Theodor W. Adorno
Theodor W. Adorno | |
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Hesse-Nassau, Prussia, German Empire | |
Died | 6 August 1969 (aged 65) , Switzerland |
Spouse |
20th-century philosophy |
Region | Western philosophy |
School | |
Doctoral advisor | Hans Cornelius Peter Gorsen |
Other academic advisors | Gilbert Ryle |
Doctoral students | Hans-Jürgen Krahl[1] |
Other notable students | Jürgen Habermas |
Main interests | |
Notable ideas |
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Part of a series on the |
Frankfurt School |
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Theodor W. Adorno (
He was a leading member of the
Amidst the vogue enjoyed by
Upon his return to Frankfurt, Adorno was involved with the reconstitution of German intellectual life through debates with
Life and career
Early years: Frankfurt
Theodor W. Adorno (alias: Theodor Adorno-Wiesengrund) was born as Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund in
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
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. Before 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 György 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.[13]
Adorno's intellectual nonconformism was also shaped by the repugnance he felt towards the nationalism that swept through the Reich during the First World War. Along with future collaborators Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and 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 how this tradition had discredited itself.[14] 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 into the intellectual circles of Berlin, where she became acquainted with Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, and Bloch, each of whom Adorno would become familiar with during the mid-1920s. After fourteen years, Gretel Karplus and Adorno 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,
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.[15]
Leaving gymnasium to study philosophy, psychology and sociology at
Vienna, Frankfurt, and Berlin
During the summer of 1924, the Viennese composer
[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.[18]
After leaving Vienna, Adorno traveled through Italy, where he met with Kracauer, Benjamin, and the economist
At this time Adorno struck up a correspondence with the composer Ernst Krenek, discussing problems of atonality and the twelve-tone technique. In a 1934 letter, he 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.[20]
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
Several months after qualifying as a lecturer in philosophy, Adorno delivered an inaugural lecture at the
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 an Institute member, the journal 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 a 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 favor of a form of ideology critique that held on to an idea of truth. Before his emigration in the autumn of 1934, Adorno began work on a Singspiel based on Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer titled The Treasure of Indian Joe, which he never completed. By the time he fled Hitler's Germany Adorno had already written over 100 opera or concert reviews and 50 critiques of music composition.
As the
Exile: Oxford, New York, Los Angeles
After the possibility of transferring his
At this time Adorno was in intense correspondence with
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."[28] 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 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."[29] In essays published by the institute's Zeitschrift, Adorno dealt with the atrophy of musical culture that had become instrumental in accelerating tendencies—toward 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 left out. Yet during the two years during which he worked on the Project, Adorno was prolific, publishing "The Radio Symphony", "A Social Critique of Radio Music", and "On Popular Music", texts that, along with the draft memorandum and other unpublished writings, are found in Robert Hullot-Kentor's 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
In November 1941 Adorno followed Horkheimer to what Thomas Mann called "German California",[31] setting up house in a Pacific Palisades neighborhood of German émigrés that included Bertolt Brecht and Schoenberg. Adorno arrived with a draft of his Philosophy of New Music, a dialectical critique of twelve-tone music that Adorno felt, while writing it, was 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.[32] The two set about completing their joint work, which transformed 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 waited 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 that 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
After the USA entered the war in 1941, the situation of the émigrés, now classed "
In addition to the aphorisms that conclude Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno put together a collection of aphorisms in honor of Horkheimer's 50th birthday that was later published as Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. These fragmentary writings, inspired by a renewed reading of Nietzsche, treated issues like
At the end of October 1949, Adorno left America for Europe just as The Authoritarian Personality was being published. Before his return, Adorno had reached an agreement with a Tübingen publisher to print an expanded version of Philosophy of New Music and 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.
Postwar 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
Essays on fascism
Starting with his 1947 essay Wagner, Nietzsche and Hitler,[36] Adorno produced a series of influential works to describe psychological fascist traits. One of these works was The Authoritarian Personality (1950),[37] published as a contribution to the Studies in Prejudice performed by multiple research institutes in the US, and consisting of 'qualitative interpretations' that uncovered the authoritarian character of test persons through indirect questions.[citation needed] 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."[38]
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
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 Löwenthal 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."[41]
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.[42]
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
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
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), and "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
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
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,
Relations between students and the West German state continued deteriorating. In spring 1968, a prominent SDS spokesman,
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."[49] 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.
Later years
Adorno began writing an introduction to a collection of poetry by Rudolf Borchardt, which was connected with a talk entitled "Charmed Language", delivered in Zürich, 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.[50] 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.
