Theodor Adorno

Konrad Reinfelder about T. W. Adorno's ancestry: http://www.dettelbach.de/Eigene_Dateien/amtsblatt/Dettel_07_28.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_W._Adorno

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Theodor W. Adorno (/əˈdɔːrnoʊ/;[1] German: [a%CB%88d%C9%94%CA%80no]; born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund; September 11, 1903 – August 6, 1969) was a German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society. He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come to be associated with thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, for whom the work of Freud, Marx and Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society. He is widely regarded as one of the 20th century's foremost thinkers on aesthetics and philosophy, as well as one of its preeminent essayists. As a critic of both fascism and what he called the culture industry, his writings—such as Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Minima Moralia (1951) and Negative Dialectics (1966)—strongly influenced the European New Left. Amidst the vogue enjoyed by existentialism and positivism in early 20th century Europe, Adorno advanced a dialectical conception of natural history that critiqued the twin temptations of ontology and empiricism through studies of Kierkegaard and Husserl. As a classically trained pianist whose sympathies with the twelve-tone technique of Arnold Schoenberg resulted in his studying composition with Alban Berg of the Second Viennese School, Adorno's commitment to avant-garde music formed the backdrop of his subsequent writings and led to his collaboration with Thomas Mann on the latter's novel Doctor Faustus, while the two men lived in California as exiles during the Second World War. Working for the newly relocated Institute for Social Research, Adorno collaborated on influential studies of authoritarianism, anti-semitism and propaganda that would later serve as models for sociological studies the Institute carried out in post-war Germany. Upon his return to Frankfurt, Adorno was influential to the reconstitution of German intellectual life through debates with Karl Popper on the limitations of positivist science, critiques of Heidegger's jargon of authenticity, writings on German responsibility for the Holocaust, and continued interventions into matters of public policy. As a writer of polemics in the tradition of Nietzsche and Karl Kraus, Adorno delivered scathing critiques of contemporary Western culture. Adorno's posthumously published Aesthetic Theory, which he planned on dedicating to Samuel Beckett, is the culmination of a lifelong commitment to modern art which attempts to revoke the "fatal separation" of feeling and understanding long demanded by the history of philosophy and explode the privilege aesthetics accords to content over form and contemplation over immersion. Contents [show] [edit]Life and career

