Repetition and reification in the work of Theodor W. Adorno

It is easy to interpret repetition as an exclusively deleterious phenomenon in the work of Theodor W. Adorno. On the macrocosmic level of society, he posits that the reification of mass culture is engaged in an ‘effort of repetition,’ the ‘bad infinity’ of whose perpetual interpellation of subjects ‘is the only trace of hope that this repetition might be in vain.’ And he argues that these dynamics play out on the microcosmic level of the pop song, with its dynamic of standardised repetition—both generically in terms of structure, and within songs themselves⁠—ensuring that listeners are led ‘back to the same familiar experience, and nothing fundamentally novel [is] introduced.’ Conversely, he consistently championed composers whose dialectical reciprocity with their musical materials assiduously avoided repetition, both in terms of the refusal to impose pre-given convention, and also in terms of how individual details of a composition acquire expressive quality in their differentiation from those which precede them. However, later in life Adorno expressed scepticism about works whose absolute resistance to repetition he claimed paradoxically led to a situation where the layperson thinks ‘radical modern music all sounds the same, because everything is constantly changing.’

In this paper, I will trace the figure of repetition throughout Adorno’s oeuvre, and furthermore suggest that, in spite of Adorno’s infamous and misplaced antipathy towards the metric regularity of jazz, Adorno’s theory might not be so prohibitive towards the uncompromising repetition of various genres of electronic music which emerged in the decades after his death.