Intellectual influences
Like most theorists of the
Hegel
Adorno's adoption of Hegelian philosophy can be traced back to his inaugural lecture in 1931, in which he postulated, "only dialectically does philosophical interpretation seem possible to me" (Gesammelte Schriften 1: 338). Hegel rejected the idea of separating methods and content, because thinking is always thinking of something; dialectics for him is "the comprehended movement of the object itself."[52] Like Gerhard Schweppenhäuser , Adorno adopted this claim as his own, and based his thinking on one of the Hegelian basic categories, determinate negation,[53] according to which something is not abstractly negated and dissolved into zero, but is preserved in a new, richer concept through its opposite.[54]
Adorno understood his Three Studies of Hegel as "preparation of a changed definition of dialectics" and that they stop "where the start should be" (Gesammelte Schriften 5: 249 f.). Adorno dedicated himself to this task in one of his later major works, the Negative Dialectics (1966). The title expresses "tradition and rebellion in equal measure."[55] Drawing from Hegelian reason's speculative dialectic, Adorno developed his own "negative" dialectic of the "non-identical".[56]
Karl Marx
Marx's
Class theory, which appears less frequently in Adorno's work, also has its origins in Marxist thinking. Adorno made explicit reference to class in two of his texts: the first, the subchapter "Classes and Strata" (Klassen und Schichten), from his Introduction to the Sociology of Music; the second, an unpublished 1942 essay, "Reflections on Class Theory", published postmortem in his Collected Works.
Sigmund Freud
Psychoanalysis is a constitutive element of critical theory.[60] Adorno read Sigmund Freud's work early on, although, unlike Horkheimer, he never underwent analysis.[61] He first read Freud while working on his initial (withdrawn) habilitation thesis, The Concept of the Unconscious in the Transcendental Theory of Mind (1927). In it Adorno argued that "the healing of all neuroses is synonymous with the complete understanding of the meaning of their symptoms by the patient". In his essay "On the Relationship between Sociology and Psychology" (1955), he justified the need to "supplement the theory of society with psychology, especially analytically oriented social psychology" in the face of fascism. Adorno emphasized the necessity of researching prevailing psychological drives in order to explain the cohesion of a repressive society acting against fundamental human interests.[62]
Adorno always remained a supporter and defender of Freudian orthodox doctrine, "psychoanalysis in its strict form".[63] From this position, he attacked Erich Fromm[64] and later Karen Horney because of their revisionism. He expressed reservations about sociologized psychoanalysis[65] as well as about its reduction to a therapeutic procedure.[66]
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
Adorno was chiefly influenced by Max Weber's critique of disenchantment, György Lukács's Hegelian interpretation of Marxism, and 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 realize 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.[69]
Music and the Culture Industry
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".[70]
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 he called the "musical material". For Adorno, twelve-tone serialism constitutes a decisive, historically developed method of composition. The objective validity of composition, according to him, 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 that 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."[71] 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".[72] 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.[citation needed]
Adorno's analysis allowed for a critique of mass culture from the left that 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, for instance, as a form of
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, that is, 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.[citation needed] 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 criticize 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.[citation needed]
Adorno's reputation as a musicologist remains controversial. His sweeping criticisms of jazz and championing of the Second Viennese School in opposition to Stravinsky have caused him to fall out of favor.[74] The distinguished American scholar Richard Taruskin[75] 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."[76] 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".[77] 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."[70] 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."[78] Another composer, Luciano Berio said, in interview, "It's not easy to completely refute anything that Adorno writes – he was, after all, one of the most acute, and also one of the most negative intellects to excavate the creativity of the past 150 years... He forgets that one of the most cunning and interesting aspects of consumer music, the mass media, and indeed of capitalism itself, is their fluidity, their unending capacity for adaptation and assimilation."[79]
On the other hand, the scholar Slavoj Žižek has written a foreword to Adorno's In Search of Wagner,[80] in which Žižek attributes an "emancipatory impulse" to the same book—although Žižek also suggests that fidelity to this impulse demands "a betrayal of the explicit theses of Adorno's Wagner study".[81]
Writing in the New Yorker in 2014,
Adorno's critique of commercial media capitalism continues to be influential. There is much scholarship influenced by Adorno on how Western entertainment industries strengthen transnational capitalism and reinforce a Western cultural dominance.[83] Adornean critique can be found in works such as Tanner Mirrlees' "The US Empire's Culture Industry" which focus upon how Western commercial entertainment is artificially reinforced by transnational media corporations rather than being a local culture.[84]
