Theodor W. Adorno (; German: [ʔaˈdɔɐ̯no];
born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund; September
11, 1903 – August 6, 1969) was a German
philosopher, sociologist, psychologist and
composer known for his critical theory of
society.
He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School
of critical theory, whose work has come to
be associated with thinkers such as Ernst
Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and
Herbert Marcuse, for whom the works of Freud,
Marx, and Hegel were essential to a critique
of modern society.
He is widely regarded as one of the 20th century's
foremost thinkers on aesthetics and philosophy,
as well as one of its preeminent essayists.
As a critic of both fascism and what he called
the culture industry, his writings—such
as Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Minima
Moralia (1951) and Negative Dialectics (1966)—strongly
influenced the European New Left.
Amidst the vogue enjoyed by existentialism
and positivism in early 20th-century Europe,
Adorno advanced a dialectical conception of
natural history that critiqued the twin temptations
of ontology and empiricism through studies
of Kierkegaard and Husserl.
As a classically trained pianist whose sympathies
with the twelve-tone technique of Arnold Schoenberg
resulted in his studying composition with
Alban Berg of the Second Viennese School,
Adorno's commitment to avant-garde music formed
the backdrop of his subsequent writings and
led to his collaboration with Thomas Mann
on the latter's novel Doctor Faustus, while
the two men lived in California as exiles
during the Second World War.
Working for the newly relocated Institute
for Social Research, Adorno collaborated on
influential studies of authoritarianism, antisemitism
and propaganda that would later serve as models
for sociological studies the Institute carried
out in post-war Germany.
Upon his return to Frankfurt, Adorno was involved
with the reconstitution of German intellectual
life through debates with Karl Popper on the
limitations of positivist science, critiques
of Heidegger's language of authenticity, writings
on German responsibility for the Holocaust,
and continued interventions into matters of
public policy.
As a writer of polemics in the tradition of
Nietzsche and Karl Kraus, Adorno delivered
scathing critiques of contemporary Western
culture.
Adorno's posthumously published Aesthetic
Theory, which he planned to dedicate to Samuel
Beckett, is the culmination of a lifelong
commitment to modern art which attempts to
revoke the "fatal separation" of feeling and
understanding long demanded by the history
of philosophy and explode the privilege aesthetics
accords to content over form and contemplation
over immersion.
== Life and career ==
=== Early years: Frankfurt ===
Theodor W. Adorno (alias: Theodor Adorno-Wiesengrund)
was born as Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund in
Frankfurt am Main on September 11, 1903, the
only child of Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund
(1870–1946) and Maria Calvelli-Adorno della
Piana (1865–1952).
His mother, a devout Catholic from Corsica,
was once a professional singer, while his
father, an assimilated Jew who had converted
to Protestantism, ran a successful wine-export
business.
Proud of her origins, Maria wanted her son's
paternal surname to be supplemented by the
addition of her own name: Adorno.
Thus his earliest publications carried the
name Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno; upon his
application for US citizenship, his name was
modified to Theodor W. Adorno.
His childhood was marked by the musical life
provided by his mother and aunt: Maria was
a singer who could boast of having performed
in Vienna at the Imperial Court, while her
sister, Agathe, who lived with them, had made
a name for herself as both a singer and pianist.
He was not only a precocious child but, as
he recalled later in life, a child prodigy
who could play pieces by Beethoven on the
piano by the time he was twelve.At the age
of six, he attended the Deutschherren middle
school before transferring to the Kaiser-Wilhelm
Gymnasium, where he studied from 1913 to 1921.
Prior to his graduation at the top of his
class, Adorno was already swept up by the
revolutionary mood of the time, as is evidenced
by his reading of Georg Lukács's The Theory
of the Novel that year, as well as by his
fascination with Ernst Bloch's The Spirit
of Utopia, of which he would later write:
Bloch's was a philosophy that could hold its
head high before the most advanced literature;
a philosophy that was not calibrated to the
abominable resignation of methodology ... I
took this motif so much as my own that I do
not believe I have ever written anything without
reference to it, either implicit or explicit.
Yet Adorno's intellectual nonconformism was
no less shaped by the repugnance he felt towards
the nationalism which swept through the Reich
during the First World War.
Along with future collaborators like Walter
Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Ernst Bloch,
Adorno was profoundly disillusioned by the
ease with which Germany's intellectual and
spiritual leaders—among them Max Weber,
Max Scheler, Georg Simmel, as well as his
friend Siegfried Kracauer—came out in support
of the war.
The younger generation's distrust for traditional
knowledge arose from the way in which this
tradition had discredited itself.
Over time, Oscar Wiesengrund's firm established
close professional and personal ties with
the factory of Karplus & Herzberger in Berlin.
The eldest daughter of the Karplus family,
Margarete, or Gretel, moved in the intellectual
circles of Berlin, where she was acquainted
with Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht and Ernst
Bloch, each of whom Adorno would become familiar
with during the mid-1920s; after fourteen
years, Gretel and Theodor were married in
1937.
At the end of his schooldays, Adorno not only
benefited from the rich concert offerings
of Frankfurt—where one could hear performances
of works by Schoenberg, Schreker, Stravinsky,
Bartók, Busoni, Delius and Hindemith—but
also began studying music composition at the
Hoch Conservatory while taking private lessons
with well-respected composers Bernhard Sekles
and Eduard Jung.
At around the same time, he befriended Siegfried
Kracauer, the Frankfurter Zeitung's literary
editor, of whom he would later write:
For years Kracauer read [Kant's] Critique
of Pure Reason with me regularly on Saturday
afternoons.
I am not exaggerating in the slightest when
I say that I owe more to this reading than
to my academic teachers ... Under his guidance
I experienced the work from the beginning
not as mere epistemology, not as an analysis
of the conditions of scientifically valid
judgments, but as a kind of coded text from
which the historical situation of spirit could
be read, with the vague expectation that in
doing so one could acquire something of truth
itself.
Leaving gymnasium to study philosophy, psychology
and sociology at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University
in Frankfurt, Adorno continued his readings
with Kracauer, turning now to Hegel and Kierkegaard,
and began publishing concert reviews and pieces
of music for distinguished journals like the
Zeitschrift für Musik, the Neue Blätter
für Kunst und Literatur and later for the
Musikblätter des Anbruch.
In these articles, Adorno championed avant-garde
music at the same time as he critiqued the
failings of musical modernity, as in the case
of Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale, which
he called in 1923 a "dismal Bohemian prank."
In these early writings, he was unequivocal
in his condemnation of performances which
either sought or pretended to achieve a transcendence
which Adorno, in line with many intellectuals
of the time, regarded as impossible: "No cathedral,"
he wrote, "can be built if no community desires
one."
In the summer of 1924, Adorno received his
doctorate with a study of Edmund Husserl under
the direction of the unorthodox neo-Kantian
Hans Cornelius.
Before his graduation, Adorno had already
met with his most important intellectual collaborators,
Max Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin.
Through Cornelius's seminars, Adorno met his
future collaborator Max Horkheimer, through
whom he was then introduced to Friedrich Pollock.
=== Vienna, Frankfurt, and Berlin ===
During the summer of 1924, the Viennese composer
Alban Berg's "Three Fragments from Wozzeck",
op. 7 premiered in Frankfurt, at which time
Adorno introduced himself to Berg and both
agreed the young philosopher and composer
would study with Berg in Vienna.
