THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#16, JUNE-AUG/2023
According to Adorno, autonomous works of art, by virtue of their peculiar attuned-outsider perspective, are ideally positioned to provide a kind of social critique. Although implicated sociohistorically in the advance of technorationality — in fact, because they are so implicated — musical works are able, in rearticulating the pool of available musical material, to expose the poor state of human relations within late capitalist society. Through their fidelity to an expressive tradition, and the internal logic with which musical material is reformed and extended, autonomous works have potential for providing insight into the problems that plague modern living. They are also able to present, through their form, a model of a future noncoercive collectivity. Through form, within the play between discrete aspects and their coming together in the creation of the work, we can glimpse a model of progressive sociality. Jazz is also thought to embody “sedimented” sociohistory, although in its case Adorno wants us to focus on how it is distributed and consumed rather than on its formal characteristics, the poverty of which, we are told, is testament to the music’s commitment to its affirmative role in consumer society. The principles motivating the creation of jazz works have little to do with artistic expression but rather exist to facilitate works being (re)produced, marketed, and consumed with ease. He writes, “Jazz is a commodity in the strict sense: its suitability for use permeates its production in terms none other than its marketability.”[1] It could be argued, and Adorno more or less declares this, that the version of “jazz” on which he is focused is one appropriated (that is, extracted and made appropriate) from the African American cultural milieu, in which heterophonia, collaboration, and open-ended play are minimized to draw to the fore values in keeping with mainstream sensibility. If we, contra Adorno, retain or attempt to recover what is not captured — that which evades and that which is rejected (jazz work as constellatory play of distinction in communion, and between black life and how it shows up in the mainstream) — we find a creative practice that bears little resemblance to the culture-industry drudge Adorno characterizes it as.[2] In fact, it may be that jazz work is also able to present a prototype for alternative forms of social organization. The possibility of this source of critical activity demands consideration.
In the absence of creative autonomy, how does jazz achieve its critical distance? How do expressive practices that are inextricably tied to — and, indeed, are dependent on — extra-artistic material develop with the independence necessary for effective opposition? How is it possible for heteronomous expressive work to stand apart from the general social field? Building on discussions concerning peculiarities of black subjectivity it is essential to consider black expression’s attuned outsiderness within the specific historical and material conditions from which it emerged. These conditions provide an alternative vantage point to that of radical music of the European tradition. The heart of the discussion will rest on a reading of Nahum Chandler’s illuminating interpretation of W.E.B. Du Bois’s set of ideas about the unsettling, yet potentially revelatory, sensation of “looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” This analytic provides an invaluable framework through which to better appreciate the distinct conditions under which the black modern was (is) formed.[3] Within jazz studies, double consciousness is often taken to narrowly denote the “transculturation” and “creolization” that has helped shape the tradition. Here I will draw to the fore the significance of the contradictory nature of African America — the critical character of its obligatory retention of two conflicting positions: that of heterogeneous difference (inhuman, African, internally differentiated) and that of the hegemon (human, white, tending toward homogeneity and resolution). I am keen to show how the reduction of African captives to commodity, coupled with the imperative that these enslaved be subject to the juridical, civil, and symbolic laws of their captors, created an insoluble contradiction. Alongside their near-comprehensive dehumanization, it was necessary that these captives retained the potential to exercise will in order that they may fall under the laws that enforced their slave difference; it was necessary for the enslaved to possess the potential to contravene the governance maintaining their subordination. Black America’s enduring embodiment of this illogicality — its impurity and its inherent, internal difference — calls into question the inclinations and priorities of the (supposedly) pure, transparent, unequivocal hegemon it is defined in opposition to. The black modern’s predisposition “toward negation and critique” is formed and nurtured “by virtue of the very act of discrimination.”[4]
The Social Situation of European Art Music
It is very difficult, after reading Adorno, to write on music without taking into consideration what this expressive form has to say about society. Music matters and is not to be taken lightly. It is never pure divertissement, even when it appears so, but is either a corroborator of monopolistic capitalism or a voice of dissent that immanently rallies against the socioeconomic order and everadvancing rationalization of modern and contemporary living. Music does not merely reflect the social and political climate but, through its formal experiments, can bring to light societal failures and present alternatives. To argue a case for jazz as a critical form, within Adorno’s understanding of radicalism, may seem perverse given his jazz critique. For Adorno jazz is the archetypal music of the culture industry, a prime example of the acute fetishization ruining the cultural landscape. The freedom promised by its syncopation and spontaneity, lauded by its early commentators as evidence of its progressiveness, was “less archaic-primitive self-expression than the music of slaves.”[5] It is not only that jazz is unable to set itself apart and reflect on society but also that it is complicit in its own captivity and in the deepening ruptures that continue to alienate individuals. Jazz, as Adorno understands it, is antithetic to radicalism. It is fully compliant with the uses made of it, with its commodification and with the false ideologies of individuality and freedom that mask unyielding control. Radical, autonomous works, while also implicated in “administered society,” refuse to present the damage as anything other than what it is. In contrast to the role that “light music” — a past manifestation of popular music — had as a foil or source of rejuvenation for art music, jazz helps entrench the separation between popular and art, through its complete service to the culture industry. Adorno writes in “On the Social Situation of Music”: In earlier epochs, art music was able to regenerate its material from time to time and enlarge its sphere by recourse to vulgar music. This is seen in medieval polyphony, which drew upon folk songs for its cantus firmi, and also in Mozart, when he combined peep-show cosmology with opera seria and Singspiel. . . . Today the possibility of balance has vanished and attempts at amalgamation, such as those undertaken by diligent art composers at the time when jazz was the rage, remain unproductive. There is no longer any “folk” whose songs and games could be taken up and sublimated by art; the opening up of markets and the bourgeois process of rationalization have subordinated all society to bourgeois categories. This subordination extends to ideology as well. The categories of contemporary vulgar music are in their entirety those of bourgeois rational society, which — only in order that they remain subject to consumption—are kept within the limits of consciousness imposed by bourgeois society not only upon the suppressed classes, but upon itself as well.”[6]
This is a remarkable passage on several counts. In it, we hear of the acute separation of art music from its popular forms, from which it had in the past drawn for inspiration. The musical expression (and so also the experiences) of the subordinate classes used to find its way into the mainstream through its incorporation into art music. Adorno denies the possibility of localized pockets of genuine community within which this revitalizing expression can be nurtured. The passage serves not only as a condensed sociohistory of the relations between art and popular forms — culminating in their severance — it also acts as a defense for the absence in his work of any serious musicological consideration of popular forms. We will return to the issue of Adorno’s evasion of alternatives to European art music.
