Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America
1. Radio version and first published version: “I never denied it, and would not have been able to either.”
2. Radio version: “to hold onto my own existence” instead of “intellectual continuity.”
3. Radio and first published version has extra sentence: “Even if I had wanted to, I would hardly have been able to.” 4. “Adjustment” is Adorno’s own translation for the German
Anpassung, which carries stronger tones, such as “conformity,” “adaptation.”
5. “Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 1 (1932): 104–124, 356–78, now in GS 18:729–777. English: “On the Social Situation of Music,” trans. Wes Blomster Telos, no. 35 (1975): 128–64.
6. With the verb erscheinen, “to appear,” Adorno plays on the distinction between phenomenal appearance (Erscheinung) and (often aesthetic) illusion or semblance (Schein).
7. Radio and first published version: “alien” instead of “contrary.”
8. Radio and first published version: “necessarily had attracted me” instead of “necessarily had affected me.”
9. Literally “research project” or “research undertaking.”
10. On this point see Adorno’s review of Sargeant’s book Jazz Hot and Hybrid in Zeitschrift für Sozialfors chung 9 (1941): 167–178.
11. “Über Jazz” published under the pseudonym Hektor Rottweiler in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5 (1936): 235–259, now in GS 17, Musikalische Schriften 4:74–108. English: “On Jazz,” trans. Jamie Owen Daniel, Discourse 12, no. 1 (1989–90): 45–69.
12. Allusion to Brecht’s alienation effect [Verfremdungseffekt]: a familiar object, practice, etc. is “defamiliarized” by detaching it from its everyday context, or by breaking the conventions through which it is unrefractedly experienced.
13. Radio version: “Hadley Cantril of Princeton University.”
14. Radio version: “whose president he is today.”
15. Radio version continues here: “It hardly requires many words to say that what is called culture industry, consciousness industry, manipulated mass culture, can be studied nowhere better than in America, where this form of directed culture of the mass media already at that time was by far the most advanced.”
16. “Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens,” in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 7 (1938): 321–356. Reprinted in Dissonanzen: Musik in der verwalteten Welt, GS 14 (1973): 7–167. English: “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gerhardt (New York: Urizen Books, 1978), 270–299. Reprinted in Adorno, The Culture Industry, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 26–52.
17. Versuch über Wagner (1952), reprinted in GS 13 (1971): 7–148. English: In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: NLB, 1981).
18. Walter Benjamin, “L’œuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproduction mécanisée” in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5 (1936): 40–68; English translation of a later, reworked version of the essay: “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 217–252.
19. Cf. the exchange of letters between Adorno and Benjamin presented in Aesthetics and Politics: Debates between Bloch, Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno, ed. Ronald Taylor (London: NLB, 1977; Verso, 1980).
20. Cf. the conclusion of Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel Der Verschollene (written 1912–1914, first chapter published separately as “Der Heizer” in 1913), which Max Brod published in 1927 under the title Amerika. English: America, trans. E. Muir (New York: New Directions, 1962).
21. Paul Felix Lazarsfeld, “Remarks on Administrative and Critical Communications Research,” in Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941): 2–16.
22. The original is “Musikerlebnis,” one of the concepts Adorno attacked in his polemic against the Musical Youth Movement.
23. In the radio version Adorno translates: “die Programmanalysiermaschine.”
24. Radio version interjects: “As an aside, if one could assume that test subjects in music-sociological studies could read the music, and then simply mark the passages that they like or dislike, then such a machine would be superfluous. But over there I had to quickly realize—which is probably the same for us too—that the number of those who can read music at all in comparison with the entire population really is hardly significant.”
25. In the radio version Adorno translates: “Inhaltsanalyse.”
26. Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944, 2d rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944). The book was reviewed in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 9 (1941): 526–7.
27. First published version: “resistance” instead of “unwillingness.”
28. Radio version continues: “and which I would never have been able to give account of if I had not been in America.”
29. In the first version of this article Adorno here quotes the following passage from Durkheim: “Moreover, there is another reason for not confusing the objective response and the average response: it is that the reactions of the average individual remain individual reactions. . . . There is no essential difference between the two propositions ‘I like this’ and ‘a certain number of us like this”’ (Emile Durkheim, Sociologie et philosophie [Paris, 1963], 121–122).
30. Radio version interjects: “such as indeed predominates in America . . . .”
31. All quotations in English in the original.
32. Radio version continues: “Much later, back in Germany, I dealt with this inhomogeneity, as opposed for instance to the views of Talcott Parsons, in methodological articles.”
The first English translation interjects the following: “Much later, back in Germany, I dealt with this discontinuity, opposing the views of Talcott Parsons in methodological articles of which I may mention ‘Soziologie und empirische Forschung.’ It is now in Sociologica II by Horkheimer and myself, in the series Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie edited by the Institut für Sozialforschung.”
33. For other perspectives on Adorno’s difficulties, cf. David E. Morrison, “Kultur und Culture: The Case of Theodor W. Adorno and Paul F. Lazarsfeld,” Social Research 45 (1978): 331–355.
34. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, trans. George Simpson (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1933).
35. “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” Kenyon Review 7 (1945): 208–217; reprinted in Reader in Public Opinion and Communication, eds. Bernard Berelson and Morris Janowitz (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1950), 309–316. Written in 1938–1941 with the assistance of George Simpson, this essay belongs to the corpus of texts from the Princeton Radio Research Project that will eventually be published as Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory as volume 3 of Adorno’s Nachlaß.
36. “On Popular Music,” with the assistance of George Simpson, Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941): 17–48. Not reprinted in GS. In the article Adorno actually provides two types of “pseudo-individualization,” both correlates of standardization in the culture industry:
(1) standardization of a product and even of its possible superficial varieties that gives the semblance of individualization where there is none: “Thus, standardization of the norm enhances in a purely technical way standardization of its own deviation—pseudo-individualization.” (25)
(2) labelling technique of styles and name-brands of products that in fact differ only negligibly provides the illusion of consumer choice: “It provides trade-marks of identification for differentiating between the actually undifferentiated. . . . Popular music becomes a multiple choice questionnaire.” (26)
37. The Authoritarian Personality by T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, in collaboration with Betty Aron, Maria Hertz Levinson, and William Morrow, Studies in Prejudice, ed. Max Horkheimer and Samuel H. Flowerman, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950). Chapters 1, 7, 16, 17, 18, and 19 appear in GS 9.1 (1975): 143–509 under the title Studies in the Authoritarian Personality.
38. Earlier English translation adds: “and certainly today would be too outdated in many respects to have any effect in America.”
39. In GS 15:163–187. The original English manuscript of the study has been published and introduced by Thomas Y. Levin and Michael von der Linn as Theodor W. Adorno, “Analytical Study of the NBC Music Appreciation Hour,” The Musical Quarterly 78 (Summer 1994): 316–377.
