New German Critique

Adorno and Musical Nominalism

Martin Jay

Perhaps no concept can more justifiably resist the demand to define its essence
than nominalism. It was, after all, coined in the fourteenth century by theolo-
gians like the English Franciscan William of Ockham (ca. 1288–ca. 1348) who
were battling against the Scholastic belief in the ontological reality of universal
essences.1 Against the latter’s version of a God who created and was then
beholden to the intelligible, rational forms he had fashioned, the nominalists
believed in an ineffable Creator whose omnipotence meant that his will could
override any constraints, including those of the forms or essences he might
once have posited. Natural laws, after all, can always be suspended by those
unexpected and inexplicable divine interventions we call miracles. Not surpris-
ingly, the nominalist impulse remained powerful in voluntarist theologies like
those developed during the Reformation by Martin Luther and John Calvin.
And once it was secularized, with human self-assertion substituting for divine
will, it could also inform modern political theories like that of Thomas Hobbes,
which stressed the artificial rather than natural origins of the state.
As the name of their movement suggested, nominalism claimed that col-
lective categories were no more than linguistic abstractions, generic or class
names, yoking together disparate, concrete particulars whose irreducible indi-
viduality was bracketed in the service of conceptual convenience. Such words,
My thanks to Robert Hullot-Kentor, Robert Kaufmann, and Michael Rosen for comments on an ear-
lier draft of this article.
1. For discussions of the importance of nominalism in Western thought since the fourteenth cen-
tury, see Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age; and Gillespie, Theological Origins of Modernity.
New German Critique 129, Vol. 43, No. 3, November 2016
DOI 10.1215/0094033X-3625325  © 2016 by New German Critique, Inc.

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 New German Critique

6  Adorno and Musical Nominalism

the nominalists argued, were merely signs rather than referentially true, or
more precisely, they were what a later age would call signifiers rather than
signifieds. According to the distinction introduced by Duns Scotus, such
generic terms dealt with the quidditas, or intelligible “whatness” of an object,
rather than its haecceitas, or “thisness,” which could be grasped only intui-
tively and not by the rational intellect. While they do necessary work for us in
our awkward attempt to make sense of a motley world of heteronomous indi-
viduals, such generic class terms do not refer, pace the realists, to ontologically
existing universal entities.
Although histories have been written about nominalism as if it were a
coherent body of thought whose identity has survived intact, the impulse
behind it has always been in tension with that very project. Perhaps even more
so than with other such collective terms, the sedimented, adventitious history
of “nominalism” is much richer than any attempt to still its meaning through a
definition that is, as it were, definitive. The difficulty of finding a common
denominator or even family resemblances in the Wittgensteinian sense among
disparate iterations of that impulse is intensified when we acknowledge that
the term has migrated beyond the confined precincts of theology or philoso-
phy. It is now a term to conjure with in aesthetic discussions, especially those
that have tried to accommodate modernist innovations in a more capacious
understanding of the aesthetic.2
Although there are nominalist impulses in earlier movements like man-
nerism, perhaps the first explicit use for aesthetic purposes in the modern era
came in an offhand note of Marcel Duchamp in 1914 from his White Box, at
the time he was moving beyond painting to an antiretinal aesthetic of the ready­
made. It simply read “A kind of pictorial Nominalism. (Check).”3 The phrase
“pictorial nominalism” then became the title of a penetrating book by Thierry
de Duve in 1984.4 He interpreted Duchamp’s provocative challenge to tradi-
tional painting as a nominalist rebuke to the essentialist version of visual expe-
rience championed by Clement Greenberg and other defenders of a high mod-
ernism narrated as a quest to purify painting’s essence. Instead, Duchamp, as
de Duve described him, polluted the visual with the linguistic, redescribed the
artist’s role as one of enunciation and judgment rather than creative fabrica-
tion, and foregrounded the conventional role of the institution of art in generat-

2. See, e.g., Sabrovsky, De lo extraordinario.

3. Marcel Duchamp, The White Box (and 1965 commentary), in Sanouillet and Peterson, Salt
Seller, 78. For a discussion of the influence of nominalism on the dissolution of Platonic organic
aesthetics in the late medieval period, see Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, 84–91.
4. De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism.

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Martin Jay  7

ing artistic value. Here the notion of “conventional” implied both unintended
conventions that existed prior to any deliberate act, as in, say, the grammar of
a language, and conventions as agreed-on rules or principles designed to inau-
gurate something new in the world, for example, “the Geneva Convention” in
international law. In either case, what was challenged was the assumption that
real universals existed prior to human will.
Duchamp’s critique of retinal painting, art that sought to provide visual
pleasure, was, de Duve argued, also a critique of realism, which lingered in
such modernist movements as cubism. Even the second-order realism of those
abstract paintings that abandoned any mimesis of the world on the other side
of the traditional painting surface as window frame—that is, a realism of the
flat canvas and the materiality of the paint placed on it—was questioned by
what de Duve called Duchamp’s “ironic asceticism.”5 Duchamp shared with
medieval nominalism a stress on the artifice and conventionality of naming,
rather than on the alleged essence of the medium. Indeed, not only painting
but even art itself was a function of the enunciative gesture of someone with
the legitimacy to proclaim it as such by the institution of art. Where the two
parted ways, however, was in their notion of the name: “Whereas for the medi-
eval thinkers, names are signs, generally speaking the words art or painting as
they appear in the nominalism of Duchamp are always proper names.”6
The privileging of proper names will immediately recall their role in the
thought of another figure whose importance for Adorno was immense, Walter
Benjamin. His “Adamic” theory of language was based on the utopian remem-
brance of the “true” individual names bestowed in the Garden of Eden prior to
the confusing Babel of tongues. Duchamp, to be sure, seems not to have known
about Benjamin and, from Adorno’s point of view, was himself not an artist of
any great importance.7 Yet, as I hope to show, when Adorno opened the ques-
tion of nominalism in musical terms, a certain echo of Duchamp’s nominalism
of proper names did reverberate.
Before I try to spell out how that echo sounded, let me describe how
nominalism has been frequently understood in musical terms. Perhaps its
major interpreter was the American philosopher Nelson Goodman, who dis-
tinguished in Languages of Art (1969) between allographic and autographic
artworks. Whereas the latter were singular objects with claims to authenticity

