of musical temporality. Some music colludes with the

illusion of symbolic signification. It retains faith in the coinci-
dence of its configurative elements with their meaning, and
thereby seeks to deny temporality. Music that takes a more
skeptical approach to this connection may be understood as ac-
knowledging more openly our "temporal predicament."
Some Examples
In this section I intend to point to passages in music that may
be understood as recognizing temporality in a de Manian
sense. I shall focus particularly upon the way in which certain
musical strategies may be understood to undermine the credi-
bility of presence, or, put another way, to insist upon the "self-
exceeding," the "denial of self-appropriation" referred to above.
My purpose is not only to demonstrate how music may indeed
'''mean' the negation of all presence" (de Man 1983, 128), but,
in reference to the earlier discussion of Adorno, to indicate the
possibility of a temporality that more completely avoids com-
pliance with social concepts of time. An undue dependence
upon musical notation is to be avoided therefore, in so far as
the notation gives credence to the idea that music is necessarily
linear in form-a view that was disputed earlier in this paper.
While the following analyses make heavy use of notated exam-
ples, it should be borne in mind that these examples are includ-
ed to assist in the identification of interpretative problems,
rather than as representations of actual musical experience.
De Man's critique implies that tonal music conspires
against temporality. It is therefore to post-tonal music that I
turn for my examples, although I intend to suggest that one of
the most effective ways in which post-tonal music "negates
presence" is through the problematization of tonal syntactical
functions. But two simpler examples are considered first. Ex-
ample 1 shows a melody extracted from a passage in Birtwistle's
Earth Dances. Melodic writing of this sort closely reflects de
Man's injunctions. It is perhaps difficult to prove that Birt-

wistle's melody is not intended to delineate harmonic collec-
tions. But in resisting segmentation more readily than inviting
it, it must be distinguished from tonal melody. There is never
much sense of a determinate function being fully articulated or
arrived at. Rather, the melody appears to leave itself perma-
nently open to the redefinition that subsequent pitches may
bring about. In this sense it is an apt reflection of the self-ex-
ceeding, non-appropriative temporality that de Man adum-
brates in his literary criticism.
}>=72 [sempre legato]
l~~ Ii i :bIt !i
ppp
~3~
~ '-....-/ ------- '---"
~3~
"---""'----
liJ\J.\J1l-----1J~J ~tl«iJl.
~3, r."I
q Is '1 '1 JI~ ~J#J )Ig
~~ ~!lPJ I 112 J1 j I§ J. J 1m
--
T
-------
.-3---,
-----------
.-3., .---3----,
'-'" ~
~«i). q I~ * i 1LoJdd Ii J IJ
Example 1. Birtwistle, Earth Dances, figure 25 (winds only).
This interpretation is strengthened by the basis of much of

Birtwistle's writing in varied ostinato. Birtwistle works to hide
the humble origins of his material (Hall 1984)-certainly var-
ied ostinato is not obviously apparent in example I-but the
result nevertheless bears traces of these origins. Example 2
shows more clearly how varied ostinato gives rise to a
~ [J=~~~ ______ _ -----------~--
.IT j .IT ;
f
.IT f ff
,..---:- --- --------

.IT f
f ff f
ff
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; j
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---- ---
,
f
If
... ----- --. ...-_ .. ------
ff f, .D f ff f
---------------
ff
f ; !
----------------------
.
_ •... 1
f .f
Example 2. Birtwistle, Secret Theatre, 2 mm. before figure 62 (lower strings only).
permanent contingency of meaning. The repetitive aspect of

