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Music as Negative Theology

Identifieur interne : 002461 ( Istex/Corpus ); précédent : 002460; suivant : 002462

Music as Negative Theology

Auteurs : Eduardo De La Fuente

Source :

Thesis eleven [ 0725-5136 ] ; 1999-02.

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Abstract

Jean-Francois Lyotard's essay `Adorno as the Devil' had argued that Theodor Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music was a `diabolic' work of `negative theology' which attributed to Schoenberg's music a secret redemptive power. However, in his later writings, such as the essays in The Inhuman, Lyotard has himself moved close to a `negative theological' position with respect to modernity, time, aesthetics and music. The paper uses the occasion of Lyotard's own theologically inspired essays on music, `God and Puppet' and `Obedience', to re-evaluate the following: Adorno's claims that music transcends mere language and `reaches' for the theological; and more general claims within modern western culture on behalf of music's ability to express the inexpressible. The argument is that the music as negative theology position is not inherently metaphysical but rather that it reflects the importance of the `unsayable' to modern conceptions of reason. In resisting the `closure' of the modern narrative of reason, music, as a temporal art, has often given expression to the more radical forms of alterity present within modern forms of time. In other words, negative theology is not the discourse of the devil; it is the impossible discourse of western reason and its internal fracturing.

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DOI: 10.1177/0725513699056000004

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<front><div type="abstract" xml:lang="en">Jean-Francois Lyotard's essay `Adorno as the Devil' had argued that Theodor Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music was a `diabolic' work of `negative theology' which attributed to Schoenberg's music a secret redemptive power. However, in his later writings, such as the essays in The Inhuman, Lyotard has himself moved close to a `negative theological' position with respect to modernity, time, aesthetics and music. The paper uses the occasion of Lyotard's own theologically inspired essays on music, `God and Puppet' and `Obedience', to re-evaluate the following: Adorno's claims that music transcends mere language and `reaches' for the theological; and more general claims within modern western culture on behalf of music's ability to express the inexpressible. The argument is that the music as negative theology position is not inherently metaphysical but rather that it reflects the importance of the `unsayable' to modern conceptions of reason. In resisting the `closure' of the modern narrative of reason, music, as a temporal art, has often given expression to the more radical forms of alterity present within modern forms of time. In other words, negative theology is not the discourse of the devil; it is the impossible discourse of western reason and its internal fracturing.</div>
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<meta-value> MUSIC AS NEGATIVE THEOLOGY Eduardo de la Fuente ABSTRACT Jean-Francois Lyotard's essay 'Adorno as the Devil' had argued that Theodor Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music was a 'diabolic' work of 'negative theology' which attributed to Schoenberg's music a secret redemptive power. However, in his later writings, such as the essays in 7he Inhuman, Lyotard has himself moved close to a 'negative theological' position with respect to modernity, time, aesthetics and music. The paper uses the occasion of Lyotard's own theologically inspired essays on music, 'God and Puppet' and 'Obedience', to re-evaluate the following: Adorno's claims that music transcends mere language and 'reaches' for the theological; and more general claims within modern western culture on behalf of music's ability to express the inexpress- ible. The argument is that the music as negative theology position is not inherently metaphysical but rather that it reflects the importance of the 'unsayable' to modern conceptions of reason. In resisting the 'closure' of the modern narrative of reason, music, as a temporal art, has often given expres- sion to the more radical forms of alterity present within modern forms of time. In other words, negative theology is not the discourse of the devil; it is the impossible discourse of western reason and its internal fracturing. KEYWORDS dissonance * Hegelian Christology * Jewish 'sublime' * time- now * tragedy Thomas Mann's (1949) theologico-musical novel Doctor Faustus con- ceives of the devil, among other things, as philosopher, aesthetician and critic. The devil appears to the fictitious composer Leverkuihn - supposedly an amalgam of Schoenberg, Nietzsche and Mann himself - with the promise of a godlike, unfettered, immediate path to the absolute through the musical work of art. In designing such a contract, the devil disowns his image as 'man of destructive criticism', and claims that the 'idea' in music since Beethoven cannot be given any conception emanating from God: 'no, that Thesis Eleven, Number 56, February 1999: 57-79 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Copyright  1999 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Pty Ltd 10725-5136(199902)56;57-79;0069411 58   Thesis Eleven (Number 56 1999) is not possible with God, who leaves the understanding too much to do. It comes from the devil, the true master and giver of such rapture' (Mann, 1949: 231). We know, from Mann's account of the origins of the novel, that Adorno was himself counsellor to this parodic work of negative theology. Mann's (1961: 43) tribute to what he sees as the 'dialectic brilliance of Adorno's turn of mind' is to ensure that the arguments of the Philosophy of Modern Music (Adorno, 1973a) find an echo in the discourse of the devil. He also prefig- ures the unexpected role that Adorno was to play in the 'musical zero-hour' that was post-war Germany: a moment when the demons of fascism were exorcised by reinstating the musical trajectory least implicated in its horrors - that of the Schoenberg school. Indeed, Mann is disturbingly prophetic: only the devil can profit from the contract; thus, Adorno returns to Germany after the 1949 publication of the Philosophy of Modern Music in a blaze of glory, while Schoenberg, a victim of modernity to the last, dies an embittered figure in Los Angeles. One could resist the temptation to allegorize this as a post- script to Mann's novel, except that Adorno returns in 1951 precisely to teach a composition class at Darmstadt, the 'mecca' of post-war avantgardism, as a substitute for Schoenberg, who is too ill to leave America. Lyotard's (1974) essay 'Adorno as the Devil' occupies a midpoint between this social-intellectual configuration - of modernism, the aesthetics of dissonance, the Jew as 'other' of European modernity, fascism, an emerg- ing political economy of mass production - and our own post-Fordist, post- Marxist, post-Schoenbergian cultural horizon. Written in the context of post-May 1968 Marxist politics and coinciding more or less with the publi- cation of Deleuze and Guattari's (1983) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schiz- ophrenia, 'Adorno as the Devil' has the confidence to make the sociological observation, 'we have the advantage over Adorno of living in a capitalism that is more energetic, more cynical, less tragic' (Lyotard, 1974: 128). In this move, 'everything' is placed 'inside representation' and the tragic, which is still crucial to the musical aesthetics of Adorno, Schoenberg and Mann, 'gives way to the parodic'. For Lyotard, the idea of the critical work of art reflects a modern theology in which the loss of totality is experienced as 'demonia- cal'. From the vantage point of a post-structuralist Paris of the early 1970s it was possible to salvage the figure of Nietzsche from the Adorno-Schoen- berg-Mann unholy alliance: It has been said that Leverkuhn was Nietzsche ... Diabolo again as simbolo. Grave error with regard to Nietzsche, but a just perspective on Schoenberg: the new music was indeed the emergence of a new deployment, 'radical', critical, inside the womb of the old, the classical deployment which was itself liturgi- cal; the Marxism of Frankfurt, the emergence of a deployment which was 'radical', Lutheran, Jewish, in the womb of the 'Roman', Viennese, and Stalinist Marxism. (Lyotard, 1974: 129-30) de la Fuente: Music as Negative Theology  59 Lyotard denounces 'negative theology' as the refuge of 'faith' in a world where everything seems to be getting worse. He links the theologi- cal underpinnings of 'radical' music to that of Marxist politics: 'It is vain to reinforce composition in the Schoenbergian sense, as it is vain to search out the right position from which to struggle [contesteti in the leftist sense: these activities remain inside faith' (Lyotard, 1974: 128). But faith in what? If we are talking about the religion of politics it is clear from his' disagreements with Lukacs, Brecht, Eisler, and in another context wih Benjamin, that Adorno does not conceive of art as political or as the 'after-image' of the failed revolution. For Adorno the term 'radical' is at best a weak metaphor when applied to art. In many respects, the metaphorical deployment of 'negative theology' as a way of linking the failed projects of Marxism and serialism (or revolutionary politics and radical music) refers more to con- flicts within Lyotard's own post-Marxist agenda than it does to Adorno's subtle dialectical formulation of the music-society-politics relationship. In contrast to