From Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia
- For the Italian family see Adorno
(Family)
Western
Philosophy
20th
century |
|
|
| Name: |
Theodor Adorno |
| Birth: |
September
11, 1903
(Frankfurt,
Germany) |
| Death: |
August
6, 1969
(Visp,
Switzerland) |
| School/tradition: |
critical
theory |
| Main interests: |
social
theory, psychoanalysis,
musicology,
cultural
studies |
| Notable ideas: |
The Culture Industry, the Authoritarian
Personality, the negative dialectic,
non-conformist
conformist |
| Influences: |
Kant,
Hegel,
Kierkegaard,
Marx,
Nietzsche,
Weber,
Freud,
Husserl |
| Influenced: |
J�rgen
Habermas |
Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno (September
11, 1903
� August
6, 1969)
was a German
sociologist,
philosopher,
musicologist,
and composer.
He was a member of the Frankfurt
School along with Max
Horkheimer, Walter
Benjamin, Herbert
Marcuse, J�rgen
Habermas, and others. He was also the Music Director of
the Radio
Project.
Already as a young music
critic and amateur sociologist, Theodor W. 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.
[edit]
Biography
[edit]
Early Frankfurt Years
Theodor (or 'Teddie') was born in Frankfurt
as an only child to the wine
merchant Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund (1870-1941,
of Jewish
descent, converted to Protestantism)
and the Catholic
singer Maria Barbara, born Calvelli-Adorno. It is the second
half of this name that he later adopted as his surname
(Wiesengrund was abbreviated to W). His musically talented
aunt Agathe also lived with the family. The young Adorno
passionately engaged in four-handed piano
playing. His childhood joy was increased by the family's
annual summer sojourn in Amorbach.
He attended the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gymnasium
where he proved to be a highly gifted student: at the
exceptionally early age of 17 he graduated from the Gymnasium
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
Universit�t) he studied philosophy, musicology, psychology
and sociology. He completed his studies swiftly: by the end
of 1924
he graduated with a dissertation
on Edmund
Husserl. (Jacques
Derrida, whose criticism of the use of the notions of
'immediacy' and 'self-presence' in Western metaphysics may
owe a debt to Adorno, also wrote his first thesis on Husserl.)
Before his graduation, Adorno had already met with his most
important intellectual collaborators, Max Horkheimer and Walter
Benjamin.
[edit]
Vienna intermezzo
During his student years in Frankfurt he had written a
number of music critiques. He believed this would be his
future profession. With this goal envisioned, he used his
relationship to Alban
Berg, who had made a name for himself with the opera
Wozzeck,
to pursue studies in Vienna
beginning in January, 1925.
He also formed contacts with other greats of the Viennese
School, namely to Anton
Webern and Arnold
Schoenberg. His own musical compositions are shaped by
the style of Berg and Schoenberg. 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
Luk�cs whose Theory of the Novel had already
enthused him while attending Gymnasium.
[edit]
The intermediate Frankfurt years
After returning from Vienna, Adorno experienced another
setback. After his dissertation supervisor Hans
Cornelius and Cornelius' assistant Max Horkheimer 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:
Construction of the aesthetic (Kierkegaard:
Konstruktion des �sthetischen) 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 � 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 "On the Social Situation of Music" ("Zur
gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik") was Adorno's
contribution to the first issue of Horkheimer's Zeitschrift
f�r Sozialwissenschaft ("journal for
sociology"); it wasn't until 1938
that he joined the Institute
for Social Research.
[edit]
Commuter between Berlin and Oxford
(1934-1937)
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
fianc�e in Germany every year. In 1936,
the Zeitschrift featured one of Adorno's most
controversial texts, "On Jazz" ("�ber
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 though a top-down
creation of standardized culture that intensified the
commodification of artistic expression. Extensive
correspondence with Horkheimer, who was then living in exile
in the United
States, led to an offer of employment in America.
[edit]
�migr� in the USA (1938-1949)
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 San
Remo. Benjamin opted to remain in Europe,
thus limiting their very rigorous future communication to
letters. Shortly after Adorno's arrival in New York,
Horkheimer's Institute for Social Research accepted him as
an official member. He also served as musical consult on the
'Radio
Project' (also known as Lazarsfeld/Stanton Analysis
Programme) directed by the Austrian
sociologist Paul
Lazarsfeld at Princeton. 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 Aufkl�rung)
in 1947.