this ostinato argues against construing it as a series of distinct,
individually meaningful units. Yet the variation makes it diffi-
cult to identify anyone unit as a source of meaning for the
whole passage-for there is no basis on which to assume that
one form is the "original" and the others the derivation. And
even the meaning of differences between forms is contingent
upon future variations. The ostinato endlessly defers its signif-
icatory function in a potentially infinite extension of its own
possibilities. In so far as the music has meaning, it resides not
in some discursive linear content that may be traced in a score,
but in that very denial of presence insisted upon by (de
Manian) temporality.
The two Birtwistle examples suggest contrasting ways in
which music may strike away from the syntactical functions of
tonality without resubscribing to the dominance of the sym-
bolic in the guise of "intervallic" harmony. However, novel
forms of harmonic organization can sometimes possess this
same critical potential-particularly when they involve engag-
ing syntactical harmony in a questioning of its own premises.
Some post-tonal music does not completely abandon tonal or-
ganization, but rather works to undermine the functional spec-
ificity normally associated with it. This is achieved by setting
up musical situations wherein traits of functionality survive but
individual chords and contexts are complicated so as to allow
no one function to be unambiguously attributed to each har-
mony. Instead of forming a succession of discretely meaningful
components, a harmonic progression becomes a chain of am-
biguous, incomplete signs, openly acknowledging the illusory
nature of the coincidence of sign and function.
Stravinsky's music provides compelling instances of this
"temporalizing" of tonal syntax, although I shall argue below
that it is by no means a feature of all his neo-tonal writing. The
same must be said of Debussy's music-the dismantling of the
musical present tends to intermingle with material that only
appears designed to celebrate it, as commentators have often
noticed. For instance, Debussy's favored device of chains of
identical but registrally displaced sonorities succeeds in divest-
ing the chord of any conventionalized syntactical function. But
instead the sonority comes to "mean" simply its sensuous self,
stripped of all dependence upon context.
[J =72]
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!'
.,
. /'fi P -.z...:= pp-=
----- pp~ ~
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mOllie/it e{11't( 8emh/ent Pit' cAtrclur q/J'un enrlroU favorable au:r cOII/idoIiCB$.
,b~ w:;;. bh~ bfj; bf8: ~ b~~ h~.~
1'1' 1'1' 1'1' -

~ "'?' ''i' ....
Example 3. Debussy, Jeux (piano duet version), 2 illill. before figure 11.
SaM rlgueur
\" Jl ;;-:- ---.... b... -----... ~
-
), ~. ? - ... •"".. ij
--
-... L !
-.:
\
~ ~"""""'l "-'--" '~~1

Salis rlgueur
b~ ~ ~,..~ i~ - ..-
"" .-
! p dml-l' ct .... ,)I({t:/I/(,
-- --== P
~'~ ~
m.
#__ • i ,~
.J-.---'~,---
~
JlI . I
"o!! •
-----------===~======= ---------
Jl-~=~=~~=.
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..- --.. :-;---....
I .---i..
=-
These contrasting attitudes to the present may be traced in

a passage from the piano duet version ofJeux (example 3). Be-
tween figure 11 and Sans rigueur, and for the first four bars of
figure 11, single complex harmonies are toyed with, but a lack
of harmonic movement or variety effectively neutralizes their
syntactical potential (see my simplified harmonic account, ex-
ample 4). 3 This contrasts sharply with the first four bars of Sans
rigueur, and its transposed repetition four bars before figure 14.
Here, delayed voice leading and congealed appoggiaturas at
once encourage and problematize the ascription of syntactic
functions. Six complex harmonies may be identified in this
passage (they are numbered in example 4) and they each affect
the possible syntactic roles of the other. Harmony no. 1 may
initially be construed as a dominant seventh on p# with added
false relation, the initial D forming a lower appoggiatura to the
E that immediately follows. Interpreted thus, the harmony
marks a return to the F# dominant seventh predominating at
figure 11 (example 5). The d complicates this interpretation
however, and the upward movement of the bass F# to G togeth-
er with the continuing sixteenth-note activity on E, D, C, and
B~ recommends an alternative interpretation that sees the P~ as
a lower appoggiatura to an implied C dominant ninth (exam-
ple 6). As my example suggests this interpretation also receives
support from an earlier passage in example 3. But to treat har-
mony no. 3 as a C dominant ninth obviously ignores the N in
the upper voice, and pushing this pitch to the foreground again
suggests alternative interpretations. Por instance harmony no.
3, lasting only a sixteenth note, could function merely as an ac-
cented passing chord between two statements of the same
whole-tone scale (harmonies 2 and 4, the move to octave Ns in
the outer voices representing a limited form of resolution-see
3. The following discussions of harmony in Debussy and Stravinsky involve

a simplification of the musical surface that is only tolerable because they are
intended to make a general point about the potential of post-tonal practice,
and not as an exhaustive analysis of the actual music concerned.
example 7). There again, having reached harmonies 5 and 6,

harmony no. 4 is more likely to be understood retrospectively
as a chromatically altered N triad, forming a relation of 1#5/3_
V 7 (example 8). Even this is dependent upon accepting the
lower appoggiatura indicated in my example. Debussy's
, -_ _ _'t'....:.mpo_ralize<!· syntax
@]
~" ~ ...
i' ~: :; lit! ~:;; Iii ~~;