Adorno begins “On the Social Situation of Music” by pointing out that no music remains untouched by “the contradictions and flaws which cut through present-day society.”[7] Music is fully implicated in these problems, which include acute alienation, permeating all corners of life. Music exists apart from, but its autonomy is sanctioned by — and is, indeed, a consequence of — hot-housed rationalization and the fragmentation of society into a number of specialized spheres of activity. The functional freedom of music needs to be considered alongside the ideology of art for art’s sake, which imbues the separation with an aesthetic value. The intensity of rationalization that accompanied the industrial, economic, and intellectual revolutions of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is a factor in this separation. Perhaps more important, this socioeconomic force employs art — or art’s status as autonomous — as an outlet in which activity that is not easily aligned with the overwhelming tendencies toward scientific and utilitarian virtues is able to thrive (and thus not disrupt the order of the rest of society). Art has a crucial role to play as a sanctioned, cordoned-off site where people are able to fulfill those impulses that have been all but expelled from other areas of life. Art’s irrationality — its unchallenged, self-referential irrationality — is not only separate from but also inextricably tied to rationalization. Where art does appear directly, it is as a commodity, with the market dictating its worth. All music is affected by alienation, although this is manifest in different ways, depending on the extent to which a musical form is willing to accommodate the workings of the culture industry. But Adorno also impresses on us that all roles in society are, to a certain extent, “determined by the [monopolistic] market.”[8] Tracking the historical development of European art music away from its social function within the church and the aristocracy toward bourgeois art helps to root Adorno’s thoughts on the “torn halves” of music.[9] It also provides a way for us to understand the contradiction of music being both of society and set apart from it. This seemingly irreconcilable position is what Adorno calls the “double character of art.”[10] Alongside autonomous music’s being implicated in or at least reflective of society, it is also relatively free of extramusical function.
The work of a musician such as Johann Sebastian Bach, who represents for Adorno the closing stages of heteronomous art music, “still retains some vestiges of a direct social function.”[11] This is demonstrated in the musician’s continued dependence on patron support, but it is also shown formally in the use of shared compositional structure and a compositional open-endedness, allowing for improvisatory performance. In this period the bourgeoisie, although still lacking in political power, begins to dominate both economically and intellectually. And by the end of the eighteenth century, the artist gains freedom from the church and the nobility and begins to produce work that is more in keeping with his own outlook and ideals and with those of his social class. As Andrew Hamilton explains, “Since it no longer fulfills a direct social function, Adorno holds, the autonomous artwork can create its own inner logic, which does not refer to anything external. In its consistency and total integration, form and content become identical; the work is its idea.”[12] Form predominates in this new musical era and in its masked disinterestedness is able to, inadvertently, report on that of which it after all remains a part. The historical movement away from functionality is key to understanding art music’s suitability for critique. Critical musical works both uncover the “barbarism of totalitarian administration” of society and represent what Lambert Zuidervaart calls a “utopian memory.”[13] This insight offered by art — of the present inadequacies and also alternatives to these — is not gained through a direct address. It cannot be read from a work’s content. (In fact, this critical acumen is possible precisely through artworks’ separation from such discourse.) In autonomous music the fragmentation experienced by the modern human is found “sedimented” in musical forms of the tradition. As Adorno tells us, “Through its material, music must give clear form to the problems assigned it by this material [that of the musical tradition] which is itself never purely natural material, but rather a social and historical product; solutions offered by music in this process stand equal to theories.” Art, although isolated from everyday life, holds a unique and necessary function within late capitalist society and, as such, can do no better than simply following the internal logic of its form, and in doing so it highlights the societal deficit. That is to say, composers, in their hermetic pursuit, by working through the musical material left to them by past generations of composers, will make work that, to a significant extent, reflects “the social antinomies which are also responsible for [their] own isolation.”[14]
Behind the Veil
In Philosophy of New Music Adorno accounts for the progressive nature of Béla Bartók’s folk-influenced work by suggesting that the forms adapted by the composer emerged from “south-east” European communities that had evaded (or, more likely, had been ignored by) the accelerated rationalization that accompanied the transformation of Western European and North American economies. He writes, “Truly extra-territorial music (the material of which, even though it is familiar, is organized in a totally different way from that in the Occident) has a power of alienation which places it in the company of the avant-garde and not that of nationalistic reaction.”[15] The idea that Eastern European forms had managed to retain their integrity because of their distance from the hub of rationalization seems similar to the idea suggested by the veteran/doctor-patient of the Golden Day tavern/asylum in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. On a bus journey north, the protagonist bumps into the veteran he had met the previous day at the inn amid much cacophonic drama.[16] Explaining the cryptic sermon he had delivered that day, the veteran describes the opportunity that double consciousness holds for a black person. He tells the invisible man: “down here they’ve forgotten to take care of the books and that’s your opportunity. You’re hidden right out in the open — that is, you would be if you only realized it.”[17] An above-underground, a space where forms are capable of surviving in their difference, “protected” by prejudice against black skin, is seen as an “opportunity.” It is obscurity within which black distinction and heterogeneity can thrive, and alternative modes of expression and thought are explored with fidelity to the black modern. As Ed Pavlić puts it, the space “quarantined by segregation . . . [was] not yet ‘disenchanted’ by modern forces [of] rationalization” and so was able to facilitate distinct forms of thought and expression.[18] And as Adorno allowed for those Eastern European communities that had evaded the machinery of capitalism, we can argue that, to a certain extent, black life occurs under the radar of ever-increasing governance, “down [where] they’ve forgotten to take care of the books.”[19]
As we will encounter in my extended discussion of W.E.B. Du Bois’s grand concept of “double consciousness,” the critical opportunity of this veil can only be adequately appreciated when reunited with its sibling parts: doubleness and double consciousness. For now, I would like to linger in “the shadow of the Veil.”[20] Recall, once more, the vet’s words, and the asymmetry of being both “hidden out in the open” and seeking refuge “down here.” This “place,” defying the laws of physics, is also a situation of having your being scripted out of books, a situation in which your opportunities come about from cooked books, where historical debt cannot be settled because the record has no account of you (and has created no account for you). This pair of simultaneous habitations tells us something concerning the dynamism of black subject formation. It is a double imposition of that persistent but unasked question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” and of fortified prior judgment — the inability and lack of will to see other than what one already expects, what has already been accounted for, that which is already included in the ledger — that veils what Du Bois gorgeously describes as “an undiscovered country, a land of new things, of change, of experiment, of wild hope and somber realization, of superlatives and italics — of wondrously blended poetry and prose.”[21] The idea of the veil, or “veiling,” as it appeared in “The Afro-American” of 1894/95, helped refine a line of inquiry concerned with America’s response to the black presence and status. Nahum Chandler writes that Du Bois argued that the response took the form of avoidance, “a certain denegation, which is the act of ‘veiling,’ hiding or disguising, of the basic question.”[22] The response, an evasion, facilitates an uninterrupted realm of differentiated sociality. Imposed invisibility cordons off the “experimental” generative realm, “an undiscovered country . . . of wild hope and somber realization,” where practices are capable of developing in fidelity with a specific experience and different conditions of being. This insight, wholly absent in Adorno’s dealings with the music, is, in fact, essential to gaining an understanding of jazz’s distinctive relation to, and its place within, the “torn halves” of modern culture.