40. “The Radio Symphony: An Experiment in Theory,” in Radio Research 1941, ed. Paul. F. Lazarsfeld and Frank N. Stanton (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1941), 110–139.
Adorno’s tripe is the sort of thing that social science research institutes, foundations, and journals go for. He is, we are told, “associated with the Institute for Social Research at Columbia University” and “has been in charge of the music research at the Office of Radio Research”; his influence in this research, his status and power are attested by the other writers’ genuflections to his suggestions, ideas, and writings: even MacDougald cannot mention the song publisher’s dictation to the song writer without a “Cf. T. W. Adorno, ‘The Fetish Character of Music and the Retrogression [sic] of Listening,’ [in] Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 7 (1938): 336.”[Second emendation in original.]
And the matter goes further than Adorno. But that will have to wait.
(B. H. Haggin, Music in the Nation [New York: William Sloan, 1949], 94–95)
The full scope of Haggin’s diatribe becomes clear in his vitriolic reviews on 25 July and 10 October 1942 (published in Music in the Nation), of Dr. Herbert Graf’s book The Opera and its Future in America, wherein the author is taken to task for “a German inclination to operate with concepts and systems” (104) such that “whatever facts Dr. Graf deals with often acquire false meaning in the process of being incorporated in the conceptual systematizations that are developed without regard for their lack of relation to fact” (105); and Haggin then launches into his true polemic: “Dr. Graf’s performance is typical of German writing. As a stage director he is cloudy where the Professor Doktor is heavily pedantic; but the striking thing about German writing is the combination of its pedantic fact-grubbing with a concept-spinning so freed from connection with fact, sometimes, as to become utterly fantastic, and indeed often manipulating facts, and misrepresenting them, for its purposes. An extreme example of this writing was Adorno’s discussion of the effect of radio on the symphony” (107). And, concluding the column: “This preoccupation with what is remote from the realities of an art that interest and affect us, this scorn for these realities is typical of the musicological writing that I have been planning to discuss. Any day now” (108).
43. Radio version and earlier English version: “To what extent the later book Introduction to the Sociology of Music meets such a need is not for me to judge.”
44. Radio version: “and I am delighted that moves in this direction are now discernible in Marburg. First of all it would be important to differentiate and correct the theorems I developed.”
45. Philosophie der neuen Musik (1949), now GS 12; Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (New York: Seabury Press, 1973). Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie: Zwölf theoretische Vorlesungen (1962), now in GS 14 (1973): 169–433. Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1976).
46. Edward A. Suchman, “Invitation to Music: A Study of the Creation of New Music Listeners by the Radio,” in Radio Research 1941, ed. Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Frank N. Stanton (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1941), 140–188.
47. Radio version continues: “This result was obtained, although here research methods were used that in turn arose precisely from that model of reified consciousness it was our task to investigate.”
48. Thurstone devised a method for measuring the attitude of a group toward a specific issue by charting the frequency distribution along a linear continuum, a limitation entailing that only those aspects of attitude can be measured for which one can compare individuals by “the ‘more and less’ type of judgment.” Subjects were presented with statements of opinion they could either endorse or reject. Their collected responses were then plotted against other subjects’ responses, allowing relative measures only (i.e., person x is “more religious” than person y).
L. L. Thurstone and E. J. Chave, The Measurement of Attitude: A Psychophysical Method and Some Experiments with a Scale for Measuring Attitude toward the Church (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929). See also note 60 below.
49. Duncan MacDougald, Jr., “The Popular Music Industry,” in Radio Research 1941, 65–109.
50. Earlier English version inserts following sentence: “Thus MacDougald had the merit of giving the first circumstantial demonstration of such mechanisms in the musical world.”
51. “The sheet is a list of the currently popular songs with the number of radio performances (10 or more) received by each one over the three major networks . . . from 5:00 P.M. to 1:00 A.M. ‘Making the sheet’ each week is the principal goal in life of every song plugger, and his success is judged by his ability to get songs on the sheet and keep them in high positions in this tabulation of plugs” (Duncan MacDougald, Jr., “The Popular Music Industry,” Radio Research 1941, 99).
Radio version has “spiel” instead of “sheet,” and the earlier English translation follows this.
52. Radio version: “Therefore this study, which has to do with old-fashioned, reporter-like types—or perhaps not reporter-like, but rather advertising agent-like types—looks easily old-fashioned and, I’d almost like to say, conciliatory.”
53. In the radio version Adorno translates the title as Die autoritätsgebundene Persönlichkeit.
54. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1972; reprint, New York: Continuum, 1989). A new translation is under way, a chapter of which has been published. Cf. “Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment,” trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, New German Critique 56 (Spring-Summer 1992): 109–142, and his introduction, 101–108.
55. Radio version: “I once put it very pointedly: ‘Man is the ideology of dehumanization.’” Cf. Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, GS 6:452; English: The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 59.
56. Studien über Authorität und Familie, ed. Max Horkheimer (Paris: Alcan, 1936). The “Allgemeiner Teil” was later retitled “Autorität und Familie” and anthologized. English: “Authority and the Family,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell and others (New York: Seabury Press, 1972).
57. The series Studies in Prejudice, edited by Max Horkheimer and Samuel H. Flowerman, and published by Harper’s (New York) was sponsored by the American Jewish Committee and presented the results of research into prejudice and social discrimination, particularly anti-Semitism. The volumes eventually published included: The Authoritarian Personality by T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford; Dynamics of Prejudice: A Psychological and Sociological Study of Veterans by Bruno Bettelheim and Morris Janowitz; Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation by Nathan W. Ackerman and Marie Jahoda; Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator by Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Gutermann; and Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany by Paul W. Massing.
58. Radio and earlier English translation: “and although twenty years have gone by, I truly feel it to be a continuation of a tradition to which I belonged in America to work as hard as I can for a similar democratization in Germany.”
59. On the enormous influence of The Authoritarian Personality, see: Richard Christie and Peggy Cook, “A Guide to Published Literature Relating to the Authoritarian Personality Through 1956,” in The Journal of Psychology 45 (1958): 171–199.
The study Adorno alludes to is: Michaela von Freyhold, Autoritarismus und politische Apathie: Analyse einer Skala zur Ermittlung autoritätsgebundener Verhaltensweisen, vol. 22 of Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1971).
