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Three Blind Mice: Goodman, McLuhan,

and Adorno on the Art of Music and

Listening in the Age of Global Transmission

Lydia Goehr

Three blind mice.

See how they run. . . .

They all ran after the farmer’s wife,Who cut off their tails with a carving knife.

Did you ever see such a thing in your life

As three blind mice?

—nursery rhyme

In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin.

—Marshall McLuhan

This essay investigates global discourse in the shadow of the 1960s. It draws onthe views of Nelson Goodman, Marshall McLuhan, and Theodor W. Adorno to

explore three concepts central to music in the age of global transmission: com-

pliance, current, and virtuality.

New German Critique 104, Vol. 35, No. 2, Summer 2008

DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2008-001 © 2008 by New German Critique, Inc.

1

Many thanks to many, many people who commented on this essay. The talk version was almost

globally delivered. It was published in an earlier and shortened version in German as “‘Three Blind

Mice’: Goodman, McLuhan und Adorno über die Kunst der Musik und des Hörens im Zeitalter der

globalen Transmission,” in Die Künste im Dialog der Kulturen: Europa und seine muslimischen

Nachbarn, ed. Christoph Wulf et al. (Berlin: Akademie, 2007). I am grateful for permission to reprintthe essay here.

New German Critique

Published by Duke University Press



2 Music and Listening

Global discourse is about the gains and losses, optimisms and pessi-

misms, of traditional culture and society under new conditions of equality and

democracy. As far as the tone of the terms is concerned, consider, first, such

words as disembodiment, disassociation, disintegration, displacement, dema-

terialization, degeneration, dehumanization, and decapitation. Then pit these

words against expansion, enhancement, extension, enlightenment, entertain-

ment, and equality. Moving from D-words to E-words, or from E to D, is a

single tonal step in the traditional Western harmonic system. Sometimes this

single step demands an entire change of mood, altering our attitude, finally,

toward the C-words of global discourse: capitalism, corporation, commod-

ity, conglomeration, calculation, commerce, and currency. Three tonal steps,

E–D–C: these are the steps of “Three Blind Mice.” Henceforth my argumentattends to how far one can go by taking little-by-little steps without assuming,

however, that where one ends up is necessarily where one wants to be.

I begin with a passage from Goodman’s Languages of Art that has

intrigued me for many years:

Since complete compliance with the score is the only requirement for a genu-

ine instance of a work, the most miserable performance without actual mis-

takes does count as such an instance, while the most brilliant performance

with a single wrong note does not. Could we not bring our theoretical vocab-

ulary into better agreement with common practice and common sense by

allowing some limited degree of deviation in performances admitted as

instances of a work? The practicing musician or composer usually bristles at

the idea that a performance with one wrong note is not a performance of the

given work at all; and ordinary usage surely sanctions overlooking a few

wrong notes. But this is one of those cases where ordinary usage gets us

quickly into trouble. The innocent-seeming principle that performances dif-

fering by just one note are instances of the same work risks the consequence—

in view of the transitivity of identity—that all performances whatsoever areof the same work. If we allow the least deviation, all assurance of work-

preservation and score-preservation is lost; for by a series of one-note errors

of omission, addition, and modification, we can go all the way from Bee-

thoven’s Fifth Symphony to Three Blind Mice.1

In what follows, I corroborate Goodman’s statement that there is nothing inno-

cent about the “innocent-seeming principle” that runs the risk that “all perfor-

1. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (New York:

Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), 186–87. Hereafter cited as LA.

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Lydia Goehr 3

mances whatsoever are of the same work.” Moreover, I ask, as no one seems to

have asked before, why his extraordinary choice of examples. It is not surpris-

ing that he chooses Beethoven’s Fifth; almost everyone uses it as an example.

But why does he choose “Three Blind Mice,” and how could one ever get from

one to the other? My argument pursues two paths, one that juxtaposes the views

of the three theorists regarding the global transmission of music, another that

seeks possible sources for Goodman’s reference to this common rhyme. The

reference to “Three Blind Mice” has a quite extraordinary history, signifying an

endemic positivistic reductionism that occurs equally in theory and practice.

Goodman’s reference is fleeting: it comes once, never to return. I e-mailed

Catherine Elgin, his longtime colleague, to ask why he might have used this

example. “I have no idea,” she wrote back. “I doubt that there was any deep rea-son.” It was a perfect response, since having no deep reason is quite consistent

with Goodman’s philosophical outlook. Nevertheless, seeking a deep reason is

not the same as seeking a deep source, and the latter I shall do to shift the per-

spective on Goodman’s view in order to separate it from its usual interpretation.

Perfect Compliance

Goodman wrote this passage, like his book, in 1968. The book’s subtitle, An

Approach to a Theory of Symbols, makes explicit his intent to offer a generaltheory of symbols. As one of the most-quoted works (in the relevant fields)

of the last forty years, the book exerts an influence reaching far beyond the

Anglo-American philosophy of the arts. Goodman’s demand for perfect com-

pliance with a score has typically been interpreted as too extreme a demand on

musical practice, despite his explicit disclaimer that he is not offering a condi-

tion or instruction for how common practice or parlance ought necessarily to

proceed. “The exigencies that dictate our technical discourse need [not] gov-

ern our everyday speech,” he insists. “I am no more recommending that in

ordinary discourse we refuse to say that a pianist who misses a note has per-

formed a Chopin Polonaise than that we refuse to call a whale a fish, the earth

spherical, or a grayish-pink human white” ( LA, 187). Still, his point is that

ordinary usage gets us into logical trouble or even perhaps into other sorts of

trouble when it comes to offering a general theory of symbols.

But why do we bristle at this demand for perfect compliance? After all,

it matches the central ideal of a music practice regulated by the work concept:

for a performance to be true to a work, it should be true to its notes. Neverthe-

less, it is one thing to speak of ideals and another to speak of conditions of

individuation and identity. To speak of perfect compliance as an ideal is to

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leave a space for the imperfections of human practice, whereas to specify per-

fect compliance as an identity or individuation condition is to remove this

space. Given an identity condition, perfect means perfect; given an ideal, per-

fect means doing the very best one can. Doing the best one can, however, is

often for the philosopher not enough.

Goodman argues for the strict condition of perfect compliance to avoid

the logical problem of vagueness. He seeks a solution to what is called the

Sorites paradox, or the little-by-little argument. Consider a pile of sand. A

single grain of sand does not make a heap, and if one grain does not, then two

grains do not, nor do three, and so on, until, given a heap of sand, one cannot

logically admit that it is a heap unless one introduces a clear cutoff point, say,

at 1,000 grains, but why not then 999 or 998, until one is back to a single grain?Similarly, given a performance of a work with a thousand notes, how many

mistakes may a performer make until we say that she has not performed the

work: one wrong note, or two, or three? And what would we say of a perfor-

mance if it had so many mistakes that it turned out to comply with another

score? “Tonight, Ladies and Gentlemen, you were meant to hear a sonata by

Beethoven; what in fact you heard was a sonata by Mozart.” Unwilling to allow

a cutoff point somewhere between no mistakes and all mistakes, Goodman

opts for the most stringent condition, permitting no wrong notes at all.Goodman’s argument for perfect compliance is designed to prevent more

than having to stipulate arbitrary cutoff points. It is designed also to prevent

overlap between works, sharply individuating one from another; hence his

fine-grained specification of syntactic and semantic conditions made consis-

tent with his strict nominalist and extensionalist commitments. It is unneces-

sary to outline those conditions and commitments here.2 Suf fice it to imagine

a scenario in which a performance could be determined to belong to more than

one work: “Tonight, Ladies and Gentlemen, you were listening to Beethoven’s

Fifth, and at a certain moment in the slow movement you were also listening to

the seventeenth-century melody ‘La Folia.’” In this essay I select no example

carelessly. This example reflects a recent discussion on the similarity between

these two pieces in the bass line and the harmonic progression.3 However, as

this discussion makes explicit, if one starts to look for musical overlaps at this

basic level of analysis, one will soon generate a list as long as Leporello’s. Bor-

rowing music has always been of the essence of musical composition, in every

2. I discuss these conditions in The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Phi-

losophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

3. Cf. Barry Cooper, ‘La Folia Revisited,’ letter, Musical Times, January 4, 1995, 4.

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Lydia Goehr 5

sort of music, probably in every part of the world. It became an issue (though

even then it did not cease) only when originality and copyright became issues,

which is to say, when Werktreue became a bourgeois demand on the practice,

more or less around 1800. As for traditional marriage, so for musical works:

given Goodman’s specifications, there should be no overlap or crisscrossing

between classes.4

Goodman knows that different works must share single notes, chords,

and even harmonic progressions. Accordingly, he specifies his conditions in so

through-composed a way that only regarded as wholes are the works finally to

be compared. In this matter, compare the use to which “Three Blind Mice”

was put in an article written in 1964 for the Journal of Aesthetics and Art

Criticism.5 Here the author, Carroll C. Pratt, discusses the gestalt principlegenerally and “God Save the Queen” specifically. Recalling the last three notes

of the national anthem and the first three of the rhyme (“Three Blind Mice”),

Pratt insists that no one would ever actually confuse the two even if sung in the

same key. What Pratt admits into his account, Goodman admits, too, despite

his reduction of gestalten to extensional classes. Reduced or unreduced, the

overall formal or compound shape in which the three descending notes are sung

makes all the difference between the anthem and the rhyme. Even if Good-

man was not devotedly reading the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism in the 1960s, he was reading work in Gestalt psychology, as evidenced in the

opening pages of his book. Still, it is only the mildest conjecture that Pratt influ-

enced Goodman’s reference to “Three Blind Mice.”

