Media, Mediation and "Bildung" in Adorno's Current of Music

Current of Music builds on the opposition between the subject in the pre-technological era, defined in terms of face, voice, and person in contrast to the anonymous, ubiquitous, authoritarian subject of technological reproduction, However, Adorno’s approach to the problem of technological mediation shows a tendency to bypass this opposition while retaining a historically situated paradigm of the work of art in which normative features are evacuated through the means of negative dialectics. The concept of “progressive broadcasting” which emerges from Current of Music, urges one to delve further into the controversy about the the pedagogical function of the new media and to reconsider Adorno’s harsh critique of Walter Damrosch’s NBC Music Appreciation Hour. Moreover, the discussion about the possible function of radio in the cultural and social mediation of aesthetical norms and ways of listening points to an unexpected discovery about Adorno’s stance on immediacy. In two passages from Radio Physiognomics and Analytical Study of the NBC Music Appreciation Hour, respectively, Adorno suggests a performative function of live music, claiming that music in the pre-technological era “was on the order of prayer and play” while offering a metaphorical construction of the archetypal childhood experience of being struck by music. It raises the question about the destiny of art in the technological and digital era: should music agency be defined in terms of building communities and identities, or can the performative potential of music still advocate, in new forms, the possibility of building a world with its cognitive as well as critical implications? Adorno’s paradoxical definition of technological mediation, with its inextricable interrelationships between disturbing absence and alleged presence, is in need of further exploration, together with the experience of the radio’s authoritarian voice from which it originated.