Music Encyclopedia:
Theodor W(iesengrund) Adorno |
(b Frankfurt, 11 Sept 1903; d Visp, 6 Aug 1969). German music sociologist. He began as a music critic and composer, then left Germany for Oxford and Los Angeles in the 1930s, returning to Frankfurt in 1949. He was a leader of the historical-idealist school of musico-sociological thinking.
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Theodor W. Adorno |
Biography:
Theodor W. Adorno |
Retaining his intellectual roots in Hegel and Marx, the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) moved freely across diverse academic disciplines to probe into the nature of contemporary European culture and the predicament of modern man. He was a leading member of the influential intellectual movement known as the Frankfurt School.
Theodor W. Adorno was born in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, on September 11, 1903, as the only son of an upper middle class family. His father, Oskar Wiesengrund, was an assimilated Jewish merchant, and his mother, Maria Calvalli-Adorno, was a musically gifted person of Italian-Catholic descent. He adopted his mother's patronomic Adorno in the late 1930s.
An economically secure and artistically rich home environment were conducive to the development of his talents in both music and the humanities. While attending a gymnasium in Frankfurt, he was encouraged by his mother to take piano lessons. His mastery of the skills of piano playing deepened and sustained his interest in the philosophical as well as technical aspects of music.
At 17 Adorno enrolled at the Frankfurt University. Although his chief interest was in philosophy, he took courses in psychology, sociology, and music, and wrote a dissertation on Husserl's phenomenology. Impressed by the power and novelty of Wozzeck, Alban Berg's opera, Adorno decided to undertake a serious study of music. The two years that Adorno spent in Vienna among a group of innovative composers including Berg and Arnold Schoenberg provided him with a first-hand professional knowledge of contemporary music and led him even to attempt musical composition. But his gift was manifested in his consideration of the nature and genesis of the modern music, especially the atonal system of Schoenberg. In a number of articles Adorno propounded the view that Schoenberg had discarded the tonality which was bound up with the bourgeois phase of cultural development and therefore was not a universal or perennial form of music.
Upon his return to Frankfurt in 1925 Adorno wrote a Habilitationsschrift, the writing which qualifies a person for university appointment, dealing with the philosophical and psychological issues of that time in Germany. It was not approved. He was successful, however, with a writing on Soren Kierkegaard, sponsored by the theologian Paul Tillich. The chief contention of his Habilitationsschriftwas that Kierkegaard, having rejected Georg Hegel's grandiose systematization of philosophy, retreated into pure subjectivity of his soul unhinged from the concrete social reality.
Adorno became associated with the Institute for Social Research, which was established in 1923 as an affiliated body of the Frankfurt, but it was personal rather than formal because of his youth and student status. It was Max Horkheimer, eight years Adorno's senior, who introduced Adorno to other senior scholars there who were embarked on a variety of projects aimed at determining the social conditions of Europe. Although Marxist and progressive in outlook, the researchers at the Institute were concerned with intellectual work rather than direct political action. Together they constituted what came to be known as the Frankfurt School credited with the creation of the Critical Theory.
Adorno began teaching philosophy at his alma mater in 1931 but the seizure of political power by Hitler disrupted his academic career and eventually forced him into exile. He took refuge first at Oxford, England, between 1934 and 1937 and thereafter in the United States until his return to Germany in 1949 to resume teaching at the Frankfurt University. The sufferings of the Jews and the crimes of the Third Reich became two of the major concerns in his philosophical reflections to the end of his life.
Early Writing Career
Adorno's association with the Institute was marked by the inclusion of his article entitled "The Social Condition of Music" in the first issue of the Institute's official journal in 1932. His article entitled "Jazz" in the same journal in 1936 revealed his life-long prejudice against that form of music which he argued was devoid of any aesthetic value.
