@Starthief: I only have read some fragments of Sound Objects, however, in this small excerpt the author to me does not seem to do justice to Adorno’s concept of fetish. Music fetishization in his theory is not to be derived psychologically, but refers via Marx to society, entirely dominated by the commodity form. “The mysteriousness of the commodity form, then, consists simply in the fact that it reflects people the social characters of their labor as the representational natural properties of these things (…)” It is not simply an individual failure or regress of niveau on the part of the childlike novice that would take care of itself. But the relation to the relationless, to the confusion of use-value and exchange-value peculiar to capitalist societies- the specific sound made responsible for the success of a piece-for example, of an instrument of a particular maker apparently indispensable to the piece of music-takes the place of content. Aesthetic experience arises from the objective content of a work, in that the form relates the sounds and is not merely a vehicle of the subjective psyche of the observer ruling over individual sounds. A sonata by Beethoven played on a lousy piano does not itself become worse. Cheated on the possibility of an aesthetic experience, only the applied technology, basically, the money that went into buying that gear, is worshipped. In sound- and media-art, Adorno’s analysis is self-evidently unpopular, as it reveals not only technical inconsistency but also the uncritical character of this postmodern appearance, which lies somewhere between bulk waste ambiance and shopping zone advertising. The predominant tendency is towards negative suspension of the difference between art and society, its immediate fusion with the reified every day. As a result, art becomes all the more a powerless appendix of the existing.
An electronic musical composition is more bound to the mediation of instrument and form than more traditional methods.
Nevertheless, through the postmodern negation of objective content, not least with the help of Sterne, a material fetish has established itself here, whereby with sound studies, thinking about sound then takes the place of thinking with sound.
In a particularly pronounced way, Adorno described this fetish in an appearance that today is perhaps closest in the form of the Max for Live craftsman and modular-gear-collector who is “busy” with sound: “He is shy and inhibited, perhaps had no luck with the girls, in any case, wants to preserve his special sphere. He tries to do this as a tinkerer. At the age of twenty, he preserves the stage of the boys who excel as matadors of their construction kits or do fretwork for the pleasure of their parents(…) He patiently constructs apparatuses whose most important components he has to acquire ready-made and explores for (…) secrets that are none. As a reader of Indian stories and travel books, he once discovered unknown lands and made his way through the jungle. As a tinkerer, he becomes an explorer of the very industrial products, interested in being discovered by him. He brings nothing home that would not be delivered to his house. Already the adventurers of the illusory activity have organized themselves in bright heaps(…)What he hears, even how he hears is completely indifferent to him, he is only interested in the fact that he hears and that he succeeds in switching on to the public mechanism with his private device.” ***Some of the quotes I used are just a quick translation; I hope that´s fine.