Adorno's hyperreflexive dialectics, which examine music from musicological-technical, philosophical-aesthetic and sociological-political perspectives, the early Lyotard is too ready to equate the discursive modes of music and their libidinal deployments with political forms. For example, the declaration 'We have to leave behind this alternative': musica ficta or musicafingens and replace them with the 'parodic work of nothing, musica figura' (Lyotard, 1974: 133), is followed a few pages later by, 'To cease com- posing in politics is to cease conserving in absentia the idea of totality, to cease constructing a "party". In place of the politica-ficta-fingens, a polit- ica-figura' (1974: 137). Is it not also Lyotard who invests the music aes- thetics of Cage - composer of the 'parodic work of nothing' - with extramusical critical potential? The Lyotard (1991a) who returns to the problematics of Adorno in the essays of the late 1980s collected in The Inhuman, directs himself to the task of thinking modernity and musical aesthetics, in a fresh, quasi-theological vein. This later Lyotard (1991a: 32) says of 'rewriting modernity' that it is an attitude, at every moment, of 'opening oneself to' a theological construct reminiscent of Walter Benjamin's (1968: 262) concept of messianic time: 'every second of time [is] the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter'. This link to Jewish theological modernism provides a bridge to Adorno, who Lyotard (1991a: 32) cites approvingly for his conception of modernity: 'At the end of Negative Dialectics, and also in the unfinished Aes- thetic Theory, Adorno lets it be understood that indeed we must rewrite mod- ernity, that modernity is, moreover, its own rewriting, but that one can only rewrite it in the form of what he calls "micrologies"'. Furthermore, in this later work Lyotard puts forward Adorno's style as precisely the. type of defi- ance of the requirement 'to communicate' that is in danger of being lost. Avant-gardism may be 'old hat', says Lyotard, but in the defiant temporalities 60   Thesis Eleven (Number 56 1999) of the avant-gardes lies a way of approaching the 'inhuman' (that which is other to humanity's well-ordered sense of self) that resists closure: What value is, what sure is, what man is, these questions are taken to be dangerous and shut away pretty fast. It is said that they open the way to 'anything goes', 'anything is possible', 'all is worthless'. Look, they add, what happens to the ones who go beyond this limit: Nietzsche taken hostage by fascist mythology, Heidegger a Nazi, and so on... A similar movement of restoration is also attacking the writing and reading of texts, and the visual arts and architecture. In the name of norm-bound reception Jauss refuses the text of Adorno: the writing of Aesthetic Theory, twisted, uncertain, almost haggard, is judged unreadable. Be communicable, that is the prescription. Avant-garde is old hat, talk about humans in a human way, address yourself to human beings, if they enjoy receiving you then they will receive you ... But what phil- osophy is must not be interrogated either, at the risk of falling into who knows what. I am not dreaming: the aim of the avant-gardes (dreadful name, I know) is something that they declared on numerous occasions. In 1913, Apollinaire wrote ingenuously: 'More than anything, artists are men who want to become inhuman'. And in 1969, Adorno again, more prudently: 'Art remains loyal to humankind uniquely through its inhumanity in regard to it'. (Lyotard, 1991a: 1-2) We may ask: why the new-found fondness for Adorno? Part of the answer seems to be that Adorno now is seen to be 'rewriting modernity' with an eye to preserving what is ungraspable about a given discourse, whether this be philosophy or music, aesthetics or art. Whether we are dealing with the more historical-sociological dialectic of the Dialectic of Enlightenment or the more conceptual-philosophical dialectic of Negative Dialectics, it is clear that Adorno wants to resist a narrative of closure (in his terms, the 'logic of identity'). The necessary incompleteness of modern narratives is a crucial concern of Lyotard's 7be Inhuman, its central notion is that of 'rewriting mod- ernity'. For Lyotard (1991a: 28) to 'write modernity'is always to 'rewrite mod- ernity', perpretating it anew 'instead of putting an end to it': 'To make the point differently, but with the same order of memory, 'a la John Cage, there is no silence that is not heard as such, and therefore makes some noise'. Lyotard (1991a: 34-5) also starts to sound remarkably like his arch-rival Juirgen Habermas when he adds: 'Postmodernity is not a new age, but the rewriting of some of the features claimed by modernity, and first of all mod- ernity's claim to ground its legitimacy on the project of liberating humanity as a whole through science and technology. But as I have said, that rewrit- ing has been at work, for a long time now, in modernity itself ... rewriting means resisting the writing of that supposed postmodernity'. Lyotard's later understanding of modernity and of its constant drive towards 'rewriting itself' presents us with the opportunity to reassess the claim that Adorno's aesthetics and the music of Schoenberg contain a theological dimension. It now seems that theology is not all bad. The later Lyotard seems de la Fuente: Music as Negative Theology  61 to be moving away from the idea that music as negative theology is one of the no longer possible fantasies of modernity (which in 'Adorno as the Devil' means Schoenbergean poetics, dodecaphony, Marxism, critique). Thus, there may be a new basis for comparing Adorno and Lyotard's musical aesthetics. Instead of distinguishing between them with the blunt tools of modernism and postmodernism (the characterization of Adorno as the unredeemable champion of 'classic' modernism, of Lyotard as the theorist of postmodern art), I propose to compare Adorno's and Lyotard's attitudes to music as a negative form of trascendence. This will involve juxtaposing Adorno's (1992, 1993) essays regarding the theological nature of musical language, and especially Schoenberg's atonal language, to Lyotard's (1991b, c) reflections in the essays 'God and the Puppet' and 'Obedience'. Admittedly, what is partly at stake in this comparison is the Kant-Hegel polarity, and these philosophers' rendering of the relationship between the 'phenomenal' and the 'incomprehensible', where, clearly, Adorno and Lyotard tend more, but not exclusively, towards one of these poles. But what is also at issue is the nature of modernity and music's relationship to it. The problem of music and negative theology highlights an underlying and recur- ring sociological and aesthetic paradox: despite the 'disenchantment of the world', the most rationalized or secularized of musics, western instrumental art music, continues to be implicated in a theology of the Absolute. In explor- ing the issue of negative theology I am therefore also proposing to analyse how music constitutes itself as a counter-discourse of modernity. We will follow Andrew Bowie's (1989: 83) suggestion that 'The importance of music in the history of modernity seems ... in part at least explained by its role as part of the counter discourse of modernity, that discourse that in the face of the determination to ground the subject in rules, codes and systems always reveals the extent to which these systems cannot be self-grounding'. Music's part in the 'rewriting of modernity' is therefore to some extent predetermined by its role as a discourse always already 'other' to self-legislating forms of reason. MUSIC, LANGUAGE AND SCHOENBERG'S 'SACRED FRAGMENT' Adorno's (1993) short essay, 'Music, Language and Composition' and the critical analysis of Schoenberg's Moses and Aaron, entitled 'Sacred Frag- ment' (Adorno, 1992), resist the systematic sociologizing that characterizes the Philosophy of Modern Music. Instead of reading the dialectic of enlighten- ment in the development of musical material, or critically analysing music for its progressive and regressive tendencies, in these essays music is deciphered as the process of becoming, in which Being is eternally present as that which is not. This approach to music conforms more fully to the ethos of 'negative dialectics'. As Adorno (1973b: 5) says, 'dialectics is the consistent sense of 62   7Thesis Eleven (Number 56 1999) nonidentity'; it does not assume 'standpoints' because there is no pure thought exempt from the 'rebuke that the thing is not. identical with the concept' (1973b: 149). Furthermore, these essays on music's theological char- acter. may serve as the basis for rereading Adorno's work as a type of musical philosophy that aims to salvage the 'non-identical': 'Adorno's concentration upon philosophy as the "effort to say that which one cannot speak" may have more than some kind of mystical significance when seen in the perspective of the question of music, language and modernity' (Bowie, 1989: 80). If, as Dahlhaus argues, as a rule in Adorno's aesthetics one 'can translate the word "Art" by "music"' (cited in Bowie, 1989: 79), then philosophy and music through their different concerns 'keep faith with their own substance through their opposites: art by making itself resistant to meanings; philosophy by refusing to clutch any immediate thing' (Adorno, 1973b: 15). What philos- ophy cannot abandon is what music is there to remind it of: 'the yearning that animates the non-conceptual side of art' (1973b: 15). In a dialectical move, Hegel's Science of Logic is rendered musical (Adorno, 1994: 135-7) and Schoenberg's music is raised (theologized) to the status of epistemology (Adorno, 1973a: 124). Straddling both systems is Adorno: negative philoso- pher and