Of more lasting value is his article on "The Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of the Listeners" in the 1936 issue of the Institute's journal. Here Adorno makes the observation that the commercially oriented music industry manipulates the musical tastes of the listeners by seductive psychological methods. He points out how helplessly the listeners are seduced into accepting the arbitrary cuts and interruptions in radio broadcasting. He maintains that such cuts are made for commercial gains and at the expense of the integrity of the original composition and performance and in utter disregard for the intelligence of the listeners. This article is valuable because it contains his lines of arguments against the culture industry to be developed more fully in his later writings.
During his stay in the United States between 1937 and 1949 Adorno was engaged in a number of projects which the members of the Institute for Social Research conducted individually or collectively. Although Adorno was disappointed by the quantitative analysis of cultural phenomena which he undertook at Princeton, he played a leading role in a large collaborative project which resulted in the publication of the influential book Authoritarian Personality.
Toward the end of the war Adorno and Horkheimer wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment published in Amsterdam in 1947. Defining enlightenment as demythologizing, the authors trace the process of taming of nature in Western civilization. The main thrust of the argument is that in the name of enlightenment a technological civilization which sets humans apart from nature has been developed and that such a civilization has become a cause of dehumanization and regimentation in modern society. They contend that the notion of reason is accepted in that civilization mainly in the sense of instrument for controlling nature, and subsequently people, rather than in the sense of enhancing human dignity and originality. In the new edition of the book published in 1969, shortly before Adorno's death, the authors declare that the enlightenment led to positivism and the identification of intelligence with what is hostile to spirit (Geistfeindschaft).
Return to Germany
After World War II many members of the Frankfort School remained in the United States or in Great Britain, but Horkheimer and Adorno returned to Germany. They were expected to provide intellectual leadership for postwar Germany. Horkheimer accepted the position of the Rector of the Frankfurt University and invited Adorno to join him. Adorno returned to Germany in 1949 although he spent a year in the United States in 1952.
Adorno lived up to what was expected of him by pouring out articles and books and by training a new generation of German scholars. His writings, voluminous as they were, however, did not contain many innovative ideas but rather restatement, in more elaborate forms and in a somewhat extravagant writing style, of the ideas which he had presented in his previous articles and books. But the true extent of his originality cannot be determined until the projected 23 volumes of his complete works are available.
In 1951 he published Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life consisting of articles which he wrote during the war. The most personal of his writings, the short essays in this book were written in an aphoristic style reminiscent of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrick Nietzsche. The purpose of the book is to examine how "objective forces" determine even the most intimate and immediate experience of an individual in contemporary society.
The Negative Dialectics, published in 1966, is a sustained polemic against the dream of philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel to construct philosophical systems enclosing coherently arranged propositions and proofs. One of the most terse statements in the book is "Bluntly put, closed systems are bound to fail." As this statement indicates, his aim in this book is to vindicate the vitality and intractability of reason.
Prisms, another major work published in 1967, contains essays on a wide range of topics from Thorstein Veblen to Franz Kafka. However, the main theme running throughout the book is the gradual decomposition of culture under the impact of instrumental reason. In this book and in Aesthetic Theory, his last major work unfinished at the time of his death in 1969 but edited and published posthumously, Adorno advances the thesis that the integrity of creative works lies in the autonomous acts of the artists who are at once submerged under and yet triumphant over social forces.
A persistent critic of positivism in philosophy and sociology and a bitter foe of commercialism and dehumanization promoted by the culture industry, Adorno championed individual dignity and creativity in an age increasingly menaced by what he regarded as mindless standardization and abject conformity. At a time when many academic philosophers were weary of dealing with large questions for fear of violating the canon of rigorous philosophical reasoning, Adorno boldly asserted that the function of philosophy is to make sense out of the totality of human experience.
Adorno, who was hailed as one of the ideological godfathers of the New Left Movement in the 1960s because of his indictment of both capitalism and communism, was criticized and humiliated by his former followers for his opposition to violent social activism. He was once forced out of his lecture room by female students at the Frankfurt University.
