The resonance of Adorno’s stay in the United States in his work is not always easy to isolate and determine, in large part because most of the work he actually completed and published while in America was of an empirical nature, and tied up with institutional team research projects that he did not himself direct. As he later admitted, when taking stock of this period of his life, many of these American projects were reworked in essays published after his return to West Germany.1 In consequence, the effect of America on Adorno was a delayed and retrospective one, and can only be fully discerned through a synoptic reading of his later culture-critical essays with their earlier American origins. Only in these essays did the empirical research and the unsystematic experience garnered in America bear full speculative fruit. One suspects that this was due to Adorno’s lack of contact with the general public in America, since many of the later German essays were written as radio talks or journal articles, that is, as critical and political interventions in a lay public sphere. Adorno’s public interventions in Germany were very much bound up with that country’s particular combination of lay and expert public, one which Habermas has described as shaped by “Experten des Alltags” (literally “experts of the everyday,” or perhaps “nontechnical experts”).2
There is thus a central irony to Adorno’s American experience; namely, that much of his work was concerned with research on media and the public sphere in America, yet the results of that research could only be later disseminated and popularized in the German media. Those who like to stylize Adorno as mandarin enemy of the popular tend to forget how active a participant in public debate he was, how often he made use of the forum of cultural critique available through West German radio to make his views known in nonspecialized terms. The question remains as to how one may connect Adorno’s real engagement in public praxis as a political intellectual with the content of his media criticism.
Recent theorists of media studies have hardly had much interest or sympathy for Adorno’s writings on the media, defining themselves rather in opposition to him, in a defiance of older German left positions one is tempted to see as almost Oedipal. But the caricatured portrayal of Adorno offered, for instance, by Friedrich Kittler, hardly does justice to the complexity of Adorno’s position, concentrating as it does exclusively on the familiar polemics of Dialectics of Enlightenment.3 A look at some of the American work which Adorno rewrote for later German publication will offer a very different view from that of Kittler.
Kittler’s accusations against Adorno and Horkheimer range from empirical ignorance regarding technology to an indictment of their transposition of Marxian use value and exchange value onto the sphere of culture (a matter in which he is in agreement with a number of other critics of Adorno).4 Most telling is Kittler’s contempt for Adorno’s notion of culture, against which he polemically defends the ham-radio amateurs and hobbyists (Bastler) denounced in the Dialectic of Enlightenment:
For hobbyists and amateurs, however, who oscillate between typewriters and computers, culture ceases to be anything more or other than a tool. The great innocence that makes the Dialectic of Enlightenment so passé is found not so much in its concept of industry as in that of culture. The book’s bitterness about fulfillments of the history of philosophy, that is, about the fact that electronic standards betray the truth about the compulsory character of all aesthetic styles… already demonstrates, as a constantly recurrent figure of thought, how blind to technology the underlying concept of culture must have been.5
One may concur with Kittler that “culture,” as such, has always been technologically mediated, and that a culture which does not reflect on this hubristically mistakes its own function. This need not, however, mean the simple reduction of “culture” to nothing more than a “tool.” As recent German criticism has pointed out, such reductivism itself relies on underlying anthropological assumptions no less than the traditional Geisteswissenschaft (humanities) it criticizes.6 To fetishize media technology viewed in a complete social vacuum is only to replace one form of blindness with another. To work out instead what a properly reflective “culture” might be — that is, one which is, in the emphatic sense of the word, enlightened about its own limits — will require reference to Niklas Luhmann, from whose work much current media theory takes its point of departure. For unlike Kittler, Luhmann never viewed media technology apart from its social embedding, apart from that modern functional differentiation of society without which the idea of “media” would make no sense. Nor would Luhmann, for all his frequent skepticism about the notion of “culture,” ever have reduced it to a mere “tool.” A passage from the posthumously published Die Politik der Gesellschaft on the nature of political “culture” makes this mediating function of culture extremely clear:
Values and discourses. reform their meaning from case to case according to the situative occasions in which they succeed or are set back, and their setbacks are remembered in the system. In this, they are moments of a culture that can only be learned in practical contact with it and is thus only very abstractly accessible to external observers.7
Rarely did Luhmann sound so much like Bourdieu (i.e. the idea of practice or habitus only fully grasped by participants) as here. The current essay will look in particular at a work of Adorno’s titled “The Radio Symphony,” published in 1941 by Frank Stanton and Paul Lazarsfeld of the Princeton Radio Research Project. Although “The Radio Symphony” is motivically related to the much better-known 1938 essay on the fetishistic character of music, it has, for present purposes, several advantages over the latter. First, “The Radio Symphony” is a more open-ended work, related as it is to concrete empirical research done on radio listening by Adorno and Edward Suchman. Second, this American article was later reworked into the first chapter of the Introduction to the Sociology of Music, and also one of Adorno’s most suggestive and underrated works on media theory and art, “Über die musikalische Verwendung des Radios” (On the Musical Use of the Radio) from 1963. Adorno’s radio research will thus be read in two directions: first, it will be compared synoptically with Studies in the Authoritarian Personality and the “Types of Musical Behavior” from the Sociology of Music, with an eye to whether there can be any correlation between the typologies of political and cultural behavior that Adorno uncovered in his American research. Second, Adorno’s continued development in the 1950s and 1960s of the results of his American stay will be examined, with special attention given to the function of the media-driven public sphere in its cultural and political ramifications.
