Critical Models Interventions and Catchwords

There is almost no review of Adorno’s work beginning in the late 1920s up to the present day that fails to comment on the difficulty of his thought: “terrifyingly dense,”¹ the critics say, “polemical,” “paradoxical,” “myopic,” and “breathless”; “cumbrous,” “tedious,” “heady,” “idiosyncratic,” and even “dandified.”² Yet in the last decades of his life, in the turbulent 1950s and 1960s, Adorno became almost a cult figure in the most public debates of West Germany. He did not become a public figure because his thought is difficult, yet he did become a public figure of uneasy thought. Epithets such as “uncompromising,” “concessionless,” and “unforgiving” suit his work better.³ He wrote for a public about a public to challenge the authority of public opinion. He wrote to reject the generation of a cult following.

When Adorno returned to West Germany in 1949, he lectured as often in the public media as in the universities and research institutes on the difficulties of bringing democracy to a society that he worried was neither deserving of it nor mature enough to rid itself entirely of its all too recent comfortable order of terror. He asked what it meant to bring democracy to a country that had formerly been governed by dictatorship. He looked to the United States, where he had lived for ten years in exile, less for an answer than for a model, indeed a critical model, of the most advanced society. He was obliged by fast-changing world circumstances to think deeply about the end of one war—a total one—and the start of another—a cold one—and, therefore, about the change of alliances that moved at least one half of a divided Germany from deep political enmity to reserved friendship with the United States. He argued that bringing democracy to a country meant less the objective destruction of the remaining edifices of dictatorship—the monuments, buildings, and street-names—than the subjective education of its people. The culture, he remarked, will still be in ruins even after the rubble has been cleared. Within his thought echoed the Bilderverbot of the Jewish religion: “They that make a graven image are all of them vanity; and their delectable things shall not profit; and they are their own witnesses; they see not, nor know; that they may be ashamed.” Adorno wanted to transfer attention from the explicit, unprofitable images to the hidden and unconscious shame of a country’s subjects. He asked for “a turn to the subject” through a confrontation with the past by subjects lost to the idola theatri of dictatorship.

Adorno didn’t think that every turn toward democracy is necessarily, or could be immediately, an advance in the concept of democracy. Democracy can go wrong.⁴ He worried that too fast a democratizing process would more suppress than transform the kind of public opinion that had enabled the dictatorship in the first place (especially when that dictatorship had emerged, as it had in Germany, out of a mass or popular movement). He was surprised by how deeply antidemocratic sentiments remained ingrained in the social consciousness of the German people. He argued that intolerance, complicity, and relations of domination exist not in private opinions as such; they exist, rather, in the public structures and objective conditions that shape those private opinions. One cannot therefore just demand of a public that it change its mind. The public structures mediate what individuals take for granted or hold as self-evident in their ordinary, everyday lives.

To educate a people in democracy was, for Adorno, to destabilize their patterns of self-evidence, the patterns that define at least for the society’s mainstream a standard of “normality.” The education consisted in converting the traditional Freudian method into a social method of psychoanalysis. It was a sociological method of combined empirical testing and critical interpretation that brought to the surface the unexpressed or concealed opinions of a people who were sometimes clinging onto the most undemocratic inclinations as guilty pleasures. The pleasure of violence, he argued following Freud, cannot be separated from the pleasure of civilization. Democracy at best opened up an arena for individual expression; at worst, it administered undemocratic thought to a people under the false promise of freedom. If, to use the normative terms of Jürgen Habermas, a democratic society supports a rational and communicative public sphere in which debate and deliberation can freely take place, then it did so for Habermas’s teacher Adorno only as the historical result of an ongoing critique and reeducation of expressed public opinion. Reason, freedom, and, indeed, communication cannot be presupposed.

Adorno wrote about mass pathology or social psychology, about the unarticulated or suppressed thinking of the public sphere. He scrutinized what was not said, the kind of unpublicized or “not-so-public” thoughts that cannot be explained away by reference solely to privately held opinions. He was extremely interested in how the spell of the past remains in the present paradoxically through the suppression of guilt, forgetfulness, or the desire to “forgive and forget,” to put one’s past behind one and “get on with life.” When he wrote of coming to terms with the past, he rejected the idea of coming to terms, with its double meaning of reconciliation and receiving articulation. To come to terms with the past was for the past also to come to terms, even if, in the end, no terms could ever do justice to that sort of past.

When Adorno investigated the unexpressed thought of the public sphere, he focused more on the criminals who harbored their still fascist beliefs than on the victims who were and were still apparently being silenced. The former urgently needed the reeducation. Similarly, he was not immediately focused, as later critical theorists were, on the range of social groups denied public space for the expression of their distinct needs. He was more concerned with the social arguments that persuaded people that their interests would better be heard if they joined the mainstream. For, in these arguments, he heard the conformism of a melting pot that was eradicating individualized interests with the same skewed reasoning used by the organizers of commemorative events who were suggesting that all who had died in the war were equally its victims.

Adorno had hope for the education and enlightenment of West Germany’s citizens. It was a hope premised on the effort and fragility of change and not on fantastic or utopian pictures of success. He expressed his hope usually in the last line of the essays he wrote and in the lectures he delivered. An example, drawn from his essay “Opinion, Delusion, Society,” states that “critical thought alone, not thought’s complacent agreement with itself, may help bring about a little change.” The hope was not strongly asserted. Tainted as the world was by authoritarianism, Adorno feared that too hopeful proclamations of democracy or even too hopeful proclamations of hope might be more dangerous than the contrasting warnings he was also giving of repeated catastrophe. His last lines of hope were thus to be read as tempered by the darkness of the damaging thoughts preceding them. The preceding thoughts would damage the established thought precisely by expressing and not suppressing the sorrow of “damaged life.”

Adorno often employed the term catastrophe. By this word he meant the organized destruction of human life in reference to the conditions that brought about the extermination camps. The conditions extended back through modernity’s course of enlightenment to the age of Goethe and Kant. How, he asked, did enlightenment go awry? He refused to see dictatorship in the form of the devil clothed as a great dictator who swoops down to take over a country, as if the society does not prepare the way. However, by catastrophe he also meant to capture the complex historical tendency of a society for its people to become overly content with public opinion polls and the consequences that followed from their increased docility. In thinking along the lines of a Marxist philosophy of history, and in terms, therefore, of historical and social tendencies, Adorno assessed the condition and possibilities of West Germany against those of the capitalist United States, the latter being the country of the most advanced administration of opinion. Adorno’s assessment was always dialectical, which means not least that he liked to turn the normal expectation of the assessment’s outcome on its head. The fact that West Germany was less democratic, he accordingly argued, allowed possibilities of reform already lost to the country with the more democratic condition. Or given the direst consequences of enlightenment, what one actually needs is more enlightenment, not less. For Adorno democracy or enlightenment was far less a proclaimed achievement and much more a fragile demand for constant education and reform.

When Adorno returned to Frankfurt he was offered, according to the law of Wiedergutmachung, a compensatory position at the university for one who had suffered under National Socialism.⁷ The offer did not come without some negotiation, and finally, when it did, he was not entirely happy with it. He wanted straight recognition of his work even if he knew that things never happen straight. He was still young when he returned, in his mid-forties, and this was the first real opportunity he had had to secure an academic position. He was brought back to his city of birth, and the welcome was evident, but it was a welcome also partially given to a foreigner, an exile, a Jew, or, as he had recently become, an American citizen. He did not feel himself to be easily or entirely any of these things.

He was asked on his return to contribute to West Germany’s “denazification” process. The request was certainly made in recognition of the collaborative work he’d already done on the East and West coasts of the United States. In New York and New Jersey, in San Francisco and Los Angeles, he worked on team projects sponsored both by academic and public organizations on anti-Semitism, authoritarianism, and the development of the mass media: radio, film, and television. He returned to West Germany to continue such projects under the auspices of the Frankfurt-based Institut für Sozialforschung (the home of critical theory) of which he, in collaboration with the head of the institute, Max Horkheimer, had long been one of the most significant members. The institute had moved with Horkheimer and other members into exile, but when it returned not all the members returned with it. (Herbert Marcuse, for one, remained in the States.)

Those who returned found themselves involved hands-on in the process of “debarbarizing” West Germany’s (guilty) citizens. Adorno was committed to the involvement despite the doubt he sometimes expressed. He worked hard on the “reeducation” of teachers. But he wondered whether the notion of education being proposed under the auspices of the institute would really help to transform the bureaucratic mindset of, say, the “desktop murderers” or reach down into the more subservient levels of society that had produced the “Bogers and Kaduks.”⁸ Adorno answered his worry with a lot more theory, more experimental sociological research, and a simple gesture of hope: perhaps, he wrote as the last line of his essay “Education after Auschwitz,” “education and enlightenment can still manage a little something.” The philosophical hope, combined with the sadness and doubt, came to typify the institute’s postwar work as a sort of “solidarity in suffering.” This did not mean a suffering for its own sake. Again, it meant that the suffering of those who had suffered would not be ignored in the sustained practice of critical theory.

Many contemporary reviewers writing mostly from England or the United States were therefore not completely fair when they criticized Adorno for equating everything that was “not Democratic” with “fascism” and “anti-Semitism.”⁹ Of course there were other ways to be “antidemocratic,” as Adorno well knew, but his assigned project was to interpret the forms of prejudice that had sustained particularly the era of National Socialism. The critics were arguably more justified when they saw Adorno extending his interpretation past West Germany to the other countries of Europe, as also to the Soviet Union, on the one side (although he did not do this that much), and to the United States, on the other (which he did much more).

Adorno had his specific reasons for looking beyond the borders of West Germany. He wanted to argue that democracy and its opposite, fascism, do not belong inherently to a people as a biological condition, not even to “the Germans.” Part of Nazi ideology was to argue precisely for this biological or naturalistic-nationalist claim. He wanted further to argue against two more equally prevalent theses: first, the thesis that fascism emerges in a country as a mere product of history, say, as a (perhaps inadvertent) consequence of historical class struggle, and second, the thesis that fascism is a consequence of not enough education, or perhaps, in Germany’s case, also too much.¹⁰ If fascism or, as he otherwise described it, the “collective narcissism” of a social democracy has to do with education or the movement of history, then it does so on terms that beg for the most extensive and intensive philosophical, social, and cultural investigation. Even to study something seemingly innocuous, such as how people enter concert halls and listen to Beethoven symphonies or why people enjoy lying on beaches to procure a tan, provided the deepest insight, so he argued, into the social tendencies of fascism.

Adorno focused his attention on listening to music and lying in the sun to locate the tendencies toward fascism within a democracy rather than without, which is also to say when the citizens of a democracy were least looking at themselves as democratic citizens. That people were not looking or listening he read as a sign that they were also not thinking. When they were not thinking they assumed they were merely having fun in the sun. He wanted to show the potentially catastrophic consequences of this fun, a fun he often described as infantile or childish. Many critics found the impulse too serious: they regarded Adorno as a killjoy in their not-so-guilty activities of life.