Black radical thought and practice is animated by acknowledgment of the critical acumen facilitated by the veil. In Bob Kaufman’s poem “Battle Report,” musicians are characterized as agents of a covert operation — “One thousand saxophones infiltrate the city /Each with a man inside” — who draw in unsuspecting “greedy ears,” assaulting them with “noisy artfully contrived screams.” Undercover action is also carried out in “O-Jazz-O War Memoir: Jazz, Don’t Listen to It at Your Own Risk,” although here, perhaps, the offensive is directed toward future or utopian reconcilement, not for the sake of black people but for a reorganization of the human/American as such.[23] Amiri Baraka interpreted Charlie Parker’s artistry as an alternative to physical retribution. He tells us through Clay, the protagonist of his play Dutchman, “Bird would’ve played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty-seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw.” Clay also speaks on behalf of blues vocalist Bessie Smith, who, “before love, suffering, desire, anything you can explain, [is] saying, and very plainly, ‘Kiss my black ass.’ ” And he adds, for those lacking the necessary “second-sight” that “if you don’t know that, it’s you that’s doing the kissing.”[24] On these accounts one could view Louis Armstrong’s Samboesque performance in a new light. Was the congenial, handkerchief-waving musician really an assassin, drawing in the credulous before delivering signifying blows disguised as docility?[25] Kitted out in vaudeville camouflage, was he not contributing to the covert “down there,” “out in the open” operations chronicled by Kaufman and Baraka? Lester Bowie speaks of Armstrong as a revolutionary, who, cloaked in the invisibility cast by the veil, blowing from way beyond its opaque side, infiltrated the mainstream without detection. He tells us, “The true revolutionary is one that’s not apparent. I mean the revolutionary that’s waving a gun out in the streets is never effective; the police just arrest him. But the police don’t ever know about the guy that smiles and drops a little poison in their coffee. Well, Louis, in that sense, was that sort of revolutionary, a true revolutionary.”[26] I am reluctant to detract from Bowie’s musing, which dramatizes the supposed opportunity of the veil so well, but it is necessary to point out — by way of Du Bois’s (and Ellison’s) instruction — that whether gun-waving or poison-slipping, as it presented a problem for purity, black life had to be veiled; it had to be hidden when “out in the open” of the general social field. Black resistance, much less dramatically, is constituted of inadvertent acts of nonabsorbance and nonmalleability, the problem of which is dealt with by the imposition of the veil.
At the risk of getting ahead of myself, I would like to say more here about how black activity in the general social field is often placed under conceptual governance. Aspects of black life that cannot be absorbed into whiteness are obscured, mutilated, or masked to help provide simple opposition to whiteness. It is behind this screen that differentiated, “chromatically saturated” black life occurs. “The Clown,” a piece recorded by Mingus in 1957 on an album of the same name, includes a recitation over a circus-waltz motif, telling a story of black desire for recognition, but it helps to appreciate that what appears aboveunderground is often a denigration of complexity and depth. The clown has, according to Mingus, “all these wonderful things going on inside . . . all these greens and yellows, all these oranges.”[27] Ellison tells of how mainstream literature presents the African American, “a most complex example of Western man . . . , [as] an oversimplified clown. . . . Seldom is he drawn as that sensitively focused process of opposites, of good and evil, of instinct and intellect, of passion and spirituality, which great literary art has projected as the image of man.”[28] The clown’s audience has no interest in the possible range of experience, represented by the clown’s carefully planned routines, which show the breadth and depth of his creativity. They are, however, completely enthralled by an accidental slapstick moment. The lack of interest in his colorful repertoire — the greens, the yellows, the oranges — in favor of its melding into a murky gray, brings the clown widespread success and popularity. At the end of the piece, in desperation, the clown takes his own life, which is met with raucous laughter. The audience is unable to recognize his blackness/humanity even in this extreme act.
The Critical Potential of Being a Problem
Early in “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” W. E.B. Du Bois makes the following declaration: “After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, — a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”[29] Without diminishing the importance of cultural hybridity, highlighted in readings by scholars such as Ingrid Monson and David Borgo, I would like to attempt a more far-reaching understanding of “double consciousness,” toward an appreciation of how it might manifest in the music and, particularly, its role in the critical potential that black expression holds.[30] I have found Monson’s engagement with the concept, and the passing but shrewd reference to Nahum Chandler’s uncommon insight, an invaluable stimulus in formulating a response to Adorno’s misunderstanding of jazz. As we will see, syncopation and swing, thought by Adorno to be evidence of culture industry affirmation, are in fact expressions of the double consciousness that structures black subjectivity and are sites of critical potential.