Further Reading
Theodor Adorno has the reputation of being one of the most obscure writers of this century. Virtually all of his translators into English seek the readers' forbearance for the inadequacy of their translations. The Suhrkamp Verlag, a German publisher, has embarked on the publication of his complete works in 23 volumes under the editorship of Rolf Tiedemann. David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (1980) and Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (1973) are useful guides to the Frankfurt School and contain valuable information on Adorno's role in the movement. Martin Jay, Adorno (1984) contains a brief biography of Adorno followed by expositions of his major ideas. Friedemann Grenz, Adornos Philosophie in Grundbegriffen (Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974) offers a clear and authoritative interpretation of Adorno's philosophy.
Additional Sources
Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, Prismatic thought: Theodor W. Adorno, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.
Jay, Martin, Adorno, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984.
Reijen, Willem van, Adorno: an introduction, Philadelphia: Pennbridge Books, 1992.
Political Dictionary:
Theodor W. Adorno |
(1903-69) German philosopher, leading figure of the Frankfurt School and exponent of Marxist Critical Theory. He also published widely on music and aesthetics. His main philosophical works were Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947 with Max Horkheimer); Minima Moralia (1951); and Negative Dialectics (1966). In Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno glossed Walter Benjamin and Friedrich Pollock. Benjamin was disenchanted with the Marxist faith in historical progress while Pollock argued that intervention in the economy had dissipated socialism as an alternative to authoritarian or democratic forms of state capitalism. Such arguments led Adorno to see capital's domination as permeating the whole of society. Control and manipulation of the masses took place through a standardized ‘culture industry’ which negated individuality and freedom. Such an ideological stranglehold led Adorno to conclude that working-class resistance was all but extinguished. Minima Moralia marked his rejection of Hegelian Marxism with his assertion that ‘the whole is the false’ in contradistinction to Hegel's claim that ‘the true is the whole’. This was reasserted in Negative Dialectics where he argued that the dialectic did not reach a unity between universal and particular as Hegel had thought. Rather, it led to a non-identity where universality is in the ascendant over particularity. This argument, coupled with his observation that philosophy lives on only because the moment to realize it was missed, encapsulates the pessimism of Adorno's thought within the Marxist tradition. In empirical work, Adorno was also associated with the development of the concept of the authoritarian personality. See also reification.
— Ian Fraser
German Literature Companion:
Theodor W. Adorno |
Adorno, Theodor W. (Frankfurt/Main, 1903-69, Visp, Valais, Switzerland), originally Wiesengrund-Adorno, studied music, philosophy, and sociology in Frankfurt, after which he continued his musical pursuits in Vienna, where his teachers included Alban Berg; at the same time he worked as a composer, music critic, and editor of the Viennese journal for avant-garde music, Anbruch. In 1930 he took up an appointment at Frankfurt University, working at the Institut für Sozialforschung with its director, the sociologist Max Horkheimer (1895-1973). Adorno, whose early research was on the philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), published his Habilitationsschrift on Kierkegaard (Kirkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, 1933). Dismissed from the university in 1933, he went to Oxford, periodically returning to Germany; in 1938 he emigrated to the USA, working for three years as musical director of Princeton's Radio Research Project. During this period he was in contact with Th. Mann whom he advised on the musical aspects of Doktor Faustus. From 1941 he collaborated again with Horkheimer, with whom he wrote Die Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947), a major work demonstrating the failure of the Aufklärung as a progressive force of enlightenment and urging the need for self-education (Selbstaufklärung). The relationship of the individual to society became one of the leading ideas of his theories. In 1949 he returned to Frankfurt University, was co-director of the reinstated Institut and, from 1956, the incumbent of the chair of philosophy and sociology. Although the negative slant of his critical deliberations aroused controversy, he was one of the most formidable intellectuals in West Germany's cultural life during the 1950s and 1960s.