[edit]Early years: Frankfurt Theodor Ludwig Adorno-Wiesengrund was born in Frankfurt am Main on September 11, 1903, the only child of Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund (1870–1946) and Maria Calvelli-Adorno della Piana (1865–1952). His mother, a devout Catholic from Corscia, was once a professional singer, while his father, an assimilated Jew who had converted to Protestantism, ran a successful wine-export business. Proud of her origins, Maria wanted her son's paternal surname to be supplemented by the addition of her own name: Adorno. Thus his earliest publications carried the name Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno; upon his application for US citizenship, his name was modified to Theodor W. Adorno. His childhood was marked by the musical life provided by his mother and aunt: Maria was a singer who could boast of having performed in Vienna at the Imperial Court, while her sister, Agathe, who lived with them, had made a name for herself as both a singer and pianist. He was not only a precocious child but, as he recalled later in life, a child prodigy who could play pieces by Beethoven on the piano by the time he was twelve.[2] At the age of six, he attended the Deutschherren middle school before transferring to the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gymnasium, where he studied from 1913 to 1921. Prior to his graduation at the top of his class, Adorno was already swept up by the revolutionary mood of the time, as is evidenced by his reading of Georg Lukacs's The Theory of the Novel that year, as well as by his fascination with Ernst Bloch's The Spirit of Utopia, of which he would later write: Bloch's was a philosophy that could hold its head high before the most advanced literature; a philosophy that was not calibrated to the abominable resignation of methodology … I took this motif so much as my own that I do not believe I have ever written anything without reference to it, either implicit or explicit.[3] Yet Adorno's intellectual nonconformism was no less shaped by the repugnance he felt towards the nationalism which swept through the Reich during the First World War. Along with future collaborators like Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Ernst Bloch, Adorno was profoundly disillusioned by the ease with which Germany's intellectual and spiritual leaders—among them Max Weber, Max Scheler, Ernst Simmel, as well as his friend Siegfried Kracauer—came out in support of the war. The younger generation's distrust for traditional knowledge arose from the way in which this tradition had discredited itself.[4] Over time, Oscar Wiesengrund's firm established close professional and personal ties with the factory of Karplus & Herzberger in Berlin. The eldest daughter of the Karplus family, Margarete, or Gretel, moved in the intellectual circles of Berlin, where she was acquainted with Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Bloch, each of whom Adorno would become familiar with during the mid-20s; after fourteen years, Gretel and Theodor were married in 1937. At the end of his schooldays, Adorno not only benefited from the rich concert offerings of Frankfurt - in which one could hear performances of works by Schoenberg, Schreker, Stravinsky, Bartók, Busoni, Delius and Hindemith - but also began studying music composition at the Hoch Conservatory while taking private lessons with well-respected composers Bernhard Sekles and Eduard Jung. At around the same time, he befriended Siegfried Kracauer, the Frankfurter Zeitung’s literary editor, of whom he would later write: For years Kracauer read [Kant%E2%80%99s] Critique of Pure Reason with me regularly on Saturday afternoons. I am not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that I owe more to this reading than to my academic teachers … Under his guidance I experienced the work from the beginning not as mere epistemology, not as an analysis of the conditions of scientifically valid judgments, but as a kind of coded text from which the historical situation of spirit could be read, with the vague expectation that in doing so one could acquire something of truth itself.” [5] Leaving gymnasium to study philosophy, psychology and sociology at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Adorno continued his readings with Kracauer, turning now to Hegel and Kierkegaard, and began publishing concert reviews and pieces of music for distinguished journals like the Zeitschrift für Musik, the Neue Blätter für Kunst und Literatur and later for the Musikblätter des Anbruch. In these articles, Adorno championed avant-garde music at the same time as he critiqued the failings of musical modernity, as in the case of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, which he called in 1923 a “dismal Bohemian prank.”[6] In these early writings, he was unequivocal in his condemnation of performances which either sought or pretended to achieve a transcendence which Adorno, in line with many intellectuals of the time, regarded as impossible: “No cathedral,” he wrote, “can be built if no community desires one.”[7] In the summer of 1924, Adorno received his doctorate with a study of Edmund Husserl under the direction of the unorthodox neo-Kantian Hans Cornelius. Before his graduation, Adorno had already met with his most important intellectual collaborators, Max Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin. Through Cornelius's seminars, Adorno met his future collaborator Max Horkheimer, through whom he was then introduced to Friedrich Pollock. [edit]Vienna, Frankfurt, and Berlin During the summer of 1924, the Viennese composer Alban Berg's Three Fragments from Wozzeck, op. 7 premiered in Frankfurt, at which time Adorno introduced himself to Berg and both agreed the young philosopher and composer would study with Berg in Vienna. Upon moving to Vienna in January 1925, Adorno immersed himself in the musical culture which had grown up around Schoenberg: in addition to his twice-weekly sessions with Berg, Adorno continued his studies on piano with Eduard Steuermann and befriended the violinist Rudolf Kolisch. In Vienna, he attended public lectures of the satirist Karl Kraus with Berg and met Lukács, who had been living in Vienna after the failure of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Alban Berg, the man Adorno referred to as "my master and teacher," was among the most prescient of his young pupil's early friends: [I am] convinced that, in the sphere of the deepest understanding of music ... you are capable of supreme achievements and will undoubtedly fulfill this promise in the shape of great philosophical works.[8] After leaving Vienna, Adorno traveled through Italy, where he met with Kracauer, Benjamin, and the economist Alfred Sohn-Rethel, with whom he developed a lasting friendship, before returning to Frankfurt. In December 1926 Adorno's "Two Pieces for String Quartet," op.2 were performed in Vienna, which provided a welcome interruption from his preparations for the Habilitation. After writing the "Piano Pieces in strict twelve-tone technique," as well as songs later integrated into the Six Bagatelles for Voice and Piano, op. 6, Adorno presented his Habilitation manuscript, The Concept of the Unconscious in the Transcendental Theory of the Psyche, to Cornelius in November 1927. Cornelius advised Adorno to withdraw his application on the grounds that the manuscript was too close to his own way of thinking. In this manuscript, Adorno attempted to underline the epistemological status of the unconscious as it emerged out of Freud's early writings. Against the function of the unconscious in both Nietzsche and Spengler, Adorno argued that Freud's notion of the unconscious serves as a "sharp weapon ... against every attempt to create a metaphysics of the instincts and to deify full, organic nature."[9] Undaunted by his academic prospects, Adorno threw himself once again into composition. In addition to publishing numerous reviews of opera performances and concerts, Adorno's "Four Songs for Medium Voice and Piano", op.3 was performed in Berlin in January 1929. Between 1928 and 1930 Adorno took on a greater role within the editorial committee of the Musikblätter des Anbruch. In a proposal for transforming the journal, Adorno sought to use Anbruch for championing radical modern music against what he called the "stabilized music" of Pfitzner, the later Strauss, as well as the neoclassicism of Stravinsky and Hindemith. During this period he published the essays "Night Music", "On Twelve-Tone Technique" and "Reaction and Progress". Yet his reservations about twelve-tone orthodoxy became steadily more pronounced: According to Adorno, twelve-tone technique's use of atonality can no more be regarded as an authoritative canon than can tonality be relied on to provide instructions for the composer. At this time, Adorno struck up a correspondence with the composer Ernst Krenek, with whom he discussed problems of atonality and twelve-tone technique. In a letter of 1934 Adorno sounded a related criticism of Schoenberg: Twelve-tone technique alone is nothing but the principle of motivic elaboration and variation, as developed in the sonata, but elevated now to a comprehensive principle of construction, namely transformed into an a priori form and, by that token, detached from the surface of the composition.[10] At this point Adorno reversed his earlier priorities: now his musical activities came second to the development of a philosophical theory of aesthetics. Thus, in the middle of 1929 he accepted Paul Tillich's offer to present an Habilitation on Kierkegaard, which Adorno eventually submitted under the title The Construction of the Aesthetic. At the time, Kierkegaard's philosophy exerted a strong influence, chiefly through its claim to pose an alternative to Idealism and Hegel's philosophy of history. Yet when Adorno turned his attention to Kierkegaard, watchwords like "anxiety," "inwardness" and "leap"—instructive for existentialist philosophy—were detached from their theological origins and posed, instead, as problems for aesthetics.[11] As the work proceeded—and Kierkegaard's overcoming of Hegel's idealism is revealed to be a mere interiorization—Adorno excitedly remarks in a letter to Berg that he is writing without looking over his shoulder at the faculty who would soon evaluate his work. Receiving favorable reports from Professors Tillich and Horkheimer, as well as Benjamin and Kracauer, the University conferred on Adorno the venia legendi in February 1931; on the very day his revised study was published, in March 1933, Hitler seized dictatorial powers.[12] Several months after qualifying as a lecturer in philosophy, Adorno delivered an inaugural lecture at the Institute for Social Research, an independent organization which had recently appointed Horkheimer as its director and, with the arrival of the literary scholar Leo Lowenthal, social psychologist Erich Fromm and philosopher Herbert Marcuse, sought to exploit recent theoretical and methodological advances in the social sciences. His lecture, "The Actuality of Philosophy," created a scandal. In it, Adorno not only deviated from the theoretical program Horkheimer had laid out a year earlier, but challenged philosophy's very capacity for comprehending reality as such: "For the mind," Adorno announced, "is indeed not capable of producing or grasping the totality of the real, but it may be possible to penetrate the detail, to explode in miniature the mass of merely existing reality."[13] In line with Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama and preliminary sketches of the Arcades Project, Adorno likened philosophical interpretation to experiments which should be conducted "until they arrive at figurations in which the answers are legible, while the questions themselves vanish." Having lost its position as the Queen of the Sciences, philosophy must now radically transform its approach to objects so that it might "construct keys before which reality springs open."[14] Following Horkheimer's taking up the directorship of the Institute, a new journal, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, was produced to publish the research of Institute members both before and after its relocation to the United States. Though Adorno was not himself an Institute member, the journal nevertheless published many of his essays, including "The Social Situation of Music" (1932), "On Jazz" (1936), "On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening" (1938) and "Fragments on Wagner" (1938). In his new role as social theorist, Adorno's philosophical analysis of cultural phenomena heavily relied on the language of historical materialism, as concepts like reification, false consciousness and ideology came to play an ever more prominent role in his work. At the same time, however, and owing to both the presence of another prominent sociologist at the Institute, Karl Mannheim, as well as the methodological problem posed by treating objects - like "musical material" - as ciphers of social contradictions, Adorno was compelled to abandon any notion of "value-free" sociology in favor of a form of ideology critique which held on to an idea of truth. Before his emigration in autumn 1934, Adorno began work on a Singspiel based on Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer entitled The Treasure of Indian Joe, which he would, however, never complete; by the time he fled Hitler's Germany Adorno had already written over a hundred opera or concert reviews and an additional fifty critiques of music composition. As the Nazi party became the largest party in the Reichstag Horkheimer's 1932 observation proved chillingly prophetic: "Only one thing is certain," he wrote, "the irrationality of society has reached a point where only the gloomiest predications have any plausibility." [15] In September Adorno's right to teach was revoked; in March, as the swastika was run up the flag pole of town hall, the Institute's offices were searched by the Frankfurt criminal police. Adorno's house on Seeheimer Strasse was similarly searched in July and his application for membership in the Reich Chamber of Literature was denied on the grounds that membership was limited to "persons who belong to the German nation by profound ties of character and blood. As a non-Aryan," he was informed, "you are unable to feel and appreciate such an obligation."[16] Soon afterwards Adorno was forced into fifteen years of exile. [edit]Exile: Oxford, London, New York, Los Angeles After the possibility of transferring his habilitation to the University of Vienna came to nothing, Adorno considered relocating to Britain upon his father's suggestion. With the help of the Academic Assistance Council, Adorno registered as an advanced student at Merton College, Oxford, in June 1934. During the next four years at Oxford, Adorno made repeated trips to Germany to see both his parents and Gretel, who was still working in Berlin. Under the direction of Gilbert Ryle, Adorno worked on a dialectical critique of Husserl's epistemology. By this time, the Institute for Social Research had relocated to New York City and began making overtures to Adorno. After months of strained relations, Horkheimer and Adorno reestablished their essential theoretical alliance during meetings in Paris. Adorno continued writing on music, publishing "The Form of the Phonograph Record" and "Crisis of Music Criticism" with the Viennese musical journal 23, "On Jazz" in the Institute's Zeitschrift, "Farewell to Jazz" in Europäischen Revue. Yet Adorno's attempts to break out of the sociology of music were, at this time, twice thwarted: neither the study of Mannheim he had been working on for years nor extracts from his study of Husserl were accepted by the Zeitschrift. Impressed by Horkheimer's book of aphorisms, Dawn and Decline, Adorno began working on his own book of aphorisms, what would later become Minima Moralia. While at Oxford, Adorno suffered two great losses: his Aunt Agathe died in June 1935, while Alban Berg died in December of the same year. To the end of his life, Adorno never abandoned the hope of completing Berg's unfinished Lulu. At this time, Adorno was in intense correspondence with Walter Benjamin on the subject of the latter’s Arcades Project. After receiving an invitation from Horkheimer to visit the Institute in New York, Adorno sailed for New York on June 9, 1937 and stayed there for two weeks. While in New York, Max Horkheimer’s essays “The Latest Attack on Metaphysics” and “Traditional and Critical Theory,” which would soon become instructive for the Institute’s self-understanding, were the subject of intense discussion. Soon after his return to Europe, Gretel moved to Britain, where she and Adorno were married on September 8, 1937; a little over a month later, Horkheimer telegrammed from New York with news of a position Adorno could take up with the Princeton Radio Project, then under the directorship of the Austrian sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld. Yet Adorno’s work continued with studies of Beethoven and Richard Wagner (published in 1939 as "Fragments on Wagner"), drafts of which he read to Benjamin during their final meeting, in December on the Italian Riviera. According to Benjamin, these drafts were astonishing for “the precision of their materialist deciphering,” as well as the way in which “musical facts … had been made socially transparent in a way that was completely new to me.”[17] In his Wagner study, the thesis later to characterize Dialectic of Enlightenment—man's domination of nature—first emerges. Adorno sailed for New York on February 16, 1938. Soon after settling into his new home on Riverside Drive, Adorno met with Lazarsfeld in Newark to discuss the Project’s plans for investigating the impact of broadcast music. Although he was expected to embed the Project’s research within a wider theoretical context, it soon became apparent that the Project was primarily concerned with data collection to be used by administrators for establishing whether groups of listeners could be targeted by broadcasts specifically aimed at them. Expected to make use of devices with which listeners could press a button to indicate whether they liked or disliked a particular piece of music, Adorno bristled with distaste and astonishment: “I reflected that culture was simply the condition that precluded a mentality that tried to measure it.”[18] Thus Adorno suggested using individual interviews to determine listener reactions and, only three months after meeting Lasarzfeld, completed a 160-page memorandum on the Project’s topic, “Music in Radio.” Adorno was primarily interested in how the musical material was affected by its distribution through the medium of radio and thought it imperative to understand how music was affected by its becoming part of daily life. “The meaning of a Beethoven symphony,” he wrote, “heard while the listener is walking around or lying in bed is very likely to differ from its effect in a concert-hall where people sit as if they were in church.”[19] In essays published by the Institute’s Zeitschrift, Adorno dealt with that atrophy of musical culture which had become instrumental in accelerating tendencies - towards conformism, trivialization and standardization - already present in the larger culture. Unsurprisingly, Adorno’s studies found little resonance among members of the project. At the end of 1939, when Lazarsfeld submitted a second application for funding, the musical section of the study was duly left out. Yet during the two years during which he worked on the Project, Adorno was nevertheless prolific, publishing “The Radio Sympthony,” “A Social Critique of Radio Music” and “On Popular Music,” texts which, along with the draft memorandum and other unpublished writings, which are now found in Robert Hullot-Kentor’s recent translation, Current of Music. In light of this situation, Horkheimer soon found a permanent post for Adorno at the Institute. In addition to helping with the Zeitschrift Adorno was expected to be the Institute's liaison with Benjamin, who soon passed on to New York the study of Charles Baudelaire he hoped would serve as a model of the larger Arcades Project. In correspondence, the two men discussed the difference in their conceptions of the relationship between critique and artworks which had become manifest through Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility." At around the same time Adorno and Horkheimer began planning for a joint work on "dialectical logic," which would later become Dialectic of Enlightenment. Alarmed by reports from Europe, where Adorno’s parents suffered increasing discrimination and Benjamin was interned in Colombes, their joint study could entertain few delusions about its practical effects. “In view of what is now threatening to engulf Europe,” Horkheimer wrote, “our present work is essentially destined to pass things down through the night that is approaching: a kind of message in a bottle”[20] As Adorno continued his work in New York with radio talks on music and a lecture on Soren Kierkegaard's doctrine of love, Benjamin fled Paris and attempted to make an illegal border crossing. After learning that his Spanish visa was invalid and fearing deportation back to France, Benjamin took an overdose of morphine tablets. In light of recent events, the Institute set about formulating a theory of anti-Semitism and fascism. On one side were those who supported Franz Neumann's thesis according to which National Socialism was a form of "monopoly capital"; on the other were those who supported Fritz Pollock's "state capitalist theory." Horkheimer’s contributions to this debate, in the form of the essays "The Authoritarian State," "The End of Reason" and "The Jews and Europe" served as a foundation for what he and Adorno planned to do in their book on dialectical logic. In November 1941 Adorno followed Horkheimer to what Thomas Mann called "German California,"[21] setting up house in a Pacific Palisades neighborhood of German emigres which included Bertolt Brecht and Arnold Schoenberg. Adorno arrived with a draft of his Philosophy of New Music, a dialectical critique of twelve-tone music, which Adorno himself felt, while writing, was already a departure from the theory of art he had spent the previous decades elaborating. Horkheimer's reaction to the manuscript was wholly positive: "If I have ever in the whole of my life felt enthusiasm about anything, then I did on this occasion," he wrote after reading the manuscript.[22] The two set about completing their joint work, which transformed itself from a book on dialectical logic to a rewriting of the history of rationality and the Enlightenment. First published in a small mimeographed edition in May 1944 as Philosophical Fragments, the text would wait another three years before achieving book form when it was published with its definitive title, Dialectic of Enlightenment, by the Amsterdam publisher Querido Verlag. This "reflection on the destructive aspect of progress" proceeded through chapter which treated rationality as both the liberation from and further domination of nature, interpretations of both Homer’s Odyssey and the Marquis de Sade, as well as analyses of the culture industry and anti-semitism. Their joint work completed, the two turned their attention to studies on anti-semitism and authoritarianism in collaboration with the Nevitt Sanford-led Public Opinion Study Group and the American Jewish Committee. In line with these studies, Adorno produced an analysis of the Californian radio preacher Martin Luther Thomas. Fascist propaganda of this sort, Adorno wrote, "simply takes people for what they are: genuine children of today’s standardized mass culture who have been robbed to a great extent of their autonomy and spontaneity"[23] The result of these labors, the 1950 study The Authoritarian Personality was pioneering in its combination of quantitative and qualitative methods of collecting and evaluating data as well as its development of the F-scale. After the USA entered the war in 1941, the situation of the émigrés, now classed "enemy aliens" became increasingly precarious as government measures turned from anti-Nazism to anti-communism. Forbidden from leaving their homes between 8pm and 6am and prohibited from going more than five miles from their houses, émigrés like Adorno, who would not be naturalized until November 1943, were severely restricted in their movements. In addition to the aphorisms which conclude Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno put together a collection of aphorisms in honor of Horkheimer’s fiftieth birthday that would later be published as Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. These fragmentary writings, inspired by a renewed reading of Nietzsche, treated issues like emigration, totalitarianism and individuality, as well as everyday matters such as giving presents, dwelling and the impossibility of love. In California, Adorno made the acquaintance of Charlie Chaplin and became friends with Fritz Lang and Hanns Eisler, with whom he completed a study of film music in 1944. In this study, the authors pushed for the greater usage of avant-garde music in film, urging that music be used to supplement, not simply accompany, the visual aspect of films. Additionally, Adorno assisted Thomas Mann on his novel Doctor Faustus after the latter asked for his help. “Would you be willing," Mann wrote, "to think through with me how the work - I mean Leverkuhn’s work - might look; how you would do it if you were in league with the Devil?”[24] At the end of October 1949, Adorno left America for Europe just as The Authoritarian Personality was being published. Before his return, Adorno had not only reached an agreement with a Tübingen publisher to print an expanded version of Philosophy of New Music, but completed two compositions: Four Songs for Voice and Piano by Stefan George, op.7, and Three Choruses for Female Voices from the Poems of Theodor Daubler, op. 8. [edit]Post-war Europe [edit]Return to Frankfurt University Upon his return, Adorno helped shape the political culture of West Germany. Until his death in 1969, twenty years after his return, Adorno contributed to the intellectual foundations of the Federal Republic, as a professor at Frankfurt University, critic of the vogue enjoyed by Heideggerian philosophy, partisan of critical sociology and teacher of music at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music. Adorno resumed his teaching duties at the university soon after his arrival,[when?] with seminars on "Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic," aesthetics, Hegel, “Contemporary Problems in the Theory of Knowledge” and “The Concept of Knowledge.” Adorno’s surprise at his students' passionate interest in intellectual matters did not, however, blind him to continuing problems within Germany: The literary climate was dominated by writers who had remained in Germany during Hitler's rule, the government re-employed people who had been active in the Nazi apparatus and people were generally loath to own up to their own collaboration or the guilt they thus incurred. Instead, the ruined city of Frankfurt continued as if nothing had happened,[citation needed] holding on to ideas of the true, the beautiful, and the good despite the atrocities, hanging on to a culture that had itself been lost in rubble or killed off in the concentration camps. All the enthusiasm Adorno's students showed for intellectual matters could not erase the suspicion that, in the words of Max Frisch, culture had become an "alibi" for the absence of political consciousness.[25] Yet the foundations for what would come to be known as "The Frankfurt School" were soon laid: Horkheimer resumed his chair in social philosophy and the Institute for Social Research, rebuilt, became a lightning rod for critical thought. [edit]Essays on Fascism Starting with his 1947 essay Wagner, Nietzsche and Hitler,[26] Adorno produced a series of influentia works to describe psychological fascist traits. One of these works was The Authoritarian Personality (1950),[27] published as a contribution to the Studies in Prejudice performed by multiple research institutes in the US, and consisted on a 'qualitative interpretations' that uncovered the authoritarian character of test persons through indirect questions.[citation needed] The books has had a major influence on sociology and remains highly debated. In 1951 he continued on the topic with his essay Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda, in which he said that "Psychological dispositions do not actually cause fascism; rather, fascism defines a psychological area which can be successfully exploited by the forces which promote it for entirely non-psychological reasons of self-interest."[28] In 1952 Adorno participated in a group experiment, revealing residual National Socialist attitudes among the recently democratized Germans. He then published two influential essays, The Meaning of Working Through the Past (1959), and Education after Auschwitz (1966), in which he argued on the survival of the uneradicated National Socialism in the mind-sets and institutions of the post-1945 Germany, and that there is still a real risk that it could raise again.[29] [edit]Public events Nevertheless, in September 1951 Adorno returned to the United States for a six-week visit, during which he attended the opening of the Hacker Psychiatry Foundation in Beverly Hills, met Leo Lowenthal and Herbert Marcuse in New York and saw his mother for the last time. After stopping in Paris, where he met Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Michel Leiris and Rene Leibowitz, Adorno delivered a lecture entitled "The Present State of Empirical Social Research in Germany" at a conference on opinion research. Here he emphasized the importance of data collection and statistical evaluation while asserting that such empirical methods have only an auxiliary function and must lead to the formation of theories which would “raise the harsh facts to the level of consciousness.”[30] With Horkheimer as dean of the Arts Faculty, then rector of the university, responsibilities for the Institute's work fell upon Adorno. At the same time, however, Adorno renewed his musical work: with talks at the Kranichsteiner Musikgesellschaft, another in connection with a production of Ernst Krenek’s opera Leben des Orest, and a seminar on “Criteria of New Music” at the Fifth International Summer Course for New Music at Kranichstein. Adorno also became increasingly involved with the publishing house of Peter Suhrkamp, inducing the latter to publish Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood Around 1900, Kracauer’s writings and a two-volume edition of Benjamin’s writings. Adorno’s own recently published Minima Moralia was not only well received in the press, but also met with great admiration from Thomas Mann, who wrote to Adorno from America in 1952: I have spent days attached to your book as if by a magnet. Every day brings new fascination … concentrated nourishment. It is said that the companion star to Sirius, white in colour, is made of such dense material that a cubic inch of it would weigh a tonne here. This is why it has such an extremely powerful gravitational field; in this respect it is similar to your book.[31] Yet Adorno was no less moved by other public events: protesting the publication of Heinrich Mann's novel Professor Unrat with its film title, The Blue Angel; declaring his sympathy with those who protested the scandal of big-game hunting and penning a defense of prostitutes. [edit]More essays on mass culture and literature Because Adorno’s American citizenship would have been forfeited by the middle of 1952 had he continued to stay outside the country, he returned once again to Santa Monica to survey his prospects at the Hacker Foundation. While there he wrote a content analysis of newspaper horoscopes (now collected in The Stars Down to Earth), the essays “Television as Ideology” and “Prologue to Television”; even so, he was pleased when, at the end of ten months, he was enjoined to return as co-director of the Institute. Back in Frankfurt, he renewed his academic duties and, from 1952 to 1954, completed the essays “Notes on Kafka”, “Valéry Proust Museum” and an essay on Schoenberg following the composer's death, all of which were included in the 1955 essay collection Prisms. In response to the publication of Thomas Mann's The Black Swan, Adorno penned a long letter to the author, who then approved its publication in the literary journal Akzente. A second collection of essays, Notes to Literature, appeared in 1958. After meeting Samuel Beckett while delivering a series of lectures in Paris the same year, Adorno set to work on "Trying to Understand Endgame," which, along with studies of Proust, Valéry and Balzac, formed the central texts of the 1961 publication of the second volume of his Notes to Literature. Adorno’s entrance into literary discussions continued in his June 1963 lecture at the annual conference of the Hölderlin Society. At the Philosophers’ Conference of October 1962 in Münster, at which Habermas wrote that Adorno was "A writer among bureaucrats", Adorno presented "Progress."[32] Although the Zeitschrift was never revived, the Institute nevertheless published a series of important sociological books, including a collection of essays entitled Sociologica (1955), the Gruppenexperiment (1955), a study of work satisfaction among workers in Mannesmann called Betriebsklima and the Soziologische Exkurse, a textbook-like anthology intended as an introductory work about the discipline. [edit]Public figure Throughout the fifties and sixties, Adorno became a public figure, not simply through his books and essays, but also through his appearances in radio and newspapers. In talks, interviews and round-table discussions broadcast on Hessen Radio, South-West Radio and Radio Bremen, Adorno discussed topics as diverse as “The Administered World” (September 1950), “What is the Meaning of ‘Working Through the Past?”’ (February 1960) to “The Teaching Profession and its Taboos” (August 1965). Additionally, he frequently wrote for Frankfurter Allgemeine, Frankfurter Rundschau and the weekly Die Zeit. At the invitation of Wolfgang Steinecke, Adorno took part in the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music in Kranichstein from 1951 to 1958. Yet conflicts between the so-called Darmstadt school, which included composers like Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Karel Goeyvaerts, Luciano Berio and Gottfried Michael Koenig, soon arose, receiving explicit expression in Adorno's 1954 lecture, "The Aging of the New Music", where he argued that atonality's freedom was being restricted to serialism in much the same way as it was once restricted by twelve-tone technique. With his friend Eduard Steuermann, Adorno feared that music was being sacrificed to stubborn rationalization. During this time Adorno not only produced a significant series of notes on Beethoven (which was never completed and only published posthumously), but also published Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy in 1960. In his 1961 return to Kranichstein, Adorno called for what he termed a "musique informelle". which would possess the ability "really and truly to be what it is, without the ideological pretense of being something else. Or rather, to admit frankly the fact of non-identity and to follow through its logic to the end."[33] [edit]Post-war German culture At the same time Adorno struck up relationships with contemporary German-language poets such as Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. Adorno’s 1949 dictum—"To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric"—posed the question of what German culture could mean after Auschwitz; his own continual revision of this dictum—in Negative Dialectics, for example, he wrote that "Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream"; while in “Commitment,” he wrote in 1962 that the dictum "expresses in negative form the impulse which inspires committed literature"—was part of post-war Germany’s struggle with history and culture. Adorno additionally befriended the writer and poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger as well as the film-maker Alexander Kluge. In 1963, Adorno was elected to the post of chairman of the German Sociological Society, where he presided over two important conferences: in 1964, on "Max Weber and Sociology" and in 1968 on "Late Capitalism or Industrial Society". A debate launched in 1961 by Adorno and Karl Popper, later published as the Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, arose out of disagreements at the 1959 14th German Sociology Conference in Berlin. Adorno's critique of the dominant climate of post-war Germany was also directed against the pathos that had grown up around Heideggerianism, as practiced by writers like Karl Jaspers and Otto Friedrich Bollow, and which had subsequently seeped into public discourse. His 1964 publication of The Jargon of Authenticity took aim at the halo such writers had attached to words like "angst", "decision" and "leap". After seven years of work, Adorno completed Negative Dialectics in 1966, after which, during the summer semester of 1967 and the winter semester of 1967-8, he offered regular philosophy seminars to discuss the book chapter by chapter. Among the students at these seminars were the Americans Angela Davis and Irving Wohlfarth. One objection which would soon take on ever greater importance, was that critical thought must adopt the standpoint of the oppressed, to which Adorno replied that negative dialectics was concerned "with the dissolution of standpoint thinking itself." [edit]Confrontations with students At the time of Negative Dialectics' publication, the fragility of West German democracy led to the increasing student protests. Monopolistic trends in the media, an educational crisis in the universities, the Shah of Persia's 1967 state visit, German support for the war in Vietnam and the emergency laws combined to create a highly unstable situation. Like many of his students, Adorno too opposed the emergency laws, as well as the war in Vietnam, which, he said, proved the continued existence of the "world of torture that had begun in Auschwitz”[34] The situation only deteriorated with the police shooting of Benno Ohnesorg at a protest against the Shah's visit. This death, as well as the subsequent acquittal of the responsible officer, were both commented upon in Adorno's lectures. As politicization increased, rifts developed within both the Institute's relationship with its students as well as within the Institute itself. Soon Adorno himself would become an object of the students' ire. At the invitation of Peter Szondi, Adorno was invited to the Free University of Berlin to give a lecture on Goethe's Iphigenie in Tauris. After a group of students marched to the lectern, unfurling a banner that read "Berlin’s left-wing fascists greet Teddy the Classicist," a number of those present left the lecture in protest after Adorno refused to abandon his talk in favor of discussing his attitude on the current political situation. Adorno shortly thereafter participated in a friendly and productive[citation needed] meeting with the Berlin Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS) and discussed "Student Unrest" with Szondi on West German Radio. But as 1968 progressed, Adorno became increasingly critical of the students' disruptions to university life. His isolation was only compounded by articles published in the magazine alternative, which, following the lead of Hannah Arendt’s articles in Merkur, claimed Adorno had subjected Benjamin to pressure during his years of exile in Berlin and compiled Benjamin’s Writings and Letters with a great deal of bias. In response, Benjamin’s longtime friend Gershom Scholem, wrote to the editor of Merkur to express his disapproval of the "in part, shameful, not to say disgraceful" remarks by Arendt.[35] Relations between students and the West German state continued deteriorating. In spring 1968, a prominent SDS spokesman, Rudi Dutschke, was gunned down in the streets; in response, massive demonstrations took place, directed in particular against the Springer Press, which had led a campaign to vilify the students. An open appeal published in Die Zeit, signed by Adorno, called for an inquiry into the social reasons that gave rise to this assassination attempt as well as an investigation into the Springer Press' manipulation of public opinion. At the same time, however, Adorno protested against disruptions of his own lectures and refused to express his solidarity with their political goals, maintaining instead his autonomy as a theoretician. Adorno rejected the so-called unity of theory and praxis advocated by the students and argued that the students' actions were premised upon a mistaken analysis of the situation. The building of barricades, he wrote to Marcuse, is "ridiculous against those who administer the bomb."[36] In September 1968 Adorno went to Vienna for the publication of Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link. Upon his return to Frankfurt, events prevented his concentrating upon the book on aesthetics he wished to write: "Valid student claims and dubious actions," he wrote to Marcuse, "are all so mixed up together that all productive work and even sensible thought are scarcely possibly any more."[37] After striking students threatened to strip the Institute's sociology seminar rooms of their furnishings and equipment, the police were brought in to close the building. Adorno began writing an introduction to a collection of poetry by Rudolf Borchardt, which was connected with a talk entitled "Charmed Language," delivered in Zurich, followed by a talk on aesthetics in Paris where he met Beckett again. Beginning in October 1966, Adorno took up work on Aesthetic Theory. In June 1969 he completed Catchwords: Critical Models. During the winter semester of 1968-9 Adorno was on sabbatical leave from the university and thus able to dedicate himself to the completion of his book of aesthetics. For the summer semester Adorno planned a lecture course entitled "An Introduction to Dialectical Thinking," as well as a seminar on the dialectics of subject and object. But at the first lecture Adorno's attempt to open up the lecture and invite questions whenever they arose degenerated into a disruption from which he quickly fled: after a student wrote on the blackboard "If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease," three women students approached the lectern, bared their breasts and scattered flower petals over his head.[citation needed] Yet Adorno continued to resist blanket condemnations of the protest movement which would have only strengthened the reactionary thesis according to which political irrationalism was the result of Adorno's teaching. After further disruptions to his lectures, Adorno canceled the lectures for the rest of the seminar, continuing only with his philosophy seminar. In the summer of 1969, weary from these activities, Adorno returned once again to Zermatt, Switzerland, at the foot of Matterhorn to restore his strength. On August 6 he died of a heart attack. [edit]Theory

