Illusions of Immediacy: Escaping Musical Fetishism Through the Art of Collecting
Rarely does one stop to question what it means to properly listen to music. One simply listens. Critical theorist Theodore Adorno, however, was deeply concerned with this issue. In his essay “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” he presents the contemporary listener as someone whose relation to music has become so deeply conditioned by commodification that it negatively affects not only how he consumes musical commodities, but also how he engages with the musical works themselves. On the other hand, Walter Benjamin, in his essay “Unpacking My Library,” presents the figure of the collector as someone who relates to commodities in an entirely different manner. This essay draws from both of these texts and ultimately argues that the contemporary listener should model his relation to music after the collector’s relation to his possessions. The first part briefly reconstructs Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism before turning to an in-depth analysis of Adorno’s musical fetishism. I then examine two of Adorno’s major critiques of the contemporary listener that emerge from musical fetishism: isolated listening and the regression of listening. Lastly, because Adorno ultimately remains pessimistic toward the possibility of overcoming musical fetishism, I turn to Benjamin’s figure of the collector as a possible way beyond this condition.
1. The Fetishisms
Commodity fetishism occurs when individuals perceive commodities as possessing an objective or inherent value–expressed in their exchange-value or price–rather than recognizing them as embodying the labor and social relations involved in their production. It is, in other words, an illusion that obscures the social character of objects as soon as they step forth into the market as commodities. Take a table, for instance. In itself, a table is merely wood transformed into an object through the labour and activities of a group of many individuals. Yet once the table enters the market, where it can be bought or sold for a price, the human activity that produced it recedes from view. Instead, the object seems to possess value inherently, as though its worth belonged to the thing itself. Marx, therefore, calls commodities “mysterious thing[s], simply because in [them] the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour” (Marx, 320). This is precisely what he calls commodity fetishism.
Adorno extends this Marxian analysis into the realm of cultural goods, particularly music, arguing that musical commodities become fetishized in a similar manner–a process he calls musical fetishism. Yet while both theories arrive at a similar conclusion, Adorno’s account pushes the argument one step further. Because he is concerned specifically with cultural goods, he argues that the consumer not only perceives the good’s value through its exchange-value, but also comes to believe that the very act of purchasing it establishes a direct relationship with the good itself. Exchange-value therefore comes to completely substitute for use-value, a process which he calls a quid pro quo (Adorno, 296). What follows is an attempt to reconstruct this argument in more concrete terms.
I begin with a simple analysis of cultural commodities. Cultural commodities are things such as music or film. At first glance, these things appear to be exempt from the market. That is, unlike ordinary commodities that openly present themselves as objects bought and sold on the market, cultural commodities appear to stand outside of this realm altogether–to “be exempted from the power of exchange” (Adorno, 296). One does not ordinarily think of a symphony or concert as a commodity in the same way one thinks of a chair or toaster. This is because they seem immediate. That is, they appear to place us into an “immediate relationship with the goods” (Adorno, 296). A music concert, for example, seems to confront the listener directly with the music itself, rather than appearing as something mediated through exchange. If this illusion of immediacy holds, then the cultural commodity’s use-value is itself immediate. One does not need to use the commodity in the ordinary sense in order to derive satisfaction from it. From this alone, cultural commodities appear to possess a twofold character: (1) they seem not to have an exchange-value, and (2) their use-value appears immediate.
However, this account only captures their first glance appearance. As Adorno argues, cultural commodities nonetheless still belong completely to the realm of the market since they “fall completely into the world of commodities, are produced for the market, and are aimed at the market” (Adorno, 296). Music, for instance, is accessed through commodities such as concert tickets or streaming platforms, just as films are accessed through movie tickets or subscription platforms. They are thus still bought and sold through exchange and possess an exchange-value. Yet even after recognizing this, their illusion of immediacy still remains. The only difference now is that they have a price. Thus, the conclusion drawn above must be revised as follows: (1) cultural commodities do in fact possess an exchange-value, and (2) their use-value still appears immediate.