Creolization within jazz, referring to interplay or synthesis of disparate cultural heritages—and, specifically, to the heterogeneity of its musical sources—is accepted by all but the most Afrocentric of commentators. Amiri Baraka, who writes that “Afro-American art is an ideological reflection of Afro-American life and culture,” also recognizes that “Afro-American use of African rhythm is . . . ‘integrated’ with European musical conventions.”[31] There is broad acceptance, including among those committed to strictly Afrological narratives and analysis, that the tradition has, throughout its history, drawn from a myriad of influences.[32] In a characteristically dispassionate exploration of the centrality of African and European admixture in the establishment and development of the tradition, Monson cautions against unreflective accounts of synthesis that inadvertently obscure and minimize African American experience: “The denial of difference in a cultural field such as jazz, in which African Americans have always been dominant, has often resulted in a failure to acknowledge the influence of African American cultural sensibilities on American society more broadly.”[33] The portrayal of early twentieth-century New Orleans as a city teeming with “brass bands, singing street vendors, black string quartets playing classical European dances (schottisches, mazurkas, quadrilles) and ragtime, and a whole variety of others . . . [along with] blues from the rag man,” cannot be dismissed as romantic fantasy.[34] It is, perhaps, nostalgia, fueled by this “gumbo” narrative, that has led to cursory renderings of double consciousness that fuse it to a nebulous multiculturalism, defusing the specificity of the modern narrative that Du Bois was carefully reconstructing in his constellation of ideas. Consider the following interpretation from David Borgo, for whom double consciousness denotes a synthesis of disparate cultural sources: “Jazz music has exhibited, to loosely borrow W.E.B. Du Bois’ well-known phrase, something of a double consciousness. Much of the impetus for past and present scholarship in jazz studies has been to gain a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which African and European values, resources and imperatives have combined and continue to recombine in this music. From the earliest meetings of downtown Creoles of Color and uptown Negroes in turn-of-the-century New Orleans, jazz has been a multi-cultural music.”[35]
Borgo is not alone in using the term to refer to a marriage of European and African (American) musical sources. Monson, in gentle criticism of Afrologic perspectives, argues that the “vernacular gloss, which sets ‘the black way’ against ‘the white way,’ simplifies a long historical process of cultural confrontation that has resulted in a cultural landscape in which African American and non–African American worlds remain distinct but partially overlapping.”[36] Emphasis is placed on dual heritage and the interplay of separate worlds, which at times coincide, overlap, or synthesize. This redress of the balance away from what Ronald Radano sees as a tendency of Afrocentric thought to “reduce the complexity of lived experience to a static and oversimplified phenomenology of blackness” neglects the crucial critical feature of Du Bois’s work.[37]
Consider the quotation at the start of this section, from the opening essay of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, which is perhaps the most quoted passage in African American critical thought.[38] Within it is contained, in condensed form, the scope of Du Bois’s grand concept, which I, following a broad but by no means unanimous convention, name, somewhat imperfectly, “double consciousness.” This group of historically determined concepts and concept metaphors assists our understanding of the distinct social, psychological, and ontological predicament of African America, as it works its way through the trauma of chattel slavery and wholesale disenfranchisement that was left in its wake. I have already spent time addressing the veil and the communal outin-the-open underground behind it. We also are alerted to the sensation, or sense, of double consciousness that evokes affective implications of “unreconciled strivings” — the feelings triggered by looking at oneself through another’s eyes. There is also the gift of second-sight, the potential of prophetic wake-fulness and insight. My focus will follow Monson’s own, that is, twoness, and, more specifically, the cohabitation of hegemon and difference. Taking a contemplative pace, I will extend Monson’s survey with a desire to open up jazz scholarship’s consideration of double consciousness to the historical-ontological implications of Du Bois’s formulation, and, ultimately, to explicate how such a reading of the black modern forces a revised response to Adorno’s jazz critique.
The African American was born out of violent displacement, geographically and ontologically. This rupture that inaugurated the black modern was anything but the slow crawl of Hegelian spiritualization.[39] The difficulty of their being (human, or less than human) announced itself as they awaited being loaded onto ships. As Chandler writes, “Even on these shores (of Africa), the question of identity would not be so much a question of relation to origin, for that, perhaps, was not the relevant concept. Rather, the experience or sense of difference or differences that specified identity as the difference . . . would be decisive.”[40] The “problem of the Negro” in America came into effect on the West African coast. In but one manifestation of this unsettling difference, Chandler reveals that it is not only, or even primarily, that the enslaved straddled two cultural worlds, two sets of symbolic significance, two sets of ethical/legal obligation; it is also that the very institution of slavery, and its laws and codes of conduct, was built on a contradiction in slave/captor civics: (a) African slaves were less than human; (b) but in order for slaves to be held accountable to the laws that supported this claim, legislators needed to acknowledge slaves’ potential for contravening them (which is to say, it was necessary to recognize slaves as human). The refusal to behold the enslaved as fellow human beings rubbed uncomfortably against the requirement that these alleged inhuman beings be recognized as subjects capable of breaking the laws concerning their inhumanity, to which they were bound. As Chandler lays it out: “The premise of the idea of slavery in America and thus of the American law of slavery is the denial of the humanity of the slave, where the essential mark or sign of the human is the capacity to be or become a subject, yet the slave can be made subordinate to the law only by recognizing his capacity to transgress it, his will, hence his subjectivity. Hence, the law of slavery ‘had to’ recognize precisely that which has been understood in the dominant discourse of right in Europe and America since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the basis for a recognition of humanity.”[41] The slave subject is unable to be reconciled — at once human and inhuman (and distinctly, American and African/black). The enslaved were branded as inhuman in order to contain their presence within the general social field, but the threat of black will (slave humanity) necessary to hold them accountable to that legal standard frustrated such efforts. This unwelcome irregularity upset the aspired-to purity of a closely guarded notion of the human and of America. Chandler’s reading of Du Bois alerts us to the fact that this predicament of white purity is inextricably tied to the “problem of the Negro”: “This difference produces a heterogeneity within the general social field of American life and history, a field that would be organized according to a racist logic of categorical distinction and be given over to a narrative of purity, of the self-repleteness and historical becoming of a white subject, a historical and social being supposedly arising of its own initiative, unmarked by any sign of difference. It would be understood to realize the purity of its own self-image in every form of historical and social activity.”[42]