The Age of Technological Transmission

What Goodman treats as a logical problem, I treat also as an anxiety in the age

of technological reproducibility, the electric age, or the age of global transmis-

sion. This is the main shift of perspective I encourage in this essay. Although

Goodman introduces the condition of perfect compliance for logical reasons,

his account perfectly suits that historical moment when McLuhan proclaimed

that “the medium is the message” or Adorno described the art of music as hav-

ing been reduced to the means of its technological transmission. Apart from

4. Consider my all-time favorite example, a joke out of the Soviet Union that retains something

of that former Cold War wit. “Tonight, Ladies and Gentlemen, you thought you were going to hear

Shostakovich’s Fifth, but what you heard was a nonperformance of this work the moment the per-

formers reversed the entire order of the notes and performed the work backward. What in fact youheard was a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth.”

5. Carroll C. Pratt, “The Perception of Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 23 (1964):

57–62.

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being an extensionalist, Goodman was also a subtle conventionalist. Despite his

account overdetermining the ideals traditionally associated with what I have

called the imaginary museum of musical works, it was responsive to the trans-

formation of that museum into a virtual museum. For in that transformation,

vagueness became an entirely new sort of threat, when going all the way ran

too great a risk of going astray or when going astray risked going all the way.6

The Medium Is the Message

For McLuhan and Adorno, the “is” in the phrase “The medium is the mes-

sage” is the product of a long social movement toward what Adorno calls iden-

tity thinking. The movement shows the reduction that takes place when the

difference between medium and message is or, more accurately, appears to beerased. Certainly, the message or the meaning of the arts has always partly

been its technological means, but until recently it was never in appearance

entirely its means. Why add this qualifying reference to what appears to be the

case? Because, for Adorno, behind the hard appearance of the historical pres-

ent lie the shards of the past difference between medium and message, waiting,

as it were, to be remembered—wanting not to be forgotten.

In a book of essays on music in the age of technological reproducibility,

which has recently appeared under the title Current of Music, Adorno showshis preoccupation with, and skepticism toward, the many meanings of the term

current , even if he does not articulate these different meanings as explicitly as

I do here.7 To speak of a current is obviously to speak of electrical transmis-

sion, a conveyor, transmitter, or conduit. But it is also to speak of the flow of

time and blood. In addition, one may speak of something as being au courant,

timely, up-to-date, or as having contemporary relevance: in this way, Adorno

always addresses the Aktualität of our current affairs. Finally, to speak of actu-

ality as relevance could be to speak of the present worth or currency of some-

thing as a product in the global market. Or it could be to direct our attention to

what is currently held as opinion or belief: thus the many references in Adorno’s

writings to the current, tenor, or tone of our times.

Goodman specifies his condition of perfect compliance to preserve the

identity of works not only through their live performance but also through

their technological transmission, be it by telephone, as it was at first in the

6. Given this threat, one must also ask how far the terms museum, music, or works can hold on

to their meanings, especially if traditional meaning is what virtuality challenges most.

7. Theodor W. Adorno, Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory, ed. Robert Hullot-

Kentor (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006).

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Lydia Goehr 7

late nineteenth century, then by radio, phonograph, television, and now com-

puter. Whereas for Goodman, however, the precise determination of notational

conditions tells us about all the identity that counts in transmitting works,

for McLuhan and Adorno this is not the case. Concerned with more than

works and notations—which means also with the experience that different

technologies now afford—they maintain that there is no guarantee that work

production will remain the same under the current conditions of transmis-

sion. New technologies have made possible so great a variety of mixing and

matching in music that the very structure of our sensorial experience has

changed.

Whether one considers the content or form of transmission, for Adorno,

it is both the works as objects that fail to preserve their identity over the air-waves and the subjective experience traditionally associated with such works—

because, as McLuhan puts it, subjects and objects are extensions of each other.

Thus neither the objective possibility nor the subjective ability simply remains

in place to listen to symphonies as they were formerly heard in live perfor-

mance. Adorno describes what happens when the concert-hall symphony is

transformed into what he calls the radio symphony, or when works once per-

formed as wholes are chopped into pieces produced for domestic transmis-

sion between breakfast, lunch, and cocktails in the kitchen, dining room, andlounge. The original symphonic character of the symphony does not remain as

it is (not even in the concert hall), despite auratic proclamations to the contrary.

Drawing on one of Adorno’s favorite examples, we are promised on the radio

that Arturo Toscanini will be “with us tonight” to perform Beethoven’s Fifth,

yet, in the untruth of appearance, what we are given is only a distorted echo of

what once was musically the case. “Tonight, Ladies and Gentlemen, what you

have been hearing is only an echo of what you once listened to as Beethoven’s

Fifth.”

For McLuhan, the new means of production and distribution have altered

the spatiotemporal shape of both our seeing and our hearing, with consequences

for our aesthetic and social experience. This is what he suggests by this most

famous line: “The medium is the message.” Changes in media have brought

about changes to meaning and experience because the former mediate the lat-

ter: media as mediating. McLuhan writes this line in his Understanding Media.

So titling his book, he points to changes in media and to understanding. What

we understand and how we understand have changed. On one occasion Adorno

pronounces that McLuhan “has it right: the medium is the message,” and he

does this at the moment of describing “civilization at its deepest degrada-

tion.” The degradation consists in a “substitution of means and ends,” Adorno

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explains, such that “human characteristics are replaced” by others, presum-

ably by characteristics now inhuman or degraded.8

Immanuel Kant also “had it right”—it is only that the a priori categories

of space and time are subject to a posteriori conventions and developments.

The latter may be so radical that the most totalizing discourse of globalization

comes “ironically” to be sustained by a mode of music production that is now

totally broken up—reduced to disconnected medleys or sound bites, as they

come to be called in the 1980s. The reduction of the totality to little bits assumes

that the bits become mutually exchangeable the more they lose their individual

meanings. In this way, the smallest item, like the smallest step, testifies to the

total loss of meaning in the whole.

Adorno quotes McLuhan’s most famous line in English. This line, too,having become a sound bite, is untranslatable. Transmission is not automati-

cally translation: only words or sentences still tethered to meaning and con-

text are translatable. Voided of meaning or decontextualized without recon-

textualization, McLuhan’s line becomes an empty sign, physically a bit, a bite,

or a piece. Adorno quotes the line in his “Marginalia on Theory and Praxis.”

Quoting the line as a Post-it sign, which is what the term marginalia sug-

gests, Adorno shows us that theory, no differently from practice, is subject to

the modes of its transmission. However, in showing this, he also asks us toretrieve the appropriate passage—the opening passage, no less—in McLuhan’s

text. Hence

in a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things

as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that,

in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely

to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of

any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced

into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.9

The language of the sound bite is not Adorno’s. It finds its common currency

only in the 1980s when awarded its thirty-second time limit. However, the idea

of the sound bite goes back at least to 1935, when Muzak was first patented

8. “Ironisch—Zivilisation in ihrer tiefsten Erniedrigung—behält McLuhan recht: the medium

is the message. Die Substitution der Zwecke durch Mittel ersetzt die Eigenschaften in den Menschen

selbst” (Theodor W. Adorno, “Marginalien zu Theorie und Praxis,” in Kulturkritik und Gesell-

schaft , vol. 10, pt. 2, of Gesammelte Schriften [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977], 772; mytranslation).

9. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 1994), 7. Hereafter cited as UM .

