Popular Is Not Enough: The Political Voice Of Joan Baez

1.5 A Critical View of a Critical Theorist: How a Bad Frankfurt Pupil Can Still Be Politically Active

Although Theodor W. Adorno can certainly be called an outstanding intellectual of the 20th century, he was “[…] a troubling figure […]” (Paddison 2), who evoked ambivalent reactions in the fields of philosophy, sociology and musical theory. Beside his often underestimated work as a composer and his lifelong passion for social research, he is most famous for his elaborations as a philosopher. Paddison concludes in characterizing Adorno’s intricate theoretical work with yet another hint at the significance of interdisciplinary work (as pointed out in chapter 1.1): “[…] the interdisciplinary character of Adorno’s work is all-pervading, even in those texts which, on one level, seem straightforwardly ‘musical’ […]” (Paddison 16). One essence which can be attached to most of his interdisciplinary work is an incisive commentary on politics. His membership at the famous Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, which was founded in 1923, was just one example of this kind of political focus. Paddison describes the aim of the Frankfurt Institute and points out the political tenor in Adorno’s lifelong work:

The Institute, which was initially independent of the university, operated as a kind of community of scholars, taking an interdisciplinary approach to current social issues of importance. The fundamental of their shared concerns was the rise of Fascism in Europe and of authoritarianism in general […] (Paddison 7).

These straightforwardly political concerns were delivered by Adorno in passionate analyses of “[…] musical models in both the classical and the popular or light music traditions […]” (Witkin 2). Mechanisms (form and/or content) in the creation of artifacts (classical or popular) for him are comparable to mechanisms in society. This is one reason why an interpretation of Baez’s political dimension of her work as a popular singer under the influence of Adorno’s theory can be a fruitful intellectual attempt although Adorno most probably would have accused Baez of trying to be manipulative. Witkin summarizes Adorno’s reason for disseminating his attitude on popular culture’s attempt to stultify its consumers:

His rejection of music ranging from Stravinsky to Louis Armstrong was not based upon the fact of their popular appeal nor their power to stimulate emotion […]; it was, rather, based upon his belief that such music was ‘manipulative’, that it colluded in the weakening and undermining of the subjects it appealed to, that its claim to spontaneity or genuine expression was untrue […] (Witkin 2-3).

Baez’s artistic and political efforts differ from Adorno’s theoretical work and his “[…] vast speculative pessimism […]” (Said in Witkin 10) not only in regard to this accusation of lacking legitimate artistic allowance. The most perceptive differences between the theoretician/philosopher and the activist/singer can be exposed, because they worked in different times. The last decade in the life of Theodor W. Adorno—the 1960s—was the first decade in the career of Joan Baez. An undeniably similar aversion to any form of authoritarianism and an interest in the question of how problems of society could be defined and possibly be solved (plus the relationship of this form of interest to artistic expression), however, can be traced in the work of both Baez as well as Adorno, who most lengthily discusses the relationship between art and society in his study Aesthetic Theory, posthumously published by his widow.

The following pages summarize the most significant similarities and differences between the work of Baez and the aesthetic theory of Adorno. A brief philosophical outline of the relationship between society and art in Adorno’s theory heads a short synopsis of the concept he and his colleague Max Horkheimer coined for what they describe as the Culture Industry and culminates in an explanation of Adorno’s critical attitude towards politically engaged art. As a next step, critics of Adorno come to word, in order to disapprove of the passiveness of his elaborations. Despite Adorno’s skepticism about popular culture and politically engaged art, a closer analysis of the passive nature of his theoretical explanations serves to prove the significance of an activist like Joan Baez, who uses her artistic work in order to support political initiatives—without necessarily turning this kind of activism into an ideological instrument keeping authoritarian mechanisms in society alive; an accusation in the writings of Adorno which he puts on every politically engaged artist in a generalizing manner (see also Sauerland 3). Although he critically exposes doubtful dimensions of the principle of l’art pour l’art (art which is created for art’s sake only), he is not willing to accept the affiliation of artistic expression and political contexts.