Upon moving to Vienna in February 1925, Adorno
immersed himself in the musical culture which
had grown up around Schoenberg: in addition
to his twice-weekly sessions with Berg, Adorno
continued his studies on piano with Eduard
Steuermann and befriended the violinist Rudolf
Kolisch.
In Vienna, he attended public lectures of
the satirist Karl Kraus with Berg and met
Lukács, who had been living in Vienna after
the failure of the Hungarian Soviet Republic.
Alban Berg, the man Adorno referred to as
"my master and teacher", was among the most
prescient of his young pupil's early friends:
[I am] convinced that, in the sphere of the
deepest understanding of music ... you are
capable of supreme achievements and will undoubtedly
fulfill this promise in the shape of great
philosophical works.
After leaving Vienna, Adorno traveled through
Italy, where he met with Kracauer, Benjamin,
and the economist Alfred Sohn-Rethel, with
whom he developed a lasting friendship, before
returning to Frankfurt.
In December 1926 Adorno's "Two Pieces for
String Quartet", op. 2 were performed in Vienna,
which provided a welcome interruption from
his preparations for the Habilitation.
After writing the "Piano Pieces in strict
twelve-tone technique", as well as songs later
integrated into the Six Bagatelles for Voice
and Piano, op. 6, Adorno presented his Habilitation
manuscript, The Concept of the Unconscious
in the Transcendental Theory of the Psyche
(Der Begriff des Unbewußten in der transzendentalen
Seelenlehre), to Cornelius in November 1927.
Cornelius advised Adorno to withdraw his application
on the grounds that the manuscript was too
close to his own way of thinking.
In this manuscript, Adorno attempted to underline
the epistemological status of the unconscious
as it emerged from Freud's early writings.
Against the function of the unconscious in
both Nietzsche and Spengler, Adorno argued
that Freud's notion of the unconscious serves
as a "sharp weapon ... against every attempt
to create a metaphysics of the instincts and
to deify full, organic nature."
Undaunted by his academic prospects, Adorno
threw himself once again into composition.
In addition to publishing numerous reviews
of opera performances and concerts, Adorno's
"Four Songs for Medium Voice and Piano", op.
3 was performed in Berlin in January 1929.
Between 1928 and 1930 Adorno took on a greater
role within the editorial committee of the
Musikblätter des Anbruch.
In a proposal for transforming the journal,
Adorno sought to use Anbruch for championing
radical modern music against what he called
the "stabilized music" of Pfitzner, the later
Strauss, as well as the neoclassicism of Stravinsky
and Hindemith.
During this period he published the essays
"Night Music", "On Twelve-Tone Technique"
and "Reaction and Progress".
Yet his reservations about twelve-tone orthodoxy
became steadily more pronounced: According
to Adorno, twelve-tone technique's use of
atonality can no more be regarded as an authoritative
canon than can tonality be relied on to provide
instructions for the composer.
At this time, Adorno struck up a correspondence
with the composer Ernst Krenek, with whom
he discussed problems of atonality and twelve-tone
technique.
In a letter of 1934 Adorno sounded a related
criticism of Schoenberg:
Twelve-tone technique alone is nothing but
the principle of motivic elaboration and variation,
as developed in the sonata, but elevated now
to a comprehensive principle of construction,
namely transformed into an a priori form and,
by that token, detached from the surface of
the composition.
At this point Adorno reversed his earlier
priorities: now his musical activities came
second to the development of a philosophical
theory of aesthetics.
Thus, in the middle of 1929 he accepted Paul
Tillich's offer to present an Habilitation
on Kierkegaard, which Adorno eventually submitted
under the title The Construction of the Aesthetic.
At the time, Kierkegaard's philosophy exerted
a strong influence, chiefly through its claim
to pose an alternative to Idealism and Hegel's
philosophy of history.
Yet when Adorno turned his attention to Kierkegaard,
watchwords like "anxiety," "inwardness" and
"leap"—instructive for existentialist philosophy—were
detached from their theological origins and
posed, instead, as problems for aesthetics.
As the work proceeded—and Kierkegaard's
overcoming of Hegel's idealism was revealed
to be a mere interiorization—Adorno excitedly
remarked in a letter to Berg that he was writing
without looking over his shoulder at the faculty
who would soon evaluate his work.
Receiving favourable reports from Professors
Tillich and Horkheimer, as well as Benjamin
and Kracauer, the University conferred on
Adorno the venia legendi in February 1931;
on the very day his revised study was published,
23 March 1933, Hitler seized dictatorial powers.Several
months after qualifying as a lecturer in philosophy,
Adorno delivered an inaugural lecture at the
Institute for Social Research, an independent
organization which had recently appointed
Horkheimer as its director and, with the arrival
of the literary scholar Leo Lowenthal, social
psychologist Erich Fromm and philosopher Herbert
Marcuse, sought to exploit recent theoretical
and methodological advances in the social
sciences.
His lecture, "The Actuality of Philosophy,"
created a scandal.
In it, Adorno not only deviated from the theoretical
program Horkheimer had laid out a year earlier,
but challenged philosophy's very capacity
for comprehending reality as such: "For the
mind," Adorno announced, "is indeed not capable
of producing or grasping the totality of the
real, but it may be possible to penetrate
the detail, to explode in miniature the mass
of merely existing reality."
In line with Benjamin's The Origin of German
Tragic Drama and preliminary sketches of the
Arcades Project, Adorno likened philosophical
interpretation to experiments which should
be conducted "until they arrive at figurations
in which the answers are legible, while the
questions themselves vanish."
Having lost its position as the Queen of the
Sciences, philosophy must now radically transform
its approach to objects so that it might "construct
keys before which reality springs open."Following
Horkheimer's taking up the directorship of
the Institute, a new journal, Zeitschrift
für Sozialforschung, was produced to publish
the research of Institute members both before
and after its relocation to the United States.
Though Adorno was not himself an Institute
member, the journal nevertheless published
many of his essays, including "The Social
Situation of Music" (1932), "On Jazz" (1936),
"On the Fetish-Character in Music and the
Regression of Listening" (1938) and "Fragments
on Wagner" (1938).
In his new role as social theorist, Adorno's
philosophical analysis of cultural phenomena
heavily relied on the language of historical
materialism, as concepts like reification,
false consciousness and ideology came to play
an ever more prominent role in his work.
At the same time, however, and owing to both
the presence of another prominent sociologist
at the Institute, Karl Mannheim, as well as
the methodological problem posed by treating
objects—like "musical material"—as ciphers
of social contradictions, Adorno was compelled
to abandon any notion of "value-free" sociology
in favour of a form of ideology critique which
held on to an idea of truth.
Before his emigration in autumn 1934, Adorno
began work on a Singspiel based on Mark Twain's
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer entitled The
Treasure of Indian Joe, which he would, however,
never complete; by the time he fled Hitler's
Germany Adorno had already written over a
hundred opera or concert reviews and an additional
fifty critiques of music composition.
As the Nazi party became the largest party
in the Reichstag Horkheimer's 1932 observation
proved typical for his milieu: "Only one thing
is certain", he wrote, "the irrationality
of society has reached a point where only
the gloomiest predictions have any plausibility."
In September Adorno's right to teach was revoked;
in March, as the swastika was run up the flag
pole of town hall, the Institute's offices
were searched by the Frankfurt criminal police.