In describing fascism in terms of social pathology and ritual, Adorno employed all manner of Kantian, Hegelian, Marxist, Freudian speculative and empirical themes. They all sat, sometimes uncomfortably, together to demonstrate the traces and tendencies of a phenomenon in a broad historical and geographical arena. The critics complained again: they found themselves deeply irritated when they were asked to hold incompatible claims simultaneously. How can Freud’s concept of human nature be made to cohere with that of Marx¹¹ or claims of “castration” and “weak egos” be made to do the explanatory work of economic “competition”?¹² Why, they asked, should we accept the near equation of fascism with advanced capitalist administration or Adorno’s high bourgeois assumptions about what real forms of fun, thinking, or happiness consist in? How come Adorno knows better, and does he really know anything about democracy? Adorno irritated the critics just as much when he described fascism, as I just suggested, with regard also to the seemingly nonpolitical or “depoliticized” tendencies toward violence such as he found in sexual and cultural taboos or in the radio and television programming designed for America’s daily entertainment. No place seemed to be protected from Adorno’s pen.

Home media, and, by then, predominantly the television, was in the early fifties still a relatively new phenomenon. It was read by Adorno as an invasion of the very idea of the family home and of having “free time,” however much it provided greater access to an ever expanding world. At the same time that the world seemed to expand in the viewer’s eye, it declined into ever more petrified forms of standardization in taste and preferences. Viewers became ever more content with the status quo, with what the media offered up to them, as if on a platter. What they saw was precooked, even predigested. They gave thanks to their “cultural stuffing” as they did to their turkey stuffing. The invasion of the media depended on sustaining a false attraction and a false familiarity. Adorno referred to the catchword encounter to describe the phenomenon. A voice, but one technologically produced, enters the home as if it is conversing with each person in the room, as if it knows each personally. It speaks “especially for you” and parts with the words “Till we meet again.” Yet no human encounter has occurred at all.

Adorno tried to break the spell of this “culinary” encounter. For him, a sure sign of a society’s attempt thoroughly to administer its citizens was when their contentment with false encounters could be seen to have seeped so deeply into their private (bourgeois) homes that no trace of free or resistant thinking was left to them. If consumption seemed to replace thinking, he concluded, then the advantages of having so much media access might not be obvious after all. The reference to the world seeming to be a certain way was crucial to the argument, because the argument’s very point was to crack the socially constructed appearance it described. Thus democracy, too, might turn out to be more falsely than truly promoted if all that ended up counting was that citizens believed they had access to decision making from the privacy of their own homes, as if simply having access deceived them into believing they were being well represented.¹³ Here Adorno’s argument was less directed against the potentially false content of the media, although he described that in detail too. It was directed more against a deception or false consciousness spelled out in terms of the contentment viewers believed they were experiencing from the mere fact of having media in their homes. For now it seemed not to matter what they watched, so long as the radio or television filled up their living room space or the silence of the background with a good feeling produced by personalized speech or friendly noise. Similarly, Adorno described the contentment of a concert-going public that was seemingly deriving more pleasure from purchasing the entrance ticket than from listening to the music. It no longer mattered what music was being played.

Adorno provided descriptions that were more speculative than strictly empirical. They were intended to bring to explicit articulation the tendencies of a society that were being masked by the apparent or easy contentment people were feeling with their daily routines. In other terms, Adorno thought it most important to subject to critique the opinions people maintained about their home lives, their free time, and their time for entertainment in order to show how “free time” (as he wrote in a last line) might become for them a “real freedom.” To what better uses, he thus asked, could radio and television be put? One better use would be for the media to try to give expression exactly not to the content but to the hidden discontent of a people who were being cheated with false promises of happiness: a media, therefore, of resistance. In the second to last line of his essay on “Television as Ideology,” he wrote: “It is obvious that the social-psychological norms should not dictate what television now has to do.”

Adorno argued at least the following about fascism, that it is not an extractable phenomenon that can be attached just to a single country at a particular point in historical time. From which it follows that the same traces or tendencies might be found in other countries under more or less different modes of disguise. Adorno focused significantly on the United States just because it was the most advanced democracy; against it he assessed the condition of a future democracy in West Germany. He wanted to show democracy’s “other side,” the underbelly of a democracy that could turn into an authoritarian state, sometimes, he said, “at any moment.” More usually he acknowledged that that this would be unlikely, at least in the United States, but still he thought it necessary to recognize the risk and to describe how such transformation happens.

Why did he think it “unlikely” in the United States? One answer he gave did not entirely convince the critics. It depended on a description of “Germany” as paternal and the “United States” as maternal, and, hence, whereas the first showed a greater tendency to submit to authoritative law or convention, the second tended to side with the insecure and dependent, the underdogs, the oppressed, the downtrodden, or the forgotten. The more maternal the society the more liberal and rebellious its movement. In the maternal tendency lay the seeds of change. The analysis of paternal and maternal social tendencies sounded crude.¹⁴ It was crude, but it assumed a different tone when measured against a research project Adorno supported on his return, when he visited one of many almost entirely destroyed cities of Germany, Darmstadt, to observe a study of the impact of postwar school education on the very high percentage of children being raised without fathers. He was interested in what sort of difference this was making and would make in the future.¹⁵

For Adorno fascism and the authoritarian personality were inseparable. To fear fascism’s return and to warn constantly of catastrophe, even in places where it was unlikely to happen, was to recognize, once more, the three critical points in tandem: that fascism was not an isolated social or cultural phenomenon, that its associated pathology of authoritarianism ran very deep, and that it could emerge in different strains and modes of “totality” even in societies that were highly democratic. Even if Adorno’s critics were more willing to accept the description of fascism as a broad social pathology, they worried that the complexity and difference Adorno so highly prized in his sociological approach was being undermined every time he read West Germany as a preversion of the more advanced United States or the United States as a postversion of West Germany, of what West Germany could become. Overall, the critics complained that the approach was too dichotomous, too two-sided, and therefore too one-sided, everything reduced to the same, despite the ardent play of dialectical opposites.¹⁶ Many reviewers simply had a problem with dialectics, where antagonisms, conflicts, and oppositions were always being formed out of embattled twosomes.

Adorno’s project in education was an enlightenment project in the expansion of reason. He pursued his interest in reason and democratic education in ways not dissimilar to John Dewey in New York, crossing boundaries between disciplines and media. Most reviewers thus commented on his ability to move either “effortlessly and brilliantly”¹⁷ or most frustratingly between all the areas of philosophy, music theory and criticism, literary criticism and cultural or media studies, sociology and political theory. The critics who disliked this interdisciplinary movement quickly developed a common mode of attack: they relegated or raised Adorno’s work to the level of “useless” or “abstract” philosophical speculation so that they could then conclude that on the level of philosophy dialectics might work even if as sociological analysis it fails. They said something similar of Adorno’s work on music when they granted it more credibility as philosophy than as an analysis of the notes. Contrarily, the philosopher-critics attacked his speculative or philosophical arguments directly to support the judgment that he was probably better a sociologist or musicologist than a philosopher. From whatever the disciplinary allegiance of the critic, Adorno was always apparently better doing what he was doing somewhere else.

However, the criticisms Adorno received provided him good material for the development of his own critique. Just as much as he rejected a political concept or mode of government, such as democracy, as a given, so he increasingly rejected any too rigid compartmentalization of the academic disciplines. To reform the universities, to bring back genuine thought to the disciplines, was as necessary as the reform of other areas of society, especially given, first, the role the professoriate had played in Nazi Germany and, second, Adorno’s observation, submitted both to sociological testing and to his own experience, that the professoriate, alongside the rural communities, was continuing more than any other social group to harbor authoritarian and anti-Semitic tendencies. The connection between professors and rural communities was not arbitrary. Adorno claimed to see it already in Martin Heidegger’s metaphysical search for the authentic in the rural life of the “farmers’ sons.” Adorno rejected both the metaphysical search for the authentic and the provincial praise of rural communities: the farmers’ sons had too often worked as guards in the concentration camps. Adorno was arguing as much against the postwar Heideggerians as against Heidegger himself. So when it came to articulating his own thoughts about university reform he aimed explicitly to prevent the contemporary Heideggerians from forgetting the infamous “blood and soil” speech their master had delivered on assuming the rectorship at the University of Freiburg in May 1933.

Adorno believed that there was more than one road to Rome, different disciplinary modes of language and expression that would lead to truth. The only road he rejected was the middle road, by which he variously meant the safe or a priori road that guarantees arrival (for the journey is rendered redundant if its endpoint is already known), the compromising or conformist road of those who prefer to submit to authority, the synthetic road that leads to some sort of Hegelian achievement of absolute spirit, the reductive or positivistic road that gives to a single explanatory principle or language (usually a philosophical one) a supreme authority, or, finally, the Heideggerian road of primordiality that provides one a resolute path, metaphorically a rural road, toward our knowing why or “for the sake of which” we do what we do.

For Adorno there were genuinely different routes and all were indirect. This meant that none unfolded its meaning without the mediation or intervention of the others. He kept concepts, terms, and phenomena separated to show then the dynamic structures of historical mediation between them. He wanted to demonstrate the nonreductive movement, interaction, and change between the various disciplines, domains, and languages. Thus, as a thinker, he constantly moved between modes of the philosophical, aesthetic, and sociological, between the conceptual, expressive, and the critical-empirical. He moved with a liberated but also a pained abandon, pained because the “truth” upon which all the different modes converged, his preferred term, was not showing itself in contemporary times to be happy. Convergence, for Adorno, led neither to a happy end nor, indeed, to an unhappy end. It led to no end at all inasmuch as it did not assume that truth was absolute. Adorno regarded truth, contrarily, to be historically conditioned at the same time that, through the act of thinking, it aimed to break free from that conditioning; hence, the pain mixed with a gesture toward liberation, the suffering with a gesture toward hope.

When Adorno spoke in rejection of the middle path as the only road that does not lead to Rome, he had one of his first, but now deceased, friends in mind, Walter Benjamin, who himself, in rejecting such a road, was thinking of the early Romantic writer Novalis.¹⁸ There were in fact many early romantic roots in Adorno and Benjamin’s shared concept of critique. Critique increasingly became in their work a mode of Ideologiekritik undertaken from the various perspectives of modern culture and society. To reject within critique the middle road was to tread the road of extremes; it was the only road left to those who wanted to think in a society living at the limits of human catastrophe and total social administration. To walk at the extreme was to exaggerate, to refuse, to shock—to break through to an overly sensitized public that was apparently acting as if nothing more could get to them. For a musical analogy Adorno usually appealed to Schoenberg, not just, however, to his own explicit rejection of the road to Rome in his Three Satires for Mixed Chorus, op. 28, but also to his early monodrama Erwartung (op. 17). For, with its strong Freudian libretto by Marie Pappenheim, this work conveyed the suppressed pain of a slow procession of persons—“thousands of people”—marching no longer to Rome and certainly not conscious of their having become the living dead.¹⁹ To speak of the living dead was again to leave a space for recovery. Adorno thought critique might manage to give a little life back to those who were now walking in exile.