60. The Thurstone (cf. note 48 above), Likert, and Guttman scales were scaling techniques developed and refined in order to guarantee unequivocal results from empirical opinion surveys. For the details of these techniques, see e.g. chapter 12,“Placing Individuals on Scales,” in Claire Sellitz, Lawrence S. Wrightman, and Stuart W. Cook, Research Methods in Social Relations, 1–3d ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1951, 1959, 1976). Compare Adorno’s own résumé of the different attitude scales in part 8 (“Construction of Scales”) in his article “Empirische Sozialforschung,” written with J. Décamps, L. Herberger, et al. for the Handwörterbuch der Sozialwissenschaften (1954) and reprinted in GS 9.2:
a. With the Thurstone scale (method of equal appearing intervals*) the scalar values of the “items,”* the individual questions or statements, are determined by the central value of the judgments of a relatively large jury of experts, and the values are distributed in approximately equal intervals across the entire scale. The positions of the questioned individuals or groups on the scale derive from the agreement or rejection of the “items,”* which are fixed in a particular sequence.
b. In the Likert scale (method of summated ratings*) those “items”* are selected that best correlate with the overall values (they are usually located at the end-points of the Thurstone scale) and that show the greatest selectivity. The subjects are asked to respond to each of the “items”* by selecting a response that is qualified usually into five degrees. The weighted individual results are summed up along the lines of point values in sports, the position of the individual or group on the scale is then determined by the magnitude of the point score.
c. With the Guttman scale (scalogram analysis*) the “items”* must be one-dimensional, that is, the agreement with a specific “item”* must include the agreement with all the other less extreme “items”* and match the rejection of all more extreme “items.”* A greater methodical rigor is gained at the price of breadth of the content. (GS 9.2:348)
61. Richard Christie and Marie Jahoda, eds., Studies in the Scope and Method of “The Authoritarian Personality” (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1954; reprint, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981).
62. Cf. for example, Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie: Studien über Husserl und die phänomenologischen Antinomien (1956), GS 5 (1970): 7–245. Against Epistemology: A Metacritique; Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies, trans. Willis Domingo (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983).
63. The child studies published by Else Frenkel-Brunswik (1908–1958) comprise the following: “A Study of Prejudice in Children,” Human Relations 1 (1948): 295–306; “Patterns of Social and Cognitive Outlooks in Children,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 21 (1951): 543–548; and together with J. Havel, “Authoritarianism in the Interviews of Children: 1. Attitudes toward Minority Groups,” Journal of General Psychology 82 (1953): 91–136; “Further Explorations by a Contributor to ‘The Authoritarian Personality,”’ in Studies in the Scope and Method of “The Authoritarian Personality,” ed. Richard Christie and Marie Jahoda, 226–275.
64. Cf. the chapters “The Bearing of Sociological Theory on Empirical Research” and “The Bearing of Empirical Research on Sociological Theory” in Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1949, 1957, 1968).
65. In the radio version Adorno translates this as “Rand der Verrückten,” later as “Rand der Wahnsinnigen.”
66. In the radio version Adorno translates “Testsätze.”
67. “The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses” (1943), in GS 9.1 (1975): 7–141.
68. Radio version and earlier English translation: “The situation I faced there was entirely different from that of the Princeton project or The Authoritarian Personality.”
69. “The Stars Down to Earth,” Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1957), 2:19–88. Reprinted in GS 9.2:7–120. An abbreviated German version was published in 1962 as “Aberglaube aus zweiter Hand” in Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Sociologica II: Reden und Vorträge (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1962). It is reprinted in GS 8:147–76. See also “The Stars Down to Earth: The Los Angeles Times Astrology Column,” Telos, 19 (Spring 1974): 13–90; reprinted in T. W. Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, ed. Stephen Crook (London/New York: Routledge, 1994), 34–127.
70. Cf. Freud’s theory of the “death drive” [Todestrieb] in Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930); English: vol. 21 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.
71. Adorno applies the “biphasic” behavior the depth psychologist Otto Fenichel (Psychoanalytic Theory of Neuroses [New York: Norton, 1945]) notes in compulsive neurotics (“The patient behaves alternately as though he were a naughty child and a strict punitive disciplinarian” [ibid., 291]) to the rationalized time schedule of modern bourgeois life, which establishes antinomies of work and pleasure. Astrology columnists offer a solution by emphasizing ego ideal responsibilities for the morning, and the pleasure principle for the evening. Adorno: “The problem of how to dispense with contradictory requirements of life is solved by the simple device of distributing these requirements over different periods mostly of the same day.” [Adorno’s emphasis] GS 9.2:56; Crook, ibid., 67.
72. Radio version interjects: “that the products of the culture industry, of the secondhand ‘popular culture’*, . . . .”
73. In the radio version Adorno translates “vorurteilsvollen.”
74. “How to Look at Television,” Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television 8 (Spring 1954): 213–235. Reprinted as “Television and the Patterns of Mass Culture” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957), 474–487.
“Fernsehen als Ideologie”: “Television as Ideology” in this volume.
75. Paul Tillich (1886–1965), German Protestant theologian and philosopher, leader of the “League of Religious Socialists” [Bund religiöser Sozialisten] in Berlin. In 1929 he was named professor of religious studies and social philosophy at the University of Frankfurt. In 1933 he was suspended by the National Socialists and emigrated to the United States, becoming a US citizen in 1940. From 1937 to 1955 he was professor for philosophical theology at the Union Theological Seminary (New York), from 1955 to 1962 at Harvard University, and from 1962 until his death at the University of Chicago. In 1931 Adorno wrote his Habilitation under Tillich, which appeared in book form in 1933: Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); the original is GS 2.
76. Radio version interjects: “and thereby learns for the first time how to put the specifically cultural into conceptual terms.”
77. Radio version interjects: “and there too nothing is for free, rather the commodities are exchanged equivalently.”
78. Radio version: “We Europeans.”
79. Radio version continues: “indeed as an expression of mechanization.”
80. Charles Alexis Henri Clével de Tocqueville (1805–1859), French writer and politician. After his visit to America in 1831–1832, he wrote his famous On Democracy in America (1835–1840), in which he described American society as the model of an inevitably expansive democracy, and surmised an inevitable loss of individualism.
Ferdinand Kürnberger (1821–1879), Austrian liberal-minded author of novels, plays, and satirical feuilletons, who achieved fame for his roman à clef about Nicolaus Lenau’s travels to the United States entitled Der Amerika-Müde (1855). Whereas the popular literature about America at the time juxtaposed a free and democratic society and natural wholesomeness to a repressive civilization of restoration Europe, Kürnberger’s novel portrays America as a land without culture where egoism and materialism prevail.
On Subject and Object
1. “Consciousness in general” is Kant’s designation for the universal validity of “judgments of experience” as opposed to the subjective validity of individual, psychological “judgments of perception” (as in Locke’s ‘ideas’ and Hume’s ‘perceptions’). Judgments of perception refer directly to sensible intuitions and are made according to the individual’s “association of ideas,” whereas judgments of experience are made by the faculty of understanding, which subsumes intuitions under universal concepts of the understanding, such as causality. Such concepts are logical universals and therefore transcend individual, subjective experience and consciousness, belonging rather to “experience in general” and “consciousness in general”:
The sum of the matter is this: the business of the senses is to intuit, that of the understanding is to think. But thinking is uniting representations in a consciousness. This unification originates either merely relative to the subject and is contingent and subjective, or it happens absolutely and is necessary or objective. The uniting of representations in a consciousness is judgment. Thinking therefore is the same as judging, or referring representations to judgments in general. Hence judgments are either merely subjective when representations are referred to a consciousness in one subject only and united in it, or they are objective when they are united in a consciousness in general, that is, necessarily. The logical moments of all judgments are so many possible ways of uniting representations in consciousness.
(Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können [1783], §22 [A 88; A. A. 4:304–5]; English: Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Carus translation revised by James W. Ellington [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977], 48)
2. Cf. Schelling’s 1810 Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen in Schellings Werke, ed. Manfred Schröter, vol. 4, Schriften zur Philosophie der Freiheit, 1804–1815 (Munich: Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1929; reprint, 1978), 309–376, esp. 330ff.: “On this view then, there are two principles in God. The first principle or the first primordial force is that through which He exists as a particular, single, individual being. We can call this force the Selfhood, the Egoism in God,” (330) and it has the form of “Egoity” [Egoität] (332) under which the being or essence [Wesen] of God is posited. The second and opposed principle is that of love, and Schelling assures the reader that egoism and love are the “human expressions” for the real and the ideal, respectively, in God.
3. “The Paralogisms of Pure Reason,” Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s, 1965), 328–383.
4. On Husserl’s attack on psychologism and his distinction between genesis and validity [Genesis/Geltung] cf. Adorno, Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie, GS 5:7–245, esp. 81–95. English: Against Epistemology: A Metacritique; Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies, trans. Willis Domingo (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982; Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1983), esp. 74–78.
5. Cf. sections 2 and 16 of the first part of Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
6. Cf. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 20: “The effect of an object upon the faculty of representation, so far as we are affected by it, is sensation [Empfindung]. That intuition which is in relation to the object through sensation, is entitled empirical. The undetermined object of an empirical intuition is entitled appearance [Erscheinung]” (Critique of Reason, 65).
7. “Seinssphäre absoluter Ursprünge,” Husserl’s term for consciousness understood as an absolute first cause. Cf. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Husserliana, vol. 3/1, ed. Karl Schuhmann (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 107 (in the original pagination of the 1922 Halle edition). English: Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Collier, 1962). Adorno quotes this phrase on the first page of his Husserl critique: Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie: Studien über Husserl und die phänomenologischen Antinomien (1956), GS 5 (1970): 7–245. English: Against Epistemology: A Metacritique.
8. Adorno plays on the resonance between Sachlichkeit, which means an objective, unemotional attitude (as in the Neue Sachlichkeit movement, sometimes translated as “The New Functionalism”) and Sache, “subject matter, matter-at-hand.”
9. Allusion to the Marburg School (H. Cohen, R. Natorp, E. Cassirer, K. Vorländer) who mobilized Kant’s transcendental epistemology against materialist theories and in favor of a strict, value-free, verifiable empiricism. “Infinitely given as a task” [unendlich aufgegeben] echoes Kant’s claim that transcendental ideas of reason operate “regulatively” rather than “constitutively”: they are not given [gegeben] in experience but given as a task [aufgegeben] to thought by which mind can think beyond what it receives in phenomenal experience.
10. Presumably alluding to the following passage from the “Preface” to the Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807) (Werke [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970], 3:56):
That habit should be called material thinking, a contingent consciousness that is absorbed only in material stuff, and therefore finds it hard work to lift the self clear of such matter, and to be with itself alone. At the opposite extreme, argumentation [Räsonieren] is freedom from all content [of thought], and a sense of vanity toward it. From it is demanded [by Hegel’s method] the effort to relinquish this freedom and, instead of being the arbitrarily moving principle of the content, to sink this freedom in the content and let it move by its own nature, that is, by the self as its own, and to observe this movement. This refusal to intrude into the immanent rhythm of the concept, either arbitrarily or with wisdom obtained from elsewhere, constitutes a restraint that is itself an essential moment of the concept.
(G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], 35–36; translation modified)
11. Cf. the first book of “The Transcendental Dialectic” in the Critique of Pure Reason.
12. Drawing on the distinction between sensible appearance (phenomenon) and intelligible essence (noumenon), Kant maintains “we indeed, rightly considering objects of sense as mere appearances, confess thereby that they are based upon a thing in itself, though we know not this thing as it is in itself but only its appearances, viz., the way in which our senses are affected by this unknown something” (Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 57 [§32, A. A. 4:314f.]). For the same structure of intelligible/sensible in terms of the moral law see Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington, 3d. ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 61 (A. A. 4:462).
13. In his later versions of the Wissenschaftslehre (especially that of 1810) Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s idealism becomes more extreme and finally, religious. In his Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben (1806) Fichte’s original principle of the intellectual and moral self-positing of the Ego (subjective idealism) is shown to rely on what is absolute, unconditioned, and can only be affirmed in thought—what Fichte now calls God.
14. Adorno plays here on the resonance between the verb erscheinen, “to appear phenomenally” (hence in Kant “phenomenon”—“appearance” as opposed to “noumenon,” “essence”—is called Erscheinung), and Schein (and the related verb scheinen, “to seem”) “semblance,” “illusion” (here “seeming appearance” as opposed to “being”).
15. “Free action” [freie Tathandlung], a phrase from Fichte’s metaphysical theory as presented in his Wissenschaftslehre (1794), which holds that the fundamental principle underlying all reality derives from the self-positing and self-affirming of the Ego, i.e., subjective idealism. Such positing precedes and itself conditions the resultant dualism between Ego (subject) and non-Ego (object); since the positing itself is unconditioned, Fichte calls it a “free action.”
16. Thinly veiled allusion to Heidegger.
17. Cf. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A20–21.
18. Adorno’s pun: “die Verdinglichung des Undinglichen,” literally, “the reification of what is not thingly,” but also playing on the colloquial Unding, “absurdity.”
19. According to David Hume (1711–1776), the mind’s primary data is comprised solely of sensory impressions, feelings, or ideas, the latter being nothing but memories of previous impressions. Therefore Hume concluded that the mind is nothing other than a bundle of subjective perceptions related through resemblance, succession, and causation and lacks any substantive identity of the self (what Kant inherited as the problem of the unity of consciousness). Cf. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), bk. 1, pt. 4; Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), section 12.
20. Adorno here echoes one of his critiques of Durkheim’s concept of faits sociaux as expounded in his Les règles de la méthode sociologique (1901) and Sociologie et philosophie (1924). For Adorno’s appraisal of Durkheim’s sociology, cf. his “Einleitung zu Emile Durkheim, ‘Soziologie und Philosophie,”’ GS 8:245–279 and “Zum gegenwärtigen Stand der deutschen Soziologie” in GS 8:500–531, esp. 503.
21. In German, like French, the article is used to indicate species as well as individual, thus, der Mensch [or l’homme] means both “man” as well as “mankind.”
