Second Salvage: Prolegomenon to a Reconstruction of "Current of Music"

Abstract

Second Salvage:Prolegomenon to a Reconstruction of "Current of Music" Robert Hullot-Kentor (bio) Another way to say the search for reality is to say the desire for completion. —Clifford Odets The centenary of T. W. Adorno's birth was a lugubrious display worldwide, but most of all in Germany. There the event was headed up by a brace of three heavily shod biographies trudging in decade-long synchronization toward the publishing occasion, as if the goal were to make sure that no detail of Adorno's life went untrampled. Even Adorno's writing table and chair were dragged into the Frankfurt ceremonies. Encased in a silicone cube, these mundane furn-ishings were established as a national treasure to be visited on Adornoplatz in hometown perpetuum. Suhrkamp Publishers and the Goethe Institute, working closely with a restaffed and now corporate-minded Adorno Archiv, distributed so absolute a mass of memento, chronology, and photograph—the known antipodes to Adorno's philosophy itself—that even under scrutiny it was often hard to decide whether the topic was, for instance, the writing of the Dialectic of Enlightenment or the framing of the Magna Carta. The jubilee successfully portrayed the life of the man as if he had been born directly into his afterlife as into a bottle. One result of these centenary achievements is that now every next mention of Adorno's life can only help steal away from the apprehension that "Life does not live"1 any sense that this ever troubled the person who once scratched the apothegm down on paper. The biographical focus, undermining the philosophy, finally undermined the biographical as well. [End Page 134] This bears directly on the intention of this essay to providea first, if provisional, introduction to Current of Music.2 For, as is to be explained, Adorno left the manuscripts of Current of Music in fragmentary condition; what is conceptually valuable in them now depends in part on reconstruction. An assumption of this reconstruction has been that, when a work is abandoned in fragments, reference to the life that left them behind can legitimately provide transitions that may potentiate tensions of thought that, deprived of their law of form, would otherwise dissipate. Certainly this assumption might have been more naively pursued prior to the centenary year. The only alternative now—for this introduction in any case—is to look the situation in the face and acknowledge that, in the transitions established here to provision a fragmentary work with a degree of tensed coherence, what is biographical in them has recently been woven into something milled out by the mile. Perhaps in this recognition, what is now lifeless, with the feel of having never lived, will at least half speak of this situation rather than simply compound the recently achieved inertness. New York City, 1938–1941 In 1937, T. W. Adorno had been living in England for three years, having fled National Socialism. Although he formerly had been a Privatdozent in philosophy—an independent lecturer—at the University of Frankfurt, the Nazis had deprived him of the right to teach, and the hardship of immigration had set him back to the status of a student at work on a dissertation, a critique of Husserlian phenomenology. He was obliged to hope that a D.Phil. taken at Oxford, in addition to his PhD, would provide the overqualification that an immigrant would minimally need to secure a position at a British university.3 In October, however, a telegram from Max Horkheimer caused him to revise these plans. Horkheimer had for some time wanted to bring Adorno to New York City, and the telegram proposed the means, if Adorno were interested in participating in the Princeton Radio Research Project, a study supported by a Rockefeller Foundation grant under the direction of the sociologist and [End Page 135] Austrian émigré Paul Lazarsfeld.4 The next day Adorno wired back his readiness to accept the position,5 but the decision was hardly made without ambivalence. On one hand, Adorno saw that catastrophe was inevitable in Europe; he had no real expectation of securing academic employment in prewar England; and his wife,Gretel, who was ill, found the English climate hard to...

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