The exceptionally wide-ranging subjects treated in Adorno's oeuvre, his highly perceptive mind, independent judgement, and pervasive preoccupation with aesthetics are in some measure reflected in his collection of aphorisms, Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (1951); its subtitle alludes to the manifestation of anti-Semitism during the National Socialist period which is a fundamental concern of his major work, Negative Dialektik (1966, ext. 1967, begun 1959). Proceeding from the need for a new way of thinking after Auschwitz, it sets out to demolish speculative philosophy which history has confounded. His detailed argumentation is particularly critical of the existential philosophy and language of M. Heidegger, on whom he wrote a separate discourse, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit (1964). In his seminal study Der Essay als Form (1958) he distinguishes between the language of poetry and its function in philosophy, in which the use of pseudo-poetic language intended to enhance meaning results in meaningless jargon. The study is printed in the collection Noten zur Literatur (4 vols., 1958-74), which contains detailed interpretations of works from major genres, at times in conjunction with music, including, as with Eichendorff, Heine, and George, the Lied. He himself contributed to the genre of the ‘lied’, setting poems by George and Trakl (‘Klage’)—part of his work as a composer, for which he was awarded the Schönberg medal in 1954. His theoretical works on music include Philosophie der neuen Musik (1949), Versuch über Wagner (1952), and Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie (1962, ext. 1968). In his Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft (1958, in Noten), proceeding from his rejection of art for ideological purposes, he maintains that an artist contributes to society by communicating inner experience which creates an awareness of human dignity. Its loss in modern society was a basic concern of his complex dialectics evolving through paradox and exposing contradictions.
The numerous editions of Adorno's work include Gesammelte Schriften (20 vols., 1970-86), Kompositionen (2 vols., 1979-83), Schubert (1984), Die musikalischen Monographien (1986), and Adorno-Noten (1984). His correspondence with W. Benjamin, Briefwechsel 1928-1940, ed. H. Lonitz, appeared in 1993.
Philosophy Dictionary:
Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno |
Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund (1903-1969) German sociologist and political thinker. Adorno was a leading member of the Frankfurt school, whose general stance he shared. His work belonged mainly to sociology, and was especially concerned with the contradictions and distortions imposed upon people by the post-Enlightenment world, with its sacrifice of life to instrumental, technological reasoning. Perhaps his best-known general work is The Authoritarian Personality (1950), describing the rigid, conformist personality-type, submissive to higher authority and bullying towards inferiors. Adorno's celebration of paradox and ambiguity, as well as his pessimistic take on the Enlightenment, have been influential in post-modernist literary and cultural criticism. Other works include The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1941) and Negative Dialiectics (1966).
Wikipedia:
Theodor W. Adorno |
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Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno (September 11, 1903 – August 6, 1969) was a German-born international sociologist, philosopher, and musicologist. He was a member of the Frankfurt School of social theory along with Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, and others. He was also the Music Director of the Radio Project from 1937 to 1941, in the U.S.
Already as a young music critic and amateur sociologist, Adorno was primarily a philosophical thinker. The label social philosopher emphasizes the socially critical aspect of his philosophical thinking, which from 1945 onwards took an intellectually prominent position in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School.
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Theodor (or "Teddie") was born in Frankfurt as an only child to the wealthy wine merchant Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund (1870–1941, of Jewish descent, converted to Protestantism) and the Catholic singer Maria Barbara, born Calvelli-Adorno. It was the second half of this name that he adopted as his surname upon becoming a naturalized American citizen in the 1930s ("Wiesengrund" was abbreviated to "W"). His musically talented aunt Agathe also lived with the family. The young Adorno passionately engaged the piano; he especially liked four-handed playing because, he later wrote, the need for coordination increased his skill and appreciation.[1] His childhood joy was increased by the family's annual summer sojourn in Amorbach. He attended the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gymnasium where he did well, graduating at the age of 17 at the top of his class. In his free time he took private lessons in composition with Bernhard Sekles and read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason together with his friend Siegfried Kracauer — 14 years his elder — on Saturday afternoons. Later he would proclaim that he owed more to these readings than to any of his academic teachers. At the University of Frankfurt (today's Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität) he studied philosophy, musicology, psychology and sociology. There he wrote his first academic work, a review of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. He completed his studies swiftly: by the end of 1924 he graduated with a dissertation on Edmund Husserl. Before his graduation, Adorno had already met with his most important intellectual collaborators, Max Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin.