[""'
I- lot' i" i" [
I
I
\.
12.111 1 6*: III,:! 11#:
··U \i:1 \t; . ;:J:
.Example 4. Harmonic summary of example I : I,:! I,:!
3.
CD-CD
" AI *
fI AI ~ b. ~ ... v or
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Example 5. Example 6.
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CD CD
fl .11_ ~
f\ AI #
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Example 7.
b.
Example 8.
Ii.
46 Adlingto~ Musical Temporality
functional intentions are admittedly somewhat less ambiguous

by this stage, though one might nevertheless be encouraged
initially to treat the upper C of harmony no. 5 as an essential
note, by analogy with the preceding two-bar phrase.
Conflicting contexts and affinities thus confront a listener
with a series of signs· that endlessly redirect, failing at anyone
moment to present sufficiently firm ground for the ascription
of a definite syntactical function. It should be noted that this is
an aspect of the music's content that cannot be straight-
forwardly gleaned from the sequence of events presented in a
score: its essence lies rather in a problematization of the idea
that temporal experience comprises merely the accumulative
assimilation of sequentially presented information. Still, my
notated examples and the linearity that they suggest rather
work to obscure this fact: surely talk of "redirection," "affini-
ties," and "contexts" merely implies a continued, even height-
ened dependence upon the past and future of linear time?
Indeed, Debussy's harmonies could be read as signaling a radi-
calization of the limited constitutive relation of the tonal
present to past and future-a recognition that the present is in
fact nothing more than an assembly of memories and anticipa-
tions.
But this is, I suggest, to be confined by the linear ideology
that tonal syntax helps perpetuate. What makes us believe in
the existence of past and future in tonal music, other than an
uncritical confidence that it constitutes an objective fact about
the form of experience? It is the fact, first, that the present is
made partly dependent for its meaning upon what is not
present, and, second, that that dependent relationship takes
the form of a connection that is not only aurally recognizable
but also readily encoded in memory, thus encouraging the
music's concretization as a fixed sequence, extending back into
the past and (a listener presumes) forward into the future. 4
4. The robustness of memory for tonal syntax remains a matter for debate
however: see Adlington 1997 for a summary of existing views on the matter.
Without these aurally recognizable connections we "forget" the

past and are "unable to predict" the future-which amounts to
their ceasing to exist. This is the case for much non-tonal
muslC.
Such an eradication of past and future might seem only to
promise a glorification of the present, abstracted from its situ-
atedness in historical time. But the post-tonal harmonic strate-
gies under discussion here cleverly avoid this total
abandonment to an ahistorical present. The residual syntactical
connections that they contain are sufficient to ensure that the
present continues to be treated as contingent-which is to say
dependent upon something absent, as it was in tonal music.
But the music's simultaneous suggestion of conflicting tonal
interpretations, and the brevity with which anyone interpreta-
tion remains viable, make it resistant to any linear hardening.
The contingency of the tonal present remains, but the possibil-
ity of salving that contingency in terms of a singular past and
future is withdrawn. Inevitably, using a score to identify the na-
ture of the problem tends to result in the foregrounding of a se-
quential purview. But the overlappings and re-readings
involved in my descriptions are intended to counter this ten-
dency, refusing the uncomplicated linearity that the notation
so seductively presents.
Stravinsky's "neoclassical" harmony sometimes exhibits
similar traits to those discerned above in the extract from }eux.
It is not consistent in this respect, however. Frequently, Stravin-
sky's reckless deployment of the diatonic scale provides little
more than a passingftisson while keeping a basic tonal orienta-
tion (and thus a keenly articulated "present") firmly in place.
Elsewhere it is difficult to draw a definite line between this
technique and a genuine, de Manian problematizing of the
present. Stravinsky's reception of tonality comes in many dif-
ferent shades and evades categorization or easy formalization. 5
Here I will merely point to some less ambiguous examples,
leaving a thorough assessment of Stravinsky's neo-tonality for
another occasion.
Lento sostenuto Jm 69
~,.,,..~ ~J'-,. i"',.,,..f: ,.,~, ~, ~fL" f: ~I' ... j!