Marginalia to Theory and Praxis
1. “Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie / Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.” Faust, Erster Teil, ll. 2038–2039. In Walter Kaufman’s translation: “Gray, my dear friend, is every theory, / And green alone life’s golden tree,” in Goethe’s Faust, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 206.
2. Adorno’s neologistic entqualifizieren suggests not only the English “disqualify” but here primarily “removing the qualities, distinctions from,” “de-differentiating.”
3. Alluding to line 16 of Rudolf Borchardt’s poem “Auf eine angeschossene Schwalbe, die der Dichter fand,” here given in a literal translation:
TO A SWALLOW SHOT AND WOUNDED, FOUND BY THE POET
Now there you lie, a small broken arrow;
Your tendon cut clean through
And no more wing is healthy
For one alone cannot carry you.
You meet my monstrous closeness
With a mien of deathly fear
My hesitation to you means claw and tooth
My leaning forward hunger for you,
And no more flight; for you are not swift;
You and your nest-mate
Could win life only
By outstripping, by escaping:
With enmity through the desert of your world
Shooting, always before the enemy,
In the shrill, shrill cry alone
You stay together, lonely community!
How, in my hand, which renders warmth,
The life-black eye is surprised!
I am not god, who disowns you,
Like hundreds upon hundreds every day,—
You had flight, and what can sustain you,
From him, the serene sustainer of your foe,
Past the spot, where your impotence lay,
went your god, flew your sibling,
And those you never honored with your thievery,
When you rounded the curve in the blueness,
Already a birth of dust crept upon you,
To it you are carrion, soon as it sees you wounded!—
Tiny tongue, that boldly feasts upon my finger
You are full of tidings without speaking;
So that you once trust stronger ones,
Must god break the ring of his own providence,—
To rectify, where even he pities
The mockery and wrong of his own work,
he has need of his great son,
whom the common kingdom does not completely compass.
Here he thanks me, what he gave me:
That he granted me his soul,
Drew taught the bridge between you and him,
The bridge he himself could not build.
He who sets each body before death
Does not let his own be gambled away:
He, who banished his creature, created
Also the creature, to save the banished.
Rudolf Borchardt, Ausgewählte Gedichte, selected and introduced by Theodor W. Adorno (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968), 76–77. Adorno’s introduction to his selection of Borchardt’s poems is reprinted in Noten zur Literatur, now GS 11:536–555. English: “Charmed Language: On the Poetry of Rudolf Borchardt,” in Adorno, Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 2:193–210.
4. “Restitution phenomena” in psychology originally referred to the (partial) recovery of cognitive function after traumatic brain injury and was metaphorically adopted to indicate analogous psychiatric processes, for instance, a schizophrenic’s (partial) regaining of a sense of reality.
5. Cf. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 92 (A51/B75).
6. Adorno plays on the commercial undertones of the terms: Betriebsamkeit, “bustle, industriousness,” from Betrieb meaning both “enterprise, business” and “hustle, bustle”; Geschäftigkeit, “busyness, zealousness,” from Geschäft meaning “business, undertaking” and “business, shop, office.”
7. Cf. Schiller’s concept of the “play-drive” [Spieltrieb] in his Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (1794/95). English: Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967).
8.“Messieurs, avant tout je suis practique”; from Versailles et Paris en 1871: D’après les dessins originaux de Gustave Doré (Paris: Libraire Plon, Plon-Nourrit, 1907); reprinted in Gustave Doré, Das graphische Werk (Munich: Rogner & Bernhard, 1975), 2:1377. In his condemnation, Adorno deploys one of his favorite puns, that of Geist (spirit) and Ungeist (boor, demon).
9. Cf. the opening of Kant’s Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785): “There is no possibility of thinking of anything at all in the world, or even out of it, which can be regarded as good without qualification, except a good will.” Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, 7 [A. A. 4:393]).
10. Produktivkraft, “productive force, productive power” (and the plural, usually rendered “forces of production” in contrast to “modes of production”) is a technical term in Marx, referring to the result of practical human energy, specifically in labor. To the extent that productive power is appropriated in the form of objectified labor by capital as surplus value, it constitutes the productive force of capital (surplus value creating wealth); to the extent that it is not so appropriated, it represents a potential point of conflict with existing modes of production.
11. “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!” (Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’” trans. H. B. Nisbet in Kant, Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, 2d ed. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 54 [A.A. 8:35]).
12. Allusion to Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have merely interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
13. Cf. Ernst Simmel, “Anti-Semitism and Mass Psychopathology,” in Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease, ed. Ernst Simmel (New York: International Universities Press, 1946):
Summarizing the parallelisms between a collective psychosis and an individual psychosis, we can say: The mass and the psychotic think and act irrationally, because of regressively disintegrated ego systems. In the individual psychotic mind, the process of regression is of a primary nature and is constant. In the collective psychotic mind regression is secondary and occurs only temporarily. The reason for this is that in the individual psychotic, the ego breaks with reality because of its pathological weakness, whereas in the mass member, reality breaks first with the ego. This ego, by submerging itself into a pathological mass, saves itself from individual regression by regressing collectively. Flight into mass psychosis is therefore an escape not only from reality, but also from individual insanity.
This insight gives us our answer to the enigmatic question why apparently normal individuals can react like psychotics under the spell of mass formation. Their ego is immature as a result of superego weakness. The immature individual who, under the stress of environmental circumstances, is on the verge of losing contact with reality, can find his way back to it when his ego, carried by the spirit of the group, finds opportunity for the discharge of pent-up aggressive instinct energies into the object world. (49–50)
14. Cf. for example, the first words of “Zarathustra’s Preface”: “When Zarathustra was thirty years old he left his home and the lake of his home and went into the mountains. Here he enjoyed his spirit and his solitude, and for ten years did not tire of it” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Viking Press, 1966], 9).
15. Aristotle divides the ‘virtues’, or ‘excellences’ 
into dianoetic, or those of intellect 
and moral, or those of character 
. The intellectual excellences involve reason and belong to the rational part of the soul, the moral excellences involve inclinations and habit, belong to the irrational part of the soul, and are obedient to reason, which is considered the divine part of man. Cf. Nicomachean Ethics, 1103a3ff.; Eudemian Ethics, 1120b5ff.; Politics, 1333a16ff.
16. The reference has not been found. Perhaps Adorno is referring to comments by Rosa Luxemburg in her so-called Junius pamphlet entitled “The Crisis of Social Democracy” (1916) where she writes: “Friedrich Engels once said, bourgeois society confronts a dilemma: either the transition to socialism or relapse into barbarism. What does a ‘relapse into barbarism’ mean at our height of European civilization? . . . This world war—this is a relapse into barbarism” (Politische Schriften, vol. 2, ed. Ossip Flechtheim [Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1966], 31). However, the Engels source has not been found.