It is clear that any generalization of black doubleness cannot simply adapt and map the specificity of blackness onto a more general social context. Rather, double consciousness allows us to approach this other context and its particular dilemmas by way of its relation to blackness. Chandler calls for us to “generalize and therefore radicalize W.E.B Du Bois’s formulation of the African American sense of identity . . . to American identities as such and to modern subjectivities in general.”[43] This suggestion is startling on first read (and perhaps only because of it being so exceptional that concepts formulated by way of black life be used to address society at large). We are called on to consider modern being as such, and white subjecthood in particular, through Du Bois’s conceptual lens. The aforementioned radicalism is not simply that double consciousness can be made to apply to nonblacks — a Bakhtinian “we are all constituted by multiple and competing voices,” which, if anything, tends toward a suppression of the difference in which blackness was founded and obscures the tendency toward purity and resolution of whiteness. Rather, what is most radical about Chandler’s challenge is that the generality requires that we revise, or at least unsettle — or, as Chandler says, “desediment” — white subjectivity in light of the “problem of the Negro.” This formulation that we might apply to the modern as such comes about from the violence enacted in the name of “racial distinction,” the result of a series of impossible ontological contortions on the part of the enslaved/black. The “grounds of historical and social existence and identification were placed in question” by the problematic of blackness — double consciousness shakes the infrastructure of white being.[44] A closer reading of Chandler does not so much contradict Monson’s “generalization” of double consciousness as explain why its white application is also a radicalization of it. I will now turn back to Adorno and offer this more substantial rendering of the black modern to set up what would be an upsetting suggestion to his ears: that black expression is not affirmative but rather founded in unavoidable conflict and irresolution, “which places it in the company of the avant-garde.”[45]
Syncopation
In the 1953 essay “The Perennial Fashion—Jazz,” Adorno corrects his earlier denial concerning the roots of the music: “However little doubt there can be regarding the African elements in jazz, it is no less certain that everything unruly in it was from the very beginning integrated into a strict scheme.”[46] What Adorno gives by way of recognition, he takes back in his dismissal of jazz and blackness, more broadly, as grounded in submission and, as such, perfect fodder for the culture industry and other mechanisms of control. And to those commentators of his earlier essay “On Jazz,” keen to soften Adorno’s blows by pointing to the fact that his criticism was not of the musical practice, the principles of structuration, and the material — commentators who want us to extrapolate Adorno’s note that “jazz is not what it ‘is’ . . . ; it is what it is used for” (i.e., not “real jazz” but its industry appropriation) — he makes clear that “the abuse of jazz is not the external calamity in whose name the puristic defenders of ‘real’ unadulterated jazz furiously protest; such misuse originates in jazz itself.” He goes on: “The Negro spirituals, antecedents of the blues, were slave songs and as such combined the lament of unfreedom with its oppressed confirmation.”[47] The implication is that jazz, as progeny of sorrow songs (and the apparent arrested development of black subjectivity), shows a long-standing propensity toward obedience and affirmation. This is as reasoned as Adorno gets in his dealing with black modernity. His inability to see past the figure of the bourgeois is depressing. Where, perhaps, the characteristic irreverence of his brand of Hegelian Marxism would be most welcome, he is dogmatic, approaching the modern exclusively by way of the dominating consciousness of the era. But it must be noted that, through this blinkered outlook, which understands the black subject as irrevocably subordinate and harboring a tendency toward sadomasochism, Adorno’s condemnation of syncopation — this centerpiece and structuring principle of jazz, and supposed evidence of the music’s freedom and spontaneity — appears to hold some truth.
In his essay “Adorno on Jazz and Society,” Joseph Lewandowski offers a thoughtful engagement with Adorno on the question of the affirmative nature of jazz and syncopation. Lewandowski acknowledges that the appropriated styles such as “sweet jazz,” which dominated the airwaves, particularly at the time Adorno was writing “Über Jazz,” could not account for all that the music was, despite Adorno’s “undifferentiated account.”[48] Nevertheless, Lewandowski argues, “Adorno’s critique of jazz retains a certain validity precisely because ‘real’ jazz is about just playing, swinging as one feels, and feeling as one swings. ‘Real’ jazz is about affirming one’s right to autonomous, individual expression — to affirm who one is — within a social collectivity.”[49] Yet in light of the insight provided by Chandler’s deep and expansive reading of Du Bois, we must reject this interpretation of the music, along with Adorno’s inadequate address of the black modern. Rather than obedience and unreflective servitude on the part of slaves, and the subsumption of “unruly” “African elements” into a “strict scheme” of whiteness, we find that the very institution, and ground of modern subjectivity as such, was dependent on this black difference.[50] To recap my reading of Chandler’s interventions, and to extend them slightly: Africans had to be inhuman to fulfill their role as slaves and foil to the (American/white) human; black being’s irresolution and difference (internal and otherwise) helps define the limit of white/American subjectivity, characterized by a tendency toward homogeneity. Simultaneously, slaves’ potential for willfulness (this mark of humanity) had to be acknowledged for them to be brought under white/American laws (civic, symbolic, or otherwise). Both of these positions had to be held at once, and this corruption was compounded by the invasion by African elements of what it meant to be human and modern. The African American does not flatten social antagonism or ontological contradiction but operates within, by what Hortense J. Spillers terms “ambivalence,” by which “we might mean . . . abeyance of closure, or break in the passage of syntagmatic movement from one more or less stable property to another, as in the radical disjuncture between ‘African’ and ‘American.’ ”[51]