Adorno's house on Seeheimer Strasse was similarly
searched in July and his application for membership
in the Reich Chamber of Literature was denied
on the grounds that membership was limited
to "persons who belong to the German nation
by profound ties of character and blood.
As a non-Aryan," he was informed, "you are
unable to feel and appreciate such an obligation."
Soon afterwards Adorno was forced into fifteen
years of exile.
=== Exile: Oxford, New York, Los Angeles ===
After the possibility of transferring his
habilitation to the University of Vienna came
to nothing, Adorno considered relocating to
Britain upon his father's suggestion.
With the help of the Academic Assistance Council,
Adorno registered as an advanced student at
Merton College, Oxford, in June 1934.
During the next four years at Oxford, Adorno
made repeated trips to Germany to see both
his parents and Gretel, who was still working
in Berlin.
Under the direction of Gilbert Ryle, Adorno
worked on a dialectical critique of Husserl's
epistemology.
By this time, the Institute for Social Research
had relocated to New York City and began making
overtures to Adorno.
After months of strained relations, Horkheimer
and Adorno reestablished their essential theoretical
alliance during meetings in Paris.
Adorno continued writing on music, publishing
"The Form of the Phonograph Record" and "Crisis
of Music Criticism" with the Viennese musical
journal 23, "On Jazz" in the Institute's Zeitschrift,
"Farewell to Jazz" in Europäische Revue.
Yet Adorno's attempts to break out of the
sociology of music were, at this time, twice
thwarted: neither the study of Mannheim he
had been working on for years nor extracts
from his study of Husserl were accepted by
the Zeitschrift.
Impressed by Horkheimer's book of aphorisms,
Dawn and Decline, Adorno began working on
his own book of aphorisms, what would later
become Minima Moralia.
While at Oxford, Adorno suffered two great
losses: his Aunt Agathe died in June 1935,
while Alban Berg died in December of the same
year.
To the end of his life, Adorno never abandoned
the hope of completing Berg's unfinished Lulu.
At this time, Adorno was in intense correspondence
with Walter Benjamin on the subject of the
latter's Arcades Project.
After receiving an invitation from Horkheimer
to visit the Institute in New York, Adorno
sailed for New York on June 9, 1937 and stayed
there for two weeks.
While in New York, Max Horkheimer's essays
"The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" and "Traditional
and Critical Theory," which would soon become
instructive for the Institute's self-understanding,
were the subject of intense discussion.
Soon after his return to Europe, Gretel moved
to Britain, where she and Adorno were married
on September 8, 1937; a little over a month
later, Horkheimer telegrammed from New York
with news of a position Adorno could take
up with the Princeton Radio Project, then
under the directorship of the Austrian sociologist
Paul Lazarsfeld.
Yet Adorno's work continued with studies of
Beethoven and Richard Wagner (published in
1939 as "Fragments on Wagner"), drafts of
which he read to Benjamin during their final
meeting, in December on the Italian Riviera.
According to Benjamin, these drafts were astonishing
for "the precision of their materialist deciphering,"
as well as the way in which "musical facts
... had been made socially transparent in
a way that was completely new to me."
In his Wagner study, the thesis later to characterize
Dialectic of Enlightenment—man's domination
of nature—first emerges.
Adorno sailed for New York on February 16,
1938.
Soon after settling into his new home on Riverside
Drive, Adorno met with Lazarsfeld in Newark
to discuss the Project's plans for investigating
the impact of broadcast music.
Although he was expected to embed the Project's
research within a wider theoretical context,
it soon became apparent that the Project was
primarily concerned with data collection to
be used by administrators for establishing
whether groups of listeners could be targeted
by broadcasts specifically aimed at them.
Expected to make use of devices with which
listeners could press a button to indicate
whether they liked or disliked a particular
piece of music, Adorno bristled with distaste
and astonishment: "I reflected that culture
was simply the condition that precluded a
mentality that tried to measure it."
Thus Adorno suggested using individual interviews
to determine listener reactions and, only
three months after meeting Lazarsfeld, completed
a 160-page memorandum on the Project's topic,
"Music in Radio."
Adorno was primarily interested in how the
musical material was affected by its distribution
through the medium of radio and thought it
imperative to understand how music was affected
by its becoming part of daily life.
"The meaning of a Beethoven symphony," he
wrote, "heard while the listener is walking
around or lying in bed is very likely to differ
from its effect in a concert-hall where people
sit as if they were in church."
In essays published by the Institute's Zeitschrift,
Adorno dealt with that atrophy of musical
culture which had become instrumental in accelerating
tendencies—towards conformism, trivialization
and standardization—already present in the
larger culture.
Unsurprisingly, Adorno's studies found little
resonance among members of the project.
At the end of 1939, when Lazarsfeld submitted
a second application for funding, the musical
section of the study was duly left out.
Yet during the two years during which he worked
on the Project, Adorno was nevertheless prolific,
publishing "The Radio Symphony", "A Social
Critique of Radio Music", and "On Popular
Music", texts which, along with the draft
memorandum and other unpublished writings,
are now found in Robert Hullot-Kentor's recent
translation, Current of Music.
In light of this situation, Horkheimer soon
found a permanent post for Adorno at the Institute.
In addition to helping with the Zeitschrift,
Adorno was expected to be the Institute's
liaison with Benjamin, who soon passed on
to New York the study of Charles Baudelaire
he hoped would serve as a model of the larger
Arcades Project.
In correspondence, the two men discussed the
difference in their conceptions of the relationship
between critique and artworks which had become
manifest through Benjamin's "The Work of Art
in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility".
At around the same time Adorno and Horkheimer
began planning for a joint work on "dialectical
logic", which would later become Dialectic
of Enlightenment.
Alarmed by reports from Europe, where Adorno's
parents suffered increasing discrimination
and Benjamin was interned in Colombes, their
joint study could entertain few delusions
about its practical effects.
"In view of what is now threatening to engulf
Europe," Horkheimer wrote, "our present work
is essentially destined to pass things down
through the night that is approaching: a kind
of message in a bottle."
As Adorno continued his work in New York with
radio talks on music and a lecture on Søren
Kierkegaard's doctrine of love, Benjamin fled
Paris and attempted to make an illegal border
crossing.
After learning that his Spanish visa was invalid
and fearing deportation back to France, Benjamin
took an overdose of morphine tablets.
In light of recent events, the Institute set
about formulating a theory of antisemitism
and fascism.
On one side were those who supported Franz
Neumann's thesis according to which National
Socialism was a form of "monopoly capital";
on the other were those who supported Friedrich
Pollock's "state capitalist theory."
Horkheimer's contributions to this debate,
in the form of the essays "The Authoritarian
State", "The End of Reason", and "The Jews
and Europe" served as a foundation for what
he and Adorno planned to do in their book
on dialectical logic.
In November 1941 Adorno followed Horkheimer
to what Thomas Mann called "German California",
setting up house in a Pacific Palisades neighborhood
of German émigrés which included Bertolt
Brecht and Arnold Schoenberg.
Adorno arrived with a draft of his Philosophy
of New Music, a dialectical critique of twelve-tone
music, which Adorno himself felt, while writing,
was already a departure from the theory of
art he had spent the previous decades elaborating.
Horkheimer's reaction to the manuscript was
wholly positive: "If I have ever in the whole
of my life felt enthusiasm about anything,
then I did on this occasion," he wrote after
reading the manuscript.
