Neoliberalism, contemporary music, and critique

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what the Frankfurt School’s “classic” critiques of art under capitalism might mean under neoliberalism. I find this so interesting because, in my view, the Frankfurt School’s critical tools do have something to say about contemporary life under neoliberalism, for example in relation to the drive towards quantification and the predominance of instrumental reason. Yet, crucially, it is also the case that Adorno, Horkheimer, and their colleagues were working under a form of (liberal, not neoliberal) capitalism that was in other ways quite different from the economic-material regime of today, and so their critical tools don’t cleanly map onto contemporary society, art, and music.

I’m happy to say that I’ve had an article related to this accepted with Twentieth-Century Music journal, in which I formulate some of these ideas more substantially and systematically (the article is 16,000+ words). This probably won’t be published formally until 2025, but should be available as a “first look” on the TCM website much sooner. Here’s the abstract for that article:

Neoliberal Reason, Contemporary Music, and Proximal Critique

Theodor W. Adorno suggested that music is mediated by socially derived forms of reason. This article rethinks this with respect to neoliberalism, drawing on work undertaken after Michel Foucault, vis-à-vis neoliberalism as ‘a specific and normative mode of reason’ (Wendy Brown). I address the characteristic flexibility and productivity of the neoliberal subject, and relate this to immanent features of music and processes of its composition. This critical attention to music’s formal, aesthetic register enables me to go beyond the more well-established (though nonetheless valuable) frameworks for discussing music and neoliberalism, which focus on music’s relation to labour conditions and creative industries. A range of music and sonic art is discussed, work by Chino Amobi, Brian Eno, Bryn Harrison, Sarah Hennies, Johannes Kreidler, Wolfgang Rihm, Marina Rosenfeld, and John Zorn. I ultimately argue that some core features of Adorno’s conception of critical art and music need reformulating for the neoliberal age.

I’m also going to be giving a more informal talk on some of this work as part of Guildhall School of Music and Drama’s ResearchWorks series, in February 2024.