For Adorno, the same music could degrade the ego yet also point beyond reification

Evidence

In Wagner’s music, as opposed to jazz, Adorno saw precisely in its moments of degeneration something good as well, namely an abandonment of the ego which was more than mere masochism: aspects of a form of self-abandonment which pointed beyond reified existence. But in regarding the structural law governing Wagner’s music as the concealment of the process of production by means of the outward appearance of the product, he saw this music, too, as having taken on a commodity character. Its commodity character involved more than mere deceptive wish-fulfilment on the part of the buyer; it also involved a concealment of the work which had produced the commodity. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 881

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Adorno’s ambivalent concept of commodity character in art — concealment of production is the operative meaning, not just buyer’s wish-fulfilment.
• XREF: Connects to Adorno’s ‘On the Fetish-Character in Music’ and his famous jazz essays; also to the reification theme from Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness. — connects to: Adorno read esoteric musical technicalities as indices of total social disorder — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2181