The two set about completing their joint work,
which transformed itself from a book on dialectical
logic to a rewriting of the history of rationality
and the Enlightenment.
First published in a small mimeographed edition
in May 1944 as Philosophical Fragments, the
text would wait another three years before
achieving book form when it was published
with its definitive title, Dialectic of Enlightenment,
by the Amsterdam publisher Querido Verlag.
This "reflection on the destructive aspect
of progress" proceeded through the chapters
which treated rationality as both the liberation
from and further domination of nature, interpretations
of both Homer's Odyssey and the Marquis de
Sade, as well as analyses of the culture industry
and antisemitism.
With their joint work completed, the two turned
their attention to studies on antisemitism
and authoritarianism in collaboration with
the Nevitt Sanford-led Public Opinion Study
Group and the American Jewish Committee.
In line with these studies, Adorno produced
an analysis of the Californian radio preacher
Martin Luther Thomas.
Fascist propaganda of this sort, Adorno wrote,
"simply takes people for what they are: genuine
children of today's standardized mass culture
who have been robbed to a great extent of
their autonomy and spontaneity" The result
of these labors, the 1950 study The Authoritarian
Personality was pioneering in its combination
of quantitative and qualitative methods of
collecting and evaluating data as well as
its development of the F-scale.
After the USA entered the war in 1941, the
situation of the émigrés, now classed "enemy
aliens", became increasingly restricted.
Forbidden from leaving their homes between
8pm and 6am and prohibited from going more
than five miles from their houses, émigrés
like Adorno, who would not be naturalized
until November 1943, were severely restricted
in their movements.
In addition to the aphorisms which conclude
Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno put together
a collection of aphorisms in honor of Horkheimer's
fiftieth birthday that would later be published
as Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged
Life.
These fragmentary writings, inspired by a
renewed reading of Nietzsche, treated issues
like emigration, totalitarianism, and individuality,
as well as everyday matters such as giving
presents, dwelling and the impossibility of
love.
In California, Adorno made the acquaintance
of Charlie Chaplin and became friends with
Fritz Lang and Hanns Eisler, with whom he
completed a study of film music in 1944.
In this study, the authors pushed for the
greater usage of avant-garde music in film,
urging that music be used to supplement, not
simply accompany, the visual aspect of films.
Additionally, Adorno assisted Thomas Mann
on his novel Doctor Faustus after the latter
asked for his help.
"Would you be willing," Mann wrote, "to think
through with me how the work—I mean Leverkühn's
work—might look; how you would do it if
you were in league with the Devil?"At the
end of October 1949, Adorno left America for
Europe just as The Authoritarian Personality
was being published.
Before his return, Adorno had not only reached
an agreement with a Tübingen publisher to
print an expanded version of Philosophy of
New Music, but completed two compositions:
Four Songs for Voice and Piano by Stefan George,
op.7, and Three Choruses for Female Voices
from the Poems of Theodor Däubler, op. 8.
=== Post-war Europe ===
==== Return to Frankfurt University ====
Upon his return, Adorno helped shape the political
culture of West Germany.
Until his death in 1969, twenty years after
his return, Adorno contributed to the intellectual
foundations of the Federal Republic, as a
professor at Frankfurt University, critic
of the vogue enjoyed by Heideggerian philosophy,
partisan of critical sociology, and teacher
of music at the Darmstadt International Summer
Courses for New Music.
Adorno resumed his teaching duties at the
university soon after his arrival, with seminars
on "Kant's Transcendental Dialectic", aesthetics,
Hegel, "Contemporary Problems in the Theory
of Knowledge", and "The Concept of Knowledge".
Adorno's surprise at his students' passionate
interest in intellectual matters did not,
however, blind him to continuing problems
within Germany: The literary climate was dominated
by writers who had remained in Germany during
Hitler's rule, the government re-employed
people who had been active in the Nazi apparatus
and people were generally loath to own up
to their own collaboration or the guilt they
thus incurred.
Instead, the ruined city of Frankfurt continued
as if nothing had happened, holding on to
ideas of the true, the beautiful, and the
good despite the atrocities, hanging on to
a culture that had itself been lost in rubble
or killed off in the concentration camps.
All the enthusiasm Adorno's students showed
for intellectual matters could not erase the
suspicion that, in the words of Max Frisch,
culture had become an "alibi" for the absence
of political consciousness.
Yet the foundations for what would come to
be known as "The Frankfurt School" were soon
laid: Horkheimer resumed his chair in social
philosophy and the Institute for Social Research,
rebuilt, became a lightning rod for critical
thought.
==== Essays on fascism ====
Starting with his 1947 essay Wagner, Nietzsche
and Hitler, Adorno produced a series of influential
works to describe psychological fascist traits.
One of these works was The Authoritarian Personality
(1950), published as a contribution to the
Studies in Prejudice performed by multiple
research institutes in the US, and consisting
of a 'qualitative interpretations' that uncovered
the authoritarian character of test persons
through indirect questions.
The books have had a major influence on sociology
and remain highly discussed and debated.
In 1951 he continued on the topic with his
essay Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist
Propaganda, in which he said that "Psychological
dispositions do not actually cause fascism;
rather, fascism defines a psychological area
which can be successfully exploited by the
forces which promote it for entirely non-psychological
reasons of self-interest."In 1952 Adorno participated
in a group experiment, revealing residual
National Socialist attitudes among the recently
democratized Germans.
He then published two influential essays,
The Meaning of Working Through the Past (1959),
and Education after Auschwitz (1966), in which
he argued on the survival of the uneradicated
National Socialism in the mind-sets and institutions
of the post-1945 Germany, and that there is
still a real risk that it could rise again.
Later on, however, Jean Améry—who had been
tortured at Auschwitz—would sharply object
that Adorno, rather than addressing such political
concerns, was exploiting Auschwitz for his
metaphysical phantom "absolute negativity"
("absolute Negativität"), using a language
intoxicated by itself ("von sich selber bis
zur Selbstblendung entzückte Sprache").
==== Public events ====
In September 1951 Adorno returned to the United
States for a six-week visit, during which
he attended the opening of the Hacker Psychiatry
Foundation in Beverly Hills, met Leo Lowenthal
and Herbert Marcuse in New York and saw his
mother for the last time.
After stopping in Paris, where he met Daniel-Henry
Kahnweiler, Michel Leiris and René Leibowitz,
Adorno delivered a lecture entitled "The Present
State of Empirical Social Research in Germany"
at a conference on opinion research.
Here he emphasized the importance of data
collection and statistical evaluation while
asserting that such empirical methods have
only an auxiliary function and must lead to
the formation of theories which would "raise
the harsh facts to the level of consciousness."With
Horkheimer as dean of the Arts Faculty, then
rector of the university, responsibilities
for the Institute's work fell upon Adorno.
At the same time, however, Adorno renewed
his musical work: with talks at the Kranichsteiner
Musikgesellschaft, another in connection with
a production of Ernst Krenek's opera Leben
des Orest, and a seminar on "Criteria of New
Music" at the Fifth International Summer Course
for New Music at Kranichstein.
Adorno also became increasingly involved with
the publishing house of Peter Suhrkamp, inducing
the latter to publish Benjamin's Berlin Childhood
Around 1900, Kracauer's writings and a two-volume
edition of Benjamin's writings.