atonal composer. In 'Music, Language and Composition' Adorno (1993) argues that, despite music's similarities to language (many of which extend beyond mere analogy), music is not language. Its similarity to language consists in 'that it is a temporal succession of articulated sounds that are more than just sound' and that its syntax consists of 'sentence, phrase, period, and punctuation. Questions, exclamations, subordinate clauses are everywhere, voices rise and fall, and, in all of this, the gesture of music is borrowed from the speaking voice' (1993: 401). The traditional belief is that, once it has liberated itself from its reliance on text and story-telling, music has no concepts. Adorno (1993: 402) is just as unhappy with this rendering of music as he is with a semiotic one, and he clarifies that music does rely on concepts: 'But the iden- tity of these musical concepts lies in their own existence and not in some- thing to which they refer'. Tonality has its own concepts and markers (chord progressions, cadences, melodic phrases) but to do away with tonality in music making is not to do away with language, despite Levi-Strauss's protes- tations that serialism is less than a language.1 Music is, therefore, entrapped in a dialectic between 'the mere phenomenological coherence of tones' which, of itself, would merely resemble an 'acoustical kaleidoscope', and 'absolute signification, on the other hand, [where] it would cease to be music and pass, falsely, into language' (1993: 402). Music's theological character lies precisely in that it carries the 'curse of ambiguity' but 'signifies something, something definite': In comparison to signifying language, music is a language of a completely different type. Therein lies music's theological aspect. What music says is a proposition at once distinct and concealed. Its idea is the form of the name of de la Fuente: Music as Negative Theology  63 God. It is demythologised prayer, freed from the magic of making anything happen, the human attempt, futile, as always, to name the name itself, not to communicate meanings. (Adorno, 1993: 402) The historian of musical aesthetics Carl Dahlhaus has commented on this passage in his summation of the modern conception of music as theol- ogy, 7Te Idea of Absolute Music: The thesis that Kierkegaard destroyed philosophically (out of secret theologi- cal motives) - that music, specifically and especially instrumental music, is a language above language - was restored philosophically .. . a century later by Theodor W. Adorno ... The language of Jewish theology, which Adorno borrowed from the poetic and linguistic theory of Walter Benjamin could, however, be exchanged for a dialectical-metaphysical one without loss of meaning, one in which a faint echo of romantic music aesthetics is audible. (Dahlhaus, 1989: 115) What is echoed is the philosophical idea of music as the 'intimation of infinity'. If German Idealism pursued theological themes in a 'specifically Pla- tonic vocabulary of the Idea as the carrier of divine energy in the world' (Steinberg, 1993: 398), 19th-century musical aesthetics went on to refer to music as an absolute language, Schopenhauer conceiving of it as the direct image of the Will. Oswald Spengler's (1954) survey of western civilization rightly gives music a high profile, and says that modernity has ushered in a reconceptualization of the mythology of musical culture. Out of the shift from God as part of nature (manifested in the world) to a post-Renaissance God as will (antithetical to this world) emerges the aesthetic complicity of music with theology. Spengler says, After the Renaissance the notion of God sheds the old sensuous and personal traits (omnipresence and omnipotence are almost mathematical concepts), becomes little by little identical with the notion of infinite space and in becoming so becomes transcendent world-will. And therefore it is that about 1700 painting has to yield to instrumental music - the only art that in the end is capable of clearly expressing what we feel about God. (Spengler, 1954: 315) Here we have our central paradox. If modernity initiates a process of rationalization that mathematicizes music, it also throws up a complex musical-philosophical configuration, which Dahlhaus (1989: 146) calls 'the poetic idea of unspeakability'.2 Mathematics and tragedy; Helmholtz and Nietzsche: one asks, 'how does a note function?', the other, 'why is music experienced as a primal pleasure?' Adorno's (1993: 404) reply is that music functions as a theology (but since it is also about how we know God, it is equally an epistemology), in which one is blinded just as one reaches the absolute: 'Music reaches the absolute immediately, but in the same instant it darkens, as when a strong light blinds the eye, which can no longer see things that are quite visible'. This type of theology is not too distant from Hegel's conception of negation as a state where changeable, finite man yearns for 64   7hesis Eleven (Number 56 1999) the 'unchangeable, infinite one'. It is interesting that Hegel renders the con- dition of unreconciled negativity in musical terms. Hegel (1977: 131) says that the condition of 'unhappy consciousness'* is one in which man knows God, 'no more than the chaotic jingling of bells, or a mist of warm incense, a musical thinking'. What Adorno (1993: 404) adds to Hegel's rationalized romanticism is the modernist sense of a mediation without end: 'Music shows its similarity to language once more in that, like signifying language, it is sent, failing, on a wandering journey of endless mediation to bring home the impossible'. Adorno (1992) is interested in Schoenberg's unfinished opera Moses and Aaron precisely because it takes as its subject matter the Old Testament pro- hibition on depicting God and therefore the human limitation on expressing through words and music the absolute. Yet beyond this thematic intention, the work encounters a second limitation: after completing the first two acts of the opera in a matter of weeks, Schoenberg was never to set the third act to music. According to Adorno (1992: 226) this second 'impossibility which appears intrinsic to the work is, in reality, an impossibility which was not intended'. The absolute is 'conjured up' but since it depends on the 'con- jurer', 'Schoenberg ensured that the work could not make it real' (1992: 227). Theological music cannot 'simply be willed' (1992: 228), as this would be to compromise the very concept, a contradiction that Schoenberg sees right through to an inconclusive end. The desire to 'outdo' theological subjectiv- ity through music rebounds into an impossibility that is historically built into theology: An immense gulf opens up between the transsubjective, the transcendentally valid that is linked to the Torah, on the one hand, and the free aesthetic act which created the work on the other. This contradiction becomes fused with the one which forms the theme of the work and directly contributes to its impossibility. Theologians have complained that the designation of monothe- ism as 'thought' - that is, something which is only subjectively intended - dimin- ishes the idea of transcendence in the text, since every thought is in a sense transcendental. (Adorno, 1992: 227) The tension, then, is between modern subjectivity and a more primor- dial inaccessibility to the absolute: primitive Judaism connected but in con- flict with Luther's personal God. In other words, the tension is between Judaism, in which there is no mediation of nature and spirit, and a Christian conception of grace, which mitigates the absoluteness of the divine. What makes these two theologies suitable for musical aesthetic speculation is their prohibition of images: which is why the aesthetics of absolute music can be understood either in terms of the iconophobia of Protestantism or the sense of absolute otherness that accompanies the Mosaic prohibition on repre- senting the divine. Schoenberg's Moses and Aaron uses the operatic form, after the demise de la Fuente: Music as Negative Theology 65 of Wagner's ideal of the total work of art, to express the limitations of instru- mental music. If the 'idea of absolute music' is one-sidedly instrumental, opera nonetheless played out the relationship of subjectivity to the divine. Tonality and the operatic form are entwined with the history of the modern subject (Descartes's formulation of the cogito dates from the same period as Monteverdi's gesturing towards harmonic polyphony and the operatic song independent of the chorus); Schoenberg's atonality marks the limit of the dis- cursive space occupied by the Christian-bourgeois individual who, saved by 'Grace', is in direct tension with the power of the divine. Slavoj Zizek (1993: 105) has noted of opera, 'At its beginning stands the recitative (the great invention of Monteverdi), the not-yet-aria, and at its end Sprachgesang, the 'spoken song', the no-longer-aria'. The space in between these two musical forms is the history of bourgeois subjectivity, beyond which lies Schoenberg's atonal revolution in which it is no longer possible to articulate in a classical tonal operatic aria, 'the sublime gesture of Grace' (1993: 106). Thus, in Schoenberg's Ernaitung, the operatic subject or autonomous agent who sup- plicates in song the Master (King or Divinity) is replaced by the shrieks and 'spoken-song' of the hysteric who cries out to the Other, which is her own unconscious. This language of pathos finds a new home in 12-tone technique and Schoenberg must ask the question again: can music as the voice of the divine go any further? Schoenberg's solution in Moses and Aaron is an ingenious commentary on the history of music as negative theology. Western tonal music had emptied music of linguistic content and had prefigured atonality by unfixing sound from the need to represent something extramusical. But Schoenberg uses the gains made by this musical tradition to pose a self-critical question: what does 'non-representation' mean to modern music? And where would a post-theological musical language such as the 12-tone technique start if it wanted to reinscribe the divine within music? Schoenberg's solution is to make the 12-tone technique answerable to the voice and the spoken word. But these are not reintroduced unproblematically. In Moses andAaron, Aaron sings but Moses can only speak; neither can represent God. Unlike Protes- tant theology, the infinity of God is not in any simple sense the antithesis of man's finite capacities. Schoenberg's message is that in 'musica ficta' the autonomous individual is not transcended by the divine but by a mirror- image, that is ungodlike and of its own making. Hence, the climatic scene of the opera is the 'idolatry' of the 'Dance of the Golden Calf'. Conflict arises because the transcendent God is compromised by anthropomorphism: this is the story that the music cannot tell without itself committing the sin of idol- atry. At the end of Act Two, following Aaron's failure to stop the people from turning to idolatry, Moses sinks to the ground in despair and says: 'Incon- ceivable God! ... 