Thus this essay will appear to sidestep some of the more familiar Adornian motifs of the technological distortion of music as artwork in favor of the question of music in its social function, as fait social.8 But this tactic may finally offer a fresh view of precisely those same tensions between the work of art and its mediated distribution. For underneath the semblance of a mandarin contempt for the American radio’s enforcement of exchange value against use value, or of a late-Freudian skepticism about the political effects of mass society’s dissolution of the old bourgeois strong ego, Adorno’s work on radio also betrays an awareness of music’s structural coupling with the political system. This awareness is accompanied with a dawning sense that the German values of inwardness and community associated with music could actually benefit from the externalizing critique of their media diffusion. The process of deinteriorizing of music and loosening of community values, which the radio operates on the classical symphonic repertoire, may thus be read as an allegory for a process of modernization of German “culture” itself — even if such a process must happen at the expense of the traditional closure of the musical artwork. In several texts to be discussed here, Adorno designates the opening up of the once-inward and monadic musical subject to its mediation through the public sphere by the Hegelian term Entäußerung (relinquishing).9 The radio will become, in this reading of Adorno, the vehicle for a cultural critique in concrete practice. In the process, however, the very notion of culture itself, too often taken for granted or substantialized by much current “cultural studies,” will have to be reexamined as well. If Adorno and Luhmann are in agreement about anything, it is in a deep suspicion of any substantial autonomy of culture.
Compared with Adorno’s work from the postwar period, “The Radio Symphony” still often appears to be defending traditional musical high culture against the incursions of mass media diffusion. The article echoes the polemic against Benjamin from the fetish-character essay of 1938: a critique of the radio listener’s distracted passivity, of the reduction of overall musical structure to atomized quotations, the pseudomorphosis of music onto film. But there are also moments which suggest a new awareness that music’s transposition to the electronic mass media is, in fact, less an externally imposed corruption than an development of its own internal tensions between public and private. Adorno notes that the all-encompassing orchestral sonority of a Beethoven symphony changes qualitatively when brought down to the intimate dimensions of a home radio listener:
What is left of the symphony even in the ideal case of an adequate reproduction of sound colors, is a mere chamber symphony.… [T]he transformation of a Beethoven symphony into a Kammersymphonie by radio, certainly undermines what is conventionally regarded as a main asset of radio transmission, namely, its seemingly collective message. It is hard to reconcile the experience of collectivity with that of “chamber.” The German musicologist, Paul Bekker, went so far as to define [the] symphony by its collective message, by its community-building power.10
A few pages later, Adorno adds that this “community building power” of the live concert hall symphony is further undermined “by the listener’s capacity to turn off the music whenever he pleases. He can arbitrarily supersede it — in contrast to the concert hall performance where he is forced, as it were, to obey its laws.”11
“Supersede” is a strangely abstract, or at least unidiomatic, choice of word here, and does not, in fact, make much sense to an English reader; Adorno was clearly not entirely comfortable with the medium of English.12 One of the possible German translations of supersede is the Hegelian aufheben (also translated as “to sublate”); one suspects strongly that this may have been the term Adorno wanted. Yet “supersede” also connotes a specifically technical displacement here (implied by the possible German translations abschaffen, verdrängen, or ersetzen), as if older ideas of community had been rendered outmoded by newer technologies. Adorno’s diagnosis of 1941 clearly points ahead historically to the newer types of individualized and domestic mass culture which would characterize the 1950s.
The last phrase from Adorno’s quote is also telling; the inwardness and concentration needed for true comprehension of symphonic music is exposed for its dependence on a moment of external compulsion, of Zwang in every sense of the word.13 (Adorno therefore already had in mind that “compulsory character of all aesthetic styles” [see above] that Kittler falsely accused him of ignoring.) Adorno’s next sentence implies a criticism of the musical tradition he is ostensibly defending: “It may be questioned whether symphonic elation is really possible or desirable.” (The “elation” he means here is the self-forgetting of the aesthetic subject in the artwork, without which no understanding can be gained.) Characteristically for Adorno, the external compulsion of the public concert hall and the internal compulsion of the symphonic artwork’s structural coherence, of the listener’s hermeneutic understanding (Verstehen), are not entirely separable. In Adornian terms, one would imagine the latter to be nothing but the historical sedimentation or trace of the former.