H""
mf
I I,
-I OJ
:
------ <i~U
~ I
i
-
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11<>1
-J
,,~""
r~r'
-'I" .,. .,'
r
I
+-"
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llall
Example 9. Stravinsky, Orpheus (reduced score), mm. 1-6.
The opening of Orpheus illustrates Stravinsky's ability to

work with a diatonic collection in such a way that syntactic
function becomes wholly suspended in a web of temporal de-
pendencies (example 9). The opening bar presents E as a tonic,
but of the Phrygian mode rather than the more conventional
major or minor key. Stravinsky's willingness to move between
modal and tonal implications considerably assists his light
handling of the diatonic collection in this passage. So while the
open fifth in bar 2 (harmony no. 3) appears to confirm estab-
lishment of the Phrygian mode on E, the addition of the low A
(simultaneously with the A in the harp) suggests instead A mi-
nor, harmony no. 3 being reinterpreted as a dominant chord.
But this does not settle the matter, for harmony no. 5 summa-
rizes rather than resolves the ambiguity, sustaining the notes of
harmony no. 4 while adding lower and upper notes that tend
to side with the E tonic-implying a first inversion tonic
chord. The harp's repetition of its first bar further strengthens
the claims of E. Still, the A remains firmly in place, and the
sheer length of this chord is an important factor in its destabi-
lizing function. Its reappearance (as harmony no. 7) is brief but
5. ApproachingStravinsky' s harmony in terms of its "reception of tonality"

is itself arguably confining. My discussion does not endeavor to address the
impact upon his music of jazz or Slavic idioms and the differing syntactical
interpretations that they may imply.
no clearer in functional allegiance, for the intervening chord

(harmony no. 6) strengthens the hand of the disruptive A, if
viewed as a modal "dominant" (example 10). Interestingly, har-
mony no. 6 itself reappears twice, the first time (harmony no.
9) immediately challenging its previous interpretation as an E-
minor seventh because harmony no. 8 so strongly implies a
turn toward C major (example 11). Harmony no. 10 appears
@ (j) CD CD
1\ rrifl~~~
v '" v <9- ..
Example 10. Example 11.
to be as much the outcome of voice-leading decisions of as any

harmonic strategy: it does little, at any rate, to clarify the re-ap-
proach to the contested C/E minor chord, whose third appear-
ance comprises harmony no. 12. The failure to arrive at a point
of harmonic definition with this chord is only emphasized by
its downbeat placement and extended length. In this way, each
harmony in the passage seeks a form of unambiguous linear
clarification that is resolutely absent.
Chromatic examples, closer in some respects to Debussy's
calcified Wagnerisms, may also be found in Stravinsky's music.
Example 12 shows a particularly concentrated passage from the
Credo of the Mass, while example 13 displays an analytical in-
terpretation of its harmonic organization. I have pictured the
passage as suggestive of superimposed, contradictory harmonic
progressions. For every chord, two or more tonal interpreta-
tions are possible. Example 13 should be largely self-explanato-
ry, and so rather than make further detailed observations I will
limit myself to general comments. I view this music as possess-
ing a dense functional suggestiveness. The superimposition of
@ [J ::; 72]
I.
D.
I .,
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. jU-di-ca-ra vi-vos
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B.
FaJ,;.lll
'II - - I ----.-...
i oJ
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36
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• - '!' l'
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t:'I
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.,
t:'I @ ,p.~-
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c.!.
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t:'I
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Example 12. Stravinsky, Mass, Credo, figure 35.

CD CD CD @ CD @ CD 7~
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Ivinsky'S harmonies
ol
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,
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or
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competing
tonal .. Cdlmllb. y' I A\.:vit 1'117 v7 :.f· .! y' n7+ v
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Example 13. Harmonic analysis of example 12.
possible functions makes each harmony thoroughly dependent

upon what is "not present" for semantic clarification, yet be-
cause every harmony shares the same condition, such clarifica-
tion never emerges. It is difficult to think of a more compelling
musical presentation of de Man's "thought grounding itself in a
space beyond its failure." The music is susceptible to descrip-
tion neither in terms of a perpetual present, nor the develop-
mental teleology of spatial time. Rather it prompts us to
recognize the possibility of a temporality wherein determined
meaning is always deferred and spatio-temporal presence per-
manently denied.
Adorno and de Man
I have so far hinted only in general terms at the function of de