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Lydia Goehr 9

in the United States. Thirty seconds, or a little bit longer: John Cage confessed

in 1948 to wanting to “compose a piece of uninterrupted silence and sell it to

the Muzak Co.” It would last the length, he stipulated, of all other “canned”

music.10 Mirroring the confession, the early patenting of Muzak shared with

the patenting of scientific entities a reduction to what Goodman later calls a

“sameness of spelling”—a reduction to a secure transmittable entity or logi-

cal sign sealed with a guarantee yet devoid of all trace of deep meaning.

However, for a long while (so the Oxford English Dictionary shows) Muzak ,

Musak , Musac, or Muzack could decide as little on its spelling as on the iden-

tity of its product.

I am tempted to describe Muzak as the first virtual or vague music in

the age of global transmission. Muzak put music composed for the foregroundinto the background. “We shall have Musak wherever we go,” the Listener

Magazine (cited in the OED) proclaimed in 1965—be it in shops, restaurants,

or any other public places with elevators. Bland or easy to listen to, so the

original patent directed, Muzak had to be immediately recognizable or famil-

iar. Nevertheless, it quickly ran into dif ficulties with a copyright law forbid-

ding reproducing Mozart as Muzak. At most, one could produce Muzak that

was almost Mozart or, better, virtually Mozart. In 1957 it was reported that

“50,000,000 Americans” are listening “in some way or another . . . to Muzakdaily” (cited in the OED). Despite the law, “some way or another” perfectly

captured the subjective vagueness of the new listening experience, matching

the objective vagueness of both the new music and its name.

McLuhan attends to the large-scale global consequences of even the

smallest alterations that modern technologies have brought about to our spatio-

temporal experience. In The Gutenberg Galaxy he writes of the extension that

global media has permitted, yet of how the extension has reduced all areas

within their reach to a “global village.”11 He shows the insecurities associated

with a new sort of technological extensionalism, which allows us to read Good-

man’s strict logical extensionalism as its anxious antidote. Whereas logic demar-

cates finely tuned classes, technology reduces whole networks or galaxies to

something local, as if all existed here and now within the confines of our living

rooms, yet to something that we fail utterly to comprehend. Suddenly all is too

close now for us actually to see it:

10. Cf. Richard Kostelanetz, John Cage: Writer; Selected Texts (New York: Limelight, 1993),

43. Here Cage was speaking of his projected piece 4' 33'' , though in 1948 he had not yet determinedits exact time.

11. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto:

University of Toronto Press, 1962), 20–21. Hereafter cited as GG.

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It is simpler to say that if a new technology extends one or more of our senses

outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will

occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a

new note is added to a melody. And when the sense ratios alter in any cul-ture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly be opaque, and what

had been vague or opaque will become translucent. (GG, 41; my emphasis)

The transformative or cognitive play between opacity and translucency evokes

the tension between closeness and distance. What is seen from afar could only

have been seen before one’s eyes had one only noticed that when the single

note was added to the melody, the entire melody was changed. McLuhan drew

his thought from Bertrand Russell’s ABC of Relativity of 1925 (though he

might have drawn it from Ludwig Wittgenstein). Changing something as small

as a letter in a word or a word in a sentence might result in an entire alteration

of our attitude. Music becomes Muzak: only in our new blindness or deafness

do we not notice the change.

Virtual Identity

Like McLuhan, when Adorno attends to change, he does so mostly by describ-

ing loss. It all sounds pessimistic, although this is not Adorno’s point. He aims

to expose all manner of positivistic reductions. Thus, for example, what theradio promises is that a live performance is perfectly transmitted over the

receiver without mediation, interruption, or interference. It is a false promise.

Consider a story he recounts in Current of Music about visiting friends in a

village near Frankfurt am Main and hearing the song of a nightingale in the

back garden (120). The song presumably was so striking that the radio station

transmitted it for all to hear. Standing in the garden some time later, Adorno

was offered a double experience: the simultaneous performance of the live

song and its live broadcast. However, the simultaneity was only approximate.A little surprised, until he recalled the physical laws of sound transmission, he

heard the broadcast before the live event. He put much store in this hardly dis-

cernible temporal difference. “Die wirkliche Nachtigall,” he wrote, “klang wie

ein Echo der übertragenen” (The real nightingale sounded like an echo of the

recorded one). The immediacy of a live concert (or live performance) was dif-

ferent, he concluded, from the false immediacy of the so-called live broadcast.

What the latter produced was a feeling of estrangement, numbness, or mute-

ness (as both Adorno and McLuhan use these terms), suggesting that the radioexperience was, after all, utterly different from what it promised to be.

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Lydia Goehr 11

Adorno similarly describes the political radio addresses of his time with

their promise of “fireside chats.” This is an example of the false personaliza-

tion of the political that is now so familiar to us, where this habituation is a

form of happiness or contentment that yields little by way of true satisfaction.

In this context of mass culture, McLuhan adapts “The medium is the message”

to “The medium is the massage.” Apparently, the alteration was prompted by

a typo in the printing of a book McLuhan wrote and designed with Quentin

Fiore, a single-letter mistake that suited their argument, as the present argu-

ment, perfectly.12

For both Adorno and McLuhan, we no longer recognize our own estrange-

ment from the political discourse, or, when we do, our only option, which is

really no option at all, is to turn the radio off. Von Heute auf Morgen—fromone day to the next. Arnold Schoenberg (the composer of this short modern

opera) thought that turning off the radio demonstrated the freedom we still

have not to accept the Neues vom Tage—the news or newness of the times.

He might also have named his work Von Heute auf Gestern. Adorno and

McLuhan also feel the loss but know that there is no going back.13

In this regard, Adorno is discontent with what McLuhan describes as

“taking it on the chin,” as McLuhan is himself discontent. In “experimental

art,” the latter explains,

men are given the exact speci fications of coming violence to their own

psyches from their own counter-irritants or technology. For those parts of

ourselves that we thrust out in the form of new invention are attempts to

counter or neutralize collective pressures and irritations. But the counter-

irritant usually proves a greater plague than the initial irritant, like a drug

habit. And it is here that the artist can show us how to “ride with the punch,”

instead of “taking it on the chin.” It can only be repeated that human his-

tory is a record of “taking it on the chin.” (UM , 66; my emphasis)

“Rid[ing] with the punch” is subtly different from “taking it on the chin.” Only

the former suggests some form of survival or noncompromising resistance

to producing the counter-irritant to which McLuhan refers. In this context,

the language of counter-irritants derives from the language of chemistry and

12. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

(Corte Madera, CA: Gingko, 1996).

13. I thank Antonia Soulez here for reminding me of another of Schoenberg’s most appropriatelines, namely, “Happy is the hand that does not keep its promise,” from Die glückliche Hand , op. 18.

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physics as much as from that of psychology. It is also closely connected to the

language of transmission. Given the seventeenth-century development of

optics in Newtonian science, the term transmission was immediately associ-

ated with the distortion of an image, showing no straight lines from A to B.

By the late eighteenth century the so-called transmissionists or Lamarckians

were speaking of the direct inheritance of characteristics, although presum-

ably even they acknowledged that at best direct inheritance leads to inexact

family resemblances. As we know from the once royal family of Spain, even

locality, which is to say, royal or absolute incest, exaggerates the features most

undesired when the family “goes all the way.”

VirtualityVirtuality, I suggest, is the most exact concept we have developed for inexact-

ness. The history of the concept is a history of loss, of the concept’s gradual

untethering from what once mattered most: human value and virtue. The term

virtuality stemmed from ancient terms for virtue and virtuousness, although it

quickly connected itself to the Latin virtus, meaning pure power, potency, or

potentiality. Even early on there was a tension between virtue having to do

with form and power and virtue having to do with content and value. In mod-

ern times the term has moved through the grounded movements of biologicalvirtualismus, through the increasingly ungrounded movements of the artistic

virtuoso, and then to virtuality as pure possibility when the tethering to the

immediate presence and presentness of reality is finally cut. In contemporary

global discourse there are references to virtuality all over the place, where “all

over the place” is the relevant point: hence to virtual experience and reality, to

virtual velocity and representation, to virtual signs, churches, patients, sex,

banking, conferences, and pets. Often these references are tainted by the same

sort of anxieties shown in response to the early technology of the telephone

and camera. What is virtual lies in the ghostly space between life and death,

neither quite one nor quite the other. Or it no longer matters where you are or

go, because everywhere is “all the same.” What matters most deeply has been

thoroughly dematerialized and lives on, if it lives at all, only in virtual space.