The critics were unimpressed: they held that extreme or exaggerated claims were inappropriate for scholarly research.²⁰ Surely standards of sobriety should be maintained even given the sadness of the world. With what justification can extreme despair or even extreme hope provide the normative basis for social theory? The reviewers expressed their disapproval of Adorno’s “radicalism.” As one reviewer wrote, it is “so extreme that it presents us with a caricature of reality rather than with a sober portrait of it. . . . This, surely, is not the voice of sober scholarship.”²¹ Another pronounced that the “scathing invective” of the sort Adorno aimed at the composer Igor Stravinsky (in contradistinction to his praise for Schoenberg), or, one may add, the scathing invective he aimed at farmers’ sons, or at suntanners, or at those who read astrology columns, or enjoyed the conducting of Toscanini—all of this was unsuitable in scholarly work. “Many of these claims, if they are truth-functional at all, are false,” the critic added, and if they are not truth-functional, what are they?²² Yet another critic found a sort of tyranny, and even worse an “arbitrary tyranny,” in Adorno’s “exemplary” display of “extreme wrongness.”²³

To be sure, it was a fine line Adorno was trying to draw between being, as it were, deliberately wrong (i.e., writing with exaggeration and hyberbole) and being just plain wrong. Moreover, the line was not only fine; it also displayed the sort of narcissistic or authoritarian tendency that accompanies any interpretative insight, whereby in being deliberately wrong one has simultaneously to be entirely convinced, at least at the moment of assertion, of the truth of one’s thought. Adorno’s responded by reminding his readers that he was expressing truth in a form different from the usual provision of truth-functional propositions. But the question remained whether that then made his truth somehow more truthful. Insofar as the truth he told might break the most firmly entrenched of our academic habits, he believed it did.

Adorno liked to repeat his extreme assertions, which did not mean, even in the case, say, of his “absurdly incomprehending”²⁴ claims about jazz, that he did not change his mind in the light of new knowledge. He recorded (in the present volume) that having gone to the United States in the late thirties allowed him to see just how limited his knowledge of jazz and popular music had been when he lived in Germany. But that he arguably did not thereafter change his mind enough, or that he repeated so many of his claims over the course of his life’s work, led some reviewers to see a decline of his work into a sort of adorned or Adornian mannerism, which is etymologically to say, into an ornamental mannerism or a failure to keep the radical experiment in his style and thinking free from the tendency to fall either into empty platitude or boring repetition. Other critics contrarily read his late work as having liberated an impulse that he failed fully to achieve in his earlier writings; hence, the proclamation of his unfinished and posthumously published Aesthetic Theory as his masterpiece. Yet other critics interpreted his later or last works as a culmination rather than as a repetition, an assessment of which he himself would have disapproved—not because he died a sudden and premature death and was probably not conscious of living with last thoughts but rather because the very idea of culmination, of tying things together neatly with a sense of finality, went utterly against his own both musical and philosophical inclination. He much preferred the idea of moving toward diminishment, of tying loose knots, of leaving the possibility open in music and in thought that something different might come next.

He would even have somehow agreed with the criticism of his work, that even if he was failing to get the whole, he was having new or brilliant insights. He would even have liked the title which he himself gave to his own beloved composition teacher, Alban Berg, that he, like, Berg, was “the master of the smallest transition.”²⁵ He would not, however, have liked to hear that he more deserved this title than Berg, especially when the critics complained that Adorno was wrong about Berg’s music and that his descriptions much better suited his own philosophy.²⁶ Adorno would have replied that the form of his philosophy is inextricably tied to the form of Berg’s music, so that if the title is deserved at all then it is so equally. However, what matters is less who deserved the title and more what it suggests about Adorno’s work.

Hence Adorno argued that in modern times to have small insights is all one can have and to make small transitions is all one can do. No one can get “the whole” because the whole as a whole is now untrue; if truth is to show itself it will do so only in momentary flashes, indirectly via the mediation of the concrete, historical, and particular. To show the truth of the whole by revealing its overall untruth was how Adorno believed he could avoid conforming either to a totalizing system of thought or the totalizing social system altogether. He articulated his argument to situate himself at the end of a movement of enlightenment that began when it was still possible to think with Hegel that “the whole is the true.” His own thinking, like music, should thus end, if it had to end, truthfully—which is to say, by no longer hiding the untruth of late enlightenment from one’s view. It should end on the anti-idealist notes of late modernity. Adorno heard those notes tending toward nothingness, or at least toward the smallest details, in Berg’s music. He heard them also in the music of Mahler and Schoenberg, especially in those “works,” he wrote, that had refused precisely to be whole works.

One might form the impression when reading Adorno, especially his more sociological pieces, that much feels overly familiar or out of date. This was not completely so in the fifties when his work, collaboratively undertaken, was reaching an ever widening public and was being judged as “an epoch-making event in social science,”²⁷ as “monumental,” or as “blazing new trails in the investigation of prejudice.”²⁸ It was regarded as seminal both in its sociopolitical application and for the development of the still relatively young discipline of sociology. His approach veered strongly away from the more plainly positivist and empiricist approaches, although it did develop its own testing procedures. It rejected polls and questionnaires in favor of more complex, so-called Gruppenexperimente, in which people met to converse on predetermined themes to enable researchers to gain access to the full range of the opinions both wittingly and unwittingly expressed.²⁹ If one thinks this approach or his findings feel all too familiar now, then arguably this testifies either to the influence his work had on the discipline of sociology thereafter or to the fact that Adorno (although not he alone) gave postwar society a powerful way to think about the problems of prejudice and authority.

But that his work in the fifties and sixties was judged as too familiar even then suggests something different and less positive, namely, that it was already out of date at the moment of production. One reviewer of the time thus described the work as “frozen” in a time already past.³⁰ Another declared fascism to be no longer “our problem.”³¹ Yet another wrote that any use of Freud, especially when crudely combined with Marx, was only confirming how much Adorno was ignoring recent developments in psychoanalysis and social theory.³² Another more simply wrote about the work on the authoritarian personality that the “results thus far obtained furnish few surprises.”³³ In his work in aesthetics Adorno was constantly criticized for ignoring the most recent developments in modern music, literature, and the other arts and for using a prewar standard of the modern by which to judge postwar artistic production.³⁴ One might be tempted to defend Adorno by stating that many of these sorts of criticism will always plague a theorist who chooses to be in the public eye or is committed philosophically to interpreting the “here and now.” Adorno, however, offered his own defense.

He conceded some but not all of the reviewers’ points. He wrote of the constant need, given the development of history, to revise the terms of Freud and Marx were they to have contemporary relevance. But he did not think fascism a problem of the past. Nor did he believe that every modernization or updating of Freudian theory was really that.³⁵ Rather than moving with the times, as one does in high fashion, he preferred to speak, with Benjamin, of holding onto the debris and ruins. He preferred to produce images not of a past put behind one but rather of a past remaining in the present in the form of frozen images of our repressed contemporary unrest. In the last line to his essay on “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” he wrote: “Only because the causes continue to exist does the captivating spell of the past remain to this day unbroken.” It was the continuation that made critique both possible and necessary.

At the same time, he adamantly rejected any suggestion that one can think from a vantage point outside of history, as if this preserves for all time the validity of one’s thought, especially if the purpose of one’s thinking is to intervene in the conditions of the present. It is just that the present contains an extensive past. Adorno described his critique as immanent: it was designed to subject to rigorous investigation the opinions of the present with the tools handed down by history. While thinking is utterly compromised by its own situation in time and place, it strives to be uncompromising, even to break out of its own conditioning. To break out of its own conditioning is to imagine that the world could be different from how it presently is. Thinking brings attention, again, to the unrest simmering beneath the seemingly happy present.

The technique was negative in the sense of belonging to a particular form of dialectical critique, hence, Adorno’s own description of his thought as a negative dialectic. To break out of conditioned thought did not mean that one sought or reached a “safe and sound” place outside, say, in the positive place of the absolute, essential, or a priori. It meant only that one sought an epistemological vantage point from which to render explicit the concealed contradictions or antinomies within. Adorno was adamant that thinkers not try “to break out of the mirror,” that they rather concentrate on dismantling the forms of representation or appearance from within. Thus, when criticized for not being able to jump over his own shadow, he replied in so many words that that was exactly his point.³⁶ If one shouldn’t put one’s past behind one, then equally one shouldn’t blank out one’s present. Still, remaining in the present was utterly different from accepting its terms.

Furthermore, for all the while that he was developing his more abstract terms of immanent critique, he was preoccupying himself, and perhaps more than anybody else after Nietzsche, with the very thought of how an idea or a mode of thinking comes to assume the character of familiarity. How does something come to have the feel of being out of date? Like Nietzsche, Adorno engaged in the timeliest of the most untimely meditations. He wrote about the old and the new, of the newness of the old and the oldness of the new, of the phenomenon of lateness, aging, actuality, and of the archaic tendency as it expressed itself in philosophy, society, and the arts. Not everything proclaimed out of date is out of date and not everything proclaimed new is new. All such claims were to be read, critically, against the grain.

It is worth noting just how many early critics of Adorno’s work articulated their discontent in terms of his failure to be systematic, because it was a very rare piece of writing in which Adorno did not argue explicitly against this very goal. When the critics charged him with being unsystematic—“resolutely anti-specialist,” said one³⁷—they revealed their despair borne out of his refusal to be pigeonholed, to be held responsible to the demands that a discipline makes on a scholar’s passage of thought. Much of their inclination to so criticize Adorno was fueled by the Positivismusstreit, the furious debate on positivist method in the social and human sciences. Adorno was deeply involved. However he was accused of arguing against a position no one had ever really held and for rendering through exaggeration the positivist position naive.

For him Viennese logical positivism was one side of a regressive philosophical coin of which Heidegger’s ontology or metaphysics of Being was the other. Both were exemplary of what he regarded as a regressive tendency in all the disciplines. The positivism forced all disciplines to become like the natural sciences; the metaphysics forced philosophy into a naturalized and foundational praise of “earth.” In the latter he had less of a problem with essences or even Being per se than with their appropriation within recent National Socialist ideology. In the former he had less of a problem with the natural sciences and much more a problem with the praise of the “scientistic,” with the reductionism in method, with a scientism increasingly embraced as the sole standard by which to measure the validity of all thought.

In 1950 a reviewer wrote of Adorno’s Philosophie der Neuen Musik that this is a work of a philosopher, musician, sociologist, and psychologist who “does not fit into any of the ready-made categories.”³⁸ This might have been blame or praise. In the specific review it was praise. The difference, however, didn’t matter to Adorno. He was more interested in revealing the false assumption implicit to the very idea of a “ready-made,” i.e., that anything ready-made is in fact ready made, especially when it comes to ready-made ways of thinking. He concluded that there were no ready-made categories into which his work either did or didn’t fit.

To return us momentarily to the media, Adorno provided a nice example of how radio might be used well to resist the idea of the ready-made. Radio might be used to present listeners not with already perfected performances of fully formed works of music, but instead with the rehearsals (in days when musical groups still had sufficient rehearsals), where the difficult and repetitive labor of putting the work together, making the performance happen, would be revealed to listeners. If the same could be shown of the labor and construction that goes into the performance of a perfected political speech (the combing of the hair, the practice of the smile, the rehearsal of the scream), listeners might come also to see through the seemingly ready-made and naturalized illusions upon which propaganda depends.