Adorno's own recently published Minima Moralia
was not only well received in the press, but
also met with great admiration from Thomas
Mann, who wrote to Adorno from America in
1952:
I have spent days attached to your book as
if by a magnet.
Every day brings new fascination ... concentrated
nourishment.
It is said that the companion star to Sirius,
white in colour, is made of such dense material
that a cubic inch of it would weigh a tonne
here.
This is why it has such an extremely powerful
gravitational field; in this respect it is
similar to your book.
Yet Adorno was no less moved by other public
events: protesting the publication of Heinrich
Mann's novel Professor Unrat with its film
title, The Blue Angel; declaring his sympathy
with those who protested the scandal of big-game
hunting and penning a defense of prostitutes.
==== More essays on mass culture and literature
====
Because Adorno's American citizenship would
have been forfeited by the middle of 1952
had he continued to stay outside the country,
he returned once again to Santa Monica to
survey his prospects at the Hacker Foundation.
While there he wrote a content analysis of
newspaper horoscopes (now collected in The
Stars Down to Earth), and the essays "Television
as Ideology" and "Prologue to Television";
even so, he was pleased when, at the end of
ten months, he was enjoined to return as co-director
of the Institute.
Back in Frankfurt, he renewed his academic
duties and, from 1952 to 1954, completed three
essays: "Notes on Kafka", "Valéry Proust
Museum", and an essay on Schoenberg following
the composer's death, all of which were included
in the 1955 essay collection Prisms.
In response to the publication of Thomas Mann's
The Black Swan, Adorno penned a long letter
to the author, who then approved its publication
in the literary journal Akzente.
A second collection of essays, Notes to Literature,
appeared in 1958.
After meeting Samuel Beckett while delivering
a series of lectures in Paris the same year,
Adorno set to work on "Trying to Understand
Endgame," which, along with studies of Proust,
Valéry, and Balzac, formed the central texts
of the 1961 publication of the second volume
of his Notes to Literature.
Adorno's entrance into literary discussions
continued in his June 1963 lecture at the
annual conference of the Hölderlin Society.
At the Philosophers' Conference of October
1962 in Münster, at which Habermas wrote
that Adorno was "A writer among bureaucrats",
Adorno presented "Progress".Although the Zeitschrift
was never revived, the Institute nevertheless
published a series of important sociological
books, including Sociologica (1955), a collection
of essays, Gruppenexperiment (1955), Betriebsklima,
a study of work satisfaction among workers
in Mannesmann, and Soziologische Exkurse,
a textbook-like anthology intended as an introductory
work about the discipline.
==== Public figure ====
Throughout the fifties and sixties, Adorno
became a public figure, not simply through
his books and essays, but also through his
appearances in radio and newspapers.
In talks, interviews and round-table discussions
broadcast on Hessen Radio, South-West Radio
and Radio Bremen, Adorno discussed topics
as diverse as "The Administered World" (September
1950), "What is the Meaning of 'Working Through
the Past?"'
(February 1960) to "The Teaching Profession
and its Taboos" (August 1965).
Additionally, he frequently wrote for Frankfurter
Allgemeine, Frankfurter Rundschau and the
weekly Die Zeit.
At the invitation of Wolfgang Steinecke, Adorno
took part in the Darmstadt Summer Courses
for New Music in Kranichstein from 1951 to
1958.
Yet conflicts between the so-called Darmstadt
school, which included composers like Pierre
Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono,
Bruno Maderna, Karel Goeyvaerts, Luciano Berio
and Gottfried Michael Koenig, soon arose,
receiving explicit expression in Adorno's
1954 lecture, "The Aging of the New Music",
where he argued that atonality's freedom was
being restricted to serialism in much the
same way as it was once restricted by twelve-tone
technique.
With his friend Eduard Steuermann, Adorno
feared that music was being sacrificed to
stubborn rationalization.
During this time Adorno not only produced
a significant series of notes on Beethoven
(which was never completed and only published
posthumously), but also published Mahler:
A Musical Physiognomy in 1960.
In his 1961 return to Kranichstein, Adorno
called for what he termed a "musique informelle",
which would possess the ability "really and
truly to be what it is, without the ideological
pretense of being something else.
Or rather, to admit frankly the fact of non-identity
and to follow through its logic to the end."
==== Post-war German culture ====
At the same time Adorno struck up relationships
with contemporary German-language poets such
as Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann.
Adorno's 1949 dictum—"To write poetry after
Auschwitz is barbaric"—posed the question
of what German culture could mean after Auschwitz;
his own continual revision of this dictum—in
Negative Dialectics, for example, he wrote
that "Perennial suffering has as much right
to expression as a tortured man has to scream";
while in "Commitment," he wrote in 1962 that
the dictum "expresses in negative form the
impulse which inspires committed literature"—was
part of post-war Germany's struggle with history
and culture.
Adorno additionally befriended the writer
and poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger as well
as the film-maker Alexander Kluge.
In 1963, Adorno was elected to the post of
chairman of the German Sociological Society,
where he presided over two important conferences:
in 1964, on "Max Weber and Sociology" and
in 1968 on "Late Capitalism or Industrial
Society".
A debate launched in 1961 by Adorno and Karl
Popper, later published as the Positivist
Dispute in German Sociology, arose out of
disagreements at the 1959 14th German Sociology
Conference in Berlin.
Adorno's critique of the dominant climate
of post-war Germany was also directed against
the pathos that had grown up around Heideggerianism,
as practiced by writers like Karl Jaspers
and Otto Friedrich Bollnow, and which had
subsequently seeped into public discourse.
His 1964 publication of The Jargon of Authenticity
took aim at the halo such writers had attached
to words like "angst", "decision" and "leap".
After seven years of work, Adorno completed
Negative Dialectics in 1966, after which,
during the summer semester of 1967 and the
winter semester of 1967–68, he offered regular
philosophy seminars to discuss the book chapter
by chapter.
Among the students at these seminars were
the Americans Angela Davis and Irving Wohlfarth.
One objection which would soon take on ever
greater importance, was that critical thought
must adopt the standpoint of the oppressed,
to which Adorno replied that negative dialectics
was concerned "with the dissolution of standpoint
thinking itself."
==== Confrontations with students ====
At the time of Negative Dialectics' publication,
the fragility of West German democracy led
to increasing student protests.
Monopolistic trends in the media, an educational
crisis in the universities, the Shah of Iran's
1967 state visit, German support for the war
in Vietnam and the emergency laws combined
to create a highly unstable situation.
Like many of his students, Adorno too opposed
the emergency laws, as well as the war in
Vietnam, which, he said, proved the continued
existence of the "world of torture that had
begun in Auschwitz".
The situation only deteriorated with the police
shooting of Benno Ohnesorg at a protest against
the Shah's visit.
This death, as well as the subsequent acquittal
of the responsible officer, were both commented
upon in Adorno's lectures.
As politicization increased, rifts developed
within both the Institute's relationship with
its students as well as within the Institute
itself.
Soon Adorno himself would become an object
of the students' ire.
At the invitation of Peter Szondi, Adorno
was invited to the Free University of Berlin
to give a lecture on Goethe's Iphigenie in
Tauris.
After a group of students marched to the lectern,
unfurling a banner that read "Berlin's left-wing
fascists greet Teddy the Classicist," a number
of those present left the lecture in protest
after Adorno refused to abandon his talk in
favour of discussing his attitude on the current
political situation.