0 word, thou word, that I lack!' Paradoxically, without the 'word' humans can lapse into idolatry, the idolatry of attempting to conceive the inconceivable God. Perhaps only by keeping music's exaggerated claims 66   7hesis Eleven (Number 56 1999) to transcendence in check will music escape the temptation to construct new idols: the 'developing variation'; 'chromaticism'; the 'twelve-tone row'. Adorno notes how dissonance, which in some of Schoenberg's purely instru- mental works is close to impossible to bear (we might say is self-indulgently 'other-worldly'!), in Moses and Aaron is rendered 'this-wordly', listenable, by the means it employs: the use of verbal language and the no longer viable operatic form to depict an Old Testament story. If modernity had created the conditions under which the 'other-worldliness' of music was established, then Schoenberg shows that the subject matter of the divine is too much even for the most advanced of musical languages. GOD AND THE PUPPET OR MUSIC AS OBEDIENCE Instead of setting out to discuss music in terms of language, Lyotard's (1991b: 153) 'God and the Puppet' tells the 'story' of repetition; a repetition 'That in trying to have itself forgotten, fixes its forgetting, and thus repeats its absence'. Music here is problematized as time, repetition and sonorous matter, and the act of organizing these, which Lyotard calls 'musical writing'. Like Adorno, he is interested in how repetition in music is always more than identical repetition, declaring that "musical pleasure appears to depend on the perception of these differences: at one and the same time the mind enjoys the same through the other, and is enchanted by diversity that identity accepts' (1991b: 154). But we have something different from Adorno's dialec- tical formulation of identity and difference; the post-Marxist Lyotard has taken on the Kantian distinction between 'genres' of discourse or 'faculties'. Lyotard (1991b: 154) distinguishes acoustics - as recognition of sounds directed at 'understanding' - from music as 'disinterested pleasure': 'I would say in Kantian terms that the exact identification of the sound belongs to the under- standing in its cognitive finality, but the variation of its putting into forms comes under the imagination obeying the finality without concepts proper to the disinterested pleasure which, according to Kant, characterises the aes- thetic feeling of the beautiful'. Helmholtz and Nietzsche are never to unite, at least not in terms of the apprehension of the phenomenon. However, Lyotard adds something substantial to Kant's narrow con- ception of aesthetic pleasure. Concerned as he is with the problem of repe- tition, he writes of a presence and absence that escapes both determined and allusive (aesthetic) repetition. He calls this the unrepeatable 'nuance' which is most approximated by the singularity of 'timbre'; unlike Schoenberg's complex atonality, which the composer could still claim to be 'hearing in his head', timbre is tied to the here-and-now of time. Here the subject is not there, because timbre does not refer to the synthesizing of sensory forms and conceptual operations. It is comparable to how Epicurus 'circumscribes death: if it's there; I'm not there; so long as I'm there, it's not there' (Lyotard, 1991b: 157). Like death, timbre cannot be lost: 'there is no mark of this loss de la Fuente: Music as Negative 7Teology  67 on the actively reflexive course of the subject ... Our disappointment when we listen to a recording is directed at the singularity that can't be found. Mind through its syntheses has no access to it' (1991b: 157). Here, Kant meets Freud via Lacan. What is evoked is an aesthetic principle 'beyond the pleasure prin- ciple', a type of repetition in which a 'trace' does not mark absence - the inscription of loss on the reflective subject - through fantasies of control: jouissance and not plaisir. The theology underlying this is paradoxical. God is taken to be a maximal expression of the capacity to synthesize temporality but since this capacity entails the simultaneous positing of all elements, God's 'ear' is equally intemporal. This conception reinserts Leibniz's God, a God who 'hears all sounds of the world, the so-called real world, but also of the other possible worlds, in the same instant' (Lyotard, 1991b: 162). God's intempo- rality is restored as an excess of synthesis, i.e. God is not negated, he loses (in positive theology he gains) value through excess. To make his point, Lyotard considers Heinrich von Kleist's piece 'On the Marionette Theatre'. Kleist's essay considers the relationship of life to being through the figure of the puppet who exhibits an openness to fateful certainty. Lyotard seizes upon the narrator's description of the energy which moves the puppets, to speak of a pure grace in which neither God nor puppet originate consciousness: Nothing, he explains, is closer to infinite divine grace than the mechanism these puppets obey. Deprived of all intention (I'd say, deprived of all capacity for temporal synthesis), the dolls merely place their limbs at the moment as they are ordered, following the law of gravity alone. We see how well this obser- vation accords (if I can say that) with the idea of the billiard ball. And how much repetition understood as immediate restitution of a movement (a vibration, if we are dealing with sound) is related to divine automatism in Aristotle's sense, which is the self-sufficiency of the same. (Lyotard, 1991b: 163) Divine automatism, in the Aristotelian sense, implies that God and puppet are pure energy, they have no 'quality, since quality is power' (Lyotard, 1991b: 163). It is a type of grace that frees the mind from vertical infinity and the resources of diachrony. This is analogous to post-tonal (Cage and minimalism) music's resistance to the differentiation of melody and harmony, consonance and dissonance. In contrast to the atonal construal of difference as relationality, Lyotard (1991b: 163) is prompting us to consider those musics, in which the logic of 'differentiation of the one and the mul- tiple would not have time or place'. In the essay entitled simply 'Obedience', Lyotard (1991c: 165) starts from Adorno's well-known thesis that 'with the liberation of material, the possibility of mastering it has increased'. However, the essay focuses on sound as sound and as an interesting counterpoint to Adorno's Schoenber- gism, Lyotard looks at Edgar Varese's aesthetics of sound-colour, i.e. timbre. (When Varese decided that instrumental pitch and colour were not enough, 68   Thesis Eleven (Number 56 1999) he used experimental timbres, such as factory sirens in Ameriques, to extend the constraints of classical tonal music.) It is hard to think of a work such as Int6grales except as a constant variation of sound colour. As in painting, Lyotard sees the exploration of pitch form leaving as a remainder the enig- matic presence of the material itself: vibration. Sound itself emerges as struc- ture. 