Part of a series on the Frankfurt School

Major works Reason and Revolution The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Eclipse of Reason The Fear of Freedom Dialectic of Enlightenment Minima Moralia Eros and Civilization One-Dimensional Man Negative Dialectics The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere The Theory of Communicative Action Notable theorists Max Horkheimer · Theodor Adorno Herbert Marcuse · Walter Benjamin Erich Fromm · Friedrich Pollock Leo Löwenthal · Jürgen Habermas Important concepts Critical theory · Dialectic · Praxis Psychoanalysis · Antipositivism Popular culture · Culture industry Advanced capitalism Privatism · Non-identity Communicative rationality Legitimation crisis v t e Adorno's work sets out from a central insight he shares with all early 20th century avant-garde art: The recognition of what is primitive in ourselves and the world itself. Neither Picasso's fascination with African sculpture nor Mondrian's reduction of painting to its most elementary component - the line - is comprehensible outside this concern with primitivism Adorno shared with the century's most radical art. At the same time, the Western world, beset by world-wars, colonialist consolidation and accelerating commodification, sank into the very barbarism civilization had prided itself in overcoming. According to Adorno, society's self-preservation had become indistinguishable from societally sanctioned self-sacrifice: of "primitive" peoples, primitive aspects of the ego and those primitive, mimetic desires found in imitation and sympathy. Adorno's theory proceeds from an understanding of this primitive quality of reality which seeks to counteract whatever aims to either repress this primitive aspect or further those systems of domination set in place by this return to barbarism. From this perspective, Adorno's writings on politics, philosophy, music and literature could be described as a lifelong critique of the ways in which each tries to justify self-mutilation as the necessary price of self-preservation. According to Adorno's translator Robert Hullot-Kentor, the central motive of Adorno's work thus consists in determining "how life could be more than the struggle for self-preservation." [38] In this sense, the principle of self-preservation, Adorno writes in Negative Dialectics, is nothing but "the law of doom thus far obeyed by history."[39] At its most basic, Adorno's thought is motivated by a fundamental critique of this law. 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. [edit]Music In his early essays for the Vienna-based journal Anbruch, Adorno claimed that musical progress is proportional to the composer's ability to constructively deal with the possibilities and limitations contained within what Adorno called the "musical material." For Adorno, twelve-tone serialism constitutes a decisive, historically developed method of composition. The objective validity of the composition, according to Adorno, rests with neither the composer's genius nor the work's conformity with prior standards, but with the way in which the work coherently expresses the dialectic of the material. In this sense, the contemporary absence of composers of the status of Bach or Beethoven is not the sign of musical regression; instead, new music is to be credited with laying bare aspects of the musical material previously repressed: The musical material's liberation from number, the harmonic series and tonal harmony. Thus, historical progress is only achieved by the composer who "submits to the work and seemingly does not undertake anything active except to follow where it leads." Because historical experience and social relations are embedded within this musical material, it is to the analysis of such material that the critic must turn. In the face of this radical liberation of the musical material, Adorno came to criticize those who, like Stravinsky, withdrew from this freedom by tasking recourse to forms of the past as well as those who turned twelve-tone composition into a technique which dictated the rules of composition. Adorno saw the culture industry as an arena in which critical tendencies or potentialities were eliminated. He argued that the culture industry, which produced and circulated cultural commodities through the mass media, manipulated the population. Popular culture was identified as a reason why people become passive; the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture made people docile and content, no matter how terrible their economic circumstances. 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".[40] Adorno conceptualised this phenomenon as pseudo-individualization and the always-the-same.[citation needed] 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.[citation needed] 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.[41] 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.[citation needed] Adorno's "negative dialectics" was an attempt to articulate a non-dominating thought that would recognize its limitations and accept the non-identity and reality of that which could not be subsumed under the subject's concepts. Indeed, Adorno sought to ground the critical bite of his sociological work in his critique of identity, which he took to be a reification in thought of the commodity form or exchange relation which always presumes a false identity between different things. The potential to 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] [edit]Marxist criticisms 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. [edit]Adorno's responses to his critics 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 sociologist thinks of a human essence is always changing over time.[42] [edit]Adorno's sociological methods