Adorno shortly thereafter participated in
a meeting with the Berlin Sozialistischer
Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS) and discussed
"Student Unrest" with Szondi on West German
Radio.
But as 1968 progressed, Adorno became increasingly
critical of the students' disruptions to university
life.
His isolation was only compounded by articles
published in the magazine alternative, which,
following the lead of Hannah Arendt's articles
in Merkur, claimed Adorno had subjected Benjamin
to pressure during his years of exile in Berlin
and compiled Benjamin's Writings and Letters
with a great deal of bias.
In response, Benjamin's longtime friend Gershom
Scholem, wrote to the editor of Merkur to
express his disapproval of the "in part, shameful,
not to say disgraceful" remarks by Arendt.Relations
between students and the West German state
continued deteriorating.
In spring 1968, a prominent SDS spokesman,
Rudi Dutschke, was gunned down in the streets;
in response, massive demonstrations took place,
directed in particular against the Springer
Press, which had led a campaign to vilify
the students.
An open appeal published in Die Zeit, signed
by Adorno, called for an inquiry into the
social reasons that gave rise to this assassination
attempt as well as an investigation into the
Springer Press' manipulation of public opinion.
At the same time, however, Adorno protested
against disruptions of his own lectures and
refused to express his solidarity with their
political goals, maintaining instead his autonomy
as a theoretician.
Adorno rejected the so-called unity of theory
and praxis advocated by the students and argued
that the students' actions were premised upon
a mistaken analysis of the situation.
The building of barricades, he wrote to Marcuse,
is "ridiculous against those who administer
the bomb."In September 1968 Adorno went to
Vienna for the publication of Alban Berg:
Master of the Smallest Link.
Upon his return to Frankfurt, events prevented
his concentrating upon the book on aesthetics
he wished to write: "Valid student claims
and dubious actions," he wrote to Marcuse,
"are all so mixed up together that all productive
work and even sensible thought are scarcely
possible any more."
After striking students threatened to strip
the Institute's sociology seminar rooms of
their furnishings and equipment, the police
were brought in to close the building.
Adorno began writing an introduction to a
collection of poetry by Rudolf Borchardt,
which was connected with a talk entitled "Charmed
Language," delivered in Zurich, followed by
a talk on aesthetics in Paris where he met
Beckett again.
Beginning in October 1966, Adorno took up
work on Aesthetic Theory.
In June 1969 he completed Catchwords: Critical
Models.
During the winter semester of 1968–69 Adorno
was on sabbatical leave from the university
and thus able to dedicate himself to the completion
of his book of aesthetics.
For the summer semester Adorno planned a lecture
course entitled "An Introduction to Dialectical
Thinking," as well as a seminar on the dialectics
of subject and object.
But at the first lecture Adorno's attempt
to open up the lecture and invite questions
whenever they arose degenerated into a disruption
from which he quickly fled: after a student
wrote on the blackboard "If Adorno is left
in peace, capitalism will never cease," three
women students approached the lectern, bared
their breasts and scattered flower petals
over his head.
Yet Adorno continued to resist blanket condemnations
of the protest movement which would have only
strengthened the conservative thesis according
to which political irrationalism was the result
of Adorno's teaching.
After further disruptions to his lectures,
Adorno canceled the lectures for the rest
of the seminar, continuing only with his philosophy
seminar.
In the summer of 1969, weary from these activities,
Adorno returned once again to Zermatt, Switzerland,
at the foot of Matterhorn to restore his strength.
On August 6 he died of a heart attack.
== Theory ==
Adorno's work sets out from a central insight
he shares with all early 20th century avant-garde
art: the recognition of what is primitive
in ourselves and the world itself.
Neither Picasso's fascination with African
sculpture nor Mondrian's reduction of painting
to its most elementary component—the line—is
comprehensible outside this concern with primitivism
Adorno shared with the century's most radical
art.
At that time, the Western world, beset by
world-wars, colonialist consolidation and
accelerating commodification, sank into the
very barbarism civilization had prided itself
in overcoming.
According to Adorno, society's self-preservation
had become indistinguishable from societally
sanctioned self-sacrifice: of "primitive"
peoples, primitive aspects of the ego and
those primitive, mimetic desires found in
imitation and sympathy.
Adorno's theory proceeds from an understanding
of this primitive quality of reality which
seeks to counteract whatever aims either to
repress this primitive aspect or to further
those systems of domination set in place by
this return to barbarism.
From this perspective, Adorno's writings on
politics, philosophy, music and literature
are a lifelong critique of the ways in which
each tries to justify self-mutilation as the
necessary price of self-preservation.
According to Adorno's translator Robert Hullot-Kentor,
the central motive of Adorno's work thus consists
in determining "how life could be more than
the struggle for self-preservation".
In this sense, the principle of self-preservation,
Adorno writes in Negative Dialectics, is nothing
but "the law of doom thus far obeyed by history."
At its most basic, Adorno's thought is motivated
by a fundamental critique of this law.
Adorno was chiefly influenced by Max Weber's
critique of disenchantment, Georg Lukács's
Hegelian interpretation of Marxism, as well
as Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history.
Adorno, along with the other major Frankfurt
School theorists Max Horkheimer and Herbert
Marcuse, argued that advanced capitalism had
managed to contain or liquidate the forces
that would bring about its collapse and that
the revolutionary moment, when it would have
been possible to transform it into socialism,
had passed.
As he put it at the beginning of his Negative
Dialectics (1966), philosophy is still necessary
because the time to realise it was missed.
Adorno argued that capitalism had become more
entrenched through its attack on the objective
basis of revolutionary consciousness and through
liquidation of the individualism that had
been the basis of critical consciousness.
Adorno, as well as Horkheimer, critiqued all
forms of positivism as responsible for technocracy
and disenchantment and sought to produce a
theory that both rejected positivism and avoided
reinstating traditional metaphysics.
Adorno and Horkheimer have been criticized
for over-applying the term "positivism," especially
in their interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein
and Karl Popper as positivists.
=== Music ===
Adorno criticized jazz and popular music,
viewing it as part of the culture industry,
that contributes to the present sustainability
of capitalism by rendering it "aesthetically
pleasing" and "agreeable".In his early essays
for the Vienna-based journal Anbruch, Adorno
claimed that musical progress is proportional
to the composer's ability to constructively
deal with the possibilities and limitations
contained within what Adorno called the "musical
material."
For Adorno, twelve-tone serialism constitutes
a decisive, historically developed method
of composition.
The objective validity of composition, according
to Adorno, rests with neither the composer's
genius nor the work's conformity with prior
standards, but with the way in which the work
coherently expresses the dialectic of the
material.
In this sense, the contemporary absence of
composers of the status of Bach or Beethoven
is not the sign of musical regression; instead,
new music is to be credited with laying bare
aspects of the musical material previously
repressed: The musical material's liberation
from number, the harmonic series and tonal
harmony.
Thus, historical progress is achieved only
by the composer who "submits to the work and
seemingly does not undertake anything active
except to follow where it leads."
Because historical experience and social relations
are embedded within this musical material,
it is to the analysis of such material that
the critic must turn.