5. Ibid., 126.
6. Ibid., 208.
7. As far as I can tell, Adorno never wrote about Duchamp at all. For an attempt to compare them
that interprets Duchamp’s readymades (as well as abstract expressionism) in terms of Adorno’s rumi-
nations on nominalism, see Bernstein, “Readymades, Monochromes, Etc.”

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8  Adorno and Musical Nominalism

and originality despite their ability to be reproduced—think of a signed oil

painting—the former were realized only in a succession of material instantia-
tions, such as readings or performances—think of a literary text or a dramatic
script, whose initial version has no auratic priority (despite the economic value
sometimes bestowed on holographic originals). One way to describe the differ-
ence is that autographic works of art can be forged or counterfeited, whereas
allographic ones cannot (although they can be plagiarized). In music, Good-
man argued that there is a meaningful distinction between notation and perfor-
mance, which allows multiple instantiations of the “same” work to appear.
Rather than posit a Platonic essence that precedes those performances, one that
is perhaps an expression of the composer’s intention in inscribing the notes as
directives for performances, culminating in what came to be called the “obbli-
gato style,” the nominalist understands the work as a complex interplay of orig-
inal notation and an infinite number of potential realizations. Some composi-
tions even allow a space for improvisation as a built-in characteristic of their
performances. The difficulty, of course, comes in knowing when radical depar-
tures from the score—either through mistakes or willful invention—make it
problematic to regard a performance as a still valid instantiation of a work, or in
qualitative terms as a “good” performance of it. As Lydia Goehr has shown in
her penetrating philosophical and historical investigation of the concept of a
musical work, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, it is by no means
easy to grapple with the consequences of a thoroughgoing nominalism.8
Significantly, in her introduction to the revised edition of that book,
Goehr notes that “it has been by moving toward critical theory that I have
come to have a completely different appreciation of the one view that has gen-
erally most offended ontologists and musicologists over the years, the view
offered by Nelson Goodman. . . . Goodman did not essentialize the work-
concept; he conventionalized it, admitting the possibility of radical change in
its application.”9 How, we have to ask, did the Frankfurt School’s attitude
toward nominalism help alert Goehr to the virtues of Goodman’s position?10
Did Adorno have a straightforward attitude toward nominalism in general and

  8. Goehr, Imaginary Museum of Musical Works. The philosophical controversy between Pla-
tonist and nominalist interpretations of musical works is still unsettled. For a recent contribution, see
Cameron, “There Are No Things.”
  9. Ibid., li.
10. Although other Frankfurt School members were less focused on nominalism than Adorno, there
are isolated references, for example, in Max Horkheimer’s 1955 essay “Schopenhauer and Society,” in
which Horkheimer writes, “In Schopenhauer’s intransigent nominalism in the face of society . . . lies at
the same time the root of his greatness” (89).

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 New German Critique

Martin Jay  9

musical nominalism in particular? Or was it characteristically dialectical,

involving an appreciation of its benefits as well as costs? As such, was it, as
Fredric Jameson has contended, “one of Adorno’s great themes”?11
To begin answering these questions, I will sample some of the references
to nominalism in Adorno’s oeuvre, which appear in many different settings.
First, I will look at those in purely philosophical contexts. In their critique of
the reduction of the Enlightenment to instrumental reason in Dialectic of
Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Adorno accused nominalism of going
too far in its denigration of conceptual realism and the metaphysical tradition
of substantive rationalism. “Enlightenment finally devoured not only symbols
but also their successors, universal concepts, and left nothing of metaphysics
except the abstract fear of the collective from which it had sprung.” As a result,
the critical impulse in the rationalist tradition had been undermined. But then
they added, “Enlightenment as a nominalist tendency stops short before the
nomen, the non-extensive, restricted concept, the proper name.”12 This cryptic
remark will become clearer when I return to that link with proper names
already mentioned in connection with Duchamp. Elsewhere, in his 1959 lec-
tures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Adorno noted the presence of a nom-
inalist impulse in the idea of synthetic a priori judgments:

This concept of synthesis is nothing but the theory of nominalism brought to

the highest pitch of abstraction because it declares not merely concepts, but
everything that can be meaningfully discussed, to be the consequence of
mental activity. Moreover, in the criticism Kant directs at metaphysics, we
can still hear the echo of the old nominalist critique of universals. . . . We can
say that the foundation of Kantian philosophy is still nominalist.13

He then, however, adds, “But Kant stands on the threshold of a development in

which the considerations that led to a radical nominalism begin to turn against
themselves. . . . He is the first to have conceived of the relation of universals to
the particulars subsumed under them as dialectical.”14
Crossing that threshold is G. W. F. Hegel, who is described in Adorno’s
Hegel: Three Studies, first published in 1963, as having developed a dialectical
method, “which is the approach of a consistent nominalism awakened to self-
consciousness, an approach that examines any and every concept in terms of

11. Jameson, Late Marxism, 157.

12. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 17.
13. Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 125.
14. Ibid.