Man's concept of temporality in relation to Adorno's. How
readily can de Man's approach be reconciled with Adorno's
critique, and what use would it serve if it could? The suggestion
that these two figures have much in common is not new. In his
book on de Man, Christopher Norris emphasizes the similari-
ties between de Man's thought and Adorno's. Both believed
that
it is only by acknowledging the limits placed upon thought by its ma-

terial and temporal condition that philosophy can hope to preserve
some sense of an alternative, better world .... Adorno, like de Man, re-
jects every form of philosophical or aesthetic ideology that claims in it-
self to transcend the bad antinomy ,of subject and object, individual
experience versus the power of objective dialectical thought (Norris
1988,150-51).
However, their handling of certain issues might more readily

seem to suggest their mutual antipathy. Beyond the broad par-
allels noted by Norris there exist many differences of emphasis.
The notion of temporal "form" is one of these. Adorno's
wholehearted use of spatial conceptions and metaphors in his
discussion of music appears to overlook the possibility, encour-
aged by de Man, that to escape organicist-spatial metaphors it-
self represents a critical act. An expression of Adorno's faith in
the spatial is the repeated tendency of his musical criticism to-
ward a synoptic, even downright conservative, view of musical
form. Reservations have been expressed by other writers about
this aspect of Adorno's approach to musical works. Max
Paddison, for instance, notes
the strange disparity between the sophistication and radicality of his

aesthetics and sociology on the one hand, and on the other hand the
lack of sophistication and the traditional character of his music-analy-
tic method (Paddison 1993, 169).
Of course, given that Adorno is every bit as much concerned

with the activity of the composer as the experience of listeners,
the prioritization of score-based conceptions of musical organi-
zation-which, as I noted earlier, are not necessarily character-
istic of a listener's experience-is not unexpected. It might even
be argued that, in places, Adorno recognizes the diffuseness of
music's various manifestations more fully than those commen-
tators that accuse him of an old-fashioned, notation-based ap-
proach. However, such nice distinctions do not always
characterize Adorno's polemic. In some of his vehement criti-
cisms of contemporary listeners, the visual perspective is indis-
criminately intermingled with the aural. For instance, an
uncritical concept of musical form lies behind his criticism of
commercial music's "culinary moments," which have a merely
"diversionary character," or its "conglomeration of irruptions,"
which are antagonistic to "the organization of the whole"
(Adorno 1991, 29, 36). At such moments the ideal of a holistic
grasp of musical "structure" is brandished with little regard as
to whether it is either appropriate or possible for a listener.
Spatial conceptions of musical organization are not, how-
ever, wholly unchallenged in Adorno's writings-as I have al-
ready sought to argue in this paper. As further indication of the
flexibility that sometimes exists in Adorno's comments on this
matter, I would like to return to an excerpt quoted earlier from
Adorno's essay "The Schema of Mass Culture." Adorno states
that "conflict concentrates past and future in the present," cre-
ating a "dialectical arrest of time" (Adorno 1991, 64). This was
interpreted earlier as supporting Adorno's central concern for a
progressive, dynamic, developmental temporality, one that sus-
pends the ever-same calibrations of empty dock time. How-
ever, there is another way of reading this excerpt. Adorno may
be seen to be attempting the formulation of a temporality that
dissolves the linear arrangement of past and future. The first
half of his statement is relatively easily understood. In conflict
or tension, the past may be said to be present in the now (in the
sense that the now is perceived in antagonistic relation to what
has gone before), and so may the future (in the sense of the ne-
cessity of some outcome-whether it is dominative or negoti-
ated). But what does Adorno mean by the "dialectical arrest of
time"? I suspect it is intended to connote something more than
the mere suspension of empty clock time. Rather it indicates a
transcendence of the entire spatio-linear framework by means
of which the temporal is usually conceptualized. In conflict,
Adorno suggests, past and future fuse, to form a dynamic
present lifted out of its impossible confinement in linear time.
Of course this positive interpretation of "the present" is in
sharp contrast to the deep suspicion of the concept normally
thought characteristic of Adorno. Julian Johnson's belief that
Adorno saw "the inability to proceed, to develop through time"
as "the mark of unfreedom in both the individual and in soci-
ety as a whole" (Johnson 1993, 209) leads him to criticize
'" ., musiC
static . " as
[existing] only in the present; it has no memory and no history. It de-