In Adorno’s terms, the global means of transmission promises one

thing and delivers another. A telephone offers you a direct line to another

person, but, as we know from cell phones or from what the Germans call the

Handy, the direct line is granted only where and when it is least needed,

which is to say, only when it is “ready to hand.” Technology promises exac-

titude and delivery but delivers inexactitude or static reception. At the same

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Lydia Goehr 13

time, the more invasive the technological mediation is, the more we forget that

it mediates. This is a form of our modern forgetfulness, of what others call

our amnesia.14

Nevertheless, for all this critical talk, virtuality as aligned to vagueness

should not be interpreted only negatively. Consider the specific idea of virtual

reality and of the reality it almost delivers. When one says that virtually all the

committee members have arrived, there is an admission of some sort of fail-

ure: something or someone is still missing. But there is also an overriding or

suf ficient satisfaction that enough people have arrived or that a quorum has

been reached. Here the practical rather than ideal difference between all and

enough is effectively suspended. Even more positively, when one says that one

is virtually out of patience, one usually means that one still has a little patienceleft. Don’t references to virtual reality thus suggest that some difference

between all and enough still exists? Certainly, but from this, one cannot draw

an exact rule. When the difference between all and enough matters and when

it doesn’t is a matter of practice, context, and convention.15

Let us return now to the ideal for perfect compliance: that we should try

to play all the notes correctly. Suppose I make six mistakes. Could I say that I

produced a virtual performance of the work, or that I virtually produced the

work? Both sound odd. Surely I could claim that tonight I played the piece wellenough for it to count because it communicated the message I wanted to con-

vey. For Goodman, the following difference is crucial. For the purposes of

logic or identity, to say that one virtually produced a performance is to admit

that one did not actually produce a performance. For the purposes of evalua-

tion or aesthetic judgment, however, to claim one virtually performed the work

might well be to say that one did enough to get the work across. Goodman

insists on keeping the two matters apart: matters of evaluation and matters of

identity should be neither conflated nor confused. Adorno and McLuhan agree

that the conflation should be avoided, but they are not convinced that separat-

ing matters or spheres is the correct way to do this.

14. Cf. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New

York: Routledge, 1995), esp. the first and ninth essays.

15. Cf. Richard Norton, “What Is Virtuality?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 30

(1972): 499–505; Espen Aarseth, “Virtual Worlds, Real Knowledge: Towards a Hermeneutics of

Virtuality,” European Review 9 (2001): 227–32; Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From

Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); and John Beckmann, ed., The Virtual Dimension: Architecture, Representation, and Crash Culture (New York: Princeton Architec-

tural Press, 1998).

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Limitlessness within Limits

Goodman is entirely attentive to a new type of music that has become limitless

with respect to its material, as well as to the extent of its distribution. Quoting

the Princeton composer Roger Sessions, Goodman confirms that “the com-

poser . . . [now] has the whole world of sound at his disposal” ( LA, 190). The

term disposal with its connotation of waste should not be disregarded, for,

when all is at one’s disposal, either nothing is wasted or all has become waste.

What Adorno describes as total administration, Sessions describes as

total organization:

The subject of “total organization” leads naturally to the consideration of

electronic media. Since the potentialities of electronic media in the realmof sound are, at least to all intents and purposes, infinite, it is possible to

measure all musical elements in terms of exact quantity, . . . since such

measurement is the very nature of the instruments and the method by which

they are used. A dynamic nuance thus not only can, but must, become a

fixed quantity, as can and must, also, any tone in the whole range of pitch or

color gradations. Every moment of music not only can but must be the

result of the minutest calculation, and the composer for the first time has

the whole world of sound at his disposal.16

The transformation of dynamic nuances to fixed quantities is exactly what

many avant-garde composers rely on but what others most want to prevent.

Aesthetic moments reduced to minute calculations: isn’t this, many ask, the

music of the horrid modern laboratory? Sessions concludes only that “in the

future of music” it is “not to be doubted” that “electronic media will play a

vital and possibly even decisive role.” This conclusion does not amount

merely to a celebration. “It is not suf ficient,” he explains, “to have the whole

world at one’s disposal—the very infinitude of possibilities cancels out pos-

sibilities . . . until limitations are discovered. No doubt the limitations are

there, and if not there they are certainly in human beings.” Sessions expresses

doubt that when everything is possible, everything that is human or wanted

is thereby delivered. He is not against the expansion of musical material but

fears for limitlessness without limits or quantity without nuances. Limitless-

ness should be assumed or appreciated only under the condition of limits, just

16. Roger Sessions, “Problems and Issues Facing the Composer Today,” in Problems of Modern

Music: The Princeton Seminar in Advanced Musical Studies, ed. Paul Henry Lang (New York:

Norton, 1962), 31.

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Lydia Goehr 15

as global or universal claims or values have meaning only when mediated by

regional or local contexts. “Values”—including those that have a chance of

winning global recognition—“don’t come from thin air,” Jürgen Habermas

has written more recently: “They win their binding force only within norma-

tive orders and practices of particular forms of cultural life.”17 What is insisted

on in this argument is that virtuality without virtue is empty, although virtue

without potentiality is blind.

Exact Music and Laboratory Science

Goodman prefaces his theoretical pronouncements about perfect compliance

by reference to Sessions. This should not be ignored, just as one should note

the thought he devotes to Cage and to other composers and artists most atten-tive to the new media in the experimental years of the 1960s. What Good-

man sees in these revolutionary years is the tendency for music production

to approximate the “chemically pure” condition of a scientific “laboratory.”

The approximation is the important point. The music approximates purity in

practice, but, for Goodman, it achieves it only in theory. Purity belongs only

to theory, scientific or philosophical, and not to the real world, and therefore

not even to those musical works that are composed allied to the demand that

utmost fidelity to their scores should be the condition of their performance.Even in performances mechanically designed perfectly to repeat each other,

significant differences will always appear in the real world, differences that

determine their varying quality or aesthetic merit. Goodman argues that what

is always exactly the same between the performances is only what the experi-

ment, designed by a theorist or contemporary composer, determines to be rel-

evant to its identity but not to its aesthetic quality: momentary or minute differ-

ences of nuance can make a great aesthetic difference. Goodman borrows this

thought from the Nobel laureate physicist Sir George Thomson, whose words

he uses to preface his chapter “Score, Sketch, and Script.”

Thus, contrary to how it might seem, Goodman is not obviously cele-

brating perfect compliance as a theoretical condition of identity. In fact, he

is showing its limit and necessity regarding only what is logically required

(according to a particular notational scheme). He admits the inexactitude of the

real world into his account the instant that, for example, he sets aside matters

of evaluation as lying outside the scope of the theory of identity. On this basis,

17. Jürgen Habermas, “Interpreting the Fall of a Monument,” in Globalizing Critical Theory,

ed. Max Pensky (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 25.

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one may interestingly conclude, it is only in the space of real-world inexacti-

tude and not in theory that aesthetic quality has a chance of surviving.18

“While a score may leave unspecified many features of a performance,

and allow for considerable variation in others within prescribed limits, full

compliance with the specifications given is categorically required” ( LA, 187).

So Goodman writes to allow what is for him no paradox at all: even the most

brilliant performance of the work with a single noncompliant note is not, strictly

speaking, a performance, whereas, strictly speaking, a perfect performance

may be entirely dull. Nonperformances might thus be better from an aesthetic

point of view than performances. In the terms of Sessions or Habermas, aes-

thetic limitlessness is only possible given the constraints of logical limits.

(Some critics have distinguished between instantiation and performance, con-fining the former to the domain of logic and the latter to the domain of com-

mon practice, but this, though useful, circumvents what I believe is really at

stake in Goodman’s account.)

Goodman sets aside more than evaluation. When addressing issues of

identity, he sets aside all nonconstitutive or nonnotational features of works

and all reference to intentions. His commitment to nominalism and exten-

sionalism is theoretically motivated, yet vicariously, I am suggesting, it pro-

tects the aesthetic vagueness or inexactitude of common practice. However,it would be mistaken to conclude that Goodman’s protection of the practice

amounts to a conservative endorsement of what the practice essentially is or

always has been. On the contrary, his thoroughgoing conventionalism allows

him to show what the practice might yet become, and, in this respect, he

strides confidently into the current of his times.

Goodman implies that recent developments in the arts allow the produc-

tion increasingly to approximate not only the scientific theory but also the social

condition of the laboratory experiment: “The overwhelming monopoly long

held by standard musical notation has inevitably inspired rebellion and alterna-

tive proposals. Composers complain variously that scores in this notation pre-

scribe too few features or too many or the wrong ones, or prescribe the right

ones too precisely or not precisely enough. Revolution here as elsewhere may

aim at more or at less or at different control of the means of production” ( LA,

186–87). Goodman pays attention to perfect compliance partly because it is

18. Cf. a later claim made by Niklas Luhmann in his comments on globalization, when he dem-

onstrates the limit of his own “systems theory.” In the global transmission of the arts or of anythingelse, he argues, the systematization implied should not be understood as capturing all meaning and

significance (“Globalization or World Society? How to Conceive of Modern Society,” International

Review of Sociology 7 [1997]: 67–79).