By way of this more substantial and accurate understanding of the black modern, we can return to this issue of syncopation and swing so central to Adorno’s jazz critique. First, we must take issue with Adorno’s musicological interpretation of syncopation. In light of his scant address of black America we should not take at face value his description of an “ostensibly disruptive principle” that never really disturbs “the crude unity of the basic rhythm”; an “embellishment” of the “objective sound . . . which is unable to dominate”; a subjectivity that has no real autonomy but is incessantly “beaten down by . . . the beat.”[52] This is not to say we must reject it. In fact, I would agree that, from a certain superficial outlook, syncopation is a “swinging around” a beat it cannot or refuses to overturn. We do encounter in the music a “centrifugal swing,” or “rotary perception,” all of which, despite their, at times, unwelding expansion, suggest spherical, bounded play, maintaining hierarchical relationships between the syncopated/variation and principal.[53] This characterization of syncopation as a fettered dance of rhythmic variations, always in deference to a quietly metronomic beat, hits precisely on Adorno’s misgivings concerning claims of supposed freedom. The problem with Adorno’s description is not its inaccuracy. If we confine ourselves to the surface impression of this rhythmic play, if we are content with Adorno’s dismissal of syncopation as a superficial, secondary element of music making, and, most important, if we accept the reduction of black life to a footnote, failing to connect the rhythmic phenomena to a distinctive subject formation, Adorno’s conclusions might have credence. If, however, we take seriously Chandler’s augmenting response to Du Bois’s call — concerning double consciousness, doubleness, the difference that Africa introduces — we start to appreciate swing feel as a musical manifestation of specific conditions of black modern being — as a suspension of the resolution between contradictory but twinned positions. Blackness is manifest in syncopation and swing as the play between regular beat and heterogeneity of variance. Let us keep in mind that the black presence “displace[s] the distinction” that tends toward keeping the white, the American, and the modern untainted by difference. It does not accomplish this by way of revolution. Rather it calls white purity into profound doubt. It complicates and disturbs racial logic and distinction. It questions the veracity of unadulteration. Black syncopation is not only impure owing to its African elements — consider how swing might be understood as the result of a ghosting imposition of an “outside” beat, say, a 6/8 over the regular 4/4 or, more radically, a Yoruba Elewe rhythmic complex over metronomic insistence[54] — but also, as explored here, owing to its “refus[al] to abide by the oppositional logic” of principal beat against a heterogeneous movement. In doing so, it ridicules the imposed polarization. It holds both regiment and “variants” in one hand, forcing out into the open the duplicity of unasked questions that maintain a “racist logic of categorical distinction.”[55]
Adorno is entangled in a problem of purity of the beat — a problem of black offbeat. He is right to note that syncopation does nothing to overturn the underlying pulse. What he fails to realize is that jazz emerges from a subject constituted by the holding of contradictory positions. It is a subject that cannot collapse into its hegemon. Putting to one side the outside “African elements,” the black modern was founded in a subjugating conundrum that required it to be internally compromised. Syncopation should not be seen as an opposing pole to the main beat but as a shaking of that beat, a loosening of the soil around its roots, preparing the ground for its displacement. The doubleness of swing, the holding both counted-out beat and the plethora of micro (and quantum) movements away from it, convulses the structure. It is a curiosity that Adorno reprimands syncopation for not overturning the maintained pulse. He also draws attention to the untruth of commentary that treats syncopation as an emblem of freedom within a social milieu structurally unable to sanction it. He seems to want to have his cake and eat it, too. Perhaps it is more useful for us to consider syncopation in relation to Adorno’s adumbration of the “double-character of art.” Earlier, I touched upon a sociohistorical explication of art as both social fact and autonomous — a trajectory from patronage, social function, and communality toward hermetic independence. Adorno also identifies this double character within artistic production and aesthetics. He tells us in Aesthetic Theory that “art is true insofar as what speaks out of it — indeed, it itself — is conflicting and unreconciled. . . . Art must testify to the unreconciled and at the same time envision its reconciliation.”[56] That is to say, one criterion for successful, authentic art is a refusal of closure; it is a keeping in play of distinction even as the work comes together or unfolds as a more or less unified piece. Speaking specifically of the conflict between the demands of an artwork’s content and its appearance, but also what can be brought to bear on the numerous conflicts that occur in the production, performance, and appreciation of a work, Adorno writes, “Adequate performance requires the formulation of the work as a problem, the recognition of the irreconcilable demands, arising from the relation of the content [Gehalt] of the work to its appearance, that confront the performer.”[57] Rather than dismissing syncopation as a pretense of independence under which “blind obeisance” prevails, might Adorno not read from it an “abeyance of closure,” of conflict? Or hear an irreducible difference brought on by the imposition of irrational racial logic? Can we not say that jazz — and syncopation and swing more specifically — speaks the truth about the irreconciliation of modern life? Do they not shake the ground on which racial distinction is founded? Does not blackness and black expression as “movement of the productive elaboration of difference” contribute, in a critical capacity, to Adorno’s thesis on the critical potential of art?
In his book Adorno in America David Jenemann draws our attention to an obscure fragment from the theorist’s engagement with jazz music. In response to Max Horkheimer’s request for input on an early draft of Syncopation, a script by fellow émigré and filmmaker William Dieterle, Adorno’s telegram offers this: “Scene in record shop ought to be high spot. . . . Suggest Kit playing six different records for different customers. . . . Six records should make satanic concert which by and by is integrated into one mighty jazz piece.”[58] In these few words Adorno happens on the distinct condition of black subjectivity and character of jazz music. His insistence that this climactic scene be a “satanic concert,” performed by an ensemble of six gramophones, echoes a persistent theme in black readings of the music, starting with Ellison’s invisible man speaking of his desire “to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing ‘What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue?’—all at the same time.”[59] In a recent talk at the New Museum Fred Moten shared a disembodied portion of sound artist Ben Hall’s Some Jokers (for Five Turntables, Basement, Ice Cream and Sloe Gin), a multimedia retelling of that mascon. Hall’s syncopating turntables create a tremolo effect, a collective vibrato, tremor. Moten hears it as a “multi-stereophonic schmear . . . a caressive crash . . . black and blur.”[60] This impurity of sound, this syncopation of versions, shakes our listening expectations and cognitive arrangement, sounding what we did not know we could hear. Adorno’s thoughts on Syncopation, despite the vehement denial of jazz as a site of possible critique, inadvertently gesture toward the alternative engagement between black expression and radical art presented here.
<excerpted from Fumi Okiji, Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018) pp.31-48.
[1] Theodor W. Adorno, “On Jazz,” trans. Jamie Owen Daniel, Discourse 12, no. 1 (1989–90): p.48.
[2] My meaning here is similar to that of both James Martin Harding and Fredric Jameson, who point to Adorno’s alleged lack of exposure to jazz of the African American variety. See James Martin Harding, “Adorno, Ellison, and the Critique of Jazz,” Cultural Critique 31 (1995): 129–58; and Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2007), p.141.
[3] W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover, 1994), p.2.
[4] Hortense J. Spillers, “The Idea of Black Culture,” CR: The New Centennial Review 6, no. 3 (2006): 26.
[5] Adorno, “On Jazz,” p.53.
[6] Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Social Situation of Music,” in Essays on Music, selected, with introduction, commentary, and notes, by Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp.427–28 (emphasis mine).