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:[85]
- 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.[86] 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.[citation needed]
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".[87] 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 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"[88] "to keep people obedient and subservient to the status quo of existing power structures."[89]
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."[89]
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 a media system that takes advantage of musical hooks mass produced via electronic media. The masses have become conditioned by the culture industry, which makes the impact of standardization far more widespread. Not recognizing 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."[90]
Tony Waters and David Philhour have tested Adorno's ideas and used musical intros from pop songs, and asked students in The United States, Germany, the United States, and Thailand what they recognize. They found that indeed, as Adorno hypothesized, the song intro recognition has spread around the world for some specific commercial pop songs. But they also demonstrate that there are still national differences in recognition. [91]
Adorno's responses to his critics
As a pioneer of a self-reflexive sociology who prefigured
Adorno's sociological methods
Adorno 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. 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 US, and reprinted in the Critical Models essays collection, 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".[94]
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".[95]
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.[96]
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
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)
- Introduction to the Sociology of Music (1962)
- 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)
- Posthumously published
- 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
- Für Sebastian Wedler (1919)
- 6 Studies for string quartet (1920)
- Piano piece (1921)
- String quartet (1921)
- 3 stories by Theodor Däubler for female chorus (1923–1945)
- 2 Pieces for string quartet, Op. 2 (1925/26)
- 7 short works for orchestra, Op.4 (1929)
- 3 Short Pieces for piano (1934)
- 2 songs for voice & orchestra after Mark Twain's "Indian Joe" (1932/33)
- Kinderjahr – Six Piano pieces from op. 68 of Robert Schumann (1941)
- 2 songs with orchestra
See also
References
Citations
- S2CID 144076949.
- ^ Christine Fillion (Fall 2012). "Adorno's Marginalien zu Theorie und Praxis: In Praise of Discontinuity". Humanitas. 2 (1).
- ^ Adorno/Horkheimer, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.
- ^ Theodor W. Adorno (trans. Francis McDonagh), "Commitment" [based on a March 1962 radio broadcast under the title "Engagement oder künstlerische Autonomie"] in Andrew Arato, Eike Gebhardt (eds.), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, Continuum, 1978, pp. 300–318 (modernist art as an opposition to the conventional experience of the mass media).
- ^ Gary Day, Literary Criticism: A New History, Edinburgh University Press, 2008, p. 265.
- ^ Adorno defined maturity as the courage and the ability to use one's own understanding independently of dominant heteronomous patterns of thought; see Macdonald, Iain (2011), "Cold, cold, warm: Autonomy, intimacy and maturity in Adorno", Philosophy & Social Criticism, 37(6), 669–689.
- concord while at the same time working to abolish discordance" (Adorno quoted by James Martin Harding in Adorno and "a Writing of the Ruins", SUNY Press, 1997, p. 30); variant translation by Robert Hullot-Kentor in Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 1997, University of Minnesota Press, p. 168: "Paradoxically, art must testify to the unreconciled and at the same time envision its reconciliation; this is a possibility only for its nondiscursive language."
(Original German: Paradox hat sie das Unversöhnte zu bezeugen und gleichwohl tendenziell zu versöhnen; möglich ist das nur ihrer nicht-diskursiven Sprache.). - ^ Oxford Dictionary of English
- ISBN 978-3-11-018202-6.
- ^ "Duden | Adorno | Rechtschreibung, Bedeutung, Definition". Duden (in German). Retrieved October 22, 2018.
- ^ "NobelPrize.org". April 2020. Retrieved November 11, 2020.
- ^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 28.
- ^ Adorno 1992, p. 212.
- ^ Claussen 2008, pp. 66–69.
- ^ Adorno 1992, pp. 58–59.
- ^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 46.
- ^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 48.
- ^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 98.
- ^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 105.
- ^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 118.
- ^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 123.
- ^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 129.
- ^ Adorno 2000, p. 38.
- ^ Adorno 2000, p. 35.
- ^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 175.
- ^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 178.
- ^ Müller-Doohm 2005, pp. 237, 239.
- ^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 247.
- ^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 249.
- ^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 262.
- ^ Claussen 2008, p. 116.
- ^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 275.
- ^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 293.
- ^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 316.
- ^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 332.
- ^ Adorno, T. (1947). Wagner, Nietzsche and Hitler. The Kenyon Review, 9(1), 155-162.