Adorno further complicates the argument when he claims this very appearance of immediacy is precisely what gives the cultural commodity its exchange-value. In simpler terms, consumers desire these commodities because they appear to establish a direct and immediate relation to the object. The consumer thinks:‘If I purchase the musical commodity, then I enter into an immediate relationship with the music.’ That is, more specifically, “the appearance of immediacy takes possession of the mediated, exchange value” (Adorno, 296). The exchange-value is therefore dependent upon this illusion. People buy tickets to the newest blockbuster film, for example, because they believe the purchase grants them direct access to the experience of the film. Importantly, however, this is still not yet the “substitution” or quid pro quo in which exchange-value completely takes over the role of use-value. At this stage in the argument, Adorno is only claiming that this appearance of immediacy is what makes the commodity desirable on the market. This illusion motivates the act of purchase and thereby sustains the commodity’s exchange-value. But this alone does not yet mean that exchange-value replaces use-value altogether.
The quid pro quo, then, lies in the fact that because the listener believes that buying the good will place him into an immediate relationship with the good, thereby fulfilling its use-value, the exchange-value assumes the role of use-value itself. In other words, the act of exchange comes to function as the source of satisfaction that use-value would ordinarily provide. In this way, Adorno writes, “the consumer is really worshipping the money that he himself has paid for the Toscanini concert” (Adorno, 296). The concertgoer believes that by purchasing the ticket he has already attained the fulfillment that the concert supposedly offers. Consequently, fulfillment no longer derives from the concert itself, but from the very act of exchange. One has not “‘made’ it by liking the concert, but rather by buying the ticket” (Adorno, 296). It is in this sense that exchange-value substitutes for use-value, the substitution that Adorno calls the “specific fetish character of music” (Adorno, 296). Or, as he puts it in one of the most frustratingly dense sentences in the essay:
“If the commodity in general combines exchange-value and use-value, then the pure use-value, whose illusion the cultural goods must preserve in completely capitalist society, must be replaced by pure exchange-value, which precisely in its capacity as exchange-value deceptively takes over the use-value. The specific fetish character of music lies in this quid pro quo” (Adorno, 296).
2. Two Cultural Critiques
While this constitutes the specific fetish character of music, fetishism produces a multitude of secondary effects upon both the musical work and the listener. The purpose of this next section is therefore to examine two of the major consequences of musical fetishism. More specifically, I present two of Adorno’s cultural critiques of the contemporary listener: (1) the tendency to consume music through isolated parts, and (2) the regression of listening.
Adorno argues that listeners no longer engage with music as a whole, but rather as separate or isolated parts. While this is clearly his claim, there are multiple reasons as to why this occurs. One primary reason is vulgarization, in which certain songs get endlessly repeated and, in turn, the internal structures of the works become increasingly standardized. The first tendency can be seen in radio culture, where the same songs circulate continuously, “played again and again and made still familiar” (Adorno, 294). Today, however, this tendency is most visible through social media platforms and streaming services where algorithms push popular songs to the consumer, making them increasingly familiar to listeners. As a result, the internal structure of the songs becomes altered. In order to accommodate what is popular or demanded by the market, songs become standardized, “down to the number of measures and the exact duration” (Adorno, 298). Not only that, but their structures are increasingly organized around “climaxes and repetitions” (Adorno, 298). Popular music, for instance, is often structured around predictable patterns: verse-chorus-verse-chorus. Moreover, the individual elements within the songs serve to highlight or “color” specific moments, “whereby each variation, or ‘chorus*,’ is played with emphasis on a special instrumental color, with the clarinet, the piano or the quasi-soloist” (Adorno, 306).
For these reasons, listeners tend to engage only with isolated moments rather than with the musical work as a unified whole. This critique is grounded in Adorno’s view that proper listening requires grasping the work as a totality. He writes, early on in the essay, “musical synthesis preserve[s] the unity of appearance and protect[s] it from falling apart into diffuse culinary moments” (Adorno, 290). Individual parts of a composition acquire their significance only through their relation to the other parts that constitute the whole. Once severed from this totality, what is lost is not merely unity, but the determinate role of the parts themselves–the very relation “which could give them meaning” (Adorno, 295). Vulgarization, however, produces precisely this isolated form of listening.