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10  Adorno and Musical Nominalism

its subject matter and in so doing convicts it of its inadequacy.”15 But then
Adorno adds that Hegel’s reflection on the self moves beyond the claim that
truth is merely a function of the constitutive subject, the claim of subjective
idealism, to “an objective idea, an idea that is no longer nominalistically reduc-
ible.”16 His version of truth is based on a kind of dynamic Platonism in which
temporality is included, that is, “Hegel’s truth is no longer in time, as nominal-
ist truth was, nor is it above time in the ontological fashion: for Hegel time
becomes a moment of truth itself.”17 The temporality of contradictions, which
emerge, sharpen, and are then sublated, is part of the truth itself, which is the
whole.
From this perspective, nominalism is itself part of the truth, but cer-
tainly not all of it. Later in Hegel: Three Studies Adorno makes a direct con-
nection between the nominalist impulse and the social forces of modern bour-
geois society:

Nominalism is part of the bourgeois bedrock; it accompanies the consolida-

tion of urbanism across all its phases, and in the most diverse nations the
ambivalence of that process is sedimented in it. Nominalism helps to free
consciousness from the pressure of the authority of the concept that had
established itself as universality; it does so by disenchanting the concept and
making it a mere abbreviation for the particularities it covers.18

But once again, Adorno continues, it goes too far, for “such enlightenment is
always also its opposite: hypostasis of the particular. To this extent, nominal-
ism encourages the bourgeoisie to be suspicious of everything that would
restrain isolated individuals in their ‘pursuit of happiness,’ the unreflective
pursuit of their own advantage, as being mere illusion.”19 Thus, Adorno darkly
concludes, “nominalism, which is anti-ideological, has been ideology from the
very beginning.”20 Hegel, in his attempt to go beyond it, is thus a powerful
weapon in the struggle to overcome bourgeois society.
Not surprisingly, when Adorno turned to the anti-Hegelian tradition of
Existenzphilosophie, from Søren Kierkegaard to Martin Heidegger, he dis-
cerned a regression to nominalist premises. In Negative Dialectics he con-
tended that “nominalism, one of the roots of the existential philosophy of the

15. Adorno, Hegel, 39.

16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 40.
18. Ibid., 113.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.

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Martin Jay  11

Protestant Kierkegaard, gave Heidegger’s ontology the attractiveness of the

non-speculative. Just as the concept of existence is a false conceptualization
of existing things, the complementary precedence which these things are
given over the concept allows the ontological concept of existence to profit in
turn.”21 In other words, despite the nominalist critique of realist metaphysics, it
offered existentialism an alternative that dulled the critical edge that had
impelled enlightenment nominalists: “Where consistent enlighteners absolu-
tize nominalism—instead of dialectically penetrating the nominalist thesis
too—they recoil into mythology. Their philosophy becomes mythology at the
point where, believing in some ultimate datum, they cut reflection short.”22
Similarly, the positivist fetish of individual facts and distrust of abstract con-
cepts was unwittingly in tension with its elevation of mathematics to a univer-
sal sign system, which smacked of the scholastic realism that nominalism had
sought to undermine.23
In summary, Adorno’s critique of nominalism as a philosophical impulse
with social implications leveled the following accusations. Although he appre-
ciated the value of its challenge to the absolute authority of generic, subordi-
nating concepts over particulars, he balked at the nominalist ontologizing of
those particulars—whether in existentialist or positivist guise—as utterly
unmediated by concepts. Despite its theological origins, he saw nominalism as
really coming into its own with the secular disenchantment of the world
wrought by bourgeois modernity, in which individual self-interest and self-
preservation trumped any claims to collective solidarity. While admitting that
it fostered an active subjectivity, he charged that it did so at the cost of obliter-
ating the integrity of the objects dominated by the constitutive subject.
Although that subject, at least in its transcendental guise, could itself be under-
mined by a nominalist critique of universals, the stress on the will as opposed
to reason in the nominalist tradition, whether divine or human, meant some
sort of complicity with the domination of nature abetted by the dialectic of
enlightenment. Likewise, the nominalist emphasis on linguistic constructiv-
ism led to the problematic exaggeration of the sovereignty of language over the
world of recalcitrant materiality. In short, in many respects, Adorno echoed a

21. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 126.

22. Ibid., 126–27. As Espen Hammer notes, for Adorno “Heidegger falls behind the nominalistic
critique of conceptual realism. Rather than respecting the difference, starting with Ockham and
Bacon, between concept and object, de dictum and de re, Heidegger reverts to what amounts to an
Aristotelian identification between language and being.” But Adorno’s “appeal to nominalism is not
meant to suggest that only particulars have a real existence, but that there is always a non-identity
between concept and object that calls for dialectical reflection” (Adorno and the Political, 111).
23. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie, 1:43.

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12  Adorno and Musical Nominalism

time-honored anxiety about the implications of nominalism that extended

back to theological debates about its implications.24
What then is the role of nominalism in the realm of the aesthetic in gen-
eral, and music in particular, for Adorno? Did he merely repeat his philosoph-
ical critique in, as it were, a different key? Did he disdainfully identify it, as
Rose Rosengard Subotnik has written, with a musical condition “obviously
antithetical to interaction and consequently to meaning”?25 Or were there ways
in which nominalism served less dubious purposes when art rather than phi-
losophy or science was involved, thus allowing observers such as Peter Uwe
Hohendahl to go so far as to speak of the “radical nominalist stance [that]
Adorno adopts with regard to art.”26 In Adorno’s posthumously published Aes-
thetic Theory, the first mention of nominalism comes in his crucial discussion
of aesthetic semblance (Schein), in which he argues that “the truth of artworks
depends on whether they succeed at absorbing into their immanent necessity
what is not identical with the concept, what is according to that concept acci-
dental. . . . The illusory quality of artworks is condensed in their claim to
wholeness.”27 It is this illusion, he claims, that nominalism challenges. Accord-
ing to Adorno, “Aesthetic nominalism culminates in the crisis of semblance
insofar as the artwork wants to be emphatically substantial. The irritation with
semblance has its locus in the object itself.”28 Reflecting on such passages,
Shierry Weber Nicholsen writes, “This emphasis on the importance of the
nonidentical and nonsubsumable detail is, by another name, Adorno’s aes-
thetic nominalism, and it is part of the dialectic of illusion or semblance
(Schein).”29