That radio might broadcast the rehearsals preceding concerts was a wonderfully improbable idea. It was just the sort of idea that motivated critics, who were otherwise constantly frustrated by the disciplinary disregard that seemed to follow from Adorno’s indefatigable critique, to acknowledge also his flashes of brilliance, provocation,³⁹ and courage.⁴⁰ As a result, nearly every review of his work began with a slap against discipline and writing followed by praise for the thought,⁴¹ or first came the praise and then the damnation. Certainly you have to make a “stiff effort,” one wrote, “but it is an effort worth making.”⁴² “For all its occasional brilliance and penetration it does not sustain its systematic claim.”⁴³ Another invoked the always useful “nevertheless” to follow a whole slew of criticisms: “Nevertheless this book is by far the best, the most profound, the most intelligent discussion of modern music we have.”⁴⁴ Another simply asked in 1962 what one was meant to do with “a tangle of shallow dogma and acute insight, systematic myopia and brilliant specific judgment.”⁴⁵

Combining the praise and damnation in this way, these judgments were beginning to sound like the pleading of Wagner’s mastersingers: if only your genius could be reined in and put to work for the good of the scholarly community. The more dangerous implications of this pleading were not lost on Adorno, whose own concern with the legacy of the responsibility of the independent thinker (and with Wagner in particular) formed a significant part of his investigation into what had gone wrong in Germany with the very idea of scholarly and artistic community. And yet Adorno never himself believed that genius or thinking ought to be unrestrained or irresponsible. He argued vehemently against any claim of arrogance and immediacy—thus against the ready given as well as the ready made—and just as vehemently for the claim that any insight or expression of truth is mediated by the strictures of historical discipline. The mediation provided the terms of responsibility precisely to separate the responsibility from an automatic allegiance to system.

To extend the point, Adorno described language or thinking, as he did society, in terms that drew upon an analogy with a work of Wagnerian art. Against his critics he argued that just as a society at its worst strives to appear as fully harmonious, perfectly ordered, gapless, seamless, without friction or fissures, so too does a perfect system of thought. When society or thought try so to appear, they assume the false or deceptive appearance of something approximating a Gesamtkunstwerk, where this term connotes more a totalized work than a multimedia production. For a total work of art attempts to have by its end no thread out of place, no sense anymore of threatening chaos or violent disorder. Analogously, it is to the advantage of an authoritarian society, as it is to an authoritarian theory, to have its conflicts or contradictions hidden from view. (Media, recall, at worst tends to hide the human labor and construction of performance and production from view.) By concealing the threatening disorder the viewers are given the illusion of absolute satisfaction and perfect happiness. They no longer see what’s going on before their eyes. They do not see, for example, that the “troublemaker” in Die Meistersinger has by this opera’s happy end been more likely “disappeared” from, than reabsorbed into, the community. To speak of “disappearance” was to employ a euphemism that attempts to remove from a people the responsibility of knowing. How, Adorno always asked, was it possible for the Germans who stayed in Nazi Germany to remain blind to “the disappearances” they saw before their eyes?

Adorno found in the language of philosophy, as in all other languages, the full range of seen and unseen dimensions. Part of his idea was to stress, as one reviewer noted, “the metaphysical limitations and ‘in-built’ barbarism of the available German vocabulary.”⁴⁶ Adorno was especially interested in dismantling language as the Viennese critic Karl Kraus had before him. He was led to do this in part because of his observation that in postwar West Germany (as in our present times too) it was no longer admissible “to pronounce definite doctrines, such as liberal or even elitist ones.”⁴⁷ It was only possible now to trace how ideology sits concealed within the iron bars of the current language. Adorno described the concealment in part to remind his readers of how, after the war, it had been pronounced inadvisable, even inadmissible, to appeal to aesthetic values in the production of art, given the profound misuse of those values in Nazi Germany: the misuse of “the beautiful.” Yet from this followed an interesting paradox; ideology was no longer admissible in politics for the same reason that aesthetics was no longer admissible in art, both had been horribly misused. But where, without the aesthetic, art now turned to explicit ideological expression (it became something like an action art), politics contrarily turned to an ideologically silent art of language (an actionless expression). Adorno criticized both sides, the directness of art and the indirectness of politics: the former for “degenerating” into an art of messages and the latter for declining into a politics of deceptive silence. As such, both were more continuing than discontinuing the discourses of the recent catastrophic past, despite their claim to be utterly opposed.

Some reviewers became bored by the constant warning structure implicit to Adorno’s philosophical thought. They did not want constantly to hear after the war the near platitude that we might be making, even if in new terms, the mistakes we’d made before the war. Adorno believed, however, that the difficulty of his philosophy lay elsewhere. To dismantle the language of a society assumed the use of a language, but a language that could not itself be cleaned of the “inbuilt” barbarism it aimed to reveal. This meant that one had to use the given or available language and conditions against their own grain. Adorno therefore demanded of his readers that they critically read his own use of language and thoughts, and in his writing he would do all he could to encourage them.

In other terms, if one could remain blind to what happens directly before one’s eyes, then, for Adorno, it was the directness that was part of the problem. Directness had failed the German people. So a new and indirect means of communicating had to be found. Communication, he argued, as it presently stood in West Germany, “clicks and puts forth as truth what should instead be suspect by virtue of prompt collective agreement.”⁴⁸ The idea that truth simply “clicks” or “snaps into place” reminded him rhythmically of those who eagerly marched in time. So he thought as much out of and against the time as he could, although never so much as to abstract himself from time altogether.

He rejected a purely instrumental view of language, replacing it with a view of how truth appears through language’s different uses. He sought new and deliberately antisystematic forms to show the silences in his speech, the “not-so-expressed” or sublimated dimension of his thinking about other people’s thought. The models he conceived come from the most experimental developments in the modern arts: he was especially taken with experiments in montage. In his writings on new music he stressed the need for focused concentration of the internally moving form and abhorred popular forms of distraction. But within the space of concentration he did not intend to reduce listening to listening for system, for logical order, or simply for coherence. He criticized Schoenberg’s middle period of twelve-tone composition for tempting listeners to do just that. He wrote, rather, about advanced listening or advanced reading as a highly educated (and perhaps too educated) form of knowing how to read for what is not said. At one and the same time he described reading or listening as a form of following “development” that had given way under advanced modernism to diminishment, incompletion, and rupture or, to recall the early romantics, to a form showing only residual points of affinity between fragments. The course of history had rendered absolute claims regarding the early romantic fragment no longer possible. What the modern fragment offered, contrarily, were shards, splinters, or the “smallest details” of suggestive and expressive dust: the remainders therefore constitutive of at least some modernist examples of montage.

Adorno regarded his own use of language to be exhortative, suggestive, and incomplete. It frustrated much more than it satisfied: too much satisfaction he associated with false claims of the Nazi aesthetic. He accordingly concurred with those of his most musically minded critics who noticed that in reading his work they grasped the “brilliant insights” when they somehow were hardly looking, as if they were catching a glimpse of something out of the corner of their eye or even at the corner of the text, where perhaps a “catchword” would be placed to hint at what was to come next. What they caught, however, was rarely something that gave them pleasure. Adorno liked to speak of grimaces, ciphers, and of how things are shown askew. Even when he wrote, as he often did, of something that is still pleasant, of colorful moments of happiness, bliss, or of ecstasy, he brought attention to the overarching grayness of catastrophe.

It’s as if everything Adorno wrote was to be a “brutal intervention” in discourses that were making the world look like everything was OK. In German, the term Stichwort—catchword—sounds like the word Stichwunde—knife wound or, by etymological association, the “trauma” of the knife. Whenever Adorno described the euphemisms and Stichworte of his time—“encounter,” “authenticity,” “Kristallnacht”—he placed, I am suggesting, a Stichwunde into the description. He used catchwords to catch catchwords out, to show how a society employs euphemisms to make it look as if it is highly in control of its language, and of everything else. Adorno feared for the reification of the language, of even a term like Auschwitz, which would likely be emptied of its meaning, he said, the more a forgetful people “come to terms” with its past.

One reviewer, a German musicologist who was brought with the help of Thomas Mann to New York, wrote with considerable understanding of Adorno’s work, although what he wrote sounds platitudinous. Apparently, however, his words were needed: “That the results at which [Adorno] arrives are not pleasant in the sense of escapism nor useful in the sense of pragmatism or utilitarian, neither proves nor disproves the validity of his way of thinking.”⁴⁹ Ten years after Adorno’s death, a former student equally defended Adorno by remarking that the only chance we have of understanding his work is to recognize that “to be just” is “in short” to be “unjust,” insofar as, to quote Baudelaire, “criticism must be partial, passionate, and political.” The thought was right, but only if it did not reduce Adorno’s critique merely to expressions of partiality or passion. Adorno argued vehemently against the reduction of philosophy to “engagement” or “commitment,” of theory to immediate action. To be unjust as a way for Adorno’s thought to be just contained much more indirection than even the use of Baudelaire’s words suggested.⁵⁰

Adorno argued that no part of his thinking, however much based on empirical finding or on logical or internal coherence, would succeed in finding a place above the social fray that would protect it from the tendency toward rigidity, stasis, congealment, death. For thinking is a form of communicating, speaking to others, a public mode of address even when it appears to be written only for the most elite. Thinking matters and words matter in the deepest concrete and material sense. When he asked whether there can still be philosophy, it was the most difficult question for a country that had sustained so central a tradition of philosophy, where it actually mattered what philosophers said in the public arena (for what philosophers say in public does not matter equally in all countries), when a still young philosopher had to find the terms for continuing to think philosophically in the face of death, in an uneasy condition of survival, of having survived when others died. Adorno was attentive to small words: he asked wozu—for what? why?—can and should there be a continuation—noch (still)—of philosophy? Or what does it mean to speak of education nach—first “toward” and then “after,” “given,” or “in the shadow of”—“Auschwitz”? A philosophy, he argued, most dies its death when thinkers remain blind to the reasons why thinking has historically become impossible for them. He interpreted the blindness as a false form of security encouraged by those desperately clinging onto system.

Readers might by now be annoyed. They might feel that any complaint articulated against Adorno was one he’d always somehow already incorporated into his writing or subjected to critique. Sometimes one has the feeling that the only way to catch Adorno out is to close the book on a philosopher who refuses to play the game by any of the rules. There is certainly something annoying about a theorist who seems to be able to defeat every criticism marshaled against him, always by undermining its terms. Consider the criticism that Adorno complained too much and that he complained about everything. His answer even to this criticism was that it suits a conformist or authoritarian society to produce a “group of complainers” through which to deflect and in which to invest its own discontent. To so marginalize the complainers, he argued, is to stifle the curiosity and questions of a people.⁵¹

He offered a similar description of how record stores and radio and concert programmers separate the music of contemporary composers into a special section as if to remind society of the boring fact that there are always people on the margin who say things or compose music the majority doesn’t like. The majority has to put up with their “avant-garde,” although they quickly realize that if they physically separate the music they don’t actually ever have to listen to it. It is enough to know it exists and that most people don’t like it. What Adorno found troubling was how willing so many composers or contemporary artists seemed to be to accept the isolation, as if the fact of isolation itself alone testified to the importance or greatness of their work: the more the isolation the greater the genius. Adorno pointed out that isolation as a socially imposed condition is different from an isolation one might freely choose for oneself, however much it might suit composers to conflate the two. He was concerned with the former, false isolation, just because too many believed that marginalizing contemporary composers was a socially harmless matter. To see the harm, Adorno argued, one only has to connect the composition of so-described difficult music first to “difficult” thought and then to “difficult” social types. To recall the jargon of the Wild West, a jargon that so often shapes political discourse, a country’s “most wanted” are precisely their most “unwanted.”