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Lydia Goehr 17

19. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, “Jene zwanziger Jahre,” in Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft , 499–506.

For more on what Adorno means by “exact imagination” (exakte Phantasie), see Shierry Weber Nich-

olsen, Exact Imagination: Late Work on Adorno’s Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).

unclear whether the revolutions in music are bringing the production closer to

or farther away from this demand. In the 1960s rebellious notational scorings

or “alternative proposals” threaten two contrary extremes: first, to overthrow

the entire production of work production altogether in favor of something much

more current, fluid, or open; second, to keep the work production in place and

even to close it down with an exactitude of technological instantiation. Good-

man remarks that he has no stake in whether work production remains as is or

whether it disappears. If work production continues, perfect compliance stays in

place as a demand; if not, then not. His theoretical claims do nothing to dictate

the changes in a practice, although they do leave (vicariously, given his insis-

tence on separating theory and practice) a space for these changes to occur.

Adorno is a much harsher critic of the 1960s than Goodman. Willing tocomment directly on and to theorize the practice itself, Adorno cannot help but

find the same threatening contradiction of extremes in the 1960s that he wit-

nesses in the 1920s, in Weimar, when the openness and “everything is possi-

ble” attitude of those democratic times was accompanied (or compensated for)

by the emergence of “exact” obsessions. Consider the explicit rise in this period

of the Werktreue ideal among musicians and conductors asking for just the sort

of exactness of imagination quickly taken to the extreme by Nazism. Here,

according to one’s truth to spirit, one’s attention to minute detail through theactive and constructive imagination was secured by blind obedience to the let-

ter.19 In Adorno’s dialectical thought, the more open the medium, the more

closed-off or reduced the message threatens to become: the latter emerging as

an antidote to the former.

Goodman’s separation of conditions of identity and evaluation is typical

of what Anglo-American philosophers of art did in the 1960s and what they

sometimes still do today. In Goodman’s view, the separation is more subtle

than simply discarding the inexactness of the world. Adorno and McLuhan

also do not want to discard that inexactness but fear that it cannot be preserved

by an abstract separation of the spheres: between, say, theory and practice,

logic and value, values and conventions, meanings and mediums. To separate

spheres too strictly tends to encourage the inexact world only to approximate

further the exactness that now hovers abstractly or ideally above it. Techno-

logical advance encourages the approximation to the extreme, and with every

step forward there is a significant if not a complete loss of content.

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When Adorno remarks that Beethoven’s Fifth is no longer heard as a

symphony but only as a medley of its most famous quotations, he tells us that

“tonight, Ladies and Gentlemen, you might have heard Beethoven’s Fifth, but

it could have been any other piece.” If new technology changes experience,

it does so by making intersubstitutability the essence of transmission, precisely

what Goodman’s exact notational specifications are introduced to prevent.

Remember Goodman’s own words: “The innocent-seeming principle that

performances differing by just one note are instances of the same work risks

the consequence . . . that all performances whatsoever are of the same work.”

What, we may ask now, is “the same work” of which all performances are

performances? The answer presumably is “Three Blind Mice”—the end point

of all music gone astray. But if all performances “are of the same work,” thenall performances are instantiations of no work at all—unless of course we

count “Three Blind Mice” as a work.

Whereas Goodman wants to preserve identity to keep the differences

between works in place, Adorno wants to preserve meaning. With an increase

in identity thinking or with an increase in identification between subjects and

objects, such that the difference between the two spheres is erased, comes a

significant loss of meaning. Though the argument here presupposes two notions

of identity, it is a significant aspect of Adorno’s argument that an overly rigiddetermination of identity conditions emanating out of an analytic approach to

philosophy has contributed to a significant loss of meaning in all spheres of

human endeavor, philosophy included. That Goodman seeks to preserve the

different identities of works against reducing all to a single work by strictly

specifying identity conditions, Adorno dialectically counters by arguing that

the difference between works depends less on their identities than on their

meanings being preserved. To be sure, no one would ever think when lis-

tening to Beethoven’s Fifth that one were listening to “Three Blind Mice.”

Adorno’s concern is not with this sort of mistake. He notes, instead, that given

how we listen to Beethoven under conditions that have turned music into

Muzak, we might as well be listening to “Three Blind Mice.” Insofar as the

present essay tracks the reference to this nursery rhyme as emblematic of a

widespread positivistic reductionism, it does this to show what has happened

not to “Three Blind Mice” but to Beethoven’s Fifth.

For Adorno and McLuhan, global culture promises that everything is

available to us wherever we happen to be. Yet what is brought to us wherever

we are is not necessarily delivered in the form of gifts from three wise men.

In fact, there is no bringing at all. All there is left is the transmission by three

absent mice of mutually exchangeable or indifferent products. In 1957 Chuck

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Lydia Goehr 19

Berry sent the point home when he mailed that famous letter to the “DJ”

instructing him to “roll over Beethoven and [to] tell Tchaikovsky the news.”

Beethoven was not so much rolled over as his works become popular medleys

of their most famous melodies: Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Ravel—what’s

the difference? Everyone could now “rock” to the tune. Even for Adorno, the

moment marked a long-promised fall of the wall between the commercially

high and the commercially low, leaving a space for something new to take its

place. The question, however, remained: whether anything was left in this

space other than endless repetitions of “Three Blind Mice.”

Autographic to Allographic

Goodman might have written that wherever, whenever, and under whateverconditions a performance is produced, it is a performance of a work only inso-

far as it perfectly complies with the relevant score. He could have written this

to bring home the fact that the circumstances of where, when, and how are

irrelevant to the identity and individuation of the works. Consider the case

when thirty performances of Beethoven’s Fifth are given throughout the world

or, in global terms, thirty thousand transmissions, drawn from numerous live

and recorded versions, spreading to the farthest reaches of the globe. What

guarantees that all performances, versions, and hearings will be of the samework if each only more or less complies with the score?

Exact notational systems preserve the identity of works and individua-

tion of performances where the works, in Goodman’s terms, are allographic.

Such works are typically two-stage works—paradigmatically, musical works—

requiring for their realization performances or readings. He distinguishes these

works from the one-stage works, which he also calls autographic. These are

paradigmatically plastic artworks, whose identity and individuation are guar-

anteed by the existence of an original and reference thereby to a particular his-

tory of production. Goodman is quick to point out that the distinction between

the singular and multiple arts is not exactly coincident with that between auto-

graphic and allographic arts. This is crucial to the present argument. To turn

his theory of symbols into a general theory of symbols or, better perhaps, to

show how attentive he is to emerging conventions of the modern age, he sug-

gests that all arts might become in the future allographic or emancipated by

notation and not, as he puts it, by proclamation (cf. LA, 121–22).

Here is a place in Goodman’s account when he appeals to common prac-

tice neither to bemoan nor to celebrate art’s entrance into the laboratory, only

to indicate what might follow from the radical developments of radical nota-

tion of his time: that they might bring an end to work production altogether.

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It is a tense moment in his account. If all art becomes allographic, what will

disappear are artworks whose identity is preserved by autographic reference to

the history of their production. However, if notation so develops that exact

specification is relinquished (as arguably in Cage’s notations), then, even if

notational, the new arts will not produce works. What will be the result? Either

that the arts will return to elements of autography for their identity to be estab-

lished or that they will appeal to something else as yet perhaps unknown. I

assume that Goodman is willing to concede that concepts might become out-

dated as traditional modes of production might become outdated. Maybe, in

the future, the arts will be neither autographic nor allographic.

Goodman articulates the difference between the two while discussing

the identity problems of fakes and forgeries. Referring to Rembrandt’s 1651image The Blind Tobit , he addresses the question of indiscernibility. If two

paintings look exactly the same to the eye, even though one is a forgery, does

the lack of apparent difference constitute an aesthetic equality? Goodman

thinks not, though he is more concerned to show that, without an educated eye,

one fails to see the minute differences that inevitably there must be—just as

without an educated ear it is well-nigh impossible to discern the difference

between words differentiated by a single letter: in English, between merry and

marry, or in German, Bruder and Brüder. Goodman argues that whereas thephenomenon of forgery or fakery arises in autographic arts, it does not in allo-

graphic arts, which means for the present argument that if all arts became

allographic, one anxiety of the modern age associated with the excessive pro-

duction of forgeries and fakes would be put to rest.