"Institut" and "Adorno-Ampel" (Adorno-traffic light) at "Senckenberganlage" in Frankfurt am Main 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). He felt that those at the top of the Institute needed to be the source primarily of theories for evaluation and empirical testing, as well as people who would process the "facts" discovered...including revising theories that were found to be false. For example, in 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.[citation needed] One example of the clash of intellectual culture and Adorno's methods can be found in Paul Lazarsfeld, the American sociologist for whom Adorno worked in the 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. Lazarsfeld, however, had trouble both with the prose style of the work Adorno handed in and what Lazarsfeld thought was Adorno's "lack of discipline in ... presentation".[43] Adorno himself provided the following personal anecdote: "What I mean by reified consciousness, I can illustrate – without elaborate philosophical contemplation - most simply with an American experience. Among the frequently changing colleagues which the Princeton Project provided me with, was a young lady. After a few days, she had gained confidence in me, and asked most kindly: “Dr Adorno, would you mind a personal question?”. I said, “It depends on the question, but just go ahead”, and she went on: “Please tell me: are you an extrovert or an introvert?”. It was as if she, as a living being, already thought according to the model of multi-choice questions in questionnaires.” [44]

[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", 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 the 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.[citation needed] The Group Experiment, which had been unavailable to English readers, is now available in an accessible translation by Jeffrey K. Olick and Andrew J. Perrin on Harvard University Press, along with introductory material explaining its relation to the rest of Adorno's work and 20th century public opinion research. [edit]Bibliography

Main article: Theodor W. Adorno bibliography Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (1933) Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Max Horkheimer, 1944) Philosophy of New Music (1949) The Authoritarian Personality (1950) Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951) In Search of Wagner (1952) Prisms (1955) Against Epistemology: A Metacritique; Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies (1956) Dissonanzen. Musik in der verwalteten Welt (1956) Notes to Literature I (1958) Sound Figures (1959) Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy (1960) Notes to Literature II (1961) Hegel: Three Studies (1963) Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (1963) Quasi una Fantasia (1963) The Jargon of Authenticity (1964) Night Music: Essays on Music 1928-1962 (1964) Negative Dialectics (1966) Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link (1968) Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (1969) Composing for the Films (1969) Aesthetic Theory (1970) Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music; Fragments and Texts (1993) Current of Music (2006)

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תאודור אדורנו

לידה 11 בספטמבר 1903 פרנקפורט, הקיסרות הגרמנית פטירה 6 באוגוסט 1969 (בגיל 65) ויספ, שווייץ מקום לימודים מרטון קולג', אוניברסיטת גתה בפרנקפורט מוסדות אוניברסיטת גתה בפרנקפורט זרם תאוריה ביקורתית תחומי עניין סוציולוגיה, פסיכואנליזה, מוזיקולוגיה הושפע מ הגל, קירקגור, ניטשה, הוסרל, מרקס, פרויד, ובר, בלוך, לוקאץ', זימל, שנברג, ברג, קפקא, בודלר, פרוסט, שפנגלר, קרקאואר, הורקהיימר השפיע על הורקהיימר, האברמאס, בורדייה, סעיד, בודריאר, ג'יימסון, שטוקהאוזן, צבי טאובר מדינה ארצות הברית, גרמניה יצירות ידועות Gesammelte Schriften, Negative Dialectics, Aesthetic Theory, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Philosophie und Musik, מינימה מוראליה פרסים והוקרה לוחית גתה של עיריית פרנקפורט (1963)

תאודור לודוויג ויזנגרונד אדורנו (Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno)‏ (11 בספטמבר 1903 – 6 באוגוסט 1969) היה פילוסוף, סוציולוג, מוזיקולוג ומלחין גרמני ממוצא יהודי ואיטלקי. אדורנו נחשב לחבר בולט באסכולת פרנקפורט, עימה נמנים אישים כגון מקס הורקהיימר, הרברט מרקוזה, ולטר בנימין, ליאו לוונטל (אנ'), יורגן האברמאס ואריך פרום.

אדורנו למד בפרנקפורט ובווינה. עם עליית הנאצים לשלטון בגרמניה היגר לאנגליה ולאחר מכן לארצות הברית. עם סיומה של מלחמת העולם השנייה חזר לגרמניה, ועמד בראש המכון למחקר חברתי של אוניברסיטת פרנקפורט.[1]

תוכן עניינים 1 ביוגרפיה 1.1 תקופה בווינה 1.2 שנות הביניים בפרנקפורט 1.3 בין ברלין ובין אוקספורד (1934-1937) 1.4 מהגר בארצות הברית (1938-1949) 1.5 התקופה האחרונה בפרנקפורט (1949-1969) 1.6 השנים האחרונות (1967-1969) 2 תאוריה 3 ספריו 4 קישורים חיצוניים 5 הערות שוליים

ביוגרפיה תאודור לודוויג ויזנגרונד אדורנו נולד בפרנקפורט וגדל כבן יחיד. אביו, אוסקר אלכסנדר ויזנגרונד (1870–1941), יהודי שהמיר את דתו ונעשה פרוטסטנטי, היה סוחר יין אמיד. אמו, מריה ברברה, בת למשפחה אריסטוקרטית איטלקית קתולית מן העיר ג'נובה, הייתה זמרת. שם נעוריה היה קלוולי-אדורנו, וחלקו השני של שם זה הוא שם המשפחה שאימץ לעצמו אדורנו בשנות השלושים, כשקיבל אזרחות אמריקאית. גם דודתו המוזיקאית אגתה גרה עם המשפחה. אדורנו הצעיר עסק בהתלהבות בנגינה בפסנתר.[2] הוא למד בגימנסיה קייזר וילהלם, עשה חיל בלימודיו, והיה הראשון בכיתה כשסיים אותם בגיל 17. בזמנו הפנוי למד קומפוזיציה בשיעורים פרטיים אצל ברנהרד זקלס, ובימי ראשון אחר הצהריים קרא את ביקורת התבונה הטהורה של עמנואל קאנט, ביחד עם חברו זיגפריד קרקאואר המבוגר ממנו ב-14 שנה. מאוחר יותר הוא יצהיר כי הוא חב לקריאה הזאת יותר מאשר לכל מורה שהוא מהאקדמיה. הוא למד פילוסופיה, מוזיקולוגיה, פסיכולוגיה וסוציולוגיה באוניברסיטת פרנקפורט, ולסיום הגיש ב-1926 דיסרטציה על אדמונד הוסרל. עוד לפני שסיים את לימודיו כבר פגש אדורנו את מקס הורקהיימר ואת ולטר בנימין, חבריו החשובים ביותר לעבודה האינטלקטואלית.

תקופה בווינה בפרנקפורט כתב אדורנו מספר מאמרי ביקורת על מוזיקה, אולם בראש ובראשונה רצה להיות מלחין. משנת 1925 למד אדורנו בווינה הלחנה אצל אלבן ברג ופסנתר אצל אדוארד שטוירמן.[3] הוא יצר קשרים עם חברי האסכולה הווינאית השנייה, אנטון וברן וארנולד שנברג. בהשראת האטונאליות המהפכנית של שנברג כתב אדורנו בן ה-22 הערות פילוסופיות על המוזיקולוגיה החדשה (אנ'), שלא התקבלו בעין יפה על ידי חסידיה. מאוכזב, צמצם אדורנו את כתיבתו על מוזיקה, והקדיש את עצמו לקריירה המשגשגת שלו כמורה באקדמיה וכאיש מחקר חברתי (אנ'). עם זאת, הוא נשאר העורך הראשי של מגזין האוונגארד Anbruch.

עם ההשפעות ארוכות הטווח על אדורנו מימי וינה שלו נמנים גם קרל קראוס, שלהרצאות שלו הלך ביחד עם אלבן ברג, וג'רג' לוקאץ'. תאוריה של הרומן של לוקאץ' הלהיבה את אדורנו עוד בימי הגימנסיה, ועל ספרו היסטוריה ותודעה מעמדית הוא כתב מאמר ביקורת.[4]

שנות הביניים בפרנקפורט כשחזר מווינה, נתקל אדורנו במכשלה נוספת. בתחילת 1928 הוא משך את הדיסרטציה שלו לקראת פרופסורה – מסה פילוסופית-פסיכולוגית מקיפה – לאחר שהמנחה שלו, האנס קורנליוס (אנ'), ומקס הורקהיימר, שהיה עוזר מחקר של קורנליוס, הביעו הסתייגויות כלפיה. נדרשו לו עוד שלוש שנים עד שהגיש את העבודה Konstruktion des Ästhetischen למנחה החדש שלו, פאול טיליך. הנאצים שללו את תוארו של אדורנו, כמו גם תאריהם של כל חבריו הפרופסורים ה"לא-אריים" בשנת 1933.

נושא הרצאת החניכה של אדורנו היה חשיבותה של הפילוסופיה היום. בהרצאתו הוא הטיל ספק במושג הטוטאליות בפעם הראשונה, וזה היה רמז מוקדם למכתמו המפורסם מתוך המינימה מוראליה (אנ'), האומר שהשלם (the whole) הוא השקר (the untrue), מכתם המכוון כנגד הגל.

המסה שכתב אדורנו ב-1932, על המצב החברתי של המוזיקה (Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik), היא תרומתו לגליונות הראשונים של כתב העת למחקר חברתי (Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung) של הורקהיימר.[5] רק ב-1938 הוא הצטרף למכון למחקר חברתי.

בין ברלין ובין אוקספורד (1934-1937) משנות ה-20 המאוחרות והלאה, במהלך ביקורים בברלין, קשר אדורנו קשרים קרובים עם ולטר בנימין ועם ארנסט בלוך. את עבודתו החשובה הראשונה של בלוך – רוח האוטופיה (Geist der Utopie) – הוא כבר הכיר עוד ב-1921. ברלין הייתה גם עירה של הכימאית מרגרטה (גרטל) קרפלוס (Margarethe 'Gretel' Karplus 1902-1993), שתינשא לו בלונדון ב-1937. ב-1934, כדי להימלט מהשלטון הנאצי, הוא היגר לאנגליה, בתקווה לקבל משרת פרופסור באוקספורד.

ב-1936 פורסם ב-Zeitschrift אחד מהטקסטים מעוררי המחלוקת ביותר מאת אדורנו, על הג'אז (Über Jazz). באותו זמן, המילה "ג'אז" שימשה פעמים רבות כשם כללי לכל סוגי המוזיקה הפופולרית. המאמר לא דן בג'אז כסגנון מוזיקלי אלא יצא נגד צורת הבידור הפורחת הזו ונגד חרושת התרבות. אדורנו האמין שחרושת התרבות היא מערכת המיועדת לשליטה בחברה דרך יצירה של תרבות מתוקננת (standardized) המעצימה את המסחור של הביטוי האמנותי. אדורנו דן בנושא זה גם במאמרו על האופי הפֶטישיסטי של המוזיקה (On the Fetish-Character in Music) (Zeitschrift, 1938), שבו הוא מנסח את אמירתו המפורסמת – "כל בידור שמשחרר את עצמו ממחיר השוק מקבל מאפיינים חתרניים".[6]

התכתבות ענפה עם הורקהיימר, שחי אז בגלות בארצות הברית, הובילה להצעת עבודה באמריקה.

מהגר בארצות הברית (1938-1949) אחרי שביקר בניו יורק סיטי בפעם הראשונה ב-1937, החליט אדורנו לעקור לשם. הוא נפרד מהוריו בבריסל, ושנתיים אחר כך הם הצטרפו אליו. מולטר בנימין הוא נפרד בסן רמו. בנימין בחר להישאר באירופה, והתקשורת ההדוקה ביניהם הוגבלה מאז למכתבים בלבד. ההסדרים שאפשרו את המעבר של אדורנו לארצות הברית קבעו שחלק מזמנו יוקדש למכון למחקר חברתי, שהועתק אז לאוניברסיטת קולומביה, ובשאר יהיה מנהל מוזיקלי בפרויקט הרדיו של הסוציולוג האוסטרי פול לזרספלד באוניברסיטת פרינסטון.[7]

ההסדר הזה נמשך עד 1941. עיקר עניינו של אדורנו היה אז בשיתוף פעולה ישיר עם הורקהיימר. הם עברו ללוס אנג'לס ביחד, ושם הוא לימד במשך שבע שנים והיה שותף לניהול יחידת המחקר ב-UCLA. עבודתם המשותפת התבטאה לראשונה במהדורה הראשונה של ספרם הדיאלקטיקה של הנאורות (Dialektik der Aufklärung) ב-1947. לנוכח אירועי השואה שהלכו והתחוורו אז, נפתחה העבודה במילים האלה:

'במובנה הכללי ביותר כהגות פרוגרסיבית, מטרתה של הנאורות הייתה תמיד לשחרר את האדם מן הפחד, ולבסס את ריבונותו. והנה העולם הנאור קורן כולו פורענות ניצחת.'[8]

בספר זה, שזכה בעיקר להתעלמות עד שיצא שנית לאור ב-1969, מציגים אדורנו והורקהיימר דינמיקה בקרב ציוויליזציה שנוטה להרס עצמי. הם טוענים שהנאורות הפכה את מושג התבונה לכוח לא רציונלי. כתוצאה מכך, התבונה השתלטה לא רק על הטבע, אלא גם על האנושיות עצמה. את הרציונליזציה הזאת של האנושיות הם זיהו כגורם לפשיזם ולמשטרים טוטליטריים אחרים.