24. According to Gillespie, “Nominalism sought to tear the rationalistic veil from the face of God
in order to found a true Christianity, but in doing so it revealed a capricious God, fearsome in his
power, unknowable, unpredictable, unconstrained by nature and reason, and indifferent to good and
evil. This vision of God turned the order of nature into a chaos of individual beings and the order of
logic into a mere concatenation of names. Man himself was dethroned from his exalted place in the
natural order of things and cast adrift in an infinite universe with no natural law to guide him and no
certain path to salvation. It is thus not surprising that for all but the most extreme ascetics and mys-
tics, this dark God of nominalism proved to be a profound source of anxiety and insecurity” (Theo-
logical Origins of Modernity, 29). The reasons listed for the anxiety may call to mind the position of
another German Jewish refugee from Nazism, Leo Strauss, more than Adorno, but there are traces of
a number of them in Adorno’s thought as well.
25. Subotnik, Developing Variations, 211.
26. Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought, 203. Later in this book, however, he notes that “with Kant and
Hegel, [Adorno] maintained the legitimacy of reason against radical nominalism and positivism” (240).
27. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 101.
28. Ibid.
29. Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, Late Work, 208.

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Martin Jay  13

Nominalism, so Adorno contended, organizes works of art “from below

to above, not by having its principles of organization foisted on it,”30 which
suggests its affinity with a democratic rather than authoritarian culture. But,
drawing on his critique of philosophical nominalism, he hesitated before fully
endorsing the wholesale demolition of universals: “The philosophical critique
of unreflective nominalism prohibits any claim that the trajectory of progres-
sive negativity, the negation of objectively binding meaning, is that of unquali-
fied progress in art. . . . Though it is nominalism that helped art achieve its
language in the first place, still there is no language without the medium of
universality beyond pure particularization, however requisite the latter.”31
Thus if left entirely unchecked, nominalism at its most corrosive ultimately
liquidates “all forms as a remnant of a spiritual being-in-itself. It terminates in
a literal facticity, and this is irreconcilable with art.”32
There has been, Adorno noted with concern, a secular trend toward the
domination of the particular over the universal in the history of Western art,
which is best evidenced in what he called “the decline of artistic genres as
such. Art has been caught up in the total process of nominalization’s advance
ever since the medieval ordo was broken up.”33 Benedetto Croce, he notes, was
perhaps the first philosopher of aesthetics to understand that each work had to
be judged on its own merits, rather than as an exemplar of a given type, a con-
clusion that had escaped Hegel in his history of aesthetic progress.
Yet here too it would be mistaken to miss what remained of the older
faith in generic forms, indeed ironically in the universal concept of “art” itself.
A dialectical approach registers the tensions in that concept, at once abstractly
universal yet performatively yearning for concrete particularity. For, Adorno
writes, “the drive towards nominalism does not originate in reflection but in
the artwork’s own impulse, and to this extent it originates in a universal of art.
From time immemorial, art has sought to rescue the special; progressive par-
ticularization was immanent to it.”34 But when it entirely forgets its generic

30. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 220.

31. Ibid., 161.
32. Ibid., 220.
33. Ibid., 199.
34. Ibid., 201. The stress on origins here should be noted. As Robert Hullot-Kentor has remarked
in connection with Adorno’s ruminations on Karl Kraus’s aphorism “Origin is goal,” “The attention
that [nominalism] brought to the individuality of the ‘real particular’ contributed profoundly to the
development of historical perception and reasoning as well as to the scientific comprehension of
nature. However, in its rejection of origin tout court it remains blind to the origin for which its cun-
ning unconsciously speaks and is, as a result, ultimately no less obtuse to history than to nature”
(Things beyond Resemblance, 8).

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14  Adorno and Musical Nominalism

universality, it risks effacing the very boundary that separates art from the
random particularities of everyday life, what Adorno calls “unformed, raw
empiria.” The history of the bourgeois novel, “the rise of the nominalistic and
thus paradoxical form par excellence,” illustrates the danger in this effacement
and anticipates the fate of later art as well, for “every loss of authenticity suf-
fered by modern art derives from this dialectic.”35 In art, formal generic types
are thus more than exhausted conventions to be discarded with scorn. They
are necessary as the constraint against which particular works always measure
themselves, for without them the latter lapse into pure contingency. Although
often abetting authoritarian social norms, conventional genres can also resist
the status quo, because of their distance from the naturalistic conduct of quo-
tidian existence. They also are a healthy check on the arbitrary willfulness of
the aesthetic subject, the alleged genius who invents entirely out of thin air. As
a result, “the relation of the universal and the particular is not so simple as the
nominalistic tendency suggests, nor as trivial as the doctrine of traditional
aesthetics, which states that the universal must be particularized. The simple
disjunction of nominalism and universalism does not hold.”36
Modernist art, which in general was championed by Adorno, might be
understood as the culmination of nominalization.37 But here too, his dialectical
instincts discerned the counterpressure of formal universalization: “That in
nominalistically advanced artworks the universal, and sometimes the conven-
tional, reappears results not from a sinful error but from the characteristics of
artworks as language, which progressively produces a vocabulary within the
windowless monad.”38 Expressionist poetry, for example, adopted some of the
color conventions promulgated by the visual artist Wassily Kandinsky.
“Expression, the fiercest antithesis to abstract universality, requires such con-
ventions in order to be able to speak as its concept promises.”39 Yet, Adorno
concluded pessimistically, the trend was moving inexorably away from the
creative dialectic of convention and transgression, and not because of the
internal aesthetic pressure of nominalization alone: “The crisis of meaning in
art, immanently provoked by the unstoppable dynamism of nominalism, is
linked with extra-aesthetic experience, for the inner-aesthetic nexus that con-

35. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 201.

