In the previous post, I argued that it is impossible to separate Adorno’s qualitative differentiation of “authentic” and “resigned” art from his evaluative judgments and aesthetic criteria, which together stem from his modernist context. But by ignoring several integral portions of Adorno’s argument, Stephen A. Marini is able to construct his own version of Adorno’s thesis, which becomes essential to his argument in two ways:
First, Marini’s uses his “pseudo-Adorno” not only to elucidate a tension in contemporary American religion (the tension between commodification and sacred song) but to rationalize a particular explanation of the tension that avoids undesirable implications. Thus, commodification represents a threat to the ability of sacred song to communicate particular meanings to religious communities and retain its potential for social and individual transformation rather than a threat to the autonomy of religious institutions themselves or the ability for isolable communities to construct and convey meaning at all.
Second, pseudo-Adorno functions as a convenient simplification of a problem that can then be solved when in reality the problem is far more complex. Marini “solves” the problem posed by pseudo-Adorno by positing the existence of “something transcendent” (323) present in sacred music, an irreducible core that he later identifies as a “voice” that “speaks through and beyond every element of religious culture,” alternatively calling for change or reinforcing order. This voice, this “living reality of human religiousness” is the sacred shield that protects sacred song from becoming “just” a commodity and preserves its authenticity (329).
On the surface, this defense amounts to little more than thinly veiled liberal theology, while subtextually, Marini identifies himself, perhaps unintentionally, as an apologist for capitalism. In the following post, I want to reason through Adorno’s critique without appeals to an abstract, metaphysical property of the sacred song. I will do this by tugging at the strands of Marini’s argument in the opposite direction; for while Marini is quite interested in the popularization of sacred forms of music, he completely ignores the other side of the same issue: What happens when mass culture infiltrates the supposedly autonomous space of the religious congregation?