Given the awareness of the political implications of music shown in this last quote, it is tempting to correlate Adorno’s empirical research into radio listening habits with the typologies sketched in by Studies in the Authoritarian Personality (see below). Adorno himself connects these two aspects of his American research in “Scholarly Experiences in America” where he notes that in the empirical musical study “On Popular Music,” “the category of pseudoindividualization was a pre-form (Vorform) of the concept of personalization, which then later played a significant role in the ‘Authoritarian Personality’, and probably attained a certain relevance for political sociology in general.”14
In this last diagnosis, Adorno was proven right; the concept of personalization continued to be important right down to Luhmann’s analyses of the mass media and the political system.15 With this suggestion of a correlation between music and the political, we have reached the crux of the present argument, namely the role of culture, including mass media culture, as mediation, in every sense of the word, between art and politics. Precisely here, however, one must proceed with care, avoiding hasty formulations such as “the politics of culture” or “political culture” which tend only to blur the boundaries of social systems with suggestive paradoxes. To subordinate the domain of culture directly to the political would be, in sociological terms, a dangerous form of “dedifferentiation.” It should be stated quite clearly at the outset that there can be no question, even for Adorno, of the one-to-one correlation between politics and culture that is historically associated with Schiller, or later, with Benjamin’s essay on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduceability. Adorno himself is quite clear on this: “In general, art cannot posit any real social forms from itself. Music was not so much community-forming as that it coaxed out from individuals the ideology that they were bound up together, strengthening their identification with this ideology and thereby with each other.”16
Music, in other words, becomes the medium of a certain kind of ideology, or semantics, if one prefers. It cannot be the direct architect of real community. Yet conversely, we would miss an essential element of Adorno’s media research if we assumed too quickly the neat differentiation of the aesthetic and the political typical of functionalist sociology (i.e., of Habermas and Luhmann, whose thought here derives from Weber and Durkheim, 1893). If Adorno does not seek to dedifferentiate the political and the aesthetic as his friend Benjamin had once done, neither does he accept differentiation as a simple given. Differentiation must be seen here as a continually ongoing process, even as a virtual one, one that is in a sense never completed. In Luhmann’s terms, differentiation is emergent.17 And it is precisely the media, as shall become clear, which effect this continued emergence of differentiation.
Thus it may be argued that Adorno is trying to describe the effects of differentiation — which, as Luhmann himself later came to see, was not always positive in its effects on the system of art — on a micrological level, within the intimate workings of subjectivity (and artistic form), and not, as with so much functional sociology, on a macro scale.18 Here Adorno’s characteristic attention to the local detail of artworks, to hermeneutical close readings, proves to be a crucial complement to the larger, overarching media-theoretical perspective of a Luhmann, who admitted himself that he had to proceed with a broad brush, and was therefore not so interested in the details, at least not of works of art.19
One of the paradoxes of functional differentiation is that it has produced, as a side-effect, increased bureaucratization “at the boundaries” between social subsystems; and “[t]his is not simply an avoidable inconvenience.”20 The effect of differentiation on art is thus bound up with the effects of bureaucracy and management on culture. Such effects within the artwork are evident in a quote from a later essay of Adorno’s, titled “Culture and Management”:
Management is not merely imposed on people from without. Rather, it multiplies itself within them…. Even those who produce culture are not protected from the “increasingly organic make-up of humans” — that is, from the fact that the managerial apparatus expands within them at the expense of spontaneity, just as in material production…”21
Again, however, Adorno was unwilling to absolutize this split effected by differentiation both within the subject and outside it; the locus where he attempts to grasp the continued mediation between different spheres or partial systems is still termed, not lifeworld, but “culture.” To be sure, Adorno’s relation to that word Kultur was anything but unambiguous; the title of his essay “Culture Criticism and Society” is devoted to debunking any notion of culture’s substantial autonomy, and his work in general is peppered with sweeping denunciations such as the claim that “all culture after Auschwitz, together with its urgent critique, is trash.”22 Yet he may still assert that “[s]ince there are hardly any more young people who dream of becoming some day a great poet or composer, there are probably — to exaggerate a little — no longer any great economic theoreticians among the adults, and in the end no longer any true political spontaneity.”23
There is no causal relation between culture and politics, and yet one cannot deny a certain interdependence between them.24 The question remains of how to redescribe this suggestive connection in more sociologically specific terms. For this, it is time to turn to the Studies in the Authoritarian Personality.
The Studies, a collective project in which Adorno collaborated with Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, is an exception to the larger pattern of Adorno’s American isolation; it was the only work of Adorno’s to become known to a larger academic and even mass-media public, generating a great deal of discussion throughout the 1950s.25 The book is still referred to today in histories of sociology. The difficulty with the Studies for a reader today is apparent right from the first sentence in the Introduction, written by all four authors:
The research to be reported in this volume was guided by the following major hypothesis: that the political, economic, and social convictions of an individual often form a broad and coherent pattern, as if bound together by a “mentality” or “spirit,” and that this pattern is an expression of deep-lying trends in his personality.26
In other words, the Studies work with a type of neo-Freudian character or personality-trait psychology (represented in America by Karen Horney and her onetime Institute for Social Research coworker Erich Fromm) against which Adorno himself would polemicize quite vehemently not long afterward.27 Fromm is, in fact, directly cited as an important source in an early footnote of the Studies.28
Yet we are virtually compelled to refer to this study when considering Adorno’s radio and music research of the 1940s, if only because his own American media-theoretical publications were not supported by empirical data-gathering such as that documented in the Studies. Contrary to all the tired and endlessly repeated clichés about Adorno’s disdain for empirical research, he is very clear in regretting the lack of a musical equivalent to Studies. As he put it in “Scholarly Experiences in America,”
I did not succeed in offering a systematically worked out sociology or social psychology of music on the radio.… This lack may have been essentially caused by my inability to make the transition to listener research. This last would be urgently necessary: above all for the purposes of differentiation and correction of my theorems. It is an open, and in fact only empirically answerable, question whether, and to what extent, and in what dimensions listeners grasp the social implications discovered in musical content analysis, and how they react to them. It would be naïve to suppose without further thought an equivalence between the social implications of the stimuli and the listeners’ “responses”…. If in fact … the norms and rules of popular hit industry are sedimented remains of public preferences from an earlier society, which was not yet so standardized and technologically organized through and through, then one may suspect that the implications of the objective material do not diverge in all ways from the consciousness and unconsciousness of those to whom it appeals — otherwise the popular could hardly be popular. There are limits set to manipulation.29
It is impossible, after having read this quote, to take seriously the caricatured view of Adorno’s theory of mass culture still put forth by so many of his opponents, although such caricatures are still being put forth to this day. Given Adorno’s own mention of Edward Suchman’s parallel empirical study of radio listeners to music, it is worth taking a brief look at how this latter might tally with Adorno’s speculative models.30 Suchman’s study followed directly upon “The Radio Symphony” in the original volume of Radio Research 1941 and was clearly intended, in part, as an illustration or testing of the theory.