Faced with the unfolding events of the
Holocaust, the work begins with the words:
- Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the
advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human
beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the
wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant
calamity. (2002 translation, 1)
- Seit je hat Aufkl�rung im umfassendsten Sinn
fortschreitenden Denkens das Ziel verfolgt, von den
Menschen die Furcht zu nehmen und sie als Herren
einzusetzen. Aber die vollends aufgekl�rte Erde strahlt
im Zeichen triumphalen Unheils. (1947 German
edition)
In this influential book, Adorno and Horkheimer outline
civilization's tendency 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: "writing poetry
after Auschwitz is barbaric" (Nach Auschwitz noch
ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch). (Adorno was,
however, to retract this statement later, 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 entrusted with the honorable task to advise Thomas
Mann on the musicological details of his 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 [anti-semitic]
Prejudice performed by multiple research institutes
in the US that uncovered the authoritarian
character of test persons through indirect questions.
[edit]
Late Frankfurt years (1949-1969)
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 purported a 'sad science' under the
impression of Fascism,
Stalinism
and Culture Industry, which seemingly offered no
alternative: "Wrong life cannot be lived rightly."
[1]
(Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen) 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 a list of his multifaceted accomplishments:
Adorno Monument in Frankfurt (desk, chair, lamp,
carpet and other utilities like the metronome of his
working room).
[edit]
Final years (1967-1969)
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 represented the spirit of revolt thus
executing an interpreted 'praxis' from 'Critical Theory'.
The leading figures of the Frankfurt School were not
prepared, despite empathizing with the students' causes, to
support their activism.
Moreover 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. 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."
Adorno became increasingly exhausted and fed up with the
situation on campus. His biographer Stefan-M�ller
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 may 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.
[edit]
Theory
Adorno was to a great extent influenced by Walter
Benjamin's application of Karl Marx's thought. Adorno,
along with other major Frankfurt School theorists such as
Horkheimer and Marcuse, argued that advanced capitalism was
able 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. 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's work focuses on art, literature and music as key
areas of sensuous, indirect critique of the established
culture and petrified modes of thought. The argument, which
is complex and dialectic, dominates his Aesthetic Theory,
Philosophy of New Music and many other works.
The culture industry is seen 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. Adorno conceptualises this phenomenon pseudo-individualization
and the always-the-same. Adorno 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, or genuine happiness.
The work on mass culture Adorno with Horkheimer. His work
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 his reflections on aesthetics and music
have only just begun to be debated, as a collection of
essays on the subject, many of which had not previously been
translated into English, has only recently been collected
and published as Essays on Music.
Adorno, 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 Frankfurt School work The
Authoritarian Personality that appeared under
Adorno's name was the single most influential empirical
study in the social sciences in America for decades 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 as an
instrument of domination that subsumed all objects under the
control of the subject, especially through the notion of
identity, i.e. of identifying as real in nature and society
only that which harmonized or fit with 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.
[edit]
Adorno and his critics
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.
[edit]
Marxist criticisms
According to Horst
M�ller'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, while M�ller argues
against the existence of such a system. In his argument, he
claims that Critical Theory provides no practical solution
for societal change. He concludes that J�rgen
Habermas, in particular, and the Frankfurt School, in
general, misconstrue Marx.
Georg
Lukacs, 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 Lukacs (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.
[edit]
Positivist criticisms
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. In Germany today there is
a group called EXIT!, who try to redefine the critical
theory of Adorno for the 21 century. Robert Kurz, author of
the book "Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus" (trans.
"The Black Book of Capitalism") is a kind of
sucessor of Adorno.
[edit]
Neoconservative criticism
Drawing on the Positivist critique, neoconservatives also
deride Adorno as a theorist unwilling to submit to
experimental falsification, and, they see in his complexity
of thought a resource for the "politically
correct" to provide long-winded justifications for
unworthy and opaque schemes of social engineering.