During his student years in Frankfurt Adorno had written a number of music critiques. He believed composition and music criticism would be his future profession. With this goal envisioned, he used his relationship to Alban Berg to pursue studies in Vienna beginning in January, 1925. He also formed contacts with other greats of the Viennese School, Anton Webern and Arnold Schoenberg. Berg complimented Adorno's Two Pieces for String Quartet Op. 2 to Schoenberg, writing that "in its seriousness and concision and above all in the uncompromising purity of its whole structure, it may be described as belonging to Schoenberg's school (and to no other!)" [2] Schoenberg’s revolutionary atonality particularly inspired the 22-year-old to pen philosophical observations on the new music, though they were not well received by its proponents. The disappointment over this caused him to cut back on his music critiques to enable his career as academic teacher and social researcher to flourish. He did however remain editor-in-chief of the avant-garde magazine Anbruch. His musicological writing already displayed his philosophical ambitions. Other lasting influences from Adorno's time in Vienna included Karl Kraus, whose lectures he attended with Alban Berg, and Georg Lukács whose Theory of the Novel had already enthused him while attending Gymnasium and whose History and Class Consciousness he had reviewed a year previously.[3]
After returning from Vienna, Adorno experienced another setback. After his dissertation supervisor Hans Cornelius and Cornelius's assistant Max Horkheimer had voiced their concerns about Adorno's professorial thesis—a comprehensive philosophical-psychological treatise—he withdrew it in early 1928. Adorno took three more years before he received the venia legendi, after submitting the manuscript Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Ästhetischen ("Construction of the Aesthetic") to his new supervisor, Paul Tillich. The topic of Adorno's inaugural lecture was the Current Importance of Philosophy, a theme he considered programmatic throughout his life. In it, he questioned the concept of totality for the first time, anticipating his famous formula (directed against Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel) that the whole is the untrue (from Minima Moralia). However, Adorno's credential was revoked by the Nazis, along with those of all professors of non-Aryan descent, in 1933.
Among Adorno's first courses was a seminar on Benjamin's treatise The Origin of German Tragic Drama. His 1932 essay Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik ("On the Social Situation of Music") was Adorno's contribution to the first issues of Horkheimer's Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung ("Journal for Social Research") [4] ; it wasn't until 1938 that he joined the Institute for Social Research.
Beginning in the late 1920s during stays in Berlin, Adorno established close relations with Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch; Adorno had become acquainted with Bloch's first major work, Geist der Utopie, in 1921. Moreover, the German capital, Berlin, was also home of chemist Margarethe ('Gretel') Karplus (1902-1993), whom Adorno would marry in London in 1937. In 1934, fleeing from the Nazi regime, he emigrated to England, with hopes of obtaining a professorship at Oxford. Though Adorno was not appointed professor at Oxford, he undertook an in depth study of Husserl's philosophy as a postgraduate at Merton College. Adorno spent the summer holidays with his fiancée in Germany every year.
In 1936, the Zeitschrift featured one of Adorno's most controversial texts, "On Jazz" ("Über Jazz"). It should be noted that "jazz" was frequently used to refer to all popular music at the time of Adorno's writing. This article was less an engagement with this style of music than a first polemic against the blooming entertainment and culture industry. Adorno believed the culture industry was a system by which society was controlled through a top-down creation of standardized culture that intensified the commodification of artistic expression. This topic is also discussed in his essay On the Fetish-Character in Music (Zeitschrift, 1938), in which Adorno formulated his famous quote "every pleasure which emancipates itself from the exchange-value takes on subversive features".[5]
Extensive correspondence with Horkheimer, who was then living in exile in the United States, led to an offer of employment in America.