Suchman’s essay seeks, among other things, to determine how many radio listeners to so-called “classical” music were initiated into the latter by radio and how many had prior knowledge of music. It begins more hopefully than Adorno’s, mentioning how the diffusion of music on the radio tends to level both class and gender distinctions associated with “classical” music. It is especially interesting that, in the American context, the compulsion of the concert hall earlier mentioned here is seen as specifically feminine, tied to a certain type of stuffy, conservative, upper-class society-ladies’ culture — the kind that Ezra Pound ironized as “Kulchur” and against which Charles Ives staged a paradigmatically masculine American revolt.31 This is a form of compulsion very distinct from the communitarian and paternalistic German Zwang mentioned by Adorno.
Suchman’s study, however, is self-confessedly unable to root its analysis in any specific understanding of the musical “material itself,” which means that it remains on the level of the “majority opinion” and “a measure of the respondent’s familiarity with ‘what is correct’.…”32 The moment Suchman gets beyond sociological characterizations of listeners’ background, he falls into the helpless banality of listing their “five favorite musical compositions,” “classified as belonging to a ‘plus’ or ‘minus’ group,” much as if they were celebrities or sports figures.33 Even so, the conclusion of his study is not far from Adorno’s: “The evidence points toward the building up of a pseudo-interest in music by the radio. Signs of real understanding are lacking. Familiarity, without understanding, seems to be the result.” 34
To differentiate musical listening types further than Suchman, we may now try to flesh out the earlier-mentioned “cultural” interdependence of music and politics by reading together the political typology of Studies in the Authoritarian Personality — a section for which Adorno was himself directly responsible — with the typology of music-listening that opens the Introduction to the Sociology of Music, and that also draws on the material gathered in America. The most famous feature of the Studies was its use of the F-scale, or Fascismscale, in a questionnaire used on respondents of a wide range in California. Rather than directly ask respondents their opinions of democratic versus authoritarian political systems, the questionnaire sought to tease out their underlying “authoritarian personality” by asking for their agreement or disagreement with such broader, vaguer, and apparently unrelated statements as:
2. Although many people may scoff, it may yet be shown that astrology can explain a lot of things.
3. America is getting so far from the true American way of life that force may be necessary to restore it.
6. It is only natural and right that women be restricted in certain ways in which men have more freedom.35
Answers to these questionnaires were used to measure such character traits as “conventionalism,” “authoritarian submission,” “anti-intraception” or “[o]pposition to the subjective, the imaginative, the tender-minded,” “superstition and stereotypy,” “projectivity” (or “the projection outwards of unconscious emotional impulses”), and “[e]xaggerated concern with sexual ‘goings-on’.”36
The Studies worked with a number of different measurement scales, among them the A[nti-] S[emitic] or AS, the E[thnocentric] or E, and the “P[olitico-] E[conomic] C[onservatism]” or PEC scales.37 These scales were then used indirectly to make up the F-scale, which was itself not directly measured, but rather “composed” out of the other scales. High scorers on the F scale meant an authoritarian personality; a low scorer would be a person of tolerant and potentially genuine “liberalism,” yet as the authors of the Studies noted:
On theoretical grounds it was expected that the correlations of F with A-S and E would not approach unity. It was hoped that the F scale would catch some of the antidemocratic potential that might not be expressed when subjects responded to items which dealt directly with hostility toward minority groups.38
It is as if the authors of the Studies were following, in their methods to measure opinion, Freud’s insight that the unconscious is not directly represented in the dream “the way popular representatives are elected from an electorate,” but rather “in a manner analogous to scrutin de liste.” 39 Like Freud’s unconscious, the authoritarian personality is never directly represented, but it is always subject to “secondary elaboration” by the (political) censor, and thus cannot be directly measured by conscious questionnaires. The choice of words here and the use of the subjunctive (“would catch”) betray the constructive, experimental aspect of the approach taken by the Studies.
One of the variables that interfered with any direct measurement of authoritarianism was “ideology,” or alternately, “culture.” Anti-Russian sentiments, which would, before the advent of the Cold War, have signified an anti-Communist paranoia, and were “largely conditioned subjectively, would be of a much more ‘realistic’ nature today, or at least they would fall to a greater extent within the ‘over-all pattern,’ being less differentiating per se between high and low scorers.”40 So too, “[i]f a trend that differentiates statistically between high and low scorers on E … appears very commonly in the interviews of all subjects, then we must conclude that it is a trend in culture itself.”41
It was to get around these sorts of politicocultural interferences that the authors of the Studies kept the F-scale as flexible and indirect as they did. Subsequent sociological researchers tried to develop similar scales to measure authoritarianism in other ways: so Rokeach developed what he called the D-scale (for democracy), and Eysenck an N-scale (for neurotic maladjustment).42 “Culture” remains, in this scheme of things, a variable that cannot be measured, or at least not correlated to individual personality traits.