mands no real attention and no thought .... [It forms part of a culture
that] caricatures the dream of the perpetual present (Johnson 1993,
223).
Here the present is invoked not as salvation from the rational-

ized structures of society (as in "The Schema of Mass Culture")
but as a product of those very structures. Adorno's comments
on memory provide further support for the argument that a
present-dominated temporality is antithetical to his critical
stance. In his article "Music and New Music" (Adorno 1992,
249-68), Adorno argues that, in the rationalized world, "the
equal and quantitative" threatens "the unequal and qualita-
tive," ana bitterly concedes that this "integration and total
elaboration of time ... is not unfitting in an age whose subjects
increasingly relinquish their control over their memory"
(Adorno 1992, 259-60). The erosion of memory is also im-
plicit in Adorno's scathing analysis of formulaic and atomistic
listening in "On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regres-
sion of Listening" (Adorno 1991,26-52). Adorno pictures the
relinquishing of memory as symptomatic of the surrender of

subjective consciousness to the objective forces prevalent in so-
ciety. An individual abandons himself or herself to the present
at the cost of the past, and thereby of history as well. So music
that does not present a meaningful evolving relationship to its
own past must be viewed as ideologically suspect. By failing to
encourage or allow an accumulating grasp of its form, such
music only furthers the sacrifice of the historical subject to the
pleasure-craving present.
Two conflicting readings of Adorno's understanding of the
"present" are therefore possible. On the one hand, the present
is viewed as the locus for the dissolution of the past and future
of rationalized time, and thus holds out some measure of free-
dom for the subject. On the other, the present is viewed as sig-
nifying the abandonment of memory, and thus the subject's
collusion with the false hopes of present-day ideology. Under
the first reading, the present signifies freedom from that very
past-future axis which constitutes the principal social control
upon individual temporality. Under the second, the hypostati-
zation of the present suggests a false, ideologically complicitous
abstraction from history. It could hardly be claimed that both
readings have equal weight in Adorno's interpretation of tem-
porality. Certainly it is the second, rather than the first view of
the present that would normally be thought of as characteristic
of Adorno's critique. But significant motifs in Adorno's
thought suggest that, once elaborated, the first interpretation
could form the basis for a compatible (and dialectically neces-
sary) adjunct to his more explicit reading of musical temporal-
ity.
I noted earlier that the extent of the non-spatial in Adorno's
thought may be disguised by commentators' (and possibly also
translators') tendency to assume that the concepts of "conflict"
or "dialectic" imply sequential development, whereas either
may be understood without such spatio-linear implications.
Other similarities may be found between de Man's concept of
temporality and Adorno's comments. Adorno's awareness of
the dangers of talking about the very possibility of a temporal

"form" is apparent from his disapproving remark that form
bears a certain affinity with the Bergsonian concept of duration
(Adorno 1984,254), which he condemns as succumbing to the
"detemporalization of time." His crucial qualifying clause-
"Duration is implied by the concept of form but is not essential
to it"-indicates his interest in entertaining a concept of tem-
poral organization that is not reducible to a static visual shape.
The idea of "process" is central to this competing perspective.
A short passage in Aesthetic Theory considers the various ways
in which art works may be viewed as processual (Adorno 1984,
252-56). Adorno's use of the concept is complex, but it is dear
from this passage that it is intended as an opposition to con-
ventional, static notions of form:
Above all, the work of art is processuaJ in so far as it is a relation be-

tween a whole and its parts. In other words, this relation itself is a pro-
cess of becoming. The work of art is not a totality in the sense of a
structure integrating the parts: once objectified, the work keeps on pro-
ducing itself in response to the tendencies at work in it (Adorno 1984,
255).
For Adorno, therefore, process refers to more than the gradual

unfolding of "temporal" art forms such as music, cinema, or
theater. Even art forms normally considered "static" fail to ex-
tinguish the motion of processual forces, which "remains visi-
ble qua motion in this standstill" (Adorno 1984,253)0 Adorno
takes his most de Manian turn in the following passage with his
consideration of the effect of process on meaning:
What becomes engulfed by this dialectical turbulence is the notion of

