Line and Colour: Instrumental (Ir-)rationality in Adorno’s Musicology

This essay subjects Adorno's historical dialectic of musical material, as it pertains to instrumentation, to Bataille's economic reading of dialectics (and latterly, to Derrida's reading of Bataille). There is a certain excess, an accumulation of waste, that cannot be jettisoned in Adorno's musicology; the problems that arise pertain directly to a musical work's ontological status as transcendental ‘thing in itself’, score, and/or performance. The implications of this reading point to a radical discontinuity between score and performance that cannot easily be reconciled by recourse to some fictive notion of the ‘work’ itself.