[7] Ibid., p.391.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Adorno uses this term in a response to Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In this seminal essay Benjamin mourns the loss of aura in high art, while showing great enthusiasm for new modes of mass reproduction such as cinema. Adorno, in a letter written in 1936, the year “Über Jazz” was published, writes to Benjamin: “Both bear the stigmata of capitalism, both contain elements of change. . . . Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up. It would be romantic to sacrifice one to the other.” Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928–40, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) p.130. Adorno’s discussion of art and light music in “On the Social Situation of Music” uses a very similar formulation. In this period, art is “bourgeois” owing to its audience, the ability of the artist to function within market capitalism, and, perhaps most importantly, because of its being a “portrayal of bourgeois self-understanding.” Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p.48.
[10] . Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p.252.
[11] Max Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp.220–21.
[12] Andrew Hamilton, “Adorno and the Autonomy of Art,” in Nostalgia for a Redeemed Future: Critical Theory, ed. Stefano G. Ludovisi and Agostini G. Saavedra (Rome: John Cabot University Press, 2009), p.257.
[13] Robert W. Witkin, Adorno on Music (London: Routledge, 1988), 12; Lambert Zuidervaart, “The Social Significance of Autonomous Art: Adorno and Bürger,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48, no. 1 (1990): pp.61–77.
[14] Adorno, “Social Situation of Music,” p.393. For Adorno the functional distance required for such insight bars music’s direct involvement in extramusical institutions and forms of communication. The passivity of such an enterprise is not lost on Adorno. Neither is its obstruction, not only to the revolutionary commitment of more politically inclined Marxist aestheticians such as Hanns Eisler but also, to a certain extent, Adorno’s own utopian hope for a “true collective” that would embody a more empathetic way of being with others. See Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977), p.42.
[15] Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music (London: A&C Black, 2003), p.36 n5.
[16] The narrator had just been expelled from college owing to a series of events in which he allowed a white trustee of the college to trespass on the “communal underground.” There they encountered tales of inadvertent incest and a riot at the asylum/ tavern but, most damningly, according to the narrator, a violation by the doctor-patient of the accepted conventions of interracial conduct.
[17] Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, (New York: Vintage International, 1947), p.154.
[18] Edward M. Pavlić, Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p.82. According to Pavlić, a key feature of this is that “syndetic cultural patterns resist the stable and ordering influences of modern rationalisations” (p.22). See also James Snead’s provocative reading of Hegel’s dismissal of the possibility of African subjecthood in “On Repetition in Black Culture,” Black American Literature Forum 15, no. 4 (1981): pp.148–49.
[19] Ellison, p.154.
[20] W.E.B. Du Bois, “Of the Passing of the First-Born,” in The Souls of Black Folk (1903; New York: Dover, 1994), p.128: “And thus in the Land of the Color-line I saw, as it fell across my baby, the shadow of the Veil. Within the Veil was he born, said I; and there within shall he live, — a Negro and a Negro’s son. Holding in that little head — ah, bitterly! — the unbowed pride of a hunted race, clinging with that tiny dimpled hand — ah, wearily! — to a hope not hopeless but unhopeful, and seeing with those bright wondering eyes that peer into my soul a land whose freedom is to us a mockery and whose liberty a lie.”
[21] W.E.B. Du Bois, “Beyond the Veil in a Virginia Town (1897),” in Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, Addresses, 1887–1961, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p.50.
[22] Nahum D. Chandler, “Of Horizon: An Introduction to ‘The Afro-American’ by W.E.B. Du Bois—circa 1894,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 2, no. 1 (2010): p.17 (emphasis in original).
[23] Lorenzo Thomas, Don’t Deny My Name: Words and Music and the Black Intellectual Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), p.105; Bob Kaufman, “Battle Report,” in Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (New York: New Directions, 1965), p.8; Bob Kaufman, “O-Jazz-O War Memoir: Jazz, Don’t Listen to It at Your Own Risk,” in Cranial Guitar: Selected Poems (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1996), p.96. For more on Kaufman and jazz see Lorenzo Thomas’s Don’t Deny My Name and Amor Kohli’s “Saxophones and Smothered Rage: Bob Kaufman, Jazz and the Quest for Redemption,” Callaloo 25, no. 1 (2002): pp.165–82.
[24] Amiri Baraka, Dutchman, in The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, ed. William J. Harris (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1999), p.97. The play appeared before his black nationalist period and was critically acclaimed, earning Baraka — then known as LeRoi Jones — an Obie Award for best off-Broadway play. For a dispassionate reconsideration of Baraka’s gender politics from his black nationalist period, showing how gender crosses race in his radicalism in a way that required him to propagate the “disempowerment” of black women, see Daniel Matlin’s “‘Lift Up Yr Self!’ Reinterpreting Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Black Power, and the Uplift Tradition,” Journal of American History 93, no. 1 (2006): pp.91–116. Interestingly, although approaching from a different direction, Ellison, in “The Art of Fiction: An Interview,” describing the transformation that the narrator of Invisible Man goes through as that from “a would-be politician and rabble-rouser and orator to that of writer” (Shadow and Act, p.76), appears to agree with Baraka’s assertion that art becomes a conduit for protest. We should keep in mind, however, that Ellison rejected suggestions that the novel was a protest.
[25] Dizzy Gillespie, although critical, acknowledged his influence. Quoted in a Nat Hentoff article, he says, “If it hadn’t been for him, there would have been none of us. I want to thank Mr. Louis Armstrong for my livelihood.” “When I Pick Up That Horn, That’s All: The Life and Music of Louis Armstrong,” Gadfly, March/April 2000, www.gad flyonline.com/archive/marchapril00/archive-louisarmstrong.html.
[26] Lester Bowie quoted in Charles Hersch, “Poisoning Their Coffee: Louis Armstrong and Civil Rights,” Polity 34, no. 3 (2002): p.380.
[27] All transcriptions from “The Clown” are my own. Charles Mingus, “The Clown,” on The Clown, Rhino Records 8122-79641-5, 2013 [1957], compact disc. The narration is of a story written by Mingus and was improvised by Jean Shepherd. From Nat Hentoff ’s liner notes: “The Clown has improvised narration by Jean Shepherd who at the time was active on the New York jazz [scene] and was also a truly original radio improviser — his instruments being memory, desire, and a very singular imagination that made his wordscapes unlike [sic] no one else’s on the air. Mingus told me how The Clown had originated: ‘I felt happy one day. I was playing a little tune on the piano that sounded happy. Then I hit a dissonance that sounded sad, and I realized that the song had to have two parts. The story, as I told it first to Jean Shepherd, is about a clown who tried to please people — like most jazz musicians do — but whom nobody liked until he was dead. My version of the story ended with the clown’s blowing his brains out, with the people laughing and finally being pleased because they thought it was part of the act. I liked the way Jean changed the ending; it leaves more up to the listener. We rehearsed once at my house, and then did it in the studio. His narration changed every time. He improvised within the story. As for the musicians, Jimmy is the leader in this piece. We play around what he does. When we do a work in a place where we have no narration, Jimmy is the clown.” The piece has been explored as a “satirical self-portrait” by Jennifer Griffith in “Mingus in the Act: Confronting the Legacies of Vaudeville and Minstrelsy,” Jazz Perspectives 4, no. 3 (2010): p.361. See also Mario Dunkel, Aesthetics of Resistance: Charles Mingus and the Civil Rights Movement (Zurich: Lit Verlag, 2012).