'In one of his letters Cezanne writes: "Form is finished when colour reaches perfection". . . It is clear too from Debussy to Boulez, Cage or Nono, via Webern and Varese, the attention of modern musicians towards this secret passibility to sound-timbre' (Lyotard, 1991a: 141). Varese's sound world is like medieval and early modern 'art-science', which Lyotard reads as 'the con- nivance of the concept and the flesh' (Lyotard, 1991c: 175). Sound intensi- ties are both spatial and temporal, the Darstellung of Tonkunst (sound-art) is only graspable in the spatialized present of its flight; the colours, not the frame. But music as sound raises the question of listening. Lyotard suggests we take seriously the etymological connection between listening and obli- gation. In German, for example, the word for obedience, Geborsam, derives from the verb 'hbren'; 'obedience' implies being obliged 'to lend one's ear' (Lyotard, 1991c: 167). He cites the theosophist Emm"'anuel Swedenborg on 'hearing': 'The Spirits which correspond to Hearing, or which constitute the province of the Ear, are those which are in simple Obedience... If these spirits are like this, this is because the relation of hearing to language is like that of passive to active, as like the relation of him who hears speech and acquiesces to him who speaks' (1991c: 178). We could ask why Lyotard chooses to follow Swedenborg in seeing listening as obligation, as part of belonging to an 'inexhaustible network'. In speaking of 'spirits' that take our ear 'hostage' Lyotard (1991c: 178) seems to be evoking the world of 'acousmatic technologies' (Pierre Schaef- fer's term for music without a perceivable source). In an electronic world a 'convocation by an other voice' is receiving nobody's voice. Lyotard (1991c: 179) claims that a reframing of listening as 'passive obedience' is a necessary counterpart to the 'liberation of those features of sound', which 'music aided by contemporary technologies is trying to free in sound, its authority, the belonging of spirit to the temporal blowing-up involved in the "being-now" of heard sound'. But lest 'obedience' start to sound like a rallying cry for muzak, Lyotard adds that 'obedience' lays the foundation for a 'vigorous cri- tique' of western music. Obedience to the sounds that envelop us reanimates the body's response to sound as sound (which he terms Tonkunst): 'a whole anthropology of sound falls. The obedience revealed for a moment in Tonkunst (with or within new technology) means that we (who, we?) are due to the donation of the event. This request is ontological, as it were; no- one is asking us anything' (1991c: 181). To the extent that Lyotard's 7Te Inhuman puts forward a consistent the- ology it is difficult to pin down. What can be stated with some confidence de la Fuente: Music as Negative Theology 69 is that Lyotard wants to replace the metaphysics of vertical differentiation and mediation (God cut-off, in conflict with man) with the theodicy of relation- ships that are internally constituted ('God and the Puppet'). He says that 'clus- ters', 'condensed sounds', 'harmonics' and 'repetition' have an inner life, not contained in the intervallic relation of notes. But what sort of theology is sug- gested by an aesthetics of sound as sound - without the play of mediation? Music as sound colour in the hands of the Catholic Messiaen is too posi- tive a theology: heaven brought closer to man by an intermediary (the com- poser). One is tempted to look for a musical equivalent to Barnett Newmann: Cage, Feldman, Reich or Glass. What is minimal music if not music straight out of the paint can: surface music? What you hear is what you hear; repe- tition without mediation. The monad, the blank space most clearly approached by silence or by a single unending sound (LaMonte Young) instead of the linear 'infinite set', where nothing is meant to be heard twice (Webern). The absolute sameness of minimalism reminds us that the tempo- rality of music is different to that of clock-time; every moment is an eternity. There are no 'endings' except the limits of our capacity to listen. Glass knows we are obliged to listen as much as we may be obliged to leave the concert hall during one of his works lasting five to six hours. By his own admission Glass has never sat uninterrupted through an entire performance of Einstein on the Beach. It does not matter if the Messiah comes and we have stopped listening. THERE IS MORE THAN ONE NEGATIVE THEOLOGY Having considered an alternative musical theology, the limitations of Adorno's negative theology become clear. Its thesis is sound enough but it derives its conclusions from a restrictive theologico-aesthetic reference point: Hegelian Christology. In reading the success of Schoenberg's modernism in its failure, Adorno judges the decline of the musical work of art from a Hegelian understanding of the contradiction between the finite and the infi- nite. If great art is no longer beautiful it is because of a fundamental inade- quation of sensuous presentation to Idea. Thus 'Art' becomes, in the words of Lyotard (1974: 127), 'a kind of Christ in its denunciating function'. Hegel had already explicitly connected tragic art to the redemptive sacrifice at the heart of Christianity: 'God himself is dead', it says in a Lutheran hymn, expressing an awareness that the human, the finite, the weak, the negative, are themselves a moment of the divine, that they are within God himself, that finitude, negativity, otherness are not outside God and do not, as otherness, hinder unity with God. Otherness, the negative is known to be a moment of the divine nature itself. This involves the highest idea of spirit. (Hegel, 1988: 326) Consequently, the 'death of God' pronounces that the 'via negativa' is the only route to salvation. Redemption is tied to suffering, the suffering of 70   Thesis Eleven (Number 56 1999) God himself; this is the manifestation of a conflict within the infinite, reveal- ing its finiteness. No more divine comedy, in Hegel's Christ-logic, the power of the divine is resolutely tragic. This understanding of redemption is clearly present in Wagner, who offered us one of opera's most tragic heroes: Tristan. The music supports the narrative by attesting to Nietzsche's (1993: 115) claim that 'tragic myth has the same origin as the pleasurable perception of dissonance in music'. In Act Three of Tristan and Isolde, the orgiastic chromaticism culminates in a sacri- fice that, like the crucifixion of Christ, is simultaneously a moment of grief and a moment of joy, redemptive tragedy. Does not chromatic dissonance die here in order to re-establish tonality? In Schoenberg this Christology is evident not as narrative but as discourse. The tragic appears not just as content - Moses and Aaron cannot be considered a tragedy in any straight- forward sense - but as the defining self-consciousness of the artistic creator: in a world of fallen gods, the figure of the artist suffers for his art and, indi- rectly, for humanity. In this artistic stance, the dialectic of God and man (in keeping with Hegel) serves as a suitable commentary on the nature of modern subjectivity. Adorno (1983: 165) will translate the death of the Grand Other sociologically: 'The break between the substantiality of the ego and the overall structure of social existence ... has become too profound to permit works of a synthesis'. The only language available in this situation is not one of beauty but of tragedy; dissonance is the syntactic device par excel- lence for expressing, in its barbarity, its lack of beauty, in 'all the darkness and guilt of the world . . . it [dissonant music] finds all its happiness, all its beauty in forbidding itself the appearance of the beautiful' (Adorno, cited in Lyotard, 1974: 127). Yet we are well within reason to ask whether Schoenberg's confron- tation with impossibility is not equally derivable from another negative the- ology: the 'analytic of the sublime'. In his reassessment of Adorno's essay 'Sacred Fragment' Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe (1994: 130) asks, 'how is it that Adorno was unable to see or did not want to see that in reality Schoenberg's endeavour expressly inscribes itself in the canonical tradition of the sublime?' This omission is all the more surprising given the opera's allusions to a Mosaic sublime. The sublime for Kant, as in Schoenberg's Moses and Aaron, is a failure of expression which gives rise to pain. The infinity of the sublime lies precisely in contemplation of what Kant calls a 'negative presentation' or non- presentation. What is more, the figure of Moses is emblematic for Kant of the 'sublime utterance' (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1994: 130-31): as, law giver, Moses is on the 'edge', receptive to the absoluteness of the divine; he is also initiator of the prohibition on images. The Mosaic Law, then, points to a different atti- tude to representation which we might call the 'ancient terror of absolute otherness'.. Before music was conceived as mediation-redemption - (Christ- ian) tragedy, it had been implicated in myth, magic, ritual and sacrifice. This attests to another musical truth, a more primordial one in which the negative de la Fuente: Music as Negative Theology  71 lies outside the Hegelian closed economy: the dialectical space where disso- nance is to the metaphysical idea of beauty as pain is to pleasure or Christ is to God. Lyotard's writings on the sublime directly address this possibility. He argues that the importance of the sublime to modernism - or 'what are called the avant-gardes in painting or in music' (Lyotard, 1991a: 135) - is in the way that the decline in the very conditions of presentation are registered. While the. sublime in art is negative - it entails terror, fear, surrender, prescription - its modus operandi is not transcendence through absence but the feeling of presence, of the 'here-and-now' that is evoked. In this configuration there is no nameable or knowable agency promising revelation: the revelation happens from 'time to time'. This absence of a mediating Other, is clearly felt, according to Lyotard, in the sublimity operative in Barnett Newman's paintings: When he [Newxnan] seeks sublimity in the here-and-now he breaks with the eloquence of romantic art but does not reject its fundamental task, that of bearing pictorial or otherwise expressive witness to the inexpressible ... The inexpressible does not reside over there in another world, or another time, but in this: in that (something) happens. In the determination of pictorial art, the indeterminate, the 'it happens' is the paint, the picture. The paint, the picture is the occurrence or event, is not expressible, and it is this that it has to witness. (Lyotard, 1991a: 92-3) The musical equivalent to this is John Cage's experiments in 'nothing- ness'. Like Newman's 'Sublime is Now', Cage's 4'33" piece is a 'message' that speaks of nothing and emanates from no-one. The 'nothingness' that confronts the audience during its performance is obligatory. This infamous piece uses silence in order to ask what is sublime, present and unnameable about sound itself. The 'here-and-now' of this musical sublime is a commentary on the whole trajectory of absolute music. The secret power of music is shown to lie in its emptiness, its semantic indeterminacy. The experiment is predicated on the 'presence' of the concert hall, the ritual of Rituals, in which our silence, our intentional silence, surrenders our ears, our souls to the power of the emptiness. Once the orchestra starts tuning its instruments or the first recog- nizable sound is produced, the emptiness is filled. But like Newman, Cage wants to demonstrate that this emptiness is powerful in its own right and its secrets can only be unlocked by showing the materials that go into produc- ing it: raising the question, can one create silence? Herein lies the value of the 4'33" piece. In order to get us to hear a sound before our 'mind's eye' has a chance to recognize it, convert it or transform it into something abstract, sym- bolic or associational - that is, into something other - Cage would have us decentre our musical perceptions, if only to recognize that silence does not exist. In the intimate relationship of silence to sound lies an indeterminacy that the privileging of music as an 'art of time' conceals; the manufacturing of 'illu- sory time'. Cage says, 'we have to let sounds be themselves'. 