17. ApO = Außerparlamentarische Opposition (Extra-parliamentary Opposition), a loosely organized activist movement that formed in reaction to the lack of effective parliamentary opposition as a consequence of the grand coalition of the SPD and CDU/CSU parties in 1966 and constituted an important part of the German New Left in 1968. It reached its culmination in the protest actions following the murder of Benno Ohnesorg and against the conservative publishing conglomerate Springer Verlag in 1968.
NPD = Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (National Democratic Party of Germany), the collective party of the extreme right, including ex-Nazi and neofascist groups. It developed a strong following, gaining representation in seven Länder of the Federal Republic from 1966 to 1968.
18. Allusion to the recent publication by his colleague at the Institute for Social Research; Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zur einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1962). English: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. T. Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988).
19. Cf. “Betrachtungen zum 20. Juli,” in Jürgen von Kempski, Recht und Politik: Studien zur Einheit der Sozialwissenschaft, Schriften 2, ed. Achim Eschbach (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992), 321–333. Originally published in Merkur (1949). Von Kempski argues that the attempted coup d’état of 20 July 1944 by Wehrmacht officers was foiled because Hitler had created diverse command structures, i.e., a bureaucracy. The final section of the article speculates about possible lessons for democratic states:
It is worth considering whether splitting up the command structures as a technique for safeguarding a totalitarian regime from coups d’état can also mutatis mutandis be translated onto democracies. As far as the safeguarding of a democratic state from overthrow is concerned, the constitutional thinkers still operate under the idea that the threat of overthrow comes from below, from the “masses.” However, under modern technological conditions, “revolutions” can scarcely still be carried out successfully; the superiority of the state in weapons technology is too great. Moreover, for the industrial states the classical age of the revolutionary situation is long past. What threatens is the transition to totalitarian forms of government by completely or half ‘legal’ paths, the cold revolution from above. This threat demands different means than those used against revolutions from below. (332)
20. Freud, Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921); English: Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, vol. 18 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1975).
21. Max Weber advocated “value-free” judgments in sociology on the model of scientific objectivity, polemicizing, on the one hand, against utilitarians who identified value with use and, on the other hand, against the unscientific particularism of the older generation of sociologists belonging to the so-called “Historical School” (e.g., Gustav Schmoller, Adolph Wagner, Georg Friedrich Knapp). Weber presents his arguments in two articles: “Die ‘Objektivität’ sozialwissenschaftlicher and sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis,” in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 19 (1904): 22–87; “Der Sinn der ‘Wertfreiheit’ der soziologischen und ökonomischen Wissenschaften,” in Logos 7 (1917–18): 40–88 (both reprinted in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre [Tübingen: 1968], 146–214 and 489–590). In English cf. Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. and ed. Edward Shils and H. A. Finch (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1949). Adorno’s comments here echo his arguments in the dispute concerning positivism in sociology. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno et al., Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie (Neuwied, Berlin: Luchterhand, 1969). Adorno’s contributions are reprinted in GS 8; English: Theodor W. Adorno et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby (London: Heinemann, 1976).
22. A salvo in Adorno’s ongoing critique of Max Scheler’s Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik: Neuer Versuch der Grundlegung eines ethischen Personalismus (1916), reprinted in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2 (Bern/Munich: Francke Verlag, 1966). English: Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Value: A New Attempt Toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism, trans. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
23. The terms “casing” [Gehäuse], “solidification, hardening” [Verfestigung] and “autonomization of the apparatus” [Verselbständigung der Apparatur] derive from Weber-inspired sociological theory of bureaucratization. “Stahlhartes Gehäuse,” an expression made famous by Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, is translated in English as the “iron cage”[sic] of modernity.
24. Reference to the attempted coup d’état of 20 July 1944 by Wehrmacht officers, most notably Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. The attempt on Hitler’s life failed, and the conspirators were executed.
25. Allusion to the famous opening of Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852): “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”
27. Cf. the first joint publication by Marx and Engels, a satirical polemic against Bruno Bauer and the Young Hegelians: Die Heilige Familie; oder, Kritik der kritischen Kritik (1845). English: The Holy Family: A Critique of Critical Criticism, in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ed. Y. Dakhina and T. Chikileva, vol. 4 (New York: International Publishers, 1975).
Critique
1. Adorno here draws on the definition of “political maturity” [Mündigkeit] from Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?” (1784) and draws implications from the formulation itself: mündig, literally “come of age” means no longer requiring a guardian [Vormund], who makes one’s decisions for one [bevormunden]. All these expressions in turn stem from mouth [Mund]; hence political maturity also means speaking for oneself, not parroting another.
2. “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!” (Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’” trans. H. B. Nisbet in Kant, Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, 2d ed. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 54 [A.A. 8:35]).
3. Allusion to Heinrich von Kleist’s (idiosyncratic) reading of Kant in March 1801, the solipsistic and relativistic consequences of which “so profoundly, so painfully shocked” him, as he reported in a letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge (22 March 1801). Friedrich Nietzsche quotes the letter as evidence of the power philosophy can have in “Schopenhauer as Educator,” in Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 140–141.
4. Compare Hegel’s definition of “argufying” [Räsonieren] as “freedom from all content [of thought], and a sense of vanity toward it. From it is demanded [by Hegel’s method] the effort to relinquish this freedom and, instead of being the arbitrarily moving principle of the content, to sink this freedom in the content and let it move by its own nature, that is, by the self as its own, and to observe this movement” (G. W. F. Hegel, “Preface,” Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], 35–36; translation modified). Original: Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Werke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 3:56.
5. Allusion to Hegel’s famous dictum,
Was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich;
und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig.
[What is rational is actual;
and what is actual is rational.]
It appears in the preface to the Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Hegel, Werke, 7:24) and is returned to in the introduction (§6) of the Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (Werke, 8:47ff.). English: G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 20.
6. Allusion to Marx’s letter to Arnold Ruge, part of public correspondence between them and Bakunin and Feuerbach, published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (1844): “If we have no business with the construction of the future or with organizing it for all time there can still be no doubt about the task confronting us at present: I mean the ruthless critique of everything existing, ruthless in that it will shrink neither from its own discoveries nor from conflict with the powers that be” (Marx, Early Writings, trans. R. Livingstone and G. Benton [London: Penguin Books, 1992], 207). Marx’s late work Capital bears the subtitle “Critique of Political Economy.”
7. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (1821); English: G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right.
8. Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1962); English: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).
9. Cf. Franz Böhm in his preface to Gruppenexperiment, the published results of a study undertaken by the Institute for Social Research exploring ideologies of various population groups in postwar Germany:
What is it then that produces the shock when reading the present investigation?
I would like to think that it is a double aspect.