Yet a decade later, in an early chapter of the 1962 Introduction to the Sociology of Music, Adorno would take up again the material from the Princeton Radio Research Project of the 1940s, claiming in the introduction to the book that he had “been constantly occupied” with this material in the meantime.43 The very first chapter of this book, “Types of Musical Behavior,” seeks to establish musical types analogous to the political types of the Studies in the Authoritarian Personality. Since we do not have the statistically measured results of Adorno’s presumed original study (was it based on the same results as Suchman’s article in the Radio Research volume of 1941?), we cannot set up a C-scale, or M-scale, for musical culture or musicality. But it is worth comparing the types from Adorno’s 1962 music sociology with those from the Studies to see if there might be correlations.
The comparison shows that there is no one-to-one correspondence between the F-scale of authoritarian traits and the types of musical behavior, just as such correspondences could not exist between the F-scale and the AS or PEC scales of the Studies. However, there are unmistakable and interesting correlations between at least four of the types.
First, the “conventional” character in the Studies broadly corresponds to the “consumer of education” (Bildungskonsument) in the music sociology, the respectable parvenu listener who fetishizes music’s supposed “cultural value” without really understanding it. The Studies’ conventional character is described as follows: “This syndrome represents stereotypy which comes from outside, but which has been integrated within the personality as part and parcel of a general conformity.”44
This mentality is further characterized by an “underlying concern with status” and a “conventionalism … set against ‘extremes’ in every respect.”45 So too the Bildungskonsument in the Einleitung:
He respects music as a cultural good, often as something which one must know due to one’s own social value…. He consumes according to the measure of the public validity of what is consumed…. He is almost always opposed to advanced new music…. Conformism and conventionalism broadly define the social character of this type.46
We may recall that Suchman had already noted the tendency of many of his listeners to treat music as an object of social status rather than something to understand for its own sake.47
Second, the political “crank” of the Studies resembles the “resentful listener” (Ressentiment-Hörer, echoing Nietzsche’s famous psychology) of the music sociology —the person who only listens to “original instruments” and, quite often, only to “early music.” (Adorno would not, one suspects, have been much more sympathetic to the more dogmatic aspects of the early music movement than Charles Rosen has been.) The political “cranks” are those who
did not succeed in adjusting themselves to the world, in accepting the “reality principle”.… These people are driven into isolation. They have to build up a spurious inner world, often approaching delusion, emphatically set against outer reality. They can exist only by self-aggrandizement, coupled with violent rejection of the external world. Their “soul” becomes their dearest possession…. In order to confirm to each other their pseudo-reality, they are likely to form sects.…48
Such people tend to build up a “spurious ‘inner world’” out of “semierudition… and pseudo-intellectuality…”49 So too the “resentful listener” of the Einleitung is “recruited largely from the upper strata of the lower middle class [Kleinbürgertum], which had its social decline right before its eyes.”50 Passed over by the objective tendencies of history, this type
scorns official musical life as hollow and illusory; but it does not go beyond this, but rather flees backwards into periods that it believes protected from the dominant commodity character, from reification…. The resentful listener, who seems nonconformist through protest against official musical life [Musikbetrieb], usually sympathizes with order and collectively for their own sake, with all social-psychological and political consequences. This is borne out by their stubbornly sectarian, potentially raging faces, which are concentrated in so-called “Bach hours”[Bachstunden] and evening concerts.51
Third, the true authoritarian character is most likely the completely unmusical type. In the Authoritarian syndrome, there is “a specific resolution of the Oedipus complex which defines the formation of the syndrome here in question. Love for the mother, in its primary form, comes under a severe taboo.”52
There is thus a “genetic relation between the ‘Authoritarian’ syndrome and the sado-masochistic resolution of the Oedipus complex.…”53 So also in the case of the (musically) “indifferent, unmusical and anti-musical,”
it is not, as bourgeois convention would have it, a question of a lack of natural aptitude, but of processes during early childhood. One may risk the hypothesis that at that time, a thoroughly brutal authority produced defects in this type. Children of especially strict fathers appear often to be unable even to learn to read notes — which is in any case the condition of any musical education worthy of humans.54
Four, the political “rebel” type shares elements with Adorno’s sketch of the jazz-fan or “expert” character. Despite the semblance of antiauthoritarianism, the “rebel” has underlying shared features with the authoritarian character.
The resolution of the Oedipus complex characteristic of the “Authoritarian” syndrome is not the only one that makes for a “high” [e.g., high-scoring on the F or Fascist scale, LP] character structure. Instead of identification with parental authority, “insurrection” may take place. This, of course, may in certain cases liquidate the sadomasochistic tendencies. However, insurrection may also occur in such a way that the authoritarian character structure is not basically affected.… This may lead to an irrational and blind hatred of all authority, with strong destructive connotations, accompanied by a secret readiness to “capitulate” and to join hands with the “hated” strong.… Symptomatically, this syndrome is characterized, above all, by a penchant for “tolerated excesses” of all kinds.…55
The musical type of “jazz expert” or “jazz fans” shares characteristics with the “Ressentiments-Hörer,” but has strong structural similarities to the “rebel.” “Out of justified revulsion at cultural fraud he would like best to replace the aesthetic response with a technical and sporting one.” (We may detect here an echo of the historical type of 1920s Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity.)
