To break the attunements of being

I can’t help but see an affinity between the ‘logic of disintegration’ of Theodor W. Adorno’s philosophy – a logic which he recognised in the atonality of his teacher, Alban Berg’s music, with its tendency towards particularisation and disintegration – and the ‘intermittent rhythm’ of the music of Don Van Vliet/Captain Beefheart, its dissonance contrived to disrupt the hypnotic banality of what Beefheart called ‘that momma heartbeat, that bom, bom, bom’, so similar to the phenomenological ‘attunements of being’ that Adorno sought to shatter. The sky speckled with stars, the sombre ground interspersed with particles of light, is an obvious analogical field for attempting to ‘unlock the constellation’, a form of speculative thinking which Adorno derived from Walter Benjamin’s famous proposition in his Trauerspiel (1928), that ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars. One can therefore form a constellation between Adorno’s micrological thinking, focused on fragmentary particulars – figuratively-speaking, from the perspective of the Lurianic kabbalah, sparks of the scattered cosmic body of Adam Kadmon: ‘Damadam to infinities!’ (Finnegans Wake page 18, line 30) – and Beefheart’s application of a convulsive logic that stutters ‘in speckled, speckled speculation’ (Van Vliet 1969) enacted in his Trauermarsch (funeral march) for bourgeois musical sensibilities, Trout Mask Replica, released on June 16th, 1969, coinciding with Bloomsday, the day James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses. takes place in 1904.

A drawing by astronomer and council communist, Anton Pannekoek, depicting a section of the northern Milky Way, from Die nördliche Milchstrasse (1920).