Theodor W. Adorno

• 1. Introduction

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  Theodor W. Adorno opened his first lecture of the summer semester in 1969 by inviting students to ask questions whenever they arose. A student wrote on the blackboard: "If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease." Three women students then walked to the lectern, bared their breasts and scattered flower petals over his head. The philosopher fled the room. That summer, on the 6th of August 1969, he died of a heart attack while on vacation in Visp.

  Adorno was a German philosopher, sociologist and music critic, and a leading figure of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. His books strongly influenced the European New Left, the very milieu that produced his hecklers. How did a trained composer become one of the century's sharpest critics of mass culture? What did he mean by the culture industry? And why did the students who read him end up treating him as an enemy?

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• 2. Prodigy Turned Philosopher

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  Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund was born in Frankfurt on the 11th of September 1903, the only child of Maria Calvelli-Adorno della Piana and Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund. His mother was a Catholic from Corsica who had worked as a professional singer. His father, an assimilated Jew who had converted to Protestantism, ran a successful wine-export business. Maria wanted her own surname kept alive, so his earliest publications carried the name Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno. On his application for US citizenship, the Wiesengrund part was dropped.

  Music filled the household, thanks to Maria and her sister Agathe, who lived with the family. Maria could say she had performed at the Imperial Court in Vienna, and Agathe was known as both a singer and a pianist. Adorno later recalled being a prodigy who could play pieces by Beethoven on the piano by the age of twelve.

  From 1913 to 1921 he attended the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gymnasium, and he graduated at the top of his class. Around then he read György Lukács's The Theory of the Novel and Ernst Bloch's The Spirit of Utopia. Of Bloch's book he later said: "I do not believe I have ever written anything without reference to it, either implicit or explicit." The nationalism of the First World War disgusted him, as it did Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer and Bloch. All of them were shaken that figures such as Max Weber, Max Scheler and Georg Simmel had backed the war.

  For years, the literary editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung, Siegfried Kracauer, read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason with him on Saturday afternoons. Adorno claimed he owed more to those sessions than to his academic teachers. At university he studied philosophy, psychology and sociology. Alongside that he studied composition at the Hoch Conservatory and took private lessons from Bernhard Sekles and Eduard Jung. He began writing concert reviews too. In 1923 he called Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale a "dismal Bohemian prank." Of false transcendence he warned: "No cathedral," he wrote, "can be built if no community desires one."

  In the summer of 1924 Adorno earned his doctorate with a study of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, supervised by Hans Cornelius. Cornelius's seminars also brought him together with Horkheimer, who introduced him to Friedrich Pollock. That same summer, Alban Berg's Three Fragments from Wozzeck premiered in Frankfurt, and Adorno introduced himself to the composer. In February 1925 he moved to Vienna to study with Berg. He met twice a week with Berg, took piano lessons from Eduard Steuermann and befriended the violinist Rudolf Kolisch. Adorno called Berg "my master and teacher."

  In November 1927 Adorno handed Cornelius a habilitation manuscript on the concept of the unconscious. Cornelius advised him to withdraw it, because it sat too close to his own way of thinking. Adorno turned back to composing, and his Two Pieces for String Quartet, Op. 2, had already been performed in Vienna in December 1926. In 1929 he accepted an offer from Paul Tillich to write a new habilitation on Kierkegaard. The university granted him the right to teach in February 1931.

  His inaugural lecture at the Institute for Social Research was titled "The Actuality of Philosophy." It caused a scandal, because it departed from the program Horkheimer had laid out a year earlier. Philosophy could not grasp the totality of the real, Adorno said, but it might "explode in miniature the mass of merely existing reality." Two years later, on the 23rd of March 1933, the day his revised Kierkegaard study was published, Hitler seized dictatorial powers.

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• 3. Exile and the Radio Project

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  In March 1933, the Frankfurt criminal police searched the offices of the Institute for Social Research. Adorno's house on Seeheimer Strasse was searched in July. In September his right to teach was revoked. The Reich Chamber of Literature then rejected his membership application. Members, it said, had to belong to the German nation "by profound ties of character and blood." As a "non-Aryan," he was told, "you are unable to feel and appreciate such an obligation." Fifteen years of exile followed.

  In June 1934, with help from the Academic Assistance Council, Adorno registered as an advanced student at Merton College, Oxford. Under Gilbert Ryle he worked on a critique of Husserl. He kept returning to Germany to see his parents and Gretel Karplus, who was still working in Berlin. Gretel came from a Berlin family whose factory had close ties to his father's firm. After fourteen years, Gretel and Adorno married in Britain on the 8th of September 1937.