אחרי 1945 הפסיק אדורנו את עבודתו כמלחין. בשנות ה-40 הוא עבד על הפילוסופיה של המוזיקה החדשה (Philosophie der neuen Musik) ועל הלחנה לסרטים של הנס אייזלר. הוא גם תרם איטרפרטציות איכותניות למחקרים על דעות קדומות שערכו כמה מכוני מחקר בארצות הברית וחשפו את האופי האוטוריטרי של הנבדק דרך שאלות עקיפות.

התקופה האחרונה בפרנקפורט (1949-1969) אחרי מלחמת העולם השנייה שב אדורנו לגרמניה, אליה התגעגע. ב-1949/1950, בזכות השפעתו של הורקהיימר, הוא קיבל משרת פרופסור באוניברסיטת פרנקפורט, וחזר אל הקריירה האקדמית שלו לאחר הפסקה ממושכת. זו הגיעה לשיאה עם מינויו הכפול לפרופסור מן המניין (Ordinarius) לפילוסופיה ולסוציולוגיה. מנהיגותו של אדורנו במכון למחקר חברתי, שחזר אף הוא לאוניברסיטה, הלכה והתחזקה, בעוד הורקהיימר, שהיה מבוגר מאדורנו בשמונה שנים, נסוג מן הניהול בהדרגה עד שב-1958/1959 השאיר אותו בידיו של חברו הצעיר ממנו.

אוסף המכתמים (אפיגראמות) של אדורנו, מינימה מוראליה, יצא לאור בגרמניה שאחרי המלחמה. הוא הציג בו מדע מלנכולי על הרקע האפל של הפשיזם, הסטליניזם וחרושת התרבות, שאיננו מציע, לכאורה, אלטרנטיבות פוליטיות או כלכליות: "אין דרך נכונה לחיות חיי טעות" ("Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen").[9] עם הספר הזה היה אדורנו לדמות אינטלקטואלית מכוננת ברפובליקה המערב גרמנית. ב-1953 נעשה ניסיון אחרון לשתף אותו במחקר בארצות הברית, אך הוא נכשל.

להלן רשימה חלקית של הישגיו של אדורנו:

ב-1952 השתתף אדורנו בניסוי קבוצתי שחשף גישות נאציונל-סוציאליסטיות בקרב הדמוקרטים הגרמנים החדשים. הניסוי ספג ביקורת מפי פטר ר. הופשטטר (Peter R. Hofstätter). החל משנת 1954 לימד מוזיקולוגיה בסמינר הקיץ למוזיקה חדשה בדרמשטדט. השתתף בדיונים רדיופוניים רבים, בין השאר עם ארנסט בלוך, אליאס קנטי וארנולד גלן (Arnold Gehlen). הרצה אדורנו בברלין וברחבי אירופה (בפריז, בווינה, באיטליה, בדוקומנטה בקאסל ב-1959, בצ'כוסלובקיה ב-1968). פרסם מכתבים וכתבים של ולטר בנימין. ב-1961 פתח בוויכוח כנגד הגישה הפוזיטיביסטית בפגישה של האגודה הסוציולוגית הגרמנית בטיבינגן. בין השנים 1963 ו-1967 כיהן אדורנו כיושב ראש של האגודה הסוציולוגית הגרמנית (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie, DGS). בתפקידו זה, עמד בראש הכינוס הסוציולוגי ה-15 ב-1964 – "מקס ובר והסוציולוגיה היום" – ובראש הכינוס הסוציולוגי ה-16 ב-1968 – "קפיטליזם מאוחר או החברה התעשייתית".

השנים האחרונות (1967-1969) ב-1966 נוסדה בגרמניה האופוזיציה החוץ-פרלמנטרית APO נגד שתי מפלגות הקואליציה הגדולות – CDU/CSU ו-SPD. ה-APO פעלה בעיקר נגד חקיקת חוקים לשעת חירום. אדורנו היה מבקר גלוי כנגד החוקים לשעת חירום, והשתתף באירוע שארגן ועד הפעולה "דמוקרטיה במצב חירום". כשהסטודנט בנו אונזורג (Benno Ohnesorg) נורה בידי שוטר בהפגנה נגד ביקורו של השאח הפרסי, הקצינו העמדות של APO השמאלנית והתחילו מהומות באוניברסיטאות. במידה רבה היו אלה סטודנטים של אדורנו שתרגמו תאוריה של התקוממות למעשה, וגזרו פרקסיס מתוך תאוריה ביקורתית. ב-31 בינואר 1969 ביקש אדורנו את עזרת המשטרה בסילוק סטודנטים שהשתלטו על המכון בפרנקפורט, מתוך פחד מוונדליזם, וכתוצאה מכך נעצרו 76 מחברי תנועת ה-SDS של רודי דוצ'קה.[10] אדורנו עצמו נעשה אז למטרה לפעולות של הסטודנטים. הוא ביקר בחריפות את הנטייה האנטי-אינטלקטואלית בשמאל של שנות ה-60, וקרא ל"מחשבה פתוחה": "מעבר לכל תוכן מסוים, המחשבה היא בראש ובראשונה כוח ההתנגדות".[11] ב-1969 התגברו ההפרעות בהרצאות שלו, והמפורסמת שבהן הייתה השתלטותן של סטודנטיות חשופות-חזה על בימת המרצה, עד שאדורנו הפסיק את סדרת ההרצאות. במכתב לסמואל בקט, הוא כתב: "ההרגשה להיות מותקף פתאום כריאקציונר – יש בה מן ההפתעה, לכל הפחות".

ביוגרף של אדורנו בשם סטפן מולר-דום (Stefan Müller-Doohm) טוען שאדורנו היה משוכנע שהתקפות הסטודנטים מכוונות כלפי התאוריות שלו כמו כלפיו עצמו ושהוא חשש שהמצב הפוליטי באותו זמן עלול להוביל לטוטליטריזם.

אדורנו יצא עם אשתו לחופשה בשווייץ, ובניגוד לאזהרות רופאיו יצא לטפס במעלה הר שגובהו 3,000 מטר, וכתוצאה מכך חש בפעמת. באותו יום נסעו הוא ואשתו אל העיר השכנה ויספ, ושם חזרה התופעה על עצמה, והוא הובהל למרפאה העירונית. בבוקר שלמחרת, ב-6 באוגוסט, הוא נפטר מהתקף לב, בגיל 65.

תאוריה בתחילת דרכו הושפע אדורנו מסרן קירקגור, והעביר קורס (ראשון) בהשפעתו אודות מגבלות הפילוסופיה. בהמשך, שיכלל את רעיונותיו, וטען כי דרך ההסתכלות שלנו על העולם מושפעת מאוד מהתרבות בה אנו חיים. כתוצאה מכך, חקר האמת נידון כמעט תמיד לכישלון מאחר שהסביבה שלנו יוצרת עבורנו שפה – עולם מושגים, או תפישה – הממסכים על האמת. לפעולת מיסוך זו קרא 'חרושת תרבות' וטען כי הסיכוי היחיד להימלט ממנה ולהתקרב להתבוננות על האמת נמצאת באמנות. יחד עם התאורטיקנים הרמן ברוך וקלמנט גרינברג הרחיב גם את המושג קיטש, המסמל את מוצרי חרושת התרבות, ואת המושג אוונגרד, המסמל את האמנות הצועדת על קרקע שלא "נכבשה" עדיין על ידי חרושת התרבות. הנושא מטופל בהרחבה בספרו תאוריה של האסתטיקה (Ästhetische Theorie) שפורסם ב-1970.

את אמירתו המפורסמת של אדורנו משנת 1949, "לכתוב שירה אחרי אושוויץ זו ברבריות", ניתן לפרש בכמה צורות. משה צוקרמן רואה בה הבעה של אי-אמון באמנות נוכח כישלונה הבוגדני אל מול הברבריות, הוא שומע בה גם פקפוק לגבי יכולתה של האמנות להיחלץ מהפקת עונג, אפילו בהקשר של עימות עם הזוועה האולטימטיבית, והוא גם חש בה את מועקת התודעה, שהשואה איננה ניתנת לייצוג, לא באופן מושגי-שכלתני ולא באופן אסתטי-אמנותי.[12] בערוב ימיו חזר בו אדורנו מן הנחרצות של אמירתו. בספרו דיאלקטיקה שלילית הוא טען שהסבל זכאי לייצוג כשם שהמעונה זכאי לצרוח. ועל-כן "ייתכן שהייתה זו טעות לקבוע שאחרי אושוויץ לא ניתן עוד לכתוב שירה".[13]

ספריו הדיאלקטיקה של הנאורות, 1947 הפילוסופיה של המוזיקה החדשה, 1949 מינימה מוראליה, 1951 מטה-ביקורת של תאוריית ההכרה מבוא לסוציולוגיה של המוזיקה דיאלקטיקה שלילית, 1966 תאוריה של האסתטיקה, 1970 חינוך לעצמאות מחשבתית, תרגום: אסף אנגרמן, הוצאת הקיבוץ המאוחד, 2017 קישורים חיצוניים מיזמי קרן ויקימדיה ויקיציטוט ציטוטים בוויקיציטוט: תאודור אדורנו ויקישיתוף תמונות ומדיה בוויקישיתוף: תאודור אדורנו דר שפיגל, קטעים מהראיון האחרון שהעניק אדורנו לפני מותו , באתר הארץ, 12 באוגוסט 2019 תאודור אדורנו

באתר Find a Grave (באנגלית) הערות שוליים

אדורנו, תאודור ו', חינוך לעצמאות מחשבתית, הקיבוץ המאוחד, 2017, עמ' 211-220

See his 1933 essay, "Vierhändig, noch einmal," reprinted in Adorno, Impromptus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968), 142–145.

מקס פאדיסון, מילון גרוב למוזיקה ומוזיקאים אונליין

Melissa Ursula Dawn Goldsmith, “Adorno on Strauss, Mahler, and Berg” (master’s thesis, Smith College, 1995), pp. 32–34.

Blomster, Wes (1978). "Introduction to Adorno Essays". Telos (35): 123.

Adorno (1938) On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. This essay will be republished in the 1956 collection Dissonanzen. Musik in der verwalteten Welt.

Letter from Adorno to Benjamin, November 27, 1937 in "The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940", Polity Press, 1999

Dialectic of Enlightenment, tr.John Cumming, Verso ed.London 1979 p.3. = 'Seit je hat Aufklärung im umfassendsten Sinn fortschreitenden Denkens das Ziel verfolgt, von den Menschen die Furcht zu nehmen und sie als Herren einzusetzen. Aber die vollends aufgeklärte Erde strahlt im Zeichen triumphalen Unheils.' German ed.Querido, Amsterdam,1947 reprinted S.Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main,1969 p.1

http://www.ldb.org/adorno.htm Quotes: Theodor W. Adorno

Leslie, Esther (1999). "Introduction to Adorno/Marcuse Correspondence on the German Student Movement". New Left Review (I/233, January–February 1999): 118–122.

Adorno, Theodor (1969). "Resignation". Telos (35): 165–168.

משה צוקרמן, על המהדורה העברית של ספרה של מרי לוונטל-פלסטינר, מציירת את חייה. שרלוטה סלומון בצל הנאציזם , זמנים, גיליון מספר 97.

לילך לחמן, "ואיך אפשר לאכול לאנץ'": שירה אחרי אושוויץ , באתר הארץ, 13 באפריל 2004. https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%AA%D7%90%D7%95%D7%93%D7%95%D7%A8_...

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Konrad Reinfelder about T. W. Adorno's ancestry: http://www.dettelbach.de/Eigene_Dateien/amtsblatt/Dettel_07_28.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_W._Adorno

Theodor W. Adorno (/əˈdɔːrnoʊ/;[1] German: [a%CB%88d%C9%94%CA%80no]; born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund; September 11, 1903 – August 6, 1969) was a German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society. He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come to be associated with thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, for whom the work of Freud, Marx and Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society. He is widely regarded as one of the 20th century's foremost thinkers on aesthetics and philosophy, as well as one of its preeminent essayists. As a critic of both fascism and what he called the culture industry, his writings—such as Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Minima Moralia (1951) and Negative Dialectics (1966)—strongly influenced the European New Left. Amidst the vogue enjoyed by existentialism and positivism in early 20th century Europe, Adorno advanced a dialectical conception of natural history that critiqued the twin temptations of ontology and empiricism through studies of Kierkegaard and Husserl. As a classically trained pianist whose sympathies with the twelve-tone technique of Arnold Schoenberg resulted in his studying composition with Alban Berg of the Second Viennese School, Adorno's commitment to avant-garde music formed the backdrop of his subsequent writings and led to his collaboration with Thomas Mann on the latter's novel Doctor Faustus, while the two men lived in California as exiles during the Second World War. Working for the newly relocated Institute for Social Research, Adorno collaborated on influential studies of authoritarianism, anti-semitism and propaganda that would later serve as models for sociological studies the Institute carried out in post-war Germany. Upon his return to Frankfurt, Adorno was influential to the reconstitution of German intellectual life through debates with Karl Popper on the limitations of positivist science, critiques of Heidegger's jargon of authenticity, writings on German responsibility for the Holocaust, and continued interventions into matters of public policy. As a writer of polemics in the tradition of Nietzsche and Karl Kraus, Adorno delivered scathing critiques of contemporary Western culture. Adorno's posthumously published Aesthetic Theory, which he planned on dedicating to Samuel Beckett, is the culmination of a lifelong commitment to modern art which attempts to revoke the "fatal separation" of feeling and understanding long demanded by the history of philosophy and explode the privilege aesthetics accords to content over form and contemplation over immersion. Contents [show] [edit]Life and career