Here Adorno most closely links his character analysis to actual musical structures:
The unchallenged rule of the regular beat, which must be matched by every art of syncopation; the inability to think music as in the truest sense dynamic and freely developing — these aspects lend this type of listener a character that is bound to authority. Admittedly, though, this character takes here the form of the Oedipal in Freud’s sense: rebellion against the father, in which the readiness to yield to him already inheres. According to its social consciousness, this type is often progressive; it is to be found of course most often among youth, and is probably bred and exploited by the teenage market.56
It is interesting that the “expert” type of listener, in the sociology of music, is actually less important than the lay “good listener,” who may resemble the “genuine liberal” in the Studies. After characterizing the musical “expert” as one who understands everything even in the most complex modern music, Adorno goes on to warn:
Anyone who would want to make all listeners into experts would be behaving, under current social conditions, in an inhumanely Utopian fashion. The compulsion (Zwang) that the integral form of the musical work exerts on the listener is incompatible not only with the latter’s nature, his situation and the state of non-professional musical education, but also with that of individual freedom. That legitimizes, relative to the type of the expert hearer, the type of the good listener.57
Against the individual, technical ability of the expert, the “good listener” depends on cultural mediation: “Such musicality needed, historically speaking, a certain homogeneity of musical culture; beyond that, a certain closure of the larger condition [Gesamtzustand], at least among the groups reacting to the artworks.”58
So in the “Genuine Liberal” type of the Studies, “[a]esthetic interests seem to occur frequently.”59 Yet Adorno chooses to characterize this type as a woman of whom he writes: “Apart from a semiprofessional interest in music she also ‘enjoys painting and dramatics.’ As to her vocation, however, she is still undecided.60
Note that nowhere does Adorno express any disapproval of this idea of “enjoying” art, a relation which, according to his own theory, would have to be seen as preaesthetic (“enjoyment,” or Genuss, having been superseded by Kantian disinterested, i.e., sublimated, contemplation). It is as if this “liberal” type were characterized less by a completely formed personality than by a fluidity that, via analogy with the aforementioned idea of social differentiation, we might term emergent. If the “order” of a differentiated and open modern society must always be a process, hence an emergent order, then one may surmise this emergent quality to characterize its members on a micrological level as well.
Beyond these rough similarities between character types, there are also overarching characteristics shared by all types: what the Authoritarian Personality calls “surface resentment,” along with “ticket thinking,” a certain “standardization” of thought combined with its superficial “personalization.” These phenomena accompany the reduction of truth content to mere private “opinion,” which Adorno would later criticize in the key essay “Opinion Delusion Society.” There is also a common decline of the Oedipal character found by Adorno both in his political and musical types. In his acceptance of this decline of Oedipus, he breaks somewhat with the later Freud (and resembles the earlier Lacan, as Peter Dews has argued at length).61 If the subsystems of politics, art, and morality — to name a few — are, for Adorno, partly mediated through culture, then that mediation itself is sedimented in the historical particularity of character structure. The decline of the Oedipal character means the end of a certain kind of culture as well. In particular, it means the end of culture understood as a well-defined community within the public sphere.
In conclusion, we may now look at how Adorno extends these motifs gained through research on American media into his later political interventions. As noted, “The Radio Symphony” was directly reworked in the 1963 essay “Über die musikalische Verwendung des Radios,” which seems to turn many of the critical doubts about media aesthetics, expressed in 1941, into polemical affirmations of the necessity of the end of traditional culture. The drastic conclusions at which Adorno arrives in this essay are surprising to a reader familiar only with his polemics against jazz, Hollywood, and television. In fact, Adorno’s proposals for a radical deployment of media technology, not only in the distribution, but also in the production of music, would seem to outbid even Benjamin’s more well-known ideas in his essay on the work of art in the age of its mechanical reproduceability. Apparently reversing his earlier distaste for the trivialization of Viennese classicism through its distracted radio reception, Adorno now sees the latter’s mediatized destruction of the German musical cultural heritage (Kulturerbe) as a healthy phenomenon. As already in “The Radio Symphony,” this culture is exemplified by the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, an ideological symbol which has been claimed by bourgeois humanism, Soviet collectivism, and the Nazis, then used to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall, and ultimately made into the official hymn of the European Community.