Slippage

Goodman is concerned with logical or notational slippage but not with the sort

of literal, historical, and metaphorical slippage that might affect the interpreta-

tion of a work, whether Beethoven’s Fifth or any other. So, whatever he means

by little-by-little steps, and he means something entirely to do with counting,

it is not the sort of slippage that might incur a change, say, of genre. Given

this thought, let us now ask how it is possible for a work that starts out as a

purely musical or instrumental work of classical music—Beethoven’s Fifth—to

become a tiny piece belonging to an entirely other genre: a nursery rhyme

called “Three Blind Mice.”

The obvious answer is by ignoring the question of genre altogether,

which is what Goodman does. All that matters is whether workhood is pre-

served if, indeed, works are what in fact are being performed. Nothing about

workhood is challenged by altering genre, as we know from the transition in

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Lydia Goehr 21

Beethoven’s Ninth, which, beginning as a purely instrumental work, ends as

a choral work. The 1960s is sometimes described as the age of hybridity, but,

again, so what when it comes to assessing Goodman’s view? His demand for

perfect compliance does not exclude hybridity of genre, just as it does noth-

ing to prevent the 1960s collapse of the high-low distinction in the arts.

Recall the use of “Three Blind Mice” in the last movement of Haydn’s

Eighty-third Symphony in G minor—one of Haydn’s Paris Symphonies of

1785–86, the one specifically named La poule. I can easily imagine cases where

one might mistake Beethoven for Haydn, but how, in Goodman’s terms, could

one get from one to the other? Moving from the C minor of the Fifth to the

G minor of the Eighty-third happens to be a common step in music, but what

would this change of key achieve? Certainly not a slippage of identity but atmost, potentially, an entire change of mood, from, say, the endless longing of

the Fifth to the culinary brutality of the Eighty-third. All this is irrelevant

to Goodman’s account. I mention this example, however, because Goodman

mentions a Haydn symphony in his book, but being the 104th, it comes not

from Paris but from London, a fact that takes us to my next irrelevant example.

This is a piece composed in 1900 by the British composer Josef Holbrook

(Josef also being Haydn’s name) titled Variations on Three Blind Mice, op. 37.

A not very inspired piece, it was apparently meant to break down the dis-tinction between high and low music altogether. Roll over Beethoven to some-

thing akin to any song, any rhyme, any tune. The point, once more, is: so what?

Goodman’s theory, like his logic and ontology, is egalitarian through and

through the moment he sets all aesthetic consideration and social evaluation

aside. Beethoven or a nursery rhyme: ontologically they are on a par—which is

why, I assume, he would actually count “Three Blind Mice” as a work.

But here now is the rub: whereas Beethoven’s Fifth is correlated with the

conventional demand that the performances comply equally with the notation

across the board, a nursery tune is not and never was. When Goodman writes

that by “a series of one-note errors” one might move from Beethoven’s Fifth to

“Three Blind Mice,” what is implied, if not by his logic then by his examples,

is that one might go (1) from one work to another work, or (2) from a musical

work to a word-music work, or (3) from one work to no work at all. Perhaps

this is all quite deliberate on Goodman’s part if what he intends to show is how

much workhood or genre has never in fact been his issue, whereas identity

always has. As he insists, he was not “quibbling about the proper use of such

words as ‘notation,’ ‘score,’ and ‘work.’” That, he added, “matters little more

than the proper use of a fork” ( LA, 189) (or, given the words of “Three Blind

Mice,” the proper use of a carving knife). Still, even if identity is his issue, the

New German Critique





question remains whether conventions associated with identity are exhaustible

by logic alone.

Travel to Transmission

The distinction between autographic and allographic works crystallized around

1800. Before that, in musical practice at least, even music was an autographic

art. Goodman makes the point, though with less historical specificity, when he

remarks that once upon a time all arts were probably autographic. The fact that

Western notation achieved an authority as arguably no other in the world sug-

gests that for many kinds of arts in many cultures exact notation has never

been the way to preserve the identity of music in its performance.

In fact, even in Western classical music after 1800 or in music specifi-cally regulated by the ideal of Werktreue, inexact scoring for musical works

was still suf ficient in a practice where performances were authorized by live

or traveling performers who professed the highest fidelity to the work: treue

almost bis zum Tod . As long as musicians traveled with the work, the work’s

identity in its performance was preserved by proclamation: by a consensus

produced in a live and public performance setting in which performers and

audience alike could place their trust in the immediate evidence that “tonight,

Ladies and Gentlemen, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is being performed.”All this changed, however, when face-to-face contact was superseded or eman-

cipated by the interface of a technology that effectively cut off works, if not at

first from their live performance, then at least from the presence of live audi-

ences. When musical works were turned from objects of travel to objects of

transmission, a new kind of trust had to be placed in that which actually could

be transmitted over the air: namely, the sound or audible event of the work

alone. With this change, claims to fidelity and the need for exact notation

became most explicit, just, as I am arguing, when the traditional authority of

works in live performance was most threatened.

From the imaginary museum to the virtual museum: I once described

how the work concept found its regulative authority in musical practice when

composer-performers stopped traveling with their music around the courts

of Europe and when performers alone assumed this task, provided they car-

ried the composers’ scores with them. Given a new separation of composer

and performer, ever-more-reliable notations or, as Goodman puts it, distinc-

tions “between constitutive and contingent properties” were required ( LA,

121). Here I am adding to this account by suggesting that the exactness require-

ment became even more urgent when works themselves were separated entirely

from human accompaniment altogether, in the age often referred to as the age

New German Critique




Lydia Goehr 23

of high fidelity. Whereas, once, perfect compliance was an authoritative condi-

tion of performance, it later became an exact condition of transmission.

The Best-Laid Plans of Mice and Men

Since its introduction by Thomas Ravenscroft in 1609, “Three Blind Mice”

has had a rich history significantly bearing on the present issue of authority.

It all began when three mice had their “tails” cut off—see how they run—

after they chased after a farmer’s wife who happened to have a carving knife

in her hand. According to one urban legend, the lyrics refer to three Protes-

tant bishops blinded by decapitation as punishment for trying to bring down

the Catholic queen, Mary I of England, also known as Bloody Mary. “Mary,

Mary, quite contrary,” how does your garden grow with all those graves of deadProtestants strewn around you? That she was also referred to as a “farmer’s

wife” picks up apparently on the large farming estates owned by her husband,

Philip II of Spain. Whatever the historical reference, the point is straight-

forward: don’t challenge women who can render you more impotent than you

already are, though gender or castration is less the point here than authority. For

as I am now arguing, authority has much to do with how subjects and objects

are identified.

McLuhan tells a marvelous story about authority. In 1910 the wirelesstelegraph became a necessary installation on ships traveling the high seas.

Apparently, an American doctor, one Hawley H. Crippen, murdered his wife

when they were living in London, left her body in the cellar, and returned with

his lover-secretary to America. What apparently aroused suspicion on the ship

was their traveling in disguise not as father and daughter but as father and son

(a small difference of gender!). Scotland Yard was wirelessed in secret from the

ship so that Crippen could be arrested before the ship arrived at port. Shortly

thereafter the British Parliament passed an act requiring “all passenger ships

to carry wireless” (UM , 246).

McLuhan concludes that the “Crippen case illustrates what happens to

the best-laid plans of mice and men in any organization when the instant speed

of information movement begins. There is a collapse of delegated authority

and a dissolution of the pyramid.” He quickly connects the Crippen case to that

of Albert Speer, who reminded all present at the trial in Nuremberg of the

absolute authority the media had been made to serve from the highest to lowest

levels of the German Nazi pyramid—before the great dissolution. McLuhan

introduces this case to illustrate the increasing artificiality of the pyramid the

more it demonstrates the sort of naturalized or “organic interdependence” evi-

denced when prodigious social events organized by new media are put on a par

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20. Cf. John Erskine, ed., A Musical Companion: A Guide to the Understanding and Enjoy-

ment of Music (New York: Knopf, 1935), 21. See also Mark DeBellis, “Schenkerian Analysis and

the Intelligent Listener,” Monist 86 (2003): 579–607; Donna Weibliche, H. Poirot, and H. Schenker

(in jest), “A Shaggy Bitch Story,” letters, Musical Times, January 4, 1995, 4; William Rothstein,

“The Americanization of Heinrich Schenker,” In Theory Only 9 (1986): 5–17; and Alan W. Pol-

lack, “Notes on the ‘All You Need Is Love’ (AYNIL),” 1996, www.recmusicbeatles.com/public/

files/awp/aynil.html.

21. Carl Schachter, “Analysis by Key: Another Look at Modulation,” Music Analysis 3 (1987): 289.

with “prodigious biological event[s],” say, when electromagnetism was discov-

ered (UM , 247, quoting Pierre Teilhard de Chardin). I shall return to the theme

of pyramids at the end of this essay.

