Defamiliarization reveals the concert-attending ritual as pure attention to a nonverbal sign-system

Evidence

So it turns out that to assess the full originality of Adorno’s historical vision, we must try to bring a new unfamiliarity to some of the social phenomena we are accustomed to take for granted: to stare, for instance, with the eyes of a foreigner at the row upon row of people in formal clothing, seated without stirring within their armchairs, each seemingly without contact with his neighbors, yet at the same time strangely divorced from any immediate visual spectacle, the eyes occasionally closed as in powerful concentration, occasionally scanning with idle distraction the distant cornices of the hall itself. For such a spectator it is not at once clear that there is any meaningful relationship between this peculiar behavior and the bewildering tissue of instrumental noises that seems to provide a kind of background for it, like Arab musicians playing behind their curtain. What is taken for granted by us is not apparent to such an outsider, namely that the event around which the concert hall is itself established consists precisely of attention to that stream of sound patterns entering in at the ear, to the organized and meaningful succession of a nonverbal sign-system, as to a kind of purely instrumental speech. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 48

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘eyes of a foreigner’ gesture is Shklovsky’s ostranenie and Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt deployed as critical method; also recalls Adorno’s own defamiliarizing social phenomenology. — connects to: Ritual binds members through shared experience of awe rather than shared belief — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 871; Perceived musical qualities like ascending notes reside in experience, not sound waves — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 144; The body functions as a sign surpassed toward meaning (+2 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: Jameson uses an estrangement device (the concert hall made alien) to demonstrate exactly how Adorno’s historical method works — form performing its own argument, the concert and its silent audience rendered as arbitrary ritual. Dense because the content (what music is) and method (defamiliarization) fold into each other.

Broader Connections

• Attention is not an organ or substance but a dynamic state of cognitive unison #expands (0.78) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 518
• Ritual binds members through shared experience of awe rather than shared belief #qualifies (0.75) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 871
• The body functions as a sign surpassed toward meaning #qualifies (0.72)
• Singing together bodily enacts the imagined community as unisonance #expands (0.72) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 551
• Perceived musical qualities like ascending notes reside in experience, not sound waves #corroborates (0.70) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 144