First of all the overly clear perception that alongside the so-called “public opinion,” which expresses itself in elections, referenda, public speeches, newspaper articles, radio broadcasts, the platforms of political parties and groups, parliamentary discussions, political meetings, there is also a non-public opinion, whose contents can diverge very considerably from the contents of the actual public opinion, whose statements however circulate alongside the statements of the public opinion like the monetary units of a second currency—indeed they have perhaps a more fixed and stable rate than the values of actual public opinion, which we flaunt according to propriety in public, especially for the audience abroad, and of which we imagine they represent our own and only currency, as though they expressed what we really mean to say, although after all they are only formal expressions we use when we are wearing our Sunday clothes. Yes, it almost appears as though what circulates about us as public opinion represents the sum of those (mutually contradictory) opinions that we wish people would believe are our true opinions, whereas non-public opinion is about the sum of those (likewise mutually contradictory) opinions that we actually have.
Second, the likewise overly clear perception of what the non-public opinion actually looks like. So that is what many of us actually think!
In other words: the one shock results from the perception that we have two currencies of opinion, each encompassing a whole bundle of diverse opinions. And the other shock overcomes us when we look at the values comprising the unofficial opinion.
(Franz Böhm, “Geleitwort,” in Gruppenexperiment: Ein Studienbericht, bearbeitet von Friedrich Pollock, vol. 2 of Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie [Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1955], here excerpted from pp. xi–xii)
Cf. also Franz Böhm, “Das Vorurteil als Element totaler Herrschaft,” in vol. 17 of Vorträge gehalten anläßlich der Hessischen Hochschulwochen für staatswissenschaftliche Fortbildung (Bad Homburg vor der Höhe: Verlag Dr. Max Gehlen, 1957), 149–167.
10. In Germany all universities are public institutions and all professors are state employees.
11. Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhaas (1810), in which the eponymous hero, “one of the most virtuous and also most terrifying men of his time,” is led by an unredressed grievance and his sense of justice eventually to lead a rebellion against the state.
12. Reference to a collection of essays by Ulrich Sonnemann, Das Land der unbegrenzten Zumutbarkeiten: Deutsche Reflexionen (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1963; Frankfurt: Syndikat Autoren- und Verlagsgesellschaft, 1985). “Zumutbarkeit,” of juridical provenance, is the quality of something being able to be reasonably expected or presumed of someone (for instance, a higher tax bracket for a higher income). This semantic field trades on the difference between what may reasonably be presumed (zumutbar) and what is an unreasonable imposition (Zumutung). Through a series of sardonic analyses of contemporary politics and culture, Sonnemann traces the expansion of “presumability” as the cipher of Germans’ unbroken obedience to authority. He defines it as:
A category, according to which the interpersonal relations in Germany are organized . . . a Something that first opens up the space for unreasonable impositions. . . . Where it dominates people, the extent of unreasonable impositions cannot be fixed precisely. Indeed the concrete measurements of what can and cannot be reasonably expected never bear their law in themselves; rather, as a true law of inertia, they always follow only the unconscious contingency of the given power relations at the time, these one puts up with like calves put up with the feed trough and the slaughterhouse, and thus these presumabilities [Zumutbarkeiten], these purely ontic though still preferably metaphysically disguised traffic rules of the German event [a swipe at Heidegger], are admittedly also with good reason, in the most desperate fashion, unlimited: in the absence of anything that is not already based on them and hence whose dimensions are determined by them, what can set them a limit? The presumable is thus above all something expandable; indeed, as a characteristically customary substitution for that positive publicity of intra- and interpersonal relations, based on respect and self-respect and upon which in turn the life and the history of free people and their societies are based, the presumable is from the very beginning a negative definition of the perpetually self-renewing fundamental relation in which the German stands to his fellow human beings, and indeed, as will be shown, to himself. (15–16)
13. The “Spiegel affair” refers to events in 1962 surrounding the weekly magazine Der Spiegel and the conservative minister of defense (and potential chancellor candidate) Franz Josef Strauss. An article drew on leaked classified NATO documents in describing the probable aftermath (ten to fifteen million dead) of a Soviet nuclear attack and an allied counterattack in Germany. The article further documented Germany’s defenses as being only “conditionally prepared” and publicized a major disagreement about strategy among the allied powers, Strauss wanting to equip the German army with tactical nuclear weapons and the Americans emphasizing conventional forces. In order to find evidence of the military leak, Strauss bypassed the constitution and ordered an illegal search of Der Spiegel’s offices and the arrest of its editor Rudolf Augstein and the article’s author Conrad Ahlers on charges of treason. Protests and demonstrations erupted as the entire West German media condemned the antidemocratic shutdown of a free press and likened it to Nazi practices. This in turn led to a party split in the governing coalition; several ministers and eventually Strauss himself were forced to resign.
14. Franz Leonard Schlüter was named by the regional coalition government to the post of minister of culture in Lower Saxony in May 1955. Schlüter, a frustrated patriot (judged by the Nazis unfit for military service because of his Jewish mother) who had failed his doctoral exams and been under investigation for improper conduct as head of the criminal police in Göttingen after the war, had been a vociferous member of the nationalist “German Party of the Right” (Deutsche Rechtspartei) before joining the right wing of liberal Free Democrat Party (FDP) in 1951. At that time he also founded a Göttingen publishing house that printed several works by former Nazi ideologues and functionaries as well as by professors who were forbidden to lecture by denazification strictures. In protest to Schlüter’s appointment, the rector of Göttingen university, Prof. Dr. Emil Woermann, and the entire university senate resigned. The Göttingen Student Union, broadly supported by the professors, initiated large-scale student strikes and demonstrations. On 9 June 1955, fifteen days after assuming the post of minister of culture, Schlüter submitted his resignation and a month later resigned also from the FDP leadership. On the third anniversary of his “fall,” Schlüter’s publishing house brought out under an anonymous author a three-hundred page book (Die große Hetze: Der niedersächsische Ministersturz, Ein Tatsachenbericht zum Fall Schlüter [Göttingen: Göttinger Verlagsanstalt, 1958]) recounting in detail the compromised writings published during the Nazi regime by Woermann and other prominent Göttingen professors.
15. Cf. Lessing’s text “The Reviewer Need Not be Able to Do Better That With Which he Finds Fault”; “Der Rezensent braucht nicht besser machen zu können, was er tadelt” in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Karl Lachmann and Franz Muncker (Leipzig: Göschen’sche Verlagshandlung, 1900), 15:62–65.