While isolated listening seems to only affect popular or “light” music, Adorno suggests that it extends to classical music as well. However, it is initially less clear why this occurs, since classical music is not circulated on the radio in the same repetitive manner as popular music, nor are its internal structures literally altered into standardized forms. Vulgarization, then, would not initially appear to operate in the same twofold manner as described above. Nevertheless, what remains common to both spheres of music are the “climaxes and repetitions,” which Adorno claims have “a precursor in great music itself, especially those of Wagner” (Adorno, 298). Richard Wagner’s music makes this tendency particularly clear, since certain dramatic climaxes stand out so strongly, inviting detached or isolated listening. Other examples of classical works follow below:
“A Beethoven symphony as a whole, spontaneously experienced, can never be appropriated. The man who in the subway triumphantly whistles loudly the theme of the finale of Brahms’s First is already primarily involved with its debris. […] The minuet from Mozart’s E-flat Major Symphony, played without its other movements, loses its symphonic cohesion” (Adorno, 299).
The second critique Adorno offers is what he calls the regression of listening–the condition in which listeners reject the possibility of engaging with other music, rather than with the ones they are used to. The word “regression” itself might initially suggest that the listeners have declined from a previously higher stage of musical ability, as though they once possessed a more developed capacity for listening and later fell away from it. Adorno’s claim, however, is more radical than this. The contemporary listener has never truly reached this higher stage at all, but instead remains trapped within what he describes as an “infantile stage” (Adorno, 303). Becoming especially provocative in this section, he further claims that listeners are “childish” and “forcibly retarded” (Adorno, 303). The significance of the word “forcibly” is that it suggests that this condition is not entirely the listener’s fault; rather, listeners are socially produced into this state. Extending this point further, he argues that they even lose their “freedom of choice and responsibility” (Adorno, 303). Therefore, it becomes unclear whether listeners are genuinely capable of recognizing or pursuing alternative forms of musical experience at all. The regression, nonetheless, lies here.
Regression, too, is particularly shown when advertising comes into play, when the listener feels he has no choice but to capitulate to the mass-produced music handed to him. Rather than engaging with unfamiliar or “oppositional music,” listeners instead “need and demand what has been palmed off on them” (Adorno, 303-304). Adorno presents this condition as a feeling of helplessness or “impotence that creeps over them in the face of monopolistic production,” through which they feel as though they have no choice but to surrender to the “inescapable product” (Adorno, 304). Thus, once again we see that the regression of listening lies precisely in the listener’s refusal to engage with other forms of music, remaining instead comfortable with whatever has already been given to him. This, in turn, not only heightens isolated listening, but also reveals a “loss of individuality” itself (Adorno, 308). Everyone merely succumbs to the same products, and the same hit songs exert their power over them. Here again we see why Adorno is so keen on describing listeners as trapped within an infantile stage, for “they demand the one dish they have once been served,” uninterested in trying a new dish so long as they remain within the comfort of what is already recognizable (Adorno, 307).
The rather more pessimistic dimension of Adorno’s argument is that musical fetishism does not appear to be something from which listeners can simply extricate themselves. It is here that his critique becomes especially bleak and, at times, complain-y. For Adorno argues that when individuals attempt to “revolt against fetishism [it] only entangle[s] them more deeply in it” (Adorno, 308). This is ultimately due to what he calls “psuedo-activity,” a form of activity that only appears authentic or resistant while remaining entirely conditioned by the same forces it attempts to oppose (Adorno, 308). He illustrates this through examples such as jazz enthusiasts or what he calls “jitterbugs,” whose performances of individuality only “make the regression more strikingly visible” (Adorno, 308). The main issue he has with them is that their feelings accompanying the act of resistance “replaces the content itself” (Adorno, 308). But he pushes the critique even further by critiquing dancing itself. The same jitterbugs, he writes, “behave as if they were electrified by syncopation [and] dance almost exclusively [to] the good rhythmic parts” (Adorno, 309). To that, one is almost tempted to respond: okay, and? Are they supposed to dance to the bad rhythmic parts instead?