36. Ibid.
37. In more recent years, however, postmodernism, a term not yet current when Adorno was writ-
ing, has seemed to some commentators even more apposite. See, e.g., Roberts, Art and Enlighten-
ment, where Roberts writes of “the postmodern condition of aesthetic nominalism” (133).
38. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 207.
39. Ibid.

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Martin Jay  15

stitutes meaning reflects the meaninglessness of the world and its course as the
tacit and therefore all the more powerful a priori of artworks.”40
With these general considerations about Adorno’s dialectical relation-
ship to nominalism behind us, I now turn to the matter at hand: how the issue
was treated in his writings on music. The application of a philosophical cate-
gory, developed in a context that was explicitly theological, to the very differ-
ent realm of music can only be an exercise, suggestive but imprecise, in ana-
logical imagination. As with other such transfers, for example, Duchamp’s
notion of “pictorial nominalism,” the results cannot be held to very rigorous
standards of definitional clarity. Thus there may be a rough parallel between
universals, concepts, and generic forms, but it would be wrong to equate them
entirely. And although Adorno shared Goodman’s interest in performance—
Adorno attacked the goal of “perfect, immaculate performance” as preserving
the work “at the price of its definitive reification”41—he did not reduce the
question of nominalism to the distinction between pure and impure renditions
of an original. For Adorno, all art was the site of productive, if always unsta-
ble, tensions between concept and material, semblance and truth, generic form
and concrete instantiation, wholeness and what transgressed it. Totalized
integrity, to be sure, might be a regulative ideal, but ironically only works that
failed to achieve it could be understood as “authentic” works of art, at least
until the society out of which they emerged was itself a reconciled totality.42
As Goehr has noted, he kept his distance from the Platonic notion of Werktreu
and “thought that the cost of listening to works only as they are offered in final
or perfect aesthetic appearance or as perfectly performed is that we lose sight
or hearing literally of the construction (form) and work (labor) that makes the
works the masterworks they sometimes are.” Adorno, moreover, argued that
“to consider works as made, as opposed to their being perpetually in the mak-
ing, tends to play into a deadening or industrialized desire not really to experi-
ence the works at all.”43
What also has to be understood is that Adorno was always enough of a
Hegelian to think historically and eschew essentialist arguments about music or
any other art. Thus rather than posit eternal definitions of artworks, understood
as either categorically Platonic or nominalist, he spoke of “nominalization,” a

40. Ibid., 296.

41. Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music,” 301.
42. For a discussion of the issue of authenticity in his work, see Jay, “Taking on the Stigma of
Inauthenticity.”
43. Goehr, Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, xxxix, xl.

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16  Adorno and Musical Nominalism

secular trend away from essential forms since the end of the Middle Ages, but
one that could be disrupted or perhaps even reversed. As is evident in his claim
that “nominalism is part of the bourgeois bedrock; it accompanies the con-
solidation of urbanism across all its phases,” he tied it, albeit somewhat loosely,
to the larger socioeconomic context in which the history of art had to be situ-
ated, even as it could also be understood as well in terms of its immanent
developmental logic.
When does nominalization really come into its own in Western music,
tipping the balance away from working within received forms to their tacit
abandonment or even explicit subversion? In Aesthetic Theory Adorno notes
that “the sense of form in Bach, who in many regards opposed bourgeois nom-
inalism, did not consist in showing respect for traditional forms but rather in
keeping them in motion, or better: in not letting them harden in the first place;
Bach was nominalistic on the basis of his sense of form.”44 He continues
shortly thereafter to argue that “in an artist with the comparable level of form
of Mozart it would be possible to show how closely that artist’s most daring
and thus most authentic formal structures verge on nominalistic collapse.”45
But it was really Richard Wagner who was the first case—if this philosophical
expression be allowed—of consistent

aesthetic nominalism: his work is the first one in which the supremacy of the
individual work, in the individual work that of the concrete, thoroughly con-
structed form, becomes, as a matter of principle, completely realized against
all kinds of schemata, against every externally pre-given form. He was the
first to draw the conclusions from the contradiction between inherited forms,
indeed the inherited form of the language of music, on the one hand, and the
concretely arising artistic tasks, on the other.46

Elsewhere Adorno grants the same honor to Gustav Mahler, whose work he
compared to the bourgeois novel.47
The most powerful culmination of the nominalist impulse in modern
art, however, is in the atonal music of Schoenberg and the second Vienna
School, the music whose impact on Adorno’s own practice as a composer and
ideas as an aesthetic theorist was profound. What Schoenberg had famously
called “the emancipation of dissonance” meant the end of the tyranny of tradi-

44. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 221.

