Introduction -- Prelude: a paradox of the ineffable. Schopenhauer's deep copy ; The Platonic solutions ; Four dialectical responses (after Nietzsche) -- Bloch's tone. The tone ; The natural klang ; The expressive tone ; Bloch's magic rattle ; The tone's inner ineffability ; The event-forms ; A dialectical account of music history ; Utopian musical speech -- Adorno's musical fracture. Adorno's tone ; Adorno's conception of history ; The tendenz des materials ; Music's language-like ineffability ; The immanent critique (...) ; The paradox of Mahler's vernacular ; The curve of inconsistency -- Interlude: Wittgenstein's silence -- Jankelevitch's inconsistency. Bergson and the inconsistency of time ; The aporetic source of fidelity ; Charm ; Cosmic silence ; Unwoven dialectics -- Deleuze and Guattari's rhythm. Deleuze's rhythm ; The rhythm of sense ; A structuralist quadrivium ; The rhythm of life ; Sonorous co-extensions -- Conclusion: a paradox of the vernacular. (shrink)

This chapter reconstructs Adorno's practices of listening to music through the prism of two categories: exact listening and inconsistent listening. Exact listening depends upon a distinct kind of intellectual confidence about the capacity for an intellectual to listen to and comprehend the forms of a given work. This practice entails his well‐known writings on the resistant powers of fractured forms in late Beethoven and the Second Viennese School; as well as his critiques of Wagner, Stravinsky, jazz, popular music, and the (...) culture industry. By contrast, inconsistent listening, found particularly in Adorno's writings on Mahler and Berg, acknowledges a significant measure of uncertainty as to what forms constitute a locus of social resistance. In these writings, Adorno shows readers more explicitly what it means to grapple with music's ineffability through his use of parataxis, extra‐musical hallucinations, and contradictory or paradoxical assertions. The chapter frames its reconstruction of Adorno's dual listening practices by delineating the philosophical importance of music's ineffability for Adorno's negative conception of utopian truth‐content. (shrink)