Purging harmony from art produces a false positivity that evacuates meaning.

Evidence

What is qualitatively new about the most recent developments in art may be that, as a result of its allergy towards harmonizations, it is even attempting to eliminate them as having already been negated. Truly a negation of the negation, this leads to the fatal flaw in any such procedure: a self-satisfied transition to a new positivity, the lack of tension observed in so many of the paintings and musical pieces of the decades following the war. False positivity is the technological location of the loss of meaning. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 683

Categorization

• DEFINE: “False positivity” is coined here as the technological site where meaning is lost, a key Adornian diagnostic term.
• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School material on the culture industry and to Adorno’s doctrine that negation must not harden into a new affirmation.