[edit]Early years: Frankfurt Theodor Ludwig Adorno-Wiesengrund was born in Frankfurt am Main on September 11, 1903, the only child of Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund (1870–1946) and Maria Calvelli-Adorno della Piana (1865–1952). His mother, a devout Catholic from Corscia, was once a professional singer, while his father, an assimilated Jew who had converted to Protestantism, ran a successful wine-export business. Proud of her origins, Maria wanted her son's paternal surname to be supplemented by the addition of her own name: Adorno. Thus his earliest publications carried the name Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno; upon his application for US citizenship, his name was modified to Theodor W. Adorno. His childhood was marked by the musical life provided by his mother and aunt: Maria was a singer who could boast of having performed in Vienna at the Imperial Court, while her sister, Agathe, who lived with them, had made a name for herself as both a singer and pianist. He was not only a precocious child but, as he recalled later in life, a child prodigy who could play pieces by Beethoven on the piano by the time he was twelve.[2] At the age of six, he attended the Deutschherren middle school before transferring to the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gymnasium, where he studied from 1913 to 1921. Prior to his graduation at the top of his class, Adorno was already swept up by the revolutionary mood of the time, as is evidenced by his reading of Georg Lukacs's The Theory of the Novel that year, as well as by his fascination with Ernst Bloch's The Spirit of Utopia, of which he would later write: Bloch's was a philosophy that could hold its head high before the most advanced literature; a philosophy that was not calibrated to the abominable resignation of methodology … I took this motif so much as my own that I do not believe I have ever written anything without reference to it, either implicit or explicit.[3] Yet Adorno's intellectual nonconformism was no less shaped by the repugnance he felt towards the nationalism which swept through the Reich during the First World War. Along with future collaborators like Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Ernst Bloch, Adorno was profoundly disillusioned by the ease with which Germany's intellectual and spiritual leaders—among them Max Weber, Max Scheler, Ernst Simmel, as well as his friend Siegfried Kracauer—came out in support of the war. The younger generation's distrust for traditional knowledge arose from the way in which this tradition had discredited itself.[4] Over time, Oscar Wiesengrund's firm established close professional and personal ties with the factory of Karplus & Herzberger in Berlin. The eldest daughter of the Karplus family, Margarete, or Gretel, moved in the intellectual circles of Berlin, where she was acquainted with Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Bloch, each of whom Adorno would become familiar with during the mid-20s; after fourteen years, Gretel and Theodor were married in 1937. At the end of his schooldays, Adorno not only benefited from the rich concert offerings of Frankfurt - in which one could hear performances of works by Schoenberg, Schreker, Stravinsky, Bartók, Busoni, Delius and Hindemith - but also began studying music composition at the Hoch Conservatory while taking private lessons with well-respected composers Bernhard Sekles and Eduard Jung. At around the same time, he befriended Siegfried Kracauer, the Frankfurter Zeitung’s literary editor, of whom he would later write: For years Kracauer read [Kant%E2%80%99s] Critique of Pure Reason with me regularly on Saturday afternoons. I am not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that I owe more to this reading than to my academic teachers … Under his guidance I experienced the work from the beginning not as mere epistemology, not as an analysis of the conditions of scientifically valid judgments, but as a kind of coded text from which the historical situation of spirit could be read, with the vague expectation that in doing so one could acquire something of truth itself.” [5] Leaving gymnasium to study philosophy, psychology and sociology at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Adorno continued his readings with Kracauer, turning now to Hegel and Kierkegaard, and began publishing concert reviews and pieces of music for distinguished journals like the Zeitschrift für Musik, the Neue Blätter für Kunst und Literatur and later for the Musikblätter des Anbruch. In these articles, Adorno championed avant-garde music at the same time as he critiqued the failings of musical modernity, as in the case of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, which he called in 1923 a “dismal Bohemian prank.”[6] In these early writings, he was unequivocal in his condemnation of performances which either sought or pretended to achieve a transcendence which Adorno, in line with many intellectuals of the time, regarded as impossible: “No cathedral,” he wrote, “can be built if no community desires one.”[7] In the summer of 1924, Adorno received his doctorate with a study of Edmund Husserl under the direction of the unorthodox neo-Kantian Hans Cornelius. Before his graduation, Adorno had already met with his most important intellectual collaborators, Max Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin. Through Cornelius's seminars, Adorno met his future collaborator Max Horkheimer, through whom he was then introduced to Friedrich Pollock. [edit]Vienna, Frankfurt, and Berlin During the summer of 1924, the Viennese composer Alban Berg's Three Fragments from Wozzeck, op. 7 premiered in Frankfurt, at which time Adorno introduced himself to Berg and both agreed the young philosopher and composer would study with Berg in Vienna. Upon moving to Vienna in January 1925, Adorno immersed himself in the musical culture which had grown up around Schoenberg: in addition to his twice-weekly sessions with Berg, Adorno continued his studies on piano with Eduard Steuermann and befriended the violinist Rudolf Kolisch. In Vienna, he attended public lectures of the satirist Karl Kraus with Berg and met Lukács, who had been living in Vienna after the failure of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Alban Berg, the man Adorno referred to as "my master and teacher," was among the most prescient of his young pupil's early friends: [I am] convinced that, in the sphere of the deepest understanding of music ... you are capable of supreme achievements and will undoubtedly fulfill this promise in the shape of great philosophical works.[8] After leaving Vienna, Adorno traveled through Italy, where he met with Kracauer, Benjamin, and the economist Alfred Sohn-Rethel, with whom he developed a lasting friendship, before returning to Frankfurt. In December 1926 Adorno's "Two Pieces for String Quartet," op.2 were performed in Vienna, which provided a welcome interruption from his preparations for the Habilitation. After writing the "Piano Pieces in strict twelve-tone technique," as well as songs later integrated into the Six Bagatelles for Voice and Piano, op. 6, Adorno presented his Habilitation manuscript, The Concept of the Unconscious in the Transcendental Theory of the Psyche, to Cornelius in November 1927. Cornelius advised Adorno to withdraw his application on the grounds that the manuscript was too close to his own way of thinking. In this manuscript, Adorno attempted to underline the epistemological status of the unconscious as it emerged out of Freud's early writings. Against the function of the unconscious in both Nietzsche and Spengler, Adorno argued that Freud's notion of the unconscious serves as a "sharp weapon ... against every attempt to create a metaphysics of the instincts and to deify full, organic nature."[9] Undaunted by his academic prospects, Adorno threw himself once again into composition. In addition to publishing numerous reviews of opera performances and concerts, Adorno's "Four Songs for Medium Voice and Piano", op.3 was performed in Berlin in January 1929. Between 1928 and 1930 Adorno took on a greater role within the editorial committee of the Musikblätter des Anbruch. In a proposal for transforming the journal, Adorno sought to use Anbruch for championing radical modern music against what he called the "stabilized music" of Pfitzner, the later Strauss, as well as the neoclassicism of Stravinsky and Hindemith. During this period he published the essays "Night Music", "On Twelve-Tone Technique" and "Reaction and Progress". Yet his reservations about twelve-tone orthodoxy became steadily more pronounced: According to Adorno, twelve-tone technique's use of atonality can no more be regarded as an authoritative canon than can tonality be relied on to provide instructions for the composer. At this time, Adorno struck up a correspondence with the composer Ernst Krenek, with whom he discussed problems of atonality and twelve-tone technique. In a letter of 1934 Adorno sounded a related criticism of Schoenberg: Twelve-tone technique alone is nothing but the principle of motivic elaboration and variation, as developed in the sonata, but elevated now to a comprehensive principle of construction, namely transformed into an a priori form and, by that token, detached from the surface of the composition.[10] At this point Adorno reversed his earlier priorities: now his musical activities came second to the development of a philosophical theory of aesthetics. Thus, in the middle of 1929 he accepted Paul Tillich's offer to present an Habilitation on Kierkegaard, which Adorno eventually submitted under the title The Construction of the Aesthetic. At the time, Kierkegaard's philosophy exerted a strong influence, chiefly through its claim to pose an alternative to Idealism and Hegel's philosophy of history. Yet when Adorno turned his attention to Kierkegaard, watchwords like "anxiety," "inwardness" and "leap"—instructive for existentialist philosophy—were detached from their theological origins and posed, instead, as problems for aesthetics.[11] As the work proceeded—and Kierkegaard's overcoming of Hegel's idealism is revealed to be a mere interiorization—Adorno excitedly remarks in a letter to Berg that he is writing without looking over his shoulder at the faculty who would soon evaluate his work. Receiving favorable reports from Professors Tillich and Horkheimer, as well as Benjamin and Kracauer, the University conferred on Adorno the venia legendi in February 1931; on the very day his revised study was published, in March 1933, Hitler seized dictatorial powers.[12] Several months after qualifying as a lecturer in philosophy, Adorno delivered an inaugural lecture at the Institute for Social Research, an independent organization which had recently appointed Horkheimer as its director and, with the arrival of the literary scholar Leo Lowenthal, social psychologist Erich Fromm and philosopher Herbert Marcuse, sought to exploit recent theoretical and methodological advances in the social sciences. His lecture, "The Actuality of Philosophy," created a scandal. In it, Adorno not only deviated from the theoretical program Horkheimer had laid out a year earlier, but challenged philosophy's very capacity for comprehending reality as such: "For the mind," Adorno announced, "is indeed not capable of producing or grasping the totality of the real, but it may be possible to penetrate the detail, to explode in miniature the mass of merely existing reality."[13] In line with Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama and preliminary sketches of the Arcades Project, Adorno likened philosophical interpretation to experiments which should be conducted "until they arrive at figurations in which the answers are legible, while the questions themselves vanish." Having lost its position as the Queen of the Sciences, philosophy must now radically transform its approach to objects so that it might "construct keys before which reality springs open."[14] Following Horkheimer's taking up the directorship of the Institute, a new journal, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, was produced to publish the research of Institute members both before and after its relocation to the United States. Though Adorno was not himself an Institute member, the journal nevertheless published many of his essays, including "The Social Situation of Music" (1932), "On Jazz" (1936), "On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening" (1938) and "Fragments on Wagner" (1938). In his new role as social theorist, Adorno's philosophical analysis of cultural phenomena heavily relied on the language of historical materialism, as concepts like reification, false consciousness and ideology came to play an ever more prominent role in his work. At the same time, however, and owing to both the presence of another prominent sociologist at the Institute, Karl Mannheim, as well as the methodological problem posed by treating objects - like "musical material" - as ciphers of social contradictions, Adorno was compelled to abandon any notion of "value-free" sociology in favor of a form of ideology critique which held on to an idea of truth. Before his emigration in autumn 1934, Adorno began work on a Singspiel based on Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer entitled The Treasure of Indian Joe, which he would, however, never complete; by the time he fled Hitler's Germany Adorno had already written over a hundred opera or concert reviews and an additional fifty critiques of music composition. As the Nazi party became the largest party in the Reichstag Horkheimer's 1932 observation proved chillingly prophetic: "Only one thing is certain," he wrote, "the irrationality of society has reached a point where only the gloomiest predications have any plausibility." [15] In September Adorno's right to teach was revoked; in March, as the swastika was run up the flag pole of town hall, the Institute's offices were searched by the Frankfurt criminal police. Adorno's house on Seeheimer Strasse was similarly searched in July and his application for membership in the Reich Chamber of Literature was denied on the grounds that membership was limited to "persons who belong to the German nation by profound ties of character and blood. As a non-Aryan," he was informed, "you are unable to feel and appreciate such an obligation."[16] Soon afterwards Adorno was forced into fifteen years of exile. [edit]Exile: Oxford, London, New York, Los Angeles After the possibility of transferring his habilitation to the University of Vienna came to nothing, Adorno considered relocating to Britain upon his father's suggestion. With the help of the Academic Assistance Council, Adorno registered as an advanced student at Merton College, Oxford, in June 1934. During the next four years at Oxford, Adorno made repeated trips to Germany to see both his parents and Gretel, who was still working in Berlin. Under the direction of Gilbert Ryle, Adorno worked on a dialectical critique of Husserl's epistemology. By this time, the Institute for Social Research had relocated to New York City and began making overtures to Adorno. After months of strained relations, Horkheimer and Adorno reestablished their essential theoretical alliance during meetings in Paris. Adorno continued writing on music, publishing "The Form of the Phonograph Record" and "Crisis of Music Criticism" with the Viennese musical journal 23, "On Jazz" in the Institute's Zeitschrift, "Farewell to Jazz" in Europäischen Revue. Yet Adorno's attempts to break out of the sociology of music were, at this time, twice thwarted: neither the study of Mannheim he had been working on for years nor extracts from his study of Husserl were accepted by the Zeitschrift. Impressed by Horkheimer's book of aphorisms, Dawn and Decline, Adorno began working on his own book of aphorisms, what would later become Minima Moralia. While at Oxford, Adorno suffered two great losses: his Aunt Agathe died in June 1935, while Alban Berg died in December of the same year. To the end of his life, Adorno never abandoned the hope of completing Berg's unfinished Lulu. At this time, Adorno was in intense correspondence with Walter Benjamin on the subject of the latter’s Arcades Project. After receiving an invitation from Horkheimer to visit the Institute in New York, Adorno sailed for New York on June 9, 1937 and stayed there for two weeks. While in New York, Max Horkheimer’s essays “The Latest Attack on Metaphysics” and “Traditional and Critical Theory,” which would soon become instructive for the Institute’s self-understanding, were the subject of intense discussion. Soon after his return to Europe, Gretel moved to Britain, where she and Adorno were married on September 8, 1937; a little over a month later, Horkheimer telegrammed from New York with news of a position Adorno could take up with the Princeton Radio Project, then under the directorship of the Austrian sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld. Yet Adorno’s work continued with studies of Beethoven and Richard Wagner (published in 1939 as "Fragments on Wagner"), drafts of which he read to Benjamin during their final meeting, in December on the Italian Riviera. According to Benjamin, these drafts were astonishing for “the precision of their materialist deciphering,” as well as the way in which “musical facts … had been made socially transparent in a way that was completely new to me.”[17] In his Wagner study, the thesis later to characterize Dialectic of Enlightenment—man's domination of nature—first emerges. Adorno sailed for New York on February 16, 1938. Soon after settling into his new home on Riverside Drive, Adorno met with Lazarsfeld in Newark to discuss the Project’s plans for investigating the impact of broadcast music. Although he was expected to embed the Project’s research within a wider theoretical context, it soon became apparent that the Project was primarily concerned with data collection to be used by administrators for establishing whether groups of listeners could be targeted by broadcasts specifically aimed at them. Expected to make use of devices with which listeners could press a button to indicate whether they liked or disliked a particular piece of music, Adorno bristled with distaste and astonishment: “I reflected that culture was simply the condition that precluded a mentality that tried to measure it.”[18] Thus Adorno suggested using individual interviews to determine listener reactions and, only three months after meeting Lasarzfeld, completed a 160-page memorandum on the Project’s topic, “Music in Radio.” Adorno was primarily interested in how the musical material was affected by its distribution through the medium of radio and thought it imperative to understand how music was affected by its becoming part of daily life. “The meaning of a Beethoven symphony,” he wrote, “heard while the listener is walking around or lying in bed is very likely to differ from its effect in a concert-hall where people sit as if they were in church.”[19] In essays published by the Institute’s Zeitschrift, Adorno dealt with that atrophy of musical culture which had become instrumental in accelerating tendencies - towards conformism, trivialization and standardization - already present in the larger culture. Unsurprisingly, Adorno’s studies found little resonance among members of the project. At the end of 1939, when Lazarsfeld submitted a second application for funding, the musical section of the study was duly left out. Yet during the two years during which he worked on the Project, Adorno was nevertheless prolific, publishing “The Radio Sympthony,” “A Social Critique of Radio Music” and “On Popular Music,” texts which, along with the draft memorandum and other unpublished writings, which are now found in Robert Hullot-Kentor’s recent translation, Current of Music. In light of this situation, Horkheimer soon found a permanent post for Adorno at the Institute. In addition to helping with the Zeitschrift Adorno was expected to be the Institute's liaison with Benjamin, who soon passed on to New York the study of Charles Baudelaire he hoped would serve as a model of the larger Arcades Project. In correspondence, the two men discussed the difference in their conceptions of the relationship between critique and artworks which had become manifest through Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility." At around the same time Adorno and Horkheimer began planning for a joint work on "dialectical logic," which would later become Dialectic of Enlightenment. Alarmed by reports from Europe, where Adorno’s parents suffered increasing discrimination and Benjamin was interned in Colombes, their joint study could entertain few delusions about its practical effects. “In view of what is now threatening to engulf Europe,” Horkheimer wrote, “our present work is essentially destined to pass things down through the night that is approaching: a kind of message in a bottle”[20] As Adorno continued his work in New York with radio talks on music and a lecture on Soren Kierkegaard's doctrine of love, Benjamin fled Paris and attempted to make an illegal border crossing. After learning that his Spanish visa was invalid and fearing deportation back to France, Benjamin took an overdose of morphine tablets. In light of recent events, the Institute set about formulating a theory of anti-Semitism and fascism. On one side were those who supported Franz Neumann's thesis according to which National Socialism was a form of "monopoly capital"; on the other were those who supported Fritz Pollock's "state capitalist theory." Horkheimer’s contributions to this debate, in the form of the essays "The Authoritarian State," "The End of Reason" and "The Jews and Europe" served as a foundation for what he and Adorno planned to do in their book on dialectical logic. In November 1941 Adorno followed Horkheimer to what Thomas Mann called "German California,"[21] setting up house in a Pacific Palisades neighborhood of German emigres which included Bertolt Brecht and Arnold Schoenberg. Adorno arrived with a draft of his Philosophy of New Music, a dialectical critique of twelve-tone music, which Adorno himself felt, while writing, was already a departure from the theory of art he had spent the previous decades elaborating. Horkheimer's reaction to the manuscript was wholly positive: "If I have ever in the whole of my life felt enthusiasm about anything, then I did on this occasion," he wrote after reading the manuscript.