  Oxford brought grief. His aunt Agathe died in June 1935, and Berg died that December. Adorno never gave up hoping to complete Berg's unfinished opera Lulu. In December 1937, on the Italian Riviera, he read drafts of his studies on Wagner to Benjamin, who praised "the precision of their materialist deciphering." It was their final meeting.

  On the 16th of February 1938 Adorno sailed for New York to join the Princeton Radio Project, directed by the Austrian sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld. The project wanted data on whether broadcasts could be aimed at particular groups of listeners. Listeners were to press a button to signal whether they liked a piece of music. Adorno was appalled: "I reflected that culture was simply the condition that precluded a mentality that tried to measure it." He proposed individual interviews instead and, within three months, produced a 160-page memorandum titled "Music in Radio."

  Adorno cared about what radio did to music once it became part of everyday life. A Beethoven symphony heard "while the listener is walking around or lying in bed," he wrote, would differ from one heard in a concert hall. There, he said, "people sit as if they were in church." His colleagues were unmoved. When Lazarsfeld applied for funding a second time at the end of 1939, the musical section was left out. Horkheimer soon found Adorno a permanent post at the Institute.

  Benjamin fled Paris and tried an illegal border crossing into Spain. When he learned that his Spanish visa was invalid, and feared being sent back to France, he took an overdose of morphine tablets. Horkheimer had already described the book he and Adorno were planning. In view of what threatened to engulf Europe, he wrote, their work was "a kind of message in a bottle."

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• 4. German California

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  In November 1941 Adorno followed Horkheimer to what Thomas Mann called "German California." He set up house in a Pacific Palisades neighborhood of German émigrés that included Bertolt Brecht and Arnold Schoenberg. Adorno arrived with a draft of Philosophy of New Music, a dialectical critique of twelve-tone music. Horkheimer's verdict was glowing: "If I have ever in the whole of my life felt enthusiasm about anything, then I did on this occasion."

  Their planned book on dialectical logic became a rewriting of the history of rationality and the Enlightenment. A small mimeographed edition appeared in May 1944 under the title Philosophical Fragments. Three years later the Amsterdam publisher Querido Verlag issued it as Dialectic of Enlightenment. Its chapters read reason as both a liberation from nature and a further way of dominating it. They offered readings of Homer's Odyssey and of the Marquis de Sade, and they analyzed the culture industry and antisemitism.

  After the United States entered the war, émigrés like Adorno were classed as "enemy aliens." They could not leave their homes between 8pm and 6am, and they could not travel more than five miles from them. Adorno was not naturalized until November 1943. During those restricted years he assembled a book of aphorisms in honor of Horkheimer's 50th birthday. It became Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. It treated emigration, totalitarianism and individuality, along with ordinary matters such as giving presents, dwelling, and the impossibility of love.

  California also gave Adorno new company. He met Charlie Chaplin and became friends with the director Fritz Lang and the composer Hanns Eisler. With Eisler he completed a study of film music in 1944. It urged that avant-garde music supplement a film's images rather than merely accompany them. Mann, too, drew him in. While writing Doktor Faustus, the novelist asked how Adorno would compose the fictional Leverkühn's work "if you were in league with the Devil."

  With the Nevitt Sanford-led Public Opinion Study Group and the American Jewish Committee, Adorno and Horkheimer then turned to antisemitism and authoritarianism. Adorno wrote an analysis of a Californian radio preacher, Martin Luther Thomas. Fascist propaganda of this kind, he wrote, "simply takes people for what they are." They were, in his words, "genuine children of today's standardized mass culture" who had been robbed of much of their autonomy. The result was the 1950 study The Authoritarian Personality, which pioneered a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods and introduced the F-scale personality test.

  At the end of October 1949 Adorno left America for Europe, just as that study was being published. Before leaving he had finished two compositions. One was Four Songs for Voice and Piano by Stefan George, Op. 7. The other was Three Choruses for Female Voices, Op. 8, on poems by Theodor Däubler.

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• 5. The Culture Industry

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  In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer gave a name to the mass media that produced and circulated cultural goods: the culture industry. Adorno argued that it eliminated critical impulses and made people passive. "Capitalist production so confines them, body and soul," he wrote, "that they fall helpless victims to what is offered them." Cultural goods only appear to differ. Underneath, he said, "the same thing is offered to everybody by the standardized production of consumption goods."

  His names for the trick were pseudo-individualisation and the always-the-same. Small modifications and inexpensive add-ons persuade each buyer that a product was tailored to personal taste. The buyer keeps returning for the next one, and the corporation earns more. Adorno's scheme for popular songs even broke the experience of recognition into five parts. They run from vague remembrance and actual identification to subsumption by a label, self-reflection, and a psychological transfer of recognition-authority to the object.