- ^ Adorno, Politics and Economics in the Interview Material, ch.17
- ^ Hammer, Espen (2006) Adorno and the political, pp.56–7
- ^ Hammer (2006) p.69
- ^ Andreas Dorschel, 'Der Geist ist stets gestört', in: Süddeutsche Zeitung nr. 129 (7 June 2004), p. 14.
- ^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 338.
- ^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 343.
- ^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 362.
- ^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 397.
- ^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 451.
- ^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 458.
- ^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 463.
- ^ Siemens, Daniel. Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts, p. 327. Yale University Press, 2017.
- ^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 464.
- ^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 475.
- ^ Lorenz Jäger: Adorno. Eine politische Biographie. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 2005, p. 32.
- ^ Schweppenhäuser, Gerhard [in German] (2009). Theodor W. Adorno zur Einführung (in German) (5th ed.). Hamburg: Junius. p. 31.
- ^ Schweppenhäuser 2009, pp. 30–38.
- ^ In a conversation between Horkheimer, Adorno and Gadamer about Nietzsche's moral criticism, Adorno complained that Nietzsche "lacked the concept of definite negation," that is, "the fact that when one opposes something that is recognized as negative with another, the negated in this other is in a new form must be included". Max Horkheimer: Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 13: Nachgelassene Schriften 1949–1972. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1989, p. 116.
- ^ Tilo Wesche: Negative Dialektik: Kritik an Hegel. In: Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm (Hrsg.): Adorno-Handbuch. Leben – Werk – Wirkung. J. B. Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart 2011, p. 318.
- ^ Albrecht Wellmer: Adorno, Anwalt des Nicht-Identischen. In: id.: Zur Dialektik von Moderne und Postmoderne. Vernunftkritik nach Adorno. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1985, pp. 135–166. In German.
- ^ Jürgen Habermas: Theorie und Praxis. Sozialphilosophische Studien. Luchterhand, Neuwied 1963, p. 170.
- ^ Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, p. 274.
- ^ Jan Rehmann: "Ideologiekritik. Die Ideologiekritik der Kritischen Theorie". In: Uwe H. Bittlingmayer / Alex Demirović / Tatjana Freytag (eds.): Handbuch Kritische Theorie. Vol. 1. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2019, pp. 663–700, here p. 664.
- ^ Martin Jay: III. Die Integration der Psychoanalyse. In: id.: Dialektische Phantasie. Die Geschichte der Frankfurter Schule und des Instituts für Sozialforschung 1923–1950. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1976, pp. 113–142.
- ^ Christian Schneider: Die Wunde Freud. In: Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm (Hrsg.): Adorno-Handbuch. Leben – Werk – Wirkung. J. B. Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart 2011, p. 284.
- OCLC 890842414.
- ^ Theodor W. Adorno: "Probleme der Moralphilosophie". Nachgelassene Schriften, section 4, vol. 10: Vorlesungen. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1996, p. 123.
- ^ Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer: Briefwechsel. Vol. I: 1927–1937. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2003, pp. 129 f.
- ^ He summarizes this in the seemingly paradoxical formulation: "The more psychoanalysis is sociologized, the duller its organ for recognizing socially caused conflicts becomes". (GS 8: 28).[clarification needed]
- ^ Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 590.
- ^ Durão 2008.
- ^ Adorno 2003, p. 167.
- ISBN 978-0-226-40336-6.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-199-74753-5.
- ^ Laughey 2007, 123.
- ^ Arato & Gephart 1982, p. 280.
- ^ Adorno 2002.
- ^ Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Jamie Owen Daniel, "On Jazz." Discourse, Vol. 12, No. 1, A Special issue on Music (Fall-Winter 1989-90), pp. 45-69
- ^ Taruskin, Richard. The Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University Press, 2005, p. xiv.
- ^ Rosen, C. (2000, p117) Critical Entertainments: Music Old and New. Harvard University Press.
- ^ Hobsbawm, Eric (1993, p. 300) The Jazz Scene . New York, Pantheon.
- ^ Letter of 5 December 1949, quoted in Stuckenschmidt, Arnold Schoenberg: His Life, World and Work, trans. H. Searle London: John Calder, 1977.
- ^ Berio, L. (1985, p27) Two Interviews. New York & London, Marion Boyars.
- ^ Adorno, Theodor (2005). In Search of Wagner. London and New York: Verso.
- ^ Žižek, Slavoj. (2005). Foreword: Why Is Wagner Worth Saving? In: Adorno, Theodor. (2005). In Search of Wagner. London and New York: Verso.