[22] The two set about completing their joint work, which transformed itself from a book on dialectical logic to a rewriting of the history of rationality and the Enlightenment. First published in a small mimeographed edition in May 1944 as Philosophical Fragments, the text would wait another three years before achieving book form when it was published with its definitive title, Dialectic of Enlightenment, by the Amsterdam publisher Querido Verlag. This "reflection on the destructive aspect of progress" proceeded through chapter which treated rationality as both the liberation from and further domination of nature, interpretations of both Homer’s Odyssey and the Marquis de Sade, as well as analyses of the culture industry and anti-semitism. Their joint work completed, the two turned their attention to studies on anti-semitism and authoritarianism in collaboration with the Nevitt Sanford-led Public Opinion Study Group and the American Jewish Committee. In line with these studies, Adorno produced an analysis of the Californian radio preacher Martin Luther Thomas. Fascist propaganda of this sort, Adorno wrote, "simply takes people for what they are: genuine children of today’s standardized mass culture who have been robbed to a great extent of their autonomy and spontaneity"[23] The result of these labors, the 1950 study The Authoritarian Personality was pioneering in its combination of quantitative and qualitative methods of collecting and evaluating data as well as its development of the F-scale. After the USA entered the war in 1941, the situation of the émigrés, now classed "enemy aliens" became increasingly precarious as government measures turned from anti-Nazism to anti-communism. Forbidden from leaving their homes between 8pm and 6am and prohibited from going more than five miles from their houses, émigrés like Adorno, who would not be naturalized until November 1943, were severely restricted in their movements. In addition to the aphorisms which conclude Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno put together a collection of aphorisms in honor of Horkheimer’s fiftieth birthday that would later be published as Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. These fragmentary writings, inspired by a renewed reading of Nietzsche, treated issues like emigration, totalitarianism and individuality, as well as everyday matters such as giving presents, dwelling and the impossibility of love. In California, Adorno made the acquaintance of Charlie Chaplin and became friends with Fritz Lang and Hanns Eisler, with whom he completed a study of film music in 1944. In this study, the authors pushed for the greater usage of avant-garde music in film, urging that music be used to supplement, not simply accompany, the visual aspect of films. Additionally, Adorno assisted Thomas Mann on his novel Doctor Faustus after the latter asked for his help. “Would you be willing," Mann wrote, "to think through with me how the work - I mean Leverkuhn’s work - might look; how you would do it if you were in league with the Devil?”[24] At the end of October 1949, Adorno left America for Europe just as The Authoritarian Personality was being published. Before his return, Adorno had not only reached an agreement with a Tübingen publisher to print an expanded version of Philosophy of New Music, but completed two compositions: Four Songs for Voice and Piano by Stefan George, op.7, and Three Choruses for Female Voices from the Poems of Theodor Daubler, op. 8. [edit]Post-war Europe [edit]Return to Frankfurt University Upon his return, Adorno helped shape the political culture of West Germany. Until his death in 1969, twenty years after his return, Adorno contributed to the intellectual foundations of the Federal Republic, as a professor at Frankfurt University, critic of the vogue enjoyed by Heideggerian philosophy, partisan of critical sociology and teacher of music at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music. Adorno resumed his teaching duties at the university soon after his arrival,[when?] with seminars on "Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic," aesthetics, Hegel, “Contemporary Problems in the Theory of Knowledge” and “The Concept of Knowledge.” Adorno’s surprise at his students' passionate interest in intellectual matters did not, however, blind him to continuing problems within Germany: The literary climate was dominated by writers who had remained in Germany during Hitler's rule, the government re-employed people who had been active in the Nazi apparatus and people were generally loath to own up to their own collaboration or the guilt they thus incurred. Instead, the ruined city of Frankfurt continued as if nothing had happened,[citation needed] holding on to ideas of the true, the beautiful, and the good despite the atrocities, hanging on to a culture that had itself been lost in rubble or killed off in the concentration camps. All the enthusiasm Adorno's students showed for intellectual matters could not erase the suspicion that, in the words of Max Frisch, culture had become an "alibi" for the absence of political consciousness.[25] Yet the foundations for what would come to be known as "The Frankfurt School" were soon laid: Horkheimer resumed his chair in social philosophy and the Institute for Social Research, rebuilt, became a lightning rod for critical thought. [edit]Essays on Fascism Starting with his 1947 essay Wagner, Nietzsche and Hitler,[26] Adorno produced a series of influentia works to describe psychological fascist traits. One of these works was The Authoritarian Personality (1950),[27] published as a contribution to the Studies in Prejudice performed by multiple research institutes in the US, and consisted on a 'qualitative interpretations' that uncovered the authoritarian character of test persons through indirect questions.[citation needed] The books has had a major influence on sociology and remains highly debated. In 1951 he continued on the topic with his essay Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda, in which he said that "Psychological dispositions do not actually cause fascism; rather, fascism defines a psychological area which can be successfully exploited by the forces which promote it for entirely non-psychological reasons of self-interest."[28] In 1952 Adorno participated in a group experiment, revealing residual National Socialist attitudes among the recently democratized Germans. He then published two influential essays, The Meaning of Working Through the Past (1959), and Education after Auschwitz (1966), in which he argued on the survival of the uneradicated National Socialism in the mind-sets and institutions of the post-1945 Germany, and that there is still a real risk that it could raise again.[29] [edit]Public events Nevertheless, in September 1951 Adorno returned to the United States for a six-week visit, during which he attended the opening of the Hacker Psychiatry Foundation in Beverly Hills, met Leo Lowenthal and Herbert Marcuse in New York and saw his mother for the last time. After stopping in Paris, where he met Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Michel Leiris and Rene Leibowitz, Adorno delivered a lecture entitled "The Present State of Empirical Social Research in Germany" at a conference on opinion research. Here he emphasized the importance of data collection and statistical evaluation while asserting that such empirical methods have only an auxiliary function and must lead to the formation of theories which would “raise the harsh facts to the level of consciousness.”[30] With Horkheimer as dean of the Arts Faculty, then rector of the university, responsibilities for the Institute's work fell upon Adorno. At the same time, however, Adorno renewed his musical work: with talks at the Kranichsteiner Musikgesellschaft, another in connection with a production of Ernst Krenek’s opera Leben des Orest, and a seminar on “Criteria of New Music” at the Fifth International Summer Course for New Music at Kranichstein. Adorno also became increasingly involved with the publishing house of Peter Suhrkamp, inducing the latter to publish Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood Around 1900, Kracauer’s writings and a two-volume edition of Benjamin’s writings. Adorno’s own recently published Minima Moralia was not only well received in the press, but also met with great admiration from Thomas Mann, who wrote to Adorno from America in 1952: I have spent days attached to your book as if by a magnet. Every day brings new fascination … concentrated nourishment. It is said that the companion star to Sirius, white in colour, is made of such dense material that a cubic inch of it would weigh a tonne here. This is why it has such an extremely powerful gravitational field; in this respect it is similar to your book.[31] Yet Adorno was no less moved by other public events: protesting the publication of Heinrich Mann's novel Professor Unrat with its film title, The Blue Angel; declaring his sympathy with those who protested the scandal of big-game hunting and penning a defense of prostitutes. [edit]More essays on mass culture and literature Because Adorno’s American citizenship would have been forfeited by the middle of 1952 had he continued to stay outside the country, he returned once again to Santa Monica to survey his prospects at the Hacker Foundation. While there he wrote a content analysis of newspaper horoscopes (now collected in The Stars Down to Earth), the essays “Television as Ideology” and “Prologue to Television”; even so, he was pleased when, at the end of ten months, he was enjoined to return as co-director of the Institute. Back in Frankfurt, he renewed his academic duties and, from 1952 to 1954, completed the essays “Notes on Kafka”, “Valéry Proust Museum” and an essay on Schoenberg following the composer's death, all of which were included in the 1955 essay collection Prisms. In response to the publication of Thomas Mann's The Black Swan, Adorno penned a long letter to the author, who then approved its publication in the literary journal Akzente. A second collection of essays, Notes to Literature, appeared in 1958. After meeting Samuel Beckett while delivering a series of lectures in Paris the same year, Adorno set to work on "Trying to Understand Endgame," which, along with studies of Proust, Valéry and Balzac, formed the central texts of the 1961 publication of the second volume of his Notes to Literature. Adorno’s entrance into literary discussions continued in his June 1963 lecture at the annual conference of the Hölderlin Society. At the Philosophers’ Conference of October 1962 in Münster, at which Habermas wrote that Adorno was "A writer among bureaucrats", Adorno presented "Progress."[32] Although the Zeitschrift was never revived, the Institute nevertheless published a series of important sociological books, including a collection of essays entitled Sociologica (1955), the Gruppenexperiment (1955), a study of work satisfaction among workers in Mannesmann called Betriebsklima and the Soziologische Exkurse, a textbook-like anthology intended as an introductory work about the discipline. [edit]Public figure Throughout the fifties and sixties, Adorno became a public figure, not simply through his books and essays, but also through his appearances in radio and newspapers. In talks, interviews and round-table discussions broadcast on Hessen Radio, South-West Radio and Radio Bremen, Adorno discussed topics as diverse as “The Administered World” (September 1950), “What is the Meaning of ‘Working Through the Past?”’ (February 1960) to “The Teaching Profession and its Taboos” (August 1965). Additionally, he frequently wrote for Frankfurter Allgemeine, Frankfurter Rundschau and the weekly Die Zeit. At the invitation of Wolfgang Steinecke, Adorno took part in the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music in Kranichstein from 1951 to 1958. Yet conflicts between the so-called Darmstadt school, which included composers like Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Karel Goeyvaerts, Luciano Berio and Gottfried Michael Koenig, soon arose, receiving explicit expression in Adorno's 1954 lecture, "The Aging of the New Music", where he argued that atonality's freedom was being restricted to serialism in much the same way as it was once restricted by twelve-tone technique. With his friend Eduard Steuermann, Adorno feared that music was being sacrificed to stubborn rationalization. During this time Adorno not only produced a significant series of notes on Beethoven (which was never completed and only published posthumously), but also published Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy in 1960. In his 1961 return to Kranichstein, Adorno called for what he termed a "musique informelle". which would possess the ability "really and truly to be what it is, without the ideological pretense of being something else. Or rather, to admit frankly the fact of non-identity and to follow through its logic to the end."[33] [edit]Post-war German culture At the same time Adorno struck up relationships with contemporary German-language poets such as Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. Adorno’s 1949 dictum—"To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric"—posed the question of what German culture could mean after Auschwitz; his own continual revision of this dictum—in Negative Dialectics, for example, he wrote that "Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream"; while in “Commitment,” he wrote in 1962 that the dictum "expresses in negative form the impulse which inspires committed literature"—was part of post-war Germany’s struggle with history and culture. Adorno additionally befriended the writer and poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger as well as the film-maker Alexander Kluge. In 1963, Adorno was elected to the post of chairman of the German Sociological Society, where he presided over two important conferences: in 1964, on "Max Weber and Sociology" and in 1968 on "Late Capitalism or Industrial Society". A debate launched in 1961 by Adorno and Karl Popper, later published as the Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, arose out of disagreements at the 1959 14th German Sociology Conference in Berlin. Adorno's critique of the dominant climate of post-war Germany was also directed against the pathos that had grown up around Heideggerianism, as practiced by writers like Karl Jaspers and Otto Friedrich Bollow, and which had subsequently seeped into public discourse. His 1964 publication of The Jargon of Authenticity took aim at the halo such writers had attached to words like "angst", "decision" and "leap". After seven years of work, Adorno completed Negative Dialectics in 1966, after which, during the summer semester of 1967 and the winter semester of 1967-8, he offered regular philosophy seminars to discuss the book chapter by chapter. Among the students at these seminars were the Americans Angela Davis and Irving Wohlfarth. One objection which would soon take on ever greater importance, was that critical thought must adopt the standpoint of the oppressed, to which Adorno replied that negative dialectics was concerned "with the dissolution of standpoint thinking itself." [edit]Confrontations with students At the time of Negative Dialectics' publication, the fragility of West German democracy led to the increasing student protests. Monopolistic trends in the media, an educational crisis in the universities, the Shah of Persia's 1967 state visit, German support for the war in Vietnam and the emergency laws combined to create a highly unstable situation. Like many of his students, Adorno too opposed the emergency laws, as well as the war in Vietnam, which, he said, proved the continued existence of the "world of torture that had begun in Auschwitz”[34] The situation only deteriorated with the police shooting of Benno Ohnesorg at a protest against the Shah's visit. This death, as well as the subsequent acquittal of the responsible officer, were both commented upon in Adorno's lectures. As politicization increased, rifts developed within both the Institute's relationship with its students as well as within the Institute itself. Soon Adorno himself would become an object of the students' ire. At the invitation of Peter Szondi, Adorno was invited to the Free University of Berlin to give a lecture on Goethe's Iphigenie in Tauris. After a group of students marched to the lectern, unfurling a banner that read "Berlin’s left-wing fascists greet Teddy the Classicist," a number of those present left the lecture in protest after Adorno refused to abandon his talk in favor of discussing his attitude on the current political situation. Adorno shortly thereafter participated in a friendly and productive[citation needed] meeting with the Berlin Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS) and discussed "Student Unrest" with Szondi on West German Radio. But as 1968 progressed, Adorno became increasingly critical of the students' disruptions to university life. His isolation was only compounded by articles published in the magazine alternative, which, following the lead of Hannah Arendt’s articles in Merkur, claimed Adorno had subjected Benjamin to pressure during his years of exile in Berlin and compiled Benjamin’s Writings and Letters with a great deal of bias. In response, Benjamin’s longtime friend Gershom Scholem, wrote to the editor of Merkur to express his disapproval of the "in part, shameful, not to say disgraceful" remarks by Arendt.[35] Relations between students and the West German state continued deteriorating. In spring 1968, a prominent SDS spokesman, Rudi Dutschke, was gunned down in the streets; in response, massive demonstrations took place, directed in particular against the Springer Press, which had led a campaign to vilify the students. An open appeal published in Die Zeit, signed by Adorno, called for an inquiry into the social reasons that gave rise to this assassination attempt as well as an investigation into the Springer Press' manipulation of public opinion. At the same time, however, Adorno protested against disruptions of his own lectures and refused to express his solidarity with their political goals, maintaining instead his autonomy as a theoretician. Adorno rejected the so-called unity of theory and praxis advocated by the students and argued that the students' actions were premised upon a mistaken analysis of the situation. The building of barricades, he wrote to Marcuse, is "ridiculous against those who administer the bomb."[36] In September 1968 Adorno went to Vienna for the publication of Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link. Upon his return to Frankfurt, events prevented his concentrating upon the book on aesthetics he wished to write: "Valid student claims and dubious actions," he wrote to Marcuse, "are all so mixed up together that all productive work and even sensible thought are scarcely possibly any more."[37] After striking students threatened to strip the Institute's sociology seminar rooms of their furnishings and equipment, the police were brought in to close the building. Adorno began writing an introduction to a collection of poetry by Rudolf Borchardt, which was connected with a talk entitled "Charmed Language," delivered in Zurich, followed by a talk on aesthetics in Paris where he met Beckett again. Beginning in October 1966, Adorno took up work on Aesthetic Theory. In June 1969 he completed Catchwords: Critical Models. During the winter semester of 1968-9 Adorno was on sabbatical leave from the university and thus able to dedicate himself to the completion of his book of aesthetics. For the summer semester Adorno planned a lecture course entitled "An Introduction to Dialectical Thinking," as well as a seminar on the dialectics of subject and object. But at the first lecture Adorno's attempt to open up the lecture and invite questions whenever they arose degenerated into a disruption from which he quickly fled: after a student wrote on the blackboard "If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease," three women students approached the lectern, bared their breasts and scattered flower petals over his head.[citation needed] Yet Adorno continued to resist blanket condemnations of the protest movement which would have only strengthened the reactionary thesis according to which political irrationalism was the result of Adorno's teaching. After further disruptions to his lectures, Adorno canceled the lectures for the rest of the seminar, continuing only with his philosophy seminar. In the summer of 1969, weary from these activities, Adorno returned once again to Zermatt, Switzerland, at the foot of Matterhorn to restore his strength. On August 6 he died of a heart attack. [edit]Theory