72  7Tesis Eleven (Number 56 1999) In the absence of diachronic determination, the sounds unleashed by Cage's sound experiments bear witness to the abyss of time. Other experi- ments, like Indeterminacy, can be said to constitute a 'machine without final- ity' (Lyotard, 1974: 132), despite the work's 90-minute duration. Even if Cage (who reads 91-minute stories) and David Tudor (who provides an impro- vised piano and electronic accompaniment) hold stopwatches, they do not pretend to control time or the flow of sounds in time. The elements of Inde- terminacy are not related as part is to whole; unlike lieder or recital, the voice may be accompanied as much as interrupted or blotted out by musical sound. This is an aesthetic that attests to the uncontrollability of clashing and multiplying sound worlds. The work is powerless in the face of an infinite aural universe, which Cage recognizes he can only make audible in a hap- hazard, uncontrolled way, for a certain period of time. This attitude towards the fragment or excerpt (the work is itself an excerpt) conforms with the modality of time that Lyotard has called the time of Nowv. In 'Time Today', Lyotard (1991d: 59) speaks of an occurrence not yet present as anything but itself: time 'now' rather than the referential 'this' or 'that time'. In diachronic formulations, 'It is always too soon or too late to grasp presentation itself and present it' (1991d: 59). But Cage's cheerful acceptance of the essential uncontrollability of time is like Leibniz's monad who - faced with the cosmological challenge of a perfect God - is resigned to an incoming event that ought not to be neutralized. Cage writes: When we re-move the world from our shoulders we notice it doesn't drop. Where is the responsibility? Responsibility is to one self; and the highest form of it is irresponsibility to oneself which is to say the calm acceptance of whatever responsibility to others and things comes a-long. (Cage, 1973: 139) This reminds one of Emmanuel Levinas's (1983: 113) elegant statement: 'the idea of the Infinite is to be found in my responsibility for the Other'. In order to be equal to this task, one must be 'prepared to receive what thought is not prepared to think' (Lyotard, 1991d: 73). Lyotard adds that 'if thinking indeed consists in receiving the event, it follows that no-one can claim to think without being ipso facto in a position of resistance to the procedures of controlling time' (1991d: 74). If like Cage this appears a non-western posi- tion, it also rests on a theological principle of 'ancient European heritage - Judaic thought': In the very heart of western culture, such an attitude has, or had, its analogue in the manner of being and thinking which issued from the Judaic tradition. What this tradition calls 'study' and 'reading' requires that any reality be treated as an obscure message addressed by an unknowable or even unnameable agency. As to a verse of the Torah, one must listen to the phenomenon, decipher and interpret it, of course, but with humour, without forgetting that this interpretation will itself be interpreted as a message no less enigmatic, de la Fuente: Music as Negative Theology   73 Levinas would say no less marvellous than the initial event ... It must be under- stood that what testifies is not at all the entity, whatever it be, which claims to be in charge of this passibility to the event, but the 'event' itself. What memorises or retains is not capacity of the mind, not even accessibility to what occurs, but, in the event, the ungraspable 'presence' of a something which is other than mind and which, 'from time to time', occurs... (Lyotard, 1991d: 72, 75) This attitude to otherness stands in sharp opposition to the philo- sophical theology of the Hegelian God-man dialectic: the ungraspable 'other' that happens 'from time to time' is not a mediated relation. However, despite its differences from the Hegelian position, the attitude described by Lyotard may also constitute a negative theology because of the value that it attaches to the alterity of the divine (see Carroll, 1989: 49-51). Negative theology might therefore take the form of either a tragic concern with the incapacity of man to express the inexpressible (Adorno-Schoenberg), or a more humorous, more celebratory position that locates in the infinite the possibility of plural 'events' that humans witness, at best, unintentionally (Lyotard-Cage). Lyotard is likely to suggest that freed from Hegelian metaphysics, post-Schoenber- gian musical sublimity is a more radical form of alterity - predicated, as in Cage, on the singularity of the 'occurrence'. NEGATIVE THEOLOGY AND MODERNITY Symptomatic, perhaps, of the postmodern is the number of recent books that reconstruct theology as one of the 'repressed' discourses of western modernity. Gillian Rose says of Mark Taylor's (1984) Erring: A Post- modern A/theology and John Milbank's (1990) Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason that these 'authorships provide evidence of that prodigious, omniscient, "contemporary" "Western" intellectuality that would crown post-modern theology or a/theology: "queen of the sciences"... Thereby is vindicated an old prognostication: that if we fail to teach theol- ogy - we will usurp it' (Rose, 1992: 278-9). Rose's (1993: 3) own position, in her book Judaism and Modernity, is that it would be a mistake to replace modern 'reason' with its supposed opposite (her specific concern is Judaic thought as 'other' to modern philosophy), to make 'diffrrance the 'hallmark of anti-reason' and 'the Other' the 'hallmark of practical anti-reason'. Rose (1993:1) comments on the tendency to want to replace philosophy with the- ologies of alterity as a move from 'Athens to Jerusaleum': 'Jerusalem against Athens has become the emblem for revelation against reason, for the hearing of commandments against the search for first principles, for the love of neigh- bour against explanation of the world, and for the prophet against the philosopher ... suddenly in the wake of the perceived demise of Marxism, Athens, for a long time already arid and crumbling, has become an uncan- nily deserted city, haunted by departed spirits'. Instead of 'hoping to escape 74   7hesis Eleven (Number 56 1999) the imperium of reason', Rose (1993: 1) wants to explore how theology expresses a fracture within western thought itself, a 'severing ... from philo- sophical logos [that] amounts to a trauma within reason itself'. The concerns of Taylor, Milbank and Rose as to the rightful place of theology in western culture raises the issue of how to conceive what we have been calling negative theology. Is negative theology a theology at all or is it a non-theology that expresses a secular-modern desire to transcend the limits of theological reasoning? With respect to our discussion of music we might also ask: does music replace theology as a model of transcendence or is its relationship to negative theology one of structural similarity or paradigmatic likeness? In answering these two questions I think it prudent to locate the discussion squarely within debates about the nature of modernity. As Luhmann (1982) would say, it is only because modern societies are func- tionally differentiated societies and because the future is opened up as a horizon of temporal uncertainty, that Christianity becomes less a 'true religion' and more the word of God grounded purely in a 'self-referential' form of divine revelation (Luhmann, 1984: 53ff). Theology emerges as just one more 'constituted horizon' through which people speculate about the complexity of their Umwelt (Milbank, 1990: 130-31). From this perspective it is not hard to see why negative theology is such a modern (although not exclusively modern) concern. Negative theology has often taken on the role, in western culture, of fulfilling the promise of what Kierkegaard called 'indirect discourse'. The fascination with negative theol- ogy, and its aesthetic potential, is no more than wanting to write and talk about the 'unsayable'. From the Greeks through Aquinas to Wittgenstein and Derrida, the 'deferral' of ultimate meaning in language (and other modes of representation) has suggested a lack that registers a more fundamental other- ness. This has prompted Mark Taylor (1982: 99) to suggest 'a striking simi- larity between Derridean differance and what theologians have traditionally called God'. This analogy has served modern thought