Perhaps even more pessimistic dimensions about Adorno’s argument emerges when he turns to the figure of the “radio ham,” or in German, the Bastler–roughly translated as the radio amateur. Unlike the ordinary listener, the radio ham appears to resist the passivity of mass culture by actively investing himself in the technical world of radio itself. Adorno describes him as someone who patiently “builds [radio] sets” and “scans the air for shortwave secrets” (Adorno, 309). Yet these acts, for Adorno, amount to nothing more than mere psuedo-activity. In fact, he pushes the critique to the extreme, claiming that “of all the fetishistic listeners, the radio ham is perhaps the most complete” (Adorno, 309). At this point, Adorno’s argument begins to feel almost oppressively totalizing, as though every possible attempt at resistance has already been absorbed in advance by the very system it seeks to oppose.
One is therefore left wondering whether any form of genuine engagement remains possible at all. The question, thus, arises: how, if at all, can the listener escape musical fetishism? A critical diagnosis of society, after all, should not simply end with critique itself. Rather, it should propose solutions. Indeed, the famous inscription on the tomb of Marx reads: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” (Marx, 145). Yet Adorno ultimately appears to offer no satisfactory path beyond the condition he describes. In fact, he seems to suggest the opposite, namely that every revolt against fetishism only entangles one deeper within it. It is precisely here that I turn to Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library.”
3. Proposed Escape
In this essay, Benjamin presents the collector as someone who stands in direct opposition to the contemporary listener described by Adorno. Whereas the fetishistic listener relates to music through all the ways described above–immediacy, repetition, and isolated moments–the collector relates to his possessions differently. That is, the collector is attentive to them, in that he does not merely value them according to their exchange-value or even use-value, but as objects that embody entire worlds into which he himself becomes inserted. Their details do not appear to him as separate, isolated facts, but as parts of a larger meaningful whole. I argue that this same mode of relation can be extended to the listener. More specifically, I present three arguments: namely, that the listener should attend to the social relations embodied within his musical objects, approach music as unified wholes, and recover the childlike capacity for renewal that Benjamin locates within the art of collecting.
Firstly, I argue that the listener must not assume that the mere acquisition of a musical commodity places him into an immediate relationship with the object’s underlying value. Instead, the listener should follow the collector’s relation to his possessions by becoming attentive to everything embodied within them. Just as the collector of books is attentive to “the period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership,” so too should the listener attend to these same dimensions when engaging with the physical forms of music, whether they be vinyl records, CDs, or concert tickets (Benjamin, 6). In doing so, he no longer treats the acquisition itself as satisfaction, but only as a passage into the world of the object. Consider, for example, the listener who purchases a rare LP pressing from his favorite artist, of which only a few thousand copies were made. What matters is not simply possessing the record, but rather everything sedimented within it: the artwork, the sleeve, production credits, the physical wear, even the small stains and scratches. Of course, the music gets first priority, but more will be said on this later. The main idea here is that nothing appears insignificant. He does not assume such experiences are immediately given through exchange alone, but instead places himself in a position where they might become possible.
The same too is true when the concertgoer purchases the physical ticket to a concert. Adorno presents the ordinary listener as believing that the act itself constitutes the experience. However, such an idea would not even enter the consciousness of the genuine listener at all. If one were to tell the die-hard fans of an artist that they got satisfaction by purchasing the ticket without yet experiencing the show, they would look at that person as though they were insane. What truly matters is everything about the experience–the strange feelings of intimacy created among complete strangers gathered together for the same reason. The listener no longer experiences the music as something mediated through a device, but as something unfolding directly before him. Even after the concert ends, he keeps the ticket stored away, not because of its exchange-value, but as a reminder of an experience that genuinely mattered to him.
One might object that, in a world where music no longer appears primarily through physical media but through technological distribution, the listener can no longer relate to musical objects in this way. I argue that though this is the historical condition in which contemporary listeners find themselves, this still does not undermine the possibility of genuine listening. Additionally, the listener may still seek out and preserve the physical forms of the works he truly admires. More importantly, however, the question becomes how one is to listen within this condition. It is here that I turn to my second argument: namely, that the listener must refrain from consuming songs in an isolated manner and instead become more like the collector, who remains attentive to the unified whole of his possessions.
