Adorno framed jazz as ritualized submission of the individual to the collective

Evidence

Jazz was seen as giving an ostensibly individual touch to the quality of being a standardized commodity, as indicating a society which had to develop and inhibit its productive forces simultaneously. Jazz, the summary stated, was a rigid ritual revealing the subjection of the ego to the collective. Adorno concluded, with reference to another of the characteristics of jazz, that `jazz is, at the same time, asserting the primeval significance of the relation between couplet and refrain, and bringing it into its own again: for the singer or dancer is hardly anything more than a human sacrificial victim, albeit a substitute one’. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 233

Categorization

• DEFINE: The ‘standardized commodity with an individual touch’ formula is the seed of Adorno’s later culture-industry pseud-individualization thesis.
• DEEPTHINKING: The jazz essay’s core paradox — a music of liberation that Adorno reads as ritual sacrifice of the self to the collective — is worth sitting with as a test case for whether politically charged art criticism can be argued from technical form at all.
• XREF: connects to: Adorno read jazz syncopation as illusory individual breakout masking collective subjection — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 879; Adorno traced jazz’s authoritarian implications to its military-march origins — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 568; Adorno read jazz as the subject ridiculing itself, then generalized to all art — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1416 (+2 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Adorno read jazz syncopation as illusory individual breakout masking collective subjection — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 879; Adorno traced jazz’s authoritarian implications to its military-march origins — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 568; Adorno read jazz as the subject ridiculing itself, then generalized to all art — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1416 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Adorno read jazz syncopation as illusory individual breakout masking collective subjection #expands (0.95) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 879
• Adorno held that authentic poetry demands immersion in individuality to reach collective language #complicates (0.72) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 547