When I recently reread Adorno’s answer to the complaint about complaint, I was reminded of the old joke about a Polish man who contacts a government official in Warsaw to tell him that he desires to emigrate to Israel. The official rhetorically asks, But haven’t we given you everything you want? He replies: “I can’t complain.” “And haven’t we given your wife a job, your children a good education, and your grandmother an apartment?” Again, he says: “I can’t complain.” “Why then,” the official asks, “do you want to move to Israel?” “Because there,” he answers, “I can complain.”

The humor of this joke is subverted when subjected to Adornian critique. Adorno himself liked to subvert humor by revealing its element of hostility. The joke depends on the double meaning of the phrase “I can’t complain.” When the man repeatedly answers with the phrase “I can’t complain” it seems to mean that he’s happy. Why then does he want to emigrate? Because the happiness is illusory, and here is the shift in meaning, because he really desires to live in a country where he can complain, i.e., where, paradoxically, he is allowed to be unhappy.

Adorno worried about false illusions of happiness, which reminds me of another exchange between a Russian and American that similarly depends on a play of double meaning. In Russian the phrase “I am afraid I can’t tell you” is uttered when someone simply does not know something. So when an American asks a Russian how she can get to the Bolshoi Theater, she is not, as she would be in New York told to “practice”; she is told rather that “I’m afraid I can’t tell you,” which the American misreads as a sign that the Russian must be so oppressed that she fears even to tell someone how to get somewhere. Here the misreading is arguably attributable to the American’s misapprehension of her own freedom.

So far I have ruined the humor with explanation. Adorno would have gone even further and perhaps suggested that if the Polish man thinks he is going to a country where he can complain, not accidentally the State for the Jews, he might find himself yet further deceived than he was before. Not because Israel is not all that it is cracked up to be, but precisely because it is, namely, a young, postwar democracy. Indeed, the Polish man might find himself more deceived when he arrives in a place that supports a culture of complaint, and so open and free a culture of complaint, that any and all of his complaints are rendered innocuous by their controlled allowance. To emigrate to a country where one can complain is a different matter from moving to a young country where either there is more or less to complain about. The political matter in this joke is one of permission, whether being allowed to do something is actually a sign of more rather than less repression. Which means that one indirect outcome of the joke might be that the man would have been happier had he stayed in the old country where he couldn’t complain. This is a joke that says that living in a democracy might be worse than living under communism, even while the joke suggests the contrary. It tells you that democracy can deceive in different ways, an indication perhaps that the joke is smarter in form than its message is really profound. But perhaps the message runs deeper than this, because if the joke is now transposed back into a society (say, postwar West Germany) where those who complained felt themselves still to be mocked in such a way as to render them “outsiders” (“it’s still only the Jews who complain”), then another sort of a hostility in a postwar democracy is exposed.

On a very different hand, this joke might just be a Jewish joke, where complaining is simply the most favored way of being in the world, wherever one happens to be.

Adorno moved between traditional academic disciplines to loosen their boundaries much as he moved between countries, genres, cultures, and languages. It is generally thought that he was rigidly German, essentially German, that he praised the German language above all others as more suitable for his thought, and therefore that he disliked things and places outside. And all this, one might add, despite his own felt exclusion in postwar West Germany from being what some Germans still wanted a German to be. Here emerges a difference that the experience of exile made explicit to Adorno, that what it means to be German is not necessarily what blood, politics, religion, ethnicity, or citizenship decrees. Many exiles believed in fact that they were holding to what was good about Germany—its culture, for example—while the country was being falsely defined by its politics. Certainly Adorno felt the difference even if he refused in theory the hard divide between a country’s politics and its culture. He argued that what an exiled “German” can hold onto abroad might be something much more fragile that the increasingly unyielding concept of Kultur.

For all his writing life he experimented with alternative genres and forms. This was deemed, under one unfortunate interpretation, as being a typically “Jewish” thing to do. The essay form that Adorno so much favored was claimed not to belong authentically to the German tradition, despite the use extending from Goethe and Heine to Hofmannsthal and Thomas Mann.⁵² The development of the essay form could alternatively be interpreted as one of the many contributions both Jewish and non-Jewish Germans made to a country seeking its enlightenment and emancipation; hence, the increasingly widespread use in the eighteenth century of the title form “Versuch zur . . ., ” to capture the experimental and provisional character of enlightened thought: the essay as trial or attempt. Here, as with the joke, the crucial point is about permissions, allowances, and claims of freedom, the freedom to try out a new thought. “In Germany,” Adorno wrote in his seminal “The essay as Form,” “the essay arouses resistance because it evokes intellectual freedom.” To which he responded elsewhere: “I will gladly put up with the reproach of essayism.”⁵³

Adorno did not deny the grain of truth found in many of the negative descriptions of his work, especially those that saw something in his work that was clinging onto being German. But he would, I think, have been puzzled by the comment one American reviewer of his Philosophy of New Music offered, namely, that in this book “the style, syntax, and jargon are clearly Germanic.”⁵⁴ The word clearly confuses more than the word Germanic. To use the term Germanic sounds like the normal offense of at least the English-speaking foreigner: “that is so Germanic”—meaning serious, heavy, impenetrable. But with the term clearly added it is as if the reviewer feared delivering the insult directly and wanted somehow to shroud it in more scholarly clothing, as if to reduce the sentence just to a statement of information: “There is no doubt that this is a work in German philosophy,” which is what the follow-up sentence in the review effectively says.⁵⁵

That Adorno got into trouble in the postwar allied countries for being German is not surprising. Nor is the fact that the more positivist critics balked at German philosophy. There was a long tradition for that. But that the critics gave him trouble for remaining “too German” proved to be a much more sensitive matter when some of the critics turned out to be exiles themselves. In the archive at Columbia University in New York, in a file of the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, himself exiled from Austria, there is a long and apologetically “outspoken” letter written from him to Adorno. It criticizes Adorno for an elitism borne out of the difficulty and foreignness of his language and for his irritating propensity to use foreign words when a good English word would do.⁵⁶ In the letter examples are alluded to but not given. They are, however, given in a draft manuscript written by Adorno that Lazarsfeld commented upon and kept, at least in copy. In this copy there are markings circled around two terms, sine qua non and prima facie, with a repeated comment added by Lazarsfeld in the margin: “cultural festisch.” There is no indication that Lazarsfeld’s mixing up of the languages here was deliberate or even a little humorous.

Adorno complained about the meddling of Americans with his manuscripts. It was one reason he said why he wanted to return home. Though he did not write this, he must have been disappointed especially by those Americans who were once also Europeans, who, in their bid to adapt, seem a bit too willing to lose touch with their native language and with the old European conventions for freely using terms from Latin and Greek. In a different context Adorno described the discomfort at stake here, when he wrote that “to anyone in the habit of thinking with his ears, the words “cultural criticism” (Kulturkritik) must have an offensive ring.” Half the explanation Adorno attributed to the fact that the word Kulturkritik, like automobile, is “pieced together from Latin and Greek.” The other half, he attributed to the “flagrant contradiction” of the phrase itself, a contradiction that accounted exactly for the critics’ unease with the phrase in the first place. For the phrase told the critics that they, as the critics of culture, are “not happy with civilization,” that (with Freud) civilization has produced their discontent. But they react by speaking of their discontent as if standing on a superior plane, even though they are entirely part of the problem.⁵⁷ How does this superiority manifest itself? Apparently by becoming (like many converts) more American than the Americans themselves, which means they shed exactly that which causes their discontent, in this case, their terms of yore.

It was not only the arguably “too American” Lazarsfeld who criticized Adorno for his bad language. The once Austrian now British critic Hans Keller did too, although with more biting wit. Perhaps the increased wit was encouraged by the difference in roles, since Keller was only playing the part of reviewer. Lazarsfeld, contrarily, was Adorno’s editor and head of their collaborative research project, and, as such, felt responsible for his colleague’s writing. Lazarsfeld wrote of this responsibility in his own essay on exile, an essay that was published on pages preceding Adorno’s own. (Adorno’s essay is included in the present volume under the very deliberate title “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America.”) In writing about his early meetings with Adorno, Lazarsfeld recorded, almost as a form of self-defense, the criticism that he himself had received for remaining “too German” in the United States. “In spite of the fact that he [Lazarsfeld] has lived in this country for seven years or more,” wrote the critic, “he has a distinctly foreign appearance and speaks with a strong accent . . . and he does have a rather heavy Germanic way of presenting a topic.” Lazarsfeld took the description to fit Adorno too. He then explained that he regarded it as a challenge to see whether he could “induce Adorno to try to link his ideas with empirical research,” to bring the ideas in line with the sort of social-scientific research methods he was developing in America. Apparently the challenge proved too difficult. He did not know how to convince Adorno, as he wrote in his private letter, to be less globally suspicious of society, to check his data, or to avoid indulging in his own fetishisms. Lazarsfeld became increasingly annoyed with constantly having to defend his colleague against his critics. He described how he once asked Adorno to produce a straightforward summary of his ideas in a memorandum that he might use to convince the critics of the work’s worth. What Adorno produced was a 160-page, single-spaced text in which, as Lazarsfeld remarked, the English had “the same tantalizing attraction and elusiveness that it had in German.” In the private letter, he added, it all makes for “very unpleasant reading.”⁵⁸

With a different tone, in the magazine Tempo in 1950, Hans Keller wrote his review of Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music It is worth quoting almost in full, both because it repeats the disciplinary, stylistic, formal, and substantial criticisms I have already mentioned and because it prepares the way for the final themes that follow. (Later, I shall fill in the one missing sentence.) “Unreadables attract each other,” Keller began,

on the basis of their common contempt for the common idiot. [For this reason] . . . I myself am prejudiced in favour of the present book. But while the truth is invariably unreadable because it is always complicated and usually beneath expectations, unreadability is not always the reader’s fault, but sometimes nobody’s (as in the case of Kant, whose thought processes necessitated a special language), and sometimes, as in the case of Adorno, everybody’s. As far as it is the author’s, it consists of (a) condensations which cannot be due to space considerations, since he often says the same thing five times over in five differently condensed groups of propositions, where a single full-length exposition would have needed far less space; (b) his highly developed art of begging all questions of evaluation; (c) his obsession for using the same word, twice in a sentence, for different concepts and leaving it entirely to God to decide how far and why A is the contrary of A (this is known as dialectics); (d) Anglicisms of vocabulary as well as grammar which seem to require a readership composed of German-, Austrian-, or Swiss-born naturalized British or American subjects who have retained a firm knowledge of German philosophical terminology and at the same time made English their second mother tongue; (e) a. snobbish and quite unforgivable partiality for what, in music, he himself detests, i.e. archaic language (“denn” instead of “als” [than], “ward “instead of “wurde” [was] etc.)

Yet Dr. Adorno offers innumerable penetrating and imaginative observations, interspersed even with strokes of genius-like insight, on almost everything except the subject indicated by his title (for “philosophy” read often “psychology”). No excuse for the reader who puts the book aside because it is too tough (which it isn’t) or because it could be much less tough (which it could). I personally shall read it thrice. Meanwhile, I cannot refrain from taking my savage revenge upon the author’s torrent of equivalent condensations by condensing them into a single sentence: The upshot of it all is that while Schonberg is a true map of psychic life, Strawinsky is a false death mask of the past. True, this doesn’t say all Dr. Adorno means, but then, does Dr. Adorno?⁵⁹

I suspect Adorno would have found some amusement in this review, less because it is somehow positive and more because it picks up on his own interest in the archaic or in catching others out in their own use of language. Keller was siding with Adorno even though he was prone to take savage revenge. It was somehow a “most British” form of savagery.