Part of a series on the Frankfurt School

Major works Reason and Revolution The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Eclipse of Reason The Fear of Freedom Dialectic of Enlightenment Minima Moralia Eros and Civilization One-Dimensional Man Negative Dialectics The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere The Theory of Communicative Action Notable theorists Max Horkheimer · Theodor Adorno Herbert Marcuse · Walter Benjamin Erich Fromm · Friedrich Pollock Leo Löwenthal · Jürgen Habermas Important concepts Critical theory · Dialectic · Praxis Psychoanalysis · Antipositivism Popular culture · Culture industry Advanced capitalism Privatism · Non-identity Communicative rationality Legitimation crisis v t e Adorno's work sets out from a central insight he shares with all early 20th century avant-garde art: The recognition of what is primitive in ourselves and the world itself. Neither Picasso's fascination with African sculpture nor Mondrian's reduction of painting to its most elementary component - the line - is comprehensible outside this concern with primitivism Adorno shared with the century's most radical art. At the same time, the Western world, beset by world-wars, colonialist consolidation and accelerating commodification, sank into the very barbarism civilization had prided itself in overcoming. According to Adorno, society's self-preservation had become indistinguishable from societally sanctioned self-sacrifice: of "primitive" peoples, primitive aspects of the ego and those primitive, mimetic desires found in imitation and sympathy. Adorno's theory proceeds from an understanding of this primitive quality of reality which seeks to counteract whatever aims to either repress this primitive aspect or further those systems of domination set in place by this return to barbarism. From this perspective, Adorno's writings on politics, philosophy, music and literature could be described as a lifelong critique of the ways in which each tries to justify self-mutilation as the necessary price of self-preservation. According to Adorno's translator Robert Hullot-Kentor, the central motive of Adorno's work thus consists in determining "how life could be more than the struggle for self-preservation." [38] In this sense, the principle of self-preservation, Adorno writes in Negative Dialectics, is nothing but "the law of doom thus far obeyed by history."[39] At its most basic, Adorno's thought is motivated by a fundamental critique of this law. 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. [edit]Music In his early essays for the Vienna-based journal Anbruch, Adorno claimed that musical progress is proportional to the composer's ability to constructively deal with the possibilities and limitations contained within what Adorno called the "musical material." For Adorno, twelve-tone serialism constitutes a decisive, historically developed method of composition. The objective validity of the composition, according to Adorno, rests with neither the composer's genius nor the work's conformity with prior standards, but with the way in which the work coherently expresses the dialectic of the material. In this sense, the contemporary absence of composers of the status of Bach or Beethoven is not the sign of musical regression; instead, new music is to be credited with laying bare aspects of the musical material previously repressed: The musical material's liberation from number, the harmonic series and tonal harmony. Thus, historical progress is only achieved by the composer who "submits to the work and seemingly does not undertake anything active except to follow where it leads." Because historical experience and social relations are embedded within this musical material, it is to the analysis of such material that the critic must turn. In the face of this radical liberation of the musical material, Adorno came to criticize those who, like Stravinsky, withdrew from this freedom by tasking recourse to forms of the past as well as those who turned twelve-tone composition into a technique which dictated the rules of composition. Adorno saw the culture industry as an arena in which critical tendencies or potentialities were eliminated. He argued that the culture industry, which produced and circulated cultural commodities through the mass media, manipulated the population. Popular culture was identified as a reason why people become passive; the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture made people docile and content, no matter how terrible their economic circumstances. 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".[40] Adorno conceptualised this phenomenon as pseudo-individualization and the always-the-same.[citation needed] 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.[citation needed] 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.[41] 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.[citation needed] Adorno's "negative dialectics" was an attempt to articulate a non-dominating thought that would recognize its limitations and accept the non-identity and reality of that which could not be subsumed under the subject's concepts. Indeed, Adorno sought to ground the critical bite of his sociological work in his critique of identity, which he took to be a reification in thought of the commodity form or exchange relation which always presumes a false identity between different things. The potential to 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] [edit]Marxist criticisms 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. [edit]Adorno's responses to his critics 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 sociologist thinks of a human essence is always changing over time.[42] [edit]Adorno's sociological methods

"Institut" and "Adorno-Ampel" (Adorno-traffic light) at "Senckenberganlage" in Frankfurt am Main 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). He felt that those at the top of the Institute needed to be the source primarily of theories for evaluation and empirical testing, as well as people who would process the "facts" discovered...including revising theories that were found to be false. For example, in 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.[citation needed] One example of the clash of intellectual culture and Adorno's methods can be found in Paul Lazarsfeld, the American sociologist for whom Adorno worked in the 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. Lazarsfeld, however, had trouble both with the prose style of the work Adorno handed in and what Lazarsfeld thought was Adorno's "lack of discipline in ... presentation".[43] Adorno himself provided the following personal anecdote: "What I mean by reified consciousness, I can illustrate – without elaborate philosophical contemplation - most simply with an American experience. Among the frequently changing colleagues which the Princeton Project provided me with, was a young lady. After a few days, she had gained confidence in me, and asked most kindly: “Dr Adorno, would you mind a personal question?”. I said, “It depends on the question, but just go ahead”, and she went on: “Please tell me: are you an extrovert or an introvert?”. It was as if she, as a living being, already thought according to the model of multi-choice questions in questionnaires.” [44]

[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", 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 the 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.[citation needed] The Group Experiment, which had been unavailable to English readers, is now available in an accessible translation by Jeffrey K. Olick and Andrew J. Perrin on Harvard University Press, along with introductory material explaining its relation to the rest of Adorno's work and 20th century public opinion research. [edit]Bibliography

Main article: Theodor W. Adorno bibliography Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (1933) Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Max Horkheimer, 1944) Philosophy of New Music (1949) The Authoritarian Personality (1950) Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951) In Search of Wagner (1952) Prisms (1955) Against Epistemology: A Metacritique; Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies (1956) Dissonanzen. Musik in der verwalteten Welt (1956) Notes to Literature I (1958) Sound Figures (1959) Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy (1960) Notes to Literature II (1961) Hegel: Three Studies (1963) Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (1963) Quasi una Fantasia (1963) The Jargon of Authenticity (1964) Night Music: Essays on Music 1928-1962 (1964) Negative Dialectics (1966) Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link (1968) Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (1969) Composing for the Films (1969) Aesthetic Theory (1970) Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music; Fragments and Texts (1993) Current of Music (2006)

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