ABSTRACT
In about 1934 Adorno drafted an essay called “Music in the Background,” so aphoristically brief that it might be taken almost as an afterthought. Anecdotal and (atypically) almost conversational in tone, the text hints at a foundation for hope, but indirectly. Adorno hears in live-performance café music the remnant of a musical life without the self-consciousness of Art (writ large) or, for that matter, the administered goods variously distributed through the reach of the culture industry. Modernity is marked by the principle of accumulation, possession. Possession defines both subjectivity and identity, just as it serves as the organizing principle of the material economies through which subjects are realized. Adorno often commented on the myriad failings of Western philosophy, this was the indictment of his Negative Dialectics, as part and parcel of modernity’s more general failure to serve the human subjects on whose behalf it endlessly, if utterly falsely, proclaims its undying allegiance.