Benjamin presents the collector to be interested in his possession’s details, “not as dry, isolated facts, but as a harmonious whole” (Benjamin, 13). Through this attentiveness, he develops his own taste, reflecting on “whether a book is for him or not,” and acquires a certain object with cultivated “flair” (Benjamin, 12-13). I argue that this same logic could be extended to the listener. Before developing his own taste, however, the listener must first learn to engage with musical works properly, namely by listening to them as a whole. At the same time, one should not shame another for the process through which taste develops, since musical preference necessarily differs from person to person. That is, one should not show disdain for another’s taste so as to discourage them from developing over time. The point, though, is that genuine taste can only emerge through attentive engagement with whole works. Within contemporary culture, this would require listening to entire albums rather than merely hit songs off of albums. For an artist’s greatness shows itself in their whole works.
More importantly, however, the listener should approach music with curiosity toward what it might disclose–whether it expresses some dimension of the human condition or reveals some truth about life. In any case, the listener must ask how he himself relates to the music. Perhaps the lyrics articulate something he has long felt but never fully expressed, or perhaps the movement of the instrumentation affects him in a way that ordinary experience cannot. What matters is that he no longer encounters music merely through isolated moments, but as a unified whole capable of gathering him into relations with both the work and himself.
In doing so, the listener could undermine the very regression of listening. He no longer remains trapped within the infantile condition Adorno describes, nor does he simply capitulate to the advertised music continually forced upon him. Instead, he opens himself toward the possibility of engaging with other music. Such listening requires resistance against the very mechanisms that produce distracted forms of musical experience–whether through the short fragments cultivated endlessly across social media or through algorithms that repeatedly elevate the same song until familiarity itself becomes mistaken for value. Yet the listener does not reject these things merely to appear different or to separate himself arrogantly from the masses, as though he possesses some superior understanding of music. Rather, he gradually becomes interested in what his own cultivated taste allows him to appreciate. Such taste cannot emerge immediately, though. It develops slowly over years of attentive engagement with whole works. In this way, he no longer accepts something as good merely because it is popular, nor does he abandon a work simply because it becomes widely loved. Instead, he learns to remain faithful to the relation he has genuinely formed with the music itself.
Thirdly, and finally, I argue that the listener should recover a childlike capacity, though not in the Adornian sense, but rather in the Benjaminian sense. Benjamin presents the collector as childlike toward the world of objects because, for him, collecting becomes a form of renewal. He writes that “to a true collector the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth” (Benjamin, 7). What matters here, once again, is not mere possession, but the capacity to breathe new life into what has been forgotten. This is why Benjamin associates collecting with childhood–in that children do not encounter objects as fixed things whose meanings have already been determined in advance. Rather, they continually recreate the world through them, “from touching things to giving them names” (Benjamin, 7). The collector participates in the same movement. He does not merely acquire commodities, but rescues them and restores them to existence. In this sense, collecting becomes an act of redemption. As he puts it, “to renew the old world–that is the collector’s deepest desire when he is driven to acquire new things” (Benjamin, 7).
I argue, then, that the listener must approach music in the same spirit of renewal. Rather than consuming songs as disposable commodities exhausted after a single use, he continually returns to them. Yet this return is fundamentally different from the repetitive listening Adorno criticizes under fetishism. The fetishistic listener returns to songs only because familiarity has become pleasurable. The genuine listener, however, returns to the work not to relive the same moment mechanically, but to rediscover it anew. Like the child who continually recreates the world through objects, the listener should approach music as something capable of revealing previously unnoticed meanings and relations. In this way, listening ceases to be passive repetition and instead becomes an act of renewal.
Ultimately, one must not succumb to the realization that the market continually pushes musical commodities upon us and thereby obstructs our listening capacities. One could completely agree with Adorno’s critiques while still actively pursuing other forms of listening. Perhaps even reading Adorno itself allows us to become conscious of these conditions and therefore push ourselves toward listening more attentively. The three arguments made through Benjamin’s collector should lead the listener towards a more genuine engagement with both the musical commodities and underlying works themselves. At least in this, there remains some hope for listeners within the conditions in which we find ourselves. Otherwise, Adorno’s critique would leave us with nothing but pessimism, whereby every attempt at genuine listening is already doomed in advance.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor W. “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening.” Essays on Music, edited by Richard Leppert, translated by Susan H. Gillespie, University of California Press, 2002, pp. 288–317.
Benjamin, Walter. Unpacking My Library. Translated by Harry Zohn, Eris, 2021.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Marx-Engels Reader. Edited by Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed., W. W. Norton & Company, 1978.