The school of Viennese classicism, almost simultaneously with the Industrial Revolution, integrated in the spirit of the age the dispersed individuals from whose totally socialized relations a harmonious whole was meant to spring…. But this inclusion was deceptive…. No one who listens to the symphony [Beethoven’s Ninth] in the bourgeois individual situation of a private apartment can believe himself or herself to be physically secured in a community; to this extent, the destruction of the symphony by the radio is also an unfolding of truth.62
This is a very rich passage; the polemic against Geborgenheit (security) places it in the vicinity of the Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, published a year later. The Jargon’s protracted attack on the language of Existentialism has structural affinities to the critique of the mediated symphony, for the individual terms of Existentialist jargon become, in Adorno’s reading, as undialectically “atomistic” as “beautiful passages” torn out of their symphonic context by a distracted radio listener.63 The characteristic of both the Jargon and of the fetishized listening to “beautiful passages” is the denial of mediation in the larger sense of that term. Hence Adorno, in a quite technologically specific metaphor, and one which refers specifically to America, calls the Jargon “the Wurlitzer organ of the spirit.” “As the Wurlitzer Organ humanizes vibrato, once the bearer of subjective expression, for the purposes of commercials, by mechanically and belatedly adding it to the mechanically produced tone, thus the jargon supplies humans with cookie-cutter patterns of being human.…”64
One might also read this passage, however, together with the seventh chapter of the Introduction to the Sociology of Music, titled “Conductor and Orchestra,” where the author develops the authoritarian political implications of the bourgeois-humanist symphony at greater length.65 Much of Adorno’s essay on the musical use of the radio may be read as a program for then-contemporary modernist electronic music practice in Germany, especially the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen. But here we may concentrate instead on the political implications of Adorno’s praise for the destruction of the bourgeois symphony. For despite all his criticisms of the naiveté of American scientistic positivism, Adorno had had to admit, in his retrospective essay on “Scientific Experiences in America,” that “[t]he Enlightenment moment present also in relation to culture, which was self-evident in the American intellectual climate, had to affect me in the strongest way.”66
This affected “especially the European preconditions for musical culture,” which, for Adorno, were also a constant and central allegory of philosophical speculation and the utopian imagination.67 Adorno was also quick, however, to note the dangers of such musical culture and its potentially authoritarian Innerlichkeit (interiority), and defended against it the American primacy of “adjustment” and unhierarchical teamwork, which he compared to the Hegelian idea of Entäusserung (relinquishing) mentioned earlier.
We do not become free people by realizing ourselves as particular individuals, as an appalling phrase has it, but rather by going out of ourselves, entering into a relation with others and in a certain sense giving ourselves up to them…. A person who is brought to friendliness, through external compulsion, even through egotistical interest, reaches in the end a certain humanity in his relation to other people sooner than the one who, in order only to be identical with himself — as if such identity were always desirable — makes a nasty and irritated face and let one know from the start that one is actually not present at all for him at all, and cannot intrude into their inwardness, which often hardly exists in the first place.68
In other words, the unity of subjectivity, whether aesthetic or philosophical, depends upon an underlying functional unity (Funktionszusammenhang) of society, which that subjectivity quixotically denies.69 Americans’ friendliness (a very Brechtian term), by contrast, acknowledges just this mediation (Vermittlung) of subjectivity, in every sense of the word.70 The paradoxical virtue of the radio and its destruction of the symphony, and its bourgeois illusions of community (Gemeinschaft) is that it exposes this dependency of the subject. Media may thus function as an “äusserer Zwang” (external compulsion) that brings the windowless monad of the subject to a less aggressive Freundlichkeit. Thus Adorno’s essay on the musical use of radio ends with an insight not far removed from those of recent media theory. Through the radio, “[a]rt exposes itself as that thing about whose categories the reified culture business anxiously lies. But only a reification, which has become self conscious might offer a view of what could be different.”71
Note that it is not the media as such, but rather their conscious reflection, which is praised here. For the media and the public sphere are not identical. As Luhmann has since made clear, the “public sphere” may be understood as the structural coupling of the subsystem of the mass media with the subsystem of politics.72 Similarly, we may extend Luhmann’s idea to see aesthetic “culture” — including art criticism and the entire domain of publicity — as a similar structural coupling of the mass media with the art system. (This idea would have to be worked out in much greater detail than present limits permit.)
One last question should be mentioned here. Just as implicit parallels have been sketched in between Adorno’s American political typologies of the authoritarian personality and the cultural typologies he uncovered via radio research, so one might find political implications in his defense of the radio as practical critic of traditional culture and its own authority, namely that of the closed work of art. In particular, this could be effected by reading the Introduction to the Sociology of Music — a work which, as earlier noted, is related to the American radio research — synoptically with several culture-critical essays such as “Culture and Management” from the same period. Adorno’s Sociology of Music attacks that central institution of bourgeois musical Öffentlichkeit, the symphony orchestra, as authoritarian. The community of orchestral musicians needed to produce the illusion of symphonic music, with its ideology of social harmony and inclusion, depends upon a dictatorial form of Weberian charisma. Adorno was, of course, remembering here his revulsion at the American wartime cult of Toscanini, which was strongly reinforced by radio broadcasts. Adorno’s critique of the orchestra conductor’s charisma may be read as an implicit critique of the charismatic authority of radio itself, which similarly works to create an illusion of aural community. Against this false totality of the symphony, a plea is made for chamber music as a form, which is “freer, less authoritarian, less violent.”73 Most interesting in our present context is that chamber music, for Adorno, produces an “equilibrium of art and reception, which society otherwise denied. It [chamber music] creates this equilibrium through a renunciation of that aspect of the public sphere, which belongs just as much to the idea of bourgeois democracy as differences of property and educational privilege are opposed to it.”74 This renunciation of claims to the public sphere must be correlated to Adorno’s assertion, later in the same book, that modern music represents a “becoming public without the public sphere” (öffentlich Werden ohne Öffentlichkeit).75 Musical modernity, although it would be wrong to deny its own mediated nature through a withdrawal into absolute solitude, rejects the bourgeois symphony’s transcendental illusions of community, of a strong individual ego, and even of a consensual public sphere, in favor of open conflict. It is as if the shift from radio to chamber symphony paralleled Tönnies’s famous move from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft — from community to society.