Adorno brought attention to the difficulties of changing languages, of thinking philosophically in a new language, of working in institutions abroad. About the experience of exile he changed his mind, showed his anger, nostalgia, his excitement, pleasure, and interest. Yet for each experience, and experience was a central category in his thought, he tried to distinguish the “feeling” or “personal sentiment” from a theory placed under the constraint of objective, materialist, and historical critique.

He wrote about the importance of returning to the place where he was born, yet subjected to critique the idea of nostalgia such as he witnessed after the war, when he found Germans speaking in the sixties of “those twenties” (a title of an essay in the present volume) as a sort of paradise before the fall, as if the twenties in all its complexity had not paved the way to the thirties. Rejecting again the idea of isolating National Socialism, or reifying decades as symbolic of a single kind of thought, Adorno argued that it was not just the Nazi era that had to be put in critical context but the eras also before and after it.

Adorno described what it meant to feel at home anywhere that one happens to be. He feared the idea of home would be too quickly conflated with the idea of adaptation. He balked at the idea that those who left Germany and freed themselves from its oppression should be put under the pressure to adapt quickly and easily to living abroad, because adaptation in one place risked the same problem as adaptation in any place. “Here nationalist, there nationalist” he quipped to one newspaper on his return.⁶⁰ Those who feel comfortable and familiar in their new home betray their own inclination to conform, to accept the conditions as they are, to simply “get on with life.” Had they been allowed to stay in their homes in Germany, he feared, they would have been happy there too. In part he was still thinking about his long-term colleague and friend Herbert Marcuse, about whom he had written earlier on that had he not been a Jew he would have become a Nazi.⁶¹

He wrote this remark in private correspondence between himself and Horkheimer when living in England in 1935 and before moving to the United States. At other times, even at the same time, he showed more fondness for his friend, even if he was always critical of his approach to critical theory.⁶² Some of the venom in the late 1930s seems to have been due to youthful competitive struggles over who would have the closer collaboration with the more mature, secure, and wealthier Horkheimer. Another explanation might turn on Adorno’s tendency to see in Marcuse’s interest in Heidegger an interest in nazism. The struggles were not nasty for the mere sake of being nasty (although the remark is unforgivable). This was a period when many of those forced into exile were deeply worried about employment and futures, and it was not clear whether Horkheimer would choose Marcuse rather than Adorno to collaborate more closely with him on his work.

To be happy nowhere, to feel in a permanent state of exile, was a sign for Adorno of one’s refusal to adapt, to identify with the status quo, to keep alive the capacity for individual thought, to keep in doubt one’s comfort and satisfaction. It all sounded more romantic than it was, as if the condition of exile was being posited as the safe place to be. But it was exactly the safety (and the positing) that Adorno denied when he spoke of not suspending but of removing certainty from the critical philosophical model. If the doubt that exile demands depends, as it did for so long in the Cartesian tradition, on a turn to the subject, then it does so—and here is the anti-Cartesian consequence—only if that turn to the subject is taken neither as a fixed nor Archimedean point of security. Instead it is to be a nonplace of moving thought, of transition, anxiety, escape, and critique, and thus precisely not the place of safe childhood, the home or birthplace that once was. Under the proper terms the turn to the subject under the condition of exile marks the (Kantian) movement of and toward a new sort of political maturity.

If childhood remained in (Adorno’s) thought (which it did), it did so, with Freud, as something like a blueprint of difference, as something like the content of a dream or promise that things might be different from how they presently were. But it also remained in thought as the place of first traumas, the first experiences of bourgeois disillusion within the family. The dynamic between parent and child, he wrote in his minima moralia on damaged life, reflects or, better, mediates the dynamic between social authority figures and individuals.

To have a dream of childhood as a blueprint of difference without also having the interpretative critique is, as the surrealists would have said, to have found the lock to a door but no key to turn it. Dreams without critique are insufficient to effect change: only thought is capable of resisting the temptation to fall into satisfaction or complacency with itself. To the Freudian theme Adorno added here the reflective, dialectical movement of thought. Critique alone provides a mode of thinking where thought never finds itself in agreement with itself, a mode therefore that refuses both identity and identification. Adorno took from the tradition of dialectical philosophy the principle that a thought always contains its own negation. But then he recalled Freud and the decayed condition of civilization. So even, he argued, if there are moments of synthesis between opposites on the path of dialectical thinking, these are passing moments or moments of standstill that precisely do not lead, as they do with Hegel (on Adorno’s reading), to final steps of absolute resolution.

With civilization’s decay in mind, Adorno rejected two modes of finality or two ideas that would give one “the final word”: first, the antihistoricist idea that the way things are now are the way they always are, and, second, the essentialist idea that things move toward how they ultimately or essentially are, where the problem lies less in the commitment to essence than in the claims regarding the movement toward it. From which it follows, first, that in childhood we can never stay and to childhood we can never return and, second, that childhood does not give us the essential blueprint for our adult lives despite our living in constant longing for something childhood represents. In the background of this argument lay also two strong but complex theological thoughts, which, given the influence of Hegel and Freud, was not surprising. The first was a rejection within Adorno’s negative dialectic of any ultimate Christian reconciliation, and the second the comparable rejection of achieved Messianic redemption. No innocence, no return, and no paradise as givens or conditions reached, even if negatively conceived gestures toward such continue and have to continue to be made.

Adorno applied his antiessentialist and historicist argument to the concept of being German. His essay (in the present volume) “Auf die Frage: Was ist deutsch?” is, as I suggested above, often misinterpreted as an essay that overly rejects an American in favor simply of a German intellectual life. To temper that reading, the essay demands to be read in the light of a longstanding obsession with the very question “What is German?” Hence Adorno’s reflective title. The question gave the title first to Wagner’s 1865–67 essay, where Wagner specifically argued for the failure, futility, or impotence of Germans who try to define or fix their own national character. For only those, Wagner explained, who so consciously try to define themselves demonstrate the internal lack of that which they seek through external definition. Wagner moved on to describe the impotence as a political one and not as a cultural or aesthetic one and argued accordingly for a retreat into the domain of art to seek the potential of what in his mind could still be German greatness. It was a greatness he unfortunately premised on the idea of purity, on removing the “foreign” or “Jewish” elements from the aesthetic space. For Nietzsche, who critically pursued the same question, Wagner’s obsession with greatness couldn’t be separated from the assertions of the lateness of the German nation, from its feeling of insecurity. He did not think, as Adorno later did not think, that such ego weakness or impotency could sustain a pure space for “the true, the good, and the beautiful.” More likely, the space where one does things “for their own sake” would be appropriated back into the political sphere, an appropriation Nietzsche described in terms of Wagner’s condescension to the Reich, a movement toward a purist and nationalist use of art with catastrophic consequences neither lived to see.

Adorno, however, did. He answered the question “What is German?” by undermining the very logic of the question. But in doing so he turned his attention away from Wagner and toward (again) his contemporary Heidegger.⁶³ The concept of being German, he wrote, should not be analyzed in terms of what it is. Being German has no posited “being” or “essence.” The reason why it is necessary to make this point now is because it’s impossible after the war to separate the faith in Being [Seinsgläubigkeit] from the faith in being German [Deutschgläubigkeit].⁶⁴ If the concept of being German has any meaning left, then it has so only when it is “loosened up” and put to work for a country’s “transition to humanity.” For the word transition Adorno used the term Übergang as he had used it to describe Alban Berg’s compositional form. The smallest transitions in meaning, in concepts, in music, all might work against the tendency toward stasis in what West Germany could no longer call its home (Heimat).

In his essay “On the Question” one is told about the need to write and read in one’s own (and preferably the original) language, of how one’s thought moves in a specific language, and of the difficulties of translating Adorno’s own particular works. It all sounds superficially as if Germany was the place for Adorno to be. Yet, to see how sharply Adorno set his critique against his own praise of being German, it helps to read this essay alongside the ones that precede and follow it (in the present volume), the essays specifically on working through Germany’s past and about his exile experiences in America. From this one acquires a suitably contrapuntal or critical perspective.

Adorno was certainly concerned with the content of these essays, but as much with their form. Reading the essays together, one sees the danger of reading them apart, of isolating an essay by Adorno, as we are prone to do, especially when translations are limited in availability. Just as one needs to follow the (contrapuntal) movement of thought within a particular essay, so in the present volume, as in others that Adorno compiled, one may trace catchwords that connect one essay to the next, as if one were being given hints but not explicit instructions as to how to connect all the dots. Why are the connections not to be made explicit by a single interpreter? Again, because there are many roads to take, and one path would exclude the potential of another. Whether or not Adorno wrote the essays in chronological sequence has surprisingly little bearing on the interconnectedness of the pieces. There is repetition, certainly, but more the sort of weaving that shows the often contradictory complexities of having experiences and thinking at the same time.

Furthermore, the essays demonstrate how misunderstandings will result when picking a choice quotation—a single assertion, sentence, or passage—in Adorno’s work, especially when this is done with the belief that it represents his thought as a whole. Adorno was as suspicious of quotation as he was of the idea that one can represent thought as a single Idea. No accident was it that he titled one of his collections Ohne Leitbild—“without guiding ideas,” but also, because of the double meaning of the word Bild, “without image or representation.” (Leitbild was also a term favored by Nazi propagandists.) Much more he preferred the production of critical and musical “models” in which the thinker as either writer or reader must move. Recall that he did not think that a thinker (or a reader) could any longer produce a whole system of thought, as Hegel purportedly produced a whole system, and especially not a system that is articulated in the form of a culminating Idea.

Hegel, as Adorno read him, showed that what follows an idea’s coming to know itself brings an end first to art and then religion, leaving a perfect system of rational philosophical thought behind in their wake. Adorno traced enlightenment’s path instead to catastrophe, to introduce the other side of the historical movement, where art, religion, and philosophy are brought to the extreme opposite of Hegel’s achievement of self-knowing. Adorno is perhaps most renowned for his proclamation that there can be no art or poetry after Auschwitz, but the proclamation applies as much to religion and philosophy. For Adorno the proclamation was as much if not more about the possibility of continuation as it was an announcement of a catastrophic end. The isolating of especially this proclamation has done its own damage in the interpretation of Adorno’s thought.

Adorno wrote an essay on “how to read Hegel” where he described the threatening seeds of destruction in Hegel’s increasingly paternalistic or authoritative-sounding texts of rational philosophy. It is these seeds that he, in his own writing, tried to bring to the surface, not in order to write against reason but to write against the tendency toward dogmatism in philosophy. Still, there is a problem in this contrast. Adorno read Hegel against Hegel’s own grain to reveal the truth content of the texts. He seemed to demand, however, that for someone to read his own texts against the grain was no more than to be true to his intentions. If this is so, then either he falsified his claim or, better, exemplified one of the deepest paradoxes of modernism, that one defeats one’s work in every act of making it (too) self-reflective. The paradox applied as much to works of art as it did to the production of philosophy. Some suggested that it was this paradox in modernism that necessitated the irony of the postmodern. And yet, sorrow—what happened in the world—prevented Adorno from moving in that direction. He was not, in my view, an ironist.