However, a more intricate criticism is offered by the
followers of Leo
Strauss, who also believe in a hermeneutics
of culture,
and often echo many of Adorno's criticisms of accessibility
and art. Their critique rests on the anti-capitalist nature
of Adorno's orientation, arguing that, while, mass culture
may consist of bread
and circuses, that these are essential for social
function and their removal or reduction in importance as
"useful lies", would threaten the continued
operation of the market and society, as well as higher
philosophical truth[citation needed].
[edit]
Adorno's responses to his critics
Adorno's defenders reply to his positivist and
neoconservative 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.
[edit]
Adorno's sociological methods
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 the men at the top of the Institute
(and they were all men) 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, rather nastily, called
"the music of slaves".
Finally, some criticisms of Adorno come from those who
feel forced to read his works, or the casual reader who
expects to find a neutral commentator, usually on music
issues. To some extent the problem is one of background:
many have noted Adorno had little sympathy for readers
without his extensive "mitteleurop�ische"
cultural background, which involved a thorough knowledge of
German philosophy, the history of literature and music, as
well as the ability to argue from first
principles.
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):
- 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...Sarnoff
was, it appears, genuinely concerned with the low level
of taste in this era of "Especially for You"
and other forgotten hits, but needed assurance that RCA
could viably air opera on Saturday afternoons.
Lazarsfeld, however, had trouble both with the prose
style of the work Adorno handed in and what Lazarsfeld
thought was Adorno's habit of "jumping to
conclusions" without being willing to do the scut
work of collecting data.
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.
[edit]
Adorno translated into English
While even German readers can find Adorno's work
difficult to understand, an additional problem for English
readers is that his German idiom is particularly difficult
to translate into English. A similar difficulty of
translation is true of Hegel, Heidegger, and a number of
other German philosophers and poets. As a result, some early
translators tended toward over-literalness. In recent years,
Edmund
Jephcott and Stanford
University Press have published new translations of some
of Adorno's lectures and books, including Introduction to
Sociology, Problems of Moral Philosophy and his
transcribed lectures on Kant's Critique
of Pure Reason and Aristotle's
"Metaphysics". These fresh translations are less
literal in their rendering of German sentences and words,
and are more accessible to English readers.
[edit]
Adorno and his theoretical
framework
Adorno's theoretical method is closely related to his
understanding of music and Arnold Schoenberg and other
contemporary composer's 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 totality 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, or
globalization of the market today) 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. For
example, his question in The Authoritarian Personality
(Adorno, T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. &
Sanford, R.N., 1950, ISBN
0-393-31112-0). This and other works written during his
sojourn in California was whether American Fundamentalist
authoritarianism could be spoken of as having a relationship
to Continental Fascism without sounding a false note in
terms of the partial totality of a "theory" that
American authoritarians MIGHT bring about a different but
equally or more pernicious form of Fascism in the US.
Adorno was concerned that a genuine sociology retain a
commitment to truth including the willingness to self-apply.
Today, his life can be read as a protest against what he
would call the "reification"
of political polls and spin as well as a culture that in
being aggressively "anti" high culture, seems
every year to make more and more cultural artifacts of less
and less quality that are consumed with some disgust by
their "fans", viewed as objects themselves.
- See also: Critical
Theory, New
musicology.
[edit]
Select bibliography (by
publication in English)
- Philosophy of Modern Music (1949)
- The
Authoritarian Personality (et al. 1950).
New York: Harper.
- Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton,
London: Routledge, 1973 (Published in German in 1966)
- Prisms (1967)
- Aesthetic Theory (Published in German in 1970)
- Dialektik
der Aufkl�rung (1944
with Horkheimer). Translations:
- Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John
Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1973.
- Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical
Fragments. Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans.
Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, Cal.:Stanford University
Press, 2002.
- Minima
Moralia (1974)
- Against Epistemology: A Metacritique; Studies in
Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies (1983).
- Critical Models: interventions and catchwords (1998).
- Metaphysics: Concept and Problems (2000).
- Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' (2001).
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References
Wikiquote
has a collection of quotations related to:
[edit]
Online works by Adorno
- The
Adorno Reference Archive at Marxists.org. Contains
complete texts of Enlightenment as Mass Deception
and Supramundane Character of the Hegelian World
Spirit
