Approche sociale et musicale: confronter "chaque son dit nous" (Adorno) avec "(on dit que) tout un monde se tient dans une petite frase musicale"

My contention is to confront two conceptions of "we" (us) between Adorno abnd Wittgenstein, as regards musical aesthetics in its relation to social alienation and from a point of view of critique of culture. I aim to test R. De Calan's statement that "in grammar, there is no politics". Besides that comparative approach that is to show some affinities between Francfort and Vienna, whereas they desagreed so much at the level of social theory of action, one question remains open: to what extent music is exposed to social critique. It seems clear enough that such a critical view was not shared by Wittgenstein for whom, as Kraus said, "When words are not just, then the works of art are excluded, and then if works are ruled out, then morals and art are ill. Which means that "justice is not rightly applied and the nation does not know where to stand up safe" (Karl Kraus). As is known, Kraus though not especially versed into music, was an important philosophical personality for both schools and aesthetical currents. The course I intend to teach, will then treat the question of what is to be understood by "the truth" of art. Does it mean socially speaking, or not ¿ Contrarily to Adorno's view, Wittgenstein would hold music true, upon the condition it is really music. Real music as such does not lie. However, the absence of language in Adorno's conception on one side, and the absence of critical suspicion as regards the relation of art with society, on the other side (Wittgenstein) make the confrontation difficult. It seems as though the absence of a critique of reification in Wittgenstein's conception is an obstacle to a comparative evaluation. However, one can show that Wittgenstein has formulated the equivalent of a critique of reification, but at the level of language. So, it is possible to consider the existence of such a critique as articulated with language. This is an important insight which implies that social critique and language are compatible and could both contribute to build up a theory of the relations between art and society that gives importance to language without excluding a critique of reification. Hence holding together the two points of demonstration, I will argue that Wittgenstein has his own view on fetichization (of "objects") as regards the relation of designation of objects (as pre-given) by names and developed an interesting critique of the "epistemological ritual" of naming objects that has a strong political dimension. I here refer to a Marxist reading of a linguistic approach to objects that has been proposed by Aldo Giogio Gargani, an important reader of Wittgenstein. More is to be said about the parallel treatment of the status of object in language in analogy to the status of merchandise. Marxiism though is not the only justification for such a comparison even if there are good reasons to search for marxist elements in the social-political context of "Vienna the red" in the same years as well as later in the 1935's in the Marxist landscape of Cambridge (G-B.) with which Wittgenstein was not so unfamiliar. The problem rather lies in the concept of "praxis", a key-word in Wittgenstein's conception of "philosophy as an activity", in his second philosophy of "forms of life", and its ambiguïty as regards the capacity of language to generate social transformation. 

So far, our comparative approach in the field of musical aesthetics at the level of "we", were it the so-called the "collective substance" (Adorno) or the anthropological ordinary subject as for Wittgenstein, is to dig out elements of a critical appraisal that could cast a new light on the articulation of language with society.