In a brilliant essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities Walter Benjamin wrote about how one comes to read a work not in the light of a life but a life in the light of a work. For both Benjamin and Adorno a biographical approach to textual interpretation ran the risk of prioritizing the subject as unmediated by the object. To turn to the subject was to recognize its objective mediation, the shaping of and by objective conditions, the inextricably private-public character of thought. Adorno argued, in relation to educating a people toward democracy, that to turn to the subject, which, recall, was the ideal end for those who had once committed heinous crimes, required not a study of individual psychology or personal biography, but instead a critique of social conditions that might open up a space for perpetrators of the crime to come to recognize themselves as such. Adorno did not like the rationalization he so often heard after the war that those who merely “went along” with fascism,” the Mitläufer, were also its victims or that they as obedient Germans had suffered as much.

Returning the point to Adorno himself, he was far less interested in autobiography, in the life that was his, than in incorporating the subjective elements of his experience into the movement of philosophical thought. He wrote, therefore, of his looking for “a kind of restitution of experience against its empiricist deformation,” and of how this search gave him “not the least important reason for returning to Germany.” But, he added, that were he now to contribute “something toward political enlightenment” in West Germany, then this would mean anything but neglecting (and here’s the last line of “Scientific Experiences”) “what I learned in and from America.” Hence, once more, one sees the critical intertwining of these two countries in his life’s work.

From Adorno’s essays one may read all about his life but then again nothing at all. The thought stems from Benjamin’s claim that one may learn something about Goethe’s life from the work, but what matters at the end is the truth content of the work itself that surpasses the life of the author. The exemplarity of genius, if we call upon the terms of Kant, is shown, for Benjamin and Adorno, by the work itself under the condition of interpretative critique and not by the life of the person who authors it. It is not wrong to see in Benjamin and Adorno’s notion of critique a theory of exemplarity belonging more to Jewish theology, with its focus on textual interpretation, than to Christian theology, where truth content is to be found in exemplary individuals who act and even suffer for the sake of all. It is not the genius of a person to whom they therefore pay attention; it is to the critical thought and sedimented history contained in the necessarily interpreted texts.

Texts, like musical works, Adorno always wants to remind us, exist only in the act of performance, but preferably, he adds, in critical as opposed to positivist performances. In positivism the performance or interpretation aims to mirror the work’s surface meaning without probing its depth: the surface tells us “all that is the case.” To aim perfectly to mirror the work is paradoxically to aim to jump out of the mirror as if one thereby reaches the truth about the work itself. In critical interpretation, by contrast, no leap is attempted: one traces instead the dialectical movement in the work by moving hermeneutically around and between the subject and the object, or the author and the work, as a way to “turn” to the critically thinking interpreter. In turning to the interpreter the work turns away from the self-enclosure of its aesthetic form to the public conditions and dimensions of its interpretation. To read a work critically is therefore to read a work against the appearance it gives in a mirror. It is to read it for what it does not show, to expose the social conflicts and antagonisms it conceals. To read a work critically is to read it simultaneously as aesthetic form and a social document of the (perhaps) barbaric history in which it is produced. To read it critically is to read it historically, which is exactly why Adorno focused entirely on works produced more or less in the “German” tradition from roughly 1800 to the time of his death.

Given the conditions first of National Socialism and then of the cold war, Adorno subjected himself to a certain sort of self-censorship or camouflage whereby meaning was hidden both as a metaphysical fact about language and out of the necessity to protect himself from his censors and readers. He often thought of his censors, for example in the United States, who were eager to find the “communism” in his work (this was the period of what later came to be called McCarthyism), or his readers, say, the young West German students of the sixties, who tried to appropriate his work for their own “radical” ends. Adorno retreated into indirection as if persuaded from every conceivable point of reference to do so. Yet there is also a theological element present in Adorno’s indirection, well captured by combining a Kantian-styled formulation of aesthetic judgment with a restatement of the Jewish Bilderverbot, namely, that critique must be a form of communication without (ohne) communicating. In the last line of his essay “Reason and Revelation” he thus spoke of showing an extreme loyalty of the “prohibition of images, far beyond what this once originally meant.”

We already know that concealment and indirection did not always serve Adorno well: it was often misunderstood or simply not accepted. Still, this did little to hinder him. He continued to write everywhere and in every form. He wrote all manner of newspaper articles, magazine and academic articles, literary and critical essays, books on composers and philosophers, and increasingly, as the technology developed, radio and television addresses. He spent his time criticizing the very media that he amply used by refusing to communicate in the way expected or in the way technology demanded of him. His communication-without-communicating was as unremitting as it was extreme. He used the media, like language, against itself to change the course of its own worst tendency, the tendency of technology to standardize taste and opinion. He brought the same aim into the university lecture hall, a fact increasingly dramatized in the late sixties with the rise of the student movement. What the university shared with the public media was the propagandistic power of the loudspeaker, the microphone, the sort of one-way dictatorial relationship of which the Nazis had made such significant use. Adorno wanted to lecture to the students as befits a university professor, but not by assuming an authoritarian personality. So in the very act of undermining the authority of the loudspeaker he refused to let the students pick it up on his or even their behalf.

Influenced by the new or “uncompromising” music of the Second Viennese School, Adorno aimed to educate the widest and most public of audiences without compromising his thought. He aimed to crack the habits of a listening public through the most indirect strategies of estrangement. He acted, one might say, in direct contrast to the wizard of Oz who has authority only while he is hidden and loses it the moment he appears. However, the contrast to the wizard is not quite right. Caught between the continuation of fascist thinking and the radical student movement, Adorno separated the hidden and the distanced from false claims of superiority and authority. In this sense he less contrasts with than approaches the wizard when the wizard himself comes out from behind his screen to show Dorothy that he and his voice are only human and small, that if he has any authority left it is one based on being truthful. Adorno effectively said the same when he resisted being made a cult figure, when he refused to give the students what they wanted of him. It was in his view a realistic and democratic gesture. For the students were told, like Dorothy, to wake up from a deceptive world of color to face the black and white world head on. One might say that the students found themselves caught in a struggle between two images of their revolutionary activity, one tied to the postwar politics of grayness in West Germany and the other to America’s strawberry fields.

Kitschy this comparison to the wizard might be, but at least it provides a different context to Adorno’s deep admiration for Karl Kraus’s journalistic criticisms of journalism or for his long-term colleagues, the interpreters of media, Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin, or, finally, for Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, and Hanns Eisler’s modern theater of “estrangement” and social “refunctioning.” For, all the time, while strongly influenced by each of these figures, Adorno could not help but criticize them for falling prey to that which they were most against, namely, the propagandistic directness or explicitness of messages. He accused each of them of being insufficiently dialectical, albeit in different ways. His point was part political and part aesthetic: thought, even political thought, should be conveyed by neither hammer nor sickle.

Adorno’s criticism of his colleagues somehow captured the unremitting character of his own particular critique, which is to say, that although it often feels like a hammer hit hard on the reader’s head, it presents itself more as a damaged arrow that refuses to release itself from the tension of its string. As such, this has made it easy for the critics, like Odysseus (inspired by Penelope), to kill Adorno, but still Adorno always claims to know better how to string the lyre. With music providing him a model for critique, he finds in music a “pent-up time” to signify the pent-up horror of thought. His trembling arrow captures the mediation of the two, the time and the horror. He aligns himself (in the last line of his essay “Those Twenties,” which is about a world that “outlived its own downfall”) with only those composers and artists “of the present in whose works the uttermost horror still quivers.”

It is tempting to think that the move away from direct messages as an effective form of education brought Adorno more into the camp of the elite or mandarin modernists who purportedly had no interest in public life than into the camp of the hands-on reformers of West Germany. But of which modernist is one actually thinking when one has such a thought? Isolation or solitude might be either an unwanted consequence of exile or a theoretical stand taken on the world. But such a stand is not automatically the same as the well-known and, some say, typically German retreat into the sphere of the esoteric or purely aesthetic.

Thomas Mann famously described this latter retreat in his aptly titled Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, but in writing this book through the years of the First World War he self-reflectively wrote himself out of the retreat. Mann spent many of his last years in Germany before 1933, and after that, when exiled in the United States, speaking against Nazi Germany, delivering public speeches for the allied war effort, and arguing for a better future with democracy. His public speaking against National Socialism was one immediate reason for his move into exile. As a consequence of a lecture he delivered in Munich in 1933, he had to leave the country or to become literally an exile, significantly because in the lecture he attempted to take Wagner and German culture into metaphorical exile, by refusing to allow Wagner’s ambivalence over what it meant to be German to be equated automatically with Hitler’s Germany. Adorno also delivered public speeches in exile in America. He was not, however, as good at them and, given his young age, as much in demand as the older and more famous Mann. He found a better medium for his sort of public speaking when he returned to Germany.

When, however, Adorno moved from Manhattan, New York to Brentwood, California he lived in close enough proximity to Thomas Mann that they were able to visit each other during the years of curfew. During this time, and in the year following the war’s end, Adorno contributed significantly to Mann’s writing of Doctor Faustus. After the book was published in 1947, it received mixed and confused reviews and caused much trouble with Arnold Schoenberg, after whom the main character in the novel, or at least his method of composing and the associated plight of new music, was more or less fashioned. The critical reviews, but more the strife with Schoenberg, contributed to Mann’s decision to publish in 1949 an account of the novel’s genesis (Entstehung) in which he described Adorno’s contribution and, with Adorno’s help, an account of Adorno’s own life.⁶⁵

While Schoenberg was apparently more willing to forgive the more famous (and his contemporary) Mann than the more irritating (and younger) Adorno, a different dynamic was initiated in the public arena. Schoenberg wrote with some condescension of their both providing to the public only a “lay” knowledge of music. The educated public, however, formed a different opinion.

In writing the Entstehung, Mann certainly helped introduce Adorno to the public, a fact not lost on early reviewers, and especially reviewers in countries other than Germany, many of whom reported that their first knowledge of Adorno came from Mann’s novel, the book of its genesis, and, for the musicologists, the strife with Schoenberg.⁶⁶ (For most young Germans of the fifties, by contrast, their introduction to Adorno was via the television and radio.) The “foreign” reviewers often used the recorded life that Adorno had given Mann to introduce their readers to the figure whose works they were reviewing, especially when that work was about modern music. This was no surprise, for just when Adorno was working with Mann on Doctor Faustus he was completing his own book, his Philosophy of New Music, the polemic, as it is often described, between the extremes poles of the dialectical development of new music, between Schoenberg the progressive and Stravinsky the restorator, between two exiled composers who lived a mere twelve miles from each other in California, with Schoenberg living closer both to Adorno and to Mann. Schoenberg was even less pleased with Adorno’s book than he was with Mann’s. He hated the position accorded to him and reviled the reduction, as he saw it, of his music to a dialectical and catastrophic mode of “philosophizing.”

