Adorno and Durkheim Go to the Blue Note

Theodor Adorno offered powerful interventions into the sociology of aesthetics and art in late modern societies. However, recent appraisals from within cultural and music studies have rightly found his work in both popular music and jazz, to be totalizing, elitist and tone-deaf. Theorists continuing the Frankfurt school tradition such as Axel Honneth and Jurgen Habermas attempt to confront and correct Adorno’s refusal to allow for emancipation or resistance in collective or intersubjective experience. Such criticisms of Adorno should be mindful of jettisoning his unrelenting and still-relevant social critique as well as his attention to the social nature of artistic form.

My research focuses on jazz from the period in which Adorno was writing and later developments. I am interested in how elements of jazz both internal to the form of the music and in terms of “art worlds” have emerged from the identity, collectivity and subjectivity unique to the Black experience in the US. Drawing on explorations of subaltern identity such as those found in W.E.B Dubois’ “double-consciousness”, Franz Fanon’s account of the psychic dimensions of colonization and resistance, Black feminists such as Angela Davis and Hortense Spillers, who explore gender in the context of America’s racialized social system, Amiri Baraka and the Black arts movement and building on work of Fumi Okiji, I contend that what Adorno gets wrong about jazz can be traced back to his totalizing account of bourgeois subjectivity and his insistence that any form of identification with the collective is by necessity false, regressive and oppressive. Finally, I confront Adorno with Durkheim’s notion of collective effervescence, which, if considered (albeit contra Durkheim) as a tool through which marginalized communities can generate condensed social energy with which to resist domination, helps to generate a dialectical regeneration of Adorno’s contributions to aesthetic sociology.