1.5.1 Music for More Than Music’s Sake: On the Credibility of Politically Engaged Artists

In his essay on art and criticism in Adorno’s aesthetics, Geuss concludes that for Adorno, any form of art which attempts to convince people that “[…] this world or life in it was worthwhile would not just be doing something unhelpful, but would be misguided in the most fundamental way possible” (Geuss 300). This pessimistic view of artistic reality cannot be enough to explain all dimensions of the relationship between art and society. The artistic work of Joan Baez indicates a great level of compliance to my more optimistic argument. Bodenschatz, for example, refers to Baez by explaining that “[…] she [Baez] thinks that music cannot be seen from a l’art-pour-l’art standpoint only […]” (Bodenschatz 11). Baez, in this sense, personifies a politicization of Adorno’s complex analysis:

The idea of beauty advocated by l’art pour l’art […] did indeed exclude […] all content [Inhalt] as disruptive that did not, before undergoing the law of form and thus precisely anti-artistically, submit to a dogmatic canon of beauty […]. This idea of beauty is limited because it sets itself up as directly antithetical to a society rejected as ugly […] (Adorno 237).

Joan Baez’s work does not indicate such a flagrant contradiction to society. She artistically addresses (what she refers to as) problems in society and underlines her point of view via offering her efforts to the work of various social movements. Such a mixture of political and artistic activities is not possible with an antithetical stand on social problems. The combination of art and activism—as it can be seen in Baez’s work—is not promising without taking part in society, without being politically active. In his book about his own version of an aesthetic theory, Adorno describes this problematic relationship between political attempts to change society and any form of art and comes to the conclusion that this relationship is a dangerous dependence, which for him—particularly in the face of modernity—turned into a vicious circle. This kind of vicious circle generally puts art in a doubtful position, where Adorno is even no longer sure if it still has got the right to exist (see also Adorno 1). Adorno expert Sauerland summarizes his definition of this complex connection between art and society:

On the one hand, all problems […] melt into art, on the other hand, works of art can still criticize the poor state of society without having to get involved with it […]3 (see Sauerland 1, transl. by Jaeger).

For Adorno, artists who criticize society in their artistic work can not be trusted, because they do not need to get involved in the solution of social problems. As a consequence, ‘true’ artists—in Adorno’s diction—can only reach artistic credibility when their art becomes autonomous, that is, separated from social mechanisms (see also Adorno 335). Aesthetically radical autonomous forms of art for him bear the only possible potential to produce authentic pieces of art (see also Geuss 300 pp.). New Music of the 20th century for him expresses the most radical and therefore most convincing criticism of modern culture and society (see also Said 41). The essence of such radical artistic means necessarily has to be a vehement artistic turning away from traditional forms and styles. Milner and Browitt formulate Adorno’s conviction:

Authentic art […] involves a necessary confrontation with already established traditional styles; ‘inferior’ work is merely the practice of imitation […] (Milner and Browitt 72).

For Adorno—due to what he and his colleague Max Horkheimer referred to as ‘Culture Industry’ (see also chapter 1.5.2.1)—modern capitalist markets (which are necessary to sell music records) and political authenticity of artistic expression can not be combined (see also Adorno 306). Particularly during the first years of her career, Baez had to face this dilemma, when she suffered from a serious “[…] confusion about being rich and famous […]” (Baez Voice 128), which was deeply rooted in this question of political credibility, as her work as a popular singer demands from her to record and to sell music albums. This is exactly the problem which Adorno articulates in his critique of the Culture Industry. Only many years after the beginning of her career was Baez able to find a certain kind of calmness and independence from this continuing expectancy of a popular artist to function as nothing but the producer of a means of trade. In her 1977 self-penned song “Time rag”, she sings that

[…] I really should tell that deep in my heart, I don’t give a damn where I stand on the charts not as long as the sun sinks into the West and that’s going to be a pretty serious test of time […]4.