well, and has allowed philosophy and art to conceive of problems peculiar to our times. Adorno's prohibition on writing poetry 'after Auschwitz' turns to the premodern, ancient Judaic taboo on representing the divine in order to convey what can and can't be said in the face of the barbarity of the Holocaust. But if Rose is correct then the 'similitude' is not to be taken at face value. God is not identical to Otherness; the discourse about God comes to repre- sent God as 'Other'. The analogy (God-Other) works because of the determi- nation of 'limits'. In modernity, the process by which theology gains the right to speak of such otherness points to the limits of reason as a self-legislating category. Here music is the supreme example of the type of contradictions built into self-confirming forms of rationality. Theorized by the Enlightenment as exhibiting the type of mathematical proportions one finds in nature, music had by the time of Beethoven surpassed the idea of a 'correspondence' with nature: the realization that tonality is no more a natural language than reason de la Fuente: Music as Negative Theology   75 is a scientific one. In turn, the romantic idea that music expresses the divine due to its semantic indeterminacy results in music turning increasingly in the 20th century to the science of semiotics - serialism finding refuge in the Saus- surean notion of the pure arbitrariness of signification. Music seems capable of defying just about any type of statement one may care to make about it. The failure of the music 'is' statement is perhaps the best testament to music's functional equivalency to negative theology. Music is not negative theology. It is a reminder of what cannot be said. But if modernity creates the conditions under which the 'unsayable' functions as a type of ungrounded otherness to self-grounding reason, this is only possible because modernity temporalizes time, i.e. it is the first his- torical period to understand itself in temporal terms (Blumenberg, 1983: 116). As Osborne (1995: 14) notes in The Politics of Time, modern reflexive time (the temporalization of time) opens up the possiblity of seeing time as homo- geneous, differentiated or abstract: 'Modernity, then has no fixed, objective referent . . . It is the product, in the instance of each utterance, of an act of historical self-definition through differentiation, identification and projec- tion'. This explains why so many modern discourses of otherness are inherently temporal. Take Derrida's (1984: 3-27) notion of 'diff6rance and its opposite, 'closure'. Derrida highlights the negative significance of time when he says that 'closure' occurs whenever 'texts' fail to recognize that meaning is essentially deferred. The deferral of meaning within texts simply means that in a given structure an 'event' stretches over a 'past' and a 'future' which are not reducible to a present (the impossiblity of absolute presence). Luhmann (1982: 278) also offers a theory of time where 'difference' becomes the organizing principle, and he speaks of 'iterative modalities' that are poten- tially inexhaustible in their possibilities. For him, the modern sense of time is best captured in the phrase 'the future cannot begin', denoting that mod- ernity opens up the future as a horizon of the present but the future can only be experienced as uncertainty (time as a risk horizon over time as teleology or chronology). But why, then, has modernity produced its own narratives of 'closure'? Eschatological conceptions of time are still possible after the tem- poralization of time and tend to involve theories of time which, in Luhmann's (1982: 278-9) terms, 'defuturize' the future by reducing the surplus possibli- ties contained in future presents. Christian time, which works through linear concepts of irreversible time - interruption, renewal, regeneration, death, etc. - prepared the way for modern time by emptying the future of its finite cosmological content. But in so doing it also robbed the temporalization of time of more radical forms of alterity: the incoming event, completely other. This is what negative theology has in varying degrees objected to in modern western narratives (including modern musical history): the prevalence of dis- courses of 'closure'. In wanting to avert such forms of 'closure' some modern philosophies of time have found it necessary to turn to more ancient, pagan or primeval 76   7hesis Eleven (Number 56 1999) notions of time, in order to give expression to the differential possiblities of modern time. This is the sense in which 'negative theology' (re)turns to repressed ways of experiencing the 'world'. Thus, we could say that Adorno and Lyotard pursue critical strategies that invoke at least two types of dis- ruptive temporality: new-time (the time of the avant-garde) and now-time (the time of revelation). So while Adorno is implicated to some extent in the Hegelian-Christological space that Lyotard wants to transcend, at the same time he shares the philosophical desire to suspend the narrative of redemp- tion by invoking a more primal sense of otherness, in understanding that modernity generates its own fractures, its own unresolvable aporias. We might say that both Adorno and Lyotard counter modernity with what Weber's (1948: 324-6) sociology of religion calls more ancient 'routes to sal- vation': that of the prophet and the mystic. Adorno preached Hegelian Protes- tant dialectics but he was seduced by Schoenberg the prophet (the ascetic whose temporal orientation is towards the new). Lyotard prefers Cage, and the minimalists, whose attitudes resemble that of the mystic (who through inaction - silence, contemplation, depersonalization - allows the divine to speak). In both cases, the suspension of modern homogenous time is central to their desire to unleash repressed forms of otherness.Yet, despite their sus- pension of the modern narrative, these models of negative theology differ from postmodern a/theology (Taylor's term) in not opting for one side of the theology/modern reason divide; theology is at best the suspension of a 'model', an attempt to unleash the critical energy that resides between mod- ernity and its 'other', the fracture that Rose (1992) calls 'The Broken Middle'. Our two thinkers consistently pursue this strategy of disrupting the con- tinuity of how we experience modernity. Thus for Adorno (1973b: 406), sus- pending the dialectic was a temporal ploy in which the 'absolute' would be forced to 'hover', it would be made to 'resist' coming to a 'standstill': 'Dialec- tics is the self-consciousness of the objective context of delusion; it does not mean to have escaped from that context ... But the absolute, as it hovers before metaphysics, would be the nonidentical that refuses to emerge until the compulsion to identity has dissolved ... It lies in the definition of nega- tive dialectics that it will not come to rest in itself, as if it were total. This is its form of hope'. Furthermore, it was in music, with its capacity for endless mediation of sameness by otherness, that he found what best approximated this model of 'deferred' negativity. While Lyotard is always one step removed from dialectics, he too wants to 'communicate without communication' the 'here-and-now' of the 'Other'. Time is central to Lyotard's (1991d: 74) think- ing just as 'resistance to the procedures of controlling time' is now a pre- condition for 'rewriting of modernity': 'To think is to question everything, including thought, and question, and the process. To question requires some- thing to happen that reason has not yet known. In thinking, one accepts the occurrence for what it is: "not yet" determined ... One cannot write without bearing witness to the abyss of time in its coming'. It is hard not to see this de la Fuente: Music as Negative Theology  77 as a rapprochement with the negative theology he had earlier so vehemently criticized. In other words, the late Lyotard realizes that the removal of the cult of Marx and the religion of dialectics (the task of 'Adorno as the Devil') does not automatically displace the Adornian (theological) question of the relationship of modernity to time, to memory, to the future, to God, to (in)humanity. If, as Lyotard claims in The Inhuman, 'modernity is essentially a temporal condition' then music is an art which has often borne witness to this. And what of the Devil? (to conclude where we began). The Devil might be put forward as the initiator of negative theology to the extent that he com- mitted the ultimate theological violence of seeking to replace God. But the Devil could never have occupied what theoretically was a position vacated by God: 'Where nothing is there the Devil too has lost his right and no pallid Venus produces anything worth while!' (Mann, 1949: 230). From the per- spective of negative theology, the Devil is neither so much a nihilistic figure (Nietzsche, Adorno, Lyotard) nor the spokesperson for nominalistic para- digms (negative dialectics, deconstruction, post-structuralism); rather the Devil represents the eclipse of theology by less 'reflective', less critical forms of 'post-theology'. The Devil's brand of post-theology would like to hold on to some of the illusions of theology. This is why the Devil describes himself to Leverkuihn, former theology student turned composer, as anything but a 'man of destructive criticism': 'I believe, indeed, the Devil passes for a man of destructive criticism? Slander and again slander, my friend! Gog's sacra- ment! If there is anything he cannot abide, if there's one thing in the whole world he cannot stomach, it is destructive criticism. What he wants and gives is triumph over it, is shining, vainglorious unreflectiveness!' (Mann, 1949: 230). Hence, the