  Consider the music itself. Adorno separated what he called apologetic music, the produced and promoted output of the pop industry, from critical music. Apologetic music, built from interchangeable parts, acts like a "social cement." Adorno also thought that jazz and popular music made capitalism look "aesthetically pleasing" and "agreeable." During his postwar stay in Santa Monica he turned the same suspicion on newspaper horoscopes. That content analysis is collected as The Stars Down to Earth. He also wrote the essays "Television as Ideology" and "Prologue to Television."

  Critics from the political right had long attacked popular culture on moral grounds, pointing to sexual and racial influences. Adorno offered a critique from the left that located the problem elsewhere. In his view, the trouble lay not in the content of mass culture but in the objective conditions under which it was produced. He even tied radio to the rise of fascism in Germany. "The authority of radio," he wrote, "becomes greater the more it addresses the listener in his privacy."

  Adorno's judgments about music itself earned him fierce opponents. He held that musical progress depends on how a composer deals with the possibilities and limits of the "musical material." That belief led him to champion the Second Viennese School and to fault Stravinsky for retreating into forms of the past. The historian Eric Hobsbawm, himself a Marxist, said Adorno's jazz writing held "some of the stupidest pages ever written about jazz." The scholar Richard Taruskin called him "preposterously overrated," and the pianist Charles Rosen called The Philosophy of New Music "largely a fraudulent presentation."

  Even Schoenberg, whom Adorno championed, did not return the favor: "I have never been able to bear the fellow." The composer Luciano Berio was more generous. He found Adorno hard to refute. But Adorno, he said, forgot the "unending capacity for adaptation and assimilation" in consumer music and in capitalism itself. The scholar Slavoj Žižek, writing a foreword to In Search of Wagner, found an "emancipatory impulse" in that book.

  In 2014 the music critic Alex Ross wrote in the New Yorker that Adorno still mattered in the digital age. Culture, Ross observed, appeared more monolithic than ever, with Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon presiding over unprecedented monopolies. Scholars have since drawn on Adorno to study transnational media firms, as in Tanner Mirrlees's book The US Empire's Culture Industry.

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• 6. Negative Dialectics

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  Adorno's Three Studies of Hegel, he explained, were a preparation for "a changed definition of dialectics." From Hegel he took determinate negation. A thing is not simply wiped out by its opposite but preserved in a richer concept. The result was Negative Dialectics, whose title expresses, in his words, "tradition and rebellion in equal measure." Its central target was what he called identity thinking. That is the habit of treating as real only what fits dominant concepts, and of dismissing everything else as nonexistent.

  The gap between a concept and its object, which no concept can fully close, became the source of his critical force. Adorno traced identity thinking back to the commodity form, which assumes a false equivalence between different things. His "exchange society," with its "insatiable and destructive appetite for expansion," reads easily as a portrait of capitalism. He took the categories of commodity fetishism and reification from György Lukács's History and Class Consciousness. Jürgen Habermas called Marxist critique in Adorno's work a "silent orthodoxy."

  Freud entered Adorno's thinking while he drafted his first, withdrawn habilitation. Unlike Horkheimer, Adorno never underwent analysis. Even so, he defended what he called "psychoanalysis in its strict form" and attacked the revisionism of Erich Fromm and, later, Karen Horney. In a 1955 essay on sociology and psychology, he argued that a theory of society needs psychology. Otherwise it cannot explain how a repressive order holds together against human interests.

  Hullot-Kentor, Adorno's translator, said the central motive of his work was to ask "how life could be more than the struggle for self-preservation." In Negative Dialectics, Adorno called self-preservation "the law of doom thus far obeyed by history." He also argued that advanced capitalism had neutralized the forces that might have overthrown it. The book opens with the claim that philosophy remains necessary because the moment to realize it was missed. Adorno and Horkheimer also attacked positivism, and critics say they stretched the label too far when they applied it to Wittgenstein and Karl Popper.

  Not everyone was persuaded. Lorenz Jäger found Adorno's "Achilles' heel" in his "almost unlimited trust in finished teachings." Horst Müller's Critique of Critical Theory objected that Adorno treated society as a self-regulating system that nobody could escape. Müller claimed that this left critical theory with no practical route to change.

  Adorno finished Negative Dialectics in 1966, after seven years of work. In the summer semester of 1967 and the winter semester of 1967-68 he led seminars on it chapter by chapter. The Americans Angela Davis and Irving Wohlfarth were among the students. One objection kept returning: critical thought should take the standpoint of the oppressed. Adorno replied that his book was concerned with "the dissolution of standpoint thinking itself."