Music Analysis

Putting everything on a par, consider one of the most infamous claims of music

theory, following the Schenkerian model, that great works of eighteenth- and

nineteenth-century Western tonal or diatonic music share the Urlinie of the

tonal scheme: the three declining steps of “Three Blind Mice.” Soon after

Schenkerian music theory reached America, the elite German claim was

reduced to a more popular or democratic claim, such that it could hold true as

much for the British national anthem, “God Save the Queen,” or for the Beatlessong “All You Need Is Love” as for any great work by Beethoven. Heinrich

Schenker maintained an evaluative stance in his theory. He wanted to explain

why the masterpieces of music are masterpieces by distinguishing between

deep value and surface structure. He did not refer in his theory to “Three Blind

Mice,” but American theorists always have. Indeed, the Americanization of

Schenkerian analysis seems to have been inspired by some rather lowbrow

music textbooks introduced into the American classroom in the first half of the

twentieth century that had taken “Three Blind Mice” as the example for teach-ing basic harmony.20

The highly respected theorist Carl Schachter remarked most famously in

1989 that “nowadays anyone familiar with music theory knows that Schenker

did more than analyse the first movement of the Eroica as ‘Three Blind Mice’

with a college education.”21 With somewhat ambiguous parsing, this loaded

sentence suggests that both Schenkerian theory and the Eroica were being

read wrongly (or blindly) even by those with a college education. I recently

asked several Schenker experts whether they knew who first described the

highbrow German method by reference to “Three Blind Mice,” but no one

seems to know. On the way, however, I was offered many references to its use.

Thanks to considerable help from Joseph Dubiel and Ian Bent, I was also able

to survey the original Schenker manuscripts and some of his correspondence

to check that the reference had not somehow entered German music theory

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Lydia Goehr 25

22. Derrick Puffett, “Schenker’s ‘Eroica,’” Musical Times, September 1996, 21.

before it arrived in the United States. Of course it hadn’t: even to this day

“Three Blind Mice” is not a known reference in German literature, as is evi-

denced in the translation of Goodman’s book, where the reference to this tune

still requires a translator’s explanatory footnote.

The significance of Schenkerian analysis is that it showed how one could

go all the way from Beethoven’s Fifth (or any other tonal work) to “Three

Blind Mice.” The hint is given in the opening measure of the symphony, which

apparently is the only measure the public still cares about. However, Schen-

kerian analysis depended not, as it does in Goodman’s account, on showing

how to preserve the work’s identity through its performance but on determin-

ing in the work a deep and universal tonal essence. That all performances share

something means only that all great tonal music played is equally analyzablein terms of a specific Urlinie that happens to correspond to the first three notes

of “Three Blind Mice.” This sort of transformational reduction to depth or

essence is quite different in spirit from the reduction we see in positivism, as is

demonstrated inadvertently in this dismissive quip from the British music the-

orist Derrick Puffett: “As everyone knows, Schenker reduced everything to

‘Three Blind Mice.’”22 To claim that everyone knows that Schenker reduced

everything is to exaggerate as Adorno would have exaggerated, to show the

difference between the high-minded Schenkerian analyses of music to essenceand the lower-minded reductions characteristic of the global age. However,

having noted the difference, one might then determine, as Adorno did, that

core (German) essentialism and positivistic (American) reductionism are but

two sides of the same administered coin.

Goodman has no sympathy with either side of this coin: logical specifica-

tion is his way out of commitments both to essential depths and to total equal-

ization across the board. Even if logic makes his account egalitarian through

and through, it does so only at the level of logic. Adorno maintains, contrarily,

that retreating into logic is part of the very problem, leaving theory to go its

own exact way without considering where the practice might go in its wake.

Philosophical Analysis

If music analysis has tended toward reductionism, philosophical analysis has,

too. In this regard, consider the work done on so-called ideographic symbol

systems in the 1950s, specifically in a 1957 article by the Cambridge philoso-

pher Margaret Masterman for a book on midcentury British philosophy. Here

we find this key passage:

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23. Margaret Masterman, “Metaphysical and Ideographic Language,” in British Philosophy in the Mid-Century: A Cambridge Symposium, ed. C. A. Mace (London: Allen and Unwin, 1957), 324.

24. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial

Society (Boston: Beacon, 1991), 186–87.

Once you are dealing with indeterminate concepts, you lose the temptation

to say, “‘Three Blind Mice’ in correct English, really means ‘There are three

blind mice.’” There may be three blind mice, or there may not be three blind

mice: there may be many esoteric ways of interpreting “Three Blind Mice”and there may be also many straight ways—who cares? For this form of

analysis, in halting the progress from indeterminacy to specificness by iso-

lating the still highly indeterminate cluster as it stands, prevents all the thorny

logical questions which have to do with the existence of actual entities . . .

from ever being able to arise. We can, of course, raise up logical dif ficulties

for ourselves by insisting on the continuation of the rhyme. But we needn’t.

If we choose to sing “Three Blind Mice” three times, and then stop, and

say that we have no particular urge to continue, then we have not done

something incomplete. We have stopped at the end of the most fundamen-tal ideographic unit, the cluster; [and] we have undoubtedly communicated

something.23

There are remarkable overlaps between Masterman’s and Goodman’s con-

cerns, between indeterminacy and specificness, logic and actual entities,

communicating in inexact ways. Masterman’s passage perfectly captured the

tension of what was at stake in Goodman’s Languages of Art , a stake that

separated many American logicians and conventionalists from the ordinary-

language—or maybe we should now call them the vague-language—Cambridgephilosophers.

Masterman’s article is now pretty much forgotten; once, however, it was

fairly well known or at least well known enough to provoke two quite remark-

able responses. The first came a decade after its publication from Herbert Mar-

cuse, in his One-Dimensional Man, in a chapter on the triumph of positive or

positivistic thinking:

Neglect has led contemporary positivism to move in a synthetically impover-ished world of academic concreteness, and to create more illusory problems

than it has destroyed. Rarely has a philosophy exhibited a more tortuous

esprit de sérieux than that displayed in such analyses as the interpretation of

Three Blind Mice in a study of “Metaphysical and Ideographic Language,”

with its discussion of an “artificially constructed Triple principle-Blindness-

Mousery asymmetric sequence constructed according to the pure principles

of ideography.”24

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Lydia Goehr 27

25. Gilbert Ryle, “Improvisation,” Mind 85 (1976): 78.

Marcuse published his book in 1964. He might have called it The Reduced Man

or even One Blind Mouse. Equally, these titles would have demonstrated the

principle of intersubstitutability or blind exchangeability. Reducing three

mice to one would have demonstrated the loss (as Marcuse saw it) of all deep

meanings in art and religion, leaving only empty, formal, or logical slogans in

their place.

The second response came almost two decades later, in 1976, from Gil-

bert Ryle, at the end of his life, in a brilliant article on improvisation written in

“late style.” In what he named an “ex-editorial afterword,” he slammed the cur-

rent condition of philosophical writing with its tendency to reduce meaningful

symbols to empty signs via the principle or monster, as he named it, of “Ini-

tialisation.” Criticizing even the philosophy journal that fed him, he wrote:

Mind ’s second century is going to see her many virtues wax and multiply,

and her few defects wane and decrease. But alas! One defect, though it is not

Mind’s alone, went unthrottled by myself when it was in its infancy; and that

infant Frankenstein is, by now, an adolescent Frankenstein. It is the monster

of Initialisation.

It is becoming modish for article-writers to amputate from the main

words of a recurring phrase their initial letters, and then, stringing these ini-

tials together, to use the resultant cryptogram as a printed proxy for that inte-gral phrase. After their first appearances the phrases “Three Blind Mice”

and “See How They Run” would be abbreviated into “TBM” and “SHTR.”

Even an otherwise excellent writer (call him “V” for short) masks behind

his (I coin it) stenograms “TMA” and “FF” the familiar “Third Man Argu-

ment” and “Friends of the Forms.” I wager that the breath-or-ink-consuming

phrase “Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of the Categories” has already

been squashed up somewhere into “KTDC,” to the inconvenience of lots of

readers (who apparently do not matter), but to the minute muscular relief of

one author (who apparently matters everything).25

Beethoven’s Fifth to TBM: a global epidemic of empty reference, such that even

cryptograms fail to hold on to their cryptic character.