Adorno would heartily disagree on Baez’s credibility regarding this statement. Artifacts of popular culture—like songs written and/or sung and/or performed by a singer like Joan Baez—for him are artistically interchangeable and therefore not practical for criticism towards society. For Adorno, “[…] popular music is mechanical in the sense that a given detail can be shifted from one song to another without any real effect on the structure as a whole […]” (Storey 106). Adorno is convinced that in popular culture, listeners of songs have to ruminate on (see also Adorno 285) what the Culture Industry enforces upon them, because

[…] the listener can supply the ‘framework’ automatically, since it is mere musical automatism itself. […] Every detail is substitutable; it serves its function only as a cog in a machine […] (Smith Reinventing 44-45).

Adorno is convinced that any audience—while consuming popular songs—becomes “[…] socialized to passively accept simple formulas and so becomes susceptible to authoritarian messages […]” (Ibid. 46). This argument a priori implies that every listener to popular music is not able to defend oneself against systematic stultification, not to mention his total negation of popular culture’s potential to be of political relevance (apart from the transformation of politically engaged artists into ideological instruments). Adorno does not even consider the possibility that songs can be capable of the contrary, of supporting the conviction of the audience to stand up against authoritarianism. He is not willing to take into account the slightest chance that artifacts of popular culture could possibly be able to offer a pool of protest against social misfortune (see also jourfixe 2006).

Adorno passionately disagrees with such an assumption—particularly in regard to popular songs—because for him, songs are generally something that he would not consider to be of artistic value at all. In Adorno’s opinion, songs as artifacts of popular culture promote passive listening and merely serve to adjust the audience to society’s status quo (see also Storey 106-107). Böning accentuates Adorno’s disparaging attitude in this respect and exposes the criticism he evoked with his unsuccessful academic attempt to silence politically critical singers:

In his criticism of musicians Theodor W. Adorno wrote in 1956: 'Nowhere is it written that singing was necessary'. Walter Moßmann and Peter Schleuning—one a singer of political songs, the other one a musicologist - later spoke of an ‘adornite silence’ and ‘ideology-critical refusal to sing’5 (see Böning 2004, transl. by Jaeger).

Following this estimation, Adorno—deliberately or without intention—promotes a process of ‘silencing’ himself. Adorno expresses this point of view in a generalizing manner, which could easily be described as authoritarian itself. The decisive nature of his rigid elaborations throws a critical light on his own work, which, as already mentioned above, is said to have only one target: authoritarianism. Adorno is a representative for the idea “[…] that music is a ‘force’ in social life, a building material of consciousness and social structure […]” (DeNora 2). Nevertheless, politically engaged artists (a popular singer in our case) for him—consciously or unconsciously—always turn into proponents of mere ideology; for him, the artistic work of popular artists always helps to harden structures of power in society (see also Sauerland 14):

[…] by speaking the truth, truth itself becomes an ideology in the sense of false consciousness. It helps [...] to consolidate the network of lies with which society is spun [...]6 (Sauerland 3, transl. by Jaeger).

Only once in his aesthetic theory does he point out the possibility that artists might at least be driven by good intentions, but in his fundamental attitude they are never able to succeed (see also Adorno 344). In this sense, politically engaged artists necessarily have to turn themselves into instruments of ideology—without exception. The following sub-chapter aims to depict weaknesses of Adorno’s theory, in order to emphasize the significance of the combination of art and activism when it comes to successful and convincing criticism towards society. While Adorno limits his convictions about the relationship between art and society to his radical aesthetic theory, Baez transforms her own beliefs into active work—as a singer on her records and on the stage, but also as an activist within the various political efforts of different social movements.