It should not be lost sight of that this shift is not without its risks, even its compensatory countertendencies toward a reaffirmation of authority; it would thus be a mistake to paint the nature of the mediation or differentiation of aesthetic culture in solely rosy terms. Here, again, many of Adorno’s warnings against the potentially distorting effects of electronic mass media are, in despite of all the contempt heaped on him by many a latter-day media theorist, supported by the insights of Luhmann, although Luhmann may describe the same phenomena in more value-neutral fashion. Among these phenomena, one might mention personalization, the false attribution of social causality to individuals and their supposedly ineffable character, which had been seen already during the Second World War as a source of the Führerprinzip. Another phenomenon is what Parsons, and Adorno after him, called “ticket thinking,” the tendency to reduce complex public and political questions to facile polarities and (often hysterically moralized) oppositions. Luhmann sees both of these phenomena as media-typical, even as inevitable effects of the medium. In The Reality of the Mass Media, he sees the reduction of reality to stereotypical “scripts” or “schemata” as one of the chief functions of media.76
More pertinent to the present discussion is Luhmann’s acknowledgment of the inherent tendency of media to a splintering and disassociation of the information it transmits.
Information itself can only appear as (however small a) surprise. Furthermore, it must be understandable as a component of communication. The principle of selection now seems to be that these requirements are intensified for the purposes of the mass media and that more attention must be given to making the information readily understandable for the broadest possible circle of receivers.77
Luhmann’s German word for “intensified” is verstärkt, which also means amplified. This procedure of information processing appears akin to a kind of “semantic loudspeaker” that amplifies the details as “surprise” and shock at the expense of Adorno’s structural-musical hearing. The result is a diagnosed loss of value in individual experience not very different from that once diagnosed in Benjamin’s Leskow essay.78
The most serious diagnosis in Luhmann’s reading is, finally, that the media tend to collapse the difference between information and communication (Mitteilung).
Generally speaking … we can say that the economy and speed of communication always require a reference to complexes of meaning (to “Gestalts,” as in Gestalt psychology) and that communication can therefore never recover the meaning which it lets receivers understand, so that it is usually not possible to work out which elements are attributable to information and which to utterance.79
The same idea is applied to film in Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, where … the yes/no coding of linguistic communication fails. One may be positively or negatively affected by films, one may find them good or bad, but there is lacking, in the total complex of what is perceived, that pointing up of contrasts [Zuspitzung] that would allow a clear distinction between acceptance and rejection. One knows that it is a question of communication, but one does not see it.80
In Luhmann’s own terms, communication as such becomes “latent” with vastly enhanced possibilities for manipulation (as he acknowledged). Unlikely as this may seem, Luhmann appears not quite to have grasped the full significance of his insight here. For he insisted elsewhere repeatedly that communication as such depends on precisely this distinction between information, communication, and understanding.81 In other words, the mass media’s collapsing of that distinction subverts and undercuts the functioning of communication as a processing of meaning. (That Luhmann himself did not seem to find this particularly worthy of comment may be due to the tendency of his theory itself to collapse the concept of meaning into that of information, as Habermas critically noted in his rejoinder.82 In other words, Luhmann’s theory of the media is itself cut to fit the latter themselves, something he himself would hardly have disputed.) And it is this collapse of communication which may be seen as the specific material and technical origin of the pre-Oedipal “regressiveness” of the masses so often diagnosed from Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego to the texts of Adorno cited here. (Even the term Luhmann uses to designate the failure of communication, Versagen, might suggest a specific analogy to Freud’s definition of that word, which refers ultimately to a failure of socialization, a failure to mature.)83
Given all these inherent tendencies — toward simplification, false “personalizing” (both in the sense of attributions to personal actors and in that of the reduction of all truth to mere “personal opinion”), “schematizing,” and latent suggestion — what Enlightenment potential might one still find one in media?
In the reading of Adorno that has been proposed here, media, for which radio was Adorno’s enduring paradigm, should serve not to reinforce false community, but rather, as the essay “Opinion Delusion Society” has it, to “liquidate opinion” as such.84 No less than the classical bourgeois individual, whose Oedipal character structure and traditional ego-bound culture are eroded by the media, the entire public sphere itself must renounce totality in a parallel gesture of Entäusserung, the emptying out of illusory and authoritarian substantiality. To this end, Adorno saw a decentralization of the media, of technical instances of management, as key. Only the decentralized freeing up of communications media could allow the latter their full Enlightenment democratic potential. As Adorno formulated it in a very Freudian turn of phrase in “Opinion Research and the Public Sphere,” “The public sphere is nothing with a determined contour, but rather polemical in nature: what was once not public should become so.”85
The last phrase is, in German: “was einmal nicht öffentlich war, soll es werden.” Freud’s famous “cultural work” of “draining the Zuyder Zee” of the id (“wo Es war …”) has become collective and political; and it is the electronic media which should be the agent of this cultural work.