Adorno, Theodor (1903—69)
German philosopher and key member of the Frankfurt School. A refined cultural critic with an incredible range of interests, Adorno wrote influential essays on music, literature, philosophy, sociology, and contemporary mass culture. He is justly regarded as one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century for the way his thought and his writing rose to meet head-on the challenge posed to philosophy by one of the most tumultuous centuries in history. His work responded to the rapid changes to culture that modernism unleashed, charting both its highs and lows; it also responded to the social transformations occasioned by the evolutions of late capitalism; but most importantly, it responded uncompromisingly and unsparingly to fascism. He dared to say philosophy had failed humanity. An only child, Adorno was born in Frankfurt am Main. Tutored by Kracauer, Siegfried, he studied philosophy, psychology, and sociology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. He then completed a doctorate on neurosis’s phenomenology at the University of Frankfurt in 1924. His initial attempt at producing a habilitation thesis, the passport to professorial appointment in the German system, came unstuck at the hands of the same thesis examiners who failed Benjamin, Walter. Unlike his friend, Adorno was given a second chance and in 1931 he succeeded with a dissertation on Kierkegaard. His tenure as a full professor in Germany was to be short-lived. When the Nazis came into power in 1933, they immediately cracked down on what Jewish people were able to do and in 1934 Adorno’s licence to teach was revoked. He moved to Oxford, where he was advised to complete another doctorate under the supervision of Gilbert Ryle so as to enable him to have a career in Britain. But this proved unsatisfactory and in 1937 he accepted an invitation from Horkheimer, Max to join him in New York, where he had re-established his Institute for Social Research at Columbia University. While based in New York he also contributed to the Princeton Radio Project directed by Austrian sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, which was interested in the ideological influence of radio. In 1941, again at the instigation of Horkheimer, he relocated to Los Angeles, where he joined a large expatriate community that included Schoenberg, Brecht, and the Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann, whom he advised on musical matters (particularly on atonality and twelve-tone music) for his anti-Nazi allegory Doktor Faustus. Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn erzählt von einem Freunde (1947), translated as Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend (1948). He arrived in Los Angeles with a completed manuscript of Philosophie der neuen Musik (1949), translated as Philosophy of Modern Music (1973), in his suitcase. He shared this with Horkheimer, who immediately warmed to its attack on the fragmentary nature of contemporary life, and it confirmed their desire to work together, which they did over the next couple of years, producing one of the most important books of the period, Dialektik der Aufklärung (1944), translated as Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972). Written as it was by two exiles from the Holocaust, Dialectic of Enlightenment does not have a particularly cheerful message, but it was in consonance with the times. Two themes stood out in particular: first, its critique of the media, or what it labelled the culture industry; second, its critique of western rationality. Adorno and Horkheimer make the essential point that rationality, by which they mean both science and philosophy, had not prevented the genocide perpetrated against the Jews of Europe; therefore, salvation for the future could not lie in that direction. They did not necessarily reject outright the idea of Enlightenment, as many have assumed, but they certainly called for its radical overhaul. In particular, they wanted to disrupt the imperceptible transformation of Enlightenment ideals into uncritically accepted myths. One such myth, which they did reject outright, is the idea that history is synonymous with progress. The most well-known chapter in Dialectic of Enlightenment is the essay on the ‘Culture Industry’, in which they argue that western culture has deteriorated into an ensemble of commodities that can no longer offer the critical or creative experience of art. This kind of culture is, they argue, dehumanizing, and, more controversially, depoliticizing, by which they meant it renders people politically passive and therefore more susceptible to the appeal of authoritarian styles of politics such as fascism. They coined the term ‘instrumental reason’ to describe this new type of rationality which is concerned solely with ends, not means. The mass media, they argue, has contributed to the problem by disseminating works that are too easy, with the result that our critical faculties have become enfeebled. This anti-instrumentalist theme is made even more explicit in what is undoubtedly Adorno’s best-known philosophical work Negative Dialektik (1966), translated as Negative Dialectics (1973), which famously pronounced that a new categorical imperative has been imposed, namely to arrange one’s thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not be repeated. It also contains the famous pronouncement that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz, by which he seems to have meant that it is literally impossible to arrange one’s thoughts in an era in which the accidental nature of fortune has been so brutally laid bare. Adorno argued that there was no logical or automatic response one could be expected to make with regard to the Holocaust, and to try to trade on it for aesthetic or political purposes was thoroughly repugnant to him. He also argued that any critique of fascism that was not also a critique of capitalism was hollow. If Negative Dialectics is Adorno’s most well-known philosophical work, it is also his most damning of philosophy, which above all disciplines, he seems to say, should have offered better protection against the murderous seductions of Nazism. Philosophy, he says, only lives on because it missed its moment to realize itself. Although his personal letters indicate that life as an exile in Santa Monica was anything but unpleasant, Adorno’s writings during his seven years in America were far from sunny in disposition. Indeed, his next book Minima Moralia, begun in 1942 but not published until 1951, was later appended with the telling subtitle ‘Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben’ (‘Reflections from a Damaged Life’). But, then, as a German examining his home nation’s collective guilt for the catastrophe that had befallen Europe, there was very little to be cheerful about. Composed of short aphorisms, Minima Moralia tries to explain both the ideological appeal of Nazism and why Germany’s defeat did not necessarily spell the end of fascism. On publication, the book rapidly became a bestseller and crossover critical success. Despite his many misgivings about Germany, he leapt at the chance to return there definitively in 1953 as Professor of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Frankfurt. He had made tentative steps in this direction in 1949, but it took a couple of years to sort out a proper position for him. In the intervening years he completed two further works on mass media: a study of horoscopes (published in 2001 in English as The Stars down to Earth: And Other Essays on the Irrational Culture) and a study of what he called the pseudo-culture of television (a collection of essays on this theme was published in 1991 in English as The Culture Industry). But perhaps most importantly, he saw to publication the great collective work of The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al., 1950), which sought to dissect the very character of the modern American. Adorno’s return to Germany brought with it some incredible highs, but it saw some terrible lows as well. He officially took over the directorship of the Institute for Social Research from Horkheimer, who retired in 1958, though in practice he had effectively been its director since the Institute’s return to Germany in 1950. He developed a powerful critique of Heidegger, Martin (who in spite of his war shame remained a hegemonic force in German philosophy) in Jargon der Eigentlichkeit: Zur deutschen Ideologie (1964), translated as The Jargon of Authenticity (1973). He tried to bring together his multivarious thoughts on aesthetics, but was unable to complete this project. Drafts in various stages of completion were published posthumously as Ästhetische Theorie (1970), translated (twice) as Aesthetic Theory (1984 and 1998). In this work Adorno explored the invidious position of the artwork that critiqued society from within a position of capture by the market. In the late 1960s, Adorno was drawn into and in some respects became a target of student activism. Dismayed by the state’s authoritarian response to the students’ protests, Adorno was willing to express solidarity with their anti-war position (he saw the Vietnam War as a continuation of the state of terror he associated with the Holocaust), but he did not share their anti-Americanism, nor could he sympathize with what he saw as their anti-intellectual posture. In January 1969, following months of student protests, strikes, and sit-ins, a group of students approached the Institute for Social Research with the intent of engaging its directors in their initiatives. For some unknown reason, Adorno panicked and, fearing that the students might damage or destroy the Institute’s premises, called the police and asked them to intervene. In August 1969, exhausted by several intimidating encounters with student activists, Adorno decided to vacation in Zermatt in the Swiss Alps, where, against the advice of doctors, he climbed a 3,000-metre peak. On reaching the summit, he immediately began experiencing severe chest pain. At his wife’s insistence, he went to the hospital in Visp, but died that evening. Further Reading: F. Jameson Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (1990). S. Jarvis Adorno: A Critical Introduction (1998).