Adorno’s American-written essay attacked commodified music and rebutted Benjamin’s optimism about film.

Evidence

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, his scholarly production continued to be prodigious. His first piece written in America, “On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Hearing,” appeared in the Zeitschrift in 1938.80 Continuing his generally critical evaluation of contemporary music, the article served as a rebuttal of the more optimistic analysis of the social significance of another mode of popular culture, the film, which Benjamin had contributed to an earlier issue61 and to which we shall return shortly. Once again, Adorno attacked the false harmony of much contemporary music. Instead, he argued for a new asceticism, which would imply the promesse de bonheur in its very denial of the fraudulent happiness of affirmative art. And also as before, he stressed the end of true subjectivity in society and in the art it produced. “The liquidation of the individual,” he wrote, “is the particular signature of the new musical situation.” — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 576

Categorization

• XREF: Foreshadows the Adorno-Benjamin debate over mass culture that continues in the next chapter; connects to the later famous Adorno vs. Benjamin film/aesthetic exchanges. — connects to: Adorno dismissed Benjamin’s stance as a psychodynamic defense mechanism. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 1515

Broader Connections

• Adorno dismissed Benjamin’s stance as a psychodynamic defense mechanism. #expands (0.80) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 1515