After visiting New York for the first time in 1937 he decided to resettle there. In Brussels he bade his parents, who followed in 1939, farewell, and said goodbye to Benjamin in Sanremo. Benjamin opted to remain in Europe, thus limiting their very rigorous future communication to letters. Adorno's relocation was enabled under an arrangement whereby part of his time was committed to the Institute for Social Research, which was then resettled at Columbia University, and the remainder as musical director on the 'Radio Project' (also known as Lazarsfeld/Stanton Analysis Programme) directed by the Austrian sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld at Princeton University. [6] That arrangement lasted until 1941. Very soon, however, his attention shifted to direct collaboration with Horkheimer. They moved to Los Angeles together, where he taught for the following seven years and served as the co-director of a research unit at the University of California. Their collective work found its first major expression in the first edition of their book Dialectic of Enlightenment (Dialektik der Aufklärung) in 1947. Faced with the unfolding events of the Holocaust, the work begins with the words:
'In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.'[7]
In this book, which was virtually ignored until republished in 1969, Adorno and Horkheimer posit a dynamic within civilization that tends towards self-destruction. They argue that the concept of reason was transformed into an irrational force by the Enlightenment. As a consequence, reason came to dominate not only nature, but also humanity itself. It is this rationalization of humanity that was identified as the primary cause of Fascism and other totalitarian regimes. Consequently, Adorno did not consider rationalism a path towards human emancipation. For that, he looked toward the arts.
After 1945 he ceased to work as a composer. By taking this step he conformed to his own famous maxim: 'To still write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric'[8]. He later retracted this statement, saying that: 'Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream... hence it may have been wrong to say that no poem could be written after Auschwitz.' He was consulted at length by Thomas Mann on the musicological details of the latter's novel Doktor Faustus. Apart from that, he worked on his 'philosophy of the new music' (Philosophie der neuen Musik) in the 1940s, and on Hanns Eisler's Composing for the films. He also contributed 'qualitative interpretations' to the Studies in Prejudice performed by multiple research institutes in the US that uncovered the authoritarian character of test persons through indirect questions.
After the war, Adorno, who had been homesick, did not hesitate long before returning to Germany. Due to Horkheimer's influence he was given a professorship in Frankfurt in 1949/1950, allowing him to continue his academic career after a prolonged hiatus. This culminated in a position as double Ordinarius (of philosophy and of sociology). In the Institute, which was affiliated with the university, Adorno's leadership status became ever more and more apparent, while Horkheimer, who was eight years older, gradually stepped back, leaving his younger friend the sole directorship in 1958/1959. His collection of aphorisms, Minima Moralia, led to greater prominence in post-war Germany when it was released by the newly founded publishing house of Peter Suhrkamp. It proposed a 'melancholy science' against the dark background of Fascism, Stalinism and Culture Industry, which seemingly offered no political or economic alternatives: "Wrong life cannot be lived rightly" (Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen).[9] The work raised Adorno to the level of a foundational intellectual figure in the West German republic, after a last attempt to get him involved in research in the USA failed in 1953.
Here is a list of his multifaceted accomplishments:
In 1966 extraparliamentary opposition (APO) formed against the grand coalition of Germany's two major parties CDU/CSU and SPD, directed primarily against the planned Notstandgesetze (emergency laws). Adorno was an outspoken critic of these policies, which he displayed by his participation in an event organized by the action committee Demokratie im Notstand ("Democracy in a State of Emergency"). When the student Benno Ohnesorg was shot by a police officer at a demonstration against a visit by the Shah of Iran, the left-wing APO became increasingly radicalized, and the universities became a place of unrest. To a considerable extent it was students of Adorno who interpreted a theory of revolt, thus executing a 'praxis' from 'Critical Theory'. It is said that Adorno asked for the help of police to remove the students that had occupied the Frankfurt Institute in fear of vandalism. Therefore Adorno in particular became a target of student action. He sharply criticised the anti-intellectual trend in the 60's Left, which he called a "pseudo-activity" attempting to overcome the separation of theory and praxis but getting caught up in its own publicity; he argued instead for "open thinking": "beyond all specialised and particular content, thinking is actually and above all the force of resistance" [10] On the other side of the spectrum, the right accused him of providing the intellectual basis for leftist violence. In 1969 the disturbances in his lecture hall, most famously as female students occupied his speaker's podium bare-breasted, increased to an extent that Adorno discontinued his lecture series. In a letter to Samuel Beckett, he wrote: "The feeling of suddenly being attacked as a reactionary at least has a surprising note."