45. Ibid.
46. Adorno, Musikalische Schriften I–III, 548–49.
47. Adorno, Mahler, 67.

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Martin Jay  17

tional tonal hierarchies. As Adorno puts it in Philosophy of New Music,

Schoenberg’s school “obeys without excuse the actuality of an accomplished
nominalism. Schoenberg draws the consequences from the dissolution of all
binding types, in music, as was implicit in his own laws of development: in the
emancipation of ever-broader levels of the material and in the progression
toward absolute musical domination of nature.”48 For Adorno, the greatness of
the early Schoenberg was precisely his unflinching embrace of the nominalist
dissolution of form, which allowed him to avoid the dubious search for organic
wholeness and reconstituted authenticity that Adorno decried in Igor Stravinsky.
It was because of identification with the early Schoenberg that commen-
tators such as Hohendahl and Nicholsen discerned a positive version of aes-
thetic nominalism in Adorno’s position.49 Max Paddison helps us understand
his distinction between a destructive and constructive version of nominalism
by foregrounding his two concepts of form: “from above to below” and “from
below to above”:

The first kind of form can be understood in relation to the handed-down pre-
given genres and formal types, imposed on the material “from above.” These
represent a level of universality (what Adorno calls schlechte Allgemeinheit)
and are normative, the form being organized from totality to detail. The sec-
ond can be understood as form which emerges out of the “inner necessity” of
the material, “from below.” It represents the nominalism (i.e. “self-identity”)
of the particular, is critical, and moves from detail towards totality.50

But for all his praise for Schoenberg’s expressionist atonality as a weak form
emerging from below, the final ominous phrase in the citation above from
Philosophy of New Music—“progression toward absolute musical domination
of nature”—reveals Adorno’s long-standing fear that both a philosophy and an
artistic practice that see the world as inherently a chaotic manifold, open to the
unchecked power of the subject whose will can impose an arbitrary new order
on it, are complicitous with the instrumental rationality that has emerged from
the dialectic of enlightenment. Such an outcome, Adorno charged, was mani-
fested in the next stage of Schoenberg’s career, a stage Adorno did not find as

48. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 155.

49. Keith Chapin, to take another example, writes: “Realist composers create works by relying on
harmonic conventions, which they assume to be based on stable properties of nature, while nominalists
create ones that avoid conventions and, because they follow the inner impulses that make them indi-
viduals, write music that is new, sui generis, and as processual as thought itself. . . . Adorno preferred
nominalism but also recognized the limitations of the position” (“Labor and Metaphysics,” 30–31).
50. Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 181.

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18  Adorno and Musical Nominalism

congenial as its atonal predecessor: that of the twelve-tone row. Schoenberg,

he writes,

was the first to detect the principles of universal unity and economy in the
new, subjective, emancipated Wagnerian material. His works adduce the evi-
dence that the more rigorously the nominalism of musical language—inau-
gurated by Wagner—is pursued, the more completely this language allows
itself to be rationally dominated. . . . It is this rationality and unification of
the material that makes the initially subordinated material entirely compliant
to subjectivity.51

Paradoxically, by regularizing that subordination through rigid rules of com-

position, the pendulum swung too far in the opposite direction, and the healthy
subjective moment in musical expression was in danger of being snuffed out in
favor of an impersonal method. The problematic implications of this shift he
discerned in Anton von Webern’s last works, which smacked of reification. By
the time Adorno wrote his dark rumination “The Aging of the New Music” in
1955, he could both point to the dangers of unconstrained nominalism—“as a
result of the atomistic disposition of musical elements, the concept of musical
coherence is liquidated, a concept without which nothing like music really
exists”—and warn that “the effort to rationalize music completely has some-
thing useless and frantic about it; it applies to a chaos that is no longer chaotic.
It is time for a concentration of compositional energy in another direction; not
toward the mere organization of material, but toward the composition of truly
coherent music out of a material however shorn of every quality.”52
What that other direction might be was not easy to see, but the dialectic
of form and formlessness, that inexorable process engendered by the ruthless
nominalist subversion of universals of any kind, was not entirely over. As
many observers have remarked, it was now apparent in what Adorno called
“musique informelle,” a term he introduced in a seminal essay of 1961 included
in his collection Quasi una Fantasia.53 He defines it as “a type of music which
has discarded all forms which are external or abstract or which confront it in
an inflexible way. At the same time, although such music should be completely
free of anything irreducibly alien to itself or superimposed on it, it should nev-

51. Ibid., 48–49.

52. Adorno, “Aging of the New Music,” 192, 191. This essay was translated by Hullot-Kentor and
Frederic Will. For critical remarks on Webern, see p. 187.
53. Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle.” For a helpful analysis of the place of this essay in
Adorno’s oeuvre and the development of postwar music, see Borio, “Dire Cela, sans Savoir Quoi.”

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Martin Jay  19

ertheless constitute itself in an objectively compelling way, in the musical sub-

stance itself, and not in terms of external laws.”54 Comparing it to the atonal
music breakthrough that occurred around 1910, but noting the intervening
serial revolution, Adorno says that musique informelle must deal with the con-
tradictions and problems “facing music at a stage when an unconstrained
musical nominalism, the rebellion against any general musical forms, becomes
conscious of its own limitation.”55 It cannot therefore go back to the early
Schoenberg, the music of expressionist atonality, as the dialectic of music and
society has moved on. Now the challenge is to face the fact that “the more
urgently the structural arrangements insist through their own shape on their
own necessity, the more they become guilty of acquiring contingent matter,
external to the composing subject.”56
The stress on the exigency of this “contingent matter, external to the
composing subject” means that older notions of nominalist art that “had
always imagined that [art] could locate its enduring core and substance in the
subject” are wrong, for “this subject now stands exposed as ephemeral.”57 The
old Romantic and expressionist subject whose interiority was objectively real-
ized in artistic form is a thing of the past, as antiquated as the ideal of organic
wholeness in the work. What now demands to be acknowledged is that the
musical material of today “is not simply the subject in its own right; it also
contains the element of what is alien to the subject, the element of otherness.”58
Thus John Cage’s music, to take an example Adorno appreciatively cites, has
to be applauded “as a protest against the dogged complicity of music with the
domination of nature.”59
This does not mean, to be sure, an undialectical privileging of that con-
tingent otherness, which would invite the positivist flattening out of aesthetic
semblance that is always a danger in nominalism unchecked. For all the impor-
tance of sonority, music cannot be reduced to nothing but noise or sound. “It
would be wrong,” Adorno argued, “to believe in the critical function of the note
as opposed to the configuration, as if it were an immediate good, as opposed
to a superstructure, and to imagine that the note from which all meaning had

54. Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” 272.

55. Ibid., 273.
56. Ibid., 277.
57. Ibid., 280.
58. Ibid., 287. The concept of musical material in Adorno has generated considerable controversy
over, for example, his claims about its historical laws of movement and the imperative to be at the
cutting edge imposed by them. For a discussion, see Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, chap. 5.
59. Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” 315.

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20  Adorno and Musical Nominalism

been removed, could nevertheless supply its own meaning.”60 Meaning, on the
other hand, should not be entirely ascribed to the relations among notes—
especially a constructed relationality imposed by the composer—as the mate-
rial is often in excess of any such attempt to master it. Without abstractly
negating any and all subjectivity, music must somehow find a way to open
itself up to what the subject cannot spin out of itself or intend with no remain-
der. That is, “it must become the ear’s form of reaction that passively appropri-
ates what might be termed the tendency inherent in the material,”61 which is
not turned into a dead “object” to be dominated by a sovereign “subject.” In
short, a musique informelle must avoid the “hostile extremes of faith in the
material and absolute organization.”62 If it succeeds, “it would emancipate
itself both from projects which are purely subjective and from thing-like objec-
tifications. . . . It would present itself not as an object to be described, but as a
force-field to be decoded.”63
In that force field, and this is the final twist in Adorno’s argument about
nominalism, there is a claim made by material that is always in excess of con-
ceptual or structural or compositional control. To make this point clearer,
Adorno suggests a comparison expressing an important lesson of much mod-
ernist art, which invokes the element of surprise that results from the process
of composition not being entirely controlled by the subject: it is, he says, “much
as a chemist can be surprised by the new substance in his test-tube.”64 A simi-
lar argument has been evident in the discourse about another chemically
involved process, that of predigitalized photography. Here the indexical trace
of something in the recorded image that was not intended to be captured by
the photographer signals the resistance of the world to the artist’s subjective
power. The result is what can be identified as another version of nominalism,
which avoids a problematic reliance on a voluntarist subject, human or divine,
to impose his or her will on a chaotic manifold. In another context I have
called it magical nominalism, a term that extrapolates from the more familiar
idea of magical realism, the belief that the world can be reenchanted, but
moves away from any realist notion, still lingering from its medieval roots, of
the reality of universals.65 Drawing on several theoretical sources, including
the work of Rosalind Krauss, de Duve, and W. J. T. Mitchell, the argument

60. Ibid., 298.

61. Ibid., 319.
62. Ibid., 304.
63. Ibid., 321.
64. Ibid., 303.
65. Jay, “Magical Nominalism.”

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Martin Jay  21

also invokes Benjamin’s Adamic theory of true names, names that are not
conventional but somehow mimetic, which brings us back to the issue left
dangling earlier in the article when I invoked Duchamp’s reference to “picto-
rial nominalism.”
Duchamp’s focus was the proper name, which was individual rather than
generic and somehow expressive of the essence of that individual, what later
philosophers would call a “rigid designator” rather than a collective name or
shifter that can serve as an interchangeable term for many different qualita-
tively distinct entities.66 Adorno, as we know, was deeply indebted to Benja-
min in many ways, among them his fascination with the utopian impulse in
proper names.67 As I noted earlier, in Dialectic of Enlightenment he and Hork-
heimer acknowledged that the corrosive power of Enlightenment “stops short
before the nomen, the non-extensive, restrictive concept, the proper name.”
Shortly after this observation, they added that in Judaism “the link between
name and essence is still acknowledged in the prohibition on uttering the name
of God. The disenchanted world of Judaism propitiates magic by negating it in
the idea of God.”68 Such a negation, like the famous Bilderverbot, or prohibi-
tion on images of God, is always in the service of a utopian possibility that
cannot be realized now, but must not be entirely abandoned as a future redemp-
tive hope. That possibility is of a world in which the endless displacement and
deferral of meaning is stilled, the subsumptive logic of general terms is
undone, and individual names and the essences they designate are finally—or
once again—one.
In what sense can we identify Adorno’s position as a defense of a nomi-
nalism that has a magical coloration? Although it would be highly misleading
to characterize it as a straightforward valorization of magic per se—works like
Dialectic of Enlightenment and Aesthetic Theory certainly acknowledge the

66. The term rigid designator was introduced by Saul Kripke in Naming and Necessity. Against
“descriptivist” semantics, in which proper names are said to be derived from descriptions of their
characteristics, it refers to a specifically named object that would be the same in every possible world
in which the object might exist. Kripke argued that certain natural kinds are also rigid designators,
defending a position more essentialist than nominalist when it came to terms like water or H2O.
67. See, e.g., Adorno’s discussion of “metaphysical experience” in terms of a child’s reverie about
place-names in Negative Dialectics, 373. As Hullot-Kentor has noted, “Benjamin’s work was also
conceived in opposition to nominalism, although the focus of his critique was distinct. It was con-
cerned with nominalism’s refutation of the expressive content of language. . . . Benjamin developed a
doctrine of ideas that attempts to recover the expressive content of language in a fashion that, with
idealism, justifies thought as part of metaphysical contents” (Things beyond Resemblance, 127). If,
however, we distinguish between a magical and a conventionalist nominalism, Benjamin and Adorno
can be enlisted on the side of the former.
68. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 17.