- ^ "The Naysayers". The New Yorker. September 7, 2014.
- ^ Lee Artz (2015). Global Entertainment Media: A Critical Introduction. 188-200.
- ^ Hearts and Mines: The US Empire's Culture Industry Tanner Mirrlees . Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2016. 103-130 pp.
- ^ Adorno, Theodor (1941). "Popular Music". Essays on Music.
- ^ Zuidervaart, Lambert. "Theodor W. Adorno". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. According to Adorno, society and culture form a sociohistorical totality, such that the pursuit of freedom in society is inseparable from the pursuit of enlightenment in culture.
- ^ Laughey 2007, 204.
- ^ Adorno 1990,[page needed].
- ^ a b Laughey 2007, 125.
- ^ Laughey 2007, 124.
- ^ Tony Waters and David Philhour (2019). Cross-National Attunement to Popular Songs across Time and Place: A Sociology of Popular Music in the United States, Germany, Thailand, and Tanzania Social Sciences, 8(11), 305; https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci8110305
- ^ For a comparison of Adorno's and Bourdieu's rather divergent conceptions of reflexivity, see: Karakayali, Nedim (April 2004). "Reading Bourdieu with Adorno: The Limits of Critical Theory and Reflexive Sociology", Sociology (Journal of the British Sociological Association), 38(2), pp. 351–368.
- ^ Berger, Frank; Setzepfandt, Christian (May 7, 2011). "Frankfurt gnadenlos entdecken". rezensionen.ch. Retrieved December 16, 2012.
- ^ Theodor W. Adorno, Stichworte. Kritische Modelle 2, 2nd edition. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969, p.145
- ^ Wiggershaus 1995, p. 242.
- ^ Theodor W. Adorno, Stichworte. Kritische Modelle, 2nd edition. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969, p. 122 (also cited in Friedemann Grenz, Adornos Philosophie in Grundbegriffen. Auflösung einiger Deutungsprobleme. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974, p. 43.).
Sources
- Adorno, Theodor (1990). "On Popular Music", translated by George Simpson. In On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, edited by Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, 301–14. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-679-72288-2.
- Adorno, Theodor (1992). Notes to Literature: Volume two. New York: Columbia University Press.
- Adorno, Theodor (2000). Brian O'Connor (ed.). The Adorno Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
- Adorno, Theodor (2002). Essays on Music. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Adorno, Theodor (2003). Negative Dialectics. New York: Continuum.
- Arato, Andrew; Gephart, Eike, eds. (1982). The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. New York: Continuum.
- Claussen, Detlev (2008). Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Durão, Fabio Akcelrud (July–August 2008). "Robert Hullot-Kentor in Conversation with Fabio Akcelrud Durão". The Brooklyn Rail: Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture. Retrieved November 28, 2011.
- Laughey, Dan (2007). Key Themes in Media Theory. England: Open University Press.
- Müller-Doohm, Stefan (2005). Adorno: A Biography. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
- Wiggershaus, Rolf (1995). The Frankfurt School, Its History, Theories and Political Significance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Further reading
- Bowie, Andrew. Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy, Cambridge: Polity 2013
- Brunger, Jeremy (5 May 2015). "The Administered World of Theodor Adorno". Numéro Cinq magazine.
- Delanty, Gerard (ed.) Theodor W. Adorno. London: SAGE, 2004.
- Edwards, Peter. "Convergences and Discord in the Correspondence Between Ligeti and Adorno", Music & Letters, 96/2, 2015.
- Gerhardt, Christina (ed.). "Adorno and Ethics". New German Critique 97 (2006): 1–3.
- Hogh, Philip. Communication and Expression: Adorno's Philosophy of Language. Translated by Antonia Hofstätter. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017.
- Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno. Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.
- Jarvis, Simon. Adorno: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity, 1998.
- Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research 1923–1950. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996.
- Jay, Martin. Adorno. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1984.
- Jeffries, Stuart. Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School. New York: Verso, 2016.
- Morgan, Ben. "The project of the Frankfurt School", Telos, Nr. 119 (2001), 75–98
- Paddison, Max. Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture: Essays on Critical Theory. London: Kahn & Averill, 2004. ISBN 1-871-08281-1.
- Scruton, Roger. Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left. New York: Bloomsbury US, 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. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- 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.
- Sound recordings with Theodor W. Adorno in the Online Archive of the Österreichische Mediathek (Scientific lectures) (in German)
- Theodor W. Adorno discography at Discogs
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.