One biographer on Adorno, Stefan-Müller Doohm, contends that he was convinced the attacks by the students were directed against his theories as well as his person and that he feared that the current political situation might lead to totalitarianism. He left with his wife on a vacation to Switzerland. Despite warnings by his doctor, he attempted to ascend a 3,000 meter high mountain, resulting in heart palpitations. The same day, he and his wife drove to the nearby town Visp, where he suffered heart palpitations once again. He was brought to the town's clinic. In the morning of the following day, August 6, he died of a heart attack.
| Part of a series on the |
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Frankfurt School |
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| Major works
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| Reason and Revolution Dialectic of Enlightenment Minima Moralia One-Dimensional Man Negative Dialectics |
| Notable theorists
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| Max Horkheimer · Theodor Adorno Herbert Marcuse · Walter Benjamin Franz Neumann · Friedrich Pollock Erich Fromm · Leo Löwenthal Helmut Reichelt · Jürgen Habermas |
| Important concepts
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| Critical theory · Dialectic · Praxis Psychoanalysis · Antipositivism Popular culture · Culture industry Advanced capitalism · Privatism |
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.
Whilst Adorno's work focuses on art, literature and music as key areas of sensual, indirect critique of the established culture and modes of thought, there is also a strand of distinctly political utopianism evident in his reflections especially on history. The argument, which is complex and dialectic, dominates his Aesthetic Theory, Philosophy of New Music and many other works.
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. 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 standardised production of consumption goods" but this is concealed under "the manipulation of taste and the official culture's pretense of individualism". [11] Adorno conceptualised this phenomenon as pseudo-individualization and the always-the-same. He saw this mass-produced culture as a danger to the more difficult high arts. Culture industries cultivate false needs; that is, needs created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom, creativity, and genuine happiness. But the subtle dialectician was also able to say that the problem with capitalism was that it blurred the line between false and true needs altogether.
The work of Adorno and Horkheimer heavily influenced intellectual discourse on popular culture and scholarly popular culture studies. At the time Adorno began writing, there was a tremendous unease among many intellectuals as to the results of mass culture and mass production on the character of individuals within a nation. By exploring the mechanisms for the creation of mass culture, Adorno presented a framework which gave specific terms to what had been a more general concern.
At the time this was considered important because of the role which the state took in cultural production; 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.
Many aspects of Adorno's work are relevant today and have been developed in many strands of contemporary critical theory, media theory, and sociology. 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.
His work on the culture industry has been criticized by such writers as Christian Bethune, who point out both that Adorno's critique is not based on a thorough knowledge of popular cultural forms, but also that it has an "end of history" tone to it. Taking Adorno's critique of popular music to its logical conclusion, one would have to conclude that Blues or rocknroll, jazz, rap or punk, were also simply one hundred percent commercial inventions for profit, with no contradictions within them.
Adorno, again along with the other principal thinkers of the Frankfurt school, attacked positivism in the social sciences and in philosophy. He was particularly harsh on approaches that claimed to be scientific and quantitative, although the collective work The Authoritarian Personality that appeared partly under Adorno's name was an influential empirical study in the social sciences in America after its publication in 1950.
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.[citation needed]
Critiques of Adorno's theories include other Marxists. Other critics include Ralf Dahrendorf and Karl Popper, positivist philosophers, neoconservatives, and many students frustrated by Adorno's style. Many Marxists accuse the Critical Theorists of claiming the intellectual heritage of Karl Marx without feeling the obligation to apply theory for political action.
According to Horst Müller's Kritik der kritischen Theorie ("Critique of Critical Theory"), Adorno posits totality as an automatic system. This 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.