16. See Gottfried Keller, Der Grüne Heinrich, Erste Fassung, ed. Thomas Böning and Gerhard Kaiser, vol. 2 of Sämtliche Werke (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985):
There is a saying that one must know not just how to tear down but also how to build up, which is used everywhere by good-natured and superficial people when a probing, searching activity or discipline uncomfortably blocks their way. This saying is appropriate where one refuses or negates what one has not personally experienced or thought through; otherwise it is utter nonsense, for one does not always tear down in order to build up again; on the contrary, one pulls down actually deliberately in order to free up some space for the light and fresh air of the world that take their places on their own wherever an obstruction has been removed. When one faces things and deals honestly with them and oneself, there isn’t anything negative; rather everything is positive, to use this gingerbread expression, and true philosophy knows no other nihilism than the sin against spirit, that is, insisting on self-righteous nonsense for a selfish or vain purpose. (679–680)
17. Cf. Karl Kraus act 1, scene 25, and act 4, scene 29, of Letzte Tage der Menschheit; English: The Last Days of Mankind, trans. Alexander Gode and Sue Ellen Wright (New York, 1974). Cf. Erich Kästner’s short essay, “Eine kleine Sonntagspredigt” [A small Sunday sermon: On the sense and nature of satire] (1947) defending and in part explaining satire in language Adorno would approve of:
[The satirist] is tormented by the need to call things by their rightful name. His method is: exaggerated presentation of negative facts with more or less artistic means for a more or less non-artistic end. And moreover only with regard to man and his organizations, from monogamy to international government. . . .
He hardly understands why people get angry at him. He of course wants people to get angry at themselves! He wants them to be ashamed of themselves. To be more clever. More rational. For he believes, at least in his happier moments, that Socrates and all the subsequent moralists and enlightenment thinkers could be right: namely, that man can improve through reasoned insight.
(“Eine kleine Sonntagspredigt,” in Gesammelte Schriften für Erwachsene [Zurich: Atrium Verlag, 1969], 7:117–120, here p. 119)
In the article he quotes in part a poem he wrote years earlier, addressed to querulous readers: “And Where is the Positive, Mr. Kästner?” The poem, “Und wo bleibt das Positive, Herr Kästner?” is originally from the collection Ein man gibt Auskunft (1930), now in Gesammelte Schriften für Erwachsene, 1:218–219.
18. The “destructive instinct” [Destruktionstrieb] together with the “aggressive instinct” [Aggressionstrieb] are expressions used by the later Freud to define more clearly the biological and psychological dimensions of the “death instinct” (which he introduced in the speculative Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920) such as it is directed at the external world. See Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923) in vol. 19 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press,1975).
19. Presumably a reference to Spinoza’s proposition “omnis determinatio est negatio” (Epistula 59) refracted through Hegel’s theory of the “speculative proposition.” Hegel claimed that Spinoza’s proposition, while “of infinite importance,” resulted in mere abstract juxtaposition of determination and negation, whereas reality contains the negation as potential and hence implies a subsumption [Aufhebung] of the determination and its negation at the level of a reflected category. In this way “determinate negation” [bestimmte Negation] drives thought and being forward to their ultimate, fully mediated identity. Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik I and II, Werke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 5:121–122; 6:195–198. English: Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Humanities Press, 1969), 111–114 and 536–540 respectively.
Resignation
1. Radio version: “In Marx the doctrine of the unity of theory and praxis was inspired by the possibility of action, which even at that time was not actualized but yet was felt to exist.”
2. Allusion to Marx’s letter to Arnold Ruge, part of the public correspondence between them and Bakunin and Feuerbach, published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (1844): “If we have no business with the construction of the future or with organizing it for all time there can still be no doubt about the task confronting us at present: I mean the ruthless critique of everything existing, ruthless in that it will shrink neither from its own discoveries nor from conflict with the powers that be” (Marx, Early Writings, trans. R. Livingstone and G. Benton [London: Penguin Books, 1992], 207).
3. Cf. the first joint publication by Marx and Engels, a satirical polemic against Bruno Bauer and the Young Hegelians: Die Heilige Familie, oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik (1845); English: The Holy Family: A Critique of Critical Criticism, in vol. 4 of The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ed. Y. Dakhina and T. Chikileva (New York: International Publishers, 1975).
4. Cf. Jürgen Habermas, “Die Scheinrevolution und ihre Kinder: Sechs Thesen über Taktik, Ziele, und Situationsanalysen der oppositionellen Jugend,” Frankfurter Rundschau, June 5, 1968, p. 8. In English, cf. Habermas, Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics, trans. Jeremy Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971).
5. Cf. act 3, scene 1, of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell (1804):
A man with eyesight clear and sense alert,
Who trusts in God and his own supple strength,
Will find some way to slip the noose of danger.
Mountain-born was never scared of mountains.
(Having finished his work he puts the tools away.)
There now! That gate should serve another twelvemonth.
An axe in the house will save a joiner’s labor.
(Reaches for his hat.)
(Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, Wilhelm Tell, trans. and ed. William F. Mainland [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972], 64–65 [ll. 1508–1513])
6. “Instinctual aim” [Triebziel] in Freud refers to the activity a sexual drive tends toward in order to release an inner biological or psychological tension. Whereas Freud developed the idea in terms of various stages of infant sexuality closely bound to specific organic sources of instinctual aims in Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (1905), in the later Triebe und Triebschicksale (1915) he considers more sublimated cases in which the aim can be modified through the influence of object-choice, anaclisis, substitution by the instincts of self-preservation, etc. In Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse Freud came to see regression [Regression] as operative when the libido reverts to an earlier stage in the child’s psychosexual development or, as presumably Adorno here implies, to a more primitive, less differentiated form of psychosexual organization, which Freud also often called “fixation.”
A relatively constant concept in Freud’s economical model of the psyche, the “pleasure principle” [Lustprinzip] denotes the strategy of directing psychological activities toward the goal of obtaining pleasure and avoiding its opposite. Several problems arise, such as the pleasure afforded from maintaining a constant tension of psychic energy (the “constancy principle”) versus the tendency toward a complete dissipation of energy (the “death drive”) and that of the complicity between the pleasure principle and the reality principle for the sake of guaranteeing satisfactions at the expense of the pleasure principle’s fundamental (utopian) role in fantasy, dream, and wish-fulfillment, to which Adorno apparently is referring. Cf. Freud, Jenseits des Lustprinzips (1920); English: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1973), 18:7–64.
Appendix 1: Discussion of Professor Adorno’s Lecture “The Meaning of Working Through the Past”
1. Cf. §143 of G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften I, Werke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 8:281–284. English: The Encyclopedia Logic: Part I the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, with the Zusätze, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991).
2. Eugen Kogon, Der SS-Staat: Das System der deutschen Konzentrationslager (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1946); reprinted by various publishers. English: Eugen Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind them, trans. Heinz Norden (New York: Berkley, 1950).
3. Adorno refers to the German idiom ein gebranntes Kind scheut das Feuer (literally, “a burned child shuns fire”), functionally but not affectively equivalent to the English “once bitten twice shy.”
Appendix 2: Introduction to the Lecture “The Meaning of Working Through the Past”
1. Cf. Gruppenexperiment: Ein Studienbericht, ed. Friedrich Pollock, vol. 2 of Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie, ed. Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Dirks (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1955).