Reviewers regarded the matter differently. They pointed to the obvious overlaps between Mann and Adorno’s works, to the Schoenbergian as well as to the Stravinskian, Nietzschean, and Dostoevskian strands they found in the complex life of the doomed composer Adrian Leverkühn.⁶⁷ But in an almost ironic preference awarded the explicitly theoretical, the reviewers attributed to Adorno’s work the more philosophical and musical value. In Hans Keller’s 1950 review, as I quoted it above, I left out the most significant line to save it for now. “Unreadables attract each other on the basis of their common contempt for the common idiot,” he began, but then he followed with this: “Thus Adorno and his unsuccessful pupil in matters twelve-tonal, Thomas Mann, appear to like each other more than they need so, and thus, too, I myself am prejudiced in favour of the present book.” That Keller described Adorno as the teacher and Mann as the pupil was not so wrong given the knowledge each had of new music. Still the impression this left, and the impression was encouraged by others, was that Adorno might also be the superior thinker. Perhaps it was this sort of impression that contributed to an irritation Mann albeit only once privately expressed to a colleague in 1951, that Adorno himself was taking far more credit for the novel than he ought.⁶⁸ That irritation would not have been lessened had Mann then read the comment by a British musicologist who, having just written that Adorno’s book was “by far the best, the most profound, the most intelligent discussion of modern music we have,” added: “There is a case [to be made] for the idea that the second most valuable—though in truth there is not much competition—might be Thomas Mann’s novel ‘Dr Faustus.’”⁶⁹ That this reviewer was claiming both books to surpass any others then written would probably not have been, for Mann, the main point.

When he returned to Germany, Adorno certainly benefited from his association of Mann, although Mann did not return himself. The association was accorded a central place in the newspapers articles that proudly announced the return. In several of those articles the journalists repeated verbatim the biographical description from Mann’s Entstehung.⁷⁰ It was as if they were bringing Mann back too. But, at the same time, the association had the effect, especially in areas other than sociology, of making people think that Adorno must, like Mann, be an aesthete, a bourgeois, an elitist, and altogether a most esoteric high modernist. To think this was to be only a little more unfair to Adorno than to Mann. It was, it seems, one of the effects of their having written in exile that they were now regarded as being somehow utterly isolated from the culture of their concern, even if, paradoxically, it was Mann who so famously claimed that he’d taken German culture into exile with him and that it would remain with him wherever he happened to be.

Furthermore, Mann himself worked against the impression that Adorno was merely an isolated elitist by describing that side of him that fitted not at all the figure of that most fastidious Kretzschmar. As is well known, Mann made several references to Adorno in his novel, for example, to Adorno’s middle but now lost (Jewish) name “Wiesengrund.” But in the twenty-fifth chapter of the novel he described his consultant on musical matters with its own mild condescension as “an intellectualist, who writes of art, of music, for vulgar newspapers, a theorist and critic, who is himself a composer, in so far as thinking allows.” That the consultant spoke brilliantly of contemporary art as “a pilgrimage on a road of peas” seemed momentarily to be beside the point. The fatal pilgrimage of modern art, which was actually the novel’s theme, was apparently less important than acknowledging the presence of an “intellectualist” writing for vulgar newspapers, at least at that moment when Mann’s aim was to capture the public side of his indefatigable consultant.

If the association with Thomas Mann encouraged one reading of Adorno’s writing, then the long-term association with Mann’s street neighbor in Pacific Palisades, Max Horkheimer, encouraged another. Otherwise put, if Doctor Faustus was written in tandem with Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music, then so too was Adorno and Horkheimer’s collaborative Dialectic of Enlightenment. The alliance between the latter was even closer than that of the former, a fact corroborated by Adorno’s decision to dedicate The Philosophy of New Music to Horkheimer rather than to Mann, a gratitude he explained in the preface to this work where he spoke of their having developed over a period of twenty years so shared a philosophy that, regarding the book’s theoretical insights, it was well nigh impossible to distinguish to whom (of the two) they belonged.

When Horkheimer penned a letter of recommendation to the University of Frankfurt to encourage the administration to invite Adorno to return, he didn’t find it necessary, as most others apparently did, to mention the connection with Mann. The close connection with himself was sufficient (and he was right, even if it tells only half the story).⁷¹ Thomas Mann once expressed surprise that his thinking came as close as it did to Adorno’s; there was much, not least the dialectics, to keep them apart. But with Horkheimer and Adorno there was no surprise at all, for they had long worked together on authoritarianism, fascism, and anti-Semitism and developed together the critical terms of what they called the Culture Industry, terms that were deeply inflected by their shared experiences, first in Frankfurt and then in Los Angeles.

If Adorno was a less public figure before as opposed to after his return, this had no bearing on the collaborative attitude he always displayed toward his work. He was a figure of collaboration and team work. Even in the twenties, as an extremely young man, he was writing as a music critic for the newspapers. He always thought, with Horkheimer, of their work as a shared intellectual labor, but a labor that sought to maintain its freedom not under the false illusion of private or personal autonomy for the authors but under the terms of a publicly mediated freedom. A freedom achieved for both was not a freedom achieved for the isolated genius of modernism; it was the freedom of enlightenment or political maturity they wanted to pass, via democratic education, to every member of society.

Precisely, then, what the reviewers picked up on was what Adorno prided himself on, that his thought was difficult, but where “difficulty” for him did not mean what it meant for them. He did not think his thought obscure or incomprehensible. He did think that it demanded effort. He did not believe it was merely elitist or snobbish or reserved for a few. He saw it as the property if not also the right of every middle-class bourgeois citizen of a society that had been promised freedom and enlightenment in the first place. He did not think his thought isolated or lonely, even if it brought to expression the deep sorrow, desolation, and loneliness of those who were continuing to live as survivors in the shadows of those who had been murdered. In reviewing Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, Gillian Rose described Adorno as a “latter day Nietzsche” who was unwilling to make his German easy for or on the Germans.

To be situated between Mann and Horkheimer was, one might say, for Adorno to have been conditioned by the competing but convergent perspectives of aesthetics and sociology. However, if one reads from the one perspective without from the other, one might be tempted to misread Adorno’s seeming retreat into aesthetics merely as a form of modernist silence or his retreat into sociology merely as a position of resignation with regard to political praxis. It would be far too simple to recall the phrase Adorno used himself to describe the high and the low halves of culture, to speak of his own aesthetic and sociological pursuits as signifying two halves of a thinker that “don’t add up.” Precisely the tension between the two lay at the center of his negative dialectic, a tension one constantly had to confront, he insisted, in a world overshadowed by catastrophe. Adorno always therefore described the interaction between social or political modernity and cultural modernism to cut through the inclination to read the tension between culture and society in terms of the uncompromising and isolated genius who must resist the demands of a society that would seek to restrict the freedom of thought. He aimed historically to dismantle both sides of this traditional model to show the deep implication of “the true, the good, and the beautiful” in the world’s errors. He wrote that perhaps silence is the only appropriate form left in a world where “speaking to each other” is no longer possible, but he chose to write his silence in the “vulgar newspapers.” In this way the silence was responsive to his experience of fascism, communism, and the cold war. It was articulated entirely within the uneasy domain of the public sphere.

In a piece written after Adorno’s death in 1969, Habermas described his teacher as a post-Socratic figure. He spoke of Adorno as writing from the position of a “suffering subject”—a bourgeois subject radicalized by suffering rather than redemption. Had the ghost of Adorno been present, he might have asked that the figure of Moses also be introduced into the funeral oration, especially the figure as given shape by Schoenberg in his unfinished opera. For Adorno resisted the authoritarian construction of his own cult status, or more modestly his own influence, by rejecting what his followers wanted of him: namely, that he would give them a clear prescription for political action. He only needed to refuse so immodest a construction or comparison of his position (a comparison with the great figures of Socrates or Moses) because this was what followers were seeing in him, which of course did not contradict the pleasure he also felt in receiving so much attention. He was ambitious. He was also sympathetic with the students’ cause. However, the students apparently preferred according him a “mythic” position than they did listening to his refusal to go along with their means of political action. Almost paradoxically, they declared the figure they so venerated “public enemy number 1.”⁷² Those more sympathetic contrarily found in his “refusal” what he himself found in Schoenberg’s opera, namely, as one reviewer put it, a “magnificent” failure.⁷³

Socrates and Moses were both public figures in a city and even in a wilderness. Socrates refused to give answers to the questions he himself posed; Moses refused to reduce the word of God to a form of compelling oratory. Traveling across America, Adorno heard in the radio voice of the southern right-wing fundamentalist Martin Luther Thomas a rhetorical directness he took to be inseparable from the authoritarian voice of the German leader whose compelling oratory had led his country of birth into catastrophe. The propaganda of his day caused Adorno as much anxiety, he remarked, as the sophistry of a former day caused Plato.⁷⁴

Adorno refused the position of Socrates or Moses, not by proclaiming himself superior to these two paradigmatic figures (for they had long been paradigms of Western thought). His refusal consisted more in his refusal to be a “figure” to whom a following could devote itself. Given the terms of his own critique of the authoritarian personality, he noted that the followers he did not want were those that would take the message but not its meaning. In invoking also such a distinction Moses had destroyed the tablets to prove himself a genuine spiritual leader. In the opera Moses’s leadership had, in Adorno’s view, become secularized to such a degree that it was leadership itself that was no longer credible, hence Schoenberg’s necessary failure, in Adorno’s view, for the opera to resolve its sacred issue.

Apart from the thoughts about leadership, Adorno’s argument of and essay entitled “Resignation” has a literally and metaphorically quietistic element. Loud claims of emancipation, loud actions against authority testify, contrary to all the claims of radicality, to a profound fear that things might actually be different from how they are. Student action, he explained just before he died, would likely result less in the empowerment they sought than in a further weakening of their already historically damaged egos. Happiness, he concluded in the last line, is found not in the loud expressions of rage but in thinking. “Thought is happiness even where it defines unhappiness: by enunciating it”—quietly. “By this alone happiness reaches into the universal unhappiness. Whoever does not let it [the thinking] atrophy has not resigned.”

The inevitable question arises whether Adorno would have been so public a figure had he not been forced by world circumstances to become so. Would he have preferred to live within the safe confines of the academic ivory tower? Some think he did anyway despite his regular appearances on television and radio. Others would have preferred that he come onto the streets (alongside Sartre) to take a stand on the barricades. If this is a question about preferences, then Adorno might well have responded by taking his usual step back from the question itself to say, given a preference, he’d have preferred National Socialism not to have happened. It’s not fair to suggest, as one critic did, that, had Europe not experienced fascism, Adorno would have had to invent it for the sake of his philosophy.

I have offered an overview of the general principles of Adorno’s thought in relation to the critics of his time. There is no principle or thought in the present essay that is not given its detail in the essays by Adorno that follow. Moreover, looking recently over some reviews written for our present times, I have not found that the critics have altered much in their style and range of commentary. Whether they are justified or not is not my point. The fact that they still say the same kinds of things suggests that Adorno’s preoccupations—with society relation’s to culture, democracy’s relation to dictatorship, a people’s relation to its media, philosophy’s relation to truth, music’s relation to suffering, a people’s relation to prejudice, and a discipline’s relation to system—all produce in the critics similarly complex or banal reactions of unease or concurrence. The best explanation for the continuity is that Adorno’s work still has something to teach us. A less pleasant explanation is that, as critics, we rely too much on complaints of old or have simply lost our imaginations.