In the face of this radical liberation of
the musical material, Adorno came to criticize
those who, like Stravinsky, withdrew from
this freedom by taking recourse to forms of
the past as well as those who turned twelve-tone
composition into a technique which dictated
the rules of composition.
Adorno saw the culture industry as an arena
in which critical tendencies or potentialities
were eliminated.
He argued that the culture industry, which
produced and circulated cultural commodities
through the mass media, manipulated the population.
Popular culture was identified as a reason
why people become passive; the easy pleasures
available through consumption of popular culture
made people docile and content, no matter
how terrible their economic circumstances.
"Capitalist production so confines them, body
and soul, that they fall helpless victims
to what is offered them."
The differences among cultural goods make
them appear different, but they are in fact
just variations on the same theme.
He wrote that "the same thing is offered to
everybody by the standardized production of
consumption goods" but this is concealed under
"the manipulation of taste and the official
culture's pretense of individualism".
By doing so, the culture industry appeals
to every single consumer in a unique and personalized
way, all while maintaining minimal costs and
effort on their behalf.
Consumers purchase the illusion that every
commodity or product is tailored to the individual's
personal preference, by incorporating subtle
modifications or inexpensive "add-ons" in
order to keep the consumer returning for new
purchases, and therefore more revenue for
the corporation system.
Adorno conceptualized this phenomenon as pseudo-individualisation
and the always-the-same.Adorno's analysis
allowed for a critique of mass culture from
the left which balanced the critique of popular
culture from the right.
From both perspectives—left and right—the
nature of cultural production was felt to
be at the root of social and moral problems
resulting from the consumption of culture.
However, while the critique from the right
emphasized moral degeneracy ascribed to sexual
and racial influences within popular culture,
Adorno located the problem not with the content,
but with the objective realities of the production
of mass culture and its effects, e.g. as a
form of reverse psychology.
Thinkers influenced by Adorno believe that
today's society has evolved in a direction
foreseen by him, especially in regard to the
past (Auschwitz), morals, or the Culture Industry.
The latter has become a particularly productive,
yet highly contested term in cultural studies.
Many of Adorno's reflections on aesthetics
and music have only just begun to be debated,
as a collection of essays on the subject,
many of which had not previously been translated
into English, has only recently been collected
and published as Essays on Music.Adorno's
work in the years before his death was shaped
by the idea of "negative dialectics", set
out especially in his book of that title.
A key notion in the work of the Frankfurt
School since Dialectic of Enlightenment had
been the idea of thought becoming an instrument
of domination that subsumes all objects under
the control of the (dominant) subject, especially
through the notion of identity, i.e. of identifying
as real in nature and society only that which
harmonized or fit with dominant concepts,
and regarding as unreal or non-existent everything
that did not.
Adorno's "negative dialectics" was an attempt
to articulate a non-dominating thought that
would recognize its limitations and accept
the non-identity and reality of that which
could not be subsumed under the subject's
concepts.
Indeed, Adorno sought to ground the critical
bite of his sociological work in his critique
of identity, which he took to be a reification
in thought of the commodity form or exchange
relation which always presumes a false identity
between different things.
The potential to criticise arises from the
gap between the concept and the object, which
can never go into the former without remainder.
This gap, this non-identity in identity, was
the secret to a critique of both material
life and conceptual reflection.Adorno's reputation
as a musicologist has been in steady decline
since his death.
His sweeping criticisms of jazz and championing
of the Second Viennese School in opposition
to Stravinsky have caused him to fall out
of favour.
The distinguished American scholar Richard
Taruskin declared Adorno to be "preposterously
over-rated."
The eminent pianist and critic Charles Rosen
saw Adorno's book The Philosophy of New Music
as "largely a fraudulent presentation, a work
of polemic that pretends to be an objective
study."
Even a fellow Marxist such as the historian
and jazz critic Eric Hobsbawm saw Adorno's
writings as containing "some of the stupidest
pages ever written about jazz".
The British philosopher Roger Scruton saw
Adorno as producing "reams of turgid nonsense
devoted to showing that the American people
are just as alienated as Marxism requires
them to be, and that their cheerful life-affirming
music is a ‘fetishized’ commodity, expressive
of their deep spiritual enslavement to the
capitalist machine."
Irritation with Adorno's tunnel vision started
even while he was alive.
He may have championed Schoenberg, but the
composer notably failed to return the compliment:
"I have never been able to bear the fellow
[...] It is disgusting, by the way, how he
treats Stravinsky."
On the other hand, the scholar Slavoj Žižek
has written a foreword to Adorno's In Search
of Wagner, where Žižek attributes an "emancipatory
impulse" to the same book, although Žižek
suggests that fidelity to this impulse demands
"a betrayal of the explicit theses of Adorno's
Wagner study."
==== The five components of recognition ====
Adorno states that a start to understand the
recognition in respect of any particular song
hit may be made by drafting a scheme which
divides the experience of recognition into
its different components.
All the factors people enumerate are interwoven
to a degree that would be impossible to separate
from one another in reality.
Adorno's scheme is directed towards the different
objective elements involved in the experience
of recognition, than the actual experience
felt for the individual.
Vague remembrance
Actual identification
Subsumption by label
Self-reflection and act of recognition
Psychological transfer of recognition-authority
to the object
=== Marxist criticisms ===
Adorno posits social totality as an automatic
system.
According to Horst Müller's Kritik der kritischen
Theorie ("Critique of Critical Theory"), this
assumption is consistent with Adorno's idea
of society as a self-regulating system, from
which one must escape (but from which nobody
can escape).
For him it was existent, but inhuman.
Müller argues against the existence of such
a system and claims that critical theory provides
no practical solution for societal change.
He concludes that Jürgen Habermas, in particular,
and the Frankfurt School in general, misconstrue
Marx.
== Standardization ==
The phenomenon of standardization is "a concept
used to characterize the formulaic products
of capitalist-driven mass media and mass culture
that appeal to the lowest common denominator
in pursuit of maximum profit".
According to Adorno we inhabit a media culture
driven society which has product consumption
as one of its main characteristics.
Mass media is employed to deliver messages
about products and services to consumers in
order to convince these individuals to purchase
the commodity they are advertising.
Standardization consists of the production
of large amounts of commodities to then pursue
consumers in order to gain the maximum profit
possible.
They do this, as mentioned above, by individualizing
products to give the illusion to consumers
that they are in fact purchasing a product
or service that was specifically designed
for them.
Adorno highlights the issues created with
the construction of popular music, where different
samples of music used in the creation of today's
chart-topping songs are put together in order
to create, re-create, and modify numerous
tracks by using the same variety of samples
from one song to another.
He makes a distinction between "Apologetic
music" and "Critical music".
Apologetic music is defined as the highly
produced and promoted music of the "pop music"
industry: music that is composed of variable
parts and interchanged to create several different
songs.
"The social and psychological functions of
popular music [are that it] acts like a social
cement" "to keep people obedient and subservient
to the status quo of existing power structures."Serious
music, according to Adorno, achieves excellence
when its whole is greater than the sum of
its parts.
The example he gives is that of Beethoven's
symphonies: "[his] greatness shows itself
in the complete subordination of the accidentally
private melodic elements to the form as a
whole."Standardization not only refers to
the products of the culture industry but to
the consumers as well: many times every day
consumers are bombarded by media advertising.
Consumers are pushed and shoved into consuming
products and services presented to them by
the media system.