1.5.2 Words Do Not Change Society: Theory Versus Practice

1.5.2.1 On Fictitious Freedom

Adorno (and his colleague Max Horkheimer) coined the term ‘Culture Industry’ in 1947, while still in US-exile at the University of Columbia, New York, where they spent more than ten years. Ironically, the freedom and openness which the members of the Frankfurt School found in American society on their flight from authoritarian repression in Europe, “[…] were the instruments, so their argument went, of its domination and repression.” (Berger 45). In their opinion, the Culture Industry’s freedom (as experienced in American mass culture) was only a fictitious freedom. Summarily, their argument went: the most important condition for the Culture Industry’s fictitious freedom was the fact that apparently free people were not about to organize their dissent against society’s numerous injustices. People who were convinced that they were free were not to become potential protesters against political misfortunes. Campbell and Kean explain the conceptual relevance of the Culture Industry in regard to possible social dissent—for them, Adorno and Horkheimer

[…] saw mass culture as a product of state monopoly capitalism seeking to mould the minds of working people by encouraging false needs whilst diminishing alternative ways of thinking that might have offered some opposition […] (Campbell and Kean 283).

This kind of brain-washing nature of the Culture Industry is only one tenor of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s concept, which attempts to examine a general lack of opposition in society. This interpretation once more articulates Adorno’s theory that artifacts, as soon as they are consumed by more than a small number of intellectuals, are nothing but mere attempts to stultify people. Impressions of an intensified process of industrialization in the United States of America during World War II and its aftermath can be interpreted as another relevant actuator of their critical concept, which

[…] pinpoints the interconnections between economy and culture and how cultural texts and artifacts are produced in an industrial process. Cultural products, it was argued, were made in the same way as other items of consumption from soap to cigarettes […] (Smith Reinventing 44).

Particularly within the realm of a scientific debate about popular culture and its political significance, Adorno repeatedly emphasizes that listeners to popular music were nothing but mere consumers, stultified and not at all able to think in terms of political opposition (see also Kellner Critical Theory 73). The main platform for artifacts of popular culture are the mass media, which—in Adorno’s diction—“[…] had, in effect, prevented history from working out the way it should have, in Marxist terms, by subverting the masses […]” (Berger 43). The Culture Industry has extended organizational methods of monopoly and state capitalism into the arts (see also Paddison 202) and popular culture stands at the top of this development. This fundamental point of view only seemingly does not allow critics to voice at least some of their doubts about Adorno’s theoretical elaborations. Fortunately, not every scholar is as easily convinced by the radical concept of the Culture Industry in all terms (see also Docker 40-50). Docker, for example, exemplifies his doubts about Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s approach regarding the way people are dealing with their relationships to each other in the United States of America:

Not only do Adorno and Horkheimer know what true art must always involve, but they also know that the culture industry denies ‘truth’, for example, the ‘true kind of relationships’ human beings should have, but can’t, in democratic America […] (Docker 40).

This exemplary quote no longer offers a satisfactory conclusion when it comes to simple questions: How could they possibly know? How did they analyze the relationships of all American citizens? Is it possible to boil a discussion down on a simple statement: every single relationship of every single American has been a lie! Such—lightly ironic—questions are supposed to depict an element of criticism towards Adorno, which clouds the Frankfurt School’s aim to overcome totalitarian mechanisms in society. Docker supports my argument when he senses a certain elitist premise, which Adorno and Horkheimer assume, while descanting on the doubtful state of culture:

[…] in a monologic way, readers are positioned by the Culture Industry essay as passive, as having automatically to accept as received truths their totalising judgements […] (Ibid. 41).

The accusation of such a form of passiveness, which seems to be expected by the reader of Adorno’s texts, can be juxtaposed to the passive process of consuming artifacts of popular culture, a passiveness which for Adorno, on the other hand, is such an incisive reason for his passionate cultural criticism. Criticizing and at the same time expecting passive acceptance puts a big question mark on Adorno’s own credibility. Apart from the above-mentioned general passive position, which is forced upon Adorno’s readers, the subsequent pages briefly point out other important aspects which question Adorno’s aesthetic theory. Adorno, for example, does not take matters of categories all too seriously. This kind of looseness in treating musical categories is particularly interesting in regard to the musical background of Joan Baez.

