Spontaneity and subjectivation of domination: the actuality of Theodor W. Adorno's critical theory of music

• Grant number: 22/08521-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: March 01, 2024
• Status: Discontinued
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - History of Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Rúrion Soares Melo
• Grantee: Ricardo Ribeiro Lira da Silva
• Host Institution: Centro Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento (CEBRAP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 19/22387-0 - Crises of democracy: critical theory and the diagnosis of present time, AP.TEM
• Associated scholarship(s): 25/01315-2 - Aesthetic Experience and the Negativity of Art, BE.EP.PD

Abstract

The present post-doctoral research, linked to the thematic project FAPESP No. 2019-22387/0, "Crises of democracy: critical theory and the diagnosis of present time", aims to investigate the potentials of Adorno's philosophy of music for an updating of the relationship between art and democracy from a critical-theoretical perspective. Our hypothesis is that the centrality given by Adorno to the problem of the subjectivation of domination in the field of music, largely neglected in Critical Theory since the communicative turn of Jürgen Habermas in the 1980s, would indicate some unexplored potentials of Adorno's theory on the critical role of music in capitalist society. Such potentials are primarily shown in the critical model present in the philosopher's late musical writings, a period in which Adorno moves away from the diagnosis, elaborated in the 1930s and 1940s, of a total elimination of subjective autonomy, either through the Cultural Industry or as a result of the progressive reification and fetishization of musical material in avant-garde music. In developing his late critical model centered on the category of musical spontaneity, Adorno sought to grasp theoretically the socially concrete possibilities of an non-reified relationship to musical practices, indicating a way of understanding the subjectivation of domination in the field of art that does not result in the unilateral and unflawed social integration of individuals. Following this track, the research seeks to investigate, through the confrontation with recent critical-theoretical developments, to what extent the Adornian conception of musical spontaneity, understood in the practical terms of a subjective behavior of openness to the artistic new, can be actualized as a constitutive element of a democratic form of life. (AU)