ABSTRACT
Adorno is almost certainly reacting to the transcontinental highways that systematically parallel the railroad tracks across the Great Plains. Adorno’s work is tightly focused on the history of Western modernity from its ascendancy in the late eighteenth century to its end phase in the aftermath of World War II and the Cold War. Throughout his life’s work Adorno pursued Benjamin’s insight framed by the question of suffering in specific relation to modernity, and to the shared social responsibility of both philosophy and aesthetics. Adorno heard Mahler’s music, caught between late Romanticism and modernity, as the sonoric engagement of history as well as the Utopian echo of something better, read through the lens of nature and, not least, by self-reflexive appropriation of kitsch, rubbed against the grain. The scandal of Mahler’s use of the banal and vulgar develops from his acknowledgment of the putative legitimacy of both.
