Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) was one of the central thinkers of the Frankfurt School, an intellectual group that founded and shaped "critical theory" of 20th century society. One of his main arguments concerned the notion that the Culture Industry (television, radio, film, music) transforms art into a standardized consumer product, dulling critical thought and turning art into an instrument of social repression and control. For example, in the short excerpt accompanying the text, Adorno's critique of protest music is heard: upon becoming popular, such music loses its power as genuine social protest. He refers specifically to Joan Baez's song "We Shall Overcome" written in the wake of the Vietnam War.
Adorno essentially argues that music, when it is pleasing to the ear and becomes part of popular culture, conceals and even cancels out the hard-hitting words that express pain, undermining the song's aim, which is to awaken and induce change. His critique is, in effect, a refusal of the almost automatic process of assimilating art (or music, in this instance) harmoniously into the system. He points precisely to the operation of phantasm—"taking something terrible and turning it into something consumable"1—which produces an illusion of harmony through pleasant music. In this sense, it can be said—with Lacan—that music itself may serve as a phantasm, masking the impossible and the unbearable.
In Seminar XVIII, Lacan speaks about the littoral2 as an absolute non-relation between two domains. That is to say, even if it is possible to name the thing itself in words, doing so will still only wrap it; it will never be the thing itself. Alongside Adorno's critique, one may say that the encounter with absolute otherness may serve as an opportunity for subjective change. Adorno writes in one of his texts that protest music can be only that which is so dissonant as to be almost impossible to listen to. An effort is thus required: the consent to acknowledge this Real as radical alterity as such, so that a possibility emerges to do something with it, savoir-faire, as an opportunity for a change.
[1] Brown, R., Theodor Adorno – Music and Protest, available online: YouTube.
[2] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVIII: On a Discourse that Might Not Be a Semblance ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. B. Fink, London: Norton, 2025, p. 99.