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22  Adorno and Musical Nominalism

benefits of leaving occultism, animism, and magic behind—it is clear that

Adorno’s insistence on the continuing importance of mimesis alerts us to his
fascination with the residues of what is often called “sympathetic magic.”69
Although insisting that the cliché about the “magic of art” ignores its complic-
ity with the rationalist disenchantment of the world, Adorno concluded that it
“has something true about it. . . . The aporia of art, pulled between regression
to literal magic or surrender of the mimetic impulse to thinglike rationality,
dictates its law of motion; the aporia cannot be eliminated.”70 Or as he put it
more positively in one of the most frequently cited aphorisms from Minima
Moralia, “art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.”71
Magic, to be sure, is itself an unstable signifier with many different
denotations and connotations. There has been no dearth of scholarly attempts
to map its manifestations in cultures, ancient and modern, and its struggle to
survive attempts to stamp it out in the name of religion or science. Although it
is hard to essentialize its characteristics, a recent study by Christopher Leh-
rich, largely informed by Claude Lévi-Strauss’s rumination on the bricolage of
“savage thought,” suggestively argues that magical thinking tends to favor the
particular over the universal. “Thought that turns resolutely towards the con-
crete,” he writes, “requires qualities at odds with historical and scientific
abstractions. In particular, by deferring to natural things, magical thought con-
structs a system whose anchors lie in nonhuman stabilities.”72
How does all this manifest itself, if at all, in musical terms? There is no
simple translation of philosophical concepts into aesthetic equivalents, and a
fortiori into music, where language is at its most indirect and attenuated. Yet,
without understanding the theoretical sources of Adorno’s dialectical attitude
toward nominalism, we cannot make sense of how it operates in his writings
on musical matters. The issue is raised in Gianmario Borio’s essay on the
question of meaning in Adorno and the musical avant-garde, which flags the
importance of Benjamin’s theological notion of language: “Transferring these
ideas to the realm of music, Adorno works along the path of secularization: the
linguistic gesture of music mimes that impulse with which man seeks to enter
into communication with the Supreme Being by means of prayer, as ‘the
human attempt, futile, as always, to name the name itself, not to communicate

69. For an insightful account of Adorno’s complicated analysis of magic, see Kaufmann, “Beyond
Gnosticism and Magic.”
70. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 54.
71. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 222.
72. Lehrich, Occult Mind, 117.

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Martin Jay  23

meanings.’”73 The citation at the end of this sentence comes from Adorno’s
1956 essay “Music, Language, and Composition,” in which he claims that

in comparison to signifying language, music is a language of a completely

different kind. Therein lies music’s theological aspect. What music says is a
proposition at once distinct and concealed. Its idea is the form [Gestalt] of
the name of God. It is demythologized prayer, freed from the magic of mak-
ing something happen, the human attempt, futile, as always, to name the
name itself, not to communicate meanings.74

Music, to be sure, cannot do without its meaningful elements, the relational

patterns that somehow signify, its striving for coherence. But it also conveys
something in excess of meaning, something beyond intention or expression,
something that, like the proper name, just is and cannot be interpreted in other
terms. As a result, music cannot be decoded, reduced entirely to language or
notation of any kind.
Or as Adorno put it in another essay of the same era, “On the Contempo-
rary Relationship of Philosophy and Music” (1953): “In music, what is at stake is
not meaning, but gesture. . . . As language, music tends toward pure naming, the
absolute unity of object and sign, which in its immediacy is lost to all language.
In the utopian and at the same time hopeless attempts at naming is located
music’s relation to philosophy, to which, for this very reason, it is incomparably
closer, in its idea, than any other art.”75 In music, Adorno continued, getting the
name right is equivalent to “the absolute as sound,” but it cannot appear without
the mediation of the compositional rationality and intended meaning that
thwarts its direct appearance. “It is the paradox of all music,” he concludes,
“that, as an effort towards that intentionless thing for which the inadequate word
‘name’ was chosen, it unfolds precisely only by dint of its participation in ratio-
nality in the broadest sense.”76 The riddle of music, its eternally enigmatic char-
acter, is due to the fact that “it does not possess its object, is not in command of
the name; rather, it longs for it, and in so doing, aims at its own demise.”77
In short, the magical nominalist impulse in music, its striving not only to
get beyond intelligible real universals to the qualitatively unique particulars
beneath but also to thwart the sovereign constitutive power of the dominating

73. Borio, “Dire Cela, sans Savoir Quoi,” 57.

74. Adorno, “Music, Language, and Composition,” 114.
75. Adorno, “On the Contemporary Relationship of Philosophy and Music,” 139–40.
76. Ibid., 140.
77. Ibid.

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24  Adorno and Musical Nominalism

subject, is the reason that music can be said to function like a secular version
of prayer. It manifests a yearning for a bliss beyond the interminable displace-
ment and deferral of meaning, for an absolute that overcomes the tension
between subject and object, for a state in which aesthetic semblance is no lon-
ger needed as an illusory antidote to a fully administered world. But through
the gesture of multiple performances, the mark of an allographic art in Good-
man’s sense, music gives us a glimpse of that bliss as an infinity of mimetic
repetitions and similarities, echoes and resonances, and not the static, death-
like perfection of a Platonic utopian order. This is a nominalism in the service
not of bourgeois disenchantment and the domination of nature but of its oppo-
site, a nominalism that is indeed magical in all its manifold implications.

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