Devil does not aim to put an end to faith. The Devil reserves the right to promote faith in false gods. Not to be confused with the 'vain- glorious unreflectiveness' promoted by the Devil, negative theology is the never-ending reflection upon the conditions of discursive (im)possibility. In any case, just as music has survived the decline of various gods, it has also outlived its various pacts with the Devil and its various turns to nega- tive theology. Music has survived the dissolution, transformation and renewal of various 20th-century theodicies. One would be less inclined to claim this of radical politics and its failed cults of Marx, Lenin and Mao! Perhaps one should go looking for the Devil there. Eduardo de la Fuente is in the School of Sociology and Social Work at the University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia. [email: Eduardo.delaFuente@utas.edu.aul Notes 1. Claude Levi-Strauss says in his conversations with Georges Charbonnier (1969: 120) that the musical grammar of serialism can at best be considered 'prosody' 78   Thesis Eleven (Number 56 1999) but not linguistic expression, since it fails to provide a semantic basis for the code. This reiterates the critique Levi-Strauss (1969: 25) made in the 'Overture' to The Raw and the Cooked: 'Only ideologically can the system [of serialism] be compared to a language, since unlike articulate speech . .. it is a system cut adrift, after cutting the cables by which it was attached'. 2. Dahlhaus (1989: 144) says of the poetics of 'unspeakability' that it rejected 'the principle of imitation - the claim that music represent either a piece of external nature through tone painting or a piece of inner nature through representation of affections, in order to avoid being empty sound, signifying nothing'. The central idea of this move in musical aesthetics is that 'By making itself "absolute", tearing itself away from empirical conditions, it [music] becomes an expression of the "absolute".' References Adorno, Theodor (1973a) Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne Mitchell and Wes Blomster. London: Seabury. Adorno, Theodor (1973b) Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton. London: Seabury. Adorno, Theodor (1983) 'Arnold Schoenberg, 1874-1951', in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge: MIT Press. Adorno, Theodor (1992) 'Sacred Fragment: Schoenberg's Moses und Aaron', in Quasi una Fantasia, trans. Rodney Livingstone. London: Verso. Adorno, Theodor (1993) 'Music, Language and Composition', trans. Susan Gillespie. Musical Quarterly 77(3): 401-14. Adorno, Theodor (1994) Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge: MIT Press. Benjamin, Walter (1968) 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books. Bowie, Andrew (1989) 'Music, Language and Modernity' in A. Benjamin and P. Osborne (eds) The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin. London: Routledge. Blumenberg, Hans (1983) The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge: MIT Press. Cage, John (1973) 'Lecture on Something', Silence. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Carroll, David (1989) Paraesthetics. New York: Routledge. Charbonnier, Georges (1969) Conversations with Levi-Strauss, trans. J. and D. Weightman. London: Jonathan Cape Dahlhaus, Carl (1989) The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1983) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizo- phrenia, trans. Robert Hurley et al. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques (1984) Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hegel, G. W. F (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F (1988) Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol III, P. Hodgson (ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press. de la Fuente. Music as Negative Theology  79 Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillipe (1994) Musica Ficta, trans. Felicia McCarren. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel (1983) 'Beyond Intentionality', in A. Montefiore (ed.) Philosophy in France Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levi-Strauss, Claude (1969) The Raw and the Cooked. London: Random. Luhmann, Niklas (1982) 'The Future Cannot Begin', in The Differentiation of Society, trans. S. Holmes and C. Larmore. New York: Columbia University Press. Luhmann, Niklas (1984) Religious Dogmatics and the Evolution of Society, trans. Peter Beyer. New York: Edwin Meller. Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1974) 'Adorno as the Devil', trans. Robert Hurley. Telos 19: 127-37. Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1991a) The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoff Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1991b) 'God and the Puppet', in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoff Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1991c) 'Obedience', in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoff Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1991d) 'Time Today', in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoff Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mann, Thomas (1949) DoctorFaustus, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. London: Martin Secker and Warburg. Mann, Thomas (1961) The Story of a Novel. New York: Knopf. Milbank, John (1990) Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. Oxford: Blackwell. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1993) The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Shaun Whiteside. London: Penguin. Osborne, Peter (1995) The Politics of Time: Modernity and the Avant-Garde. London: Verso. Rose, Gillian (1992) The Broken Middle: Out of ourAncient Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Rose, Gillian (1993) Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays. Oxford: Blackwell. Spengler, Oswald (1954) The Decline of the West, vol. II, trans. C. F. Atkinson. London: George Allen & Unwin. Steinberg, Michael (1993) 'Introduction: Music, Language and Culture', Musical Quarterly 77(3): 397-400. Taylor, Mark C. (1982) Deconstructing Theology. New York: Crossroad Publishing. Taylor, Mark C. (1984) Erring: A Postmodern A/theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weber, Max (1948) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Zizek, Slavoj (1993) Tarrying with the Negative. Durham: Duke University Press. </meta-value>
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                  <p>1. Claude Levi-Strauss says in his conversations with Georges Charbonnier (1969: 120) that the musical grammar of serialism can at best be considered `prosody' but not linguistic expression, since it fails to provide a semantic basis for the code. This reiterates the critique Levi-Strauss (1969: 25) made in the `Overture' to <italic>The Raw and the Cooked</italic>
: `Only ideologically can the system [of serialism] be compared to a language, since unlike articulate speech... it is a system cut adrift, after cutting the cables by which it was attached'.</p>         
               </list-item>         
               <list-item>           
                  <p>2. Dahlhaus (1989: 144) says of the poetics of `unspeakability' that it rejected `the principle of imitation - the claim that music represent either a piece of external nature through tone painting or a piece of inner nature through representation of affections, in order to avoid being empty sound, signifying nothing'. The central idea of this move in musical aesthetics is that `By making itself “absolute”, tearing itself away from empirical conditions, it [music] becomes an expression of the “absolute” '.</p>         
               </list-item>       
            </list>     
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      </notes>
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<abstract lang="en">Jean-Francois Lyotard's essay `Adorno as the Devil' had argued that Theodor Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music was a `diabolic' work of `negative theology' which attributed to Schoenberg's music a secret redemptive power. However, in his later writings, such as the essays in The Inhuman, Lyotard has himself moved close to a `negative theological' position with respect to modernity, time, aesthetics and music. The paper uses the occasion of Lyotard's own theologically inspired essays on music, `God and Puppet' and `Obedience', to re-evaluate the following: Adorno's claims that music transcends mere language and `reaches' for the theological; and more general claims within modern western culture on behalf of music's ability to express the inexpressible. The argument is that the music as negative theology position is not inherently metaphysical but rather that it reflects the importance of the `unsayable' to modern conceptions of reason. In resisting the `closure' of the modern narrative of reason, music, as a temporal art, has often given expression to the more radical forms of alterity present within modern forms of time. In other words, negative theology is not the discourse of the devil; it is the impossible discourse of western reason and its internal fracturing.</abstract>
<subject><genre>keywords</genre>
<topic>dissonance</topic>
<topic>Hegelian Christology</topic>
<topic>Jewish `sublime'</topic>
<topic>time-now</topic>
<topic>tragedy</topic>
</subject>
<relatedItem type="host"><titleInfo><title>Thesis eleven</title>
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<part><date>1999</date>
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<number>56</number>
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Music as Negative Theology

Music as Negative Theology

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