The masses have become conditioned by the
culture industry, which makes the impact of
standardization much more important.
By not realizing the impact of social media
and commercial advertising, the individual
is caught in a situation where conformity
is the norm.
"During consumption the masses become characterized
by the commodities which they use and exchange
among themselves."
=== 
Adorno's responses to his critics ===
As a pioneer of a self-reflexive sociology
who prefigured Bourdieu's ability to factor
in the effect of reflection on the societal
object, Adorno realized that some criticism
(including deliberate disruption of his classes
in the 1960s) could never be answered in a
dialogue between equals if, as he seems to
have believed, what the naive ethnographer
or sociologist thinks of a human essence is
always changing over time.
== Adorno's sociological methods ==
As Adorno believed that sociology needs to
be self-reflective and self-critical, he also
believed that the language the sociologist
uses, like the language of the ordinary person,
is a political construct in large measure
that uses, often unreflectingly, concepts
installed by dominant classes and social structures
(such as our notion of "deviance" which includes
both genuinely deviant individuals and "hustlers"
operating below social norms because they
lack the capital to operate above: for an
analysis of this phenomenon, cf.
Pierre Bourdieu's book The Weight of the World).
He felt that those at the top of the Institute
needed to be the source primarily of theories
for evaluation and empirical testing, as well
as people who would process the "facts" discovered...including
revising theories that were found to be false.
For example, in an essay published in Germany
on Adorno's return from the USA, and reprinted
in the Critical Models essays collection (ISBN
0-231-07635-5), Adorno praised the egalitarianism
and openness of US society based on his sojourn
in New York and the Los Angeles area between
1935 and 1955: "Characteristic for the life
in America [...]is a moment of peacefulness,
kindness and generosity".
("Dem amerikanischen Leben eignet [...] ein
Moment von Friedlichkeit, Gutartigkeit und
Großzügigkeit".)One example of the clash
of intellectual culture and Adorno's methods
can be found in Paul Lazarsfeld, the American
sociologist for whom Adorno worked in the
late 1930s after fleeing Hitler.
As Rolf Wiggershaus recounts in The Frankfurt
School, Its History, Theories and Political
Significance (MIT 1995), Lazarsfeld was the
director of a project, funded and inspired
by David Sarnoff (the head of RCA), to discover
both the sort of music that listeners of radio
liked and ways to improve their "taste", so
that RCA could profitably air more classical
music.
Lazarsfeld, however, had trouble both with
the prose style of the work Adorno handed
in and what Lazarsfeld thought was Adorno's
"lack of discipline in ... presentation".Adorno
himself provided the following personal anecdote:
What I mean by reified consciousness, I can
illustrate—without elaborate philosophical
contemplation—most simply with an American
experience.
Among the frequently changing colleagues which
the Princeton Project provided me with, was
a young lady.
After a few days, she had gained confidence
in me, and asked most kindly: "Dr Adorno,
would you mind a personal question?".
I said, "It depends on the question, but just
go ahead", and she went on: "Please tell me:
are you an extrovert or an introvert?".
It was as if she, as a living being, already
thought according to the model of multi-choice
questions in questionnaires.
== Adorno translated into English ==
While even German readers can find Adorno's
work difficult to understand, an additional
problem for English readers is that his German
idiom is particularly difficult to translate
into English.
A similar difficulty of translation is true
of Hegel, Heidegger, and a number of other
German philosophers and poets.
As a result, some early translators tended
toward over-literalness.
In recent years, Edmund Jephcott and Stanford
University Press have published new translations
of some of Adorno's lectures and books, including
Introduction to Sociology, Problems of Moral
Philosophy and his transcribed lectures on
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Aristotle's
"Metaphysics", and a new translation of the
Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Professor Henry Pickford, of the University
of Colorado at Boulder, has translated many
of Adorno's works such as "The Meaning of
Working Through the Past."
A new translation has also appeared of Aesthetic
Theory and the Philosophy of New Music by
Robert Hullot-Kentor, from the University
of Minnesota Press.
Hullot-Kentor is also currently working on
a new translation of Negative Dialectics.
Adorno's correspondence with Alban Berg, Towards
a Theory of Musical Reproduction, and the
letters to Adorno's parents, have been translated
by Wieland Hoban and published by Polity Press.
These fresh translations are slightly less
literal in their rendering of German sentences
and words, and are more accessible to English
readers.
The Group Experiment, which had been unavailable
to English readers, is now available in an
accessible translation by Jeffrey K. Olick
and Andrew J. Perrin on Harvard University
Press, along with introductory material explaining
its relation to the rest of Adorno's work
and 20th-century public opinion research.
== Works ==
Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic
(1933)
Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Max Horkheimer,
1944)
Composing for the Films (1947)
Philosophy of New Music (1949)
The Authoritarian Personality (1950)
Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life
(1951)
In Search of Wagner (1952)
Prisms (1955)
Against Epistemology: A Metacritique; Studies
in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies
(1956)
Dissonanzen.
Musik in der verwalteten Welt (1956)
Notes to Literature I (1958)
Sound Figures (1959)
Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy (1960)
Notes to Literature II (1961)
Hegel: Three Studies (1963)
Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords
(1963)
Quasi una Fantasia (1963)
The Jargon of Authenticity (1964)
Night Music: Essays on Music 1928–1962 (1964)
Negative Dialectics (1966)
Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link (1968)
Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords
(1969)
Aesthetic Theory (1970)
Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music; Fragments
and Texts (1993)
The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther
Thomas’ Radio Addresses (2000)
Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' (2002)
Current of Music (2006)
=== Musical works ===
Kinderjahr – Piano piece
1921 – Piano piece
2 Pieces for string quartet, Op. 2
1934 – 3 Short Pieces for piano
7 short works for orchestra, Op.4
2 songs for voice & orchestra after Mark Twain's
"Indian Joe"
2 songs with orchestra
3 stories by T Däubler for female chorus
1921 – String quartet
1920 – 6 studies for string quartet
1919: Für Sebastian Wedler
== See also ==
Positivism dispute
== References ==
Notes
Bibliography
Further reading
Edwards, Peter.
"Convergences and Discord in the Correspondence
Between Ligeti and Adorno", Music & Letters,
96/2, 2015.
Morgan, Ben.
The project of the Frankfurt School, Telos,
Nr. 119 (2001), 75–98
Scruton, Roger.
Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of
the New Left.
New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2015.
== External links ==
Adorno, Theodor.
Aesthetic Theory.
University of Minnesota Press, 1996
"Theodor Adorno".
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Zuidervaart, Lambert.
"Theodor W. Adorno".
In Zalta, Edward N. Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy.
Theodor W. Adorno at Find a Grave
Illuminations – The Critical Theory Project
Odysseus and the Siren Call of Reason: The
Frankfurt School Critique of Enlightenment
published in Other Voices, n.1 v.1, 1997.
"Adorno during the 1950s" by Juergen Habermas
Daniel Sherer, "Adorno's Reception of Loos:
Modern Architecture, Aesthetic Theory, and
the Critique of Ornament," Potlatch 3 (Spring
2014), 19–31.Online works by Adorno
Works by or about Theodor W. Adorno at Internet
Archive
The Adorno Reference Archive at Marxists.org.
Contains complete texts of Enlightenment as
Mass Deception, Supramundane Character of
the Hegelian World Spirit and Minima Moralia.
Negative Dialectics at efn.org.