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• 7. Rebuilding Frankfurt

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  Adorno taught at the University of Frankfurt from soon after his return until his death in 1969, twenty years later. His first seminars covered Kant's Transcendental Dialectic, aesthetics and Hegel. The ruined city troubled him. Writers who had stayed in Germany dominated literature. The government rehired people who had served the Nazi apparatus, and few wanted to own up to their guilt. Max Frisch's phrase fit the mood: culture had become an "alibi" for the lack of political consciousness.

  In 1959 and 1966 he published two essays, "The Meaning of Working Through the Past" and "Education after Auschwitz." They argued that National Socialism survived in the attitudes and institutions of postwar Germany and could rise again. A 1952 group experiment had already revealed leftover Nazi attitudes among Germans. Jean Améry, who had been tortured at Auschwitz, later objected that Adorno exploited Auschwitz for a "metaphysical phantom" of absolute negativity.

  His 1949 dictum, "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric," posed the question of what German culture could mean afterward. He kept revising it. In Negative Dialectics he conceded that "Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream." In 1962 he wrote that the dictum "expresses in negative form the impulse which inspires committed literature." He befriended the poets Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, along with the writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger and the film-maker Alexander Kluge.

  Disagreements at the 14th German Sociology Conference in Berlin in 1959 fed a debate. Adorno and Karl Popper launched it in 1961, over the limits of positivist science. It was later published as the Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. In 1963 Adorno became chairman of the German Sociological Society. His 1964 book The Jargon of Authenticity went after Heideggerian writers such as Karl Jaspers and Otto Friedrich Bollnow. They had attached a halo to words like "angst," "decision" and "leap." At the Philosophers' Conference in Münster in October 1962, Habermas called him "A writer among bureaucrats."

  Throughout the fifties and sixties Adorno became a public figure on German radio. On Hessen Radio he discussed "The Administered World" in September 1950, and in February 1960 he asked what "Working Through the Past" meant. He also wrote for the Frankfurter Allgemeine, the Frankfurter Rundschau and Die Zeit. Thomas Mann wrote to him in 1952 that he had spent days attached to Minima Moralia as if by a magnet. Helmut Viebrock nominated Adorno for the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature.

  From 1951 to 1958 he took part in the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music. There, in his 1954 lecture "The Aging of the New Music," he warned of a trap. Serialism, he said, was restricting atonality's freedom just as twelve-tone technique once had. The quarrel was with the Darmstadt school, whose composers included Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Seven years later, back at Kranichstein, he called for "musique informelle." In 1958 he met Samuel Beckett in Paris, which led to his essay "Trying to Understand Endgame."

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• 8. The Students Turn

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  In 1967, police shot Benno Ohnesorg at a protest in West Germany against the Shah of Iran's state visit. The officer responsible was later acquitted, and Adorno discussed both events in his lectures. He opposed the emergency laws. He said the war in Vietnam proved the continued existence of the "world of torture that had begun in Auschwitz." Yet he was soon an object of the students' anger.

  Péter Szondi invited Adorno to the Free University of Berlin to speak on Goethe's Iphigenie in Tauris. Students unfurled a banner reading "Berlin's left-wing fascists greet Teddy the Classicist." Adorno refused to drop his talk in favor of discussing current politics, and some of the audience walked out. In spring 1968 a prominent SDS spokesman, Rudi Dutschke, was gunned down in the street. Adorno signed an appeal in Die Zeit calling for an inquiry into the social causes and for an investigation of the Springer Press.

  Still, he would not endorse the protesters' goals. He rejected the students' call to unite theory and practice, and he told Marcuse that building barricades was "ridiculous against those who administer the bomb." He referred to the radical students as "stormtroopers in jeans." Meanwhile, articles in the magazine alternative, echoing Hannah Arendt in Merkur, accused him of pressuring Benjamin and of biased editing of Benjamin's writings. Gershom Scholem called Arendt's remarks "in part, shameful, not to say disgraceful."

  In September 1968 Adorno traveled to Vienna for the publication of Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link. Back in Frankfurt he wrote to Marcuse that "Valid student claims and dubious actions" were so mixed together that productive work was scarcely possible. When striking students threatened to strip the sociology seminar rooms of their furnishings, the police were called to close the building.

  After the disruption of his 1969 lecture course, Adorno cancelled the remaining lectures and kept only his philosophy seminar. He still resisted blanket condemnations of the protest movement, because they would have supported the conservative claim that political irrationalism came from his teaching. During a sabbatical in the winter of 1968-69 he pressed on with the book he had begun in October 1966. In June 1969 he completed Catchwords: Critical Models.

  The aesthetics book he was working on was Aesthetic Theory. It was published posthumously in 1970, and he had planned to dedicate it to Samuel Beckett.

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