meaning. Since a negative judgement must be passed on history, the
unity of process and result is unattainable. Increasingly, the individual
moments refuse to accommodate themselves within a preconceived to-
tality, opening a cleavage that destroys meaning (Adorno 1984,255).
Here, Adorno is emphatic that process places itself in opposi-

tion not just to totalized forms but also to self-present mean-
ing. It thereby signals a moment of freedom within art.
Adorno's concept of process, as described in this passage,

has a striking affinity with de Man's understanding of tempo-
rality. It provides further indication, alongside Adorno's
cautious articulations of a non-spatial "present," that de Man's
thought is far from incompatible with a wider Adornian frame-
work. This is not to claim that de Man's position is representa-
tive of Adorno's complex and contradictory overall stance on
temporality. But its use as an "adjunct" (as I earlier described it)
seems to me beyond question. And part of its value consists in
revealing the potential for ideological resistance in music that
Adorno consistently denounces. Debussy and Stravinsky do
not fare well under Adorno's critical gaze, yet I have suggested
above how it is their music that (on occasion) most effectively
resists compliance with a rationalized temporality. Present-day
inheritors of Stravinsky's harmonic strategies have also some-
times managed to retain this critical edge, yet would generally
be viewed as unlikely beneficiaries from Adorno's criticism.
The repetitive and non-developmental aspects of the minimal-
ism of Steve Reich remain in many ways totally antithetical to
an Adornian aesthetic. Yet a piece like the Variations for
Winds, Strings and Keyboards is nothing other than a sus-
tained exercise in the problematization of diatonic functions;
its density of allusion and continuous, anxious harmonic
movement largely prevent the establishment of any unambigu-
ous semantic reference point. 6 And Stravinsky's more complex,
chromatic harmony finds more than a passing resonance in the
music of Louis Andriessen. In his De Tijd ("Time"), it is not
simply the superimposed pulse layers that are pertinent to the
subject matter, but also the harmony which perpetually defers
definition, urging the exceeding of the spatio-temporal frame-
work that the pulse layers are simultaneously connoting. The
grating dialectic of temporalities that results forms a striking
parallel to the intermingling of antinomial contradictions that
6. In fact this piece is something of a one-off, its perpetual harmonic "slip-

page" contrasting with the more abrupt (and less frequent) harmonic shifts
characteristic of much of Reich's music.
Adorno cautiously articulates in "The Schema of Mass

Culture." It might be seen as the epitome of the wider musical
critique of temporality for which I am arguing here.
Contrariwise, the shortcomings of compositional ap-
proaches favored by Adorno are also revealed by a de Manian
perspective-a fact quite in keeping with Adorno's own insis-
tence upon the ingrained falsity attending all conceptual
thought. It becomes preeminently dear that the tendency of
music toward linguistic logic-a phenomenon discerned by
Adorno in the "cognitive character" of Schoenberg's music
(Adorno 1973b, 124)-is damaging at the same time as it is
(according to Adorno) laudable. Conceived thus, music risks
sacrificing that very allegorical character that allows it to act as
an exemplar for self-exceeding, non-spatial temporality.
If de Man serves to qualify some of Adorno's summary
judgements on particular musical idioms, the reverse is also
true: Adorno's framework demands the qualification of de
Man's discussion of temporality. Principally, Adorno would
loudly refuse the idea that we may rest content with the effort
to articulate the non-spatial-as if that did not involve the very
engagement with the symbolic that recognition of the tempo-
ral presumed to dismantle. Adorno possibly sensed that the val-
ue of particular types of musical experience lies precisely in the
resistance they exert against symbolic rendering-in other
words, against linguistic description. This might account for
Adorno's own failure to articulate openly the sort of interpreta-
tion of temporality I have outlined here: its presence in his
writings is hinted at rather than explicitly stated, alluded to
rather than directly confronted. From Adorno's standpoint, the
necessity of philosophical engagement unquestionably re-
mains: social critique demands an involvement with the sym-
bolic concepts of that society, and it is in this light that the
Hegelian picture of the developing subject remains a necessary
verbal counterweight to more dominant tendencies that pro-
mote repetition and stultification. But the falsity attendant
upon any conceptualization of temporality demands that the
possibility of an alternative be kept in mind-one that resists

description or depiction and that is also perhaps better heard
than visualized. De Man's single-mindedness in articulating
this alternative temporality (albeit in rather disparate form)
perhaps takes him too far in the direction of a false encapsula-
tion. But it at least helps us to recognize its possibility, its rele-
vance to Adorno's project, and its centrality to musical
expenence.
References
Adlington, Robert. 1997. "Temporality in Post-Tonal Music." D.Phil. diss.,