No Regrets

Recall Goodman’s thought that in the future all arts might become allographic

through the emancipation of notation. Adorno and McLuhan also ponder this

possibility, though in terms that show the transformation of the production and

reception of works into the reproduction or re-reception of works produced

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under the sole condition of copy production. What Adorno describes as a loss

of cultic or aesthetic value marks the moment when the commodified concept

of aura is introduced. When works are still produced and received as works, or

when aesthetic experience is still possible, reflective or sentimental appeals to

aura are not necessary. One calls for something, Adorno argues, and even more

for a concept or idea of something, be it of history, tradition, beauty, authentic-

ity, or happiness, only when it is too late, when those things are no longer either

experienced or lived. The production of auratic works without aura is no dif-

ferent from the production of cryptograms without cryptic meaning.

Let us add to this list now the call for perfect compliance, associated

as it is with the older condition of Werktreue. Like the other calls, the call for

compliance marks a loss of experience or autography, even if, for Goodman, itmarks a new exactness in theory. If Goodman introduces the condition of per-

fect compliance just when it seems most threatened, so Toscanini, in Adorno’s

terms, becomes most adored on the radio just when he becomes most absent.

Mediated by new media, auratic presence transforms what once was regarded

as cultic experience into the empty presence of virtual experience.

Habermas’s argument for binding force (introduced above) was an argu-

ment for tethering in a virtual world in which tethering now seems to be entirely

absent. In the discourse of globalization, concepts are introduced, such as McLu-han’s “global village,” to show the necessity of making local, personal, and

secure what feels most cold, distant, or mechanical. Cold is one of McLu-

han’s terms, as it is also one of Adorno’s. Sympathetic to the need for tethering,

Adorno worries, however, about its blind appeal: we tend to make explicit appeal

to things when they are no longer possible to have. What we want, we turn into

empty, intellectual, or compensatory concepts suiting our now overly reflective

practices that go hand in hand with a global society that promises exactly what

it cannot provide. In these terms, perfect compliance is a compensatory con-

cept par excellence, showing, on the one side, a fidelity to art we still crave but,

on the other, what we ourselves have become: namely, perfectly compliant. It

is even an untimely concept, as so many of Adorno’s concepts are, which when

they arrive in theory reveal something now moribund in the practice.

Reductions Everywhere Are Not All the Same

Much of my argument has suggested that positivistic reductions, occurring in

music, philosophy, or society, all result in the same thing: blandness, blind-

ness, impotence, castration—differences turned into identities. Yet these reduc-

tions, though noticed or described by Goodman, Adorno, and McLuhan, are

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Lydia Goehr 29

not the intended outcomes of their own theories. They all seek to avoid, though

by different means, what they see and hear all around them.

When I began work on the present argument, I wanted to show how

once one starts looking for references to “Three Blind Mice,” one finds them

everywhere—everywhere being the global point. I was tempted to generate my

own Leporello list of references, including the many laboratory experiments

performed on mice and men, the highly successful record label in Japan, the

1938 film about three sisters from Kansas blindly seeking rich husbands in

California, a more recent film about three Vietnamese boys innocently caught

up in a war not of their own making, and Ken Auletta’s oft-quoted book about

the castration anxieties of the three television networks, NBC, ABC, and CBS,

which have apparently lost their way in the global market.In reference to every item, I intended to say that going all the way, with-

out losing one’s way, was what Goodman’s perfect compliance condition was

meant to guarantee. Then it occurred to me that sometimes going all the way

or losing one’s way is exactly what one ought to do. What example shows this

better than the Art Blakey quintet’s 1962 rendition of “Three Blind Mice”?

To say that the quintet goes all the way from work to rhyme is to demonstrate

no anxiety about hybridity, medium, transmission, authority, or identity. Things

don’t necessarily go wrong when one loses one’s way. Indeed, doesn’t thisexample evidence a place midway between rigid authority and giving up on

authority altogether? Between the mouse that circles the spinning wheel with

absolute authority and the mouse that spins with no authority at all, isn’t there a

space on the global wheel for the mouse of improvisation, be it in philosophy,

as Ryle argued, or in music and society, as so many have argued in more recent

years? Doesn’t improvisation fit the global discourse along the current of its

E-words, that is, a discourse that seeks advantage more than decline in the

temporariness and fluidity of the virtual media?

This all sounds very compelling, though I do not think that we should be

deceived by the potentially blind optimism of the third mouse. To make this

point, I offer two more examples: one entertaining, the other not. They are

chosen in part to express my gratitude to those who first gave me the opportu-

nity to write this essay in preparation for a conference in the newly built (vir-

tual) library of Alexandria. The two examples are connected by the theme of

infantilism and primitive mimetic impulses: the lure of the umbilical cord, the

lure of traditional authority, the lure of the pyramid. Wherever we go, we seek

everywhere and anywhere an extension of ourselves even as we claim to seek

something different.

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26. For more on Mickey Mouse from a critical point of view, see Miriam Hansen, “Of Mice andDucks: Benjamin and Adorno on Disney,” South Atlantic Quarterly 92 (1993): 27–61; and Barbara

White, “As If They Didn’t Hear the Music; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Mickey

Mouse,” Opera Quarterly 22 (2006): 65–89.

The first example is a 1939 film made in America titled We Want Our

Mummy—our mummy being precisely whom we most want whenever we are

troubled. The sixteen-minute film was made by the Three Stooges, who intro-

duced for this film the signature tune they would use for every film and televi-

sion appearance thereafter: “Three Blind Mice.” I am sure Goodman watched

The Three Stooges at least once. The film’s title is not very subtly ambigu-

ous, and its narrative explains why. Three not very wise men are sent by the

Museum of Ancient History in New York on a mission to retrieve a kidnapped

professor and, more important, the mummy of King Rutentuten the Third of

Egypt. Hailing a taxi from the Bronx Taxi Cab Company, the Stooges order

the driver to take them to Egypt. Arriving at the city limits of Cairo, the taxi

doors no longer open—the loss of civilization—forcing the Stooges to catapultthemselves through the roof. The only thing still functioning is the radio. “You

have been listening to Ali Ben Woodwin and the Swinging Bedouins.” The

radio then seamlessly segues into a sales pitch having something to do with

camels and elephants—to which one Stooge responds, “Everywhere we go,

commercial announcements!” This moment is already brilliant enough for any

argument on global sameness, but it only gets better. The moment is followed

by escapades in a cave and a crypt, after which the taxi takes the Stooges home

with the mummy and professor, saved from the New York criminals who, bycrude technological tricks and colonialist displacements, have made everyone

believe that the Egyptian caves are cursed. At every instant of fright in the

foreign place, the Stooges call for their mummy. What else could they do in

this age of global transmission than seek their umbilical cord—“all you need

is love.” In this slapstick film, to seek a mummy is also a project of archae-

ology, which, apart from its obvious colonialist thematic, is about bringing

meaning back to New York’s museums, whose artifacts would otherwise be

mute or useless, as the museum curator explicitly maintains at the film’s start.

The film ends with the Three Stooges appropriately remarking on the world’s

smallness—a perfect forerunner of what then occurs in 1964, when, at the New

York World’s Fair, Walt Disney introduces the theme of “It’s a small world”

and its first “world citizen.” That citizen is also a mouse—called Mickey.26

Small world or global village, my second example is offered through

McLuhan. “Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library,” he writes,

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Lydia Goehr 31

the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in an

infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us,

Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once

move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribaldrums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. . . . Terror is

the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything

all the time. (GG, 32)

To give up on the authority of the text or the work might be interpreted as

endorsing the return of the improvisatory condition of oral society. However,

if this is the argument, it is a potentially regressive one, especially if it fails

to recognize the terror that once also af flicted oral culture. In my argument,

overall, we have learned that we can no more trust the ear than the eye (given

the earlier arguments about the changes in experience), just as we can no bet-

ter seek guarantees in literacy as opposed to orality. Workhood or improvi-

sation is also a false choice. To be sure, Goodman finds in theory a security in

perfect compliance, but as I have argued, he is entirely aware, as Adorno and

McLuhan are aware, that in the actual world the relations between orality and

literacy, or between workhood and improvisation, are quite as inexact as those

between eye and ear.

I finally want to say that in this inexact space—not covered by logic—resides an uncertainty that we sometimes hear in jazz, sometimes in Bee-

thoven’s Fifth, and sometimes even in “Three Blind Mice” when small children

move with little-by-little steps in their dance. To be sure, in this inexact space,

the curses of global culture become immediately most evident, but so, too, do

the promises that cannot, contra Adorno, all be false. Thus one commentator

reacted to my argument by reminding me that not even castration always leads

to dire consequences, that it might even help pave the way to liberation. Even,

however, if one were to respond to this by saying that the end might still not justify the means, I assume the point only was that listening to songs sung at

an unnaturally high pitch might open our minds and by extension our worlds

to thoughts that are not yet perfectly compliant.

New German Critique




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