Louis Léopold Boilly – Cinquantetrois têtes d’expression. 1823-1828

Of course Adorno is not talking about rave music but about twelve-tone music in the quote below, nevertheless we find this quote fitting in the course of our debates. We are pro loosing the tension that seals of your face, pro weeping, pro examining the flow and definately pro giving approbiate names and descriptions to this project: a shape of reconciliation at the boundary of frenzy, failing at promises, failing at resemblance, not loosing, not winning. but read for yourself, dear shituationists:

“It is the gesture of release. The tension of the facial muscles, the tension which both directs the face into action on the environment and seals it off from that environment, is released. Music and tears open the lips and set the arrested human being free. The sentimentality of inferior music recalls in its caricature what superior music is truly capable of shaping at the boundary of frenzy: reconciliation.* One who lets himself go in tears, or in a form of music no longer resembling him in any way, at the same time lets the stream of everything he himself is not, everything which had been dammed up behind the wall of the objective world, flow back through him. As one who weeps, or one who sings, he goes forth into alienated reality […] The potentiality of the most recent phase of music indicates a change in position. It is no longer the statement and image of an inner factor, but rather an attitude towards reality, perceived by music, but no longer glossed over in the images. In the extreme isolation resulting therefrom, the social character of music changes.”

Theodor W. Adorno – Philosophy of modern music, p. 129

(the book was also translated as Philosophy of new music, from where i stiched in the sentence marked with *, that i couldn’t find from the first version.)