University of Sussex.
Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund. 1973a. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B.
Ashton. London: Routledge.
- - - . 1973b. Philosophy 0/Modern Music. Trans. A. G. Mitchell and W
V Blomster. London: Sheed and Ward.
- - - . 1977. Introduction to the Sociology 0/ Music. Trans. E. B. Ashton.
New York: Seabury Press.
- - - . 1981. In Search ofWagner. Trans. R. Livingstone. Trowbridge: New
Left Books.
- - - . 1984. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. C. Lenhardt. London: Routledge.
- - - . 1991. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Ed. J.
M. Bernstein. London: Routledge.
- - - . 1992. Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modern Music. Trans. R.
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Buck-Morss, Susan. 1977. The Origin o/Negative Dialectics. Hassocks: Har-
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Musical Temporality.

Perspectives from Adorno and

This paper focuses upon Adorno's critique of musical tempo-

discern in his philosophy a resistance to sociohistoric dogma at

Adorno's Critique ofMusical Temporality

which objects and events are presented but essentially extrane-

For time cannot be a determination of outer appearances; it belongs

So time may not be understood to exist in itself, or as an ex-

Only when Spirit is fully self-aware-when the knowing

In this way, the subject surrenders its freedom of contempla-

[The] unregulated running riot [in undifferentiated time] contradicts

Hegel does not move beyond this analysis to discuss the

Adorno develops the Hegelian idea of the self-conscious sub-

A truly dynamic temporality is the corollary of a truly free, indepen-

Reified and rationalized thought increasingly stultifies the pro-

time, of particular importance to Adorno, itself relates back to

It need not be so. Whenever behavior in spare time is truly autono-

Adorno not only documents the malicious spread of rational-

profound expression of the relations of domination within the

Temporality in music, as in true thought, Adorno argues, must proceed

For Adorno, Beethoven-or more precisely, certain pieces of

Symphony, Beethoven achieved an unsurpassed "degree of free-

a technique of permanent beginnings .... His music is devoid of recol-

Stravinsky's musical time is a dehumanized process of measur-

Negative Dialectics, Antinomy, and the Concept of

In broad terms it is this framework, with its oppositi~n of ra-

Hegel's own principle that no concept can be supposed to fall

claiming duree as a "particular and privileged mode of cogni-

In isolation, the time of subjective experience along with its content

For, as mentioned earlier, the subject can only claim a measure

be treated as guilt-free or blameless. Truth claims-such as that

framework does not allow this. Composition becomes split be-

The empty passage of time, the meaningless transience oflife was to be

Adorno notes that it is this very thematicization of time, the

which concerns a grotesque distension of dock time-a dis-

They are the expressive-dynamic and rhythmic-spatial modes oflisten-

fulfilling domination of time and, in its highest manifestations, trans-

Here Adorno explicitly connects his dynamic and repetitive

making the connection explicitly. And then there is the ques-

As with Hegel, contradiction, with negation as its logical principle,

Yet it is the Hegelian concept of dialectic, with its possibility of

suggestion that dialectical musical form is an apt manifestation

resolution, presents no sequential form. The irreducible con-

1. These are issues I confront in greater detail in my doctoral thesis

A review of where we stand in relation to Adorno's critique of

temporality as essentially developmental, rather than repetitive

a useful means of drawing out incipient motifs in Adorno's

De Man and Temporality

[De Man] is a critic who declares reading itself to be in some sense an

Picking up from Nietzsche's view of language as a set of tropes

aims-as most theories do-to achieve a sense of having thoroughly

The paradox of saying such a theory-of constructing a theory

logical position may be tenable if it is sufficiently earned by the

Their relationship is one of simultaneity, which, in truth, is spatial in

But de Man believes that human temporality dictates that

irrevocably temporaL He proposes that allegory, not symbol, is

Allegory holds out against the lure of transcendence or visionary pa-

The allegorical sign refers not to an object with which it coin-

predicament" (de Man 1969, 203)-be it through the un-