Georg Lukács, a Marxist philosopher, infamously described Adorno as having taken up residence in the 'Grand Hotel Abyss', in his 1962 preface to The Theory of the Novel. This was understood to mean that Lukács (who at the time supported "socialist realism" and in general the Marxism of the East German regime) associated Adorno with a dated proto-Marxism, that indulged in despair, despite a comfortable bourgeois lifestyle.
Positivist philosophers accuse Adorno of theorizing without submitting his theories to empirical tests, basing their critique on Karl Popper's revision of Logical Positivism in which Popper substituted "falsifiability" as a criterion of scientificity for the original "verifiability" criterion of meaning proposed by A.J. Ayer and other early Logical Positivists. In particular, interpreters of Karl Popper apply the test of "falsifiability" to Adorno's thought and find that he was elusive when presented with contrary evidence.[citation needed]
Adorno's defenders[who?] reply to his positivist and conservative critics by pointing to his extensive numerical and empirical research, notably the "F-scale" in his work on Fascist tendencies in individual personalities in The Authoritarian Personality. And in fact, quantitative research using questionnaires and other tools of the modern sociologist was in full use at Adorno's Institute for Social Research.
Adorno also argued that the authoritarian personality would, of course, use culture and its consumption to exert social control, but that such control is inherently degrading to those who are subjected to it, and instead such personalities would project their own fear of loss of control on to society as a whole.
However, 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 sociologists thinks of a human essence is always changing over time.
Because Adorno believed that sociology needs to be self-reflective and self-critical, he 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 individual 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).
Thus Adorno 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 essays 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. Prior to going to the USA, and as shown in his rather infamous essay "On Jazz", Adorno seems to have thought that the USA was a cultural wasteland in which people's minds and responses were formed by what he called "the music of slaves".
One example of the clash of intellectual culture and Adorno's methods can be found in Paul Lazarsfeld, the American (and Americanized) sociologist for whom Adorno worked in the middle 1930s after fleeing Hitler.
As Rolf Wiggershaus recounts in The Frankfurt School, Its History, Theories and Political Significance (MIT 1995):
Adorno, however, rather than being arrogant, seems to have had a depressive personality, and Rolf Wiggershaus tells an anecdote which doesn't fit the image formed of an arrogant pedant: he noted that the typists at the Radio Research Project liked and understood what Adorno was saying about the actual effect of modern media. They may have responded to comments similar to that found in Dialectic of Enlightenment, written by Adorno with his close associate Max Horkheimer, that it appeared that movie-goers were less enthralled with the content even of "blockbusters" of the era, films that are now lauded by Hollywood mavens as "art", than by the air-conditioned comfort of the theaters—an observation reflected in movie business at the time by the expression that one found a good place to sell popcorn and built a theatre around it.
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 University of Minnesota Press. 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 less literal in their rendering of German sentences and words, and are more accessible to English readers.
Adorno's theoretical method is closely related to his understanding of music and Arnold Schoenberg and other contemporary composers' atonal (less so "twelve-tone") techniques (Adorno had studied composition for several years with Alban Berg), which challenged the hierarchical nature of traditional tonality in composition. For even if "the whole is untrue", for Adorno we retain the ability to form partial critical conceptions and submit them to a test as we progress towards a "higher" awareness. This role of a critical consciousness was a common concern in the Second Viennese School prior to the Second World War, and demanded that composers relate to the traditions more as a canon of taboos rather than as a canon of masterpieces that should be imitated. For the composer (poet, artist, philosopher) of this era, every work of art or thought was thus likely to be shocking or difficult to understand. Only through its "corrosive unacceptability" to the commercially-defined sensibilities of the middle class could new art hope to challenge dominant cultural assumptions.
Adorno's followers argue that he seems to have managed the very idea that one can abandon tonality while still being able to rank artistic and ethical phenomena on a tentative scale, not because he was a sentimentalist about this ability but because he saw the drive towards totality (whether the Stalinist or Fascist totality of his time) as derivative of the ability to make ethical and artistic judgement, which, following Kant, Adorno thought part of being human. Thus his method (better: anti-method) was to use language and its "big" concepts tentatively and musically, partly to see if they "sound right" and fit the data.
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