[28] Ralph Ellison, “The Seer and the Seen,” in Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage International, 1995), p.26.
[29] W.E.B. Du Bois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” in The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover, 1994), p.2.
[30] See Ingrid Monson, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Ingrid Monson, “Doubleness and Jazz Improvisation: Irony, Parody, and Ethnomusicology,” Critical Inquiry 20, no. 2 (1994): pp.283–313; and David Borgo, “The Play of Meaning and the Meaning of Play in Jazz,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 11, no. 3/4 (2004): pp.174–90. Paul Austerlitz makes a similar attempt in his book Jazz Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), although his study follows a track more faithful to the discipline of ethnomusicology.
[31] Amiri Baraka, Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), pp.106, 36.
[32] Austerlitz picks up on this ambivalence in his introduction to Jazz Consciousness.
[33] Monson, Saying Something, p.132.
[34] Charles Hersch, Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p.16.
[35] Borgo, “The Play of Meaning,” p.181.
[36] Monson, Saying Something, p.100.
[37] Ronald M. Radano, Lying up a Nation: Race and Black Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p.10.
[38] Most often encountered in Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, an earlier version of the essay was published in 1897 in the Atlantic Monthly. Monson also refers to a second quotation that perhaps had greater influence on her understanding of double consciousness. This is from a posthumously published sketch of his visit to Prince Edward County, Virginia, written sometime between late 1897 and 1898. Du Bois writes: “You who live in single towns will hardly comprehend the double life of this Virginia hamlet. The doctrine of class does not explain it — the caste misses the kernel of truth. It is two worlds separate yet bound together like those double stars that, bound for all time, whirl around each other separate yet one” (Du Bois, “Beyond the Veil,” 49). This appears to be the basis of Monson’s consideration, and through it our attention is drawn to an isolated strand of the grand concept — that of “twoness.” This sets up a discussion concerning multiple voices, dual identity, and admixture. See Monson, Saying Something, pp.98–101.
[39] Double consciousness as a play of difference between the general social field and the sociality taking place behind the veil is dynamic but not “dialectic” in the strictly Hegelian sense of the term. The dogged irresolution of these conflicting positions — their conflict having less to do with incompatible racial or cultural markers than with the irreducibility of black heterogeneity on the one side and the tendency toward homogeneity on the other — results in what Chandler, borrowing from Jacques Derrida, calls “desedimentation” — that is, to “make tremble by dislodging the layers of sedimented premises that hold in place” consolidated hegemony. There is a suggestion of utopian promise inherent in the ever-present potential for loosening congealed positions of thought — a “longing to . . . merge . . . double self into a better and truer self ” without giving up the distinction between the two parts.
[40] Nahum D. Chandler, “Originary Displacement,” boundary 2 27, no. 3 (2000): p.258.
[41] Ibid., 268.
[42] Ibid., 273.
[43] Ibid., 250–51. Hortense J. Spillers draws from Chandler’s essay, as part of a parallel discussion concerning the necessity (or otherwise) of cultural difference: “we should think that ‘black culture,’ which might be established as an ‘example,’ might take us back or ahead to the problematic of culture in general and ‘as such.’ ” Spillers, “The Idea of Black Culture,” p.25. We also see something of this in Austerlitz’s Jazz Consciousness, a study on the music’s global “inclusiveness.” Austerlitz uses double consciousness as an analytical framework to think through transnational affiliations and contextual distinction.
[44] Nahum D. Chandler, “Of Exorbitance: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought,” Criticism 50, no. 3 (2008): p.347.
[45] Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, p.26 n5.
[46] Theodor W. Adorno, “The Perennial Fashion—Jazz,” in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p.269.
[47] Adorno, “On Jazz,” p.47; Adorno, “The Perennial Fashion—Jazz,” p.269.
[48] Note here the focus on divergent styles rather than industry mutilation. I would argue that whether “sweet” or “hot,” the overwhelming problem is the bloodletting of blackness from above-underground transformations.
[49] Joseph D. Lewandowski, “Adorno on Jazz and Society,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 22, no. 5 (1996): p.104.
[50] Adorno, “The Perennial Fashion—Jazz,” p.269.
[51] Hortense J. Spillers, “Moving On Down the Line: Variations on the AfricanAmerican Sermon,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p.262.
[52] Adorno, “The Perennial Fashion—Jazz,” p.268; Adorno, “On Jazz,” pp.67, 68.
[53] Mingus on “rotary perception”: “With Rotary Perception you may imagine a circle round the beat. . . . The notes can fall at any point within the circle so that the original feeling for the beat is not disturbed. If anyone in the group loses confidence, one of the quartet can hit the beat again.” Brian Priestley, Mingus: A Critical Biography (New York: Da Capo, 1983), pp.124–25. See also Fred Moten, “The New International of Rhythmic Feeling(s),” Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex and Race 18, no. 1 (2008): pp.31–56.
[54] See Moten, “The New International of Rhythmic Feeling(s).”
[55] Chandler, “Originary Displacement,” p.275; Nahum D. Chandler, X—The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), p.121.
[56] Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p.168.
[57] Ibid., 106.
[58] David Jenemann, Adorno in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p.114.
[59] Ellison, Invisible Man, p.8 (emphasis in original). See Alexander Weheliye’s Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity for an inspired reading of the invisible man’s listening preferential toward a formulation of the sonic black modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
[60] Fred Moten, “Fred Moten on Chris Ofili: Bluets, Black + Blue, In Lovely Blue,” lecture-presentation at the New Museum (NY), Jan. 29, 2015, posted by “New Museum,” Nov. 30, 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=04aEVHhIVTw.
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