1.5.2.2 On the Credibility of Hazy Categories

Adorno’s aesthetic theory challenges even the most sophisticated experts among his readers because of its combination of a dense philosophical discourse and a chaotic composure of technical musical terms (see also Rampley 150). A closer analysis of this kind of intellectual challenge, which he forces upon his readers, however, exposes Adorno’s hazy treatment of special terms for musical categories. Adorno points out his skepticism towards categories in general by locating the danger of simplification in the way aesthetic genres are defined according to the common characteristics they share with each other:

The universal aesthetic genre concepts, which ever and again established themselves as norms, were always marked by a didactic reflection that sought to dispose over the quality, which was mediated by particularization, by measuring them according to common characteristics even though these common characteristics were not necessarily what was essential to the works (Adorno 201).

This argument can not a priori be negated. The claim of always appropriate clear-cut artistic categories might include the risk of limiting the analysis to an unsatisfying surface. Nevertheless, the total ignorance of categories in a debate about music (and its relationship to society) contains the risk of argumentative incredibility. One example in his theoretical work, which eloquently depicts this kind of risk, is the way Adorno deals with the term ‘folk’. Paddison points out this critical aspect regarding Adorno’s doubtful way of distinguishing between musical categories:

Related to the increasingly ‘sociological’ writings are those on aspects of folks music, ‘popular music’ and jazz. There are, of course, very different categories of music involved here—categories which Adorno sometimes distinguished between, but often did not […] (Paddison 26).

This analysis points out that Adorno’s treatment of different musical categories indicates a great level of vagueness. My argument is: such a blurred usage of terms can be interpreted as a weakness of his theory, more than once forcing the reader to ask: which category does he mean? His all too loose and relaxed treatment of the musical category of ‘folk music’ exemplifies this kind of doubtfulness, which his theory has to be treated with, particularly when it comes to the work of a folk singer like Joan Baez:

‘Folk music’ as a category increasingly tends in the later writings to blur into a general concept of ‘popular music’ which is itself very hazy, and Adorno sometimes seems to make little distinction between popular songs (Schlager), jazz, and ‘light music’ (leichte Musik) […] (Ibid.).

The fourth chapter of this present study outlines the relevance of folk music, the famous Folk Music Revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s and the artistic role of Joan Baez in this musical movement. It contradicts Adorno’s philosophy, who wrongfully predicted in 1932 that there was no ‘folk’ left anyway (Ibid. 26-27). Baez and other artists during the beginning years of her career up until today falsify Adorno’s predictions about the doubtful existence of folk music. All in all, Baez’s efforts differ from Adorno’s theoretical point of view not only in regard to the falsification of his negation of folk music or the authenticity in the political impetus of popular artists, who are trying to mould the boundaries between art and politics: The most relevant dimension of my doubts about Adorno’s theory is the fact that any kind of theory about society and the question of how to change it for the better necessarily has to stay limited to the passive boundaries of words. This juxtaposition emphasizes the significance which a politically active singer like Joan Baez personifies in the combination of her artistic with her political accomplishments. Adorno harshly (and often rightfully) criticizes problems of society and, all the same, is not willing to do more than write complex philosophical explanations about it.

1.5.2.3 On the Passiveness of Theories

The most incisive juxtaposing element in the comparison of Adorno’s philosophical work with Baez’s work as a singer and activist is that a theoretician always has to stay passive when it comes to criticism towards society. Adorno and his colleagues at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research more than once emphasize the exclusiveness of the work of thought, ignoring the fact that good intentions to change society stay mere intentions as long as they are limited to theory only. Particularly during the last years of his life (which were also the first decade of Baez’s career), Adorno had had to face this kind of dilemma when he came under serious attack from the New Left for refusing to take part in political activities (see also Paddison 11) during the socially troubled times of the 1960s. He and other outstanding figures of the Frankfurt School were considerably confused about this new interpretation of their Critical Theory. Paddison summarizes this kind of confusion and outlines the reaction of Adorno and other devotees of Critical Theory to this political attack: